Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens (best books to read for students TXT) đ
- Author: Charles Dickens
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âTime presses, madame. Take care!â
âIf this house was blazing from the roof to the ground,â she returned, âI would stay in it to justify myself against my righteous motives being classed with those of stabbers and thieves.â
Rigaud snapped his fingers tauntingly in her face. âOne 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) brotherâs youngest daughter, on her coming of age, âas the remembrance his disinterestedness may like best, of his protection of a friendless young orphan girl.â Two thousand guineas. What! You will never come to the money?â
âThat patron,â she was vehemently proceeding, when he checked her.
âNames! Call him Mr Frederick Dorrit. No more evasions.â
âThat Frederick Dorrit was the beginning of it all. If he had not been a player of music, and had not kept, in those days of his youth and prosperity, an idle house where singers, and players, and such-like children of Evil turned their backs on the Light and their faces to the Darkness, she might have remained in her lowly station, and might not have been raised out of it to be cast down. But, no. Satan entered into that Frederick Dorrit, and counselled him that he was a man of innocent and laudable tastes who did kind actions, and that here was a poor girl with a voice for singing music with. Then he is to have her taught. Then Arthurâs father, who has all along been secretly pining in the ways of virtuous ruggedness for those accursed snares which are called the Arts, becomes acquainted with her. And so, a graceless orphan, training to be a singing girl, carries it, by that Frederick Dorritâs agency, against me, and I am humbled and deceived!âNot I, that is to say,â she added quickly, as colour flushed into her face; âa greater than I. What am I?â
Jeremiah Flintwinch, who had been gradually screwing himself towards her, and who was now very near her elbow without her knowing it, made a specially wry face of objection when she said these words, and moreover twitched his gaiters, as if such pretensions were equivalent to little barbs in his legs.
âLastly,â she continued, âfor I am at the end of these things, and I will say no more of them, and you shall say no more of them, and all that remains will be to determine whether the knowledge of them can be kept among us who are here present; lastly, when I suppressed that paper, with the knowledge of Arthurâs fatherââ
âBut not with his consent, you know,â said Mr Flintwinch.
âWho said with his consent?â She started to find Jeremiah so near her, and drew back her head, looking at him with some rising distrust. âYou were often enough between us when he would have had me produce it and I would not, to have contradicted me if I had said, with his consent. I say, when I suppressed that paper, I made no effort to destroy it, but kept it by me, here in this house, many years. The rest of the Gilbert property being left to Arthurâs father, I could at any time, without unsettling more than the two sums, have made a pretence of finding it. But, besides that I must have supported such pretence by a direct falsehood (a great responsibility), I have seen no new reason, in all the time I have been tried here, to bring it to light. It was a rewarding of sin; the wrong result of a delusion. I did what I was appointed to do, and I have undergone, within these four walls, what I was appointed to undergo. When the paper was at last destroyedâas I thoughtâin my presence, she had long been dead, and her patron, Frederick Dorrit, had long been deservedly ruined and imbecile. He had no daughter. I had found the niece before then; and what I did for her, was better for her far than the money of which she would have had no good.â She added, after a moment, as though she addressed the watch: âShe herself was innocent, and I might not have forgotten to relinquish it to her at my death:â and sat looking at it.
âShall I recall something to you, worthy madame?â said Rigaud. âThe little paper was in this house on the night when our friend the prisonerâjail-comrade of my soulâcame home from foreign countries. Shall I recall yet something more to you? The little singing-bird that never was fledged, was long kept in a cage by a guardian of your appointing, well enough known to our old intriguer here. Shall we coax our old intriguer to tell us when he saw him last?â
âIâll tell you!â cried Affery, unstopping her mouth. âI dreamed it, first of all my dreams. Jeremiah, if you come a-nigh me now, Iâll scream to be heard at St Paulâs! The person as this man has spoken of, was jeremiahâs own twin brother; and he was here in the dead of the night, on the night when Arthur come home, and Jeremiah with his own hands give him this paper, along with I donât know what more, and he took it away in an iron boxâHelp! Murder! Save me from Jere-mi-ah!â
Mr Flintwinch had made a run at her, but Rigaud had caught him in his arms midway. After a momentâs wrestle with him, Flintwinch gave up, and put his hands in his pockets.
âWhat!â cried Rigaud, rallying him as he poked and jerked him back with his elbows, âassault a lady with such a genius for dreaming! Ha, ha, ha! Why, sheâll be a fortune to you as an exhibition. All that she dreams comes true. Ha, ha, ha! Youâre so like him, Little Flintwinch. So like him, as I knew him (when I first spoke English for him to the host) in the Cabaret of the Three Billiard Tables, in the little street of the high roofs, by the wharf at Antwerp! Ah, but he was a brave boy to drink. Ah, but he was a brave boy to smoke! Ah, but he lived in a sweet bachelor-apartmentâfurnished, on the fifth floor, above the wood and charcoal merchantâs, and the dressmakerâs, and the chair-makerâs, and the maker of tubsâwhere I knew him too, and wherewith his cognac and tobacco, he had twelve sleeps a day and one fit, until he had a fit too much, and ascended to the skies. Ha, ha, ha! What does it matter how I took possession of the papers in his iron box? Perhaps he confided it to my hands for you, perhaps it was locked and my curiosity was piqued, perhaps I suppressed it. Ha, ha, ha! What does it matter, so that I have it safe? We are not particular here; hey, Flintwinch? We are not particular here; is it not so, madame?â
Retiring before him with vicious counter-jerks of his own elbows, Mr Flintwinch had got back into his corner, where he now stood with his hands in his pockets, taking breath, and returning Mrs Clennamâs stare. âHa, ha, ha! But whatâs this?â cried Rigaud. âIt appears as if you donât know, one the other. Permit me, Madame Clennam who suppresses, to present Monsieur Flintwinch who intrigues.â
Mr Flintwinch, unpocketing one of his hands to scrape his jaw, advanced a step or so in that attitude, still returning Mrs Clennamâs look, and thus addressed her:
âNow, I know what you mean by opening your eyes so wide at me, but you neednât take the trouble, because I donât care for it. Iâve been telling you for how many years that youâre one of the most opinionated and obstinate of women. Thatâs what YOU are. You call yourself humble and sinful, but you are the most Bumptious of your sex. Thatâs what YOU are. I have told you, over and over again when we have had a tiff, that you wanted to make everything go down before you, but I wouldnât go down before youâthat you wanted to swallow up everybody alive, but I wouldnât be swallowed up alive. Why didnât you destroy the paper when you first laid hands upon it?
I advised you to; but no, itâs not your way to take advice. You must keep it forsooth. Perhaps you may carry it out at some other time, forsooth. As if I didnât know better than that! I think I see your pride carrying it out, with a chance of being suspected of having kept it by you. But thatâs the way you cheat yourself. just as you cheat yourself into making out that you didnât do all this business because you were a rigorous woman, all slight, and spite, and power, and unforgiveness, but because you were a servant and a minister, and were appointed to do it. Who are you, that you should be appointed to do it? That may be your religion, but itâs my gammon. And to tell you all the truth while I am about it,â said Mr Flintwinch, crossing his arms, and becoming the express image of irascible doggedness, âI have been raspedârasped these forty yearsâby your taking such high ground even with me, who knows better; the effect of it being coolly to put me on low ground. I admire you very much; you are a woman of strong head and great talent; but the strongest head, and the greatest talent, canât rasp a man for forty years without making him sore. So I donât care for your present eyes. Now, I am coming to the paper, and mark what I say. You put it away somewhere, and you kept your own counsel where. Youâre an active woman at that time, and if you want to get that paper, you can get it. But, mark. There comes a time when you are struck into what you are now, and then if you want to get that paper, you canât get it. So it lies, long years, in its hiding-place. At last, when we are expecting Arthur home every day, and when any day may bring him home, and itâs impossible to say what rummaging he may make about the house, I recommend you five thousand times, if you canât get at it, to let me get at it, that it may be put in the fire. But noâno one but you knows where it is, and thatâs power; and, call yourself whatever humble names you will, I call you a female Lucifer in appetite for power! On a Sunday night, Arthur comes home. He has not been in this room ten minutes, when he speaks of his fatherâs watch. You know very well that the Do Not Forget, at the time when his father sent that watch to you, could only mean, the rest of the story being then all dead and over, Do Not Forget the suppression. Make restitution! Arthurâs ways have frightened you a bit, and the paper shall be burnt after all. So, before that jumping jade and Jezebel,â Mr Flintwinch grinned at his wife, âhas got you into bed, you at last tell me where you have put the paper, among the old ledgers in the cellars, where Arthur himself went prowling the very next morning. But itâs not to be burnt on a Sunday night. No; you are strict, you are; we must wait over twelve oâclock, and get into Monday. Now, all this is a swallowing of me up alive that rasps me; so, feeling a little out of temper, and not being as strict as yourself, I take a look at the document before twelve oâclock to refresh my memory as to its appearanceâfold up one of the many yellow old papers in the cellars like itâand afterwards, when we have
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