CHAPTER XLI

In Mr. Tulkinghorn’s Room

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 lawyer, 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 platform 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 said 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 saying 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 community. 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.