Bleak House. Charles Dickens

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 you would call anything, has been done to-day,' replies Mr. Tulkinghorn.

      'Nor ever will be,' says my Lady.

      Sir Leicester has no objection to an interminable Chancery suit. It is a slow, expensive, British, constitutional kind of thing. To be sure, he has not a vital interest in the suit in question, her part in which was the only property my Lady brought him; and he has a shadowy impression that for his name – the name of Dedlock – to be in a cause, and not in the title of that cause, is a most ridiculous accident. But he regards the Court of Chancery, even if it should involve an occasional delay of justice and a trifling amount of confusion, as a something, devised in conjunction with a variety of other somethings, by the perfection of human wisdom, for the eternal settlement (humanly speaking) of everything. And he is upon the whole of a fixed opinion, that to give the sanction of his countenance to any complaints respecting it, would be to encourage some person in the lower classes to rise up somewhere – like Wat Tyler.

      'As a few fresh affidavits have been put upon the file,' says Mr. Tulkinghorn, 'and as they are short, and as I proceed upon the troublesome principle of begging leave to possess my clients with any new proceedings in a cause;' cautious man Mr. Tulkinghorn, taking no more responsibility than necessary; 'and further, as I see you are going to Paris; I have brought them in my pocket.'

      (Sir Leicester was going to Paris too, by-the-bye, but the delight of the fashionable intelligence was in his Lady.)

      Mr. Tulkinghorn takes out his papers, asks permission to place them on a golden talisman of a table at my Lady's elbow, puts on his spectacles, and begins to read by the light of a shaded lamp.

      '"In Chancery. Between John Jarndyce–" '

      My Lady interrupts, requesting him to miss as many of the formal horrors as he can.

      Mr. Tulkinghorn glances over his spectacles, and begins again lower down. My Lady carelessly and scornfully abstracts her attention. Sir Leicester in a great chair looks at the fire, and appears to have a stately liking for the legal repetitions and prolixities, as ranging among the national bulwarks. It happens that the fire is hot, where my Lady sits; and that the hand-screen is more beautiful than useful, being priceless but small. My Lady, changing her position, sees the papers on the table – looks at them nearer – looks at them nearer still– asks impulsively:

      'Who copied that?'

      Mr. Tulkinghorn stops short, surprised by my Lady's animation and her unusual tone.

      'Is it what you people call law-hand?' she says, looking full at him in her careless way again, and toying with her screen.

      'Not quite. Probably'—Mr. Tulkinghorn examines it as he speaks—'the legal character which it has, was acquired after the original hand was formed. Why do you ask?'

      'Anything to vary this detestable monotony. O, go on, do!'

      Mr. Tulkinghorn reads again. The heat is greater, my Lady screens her face. Sir Leicester dozes, starts up suddenly, and cries 'Eh? what do you say?'

      'I say I am afraid,' says Mr. Tulkinghorn, who had risen hastily, 'that Lady Dedlock is ill.'

      'Faint,' my Lady murmurs, with white lips, 'only that; but it is like the faintness of death. Don't speak to me. Ring, and take me to my room!'

      Mr. Tulkinghorn retires into another chamber; bells ring, feet shuffle and patter, silence ensues. Mercury at last begs Mr. Tulkinghorn to return.

      'Better now,' quoth Sir Leicester, motioning the lawyer to sit down and read to him alone. 'I have been quite alarmed. I never knew my Lady swoon before. But the weather is extremely trying – and she really has been bored to death down at our place in Lincolnshire.'

      Chapter III

      A progress

      I have a great