Maggy sat at her work in her great white cap with its quantity of opaque frilling hiding what profile she had (she had none to spare), and her serviceable eye brought to bear upon her occupation, on the window side of the room. What with her flapping cap, and what with her unserviceable eye, she was quite partitioned off from her Little Mother, whose seat was opposite the window. The tread and shuffle of feet on the pavement of the yard had much diminished since the taking of the Chair, the tide of Collegians having set strongly in the direction of Harmony. Some few who had no music in their souls, or no money in their pockets, dawdled about; and the old spectacle of the visitor-wife and the depressed unseasoned prisoner still lingered in corners, as broken cobwebs and such unsightly discomforts draggle in corners of other places. It was the quietest time the College knew, saving the night hours when the Collegians took the benefit of the act of sleep. The occasional rattle of applause upon the tables of the Snuggery, denoted the successful termination of a morsel of Harmony; or the responsive acceptance, by the united children, of some toast or sentiment offered to them by their Father. Occasionally, a vocal strain more sonorous than the generality informed the listener that some boastful bass was in blue water, or in the hunting field, or with the reindeer, or on the mountain, or among the heather; but the Marshal of the Marshalsea knew better, and had got him hard and fast.
As Arthur Clennam moved to sit down by the side of Little Dorrit, she trembled so that she had much ado to hold her needle. Clennam gently put his hand upon her work, and said, ‘Dear Little Dorrit, let me lay it down.’
She yielded it to him, and he put it aside. Her hands were then nervously clasping together, but he took one of them.
‘How seldom I have seen you lately, Little Dorrit!’
‘I have been busy, sir.’
‘But I heard only to-day,’ said Clennam, ‘by mere accident, of your having been with those good people close by me. Why not come to me, then?’
‘I—I don’t know. Or rather, I thought you might be busy too. You generally are now, are you not?’
He saw her trembling little form and her downcast face, and the eyes that drooped the moment they were raised to his—he saw them almost with as much concern as tenderness.
‘My child, your manner is so changed!’
The trembling was now quite beyond her control. Softly withdrawing her hand, and laying it in her other hand, she sat before him with her head bent and her whole form trembling.
‘My own Little Dorrit,’ said Clennam, compassionately.
She burst into tears. Maggy looked round of a sudden, and stared for at least a minute; but did not interpose. Clennam waited some little while before he spoke again.
‘I cannot bear,’ he said then, ‘to see you weep; but I hope this is a relief to an overcharged heart.’
‘Yes it is, sir. Nothing but that.’
‘Well, well! I feared you would think too much of what passed here just now. It is of no moment; not the least. I am only unfortunate to have come in the way. Let it go by with these tears. It is not worth one of them. One of them? Such an idle thing should be repeated, with my glad consent, fifty times a day, to save you a moment’s heart-ache, Little Dorrit.’
She had taken courage now, and answered, far more in her usual manner, ‘You are so good! But even if there was nothing else in it to be sorry for and ashamed of, it is such a bad return to you—’
‘Hush!’ said Clennam, smiling and touching her lips with his hand. ‘Forgetfulness in you who remember so many and so much, would be new indeed. Shall I remind you that I am not, and that I never was, anything but the friend whom you agreed to trust? No. You remember it, don’t you?’
‘I try to do so, or I should have broken the promise just now, when my mistaken brother was here. You will consider his bringing-up in this place, and will not judge him hardly, poor fellow, I know!’ In raising her eyes with these words, she observed his face more nearly than she had done yet, and said, with a quick change of tone, ‘You have not been ill, Mr Clennam?’
‘No.’
‘Nor tried? Nor hurt?’ she asked him, anxiously.
It fell to Clennam now, to be not quite certain how to answer. He said in reply:
‘To speak the truth, I have been a little troubled, but it is over. Do I show it so plainly? I ought to have more fortitude and self-command than that. I thought I had. I must learn them of you. Who could teach me better!’
He never thought that she saw in him what no one else could see. He never thought that in the whole world there were no other eyes that looked upon him with the same light and strength as hers.
‘But it brings me to something that I wish to say,’ he continued, ‘and therefore I will not quarrel even with my own face for telling tales and being unfaithful to me. Besides, it is a privilege and pleasure to confide in my Little Dorrit. Let me confess then, that, forgetting how grave I was, and how old I was, and how the time for such things had gone by me with the many years of sameness and little happiness that made up my long life far away, without marking it—that, forgetting all this, I fancied I loved some one.’
‘Do I know her, sir?’ asked Little Dorrit.
‘No, my child.’
‘Not the lady who has been kind to me for your sake?’
‘Flora. No, no. Do you think—’
‘I never quite thought so,’ said Little Dorrit, more to herself than him. ‘I did wonder at it a little.’
‘Well!’ said Clennam, abiding by the feeling that had fallen on him in the avenue on the night of the roses, the feeling that he was an older man, who had done with that tender part of life, ‘I found out my mistake, and I thought about it a little—in short, a good deal—and got wiser. Being wiser, I counted up my years and considered what I am, and looked back, and looked forward, and found that I should soon be grey. I found that I had climbed the hill, and passed the level ground upon the top, and was descending quickly.’
If he had known the sharpness of the pain he caused the patient heart, in speaking thus! While doing it, too, with the purpose of easing and serving her.
‘I found that the day when any such thing would have been graceful in me, or good in me, or hopeful or happy for me or any one in connection with me, was gone, and would never shine again.’
O! If he had known, if he had known! If he could have seen the dagger in his hand, and the cruel wounds it struck in the faithful bleeding breast of his Little Dorrit!
‘All that is over, and I have turned my face from it. Why do I speak of this to Little Dorrit? Why do I show you, my child, the space of years that there is between us, and recall to you that I have passed, by the amount of your whole life, the time that is present to you?’
‘Because you trust me, I hope. Because you know that nothing can touch you without touching me; that nothing can make you happy or unhappy, but it must make me, who am so grateful to you, the same.’
He heard the thrill in her voice, he saw her earnest face, he saw her clear true eyes, he saw the quickened bosom that would have joyfully thrown itself before him to receive a mortal wound directed at his breast, with the dying cry, ‘I love him!’ and the remotest suspicion of the truth never dawned upon his mind. No. He saw the devoted little creature with her worn shoes, in her common dress, in her jail-home; a slender child in body, a strong heroine in soul; and the light of her domestic story made all else dark to him.
‘For those reasons assuredly, Little Dorrit, but for another too. So far removed, so different, and so much older, I am the better fitted for your friend and adviser. I mean, I am the more easily to be trusted; and any little constraint that you might feel with another, may vanish before me. Why have you kept so retired from me? Tell me.’
‘I am better here. My place and use are here. I am much better here,’ said Little Dorrit, faintly.
‘So you said that day upon the bridge. I thought of it much afterwards. Have you no secret you could entrust to me, with hope and comfort, if you would!’
‘Secret? No, I have no secret,’ said Little Dorrit in some trouble.
They had been speaking in low voices; more because it was natural to what they said to adopt that tone, than with any care to reserve it from Maggy at her work. All of a sudden Maggy stared again, and this time spoke:
‘I say! Little Mother!’
‘Yes, Maggy.’
‘If you an’t got no secret of your own to tell him, tell him that about the Princess.Shehad a secret, you know.’
‘The Princess had a secret?’ said Clennam, in some surprise. ‘What Princess was that, Maggy?’
‘Lor! How you do go and bother a gal of ten,’ said Maggy, ‘catching the poor thing up in that way. Whoever said the Princess had a secret?Inever said so.’
‘I beg your pardon. I thought you did.’
‘No, I didn’t. How could I, when it was her as wanted to find it out? It was the little woman as had the secret, and she was always a spinning at her wheel. And so she says to her, why do you keep it there? And so the t’other one says to her, no I don’t; and so the t’other one says to her, yes you do; and then they both goes to the cupboard, and there it is. And she wouldn’t go into the Hospital, and so she died.Youknow, Little Mother; tell him that. For it was a reg’lar good secret, that was!’ cried Maggy, hugging herself.
Arthur looked at Little Dorrit for help to comprehend this, and was struck by seeing her so timid and red. But, when she told him that it was only a Fairy Tale she had one day made up for Maggy, and that there was nothing in it which she wouldn’t be ashamed to tell again to anybody else, even if she could remember it, he left the subject where it was.
However, he returned to his own subject by first entreating her to see him oftener, and to remember that it was impossible to have a stronger interest in her welfare than he had, or to be more set upon promoting it than he was. When she answered fervently, she well knew that, she never forgot it, he touched upon his second and more delicate point—the suspicion he had formed.
‘Little Dorrit,’ he said, taking her hand again, and speaking lower than he had spoken yet, so that even Maggy in the small room could not hear him, ‘another word. I have wanted very much to say this to you; I have tried for opportunities. Don’t mind me, who, for the matter of years, might be your father or your uncle. Always think of me as quite an old man. I know that all your devotion centres in this room, and that nothing to the last will ever tempt you away from the duties you discharge here. If I were not sure of it, I should, before now, have implored you, and implored your father, to let me make some provision for you in a more suitable place. But you may have an interest—I will not say, now, though even that might be—may have, at another time, an interest in some one else; an interest not incompatible with your affection here.’
She was very, very pale, and silently shook her head.
‘It may be, dear Little Dorrit.’
‘No. No. No.’ She shook her head, after each slow repetition of the word, with an air of quiet desolation that he remembered long afterwards. The time came when he remembered it well, long afterwards, within those prison walls; within that very room.
‘But, if it ever should be, tell me so, my dear child. Entrust the truth to me, point out the object of such an interest to me, and I will try with all the zeal, and honour, and friendship and respect that I feel for you, good Little Dorrit of my heart, to do you a lasting service.’
‘O thank you, thank you! But, O no, O no, O no!’ She said this, looking at him with her work-worn hands folded together, and in the same resigned accents as before.
‘I press for no confidence now. I only ask you to repose unhesitating trust in me.’
‘Can I do less than that, when you are so good!’
‘Then you will trust me fully? Will have no secret unhappiness, or anxiety, concealed from me?’
‘Almost none.’
‘And you have none now?’
She shook her head. But she was very pale.
‘When I lie down to-night, and my thoughts come back—as they will, for they do every night, even when I have not seen you—to this sad place, I may believe that there is no grief beyond this room, now, and its usual occupants, which preys on Little Dorrit’s mind?’
She seemed to catch at these words—that he remembered, too, long afterwards—and said, more brightly, ‘Yes, Mr Clennam; yes, you may!’
The crazy staircase, usually not slow to give notice when any one was coming up or down, here creaked under a quick tread, and a further sound was heard upon it, as if a little steam-engine with more steam than it knew what to do with, were working towards the room. As it approached, which it did very rapidly, it laboured with increased energy; and, after knocking at the door, it sounded as if it were stooping down and snorting in at the keyhole.
Before Maggy could open the door, Mr Pancks, opening it from without, stood without a hat and with his bare head in the wildest condition, looking at Clennam and Little Dorrit, over her shoulder. He had a lighted cigar in his hand, and brought with him airs of ale and tobacco smoke.
‘Pancks the gipsy,’ he observed out of breath, ‘fortune-telling.’
He stood dingily smiling, and breathing hard at them, with a most curious air; as if, instead of being his proprietor’s grubber, he were the triumphant proprietor of the Marshalsea, the Marshal, all the turnkeys, and all the Collegians. In his great self-satisfaction he put his cigar to his lips (being evidently no smoker), and took such a pull at it, with his right eye shut up tight for the purpose, that he underwent a convulsion of shuddering and choking. But even in the midst of that paroxysm, he still essayed to repeat his favourite introduction of himself, ‘Pa-ancks the gi-ipsy, fortune-telling.’
‘I am spending the evening with the rest of ‘em,’ said Pancks. ‘I’ve been singing. I’ve been taking a part in White sand and grey sand.Idon’t know anything about it. Never mind. I’ll take any part in anything. It’s all the same, if you’re loud enough.’
At first Clennam supposed him to be intoxicated. But he soon perceived that though he might be a little the worse (or better) for ale, the staple of his excitement was not brewed from malt, or distilled from any grain or berry.
‘How d’ye do, Miss Dorrit?’ said Pancks. ‘I thought you wouldn’t mind my running round, and looking in for a moment. Mr Clennam I heard was here, from Mr Dorrit. How are you, Sir?’
Clennam thanked him, and said he was glad to see him so gay.
‘Gay!’ said Pancks. ‘I’m in wonderful feather, sir. I can’t stop a minute, or I shall be missed, and I don’t want ‘em to miss me.—Eh, Miss Dorrit?’
He seemed to have an insatiate delight in appealing to her and looking at her; excitedly sticking his hair up at the same moment, like a dark species of cockatoo.
‘I haven’t been here half an hour. I knew Mr Dorrit was in the chair, and I said, “I’ll go and support him!” I ought to be down in Bleeding Heart Yard by rights; but I can worry them to-morrow.—Eh, Miss Dorrit?’
His little black eyes sparkled electrically. His very hair seemed to sparkle as he roughened it. He was in that highly-charged state that one might have expected to draw sparks and snaps from him by presenting a knuckle to any part of his figure.
‘Capital company here,’ said Pancks.—‘Eh, Miss Dorrit?’
She was half afraid of him, and irresolute what to say. He laughed, with a nod towards Clennam.
‘Don’t mind him, Miss Dorrit. He’s one of us. We agreed that you shouldn’t take on to mind me before people, but we didn’t mean Mr Clennam. He’s one of us. He’s in it. An’t you, Mr Clennam?—Eh, Miss Dorrit?’
The excitement of this strange creature was fast communicating itself to Clennam. Little Dorrit with amazement, saw this, and observed that they exchanged quick looks.
‘I was making a remark,’ said Pancks, ‘but I declare I forget what it was. Oh, I know! Capital company here. I’ve been treating ‘em all round.—Eh, Miss Dorrit?’
‘Very generous of you,’ she returned, noticing another of the quick looks between the two.
‘Not at all,’ said Pancks. ‘Don’t mention it. I’m coming into my property, that’s the fact. I can afford to be liberal. I think I’ll give ‘em a treat here. Tables laid in the yard. Bread in stacks. Pipes in faggots. Tobacco in hayloads. Roast beef and plum-pudding for every one. Quart of double stout a head. Pint of wine too, if they like it, and the authorities give permission.—Eh, Miss Dorrit?’
She was thrown into such a confusion by his manner, or rather by Clennam’s growing understanding of his manner (for she looked to him after every fresh appeal and cockatoo demonstration on the part of Mr Pancks), that she only moved her lips in answer, without forming any word.
‘And oh, by-the-bye!’ said Pancks, ‘you were to live to know what was behind us on that little hand of yours. And so you shall, you shall, my darling.—Eh, Miss Dorrit?’
He had suddenly checked himself. Where he got all the additional black prongs from, that now flew up all over his head like the myriads of points that break out in the large change of a great firework, was a wonderful mystery.
‘But I shall be missed;’ he came back to that; ‘and I don’t want ‘em to miss me. Mr Clennam, you and I made a bargain. I said you should find me stick to it. You shall find me stick to it now, sir, if you’ll step out of the room a moment. Miss Dorrit, I wish you good night. Miss Dorrit, I wish you good fortune.’
He rapidly shook her by both hands, and puffed down stairs. Arthur followed him with such a hurried step, that he had very nearly tumbled over him on the last landing, and rolled him down into the yard.
‘What is it, for Heaven’s sake!’ Arthur demanded, when they burst out there both together.
‘Stop a moment, sir. Mr Rugg. Let me introduce him.’
With those words he presented another man without a hat, and also with a cigar, and also surrounded with a halo of ale and tobacco smoke, which man, though not so excited as himself, was in a state which would have been akin to lunacy but for its fading into sober method when compared with the rampancy of Mr Pancks.
‘Mr Clennam, Mr Rugg,’ said Pancks. ‘Stop a moment. Come to the pump.’
They adjourned to the pump. Mr Pancks, instantly putting his head under the spout, requested Mr Rugg to take a good strong turn at the handle. Mr Rugg complying to the letter, Mr Pancks came forth snorting and blowing to some purpose, and dried himself on his handkerchief.
‘I am the clearer for that,’ he gasped to Clennam standing astonished. ‘But upon my soul, to hear her father making speeches in that chair, knowing what we know, and to see her up in that room in that dress, knowing what we know, is enough to—give me a back, Mr Rugg—a little higher, sir,—that’ll do!’
Then and there, on that Marshalsea pavement, in the shades of evening, did Mr Pancks, of all mankind, fly over the head and shoulders of Mr Rugg of Pentonville, General Agent, Accountant, and Recoverer of Debts. Alighting on his feet, he took Clennam by the button-hole, led him behind the pump, and pantingly produced from his pocket a bundle of papers.
Mr Rugg, also, pantingly produced from his pocket a bundle of papers.
‘Stay!’ said Clennam in a whisper.‘You have made a discovery.’
Mr Pancks answered, with an unction which there is no language to convey, ‘We rather think so.’
‘Does it implicate any one?’
‘How implicate, sir?’
‘In any suppression or wrong dealing of any kind?’
‘Not a bit of it.’
‘Thank God!’ said Clennam to himself. ‘Now show me.’
‘You are to understand’—snorted Pancks, feverishly unfolding papers, and speaking in short high-pressure blasts of sentences, ‘Where’s the Pedigree? Where’s Schedule number four, Mr Rugg? Oh! all right! Here we are.—You are to understand that we are this very day virtually complete. We shan’t be legally for a day or two. Call it at the outside a week. We’ve been at it night and day for I don’t know how long. Mr Rugg, you know how long? Never mind. Don’t say. You’ll only confuse me. You shall tell her, Mr Clennam. Not till we give you leave. Where’s that rough total, Mr Rugg? Oh! Here we are! There sir! That’s what you’ll have to break to her. That man’s your Father of the Marshalsea!’
Resigning herself to inevitable fate by making the best of those people, the Miggleses, and submitting her philosophy to the draught upon it, of which she had foreseen the likelihood in her interview with Arthur, Mrs Gowan handsomely resolved not to oppose her son’s marriage. In her progress to, and happy arrival at, this resolution, she was possibly influenced, not only by her maternal affections but by three politic considerations.
Of these, the first may have been that her son had never signified the smallest intention to ask her consent, or any mistrust of his ability to dispense with it; the second, that the pension bestowed upon her by a grateful country (and a Barnacle) would be freed from any little filial inroads, when her Henry should be married to the darling only child of a man in very easy circumstances; the third, that Henry’s debts must clearly be paid down upon the altar-railing by his father-in-law. When, to these three-fold points of prudence there is added the fact that Mrs Gowan yielded her consent the moment she knew of Mr Meagles having yielded his, and that Mr Meagles’s objection to the marriage had been the sole obstacle in its way all along, it becomes the height of probability that the relict of the deceased Commissioner of nothing particular, turned these ideas in her sagacious mind.
Among her connections and acquaintances, however, she maintained her individual dignity and the dignity of the blood of the Barnacles, by diligently nursing the pretence that it was a most unfortunate business; that she was sadly cut up by it; that this was a perfect fascination under which Henry laboured; that she had opposed it for a long time, but what could a mother do; and the like. She had already called Arthur Clennam to bear witness to this fable, as a friend of the Meagles family; and she followed up the move by now impounding the family itself for the same purpose. In the first interview she accorded to Mr Meagles, she slided herself into the position of disconsolately but gracefully yielding to irresistible pressure. With the utmost politeness and good-breeding, she feigned that it was she—not he—who had made the difficulty, and who at length gave way; and that the sacrifice was hers—not his. The same feint, with the same polite dexterity, she foisted on Mrs Meagles, as a conjuror might have forced a card on that innocent lady; and, when her future daughter-in-law was presented to her by her son, she said on embracing her, ‘My dear, what have you done to Henry that has bewitched him so!’ at the same time allowing a few tears to carry before them, in little pills, the cosmetic powder on her nose; as a delicate but touching signal that she suffered much inwardly for the show of composure with which she bore her misfortune.
Among the friends of Mrs Gowan (who piqued herself at once on being Society, and on maintaining intimate and easy relations with that Power), Mrs Merdle occupied a front row. True, the Hampton Court Bohemians, without exception, turned up their noses at Merdle as an upstart; but they turned them down again, by falling flat on their faces to worship his wealth. In which compensating adjustment of their noses, they were pretty much like Treasury, Bar, and Bishop, and all the rest of them.
To Mrs Merdle, Mrs Gowan repaired on a visit of self-condolence, after having given the gracious consent aforesaid. She drove into town for the purpose in a one-horse carriage irreverently called at that period of English history, a pill-box. It belonged to a job-master in a small way, who drove it himself, and who jobbed it by the day, or hour, to most of the old ladies in Hampton Court Palace; but it was a point of ceremony, in that encampment, that the whole equipage should be tacitly regarded as the private property of the jobber for the time being, and that the job-master should betray personal knowledge of nobody but the jobber in possession. So the Circumlocution Barnacles, who were the largest job-masters in the universe, always pretended to know of no other job but the job immediately in hand.
Mrs Merdle was at home, and was in her nest of crimson and gold, with the parrot on a neighbouring stem watching her with his head on one side, as if he took her for another splendid parrot of a larger species. To whom entered Mrs Gowan, with her favourite green fan, which softened the light on the spots of bloom.
‘My dear soul,’ said Mrs Gowan, tapping the back of her friend’s hand with this fan after a little indifferent conversation, ‘you are my only comfort. That affair of Henry’s that I told you of, is to take place. Now, how does it strike you? I am dying to know, because you represent and express Society so well.’
Mrs Merdle reviewed the bosom which Society was accustomed to review; and having ascertained that show-window of Mr Merdle’s and the London jewellers’ to be in good order, replied:
‘As to marriage on the part of a man, my dear, Society requires that he should retrieve his fortunes by marriage. Society requires that he should gain by marriage. Society requires that he should found a handsome establishment by marriage. Society does not see, otherwise, what he has to do with marriage. Bird, be quiet!’
0351m
For the parrot on his cage above them, presiding over the conference as if he were a judge (and indeed he looked rather like one), had wound up the exposition with a shriek.
‘Cases there are,’ said Mrs Merdle, delicately crooking the little finger of her favourite hand, and making her remarks neater by that neat action; ‘cases there are where a man is not young or elegant, and is rich, and has a handsome establishment already. Those are of a different kind. In such cases—’
Mrs Merdle shrugged her snowy shoulders and put her hand upon the jewel-stand, checking a little cough, as though to add, ‘why, a man looks out for this sort of thing, my dear.’ Then the parrot shrieked again, and she put up her glass to look at him, and said, ‘Bird! Do be quiet!’
‘But, young men,’ resumed Mrs Merdle, ‘and by young men you know what I mean, my love—I mean people’s sons who have the world before them—they must place themselves in a better position towards Society by marriage, or Society really will not have any patience with their making fools of themselves. Dreadfully worldly all this sounds,’ said Mrs Merdle, leaning back in her nest and putting up her glass again, ‘does it not?’
‘But it is true,’ said Mrs Gowan, with a highly moral air.
‘My dear, it is not to be disputed for a moment,’ returned Mrs Merdle; ‘because Society has made up its mind on the subject, and there is nothing more to be said. If we were in a more primitive state, if we lived under roofs of leaves, and kept cows and sheep and creatures instead of banker’s accounts (which would be delicious; my dear, I am pastoral to a degree, by nature), well and good. But we don’t live under leaves, and keep cows and sheep and creatures. I perfectly exhaust myself sometimes, in pointing out the distinction to Edmund Sparkler.’
Mrs Gowan, looking over her green fan when this young gentleman’s name was mentioned, replied as follows:
‘My love, you know the wretched state of the country—those unfortunate concessions of John Barnacle’s!—and you therefore know the reasons for my being as poor as Thingummy.’
‘A church mouse?’ Mrs Merdle suggested with a smile.
‘I was thinking of the other proverbial church person—Job,’ said Mrs Gowan. ‘Either will do. It would be idle to disguise, consequently, that there is a wide difference between the position of your son and mine. I may add, too, that Henry has talent—’
‘Which Edmund certainly has not,’ said Mrs Merdle, with the greatest suavity.
‘—and that his talent, combined with disappointment,’ Mrs Gowan went on, ‘has led him into a pursuit which—ah dear me! You know, my dear. Such being Henry’s different position, the question is what is the most inferior class of marriage to which I can reconcile myself.’
Mrs Merdle was so much engaged with the contemplation of her arms (beautiful-formed arms, and the very thing for bracelets), that she omitted to reply for a while. Roused at length by the silence, she folded the arms, and with admirable presence of mind looked her friend full in the face, and said interrogatively, ‘Ye-es? And then?’
‘And then, my dear,’ said Mrs Gowan not quite so sweetly as before, ‘I should be glad to hear what you have to say to it.’
Here the parrot, who had been standing on one leg since he screamed last, burst into a fit of laughter, bobbed himself derisively up and down on both legs, and finished by standing on one leg again, and pausing for a reply, with his head as much awry as he could possibly twist it.
‘Sounds mercenary to ask what the gentleman is to get with the lady,’ said Mrs Merdle; ‘but Society is perhaps a little mercenary, you know, my dear.’
‘From what I can make out,’ said Mrs Gowan, ‘I believe I may say that Henry will be relieved from debt—’
‘Much in debt?’ asked Mrs Merdle through her eyeglass.
‘Why tolerably, I should think,’ said Mrs Gowan.
‘Meaning the usual thing; I understand; just so,’ Mrs Merdle observed in a comfortable sort of way.
‘And that the father will make them an allowance of three hundred a-year, or perhaps altogether something more, which, in Italy-’
‘Oh! Going to Italy?’ said Mrs Merdle.
‘For Henry to study. You need be at no loss to guess why, my dear. That dreadful Art—’
True. Mrs Merdle hastened to spare the feelings of her afflicted friend. She understood. Say no more!
‘And that,’ said Mrs Gowan, shaking her despondent head, ‘that’s all. That,’ repeated Mrs Gowan, furling her green fan for the moment, and tapping her chin with it (it was on the way to being a double chin; might be called a chin and a half at present), ‘that’s all! On the death of the old people, I suppose there will be more to come; but how it may be restricted or locked up, I don’t know. And as to that, they may live for ever. My dear, they are just the kind of people to do it.’
Now, Mrs Merdle, who really knew her friend Society pretty well, and who knew what Society’s mothers were, and what Society’s daughters were, and what Society’s matrimonial market was, and how prices ruled in it, and what scheming and counter-scheming took place for the high buyers, and what bargaining and huckstering went on, thought in the depths of her capacious bosom that this was a sufficiently good catch. Knowing, however, what was expected of her, and perceiving the exact nature of the fiction to be nursed, she took it delicately in her arms, and put her required contribution of gloss upon it.
‘And that is all, my dear?’ said she, heaving a friendly sigh. ‘Well, well! The fault is not yours. You have nothing to reproach yourself with. You must exercise the strength of mind for which you are renowned, and make the best of it.’
‘The girl’s family have made,’ said Mrs Gowan, ‘of course, the most strenuous endeavours to—as the lawyers say—to have and to hold Henry.’
‘Of course they have, my dear,’ said Mrs Merdle.
‘I have persisted in every possible objection, and have worried myself morning, noon, and night, for means to detach Henry from the connection.’
‘No doubt you have, my dear,’ said Mrs Merdle.
‘And all of no use. All has broken down beneath me. Now tell me, my love. Am I justified in at last yielding my most reluctant consent to Henry’s marrying among people not in Society; or, have I acted with inexcusable weakness?’
In answer to this direct appeal, Mrs Merdle assured Mrs Gowan (speaking as a Priestess of Society) that she was highly to be commended, that she was much to be sympathised with, that she had taken the highest of parts, and had come out of the furnace refined. And Mrs Gowan, who of course saw through her own threadbare blind perfectly, and who knew that Mrs Merdle saw through it perfectly, and who knew that Society would see through it perfectly, came out of this form, notwithstanding, as she had gone into it, with immense complacency and gravity.
The conference was held at four or five o’clock in the afternoon, when all the region of Harley Street, Cavendish Square, was resonant of carriage-wheels and double-knocks. It had reached this point when Mr Merdle came home from his daily occupation of causing the British name to be more and more respected in all parts of the civilised globe capable of the appreciation of world-wide commercial enterprise and gigantic combinations of skill and capital. For, though nobody knew with the least precision what Mr Merdle’s business was, except that it was to coin money, these were the terms in which everybody defined it on all ceremonious occasions, and which it was the last new polite reading of the parable of the camel and the needle’s eye to accept without inquiry.
For a gentleman who had this splendid work cut out for him, Mr Merdle looked a little common, and rather as if, in the course of his vast transactions, he had accidentally made an interchange of heads with some inferior spirit. He presented himself before the two ladies in the course of a dismal stroll through his mansion, which had no apparent object but escape from the presence of the chief butler.
‘I beg your pardon,’ he said, stopping short in confusion; ‘I didn’t know there was anybody here but the parrot.’
However, as Mrs Merdle said, ‘You can come in!’ and as Mrs Gowan said she was just going, and had already risen to take her leave, he came in, and stood looking out at a distant window, with his hands crossed under his uneasy coat-cuffs, clasping his wrists as if he were taking himself into custody. In this attitude he fell directly into a reverie from which he was only aroused by his wife’s calling to him from her ottoman, when they had been for some quarter of an hour alone.
‘Eh? Yes?’ said Mr Merdle, turning towards her. ‘What is it?’
‘What is it?’ repeated Mrs Merdle. ‘It is, I suppose, that you have not heard a word of my complaint.’
‘Your complaint, Mrs Merdle?’ said Mr Merdle. ‘I didn’t know that you were suffering from a complaint. What complaint?’
‘A complaint of you,’ said Mrs Merdle.
‘Oh! A complaint of me,’ said Mr Merdle. ‘What is the—what have I—what may you have to complain of in me, Mrs Merdle?’
In his withdrawing, abstracted, pondering way, it took him some time to shape this question. As a kind of faint attempt to convince himself that he was the master of the house, he concluded by presenting his forefinger to the parrot, who expressed his opinion on that subject by instantly driving his bill into it.
‘You were saying, Mrs Merdle,’ said Mr Merdle, with his wounded finger in his mouth, ‘that you had a complaint against me?’
‘A complaint which I could scarcely show the justice of more emphatically, than by having to repeat it,’ said Mrs Merdle. ‘I might as well have stated it to the wall. I had far better have stated it to the bird. He would at least have screamed.’
‘You don’t want me to scream, Mrs Merdle, I suppose,’ said Mr Merdle, taking a chair.
‘Indeed I don’t know,’ retorted Mrs Merdle, ‘but that you had better do that, than be so moody and distraught. One would at least know that you were sensible of what was going on around you.’
‘A man might scream, and yet not be that, Mrs Merdle,’ said Mr Merdle, heavily.
‘And might be dogged, as you are at present, without screaming,’ returned Mrs Merdle. ‘That’s very true. If you wish to know the complaint I make against you, it is, in so many plain words, that you really ought not to go into Society unless you can accommodate yourself to Society.’
Mr Merdle, so twisting his hands into what hair he had upon his head that he seemed to lift himself up by it as he started out of his chair, cried:
‘Why, in the name of all the infernal powers, Mrs Merdle, who does more for Society than I do? Do you see these premises, Mrs Merdle? Do you see this furniture, Mrs Merdle? Do you look in the glass and see yourself, Mrs Merdle? Do you know the cost of all this, and who it’s all provided for? And yet will you tell me that I oughtn’t to go into Society? I, who shower money upon it in this way? I, who might always be said—to—to—to harness myself to a watering-cart full of money, and go about saturating Society every day of my life.’
‘Pray, don’t be violent, Mr Merdle,’ said Mrs Merdle.
‘Violent?’ said Mr Merdle. ‘You are enough to make me desperate. You don’t know half of what I do to accommodate Society. You don’t know anything of the sacrifices I make for it.’
‘I know,’ returned Mrs Merdle, ‘that you receive the best in the land. I know that you move in the whole Society of the country. And I believe I know (indeed, not to make any ridiculous pretence about it, I know I know) who sustains you in it, Mr Merdle.’
‘Mrs Merdle,’ retorted that gentleman, wiping his dull red and yellow face, ‘I know that as well as you do. If you were not an ornament to Society, and if I was not a benefactor to Society, you and I would never have come together. When I say a benefactor to it, I mean a person who provides it with all sorts of expensive things to eat and drink and look at. But, to tell me that I am not fit for it after all I have done for it—after all I have done for it,’ repeated Mr Merdle, with a wild emphasis that made his wife lift up her eyelids, ‘after all—all!—to tell me I have no right to mix with it after all, is a pretty reward.’
‘I say,’ answered Mrs Merdle composedly, ‘that you ought to make yourself fit for it by being more degage, and less preoccupied. There is a positive vulgarity in carrying your business affairs about with you as you do.’
‘How do I carry them about, Mrs Merdle?’ asked Mr Merdle.
‘How do you carry them about?’ said Mrs Merdle. ‘Look at yourself in the glass.’
Mr Merdle involuntarily turned his eyes in the direction of the nearest mirror, and asked, with a slow determination of his turbid blood to his temples, whether a man was to be called to account for his digestion?
‘You have a physician,’ said Mrs Merdle.
‘He does me no good,’ said Mr Merdle.
Mrs Merdle changed her ground.
‘Besides,’ said she, ‘your digestion is nonsense. I don’t speak of your digestion. I speak of your manner.’
‘Mrs Merdle,’ returned her husband, ‘I look to you for that. You supply manner, and I supply money.’
‘I don’t expect you,’ said Mrs Merdle, reposing easily among her cushions, ‘to captivate people. I don’t want you to take any trouble upon yourself, or to try to be fascinating. I simply request you to care about nothing—or seem to care about nothing—as everybody else does.’
‘Do I ever say I care about anything?’ asked Mr Merdle.
‘Say? No! Nobody would attend to you if you did. But you show it.’
‘Show what? What do I show?’ demanded Mr Merdle hurriedly.
‘I have already told you. You show that you carry your business cares an projects about, instead of leaving them in the City, or wherever else they belong to,’ said Mrs Merdle. ‘Or seeming to. Seeming would be quite enough: I ask no more. Whereas you couldn’t be more occupied with your day’s calculations and combinations than you habitually show yourself to be, if you were a carpenter.’
‘A carpenter!’ repeated Mr Merdle, checking something like a groan. ‘I shouldn’t so much mind being a carpenter, Mrs Merdle.’
‘And my complaint is,’ pursued the lady, disregarding the low remark, ‘that it is not the tone of Society, and that you ought to correct it, Mr Merdle. If you have any doubt of my judgment, ask even Edmund Sparkler.’ The door of the room had opened, and Mrs Merdle now surveyed the head of her son through her glass. ‘Edmund; we want you here.’
Mr Sparkler, who had merely put in his head and looked round the room without entering (as if he were searching the house for that young lady with no nonsense about her), upon this followed up his head with his body, and stood before them. To whom, in a few easy words adapted to his capacity, Mrs Merdle stated the question at issue.
The young gentleman, after anxiously feeling his shirt-collar as if it were his pulse and he were hypochondriacal, observed, ‘That he had heard it noticed by fellers.’
‘Edmund Sparkler has heard it noticed,’ said Mrs Merdle, with languid triumph. ‘Why, no doubt everybody has heard it noticed!’ Which in truth was no unreasonable inference; seeing that Mr Sparkler would probably be the last person, in any assemblage of the human species, to receive an impression from anything that passed in his presence.
‘And Edmund Sparkler will tell you, I dare say,’ said Mrs Merdle, waving her favourite hand towards her husband, ‘how he has heard it noticed.’
‘I couldn’t,’ said Mr Sparkler, after feeling his pulse as before, ‘couldn’t undertake to say what led to it—‘cause memory desperate loose. But being in company with the brother of a doosed fine gal—well educated too—with no biggodd nonsense about her—at the period alluded to—’
‘There! Never mind the sister,’ remarked Mrs Merdle, a little impatiently. ‘What did the brother say?’
‘Didn’t say a word, ma’am,’ answered Mr Sparkler. ‘As silent a feller as myself. Equally hard up for a remark.’
‘Somebody said something,’ returned Mrs Merdle. ‘Never mind who it was.’
(‘Assure you I don’t in the least,’ said Mr Sparkler.)
‘But tell us what it was.’
Mr Sparkler referred to his pulse again, and put himself through some severe mental discipline before he replied:
‘Fellers referring to my Governor—expression not my own—occasionally compliment my Governor in a very handsome way on being immensely rich and knowing—perfect phenomenon of Buyer and Banker and that—but say the Shop sits heavily on him. Say he carried the Shop about, on his back rather—like Jew clothesmen with too much business.’
‘Which,’ said Mrs Merdle, rising, with her floating drapery about her, ‘is exactly my complaint. Edmund, give me your arm up-stairs.’
Mr Merdle, left alone to meditate on a better conformation of himself to Society, looked out of nine windows in succession, and appeared to see nine wastes of space. When he had thus entertained himself he went down-stairs, and looked intently at all the carpets on the ground-floor; and then came up-stairs again, and looked intently at all the carpets on the first-floor; as if they were gloomy depths, in unison with his oppressed soul. Through all the rooms he wandered, as he always did, like the last person on earth who had any business to approach them. Let Mrs Merdle announce, with all her might, that she was at Home ever so many nights in a season, she could not announce more widely and unmistakably than Mr Merdle did that he was never at home.
At last he met the chief butler, the sight of which splendid retainer always finished him. Extinguished by this great creature, he sneaked to his dressing-room, and there remained shut up until he rode out to dinner, with Mrs Merdle, in her own handsome chariot. At dinner, he was envied and flattered as a being of might, was Treasuried, Barred, and Bishoped, as much as he would; and an hour after midnight came home alone, and being instantly put out again in his own hall, like a rushlight, by the chief butler, went sighing to bed.