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<Inapoi la Cuprins

 Charles Dickens

 

BLEAK HOUSE

Inapoi la Sumar


CHAPTER LVIII  

A Wintry Day and Night

 

Still impassive, as behoves its breeding, the Dedlock town house  carries itself as usual towards the street of dismal grandeur.   There are powdered heads from time to time in the little windows of  the hall, looking out at the untaxed powder falling all day from  the sky; and in the same conservatory there is peach blossom  turning itself exotically to the great hall fire from the nipping  weather out of doors.  It is given out that my Lady has gone down  into Lincolnshire, but is expected to return presently.  Rumour, busy overmuch, however, will not go down into Lincolnshire.   It persists in flitting and chattering about town.  It knows that  that poor unfortunate man, Sir Leicester, has been sadly used.  It  hears, my dear child, all sorts of shocking things.  It makes the  world of five miles round quite merry.  Not to know that there is  something wrong at the Dedlocks' is to augur yourself unknown.  One  of the peachy-cheeked charmers with the skeleton throats is already  apprised of all the principal circumstances that will come out  before the Lords on Sir Leicester's application for a bill of  divorce.  At Blaze and Sparkle's the jewellers and at Sheen and Gloss's the  mercers, it is and will be for several hours the topic of the age,  the feature of the century. 

The patronesses of those  establishments, albeit so loftily inscrutable, being as nicely  weighed and measured there as any other article of the stock-in- trade, are perfectly understood in this new fashion by the rawest  hand behind the counter. 

"Our people, Mr. Jones," said Blaze and  Sparkle to the hand in question on engaging him, "our people, sir,  are sheep--mere sheep.  Where two or three marked ones go, all the  rest follow.  Keep those two or three in your eye, Mr. Jones, and  you have the flock."  So, likewise, Sheen and Gloss to THEIR Jones,  in reference to knowing where to have the fashionable people and  how to bring what they (Sheen and Gloss) choose into fashion.  On  similar unerring principles, Mr. Sladdery the librarian, and indeed  the great farmer of gorgeous sheep, admits this very day, "Why yes,  sir, there certainly ARE reports concerning Lady Dedlock, very  current indeed among my high connexion, sir.  You see, my high  connexion must talk about something, sir; and it's only to get a  subject into vogue with one or two ladies I could name to make it  go down with the whole.  Just what I should have done with those  ladies, sir, in the case of any novelty you had left to me to bring  in, they have done of themselves in this case through knowing Lady  Dedlock and being perhaps a little innocently jealous of her too,  sir.  You'll find, sir, that this topic will be very popular among  my high connexion.  If it had been a speculation, sir, it would  have brought money.  And when I say so, you may trust to my being  right, sir, for I have made it my business to study my high  connexion and to be able to wind it up like a clock, sir." 

Thus rumour thrives in the capital, and will not go down into  Lincolnshire.  By half-past five, post meridian, Horse Guards'  time, it has even elicited a new remark from the Honourable Mr.  Stables, which bids fair to outshine the old one, on which he has  so long rested his colloquial reputation.  This sparkling sally is  to the effect that although he always knew she was the best-groomed  woman in the stud, he had no idea she was a bolter. 

It is  immensely received in turf-circles.  At feasts and festivals also, in firmaments she has often graced,  and among constellations she outshone but yesterday, she is still  the prevalent subject.  What is it?  Who is it?  When was it?   Where was it?  How was it?  She is discussed by her dear friends  with all the genteelest slang in vogue, with the last new word, the  last new manner, the last new drawl, and the perfection of polite  indifference.  A remarkable feature of the theme is that it is  found to be so inspiring that several people come out upon it who  never came out before--positively say things!  William Buffy  carries one of these smartnesses from the place where he dines down  to the House, where the Whip for his party hands it about with his  snuff-box to keep men together who want to be off, with such effect  that the Speaker (who has had it privately insinuated into his own  ear under the corner of his wig) cries,

"Order at the bar!" three  times without making an impression.  And not the least amazing circumstance connected with her being  vaguely the town talk is that people hovering on the confines of  Mr. Sladdery's high connexion, people who know nothing and ever did  know nothing about her, think it essential to their reputation to  pretend that she is their topic too, and to retail her at second- hand with the last new word and the last new manner, and the last  new drawl, and the last new polite indifference, and all the rest  of it, all at second-hand but considered equal to new in inferior  systems and to fainter stars.  If there be any man of letters, art,  or science among these little dealers, how noble in him to support  the feeble sisters on such majestic crutches!  So goes the wintry day outside the Dedlock mansion.  How within it?  Sir Leicester, lying in his bed, can speak a little, though with  difficulty and indistinctness.  He is enjoined to silence and to  rest, and they have given him some opiate to lull his pain, for his  old enemy is very hard with him.  He is never asleep, though  sometimes he seems to fall into a dull waking doze.  He caused his  bedstead to be moved out nearer to the window when he heard it was  such inclement weather, and his head to be so adjusted that he  could see the driving snow and sleet.  He watches it as it falls,  throughout the whole wintry day.  Upon the least noise in the house, which is kept hushed, his hand  is at the pencil.  The old housekeeper, sitting by him, knows what  he would write and whispers, "No, he has not come back yet, Sir  Leicester. 

It was late last night when he went.  He has been but a  little time gone yet." 

He withdraws his hand and falls to looking at the sleet and snow  again until they seem, by being long looked at, to fall so thick  and fast that he is obliged to close his eyes for a minute on the  giddy whirl of white flakes and icy blots.  He began to look at them as soon as it was light.  The day is not  yet far spent when he conceives it to be necessary that her rooms  should be prepared for her.  It is very cold and wet.  Let there be  good fires.  Let them know that she is expected.  Please see to it  yourself.  He writes to this purpose on his slate, and Mrs.  Rouncewell with a heavy heart obeys. 

"For I dread, George," the old lady says to her son, who waits  below to keep her company when she has a little leisure, "I dread,  my dear, that my Lady will never more set foot within these walls." 

"That's a bad presentiment, mother." 

"Nor yet within the walls of Chesney Wold, my dear." 

"That's worse.  But why, mother?" 

"When I saw my Lady yesterday, George, she looked to me--and I may  say at me too--as if the step on the Ghost's Walk had almost walked  her down." 

"Come, come!  You alarm yourself with old-story fears, mother." 

"No I don't, my dear.  No I don't.  It's going on for sixty year  that I have been in this family, and I never had any fears for it  before.  But it's breaking up, my dear; the great old Dedlock  family is breaking up." 

"I hope not, mother." 

"I am thankful I have lived long enough to be with Sir Leicester in  this illness and trouble, for I know I am not too old nor too  useless to be a welcomer sight to him than anybody else in my place  would be.  But the step on the Ghost's Walk will walk my Lady down,  George; it has been many a day behind her, and now it will pass her  and go on." 

"Well, mother dear, I say again, I hope not." 

"Ah, so do I, George," the old lady returns, shaking her head and  parting her folded hands. 

"But if my fears come true, and he has  to know it, who will tell him!" 

"Are these her rooms?" 

"These are my Lady's rooms, just as she left them." 

"Why, now," says the trooper, glancing round him and speaking in a  lower voice, "I begin to understand how you come to think as you do  think, mother.  Rooms get an awful look about them when they are  fitted up, like these, for one person you are used to see in them,  and that person is away under any shadow, let alone being God knows  where." 

He is not far out.  As all partings foreshadow the great final one,  so, empty rooms, bereft of a familiar presence, mournfully whisper  what your room and what mine must one day be.  My Lady's state has  a hollow look, thus gloomy and abandoned; and in the inner  apartment, where Mr. Bucket last night made his secret  perquisition, the traces of her dresses and her ornaments, even the  mirrors accustomed to reflect them when they were a portion of  herself, have a desolate and vacant air.  Dark and cold as the  wintry day is, it is darker and colder in these deserted chambers  than in many a hut that will barely exclude the weather; and though  the servants heap fires in the grates and set the couches and the  chairs within the warm glass screens that let their ruddy light  shoot through to the furthest corners, there is a heavy cloud upon  the rooms which no light will dispel. 

The old housekeeper and her son remain until the preparations are  complete, and then she returns upstairs.  Volumnia has taken Mrs.  Rouncewell's place in the meantime, though pearl necklaces and  rouge pots, however calculated to embellish Bath, are but  indifferent comforts to the invalid under present circumstances.   Volumnia, not being supposed to know (and indeed not knowing) what  is the matter, has found it a ticklish task to offer appropriate  observations and consequently has supplied their place with  distracting smoothings of the bed-linen, elaborate locomotion on  tiptoe, vigilant peeping at her kinsman's eyes, and one  exasperating whisper to herself of, "He is asleep." 

In disproof of  which superfluous remark Sir Leicester has indignantly written on  the slate, "I am not."  Yielding, therefore, the chair at the bedside to the quaint old  housekeeper, Volumnia sits at a table a little removed,  sympathetically sighing.  Sir Leicester watches the sleet and snow  and listens for the returning steps that he expects.  In the ears  of his old servant, looking as if she had stepped out of an old  picture-frame to attend a summoned Dedlock to another world, the  silence is fraught with echoes of her own words, "who will tell  him!" 

He has been under his valet's hands this morning to be made  presentable and is as well got up as the circumstances will allow.   He is propped with pillows, his grey hair is brushed in its usual  manner, his linen is arranged to a nicety, and he is wrapped in a  responsible dressing-gown.  His eye-glass and his watch are ready  to his hand.  It is necessary--less to his own dignity now perhaps  than for her sake--that he should be seen as little disturbed and  as much himself as may be.  Women will talk, and Volumnia, though a  Dedlock, is no exceptional case.  He keeps her here, there is  little doubt, to prevent her talking somewhere else.  He is very  ill, but he makes his present stand against distress of mind and  body most courageously. 

The fair Volumnia, being one of those sprightly girls who cannot  long continue silent without imminent peril of seizure by the  dragon Boredom, soon indicates the approach of that monster with a  series of undisguisable yawns.  Finding it impossible to suppress  those yawns by any other process than conversation, she compliments  Mrs. Rouncewell on her son, declaring that he positively is one of  the finest figures she ever saw and as soldierly a looking person,  she should think, as what's his name, her favourite Life Guardsman --the man she dotes on, the dearest of creatures--who was killed at  Waterloo.  Sir Leicester hears this tribute with so much surprise and stares  about him in such a confused way that Mrs. Rouncewell feels it  necesary to explain. 

"Miss Dedlock don't speak of my eldest son, Sir Leicester, but my  youngest.  I have found him.  He has come home." 

Sir Leicester breaks silence with a harsh cry. 

"George?  Your son  George come home, Mrs. Rouncewell?" 

The old housekeeper wipes her eyes.  "Thank God.  Yes, Sir  Leicester." 

Does this discovery of some one lost, this return of some one so  long gone, come upon him as a strong confirmation of his hopes?   Does he think, "Shall I not, with the aid I have, recall her safely  after this, there being fewer hours in her case than there are  years in his?"  It is of no use entreating him; he is determined to speak now, and  he does.  In a thick crowd of sounds, but still intelligibly enough  to be understood. 

"Why did you not tell me, Mrs. Rouncewell?" 

"It happened only yesterday, Sir Leicester, and I doubted your  being well enough to be talked to of such things." 

Besides, the giddy Volumnia now remembers with her little scream  that nobody was to have known of his being Mrs. Rouncewell's son  and that she was not to have told.  But Mrs. Rouncewell protests,  with warmth enough to swell the stomacher, that of course she would  have told Sir Leicester as soon as he got better. 

"Where is your son George, Mrs. Rouncewell?" asks Sir Leicester,  Mrs. Rouncewell, not a little alarmed by his disregard of the  doctor's injunctions, replies, in London. 

"Where in London?" 

Mrs. Rouncewell is constrained to admit that he is in the house. 

"Bring him here to my room.  Bring him directly." 

The old lady can do nothing but go in search of him.  Sir  Leicester, with such power of movement as he has, arranges himself  a little to receive him.  When he has done so, he looks out again  at the falling sleet and snow and listens again for the returning  steps.  A quantity of straw has been tumbled down in the street to  deaden the noises there, and she might be driven to the door  perhaps without his hearing wheels.  He is lying thus, apparently forgetful of his newer and minor  surprise, when the housekeeper returns, accompanied by her trooper  son.  Mr. George approaches softly to the bedside, makes his bow,  squares his chest, and stands, with his face flushed, very heartily  ashamed of himself. 

"Good heaven, and it is really George Rouncewell!" exclaims Sir  Leicester. 

"Do you remember me, George?" 

The trooper needs to look at him and to separate this sound from  that sound before he knows what he has said, but doing this and  being a little helped by his mother, he replies, "I must have a  very bad memory, indeed, Sir Leicester, if I failed to remember  you." 

"When I look at you, George Rouncewell," Sir Leicester observes  with difficulty, "I see something of a boy at Chesney Wold--I  remember well--very well." 

He looks at the trooper until tears come into his eyes, and then he  looks at the sleet and snow again. 

"I ask your pardon, Sir Leicester," says the trooper, "but would  you accept of my arms to raise you up?  You would lie easier, Sir  Leicester, if you would allow me to move you." 

"If you please, George Rouncewell; if you will be so good." 

The trooper takes him in his arms like a child, lightly raises him,  and turns him with his face more towards the window. 

"Thank you.   You have your mother's gentleness," returns Sir Leicester, "and  your own strength.  Thank you." 

He signs to him with his hand not to go away.  George quietly  remains at the bedside, waiting to be spoken to. 

"Why did you wish for secrecy?"  It takes Sir Leicester some time  to ask this. 

"Truly I am not much to boast of, Sir Leicester, and I--I should  still, Sir Leicester, if you was not so indisposed--which I hope  you will not be long--I should still hope for the favour of being  allowed to remain unknown in general.  That involves explanations  not very hard to be guessed at, not very well timed here, and not  very creditable to myself.  However opinions may differ on a  variety of subjects, I should think it would be universally agreed,  Sir Leicester, that I am not much to boast of." 

"You have been a soldier," observes Sir Leicester, "and a faithful  one." 

George makes his military how. 

"As far as that goes, Sir  Leicester, I have done my duty under discipline, and it was the  least I could do." 

"You find me," says Sir Leicester, whose eyes are much attracted  towards him, "far from well, George Rouncewell." 

"I am very sorry both to hear it and to see it, Sir Leicester." 

"I am sure you are.  No.  In addition to my older malady, I have  had a sudden and bad attack.  Something that deadens," making an  endeavour to pass one hand down one side, "and confuses," touching  his lips.  George, with a look of assent and sympathy, makes another bow.  The  different times when they were both young men (the trooper much the  younger of the two) and looked at one another down at Chesney Wold  arise before them both and soften both.  Sir Leicester, evidently with a great determination to say, in his  own manner, something that is on his mind before relapsing into  silence, tries to raise himself among his pillows a little more.   George, observant of the action, takes him in his arms again and  places him as he desires to be. 

"Thank you, George.  You are  another self to me.  You have often carried my spare gun at Chesney  Wold, George.  You are familiar to me in these strange  circumstances, very familiar."  He has put Sir Leicester's sounder  arm over his shoulder in lifting him up, and Sir Leicester is slow  in drawing it away again as he says these words. 

"I was about to add," he presently goes on, "I was about to add,  respecting this attack, that it was unfortunately simultaneous with  a slight misunderstanding between my Lady and myself.  I do not  mean that there was any difference between us (for there has been  none), but that there was a misunderstanding of certain  circumstances important only to ourselves, which deprives me, for a  little while, of my Lady's society.  She has found it necessary to  make a journey--I trust will shortly return.  Volumnia, do I make  myself intelligible?  The words are not quite under my command in  the manner of pronouncing them."  Volumnia understands him perfectly, and in truth be delivers  himself with far greater plainness than could have been supposed  possible a minute ago.  The effort by which he does so is written  in the anxious and labouring expression of his face.  Nothing but  the strength of his purpose enables him to make it.  "Therefore, Volumnia, I desire to say in your presence--and in the  presence of my old retainer and friend, Mrs. Rouncewell, whose  truth and fidelity no one can question, and in the presence of her  son George, who comes back like a familiar recollection of my youth  in the home of my ancestors at Chesney Wold--in case I should  relapse, in case I should not recover, in case I should lose both  my speech and the power of writing, though I hope for better  things--"  The old housekeeper weeping silently; Volumnia in the greatest  agitation, with the freshest bloom on her cheeks; the trooper with  his arms folded and his head a little bent, respectfully attentive. 

"Therefore I desire to say, and to call you all to witness-- beginning, Volumnia, with yourself, most solemnly--that I am on  unaltered terms with Lady Dedlock.  That I assert no cause whatever  of complaint against her.  That I have ever had the strongest  affection for her, and that I retain it undiminished.  Say this to  herself, and to every one.  If you ever say less than this, you  will be guilty of deliberate falsehood to me."  Volumnia tremblingly protests that she will observe his injunctions  to the letter. 

"My Lady is too high in position, too handsome, too accomplished,  too superior in most respects to the best of those by whom she is  surrounded, not to have her enemies and traducers, I dare say.  Let  it be known to them, as I make it known to you, that being of sound  mind, memory, and understanding, I revoke no disposition I have  made in her favour.  I abridge nothing I have ever bestowed upon  her.  I am on unaltered terms with her, and I recall--having the  full power to do it if I were so disposed, as you see--no act I  have done for her advantage and happiness." 

His formal array of words might have at any other time, as it has  often had, something ludicrous in it, but at this time it is  serious and affecting.  His noble earnestness, his fidelity, his  gallant shielding of her, his generous conquest of his own wrong  and his own pride for her sake, are simply honourable, manly, and  true.  Nothing less worthy can be seen through the lustre of such  qualities in the commonest mechanic, nothing less worthy can be  seen in the best-born gentleman.  In such a light both aspire  alike, both rise alike, both children of the dust shine equally.  Overpowered by his exertions, he lays his head back on his pillows  and closes his eyes for not more than a minute, when he again  resumes his watching of the weather and his attention to the  muffled sounds.  In the rendering of those little services, and in  the manner of their acceptance, the trooper has become installed as  necessary to him.  Nothing has been said, but it is quite  understood.  He falls a step or two backward to be out of sight and  mounts guard a little behind his mother's chair. 

The day is now beginning to decline.  The mist and the sleet into  which the snow has all resolved itself are darker, and the blaze  begins to tell more vividly upon the room walls and furniture.  The  gloom augments; the bright gas springs up in the streets; and the  pertinacious oil lamps which yet hold their ground there, with  their source of life half frozen and half thawed, twinkle gaspingly  like fiery fish out of water--as they are.  The world, which has  been rumbling over the straw and pulling at the bell, "to inquire,"  begins to go home, begins to dress, to dine, to discuss its dear  friend with all the last new modes, as already mentioned.  Now does Sir Leicester become worse, restless, uneasy, and in great  pain.  Volumnia, lighting a candle (with a predestined aptitude for  doing something objectionable), is bidden to put it out again, for  it is not yet dark enough.  Yet it is very dark too, as dark as it  will be all night.  By and by she tries again.  No!  Put it out.   It is not dark enough yet.  His old housekeeper is the first to understand that he is striving  to uphold the fiction with himself that it is not growing late. 

"Dear Sir Leicester, my honoured master," she softly whispers, "I  must, for your own good, and my duty, take the freedom of begging  and praying that you will not lie here in the lone darkness  watching and waiting and dragging through the time.  Let me draw  the curtains, and light the candles, and make things more  comfortable about you.  The church-clocks will strike the hours  just the same, Sir Leicester, and the night will pass away just the  same.  My Lady will come back, just the same." 

"I know it, Mrs. Rouncewell, but I am weak--and he has been so long  gone." 

"Not so very long, Sir Leicester.  Not twenty-four hours yet." 

"But that is a long time.  Oh, it is a long time!"  He says it with a groan that wrings her heart.  She knows that this is not a period for bringing the rough light  upon him; she thinks his tears too sacred to be seen, even by her.   

Therefore she sits in the darkness for a while without a word, then  gently begins to move about, now stirring the fire, now standing at  the dark window looking out.  Finally he tells her, with recovered  self-command, "As you say, Mrs. Rouncewell, it is no worse for  being confessed.  It is getting late, and they are not come.  Light  the room!" 

When it is lighted and the weather shut out, it is only  left to him to listen.  But they find that however dejected and ill he is, he brightens  when a quiet pretence is made of looking at the fires in her rooms  and being sure that everything is ready to receive her.  Poor  pretence as it is, these allusions to her being expected keep up  hope within him.  Midnight comes, and with it the same blank.  The carriages in the  streets are few, and other late sounds in that neighbourhood there  are none, unless a man so very nomadically drunk as to stray into  the frigid zone goes brawling and bellowing along the pavement.   Upon this wintry night it is so still that listening to the intense  silence is like looking at intense darkness.  If any distant sound  be audible in this case, it departs through the gloom like a feeble  light in that, and all is heavier than before. 

The corporation of servants are dismissed to bed (not unwilling to  go, for they were up all last night), and only Mrs. Rouncewell and  George keep watch in Sir Leicester's room.  As the night lags  tardily on--or rather when it seems to stop altogether, at between  two and three o'clock--they find a restless craving on him to know  more about the weather, now he cannot see it.  Hence George,  patrolling regularly every half-hour to the rooms so carefully  looked after, extends his march to the hall-door, looks about him,  and brings back the best report he can make of the worst of nights,  the sleet still falling and even the stone footways lying ankle- deep in icy sludge.  Volumnia, in her room up a retired landing on the stair-case--the  second turning past the end of the carving and gilding, a cousinly  room containing a fearful abortion of a portrait of Sir Leicester  banished for its crimes, and commanding in the day a solemn yard  planted with dried-up shrubs like antediluvian specimens of black  tea--is a prey to horrors of many kinds. 

Not last nor least among  them, possibly, is a horror of what may befall her little income in  the event, as she expresses it, "of anything happening" to Sir  Leicester.  Anything, in this sense, meaning one thing only; and  that the last thing that can happen to the consciousness of any  baronet in the known world.  An effect of these horrors is that Volumnia finds she cannot go to  bed in her own room or sit by the fire in her own room, but must  come forth with her fair head tied up in a profusion of shawl, and  her fair form enrobed in drapery, and parade the mansion like a  ghost, particularly haunting the rooms, warm and luxurious,  prepared for one who still does not return.  Solitude under such  circumstances being not to be thought of, Volumnia is attended by  her maid, who, impressed from her own bed for that purpose,  extremely cold, very sleepy, and generally an injured maid as  condemned by circumstances to take office with a cousin, when she  had resolved to be maid to nothing less than ten thousand a year,  has not a sweet expression of countenance.  The periodical visits of the trooper to these rooms, however, in  the course of his patrolling is an assurance of protection and  company both to mistress and maid, which renders them very  acceptable in the small hours of the night. 

Whenever he is heard  advancing, they both make some little decorative preparation to  receive him; at other times they divide their watches into short  scraps of oblivion and dialogues not wholly free from acerbity, as  to whether Miss Dedlock, sitting with her feet upon the fender, was  or was not falling into the fire when rescued (to her great  displeasure) by her guardian genius the maid. 

"How is Sir Leicester now, Mr. George?" inquires Volumnia,  adjusting her cowl over her head. 

"Why, Sir Leicester is much the same, miss.  He is very low and  ill, and he even wanders a little sometimes." 

"Has he asked for me?" inquires Volumnia tenderly. 

"Why, no, I can't say he has, miss.  Not within my hearing, that is  to say." 

"This is a truly sad time, Mr. George." 

"It is indeed, miss.  Hadn't you better go to bed?" 

"You had a deal better go to bed, Miss Dedlock," quoth the maid  sharply.  But Volumnia answers No! No!  She may be asked for, she may be  wanted at a moment's notice.  She never should forgive herself "if  anything was to happen" and she was not on the spot.  She declines  to enter on the question, mooted by the maid, how the spot comes to  be there, and not in her room (which is nearer to Sir Leicester's),  but staunchly declares that on the spot she will remain.  Volumnia  further makes a merit of not having "closed an eye"--as if she had  twenty or thirty--though it is hard to reconcile this statement  with her having most indisputably opened two within five minutes. 

But when it comes to four o'clock, and still the same blank,  Volumnia's constancy begins to fail her, or rather it begins to  strengthen, for she now considers that it is her duty to be ready  for the morrow, when much may be expected of her, that, in fact,  howsoever anxious to remain upon the spot, it may be required of  her, as an act of self-devotion, to desert the spot.  So when the  trooper reappears with his, "Hadn't you better go to bed, miss?"  and when the maid protests, more sharply than before, "You had a  deal better go to bed, Miss Dedlock!" she meekly rises and says,  "Do with me what you think best!"  Mr. George undoubtedly thinks it best to escort her on his arm to  the door of her cousinly chamber, and the maid as undoubtedly  thinks it best to hustle her into bed with mighty little ceremony.   Accordingly, these steps are taken; and now the trooper, in his  rounds, has the house to himself. 

There is no improvement in the weather.  From the portico, from the  eaves, from the parapet, from every ledge and post and pillar,  drips the thawed snow.  It has crept, as if for shelter, into the  lintels of the great door--under it, into the corners of the  windows, into every chink and crevice of retreat, and there wastes  and dies.  It is falling still; upon the roof, upon the skylight,  even through the skylight, and drip, drip, drip, with the  regularity of the Ghost's Walk, on the stone floor below. 

The trooper, his old recollections awakened by the solitary  grandeur of a great house--no novelty to him once at Chesney Wold-- goes up the stairs and through the chief rooms, holding up his  light at arm's length.  Thinking of his varied fortunes within the  last few weeks, and of his rustic boyhood, and of the two periods  of his life so strangely brought together across the wide  intermediate space; thinking of the murdered man whose image is  fresh in his mind; thinking of the lady who has disappeared from  these very rooms and the tokens of whose recent presence are all  here; thinking of the master of the house upstairs and of the  foreboding, "Who will tell him!" he looks here and looks there, and  reflects how he MIGHT see something now, which it would tax his  boldness to walk up to, lay his hand upon, and prove to be a fancy.   But it is all blank, blank as the darkness above and below, while  he goes up the great staircase again, blank as the oppressive  silence. 

"All is still in readiness, George Rouncewell?" 

"Quite orderly and right, Sir Leicester." 

"No word of any kind?" 

The trooper shakes his head. 

"No letter that can possibly have been overlooked?" 

But he knows there is no such hope as that and lays his head down  without looking for an answer.  Very familiar to him, as he said himself some hours ago, George  Rouncewell lifts him into easier positions through the long  remainder of the blank wintry night, and equally familiar with his  unexpressed wish, extinguishes the light and undraws the curtains  at the first late break of day.  The day comes like a phantom.   Cold, colourless, and vague, it sends a warning streak before it of  a deathlike hue, as if it cried out, "Look what I am bringing you  who watch there!  Who will tell him!"  

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