Page:Bleak House.djvu/698
from the floor, she tries to collect her thoughts. In the eyes of Mr. Guppy she is the same Lady Dedlock, holding the same prepared, proud, chilling state.
“Your Ladyship may not be at first disposed to excuse this visit from one who has never been very welcome to your Ladyship—which he don’t complain of, for he is bound to confess that there never has been any particular reason on the face of things, why he should be; but I hope when I mention my motives to your Ladyship, you will not find fault with me,” says Mr. Guppy.
“Do so.”
“Thank your Ladyship. I ought first to explain to your Ladyship,” Mr. Guppy sits on the edge of a chair, and puts his hat on the carpet at his feet, “that Miss Summerson, whose image as I formerly mentioned to your Ladyship was at one period of my life imprinted on my art until erased by circumstances over which I had no controul, communicated to me, after I had the pleasure of waiting on your Ladyship last, that she particularly wished me to take no steps whatever in any matter at all relating to her. And Miss Summerson’s wishes being to me a law (except as connected with circumstances over which I have no controul), I consequently never expected to have the distinguished honor of waiting on your Ladyship again.”
And yet he is here now. Lady Dedlock moodily reminds him.
“And yet I am here now,” Mr. Guppy admits. “My object being to communicate to your Ladyship, under the seal of confidence, why I am here.”
He cannot do so, she tells him, too plainly or too briefly.
“Nor can I,” Mr. Guppy returns, with a sense of injury upon him, “too particularly request your Ladyship to take particular notice that it’s no personal affair of mine that brings me here. I have no interested views of my own to serve in coming here. If it was not for my promise to Miss Summerson, and my keeping of it sacred,—I, in point of fact shouldn’t have darkened these doors again, but should have seen ’em further first.”
Mr. Guppy considers this a favorable moment for sticking up his hair with both hands.
“Your Ladyship will remember when I mention it, that the last time I was here, I run against a party very eminent in our profession, and whose loss we all deplore. That party certainly did from that time apply himself to cutting in against me in a way that I will call sharp practice, and did make it, at every turn and point, extremely difficult for me to be sure that I hadn’t inadvertently led up to something contrairy to Miss Summerson’s wishes. Self-praise is no recommendation; but I may say for myself that I am not so bad a man of business neither.”
Lady Dedlock looks at him in stern inquiry. Mr. Guppy immediately withdraws his eyes from her face, and looks anywhere else.
“Indeed, it has been made so hard,” he goes on, “to have any idea what that party was up to in combination with others, that until the loss which we all deplore, I was gravelled—an expression which your Ladyship, moving in the higher circles, will be so good as to consider tantamount to knocked over. Small likewise—a name by which I refer to another party, a friend of mine that your Ladyship is not acquainted with—got to