Fair wards of courtshave faded into mothers and grandmothers; a long procession of Chancellors has come in and gone out; the legion of bills in the suit have been transformed into mere bills of mortality;tthere are not three Jarndyces left upon the earth perhaps, since old Tom Jarndyce in despair blew his brains out at a coffee-house in Chancery Lane; but Jarndyce and Jarndyce still drags its dreary length before the Court,13perennially hopeless.
Jarndyce and Jarndyce has passed into a joke. That is the only good that has ever come of it. It has been death to many, but it is a joke in the profession. Every master in Chancery has had a reference out of it. Every Chancellor was ‘in it,’ for somebody or other, when he was counsel at the bar. Good things have been said about it by blue-nosed, bulbousshoed old benchers,uin select port-wine committee after dinner in hall. Articled clerksvhave been in the habit of fleshing their legal wit upon it. The last Lord Chancellor handled it neatly when, correcting Mr. Blowers, the eminent silk gown who said that such a thing might happen when the sky rained potatoes,14he observed, ‘or when we get through Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Mr. Blowers;‘—a pleasantry that particularly tickled the maces, bags, and purses.
How many people out of the suit, Jarndyce and Jarndyce has stretched forth its unwholesome hand to spoil and corrupt, would be a very wide question. From the master, upon whose impaling files reams of dusty warrants in Jarndyce and Jarndyce have grimly writhed into many shapes; down to the copying-clerk in the Six Clerks’ Office,15who has copied his tens of thousands of Chancery-folio-pageswunder that eternal heading; no man’s nature has been made better by it. In trickery, evasion, procrastination, spoliation, botheration, under false pretences of all sorts, there are influences that can never come to good. The very solicitors’ boys who have kept the wretched suitors at bay, by protesting time out of mind that Mr. Chizzle, Mizzle, or otherwise, was particularly engaged and had appointments until dinner, may have got an extra moral twist and shuffle into themselves out of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. The receiver in the cause has acquired a goodly sum of money by it, but has acquired too a distrust of his own mother; and a contempt for his own kind. Chizzle, Mizzle, and otherwise, have lapsed into a habit of vaguely promising themselves that they will look into that outstanding little matter, and see what can be done for Drizzle—who was not well used—when Jarndyce and Jarndyce shall be got out of the office. Shirking and sharking, in all their many varieties, have been sown broadcast by the ill-fated cause; and even those who have contemplated its history from the outermost circle of such evil, have been insensibly tempted into a loose way of letting bad things alone to take their own bad course, and a loose belief that if the world go wrong, it was, in some off-hand manner, never meant to go right.
Thus, in the midst of the mud and at the heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.
‘Mr. Tangle,’ says the Lord High Chancellor, latterly something restless under the eloquence of that learned gentleman.
‘Mlud,’ says Mr. Tangle. Mr. Tangle knows more of Jarndyce and Jarndyce than anybody. He is famous for it—supposed never to have read anything else since he left school.
‘Have you nearly concluded your argument?’
‘Mlud, no—variety of points—feel it my duty tsubmit—ludship,’ is the reply that slides out of Mr. Tangle.
‘Several members of the bar are still to be heard, I believe?’ says the Chancellor, with a slight smile.
Eighteen of Mr. Tangle’s learned friends, each armed with a little summary of eighteen hundred sheets, bob up like eighteen hammers in a pianoforte, make eighteen bows, and drop into their eighteen places of obscurity
‘We will proceed with the hearing on Wednesday fortnight,’ says the Chancellor. For the question at issue is only a question of costs, a mere bud on the forest tree of the parent suit, and really will come to a settlement one of these days.
The Chancellor rises; the bar rises; the prisoner is brought forward in a hurry; the man from Shropshire cries, ‘My lord!’ Maces, bags, and purses, indignantly proclaim silence, and frown at the man from Shropshire.
‘In reference,’ proceeds the Chancellor, still on Jarndyce and Jarndyce, ‘to the young girl—‘
‘Begludship’s pardon—boy,’ says Mr. Tangle, prematurely.
‘In reference,’ proceeds the Chancellor, with extra distinctness, ‘to the young girl and boy, the two young people,’ (Mr. Tangle crushed.)
‘Whom I directed to be in attendance to-day, and who are now in my private room, I will see them and satisfy myself as to the expediency of making the order for their residing with their uncle.’
Mr. Tangle on his legs again.
‘Begludship’s pardon—dead.’
‘With their,’ Chancellor looking through his double eye-glass at the papers on his desk, ‘grandfather.’
‘Begludship’s pardon—victim of rash action—brains.’
Suddenly a very little counsel, with a terrific bass voice, arises, fully inflated, in the back settlements of the fog, and says, ‘Will your lordship allow me? I appear for him. He is a cousin, several times removed. I am not at the moment prepared to inform the Court in what exact remove he is a cousin; but he is a cousin.’
Leaving this address (delivered like a sepulchral message) ringing in the rafters of the roof, the very little counsel drops, and the fog knows him no more. Everybody looks for him. Nobody can see him.16
‘I will speak with both the young people,’ says the Chancellor anew, ‘and satisfy myself on the subject of their residing with their cousin. I will mention the matter to-morrow morning when I take my seat.’
The Chancellor is about to bow to the bar, when the prisoner is presented. Nothing can possibly come of the prisoner’s conglomeration, but his being sent back to prison; which is soon done. The man from Shropshire ventures another demonstrative ‘My lord!’ but the Chancellor, being aware of him, has dexterously vanished. Everybody else quickly vanishes too. A battery of blue bagsxis loaded with heavy charges of papers and carried off by clerks; the little mad old woman marches off with her documents; the empty court is locked up. If all the injustice it has committed, and all the misery it has caused, could only be locked up with it, and the whole burnt away in a great funeral pyre,—why so much the better for other parties than the parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce!