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

CHAPTER VII

The Ghost’s Walk

 

While Esther sleeps, and while Esther wakes, it is still wet weather

down at the place in Lincolnshire. The rain is ever falling—drip,

drip, drip—by day and night upon the broad flagged terrace-pavement, the Ghost’s Walk. The weather is so very bad down in

Lincolnshire that the liveliest imagination can scarcely apprehend

its ever being fine again. Not that there is any superabundant life

of imagination on the spot, for Sir Leicester is not here (and,

truly, even if he were, would not do much for it in that

particular), but is in Paris with my Lady; and solitude, with dusky

wings, sits brooding upon Chesney Wold.

 

There may be some motions of fancy among the lower animals at

Chesney Wold. The horses in the stables—the long stables in a

barren, red-brick court-yard, where there is a great bell in a

turret, and a clock with a large face, which the pigeons who live

near it and who love to perch upon its shoulders seem to be always

consulting—THEY may contemplate some mental pictures of fine

weather on occasions, and may be better artists at them than the

grooms. The old roan, so famous for cross-country work, turning his

large eyeball to the grated window near his rack, may remember the

fresh leaves that glisten there at other times and the scents that

stream in, and may have a fine run with the hounds, while the human

helper, clearing out the next stall, never stirs beyond his

pitchfork and birch-broom. The grey, whose place is opposite the

door and who with an impatient rattle of his halter pricks his ears

and turns his head so wistfully when it is opened, and to whom the

opener says, “Woa grey, then, steady! Noabody wants you to-day!”

may know it quite as well as the man. The whole seemingly

monotonous and uncompanionable half-dozen, stabled together, may

pass the long wet hours when the door is shut in livelier

communication than is held in the servants’ hall or at the Dedlock

Arms, or may even beguile the time by improving (perhaps corrupting)

the pony in the loose-box in the corner.

 

So the mastiff, dozing in his kennel in the court-yard with his

large head on his paws, may think of the hot sunshine when the

shadows of the stable-buildings tire his patience out by changing

and leave him at one time of the day no broader refuge than the

shadow of his own house, where he sits on end, panting and growling

short, and very much wanting something to worry besides himself and

his chain. So now, half-waking and all-winking, he may recall the

house full of company, the coach-houses full of vehicles, the

stables full of horses, and the out-buildings full of attendants

upon horses, until he is undecided about the present and comes forth

to see how it is. Then, with that impatient shake of himself, he

may growl in the spirit, “Rain, rain, rain! Nothing but rain—and

no family here!” as he goes in again and lies down with a gloomy

yawn.

 

So with the dogs in the kennel-buildings across the park, who have

their restless fits and whose doleful voices when the wind has been

very obstinate have even made it known in the house itself—

upstairs, downstairs, and in my Lady’s chamber. They may hunt the

whole country-side, while the raindrops are pattering round their

inactivity. So the rabbits with their self-betraying tails,

frisking in and out of holes at roots of trees, may be lively with

ideas of the breezy days when their ears are blown about or of those

seasons of interest when there are sweet young plants to gnaw. The

turkey in the poultry-yard, always troubled with a class-grievance

(probably Christmas), may be reminiscent of that summer morning

wrongfully taken from him when he got into the lane among the felled

trees, where there was a barn and barley. The discontented goose,

who stoops to pass under the old gateway, twenty feet high, may

gabble out, if we only knew it, a waddling preference for weather

when the gateway casts its shadow on the ground.

 

Be this as it may, there is not much fancy otherwise stirring at

Chesney Wold. If there be a little at any odd moment, it goes,

like a little noise in that old echoing place, a long way and

usually leads off to ghosts and mystery.

 

It has rained so hard and rained so long down in Lincolnshire that

Mrs. Rouncewell, the old housekeeper at Chesney Wold, has several

times taken off her spectacles and cleaned them to make certain

that the drops were not upon the glasses. Mrs. Rouncewell might

have been sufficiently assured by hearing the rain, but that she is

rather deaf, which nothing will induce her to believe. She is a

fine old lady, handsome, stately, wonderfully neat, and has such a

back and such a stomacher that if her stays should turn out when

she dies to have been a broad old-fashioned family fire-grate,

nobody who knows her would have cause to be surprised. Weather

affects Mrs. Rouncewell little. The house is there in all

weathers, and the house, as she expresses it, “is what she looks

at.” She sits in her room (in a side passage on the ground floor,

with an arched window commanding a smooth quadrangle, adorned at

regular intervals with smooth round trees and smooth round blocks

of stone, as if the trees were going to play at bowls with the

stones), and the whole house reposes on her mind. She can open it

on occasion and be busy and fluttered, but it is shut up now and

lies on the breadth of Mrs. Rouncewell’s iron-bound bosom in a

majestic sleep.

 

It is the next difficult thing to an impossibility to imagine

Chesney Wold without Mrs. Rouncewell, but she has only been here

fifty years. Ask her how long, this rainy day, and she shall

answer “fifty year, three months, and a fortnight, by the blessing

of heaven, if I live till Tuesday.” Mr. Rouncewell died some time

before the decease of the pretty fashion of pig-tails, and modestly

hid his own (if he took it with him) in a corner of the churchyard

in the park near the mouldy porch. He was born in the market-town,

and so was his young widow. Her progress in the family began in

the time of the last Sir Leicester and originated in the still-room.

 

The present representative of the Dedlocks is an excellent master.

He supposes all his dependents to be utterly bereft of individual

characters, intentions, or opinions, and is persuaded that he was

born to supersede the necessity of their having any. If he were to

make a discovery to the contrary, he would be simply stunned—would

never recover himself, most likely, except to gasp and die. But he

is an excellent master still, holding it a part of his state to be

so. He has a great liking for Mrs. Rouncewell; he says she is a

most respectable, creditable woman. He always shakes hands with

her when he comes down to Chesney Wold and when he goes away; and

if he were very ill, or if he were knocked down by accident, or run

over, or placed in any situation expressive of a Dedlock at a

disadvantage, he would say if he could speak, “Leave me, and send

Mrs. Rouncewell here!” feeling his dignity, at such a pass, safer

with her than with anybody else.

 

Mrs. Rouncewell has known trouble. She has had two sons, of whom

the younger ran wild, and went for a soldier, and never came back.

Even to this hour, Mrs. Rouncewell’s calm hands lose their

composure when she speaks of him, and unfolding themselves from her

stomacher, hover about her in an agitated manner as she says what a

likely lad, what a fine lad, what a gay, good-humoured, clever lad

he was! Her second son would have been provided for at Chesney

Wold and would have been made steward in due season, but he took,

when he was a schoolboy, to constructing steam-engines out of

saucepans and setting birds to draw their own water with the least

possible amount of labour, so assisting them with artful

contrivance of hydraulic pressure that a thirsty canary had only,

in a literal sense, to put his shoulder to the wheel and the job

was done. This propensity gave Mrs. Rouncewell great uneasiness.

She felt it with a mother’s anguish to be a move in the Wat Tyler

direction, well knowing that Sir Leicester had that general

impression of an aptitude for any art to which smoke and a tall

chimney might be considered essential. But the doomed young rebel

(otherwise a mild youth, and very persevering), showing no sign of

grace as he got older but, on the contrary, constructing a model of

a power-loom, she was fain, with many tears, to mention his

backslidings to the baronet. “Mrs. Rouncewell,” said Sir

Leicester, “I can never consent to argue, as you know, with any one

on any subject. You had better get rid of your boy; you had better

get him into some Works. The iron country farther north is, I

suppose, the congenial direction for a boy with these tendencies.”

Farther north he went, and farther north he grew up; and if Sir

Leicester Dedlock ever saw him when he came to Chesney Wold to

visit his mother, or ever thought of him afterwards, it is certain

that he only regarded him as one of a body of some odd thousand

conspirators, swarthy and grim, who were in the habit of turning

out by torchlight two or three nights in the week for unlawful

purposes.

 

Nevertheless, Mrs. Rouncewell’s son has, in the course of nature

and art, grown up, and established himself, and married, and called

unto him Mrs. Rouncewell’s grandson, who, being out of his

apprenticeship, and home from a journey in far countries, whither

he was sent to enlarge his knowledge and complete his preparations

for the venture of this life, stands leaning against the chimney-piece this very day in Mrs. Rouncewell’s room at Chesney Wold.

 

“And, again and again, I am glad to see you, Watt! And, once

again, I am glad to see you, Watt!” says Mrs. Rouncewell. “You are

a fine young fellow. You are like your poor uncle George.