Bleak House by Charles Dickens (ebook reader that looks like a book TXT) 📕

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.”

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 want—”

“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 rouse 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 apologize 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

meantime, 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.”

“Go on!”

“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