Chapter 10

CHAPTER 10

The Dreams of Mrs Flintwinch thicken

The shady waiting-rooms of the Circumlocution Office, where he
passed a good deal of time in company with various troublesome
Convicts who were under sentence to be broken alive on that wheel,
had afforded Arthur Clennam ample leisure, in three or four
successive days, to exhaust the subject of his late glimpse of Miss
Wade and Tattycoram. He had been able to make no more of it and no
less of it, and in this unsatisfactory condition he was fain to
leave it.

During this space he had not been to his mother's dismal old house.

One of his customary evenings for repairing thither now coming
round, he left his dwelling and his partner at nearly nine o'clock,
and slowly walked in the direction of that grim home of his youth.

It always affected his imagination as wrathful, mysterious, and
sad; and his imagination was sufficiently impressible to see the
whole neighbourhood under some tinge of its dark shadow. As he
went along, upon a dreary night, the dim streets by which he went,
seemed all depositories of oppressive secrets. The deserted
counting-houses, with their secrets of books and papers locked up
in chests and safes; the banking-houses, with their secrets of
strong rooms and wells, the keys of which were in a very few secret
pockets and a very few secret breasts; the secrets of all the
dispersed grinders in the vast mill, among whom there were
doubtless plunderers, forgers, and trust-betrayers of many sorts,
whom the light of any day that dawned might reveal; he could have
fancied that these things, in hiding, imparted a heaviness to the
air. The shadow thickening and thickening as he approached its
source, he thought of the secrets of the lonely church-vaults,
where the people who had hoarded and secreted in iron coffers were
in their turn similarly hoarded, not yet at rest from doing harm;
and then of the secrets of the river, as it rolled its turbid tide
between two frowning wildernesses of secrets, extending, thick and
dense, for many miles, and warding off the free air and the free
country swept by winds and wings of birds.

The shadow still darkening as he drew near the house, the
melancholy room which his father had once occupied, haunted by the
appealing face he had himself seen fade away with him when there
was no other watcher by the bed, arose before his mind. Its close
air was secret. The gloom, and must, and dust of the whole
tenement, were secret. At the heart of it his mother presided,
inflexible of face, indomitable of will, firmly holding all the
secrets of her own and his father's life, and austerely opposing
herself, front to front, to the great final secret of all life.

He had turned