Bleak House
patronage, you should exert your influence to keep her from these
dangerous hands. You might show her what violence would be done in
such association to her duties and principles, and you might preserve
her for a better fate. You might point out to her that she probably
would, in good time, find a husband at Chesney Wold by whom she would
not be—” Sir Leicester adds, after a moment’s consideration,
“dragged from the altars of her forefathers.”
These remarks he offers with his unvarying politeness and deference
when he addresses himself to his wife. She merely moves her head in
reply. The moon is rising, and where she sits there is a little
stream of cold pale light, in which her head is seen.
“It is worthy of remark,” says Mr. Tulkinghorn, “however, that these
people are, in their way, very proud.”
“Proud?” Sir Leicester doubts his hearing.
“I should not be surprised if they all voluntarily abandoned the
girl—yes, lover and all—instead of her abandoning them, supposing
she remained at Chesney Wold under such circumstances.”
“Well!” says Sir Leicester tremulously. “Well! You should know, Mr.
Tulkinghorn. You have been among them.”
“Really, Sir Leicester,” returns the lawyer, “I state the fact. Why,
I could tell you a story—with Lady Dedlock’s permission.”
Her head concedes it, and Volumnia is enchanted. A story! Oh, he is
going to tell something at last! A ghost in it, Volumnia hopes?
“No. Real flesh and blood.” Mr. Tulkinghorn stops for an instant and
repeats with some little emphasis grafted upon his usual monotony,
“Real flesh and blood, Miss Dedlock. Sir Leicester, these particulars
have only lately become known to me. They are very brief. They
exemplify what I have said. I suppress names for the present. Lady
Dedlock will not think me ill-bred, I hope?”
By the light of the fire, which is low, he can be seen looking
towards the moonlight. By the light of the moon Lady Dedlock can be
seen, perfectly still.
“A townsman of this Mr. Rouncewell, a man in exactly parallel
circumstances as I am told, had the good fortune to have a daughter
who attracted the notice of a great lady. I speak of really a great
lady, not merely great to him, but married to a gentleman of your
condition, Sir Leicester.”
Sir Leicester condescendingly says, “Yes, Mr. Tulkinghorn,” implying
that then she must have appeared of very considerable moral
dimensions indeed in the eyes of an iron-master.
“The lady was wealthy and beautiful, and had a liking for the girl,
and treated her with great kindness, and kept her always near her.
Now this lady preserved a secret under all her greatness, which she
had preserved for many years. In fact, she had in early life been
engaged to marry a young rake—he was a captain in the army—nothing
connected with whom came to any good. She never did marry him, but
she gave birth to a child of which he was the father.”
By the light of the fire he can be seen looking towards the
moonlight. By the moonlight, Lady Dedlock can be seen in profile,
perfectly still.
“The captain in the army being dead, she believed herself safe; but a
train of circumstances with which I need not trouble you led to
discovery. As I received the story, they began in an imprudence on
her own part one day when she was taken by surprise, which shows how
difficult it is for the firmest of us (she was very firm) to be
always guarded. There was great domestic trouble and amazement, you
may suppose; I leave you to imagine, Sir Leicester, the husband’s
grief. But that is not the present point. When Mr. Rouncewell’s
townsman heard of the disclosure, he no more allowed the girl to be
patronized and honoured than he would have suffered her to be trodden
underfoot before his eyes. Such was his pride, that he indignantly
took her away, as if from reproach and disgrace. He had no sense of
the honour done him and his daughter by the lady’s condescension; not
the least. He resented the girl’s position, as if the lady had been
the commonest of commoners. That is the story. I hope Lady Dedlock
will excuse its painful nature.”
There are various opinions on the merits, more or less conflicting
with Volumnia’s. That fair young creature cannot believe there ever
was any such lady and rejects the whole history on the threshold. The
majority incline to the debilitated cousin’s sentiment, which is in
few words—“no business—Rouncewell’s fernal townsman.” Sir Leicester
generally refers back in his mind to Wat Tyler and arranges a
sequence of events on a plan of his own.
There is not much conversation in all, for late hours have been kept
at Chesney Wold since the necessary expenses elsewhere began, and
this is the first night in many on which the family have been alone.
It is past ten when Sir Leicester begs Mr. Tulkinghorn to ring for
candles. Then the stream of moonlight has swelled into a lake, and
then Lady Dedlock for the first time moves, and rises, and comes
forward to a table for a glass of water. Winking cousins, bat-like in
the candle glare, crowd round to give it; Volumnia (always ready for
something better if procurable) takes another, a very mild sip of
which contents her; Lady Dedlock, graceful, self-possessed, looked
after by admiring eyes, passes away slowly down the long perspective
by the side of that nymph, not at all improving her as a question of
contrast.
CHAPTER XLI
In Mr. Tulkinghorn’s Room
Mr. Tulkinghorn arrives in his turret-room a little breathed by the
journey up, though leisurely performed. There is an expression on his
face as if he had discharged his mind of some grave matter and were,
in his close way, satisfied. To say of a man so severely and strictly
self-repressed that he is triumphant would be to do him as great an
injustice as to suppose him troubled with love or sentiment or any
romantic weakness. He is sedately satisfied. Perhaps there is a
rather increased sense of power upon him as he loosely grasps one of
his veinous wrists with his other hand and holding it behind his back
walks noiselessly up and down.
There is a capacious writing-table in the room on which is a pretty
large accumulation of papers. The green lamp is lighted, his
reading-glasses lie upon the desk, the easy-chair is wheeled up to
it, and it would seem as though he had intended to bestow an hour or
so upon these claims on his attention before going to bed. But he
happens not to be in a business mind. After a glance at the documents
awaiting his notice—with his head bent low over the table, the old
man’s sight for print or writing being defective at night—he opens
the French window and steps out upon the leads. There he again walks
slowly up and down in the same attitude, subsiding, if a man so cool
may have any need to subside, from the story he has related
downstairs.
The time was once when men as knowing as Mr. Tulkinghorn would walk
on turret-tops in the starlight and look up into the sky to read
their fortunes there. Hosts of stars are visible to-night, though
their brilliancy is eclipsed by the splendour of the moon. If he be
seeking his own star as he methodically turns and turns upon the
leads, it should be but a pale one to be so rustily represented
below. If he be tracing out his destiny, that may be written in other
characters nearer to his hand.
As he paces the leads with his eyes most probably as high above his
thoughts as they are high above the earth, he is suddenly stopped in
passing the window by two eyes that meet his own. The ceiling of his
room is rather low; and the upper part of the door, which is opposite
the window, is of glass. There is an inner baize door, too, but the
night being warm he did not close it when he came upstairs. These
eyes that meet his own are looking in through the glass from the
corridor outside. He knows them well. The blood has not flushed into
his face so suddenly and redly for many a long year as when he
recognizes Lady Dedlock.
He steps into the room, and she comes in too, closing both the doors
behind her. There is a wild disturbance—is it fear or anger?—in her
eyes. In her carriage and all else she looks as she looked downstairs
two hours ago.
Is it fear or is it anger now? He cannot be sure. Both might be as
pale, both as intent.
“Lady Dedlock?”
She does not speak at first, nor even when she has slowly dropped
into the easy-chair by the table. They look at each other, like two
pictures.
“Why have you told my story to so many persons?”
“Lady Dedlock, it was necessary for me to inform you that I knew it.”
“How long have you known it?”
“I have suspected it a long while—fully known it a little while.”
“Months?”
“Days.”
He stands before her with one hand on a chair-back and the other in
his old-fashioned waistcoat and shirt-frill, exactly as he has stood
before her at any time since her marriage. The same formal
politeness, the same composed deference that might as well be
defiance; the whole man the same dark, cold object, at the same
distance, which nothing has ever diminished.
“Is this true concerning the poor girl?”
He slightly inclines and advances his head as not quite understanding
the question.
“You know what you related. Is it true? Do her friends know my story
also? Is it the town-talk yet? Is it chalked upon the walls and cried
in the streets?”
So! Anger, and fear, and shame. All three contending. What power this
woman has to keep these raging passions down! Mr. Tulkinghorn’s
thoughts take such form as he looks at her, with his ragged grey
eyebrows a hair’s breadth more contracted than usual under her gaze.
“No, Lady Dedlock. That was a hypothetical case, arising out of Sir
Leicester’s unconsciously carrying the matter with so high a hand.
But it would be a real case if they knew—what we know.”
“Then they do not know it yet?”
“No.”
“Can I save the poor girl from injury before they know it?”
“Really, Lady Dedlock,” Mr. Tulkinghorn replies, “I cannot give a
satisfactory opinion on that point.”
And he thinks, with the interest of attentive curiosity, as he
watches the struggle in her breast, “The power and force of this
woman are astonishing!”
“Sir,” she says, for the moment obliged to set her lips with all the
energy she has, that she may speak distinctly, “I will make it
plainer. I do not dispute your hypothetical case. I anticipated it,
and felt its truth as strongly as you can do, when I saw Mr.
Rouncewell here. I knew very well that if he could have had the power
of seeing me as I was, he would consider the poor girl tarnished by
having for a moment been, although most innocently, the subject of my
great and distinguished patronage. But I have an interest in her, or
I should rather say—no longer belonging to this place—I had, and if
you can find so much consideration for the woman under your foot as
to remember that, she will be very sensible of your mercy.”
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.”