He took another candle from a cupboard, lighted it, left the first on

the table, and went upon his errand. He was a short, bald old man, in a

high-shouldered black coat and waistcoat, drab breeches, and long drab

gaiters. He might, from his dress, have been either clerk or servant,

and in fact had long been both. There was nothing about him in the way

of decoration but a watch, which was lowered into the depths of its

proper pocket by an old black ribbon, and had a tarnished copper key

moored above it, to show where it was sunk. His head was awry, and

he had a one-sided, crab-like way with him, as if his foundations had

yielded at about the same time as those of the house, and he ought to

have been propped up in a similar manner.

'How weak am I,' said Arthur Clennam, when he was gone, 'that I could

shed tears at this reception! I, who have never experienced anything

else; who have never expected anything else.' He not only could,

but did. It was the momentary yielding of a nature that had been

disappointed from the dawn of its perceptions, but had not quite given

up all its hopeful yearnings yet. He subdued it, took up the candle,

and examined the room. The old articles of furniture were in their old

places; the Plagues of Egypt, much the dimmer for the fly and smoke

plagues of London, were framed and glazed upon the walls. There was the

old cellaret with nothing in it, lined with lead, like a sort of coffin

in compartments; there was the old dark closet, also with nothing in

it, of which he had been many a time the sole contents, in days of

punishment, when he had regarded it as the veritable entrance to that

bourne to which the tract had found him galloping. There was the large,

hard-featured clock on the sideboard, which he used to see bending its

figured brows upon him with a savage joy when he was behind-hand with

his lessons, and which, when it was wound up once a week with an iron

handle, used to sound as if it were growling in ferocious anticipation

of the miseries into which it would bring him. But here was the old man

come back, saying, 'Arthur, I'll go before and light you.'

Arthur followed him up the staircase, which was panelled off into spaces

like so many mourning tablets, into a dim bed-chamber, the floor of

which had gradually so sunk and settled, that the fire-place was in a

dell. On a black bier-like sofa in this hollow, propped up behind with

one great angular black bolster like the block at a state execution in

the good old times, sat his mother in a widow's dress.




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