Page:Martin Chuzzlewit.djvu/280

226 "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 were 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's 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 everyday, Chuff," said Anthony, with as much softness