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

her hand, with that new freedom in the use of her hand of which she showed no consciousness whatever, bending her eyes upon it as if she were defying it to move her, Rigaud cried with a loud and contemptuous snapping of his fingers. “Come, madame! Time runs out. Come, lady of piety, it must be! You can tell nothing I don’t know. Come to the money stolen, or I will! Death of my soul, I have had enough of your other jargon. Come straight to the stolen money!”

“Wretch that you are,” she answered, and now her hands clasped her head: “through what fatal error of Flintwinch’s, through what incompleteness on his part, who was the only other person helping in these things and trusted with them, through whose and what bringing together of the ashes of a burnt paper, you have become possessed of that codicil, I know no more than how you acquired the rest of your power here⁠—”

“And yet,” interrupted Rigaud, “it is my odd fortune to have by me, in a convenient place that I know of, that same short little addition to the will of Monsieur Gilbert Clennam, written by a lady and witnessed by the same lady and our old intriguer! Ah, bah, old intriguer, crooked little puppet! Madame, let us go on. Time presses. You or I to finish?”

“I!” she answered, with increased determination, if it were possible. “I, because I will not endure to be shown myself, and have myself shown to anyone, with your horrible distortion upon me. You, with your practices of infamous foreign prisons and galleys would make it the money that impelled me. It was not the money.”

“Bah, bah, bah! I repudiate, for the moment, my politeness, and say, Lies, lies, lies. You know you suppressed the deed and kept the money.”

“Not for the money’s sake, wretch!” She made a struggle as if she were starting up; even as if, in her vehemence, she had almost risen on her disabled feet. “If Gilbert Clennam, reduced to imbecility, at the point of death, and labouring under the delusion of some imaginary relenting towards a girl of whom he had heard that his nephew had once had a fancy for her which he had crushed out of him, and that she afterwards drooped away into melancholy and withdrawal from all who knew her⁠—if, in that state of weakness, he dictated to me, whose life she had darkened with her sin, and who had been appointed to know her wickedness from her own hand and her own lips, a bequest meant as a recompense to her for supposed unmerited suffering; was there no difference between my spurning that injustice, and coveting mere money⁠—a thing which you, and your comrades in the prisons, may steal from anyone?”

“Time presses, madame. Take care!”

“If this house was blazing from the roof to the ground,” she returned, “I would stay in it to justify myself against my righteous motives being classed with those of stabbers and thieves.”

Rigaud snapped his fingers tauntingly in her face. “One thousand guineas to the little beauty you slowly hunted to death. One thousand guineas to the youngest daughter her patron might have at fifty, or (if he had none) brother’s youngest daughter, on her coming of age, ‘as the remembrance his disinterestedness may like best, of his protection of a friendless young orphan girl.’ Two thousand guineas. What! You will never come to the money?”

“That patron,” she was vehemently proceeding, when he checked her.

“Names! Call him Mr. Frederick Dorrit. No more evasions.”

“That Frederick Dorrit was the beginning of it all. If he had not been a player of music, and had not kept, in those days of his youth and prosperity, an idle house where singers, and players, and suchlike children of Evil turned their backs on the Light and their faces to the Darkness, she might have remained in her lowly station, and might not have been raised out of it to be cast down. But, no. Satan entered into that Frederick Dorrit, and counselled him that he was a man of innocent and laudable tastes who did kind actions, and that here was a poor girl with a voice for singing music with. Then he is to have her taught. Then Arthur’s father, who has all along been secretly pining in the ways of virtuous ruggedness for those accursed snares which are called the Arts, becomes acquainted with her. And so, a graceless orphan, training to be a singing girl, carries it, by that Frederick Dorrit’s agency, against me, and I am humbled and deceived!⁠—Not I, that is to say,” she added quickly, as colour flushed into her face; “a greater than I. What am I?”

Jeremiah Flintwinch, who had been gradually screwing himself towards her, and who was now very near her elbow without her knowing it, made a specially wry face of objection when she said these words, and moreover twitched his gaiters, as if such pretensions were equivalent to little barbs in his legs.

“Lastly,” she continued, “for I am at the end of these things, and I will say no more of them, and you shall say no more of them, and all that remains will be to determine whether the knowledge of them can be kept among us who are here present; lastly, when I suppressed that paper, with the knowledge of Arthur’s father⁠—”

“But not with his consent, you know,” said Mr. Flintwinch.

“Who said with his consent?” She started to find Jeremiah so near her, and drew back her head, looking at him with some rising distrust. “You were often enough between us when he would have had me produce it and I would not, to have contradicted me if I had said, with his consent. I say, when I suppressed that paper, I made no effort to destroy it, but kept it by me, here in this house, many years. The rest of the Gilbert property being left to Arthur’s father, I could at any time, without