There was something so captivating in his light way
of touching these fantastic strings, and he was such
a mirthful child by the side of the graver childhood
we had seen, that he made my guardian smile even as
he turned towards us from a little private talk with
Mrs. Blinder. We kissed Charley, and took her
downstairs with us, and stopped outside the house
to see her run away to her work. I don’t
know where she was going, but we saw her run, such
a little, little creature in her womanly bonnet and
apron, through a covered way at the bottom of the
court and melt into the city’s strife and sound
like a dewdrop in an ocean.
Tom-all-Alone’s
My Lady Dedlock is restless, very restless.
The astonished fashionable intelligence hardly knows
where to have her. To-day she is at Chesney
Wold; yesterday she was at her house in town; to-morrow
she may be abroad, for anything the fashionable intelligence
can with confidence predict. Even Sir Leicester’s
gallantry has some trouble to keep pace with her.
It would have more but that his other faithful ally,
for better and for worse—the gout—darts
into the old oak bed-chamber at Chesney Wold and grips
him by both legs.
Sir Leicester receives the gout as a troublesome demon,
but still a demon of the patrician order. All
the Dedlocks, in the direct male line, through a course
of time during and beyond which the memory of man
goeth not to the contrary, have had the gout.
It can be proved, sir. Other men’s fathers
may have died of the rheumatism or may have taken
base contagion from the tainted blood of the sick
vulgar, but the Dedlock family have communicated something
exclusive even to the levelling process of dying by
dying of their own family gout. It has come
down through the illustrious line like the plate,
or the pictures, or the place in Lincolnshire.
It is among their dignities. Sir Leicester
is perhaps not wholly without an impression, though
he has never resolved it into words, that the angel
of death in the discharge of his necessary duties
may observe to the shades of the aristocracy, “My
lords and gentlemen, I have the honour to present
to you another Dedlock certified to have arrived per
the family gout.”
Hence Sir Leicester yields up his family legs to the
family disorder as if he held his name and fortune
on that feudal tenure. He feels that for a Dedlock
to be laid upon his back and spasmodically twitched
and stabbed in his extremities is a liberty taken
somewhere, but he thinks, “We have all yielded
to this; it belongs to us; it has for some hundreds
of years been understood that we are not to make the
vaults in the park interesting on more ignoble terms;
and I submit myself to the compromise.”
