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reconcilement of ingrain differences ever effected! It has been tried

many times by other daughters, Minnie; it has never succeeded; nothing

has ever come of it but failure.

So Clennam thought. So he did not say; it was too late. He bound himself

to do all she asked, and she knew full well that he would do it.

They were now at the last tree in the avenue. She stopped, and withdrew

her arm. Speaking to him with her eyes lifted up to his, and with the

hand that had lately rested on his sleeve trembling by touching one of

the roses in his breast as an additional appeal to him, she said:

'Dear Mr Clennam, in my happiness--for I am happy, though you have seen

me crying--I cannot bear to leave any cloud between us. If you have

anything to forgive me (not anything that I have wilfully done, but any

trouble I may have caused you without meaning it, or having it in my

power to help it), forgive me to-night out of your noble heart!'

He stooped to meet the guileless face that met his without shrinking. He

kissed it, and answered, Heaven knew that he had nothing to forgive.

As he stooped to meet the innocent face once again, she whispered,

'Good-bye!' and he repeated it. It was taking leave of all his old

hopes--all nobody's old restless doubts. They came out of the avenue

next moment, arm-in-arm as they had entered it: and the trees seemed to

close up behind them in the darkness, like their own perspective of the

past.

The voices of Mr and Mrs Meagles and Doyce were audible directly,

speaking near the garden gate. Hearing Pet's name among them, Clennam

called out, 'She is here, with me.' There was some little wondering and

laughing until they came up; but as soon as they had all come together,

it ceased, and Pet glided away.

Mr Meagles, Doyce, and Clennam, without speaking, walked up and down

on the brink of the river, in the light of the rising moon, for a few

minutes; and then Doyce lingered behind, and went into the house. Mr

Meagles and Clennam walked up and down together for a few minutes more

without speaking, until at length the former broke silence.

'Arthur,' said he, using that familiar address for the first time in

their communication, 'do you remember my telling you, as we walked up

and down one hot morning, looking over the harbour at Marseilles, that

Pet's baby sister who was dead seemed to Mother and me to have grown as

she had grown, and changed as she had changed?'

'Very well.'

'You remember my saying that our thoughts had never been able to

separate those twin sisters, and that, in our fancy, whatever Pet was,

the other was?'

'Yes, very well.'

'Arthur,' said Mr Meagles, much subdued, 'I carry that fancy further

to-night. I feel to-night, my dear fellow, as if you had loved my dead

child very tenderly, and had lost her when she was like what Pet is

now.'

'Thank you!' murmured Clennam, 'thank you!' And pressed his hand.

'Will you come in?' said Mr Meagles, presently.

'In a little while.'

Mr Meagles fell away, and he was left alone. When he had walked on the

river's brink in the peaceful moonlight for some half an hour, he put

his hand in his breast and tenderly took out the handful of roses.

Perhaps he put them to his heart, perhaps he put them to his lips, but

certainly he bent down on the shore and gently launched them on the

flowing river. Pale and unreal in the moonlight, the river floated them

away. The lights were bright within doors when he entered, and the

faces on which they shone, his own face not excepted, were soon quietly

cheerful. They talked of many subjects (his partner never had had such a

ready store to draw upon for the beguiling of the time), and so to

bed, and to sleep. While the flowers, pale and unreal in the moonlight,

floated away upon the river; and thus do greater things that once were

in our breasts, and near our hearts, flow from us to the eternal seas.

CHAPTER 29. Mrs Flintwinch goes on Dreaming

The house in the city preserved its heavy dulness through all these

transactions, and the invalid within it turned the same unvarying

round of life. Morning, noon, and night, morning, noon, and night, each

recurring with its accompanying monotony, always the same reluctant

return of the same sequences of machinery, like a dragging piece of

clockwork.

The wheeled chair had its associated remembrances and reveries, one may

suppose, as every place that is made the station of a human being has.

Pictures of demolished streets and altered houses, as they formerly were

when the occupant of the chair was familiar with them, images of people

as they too used to be, with little or no allowance made for the lapse

of time since they were seen; of these, there must have been many in the

long routine of gloomy days. To stop the clock of busy existence at the

hour when we were personally sequestered from it, to suppose mankind

stricken motionless when we were brought to a stand-still, to be unable

to measure the changes beyond our view by any larger standard than

the shrunken one of our own uniform and contracted existence, is the

infirmity of many invalids, and the mental unhealthiness of almost all

recluses.

What scenes and actors the stern woman most reviewed, as she sat

from season to season in her one dark room, none knew but herself. Mr

Flintwinch, with his wry presence brought to bear upon her daily like

some eccentric mechanical force, would perhaps have screwed it out of

her, if there had been less resistance in her; but she was too strong

for him. So far as Mistress Affery was concerned, to regard her

liege-lord and her disabled mistress with a face of blank wonder, to

go about the house after dark with her apron over her head, always to

listen for the strange noises and sometimes to hear them, and never

to emerge from her ghostly, dreamy, sleep-waking state, was occupation

enough for her.

There was a fair stroke of business doing, as Mistress Affery made out,

for her husband had abundant occupation in his little office, and saw

more people than had been used to come there for some years. This might

easily be, the house having been long deserted; but he did receive

letters, and comers, and keep books, and correspond. Moreover, he went

about to other counting-houses, and to wharves, and docks, and to the

Custom House,' and to Garraway's Coffee House, and the Jerusalem Coffee

House, and on 'Change; so that he was much in and out. He began, too,

sometimes of an evening, when Mrs Clennam expressed no particular wish

for his society, to resort to a tavern in the neighbourhood to look at

the shipping news and closing prices in the evening paper, and even to

exchange Small socialities with mercantile Sea Captains who frequented

that establishment. At some period of every day, he and Mrs Clennam held

a council on matters of business; and it appeared to Affery, who was

always groping about, listening and watching, that the two clever ones

were making money.

The state of mind into which Mr Flintwinch's dazed lady had fallen, had

now begun to be so expressed in all her looks and actions that she was

held in very low account by the two clever ones, as a person, never

of strong intellect, who was becoming foolish. Perhaps because her

appearance was not of a commercial cast, or perhaps because it occurred

to him that his having taken her to wife might expose his judgment to

doubt in the minds of customers, Mr Flintwinch laid his commands upon

her that she should hold her peace on the subject of her conjugal

relations, and should no longer call him Jeremiah out of the domestic

trio. Her frequent forgetfulness of this admonition intensified her

startled manner, since Mr Flintwinch's habit of avenging himself on her

remissness by making springs after her on the staircase, and shaking

her, occasioned her to be always nervously uncertain when she might be

thus waylaid next.

Little Dorrit had finished a long day's work in Mrs Clennam's room, and

was neatly gathering up her shreds and odds and ends before going home.

Mr Pancks, whom Affery had just shown in, was addressing an inquiry to

Mrs Clennam on the subject of her health, coupled with the remark that,

'happening to find himself in that direction,' he had looked in to

inquire, on behalf of his proprietor, how she found herself. Mrs

Clennam, with a deep contraction of her brows, was looking at him.

'Mr Casby knows,' said she, 'that I am not subject to changes. The

change that I await here is the great change.'

'Indeed, ma'am?' returned Mr Pancks, with a wandering eye towards the

figure of the little seamstress on her knee picking threads and fraying

of her work from the carpet. 'You look nicely, ma'am.'

'I bear what I have to bear,' she answered. 'Do you what you have to

do.' 'Thank you, ma'am,' said Mr Pancks, 'such is my endeavour.'

'You are often in this direction, are you not?' asked Mrs Clennam.

'Why, yes, ma'am,' said Pancks, 'rather so lately; I have lately been

round this way a good deal, owing to one thing and another.' 'Beg Mr

Casby and his daughter not to trouble themselves, by deputy, about me.

When they wish to see me, they know I am here to see them. They have no

need to trouble themselves to send. You have no need to trouble yourself

to come.' 'Not the least trouble, ma'am,' said Mr Pancks. 'You really

are looking uncommonly nicely, ma'am.'

'Thank you. Good evening.'

The dismissal, and its accompanying finger pointed straight at the door,

was so curt and direct that Mr Pancks did not see his way to prolong his

visit. He stirred up his hair with his sprightliest expression, glanced

at the little figure again, said 'Good evening, ma 'am; don't come down,

Mrs Affery, I know the road to the door,' and steamed out. Mrs Clennam,

her chin resting on her hand, followed him with attentive and darkly

distrustful eyes; and Affery stood looking at her as if she were

spell-bound.

Slowly and thoughtfully, Mrs Clennam's eyes turned from the door by

which Pancks had gone out, to Little Dorrit, rising from the carpet.

With her chin drooping more heavily on her hand, and her eyes vigilant

and lowering, the sick woman sat looking at her until she attracted her

attention. Little Dorrit coloured under such a gaze, and looked down.

Mrs Clennam still sat intent.

'Little Dorrit,' she said, when she at last broke silence, 'what do you

know of that man?'

'I don't know anything of him, ma'am, except that I have seen him about,

and that he has spoken to me.'

'What has he said to you?'

'I don't understand what he has said, he is so strange. But nothing

rough or disagreeable.'

'Why does he come here to see you?'

'I don't know, ma'am,' said Little Dorrit, with perfect frankness.

'You know that he does come here to see you?'

'I have fancied so,' said Little Dorrit. 'But why he should come here or

anywhere for that, ma'am, I can't think.'

Mrs Clennam cast her eyes towards the ground, and with her strong, set

face, as intent upon a subject in her mind as it had lately been upon

the form that seemed to pass out of her view, sat absorbed. Some minutes

elapsed before she came out of this thoughtfulness, and resumed her hard

composure.

Little Dorrit in the meanwhile had been waiting to go, but afraid to

disturb her by moving. She now ventured to leave the spot where she

had been standing since she had risen, and to pass gently round by the

wheeled chair. She stopped at its side to say 'Good night, ma'am.'

Mrs Clennam put out her hand, and laid it on her arm. Little Dorrit,

confused under the touch, stood faltering. Perhaps some momentary

recollection of the story of the Princess may have been in her mind.

'Tell me, Little Dorrit,' said Mrs Clennam, 'have you many friends now?'

'Very few, ma'am. Besides you, only Miss Flora and--one more.'

'Meaning,' said Mrs Clennam, with her unbent finger again pointing to

the door, 'that man?'

'Oh no, ma'am!'

'Some friend of his, perhaps?'

'No ma'am.' Little Dorrit earnestly shook her head. 'Oh no! No one at

all like him, or belonging to him.'

'Well!' said Mrs Clennam, almost smiling. 'It is no affair of mine. I

ask, because I take an interest in you; and because I believe I was your

friend when you had no other who could serve you. Is that so?'

'Yes, ma'am; indeed it is. I have been here many a time when, but for

you and the work you gave me, we should have wanted everything.'

'We,' repeated Mrs Clennam, looking towards the watch, once her dead

husband's, which always lay upon her table. 'Are there many of you?'

'Only father and I, now. I mean, only father and I to keep regularly out

of what we get.'

'Have you undergone many privations? You and your father and who else

there may be of you?' asked Mrs Clennam, speaking deliberately, and

meditatively turning the watch over and over.

'Sometimes it has been rather hard to live,' said Little Dorrit, in her

soft voice, and timid uncomplaining way; 'but I think not harder--as to

that--than many people find it.'

'That's well said!' Mrs Clennam quickly returned. 'That's the truth!

You are a good, thoughtful girl. You are a grateful girl too, or I much

mistake you.'

'It is only natural to be that. There is no merit in being that,' said

Little Dorrit. 'I am indeed.' Mrs Clennam, with a gentleness of which

the dreaming Affery had never dreamed her to be capable, drew down the

face of her little seamstress, and kissed her on the forehead. 'Now go,