The Solitary House (With Bonus Novels Bleak House and the Woman in White)

by Lynn Shepherd

  “I will not begin it in the old way now,” said Richard with a sad smile. “I have learned a lesson now, sir. It was a hard one; but you shall be assured, indeed, that I have learned it.”

  “Well, well,” said my guardian, comforting him; “well, well, well, dear boy!”

  “I was thinking, sir,” resumed Richard, “that there is nothing on earth I should so much like to see as their house—Dame Durden’s and Woodcourt’s house. If I could be removed there when I begin to recover my strength, I feel as if I should get well there, sooner than anywhere.”

  “Why, so have I been thinking too, Rick,” said my guardian, “and our little woman likewise; she and I have been talking of it this very day. I dare say her husband won’t object. What do you think?”

  Richard smiled; and lifted up his arm to touch him, as he stood behind the head of the couch.

  “I say nothing of Ada,” said Richard, “but I think of her, and have thought of her very much. Look at her! see her here, sir, bending over this pillow when she has so much need to rest upon it herself, my dear love, my poor girl!”

  He clasped her in his arms, and none of us spoke. He gradually released her; and she looked upon us, and looked up to Heaven, and moved her lips.

  “When I get to Bleak House,” said Richard, “I shall have much to tell you, sir, and you will have much to show me. You will go, won’t you?”

  “Undoubtedly, dear Rick.”

  “Thank you; like you, like you,” said Richard. “But it’s all like you. They have been telling me how you planned it, and how you remembered all Esther’s familiar tastes and ways. It will be like coming to the old Bleak House again.”

  “And you will come there too, I hope, Rick. I am a solitary man now, you know, and it will be a charity to come to me. A charity to come to me, my love!” he repeated to Ada, as he gently passed his hand over her golden hair, and put a lock of it to his lips. (I think he vowed within himself to cherish her if she were left alone.)

  “It was a troubled dream?” said Richard, clasping both my guardian’s hands eagerly.

  “Nothing more, Rick; nothing more.”

  “And you, being a good man, can pass it as such, and forgive and pity the dreamer, and be lenient and encouraging when he wakes?”

  “Indeed I can. What am I but another dreamer, Rick?”

  “I will begin the world!” said Richard, with a light in his eyes.

  My husband drew a little nearer towards Ada, and I saw him solemnly lift up his hand to warn my guardian.

  “When shall I go from this place, to that pleasant country where the old times are, where I shall have strength to tell what Ada has been to me, where I shall be able to recall my many faults and blindnesses, where I shall prepare myself to be a guide to my unborn child?” said Richard. “When shall I go?”

  “Dear Rick, when you are strong enough,” returned my guardian.

  “Ada, my darling!”

  He sought to raise himself a little. Allan raised him so that she could hold him to her bosom; which was what he wanted.

  “I have done you many wrongs, my own. I have fallen like a poor stray shadow on your way, I have married you to poverty and trouble, I have scattered your means to the winds. You will forgive me all this, my Ada, before I begin the world?”

  A smile irradiated his face, as she bent to kiss him. He slowly laid his face down upon her bosom, drew his arms closer round her neck, and with one parting sob began the world. Not this world, O not this! The world that sets this right.

  When all was still, at a late hour, poor crazed Miss Flite came weeping to me, and told me she had given her birds their liberty.

  CHAPTER 66

  DOWN IN LINCOLNSHIRE

  There is a hush upon Chesney Wold in these altered days, as there is upon a portion of the family history. The story goes, that Sir Leicester paid some who could have spoken out, to hold their peace; but it is a lame story, feebly whispering and creeping about and any brighter spark of life it shows soon dies away. It is known for certain that the handsome Lady Dedlock lies in the mausoleum in the park, where the trees arch darkly overhead, and the owl is heard at night making the woods ring; but whence she was brought home, to be laid among the echoes of that solitary place, or how she died, is all mystery. Some of her old friends, principally to be found among the peachy-cheeked charmers with the skeleton throats, did once occasionally say, as they toyed in a ghastly manner with large fans—like charmers reduced to flirting with grim Death, after losing all their other beaux—did once occasionally say, when the Wold assembled together, that they wondered the ashes of the Dedlocks, entombed in the mausoleum, never rose against the profanation of her company. But the dead-and-gone Dedlocks take it very calmly, and have never been known to object.

  Up from among the fern in the hollow, and winding by the bridle-road among the trees, comes sometimes to this lonely spot the sound of horses’ hoofs. Then may be seen Sir Leicester—invalided, bent, and almost blind, but of worthy presence yet—riding with a stalwart man beside him, constant to his bridle-rein. When they come to a certain spot before the mausoleum-door, Sir Leicester’s accustomed horse stops of his own accord, and Sir Leicester, pulling off his hat, is still for a few moments before they ride away.

  War rages yet with the audacious Boythorn, though at uncertain intervals, and now hotly, and now coolly; flickering like an unsteady fire. The truth is said to be, that when Sir Leicester came down to Lincolnshire for good, Mr. Boythorn showed a manifest desire to abandon his right of way, and do whatever Sir Leicester would: which Sir Leicester, conceiving to be a condescension to his illness or misfortune, took in such high dudgeon, and was so magnificently aggrieved by, that Mr. Boythorn found himself under the necessity of committing a flagrant trespass to restore his neighbour to himself. Similarly Mr. Boythorn continues to post tremendous placards on the disputed thoroughfare, and (with his bird upon his head) to hold forth vehemently against Sir Leicester in the sanctuary of his own home; similarly, also, he defies him as of old in the little church, by testifying a bland unconsciousness of his existence. But it is whispered that when he is most ferocious towards his old foe, he is really most considerate; and that Sir Leicester, in the dignity of being implacable, little supposes how much he is humoured. As little does he think how near together he and his antagonist have suffered, in the fortunes of two sisters; and his antagonist, who knows it now, is not the man to tell him. So the quarrel goes on to the satisfaction of both.

  In one of the lodges of the park; that lodge within sight of the house where, once upon a time, when the waters were out down in Lincolnshire, my Lady used to see the Keeper’s child; the stalwart man, the trooper formerly, is housed. Some relics of his old calling hang upon the walls, and these it is the chosen recreation of a little lame man about the stable-yard to keep gleaming bright. A busy little man he always is, in the polishing at harness-house doors, of stirrup-irons, bits, curb-chains, harness bosses, anything in the way of a stable-yard that will take a polish: leading a life of friction. A shaggy little damaged man, withal, not unlike an old dog of some mongrel breed, who has been considerably knocked about. He answers to the name of Phil.

  A goodly sight it is to see the grand old housekeeper (harder of hearing now) going to church on the arm of her son, and to observe—which few do, for the house is scant of company in these times—the relations of both towards Sir Leicester, and his towards them. They have visitors in the high summer weather, when a grey cloak and umbrella, unknown to Chesney Wold at other periods, are seen among the leaves; when two young ladies are occasionally found gambolling, in sequestered sawpits and such nooks of the park; and when the smoke of two pipes wreathes away into the fragrant evening air, from the trooper’s door. Then is a fife heard trolling within the lodge, on the inspiring topic of the British Grenadiers; and, as the evening closes in, a gruff inflexible voice is heard to say, while two men pace together up and down, “But I never own to it before the old girl. Discipline must be ma
intained.”

  The greater part of the house is shut up, and it is a show-house no longer; yet Sir Leicester holds his shrunken state in the long drawing-room for all that, and reposes in his old place before my Lady’s picture. Closed in by night with broad screens, and illumined only in that part, the light of the drawing-room seems gradually contracting and dwindling until it shall be no more. A little more, in truth, and it will be all extinguished for Sir Leicester; and the damp door in the mausoleum which shuts so tight, and looks so obdurate, will have opened and relieved him.

  Volumnia, growing with the flight of time pinker as to the red in her face, and yellower as to the white, reads to Sir Leicester in the long evenings, and is driven to various artifices to conceal her yawns: of which the chief and most efficacious is the insertion of the pearl necklace between her rosy lips. Longwinded treatises on the Buffy and Boodle question, showing how Buffy is immaculate and Boodle villainous, and how the country is lost by being all Boodle and no Buffy, or saved by being all Buffy and no Boodle (it must be one of the two, and cannot be anything else), are the staple of her reading. Sir Leicester is not particular what it is, and does not appear to follow it very closely; further than that he always comes broad awake the moment Volumnia ventures to leave off, and sonorously repeating her last words, begs with some displeasure to know if she finds herself fatigued? However, Volumnia, in the course of her birdlike hopping about and pecking at papers, has alighted on a memorandum concerning herself, in the event of “anything happening” to her kinsman, which is handsome compensation for an extensive course of reading, and holds even the dragon Boredom at bay.

  The cousins generally are rather shy of Chesney Wold in its dulness, but take to it a little in the shooting season, when guns are heard in the plantations, and a few scattered beaters and keepers wait at the old places of appointment, for low-spirited twos and threes of cousins. The debilitated cousin, more debilitated by the dreariness of the place, gets into a fearful state of depression, groaning under penitential sofa-pillows in his gunless hours, and protesting that such fernal old jail’s—nough t’sew fler up—frever.

  The only great occasions for Volumnia, in this changed aspect of the place in Lincolnshire, are those occasions, rare and widely separated, when something is to be done for the county, or the country, in the way of gracing a public ball. Then, indeed, does the tuckered sylph come out in fairy form, and proceed with joy under cousinly escort to the exhausted old assembly-room, fourteen heavy miles off: which, during three hundred and sixty-four days and nights of every ordinary year, is a kind of Antipodean lumber-room, full of old chairs and tables, upside down. Then, indeed, does she captivate all hearts by her condescension, by her girlish vivacity, and by her skipping about as in the days when the hideous old general with the mouth too full of teeth, had not cut one of them at two guineas each. Then does she twirl and twine, a pastoral nymph of good family, through the maze of the dance. Then do the swains appear with tea, with lemonade, with sandwiches, with homage. Then is she kind and cruel, stately and unassuming, various, beautifully wilful. Then is there a singular kind of parallel between her and the little glass chandeliers of another age, embellishing that assembly-room; which, with their meagre stems, their spare little drops, their disappointing knobs where no drops are, their bare little stalks from which knobs and drops have both departed, and their little feeble prismatic twinkling, all seem Volumnias.

  For the rest, Lincolnshire life to Volumnia is a vast blank of overgrown house looking out upon trees, sighing, wringing their hands, bowing their heads, and casting their tears upon the window-panes in monotonous depressions. A labyrinth of grandeur, less the property of an old family of human beings and their ghostly likenesses, than of an old family of echoings and thunderings which start out of their hundred graves at every sound, and go resounding through the building. A waste of unused passages and staircases, in which to drop a comb upon a bedroom floor at night is to send a stealthy footfall on an errand through the house. A place where few people care to go about alone; where a maid screams if an ash drops from the fire, takes to crying at all times and seasons, becomes the victim of a low disorder of the spirits, and gives warning and departs.

  Thus Chesney Wold. With so much of itself abandoned to darkness and vacancy; with so little change under the summer shining or the wintry lowering; so sombre and motionless always—no flag flying now by day, no rows of lights sparkling by night; with no family to come and go, no visitors to be the souls of pale cold shapes of rooms, no stir of life about it;—passion and pride, even to the stranger’s eye, have died away from the place in Lincolnshire, and yielded it to dull repose.

  CHAPTER 67

  THE CLOSE OF ESTHER’S NARRATIVE

  Full seven happy years I have been the mistress of Bleak House. The few words that I have to add to what I have written, are soon penned; then I, and the unknown friend to whom I write, will part for ever. Not without much dear remembrance on my side. Not without some, I hope, on his or hers.

  They gave my darling into my arms, and through many weeks I never left her. The little child who was to have done so much, was born before the turf was planted on its father’s grave. It was a boy; and I, my husband, and my guardian, gave him his father’s name.

  The help that my dear counted on, did come to her; though it came, in the Eternal wisdom, for another purpose. Though to bless and restore his mother, not his father, was the errand of this baby, its power was mighty to do it. When I saw the strength of the weak little hand, and how its touch could heal my darling’s heart, and raised up hope within her, I felt a new sense of the goodness and the tenderness of God.

  They throve; and by degrees I saw my dear girl pass into my country garden, and walk there with her infant in her arms. I was married then. I was the happiest of the happy.

  It was at this time that my guardian joined us, and asked Ada when she would come home?

  “Both houses are your home, my dear,” said he, “but the older Bleak House claims priority. When you and my boy are strong enough to do it, come and take possession of your home.”

  Ada called him “her dearest cousin, John.” But he said, No, it must be guardian now. He was her guardian hence forth, and the boy’s; and he had an old association with the name. So she called him guardian, and has called him guardian ever since. The children know him by no other name.—I say the children; I have two little daughters.

  It is difficult to believe that Charley (round-eyed still, and not at all grammatical) is married to a miller in our neighbourhood; yet so it is; and even now, looking up from my desk as I write, early in the morning at my summer window, I see the very mill beginning to go round. I hope the miller will not spoil Charley; but he is very fond of her, and Charley is rather vain of such a match—for he is well to do, and was in great request. So far as my small maid is concerned, I might suppose Time to have stood for seven years as still as the mill did half an hour ago; since little Emma, Charley’s sister, is exactly what Charley used to be. As to Tom, Charley’s brother, I am really afraid to say what he did at school in cyphering, but I think it was Decimals. He is apprenticed to the miller, whatever it was; and is a good bashful fellow, always falling in love with somebody, and being ashamed of it.

  Caddy Jellyby passed her very last holidays with us, and was a dearer creature than ever; perpetually dancing in and out of the house with the children, as if she had never given a dancing-lesson in her life. Caddy keeps her own little carriage now, instead of hiring one, and lives full two miles further westward than Newman Street. She works very hard, her husband (an excellent one) being lame, and able to do very little. Still, she is more than contented, and does all she has to do with all her heart. Mr. Jellyby spends his evenings at her new house with his head against the wall, as he used to do in her old one. I have heard that Mrs. Jellyby was understood to suffer great mortification, from her daughter’s ignoble marriage and pursuits; but I hope she got over it in time. She has been disappointed in
Borrioboola-Gha, which turned out a failure in consequence of the king of Borrioboola wanting to sell everybody—who survived the climate—for Rum; but she has taken up with the rights of women to sit in Parliament, and Caddy tells me it is a mission involving more correspondence than the old one. I had almost forgotten Caddy’s poor little girl. She is not such a mite now; but she is deaf and dumb. I believe there never was a better mother than Caddy, who learns, in her scanty intervals of leisure, innumerable deaf and dumb arts, to soften the affliction of her child.

  As if I were never to have done with Caddy, I am reminded here of Peepy and old Mr. Turveydrop. Peepy is in the Custom House, and doing extremely well. Old Mr. Turveydrop, very apoplectic, still exhibits his Deportment about town; still enjoys himself in the old manner; is still believed in, in the old way. He is constant in his patronage of Peepy, and is understood to have bequeathed him a favourite French clock in his dressing-room—which is not his property.

  With the first money we saved at home, we added to our pretty house by throwing out a little Growlery expressly for my guardian; which we inaugurated with great splendour the next time he came down to see us. I try to write all this lightly, because my heart is full in drawing to an end; but when I write of him, my tears will have their way.

  I never look at him, but I hear our poor dear Richard calling him a good man. To Ada and her pretty boy, he is the fondest father; to me, he is what he has ever been, and what name can I give to that? He is my husband’s best and dearest friend, he is our children’s darling, he is the object of our deepest love and veneration. Yet while I feel towards him as if he were a superior being, I am so familiar with him, and so easy with him, that I almost wonder at myself. I have never lost my old names, nor has he lost his; nor do I ever, when he is with us, sit in any other place than in my old chair at his side. Dame Trot, Dame Durden, Little Woman!—all just the same as ever; and I answer, Yes, dear Guardian! just the same.