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and I shouldn’t wonder if you was to read something about it before long, if you look sharp. I know my business, and that’s all I’ve got to say to you on that subject. Now about those letters. You want to know who’s got ’em. I don’t mind telling you. I have got ’em. Is that the packet?”

Mr. Smallweed looks, with greedy eyes, at the little bundle Mr. Bucket produces from a mysterious part of his coat, and identifies it as the same.

“What have you got to say next?” asks Mr. Bucket. “Now, don’t open your mouth too wide, because you don’t look handsome when you do it.”

“I want five hundred pound.”

“No, you don’t; you mean fifty,” says Mr. Bucket, humorously.

It appears, however, that Mr. Smallweed means five hundred.

“That is, I am deputed by Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, to consider (without admitting or promising anything) this bit of business,” says Mr. Bucket; Sir Leicester mechanically bows his head; “and you ask me to consider a proposal of five hundred pound. Why, it’s an unreasonable proposal! Two fifty would be bad enough, but better than that. Hadn’t you better say two fifty?”

Mr. Smallweed is quite clear that he had better not.

“Then,” says Mr. Bucket, “let’s hear Mr. Chadband. Lord! Many a time I’ve heard my old fellow-serjeant of that name; and a moderate man he was in all respects, as ever I come across!”

Thus invited, Mr. Chadband steps forth, and, after a little sleek smiling and a little oil-grinding with the palms of his hands, delivers himself as follows:

“My friends, we are now—Rachael my wife, and I—in the mansions of the rich and great. Why are we now in the mansions of the rich and great, my friends? Is it because we are invited? Because we are bidden to feast with them, because we are bidden to rejoice with them, because we are bidden to play the lute with them, because we are bidden to dance with them? No. Then why are we here, my friends? Air we in possession of a sinful secret, and doe we require corn, and wine, and oil—or, what is much the same thing, money—for the keeping thereof? Probably so, my friends.”

“You’re a man of business, you are,” returns Mr. Bucket, very attentive; “and consequently you’re going on to mention what the nature of your secret is. You are right. You couldn’t do better.”

“Let us then, my brother, in a spirit of love,” says Mr. Chadband, with a cunning eye, “proceed untoe it. Rachael my wife, advance!”

Mrs. Chadband, more than ready, so advances as to jostle her husband into the back-ground, and confronts Mr. Bucket with a hard frowning smile.

“Since you want to know what we know,” says she, “I’ll tell you. I helped to bring up Miss Hawdon, her Ladyship’s daughter. I was in the service of her Ladyship’s sister, who was very sensitive to the disgrace her Ladyship brought upon her, and gave out, even to her Ladyship, that the child was dead—she was very nearly so—when she was born. But she’s alive, and I know her.” With these words, and a laugh, and laying a bitter stress on the word “Ladyship,” Mrs. Chadband folds her arms, and looks implacably at Mr. Bucket.