Bleak House - Charles Dickens (read this if txt) 📗

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serious and affecting. His noble earnestness, his fidelity, his

gallant shielding of her, his generous conquest of his own wrong

and his own pride for her sake, are simply honourable, manly, and

true. Nothing less worthy can be seen through the lustre of such

qualities in the commonest mechanic, nothing less worthy can be

seen in the best-born gentleman. In such a light both aspire

alike, both rise alike, both children of the dust shine equally.

 

Overpowered by his exertions, he lays his head back on his pillows

and closes his eyes for not more than a minute, when he again

resumes his watching of the weather and his attention to the

muffled sounds. In the rendering of those little services, and in

the manner of their acceptance, the trooper has become installed as

necessary to him. Nothing has been said, but it is quite

understood. He falls a step or two backward to be out of sight and

mounts guard a little behind his mother’s chair.

 

The day is now beginning to decline. The mist and the sleet into

which the snow has all resolved itself are darker, and the blaze

begins to tell more vividly upon the room walls and furniture. The

gloom augments; the bright gas springs up in the streets; and the

pertinacious oil lamps which yet hold their ground there, with

their source of life half frozen and half thawed, twinkle gaspingly

like fiery fish out of water—as they are. The world, which has

been rumbling over the straw and pulling at the bell, “to inquire,”

begins to go home, begins to dress, to dine, to discuss its dear

friend with all the last new modes, as already mentioned.

 

Now does Sir Leicester become worse, restless, uneasy, and in great

pain. Volumnia, lighting a candle (with a predestined aptitude for

doing something objectionable), is bidden to put it out again, for

it is not yet dark enough. Yet it is very dark too, as dark as it

will be all night. By and by she tries again. No! Put it out.

It is not dark enough yet.

 

His old housekeeper is the first to understand that he is striving

to uphold the fiction with himself that it is not growing late.

 

“Dear Sir Leicester, my honoured master,” she softly whispers, “I

must, for your own good, and my duty, take the freedom of begging

and praying that you will not lie here in the lone darkness

watching and waiting and dragging through the time. Let me draw

the curtains, and light the candles, and make things more

comfortable about you. The church-clocks will strike the hours

just the same, Sir Leicester, and the night will pass away just the

same. My Lady will come back, just the same.”

 

“I know it, Mrs. Rouncewell, but I am weak—and he has been so long

gone.”

 

“Not so very long, Sir Leicester. Not twenty-four hours yet.”

 

“But that is a long time. Oh, it is a long time!”

 

He says it with a groan that wrings her heart.

 

She knows that this is not a period for bringing the rough light

upon him; she thinks his tears too sacred to be seen, even by her.

Therefore she sits in the darkness for a while without a word, then

gently begins to move about, now stirring the fire, now standing at

the dark window looking out. Finally he tells her, with recovered

self-command, “As you say, Mrs. Rouncewell, it is no worse for

being confessed. It is getting late, and they are not come. Light

the room!” When it is lighted and the weather shut out, it is only

left to him to listen.

 

But they find that however dejected and ill he is, he brightens

when a quiet pretence is made of looking at the fires in her rooms

and being sure that everything is ready to receive her. Poor

pretence as it is, these allusions to her being expected keep up

hope within him.

 

Midnight comes, and with it the same blank. The carriages in the

streets are few, and other late sounds in that neighbourhood there

are none, unless a man so very nomadically drunk as to stray into

the frigid zone goes brawling and bellowing along the pavement.

Upon this wintry night it is so still that listening to the intense

silence is like looking at intense darkness. If any distant sound

be audible in this case, it departs through the gloom like a feeble

light in that, and all is heavier than before.

 

The corporation of servants are dismissed to bed (not unwilling to

go, for they were up all last night), and only Mrs. Rouncewell and

George keep watch in Sir Leicester’s room. As the night lags

tardily on—or rather when it seems to stop altogether, at between

two and 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