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

a sort of coffin in compartments; there was the old dark closet, also with nothing in it, of which he had been many a time the sole contents, in days of punishment, when he had regarded it as the veritable entrance to that bourne to which the tract had found him galloping. There was the large, hard-featured clock on the sideboard, which he used to see bending its figured brows upon him with a savage joy when he was behindhand with his lessons, and which, when it was wound up once a week with an iron handle, used to sound as if it were growling in ferocious anticipation of the miseries into which it would bring him. But here was the old man come back, saying, “Arthur, I’ll go before and light you.”

Arthur followed him up the staircase, which was panelled off into spaces like so many mourning tablets, into a dim bedchamber, the floor of which had gradually so sunk and settled, that the fireplace was in a dell. On a black bier-like sofa in this hollow, propped up behind with one great angular black bolster like the block at a state execution in the good old times, sat his mother in a widow’s dress.

She and his father had been at variance from his earliest remembrance. To sit speechless himself in the midst of rigid silence, glancing in dread from the one averted face to the other, had been the peacefullest occupation of his childhood. She gave him one glassy kiss, and four stiff fingers muffled in worsted. This embrace concluded, he sat down on the opposite side of her little table. There was a fire in the grate, as there had been night and day for fifteen years. There was a kettle on the hob, as there had been night and day for fifteen years. There was a little mound of damped ashes on the top of the fire, and another little mound swept together under the grate, as there had been night and day for fifteen years. There was a smell of black dye in the airless room, which the fire had been drawing out of the crape and stuff of the widow’s dress for fifteen months, and out of the bier-like sofa for fifteen years.

“Mother, this is a change from your old active habits.”

“The world has narrowed to these dimensions, Arthur,” she replied, glancing round the room. “It is well for me that I never set my heart upon its hollow vanities.”

The old influence of her presence and her stern strong voice, so gathered about her son, that he felt conscious of a renewal of the timid chill and reserve of his childhood.

“Do you never leave your room, mother?”

“What with my rheumatic affection, and what with its attendant debility or nervous weakness⁠—names are of no matter now⁠—I have lost the use of my limbs. I never leave my room. I have not been outside this door for⁠—tell him for how long,” she said, speaking over her shoulder.

“A dozen year next Christmas,” returned a cracked voice out of the dimness behind.

“Is that Affery?” said Arthur, looking towards it.

The cracked voice replied that it was Affery: and an old woman came forward into what doubtful light there was, and kissed her hand once; then subsided again into the dimness.

“I am able,” said Mrs. Clennam, with a slight motion of her worsted-muffled right hand toward a chair on wheels, standing before a tall writing cabinet close shut up, “I am able to attend to my business duties, and I am thankful for the privilege. It is a great privilege. But no more of business on this day. It is a bad night, is it not?”

“Yes, mother.”

“Does it snow?”

“Snow, mother? And we only yet in September?”

“All seasons are alike to me,” she returned, with a grim kind of luxuriousness. “I know nothing of summer and winter, shut up here. The Lord has been pleased to put me beyond all that.” With her cold grey eyes and her cold grey hair, and her immovable face, as stiff as the folds of her stony headdress⁠—her being beyond the reach of the seasons seemed but a fit sequence to her being beyond the reach of all changing emotions.

On her little table lay two or three books, her handkerchief, a pair of steel spectacles newly taken off, and an old-fashioned gold watch in a heavy double case. Upon this last object her son’s eyes and her own now rested together.

“I see that you received the packet I sent you on my father’s death, safely, mother.”

“You see.”

“I never knew my father to show so much anxiety on any subject, as that his watch should be sent straight to you.”

“I keep it here as a remembrance of your father.”

“It was not until the last, that he expressed the wish; when he could only put his hand upon it, and very indistinctly say to me ‘your mother.’ A moment before, I thought him wandering in his mind, as he had been for many hours⁠—I think he had no consciousness of pain in his short illness⁠—when I saw him turn himself in his bed and try to open it.”

“Was your father, then, not wandering in his mind when he tried to open it?”

“No. He was quite sensible at that time.”

Mrs. Clennam shook her head; whether in dismissal of the deceased or opposing herself to her son’s opinion, was not clearly expressed.

“After my father’s death I opened it myself, thinking there might be, for anything I knew, some memorandum there. However, as I need not tell you, mother, there was nothing but the old silk watch-paper worked in beads, which you found (no doubt) in its place between the cases, where I found and left it.”

Mrs. Clennam signified assent; then added, “No more of business on this day,” and then added, “Affery, it is nine o’clock.”

Upon this, the old woman cleared the little table, went out of the room, and quickly returned with a tray on which was a dish of little