Little Dorrit
the hundredth time, to dwell upon every circumstance that had impressed
itself upon his mind on the mysterious night when he had seen the man at
his mother’s. Again the man jostled him in the crooked street, again
he followed the man and lost him, again he came upon the man in the
court-yard looking at the house, again he followed the man and stood
beside him on the door-steps.
‘Who passes by this road so late?
Compagnon de la Majolaine;
Who passes by this road so late?
Always gay!’
It was not the first time, by many, that he had recalled the song of the
child’s game, of which the fellow had hummed this verse while they stood
side by side; but he was so unconscious of having repeated it audibly,
that he started to hear the next verse.
‘Of all the king’s knights ‘tis the flower,
Compagnon de la Majolaine;
Of all the king’s knights ‘tis the flower,
Always gay!’
Cavalletto had deferentially suggested the words and tune, supposing him
to have stopped short for want of more.
‘Ah! You know the song, Cavalletto?’
‘By Bacchus, yes, sir! They all know it in France. I have heard it many
times, sung by the little children. The last time when it I have heard,’
said Mr Baptist, formerly Cavalletto, who usually went back to his
native construction of sentences when his memory went near home, ‘is
from a sweet little voice. A little voice, very pretty, very innocent.
Altro!’
‘The last time I heard it,’ returned Arthur, ‘was in a voice quite the
reverse of pretty, and quite the reverse of innocent.’ He said it more
to himself than to his companion, and added to himself, repeating
the man’s next words. ‘Death of my life, sir, it’s my character to be
impatient!’
‘EH!’ cried Cavalletto, astounded, and with all his colour gone in a
moment.
‘What is the matter?’
‘Sir! You know where I have heard that song the last time?’
With his rapid native action, his hands made the outline of a high hook
nose, pushed his eyes near together, dishevelled his hair, puffed out
his upper lip to represent a thick moustache, and threw the heavy end
of an ideal cloak over his shoulder. While doing this, with a swiftness
incredible to one who has not watched an Italian peasant, he indicated a
very remarkable and sinister smile. The whole change passed over him
like a flash of light, and he stood in the same instant, pale and
astonished, before his patron.
‘In the name of Fate and wonder,’ said Clennam, ‘what do you mean? Do
you know a man of the name of Blandois?’
‘No!’ said Mr Baptist, shaking his head.
‘You have just now described a man who was by when you heard that song;
have you not?’
‘Yes!’ said Mr Baptist, nodding fifty times.
‘And was he not called Blandois?’
‘No!’ said Mr Baptist. ‘Altro, Altro, Altro, Altro!’ He could not reject
the name sufficiently, with his head and his right forefinger going at
once.
‘Stay!’ cried Clennam, spreading out the handbill on his desk. ‘Was this
the man? You can understand what I read aloud?’
‘Altogether. Perfectly.’
‘But look at it, too. Come here and look over me, while I read.’
Mr Baptist approached, followed every word with his quick eyes, saw
and heard it all out with the greatest impatience, then clapped his
two hands flat upon the bill as if he had fiercely caught some noxious
creature, and cried, looking eagerly at Clennam, ‘It is the man! Behold
him!’
‘This is of far greater moment to me’ said Clennam, in great agitation,
‘than you can imagine. Tell me where you knew the man.’
Mr Baptist, releasing the paper very slowly and with much discomfiture,
and drawing himself back two or three paces, and making as though he
dusted his hands, returned, very much against his will:
‘At Marsiglia--Marseilles.’
‘What was he?’
‘A prisoner, and--Altro! I believe yes!--an,’ Mr Baptist crept closer
again to whisper it, ‘Assassin!’
Clennam fell back as if the word had struck him a blow: so terrible
did it make his mother’s communication with the man appear.
Cavalletto dropped on one knee, and implored him, with a redundancy of
gesticulation, to hear what had brought himself into such foul company.
He told with perfect truth how it had come of a little contraband
trading, and how he had in time been released from prison, and how he
had gone away from those antecedents. How, at the house of entertainment
called the Break of Day at Chalons on the Saone, he had been awakened
in his bed at night by the same assassin, then assuming the name of
Lagnier, though his name had formerly been Rigaud; how the assassin had
proposed that they should join their fortunes together; how he held
the assassin in such dread and aversion that he had fled from him at
daylight, and how he had ever since been haunted by the fear of seeing
the assassin again and being claimed by him as an acquaintance. When he
had related this, with an emphasis and poise on the word, ‘assassin,’
peculiarly belonging to his own language, and which did not serve to
render it less terrible to Clennam, he suddenly sprang to his feet,
pounced upon the bill again, and with a vehemence that would have been
absolute madness in any man of Northern origin, cried ‘Behold the same
assassin! Here he is!’
In his passionate raptures, he at first forgot the fact that he had
lately seen the assassin in London. On his remembering it, it suggested
hope to Clennam that the recognition might be of later date than the
night of the visit at his mother’s; but Cavalletto was too exact and
clear about time and place, to leave any opening for doubt that it had
preceded that occasion.
‘Listen,’ said Arthur, very seriously. ‘This man, as we have read here,
has wholly disappeared.’
‘Of it I am well content!’ said Cavalletto, raising his eyes piously. ‘A
thousand thanks to Heaven! Accursed assassin!’
‘Not so,’ returned Clennam; ‘for until something more is heard of him, I
can never know an hour’s peace.’
‘Enough, Benefactor; that is quite another thing. A million of excuses!’
‘Now, Cavalletto,’ said Clennam, gently turning him by the arm, so that
they looked into each other’s eyes. ‘I am certain that for the little
I have been able to do for you, you are the most sincerely grateful of
men.’
‘I swear it!’ cried the other.
‘I know it. If you could find this man, or discover what has become of
him, or gain any later intelligence whatever of him, you would render
me a service above any other service I could receive in the world, and
would make me (with far greater reason) as grateful to you as you are to
me.’
‘I know not where to look,’ cried the little man, kissing Arthur’s
hand in a transport. ‘I know not where to begin. I know not where to go.
But, courage! Enough! It matters not! I go, in this instant of time!’
‘Not a word to any one but me, Cavalletto.’
‘Al-tro!’ cried Cavalletto. And was gone with great speed.
CHAPTER 23. Mistress Affery makes a Conditional Promise,
respecting her Dreams
Left alone, with the expressive looks and gestures of Mr Baptist,
otherwise Giovanni Baptista Cavalletto, vividly before him, Clennam
entered on a weary day. It was in vain that he tried to control his
attention by directing it to any business occupation or train of
thought; it rode at anchor by the haunting topic, and would hold to no
other idea. As though a criminal should be chained in a stationary boat
on a deep clear river, condemned, whatever countless leagues of water
flowed past him, always to see the body of the fellow-creature he had
drowned lying at the bottom, immovable, and unchangeable, except as
the eddies made it broad or long, now expanding, now contracting
its terrible lineaments; so Arthur, below the shifting current of
transparent thoughts and fancies which were gone and succeeded by others
as soon as come, saw, steady and dark, and not to be stirred from its
place, the one subject that he endeavoured with all his might to rid
himself of, and that he could not fly from.
The assurance he now had, that Blandois, whatever his right name, was
one of the worst of characters, greatly augmented the burden of his
anxieties. Though the disappearance should be accounted for to-morrow,
the fact that his mother had been in communication with such a man,
would remain unalterable. That the communication had been of a secret
kind, and that she had been submissive to him and afraid of him, he
hoped might be known to no one beyond himself; yet, knowing it, how
could he separate it from his old vague fears, and how believe that
there was nothing evil in such relations?
Her resolution not to enter on the question with him, and his knowledge
of her indomitable character, enhanced his sense of helplessness. It was
like the oppression of a dream to believe that shame and exposure were
impending over her and his father’s memory, and to be shut out, as by a
brazen wall, from the possibility of coming to their aid. The purpose he
had brought home to his native country, and had ever since kept in view,
was, with her greatest determination, defeated by his mother herself, at
the time of all others when he feared that it pressed most. His advice,
energy, activity, money, credit, all his resources whatsoever, were all
made useless. If she had been possessed of the old fabled influence, and
had turned those who looked upon her into stone, she could not have
rendered him more completely powerless (so it seemed to him in his
distress of mind) than she did, when she turned her unyielding face to
his in her gloomy room.
But the light of that day’s discovery, shining on these considerations,
roused him to take a more decided course of action. Confident in the
rectitude of his purpose, and impelled by a sense of overhanging danger
closing in around, he resolved, if his mother would still admit of no
approach, to make a desperate appeal to Affery. If she could be brought
to become communicative, and to do what lay in her to break the spell of
secrecy that enshrouded the house, he might shake off the paralysis of
which every hour that passed over his head made him more acutely
sensible. This was the result of his day’s anxiety, and this was the
decision he put in practice when the day closed in.
His first disappointment, on arriving at the house, was to find the door
open, and Mr Flintwinch smoking a pipe on the steps. If circumstances
had been commonly favourable, Mistress Affery would have opened the
door to his knock. Circumstances being uncommonly unfavourable, the door
stood open, and Mr Flintwinch was smoking his pipe on the steps.
‘Good evening,’ said Arthur.
‘Good evening,’ said Mr Flintwinch.
The smoke came crookedly out of Mr Flintwinch’s mouth, as if it
circulated through the whole of his wry figure and came back by his wry
throat, before coming forth to mingle with the smoke from the crooked
chimneys and the mists from the crooked river.
‘Have you any news?’ said Arthur.
‘We have no news,’ said Jeremiah.
‘I mean of the foreign man,’ Arthur explained.
‘_I_ mean of the foreign man,’ said Jeremiah.
He looked so grim, as he stood askew, with the knot of his cravat under
his ear, that the thought passed into Clennam’s mind, and not for the
first time by many, could Flintwinch for a purpose of his own have got
rid of Blandois? Could it have been his secret, and his safety, that
were at issue? He was small and bent, and perhaps not actively strong;
yet he was as tough as an old yew-tree, and as crusty as an old jackdaw.
Such a man, coming behind a much younger and more vigorous man, and
having the will to put an end to him and no relenting, might do it
pretty surely in that solitary place at a late hour.
While, in the morbid condition of his thoughts, these thoughts drifted