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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