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

so for the comfort of the Parisians,

and it knows all fashionable things. To know things otherwise were

to be unfashionable. My Lady Dedlock has been down at what she

calls, in familiar conversation, her “place” in Lincolnshire. The

waters are out in Lincolnshire. An arch of the bridge in the park

has been sapped and sopped away. The adjacent lowlying ground for

half a mile in breadth is a stagnant river with melancholy trees

for islands in it and a surface punctured all over, all day long,

with falling rain. My Lady Dedlock’s place has been extremely

dreary. The weather for many a day and night has been so wet that

the trees seem wet through, and the soft loppings and prunings of

the woodman’s axe can make no crash or crackle as they fall. The

deer, looking soaked, leave quagmires where they pass. The shot of

a rifle loses its sharpness in the moist air, and its smoke moves

in a tardy little cloud towards the green rise, coppice-topped,

that makes a background for the falling rain. The view from my

Lady Dedlock’s own windows is alternately a lead-coloured view and

a view in Indian ink. The vases on the stone terrace in the

foreground catch the rain all day; and the heavy drops fall—drip,

drip, drip—upon the broad flagged pavement, called from old time

the Ghost’s Walk, all night. On Sundays the little church in the

park is mouldy; the oaken pulpit breaks out into a cold sweat; and

there is a general smell and taste as of the ancient Dedlocks in

their graves. My Lady Dedlock (who is childless), looking out in

the early twilight from her boudoir at a keeper’s lodge and seeing

the light of a fire upon the latticed panes, and smoke rising from

the chimney, and a child, chased by a woman, running out into the

rain to meet the shining figure of a wrapped-up man coming through

the gate, has been put quite out of temper. My Lady Dedlock says

she has been “bored to death.”

 

Therefore my Lady Dedlock has come away from the place in

Lincolnshire and has left it to the rain, and the crows, and the

rabbits, and the deer, and the partridges and pheasants. The

pictures of the Dedlocks past and gone have seemed to vanish into

the damp walls in mere lowness of spirits, as the housekeeper has

passed along the old rooms shutting up the shutters. And when they

will next come forth again, the fashionable intelligence—which,

like the fiend, is omniscient of the past and present, but not the

future—cannot yet undertake to say.

 

Sir Leicester Dedlock is only a baronet, but there is no mightier

baronet than he. His family is as old as the hills, and infinitely

more respectable. He has a general opinion that the world might

get on without hills but would be done up without Dedlocks. He

would on the whole admit nature to be a good idea (a little low,

perhaps, when not enclosed with a park-fence), but an idea

dependent for its execution on your great county families. He is a

gentleman of strict conscience, disdainful of all littleness and

meanness and ready on the shortest notice to die any death you may

please to mention rather than give occasion for the least

impeachment of his integrity. He is an honourable, obstinate,

truthful, high-spirited, intensely prejudiced, perfectly

unreasonable man.

 

Sir Leicester is twenty years, full measure, older than my Lady.

He will never see sixty-five again, nor perhaps sixty-six, nor yet

sixty-seven. He has a twist of the gout now and then and walks a

little stiffly. He is of a worthy presence, with his light-grey

hair and whiskers, his fine shirt-frill, his pure-white waistcoat,

and his blue coat with bright buttons always buttoned. He is

ceremonious, stately, most polite on every occasion to my Lady, and

holds her personal attractions in the highest estimation. His

gallantry to my Lady, which has never changed since he courted her,

is the one little touch of romantic fancy in him.

 

Indeed, he married her for love. A whisper still goes about that

she had not even family; howbeit, Sir Leicester had so much family

that perhaps he had enough and could dispense with any more. But

she had beauty, pride, ambition, insolent resolve, and sense enough

to portion out a legion of fine ladies. Wealth and station, added

to these, soon floated her upward, and for years now my Lady

Dedlock has been at the centre of the fashionable intelligence and

at the top of the fashionable tree.

 

How Alexander wept when he had no more worlds to conquer, everybody

knows—or has some reason to know by this time, the matter having

been rather frequently mentioned. My Lady Dedlock, having

conquered HER world, fell not into the melting, but rather into the

freezing, mood. An exhausted composure, a worn-out placidity, an

equanimity of fatigue not to be ruffled by interest or satisfaction,

are the trophies of her victory. She is perfectly well-bred.

If she could be translated to heaven to-morrow, she might be

expected to ascend without any rapture.

 

She has beauty still, and if it be not in its heyday, it is not yet

in its autumn. She has a fine face—originally of a character that

would be rather called very pretty than handsome, but improved into

classicality by the acquired expression of her fashionable state.

Her figure is elegant and has the effect of being tall. Not that

she is so, but that “the most is made,” as the Honourable Bob

Stables has frequently asserted upon oath, “of all her points.”

The same authority observes that she is perfectly got up and

remarks in commendation of her hair especially that she is the

best-groomed woman in the whole stud.

 

With all her perfections on her head, my Lady Dedlock has come up

from her place in Lincolnshire (hotly pursued by the fashionable

intelligence) to pass a few days at her house in town previous to

her departure for Paris, where her ladyship intends to stay some

weeks, after which her movements are uncertain. And at her house

in town, upon this muddy, murky afternoon, presents himself an old-fashioned old gentleman, attorney-at-law and eke solicitor of the

High Court of Chancery, who has the honour of acting as legal

adviser of the Dedlocks and has as many cast-iron boxes in his

office with that name outside as if the present baronet were the

coin of the conjuror’s trick and were constantly being juggled

through the whole set. Across the hall, and up the stairs, and

along the passages, and through the rooms, which are very brilliant

in the season and very dismal out of it—fairy-land to visit, but a

desert to live in—the old gentleman is conducted by a Mercury in

powder to my Lady’s presence.

 

The old gentleman is rusty to look at, but is reputed to have made

good thrift out of aristocratic marriage settlements and

aristocratic wills, and to be very rich. He is surrounded by a

mysterious halo of family confidences, of which he is known to be

the silent depository. There are noble mausoleums rooted for

centuries in retired glades of parks among the growing timber and

the fern, which perhaps hold fewer noble secrets than walk abroad

among men, shut up in the breast of Mr. Tulkinghorn. He is of what

is called the old school—a phrase generally meaning any school

that seems never to have been young—and wears knee-breeches tied

with ribbons, and gaiters or stockings. One peculiarity of his

black clothes and of his black stockings, be they silk or worsted,

is that they never shine. Mute, close, irresponsive to any

glancing light, his dress is like himself. He never converses when

not professionally consulted. He is found sometimes, speechless but

quite at home, at corners of dinner-tables in great country houses

and near doors of drawing-rooms, concerning which the fashionable

intelligence is eloquent, where everybody knows him and where half

the Peerage stops to say “How do you do, Mr. Tulkinghorn?” He

receives these salutations with gravity and buries them along with

the rest of his knowledge.

 

Sir Leicester Dedlock is with my Lady and is happy to see Mr.

Tulkinghorn. There is an air of prescription about him which is

always agreeable to Sir Leicester; he receives it as a kind of

tribute. He likes Mr. Tulkinghorn’s dress; there is a kind of

tribute in that too. It is eminently respectable, and likewise, in

a general way, retainer-like. It expresses, as it were, the

steward of the legal mysteries, the butler of the legal cellar, of

the Dedlocks.

 

Has Mr. Tulkinghorn any idea of this himself? It may be so, or it

may not, but there is this remarkable circumstance to be noted in

everything associated with my Lady Dedlock as one of a class—as

one of the leaders and representatives of her little world. She

supposes herself to be an inscrutable Being, quite out of the reach

and ken of ordinary mortals—seeing herself in her glass, where

indeed she looks so. Yet every dim little star revolving about

her, from her maid to the manager of the Italian Opera, knows her

weaknesses, prejudices, follies, haughtinesses, and caprices and

lives upon as accurate a calculation and as nice a measure of her

moral nature as her dressmaker takes of her physical proportions.

Is a new dress, a new custom, a new singer, a new dancer, a new

form of jewellery, a new dwarf or giant, a new chapel, a new

anything, to be set up? There are deferential people in a dozen

callings whom my Lady Dedlock suspects of nothing but prostration

before her, who can tell you how to manage her as if she were a

baby, who do nothing but nurse her all their lives, who, humbly

affecting to follow with profound subservience, lead her and her

whole troop after them; who, in hooking one, hook all and bear them

off as Lemuel Gulliver bore away the stately fleet of the majestic

Lilliput. “If you want to address our people, sir,” say Blaze and

Sparkle, the jewellers—meaning by our people Lady Dedlock and the

rest—“you must remember that you are not dealing with the general

public; you must hit our people in their weakest place, and their

weakest place is such a place.” “To make this article go down,

gentlemen,” say Sheen and Gloss, the mercers, to their friends the

manufacturers, “you must come to us, because we know where to have

the fashionable people, and we can make it fashionable.” “If you

want to get this print upon the tables of my high connexion, sir,”

says Mr. Sladdery, the librarian, “or if you want to get this dwarf

or giant into the houses of my high connexion, sir, or if you want

to secure to this entertainment the patronage of my high connexion,

sir, you must leave it, if you please, to me, for I have been

accustomed to study the leaders of my high connexion, sir, and I

may tell you without vanity that I can turn them round my finger”—

in which Mr. Sladdery, who is an honest man, does not exaggerate at

all.

 

Therefore, while Mr. Tulkinghorn may not know what is passing in

the Dedlock mind at present, it is very possible that he may.

 

“My Lady’s cause has been again before the Chancellor, has it, Mr.

Tulkinghorn?” says Sir Leicester, giving him his hand.

 

“Yes. It has been on again to-day,” Mr. Tulkinghorn replies,

making one of his quiet bows to my Lady, who is on a sofa near the

fire, shading her face with a hand-screen.

 

“It would be useless to ask,” says my Lady with the dreariness of

the place in Lincolnshire still upon her, “whether anything has

been done.”

 

“Nothing that