Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens [big ebook reader txt] 📗

by, though. A lame foreigner with a stick.”

“Ay, ay. You do take a reference sometimes, I see?” said Clennam.

“When he can pay, sir,” replied Pancks. “Take all you can get, and keep back all you can’t be forced to give up. That’s business. The lame foreigner with the stick wants a top room down the Yard. Is he good for it?”

“I am,” said Clennam, “and I will answer for him.”

“That’s enough. What I must have of Bleeding Heart Yard,” said Pancks, making a note of the case in his book, “is my bond. I want my bond, you see. Pay up, or produce your property! That’s the watchword down the Yard. The lame foreigner with the stick represented that you sent him; but he could represent (as far as that goes) that the Great Mogul sent him. He has been in the hospital, I believe?”

“Yes. Through having met with an accident. He is only just now discharged.”

“It’s pauperising a man, sir, I have been shown, to let him into a hospital?” said Pancks. And again blew off that remarkable sound.

“I have been shown so too,” said Clennam, coldly.

Mr. Pancks, being by that time quite ready for a start, got under steam in a moment, and, without any other signal or ceremony, was snorting down the stepladder and working into Bleeding Heart Yard, before he seemed to be well out of the countinghouse.

Throughout the remainder of the day, Bleeding Heart Yard was in consternation, as the grim Pancks cruised in it; haranguing the inhabitants on their backslidings in respect of payment, demanding his bond, breathing notices to quit and executions, running down defaulters, sending a swell of terror on before him, and leaving it in his wake. Knots of people, impelled by a fatal attraction, lurked outside any house in which he was known to be, listening for fragments of his discourses to the inmates; and, when he was rumoured to be coming down the stairs, often could not disperse so quickly but that he would be prematurely in among them, demanding their own arrears, and rooting them to the spot. Throughout the remainder of the day, Mr. Pancks’s What were they up to? and What did they mean by it? sounded all over the Yard. Mr. Pancks wouldn’t hear of excuses, wouldn’t hear of complaints, wouldn’t hear of repairs, wouldn’t hear of anything but unconditional money down. Perspiring and puffing and darting about in eccentric directions, and becoming hotter and dingier every moment, he lashed the tide of the yard into a most agitated and turbid state. It had not settled down into calm water again full two hours after he had been seen fuming away on the horizon at the top of the steps.

There were several small assemblages of the Bleeding Hearts at the popular points of meeting in the Yard that night, among whom it was universally agreed that Mr. Pancks was a hard man to have to do with; and that it was much to be regretted, so it was, that a gentleman like Mr. Casby should put his rents in his hands, and never know him in his true light. For (said the Bleeding Hearts), if a gentleman with that head of hair and them eyes took his rents into his own hands, ma’am, there would be none of this worriting and wearing, and things would be very different.

At which identical evening hour and minute, the Patriarch⁠—who had floated serenely through the Yard in the forenoon before the harrying began, with the express design of getting up this trustfulness in his shining bumps and silken locks⁠—at which identical hour and minute, that first-rate humbug of a thousand guns was heavily floundering in the little Dock of his exhausted Tug at home, and was saying, as he turned his thumbs:

“A very bad day’s work, Pancks, very bad day’s work. It seems to me, sir, and I must insist on making this observation forcibly in justice to myself, that you ought to have got much more money, much more money.”

XXIV Fortune-Telling

Little Dorrit received a call that same evening from Mr. Plornish, who, having intimated that he wished to speak to her privately, in a series of coughs so very noticeable as to favour the idea that her father, as regarded her seamstress occupation, was an illustration of the axiom that there are no such stone-blind men as those who will not see, obtained an audience with her on the common staircase outside the door.

“There’s been a lady at our place today, Miss Dorrit,” Plornish growled, “and another one along with her as is a old wixen if ever I met with such. The way she snapped a person’s head off, dear me!”

The mild Plornish was at first quite unable to get his mind away from Mr. F.’s Aunt. “For,” said he, to excuse himself, “she is, I do assure you, the winegariest party.”

At length, by a great effort, he detached himself from the subject sufficiently to observe:

“But she’s neither here nor there just at present. The other lady, she’s Mr. Casby’s daughter; and if Mr. Casby an’t well off, none better, it an’t through any fault of Pancks. For, as to Pancks, he does, he really does, he does indeed!”

Mr. Plornish, after his usual manner, was a little obscure, but conscientiously emphatic.

“And what she come to our place for,” he pursued, “was to leave word that if Miss Dorrit would step up to that card⁠—which it’s Mr. Casby’s house that is, and Pancks he has a office at the back, where he really does, beyond belief⁠—she would be glad for to engage her. She was a old and a dear friend, she said particular, of Mr. Clennam, and hoped for to prove herself a useful friend to his friend. Them was her words. Wishing to know whether Miss Dorrit could come tomorrow morning, I said I would see you, Miss, and inquire, and look round there tonight, to say yes, or, if you was engaged tomorrow, when?”

“I can go tomorrow, thank you,” said Little Dorrit.