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

With Barnacle junior, he signified his desire to confer; and found that young gentleman singeing the calves of his legs at the parental fire, and supporting his spine against the mantel-shelf. It was a comfortable room, handsomely furnished in the higher official manner; and presenting stately suggestions of the absent Barnacle, in the thick carpet, the leather-covered desk to sit at, the leather-covered desk to stand at, the formidable easy-chair and hearthrug, the interposed screen, the torn-up papers, the dispatch-boxes with little labels sticking out of them, like medicine bottles or dead game, the pervading smell of leather and mahogany, and a general bamboozling air of How not to do it.

The present Barnacle, holding Mr. Clennam’s card in his hand, had a youthful aspect, and the fluffiest little whisker, perhaps, that ever was seen. Such a downy tip was on his callow chin, that he seemed half fledged like a young bird; and a compassionate observer might have urged that, if he had not singed the calves of his legs, he would have died of cold. He had a superior eyeglass dangling round his neck, but unfortunately had such flat orbits to his eyes and such limp little eyelids that it wouldn’t stick in when he put it up, but kept tumbling out against his waistcoat buttons with a click that discomposed him very much.

“Oh, I say. Look here! My father’s not in the way, and won’t be in the way today,” said Barnacle Junior. “Is this anything that I can do?”

(Click! Eyeglass down. Barnacle Junior quite frightened and feeling all round himself, but not able to find it.)

“You are very good,” said Arthur Clennam. “I wish however to see Mr. Barnacle.”

“But I say. Look here! You haven’t got any appointment, you know,” said Barnacle Junior.

(By this time he had found the eyeglass, and put it up again.)

“No,” said Arthur Clennam. “That is what I wish to have.”

“But I say. Look here! Is this public business?” asked Barnacle junior.

(Click! Eyeglass down again. Barnacle Junior in that state of search after it that Mr. Clennam felt it useless to reply at present.)

“Is it,” said Barnacle junior, taking heed of his visitor’s brown face, “anything about⁠—Tonnage⁠—or that sort of thing?”

(Pausing for a reply, he opened his right eye with his hand, and stuck his glass in it, in that inflammatory manner that his eye began watering dreadfully.)

“No,” said Arthur, “it is nothing about tonnage.”

“Then look here. Is it private business?”

“I really am not sure. It relates to a Mr. Dorrit.”

“Look here, I tell you what! You had better call at our house, if you are going that way. Twenty-four, Mews Street, Grosvenor Square. My father’s got a slight touch of the gout, and is kept at home by it.”

(The misguided young Barnacle evidently going blind on his eyeglass side, but ashamed to make any further alteration in his painful arrangements.)

“Thank you. I will call there now. Good morning.” Young Barnacle seemed discomfited at this, as not having at all expected him to go.

“You are quite sure,” said Barnacle junior, calling after him when he got to the door, unwilling wholly to relinquish the bright business idea he had conceived; “that it’s nothing about Tonnage?”

“Quite sure.”

With such assurance, and rather wondering what might have taken place if it had been anything about tonnage, Mr. Clennam withdrew to pursue his inquiries.

Mews Street, Grosvenor Square, was not absolutely Grosvenor Square itself, but it was very near it. It was a hideous little street of dead wall, stables, and dunghills, with lofts over coach-houses inhabited by coachmen’s families, who had a passion for drying clothes and decorating their windowsills with miniature turnpike-gates. The principal chimney-sweep of that fashionable quarter lived at the blind end of Mews Street; and the same corner contained an establishment much frequented about early morning and twilight for the purchase of wine-bottles and kitchen-stuff. Punch’s shows used to lean against the dead wall in Mews Street, while their proprietors were dining elsewhere; and the dogs of the neighbourhood made appointments to meet in the same locality. Yet there were two or three small airless houses at the entrance end of Mews Street, which went at enormous rents on account of their being abject hangers-on to a fashionable situation; and whenever one of these fearful little coops was to be let (which seldom happened, for they were in great request), the house agent advertised it as a gentlemanly residence in the most aristocratic part of town, inhabited solely by the elite of the beau monde.

If a gentlemanly residence coming strictly within this narrow margin had not been essential to the blood of the Barnacles, this particular branch would have had a pretty wide selection among, let us say, ten thousand houses, offering fifty times the accommodation for a third of the money. As it was, Mr. Barnacle, finding his gentlemanly residence extremely inconvenient and extremely dear, always laid it, as a public servant, at the door of the country, and adduced it as another instance of the country’s parsimony.

Arthur Clennam came to a squeezed house, with a ramshackle bowed front, little dingy windows, and a little dark area like a damp waistcoat-pocket, which he found to be number twenty-four, Mews Street, Grosvenor Square. To the sense of smell the house was like a sort of bottle filled with a strong distillation of Mews; and when the footman opened the door, he seemed to take the stopper out.

The footman was to the Grosvenor Square footmen, what the house was to the Grosvenor Square houses. Admirable in his way, his way was a back and a bye way. His gorgeousness was not unmixed with dirt; and both in complexion and consistency he had suffered from the closeness of his pantry. A sallow flabbiness was upon him when he took the stopper out, and presented the bottle to Mr. Clennam’s nose.

“Be so good as to give that card to Mr. Tite Barnacle, and to say that I have just now seen the younger Mr. Barnacle, who recommended me to