“And what kind of man,” my Lady asks, “was this deplorable creature?”

“Very difficult to say,” returns the lawyer, shaking his head.  “He had lived so wretchedly and was so neglected, with his gipsy colour and his wild black hair and beard, that I should have considered him the commonest of the common.  The surgeon had a notion that he had once been something better, both in appearance and condition.”

“What did they call the wretched being?”

“They called him what he had called himself, but no one knew his name.”

“Not even any one who had attended on him?”

“No one had attended on him.  He was found dead.  In fact, I found him.”

“Without any clue to anything more?”

“Without any; there was,” says the lawyer meditatively, “an old portmanteau, but—­No, there were no papers.”

During the utterance of every word of this short dialogue, Lady Dedlock and Mr. Tulkinghorn, without any other alteration in their customary deportment, have looked very steadily at one another—­as was natural, perhaps, in the discussion of so unusual a subject.  Sir Leicester has looked at the fire, with the general expression of the Dedlock on the staircase.  The story being told, he renews his stately protest, saying that as it is quite clear that no association in my Lady’s mind can possibly be traceable to this poor wretch (unless he was a begging-letter writer), he trusts to hear no more about a subject so far removed from my Lady’s station.

“Certainly, a collection of horrors,” says my Lady, gathering up her mantles and furs, “but they interest one for the moment!  Have the kindness, Mr. Tulkinghorn, to open the door for me.”

Mr. Tulkinghorn does so with deference and holds it open while she passes out.  She passes close to him, with her usual fatigued manner and insolent grace.  They meet again at dinner—­again, next day—­ again, for many days in succession.  Lady Dedlock is always the same exhausted deity, surrounded by worshippers, and terribly liable to be bored to death, even while presiding at her own shrine.  Mr. Tulkinghorn is always the same speechless repository of noble confidences, so oddly but of place and yet so perfectly at home.  They appear to take as little note of one another as any two people enclosed within the same walls could.  But whether each evermore watches and suspects the other, evermore mistrustful of some great reservation; whether each is evermore prepared at all points for the other, and never to be taken unawares; what each would give to know how much the other knows—­all this is hidden, for the time, in their own hearts.

CHAPTER XIII

Esther’s Narrative