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 professionally 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.