In a rather ill-favoured and ill-savoured neighbourhood, though one of its rising grounds bears the name of Mount Pleasant, the Elfin Smallweed, christened Bartholomew and known on the domestic hearth as Bart, passes that limited portion of his time on which the office and its contingencies have no claim. He dwells in a little narrow street, always solitary, shady, and sad, closely bricked in on all sides like a tomb, but where there yet lingers the stump of an old forest tree whose flavour is about as fresh and natural as the Smallweed smack of youth.
There has been only one child in the Smallweed family for several generations. Little old men and women there have been, but no child, until Mr. Smallweed's grandmother, now living, became weak in her intellect and fell (for the first time) into a childish state. With such infantine graces as a total want of observation, memory, understanding, and interest, and an eternal disposition to fall asleep over the fire and into it, Mr. Smallweed's grandmother has undoubtedly brightened the family.
Mr. Smallweed's grandfather is likewise of the party. He is in a helpless condition as to his lower, and nearly so as to his upper, limbs, but his mind is unimpaired. It holds, as well as it ever held, the first four rules of arithmetic and a certain small collection of the hardest facts. In respect of ideality, reverence, wonder, and other such phrenological attributes, it is no worse off than it used to be. Everything that Mr. Smallweed's grandfather ever put away in his mind was a grub at first, and is a grub at last. In all his life he has never bred a single butterfly.
The father of this pleasant grandfather, of the neighbourhood of Mount Pleasant, was a horny-skinned, two-legged, money-getting species of spider who spun webs to catch unwary flies and retired into holes until they were entrapped. The name of this old pagan's god was Compound Interest. He lived for it, married it, died of it. Meeting with a heavy loss in an honest little enterprise in which all the loss was intended to have been on the other side, he broke something--something necessary to his existence, therefore it couldn't have been his heart--and made an end of his career. As his character was not good, and he had been bred at a charity school in a complete course, according to question and answer, of those ancient people the Amorites and Hittites, he was frequently quoted as an example of the failure of education.
His spirit shone through his son, to whom he had always preached of "going out" early in life and whom he made a clerk in a sharp scrivener's office at twelve years old. There the young gentleman improved his mind, which was of a lean and anxious character, and developing the family gifts, gradually elevated himself into the discounting profession. Going out early in life and marrying late, as his father had done before him, he too begat a lean and anxious-minded son, who in his turn, going out early in life and marrying late, became the father of Bartholomew and Judith Smallweed, twins. During the whole time consumed in the slow growth of this family tree, the house of Smallweed, always early to go out and late to marry, has strengthened itself in its practical character, has discarded all amusements, discountenanced all story-books, fairy-tales, fictions, and fables, and banished all levities whatsoever. Hence the gratifying fact that it has had no child born to it and that the complete little men and women whom it has produced have been observed to bear a likeness to old monkeys with something depressing on their minds.
At the present time, in the dark little parlour certain feet below the level of the street--a grim, hard, uncouth parlour, only ornamented with the coarsest of baize table-covers, and the hardest of sheet-iron tea-trays, and offering in its decorative character no bad allegorical representation of Grandfather Smallweed's mind--seated in two black horsehair porter's chairs, one on each side of the fire-place, the superannuated Mr. and Mrs. Smallweed while away the rosy hours. On the stove are a couple of trivets for the pots and kettles which it is Grandfather Smallweed's usual occupation to watch, and projecting from the chimney-piece between them is a sort of brass gallows for roasting, which he also superintends when it is in action. Under the venerable Mr. Smallweed's seat and guarded by his spindle legs is a drawer in his chair, reported to contain property to a fabulous amount. Beside him is a spare cushion with which he is always provided in order that he may have something to throw at the venerable partner of his respected age whenever she makes an allusion to money--a subject on which he is particularly sensitive.
"And where's Bart?" Grandfather Smallweed inquires of Judy, Bart's twin sister.
"He an't come in yet," says Judy.
"It's his tea-time, isn't it?"
"No."
"How much do you mean to say it wants then?"
"Ten minutes."
"Hey?"
"Ten minutes." (Loud on the part of Judy.)
"Ho!" says Grandfather Smallweed. "Ten minutes."
Grandmother Smallweed, who has been mumbling and shaking her head at the trivets, hearing figures mentioned, connects them with money and screeches like a horrible old parrot without any plumage, "Ten ten-pound notes!"
Grandfather Smallweed immediately throws the cushion at her.
"Drat you, be quiet!" says the good old man.
The effect of this act of jaculation is twofold. It not only doubles up Mrs. Smallweed's head against the side of her porter's chair and causes her to present, when extricated by her granddaughter, a highly unbecoming state of cap, but the necessary exertion recoils on Mr. Smallweed himself, whom it throws back into HIS porter's chair like a broken puppet. The excellent old gentleman being at these times a mere clothes-bag with a black skull-cap on the top of it, does not present a very animated appearance until he has undergone the two operations at the hands of his granddaughter of being shaken up like a great bottle and poked and punched like a great bolster. Some indication of a neck being developed in him by these means, he and the sharer of his life's evening again fronting one another in their two porter's chairs, like a couple of sentinels long forgotten on their post by the Black Serjeant, Death.
Judy the twin is worthy company for these associates. She is so indubitably sister to Mr. Smallweed the younger that the two kneaded into one would hardly make a young person of average proportions, while she so happily exemplifies the before-mentioned family likeness to the monkey tribe that attired in a spangled robe and cap she might walk about the table-land on the top of a barrel-organ without exciting much remark as an unusual specimen. Under existing circumstances, however, she is dressed in a plain, spare gown of brown stuff.
Judy never owned a doll, never heard of Cinderella, never played at any game. She once or twice fell into children's company when she was about ten years old, but the children couldn't get on with Judy, and Judy couldn't get on with them. She seemed like an animal of another species, and there was instinctive repugnance on both sides. It is very doubtful whether Judy knows how to laugh. She has so rarely seen the thing done that the probabilities are strong the other way. Of anything like a youthful laugh, she certainly can have no conception. If she were to try one, she would find her teeth in her way, modelling that action of her face, as she has unconsciously modelled all its other expressions, on her pattern of sordid age. Such is Judy.
And her twin brother couldn't wind up a top for his life. He knows no more of Jack the Giant Killer or of Sinbad the Sailor than he knows of the people in the stars. He could as soon play at leap-frog or at cricket as change into a cricket or a frog himself. But he is so much the better off than his sister that on his narrow world of fact an opening has dawned into such broader regions as lie within the ken of Mr. Guppy. Hence his admiration and his emulation of that shining enchanter.
Judy, with a gong-like clash and clatter, sets one of the sheet-iron tea-trays on the table and arranges cups and saucers. The bread she puts on in an iron basket, and the butter (and not much of it) in a small pewter plate. Grandfather Smallweed looks hard after the tea as it is served out and asks Judy where the girl is.
"Charley, do you mean?" says Judy.
"Hey?" from Grandfather Smallweed.
"Charley, do you mean?"
This touches a spring in Grandmother Smallweed, who, chuckling as usual at the trivets, cries, "Over the water! Charley over the water, Charley over the water, over the water to Charley, Charley over the water, over the water to Charley!" and becomes quite energetic about it. Grandfather looks at the cushion but has not sufficiently recovered his late exertion.
"Ha!" he says when there is silence. "If that's her name. She eats a deal. It would be better to allow her for her keep."
Judy, with her brother's wink, shakes her head and purses up her mouth into no without saying it.
"No?" returns the old man. "Why not?"
"She'd want sixpence a day, and we can do it for less," says Judy.
"Sure?"
Judy answers with a nod of deepest meaning and calls, as she scrapes the butter on the loaf with every precaution against waste and cuts it into slices, "You, Charley, where are you?" Timidly obedient to the summons, a little girl in a rough apron and a large bonnet, with her hands covered with soap and water and a scrubbing brush in one of them, appears, and curtsys.
"What work are you about now?" says Judy, making an ancient snap at her like a very sharp old beldame.
"I'm a-cleaning the upstairs back room, miss," replies Charley.
"Mind you do it thoroughly, and don't loiter. Shirking won't do for me. Make haste! Go along!" cries Judy with a stamp upon the ground. "You girls are more trouble than you're worth, by half."
On this severe matron, as she returns to her task of scraping the butter and cutting the bread, falls the shadow of her brother, looking in at the window. For whom, knife and loaf in hand, she opens the street-door.
"Aye, aye, Bart!" says Grandfather Smallweed. "Here you are, hey?"
"Here I am," says Bart.
"Been along with your friend again, Bart?"
Small nods.
"Dining at his expense, Bart?"
Small nods again.
"That's right. Live at his expense as much as you can, and take warning by his foolish example. That's the use of such a friend. The only use you can put him to," says the venerable sage.
His grandson, without receiving this good counsel as dutifully as he might, honours it with all such acceptance as may lie in a slight wink and a nod and takes a chair at the tea-table. The four old faces then hover over teacups like a company of ghastly cherubim, Mrs. Smallweed perpetually twitching her head and chattering at the trivets and Mr. Smallweed requiring to be repeatedly shaken up like a large black draught.
"Yes, yes," says the good old gentleman, reverting to his lesson of wisdom. "That's such advice as your father would have given you, Bart. You never saw your father. More's the pity. He was my true son." Whether it is intended to be conveyed that he was particularly pleasant to look at, on that account, does not appear.
"He was my true son," repeats the old gentleman, folding his bread and butter on his knee, "a good accountant, and died fifteen years ago."
Mrs. Smallweed, following her usual instinct, breaks out with "Fifteen hundred pound. Fifteen hundred pound in a black box, fifteen hundred pound locked up, fifteen hundred pound put away and hid!" Her worthy husband, setting aside his bread and butter, immediately discharges the cushion at her, crushes her against the side of her chair, and falls back in his own, overpowered. His appearance, after visiting Mrs. Smallweed with one of these admonitions, is particularly impressive and not wholly prepossessing, firstly because the exertion generally twists his black skull-cap over one eye and gives him an air of goblin rakishness, secondly because he mutters violent imprecations against Mrs. Smallweed, and thirdly because the contrast between those powerful expressions and his powerless figure is suggestive of a baleful old malignant who would be very wicked if he could. All this, however, is so common in the Smallweed family circle that it produces no impression. The old gentleman is merely shaken and has his internal feathers beaten up, the cushion is restored to its usual place beside him, and the old lady, perhaps with her cap adjusted and perhaps not, is planted in her chair again, ready to be bowled down like a ninepin.
Some time elapses in the present instance before the old gentleman is sufficiently cool to resume his discourse, and even then he mixes it up with several edifying expletives addressed to the unconscious partner of his bosom, who holds communication with nothing on earth but the trivets. As thus: "If your father, Bart, had lived longer, he might have been worth a deal of money--you brimstone chatterer!--but just as he was beginning to build up the house that he had been making the foundations for, through many a year--you jade of a magpie, jackdaw, and poll-parrot, what do you mean!--he took ill and died of a low fever, always being a sparing and a spare man, full of business care--I should like to throw a cat at you instead of a cushion, and I will too if you make such a confounded fool of yourself!--and your mother, who was a prudent woman as dry as a chip, just dwindled away like touchwood after you and Judy were born--you are an old pig. You are a brimstone pig. You're a head of swine!"
Judy, not interested in what she has often heard, begins to collect in a basin various tributary streams of tea, from the bottoms of cups and saucers and from the bottom of the tea-pot for the little charwoman's evening meal. In like manner she gets together, in the iron bread-basket, as many outside fragments and worn-down heels of loaves as the rigid economy of the house has left in existence.
"But your father and me were partners, Bart," says the old gentleman, "and when I am gone, you and Judy will have all there is. It's rare for you both that you went out early in life--Judy to the flower business, and you to the law. You won't want to spend it. You'll get your living without it, and put more to it. When I am gone, Judy will go back to the flower business and you'll still stick to the law."
One might infer from Judy's appearance that her business rather lay with the thorns than the flowers, but she has in her time been apprenticed to the art and mystery of artificial flower-making. A close observer might perhaps detect both in her eye and her brother's, when their venerable grandsire anticipates his being gone, some little impatience to know when he may be going, and some resentful opinion that it is time he went.
"Now, if everybody has done," says Judy, completing her preparations, "I'll have that girl in to her tea. She would never leave off if she took it by herself in the kitchen."
Charley is accordingly introduced, and under a heavy fire of eyes, sits down to her basin and a Druidical ruin of bread and butter. In the active superintendence of this young person, Judy Smallweed appears to attain a perfectly geological age and to date from the remotest periods. Her systematic manner of flying at her and pouncing on her, with or without pretence, whether or no, is wonderful, evincing an accomplishment in the art of girl-driving seldom reached by the oldest practitioners.
"Now, don't stare about you all the afternoon," cries Judy, shaking her head and stamping her foot as she happens to catch the glance which has been previously sounding the basin of tea, "but take your victuals and get back to your work."
"Yes, miss," says Charley.
"Don't say yes," returns Miss Smallweed, "for I know what you girls are. Do it without saying it, and then I may begin to believe you."
Charley swallows a great gulp of tea in token of submission and so disperses the Druidical ruins that Miss Smallweed charges her not to gormandize, which "in you girls," she observes, is disgusting. Charley might find some more difficulty in meeting her views on the general subject of girls but for a knock at the door.
"See who it is, and don't chew when you open it!" cries Judy.
The object of her attentions withdrawing for the purpose, Miss Smallweed takes that opportunity of jumbling the remainder of the bread and butter together and launching two or three dirty tea-cups into the ebb-tide of the basin of tea as a hint that she considers the eating and drinking terminated.
"Now! Who is it, and what's wanted?" says the snappish Judy.
It is one Mr. George, it appears. Without other announcement or ceremony, Mr. George walks in.
"Whew!" says Mr. George. "You are hot here. Always a fire, eh? Well! Perhaps you do right to get used to one." Mr. George makes the latter remark to himself as he nods to Grandfather Smallweed.
"Ho! It's you!" cries the old gentleman. "How de do? How de do?"
"Middling," replies Mr. George, taking a chair. "Your granddaughter I have had the honour of seeing before; my service to you, miss."
"This is my grandson," says Grandfather Smallweed. "You ha'n't seen him before. He is in the law and not much at home."
"My service to him, too! He is like his sister. He is very like his sister. He is devilish like his sister," says Mr. George, laying a great and not altogether complimentary stress on his last adjective.
"And how does the world use you, Mr. George?" Grandfather Smallweed inquires, slowly rubbing his legs.
"Pretty much as usual. Like a football."
He is a swarthy brown man of fifty, well made, and good looking, with crisp dark hair, bright eyes, and a broad chest. His sinewy and powerful hands, as sunburnt as his face, have evidently been used to a pretty rough life. What is curious about him is that he sits forward on his chair as if he were, from long habit, allowing space for some dress or accoutrements that he has altogether laid aside. His step too is measured and heavy and would go well with a weighty clash and jingle of spurs. He is close-shaved now, but his mouth is set as if his upper lip had been for years familiar with a great moustache; and his manner of occasionally laying the open palm of his broad brown hand upon it is to the same effect. Altogether one might guess Mr. George to have been a trooper once upon a time.
A special contrast Mr. George makes to the Smallweed family. Trooper was never yet billeted upon a household more unlike him. It is a broadsword to an oyster-knife. His developed figure and their stunted forms, his large manner filling any amount of room and their little narrow pinched ways, his sounding voice and their sharp spare tones, are in the strongest and the strangest opposition. As he sits in the middle of the grim parlour, leaning a little forward, with his hands upon his thighs and his elbows squared, he looks as though, if he remained there long, he would absorb into himself the whole family and the whole four-roomed house, extra little back-kitchen and all.
"Do you rub your legs to rub life into 'em?" he asks of Grandfather Smallweed after looking round the room.
"Why, it's partly a habit, Mr. George, and--yes--it partly helps the circulation," he replies.
"The cir-cu-la-tion!" repeats Mr. George, folding his arms upon his chest and seeming to become two sizes larger. "Not much of that, I should think."
"Truly I'm old, Mr. George," says Grandfather Smallweed. "But I can carry my years. I'm older than HER," nodding at his wife, "and see what she is? You're a brimstone chatterer!" with a sudden revival of his late hostility.
"Unlucky old soul!" says Mr. George, turning his head in that direction. "Don't scold the old lady. Look at her here, with her poor cap half off her head and her poor hair all in a muddle. Hold up, ma'am. That's better. There we are! Think of your mother, Mr. Smallweed," says Mr. George, coming back to his seat from assisting her, "if your wife an't enough."
"I suppose you were an excellent son, Mr. George?" the old man hints with a leer.
The colour of Mr. George's face rather deepens as he replies, "Why no. I wasn't."
"I am astonished at it."
"So am I. I ought to have been a good son, and I think I meant to have been one. But I wasn't. I was a thundering bad son, that's the long and the short of it, and never was a credit to anybody."
"Surprising!" cries the old man.
"However," Mr. George resumes, "the less said about it, the better now. Come! You know the agreement. Always a pipe out of the two months' interest! (Bosh! It's all correct. You needn't be afraid to order the pipe. Here's the new bill, and here's the two months' interest-money, and a devil-and-all of a scrape it is to get it together in my business.)"
Mr. George sits, with his arms folded, consuming the family and the parlour while Grandfather Smallweed is assisted by Judy to two black leathern cases out of a locked bureau, in one of which he secures the document he has just received, and from the other takes another similar document which he hands to Mr. George, who twists it up for a pipelight. As the old man inspects, through his glasses, every up-stroke and down-stroke of both documents before he releases them from their leathern prison, and as he counts the money three times over and requires Judy to say every word she utters at least twice, and is as tremulously slow of speech and action as it is possible to be, this business is a long time in progress. When it is quite concluded, and not before, he disengages his ravenous eyes and fingers from it and answers Mr. George's last remark by saying, "Afraid to order the pipe? We are not so mercenary as that, sir. Judy, see directly to the pipe and the glass of cold brandy-and-water for Mr. George."
The sportive twins, who have been looking straight before them all this time except when they have been engrossed by the black leathern cases, retire together, generally disdainful of the visitor, but leaving him to the old man as two young cubs might leave a traveller to the parental bear.
"And there you sit, I suppose, all the day long, eh?" says Mr. George with folded arms.
"Just so, just so," the old man nods.
"And don't you occupy yourself at all?"
"I watch the fire--and the boiling and the roasting--"
"When there is any," says Mr. George with great expression.
"Just so. When there is any."
"Don't you read or get read to?"
The old man shakes his head with sharp sly triumph. "No, no. We have never been readers in our family. It don't pay. Stuff. Idleness. Folly. No, no!"
"There's not much to choose between your two states," says the visitor in a key too low for the old man's dull hearing as he looks from him to the old woman and back again. "I say!" in a louder voice.
"I hear you."
"You'll sell me up at last, I suppose, when I am a day in arrear."
"My dear friend!" cries Grandfather Smallweed, stretching out both hands to embrace him. "Never! Never, my dear friend! But my friend in the city that I got to lend you the money--HE might!"
"Oh! You can't answer for him?" says Mr. George, finishing the inquiry in his lower key with the words "You lying old rascal!"
"My dear friend, he is not to be depended on. I wouldn't trust him. He will have his bond, my dear friend."
"Devil doubt him," says Mr. George. Charley appearing with a tray, on which are the pipe, a small paper of tobacco, and the brandy-and-water, he asks her, "How do you come here! You haven't got the family face."
"I goes out to work, sir," returns Charley.
The trooper (if trooper he be or have been) takes her bonnet off, with a light touch for so strong a hand, and pats her on the head. "You give the house almost a wholesome look. It wants a bit of youth as much as it wants fresh air." Then he dismisses her, lights his pipe, and drinks to Mr. Smallweed's friend in the city--the one solitary flight of that esteemed old gentleman's imagination.
"So you think he might be hard upon me, eh?"
"I think he might--I am afraid he would. I have known him do it," says Grandfather Smallweed incautiously, "twenty times."
Incautiously, because his stricken better-half, who has been dozing over the fire for some time, is instantly aroused and jabbers "Twenty thousand pounds, twenty twenty-pound notes in a money-box, twenty guineas, twenty million twenty per cent, twenty--" and is then cut short by the flying cushion, which the visitor, to whom this singular experiment appears to be a novelty, snatches from her face as it crushes her in the usual manner.
"You're a brimstone idiot. You're a scorpion--a brimstone scorpion! You're a sweltering toad. You're a chattering clattering broomstick witch that ought to be burnt!" gasps the old man, prostrate in his chair. "My dear friend, will you shake me up a little?"
Mr. George, who has been looking first at one of them and then at the other, as if he were demented, takes his venerable acquaintance by the throat on receiving this request, and dragging him upright in his chair as easily as if he were a doll, appears in two minds whether or no to shake all future power of cushioning out of him and shake him into his grave. Resisting the temptation, but agitating him violently enough to make his head roll like a harlequin's, he puts him smartly down in his chair again and adjusts his skull-cap with such a rub that the old man winks with both eyes for a minute afterwards.
"O Lord!" gasps Mr. Smallweed. "That'll do. Thank you, my dear friend, that'll do. Oh, dear me, I'm out of breath. O Lord!" And Mr. Smallweed says it not without evident apprehensions of his dear friend, who still stands over him looming larger than ever.
The alarming presence, however, gradually subsides into its chair and falls to smoking in long puffs, consoling itself with the philosophical reflection, "The name of your friend in the city begins with a D, comrade, and you're about right respecting the bond."
"Did you speak, Mr. George?" inquires the old man.
The trooper shakes his head, and leaning forward with his right elbow on his right knee and his pipe supported in that hand, while his other hand, resting on his left leg, squares his left elbow in a martial manner, continues to smoke. Meanwhile he looks at Mr. Smallweed with grave attention and now and then fans the cloud of smoke away in order that he may see him the more clearly.
"I take it," he says, making just as much and as little change in his position as will enable him to reach the glass to his lips with a round, full action, "that I am the only man alive (or dead either) that gets the value of a pipe out of YOU?"
"Well," returns the old man, "it's true that I don't see company, Mr. George, and that I don't treat. I can't afford to it. But as you, in your pleasant way, made your pipe a condition--"
"Why, it's not for the value of it; that's no great thing. It was a fancy to get it out of you. To have something in for my money."
"Ha! You're prudent, prudent, sir!" cries Grandfather Smallweed, rubbing his legs.
"Very. I always was." Puff. "It's a sure sign of my prudence that I ever found the way here." Puff. "Also, that I am what I am." Puff. "I am well known to be prudent," says Mr. George, composedly smoking. "I rose in life that way."
"Don't be down-hearted, sir. You may rise yet."
Mr. George laughs and drinks.
"Ha'n't you no relations, now," asks Grandfather Smallweed with a twinkle in his eyes, "who would pay off this little principal or who would lend you a good name or two that I could persuade my friend in the city to make you a further advance upon? Two good names would be sufficient for my friend in the city. Ha'n't you no such relations, Mr. George?"
Mr. George, still composedly smoking, replies, "If I had, I shouldn't trouble them. I have been trouble enough to my belongings in my day. It MAY be a very good sort of penitence in a vagabond, who has wasted the best time of his life, to go back then to decent people that he never was a credit to and live upon them, but it's not my sort. The best kind of amends then for having gone away is to keep away, in my opinion."
"But natural affection, Mr. George," hints Grandfather Smallweed.
"For two good names, hey?" says Mr. George, shaking his head and still composedly smoking. "No. That's not my sort either."
Grandfather Smallweed has been gradually sliding down in his chair since his last adjustment and is now a bundle of clothes with a voice in it calling for Judy. That houri, appearing, shakes him up in the usual manner and is charged by the old gentleman to remain near him. For he seems chary of putting his visitor to the trouble of repeating his late attentions.
"Ha!" he observes when he is in trim again. "If you could have traced out the captain, Mr. George, it would have been the making of you. If when you first came here, in consequence of our advertisement in the newspapers--when I say 'our,' I'm alluding to the advertisements of my friend in the city, and one or two others who embark their capital in the same way, and are so friendly towards me as sometimes to give me a lift with my little pittance--if at that time you could have helped us, Mr. George, it would have been the making of you."
"I was willing enough to be 'made,' as you call it," says Mr. George, smoking not quite so placidly as before, for since the entrance of Judy he has been in some measure disturbed by a fascination, not of the admiring kind, which obliges him to look at her as she stands by her grandfather's chair, "but on the whole, I am glad I wasn't now."
"Why, Mr. George? In the name of--of brimstone, why?" says Grandfather Smallweed with a plain appearance of exasperation. (Brimstone apparently suggested by his eye lighting on Mrs. Smallweed in her slumber.)
"For two reasons, comrade."
"And what two reasons, Mr. George? In the name of the--"
"Of our friend in the city?" suggests Mr. George, composedly drinking.
"Aye, if you like. What two reasons?"
"In the first place," returns Mr. George, but still looking at Judy as if she being so old and so like her grandfather it is indifferent which of the two he addresses, "you gentlemen took me in. You advertised that Mr. Hawdon (Captain Hawdon, if you hold to the saying 'Once a captain, always a captain') was to hear of something to his advantage."
"Well?" returns the old man shrilly and sharply.
"Well!" says Mr. George, smoking on. "It wouldn't have been much to his advantage to have been clapped into prison by the whole bill and judgment trade of London."
"How do you know that? Some of his rich relations might have paid his debts or compounded for 'em. Besides, he had taken US in. He owed us immense sums all round. I would sooner have strangled him than had no return. If I sit here thinking of him," snarls the old man, holding up his impotent ten fingers, "I want to strangle him now." And in a sudden access of fury, he throws the cushion at the unoffending Mrs. Smallweed, but it passes harmlessly on one side of her chair.
"I don't need to be told," returns the trooper, taking his pipe from his lips for a moment and carrying his eyes back from following the progress of the cushion to the pipe-bowl which is burning low, "that he carried on heavily and went to ruin. I have been at his right hand many a day when he was charging upon ruin full-gallop. I was with him when he was sick and well, rich and poor. I laid this hand upon him after he had run through everything and broken down everything beneath him--when he held a pistol to his head."
"I wish he had let it off," says the benevolent old man, "and blown his head into as many pieces as he owed pounds!"
"That would have been a smash indeed," returns the trooper coolly; "any way, he had been young, hopeful, and handsome in the days gone by, and I am glad I never found him, when he was neither, to lead to a result so much to his advantage. That's reason number one."
"I hope number two's as good?" snarls the old man.
"Why, no. It's more of a selfish reason. If I had found him, I must have gone to the other world to look. He was there."
"How do you know he was there?"
"He wasn't here."
"How do you know he wasn't here?"
"Don't lose your temper as well as your money," says Mr. George, calmly knocking the ashes out of his pipe. "He was drowned long before. I am convinced of it. He went over a ship's side. Whether intentionally or accidentally, I don't know. Perhaps your friend in the city does. Do you know what that tune is, Mr. Smallweed?" he adds after breaking off to whistle one, accompanied on the table with the empty pipe.
"Tune!" replied the old man. "No. We never have tunes here."
"That's the Dead March in Saul. They bury soldiers to it, so it's the natural end of the subject. Now, if your pretty granddaughter--excuse me, miss--will condescend to take care of this pipe for two months, we shall save the cost of one next time. Good evening, Mr. Smallweed!"
"My dear friend!" the old man gives him both his hands.
"So you think your friend in the city will be hard upon me if I fall in a payment?" says the trooper, looking down upon him like a giant.
"My dear friend, I am afraid he will," returns the old man, looking up at him like a pygmy.
Mr. George laughs, and with a glance at Mr. Smallweed and a parting salutation to the scornful Judy, strides out of the parlour, clashing imaginary sabres and other metallic appurtenances as he goes.
"You're a damned rogue," says the old gentleman, making a hideous grimace at the door as he shuts it. "But I'll lime you, you dog, I'll lime you!"
After this amiable remark, his spirit soars into those enchanting regions of reflection which its education and pursuits have opened to it, and again he and Mrs. Smallweed while away the rosy hours, two unrelieved sentinels forgotten as aforesaid by the Black Serjeant.
While the twain are faithful to their post, Mr. George strides through the streets with a massive kind of swagger and a grave-enough face. It is eight o'clock now, and the day is fast drawing in. He stops hard by Waterloo Bridge and reads a playbill, decides to go to Astley's Theatre. Being there, is much delighted with the horses and the feats of strength; looks at the weapons with a critical eye; disapproves of the combats as giving evidences of unskilful swordsmanship; but is touched home by the sentiments. In the last scene, when the Emperor of Tartary gets up into a cart and condescends to bless the united lovers by hovering over them with the Union Jack, his eyelashes are moistened with emotion.
The theatre over, Mr. George comes across the water again and makes his way to that curious region lying about the Haymarket and Leicester Square which is a centre of attraction to indifferent foreign hotels and indifferent foreigners, racket-courts, fighting-men, swordsmen, footguards, old china, gaming-houses, exhibitions, and a large medley of shabbiness and shrinking out of sight. Penetrating to the heart of this region, he arrives by a court and a long whitewashed passage at a great brick building composed of bare walls, floors, roof-rafters, and skylights, on the front of which, if it can be said to have any front, is painted GEORGE'S SHOOTING GALLERY, &c.
Into George's Shooting Gallery, &c., he goes; and in it there are gaslights (partly turned off now), and two whitened targets for rifle-shooting, and archery accommodation, and fencing appliances, and all necessaries for the British art of boxing. None of these sports or exercises being pursued in George's Shooting Gallery to-night, which is so devoid of company that a little grotesque man with a large head has it all to himself and lies asleep upon the floor.
The little man is dressed something like a gunsmith, in a green-baize apron and cap; and his face and hands are dirty with gunpowder and begrimed with the loading of guns. As he lies in the light before a glaring white target, the black upon him shines again. Not far off is the strong, rough, primitive table with a vice upon it at which he has been working. He is a little man with a face all crushed together, who appears, from a certain blue and speckled appearance that one of his cheeks presents, to have been blown up, in the way of business, at some odd time or times.
"Phil!" says the trooper in a quiet voice.
"All right!" cries Phil, scrambling to his feet.
"Anything been doing?"
"Flat as ever so much swipes," says Phil. "Five dozen rifle and a dozen pistol. As to aim!" Phil gives a howl at the recollection.
"Shut up shop, Phil!"
As Phil moves about to execute this order, it appears that he is lame, though able to move very quickly. On the speckled side of his face he has no eyebrow, and on the other side he has a bushy black one, which want of uniformity gives him a very singular and rather sinister appearance. Everything seems to have happened to his hands that could possibly take place consistently with the retention of all the fingers, for they are notched, and seamed, and crumpled all over. He appears to be very strong and lifts heavy benches about as if he had no idea what weight was. He has a curious way of limping round the gallery with his shoulder against the wall and tacking off at objects he wants to lay hold of instead of going straight to them, which has left a smear all round the four walls, conventionally called "Phil's mark."
This custodian of George's Gallery in George's absence concludes his proceedings, when he has locked the great doors and turned out all the lights but one, which he leaves to glimmer, by dragging out from a wooden cabin in a corner two mattresses and bedding. These being drawn to opposite ends of the gallery, the trooper makes his own bed and Phil makes his.
"Phil!" says the master, walking towards him without his coat and waistcoat, and looking more soldierly than ever in his braces. "You were found in a doorway, weren't you?"
"Gutter," says Phil. "Watchman tumbled over me."
"Then vagabondizing came natural to YOU from the beginning."
"As nat'ral as possible," says Phil.
"Good night!"
"Good night, guv'ner."
Phil cannot even go straight to bed, but finds it necessary to shoulder round two sides of the gallery and then tack off at his mattress. The trooper, after taking a turn or two in the rifle-distance and looking up at the moon now shining through the skylights, strides to his own mattress by a shorter route and goes to bed too.

In a rather ill-favoured neighbourhood, the Elfin Smallweed, christened Bartholomew and known at home as Bart, passes that limited portion of his time on which the office has no claim. He dwells in a little narrow street, solitary, shady, and sad, closely bricked in on all sides like a tomb, but where there lingers the stump of an old tree whose flavour is about as fresh and natural as the Smallweed smack of youth.
There has been only one child in the Smallweed family for several generations. Little old men and women there have been, but no child, until Mr. Smallweed's grandmother became weak in her intellect and fell (for the first time) into a childish state. Mr. Smallweed's grandfather is in a helpless condition as to his lower limbs, but his mind is unimpaired. It holds, as well as it ever held, the rules of arithmetic and a small collection of the hardest facts.
The father of this pleasant grandfather was a horny-skinned, two-legged, money-getting species of spider who spun webs to catch unwary flies. The name of this old pagan's god was Compound Interest. He lived for it, married it, died of it. Meeting with a heavy loss in an honest little enterprise in which all the loss was intended to have been on the other side, he broke something - it couldn't have been his heart - and made an end of his career.
His spirit shone through his son, whom he made a clerk in a sharp scrivener's office at twelve years old. There the young gentleman improved his mind, which was of a lean and anxious character, and gradually elevated himself into the discounting profession. Going out early in life and marrying late, as his father had done before him, he too begat a lean and anxious-minded son, who in his turn became the father of Bartholomew and Judith Smallweed, twins.
During this whole time, the house of Smallweed has discarded all amusements, fairy-tales, fictions, and fables, and banished all levities whatsoever. Hence the gratifying fact that it has had no child born to it and that the complete little men and women whom it has produced bear a likeness to old monkeys with something depressing on their minds.
At the present time, in the grim, dark little parlour some feet below the level of the street, seated in two black horsehair porter's chairs, one on each side of the fire-place, the oldest Mr. and Mrs. Smallweed while away the hours. On the stove are a couple of trivets for the pots and kettles which it is Grandfather Smallweed's usual occupation to watch. Under his seat and guarded by his spindle legs is a drawer in his chair, reported to contain property to a fabulous amount. Beside him is a spare cushion, provided in order that he may have something to throw at his venerable partner whenever she mentions money - a subject on which he is particularly sensitive.
"Where's Bart?" Grandfather Smallweed inquires of Judy, Bart's twin sister.
"He an't come in yet," says Judy.
"It's his tea-time, isn't it?"
"Not for ten minutes."
"Ho!" says Grandfather Smallweed. "Ten minutes."
Grandmother Smallweed, who has been mumbling and shaking her head, hearing figures mentioned, screeches like a horrible old parrot without any plumage, "Ten ten-pound notes!"
Grandfather Smallweed immediately throws the cushion at her.
"Drat you, be quiet!" says the good old man.
This exertion recoils on Mr. Smallweed himself, throwing him back into his chair like a broken puppet. His granddaughter shakes him up again, poking and punching him like a great bolster.
Judy the twin is worthy company for these associates. She is so indubitably sister to Mr. Smallweed the younger; she so happily exemplifies the family likeness to the monkey tribe, that attired in a spangled robe and cap she might walk on top of a barrel-organ without exciting much remark. At present, however, she is dressed in a plain brown gown.
Judy never owned a doll, never heard of Cinderella, never played at any game. She once or twice fell into children's company when she was about ten years old, but the children couldn't get on with Judy, and Judy couldn't get on with them. She seemed like an animal of another species, and there was instinctive repugnance on both sides. It is very doubtful whether Judy knows how to laugh.
And her twin brother likewise has learnt no games or fairy-stories. But he is better off than his sister, in that on his narrow world an opening has dawned into the broader regions inhabited by Mr. Guppy. Hence his admiration of that shining enchanter.
Judy, with a clash and clatter, sets an iron tea-tray on the table and arranges cups and saucers. She puts the bread in an iron basket, and the meagre butter in a small pewter plate. Grandfather Smallweed looks hard at the tea and asks Judy where the girl is.
"Charley, do you mean?" says Judy.
"Ha!" says Grandfather. "She eats a deal. It would be better to just pay her for her keep."
Judy shakes her head and purses up her mouth. "She'd want sixpence a day, and we can do it for less," says she.
"Sure?"
Judy answers with a nod and calls, as she scrapes the butter on the loaf, "Charley, where are you?" Timidly obedient, a little girl in a rough apron appears, with her hands covered with soap and water and a scrubbing brush in one of them.
"What work are you about now?" says Judy, like a sharp old woman.
"I'm a-cleaning the upstairs back room, miss," replies Charley.
"Mind you do it thoroughly, and don't loiter. Make haste! Go along!" cries Judy with a stamp.
As she returns to her task, her brother arrives home.
"Aye, aye, Bart!" says Grandfather Smallweed. "Been along with your friend again, Bart?"
Small nods.
"Dining at his expense, Bart?"
Small nods again.
"That's right. Live at his expense as much as you can. That's the only use of such a friend," says the venerable sage.
His grandson receives this good advice with a wink and a nod and takes a chair at the tea-table. The four old faces hover over teacups like a company of ghastly cherubim, Mrs. Smallweed perpetually twitching her head and chattering and Mr. Smallweed requiring to be repeatedly shaken up.
"Yes, yes," says the good old gentleman. "That's fatherly advice, Bart. You never saw your father. More's the pity. He was my true son, and died fifteen years ago."
Mrs. Smallweed breaks out with "Fifteen hundred pound in a black box, put away and hid!" Her worthy husband immediately throws the cushion at her, crushing her against the side of her chair, and falls back in his own, overpowered. He mutters baleful and violent imprecations against Mrs. Smallweed. All this, however, is common in the Smallweed family circle. The old gentleman is merely shaken and has his internal feathers beaten up, the cushion is restored to its place beside him, and the old lady is planted in her chair again.
Some time elapses before the old gentleman is cool enough to resume his discourse, and even then he mixes it up with several expletives addressed to the partner of his bosom.
"If your father, Bart, had lived longer, he might have been worth a deal of money - you brimstone chatterer! - but just as he was beginning to build up his funds, he took ill and died of a fever - I should like to throw a cat at you instead of a cushion, you confounded fool! - and your mother, who was a prudent woman, just dwindled away after you and Judy were born - you old pig!"
Judy, not interested in what she has often heard, begins to collect leftovers of tea in a basin, and of bread-and-butter in the iron bread-basket, for the little charwoman's evening meal.
"But your father and me were partners, Bart," says the old gentleman, "and when I am gone, you and Judy will have all there is. You won't want to spend it. You'll get your living without it, and put more to it. When I am gone, Judy will go back to the flower business and you'll stick to the law."
One might infer from Judy's appearance that her business rather lay with the thorns than the flowers, but she has in her time been apprenticed to the art of artificial flower-making. A close observer might perhaps detect both in her eye and her brother's some impatience to know when their grandfather may be going, and some resentful opinion that it is time he went.
"Now, if everybody has done," says Judy. "I'll have that girl in to her tea. She would never leave off if she took it by herself in the kitchen."
Charley is accordingly introduced, and under a heavy fire of eyes, sits down to her basin and her ruins of bread and butter.
"Now, don't stare about you all afternoon," cries Judy, stamping her foot, "but take your victuals and get back to your work."
"Yes, miss," says Charley.
"Don't say yes," returns Miss Smallweed, "for I know what you girls are. Do it without saying it, and then I may begin to believe you."
Charley swallows a great gulp of tea in token of submission, just as there is a knock at the door.
"See who it is, and don't chew when you open it!" cries Judy.
It is one Mr. George, it appears. Without ceremony, Mr. George walks in.
"Whew!" says Mr. George. "You are hot here. Always a fire, eh? Well! Perhaps you do right to get used to one."
"Ho! It's you!" cries the old gentleman. "How de do?"
"Middling," replies Mr. George, taking a chair. "Your granddaughter I have had the honour of seeing before; my service to you, miss."
"This is my grandson," says old Smallweed. "You ha'n't seen him before. He is in the law."
"My service to him, too! He is devilish like his sister," says Mr. George.
"And how does the world use you, Mr. George?" Grandfather Smallweed inquires, rubbing his legs.
"Pretty much as usual. Like a football."
He is a swarthy, brown man of fifty, well made, and good looking, with curly dark hair, bright eyes, and a broad chest. His powerful, sunburnt hands have evidently been used to a pretty rough life. He sits forward on his chair. His step is measured and heavy and would go well with a weighty clash and jingle of spurs. Altogether one might guess Mr. George to have been a trooper once upon a time.
He makes a contrast to the Smallweed family. A soldier was never yet billeted upon a household more unlike him. His broad figure and their stunted forms, his large manner and their narrow pinched ways, his resounding voice and their sharp thin tones, are in the strangest opposition.
"Do you rub your legs to rub life into 'em?" he asks of Grandfather Smallweed.
"Why, it's partly a habit, Mr. George, and it partly helps the circulation. I can carry my years. I'm older than her," says Grandfather Smallweed, nodding at his wife, "the brimstone chatterer!"
"Unlucky old soul!" says Mr. George. "Don't scold the old lady. Look at her, with her poor cap half off. Hold up, ma'am. That's better. There we are!"
"I suppose you were an excellent son, Mr. George?" the old man hints with a leer.
The colour of Mr. George's face rather deepens as he replies, "Why, no. I wasn't."
"I am astonished at it."
"So am I. I ought to have been a good son, and I think I meant to have been one. But I wasn't. I was a thundering bad son, and never was a credit to anybody."
"Surprising!" cries the old man.
"However," Mr. George resumes, "the less said about it, the better. Come! You know the agreement. Always a pipe out of the two months' interest! Here's the bill, and here's the two months' interest-money, and a devil of a scrape it is to get it together in my business."
Mr. George sits, with his arms folded, while Grandfather Smallweed is assisted by Judy to two black leather cases out of a locked bureau, in one of which he secures the document he has just received, and from the other takes another similar document which he hands to Mr. George. As the old man inspects every letter of both documents, and as he counts the money three times over, this business takes a long time. When it is done, he says,
"Judy, see to the pipe and the glass of brandy-and-water for Mr. George."
The twins retire together, disdainful of the visitor, but leaving him to the old man as two young cubs might leave a traveller to the parental bear.
"And there you sit, I suppose, all day long, eh?" says Mr. George.
"Just so," the old man nods.
"Don't you read or get read to?"
The old man shakes his head with sharp sly triumph. "No, no. We have never been readers in our family. It don't pay. Idleness. Folly. No, no!"
"You'll sell me up at last, I suppose, when I am a day in arrears."
"My dear friend!" cries Grandfather Smallweed, stretching out both hands, "Never! Never! But my friend in the city that I got to lend you the money - he might!"
"Oh! You can't answer for him?" says Mr. George, adding in an undertone, "You lying old rascal!"
"My dear friend, he is not to be depended on. He will have his bond."
"Devil doubt him," says Mr. George. Charley appears with a tray, on which are the clay pipe, a small paper of tobacco, and the brandy-and-water. He asks her,
"How do you come here? You haven't got the family face."
"I goes out to work, sir," returns Charley.
The trooper takes her bonnet off, with a light touch for so strong a hand, and pats her on the head. "You give the house almost a wholesome look." Then he dismisses her, lights his pipe, and drinks to Mr. Smallweed's friend in the city - the one solitary flight of that old gentleman's imagination.
"So you think he might be hard upon me, eh?"
"I am afraid he would. I have known him do it," says Grandfather Smallweed incautiously, "twenty times."
Incautiously, because his stricken better-half, who has been dozing over the fire, is instantly aroused and jabbers "Twenty thousand pounds, twenty twenty-pound notes in a money-box, twenty guineas-" and is cut short by the flying cushion, which the visitor snatches from her face.
"You're a brimstone idiot. You're a brimstone scorpion! You're a sweltering toad. You're a chattering broomstick witch that ought to be burnt!" gasps the old man, prostrate in his chair. "My dear friend, will you shake me up a little?"
Mr. George, who has been looking at them as if he were demented, takes his venerable acquaintance by the throat on receiving this request, and dragging him upright in his chair as easily as if he were a doll, appears in two minds whether to shake him into his grave. Resisting the temptation, but agitating him enough to make his head roll like a puppet's, he puts him smartly down in his chair again.
"O Lord!" gasps Mr. Smallweed. "Thank you, my dear friend, that'll do." He says this with evident apprehensions of his dear friend, who still stands over him looming larger than ever.
The alarming presence, however, subsides into its chair and falls to smoking. Meanwhile he looks at Mr. Smallweed with grave attention.
"I take it," he says, "that I am the only man alive that gets the value of a pipe out of you?"
"Well," returns the old man, "it's true that I don't see company, Mr. George, and that I don't treat. I can't afford it. But as you, in your pleasant way, made your pipe a condition-"
"Why, it's not for the value of it. It was a fancy to get it out of you. To have something for my money."
"Ha! You're prudent, prudent, sir!" cries Grandfather Smallweed, rubbing his legs.
"Very. I always was." Puff. "It's a sign of my prudence that I ever found the way here." Puff. "Also, that I am what I am." Puff. "I am well known to be prudent," says Mr. George, composedly smoking. "I rose in life that way."
"Don't be down-hearted, sir. You may rise yet."
Mr. George laughs and drinks.
"Ha'n't you no relations, now," asks Grandfather Smallweed with a twinkle in his eyes, "who would pay off this little loan, or a good name or two that I could persuade my friend in the city to make you a further advance upon? Two good names would be sufficient for my friend in the city. Ha'n't you no such relations, Mr. George?"
Mr. George replies, "If I had, I shouldn't trouble them. I have been trouble enough in my day. A vagabond might go back to decent people that he never was a credit to and make amends by living upon them, but the best kind of amends is to keep away, in my opinion."
Grandfather Smallweed has been gradually sliding down in his chair since his last adjustment and is now a bundle of clothes with a voice in it calling for Judy. Appearing, she shakes him up in the usual manner and is charged by the old gentleman to remain near him. For he seems wary of asking his visitor to repeat his attentions.
"Ha!" he observes. "If you could have found the captain, Mr. George, it would have been the making of you. If when you first came here, in consequence of our advertisement in the newspapers - if you could have helped us, Mr. George, it would have been the making of you."
"I was willing enough to be 'made,' as you call it," says Mr. George, smoking not quite so placidly as before, "but on the whole, I am glad I wasn't now."
"Why, Mr. George? In the name of brimstone, why?" says Grandfather Smallweed with exasperation.
"For two reasons, comrade. In the first place," returns Mr. George, "you took me in. You advertised that Captain Hawdon was to hear of something to his advantage."
"Well?" returns the old man sharply.
"Well!" says Mr. George, smoking on. "It wouldn't have been much to his advantage to have been clapped into prison."
"Some of his rich relations might have paid his debts. Besides, he had taken us in. He owed us immense sums all round. When I think of him," snarls the old man, "I want to strangle him." And in a sudden fury, he throws the cushion at Mrs. Smallweed, but it passes harmlessly on one side of her chair.
"I don't need to be told," returns the trooper, "that he carried on heavily and went to ruin. I have been at his right hand many a day when he was charging upon ruin full-gallop. I was with him when he was sick and well, rich and poor. I laid this hand upon him after he had run through everything and broken down - when he held a pistol to his head."
"I wish he had let it off," says the benevolent old man, "and blown his head into as many pieces as he owed pounds!"
"That would have been a smash indeed," returns the trooper coolly. "Anyway, he had been young, hopeful, and handsome in the days gone by, and I am glad I never found him, to lead to his being imprisoned. That's reason number one."
"I hope number two's as good?" snarls the old man.
"Why, no. It's a more selfish reason. If I had found him, I must have gone to the other world to look. He was there."
"How do you know?"
"He wasn't here."
"How do you know he wasn't here?"
"Don't lose your temper as well as your money," says Mr. George, calmly knocking the ashes out of his pipe. "He was drowned long ago. I am convinced of it. He went over a ship's side. Whether intentionally or accidentally, I don't know. Perhaps your friend in the city does. Do you know what tune this is, Mr. Smallweed?" he adds after breaking off to whistle one.
"Tune!" replied the old man. "No. We never have tunes here."
"That's the Dead March in Saul. They bury soldiers to it, so it's the natural end of the subject. Now, if your pretty granddaughter will take care of this pipe for two months, we shall save the cost of one next time. Good evening, Mr. Smallweed!"
"My dear friend!" The old man gives him both his hands.
"So you think your friend in the city will be hard upon me if I fail in a payment?" says the trooper, looking down upon him like a giant.
"My dear friend, I am afraid he will."
Mr. George laughs, and with a parting salutation to the scornful Judy, strides out of the parlour.
"You're a damned rogue," says the old gentleman, making a hideous grimace at the door. "But I'll lime you, you dog, I'll lime you!"
Mr. George strides through the streets with a massive swagger and a grave face. It is eight o'clock of the evening now. He stops by Waterloo Bridge and reads a playbill, and decides to go to Astley's Theatre. There, he is much delighted with the horses and the feats of strength; looks at the weapons with a critical eye; disapproves of the combats as showing unskilful swordsmanship; but is touched by the sentiments.
The theatre over, Mr. George crosses the river again and makes his way to that curious region lying about the Haymarket and Leicester Square which is a centre of attraction to indifferent foreign hotels, racket-courts, swordsmen, gaming-houses, exhibitions, and a large medley of shabbiness. At the heart of this region, he arrives at a great brick building with bare walls, floors, and roof-rafters, on the front of which is painted GEORGE'S SHOOTING GALLERY, &c.
Into George's Shooting Gallery, &c., he goes. Inside there are gaslights and two targets for rifle-shooting, and equipment for archery, fencing and boxing. None of these sports is being pursued tonight in the gallery, which is so devoid of company that a little grotesque man with a large head has it all to himself and lies asleep upon the floor.
The little man is dressed something like a gunsmith, in a green-baize apron and cap; and his face and hands are dirty with gunpowder. Not far off is the strong table with a vice upon it at which he has been working. His face is speckled on one side and crushed together: he appears to have been blown up at some odd time or times.
"Phil!" says the trooper quietly.
"All right!" cries Phil, scrambling to his feet.
"Anything been doing?"
"Flat," says Phil. "Five dozen rifle and a dozen pistol."
"Shut up shop, Phil!"
As Phil does so, it appears that he is lame, though able to move very quickly. On the speckled side of his face he has no eyebrow, and on the other side he has a bushy black one, which gives him a rather sinister appearance. Everything seems to have happened to his hands that could possibly take place without losing his fingers, for they are notched, seamed, and crumpled all over. He appears to be very strong and lifts heavy benches about as if he had no idea what weight was. He has a curious way of limping round the gallery with his shoulder against the wall, which has left a smear all round the four walls.
This custodian of George's Gallery, when he has locked the great doors and turned out all the lights but one, drags out from a wooden cabin in a corner two mattresses and bedding. Once these have been drawn to opposite ends of the gallery, the trooper makes his own bed and Phil makes his.
"Phil!" says the master. "You were found in a doorway, weren't you?"
"Gutter," says Phil.
"Then vagabondizing came natural to you from the beginning."
"As nat'ral as possible," says Phil.
"Good night!"
"Good night, guv'ner."
Phil cannot go straight to bed, but finds it necessary to shoulder round two sides of the gallery and then veer off at his mattress. The trooper strides to his own mattress by a shorter route and goes to bed too.


Mr. Tulkinghorn arrives in his turret-room a little breathed by the journey up, though leisurely performed. There is an expression on his face as if he had discharged his mind of some grave matter and were, in his close way, satisfied. To say of a man so severely and strictly self-repressed that he is triumphant would be to do him as great an injustice as to suppose him troubled with love or sentiment or any romantic weakness. He is sedately satisfied. Perhaps there is a rather increased sense of power upon him as he loosely grasps one of his veinous wrists with his other hand and holding it behind his back walks noiselessly up and down.
There is a capacious writing-table in the room on which is a pretty large accumulation of papers. The green lamp is lighted, his reading-glasses lie upon the desk, the easy-chair is wheeled up to it, and it would seem as though he had intended to bestow an hour or so upon these claims on his attention before going to bed. But he happens not to be in a business mind. After a glance at the documents awaiting his notice--with his head bent low over the table, the old man's sight for print or writing being defective at night--he opens the French window and steps out upon the leads. There he again walks slowly up and down in the same attitude, subsiding, if a man so cool may have any need to subside, from the story he has related downstairs.
The time was once when men as knowing as Mr. Tulkinghorn would walk on turret-tops in the starlight and look up into the sky to read their fortunes there. Hosts of stars are visible to-night, though their brilliancy is eclipsed by the splendour of the moon. If he be seeking his own star as he methodically turns and turns upon the leads, it should be but a pale one to be so rustily represented below. If he be tracing out his destiny, that may be written in other characters nearer to his hand.
As he paces the leads with his eyes most probably as high above his thoughts as they are high above the earth, he is suddenly stopped in passing the window by two eyes that meet his own. The ceiling of his room is rather low; and the upper part of the door, which is opposite the window, is of glass. There is an inner baize door, too, but the night being warm he did not close it when he came upstairs. These eyes that meet his own are looking in through the glass from the corridor outside. He knows them well. The blood has not flushed into his face so suddenly and redly for many a long year as when he recognizes Lady Dedlock.
He steps into the room, and she comes in too, closing both the doors behind her. There is a wild disturbance--is it fear or anger?--in her eyes. In her carriage and all else she looks as she looked downstairs two hours ago.
Is it fear or is it anger now? He cannot be sure. Both might be as pale, both as intent.
"Lady Dedlock?"
She does not speak at first, nor even when she has slowly dropped into the easy-chair by the table. They look at each other, like two pictures.
"Why have you told my story to so many persons?"
"Lady Dedlock, it was necessary for me to inform you that I knew it."
"How long have you known it?"
"I have suspected it a long while--fully known it a little while."
"Months?"
"Days."
He stands before her with one hand on a chair-back and the other in his old-fashioned waistcoat and shirt-frill, exactly as he has stood before her at any time since her marriage. The same formal politeness, the same composed deference that might as well be defiance; the whole man the same dark, cold object, at the same distance, which nothing has ever diminished.
"Is this true concerning the poor girl?"
He slightly inclines and advances his head as not quite understanding the question.
"You know what you related. Is it true? Do her friends know my story also? Is it the town-talk yet? Is it chalked upon the walls and cried in the streets?"
So! Anger, and fear, and shame. All three contending. What power this woman has to keep these raging passions down! Mr. Tulkinghorn's thoughts take such form as he looks at her, with his ragged grey eyebrows a hair's breadth more contracted than usual under her gaze.
"No, Lady Dedlock. That was a hypothetical case, arising out of Sir Leicester's unconsciously carrying the matter with so high a hand. But it would be a real case if they knew--what we know."
"Then they do not know it yet?"
"No."
"Can I save the poor girl from injury before they know it?"
"Really, Lady Dedlock," Mr. Tulkinghorn replies, "I cannot give a satisfactory opinion on that point."
And he thinks, with the interest of attentive curiosity, as he watches the struggle in her breast, "The power and force of this woman are astonishing!"
"Sir," she says, for the moment obliged to set her lips with all the energy she has, that she may speak distinctly, "I will make it plainer. I do not dispute your hypothetical case. I anticipated it, and felt its truth as strongly as you can do, when I saw Mr. Rouncewell here. I knew very well that if he could have had the power of seeing me as I was, he would consider the poor girl tarnished by having for a moment been, although most innocently, the subject of my great and distinguished patronage. But I have an interest in her, or I should rather say--no longer belonging to this place--I had, and if you can find so much consideration for the woman under your foot as to remember that, she will be very sensible of your mercy."
Mr. Tulkinghorn, profoundly attentive, throws this off with a shrug of self-depreciation and contracts his eyebrows a little more.
"You have prepared me for my exposure, and I thank you for that too. Is there anything that you require of me? Is there any claim that I can release or any charge or trouble that I can spare my husband in obtaining HIS release by certifying to the exactness of your discovery? I will write anything, here and now, that you will dictate. I am ready to do it."
And she would do it, thinks the lawyer, watchful of the firm hand with which she takes the pen!
"I will not trouble you, Lady Dedlock. Pray spare yourself."
"I have long expected this, as you know. I neither wish to spare myself nor to be spared. You can do nothing worse to me than you have done. Do what remains now."
"Lady Dedlock, there is nothing to be done. I will take leave to say a few words when you have finished."
Their need for watching one another should be over now, but they do it all this time, and the stars watch them both through the opened window. Away in the moonlight lie the woodland fields at rest, and the wide house is as quiet as the narrow one. The narrow one! Where are the digger and the spade, this peaceful night, destined to add the last great secret to the many secrets of the Tulkinghorn existence? Is the man born yet, is the spade wrought yet? Curious questions to consider, more curious perhaps not to consider, under the watching stars upon a summer night.
"Of repentance or remorse or any feeling of mine," Lady Dedlock presently proceeds, "I say not a word. If I were not dumb, you would be deaf. Let that go by. It is not for your ears."
He makes a feint of offering a protest, but she sweeps it away with her disdainful hand.
"Of other and very different things I come to speak to you. My jewels are all in their proper places of keeping. They will be found there. So, my dresses. So, all the valuables I have. Some ready money I had with me, please to say, but no large amount. I did not wear my own dress, in order that I might avoid observation. I went to be henceforward lost. Make this known. I leave no other charge with you."
"Excuse me, Lady Dedlock," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, quite unmoved. "I am not sure that I understand you. You want--"
"To be lost to all here. I leave Chesney Wold to-night. I go this hour."
Mr. Tulkinghorn shakes his head. She rises, but he, without moving hand from chair-back or from old-fashioned waistcoat and shirt-frill, shakes his head.
"What? Not go as I have said?"
"No, Lady Dedlock," he very calmly replies.
"Do you know the relief that my disappearance will be? Have you forgotten the stain and blot upon this place, and where it is, and who it is?"
"No, Lady Dedlock, not by any means."
Without deigning to rejoin, she moves to the inner door and has it in her hand when he says to her, without himself stirring hand or foot or raising his voice, "Lady Dedlock, have the goodness to stop and hear me, or before you reach the staircase I shall ring the alarm-bell and rouse the house. And then I must speak out before every guest and servant, every man and woman, in it."
He has conquered her. She falters, trembles, and puts her hand confusedly to her head. Slight tokens these in any one else, but when so practised an eye as Mr. Tulkinghorn's sees indecision for a moment in such a subject, he thoroughly knows its value.
He promptly says again, "Have the goodness to hear me, Lady Dedlock," and motions to the chair from which she has risen. She hesitates, but he motions again, and she sits down.
"The relations between us are of an unfortunate description, Lady Dedlock; but as they are not of my making, I will not apologize for them. The position I hold in reference to Sir Leicester is so well known to you that I can hardly imagine but that I must long have appeared in your eyes the natural person to make this discovery."
"Sir," she returns without looking up from the ground on which her eyes are now fixed, "I had better have gone. It would have been far better not to have detained me. I have no more to say."
"Excuse me, Lady Dedlock, if I add a little more to hear."
"I wish to hear it at the window, then. I can't breathe where I am."
His jealous glance as she walks that way betrays an instant's misgiving that she may have it in her thoughts to leap over, and dashing against ledge and cornice, strike her life out upon the terrace below. But a moment's observation of her figure as she stands in the window without any support, looking out at the stars--not up--gloomily out at those stars which are low in the heavens, reassures him. By facing round as she has moved, he stands a little behind her.
"Lady Dedlock, I have not yet been able to come to a decision satisfactory to myself on the course before me. I am not clear what to do or how to act next. I must request you, in the meantime, to keep your secret as you have kept it so long and not to wonder that I keep it too."
He pauses, but she makes no reply.
"Pardon me, Lady Dedlock. This is an important subject. You are honouring me with your attention?"
"I am."
"Thank you. I might have known it from what I have seen of your strength of character. I ought not to have asked the question, but I have the habit of making sure of my ground, step by step, as I go on. The sole consideration in this unhappy case is Sir Leicester."
"Then why," she asks in a low voice and without removing her gloomy look from those distant stars, "do you detain me in his house?"
"Because he IS the consideration. Lady Dedlock, I have no occasion to tell you that Sir Leicester is a very proud man, that his reliance upon you is implicit, that the fall of that moon out of the sky would not amaze him more than your fall from your high position as his wife."
She breathes quickly and heavily, but she stands as unflinchingly as ever he has seen her in the midst of her grandest company.
"I declare to you, Lady Dedlock, that with anything short of this case that I have, I would as soon have hoped to root up by means of my own strength and my own hands the oldest tree on this estate as to shake your hold upon Sir Leicester and Sir Leicester's trust and confidence in you. And even now, with this case, I hesitate. Not that he could doubt (that, even with him, is impossible), but that nothing can prepare him for the blow."
"Not my flight?" she returned. "Think of it again."
"Your flight, Lady Dedlock, would spread the whole truth, and a hundred times the whole truth, far and wide. It would be impossible to save the family credit for a day. It is not to be thought of."
There is a quiet decision in his reply which admits of no remonstrance.
"When I speak of Sir Leicester being the sole consideration, he and the family credit are one. Sir Leicester and the baronetcy, Sir Leicester and Chesney Wold, Sir Leicester and his ancestors and his patrimony"--Mr. Tulkinghorn very dry here--"are, I need not say to you, Lady Dedlock, inseparable."
"Go on!"
"Therefore," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, pursuing his case in his jog-trot style, "I have much to consider. This is to be hushed up if it can be. How can it be, if Sir Leicester is driven out of his wits or laid upon a death-bed? If I inflicted this shock upon him to-morrow morning, how could the immediate change in him be accounted for? What could have caused it? What could have divided you? Lady Dedlock, the wall-chalking and the street-crying would come on directly, and you are to remember that it would not affect you merely (whom I cannot at all consider in this business) but your husband, Lady Dedlock, your husband."
He gets plainer as he gets on, but not an atom more emphatic or animated.
"There is another point of view," he continues, "in which the case presents itself. Sir Leicester is devoted to you almost to infatuation. He might not be able to overcome that infatuation, even knowing what we know. I am putting an extreme case, but it might be so. If so, it were better that he knew nothing. Better for common sense, better for him, better for me. I must take all this into account, and it combines to render a decision very difficult."
She stands looking out at the same stars without a word. They are beginning to pale, and she looks as if their coldness froze her.
"My experience teaches me," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, who has by this time got his hands in his pockets and is going on in his business consideration of the matter like a machine. "My experience teaches me, Lady Dedlock, that most of the people I know would do far better to leave marriage alone. It is at the bottom of three fourths of their troubles. So I thought when Sir Leicester married, and so I always have thought since. No more about that. I must now be guided by circumstances. In the meanwhile I must beg you to keep your own counsel, and I will keep mine."
"I am to drag my present life on, holding its pains at your pleasure, day by day?" she asks, still looking at the distant sky.
"Yes, I am afraid so, Lady Dedlock."
"It is necessary, you think, that I should be so tied to the stake?"
"I am sure that what I recommend is necessary."
"I am to remain on this gaudy platform on which my miserable deception has been so long acted, and it is to fall beneath me when you give the signal?" she said slowly.
"Not without notice, Lady Dedlock. I shall take no step without forewarning you."
She asks all her questions as if she were repeating them from memory or calling them over in her sleep.
"We are to meet as usual?"
"Precisely as usual, if you please."
"And I am to hide my guilt, as I have done so many years?"
"As you have done so many years. I should not have made that reference myself, Lady Dedlock, but I may now remind you that your secret can be no heavier to you than it was, and is no worse and no better than it was. I know it certainly, but I believe we have never wholly trusted each other."
She stands absorbed in the same frozen way for some little time before asking, "Is there anything more to be said to-night?"
"Why," Mr. Tulkinghorn returns methodically as he softly rubs his hands, "I should like to be assured of your acquiescence in my arrangements, Lady Dedlock."
"You may be assured of it."
"Good. And I would wish in conclusion to remind you, as a business precaution, in case it should be necessary to recall the fact in any communication with Sir Leicester, that throughout our interview I have expressly stated my sole consideration to be Sir Leicester's feelings and honour and the family reputation. I should have been happy to have made Lady Dedlock a prominent consideration, too, if the case had admitted of it; but unfortunately it does not."
"I can attest your fidelity, sir."
Both before and after saying it she remains absorbed, but at length moves, and turns, unshaken in her natural and acquired presence, towards the door. Mr. Tulkinghorn opens both the doors exactly as he would have done yesterday, or as he would have done ten years ago, and makes his old-fashioned bow as she passes out. It is not an ordinary look that he receives from the handsome face as it goes into the darkness, and it is not an ordinary movement, though a very slight one, that acknowledges his courtesy. But as he reflects when he is left alone, the woman has been putting no common constraint upon herself.
He would know it all the better if he saw the woman pacing her own rooms with her hair wildly thrown from her flung-back face, her hands clasped behind her head, her figure twisted as if by pain. He would think so all the more if he saw the woman thus hurrying up and down for hours, without fatigue, without intermission, followed by the faithful step upon the Ghost's Walk. But he shuts out the now chilled air, draws the window-curtain, goes to bed, and falls asleep. And truly when the stars go out and the wan day peeps into the turret-chamber, finding him at his oldest, he looks as if the digger and the spade were both commissioned and would soon be digging.
The same wan day peeps in at Sir Leicester pardoning the repentant country in a majestically condescending dream; and at the cousins entering on various public employments, principally receipt of salary; and at the chaste Volumnia, bestowing a dower of fifty thousand pounds upon a hideous old general with a mouth of false teeth like a pianoforte too full of keys, long the admiration of Bath and the terror of every other community. Also into rooms high in the roof, and into offices in court-yards, and over stables, where humbler ambition dreams of bliss, in keepers' lodges, and in holy matrimony with Will or Sally. Up comes the bright sun, drawing everything up with it--the Wills and Sallys, the latent vapour in the earth, the drooping leaves and flowers, the birds and beasts and creeping things, the gardeners to sweep the dewy turf and unfold emerald velvet where the roller passes, the smoke of the great kitchen fire wreathing itself straight and high into the lightsome air. Lastly, up comes the flag over Mr. Tulkinghorn's unconscious head cheerfully proclaiming that Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock are in their happy home and that there is hospitality at the place in Lincolnshire.

Mr. Tulkinghorn arrives in his turret-room a little breathless, and with a satisfied expression. To say of a man so strictly self-repressed that he is triumphant would be to do him an injustice. He is sedately satisfied. Perhaps there is an increased sense of power upon him as he clasps his hands behind his back and walks noiselessly up and down.
There is a large writing-table in the room holding a pile of papers. The lamp is lighted, his reading-glasses lie upon the desk, and it would seem as though he had intended to give an hour or so to these documents before going to bed. But after a glance at them, he opens the French window and steps out upon the turret-top. There he again walks slowly up and down in the same attitude, subsiding from the story he has related downstairs.
Hosts of stars are visible tonight, though their brilliancy is eclipsed by the splendour of the moon. As he paces the roof-leads, he is suddenly stopped in passing his window by two eyes that meet his own across his room. He knows them well. The blood has not flushed into his face so suddenly and redly for many a long year, as when he recognizes Lady Dedlock.
He steps back into the room, and she comes in too, closing the door behind her. There is a wild disturbance - is it fear or anger? - in her eyes. In all else she looks as she looked downstairs two hours ago.
"Lady Dedlock?"
She does not speak at first, not even when she has slowly dropped into the easy-chair. They look at each other.
"Why have you told my story to so many persons?"
"Lady Dedlock, it was necessary for me to inform you that I knew it."
"How long have you known it?"
"I have suspected it a long while - fully known it a little while."
"Months?"
"Days."
He stands before her with his usual formal politeness.
"Is this true concerning the poor girl?"
He slightly tilts his head, not quite understanding the question.
"You know what you related. Is it true? Do her friends know my story also? Is it the town-talk yet? Is it cried in the streets?"
So! Anger, and fear, and shame. What power this woman has to keep these raging passions down! Mr. Tulkinghorn's thoughts take such form as he looks at her, with his brows a hair's breadth more contracted than usual.
"No, Lady Dedlock. That was a hypothetical case. But it would be a real case if they knew - what we know."
"Then they do not know it yet?"
"No."
"Can I save the poor girl from injury before they know it?"
"Really, Lady Dedlock," Mr. Tulkinghorn replies, "I cannot give a satisfactory opinion on that point."
And he thinks, with attentive curiosity, as he watches the struggle in her breast, "The power and force of this woman are astonishing!"
"Sir," she says, "I will make it plainer. I do not dispute your hypothetical case. I anticipated it, when I saw Mr. Rouncewell here. I knew very well that if he could have had the power of seeing me as I was, he would consider the poor girl tarnished by having been the subject of my patronage. But I have an interest in her, or I should rather say - no longer belonging to this place - I had, and if you can find so much consideration for me as to remember that, I will be very sensible of your mercy."
Mr. Tulkinghorn, profoundly attentive, shrugs and contracts his eyebrows a little more.
"You have prepared me for my exposure, and I thank you for that too. Is there anything that you require of me? Is there any trouble that I can spare my husband in obtaining his release by certifying to the exactness of your discovery? I will write anything, here and now, that you will dictate. I am ready to do it."
And she would do it, thinks the lawyer!
"I will not trouble you, Lady Dedlock. Pray spare yourself."
"I have long expected this, as you know. I neither wish to spare myself nor to be spared. You can do nothing worse to me than you have done. Do what remains now."
"Lady Dedlock, there is nothing to be done. I will take leave to say a few words when you have finished."
They watch each other all this time, and the stars watch them both through the opened window. Away in the moonlight lie the woodland fields at rest, and the wide house is as quiet as the narrow grave. The grave! Where are the digger and the spade, this peaceful night, destined to add the last great secret to the many secrets of the Tulkinghorn existence?
"Of repentance or remorse or any feeling of mine," Lady Dedlock proceeds, "I say not a word. It is not for your ears. Of other and very different things I come to speak to you. My jewels are all in their proper places of keeping. They will be found there. So, my dresses and my valuables. Some ready money I had with me, please to say, but no large amount. I did not wear my own dress, in order that I might avoid observation. I went to be lost from now on. Make this known. I leave no other charge with you."
"Excuse me, Lady Dedlock," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, unmoved. "I am not sure that I understand you. You want-"
"To be lost to all here. I leave Chesney Wold tonight. I go this hour."
Mr. Tulkinghorn shakes his head.
"No, Lady Dedlock," he very calmly replies.
"Do you know the relief that my disappearance will be? Have you forgotten the stain upon this place?"
"No, Lady Dedlock, not by any means."
Without deigning to reply, she moves to the door when he says to her, without raising his voice, "Lady Dedlock, have the goodness to stop and hear me, or I shall ring the alarm-bell and rouse the house. And then I must speak out before every guest and servant, every man and woman, in it."
He has conquered her. She falters, trembles, and puts her hand confusedly to her head. Mr. Tulkinghorn motions to the chair. She hesitates, but he motions again, and she sits down.
"Lady Dedlock, because of my position, I must long have appeared in your eyes the natural person to make this discovery."
"Sir," she returns without looking up, "I had better have gone. I have no more to say."
"Excuse me, Lady Dedlock, but there is a little more to hear."
"I wish to hear it at the window, then. I can't breathe where I am."
As she walks that way he has an instant's misgiving that she may intend to leap over and strike her life out upon the terrace below. But a moment's observation of her figure as she stands in the window looking out at the stars reassures him. He stands a little behind her.
"Lady Dedlock, I have not yet been able to come to a decision about the course before me. I am not clear what to do or how to act next. I must request you, in the meantime, to keep your secret as you have kept it so long and not to wonder that I keep it too." He pauses. "You are honouring me with your attention?"
"I am."
"Thank you. The sole consideration in this unhappy case is Sir Leicester."
"Then why," she asks in a low voice, "do you detain me in his house?"
"Because he is the consideration. Lady Dedlock, I need not tell you that Sir Leicester is a very proud man, that his reliance upon you is implicit, that the fall of that moon out of the sky would not amaze him more than your fall from your high position as his wife."
She breathes quickly, but stands as unflinchingly as ever.
"I declare to you, Lady Dedlock, that with anything short of this case, I would as soon have rooted up the oldest tree on this estate as have shaken Sir Leicester's trust and confidence in you. And even now, with this case, I hesitate; because nothing can prepare him for the blow."
"Not my flight?" she returned.
"Your flight, Lady Dedlock, would spread the whole truth far and wide. It would be impossible to save the family credit for a day. It is not to be thought of."
"Go on!"
"Therefore," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, "I have much to consider. This is to be hushed up if it can be. How can it be, if Sir Leicester is driven out of his wits? If I inflicted this shock upon him tomorrow morning, how could the change in him be accounted for? What could have caused it? What could have divided you? Lady Dedlock, the street-talk would start directly, and it would not affect you merely (whom I cannot at all consider in this business) but your husband."
He gets plainer as he goes on, but not an atom more animated.
"There is another point of view," he continues. "Sir Leicester is devoted to you almost to infatuation. He might not be able to overcome that infatuation, even knowing what we know. If so, it were better that he knew nothing. Better for common sense, better for him, better for me. I must take all this into account, and it makes a decision very difficult."
She stands looking out at the same stars without a word, as if their coldness froze her.
"My experience teaches me," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, going on in his business consideration of the matter like a machine, "that most people would do far better to leave marriage alone. It is at the bottom of three fourths of their troubles. So I thought when Sir Leicester married, and so I always have thought since. No more about that. I must now be guided by circumstances. In the meanwhile I must ask you to keep your own counsel, and I will keep mine."
"I am to drag my present life on, at your pleasure, day by day?" she asks, still looking at the distant sky.
"Yes, I am afraid so, Lady Dedlock."
"I am to remain on this gaudy platform on which my miserable deception has been so long acted, and it is to fall beneath me when you give the signal?" she said slowly.
"Not without warning, Lady Dedlock."
"We are to meet as usual?"
"Precisely as usual, if you please."
"And I am to hide my guilt, as I have done so many years?"
"As you have done so many years. Your secret can be no heavier to you than it was, and is no worse and no better than it was."
She stands absorbed in the same frozen way for some little time before asking, "Is there anything more to be said tonight?"
"Why," Mr. Tulkinghorn returns methodically as he softly rubs his hands, "I should like to be assured of your acquiescence in my arrangements, Lady Dedlock."
"You have it."
"Good. And I would wish in conclusion to remind you, as a business precaution, that I have expressly stated my sole consideration to be Sir Leicester's feelings and honour and the family reputation. I should have been happy to have made Lady Dedlock a consideration, too, if the case had admitted of it; but unfortunately it does not."
"I can attest your fidelity, sir."
She turns towards the door. Mr. Tulkinghorn makes his old-fashioned bow as she passes out. It is not an ordinary look that he receives from the handsome face as it goes into the darkness, and it is not an ordinary movement, though a very slight one, that acknowledges his courtesy. But as he reflects when he is left alone, the woman has been putting no common constraint upon herself.
He would know it all the better if he saw the woman pacing her own rooms with her hair wildly thrown back, her hands clasped behind her head, her figure twisted as if by pain. He would think so all the more if he saw the woman thus hurrying up and down for hours, without pause, followed by the faithful step upon the Ghost's Walk. But he shuts out the chilly air, draws the curtain, goes to bed, and falls asleep.
At last the stars go out; the wan day peeps in at Sir Leicester pardoning the repentant country in a majestically condescending dream; and at the cousins, and at the chaste Volumnia, dreaming of a hideous old general in Bath. Also into rooms high in the roof, and into offices in court-yards, and over stables, where humbler ambition dreams of bliss. Up comes the bright sun, drawing everything up with it - the drooping leaves and flowers, the birds and beasts, the gardeners to sweep the dewy turf, the smoke of the great kitchen fire wreathing itself high into the air. Lastly, up comes the flag over Mr. Tulkinghorn's unconscious head cheerfully proclaiming that Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock are in their happy home in Lincolnshire.