The house in the city preserved its heavy dulness through all
these transactions, and the invalid within it turned the same unvarying round of
life. Morning, noon, and night, morning, noon, and night, each recurring with
its accompanying monotony, always the same reluctant return of the same
sequences of machinery, like a dragging piece of clockwork.
The wheeled chair had its associated remembrances and reveries, one may
suppose, as every place that is made the station of a human being has. Pictures
of demolished streets and altered houses, as they formerly were when the
occupant of the chair was familiar with them, images of people as they too used
to be, with little or no allowance made for the lapse of time since they were
seen; of these, there must have been many in the long routine of gloomy days. To
stop the clock of busy existence at the hour when we were personally sequestered
from it, to suppose mankind stricken motionless when we were brought to a
stand-still, to be unable to measure the changes beyond our view by any larger
standard than the shrunken one of our own uniform and contracted existence, is
the infirmity of many invalids, and the mental unhealthiness of almost all
recluses.
What scenes and actors the stern woman most reviewed, as she sat from season
to season in her one dark room, none knew but herself. Mr Flintwinch, with his
wry presence brought to bear upon her daily like some eccentric mechanical
force, would perhaps have screwed it out of her, if there had been less
resistance in her; but she was too strong for him. So far as Mistress Affery was
concerned, to regard her liege-lord and her disabled mistress with a face of
blank wonder, to go about the house after dark with her apron over her head,
always to listen for the strange noises and sometimes to hear them, and never to
emerge from her ghostly, dreamy, sleep- waking state, was occupation enough for
her.
There was a fair stroke of business doing, as Mistress Affery made out, for
her husband had abundant occupation in his little office, and saw more people
than had been used to come there for some years. This might easily be, the house
having been long deserted; but he did receive letters, and comers, and keep
books, and correspond. Moreover, he went about to other counting-houses, and to
wharves, and docks, and to the Custom House,' and to Garraway's Coffee House,
and the Jerusalem Coffee House, and on 'Change; so that he was much in and out.
He began, too, sometimes of an evening, when Mrs Clennam expressed no particular
wish for his society, to resort to a tavern in the neighbourhood to look at the
shipping news and closing prices in the evening paper, and even to exchange
Small socialities with mercantile Sea Captains who frequented that
establishment. At some period of every day, he and Mrs Clennam held a council on
matters of business; and it appeared to Affery, who was always groping about,
listening and watching, that the two clever ones were making money.
The state of mind into which Mr Flintwinch's dazed lady had fallen, had now
begun to be so expressed in all her looks and actions that she was held in very
low account by the two clever ones, as a person, never of strong intellect, who
was becoming foolish. Perhaps because her appearance was not of a commercial
cast, or perhaps because it occurred to him that his having taken her to wife
might expose his judgment to doubt in the minds of customers, Mr Flintwinch laid
his commands upon her that she should hold her peace on the subject of her
conjugal relations, and should no longer call him Jeremiah out of the domestic
trio. Her frequent forgetfulness of this admonition intensified her startled
manner, since Mr Flintwinch's habit of avenging himself on her remissness by
making springs after her on the staircase, and shaking her, occasioned her to be
always nervously uncertain when she might be thus waylaid next.
Little Dorrit had finished a long day's work in Mrs Clennam's room, and was
neatly gathering up her shreds and odds and ends before going home. Mr Pancks,
whom Affery had just shown in, was addressing an inquiry to Mrs Clennam on the
subject of her health, coupled with the remark that, 'happening to find himself
in that direction,' he had looked in to inquire, on behalf of his proprietor,
how she found herself. Mrs Clennam, with a deep contraction of her brows, was
looking at him.
'Mr Casby knows,' said she, 'that I am not subject to changes. The change
that I await here is the great change.'
'Indeed, ma'am?' returned Mr Pancks, with a wandering eye towards the figure
of the little seamstress on her knee picking threads and fraying of her work
from the carpet. 'You look nicely, ma'am.'
'I bear what I have to bear,' she answered. 'Do you what you have to do.'
'Thank you, ma'am,' said Mr Pancks, 'such is my endeavour.'
'You are often in this direction, are you not?' asked Mrs Clennam.
'Why, yes, ma'am,' said Pancks, 'rather so lately; I have lately been round
this way a good deal, owing to one thing and another.' 'Beg Mr Casby and his
daughter not to trouble themselves, by deputy, about me. When they wish to see
me, they know I am here to see them. They have no need to trouble themselves to
send. You have no need to trouble yourself to come.' 'Not the least trouble,
ma'am,' said Mr Pancks. 'You really are looking uncommonly nicely, ma'am.'
'Thank you. Good evening.'
The dismissal, and its accompanying finger pointed straight at the door, was
so curt and direct that Mr Pancks did not see his way to prolong his visit. He
stirred up his hair with his sprightliest expression, glanced at the little
figure again, said 'Good evening, ma 'am; don't come down, Mrs Affery, I know
the road to the door,' and steamed out. Mrs Clennam, her chin resting on her
hand, followed him with attentive and darkly distrustful eyes; and Affery stood
looking at her as if she were spell-bound.
Slowly and thoughtfully, Mrs Clennam's eyes turned from the door by which
Pancks had gone out, to Little Dorrit, rising from the carpet. With her chin
drooping more heavily on her hand, and her eyes vigilant and lowering, the sick
woman sat looking at her until she attracted her attention. Little Dorrit
coloured under such a gaze, and looked down. Mrs Clennam still sat intent.
'Little Dorrit,' she said, when she at last broke silence, 'what do you know
of that man?'
'I don't know anything of him, ma'am, except that I have seen him about, and
that he has spoken to me.'
'What has he said to you?'
'I don't understand what he has said, he is so strange. But nothing rough or
disagreeable.'
'Why does he come here to see you?'
'I don't know, ma'am,' said Little Dorrit, with perfect frankness.
'You know that he does come here to see you?'
'I have fancied so,' said Little Dorrit. 'But why he should come here or
anywhere for that, ma'am, I can't think.'
Mrs Clennam cast her eyes towards the ground, and with her strong, set face,
as intent upon a subject in her mind as it had lately been upon the form that
seemed to pass out of her view, sat absorbed. Some minutes elapsed before she
came out of this thoughtfulness, and resumed her hard composure.
Little Dorrit in the meanwhile had been waiting to go, but afraid to disturb
her by moving. She now ventured to leave the spot where she had been standing
since she had risen, and to pass gently round by the wheeled chair. She stopped
at its side to say 'Good night, ma'am.'
Mrs Clennam put out her hand, and laid it on her arm. Little Dorrit, confused
under the touch, stood faltering. Perhaps some momentary recollection of the
story of the Princess may have been in her mind.
'Tell me, Little Dorrit,' said Mrs Clennam, 'have you many friends now?'
'Very few, ma'am. Besides you, only Miss Flora and--one more.'
'Meaning,' said Mrs Clennam, with her unbent finger again pointing to the
door, 'that man?'
'Oh no, ma'am!'
'Some friend of his, perhaps?'
'No ma'am.' Little Dorrit earnestly shook her head. 'Oh no! No one at all
like him, or belonging to him.'
'Well!' said Mrs Clennam, almost smiling. 'It is no affair of mine. I ask,
because I take an interest in you; and because I believe I was your friend when
you had no other who could serve you. Is that so?'
'Yes, ma'am; indeed it is. I have been here many a time when, but for you and
the work you gave me, we should have wanted everything.'
'We,' repeated Mrs Clennam, looking towards the watch, once her dead
husband's, which always lay upon her table. 'Are there many of you?'
'Only father and I, now. I mean, only father and I to keep regularly out of
what we get.'
'Have you undergone many privations? You and your father and who else there
may be of you?' asked Mrs Clennam, speaking deliberately, and meditatively
turning the watch over and over.
'Sometimes it has been rather hard to live,' said Little Dorrit, in her soft
voice, and timid uncomplaining way; 'but I think not harder--as to that--than
many people find it.'
'That's well said!' Mrs Clennam quickly returned. 'That's the truth! You are
a good, thoughtful girl. You are a grateful girl too, or I much mistake you.'
'It is only natural to be that. There is no merit in being that,' said Little
Dorrit. 'I am indeed.' Mrs Clennam, with a gentleness of which the dreaming
Affery had never dreamed her to be capable, drew down the face of her little
seamstress, and kissed her on the forehead. 'Now go, Little Dorrit,' said
she,'or you will be late, poor child!'
In all the dreams Mistress Affery had been piling up since she first became
devoted to the pursuit, she had dreamed nothing more astonishing than this. Her
head ached with the idea that she would find the other clever one kissing Little
Dorrit next, and then the two clever ones embracing each other and dissolving
into tears of tenderness for all mankind. The idea quite stunned her, as she
attended the light footsteps down the stairs, that the house door might be
safely shut.
On opening it to let Little Dorrit out, she found Mr Pancks, instead of
having gone his way, as in any less wonderful place and among less wonderful
phenomena he might have been reasonably expected to do, fluttering up and down
the court outside the house.
The moment he saw Little Dorrit, he passed her briskly, said with his finger
to his nose (as Mrs Affery distinctly heard), 'Pancks the gipsy,
fortune-telling,' and went away. 'Lord save us, here's a gipsy and a
fortune-teller in it now!' cried Mistress Affery. 'What next! She stood at the
open door, staggering herself with this enigma, on a rainy, thundery evening.
The clouds were flying fast, and the wind was coming up in gusts, banging some
neighbouring shutters that had broken loose, twirling the rusty chimney-cowls
and weather-cocks, and rushing round and round a confined adjacent churchyard as
if it had a mind to blow the dead citizens out of their graves. The low thunder,
muttering in all quarters of the sky at once, seemed to threaten vengeance for
this attempted desecration, and to mutter, 'Let them rest! Let them rest!'
Mistress Affery, whose fear of thunder and lightning was only to be equalled
by her dread of the haunted house with a premature and preternatural darkness in
it, stood undecided whether to go in or not, until the question was settled for
her by the door blowing upon her in a violent gust of wind and shutting her out.
'What's to be done now, what's to be done now!' cried Mistress Affery, wringing
her hands in this last uneasy dream of all; 'when she's all alone by herself
inside, and can no more come down to open it than the churchyard dead
themselves!'
In this dilemma, Mistress Affery, with her apron as a hood to keep the rain
off, ran crying up and down the solitary paved enclosure several times. Why she
should then stoop down and look in at the keyhole of the door as if an eye would
open it, it would be difficult to say; but it is none the less what most people
would have done in the same situation, and it is what she did.
From this posture she started up suddenly, with a half scream, feeling
something on her shoulder. It was the touch of a hand; of a man's hand.
The man was dressed like a traveller, in a foraging cap with fur about it,
and a heap of cloak. He looked like a foreigner. He had a quantity of hair and
moustache--jet black, except at the shaggy ends, where it had a tinge of
red--and a high hook nose. He laughed at Mistress Affery's start and cry; and as
he laughed, his moustache went up under his nose, and his nose came down over
his moustache.
'What's the matter?' he asked in plain English. 'What are you frightened at?'
'At you,' panted Affery.
'Me, madam?'
'And the dismal evening, and--and everything,' said Affery. 'And here! The
wind has been and blown the door to, and I can't get in.'
'Hah!' said the gentleman, who took that very coolly. 'Indeed! Do you know
such a name as Clennam about here?'
'Lord bless us, I should think I did, I should think I did!' cried Affery,
exasperated into a new wringing of hands by the inquiry.
'Where about here?'
'Where!' cried Affery, goaded into another inspection of the keyhole. 'Where
but here in this house? And she's all alone in her room, and lost the use of her
limbs and can't stir to help herself or me, and t'other clever one's out, and
Lord forgive me!' cried Affery, driven into a frantic dance by these accumulated
considerations, 'if I ain't a-going headlong out of my mind!'
Taking a warmer view of the matter now that it concerned himself, the
gentleman stepped back to glance at the house, and his eye soon rested on the
long narrow window of the little room near the hall- door.
'Where may the lady be who has lost the use of her limbs, madam?' he
inquired, with that peculiar smile which Mistress Affery could not choose but
keep her eyes upon.
'Up there!' said Affery. 'Them two windows.'
'Hah! I am of a fair size, but could not have the honour of presenting myself
in that room without a ladder. Now, madam, frankly --frankness is a part of my
character--shall I open the door for you?'
'Yes, bless you, sir, for a dear creetur, and do it at once,' cried Affery,
'for she may be a-calling to me at this very present minute, or may be setting
herself a fire and burning herself to death, or there's no knowing what may be
happening to her, and me a-going out of my mind at thinking of it!'
'Stay, my good madam!' He restrained her impatience with a smooth white hand.
'Business-hours, I apprehend, are over for the day?' 'Yes, yes, yes,' cried
Affery. 'Long ago.'
'Let me make, then, a fair proposal. Fairness is a part of my character. I am
just landed from the packet-boat, as you may see.'
He showed her that his cloak was very wet, and that his boots were saturated
with water; she had previously observed that he was dishevelled and sallow, as
if from a rough voyage, and so chilled that he could not keep his teeth from
chattering. 'I am just landed from the packet-boat, madam, and have been delayed
by the weather: the infernal weather! In consequence of this, madam, some
necessary business that I should otherwise have transacted here within the
regular hours (necessary business because money- business), still remains to be
done. Now, if you will fetch any authorised neighbouring somebody to do it in
return for my opening the door, I'll open the door. If this arrangement should
be objectionable, I'll--' and with the same smile he made a significant feint of
backing away.
Mistress Affery, heartily glad to effect the proposed compromise, gave in her
willing adhesion to it. The gentleman at once requested her to do him the favour
of holding his cloak, took a short run at the narrow window, made a leap at the
sill, clung his way up the bricks, and in a moment had his hand at the sash,
raising it. His eyes looked so very sinister, as he put his leg into the room
and glanced round at Mistress Affery, that she thought with a sudden coldness,
if he were to go straight up-stairs to murder the invalid, what could she do to
prevent him?
Happily he had no such purpose; for he reappeared, in a moment, at the house
door. 'Now, my dear madam,' he said, as he took back his cloak and threw it on,
'if you have the goodness to--what the Devil's that!'
The strangest of sounds. Evidently close at hand from the peculiar shock it
communicated to the air, yet subdued as if it were far off. A tremble, a rumble,
and a fall of some light dry matter.
'What the Devil is it?'
'I don't know what it is, but I've heard the like of it over and over again,'
said Affery, who had caught his arm. He could hardly be a very brave man, even
she thought in her dreamy start and fright, for his trembling lips had turned
colourless. After listening a few moments, he made light of it.
'Bah! Nothing! Now, my dear madam, I think you spoke of some clever
personage. Will you be so good as to confront me with that genius?' He held the
door in his hand, as though he were quite ready to shut her out again if she
failed.
'Don't you say anything about the door and me, then,' whispered Affery.
'Not a word.'
'And don't you stir from here, or speak if she calls, while I run round the
corner.'
'Madam, I am a statue.'
Affery had so vivid a fear of his going stealthily up-stairs the moment her
back was turned, that after hurrying out of sight, she returned to the gateway
to peep at him. Seeing him still on the threshold, more out of the house than in
it, as if he had no love for darkness and no desire to probe its mysteries, she
flew into the next street, and sent a message into the tavern to Mr Flintwinch,
who came out directly. The two returning together--the lady in advance, and Mr
Flintwinch coming up briskly behind, animated with the hope of shaking her
before she could get housed-- saw the gentleman standing in the same place in
the dark, and heard the strong voice of Mrs Clennam calling from her room, 'Who
is it? What is it? Why does no one answer? Who is that, down there?'
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