Little Dorrit

C >> Charles Dickens >> Little Dorrit

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49 | 50 | 51 | 52 | 53 | 54 | 55 | 56 | 57 | 58 | 59 | 60 | 61 | 62 | 63 | 64 | 65 | 66 | 67 | 68 | 69 | 70 | 71 | 72 | 73 | 74 | 75

'Painters, writers, patriots, all the rest who have stands in the
market. Give almost any man I know ten pounds, and he will impose
upon you to a corresponding extent; a thousand pounds--to a
corresponding extent; ten thousand pounds--to a corresponding
extent. So great the success, so great the imposition. But what
a capital world it is!' cried Gowan with warm enthusiasm. 'What a
jolly, excellent, lovable world it is!'

'I had rather thought,' said Clennam, 'that the principle you
mention was chiefly acted on by--'

'By the Barnacles?' interrupted Gowan, laughing.

'By the political gentlemen who condescend to keep the
Circumlocution Office.'

'Ah! Don't be hard upon the Barnacles,' said Gowan, laughing
afresh, 'they are darling fellows! Even poor little Clarence, the
born idiot of the family, is the most agreeable and most endearing
blockhead! And by Jupiter, with a kind of cleverness in him too
that would astonish you!'

'It would. Very much,' said Clennam, drily.

'And after all,' cried Gowan, with that characteristic balancing of
his which reduced everything in the wide world to the same light
weight, 'though I can't deny that the Circumlocution Office may
ultimately shipwreck everybody and everything, still, that will
probably not be in our time--and it's a school for gentlemen.'

'It's a very dangerous, unsatisfactory, and expensive school to the
people who pay to keep the pupils there, I am afraid,' said
Clennam, shaking his head.

'Ah! You are a terrible fellow,' returned Gowan, airily. 'I can
understand how you have frightened that little donkey, Clarence,
the most estimable of moon-calves (I really love him) nearly out of
his wits. But enough of him, and of all the rest of them. I want
to present you to my mother, Mr Clennam. Pray do me the favour to
give me the opportunity.'

In nobody's state of mind, there was nothing Clennam would have
desired less, or would have been more at a loss how to avoid.

'My mother lives in a most primitive manner down in that dreary
red-brick dungeon at Hampton Court,' said Gowan. 'If you would
make your own appointment, suggest your own day for permitting me
to take you there to dinner, you would be bored and she would be
charmed. Really that's the state of the case.'

What could Clennam say after this? His retiring character included
a great deal that was simple in the best sense, because unpractised
and unused; and in his simplicity and modesty, he could only say
that he was happy to place himself at Mr Gowan's disposal.
Accordingly he said it, and the day was fixed. And a dreaded day
it was on his part, and a very unwelcome day when it came and they
went down to Hampton Court together.

The venerable inhabitants of that venerable pile seemed, in those
times, to be encamped there like a sort of civilised gipsies.
There was a temporary air about their establishments, as if they
were going away the moment they could get anything better; there
was also a dissatisfied air about themselves, as if they took it
very ill that they had not already got something much better.
Genteel blinds and makeshifts were more or less observable as soon
as their doors were opened; screens not half high enough, which
made dining-rooms out of arched passages, and warded off obscure
corners where footboys slept at nights with their heads among the
knives and forks; curtains which called upon you to believe that
they didn't hide anything; panes of glass which requested you not
to see them; many objects of various forms, feigning to have no
connection with their guilty secret, a bed; disguised traps in
walls, which were clearly coal-cellars; affectations of no
thoroughfares, which were evidently doors to little kitchens.
Mental reservations and artful mysteries grew out of these things.
Callers looking steadily into the eyes of their receivers,
pretended not to smell cooking three feet off; people, confronting
closets accidentally left open, pretended not to see bottles;
visitors with their heads against a partition of thin canvas, and
a page and a young female at high words on the other side, made
believe to be sitting in a primeval silence. There was no end to
the small social accommodation-bills of this nature which the
gipsies of gentility were constantly drawing upon, and accepting
for, one another.

Some of these Bohemians were of an irritable temperament, as
constantly soured and vexed by two mental trials: the first, the
consciousness that they had never got enough out of the public; the
second, the consciousness that the public were admitted into the
building. Under the latter great wrong, a few suffered
dreadfully--particularly on Sundays, when they had for some time
expected the earth to open and swallow the public up; but which
desirable event had not yet occurred, in consequence of some
reprehensible laxity in the arrangements of the Universe.

Mrs Gowan's door was attended by a family servant of several years'
standing, who had his own crow to pluck with the public concerning
a situation in the Post-Office which he had been for some time
expecting, and to which he was not yet appointed. He perfectly
knew that the public could never have got him in, but he grimly
gratified himself with the idea that the public kept him out.
Under the influence of this injury (and perhaps of some little
straitness and irregularity in the matter of wages), he had grown
neglectful of his person and morose in mind; and now beholding in
Clennam one of the degraded body of his oppressors, received him
with ignominy.
Mrs Gowan, however, received him with condescension. He found her
a courtly old lady, formerly a Beauty, and still sufficiently well-
favoured to have dispensed with the powder on her nose and a
certain impossible bloom under each eye. She was a little lofty
with him; so was another old lady, dark-browed and high-nosed, and
who must have had something real about her or she could not have
existed, but it was certainly not her hair or her teeth or her
figure or her complexion; so was a grey old gentleman of dignified
and sullen appearance; both of whom had come to dinner. But, as
they had all been in the British Embassy way in sundry parts of the
earth, and as a British Embassy cannot better establish a character
with the Circumlocution Office than by treating its compatriots
with illimitable contempt (else it would become like the Embassies
of other countries), Clennam felt that on the whole they let him
off lightly.

The dignified old gentleman turned out to be Lord Lancaster
Stiltstalking, who had been maintained by the Circumlocution Office
for many years as a representative of the Britannic Majesty abroad.

This noble Refrigerator had iced several European courts in his
time, and had done it with such complete success that the very name
of Englishman yet struck cold to the stomachs of foreigners who had
the distinguished honour of remembering him at a distance of a
quarter of a century.

He was now in retirement, and hence (in a ponderous white cravat,
like a stiff snow-drift) was so obliging as to shade the dinner.
There was a whisper of the pervading Bohemian character in the
nomadic nature of the service and its curious races of plates and
dishes; but the noble Refrigerator, infinitely better than plate or
porcelain, made it superb. He shaded the dinner, cooled the wines,
chilled the gravy, and blighted the vegetables.

There was only one other person in the room: a microscopically
small footboy, who waited on the malevolent man who hadn't got into
the Post-Office. Even this youth, if his jacket could have been
unbuttoned and his heart laid bare, would have been seen, as a
distant adherent of the Barnacle family, already to aspire to a
situation under Government.

Mrs Gowan with a gentle melancholy upon her, occasioned by her
son's being reduced to court the swinish public as a follower of
the low Arts, instead of asserting his birthright and putting a
ring through its nose as an acknowledged Barnacle, headed the
conversation at dinner on the evil days. It was then that Clennam
learned for the first time what little pivots this great world goes
round upon.

'If John Barnacle,' said Mrs Gowan, after the degeneracy of the
times had been fully ascertained, 'if John Barnacle had but
abandoned his most unfortunate idea of conciliating the mob, all
would have been well, and I think the country would have been
preserved.'
The old lady with the high nose assented; but added that if
Augustus Stiltstalking had in a general way ordered the cavalry out
with instructions to charge, she thought the country would have
been preserved.

The noble Refrigerator assented; but added that if William Barnacle
and Tudor Stiltstalking, when they came over to one another and
formed their ever-memorable coalition, had boldly muzzled the
newspapers, and rendered it penal for any Editor-person to presume
to discuss the conduct of any appointed authority abroad or at
home, he thought the country would have been preserved.

It was agreed that the country (another word for the Barnacles and
Stiltstalkings) wanted preserving, but how it came to want
preserving was not so clear. It was only clear that the question
was all about John Barnacle, Augustus Stiltstalking, William
Barnacle and Tudor Stiltstalking, Tom, Dick, or Harry Barnacle or
Stiltstalking, because there was nobody else but mob. And this was
the feature of the conversation which impressed Clennam, as a man
not used to it, very disagreeably: making him doubt if it were
quite right to sit there, silently hearing a great nation narrowed
to such little bounds. Remembering, however, that in the
Parliamentary debates, whether on the life of that nation's body or
the life of its soul, the question was usually all about and
between John Barnacle, Augustus Stiltstalking, William Barnacle and
Tudor Stiltstalking, Tom, Dick, or Harry Barnacle or Stiltstalking,
and nobody else; he said nothing on the part of mob, bethinking
himself that mob was used to it.

Mr Henry Gowan seemed to have a malicious pleasure in playing off
the three talkers against each other, and in seeing Clennam
startled by what they said. Having as supreme a contempt for the
class that had thrown him off as for the class that had not taken
him on, he had no personal disquiet in anything that passed. His
healthy state of mind appeared even to derive a gratification from
Clennam's position of embarrassment and isolation among the good
company; and if Clennam had been in that condition with which
Nobody was incessantly contending, he would have suspected it, and
would have struggled with the suspicion as a meanness, even while
he sat at the table.

In the course of a couple of hours the noble Refrigerator, at no
time less than a hundred years behind the period, got about five
centuries in arrears, and delivered solemn political oracles
appropriate to that epoch. He finished by freezing a cup of tea
for his own drinking, and retiring at his lowest temperature. Then
Mrs Gowan, who had been accustomed in her days of a vacant arm-
chair beside her to which to summon state to retain her devoted
slaves, one by one, for short audiences as marks of her especial
favour, invited Clennam with a turn of her fan to approach the
presence. He obeyed, and took the tripod recently vacated by Lord
Lancaster Stiltstalking.

'Mr Clennam,' said Mrs Gowan, 'apart from the happiness I have in
becoming known to you, though in this odiously inconvenient place--
a mere barrack--there is a subject on which I am dying to speak to
you. It is the subject in connection with which my son first had,
I believe, the pleasure of cultivating your acquaintance.'

Clennam inclined his head, as a generally suitable reply to what he
did not yet quite understand.

'First,' said Mrs Gowan, 'now, is she really pretty?'

In nobody's difficulties, he would have found it very difficult to
answer; very difficult indeed to smile, and say 'Who?'

'Oh! You know!' she returned. 'This flame of Henry's. This
unfortunate fancy. There! If it is a point of honour that I
should originate the name--Miss Mickles--Miggles.'

'Miss Meagles,' said Clennam, 'is very beautiful.'

'Men are so often mistaken on those points,' returned Mrs Gowan,
shaking her head, 'that I candidly confess to you I feel anything
but sure of it, even now; though it is something to have Henry
corroborated with so much gravity and emphasis. He picked the
people up at Rome, I think?'

The phrase would have given nobody mortal offence. Clennam
replied, 'Excuse me, I doubt if I understand your expression.'

'Picked the people up,' said Mrs Gowan, tapping the sticks of her
closed fan (a large green one, which she used as a hand-screen) on
her little table. 'Came upon them. Found them out. Stumbled UP
against them.'

'The people?'

'Yes. The Miggles people.'

'I really cannot say,' said Clennam, 'where my friend Mr Meagles
first presented Mr Henry Gowan to his daughter.'

'I am pretty sure he picked her up at Rome; but never mind where--
somewhere. Now (this is entirely between ourselves), is she very
plebeian?'

'Really, ma'am,' returned Clennam, 'I am so undoubtedly plebeian
myself, that I do not feel qualified to judge.'

'Very neat!' said Mrs Gowan, coolly unfurling her screen. 'Very
happy! From which I infer that you secretly think her manner equal
to her looks?'

Clennam, after a moment's stiffness, bowed.

'That's comforting, and I hope you may be right. Did Henry tell me
you had travelled with them?'
'I travelled with my friend Mr Meagles, and his wife and daughter,
during some months.' (Nobody's heart might have been wrung by the
remembrance.)

'Really comforting, because you must have had a large experience of
them. You see, Mr Clennam, this thing has been going on for a long
time, and I find no improvement in it. Therefore to have the
opportunity of speaking to one so well informed about it as
yourself, is an immense relief to me. Quite a boon. Quite a
blessing, I am sure.'

'Pardon me,' returned Clennam, 'but I am not in Mr Henry Gowan's
confidence. I am far from being so well informed as you suppose me
to be. Your mistake makes my position a very delicate one. No
word on this topic has ever passed between Mr Henry Gowan and
myself.'

Mrs Gowan glanced at the other end of the room, where her son was
playing ecarte on a sofa, with the old lady who was for a charge of
cavalry.

'Not in his confidence? No,' said Mrs Gowan. 'No word has passed
between you? No. That I can imagine. But there are unexpressed
confidences, Mr Clennam; and as you have been together intimately
among these people, I cannot doubt that a confidence of that sort
exists in the present case. Perhaps you have heard that I have
suffered the keenest distress of mind from Henry's having taken to
a pursuit which--well!' shrugging her shoulders, 'a very
respectable pursuit, I dare say, and some artists are, as artists,
quite superior persons; still, we never yet in our family have gone
beyond an Amateur, and it is a pardonable weakness to feel a
little--'

As Mrs Gowan broke off to heave a sigh, Clennam, however resolute
to be magnanimous, could not keep down the thought that there was
mighty little danger of the family's ever going beyond an Amateur,
even as it was.

'Henry,' the mother resumed, 'is self-willed and resolute; and as
these people naturally strain every nerve to catch him, I can
entertain very little hope, Mr Clennam, that the thing will be
broken off. I apprehend the girl's fortune will be very small;
Henry might have done much better; there is scarcely anything to
compensate for the connection: still, he acts for himself; and if
I find no improvement within a short time, I see no other course
than to resign myself and make the best of these people. I am
infinitely obliged to you for what you have told me.'
As she shrugged her shoulders, Clennam stiffly bowed again. With
an uneasy flush upon his face, and hesitation in his manner, he
then said in a still lower tone than he had adopted yet:

'Mrs Gowan, I scarcely know how to acquit myself of what I feel to
be a duty, and yet I must ask you for your kind consideration in
attempting to discharge it. A misconception on your part, a very
great misconception if I may venture to call it so, seems to
require setting right. You have supposed Mr Meagles and his family
to strain every nerve, I think you said--'

'Every nerve,' repeated Mrs Gowan, looking at him in calm
obstinacy, with her green fan between her face and the fire.

'To secure Mr Henry Gowan?'

The lady placidly assented.

'Now that is so far,' said Arthur, 'from being the case, that I
know Mr Meagles to be unhappy in this matter; and to have
interposed all reasonable obstacles with the hope of putting an end
to it.'

Mrs Gowan shut up her great green fan, tapped him on the arm with
it, and tapped her smiling lips. 'Why, of course,' said she.
'Just what I mean.'

Arthur watched her face for some explanation of what she did mean.

'Are you really serious, Mr Clennam? Don't you see?'

Arthur did not see; and said so.

'Why, don't I know my son, and don't I know that this is exactly
the way to hold him?' said Mrs Gowan, contemptuously; 'and do not
these Miggles people know it, at least as well as I? Oh, shrewd
people, Mr Clennam: evidently people of business! I believe
Miggles belonged to a Bank. It ought to have been a very
profitable Bank, if he had much to do with its management. This is
very well done, indeed.'

'I beg and entreat you, ma'am--' Arthur interposed.

'Oh, Mr Clennam, can you really be so credulous?'

It made such a painful impression upon him to hear her talking in
this haughty tone, and to see her patting her contemptuous lips
with her fan, that he said very earnestly, 'Believe me, ma'am, this
is unjust, a perfectly groundless suspicion.'

'Suspicion?' repeated Mrs Gowan. 'Not suspicion, Mr Clennam,
Certainty. It is very knowingly done indeed, and seems to have
taken YOU in completely.' She laughed; and again sat tapping her
lips with her fan, and tossing her head, as if she added, 'Don't
tell me. I know such people will do anything for the honour of
such an alliance.'

At this opportune moment, the cards were thrown up, and Mr Henry
Gowan came across the room saying, 'Mother, if you can spare Mr
Clennam for this time, we have a long way to go, and it's getting
late.' Mr Clennam thereupon rose, as he had no choice but to do;
and Mrs Gowan showed him, to the last, the same look and the same
tapped contemptuous lips.

'You have had a portentously long audience of my mother,' said
Gowan, as the door closed upon them. 'I fervently hope she has not
bored you?'

'Not at all,' said Clennam.

They had a little open phaeton for the journey, and were soon in it
on the road home. Gowan, driving, lighted a cigar; Clennam
declined one. Do what he would, he fell into such a mood of
abstraction that Gowan said again, 'I am very much afraid my mother
has bored you?' To which he roused himself to answer, 'Not at
all!' and soon relapsed again.

In that state of mind which rendered nobody uneasy, his
thoughtfulness would have turned principally on the man at his
side. He would have thought of the morning when he first saw him
rooting out the stones with his heel, and would have asked himself,
'Does he jerk me out of the path in the same careless, cruel way?'
He would have thought, had this introduction to his mother been
brought about by him because he knew what she would say, and that
he could thus place his position before a rival and loftily warn
him off, without himself reposing a word of confidence in him? He
would have thought, even if there were no such design as that, had
he brought him there to play with his repressed emotions, and
torment him? The current of these meditations would have been
stayed sometimes by a rush of shame, bearing a remonstrance to
himself from his own open nature, representing that to shelter such
suspicions, even for the passing moment, was not to hold the high,
unenvious course he had resolved to keep. At those times, the
striving within him would have been hardest; and looking up and
catching Gowan's eyes, he would have started as if he had done him
an injury.

Then, looking at the dark road and its uncertain objects, he would
have gradually trailed off again into thinking, 'Where are we
driving, he and I, I wonder, on the darker road of life? How will
it be with us, and with her, in the obscure distance?' Thinking of
her, he would have been troubled anew with a reproachful misgiving
that it was not even loyal to her to dislike him, and that in being
so easily prejudiced against him he was less deserving of her than
at first.

'You are evidently out of spirits,' said Gowan; 'I am very much
afraid my mother must have bored you dreadfully.'
'Believe me, not at all,' said Clennam. 'It's nothing--nothing!'

CHAPTER 27

Five-and-Twenty

A frequently recurring doubt, whether Mr Pancks's desire to collect
information relative to the Dorrit family could have any possible
bearing on the misgivings he had imparted to his mother on his
return from his long exile, caused Arthur Clennam much uneasiness
at this period. What Mr Pancks already knew about the Dorrit
family, what more he really wanted to find out, and why he should
trouble his busy head about them at all, were questions that often
perplexed him. Mr Pancks was not a man to waste his time and
trouble in researches prompted by idle curiosity. That he had a
specific object Clennam could not doubt. And whether the
attainment of that object by Mr Pancks's industry might bring to
light, in some untimely way, secret reasons which had induced his
mother to take Little Dorrit by the hand, was a serious
speculation.

Not that he ever wavered either in his desire or his determination
to repair a wrong that had been done in his father's time, should
a wrong come to light, and be reparable. The shadow of a supposed
act of injustice, which had hung over him since his father's death,
was so vague and formless that it might be the result of a reality
widely remote from his idea of it. But, if his apprehensions
should prove to be well founded, he was ready at any moment to lay
down all he had, and begin the world anew. As the fierce dark
teaching of his childhood had never sunk into his heart, so that
first article in his code of morals was, that he must begin, in
practical humility, with looking well to his feet on Earth, and
that he could never mount on wings of words to Heaven. Duty on
earth, restitution on earth, action on earth; these first, as the
first steep steps upward. Strait was the gate and narrow was the
way; far straiter and narrower than the broad high road paved with
vain professions and vain repetitions, motes from other men's eyes
and liberal delivery of others to the judgment--all cheap materials
costing absolutely nothing.

No. It was not a selfish fear or hesitation that rendered him
uneasy, but a mistrust lest Pancks might not observe his part of
the understanding between them, and, making any discovery, might
take some course upon it without imparting it to him. On the other
hand, when he recalled his conversation with Pancks, and the little
reason he had to suppose that there was any likelihood of that
strange personage being on that track at all, there were times when
he wondered that he made so much of it. Labouring in this sea, as
all barks labour in cross seas, he tossed about and came to no
haven.

The removal of Little Dorrit herself from their customary
association, did not mend the matter. She was so much out, and so
much in her own room, that he began to miss her and to find a blank
in her place. He had written to her to inquire if she were better,
and she had written back, very gratefully and earnestly telling him
not to be uneasy on her behalf, for she was quite well; but he had
not seen her, for what, in their intercourse, was a long time.

He returned home one evening from an interview with her father, who
had mentioned that she was out visiting--which was what he always
said when she was hard at work to buy his supper--and found Mr
Meagles in an excited state walking up and down his room. On his
opening the door, Mr Meagles stopped, faced round, and said:

'Clennam!--Tattycoram!'

'What's the matter?'

'Lost!'

'Why, bless my heart alive!' cried Clennam in amazement. 'What do
you mean?'

'Wouldn't count five-and-twenty, sir; couldn't be got to do it;
stopped at eight, and took herself off.'

'Left your house?'

'Never to come back,' said Mr Meagles, shaking his head. 'You
don't know that girl's passionate and proud character. A team of
horses couldn't draw her back now; the bolts and bars of the old
Bastille couldn't keep her.'

'How did it happen? Pray sit down and tell me.'

'As to how it happened, it's not so easy to relate: because you
must have the unfortunate temperament of the poor impetuous girl
herself, before you can fully understand it. But it came about in
this way. Pet and Mother and I have been having a good deal of
talk together of late. I'll not disguise from you, Clennam, that
those conversations have not been of as bright a kind as I could
wish; they have referred to our going away again. In proposing to
do which, I have had, in fact, an object.'