Charles Dickens - Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit

“There's not time for that, Jonas,” said the old man.

“Not time for what?” bawled his heir.

“For me to come to want. I wish there was!”

“You always were as selfish an old blade as need be,” said Jonas in a voice too low for him to hear, and looking at him with an angry frown. “You act up to your character. You wouldn't mind coming to want, wouldn't you! I dare say you wouldn't. And your own flesh and blood might come to want too, might they, for anything you cared? Oh you precious old flint!”

After this dutiful address he took his tea-cup in his hand—for that meal was in progress, and the father and son and Chuffey were partakers of it. Then, looking steadfastly at his father, and stopping now and then to carry a spoonful of tea to his lips, he proceeded in the same tone, thus:

“Want, indeed! You're a nice old man to be talking of want at this time of day. Beginning to talk of want, are you? Well, I declare! There isn't time? No, I should hope not. But you'd live to be a couple of hundred if you could; and after all be discontented. I know you!”

The old man sighed, and still sat cowering before the fire. Mr Jonas shook his Britannia-metal teaspoon at him, and taking a loftier position, went on to argue the point on high moral grounds.

“If you're in such a state of mind as that,” he grumbled, but in the same subdued key, “why don't you make over your property? Buy an annuity cheap, and make your life interesting to yourself and everybody else that watches the speculation. But no, that wouldn't suit YOU. That would be natural conduct to your own son, and you like to be unnatural, and to keep him out of his rights. Why, I should be ashamed of myself if I was you, and glad to hide my head in the what you may call it.”

Possibly this general phrase supplied the place of grave, or tomb, or sepulchre, or cemetery, or mausoleum, or other such word which the filial tenderness of Mr Jonas made him delicate of pronouncing. He pursued the theme no further; for Chuffey, somehow discovering, from his old corner by the fireside, that Anthony was in the attitude of a listener, and that Jonas appeared to be speaking, suddenly cried out, like one inspired:

“He is your own son, Mr Chuzzlewit. Your own son, sir!”

Old Chuffey little suspected what depth of application these words had, or that, in the bitter satire which they bore, they might have sunk into the old man's very soul, could he have known what words here hanging on his own son's lips, or what was passing in his thoughts. But the voice diverted the current of Anthony's reflections, and roused him.

“Yes, yes, Chuffey, Jonas is a chip of the old block. It is a very old block, now, Chuffey,” said the old man, with a strange look of discomposure.

“Precious old,” assented Jonas

“No, no, no,” said Chuffey. “No, Mr Chuzzlewit. Not old at all, sir.”

“Oh! He's worse than ever, you know!” cried Jonas, quite disgusted. “Upon my soul, father, he's getting too bad. Hold your tongue, will you?”

“He says you're wrong!” cried Anthony to the old clerk.

“Tut, tut!” was Chuffey's answer. “I know better. I say HE'S wrong. I say HE'S wrong. He's a boy. That's what he is. So are you, Mr Chuzzlewit—a kind of boy. Ha! ha! ha! You're quite a boy to many I have known; you're a boy to me; you're a boy to hundreds of us. Don't mind him!”

With which extraordinary speech—for in the case of Chuffey this was a burst of eloquence without a parallel—the poor old shadow drew through his palsied arm his master's hand, and held it there, with his own folded upon it, as if he would defend him.

“I grow deafer every day, Chuff,” said Anthony, with as much softness of manner, or, to describe it more correctly, with as little hardness as he was capable of expressing.

“No, no,” cried Chuffey. “No, you don't. What if you did? I've been deaf this twenty year.”

“I grow blinder, too,” said the old man, shaking his head.

“That's a good sign!” cried Chuffey. “Ha! ha! The best sign in the world! You saw too well before.”

He patted Anthony upon the hand as one might comfort a child, and drawing the old man's arm still further through his own, shook his trembling fingers towards the spot where Jonas sat, as though he would wave him off. But, Anthony remaining quite still and silent, he relaxed his hold by slow degrees and lapsed into his usual niche in the corner; merely putting forth his hand at intervals and touching his old employer gently on the coat, as with the design of assuring himself that he was yet beside him.

Mr Jonas was so very much amazed by these proceedings that he could do nothing but stare at the two old men, until Chuffey had fallen into his usual state, and Anthony had sunk into a doze; when he gave some vent to his emotions by going close up to the former personage, and making as though he would, in vulgar parlance, “punch his head.”

“They've been carrying on this game,” thought Jonas in a brown study, “for the last two or three weeks. I never saw my father take so much notice of him as he has in that time. What! You're legacy hunting, are you, Mister Chuff? Eh?”

But Chuffey was as little conscious of the thought as of the bodily advance of Mr Jonas's clenched fist, which hovered fondly about his ear. When he had scowled at him to his heart's content, Jonas took the candle from the table, and walking into the glass office, produced a bunch of keys from his pocket. With one of these he opened a secret drawer in the desk; peeping stealthily out, as he did so, to be certain that the two old men were still before the fire.

“All as right as ever,” said Jonas, propping the lid of the desk open with his forehead, and unfolding a paper. “Here's the will, Mister Chuff. Thirty pound a year for your maintenance, old boy, and all the rest to his only son, Jonas. You needn't trouble yourself to be too affectionate. You won't get anything by it. What's that?”

It WAS startling, certainly. A face on the other side of the glass partition looking curiously in; and not at him but at the paper in his hand. For the eyes were attentively cast down upon the writing, and were swiftly raised when he cried out. Then they met his own, and were as the eyes of Mr Pecksniff.

Suffering the lid of the desk to fall with a loud noise, but not forgetting even then to lock it, Jonas, pale and breathless, gazed upon this phantom. It moved, opened the door, and walked in.

“What's the matter?” cried Jonas, falling back. “Who is it? Where do you come from? What do you want?”

“Matter!” cried the voice of Mr Pecksniff, as Pecksniff in the flesh smiled amiably upon him. “The matter, Mr Jonas!”

“What are you prying and peering about here for?” said Jonas, angrily. “What do you mean by coming up to town in this way, and taking one unawares? It's precious odd a man can't read the—the newspaper—in his own office without being startled out of his wits by people coming in without notice. Why didn't you knock at the door?”

“So I did, Mr Jonas,” answered Pecksniff, “but no one heard me. I was curious,” he added in his gentle way as he laid his hand upon the young man's shoulder, “to find out what part of the newspaper interested you so much; but the glass was too dim and dirty.”

Jonas glanced in haste at the partition. Well. It wasn't very clean. So far he spoke the truth.

“Was it poetry now?” said Mr Pecksniff, shaking the forefinger of his right hand with an air of cheerful banter. “Or was it politics? Or was it the price of stock? The main chance, Mr Jonas, the main chance, I suspect.”

“You ain't far from the truth,” answered Jonas, recovering himself and snuffing the candle; “but how the deuce do you come to be in London again? Ecod! it's enough to make a man stare, to see a fellow looking at him all of a sudden, who he thought was sixty or seventy mile away.”