Page:Bleak House.djvu/771

 “Now, mind how you put it, Bucket,” cried the old man anxiously, with his hand at his ear. “Speak up; none of your brimstone tricks. Pick me up; I want to hear better. O Lord, I am shaken to bits!”

Mr. Bucket had certainly picked him up at a dart. However, as soon as he could be heard though Mr. Smallweed's coughing, and his vicious ejaculations of “O my bones! O dear! I've no breath in my body! I'm worse than the chattering, clattering, brimstone pig at home!” Mr. Bucket proceeded, in the same convivial manner as before.

“So, as I happen to be in the habit of coming about your premises, you take me into your confidence, don't you?”

I think it would be impossible to make an admission with more ill-will, and a worse grace, than Mr. Smallweed displayed when he admitted this; rendering it perfectly evident that Mr. Bucket was the very last person he would have thought of taking into his confidence, if he could by any possibility have kept him out of it.

“And I go into the business with you,—very pleasant we are over it; and I confirm you in your well-founded fears, that you will-get-your-self-in-to-a-most precious line if you don't come out with that there will,” said Mr. Bucket, emphatically; “and accordingly you arrange with me that it shall be delivered up to this present Mr. Jarndyce, on no conditions. If it should prove to be valuable, you trusting yourself to him for your reward; that's about where it is, ain't it?”

“That's what was agreed,” Mr. Smallweed assented, with the same bad grace.

“In consequence of which,” said Mr. Bucket, dismissing his agreeable manner all at once, and becoming strictly business-like, “you've got that will upon your person at the present time; and the only thing that remains for you to do is, just to Out with it!”

Having given us one glance out of the watching corner of his eye, and having given his nose one triumphant rub with his fore-finger, Mr. Bucket stood with his eyes fastened on his confidential friend, and his hand stretched forth ready to take the paper and present it to my guardian. It was not produced without much reluctance, and many declarations on the part of Mr. Smallweed that he was a poor industrious man, and that he left it to Mr. Jarndyce's honor not to let him lose by his honesty. Little by little, he very slowly took from a breast-pocket a stained discolored paper, which was much singed upon the outside, and a little burnt at the edges, as if it had long ago been thrown upon a fire, and hastily snatched off again. Mr. Bucket lost no time in transferring this paper, with the dexterity of a conjuror, from Mr. Smallweed to Mr. Jarndyce. As he gave it to my guardian, he whispered behind his fingers:

“Hadn't settled how to make their market of it. Quarrelled and hinted about it. I laid out twenty pound upon it. First, the avaricious grandchildren split upon him, on account of their objections to his living so unreasonably long, and then they split on one another. Lord! there ain't one of the family that wouldn't sell the other for a pound or two, except the old lady—and she's only out of it because she's too weak in her mind to drive a bargain.”

“Mr. Bucket,” said my guardian aloud, “whatever the worth of this