Bleak House
them, officers of police coarsely handling his most precious
heirlooms, thousands of fingers pointing at him, thousands of faces
sneering at him. But if such shadows flit before him to his
bewilderment, there is one other shadow which he can name with
something like distinctness even yet and to which alone he addresses
his tearing of his white hair and his extended arms.
It is she in association with whom, saving that she has been for
years a main fibre of the root of his dignity and pride, he has never
had a selfish thought. It is she whom he has loved, admired,
honoured, and set up for the world to respect. It is she who, at the
core of all the constrained formalities and conventionalities of his
life, has been a stock of living tenderness and love, susceptible as
nothing else is of being struck with the agony he feels. He sees her,
almost to the exclusion of himself, and cannot bear to look upon her
cast down from the high place she has graced so well.
And even to the point of his sinking on the ground, oblivious of his
suffering, he can yet pronounce her name with something like
distinctness in the midst of those intrusive sounds, and in a tone of
mourning and compassion rather than reproach.
CHAPTER LV
Flight
Inspector Bucket of the Detective has not yet struck his great blow,
as just now chronicled, but is yet refreshing himself with sleep
preparatory to his field-day, when through the night and along the
freezing wintry roads a chaise and pair comes out of Lincolnshire,
making its way towards London.
Railroads shall soon traverse all this country, and with a rattle and
a glare the engine and train shall shoot like a meteor over the wide
night-landscape, turning the moon paler; but as yet such things are
non-existent in these parts, though not wholly unexpected.
Preparations are afoot, measurements are made, ground is staked out.
Bridges are begun, and their not yet united piers desolately look at
one another over roads and streams like brick and mortar couples with
an obstacle to their union; fragments of embankments are thrown up
and left as precipices with torrents of rusty carts and barrows
tumbling over them; tripods of tall poles appear on hilltops, where
there are rumours of tunnels; everything looks chaotic and abandoned
in full hopelessness. Along the freezing roads, and through the
night, the post-chaise makes its way without a railroad on its mind.
Mrs. Rouncewell, so many years housekeeper at Chesney Wold, sits
within the chaise; and by her side sits Mrs. Bagnet with her grey
cloak and umbrella. The old girl would prefer the bar in front, as
being exposed to the weather and a primitive sort of perch more in
accordance with her usual course of travelling, but Mrs. Rouncewell
is too thoughtful of her comfort to admit of her proposing it. The
old lady cannot make enough of the old girl. She sits, in her stately
manner, holding her hand, and regardless of its roughness, puts it
often to her lips. “You are a mother, my dear soul,” says she many
times, “and you found out my George’s mother!”
“Why, George,” returns Mrs. Bagnet, “was always free with me, ma’am,
and when he said at our house to my Woolwich that of all the things
my Woolwich could have to think of when he grew to be a man, the
comfortablest would be that he had never brought a sorrowful line
into his mother’s face or turned a hair of her head grey, then I felt
sure, from his way, that something fresh had brought his own mother
into his mind. I had often known him say to me, in past times, that
he had behaved bad to her.”
“Never, my dear!” returns Mrs. Rouncewell, bursting into tears. “My
blessing on him, never! He was always fond of me, and loving to me,
was my George! But he had a bold spirit, and he ran a little wild and
went for a soldier. And I know he waited at first, in letting us know
about himself, till he should rise to be an officer; and when he
didn’t rise, I know he considered himself beneath us, and wouldn’t be
a disgrace to us. For he had a lion heart, had my George, always from
a baby!”
The old lady’s hands stray about her as of yore, while she recalls,
all in a tremble, what a likely lad, what a fine lad, what a gay
good-humoured clever lad he was; how they all took to him down at
Chesney Wold; how Sir Leicester took to him when he was a young
gentleman; how the dogs took to him; how even the people who had been
angry with him forgave him the moment he was gone, poor boy. And now
to see him after all, and in a prison too! And the broad stomacher
heaves, and the quaint upright old-fashioned figure bends under its
load of affectionate distress.
Mrs. Bagnet, with the instinctive skill of a good warm heart, leaves
the old housekeeper to her emotions for a little while—not without
passing the back of her hand across her own motherly eyes—and
presently chirps up in her cheery manner, “So I says to George when I
goes to call him in to tea (he pretended to be smoking his pipe
outside), ‘What ails you this afternoon, George, for gracious sake? I
have seen all sorts, and I have seen you pretty often in season and
out of season, abroad and at home, and I never see you so melancholy
penitent.’ ‘Why, Mrs. Bagnet,’ says George, ‘it’s because I AM
melancholy and penitent both, this afternoon, that you see me so.’
‘What have you done, old fellow?’ I says. ‘Why, Mrs. Bagnet,’ says
George, shaking his head, ‘what I have done has been done this many a
long year, and is best not tried to be undone now. If I ever get to
heaven it won’t be for being a good son to a widowed mother; I say no
more.’ Now, ma’am, when George says to me that it’s best not tried to
be undone now, I have my thoughts as I have often had before, and I
draw it out of George how he comes to have such things on him that
afternoon. Then George tells me that he has seen by chance, at the
lawyer’s office, a fine old lady that has brought his mother plain
before him, and he runs on about that old lady till he quite forgets
himself and paints her picture to me as she used to be, years upon
years back. So I says to George when he has done, who is this old
lady he has seen? And George tells me it’s Mrs. Rouncewell,
housekeeper for more than half a century to the Dedlock family down
at Chesney Wold in Lincolnshire. George has frequently told me before
that he’s a Lincolnshire man, and I says to my old Lignum that night,
‘Lignum, that’s his mother for five and for-ty pound!’”
All this Mrs. Bagnet now relates for the twentieth time at least
within the last four hours. Trilling it out like a kind of bird, with
a pretty high note, that it may be audible to the old lady above the
hum of the wheels.
“Bless you, and thank you,” says Mrs. Rouncewell. “Bless you, and
thank you, my worthy soul!”
“Dear heart!” cries Mrs. Bagnet in the most natural manner. “No
thanks to me, I am sure. Thanks to yourself, ma’am, for being so
ready to pay ’em! And mind once more, ma’am, what you had best do
on finding George to be your own son is to make him—for your
sake—have every sort of help to put himself in the right and clear
himself of a charge of which he is as innocent as you or me. It won’t
do to have truth and justice on his side; he must have law and
lawyers,” exclaims the old girl, apparently persuaded that the latter
form a separate establishment and have dissolved partnership with
truth and justice for ever and a day.
“He shall have,” says Mrs. Rouncewell, “all the help that can be got
for him in the world, my dear. I will spend all I have, and
thankfully, to procure it. Sir Leicester will do his best, the whole
family will do their best. I—I know something, my dear; and will
make my own appeal, as his mother parted from him all these years,
and finding him in a jail at last.”
The extreme disquietude of the old housekeeper’s manner in saying
this, her broken words, and her wringing of her hands make a powerful
impression on Mrs. Bagnet and would astonish her but that she refers
them all to her sorrow for her son’s condition. And yet Mrs. Bagnet
wonders too why Mrs. Rouncewell should murmur so distractedly, “My
Lady, my Lady, my Lady!” over and over again.
The frosty night wears away, and the dawn breaks, and the post-chaise
comes rolling on through the early mist like the ghost of a chaise
departed. It has plenty of spectral company in ghosts of trees and
hedges, slowly vanishing and giving place to the realities of day.
London reached, the travellers alight, the old housekeeper in great
tribulation and confusion, Mrs. Bagnet quite fresh and collected—as
she would be if her next point, with no new equipage and outfit, were
the Cape of Good Hope, the Island of Ascension, Hong Kong, or any
other military station.
But when they set out for the prison where the trooper is
confined, the old lady has managed to draw about her, with her
lavender-coloured dress, much of the staid calmness which is its
usual accompaniment. A wonderfully grave, precise, and handsome piece
of old china she looks, though her heart beats fast and her stomacher
is ruffled more than even the remembrance of this wayward son has
ruffled it these many years.
Approaching the cell, they find the door opening and a warder in the
act of coming out. The old girl promptly makes a sign of entreaty to
him to say nothing; assenting with a nod, he suffers them to enter as
he shuts the door.
So George, who is writing at his table, supposing himself to be
alone, does not raise his eyes, but remains absorbed. The old
housekeeper looks at him, and those wandering hands of hers are quite
enough for Mrs. Bagnet’s confirmation, even if she could see the
mother and the son together, knowing what she knows, and doubt their
relationship.
Not a rustle of the housekeeper’s dress, not a gesture, not a word
betrays her. She stands looking at him as he writes on, all
unconscious, and only her fluttering hands give utterance to her
emotions. But they are very eloquent, very, very eloquent. Mrs.
Bagnet understands them. They speak of gratitude, of joy, of grief,
of hope; of inextinguishable affection, cherished with no return
since this stalwart man was a stripling; of a better son loved less,
and this son loved so fondly and so proudly; and they speak in such
touching language that Mrs. Bagnet’s eyes brim up with tears and they
run glistening down her sun-brown face.
“George Rouncewell! Oh, my dear child, turn and look at me!”
The trooper starts up, clasps his mother round the neck, and falls
down on his knees before her. Whether in a late repentance, whether
in the first association that comes back upon him, he puts his hands
together as a child does when it says its prayers, and raising them
towards her breast, bows down his head, and cries.
“My George, my dearest son! Always my favourite, and my favourite
still, where have you been these cruel years and years? Grown such a
man too, grown such a fine strong man. Grown so like what I knew he
must be, if it pleased God he was alive!”
She can ask, and he can answer, nothing connected for a time. All
that time the old girl, turned away, leans one arm against the
whitened wall, leans her honest forehead upon it, wipes her eyes with
her serviceable grey cloak, and quite enjoys herself like the best of
old girls as she is.
“Mother,” says the trooper when they are more composed, “forgive me
first of all, for I know my need of it.”
Forgive him! She does it with all her heart and soul. She always has
done it. She tells him how she has had it written in her will, these
many years, that he was her beloved son George. She has never
believed any ill of him, never. If she had died without this
happiness—and she is an old woman now and can’t look to live very
long—she would have blessed him with her last breath, if she had had