put back an hour, and we were sitting round the fire with no light but the blaze, when the hall-door suddenly burst open, and the hall resounded with these words, uttered with the greatest vehemence and in a stentorian tone :
“We have been misdirected, Jarndyce, by a most abandoned ruffian, who told us to take the turning to the right instead of to the left. He is the most intolerable scoundrel on the face of the earth. His father must have been a most consummate villain, ever to have had such a son. I would have that fellow shot without the least remorse !”
“Did he do it on purpose ?” Mr. Jarndyce enquired.
“I have not the slightest doubt that the scoundrel has passed his whole existence in misdirecting travellers !” returned the other. “By my soul, I thought him the worst-looking dog I had ever beheld, when he was telling me to take the turning to the right. And yet I stood before that fellow face to face, and didn′t knock his brains out !”
“Teeth, you mean ?” said Mr. Jarndyce.
“Ha, ha, ha !” laughed Mr. Lawrence Boythorn, really making the whole house vibrate. “What, you have not forgotten it yet ! Ha, ha, ha !—And that was another most consummate vagabond ! By my soul, the countenance of that fellow, when he was a boy, was the blackest image of perfidy, cowardice, and cruelty ever set up as a scarecrow in a field of scoundrels. If I were to meet that most unparalleled despot in the streets to-morrow, I would fell him like a rotten tree !”
“I have no doubt of it,” said Mr. Jarndyce. “Now, will you come up-stairs ?”
“By my soul, Jarndyce,” returned his guest, who seemed to refer to his watch, “if you had been married, I would have turned back at the garden gate, and gone away to the remotest summits of the Himalaya Mountains, sooner than I would have presented myself at this unseasonable hour.”
“Not quite so far, I hope ?” said Mr. Jarndyce.
“By my life and honor, yes!” cried the visitor. “I wouldn′t be guilty of the audacious insolence of keeping a lady of the house waiting all this time, for any earthly consideration. I would infinitely rather destroy myself—infinitely rather !”
Talking thus, they went up-stairs ; and presently we heard him in his bedroom thundering “Ha, ha, ha !” and again “Ha, ha, ha !” until the flattest echo in the neighbourhood seemed to catch the contagion, and to laugh as enjoyingly as he did, or as we did when we heard him laugh.
We all conceived a prepossession in his favor ; for there was a sterling-quality in this laugh, and in his vigorous healthy voice, and in the roundness and fulness with which he uttered every word he spoke, and in the very fury of his superlatives, which seemed to go off like blank cannons and hurt nothing. But we were hardly prepared to have it so confirmed by his appearance, when Mr. Jarndyce presented him. He was not only a very handsome old gentleman—upright and stalwart as he had been described to us—with a massive grey head, a fine composure of face when silent, a figure that might have become corpulent but for his being so continually in earnest that he gave it no rest, and a chin that might have subsided into a double chin but for the vehement emphasis in which it was constantly required to assist ; but he was such a true gentleman in his manner, so chivalrously polite, his face was lighted by a smile of so much sweetness and tenderness, and it seemed so plain that he had nothing to hide, but
