Little Dorrit
Accident and spies intermix themselves against my playfulness, and spoil
the fruit, perhaps--who knows? only you and Flintwinch--when it is just
ripe. Thus, madame, I am here for the last time. Listen! Definitely the
last.’
As he struck his straggling boot-heels against the flap of the table,
meeting her frown with an insolent gaze, he began to change his tone for
a fierce one.
‘Bah! Stop an instant! Let us advance by steps. Here is my Hotel-note to
be paid, according to contract. Five minutes hence we may be at daggers’
points. I’ll not leave it till then, or you’ll cheat me. Pay it! Count
me the money!’
‘Take it from his hand and pay it, Flintwinch,’ said Mrs Clennam.
He spirted it into Mr Flintwinch’s face when the old man advanced to
take it, and held forth his hand, repeating noisily, ‘Pay it! Count it
out! Good money!’ Jeremiah picked the bill up, looked at the total with
a bloodshot eye, took a small canvas bag from his pocket, and told the
amount into his hand.
Rigaud chinked the money, weighed it in his hand, threw it up a little
way and caught it, chinked it again.
‘The sound of it, to the bold Rigaud Blandois, is like the taste of
fresh meat to the tiger. Say, then, madame. How much?’
He turned upon her suddenly with a menacing gesture of the weighted hand
that clenched the money, as if he were going to strike her with it.
‘I tell you again, as I told you before, that we are not rich here, as
you suppose us to be, and that your demand is excessive. I have not the
present means of complying with such a demand, if I had ever so great an
inclination.’
‘If!’ cried Rigaud. ‘Hear this lady with her If! Will you say that you
have not the inclination?’
‘I will say what presents itself to me, and not what presents itself to
you.’
‘Say it then. As to the inclination. Quick! Come to the inclination, and
I know what to do.’
She was no quicker, and no slower, in her reply. ‘It would seem that
you have obtained possession of a paper--or of papers--which I assuredly
have the inclination to recover.’
Rigaud, with a loud laugh, drummed his heels against the table, and
chinked his money. ‘I think so! I believe you there!’
‘The paper might be worth, to me, a sum of money. I cannot say how much,
or how little.’
‘What the Devil!’ he asked savagely. ‘Not after a week’s grace to
consider?’
‘No! I will not out of my scanty means--for I tell you again, we are
poor here, and not rich--I will not offer any price for a power that I
do not know the worst and the fullest extent of. This is the third time
of your hinting and threatening. You must speak explicitly, or you may
go where you will, and do what you will. It is better to be torn to
pieces at a spring, than to be a mouse at the caprice of such a cat.’
He looked at her so hard with those eyes too near together that the
sinister sight of each, crossing that of the other, seemed to make the
bridge of his hooked nose crooked. After a long survey, he said, with
the further setting off of his internal smile:
‘You are a bold woman!’
‘I am a resolved woman.’
‘You always were. What? She always was; is it not so, my little
Flintwinch?’
‘Flintwinch, say nothing to him. It is for him to say, here and now,
all he can; or to go hence, and do all he can. You know this to be our
determination. Leave him to his action on it.’
She did not shrink under his evil leer, or avoid it. He turned it upon
her again, but she remained steady at the point to which she had fixed
herself. He got off the table, placed a chair near the sofa, sat down in
it, and leaned an arm upon the sofa close to her own, which he touched
with his hand. Her face was ever frowning, attentive, and settled.
‘It is your pleasure then, madame, that I shall relate a morsel of
family history in this little family society,’ said Rigaud, with a
warning play of his lithe fingers on her arm. ‘I am something of a
doctor. Let me touch your pulse.’
She suffered him to take her wrist in his hand. Holding it, he proceeded
to say:
‘A history of a strange marriage, and a strange mother, and a revenge,
and a suppression.--Aye, aye, aye? this pulse is beating curiously!
It appears to me that it doubles while I touch it. Are these the usual
changes of your malady, madame?’
There was a struggle in her maimed arm as she twisted it away, but there
was none in her face. On his face there was his own smile.
‘I have lived an adventurous life. I am an adventurous character. I have
known many adventurers; interesting spirits--amiable society! To one
of them I owe my knowledge and my proofs--I repeat it, estimable
lady--proofs--of the ravishing little family history I go to commence.
You will be charmed with it. But, bah! I forget. One should name a
history. Shall I name it the history of a house? But, bah, again. There
are so many houses. Shall I name it the history of this house?’
Leaning over the sofa, poised on two legs of his chair and his left
elbow; that hand often tapping her arm to beat his words home; his
legs crossed; his right hand sometimes arranging his hair, sometimes
smoothing his moustache, sometimes striking his nose, always threatening
her whatever it did; coarse, insolent, rapacious, cruel, and powerful,
he pursued his narrative at his ease.
‘In fine, then, I name it the history of this house. I commence it.
There live here, let us suppose, an uncle and nephew. The uncle, a
rigid old gentleman of strong force of character; the nephew, habitually
timid, repressed, and under constraint.’
Mistress Affery, fixedly attentive in the window-seat, biting the
rolled up end of her apron, and trembling from head to foot, here cried
out, ‘Jeremiah, keep off from me! I’ve heerd, in my dreams, of Arthur’s
father and his uncle. He’s a talking of them. It was before my time
here; but I’ve heerd in my dreams that Arthur’s father was a poor,
irresolute, frightened chap, who had had everything but his orphan life
scared out of him when he was young, and that he had no voice in the
choice of his wife even, but his uncle chose her. There she sits! I
heerd it in my dreams, and you said it to her own self.’
As Mr Flintwinch shook his fist at her, and as Mrs Clennam gazed upon
her, Rigaud kissed his hand to her.
‘Perfectly right, dear Madame Flintwinch. You have a genius for
dreaming.’
‘I don’t want none of your praises,’ returned Affery. ‘I don’t want to
have nothing at all to say to you. But Jeremiah said they was dreams,
and I’ll tell ‘em as such!’ Here she put her apron in her mouth again,
as if she were stopping somebody else’s mouth--perhaps Jeremiah’s, which
was chattering with threats as if he were grimly cold.
‘Our beloved Madame Flintwinch,’ said Rigaud, ‘developing all of a
sudden a fine susceptibility and spirituality, is right to a marvel.
Yes. So runs the history. Monsieur, the uncle, commands the nephew to
marry. Monsieur says to him in effect, “My nephew, I introduce to you a
lady of strong force of character, like myself--a resolved lady, a stern
lady, a lady who has a will that can break the weak to powder: a lady
without pity, without love, implacable, revengeful, cold as the stone,
but raging as the fire.” Ah! what fortitude! Ah, what superiority of
intellectual strength! Truly, a proud and noble character that I
describe in the supposed words of Monsieur, the uncle. Ha, ha, ha! Death
of my soul, I love the sweet lady!’
Mrs Clennam’s face had changed. There was a remarkable darkness of
colour on it, and the brow was more contracted. ‘Madame, madame,’ said
Rigaud, tapping her on the arm, as if his cruel hand were sounding a
musical instrument, ‘I perceive I interest you. I perceive I awaken your
sympathy. Let us go on.’
The drooping nose and the ascending moustache had, however, to be hidden
for a moment with the white hand, before he could go on; he enjoyed the
effect he made so much.
‘The nephew, being, as the lucid Madame Flintwinch has remarked, a poor
devil who has had everything but his orphan life frightened and famished
out of him--the nephew abases his head, and makes response: “My uncle,
it is to you to command. Do as you will!” Monsieur, the uncle, does as
he will. It is what he always does. The auspicious nuptials take place;
the newly married come home to this charming mansion; the lady is
received, let us suppose, by Flintwinch. Hey, old intriguer?’
Jeremiah, with his eyes upon his mistress, made no reply. Rigaud looked
from one to the other, struck his ugly nose, and made a clucking with
his tongue.
‘Soon the lady makes a singular and exciting discovery. Thereupon,
full of anger, full of jealousy, full of vengeance, she forms--see you,
madame!--a scheme of retribution, the weight of which she ingeniously
forces her crushed husband to bear himself, as well as execute upon her
enemy. What superior intelligence!’
‘Keep off, Jeremiah!’ cried the palpitating Affery, taking her apron
from her mouth again. ‘But it was one of my dreams, that you told her,
when you quarrelled with her one winter evening at dusk--there she sits
and you looking at her--that she oughtn’t to have let Arthur when he
come home, suspect his father only; that she had always had the strength
and the power; and that she ought to have stood up more to Arthur, for
his father. It was in the same dream where you said to her that she was
not--not something, but I don’t know what, for she burst out tremendous
and stopped you. You know the dream as well as I do. When you come
down-stairs into the kitchen with the candle in your hand, and hitched
my apron off my head. When you told me I had been dreaming. When you
wouldn’t believe the noises.’ After this explosion Affery put her apron
into her mouth again; always keeping her hand on the window-sill and her
knee on the window-seat, ready to cry out or jump out if her lord and
master approached.
Rigaud had not lost a word of this.
‘Haha!’ he cried, lifting his eyebrows, folding his arms, and leaning
back in his chair. ‘Assuredly, Madame Flintwinch is an oracle! How shall
we interpret the oracle, you and I and the old intriguer? He said that
you were not--? And you burst out and stopped him! What was it you were
not? What is it you are not? Say then, madame!’
Under this ferocious banter, she sat breathing harder, and her mouth was
disturbed. Her lips quivered and opened, in spite of her utmost efforts
to keep them still.
‘Come then, madame! Speak, then! Our old intriguer said that you were
not--and you stopped him. He was going to say that you were not--what?
I know already, but I want a little confidence from you. How, then? You
are not what?’
She tried again to repress herself, but broke out vehemently, ‘Not
Arthur’s mother!’
‘Good,’ said Rigaud. ‘You are amenable.’
With the set expression of her face all torn away by the explosion
of her passion, and with a bursting, from every rent feature, of the
smouldering fire so long pent up, she cried out: ‘I will tell it myself!
I will not hear it from your lips, and with the taint of your wickedness
upon it. Since it must be seen, I will have it seen by the light I stood
in. Not another word. Hear me!’
‘Unless you are a more obstinate and more persisting woman than even
I know you to be,’ Mr Flintwinch interposed, ‘you had better leave Mr
Rigaud, Mr Blandois, Mr Beelzebub, to tell it in his own way. What does
it signify when he knows all about it?’
‘He does not know all about it.’
‘He knows all he cares about it,’ Mr Flintwinch testily urged.
‘He does not know _me_.’
‘What do you suppose he cares for you, you conceited woman?’ said Mr
Flintwinch.
‘I tell you, Flintwinch, I will speak. I tell you when it has come
to this, I will tell it with my own lips, and will express myself