Page:Bleak House.djvu/113

 “It shall not happen again, sir,” I returned, “but at first it is difficult”

“Nonsense !” he said, “it′s easy, easy. Why not ? I hear of a good little orphan girl without a protector, and I take it into my head to be that protector. She grows up, and more than justifies my good opinion, and I remain her guardian and her friend. What is there in all this ? So, so ! Now, we have cleared off old scores, and I have before me thy pleasant, tnisting, trusty face again.”

I said to myself, “Esther, my dear, you surprise me ! This really is not what I expected of you !” and it had such a good eftect, that I folded my hands upon my basket and quite recovered myself. Mr. Jarndyce, expressing his approval in his face, began to talk to me as confidentially, as if I had been in the habit of conversing with him every morning for I don′t know how long. I almost felt as if I had.

“Of course, Esther,” he said, “you don′t understand this Chancery business?”

And of course I shook my head.

“I don′t know who does,” he returned. “The Lawyers have twisted it into such a state of bedevilment that the original merits of the case have long disappeared from the face of the earth. It′s about a Will, and the trusts under a Will—or it was, once. It′s about nothing but Costs, now. We are always appearing, and disappearing, and swearing, and interrogating, and filing, and cross-filing, and arguing, and sealing, and motioning, and referring, and reporting, and revolving about the Lord Chancellor and all his satellites, and equitably waltzing ourselves off to dusty death, about Costs. That′s the great question. All the rest, by some extraordinary means, has melted away.”

“But it was, sir,” said I, to bring him back, for he began to rub his head, “about a Will?”

“Why, yes, it was about a Will when it was about anything,” he returned. “A certain Jarndyce, in an evil hour, made a great fortune, and made a great Will. In the question how the trusts under that Will are to be administered, the fortune left by the Will is squandered away ; the legatees under the Will are reduced to such a miserable condition that they would be sufficiently punished, if they had committed an enormous crime in having money left them ; and the Will itself is made a dead letter. All through the deplorable cause, everything that everybody in it, except one man, knows already, is refeffed to that only one man who don′t know it, to find out—all through the deplorable cause, everybody must have copies, over and over again, of everything that has accumulated about it in the way of cartloads of papers (or must pay for them without having them, which is the usual course, for nobody wants them) ; and must go down the middle and up again, through such an infernal country-dance of costs and fees and nonsense and corruption, as was never dreamed of in the wildest visions of a Witch′s Sabbath. Equity sends questions to Law, Law sends questions back to Equity ; Law finds it can′t do this. Equity finds it can′t do that; neither can so much as say it can′t do anything, without this solicitor instructing and this counsel appearing for A, and that solicitor instructing and that counsel appealing for B ; and so on through the whole alphabet, like the history of the Apple Pie. And thus, through years and years, and lives and lives,