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Read books online » Fiction » Bleak House by Charles Dickens (the top 100 crime novels of all time .txt) 📖

Book online «Bleak House by Charles Dickens (the top 100 crime novels of all time .txt) 📖». Author Charles Dickens



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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 sald 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 upstairs, 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 had 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.”

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