The Solitary House (106 page)

“If not, say how much more, in your conscience as a soldier, you can demand. There is no need for you to part with the writing, against your inclination—though I should prefer to have it.”

Mr. George sits squarely in exactly the same attitude, looks at the painted ceiling, and says never a word. The irascible Mr. Smallweed scratches the air.

“The question is,” says Mr. Tulkinghorn in his methodical, subdued, uninteresting way, “first, whether you have any of Captain Hawdon’s writing?”

“First, whether I have any of Captain Hawdon’s writing, sir,” repeats Mr. George.

“Secondly, what will satisfy you for the trouble of producing it?”

“Secondly, what will satisfy me for the trouble of producing it, sir,” repeats Mr. George.

“Thirdly, you can judge for yourself whether it is at all like that,” says Mr. Tulkinghorn, suddenly handing him some sheets of written paper tied together.

“Whether it is at all like that, sir. Just so,” repeats Mr. George.

All three repetitions Mr. George pronounces in a mechanical manner, looking straight at Mr. Tulkinghorn; nor does he so much as glance at the affidavit in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, that has been given to him for his inspection (though he still holds it in his hand), but continues to look at the lawyer with an air of troubled meditation.

“Well?” says Mr. Tulkinghorn. “What do you say?”

“Well, sir,” replies Mr. George, rising erect and looking immense, “I would rather, if you’ll excuse me, have nothing to do with this.”

Mr. Tulkinghorn, outwardly quite undisturbed, demands, “Why not?”

“Why, sir,” returns the trooper. “Except on military compulsion, I am not a man of business. Among civilians I am what they call in Scotland a ne’er-do-weel. I have no head for
papers, sir. I can stand any fire better than a fire of cross questions. I mentioned to Mr. Smallweed, only an hour or so ago, that when I come into things of this kind I feel as if I was being smothered. And that is my sensation,” says Mr. George, looking round upon the company, “at the present moment.”

With that, he takes three strides forward to replace the papers on the lawyer’s table, and three strides backward to resume his former station: where he stands perfectly upright, now looking at the ground, and now at the painted ceiling, with his hands behind him as if to prevent himself from accepting any other document whatever.

Under this provocation, Mr. Smallweed’s favourite adjective of disparagement is so close to his tongue, that he begins the words “my dear friend” with the monosyllable “Brim”; thus converting the possessive pronoun into Brimmy, and appearing to have an impediment in his speech. Once past this difficulty, however, he exhorts his dear friend in the tenderest manner not to be rash, but to do what so eminent a gentleman requires, and to do it with a good grace: confident that it must be unobjectionable as well as profitable. Mr. Tulkinghorn merely utters an occasional sentence, as, “You are the best judge of your own interest, sergeant.” “Take care you do no harm by this.” “Please yourself, please yourself.” “If you know what you mean, that’s quite enough.” These he utters with an appearance of perfect indifference, as he looks over the papers on his table, and prepares to write a letter.

Mr. George looks distrustfully from the painted ceiling to the ground, from the ground to Mr. Smallweed, from Mr. Smallweed to Mr. Tulkinghorn, and from Mr. Tulkinghorn to the painted ceiling again; often in his perplexity changing the leg on which he rests.

“I do assure you, sir,” says Mr. George, “not to say it offensively, that between you and Mr. Smallweed here, I really am being smothered fifty times over. I really am, sir. I am not a match for you gentlemen. Will you allow me to ask why you want to see the captain’s hand, in the case that I could find any specimen of it?”

Mr. Tulkinghorn quietly shakes his head. “No. If you were a
man of business, sergeant, you would not need to be informed, that there are confidential reasons, very harmless in themselves, for many such wants, in the profession to which I belong. But if you are afraid of doing any injury to Captain Hawdon, you may set your mind at rest about that.”

“Ay! He is dead, sir.”

“Is
he?” Mr. Tulkinghorn quietly sits down to write.

“Well, sir,” says the trooper, looking into his hat after another disconcerted pause; “I am sorry not to have given you more satisfaction. If it would be any satisfaction to any one, that I should be confirmed in my judgment that I would rather have nothing to do with this, by a friend of mine, who has a better head for business than I have, and who is an old soldier, I am willing to consult with him. I—I really am so completely smothered myself at present,” says Mr. George, passing his hand hopelessly across his brow, “that I don’t know but what it might be a satisfaction to me.”

Mr. Smallweed, hearing that this authority is an old soldier, so strongly inculcates the expediency of the trooper’s taking counsel with him, and particularly informing him of its being a question of five guineas or more, that Mr. George engages to go and see him. Mr. Tulkinghorn says nothing either way.

“I’ll consult my friend, then, by your leave, sir,” says the trooper, “and I’ll take the liberty of looking in again with the final answer in the course of the day. Mr. Smallweed, if you wish to be carried downstairs—”

“In a moment, my dear friend, in a moment. Will you first let me speak half a word with this gentleman, in private?”

“Certainly, sir. Don’t hurry yourself on my account.” The trooper retires to a distant part of the room, and resumes his curious inspection of the boxes; strong and otherwise.

“If I wasn’t as weak as a Brimstone Baby, sir,” whispers Grandfather Smallweed, drawing the lawyer down to his level by the lapel of his coat, and flashing some half-quenched green fire out of his angry eyes, “I’d tear the writing away from him. He’s got it buttoned in his breast. I saw him put it there. Judy saw him put it there. Speak up, you crabbed image for the sign of a walking-stick shop, and say you saw him put it there!”

This vehement conjuration the old gentleman accompanies with such a thrust at his granddaughter, that it is too much for his strength, and he slips away out of his chair, drawing Mr. Tulkinghorn with him, until he is arrested by Judy, and well shaken.

“Violence will not do for me, my friend,” Mr. Tulkinghorn then remarks coolly.

“No, no, I know, I know, sir. But it’s chafing and galling—it’s—it’s worst than your smattering chattering Magpie of a grandmother,” to the imperturbable Judy, who only looks at the fire, “to know he has got what’s wanted, and won’t give it up. He, not to give it up!
He!
A vagabond! But never mind, sir, never mind. At the most, he has only his own way for a little while. I have him periodically in a vise. I’ll twist him, sir. I’ll screw him, sir. If he won’t do it with a good grace, I’ll make him do it with a bad one, sir!—Now, my dear Mr. George,” says Grandfather Smallweed, winking at the lawyer hideously, as he releases him, “I am ready for your kind assistance, my excellent friend!”

Mr. Tulkinghorn, with some shadowy sign of amusement manifesting itself through his self-possession, stands on the hearth-rug with his back to the fire, watching the disappearance of Mr. Smallweed, and acknowledging the trooper’s parting salute with one slight nod.

It is more difficult to get rid of the old gentleman, Mr. George finds, than to bear a hand in carrying him downstairs; for, when he is replaced in his conveyance, he is so loquacious on the subject of the guineas, and retains such an affectionate hold of his button—having, in truth, a secret longing to rip his coat open, and rob him—that some degree of force is necessary on the trooper’s part to effect a separation. It is accomplished at last, and he proceeds alone in quest of his adviser.

By the cloisterly Temple, and by Whitefriars (there, not without a glance at Hanging-Sword Alley, which would seem to be something in his way), and by Blackfriars Bridge, and Blackfriars Road, Mr. George sedately marches to a street of little shops lying somewhere in the ganglion of roads from Kent and Surrey, and of streets from the bridges of London,
centring in the far-famed Elephant who has lost his castle formed of a thousand four-horse coaches, to a stronger iron monster than he, ready to chop him into mince-meat any day he dares. To one of the little shops in this street, which is a musician’s shop, having a few fiddles in the window, and some Pan’s pipes and a tambourine, and a triangle, and certain elongated scraps of music, Mr. George directs his massive tread. And halting at a few paces from it, as he sees a soldierly-looking woman, with her outer skirts tucked up, come forth with a small wooden tub, and in that tub commence a whisking and a splashing on the margin of the pavement, Mr. George says to himself, “She’s as usual, washing greens. I never saw her, except upon a baggage-waggon, when she wasn’t washing greens!”

The subject of this reflection is at all events so occupied in washing greens at present, that she remains unsuspicious of Mr. George’s approach; until, lifting up herself and her tub together, when she has poured the water off into the gutter, she finds him standing near her. Her reception of him is not flattering.

“George, I never see you but I wish you was a hundred mile away!”

The trooper, without remarking on this welcome, follows into the musical-instrument shop, where the lady places her tub of greens upon the counter, and having shaken hands with him, rests her arms upon it.

“I never,” she says, “George, consider Matthew Bagnet safe a minute when you’re near him. You are that restless and that roving—”

“Yes! I know I am, Mrs. Bagnet. I know I am.”

“You know you are!” says Mrs. Bagnet. “What’s the use of that?
Why
are you?”

“The nature of the animal, I suppose,” returns the trooper good-humouredly.

“Ah!” cries Mrs. Bagnet, something shrilly, “but what satisfaction will the nature of the animal be to me when the animal shall have tempted my Mat away from the musical business to New Zealand or Australey?”

Mrs. Bagnet is not at all an ill-looking woman. Rather large-boned, a little coarse in the grain, and freckled by the sun and wind which have tanned her hair upon the forehead; but healthy, wholesome, and bright-eyed. A strong, busy, active, honest-faced woman of from forty-five to fifty. Clean, hardy, and so economically dressed (though substantially), that the only article of ornament of which she stands possessed appears to be her wedding-ring; around which her finger has grown to be so large since it was put on, that it will never come off again until it shall mingle with Mrs. Bagnet’s dust.

“Mrs. Bagnet,” says the trooper, “I am on my parole with you. Mat will get no harm from me. You may trust me so far.”

“Well, I think I may. But the very looks of you are unsettling,” Mrs. Bagnet rejoins. “Ah, George, George! If you had only settled down, and married Joe Pouch’s widow when he died in North America,
she’d
have combed your hair for you.”

“It was a chance for me, certainly,” returns the trooper, half-laughingly, half-seriously, “but I shall never settle down into a respectable man now. Joe Pouch’s widow might have done me good—there was something in her—and something of her—but I couldn’t make up my mind to it. If I had had the luck to meet with such a wife as Mat found!”

Mrs. Bagnet, who seems in a virtuous way to be under little reserve with a good sort of fellow, but to be another good sort of fellow herself for that matter, receives this compliment by flicking Mr. George in the face with a head of greens, and taking her tub into the little room behind the shop.

“Why, Quebec, my poppet,” says George, following, on invitation, into that department. “And little Malta, too! Come and kiss your Bluffy!”

These young ladies—not supposed to have been actually christened by the names applied to them, though always so called in the family, from the places of their birth in barracks—are respectively employed on three-legged stools; the younger (some five or six years old), in learning her letters out of a penny primer; the elder (eight or nine perhaps), in teaching her, and sewing with great assiduity. Both hail Mr. George with acclamations
as an old friend, and after some kissing and romping plant their stools beside him.

“And how’s young Woolwich?” says Mr. George.

“Ah! There now!” cries Mrs. Bagnet, turning about from her saucepans (for she is cooking dinner) with a bright flush on her face. “Would you believe it? Got an engagement at the Theayter, with his father, to play the fife in a military piece.”

“Well done, my godson!” cries Mr. George, slapping his thigh.

“I believe you!” says Mrs. Bagnet. “He’s a Briton. That’s what Woolwich is. A Briton!”

“And Mat blows away at his bassoon, and you’re respectable civilians one and all,” says Mr. George. “Family people. Children growing up. Mat’s old mother in Scotland, and your old father somewhere else, corresponded with; and helped a little; and—well, well! To be sure, I don’t know why I shouldn’t be wished a hundred mile away, for I have not much to do with all this!”

Mr. George is becoming thoughtful; sitting before the fire in the white-washed room, which has a sanded floor, and a barrack smell, and contains nothing superfluous, and has not a visible speck of dirt or dust in it, from the faces of Quebec and Malta to the bright tin pots and pannikins upon the dresser shelves;—Mr. George is becoming thoughtful, sitting here while Mrs. Bagnet is busy, when Mr. Bagnet and young Woolwich opportunely come home. Mr. Bagnet is an ex-artilleryman, tall and upright, with shaggy eyebrows, and whiskers like the fibres of a cocoa-nut, not a hair upon his head, and a torrid complexion. His voice, short, deep, and resonant, is not at all unlike the tones of the instrument to which he is devoted. Indeed there may be generally observed in him an unbending, unyielding, brass-bound air, as if he were himself the bassoon of the human orchestra. Young Woolwich is the type and model of a young drummer.

Both father and son salute the trooper heartily. He saying, in due season, that he has come to advise with Mr. Bagnet, Mr. Bagnet hospitably declares that he will hear of no business until after dinner; and that his friend shall not partake of his
counsel, without first partaking of boiled pork and greens. The trooper yielding to this invitation, he and Mr. Bagnet, not to embarrass the domestic preparations, go forth to take a turn up and down the little street, which they promenade with measured tread and folded arms, as if it were a rampart.