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Little Dorrit

by Charles Dickens · English · Gutenberg #963 · 1,899,891 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Little Dorrit

Author: Charles Dickens


        
Release date: July 1, 1997 [eBook #963]
                Most recently updated: February 9, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/963

Credits: Jo Churcher, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LITTLE DORRIT ***




LITTLE DORRIT

By Charles Dickens




CONTENTS


     Preface to the 1857 Edition


     BOOK THE FIRST: POVERTY
     1.  Sun and Shadow
     2.  Fellow Travellers
     3.  Home
     4.  Mrs Flintwinch has a Dream
     5.  Family Affairs
     6.  The Father of the Marshalsea
     7.  The Child of the Marshalsea
     8.  The Lock
     9.  little Mother
     10.  Containing the whole Science of Government
     11.  Let Loose
     12.  Bleeding Heart Yard
     13.  Patriarchal
     14.  Little Dorrit’s Party
     15.  Mrs Flintwinch has another Dream
     16.  Nobody’s Weakness
     17.  Nobody’s Rival
     18.  Little Dorrit’s Lover
     19.  The Father of the Marshalsea in two or three Relations
     20.  Moving in Society
     21.  Mr Merdle’s Complaint
     22.  A Puzzle
     23.  Machinery in Motion
     24.  Fortune-Telling
     25.  Conspirators and Others
     26.  Nobody’s State of Mind
     27.  Five-and-Twenty
     28.  Nobody’s Disappearance
     29.  Mrs Flintwinch goes on Dreaming
     30.  The Word of a Gentleman
     31.  Spirit
     32.  More Fortune-Telling
     33.  Mrs Merdle’s Complaint
     34.  A Shoal of Barnacles
     35.  What was behind Mr Pancks on Little Dorrit’s Hand
     36.  The Marshalsea becomes an Orphan


     BOOK THE SECOND: RICHES

     1.  Fellow Travellers
     2.  Mrs General
     3.  On the Road
     4.  A Letter from Little Dorrit
     5.  Something Wrong Somewhere
     6.  Something Right Somewhere
     7.  Mostly, Prunes and Prism
     8.  The Dowager Mrs Gowan is reminded that ‘It Never Does’
     9.  Appearance and Disappearance
     10.  The Dreams of Mrs Flintwinch thicken
     11.  A Letter from Little Dorrit
     12.  In which a Great Patriotic Conference is holden
     13.  The Progress of an Epidemic
     14.  Taking Advice
     15.  No just Cause or Impediment why these Two Persons should
          not be joined together
     16.  Getting on
     17.  Missing
     18.  A Castle in the Air
     19.  The Storming of the Castle in the Air
     20.  Introduces the next
     21.  The History of a Self-Tormentor
     22.  Who Passes by this Road so late?
     23.  Mistress Affery makes a Conditional Promise, respecting her
          Dreams
     24.  The Evening of a Long Day
     25.  The Chief Butler Resigns the Seals of Office
     26.  Reaping the Whirlwind
     27.  The Pupil of the Marshalsea
     28.  An Appearance in the Marshalsea
     29.  A Plea in the Marshalsea
     30.  Closing in
     31.  Closed
     32.  Going
     33.  Going!
     34.  Gone




PREFACE TO THE 1857 EDITION


I have been occupied with this story, during many working hours of two
years. I must have been very ill employed, if I could not leave its
merits and demerits as a whole, to express themselves on its being read
as a whole. But, as it is not unreasonable to suppose that I may have
held its threads with a more continuous attention than anyone else can
have given them during its desultory publication, it is not unreasonable
to ask that the weaving may be looked at in its completed state, and
with the pattern finished.

If I might offer any apology for so exaggerated a fiction as the
Barnacles and the Circumlocution Office, I would seek it in the
common experience of an Englishman, without presuming to mention the
unimportant fact of my having done that violence to good manners, in the
days of a Russian war, and of a Court of Inquiry at Chelsea. If I might
make so bold as to defend that extravagant conception, Mr Merdle, I
would hint that it originated after the Railroad-share epoch, in the
times of a certain Irish bank, and of one or two other equally
laudable enterprises. If I were to plead anything in mitigation of the
preposterous fancy that a bad design will sometimes claim to be a good
and an expressly religious design, it would be the curious coincidence
that it has been brought to its climax in these pages, in the days of
the public examination of late Directors of a Royal British Bank. But,
I submit myself to suffer judgment to go by default on all these counts,
if need be, and to accept the assurance (on good authority) that nothing
like them was ever known in this land.

Some of my readers may have an interest in being informed whether or no
any portions of the Marshalsea Prison are yet standing. I did not know,
myself, until the sixth of this present month, when I went to look. I
found the outer front courtyard, often mentioned here, metamorphosed
into a butter shop; and I then almost gave up every brick of the jail
for lost. Wandering, however, down a certain adjacent ‘Angel Court,
leading to Bermondsey’, I came to ‘Marshalsea Place:’ the houses in
which I recognised, not only as the great block of the former prison,
but as preserving the rooms that arose in my mind’s-eye when I became
Little Dorrit’s biographer. The smallest boy I ever conversed with,
carrying the largest baby I ever saw, offered a supernaturally
intelligent explanation of the locality in its old uses, and was very
nearly correct. How this young Newton (for such I judge him to be) came
by his information, I don’t know; he was a quarter of a century too
young to know anything about it of himself. I pointed to the window of
the room where Little Dorrit was born, and where her father lived so
long, and asked him what was the name of the lodger who tenanted that
apartment at present? He said, ‘Tom Pythick.’ I asked him who was Tom
Pythick? and he said, ‘Joe Pythick’s uncle.’

A little further on, I found the older and smaller wall, which used
to enclose the pent-up inner prison where nobody was put, except for
ceremony. But, whosoever goes into Marshalsea Place, turning out of
Angel Court, leading to Bermondsey, will find his feet on the very
paving-stones of the extinct Marshalsea jail; will see its narrow yard
to the right and to the left, very little altered if at all, except that
the walls were lowered when the place got free; will look upon rooms
in which the debtors lived; and will stand among the crowding ghosts of
many miserable years.

In the Preface to Bleak House I remarked that I had never had so many
readers. In the Preface to its next successor, Little Dorrit, I have
still to repeat the same words. Deeply sensible of the affection and
confidence that have grown up between us, I add to this Preface, as I
added to that, May we meet again!

London May 1857




BOOK THE FIRST: POVERTY




CHAPTER 1. Sun and Shadow


Thirty years ago, Marseilles lay burning in the sun, one day.

A blazing sun upon a fierce August day was no greater rarity in southern
France then, than at any other time, before or since. Everything in
Marseilles, and about Marseilles, had stared at the fervid sky, and been
stared at in return, until a staring habit had become universal there.
Strangers were stared out of countenance by staring white houses,
staring white walls, staring white streets, staring tracts of arid road,
staring hills from which verdure was burnt away. The only things to be
seen not fixedly staring and glaring were the vines drooping under their
load of grapes. These did occasionally wink a little, as the hot air
barely moved their faint leaves.

There was no wind to make a ripple on the foul water within the harbour,
or on the beautiful sea without. The line of demarcation between the two
colours, black and blue, showed the point which the pure sea would not
pass; but it lay as quiet as the abominable pool, with which it never
mixed. Boats without awnings were too hot to touch; ships blistered at
their moorings; the stones of the quays had not cooled, night or
day, for months. Hindoos, Russians, Chinese, Spaniards, Portuguese,
Englishmen, Frenchmen, Genoese, Neapolitans, Venetians, Greeks, Turks,
descendants from all the builders of Babel, come to trade at Marseilles,
sought the shade alike--taking refuge in any hiding-place from a sea too
intensely blue to be looked at, and a sky of purple, set with one great
flaming jewel of fire.

The universal stare made the eyes ache. Towards the distant line of
Italian coast, indeed, it was a little relieved by light clouds of mist,
slowly rising from the evaporation of the sea, but it softened nowhere
else. Far away the staring roads, deep in dust, stared from the
hill-side, stared from the hollow, stared from the interminable
plain. Far away the dusty vines overhanging wayside cottages, and the
monotonous wayside avenues of parched trees without shade, drooped
beneath the stare of earth and sky. So did the horses with drowsy bells,
in long files of carts, creeping slowly towards the interior; so did
their recumbent drivers, when they were awake, which rarely happened;
so did the exhausted labourers in the fields. Everything that lived or
grew, was oppressed by the glare; except the lizard, passing swiftly
over rough stone walls, and the cicala, chirping his dry hot chirp, like
a rattle. The very dust was scorched brown, and something quivered in
the atmosphere as if the air itself were panting.

Blinds, shutters, curtains, awnings, were all closed and drawn to keep
out the stare. Grant it but a chink or keyhole, and it shot in like a
white-hot arrow. The churches were the freest from it. To come out of
the twilight of pillars and arches--dreamily dotted with winking lamps,
dreamily peopled with ugly old shadows piously dozing, spitting, and
begging--was to plunge into a fiery river, and swim for life to the
nearest strip of shade. So, with people lounging and lying wherever
shade was, with but little hum of tongues or barking of dogs, with
occasional jangling of discordant church bells and rattling of vicious
drums, Marseilles, a fact to be strongly smelt and tasted, lay broiling
in the sun one day.

In Marseilles that day there was a villainous prison. In one of its
chambers, so repulsive a place that even the obtrusive stare blinked at
it, and left it to such refuse of reflected light as it could find for
itself, were two men. Besides the two men, a notched and disfigured
bench, immovable from the wall, with a draught-board rudely hacked upon
it with a knife, a set of draughts, made of old buttons and soup bones,
a set of dominoes, two mats, and two or three wine bottles. That was all
the chamber held, exclusive of rats and other unseen vermin, in addition
to the seen vermin, the two men.

It received such light as it got through a grating of iron bars
fashioned like a pretty large window, by means of which it could be
always inspected from the gloomy staircase on which the grating gave.
There was a broad strong ledge of stone to this grating where the bottom
of it was let into the masonry, three or four feet above the ground.
Upon it, one of the two men lolled, half sitting and half lying, with
his knees drawn up, and his feet and shoulders planted against the
opposite sides of the aperture. The bars were wide enough apart to
admit of his thrusting his arm through to the elbow; and so he held on
negligently, for his greater ease.

A prison taint was on everything there. The imprisoned air, the
imprisoned light, the imprisoned damps, the imprisoned men, were all
deteriorated by confinement. As the captive men were faded and haggard,
so the iron was rusty, the stone was slimy, the wood was rotten, the air
was faint, the light was dim. Like a well, like a vault, like a tomb,
the prison had no knowledge of the brightness outside, and would have
kept its polluted atmosphere intact in one of the spice islands of the
Indian ocean.

The man who lay on the ledge of the grating was even chilled. He jerked
his great cloak more heavily upon him by an impatient movement of one
shoulder, and growled, ‘To the devil with this Brigand of a Sun that
never shines in here!’

He was waiting to be fed, looking sideways through the bars that he
might see the further down the stairs, with much of the expression of
a wild beast in similar expectation. But his eyes, too close together,
were not so nobly set in his head as those of the king of beasts are in
his, and they were sharp rather than bright--pointed weapons with little
surface to betray them. They had no depth or change; they glittered,
and they opened and shut. So far, and waiving their use to himself, a
clockmaker could have made a better pair. He had a hook nose, handsome
after its kind, but too high between the eyes by probably just as much
as his eyes were too near to one another. For the rest, he was large and
tall in frame, had thin lips, where his thick moustache showed them at
all, and a quantity of dry hair, of no definable colour, in its shaggy
state, but shot with red. The hand with which he held the grating
(seamed all over the back with ugly scratches newly healed), was
unusually small and plump; would have been unusually white but for the
prison grime.

The other man was lying on the stone floor, covered with a coarse brown
coat.

‘Get up, pig!’ growled the first. ‘Don’t sleep when I am hungry.’

‘It’s all one, master,’ said the pig, in a submissive manner, and not
without cheerfulness; ‘I can wake when I will, I can sleep when I will.
It’s all the same.’

As he said it, he rose, shook himself, scratched himself, tied his brown
coat loosely round his neck by the sleeves (he had previously used it
as a coverlet), and sat down upon the pavement yawning, with his back
against the wall opposite to the grating.

‘Say what the hour is,’ grumbled the first man.

‘The mid-day bells will ring--in forty minutes.’ When he made the
little pause, he had looked round the prison-room, as if for certain
information.

‘You are a clock. How is it that you always know?’

‘How can I say? I always know what the hour is, and where I am. I was
brought in here at night, and out of a boat, but I know where I am. See
here! Marseilles harbour;’ on his knees on the pavement, mapping it all
out with a swarthy forefinger; ‘Toulon (where the galleys are), Spain
over there, Algiers over _there_. Creeping away to the left here, Nice.
Round by the Cornice to Genoa. Genoa Mole and Harbour. Quarantine
Ground. City there; terrace gardens blushing with the bella donna. Here,
Porto Fino. Stand out for Leghorn. Out again for Civita Vecchia, so away
to--hey! there’s no room for Naples;’ he had got to the wall by this
time; ‘but it’s all one; it’s in there!’

He remained on his knees, looking up at his fellow-prisoner with a
lively look for a prison. A sunburnt, quick, lithe, little man, though
rather thickset. Earrings in his brown ears, white teeth lighting up his
grotesque brown face, intensely black hair clustering about his brown
throat, a ragged red shirt open at his brown breast. Loose, seaman-like
trousers, decent shoes, a long red cap, a red sash round his waist, and
a knife in it.

‘Judge if I come back from Naples as I went! See here, my master! Civita
Vecchia, Leghorn, Porto Fino, Genoa, Cornice, Off Nice (which is in
there), Marseilles, you and me. The apartment of the jailer and his keys
is where I put this thumb; and here at my wrist they keep the national
razor in its case--the guillotine locked up.’

The other man spat suddenly on the pavement, and gurgled in his throat.

Some lock below gurgled in _its_ throat immediately afterwards, and then
a door crashed. Slow steps began ascending the stairs; the prattle of
a sweet little voice mingled with the noise they made; and the
prison-keeper appeared carrying his daughter, three or four years old,
and a basket.

‘How goes the world this forenoon, gentlemen? My little one, you see,
going round with me to have a peep at her father’s birds. Fie, then!
Look at the birds, my pretty, look at the birds.’

He looked sharply at the birds himself, as he held the child up at
the grate, especially at the little bird, whose activity he seemed to
mistrust. ‘I have brought your bread, Signor John Baptist,’ said he
(they all spoke in French, but the little man was an Italian); ‘and if I
might recommend you not to game--’

‘You don’t recommend the master!’ said John Baptist, showing his teeth
as he smiled.

‘Oh! but the master wins,’ returned the jailer, with a passing look of
no particular liking at the other man, ‘and you lose. It’s quite another
thing. You get husky bread and sour drink by it; and he gets sausage of
Lyons, veal in savoury jelly, white bread, strachino cheese, and good
wine by it. Look at the birds, my pretty!’

‘Poor birds!’ said the child.

The fair little face, touched with divine compassion, as it peeped
shrinkingly through the grate, was like an angel’s in the prison. John
Baptist rose and moved towards it, as if it had a good attraction for
him. The other bird remained as before, except for an impatient glance
at the basket.

‘Stay!’ said the jailer, putting his little daughter on the outer ledge
of the grate, ‘she shall feed the birds. This big loaf is for Signor
John Baptist. We must break it to get it through into the cage. So,
there’s a tame bird to kiss the little hand! This sausage in a vine
leaf is for Monsieur Rigaud. Again--this veal in savoury jelly is for
Monsieur Rigaud. Again--these three white little loaves are for Monsieur
Rigaud. Again, this cheese--again, this wine--again, this tobacco--all
for Monsieur Rigaud. Lucky bird!’

The child put all these things between the bars into the soft, Smooth,
well-shaped hand, with evident dread--more than once drawing back
her own and looking at the man with her fair brow roughened into an
expression half of fright and half of anger. Whereas she had put the
lump of coarse bread into the swart, scaled, knotted hands of John
Baptist (who had scarcely as much nail on his eight fingers and two
thumbs as would have made out one for Monsieur Rigaud), with ready
confidence; and, when he kissed her hand, had herself passed it
caressingly over his face. Monsieur Rigaud, indifferent to this
distinction, propitiated the father by laughing and nodding at the
daughter as often as she gave him anything; and, so soon as he had
all his viands about him in convenient nooks of the ledge on which he
rested, began to eat with an appetite.

When Monsieur Rigaud laughed, a change took place in his face, that
was more remarkable than prepossessing. His moustache went up under his
nose, and his nose came down over his moustache, in a very sinister and
cruel manner.

‘There!’ said the jailer, turning his basket upside down to beat the
crumbs out, ‘I have expended all the money I received; here is the note
of it, and _that’s_ a thing accomplished. Monsieur Rigaud, as I expected
yesterday, the President will look for the pleasure of your society at
an hour after mid-day, to-day.’

‘To try me, eh?’ said Rigaud, pausing, knife in hand and morsel in
mouth.

‘You have said it. To try you.’

‘There is no news for me?’ asked John Baptist, who had begun,
contentedly, to munch his bread.

The jailer shrugged his shoulders.

‘Lady of mine! Am I to lie here all my life, my father?’

‘What do I know!’ cried the jailer, turning upon him with southern
quickness, and gesticulating with both his hands and all his fingers,
as if he were threatening to tear him to pieces. ‘My friend, how is it
possible for me to tell how long you are to lie here? What do I know,
John Baptist Cavalletto? Death of my life! There are prisoners here
sometimes, who are not in such a devil of a hurry to be tried.’

He seemed to glance obliquely at Monsieur Rigaud in this remark; but
Monsieur Rigaud had already resumed his meal, though not with quite so
quick an appetite as before.

‘Adieu, my birds!’ said the keeper of the prison, taking his pretty
child in his arms, and dictating the words with a kiss.

‘Adieu, my birds!’ the pretty child repeated.

Her innocent face looked back so brightly over his shoulder, as he
walked away with her, singing her the song of the child’s game:

     ‘Who passes by this road so late?
          Compagnon de la Majolaine!
     Who passes by this road so late?
          Always gay!’

that John Baptist felt it a point of honour to reply at the grate, and
in good time and tune, though a little hoarsely:

     ‘Of all the king’s knights ‘tis the flower,
         Compagnon de la Majolaine!
     Of all the king’s knights ‘tis the flower,
          Always gay!’

Which accompanied them so far down the few steep stairs, that the
prison-keeper had to stop at last for his little daughter to hear the
song out, and repeat the Refrain while they were yet in sight. Then the
child’s head disappeared, and the prison-keeper’s head disappeared, but
the little voice prolonged the strain until the door clashed.

Monsieur Rigaud, finding the listening John Baptist in his way before
the echoes had ceased (even the echoes were the weaker for imprisonment,
and seemed to lag), reminded him with a push of his foot that he had
better resume his own darker place. The little man sat down again
upon the pavement with the negligent ease of one who was thoroughly
accustomed to pavements; and placing three hunks of coarse bread before
himself, and falling to upon a fourth, began contentedly to work his way
through them as if to clear them off were a sort of game.

Perhaps he glanced at the Lyons sausage, and perhaps he glanced at the
veal in savoury jelly, but they were not there long, to make his mouth
water; Monsieur Rigaud soon dispatched them, in spite of the president
and tribunal, and proceeded to suck his fingers as clean as he could,
and to wipe them on his vine leaves. Then, as he paused in his drink
to contemplate his fellow-prisoner, his moustache went up, and his nose
came down.

‘How do you find the bread?’

‘A little dry, but I have my old sauce here,’ returned John Baptist,
holding up his knife.

‘How sauce?’

‘I can cut my bread so--like a melon. Or so--like an omelette. Or
so--like a fried fish. Or so--like Lyons sausage,’ said John Baptist,
demonstrating the various cuts on the bread he held, and soberly chewing
what he had in his mouth.

‘Here!’ cried Monsieur Rigaud. ‘You may drink. You may finish this.’

It was no great gift, for there was mighty little wine left; but Signor
Cavalletto, jumping to his feet, received the bottle gratefully, turned
it upside down at his mouth, and smacked his lips.

‘Put the bottle by with the rest,’ said Rigaud.

The little man obeyed his orders, and stood ready to give him a lighted
match; for he was now rolling his tobacco into cigarettes by the aid of
little squares of paper which had been brought in with it.

‘Here! You may have one.’

‘A thousand thanks, my master!’ John Baptist said in his own language,
and with the quick conciliatory manner of his own countrymen.

Monsieur Rigaud arose, lighted a cigarette, put the rest of his stock
into a breast-pocket, and stretched himself out at full length upon the
bench. Cavalletto sat down on the pavement, holding one of his ankles in
each hand, and smoking peacefully. There seemed to be some uncomfortable
attraction of Monsieur Rigaud’s eyes to the immediate neighbourhood of
that part of the pavement where the thumb had been in the plan. They
were so drawn in that direction, that the Italian more than once
followed them to and back from the pavement in some surprise.

‘What an infernal hole this is!’ said Monsieur Rigaud, breaking a long
pause. ‘Look at the light of day. Day? the light of yesterday week, the
light of six months ago, the light of six years ago. So slack and dead!’

It came languishing down a square funnel that blinded a window in the
staircase wall, through which the sky was never seen--nor anything else.

‘Cavalletto,’ said Monsieur Rigaud, suddenly withdrawing his gaze from
this funnel to which they had both involuntarily turned their eyes, ‘you
know me for a gentleman?’

‘Surely, surely!’

‘How long have we been here?’

‘I, eleven weeks, to-morrow night at midnight. You, nine weeks and three
days, at five this afternoon.’

‘Have I ever done anything here? Ever touched the broom, or spread
the mats, or rolled them up, or found the draughts, or collected the
dominoes, or put my hand to any kind of work?’

‘Never!’

‘Have you ever thought of looking to me to do any kind of work?’

John Baptist answered with that peculiar back-handed shake of the
right forefinger which is the most expressive negative in the Italian
language.

‘No! You knew from the first moment when you saw me here, that I was a
gentleman?’

‘ALTRO!’ returned John Baptist, closing his eyes and giving his head a
most vehement toss. The word being, according to its Genoese emphasis,
a confirmation, a contradiction, an assertion, a denial, a taunt,
a compliment, a joke, and fifty other things, became in the present
instance, with a significance beyond all power of written expression,
our familiar English ‘I believe you!’

‘Haha! You are right! A gentleman I am! And a gentleman I’ll live, and
a gentleman I’ll die! It’s my intent to be a gentleman. It’s my game.
Death of my soul, I play it out wherever I go!’

He changed his posture to a sitting one, crying with a triumphant air:

‘Here I am! See me! Shaken out of destiny’s dice-box into the company
of a mere smuggler;--shut up with a poor little contraband trader, whose
papers are wrong, and whom the police lay hold of besides, for placing
his boat (as a means of getting beyond the frontier) at the disposition
of other little people whose papers are wrong; and he instinctively
recognises my position, even by this light and in this place. It’s well
done! By Heaven! I win, however the game goes.’

Again his moustache went up, and his nose came down.

‘What’s the hour now?’ he asked, with a dry hot pallor upon him, rather
difficult of association with merriment.

‘A little half-hour after mid-day.’

‘Good! The President will have a gentleman before him soon. Come!
Shall I tell you on what accusation? It must be now, or never, for I
shall not return here. Either I shall go free, or I shall go to be made
ready for shaving. You know where they keep the razor.’

Signor Cavalletto took his cigarette from between his parted lips, and
showed more momentary discomfiture than might have been expected.

‘I am a’--Monsieur Rigaud stood up to say it--‘I am a cosmopolitan
gentleman. I own no particular country. My father was Swiss--Canton de
Vaud. My mother was French by blood, English by birth. I myself was born
in Belgium. I am a citizen of the world.’

His theatrical air, as he stood with one arm on his hip within the folds
of his cloak, together with his manner of disregarding his companion
and addressing the opposite wall instead, seemed to intimate that he
was rehearsing for the President, whose examination he was shortly to
undergo, rather than troubling himself merely to enlighten so small a
person as John Baptist Cavalletto.

‘Call me five-and-thirty years of age. I have seen the world. I have
lived here, and lived there, and lived like a gentleman everywhere. I
have been treated and respected as a gentleman universally. If you try
to prejudice me by making out that I have lived by my wits--how do
your lawyers live--your politicians--your intriguers--your men of the
Exchange?’

He kept his small smooth hand in constant requisition, as if it were a
witness to his gentility that had often done him good service before.

‘Two years ago I came to Marseilles. I admit that I was poor; I had been
ill. When your lawyers, your politicians, your intriguers, your men of
the Exchange fall ill, and have not scraped money together, _they_ become
poor. I put up at the Cross of Gold,--kept then by Monsieur Henri
Barronneau--sixty-five at least, and in a failing state of health. I had
lived in the house some four months when Monsieur Henri Barronneau had
the misfortune to die;--at any rate, not a rare misfortune, that. It
happens without any aid of mine, pretty often.’

John Baptist having smoked his cigarette down to his fingers’ ends,
Monsieur Rigaud had the magnanimity to throw him another. He lighted the
second at the ashes of the first, and smoked on, looking sideways at his
companion, who, preoccupied with his own case, hardly looked at him.

‘Monsieur Barronneau left a widow. She was two-and-twenty. She had
gained a reputation for beauty, and (which is often another thing) was
beautiful. I continued to live at the Cross of Gold. I married Madame
Barronneau. It is not for me to say whether there was any great
disparity in such a match. Here I stand, with the contamination of a
jail upon me; but it is possible that you may think me better suited to
her than her former husband was.’

He had a certain air of being a handsome man--which he was not; and
a certain air of being a well-bred man--which he was not. It was mere
swagger and challenge; but in this particular, as in many others,
blustering assertion goes for proof, half over the world.

‘Be it as it may, Madame Barronneau approved of me. _That_ is not to
prejudice me, I hope?’

His eye happening to light upon John Baptist with this inquiry, that
little man briskly shook his head in the negative, and repeated in an
argumentative tone under his breath, altro, altro, altro, altro--an
infinite number of times.

‘Now came the difficulties of our position. I am proud. I say nothing
in defence of pride, but I am proud. It is also my character to govern.
I can’t submit; I must govern. Unfortunately, the property of Madame
Rigaud was settled upon herself. Such was the insane act of her late
husband. More unfortunately still, she had relations. When a wife’s
relations interpose against a husband who is a gentleman, who is proud,
and who must govern, the consequences are inimical to peace. There
was yet another source of difference between us. Madame Rigaud was
unfortunately a little vulgar. I sought to improve her manners and
ameliorate her general tone; she (supported in this likewise by her
relations) resented my endeavours. Quarrels began to arise between us;
and, propagated and exaggerated by the slanders of the relations of
Madame Rigaud, to become notorious to the neighbours. It has been said
that I treated Madame Rigaud with cruelty. I may have been seen to slap
her face--nothing more. I have a light hand; and if I have been seen
apparently to correct Madame Rigaud in that manner, I have done it
almost playfully.’

If the playfulness of Monsieur Rigaud were at all expressed by his smile
at this point, the relations of Madame Rigaud might have said that
they would have much preferred his correcting that unfortunate woman
seriously.

‘I am sensitive and brave. I do not advance it as a merit to be
sensitive and brave, but it is my character. If the male relations of
Madame Rigaud had put themselves forward openly, I should have known how
to deal with them. They knew that, and their machinations were conducted
in secret; consequently, Madame Rigaud and I were brought into frequent
and unfortunate collision. Even when I wanted any little sum of money
for my personal expenses, I could not obtain it without collision--and
I, too, a man whose character it is to govern! One night, Madame Rigaud
and myself were walking amicably--I may say like lovers--on a height
overhanging the sea. An evil star occasioned Madame Rigaud to advert to
her relations; I reasoned with her on that subject, and remonstrated on
the want of duty and devotion manifested in her allowing herself to be
influenced by their jealous animosity towards her husband. Madame Rigaud
retorted; I retorted; Madame Rigaud grew warm; I grew warm, and provoked
her. I admit it. Frankness is a part of my character. At length, Madame
Rigaud, in an access of fury that I must ever deplore, threw herself
upon me with screams of passion (no doubt those that were overheard
at some distance), tore my clothes, tore my hair, lacerated my hands,
trampled and trod the dust, and finally leaped over, dashing herself to
death upon the rocks below. Such is the train of incidents which
malice has perverted into my endeavouring to force from Madame Rigaud
a relinquishment of her rights; and, on her persistence in a refusal to
make the concession I required, struggling with her--assassinating her!’

He stepped aside to the ledge where the vine leaves yet lay strewn
about, collected two or three, and stood wiping his hands upon them,
with his back to the light.

‘Well,’ he demanded after a silence, ‘have you nothing to say to all
that?’

‘It’s ugly,’ returned the little man, who had risen, and was brightening
his knife upon his shoe, as he leaned an arm against the wall.

‘What do you mean?’

John Baptist polished his knife in silence.

‘Do you mean that I have not represented the case correctly?’

‘Al-tro!’ returned John Baptist. The word was an apology now, and stood
for ‘Oh, by no means!’

‘What then?’

‘Presidents and tribunals are so prejudiced.’

‘Well,’ cried the other, uneasily flinging the end of his cloak over his
shoulder with an oath, ‘let them do their worst!’

‘Truly I think they will,’ murmured John Baptist to himself, as he bent
his head to put his knife in his sash.

Nothing more was said on either side, though they both began walking
to and fro, and necessarily crossed at every turn. Monsieur Rigaud
sometimes stopped, as if he were going to put his case in a new light,
or make some irate remonstrance; but Signor Cavalletto continuing to
go slowly to and fro at a grotesque kind of jog-trot pace with his eyes
turned downward, nothing came of these inclinings.

By-and-by the noise of the key in the lock arrested them both. The sound
of voices succeeded, and the tread of feet. The door clashed, the voices
and the feet came on, and the prison-keeper slowly ascended the stairs,
followed by a guard of soldiers.

‘Now, Monsieur Rigaud,’ said he, pausing for a moment at the grate, with
his keys in his hands, ‘have the goodness to come out.’

‘I am to depart in state, I see?’

‘Why, unless you did,’ returned the jailer, ‘you might depart in so many
pieces that it would be difficult to get you together again. There’s a
crowd, Monsieur Rigaud, and it doesn’t love you.’

He passed on out of sight, and unlocked and unbarred a low door in the
corner of the chamber. ‘Now,’ said he, as he opened it and appeared
within, ‘come out.’

There is no sort of whiteness in all the hues under the sun at all like
the whiteness of Monsieur Rigaud’s face as it was then. Neither is there
any expression of the human countenance at all like that expression in
every little line of which the frightened heart is seen to beat. Both
are conventionally compared with death; but the difference is the whole
deep gulf between the struggle done, and the fight at its most desperate
extremity.

He lighted another of his paper cigars at his companion’s; put it
tightly between his teeth; covered his head with a soft slouched hat;
threw the end of his cloak over his shoulder again; and walked out into
the side gallery on which the door opened, without taking any further
notice of Signor Cavalletto. As to that little man himself, his whole
attention had become absorbed in getting near the door and looking out
at it. Precisely as a beast might approach the opened gate of his den
and eye the freedom beyond, he passed those few moments in watching and
peering, until the door was closed upon him.

There was an officer in command of the soldiers; a stout, serviceable,
profoundly calm man, with his drawn sword in his hand, smoking a cigar.
He very briefly directed the placing of Monsieur Rigaud in the midst of
the party, put himself with consummate indifference at their head, gave
the word ‘march!’ and so they all went jingling down the staircase. The
door clashed--the key turned--and a ray of unusual light, and a breath
of unusual air, seemed to have passed through the jail, vanishing in a
tiny wreath of smoke from the cigar.

Still, in his captivity, like a lower animal--like some impatient ape,
or roused bear of the smaller species--the prisoner, now left solitary,
had jumped upon the ledge, to lose no glimpse of this departure. As he
yet stood clasping the grate with both hands, an uproar broke upon his
hearing; yells, shrieks, oaths, threats, execrations, all comprehended
in it, though (as in a storm) nothing but a raging swell of sound
distinctly heard.

Excited into a still greater resemblance to a caged wild animal by his
anxiety to know more, the prisoner leaped nimbly down, ran round the
chamber, leaped nimbly up again, clasped the grate and tried to shake
it, leaped down and ran, leaped up and listened, and never rested until
the noise, becoming more and more distant, had died away. How many
better prisoners have worn their noble hearts out so; no man thinking
of it; not even the beloved of their souls realising it; great kings
and governors, who had made them captive, careering in the sunlight
jauntily, and men cheering them on. Even the said great personages dying
in bed, making exemplary ends and sounding speeches; and polite history,
more servile than their instruments, embalming them!

At last, John Baptist, now able to choose his own spot within the
compass of those walls for the exercise of his faculty of going to sleep
when he would, lay down upon the bench, with his face turned over on his
crossed arms, and slumbered. In his submission, in his lightness, in his
good humour, in his short-lived passion, in his easy contentment with
hard bread and hard stones, in his ready sleep, in his fits and starts,
altogether a true son of the land that gave him birth.

The wide stare stared itself out for one while; the Sun went down in
a red, green, golden glory; the stars came out in the heavens, and the
fire-flies mimicked them in the lower air, as men may feebly imitate
the goodness of a better order of beings; the long dusty roads and the
interminable plains were in repose--and so deep a hush was on the sea,
that it scarcely whispered of the time when it shall give up its dead.




CHAPTER 2 Fellow Travellers


‘No more of yesterday’s howling over yonder to-day, Sir; is there?’

‘I have heard none.’

‘Then you may be sure there _is_ none. When these people howl, they howl
to be heard.’

‘Most people do, I suppose.’

‘Ah! but these people are always howling. Never happy otherwise.’

‘Do you mean the Marseilles people?’

‘I mean the French people. They’re always at it. As to Marseilles, we
know what Marseilles is. It sent the most insurrectionary tune into the
world that was ever composed. It couldn’t exist without allonging and
marshonging to something or other--victory or death, or blazes, or
something.’

The speaker, with a whimsical good humour upon him all the time, looked
over the parapet-wall with the greatest disparagement of Marseilles; and
taking up a determined position by putting his hands in his pockets and
rattling his money at it, apostrophised it with a short laugh.

‘Allong and marshong, indeed. It would be more creditable to you,
I think, to let other people allong and marshong about their lawful
business, instead of shutting ‘em up in quarantine!’

‘Tiresome enough,’ said the other. ‘But we shall be out to-day.’

‘Out to-day!’ repeated the first. ‘It’s almost an aggravation of the
enormity, that we shall be out to-day. Out! What have we ever been in
for?’

‘For no very strong reason, I must say. But as we come from the East,
and as the East is the country of the plague--’

‘The plague!’ repeated the other. ‘That’s my grievance. I have had the
plague continually, ever since I have been here. I am like a sane man
shut up in a madhouse; I can’t stand the suspicion of the thing. I came
here as well as ever I was in my life; but to suspect me of the plague
is to give me the plague. And I have had it--and I have got it.’

‘You bear it very well, Mr Meagles,’ said the second speaker, smiling.

‘No. If you knew the real state of the case, that’s the last observation
you would think of making. I have been waking up night after night, and
saying, _now_ I have got it, _now_ it has developed itself, _now_ I am
in for it, _now_ these fellows are making out their case for their
precautions. Why, I’d as soon have a spit put through me, and be stuck
upon a card in a collection of beetles, as lead the life I have been
leading here.’

‘Well, Mr Meagles, say no more about it now it’s over,’ urged a cheerful
feminine voice.

‘Over!’ repeated Mr Meagles, who appeared (though without any
ill-nature) to be in that peculiar state of mind in which the last word
spoken by anybody else is a new injury. ‘Over! and why should I say no
more about it because it’s over?’

It was Mrs Meagles who had spoken to Mr Meagles; and Mrs Meagles was,
like Mr Meagles, comely and healthy, with a pleasant English face which
had been looking at homely things for five-and-fifty years or more, and
shone with a bright reflection of them.

‘There! Never mind, Father, never mind!’ said Mrs Meagles. ‘For goodness
sake content yourself with Pet.’

‘With Pet?’ repeated Mr Meagles in his injured vein. Pet, however,
being close behind him, touched him on the shoulder, and Mr Meagles
immediately forgave Marseilles from the bottom of his heart.

Pet was about twenty. A fair girl with rich brown hair hanging free in
natural ringlets. A lovely girl, with a frank face, and wonderful eyes;
so large, so soft, so bright, set to such perfection in her kind good
head. She was round and fresh and dimpled and spoilt, and there was in
Pet an air of timidity and dependence which was the best weakness in
the world, and gave her the only crowning charm a girl so pretty and
pleasant could have been without.

‘Now, I ask you,’ said Mr Meagles in the blandest confidence, falling
back a step himself, and handing his daughter a step forward to
illustrate his question: ‘I ask you simply, as between man and man,
you know, DID you ever hear of such damned nonsense as putting Pet in
quarantine?’

‘It has had the result of making even quarantine enjoyable.’

‘Come!’ said Mr Meagles, ‘that’s something to be sure. I am obliged to
you for that remark. Now, Pet, my darling, you had better go along with
Mother and get ready for the boat. The officer of health, and a variety
of humbugs in cocked hats, are coming off to let us out of this at last:
and all we jail-birds are to breakfast together in something approaching
to a Christian style again, before we take wing for our different
destinations. Tattycoram, stick you close to your young mistress.’

He spoke to a handsome girl with lustrous dark hair and eyes, and very
neatly dressed, who replied with a half curtsey as she passed off in the
train of Mrs Meagles and Pet. They crossed the bare scorched terrace
all three together, and disappeared through a staring white archway.
Mr Meagles’s companion, a grave dark man of forty, still stood looking
towards this archway after they were gone; until Mr Meagles tapped him
on the arm.

‘I beg your pardon,’ said he, starting.

‘Not at all,’ said Mr Meagles.

They took one silent turn backward and forward in the shade of the wall,
getting, at the height on which the quarantine barracks are placed, what
cool refreshment of sea breeze there was at seven in the morning. Mr
Meagles’s companion resumed the conversation.

‘May I ask you,’ he said, ‘what is the name of--’

‘Tattycoram?’ Mr Meagles struck in. ‘I have not the least idea.’

‘I thought,’ said the other, ‘that--’

‘Tattycoram?’ suggested Mr Meagles again.

‘Thank you--that Tattycoram was a name; and I have several times
wondered at the oddity of it.’

‘Why, the fact is,’ said Mr Meagles, ‘Mrs Meagles and myself are, you
see, practical people.’

‘That you have frequently mentioned in the course of the agreeable and
interesting conversations we have had together, walking up and down on
these stones,’ said the other, with a half smile breaking through the
gravity of his dark face.

‘Practical people. So one day, five or six years ago now, when we took
Pet to church at the Foundling--you have heard of the Foundling Hospital
in London? Similar to the Institution for the Found Children in Paris?’

‘I have seen it.’

‘Well! One day when we took Pet to church there to hear the
music--because, as practical people, it is the business of our lives to
show her everything that we think can please her--Mother (my usual name
for Mrs Meagles) began to cry so, that it was necessary to take her out.
“What’s the matter, Mother?” said I, when we had brought her a little
round: “you are frightening Pet, my dear.” “Yes, I know that, Father,”
 says Mother, “but I think it’s through my loving her so much, that it
ever came into my head.” “That ever what came into your head, Mother?”
 “O dear, dear!” cried Mother, breaking out again, “when I saw all those
children ranged tier above tier, and appealing from the father none of
them has ever known on earth, to the great Father of us all in Heaven,
I thought, does any wretched mother ever come here, and look among those
young faces, wondering which is the poor child she brought into this
forlorn world, never through all its life to know her love, her kiss,
her face, her voice, even her name!” Now that was practical in Mother,
and I told her so. I said, “Mother, that’s what I call practical in you,
my dear.”’

The other, not unmoved, assented.

‘So I said next day: Now, Mother, I have a proposition to make that I
think you’ll approve of. Let us take one of those same little children
to be a little maid to Pet. We are practical people. So if we should
find her temper a little defective, or any of her ways a little wide
of ours, we shall know what we have to take into account. We shall
know what an immense deduction must be made from all the influences and
experiences that have formed us--no parents, no child-brother or sister,
no individuality of home, no Glass Slipper, or Fairy Godmother. And
that’s the way we came by Tattycoram.’

‘And the name itself--’

‘By George!’ said Mr Meagles, ‘I was forgetting the name itself. Why,
she was called in the Institution, Harriet Beadle--an arbitrary name,
of course. Now, Harriet we changed into Hattey, and then into Tatty,
because, as practical people, we thought even a playful name might be
a new thing to her, and might have a softening and affectionate kind of
effect, don’t you see? As to Beadle, that I needn’t say was wholly out
of the question. If there is anything that is not to be tolerated on
any terms, anything that is a type of Jack-in-office insolence and
absurdity, anything that represents in coats, waistcoats, and big sticks
our English holding on by nonsense after every one has found it out, it
is a beadle. You haven’t seen a beadle lately?’

‘As an Englishman who has been more than twenty years in China, no.’

‘Then,’ said Mr Meagles, laying his forefinger on his companion’s breast
with great animation, ‘don’t you see a beadle, now, if you can help it.
Whenever I see a beadle in full fig, coming down a street on a Sunday
at the head of a charity school, I am obliged to turn and run away, or
I should hit him. The name of Beadle being out of the question, and the
originator of the Institution for these poor foundlings having been a
blessed creature of the name of Coram, we gave that name to Pet’s little
maid. At one time she was Tatty, and at one time she was Coram, until we
got into a way of mixing the two names together, and now she is always
Tattycoram.’

‘Your daughter,’ said the other, when they had taken another silent turn
to and fro, and, after standing for a moment at the wall glancing down
at the sea, had resumed their walk, ‘is your only child, I know, Mr
Meagles. May I ask you--in no impertinent curiosity, but because I have
had so much pleasure in your society, may never in this labyrinth of
a world exchange a quiet word with you again, and wish to preserve an
accurate remembrance of you and yours--may I ask you, if I have not
gathered from your good wife that you have had other children?’

‘No. No,’ said Mr Meagles. ‘Not exactly other children. One other
child.’

‘I am afraid I have inadvertently touched upon a tender theme.’

‘Never mind,’ said Mr Meagles. ‘If I am grave about it, I am not at all
sorrowful. It quiets me for a moment, but does not make me unhappy. Pet
had a twin sister who died when we could just see her eyes--exactly like
Pet’s--above the table, as she stood on tiptoe holding by it.’

‘Ah! indeed, indeed!’

‘Yes, and being practical people, a result has gradually sprung up in
the minds of Mrs Meagles and myself which perhaps you may--or perhaps
you may not--understand. Pet and her baby sister were so exactly alike,
and so completely one, that in our thoughts we have never been able
to separate them since. It would be of no use to tell us that our dead
child was a mere infant. We have changed that child according to the
changes in the child spared to us and always with us. As Pet has grown,
that child has grown; as Pet has become more sensible and womanly, her
sister has become more sensible and womanly by just the same degrees.
It would be as hard to convince me that if I was to pass into the other
world to-morrow, I should not, through the mercy of God, be received
there by a daughter, just like Pet, as to persuade me that Pet herself
is not a reality at my side.’

‘I understand you,’ said the other, gently.

‘As to her,’ pursued her father, ‘the sudden loss of her little picture
and playfellow, and her early association with that mystery in which we
all have our equal share, but which is not often so forcibly presented
to a child, has necessarily had some influence on her character. Then,
her mother and I were not young when we married, and Pet has always had
a sort of grown-up life with us, though we have tried to adapt ourselves
to her. We have been advised more than once when she has been a
little ailing, to change climate and air for her as often as we
could--especially at about this time of her life--and to keep her
amused. So, as I have no need to stick at a bank-desk now (though I have
been poor enough in my time I assure you, or I should have married Mrs
Meagles long before), we go trotting about the world. This is how you
found us staring at the Nile, and the Pyramids, and the Sphinxes, and
the Desert, and all the rest of it; and this is how Tattycoram will be a
greater traveller in course of time than Captain Cook.’

‘I thank you,’ said the other, ‘very heartily for your confidence.’

‘Don’t mention it,’ returned Mr Meagles, ‘I am sure you are quite
welcome. And now, Mr Clennam, perhaps I may ask you whether you have yet
come to a decision where to go next?’

‘Indeed, no. I am such a waif and stray everywhere, that I am liable to
be drifted where any current may set.’

‘It’s extraordinary to me--if you’ll excuse my freedom in saying
so--that you don’t go straight to London,’ said Mr Meagles, in the tone
of a confidential adviser.

‘Perhaps I shall.’

‘Ay! But I mean with a will.’

‘I have no will. That is to say,’--he coloured a little,--‘next to none
that I can put in action now. Trained by main force; broken, not bent;
heavily ironed with an object on which I was never consulted and which
was never mine; shipped away to the other end of the world before I
was of age, and exiled there until my father’s death there, a year ago;
always grinding in a mill I always hated; what is to be expected from me
in middle life? Will, purpose, hope? All those lights were extinguished
before I could sound the words.’

‘Light ‘em up again!’ said Mr Meagles.

‘Ah! Easily said. I am the son, Mr Meagles, of a hard father and
mother. I am the only child of parents who weighed, measured, and priced
everything; for whom what could not be weighed, measured, and priced,
had no existence. Strict people as the phrase is, professors of a stern
religion, their very religion was a gloomy sacrifice of tastes and
sympathies that were never their own, offered up as a part of a bargain
for the security of their possessions. Austere faces, inexorable
discipline, penance in this world and terror in the next--nothing
graceful or gentle anywhere, and the void in my cowed heart
everywhere--this was my childhood, if I may so misuse the word as to
apply it to such a beginning of life.’

‘Really though?’ said Mr Meagles, made very uncomfortable by the picture
offered to his imagination. ‘That was a tough commencement. But come!
You must now study, and profit by, all that lies beyond it, like a
practical man.’

‘If the people who are usually called practical, were practical in your
direction--’

‘Why, so they are!’ said Mr Meagles.

‘Are they indeed?’

‘Well, I suppose so,’ returned Mr Meagles, thinking about it. ‘Eh? One
can but _be_ practical, and Mrs Meagles and myself are nothing else.’

‘My unknown course is easier and more helpful than I had expected to
find it, then,’ said Clennam, shaking his head with his grave smile.
‘Enough of me. Here is the boat.’

The boat was filled with the cocked hats to which Mr Meagles entertained
a national objection; and the wearers of those cocked hats landed
and came up the steps, and all the impounded travellers congregated
together. There was then a mighty production of papers on the part of
the cocked hats, and a calling over of names, and great work of signing,
sealing, stamping, inking, and sanding, with exceedingly blurred,
gritty, and undecipherable results. Finally, everything was done
according to rule, and the travellers were at liberty to depart
whithersoever they would.

They made little account of stare and glare, in the new pleasure of
recovering their freedom, but flitted across the harbour in gay boats,
and reassembled at a great hotel, whence the sun was excluded by closed
lattices, and where bare paved floors, lofty ceilings, and resounding
corridors tempered the intense heat. There, a great table in a great
room was soon profusely covered with a superb repast; and the quarantine
quarters became bare indeed, remembered among dainty dishes, southern
fruits, cooled wines, flowers from Genoa, snow from the mountain tops,
and all the colours of the rainbow flashing in the mirrors.

‘But I bear those monotonous walls no ill-will now,’ said Mr Meagles.
‘One always begins to forgive a place as soon as it’s left behind; I
dare say a prisoner begins to relent towards his prison, after he is let
out.’

They were about thirty in company, and all talking; but necessarily in
groups. Father and Mother Meagles sat with their daughter between them,
the last three on one side of the table: on the opposite side sat Mr
Clennam; a tall French gentleman with raven hair and beard, of a swart
and terrible, not to say genteelly diabolical aspect, but who had
shown himself the mildest of men; and a handsome young Englishwoman,
travelling quite alone, who had a proud observant face, and had either
withdrawn herself from the rest or been avoided by the rest--nobody,
herself excepted perhaps, could have quite decided which. The rest
of the party were of the usual materials: travellers on business, and
travellers for pleasure; officers from India on leave; merchants in
the Greek and Turkey trades; a clerical English husband in a meek
strait-waistcoat, on a wedding trip with his young wife; a majestic
English mama and papa, of the patrician order, with a family of three
growing-up daughters, who were keeping a journal for the confusion of
their fellow-creatures; and a deaf old English mother, tough in travel,
with a very decidedly grown-up daughter indeed, which daughter went
sketching about the universe in the expectation of ultimately toning
herself off into the married state.

The reserved Englishwoman took up Mr Meagles in his last remark.

‘Do you mean that a prisoner forgives his prison?’ said she, slowly and
with emphasis.


‘That was my speculation, Miss Wade. I don’t pretend to know positively
how a prisoner might feel. I never was one before.’

‘Mademoiselle doubts,’ said the French gentleman in his own language,
‘it’s being so easy to forgive?’

‘I do.’

Pet had to translate this passage to Mr Meagles, who never by any
accident acquired any knowledge whatever of the language of any country
into which he travelled. ‘Oh!’ said he. ‘Dear me! But that’s a pity,
isn’t it?’

‘That I am not credulous?’ said Miss Wade.

‘Not exactly that. Put it another way. That you can’t believe it easy to
forgive.’

‘My experience,’ she quietly returned, ‘has been correcting my belief
in many respects, for some years. It is our natural progress, I have
heard.’

‘Well, well! But it’s not natural to bear malice, I hope?’ said Mr
Meagles, cheerily.

‘If I had been shut up in any place to pine and suffer, I should always
hate that place and wish to burn it down, or raze it to the ground. I
know no more.’

‘Strong, sir?’ said Mr Meagles to the Frenchman; it being another of his
habits to address individuals of all nations in idiomatic English, with
a perfect conviction that they were bound to understand it somehow.
‘Rather forcible in our fair friend, you’ll agree with me, I think?’

The French gentleman courteously replied, ‘Plait-il?’ To which Mr
Meagles returned with much satisfaction, ‘You are right. My opinion.’

The breakfast beginning by-and-by to languish, Mr Meagles made the
company a speech. It was short enough and sensible enough, considering
that it was a speech at all, and hearty. It merely went to the effect
that as they had all been thrown together by chance, and had all
preserved a good understanding together, and were now about to disperse,
and were not likely ever to find themselves all together again, what
could they do better than bid farewell to one another, and give one
another good-speed in a simultaneous glass of cool champagne all round
the table? It was done, and with a general shaking of hands the assembly
broke up for ever.

The solitary young lady all this time had said no more. She rose with
the rest, and silently withdrew to a remote corner of the great room,
where she sat herself on a couch in a window, seeming to watch the
reflection of the water as it made a silver quivering on the bars of the
lattice. She sat, turned away from the whole length of the apartment, as
if she were lonely of her own haughty choice. And yet it would have been
as difficult as ever to say, positively, whether she avoided the rest,
or was avoided.

The shadow in which she sat, falling like a gloomy veil across her
forehead, accorded very well with the character of her beauty. One could
hardly see the face, so still and scornful, set off by the arched
dark eyebrows, and the folds of dark hair, without wondering what its
expression would be if a change came over it. That it could soften or
relent, appeared next to impossible. That it could deepen into anger or
any extreme of defiance, and that it must change in that direction when
it changed at all, would have been its peculiar impression upon most
observers. It was dressed and trimmed into no ceremony of expression.
Although not an open face, there was no pretence in it. ‘I am
self-contained and self-reliant; your opinion is nothing to me; I have
no interest in you, care nothing for you, and see and hear you with
indifference’--this it said plainly. It said so in the proud eyes, in
the lifted nostril, in the handsome but compressed and even cruel mouth.
Cover either two of those channels of expression, and the third would
have said so still. Mask them all, and the mere turn of the head would
have shown an unsubduable nature.

Pet had moved up to her (she had been the subject of remark among her
family and Mr Clennam, who were now the only other occupants of the
room), and was standing at her side.

‘Are you’--she turned her eyes, and Pet faltered--‘expecting any one to
meet you here, Miss Wade?’

‘I? No.’

‘Father is sending to the Poste Restante. Shall he have the pleasure of
directing the messenger to ask if there are any letters for you?’

‘I thank him, but I know there can be none.’

‘We are afraid,’ said Pet, sitting down beside her, shyly and half
tenderly, ‘that you will feel quite deserted when we are all gone.’

‘Indeed!’

‘Not,’ said Pet, apologetically and embarrassed by her eyes, ‘not, of
course, that we are any company to you, or that we have been able to be
so, or that we thought you wished it.’

‘I have not intended to make it understood that I did wish it.’

‘No. Of course. But--in short,’ said Pet, timidly touching her hand as
it lay impassive on the sofa between them, ‘will you not allow Father to
tender you any slight assistance or service? He will be very glad.’

‘Very glad,’ said Mr Meagles, coming forward with his wife and Clennam.
‘Anything short of speaking the language, I shall be delighted to
undertake, I am sure.’

‘I am obliged to you,’ she returned, ‘but my arrangements are made, and
I prefer to go my own way in my own manner.’

‘_Do_ you?’ said Mr Meagles to himself, as he surveyed her with a puzzled
look. ‘Well! There’s character in that, too.’

‘I am not much used to the society of young ladies, and I am afraid I
may not show my appreciation of it as others might. A pleasant journey
to you. Good-bye!’

She would not have put out her hand, it seemed, but that Mr Meagles put
out his so straight before her that she could not pass it. She put hers
in it, and it lay there just as it had lain upon the couch.

‘Good-bye!’ said Mr Meagles. ‘This is the last good-bye upon the list,
for Mother and I have just said it to Mr Clennam here, and he only waits
to say it to Pet. Good-bye! We may never meet again.’

‘In our course through life we shall meet the people who are coming to
meet _us_, from many strange places and by many strange roads,’ was the
composed reply; ‘and what it is set to us to do to them, and what it is
set to them to do to us, will all be done.’

There was something in the manner of these words that jarred upon Pet’s
ear. It implied that what was to be done was necessarily evil, and it
caused her to say in a whisper, ‘O Father!’ and to shrink childishly, in
her spoilt way, a little closer to him. This was not lost on the
speaker.

‘Your pretty daughter,’ she said, ‘starts to think of such things. Yet,’
looking full upon her, ‘you may be sure that there are men and women
already on their road, who have their business to do with _you_, and who
will do it. Of a certainty they will do it. They may be coming hundreds,
thousands, of miles over the sea there; they may be close at hand now;
they may be coming, for anything you know or anything you can do to
prevent it, from the vilest sweepings of this very town.’

With the coldest of farewells, and with a certain worn expression on her
beauty that gave it, though scarcely yet in its prime, a wasted look,
she left the room.

Now, there were many stairs and passages that she had to traverse in
passing from that part of the spacious house to the chamber she had
secured for her own occupation. When she had almost completed the
journey, and was passing along the gallery in which her room was, she
heard an angry sound of muttering and sobbing. A door stood open, and
within she saw the attendant upon the girl she had just left; the maid
with the curious name.

She stood still, to look at this maid. A sullen, passionate girl! Her
rich black hair was all about her face, her face was flushed and hot,
and as she sobbed and raged, she plucked at her lips with an unsparing
hand.

‘Selfish brutes!’ said the girl, sobbing and heaving between whiles.
‘Not caring what becomes of me! Leaving me here hungry and thirsty and
tired, to starve, for anything they care! Beasts! Devils! Wretches!’

‘My poor girl, what is the matter?’

She looked up suddenly, with reddened eyes, and with her hands
suspended, in the act of pinching her neck, freshly disfigured with
great scarlet blots. ‘It’s nothing to you what’s the matter. It don’t
signify to any one.’

‘O yes it does; I am sorry to see you so.’

‘You are not sorry,’ said the girl. ‘You are glad. You know you are
glad. I never was like this but twice over in the quarantine yonder; and
both times you found me. I am afraid of you.’

‘Afraid of me?’

‘Yes. You seem to come like my own anger, my own malice, my
own--whatever it is--I don’t know what it is. But I am ill-used, I am
ill-used, I am ill-used!’ Here the sobs and the tears, and the tearing
hand, which had all been suspended together since the first surprise,
went on together anew.

The visitor stood looking at her with a strange attentive smile. It was
wonderful to see the fury of the contest in the girl, and the bodily
struggle she made as if she were rent by the Demons of old.

‘I am younger than she is by two or three years, and yet it’s me that
looks after her, as if I was old, and it’s she that’s always petted and
called Baby! I detest the name. I hate her! They make a fool of her,
they spoil her. She thinks of nothing but herself, she thinks no more of
me than if I was a stock and a stone!’ So the girl went on.

‘You must have patience.’

‘I _won’t_ have patience!’

‘If they take much care of themselves, and little or none of you, you
must not mind it.’

I _will_ mind it.’

‘Hush! Be more prudent. You forget your dependent position.’

‘I don’t care for that. I’ll run away. I’ll do some mischief. I won’t
bear it; I can’t bear it; I shall die if I try to bear it!’

The observer stood with her hand upon her own bosom, looking at the
girl, as one afflicted with a diseased part might curiously watch the
dissection and exposition of an analogous case.

The girl raged and battled with all the force of her youth and fulness
of life, until by little and little her passionate exclamations trailed
off into broken murmurs as if she were in pain. By corresponding degrees
she sank into a chair, then upon her knees, then upon the ground beside
the bed, drawing the coverlet with her, half to hide her shamed head and
wet hair in it, and half, as it seemed, to embrace it, rather than have
nothing to take to her repentant breast.

‘Go away from me, go away from me! When my temper comes upon me, I
am mad. I know I might keep it off if I only tried hard enough, and
sometimes I do try hard enough, and at other times I don’t and won’t.
What have I said! I knew when I said it, it was all lies. They think I
am being taken care of somewhere, and have all I want. They are nothing
but good to me. I love them dearly; no people could ever be kinder to a
thankless creature than they always are to me. Do, do go away, for I am
afraid of you. I am afraid of myself when I feel my temper coming, and I
am as much afraid of you. Go away from me, and let me pray and cry
myself better!’

The day passed on; and again the wide stare stared itself out; and the
hot night was on Marseilles; and through it the caravan of the morning,
all dispersed, went their appointed ways. And thus ever by day and
night, under the sun and under the stars, climbing the dusty hills and
toiling along the weary plains, journeying by land and journeying by
sea, coming and going so strangely, to meet and to act and react on one
another, move all we restless travellers through the pilgrimage of life.




CHAPTER 3. Home


It was a Sunday evening in London, gloomy, close, and stale. Maddening
church bells of all degrees of dissonance, sharp and flat, cracked
and clear, fast and slow, made the brick-and-mortar echoes hideous.
Melancholy streets, in a penitential garb of soot, steeped the souls of
the people who were condemned to look at them out of windows, in dire
despondency. In every thoroughfare, up almost every alley, and down
almost every turning, some doleful bell was throbbing, jerking, tolling,
as if the Plague were in the city and the dead-carts were going round.
Everything was bolted and barred that could by possibility furnish
relief to an overworked people. No pictures, no unfamiliar animals, no
rare plants or flowers, no natural or artificial wonders of the ancient
world--all _taboo_ with that enlightened strictness, that the ugly South
Sea gods in the British Museum might have supposed themselves at home
again. Nothing to see but streets, streets, streets. Nothing to breathe
but streets, streets, streets. Nothing to change the brooding mind,
or raise it up. Nothing for the spent toiler to do, but to compare the
monotony of his seventh day with the monotony of his six days, think
what a weary life he led, and make the best of it--or the worst,
according to the probabilities.

At such a happy time, so propitious to the interests of religion and
morality, Mr Arthur Clennam, newly arrived from Marseilles by way of
Dover, and by Dover coach the Blue-eyed Maid, sat in the window of a
coffee-house on Ludgate Hill. Ten thousand responsible houses surrounded
him, frowning as heavily on the streets they composed, as if they were
every one inhabited by the ten young men of the Calender’s story, who
blackened their faces and bemoaned their miseries every night. Fifty
thousand lairs surrounded him where people lived so unwholesomely that
fair water put into their crowded rooms on Saturday night, would be
corrupt on Sunday morning; albeit my lord, their county member, was
amazed that they failed to sleep in company with their butcher’s meat.
Miles of close wells and pits of houses, where the inhabitants gasped
for air, stretched far away towards every point of the compass. Through
the heart of the town a deadly sewer ebbed and flowed, in the place of
a fine fresh river. What secular want could the million or so of
human beings whose daily labour, six days in the week, lay among these
Arcadian objects, from the sweet sameness of which they had no escape
between the cradle and the grave--what secular want could they possibly
have upon their seventh day? Clearly they could want nothing but a
stringent policeman.

Mr Arthur Clennam sat in the window of the coffee-house on Ludgate Hill,
counting one of the neighbouring bells, making sentences and burdens of
songs out of it in spite of himself, and wondering how many sick
people it might be the death of in the course of the year. As the hour
approached, its changes of measure made it more and more exasperating.
At the quarter, it went off into a condition of deadly-lively
importunity, urging the populace in a voluble manner to Come to church,
Come to church, Come to church! At the ten minutes, it became aware
that the congregation would be scanty, and slowly hammered out in low
spirits, They _won’t_ come, they _won’t_ come, they _won’t_ come! At the
five minutes, it abandoned hope, and shook every house in the
neighbourhood for three hundred seconds, with one dismal swing per
second, as a groan of despair.

‘Thank Heaven!’ said Clennam, when the hour struck, and the bell
stopped.

But its sound had revived a long train of miserable Sundays, and the
procession would not stop with the bell, but continued to march on.
‘Heaven forgive me,’ said he, ‘and those who trained me. How I have
hated this day!’

There was the dreary Sunday of his childhood, when he sat with his hands
before him, scared out of his senses by a horrible tract which commenced
business with the poor child by asking him in its title, why he was
going to Perdition?--a piece of curiosity that he really, in a frock and
drawers, was not in a condition to satisfy--and which, for the further
attraction of his infant mind, had a parenthesis in every other line
with some such hiccupping reference as 2 Ep. Thess. c. iii, v. 6 &
7. There was the sleepy Sunday of his boyhood, when, like a military
deserter, he was marched to chapel by a picquet of teachers three times
a day, morally handcuffed to another boy; and when he would willingly
have bartered two meals of indigestible sermon for another ounce or
two of inferior mutton at his scanty dinner in the flesh. There was the
interminable Sunday of his nonage; when his mother, stern of face and
unrelenting of heart, would sit all day behind a Bible--bound, like her
own construction of it, in the hardest, barest, and straitest boards,
with one dinted ornament on the cover like the drag of a chain, and a
wrathful sprinkling of red upon the edges of the leaves--as if it, of
all books! were a fortification against sweetness of temper, natural
affection, and gentle intercourse. There was the resentful Sunday of a
little later, when he sat down glowering and glooming through the tardy
length of the day, with a sullen sense of injury in his heart, and no
more real knowledge of the beneficent history of the New Testament than
if he had been bred among idolaters. There was a legion of Sundays,
all days of unserviceable bitterness and mortification, slowly passing
before him.

‘Beg pardon, sir,’ said a brisk waiter, rubbing the table. ‘Wish see
bed-room?’

‘Yes. I have just made up my mind to do it.’

‘Chaymaid!’ cried the waiter. ‘Gelen box num seven wish see room!’

‘Stay!’ said Clennam, rousing himself. ‘I was not thinking of what I
said; I answered mechanically. I am not going to sleep here. I am going
home.’

‘Deed, sir? Chaymaid! Gelen box num seven, not go sleep here, gome.’

He sat in the same place as the day died, looking at the dull houses
opposite, and thinking, if the disembodied spirits of former inhabitants
were ever conscious of them, how they must pity themselves for their old
places of imprisonment. Sometimes a face would appear behind the dingy
glass of a window, and would fade away into the gloom as if it had seen
enough of life and had vanished out of it. Presently the rain began to
fall in slanting lines between him and those houses, and people began
to collect under cover of the public passage opposite, and to look out
hopelessly at the sky as the rain dropped thicker and faster. Then wet
umbrellas began to appear, draggled skirts, and mud. What the mud had
been doing with itself, or where it came from, who could say? But it
seemed to collect in a moment, as a crowd will, and in five minutes to
have splashed all the sons and daughters of Adam. The lamplighter was
going his rounds now; and as the fiery jets sprang up under his touch,
one might have fancied them astonished at being suffered to introduce
any show of brightness into such a dismal scene.

Mr Arthur Clennam took up his hat and buttoned his coat, and walked out.
In the country, the rain would have developed a thousand fresh scents,
and every drop would have had its bright association with some beautiful
form of growth or life. In the city, it developed only foul stale
smells, and was a sickly, lukewarm, dirt-stained, wretched addition to
the gutters.

He crossed by St Paul’s and went down, at a long angle, almost to the
water’s edge, through some of the crooked and descending streets which
lie (and lay more crookedly and closely then) between the river and
Cheapside. Passing, now the mouldy hall of some obsolete Worshipful
Company, now the illuminated windows of a Congregationless Church that
seemed to be waiting for some adventurous Belzoni to dig it out and
discover its history; passing silent warehouses and wharves, and here
and there a narrow alley leading to the river, where a wretched little
bill, FOUND DROWNED, was weeping on the wet wall; he came at last to the
house he sought. An old brick house, so dingy as to be all but black,
standing by itself within a gateway. Before it, a square court-yard
where a shrub or two and a patch of grass were as rank (which is saying
much) as the iron railings enclosing them were rusty; behind it,
a jumble of roots. It was a double house, with long, narrow,
heavily-framed windows. Many years ago, it had had it in its mind to
slide down sideways; it had been propped up, however, and was leaning on
some half-dozen gigantic crutches: which gymnasium for the neighbouring
cats, weather-stained, smoke-blackened, and overgrown with weeds,
appeared in these latter days to be no very sure reliance.

‘Nothing changed,’ said the traveller, stopping to look round. ‘Dark and
miserable as ever. A light in my mother’s window, which seems never to
have been extinguished since I came home twice a year from school, and
dragged my box over this pavement. Well, well, well!’

He went up to the door, which had a projecting canopy in carved work
of festooned jack-towels and children’s heads with water on the brain,
designed after a once-popular monumental pattern, and knocked. A
shuffling step was soon heard on the stone floor of the hall, and the
door was opened by an old man, bent and dried, but with keen eyes.

He had a candle in his hand, and he held it up for a moment to assist
his keen eyes. ‘Ah, Mr Arthur?’ he said, without any emotion, ‘you are
come at last? Step in.’

Mr Arthur stepped in and shut the door.

‘Your figure is filled out, and set,’ said the old man, turning to look
at him with the light raised again, and shaking his head; ‘but you don’t
come up to your father in my opinion. Nor yet your mother.’

‘How is my mother?’

‘She is as she always is now. Keeps her room when not actually
bedridden, and hasn’t been out of it fifteen times in as many years,
Arthur.’ They had walked into a spare, meagre dining-room. The old man
had put the candlestick upon the table, and, supporting his right elbow
with his left hand, was smoothing his leathern jaws while he looked at
the visitor. The visitor offered his hand. The old man took it coldly
enough, and seemed to prefer his jaws, to which he returned as soon as
he could.

‘I doubt if your mother will approve of your coming home on the Sabbath,
Arthur,’ he said, shaking his head warily.

‘You wouldn’t have me go away again?’

‘Oh! I? I? I am not the master. It’s not what _I_ would have. I have
stood between your father and mother for a number of years. I don’t
pretend to stand between your mother and you.’

‘Will you tell her that I have come home?’

‘Yes, Arthur, yes. Oh, to be sure! I’ll tell her that you have come
home. Please to wait here. You won’t find the room changed.’ He took
another candle from a cupboard, lighted it, left the first on the table,
and went upon his errand. He was a short, bald old man, in a
high-shouldered black coat and waistcoat, drab breeches, and 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, glancing in
dread from the one averted face to the other, had been the peacefullest
occupation of his childhood. She gave him one glassy kiss, and four
stiff fingers muffled in worsted. This embrace concluded, he sat down on
the opposite side of her little table. There was a fire in the grate,
as there had been night and day for fifteen years. There was a kettle on
the hob, as there had been night and day for fifteen years. There was a
little mound of damped ashes on the top of the fire, and another little
mound swept together under the grate, as there had been night and day
for fifteen years. There was a smell of black dye in the airless room,
which the fire had been drawing out of the crape and stuff of the
widow’s dress for fifteen months, and out of the bier-like sofa for
fifteen years.

‘Mother, this is a change from your old active habits.’

‘The world has narrowed to these dimensions, Arthur,’ she replied,
glancing round the room. ‘It is well for me that I never set my heart
upon its hollow vanities.’

The old influence of her presence and her stern strong voice, so
gathered about her son, that he felt conscious of a renewal of the timid
chill and reserve of his childhood.

‘Do you never leave your room, mother?’

‘What with my rheumatic affection, and what with its attendant debility
or nervous weakness--names are of no matter now--I have lost the use
of my limbs. I never leave my room. I have not been outside this door
for--tell him for how long,’ she said, speaking over her shoulder.

‘A dozen year next Christmas,’ returned a cracked voice out of the
dimness behind.

‘Is that Affery?’ said Arthur, looking towards it.

The cracked voice replied that it was Affery: and an old woman came
forward into what doubtful light there was, and kissed her hand once;
then subsided again into the dimness.

‘I am able,’ said Mrs Clennam, with a slight motion of her
worsted-muffled right hand toward a chair on wheels, standing before a
tall writing cabinet close shut up, ‘I am able to attend to my business
duties, and I am thankful for the privilege. It is a great privilege.
But no more of business on this day. It is a bad night, is it not?’

‘Yes, mother.’

‘Does it snow?’

‘Snow, mother? And we only yet in September?’

‘All seasons are alike to me,’ she returned, with a grim kind of
luxuriousness. ‘I know nothing of summer and winter, shut up here.
The Lord has been pleased to put me beyond all that.’ With her cold grey
eyes and her cold grey hair, and her immovable face, as stiff as the
folds of her stony head-dress,--her being beyond the reach of the
seasons seemed but a fit sequence to her being beyond the reach of all
changing emotions.

On her little table lay two or three books, her handkerchief, a pair of
steel spectacles newly taken off, and an old-fashioned gold watch in a
heavy double case. Upon this last object her son’s eyes and her own now
rested together.

‘I see that you received the packet I sent you on my father’s death,
safely, mother.’

‘You see.’

‘I never knew my father to show so much anxiety on any subject, as that
his watch should be sent straight to you.’

‘I keep it here as a remembrance of your father.’

‘It was not until the last, that he expressed the wish; when he could
only put his hand upon it, and very indistinctly say to me “your
mother.” A moment before, I thought him wandering in his mind, as he
had been for many hours--I think he had no consciousness of pain in his
short illness--when I saw him turn himself in his bed and try to open
it.’

‘Was your father, then, not wandering in his mind when he tried to open
it?’

‘No. He was quite sensible at that time.’

Mrs Clennam shook her head; whether in dismissal of the deceased or
opposing herself to her son’s opinion, was not clearly expressed.

‘After my father’s death I opened it myself, thinking there might be,
for anything I knew, some memorandum there. However, as I need not tell
you, mother, there was nothing but the old silk watch-paper worked in
beads, which you found (no doubt) in its place between the cases, where
I found and left it.’

Mrs Clennam signified assent; then added, ‘No more of business on this
day,’ and then added, ‘Affery, it is nine o’clock.’

Upon this, the old woman cleared the little table, went out of the room,
and quickly returned with a tray on which was a dish of little rusks and
a small precise pat of butter, cool, symmetrical, white, and plump. The
old man who had been standing by the door in one attitude during the
whole interview, looking at the mother up-stairs as he had looked at the
son down-stairs, went out at the same time, and, after a longer absence,
returned with another tray on which was the greater part of a bottle
of port wine (which, to judge by his panting, he had brought from the
cellar), a lemon, a sugar-basin, and a spice box. With these materials
and the aid of the kettle, he filled a tumbler with a hot and
odorous mixture, measured out and compounded with as much nicety as a
physician’s prescription. Into this mixture Mrs Clennam dipped certain
of the rusks, and ate them; while the old woman buttered certain other
of the rusks, which were to be eaten alone. When the invalid had eaten
all the rusks and drunk all the mixture, the two trays were removed;
and the books and the candle, watch, handkerchief, and spectacles were
replaced upon the table. She then put on the spectacles and read certain
passages aloud from a book--sternly, fiercely, wrathfully--praying that
her enemies (she made them by her tone and manner expressly hers) might
be put to the edge of the sword, consumed by fire, smitten by plagues
and leprosy, that their bones might be ground to dust, and that they
might be utterly exterminated. As she read on, years seemed to fall
away from her son like the imaginings of a dream, and all the old dark
horrors of his usual preparation for the sleep of an innocent child to
overshadow him.

She shut the book and remained for a little time with her face shaded by
her hand. So did the old man, otherwise still unchanged in attitude; so,
probably, did the old woman in her dimmer part of the room. Then the
sick woman was ready for bed.

‘Good night, Arthur. Affery will see to your accommodation. Only touch
me, for my hand is tender.’ He touched the worsted muffling of her
hand--that was nothing; if his mother had been sheathed in brass there
would have been no new barrier between them--and followed the old man
and woman down-stairs.

The latter asked him, when they were alone together among the heavy
shadows of the dining-room, would he have some supper?

‘No, Affery, no supper.’

‘You shall if you like,’ said Affery. ‘There’s her tomorrow’s partridge
in the larder--her first this year; say the word and I’ll cook it.’

No, he had not long dined, and could eat nothing.

‘Have something to drink, then,’ said Affery; ‘you shall have some of
her bottle of port, if you like. I’ll tell Jeremiah that you ordered me
to bring it you.’

No; nor would he have that, either.

‘It’s no reason, Arthur,’ said the old woman, bending over him to
whisper, ‘that because I am afeared of my life of ‘em, you should be.
You’ve got half the property, haven’t you?’

‘Yes, yes.’

‘Well then, don’t you be cowed. You’re clever, Arthur, an’t you?’

He nodded, as she seemed to expect an answer in the affirmative.

‘Then stand up against them! She’s awful clever, and none but a clever
one durst say a word to her. _He’s_ a clever one--oh, he’s a clever
one!--and he gives it her when he has a mind to’t, he does!’

‘Your husband does?’

‘Does? It makes me shake from head to foot, to hear him give it her. My
husband, Jeremiah Flintwinch, can conquer even your mother. What can he
be but a clever one to do that!’

His shuffling footstep coming towards them caused her to retreat to the
other end of the room. Though a tall, hard-favoured, sinewy old woman,
who in her youth might have enlisted in the Foot Guards without much
fear of discovery, she collapsed before the little keen-eyed crab-like
old man.

‘Now, Affery,’ said he, ‘now, woman, what are you doing? Can’t you find
Master Arthur something or another to pick at?’

Master Arthur repeated his recent refusal to pick at anything.

‘Very well, then,’ said the old man; ‘make his bed. Stir yourself.’ His
neck was so twisted that the knotted ends of his white cravat usually
dangled under one ear; his natural acerbity and energy, always
contending with a second nature of habitual repression, gave his
features a swollen and suffused look; and altogether, he had a weird
appearance of having hanged himself at one time or other, and of having
gone about ever since, halter and all, exactly as some timely hand had
cut him down.

‘You’ll have bitter words together to-morrow, Arthur; you and your
mother,’ said Jeremiah. ‘Your having given up the business on your
father’s death--which she suspects, though we have left it to you to
tell her--won’t go off smoothly.’

‘I have given up everything in life for the business, and the time came
for me to give up that.’

‘Good!’ cried Jeremiah, evidently meaning Bad. ‘Very good! only don’t
expect me to stand between your mother and you, Arthur. I stood between
your mother and your father, fending off this, and fending off that, and
getting crushed and pounded betwixt em; and I’ve done with such work.’

‘You will never be asked to begin it again for me, Jeremiah.’

‘Good. I’m glad to hear it; because I should have had to decline it, if
I had been. That’s enough--as your mother says--and more than enough of
such matters on a Sabbath night. Affery, woman, have you found what you
want yet?’

She had been collecting sheets and blankets from a press, and hastened
to gather them up, and to reply, ‘Yes, Jeremiah.’ Arthur Clennam helped
her by carrying the load himself, wished the old man good night, and
went up-stairs with her to the top of the house.

They mounted up and up, through the musty smell of an old close house,
little used, to a large garret bed-room. Meagre and spare, like all the
other rooms, it was even uglier and grimmer than the rest, by being the
place of banishment for the worn-out furniture. Its movables were ugly
old chairs with worn-out seats, and ugly old chairs without any seats;
a threadbare patternless carpet, a maimed table, a crippled wardrobe,
a lean set of fire-irons like the skeleton of a set deceased, a
washing-stand that looked as if it had stood for ages in a hail of
dirty soapsuds, and a bedstead with four bare atomies of posts, each
terminating in a spike, as if for the dismal accommodation of lodgers
who might prefer to impale themselves. Arthur opened the long low
window, and looked out upon the old blasted and blackened forest of
chimneys, and the old red glare in the sky, which had seemed to him once
upon a time but a nightly reflection of the fiery environment that was
presented to his childish fancy in all directions, let it look where it
would.

He drew in his head again, sat down at the bedside, and looked on at
Affery Flintwinch making the bed.

‘Affery, you were not married when I went away.’

She screwed her mouth into the form of saying ‘No,’ shook her head, and
proceeded to get a pillow into its case.

‘How did it happen?’

‘Why, Jeremiah, o’ course,’ said Affery, with an end of the pillow-case
between her teeth.

‘Of course he proposed it, but how did it all come about? I should have
thought that neither of you would have married; least of all should I
have thought of your marrying each other.’

‘No more should I,’ said Mrs Flintwinch, tying the pillow tightly in its
case.

‘That’s what I mean. When did you begin to think otherwise?’

‘Never begun to think otherwise at all,’ said Mrs Flintwinch.

Seeing, as she patted the pillow into its place on the bolster, that he
was still looking at her as if waiting for the rest of her reply,
she gave it a great poke in the middle, and asked, ‘How could I help
myself?’

‘How could you help yourself from being married!’

‘O’ course,’ said Mrs Flintwinch. ‘It was no doing o’ mine. I’d never
thought of it. I’d got something to do, without thinking, indeed! She
kept me to it (as well as he) when she could go about, and she could go
about then.’

‘Well?’

‘Well?’ echoed Mrs Flintwinch. ‘That’s what I said myself. Well! What’s
the use of considering? If them two clever ones have made up their minds
to it, what’s left for _me_ to do? Nothing.’

‘Was it my mother’s project, then?’

‘The Lord bless you, Arthur, and forgive me the wish!’ cried Affery,
speaking always in a low tone. ‘If they hadn’t been both of a mind in
it, how could it ever have been? Jeremiah never courted me; t’ant likely
that he would, after living in the house with me and ordering me
about for as many years as he’d done. He said to me one day, he said,
“Affery,” he said, “now I am going to tell you something. What do you
think of the name of Flintwinch?” “What do I think of it?” I says.
“Yes,” he said, “because you’re going to take it,” he said. “Take it?” I
says. “Jere-_mi_-ah?” Oh! he’s a clever one!’

Mrs Flintwinch went on to spread the upper sheet over the bed, and the
blanket over that, and the counterpane over that, as if she had quite
concluded her story.

‘Well?’ said Arthur again.

‘Well?’ echoed Mrs Flintwinch again. ‘How could I help myself? He said
to me, “Affery, you and me must be married, and I’ll tell you why. She’s
failing in health, and she’ll want pretty constant attendance up in
her room, and we shall have to be much with her, and there’ll be nobody
about now but ourselves when we’re away from her, and altogether it will
be more convenient. She’s of my opinion,” he said, “so if you’ll put
your bonnet on next Monday morning at eight, we’ll get it over.”’ Mrs
Flintwinch tucked up the bed.

‘Well?’

‘Well?’ repeated Mrs Flintwinch, ‘I think so! I sits me down and says
it. Well!--Jeremiah then says to me, “As to banns, next Sunday being the
third time of asking (for I’ve put ‘em up a fortnight), is my reason for
naming Monday. She’ll speak to you about it herself, and now she’ll find
you prepared, Affery.” That same day she spoke to me, and she said, “So,
Affery, I understand that you and Jeremiah are going to be married. I
am glad of it, and so are you, with reason. It is a very good thing for
you, and very welcome under the circumstances to me. He is a sensible
man, and a trustworthy man, and a persevering man, and a pious man.”
 What could I say when it had come to that? Why, if it had been--a
smothering instead of a wedding,’ Mrs Flintwinch cast about in her mind
with great pains for this form of expression, ‘I couldn’t have said a
word upon it, against them two clever ones.’

‘In good faith, I believe so.’

‘And so you may, Arthur.’

‘Affery, what girl was that in my mother’s room just now?’

‘Girl?’ said Mrs Flintwinch in a rather sharp key.

‘It was a girl, surely, whom I saw near you--almost hidden in the dark
corner?’

‘Oh! She? Little Dorrit? _She_‘s nothing; she’s a whim of--hers.’ It was
a peculiarity of Affery Flintwinch that she never spoke of Mrs Clennam
by name. ‘But there’s another sort of girls than that about. Have you
forgot your old sweetheart? Long and long ago, I’ll be bound.’

‘I suffered enough from my mother’s separating us, to remember her. I
recollect her very well.’

‘Have you got another?’

‘No.’

‘Here’s news for you, then. She’s well to do now, and a widow. And if
you like to have her, why you can.’

‘And how do you know that, Affery?’

‘Them two clever ones have been speaking about it.--There’s Jeremiah on
the stairs!’ She was gone in a moment.

Mrs Flintwinch had introduced into the web that his mind was busily
weaving, in that old workshop where the loom of his youth had stood, the
last thread wanting to the pattern. The airy folly of a boy’s love had
found its way even into that house, and he had been as wretched under
its hopelessness as if the house had been a castle of romance. Little
more than a week ago at Marseilles, the face of the pretty girl from
whom he had parted with regret, had had an unusual interest for him, and
a tender hold upon him, because of some resemblance, real or imagined,
to this first face that had soared out of his gloomy life into the
bright glories of fancy. He leaned upon the sill of the long low window,
and looking out upon the blackened forest of chimneys again, began to
dream; for it had been the uniform tendency of this man’s life--so much
was wanting in it to think about, so much that might have been better
directed and happier to speculate upon--to make him a dreamer, after
all.




CHAPTER 4. Mrs Flintwinch has a Dream


When Mrs Flintwinch dreamed, she usually dreamed, unlike the son of her
old mistress, with her eyes shut. She had a curiously vivid dream that
night, and before she had left the son of her old mistress many hours.
In fact it was not at all like a dream; it was so very real in every
respect. It happened in this wise.

The bed-chamber occupied by Mr and Mrs Flintwinch was within a few paces
of that to which Mrs Clennam had been so long confined. It was not on
the same floor, for it was a room at the side of the house, which was
approached by a steep descent of a few odd steps, diverging from the
main staircase nearly opposite to Mrs Clennam’s door. It could scarcely
be said to be within call, the walls, doors, and panelling of the old
place were so cumbrous; but it was within easy reach, in any undress,
at any hour of the night, in any temperature. At the head of the bed
and within a foot of Mrs Flintwinch’s ear, was a bell, the line of which
hung ready to Mrs Clennam’s hand. Whenever this bell rang, up started
Affery, and was in the sick room before she was awake.

Having got her mistress into bed, lighted her lamp, and given her good
night, Mrs Flintwinch went to roost as usual, saving that her lord had
not yet appeared. It was her lord himself who became--unlike the
last theme in the mind, according to the observation of most
philosophers--the subject of Mrs Flintwinch’s dream.

It seemed to her that she awoke after sleeping some hours, and found
Jeremiah not yet abed. That she looked at the candle she had left
burning, and, measuring the time like King Alfred the Great, was
confirmed by its wasted state in her belief that she had been asleep for
some considerable period. That she arose thereupon, muffled herself up
in a wrapper, put on her shoes, and went out on the staircase, much
surprised, to look for Jeremiah.

The staircase was as wooden and solid as need be, and Affery went
straight down it without any of those deviations peculiar to dreams.
She did not skim over it, but walked down it, and guided herself by the
banisters on account of her candle having died out. In one corner of
the hall, behind the house-door, there was a little waiting-room, like a
well-shaft, with a long narrow window in it as if it had been ripped up.
In this room, which was never used, a light was burning.

Mrs Flintwinch crossed the hall, feeling its pavement cold to her
stockingless feet, and peeped in between the rusty hinges on the door,
which stood a little open. She expected to see Jeremiah fast asleep or
in a fit, but he was calmly seated in a chair, awake, and in his usual
health. But what--hey?--Lord forgive us!--Mrs Flintwinch muttered some
ejaculation to this effect, and turned giddy.

For, Mr Flintwinch awake, was watching Mr Flintwinch asleep. He sat on
one side of the small table, looking keenly at himself on the other side
with his chin sunk on his breast, snoring. The waking Flintwinch had his
full front face presented to his wife; the sleeping Flintwinch was
in profile. The waking Flintwinch was the old original; the sleeping
Flintwinch was the double, just as she might have distinguished between
a tangible object and its reflection in a glass, Affery made out this
difference with her head going round and round.

If she had had any doubt which was her own Jeremiah, it would have been
resolved by his impatience. He looked about him for an offensive weapon,
caught up the snuffers, and, before applying them to the cabbage-headed
candle, lunged at the sleeper as though he would have run him through
the body.

‘Who’s that? What’s the matter?’ cried the sleeper, starting.

Mr Flintwinch made a movement with the snuffers, as if he would have
enforced silence on his companion by putting them down his throat; the
companion, coming to himself, said, rubbing his eyes, ‘I forgot where I
was.’

‘You have been asleep,’ snarled Jeremiah, referring to his watch, ‘two
hours. You said you would be rested enough if you had a short nap.’

‘I have had a short nap,’ said Double.

‘Half-past two o’clock in the morning,’ muttered Jeremiah. ‘Where’s your
hat? Where’s your coat? Where’s the box?’

‘All here,’ said Double, tying up his throat with sleepy carefulness in
a shawl. ‘Stop a minute. Now give me the sleeve--not that sleeve, the
other one. Ha! I’m not as young as I was.’ Mr Flintwinch had pulled
him into his coat with vehement energy. ‘You promised me a second glass
after I was rested.’

‘Drink it!’ returned Jeremiah, ‘and--choke yourself, I was going
to say--but go, I mean.’ At the same time he produced the identical
port-wine bottle, and filled a wine-glass.

‘Her port-wine, I believe?’ said Double, tasting it as if he were in the
Docks, with hours to spare. ‘Her health.’

He took a sip.

‘Your health!’

He took another sip.

‘His health!’

He took another sip.

‘And all friends round St Paul’s.’ He emptied and put down the
wine-glass half-way through this ancient civic toast, and took up the
box. It was an iron box some two feet square, which he carried under his
arms pretty easily. Jeremiah watched his manner of adjusting it, with
jealous eyes; tried it with his hands, to be sure that he had a firm
hold of it; bade him for his life be careful what he was about; and then
stole out on tiptoe to open the door for him. Affery, anticipating
the last movement, was on the staircase. The sequence of things was
so ordinary and natural, that, standing there, she could hear the door
open, feel the night air, and see the stars outside.

But now came the most remarkable part of the dream. She felt so afraid
of her husband, that being on the staircase, she had not the power to
retreat to her room (which she might easily have done before he had
fastened the door), but stood there staring. Consequently when he came
up the staircase to bed, candle in hand, he came full upon her. He
looked astonished, but said not a word. He kept his eyes upon her, and
kept advancing; and she, completely under his influence, kept retiring
before him. Thus, she walking backward and he walking forward, they
came into their own room. They were no sooner shut in there, than Mr
Flintwinch took her by the throat, and shook her until she was black in
the face.

‘Why, Affery, woman--Affery!’ said Mr Flintwinch. ‘What have you been
dreaming of? Wake up, wake up! What’s the matter?’

‘The--the matter, Jeremiah?’ gasped Mrs Flintwinch, rolling her eyes.

‘Why, Affery, woman--Affery! You have been getting out of bed in your
sleep, my dear! I come up, after having fallen asleep myself, below, and
find you in your wrapper here, with the nightmare. Affery, woman,’ said
Mr Flintwinch, with a friendly grin on his expressive countenance, ‘if
you ever have a dream of this sort again, it’ll be a sign of your being
in want of physic. And I’ll give you such a dose, old woman--such a
dose!’

Mrs Flintwinch thanked him and crept into bed.




CHAPTER 5. Family Affairs


As the city clocks struck nine on Monday morning, Mrs Clennam was
wheeled by Jeremiah Flintwinch of the cut-down aspect to her tall
cabinet. When she had unlocked and opened it, and had settled herself
at its desk, Jeremiah withdrew--as it might be, to hang himself more
effectually--and her son appeared.

‘Are you any better this morning, mother?’

She shook her head, with the same austere air of luxuriousness that she
had shown over-night when speaking of the weather. ‘I shall never be
better any more. It is well for me, Arthur, that I know it and can bear
it.’

Sitting with her hands laid separately upon the desk, and the tall
cabinet towering before her, she looked as if she were performing on a
dumb church organ. Her son thought so (it was an old thought with him),
while he took his seat beside it.

She opened a drawer or two, looked over some business papers, and put
them back again. Her severe face had no thread of relaxation in it, by
which any explorer could have been guided to the gloomy labyrinth of her
thoughts.

‘Shall I speak of our affairs, mother? Are you inclined to enter upon
business?’

‘Am I inclined, Arthur? Rather, are you? Your father has been dead a
year and more. I have been at your disposal, and waiting your pleasure,
ever since.’

‘There was much to arrange before I could leave; and when I did leave, I
travelled a little for rest and relief.’

She turned her face towards him, as not having heard or understood his
last words.

‘For rest and relief.’

She glanced round the sombre room, and appeared from the motion of her
lips to repeat the words to herself, as calling it to witness how little
of either it afforded her.

‘Besides, mother, you being sole executrix, and having the direction and
management of the estate, there remained little business, or I might say
none, that I could transact, until you had had time to arrange matters
to your satisfaction.’

‘The accounts are made out,’ she returned. ‘I have them here. The
vouchers have all been examined and passed. You can inspect them when
you like, Arthur; now, if you please.’

‘It is quite enough, mother, to know that the business is completed.
Shall I proceed then?’

‘Why not?’ she said, in her frozen way.

‘Mother, our House has done less and less for some years past, and our
dealings have been progressively on the decline. We have never shown
much confidence, or invited much; we have attached no people to us; the
track we have kept is not the track of the time; and we have been
left far behind. I need not dwell on this to you, mother. You know it
necessarily.’

‘I know what you mean,’ she answered, in a qualified tone.

‘Even this old house in which we speak,’ pursued her son, ‘is an
instance of what I say. In my father’s earlier time, and in his uncle’s
time before him, it was a place of business--really a place of business,
and business resort. Now, it is a mere anomaly and incongruity here, out
of date and out of purpose. All our consignments have long been made to
Rovinghams’ the commission-merchants; and although, as a check upon
them, and in the stewardship of my father’s resources, your judgment and
watchfulness have been actively exerted, still those qualities would
have influenced my father’s fortunes equally, if you had lived in any
private dwelling: would they not?’

‘Do you consider,’ she returned, without answering his question, ‘that
a house serves no purpose, Arthur, in sheltering your infirm and
afflicted--justly infirm and righteously afflicted--mother?’

‘I was speaking only of business purposes.’

‘With what object?’

‘I am coming to it.’

‘I foresee,’ she returned, fixing her eyes upon him, ‘what it is.
But the Lord forbid that I should repine under any visitation. In my
sinfulness I merit bitter disappointment, and I accept it.’

‘Mother, I grieve to hear you speak like this, though I have had my
apprehensions that you would--’

‘You knew I would. You knew _me_,’ she interrupted.

Her son paused for a moment. He had struck fire out of her, and was
surprised. ‘Well!’ she said, relapsing into stone. ‘Go on. Let me hear.’

‘You have anticipated, mother, that I decide for my part, to abandon
the business. I have done with it. I will not take upon myself to advise
you; you will continue it, I see. If I had any influence with you, I
would simply use it to soften your judgment of me in causing you this
disappointment: to represent to you that I have lived the half of a long
term of life, and have never before set my own will against yours. I
cannot say that I have been able to conform myself, in heart and spirit,
to your rules; I cannot say that I believe my forty years have been
profitable or pleasant to myself, or any one; but I have habitually
submitted, and I only ask you to remember it.’

Woe to the suppliant, if such a one there were or ever had been, who had
any concession to look for in the inexorable face at the cabinet. Woe to
the defaulter whose appeal lay to the tribunal where those severe eyes
presided. Great need had the rigid woman of her mystical religion,
veiled in gloom and darkness, with lightnings of cursing, vengeance, and
destruction, flashing through the sable clouds. Forgive us our debts as
we forgive our debtors, was a prayer too poor in spirit for her. Smite
Thou my debtors, Lord, wither them, crush them; do Thou as I would do,
and Thou shalt have my worship: this was the impious tower of stone she
built up to scale Heaven.

‘Have you finished, Arthur, or have you anything more to say to me? I
think there can be nothing else. You have been short, but full of
matter!’

‘Mother, I have yet something more to say. It has been upon my mind,
night and day, this long time. It is far more difficult to say than what
I have said. That concerned myself; this concerns us all.’

‘Us all! Who are us all?’

‘Yourself, myself, my dead father.’

She took her hands from the desk; folded them in her lap; and sat
looking towards the fire, with the impenetrability of an old Egyptian
sculpture.

‘You knew my father infinitely better than I ever knew him; and his
reserve with me yielded to you. You were much the stronger, mother, and
directed him. As a child, I knew it as well as I know it now. I knew
that your ascendancy over him was the cause of his going to China to
take care of the business there, while you took care of it here (though
I do not even now know whether these were really terms of separation
that you agreed upon); and that it was your will that I should remain
with you until I was twenty, and then go to him as I did. You will not
be offended by my recalling this, after twenty years?’

‘I am waiting to hear why you recall it.’

He lowered his voice, and said, with manifest reluctance, and against
his will:

‘I want to ask you, mother, whether it ever occurred to you to
suspect--’

At the word Suspect, she turned her eyes momentarily upon her son, with
a dark frown. She then suffered them to seek the fire, as before; but
with the frown fixed above them, as if the sculptor of old Egypt had
indented it in the hard granite face, to frown for ages.

‘--that he had any secret remembrance which caused him trouble of
mind--remorse? Whether you ever observed anything in his conduct
suggesting that; or ever spoke to him upon it, or ever heard him hint at
such a thing?’

‘I do not understand what kind of secret remembrance you mean to infer
that your father was a prey to,’ she returned, after a silence. ‘You
speak so mysteriously.’

‘Is it possible, mother,’ her son leaned forward to be the nearer to her
while he whispered it, and laid his hand nervously upon her desk, ‘is
it possible, mother, that he had unhappily wronged any one, and made no
reparation?’

Looking at him wrathfully, she bent herself back in her chair to keep
him further off, but gave him no reply.

‘I am deeply sensible, mother, that if this thought has never at any
time flashed upon you, it must seem cruel and unnatural in me, even in
this confidence, to breathe it. But I cannot shake it off. Time and
change (I have tried both before breaking silence) do nothing to wear it
out.  Remember, I was with my father. Remember, I saw his face when he
gave the watch into my keeping, and struggled to express that he sent it
as a token you would understand, to you. Remember, I saw him at the last
with the pencil in his failing hand, trying to write some word for you
to read, but to which he could give no shape. The more remote and cruel
this vague suspicion that I have, the stronger the circumstances that
could give it any semblance of probability to me. For Heaven’s sake, let
us examine sacredly whether there is any wrong entrusted to us to set
right. No one can help towards it, mother, but you.’

Still so recoiling in her chair that her overpoised weight moved it,
from time to time, a little on its wheels, and gave her the appearance
of a phantom of fierce aspect gliding away from him, she interposed her
left arm, bent at the elbow with the back of her hand towards her face,
between herself and him, and looked at him in a fixed silence.

‘In grasping at money and in driving hard bargains--I have begun, and I
must speak of such things now, mother--some one may have been grievously
deceived, injured, ruined. You were the moving power of all this
machinery before my birth; your stronger spirit has been infused into
all my father’s dealings for more than two score years. You can set
these doubts at rest, I think, if you will really help me to discover
the truth. Will you, mother?’

He stopped in the hope that she would speak. But her grey hair was not
more immovable in its two folds, than were her firm lips.

‘If reparation can be made to any one, if restitution can be made to any
one, let us know it and make it. Nay, mother, if within my means, let
_me_ make it. I have seen so little happiness come of money; it has
brought within my knowledge so little peace to this house, or to any one
belonging to it, that it is worth less to me than to another. It can buy
me nothing that will not be a reproach and misery to me, if I am haunted
by a suspicion that it darkened my father’s last hours with remorse, and
that it is not honestly and justly mine.’

There was a bell-rope hanging on the panelled wall, some two or three
yards from the cabinet. By a swift and sudden action of her foot, she
drove her wheeled chair rapidly back to it and pulled it
violently--still holding her arm up in its shield-like posture, as if he
were striking at her, and she warding off the blow.

A girl came hurrying in, frightened.

‘Send Flintwinch here!’

In a moment the girl had withdrawn, and the old man stood within the
door. ‘What! You’re hammer and tongs, already, you two?’ he said, coolly
stroking his face. ‘I thought you would be. I was pretty sure of it.’

‘Flintwinch!’ said the mother, ‘look at my son. Look at him!’

‘Well, I _am_ looking at him,’ said Flintwinch.

She stretched out the arm with which she had shielded herself, and as
she went on, pointed at the object of her anger.

‘In the very hour of his return almost--before the shoe upon his foot is
dry--he asperses his father’s memory to his mother! Asks his mother
to become, with him, a spy upon his father’s transactions through a
lifetime! Has misgivings that the goods of this world which we have
painfully got together early and late, with wear and tear and toil and
self-denial, are so much plunder; and asks to whom they shall be given
up, as reparation and restitution!’

Although she said this raging, she said it in a voice so far from being
beyond her control that it was even lower than her usual tone. She also
spoke with great distinctness.

‘Reparation!’ said she. ‘Yes, truly! It is easy for him to talk of
reparation, fresh from journeying and junketing in foreign lands, and
living a life of vanity and pleasure. But let him look at me, in prison,
and in bonds here. I endure without murmuring, because it is appointed
that I shall so make reparation for my sins. Reparation! Is there none
in this room? Has there been none here this fifteen years?’

Thus was she always balancing her bargains with the Majesty of heaven,
posting up the entries to her credit, strictly keeping her set-off, and
claiming her due. She was only remarkable in this, for the force
and emphasis with which she did it. Thousands upon thousands do it,
according to their varying manner, every day.

‘Flintwinch, give me that book!’

The old man handed it to her from the table. She put two fingers between
the leaves, closed the book upon them, and held it up to her son in
a threatening way.

‘In the days of old, Arthur, treated of in this commentary, there were
pious men, beloved of the Lord, who would have cursed their sons for
less than this: who would have sent them forth, and sent whole nations
forth, if such had supported them, to be avoided of God and man, and
perish, down to the baby at the breast. But I only tell you that if you
ever renew that theme with me, I will renounce you; I will so dismiss
you through that doorway, that you had better have been motherless from
your cradle. I will never see or know you more. And if, after all, you
were to come into this darkened room to look upon me lying dead, my body
should bleed, if I could make it, when you came near me.’

In part relieved by the intensity of this threat, and in part (monstrous
as the fact is) by a general impression that it was in some sort a
religious proceeding, she handed back the book to the old man, and was
silent.

‘Now,’ said Jeremiah; ‘premising that I’m not going to stand between you
two, will you let me ask (as I _have_ been called in, and made a third)
what is all this about?’

‘Take your version of it,’ returned Arthur, finding it left to him to
speak, ‘from my mother. Let it rest there. What I have said, was said to
my mother only.’

‘Oh!’ returned the old man. ‘From your mother? Take it from your mother?
Well! But your mother mentioned that you had been suspecting your father.
That’s not dutiful, Mr Arthur. Who will you be suspecting next?’

‘Enough,’ said Mrs Clennam, turning her face so that it was addressed
for the moment to the old man only. ‘Let no more be said about this.’

‘Yes, but stop a bit, stop a bit,’ the old man persisted. ‘Let us see
how we stand. Have you told Mr Arthur that he mustn’t lay offences at
his father’s door? That he has no right to do it? That he has no ground
to go upon?’

‘I tell him so now.’

‘Ah! Exactly,’ said the old man. ‘You tell him so now. You hadn’t told
him so before, and you tell him so now. Ay, ay! That’s right! You know I
stood between you and his father so long, that it seems as if death had
made no difference, and I was still standing between you. So I will, and
so in fairness I require to have that plainly put forward. Arthur, you
please to hear that you have no right to mistrust your father, and have
no ground to go upon.’

He put his hands to the back of the wheeled chair, and muttering to
himself, slowly wheeled his mistress back to her cabinet. ‘Now,’ he
resumed, standing behind her: ‘in case I should go away leaving things
half done, and so should be wanted again when you come to the other half
and get into one of your flights, has Arthur told you what he means to
do about the business?’

‘He has relinquished it.’

‘In favour of nobody, I suppose?’

Mrs Clennam glanced at her son, leaning against one of the windows. He
observed the look and said, ‘To my mother, of course. She does what she
pleases.’

‘And if any pleasure,’ she said after a short pause, ‘could arise for me
out of the disappointment of my expectations that my son, in the prime
of his life, would infuse new youth and strength into it, and make it
of great profit and power, it would be in advancing an old and faithful
servant. Jeremiah, the captain deserts the ship, but you and I will sink
or float with it.’

Jeremiah, whose eyes glistened as if they saw money, darted a sudden
look at the son, which seemed to say, ‘I owe _you_ no thanks for this;
_you_ have done nothing towards it!’ and then told the mother that he
thanked her, and that Affery thanked her, and that he would never desert
her, and that Affery would never desert her. Finally, he hauled up his
watch from its depths, and said, ‘Eleven. Time for your oysters!’ and with
that change of subject, which involved no change of expression or manner,
rang the bell.

But Mrs Clennam, resolved to treat herself with the greater rigour for
having been supposed to be unacquainted with reparation, refused to
eat her oysters when they were brought. They looked tempting; eight in
number, circularly set out on a white plate on a tray covered with a
white napkin, flanked by a slice of buttered French roll, and a little
compact glass of cool wine and water; but she resisted all persuasions,
and sent them down again--placing the act to her credit, no doubt, in
her Eternal Day-Book.

This refection of oysters was not presided over by Affery, but by the
girl who had appeared when the bell was rung; the same who had been in
the dimly-lighted room last night. Now that he had an opportunity of
observing her, Arthur found that her diminutive figure, small features,
and slight spare dress, gave her the appearance of being much younger
than she was. A woman, probably of not less than two-and-twenty, she
might have been passed in the street for little more than half that
age. Not that her face was very youthful, for in truth there was more
consideration and care in it than naturally belonged to her utmost
years; but she was so little and light, so noiseless and shy, and
appeared so conscious of being out of place among the three hard elders,
that she had all the manner and much of the appearance of a subdued
child.

In a hard way, and in an uncertain way that fluctuated between patronage
and putting down, the sprinkling from a watering-pot and hydraulic
pressure, Mrs Clennam showed an interest in this dependent. Even in the
moment of her entrance, upon the violent ringing of the bell, when the
mother shielded herself with that singular action from the son, Mrs
Clennam’s eyes had had some individual recognition in them, which seemed
reserved for her. As there are degrees of hardness in the hardest metal,
and shades of colour in black itself, so, even in the asperity of Mrs
Clennam’s demeanour towards all the rest of humanity and towards Little
Dorrit, there was a fine gradation.

Little Dorrit let herself out to do needlework. At so much a day--or at
so little--from eight to eight, Little Dorrit was to be hired. Punctual
to the moment, Little Dorrit appeared; punctual to the moment, Little
Dorrit vanished. What became of Little Dorrit between the two eights was
a mystery.

Another of the moral phenomena of Little Dorrit. Besides her
consideration money, her daily contract included meals. She had an
extraordinary repugnance to dining in company; would never do so, if
it were possible to escape. Would always plead that she had this bit of
work to begin first, or that bit of work to finish first; and would, of
a certainty, scheme and plan--not very cunningly, it would seem, for she
deceived no one--to dine alone. Successful in this, happy in carrying
off her plate anywhere, to make a table of her lap, or a box, or the
ground, or even as was supposed, to stand on tip-toe, dining moderately
at a mantel-shelf; the great anxiety of Little Dorrit’s day was set at
rest.

It was not easy to make out Little Dorrit’s face; she was so retiring,
plied her needle in such removed corners, and started away so scared if
encountered on the stairs. But it seemed to be a pale transparent face,
quick in expression, though not beautiful in feature, its soft hazel
eyes excepted. A delicately bent head, a tiny form, a quick little pair
of busy hands, and a shabby dress--it must needs have been very shabby
to look at all so, being so neat--were Little Dorrit as she sat at work.

For these particulars or generalities concerning Little Dorrit, Mr
Arthur was indebted in the course of the day to his own eyes and to Mrs
Affery’s tongue. If Mrs Affery had had any will or way of her own, it
would probably have been unfavourable to Little Dorrit. But as ‘them two
clever ones’--Mrs Affery’s perpetual reference, in whom her personality
was swallowed up--were agreed to accept Little Dorrit as a matter of
course, she had nothing for it but to follow suit. Similarly, if the
two clever ones had agreed to murder Little Dorrit by candlelight, Mrs
Affery, being required to hold the candle, would no doubt have done it.

In the intervals of roasting the partridge for the invalid chamber, and
preparing a baking-dish of beef and pudding for the dining-room, Mrs
Affery made the communications above set forth; invariably putting
her head in at the door again after she had taken it out, to enforce
resistance to the two clever ones. It appeared to have become a perfect
passion with Mrs Flintwinch, that the only son should be pitted against
them.

In the course of the day, too, Arthur looked through the whole 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. Down in the cellars, as up in the bed-chambers, old objects
that he well remembered were changed by age and decay, but were still in
their old places; even to empty beer-casks hoary with cobwebs, and empty
wine-bottles with fur and fungus choking up their throats. There, too,
among unusual bottle-racks and pale slants of light from the yard above,
was the strong room stored with old ledgers, which had as musty and
corrupt a smell as if they were regularly balanced, in the dead small
hours, by a nightly resurrection of old book-keepers.

The baking-dish was served up in a penitential manner on a shrunken
cloth at an end of the dining-table, at two o’clock, when he dined with
Mr Flintwinch, the new partner. Mr Flintwinch informed him that his
mother had recovered her equanimity now, and that he need not fear her
again alluding to what had passed in the morning. ‘And don’t you lay
offences at your father’s door, Mr Arthur,’ added Jeremiah, ‘once for
all, don’t do it! Now, we have done with the subject.’

Mr Flintwinch had been already rearranging and dusting his own
particular little office, as if to do honour to his accession to new
dignity. He resumed this occupation when he was replete with beef, had
sucked up all the gravy in the baking-dish with the flat of his knife,
and had drawn liberally on a barrel of small beer in the scullery. Thus
refreshed, he tucked up his shirt-sleeves and went to work again; and Mr
Arthur, watching him as he set about it, plainly saw that his father’s
picture, or his father’s grave, would be as communicative with him as
this old man.

‘Now, Affery, woman,’ said Mr Flintwinch, as she crossed the hall. ‘You
hadn’t made Mr Arthur’s bed when I was up there last. Stir yourself.
Bustle.’

But Mr Arthur found the house so blank and dreary, and was so unwilling
to assist at another implacable consignment of his mother’s enemies
(perhaps himself among them) to mortal disfigurement and immortal ruin,
that he announced his intention of lodging at the coffee-house where he
had left his luggage. Mr Flintwinch taking kindly to the idea of getting
rid of him, and his mother being indifferent, beyond considerations of
saving, to most domestic arrangements that were not bounded by the walls
of her own chamber, he easily carried this point without new offence.
Daily business hours were agreed upon, which his mother, Mr Flintwinch,
and he, were to devote together to a necessary checking of books and
papers; and he left the home he had so lately found, with depressed
heart.

But Little Dorrit?

The business hours, allowing for intervals of invalid regimen of oysters
and partridges, during which Clennam refreshed himself with a walk,
were from ten to six for about a fortnight. Sometimes Little Dorrit was
employed at her needle, sometimes not, sometimes appeared as a humble
visitor: which must have been her character on the occasion of his
arrival. His original curiosity augmented every day, as he watched for
her, saw or did not see her, and speculated about her. Influenced by his
predominant idea, he even fell into a habit of discussing with himself
the possibility of her being in some way associated with it. At last he
resolved to watch Little Dorrit and know more of her story.




CHAPTER 6. The Father of the Marshalsea


Thirty years ago there stood, a few doors short of the church of Saint
George, in the borough of Southwark, on the left-hand side of the way
going southward, the Marshalsea Prison. It had stood there many years
before, and it remained there some years afterwards; but it is gone now,
and the world is none the worse without it.

It was an oblong pile of barrack building, partitioned into squalid
houses standing back to back, so that there were no back rooms;
environed by a narrow paved yard, hemmed in by high walls duly spiked at
top. Itself a close and confined prison for debtors, it contained within
it a much closer and more confined jail for smugglers. Offenders against
the revenue laws, and defaulters to excise or customs who had incurred
fines which they were unable to pay, were supposed to be incarcerated
behind an iron-plated door closing up a second prison, consisting of a
strong cell or two, and a blind alley some yard and a half wide, which
formed the mysterious termination of the very limited skittle-ground in
which the Marshalsea debtors bowled down their troubles.

Supposed to be incarcerated there, because the time had rather outgrown
the strong cells and the blind alley. In practice they had come to be
considered a little too bad, though in theory they were quite as good as
ever; which may be observed to be the case at the present day with other
cells that are not at all strong, and with other blind alleys that are
stone-blind. Hence the smugglers habitually consorted with the debtors
(who received them with open arms), except at certain constitutional
moments when somebody came from some Office, to go through some form of
overlooking something which neither he nor anybody else knew anything
about. On these truly British occasions, the smugglers, if any, made a
feint of walking into the strong cells and the blind alley, while this
somebody pretended to do his something: and made a reality of walking
out again as soon as he hadn’t done it--neatly epitomising the
administration of most of the public affairs in our right little, tight
little, island.

There had been taken to the Marshalsea Prison, long before the day when
the sun shone on Marseilles and on the opening of this narrative, a
debtor with whom this narrative has some concern.

He was, at that time, a very amiable and very helpless middle-aged
gentleman, who was going out again directly. Necessarily, he was going
out again directly, because the Marshalsea lock never turned upon a
debtor who was not. He brought in a portmanteau with him, which he
doubted its being worth while to unpack; he was so perfectly clear--like
all the rest of them, the turnkey on the lock said--that he was going
out again directly.

He was a shy, retiring man; well-looking, though in an effeminate style;
with a mild voice, curling hair, and irresolute hands--rings upon the
fingers in those days--which nervously wandered to his trembling lip a
hundred times in the first half-hour of his acquaintance with the jail.
His principal anxiety was about his wife.

‘Do you think, sir,’ he asked the turnkey, ‘that she will be very much
shocked, if she should come to the gate to-morrow morning?’

The turnkey gave it as the result of his experience that some of ‘em was
and some of ‘em wasn’t. In general, more no than yes. ‘What like is she,
you see?’ he philosophically asked: ‘that’s what it hinges on.’

‘She is very delicate and inexperienced indeed.’

‘That,’ said the turnkey, ‘is agen her.’

‘She is so little used to go out alone,’ said the debtor, ‘that I am at
a loss to think how she will ever make her way here, if she walks.’

‘P’raps,’ quoth the turnkey, ‘she’ll take a ackney coach.’

‘Perhaps.’ The irresolute fingers went to the trembling lip. ‘I hope she
will. She may not think of it.’

‘Or p’raps,’ said the turnkey, offering his suggestions from the the top
of his well-worn wooden stool, as he might have offered them to a child
for whose weakness he felt a compassion, ‘p’raps she’ll get her brother,
or her sister, to come along with her.’

‘She has no brother or sister.’

‘Niece, nevy, cousin, serwant, young ‘ooman, greengrocer.--Dash it! One
or another on ‘em,’ said the turnkey, repudiating beforehand the refusal
of all his suggestions.

‘I fear--I hope it is not against the rules--that she will bring the
children.’

‘The children?’ said the turnkey. ‘And the rules? Why, lord set you
up like a corner pin, we’ve a reg’lar playground o’ children here.
Children! Why we swarm with ‘em. How many a you got?’

‘Two,’ said the debtor, lifting his irresolute hand to his lip again,
and turning into the prison.

The turnkey followed him with his eyes. ‘And you another,’ he observed
to himself, ‘which makes three on you. And your wife another, I’ll lay
a crown. Which makes four on you. And another coming, I’ll lay
half-a-crown. Which’ll make five on you. And I’ll go another seven and
sixpence to name which is the helplessest, the unborn baby or you!’

He was right in all his particulars. She came next day with a little
boy of three years old, and a little girl of two, and he stood entirely
corroborated.

‘Got a room now; haven’t you?’ the turnkey asked the debtor after a week
or two.

‘Yes, I have got a very good room.’

‘Any little sticks a coming to furnish it?’ said the turnkey.

‘I expect a few necessary articles of furniture to be delivered by the
carrier, this afternoon.’

‘Missis and little ‘uns a coming to keep you company?’ asked the
turnkey.

‘Why, yes, we think it better that we should not be scattered, even for
a few weeks.’

‘Even for a few weeks, _of_ course,’ replied the turnkey. And he followed
him again with his eyes, and nodded his head seven times when he was
gone.

The affairs of this debtor were perplexed by a partnership, of which he
knew no more than that he had invested money in it; by legal matters
of assignment and settlement, conveyance here and conveyance there,
suspicion of unlawful preference of creditors in this direction, and of
mysterious spiriting away of property in that; and as nobody on the face
of the earth could be more incapable of explaining any single item in
the heap of confusion than the debtor himself, nothing comprehensible
could be made of his case. To question him in detail, and endeavour
to reconcile his answers; to closet him with accountants and sharp
practitioners, learned in the wiles of insolvency and bankruptcy; was
only to put the case out at compound interest and incomprehensibility.
The irresolute fingers fluttered more and more ineffectually about the
trembling lip on every such occasion, and the sharpest practitioners
gave him up as a hopeless job.

‘Out?’ said the turnkey, ‘_he_‘ll never get out, unless his creditors take
him by the shoulders and shove him out.’

He had been there five or six months, when he came running to this
turnkey one forenoon to tell him, breathless and pale, that his wife was
ill.

‘As anybody might a known she would be,’ said the turnkey.

‘We intended,’ he returned, ‘that she should go to a country lodging
only to-morrow. What am I to do! Oh, good heaven, what am I to do!’

‘Don’t waste your time in clasping your hands and biting your fingers,’
responded the practical turnkey, taking him by the elbow, ‘but come
along with me.’

The turnkey conducted him--trembling from head to foot, and constantly
crying under his breath, What was he to do! while his irresolute fingers
bedabbled the tears upon his face--up one of the common staircases in
the prison to a door on the garret story. Upon which door the turnkey
knocked with the handle of his key.

‘Come in!’ cried a voice inside.

The turnkey, opening the door, disclosed in a wretched, ill-smelling
little room, two hoarse, puffy, red-faced personages seated at a
rickety table, playing at all-fours, smoking pipes, and drinking brandy.

‘Doctor,’ said the turnkey, ‘here’s a gentleman’s wife in want of you
without a minute’s loss of time!’

The doctor’s friend was in the positive degree of hoarseness, puffiness,
red-facedness, all-fours, tobacco, dirt, and brandy; the doctor in
the comparative--hoarser, puffier, more red-faced, more all-fourey,
tobaccoer, dirtier, and brandier. The doctor was amazingly shabby, in
a torn and darned rough-weather sea-jacket, out at elbows and eminently
short of buttons (he had been in his time the experienced surgeon
carried by a passenger ship), the dirtiest white trousers conceivable by
mortal man, carpet slippers, and no visible linen. ‘Childbed?’ said
the doctor. ‘I’m the boy!’ With that the doctor took a comb from the
chimney-piece and stuck his hair upright--which appeared to be his
way of washing himself--produced a professional chest or case, of most
abject appearance, from the cupboard where his cup and saucer and coals
were, settled his chin in the frowsy wrapper round his neck, and became
a ghastly medical scarecrow.

The doctor and the debtor ran down-stairs, leaving the turnkey to return
to the lock, and made for the debtor’s room. All the ladies in the
prison had got hold of the news, and were in the yard. Some of them
had already taken possession of the two children, and were hospitably
carrying them off; others were offering loans of little comforts from
their own scanty store; others were sympathising with the greatest
volubility. The gentlemen prisoners, feeling themselves at a
disadvantage, had for the most part retired, not to say sneaked,
to their rooms; from the open windows of which some of them now
complimented the doctor with whistles as he passed below, while others,
with several stories between them, interchanged sarcastic references to
the prevalent excitement.

It was a hot summer day, and the prison rooms were baking between the
high walls. In the debtor’s confined chamber, Mrs Bangham, charwoman and
messenger, who was not a prisoner (though she had been once), but
was the popular medium of communication with the outer world, had
volunteered her services as fly-catcher and general attendant. The walls
and ceiling were blackened with flies. Mrs Bangham, expert in sudden
device, with one hand fanned the patient with a cabbage leaf, and with
the other set traps of vinegar and sugar in gallipots; at the same time
enunciating sentiments of an encouraging and congratulatory nature,
adapted to the occasion.

‘The flies trouble you, don’t they, my dear?’ said Mrs Bangham. ‘But
p’raps they’ll take your mind off of it, and do you good. What between
the buryin ground, the grocer’s, the waggon-stables, and the paunch
trade, the Marshalsea flies gets very large. P’raps they’re sent as a
consolation, if we only know’d it. How are you now, my dear? No better?
No, my dear, it ain’t to be expected; you’ll be worse before you’re
better, and you know it, don’t you? Yes. That’s right! And to think of
a sweet little cherub being born inside the lock! Now ain’t it pretty,
ain’t _that_ something to carry you through it pleasant? Why, we ain’t
had such a thing happen here, my dear, not for I couldn’t name the time
when. And you a crying too?’ said Mrs Bangham, to rally the patient more
and more. ‘You! Making yourself so famous! With the flies a falling into
the gallipots by fifties! And everything a going on so well! And here if
there ain’t,’ said Mrs Bangham as the door opened, ‘if there ain’t your
dear gentleman along with Dr Haggage! And now indeed we _are_ complete, I
_think_!’

The doctor was scarcely the kind of apparition to inspire a patient
with a sense of absolute completeness, but as he presently delivered the
opinion, ‘We are as right as we can be, Mrs Bangham, and we shall
come out of this like a house afire;’ and as he and Mrs Bangham took
possession of the poor helpless pair, as everybody else and anybody else
had always done, the means at hand were as good on the whole as better
would have been. The special feature in Dr Haggage’s treatment of the
case, was his determination to keep Mrs Bangham up to the mark. As thus:

‘Mrs Bangham,’ said the doctor, before he had been there twenty minutes,
‘go outside and fetch a little brandy, or we shall have you giving in.’

‘Thank you, sir. But none on my accounts,’ said Mrs Bangham.

‘Mrs Bangham,’ returned the doctor, ‘I am in professional attendance
on this lady, and don’t choose to allow any discussion on your part. Go
outside and fetch a little brandy, or I foresee that you’ll break down.’

‘You’re to be obeyed, sir,’ said Mrs Bangham, rising. ‘If you was to put
your own lips to it, I think you wouldn’t be the worse, for you look but
poorly, sir.’

‘Mrs Bangham,’ returned the doctor, ‘I am not your business, thank you,
but you are mine. Never you mind _me_, if you please. What you have got to
do, is, to do as you are told, and to go and get what I bid you.’

Mrs Bangham submitted; and the doctor, having administered her
potion, took his own. He repeated the treatment every hour, being very
determined with Mrs Bangham. Three or four hours passed; the flies
fell into the traps by hundreds; and at length one little life, hardly
stronger than theirs, appeared among the multitude of lesser deaths.

‘A very nice little girl indeed,’ said the doctor; ‘little, but
well-formed. Halloa, Mrs Bangham! You’re looking queer! You be off,
ma’am, this minute, and fetch a little more brandy, or we shall have you
in hysterics.’

By this time, the rings had begun to fall from the debtor’s irresolute
hands, like leaves from a wintry tree. Not one was left upon them that
night, when he put something that chinked into the doctor’s greasy palm.
In the meantime Mrs Bangham had been out on an errand to a neighbouring
establishment decorated with three golden balls, where she was very well
known.

‘Thank you,’ said the doctor, ‘thank you. Your good lady is quite
composed. Doing charmingly.’

‘I am very happy and very thankful to know it,’ said the debtor, ‘though
I little thought once, that--’

‘That a child would be born to you in a place like this?’ said the
doctor. ‘Bah, bah, sir, what does it signify? A little more elbow-room
is all we want here. We are quiet here; we don’t get badgered here;
there’s no knocker here, sir, to be hammered at by creditors and bring a
man’s heart into his mouth. Nobody comes here to ask if a man’s at
home, and to say he’ll stand on the door mat till he is. Nobody writes
threatening letters about money to this place. It’s freedom, sir, it’s
freedom! I have had to-day’s practice at home and abroad, on a march,
and aboard ship, and I’ll tell you this: I don’t know that I have ever
pursued it under such quiet circumstances as here this day. Elsewhere,
people are restless, worried, hurried about, anxious respecting one
thing, anxious respecting another. Nothing of the kind here, sir. We
have done all that--we know the worst of it; we have got to the bottom,
we can’t fall, and what have we found? Peace. That’s the word for
it. Peace.’ With this profession of faith, the doctor, who was an old
jail-bird, and was more sodden than usual, and had the additional and
unusual stimulus of money in his pocket, returned to his associate and
chum in hoarseness, puffiness, red-facedness, all-fours, tobacco, dirt,
and brandy.

Now, the debtor was a very different man from the doctor, but he had
already begun to travel, by his opposite segment of the circle, to the
same point. Crushed at first by his imprisonment, he had soon found a
dull relief in it. He was under lock and key; but the lock and key that
kept him in, kept numbers of his troubles out. If he had been a man with
strength of purpose to face those troubles and fight them, he might have
broken the net that held him, or broken his heart; but being what he
was, he languidly slipped into this smooth descent, and never more took
one step upward.

When he was relieved of the perplexed affairs that nothing would make
plain, through having them returned upon his hands by a dozen agents in
succession who could make neither beginning, middle, nor end of them or
him, he found his miserable place of refuge a quieter refuge than it
had been before. He had unpacked the portmanteau long ago; and his elder
children now played regularly about the yard, and everybody knew the
baby, and claimed a kind of proprietorship in her.

‘Why, I’m getting proud of you,’ said his friend the turnkey, one day.
‘You’ll be the oldest inhabitant soon. The Marshalsea wouldn’t be like
the Marshalsea now, without you and your family.’

The turnkey really was proud of him. He would mention him in laudatory
terms to new-comers, when his back was turned. ‘You took notice of him,’
he would say, ‘that went out of the lodge just now?’

New-comer would probably answer Yes.

‘Brought up as a gentleman, he was, if ever a man was. Ed’cated at no
end of expense. Went into the Marshal’s house once to try a new piano
for him. Played it, I understand, like one o’clock--beautiful! As to
languages--speaks anything. We’ve had a Frenchman here in his time, and
it’s my opinion he knowed more French than the Frenchman did. We’ve had
an Italian here in his time, and he shut _him_ up in about half a minute.
You’ll find some characters behind other locks, I don’t say you won’t;
but if you want the top sawyer in such respects as I’ve mentioned, you
must come to the Marshalsea.’

When his youngest child was eight years old, his wife, who had long been
languishing away--of her own inherent weakness, not that she retained
any greater sensitiveness as to her place of abode than he did--went
upon a visit to a poor friend and old nurse in the country, and died
there. He remained shut up in his room for a fortnight afterwards;
and an attorney’s clerk, who was going through the Insolvent Court,
engrossed an address of condolence to him, which looked like a Lease,
and which all the prisoners signed. When he appeared again he was
greyer (he had soon begun to turn grey); and the turnkey noticed that
his hands went often to his trembling lips again, as they had used to do
when he first came in. But he got pretty well over it in a month or
two; and in the meantime the children played about the yard as regularly
as ever, but in black.

Then Mrs Bangham, long popular medium of communication with the outer
world, began to be infirm, and to be found oftener than usual comatose
on pavements, with her basket of purchases spilt, and the change of her
clients ninepence short. His son began to supersede Mrs Bangham, and
to execute commissions in a knowing manner, and to be of the prison
prisonous, of the streets streety.

Time went on, and the turnkey began to fail. His chest swelled, and his
legs got weak, and he was short of breath. The well-worn wooden stool
was ‘beyond him,’ he complained. He sat in an arm-chair with a cushion,
and sometimes wheezed so, for minutes together, that he couldn’t turn
the key. When he was overpowered by these fits, the debtor often turned
it for him.

‘You and me,’ said the turnkey, one snowy winter’s night when the lodge,
with a bright fire in it, was pretty full of company, ‘is the oldest
inhabitants. I wasn’t here myself above seven year before you. I shan’t
last long. When I’m off the lock for good and all, you’ll be the Father
of the Marshalsea.’

The turnkey went off the lock of this world next day. His words were
remembered and repeated; and tradition afterwards handed down from
generation to generation--a Marshalsea generation might be calculated as
about three months--that the shabby old debtor with the soft manner and
the white hair, was the Father of the Marshalsea.

And he grew to be proud of the title. If any impostor had arisen to
claim it, he would have shed tears in resentment of the attempt to
deprive him of his rights. A disposition began to be perceived in him
to exaggerate the number of years he had been there; it was generally
understood that you must deduct a few from his account; he was vain, the
fleeting generations of debtors said.

All new-comers were presented to him. He was punctilious in the exaction
of this ceremony. The wits would perform the office of introduction with
overcharged pomp and politeness, but they could not easily overstep his
sense of its gravity. He received them in his poor room (he disliked an
introduction in the mere yard, as informal--a thing that might happen
to anybody), with a kind of bowed-down beneficence. They were welcome to
the Marshalsea, he would tell them. Yes, he was the Father of the place.
So the world was kind enough to call him; and so he was, if more than
twenty years of residence gave him a claim to the title. It looked
small at first, but there was very good company there--among a
mixture--necessarily a mixture--and very good air.

It became a not unusual circumstance for letters to be put under his
door at night, enclosing half-a-crown, two half-crowns, now and then at
long intervals even half-a-sovereign, for the Father of the Marshalsea.
‘With the compliments of a collegian taking leave.’ He received the
gifts as tributes, from admirers, to a public character. Sometimes
these correspondents assumed facetious names, as the Brick, Bellows, Old
Gooseberry, Wideawake, Snooks, Mops, Cutaway, the Dogs-meat Man; but he
considered this in bad taste, and was always a little hurt by it.

In the fulness of time, this correspondence showing signs of wearing
out, and seeming to require an effort on the part of the correspondents
to which in the hurried circumstances of departure many of them might
not be equal, he established the custom of attending collegians of
a certain standing, to the gate, and taking leave of them there. The
collegian under treatment, after shaking hands, would occasionally
stop to wrap up something in a bit of paper, and would come back again
calling ‘Hi!’

He would look round surprised.’Me?’ he would say, with a smile.

By this time the collegian would be up with him, and he would paternally
add, VWhat have you forgotten? What can I do for you?’

‘I forgot to leave this,’ the collegian would usually return, ‘for the
Father of the Marshalsea.’

‘My good sir,’ he would rejoin, ‘he is infinitely obliged to you.’ But,
to the last, the irresolute hand of old would remain in the pocket into
which he had slipped the money during two or three turns about the yard,
lest the transaction should be too conspicuous to the general body of
collegians.

One afternoon he had been doing the honours of the place to a rather
large party of collegians, who happened to be going out, when, as he was
coming back, he encountered one from the poor side who had been taken in
execution for a small sum a week before, had ‘settled’ in the course of
that afternoon, and was going out too. The man was a mere Plasterer in
his working dress; had his wife with him, and a bundle; and was in high
spirits.

‘God bless you, sir,’ he said in passing.

‘And you,’ benignantly returned the Father of the Marshalsea.

They were pretty far divided, going their several ways, when the
Plasterer called out, ‘I say!--sir!’ and came back to him.

‘It ain’t much,’ said the Plasterer, putting a little pile of halfpence
in his hand, ‘but it’s well meant.’

The Father of the Marshalsea had never been offered tribute in copper
yet. His children often had, and with his perfect acquiescence it had
gone into the common purse to buy meat that he had eaten, and drink that
he had drunk; but fustian splashed with white lime, bestowing halfpence
on him, front to front, was new.

‘How dare you!’ he said to the man, and feebly burst into tears.

The Plasterer turned him towards the wall, that his face might not be
seen; and the action was so delicate, and the man was so penetrated with
repentance, and asked pardon so honestly, that he could make him no less
acknowledgment than, ‘I know you meant it kindly. Say no more.’

‘Bless your soul, sir,’ urged the Plasterer, ‘I did indeed. I’d do more
by you than the rest of ‘em do, I fancy.’

‘What would you do?’ he asked.

‘I’d come back to see you, after I was let out.’

‘Give me the money again,’ said the other, eagerly, ‘and I’ll keep it,
and never spend it. Thank you for it, thank you! I shall see you again?’

‘If I live a week you shall.’

They shook hands and parted. The collegians, assembled in Symposium in
the Snuggery that night, marvelled what had happened to their Father; he
walked so late in the shadows of the yard, and seemed so downcast.




CHAPTER 7. The Child of the Marshalsea


The baby whose first draught of air had been tinctured with Doctor
Haggage’s brandy, was handed down among the generations of collegians,
like the tradition of their common parent. In the earlier stages of her
existence, she was handed down in a literal and prosaic sense; it being
almost a part of the entrance footing of every new collegian to nurse
the child who had been born in the college.

‘By rights,’ remarked the turnkey when she was first shown to him, ‘I
ought to be her godfather.’

The debtor irresolutely thought of it for a minute, and said, ‘Perhaps
you wouldn’t object to really being her godfather?’

‘Oh! _I_ don’t object,’ replied the turnkey, ‘if you don’t.’

Thus it came to pass that she was christened one Sunday afternoon, when
the turnkey, being relieved, was off the lock; and that the turnkey
went up to the font of Saint George’s Church, and promised and vowed and
renounced on her behalf, as he himself related when he came back, ‘like
a good ‘un.’

This invested the turnkey with a new proprietary share in the child,
over and above his former official one. When she began to walk and talk,
he became fond of her; bought a little arm-chair and stood it by the
high fender of the lodge fire-place; liked to have her company when he
was on the lock; and used to bribe her with cheap toys to come and talk
to him. The child, for her part, soon grew so fond of the turnkey that
she would come climbing up the lodge-steps of her own accord at all
hours of the day. When she fell asleep in the little armchair by the
high fender, the turnkey would cover her with his pocket-handkerchief;
and when she sat in it dressing and undressing a doll which soon came
to be unlike dolls on the other side of the lock, and to bear a horrible
family resemblance to Mrs Bangham--he would contemplate her from the
top of his stool with exceeding gentleness. Witnessing these things,
the collegians would express an opinion that the turnkey, who was a
bachelor, had been cut out by nature for a family man. But the turnkey
thanked them, and said, ‘No, on the whole it was enough to see other
people’s children there.’

At what period of her early life the little creature began to perceive
that it was not the habit of all the world to live locked up in narrow
yards surrounded by high walls with spikes at the top, would be a
difficult question to settle. But she was a very, very little creature
indeed, when she had somehow gained the knowledge that her clasp of her
father’s hand was to be always loosened at the door which the great key
opened; and that while her own light steps were free to pass beyond it,
his feet must never cross that line. A pitiful and plaintive look, with
which she had begun to regard him when she was still extremely young,
was perhaps a part of this discovery.

With a pitiful and plaintive look for everything, indeed, but with
something in it for only him that was like protection, this Child of
the Marshalsea and the child of the Father of the Marshalsea, sat by her
friend the turnkey in the lodge, kept the family room, or wandered about
the prison-yard, for the first eight years of her life. With a pitiful
and plaintive look for her wayward sister; for her idle brother; for the
high blank walls; for the faded crowd they shut in; for the games of the
prison children as they whooped and ran, and played at hide-and-seek,
and made the iron bars of the inner gateway ‘Home.’

Wistful and wondering, she would sit in summer weather by the high
fender in the lodge, looking up at the sky through the barred window,
until, when she turned her eyes away, bars of light would arise between
her and her friend, and she would see him through a grating, too.

‘Thinking of the fields,’ the turnkey said once, after watching her,
‘ain’t you?’

‘Where are they?’ she inquired.

‘Why, they’re--over there, my dear,’ said the turnkey, with a vague
flourish of his key. ‘Just about there.’

‘Does anybody open them, and shut them? Are they locked?’

The turnkey was discomfited. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Not in general.’

‘Are they very pretty, Bob?’ She called him Bob, by his own particular
request and instruction.

‘Lovely. Full of flowers. There’s buttercups, and there’s daisies,
and there’s’--the turnkey hesitated, being short of floral
nomenclature--‘there’s dandelions, and all manner of games.’

‘Is it very pleasant to be there, Bob?’

‘Prime,’ said the turnkey.

‘Was father ever there?’

‘Hem!’ coughed the turnkey. ‘O yes, he was there, sometimes.’

‘Is he sorry not to be there now?’

‘N-not particular,’ said the turnkey.

‘Nor any of the people?’ she asked, glancing at the listless crowd
within. ‘O are you quite sure and certain, Bob?’

At this difficult point of the conversation Bob gave in, and changed the
subject to hard-bake: always his last resource when he found his little
friend getting him into a political, social, or theological corner.
But this was the origin of a series of Sunday excursions that these two
curious companions made together. They used to issue from the lodge on
alternate Sunday afternoons with great gravity, bound for some meadows
or green lanes that had been elaborately appointed by the turnkey in
the course of the week; and there she picked grass and flowers to bring
home, while he smoked his pipe. Afterwards, there were tea-gardens,
shrimps, ale, and other delicacies; and then they would come back hand
in hand, unless she was more than usually tired, and had fallen asleep
on his shoulder.

In those early days, the turnkey first began profoundly to consider
a question which cost him so much mental labour, that it remained
undetermined on the day of his death. He decided to will and bequeath
his little property of savings to his godchild, and the point arose how
could it be so ‘tied up’ as that only she should have the benefit of
it? His experience on the lock gave him such an acute perception of the
enormous difficulty of ‘tying up’ money with any approach to tightness,
and contrariwise of the remarkable ease with which it got loose, that
through a series of years he regularly propounded this knotty point to
every new insolvent agent and other professional gentleman who passed in
and out.

‘Supposing,’ he would say, stating the case with his key on the
professional gentleman’s waistcoat; ‘supposing a man wanted to leave his
property to a young female, and wanted to tie it up so that nobody else
should ever be able to make a grab at it; how would you tie up that
property?’

‘Settle it strictly on herself,’ the professional gentleman would
complacently answer.

‘But look here,’ quoth the turnkey. ‘Supposing she had, say a brother,
say a father, say a husband, who would be likely to make a grab at that
property when she came into it--how about that?’

‘It would be settled on herself, and they would have no more legal claim
on it than you,’ would be the professional answer.

‘Stop a bit,’ said the turnkey. ‘Supposing she was tender-hearted, and
they came over her. Where’s your law for tying it up then?’

The deepest character whom the turnkey sounded, was unable to produce
his law for tying such a knot as that. So, the turnkey thought about it
all his life, and died intestate after all.

But that was long afterwards, when his god-daughter was past sixteen.
The first half of that space of her life was only just accomplished,
when her pitiful and plaintive look saw her father a widower. From that
time the protection that her wondering eyes had expressed towards him,
became embodied in action, and the Child of the Marshalsea took upon
herself a new relation towards the Father.

At first, such a baby could do little more than sit with him, deserting
her livelier place by the high fender, and quietly watching him. But
this made her so far necessary to him that he became accustomed to her,
and began to be sensible of missing her when she was not there. Through
this little gate, she passed out of childhood into the care-laden world.

What her pitiful look saw, at that early time, in her father, in her
sister, in her brother, in the jail; how much, or how little of the
wretched truth it pleased God to make visible to her; lies hidden with
many mysteries. It is enough that she was inspired to be something which
was not what the rest were, and to be that something, different and
laborious, for the sake of the rest. Inspired? Yes. Shall we speak of
the inspiration of a poet or a priest, and not of the heart impelled by
love and self-devotion to the lowliest work in the lowliest way of life!

With no earthly friend to help her, or so much as to see her, but the
one so strangely assorted; with no knowledge even of the common daily
tone and habits of the common members of the free community who are not
shut up in prisons; born and bred in a social condition, false even with
a reference to the falsest condition outside the walls; drinking from
infancy of a well whose waters had their own peculiar stain, their own
unwholesome and unnatural taste; the Child of the Marshalsea began her
womanly life.

No matter through what mistakes and discouragements, what ridicule (not
unkindly meant, but deeply felt) of her youth and little figure, what
humble consciousness of her own babyhood and want of strength, even
in the matter of lifting and carrying; through how much weariness
and hopelessness, and how many secret tears; she drudged on, until
recognised as useful, even indispensable. That time came. She took the
place of eldest of the three, in all things but precedence; was the
head of the fallen family; and bore, in her own heart, its anxieties and
shames.

At thirteen, she could read and keep accounts, that is, could put down
in words and figures how much the bare necessaries that they wanted
would cost, and how much less they had to buy them with. She had been,
by snatches of a few weeks at a time, to an evening school outside,
and got her sister and brother sent to day-schools by desultory starts,
during three or four years. There was no instruction for any of them at
home; but she knew well--no one better--that a man so broken as to be
the Father of the Marshalsea, could be no father to his own children.

To these scanty means of improvement, she added another of her own
contriving. Once, among the heterogeneous crowd of inmates there
appeared a dancing-master. Her sister had a great desire to learn the
dancing-master’s art, and seemed to have a taste that way. At thirteen
years old, the Child of the Marshalsea presented herself to the
dancing-master, with a little bag in her hand, and preferred her humble
petition.

‘If you please, I was born here, sir.’

‘Oh! You are the young lady, are you?’ said the dancing-master,
surveying the small figure and uplifted face.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And what can I do for you?’ said the dancing-master.

‘Nothing for me, sir, thank you,’ anxiously undrawing the strings of
the little bag; ‘but if, while you stay here, you could be so kind as to
teach my sister cheap--’

‘My child, I’ll teach her for nothing,’ said the dancing-master,
shutting up the bag. He was as good-natured a dancing-master as ever
danced to the Insolvent Court, and he kept his word. The sister was so
apt a pupil, and the dancing-master had such abundant leisure to bestow
upon her (for it took him a matter of ten weeks to set to his creditors,
lead off, turn the Commissioners, and right and left back to his
professional pursuits), that wonderful progress was made. Indeed the
dancing-master was so proud of it, and so wishful to display it before
he left to a few select friends among the collegians, that at six
o’clock on a certain fine morning, a minuet de la cour came off in
the yard--the college-rooms being of too confined proportions for the
purpose--in which so much ground was covered, and the steps were so
conscientiously executed, that the dancing-master, having to play the
kit besides, was thoroughly blown.

The success of this beginning, which led to the dancing-master’s
continuing his instruction after his release, emboldened the poor child
to try again. She watched and waited months for a seamstress. In the
fulness of time a milliner came in, and to her she repaired on her own
behalf.

‘I beg your pardon, ma’am,’ she said, looking timidly round the door of
the milliner, whom she found in tears and in bed: ‘but I was born here.’

Everybody seemed to hear of her as soon as they arrived; for the
milliner sat up in bed, drying her eyes, and said, just as the
dancing-master had said:

‘Oh! _You_ are the child, are you?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘I am sorry I haven’t got anything for you,’ said the milliner, shaking
her head.

‘It’s not that, ma’am. If you please I want to learn needle-work.’

‘Why should you do that,’ returned the milliner, ‘with me before you? It
has not done me much good.’

‘Nothing--whatever it is--seems to have done anybody much good who comes
here,’ she returned in all simplicity; ‘but I want to learn just the
same.’

‘I am afraid you are so weak, you see,’ the milliner objected.

‘I don’t think I am weak, ma’am.’

‘And you are so very, very little, you see,’ the milliner objected.

‘Yes, I am afraid I am very little indeed,’ returned the Child of the
Marshalsea; and so began to sob over that unfortunate defect of hers,
which came so often in her way. The milliner--who was not morose or
hard-hearted, only newly insolvent--was touched, took her in hand with
goodwill, found her the most patient and earnest of pupils, and made her
a cunning work-woman in course of time.

In course of time, and in the very self-same course of time, the Father
of the Marshalsea gradually developed a new flower of character. The
more Fatherly he grew as to the Marshalsea, and the more dependent he
became on the contributions of his changing family, the greater stand
he made by his forlorn gentility. With the same hand that he pocketed
a collegian’s half-crown half an hour ago, he would wipe away the
tears that streamed over his cheeks if any reference were made to his
daughters’ earning their bread. So, over and above other daily cares,
the Child of the Marshalsea had always upon her the care of preserving
the genteel fiction that they were all idle beggars together.

The sister became a dancer. There was a ruined uncle in the family
group--ruined by his brother, the Father of the Marshalsea, and knowing
no more how than his ruiner did, but accepting the fact as an inevitable
certainty--on whom her protection devolved. Naturally a retired and
simple man, he had shown no particular sense of being ruined at the time
when that calamity fell upon him, further than that he left off washing
himself when the shock was announced, and never took to that luxury any
more. He had been a very indifferent musical amateur in his better days;
and when he fell with his brother, resorted for support to playing a
clarionet as dirty as himself in a small Theatre Orchestra. It was the
theatre in which his niece became a dancer; he had been a fixture there
a long time when she took her poor station in it; and he accepted
the task of serving as her escort and guardian, just as he would have
accepted an illness, a legacy, a feast, starvation--anything but soap.

To enable this girl to earn her few weekly shillings, it was necessary
for the Child of the Marshalsea to go through an elaborate form with the
Father.

‘Fanny is not going to live with us just now, father. She will be here a
good deal in the day, but she is going to live outside with uncle.’

‘You surprise me. Why?’

‘I think uncle wants a companion, father. He should be attended to, and
looked after.’

‘A companion? He passes much of his time here. And you attend to him and
look after him, Amy, a great deal more than ever your sister will. You
all go out so much; you all go out so much.’

This was to keep up the ceremony and pretence of his having no idea that
Amy herself went out by the day to work.

‘But we are always glad to come home, father; now, are we not? And as to
Fanny, perhaps besides keeping uncle company and taking care of him, it
may be as well for her not quite to live here, always. She was not born
here as I was, you know, father.’

‘Well, Amy, well. I don’t quite follow you, but it’s natural I suppose
that Fanny should prefer to be outside, and even that you often should,
too. So, you and Fanny and your uncle, my dear, shall have your own way.
Good, good. I’ll not meddle; don’t mind me.’

To get her brother out of the prison; out of the succession to Mrs
Bangham in executing commissions, and out of the slang interchange with
very doubtful companions consequent upon both; was her hardest task. At
eighteen he would have dragged on from hand to mouth, from hour to hour,
from penny to penny, until eighty. Nobody got into the prison from whom
he derived anything useful or good, and she could find no patron for him
but her old friend and godfather.

‘Dear Bob,’ said she, ‘what is to become of poor Tip?’ His name was
Edward, and Ted had been transformed into Tip, within the walls.

The turnkey had strong private opinions as to what would become of
poor Tip, and had even gone so far with the view of averting their
fulfilment, as to sound Tip in reference to the expediency of running
away and going to serve his country. But Tip had thanked him, and said
he didn’t seem to care for his country.

‘Well, my dear,’ said the turnkey, ‘something ought to be done with him.
Suppose I try and get him into the law?’

‘That would be so good of you, Bob!’

The turnkey had now two points to put to the professional gentlemen as
they passed in and out. He put this second one so perseveringly that
a stool and twelve shillings a week were at last found for Tip in the
office of an attorney in a great National Palladium called the Palace
Court; at that time one of a considerable list of everlasting bulwarks
to the dignity and safety of Albion, whose places know them no more.

Tip languished in Clifford’s Inns for six months, and at the expiration
of that term sauntered back one evening with his hands in his pockets,
and incidentally observed to his sister that he was not going back
again.

‘Not going back again?’ said the poor little anxious Child of the
Marshalsea, always calculating and planning for Tip, in the front rank
of her charges.

‘I am so tired of it,’ said Tip, ‘that I have cut it.’

Tip tired of everything. With intervals of Marshalsea lounging, and Mrs
Bangham succession, his small second mother, aided by her trusty friend,
got him into a warehouse, into a market garden, into the hop trade,
into the law again, into an auctioneers, into a brewery, into a
stockbroker’s, into the law again, into a coach office, into a waggon
office, into the law again, into a general dealer’s, into a distillery,
into the law again, into a wool house, into a dry goods house, into the
Billingsgate trade, into the foreign fruit trade, and into the docks.
But whatever Tip went into, he came out of tired, announcing that he
had cut it. Wherever he went, this foredoomed Tip appeared to take the
prison walls with him, and to set them up in such trade or calling;
and to prowl about within their narrow limits in the old slip-shod,
purposeless, down-at-heel way; until the real immovable Marshalsea walls
asserted their fascination over him, and brought him back.

Nevertheless, the brave little creature did so fix her heart on her
brother’s rescue, that while he was ringing out these doleful changes,
she pinched and scraped enough together to ship him for Canada. When he
was tired of nothing to do, and disposed in its turn to cut even that,
he graciously consented to go to Canada. And there was grief in her
bosom over parting with him, and joy in the hope of his being put in a
straight course at last.

‘God bless you, dear Tip. Don’t be too proud to come and see us, when
you have made your fortune.’

‘All right!’ said Tip, and went.

But not all the way to Canada; in fact, not further than Liverpool.
After making the voyage to that port from London, he found himself
so strongly impelled to cut the vessel, that he resolved to walk back
again. Carrying out which intention, he presented himself before her at
the expiration of a month, in rags, without shoes, and much more tired
than ever.

At length, after another interval of successorship to Mrs Bangham, he
found a pursuit for himself, and announced it.

‘Amy, I have got a situation.’

‘Have you really and truly, Tip?’

‘All right. I shall do now. You needn’t look anxious about me any more,
old girl.’

‘What is it, Tip?’

‘Why, you know Slingo by sight?’

‘Not the man they call the dealer?’

‘That’s the chap. He’ll be out on Monday, and he’s going to give me a
berth.’

‘What is he a dealer in, Tip?’

‘Horses. All right! I shall do now, Amy.’

She lost sight of him for months afterwards, and only heard from him
once. A whisper passed among the elder collegians that he had been seen
at a mock auction in Moorfields, pretending to buy plated articles for
massive silver, and paying for them with the greatest liberality in
bank notes; but it never reached her ears. One evening she was alone at
work--standing up at the window, to save the twilight lingering above
the wall--when he opened the door and walked in.

She kissed and welcomed him; but was afraid to ask him any questions. He
saw how anxious and timid she was, and appeared sorry.

‘I am afraid, Amy, you’ll be vexed this time. Upon my life I am!’

‘I am very sorry to hear you say so, Tip. Have you come back?’

‘Why--yes.’

‘Not expecting this time that what you had found would answer very well,
I am less surprised and sorry than I might have been, Tip.’

‘Ah! But that’s not the worst of it.’

‘Not the worst of it?’

‘Don’t look so startled. No, Amy, not the worst of it. I have come back,
you see; but--_don’t_ look so startled--I have come back in what I may
call a new way. I am off the volunteer list altogether. I am in now, as
one of the regulars.’

‘Oh! Don’t say you are a prisoner, Tip! Don’t, don’t!’

‘Well, I don’t want to say it,’ he returned in a reluctant tone; ‘but if
you can’t understand me without my saying it, what am I to do? I am in
for forty pound odd.’

For the first time in all those years, she sunk under her cares. She
cried, with her clasped hands lifted above her head, that it would kill
their father if he ever knew it; and fell down at Tip’s graceless feet.

It was easier for Tip to bring her to her senses than for her to bring
_him_ to understand that the Father of the Marshalsea would be beside
himself if he knew the truth. The thing was incomprehensible to Tip, and
altogether a fanciful notion. He yielded to it in that light only, when
he submitted to her entreaties, backed by those of his uncle and sister.
There was no want of precedent for his return; it was accounted for
to the father in the usual way; and the collegians, with a better
comprehension of the pious fraud than Tip, supported it loyally.

This was the life, and this the history, of the child of the Marshalsea
at twenty-two. With a still surviving attachment to the one miserable
yard and block of houses as her birthplace and home, she passed to and
fro in it shrinkingly now, with a womanly consciousness that she was
pointed out to every one. Since she had begun to work beyond the walls,
she had found it necessary to conceal where she lived, and to come and
go as secretly as she could, between the free city and the iron gates,
outside of which she had never slept in her life. Her original timidity
had grown with this concealment, and her light step and her little
figure shunned the thronged streets while they passed along them.

Worldly wise in hard and poor necessities, she was innocent in all
things else. Innocent, in the mist through which she saw her father,
and the prison, and the turbid living river that flowed through it and
flowed on.

This was the life, and this the history, of Little Dorrit; now going
home upon a dull September evening, observed at a distance by Arthur
Clennam. This was the life, and this the history, of Little Dorrit;
turning at the end of London Bridge, recrossing it, going back again,
passing on to Saint George’s Church, turning back suddenly once more,
and flitting in at the open outer gate and little court-yard of the
Marshalsea.




CHAPTER 8. The Lock


Arthur Clennam stood in the street, waiting to ask some passer-by what
place that was. He suffered a few people to pass him in whose face there
was no encouragement to make the inquiry, and still stood pausing in the
street, when an old man came up and turned into the courtyard.

He stooped a good deal, and plodded along in a slow pre-occupied manner,
which made the bustling London thoroughfares no very safe resort for
him. He was dirtily and meanly dressed, in a threadbare coat, once blue,
reaching to his ankles and buttoned to his chin, where it vanished in
the pale ghost of a velvet collar. A piece of red cloth with which that
phantom had been stiffened in its lifetime was now laid bare, and poked
itself up, at the back of the old man’s neck, into a confusion of grey
hair and rusty stock and buckle which altogether nearly poked his
hat off. A greasy hat it was, and a napless; impending over his eyes,
cracked and crumpled at the brim, and with a wisp of pocket-handkerchief
dangling out below it. His trousers were so long and loose, and his
shoes so clumsy and large, that he shuffled like an elephant; though how
much of this was gait, and how much trailing cloth and leather, no one
could have told. Under one arm he carried a limp and worn-out case,
containing some wind instrument; in the same hand he had a pennyworth
of snuff in a little packet of whitey-brown paper, from which he slowly
comforted his poor blue old nose with a lengthened-out pinch, as Arthur
Clennam looked at him.

To this old man crossing the court-yard, he preferred his inquiry,
touching him on the shoulder. The old man stopped and looked round, with
the expression in his weak grey eyes of one whose thoughts had been far
off, and who was a little dull of hearing also.

‘Pray, sir,’ said Arthur, repeating his question, ‘what is this place?’

‘Ay! This place?’ returned the old man, staying his pinch of snuff on
its road, and pointing at the place without looking at it. ‘This is the
Marshalsea, sir.’

‘The debtors’ prison?’

‘Sir,’ said the old man, with the air of deeming it not quite necessary
to insist upon that designation, ‘the debtors’ prison.’

He turned himself about, and went on.

‘I beg your pardon,’ said Arthur, stopping him once more, ‘but will you
allow me to ask you another question? Can any one go in here?’

‘Any one can _go in_,’ replied the old man; plainly adding by the
significance of his emphasis, ‘but it is not every one who can go out.’

‘Pardon me once more. Are you familiar with the place?’

‘Sir,’ returned the old man, squeezing his little packet of snuff in his
hand, and turning upon his interrogator as if such questions hurt him.
‘I am.’

‘I beg you to excuse me. I am not impertinently curious, but have a good
object. Do you know the name of Dorrit here?’

‘My name, sir,’ replied the old man most unexpectedly, ‘is Dorrit.’

Arthur pulled off his hat to him. ‘Grant me the favour of half-a-dozen
words. I was wholly unprepared for your announcement, and hope that
assurance is my sufficient apology for having taken the liberty of
addressing you. I have recently come home to England after a long
absence. I have seen at my mother’s--Mrs Clennam in the city--a young
woman working at her needle, whom I have only heard addressed or spoken
of as Little Dorrit. I have felt sincerely interested in her, and have
had a great desire to know something more about her. I saw her, not a
minute before you came up, pass in at that door.’

The old man looked at him attentively. ‘Are you a sailor, sir?’ he
asked. He seemed a little disappointed by the shake of the head that
replied to him. ‘Not a sailor? I judged from your sunburnt face that you
might be. Are you in earnest, sir?’

‘I do assure you that I am, and do entreat you to believe that I am, in
plain earnest.’

‘I know very little of the world, sir,’ returned the other, who had a
weak and quavering voice. ‘I am merely passing on, like the shadow over
the sun-dial. It would be worth no man’s while to mislead me; it would
really be too easy--too poor a success, to yield any satisfaction. The
young woman whom you saw go in here is my brother’s child. My brother
is William Dorrit; I am Frederick. You say you have seen her at your
mother’s (I know your mother befriends her), you have felt an interest
in her, and you wish to know what she does here. Come and see.’

He went on again, and Arthur accompanied him.

‘My brother,’ said the old man, pausing on the step and slowly facing
round again, ‘has been here many years; and much that happens even among
ourselves, out of doors, is kept from him for reasons that I needn’t
enter upon now. Be so good as to say nothing of my niece’s working at
her needle. Be so good as to say nothing that goes beyond what is said
among us. If you keep within our bounds, you cannot well be wrong. Now!
Come and see.’

Arthur followed him down a narrow entry, at the end of which a key was
turned, and a strong door was opened from within. It admitted them into
a lodge or lobby, across which they passed, and so through another door
and a grating into the prison. The old man always plodding on before,
turned round, in his slow, stiff, stooping manner, when they came to the
turnkey on duty, as if to present his companion. The turnkey nodded; and
the companion passed in without being asked whom he wanted.

The night was dark; and the prison lamps in the yard, and the candles in
the prison windows faintly shining behind many sorts of wry old curtain
and blind, had not the air of making it lighter. A few people loitered
about, but the greater part of the population was within doors. The old
man, taking the right-hand side of the yard, turned in at the third or
fourth doorway, and began to ascend the stairs. ‘They are rather dark,
sir, but you will not find anything in the way.’

He paused for a moment before opening a door on the second story. He had
no sooner turned the handle than the visitor saw Little Dorrit, and saw
the reason of her setting so much store by dining alone.

She had brought the meat home that she should have eaten herself, and
was already warming it on a gridiron over the fire for her father, clad
in an old grey gown and a black cap, awaiting his supper at the table.
A clean cloth was spread before him, with knife, fork, and spoon,
salt-cellar, pepper-box, glass, and pewter ale-pot. Such zests as his
particular little phial of cayenne pepper and his pennyworth of pickles
in a saucer, were not wanting.

She started, coloured deeply, and turned white. The visitor, more with
his eyes than by the slight impulsive motion of his hand, entreated her
to be reassured and to trust him.

‘I found this gentleman,’ said the uncle--‘Mr Clennam, William, son of
Amy’s friend--at the outer gate, wishful, as he was going by, of paying
his respects, but hesitating whether to come in or not. This is my
brother William, sir.’

‘I hope,’ said Arthur, very doubtful what to say, ‘that my respect for
your daughter may explain and justify my desire to be presented to you,
sir.’

‘Mr Clennam,’ returned the other, rising, taking his cap off in the
flat of his hand, and so holding it, ready to put on again, ‘you do me
honour. You are welcome, sir;’ with a low bow. ‘Frederick, a chair. Pray
sit down, Mr Clennam.’

He put his black cap on again as he had taken it off, and resumed his
own seat. There was a wonderful air of benignity and patronage in his
manner. These were the ceremonies with which he received the collegians.

‘You are welcome to the Marshalsea, sir. I have welcomed many gentlemen
to these walls. Perhaps you are aware--my daughter Amy may have
mentioned that I am the Father of this place.’

‘I--so I have understood,’ said Arthur, dashing at the assertion.

‘You know, I dare say, that my daughter Amy was born here. A good girl,
sir, a dear girl, and long a comfort and support to me. Amy, my dear,
put this dish on; Mr Clennam will excuse the primitive customs to which
we are reduced here. Is it a compliment to ask you if you would do me
the honour, sir, to--’

‘Thank you,’ returned Arthur. ‘Not a morsel.’

He felt himself quite lost in wonder at the manner of the man, and that
the probability of his daughter’s having had a reserve as to her family
history, should be so far out of his mind.

She filled his glass, put all the little matters on the table ready to
his hand, and then sat beside him while he ate his supper. Evidently in
observance of their nightly custom, she put some bread before herself,
and touched his glass with her lips; but Arthur saw she was troubled
and took nothing. Her look at her father, half admiring him and proud
of him, half ashamed for him, all devoted and loving, went to his inmost
heart.

The Father of the Marshalsea condescended towards his brother as an
amiable, well-meaning man; a private character, who had not arrived at
distinction. ‘Frederick,’ said he, ‘you and Fanny sup at your lodgings
to-night, I know. What have you done with Fanny, Frederick?’

‘She is walking with Tip.’

‘Tip--as you may know--is my son, Mr Clennam. He has been a little
wild, and difficult to settle, but his introduction to the world was
rather’--he shrugged his shoulders with a faint sigh, and looked round
the room--‘a little adverse. Your first visit here, sir?’

‘My first.’

‘You could hardly have been here since your boyhood without my
knowledge. It very seldom happens that anybody--of any pretensions--any
pretensions--comes here without being presented to me.’

‘As many as forty or fifty in a day have been introduced to my brother,’
said Frederick, faintly lighting up with a ray of pride.

‘Yes!’ the Father of the Marshalsea assented. ‘We have even exceeded
that number. On a fine Sunday in term time, it is quite a Levee--quite
a Levee. Amy, my dear, I have been trying half the day to remember the
name of the gentleman from Camberwell who was introduced to me last
Christmas week by that agreeable coal-merchant who was remanded for six
months.’

‘I don’t remember his name, father.’

‘Frederick, do _you_ remember his name?’

Frederick doubted if he had ever heard it. No one could doubt that
Frederick was the last person upon earth to put such a question to, with
any hope of information.

‘I mean,’ said his brother, ‘the gentleman who did that handsome action
with so much delicacy. Ha! Tush! The name has quite escaped me. Mr
Clennam, as I have happened to mention handsome and delicate action, you
may like, perhaps, to know what it was.’

‘Very much,’ said Arthur, withdrawing his eyes from the delicate head
beginning to droop and the pale face with a new solicitude stealing over
it.

‘It is so generous, and shows so much fine feeling, that it is almost a
duty to mention it. I said at the time that I always would mention it
on every suitable occasion, without regard to personal sensitiveness.
A--well--a--it’s of no use to disguise the fact--you must know, Mr
Clennam, that it does sometimes occur that people who come here desire
to offer some little--Testimonial--to the Father of the place.’

To see her hand upon his arm in mute entreaty half-repressed, and her
timid little shrinking figure turning away, was to see a sad, sad sight.

‘Sometimes,’ he went on in a low, soft voice, agitated, and clearing
his throat every now and then; ‘sometimes--hem--it takes one shape and
sometimes another; but it is generally--ha--Money. And it is, I cannot
but confess it, it is too often--hem--acceptable. This gentleman that I
refer to, was presented to me, Mr Clennam, in a manner highly gratifying
to my feelings, and conversed not only with great politeness, but with
great--ahem--information.’ All this time, though he had finished his
supper, he was nervously going about his plate with his knife and
fork, as if some of it were still before him. ‘It appeared from his
conversation that he had a garden, though he was delicate of mentioning
it at first, as gardens are--hem--are not accessible to me. But it came
out, through my admiring a very fine cluster of geranium--beautiful
cluster of geranium to be sure--which he had brought from his
conservatory. On my taking notice of its rich colour, he showed me a
piece of paper round it, on which was written, “For the Father of the
Marshalsea,” and presented it to me. But this was--hem--not all. He made
a particular request, on taking leave, that I would remove the paper in
half an hour. I--ha--I did so; and I found that it contained--ahem--two
guineas. I assure you, Mr Clennam, I have received--hem--Testimonials
in many ways, and of many degrees of value, and they have always
been--ha--unfortunately acceptable; but I never was more pleased than
with this--ahem--this particular Testimonial.’

Arthur was in the act of saying the little he could say on such a theme,
when a bell began to ring, and footsteps approached the door. A pretty
girl of a far better figure and much more developed than Little Dorrit,
though looking much younger in the face when the two were observed
together, stopped in the doorway on seeing a stranger; and a young man
who was with her, stopped too.

‘Mr Clennam, Fanny. My eldest daughter and my son, Mr Clennam. The bell
is a signal for visitors to retire, and so they have come to say good
night; but there is plenty of time, plenty of time. Girls, Mr Clennam
will excuse any household business you may have together. He knows, I
dare say, that I have but one room here.’

‘I only want my clean dress from Amy, father,’ said the second girl.

‘And I my clothes,’ said Tip.

Amy opened a drawer in an old piece of furniture that was a chest of
drawers above and a bedstead below, and produced two little bundles,
which she handed to her brother and sister. ‘Mended and made up?’
Clennam heard the sister ask in a whisper. To which Amy answered ‘Yes.’
He had risen now, and took the opportunity of glancing round the room.
The bare walls had been coloured green, evidently by an unskilled hand,
and were poorly decorated with a few prints. The window was curtained,
and the floor carpeted; and there were shelves and pegs, and other such
conveniences, that had accumulated in the course of years. It was a
close, confined room, poorly furnished; and the chimney smoked to boot,
or the tin screen at the top of the fireplace was superfluous; but
constant pains and care had made it neat, and even, after its kind,
comfortable.

All the while the bell was ringing, and the uncle was anxious to go.
‘Come, Fanny, come, Fanny,’ he said, with his ragged clarionet case
under his arm; ‘the lock, child, the lock!’

Fanny bade her father good night, and whisked off airily. Tip had
already clattered down-stairs. ‘Now, Mr Clennam,’ said the uncle,
looking back as he shuffled out after them, ‘the lock, sir, the lock.’

Mr Clennam had two things to do before he followed; one, to offer his
testimonial to the Father of the Marshalsea, without giving pain to his
child; the other to say something to that child, though it were but a
word, in explanation of his having come there.

‘Allow me,’ said the Father, ‘to see you down-stairs.’

She had slipped out after the rest, and they were alone. ‘Not on any
account,’ said the visitor, hurriedly. ‘Pray allow me to--’ chink,
chink, chink.

‘Mr Clennam,’ said the Father, ‘I am deeply, deeply--’ But his visitor
had shut up his hand to stop the clinking, and had gone down-stairs with
great speed.

He saw no Little Dorrit on his way down, or in the yard. The last two or
three stragglers were hurrying to the lodge, and he was following,
when he caught sight of her in the doorway of the first house from the
entrance. He turned back hastily.

‘Pray forgive me,’ he said, ‘for speaking to you here; pray forgive me
for coming here at all! I followed you to-night. I did so, that I might
endeavour to render you and your family some service. You know the
terms on which I and my mother are, and may not be surprised that I
have preserved our distant relations at her house, lest I should
unintentionally make her jealous, or resentful, or do you any injury in
her estimation. What I have seen here, in this short time, has greatly
increased my heartfelt wish to be a friend to you. It would recompense
me for much disappointment if I could hope to gain your confidence.’

She was scared at first, but seemed to take courage while he spoke to
her.

‘You are very good, sir. You speak very earnestly to me. But I--but I
wish you had not watched me.’

He understood the emotion with which she said it, to arise in her
father’s behalf; and he respected it, and was silent.

‘Mrs Clennam has been of great service to me; I don’t know what we
should have done without the employment she has given me; I am afraid
it may not be a good return to become secret with her; I can say no more
to-night, sir. I am sure you mean to be kind to us. Thank you, thank
you.’

‘Let me ask you one question before I leave. Have you known my mother
long?’

‘I think two years, sir,--The bell has stopped.’

‘How did you know her first? Did she send here for you?’

‘No. She does not even know that I live here. We have a friend, father
and I--a poor labouring man, but the best of friends--and I wrote out
that I wished to do needlework, and gave his address. And he got what
I wrote out displayed at a few places where it cost nothing, and Mrs
Clennam found me that way, and sent for me. The gate will be locked,
sir!’

She was so tremulous and agitated, and he was so moved by compassion for
her, and by deep interest in her story as it dawned upon him, that he
could scarcely tear himself away. But the stoppage of the bell, and the
quiet in the prison, were a warning to depart; and with a few hurried
words of kindness he left her gliding back to her father.

But he remained too late. The inner gate was locked, and the lodge
closed. After a little fruitless knocking with his hand, he was standing
there with the disagreeable conviction upon him that he had got to get
through the night, when a voice accosted him from behind.

‘Caught, eh?’ said the voice. ‘You won’t go home till morning. Oh! It’s
you, is it, Mr Clennam?’

The voice was Tip’s; and they stood looking at one another in the
prison-yard, as it began to rain.

‘You’ve done it,’ observed Tip; ‘you must be sharper than that next
time.’

‘But you are locked in too,’ said Arthur.

‘I believe I am!’ said Tip, sarcastically. ‘About! But not in your way.
I belong to the shop, only my sister has a theory that our governor must
never know it. I don’t see why, myself.’

‘Can I get any shelter?’ asked Arthur. ‘What had I better do?’

‘We had better get hold of Amy first of all,’ said Tip, referring any
difficulty to her as a matter of course.

‘I would rather walk about all night--it’s not much to do--than give
that trouble.’

‘You needn’t do that, if you don’t mind paying for a bed. If you don’t
mind paying, they’ll make you up one on the Snuggery table, under the
circumstances. If you’ll come along, I’ll introduce you there.’

As they passed down the yard, Arthur looked up at the window of the room
he had lately left, where the light was still burning. ‘Yes, sir,’ said
Tip, following his glance. ‘That’s the governor’s. She’ll sit with him
for another hour reading yesterday’s paper to him, or something of that
sort; and then she’ll come out like a little ghost, and vanish away
without a sound.’

‘I don’t understand you.’

‘The governor sleeps up in the room, and she has a lodging at the
turnkey’s. First house there,’ said Tip, pointing out the doorway into
which she had retired. ‘First house, sky parlour. She pays twice as much
for it as she would for one twice as good outside. But she stands by the
governor, poor dear girl, day and night.’

This brought them to the tavern-establishment at the upper end of the
prison, where the collegians had just vacated their social evening club.
The apartment on the ground-floor in which it was held, was the Snuggery
in question; the presidential tribune of the chairman, the pewter-pots,
glasses, pipes, tobacco-ashes, and general flavour of members, were
still as that convivial institution had left them on its adjournment.
The Snuggery had two of the qualities popularly held to be essential to
grog for ladies, in respect that it was hot and strong; but in the third
point of analogy, requiring plenty of it, the Snuggery was defective;
be

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