Bleak House

Mr. Tulkinghorn, profoundly attentive, throws this off with a shrug of self-depreciation, and contracts his eyebrows a little more.

'You have prepared me for my exposure, and I thank you for that too. Is there anything that you require of me? Is there any claim that I can release, or any charge or trouble that I can spare my husband in obtaining his release, by certifying to the exactness of your discovery? I will write anything, here and now, that you will dictate. I am ready to do it.'

And she would do it! thinks the lawyer, watchful of the firm hand with which she takes the pen!

'I will not trouble you, Lady Dedlock. Pray spare yourself.'

'I have long expected this, as you know. I neither wish to spare myself, nor to be spared. You can do nothing worse to me than you have done. Do what remains, now.'

'Lady Dedlock, there is nothing to be done. I will take leave to say a few words, when you have finished.'

Their need for watching one another should be over now, but they do it all this time, and the stars watch them both through the opened window. Away in the moonlight lie the woodland fields at rest, and the wide house is as quiet as the narrow one. The narrow one! Where are the digger and the spade, this peaceful night, destined to add the last great secret to the many secrets of the Tulkinghorn existence? Is the man born yet, is the spade wrought yet? Curious questions to consider, more curious perhaps not to consider, under the watching stars upon a summer night.

'Of repentance or remorse, or any feeling of mine,' Lady Dedlock presently proceeds, 'I say not a word. If I were not dumb, you would be deaf. Let that go by. It is not for your ears.'

He makes a feint of offering a protest, but she sweeps it away with her disdainful hand.

'Of other and very different things I come to speak to you. My jewels are all in their proper places of keeping. They will be found there. So, my dresses. So, all the valuables I have. Some ready money I had with me, please to say, but no large amount. I did not wear my own dress, in order that I might avoid observation. I went, to be henceforward lost. Make this known. I leave no other charge with you.'

'Excuse me, Lady Dedlock,' says Mr. Tulkinghorn, quite unmoved. 'I am not sure that I understand you. You went?—'

'To be lost to all here. I leave Chesney Wold to-night. I go this hour.'

Mr. Tulkinghorn shakes his head. She rises; but he, without moving hand from chair-back or from old-fashioned waistcoat and shirt-frill, shakes his head.

'What? Not go as I have said?'

'No, Lady Dedlock,' he very calmly replies.

'Do you know the relief that my disappearance will be? Have you forgotten the stain and blot upon this place, and where it is, and who it is?'

'No, Lady Dedlock, not by any means.'

Without deigning to rejoin, she moves to the inner door and has it in her hand, when he says to her, without himself stirring hand or foot, or raising his voice:

'Lady Dedlock, have the goodness to stop and hear me, or before you reach the staircase I shall ring the alarm-bell and raise the house. And then I must speak out, before every guest and servant, every man and woman, in it.'

He has conquered her. She falters, trembles, and puts her hand confusedly to her head. Slight tokens these in any one else; but when so practised an eye as Mr. Tulkinghorn's sees indecision for a moment in such a subject, he thoroughly knows its value.

He promptly says again, 'Have the goodness to hear me, Lady Dedlock,' and motions to the chair from which she has risen. She hesitates, but he motions again, and she sits down.

'The relations between us are of an unfortunate description, Lady Dedlock; but, as they are not of my making, I will not apologise for them. The position I hold in reference to Sir Leicester is so well known to you, that I can hardly imagine but that I must long have appeared in your eyes the natural person to make this discovery.'

'Sir,' she returns, without looking up from the ground, on which her eyes are now fixed. 'I had better have gone. It would have been far better not to have detained me. I have no more to say.'

'Excuse me, Lady Dedlock, if I add, a little more to hear.'

'I wish to hear it at the window, then. I can't breathe where I am.'

His jealous glance as she walks that way, betrays an instant's misgiving that she may have it in her thoughts to leap over, and dashing against ledge and cornice, strike her life out upon the terrace below. But a moment's observation of her figure as she stands in the window without any support, looking out at the stars – not up – gloomily out at those stars which are low in the heavens – reassures him. By facing round as she has moved, he stands a little behind her.

'Lady Dedlock, I have not yet been able to come to a decision satisfactory to myself, on the course before me. I am not clear what to do, or how to act next. I must request you, in the mean time, to keep your secret as you have kept it so long, and not to wonder that I keep it too.'

He pauses, but she makes no reply.

'Pardon me, Lady Dedlock. This is an important subject. You are honouring me with your attention?'

'I am.'

'Thank you. I might have known it, from what I have seen of your strength of character. I ought not to have asked the question, but I have the habit of making sure of my ground, step by step, as I go on. The sole consideration in this unhappy case is Sir Leicester.'

'Then why,' she asks in a low voice, and without removing her gloomy look from those distant stars, 'do you detain me in his house?'

'Because he is the consideration. Lady Dedlock, I have no occasion to tell you that Sir Leicester is a very proud man; that his reliance upon you is implicit; that the fall of that moon out of the sky, would not amaze him more than your fall from your high position as his wife.'

She breathes quickly and heavily, but she stands as unflinchingly as ever he has seen her in the midst of her grandest company.

'I declare to you, Lady Dedlock, that with anything short of this case that I have, I would as soon have hoped to root up, by means of my own strength and my own hands, the oldest tree on this estate, as to shake your hold upon Sir Leicester, and Sir Leicester's trust and confidence in you. And even now, with this case, I hesitate. Not that he could doubt (that, even with him, is impossible), but that nothing can prepare him for the blow.'

'Not my flight?' she returned. 'Think of it again.'

'Your flight, Lady Dedlock, would spread the whole truth, and a hundred times the whole truth, far and wide. It would be impossible to save the family credit for a day. It is not to be thought of.'

There is a quiet decision in his reply, which admits of no remonstrance.

'When I speak of Sir Leicester being the sole consideration, he and the family credit are one. Sir Leicester and the baronetcy, Sir Leicester and Chesney Wold, Sir Leicester and his ancestors and his patrimony;' Mr. Tulkinghorn very dry here; 'are, I need not say to you, Lady Dedlock, inseparable.'

'Goon!'

'Therefore,' says Mr. Tulkinghorn, pursuing his case in his jog-trot style, 'I have much to consider. This is to be hushed up, if it can be. How can it be, if Sir Leicester is driven out of his wits, or laid upon a death-bed? If I inflicted this shock upon him to-morrow morning, how could the immediate change in him be accounted for? What could have caused it? What could have divided you? Lady Dedlock. the wall-chalking and the street-crying would come on directly; and you are to remember that it would not affect you merely (whom I cannot at all consider in this business), but your husband, Lady Dedlock, your husband.'

He gets plainer as he gets on, but not an atom more emphatic or animated.

'There is another point of view,' he continues, 'in which the case presents itself. Sir Leicester is devoted to you almost to infatuation. He might not be able to overcome that infatuation, even knowing what we know. I am putting an extreme case, but it might be so. If so, it were better that he knew nothing. Better for common sense, better for him, better for me. I must take all this into account, and it combines to render a decision very difficult.'

She stands looking out at the same stars without a word. They are beginning to pale, and she looks as if their coldness froze her.

'My experience teaches me,' says Mr. Tulkinghorn, who has by this time got his hands in his pockets, and is going on in his business consideration of the matter, like a machine, 'My experience teaches me, Lady Dedlock, that most of the people I know would do far better to leave marriage alone. It is at the bottom of three-fourths of their troubles. So I thought when Sir Leicester married, and so I always have thought since. No more about that. I must now be guided by circumstances. In the meanwhile I must beg you to keep your own counsel, and I will keep mine.'

'I am to drag my present life on, holding its pains at your pleasure, day by day?' she asks, still looking at the distant sky.

'Yes, I am afraid so, Lady Dedlock.'

'It is necessary, you think, that I should be so tied to the stake?'

'I am sure that what I recommend is necessary.'

'I am to remain on this gaudy platform, on which my miserable deception has been so long acted, and it is to fall beneath me when you give the signal?' she said slowly.

'Not without notice, Lady Dedlock. I shall take no step without forewarning you.'

She asks all her questions as if she were repeating them from memory, or calling them over in her sleep.

'We are to meet as usual?'

'Precisely as usual, if you please.'

'And I am to hide my guilt, as I have done so many years?'

'As you have done so many years. I should not have made that reference myself, Lady Dedlock, but I may now remind you that your secret can be no heavier to you than it was, and is no worse and no better than it was. I know it certainly, but I believe we have never wholly trusted each other.'

She stands absorbed in the same frozen way for some little time, before asking:

'Is there anything more to be said to-night?'

'Why,' Mr. Tulkinghorn returns methodically, as he softly rubs his hands, 'I should like to be assured of your acquiescence in my arrangements, Lady Dedlock.'

'You may be assured of it.'

'Good. And I would wish in conclusion to remind you, as a business precaution, in case it should be necessary to recall the fact in any communication with Sir Leicester, that throughout our interview I have expressly stated my sole consideration to be Sir Leicester's feelings and honour, and the family reputation. I should have been happy to have made Lady Dedlock a prominent consideration, too, if the case had admitted of it; but unfortunately it does not.'

'I can attest your fidelity, sir.'

Both before and after saying it she remains absorbed, but at length moves, and turns, unshaken in her natural and acquired presence, towards the door. Mr. Tulkinghorn opens both the doors exactly as he would have done yesterday, or as he would have done ten years ago, and makes his old-fashioned bow as she passes out. It is not an ordinary look that he receives from the handsome face as it goes into the darkness, and it is not an ordinary movement, though a very slight one, that acknowledges his courtesy. But, as he reflects when he is left alone, the woman has been putting no common constraint upon herself.

He would know it all the better, if he saw the woman pacing her own rooms with her hair wildly thrown from her flung-back face, her hands clasped behind her head, her figure twisted as if by pain. He would think so all the more, if he saw the woman thus hurrying up and down for hours, without fatigue, without intermission, followed by the faithful step upon the Ghost's Walk. But he shuts out the now chilled air, draws the window-curtain, goes to bed, and falls asleep. And truly when the stars go out and the wan day peeps into the turret-chamber, finding him at his oldest, he looks as if the digger and the spade were both commissioned, and would soon be digging.

The same wan day peeps in at Sir Leicester pardoning the repentant country in a majestically condescending dream; and at the cousins entering on various public employments, principally receipt of salary; and at the chaste Volumnia, bestowing a dower of fifty thousand pounds upon a hideous old General, with a mouth of false teeth like a pianoforte too full of keys, long the admiration of Bath and the terror of every other community. Also into rooms high in the roof, and into offices in court-yards and over stables, where humbler ambition dreams of bliss, in keepers' lodges, and in holy matrimony with Will or Sally. Up comes the bright sun, drawing everything up with it – the Wills and Sallys, the latent vapour in the earth, the drooping leaves and flowers, the birds and beasts and creeping things, the gardeners to sweep the dewy turf and unfold emerald velvet where the roller passes, the smoke of the great kitchen fire wreathing itself straight and high into the lightsome air. Lastly, up comes the flag over Mr. Tulkinghorn's unconscious head, cheerfully proclaiming that Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock are in their happy home, and that there is hospitality at the place in Lincolnshire.

Chapter XLII

In Mr. Tulkinghorn's chambers

From the verdant undulations and the spreading oaks of the Dedlock property, Mr. Tulkinghorn transfers himself to the stale heat and dust of London. His manner of coming and going between the two places, is one of his impenetrabilities. He walks into Chesney Wold as if it were next door to his chambers, and returns to his chambers as if he had never been out of Lincoln's Inn Fields. He neither changes his dress before the journey, nor talks of it afterwards. He melted out of his turret-room this morning, just as now, in the late twilight, he melts into his own square.

Like a dingy London bird among the birds at roost in these pleasant fields, where the sheep are all made into parchment, the goats into wigs, and the pasture into chaff, the lawyer, smoke-dried and faded, dwelling among mankind but not consorting with them, aged without experience of genial youth, and so long used to make his cramped nest in holes and corners of human nature that he has forgotten its broader and better range, comes sauntering home. In the oven made by the hot pavements and hot buildings, he has baked himself dryer than usual; and he has, in his thirsty mind, his mellowed port-wine half a century old.

The lamplighter is skipping up and down his ladder on Mr. Tulkinghorn's side of the Fields, when that high-priest of noble mysteries arrives at his own dull court-yard. He ascends the door-steps, and is gliding into the dusky hall, when he encounters, on the top step, a bowing and propitiatory little man.

'Is that Snagsby?'

'Yes, sir. I hope you are well, sir. I was just giving you up, sir, and going home.'

'Aye? What is it? What do you want with me?'

'Well, sir,' says Mr. Snagsby, holding his hat at the side of his head, in his deference towards his best customer, 'I was wishful to say a word to you, sir.'

'Can you say it here?'

'Perfectly, sir.'

'Say it then.' The lawyer turns, leans his arms on the iron railing at the top of the steps, and looks at the lamplighter lighting the court-yard.

'It is relating,' says Mr. Snagsby, in a mysterious low voice: 'it is relating – not to put too fine a point upon it – to the foreigner, sir.'

Mr. Tulkinghorn eyes him with some surprise. 'What foreigner?'

'The foreign female, sir. French, if I don't mistake? I am not acquainted with that language myself, but I should judge from her manners and appearance that she was French; anyways, certainly foreign. Her that was up-stairs, sir, when Mr. Bucket and me had the honour of waiting upon you with the sweeping-boy that night.'

'Oh! yes, yes. Mademoiselle Hortense.'

'Indeed, sir?' Mr. Snagsby coughs his cough of submission behind his hat. 'I am not acquainted myself with the names of foreigners in general, but I have no doubt it would be that.' Mr. Snagsby appears to have set out in this reply with some desperate design of repeating the name; but on reflection coughs again to excuse himself.

'And what can you have to say, Snagsby,' demands Mr. Tulkinghorn, 'about her?'

'Well, sir,' returns the stationer, shading his communication with his hat, 'it falls a little hard upon me. My domestic happiness is very great – at least, it's as great as can be expected, I'm sure – but my little woman is rather given to jealousy. Not to put too fine a point upon it, she is very much given to jealousy. And you see, a foreign female of that genteel appearance coming into the shop, and hovering – I should be the last to make use of a strong expression, if I could avoid it, but hovering, sir – in the court – you know it is – now ain't it? I only put it to yourself, sir.'

Mr. Snagsby having said this in a very plaintive manner, throws in a cough of general application to fill up all the blanks.

'Why, what do you mean?' asks Mr. Tulkinghorn.

'Just so, sir,' returns Mr. Snagsby; 'I was sure you would feel it yourself, and would excuse the reasonableness of my feelings when coupled with the known excitableness of my little woman. You see, the foreign female – which you mentioned her name just now, with quite a native sound I am sure – caught up the word Snagsby that night, being uncommon quick, and made inquiry, and got the direction and come at dinner-time. Now Guster, our young woman, is timid and has fits, and she, taking fright at the foreigner's looks – which are fierce – and at a grinding manner that she has of speaking – which is calculated to alarm a weak mind– gave way to it, instead of bearing up against it, and tumbled down the kitchen stairs out of one into another, such fits as I do sometimes think are never gone into, or come out of, in any house but ours. Consequently there was by good fortune ample occupation for my little woman, and only me to answer the shop. When she did say that Mr. Tulkinghorn, being always denied to her by his Employer (which I had no doubt at the time was a foreign mode of viewing a clerk), she would do herself the pleasure of continually calling at my place until she was let in here. Since then she has been, as I began by saying, hovering – Hovering, sir,' Mr. Snagsby repeats the word with pathetic emphasis, 'in the court. The effects of which movement it is impossible to calculate. I shouldn't wonder if it might have already given rise to the painfullest mistakes even in the neighbours' minds, not mentioning (if such a thing was possible) my little woman. Whereas, Goodness knows,' says Mr. Snagsby, shaking his head, 'I never had an idea of a foreign female, except as being formerly connected with a bunch of brooms and a baby, or at the present time with a tambourine and earrings. I never had, I do assure you, sir!'

Mr. Tulkinghorn has listened gravely to this complaint, and inquires, when the stationer has finished, 'And that's all, is it, Snagsby?'

'Why yes, sir, that's all,' says Mr. Snagsby, ending with a cough that plainly adds, 'and it's enough too – for me.'

'I don't know what Mademoiselle Hortense may want or mean, unless she is mad,' says the lawyer.

'Even if she was, you know, sir,' Mr. Snagsby pleads, 'it wouldn't be a consolation to have some weapon or another in the form of a foreign dagger, planted in the family.'

'No,' says the other. 'Well, well! This shall be stopped. I am sorry you have been inconvenienced. If she comes again, send her here.'

Mr. Snagsby, with much bowing and short apologetic coughing, takes his leave, lightened in heart. Mr. Tulkinghorn goes up-stairs, saying to himself, 'These women were created to give trouble, the whole earth over. The Mistress not being enough to deal with, here's the maid now! But I will be short with this jade at least!'

So saying, he unlocks his door, gropes his way into his murky rooms, lights his candles, and looks about him. It is too dark to see much of the allegory overhead there; but that importunate Roman, who is for ever toppling out of the clouds and pointing, is at his old work pretty distinctly. Not honouring him with much attention, Mr. Tulkinghorn takes a small key from his pocket, unlocks a drawer in which there is another key, which unlocks a chest in which there is another key, and so comes to the cellar-key, with which he prepares to descend to the regions of old wine. He is going towards the door with a candle in his hand, when a knock comes.

'Who's this? – Aye, aye, mistress, it's you, is it? You appear at a good time. I have just been hearing of you. Now! What do you want?'

He stands the candle on the chimney-piece in the clerk's hall, and taps his dry cheek with the key, as he addresses these words of welcome to Mademoiselle Hortense. That feline personage, with her lips tightly shut, and her eyes looking out at him sideways, softly closes the door before replying.

'I have had great deal of trouble to find you, sir.'

'Have you!'

'I have been here very often, sir. It has always been said to me, he is not at home, he is engage, he is this and that, he is not for you.'

'Quite right, and quite true.'

'Not true. Lies!'

At times, there is a suddenness in the manner of Mademoiselle Hortense so like a bodily spring upon the subject of it, that such subject involuntarily starts and falls back. It is Mr. Tulkinghorn's case at present, though Mademoiselle Hortense, with her eyes almost shut up (but still looking out sideways), is only smiling contemptuously and shaking her head.

'Now, mistress,' says the lawyer, tapping the key hastily upon the chimney-piece. 'If you have anything to say, say it, say it.'

'Sir, you have not use me well. You have been mean and shabby.'

'Mean and shabby, eh?' returns the lawyer, rubbing his nose with the key.

'Yes. What is it that I tell you? You know you have. You have attrapped me – catched me – to give you information; you have asked me to show you the dress of mine my Lady must have wore that night, you have prayed me to come in it here to meet that boy – Say! Is it not?' Mademoiselle Hortense makes another spring.

'You are a vixen, a vixen!' Mr. Tulkinghorn seems to meditate, as he looks distrustfully at her; then he replies, 'Well, wench, well. I paid you.'

'You paid me!' she repeats, with fierce disdain. 'Two sovereign! I have not change them, I ref-use them, I des-pise them, I throw them from me!' Which she literally does, taking them out of her bosom as she speaks, and flinging them with such violence on the floor, that they jerk up again into the light before they roll away into corners, and slowly settle down there after spinning vehemently.

'Now!' says Mademoiselle Hortense, darkening her large eyes again. 'You have paid me? Eh, my God, O yes!'

Mr. Tulkinghorn rubs his head with the key, while she entertains herself with a sarcastic laugh.

'You must be rich, my fair friend,' he composedly observes, 'to throw money about in that way!'

'I am rich,' she returns, 'I am very rich in hate. I hate my Lady, of all my heart. You know that.'

'Know it? How should I know it?'

'Because you have known it perfectly, before you prayed me to give you that information. Because you have known perfectly that I was en-r-r-r-raged!' It appears impossible for Mademoiselle to roll the letter r sufficiently in this word, notwithstanding that she assists her energetic delivery, by clenching both her hands, and setting all her teeth.

'Oh! I knew that, did I?' says Mr. Tulkinghorn, examining the wards of the key.

'Yes, without doubt. I am not blind. You have made sure of me because you knew that. You had reason! I det-est her.' Mademoiselle folds her arms, and throws this last remark at him over one of her shoulders.

'Having said this, have you anything else to say, Mademoiselle?'

'I am not yet placed. Place me well. Find me a good condition! If you cannot, or do not choose to do that, employ me to pursue her, to chase her, to disgrace and to dishonour her. I will help you well, and with a good will. It is what you do. Do I not know that?'

'You appear to know a good deal,' Mr. Tulkinghorn retorts.

'Do I not? Is it that I am so weak as to believe, like a child, that I come here in that dress to rec-eive that boy, only to decide a little bet, a wager? – Eh, my God, O yes!' In this reply, down to the word 'wager' inclusive, Mademoiselle has been ironically polite and tender; then, as suddenly dashed into the bitterest and most defiant scorn, with her black eyes in one and the same moment very nearly shut, and staringly wide open.