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

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 anyone, if restitution can be made to anyone, 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 anyone 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In a moment the girl had withdrawn, and the old man stood within the door.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