The Solitary House (120 page)

But in that house, in that same moment, there happens to be an old man of the name of Tulkinghorn. And that old man, coming with his quiet footsteps to the library, has his hand at that moment on the handle of the door—comes in—and comes face to face with the young man as he is leaving the room.

One glance between the old man and the lady; and for an instant the blind that is always down flies up. Suspicion, eager and sharp, looks out. Another instant; close again.

“I beg your pardon, Lady Dedlock. I beg your pardon a thousand times. It is so very unusual to find you here at this hour. I supposed the room was empty. I beg your pardon!”

“Stay!” She negligently calls him back. “Remain here, I beg.
I am going out to dinner. I have nothing more to say to this young man!”

The disconcerted young man bows, as he goes out, and cringingly hopes that Mr. Tulkinghorn of the Fields is well.

“Aye, aye?” says the lawyer, looking at him from under his bent brows; though he has no need to look again—not he. “From Kenge and Carboy’s, surely?”

“Kenge and Carboy’s, Mr. Tulkinghorn. Name of Guppy, sir.”

“To be sure. Why, thank you, Mr. Guppy, I am very well!”

“Happy to hear it, sir. You can’t be too well, sir, for the credit of the profession.”

“Thank you, Mr. Guppy!”

Mr. Guppy sneaks away. Mr. Tulkinghorn, such a foil in his old-fashioned rusty black to Lady Dedlock’s brightness, hands her down the staircase to her carriage. He returns rubbing his chin, and rubs it a good deal in the course of the evening.

CHAPTER 34

A TURN OF THE SCREW

N
ow, what,” says Mr. George, “may this be? is it blank cartridge, or ball? A flash in the pan, or a shot?”

An open letter is the subject of the trooper’s speculations, and it seems to perplex him mightily. He looks at it at arm’s length, brings it close to him, holds it in his right hand, holds it in his left hand, reads it with his head on this side, with his head on that side, contracts his eyebrows, elevates them; still, cannot satisfy himself. He smooths it out upon the table with his heavy palm, and thoughtfully walking up and down the gallery, makes a halt before it every now and then, to come upon it with a fresh
eye. Even that won’t do. “Is it,” Mr. George still muses, “blank cartridge or ball?”

Phil Squod, with the aid of a brush and paint-pot, is employed in the distance whitening the targets; softly whistling, in quick-march-time, and in drum-and-fife manner, that he must and will go back again to the girl he left behind him.

“Phil!” The trooper beckons as he calls him.

Phil approaches in his usual way; sidling off at first as if he were going anywhere else, and then bearing down upon his commander like a bayonet-charge. Certain splashes of white show in high relief upon his dirty face, and he scrapes his one eyebrow with the handle of the brush.

“Attention, Phil! Listen to this.”

“Steady, commander, steady.”

“ ‘Sir. Allow me to remind you (though there is no legal necessity for my doing so, as you are aware) that the bill at two months’ date drawn on yourself by Mr. Matthew Bagnet, and by you accepted, for the sum of ninety-seven pounds four shillings and ninepence, will become due tomorrow, when you will please be prepared to take up the same on presentation. Yours, JOSHUA SMALLWEED.’—What do you make of that, Phil?”

“Mischief, guv’ner.”

“Why?”

“I think,” replies Phil, after pensively tracing out a cross-wrinkle in his forehead with the brush-handle, “that mischeevious consequences is always meant when money’s asked for.”

“Lookye, Phil,” says the trooper, sitting on the table. “First and last, I have paid, I may say, half as much again as this principal, in interest and one thing and another.”

Phil intimates, by sidling back a pace or two, with a very unaccountable wrench of his wry face, that he does not regard the transaction as being made more promising by this incident.

“And lookye further, Phil,” says the trooper, staying his premature conclusions with a wave of his hand. “There has always been an understanding that this bill was to be what they call Renewed. And it has been renewed, no end of times. What do you say now?”

“I say that I think the times is come to a end at last.”

“You do? Humph! I am much of the same mind myself.”

“Joshua Smallweed is him that was brought here in a chair?”

“The same.”

“Guv’ner,” says Phil, with exceeding gravity, “he’s a leech in his dispositions, he’s a screw and a wice in his actions, a snake in his twistings, and a lobster in his claws.”

Having thus expressively uttered his sentiments, Mr. Squod, after waiting a little to ascertain if any further remark be expected of him, gets back, by his usual series of movements, to the target he has in hand; and vigorously signifies, through his former musical medium, that he must and he will return to that ideal young lady. George, having folded the letter, walks in that direction.

“There
is
a way, commander,” says Phil, looking cunningly at him, “of settling this.”

“Paying the money, I suppose? I wish I could.”

Phil shakes his head. “No, guv’ner, no; not so bad as that. There
is
a way,” says Phil, with a highly artistic turn of his brush—“what I’m a-doing at present.”

“White-washing.”

Phil nods.

“A pretty way that would be! Do you know what would become of the Bagnets in that case? Do you know they would be ruined to pay off old scores?
You’re
a moral character,” says the trooper, eyeing him in his large way with no small indignation, “upon my life you are, Phil!”

Phil, on one knee at the target, is in course of protesting earnestly, though not without many allegorical scoops of his brush, and smoothings of the white surface round the rim with his thumb, that he had forgotten the Bagnet responsibility, and would not so much as injure a hair of the head of any member of that worthy family, when steps are audible in the long passage without, and a cheerful voice is heard to wonder whether George is at home. Phil, with a look at his master, hobbles up, saying, “Here’s the guv’ner, Mrs. Bagnet! Here he is!” and the old girl herself, accompanied by Mr. Bagnet, appears.

The old girl never appears in walking trim, in any season of the year, without a grey cloth cloak, coarse and much worn but
very clean, which is, undoubtedly, the identical garment rendered so interesting to Mr. Bagnet by having made its way home to Europe from another quarter of the globe in company with Mrs. Bagnet and an umbrella. The latter faithful appendage is also invariably a part of the old girl’s presence out of doors. It is of no colour known in this life, and has a corrugated wooden crook for a handle, with a metallic object let into its prow or beak, resembling a little model of a fanlight over a street door, or one of the oval glasses out of a pair of spectacles: which ornamental object has not that tenacious capacity of sticking to its post that might be desired in an article long associated with the British army. The old girl’s umbrella is of a flabby habit of waist, and seems to be in need of stays—an appearance that is possibly referable to its having served, through a series of years, at home as a cupboard, and on journeys as a carpet bag. She never puts it up, having the greatest reliance on her well-proved cloak with its capacious hood; but generally uses the instrument as a wand with which to point out joints of meat or bunches of greens in marketing, or to arrest the attention of tradesmen by a friendly poke. Without her market-basket, which is a sort of wicker well with two flapping lids, she never stirs abroad. Attended by these her trusty companions, therefore, her honest sunburnt face looking cheerily out of a rough straw bonnet, Mrs. Bagnet now arrives fresh-coloured and bright, in George’s Shooting Gallery.

“Well, George, old fellow,” says she, “and how do
you
do, this sunshiny morning?”

Giving him a friendly shake of the hand, Mrs. Bagnet draws a long breath after her walk, and sits down to enjoy a rest. Having a faculty, matured on the tops of baggage-waggons, and in other such positions, of resting easily anywhere, she perches on a rough bench, unties her bonnet-strings, pushes back her bonnet, crosses her arms, and looks perfectly comfortable.

Mr. Bagnet, in the meantime, has shaken hands with his old comrade, and with Phil: on whom Mrs. Bagnet likewise bestows a good-humoured nod and smile.

“Now, George,” said Mrs. Bagnet briskly, “here we are, Lignum and myself”; she often speaks of her husband by this
appellation, on account, as it is supposed, of Lignum Vitae having been his old regimental nickname when they first became acquainted, in compliment to the extreme hardness and toughness of his physiognomy; “just looked in, we have, to make it all correct as usual about that security. Give him the new bill to sign, George, and he’ll sign it like a man.”

“I was coming to you this morning,” observes the trooper, reluctantly.

“Yes, we thought you’d come to us this morning, but we turned out early, and left Woolwich, the best of boys, to mind his sisters, and came to you instead—as you see! For Lignum, he’s tied so close now, and gets so little exercise, that a walk does him good. But what’s the matter, George?” asks Mrs. Bagnet, stopping in her cheerful talk. “You don’t look yourself.”

“I am not quite myself,” returns the trooper; “I have been a little put out, Mrs. Bagnet.”

Her bright quick eye catches the truth directly. “George!” holding up her forefinger. “Don’t tell me there’s anything wrong about that security of Lignum’s! Don’t do it, George, on account of the children!”

The trooper looks at her with a troubled visage.

“George,” says Mrs. Bagnet, using both her arms for emphasis, and occasionally bringing down her open hands upon her knees. “If you have allowed anything wrong to come to that security of Lignum’s, and if you have let him in for it, and if you put us in danger of being sold up—and I see sold up in your face, George, as plain as print—you have done a shameful action, and have deceived us cruelly. I tell you, cruelly, George. There!”

Mr. Bagnet, otherwise as immovable as a pump of a lamppost, puts his large right hand on the top of his bald head, as if to defend it from a shower-bath, and looks with great uneasiness at Mrs. Bagnet.

“George,” says that old girl, “I wonder at you! George, I am ashamed of you! George, I couldn’t have believed you would have done it! I always knew you to be a rolling stone that gathered no moss; but I never thought you would have taken away what little moss there was for Bagnet and the children to lie
upon. You know what a hard-working, steady-going chap he is. You know what Quebec and Malta and Woolwich are—and I never did think you would, or could, have had the heart to serve us so. O George!” Mrs. Bagnet gathers up her cloak to wipe her eyes on, in a very genuine manner, “How could you do it?”

Mrs. Bagnet ceasing, Mr. Bagnet removes his hand from his head, as if the shower-bath were over, and looks disconsolately at Mr. George; who has turned quite white, and looks distressfully at the grey cloak and straw bonnet.

“Mat,” says the trooper in a subdued voice, addressing him, but still looking at his wife; “I am sorry you take it so much to heart, because I do hope it’s not so bad as that comes to. I certainly have, this morning, received this letter”; which he reads aloud; “but I hope it may be set right yet. As to a rolling stone, why, what you say is true. I
am
a rolling stone; and I never rolled in anybody’s way, I fully believe, that I rolled the least good to. But it’s impossible for an old vagabond comrade to like your wife and family better than
I
like ’em, Mat, and I trust you’ll look upon me as forgivingly as you can. Don’t think I’ve kept anything from you. I haven’t had the letter more than a quarter of an hour.”

“Old girl,” murmurs Mr. Bagnet, after a short silence, “will you tell him my opinion?”

“Oh! Why didn’t he marry,” Mrs. Bagnet answers, half laughing and half crying, “Joe Pouch’s widder in North America? Then he wouldn’t have got himself into these troubles.”

“The old girl,” says Mr. Bagnet, “puts it correct—why didn’t you?”

“Well, she has a better husband by this time, I hope,” returns the trooper. “Anyhow, here I stand, this present day,
not
married to Joe Pouch’s widder. What shall I do? You see all I have got about me. It’s not mine; it’s yours. Give the word, and I’ll sell off every morsel. If I could have hoped it would have brought in nearly the sum wanted, I’d have sold all long ago. Don’t believe that I’ll leave you or yours in the lurch, Mat. I’d sell myself first. I only wish,” says the trooper, giving himself a disparaging blow in the chest, “that I knew of any one who’d buy such a second-hand piece of old stores.”

“Old girl,” murmurs Mr. Bagnet, “give him another bit of my mind.”

“George,” says the old girl, “you are not so much to be blamed, on full consideration, except for ever taking this business without the means.”

“And that was like me!” observes the penitent trooper, shaking his head. “Like me, I know.”