Page:Bleak House.djvu/43

 Dear, dear, to think how much time we passed alone together afterwards, and how often I repeated to the doll the story of my birthday, and confided to her that I would try, as hard as ever I could, to repair the fault I had been born with (of which I confusedly felt guilty and yet innocent), and would strive as I grew up to be industrious, contented and kind-hearted, and to do some good to some one, and win some love to myself if I could. I hope it is not self-indulgent to shed these tears as I think of it. I am very thankful, I am very cheerful, but I cannot quite help their coming to my eyes.

There! I have wiped them away now, and can go on again properly.

I felt the distance between my godmother and myself so much more after the birthday, and felt so sensible of filling a place in her house which ought to have been empty, that I found her more difficult of approach, though I was fervently grateful to her in my heart, than ever. I felt in the same way towards my school companions; I felt in the same way towards Mrs. Rachael, who was a widow; and O, towards her daughter, of whom she was proud, who came to see her once a fortnight! I was very retired and quiet, and tried to be very diligent.

One sunny afternoon, when I had come home from school with my books and portfolio, watching my long shadow at my side, and as I was gliding up stairs to my room as usual, my godmother looked out of the parlor door, and called me back. Sitting with her, I found—which was very unusual indeed—a stranger. A portly important-looking gentleman, dressed all in black, with a white cravat, large gold watch seals, a pair of gold eye-glasses, and a large seal-ring upon his little finger.

“This,” said my godmother in an under tone, “is the child.” Then she said, in her naturally stern way of speaking, “This is Esther, sir.” The gentleman put up his eye-glasses to look at me, and said, “Come here, my dear!” He shook hands with me, and asked me to take off my bonnet—looking at me all the while. When I had complied, he said, “Ah!” and afterwards “Yes!” And then, taking off: his eye-glasses and folding them in a red case, and leaning back in his arm-chair, turning the case about in his two hands he gave my godmother a nod. Upon that, my godmother said, “You may go upstairs, Esther!” and I made him my curtsey and left him.

It must have been two years afterwards, and I was almost fourteen, when one dreadful night my godmother and I sat at the fireside. I was reading aloud, and she was listening. I had come down at nine o'clock, as I always did, to read the Bible to her; and was reading, from St. John, how our Saviour stooped down, writing with his finger in the dust, when they brought the sinful woman to him.

“‘So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself and said unto them. He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her!’”

I was stopped by my godmother's rising, putting her hand to her head, and crying out, in an awful voice, from quite another part of the book: “‘Watch ye therefore! lest coming suddenly he find you sleeping. And what I say unto you, I say unto all. Watch!’”

In an instant, while she stood before me repeating these words, she fell down on the floor. I had no need to cry out; her voice had sounded through the house, and been heard in the street.

She was laid upon her bed. For more than a week she lay there, little