066 - Down in Lincolnshire

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Bleak house by Charles Dickens, chapter 66, down in Lincolnshire.

There is a hush upon Chesney World in these altered days as there is upon a portion of the family history.

The story goes that Sir Leicester paid some who could have spoken out to hold their peace,

but it is a lame story, feebly whispering and creeping about,

and any brighter spark of life it shows soon dies away.

It is known for certain that the handsome lady deadlock lies in the mausoleum in the park,

where the trees arched darkly overhead and the owl is heard at night making the woods ring.

But when she was brought home to be laid among the echoes of that solitary place or how she died is all mystery.

Some of her old friends, principally to be found among the peachy cheek charmers with the skeleton throats,

did once occasionally say, as they toyed in a ghastly manner with large fans,

like charmers reduced to flirting with grim death after losing all their other bows,

did once occasionally say, when the world assembled together,

that they wondered the ashes of the deadlocks, entombed in the mausoleum,

never rose against the profanation of her company.

But the dead and gone deadlocks take it very calmly and have never been known to object.

Up from among the fern in the hollow and winding by the bridal road among the trees

comes sometimes to this lonely spot, the sound of horse's hoofs,

then may be seen Sir Leicester, invalidid bent and almost blind,

but of worthy presence yet, riding with a stalwart man beside him,

constant to his bridal reign.

When they come to a certain spot before the mausoleum door,

Sir Leicester's a custom horse stops of his own accord,

and Sir Leicester pulling off his hat is still for a few moments before they ride away.

War rages yet with the audacious boythorn, though at uncertain intervals,

and now hotly and now coolly flickering like an unsteady fire.

The truth is said to be that when Sir Leicester came down to Lincolnshire for good,

Mr. Boythorn showed a manifest desire to abandon his right of way,

and do whatever Sir Leicester would, which Sir Leicester conceiving to be a condescension

to his illness or misfortune took in such high duchon and was so magnificently aggrieved by

that Mr. Boythorn found himself under the necessity of committing a flagrant trespass

to restore his neighbor to himself.

Similarly, Mr. Boythorn continues to post tremendous placards on the disputed thoroughfare,

and with his bird upon his head to hold forth vehemently against Sir Leicester

in the sanctuary of his own home.

Similarly, also, he defies him as of old in the little church

by testifying a bland, unconsciousness of his existence.

But it is whispered that when he is most ferocious towards his old foe,

he is really most considerate, and that Sir Leicester in the dignity of being implacable,

little supposes how much he is humored.

As little does he think how near together he and his antagonist have suffered

in the fortunes of two sisters, and his antagonist, who knows it now,

is not the man to tell him.

So the quarrel goes on to the satisfaction of both.

In one of the lodges of the park, that lodge within sight of the house

where, once upon a time, when the waters were out down in Lincolnshire,

my lady used to see the keeper's child, the stalwart man, the trooper formally, is housed.

Some relics of his old calling hang upon the walls,

and these, it is the chosen recreation of a little layman about the stable yard

to keep gleaming bright.

A busy little man, he always is, in the polishing at Harness House doors,

of stirrup irons, bits, curb chains, harness bosses, anything in the way of a stable yard

that will take a polish, leading a life of friction.

A shaggy little damaged man, with all, not unlike an old dog of some mongrel breed,

who has been considerably knocked about.

He answers to the name of Phil.

A goodly sight it is to see the grand old housekeeper,

harder of hearing now, going to church on the arm of her son,

and to observe which few do, for the house's scant of company in these times,

the relations of both towards Sir Leicester and his towards them.

They have visitors in the high summer weather,

when a grey cloak and umbrella, unknown to Chesney World at other periods,

are seen among beliefs.

When two young ladies are occasionally found gambling,

in sequestered sawpits, and such nooks of the park,

and when the smoke of two pipes wreaths away into the fragrant evening air,

from the trooper's door.

Then is a fife heard trolling within the lodge,

on the inspiring topic of the British grenadiers,

and as evening closes in, a gruff inflexible voice is heard to say,

while two men pace together up and down.

But I never own to it before the old girl, discipline must be maintained.

The greater part of the house is shut up,

and it is a showhouse no longer.

Yet Sir Leicester holds his shrunken state in the long drawing-room for all that,

and reposes in his old place before my lady's picture.

Closed in by night with broad screens,

and illumined only in that part,

the light of the drawing-room seems gradually contracting and dwindling,

until it shall be no more.

A little more in truth, and it will be all extinguished for Sir Leicester,

and the damp door in the mausoleum which shuts so tight,

and looks so obter it, will have opened and relieved him.

Valamnia, growing with the flight of time,

pinker as to the red in her face, and yellower as to the white,

reads to Sir Leicester in the long evenings,

and is driven to various artifices to conceal her yarns,

of which the chief and most efficacious is the insertion of the pearl necklace

between her rosy lips.

Long-winded treatises on the Buffy and Boodle question,

showing how Buffy is immaculate and booty villainous,

and how the country is lost by being all,

and no Buffy, or saved by being all Buffy and no Boodle.

It must be one of the two, and cannot be anything else,

all the staple of her reading.

Sir Leicester is not particular what it is,

and does not appear to follow it very closely.

Further than that, he always comes brought awake,

the moment Valamnia ventures to leave off,

and sonnerously repeating her last words,

begs with some displeasure to know if she finds herself fatigued.

However, Valamnia, in the course of her bird-like hopping about

and pecking at papers, has alighted on a memorandum concerning herself

in the event of anything happening to her kinsman,

which is handsome compensation for an extensive course of reading

and holds even the dragon boredom at bay.

The cousins generally are rather shy of Chesney World in its dullness,

but take to it a little in the shooting season,

when guns are heard in the plantations,

and a few scattered beaters and keepers wait at the old places of appointment,

for low-spirited twos and threes of cousins.

The debilitated cousin, more debilitated by the dreariness of the place,

gets into a fearful state of depression,

groaning under penitential sofa pillows in his gunless hours

and protesting that such fernall old jails,

not to so flur up, forever.

The only great occasion for Valamnia in this changed aspect of the place is Lincolnshire,

as those occasions rare and widely separated,

when something is to be done for the country,

or the country in the way of gracing a public ball.

Then indeed, does the Tucker itself come out in fairy form

and proceed with joy, under cousinly escort,

to the exhausted old assembly room,

fourteen heavy miles off,

which, during 364 days and nights of every ordinary year,

is a kind of antipodian lumber room,

full of old chairs and tables upside down.

Then indeed, does she captivate all hearts by her condescension,

by her girlish vivacity,

and by her skipping about,

as in the days when the hideous old general,

with a mouth to full of teeth,

had not cut one of them at two guinea's each.

Then does she twirl in twine,

a pastoral nymph of good family,

through the maze of the dance.

Then do the swains appear with tea,

with lemonade, with sandwiches, with homage.

Then she is kind and cruel,

stately and unassuming,

various, beautifully willful.

Then is there a singular kind of parallel

between her and the little glass chandeliers of another age,

embellishing that assembly room,

which, with their meager stems,

their spare little drops,

their disappointing knobs where no drops are,

their bare little stalks from which knobs and drops

have both deported,

and their little feeble, prismatic twinkling,

all seem volumnias.

For the rest,

Lincoln's shy life to volumnia is a vast blank

of overgrown house,

looking out upon trees,

sying, ringing their hands,

bound their heads,

and casting their tears upon the window-pains,

in monotonous depressions.

A labyrinth of grandeur,

lest the property of an old family of human beings,

and their ghostly likenesses,

then of an old family of echoings and thunderings,

which start out of their hundred graves at every sound,

and go resounding through the building.

A waste of unused passages and staircases,

in which to drop a comb upon a bedroom floor at night,

is to send a stealthy footfall

on an errand through the house,

a place where few people care to go about alone,

where a maid screams,

if an ash drops from the fire,

takes to crying at all times and seasons,

becomes the victim of a low disorder of the spirits,

and gives warning and departs.

Thus, Chesney World,

with so much of itself abandoned to darkness and vacancy,

with so little change under the summer shining,

or the wintery lowering,

so somber and motionless always,

no flag flying now by day,

no rows of lights sparkling by night,

with no family to come and go,

no visitors to be the souls of pale,

cold shapes of rooms,

no stir of life about it,

passion and pride,

even to the stranger's eye,

have died away from the place in Lincolnshire,

and yielded it to dull repose.

End of chapter 66.

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