The Solitary House (160 page)

Sir Leicester, leaning back in his chair, and grasping the elbows, sits looking at him with a stony face.

“Now, Sir Leicester Dedlock,” proceeds Mr. Bucket, “thus preparing you, let me beg of you not to trouble your mind, for a moment, as to anything having come to
my
knowledge. I know so much about so many characters, high and low, that a piece of information more or less, don’t signify a straw. I don’t suppose there’s a move on the board that would surprise me; and as to this or that move having taken place, why my knowing it is no odds at all; any possible move whatever (provided it’s in a wrong direction) being a probable move according to my experience. Therefore, what I say to you, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, is, don’t you go and let yourself be put out of the way, because of my knowing anything of your family affairs.”

“I thank you for your preparation,” returns Sir Leicester, after a silence, without moving hand, foot, or feature; “which I hope is not necessary, though I give it credit for being well intended. Be so good as to go on. Also”; Sir Leicester seems to
shrink in the shadow of his figure; “also, to take a seat, if you have no objection.”

None at all. Mr. Bucket brings a chair and diminishes his shadow. “Now, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, with this short preface I come to the point. Lady Dedlock—”

Sir Leicester raises himself in his seat, and stares at him fiercely. Mr. Bucket brings the finger into play as an emollient.

“Lady Dedlock, you see she’s universally admired. That’s what her Ladyship is; she’s universally admired,” says Mr. Bucket.

“I would greatly prefer, officer,” Sir Leicester returns, stiffly, “my Lady’s name being entirely omitted from this discussion.”

“So would I, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, but—it’s impossible.”

“Impossible?”

Mr. Bucket shakes his relentless head.

“Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, it’s altogether impossible. What I have got to say is about her Ladyship. She is the pivot it all turns on.”

“Officer,” retorts Sir Leicester, with a fiery eye, and a quivering lip, “you know your duty. Do your duty; but be careful not to overstep it. I would not suffer it. I would not endure it. You bring my Lady’s name into this communication, upon your responsibility—upon your responsibility. My Lady’s name is not a name for common persons to trifle with!”

“Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, I say what I must say; and no more.”

“I hope it may prove so. Very well. Go on. Go on, sir!”

Glancing at the angry eyes which now avoid him, and at the angry figure trembling from head to foot, yet striving to be still, Mr. Bucket feels his way with his forefinger, and in a low voice proceeds.

“Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, it becomes my duty to tell you that the deceased Mr. Tulkinghorn long entertained mistrusts and suspicions of Lady Dedlock.”

“If he had dared to breathe them to me, sir—which he never did—I would have killed him myself!” exclaims Sir Leicester, striking his hand upon the table. But, in the very heat and fury
of the act, he stops, fixed by the knowing eyes of Mr. Bucket, whose forefinger is slowly going, and who, with mingled confidence and patience, shakes his head.

“Sir Leicester Dedlock, the deceased Mr. Tulkinghorn was deep and close; and what he fully had in his mind in the very beginning, I can’t quite take upon myself to say. But I know from his lips, that he long ago suspected Lady Dedlock of having discovered, through the sight of some handwriting—in this very house, and when you yourself, Sir Leicester Dedlock, were present—the existence, in great poverty, of a certain person, who had been her lover before you courted her, and who ought to have been her husband”; Mr. Bucket stops and deliberately repeats, “ought to have been her husband; not a doubt about it. I know from his lips, that when that person soon afterwards died, he suspected Lady Dedlock of visiting his wretched lodging, and his wretched grave, alone and in secret. I know from my own inquiries, and through my eyes and ears, that Lady Dedlock did make such visit, in the dress of her own maid; for the deceased Mr. Tulkinghorn employed me to reckon up her Ladyship—if you’ll excuse my making use of the term we commonly employ—and I reckoned her up, so far, completely. I confronted the maid, in the chambers in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, with a witness who had been Lady Dedlock’s guide; and there couldn’t be the shadow of a doubt that she had worn the young woman’s dress, unknown to her. Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, I did endeavour to pave the way a little towards these unpleasant disclosures, yesterday, by saying that very strange things happened even in high families sometimes. All this, and more, has happened in your own family, and to and through your own Lady. It’s my belief that the deceased Mr. Tulkinghorn followed up these inquiries to the hour of his death; and that he and Lady Dedlock even had bad blood between them upon the matter, that very night. Now, only you put that to Lady Dedlock, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet; and ask her Ladyship whether, even after he had left here, she didn’t go down to his chambers with the intention of saying something further to him, dressed in a loose black mantle with a deep fringe to it.”

Sir Leicester sits like a statue, gazing at the cruel finger that is probing the life-blood of his heart.

“You put that to her Ladyship, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, from me, Inspector Bucket of the Detective. And if her Ladyship makes any difficulty about admitting of it, you tell her that it’s no use; that Inspector Bucket knows it, and knows that she passed the soldier as you called him (though he’s not in the army now), and knows that she knows she passed him, on the staircase. Now, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, why do I relate all this?”

Sir Leicester, who has covered his face with his hands, uttering a single groan, requests him to pause for a moment. By and by he takes his hands away; and so preserves his dignity and outward calmness, though there is no more colour in his face than in his white hair, that Mr. Bucket is a little awed by him. Something frozen and fixed is upon his manner, over and above its usual shell of haughtiness; and Mr. Bucket soon detects an unusual slowness in his speech, with now and then a curious trouble in beginning, which occasions him to utter inarticulate sounds. With such sounds, he now breaks silence; soon, however, controlling himself to say, that he does not comprehend why a gentleman so faithful and zealous as the late Mr. Tulkinghorn should have communicated to him nothing of this painful, this distressing, this unlooked-for, this overwhelming, this incredible intelligence.

“Again, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet,” returns Mr. Bucket, “put it to her Ladyship to clear that up. Put it to her Ladyship, if you think it right, from Inspector Bucket of the Detective. You’ll find, or I’m much mistaken, that the deceased Mr. Tulkinghorn had the intention of communicating the whole to you, as soon as he considered it ripe; and further, that he had given her Ladyship so to understand. Why, he might have been going to reveal it the very morning when I examined the body! You don’t know what I’m going to say and do, five minutes from this present time, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet; and supposing I was to be picked off now, you might wonder why I hadn’t done it, don’t you see?”

True. Sir Leicester, avoiding, with some trouble, those obtrusive sounds, says, “True.” At this juncture, a considerable
noise of voices is heard in the hall. Mr. Bucket, after listening, goes to the library-door, softly unlocks and opens it, and listens again. Then he draws in his head, and whispers, hurriedly, but composedly, “Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, this unfortunate family affair has taken air, as I expected it might; the deceased Mr. Tulkinghorn being cut down so sudden. The chance to hush it is, to let in these people now in a wrangle with your footmen. Would you mind sitting quiet—on the family account—while I reckon ’em up? And would you just throw in a nod, when I seem to ask you for it?”

Sir Leicester indistinctly answers, “Officer. The best you can, the best you can!” and Mr. Bucket, with a nod and a sagacious crook of the forefinger, slips down into the hall, where the voices quickly die away. He is not long in returning, a few paces ahead of Mercury, and a brother deity also powdered and in peach-blossomed smalls, who bear between them a chair in which is an incapable old man. Another man and two women come behind. Directing the pitching of the chair, in an affable and easy manner, Mr. Bucket dismisses the Mercuries, and locks the door again. Sir Leicester looks on at this invasion of the sacred precincts with an icy stare.

“Now, perhaps you may know me, ladies and gentlemen,” says Mr. Bucket, in a confidential voice. “I am Inspector Bucket of the Detective, I am; and this,” producing the tip of his convenient little staff from his breast-pocket, “is my authority. Now, you wanted to see Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet. Well! You do see him; and, mind you, it ain’t every one as is admitted to that honour. Your name, old gentleman, is Smallweed; that’s what your name is; I know it well.”

“Well, and you never heard any harm of it!” cries Mr. Smallweed in a shrill loud voice.

“You don’t happen to know why they killed the pig, do you?” retorts Mr. Bucket, with a steadfast look, but without loss of temper.

“No!”

“Why, they killed him,” says Mr. Bucket, “on account of his having so much cheek. Don’t
you
get into the same position,
because it isn’t worthy of you. You ain’t in the habit of conversing with a deaf person, are you?”

“Yes,” snarls Mr. Smallweed, “my wife’s deaf.”

“That accounts for your pitching your voice so high. But as she ain’t here, just pitch it an octave or two lower, will you, and I’ll not only be obliged to you, but it’ll do you more credit,” says Mr. Bucket. “This other gentleman is in the preaching line, I think?”

“Name of Chadband,” Mr. Smallweed puts in, speaking henceforth in a much lower key.

“Once had a friend and brother sergeant of the same name,” says Mr. Bucket, offering his hand, “and consequently feel a liking for it. Mrs. Chadband, no doubt?”

“And Mrs. Snagsby,” Mr. Smallweed introduces.

“Husband a law-stationer, and a friend of my own,” says Mr. Bucket. “Love him like a brother!—Now, what’s up?”

“Do you mean what business have we come upon?” Mr. Smallweed asks, a little dashed by the suddenness of this turn.

“Ah! You know what I mean. Let us hear what it’s all about in presence of Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet. Come.”

Mr. Smallweed, beckoning Mr. Chadband, takes a moment’s counsel with him in a whisper. Mr. Chadband, expressing a considerable amount of oil from the pores of his forehead and the palms of his hands, says aloud, “Yes. You first!” and retires to his former place.

“I was the client and friend of Mr. Tulkinghorn,” pipes Grandfather Smallweed, then; “I did business with him. I was useful to him, and he was useful to me. Krook, dead and gone, was my brother-in-law. He was own brother to a brimstone magpie—leastways Mrs. Smallweed. I come into Krook’s property. I examined all his papers and all his effects. They were all dug out under my eyes. There was a bundle of letters belonging to a dead and gone lodger, as was hid away at the back of a shelf in the side of Lady Jane’s bed—his cat’s bed. He hid all manner of things away, everywheres. Mr. Tulkinghorn wanted ’em and got ’em, but I looked ’em over first. I’m a man of business, and I took a squint at ’em. They were letters from the lodger’s sweetheart, and she signed Honoria. Dear me, that’s not a common
name, Honoria, is it? There’s no lady in this house that signs Honoria, is there? O no, I don’t think so! O no, I don’t think so! And not in the same hand, perhaps? O no, I don’t think so!”

Here Mr. Smallweed, seized with a fit of coughing in the midst of his triumph, breaks off to ejaculate, “O dear me! O Lord! I’m shaken all to pieces!”

“Now, when you’re ready,” says Mr. Bucket, after awaiting his recovery, “to come to anything that concerns Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, here the gentleman sits, you know.”

“Haven’t I come to it, Mr. Bucket?” cries Grandfather Smallweed. “Isn’t the gentleman concerned yet? Not with Captain Hawdon, and his ever affectionate Honoria, and their child into the bargain? Come, then, I want to know where those letters are. That concerns me, if it don’t concern Sir Leicester Dedlock. I will know where they are. I won’t have ’em disappear so quietly. I handed ’em over to my friend and solicitor, Mr. Tulkinghorn; not to anybody else.”

“Why, he paid you for them, you know, and handsome too,” says Mr. Bucket.

“I don’t care for that. I want to know who’s got ’em. And I tell you what we want—what we all here want, Mr. Bucket. We want more painstaking and search-making into this murder. We know where the interest and the motive was, and you have not done enough. If George the vagabond dragoon had any hand in it, he was only an accomplice, and was set on. You know what I mean as well as any man.”

“Now I tell you what,” says Mr. Bucket, instantaneously altering his manner, coming close to him, and communicating an extraordinary fascination to the forefinger, “I am damned if I am a-going to have my case spoilt, or interfered with, or anticipated by so much as half a second of time, by any human being in creation.
You
want more painstaking and search-making?
You
do? Do you see this hand, and do you think that
I
don’t know the right time to stretch it out, and put it on the arm that fired that shot?”

Such is the dread power of the man, and so terribly evident it is that he makes no idle boast, that Mr. Smallweed begins to
apologize. Mr. Bucket, dismissing his sudden anger, checks him.

“The advice I give you, is, don’t you trouble your head about the murder. That’s my affair. You keep half an eye on the newspapers; and I shouldn’t wonder if you was to read something about it before long, if you look sharp. I know my business, and that’s all I’ve got to say to you on that subject. Now about those letters. You want to know who’s got ’em. I don’t mind telling you.
I
have got ’em. Is that the packet?”

Mr. Smallweed looks, with greedy eyes, at the little bundle Mr. Bucket produces from a mysterious part of his coat, and identifies it as the same.