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Bleak House: Jarndyce

My childhood knew no mother. My earliest recollection was of a kindly woman who called herself my godmother. Once I had asked her about my real mother, and she had replied: "Your mother, Esther, is you disgrace, and you were hers." When my godmother died I was told by Kenge and Carboy, great London lawyers, that a guardian had been appointed for me and that his name was John Jarndyce; that he had been asked to receive into his home a ward of the Chancery Court, a young lady, and that I was to be her companion and was to go to Bleak House, down in Hertfordshire, to live. Then first I met my beautiful, darling Ada Clare, and her handsome distant cousin, Richard Carstone (also a ward in the terrible Chancery), a gay, unstable boy whose love Ada soon returned--alas--for in the end they were married and Richard, chasing the will-o'-the-wisp of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, passed out of the world forever. Through my guardian, a kindly, hearty gentleman nearer sixty than fifty, perhaps, I met many people of low and high degree. Of the latter were Sir Leicester Dedlock and my Lady Dedlock, great personages in rank and fashion, with a fine town house in London and a superb country estate, Chesney Wold, off in Lincolnshire. Sir Leicester had married for love, rumor had it, a bit beneath him. But my lady showed no signs of that. She was proud, cold, haughty, they said, with beauty still, not yet in its autumn. Sir Leicester, twenty years older, was a man of worthy presence, ceremonious and stately. He had supreme faith in two things--the British aristocracy and Lady Dedlock. My lady was in Jarndyce and Jarndyce through some almost forgotten ancestor. One afternoon in her London mansion Mr. Tulkinghorn, the family lawyer, was with her in connection with the case. Mr. Tulkinghorn, I came to know, was a rusty, silent man, the butler of the legal cellars of the Dedlocks; grown rich out of aristocratic marriage settlements and aristocratic wills; an oyster of the old school whom nobody could open. "Who copied that?" cried my lady, impulsively, as she caught sight of some handwriting on a legal document before her. "Why do you ask?" queried the keen lawyer, struck by her animation and unusual tone. "Anything to vary this detestable monotony," she returned, then fainted.