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

to expect him to be sitting there without that head.

Arthur Clennam moved to attract his attention, and the grey eyebrows turned towards him.

“I beg your pardon,” said Clennam, “I fear you did not hear me announced?”

“No, sir, I did not. Did you wish to see me, sir?”

“I wished to pay my respects.”

Mr. Casby seemed a feather’s weight disappointed by the last words, having perhaps prepared himself for the visitor’s wishing to pay something else. “Have I the pleasure, sir,” he proceeded⁠—“take a chair, if you please⁠—have I the pleasure of knowing⁠—? Ah! truly, yes, I think I have! I believe I am not mistaken in supposing that I am acquainted with those features? I think I address a gentleman of whose return to this country I was informed by Mr. Flintwinch?”

“That is your present visitor.”

“Really! Mr. Clennam?”

“No other, Mr. Casby.”

“Mr. Clennam, I am glad to see you. How have you been since we met?”

Without thinking it worth while to explain that in the course of some quarter of a century he had experienced occasional slight fluctuations in his health and spirits, Clennam answered generally that he had never been better, or something equally to the purpose; and shook hands with the possessor of “that head” as it shed its patriarchal light upon him.

“We are older, Mr. Clennam,” said Christopher Casby.

“We are⁠—not younger,” said Clennam. After this wise remark he felt that he was scarcely shining with brilliancy, and became aware that he was nervous.

“And your respected father,” said Mr. Casby, “is no more! I was grieved to hear it, Mr. Clennam, I was grieved.”

Arthur replied in the usual way that he felt infinitely obliged to him.

“There was a time,” said Mr. Casby, “when your parents and myself were not on friendly terms. There was a little family misunderstanding among us. Your respected mother was rather jealous of her son, maybe; when I say her son, I mean your worthy self, your worthy self.”

His smooth face had a bloom upon it like ripe wall-fruit. What with his blooming face, and that head, and his blue eyes, he seemed to be delivering sentiments of rare wisdom and virtue. In like manner, his physiognomical expression seemed to teem with benignity. Nobody could have said where the wisdom was, or where the virtue was, or where the benignity was; but they all seemed to be somewhere about him.

“Those times, however,” pursued Mr. Casby, “are past and gone, past and gone. I do myself the pleasure of making a visit to your respected mother occasionally, and of admiring the fortitude and strength of mind with which she bears her trials, bears her trials.”

When he made one of these little repetitions, sitting with his hands crossed before him, he did it with his head on one side, and a gentle smile, as if he had something in his thoughts too sweetly profound to be put into words. As if he denied himself the pleasure of uttering it, lest he should soar too high; and his meekness therefore preferred to be unmeaning.

“I have heard that you were kind enough on one of those occasions,” said Arthur, catching at the opportunity as it drifted past him, “to mention Little Dorrit to my mother.”

“Little⁠—? Dorrit? That’s the seamstress who was mentioned to me by a small tenant of mine? Yes, yes. Dorrit? That’s the name. Ah, yes, yes! You call her Little Dorrit?”

No road in that direction. Nothing came of the crosscut. It led no further.

“My daughter Flora,” said Mr. Casby, “as you may have heard probably, Mr. Clennam, was married and established in life, several years ago. She had the misfortune to lose her husband when she had been married a few months. She resides with me again. She will be glad to see you, if you will permit me to let her know that you are here.”

“By all means,” returned Clennam. “I should have preferred the request, if your kindness had not anticipated me.”

Upon this Mr. Casby rose up in his list shoes, and with a slow, heavy step (he was of an elephantine build), made for the door. He had a long wide-skirted bottle-green coat on, and a bottle-green pair of trousers, and a bottle-green waistcoat. The Patriarchs were not dressed in bottle-green broadcloth, and yet his clothes looked patriarchal.

He had scarcely left the room, and allowed the ticking to become audible again, when a quick hand turned a latchkey in the house-door, opened it, and shut it. Immediately afterwards, a quick and eager short dark man came into the room with so much way upon him that he was within a foot of Clennam before he could stop.

“Halloa!” he said.

Clennam saw no reason why he should not say “Halloa!” too.

“What’s the matter?” said the short dark man.

“I have not heard that anything is the matter,” returned Clennam.

“Where’s Mr. Casby?” asked the short dark man, looking about.

“He will be here directly, if you want him.”

“I want him?” said the short dark man. “Don’t you?”

This elicited a word or two of explanation from Clennam, during the delivery of which the short dark man held his breath and looked at him. He was dressed in black and rusty iron grey; had jet black beads of eyes; a scrubby little black chin; wiry black hair striking out from his head in prongs, like forks or hairpins; and a complexion that was very dingy by nature, or very dirty by art, or a compound of nature and art. He had dirty hands and dirty broken nails, and looked as if he had been in the coals; he was in a perspiration, and snorted and sniffed and puffed and blew, like a little labouring steam-engine.

“Oh!” said he, when Arthur told him how he came to be there. “Very well. That’s right. If he should ask for Pancks, will you be so good as to say that Pancks is come in?” And so, with a snort and a puff, he worked out by another door.

Now, in the old days at home, certain audacious doubts respecting the last of the Patriarchs, which were afloat in the air,