It has left off raining down in Lincolnshire at last, and Chesney Wold has taken heart. Mrs. Rouncewell is full of hospitable cares, for Sir Leicester and my Lady are coming home from Paris. The fashionable intelligence has found it out and communicates the glad tidings to benighted England. It has also found out that they will entertain a brilliant and distinguished circle of the ELITE of the BEAU MONDE (the fashionable intelligence is weak in English, but a giant refreshed in French) at the ancient and hospitable family seat in Lincolnshire.
For the greater honour of the brilliant and distinguished circle, and of Chesney Wold into the bargain, the broken arch of the bridge in the park is mended; and the water, now retired within its proper limits and again spanned gracefully, makes a figure in the prospect from the house. The clear, cold sunshine glances into the brittle woods and approvingly beholds the sharp wind scattering the leaves and drying the moss. It glides over the park after the moving shadows of the clouds, and chases them, and never catches them, all day. It looks in at the windows and touches the ancestral portraits with bars and patches of brightness never contemplated by the painters. Athwart the picture of my Lady, over the great chimney-piece, it throws a broad bend-sinister of light that strikes down crookedly into the hearth and seems to rend it.
Through the same cold sunshine and the same sharp wind, my Lady and Sir Leicester, in their travelling chariot (my Lady’s woman and Sir Leicester’s man affectionate in the rumble), start for home. With a considerable amount of jingling and whip-cracking, and many plunging demonstrations on the part of two bare-backed horses and two centaurs with glazed hats, jack-boots, and flowing manes and tails, they rattle out of the yard of the Hotel Bristol in the Place Vendome and canter between the sun-and-shadow-chequered colonnade of the Rue de Rivoli and the garden of the ill-fated palace of a headless king and queen, off by the Place of Concord, and the Elysian Fields, and the Gate of the Star, out of Paris.
Sooth to say, they cannot go away too fast, for even here my Lady Dedlock has been bored to death. Concert, assembly, opera, theatre, drive, nothing is new to my Lady under the worn-out heavens. Only last Sunday, when poor wretches were gay — within the walls playing with children among the clipped trees and the statues in the Palace Garden; walking, a score abreast, in the Elysian Fields, made more Elysian by performing dogs and wooden horses; between whiles filtering (a few) through the gloomy Cathedral of Our Lady to say a word or two at the base of a pillar within flare of a rusty little gridiron-full of gusty little tapers; without the walls encompassing Paris with dancing, love-making, wine-drinking, tobacco-smoking, tomb-visiting, billiard card and domino playing, quack-doctoring, and much murderous refuse, animate and inanimate — only last Sunday, my Lady, in the desolation of Boredom and the clutch of Giant Despair, almost hated her own maid for being in spirits.
She cannot, therefore, go too fast from Paris. Weariness of soul lies before her, as it lies behind — her Ariel has put a girdle of it round the whole earth, and it cannot be unclasped — but the imperfect remedy is always to fly from the last place where it has been experienced. Fling Paris back into the distance, then, exchanging it for endless avenues and cross-avenues of wintry trees! And, when next beheld, let it be some leagues away, with the Gate of the Star a white speck glittering in the sun, and the city a mere mound in a plain — two dark square towers rising out of it, and light and shadow descending on it aslant, like the angels in Jacob’s dream!
Sir Leicester is generally in a complacent state, and rarely bored. When he has nothing else to do, he can always contemplate his own greatness. It is a considerable advantage to a man to have so inexhaustible a subject. After reading his letters, he leans back in his corner of the carriage and generally reviews his importance to society.
“You have an unusual amount of correspondence this morning?” says my Lady after a long time. She is fatigued with reading. Has almost read a page in twenty miles.
“Nothing in it, though. Nothing whatever.”
“I saw one of Mr. Tulkinghorn’s long effusions, I think?”
“You see everything,” says Sir Leicester with admiration.
“Ha!” sighs my Lady. “He is the most tiresome of men!”
“He sends — I really beg your pardon — he sends,” says Sir Leicester, selecting the letter and unfolding it, “a message to you. Our stopping to change horses as I came to his postscript drove it out of my memory. I beg you’ll excuse me. He says — ” Sir Leicester is so long in taking out his eye-glass and adjusting it that my Lady looks a little irritated. “He says ‘In the matter of the right of way — ’ I beg your pardon, that’s not the place. He says — yes! Here I have it! He says, ‘I beg my respectful compliments to my Lady, who, I hope, has benefited by the change. Will you do me the favour to mention (as it may interest her) that I have something to tell her on her return in reference to the person who copied the affidavit in the Chancery suit, which so powerfully stimulated her curiosity. I have seen him.’”
My Lady, leaning forward, looks out of her window.
“That’s the message,” observes Sir Leicester.
“I should like to walk a little,” says my Lady, still looking out of her window.
“Walk?” repeats Sir Leicester in a tone of surprise.
“I should like to walk a little,” says my Lady with unmistakable distinctness. “Please to stop the carriage.”
The carriage is stopped, the affectionate man alights from the rumble, opens the door, and lets down the steps, obedient to an impatient motion of my Lady’s hand. My Lady alights so quickly and walks away so quickly that Sir Leicester, for all his scrupulous politeness, is unable to assist her, and is left behind. A space of a minute or two has elapsed before he comes up with her. She smiles, looks very handsome, takes his arm, lounges with him for a quarter of a mile, is very much bored, and resumes her seat in the carriage.
The rattle and clatter continue through the greater part of three days, with more or less of bell-jingling and whip-cracking, and more or less plunging of centaurs and bare-backed horses. Their courtly politeness to each other at the hotels where they tarry is the theme of general admiration. Though my Lord IS a little aged for my Lady, says Madame, the hostess of the Golden Ape, and though he might be her amiable father, one can see at a glance that they love each other. One observes my Lord with his white hair, standing, hat in hand, to help my Lady to and from the carriage. One observes my Lady, how recognisant of my Lord’s politeness, with an inclination of her gracious head and the concession of her so-genteel fingers! It is ravishing!
The sea has no appreciation of great men, but knocks them about like the small fry. It is habitually hard upon Sir Leicester, whose countenance it greenly mottles in the manner of sage-cheese and in whose aristocratic system it effects a dismal revolution. It is the Radical of Nature to him. Nevertheless, his dignity gets over it after stopping to refit, and he goes on with my Lady for Chesney Wold, lying only one night in London on the way to Lincolnshire.
Through the same cold sunlight, colder as the day declines, and through the same sharp wind, sharper as the separate shadows of bare trees gloom together in the woods, and as the Ghost’s Walk, touched at the western corner by a pile of fire in the sky, resigns itself to coming night, they drive into the park. The rooks, swinging in their lofty houses in the elm-tree avenue, seem to discuss the question of the occupancy of the carriage as it passes underneath, some agreeing that Sir Leicester and my Lady are come down, some arguing with malcontents who won’t admit it, now all consenting to consider the question disposed of, now all breaking out again in violent debate, incited by one obstinate and drowsy bird who will persist in putting in a last contradictory croak. Leaving them to swing and caw, the travelling chariot rolls on to the house, where fires gleam warmly through some of the windows, though not through so many as to give an inhabited expression to the darkening mass of front. But the brilliant and distinguished circle will soon do that.
Mrs. Rouncewell is in attendance and receives Sir Leicester’s customary shake of the hand with a profound curtsy.
“How do you do, Mrs. Rouncewell? I am glad to see you.”
“I hope I have the honour of welcoming you in good health, Sir Leicester?”
“In excellent health, Mrs. Rouncewell.”
“My Lady is looking charmingly well,” says Mrs. Rouncewell with another curtsy.
My Lady signifies, without profuse expenditure of words, that she is as wearily well as she can hope to be.
But Rosa is in the distance, behind the housekeeper; and my Lady, who has not subdued the quickness of her observation, whatever else she may have conquered, asks, “Who is that girl?”
“A young scholar of mine, my Lady. Rosa.”
“Come here, Rosa!” Lady Dedlock beckons her, with even an appearance of interest. “Why, do you know how pretty you are, child?” she says, touching her shoulder with her two forefingers.
Rosa, very much abashed, says, “No, if you please, my Lady!” and glances up, and glances down, and don’t know where to look, but looks all the prettier.
“How old are you?”
“Nineteen, my Lady.”
“Nineteen,” repeats my Lady thoughtfully. “Take care they don’t spoil you by flattery.”
“Yes, my Lady.”
My Lady taps her dimpled cheek with the same delicate gloved fingers and goes on to the foot of the oak staircase, where Sir Leicester pauses for her as her knightly escort. A staring old Dedlock in a panel, as large as life and as dull, looks as if he didn’t know what to make of it, which was probably his general state of mind in the days of Queen Elizabeth.
That evening, in the housekeeper’s room, Rosa can do nothing but murmur Lady Dedlock’s praises. She is so affable, so graceful, so beautiful, so elegant; has such a sweet voice and such a thrilling touch that Rosa can feel it yet! Mrs. Rouncewell confirms all this, not without personal pride, reserving only the one point of affability. Mrs. Rouncewell is not quite sure as to that. Heaven forbid that she should say a syllable in dispraise of any member of that excellent family, above all, of my Lady, whom the whole world admires; but if my Lady would only be “a little more free,” not quite so cold and distant, Mrs. Rounceweil thinks she would be more affable.
“’Tis almost a pity,” Mrs. Rouncewell adds — only “almost” because it borders on impiety to suppose that anything could be better than it is, in such an express dispensation as the Dedlock affairs — “that my Lady has no family. If she had had a daughter now, a grown young lady, to interest her, I think she would have had the only kind of excellence she wants.”
“Might not that have made her still more proud, grandmother?” says Watt, who has been home and come back again, he is such a good grandson.
“More and most, my dear,” returns the housekeeper with dignity, “are words it’s not my place to use — nor so much as to hear — applied to any drawback on my Lady.”
“I beg your pardon, grandmother. But she is proud, is she not?”
“If she is, she has reason to be. The Dedlock family have always reason to be.”
“Well,” says Watt, “it’s to be hoped they line out of their prayer-books a certain passage for the common people about pride and vainglory. Forgive me, grandmother! Only a joke!”
“Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock, my dear, are not fit subjects for joking.”
“Sir Leicester is no joke by any means,” says Watt, “and I humbly ask his pardon. I suppose, grandmother, that even with the family and their guests down here, there is no ojection to my prolonging my stay at the Dedlock Arms for a day or two, as any other traveller might?”
“Surely, none in the world, child.”
“I am glad of that,” says Watt, “because I have an inexpressible desire to extend my knowledge of this beautiful neighbourhood.”
He happens to glance at Rosa, who looks down and is very shy indeed. But according to the old superstition, it should be Rosa’s ears that burn, and not her fresh bright cheeks, for my Lady’s maid is holding forth about her at this moment with surpassing energy.
My Lady’s maid is a Frenchwoman of two and thirty, from somewhere in the southern country about Avignon and Marseilles, a large-eyed brown woman with black hair who would be handsome but for a certain feline mouth and general uncomfortable tightness of face, rendering the jaws too eager and the skull too prominent. There is something indefinably keen and wan about her anatomy, and she has a watchful way of looking out of the corners of her eyes without turning her head which could be pleasantly dispensed with, especially when she is in an ill humour and near knives. Through all the good taste of her dress and little adornments, these objections so express themselves that she seems to go about like a very neat she-wolf imperfectly tamed. Besides being accomplished in all the knowledge appertaining to her post, she is almost an Englishwoman in her acquaintance with the language; consequently, she is in no want of words to shower upon Rosa for having attracted my Lady’s attention, and she pours them out with such grim ridicule as she sits at dinner that her companion, the affectionate man, is rather relieved when she arrives at the spoon stage of that performance.
Ha, ha, ha! She, Hortense, been in my Lady’s service since five years and always kept at the distance, and this doll, this puppet, caressed — absolutely caressed — by my Lady on the moment of her arriving at the house! Ha, ha, ha! “And do you know how pretty you are, child?” “No, my Lady.” You are right there! “And how old are you, child! And take care they do not spoil you by flattery, child!” Oh, how droll! It is the BEST thing altogether.
In short, it is such an admirable thing that Mademoiselle Hortense can’t forget it; but at meals for days afterwards, even among her countrywomen and others attached in like capacity to the troop of visitors, relapses into silent enjoyment of the joke — an enjoyment expressed, in her own convivial manner, by an additional tightness of face, thin elongation of compressed lips, and sidewise look, which intense appreciation of humour is frequently reflected in my Lady’s mirrors when my Lady is not among them.
All the mirrors in the house are brought into action now, many of them after a long blank. They reflect handsome faces, simpering faces, youthful faces, faces of threescore and ten that will not submit to be old; the entire collection of faces that have come to pass a January week or two at Chesney Wold, and which the fashionable intelligence, a mighty hunter before the Lord, hunts with a keen scent, from their breaking cover at the Court of St. James’s to their being run down to death. The place in Lincolnshire is all alive. By day guns and voices are heard ringing in the woods, horsemen and carriages enliven the park roads, servants and hangers-on pervade the village and the Dedlock Arms. Seen by night from distant openings in the trees, the row of windows in the long drawing-room, where my Lady’s picture hangs over the great chimney-piece, is like a row of jewels set in a black frame. On Sunday the chill little church is almost warmed by so much gallant company, and the general flavour of the Dedlock dust is quenched in delicate perfumes.
The brilliant and distinguished circle comprehends within it no contracted amount of education, sense, courage, honour, beauty, and virtue. Yet there is something a little wrong about it in despite of its immense advantages. What can it be?
Dandyism? There is no King George the Fourth now (more the pity) to set the dandy fashion; there are no............