The Bank offered no violence to the wholesome monotony of the town. It was another red brick house, with black outside shutters, green inside blinds, a black street-door up two white steps, a brazen door-plate, and a brazen door-handle full stop. It was a size larger than Mr. Bounderby’s house, as other houses were from a size to a half-a-dozen sizes smaller; in all other particulars, it was strictly according to pattern.
Mrs. Sparsit was conscious that by coming in the evening tide among the desks and writing implements, she shed a feminine, not to say also aristocratic, grace upon the office. Seated, with her needlework or netting apparatus, at the window, she had a self-laudatory sense of correcting, by her ladylike deportment, the rude business aspect of the place. With this impression of her interesting character upon her, Mrs. Sparsit considered herself, in some sort, the Bank Fairy. The townspeople who, in their passing and repassing, saw her there regarded her as the Bank Dragon keeping watch over the treasures of the mine.
What those treasures were, Mrs. Sparsit knew as little as they did. Gold and silver coin, precious paper, secrets that if divulged would bring a vague destruction upon vague persons (generally, however, people whom she disliked), were the chief items in her ideal catalogue thereof. For the rest, she knew that after office-hours, she reigned supreme over all the office furniture, and over a locked-up iron room with three locks, against the door of which strong chamber the light porter laid his head every night, on a truckle bed, that disappeared at cockcrow. Further she was lady paramount over certain vaults in the basement, sharply piked off from communication with the predatory world; and over the relics of the current day’s work, consisting of blots of ink, worn-out pens, fragments of wafers, and scraps of paper torn so small, that nothing interesting could ever be deciphered on them when Mrs. Sparsit tried. Lastly, she was guardian over a little armoury of cutlasses and carbines, arrayed in vengeful order above one of the official chimney-pieces; and over that respectable tradition never to be separated from a place of business claiming to be wealthy – a row of fire-buckets – vessels calculated to be of no physical utility on any occasion, but observed to exercise a fine moral influence, almost equal to bullion, on most beholders.
A deaf serving woman and a light porter completed Mrs. Sparsit’s empire. The deaf serving woman was rumoured to be wealthy; and a saying had for years gone about among the lower orders of Coketown, that she would be murdered some night when the Bank was shut, for the sake of her money. It was generally considered, indeed, that she had been due some time, and ought to have fallen long ago; but she had kept her life, and her situation, with an ill-conditioned tenacity that occasioned much offence and disappointment.
Mrs. Sparsit’s tea was just set for her on a pert little table, with its tripod of legs in an attitude, which she insinuated after office-hours, into the company of the stern, leathern-topped, long board-table that bestrode the middle of the room. The light porter placed the tea-tray on it, knuckling his forehead as a form of homage.
“Thank you, Bitzer,” said Mrs. Sparsit.
“Thank you, ma’am,” returned the light porter. He was a very light porter indeed; as light as in the days when he blinkingly defined a horse, for girl number twenty.
“All is shut up, Bitzer?” said Mrs. Sparsit.
“All is shut up, ma’am.”
“And what,” said Mrs. Sparsit, pouring out her tea, “is the news of the day? Anything?”
“Well, ma’am, I can’t say that I have heard anything particular. Our people are a bad lot ma’am; but that is no news, unfortunately.”
“What are the restless wretches doing now?” asked Mrs. Sparsit.
“Merely going on in the old way, ma’am. Uniting, and leaguing, and engaging to stand by one another.”
“It is much to be regretted,” said Mrs. Sparsit, making her nose more Roman and her eyebrows more Coriolanian in the strength of severity, “that the united masters allow of any such class-combinations.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Bitzer.