She set the dish on, touched my guardian quietly on the arm with a
finger to notify that dinner was ready, and vanished. We took our seats
at the round table, and my guardian kept Drummle on one side of him,
while Startop sat on the other. It was a noble dish of fish that the
housekeeper had put on table, and we had a joint of equally choice
mutton afterwards, and then an equally choice bird. Sauces, wines, all
the accessories we wanted, and all of the best, were given out by our
host from his dumb-waiter; and when they had made the circuit of the
table, he always put them back again. Similarly, he dealt us clean
plates and knives and forks, for each course, and dropped those just
disused into two baskets on the ground by his chair. No other attendant
than the housekeeper appeared. She set on every dish; and I always saw
in her face, a face rising out of the caldron. Years afterwards, I made
a dreadful likeness of that woman, by causing a face that had no other
natural resemblance to it than it derived from flowing hair to pass
behind a bowl of flaming spirits in a dark room.
Induced to take particular notice of the housekeeper, both by her
own striking appearance and by Wemmick's preparation, I observed
that whenever she was in the room she kept her eyes attentively on my
guardian, and that she would remove her hands from any dish she put
before him, hesitatingly, as if she dreaded his calling her back, and
wanted him to speak when she was nigh, if he had anything to say. I
fancied that I could detect in his manner a consciousness of this, and a
purpose of always holding her in suspense.
Dinner went off gayly, and although my guardian seemed to follow rather
than originate subjects, I knew that he wrenched the weakest part of
our dispositions out of us. For myself, I found that I was expressing my
tendency to lavish expenditure, and to patronize Herbert, and to boast
of my great prospects, before I quite knew that I had opened my lips.
It was so with all of us, but with no one more than Drummle: the
development of whose inclination to gird in a grudging and suspicious
way at the rest, was screwed out of him before the fish was taken off.
It was not then, but when we had got to the cheese, that our
conversation turned upon our rowing feats, and that Drummle was rallied
for coming up behind of a night in that slow amphibious way of his.
Drummle upon this, informed our host that he much preferred our room to
our company, and that as to skill he was more than our master, and that
as to strength he could scatter us like chaff. By some invisible agency,
my guardian wound him up to a pitch little short of ferocity about this
trifle; and he fell to baring and spanning his arm to show how muscular
it was, and we all fell to baring and spanning our arms in a ridiculous
manner.