It is at the bottom of three-fourths of their troubles. So I thought when Sir Leicester married, and so I always have thought since. No more about that. I must now be guided by circumstances. In the meanwhile I must beg you to keep your own counsel, and I will keep mine.”
“I am to drag my present life on, holding its pains at your pleasure, day by day?” she asks, still looking at the distant sky.
“Yes, I am afraid so, Lady Dedlock.”
“It is necessary, you think, that I should be so tied to the stake?”
“I am sure that what I recommend is necessary.”
“I am to remain upon this gaudy platform, on which my miserable deception has been so long acted, and it is to fall beneath me when you give the signal?” she says slowly.
“Not without notice, Lady Dedlock. I shall take no step without forewarning you.”
She asks all her questions as if she were repeating them from memory, or calling them over in her sleep.
“We are to meet as usual?”
“Precisely as usual, if you please.”
“And I am to hide my guilt, as I have done so many years?”
“As you have done so many years. I should not have made that reference myself. Lady Dedlock, but I may now remind you that your secret can be no heavier to you than it was, and is no worse and no better than it was. I know it certainly, but I believe we have never wholly trusted each other.”
She stands absorbed in the same frozen way for some little time, before asking:
“Is there anything more to be said to-night?”
“Why,” Mr. Tulkinghorn returns methodically, as he softly rubs his hands, “I should like to be assured of your acquiescence in my arrangements, Lady Dedlock.”
“You may be assured of it.”
“Good. And I would wish in conclusion to remind you, as a business precaution, in case it should be necessary to recal the fact in any communication with Sir Leicester, that throughout our interview I have expressly stated my sole consideration to be Sir Leicester's feelings and honor, and the family reputation. I should have been happy to have made Lady Dedlock a prominent consideration too, if the case had admitted of it; but unfortunately it does not.”
“I can attest your fidelity, sir.”
Both before and after saying it, she remains absorbed; but at length moves, and turns, unshaken in her natural and acquired presence, towards the door. Mr. Tulkinghorn opens both the doors exactly as he would have done yesterday, or as he would have done ten years ago, and makes his old-fashioned bow as she passes out. It is not an ordinary look that he receives from the handsome face as it goes into the darkness, and it is not an ordinary movement, though a very slight one, that acknowledges his courtesy. But, as he reflects when he is left alone, the woman has been putting no common constraint upon herself.
He would know it all the better, if he saw the woman pacing her own rooms with her hair wildly thrown from her flung back face, her hands
