Page 1106 - bleak-house

his chair, and walks a few steps, supporting himself by the
table. Then he stops, and with more of those inarticulate
sounds, lifts up his eyes and seems to stare at something.
Heaven knows what he sees. The green, green woods of
Chesney Wold, the noble house, the pictures of his forefa-
thers, strangers defacing them, officers of police coarsely
handling his most precious heirlooms, thousands of fingers
pointing at him, thousands of faces sneering at him. But if
such shadows flit before him to his bewilderment, there is
one other shadow which he can name with something like
distinctness even yet and to which alone he addresses his
tearing of his white hair and his extended arms.
It is she in association with whom, saving that she has
been for years a main fibre of the root of his dignity and
pride, he has never had a selfish thought. It is she whom he
has loved, admired, honoured, and set up for the world to
respect. It is she who, at the core of all the constrained for-
malities and conventionalities of his life, has been a stock of
living tenderness and love, susceptible as nothing else is of
being struck with the agony he feels. He sees her, almost to
the exclusion of himself, and cannot bear to look upon her
cast down from the high place she has graced so well.
And even to the point of his sinking on the ground,
oblivious of his suffering, he can yet pronounce her name
with something like distinctness in the midst of those in-
trusive sounds, and in a tone of mourning and compassion
rather than reproach.

1106 Bleak House