“So she is certainly. So she is” observed the dwarf.
“And she has a right to do as she likes, I hope, Quilp,” said the old lady trembling, partly with anger and partly with a secret fear of her impish son-in-law.
“Hope she has!” he replied, “Oh! Don’t you know she has? Don’t you know she has, Mrs. Jiniwin?”
“I know she ought to have, Quilp, and would have if she was of my way of thinking.”
“Why an’t you of your mother’s way of thinking, my dear?” said the dwarf, turning round and addressing his wife, “why don’t you always imitate your mother, my dear? She’s the ornament of her sex—your father said so every day of his life, I am sure he did.”
“Her father was a blessed creetur, Quilp, and worth twenty thousand of some people” said Mrs. Jiniwin; “twenty hundred million thousand.”
“I should like to have known him” remarked the dwarf. “I dare say he was a blessed creature then; but I’m sure he is now. It was a happy release. I believe he had suffered a long time?”
The old lady gave a gasp but nothing came of it; Quilp resumed, with the same malice in his eye and the same sarcastic politeness on his tongue.
“You look ill, Mrs. Jiniwin; I know you have been exciting yourself too much—talking perhaps, for it is your weakness. Go to bed. Do go to bed.”
“I shall go when I please, Quilp, and not before.”
“But please to go now. Do please to go now,” said the dwarf.
The old woman looked angrily at him, but retreated as he advanced, and falling back before him suffered him to shut the door upon her and bolt her out among the guests, who were by this time crowding downstairs. Being left alone with his wife, who sat trembling in a corner with her eyes fixed upon the ground, the little man planted himself before her, at some distance, and folding his arms looked steadily at her for a long time without speaking.
“Oh you nice creature!” were the words with which he broke silence; smacking his lips as if this were no figure of speech, and she were actually a sweetmeat. “Oh you precious darling! oh you de‑licious charmer!”
Mrs. Quilp sobbed; and knowing the nature of her pleasant lord, appeared quite as much alarmed by these compliments, as she would have been by the most extreme demonstrations of violence.
“She’s such,” said the dwarf, with a ghastly grin—“such a jewel, such a diamond, such a pearl, such a ruby, such a golden casket set with gems of all sorts! She’s such a treasure! I’m so fond of her!”
The poor little woman shivered from head to foot; and raising her eyes to his face with an imploring look, suffered them to droop again, and sobbed once more.
“The best of her is,” said the dwarf, advancing with a sort of skip, which, what with the crookedness of his legs, the ugliness of his face, and the mockery of his manner, was perfectly goblin-like;—“the best of her is that she’s so meek, and she’s so mild, and she never has a will of her own, and she has such an insinuating mother!”
Uttering these latter words with a gloating maliciousness, within a hundred degrees of which no one but himself could possibly approach, Mr. Quilp planted his two hands on his knees, and straddling his legs out very wide apart, stooped slowly down, and down, and down, until, by screwing his head very much on one side, he came between his wife’s eyes and the floor.
“Mrs. Quilp!”
“Yes, Quilp.”
“Am I nice to look at? Should I be the handsomest creature in the world if I had but whiskers? Am I quite a lady’s man as it is?—am I, Mrs. Quilp?”
Mrs. Quilp dutifully replied, “Yes, Quilp;” and fascinated by his gaze, remained looking timidly at him, while he treated her with a succession of such horrible grimaces, as none but himself and nightmares had the power of assuming. During the whole of this performance, which was somewhat of the longest, he preserved a dead silence, except when, by an unexpected skip or leap, he made his wife start backward with an irrepressible shriek. Then he chuckled.
“Mrs. Quilp,” he said at last.
“Yes, Quilp,” she meekly replied.
Instead of pursuing the theme he had in his mind, Quilp rose, folded his arms again, and looked at her more sternly than before, while she averted her eyes and kept them on the ground.
“Mrs. Quilp.”
“Yes, Quilp.”
“If ever you listen to these beldames again, I’ll bite you.”
With this laconic threat, which he accompanied with a snarl that gave him the appearance of being particularly in earnest, Mr. Quilp bade her clear the tea-board away, and bring the rum. The spirit being set before him in a huge case-bottle, which had originally come out of some ship’s locker, he ordered cold water and the box of cigars; and these being supplied, he settled himself in an armchair with his large head and face squeezed up against the back, and his little legs planted on the table.
“Now, Mrs. Quilp,” he said; “I feel in a smoking humour, and shall probably blaze away all night. But sit where you are, if you please, in case I want you.”
His wife returned no other reply than the customary “Yes, Quilp,” and the small lord of the creation took his first cigar and mixed his first glass of grog. The sun went down and the stars peeped out, the Tower turned from its own proper colours to grey and from grey to black, the room became perfectly dark and the end of the cigar a deep fiery red, but still Mr. Quilp went on smoking and drinking in the same position, and staring listlessly out of window with the doglike smile always on his face, save when Mrs. Quilp made some involuntary movement of restlessness or fatigue; and then it expanded into a grin of delight.
V
Whether
