She breathes quickly and heavily, but she stands as unflinchingly as ever he has seen her in the midst of her grandest company.
“I declare to you, Lady Dedlock, that with anything short of this case that I have, I would as soon have hoped to root up by means of my own strength and my own hands the oldest tree on this estate as to shake your hold upon Sir Leicester and Sir Leicester’s trust and confidence in you. And even now, with this case, I hesitate. Not that he could doubt (that, even with him, is impossible), but that nothing can prepare him for the blow.”
“Not my flight?” she returned. “Think of it again.”
“Your flight, Lady Dedlock, would spread the whole truth, and a hundred times the whole truth, far and wide. It would be impossible to save the family credit for a day. It is not to be thought of.”
There is a quiet decision in his reply which admits of no remonstrance.
“When I speak of Sir Leicester being the sole consideration, he and the family credit are one. Sir Leicester and the baronetcy, Sir Leicester and Chesney Wold, Sir Leicester and his ancestors and his patrimony”— Mr. Tulkinghorn very dry here—“are, I need not say to you, Lady Dedlock, inseparable.”
“Go on!”
“Therefore,” says Mr. Tulkinghorn, pursuing his case in his jog-trot style, “I have much to consider. This is to be hushed up if it can be. How can it be, if Sir Leicester is driven out of his wits or laid upon a deathbed? If I inflicted this shock upon him tomorrow morning, how could the immediate change in him be accounted for? What could have caused it? What could have divided you? Lady Dedlock, the wall-chalking and the street-crying would come on directly, and you are to remember that it