“I am not angry,” observed Mr. Pecksniff. “I am hurt, Mr. Chuzzlewit; wounded in my feelings; but I am not angry, my good sir.”
Mr. Chuzzlewit resumed.
“Once resolved to try him, I was resolute to pursue the trial to the end; but while I was bent on fathoming the depth of his duplicity, I made a sacred compact with myself that I would give him credit on the other side for any latent spark of goodness, honour, forbearance—any virtue—that might glimmer in him. For first to last there has been no such thing. Not once. He cannot say I have not given him opportunity. He cannot say I have ever led him on. He cannot say I have not left him freely to himself in all things; or that I have not been a passive instrument in his hands, which he might have used for good as easily as evil. Or if he can, he Lies! And that’s his nature, too.”
“Mr. Chuzzlewit,” interrupted Pecksniff, shedding tears. “I am not angry, sir. I cannot be angry with you. But did you never, my dear sir, express a desire that the unnatural young man who by his wicked arts has estranged your good opinion from me, for the time being; only for the time being; that your grandson, Mr. Chuzzlewit, should be dismissed my house? Recollect yourself, my Christian friend.”
“I have said so, have I not?” retorted the old man, sternly. “I could not tell how far your specious hypocrisy had deceived him, knave; and knew no better way of opening his eyes than by presenting you before him in your own servile character. Yes. I did express that desire. And you leaped to meet it; and you met it; and turning in an instant on the hand you had licked and beslavered, as only such hounds can, you strengthened, and confirmed, and justified me in my scheme.”
Mr. Pecksniff made a bow; a submissive, not to say a grovelling and an abject bow. If he had been complimented on his practice of the loftiest virtues, he never could have bowed as he bowed then.
“The wretched man who has been murdered,” Mr. Chuzzlewit went on to say; “then passing by the name of—”
“Tigg,” suggested Mark.
“Of Tigg—brought begging messages to me on behalf of a friend of his, and an unworthy relative of mine; and finding him a man well enough suited to my purpose, I employed him to glean some news of you, Martin, for me. It was from him I learned that you had taken up your abode with yonder fellow. It was he, who meeting you here in town, one evening—you remember where?”
“At the pawnbroker’s shop,” said Martin.
“Yes; watched you to your lodging, and enabled me to send you a banknote.”
“I little thought,” said Martin, greatly moved, “that it had come from you; I little thought that you were interested in my fate. If I had—”
“If you had,” returned the old man, sorrowfully, “you would have shown less knowledge of me as I seemed to be, and as I really was. I hoped to bring you back, Martin, penitent and humbled. I hoped to distress you into coming back to me. Much as I loved you, I had that to acknowledge which I could not reconcile it to myself to avow, then, unless you made submission to me first. Thus it was I lost you. If I have had, indirectly, any act or part in the fate of that unhappy man, by putting means, however small, within his reach, Heaven forgive me! I might have known, perhaps, that he would misuse money; that it was ill-bestowed upon him; and that sown by his hands it could engender mischief only. But I never thought of him at that time as having the disposition or ability to be a serious impostor, or otherwise than as a thoughtless, idle-humoured, dissipated spendthrift, sinning more against himself than others, and frequenting low haunts and indulging vicious tastes, to his own ruin only.”
“Beggin’ your pardon, sir,” said Mr. Tapley, who had Mrs. Lupin on his arm by this time, quite agreeably; “if I may make so bold as say so, my opinion is, as you was quite correct, and that he turned out perfectly nat’ral for all that. There’s surprisin’ number of men, sir, who as long as they’ve only got their own shoes and stockings to depend upon, will walk downhill, along the gutters quiet enough and by themselves, and not do much harm. But set any on ’em up with a coach and horses, sir; and it’s wonderful what a knowledge of drivin’ he’ll show, and how he’ll fill his wehicle with passengers, and start off in the middle of the road, neck or nothing, to the Devil! Bless your heart, sir, there’s ever so many Tiggs a-passin’ this here Temple-gate any hour in the day, that only want a chance to turn out full-blown Montagues every one!”
“Your ignorance, as you call it, Mark,” said Mr. Chuzzlewit, “is wiser than some men’s enlightenment, and mine among them. You are right; not for the first time today. Now hear me out, my dears. And hear me, you, who, if what I have been told be accurately stated, are Bankrupt in pocket no less than in good name! And when you have heard me, leave this place, and poison my sight no more!”
Mr. Pecksniff laid his hand upon his breast, and bowed again.
“The penance I have done in his house,” said Mr. Chuzzlewit, “has earned this reflection with it constantly, above all others. That if it had pleased Heaven to visit such infirmity on my old age as really had reduced me to the state in which I feigned to be, I should have brought its misery upon myself. Oh you whose wealth, like mine, has been a source of continual unhappiness, leading you to distrust the nearest and dearest, and to dig yourself a living grave
