Chapter 66

Down In Lincolnshire

There is a hush upon Chesney Wold in these altered days,

as there is upon a portion of the family history. The story

goes, that Sir Leicester paid some who could have spoken

out, to hold their peace; but it is a lame story, feebly whispering

and creeping about, and any brighter spark of life it shows soon

dies away. It is known for certain that the handsome Lady Dedlock

lies in the mausoleum in the park, where the trees arch darkly

overhead, and the owl is heard at night making the woods ring;

but whence she was brought home, to be laid among the echoes of

that solitary place, or how she died, is all mystery. Some of her old

friends, principally to be found among the peachy-cheeked

charmers with the skeleton throats, did once occasionally say, as

they toyed in a ghastly manner with large fans—like charmers

reduced to flirting with grim Death, after losing all their other

beaux—did once occasionally say, when the World assembled

together, that they wondered the ashes of the Dedlocks, entombed

in the mausoleum, never rose against the profanation of her

company. But the dead-and-gone Dedlocks take it very calmly,

and have never been known to object.

Up from among the fern in the hollow, and winding by the

bridle-road among the trees, comes sometimes to this lonely spot

the sound of horses’ hoofs. Then may be seen Sir Leicester—

invalided, bent, and almost blind, but of worthy presence yet—

riding with a stalwart man beside him, constant to his bridle-rein.

When they come to a certain spot before the mausoleum door, Sir

Leicester’s accustomed horse stops of his own accord, and Sir

Leicester, pulling off his hat, is still for a few moments before they

ride away.

War rages yet with the audacious Boythorn, though at

uncertain intervals, and now hotly, and now coolly; flickering like

an unsteady fire. The truth is said to be, that when Sir Leicester

came down to Lincolnshire for good, Mr Boythorn showed a

manifest desire to abandon his right of way, and do whatever Sir

Leicester would: which Sir Leicester, conceiving to be a

condescension to his illness or misfortune, took in such high

dudgeon, and was so magnificently aggrieved by, that Mr

Boythorn found himself under the necessity of committing a

flagrant trespass to restore his neighbour to himself. Similarly Mr

Boythorn continues to post tremendous placards on the disputed

thoroughfare, and (with his bird upon his head) to hold forth

vehemently against Sir Leicester in the sanctuary of his own

home; similarly, also, he defies him as of old in the little church, by

testifying a bland unconsciousness of his existence. But it is

whispered that when he is most ferocious towards his old foe, he is

really most considerate; and that Sir Leicester, in the dignity of

being implacable, little supposes how much he is humoured. As

little does he think how near together he and his antagonist have

suffered, in the fortunes of two sisters, and his antagonist, who

knows it now, is not the man to tell him. So the quarrel goes on to

the satisfaction of both.

In one of the lodges of the park; that lodge within sight of the

house where, once upon a time, when the waters were out down at

Lincolnshire, my Lady used to see the Keeper’s child; the stalwart man, the trooper formerly, is housed. Some relics of his old calling

hang upon the walls, and these it is the chosen recreation of a little

lame man about the stable-yard to keep gleaming bright. A busy

little man he always is, in the polishing at harness-house doors, of

stirrup-irons, bits, curb-chains, harness-bosses, anything in the

way of a stable-yard that will take a polish: leading a life of friction.

A shaggy little damaged man, withal, not unlike an old dog of some

mongrel breed, who has been considerably knocked about. He

answers to the name of Phil.

A goodly sight it is to see the grand old housekeeper (harder of

hearing now) going to church on the arm of her son, and to

observe—which few do, for the house is scant of company in these

times—the relations of both towards Sir Leicester, and his

towards them. They have visitors in the high summer weather,

when a grey cloak and umbrella, unknown to Chesney Wold at

other periods, are seen among the leaves; when two young ladies

are occasionally found gambolling, in sequestered saw-pits, and

such nooks of the park; and when the smoke of two pipes wreathes

away into the fragrant evening air, from the trooper’s door. Then

is a fife heard trolling within the lodge on the inspiring topic of the

British Grenadiers; and, as the evening closes in, a gruff inflexible

voice is heard to say, while two men pace together up and down,

“But I never own to it before the old girl. Discipline must be

maintained.”

The greater part of the house is shut up, and it is a show-house

no longer; yet Sir Leicester holds his shrunken state in the long

drawing-room for all that, and reposes in his old place before my

Lady’s picture. Closed in by night with broad screens, and

illumined only in that part, the light of the drawing-room seems gradually contracting and dwindling until it shall be no more. A

little more, in truth, and it will be all extinguished for Sir

Leicester; and the damp door in the mausoleum which shuts so

tight, and looks so obdurate, will have opened and received him.

Volumnia, growing with the flight of time pinker as to the red in

her face, and yellower as to the white, reads to Sir Leicester in the

long evenings, and is driven to various artifices to conceal her

yawns: of which the chief and most efficacious is the insertion of

the pearl necklace between her rosy lips. Longwinded treatises on

the Buffy and Boodle question, showing how Buffy is immaculate

and Boodle villainous, and how the country is lost by being all

Boodle and no Buffy, or saved by being all Buffy and no Boodle (it

must be one of the two, and cannot be anything else), are the

staple of her reading. Sir Leicester is not particular what it is, and

does not appear to follow it very closely; further than that he

always comes broad awake the moment Volumnia ventures to

leave off, and sonorously repeating her last word, begs with some

displeasure to know if she finds herself fatigued? However,

Volumnia, in the course of her bird-like hopping about and

pecking at papers, has lighted on a memorandum concerning

herself, in the event of “anything happening” to her kinsman,

which is handsome compensation for an extensive course of

reading, and holds even the dragon Boredom at bay.

The cousins generally are rather shy of Chesney Wold in its

dulness, but take to it a little in the shooting season, when guns

are heard in the plantations, and a few scattered beaters and

keepers wait at the old places of appointment, for low-spirited

twos and threes of cousins. The debilitated cousin, more

debilitated by the deariness of the place, gets into a fearful state of depression, groaning under penitential sofa-pillows in his gunless

hours, and protesting that such fernal old jail’s—nough t’sew fler

up—frever.

The only great occasions for Volumnia, in this changed aspect

of the place in Lincolnshire, are those occasions, rare and widely

separated, when something is to be done for the county, or the

country, in the way of gracing a public ball. Then, indeed, does the

tuckered slyph come out in fairy form, and proceed with joy under

cousinly escort to the exhausted old assembly-room, fourteen

heavy miles off; which, during three hundred and sixty-four days

and nights of every ordinary year, is a kind of Antipodean lumber-

room, full of old chairs and tables, upside down. Then, indeed,

does she captivate all hearts by her condescension, by her girlish

vivacity, and by her skipping about as in the days when the

hideous old general with the mouth too full of teeth, had not cut

one of them at two guineas each. Then does she twirl and twine, a

pastoral nymph of good family, through the mazes of the dance.

Then do the swains appear with tea, with lemonade, with

sandwiches, with homage. Then is she kind and cruel, stately and

unassuming, various, beautifully wilful. Then is there a singular

kind of parallel between her and the little glass chandeliers of

another age, embellishing that assembly-room; which, with their

meagre stems, their spare little drops, their disappointing knobs

were no drops are, their bare little stalks from which knobs and

drops have both departed, and their little feeble prismatic

twinkling, all seem Volumnias.

For the rest, Lincolnshire life to Volumnia is a vast blank of

overgrown house looking out upon trees, sighing, wringing their

hands, bowing their heads, and casting their tears upon the window-panes in monotonous depression. A labyrinth of

grandeur, less the property of an old family of human beings and

their ghostly likenesses, than of an old family of echoings and

thunderings which start out of their hundred graves at every

sound, and go resounding through the building. A waste of unused

passages and staircases, in which to drop a comb upon a bedroom

floor at night is to send a stealthy footfall on an errand through the

house. A place where few people care to go about alone; where a

maid screams if an ash drops from the fire, takes to crying at all

times and seasons, becomes the victim of a low disorder of the

spirits, and gives warning and departs.

Thus Chesney Wold. With so much of itself abandoned to

darkness and vacancy; with so little change under the summer

shining or the wintry lowering; so sombre and motionless

always—no flag flying now by day, no rows of light sparkling by

night; with no family to come and go, no visitors to be the souls of

pale cold shapes of rooms, no stir of life about it;—passion and

pride, even to the stranger’s eye, have died away from the place of

Lincolnshire, and yielded it to dull repose.

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