Tales from Dickens

by Hallie Erminie Rives; Charles Dickens

He was rich, yet was so tender-hearted and benevolent that all who knew him loved him. Most of his good deeds he never told, for he had a great dislike to being thanked. It used to be said that once, after he had done an extremely generous thing for a relative of his, seeing her coming in the front gate to thank him, he escaped by the back door and was not seen again for three months. He never spoke ill of his neighbors, and whenever he was vexed he would pretend to look for a weather-cock and say, "Dear, dear! The wind must be coming from the east!"

It happened, finally, that all the other Jarndyce heirs had died except two, a young girl named Ada Clare and a young man named Richard Carstone. These two, who were cousins, were left orphans. The master of Bleak House, therefore, in the goodness of his heart, offered them a home with him, and this they thankfully accepted. Mr. Jarndyce now wished to find a companion for Ada Clare; and this is how Esther Summerson comes into this story.

Esther was a sweet girl who had been brought up by a stern, hard-hearted woman whom she had always called "godmother," in ignorance of her parentage. She had never known who were her mother or father, for from earliest babyhood her godmother had forbidden her to ask questions concerning them, and she would have had a sad and lonely youth but for her sunny disposition.

It was not till her godmother died suddenly that she found she had a guardian, and that he was Mr. Jarndyce of Bleak House. How he came to be her guardian was a mystery to her, but she was glad to find herself not altogether friendless. Although he had taken the pains to see her more than once, and had noticed with pleasure what a cheerful, loving nature she had, yet Esther had never, so far as she knew, seen him, so that she received his invitation to come and live at Bleak House with joyful surprise.

She went, on the day appointed, to London, and there she met Ada, whom she began to love at once, and Richard, a handsome, careless young fellow of nineteen. They spent the day together and got well acquainted before they took the morrow's coach to Bleak House.

At the Chancery Court they met poor, crazy little Miss Flite, who insisted on taking them to her room above the rag-and-bottle shop to show them her caged birds. And that night (as they had been directed) they stayed at the house of a Mrs. Jellyby, of whom Mr. Jarndyce had heard as a woman of great charity.

Mrs. Jellyby was a woman with a mission, which mission was the education of the natives of Borrioboola-Gha, in Africa, and the cultivation there of the coffee-bean. She thought of nothing else, and was for ever sending out letters or pamphlets about it.

But she seemed unable to see or think of anything nearer home than Africa. The house was unswept, the children dirty and always under foot, and the meals half-cooked. She would sit all day in slipshod slippers and a dress that did not meet in the back, drinking coffee and dictating to her eldest daughter Caddy (who hated Africa and all its natives) letters about coffee cultivation and the uplifting of the natives of Borrioboola-Gha.

A very strange sort of philanthropist both Esther and Ada thought Mrs. Jellyby. Perhaps, however, Mr. Jarndyce sent them there for a useful lesson, for he afterward asked them what they thought of her, and he seemed well pleased to learn that they considered her ideas of doing good in the world extremely odd.

Next day they drove to Bleak House. Not one of them had ever seen Mr. Jarndyce, but they found him all they had imagined and more—the kindest, pleasantest and most thoughtful person in the world. Before they had been there two days they felt as if they had known him all their lives.