Page:Bleak House.djvu/46

 porch—it was a very frosty day—I felt so miserable and self-reproachful, that I clung to her and told her it was my fault, I knew, that she could say good bye so easily!

“No, Esther !” she returned. “It is your misfortune!”

The coach was at the little lawn gate—we had not come out until we heard the wheels—and thus I left her, with a sorrowful heart. She went in before my boxes were lifted to the coach-roof, and shut the door. As long as I could see the house, I looked back at it from the window, through my tears. My godmother had left Mrs. Rachael all the little property she possessed; and there was to be a sale; and an old hearth-rug with roses on it, which always seemed to me the first thing in the world I had ever seen, was hanging outside in the frost and snow. A day or two before, I had wrapped the dear old doll in her own shawl, and quietly laid her—I am half ashamed to tell it—in the garden-earth, under the tree that shaded my old window. I had no companion left but my bird, and him I carried with me in his cage.

When the house was out of sight, I sat, with my bird-cage in the straw at my feet, forward on the low seat, to look out of the high window; watching the frosty trees, that were like beautiful pieces of spar; and the fields all smooth and white with last night's snow; and the sun, so red but yielding so little heat; and the ice, dark like metal, where the skaters and sliders had brushed the snow away. There was a gentleman in the coach who sat on the opposite seat, and looked very large in a quantity of wrappings; but he sat gazing out of the other window, and took no notice of me.

I thought of my dead godmother; of the night when I read to her; of her frowning so fixedly and sternly in her bed; of the strange place I was going to; of the people I should find there, and what they would be like, and what they would say to me; when a voice in the coach gave me a terrible start.

It said, “What the de-vil are you crying for?”

I was so frightened that I lost my voice, and could only answer in a whisper. “Me, sir?” For of course I knew it must have been the gentleman in the quantity of wrappings, though he was still looking out of his window.

“Yes, you,” he said, turning round.

“I didn't know I was crying, sir,” I faltered.

“But you are!” said the gentleman. “Look here!” He came quite opposite to me from the other corner of the coach, brushed one of his large furry cuff's across my eyes (but without hurting me), and showed me that it was wet.

“There! Now you know you are,” he said. “Don't you ?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“And what are you crying for?” said the gentleman. “Don't you want to go there?”

“Where, sir?”

“Where ? Why, wherever you are going,” said the gentleman.

“I am very glad to go there, sir,” I answered.

“Well, then! Look glad!” said the gentleman.

I thought he was very strange; or at least that what I could see of him was very strange, for he was wrapped up to the chin, and his face was almost hidden in a fur cap, with broad fur straps at the side