The gaunt rooms, deserted for years upon
years, seemed to have settled down into a gloomy lethargy from which
nothing could rouse them again. The furniture, at once spare and
lumbering, hid in the rooms rather than furnished them, and there was
no colour in all the house; such colour as had ever been there, had long
ago started away on lost sunbeams--got itself absorbed, perhaps, into
flowers, butterflies, plumage of birds, precious stones, what not.
There was not one straight floor from the foundation to the roof; the ceilings
were so fantastically clouded by smoke and dust, that old women might
have told fortunes in them better than in grouts of tea; the dead-cold
hearths showed no traces of having ever been warmed but in heaps of soot
that had tumbled down the chimneys, and eddied about in little
dusky whirlwinds when the doors were opened. In what had once been
a drawing-room, there were a pair of meagre mirrors, with dismal
processions of black figures carrying black garlands, walking round
the frames; but even these were short of heads and legs, and one
undertaker-like Cupid had swung round on its own axis and got upside
down, and another had fallen off altogether.
The room Arthur Clennam's deceased father had occupied for business purposes,
when he first remembered him, was so unaltered that he might have been imagined still
to keep it invisibly, as his visible relict kept her room up-stairs;
Jeremiah Flintwinch still going between them negotiating. His picture,
dark and gloomy, earnestly speechless on the wall, with the eyes
intently looking at his son as they had looked when life departed from
them, seemed to urge him awfully to the task he had attempted; but as
to any yielding on the part of his mother, he had now no hope, and as to
any other means of setting his distrust at rest, he had abandoned hope a
long time
Down in the cellars, as up in the bed-chambers, old objects that he well
remembered were changed by age and decay, but were still in their
old places; even to empty beer-casks hoary with cobwebs, and empty
wine-bottles with fur and fungus choking up their throats. There, too,
among unusual bottle-racks and pale slants of light from the yard above,
was the strong room stored with old ledgers, which had as musty and
corrupt a smell as if they were regularly balanced, in the dead small
hours, by a nightly resurrection of old book-keepers.
The baking-dish was served up in a penitential manner on a shrunken
cloth at an end of the dining-table, at two o'clock, when he dined with
Mr Flintwinch, the new partner. Mr Flintwinch informed him that his
mother had recovered her equanimity now, and that he need not fear her
again alluding to what had passed in the morning. 'And don't you lay
offences at your father's door, Mr Arthur,' added Jeremiah, 'once for
all, don't do it! Now, we have done with the subject.'