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

explain his object, as I shall beg him to have the goodness to do to myself and Flintwinch, when Flintwinch returns, it will prove, no doubt, to be one more or less in the usual way of our business, which it will be both our business and our pleasure to advance. It can be nothing else.”

“We shall see, madame!” said the man of business.

“We shall see,” she assented. “The gentleman is acquainted with Flintwinch; and when the gentleman was in London last, I remember to have heard that he and Flintwinch had some entertainment or good-fellowship together. I am not in the way of knowing much that passes outside this room, and the jingle of little worldly things beyond it does not much interest me; but I remember to have heard that.”

“Right, madame. It is true.” He laughed again, and whistled the burden of the tune he had sung at the door.

“Therefore, Arthur,” said his mother, “the gentleman comes here as an acquaintance, and no stranger; and it is much to be regretted that your unreasonable temper should have found offence in him. I regret it. I say so to the gentleman. You will not say so, I know; therefore I say it for myself and Flintwinch, since with us two the gentleman’s business lies.”

The key of the door below was now heard in the lock, and the door was heard to open and close. In due sequence Mr. Flintwinch appeared; on whose entrance the visitor rose from his chair, laughing loud, and folded him in a close embrace.

“How goes it, my cherished friend!” said he. “How goes the world, my Flintwinch? Rose-coloured? So much the better, so much the better! Ah, but you look charming! Ah, but you look young and fresh as the flowers of Spring! Ah, good little boy! Brave child, brave child!”

While heaping these compliments on Mr. Flintwinch, he rolled him about with a hand on each of his shoulders, until the staggerings of that gentleman, who under the circumstances was dryer and more twisted than ever, were like those of a teetotum nearly spent.

“I had a presentiment, last time, that we should be better and more intimately acquainted. Is it coming on you, Flintwinch? Is it yet coming on?”

“Why, no, sir,” retorted Mr. Flintwinch. “Not unusually. Hadn’t you better be seated? You have been calling for some more of that port, sir, I guess?”

“Ah, Little joker! Little pig!” cried the visitor. “Ha ha ha ha!” And throwing Mr. Flintwinch away, as a closing piece of raillery, he sat down again.

The amazement, suspicion, resentment, and shame, with which Arthur looked on at all this, struck him dumb. Mr. Flintwinch, who had spun backward some two or three yards under the impetus last given to him, brought himself up with a face completely unchanged in its stolidity except as it was affected by shortness of breath, and looked hard at Arthur. Not a whit less reticent and wooden was Mr. Flintwinch outwardly, than in the usual course of things: the only perceptible difference in him being that the knot of cravat which was generally under his ear, had worked round to the back of his head: where it formed an ornamental appendage not unlike a bagwig, and gave him something of a courtly appearance.

As Mrs. Clennam never removed her eyes from Blandois (on whom they had some effect, as a steady look has on a lower sort of dog), so Jeremiah never removed his from Arthur. It was as if they had tacitly agreed to take their different provinces. Thus, in the ensuing silence, Jeremiah stood scraping his chin and looking at Arthur as though he were trying to screw his thoughts out of him with an instrument.

After a little, the visitor, as if he felt the silence irksome, rose, and impatiently put himself with his back to the sacred fire which had burned through so many years. Thereupon Mrs. Clennam said, moving one of her hands for the first time, and moving it very slightly with an action of dismissal:

“Please to leave us to our business, Arthur.”

“Mother, I do so with reluctance.”

“Never mind with what,” she returned, “or with what not. Please to leave us. Come back at any other time when you may consider it a duty to bury half an hour wearily here. Good night.”

She held up her muffled fingers that he might touch them with his, according to their usual custom, and he stood over her wheeled chair to touch her face with his lips. He thought, then, that her cheek was more strained than usual, and that it was colder. As he followed the direction of her eyes, in rising again, towards Mr. Flintwinch’s good friend, Mr. Blandois, Mr. Blandois snapped his finger and thumb with one loud contemptuous snap.

“I leave your⁠—your business acquaintance in my mother’s room, Mr. Flintwinch,” said Clennam, “with a great deal of surprise and a great deal of unwillingness.”

The person referred to snapped his finger and thumb again.

“Good night, mother.”

“Good night.”

“I had a friend once, my good comrade Flintwinch,” said Blandois, standing astride before the fire, and so evidently saying it to arrest Clennam’s retreating steps, that he lingered near the door; “I had a friend once, who had heard so much of the dark side of this city and its ways, that he wouldn’t have confided himself alone by night with two people who had an interest in getting him under the ground⁠—my faith! not even in a respectable house like this⁠—unless he was bodily too strong for them. Bah! What a poltroon, my Flintwinch! Eh?”

“A cur, sir.”

“Agreed! A cur. But he wouldn’t have done it, my Flintwinch, unless he had known them to have the will to silence him, without the power. He wouldn’t have drunk from a glass of water under such circumstances⁠—not even in a respectable house like this, my Flintwinch⁠—unless he had seen one of them drink first, and swallow too!”

Disdaining to speak, and indeed not very well able, for he was half-choking, Clennam only glanced at the visitor as he passed out. The