house. Dull and dark he found it. The gaunt rooms, deserted for
years upon years, seemed to have settled down into a gloomy
lethargy from which nothing could rouse them again. The furniture,
at once spare and lumbering, hid in the rooms rather than furnished
them, and there was no colour in all the house; such colour as had
ever been there, had long ago started away on lost sunbeams--got
itself absorbed, perhaps, into flowers, butterflies, plumage of
birds, precious stones, what not. There was not one straight floor
from the foundation to the roof; the ceilings were so fantastically
clouded by smoke and dust, that old women might have told fortunes
in them better than in grouts of tea; the dead-cold hearths showed
no traces of having ever been warmed but in heaps of soot that had
tumbled down the chimneys, and eddied about in little dusky
whirlwinds when the doors were opened. In what had once been a
drawing-room, there were a pair of meagre mirrors, with dismal
processions of black figures carrying black garlands, walking round
the frames; but even these were short of heads and legs, and one
undertaker-like Cupid had swung round on its own axis and got
upside down, and another had fallen off altogether. The room
Arthur Clennam's deceased father had occupied for business
purposes, when he first remembered him, was so unaltered that he
might have been imagined still to keep it invisibly, as his visible
relict kept her room up-stairs; Jeremiah Flintwinch still going
between them negotiating. His picture, dark and gloomy, earnestly
speechless on the wall, with the eyes intently looking at his son
as they had looked when life departed from them, seemed to urge him
awfully to the task he had attempted; but as to any yielding on the
part of his mother, he had now no hope, and as to any other means
of setting his distrust at rest, he had abandoned hope a long time.