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

Miss Wade had an attendant with her⁠—a young woman brought up by friends of mine, over whom her influence is not considered very salutary, and to whom I should be glad to have the opportunity of giving the assurance that she has not yet forfeited the interest of those protectors.”

“Really, really?” returned the Patriarch.

“Will you therefore be so good as to give me the address of Miss Wade?”

“Dear, dear, dear!” said the Patriarch, “how very unfortunate! If you had only sent in to me when they were here! I observed the young woman, Mr. Clennam. A fine full-coloured young woman, Mr. Clennam, with very dark hair and very dark eyes. If I mistake not, if I mistake not?”

Arthur assented, and said once more with new expression, “If you would be so good as to give me the address.”

“Dear, dear, dear!” exclaimed the Patriarch in sweet regret. “Tut, tut, tut! what a pity, what a pity! I have no address, sir. Miss Wade mostly lives abroad, Mr. Clennam. She has done so for some years, and she is (if I may say so of a fellow-creature and a lady) fitful and uncertain to a fault, Mr. Clennam. I may not see her again for a long, long time. I may never see her again. What a pity, what a pity!”

Clennam saw now, that he had as much hope of getting assistance out of the Portrait as out of the Patriarch; but he said nevertheless:

“Mr. Casby, could you, for the satisfaction of the friends I have mentioned, and under any obligation of secrecy that you may consider it your duty to impose, give me any information at all touching Miss Wade? I have seen her abroad, and I have seen her at home, but I know nothing of her. Could you give me any account of her whatever?”

“None,” returned the Patriarch, shaking his big head with his utmost benevolence. “None at all. Dear, dear, dear! What a real pity that she stayed so short a time, and you delayed! As confidential agency business, agency business, I have occasionally paid this lady money; but what satisfaction is it to you, sir, to know that?”

“Truly, none at all,” said Clennam.

“Truly,” assented the Patriarch, with a shining face as he philanthropically smiled at the fire, “none at all, sir. You hit the wise answer, Mr. Clennam. Truly, none at all, sir.”

His turning of his smooth thumbs over one another as he sat there, was so typical to Clennam of the way in which he would make the subject revolve if it were pursued, never showing any new part of it nor allowing it to make the smallest advance, that it did much to help to convince him of his labour having been in vain. He might have taken any time to think about it, for Mr. Casby, well accustomed to get on anywhere by leaving everything to his bumps and his white hair, knew his strength to lie in silence. So there Casby sat, twirling and twirling, and making his polished head and forehead look largely benevolent in every knob.

With this spectacle before him, Arthur had risen to go, when from the inner Dock where the good ship Pancks was hove down when out in no cruising ground, the noise was heard of that steamer labouring towards him. It struck Arthur that the noise began demonstratively far off, as though Mr. Pancks sought to impress on anyone who might happen to think about it, that he was working on from out of hearing.

Mr. Pancks and he shook hands, and the former brought his employer a letter or two to sign. Mr. Pancks in shaking hands merely scratched his eyebrow with his left forefinger and snorted once, but Clennam, who understood him better now than of old, comprehended that he had almost done for the evening and wished to say a word to him outside. Therefore, when he had taken his leave of Mr. Casby, and (which was a more difficult process) of Flora, he sauntered in the neighbourhood on Mr. Pancks’s line of road.

He had waited but a short time when Mr. Pancks appeared. Mr. Pancks shaking hands again with another expressive snort, and taking off his hat to put his hair up, Arthur thought he received his cue to speak to him as one who knew pretty well what had just now passed. Therefore he said, without any preface:

“I suppose they were really gone, Pancks?”

“Yes,” replied Pancks. “They were really gone.”

“Does he know where to find that lady?”

“Can’t say. I should think so.”

Mr. Pancks did not? No, Mr. Pancks did not. Did Mr. Pancks know anything about her?

“I expect,” rejoined that worthy, “I know as much about her as she knows about herself. She is somebody’s child⁠—anybody’s, nobody’s. Put her in a room in London here with any six people old enough to be her parents, and her parents may be there for anything she knows. They may be in any house she sees, they may be in any churchyard she passes, she may run against ’em in any street, she may make chance acquaintance of ’em at any time; and never know it. She knows nothing about ’em. She knows nothing about any relative whatever. Never did. Never will.”

“Mr. Casby could enlighten her, perhaps?”

“May be,” said Pancks. “I expect so, but don’t know. He has long had money (not overmuch as I make out) in trust to dole out to her when she can’t do without it. Sometimes she’s proud and won’t touch it for a length of time; sometimes she’s so poor that she must have it. She writhes under her life. A woman more angry, passionate, reckless, and revengeful never lived. She came for money tonight. Said she had peculiar occasion for it.”

“I think,” observed Clennam musing, “I by chance know what occasion⁠—I mean into whose pocket the money is to go.”

“Indeed?” said Pancks. “If it’s a compact, I recommend that party to be exact in it. I wouldn’t trust myself to that woman, young and handsome as she is, if I had wronged her; no, not for twice