BLEAK HOUSE

Inapoi la sumar

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 fall 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 resfless 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.  Ah!"   Mrs. Rouncewell's hands unquiet, as usual, on this reference. 

"They say I am like my father, grandmother." 

"Like him, also, my dear--but most like your poor uncle George!   And your dear father."  Mrs. Rouncewell folds her hands again. 

"He  is well?"  "Thriving, grandmother, in every way." 

"I am thankful!"  Mrs. Rouncewell is fond of her son but has a  plaintive feeling towards him, much as if he were a very honourable  soldier who had gone over to the enemy. 

"He is quite happy?" says she. 

"Quite." 

"I am thankful!  So he has brought you up to follow in his ways and  has sent you into foreign countries and the like?  Well, he knows  best.  There may be a world beyond Chesney Wold that I don't  understand.  Though I am not young, either.  And I have seen a  quantity of good company too!"  "Grandmother," says the young man, changing the subject, "what a  very pretty girl that was I found with you just now.  You called  her Rosa?" 

"Yes, child.  She is daughter of a widow in the village.  Maids are  so hard to teach, now-a-days, that I have put her about me young.   She's an apt scholar and will do well.  She shows the house  already, very pretty.  She lives with me at my table here." 

"I hope I have not driven her away?" 

"She supposes we have family affairs to speak about, I dare say.   She is very modest.  It is a fine quality in a young woman.  And  scarcer," says Mrs. Rouncewell, expanding her stomacher to its  utmost limits, "than it formerly was!" 

The young man inclines his head in acknowledgment of the precepts  of experience.  Mrs. Rouncewell listens.  "Wheels!" says she.  They have long been audible to the younger  ears of her companion.

  "What wheels on such a day as this, for  gracious sake?"  After a short interval, a tap at the door.  "Come in!"  A dark- eyed, dark-haired, shy, village beauty comes in--so fresh in her  rosy and yet delicate bloom that the drops of rain which have  beaten on her hair look like the dew upon a flower fresh gathered.  "What company is this, Rosa?" says Mrs. Rouncewell. 

"It's two young men in a gig, ma'am, who want to see the house-- yes, and if you please, I told them so!" in quick reply to a  gesture of dissent from the housekeeper. 

"I went to the hall-door  and told them it was the wrong day and the wrong hour, but the  young man who was driving took off his hat in the wet and begged me  to bring this card to you." 

"Read it, my dear Watt," says the housekeeper.  Rosa is so shy as she gives it to him that they drop it between  them and almost knock their foreheads together as they pick it up.   Rosa is shyer than before.

  "Mr. Guppy" is all the information the card yields. 

"Guppy!" repeats Mrs. Rouncewell, "MR. Guppy!  Nonsense, I never  heard of him!" 

"If you please, he told ME that!" says Rosa.  "But he said that he  and the other young gentleman came from London only last night by  the mail, on business at the magistrates' meeting, ten miles off,  this morning, and that as their business was soon over, and they  had heard a great deal said of Chesney Wold, and really didn't know  what to do with themselves, they had come through the wet to see  it.  They are lawyers.  He says he is not in Mr. Tulkinghorn's  office, but he is sure he may make use of Mr. Tulkinghorn's name if  necessary."  Finding, now she leaves off, that she has been making  quite a long speech, Rosa is shyer than ever.  Now, Mr. Tulkinghorn is, in a manner, part and parcel of the place,  and besides, is supposed to have made Mrs. Rouncewell's will.  The  old lady relaxes, consents to the admission of the visitors as a  favour, and dismisses Rosa.  The grandson, however, being smitten  by a sudden wish to see the house himself, proposes to join the  party.  The grandmother, who is pleased that he should have that  interest, accompanies him--though to do him justice, he is  exceedingly unwilling to trouble her. 

"Much obliged to you, ma'am!" says Mr. Guppy, divesting himself of  his wet dreadnought in the hall. 

"Us London lawyers don't often  get an out, and when we do, we like to make the most of it, you  know."

The old housekeeper, with a gracious severity of deportment, waves  her hand towards the great staircase.  Mr. Guppy and his friend  follow Rosa; Mrs. Rouncewell and her grandson follow them; a young  gardener goes before to open the shutters.  As is usually the case with people who go over houses, Mr. Guppy  and his friend are dead beat before they have well begun.  They  straggle about in wrong places, look at wrong things, don't care  for the right things, gape when more rooms are opened, exhibit  profound depression of spirits, and are clearly knocked up.  In  each successive chamber that they enter, Mrs. Rouncewell, who is as  upright as the house itself, rests apart in a window-seat or other  such nook and listens with stately approval to Rosa's exposition.   Her grandson is so attentive to it that Rosa is shyer than ever-- and prettier.  Thus they pass on from room to room, raising the  pictured Dedlocks for a few brief minutes as the young gardener  admits the light, and reconsigning them to their graves as he shuts  it out again.  It appears to the afflicted Mr. Guppy and his  inconsolable friend that there is no end to the Dedlocks, whose  family greatness seems to consist in their never having done  anything to distinguish themselves for seven hundred years.  Even the long drawing-room of Chesney Wold cannot revive Mr.  Guppy's spirits.  He is so low that he droops on the threshold and  has hardly strength of mind to enter.  But a portrait over the  chimney-piece, painted by the fashionable artist of the day, acts  upon him like a charm.  He recovers in a moment.  He stares at it  with uncommon interest; he seems to be fixed and fascinated by it. 

"Dear me!" says Mr. Guppy.  "Who's that?"  "The picture over the fire-place," says Rosa, "is the portrait of  the present Lady Dedlock.  It is considered a perfect likeness, and  the best work of the master." 

"'Blest," says Mr. Guppy, staring in a kind of dismay at his  friend, "if I can ever have seen her.  Yet I know her!  Has the  picture been engraved, miss?" 

"The picture has never been engraved.  Sir Leicester has always  refused permission." 

"Well!" says Mr. Guppy in a low voice. 

"I'll be shot if it ain't  very curious how well I know that picture!  So that's Lady Dedlock,  is it!" 

"The picture on the right is the present Sir Leicester Dedlock.   The picture on the left is his father, the late Sir Leicester."  Mr. Guppy has no eyes for either of these magnates. 

"It's  unaccountable to me," he says, still staring at the portrait, "how  well I know that picture!  I'm dashed," adds Mr. Guppy, looking  round, "if I don't think I must have had a dream of that picture,  you know!"  As no one present takes any especial interest in Mr. Guppy's  dreams, the probability is not pursued.  But he still remains so  absorbed by the portrait that he stands immovable before it until  the young gardener has closed the shutters, when he comes out of  the room in a dazed state that is an odd though a sufficient  substitute for interest and follows into the succeeding rooms with  a confused stare, as if he were looking everywhere for Lady Dedlock  again.  He sees no more of her.  He sees her rooms, which are the last  shown, as being very elegant, and he looks out of the windows from  which she looked out, not long ago, upon the weather that bored her  to death.  All things have an end, even houses that people take  infinite pains to see and are tired of before they begin to see  them.  He has come to the end of the sight, and the fresh village  beauty to the end of her description; which is always this: "The  terrace below is much admired.  It is called, from an old story in  the family, the Ghost's Walk." 

"No?" says Mr. Guppy, greedily curious. 

"What's the story, miss?   Is it anything about a picture?" 

"Pray tell us the story," says Watt in a half whisper. 

"I don't know it, sir."  Rosa is shyer than ever. 

"It is not related to visitors; it is almost forgotten," says the  housekeeper, advancing. 

"It has never been more than a family  anecdote."  "You'll excuse my asking again if it has anything to do with a  picture, ma'am," observes Mr. Guppy, "because I do assure you that  the more I think of that picture the better I know it, without  knowing how I know it!"  The story has nothing to do with a picture; the housekeeper can  guarantee that.  Mr. Guppy is obliged to her for the information  and is, moreover, generally obliged.  He retires with his friend,  guided down another staircase by the young gardener, and presently  is heard to drive away.  It is now dusk.  Mrs. Rouncewell can trust  to the discretion of her two young hearers and may tell THEM how  the terrace came to have that ghostly name.  She seats herself in a large chair by the fast-darkening window and  tells them: "In the wicked days, my dears, of King Charles the  First--I mean, of course, in the wicked days of the rebels who  leagued themselves against that excellent king--Sir Morbury Dedlock  was the owner of Chesney Wold.  Whether there was any account of a  ghost in the family before those days, I can't say.  I should think  it very likely indeed." 

Mrs. Rouncewell holds this opinion because she considers that a  family of such antiquity and importance has a right to a ghost.   She regards a ghost as one of the privileges of the upper classes,  a genteel distinction to which the common people have no claim. 

"Sir Morbury Dedlock," says Mrs. Rouncewell, "was, I have no  occasion to say, on the side of the blessed martyr.  But it IS  supposed that his Lady, who had none of the family blood in her  veins, favoured the bad cause.  It is said that she had relations  among King Charles's enemies, that she was in correspondence with  them, and that she gave them information.  When any of the country  gentlemen who followed his Majesty's cause met here, it is said  that my Lady was always nearer to the door of their council-room  than they supposed.  Do you hear a sound like a footstep passing  along the terrace, Watt?"  Rosa draws nearer to the housekeeper. 

"I hear the rain-drip on the stones," replies the young man, "and I  hear a curious echo--I suppose an echo--which is very like a  halting step." 

The housekeeper gravely nods and continues: "Partly on account of  this division between them, and partly on other accounts, Sir  Morbury and his Lady led a troubled life.  She was a lady of a  haughty temper.  They were not well suited to each other in age or  character, and they had no children to moderate between them.   After her favourite brother, a young gentleman, was killed in the  civil wars (by Sir Morbury's near kinsman), her feeling was so  violent that she hated the race into which she had married.  When  the Dedlocks were about to ride out from Chesney Wold in the king's  cause, she is supposed to have more than once stolen down into the  stables in the dead of night and lamed their horses; and the story  is that once at such an hour, her husband saw her gliding down the  stairs and followed her into the stall where his own favourite  horse stood.  There he seized her by the wrist, and in a struggle  or in a fall or through the horse being frightened and lashing out,  she was lamed in the hip and from that hour began to pine away." 

The housekeeper has dropped her voice to a little more than a  whisper. 

"She had been a lady of a handsome figure and a noble carriage.   She never complained of the change; she never spoke to any one of  being crippled or of being in pain, but day by day she tried to  walk upon the terrace, and with the help of the stone balustrade,  went up and down, up and down, up and down, in sun and shadow, with  greater difficulty every day.  At last, one afternoon her husband  (to whom she had never, on any persuasion, opened her lips since  that night), standing at the great south window, saw her drop upon  the pavement.  He hastened down to raise her, but she repulsed him  as he bent over her, and looking at him fixedly and coldly, said,  'I will die here where I have walked.  And I will walk here, though  I am in my grave.  I will walk here until the pride of this house  is humbled.  And when calamity or when disgrace is coming to it,  let the Dedlocks listen for my step!'  Watt looks at Rosa.  Rosa in the deepening gloom looks down upon  the ground, half frightened and half shy. 

"There and then she died.  And from those days," says Mrs.  Rouncewell, "the name has come down--the Ghost's Walk.  If the  tread is an echo, it is an echo that is only heard after dark, and  is often unheard for a long while together.  But it comes back from  time to time; and so sure as there is sickness or death in the  family, it will be heard then." 

"And disgrace, grandmother--" says Watt. 

"Disgrace never comes to Chesney Wold," returns the housekeeper.  Her grandson apologizes with "True.  True." 

"That is the story.  Whatever the sound is, it is a worrying  sound," says Mrs. Rouncewell, getting up from her chair; "and what  is to be noticed in it is that it MUST BE HEARD.  My Lady, who is  afraid of nothing, admits that when it is there, it must be heard.   You cannot shut it out.  Watt, there is a tall French clock behind  you (placed there, 'a purpose) that has a loud beat when it is in  motion and can play music.  You understand how those things are  managed?" 

"Pretty well, grandmother, I think." 

"Set it a-going."  Watt sets it a-going--music and all. 

"Now, come hither," says the housekeeper. 

"Hither, child, towards  my Lady's pillow.  I am not sure that it is dark enough yet, but  listen!  Can you hear the sound upon the terrace, through the  music, and the beat, and everything?" 

"I certainly can!" 

"So my Lady says."

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