Yet there was a nameless air of preparation in the room, as if it were strung up for an occasion. From what the room derived it—every one of its small variety of objects being in the fixed spot it had occupied for years—no one could have said without looking attentively at its mistress, and that, too, with a previous knowledge of her face. Although her unchanging black dress was in every plait precisely as of old, and her unchanging attitude was rigidly preserved, a very slight additional setting of her features and contraction of her gloomy forehead was so powerfully marked, that it marked everything about her.
‘Who are these?’ she said, wonderingly, as the two attendants entered. ‘What do these people want here?’
‘Who are these, dear madame, is it?’ returned Rigaud. ‘Faith, they are friends of your son the prisoner. And what do they want here, is it? Death, madame, I don’t know. You will do well to ask them.’
‘You know you told us at the door, not to go yet,’ said Pancks.
‘And you know you told me at the door, you didn’t mean to go,’ retorted Rigaud. ‘In a word, madame, permit me to present two spies of the prisoner’s—madmen, but spies. If you wish them to remain here during our little conversation, say the word. It is nothing to me.’
‘Why should I wish them to remain here?’ said Mrs Clennam. ‘What have I to do with them?’
‘Then, dearest madame,’ said Rigaud, throwing himself into an arm-chair so heavily that the old room trembled, ‘you will do well to dismiss them. It is your affair. They are not my spies, not my rascals.’
‘Hark! You Pancks,’ said Mrs Clennam, bending her brows upon him angrily, ‘you Casby’s clerk! Attend to your employer’s business and your own. Go. And take that other man with you.’
‘Thank you, ma’am,’ returned Mr Pancks, ‘I am glad to say I see no objection to our both retiring. We have done all we undertook to do for Mr Clennam. His constant anxiety has been (and it grew worse upon him when he became a prisoner), that this agreeable gentleman should be brought back here to the place from which he slipped away. Here he is—brought back. And I will say,’ added Mr Pancks, ‘to his ill-looking face, that in my opinion the world would be no worse for his slipping out of it altogether.’
‘Your opinion is not asked,’ answered Mrs Clennam. ‘Go.’