long drab
gaiters. He might, from his dress, have been either clerk or servant,
and in fact had long been both. There was nothing about him in the way
of decoration but a watch, which was lowered into the depths of its
proper pocket by an old black ribbon, and had a tarnished copper key
moored above it, to show where it was sunk. His head was awry, and
he had a one-sided, crab-like way with him, as if his foundations had
yielded at about the same time as those of the house, and he ought to
have been propped up in a similar manner.

'How weak am I,' said Arthur Clennam, when he was gone, 'that I could
shed tears at this reception! I, who have never experienced anything
else; who have never expected anything else.' He not only could,
but did. It was the momentary yielding of a nature that had been
disappointed from the dawn of its perceptions, but had not quite given
up all its hopeful yearnings yet. He subdued it, took up the candle,
and examined the room. The old articles of furniture were in their old
places; the Plagues of Egypt, much the dimmer for the fly and smoke
plagues of London, were framed and glazed upon the walls. There was the
old cellaret with nothing in it, lined with lead, like a sort of coffin
in compartments; there was the old dark closet, also with nothing in
it, of which he had been many a time the sole contents, in days of
punishment, when he had regarded it as the veritable entrance to that
bourne to which the tract had found him galloping. There was the large,
hard-featured clock on the sideboard, which he used to see bending its
figured brows upon him with a savage joy when he was behind-hand with
his lessons, and which, when it was wound up once a week with an iron
handle, used to sound as if it were growling in ferocious anticipation
of the miseries into which it would bring him. But here was the old man
come back, saying, 'Arthur, I'll go before and light you.'

Arthur followed him up the staircase, which was panelled off into spaces
like so many mourning tablets, into a dim bed-chamber, the floor of
which had gradually so sunk and settled, that the fire-place was in a
dell. On a black bier-like sofa in this hollow, propped up behind with
one great angular black bolster like the block at a state execution in
the good old times, sat his mother in a widow's dress.

She and his father had been at variance from his earliest remembrance.
To sit speechless himself in the midst of rigid silence, g