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

and youth are gone, and the labourers who worked in the vineyard and pressed the grapes are dust. With characteristic ignorance, it acted on the most decided and energetic notions of How to do it; and never showed the least respect for, or gave any quarter to, the great political science, How not to do it. Indeed it had a barbarous way of striking the latter art and mystery dead, in the person of any enlightened subject who practised it.

Accordingly, the men who were wanted were sought out and found; which was in itself a most uncivilised and irregular way of proceeding. Being found, they were treated with great confidence and honour (which again showed dense political ignorance), and were invited to come at once and do what they had to do. In short, they were regarded as men who meant to do it, engaging with other men who meant it to be done.

Daniel Doyce was one of the chosen. There was no foreseeing at that time whether he would be absent months or years. The preparations for his departure, and the conscientious arrangement for him of all the details and results of their joint business, had necessitated labour within a short compass of time, which had occupied Clennam day and night. He had slipped across the water in his first leisure, and had slipped as quickly back again for his farewell interview with Doyce.

Him Arthur now showed, with pains and care, the state of their gains and losses, responsibilities and prospects. Daniel went through it all in his patient manner, and admired it all exceedingly. He audited the accounts, as if they were a far more ingenious piece of mechanism than he had ever constructed, and afterwards stood looking at them, weighing his hat over his head by the brims, as if he were absorbed in the contemplation of some wonderful engine.

“It’s all beautiful, Clennam, in its regularity and order. Nothing can be plainer. Nothing can be better.”

“I am glad you approve, Doyce. Now, as to the management of your capital while you are away, and as to the conversion of so much of it as the business may need from time to time⁠—” His partner stopped him.

“As to that, and as to everything else of that kind, all rests with you. You will continue in all such matters to act for both of us, as you have done hitherto, and to lighten my mind of a load it is much relieved from.”

“Though, as I often tell you,” returned Clennam, “you unreasonably depreciate your business qualities.”

“Perhaps so,” said Doyce, smiling. “And perhaps not. Anyhow, I have a calling that I have studied more than such matters, and that I am better fitted for. I have perfect confidence in my partner, and I am satisfied that he will do what is best. If I have a prejudice connected with money and money figures,” continued Doyce, laying that plastic workman’s thumb of his on the lapel of his partner’s coat, “it is against speculating. I don’t think I have any other. I dare say I entertain that prejudice, only because I have never given my mind fully to the subject.”

“But you shouldn’t call it a prejudice,” said Clennam. “My dear Doyce, it is the soundest sense.”

“I am glad you think so,” returned Doyce, with his grey eye looking kind and bright.

“It so happens,” said Clennam, “that just now, not half an hour before you came down, I was saying the same thing to Pancks, who looked in here. We both agreed that to travel out of safe investments is one of the most dangerous, as it is one of the most common, of those follies which often deserve the name of vices.”

“Pancks?” said Doyce, tilting up his hat at the back, and nodding with an air of confidence. “Aye, aye, aye! That’s a cautious fellow.”

“He is a very cautious fellow indeed,” returned Arthur. “Quite a specimen of caution.”

They both appeared to derive a larger amount of satisfaction from the cautious character of Mr. Pancks, than was quite intelligible, judged by the surface of their conversation.

“And now,” said Daniel, looking at his watch, “as time and tide wait for no man, my trusty partner, and as I am ready for starting, bag and baggage, at the gate below, let me say a last word. I want you to grant a request of mine.”

“Any request you can make⁠—Except,” Clennam was quick with his exception, for his partner’s face was quick in suggesting it, “except that I will abandon your invention.”

“That’s the request, and you know it is,” said Doyce.

“I say, No, then. I say positively, No. Now that I have begun, I will have some definite reason, some responsible statement, something in the nature of a real answer, from those people.”

“You will not,” returned Doyce, shaking his head. “Take my word for it, you never will.”

“At least, I’ll try,” said Clennam. “It will do me no harm to try.”

“I am not certain of that,” rejoined Doyce, laying his hand persuasively on his shoulder. “It has done me harm, my friend. It has aged me, tired me, vexed me, disappointed me. It does no man any good to have his patience worn out, and to think himself ill-used. I fancy, even already, that unavailing attendance on delays and evasions has made you something less elastic than you used to be.”

“Private anxieties may have done that for the moment,” said Clennam, “but not official harrying. Not yet. I am not hurt yet.”

“Then you won’t grant my request?”

“Decidedly, No,” said Clennam. “I should be ashamed if I submitted to be so soon driven out of the field, where a much older and a much more sensitively interested man contended with fortitude so long.”

As there was no moving him, Daniel Doyce returned the grasp of his hand, and, casting a farewell look round the countinghouse, went downstairs with him. Doyce was to go to Southampton to join the small staff of his fellow-travellers; and a coach was at