‘I beg your pardon,’ he said, stopping short in confusion; ‘I didn’t know there was anybody here but the parrot.’
However, as Mrs Merdle said, ‘You can come in!’ and as Mrs Gowan said she was just going, and had already risen to take her leave, he came in, and stood looking out at a distant window, with his hands crossed under his uneasy coat-cuffs, clasping his wrists as if he were taking himself into custody. In this attitude he fell directly into a reverie from which he was only aroused by his wife’s calling to him from her ottoman, when they had been for some quarter of an hour alone.
‘Eh? Yes?’ said Mr Merdle, turning towards her. ‘What is it?’
‘What is it?’ repeated Mrs Merdle. ‘It is, I suppose, that you have not heard a word of my complaint.’
‘Your complaint, Mrs Merdle?’ said Mr Merdle. ‘I didn’t know that you were suffering from a complaint. What complaint?’
‘A complaint of you,’ said Mrs Merdle.
‘Oh! A complaint of me,’ said Mr Merdle. ‘What is the—what have I—what may you have to complain of in me, Mrs Merdle?’
In his withdrawing, abstracted, pondering way, it took him some time to shape this question. As a kind of faint attempt to convince himself that he was the master of the house, he concluded by presenting his forefinger to the parrot, who expressed his opinion on that subject by instantly driving his bill into it.
‘You were saying, Mrs Merdle,’ said Mr Merdle, with his wounded finger in his mouth, ‘that you had a complaint against me?’
‘A complaint which I could scarcely show the justice of more emphatically, than by having to repeat it,’ said Mrs Merdle. ‘I might as well have stated it to the wall. I had far better have stated it to the bird. He would at least have screamed.’