Bleak House - The Original Classic Edition. Dickens Charles

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ lounging resort, to be seen at Brighton and elsewhere at fashionable times, and to lead an idle life in the very best clothes. To enable him to do this, the affection-

       ate little dancing-mistress had toiled and laboured and would have toiled and laboured to that hour if her strength had lasted so long. For the mainspring of the story was that in spite of the man's absorbing selfishness, his wife (overpowered by his deportment) had, to the last, believed in him and had, on her death-bed, in the most moving terms, confided him to their son as one who had an inextinguishable claim upon him and whom he could never regard with too much pride and deference. The son, inheriting his mother's belief, and having the deportment always before him, had lived and grown in the same faith, and now, at thirty years of age, worked for his father twelve hours a day and looked up to him with veneration on the old imaginary pinnacle.

       "The airs the fellow gives himself !" said my informant, shaking her head at old Mr. Turveydrop with speechless indignation as he drew on his tight gloves, of course unconscious of the homage she was rendering. "He fully believes he is one of the aristocracy! And he is so condescending to the son he so egregiously deludes that you might suppose him the most virtuous of parents. Oh!" said the old lady, apostrophizing him with infinite vehemence. "I could bite you!"

       I could not help being amused, though I heard the old lady out with feelings of real concern. It was difficult to doubt her with the father and son before me. What I might have thought of them without the old lady's account, or what I might have thought of the old lady's account without them, I cannot say. There was a fitness of things in the whole that carried conviction with it.

       My eyes were yet wandering, from young Mr. Turveydrop working so hard, to old Mr. Turveydrop deporting himself so beautifully, when the latter came ambling up to me and entered into conversation.

       He asked me, first of all, whether I conferred a charm and a distinction on London by residing in it? I did not think it necessary to

       reply that I was perfectly aware I should not do that, in any case, but merely told him where I did reside.

       "A lady so graceful and accomplished," he said, kissing his right glove and afterwards extending it towards the pupils, "will look leni-

       ently on the deficiencies here. We do our best to polish--polish--polish!"

       He sat down beside me, taking some pains to sit on the form, I thought, in imitation of the print of his illustrious model on the sofa. And really he did look very like it.

       "To polish--polish--polish!" he repeated, taking a pinch of snuff and gently fluttering his fingers. "But we are not, if I may say so

       to one formed to be graceful both by Nature and Art--" with the high-shouldered bow, which it seemed impossible for him to make without lifting up his eyebrows and shutting his eyes "--we are not what we used to be in point of deportment."

       "Are we not, sir?" said I.

       "We have degenerated," he returned, shaking his head, which he could do to a very limited extent in his cravat. "A levelling age is not favourable to deportment. It develops vulgarity. Perhaps I speak with some little partiality. It may not be for me to say that I have been called, for some years now, Gentleman Turveydrop, or that his Royal Highness the Prince Regent did me the honour to inquire, on my removing my hat as he drove out of the Pavilion at Brighton (that fine building), 'Who is he? Who the devil is he? Why don't

       I know him? Why hasn't he thirty thousand a year?' But these are little matters of anecdote--the general property, ma'am--still repeated occasionally among the upper classes."

       "Indeed?" said I.

       99

       He replied with the high-shouldered bow. "Where what is left among us of deportment," he added, "still lingers. England--alas, my country!--has degenerated very much, and is degenerating every day. She has not many gentlemen left. We are few. I see nothing to succeed us but a race of weavers."

       "One might hope that the race of gentlemen would be perpetuated here," said I.

       "You are very good." He smiled with a high-shouldered bow again. "You flatter me. But, no--no! I have never been able to imbue

       my poor boy with that part of his art. Heaven forbid that I should disparage my dear child, but he has--no deportment." "He appears to be an excellent master," I observed.

       "Understand me, my dear madam, he IS an excellent master. All that can be acquired, he has acquired. All that can be imparted, he can impart. But there ARE things--" He took another pinch of snuff and made the bow again, as if to add, "This kind of thing, for instance."

       I glanced towards the centre of the room, where Miss Jellyby's lover, now engaged with single pupils, was undergoing greater drudgery than ever.

       "My amiable child," murmured Mr. Turveydrop, adjusting his cravat. "Your son is indefatigable," said I.

       "It is my reward," said Mr. Turveydrop, "to hear you say so. In some respects, he treads in the footsteps of his sainted mother. She was a devoted creature. But wooman, lovely wooman," said Mr. Turveydrop with very disagreeable gallantry, "what a sex you are!"

       I rose and joined Miss Jellyby, who was by this time putting on her bonnet. The time allotted to a lesson having fully elapsed, there was a general putting on of bonnets. When Miss Jellyby and the unfortunate Prince found an opportunity to become betrothed I don't know, but they certainly found none on this occasion to exchange a dozen words.

       "My dear," said Mr. Turveydrop benignly to his son, "do you know the hour?"

       "No, father." The son had no watch. The father had a handsome gold one, which he pulled out with an air that was an example to mankind.

       "My son," said he, "it's two o'clock. Recollect your school at Kensington at three."

       "That's time enough for me, father," said Prince. "I can take a morsel of dinner standing and be off." "My dear boy," returned his father, "you must be very quick. You will find the cold mutton on the table." "Thank you, father. Are YOU off now, father?"

       "Yes, my dear. I suppose," said Mr. Turveydrop, shutting his eyes and lifting up his shoulders with modest consciousness, "that I

       must show myself, as usual, about town."

       "You had better dine out comfortably somewhere," said his son.

       "My dear child, I intend to. I shall take my little meal, I think, at the French house, in the Opera Colonnade." "That's right. Good-bye, father!" said Prince, shaking hands.

       "Good-bye, my son. Bless you!"

       Mr. Turveydrop said this in quite a pious manner, and it seemed to do his son good, who, in parting from him, was so pleased with him, so dutiful to him, and so proud of him that I almost felt as if it were an unkindness to the younger man not to be able to believe implicitly in the elder. The few moments that were occupied by Prince in taking leave of us (and particularly of one of us, as I saw, being in the secret), enhanced my favourable impression of his almost childish character. I felt a liking for him and a compassion for him as he put his little kit in his pocket--and with it his desire to stay a little while with Caddy--and went away good-humoured-

       100

       ly to his cold mutton and his school at Kensington, that made me scarcely less irate with his father than the censorious old lady.

       The father opened the room door for us and bowed us out in a manner, I must acknowledge, worthy of his shining original. In the СКАЧАТЬ