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

Ah!”

Mrs. Rouncewell’s hands unquiet, as usual, on this reference.

 

“They say I am like my father, grandmother.”

 

“Like him, also, my dear—but most like your poor uncle George!

And your dear father.” Mrs. Rouncewell folds her hands again. “He

is well?”

 

“Thriving, grandmother, in every way.”

 

“I am thankful!” Mrs. Rouncewell is fond of her son but has a

plaintive feeling towards him, much as if he were a very honourable

soldier who had gone over to the enemy.

 

“He is quite happy?” says she.

 

“Quite.”

 

“I am thankful! So he has brought you up to follow in his ways and

has sent you into foreign countries and the like? Well, he knows

best. There may be a world beyond Chesney Wold that I don’t

understand. Though I am not young, either. And I have seen a

quantity of good company too!”

 

“Grandmother,” says the young man, changing the subject, “what a

very pretty girl that was I found with you just now. You called

her Rosa?”

 

“Yes, child. She is daughter of a widow in the village. Maids are

so hard to teach, now-a-days, that I have put her about me young.

She’s an apt scholar and will do well. She shows the house

already, very pretty. She lives with me at my table here.”

 

“I hope I have not driven her away?”

 

“She supposes we have family affairs to speak about, I dare say.

She is very modest. It is a fine quality in a young woman. And

scarcer,” says Mrs. Rouncewell, expanding her stomacher to its

utmost limits, “than it formerly was!”

 

The young man inclines his head in acknowledgment of the precepts

of experience. Mrs. Rouncewell listens.

 

“Wheels!” says she. They have long been audible to the younger

ears of her companion. “What wheels on such a day as this, for

gracious sake?”

 

After a short interval, a tap at the door. “Come in!” A dark-eyed, dark-haired, shy, village beauty comes in—so fresh in her

rosy and yet delicate bloom that the drops of rain which have

beaten on her hair look like the dew upon a flower fresh gathered.

 

“What company is this, Rosa?” says Mrs. Rouncewell.

 

“It’s two young men in a gig, ma’am, who want to see the house—

yes, and if you please, I told them so!” in quick reply to a

gesture of dissent from the housekeeper. “I went to the hall-door

and told them it was the wrong day and the wrong hour, but the

young man who was driving took off his hat in the wet and begged me

to bring this card to you.”

 

“Read it, my dear Watt,” says the housekeeper.

 

Rosa is so shy as she gives it to him that they drop it between

them and almost knock their foreheads together as they pick it up.

Rosa is shyer than before.

 

“Mr. Guppy” is all the information the card yields.

 

“Guppy!” repeats Mrs. Rouncewell, “MR. Guppy! Nonsense, I never

heard of him!”

 

“If you please, he told ME that!” says Rosa. “But he said that he

and the other young gentleman came from London only last night by

the mail, on business at the magistrates’ meeting, ten miles off,

this morning, and that as their business was soon over, and they

had heard a great deal said of Chesney Wold, and really didn’t know

what to do with themselves, they had come through the wet to see

it. They are lawyers. He says he is not in Mr. Tulkinghorn’s

office, but he is sure he may make use of Mr. Tulkinghorn’s name if

necessary.” Finding, now she leaves off, that she has been making

quite a long speech, Rosa is shyer than ever.

 

Now, Mr. Tulkinghorn is, in a manner, part and parcel of the place,

and besides, is supposed to have made Mrs. Rouncewell’s will. The

old lady relaxes, consents to the admission of the visitors as a

favour, and dismisses Rosa. The grandson, however, being smitten

by a sudden wish to see the house himself, proposes to join the

party. The grandmother, who is pleased that he should have that

interest, accompanies him—though to do him justice, he is

exceedingly unwilling to trouble her.

 

“Much obliged to you, ma’am!” says Mr. Guppy, divesting himself of

his wet dreadnought in the hall. “Us London lawyers don’t often

get an out, and when we do, we like to make the most of it, you

know.”

 

The old housekeeper, with a gracious severity of deportment, waves

her hand towards the great staircase. Mr. Guppy and his friend

follow Rosa; Mrs. Rouncewell and her grandson follow them; a young

gardener goes before to open the shutters.

 

As is usually the case with people who go over houses, Mr. Guppy

and his friend are dead beat before they have well begun. They

straggle about in wrong places, look at wrong things, don’t care

for the right things, gape when more rooms are opened, exhibit

profound depression of spirits, and are clearly knocked up. In

each successive chamber that they enter, Mrs. Rouncewell, who is as

upright as the house itself, rests apart in a window-seat or other

such nook and listens with stately approval to Rosa’s exposition.

Her grandson is so attentive to it that Rosa is shyer than ever—

and prettier. Thus they pass on from room to room, raising the

pictured Dedlocks for a few brief minutes as the young gardener

admits the light, and reconsigning them to their graves as he shuts

it out again. It appears to the afflicted Mr. Guppy and his

inconsolable friend that there is no end to the Dedlocks, whose

family greatness seems to consist in their never having done

anything to distinguish themselves for seven hundred years.

 

Even the long drawing-room of Chesney Wold cannot revive Mr.

Guppy’s spirits. He is so low that he droops on the threshold and

has hardly strength of mind to enter. But a portrait over the

chimney-piece, painted by the fashionable artist of the day, acts

upon him like a charm. He recovers in a moment. He stares at it

with uncommon interest; he seems to be fixed and fascinated by it.

 

“Dear me!” says Mr. Guppy. “Who’s that?”

 

“The picture over the fire-place,” says Rosa, “is the portrait of

the present Lady Dedlock. It is considered a perfect likeness, and

the best work of the master.”

 

“Blest,” says Mr. Guppy, staring in a kind of dismay at his

friend, “if I can ever have seen her. Yet I know her! Has the

picture been engraved, miss?”

 

“The picture has never been engraved. Sir Leicester has always

refused permission.”

 

“Well!” says Mr. Guppy in a low voice. “I’ll be shot if it ain’t

very curious how well I know that picture! So that’s Lady Dedlock,

is it!”

 

“The picture on the right is the present Sir Leicester Dedlock.

The picture on the left is his father, the late Sir Leicester.”

 

Mr. Guppy has no eyes for either of these magnates. “It’s

unaccountable to me,” he says, still staring at the portrait, “how

well I know that picture! I’m dashed,” adds Mr. Guppy, looking

round, “if I don’t think I must have had a dream of that picture,

you know!”

 

As no one present takes any especial interest in Mr. Guppy’s

dreams, the probability is not pursued. But he still remains so

absorbed by the portrait that he stands immovable before it until

the young gardener has closed the shutters, when he comes out of

the room in a dazed state that is an odd though a sufficient

substitute for interest and follows into the succeeding rooms with

a confused stare, as if he were looking everywhere for Lady Dedlock

again.

 

He sees no more of her. He sees her rooms, which are the last

shown, as being very elegant, and he looks out of the windows from

which she looked out, not long ago, upon the weather that bored her

to death. All things have an end, even houses that people take

infinite pains to see and are tired of before they begin to see

them. He has come to the end of the sight, and the fresh village

beauty to the end of her description; which is always this: “The

terrace below is much admired. It is called, from an old story in

the family, the Ghost’s Walk.”

 

“No?” says Mr. Guppy, greedily curious. “What’s the story, miss?

Is it anything about a picture?”

 

“Pray tell us the story,” says Watt in a half whisper.

 

“I don’t know it, sir.” Rosa is shyer than ever.

 

“It is not related to visitors; it is almost forgotten,” says the

housekeeper, advancing. “It has never been more than a family

anecdote.”

 

“You’ll excuse my asking again if it has anything to do with a

picture, ma’am,” observes Mr. Guppy, “because I do assure you that

the more I think of that picture the better I know it, without

knowing how I know it!”

 

The story has nothing to do with a picture; the housekeeper can

guarantee that. Mr. Guppy is obliged to her for the information

and is, moreover, generally obliged. He retires with his friend,

guided down another staircase by the young gardener, and presently

is heard to drive away. It is now dusk. Mrs. Rouncewell can trust

to the discretion of her two young hearers and may tell THEM how

the terrace came to have that ghostly name.

 

She seats herself in a large chair by the fast-darkening window and

tells them: “In the wicked days, my dears, of King Charles the

First—I mean, of course, in the wicked days of the rebels who

leagued themselves against that excellent king—Sir Morbury Dedlock

was the owner of Chesney Wold. Whether there was any account of a

ghost in the family before those days, I can’t say. I should think

it very likely indeed.”

 

Mrs. Rouncewell holds this opinion because she considers that a

family of such antiquity and importance has a right to a ghost.

She regards a ghost as one of the privileges of the upper classes,

a genteel distinction to which the common people have no claim.

 

“Sir Morbury Dedlock,” says Mrs. Rouncewell, “was, I have no

occasion to say, on the side of the blessed martyr. But it IS

supposed that his Lady, who had none of the family blood in her

veins, favoured the bad cause. It is said that she had relations

among King Charles’s enemies, that she was in correspondence with

them, and that she gave them information. When any of the country

gentlemen who followed his Majesty’s cause met here, it is said

that my Lady was always nearer to the door of their council-room

than they supposed. Do you hear a sound like a footstep passing

along the terrace, Watt?”

 

Rosa draws nearer to the housekeeper.

 

“I hear the rain-drip on the stones,” replies the young man, “and I

hear a curious echo—I suppose an echo—which is very like a

halting step.”

 

The housekeeper gravely nods and continues: “Partly on account of

this division between them, and partly on other accounts, Sir

Morbury and his Lady led a troubled life. She was a lady of a

haughty temper. They were not well suited to each other in age or

character, and they had no children to moderate between them.

After her favourite brother, a young gentleman, was killed in the

civil wars (by Sir Morbury’s near kinsman), her feeling was so

violent that she hated the race into which she had married. When

the Dedlocks were about to ride out from Chesney Wold in the king’s

cause, she is supposed to have more than once stolen down into