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

placards on the disputed thoroughfare and (with his bird

upon his head) to hold forth vehemently against Sir Leicester in

the sanctuary of his own home; similarly, also, he defies him as of

old in the little church by testifying a bland unconsciousness of

his existence. But it is whispered that when he is most ferocious

towards his old foe, he is really most considerate, and that Sir

Leicester, in the dignity of being implacable, little supposes how

much he is humoured. As little does he think how near together he

and his antagonist have suffered in the fortunes of two sisters,

and his antagonist, who knows it now, is not the man to tell him.

So the quarrel goes on to the satisfaction of both.

 

In one of the lodges of the park—that lodge within sight of the

house where, once upon a time, when the waters were out down in

Lincolnshire, my Lady used to see the keeper’s child—the stalwart

man, the trooper formerly, is housed. Some relics of his old

calling hang upon the walls, and these it is the chosen recreation

of a little lame man about the stable-yard to keep gleaming bright.

A busy little man he always is, in the polishing at harness-house

doors, of stirrup-irons, bits, curb-chains, harness bosses,

anything in the way of a stable-yard that will take a polish,

leading a life of friction. A shaggy little damaged man, withal,

not unlike an old dog of some mongrel breed, who has been

considerably knocked about. He answers to the name of Phil.

 

A goodly sight it is to see the grand old housekeeper (harder of

hearing now) going to church on the arm of her son and to observe—

which few do, for the house is scant of company in these times—the

relations of both towards Sir Leicester, and his towards them.

They have visitors in the high summer weather, when a grey cloak

and umbrella, unknown to Chesney Wold at other periods, are seen

among the leaves; when two young ladies are occasionally found

gambolling in sequestered saw-pits and such nooks of the park; and

when the smoke of two pipes wreathes away into the fragrant evening

air from the trooper’s door. Then is a fife heard trolling within

the lodge on the inspiring topic of the “British Grenadiers”; and

as the evening closes in, a gruff inflexible voice is heard to say,

while two men pace together up and down, “But I never own to it

before the old girl. Discipline must be maintained.”

 

The greater part of the house is shut up, and it is a show-house no

longer; yet Sir Leicester holds his shrunken state in the long

drawing-room for all that, and reposes in his old place before my

Lady’s picture. Closed in by night with broad screens, and

illumined only in that part, the light of the drawing-room seems

gradually contracting and dwindling until it shall be no more. A

little more, in truth, and it will be all extinguished for Sir

Leicester; and the damp door in the mausoleum which shuts so tight,

and looks so obdurate, will have opened and received him.

 

Volumnia, growing with the flight of time pinker as to the red in

her face, and yellower as to the white, reads to Sir Leicester in

the long evenings and is driven to various artifices to conceal her

yawns, of which the chief and most efficacious is the insertion of

the pearl necklace between her rosy lips. Long-winded treatises on

the Buffy and Boodle question, showing how Buffy is immaculate and

Boodle villainous, and how the country is lost by being all Boodle

and no Buffy, or saved by being all Buffy and no Boodle (it must be

one of the two, and cannot be anything else), are the staple of her

reading. Sir Leicester is not particular what it is and does not

appear to follow it very closely, further than that he always comes

broad awake the moment Volumnia ventures to leave off, and

sonorously repeating her last words, begs with some displeasure to

know if she finds herself fatigued. However, Volumnia, in the

course of her bird-like hopping about and pecking at papers, has

alighted on a memorandum concerning herself in the event of

“anything happening” to her kinsman, which is handsome compensation

for an extensive course of reading and holds even the dragon

Boredom at bay.

 

The cousins generally are rather shy of Chesney Wold in its

dullness, but take to it a little in the shooting season, when guns

are heard in the plantations, and a few scattered beaters and

keepers wait at the old places of appointment for low-spirited twos

and threes of cousins. The debilitated cousin, more debilitated by

the dreariness of the place, gets into a fearful state of

depression, groaning under penitential sofa-pillows in his gunless

hours and protesting that such fernal old jail’s—nough t’sew fler

up—frever.

 

The only great occasions for Volumnia in this changed aspect of the

place in Lincolnshire are those occasions, rare and widely

separated, when something is to be done for the county or the

country in the way of gracing a public ball. Then, indeed, does

the tuckered sylph come out in fairy form and proceed with joy

under cousinly escort to the exhausted old assembly-room, fourteen

heavy miles off, which, during three hundred and sixty-four days

and nights of every ordinary year, is a kind of antipodean lumber-room full of old chairs and tables upside down. Then, indeed, does

she captivate all hearts by her condescension, by her girlish

vivacity, and by her skipping about as in the days when the hideous

old general with the mouth too full of teeth had not cut one of

them at two guineas each. Then does she twirl and twine, a

pastoral nymph of good family, through the mazes of the dance.

Then do the swains appear with tea, with lemonade, with sandwiches,

with homage. Then is she kind and cruel, stately and unassuming,

various, beautifully wilful. Then is there a singular kind of

parallel between her and the little glass chandeliers of another

age embellishing that assembly-room, which, with their meagre

stems, their spare little drops, their disappointing knobs where no

drops are, their bare little stalks from which knobs and drops have

both departed, and their little feeble prismatic twinkling, all

seem Volumnias.

 

For the rest, Lincolnshire life to Volumnia is a vast blank of

overgrown house looking out upon trees, sighing, wringing their

hands, bowing their heads, and casting their tears upon the window-panes in monotonous depressions. A labyrinth of grandeur, less the

property of an old family of human beings and their ghostly

likenesses than of an old family of echoings and thunderings which

start out of their hundred graves at every sound and go resounding

through the building. A waste of unused passages and staircases in

which to drop a comb upon a bedroom floor at night is to send a

stealthy footfall on an errand through the house. A place where

few people care to go about alone, where a maid screams if an ash

drops from the fire, takes to crying at all times and seasons,

becomes the victim of a low disorder of the spirits, and gives

warning and departs.

 

Thus Chesney Wold. With so much of itself abandoned to darkness

and vacancy; with so little change under the summer shining or the

wintry lowering; so sombre and motionless always—no flag flying

now by day, no rows of lights sparkling by night; with no family to

come and go, no visitors to be the souls of pale cold shapes of

rooms, no stir of life about it—passion and pride, even to the

stranger’s eye, have died away from the place in Lincolnshire and

yielded it to dull repose.