‘Man! I justify myself by the authority of these Books,’ she cried, with stern emphasis, and appearing from the sound that followed to strike the dead-weight of her arm upon the table.
‘Never mind that,’ returned Jeremiah calmly, ‘we won’t enter into that question at present. However that may be, you carry out your purposes, and you make everything go down before them. Now, I won’t go down before them. I have been faithful to you, and useful to you, and I am attached to you. But I can’t consent, and I won’t consent, and I never did consent, and I never will consent to be lost in you. Swallow up everybody else, and welcome. The peculiarity of my temper is, ma’am, that I won’t be swallowed up alive.’
Perhaps this had originally been the mainspring of the understanding between them. Descrying thus much of force of character in Mr Flintwinch, perhaps Mrs Clennam had deemed alliance with him worth her while.
‘Enough and more than enough of the subject,’ said she gloomily.
‘Unless you drop down upon me again,’ returned the persistent Flintwinch, ‘and then you must expect to hear of it again.’
Mistress Affery dreamed that the figure of her lord here began walking up and down the room, as if to cool his spleen, and that she ran away; but that, as he did not issue forth when she had stood listening and trembling in the shadowy hall a little time, she crept up-stairs again, impelled as before by ghosts and curiosity, and once more cowered outside the door.
‘Please to light the candle, Flintwinch,’ Mrs Clennam was saying, apparently wishing to draw him back into their usual tone. ‘It is nearly time for tea. Little Dorrit is coming, and will find me in the dark.’
Mr Flintwinch lighted the candle briskly, and said as he put it down upon the table:
‘What are you going to do with Little Dorrit? Is she to come to work here for ever? To come to tea here for ever? To come backwards and forwards here, in the same way, for ever?’
‘How can you talk about “for ever” to a maimed creature like me? Are we not all cut down like the grass of the field, and was not I shorn by the scythe many years ago: since when I have been lying here, waiting to be gathered into the barn?’