Jo, is it thou? Well, well! Though a rejected
witness, who “can’t exactly say”
what will be done to him in greater hands than men’s,
thou art not quite in outer darkness. There is
something like a distant ray of light in thy muttered
reason for this: “He wos wery good to me,
he wos!”
On the Watch
It has left off raining down in Lincolnshire at last,
and Chesney Wold has taken heart. Mrs. Rouncewell
is full of hospitable cares, for Sir Leicester and
my Lady are coming home from Paris. The fashionable
intelligence has found it out and communicates the
glad tidings to benighted England. It has also
found out that they will entertain a brilliant and
distinguished circle of the elite of the beau
monde (the fashionable intelligence is weak in
English, but a giant refreshed in French) at the ancient
and hospitable family seat in Lincolnshire.
For the greater honour of the brilliant and distinguished
circle, and of Chesney Wold into the bargain, the
broken arch of the bridge in the park is mended; and
the water, now retired within its proper limits and
again spanned gracefully, makes a figure in the prospect
from the house. The clear, cold sunshine glances
into the brittle woods and approvingly beholds the
sharp wind scattering the leaves and drying the moss.
It glides over the park after the moving shadows
of the clouds, and chases them, and never catches them,
all day. It looks in at the windows and touches
the ancestral portraits with bars and patches of brightness
never contemplated by the painters. Athwart
the picture of my Lady, over the great chimney-piece,
it throws a broad bend-sinister of light that strikes
down crookedly into the hearth and seems to rend it.
Through the same cold sunshine and the same sharp
wind, my Lady and Sir Leicester, in their travelling
chariot (my Lady’s woman and Sir Leicester’s
man affectionate in the rumble), start for home.
With a considerable amount of jingling and whip-cracking,
and many plunging demonstrations on the part of two
bare-backed horses and two centaurs with glazed hats,
jack-boots, and flowing manes and tails, they rattle
out of the yard of the Hotel Bristol in the Place
Vendome and canter between the sun-and-shadow-chequered
colonnade of the Rue de Rivoli and the garden of the
ill-fated palace of a headless king and queen, off
by the Place of Concord, and the Elysian Fields, and
the Gate of the Star, out of Paris.
Sooth to say, they cannot go away too fast, for even
here my Lady Dedlock has been bored to death.
Concert, assembly, opera, theatre, drive, nothing
is new to my Lady under the worn-out heavens.
Only last Sunday, when poor wretches were gay—within
the walls playing with children among the clipped
trees and the statues in the Palace Garden; walking,
a score abreast, in the Elysian Fields, made more
Elysian by performing dogs and wooden horses; between
