Chapter 30: Closing in

Little Dorrit

by Charles Dickens

The last day of the appointed week touched the bars of the
Marshalsea gate. Black, all night, since the gate had clashed upon
Little Dorrit, its iron stripes were turned by the early-glowing sun
into stripes of gold. Far aslant across the city, over its jumbled
roofs, and through the open tracery of its church towers, struck the
long bright rays, bars of the prison of this lower world.

Throughout the day the old house within the gateway remained
untroubled by any visitors. But, when the sun was low, three men
turned in at the gateway and made for the dilapidated house.

Rigaud was the first, and walked by himself smoking. Mr Baptist
was the second, and jogged close after him, looking at no other
object. Mr Pancks was the third, and carried his hat under his arm
for the liberation of his restive hair; the weather being extremely
hot. They all came together at the door-steps.

'You pair of madmen!' said Rigaud, facing about. 'Don't go
yet!'

'We don't mean to,' said Mr Pancks. Giving him a dark glance in
acknowledgment of his answer, Rigaud knocked loudly. He had charged
himself with drink, for the playing out of his game, and was
impatient to begin. He had hardly finished one long resounding
knock, when he turned to the knocker again and began another. That
was not yet finished when Jeremiah Flintwinch opened the door, and
they all clanked into the stone hall. Rigaud, thrusting Mr
Flintwinch aside, proceeded straight up-stairs. His two attendants
followed him, Mr Flintwinch followed them, and they all came trooping
into Mrs Clennam's quiet room. It was in its usual state; except
that one of the windows was wide open, and Affery sat on its
old-fashioned window-seat, mending a stocking. The usual articles
were on the little table; the usual deadened fire was in the grate;
the bed had its usual pall upon it; and the mistress of all sat on
her black bier-like sofa, propped up by her black angular bolster
that was like the headsman's block.

Yet there was a nameless air of preparation in the room, as if
it were strung up for an occasion. From what the room derived it--
every one of its small variety of objects being in the fixed spot it
had occupied for years--no one could have said without looking
attentively at its mistress, and that, too, with a previous knowledge
of her face. Although her unchanging black dress was in every plait
precisely as of old, and her unchanging attitude was rigidly
preserved, a very slight additional setting of her features and
contraction of her gloomy forehead was so powerfully marked, that it
marked everything about her.

'Who are these?' she said, wonderingly, as the two attendants
entered. 'What do these people want here?'

'Who are these, dear madame, is it?' returned Rigaud. 'Faith,
they are friends of your son the prisoner. And what do they want
here, is it? Death, madame, I don't know. You will do well to ask
them.'

'You know you told us at the door, not to go yet,' said
Pancks.

'And you know you told me at the door, you didn't mean to go,'
retorted Rigaud. 'In a word, madame, permit me to present two spies
of the prisoner's--madmen, but spies. If you wish them to remain
here during our little conversation, say the word. It is nothing to
me.'

'Why should I wish them to remain here?' said Mrs Clennam.
'What have I to do with them?'

'Then, dearest madame,' said Rigaud, throwing himself into an
arm- chair so heavily that the old room trembled, 'you will do well
to dismiss them. It is your affair. They are not my spies, not my
rascals.'

'Hark! You Pancks,' said Mrs Clennam, bending her brows upon
him angrily, 'you Casby's clerk! Attend to your employer's business
and your own. Go. And take that other man with you.' 'Thank you,
ma'am,' returned Mr Pancks, 'I am glad to say I see no objection to
our both retiring. We have done all we undertook to do for Mr
Clennam. His constant anxiety has been (and it grew worse upon him
when he became a prisoner), that this agreeable gentleman should be
brought back here to the place from which he slipped away. Here he
is--brought back. And I will say,' added Mr Pancks, 'to his
ill-looking face, that in my opinion the world would be no worse for
his slipping out of it altogether.'

'Your opinion is not asked,' answered Mrs Clennam. 'Go.'

'I am sorry not to leave you in better company, ma'am,' said
Pancks; 'and sorry, too, that Mr Clennam can't be present. It's my
fault, that is.'

'You mean his own,' she returned.

'No, I mean mine, ma'am,' said Pancks,'for it was my misfortune
to lead him into a ruinous investment.' (Mr Pancks still clung to
that word, and never said speculation.) 'Though I can prove by
figures,' added Mr Pancks, with an anxious countenance, 'that it
ought to have been a good investment. I have gone over it since it
failed, every day of my life, and it comes out--regarded as a
question of figures--triumphant. The present is not a time or
place,' Mr Pancks pursued, with a longing glance into his hat, where
he kept his calculations, 'for entering upon the figures; but the
figures are not to be disputed. Mr Clennam ought to have been at
this moment in his carriage and pair, and I ought to have been worth
from three to five thousand pound.'

Mr Pancks put his hair erect with a general aspect of confidence
that could hardly have been surpassed, if he had had the amount in
his pocket. These incontrovertible figures had been the occupation
of every moment of his leisure since he had lost his money, and were
destined to afford him consolation to the end of his days.

'However,' said Mr Pancks, 'enough of that. Altro, old boy, you
have seen the figures, and you know how they come out.' Mr Baptist,
who had not the slightest arithmetical power of compensating himself
in this way, nodded, with a fine display of bright teeth.

At whom Mr Flintwinch had been looking, and to whom he then
said:

'Oh! it's you, is it? I thought I remembered your face, but I
wasn't certain till I saw your teeth. Ah! yes, to be sure. It was
this officious refugee,' said Jeremiah to Mrs Clennam, 'who came
knocking at the door on the night when Arthur and Chatterbox were
here, and who asked me a whole Catechism of questions about Mr
Blandois.'

'It is true,' Mr Baptist cheerfully admitted. 'And behold him,
padrone! I have found him consequentementally.'

'I shouldn't have objected,' returned Mr Flintwinch, 'to your
having broken your neck consequentementally.'

'And now,' said Mr Pancks, whose eye had often stealthily
wandered to the window-seat and the stocking that was being mended
there, 'I've only one other word to say before I go. If Mr Clennam
was here--but unfortunately, though he has so far got the better of
this fine gentleman as to return him to this place against his will,
he is ill and in prison--ill and in prison, poor fellow--if he was
here,' said Mr Pancks, taking one step aside towards the window-seat,
and laying his right hand upon the stocking; 'he would say, "Affery,
tell your dreams!"'

Mr Pancks held up his right forefinger between his nose and the
stocking with a ghostly air of warning, turned, steamed out and towed
Mr Baptist after him. The house-door was heard to close upon them,
their steps were heard passing over the dull pavement of the echoing
court-yard, and still nobody had added a word. Mrs Clennam and
Jeremiah had exchanged a look; and had then looked, and looked still,
at Affery, who sat mending the stocking with great assiduity.

'Come!' said Mr Flintwinch at length, screwing himself a curve
or two in the direction of the window-seat, and rubbing the palms of
his hands on his coat-tail as if he were preparing them to do
something: 'Whatever has to be said among us had better be begun to
be said without more loss of time.--So, Affery, my woman, take
yourself away!'

In a moment Affery had thrown the stocking down, started up,
caught hold of the windowsill with her right hand, lodged herself
upon the window-seat with her right knee, and was flourishing her
left hand, beating expected assailants off.

'No, I won't, Jeremiah--no, I won't--no, I won't! I won't go!
I'll stay here. I'll hear all I don't know, and say all I know. I
will, at last, if I die for it. I will, I will, I will, I will!'

Mr Flintwinch, stiffening with indignation and amazement,
moistened the fingers of one hand at his lips, softly described a
circle with them in the palm of the other hand, and continued with a
menacing grin to screw himself in the direction of his wife; gasping
some remark as he advanced, of which, in his choking anger, only the
words, 'Such a dose!' were audible.

'Not a bit nearer, Jeremiah!' cried Affery, never ceasing to
beat the air. 'Don't come a bit nearer to me, or I'll rouse the
neighbourhood! I'll throw myself out of window. I'll scream Fire
and Murder! I'll wake the dead! Stop where you are, or I'll make
shrieks enough to wake the dead!'

The determined voice of Mrs Clennam echoed 'Stop!' Jeremiah had
stopped already. 'It is closing in, Flintwinch. Let her alone.
Affery, do you turn against me after these many years?'

'I do, if it's turning against you to hear what I don't know,
and say what I know. I have broke out now, and I can't go back. I
am determined to do it. I will do it, I will, I will, I will! If
that's turning against you, yes, I turn against both of you two
clever ones. I told Arthur when he first come home to stand up
against you. I told him it was no reason, because I was afeard of my
life of you, that he should be. All manner of things have been
a-going on since then, and I won't be run up by Jeremiah, nor yet I
won't be dazed and scared, nor made a party to I don't know what, no
more. I won't, I won't, I won't! I'll up for Arthur when he has
nothing left, and is ill, and in prison, and can't up for himself. I
will, I will, I will, I will!'

'How do you know, you heap of confusion,' asked Mrs Clennam
sternly, 'that in doing what you are doing now, you are even serving
Arthur?'

'I don't know nothing rightly about anything,' said Affery; 'and
if ever you said a true word in your life, it's when you call me a
heap of confusion, for you two clever ones have done your most to
make me such. You married me whether I liked it or not, and you've
led me, pretty well ever since, such a life of dreaming and
frightening as never was known, and what do you expect me to be but a
heap of confusion? You wanted to make me such, and I am such; but I
won't submit no longer; no, I won't, I won't, I won't, I won't!' She
was still beating the air against all comers.

After gazing at her in silence, Mrs Clennam turned to Rigaud.
'You see and hear this foolish creature. Do you object to such a
piece of distraction remaining where she is?'

'I, madame,' he replied, 'do I? That's a question for you.'

'I do not,' she said, gloomily. 'There is little left to choose
now. Flintwinch, it is closing in.'

Mr Flintwinch replied by directing a look of red vengeance at
his wife, and then, as if to pinion himself from falling upon her,
screwed his crossed arms into the breast of his waistcoat, and with
his chin very near one of his elbows stood in a corner, watching
Rigaud in the oddest attitude. Rigaud, for his part, arose from his
chair, and seated himself on the table with his legs dangling. In
this easy attitude, he met Mrs Clennam's set face, with his moustache
going up and his nose coming down.

'Madame, I am a gentleman--'

'Of whom,' she interrupted in her steady tones, 'I have heard
disparagement, in connection with a French jail and an accusation of
murder.'

He kissed his hand to her with his exaggerated gallantry.

'Perfectly. Exactly. Of a lady too! What absurdity! How
incredible! I had the honour of making a great success then; I hope
to have the honour of making a great success now. I kiss your hands.
Madame, I am a gentleman (I was going to observe), who when he says,
"I will definitely finish this or that affair at the present
sitting," does definitely finish it. I announce to you that we are
arrived at our last sitting on our little business. You do me the
favour to follow, and to comprehend?'

She kept her eyes fixed upon him with a frown. 'Yes.'

'Further, I am a gentleman to whom mere mercenary trade-bargains
are unknown, but to whom money is always acceptable as the means of
pursuing his pleasures. You do me the favour to follow, and to
comprehend?'

'Scarcely necessary to ask, one would say. Yes.'

'Further, I am a gentleman of the softest and sweetest
disposition, but who, if trifled with, becomes enraged. Noble
natures under such circumstances become enraged. I possess a noble
nature. When the lion is awakened--that is to say, when I
enrage--the satisfaction of my animosity is as acceptable to me as
money. You always do me the favour to follow, and to comprehend?'

'Yes,' she answered, somewhat louder than before.

'Do not let me derange you; pray be tranquil. I have said we
are now arrived at our last sitting. Allow me to recall the two
sittings we have held.'

'It is not necessary.'

'Death, madame,' he burst out, 'it's my fancy! Besides, it
clears the way. The first sitting was limited. I had the honour of
making your acquaintance--of presenting my letter; I am a Knight of
Industry, at your service, madame, but my polished manners had won me
so much of success, as a master of languages, among your compatriots
who are as stiff as their own starch is to one another, but are ready
to relax to a foreign gentleman of polished manners-- and of
observing one or two little things,' he glanced around the room and
smiled, 'about this honourable house, to know which was necessary to
assure me, and to convince me that I had the distinguished pleasure
of making the acquaintance of the lady I sought. I achieved this. I
gave my word of honour to our dear Flintwinch that I would return. I
gracefully departed.'

Her face neither acquiesced nor demurred. The same when he
paused, and when he spoke, it as yet showed him always the one
attentive frown, and the dark revelation before mentioned of her
being nerved for the occasion.

'I say, gracefully departed, because it was graceful to retire
without alarming a lady. To be morally graceful, not less than
physically, is a part of the character of Rigaud Blandois. It was
also politic, as leaving you with something overhanging you, to
expect me again with a little anxiety on a day not named. But your
slave is politic. By Heaven, madame, politic! Let us return. On
the day not named, I have again the honour to render myself at your
house. I intimate that I have something to sell, which, if not
bought, will compromise madame whom I highly esteem. I explain
myself generally. I demand--I think it was a thousand pounds. Will
you correct me?'

Thus forced to speak, she replied with constraint, 'You demanded
as much as a thousand pounds.'

'I demand at present, Two. Such are the evils of delay. But to
return once more. We are not accordant; we differ on that occasion.
I am playful; playfulness is a part of my amiable character.
Playfully, I become as one slain and hidden. For, it may alone be
worth half the sum to madame, to be freed from the suspicions that my
droll idea awakens. Accident and spies intermix themselves against
my playfulness, and spoil the fruit, perhaps-- who knows? only you
and Flintwinch--when it is just ripe. Thus, madame, I am here for
the last time. Listen! Definitely the last.'

As he struck his straggling boot-heels against the flap of the
table, meeting her frown with an insolent gaze, he began to change
his tone for a fierce one.

'Bah! Stop an instant! Let us advance by steps. Here is my
Hotel-note to be paid, according to contract. Five minutes hence we
may be at daggers' points. I'll not leave it till then, or you'll
cheat me. Pay it! Count me the money!'

'Take it from his hand and pay it, Flintwinch,' said Mrs
Clennam.

He spirted it into Mr Flintwinch's face when the old man
advanced to take it, and held forth his hand, repeating noisily, 'Pay
it! Count it out! Good money!' Jeremiah picked the bill up, looked
at the total with a bloodshot eye, took a small canvas bag from his
pocket, and told the amount into his hand.

Rigaud chinked the money, weighed it in his hand, threw it up a
little way and caught it, chinked it again.

'The sound of it, to the bold Rigaud Blandois, is like the taste
of fresh meat to the tiger. Say, then, madame. How much?'

He turned upon her suddenly with a menacing gesture of the
weighted hand that clenched the money, as if he were going to strike
her with it.

'I tell you again, as I told you before, that we are not rich
here, as you suppose us to be, and that your demand is excessive. I
have not the present means of complying with such a demand, if I had
ever so great an inclination.'

'If!' cried Rigaud. 'Hear this lady with her If! Will you say
that you have not the inclination?'

'I will say what presents itself to me, and not what presents
itself to you.'

'Say it then. As to the inclination. Quick! Come to the
inclination, and I know what to do.'

She was no quicker, and no slower, in her reply. 'It would seem
that you have obtained possession of a paper--or of papers--which I
assuredly have the inclination to recover.'

Rigaud, with a loud laugh, drummed his heels against the table,
and chinked his money. 'I think so! I believe you there!'

'The paper might be worth, to me, a sum of money. I cannot say
how much, or how little.'

'What the Devil!' he asked savagely.'Not after a week's grace to
consider?'

'No! I will not out of my scanty means--for I tell you again,
we are poor here, and not rich--I will not offer any price for a
power that I do not know the worst and the fullest extent of. This
is the third time of your hinting and threatening. You must speak
explicitly, or you may go where you will, and do what you will. It
is better to be torn to pieces at a spring, than to be a mouse at the
caprice of such a cat.'

He looked at her so hard with those eyes too near together that
the sinister sight of each, crossing that of the other, seemed to
make the bridge of his hooked nose crooked. After a long survey, he
said, with the further setting off of his internal smile:

'You are a bold woman!'

'I am a resolved woman.'

'You always were. What? She always was; is it not so, my
little Flintwinch?'

'Flintwinch, say nothing to him. It is for him to say, here and
now, all he can; or to go hence, and do all he can. You know this to
be our determination. Leave him to his action on it.'

She did not shrink under his evil leer, or avoid it. He turned
it upon her again, but she remained steady at the point to which she
had fixed herself. He got off the table, placed a chair near the
sofa, sat down in it, and leaned an arm upon the sofa close to her
own, which he touched with his hand. Her face was ever frowning,
attentive, and settled.

'It is your pleasure then, madame, that I shall relate a morsel
of family history in this little family society,' said Rigaud, with a
warning play of his lithe fingers on her arm. 'I am something of a
doctor. Let me touch your pulse.'

She suffered him to take her wrist in his hand. Holding it, he
proceeded to say:

'A history of a strange marriage, and a strange mother, and a
revenge, and a suppression.--Aye, aye, aye? this pulse is beating
curiously! It appears to me that it doubles while I touch it. Are
these the usual changes of your malady, madame?'

There was a struggle in her maimed arm as she twisted it away,
but there was none in her face. On his face there was his own
smile.

'I have lived an adventurous life. I am an adventurous
character. I have known many adventurers; interesting
spirits--amiable society! To one of them I owe my knowledge and my
proofs--I repeat it, estimable lady--proofs--of the ravishing little
family history I go to commence. You will be charmed with it. But,
bah! I forget. One should name a history. Shall I name it the
history of a house? But, bah, again. There are so many houses.
Shall I name it the history of this house?'

Leaning over the sofa, poised on two legs of his chair and his
left elbow; that hand often tapping her arm to beat his words home;
his legs crossed; his right hand sometimes arranging his hair,
sometimes smoothing his moustache, sometimes striking his nose,
always threatening her whatever it did; coarse, insolent, rapacious,
cruel, and powerful, he pursued his narrative at his ease.

'In fine, then, I name it the history of this house. I commence
it. There live here, let us suppose, an uncle and nephew. The
uncle, a rigid old gentleman of strong force of character; the
nephew, habitually timid, repressed, and under constraint.'

Mistress Affery, fixedly attentive in the window-seat, biting
the rolled up end of her apron, and trembling from head to foot, here
cried out,'Jeremiah, keep off from me! I've heerd, in my dreams, of
Arthur's father and his uncle. He's a talking of them. It was
before my time here; but I've heerd in my dreams that Arthur's father
was a poor, irresolute, frightened chap, who had had everything but
his orphan life scared out of him when he was young, and that he had
no voice in the choice of his wife even, but his uncle chose her.
There she sits! I heerd it in my dreams, and you said it to her own
self.'

As Mr Flintwinch shook his fist at her, and as Mrs Clennam gazed
upon her, Rigaud kissed his hand to her. 'Perfectly right, dear
Madame Flintwinch. You have a genius for dreaming.'

'I don't want none of your praises,' returned Affery. 'I don't
want to have nothing at all to say to you. But Jeremiah said they
was dreams, and I'll tell 'em as such!' Here she put her apron in
her mouth again, as if she were stopping somebody else's mouth--
perhaps jeremiah's, which was chattering with threats as if he were
grimly cold.

'Our beloved Madame Flintwinch,' said Rigaud, 'developing all of
a sudden a fine susceptibility and spirituality, is right to a
marvel. Yes. So runs the history. Monsieur, the uncle, commands
the nephew to marry. Monsieur says to him in effect, "My nephew, I
introduce to you a lady of strong force of character, like myself--a
resolved lady, a stern lady, a lady who has a will that can break the
weak to powder: a lady without pity, without love, implacable,
revengeful, cold as the stone, but raging as the fire."

Ah! what fortitude! Ah, what superiority of intellectual
strength! Truly, a proud and noble character that I describe in the
supposed words of Monsieur, the uncle. Ha, ha, ha! Death of my
soul, I love the sweet lady!'

Mrs Clennam's face had changed. There was a remarkable darkness
of colour on it, and the brow was more contracted. 'Madame, madame,'
said Rigaud, tapping her on the arm, as if his cruel hand were
sounding a musical instrument, 'I perceive I interest you. I
perceive I awaken your sympathy. Let us go on.'

The drooping nose and the ascending moustache had, however, to
be hidden for a moment with the white hand, before he could go on; he
enjoyed the effect he made so much.

'The nephew, being, as the lucid Madame Flintwinch has remarked,
a poor devil who has had everything but his orphan life frightened
and famished out of him--the nephew abases his head, and makes
response: "My uncle, it is to you to command. Do as you will!"
Monsieur, the uncle, does as he will. It is what he always does.
The auspicious nuptials take place; the newly married come home to
this charming mansion; the lady is received, let us suppose, by
Flintwinch. Hey, old intriguer?'

Jeremiah, with his eyes upon his mistress, made no reply.
Rigaud looked from one to the other, struck his ugly nose, and made a
clucking with his tongue.

'Soon the lady makes a singular and exciting discovery.
Thereupon, full of anger, full of jealousy, full of vengeance, she
forms--see you, madame!--a scheme of retribution, the weight of which
she ingeniously forces her crushed husband to bear himself, as well
as execute upon her enemy. What superior intelligence!'

'Keep off, Jeremiah!' cried the palpitating Affery, taking her
apron from her mouth again. 'But it was one of my dreams, that you
told her, when you quarrelled with her one winter evening at dusk--
there she sits and you looking at her--that she oughtn't to have let
Arthur when he come home, suspect his father only; that she had
always had the strength and the power; and that she ought to have
stood up more to Arthur, for his father. It was in the same dream
where you said to her that she was not--not something, but I don't
know what, for she burst out tremendous and stopped you. You know
the dream as well as I do. When you come down-stairs into the
kitchen with the candle in your hand, and hitched my apron off my
head. When you told me I had been dreaming. When you wouldn't
believe the noises.' After this explosion Affery put her apron into
her mouth again; always keeping her hand on the window-sill and her
knee on the window-seat, ready to cry out or jump out if her lord and
master approached.

Rigaud had not lost a word of this.

'Haha!' he cried, lifting his eyebrows, folding his arms, and
leaning back in his chair. 'Assuredly, Madame Flintwinch is an
oracle! How shall we interpret the oracle, you and I and the old
intriguer? He said that you were not--? And you burst out and
stopped him! What was it you were not? What is it you are not? Say
then, madame!'

Under this ferocious banter, she sat breathing harder, and her
mouth was disturbed. Her lips quivered and opened, in spite of her
utmost efforts to keep them still.

'Come then, madame! Speak, then! Our old intriguer said that
you were not-- and you stopped him. He was going to say that you
were not--what? I know already, but I want a little confidence from
you. How, then? You are not what?'

She tried again to repress herself, but broke out vehemently,
'Not Arthur's mother!'

'Good,' said Rigaud. 'You are amenable.'

With the set expression of her face all torn away by the
explosion of her passion, and with a bursting, from every rent
feature, of the smouldering fire so long pent up, she cried out: 'I
will tell it myself! I will not hear it from your lips, and with the
taint of your wickedness upon it. Since it must be seen, I will have
it seen by the light I stood in. Not another word. Hear me!'

'Unless you are a more obstinate and more persisting woman than
even I know you to be,' Mr Flintwinch interposed, 'you had better
leave Mr Rigaud, Mr Blandois, Mr Beelzebub, to tell it in his own
way. What does it signify when he knows all about it?'

'He does not know all about it.'

'He knows all he cares about it,' Mr Flintwinch testily urged.
'He does not know me.'

'What do you suppose he cares for you, you conceited woman?'
said Mr Flintwinch.

'I tell you, Flintwinch, I will speak. I tell you when it has
come to this, I will tell it with my own lips, and will express
myself throughout it. What! Have I suffered nothing in this room,
no deprivation, no imprisonment, that I should condescend at last to
contemplate myself in such a glass as that. Can you see him? Can
you hear him? If your wife were a hundred times the ingrate that she
is, and if I were a thousand times more hopeless than I am of
inducing her to be silent if this man is silenced, I would tell it
myself, before I would bear the torment of the hearing it from
him.'

Rigaud pushed his chair a little back; pushed his legs out
straight before him; and sat with his arms folded over against
her.

'You do not know what it is,' she went on addressing him, 'to be
brought up strictly and straitly. I was so brought up. Mine was no
light youth of sinful gaiety and pleasure. Mine were days of
wholesome repression, punishment, and fear. The corruption of our
hearts, the evil of our ways, the curse that is upon us, the terrors
that surround us--these were the themes of my childhood. They formed
my character, and filled me with an abhorrence of evil- doers. When
old Mr Gilbert Clennam proposed his orphan nephew to my father for my
husband, my father impressed upon me that his bringing-up had been,
like mine, one of severe restraint. He told me, that besides the
discipline his spirit had undergone, he had lived in a starved house,
where rioting and gaiety were unknown, and where every day was a day
of toil and trial like the last. He told me that he had been a man
in years long before his uncle had acknowledged him as one; and that
from his school-days to that hour, his uncle's roof has been a
sanctuary to him from the contagion of the irreligious and dissolute.
When, within a twelvemonth of our marriage, I found my husband, at
that time when my father spoke of him, to have sinned against the
Lord and outraged me by holding a guilty creature in my place, was I
to doubt that it had been appointed to me to make the discovery, and
that it was appointed to me to lay the hand of punishment upon that
creature of perdition? Was I to dismiss in a moment--not my own
wrongs--what was I! but all the rejection of sin, and all the war
against it, in which I had been bred?' She laid her wrathful hand
upon the watch on the table.

'No! "Do not forget." The initials of those words are within
here now, and were within here then. I was appointed to find the old
letter that referred to them, and that told me what they meant, and
whose work they were, and why they were worked, lying with this watch
in his secret drawer. But for that appointment there would have been
no discovery. "Do not forget." It spoke to me like a voice from an
angry cloud. Do not forget the deadly sin, do not forget the
appointed discovery, do not forget the appointed suffering. I did
not forget. Was it my own wrong I remembered? Mine! I was but a
servant and a minister. What power could I have over them, but that
they were bound in the bonds of their sin, and delivered to me!'

More than forty years had passed over the grey head of this
determined woman, since the time she recalled. More than forty years
of strife and struggle with the whisper that, by whatever name she
called her vindictive pride and rage, nothing through all eternity
could change their nature. Yet, gone those more than forty years,
and come this Nemesis now looking her in the face, she still abided
by her old impiety--still reversed the order of Creation, and
breathed her own breath into a clay image of her Creator. Verily,
verily, travellers have seen many monstrous idols in many countries;
but no human eyes have ever seen more daring, gross, and shocking
images of the Divine nature than we creatures of the dust make in our
own likenesses, of our own bad passions.

'When I forced him to give her up to me, by her name and place
of abode,' she went on in her torrent of indignation and defence;
'when I accused her, and she fell hiding her face at my feet, was it
my injury that I asserted, were they my reproaches that I poured upon
her? Those who were appointed of old to go to wicked kings and
accuse them--were they not ministers and servants? And had not I,
unworthy and far-removed from them, sin to denounce? When she
pleaded to me her youth, and his wretched and hard life (that was her
phrase for the virtuous training he had belied), and the desecrated
ceremony of marriage there had secretly been between them, and the
terrors of want and shame that had overwhelmed them both when I was
first appointed to be the instrument of their punishment, and the
love (for she said the word to me, down at my feet) in which she had
abandoned him and left him to me, was it my enemy that became my
footstool, were they the words of my wrath that made her shrink and
quiver! Not unto me the strength be ascribed; not unto me the
wringing of the expiation!'

Many years had come and gone since she had had the free use even
of her fingers; but it was noticeable that she had already more than
once struck her clenched hand vigorously upon the table, and that
when she said these words she raised her whole arm in the air, as
though it had been a common action with her.

'And what was the repentance that was extorted from the hardness
of her heart and the blackness of her depravity? I, vindictive and
implacable? It may be so, to such as you who know no righteousness,
and no appointment except Satan's. Laugh; but I will be known as I
know myself, and as Flintwinch knows me, though it is only to you and
this half-witted woman.'

'Add, to yourself, madame,' said Rigaud. 'I have my little
suspicions that madame is rather solicitous to be justified to
herself.'

'It is false. It is not so. I have no need to be,' she said,
with great energy and anger.

'Truly?' retorted Rigaud. 'Hah!'

'I ask, what was the penitence, in works, that was demanded of
her?

"You have a child; I have none. You love that child. Give him
to me. He shall believe himself to be my son, and he shall be
believed by every one to be my son. To save you from exposure, his
father shall swear never to see or communicate with you more; equally
to save him from being stripped by his uncle, and to save your child
from being a beggar, you shall swear never to see or communicate with
either of them more. That done, and your present means, derived from
my husband, renounced, I charge myself with your support. You may,
with your place of retreat unknown, then leave, if you please,
uncontradicted by me, the lie that when you passed out of all
knowledge but mine, you merited a good name." That was all. She had
to sacrifice her sinful and shameful affections; no more. She was
then free to bear her load of guilt in secret, and to break her heart
in secret; and through such present misery (light enough for her, I
think!) to purchase her redemption from endless misery, if she could.
If, in this, I punished her here, did I not open to her a way
hereafter? If she knew herself to be surrounded by insatiable
vengeance and unquenchable fires, were they mine? If I threatened
her, then and afterwards, with the terrors that encompassed her, did
I hold them in my right hand?'

She turned the watch upon the table, and opened it, and, with an
unsoftening face, looked at the worked letters within.

'They did not forget. It is appointed against such offences
that the offenders shall not be able to forget. If the presence of
Arthur was a daily reproach to his father, and if the absence of
Arthur was a daily agony to his mother, that was the just
dispensation of Jehovah. As well might it be charged upon me, that
the stings of an awakened conscience drove her mad, and that it was
the will of the Disposer of all things that she should live so, many
years. I devoted myself to reclaim the otherwise predestined and
lost boy; to give him the reputation of an honest origin; to bring
him up in fear and trembling, and in a life of practical contrition
for the sins that were heavy on his head before his entrance into
this condemned world. Was that a cruelty? Was I, too, not visited
with consequences of the original offence in which I had no
complicity? Arthur's father and I lived no further apart, with half
the globe between us, than when we were together in this house. He
died, and sent this watch back to me, with its Do not forget. I do
not forget, though I do not read it as he did. I read in it, that I
was appointed to do these things. I have so read these three letters
since I have had them lying on this table, and I did so read them,
with equal distinctness, when they were thousands of miles away.'

As she took the watch-case in her hand, with that new freedom in
the use of her hand of which she showed no consciousness whatever,
bending her eyes upon it as if she were defying it to move her,
Rigaud cried with a loud and contemptuous snapping of his fingers.
'Come, madame! Time runs out. Come, lady of piety, it must be! You
can tell nothing I don't know. Come to the money stolen, or I will!
Death of my soul, I have had enough of your other jargon. Come
straight to the stolen money!'

'Wretch that you are,' she answered, and now her hands clasped
her head: 'through what fatal error of Flintwinch's, through what
incompleteness on his part, who was the only other person helping in
these things and trusted with them, through whose and what bringing
together of the ashes of a burnt paper, you have become possessed of
that codicil, I know no more than how you acquired the rest of your
power here--'

'And yet,' interrupted Rigaud, 'it is my odd fortune to have by
me, in a convenient place that I know of, that same short little
addition to the will of Monsieur Gilbert Clennam, written by a lady
and witnessed by the same lady and our old intriguer! Ah, bah, old
intriguer, crooked little puppet! Madame, let us go on. Time
presses. You or I to finish?'

'I!' she answered, with increased determination, if it were
possible. 'I, because I will not endure to be shown myself, and have
myself shown to any one, with your horrible distortion upon me. You,
with your practices of infamous foreign prisons and galleys would
make it the money that impelled me. It was not the money.'

'Bah, bah, bah! I repudiate, for the moment, my politeness, and
say, Lies, lies, lies. You know you suppressed the deed and kept the
money.'

'Not for the money's sake, wretch!' She made a struggle as if
she were starting up; even as if, in her vehemence, she had almost
risen on her disabled feet. 'If Gilbert Clennam, reduced to
imbecility, at the point of death, and labouring under the delusion
of some imaginary relenting towards a girl of whom he had heard that
his nephew had once had a fancy for her which he had crushed out of
him, and that she afterwards drooped away into melancholy and
withdrawal from all who knew her--if, in that state of weakness, he
dictated to me, whose life she had darkened with her sin, and who had
been appointed to know her wickedness from her own hand and her own
lips, a bequest meant as a recompense to her for supposed unmerited
suffering; was there no difference between my spurning that
injustice, and coveting mere money--a thing which you, and your
comrades in the prisons, may steal from anyone?'

'Time presses, madame. Take care!'

'If this house was blazing from the roof to the ground,' she
returned, 'I would stay in it to justify myself against my righteous
motives being classed with those of stabbers and thieves.'

Rigaud snapped his fingers tauntingly in her face. 'One
thousand guineas to the little beauty you slowly hunted to death.
One thousand guineas to the youngest daughter her patron might have
at fifty, or (if he had none) brother's youngest daughter, on her
coming of age, "as the remembrance his disinterestedness may like
best, of his protection of a friendless young orphan girl." Two
thousand guineas. What! You will never come to the money?'

'That patron,' she was vehemently proceeding, when he checked
her.

'Names! Call him Mr Frederick Dorrit. No more evasions.'

'That Frederick Dorrit was the beginning of it all. If he had
not been a player of music, and had not kept, in those days of his
youth and prosperity, an idle house where singers, and players, and
such-like children of Evil turned their backs on the Light and their
faces to the Darkness, she might have remained in her lowly station,
and might not have been raised out of it to be cast down. But, no.
Satan entered into that Frederick Dorrit, and counselled him that he
was a man of innocent and laudable tastes who did kind actions, and
that here was a poor girl with a voice for singing music with. Then
he is to have her taught. Then Arthur's father, who has all along
been secretly pining in the ways of virtuous ruggedness for those
accursed snares which are called the Arts, becomes acquainted with
her. And so, a graceless orphan, training to be a singing girl,
carries it, by that Frederick Dorrit's agency, against me, and I am
humbled and deceived!--Not I, that is to say,' she added quickly, as
colour flushed into her face; 'a greater than I. What am I?'

Jeremiah Flintwinch, who had been gradually screwing himself
towards her, and who was now very near her elbow without her knowing
it, made a specially wry face of objection when she said these words,
and moreover twitched his gaiters, as if such pretensions were
equivalent to little barbs in his legs.

'Lastly,' she continued, 'for I am at the end of these things,
and I will say no more of them, and you shall say no more of them,
and all that remains will be to determine whether the knowledge of
them can be kept among us who are here present; lastly, when I
suppressed that paper, with the knowledge of Arthur's father--'

'But not with his consent, you know,' said Mr Flintwinch.

'Who said with his consent?' She started to find Jeremiah so
near her, and drew back her head, looking at him with some rising
distrust. 'You were often enough between us when he would have had
me produce it and I would not, to have contradicted me if I had said,
with his consent. I say, when I suppressed that paper, I made no
effort to destroy it, but kept it by me, here in this house, many
years. The rest of the Gilbert property being left to Arthur's
father, I could at any time, without unsettling more than the two
sums, have made a pretence of finding it. But, besides that I must
have supported such pretence by a direct falsehood (a great
responsibility), I have seen no new reason, in all the time I have
been tried here, to bring it to light. It was a rewarding of sin;
the wrong result of a delusion. I did what I was appointed to do,
and I have undergone, within these four walls, what I was appointed
to undergo. When the paper was at last destroyed--as I thought--in
my presence, she had long been dead, and her patron, Frederick
Dorrit, had long been deservedly ruined and imbecile. He had no
daughter. I had found the niece before then; and what I did for her,
was better for her far than the money of which she would have had no
good.' She added, after a moment, as though she addressed the watch:
'She herself was innocent, and I might not have forgotten to
relinquish it to her at my death:' and sat looking at it.

'Shall I recall something to you, worthy madame?' said Rigaud.
'The little paper was in this house on the night when our friend the
prisoner--jail-comrade of my soul--came home from foreign countries.
Shall I recall yet something more to you? The little singing-bird
that never was fledged, was long kept in a cage by a guardian of your
appointing, well enough known to our old intriguer here. Shall we
coax our old intriguer to tell us when he saw him last?'

'I'll tell you!' cried Affery, unstopping her mouth. 'I dreamed
it, first of all my dreams. Jeremiah, if you come a-nigh me now,
I'll scream to be heard at St Paul's! The person as this man has
spoken of, was jeremiah's own twin brother; and he was here in the
dead of the night, on the night when Arthur come home, and Jeremiah
with his own hands give him this paper, along with I don't know what
more, and he took it away in an iron box--Help! Murder! Save me
from Jere-mi-ah!'

Mr Flintwinch had made a run at her, but Rigaud had caught him
in his arms midway. After a moment's wrestle with him, Flintwinch
gave up, and put his hands in his pockets.

'What!' cried Rigaud, rallying him as he poked and jerked him
back with his elbows, 'assault a lady with such a genius for
dreaming! Ha, ha, ha! Why, she'll be a fortune to you as an
exhibition. All that she dreams comes true. Ha, ha, ha! You're so
like him, Little Flintwinch. So like him, as I knew him (when I
first spoke English for him to the host) in the Cabaret of the Three
Billiard Tables, in the little street of the high roofs, by the wharf
at Antwerp! Ah, but he was a brave boy to drink. Ah, but he was a
brave boy to smoke! Ah, but he lived in a sweet bachelor-
apartment--furnished, on the fifth floor, above the wood and charcoal
merchant's, and the dress-maker's, and the chair-maker's, and the
maker of tubs--where I knew him too, and wherewith his cognac and
tobacco, he had twelve sleeps a day and one fit, until he had a fit
too much, and ascended to the skies. Ha, ha, ha! What does it
matter how I took possession of the papers in his iron box? Perhaps
he confided it to my hands for you, perhaps it was locked and my
curiosity was piqued, perhaps I suppressed it. Ha, ha, ha! What
does it matter, so that I have it safe? We are not particular here;
hey, Flintwinch? We are not particular here; is it not so,
madame?'

Retiring before him with vicious counter-jerks of his own
elbows, Mr Flintwinch had got back into his corner, where he now
stood with his hands in his pockets, taking breath, and returning Mrs
Clennam's stare. 'Ha, ha, ha! But what's this?' cried Rigaud. 'It
appears as if you don't know, one the other. Permit me, Madame
Clennam who suppresses, to present Monsieur Flintwinch who
intrigues.'

Mr Flintwinch, unpocketing one of his hands to scrape his jaw,
advanced a step or so in that attitude, still returning Mrs Clennam's
look, and thus addressed her:

'Now, I know what you mean by opening your eyes so wide at me,
but you needn't take the trouble, because I don't care for it. I've
been telling you for how many years that you're one of the most
opinionated and obstinate of women. That's what you are. You call
yourself humble and sinful, but you are the most Bumptious of your
sex. That's what you are. I have told you, over and over again when
we have had a tiff, that you wanted to make everything go down before
you, but I wouldn't go down before you--that you wanted to swallow up
everybody alive, but I wouldn't be swallowed up alive. Why didn't
you destroy the paper when you first laid hands upon it?

I advised you to; but no, it's not your way to take advice. You
must keep it forsooth. Perhaps you may carry it out at some other
time, forsooth. As if I didn't know better than that! I think I see
your pride carrying it out, with a chance of being suspected of
having kept it by you. But that's the way you cheat yourself. just
as you cheat yourself into making out that you didn't do all this
business because you were a rigorous woman, all slight, and spite,
and power, and unforgiveness, but because you were a servant and a
minister, and were appointed to do it. Who are you, that you should
be appointed to do it? That may be your religion, but it's my
gammon. And to tell you all the truth while I am about it,' said Mr
Flintwinch, crossing his arms, and becoming the express image of
irascible doggedness, 'I have been rasped--rasped these forty
years--by your taking such high ground even with me, who knows
better; the effect of it being coolly to put me on low ground. I
admire you very much; you are a woman of strong head and great
talent; but the strongest head, and the greatest talent, can't rasp a
man for forty years without making him sore. So I don't care for
your present eyes. Now, I am coming to the paper, and mark what I
say. You put it away somewhere, and you kept your own counsel where.
You're an active woman at that time, and if you want to get that
paper, you can get it. But, mark. There comes a time when you are
struck into what you are now, and then if you want to get that paper,
you can't get it. So it lies, long years, in its hiding-place. At
last, when we are expecting Arthur home every day, and when any day
may bring him home, and it's impossible to say what rummaging he may
make about the house, I recommend you five thousand times, if you
can't get at it, to let me get at it, that it may be put in the fire.
But no--no one but you knows where it is, and that's power; and,
call yourself whatever humble names you will, I call you a female
Lucifer in appetite for power! On a Sunday night, Arthur comes home.
He has not been in this room ten minutes, when he speaks of his
father's watch. You know very well that the Do Not Forget, at the
time when his father sent that watch to you, could only mean, the
rest of the story being then all dead and over, Do Not Forget the
suppression. Make restitution! Arthur's ways have frightened you a
bit, and the paper shall be burnt after all. So, before that jumping
jade and Jezebel,' Mr Flintwinch grinned at his wife, 'has got you
into bed, you at last tell me where you have put the paper, among the
old ledgers in the cellars, where Arthur himself went prowling the
very next morning. But it's not to be burnt on a Sunday night. No;
you are strict, you are; we must wait over twelve o'clock, and get
into Monday. Now, all this is a swallowing of me up alive that rasps
me; so, feeling a little out of temper, and not being as strict as
yourself, I take a look at the document before twelve o'clock to
refresh my memory as to its appearance--fold up one of the many
yellow old papers in the cellars like it--and afterwards, when we
have got into Monday morning, and I have, by the light of your lamp,
to walk from you, lying on that bed, to this grate, make a little
exchange like the conjuror, and burn accordingly. My brother
Ephraim, the lunatic-keeper (I wish he had had himself to keep in a
strait-waistcoat), had had many jobs since the close of the long job
he got from you, but had not done well. His wife died (not that that
was much; mine might have died instead, and welcome), he speculated
unsuccessfully in lunatics, he got into difficulty about
over-roasting a patient to bring him to reason, and he got into debt.
He was going out of the way, on what he had been able to scrape up,
and a trifle from me. He was here that early Monday morning, waiting
for the tide; in short, he was going to Antwerp, where (I am afraid
you'll be shocked at my saying, And be damned to him!) he made the
acquaintance of this gentleman. He had come a long way, and, I
thought then, was only sleepy; but, I suppose now, was drunk. When
Arthur's mother had been under the care of him and his wife, she had
been always writing, incessantly writing,--mostly letters of
confession to you, and Prayers for forgiveness. My brother had
handed, from time to time, lots of these sheets to me. I thought I
might as well keep them to myself as have them swallowed up alive
too; so I kept them in a box, looking over them when I felt in the
humour. Convinced that it was advisable to get the paper out of the
place, with Arthur coming about it, I put it into this same box, and
I locked the whole up with two locks, and I trusted it to my brother
to take away and keep, till I should write about it. I did write
about it, and never got an answer. I didn't know what to make of it,
till this gentleman favoured us with his first visit. Of course, I
began to suspect how it was, then; and I don't want his word for it
now to understand how he gets his knowledge from my papers, and your
paper, and my brother's cognac and tobacco talk (I wish he'd had to
gag himself). Now, I have only one thing more to say, you hammer-
headed woman, and that is, that I haven't altogether made up my mind
whether I might, or might not, have ever given you any trouble about
the codicil. I think not; and that I should have been quite
satisfied with knowing I had got the better of you, and that I held
the power over you. In the present state of circumstances, I have no
more explanation to give you till this time to-morrow night. So you
may as well,' said Mr Flintwinch, terminating his oration with a
screw, 'keep your eyes open at somebody else, for it's no use keeping
'em open at me.'

She slowly withdrew them when he had ceased, and dropped her
forehead on her hand. Her other hand pressed hard upon the table,
and again the curious stir was observable in her, as if she were
going to rise.

'This box can never bring, elsewhere, the price it will bring
here.

This knowledge can never be of the same profit to you, sold to
any other person, as sold to me. But I have not the present means of
raising the sum you have demanded. I have not prospered. What will
you take now, and what at another time, and how am I to be assured of
your silence?'

'My angel,' said Rigaud, 'I have said what I will take, and time
presses. Before coming here, I placed copies of the most important
of these papers in another hand. Put off the time till the
Marshalsea gate shall be shut for the night, and it will be too late
to treat. The prisoner will have read them.'

She put her two hands to her head again, uttered a loud
exclamation, and started to her feet. She staggered for a moment, as
if she would have fallen; then stood firm.

'Say what you mean. Say what you mean, man!'

Before her ghostly figure, so long unused to its erect attitude,
and so stiffened in it, Rigaud fell back and dropped his voice. It
was, to all the three, almost as if a dead woman had risen.

'Miss Dorrit,' answered Rigaud, 'the little niece of Monsieur
Frederick, whom I have known across the water, is attached to the
prisoner. Miss Dorrit, little niece of Monsieur Frederick, watches
at this moment over the prisoner, who is ill. For her I with my own
hands left a packet at the prison, on my way here, with a letter of
instructions, "For his sake"--she will do anything for his sake--to
keep it without breaking the seal, in case of its being reclaimed
before the hour of shutting up to-night--if it should not be
reclaimed before the ringing of the prison bell, to give it to him;
and it encloses a second copy for herself, which he must give to her.
What! I don't trust myself among you, now we have got so far,
without giving my secret a second life. And as to its not bringing
me, elsewhere, the price it will bring here, say then, madame, have
you limited and settled the price the little niece will give--for his
sake--to hush it up? Once more I say, time presses. The packet not
reclaimed before the ringing of the bell to-night, you cannot buy. I
sell, then, to the little girl!'

Once more the stir and struggle in her, and she ran to a closet,
tore the door open, took down a hood or shawl, and wrapped it over
her head. Affery, who had watched her in terror, darted to her in
the middle of the room, caught hold of her dress, and went on her
knees to her.

'Don't, don't, don't! What are you doing? Where are you going?
You're a fearful woman, but I don't bear you no ill-will. I can do
poor Arthur no good now, that I see; and you needn't be afraid of me.
I'll keep your secret. Don't go out, you'll fall dead in the
street. Only promise me, that, if it's the poor thing that's kept
here secretly, you'll let me take charge of her and be her nurse.
Only promise me that, and never be afraid of me.'

Mrs Clennam stood still for an instant, at the height of her
rapid haste, saying in stern amazement:

'Kept here? She has been dead a score of years or more. Ask
Flintwinch--ask him. They can both tell you that she died when
Arthur went abroad.'

'So much the worse,' said Affery, with a shiver, 'for she haunts
the house, then. Who else rustles about it, making signals by
dropping dust so softly? Who else comes and goes, and marks the
walls with long crooked touches when we are all a-bed? Who else
holds the door sometimes? But don't go out--don't go out! Mistress,
you'll die in the street!'

Her mistress only disengaged her dress from the beseeching
hands, said to Rigaud, 'Wait here till I come back!' and ran out of
the room. They saw her, from the window, run wildly through the
court- yard and out at the gateway.

For a few moments they stood motionless. Affery was the first
to move, and she, wringing her hands, pursued her mistress. Next,
Jeremiah Flintwinch, slowly backing to the door, with one hand in a
pocket, and the other rubbing his chin, twisted himself out in his
reticent way, speechlessly. Rigaud, left alone, composed himself
upon the window-seat of the open window, in the old Marseilles-jail
attitude. He laid his cigarettes and fire-box ready to his hand, and
fell to smoking.

'Whoof! Almost as dull as the infernal old jail. Warmer, but
almost as dismal. Wait till she comes back? Yes, certainly; but
where is she gone, and how long will she be gone? No matter! Rigaud
Lagnier Blandois, my amiable subject, you will get your money. You
will enrich yourself. You have lived a gentleman; you will die a
gentleman. You triumph, my little boy; but it is your character to
triumph. Whoof!' In the hour of his triumph, his moustache went up
and his nose came down, as he ogled a great beam over his head with
particular satisfaction.