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

by Lynn Shepherd

  “I have frightened you?” she said.

  No. It was not fright. Why should I be frightened!

  “I believe,” said Lady Dedlock to my guardian, “I have the pleasure of speaking to Mr. Jarndyce.”

  “Your remembrance does me more honour than I had supposed it would, Lady Dedlock,” he returned.

  “I recognized you in church on Sunday. I am sorry that any local disputes of Sir Leicester’s—they are not of his seeking, however, I believe—should render it a matter of some absurd difficulty to show you any attention here.”

  “I am aware of the circumstances,” returned my guardian with a smile, “and am sufficiently obliged.”

  She had given him her hand, in an indifferent way that seemed habitual to her, and spoke in a correspondingly indifferent manner, though in a very pleasant voice. She was as graceful as she was beautiful; perfectly self-possessed; and had the air, I thought, of being able to attract and interest any one, if she thought it worth her while. The keeper had brought her a chair, on which she sat, in the middle of the porch between us.

  “Is the young gentleman disposed of, whom you wrote to Sir Leicester about, and whose wishes Sir Leicester was sorry not to have it in his power to advance in any way?” she said, over her shoulder, to my guardian.

  “I hope so,” said he.

  She seemed to respect him, and even to wish to conciliate him. There was something very winning in her haughty manner; and it became more familiar—I was going to say more easy, but that could hardly be—as she spoke to him over her shoulder.

  “I presume this is your other ward, Miss Clare?”

  He presented Ada, in form.

  “You will lose the disinterested part of your Don Quixote character,” said Lady Dedlock to Mr. Jarndyce, over her shoulder again, “if you only redress the wrongs of beauty like this. But present me,” and she turned full upon me, “to this young lady too!”

  “Miss Summerson really is my ward,” said Mr. Jarndyce. “I am responsible to no Lord Chancellor in her case.”

  “Has Miss Summerson lost both her parents?” said my Lady.

  “Yes.”

  “She is very fortunate in her guardian.”

  Lady Dedlock looked at me, and I looked at her, and said I was indeed. All at once she turned from me with a hasty air, almost expressive of displeasure or dislike, and spoke to him over her shoulder again.

  “Ages have passed since we were in the habit of meeting, Mr. Jarndyce.”

  “A long time. At least I thought it was a long time, until I saw you last Sunday,” he returned.

  “What! Even you are a courtier, or think it necessary to become one to me!” she said, with some disdain. “I have achieved that reputation, I suppose.”

  “You have achieved so much, Lady Dedlock,” said my guardian, “that you pay some little penalty, I dare say. But none to me.”

  “So much!” she repeated, slightly laughing. “Yes!”

  With her air of superiority, and power, and fascination, and I know not what, she seemed to regard Ada and me as little more than children. So, as she slightly laughed, and afterwards sat looking at the rain, she was as self-possessed, and as free to occupy herself with her own thoughts, as if she had been alone.

  “I think you knew my sister, when we were abroad together, better than you knew me?” she said, looking at him again.

  “Yes, we happened to meet oftener,” he returned.

  “We went our several ways,” said Lady Dedlock, “and had little in common even before we agreed to differ. It is to be regretted, I suppose, but it could not be helped.”

  Lady Dedlock again sat looking at the rain. The storm soon began to pass upon its way. The shower greatly abated, the lightning ceased, the thunder rolled among the distant hills, and the sun began to glisten on the wet leaves and the falling rain. As we sat there, silently, we saw a little pony phaeton coming towards us at a merry pace.

  “The messenger is coming back, my Lady,” said the keeper, “with the carriage.”

  As it drove up, we saw that there were two people inside. There alighted from it, with some cloaks and wrappers, first the Frenchwoman whom I had seen in church, and secondly the pretty girl; the Frenchwoman with a defiant confidence; the pretty girl confused and hesitating.

  “What now?” said Lady Dedlock. “Two!”

  “I am your maid, my Lady, at the present,” said the Frenchwoman. “The message was for the attendant.”

  “I was afraid you might mean me, my Lady,” said the pretty girl.

  “I did mean you, child,” replied her mistress, calmly. “Put that shawl on me.”

  She slightly stooped her shoulders to receive it, and the pretty girl lightly dropped it in its place. The Frenchwoman stood unnoticed, looking on with her lips very tightly set.

  “I am sorry,” said Lady Dedlock to Mr. Jarndyce, “that we are not likely to renew our former acquaintance. You will allow me to send the carriage back for your two wards. It shall be here directly.”

  But as he would on no account accept this offer, she took a graceful leave of Ada—none of me—and put her hand upon his proffered arm, and got into the carriage, which was a little, low, park carriage, with a hood.

  “Come in, child,” she said to the pretty girl, “I shall want you. Go on!”

  The carriage rolled away; and the Frenchwoman, with the wrappers she had brought hanging over her arm, remained standing where she had alighted.

  I suppose there is nothing Pride can so little bear with as Pride itself, and that she was punished for her imperious manner. Her retaliation was the most singular I could have imagined. She remained perfectly still until the carriage had turned into the drive, and then, without the least discomposure of countenance, slipped off her shoes, left them on the ground, and walked deliberately in the same direction, through the wettest of the wet grass.

  “Is that young woman mad?” said my guardian.

  “O no, sir!” said the keeper, who, with his wife, was looking after her. “Hortense is not one of that sort. She has as good a headpiece as the best. But she’s mortal high and passionate—powerful high and passionate; and what with having notice to leave, and having others put above her, she don’t take kindly to it.”

  “But why should she walk shoeless, through all that water?” said my guardian.

  “Why, indeed, sir, unless it is to cool her down!” said the man.

  “Or unless she fancies it’s blood,” said the woman. “She’d as soon walk through that as anything else, I think, when her own’s up!”

  We passed not far from the House, a few minutes afterwards. Peaceful as it had looked when we first saw it, it looked even more so now, with a diamond spray glittering all about it, a light wind blowing, the birds no longer hushed but singing strongly, everything refreshed by the late rain, and the little carriage shining at the doorway like a fairy carriage made of silver. Still, very steadfastly and quietly walking towards it, a peaceful figure too in the landscape, went Mademoiselle Hortense, shoeless, through the wet grass.

  CHAPTER 19

  MOVING ON

  It is the long vacation in the regions of Chancery Lane. The good ships Law and Equity, those teak-built, copper-bottomed, iron-fastened, brazen-faced, and not by any means fast-sailing Clippers, are laid up in ordinary. The Flying Dutchman, with a crew of ghostly clients imploring all whom they may encounter to peruse their papers, has drifted, for the time being, Heaven knows where. The Courts are all shut up; the public offices lie in a hot sleep; Westminster Hall itself is a shady solitude where nightingales might sing, and a tenderer class of suitors than is usually found there, walk.

  The Temple, Chancery Lane, Serjeants’ Inn, and Lincoln’s Inn even unto the Fields, are like tidal harbours at low water; where stranded proceedings, offices at anchor, idle clerks, lounging on lopsided stools that will not recover their perpendicular until the current of Term sets in, lie high and dry upon the ooze of the long vacation. Outer doors of chambers are shut
up by the score, messages and parcels are to be left at the Porter’s Lodge by the bushel. A crop of grass would grow in the chinks of the stone pavement outside Lincoln’s Inn Hall, but that the ticket-porters, who have nothing to do beyond sitting in the shade there, with their white aprons over their heads to keep the flies off, grub it up and eat it thoughtfully.

  There is only one Judge in town. Even he only comes twice a week to sit in chambers. If the country folks of those assize towns on his circuit could see him now! No full-bottomed wig, no red petticoats, no fur, no javelin-men, no white wands. Merely a close-shaven gentleman in white trousers and a white hat, with sea-bronze on the judicial countenance, and a strip of bark peeled by the solar rays from the judicial nose, who calls in at the shellfish shop as he comes along, and drinks iced ginger-beer!

  The bar of England is scattered over the face of the earth. How England can get on through four long summer months without its bar—which is its acknowledged refuge in adversity, and its only legitimate triumph in prosperity—is beside the question; assuredly that shield and buckler of Britannia are not in present wear. The learned gentleman who is always so tremendously indignant at the unprecedented outrage committed on the feelings of his client by the opposite party, that he never seems likely to recover it, is doing infinitely better than might be expected in Switzerland. The learned gentleman who does the withering business, and who blights all opponents with his gloomy sarcasm, is as merry as a grig at a French watering-place. The learned gentleman who weeps by the pint on the smallest provocation, has not shed a tear these six weeks. The very learned gentleman who has cooled the natural heat of his gingery complexion in pools and fountains of law, until he has become great in knotty arguments for term-time, when he poses the drowsy Bench with legal “chaff,” inexplicable to the uninitiated and to most of the initiated too, is roaming, with a characteristic delight in aridity and dust, about Constantinople. Other dispersed fragments of the same great Palladium are to be found on the canals of Venice, at the second cataract of the Nile, in the baths of Germany, and sprinkled on the sea-sand all over the English coast. Scarcely one is to be encountered in the deserted region of Chancery Lane. If such a lonely member of the bar do flit across the waste, and come upon a prowling suitor who is unable to leave off haunting the scenes of his anxiety, they frighten one another, and retreat into opposite shades.

  It is the hottest long vacation known for many years. All the young clerks are madly in love, and, according to their various degrees, pine for bliss with the beloved object, at Margate, Ramsgate, or Gravesend. All the middle-aged clerks think their families too large. All the unowned dogs who stray into the Inns of Court, and pant about staircases and other dry places, seeking water, give short howls of aggravation. All the blind men’s dogs in the streets draw their masters against pumps, or trip them over buckets. A shop with a sun-blind, and a watered pavement, and a bowl of gold and silver fish in the window, is a sanctuary. Temple Bar gets so hot, that it is, to the adjacent Strand and Fleet Street, what a heater is in an urn, and keeps them simmering all night.

  There are offices about the Inns of Court in which a man might be cool, if any coolness were worth purchasing at such a price in dullness; but, the little thoroughfares immediately outside those retirements seem to blaze. In Mr. Krook’s court, it is so hot that the people turn their houses inside out, and sit in chairs upon the pavement—Mr. Krook included, who there pursues his studies, with his cat (who never is too hot) by his side. The Sol’s Arms has discontinued the harmonic meetings for the season, and Little Swills is engaged at the Pastoral Gardens down the river, where he comes out in quite an innocent manner, and sings comic ditties of a juvenile complexion, calculated (as the bill says) not to wound the feelings of the most fastidious mind.

  Over all the legal neighbourhood, there hangs, like some great veil of rust, or gigantic cobweb, the idleness and pensiveness of the long vacation. Mr. Snagsby, law-stationer of Cook’s Court, Cursitor Street, is sensible of the influence; not only in his mind as a sympathetic and contemplative man, but also in his business as a law-stationer aforesaid. He has more leisure of musing in Staple Inn and in the Rolls Yard, during the long vacation, than at other seasons; and he says to the two ’prentices, what a thing it is in such hot weather to think that you live in an island, with the sea a-rolling and a-bowling right round you.

  Guster is busy in the little drawing-room, on this present afternoon in the long vacation, when Mr. and Mrs. Snagsby have it in contemplation to receive company. The expected guests are rather select than numerous, being Mr. and Mrs. Chadband, and no more. From Mr. Chadband’s being much given to describe himself, both verbally and in writing, as a vessel, he is occasionally mistaken by strangers for a gentleman connected with navigation; but, he is, as he expresses it, “in the ministry.” Mr. Chadband is attached to no particular denomination; and is considered by his persecutors to have nothing so very remarkable to say on the greatest of subjects as to render his volunteering, on his own account, at all incumbent on his conscience; but, he has his followers, and Mrs. Snagsby is of the number. Mrs. Snagsby has but recently taken a passage upward by the vessel, Chadband; and her attention was attracted to that Bark Al, when she was something flushed by the hot weather.

  “My little woman,” says Mr. Snagsby to the sparrows in Staple Inn, “likes to have her religion rather sharp, you see!”

  So, Guster, much impressed by regarding herself for the time as the handmaid of Chadband, whom she knows to be endowed with the gift of holding forth for four hours at a stretch, prepares the little drawing-room for tea. All the furniture is shaken and dusted, the portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Snagsby are touched up with a wet cloth, the best tea-service is set forth, and there is excellent provision made of dainty new bread, crusty twists, cool fresh butter, thin slices of ham, tongue and German sausage, and delicate little rows of anchovies nestling in parsley; not to mention new-laid eggs, to be brought up warm in a napkin, and hot buttered toast. For Chadband is rather a consuming vessel—the persecutors say a gorging vessel; and can wield such weapons of the flesh as a knife and fork, remarkably well.

  Mr. Snagsby in his best coat, looking at all the preparations when they are completed, and coughing his cough of deference behind his hand, says to Mrs. Snagsby, “At what time did you expect Mr. and Mrs. Chadband, my love?”

  “At six,” says Mrs. Snagsby.

  Mr. Snagsby observes in a mild and casual way, that “it’s gone that.”

  “Perhaps you’d like to begin without them,” is Mrs. Snagsby’s reproachful remark.

  Mr. Snagsby does look as if he would like it very much, but he says, with his cough of mildness, “No, my dear, no. I merely named the time.”

  “What’s time,” says Mrs. Snagsby, “to eternity?”

  “Very true, my dear,” says Mr. Snagsby. “Only when a person lays in victuals for tea, a person does it with a view—perhaps—more to time. And when a time is named for having tea, it’s better to come up to it.”

  “To come up to it!” Mrs. Snagsby repeats with severity. “Up to it! As if Mr. Chadband was a fighter!”

  “Not at all, my dear,” says Mr. Snagsby.

  Here, Guster, who had been looking out of the bedroom window, comes rustling and scratching down the little staircase like a popular ghost, and, falling flushed into the drawing-room announces that Mr. and Mrs. Chadband have appeared in the court. The bell at the inner door in the passage immediately thereafter tinkling, she is admonished by Mrs. Snagsby, on pain of instant reconsignment to her patron saint, not to omit the ceremony of announcement. Much discomposed in her nerves (which were previously in the best order) by this threat, she so fearfully mutilates that point of state as to announce “Mr. and Mrs. Cheeseming, least which, Imeantersay, whatsername!” and retires conscience-stricken from the presence.

  Mr. Chadband is a large yellow man, with a fat smile, and a general appearance of having a good deal of train oil in his system. Mrs. Chadband is a stern, severe-
looking, silent woman. Mr. Chadband moves softly and cumbrously, not unlike a bear who has been taught to walk upright. He is very much embarrassed about the arms, as if they were inconvenient to him, and he wanted to grovel; is very much in a perspiration about the head; and never speaks without first putting up his great hand, as delivering a token to his hearers that he is going to edify them.

  “My friends,” says Mr. Chadband, “Peace be on this house! On the master thereof, on the mistress thereof, on the young maidens, and on the young men! My friends, why do I wish for peace? What is peace? Is it war? No. Is it strife? No. Is it lovely, and gentle, and beautiful, and pleasant, and serene, and joyful? O yes! Therefore, my friends, I wish for peace, upon you and upon yours.”

  In consequence of Mrs. Snagsby looking deeply edified, Mr. Snagsby thinks it expedient on the whole to say Amen, which is well received.

  “Now, my friends,” proceeds Mr. Chadband, “since I am upon this theme—”

  Guster presents herself. Mrs. Snagsby, in a spectral bass voice, and without removing her eyes from Chadband, says, with dread distinctness, “Go away!”

  “Now, my friends,” says Chadband, “since I am upon this theme, and in my lowly path improving it—”

  Guster is heard unaccountably to murmur “one thousing seven hunderd and eighty-two.” The spectral voice repeats more solemnly, “Go away!”

  “Now, my friends,” says Mr. Chadband, “we will inquire in a spirit of love—”

  Still Guster reiterates “one thousing seven hunderd and eighty-two.”

  Mr. Chadband, pausing with the resignation of a man accustomed to be persecuted, and languidly folding up his chin into his fat smile, says, “Let us hear the maiden! Speak, maiden!”

  “One thousing seven hunderd and eighty-two, if you please, sir. Which he wish to know what the shilling ware for,” says Guster, breathless.

  “For?” returns Mrs. Chadband. “For his fare!”

  Guster replied that “he insists on one and eightpence, or on summonsizzing the party.” Mrs. Snagsby and Mrs. Chadband are proceeding to grow shrill in indignation, when Mr. Chadband quiets the tumult by lifting his hand.