Chapter 13 - Page 2

been stifled by Mutes in
the Eastern manner--and the door, closing again, seemed to shut out
sound and motion. The furniture was formal, grave, and quaker-
like, but well-kept; and had as prepossessing an aspect as
anything, from a human creature to a wooden stool, that is meant
for much use and is preserved for little, can ever wear. There was
a grave clock, ticking somewhere up the staircase; and there was a
songless bird in the same direction, pecking at his cage, as if he
were ticking too. The parlour-fire ticked in the grate. There was
only one person on the parlour-hearth, and the loud watch in his
pocket ticked audibly.

The servant-maid had ticked the two words 'Mr Clennam' so softly
that she had not been heard; and he consequently stood, within the
door she had closed, unnoticed. The figure of a man advanced in
life, whose smooth grey eyebrows seemed to move to the ticking as
the fire-light flickered on them, sat in an arm-chair, with his
list shoes on the rug, and his thumbs slowly revolving over one
another. This was old Christopher Casby--recognisable at a
glance--as unchanged in twenty years and upward as his own solid
furniture--as little touched by the influence of the varying
seasons as the old rose-leaves and old lavender in his porcelain
jars.

Perhaps there never was a man, in this troublesome world, so
troublesome for the imagination to picture as a boy. And yet he
had changed very little in his progress through life. Confronting
him, in the room in which he sat, was a boy's portrait, which
anybody seeing him would have identified as Master Christopher
Casby, aged ten: though disguised with a haymaking rake, for which
he had had, at any time, as much taste or use as for a diving-bell;
and sitting (on one of his own legs) upon a bank of violets, moved
to precocious contemplation by the spire of a village church.
There was the same smooth face and forehead, the same calm blue
eye, the same placid air. The shining bald head, which looked so
very large because it shone so much; and the long grey hair at its
sides and back, like floss silk or spun glass, which looked so very
benevolent because it was never cut; were not, of course, to be
seen in the boy as in the old man. Nevertheless, in the Seraphic
creature with the haymaking rake, were clearly to be discerned the
rudiments of the Patriarch with the list shoes.

Patriarch was the name which many people delighted to give him.
Various old ladies in the neighbourhood spoke of him as The Last of
the Patriarchs. So grey, so slow, so quiet, so impassionate, so
very bumpy in the head, Patriarch was the word for him. He had
been accosted in the streets, and respectfully solicited to become
a Patriarch for painters