Bleak House
three o’clock—they find a restless craving on him to know more about
the weather, now he cannot see it. Hence George, patrolling regularly
every half-hour to the rooms so carefully looked after, extends his
march to the hall-door, looks about him, and brings back the best
report he can make of the worst of nights, the sleet still falling
and even the stone footways lying ankle-deep in icy sludge.
Volumnia, in her room up a retired landing on the staircase—the
second turning past the end of the carving and gilding, a cousinly
room containing a fearful abortion of a portrait of Sir Leicester
banished for its crimes, and commanding in the day a solemn yard
planted with dried-up shrubs like antediluvian specimens of black
tea—is a prey to horrors of many kinds. Not last nor least among
them, possibly, is a horror of what may befall her little income in
the event, as she expresses it, “of anything happening” to Sir
Leicester. Anything, in this sense, meaning one thing only; and that
the last thing that can happen to the consciousness of any baronet in
the known world.
An effect of these horrors is that Volumnia finds she cannot go to
bed in her own room or sit by the fire in her own room, but must come
forth with her fair head tied up in a profusion of shawl, and her
fair form enrobed in drapery, and parade the mansion like a ghost,
particularly haunting the rooms, warm and luxurious, prepared for one
who still does not return. Solitude under such circumstances being
not to be thought of, Volumnia is attended by her maid, who,
impressed from her own bed for that purpose, extremely cold, very
sleepy, and generally an injured maid as condemned by circumstances
to take office with a cousin, when she had resolved to be maid to
nothing less than ten thousand a year, has not a sweet expression of
countenance.
The periodical visits of the trooper to these rooms, however, in the
course of his patrolling is an assurance of protection and company
both to mistress and maid, which renders them very acceptable in the
small hours of the night. Whenever he is heard advancing, they both
make some little decorative preparation to receive him; at other
times they divide their watches into short scraps of oblivion and
dialogues not wholly free from acerbity, as to whether Miss Dedlock,
sitting with her feet upon the fender, was or was not falling into
the fire when rescued (to her great displeasure) by her guardian
genius the maid.
“How is Sir Leicester now, Mr. George?” inquires Volumnia, adjusting
her cowl over her head.
“Why, Sir Leicester is much the same, miss. He is very low and ill,
and he even wanders a little sometimes.”
“Has he asked for me?” inquires Volumnia tenderly.
“Why, no, I can’t say he has, miss. Not within my hearing, that is to
say.”
“This is a truly sad time, Mr. George.”
“It is indeed, miss. Hadn’t you better go to bed?”
“You had a deal better go to bed, Miss Dedlock,” quoth the maid
sharply.
But Volumnia answers No! No! She may be asked for, she may be wanted
at a moment’s notice. She never should forgive herself “if anything
was to happen” and she was not on the spot. She declines to enter on
the question, mooted by the maid, how the spot comes to be there, and
not in her room (which is nearer to Sir Leicester’s), but staunchly
declares that on the spot she will remain. Volumnia further makes a
merit of not having “closed an eye”—as if she had twenty or
thirty—though it is hard to reconcile this statement with her having
most indisputably opened two within five minutes.
But when it comes to four o’clock, and still the same blank,
Volumnia’s constancy begins to fail her, or rather it begins to
strengthen, for she now considers that it is her duty to be ready for
the morrow, when much may be expected of her, that, in fact,
howsoever anxious to remain upon the spot, it may be required of her,
as an act of self-devotion, to desert the spot. So when the trooper
reappears with his, “Hadn’t you better go to bed, miss?” and when the
maid protests, more sharply than before, “You had a deal better go to
bed, Miss Dedlock!” she meekly rises and says, “Do with me what you
think best!”
Mr. George undoubtedly thinks it best to escort her on his arm to the
door of her cousinly chamber, and the maid as undoubtedly thinks it
best to hustle her into bed with mighty little ceremony. Accordingly,
these steps are taken; and now the trooper, in his rounds, has the
house to himself.
There is no improvement in the weather. From the portico, from the
eaves, from the parapet, from every ledge and post and pillar, drips
the thawed snow. It has crept, as if for shelter, into the lintels of
the great door—under it, into the corners of the windows, into every
chink and crevice of retreat, and there wastes and dies. It is
falling still; upon the roof, upon the skylight, even through the
skylight, and drip, drip, drip, with the regularity of the Ghost’s
Walk, on the stone floor below.
The trooper, his old recollections awakened by the solitary grandeur
of a great house—no novelty to him once at Chesney Wold—goes up the
stairs and through the chief rooms, holding up his light at arm’s
length. Thinking of his varied fortunes within the last few weeks,
and of his rustic boyhood, and of the two periods of his life so
strangely brought together across the wide intermediate space;
thinking of the murdered man whose image is fresh in his mind;
thinking of the lady who has disappeared from these very rooms and
the tokens of whose recent presence are all here; thinking of the
master of the house upstairs and of the foreboding, “Who will tell
him!” he looks here and looks there, and reflects how he MIGHT see
something now, which it would tax his boldness to walk up to, lay his
hand upon, and prove to be a fancy. But it is all blank, blank as the
darkness above and below, while he goes up the great staircase again,
blank as the oppressive silence.
“All is still in readiness, George Rouncewell?”
“Quite orderly and right, Sir Leicester.”
“No word of any kind?”
The trooper shakes his head.
“No letter that can possibly have been overlooked?”
But he knows there is no such hope as that and lays his head down
without looking for an answer.
Very familiar to him, as he said himself some hours ago, George
Rouncewell lifts him into easier positions through the long remainder
of the blank wintry night, and equally familiar with his unexpressed
wish, extinguishes the light and undraws the curtains at the first
late break of day. The day comes like a phantom. Cold, colourless,
and vague, it sends a warning streak before it of a deathlike hue, as
if it cried out, “Look what I am bringing you who watch there! Who
will tell him!”
CHAPTER LIX
Esther’s Narrative
It was three o’clock in the morning when the houses outside London
did at last begin to exclude the country and to close us in with
streets. We had made our way along roads in a far worse condition
than when we had traversed them by daylight, both the fall and the
thaw having lasted ever since; but the energy of my companion never
slackened. It had only been, as I thought, of less assistance than
the horses in getting us on, and it had often aided them. They had
stopped exhausted half-way up hills, they had been driven through
streams of turbulent water, they had slipped down and become
entangled with the harness; but he and his little lantern had been
always ready, and when the mishap was set right, I had never heard
any variation in his cool, “Get on, my lads!”
The steadiness and confidence with which he had directed our journey
back I could not account for. Never wavering, he never even stopped
to make an inquiry until we were within a few miles of London. A very
few words, here and there, were then enough for him; and thus we
came, at between three and four o’clock in the morning, into
Islington.
I will not dwell on the suspense and anxiety with which I reflected
all this time that we were leaving my mother farther and farther
behind every minute. I think I had some strong hope that he must be
right and could not fail to have a satisfactory object in following
this woman, but I tormented myself with questioning it and discussing
it during the whole journey. What was to ensue when we found her and
what could compensate us for this loss of time were questions also
that I could not possibly dismiss; my mind was quite tortured by long
dwelling on such reflections when we stopped.
We stopped in a high-street where there was a coach-stand. My
companion paid our two drivers, who were as completely covered with
splashes as if they had been dragged along the roads like the
carriage itself, and giving them some brief direction where to take
it, lifted me out of it and into a hackney-coach he had chosen from
the rest.
“Why, my dear!” he said as he did this. “How wet you are!”
I had not been conscious of it. But the melted snow had found its way
into the carriage, and I had got out two or three times when a fallen
horse was plunging and had to be got up, and the wet had penetrated
my dress. I assured him it was no matter, but the driver, who knew
him, would not be dissuaded by me from running down the street to his
stable, whence he brought an armful of clean dry straw. They shook it
out and strewed it well about me, and I found it warm and
comfortable.
“Now, my dear,” said Mr. Bucket, with his head in at the window after
I was shut up. “We’re a-going to mark this person down. It may take a
little time, but you don’t mind that. You’re pretty sure that I’ve
got a motive. Ain’t you?”
I little thought what it was, little thought in how short a time I
should understand it better, but I assured him that I had confidence
in him.
“So you may have, my dear,” he returned. “And I tell you what! If you
only repose half as much confidence in me as I repose in you after
what I’ve experienced of you, that’ll do. Lord! You’re no trouble at
all. I never see a young woman in any station of society—and I’ve
seen many elevated ones too—conduct herself like you have conducted
yourself since you was called out of your bed. You’re a pattern, you
know, that’s what you are,” said Mr. Bucket warmly; “you’re a
pattern.”
I told him I was very glad, as indeed I was, to have been no
hindrance to him, and that I hoped I should be none now.
“My dear,” he returned, “when a young lady is as mild as she’s game,
and as game as she’s mild, that’s all I ask, and more than I expect.
She then becomes a queen, and that’s about what you are yourself.”
With these encouraging words—they really were encouraging to me
under those lonely and anxious circumstances—he got upon the box,
and we once more drove away. Where we drove I neither knew then nor
have ever known since, but we appeared to seek out the narrowest and
worst streets in London. Whenever I saw him directing the driver, I
was prepared for our descending into a deeper complication of such
streets, and we never failed to do so.
Sometimes we emerged upon a wider thoroughfare or came to a larger
building than the generality, well lighted. Then we stopped at
offices like those we had visited when we began our journey, and I
saw him in consultation with others. Sometimes he would get down by
an archway or at a street corner and mysteriously show the light of
his little lantern. This would attract similar lights from various
dark quarters, like so many insects, and a fresh consultation would
be held. By degrees we appeared to contract our search within
narrower and easier limits. Single police-officers on duty could now
tell Mr. Bucket what he wanted to know and point to him where to go.
At last we stopped for a rather long conversation between him and one