第 9 页

sinfulness I merit bitter disappointment, and I accept it.'

'Mother, I grieve to hear you speak like this, though I have had my

apprehensions that you would--'

'You knew I would. You knew ME,' she interrupted.

Her son paused for a moment. He had struck fire out of her, and was

surprised.

'Well!' she said, relapsing into stone. 'Go on. Let me hear.'

'You have anticipated, mother, that I decide for my part, to abandon

the business. I have done with it. I will not take upon myself to advise

you; you will continue it, I see. If I had any influence with you, I

would simply use it to soften your judgment of me in causing you this

disappointment: to represent to you that I have lived the half of a long

term of life, and have never before set my own will against yours. I

cannot say that I have been able to conform myself, in heart and spirit,

to your rules; I cannot say that I believe my forty years have been

profitable or pleasant to myself, or any one; but I have habitually

submitted, and I only ask you to remember it.'

Woe to the suppliant, if such a one there were or ever had been, who had

any concession to look for in the inexorable face at the cabinet. Woe to

the defaulter whose appeal lay to the tribunal where those severe eyes

presided. Great need had the rigid woman of her mystical religion,

veiled in gloom and darkness, with lightnings of cursing, vengeance, and

destruction, flashing through the sable clouds. Forgive us our debts as

we forgive our debtors, was a prayer too poor in spirit for her. Smite

Thou my debtors, Lord, wither them, crush them; do Thou as I would do,

and Thou shalt have my worship: this was the impious tower of stone she

built up to scale Heaven.

'Have you finished, Arthur, or have you anything more to say to me?

I think there can be nothing else. You have been short, but full of

matter!'

'Mother, I have yet something more to say. It has been upon my mind,

night and day, this long time. It is far more difficult to say than what

I have said. That concerned myself; this concerns us all.'

'Us all! Who are us all?'

'Yourself, myself, my dead father.'

She took her hands from the desk; folded them in her lap; and sat

looking towards the fire, with the impenetrability of an old Egyptian

sculpture.

'You knew my father infinitely better than I ever knew him; and his

reserve with me yielded to you. You were much the stronger, mother, and

directed him. As a child, I knew it as well as I know it now. I knew

that your ascendancy over him was the cause of his going to China to

take care of the business there, while you took care of it here (though

I do not even now know whether these were really terms of separation

that you agreed upon); and that it was your will that I should remain

with you until I was twenty, and then go to him as I did. You will not

be offended by my recalling this, after twenty years?'

'I am waiting to hear why you recall it.'

He lowered his voice, and said, with manifest reluctance, and against

his will:

'I want to ask you, mother, whether it ever occurred to you to

suspect--'

At the word Suspect, she turned her eyes momentarily upon her son, with

a dark frown. She then suffered them to seek the fire, as before; but

with the frown fixed above them, as if the sculptor of old Egypt had

indented it in the hard granite face, to frown for ages.

'--that he had any secret remembrance which caused him trouble of

mind--remorse? Whether you ever observed anything in his conduct

suggesting that; or ever spoke to him upon it, or ever heard him hint at

such a thing?'

'I do not understand what kind of secret remembrance you mean to infer

that your father was a prey to,' she returned, after a silence. 'You

speak so mysteriously.'

'Is it possible, mother,' her son leaned forward to be the nearer to her

while he whispered it, and laid his hand nervously upon her desk, 'is

it possible, mother, that he had unhappily wronged any one, and made no

reparation?'

Looking at him wrathfully, she bent herself back in her chair to keep

him further off, but gave him no reply.

'I am deeply sensible, mother, that if this thought has never at any

time flashed upon you, it must seem cruel and unnatural in me, even in

this confidence, to breathe it. But I cannot shake it off.

Time and change (I have tried both before breaking silence) do nothing

to wear it out. Remember, I was with my father. Remember, I saw his face

when he gave the watch into my keeping, and struggled to express that he

sent it as a token you would understand, to you. Remember, I saw him at

the last with the pencil in his failing hand, trying to write some word

for you to read, but to which he could give no shape. The more

remote and cruel this vague suspicion that I have, the stronger the

circumstances that could give it any semblance of probability to me.

For Heaven's sake, let us examine sacredly whether there is any wrong

entrusted to us to set right. No one can help towards it, mother, but

you.'

Still so recoiling in her chair that her overpoised weight moved it,

from time to time, a little on its wheels, and gave her the appearance

of a phantom of fierce aspect gliding away from him, she interposed her

left arm, bent at the elbow with the back of her hand towards her face,

between herself and him, and looked at him in a fixed silence.

'In grasping at money and in driving hard bargains--I have begun, and I

must speak of such things now, mother--some one may have been grievously

deceived, injured, ruined. You were the moving power of all this

machinery before my birth; your stronger spirit has been infused into

all my father's dealings for more than two score years. You can set

these doubts at rest, I think, if you will really help me to discover

the truth. Will you, mother?'

He stopped in the hope that she would speak. But her grey hair was not

more immovable in its two folds, than were her firm lips.

'If reparation can be made to any one, if restitution can be made to any

one, let us know it and make it. Nay, mother, if within my means, let ME

make it. I have seen so little happiness come of money; it has brought

within my knowledge so little peace to this house, or to any one

belonging to it, that it is worth less to me than to another. It can buy

me nothing that will not be a reproach and misery to me, if I am haunted

by a suspicion that it darkened my father's last hours with remorse, and

that it is not honestly and justly mine.' There was a bell-rope hanging

on the panelled wall, some two or three yards from the cabinet. By a

swift and sudden action of her foot, she drove her wheeled chair rapidly

back to it and pulled it violently--still holding her arm up in its

shield-like posture, as if he were striking at her, and she warding off

the blow.

A girl came hurrying in, frightened.

'Send Flintwinch here!'

In a moment the girl had withdrawn, and the old man stood within the

door. 'What! You're hammer and tongs, already, you two?' he said, coolly

stroking his face. 'I thought you would be. I was pretty sure of it.'

'Flintwinch!' said the mother, 'look at my son. Look at him!'

'Well, I AM looking at him,' said Flintwinch.

She stretched out the arm with which she had shielded herself, and as

she went on, pointed at the object of her anger.

'In the very hour of his return almost--before the shoe upon his foot is

dry--he asperses his father's memory to his mother! Asks his mother

to become, with him, a spy upon his father's transactions through a

lifetime! Has misgivings that the goods of this world which we have

painfully got together early and late, with wear and tear and toil and

self-denial, are so much plunder; and asks to whom they shall be given

up, as reparation and restitution!'

Although she said this raging, she said it in a voice so far from being

beyond her control that it was even lower than her usual tone. She also

spoke with great distinctness.

'Reparation!' said she. 'Yes, truly! It is easy for him to talk of

reparation, fresh from journeying and junketing in foreign lands, and

living a life of vanity and pleasure. But let him look at me, in prison,

and in bonds here. I endure without murmuring, because it is appointed

that I shall so make reparation for my sins. Reparation! Is there none

in this room? Has there been none here this fifteen years?'

Thus was she always balancing her bargains with the Majesty of heaven,

posting up the entries to her credit, strictly keeping her set-off, and

claiming her due. She was only remarkable in this, for the force

and emphasis with which she did it. Thousands upon thousands do it,

according to their varying manner, every day.

'Flintwinch, give me that book!'

The old man handed it to her from the table. She put two fingers between

the leaves, closed the book upon them, and held it up to her son in

a threatening way. 'In the days of old, Arthur, treated of in this

commentary, there were pious men, beloved of the Lord, who would have

cursed their sons for less than this: who would have sent them forth,

and sent whole nations forth, if such had supported them, to be avoided

of God and man, and perish, down to the baby at the breast. But I only

tell you that if you ever renew that theme with me, I will renounce you;

I will so dismiss you through that doorway, that you had better have

been motherless from your cradle. I will never see or know you more. And

if, after all, you were to come into this darkened room to look upon me

lying dead, my body should bleed, if I could make it, when you came near

me.'

In part relieved by the intensity of this threat, and in part (monstrous

as the fact is) by a general impression that it was in some sort a

religious proceeding, she handed back the book to the old man, and was

silent.

'Now,' said Jeremiah; 'premising that I'm not going to stand between you

two, will you let me ask (as I have been called in, and made a third)

what is all this about?'

'Take your version of it,' returned Arthur, finding it left to him to

speak, 'from my mother. Let it rest there. What I have said, was said to

my mother only.' 'Oh!' returned the old man. 'From your mother? Take

it from your mother? Well! But your mother mentioned that you had been

suspecting your father. That's not dutiful, Mr Arthur. Who will you be

suspecting next?'

'Enough,' said Mrs Clennam, turning her face so that it was addressed

for the moment to the old man only. 'Let no more be said about this.'

'Yes, but stop a bit, stop a bit,' the old man persisted. 'Let us see

how we stand. Have you told Mr Arthur that he mustn't lay offences at

his father's door? That he has no right to do it? That he has no ground

to go upon?'

'I tell him so now.'

'Ah! Exactly,' said the old man. 'You tell him so now. You hadn't told

him so before, and you tell him so now. Ay, ay! That's right! You know I

stood between you and his father so long, that it seems as if death had

made no difference, and I was still standing between you. So I will, and

so in fairness I require to have that plainly put forward. Arthur, you

please to hear that you have no right to mistrust your father, and have

no ground to go upon.'

He put his hands to the back of the wheeled chair, and muttering to

himself, slowly wheeled his mistress back to her cabinet. 'Now,' he

resumed, standing behind her: 'in case I should go away leaving things

half done, and so should be wanted again when you come to the other half

and get into one of your flights, has Arthur told you what he means to

do about the business?'

'He has relinquished it.'

'In favour of nobody, I suppose?'

Mrs Clennam glanced at her son, leaning against one of the windows.

He observed the look and said, 'To my mother, of course. She does what

she pleases.'

'And if any pleasure,' she said after a short pause, 'could arise for me

out of the disappointment of my expectations that my son, in the prime

of his life, would infuse new youth and strength into it, and make it

of great profit and power, it would be in advancing an old and faithful

servant. Jeremiah, the captain deserts the ship, but you and I will sink

or float with it.'

Jeremiah, whose eyes glistened as if they saw money, darted a sudden

look at the son, which seemed to say, 'I owe YOU no thanks for this; YOU

have done nothing towards it!' and then told the mother that he thanked

her, and that Affery thanked her, and that he would never desert her,

and that Affery would never desert her. Finally, he hauled up his watch

from its depths, and said, 'Eleven. Time for your oysters!' and with

that change of subject, which involved no change of expression or

manner, rang the bell.

But Mrs Clennam, resolved to treat herself with the greater rigour for

having been supposed to be unacquainted with reparation, refused to

eat her oysters when they were brought. They looked tempting; eight in

number, circularly set out on a white plate on a tray covered with a

white napkin, flanked by a slice of buttered French roll, and a little

compact glass of cool wine and water; but she resisted all persuasions,

and sent them down again--placing the act to her credit, no doubt, in

her Eternal Day-Book.

This refection of oysters was not presided over by Affery, but by the

girl who had appeared when the bell was rung; the same who had been in

the dimly-lighted room last night. Now that he had an opportunity of

observing her, Arthur found that her diminutive figure, small features,

and slight spare dress, gave her the appearance of being much younger

than she was. A woman, probably of not less than two-and-twenty, she