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

it was worth my while, for my own pleasure⁠—the gratification of a strong feeling⁠—to pay a spy who would fetch and carry for money. I paid this creature. And I dare say that if I had wanted to make such a bargain, and if I could have paid him enough, and if he could have done it in the dark, free from all risk, he would have taken any life with as little scruple as he took my money. That, at least, is my opinion of him; and I see it is not very far removed from yours. Your mother’s opinion of him, I am to assume (following your example of assuming this and that), was vastly different.”

“My mother, let me remind you,” said Clennam, “was first brought into communication with him in the unlucky course of business.”

“It appears to have been an unlucky course of business that last brought her into communication with him,” returned Miss Wade; “and business hours on that occasion were late.”

“You imply,” said Arthur, smarting under these cool-handed thrusts, of which he had deeply felt the force already, “that there was something⁠—”

“Mr. Clennam,” she composedly interrupted, “recollect that I do not speak by implication about the man. He is, I say again without disguise, a low mercenary wretch. I suppose such a creature goes where there is occasion for him. If I had not had occasion for him, you would not have seen him and me together.”

Wrung by her persistence in keeping that dark side of the case before him, of which there was a half-hidden shadow in his own breast, Clennam was silent.

“I have spoken of him as still living,” she added, “but he may have been put out of the way for anything I know. For anything I care, also. I have no further occasion for him.”

With a heavy sigh and a despondent air, Arthur Clennam slowly rose. She did not rise also, but said, having looked at him in the meanwhile with a fixed look of suspicion, and lips angrily compressed:

“He was the chosen associate of your dear friend, Mr. Gowan, was he not? Why don’t you ask your dear friend to help you?”

The denial that he was a dear friend rose to Arthur’s lips; but he repressed it, remembering his old struggles and resolutions, and said:

“Further than that he has never seen Blandois since Blandois set out for England, Mr. Gowan knows nothing additional about him. He was a chance acquaintance, made abroad.”

“A chance acquaintance made abroad!” she repeated. “Yes. Your dear friend has need to divert himself with all the acquaintances he can make, seeing what a wife he has. I hate his wife, sir.”

The anger with which she said it, the more remarkable for being so much under her restraint, fixed Clennam’s attention, and kept him on the spot. It flashed out of her dark eyes as they regarded him, quivered in her nostrils, and fired the very breath she exhaled; but her face was otherwise composed into a disdainful serenity; and her attitude was as calmly and haughtily graceful as if she had been in a mood of complete indifference.

“All I will say is, Miss Wade,” he remarked, “that you can have received no provocation to a feeling in which I believe you have no sharer.”

“You may ask your dear friend, if you choose,” she returned, “for his opinion upon that subject.”

“I am scarcely on those intimate terms with my dear friend,” said Arthur, in spite of his resolutions, “that would render my approaching the subject very probable, Miss Wade.”

“I hate him,” she returned. “Worse than his wife, because I was once dupe enough, and false enough to myself, almost to love him. You have seen me, sir, only on commonplace occasions, when I dare say you have thought me a commonplace woman, a little more self-willed than the generality. You don’t know what I mean by hating, if you know me no better than that; you can’t know, without knowing with what care I have studied myself and people about me. For this reason I have for some time inclined to tell you what my life has been⁠—not to propitiate your opinion, for I set no value on it; but that you may comprehend, when you think of your dear friend and his dear wife, what I mean by hating. Shall I give you something I have written and put by for your perusal, or shall I hold my hand?”

Arthur begged her to give it to him. She went to the bureau, unlocked it, and took from an inner drawer a few folded sheets of paper. Without any conciliation of him, scarcely addressing him, rather speaking as if she were speaking to her own looking-glass for the justification of her own stubbornness, she said, as she gave them to him:

“Now you may know what I mean by hating! No more of that. Sir, whether you find me temporarily and cheaply lodging in an empty London house, or in a Calais apartment, you find Harriet with me. You may like to see her before you leave. Harriet, come in!” She called Harriet again. The second call produced Harriet, once Tattycoram.

“Here is Mr. Clennam,” said Miss Wade; “not come for you; he has given you up⁠—I suppose you have, by this time?”

“Having no authority, or influence⁠—yes,” assented Clennam.

“Not come in search of you, you see; but still seeking someone. He wants that Blandois man.”

“With whom I saw you in the Strand in London,” hinted Arthur.

“If you know anything of him, Harriet, except that he came from Venice⁠—which we all know⁠—tell it to Mr. Clennam freely.”

“I know nothing more about him,” said the girl.

“Are you satisfied?” Miss Wade inquired of Arthur.

He had no reason to disbelieve them; the girl’s manner being so natural as to be almost convincing, if he had had any previous doubts. He replied, “I must seek for intelligence elsewhere.”

He was not going in the same breath; but he had risen before the girl entered, and she evidently thought he was. She