Little Dorrit
wintry breath that had a faint remembrance in it of the bygone spring.
He stepped into the sober, silent, air-tight house--one might have
fancied it to have been stifled by Mutes in the Eastern manner--and the
door, closing again, seemed to shut out sound and motion. The
furniture was formal, grave, and quaker-like, but well-kept; and had as
prepossessing an aspect as anything, from a human creature to a wooden
stool, that is meant for much use and is preserved for little, can ever
wear. There was a grave clock, ticking somewhere up the staircase; and
there was a songless bird in the same direction, pecking at his cage, as
if he were ticking too. The parlour-fire ticked in the grate. There was
only one person on the parlour-hearth, and the loud watch in his pocket
ticked audibly.
The servant-maid had ticked the two words ‘Mr Clennam’ so softly that
she had not been heard; and he consequently stood, within the door
she had closed, unnoticed. The figure of a man advanced in life, whose
smooth grey eyebrows seemed to move to the ticking as the fire-light
flickered on them, sat in an arm-chair, with his list shoes on the
rug, and his thumbs slowly revolving over one another. This was old
Christopher Casby--recognisable at a glance--as unchanged in twenty
years and upward as his own solid furniture--as little touched by the
influence of the varying seasons as the old rose-leaves and old lavender
in his porcelain jars.
Perhaps there never was a man, in this troublesome world, so troublesome
for the imagination to picture as a boy. And yet he had changed very
little in his progress through life. Confronting him, in the room in
which he sat, was a boy’s portrait, which anybody seeing him would have
identified as Master Christopher Casby, aged ten: though disguised with
a haymaking rake, for which he had had, at any time, as much taste or
use as for a diving-bell; and sitting (on one of his own legs) upon a
bank of violets, moved to precocious contemplation by the spire of a
village church. There was the same smooth face and forehead, the same
calm blue eye, the same placid air. The shining bald head, which looked
so very large because it shone so much; and the long grey hair at its
sides and back, like floss silk or spun glass, which looked so very
benevolent because it was never cut; were not, of course, to be seen in
the boy as in the old man. Nevertheless, in the Seraphic creature with
the haymaking rake, were clearly to be discerned the rudiments of the
Patriarch with the list shoes.
Patriarch was the name which many people delighted to give him.
Various old ladies in the neighbourhood spoke of him as The Last of the
Patriarchs. So grey, so slow, so quiet, so impassionate, so very bumpy
in the head, Patriarch was the word for him. He had been accosted in the
streets, and respectfully solicited to become a Patriarch for painters
and for sculptors; with so much importunity, in sooth, that it would
appear to be beyond the Fine Arts to remember the points of a Patriarch,
or to invent one. Philanthropists of both sexes had asked who he was,
and on being informed, ‘Old Christopher Casby, formerly Town-agent to
Lord Decimus Tite Barnacle,’ had cried in a rapture of disappointment,
‘Oh! why, with that head, is he not a benefactor to his species! Oh!
why, with that head, is he not a father to the orphan and a friend to
the friendless!’ With that head, however, he remained old Christopher
Casby, proclaimed by common report rich in house property; and with that
head, he now sat in his silent parlour. Indeed it would be the height of
unreason 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 cross-cut. 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 hair-pins; 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, had, by some
forgotten means, come in contact with Arthur’s sensorium. He was aware
of motes and specks of suspicion in the atmosphere of that time; seen
through which medium, Christopher Casby was a mere Inn signpost, without
any Inn--an invitation to rest and be thankful, when there was no place
to put up at, and nothing whatever to be thankful for. He knew that some
of these specks even represented Christopher as capable of harbouring
designs in ‘that head,’ and as being a crafty impostor. Other motes
there were which showed him as a heavy, selfish, drifting Booby, who,
having stumbled, in the course of his unwieldy jostlings against other
men, on the discovery that to get through life with ease and credit,
he had but to hold his tongue, keep the bald part of his head well
polished, and leave his hair alone, had had just cunning enough to seize
the idea and stick to it. It was said that his being town-agent to
Lord Decimus Tite Barnacle was referable, not to his having the least
business capacity, but to his looking so supremely benignant that nobody
could suppose the property screwed or jobbed under such a man; also,
that for similar reasons he now got more money out of his own wretched
lettings, unquestioned, than anybody with a less nobby and less shining
crown could possibly have done. In a word, it was represented (Clennam
called to mind, alone in the ticking parlour) that many people select
their models, much as the painters, just now mentioned, select theirs;
and that, whereas in the Royal Academy some evil old ruffian of a
Dog-stealer will annually be found embodying all the cardinal virtues,
on account of his eyelashes, or his chin, or his legs (thereby planting
thorns of confusion in the breasts of the more observant students of
nature), so, in the great social Exhibition, accessories are often
accepted in lieu of the internal character.
Calling these things to mind, and ranging Mr Pancks in a row with them,
Arthur Clennam leaned this day to the opinion, without quite deciding
on it, that the last of the Patriarchs was the drifting Booby aforesaid,
with the one idea of keeping the bald part of his head highly polished:
and that, much as an unwieldy ship in the Thames river may sometimes be
seen heavily driving with the tide, broadside on, stern first, in its