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thing! We have got Mrs Bangham in this book. But what makes these books

interesting to most people is--not who's in 'em, but who isn't--who's

coming, you know, and when. That's the interesting question.'

Commendingly looking back at the pillow he had improvised, he left them

to their hour's repose. Maggy was snoring already, and Little Dorrit

was soon fast asleep with her head resting on that sealed book of Fate,

untroubled by its mysterious blank leaves.

This was Little Dorrit's party. The shame, desertion, wretchedness, and

exposure of the great capital; the wet, the cold, the slow hours, and

the swift clouds of the dismal night. This was the party from which

Little Dorrit went home, jaded, in the first grey mist of a rainy

morning.

CHAPTER 15. Mrs Flintwinch has another Dream

The debilitated old house in the city, wrapped in its mantle of soot,

and leaning heavily on the crutches that had partaken of its decay and

worn out with it, never knew a healthy or a cheerful interval, let what

would betide. If the sun ever touched it, it was but with a ray, and

that was gone in half an hour; if the moonlight ever fell upon it, it

was only to put a few patches on its doleful cloak, and make it look

more wretched. The stars, to be sure, coldly watched it when the nights

and the smoke were clear enough; and all bad weather stood by it with

a rare fidelity. You should alike find rain, hail, frost, and thaw

lingering in that dismal enclosure when they had vanished from other

places; and as to snow, you should see it there for weeks, long after

it had changed from yellow to black, slowly weeping away its grimy life.

The place had no other adherents. As to street noises, the rumbling of

wheels in the lane merely rushed in at the gateway in going past, and

rushed out again: making the listening Mistress Affery feel as if she

were deaf, and recovered the sense of hearing by instantaneous flashes.

So with whistling, singing, talking, laughing, and all pleasant human

sounds. They leaped the gap in a moment, and went upon their way. The

varying light of fire and candle in Mrs Clennam's room made the greatest

change that ever broke the dead monotony of the spot. In her two long

narrow windows, the fire shone sullenly all day, and sullenly all night.

On rare occasions it flashed up passionately, as she did; but for the

most part it was suppressed, like her, and preyed upon itself evenly and

slowly. During many hours of the short winter days, however, when it was

dusk there early in the afternoon, changing distortions of herself

in her wheeled chair, of Mr Flintwinch with his wry neck, of Mistress

Affery coming and going, would be thrown upon the house wall that was

over the gateway, and would hover there like shadows from a great magic

lantern. As the room-ridden invalid settled for the night, these would

gradually disappear: Mistress Affery's magnified shadow always flitting

about, last, until it finally glided away into the air, as though she

were off upon a witch excursion. Then the solitary light would burn

unchangingly, until it burned pale before the dawn, and at last died

under the breath of Mrs Affery, as her shadow descended on it from the

witch-region of sleep.

Strange, if the little sick-room fire were in effect a beacon fire,

summoning some one, and that the most unlikely some one in the world,

to the spot that MUST be come to. Strange, if the little sick-room light

were in effect a watch-light, burning in that place every night until

an appointed event should be watched out! Which of the vast multitude

of travellers, under the sun and the stars, climbing the dusty hills

and toiling along the weary plains, journeying by land and journeying by

sea, coming and going so strangely, to meet and to act and react on one

another; which of the host may, with no suspicion of the journey's end,

be travelling surely hither?

Time shall show us. The post of honour and the post of shame, the

general's station and the drummer's, a peer's statue in Westminster

Abbey and a seaman's hammock in the bosom of the deep, the mitre and

the workhouse, the woolsack and the gallows, the throne and the

guillotine--the travellers to all are on the great high road, but it

has wonderful divergencies, and only Time shall show us whither each

traveller is bound.

On a wintry afternoon at twilight, Mrs Flintwinch, having been heavy all

day, dreamed this dream:

She thought she was in the kitchen getting the kettle ready for tea, and

was warming herself with her feet upon the fender and the skirt of her

gown tucked up, before the collapsed fire in the middle of the grate,

bordered on either hand by a deep cold black ravine. She thought that

as she sat thus, musing upon the question whether life was not for some

people a rather dull invention, she was frightened by a sudden noise

behind her. She thought that she had been similarly frightened once last

week, and that the noise was of a mysterious kind--a sound of rustling

and of three or four quick beats like a rapid step; while a shock or

tremble was communicated to her heart, as if the step had shaken the

floor, or even as if she had been touched by some awful hand. She

thought that this revived within her certain old fears of hers that

the house was haunted; and that she flew up the kitchen stairs without

knowing how she got up, to be nearer company.

Mistress Affery thought that on reaching the hall, she saw the door of

her liege lord's office standing open, and the room empty. That she went

to the ripped-up window in the little room by the street door to connect

her palpitating heart, through the glass, with living things beyond

and outside the haunted house. That she then saw, on the wall over the

gateway, the shadows of the two clever ones in conversation above. That

she then went upstairs with her shoes in her hand, partly to be near

the clever ones as a match for most ghosts, and partly to hear what they

were talking about.

'None of your nonsense with me,' said Mr Flintwinch. 'I won't take it

from you.'

Mrs Flintwinch dreamed that she stood behind the door, which was just

ajar, and most distinctly heard her husband say these bold words.

'Flintwinch,' returned Mrs Clennam, in her usual strong low voice,

'there is a demon of anger in you. Guard against it.'

'I don't care whether there's one or a dozen,' said Mr Flintwinch,

forcibly suggesting in his tone that the higher number was nearer the

mark. 'If there was fifty, they should all say, None of your nonsense

with me, I won't take it from you--I'd make 'em say it, whether they

liked it or not.'

'What have I done, you wrathful man?' her strong voice asked.

'Done?' said Mr Flintwinch. 'Dropped down upon me.'

'If you mean, remonstrated with you--'

'Don't put words into my mouth that I don't mean,' said Jeremiah,

sticking to his figurative expression with tenacious and impenetrable

obstinacy: 'I mean dropped down upon me.'

'I remonstrated with you,' she began again, 'because--'

'I won't have it!' cried Jeremiah. 'You dropped down upon me.'

'I dropped down upon you, then, you ill-conditioned man,' (Jeremiah

chuckled at having forced her to adopt his phrase,) 'for having been

needlessly significant to Arthur that morning. I have a right to

complain of it as almost a breach of confidence. You did not mean it--'

'I won't have it!' interposed the contradictory Jeremiah, flinging back

the concession. 'I did mean it.'

'I suppose I must leave you to speak in soliloquy if you choose,' she

replied, after a pause that seemed an angry one. 'It is useless my

addressing myself to a rash and headstrong old man who has a set purpose

not to hear me.'

'Now, I won't take that from you either,' said Jeremiah. 'I have no such

purpose. I have told you I did mean it. Do you wish to know why I meant

it, you rash and headstrong old woman?'

'After all, you only restore me my own words,' she said, struggling with

her indignation. 'Yes.'

'This is why, then. Because you hadn't cleared his father to him, and

you ought to have done it. Because, before you went into any tantrum

about yourself, who are--'

'Hold there, Flintwinch!' she cried out in a changed voice: 'you may go

a word too far.'

The old man seemed to think so. There was another pause, and he had

altered his position in the room, when he spoke again more mildly:

'I was going to tell you why it was. Because, before you took your own

part, I thought you ought to have taken the part of Arthur's father.

Arthur's father! I had no particular love for Arthur's father. I served

Arthur's father's uncle, in this house, when Arthur's father was not

much above me--was poorer as far as his pocket went--and when his uncle

might as soon have left me his heir as have left him. He starved in the

parlour, and I starved in the kitchen; that was the principal difference

in our positions; there was not much more than a flight of breakneck

stairs between us. I never took to him in those times; I don't know that

I ever took to him greatly at any time. He was an undecided, irresolute

chap, who had everything but his orphan life scared out of him when he

was young. And when he brought you home here, the wife his uncle

had named for him, I didn't need to look at you twice (you were a

good-looking woman at that time) to know who'd be master. You have stood

of your own strength ever since. Stand of your own strength now. Don't

lean against the dead.'

'I do not--as you call it--lean against the dead.'

'But you had a mind to do it, if I had submitted,' growled Jeremiah,

'and that's why you drop down upon me. You can't forget that I didn't

submit. I suppose you are astonished that I should consider it worth my

while to have justice done to Arthur's father?

Hey? It doesn't matter whether you answer or not, because I know you

are, and you know you are. Come, then, I'll tell you how it is. I may

be a bit of an oddity in point of temper, but this is my temper--I can't

let anybody have entirely their own way. You are a determined woman, and

a clever woman; and when you see your purpose before you, nothing will

turn you from it. Who knows that better than I do?'

'Nothing will turn me from it, Flintwinch, when I have justified it to

myself. Add that.'

'Justified it to yourself? I said you were the most determined woman on

the face of the earth (or I meant to say so), and if you are determined

to justify any object you entertain, of course you'll do it.'

'Man! I justify myself by the authority of these Books,' she cried, with

stern emphasis, and appearing from the sound that followed to strike the

dead-weight of her arm upon the table.

'Never mind that,' returned Jeremiah calmly, 'we won't enter into that

question at present. However that may be, you carry out your purposes,

and you make everything go down before them. Now, I won't go down before

them. I have been faithful to you, and useful to you, and I am attached

to you. But I can't consent, and I won't consent, and I never did

consent, and I never will consent to be lost in you. Swallow up

everybody else, and welcome. The peculiarity of my temper is, ma'am,

that I won't be swallowed up alive.'

Perhaps this had Originally been the mainspring of the understanding

between them. Descrying thus much of force of character in Mr

Flintwinch, perhaps Mrs Clennam had deemed alliance with him worth her

while.

'Enough and more than enough of the subject,' said she gloomily.

'Unless you drop down upon me again,' returned the persistent

Flintwinch, 'and then you must expect to hear of it again.'

Mistress Affery dreamed that the figure of her lord here began walking

up and down the room, as if to cool his spleen, and that she ran away;

but that, as he did not issue forth when she had stood listening and

trembling in the shadowy hall a little time, she crept up-stairs again,

impelled as before by ghosts and curiosity, and once more cowered

outside the door.

'Please to light the candle, Flintwinch,' Mrs Clennam was saying,

apparently wishing to draw him back into their usual tone. 'It is nearly

time for tea. Little Dorrit is coming, and will find me in the dark.'

Mr Flintwinch lighted the candle briskly, and said as he put it down

upon the table:

'What are you going to do with Little Dorrit? Is she to come to work

here for ever? To come to tea here for ever? To come backwards and

forwards here, in the same way, for ever?' 'How can you talk about "for

ever" to a maimed creature like me? Are we not all cut down like the

grass of the field, and was not I shorn by the scythe many years ago:

since when I have been lying here, waiting to be gathered into the

barn?'

'Ay, ay! But since you have been lying here--not near dead--nothing like

it--numbers of children and young people, blooming women, strong men,

and what not, have been cut down and carried; and still here are you,

you see, not much changed after all. Your time and mine may be a long

one yet. When I say for ever, I mean (though I am not poetical) through

all our time.' Mr Flintwinch gave this explanation with great calmness,

and calmly waited for an answer.

'So long as Little Dorrit is quiet and industrious, and stands in need

of the slight help I can give her, and deserves it; so long, I suppose,

unless she withdraws of her own act, she will continue to come here, I

being spared.'

'Nothing more than that?' said Flintwinch, stroking his mouth and chin.