Little Dorrit

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'Who passes by this road so late?
Compagnon de la Majolaine;
Who passes by this road so late?
Always gay!'

It was not the first time, by many, that he had recalled the song
of the child's game, of which the fellow had hummed @ verse while
they stood side by side; but he was so unconscious of having
repeated it audibly, that he started to hear the next verse.

'Of all the king's knights 'tis the flower,
Compagnon de la Majolaine;
Of all the king's knights 'tis the flower,
Always gay!'

Cavalletto had deferentially suggested the words and tune,
supposing him to have stopped short for want of more.

'Ah! You know the song, Cavalletto?'

'By Bacchus, yes, sir! They all know it in France. I have heard
it many times, sung by the little children. The last time when it
I have heard,' said Mr Baptist, formerly Cavalletto, who usually
went back to his native construction of sentences when his memory
went near home, 'is from a sweet little voice. A little voice,
very pretty, very innocent. Altro!'

'The last time I heard it,' returned Arthur, 'was in a voice quite
the reverse of pretty, and quite the reverse of innocent.' He said
it more to himself than to his companion, and added to himself,
repeating the man's next words. 'Death of my life, sir, it's my
character to be impatient!'

'EH!' cried Cavalletto, astounded, and with all his colour gone in
a moment.

'What is the matter?'

'Sir! You know where I have heard that song the last time?'

With his rapid native action, his hands made the outline of a high
hook nose, pushed his eyes near together, dishevelled his hair,
puffed out his upper lip to represent a thick moustache, and threw
the heavy end of an ideal cloak over his shoulder. While doing
this, with a swiftness incredible to one who has not watched an
Italian peasant, he indicated a very remarkable and sinister smile.

The whole change passed over him like a flash of light, and he
stood in the same instant, pale and astonished, before his patron.

'In the name of Fate and wonder,' said Clennam, 'what do you mean?
Do you know a man of the name of Blandois?'

'No!' said Mr Baptist, shaking his head.

'You have just now described a man who was by when you heard that
song; have you not?'

'Yes!' said Mr Baptist, nodding fifty times.

'And was he not called Blandois?'

'No!' said Mr Baptist. 'Altro, Altro, Altro, Altro!' He could not
reject the name sufficiently, with his head and his right
forefinger going at once.

'Stay!' cried Clennam, spreading out the handbill on his desk.
'Was this the man? You can understand what I read aloud?'

'Altogether. Perfectly.'

'But look at it, too. Come here and look over me, while I read.'

Mr Baptist approached, followed every word with his quick eyes, saw
and heard it all out with the greatest impatience, then clapped his
two hands flat upon the bill as if he had fiercely caught some
noxious creature, and cried, looking eagerly at Clennam, 'It is the
man! Behold him!'

'This is of far greater moment to me' said Clennam, in great
agitation, 'than you can imagine. Tell me where you knew the man.'

Mr Baptist, releasing the paper very slowly and with much
discomfiture, and drawing himself back two or three paces, and
making as though he dusted his hands, returned, very much against
his will:

'At Marsiglia--Marseilles.'

'What was he?'

'A prisoner, and--Altro! I believe yes!--an,' Mr Baptist crept
closer again to whisper it, 'Assassin!'

Clennam fell back as if the word had struck him a blow: so terrible
did it make his mother's communication with the man appear.
Cavalletto dropped on one knee, and implored him, with a redundancy
of gesticulation, to hear what had brought himself into such foul
company.

He told with perfect truth how it had come of a little contraband
trading, and how he had in time been released from prison, and how
he had gone away from those antecedents. How, at the house of
entertainment called the Break of Day at Chalons on the Saone, he
had been awakened in his bed at night by the same assassin, then
assuming the name of Lagnier, though his name had formerly been
Rigaud; how the assassin had proposed that they should join their
fortunes together; how he held the assassin in such dread and
aversion that he had fled from him at daylight, and how he had ever
since been haunted by the fear of seeing the assassin again and
being claimed by him as an acquaintance. When he had related this,
with an emphasis and poise on the word, 'assassin,' peculiarly
belonging to his own language, and which did not serve to render it
less terrible to Clennam, he suddenly sprang to his feet, pounced
upon the bill again, and with a vehemence that would have been
absolute madness in any man of Northern origin, cried 'Behold the
same assassin! Here he is!'

In his passionate raptures, he at first forgot the fact that he had
lately seen the assassin in London. On his remembering it, it
suggested hope to Clennam that the recognition might be of later
date than the night of the visit at his mother's; but Cavalletto
was too exact and clear about time and place, to leave any opening
for doubt that it had preceded that occasion.

'Listen,' said Arthur, very seriously. 'This man, as we have read
here, has wholly disappeared.'

'Of it I am well content!' said Cavalletto, raising his eyes
piously. 'A thousand thanks to Heaven! Accursed assassin!'

'Not so,' returned Clennam; 'for until something more is heard of
him, I can never know an hour's peace.'

'Enough, Benefactor; that is quite another thing. A million of
excuses!'

'Now, Cavalletto,' said Clennam, gently turning him by the arm, so
that they looked into each other's eyes. 'I am certain that for
the little I have been able to do for you, you are the most
sincerely grateful of men.'

'I swear it!' cried the other.

'I know it. If you could find this man, or discover what has
become of him, or gain any later intelligence whatever of him, you
would render me a service above any other service I could receive
in the world, and would make me (with far greater reason) as
grateful to you as you are to me.'
'I know not where to look,' cried the little man, kissing Arthur's
hand in a transport. 'I know not where to begin. I know not where
to go. But, courage! Enough! It matters not! I go, in this
instant of time!'

'Not a word to any one but me, Cavalletto.'

'Al-tro!' cried Cavalletto. And was gone with great speed.

CHAPTER 23

Mistress Affery makes a Conditional Promise,
respecting her Dreams

Left alone, with the expressive looks and gestures of Mr Baptist,
otherwise Giovanni Baptista Cavalletto, vividly before him, Clennam
entered on a weary day. It was in vain that he tried to control
his attention by directing it to any business occupation or train
of thought; it rode at anchor by the haunting topic, and would hold
to no other idea. As though a criminal should be chained in a
stationary boat on a deep clear river, condemned, whatever
countless leagues of water flowed past him, always to see the body
of the fellow-creature he had drowned lying at the bottom,
immovable, and unchangeable, except as the eddies made it broad or
long, now expanding, now contracting its terrible lineaments; so
Arthur, below the shifting current of transparent thoughts and
fancies which were gone and succeeded by others as soon as come,
saw, steady and dark, and not to be stirred from its place, the one
subject that he endeavoured with all his might to rid himself of,
and that he could not fly from. The assurance he now had, that
Blandois, whatever his right name, was one of the worst of
characters, greatly augmented the burden of his anxieties. Though
the disappearance should be accounted for to-morrow, the fact that
his mother had been in communication with such a man, would remain
unalterable. That the communication had been of a secret kind, and
that she had been submissive to him and afraid of him, he hoped
might be known to no one beyond himself; yet, knowing it, how could
he separate it from his old vague fears, and how believe that there
was nothing evil in such relations?
Her resolution not to enter on the question with him, and his
knowledge of her indomitable character, enhanced his sense of
helplessness. It was like the oppression of a dream to believe
that shame and exposure were impending over her and his father's
memory, and to be shut out, as by a brazen wall, from the
possibility of coming to their aid. The purpose he had brought
home to his native country, and had ever since kept in view, was,
with her greatest determination, defeated by his mother herself, at
the time of all others when he feared that it pressed most. His
advice, energy, activity, money, credit, all his resources
whatsoever, were all made useless. If she had been possessed of
the old fabled influence, and had turned those who looked upon her
into stone, she could not have rendered him more completely
powerless (so it seemed to him in his distress of mind) than she
did, when she turned her unyielding face to his in her gloomy room.

But the light of that day's discovery, shining on these
considerations, roused him to take a more decided course of action.

Confident in the rectitude of his purpose, and impelled by a sense
of overhanging danger closing in around, he resolved, if his mother
would still admit of no approach, to make a desperate appeal to
Affery. If she could be brought to become communicative, and to do
what lay in her to break the spell of secrecy that enshrouded the
house, he might shake off the paralysis of which every hour that
passed over his head made him more acutely sensible. This was the
result of his day's anxiety, and this was the decision he put in
practice when the day closed in.

His first disappointment, on arriving at the house, was to find the
door open, and Mr Flintwinch smoking a pipe on the steps. If
circumstances had been commonly favourable, Mistress Affery would
have opened the door to his knock. Circumstances being uncommonly
unfavourable, the door stood open, and Mr Flintwinch was smoking
his pipe on the steps.

'Good evening,' said Arthur.

'Good evening,' said Mr Flintwinch.

The smoke came crookedly out of Mr Flintwinch's mouth, as if it
circulated through the whole of his wry figure and came back by his
wry throat, before coming forth to mingle with the smoke from the
crooked chimneys and the mists from the crooked river.

'Have you any news?' said Arthur.

'We have no news,' said Jeremiah.

'I mean of the foreign man,' Arthur explained.

_'I_ mean of the foreign man,' said Jeremiah.

He looked so grim, as he stood askew, with the knot of his cravat
under his ear, that the thought passed into Clennam's mind, and not
for the first time by many, could Flintwinch for a purpose of his
own have got rid of Blandois? Could it have been his secret, and
his safety, that were at issue? He was small and bent, and perhaps
not actively strong; yet he was as tough as an old yew-tree, and as
crusty as an old jackdaw. Such a man, coming behind a much younger
and more vigorous man, and having the will to put an end to him and
no relenting, might do it pretty surely in that solitary place at
a late hour.

While, in the morbid condition of his thoughts, these thoughts
drifted over the main one that was always in Clennam's mind, Mr
Flintwinch, regarding the opposite house over the gateway with his
neck twisted and one eye shut up, stood smoking with a vicious
expression upon him; more as if he were trying to bite off the stem
of his pipe, than as if he were enjoying it. Yet he was enjoying
it in his own way.

'You'll be able to take my likeness, the next time you call,
Arthur, I should think,' said Mr Flintwinch, drily, as he stooped
to knock the ashes out.

Rather conscious and confused, Arthur asked his pardon, if he had
stared at him unpolitely. 'But my mind runs so much upon this
matter,' he said, 'that I lose myself.'

'Hah! Yet I don't see,' returned Mr Flintwinch, quite at his
leisure, 'why it should trouble YOU, Arthur.'

'No?'

'No,' said Mr Flintwinch, very shortly and decidedly: much as if he
were of the canine race, and snapped at Arthur's hand.

'Is it nothing to see those placards about? Is it nothing to me to
see my mother's name and residence hawked up and down in such an
association?'

'I don't see,' returned Mr Flintwinch, scraping his horny cheek,
'that it need signify much to you. But I'll tell you what I do
see, Arthur,' glancing up at the windows; 'I see the light of fire
and candle in your mother's room!'

'And what has that to do with it?'

'Why, sir, I read by it,' said Mr Flintwinch, screwing himself at
him, 'that if it's advisable (as the proverb says it is) to let
sleeping dogs lie, it's just as advisable, perhaps, to let missing
dogs lie. Let 'em be. They generally turn up soon enough.'

Mr Flintwinch turned short round when he had made this remark, and
went into the dark hall. Clennam stood there, following him with
his eyes, as he dipped for a light in the phosphorus-box in the
little room at the side, got one after three or four dips, and
lighted the dim lamp against the wall. All the while, Clennam was
pursuing the probabilities--rather as if they were being shown to
him by an invisible hand than as if he himself were conjuring them
up--of Mr Flintwinch's ways and means of doing that darker deed,
and removing its traces by any of the black avenues of shadow that
lay around them.

'Now, sir,' said the testy Jeremiah; 'will it be agreeable to walk
up-stairs?'

'My mother is alone, I suppose?'

'Not alone,' said Mr Flintwinch. 'Mr Casby and his daughter are
with her. They came in while I was smoking, and I stayed behind to
have my smoke out.'

This was the second disappointment. Arthur made no remark upon it,
and repaired to his mother's room, where Mr Casby and Flora had
been taking tea, anchovy paste, and hot buttered toast. The relics
of those delicacies were not yet removed, either from the table or
from the scorched countenance of Affery, who, with the kitchen
toasting-fork still in her hand, looked like a sort of allegorical
personage; except that she had a considerable advantage over the
general run of such personages in point of significant emblematical
purpose.

Flora had spread her bonnet and shawl upon the bed, with a care
indicative of an intention to stay some time. Mr Casby, too, was
beaming near the hob, with his benevolent knobs shining as if the
warm butter of the toast were exuding through the patriarchal
skull, and with his face as ruddy as if the colouring matter of the
anchovy paste were mantling in the patriarchal visage. Seeing
this, as he exchanged the usual salutations, Clennam decided to
speak to his mother without postponement.

It had long been customary, as she never changed her room, for
those who had anything to say to her apart, to wheel her to her
desk; where she sat, usually with the back of her chair turned
towards the rest of the room, and the person who talked with her
seated in a corner, on a stool which was always set in that place
for that purpose. Except that it was long since the mother and son
had spoken together without the intervention of a third person, it
was an ordinary matter of course within the experience of visitors
for Mrs Clennam to be asked, with a word of apology for the
interruption, if she could be spoken with on a matter of business,
and, on her replying in the affirmative, to be wheeled into the
position described.

Therefore, when Arthur now made such an apology, and such a
request, and moved her to her desk and seated himself on the stool,
Mrs Finching merely began to talk louder and faster, as a delicate
hint that she could overhear nothing, and Mr Casby stroked his long
white locks with sleepy calmness.

'Mother, I have heard something to-day which I feel persuaded you
don't know, and which I think you should know, of the antecedents
of that man I saw here.'

'I know nothing of the antecedents of the man you saw here,
Arthur.'

She spoke aloud. He had lowered his own voice; but she rejected
that advance towards confidence as she rejected every other, and
spoke in her usual key and in her usual stern voice.

'I have received it on no circuitous information; it has come to me
direct.'
She asked him, exactly as before, if he were there to tell her what
it was?

'I thought it right that you should know it.'

'And what is it?'

'He has been a prisoner in a French gaol.'

She answered with composure, 'I should think that very likely.'

' But in a gaol for criminals, mother. On an accusation of
murder.'

She started at the word, and her looks expressed her natural
horror. Yet she still spoke aloud, when she demanded:--

'Who told you so?'

'A man who was his fellow-prisoner.'

'That man's antecedents, I suppose, were not known to you, before
he told you?'

'No.'

'Though the man himself was?'

'Yes.'

'My case and Flintwinch's, in respect of this other man! I dare
say the resemblance is not so exact, though, as that your informant
became known to you through a letter from a correspondent with whom
he had deposited money? How does that part of the parallel stand?'

Arthur had no choice but to say that his informant had not become
known to him through the agency of any such credentials, or indeed
of any credentials at all. Mrs Clennam's attentive frown expanded
by degrees into a severe look of triumph, and she retorted with
emphasis, 'Take care how you judge others, then. I say to you,
Arthur, for your good, take care how you judge!'
Her emphasis had been derived from her eyes quite as much as from
the stress she laid upon her words. She continued to look at him;
and if, when he entered the house, he had had any latent hope of
prevailing in the least with her, she now looked it out of his
heart.

'Mother, shall I do nothing to assist you?'

'Nothing.'

'Will you entrust me with no confidence, no charge, no explanation?

Will you take no counsel with me? Will you not let me come near
you?'

'How can you ask me? You separated yourself from my affairs. It
was not my act; it was yours. How can you consistently ask me such
a question? You know that you left me to Flintwinch, and that he
occupies your place.'

Glancing at Jeremiah, Clennam saw in his very gaiters that his
attention was closely directed to them, though he stood leaning
against the wall scraping his jaw, and pretended to listen to Flora
as she held forth in a most distracting manner on a chaos of
subjects, in which mackerel, and Mr F.'s Aunt in a swing, had
become entangled with cockchafers and the wine trade.

'A prisoner, in a French gaol, on an accusation of murder,'
repeated Mrs Clennam, steadily going over what her son had said.
'That is all you know of him from the fellow-prisoner?'

'In substance, all.'

'And was the fellow-prisoner his accomplice and a murderer, too?
But, of course, he gives a better account of himself than of his
friend; it is needless to ask. This will supply the rest of them
here with something new to talk about. Casby, Arthur tells me--'

'Stay, mother! Stay, stay!' He interrupted her hastily, for it
had not entered his imagination that she would openly proclaim what
he had told her.

'What now?' she said with displeasure. 'What more?'

'I beg you to excuse me, Mr Casby--and you, too, Mrs Finching--for
one other moment with my mother--'

He had laid his hand upon her chair, or she would otherwise have
wheeled it round with the touch of her foot upon the ground. They
were still face to face. She looked at him, as he ran over the
possibilities of some result he had not intended, and could not
foresee, being influenced by Cavalletto's disclosure becoming a
matter of notoriety, and hurriedly arrived at the conclusion that
it had best not be talked about; though perhaps he was guided by no
more distinct reason than that he had taken it for granted that his
mother would reserve it to herself and her partner.

'What now?' she said again, impatiently. 'What is it?'

'I did not mean, mother, that you should repeat what I have
communicated. I think you had better not repeat it.'

'Do you make that a condition with me?'

'Well! Yes.'

'Observe, then! It is you who make this a secret,' said she,
holding up her hand, 'and not I. It is you, Arthur, who bring here
doubts and suspicions and entreaties for explanations, and it is
you, Arthur, who bring secrets here. What is it to me, do you
think, where the man has been, or what he has been? What can it be
to me? The whole world may know it, if they care to know it; it is
nothing to me. Now, let me go.'

He yielded to her imperious but elated look, and turned her chair
back to the place from which he had wheeled it. In doing so he saw
elation in the face of Mr Flintwinch, which most assuredly was not
inspired by Flora. this turning of his intelligence and of his
whole attempt and design against himself, did even more than his
mother's fixedness and firmness to convince him that his efforts
with her were idle. Nothing remained but the appeal to his old
friend Affery.

But even to get the very doubtful and preliminary stage of making
the appeal, seemed one of the least promising of human
undertakings. She was so completely under the thrall of the two
clever ones, was so systematically kept in sight by one or other of
them, and was so afraid to go about the house besides, that every
opportunity of speaking to her alone appeared to be forestalled.
Over and above that, Mistress Affery, by some means (it was not
very difficult to guess, through the sharp arguments of her liege
lord), had acquired such a lively conviction of the hazard of
saying anything under any circumstances, that she had remained all
this time in a corner guarding herself from approach with that
symbolical instrument of hers; so that, when a word or two had been
addressed to her by Flora, or even by the bottle-green patriarch
himself, she had warded off conversation with the toasting-fork
like a dumb woman.

After several abortive attempts to get Affery to look at him while
she cleared the table and washed the tea-service, Arthur thought of
an expedient which Flora might originate. To whom he therefore
whispered, 'Could you say you would like to go through the house?'

Now, poor Flora, being always in fluctuating expectation of the
time when Clennam would renew his boyhood and be madly in love with
her again, received the whisper with the utmost delight; not only
as rendered precious by its mysterious character, but as preparing
the way for a tender interview in which he would declare the state
of his affections. She immediately began to work out the hint.

'Ah dear me the poor old room,' said Flora, glancing round, 'looks
just as ever Mrs Clennam I am touched to see except for being
smokier which was to be expected with time and which we must all
expect and reconcile ourselves to being whether we like it or not
as I am sure I have had to do myself if not exactly smokier
dreadfully stouter which is the same or worse, to think of the days
when papa used to bring me here the least of girls a perfect mass
of chilblains to be stuck upon a chair with my feet on the rails
and stare at Arthur--pray excuse me--Mr Clennam--the least of boys
in the frightfullest of frills and jackets ere yet Mr F. appeared
a misty shadow on the horizon paying attentions like the well-known
spectre of some place in Germany beginning with a B is a moral
lesson inculcating that all the paths in life are similar to the
paths down in the North of England where they get the coals and
make the iron and things gravelled with ashes!'

Having paid the tribute of a sigh to the instability of human
existence, Flora hurried on with her purpose.

'Not that at any time,' she proceeded, 'its worst enemy could have
said it was a cheerful house for that it was never made to be but
always highly impressive, fond memory recalls an occasion in youth
ere yet the judgment was mature when Arthur--confirmed habit--Mr
Clennam--took me down into an unused kitchen eminent for mouldiness
and proposed to secrete me there for life and feed me on what he
could hide from his meals when he was not at home for the holidays
and on dry bread in disgrace which at that halcyon period too
frequently occurred, would it be inconvenient or asking too much to
beg to be permitted to revive those scenes and walk through the
house?'

Mrs Clennam, who responded with a constrained grace to Mrs
Finching's good nature in being there at all, though her visit
(before Arthur's unexpected arrival) was undoubtedly an act of pure
good nature and no self-gratification, intimated that all the house
was open to her. Flora rose and looked to Arthur for his escort.
'Certainly,' said he, aloud; 'and Affery will light us, I dare
say.'

Affery was excusing herself with 'Don't ask nothing of me, Arthur!'
when Mr Flintwinch stopped her with 'Why not? Affery, what's the
matter with you, woman? Why not, jade!' Thus expostulated with,
she came unwillingly out of her corner, resigned the toasting-fork
into one of her husband's hands, and took the candlestick he
offered from the other.