Chapter 23

CHAPTER 23

Mistress Affery makes a Conditional Promise,
respecting her Dreams

Left alone, with the expressive looks and gestures of Mr Baptist,
otherwise Giovanni Baptista Cavalletto, vividly before him, Clennam
entered on a weary day. It was in vain that he tried to control
his attention by directing it to any business occupation or train
of thought; it rode at anchor by the haunting topic, and would hold
to no other idea. As though a criminal should be chained in a
stationary boat on a deep clear river, condemned, whatever
countless leagues of water flowed past him, always to see the body
of the fellow-creature he had drowned lying at the bottom,
immovable, and unchangeable, except as the eddies made it broad or
long, now expanding, now contracting its terrible lineaments; so
Arthur, below the shifting current of transparent thoughts and
fancies which were gone and succeeded by others as soon as come,
saw, steady and dark, and not to be stirred from its place, the one
subject that he endeavoured with all his might to rid himself of,
and that he could not fly from. The assurance he now had, that
Blandois, whatever his right name, was one of the worst of
characters, greatly augmented the burden of his anxieties. Though
the disappearance should be accounted for to-morrow, the fact that
his mother had been in communication with such a man, would remain
unalterable. That the communication had been of a secret kind, and
that she had been submissive to him and afraid of him, he hoped
might be known to no one beyond himself; yet, knowing it, how could
he separate it from his old vague fears, and how believe that there
was nothing evil in such relations?
Her resolution not to enter on the question with him, and his
knowledge of her indomitable character, enhanced his sense of
helplessness. It was like the oppression of a dream to believe
that shame and exposure were impending over her and his father's
memory, and to be shut out, as by a brazen wall, from the
possibility of coming to their aid. The purpose he had brought
home to his native country, and had ever since kept in view, was,
with her greatest determination, defeated by his mother herself, at
the time of all others when he feared that it pressed most. His
advice, energy, activity, money, credit, all his resources
whatsoever, were all made useless. If she had been possessed of
the old fabled influence, and had turned those who looked upon her
into stone, she could not have rendered him more completely
powerless (so it seemed to him in his distress of mind) than she
did, when she turned her unyielding face to his in her gloomy room.

But the light of that day's discovery, shining on these
considerations, roused him to take