But they find that however dejected and ill he is, he brightens when a quiet pretence is made of looking at the fires in her rooms and being sure that everything is ready to receive her.
Poor pretence as it is, these allusions to her being expected keep up hope within him.
Midnight comes, and with it the same blank.
The carriages in the streets are few, and other late sounds in that neighbourhood there are none, unless a man so very nomadically drunk as to stray into the frigid zone goes brawling and bellowing along the pavement.
Upon this wintry night it is so still that listening to the intense silence is like looking at intense darkness.
If any distant sound be audible in this case, it departs through the gloom like a feeble light in that, and all is heavier than before.
The corporation of servants are dismissed to bed (not unwilling to go, for they were up all last night), and only Mrs. Rouncewell and George keep watch in Sir Leicester's room.
As the night lags tardily on--or rather when it seems to stop altogether, at between two and three o'clock--they find a restless craving on him to know more about the weather, now he cannot see it.
Hence George, patrolling regularly every half-hour to the rooms so carefully looked after, extends his march to the hall-door, looks about him, and brings back the best report he can make of the worst of nights, the sleet still falling and even the stone footways lying ankle- deep in icy sludge.
Volumnia, in her room up a retired landing on the staircase--the second turning past the end of the carving and gilding, a cousinly room containing a fearful abortion of a portrait of Sir Leicester banished for its crimes, and commanding in the day a solemn yard planted with dried-up shrubs like antediluvian specimens of black tea--is a prey to horrors of many kinds.
Not last nor least among them, possibly, is a horror of what may befall her little income in the event, as she expresses it, "of anything happening" to Sir Leicester. Anything, in this sense, meaning one thing only; and that the last thing that can happen to the consciousness of any baronet in the known world.
An effect of these horrors is that Volumnia finds she cannot go to bed in her own room or sit by the fire in her own room, but must come forth with her fair head tied up in a profusion of shawl, and her fair form enrobed in drapery, and parade the mansion like a ghost, particularly haunting the rooms, warm and luxurious, prepared for one who still does not return.
Solitude under such circumstances being not to be thought of, Volumnia is attended by her maid, who, impressed from her own bed for that purpose, extremely cold, very sleepy, and generally an injured maid as condemned by circumstances to take office with a cousin, when she had resolved to be maid to nothing less than ten thousand a year, has not a sweet expression of countenance.
The periodical visits of the trooper to these rooms, however, in the course of his patrolling is an assurance of protection and company both to mistress and maid, which renders them very acceptable in the small hours of the night.
Whenever he is heard advancing, they both make some little decorative preparation to receive him; at other times they divide their watches into short scraps of oblivion and dialogues not wholly free from acerbity, as to whether Miss Dedlock, sitting with her feet upon the fender, was or was not falling into the fire when rescued (to her great displeasure) by her guardian genius the maid.
"How is Sir Leicester now, Mr. George?" inquires Volumnia, adjusting her cowl over her head.
"Why, Sir Leicester is much the same, miss.
He is very low and ill, and he even wanders a little sometimes."
"Has he asked for me?" inquires Volumnia tenderly.
"Why, no, I can't say he has, miss. Not within my hearing, that is to say."
"This is a truly sad time, Mr. George."
"It is indeed, miss.
Hadn't you better go to bed?"
"You had a deal better go to bed, Miss Dedlock," quoth the maid sharply.
But Volumnia answers No! No!
She may be asked for, she may be wanted at a moment's notice.
She never should forgive herself "if anything was to happen" and she was not on the spot.
She declines to enter on the question, mooted by the maid, how the spot comes to be there, and not in her room (which is nearer to Sir Leicester's), but staunchly declares that on the spot she will remain.
Volumnia further makes a merit of not having "closed an eye"--as if she had twenty or thirty--though it is hard to reconcile this statement with her having most indisputably opened two within five minutes.
But when it comes to four o'clock, and still the same blank, Volumnia's constancy begins to fail her, or rather it begins to strengthen, for she now considers that it is her duty to be ready for the morrow, when much may be expected of her, that, in fact, howsoever anxious to remain upon the spot, it may be required of her, as an act of self-devotion, to desert the spot.
So when the trooper reappears with his,
"Hadn't you better go to bed, miss?" and when the maid protests, more sharply than before,
"You had a deal better go to bed, Miss Dedlock!" she meekly rises and says,
"Do with me what you think best!"
Mr. George undoubtedly thinks it best to escort her on his arm to the door of her cousinly chamber, and the maid as undoubtedly thinks it best to hustle her into bed with mighty little ceremony.
Accordingly, these steps are taken; and now the trooper, in his rounds, has the house to himself.
There is no improvement in the weather.
From the portico, from the eaves, from the parapet, from every ledge and post and pillar, drips the thawed snow.
It has crept, as if for shelter, into the lintels of the great door--under it, into the corners of the windows, into every chink and crevice of retreat, and there wastes and dies.
It is falling still; upon the roof, upon the skylight, even through the skylight, and drip, drip, drip, with the regularity of the Ghost's Walk, on the stone floor below.
The trooper, his old recollections awakened by the solitary grandeur of a great house--no novelty to him once at Chesney Wold-- goes up the stairs and through the chief rooms, holding up his light at arm's length.
Thinking of his varied fortunes within the last few weeks, and of his rustic boyhood, and of the two periods of his life so strangely brought together across the wide intermediate space; thinking of the murdered man whose image is fresh in his mind; thinking of the lady who has disappeared from these very rooms and the tokens of whose recent presence are all here; thinking of the master of the house upstairs and of the foreboding,
"Who will tell him!" he looks here and looks there, and reflects how he MIGHT see something now, which it would tax his boldness to walk up to, lay his hand upon, and prove to be a fancy.
But it is all blank, blank as the darkness above and below, while he goes up the great staircase again, blank as the oppressive silence.
"All is still in readiness, George Rouncewell?"
"Quite orderly and right, Sir Leicester."
"No word of any kind?"
The trooper shakes his head.
"No letter that can possibly have been overlooked?"
But he knows there is no such hope as that and lays his head down without looking for an answer.