‘Well!’ said Daniel, in his steady even way, ‘I’ll try to make it so.’
He had the power, often to be found in union with such a character, of explaining what he himself perceived, and meant, with the direct force and distinctness with which it struck his own mind. His manner of demonstration was so orderly and neat and simple, that it was not easy to mistake him. There was something almost ludicrous in the complete irreconcilability of a vague conventional notion that he must be a visionary man, with the precise, sagacious travelling of his eye and thumb over the plans, their patient stoppages at particular points, their careful returns to other points whence little channels of explanation had to be traced up, and his steady manner of making everything good and everything sound at each important stage, before taking his hearer on a line’s-breadth further. His dismissal of himself from his description, was hardly less remarkable. He never said, I discovered this adaptation or invented that combination; but showed the whole thing as if the Divine artificer had made it, and he had happened to find it; so modest he was about it, such a pleasant touch of respect was mingled with his quiet admiration of it, and so calmly convinced he was that it was established on irrefragable laws.
Not only that evening, but for several succeeding evenings, Clennam was quite charmed by this investigation. The more he pursued it, and the oftener he glanced at the grey head bending over it, and the shrewd eye kindling with pleasure in it and love of it—instrument for probing his heart though it had been made for twelve long years—the less he could reconcile it to his younger energy to let it go without one effort more. At length he said:
‘Doyce, it came to this at last—that the business was to be sunk with Heaven knows how many more wrecks, or begun all over again?’
‘Yes,’ returned Doyce, ‘that’s what the noblemen and gentlemen made of it after a dozen years.’
‘And pretty fellows too!’ said Clennam, bitterly.
‘The usual thing!’ observed Doyce. ‘I must not make a martyr of myself, when I am one of so large a company.’
‘Relinquish it, or begin it all over again?’ mused Clennam.
‘That was exactly the long and the short of it,’ said Doyce.
‘Then, my friend,’ cried Clennam, starting up and taking his work-roughened hand, ‘it shall be begun all over again!’