Bleak House, Charles Dickens [the beginning after the end novel read .txt] 📗

National and Domestic

England has been in a dreadful state for some weeks. Lord Coodle

would go out, Sir Thomas Doodle wouldn’t come in, and there being

nobody in Great Britain (to speak of) except Coodle and Doodle,

there has been no government. It is a mercy that the hostile

meeting between those two great men, which at one time seemed

inevitable, did not come off, because if both pistols had taken

effect, and Coodle and Doodle had killed each other, it is to be

presumed that England must have waited to be governed until young

Coodle and young Doodle, now in frocks and long stockings, were

grown up. This stupendous national calamity, however, was averted

by Lord Coodle’s making the timely discovery that if in the heat of

debate he had said that he scorned and despised the whole ignoble

career of Sir Thomas Doodle, he had merely meant to say that party

differences should never induce him to withhold from it the tribute

of his warmest admiration; while it as opportunely turned out, on

the other hand, that Sir Thomas Doodle had in his own bosom

expressly booked Lord Coodle to go down to posterity as the mirror

of virtue and honour. Still England has been some weeks in the

dismal strait of having no pilot (as was well observed by Sir

Leicester Dedlock) to weather the storm; and the marvellous part of

the matter is that England has not appeared to care very much about

it, but has gone on eating and drinking and marrying and giving in

marriage as the old world did in the days before the flood. But

Coodle knew the danger, and Doodle knew the danger, and all their

followers and hangers-on had the clearest possible perception of

the danger. At last Sir Thomas Doodle has not only condescended to

come in, but has done it handsomely, bringing in with him all his

nephews, all his male cousins, and all his brothers-in-law. So

there is hope for the old ship yet.

Doodle has found that he must throw himself upon the country,

chiefly in the form of sovereigns and beer. In this metamorphosed

state he is available in a good many places simultaneously and can

throw himself upon a considerable portion of the country at one

time. Britannia being much occupied in pocketing Doodle in the

form of sovereigns, and swallowing Doodle in the form of beer, and

in swearing herself black in the face that she does neither—

plainly to the advancement of her glory and morality—the London

season comes to a sudden end, through all the Doodleites and

Coodleites dispersing to assist Britannia in those religious

exercises.

Hence Mrs. Rouncewell, housekeeper at Chesney Wold, foresees,

though no instructions have yet come down, that the family may

shortly be expected, together with a pretty large accession

of cousins and others who can in any way assist the great

Constitutional work. And hence the stately old dame, taking Time

by the forelock, leads him up and down the staircases, and along

the galleries and passages, and through the rooms, to witness

before he grows any older that everything is ready, that floors are

rubbed bright, carpets spread, curtains shaken out, beds puffed and

patted, still-room and kitchen cleared for action—all things

prepared as beseems the Dedlock dignity.

This present summer evening, as the sun goes down, the preparations

are complete. Dreary and solemn the old house looks, with so many

appliances of habitation and with no inhabitants except the

pictured forms upon the walls. So did these come and go, a Dedlock

in possession might have ruminated passing along; so did they see

this gallery hushed and quiet, as I see it now; so think, as I

think, of the gap that they would make in this domain when they

were gone; so find it, as I find it, difficult to believe that it

could be without them; so pass from my world, as I pass from

theirs, now closing the reverberating door; so leave no blank to

miss them, and so die.

Through some of the fiery windows beautiful from without, and set,

at this sunset hour, not in dull-grey stone but in a glorious house

of gold, the light excluded at other windows pours in rich, lavish,

overflowing like the summer plenty in the land. Then do the frozen

Dedlocks thaw. Strange movements come upon their features as the

shadows of leaves play there. A dense justice in a corner is

beguiled into a wink. A staring baronet, with a truncheon, gets a

dimple in his chin. Down into the bosom of a stony shepherdess

there steals a fleck of light and warmth that would have done it

good a hundred years ago. One ancestress of Volumnia, in high-heeled shoes, very like her—casting the shadow of that virgin

event before her full two centuries—shoots out into a halo and

becomes a saint. A maid of honour of the court of Charles the

Second, with large round eyes (and other charms to correspond),

seems to bathe in glowing water, and it ripples as it glows.

But the fire of the sun is dying. Even now the floor is dusky, and

shadow slowly mounts the walls, bringing the Dedlocks down like age

and death. And now, upon my Lady’s picture over the great chimney-piece, a weird shade falls from some old tree, that turns it pale,

and flutters it, and looks as if a great arm held a veil or hood,

watching an opportunity to draw it over her. Higher and darker

rises shadow on the wall—now a red gloom on the ceiling—now the

fire is out.

All that prospect, which from the terrace looked so near, has moved

solemnly away and changed—not the first nor the last of beautiful

things that look so near and will so change—into a distant

phantom. Light mists arise, and the dew falls, and all the sweet

scents in the garden are heavy in the air. Now the woods settle

into great masses as if they were each one profound tree. And now

the moon rises to separate them, and to glimmer here and there in

horizontal lines behind their stems, and to make the avenue a

pavement of light among high cathedral arches fantastically broken.

Now the moon is high; and the great house, needing habitation more

than ever, is like a body without life. Now it is even awful,

stealing through it, to think of the live people who have slept in

the solitary bedrooms, to say nothing of the dead. Now is the time

for shadow, when every corner is a cavern and every downward step a

pit, when the stained glass is reflected in pale and faded hues

upon the floors, when anything and everything can be made of the

heavy staircase beams excepting their own proper shapes, when the

armour has dull lights upon it not easily to be distinguished from

stealthy movement, and when barred helmets are frightfully

suggestive of heads inside. But of all the shadows in Chesney

Wold, the shadow in the long drawing-room upon my Lady’s picture is

the first to come, the last to be disturbed. At this hour and by

this light it changes into threatening hands raised up and menacing

the handsome face with every breath that stirs.

“She is not well, ma’am,” says a groom in Mrs. Rouncewell’s

audience-chamber.

“My Lady not well! What’s the matter?”

“Why, my Lady has been but poorly, ma’am, since she was last here—

I don’t mean with the family, ma’am, but when she was here as a

bird of passage like. My Lady has not been out much, for her, and

has