Mr. Tulkinghorn arrives in his turret-room a little breathed by
the journey up, though leisurely performed. There is an expression on his face
as if he had discharged his mind of some grave matter and were, in his close
way, satisfied. To say of a man so severely and strictly self-repressed that he
is triumphant would be to do him as great an injustice as to suppose him
troubled with love or sentiment or any romantic weakness. He is sedately
satisfied. Perhaps there is a rather increased sense of power upon him as he
loosely grasps one of his veinous wrists with his other hand and holding it
behind his back walks noiselessly up and down.
There is a capacious writing-table in the room on which is a pretty large
accumulation of papers. The green lamp is lighted, his reading-glasses lie upon
the desk, the easy-chair is wheeled up to it, and it would seem as though he had
intended to bestow an hour or so upon these claims on his attention before going
to bed. But he happens not to be in a business mind. After a glance at the
documents awaiting his notice--with his head bent low over the table, the old
man's sight for print or writing being defective at night--he opens the French
window and steps out upon the leads. There he again walks slowly up and down in
the same attitude, subsiding, if a man so cool may have any need to subside,
from the story he has related downstairs.
The time was once when men as knowing as Mr. Tulkinghorn would walk on
turret-tops in the starlight and look up into the sky to read their fortunes
there. Hosts of stars are visible to-night, though their brilliancy is eclipsed
by the splendour of the moon. If he be seeking his own star as he methodically
turns and turns upon the leads, it should be but a pale one to be so rustily
represented below. If he be tracing out his destiny, that may be written in
other characters nearer to his hand.
As he paces the leads with his eyes most probably as high above his thoughts
as they are high above the earth, he is suddenly stopped in passing the window
by two eyes that meet his own. The ceiling of his room is rather low; and the
upper part of the door, which is opposite the window, is of glass. There is an
inner baize door, too, but the night being warm he did not close it when he came
upstairs. These eyes that meet his own are looking in through the glass from the
corridor outside. He knows them well. The blood has not flushed into his face so
suddenly and redly for many a long year as when he recognizes Lady Dedlock.
He steps into the room, and she comes in too, closing both the doors behind
her. There is a wild disturbance--is it fear or anger?--in her eyes. In her
carriage and all else she looks as she looked downstairs two hours ago.
Is it fear or is it anger now? He cannot be sure. Both might be as pale, both
as intent.
"Lady Dedlock?"
She does not speak at first, nor even when she has slowly dropped into the
easy-chair by the table. They look at each other, like two pictures.
"Why have you told my story to so many persons?"
"Lady Dedlock, it was necessary for me to inform you that I knew it."
"How long have you known it?"
"I have suspected it a long while--fully known it a little while."
"Months?"
"Days."
He stands before her with one hand on a chair-back and the other in his
old-fashioned waistcoat and shirt-frill, exactly as he has stood before her at
any time since her marriage. The same formal politeness, the same composed
deference that might as well be defiance; the whole man the same dark, cold
object, at the same distance, which nothing has ever diminished.
"Is this true concerning the poor girl?"
He slightly inclines and advances his head as not quite understanding the
question.
"You know what you related. Is it true? Do her friends know my story also? Is
it the town-talk yet? Is it chalked upon the walls and cried in the streets?"
So! Anger, and fear, and shame. All three contending. What power this woman
has to keep these raging passions down! Mr. Tulkinghorn's thoughts take such
form as he looks at her, with his ragged grey eyebrows a hair's breadth more
contracted than usual under her gaze.
"No, Lady Dedlock. That was a hypothetical case, arising out of Sir
Leicester's unconsciously carrying the matter with so high a hand. But it would
be a real case if they knew--what we know."
"Then they do not know it yet?"
"No."
"Can I save the poor girl from injury before they know it?"
"Really, Lady Dedlock," Mr. Tulkinghorn replies, "I cannot give a
satisfactory opinion on that point."
And he thinks, with the interest of attentive curiosity, as he watches the
struggle in her breast, "The power and force of this woman are astonishing!"
"Sir," she says, for the moment obliged to set her lips with all the energy
she has, that she may speak distinctly, "I will make it plainer. I do not
dispute your hypothetical case. I anticipated it, and felt its truth as strongly
as you can do, when I saw Mr. Rouncewell here. I knew very well that if he could
have had the power of seeing me as I was, he would consider the poor girl
tarnished by having for a moment been, although most innocently, the subject of
my great and distinguished patronage. But I have an interest in her, or I should
rather say--no longer belonging to this place--I had, and if you can find so
much consideration for the woman under your foot as to remember that, she will
be very sensible of your mercy."
Mr. Tulkinghorn, profoundly attentive, throws this off with a shrug of
self-depreciation and contracts his eyebrows a little more.
"You have prepared me for my exposure, and I thank you for that too. Is there
anything that you require of me? Is there any claim that I can release or any
charge or trouble that I can spare my husband in obtaining HIS release by
certifying to the exactness of your discovery? I will write anything, here and
now, that you will dictate. I am ready to do it."
And she would do it, thinks the lawver, watchful of the firm hand with which
she takes the pen!
"I will not trouble you, Lady Dedlock. Pray spare yourself."
"I have long expected this, as you know. I neither wish to spare myself nor
to be spared. You can do nothing worse to me than you have done. Do what remains
now."
"Lady Dedlock, there is nothing to be done. I will take leave to say a few
words when you have finished."
Their need for watching one another should be over now, but they do it all
this time, and the stars watch them both through the opened window. Away in the
moonlight lie the woodland fields at rest, and the wide house is as quiet as the
narrow one. The narrow one! Where are the digger and the spade, this peaceful
night, destined to add the last great secret to the many secrets of the
Tulkinghorn existence? Is the man born yet, is the spade wrought yet? Curious
questions to consider, more curious perhaps not to consider, under the watching
stars upon a summer night.
"Of repentance or remorse or any feeling of mine," Lady Dedlock presently
proceeds, "I say not a word. If I were not dumb, you would be deaf. Let that go
by. It is not for your ears."
He makes a feint of offering a protest, but she sweeps it away with her
disdainful hand.
"Of other and very different things I come to speak to you. My jewels are all
in their proper places of keeping. They will be found there. So, my dresses. So,
all the valuables I have. Some ready money I had with me, please to say, but no
large amount. I did not wear my own dress, in order that I might avoid
observation. I went to be henceforward lost. Make this known. I leave no other
charge with you."
"Excuse me, Lady Dedlock," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, quite unmoved. "I am not
sure that I understand you. You want--"
"To be lost to all here. I leave Chesney Wold to-night. I go this hour."
Mr. Tulkinghorn shakes his head. She rises, but he, without moving hand from
chair-back or from old-fashioned waistcoat and shirt- frill, shakes his head.
"What? Not go as I have said?"
"No, Lady Dedlock," he very calmly replies.
"Do you know the relief that my disappearance will be? Have you forgotten the
stain and blot upon this place, and where it is, and who it is?"
"No, Lady Dedlock, not by any means."
Without deigning to rejoin, she moves to the inner door and has it in her
hand when he says to her, without himself stirring hand or foot or raising his
voice, "Lady Dedlock, have the goodness to stop and hear me, or before you reach
the staircase I shall ring the alarm-bell and rouse the house. And then I must
speak out before every guest and servant, every man and woman, in it."
He has conquered her. She falters, trembles, and puts her hand confusedly to
her head. Slight tokens these in any one else, but when so practised an eye as
Mr. Tulkinghorn's sees indecision for a moment in such a subject, he thoroughly
knows its value.
He promptly says again, "Have the goodness to hear me, Lady Dedlock," and
motions to the chair from which she has risen. She hesitates, but he motions
again, and she sits down.
"The relations between us are of an unfortunate description, Lady Dedlock;
but as they are not of my making, I will not apologize for them. The position I
hold in reference to Sir Leicester is so well known to you that I can hardly
imagine but that I must long have appeared in your eyes the natural person to
make this discovery."
"Sir," she returns without looking up from the ground on which her eyes are
now fixed, "I had better have gone. It would have been far better not to have
detained me. I have no more to say."
"Excuse me, Lady Dedlock, if I add a little more to hear."
"I wish to hear it at the window, then. I can't breathe where I am."
His jealous glance as she walks that way betrays an instant's misgiving that
she may have it in her thoughts to leap over, and dashing against ledge and
cornice, strike her life out upon the terrace below. But a moment's observation
of her figure as she stands in the window without any support, looking out at
the stars --not up-gloomily out at those stars which are low in the heavens,
reassures him. By facing round as she has moved, he stands a little behind her.
"Lady Dedlock, I have not yet been able to come to a decision satisfactory to
myself on the course before me. I am not clear what to do or how to act next. I
must request you, in the meantime, to keep your secret as you have kept it so
long and not to wonder that I keep it too."
He pauses, but she makes no reply.
"Pardon me, Lady Dedlock. This is an important subject. You are honouring me
with your attention?"
"I am."
"'Thank you. I might have known it from what I have seen of your strength of
character. I ought not to have asked the question, but I have the habit of
making sure of my ground, step by step, as I go on. The sole consideration in
this unhappy case is Sir Leicester."
"'Then why," she asks in a low voice and without removing her gloomy look
from those distant stars, "do you detain me in his house?"
"Because he IS the consideration. Lady Dedlock, I have no occasion to tell
you that Sir Leicester is a very proud man, that his reliance upon you is
implicit, that the fall of that moon out of the sky would not amaze him more
than your fall from your high position as his wife."
She breathes quickly and heavily, but she stands as unflinchingly as ever he
has seen her in the midst of her grandest company.
"I declare to you, Lady Dedlock, that with anything short of this case that I
have, I would as soon have hoped to root up by means of my own strength and my
own hands the oldest tree on this estate as to shake your hold upon Sir
Leicester and Sir Leicester's trust and confidence in you. And even now, with
this case, I hesitate. Not that he could doubt (that, even with him, is
impossible), but that nothing can prepare him for the blow."
"Not my flight?" she returned. "Think of it again."
"Your flight, Lady Dedlock, would spread the whole truth, and a hundred times
the whole truth, far and wide. It would be impossible to save the family credit
for a day. It is not to be thought of."
There is a quiet decision in his reply which admits of no remonstrance.
"When I speak of Sir Leicester being the sole consideration, he and the
family credit are one. Sir Leicester and the baronetcy, Sir Leicester and
Chesney Wold, Sir Leicester and his ancestors and his patrimony"--Mr.
Tulkinghorn very dry here--"are, I need not say to you, Lady Dedlock,
inseparable."
"Go on!"
"Therefore," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, pursuing his case in his jog- trot style,
"I have much to consider. This is to be hushed up if it can be. How can it be,
if Sir Leicester is driven out of his wits or laid upon a death-bed? If I
inflicted this shock upon him to-morrow morning, how could the immediate change
in him be accounted for? What could have caused it? What could have divided you?
Lady Dedlock, the wall-chalking and the street-crying would come on directly,
and you are to remember that it would not affect you merely (whom I cannot at
all consider in this business) but your husband, Lady Dedlock, your husband."
He gets plainer as he gets on, but not an atom more emphatic or animated.
"There is another point of view," he continues, "in which the case presents
itself. Sir Leicester is devoted to you almost to infatuation. He might not be
able to overcome that infatuation, even knowing what we know. I am putting an
extreme case, but it might be so. If so, it were better that he knew nothing.
Better for common sense, better for him, better for me. I must take all this
into account, and it combines to render a decision very difficult."
She stands looking out at the same stars without a word. They are beginning
to pale, and she looks as if their coldness froze her.
"My experience teaches me," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, who has by this time got
his hands in his pockets 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 platforna 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 saving 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 commuuity. 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.
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