第 115 页

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