Little Dorrit
throughout it. What! Have I suffered nothing in this room, no
deprivation, no imprisonment, that I should condescend at last to
contemplate myself in such a glass as _that_. Can you see him? Can you
hear him? If your wife were a hundred times the ingrate that she is, and
if I were a thousand times more hopeless than I am of inducing her to be
silent if this man is silenced, I would tell it myself, before I would
bear the torment of the hearing it from him.’
Rigaud pushed his chair a little back; pushed his legs out straight
before him; and sat with his arms folded over against her.
‘You do not know what it is,’ she went on addressing him, ‘to be brought
up strictly and straitly. I was so brought up. Mine was no light youth
of sinful gaiety and pleasure. Mine were days of wholesome repression,
punishment, and fear. The corruption of our hearts, the evil of our
ways, the curse that is upon us, the terrors that surround us--these
were the themes of my childhood. They formed my character, and filled me
with an abhorrence of evil-doers. When old Mr Gilbert Clennam proposed
his orphan nephew to my father for my husband, my father impressed upon
me that his bringing-up had been, like mine, one of severe restraint.
He told me, that besides the discipline his spirit had undergone, he
had lived in a starved house, where rioting and gaiety were unknown, and
where every day was a day of toil and trial like the last. He told me
that he had been a man in years long before his uncle had acknowledged
him as one; and that from his school-days to that hour, his uncle’s roof
has been a sanctuary to him from the contagion of the irreligious
and dissolute. When, within a twelvemonth of our marriage, I found
my husband, at that time when my father spoke of him, to have sinned
against the Lord and outraged me by holding a guilty creature in my
place, was I to doubt that it had been appointed to me to make the
discovery, and that it was appointed to me to lay the hand of punishment
upon that creature of perdition? Was I to dismiss in a moment--not my
own wrongs--what was I! but all the rejection of sin, and all the war
against it, in which I had been bred?’
She laid her wrathful hand upon the watch on the table.
‘No! “Do not forget.” The initials of those words are within here now,
and were within here then. I was appointed to find the old letter that
referred to them, and that told me what they meant, and whose work they
were, and why they were worked, lying with this watch in his secret
drawer. But for that appointment there would have been no discovery.
“Do not forget.” It spoke to me like a voice from an angry cloud. Do
not forget the deadly sin, do not forget the appointed discovery, do not
forget the appointed suffering. I did not forget. Was it my own wrong I
remembered? Mine! I was but a servant and a minister. What power could I
have over them, but that they were bound in the bonds of their sin, and
delivered to me!’
More than forty years had passed over the grey head of this determined
woman, since the time she recalled. More than forty years of strife
and struggle with the whisper that, by whatever name she called her
vindictive pride and rage, nothing through all eternity could change
their nature. Yet, gone those more than forty years, and come this
Nemesis now looking her in the face, she still abided by her old
impiety--still reversed the order of Creation, and breathed her own
breath into a clay image of her Creator. Verily, verily, travellers have
seen many monstrous idols in many countries; but no human eyes have ever
seen more daring, gross, and shocking images of the Divine nature than
we creatures of the dust make in our own likenesses, of our own bad
passions.
‘When I forced him to give her up to me, by her name and place of
abode,’ she went on in her torrent of indignation and defence; ‘when I
accused her, and she fell hiding her face at my feet, was it my injury
that I asserted, were they my reproaches that I poured upon her? Those
who were appointed of old to go to wicked kings and accuse them--were
they not ministers and servants? And had not I, unworthy and far-removed
from them, sin to denounce? When she pleaded to me her youth, and his
wretched and hard life (that was her phrase for the virtuous training he
had belied), and the desecrated ceremony of marriage there had
secretly been between them, and the terrors of want and shame that had
overwhelmed them both when I was first appointed to be the instrument of
their punishment, and the love (for she said the word to me, down at my
feet) in which she had abandoned him and left him to me, was it _my_
enemy that became my footstool, were they the words of my wrath that
made her shrink and quiver! Not unto me the strength be ascribed; not
unto me the wringing of the expiation!’
Many years had come and gone since she had had the free use even of
her fingers; but it was noticeable that she had already more than once
struck her clenched hand vigorously upon the table, and that when she
said these words she raised her whole arm in the air, as though it had
been a common action with her.
‘And what was the repentance that was extorted from the hardness of her
heart and the blackness of her depravity? I, vindictive and implacable?
It may be so, to such as you who know no righteousness, and no
appointment except Satan’s. Laugh; but I will be known as I know
myself, and as Flintwinch knows me, though it is only to you and this
half-witted woman.’
‘Add, to yourself, madame,’ said Rigaud. ‘I have my little suspicions
that madame is rather solicitous to be justified to herself.’
‘It is false. It is not so. I have no need to be,’ she said, with great
energy and anger.
‘Truly?’ retorted Rigaud. ‘Hah!’
‘I ask, what was the penitence, in works, that was demanded of her?
“You have a child; I have none. You love that child. Give him to me. He
shall believe himself to be my son, and he shall be believed by every
one to be my son. To save you from exposure, his father shall swear
never to see or communicate with you more; equally to save him from
being stripped by his uncle, and to save your child from being a beggar,
you shall swear never to see or communicate with either of them more.
That done, and your present means, derived from my husband, renounced,
I charge myself with your support. You may, with your place of retreat
unknown, then leave, if you please, uncontradicted by me, the lie that
when you passed out of all knowledge but mine, you merited a good name.”
That was all. She had to sacrifice her sinful and shameful affections;
no more. She was then free to bear her load of guilt in secret, and to
break her heart in secret; and through such present misery (light enough
for her, I think!) to purchase her redemption from endless misery, if
she could. If, in this, I punished her here, did I not open to her a way
hereafter? If she knew herself to be surrounded by insatiable vengeance
and unquenchable fires, were they mine? If I threatened her, then and
afterwards, with the terrors that encompassed her, did I hold them in my
right hand?’
She turned the watch upon the table, and opened it, and, with an
unsoftening face, looked at the worked letters within.
‘They did _not_ forget. It is appointed against such offences that the
offenders shall not be able to forget. If the presence of Arthur was a
daily reproach to his father, and if the absence of Arthur was a daily
agony to his mother, that was the just dispensation of Jehovah. As well
might it be charged upon me, that the stings of an awakened conscience
drove her mad, and that it was the will of the Disposer of all things
that she should live so, many years. I devoted myself to reclaim the
otherwise predestined and lost boy; to give him the reputation of an
honest origin; to bring him up in fear and trembling, and in a life of
practical contrition for the sins that were heavy on his head before his
entrance into this condemned world. Was that a cruelty? Was I, too,
not visited with consequences of the original offence in which I had no
complicity? Arthur’s father and I lived no further apart, with half the
globe between us, than when we were together in this house. He died,
and sent this watch back to me, with its Do not forget. I do NOT forget,
though I do not read it as he did. I read in it, that I was appointed
to do these things. I have so read these three letters since I have
had them lying on this table, and I did so read them, with equal
distinctness, when they were thousands of miles away.’
As she took the watch-case in her hand, with that new freedom in the use
of her hand of which she showed no consciousness whatever, bending her
eyes upon it as if she were defying it to move her, Rigaud cried with a
loud and contemptuous snapping of his fingers. ‘Come, madame! Time runs
out. Come, lady of piety, it must be! You can tell nothing I don’t know.
Come to the money stolen, or I will! Death of my soul, I have had enough
of your other jargon. Come straight to the stolen money!’
‘Wretch that you are,’ she answered, and now her hands clasped her head:
‘through what fatal error of Flintwinch’s, through what incompleteness
on his part, who was the only other person helping in these things and
trusted with them, through whose and what bringing together of the ashes
of a burnt paper, you have become possessed of that codicil, I know no
more than how you acquired the rest of your power here--’
‘And yet,’ interrupted Rigaud, ‘it is my odd fortune to have by me, in a
convenient place that I know of, that same short little addition to the
will of Monsieur Gilbert Clennam, written by a lady and witnessed by the
same lady and our old intriguer! Ah, bah, old intriguer, crooked little
puppet! Madame, let us go on. Time presses. You or I to finish?’
‘I!’ she answered, with increased determination, if it were possible.
‘I, because I will not endure to be shown myself, and have myself
shown to any one, with your horrible distortion upon me. You, with your
practices of infamous foreign prisons and galleys would make it the
money that impelled me. It was not the money.’
‘Bah, bah, bah! I repudiate, for the moment, my politeness, and say,
Lies, lies, lies. You know you suppressed the deed and kept the money.’
‘Not for the money’s sake, wretch!’ She made a struggle as if she were
starting up; even as if, in her vehemence, she had almost risen on her
disabled feet. ‘If Gilbert Clennam, reduced to imbecility, at the point
of death, and labouring under the delusion of some imaginary relenting
towards a girl of whom he had heard that his nephew had once had a fancy
for her which he had crushed out of him, and that she afterwards drooped
away into melancholy and withdrawal from all who knew her--if, in that
state of weakness, he dictated to me, whose life she had darkened with
her sin, and who had been appointed to know her wickedness from her
own hand and her own lips, a bequest meant as a recompense to her
for supposed unmerited suffering; was there no difference between my
spurning that injustice, and coveting mere money--a thing which you, and
your comrades in the prisons, may steal from anyone?’
‘Time presses, madame. Take care!’
‘If this house was blazing from the roof to the ground,’ she returned,
‘I would stay in it to justify myself against my righteous motives being
classed with those of stabbers and thieves.’
Rigaud snapped his fingers tauntingly in her face. ‘One thousand guineas
to the little beauty you slowly hunted to death. One thousand guineas
to the youngest daughter her patron might have at fifty, or (if he
had none) brother’s youngest daughter, on her coming of age, “as the
remembrance his disinterestedness may like best, of his protection of