CHAPTER II
 
 
 

           In Fashion
 

        It is but a glimpse of the world of fashion that we want on this

        same miry afternoon.  It is not so unlike the Court of Chancery but

        that we may pass from the one scene to the other, as the crow

        flies.  Both the world of fashion and the Court of Chancery are

        things of precedent and usage: oversleeping Rip Van Winkles who

        have played at strange games through a deal of thundery weather;

        sleeping beauties whom the knight will wake one day, when all the

        stopped spits in the kitchen shall begin to turn prodigiously!
 
 

        It is not a large world.  Relatively even to this world of ours,

        which has its limits too (as your Highness shall find when you have

        made the tour of it and are come to the brink of the void beyond),

        it is a very little speck.  There is much good in it; there are

        many good and true people in it; it has its appointed place.  But

        the evil of it is that it is a world wrapped up in too much

        jeweller's cotton and fine wool, and cannot hear the rushing of the

        larger worlds, and cannot see them as they circle round the sun.

        It is a deadened world, and its growth is sometimes unhealthy for

        want of air.
 
 

        My Lady Dedlock has returned to her house in town for a few days

        previous to her departure for Paris, where her ladyship intends to

        stay some weeks, after which her movements are uncertain.  The

        fashionable intelligence says so for the comfort of the Parisians,

        and it knows all fashionable things.  To know things otherwise were

        to be unfashionable.  My Lady Dedlock has been down at what she

        calls, in familiar conversation, her "place" in Lincolnshire.  The

        waters are out in Lincolnshire.  An arch of the bridge in the park

        has been sapped and sopped away.  The adjacent low-lying ground for

        half a mile in breadth is a stagnant river with melancholy trees

        for islands in it and a surface punctured all over, all day long,

        with falling rain.  My Lady Dedlock's place has been extremely

        dreary.  The weather for many a day and night has been so wet that

        the trees seem wet through, and the soft loppings and prunings of

        the woodman's axe can make no crash or crackle as they fall.  The

        deer, looking soaked, leave quagmires where they pass.  The shot of

        a rifle loses its sharpness in the moist air, and its smoke moves

        in a tardy little cloud towards the green rise, coppice-topped,

        that makes a background for the falling rain.  The view from my

        Lady Dedlock's own windows is alternately a lead-coloured view and

        a view in Indian ink.  The vases on the stone terrace in the

        foreground catch the rain all day; and the heavy drops fall--drip,

        drip, drip--upon the broad flagged pavement, called from old time

        the Ghost's Walk, all night.  On Sundays the little church in the

        park is mouldy; the oaken pulpit breaks out into a cold sweat; and

        there is a general smell and taste as of the ancient Dedlocks in

        their graves.  My Lady Dedlock (who is childless), looking out in

        the early twilight from her boudoir at a keeper's lodge and seeing

        the light of a fire upon the latticed panes, and smoke rising from

        the chimney, and a child, chased by a woman, running out into the

        rain to meet the shining figure of a wrapped-up man coming through

        the gate, has been put quite out of temper.  My Lady Dedlock says

        she has been "bored to death."
 
 

        Therefore my Lady Dedlock has come away from the place in

        Lincolnshire and has left it to the rain, and the crows, and the

        rabbits, and the deer, and the partridges and pheasants.  The

        pictures of the Dedlocks past and gone have seemed to vanish into

        the damp walls in mere lowness of spirits, as the housekeeper has

        passed along the old rooms shutting up the shutters.  And when they

        will next come forth again, the fashionable intelligence--which,

        like the fiend, is omniscient of the past and present, but not the

        future--cannot yet undertake to say.
 
 

        Sir Leicester Dedlock is only a baronet, but there is no mightier

        baronet than he.  His family is as old as the hills, and infinitely

        more respectable.  He has a general opinion that the world might

        get on without hills but would be done up without Dedlocks.  He

        would on the whole admit nature to be a good idea (a little low,

        perhaps, when not enclosed with a park-fence), but an idea

        dependent for its execution on your great county families.  He is a

        gentleman of strict conscience, disdainful of all littleness and

        meanness and ready on the shortest notice to die any death you may

        please to mention rather than give occasion for the least

        impeachment of his integrity.  He is an honourable, obstinate,

        truthful, high-spirited, intensely prejudiced, perfectly

        unreasonable man.
 
 

        Sir Leicester is twenty years, full measure, older than my Lady.

        He will never see sixty-five again, nor perhaps sixty-six, nor yet

        sixty-seven.  He has a twist of the gout now and then and walks a

        little stiffly.  He is of a worthy presence, with his light-grey

        hair and whiskers, his fine shirt-frill, his pure-white waistcoat,

        and his blue coat with bright buttons always buttoned.  He is

        ceremonious, stately, most polite on every occasion to my Lady, and

        holds her personal attractions in the highest estimation.  His

        gallantry to my Lady, which has never changed since he courted her,

        is the one little touch of romantic fancy in him.
 
 

        Indeed, he married her for love.  A whisper still goes about that

        she had not even family; howbeit, Sir Leicester had so much family

        that perhaps he had enough and could dispense with any more.  But

        she had beauty, pride, ambition, insolent resolve, and sense enough

        to portion out a legion of fine ladies.  Wealth and station, added

        to these, soon floated her upward, and for years now my Lady

        Dedlock has been at the centre of the fashionable intelligence and

        at the top of the fashionable tree.
 
 

        How Alexander wept when he had no more worlds to conquer, everybody

        knows--or has some reason to know by this time, the matter having

        been rather frequently mentioned.  My Lady Dedlock, having

        conquered HER world, fell not into the melting, but rather into the

        freezing, mood.  An exhausted composure, a worn-out placidity, an

        equanimity of fatigue not to be ruffled by interest or satisfaction,

        are the trophies of her victory.  She is perfectly well-bred.

        If she could be translated to heaven to-morrow, she might be

        expected to ascend without any rapture.
 
 

        She has beauty still, and if it be not in its heyday, it is not yet

        in its autumn.  She has a fine face--originally of a character that

        would be rather called very pretty than handsome, but improved into

        classicality by the acquired expression of her fashionable state.

        Her figure is elegant and has the effect of being tall.  Not that

        she is so, but that "the most is made," as the Honourable Bob

        Stables has frequently asserted upon oath, "of all her points."

        The same authority observes that she is perfectly got up and

        remarks in commendation of her hair especially that she is the

        best-groomed woman in the whole stud.
 
 

        With all her perfections on her head, my Lady Dedlock has come up

        from her place in Lincolnshire (hotly pursued by the fashionable

        intelligence) to pass a few days at her house in town previous to

        her departure for Paris, where her ladyship intends to stay some

        weeks, after which her movements are uncertain.  And at her house

        in town, upon this muddy, murky afternoon, presents himself an old-

        fashioned old gentleman, attorney-at-law and eke solicitor of the

        High Court of Chancery, who has the honour of acting as legal

        adviser of the Dedlocks and has as many cast-iron boxes in his

        office with that name outside as if the present baronet were the

        coin of the conjuror's trick and were constantly being juggled

        through the whole set.  Across the hall, and up the stairs, and

        along the passages, and through the rooms, which are very brilliant

        in the season and very dismal out of it--fairy-land to visit, but a

        desert to live in--the old gentleman is conducted by a Mercury in

        powder to my Lady's presence.
 
 

        The old gentleman is rusty to look at, but is reputed to have made

        good thrift out of aristocratic marriage settlements and

        aristocratic wills, and to be very rich.  He is surrounded by a

        mysterious halo of family confidences, of which he is known to be

        the silent depository.  There are noble mausoleums rooted for

        centuries in retired glades of parks among the growing timber and

        the fern, which perhaps hold fewer noble secrets than walk abroad

        among men, shut up in the breast of Mr. Tulkinghorn.  He is of what

        is called the old school--a phrase generally meaning any school

        that seems never to have been young--and wears knee-breeches tied

        with ribbons, and gaiters or stockings.  One peculiarity of his

        black clothes and of his black stockings, be they silk or worsted,

        is that they never shine.  Mute, close, irresponsive to any

        glancing light, his dress is like himself.  He never converses when

        not professionaly consulted.  He is found sometimes, speechless but

        quite at home, at corners of dinner-tables in great country houses

        and near doors of drawing-rooms, concerning which the fashionable

        intelligence is eloquent, where everybody knows him and where half

        the Peerage stops to say "How do you do, Mr. Tulkinghorn?"  He

        receives these salutations with gravity and buries them along with

        the rest of his knowledge.
 
 

        Sir Leicester Dedlock is with my Lady and is happy to see Mr.

        Tulkinghorn.  There is an air of prescription about him which is

        always agreeable to Sir Leicester; he receives it as a kind of

        tribute.  He likes Mr. Tulkinghorn's dress; there is a kind of

        tribute in that too.  It is eminently respectable, and likewise, in

        a general way, retainer-like.  It expresses, as it were, the

        steward of the legal mysteries, the butler of the legal cellar, of

        the Dedlocks.
 
 

        Has Mr. Tulkinghorn any idea of this himself?  It may be so, or it

        may not, but there is this remarkable circumstance to be noted in

        everything associated with my Lady Dedlock as one of a class--as

        one of the leaders and representatives of her little world.  She

        supposes herself to be an inscrutable Being, quite out of the reach

        and ken of ordinary mortals--seeing herself in her glass, where

        indeed she looks so.  Yet every dim little star revolving about

        her, from her maid to the manager of the Italian Opera, knows her

        weaknesses, prejudices, follies, haughtinesses, and caprices and

        lives upon as accurate a calculation and as nice a measure of her

        moral nature as her dressmaker takes of her physical proportions.

        Is a new dress, a new custom, a new singer, a new dancer, a new

        form of jewellery, a new dwarf or giant, a new chapel, a new

        anything, to be set up?  There are deferential people in a dozen

        callings whom my Lady Dedlock suspects of nothing but prostration

        before her, who can tell you how to manage her as if she were a

        baby, who do nothing but nurse her all their lives, who, humbly

        affecting to follow with profound subservience, lead her and her

        whole troop after them; who, in hooking one, hook all and bear them

        off as Lemuel Gulliver bore away the stately fleet of the majestic

        Lilliput.  "If you want to address our people, sir," say Blaze and

        Sparkle, the jewellers--meaning by our people Lady Dedlock and the

        rest--"you must remember that you are not dealing with the general

        public; you must hit our people in their weakest place, and their

        weakest place is such a place."  "To make this article go down,

        gentlemen," say Sheen and Gloss, the mercers, to their friends the

        manufacturers, "you must come to us, because we know where to have

        the fashionable people, and we can make it fashionable."  "If you

        want to get this print upon the tables of my high connexion, sir,"

        says Mr. Sladdery, the librarian, "or if you want to get this dwarf

        or giant into the houses of my high connexion, sir, or if you want

        to secure to this entertainment the patronage of my high connexion,

        sir, you must leave it, if you please, to me, for I have been

        accustomed to study the leaders of my high connexion, sir, and I

        may tell you without vanity that I can turn them round my finger"--

        in which Mr. Sladdery, who is an honest man, does not exaggerate at

        all.
 
 

        Therefore, while Mr. Tulkinghorn may not know what is passing in

        the Dedlock mind at present, it is very possible that he may.
 
 

        "My Lady's cause has been again before the Chancellor, has it, Mr.

        Tulkinghorn?" says Sir Leicester, giving him his hand.
 
 

        "Yes.  It has been on again to-day," Mr. Tulkinghorn replies,

        making one of his quiet bows to my Lady, who is on a sofa near the

        fire, shading her face with a hand-screen.
 
 

        "It would be useless to ask," says my Lady with the dreariness of

        the place in Lincolnshire still upon her, "whether anything has

        been done."
 
 

        "Nothing that YOU would call anything has been done to-day,"

        replies Mr. Tulkinghorn.
 
 

        "Nor ever will be," says my Lady.
 
 

        Sir Leicester has no objection to an interminable Chancery suit.

        It is a slow, expensive, British, constitutional kind of thing.  To

        be sure, he has not a vital interest in the suit in question, her

        part in which was the only property my Lady brought him; and he has

        a shadowy impression that for his name--the name of Dedlock--to be

        in a cause, and not in the title of that cause, is a most

        ridiculous accident.  But he regards the Court of Chancery, even if

        it should involve an occasional delay of justice and a trifling

        amount of confusion, as a something devised in conjunction with a

        variety of other somethings by the perfection of human wisdom for

        the eternal settlement (humanly speaking) of everything.  And he is

        upon the whole of a fixed opinion that to give the sanction of his

        countenance to any complaints respecting it would be to encourage

        some person in the lower classes to rise up somewhere--like Wat

        Tyler.
 
 

        "As a few fresh affidavits have been put upon the file," says Mr.

        Tulkinghorn, "and as they are short, and as I proceed upon the

        troublesome principle of begging leave to possess my clients with

        any new proceedings in a cause"--cautious man Mr. Tulkinghorn,

        taking no more responsibility than necessary--"and further, as I

        see you are going to Paris, I have brought them in my pocket."
 
 

        (Sir Leicester was going to Paris too, by the by, but the delight

        of the fashionable intelligence was in his Lady.)
 
 

        Mr. Tulkinghorn takes out his papers, asks permission to place them

        on a golden talisman of a table at my Lady's elbow, puts on his

        spectacles, and begins to read by the light of a shaded lamp.
 
 

        "'In Chancery.  Between John Jarndyce--'"
 
 

        My Lady interrupts, requesting him to miss as many of the formal

        horrors as he can.
 
 

        Mr. Tulkinghorn glances over his spectacles and begins again lower

        down.  My Lady carelessly and scornfully abstracts her attention.

        Sir Leicester in a great chair looks at the file and appears to

        have a stately liking for the legal repetitions and prolixities as

        ranging among the national bulwarks.  It happens that the fire is

        hot where my Lady sits and that the hand-screen is more beautiful

        than useful, being priceless but small.  My Lady, changing her

        position, sees the papers on the table--looks at them nearer--looks

        at them nearer still--asks impulsively, "Who copied that?"
 
 

        Mr. Tulkinghorn stops short, surprised by my Lady's animation and

        her unusual tone.
 
 

        "Is it what you people call law-hand?" she asks, looking full at

        him in her careless way again and toying with her screen.
 
 

        "Not quite.  Probably"--Mr. Tulkinghorn examines it as he speaks--

        "the legal character which it has was acquired after the original

        hand was formed.  Why do you ask?"
 
 

        "Anything to vary this detestable monotony.  Oh, go on, do!"
 
 

        Mr. Tulkinghorn reads again.  The heat is greater; my Lady screens

        her face.  Sir Leicester dozes, starts up suddenly, and cries, "Eh?

        What do you say?"
 
 

        "I say I am afraid," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, who had risen hastily,

        "that Lady Dedlock is ill."
 
 

        "Faint," my Lady murmurs with white lips, "only that; but it is

        like the faintness of death.  Don't speak to me.  Ring, and take me

        to my room!"
 
 

        Mr. Tulkinghorn retires into another chamber; bells ring, feet

        shuffle and patter, silence ensues.  Mercury at last begs Mr.

        Tulkinghorn to return.
 
 

        "Better now," quoth Sir Leicester, motioning the lawyer to sit down

        and read to him alone.  "I have been quite alarmed.  I never knew

        my Lady swoon before.  But the weather is extremely trying, and she

        really has been bored to death down at our place in Lincolnshire."