Martin Chuzzlewit

‘Oh! I beg your pardon, Mr Pecksniff: I beg your pardon for intruding; but – ’

‘No intrusion, Mr Pinch,’ said that gentleman very sweetly, but without looking round. ‘Pray be seated, Mr Pinch. Have the goodness to shut the door, Mr Pinch, if you please.’

‘Certainly, sir,’ said Pinch; not doing so, however, but holding it rather wider open than before, and beckoning nervously to somebody without: ‘Mr Westlock, sir, hearing that you were come home – ’

‘Mr Pinch, Mr Pinch!’ said Pecksniff, wheeling his chair about, and looking at him with an aspect of the deepest melancholy, ‘I did not expect this from you. I have not deserved this from you!’

‘No, but upon my word, sir – ’ urged Pinch.

‘The less you say, Mr Pinch,’ interposed the other, ‘the better. I utter no complaint. Make no defence.’

‘No, but do have the goodness, sir,’ cried Pinch, with great earnestness, ‘if you please. Mr Westlock, sir, going away for good and all, wishes to leave none but friends behind him. Mr Westlock and you, sir, had a little difference the other day; you have had many little differences.’

‘Little differences!’ cried Charity.

‘Little differences!’ echoed Mercy.

‘My loves!’ said Mr Pecksniff, with the same serene upraising of his hand; ‘My dears!’ After a solemn pause he meekly bowed to Mr Pinch, as who should say, ‘Proceed;’ but Mr Pinch was so very much at a loss how to resume, and looked so helplessly at the two Miss Pecksniffs, that the conversation would most probably have terminated there, if a good-looking youth, newly arrived at man’s estate, had not stepped forward from the doorway and taken up the thread of the discourse.

‘Come, Mr Pecksniff,’ he said, with a smile, ‘don’t let there be any ill-blood between us, pray. I am sorry we have ever differed, and extremely sorry I have ever given you offence. Bear me no ill-will at parting, sir.’

‘I bear,’ answered Mr Pecksniff, mildly, ‘no ill-will to any man on earth.’

‘I told you he didn’t,’ said Pinch, in an undertone; ‘I knew he didn’t! He always says he don’t.’

‘Then you will shake hands, sir?’ cried Westlock, advancing a step or two, and bespeaking Mr Pinch’s close attention by a glance.

‘Umph!’ said Mr Pecksniff, in his most winning tone.

‘You will shake hands, sir.’

‘No, John,’ said Mr Pecksniff, with a calmness quite ethereal; ‘no, I will not shake hands, John. I have forgiven you. I had already forgiven you, even before you ceased to reproach and taunt me. I have embraced you in the spirit, John, which is better than shaking hands.’

‘Pinch,’ said the youth, turning towards him, with a hearty disgust of his late master, ‘what did I tell you?’

Poor Pinch looked down uneasily at Mr Pecksniff, whose eye was fixed upon him as it had been from the first; and looking up at the ceiling again, made no reply.

‘As to your forgiveness, Mr Pecksniff,’ said the youth, ‘I’ll not have it upon such terms. I won’t be forgiven.’

‘Won’t you, John?’ retorted Mr Pecksniff, with a smile. ‘You must. You can’t help it. Forgiveness is a high quality; an exalted virtue; far above your control or influence, John. I will forgive you. You cannot move me to remember any wrong you have ever done me, John.’

‘Wrong!’ cried the other, with all the heat and impetuosity of his age. ‘Here’s a pretty fellow! Wrong! Wrong I have done him! He’ll not even remember the five hundred pounds he had with me under false pretences; or the seventy pounds a year for board and lodging that would have been dear at seventeen! Here’s a martyr!’

‘Money, John,’ said Mr Pecksniff, ‘is the root of all evil. I grieve to see that it is already bearing evil fruit in you. But I will not remember its existence. I will not even remember the conduct of that misguided person’ – and here, although he spoke like one at peace with all the world, he used an emphasis that plainly said “I have my eye upon the rascal now” – ‘that misguided person who has brought you here to-night, seeking to disturb (it is a happiness to say, in vain) the heart’s repose and peace of one who would have shed his dearest blood to serve him.’

The voice of Mr Pecksniff trembled as he spoke, and sobs were heard from his daughters. Sounds floated on the air, moreover, as if two spirit voices had exclaimed: one, ‘Beast!’ the other, ‘Savage!’

‘Forgiveness,’ said Mr Pecksniff, ‘entire and pure forgiveness is not incompatible with a wounded heart; perchance when the heart is wounded, it becomes a greater virtue. With my breast still wrung and grieved to its inmost core by the ingratitude of that person, I am proud and glad to say that I forgive him. Nay! I beg,’ cried Mr Pecksniff, raising his voice, as Pinch appeared about to speak, ‘I beg that individual not to offer a remark; he will truly oblige me by not uttering one word, just now. I am not sure that I am equal to the trial. In a very short space of time, I shall have sufficient fortitude, I trust to converse with him as if these events had never happened. But not,’ said Mr Pecksniff, turning round again towards the fire, and waving his hand in the direction of the door, ‘not now.’

‘Bah!’ cried John Westlock, with the utmost disgust and disdain the monosyllable is capable of expressing. ‘Ladies, good evening. Come, Pinch, it’s not worth thinking of. I was right and you were wrong. That’s small matter; you’ll be wiser another time.’

So saying, he clapped that dejected companion on the shoulder, turned upon his heel, and walked out into the passage, whither poor Mr Pinch, after lingering irresolutely in the parlour for a few seconds, expressing in his countenance the deepest mental misery and gloom followed him. Then they took up the box between them, and sallied out to meet the mail.

That fleet conveyance passed, every night, the corner of a lane at some distance; towards which point they bent their steps. For some minutes they walked along in silence, until at length young Westlock burst into a loud laugh, and at intervals into another, and another. Still there was no response from his companion.

‘I’ll tell you what, Pinch!’ he said abruptly, after another lengthened silence – ‘You haven’t half enough of the devil in you. Half enough! You haven’t any.’

‘Well!’ said Pinch with a sigh, ‘I don’t know, I’m sure. It’s compliment to say so. If I haven’t, I suppose, I’m all the better for it.’

‘All the better!’ repeated his companion tartly: ‘All the worse, you mean to say.’

‘And yet,’ said Pinch, pursuing his own thoughts and not this last remark on the part of his friend, ‘I must have a good deal of what you call the devil in me, too, or how could I make Pecksniff so uncomfortable? I wouldn’t have occasioned him so much distress – don’t laugh, please – for a mine of money; and Heaven knows I could find good use for it too, John. How grieved he was!’

‘He grieved!’ returned the other.

‘Why didn’t you observe that the tears were almost starting out of his eyes!’ cried Pinch. ‘Bless my soul, John, is it nothing to see a man moved to that extent and know one’s self to be the cause! And did you hear him say that he could have shed his blood for me?’

‘Do you want any blood shed for you?’ returned his friend, with considerable irritation. ‘Does he shed anything for you that you do want? Does he shed employment for you, instruction for you, pocket money for you? Does he shed even legs of mutton for you in any decent proportion to potatoes and garden stuff?’

‘I am afraid,’ said Pinch, sighing again, ‘that I am a great eater; I can’t disguise from myself that I’m a great eater. Now, you know that, John.’

‘You a great eater!’ retorted his companion, with no less indignation than before. ‘How do you know you are?’

There appeared to be forcible matter in this inquiry, for Mr Pinch only repeated in an undertone that he had a strong misgiving on the subject, and that he greatly feared he was.

‘Besides, whether I am or no,’ he added, ‘that has little or nothing to do with his thinking me ungrateful. John, there is scarcely a sin in the world that is in my eyes such a crying one as ingratitude; and when he taxes me with that, and believes me to be guilty of it, he makes me miserable and wretched.’

‘Do you think he don’t know that?’ returned the other scornfully. ‘But come, Pinch, before I say anything more to you, just run over the reasons you have for being grateful to him at all, will you? Change hands first, for the box is heavy. That’ll do. Now, go on.’

‘In the first place,’ said Pinch, ‘he took me as his pupil for much less than he asked.’

‘Well,’ rejoined his friend, perfectly unmoved by this instance of generosity. ‘What in the second place?’

‘What in the second place?’ cried Pinch, in a sort of desperation, ‘why, everything in the second place. My poor old grandmother died happy to think that she had put me with such an excellent man. I have grown up in his house, I am in his confidence, I am his assistant, he allows me a salary; when his business improves, my prospects are to improve too. All this, and a great deal more, is in the second place. And in the very prologue and preface to the first place, John, you must consider this, which nobody knows better than I: that I was born for much plainer and poorer things, that I am not a good hand for his kind of business, and have no talent for it, or indeed for anything else but odds and ends that are of no use or service to anybody.’

He said this with so much earnestness, and in a tone so full of feeling, that his companion instinctively changed his manner as he sat down on the box (they had by this time reached the finger-post at the end of the lane); motioned him to sit down beside him; and laid his hand upon his shoulder.

‘I believe you are one of the best fellows in the world,’ he said, ‘Tom Pinch.’

‘Not at all,’ rejoined Tom. ‘If you only knew Pecksniff as well as I do, you might say it of him, indeed, and say it truly.’

‘I’ll say anything of him, you like,’ returned the other, ‘and not another word to his disparagement.’

‘It’s for my sake, then; not his, I am afraid,’ said Pinch, shaking his head gravely.

‘For whose you please, Tom, so that it does please you. Oh! He’s a famous fellow! he never scraped and clawed into his pouch all your poor grandmother’s hard savings – she was a housekeeper, wasn’t she, Tom?’

‘Yes,’ said Mr Pinch, nursing one of his large knees, and nodding his head; ‘a gentleman’s housekeeper.’