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their ever-memorable coalition, had boldly muzzled the newspapers,

and rendered it penal for any Editor-person to presume to discuss the

conduct of any appointed authority abroad or at home, he thought the

country would have been preserved.

It was agreed that the country (another word for the Barnacles and

Stiltstalkings) wanted preserving, but how it came to want preserving

was not so clear. It was only clear that the question was all about

John Barnacle, Augustus Stiltstalking, William Barnacle and Tudor

Stiltstalking, Tom, Dick, or Harry Barnacle or Stiltstalking, because

there was nobody else but mob. And this was the feature of the

conversation which impressed Clennam, as a man not used to it, very

disagreeably: making him doubt if it were quite right to sit there,

silently hearing a great nation narrowed to such little bounds.

Remembering, however, that in the Parliamentary debates, whether on the

life of that nation's body or the life of its soul, the question was

usually all about and between John Barnacle, Augustus Stiltstalking,

William Barnacle and Tudor Stiltstalking, Tom, Dick, or Harry Barnacle

or Stiltstalking, and nobody else; he said nothing on the part of mob,

bethinking himself that mob was used to it.

Mr Henry Gowan seemed to have a malicious pleasure in playing off the

three talkers against each other, and in seeing Clennam startled by what

they said. Having as supreme a contempt for the class that had thrown

him off as for the class that had not taken him on, he had no personal

disquiet in anything that passed. His healthy state of mind appeared

even to derive a gratification from Clennam's position of embarrassment

and isolation among the good company; and if Clennam had been in that

condition with which Nobody was incessantly contending, he would have

suspected it, and would have struggled with the suspicion as a meanness,

even while he sat at the table.

In the course of a couple of hours the noble Refrigerator, at no time

less than a hundred years behind the period, got about five centuries

in arrears, and delivered solemn political oracles appropriate to that

epoch. He finished by freezing a cup of tea for his own drinking,

and retiring at his lowest temperature. Then Mrs Gowan, who had been

accustomed in her days of a vacant arm-chair beside her to which

to summon state to retain her devoted slaves, one by one, for short

audiences as marks of her especial favour, invited Clennam with a turn

of her fan to approach the presence. He obeyed, and took the tripod

recently vacated by Lord Lancaster Stiltstalking.

'Mr Clennam,' said Mrs Gowan, 'apart from the happiness I have in

becoming known to you, though in this odiously inconvenient place--a

mere barrack--there is a subject on which I am dying to speak to you. It

is the subject in connection with which my son first had, I believe, the

pleasure of cultivating your acquaintance.'

Clennam inclined his head, as a generally suitable reply to what he did

not yet quite understand.

'First,' said Mrs Gowan, 'now, is she really pretty?'

In nobody's difficulties, he would have found it very difficult to

answer; very difficult indeed to smile, and say 'Who?'

'Oh! You know!' she returned. 'This flame of Henry's. This unfortunate

fancy. There! If it is a point of honour that I should originate the

name--Miss Mickles--Miggles.'

'Miss Meagles,' said Clennam, 'is very beautiful.'

'Men are so often mistaken on those points,' returned Mrs Gowan, shaking

her head, 'that I candidly confess to you I feel anything but sure of

it, even now; though it is something to have Henry corroborated with so

much gravity and emphasis. He picked the people up at Rome, I think?'

The phrase would have given nobody mortal offence. Clennam replied,

'Excuse me, I doubt if I understand your expression.'

'Picked the people up,' said Mrs Gowan, tapping the sticks of her closed

fan (a large green one, which she used as a hand-screen) on her little

table. 'Came upon them. Found them out. Stumbled UP against them.'

'The people?'

'Yes. The Miggles people.'

'I really cannot say,' said Clennam, 'where my friend Mr Meagles first

presented Mr Henry Gowan to his daughter.'

'I am pretty sure he picked her up at Rome; but never mind

where--somewhere. Now (this is entirely between ourselves), is she very

plebeian?'

'Really, ma'am,' returned Clennam, 'I am so undoubtedly plebeian myself,

that I do not feel qualified to judge.'

'Very neat!' said Mrs Gowan, coolly unfurling her screen. 'Very happy!

From which I infer that you secretly think her manner equal to her

looks?'

Clennam, after a moment's stiffness, bowed.

'That's comforting, and I hope you may be right. Did Henry tell me you

had travelled with them?' 'I travelled with my friend Mr Meagles, and

his wife and daughter, during some months.' (Nobody's heart might have

been wrung by the remembrance.)

'Really comforting, because you must have had a large experience of

them. You see, Mr Clennam, this thing has been going on for a long time,

and I find no improvement in it. Therefore to have the opportunity of

speaking to one so well informed about it as yourself, is an immense

relief to me. Quite a boon. Quite a blessing, I am sure.'

'Pardon me,' returned Clennam, 'but I am not in Mr Henry Gowan's

confidence. I am far from being so well informed as you suppose me to

be. Your mistake makes my position a very delicate one. No word on this

topic has ever passed between Mr Henry Gowan and myself.'

Mrs Gowan glanced at the other end of the room, where her son was

playing ecarte on a sofa, with the old lady who was for a charge of

cavalry.

'Not in his confidence? No,' said Mrs Gowan. 'No word has passed between

you? No. That I can imagine. But there are unexpressed confidences, Mr

Clennam; and as you have been together intimately among these people, I

cannot doubt that a confidence of that sort exists in the present case.

Perhaps you have heard that I have suffered the keenest distress of

mind from Henry's having taken to a pursuit which--well!' shrugging her

shoulders, 'a very respectable pursuit, I dare say, and some artists

are, as artists, quite superior persons; still, we never yet in our

family have gone beyond an Amateur, and it is a pardonable weakness to

feel a little--'

As Mrs Gowan broke off to heave a sigh, Clennam, however resolute to

be magnanimous, could not keep down the thought that there was mighty

little danger of the family's ever going beyond an Amateur, even as it

was.

'Henry,' the mother resumed, 'is self-willed and resolute; and as these

people naturally strain every nerve to catch him, I can entertain very

little hope, Mr Clennam, that the thing will be broken off. I apprehend

the girl's fortune will be very small; Henry might have done much

better; there is scarcely anything to compensate for the connection:

still, he acts for himself; and if I find no improvement within a short

time, I see no other course than to resign myself and make the best of

these people. I am infinitely obliged to you for what you have told

me.' As she shrugged her shoulders, Clennam stiffly bowed again. With an

uneasy flush upon his face, and hesitation in his manner, he then said

in a still lower tone than he had adopted yet:

'Mrs Gowan, I scarcely know how to acquit myself of what I feel to be a

duty, and yet I must ask you for your kind consideration in

attempting to discharge it. A misconception on your part, a very great

misconception if I may venture to call it so, seems to require setting

right. You have supposed Mr Meagles and his family to strain every

nerve, I think you said--'

'Every nerve,' repeated Mrs Gowan, looking at him in calm obstinacy,

with her green fan between her face and the fire.

'To secure Mr Henry Gowan?'

The lady placidly assented.

'Now that is so far,' said Arthur, 'from being the case, that I know

Mr Meagles to be unhappy in this matter; and to have interposed all

reasonable obstacles with the hope of putting an end to it.'

Mrs Gowan shut up her great green fan, tapped him on the arm with it,

and tapped her smiling lips. 'Why, of course,' said she. 'Just what I

mean.'

Arthur watched her face for some explanation of what she did mean.

'Are you really serious, Mr Clennam? Don't you see?'

Arthur did not see; and said so.

'Why, don't I know my son, and don't I know that this is exactly the way

to hold him?' said Mrs Gowan, contemptuously; 'and do not these Miggles

people know it, at least as well as I? Oh, shrewd people, Mr Clennam:

evidently people of business! I believe Miggles belonged to a Bank. It

ought to have been a very profitable Bank, if he had much to do with its

management. This is very well done, indeed.'

'I beg and entreat you, ma'am--' Arthur interposed.

'Oh, Mr Clennam, can you really be so credulous?'

It made such a painful impression upon him to hear her talking in this

haughty tone, and to see her patting her contemptuous lips with her

fan, that he said very earnestly, 'Believe me, ma'am, this is unjust, a

perfectly groundless suspicion.'

'Suspicion?' repeated Mrs Gowan. 'Not suspicion, Mr Clennam, Certainty.

It is very knowingly done indeed, and seems to have taken YOU in

completely.' She laughed; and again sat tapping her lips with her fan,

and tossing her head, as if she added, 'Don't tell me. I know such

people will do anything for the honour of such an alliance.'

At this opportune moment, the cards were thrown up, and Mr Henry Gowan

came across the room saying, 'Mother, if you can spare Mr Clennam for

this time, we have a long way to go, and it's getting late.' Mr Clennam

thereupon rose, as he had no choice but to do; and Mrs Gowan showed him,

to the last, the same look and the same tapped contemptuous lips.

'You have had a portentously long audience of my mother,' said Gowan, as

the door closed upon them. 'I fervently hope she has not bored you?'

'Not at all,' said Clennam.

They had a little open phaeton for the journey, and were soon in it on

the road home. Gowan, driving, lighted a cigar; Clennam declined one. Do

what he would, he fell into such a mood of abstraction that Gowan said

again, 'I am very much afraid my mother has bored you?' To which he

roused himself to answer, 'Not at all!' and soon relapsed again.

In that state of mind which rendered nobody uneasy, his thoughtfulness

would have turned principally on the man at his side. He would have

thought of the morning when he first saw him rooting out the stones with

his heel, and would have asked himself, 'Does he jerk me out of the

path in the same careless, cruel way?' He would have thought, had this

introduction to his mother been brought about by him because he knew

what she would say, and that he could thus place his position before

a rival and loftily warn him off, without himself reposing a word of

confidence in him? He would have thought, even if there were no such

design as that, had he brought him there to play with his repressed

emotions, and torment him? The current of these meditations would have

been stayed sometimes by a rush of shame, bearing a remonstrance to

himself from his own open nature, representing that to shelter such

suspicions, even for the passing moment, was not to hold the high,

unenvious course he had resolved to keep. At those times, the striving

within him would have been hardest; and looking up and catching Gowan's

eyes, he would have started as if he had done him an injury.

Then, looking at the dark road and its uncertain objects, he would have

gradually trailed off again into thinking, 'Where are we driving, he

and I, I wonder, on the darker road of life? How will it be with us, and

with her, in the obscure distance?' Thinking of her, he would have been

troubled anew with a reproachful misgiving that it was not even loyal to

her to dislike him, and that in being so easily prejudiced against him

he was less deserving of her than at first.

'You are evidently out of spirits,' said Gowan; 'I am very much afraid

my mother must have bored you dreadfully.' 'Believe me, not at all,'

said Clennam. 'It's nothing--nothing!'

CHAPTER 27. Five-and-Twenty

A frequently recurring doubt, whether Mr Pancks's desire to collect

information relative to the Dorrit family could have any possible

bearing on the misgivings he had imparted to his mother on his return

from his long exile, caused Arthur Clennam much uneasiness at this

period. What Mr Pancks already knew about the Dorrit family, what more

he really wanted to find out, and why he should trouble his busy head

about them at all, were questions that often perplexed him. Mr Pancks

was not a man to waste his time and trouble in researches prompted by

idle curiosity. That he had a specific object Clennam could not doubt.

And whether the attainment of that object by Mr Pancks's industry might

bring to light, in some untimely way, secret reasons which had induced

his mother to take Little Dorrit by the hand, was a serious speculation.

Not that he ever wavered either in his desire or his determination to

repair a wrong that had been done in his father's time, should a

wrong come to light, and be reparable. The shadow of a supposed act

of injustice, which had hung over him since his father's death, was

so vague and formless that it might be the result of a reality widely

remote from his idea of it. But, if his apprehensions should prove to

be well founded, he was ready at any moment to lay down all he had, and