Little Dorrit
lips to repeat the words to herself, as calling it to witness how little
of either it afforded her.
‘Besides, mother, you being sole executrix, and having the direction and
management of the estate, there remained little business, or I might say
none, that I could transact, until you had had time to arrange matters
to your satisfaction.’
‘The accounts are made out,’ she returned. ‘I have them here. The
vouchers have all been examined and passed. You can inspect them when
you like, Arthur; now, if you please.’
‘It is quite enough, mother, to know that the business is completed.
Shall I proceed then?’
‘Why not?’ she said, in her frozen way.
‘Mother, our House has done less and less for some years past, and our
dealings have been progressively on the decline. We have never shown
much confidence, or invited much; we have attached no people to us; the
track we have kept is not the track of the time; and we have been
left far behind. I need not dwell on this to you, mother. You know it
necessarily.’
‘I know what you mean,’ she answered, in a qualified tone.
‘Even this old house in which we speak,’ pursued her son, ‘is an
instance of what I say. In my father’s earlier time, and in his uncle’s
time before him, it was a place of business--really a place of business,
and business resort. Now, it is a mere anomaly and incongruity here, out
of date and out of purpose. All our consignments have long been made to
Rovinghams’ the commission-merchants; and although, as a check upon
them, and in the stewardship of my father’s resources, your judgment and
watchfulness have been actively exerted, still those qualities would
have influenced my father’s fortunes equally, if you had lived in any
private dwelling: would they not?’
‘Do you consider,’ she returned, without answering his question, ‘that
a house serves no purpose, Arthur, in sheltering your infirm and
afflicted--justly infirm and righteously afflicted--mother?’
‘I was speaking only of business purposes.’
‘With what object?’
‘I am coming to it.’
‘I foresee,’ she returned, fixing her eyes upon him, ‘what it is.
But the Lord forbid that I should repine under any visitation. In my
sinfulness I merit bitter disappointment, and I accept it.’
‘Mother, I grieve to hear you speak like this, though I have had my
apprehensions that you would--’
‘You knew I would. You knew _me_,’ she interrupted.
Her son paused for a moment. He had struck fire out of her, and was
surprised. ‘Well!’ she said, relapsing into stone. ‘Go on. Let me hear.’
‘You have anticipated, mother, that I decide for my part, to abandon
the business. I have done with it. I will not take upon myself to advise
you; you will continue it, I see. If I had any influence with you, I
would simply use it to soften your judgment of me in causing you this
disappointment: to represent to you that I have lived the half of a long
term of life, and have never before set my own will against yours. I
cannot say that I have been able to conform myself, in heart and spirit,
to your rules; I cannot say that I believe my forty years have been
profitable or pleasant to myself, or any one; but I have habitually
submitted, and I only ask you to remember it.’
Woe to the suppliant, if such a one there were or ever had been, who had
any concession to look for in the inexorable face at the cabinet. Woe to
the defaulter whose appeal lay to the tribunal where those severe eyes
presided. Great need had the rigid woman of her mystical religion,
veiled in gloom and darkness, with lightnings of cursing, vengeance, and
destruction, flashing through the sable clouds. Forgive us our debts as
we forgive our debtors, was a prayer too poor in spirit for her. Smite
Thou my debtors, Lord, wither them, crush them; do Thou as I would do,
and Thou shalt have my worship: this was the impious tower of stone she
built up to scale Heaven.
‘Have you finished, Arthur, or have you anything more to say to me? I
think there can be nothing else. You have been short, but full of
matter!’
‘Mother, I have yet something more to say. It has been upon my mind,
night and day, this long time. It is far more difficult to say than what
I have said. That concerned myself; this concerns us all.’
‘Us all! Who are us all?’
‘Yourself, myself, my dead father.’
She took her hands from the desk; folded them in her lap; and sat
looking towards the fire, with the impenetrability of an old Egyptian
sculpture.
‘You knew my father infinitely better than I ever knew him; and his
reserve with me yielded to you. You were much the stronger, mother, and
directed him. As a child, I knew it as well as I know it now. I knew
that your ascendancy over him was the cause of his going to China to
take care of the business there, while you took care of it here (though
I do not even now know whether these were really terms of separation
that you agreed upon); and that it was your will that I should remain
with you until I was twenty, and then go to him as I did. You will not
be offended by my recalling this, after twenty years?’
‘I am waiting to hear why you recall it.’
He lowered his voice, and said, with manifest reluctance, and against
his will:
‘I want to ask you, mother, whether it ever occurred to you to
suspect--’
At the word Suspect, she turned her eyes momentarily upon her son, with
a dark frown. She then suffered them to seek the fire, as before; but
with the frown fixed above them, as if the sculptor of old Egypt had
indented it in the hard granite face, to frown for ages.
‘--that he had any secret remembrance which caused him trouble of
mind--remorse? Whether you ever observed anything in his conduct
suggesting that; or ever spoke to him upon it, or ever heard him hint at
such a thing?’
‘I do not understand what kind of secret remembrance you mean to infer
that your father was a prey to,’ she returned, after a silence. ‘You
speak so mysteriously.’
‘Is it possible, mother,’ her son leaned forward to be the nearer to her
while he whispered it, and laid his hand nervously upon her desk, ‘is
it possible, mother, that he had unhappily wronged any one, and made no
reparation?’
Looking at him wrathfully, she bent herself back in her chair to keep
him further off, but gave him no reply.
‘I am deeply sensible, mother, that if this thought has never at any
time flashed upon you, it must seem cruel and unnatural in me, even in
this confidence, to breathe it. But I cannot shake it off. Time and
change (I have tried both before breaking silence) do nothing to wear it
out. Remember, I was with my father. Remember, I saw his face when he
gave the watch into my keeping, and struggled to express that he sent it
as a token you would understand, to you. Remember, I saw him at the last
with the pencil in his failing hand, trying to write some word for you
to read, but to which he could give no shape. The more remote and cruel
this vague suspicion that I have, the stronger the circumstances that
could give it any semblance of probability to me. For Heaven’s sake, let
us examine sacredly whether there is any wrong entrusted to us to set
right. No one can help towards it, mother, but you.’
Still so recoiling in her chair that her overpoised weight moved it,
from time to time, a little on its wheels, and gave her the appearance
of a phantom of fierce aspect gliding away from him, she interposed her
left arm, bent at the elbow with the back of her hand towards her face,
between herself and him, and looked at him in a fixed silence.
‘In grasping at money and in driving hard bargains--I have begun, and I
must speak of such things now, mother--some one may have been grievously
deceived, injured, ruined. You were the moving power of all this
machinery before my birth; your stronger spirit has been infused into
all my father’s dealings for more than two score years. You can set
these doubts at rest, I think, if you will really help me to discover
the truth. Will you, mother?’
He stopped in the hope that she would speak. But her grey hair was not
more immovable in its two folds, than were her firm lips.
‘If reparation can be made to any one, if restitution can be made to any
one, let us know it and make it. Nay, mother, if within my means, let
_me_ make it. I have seen so little happiness come of money; it has
brought within my knowledge so little peace to this house, or to any one
belonging to it, that it is worth less to me than to another. It can buy
me nothing that will not be a reproach and misery to me, if I am haunted
by a suspicion that it darkened my father’s last hours with remorse, and
that it is not honestly and justly mine.’
There was a bell-rope hanging on the panelled wall, some two or three
yards from the cabinet. By a swift and sudden action of her foot, she
drove her wheeled chair rapidly back to it and pulled it
violently--still holding her arm up in its shield-like posture, as if he
were striking at her, and she warding off the blow.
A girl came hurrying in, frightened.
‘Send Flintwinch here!’
In a moment the girl had withdrawn, and the old man stood within the
door. ‘What! You’re hammer and tongs, already, you two?’ he said, coolly
stroking his face. ‘I thought you would be. I was pretty sure of it.’
‘Flintwinch!’ said the mother, ‘look at my son. Look at him!’
‘Well, I _am_ looking at him,’ said Flintwinch.
She stretched out the arm with which she had shielded herself, and as
she went on, pointed at the object of her anger.
‘In the very hour of his return almost--before the shoe upon his foot is
dry--he asperses his father’s memory to his mother! Asks his mother
to become, with him, a spy upon his father’s transactions through a
lifetime! Has misgivings that the goods of this world which we have
painfully got together early and late, with wear and tear and toil and
self-denial, are so much plunder; and asks to whom they shall be given
up, as reparation and restitution!’
Although she said this raging, she said it in a voice so far from being
beyond her control that it was even lower than her usual tone. She also
spoke with great distinctness.
‘Reparation!’ said she. ‘Yes, truly! It is easy for him to talk of
reparation, fresh from journeying and junketing in foreign lands, and
living a life of vanity and pleasure. But let him look at me, in prison,
and in bonds here. I endure without murmuring, because it is appointed
that I shall so make reparation for my sins. Reparation! Is there none
in this room? Has there been none here this fifteen years?’
Thus was she always balancing her bargains with the Majesty of heaven,
posting up the entries to her credit, strictly keeping her set-off, and
claiming her due. She was only remarkable in this, for the force
and emphasis with which she did it. Thousands upon thousands do it,
according to their varying manner, every day.
‘Flintwinch, give me that book!’
The old man handed it to her from the table. She put two fingers between
the leaves, closed the book upon them, and held it up to her son in
a threatening way.
‘In the days of old, Arthur, treated of in this commentary, there were
pious men, beloved of the Lord, who would have cursed their sons for
less than this: who would have sent them forth, and sent whole nations
forth, if such had supported them, to be avoided of God and man, and
perish, down to the baby at the breast. But I only tell you that if you
ever renew that theme with me, I will renounce you; I will so dismiss
you through that doorway, that you had better have been motherless from
your cradle. I will never see or know you more. And if, after all, you
were to come into this darkened room to look upon me lying dead, my body
should bleed, if I could make it, when you came near me.’