第 132 页

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