M

anifold are the cares of wealth and state. Mr Dorrit’s satisfaction in remembering that it had not been necessary for him to announce himself to Clennam and

Co., or to make an allusion to his having had any knowledge of the intrusive person of that name, had been damped over-night, while it was still fresh, by a debate that arose within him whether or no he should take the Marshalsea in his way back, and look at the old gate. He had decided not to do so; and had astonished the coachman by being very fierce with him for proposing to go over London Bridge and recross the river by Waterloo Bridge—a course which would have taken him almost within sight of his old quarters. Still, for all that, the question had raised a conflict in his breast; and, for some odd reason or no reason, he was vaguely dissatisfied. Even at the Merdle dinner-table next day, he was so out of sorts about it that he continued at intervals to turn it over and over, in a manner frightfully inconsistent with the good society surrounding him. It made him hot to think what the Chief Butler’s opinion of him would have been, if that illustrious personage could have plumbed with that heavy eye of his the stream of his meditations.

The farewell banquet was of a gorgeous nature, and wound up his visit in a most brilliant manner. Fanny combined with the attractions of her youth and beauty, a certain weight of self- sustainment as if she had been married twenty years. He felt that

he could leave her with a quiet mind to tread the paths of distinction, and wished—but without abatement of patronage, and without prejudice to the retiring virtues of his favourite child— that he had such another daughter.

‘My dear,’ he told her at parting, ‘our family looks to you to— ha—assert its dignity and—hum—maintain its importance. I know you will never disappoint it.’

‘No, papa,’ said Fanny, ‘you may rely upon that, I think. My best love to dearest Amy, and I will write to her very soon.’

‘Shall I convey any message to—ha—anybody else?’ asked Mr Dorrit, in an insinuating manner.

‘Papa,’ said Fanny, before whom Mrs General instantly loomed, ‘no, I thank you. You are very kind, Pa, but I must beg to be excused. There is no other message to send, I thank you, dear papa, that it would be at all agreeable to you to take.’

They parted in an outer drawing-room, where only Mr Sparkler waited on his lady, and dutifully bided his time for shaking hands. When Mr Sparkler was admitted to this closing audience, Mr Merdle came creeping in with not much more appearance of arms in his sleeves than if he had been the twin brother of Miss Biffin, and insisted on escorting Mr Dorrit down-stairs. All Mr Dorrit’s protestations being in vain, he enjoyed the honour of being accompanied to the hall-door by this distinguished man, who (as Mr Dorrit told him in shaking hands on the step) had really overwhelmed him with attentions and services during this memorable visit. Thus they parted; Mr Dorrit entering his carriage with a swelling breast, not at all sorry that his Courier, who had come to take leave in the lower regions, should have an opportunity of beholding the grandeur of his departure.

The aforesaid grandeur was yet full upon Mr Dorrit when he alighted at his hotel. Helped out by the Courier and some half- dozen of the hotel servants, he was passing through the hall with a serene magnificence, when lo! a sight presented itself that struck him dumb and motionless. John Chivery, in his best clothes, with his tall hat under his arm, his ivory-handled cane genteelly embarrassing his deportment, and a bundle of cigars in his hand!

‘Now, young man,’ said the porter. ‘This is the gentleman. This young man has persisted in waiting, sir, saying you would be glad to see him.’

Mr Dorrit glared on the young man, choked, and said, in the mildest of tones, ‘Ah! Young John! It is Young John, I think; is it not?’

‘Yes, sir,’ returned Young John.

‘I—ha—thought it was Young john!’ said Mr Dorrit. ‘The young man may come up,’ turning to the attendants, as he passed on: ‘oh yes, he may come up. Let Young John follow. I will speak to him above.’

Young John followed, smiling and much gratified. Mr Dorrit’s rooms were reached. Candles were lighted. The attendants withdrew.

‘Now, sir,’ said Mr Dorrit, turning round upon him and seizing him by the collar when they were safely alone. ‘What do you mean by this?’

The amazement and horror depicted in the unfortunate john’s face—for he had rather expected to be embraced next—were of that powerfully expressive nature that Mr Dorrit withdrew his hand and merely glared at him.

‘How dare you do this?’ said Mr Dorrit. ‘How do you presume to

come here? How dare you insult me?’

‘I insult you, sir?’ cried Young John. ‘Oh!’

‘Yes, sir,’ returned Mr Dorrit. ‘Insult me. Your coming here is an affront, an impertinence, an audacity. You are not wanted here. Who sent you here? What—ha—the Devil do you do here?’

‘I thought, sir,’ said Young John, with as pale and shocked a face as ever had been turned to Mr Dorrit’s in his life—even in his College life: ‘I thought, sir, you mightn’t object to have the goodness to accept a bundle—’

‘Damn your bundle, sir!’ cried Mr Dorrit, in irrepressible rage. ‘I—hum—don’t smoke.’

‘I humbly beg your pardon, sir. You used to.’

‘Tell me that again,’ cried Mr Dorrit, quite beside himself, ‘and I’ll take the poker to you!’

John Chivery backed to the door.

‘Stop, sir!’ cried Mr Dorrit. ‘Stop! Sit down. Confound you, sit down!’

John Chivery dropped into the chair nearest the door, and Mr Dorrit walked up and down the room; rapidly at first; then, more slowly. Once, he went to the window, and stood there with his forehead against the glass. All of a sudden, he turned and said:

‘What else did you come for, Sir?’

‘Nothing else in the world, sir. Oh dear me! Only to say, Sir, that I hoped you was well, and only to ask if Miss Amy was Well?’

‘What’s that to you, sir?’ retorted Mr Dorrit.

‘It’s nothing to me, sir, by rights. I never thought of lessening the distance betwixt us, I am sure. I know it’s a liberty, sir, but I never thought you’d have taken it ill. Upon my word and honour, sir,’ said Young John, with emotion, ‘in my poor way, I am too

proud to have come, I assure you, if I had thought so.’

Mr Dorrit was ashamed. He went back to the window, and leaned his forehead against the glass for some time. When he turned, he had his handkerchief in his hand, and he had been wiping his eyes with it, and he looked tired and ill.

‘Young John, I am very sorry to have been hasty with you, but—ha—some remembrances are not happy remembrances, and—hum—you shouldn’t have come.’

‘I feel that now, sir,’ returned John Chivery; ‘but I didn’t before, and Heaven knows I meant no harm, sir.’

‘No. No,’ said Mr Dorrit. ‘I am—hum—sure of that. Ha. Give me your hand, Young John, give me your hand.’

Young John gave it; but Mr Dorrit had driven his heart out of it, and nothing could change his face now, from its white, shocked look.

‘There!’ said Mr Dorrit, slowly shaking hands with him. ‘Sit down again, Young John.’

‘Thank you, sir—but I’d rather stand.’

Mr Dorrit sat down instead. After painfully holding his head a little while, he turned it to his visitor, and said, with an effort to be easy:

‘And how is your father, Young John? How—ha—how are they all, Young John?’

‘Thank you, sir, They’re all pretty well, sir. They’re not any ways complaining.’

‘Hum. You are in your—ha—old business I see, John?’ said Mr Dorrit, with a glance at the offending bundle he had anathematised.

‘Partly, sir. I am in my’—John hesitated a little—‘father’s

business likewise.’

‘Oh indeed!’ said Mr Dorrit. ‘Do you—ha hum—go upon the ha—’

‘Lock, sir? Yes, sir.’ ‘Much to do, John?’

‘Yes, sir; we’re pretty heavy at present. I don’t know how it is, but we generally are pretty heavy.’

‘At this time of the year, Young John?’

‘Mostly at all times of the year, sir. I don’t know the time that makes much difference to us. I wish you good night, sir.’

‘Stay a moment, John—ha—stay a moment. Hum. Leave me the cigars, John, I—ha—beg.’

‘Certainly, sir.’ John put them, with a trembling hand, on the table.

‘Stay a moment, Young John; stay another moment. It would be a—ha—a gratification to me to send a little—hum—Testimonial, by such a trusty messenger, to be divided among—ha hum— them—them—according to their wants. Would you object to take it, John?’

‘Not in any ways, sir. There’s many of them, I’m sure, that would be the better for it.’

‘Thank you, John. I—ha—I’ll write it, John.’

His hand shook so that he was a long time writing it, and wrote it in a tremulous scrawl at last. It was a cheque for one hundred pounds. He folded it up, put it in Young John’s hand, and pressed the hand in his.

‘I hope you’ll—ha—overlook—hum—what has passed, John.’ ‘Don’t speak of it, sir, on any accounts. I don’t in any ways bear

malice, I’m sure.’

But nothing while John was there could change John’s face to its natural colour and expression, or restore John’s natural manner.

‘And, John,’ said Mr Dorrit, giving his hand a final pressure, and releasing it, ‘I hope we—ha—agree that we have spoken together in confidence; and that you will abstain, in going out, from saying anything to any one that might—hum—suggest that— ha—once I—’

‘Oh! I assure you, sir,’ returned John Chivery, ‘in my poor humble way, sir, I’m too proud and honourable to do it, sir.’

Mr Dorrit was not too proud and honourable to listen at the door that he might ascertain for himself whether John really went straight out, or lingered to have any talk with any one. There was no doubt that he went direct out at the door, and away down the street with a quick step. After remaining alone for an hour, Mr Dorrit rang for the Courier, who found him with his chair on the hearth-rug, sitting with his back towards him and his face to the fire. ‘You can take that bundle of cigars to smoke on the journey, if you like,’ said Mr Dorrit, with a careless wave of his hand. ‘Ha— brought by—hum—little offering from—ha—son of old tenant of mine.’

Next morning’s sun saw Mr Dorrit’s equipage upon the Dover road, where every red-jacketed postilion was the sign of a cruel house, established for the unmerciful plundering of travellers. The whole business of the human race, between London and Dover, being spoliation, Mr Dorrit was waylaid at Dartford, pillaged at Gravesend, rifled at Rochester, fleeced at Sittingbourne, and sacked at Canterbury. However, it being the Courier’s business to get him out of the hands of the banditti, the Courier brought him

off at every stage; and so the red-jackets went gleaming merrily along the spring landscape, rising and falling to a regular measure, between Mr Dorrit in his snug corner and the next chalky rise in the dusty highway.

Another day’s sun saw him at Calais. And having now got the Channel between himself and John Chivery, he began to feel safe, and to find that the foreign air was lighter to breathe than the air of England.

On again by the heavy French roads for Paris. Having now quite recovered his equanimity, Mr Dorrit, in his snug corner, fell to castle-building as he rode along. It was evident that he had a very large castle in hand. All day long he was running towers up, taking towers down, adding a wing here, putting on a battlement there, looking to the walls, strengthening the defences, giving ornamental touches to the interior, making in all respects a superb castle of it. His preoccupied face so clearly denoted the pursuit in which he was engaged, that every cripple at the post-houses, not blind, who shoved his little battered tin-box in at the carriage window for Charity in the name of Heaven, Charity in the name of our Lady, Charity in the name of all the Saints, knew as well what work he was at, as their countryman Le Brun could have known it himself, though he had made that English traveller the subject of a special physiognomical treatise.

Arrived at Paris, and resting there three days, Mr Dorrit strolled much about the streets alone, looking in at the shop- windows, and particularly the jewellers’ windows. Ultimately, he went into the most famous jeweller’s, and said he wanted to buy a little gift for a lady.

It was a charming little woman to whom he said it—a sprightly

little woman, dressed in perfect taste, who came out of a green velvet bower to attend upon him, from posting up some dainty little books of account which one could hardly suppose to be ruled for the entry of any articles more commercial than kisses, at a dainty little shining desk which looked in itself like a sweetmeat.

For example, then, said the little woman, what species of gift did Monsieur desire? A love-gift?

Mr Dorrit smiled, and said, Eh, well! Perhaps. What did he know? It was always possible; the sex being so charming. Would she show him some?

Most willingly, said the little woman. Flattered and enchanted to show him many. But pardon! To begin with, he would have the great goodness to observe that there were love-gifts, and there were nuptial gifts. For example, these ravishing ear-rings and this necklace so superb to correspond, were what one called a love-gift. These brooches and these rings, of a beauty so gracious and celestial, were what one called, with the permission of Monsieur, nuptial gifts.

Perhaps it would be a good arrangement, Mr Dorrit hinted, smiling, to purchase both, and to present the love-gift first, and to finish with the nuptial offering?

Ah Heaven! said the little woman, laying the tips of the fingers of her two little hands against each other, that would be generous indeed, that would be a special gallantry! And without doubt the lady so crushed with gifts would find them irresistible.

Mr Dorrit was not sure of that. But, for example, the sprightly little woman was very sure of it, she said. So Mr Dorrit bought a gift of each sort, and paid handsomely for it. As he strolled back to his hotel afterwards, he carried his head high: having plainly got

up his castle now to a much loftier altitude than the two square towers of Notre Dame.

Building away with all his might, but reserving the plans of his castle exclusively for his own eye, Mr Dorrit posted away for Marseilles. Building on, building on, busily, busily, from morning to night. Falling asleep, and leaving great blocks of building materials dangling in the air; waking again, to resume work and get them into their places. What time the Courier in the rumble, smoking Young john’s best cigars, left a little thread of thin light smoke behind—perhaps as he built a castle or two with stray pieces of Mr Dorrit’s money.

Not a fortified town that they passed in all their journey was as strong, not a Cathedral summit was as high, as Mr Dorrit’s castle. Neither the Saone nor the Rhone sped with the swiftness of that peerless building; nor was the Mediterranean deeper than its foundations; nor were the distant landscapes on the Cornice road, nor the hills and bay of Genoa the Superb, more beautiful. Mr Dorrit and his matchless castle were disembarked among the dirty white houses and dirtier felons of Civita Vecchia, and thence scrambled on to Rome as they could, through the filth that festered on the way.

Chapter 19

The Storming of the Castle in the Air

T

he sun had gone down full four hours, and it was later than most travellers would like it to be for finding themselves outside the walls of Rome, when Mr Dorrit’s carriage, still on its last wearisome stage, rattled over the solitary Campagna. The savage herdsmen and the fierce-looking peasants who had chequered the way while the light lasted, had all gone down with the sun, and left the wilderness blank. At some turns of the road, a pale flare on the horizon, like an exhalation from the ruin-sown land, showed that the city was yet far off; but this poor relief was rare and short-lived. The carriage dipped down again into a hollow of the black dry sea, and for a long time there was

nothing visible save its petrified swell and the gloomy sky.

Mr Dorrit, though he had his castle-building to engage his mind, could not be quite easy in that desolate place. He was far more curious, in every swerve of the carriage, and every cry of the postilions, than he had been since he quitted London. The valet on the box evidently quaked. The Courier in the rumble was not altogether comfortable in his mind. As often as Mr Dorrit let down the glass and looked back at him (which was very often), he saw him smoking John Chivery out, it is true, but still generally standing up the while and looking about him, like a man who had his suspicions, and kept upon his guard. Then would Mr Dorrit, pulling up the glass again, reflect that those postilions were cut- throat looking fellows, and that he would have done better to have

slept at Civita Vecchia, and have started betimes in the morning. But, for all this, he worked at his castle in the intervals.

And now, fragments of ruinous enclosure, yawning window-gap and crazy wall, deserted houses, leaking wells, broken water- tanks, spectral cypress-trees, patches of tangled vine, and the changing of the track to a long, irregular, disordered lane where everything was crumbling away, from the unsightly buildings to the jolting road—now, these objects showed that they were nearing Rome. And now, a sudden twist and stoppage of the carriage inspired Mr Dorrit with the mistrust that the brigand moment was come for twisting him into a ditch and robbing him; until, letting down the glass again and looking out, he perceived himself assailed by nothing worse than a funeral procession, which came mechanically chaunting by, with an indistinct show of dirty vestments, lurid torches, swinging censers, and a great cross borne before a priest. He was an ugly priest by torchlight; of a lowering aspect, with an overhanging brow; and as his eyes met those of Mr Dorrit, looking bareheaded out of the carriage, his lips, moving as they chaunted, seemed to threaten that important traveller; likewise the action of his hand, which was in fact his manner of returning the traveller’s salutation, seemed to come in aid of that menace. So thought Mr Dorrit, made fanciful by the weariness of building and travelling, as the priest drifted past him, and the procession straggled away, taking its dead along with it. Upon their so-different way went Mr Dorrit’s company too; and soon, with their coach load of luxuries from the two great capitals of Europe, they were (like the Goths reversed) beating at the gates of Rome.

Mr Dorrit was not expected by his own people that night. He

had been; but they had given him up until to-morrow, not doubting that it was later than he would care, in those parts, to be out. Thus, when his equipage stopped at his own gate, no one but the porter appeared to receive him. Was Miss Dorrit from home? he asked. No. She was within. Good, said Mr Dorrit to the assembling servants; let them keep where they were; let them help to unload the carriage; he would find Miss Dorrit for himself. So he went up his grand staircase, slowly, and tired, and looked into various chambers which were empty, until he saw a light in a small ante-room. It was a curtained nook, like a tent, within two other rooms; and it looked warm and bright in colour, as he approached it through the dark avenue they made.

There was a draped doorway, but no door; and as he stopped here, looking in unseen, he felt a pang. Surely not like jealousy? For why like jealousy? There was only his daughter and his brother there: he, with his chair drawn to the hearth, enjoying the warmth of the evening wood fire; she seated at a little table, busied with some embroidery work. Allowing for the great difference in the still-life of the picture, the figures were much the same as of old; his brother being sufficiently like himself to represent himself, for a moment, in the composition. So had he sat many a night, over a coal fire far away; so had she sat, devoted to him. Yet surely there was nothing to be jealous of in the old miserable poverty. Whence, then, the pang in his heart?

‘Do you know, uncle, I think you are growing young again?’ Her uncle shook his head and said, ‘Since when, my dear; since when?’ ‘I think,’ returned Little Dorrit, plying her needle, ‘that you have been growing younger for weeks past. So cheerful, uncle, and

so ready, and so interested.’

‘My dear child—all you.’ ‘All me, uncle!’

‘Yes, yes. You have done me a world of good. You have been so considerate of me, and so tender with me, and so delicate in trying to hide your attentions from me, that I—well, well, well! It’s treasured up, my darling, treasured up.’

‘There is nothing in it but your own fresh fancy, uncle,’ said Little Dorrit, cheerfully.

‘Well, well, well!’ murmured the old man. ‘Thank God!’

She paused for an instant in her work to look at him, and her look revived that former pain in her father’s breast; in his poor weak breast, so full of contradictions, vacillations, inconsistencies, the little peevish perplexities of this ignorant life, mists which the morning without a night only can clear away.

‘I have been freer with you, you see, my dove,’ said the old man, ‘since we have been alone. I say, alone, for I don’t count Mrs General; I don’t care for her; she has nothing to do with me. But I know Fanny was impatient of me. And I don’t wonder at it, or complain of it, for I am sensible that I must be in the way, though I try to keep out of it as well as I can. I know I am not fit company for our company. My brother William,’ said the old man admiringly, ‘is fit company for monarchs; but not so your uncle, my dear. Frederick Dorrit is no credit to William Dorrit, and he knows it quite well. Ah! Why, here’s your father, Amy! My dear William, welcome back! My beloved brother, I am rejoiced to see you!’

(Turning his head in speaking, he had caught sight of him as he stood in the doorway.)

Little Dorrit with a cry of pleasure put her arms about her

father’s neck, and kissed him again and again. Her father was a little impatient, and a little querulous. ‘I am glad to find you at last, Amy,’ he said. ‘Ha. Really I am glad to find—hum—any one to receive me at last. I appear to have been—ha—so little expected, that upon my word I began—ha hum—to think it might be right to offer an apology for—ha—taking the liberty of coming back at all.’

‘It was so late, my dear William,’ said his brother, ‘that we had given you up for to-night.’

‘I am stronger than you, dear Frederick,’ returned his brother with an elaboration of fraternity in which there was severity; ‘and I hope I can travel without detriment at—ha—any hour I choose.’

‘Surely, surely,’ returned the other, with a misgiving that he had given offence. ‘Surely, William.’

‘Thank you, Amy,’ pursued Mr Dorrit, as she helped him to put off his wrappers. ‘I can do it without assistance. I—ha—need not trouble you, Amy. Could I have a morsel of bread and a glass of wine, or—hum—would it cause too much inconvenience?’

‘Dear father, you shall have supper in a very few minutes.’ ‘Thank you, my love,’ said Mr Dorrit, with a reproachful frost

upon him; ‘I—ha—am afraid I am causing inconvenience. Hum. Mrs General pretty well?’

‘Mrs General complained of a headache, and of being fatigued; and so, when we gave you up, she went to bed, dear.’

Perhaps Mr Dorrit thought that Mrs General had done well in being overcome by the disappointment of his not arriving. At any rate, his face relaxed, and he said with obvious satisfaction, ‘Extremely sorry to hear that Mrs General is not well.’

During this short dialogue, his daughter had been observant of him, with something more than her usual interest. It would seem

as though he had a changed or worn appearance in her eyes, and he perceived and resented it; for he said with renewed peevishness, when he had divested himself of his travelling-cloak, and had come to the fire: ‘Amy, what are you looking at? What do you see in me that causes you to—ha—concentrate your solicitude on me in that—hum—very particular manner?’

‘I did not know it, father; I beg your pardon. It gladdens my eyes to see you again; that’s all.’

‘Don’t say that’s all, because—ha—that’s not all. You—hum— you think,’ said Mr Dorrit, with an accusatory emphasis, ‘that I am not looking well.’

‘I thought you looked a little tired, love.’

‘Then you are mistaken,’ said Mr Dorrit. ‘Ha, I am not tired. Ha, hum. I am very much fresher than I was when I went away.’

He was so inclined to be angry that she said nothing more in her justification, but remained quietly beside him embracing his arm. As he stood thus, with his brother on the other side, he fell into a heavy doze, of not a minute’s duration, and awoke with a start.

‘Frederick,’ he said, turning to his brother: ‘I recommend you to go to bed immediately.’

‘No, William. I’ll wait and see you sup.’

‘Frederick,’ he retorted, ‘I beg you to go to bed. I—ha—make it a personal request that you go to bed. You ought to have been in bed long ago. You are very feeble.’

‘Hah!’ said the old man, who had no wish but to please him. ‘Well, well, well! I dare say I am.’

‘My dear Frederick,’ returned Mr Dorrit, with an astonishing superiority to his brother’s failing powers, ‘there can be no doubt

of it. It is painful to me to see you so weak. Ha. It distresses me. Hum. I don’t find you looking at all well. You are not fit for this sort of thing. You should be more careful, you should be very careful.’

‘Shall I go to bed?’ asked Frederick.

‘Dear Frederick,’ said Mr Dorrit, ‘do, I adjure you! Good night, brother. I hope you will be stronger to-morrow. I am not at all pleased with your looks. Good night, dear fellow.’ After dismissing his brother in this gracious way, he fell into a doze again before the old man was well out of the room: and he would have stumbled forward upon the logs, but for his daughter’s restraining hold.

‘Your uncle wanders very much, Amy,’ he said, when he was thus roused. ‘He is less—ha—coherent, and his conversation is more—hum—broken, than I have—ha, hum—ever known. Has he had any illness since I have been gone?’

‘No, father.’

‘You—ha—see a great change in him, Amy?’ ‘I have not observed it, dear.’

‘Greatly broken,’ said Mr Dorrit. ‘Greatly broken. My poor, affectionate, failing Frederick! Ha. Even taking into account what he was before, he is—hum—sadly broken!’

His supper, which was brought to him there, and spread upon the little table where he had seen her working, diverted his attention.

She sat at his side as in the days that were gone, for the first time since those days ended. They were alone, and she helped him to his meat and poured out his drink for him, as she had been used to do in the prison. All this happened now, for the first time since their accession to wealth. She was afraid to look at him much,

after the offence he had taken; but she noticed two occasions in the course of his meal, when he all of a sudden looked at her, and looked about him, as if the association were so strong that he needed assurance from his sense of sight that they were not in the old prison-room. Both times, he put his hand to his head as if he missed his old black cap—though it had been ignominiously given away in the Marshalsea, and had never got free to that hour, but still hovered about the yards on the head of his successor.

He took very little supper, but was a long time over it, and often reverted to his brother’s declining state. Though he expressed the greatest pity for him, he was almost bitter upon him. He said that poor Frederick—ha hum—drivelled. There was no other word to express it; drivelled. Poor fellow! It was melancholy to reflect what Amy must have undergone from the excessive tediousness of his Society—wandering and babbling on, poor dear estimable creature, wandering and babbling on—if it had not been for the relief she had had in Mrs General. Extremely sorry, he then repeated with his former satisfaction, that that—ha—superior woman was poorly.

Little Dorrit, in her watchful love, would have remembered the lightest thing he said or did that night, though she had had no subsequent reason to recall that night. She always remembered that, when he looked about him under the strong influence of the old association, he tried to keep it out of her mind, and perhaps out of his own too, by immediately expatiating on the great riches and great company that had encompassed him in his absence, and on the lofty position he and his family had to sustain. Nor did she fail to recall that there were two under-currents, side by side, pervading all his discourse and all his manner; one showing her

how well he had got on without her, and how independent he was of her; the other, in a fitful and unintelligible way almost complaining of her, as if it had been possible that she had neglected him while he was away.

His telling her of the glorious state that Mr Merdle kept, and of the court that bowed before him, naturally brought him to Mrs Merdle. So naturally indeed, that although there was an unusual want of sequence in the greater part of his remarks, he passed to her at once, and asked how she was.

‘She is very well. She is going away next week.’ ‘Home?’ asked Mr Dorrit.

‘After a few weeks’ stay upon the road.’

‘She will be a vast loss here,’ said Mr Dorrit. ‘A vast—ha— acquisition at home. To Fanny, and to—hum—the rest of the— ha—great world.’

Little Dorrit thought of the competition that was to be entered upon, and assented very softly.

‘Mrs Merdle is going to have a great farewell Assembly, dear, and a dinner before it. She has been expressing her anxiety that you should return in time. She has invited both you and me to her dinner.’

‘She is—ha—very kind. When is the day?’ ‘The day after to-morrow.’

‘Write round in the morning, and say that I have returned, and shall—hum—be delighted.’

‘May I walk with you up the stairs to your room, dear?’

‘No!’ he answered, looking angrily round; for he was moving away, as if forgetful of leave-taking. ‘You may not, Amy. I want no help. I am your father, not your infirm uncle!’ He checked himself,

as abruptly as he had broken into this reply, and said, ‘You have not kissed me, Amy. Good night, my dear! We must marry—ha— we must marry you, now.’ With that he went, more slowly and more tired, up the staircase to his rooms, and, almost as soon as he got there, dismissed his valet. His next care was to look about him for his Paris purchases, and, after opening their cases and carefully surveying them, to put them away under lock and key. After that, what with dozing and what with castle-building, he lost himself for a long time, so that there was a touch of morning on the eastward rim of the desolate Campagna when he crept to bed.

Mrs General sent up her compliments in good time next day, and hoped he had rested well after this fatiguing journey. He sent down his compliments, and begged to inform Mrs General that he had rested very well indeed, and was in high condition. Nevertheless, he did not come forth from his own rooms until late in the afternoon; and, although he then caused himself to be magnificently arrayed for a drive with Mrs General and his daughter, his appearance was scarcely up to his description of himself. As the family had no visitors that day, its four members dined alone together. He conducted Mrs General to the seat at his right hand with immense ceremony; and Little Dorrit could not but notice as she followed with her uncle, both that he was again elaborately dressed, and that his manner towards Mrs General was very particular. The perfect formation of that accomplished lady’s surface rendered it difficult to displace an atom of its genteel glaze, but Little Dorrit thought she descried a slight thaw of triumph in a corner of her frosty eye.

Notwithstanding what may be called in these pages the Pruney and Prismatic nature of the family banquet, Mr Dorrit several

times fell asleep while it was in progress. His fits of dozing were as sudden as they had been overnight, and were as short and profound. When the first of these slumberings seized him, Mrs General looked almost amazed: but, on each recurrence of the symptoms, she told her polite beads, Papa, Potatoes, Poultry, Prunes, and Prism; and, by dint of going through that infallible performance very slowly, appeared to finish her rosary at about the same time as Mr Dorrit started from his sleep.

He was again painfully aware of a somnolent tendency in Frederick (which had no existence out of his own imagination), and after dinner, when Frederick had withdrawn, privately apologised to Mrs General for the poor man. ‘The most estimable and affectionate of brothers,’ he said, ‘but—ha, hum—broken up altogether. Unhappily, declining fast.’

‘Mr Frederick, sir,’ quoth Mrs General, ‘is habitually absent and drooping, but let us hope it is not so bad as that.’

Mr Dorrit, however, was determined not to let him off. ‘Fast declining, madam. A wreck. A ruin. Mouldering away before our eyes. Hum. Good Frederick!’

‘You left Mrs Sparkler quite well and happy, I trust?’ said Mrs General, after heaving a cool sigh for Frederick.

‘Surrounded,’ replied Mr Dorrit, ‘by—ha—all that can charm the taste, and—hum—elevate the mind. Happy, my dear madam, in a—hum—husband.’

Mrs General was a little fluttered; seeming delicately to put the word away with her gloves, as if there were no knowing what it might lead to.

‘Fanny,’ Mr Dorrit continued. ‘Fanny, Mrs General, has high qualities. Ha. Ambition—hum—purpose, consciousness of—ha—

position, determination to support that position—ha, hum—grace, beauty, and native nobility.’

‘No doubt,’ said Mrs General (with a little extra stiffness). ‘Combined with these qualities, madam,’ said Mr Dorrit, ‘Fanny

has—ha—manifested one blemish which has made me—hum— made me uneasy, and—ha—I must add, angry; but which I trust may now be considered at an end, even as to herself, and which is undoubtedly at an end as to—ha—others.’

‘To what, Mr Dorrit,’ returned Mrs General, with her gloves again somewhat excited, ‘can you allude? I am at a loss to—’

‘Do not say that, my dear madam,’ interrupted Mr Dorrit.

Mrs General’s voice, as it died away, pronounced the words, ‘at a loss to imagine.’

After which Mr Dorrit was seized with a doze for about a minute, out of which he sprang with spasmodic nimbleness.

‘I refer, Mrs General, to that—ha—strong spirit of opposition, or—hum—I might say—ha—jealousy in Fanny, which has occasionally risen against the—ha—sense I entertain of—hum— the claims of—ha—the lady with whom I have now the honour of communing.’

‘Mr Dorrit,’ returned Mrs General, ‘is ever but too obliging, ever but too appreciative. If there have been moments when I have imagined that Miss Dorrit has indeed resented the favourable opinion Mr Dorrit has formed of my services, I have found, in that only too high opinion, my consolation and recompense.’

‘Opinion of your services, madam?’ said Mr Dorrit.

‘Of,’ Mrs General repeated, in an elegantly impressive manner, ‘my services.’

‘Of your services alone, dear madam?’ said Mr Dorrit.

‘I presume,’ retorted Mrs General, in her former impressive manner, ‘of my services alone. For, to what else,’ said Mrs General, with a slightly interrogative action of her gloves, ‘could I impute—’ ‘To—ha—yourself, Mrs General. Ha, hum. To yourself and your

merits,’ was Mr Dorrit’s rejoinder.

‘Mr Dorrit will pardon me,’ said Mrs General, ‘if I remark that this is not a time or place for the pursuit of the present conversation. Mr Dorrit will excuse me if I remind him that Miss Dorrit is in the adjoining room, and is visible to myself while I utter her name. Mr Dorrit will forgive me if I observe that I am agitated, and that I find there are moments when weaknesses I supposed myself to have subdued, return with redoubled power. Mr Dorrit will allow me to withdraw.’

‘Hum. Perhaps we may resume this—ha—interesting conversation,’ said Mr Dorrit, ‘at another time; unless it should be, what I hope it is not—hum—in any way disagreeable to—ah—Mrs General.’

‘Mr Dorrit,’ said Mrs General, casting down her eyes as she rose with a bend, ‘must ever claim my homage and obedience.’

Mrs General then took herself off in a stately way, and not with that amount of trepidation upon her which might have been expected in a less remarkable woman. Mr Dorrit, who had conducted his part of the dialogue with a certain majestic and admiring condescension—much as some people may be seen to conduct themselves in Church, and to perform their part in the service—appeared, on the whole, very well satisfied with himself and with Mrs General too. On the return of that lady to tea, she had touched herself up with a little powder and pomatum, and was not without moral enchantment likewise: the latter showing

itself in much sweet patronage of manner towards Miss Dorrit, and in an air of as tender interest in Mr Dorrit as was consistent with rigid propriety. At the close of the evening, when she rose to retire, Mr Dorrit took her by the hand as if he were going to lead her out into the Piazza of the people to walk a minuet by moonlight, and with great solemnity conducted her to the room door, where he raised her knuckles to his lips. Having parted from her with what may be conjectured to have been a rather bony kiss of a cosmetic flavour, he gave his daughter his blessing, graciously. And having thus hinted that there was something remarkable in the wind, he again went to bed.

He remained in the seclusion of his own chamber next morning; but, early in the afternoon, sent down his best compliments to Mrs General, by Mr Tinkler, and begged she would accompany Miss Dorrit on an airing without him. His daughter was dressed for Mrs Merdle’s dinner before he appeared. He then presented himself in a refulgent condition as to his attire, but looking indefinably shrunken and old. However, as he was plainly determined to be angry with her if she so much as asked him how he was, she only ventured to kiss his cheek, before accompanying him to Mrs Merdle’s with an anxious heart.

The distance that they had to go was very short, but he was at his building work again before the carriage had half traversed it. Mrs Merdle received him with great distinction; the bosom was in admirable preservation, and on the best terms with itself; the dinner was very choice; and the company was very select.

It was principally English; saving that it comprised the usual French Count and the usual Italian Marchese—decorative social milestones, always to be found in certain places, and varying very

little in appearance. The table was long, and the dinner was long; and Little Dorrit, overshadowed by a large pair of black whiskers and a large white cravat, lost sight of her father altogether, until a servant put a scrap of paper in her hand, with a whispered request from Mrs Merdle that she would read it directly. Mrs Merdle had written on it in pencil, ‘Pray come and speak to Mr Dorrit, I doubt if he is well.’

She was hurrying to him, unobserved, when he got up out of his chair, and leaning over the table called to her, supposing her to be still in her place:

‘Amy, Amy, my child!’

The action was so unusual, to say nothing of his strange eager appearance and strange eager voice, that it instantaneously caused a profound silence.

‘Amy, my dear,’ he repeated. ‘Will you go and see if Bob is on the lock?’

She was at his side, and touching him, but he still perversely supposed her to be in her seat, and called out, still leaning over the table, ‘Amy, Amy. I don’t feel quite myself. Ha. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I particularly wish to see Bob. Ha. Of all the turnkeys, he’s as much my friend as yours. See if Bob is in the lodge, and beg him to come to me.’

All the guests were now in consternation, and everybody rose. ‘Dear father, I am not there; I am here, by you.’

‘Oh! You are here, Amy! Good. Hum. Good. Ha. Call Bob. If he has been relieved, and is not on the lock, tell Mrs Bangham to go and fetch him.’

She was gently trying to get him away; but he resisted, and would not go.

‘I tell you, child,’ he said petulantly, ‘I can’t be got up the narrow stairs without Bob. Ha. Send for Bob. Hum. Send for Bob—best of all the turnkeys—send for Bob!’

He looked confusedly about him, and, becoming conscious of the number of faces by which he was surrounded, addressed them:

‘Ladies and gentlemen, the duty—ha—devolves upon me of— hum—welcoming you to the Marshalsea! Welcome to the Marshalsea! The space is—ha—limited—limited—the parade might be wider; but you will find it apparently grow larger after a time—a time, ladies and gentlemen—and the air is, all things considered, very good. It blows over the—ha—Surrey hills. Blows over the Surrey hills. This is the Snuggery. Hum. Supported by a small subscription of the—ha—Collegiate body. In return for which—hot water—general kitchen—and little domestic advantages. Those who are habituated to the—ha—Marshalsea, are pleased to call me its father. I am accustomed to be complimented by strangers as the—ha—Father of the Marshalsea. Certainly, if years of residence may establish a claim to so—ha— honourable a title, I may accept the—hum—conferred distinction. My child, ladies and gentlemen. My daughter. Born here!’

She was not ashamed of it, or ashamed of him. She was pale and frightened; but she had no other care than to soothe him and get him away, for his own dear sake. She was between him and the wondering faces, turned round upon his breast with her own face raised to his. He held her clasped in his left arm, and between whiles her low voice was heard tenderly imploring him to go away with her.

‘Born here,’ he repeated, shedding tears. ‘Bred here. Ladies

and gentlemen, my daughter. Child of an unfortunate father, but— ha—always a gentleman. Poor, no doubt, but—hum—proud. Always proud. It has become a—hum—not infrequent custom for my—ha—personal admirers—personal admirers solely—to be pleased to express their desire to acknowledge my semi-official position here, by offering—ha—little tributes, which usually take the form of—ha—voluntary recognitions of my humble endeavours to—hum—to uphold a Tone here—a Tone—I beg it to be understood that I do not consider myself compromised. Ha. Not compromised. Ha. Not a beggar. No; I repudiate the title! At the same time far be it from me to—hum—to put upon the fine feelings by which my partial friends are actuated, the slight of scrupling to admit that those offerings are—hum—highly acceptable. On the contrary, they are most acceptable. In my child’s name, if not in my own, I make the admission in the fullest manner, at the same time reserving—ha—shall I say my personal dignity? Ladies and gentlemen, God bless you all!’

By this time, the exceeding mortification undergone by the Bosom had occasioned the withdrawal of the greater part of the company into other rooms. The few who had lingered thus long followed the rest, and Little Dorrit and her father were left to the servants and themselves. Dearest and most precious to her, he would come with her now, would he not? He replied to her fervid entreaties, that he would never be able to get up the narrow stairs without Bob; where was Bob, would nobody fetch Bob? Under pretence of looking for Bob, she got him out against the stream of gay company now pouring in for the evening assembly, and got him into a coach that had just set down its load, and got him home. The broad stairs of his Roman palace were contracted in his

failing sight to the narrow stairs of his London prison; and he would suffer no one but her to touch him, his brother excepted. They got him up to his room without help, and laid him down on his bed. And from that hour his poor maimed spirit, only remembering the place where it had broken its wings, cancelled the dream through which it had since groped, and knew of nothing beyond the Marshalsea. When he heard footsteps in the street, he took them for the old weary tread in the yards. When the hour came for locking up, he supposed all strangers to be excluded for the night. When the time for opening came again, he was so anxious to see Bob, that they were fain to patch up a narrative how that Bob—many a year dead then, gentle turnkey—had taken cold, but hoped to be out to-morrow, or the next day, or the next at furthest.

He fell away into a weakness so extreme that he could not raise his hand. But he still protected his brother according to his long usage; and would say with some complacency, fifty times a day, when he saw him standing by his bed, ‘My good Frederick, sit down. You are very feeble indeed.’

They tried him with Mrs General, but he had not the faintest knowledge of her. Some injurious suspicion lodged itself in his brain, that she wanted to supplant Mrs Bangham, and that she was given to drinking. He charged her with it in no measured terms; and was so urgent with his daughter to go round to the Marshal and entreat him to turn her out, that she was never reproduced after the first failure. Saving that he once asked ‘if Tip had gone outside?’ the remembrance of his two children not present seemed to have departed from him. But the child who had done so much for him and had been so poorly repaid, was never

out of his mind. Not that he spared her, or was fearful of her being spent by watching and fatigue; he was not more troubled on that score than he had usually been. No; he loved her in his old way. They were in the jail again, and she tended him, and he had constant need of her, and could not turn without her; and he even told her, sometimes, that he was content to have undergone a great deal for her sake. As to her, she bent over his bed with her quiet face against his, and would have laid down her own life to restore him.

When he had been sinking in this painless way for two or three days, she observed him to be troubled by the ticking of his watch— a pompous gold watch that made as great a to-do about its going as if nothing else went but itself and Time. She suffered it to run down; but he was still uneasy, and showed that was not what he wanted. At length he roused himself to explain that he wanted money to be raised on this watch. He was quite pleased when she pretended to take it away for the purpose, and afterwards had a relish for his little tastes of wine and jelly, that he had not had before.

He soon made it plain that this was so; for, in another day or two he sent off his sleeve-buttons and finger-rings. He had an amazing satisfaction in entrusting her with these errands, and appeared to consider it equivalent to making the most methodical and provident arrangements. After his trinkets, or such of them as he had been able to see about him, were gone, his clothes engaged his attention; and it is as likely as not that he was kept alive for some days by the satisfaction of sending them, piece by piece, to an imaginary pawnbroker’s.

Thus for ten days Little Dorrit bent over his pillow, laying her

cheek against his. Sometimes she was so worn out that for a few minutes they would slumber together. Then she would awake; to recollect with fast-flowing silent tears what it was that touched her face, and to see, stealing over the cherished face upon the pillow, a deeper shadow than the shadow of the Marshalsea Wall.

Quietly, quietly, all the lines of the plan of the great Castle melted one after another. Quietly, quietly, the ruled and cross- ruled countenance on which they were traced, became fair and blank. Quietly, quietly, the reflected marks of the prison bars and of the zig-zag iron on the wall-top, faded away. Quietly, quietly, the face subsided into a far younger likeness of her own than she had ever seen under the grey hair, and sank to rest.

At first her uncle was stark distracted. ‘O my brother! O William, William! You to go before me; you to go alone; you to go, and I to remain! You, so far superior, so distinguished, so noble; I, a poor useless creature fit for nothing, and whom no one would have missed!’

It did her, for the time, the good of having him to think of and to succour.

‘Uncle, dear uncle, spare yourself, spare me!’

The old man was not deaf to the last words. When he did begin to restrain himself, it was that he might spare her. He had no care for himself; but, with all the remaining power of the honest heart, stunned so long and now awaking to be broken, he honoured and blessed her.

‘O God,’ he cried, before they left the room, with his wrinkled hands clasped over her. ‘Thou seest this daughter of my dear dead brother! All that I have looked upon, with my half-blind and sinful eyes, Thou hast discerned clearly, brightly. Not a hair of her head

shall be harmed before Thee. Thou wilt uphold her here to her last hour. And I know Thou wilt reward her hereafter!’

They remained in a dim room near, until it was almost midnight, quiet and sad together. At times his grief would seek relief in a burst like that in which it had found its earliest expression; but, besides that his little strength would soon have been unequal to such strains, he never failed to recall her words, and to reproach himself and calm himself. The only utterance with which he indulged his sorrow, was the frequent exclamation that his brother was gone, alone; that they had been together in the outset of their lives, that they had fallen into misfortune together, that they had kept together through their many years of poverty, that they had remained together to that day; and that his brother was gone alone, alone!

They parted, heavy and sorrowful. She would not consent to leave him anywhere but in his own room, and she saw him lie down in his clothes upon his bed, and covered him with her own hands. Then she sank upon her own bed, and fell into a deep sleep: the sleep of exhaustion and rest, though not of complete release from a pervading consciousness of affliction. Sleep, good Little Dorrit. Sleep through the night!

It was a moonlight night; but the moon rose late, being long past the full. When it was high in the peaceful firmament, it shone through half-closed lattice blinds into the solemn room where the stumblings and wanderings of a life had so lately ended. Two quiet figures were within the room; two figures, equally still and impassive, equally removed by an untraversable distance from the teeming earth and all that it contains, though soon to lie in it.

One figure reposed upon the bed. The other, kneeling on the

floor, drooped over it; the arms easily and peacefully resting on the coverlet; the face bowed down, so that the lips touched the hand over which with its last breath it had bent. The two brothers were before their Father; far beyond the twilight judgment of this world; high above its mists and obscurities.

Chapter 20

Introduces the next

T

he passengers were landing from the packet on the pier at Calais. A low-lying place and a low-spirited place Calais was, with the tide ebbing out towards low water-mark.

There had been no more water on the bar than had sufficed to float the packet in; and now the bar itself, with a shallow break of sea over it, looked like a lazy marine monster just risen to the surface, whose form was indistinctly shown as it lay asleep. The meagre lighthouse all in white, haunting the seaboard as if it were the ghost of an edifice that had once had colour and rotundity, dropped melancholy tears after its late buffeting by the waves. The long rows of gaunt black piles, slimy and wet and weather-worn, with funeral garlands of seaweed twisted about them by the late tide, might have represented an unsightly marine cemetery. Every wave-dashed, storm-beaten object, was so low and so little, under the broad grey sky, in the noise of the wind and sea, and before the curling lines of surf, making at it ferociously, that the wonder was there was any Calais left, and that its low gates and low wall and low roofs and low ditches and low sand-hills and low ramparts and flat streets, had not yielded long ago to the undermining and besieging sea, like the fortifications children make on the sea- shore.

After slipping among oozy piles and planks, stumbling up wet steps and encountering many salt difficulties, the passengers entered on their comfortless peregrination along the pier; where

all the French vagabonds and English outlaws in the town (half the population) attended to prevent their recovery from bewilderment. After being minutely inspected by all the English, and claimed and reclaimed and counter-claimed as prizes by all the French in a hand-to-hand scuffle three quarters of a mile long, they were at last free to enter the streets, and to make off in their various directions, hotly pursued.

Clennam, harassed by more anxieties than one, was among this devoted band. Having rescued the most defenceless of his compatriots from situations of great extremity, he now went his way alone, or as nearly alone as he could be, with a native gentleman in a suit of grease and a cap of the same material, giving chase at a distance of some fifty yards, and continually calling after him, ‘Hi! Ice-say! You! Seer! Ice-say! Nice Oatel!’

Even this hospitable person, however, was left behind at last, and Clennam pursued his way, unmolested. There was a tranquil air in the town after the turbulence of the Channel and the beach, and its dulness in that comparison was agreeable. He met new groups of his countrymen, who had all a straggling air of having at one time overblown themselves, like certain uncomfortable kinds of flowers, and of being now mere weeds. They had all an air, too, of lounging out a limited round, day after day, which strongly reminded him of the Marshalsea. But, taking no further note of them than was sufficient to give birth to the reflection, he sought out a certain street and number which he kept in his mind.

‘So Pancks said,’ he murmured to himself, as he stopped before a dull house answering to the address. ‘I suppose his information to be correct and his discovery, among Mr Casby’s loose papers, indisputable; but, without it, I should hardly have supposed this to

be a likely place.’

A dead sort of house, with a dead wall over the way and a dead gateway at the side, where a pendant bell-handle produced two dead tinkles, and a knocker produced a dead, flat, surface-tapping, that seemed not to have depth enough in it to penetrate even the cracked door. However, the door jarred open on a dead sort of spring; and he closed it behind him as he entered a dull yard, soon brought to a close by another dead wall, where an attempt had been made to train some creeping shrubs, which were dead; and to make a little fountain in a grotto, which was dry; and to decorate that with a little statue, which was gone.

The entry to the house was on the left, and it was garnished as the outer gateway was, with two printed bills in French and English, announcing Furnished Apartments to let, with immediate possession. A strong cheerful peasant woman, all stocking, petticoat, white cap, and ear-ring, stood here in a dark doorway, and said with a pleasant show of teeth, ‘Ice-say! Seer! Who?’

Clennam, replying in French, said the English lady; he wished to see the English lady. ‘Enter then and ascend, if you please,’ returned the peasant woman, in French likewise. He did both, and followed her up a dark bare staircase to a back room on the first- floor. Hence, there was a gloomy view of the yard that was dull, and of the shrubs that were dead, and of the fountain that was dry, and of the pedestal of the statue that was gone.

‘Monsieur Blandois,’ said Clennam. ‘With pleasure, Monsieur.’

Thereupon the woman withdrew and left him to look at the room. It was the pattern of room always to be found in such a house. Cool, dull, and dark. Waxed floor very slippery. A room not

large enough to skate in; nor adapted to the easy pursuit of any other occupation. Red and white curtained windows, little straw mat, little round table with a tumultuous assemblage of legs underneath, clumsy rush-bottomed chairs, two great red velvet arm-chairs affording plenty of space to be uncomfortable in, bureau, chimney-glass in several pieces pretending to be in one piece, pair of gaudy vases of very artificial flowers; between them a Greek warrior with his helmet off, sacrificing a clock to the Genius of France.

After some pause, a door of communication with another room was opened, and a lady entered. She manifested great surprise on seeing Clennam, and her glance went round the room in search of some one else.

‘Pardon me, Miss Wade. I am alone.’

‘It was not your name that was brought to me.’

‘No; I know that. Excuse me. I have already had experience that my name does not predispose you to an interview; and I ventured to mention the name of one I am in search of.’

‘Pray,’ she returned, motioning him to a chair so coldly that he remained standing, ‘what name was it that you gave?’

‘I mentioned the name of Blandois.’ ‘Blandois?’

‘A name you are acquainted with.’

‘It is strange,’ she said, frowning, ‘that you should still press an undesired interest in me and my acquaintances, in me and my affairs, Mr Clennam. I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Pardon me. You know the name?’

‘What can you have to do with the name? What can I have to do with the name? What can you have to do with my knowing or not

knowing any name? I know many names and I have forgotten many more. This may be in the one class, or it may be in the other, or I may never have heard it. I am acquainted with no reason for examining myself, or for being examined, about it.’

‘If you will allow me,’ said Clennam, ‘I will tell you my reason for pressing the subject. I admit that I do press it, and I must beg you to forgive me if I do so, very earnestly. The reason is all mine, I do not insinuate that it is in any way yours.’

‘Well, sir,’ she returned, repeating a little less haughtily than before her former invitation to him to be seated: to which he now deferred, as she seated herself. ‘I am at least glad to know that this is not another bondswoman of some friend of yours, who is bereft of free choice, and whom I have spirited away. I will hear your reason, if you please.’

‘First, to identify the person of whom we speak,’ said Clennam, ‘let me observe that it is the person you met in London some time back. You will remember meeting him near the river—in the Adelphi!’

‘You mix yourself most unaccountably with my business,’ she replied, looking full at him with stern displeasure. ‘How do you know that?’

‘I entreat you not to take it ill. By mere accident.’ ‘What accident?’

‘Solely the accident of coming upon you in the street and seeing the meeting.’

‘Do you speak of yourself, or of some one else?’ ‘Of myself. I saw it.’

‘To be sure it was in the open street,’ she observed, after a few moments of less and less angry reflection. ‘Fifty people might have

seen it. It would have signified nothing if they had.’

‘Nor do I make my having seen it of any moment, nor (otherwise than as an explanation of my coming here) do I connect my visit with it or the favour that I have to ask.’

‘Oh! You have to ask a favour! It occurred to me,’ and the handsome face looked bitterly at him, ‘that your manner was softened, Mr Clennam.’

He was content to protest against this by a slight action without contesting it in words. He then referred to Blandois’ disappearance, of which it was probable she had heard? However probable it was to him, she had heard of no such thing. Let him look round him (she said) and judge for himself what general intelligence was likely to reach the ears of a woman who had been shut up there while it was rife, devouring her own heart. When she had uttered this denial, which he believed to be true, she asked him what he meant by disappearance? That led to his narrating the circumstances in detail, and expressing something of his anxiety to discover what had really become of the man, and to repel the dark suspicions that clouded about his mother’s house. She heard him with evident surprise, and with more marks of suppressed interest than he had seen in her; still they did not overcome her distant, proud, and self-secluded manner. When he had finished, she said nothing but these words:

‘You have not yet told me, sir, what I have to do with it, or what the favour is? Will you be so good as come to that?’

‘I assume,’ said Arthur, persevering, in his endeavour to soften her scornful demeanour, ‘that being in communication—may I say, confidential communication?—with this person—’

‘You may say, of course, whatever you like,’ she remarked; ‘but

I do not subscribe to your assumptions, Mr Clennam, or to any one’s.’

‘—that being, at least in personal communication with him,’ said Clennam, changing the form of his position in the hope of making it unobjectionable, ‘you can tell me something of his antecedents, pursuits, habits, usual place of residence. Can give me some little clue by which to seek him out in the likeliest manner, and either produce him, or establish what has become of him. This is the favour I ask, and I ask it in a distress of mind for which I hope you will feel some consideration. If you should have any reason for imposing conditions upon me, I will respect it without asking what it is.’

‘You chanced to see me in the street with the man,’ she observed, after being, to his mortification, evidently more occupied with her own reflections on the matter than with his appeal. ‘Then you knew the man before?’

‘Not before; afterwards. I never saw him before, but I saw him again on this very night of his disappearance. In my mother’s room, in fact. I left him there. You will read in this paper all that is known of him.’

He handed her one of the printed bills, which she read with a steady and attentive face.

‘This is more than I knew of him,’ she said, giving it back.

Clennam’s looks expressed his heavy disappointment, perhaps his incredulity; for she added in the same unsympathetic tone: ‘You don’t believe it. Still, it is so. As to personal communication: it seems that there was personal communication between him and your mother. And yet you say you believe her declaration that she knows no more of him!’

A sufficiently expressive hint of suspicion was conveyed in these words, and in the smile by which they were accompanied, to bring the blood into Clennam’s cheeks.

‘Come, sir,’ she said, with a cruel pleasure in repeating the stab, ‘I will be as open with you as you can desire. I will confess that if I cared for my credit (which I do not), or had a good name to preserve (which I have not, for I am utterly indifferent to its being considered good or bad), I should regard myself as heavily compromised by having had anything to do with this fellow. Yet he never passed in at my door—never sat in colloquy with me until midnight.’

She took her revenge for her old grudge in thus turning his subject against him. Hers was not the nature to spare him, and she had no compunction.

‘That he is a low, mercenary wretch; that I first saw him prowling about Italy (where I was, not long ago), and that I hired him there, as the suitable instrument of a purpose I happened to have; I have no objection to tell you. In short, it was worth my while, for my own pleasure—the gratification of a strong feeling— to pay a spy who would fetch and carry for money. I paid this creature. And I dare say that if I had wanted to make such a bargain, and if I could have paid him enough, and if he could have done it in the dark, free from all risk, he would have taken any life with as little scruple as he took my money. That, at least, is my opinion of him; and I see it is not very far removed from yours. Your mother’s opinion of him, I am to assume (following your example of assuming this and that), was vastly different.’

‘My mother, let me remind you,’ said Clennam, ‘was first brought into communication with him in the unlucky course of

business.’

‘It appears to have been an unlucky course of business that last brought her into communication with him,’ returned Miss Wade; ‘and business hours on that occasion were late.’

‘You imply,’ said Arthur, smarting under these cool-handed thrusts, of which he had deeply felt the force already, ‘that there was something—’

‘Mr Clennam,’ she composedly interrupted, ‘recollect that I do not speak by implication about the man. He is, I say again without disguise, a low mercenary wretch. I suppose such a creature goes where there is occasion for him. If I had not had occasion for him, you would not have seen him and me together.’

Wrung by her persistence in keeping that dark side of the case before him, of which there was a half-hidden shadow in his own breast, Clennam was silent.

‘I have spoken of him as still living,’ she added, ‘but he may have been put out of the way for anything I know. For anything I care, also. I have no further occasion for him.’

With a heavy sigh and a despondent air, Arthur Clennam slowly rose.

She did not rise also, but said, having looked at him in the meanwhile with a fixed look of suspicion, and lips angrily compressed:

‘He was the chosen associate of your dear friend, Mr Gowan, was he not? Why don’t you ask your dear friend to help you?’

The denial that he was a dear friend rose to Arthur’s lips; but he repressed it, remembering his old struggles and resolutions, and said:

‘Further than that he has never seen Blandois since Blandois

set out for England, Mr Gowan knows nothing additional about him. He was a chance acquaintance, made abroad.’

‘A chance acquaintance made abroad!’ she repeated. ‘Yes. Your dear friend has need to divert himself with all the acquaintances he can make, seeing what a wife he has. I hate his wife, sir.’

The anger with which she said it, the more remarkable for being so much under her restraint, fixed Clennam’s attention, and kept him on the spot. It flashed out of her dark eyes as they regarded him, quivered in her nostrils, and fired the very breath she exhaled; but her face was otherwise composed into a disdainful serenity; and her attitude was as calmly and haughtily graceful as if she had been in a mood of complete indifference.

‘All I will say is, Miss Wade,’ he remarked, ‘that you can have received no provocation to a feeling in which I believe you have no sharer.’

‘You may ask your dear friend, if you choose,’ she returned, ‘for his opinion upon that subject.’

‘I am scarcely on those intimate terms with my dear friend,’ said Arthur, in spite of his resolutions, ‘that would render my approaching the subject very probable, Miss Wade.’

‘I hate him,’ she returned. ‘Worse than his wife, because I was once dupe enough, and false enough to myself, almost to love him. You have seen me, sir, only on common-place occasions, when I dare say you have thought me a common-place woman, a little more self-willed than the generality. You don’t know what I mean by hating, if you know me no better than that; you can’t know, without knowing with what care I have studied myself and people about me. For this reason I have for some time inclined to tell you what my life has been—not to propitiate your opinion, for I set no

value on it; but that you may comprehend, when you think of your dear friend and his dear wife, what I mean by hating. Shall I give you something I have written and put by for your perusal, or shall I hold my hand?’

Arthur begged her to give it to him. She went to the bureau, unlocked it, and took from an inner drawer a few folded sheets of paper. Without any conciliation of him, scarcely addressing him, rather speaking as if she were speaking to her own looking-glass for the justification of her own stubbornness, she said, as she gave them to him:

‘Now you may know what I mean by hating! No more of that. Sir, whether you find me temporarily and cheaply lodging in an empty London house, or in a Calais apartment, you find Harriet with me. You may like to see her before you leave. Harriet, come in!’ She called Harriet again. The second call produced Harriet, once Tattycoram.

‘Here is Mr Clennam,’ said Miss Wade; ‘not come for you; he has given you up,—I suppose you have, by this time?’

‘Having no authority, or influence—yes,’ assented Clennam. ‘Not come in search of you, you see; but still seeking some one.

He wants that Blandois man.’

‘With whom I saw you in the Strand in London,’ hinted Arthur. ‘If you know anything of him, Harriet, except that he came from Venice—which we all know—tell it to Mr Clennam freely.’

‘I know nothing more about him,’ said the girl. ‘Are you satisfied?’ Miss Wade inquired of Arthur.

He had no reason to disbelieve them; the girl’s manner being so natural as to be almost convincing, if he had had any previous doubts. He replied, ‘I must seek for intelligence elsewhere.’

He was not going in the same breath; but he had risen before the girl entered, and she evidently thought he was. She looked quickly at him, and said:

‘Are they well, sir?’ ‘Who?’

She stopped herself in saying what would have been ‘all of them;’ glanced at Miss Wade; and said ‘Mr and Mrs Meagles.’

‘They were, when I last heard of them. They are not at home.

By the way, let me ask you. Is it true that you were seen there?’ ‘Where? Where does any one say I was seen?’ returned the girl,

sullenly casting down her eyes.

‘Looking in at the garden gate of the cottage.’ ‘No,’ said Miss Wade. ‘She has never been near it.’

‘You are wrong, then,’ said the girl. ‘I went down there the last time we were in London. I went one afternoon when you left me alone. And I did look in.’

‘You poor-spirited girl,’ returned Miss Wade with infinite contempt; ‘does all our companionship, do all our conversations, do all your old complainings, tell for so little as that?’

‘There was no harm in looking in at the gate for an instant,’ said the girl. ‘I saw by the windows that the family were not there.’

‘Why should you go near the place?’

‘Because I wanted to see it. Because I felt that I should like to look at it again.’

As each of the two handsome faces looked at the other, Clennam felt how each of the two natures must be constantly tearing the other to pieces.

‘Oh!’ said Miss Wade, coldly subduing and removing her glance; ‘if you had any desire to see the place where you led the life from

which I rescued you because you had found out what it was, that is another thing. But is that your truth to me? Is that your fidelity to me? Is that the common cause I make with you? You are not worth the confidence I have placed in you. You are not worth the favour I have shown you. You are no higher than a spaniel, and had better go back to the people who did worse than whip you.’

‘If you speak so of them with any one else by to hear, you’ll provoke me to take their part,’ said the girl.

‘Go back to them,’ Miss Wade retorted. ‘Go back to them.’

‘You know very well,’ retorted Harriet in her turn, ‘that I won’t go back to them. You know very well that I have thrown them off, and never can, never shall, never will, go back to them. Let them alone, then, Miss Wade.’

‘You prefer their plenty to your less fat living here,’ she rejoined. ‘You exalt them, and slight me. What else should I have expected? I ought to have known it.’

‘It’s not so,’ said the girl, flushing high, ‘and you don’t say what you mean. I know what you mean. You are reproaching me, underhanded, with having nobody but you to look to. And because I have nobody but you to look to, you think you are to make me do, or not do, everything you please, and are to put any affront upon me. You are as bad as they were, every bit. But I will not be quite tamed, and made submissive. I will say again that I went to look at the house, because I had often thought that I should like to see it once more. I will ask again how they are, because I once liked them and at times thought they were kind to me.’

Hereupon Clennam said that he was sure they would still receive her kindly, if she should ever desire to return.

‘Never!’ said the girl passionately. ‘I shall never do that. Nobody

knows that better than Miss Wade, though she taunts me because she has made me her dependant. And I know I am so; and I know she is overjoyed when she can bring it to my mind.’

‘A good pretence!’ said Miss Wade, with no less anger, haughtiness, and bitterness; ‘but too threadbare to cover what I plainly see in this. My poverty will not bear competition with their money. Better go back at once, better go back at once, and have done with it!’

Arthur Clennam looked at them, standing a little distance asunder in the dull confined room, each proudly cherishing her own anger; each, with a fixed determination, torturing her own breast, and torturing the other’s. He said a word or two of leave- taking; but Miss Wade barely inclined her head, and Harriet, with the assumed humiliation of an abject dependent and serf (but not without defiance for all that), made as if she were too low to notice or to be noticed.

He came down the dark winding stairs into the yard with an increased sense upon him of the gloom of the wall that was dead, and of the shrubs that were dead, and of the fountain that was dry, and of the statue that was gone. Pondering much on what he had seen and heard in that house, as well as on the failure of all his efforts to trace the suspicious character who was lost, he returned to London and to England by the packet that had taken him over. On the way he unfolded the sheets of paper, and read in them what is reproduced in the next chapter.

Chapter 21

The History of a Self-Tormentor

have the misfortune of not being a fool. From a very early age I have detected what those about me thought they hid from me. If I could have been habitually imposed upon, instead of

habitually discerning the truth, I might have lived as smoothly as most fools do.

My childhood was passed with a grandmother; that is to say, with a lady who represented that relative to me, and who took that title on herself. She had no claim to it, but I—being to that extent a little fool—had no suspicion of her. She had some children of her own family in her house, and some children of other people. All girls; ten in number, including me. We all lived together and were educated together.

I must have been about twelve years old when I began to see how determinedly those girls patronised me. I was told I was an orphan. There was no other orphan among us; and I perceived (here was the first disadvantage of not being a fool) that they conciliated me in an insolent pity, and in a sense of superiority. I did not set this down as a discovery, rashly. I tried them often. I could hardly make them quarrel with me. When I succeeded with any of them, they were sure to come after an hour or two, and begin a reconciliation. I tried them over and over again, and I never knew them wait for me to begin. They were always forgiving me, in their vanity and condescension. Little images of grown people!

One of them was my chosen friend. I loved that stupid mite in a passionate way that she could no more deserve than I can remember without feeling ashamed of, though I was but a child. She had what they called an amiable temper, an affectionate temper. She could distribute, and did distribute pretty looks and smiles to every one among them. I believe there was not a soul in the place, except myself, who knew that she did it purposely to wound and gall me!

Nevertheless, I so loved that unworthy girl that my life was made stormy by my fondness for her. I was constantly lectured and disgraced for what was called ‘trying her;’ in other words charging her with her little perfidy and throwing her into tears by showing her that I read her heart. However, I loved her faithfully; and one time I went home with her for the holidays.

She was worse at home than she had been at school. She had a crowd of cousins and acquaintances, and we had dances at her house, and went out to dances at other houses, and, both at home and out, she tormented my love beyond endurance. Her plan was, to make them all fond of her—and so drive me wild with jealousy. To be familiar and endearing with them all—and so make me mad with envying them. When we were left alone in our bedroom at night, I would reproach her with my perfect knowledge of her baseness; and then she would cry and cry and say I was cruel, and then I would hold her in my arms till morning: loving her as much as ever, and often feeling as if, rather than suffer so, I could so hold her in my arms and plunge to the bottom of a river—where I would still hold her after we were both dead.

It came to an end, and I was relieved. In the family there was an aunt who was not fond of me. I doubt if any of the family liked me

much; but I never wanted them to like me, being altogether bound up in the one girl. The aunt was a young woman, and she had a serious way with her eyes of watching me. She was an audacious woman, and openly looked compassionately at me. After one of the nights that I have spoken of, I came down into a greenhouse before breakfast. Charlotte (the name of my false young friend) had gone down before me, and I heard this aunt speaking to her about me as I entered. I stopped where I was, among the leaves, and listened.

The aunt said, ‘Charlotte, Miss Wade is wearing you to death, and this must not continue.’ I repeat the very words I heard.

Now, what did she answer? Did she say, ‘It is I who am wearing her to death, I who am keeping her on a rack and am the executioner, yet she tells me every night that she loves me devotedly, though she knows what I make her undergo?’ No; my first memorable experience was true to what I knew her to be, and to all my experience. She began sobbing and weeping (to secure the aunt’s sympathy to herself), and said, ‘Dear aunt, she has an unhappy temper; other girls at school, besides I, try hard to make it better; we all try hard.’

Upon that the aunt fondled her, as if she had said something noble instead of despicable and false, and kept up the infamous pretence by replying, ‘But there are reasonable limits, my dear love, to everything, and I see that this poor miserable girl causes you more constant and useless distress than even so good an effort justifies.’

The poor miserable girl came out of her concealment, as you may be prepared to hear, and said, ‘Send me home.’ I never said another word to either of them, or to any of them, but ‘Send me

home, or I will walk home alone, night and day!’ When I got home, I told my supposed grandmother that, unless I was sent away to finish my education somewhere else before that girl came back, or before any one of them came back, I would burn my sight away by throwing myself into the fire, rather than I would endure to look at their plotting faces.

I went among young women next, and I found them no better. Fair words and fair pretences; but I penetrated below those assertions of themselves and depreciations of me, and they were no better. Before I left them, I learned that I had no grandmother and no recognised relation. I carried the light of that information both into my past and into my future. It showed me many new occasions on which people triumphed over me, when they made a pretence of treating me with consideration, or doing me a service.

A man of business had a small property in trust for me. I was to be a governess; I became a governess; and went into the family of a poor nobleman, where there were two daughters—little children, but the parents wished them to grow up, if possible, under one instructress. The mother was young and pretty. From the first, she made a show of behaving to me with great delicacy. I kept my resentment to myself; but I knew very well that it was her way of petting the knowledge that she was my Mistress, and might have behaved differently to her servant if it had been her fancy.

I say I did not resent it, nor did I; but I showed her, by not gratifying her, that I understood her. When she pressed me to take wine, I took water. If there happened to be anything choice at table, she always sent it to me: but I always declined it, and ate of the rejected dishes. These disappointments of her patronage were a sharp retort, and made me feel independent.

I liked the children. They were timid, but on the whole disposed to attach themselves to me. There was a nurse, however, in the house, a rosy-faced woman always making an obtrusive pretence of being gay and good-humoured, who had nursed them both, and who had secured their affections before I saw them. I could almost have settled down to my fate but for this woman. Her artful devices for keeping herself before the children in constant competition with me, might have blinded many in my place; but I saw through them from the first. On the pretext of arranging my rooms and waiting on me and taking care of my wardrobe (all of which she did busily), she was never absent. The most crafty of her many subtleties was her feint of seeking to make the children fonder of me. She would lead them to me and coax them to me. ‘Come to good Miss Wade, come to dear Miss Wade, come to pretty Miss Wade. She loves you very much. Miss Wade is a clever lady, who has read heaps of books, and can tell you far better and more interesting stories than I know. Come and hear Miss Wade!’ How could I engage their attentions, when my heart was burning against these ignorant designs? How could I wonder, when I saw their innocent faces shrinking away, and their arms twining round her neck, instead of mine? Then she would look up at me, shaking their curls from her face, and say, ‘They’ll come round soon, Miss Wade; they’re very simple and loving, ma’am; don’t be at all cast down about it, ma’am’—exulting over me!

There was another thing the woman did. At times, when she saw that she had safely plunged me into a black despondent brooding by these means, she would call the attention of the children to it, and would show them the difference between herself and me. ‘Hush! Poor Miss Wade is not well. Don’t make a

noise, my dears, her head aches. Come and comfort her. Come and ask her if she is better; come and ask her to lie down. I hope you have nothing on your mind, ma’am. Don’t take on, ma’am, and be sorry!’

It became intolerable. Her ladyship, my Mistress, coming in one day when I was alone, and at the height of feeling that I could support it no longer, I told her I must go. I could not bear the presence of that woman Dawes.

‘Miss Wade! Poor Dawes is devoted to you; would do anything for you!’

I knew beforehand she would say so; I was quite prepared for it; I only answered, it was not for me to contradict my Mistress; I must go.

‘I hope, Miss Wade,’ she returned, instantly assuming the tone of superiority she had always so thinly concealed, ‘that nothing I have ever said or done since we have been together, has justified your use of that disagreeable word, “Mistress.” It must have been wholly inadvertent on my part. Pray tell me what it is.’

I replied that I had no complaint to make, either of my Mistress or to my Mistress; but I must go.

She hesitated a moment, and then sat down beside me, and laid her hand on mine. As if that honour would obliterate any remembrance!

‘Miss Wade, I fear you are unhappy, through causes over which I have no influence.’

I smiled, thinking of the experience the word awakened, and said, ‘I have an unhappy temper, I suppose.’

‘I did not say that.’

‘It is an easy way of accounting for anything,’ said I.

‘It may be; but I did not say so. What I wish to approach is something very different. My husband and I have exchanged some remarks upon the subject, when we have observed with pain that you have not been easy with us.’

‘Easy? Oh! You are such great people, my lady,’ said I.

‘I am unfortunate in using a word which may convey a meaning—and evidently does—quite opposite to my intention.’ (She had not expected my reply, and it shamed her.) ‘I only mean, not happy with us. It is a difficult topic to enter on; but, from one young woman to another, perhaps—in short, we have been apprehensive that you may allow some family circumstances of which no one can be more innocent than yourself, to prey upon your spirits. If so, let us entreat you not to make them a cause of grief. My husband himself, as is well known, formerly had a very dear sister who was not in law his sister, but who was universally beloved and respected .

I saw directly that they had taken me in for the sake of the dead woman, whoever she was, and to have that boast of me and advantage of me; I saw, in the nurse’s knowledge of it, an encouragement to goad me as she had done; and I saw, in the children’s shrinking away, a vague impression, that I was not like other people. I left that house that night.

After one or two short and very similar experiences, which are not to the present purpose, I entered another family where I had but one pupil: a girl of fifteen, who was the only daughter. The parents here were elderly people: people of station, and rich. A nephew whom they had brought up was a frequent visitor at the house, among many other visitors; and he began to pay me attention.

I was resolute in repulsing him; for I had determined when I went there, that no one should pity me or condescend to me. But he wrote me a letter. It led to our being engaged to be married.

He was a year younger than I, and young-looking even when that allowance was made. He was on absence from India, where he had a post that was soon to grow into a very good one. In six months we were to be married, and were to go to India. I was to stay in the house, and was to be married from the house. Nobody objected to any part of the plan.

I cannot avoid saying he admired me; but, if I could, I would. Vanity has nothing to do with the declaration, for his admiration worried me. He took no pains to hide it; and caused me to feel among the rich people as if he had bought me for my looks, and made a show of his purchase to justify himself. They appraised me in their own minds, I saw, and were curious to ascertain what my full value was. I resolved that they should not know. I was immovable and silent before them; and would have suffered any one of them to kill me sooner than I would have laid myself out to bespeak their approval.

He told me I did not do myself justice. I told him I did, and it was because I did and meant to do so to the last, that I would not stoop to propitiate any of them. He was concerned and even shocked, when I added that I wished he would not parade his attachment before them; but he said he would sacrifice even the honest impulses of his affection to my peace.

Under that pretence he began to retort upon me. By the hour together, he would keep at a distance from me, talking to any one rather than to me. I have sat alone and unnoticed, half an evening, while he conversed with his young cousin, my pupil. I have seen

all the while, in people’s eyes, that they thought the two looked nearer on an equality than he and I. I have sat, divining their thoughts, until I have felt that his young appearance made me ridiculous, and have raged against myself for ever loving him.

For I did love him once. Undeserving as he was, and little as he thought of all these agonies that it cost me—agonies which should have made him wholly and gratefully mine to his life’s end—I loved him. I bore with his cousin’s praising him to my face, and with her pretending to think that it pleased me, but full well knowing that it rankled in my breast; for his sake. While I have sat in his presence recalling all my slights and wrongs, and deliberating whether I should not fly from the house at once and never see him again—I have loved him.

His aunt (my Mistress you will please to remember) deliberately, wilfully, added to my trials and vexations. It was her delight to expatiate on the style in which we were to live in India, and on the establishment we should keep, and the company we should entertain when he got his advancement. My pride rose against this barefaced way of pointing out the contrast my married life was to present to my then dependent and inferior position. I suppressed my indignation; but I showed her that her intention was not lost upon me, and I repaid her annoyance by affecting humility. What she described would surely be a great deal too much honour for me, I would tell her. I was afraid I might not be able to support so great a change. Think of a mere governess, her daughter’s governess, coming to that high distinction! It made her uneasy, and made them all uneasy, when I answered in this way. They knew that I fully understood her.

It was at the time when my troubles were at their highest, and

when I was most incensed against my lover for his ingratitude in caring as little as he did for the innumerable distresses and mortifications I underwent on his account, that your dear friend, Mr Gowan, appeared at the house. He had been intimate there for a long time, but had been abroad. He understood the state of things at a glance, and he understood me.

He was the first person I had ever seen in my life who had understood me. He was not in the house three times before I knew that he accompanied every movement of my mind. In his coldly easy way with all of them, and with me, and with the whole subject, I saw it clearly. In his light protestations of admiration of my future husband, in his enthusiasm regarding our engagement and our prospects, in his hopeful congratulations on our future wealth and his despondent references to his own poverty—all equally hollow, and jesting, and full of mockery—I saw it clearly. He made me feel more and more resentful, and more and more contemptible, by always presenting to me everything that surrounded me with some new hateful light upon it, while he pretended to exhibit it in its best aspect for my admiration and his own. He was like the dressed-up Death in the Dutch series; whatever figure he took upon his arm, whether it was youth or age, beauty or ugliness, whether he danced with it, sang with it, played with it, or prayed with it, he made it ghastly.

You will understand, then, that when your dear friend complimented me, he really condoled with me; that when he soothed me under my vexations, he laid bare every smarting wound I had; that when he declared my ‘faithful swain’ to be ‘the most loving young fellow in the world, with the tenderest heart that ever beat,’ he touched my old misgiving that I was made

ridiculous. These were not great services, you may say. They were acceptable to me, because they echoed my own mind, and confirmed my own knowledge. I soon began to like the society of your dear friend better than any other.

When I perceived (which I did, almost as soon) that jealousy was growing out of this, I liked this society still better. Had I not been subject to jealousy, and were the endurances to be all mine? No. Let him know what it was! I was delighted that he should know it; I was delighted that he should feel keenly, and I hoped he did.

More than that. He was tame in comparison with Mr Gowan, who knew how to address me on equal terms, and how to anatomise the wretched people around us.

This went on, until the aunt, my Mistress, took it upon herself to speak to me. It was scarcely worth alluding to; she knew I meant nothing; but she suggested from herself, knowing it was only necessary to suggest, that it might be better if I were a little less companionable with Mr Gowan.

I asked her how she could answer for what I meant? She could always answer, she replied, for my meaning nothing wrong. I thanked her, but said I would prefer to answer for myself and to myself. Her other servants would probably be grateful for good characters, but I wanted none.

Other conversation followed, and induced me to ask her how she knew that it was only necessary for her to make a suggestion to me, to have it obeyed? Did she presume on my birth, or on my hire? I was not bought, body and soul. She seemed to think that her distinguished nephew had gone into a slave-market and purchased a wife.

It would probably have come, sooner or later, to the end to which it did come, but she brought it to its issue at once. She told me, with assumed commiseration, that I had an unhappy temper. On this repetition of the old wicked injury, I withheld no longer, but exposed to her all I had known of her and seen in her, and all I had undergone within myself since I had occupied the despicable position of being engaged to her nephew. I told her that Mr Gowan was the only relief I had had in my degradation; that I had borne it too long, and that I shook it off too late; but that I would see none of them more. And I never did. Your dear friend followed me to my retreat, and was very droll on the severance of the connection; though he was sorry, too, for the excellent people (in their way the best he had ever met), and deplored the necessity of breaking mere house-flies on the wheel. He protested before long, and far more truly than I then supposed, that he was not worth acceptance by a woman of such endowments, and such power of character; but—well, well!—

Your dear friend amused me and amused himself as long as it suited his inclinations; and then reminded me that we were both people of the world, that we both understood mankind, that we both knew there was no such thing as romance, that we were both prepared for going different ways to seek our fortunes like people of sense, and that we both foresaw that whenever we encountered one another again we should meet as the best friends on earth. So he said, and I did not contradict him.

It was not very long before I found that he was courting his present wife, and that she had been taken away to be out of his reach. I hated her then, quite as much as I hate her now; and naturally, therefore, could desire nothing better than that she

should marry him. But I was restlessly curious to look at her—so curious that I felt it to be one of the few sources of entertainment left to me. I travelled a little: travelled until I found myself in her society, and in yours. Your dear friend, I think, was not known to you then, and had not given you any of those signal marks of his friendship which he has bestowed upon you.

In that company I found a girl, in various circumstances of whose position there was a singular likeness to my own, and in whose character I was interested and pleased to see much of the rising against swollen patronage and selfishness, calling themselves kindness, protection, benevolence, and other fine names, which I have described as inherent in my nature. I often heard it said, too, that she had ‘an unhappy temper.’ Well understanding what was meant by the convenient phrase, and wanting a companion with a knowledge of what I knew, I thought I would try to release the girl from her bondage and sense of injustice. I have no occasion to relate that I succeeded.

We have been together ever since, sharing my small means.

Chapter 22

Who passes by this Road so late?

rthur Clennam had made his unavailing expedition to Calais in the midst of a great pressure of business. A certain barbaric Power with valuable possessions on the

map of the world, had occasion for the services of one or two engineers, quick in invention and determined in execution: practical men, who could make the men and means their ingenuity perceived to be wanted out of the best materials they could find at hand; and who were as bold and fertile in the adaptation of such materials to their purpose, as in the conception of their purpose itself. This Power, being a barbaric one, had no idea of stowing away a great national object in a Circumlocution Office, as strong wine is hidden from the light in a cellar until its fire and youth are gone, and the labourers who worked in the vineyard and pressed the grapes are dust. With characteristic ignorance, it acted on the most decided and energetic notions of How to do it; and never showed the least respect for, or gave any quarter to, the great political science, How not to do it. Indeed it had a barbarous way of striking the latter art and mystery dead, in the person of any enlightened subject who practised it.

Accordingly, the men who were wanted were sought out and found; which was in itself a most uncivilised and irregular way of proceeding. Being found, they were treated with great confidence and honour (which again showed dense political ignorance), and were invited to come at once and do what they had to do. In short,

they were regarded as men who meant to do it, engaging with other men who meant it to be done.

Daniel Doyce was one of the chosen. There was no foreseeing at that time whether he would be absent months or years. The preparations for his departure, and the conscientious arrangement for him of all the details and results of their joint business, had necessitated labour within a short compass of time, which had occupied Clennam day and night. He had slipped across the water in his first leisure, and had slipped as quickly back again for his farewell interview with Doyce.

Him Arthur now showed, with pains and care, the state of their gains and losses, responsibilities and prospects. Daniel went through it all in his patient manner, and admired it all exceedingly. He audited the accounts, as if they were a far more ingenious piece of mechanism than he had ever constructed, and afterwards stood looking at them, weighing his hat over his head by the brims, as if he were absorbed in the contemplation of some wonderful engine.

‘It’s all beautiful, Clennam, in its regularity and order. Nothing can be plainer. Nothing can be better.’

‘I am glad you approve, Doyce. Now, as to the management of your capital while you are away, and as to the conversion of so much of it as the business may need from time to time—’ His partner stopped him.

‘As to that, and as to everything else of that kind, all rests with you. You will continue in all such matters to act for both of us, as you have done hitherto, and to lighten my mind of a load it is much relieved from.’

‘Though, as I often tell you,’ returned Clennam, ‘you

unreasonably depreciate your business qualities.’

‘Perhaps so,’ said Doyce, smiling. ‘And perhaps not. Anyhow, I have a calling that I have studied more than such matters, and that I am better fitted for. I have perfect confidence in my partner, and I am satisfied that he will do what is best. If I have a prejudice connected with money and money figures,’ continued Doyce, laying that plastic workman’s thumb of his on the lapel of his partner’s coat, ‘it is against speculating. I don’t think I have any other. I dare say I entertain that prejudice, only because I have never given my mind fully to the subject.’

‘But you shouldn’t call it a prejudice,’ said Clennam. ‘My dear Doyce, it is the soundest sense.’

‘I am glad you think so,’ returned Doyce, with his grey eye looking kind and bright.

‘It so happens,’ said Clennam, ‘that just now, not half an hour before you came down, I was saying the same thing to Pancks, who looked in here. We both agreed that to travel out of safe investments is one of the most dangerous, as it is one of the most common, of those follies which often deserve the name of vices.’

‘Pancks?’ said Doyce, tilting up his hat at the back, and nodding with an air of confidence. ‘Aye, aye, aye! That’s a cautious fellow.’

‘He is a very cautious fellow indeed,’ returned Arthur. ‘Quite a specimen of caution.’

They both appeared to derive a larger amount of satisfaction from the cautious character of Mr Pancks, than was quite intelligible, judged by the surface of their conversation.

‘And now,’ said Daniel, looking at his watch, ‘as time and tide wait for no man, my trusty partner, and as I am ready for starting, bag and baggage, at the gate below, let me say a last word. I want

you to grant a request of mine.’

‘Any request you can make—Except,’ Clennam was quick with his exception, for his partner’s face was quick in suggesting it, ‘except that I will abandon your invention.’

‘That’s the request, and you know it is,’ said Doyce.

‘I say, No, then. I say positively, No. Now that I have begun, I will have some definite reason, some responsible statement, something in the nature of a real answer, from those people.’

‘You will not,’ returned Doyce, shaking his head. ‘Take my word for it, you never will.’

‘At least, I’ll try,’ said Clennam. ‘It will do me no harm to try.’

‘I am not certain of that,’ rejoined Doyce, laying his hand persuasively on his shoulder. ‘It has done me harm, my friend. It has aged me, tired me, vexed me, disappointed me. It does no man any good to have his patience worn out, and to think himself ill- used. I fancy, even already, that unavailing attendance on delays and evasions has made you something less elastic than you used to be.’

‘Private anxieties may have done that for the moment,’ said Clennam, ‘but not official harrying. Not yet. I am not hurt yet.’

‘Then you won’t grant my request?’

‘Decidedly, No,’ said Clennam. ‘I should be ashamed if I submitted to be so soon driven out of the field, where a much older and a much more sensitively interested man contended with fortitude so long.’

As there was no moving him, Daniel Doyce returned the grasp of his hand, and, casting a farewell look round the counting-house, went down-stairs with him. Doyce was to go to Southampton to join the small staff of his fellow-travellers; and a coach was at the

gate, well furnished and packed, and ready to take him there. The workmen were at the gate to see him off, and were mightily proud of him. ‘Good luck to you, Mr Doyce!’ said one of the number. ‘Wherever you go, they’ll find as they’ve got a man among ‘em) a man as knows his tools and as his tools knows, a man as is willing and a man as is able, and if that’s not a man, where is a man!’ This oration from a gruff volunteer in the back-ground, not previously suspected of any powers in that way, was received with three loud cheers; and the speaker became a distinguished character for ever afterwards. In the midst of the three loud cheers, Daniel gave them all a hearty ‘Good Bye, Men!’ and the coach disappeared from sight, as if the concussion of the air had blown it out of Bleeding Heart Yard.

Mr Baptist, as a grateful little fellow in a position of trust, was among the workmen, and had done as much towards the cheering as a mere foreigner could. In truth, no men on earth can cheer like Englishmen, who do so rally one another’s blood and spirit when they cheer in earnest, that the stir is like the rush of their whole history, with all its standards waving at once, from Saxon Alfred’s downwards. Mr Baptist had been in a manner whirled away before the onset, and was taking his breath in quite a scared condition when Clennam beckoned him to follow up-stairs, and return the books and papers to their places.

In the lull consequent on the departure—in that first vacuity which ensues on every separation, foreshadowing the great separation that is always overhanging all mankind—Arthur stood at his desk, looking dreamily out at a gleam of sun. But his liberated attention soon reverted to the theme that was foremost in his thoughts, and began, for the hundredth time, to dwell upon

every circumstance that had impressed itself upon his mind on the mysterious night when he had seen the man at his mother’s. Again the man jostled him in the crooked street, again he followed the man and lost him, again he came upon the man in the court-yard looking at the house, again he followed the man and stood beside him on the door-steps.

‘Who passes by this road so late? Compagnon de la Majolaine;

Who passes by this road so late?

Always gay!’

It was not the first time, by many, that he had recalled the song of the child’s game, of which the fellow had hummed @ verse while they stood side by side; but he was so unconscious of having repeated it audibly, that he started to hear the next verse.

‘Of all the king’s knights ’tis the flower, Compagnon de la Majolaine;

Of all the king’s knights ’tis the flower, Always gay!’

Cavalletto had deferentially suggested the words and tune, supposing him to have stopped short for want of more.

‘Ah! You know the song, Cavalletto?’

‘By Bacchus, yes, sir! They all know it in France. I have heard it many times, sung by the little children. The last time when it I have heard,’ said Mr Baptist, formerly Cavalletto, who usually went back to his native construction of sentences when his

memory went near home, ‘is from a sweet little voice. A little voice, very pretty, very innocent. Altro!’

‘The last time I heard it,’ returned Arthur, ‘was in a voice quite the reverse of pretty, and quite the reverse of innocent.’ He said it more to himself than to his companion, and added to himself, repeating the man’s next words. ‘Death of my life, sir, it’s my character to be impatient!’

‘EH!’ cried Cavalletto, astounded, and with all his colour gone in a moment.

‘What is the matter?’

‘Sir! You know where I have heard that song the last time?’

With his rapid native action, his hands made the outline of a high hook nose, pushed his eyes near together, dishevelled his hair, puffed out his upper lip to represent a thick moustache, and threw the heavy end of an ideal cloak over his shoulder. While doing this, with a swiftness incredible to one who has not watched an Italian peasant, he indicated a very remarkable and sinister smile.

The whole change passed over him like a flash of light, and he stood in the same instant, pale and astonished, before his patron.

‘In the name of Fate and wonder,’ said Clennam, ‘what do you mean? Do you know a man of the name of Blandois?’

‘No!’ said Mr Baptist, shaking his head.

‘You have just now described a man who was by when you heard that song; have you not?’

‘Yes!’ said Mr Baptist, nodding fifty times. ‘And was he not called Blandois?’

‘No!’ said Mr Baptist. ‘Altro, Altro, Altro, Altro!’ He could not reject the name sufficiently, with his head and his right forefinger

going at once.

‘Stay!’ cried Clennam, spreading out the handbill on his desk. ‘Was this the man? You can understand what I read aloud?’

‘Altogether. Perfectly.’

‘But look at it, too. Come here and look over me, while I read.’

Mr Baptist approached, followed every word with his quick eyes, saw and heard it all out with the greatest impatience, then clapped his two hands flat upon the bill as if he had fiercely caught some noxious creature, and cried, looking eagerly at Clennam, ‘It is the man! Behold him!’

‘This is of far greater moment to me’ said Clennam, in great agitation, ‘than you can imagine. Tell me where you knew the man.’

Mr Baptist, releasing the paper very slowly and with much discomfiture, and drawing himself back two or three paces, and making as though he dusted his hands, returned, very much against his will:

‘At Marsiglia—Marseilles.’ ‘What was he?’

‘A prisoner, and—Altro! I believe yes!—an,’ Mr Baptist crept closer again to whisper it, ‘Assassin!’

Clennam fell back as if the word had struck him a blow: so terrible did it make his mother’s communication with the man appear. Cavalletto dropped on one knee, and implored him, with a redundancy of gesticulation, to hear what had brought himself into such foul company.

He told with perfect truth how it had come of a little contraband trading, and how he had in time been released from prison, and how he had gone away from those antecedents. How,

at the house of entertainment called the Break of Day at Chalons on the Saone, he had been awakened in his bed at night by the same assassin, then assuming the name of Lagnier, though his name had formerly been Rigaud; how the assassin had proposed that they should join their fortunes together; how he held the assassin in such dread and aversion that he had fled from him at daylight, and how he had ever since been haunted by the fear of seeing the assassin again and being claimed by him as an acquaintance. When he had related this, with an emphasis and poise on the word, ‘assassin,’ peculiarly belonging to his own language, and which did not serve to render it less terrible to Clennam, he suddenly sprang to his feet, pounced upon the bill again, and with a vehemence that would have been absolute madness in any man of Northern origin, cried ‘Behold the same assassin! Here he is!’

In his passionate raptures, he at first forgot the fact that he had lately seen the assassin in London. On his remembering it, it suggested hope to Clennam that the recognition might be of later date than the night of the visit at his mother’s; but Cavalletto was too exact and clear about time and place, to leave any opening for doubt that it had preceded that occasion.

‘Listen,’ said Arthur, very seriously. ‘This man, as we have read here, has wholly disappeared.’

‘Of it I am well content!’ said Cavalletto, raising his eyes piously. ‘A thousand thanks to Heaven! Accursed assassin!’

‘Not so,’ returned Clennam; ‘for until something more is heard of him, I can never know an hour’s peace.’

‘Enough, Benefactor; that is quite another thing. A million of excuses!’

‘Now, Cavalletto,’ said Clennam, gently turning him by the arm, so that they looked into each other’s eyes. ‘I am certain that for the little I have been able to do for you, you are the most sincerely grateful of men.’

‘I swear it!’ cried the other.

‘I know it. If you could find this man, or discover what has become of him, or gain any later intelligence whatever of him, you would render me a service above any other service I could receive in the world, and would make me (with far greater reason) as grateful to you as you are to me.’

‘I know not where to look,’ cried the little man, kissing Arthur’s hand in a transport. ‘I know not where to begin. I know not where to go. But, courage! Enough! It matters not! I go, in this instant of time!’

‘Not a word to any one but me, Cavalletto.’

‘Al-tro!’ cried Cavalletto. And was gone with great speed.

Chapter 23

Mistress Affery makes a Conditional Promise, respecting her Dreams

eft alone, with the expressive looks and gestures of Mr Baptist, otherwise Giovanni Baptista Cavalletto, vividly before him, Clennam entered on a weary day. It was in

vain that he tried to control his attention by directing it to any business occupation or train of thought; it rode at anchor by the haunting topic, and would hold to no other idea. As though a criminal should be chained in a stationary boat on a deep clear river, condemned, whatever countless leagues of water flowed past him, always to see the body of the fellow-creature he had drowned lying at the bottom, immovable, and unchangeable, except as the eddies made it broad or long, now expanding, now contracting its terrible lineaments; so Arthur, below the shifting current of transparent thoughts and fancies which were gone and succeeded by others as soon as come, saw, steady and dark, and not to be stirred from its place, the one subject that he endeavoured with all his might to rid himself of, and that he could not fly from.

The assurance he now had, that Blandois, whatever his right name, was one of the worst of characters, greatly augmented the burden of his anxieties. Though the disappearance should be accounted for to-morrow, the fact that his mother had been in communication with such a man, would remain unalterable. That the communication had been of a secret kind, and that she had

been submissive to him and afraid of him, he hoped might be known to no one beyond himself; yet, knowing it, how could he separate it from his old vague fears, and how believe that there was nothing evil in such relations? Her resolution not to enter on the question with him, and his knowledge of her indomitable character, enhanced his sense of helplessness. It was like the oppression of a dream to believe that shame and exposure were impending over her and his father’s memory, and to be shut out, as by a brazen wall, from the possibility of coming to their aid. The purpose he had brought home to his native country, and had ever since kept in view, was, with her greatest determination, defeated by his mother herself, at the time of all others when he feared that it pressed most. His advice, energy, activity, money, credit, all his resources whatsoever, were all made useless. If she had been possessed of the old fabled influence, and had turned those who looked upon her into stone, she could not have rendered him more completely powerless (so it seemed to him in his distress of mind) than she did, when she turned her unyielding face to his in her gloomy room.

But the light of that day’s discovery, shining on these considerations, roused him to take a more decided course of action. Confident in the rectitude of his purpose, and impelled by a sense of overhanging danger closing in around, he resolved, if his mother would still admit of no approach, to make a desperate appeal to Affery. If she could be brought to become communicative, and to do what lay in her to break the spell of secrecy that enshrouded the house, he might shake off the paralysis of which every hour that passed over his head made him more acutely sensible. This was the result of his day’s anxiety, and

this was the decision he put in practice when the day closed in.

His first disappointment, on arriving at the house, was to find the door open, and Mr Flintwinch smoking a pipe on the steps. If circumstances had been commonly favourable, Mistress Affery would have opened the door to his knock. Circumstances being uncommonly unfavourable, the door stood open, and Mr Flintwinch was smoking his pipe on the steps.

‘Good evening,’ said Arthur.

‘Good evening,’ said Mr Flintwinch.

The smoke came crookedly out of Mr Flintwinch’s mouth, as if it circulated through the whole of his wry figure and came back by his wry throat, before coming forth to mingle with the smoke from the crooked chimneys and the mists from the crooked river.

‘Have you any news?’ said Arthur. ‘We have no news,’ said Jeremiah.

‘I mean of the foreign man,’ Arthur explained. ‘I mean of the foreign man,’ said Jeremiah.

He looked so grim, as he stood askew, with the knot of his cravat under his ear, that the thought passed into Clennam’s mind, and not for the first time by many, could Flintwinch for a purpose of his own have got rid of Blandois? Could it have been his secret, and his safety, that were at issue? He was small and bent, and perhaps not actively strong; yet he was as tough as an old yew-tree, and as crusty as an old jackdaw. Such a man, coming behind a much younger and more vigorous man, and having the will to put an end to him and no relenting, might do it pretty surely in that solitary place at a late hour.

While, in the morbid condition of his thoughts, these thoughts drifted over the main one that was always in Clennam’s mind, Mr

Flintwinch, regarding the opposite house over the gateway with his neck twisted and one eye shut up, stood smoking with a vicious expression upon him; more as if he were trying to bite off the stem of his pipe, than as if he were enjoying it. Yet he was enjoying it in his own way.

‘You’ll be able to take my likeness, the next time you call, Arthur, I should think,’ said Mr Flintwinch, drily, as he stooped to knock the ashes out.

Rather conscious and confused, Arthur asked his pardon, if he had stared at him unpolitely. ‘But my mind runs so much upon this matter,’ he said, ‘that I lose myself.’

‘Hah! Yet I don’t see,’ returned Mr Flintwinch, quite at his leisure, ‘why it should trouble you, Arthur.’

‘No?’

‘No,’ said Mr Flintwinch, very shortly and decidedly: much as if he were of the canine race, and snapped at Arthur’s hand.

‘Is it nothing to see those placards about? Is it nothing to me to see my mother’s name and residence hawked up and down in such an association?’

‘I don’t see,’ returned Mr Flintwinch, scraping his horny cheek, ‘that it need signify much to you. But I’ll tell you what I do see, Arthur,’ glancing up at the windows; ‘I see the light of fire and candle in your mother’s room!’

‘And what has that to do with it?’

‘Why, sir, I read by it,’ said Mr Flintwinch, screwing himself at him, ‘that if it’s advisable (as the proverb says it is) to let sleeping dogs lie, it’s just as advisable, perhaps, to let missing dogs lie. Let ’em be. They generally turn up soon enough.’

Mr Flintwinch turned short round when he had made this

remark, and went into the dark hall. Clennam stood there, following him with his eyes, as he dipped for a light in the phosphorus-box in the little room at the side, got one after three or four dips, and lighted the dim lamp against the wall. All the while, Clennam was pursuing the probabilities—rather as if they were being shown to him by an invisible hand than as if he himself were conjuring them up—of Mr Flintwinch’s ways and means of doing that darker deed, and removing its traces by any of the black avenues of shadow that lay around them.

‘Now, sir,’ said the testy Jeremiah; ‘will it be agreeable to walk up-stairs?’

‘My mother is alone, I suppose?’

‘Not alone,’ said Mr Flintwinch. ‘Mr Casby and his daughter are with her. They came in while I was smoking, and I stayed behind to have my smoke out.’

This was the second disappointment. Arthur made no remark upon it, and repaired to his mother’s room, where Mr Casby and Flora had been taking tea, anchovy paste, and hot buttered toast. The relics of those delicacies were not yet removed, either from the table or from the scorched countenance of Affery, who, with the kitchen toasting-fork still in her hand, looked like a sort of allegorical personage; except that she had a considerable advantage over the general run of such personages in point of significant emblematical purpose.

Flora had spread her bonnet and shawl upon the bed, with a care indicative of an intention to stay some time. Mr Casby, too, was beaming near the hob, with his benevolent knobs shining as if the warm butter of the toast were exuding through the patriarchal skull, and with his face as ruddy as if the colouring matter of the

anchovy paste were mantling in the patriarchal visage. Seeing this, as he exchanged the usual salutations, Clennam decided to speak to his mother without postponement.

It had long been customary, as she never changed her room, for those who had anything to say to her apart, to wheel her to her desk; where she sat, usually with the back of her chair turned towards the rest of the room, and the person who talked with her seated in a corner, on a stool which was always set in that place for that purpose. Except that it was long since the mother and son had spoken together without the intervention of a third person, it was an ordinary matter of course within the experience of visitors for Mrs Clennam to be asked, with a word of apology for the interruption, if she could be spoken with on a matter of business, and, on her replying in the affirmative, to be wheeled into the position described.

Therefore, when Arthur now made such an apology, and such a request, and moved her to her desk and seated himself on the stool, Mrs Finching merely began to talk louder and faster, as a delicate hint that she could overhear nothing, and Mr Casby stroked his long white locks with sleepy calmness.

‘Mother, I have heard something to-day which I feel persuaded you don’t know, and which I think you should know, of the antecedents of that man I saw here.’

‘I know nothing of the antecedents of the man you saw here, Arthur.’

She spoke aloud. He had lowered his own voice; but she rejected that advance towards confidence as she rejected every other, and spoke in her usual key and in her usual stern voice.

‘I have received it on no circuitous information; it has come to

me direct.’ She asked him, exactly as before, if he were there to tell her what it was?

‘I thought it right that you should know it.’ ‘And what is it?’

‘He has been a prisoner in a French gaol.’

She answered with composure, ‘I should think that very likely.’ ‘But in a gaol for criminals, mother. On an accusation of

murder.’

She started at the word, and her looks expressed her natural horror. Yet she still spoke aloud, when she demanded:—

‘Who told you so?’

‘A man who was his fellow-prisoner.’

‘That man’s antecedents, I suppose, were not known to you, before he told you?’

‘No.’

‘Though the man himself was?’ ‘Yes.’

‘My case and Flintwinch’s, in respect of this other man! I dare say the resemblance is not so exact, though, as that your informant became known to you through a letter from a correspondent with whom he had deposited money? How does that part of the parallel stand?’

Arthur had no choice but to say that his informant had not become known to him through the agency of any such credentials, or indeed of any credentials at all. Mrs Clennam’s attentive frown expanded by degrees into a severe look of triumph, and she retorted with emphasis, ‘Take care how you judge others, then. I say to you, Arthur, for your good, take care how you judge!’ Her emphasis had been derived from her eyes quite as much as from

the stress she laid upon her words. She continued to look at him; and if, when he entered the house, he had had any latent hope of prevailing in the least with her, she now looked it out of his heart.

‘Mother, shall I do nothing to assist you?’ ‘Nothing.’

‘Will you entrust me with no confidence, no charge, no explanation?

Will you take no counsel with me? Will you not let me come near you?’

‘How can you ask me? You separated yourself from my affairs. It was not my act; it was yours. How can you consistently ask me such a question? You know that you left me to Flintwinch, and that he occupies your place.’

Glancing at Jeremiah, Clennam saw in his very gaiters that his attention was closely directed to them, though he stood leaning against the wall scraping his jaw, and pretended to listen to Flora as she held forth in a most distracting manner on a chaos of subjects, in which mackerel, and Mr F.’s Aunt in a swing, had become entangled with cockchafers and the wine trade.

‘A prisoner, in a French gaol, on an accusation of murder,’ repeated Mrs Clennam, steadily going over what her son had said. ‘That is all you know of him from the fellow-prisoner?’

‘In substance, all.’

‘And was the fellow-prisoner his accomplice and a murderer, too? But, of course, he gives a better account of himself than of his friend; it is needless to ask. This will supply the rest of them here with something new to talk about. Casby, Arthur tells me—’

‘Stay, mother! Stay, stay!’ He interrupted her hastily, for it had not entered his imagination that she would openly proclaim what

he had told her.

‘What now?’ she said with displeasure. ‘What more?’

‘I beg you to excuse me, Mr Casby—and you, too, Mrs Finching—for one other moment with my mother—’

He had laid his hand upon her chair, or she would otherwise have wheeled it round with the touch of her foot upon the ground. They were still face to face. She looked at him, as he ran over the possibilities of some result he had not intended, and could not foresee, being influenced by Cavalletto’s disclosure becoming a matter of notoriety, and hurriedly arrived at the conclusion that it had best not be talked about; though perhaps he was guided by no more distinct reason than that he had taken it for granted that his mother would reserve it to herself and her partner.

‘What now?’ she said again, impatiently. ‘What is it?’

‘I did not mean, mother, that you should repeat what I have communicated. I think you had better not repeat it.’

‘Do you make that a condition with me?’ ‘Well! Yes.’

‘Observe, then! It is you who make this a secret,’ said she, holding up her hand, ‘and not I. It is you, Arthur, who bring here doubts and suspicions and entreaties for explanations, and it is you, Arthur, who bring secrets here. What is it to me, do you think, where the man has been, or what he has been? What can it be to me? The whole world may know it, if they care to know it; it is nothing to me. Now, let me go.’

He yielded to her imperious but elated look, and turned her chair back to the place from which he had wheeled it. In doing so he saw elation in the face of Mr Flintwinch, which most assuredly was not inspired by Flora. this turning of his intelligence and of

his whole attempt and design against himself, did even more than his mother’s fixedness and firmness to convince him that his efforts with her were idle. Nothing remained but the appeal to his old friend Affery.

But even to get the very doubtful and preliminary stage of making the appeal, seemed one of the least promising of human undertakings. She was so completely under the thrall of the two clever ones, was so systematically kept in sight by one or other of them, and was so afraid to go about the house besides, that every opportunity of speaking to her alone appeared to be forestalled. Over and above that, Mistress Affery, by some means (it was not very difficult to guess, through the sharp arguments of her liege lord), had acquired such a lively conviction of the hazard of saying anything under any circumstances, that she had remained all this time in a corner guarding herself from approach with that symbolical instrument of hers; so that, when a word or two had been addressed to her by Flora, or even by the bottle-green patriarch himself, she had warded off conversation with the toasting-fork like a dumb woman.

After several abortive attempts to get Affery to look at him while she cleared the table and washed the tea-service, Arthur thought of an expedient which Flora might originate. To whom he therefore whispered, ‘Could you say you would like to go through the house?’

Now, poor Flora, being always in fluctuating expectation of the time when Clennam would renew his boyhood and be madly in love with her again, received the whisper with the utmost delight; not only as rendered precious by its mysterious character, but as preparing the way for a tender interview in which he would

declare the state of his affections. She immediately began to work out the hint.

‘Ah dear me the poor old room,’ said Flora, glancing round, ‘looks just as ever Mrs Clennam I am touched to see except for being smokier which was to be expected with time and which we must all expect and reconcile ourselves to being whether we like it or not as I am sure I have had to do myself if not exactly smokier dreadfully stouter which is the same or worse, to think of the days when papa used to bring me here the least of girls a perfect mass of chilblains to be stuck upon a chair with my feet on the rails and stare at Arthur—pray excuse me—Mr Clennam—the least of boys in the frightfullest of frills and jackets ere yet Mr F. appeared a misty shadow on the horizon paying attentions like the well- known spectre of some place in Germany beginning with a B is a moral lesson inculcating that all the paths in life are similar to the paths down in the North of England where they get the coals and make the iron and things gravelled with ashes!’

Having paid the tribute of a sigh to the instability of human existence, Flora hurried on with her purpose.

‘Not that at any time,’ she proceeded, ‘its worst enemy could have said it was a cheerful house for that it was never made to be but always highly impressive, fond memory recalls an occasion in youth ere yet the judgment was mature when Arthur—confirmed habit—Mr Clennam—took me down into an unused kitchen eminent for mouldiness and proposed to secrete me there for life and feed me on what he could hide from his meals when he was not at home for the holidays and on dry bread in disgrace which at that halcyon period too frequently occurred, would it be inconvenient or asking too much to beg to be permitted to revive

those scenes and walk through the house?’

Mrs Clennam, who responded with a constrained grace to Mrs Finching’s good nature in being there at all, though her visit (before Arthur’s unexpected arrival) was undoubtedly an act of pure good nature and no self-gratification, intimated that all the house was open to her. Flora rose and looked to Arthur for his escort. ‘Certainly,’ said he, aloud; ‘and Affery will light us, I dare say.’

Affery was excusing herself with ‘Don’t ask nothing of me, Arthur!’ when Mr Flintwinch stopped her with ‘Why not? Affery, what’s the matter with you, woman? Why not, jade!’ Thus expostulated with, she came unwillingly out of her corner, resigned the toasting-fork into one of her husband’s hands, and took the candlestick he offered from the other.

‘Go before, you fool!’ said Jeremiah. ‘Are you going up, or down, Mrs Finching?’

Flora answered, ‘Down.’

‘Then go before, and down, you Affery,’ said Jeremiah. ‘And do it properly, or I’ll come rolling down the banisters, and tumbling over you!’

Affery headed the exploring party; Jeremiah closed it. He had no intention of leaving them. Clennam looking back, and seeing him following three stairs behind, in the coolest and most methodical manner exclaimed in a low voice, ‘Is there no getting rid of him!’ Flora reassured his mind by replying promptly, ‘Why though not exactly proper Arthur and a thing I couldn’t think of before a younger man or a stranger still I don’t mind him if you so particularly wish it and provided you’ll have the goodness not to take me too tight.’

Wanting the heart to explain that this was not at all what he meant, Arthur extended his supporting arm round Flora’s figure. ‘Oh my goodness me,’ said she. ‘You are very obedient indeed really and it’s extremely honourable and gentlemanly in you I am sure but still at the same time if you would like to be a little tighter than that I shouldn’t consider it intruding.’

In this preposterous attitude, unspeakably at variance with his anxious mind, Clennam descended to the basement of the house; finding that wherever it became darker than elsewhere, Flora became heavier, and that when the house was lightest she was too. Returning from the dismal kitchen regions, which were as dreary as they could be, Mistress Affery passed with the light into his father’s old room, and then into the old dining-room; always passing on before like a phantom that was not to be overtaken, and neither turning nor answering when he whispered, ‘Affery! I want to speak to you!’

In the dining-room, a sentimental desire came over Flora to look into the dragon closet which had so often swallowed Arthur in the days of his boyhood—not improbably because, as a very dark closet, it was a likely place to be heavy in. Arthur, fast subsiding into despair, had opened it, when a knock was heard at the outer door.

Mistress Affery, with a suppressed cry, threw her apron over her head.

‘What? You want another dose!’ said Mr Flintwinch. ‘You shall have it, my woman, you shall have a good one! Oh! You shall have a sneezer, you shall have a teaser!’

‘In the meantime is anybody going to the door?’ said Arthur.

‘In the meantime, I am going to the door, sir,’ returned the old

man so savagely, as to render it clear that in a choice of difficulties he felt he must go, though he would have preferred not to go. ‘Stay here the while, all! Affery, my woman, move an inch, or speak a word in your foolishness, and I’ll treble your dose!’

The moment he was gone, Arthur released Mrs Finching: with some difficulty, by reason of that lady misunderstanding his intentions, and making arrangements with a view to tightening instead of slackening.

‘Affery, speak to me now!’

‘Don’t touch me, Arthur!’ she cried, shrinking from him. ‘Don’t come near me. He’ll see you. Jeremiah will. Don’t.’

‘He can’t see me,’ returned Arthur, suiting the action to the word, ‘if I blow the candle out.’

‘He’ll hear you,’ cried Affery.

‘He can’t hear me,’ returned Arthur, suiting the action to the words again, ‘if I draw you into this black closet, and speak here.

Why do you hide your face?’

‘Because I am afraid of seeing something.’

‘You can’t be afraid of seeing anything in this darkness, Affery.’ ‘Yes I am. Much more than if it was light.’

‘Why are you afraid?’

‘Because the house is full of mysteries and secrets; because it’s full of whisperings and counsellings; because it’s full of noises. There never was such a house for noises. I shall die of ’em, if Jeremiah don’t strangle me first. As I expect he will.’

‘I have never heard any noises here, worth speaking of.’

‘Ah! But you would, though, if you lived in the house, and was obliged to go about it as I am,’ said Affery; ‘and you’d feel that they was so well worth speaking of, that you’d feel you was nigh

bursting through not being allowed to speak of ’em. Here’s Jeremiah! You’ll get me killed.’

‘My good Affery, I solemnly declare to you that I can see the light of the open door on the pavement of the hall, and so could you if you would uncover your face and look.’

‘I durstn’t do it,’ said Affery, ‘I durstn’t never, Arthur. I’m always blind-folded when Jeremiah an’t a looking, and sometimes even when he is.’

‘He cannot shut the door without my seeing him,’ said Arthur. ‘You are as safe with me as if he was fifty miles away.’

(‘I wish he was!’ cried Affery.)

‘Affery, I want to know what is amiss here; I want some light thrown on the secrets of this house.’

‘I tell you, Arthur,’ she interrupted, ‘noises is the secrets, rustlings and stealings about, tremblings, treads overhead and treads underneath.’

‘But those are not all the secrets.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Affery. ‘Don’t ask me no more. Your old sweetheart an’t far off, and she’s a blabber.’

His old sweetheart, being in fact so near at hand that she was then reclining against him in a flutter, a very substantial angle of forty-five degrees, here interposed to assure Mistress Affery with greater earnestness than directness of asseveration, that what she heard should go no further, but should be kept inviolate, ‘if on no other account on Arthur’s—sensible of intruding in being too familiar Doyce and Clennam’s.’

‘I make an imploring appeal to you, Affery, to you, one of the few agreeable early remembrances I have, for my mother’s sake, for your husband’s sake, for my own, for all our sakes. I am sure

you can tell me something connected with the coming here of this man, if you will.’

‘Why, then I’ll tell you, Arthur,’ returned Affery—‘Jeremiah’s coming!’

‘No, indeed he is not. The door is open, and he is standing outside, talking.’

‘I’ll tell you then,’ said Affery, after listening, ‘that the first time he ever come he heard the noises his own self. “What’s that?” he said to me. “I don’t know what it is,” I says to him, catching hold of him, “but I have heard it over and over again.” While I says it, he stands a looking at me, all of a shake, he do.’

‘Has he been here often?’

‘Only that night, and the last night.’

‘What did you see of him on the last night, after I was gone?’ ‘Them two clever ones had him all alone to themselves.

Jeremiah come a dancing at me sideways, after I had let you out (he always comes a dancing at me sideways when he’s going to hurt me), and he said to me, “Now, Affery,” he said, “I am a coming behind you, my woman, and a going to run you up.” So he took and squeezed the back of my neck in his hand, till it made me open my mouth, and then he pushed me before him to bed, squeezing all the way. That’s what he calls running me up, he do. Oh, he’s a wicked one!’

‘And did you hear or see no more, Affery?’

‘Don’t I tell you I was sent to bed, Arthur! Here he is!’

‘I assure you he is still at the door. Those whisperings and counsellings, Affery, that you have spoken of. What are they?’

‘How should I know? Don’t ask me nothing about ’em, Arthur.

Get away!’

‘But my dear Affery; unless I can gain some insight into these hidden things, in spite of your husband and in spite of my mother, ruin will come of it.’

‘Don’t ask me nothing,’ repeated Affery. ‘I have been in a dream for ever so long. Go away, go away!’

‘You said that before,’ returned Arthur. ‘You used the same expression that night, at the door, when I asked you what was going on here. What do you mean by being in a dream?’

‘I an’t a going to tell you. Get away! I shouldn’t tell you, if you was by yourself; much less with your old sweetheart here.’

It was equally vain for Arthur to entreat, and for Flora to protest. Affery, who had been trembling and struggling the whole time, turned a deaf ear to all adjuration, and was bent on forcing herself out of the closet.

‘I’d sooner scream to Jeremiah than say another word! I’ll call out to him, Arthur, if you don’t give over speaking to me. Now here’s the very last word I’ll say afore I call to him—If ever you begin to get the better of them two clever ones your own self (you ought to it, as I told you when you first come home, for you haven’t been a living here long years, to be made afeared of your life as I have), then do you get the better of ’em afore my face; and then do you say to me, Affery tell your dreams! Maybe, then I’ll tell ’em!’

The shutting of the door stopped Arthur from replying. They glided into the places where Jeremiah had left them; and Clennam, stepping forward as that old gentleman returned, informed him that he had accidentally extinguished the candle. Mr Flintwinch looked on as he re-lighted it at the lamp in the hall, and preserved a profound taciturnity respecting the person who had been holding him in conversation. Perhaps his irascibility

demanded compensation for some tediousness that the visitor had expended on him; however that was, he took such umbrage at seeing his wife with her apron over her head, that he charged at her, and taking her veiled nose between his thumb and finger, appeared to throw the whole screw-power of his person into the wring he gave it.

Flora, now permanently heavy, did not release Arthur from the survey of the house, until it had extended even to his old garret bedchamber. His thoughts were otherwise occupied than with the tour of inspection; yet he took particular notice at the time, as he afterwards had occasion to remember, of the airlessness and closeness of the house; that they left the track of their footsteps in the dust on the upper floors; and that there was a resistance to the opening of one room door, which occasioned Affery to cry out that somebody was hiding inside, and to continue to believe so, though somebody was sought and not discovered. When they at last returned to his mother’s room, they found her shading her face with her muffled hand, and talking in a low voice to the Patriarch as he stood before the fire, whose blue eyes, polished head, and silken locks, turning towards them as they came in, imparted an inestimable value and inexhaustible love of his species to his remark:

‘So you have been seeing the premises, seeing the premises— premises—seeing the premises!’

It was not in itself a jewel of benevolence or wisdom, yet he made it an exemplar of both that one would have liked to have a copy of.

Chapter 24

The Evening of a Long Day

T

hat illustrious man and great national ornament, Mr Merdle, continued his shining course. It began to be widely understood that one who had done society the

admirable service of making so much money out of it, could not be suffered to remain a commoner. A baronetcy was spoken of with confidence; a peerage was frequently mentioned. Rumour had it that Mr Merdle had set his golden face against a baronetcy; that he had plainly intimated to Lord Decimus that a baronetcy was not enough for him; that he had said, ‘No—a Peerage, or plain Merdle.’ This was reported to have plunged Lord Decimus as nigh to his noble chin in a slough of doubts as so lofty a person could be sunk. For the Barnacles, as a group of themselves in creation, had an idea that such distinctions belonged to them; and that when a soldier, sailor, or lawyer became ennobled, they let him in, as it were, by an act of condescension, at the family door, and immediately shut it again. Not only (said Rumour) had the troubled Decimus his own hereditary part in this impression, but he also knew of several Barnacle claims already on the file, which came into collision with that of the master spirit. Right or wrong, Rumour was very busy; and Lord Decimus, while he was, or was supposed to be, in stately excogitation of the difficulty, lent her some countenance by taking, on several public occasions, one of those elephantine trots of his through a jungle of overgrown sentences, waving Mr Merdle about on his trunk as Gigantic

Enterprise, The Wealth of England, Elasticity, Credit, Capital, Prosperity, and all manner of blessings.

So quietly did the mowing of the old scythe go on, that fully three months had passed unnoticed since the two English brothers had been laid in one tomb in the strangers’ cemetery at Rome. Mr and Mrs Sparkler were established in their own house: a little mansion, rather of the Tite Barnacle class, quite a triumph of inconvenience, with a perpetual smell in it of the day before yesterday’s soup and coach-horses, but extremely dear, as being exactly in the centre of the habitable globe. In this enviable abode (and envied it really was by many people), Mrs Sparkler had intended to proceed at once to the demolition of the Bosom, when active hostilities had been suspended by the arrival of the Courier with his tidings of death. Mrs Sparkler, who was not unfeeling, had received them with a violent burst of grief, which had lasted twelve hours; after which, she had arisen to see about her mourning, and to take every precaution that could ensure its being as becoming as Mrs Merdle’s. A gloom was then cast over more than one distinguished family (according to the politest sources of intelligence), and the Courier went back again.

Mr and Mrs Sparkler had been dining alone, with their gloom cast over them, and Mrs Sparkler reclined on a drawing-room sofa. It was a hot summer Sunday evening. The residence in the centre of the habitable globe, at all times stuffed and close as if it had an incurable cold in its head, was that evening particularly stifling.

The bells of the churches had done their worst in the way of clanging among the unmelodious echoes of the streets, and the lighted windows of the churches had ceased to be yellow in the

grey dusk, and had died out opaque black. Mrs Sparkler, lying on her sofa, looking through an open window at the opposite side of a narrow street over boxes of mignonette and flowers, was tired of the view. Mrs Sparkler, looking at another window where her husband stood in the balcony, was tired of that view. Mrs Sparkler, looking at herself in her mourning, was even tired of that view: though, naturally, not so tired of that as of the other two. ‘It’s like lying in a well,’ said Mrs Sparkler, changing her position fretfully. ‘Dear me, Edmund, if you have anything to say,

why don’t you say it?’

Mr Sparkler might have replied with ingenuousness, ‘My life, I have nothing to say.’ But, as the repartee did not occur to him, he contented himself with coming in from the balcony and standing at the side of his wife’s couch.

‘Good gracious, Edmund!’ said Mrs Sparkler more fretfully still, you are absolutely putting mignonette up your nose! Pray don’t!’

Mr Sparkler, in absence of mind—perhaps in a more literal absence of mind than is usually understood by the phrase—had smelt so hard at a sprig in his hand as to be on the verge of the offence in question. He smiled, said, ‘I ask your pardon, my dear,’ and threw it out of window.

‘You make my head ache by remaining in that position, Edmund,’ said Mrs Sparkler, raising her eyes to him after another minute; ‘you look so aggravatingly large by this light. Do sit down.’ ‘Certainly, my dear,’ said Mr Sparkler, and took a chair on the

same spot.

‘If I didn’t know that the longest day was past,’ said Fanny, yawning in a dreary manner, ‘I should have felt certain this was the longest day. I never did experience such a day.’

‘Is that your fan, my love?’ asked Mr Sparkler, picking up one and presenting it.

‘Edmund,’ returned his wife, more wearily yet, ‘don’t ask weak questions, I entreat you not. Whose can it be but mine?’

‘Yes, I thought it was yours,’ said Mr Sparkler.

‘Then you shouldn’t ask,’ retorted Fanny. After a little while she turned on her sofa and exclaimed, ‘Dear me, dear me, there never was such a long day as this!’ After another little while, she got up slowly, walked about, and came back again.

‘My dear,’ said Mr Sparkler, flashing with an original conception, ‘I think you must have got the fidgets.’

‘Oh, Fidgets!’ repeated Mrs Sparkler. ‘Don’t.’

‘My adorable girl,’ urged Mr Sparkler, ‘try your aromatic vinegar. I have often seen my mother try it, and it seemingly refreshed her.

And she is, as I believe you are aware, a remarkably fine woman, with no non—’

‘Good Gracious!’ exclaimed Fanny, starting up again. ‘It’s beyond all patience! This is the most wearisome day that ever did dawn upon the world, I am certain.’

Mr Sparkler looked meekly after her as she lounged about the room, and he appeared to be a little frightened. When she had tossed a few trifles about, and had looked down into the darkening street out of all the three windows, she returned to her sofa, and threw herself among its pillows.

‘Now Edmund, come here! Come a little nearer, because I want to be able to touch you with my fan, that I may impress you very much with what I am going to say. That will do. Quite close enough. Oh, you do look so big!’

Mr Sparkler apologised for the circumstance, pleaded that he couldn’t help it, and said that ‘our fellows,’ without more particularly indicating whose fellows, used to call him by the name of Quinbus Flestrin, Junior, or the Young Man Mountain.

‘You ought to have told me so before,’ Fanny complained.

‘My dear,’ returned Mr Sparkler, rather gratified, ‘I didn’t know It would interest you, or I would have made a point of telling you.’

‘There! For goodness sake, don’t talk,’ said Fanny; ‘I want to talk, myself. Edmund, we must not be alone any more. I must take such precautions as will prevent my being ever again reduced to the state of dreadful depression in which I am this evening.’

‘My dear,’ answered Mr Sparkler; ‘being as you are well known to be, a remarkably fine woman with no—’

‘Oh, good GRACIOUS!’ cried Fanny.

Mr Sparkler was so discomposed by the energy of this exclamation, accompanied with a flouncing up from the sofa and a flouncing down again, that a minute or two elapsed before he felt himself equal to saying in explanation:

‘I mean, my dear, that everybody knows you are calculated to shine in society.’

‘Calculated to shine in society,’ retorted Fanny with great irritability; ‘yes, indeed! And then what happens? I no sooner recover, in a visiting point of view, the shock of poor dear papa’s death, and my poor uncle’s—though I do not disguise from myself that the last was a happy release, for, if you are not presentable you had much better die—’

‘You are not referring to me, my love, I hope?’ Mr Sparkler humbly interrupted.

‘Edmund, Edmund, you would wear out a Saint. Am I not

expressly speaking of my poor uncle?’

‘You looked with so much expression at myself, my dear girl,’ said Mr Sparkler, ‘that I felt a little uncomfortable. Thank you, my love.’

‘Now you have put me out,’ observed Fanny with a resigned toss of her fan, ‘and I had better go to bed.’

‘Don’t do that, my love,’ urged Mr Sparkler. ‘Take time.’

Fanny took a good deal of time: lying back with her eyes shut, and her eyebrows raised with a hopeless expression as if she had utterly given up all terrestrial affairs. At length, without the slightest notice, she opened her eyes again, and recommenced in a short, sharp manner:

‘What happens then, I ask! What happens? Why, I find myself at the very period when I might shine most in society, and should most like for very momentous reasons to shine in society—I find myself in a situation which to a certain extent disqualifies me for going into society. it’s too bad, really!’

‘My dear,’ said Mr Sparkler. ‘I don’t think it need keep you at home.’

‘Edmund, you ridiculous creature,’ returned Fanny, with great indignation; ‘do you suppose that a woman in the bloom of youth and not wholly devoid of personal attractions, can put herself, at such a time, in competition as to figure with a woman in every other way her inferior? If you do suppose such a thing, your folly is boundless.’

Mr Sparkler submitted that he had thought ‘it might be got over.’

‘Got over!’ repeated Fanny, with immeasurable scorn. ‘For a time,’ Mr Sparkler submitted.

Honouring the last feeble suggestion with no notice, Mrs Sparkler declared with bitterness that it really was too bad, and that positively it was enough to make one wish one was dead!

‘However,’ she said, when she had in some measure recovered from her sense of personal ill-usage; ‘provoking as it is, and cruel as it seems, I suppose it must be submitted to.’

‘Especially as it was to be expected,’ said Mr Sparkler. ‘Edmund,’ returned his wife, ‘if you have nothing more

becoming to do than to attempt to insult the woman who has honoured you with her hand, when she finds herself in adversity, I think you had better go to bed!’

Mr Sparkler was much afflicted by the charge, and offered a most tender and earnest apology. His apology was accepted; but Mrs Sparkler requested him to go round to the other side of the sofa and sit in the window-curtain, to tone himself down.

‘Now, Edmund,’ she said, stretching out her fan, and touching him with it at arm’s length, ‘what I was going to say to you when you began as usual to prose and worry, is, that I shall guard against our being alone any more, and that when circumstances prevent my going out to my own satisfaction, I must arrange to have some people or other always here; for I really cannot, and will not, have another such day as this has been.’

Mr Sparkler’s sentiments as to the plan were, in brief, that it had no nonsense about it. He added, ‘And besides, you know it’s likely that you’ll soon have your sister—’

‘Dearest Amy, yes!’ cried Mrs Sparkler with a sigh of affection. ‘Darling little thing! Not, however, that Amy would do here alone.’

Mr Sparkler was going to say ‘No?’ interrogatively, but he saw his danger and said it assentingly, ‘No, Oh dear no; she wouldn’t

do here alone.’

‘No, Edmund. For not only are the virtues of the precious child of that still character that they require a contrast—require life and movement around them to bring them out in their right colours and make one love them of all things; but she will require to be roused, on more accounts than one.’

‘That’s it,’ said Mr Sparkler. ‘Roused.’

‘Pray don’t, Edmund! Your habit of interrupting without having the least thing in the world to say, distracts one. You must be broken of it. Speaking of Amy;—my poor little pet was devotedly attached to poor papa, and no doubt will have lamented his loss exceedingly, and grieved very much. I have done so myself. I have felt it dreadfully. But Amy will no doubt have felt it even more, from having been on the spot the whole time, and having been with poor dear papa at the last; which I unhappily was not.’

Here Fanny stopped to weep, and to say, ‘Dear, dear, beloved papa! How truly gentlemanly he was! What a contrast to poor uncle!’

‘From the effects of that trying time,’ she pursued, ‘my good little Mouse will have to be roused. Also, from the effects of this long attendance upon Edward in his illness; an attendance which is not yet over, which may even go on for some time longer, and which in the meanwhile unsettles us all by keeping poor dear papa’s affairs from being wound up. Fortunately, however, the papers with his agents here being all sealed up and locked up, as he left them when he providentially came to England, the affairs are in that state of order that they can wait until my brother Edward recovers his health in Sicily, sufficiently to come over, and administer, or execute, or whatever it may be that will have to be

done.’

‘He couldn’t have a better nurse to bring him round,’ Mr Sparkler made bold to opine.

‘For a wonder, I can agree with you,’ returned his wife, languidly turning her eyelids a little in his direction (she held forth, in general, as if to the drawing-room furniture), ‘and can adopt your words. He couldn’t have a better nurse to bring him round. There are times when my dear child is a little wearing to an active mind; but, as a nurse, she is Perfection. Best of Amys!’

Mr Sparkler, growing rash on his late success, observed that Edward had had, biggodd, a long bout of it, my dear girl.

‘If Bout, Edmund,’ returned Mrs Sparkler, ‘is the slang term for indisposition, he has. If it is not, I am unable to give an opinion on the barbarous language you address to Edward’s sister. That he contracted Malaria Fever somewhere, either by travelling day and night to Rome, where, after all, he arrived too late to see poor dear papa before his death—or under some other unwholesome circumstances—is indubitable, if that is what you mean. Likewise that his extremely careless life has made him a very bad subject for it indeed.’

Mr Sparkler considered it a parallel case to that of some of our fellows in the West Indies with Yellow Jack. Mrs Sparkler closed her eyes again, and refused to have any consciousness of our fellows of the West Indies, or of Yellow Jack.

‘So, Amy,’ she pursued, when she reopened her eyelids, ‘will require to be roused from the effects of many tedious and anxious weeks. And lastly, she will require to be roused from a low tendency which I know very well to be at the bottom of her heart. Don’t ask me what it is, Edmund, because I must decline to tell

you.’

‘I am not going to, my dear,’ said Mr Sparkler.

‘I shall thus have much improvement to effect in my sweet child,’ Mrs Sparkler continued, ‘and cannot have her near me too soon. Amiable and dear little Twoshoes! As to the settlement of poor papa’s affairs, my interest in that is not very selfish. Papa behaved very generously to me when I was married, and I have little or nothing to expect. Provided he had made no will that can come into force, leaving a legacy to Mrs General, I am contented. Dear papa, dear papa.’

She wept again, but Mrs General was the best of restoratives.

The name soon stimulated her to dry her eyes and say:

‘It is a highly encouraging circumstance in Edward’s illness, I am thankful to think, and gives one the greatest confidence in his sense not being impaired, or his proper spirit weakened—down to the time of poor dear papa’s death at all events—that he paid off Mrs General instantly, and sent her out of the house. I applaud him for it. I could forgive him a great deal for doing, with such promptitude, so exactly what I would have done myself!’

Mrs Sparkler was in the full glow of her gratification, when a double knock was heard at the door. A very odd knock. Low, as if to avoid making a noise and attracting attention. Long, as if the person knocking were preoccupied in mind, and forgot to leave off.

‘Halloa!’ said Mr Sparkler. ‘Who’s this?’

‘Not Amy and Edward without notice and without a carriage!’ said Mrs Sparkler. ‘Look out.’

The room was dark, but the street was lighter, because of its lamps. Mr Sparkler’s head peeping over the balcony looked so

very bulky and heavy that it seemed on the point of overbalancing him and flattening the unknown below.

‘It’s one fellow,’ said Mr Sparkler. ‘I can’t see who—stop though!’ On this second thought he went out into the balcony again and had another look. He came back as the door was opened, and announced that he believed he had identified ‘his governor’s tile.’ He was not mistaken, for his governor, with his tile in his hand, was introduced immediately afterwards.

‘Candles!’ said Mrs Sparkler, with a word of excuse for the darkness.

‘It’s light enough for me,’ said Mr Merdle.

When the candles were brought in, Mr Merdle was discovered standing behind the door, picking his lips. ‘I thought I’d give you a call,’ he said. ‘I am rather particularly occupied just now; and, as I happened to be out for a stroll, I thought I’d give you a call.’

As he was in dinner dress, Fanny asked him where he had been dining?

‘Well,’ said Mr Merdle, ‘I haven’t been dining anywhere, particularly.’

‘Of course you have dined?’ said Fanny.

‘Why—no, I haven’t exactly dined,’ said Mr Merdle.

He had passed his hand over his yellow forehead and considered, as if he were not sure about it. Something to eat was proposed. ‘No, thank you,’ said Mr Merdle, ‘I don’t feel inclined for it. I was to have dined out along with Mrs Merdle. But as I didn’t feel inclined for dinner, I let Mrs Merdle go by herself just as we were getting into the carriage, and thought I’d take a stroll instead.’

Would he have tea or coffee? ‘No, thank you,’ said Mr Merdle. ‘I

looked in at the Club, and got a bottle of wine.’

At this period of his visit, Mr Merdle took the chair which Edmund Sparkler had offered him, and which he had hitherto been pushing slowly about before him, like a dull man with a pair of skates on for the first time, who could not make up his mind to start. He now put his hat upon another chair beside him, and, looking down into it as if it were some twenty feet deep, said again: ‘You see I thought I’d give you a call.’

‘Flattering to us,’ said Fanny, ‘for you are not a calling man.’ ‘No—no,’ returned Mr Merdle, who was by this time taking

himself into custody under both coat-sleeves. ‘No, I am not a calling man.’

‘You have too much to do for that,’ said Fanny. ‘Having so much to do, Mr Merdle, loss of appetite is a serious thing with you, and you must have it seen to. You must not be ill.’

‘Oh! I am very well,’ replied Mr Merdle, after deliberating about it. ‘I am as well as I usually am. I am well enough. I am as well as I want to be.’

The master-mind of the age, true to its characteristic of being at all times a mind that had as little as possible to say for itself and great difficulty in saying it, became mute again. Mrs Sparkler began to wonder how long the master-mind meant to stay.

‘I was speaking of poor papa when you came in, sir.’ ‘Aye! Quite a coincidence,’ said Mr Merdle.

Fanny did not see that; but felt it incumbent on her to continue talking. ‘I was saying,’ she pursued, ‘that my brother’s illness has occasioned a delay in examining and arranging papa’s property.’

‘Yes,’ said Mr Merdle; ‘yes. There has been a delay.’ ‘Not that it is of consequence,’ said Fanny.

‘Not,’ assented Mr Merdle, after having examined the cornice of all that part of the room which was within his range: ‘not that it is of any consequence.’

‘My only anxiety is,’ said Fanny, ‘that Mrs General should not get anything.’

‘She won’t get anything,’ said Mr Merdle.

Fanny was delighted to hear him express the opinion. Mr Merdle, after taking another gaze into the depths of his hat as if he thought he saw something at the bottom, rubbed his hair and slowly appended to his last remark the confirmatory words, ‘Oh dear no. No. Not she. Not likely.’

As the topic seemed exhausted, and Mr Merdle too, Fanny inquired if he were going to take up Mrs Merdle and the carriage in his way home?

‘No,’ he answered; ‘I shall go by the shortest way, and leave Mrs Merdle to—’ here he looked all over the palms of both his hands as if he were telling his own fortune—‘to take care of herself. I dare say she’ll manage to do it.’

‘Probably,’ said Fanny.

There was then a long silence; during which, Mrs Sparkler, lying back on her sofa again, shut her eyes and raised her eyebrows in her former retirement from mundane affairs.

‘But, however,’ said Mr Merdle, ‘I am equally detaining you and myself. I thought I’d give you a call, you know.’

‘Charmed, I am sure,’ said Fanny.

‘So I am off,’ added Mr Merdle, getting up. ‘Could you lend me a penknife?’

It was an odd thing, Fanny smilingly observed, for her who could seldom prevail upon herself even to write a letter, to lend to

a man of such vast business as Mr Merdle. ‘Isn’t it?’ Mr Merdle acquiesced; ‘but I want one; and I know you have got several little wedding keepsakes about, with scissors and tweezers and such things in them. You shall have it back to-morrow.’

‘Edmund,’ said Mrs Sparkler, ‘open (now, very carefully, I beg and beseech, for you are so very awkward) the mother of pearl box on my little table there, and give Mr Merdle the mother of pearl penknife.’

‘Thank you,’ said Mr Merdle; ‘but if you have got one with a darker handle, I think I should prefer one with a darker handle.’

‘Tortoise-shell?’

‘Thank you,’ said Mr Merdle; ‘yes. I think I should prefer tortoise-shell.’

Edmund accordingly received instructions to open the tortoise- shell box, and give Mr Merdle the tortoise-shell knife. On his doing so, his wife said to the master-spirit graciously:

‘I will forgive you, if you ink it.’

‘I’ll undertake not to ink it,’ said Mr Merdle.

The illustrious visitor then put out his coat-cuff, and for a moment entombed Mrs Sparkler’s hand: wrist, bracelet, and all. Where his own hand had shrunk to, was not made manifest, but it was as remote from Mrs Sparkler’s sense of touch as if he had been a highly meritorious Chelsea Veteran or Greenwich Pensioner.

Thoroughly convinced, as he went out of the room, that it was the longest day that ever did come to an end at last, and that there never was a woman, not wholly devoid of personal attractions, so worn out by idiotic and lumpish people, Fanny passed into the balcony for a breath of air. Waters of vexation filled her eyes; and

they had the effect of making the famous Mr Merdle, in going down the street, appear to leap, and waltz, and gyrate, as if he were possessed of several Devils.

Chapter 25

The Chief Butler Resigns the Seals of Office

he dinner-party was at the great Physician’s. Bar was there, and in full force. Ferdinand Barnacle was there, and in his most engaging state. Few ways of life were hidden

from Physician, and he was oftener in its darkest places than even Bishop. There were brilliant ladies about London who perfectly doted on him, my dear, as the most charming creature and the most delightful person, who would have been shocked to find themselves so close to him if they could have known on what sights those thoughtful eyes of his had rested within an hour or two, and near to whose beds, and under what roofs, his composed figure had stood. But Physician was a composed man, who performed neither on his own trumpet, nor on the trumpets of other people. Many wonderful things did he see and hear, and much irreconcilable moral contradiction did he pass his life among; yet his equality of compassion was no more disturbed than the Divine Master’s of all healing was. He went, like the rain, among the just and unjust, doing all the good he could, and neither proclaiming it in the synagogues nor at the corner of streets.

As no man of large experience of humanity, however quietly carried it may be, can fail to be invested with an interest peculiar to the possession of such knowledge, Physician was an attractive man. Even the daintier gentlemen and ladies who had no idea of his secret, and who would have been startled out of more wits than

they had, by the monstrous impropriety of his proposing to them ‘Come and see what I see!’ confessed his attraction. Where he was, something real was. And half a grain of reality, like the smallest portion of some other scarce natural productions, will flavour an enormous quantity of diluent.

It came to pass, therefore, that Physician’s little dinners always presented people in their least conventional lights. The guests said to themselves, whether they were conscious of it or no, ‘Here is a man who really has an acquaintance with us as we are, who is admitted to some of us every day with our wigs and paint off, who hears the wanderings of our minds, and sees the undisguised expression of our faces, when both are past our control; we may as well make an approach to reality with him, for the man has got the better of us and is too strong for us.’ Therefore, Physician’s guests came out so surprisingly at his round table that they were almost natural.

Bar’s knowledge of that agglomeration of jurymen which is called humanity was as sharp as a razor; yet a razor is not a generally convenient instrument, and Physician’s plain bright scalpel, though far less keen, was adaptable to far wider purposes. Bar knew all about the gullibility and knavery of people; but Physician could have given him a better insight into their tendernesses and affections, in one week of his rounds, than Westminster Hall and all the circuits put together, in threescore years and ten. Bar always had a suspicion of this, and perhaps was glad to encourage it (for, if the world were really a great Law Court, one would think that the last day of Term could not too soon arrive); and so he liked and respected Physician quite as much as any other kind of man did.

Mr Merdle’s default left a Banquo’s chair at the table; but, if he had been there, he would have merely made the difference of Banquo in it, and consequently he was no loss. Bar, who picked up all sorts of odds and ends about Westminster Hall, much as a raven would have done if he had passed as much of his time there, had been picking up a great many straws lately and tossing them about, to try which way the Merdle wind blew. He now had a little talk on the subject with Mrs Merdle herself; sidling up to that lady, of course, with his double eye-glass and his jury droop.

‘A certain bird,’ said Bar; and he looked as if it could have been no other bird than a magpie; ‘has been whispering among us lawyers lately, that there is to be an addition to the titled personages of this realm.’

‘Really?’ said Mrs Merdle.

‘Yes,’ said Bar. ‘Has not the bird been whispering in very different ears from ours—in lovely ears?’ He looked expressively at Mrs Merdle’s nearest ear-ring.

‘Do you mean mine?’ asked Mrs Merdle.

‘When I say lovely,’ said Bar, ‘I always mean you.’

‘You never mean anything, I think,’ returned Mrs Merdle (not displeased).

‘Oh, cruelly unjust!’ said Bar. ‘But, the bird.’

‘I am the last person in the world to hear news,’ observed Mrs Merdle, carelessly arranging her stronghold. ‘Who is it?’

‘What an admirable witness you would make!’ said Bar. ‘No jury (unless we could empanel one of blind men) could resist you, if you were ever so bad a one; but you would be such a good one!’

‘Why, you ridiculous man?’ asked Mrs Merdle, laughing.

Bar waved his double eye-glass three or four times between

himself and the Bosom, as a rallying answer, and inquired in his most insinuating accents:

‘What am I to call the most elegant, accomplished and charming of women, a few weeks, or it may be a few days, hence?’

‘Didn’t your bird tell you what to call her?’ answered Mrs Merdle. ‘Do ask it to-morrow, and tell me the next time you see me what it says.’

This led to further passages of similar pleasantry between the two; but Bar, with all his sharpness, got nothing out of them. Physician, on the other hand, taking Mrs Merdle down to her carriage and attending on her as she put on her cloak, inquired into the symptoms with his usual calm directness.

‘May I ask,’ he said, ‘is this true about Merdle?’

‘My dear doctor,’ she returned, ‘you ask me the very question that I was half disposed to ask you.’

‘To ask me! Why me?’

‘Upon my honour, I think Mr Merdle reposes greater confidence in you than in any one.’

‘On the contrary, he tells me absolutely nothing, even professionally. You have heard the talk, of course?’

‘ Of course I have. But you know what Mr Merdle is; you know how taciturn and reserved he is. I assure you I have no idea what foundation for it there may be. I should like it to be true; why should I deny that to you? You would know better, if I did!’

‘Just so,’ said Physician.

‘But whether it is all true, or partly true, or entirely false, I am wholly unable to say. It is a most provoking situation, a most absurd situation; but you know Mr Merdle, and are not surprised.’ Physician was not surprised, handed her into her carriage, and

bade her Good Night. He stood for a moment at his own hall door, looking sedately at the elegant equipage as it rattled away. On his return up-stairs, the rest of the guests soon dispersed, and he was left alone. Being a great reader of all kinds of literature (and never at all apologetic for that weakness), he sat down comfortably to read.

The clock upon his study table pointed to a few minutes short of twelve, when his attention was called to it by a ringing at the door bell. A man of plain habits, he had sent his servants to bed and must needs go down to open the door. He went down, and there found a man without hat or coat, whose shirt sleeves were rolled up tight to his shoulders. For a moment, he thought the man had been fighting: the rather, as he was much agitated and out of breath. A second look, however, showed him that the man was particularly clean, and not otherwise discomposed as to his dress than as it answered this description.

‘I come from the warm-baths, sir, round in the neighbouring street.’

‘And what is the matter at the warm-baths?’

‘Would you please to come directly, sir. We found that, lying on the table.’

He put into the physician’s hand a scrap of paper. Physician looked at it, and read his own name and address written in pencil; nothing more. He looked closer at the writing, looked at the man, took his hat from its peg, put the key of his door in his pocket, and they hurried away together.

When they came to the warm-baths, all the other people belonging to that establishment were looking out for them at the door, and running up and down the passages. ‘Request everybody

else to keep back, if you please,’ said the physician aloud to the master; ‘and do you take me straight to the place, my friend,’ to the messenger.

The messenger hurried before him, along a grove of little rooms, and turning into one at the end of the grove, looked round the door. Physician was close upon him, and looked round the door too.

There was a bath in that corner, from which the water had been hastily drained off. Lying in it, as in a grave or sarcophagus, with a hurried drapery of sheet and blanket thrown across it, was the body of a heavily-made man, with an obtuse head, and coarse, mean, common features. A sky-light had been opened to release the steam with which the room had been filled; but it hung, condensed into water-drops, heavily upon the walls, and heavily upon the face and figure in the bath. The room was still hot, and the marble of the bath still warm; but the face and figure were clammy to the touch. The white marble at the bottom of the bath was veined with a dreadful red. On the ledge at the side, were an empty laudanum-bottle and a tortoise-shell handled penknife— soiled, but not with ink.

‘Separation of jugular vein—death rapid—been dead at least half an hour.’ This echo of the physician’s words ran through the passages and little rooms, and through the house while he was yet straightening himself from having bent down to reach to the bottom of the bath, and while he was yet dabbling his hands in water; redly veining it as the marble was veined, before it mingled into one tint.

He turned his eyes to the dress upon the sofa, and to the watch, money, and pocket-book on the table. A folded note half buckled

up in the pocket-book, and half protruding from it, caught his observant glance. He looked at it, touched it, pulled it a little further out from among the leaves, said quietly, ‘This is addressed to me,’ and opened and read it.

There were no directions for him to give. The people of the house knew what to do; the proper authorities were soon brought; and they took an equable business-like possession of the deceased, and of what had been his property, with no greater disturbance of manner or countenance than usually attends the winding-up of a clock. Physician was glad to walk out into the night air—was even glad, in spite of his great experience, to sit down upon a door-step for a little while: feeling sick and faint.

Bar was a near neighbour of his, and, when he came to the house, he saw a light in the room where he knew his friend often sat late getting up his work. As the light was never there when Bar was not, it gave him assurance that Bar was not yet in bed. In fact, this busy bee had a verdict to get to-morrow, against evidence, and was improving the shining hours in setting snares for the gentlemen of the jury.

Physician’s knock astonished Bar; but, as he immediately suspected that somebody had come to tell him that somebody else was robbing him, or otherwise trying to get the better of him, he came down promptly and softly. He had been clearing his head with a lotion of cold water, as a good preparative to providing hot water for the heads of the jury, and had been reading with the neck of his shirt thrown wide open that he might the more freely choke the opposite witnesses. In consequence, he came down, looking rather wild. Seeing Physician, the least expected of men, he looked wilder and said, ‘What’s the matter?’

‘You asked me once what Merdle’s complaint was.’ ‘Extraordinary answer! I know I did.’

‘I told you I had not found out.’ ‘Yes. I know you did.’

‘I have found it out.’

‘My God!’ said Bar, starting back, and clapping his hand upon the other’s breast. ‘And so have I! I see it in your face.’

They went into the nearest room, where Physician gave him the letter to read. He read it through half-a-dozen times. There was not much in it as to quantity; but it made a great demand on his close and continuous attention. He could not sufficiently give utterance to his regret that he had not himself found a clue to this. The smallest clue, he said, would have made him master of the case, and what a case it would have been to have got to the bottom of!

Physician had engaged to break the intelligence in Harley Street. Bar could not at once return to his inveiglements of the most enlightened and remarkable jury he had ever seen in that box, with whom, he could tell his learned friend, no shallow sophistry would go down, and no unhappily abused professional tact and skill prevail (this was the way he meant to begin with them); so he said he would go too, and would loiter to and fro near the house while his friend was inside. They walked there, the better to recover self-possession in the air; and the wings of day were fluttering the night when Physician knocked at the door.

A footman of rainbow hues, in the public eye, was sitting up for his master—that is to say, was fast asleep in the kitchen over a couple of candles and a newspaper, demonstrating the great accumulation of mathematical odds against the probabilities of a

house being set on fire by accident When this serving man was roused, Physician had still to await the rousing of the Chief Butler. At last that noble creature came into the dining-room in a flannel gown and list shoes; but with his cravat on, and a Chief Butler all over. It was morning now. Physician had opened the shutters of one window while waiting, that he might see the light. ‘Mrs Merdle’s maid must be called, and told to get Mrs Merdle up, and prepare her as gently as she can to see me. I have dreadful news to break to her.’

Thus Physician to the Chief Butler. The latter, who had a candle in his hand, called his man to take it away. Then he approached the window with dignity; looking on at Physician’s news exactly as he had looked on at the dinners in that very room.

‘Mr Merdle is dead.’

‘I should wish,’ said the Chief Butler, ‘to give a month’s notice.’ ‘Mr Merdle has destroyed himself.’

‘Sir,’ said the Chief Butler, ‘that is very unpleasant to the feelings of one in my position, as calculated to awaken prejudice; and I should wish to leave immediately.’

‘If you are not shocked, are you not surprised, man?’ demanded the Physician, warmly.

The Chief Butler, erect and calm, replied in these memorable words.

‘Sir, Mr Merdle never was the gentleman, and no ungentlemanly act on Mr Merdle’s part would surprise me. Is there anybody else I can send to you, or any other directions I can give before I leave, respecting what you would wish to be done?’

When Physician, after discharging himself of his trust up-stairs, rejoined Bar in the street, he said no more of his interview with

Mrs Merdle than that he had not yet told her all, but that what he had told her she had borne pretty well. Bar had devoted his leisure in the street to the construction of a most ingenious man-trap for catching the whole of his jury at a blow; having got that matter settled in his mind, it was lucid on the late catastrophe, and they walked home slowly, discussing it in every bearing. Before parting at the Physician’s door, they both looked up at the sunny morning sky, into which the smoke of a few early fires and the breath and voices of a few early stirrers were peacefully rising, and then looked round upon the immense city, and said, if all those hundreds and thousands of beggared people who were yet asleep could only know, as they two spoke, the ruin that impended over them, what a fearful cry against one miserable soul would go up to Heaven!

The report that the great man was dead, got about with astonishing rapidity. At first, he was dead of all the diseases that ever were known, and of several bran-new maladies invented with the speed of Light to meet the demand of the occasion. He had concealed a dropsy from infancy, he had inherited a large estate of water on the chest from his grandfather, he had had an operation performed upon him every morning of his life for eighteen years, he had been subject to the explosion of important veins in his body after the manner of fireworks, he had had something the matter with his lungs, he had had something the matter with his heart, he had had something the matter with his brain. Five hundred people who sat down to breakfast entirely uninformed on the whole subject, believed before they had done breakfast, that they privately and personally knew Physician to have said to Mr Merdle, ‘You must expect to go out, some day, like the snuff of a

candle;’ and that they knew Mr Merdle to have said to Physician, ‘A man can die but once.’ By about eleven o’clock in the forenoon, something the matter with the brain, became the favourite theory against the field; and by twelve the something had been distinctly ascertained to be ‘Pressure.’

Pressure was so entirely satisfactory to the public mind, and seemed to make everybody so comfortable, that it might have lasted all day but for Bar’s having taken the real state of the case into Court at half-past nine. This led to its beginning to be currently whispered all over London by about one, that Mr Merdle had killed himself. Pressure, however, so far from being overthrown by the discovery, became a greater favourite than ever. There was a general moralising upon Pressure, in every street. All the people who had tried to make money and had not been able to do it, said, There you were! You no sooner began to devote yourself to the pursuit of wealth than you got Pressure. The idle people improved the occasion in a similar manner. See, said they, what you brought yourself to by work, work, work! You persisted in working, you overdid it. Pressure came on, and you were done for! This consideration was very potent in many quarters, but nowhere more so than among the young clerks and partners who had never been in the slightest danger of overdoing it. These, one and all, declared, quite piously, that they hoped they would never forget the warning as long as they lived, and that their conduct might be so regulated as to keep off Pressure, and preserve them, a comfort to their friends, for many years.

But, at about the time of High ’Change, Pressure began to wane, and appalling whispers to circulate, east, west, north, and south. At first they were faint, and went no further than a doubt

whether Mr Merdle’s wealth would be found to be as vast as had been supposed; whether there might not be a temporary difficulty in ‘realising’ it; whether there might not even be a temporary suspension (say a month or so), on the part of the wonderful Bank. As the whispers became louder, which they did from that time every minute, they became more threatening. He had sprung from nothing, by no natural growth or process that any one could account for; he had been, after all, a low, ignorant fellow; he had been a down-looking man, and no one had ever been able to catch his eye; he had been taken up by all sorts of people in quite an unaccountable manner; he had never had any money of his own, his ventures had been utterly reckless, and his expenditure had been most enormous. In steady progression, as the day declined, the talk rose in sound and purpose. He had left a letter at the Baths addressed to his physician, and his physician had got the letter, and the letter would be produced at the Inquest on the morrow, and it would fall like a thunderbolt upon the multitude he had deluded. Numbers of men in every profession and trade would be blighted by his insolvency; old people who had been in easy circumstances all their lives would have no place of repentance for their trust in him but the workhouse; legions of women and children would have their whole future desolated by the hand of this mighty scoundrel. Every partaker of his magnificent feasts would be seen to have been a sharer in the plunder of innumerable homes; every servile worshipper of riches who had helped to set him on his pedestal, would have done better to worship the Devil point-blank. So, the talk, lashed louder and higher by confirmation on confirmation, and by edition after edition of the evening papers, swelled into such a roar when night

came, as might have brought one to believe that a solitary watcher on the gallery above the Dome of St Paul’s would have perceived the night air to be laden with a heavy muttering of the name of Merdle, coupled with every form of execration.

For by that time it was known that the late Mr Merdle’s complaint had been simply Forgery and Robbery. He, the uncouth object of such wide-spread adulation, the sitter at great men’s feasts, the roc’s egg of great ladies’ assemblies, the subduer of exclusiveness, the leveller of pride, the patron of patrons, the bargain-driver with a Minister for Lordships of the Circumlocution Office, the recipient of more acknowledgment within some ten or fifteen years, at most, than had been bestowed in England upon all peaceful public benefactors, and upon all the leaders of all the Arts and Sciences, with all their works to testify for them, during two centuries at least—he, the shining wonder, the new constellation to be followed by the wise men bringing gifts, until it stopped over a certain carrion at the bottom of a bath and disappeared—was simply the greatest Forger and the greatest Thief that ever cheated the gallows.

Chapter 26

Reaping the Whirlwind

ith a precursory sound of hurried breath and hurried feet, Mr Pancks rushed into Arthur Clennam’s Counting-house. The Inquest was over, the letter was

public, the Bank was broken, the other model structures of straw had taken fire and were turned to smoke. The admired piratical ship had blown up, in the midst of a vast fleet of ships of all rates, and boats of all sizes; and on the deep was nothing but ruin; nothing but burning hulls, bursting magazines, great guns self- exploded tearing friends and neighbours to pieces, drowning men clinging to unseaworthy spars and going down every minute, spent swimmers floating dead, and sharks.

The usual diligence and order of the Counting-house at the Works were overthrown. Unopened letters and unsorted papers lay strewn about the desk. In the midst of these tokens of prostrated energy and dismissed hope, the master of the Counting-house stood idle in his usual place, with his arms crossed on the desk, and his head bowed down upon them.

Mr Pancks rushed in and saw him, and stood still. In another minute, Mr Pancks’s arms were on the desk, and Mr Pancks’s head was bowed down upon them; and for some time they remained in these attitudes, idle and silent, with the width of the little room between them. Mr Pancks was the first to lift up his head and speak.

‘I persuaded you to it, Mr Clennam. I know it. Say what you

will. You can’t say more to me than I say to myself. You can’t say more than I deserve.’

‘O, Pancks, Pancks!’ returned Clennam, ‘don’t speak of deserving. What do I myself deserve!’

‘Better luck,’ said Pancks.

‘I,’ pursued Clennam, without attending to him, ‘who have ruined my partner! Pancks, Pancks, I have ruined Doyce! The honest, self-helpful, indefatigable old man who has worked his way all through his life; the man who has contended against so much disappointment, and who has brought out of it such a good and hopeful nature; the man I have felt so much for, and meant to be so true and useful to; I have ruined him—brought him to shame and disgrace—ruined him, ruined him!’

The agony into which the reflection wrought his mind was so distressing to see, that Mr Pancks took hold of himself by the hair of his head, and tore it in desperation at the spectacle.

‘Reproach me!’ cried Pancks. ‘Reproach me, sir, or I’ll do myself an injury. Say,—You fool, you villain. Say,—Ass, how could you do it; Beast, what did you mean by it! Catch hold of me somewhere.

Say something abusive to me!’ All the time, Mr Pancks was tearing at his tough hair in a most pitiless and cruel manner.

‘If you had never yielded to this fatal mania, Pancks,’ said Clennam, more in commiseration than retaliation, ‘it would have been how much better for you, and how much better for me!’

‘At me again, sir!’ cried Pancks, grinding his teeth in remorse. ‘At me again!’

‘If you had never gone into those accursed calculations, and brought out your results with such abominable clearness,’ groaned

Clennam, ‘it would have been how much better for you, Pancks, and how much better for me!’

‘At me again, sir!’ exclaimed Pancks, loosening his hold of his hair; ‘at me again, and again!’

Clennam, however, finding him already beginning to be pacified, had said all he wanted to say, and more. He wrung his hand, only adding, ‘Blind leaders of the blind, Pancks! Blind leaders of the blind! But Doyce, Doyce, Doyce; my injured partner!’ That brought his head down on the desk once more.

Their former attitudes and their former silence were once more first encroached upon by Pancks.

‘Not been to bed, sir, since it began to get about. Been high and low, on the chance of finding some hope of saving any cinders from the fire. All in vain. All gone. All vanished.’

‘I know it,’ returned Clennam, ‘too well.’

Mr Pancks filled up a pause with a groan that came out of the very depths of his soul.

‘Only yesterday, Pancks,’ said Arthur; ‘only yesterday, Monday, I had the fixed intention of selling, realising, and making an end of it.’

‘I can’t say as much for myself, sir,’ returned Pancks. ‘Though it’s wonderful how many people I’ve heard of, who were going to realise yesterday, of all days in the three hundred and sixty-five, if it hadn’t been too late!’

His steam-like breathings, usually droll in their effect, were more tragic than so many groans: while from head to foot, he was in that begrimed, besmeared, neglected state, that he might have been an authentic portrait of Misfortune which could scarcely be discerned through its want of cleaning.

‘Mr Clennam, had you laid out—everything?’ He got over the break before the last word, and also brought out the last word itself with great difficulty.

‘Everything.’

Mr Pancks took hold of his tough hair again, and gave it such a wrench that he pulled out several prongs of it. After looking at these with an eye of wild hatred, he put them in his pocket.

‘My course,’ said Clennam, brushing away some tears that had been silently dropping down his face, ‘must be taken at once. What wretched amends I can make must be made. I must clear my unfortunate partner’s reputation. I must retain nothing for myself. I must resign to our creditors the power of management I have so much abused, and I must work out as much of my fault—or crime—as is susceptible of being worked out in the rest of my days.’

‘Is it impossible, sir, to tide over the present?’

‘Out of the question. Nothing can be tided over now, Pancks. The sooner the business can pass out of my hands, the better for it. There are engagements to be met, this week, which would bring the catastrophe before many days were over, even if I would postpone it for a single day by going on for that space, secretly knowing what I know. All last night I thought of what I would do; what remains is to do it.’

‘Not entirely of yourself?’ said Pancks, whose face was as damp as if his steam were turning into water as fast as he dismally blew it off. ‘Have some legal help.’

‘Perhaps I had better.’ ‘Have Rugg.’

‘There is not much to do. He will do it as well as another.’

‘Shall I fetch Rugg, Mr Clennam?’

‘If you could spare the time, I should be much obliged to you.’ Mr Pancks put on his hat that moment, and steamed away to

Pentonville. While he was gone Arthur never raised his head from the desk, but remained in that one position.

Mr Pancks brought his friend and professional adviser, Mr Rugg, back with him. Mr Rugg had had such ample experience, on the road, of Mr Pancks’s being at that present in an irrational state of mind, that he opened his professional mediation by requesting that gentleman to take himself out of the way. Mr Pancks, crushed and submissive, obeyed.

‘He is not unlike what my daughter was, sir, when we began the Breach of Promise action of Rugg and Bawkins, in which she was Plaintiff,’ said Mr Rugg. ‘He takes too strong and direct an interest in the case. His feelings are worked upon. There is no getting on, in our profession, with feelings worked upon, sir.’

As he pulled off his gloves and put them in his hat, he saw, in a side glance or two, that a great change had come over his client.

‘I am sorry to perceive, sir,’ said Mr Rugg, ‘that you have been allowing your own feelings to be worked upon. Now, pray don’t, pray don’t. These losses are much to be deplored, sir, but we must look ’em in the face.’

‘If the money I have sacrificed had been all my own, Mr Rugg,’ sighed Mr Clennam, ‘I should have cared far less.’

‘Indeed, sir?’ said Mr Rugg, rubbing his hands with a cheerful air.

‘You surprise me. That’s singular, sir. I have generally found, in my experience, that it’s their own money people are most particular about. I have seen people get rid of a good deal of other

people’s money, and bear it very well: very well indeed.’

With these comforting remarks, Mr Rugg seated himself on an office-stool at the desk and proceeded to business.

‘Now, Mr Clennam, by your leave, let us go into the matter. Let us see the state of the case. The question is simple. The question is the usual plain, straightforward, common-sense question. What can we do for ourself? What can we do for ourself?’

‘This is not the question with me, Mr Rugg,’ said Arthur. ‘You mistake it in the beginning. It is, what can I do for my partner, how can I best make reparation to him?’

‘I am afraid, sir, do you know,’ argued Mr Rugg persuasively, ‘that you are still allowing your feeling to be worked upon. I don’t like the term “reparation,” sir, except as a lever in the hands of counsel. Will you excuse my saying that I feel it my duty to offer you the caution, that you really must not allow your feelings to be worked upon?’

‘Mr Rugg,’ said Clennam, nerving himself to go through with what he had resolved upon, and surprising that gentleman by appearing, in his despondency, to have a settled determination of purpose; ‘you give me the impression that you will not be much disposed to adopt the course I have made up my mind to take. If your disapproval of it should render you unwilling to discharge such business as it necessitates, I am sorry for it, and must seek other aid. But I will represent to you at once, that to argue against it with me is useless.’

‘Good, sir,’ answered Mr Rugg, shrugging his shoulders. ‘Good, sir. Since the business is to be done by some hands, let it be done by mine. Such was my principle in the case of Rugg and Bawkins. Such is my principle in most cases.’

Clennam then proceeded to state to Mr Rugg his fixed resolution. He told Mr Rugg that his partner was a man of great simplicity and integrity, and that in all he meant to do, he was guided above all things by a knowledge of his partner’s character, and a respect for his feelings. He explained that his partner was then absent on an enterprise of importance, and that it particularly behoved himself publicly to accept the blame of what he had rashly done, and publicly to exonerate his partner from all participation in the responsibility of it, lest the successful conduct of that enterprise should be endangered by the slightest suspicion wrongly attaching to his partner’s honour and credit in another country. He told Mr Rugg that to clear his partner morally, to the fullest extent, and publicly and unreservedly to declare that he, Arthur Clennam, of that Firm, had of his own sole act, and even expressly against his partner’s caution, embarked its resources in the swindles that had lately perished, was the only real atonement within his power; was a better atonement to the particular man than it would be to many men; and was therefore the atonement he had first to make. With this view, his intention was to print a declaration to the foregoing effect, which he had already drawn up; and, besides circulating it among all who had dealings with the House, to advertise it in the public papers. Concurrently with this measure (the description of which cost Mr Rugg innumerable wry faces and great uneasiness in his limbs), he would address a letter to all the creditors, exonerating his partner in a solemn manner, informing them of the stoppage of the House until their pleasure could be known and his partner communicated with, and humbly submitting himself to their direction. If, through their consideration for his partner’s innocence, the affairs could ever be

got into such train as that the business could be profitably resumed, and its present downfall overcome, then his own share in it should revert to his partner, as the only reparation he could make to him in money value for the distress and loss he had unhappily brought upon him, and he himself, at as mall a salary as he could live upon, would ask to be allowed to serve the business as a faithful clerk.

Though Mr Rugg saw plainly there was no preventing this from being done, still the wryness of his face and the uneasiness of his limbs so sorely required the propitiation of a Protest, that he made one.

‘I offer no objection, sir,’ said he, ‘I argue no point with you. I will carry out your views, sir; but, under protest.’ Mr Rugg then stated, not without prolixity, the heads of his protest. These were, in effect, because the whole town, or he might say the whole country, was in the first madness of the late discovery, and the resentment against the victims would be very strong: those who had not been deluded being certain to wax exceedingly wroth with them for not having been as wise as they were: and those who had been deluded being certain to find excuses and reasons for themselves, of which they were equally certain to see that other sufferers were wholly devoid: not to mention the great probability of every individual sufferer persuading himself, to his violent indignation, that but for the example of all the other sufferers he never would have put himself in the way of suffering. Because such a declaration as Clennam’s, made at such a time, would certainly draw down upon him a storm of animosity, rendering it impossible to calculate on forbearance in the creditors, or on unanimity among them; and exposing him a solitary target to a

straggling cross-fire, which might bring him down from half-a- dozen quarters at once.

To all this Clennam merely replied that, granting the whole protest, nothing in it lessened the force, or could lessen the force, of the voluntary and public exoneration of his partner. He therefore, once and for all, requested Mr Rugg’s immediate aid in getting the business despatched. Upon that, Mr Rugg fell to work; and Arthur, retaining no property to himself but his clothes and books, and a little loose money, placed his small private banker’s- account with the papers of the business.

The disclosure was made, and the storm raged fearfully. Thousands of people were wildly staring about for somebody alive to heap reproaches on; and this notable case, courting publicity, set the living somebody so much wanted, on a scaffold. When people who had nothing to do with the case were so sensible of its flagrancy, people who lost money by it could scarcely be expected to deal mildly with it. Letters of reproach and invective showered in from the creditors; and Mr Rugg, who sat upon the high stool every day and read them all, informed his client within a week that he feared there were writs out.

‘I must take the consequences of what I have done,’ said Clennam. ‘The writs will find me here.’

On the very next morning, as he was turning in Bleeding Heart Yard by Mrs Plornish’s corner, Mrs Plornish stood at the door waiting for him, and mysteriously besought him to step into Happy Cottage. There he found Mr Rugg.

‘I thought I’d wait for you here. I wouldn’t go on to the Counting-house this morning if I was you, sir.’

‘Why not, Mr Rugg?’

‘There are as many as five out, to my knowledge.’

‘It cannot be too soon over,’ said Clennam. ‘Let them take me at once.’

‘Yes, but,’ said Mr Rugg, getting between him and the door, ‘hear reason, hear reason. They’ll take you soon enough, Mr Clennam, I don’t doubt; but, hear reason. It almost always happens, in these cases, that some insignificant matter pushes itself in front and makes much of itself. Now, I find there’s a little one out—a mere Palace Court jurisdiction—and I have reason to believe that a caption may be made upon that. I wouldn’t be taken upon that.’

‘Why not?’ asked Clennam.

‘I’d be taken on a full-grown one, sir,’ said Mr Rugg. ‘It’s as well to keep up appearances. As your professional adviser, I should prefer your being taken on a writ from one of the Superior Courts, if you have no objection to do me that favour. It looks better.’

‘Mr Rugg,’ said Arthur, in his dejection, ‘my only wish is, that it should be over. I will go on, and take my chance.’

‘Another word of reason, sir!’ cried Mr Rugg. ‘Now, this is reason. The other may be taste; but this is reason. If you should be taken on a little one, sir, you would go to the Marshalsea. Now, you know what the Marshalsea is. Very close. Excessively confined. Whereas in the King’s Bench—’ Mr Rugg waved his right hand freely, as expressing abundance of space.

‘I would rather,’ said Clennam, ‘be taken to the Marshalsea than to any other prison.’

‘Do you say so indeed, sir?’ returned Mr Rugg. ‘Then this is taste, too, and we may be walking.’

He was a little offended at first, but he soon overlooked it. They

walked through the Yard to the other end. The Bleeding Hearts were more interested in Arthur since his reverses than formerly; now regarding him as one who was true to the place and had taken up his freedom. Many of them came out to look after him, and to observe to one another, with great unctuousness, that he was ‘pulled down by it.’ Mrs Plornish and her father stood at the top of the steps at their own end, much depressed and shaking their heads.

There was nobody visibly in waiting when Arthur and Mr Rugg arrived at the Counting-house. But an elderly member of the Jewish persuasion, preserved in rum, followed them close, and looked in at the glass before Mr Rugg had opened one of the day’s letters.

‘Oh!’ said Mr Rugg, looking up. ‘How do you do? Step in—Mr Clennam, I think this is the gentleman I was mentioning.’

This gentleman explained the object of his visit to be ‘a tyfling madder ob bithznithz,’ and executed his legal function.

‘Shall I accompany you, Mr Clennam?’ asked Mr Rugg politely, rubbing his hands.

‘I would rather go alone, thank you. Be so good as send me my clothes.’ Mr Rugg in a light airy way replied in the affirmative, and shook hands with him. He and his attendant then went down- stairs, got into the first conveyance they found, and drove to the old gates.

‘Where I little thought, Heaven forgive me,’ said Clennam to himself, ‘that I should ever enter thus!’

Mr Chivery was on the Lock, and Young John was in the Lodge: either newly released from it, or waiting to take his own spell of duty. Both were more astonished on seeing who the

prisoner was, than one might have thought turnkeys would have been. The elder Mr Chivery shook hands with him in a shame- faced kind of way, and said, ‘I don’t call to mind, sir, as I was ever less glad to see you.’ The younger Mr Chivery, more distant, did not shake hands with him at all; he stood looking at him in a state of indecision so observable that it even came within the observation of Clennam with his heavy eyes and heavy heart. Presently afterwards, Young John disappeared into the jail.

As Clennam knew enough of the place to know that he was required to remain in the Lodge a certain time, he took a seat in a corner, and feigned to be occupied with the perusal of letters from his pocket.

They did not so engross his attention, but that he saw, with gratitude, how the elder Mr Chivery kept the Lodge clear of prisoners; how he signed to some, with his keys, not to come in, how he nudged others with his elbows to go out, and how he made his misery as easy to him as he could.

Arthur was sitting with his eyes fixed on the floor, recalling the past, brooding over the present, and not attending to either, when he felt himself touched upon the shoulder. It was by Young John; and he said, ‘You can come now.’

He got up and followed Young John. When they had gone a step or two within the inner iron-gate, Young John turned and said to him:

‘You want a room. I have got you one.’ ‘I thank you heartily.’

Young John turned again, and took him in at the old doorway, up the old staircase, into the old room. Arthur stretched out his hand. Young John looked at it, looked at him—sternly—swelled,

choked, and said:

‘I don’t know as I can. No, I find I can’t. But I thought you’d like the room, and here it is for you.’

Surprise at this inconsistent behaviour yielded when he was gone (he went away directly) to the feelings which the empty room awakened in Clennam’s wounded breast, and to the crowding associations with the one good and gentle creature who had sanctified it. Her absence in his altered fortunes made it, and him in it, so very desolate and so much in need of such a face of love and truth, that he turned against the wall to weep, sobbing out, as his heart relieved itself, ‘O my Little Dorrit!’

Chapter 27

The Pupil of the Marshalsea

T

he day was sunny, and the Marshalsea, with the hot noon striking upon it, was unwontedly quiet. Arthur Clennam dropped into a solitary arm-chair, itself as faded as any

debtor in the jail, and yielded himself to his thoughts.

In the unnatural peace of having gone through the dreaded arrest, and got there,—the first change of feeling which the prison most commonly induced, and from which dangerous resting-place so many men had slipped down to the depths of degradation and disgrace by so many ways,—he could think of some passages in his life, almost as if he were removed from them into another state of existence. Taking into account where he was, the interest that had first brought him there when he had been free to keep away, and the gentle presence that was equally inseparable from the walls and bars about him and from the impalpable remembrances of his later life which no walls or bars could imprison, it was not remarkable that everything his memory turned upon should bring him round again to Little Dorrit. Yet it was remarkable to him; not because of the fact itself, but because of the reminder it brought with it, how much the dear little creature had influenced his better resolutions.

None of us clearly know to whom or to what we are indebted in this wise, until some marked stop in the whirling wheel of life brings the right perception with it. It comes with sickness, it comes with sorrow, it comes with the loss of the dearly loved, it is

one of the most frequent uses of adversity. It came to Clennam in his adversity, strongly and tenderly. ‘When I first gathered myself together,’ he thought, ‘and set something like purpose before my jaded eyes, whom had I before me, toiling on, for a good object’s sake, without encouragement, without notice, against ignoble obstacles that would have turned an army of received heroes and heroines? One weak girl! When I tried to conquer my misplaced love, and to be generous to the man who was more fortunate than I, though he should never know it or repay me with a gracious word, in whom had I watched patience, self-denial, self-subdual, charitable construction, the noblest generosity of the affections? In the same poor girl! If I, a man, with a man’s advantages and means and energies, had slighted the whisper in my heart, that if my father had erred, it was my first duty to conceal the fault and to repair it, what youthful figure with tender feet going almost bare on the damp ground, with spare hands ever working, with its slight shape but half protected from the sharp weather, would have stood before me to put me to shame? Little Dorrit’s.’ So always as he sat alone in the faded chair, thinking. Always, Little Dorrit. Until it seemed to him as if he met the reward of having wandered away from her, and suffered anything to pass between him and his remembrance of her virtues.

His door was opened, and the head of the elder Chivery was put in a very little way, without being turned towards him.

‘I am off the Lock, Mr Clennam, and going out. Can I do anything for you?’

‘Many thanks. Nothing.’

‘You’ll excuse me opening the door,’ said Mr Chivery; ‘but I couldn’t make you hear.’

‘Did you knock?’ ‘Half-a-dozen times.’

Rousing himself, Clennam observed that the prison had awakened from its noontide doze, that the inmates were loitering about the shady yard, and that it was late in the afternoon. He had been thinking for hours. ‘Your things is come,’ said Mr Chivery, ‘and my son is going to carry ’em up. I should have sent ’em up but for his wishing to carry ’em himself. Indeed he would have ’em himself, and so I couldn’t send ’em up. Mr Clennam, could I say a word to you?’

‘Pray come in,’ said Arthur; for Mr Chivery’s head was still put in at the door a very little way, and Mr Chivery had but one ear upon him, instead of both eyes. This was native delicacy in Mr Chivery—true politeness; though his exterior had very much of a turnkey about it, and not the least of a gentleman.

‘Thank you, sir,’ said Mr Chivery, without advancing; ‘it’s no odds me coming in. Mr Clennam, don’t you take no notice of my son (if you’ll be so good) in case you find him cut up anyways difficult. My son has a ’art, and my son’s ’art is in the right place. Me and his mother knows where to find it, and we find it sitiwated correct.’

With this mysterious speech, Mr Chivery took his ear away and shut the door. He might have been gone ten minutes, when his son succeeded him.

‘Here’s your portmanteau,’ he said to Arthur, putting it carefully down.

‘It’s very kind of you. I am ashamed that you should have the trouble.’

He was gone before it came to that; but soon returned, saying

exactly as before, ‘Here’s your black box:’ which he also put down with care.

‘I am very sensible of this attention. I hope we may shake hands now, Mr John.’

Young John, however, drew back, turning his right wrist in a socket made of his left thumb and middle-finger and said as he had said at first, ‘I don’t know as I can. No; I find I can’t!’ He then stood regarding the prisoner sternly, though with a swelling humour in his eyes that looked like pity.

‘Why are you angry with me,’ said Clennam, ‘and yet so ready to do me these kind services? There must be some mistake between us. If I have done anything to occasion it I am sorry.’

‘No mistake, sir,’ returned John, turning the wrist backwards and forwards in the socket, for which it was rather tight. ‘No mistake, sir, in the feelings with which my eyes behold you at the present moment! If I was at all fairly equal to your weight, Mr Clennam—which I am not; and if you weren’t under a cloud— which you are; and if it wasn’t against all rules of the Marshalsea— which it is; those feelings are such, that they would stimulate me, more to having it out with you in a Round on the present spot than to anything else I could name.’ Arthur looked at him for a moment in some wonder, and some little anger. ‘Well, well!’ he said. ‘A mistake, a mistake!’ Turning away, he sat down with a heavy sigh in the faded chair again.

Young John followed him with his eyes, and, after a short pause, cried out, ‘I beg your pardon!’

‘Freely granted,’ said Clennam, waving his hand without raising his sunken head. ‘Say no more. I am not worth it.’

‘This furniture, sir,’ said Young John in a voice of mild and soft

explanation, ‘belongs to me. I am in the habit of letting it out to parties without furniture, that have the room. It an’t much, but it’s at your service. Free, I mean. I could not think of letting you have it on any other terms. You’re welcome to it for nothing.’

Arthur raised his head again to thank him, and to say he could not accept the favour. John was still turning his wrist, and still contending with himself in his former divided manner.

‘What is the matter between us?’ said Arthur.

‘I decline to name it, sir,’ returned Young John, suddenly turning loud and sharp. ‘Nothing’s the matter.’

Arthur looked at him again, in vain, for an explanation of his behaviour. After a while, Arthur turned away his head again. Young John said, presently afterwards, with the utmost mildness:

‘The little round table, sir, that’s nigh your elbow, was—you know whose—I needn’t mention him—he died a great gentleman. I bought it of an individual that he gave it to, and that lived here after him. But the individual wasn’t any ways equal to him. Most individuals would find it hard to come up to his level.’

Arthur drew the little table nearer, rested his arm upon it, and kept it there.

‘Perhaps you may not be aware, sir,’ said Young John, ‘that I intruded upon him when he was over here in London. On the whole he was of opinion that it was an intrusion, though he was so good as to ask me to sit down and to inquire after father and all other old friends. Leastways humblest acquaintances. He looked, to me, a good deal changed, and I said so when I came back. I asked him if Miss Amy was well—’

‘And she was?’

‘I should have thought you would have known without putting

the question to such as me,’ returned Young John, after appearing to take a large invisible pill. ‘Since you do put me the question, I am sorry I can’t answer it. But the truth is, he looked upon the inquiry as a liberty, and said, “What was that to me?” It was then I became quite aware I was intruding: of which I had been fearful before. However, he spoke very handsome afterwards; very handsome.’

They were both silent for several minutes: except that Young John remarked, at about the middle of the pause, ‘He both spoke and acted very handsome.’

It was again Young John who broke the silence by inquiring:

‘If it’s not a liberty, how long may it be your intentions, sir, to go without eating and drinking?’

‘I have not felt the want of anything yet,’ returned Clennam. ‘I have no appetite just now.’

‘The more reason why you should take some support, sir,’ urged Young John. ‘If you find yourself going on sitting here for hours and hours partaking of no refreshment because you have no appetite, why then you should and must partake of refreshment without an appetite. I’m going to have tea in my own apartment. If it’s not a liberty, please to come and take a cup. Or I can bring a tray here in two minutes.’

Feeling that Young John would impose that trouble on himself if he refused, and also feeling anxious to show that he bore in mind both the elder Mr Chivery’s entreaty, and the younger Mr Chivery’s apology, Arthur rose and expressed his willingness to take a cup of tea in Mr john’s apartment. Young John locked his door for him as they went out, slided the key into his pocket with great dexterity, and led the way to his own residence.

It was at the top of the house nearest to the gateway. It was the room to which Clennam had hurried on the day when the enriched family had left the prison for ever, and where he had lifted her insensible from the floor. He foresaw where they were going as soon as their feet touched the staircase. The room was so far changed that it was papered now, and had been repainted, and was far more comfortably furnished; but he could recall it just as he had seen it in that single glance, when he raised her from the ground and carried her down to the carriage.

Young John looked hard at him, biting his fingers. ‘I see you recollect the room, Mr Clennam?’

‘I recollect it well, Heaven bless her!’

Oblivious of the tea, Young John continued to bite his fingers and to look at his visitor, as long as his visitor continued to glance about the room. Finally, he made a start at the teapot, gustily rattled a quantity of tea into it from a canister, and set off for the common kitchen to fill it with hot water.

The room was so eloquent to Clennam in the changed circumstances of his return to the miserable Marshalsea; it spoke to him so mournfully of her, and of his loss of her; that it would have gone hard with him to resist it, even though he had not been alone. Alone, he did not try. He had his hand on the insensible wall as tenderly as if it had been herself that he touched, and pronounced her name in a low voice. He stood at the window, looking over the prison-parapet with its grim spiked border, and breathed a benediction through the summer haze towards the distant land where she was rich and prosperous.

Young John was some time absent, and, when he came back, showed that he had been outside by bringing with him fresh

butter in a cabbage leaf, some thin slices of boiled ham in another cabbage leaf, and a little basket of water-cresses and salad herbs. When these were arranged upon the table to his satisfaction, they sat down to tea.

Clennam tried to do honour to the meal, but unavailingly. The ham sickened him, the bread seemed to turn to sand in his mouth. He could force nothing upon himself but a cup of tea.

‘Try a little something green,’ said Young John, handing him the basket.

He took a sprig or so of water-cress, and tried again; but the bread turned to a heavier sand than before, and the ham (though it was good enough of itself) seemed to blow a faint simoom of ham through the whole Marshalsea.

‘Try a little more something green, sir,’ said Young John; and again handed the basket.

It was so like handing green meat into the cage of a dull imprisoned bird, and John had so evidently brought the little basket as a handful of fresh relief from the stale hot paving-stones and bricks of the jail, that Clennam said, with a smile, ‘It was very kind of you to think of putting this between the wires; but I cannot even get this down to-day.’

As if the difficulty were contagious, Young John soon pushed away his own plate, and fell to folding the cabbage-leaf that had contained the ham. When he had folded it into a number of layers, one over another, so that it was small in the palm of his hand, he began to flatten it between both his hands, and to eye Clennam attentively.

‘I wonder,’ he at length said, compressing his green packet with some force, ‘that if it’s not worth your while to take care of yourself

for your own sake, it’s not worth doing for some one else’s.’

‘Truly,’ returned Arthur, with a sigh and a smile, ‘I don’t know for whose.’

‘Mr Clennam,’ said John, warmly, ‘I am surprised that a gentleman who is capable of the straightforwardness that you are capable of, should be capable of the mean action of making me such an answer. Mr Clennam, I am surprised that a gentleman who is capable of having a heart of his own, should be capable of the heartlessness of treating mine in that way. I am astonished at it, sir. Really and truly I am astonished!’

Having got upon his feet to emphasise his concluding words, Young John sat down again, and fell to rolling his green packet on his right leg; never taking his eyes off Clennam, but surveying him with a fixed look of indignant reproach.

‘I had got over it, sir,’ said John. ‘I had conquered it, knowing that it must be conquered, and had come to the resolution to think no more about it. I shouldn’t have given my mind to it again, I hope, if to this prison you had not been brought, and in an hour unfortunate for me, this day!’ (In his agitation Young John adopted his mother’s powerful construction of sentences.) ‘When you first came upon me, sir, in the Lodge, this day, more as if a Upas tree had been made a capture of than a private defendant, such mingled streams of feelings broke loose again within me, that everything was for the first few minutes swept away before them, and I was going round and round in a vortex. I got out of it. I struggled, and got out of it. If it was the last word I had to speak, against that vortex with my utmost powers I strove, and out of it I came. I argued that if I had been rude, apologies was due, and those apologies without a question of demeaning, I did make. And

now, when I’ve been so wishful to show that one thought is next to being a holy one with me and goes before all others—now, after all, you dodge me when I ever so gently hint at it, and throw me back upon myself. For, do not, sir,’ said Young John, ‘do not be so base as to deny that dodge you do, and thrown me back upon myself you have!’

All amazement, Arthur gazed at him like one lost, only saying, ‘What is it? What do you mean, John?’ But, John, being in that state of mind in which nothing would seem to be more impossible to a certain class of people than the giving of an answer, went ahead blindly.

‘I hadn’t,’ John declared, ‘no, I hadn’t, and I never had the audaciousness to think, I am sure, that all was anything but lost. I hadn’t, no, why should I say I hadn’t if I ever had, any hope that it was possible to be so blest, not after the words that passed, not even if barriers insurmountable had not been raised! But is that a reason why I am to have no memory, why I am to have no thoughts, why I am to have no sacred spots, nor anything?’

‘What can you mean?’ cried Arthur.

‘It’s all very well to trample on it, sir,’ John went on, scouring a very prairie of wild words, ‘if a person can make up his mind to be guilty of the action. It’s all very well to trample on it, but it’s there. It may be that it couldn’t be trampled upon if it wasn’t there. But that doesn’t make it gentlemanly, that doesn’t make it honourable, that doesn’t justify throwing a person back upon himself after he has struggled and strived out of himself like a butterfly. The world may sneer at a turnkey, but he’s a man—when he isn’t a woman, which among female criminals he’s expected to be.’

Ridiculous as the incoherence of his talk was, there was yet a

truthfulness in Young john’s simple, sentimental character, and a sense of being wounded in some very tender respect, expressed in his burning face and in the agitation of his voice and manner, which Arthur must have been cruel to disregard. He turned his thoughts back to the starting-point of this unknown injury; and in the meantime Young John, having rolled his green packet pretty round, cut it carefully into three pieces, and laid it on a plate as if it were some particular delicacy.

‘It seems to me just possible,’ said Arthur, when he had retraced the conversation to the water-cresses and back again, ‘that you have made some reference to Miss Dorrit.’

‘It is just possible, sir,’ returned John Chivery.

‘I don’t understand it. I hope I may not be so unlucky as to make you think I mean to offend you again, for I never have meant to offend you yet, when I say I don’t understand it.’

‘Sir,’ said Young John, ‘will you have the perfidy to deny that you know and long have known that I felt towards Miss Dorrit, call it not the presumption of love, but adoration and sacrifice ?’

‘Indeed, John, I will not have any perfidy if I know it; why you should suspect me of it I am at a loss to think. Did you ever hear from Mrs Chivery, your mother, that I went to see her once?’

‘No, sir,’ returned John, shortly. ‘Never heard of such a thing.’ ‘But I did. Can you imagine why?’

‘No, sir,’ returned John, shortly. ‘I can’t imagine why.’

‘I will tell you. I was solicitous to promote Miss Dorrit’s happiness; and if I could have supposed that Miss Dorrit returned your affection—’

Poor John Chivery turned crimson to the tips of his ears. ‘Miss Dorrit never did, sir. I wish to be honourable and true, so far as in

my humble way I can, and I would scorn to pretend for a moment that she ever did, or that she ever led me to believe she did; no, nor even that it was ever to be expected in any cool reason that she would or could. She was far above me in all respects at all times. As likewise,’ added John, ‘similarly was her gen-teel family.’ His chivalrous feeling towards all that belonged to her made him so very respectable, in spite of his small stature and his rather weak legs, and his very weak hair, and his poetical temperament, that a Goliath might have sat in his place demanding less

consideration at Arthur’s hands.

‘You speak, John,’ he said, with cordial admiration, ‘like a Man.’ ‘Well, sir,’ returned John, brushing his hand across his eyes,

‘then I wish you’d do the same.’

He was quick with this unexpected retort, and it again made Arthur regard him with a wondering expression of face.

‘Leastways,’ said John, stretching his hand across the tea-tray, ‘if too strong a remark, withdrawn! But, why not, why not? When I say to you, Mr Clennam, take care of yourself for some one else’s sake, why not be open, though a turnkey? Why did I get you the room which I knew you’d like best? Why did I carry up your things?

Not that I found ’em heavy; I don’t mention ’em on that accounts; far from it. Why have I cultivated you in the manner I have done since the morning? On the ground of your own merits? No. They’re very great, I’ve no doubt at all; but not on the ground of them. Another’s merits have had their weight, and have had far more weight with Me. Then why not speak free?’

‘Unaffectedly, John,’ said Clennam, ‘you are so good a fellow and I have so true a respect for your character, that if I have

appeared to be less sensible than I really am of the fact that the kind services you have rendered me to-day are attributable to my having been trusted by Miss Dorrit as her friend—I confess it to be a fault, and I ask your forgiveness.’

‘Oh! why not,’ John repeated with returning scorn, ‘why not speak free!’

‘I declare to you,’ returned Arthur, ‘that I do not understand you. Look at me. Consider the trouble I have been in. Is it likely that I would wilfully add to my other self-reproaches, that of being ungrateful or treacherous to you. I do not understand you.’

john’s incredulous face slowly softened into a face of doubt. He rose, backed into the garret-window of the room, beckoned Arthur to come there, and stood looking at him thoughtfully. ‘Mr Clennam, do you mean to say that you don’t know?’

‘What, John?’

‘Lord,’ said Young John, appealing with a gasp to the spikes on the wall. ‘He says, What!’ Clennam looked at the spikes, and looked at John; and looked at the spikes, and looked at John.

‘He says What! And what is more,’ exclaimed Young John, surveying him in a doleful maze, ‘he appears to mean it! Do you see this window, sir?’

‘Of course I see this window.’ ‘See this room?’

‘Why, of course I see this room.’

‘That wall opposite, and that yard down below? They have all been witnesses of it, from day to day, from night to night, from week to week, from month to month. For how often have I seen Miss Dorrit here when she has not seen me!’

‘Witnesses of what?’ said Clennam.

‘Of Miss Dorrit’s love.’ ‘For whom?’

‘You,’ said John. And touched him with the back of his hand upon the breast, and backed to his chair, and sat down on it with a pale face, holding the arms, and shaking his head at him.

If he had dealt Clennam a heavy blow, instead of laying that light touch upon him, its effect could not have been to shake him more. He stood amazed; his eyes looking at John; his lips parted, and seeming now and then to form the word ‘Me!’ without uttering it; his hands dropped at his sides; his whole appearance that of a man who has been awakened from sleep, and stupefied by intelligence beyond his full comprehension.

‘Me!’ he at length said aloud. ‘Ah!’ groaned Young John. ‘You!’

He did what he could to muster a smile, and returned, ‘Your fancy. You are completely mistaken.’

‘I mistaken, sir!’ said Young John. ‘I completely mistaken on that subject! No, Mr Clennam, don’t tell me so. On any other, if you like, for I don’t set up to be a penetrating character, and am well aware of my own deficiencies. But, I mistaken on a point that has caused me more smart in my breast than a flight of savages’ arrows could have done! I mistaken on a point that almost sent me into my grave, as I sometimes wished it would, if the grave could only have been made compatible with the tobacco-business and father and mother’s feelings! I mistaken on a point that, even at the present moment, makes me take out my pocket-handkercher like a great girl, as people say: though I am sure I don’t know why a great girl should be a term of reproach, for every rightly constituted male mind loves ’em great and small. Don’t tell me so,

don’t tell me so!’

Still highly respectable at bottom, though absurd enough upon the surface, Young John took out his pocket-handkerchief with a genuine absence both of display and concealment, which is only to be seen in a man with a great deal of good in him, when he takes out his pocket-handkerchief for the purpose of wiping his eyes. Having dried them, and indulged in the harmless luxury of a sob and a sniff, he put it up again.

The touch was still in its influence so like a blow that Arthur could not get many words together to close the subject with. He assured John Chivery when he had returned his handkerchief to his pocket, that he did all honour to his disinterestedness and to the fidelity of his remembrance of Miss Dorrit. As to the impression on his mind, of which he had just relieved it—here John interposed, and said, ‘No impression! Certainty!’—as to that, they might perhaps speak of it at another time, but would say no more now. Feeling low-spirited and weary, he would go back to his room, with john’s leave, and come out no more that night. John assented, and he crept back in the shadow of the wall to his own lodging.

The feeling of the blow was still so strong upon him that, when the dirty old woman was gone whom he found sitting on the stairs outside his door, waiting to make his bed, and who gave him to understand while doing it, that she had received her instructions from Mr Chivery, ‘not the old ’un but the young ’un,’ he sat down in the faded arm-chair, pressing his head between his hands, as if he had been stunned. Little Dorrit love him! More bewildering to him than his misery, far.

Consider the improbability. He had been accustomed to call her

his child, and his dear child, and to invite her confidence by dwelling upon the difference in their respective ages, and to speak of himself as one who was turning old. Yet she might not have thought him old. Something reminded him that he had not thought himself so, until the roses had floated away upon the river.

He had her two letters among other papers in his box, and he took them out and read them. There seemed to be a sound in them like the sound of her sweet voice. It fell upon his ear with many tones of tenderness, that were not insusceptible of the new meaning. Now it was that the quiet desolation of her answer, ‘No, No, No,’ made to him that night in that very room—that night when he had been shown the dawn of her altered fortune, and when other words had passed between them which he had been destined to remember in humiliation and a prisoner, rushed into his mind.

Consider the improbability.

But it had a preponderating tendency, when considered, to become fainter. There was another and a curious inquiry of his own heart’s that concurrently became stronger. In the reluctance he had felt to believe that she loved any one; in his desire to set that question at rest; in a half-formed consciousness he had had that there would be a kind of nobleness in his helping her love for any one, was there no suppressed something on his own side that he had hushed as it arose? Had he ever whispered to himself that he must not think of such a thing as her loving him, that he must not take advantage of her gratitude, that he must keep his experience in remembrance as a warning and reproof; that he must regard such youthful hopes as having passed away, as his

friend’s dead daughter had passed away; that he must be steady in saying to himself that the time had gone by him, and he was too saddened and old?

He had kissed her when he raised her from the ground on the day when she had been so consistently and expressively forgotten. Quite as he might have kissed her, if she had been conscious? No difference?

The darkness found him occupied with these thoughts. The darkness also found Mr and Mrs Plornish knocking at his door. They brought with them a basket, filled with choice selections from that stock in trade which met with such a quick sale and produced such a slow return. Mrs Plornish was affected to tears. Mr Plornish amiably growled, in his philosophical but not lucid manner, that there was ups you see, and there was downs. It was in vain to ask why ups, why downs; there they was, you know. He had heerd it given for a truth that accordin’ as the world went round, which round it did rewolve undoubted, even the best of gentlemen must take his turn of standing with his ed upside down and all his air a flying the wrong way into what you might call Space. Wery well then. What Mr Plornish said was, wery well then. That gentleman’s ed would come up-ards when his turn come, that gentleman’s air would be a pleasure to look upon being all smooth again, and wery well then!

It has been already stated that Mrs Plornish, not being philosophical, wept. It further happened that Mrs Plornish, not being philosophical, was intelligible. It may have arisen out of her softened state of mind, out of her sex’s wit, out of a woman’s quick association of ideas, or out of a woman’s no association of ideas, but it further happened somehow that Mrs Plornish’s intelligibility

displayed itself upon the very subject of Arthur’s meditations.

‘The way father has been talking about you, Mr Clennam,’ said Mrs Plornish, ‘you hardly would believe. It’s made him quite poorly. As to his voice, this misfortune has took it away. You know what a sweet singer father is; but he couldn’t get a note out for the children at tea, if you’ll credit what I tell you.’

While speaking, Mrs Plornish shook her head, and wiped her eyes, and looked retrospectively about the room.

‘As to Mr Baptist,’ pursued Mrs Plornish, ‘whatever he’ll do when he comes to know of it, I can’t conceive nor yet imagine. He’d have been here before now, you may be sure, but that he’s away on confidential business of your own. The persevering manner in which he follows up that business, and gives himself no rest from it—it really do,’ said Mrs Plornish, winding up in the Italian manner, ‘as I say to him, Mooshattonisha padrona.’

Though not conceited, Mrs Plornish felt that she had turned this Tuscan sentence with peculiar elegance. Mr Plornish could not conceal his exultation in her accomplishments as a linguist.

‘But what I say is, Mr Clennam,’ the good woman went on, ‘there’s always something to be thankful for, as I am sure you will yourself admit. Speaking in this room, it’s not hard to think what the present something is. It’s a thing to be thankful for, indeed, that Miss Dorrit is not here to know it.’

Arthur thought she looked at him with particular expression. ‘It’s a thing,’ reiterated Mrs Plornish, ‘to be thankful for,

indeed, that Miss Dorrit is far away. It’s to be hoped she is not likely to hear of it. If she had been here to see it, sir, it’s not to be doubted that the sight of you,’ Mrs Plornish repeated those words—‘not to be doubted, that the sight of you—in misfortune

and trouble, would have been almost too much for her affectionate heart. There’s nothing I can think of, that would have touched Miss Dorrit so bad as that.’

Of a certainty Mrs Plornish did look at him now, with a sort of quivering defiance in her friendly emotion.

‘Yes!’ said she. ‘And it shows what notice father takes, though at his time of life, that he says to me this afternoon, which Happy Cottage knows I neither make it up nor any ways enlarge, “Mary, it’s much to be rejoiced in that Miss Dorrit is not on the spot to behold it.” Those were father’s words. Father’s own words was, “Much to be rejoiced in, Mary, that Miss Dorrit is not on the spot to behold it.” I says to father then, I says to him, “Father, you are right!” That,’ Mrs Plornish concluded, with the air of a very precise legal witness, ‘is what passed betwixt father and me. And I tell you nothing but what did pass betwixt me and father.’

Mr Plornish, as being of a more laconic temperament, embraced this opportunity of interposing with the suggestion that she should now leave Mr Clennam to himself. ‘For, you see,’ said Mr Plornish, gravely, ‘I know what it is, old gal;’ repeating that valuable remark several times, as if it appeared to him to include some great moral secret. Finally, the worthy couple went away arm in arm.

Little Dorrit, Little Dorrit. Again, for hours. Always Little Dorrit!

Happily, if it ever had been so, it was over, and better over. Granted that she had loved him, and he had known it and had suffered himself to love her, what a road to have led her away upon—the road that would have brought her back to this miserable place! He ought to be much comforted by the reflection

that she was quit of it forever; that she was, or would soon be, married (vague rumours of her father’s projects in that direction had reached Bleeding Heart Yard, with the news of her sister’s marriage); and that the Marshalsea gate had shut for ever on all those perplexed possibilities of a time that was gone.

Dear Little Dorrit.

Looking back upon his own poor story, she was its vanishing- point. Every thing in its perspective led to her innocent figure. He had travelled thousands of miles towards it; previous unquiet hopes and doubts had worked themselves out before it; it was the centre of the interest of his life; it was the termination of everything that was good and pleasant in it; beyond, there was nothing but mere waste and darkened sky.

As ill at ease as on the first night of his lying down to sleep within those dreary walls, he wore the night out with such thoughts. What time Young John lay wrapt in peaceful slumber, after composing and arranging the following monumental inscription on his pillow—

STRANGER!

RESPECT THE TOMB OF

JOHN CHIVERY, JUNIOR, WHO DIED AT AN ADVANCED AGE NOT NECESSARY TO MENTION.

HE ENCOUNTERED HIS RIVAL IN A DISTRESSED STATE, AND FELT INCLINED

TO HAVE A ROUND WITH HIM;

BUT, FOR THE SAKE OF THE LOVED ONE, CONQUERED THOSE FEELINGS OF BITTERNESS, AND BECAME

MAGNANIMOUS.

Chapter 28

An Appearance in the Marshalsea

T

he opinion of the community outside the prison gates bore hard on Clennam as time went on, and he made no friends among the community within. Too depressed to associate

with the herd in the yard, who got together to forget their cares; too retiring and too unhappy to join in the poor socialities of the tavern; he kept his own room, and was held in distrust. Some said he was proud; some objected that he was sullen and reserved; some were contemptuous of him, for that he was a poor-spirited dog who pined under his debts. The whole population were shy of him on these various counts of indictment, but especially the last, which involved a species of domestic treason; and he soon became so confirmed in his seclusion, that his only time for walking up and down was when the evening Club were assembled at their songs and toasts and sentiments, and when the yard was nearly left to the women and children.

Imprisonment began to tell upon him. He knew that he idled and moped. After what he had known of the influences of imprisonment within the four small walls of the very room he occupied, this consciousness made him afraid of himself. Shrinking from the observation of other men, and shrinking from his own, he began to change very sensibly. Anybody might see that the shadow of the wall was dark upon him.

One day when he might have been some ten or twelve weeks in jail, and when he had been trying to read and had not been able to

release even the imaginary people of the book from the Marshalsea, a footstep stopped at his door, and a hand tapped at it. He arose and opened it, and an agreeable voice accosted him with ‘How do you do, Mr Clennam? I hope I am not unwelcome in calling to see you.’

It was the sprightly young Barnacle, Ferdinand. He looked very good-natured and prepossessing, though overpoweringly gay and free, in contrast with the squalid prison.

‘You are surprised to see me, Mr Clennam,’ he said, taking the seat which Clennam offered him.

‘I must confess to being much surprised.’ ‘Not disagreeably, I hope?’

‘By no means.’

‘Thank you. Frankly,’ said the engaging young Barnacle, ‘I have been excessively sorry to hear that you were under the necessity of a temporary retirement here, and I hope (of course as between two private gentlemen) that our place has had nothing to do with it?’

‘Your office?’

‘Our Circumlocution place.’

‘I cannot charge any part of my reverses upon that remarkable establishment.’

Upon my life,’ said the vivacious young Barnacle, ‘I am heartily glad to know it. It is quite a relief to me to hear you say it. I should have so exceedingly regretted our place having had anything to do with your difficulties.’

Clennam again assured him that he absolved it of the responsibility.

‘That’s right,’ said Ferdinand. ‘I am very happy to hear it. I was rather afraid in my own mind that we might have helped to floor

you, because there is no doubt that it is our misfortune to do that kind of thing now and then. We don’t want to do it; but if men will be gravelled, why—we can’t help it.’

‘Without giving an unqualified assent to what you say,’ returned Arthur, gloomily, ‘I am much obliged to you for your interest in me.’

‘No, but really! Our place is,’ said the easy young Barnacle, ‘the most inoffensive place possible. You’ll say we are a humbug. I won’t say we are not; but all that sort of thing is intended to be, and must be. Don’t you see?’

‘I do not,’ said Clennam.

‘You don’t regard it from the right point of view. It is the point of view that is the essential thing. Regard our place from the point of view that we only ask you to leave us alone, and we are as capital a Department as you’ll find anywhere.’

‘Is your place there to be left alone?’ asked Clennam.

‘You exactly hit it,’ returned Ferdinand. ‘It is there with the express intention that everything shall be left alone. That is what it means. That is what it’s for. No doubt there’s a certain form to be kept up that it’s for something else, but it’s only a form. Why, good Heaven, we are nothing but forms! Think what a lot of our forms you have gone through. And you have never got any nearer to an end?’

‘Never,’ said Clennam.

‘Look at it from the right point of view, and there you have us— official and effectual. It’s like a limited game of cricket. A field of outsiders are always going in to bowl at the Public Service, and we block the balls.’

Clennam asked what became of the bowlers? The airy young

Barnacle replied that they grew tired, got dead beat, got lamed, got their backs broken, died off, gave it up, went in for other games.

‘And this occasions me to congratulate myself again,’ he pursued, ‘on the circumstance that our place has had nothing to do with your temporary retirement. It very easily might have had a hand in it; because it is undeniable that we are sometimes a most unlucky place, in our effects upon people who will not leave us alone. Mr Clennam, I am quite unreserved with you. As between yourself and myself, I know I may be. I was so, when I first saw you making the mistake of not leaving us alone; because I perceived that you were inexperienced and sanguine, and had—I hope you’ll not object to my saying—some simplicity.’

‘Not at all.’

‘Some simplicity. Therefore I felt what a pity it was, and I went out of my way to hint to you (which really was not official, but I never am official when I can help it) something to the effect that if I were you, I wouldn’t bother myself. However, you did bother yourself, and you have since bothered yourself. Now, don’t do it any more.’

‘I am not likely to have the opportunity,’ said Clennam.

‘Oh yes, you are! You’ll leave here. Everybody leaves here. There are no ends of ways of leaving here. Now, don’t come back to us. That entreaty is the second object of my call. Pray, don’t come back to us. Upon my honour,’ said Ferdinand in a very friendly and confiding way, ‘I shall be greatly vexed if you don’t take warning by the past and keep away from us.’

‘And the invention?’ said Clennam.

‘My good fellow,’ returned Ferdinand, ‘if you’ll excuse the

freedom of that form of address, nobody wants to know of the invention, and nobody cares twopence-halfpenny about it.’

‘Nobody in the Office, that is to say?’

‘Nor out of it. Everybody is ready to dislike and ridicule any invention. You have no idea how many people want to be left alone.

You have no idea how the Genius of the country (overlook the Parliamentary nature of the phrase, and don’t be bored by it) tends to being left alone. Believe me, Mr Clennam,’ said the sprightly young Barnacle in his pleasantest manner, ‘our place is not a wicked Giant to be charged at full tilt; but only a windmill showing you, as it grinds immense quantities of chaff, which way the country wind blows.’

‘If I could believe that,’ said Clennam, ‘it would be a dismal prospect for all of us.’

‘Oh! Don’t say so!’ returned Ferdinand. ‘It’s all right. We must have humbug, we all like humbug, we couldn’t get on without humbug. A little humbug, and a groove, and everything goes on admirably, if you leave it alone.’

With this hopeful confession of his faith as the head of the rising Barnacles who were born of woman, to be followed under a variety of watchwords which they utterly repudiated and disbelieved, Ferdinand rose. Nothing could be more agreeable than his frank and courteous bearing, or adapted with a more gentlemanly instinct to the circumstances of his visit.

‘Is it fair to ask,’ he said, as Clennam gave him his hand with a real feeling of thankfulness for his candour and good-humour, ‘whether it is true that our late lamented Merdle is the cause of this passing inconvenience?’

‘I am one of the many he has ruined. Yes.’

‘He must have been an exceedingly clever fellow,’ said Ferdinand Barnacle.

Arthur, not being in the mood to extol the memory of the deceased, was silent.

‘A consummate rascal, of course,’ said Ferdinand, ‘but remarkably clever! One cannot help admiring the fellow. Must have been such a master of humbug. Knew people so well—got over them so completely—did so much with them!’ In his easy way, he was really moved to genuine admiration.

‘I hope,’ said Arthur, ‘that he and his dupes may be a warning to people not to have so much done with them again.’

‘My dear Mr Clennam,’ returned Ferdinand, laughing, ‘have you really such a verdant hope? The next man who has as large a capacity and as genuine a taste for swindling, will succeed as well. Pardon me, but I think you really have no idea how the human bees will swarm to the beating of any old tin kettle; in that fact lies the complete manual of governing them. When they can be got to believe that the kettle is made of the precious metals, in that fact lies the whole power of men like our late lamented. No doubt there are here and there,’ said Ferdinand politely, ‘exceptional cases, where people have been taken in for what appeared to them to be much better reasons; and I need not go far to find such a case; but they don’t invalidate the rule. Good day! I hope that when I have the pleasure of seeing you, next, this passing cloud will have given place to sunshine. Don’t come a step beyond the door. I know the way out perfectly. Good day!’

With those words, the best and brightest of the Barnacles went down-stairs, hummed his way through the Lodge, mounted his

horse in the front court-yard, and rode off to keep an appointment with his noble kinsman, who wanted a little coaching before he could triumphantly answer certain infidel Snobs who were going to question the Nobs about their statesmanship.

He must have passed Mr Rugg on his way out, for, a minute or two afterwards, that ruddy-headed gentleman shone in at the door, like an elderly Phoebus.

‘How do you do to-day, sir?’ said Mr Rugg. ‘Is there any little thing I can do for you to-day, sir?’

‘No, I thank you.’

Mr Rugg’s enjoyment of embarrassed affairs was like a housekeeper’s enjoyment in pickling and preserving, or a washerwoman’s enjoyment of a heavy wash, or a dustman’s enjoyment of an overflowing dust-bin, or any other professional enjoyment of a mess in the way of business.

‘I still look round, from time to time, sir,’ said Mr Rugg, cheerfully, ‘to see whether any lingering Detainers are accumulating at the gate. They have fallen in pretty thick, sir; as thick as we could have expected.’

He remarked upon the circumstance as if it were matter of congratulation: rubbing his hands briskly, and rolling his head a little.

‘As thick,’ repeated Mr Rugg, ‘as we could reasonably have expected. Quite a shower-bath of ’em. I don’t often intrude upon you now, when I look round, because I know you are not inclined for company, and that if you wished to see me, you would leave word in the Lodge. But I am here pretty well every day, sir. Would this be an unseasonable time, sir,’ asked Mr Rugg, coaxingly, ‘for me to offer an observation?’

‘As seasonable a time as any other.’

‘Hum! Public opinion, sir,’ said Mr Rugg, ‘has been busy with you.’

‘I don’t doubt it.’

‘Might it not be advisable, sir,’ said Mr Rugg, more coaxingly yet, ‘now to make, at last and after all, a trifling concession to public opinion? We all do it in one way or another. The fact is, we must do it.’

‘I cannot set myself right with it, Mr Rugg, and have no business to expect that I ever shall.’

‘Don’t say that, sir, don’t say that. The cost of being moved to the Bench is almost insignificant, and if the general feeling is strong that you ought to be there, why—really—’

‘I thought you had settled, Mr Rugg,’ said Arthur, ‘that my determination to remain here was a matter of taste.’

‘Well, sir, well! But is it good taste, is it good taste? That’s the Question.’ Mr Rugg was so soothingly persuasive as to be quite pathetic. ‘I was almost going to say, is it good feeling? This is an extensive affair of yours; and your remaining here where a man can come for a pound or two, is remarked upon as not in keeping. It is not in keeping. I can’t tell you, sir, in how many quarters I heard it mentioned. I heard comments made upon it last night in a Parlour frequented by what I should call, if I did not look in there now and then myself, the best legal company—I heard, there, comments on it that I was sorry to hear. They hurt me on your account. Again, only this morning at breakfast. My daughter (but a woman, you’ll say: yet still with a feeling for these things, and even with some little personal experience, as the plaintiff in Rugg and Bawkins) was expressing her great surprise; her great surprise.

Now under these circumstances, and considering that none of us can quite set ourselves above public opinion, wouldn’t a trifling concession to that opinion be—Come, sir,’ said Rugg, ‘I will put it on the lowest ground of argument, and say, amiable?’

Arthur’s thoughts had once more wandered away to Little Dorrit, and the question remained unanswered.

‘As to myself, sir,’ said Mr Rugg, hoping that his eloquence had reduced him to a state of indecision, ‘it is a principle of mine not to consider myself when a client’s inclinations are in the scale. But, knowing your considerate character and general wish to oblige, I will repeat that I should prefer your being in the Bench.

Your case has made a noise; it is a creditable case to be professionally concerned in; I should feel on a better standing with my connection, if you went to the Bench. Don’t let that influence you, sir. I merely state the fact.’

So errant had the prisoner’s attention already grown in solitude and dejection, and so accustomed had it become to commune with only one silent figure within the ever-frowning walls, that Clennam had to shake off a kind of stupor before he could look at Mr Rugg, recall the thread of his talk, and hurriedly say, ‘I am unchanged, and unchangeable, in my decision. Pray, let it be; let it be!’ Mr Rugg, without concealing that he was nettled and mortified, replied:

‘Oh! Beyond a doubt, sir. I have travelled out of the record, sir, I am aware, in putting the point to you. But really, when I herd it remarked in several companies, and in very good company, that however worthy of a foreigner, it is not worthy of the spirit of an Englishman to remain in the Marshalsea when the glorious liberties of his island home admit of his removal to the Bench, I

thought I would depart from the narrow professional line marked out to me, and mention it. Personally,’ said Mr Rugg, ‘I have no opinion on the topic.’

‘That’s well,’ returned Arthur.

‘Oh! None at all, sir!’ said Mr Rugg. ‘If I had, I should have been unwilling, some minutes ago, to see a client of mine visited in this place by a gentleman of a high family riding a saddle-horse. But it was not my business. If I had, I might have wished to be now empowered to mention to another gentleman, a gentleman of military exterior at present waiting in the Lodge, that my client had never intended to remain here, and was on the eve of removal to a superior abode. But my course as a professional machine is clear; I have nothing to do with it. Is it your good pleasure to see the gentleman, sir?’

‘Who is waiting to see me, did you say?’

‘I did take that unprofessional liberty, sir. Hearing that I was your professional adviser, he declined to interpose before my very limited function was performed. Happily,’ said Mr Rugg, with sarcasm, ‘I did not so far travel out of the record as to ask the gentleman for his name.’

‘I suppose I have no resource but to see him,’ sighed Clennam, wearily.

‘Then it is your good pleasure, sir?’ retorted Rugg. ‘Am I honoured by your instructions to mention as much to the gentleman, as I pass out? I am? Thank you, sir. I take my leave.’ His leave he took accordingly, in dudgeon.

The gentleman of military exterior had so imperfectly awakened Clennam’s curiosity, in the existing state of his mind, that a half-forgetfulness of such a visitor’s having been referred to,

was already creeping over it as a part of the sombre veil which almost always dimmed it now, when a heavy footstep on the stairs aroused him. It appeared to ascend them, not very promptly or spontaneously, yet with a display of stride and clatter meant to be insulting. As it paused for a moment on the landing outside his door, he could not recall his association with the peculiarity of its sound, though he thought he had one. Only a moment was given him for consideration. His door was immediately swung open by a thump, and in the doorway stood the missing Blandois, the cause of many anxieties.

‘Salve, fellow jail-bird !’ said he. ‘You want me, it seems. Here I am!’

Before Arthur could speak to him in his indignant wonder, Cavalletto followed him into the room. Mr Pancks followed Cavalletto. Neither of the two had been there since its present occupant had had possession of it. Mr Pancks, breathing hard, sidled near the window, put his hat on the ground, stirred his hair up with both hands, and folded his arms, like a man who had come to a pause in a hard day’s work. Mr Baptist, never taking his eyes from his dreaded chum of old, softly sat down on the floor with his back against the door and one of his ankles in each hand: resuming the attitude (except that it was now expressive of unwinking watchfulness) in which he had sat before the same man in the deeper shade of another prison, one hot morning at Marseilles. ‘I have it on the witnessing of these two madmen,’ said Monsieur Blandois, otherwise Lagnier, otherwise Rigaud, ‘that you want me, brother-bird. Here I am!’ Glancing round contemptuously at the bedstead, which was turned up by day, he leaned his back against it as a resting-place, without removing his

hat from his head, and stood defiantly lounging with his hands in his pockets.

‘You villain of ill-omen!’ said Arthur. ‘You have purposely cast a dreadful suspicion upon my mother’s house. Why have you done it?

What prompted you to the devilish invention?’

Monsieur Rigaud, after frowning at him for a moment, laughed. ‘Hear this noble gentleman! Listen, all the world, to this creature of Virtue! But take care, take care. It is possible, my friend, that your ardour is a little compromising. Holy Blue! It is possible.’

‘Signore!’ interposed Cavalletto, also addressing Arthur: ‘for to commence, hear me! I received your instructions to find him, Rigaud; is it not?’

‘It is the truth.’

‘I go, consequentementally,’—it would have given Mrs Plornish great concern if she could have been persuaded that his occasional lengthening of an adverb in this way, was the chief fault of his English,—‘first among my countrymen. I ask them what news in Londra, of foreigners arrived. Then I go among the French. Then I go among the Germans. They all tell me. The great part of us know well the other, and they all tell me. But!—no person can tell me nothing of him, Rigaud. Fifteen times,’ said Cavalletto, thrice throwing out his left hand with all its fingers spread, and doing it so rapidly that the sense of sight could hardly follow the action, ‘I ask of him in every place where go the foreigners; and fifteen times,’ repeating the same swift performance, ‘they know nothing. But!—’ At this significant Italian rest on the word ‘But,’ his backhanded shake of his right forefinger came into play; a very little, and very cautiously.

‘But!—After a long time when I have not been able to find that he is here in Londra, some one tells me of a soldier with white hair—hey?—not hair like this that he carries—white—who lives retired secrettementally, in a certain place. But!—’ with another rest upon the word, ‘who sometimes in the after-dinner, walks, and smokes. It is necessary, as they say in Italy (and as they know, poor people), to have patience. I have patience. I ask where is this certain place. One. believes it is here, one believes it is there. Eh well! It is not here, it is not there. I wait patientissamentally. At last I find it. Then I watch; then I hide, until he walks and smokes. He is a soldier with grey hair—But!—’ a very decided rest indeed, and a very vigorous play from side to side of the back-handed forefinger—‘he is also this man that you see.’

It was noticeable, that, in his old habit of submission to one who had been at the trouble of asserting superiority over him, he even then bestowed upon Rigaud a confused bend of his head, after thus pointing him out.

‘Eh well, Signore!’ he cried in conclusion, addressing Arthur again. ‘I waited for a good opportunity. I writed some words to Signor Panco,’ an air of novelty came over Mr Pancks with this designation, ‘to come and help. I showed him, Rigaud, at his window, to Signor Panco, who was often the spy in the day. I slept at night near the door of the house. At last we entered, only this to- day, and now you see him! As he would not come up in presence of the illustrious Advocate,’ such was Mr Baptist’s honourable mention of Mr Rugg, ‘we waited down below there, together, and Signor Panco guarded the street.’ At the close of this recital, Arthur turned his eyes upon the impudent and wicked face. As it met his, the nose came down over the moustache and the

moustache went up under the nose. When nose and moustache had settled into their places again, Monsieur Rigaud loudly snapped his fingers half-a-dozen times; bending forward to jerk the snaps at Arthur, as if they were palpable missiles which he jerked into his face.

‘Now, Philosopher!’ said Rigaud. ‘What do you want with me?’ ‘I want to know,’ returned Arthur, without disguising his

abhorrence, ‘how you dare direct a suspicion of murder against my mother’s house?’

‘Dare!’ cried Rigaud. ‘Ho, ho! Hear him! Dare? Is it dare? By Heaven, my small boy, but you are a little imprudent!’

‘I want that suspicion to be cleared away,’ said Arthur. ‘You shall be taken there, and be publicly seen. I want to know, moreover, what business you had there when I had a burning desire to fling you down-stairs. Don’t frown at me, man! I have seen enough of you to know that you are a bully and coward. I need no revival of my spirits from the effects of this wretched place to tell you so plain a fact, and one that you know so well.’

White to the lips, Rigaud stroked his moustache, muttering, ‘By Heaven, my small boy, but you are a little compromising of my lady, your respectable mother’—and seemed for a minute undecided how to act. His indecision was soon gone. He sat himself down with a threatening swagger, and said:

‘Give me a bottle of wine. You can buy wine here. Send one of your madmen to get me a bottle of wine. I won’t talk to you without wine. Come! Yes or no?’

‘Fetch him what he wants, Cavalletto,’ said Arthur, scornfully, producing the money.

‘Contraband beast,’ added Rigaud, ‘bring Port wine! I’ll drink

nothing but Porto-Porto.’

The contraband beast, however, assuring all present, with his significant finger, that he peremptorily declined to leave his post at the door, Signor Panco offered his services. He soon returned with the bottle of wine: which, according to the custom of the place, originating in a scarcity of corkscrews among the Collegians (in common with a scarcity of much else), was already opened for use.

‘Madman! A large glass,’ said Rigaud.

Signor Panco put a tumbler before him; not without a visible conflict of feeling on the question of throwing it at his head.

‘Haha!’ boasted Rigaud. ‘Once a gentleman, and always a gentleman. A gentleman from the beginning, and a gentleman to the end. What the Devil! A gentleman must be waited on, I hope? It’s a part of my character to be waited on!’

He half filled the tumbler as he said it, and drank off the contents when he had done saying it.

‘Hah!’ smacking his lips. ‘Not a very old prisoner that! I judge by your looks, brave sir, that imprisonment will subdue your blood much sooner than it softens this hot wine. You are mellowing— losing body and colour already. I salute you!’

He tossed off another half glass: holding it up both before and afterwards, so as to display his small, white hand.

‘To business,’ he then continued. ‘To conversation. You have shown yourself more free of speech than body, sir.’

‘I have used the freedom of telling you what you know yourself to be. You know yourself, as we all know you, to be far worse than that.’

‘Add, always a gentleman, and it’s no matter. Except in that

regard, we are all alike. For example: you couldn’t for your life be a gentleman; I couldn’t for my life be otherwise. How great the difference! Let us go on. Words, sir, never influence the course of the cards, or the course of the dice. Do you know that? You do? I also play a game, and words are without power over it.’

Now that he was confronted with Cavalletto, and knew that his story was known—whatever thin disguise he had worn, he dropped; and faced it out, with a bare face, as the infamous wretch he was.

‘No, my son,’ he resumed, with a snap of his fingers. ‘I play my game to the end in spite of words; and Death of my Body and Death of my Soul! I’ll win it. You want to know why I played this little trick that you have interrupted? Know then that I had, and that I have—do you understand me? have—a commodity to sell to my lady your respectable mother. I described my precious commodity, and fixed my price. Touching the bargain, your admirable mother was a little too calm, too stolid, too immovable and statue-like. In fine, your admirable mother vexed me. To make variety in my position, and to amuse myself—what! a gentleman must be amused at somebody’s expense!—I conceived the happy idea of disappearing. An idea, see you, that your characteristic mother and my Flintwinch would have been well enough pleased to execute. Ah! Bah, bah, bah, don’t look as from high to low at me! I repeat it. Well enough pleased, excessively enchanted, and with all their hearts ravished. How strongly will you have it?’

He threw out the lees of his glass on the ground, so that they nearly spattered Cavalletto. This seemed to draw his attention to him anew. He set down his glass and said:

‘I’ll not fill it. What! I am born to be served. Come then, you

Cavalletto, and fill!’

The little man looked at Clennam, whose eyes were occupied with Rigaud, and, seeing no prohibition, got up from the ground, and poured out from the bottle into the glass. The blending, as he did so, of his old submission with a sense of something humorous; the striving of that with a certain smouldering ferocity, which might have flashed fire in an instant (as the born gentleman seemed to think, for he had a wary eye upon him); and the easy yielding of all to a good-natured, careless, predominant propensity to sit down on the ground again: formed a very remarkable combination of character.

‘This happy idea, brave sir,’ Rigaud resumed after drinking, ‘was a happy idea for several reasons. It amused me, it worried your dear mama and my Flintwinch, it caused you agonies (my terms for a lesson in politeness towards a gentleman), and it suggested to all the amiable persons interested that your entirely devoted is a man to fear. By Heaven, he is a man to fear! Beyond this; it might have restored her wit to my lady your mother— might, under the pressing little suspicion your wisdom has recognised, have persuaded her at last to announce, covertly, in the journals, that the difficulties of a certain contract would be removed by the appearance of a certain important party to it. Perhaps yes, perhaps no. But that, you have interrupted. Now, what is it you say? What is it you want?’

Never had Clennam felt more acutely that he was a prisoner in bonds, than when he saw this man before him, and could not accompany him to his mother’s house. All the undiscernible difficulties and dangers he had ever feared were closing in, when he could not stir hand or foot.

‘Perhaps, my friend, philosopher, man of virtue, Imbecile, what you will; perhaps,’ said Rigaud, pausing in his drink to look out of his glass with his horrible smile, ‘you would have done better to leave me alone?’

‘No! At least,’ said Clennam, ‘you are known to be alive and unharmed. At least you cannot escape from these two witnesses; and they can produce you before any public authorities, or before hundreds of people!’

‘But will not produce me before one,’ said Rigaud, snapping his fingers again with an air of triumphant menace. ‘To the Devil with your witnesses! To the Devil with your produced! To the Devil with yourself! What! Do I know what I know, for that? Have I my commodity on sale, for that? Bah, poor debtor! You have interrupted my little project. Let it pass. How then? What remains? To you, nothing; to me, all. Produce me! Is that what you want? I will produce myself, only too quickly. Contrabandist! Give me pen, ink, and paper.’

Cavalletto got up again as before, and laid them before him in his former manner. Rigaud, after some villainous thinking and smiling, wrote, and read aloud, as follows:

‘To Mrs CLENNAM.

‘Wait answer.

‘Prison of the Marshalsea.

‘At the apartment of your son. ‘Dear Madam,—I am in despair to be informed to-day by our prisoner here (who has had the goodness to employ spies to seek me, living for politic reasons in retirement), that you have had

fears for my safety.

‘Reassure yourself, dear madam. I am well, I am strong and constant.

‘With the greatest impatience I should fly to your house, but that I foresee it to be possible, under the circumstances, that you will not yet have quite definitively arranged the little proposition I have had the honour to submit to you. I name one week from this day, for a last final visit on my part; when you will unconditionally accept it or reject it, with its train of consequences.

‘I suppress my ardour to embrace you and achieve this interesting business, in order that you may have leisure to adjust its details to our perfect mutual satisfaction.

‘In the meanwhile, it is not too much to propose (our prisoner having deranged my housekeeping), that my expenses of lodging and nourishment at an hotel shall be paid by you. ‘Receive, dear madam, the assurance of my highest and most distinguished consideration,

‘RIGAUD BLANDOIS.

‘A thousand friendships to that dear Flintwinch. ‘I kiss the hands of Madame F.’

When he had finished this epistle, Rigaud folded it and tossed it with a flourish at Clennam’s feet. ‘Hola you! Apropos of producing, let somebody produce that at its address, and produce the answer here.’

‘Cavalletto,’ said Arthur. ‘Will you take this fellow’s letter?’

But, Cavalletto’s significant finger again expressing that his post was at the door to keep watch over Rigaud, now he had found him with so much trouble, and that the duty of his post was to sit

on the floor backed up by the door, looking at Rigaud and holding his own ankles,—Signor Panco once more volunteered. His services being accepted, Cavalletto suffered the door to open barely wide enough to admit of his squeezing himself out, and immediately shut it on him.

‘Touch me with a finger, touch me with an epithet, question my superiority as I sit here drinking my wine at my pleasure,’ said Rigaud, ‘and I follow the letter and cancel my week’s grace. You wanted me? You have got me! How do you like me?’

‘You know,’ returned Clennam, with a bitter sense of his helplessness, ‘that when I sought you, I was not a prisoner.’

‘To the Devil with you and your prison,’ retorted Rigaud, leisurely, as he took from his pocket a case containing the materials for making cigarettes, and employed his facile hands in folding a few for present use; ‘I care for neither of you. Contrabandist! A light.’

Again Cavalletto got up, and gave him what he wanted. There had been something dreadful in the noiseless skill of his cold, white hands, with the fingers lithely twisting about and twining one over another like serpents. Clennam could not prevent himself from shuddering inwardly, as if he had been looking on at a nest of those creatures.

‘Hola, Pig!’ cried Rigaud, with a noisy stimulating cry, as if Cavalletto were an Italian horse or mule. ‘What! The infernal old jail was a respectable one to this. There was dignity in the bars and stones of that place. It was a prison for men. But this? Bah! A hospital for imbeciles!’

He smoked his cigarette out, with his ugly smile so fixed upon his face that he looked as though he were smoking with his

drooping beak of a nose, rather than with his mouth; like a fancy in a weird picture. When he had lighted a second cigarette at the still burning end of the first, he said to Clennam:

‘One must pass the time in the madman’s absence. One must talk. One can’t drink strong wine all day long, or I would have another bottle. She’s handsome, sir. Though not exactly to my taste, still, by the Thunder and the Lightning! handsome. I felicitate you on your admiration.’

‘I neither know nor ask,’ said Clennam, ‘of whom you speak.’ ‘Della bella Gowana, sir, as they say in Italy. Of the Gowan, the

fair Gowan.’

‘Of whose husband you were the—follower, I think?’ ‘Sir? Follower? You are insolent. The friend.’

‘Do you sell all your friends?’

Rigaud took his cigarette from his mouth, and eyed him with a momentary revelation of surprise. But he put it between his lips again, as he answered with coolness:

‘I sell anything that commands a price. How do your lawyers live, your politicians, your intriguers, your men of the Exchange? How do you live? How do you come here? Have you sold no friend? Lady of mine! I rather think, yes!’

Clennam turned away from him towards the window, and sat looking out at the wall.

‘Effectively, sir,’ said Rigaud, ‘Society sells itself and sells me: and I sell Society. I perceive you have acquaintance with another lady. Also handsome. A strong spirit. Let us see. How do they call her? Wade.’

He received no answer, but could easily discern that he had hit the mark.

‘Yes,’ he went on, ‘that handsome lady and strong spirit addresses me in the street, and I am not insensible. I respond. That handsome lady and strong spirit does me the favour to remark, in full confidence, “I have my curiosity, and I have my chagrins. You are not more than ordinarily honourable, perhaps?” I announce myself, “Madame, a gentleman from the birth, and a gentleman to the death; but not more than ordinarily honourable. I despise such a weak fantasy.” Thereupon she is pleased to compliment. “The difference between you and the rest is,” she answers, “that you say so.” For she knows Society. I accept her congratulations with gallantry and politeness. Politeness and little gallantries are inseparable from my character. She then makes a proposition, which is, in effect, that she has seen us much together; that it appears to her that I am for the passing time the cat of the house, the friend of the family; that her curiosity and her chagrins awaken the fancy to be acquainted with their movements, to know the manner of their life, how the fair Gowana is beloved, how the fair Gowana is cherished, and so on. She is not rich, but offers such and such little recompenses for the little cares and derangements of such services; and I graciously—to do everything graciously is a part of my character—consent to accept them. O yes! So goes the world. It is the mode.’

Though Clennam’s back was turned while he spoke, and thenceforth to the end of the interview, he kept those glittering eyes of his that were too near together, upon him, and evidently saw in the very carriage of the head, as he passed with his braggart recklessness from clause to clause of what he said, that he was saying nothing which Clennam did not already know.

‘Whoof! The fair Gowana!’ he said, lighting a third cigarette

with a sound as if his lightest breath could blow her away. ‘Charming, but imprudent! For it was not well of the fair Gowana to make mysteries of letters from old lovers, in her bedchamber on the mountain, that her husband might not see them. No, no. That was not well. Whoof! The Gowana was mistaken there.’

‘I earnestly hope,’ cried Arthur aloud, ‘that Pancks may not be long gone, for this man’s presence pollutes the room.’

‘Ah! But he’ll flourish here, and everywhere,’ said Rigaud, with an exulting look and snap of his fingers. ‘He always has; he always will!’ Stretching his body out on the only three chairs in the room besides that on which Clennam sat, he sang, smiting himself on the breast as the gallant personage of the song.

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

Who passes by this road so late?

Always gay!

‘Sing the Refrain, pig! You could sing it once, in another jail. Sing it! Or, by every Saint who was stoned to death, I’ll be affronted and compromising; and then some people who are not dead yet, had better have been stoned along with them!’

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

Of all the king’s knights ’tis the flower, Always gay!’

Partly in his old habit of submission, partly because his not

doing it might injure his benefactor, and partly because he would as soon do it as anything else, Cavalletto took up the Refrain this time. Rigaud laughed, and fell to smoking with his eyes shut.

Possibly another quarter of an hour elapsed before Mr Pancks’s step was heard upon the stairs, but the interval seemed to Clennam insupportably long. His step was attended by another step; and when Cavalletto opened the door, he admitted Mr Pancks and Mr Flintwinch. The latter was no sooner visible, than Rigaud rushed at him and embraced him boisterously.

‘How do you find yourself, sir?’ said Mr Flintwinch, as soon as he could disengage himself, which he struggled to do with very little ceremony. ‘Thank you, no; I don’t want any more.’ This was in reference to another menace of attention from his recovered friend.

‘Well, Arthur. You remember what I said to you about sleeping dogs and missing ones. It’s come true, you see.’

He was as imperturbable as ever, to all appearance, and nodded his head in a moralising way as he looked round the room.

‘And this is the Marshalsea prison for debt!’ said Mr Flintwinch. ‘Hah! you have brought your pigs to a very indifferent market, Arthur.’

If Arthur had patience, Rigaud had not. He took his little Flintwinch, with fierce playfulness, by the two lapels of his coat, and cried:

‘To the Devil with the Market, to the Devil with the Pigs, and to the Devil with the Pig-Driver! Now! Give me the answer to my letter.’

‘If you can make it convenient to let go a moment, sir,’ returned Mr Flintwinch, ‘I’ll first hand Mr Arthur a little note that I have for

him.’

He did so. It was in his mother’s maimed writing, on a slip of paper, and contained only these words:

‘I hope it is enough that you have ruined yourself. Rest contented without more ruin. Jeremiah Flintwinch is my messenger and representative.

Your affectionate M. C.’

Clennam read this twice, in silence, and then tore it to pieces. Rigaud in the meanwhile stepped into a chair, and sat himself on the back with his feet upon the seat.

‘Now, Beau Flintwinch,’ he said, when he had closely watched the note to its destruction, ‘the answer to my letter?’

‘Mrs Clennam did not write, Mr Blandois, her hands being cramped, and she thinking it as well to send it verbally by me.’ Mr Flintwinch screwed this out of himself, unwillingly and rustily. ‘She sends her compliments, and says she doesn’t on the whole wish to term you unreasonable, and that she agrees. But without prejudicing the appointment that stands for this day week.’

Monsieur Rigaud, after indulging in a fit of laughter, descended from his throne, saying, ‘Good! I go to seek an hotel!’ But, there his eyes encountered Cavalletto, who was still at his post.

‘Come, Pig,’ he added, ‘I have had you for a follower against my will; now, I’ll have you against yours. I tell you, my little reptiles, I am born to be served. I demand the service of this contrabandist as my domestic until this day week.’

In answer to Cavalletto’s look of inquiry, Clennam made him a sign to go; but he added aloud, ‘unless you are afraid of him.’

Cavalletto replied with a very emphatic finger-negative. ‘No, master, I am not afraid of him, when I no more keep it secrettementally that he was once my comrade.’ Rigaud took no notice of either remark until he had lighted his last cigarette and was quite ready for walking.

‘Afraid of him,’ he said then, looking round upon them all. ‘Whoof! My children, my babies, my little dolls, you are all afraid of him. You give him his bottle of wine here; you give him meat, drink, and lodging there; you dare not touch him with a finger or an epithet. No. It is his character to triumph! Whoof!

‘Of all the king’s knights he’s the flower, And he’s always gay!’

With this adaptation of the Refrain to himself, he stalked out of the room closely followed by Cavalletto, whom perhaps he had pressed into his service because he tolerably well knew it would not be easy to get rid of him. Mr Flintwinch, after scraping his chin, and looking about with caustic disparagement of the Pig- Market, nodded to Arthur, and followed. Mr Pancks, still penitent and depressed, followed too; after receiving with great attention a secret word or two of instructions from Arthur, and whispering back that he would see this affair out, and stand by it to the end. The prisoner, with the feeling that he was more despised, more scorned and repudiated, more helpless, altogether more miserable and fallen than before, was left alone again.

Chapter 29

A Plea in the Marshalsea

aggard anxiety and remorse are bad companions to be barred up with. Brooding all day, and resting very little indeed at night, t will not arm a man against misery.

Next morning, Clennam felt that his health was sinking, as his spirits had already sunk and that the weight under which he bent was bearing him down.

Night after night he had risen from his bed of wretchedness at twelve or one o’clock, and had sat at his window watching the sickly lamps in the yard, and looking upward for the first wan trace of day, hours before it was possible that the sky could show it to him. Now when the night came, he could not even persuade himself to undress.

For a burning restlessness set in, an agonised impatience of the prison, and a conviction that he was going to break his heart and die there, which caused him indescribable suffering. His dread and hatred of the place became so intense that he felt it a labour to draw his breath in it. The sensation of being stifled sometimes so overpowered him, that he would stand at the window holding his throat and gasping. At the same time a longing for other air, and a yearning to be beyond the blind blank wall, made him feel as if he must go mad with the ardour of the desire.

Many other prisoners had had experience of this condition before him, and its violence and continuity had worn themselves out in their cases, as they did in his. Two nights and a day

exhausted it. It came back by fits, but those grew fainter and returned at lengthening intervals. A desolate calm succeeded; and the middle of the week found him settled down in the despondency of low, slow fever.

With Cavalletto and Pancks away, he had no visitors to fear but Mr and Mrs Plornish. His anxiety, in reference to that worthy pair, was that they should not come near him; for, in the morbid state of his nerves, he sought to be left alone, and spared the being seen so subdued and weak. He wrote a note to Mrs Plornish representing himself as occupied with his affairs, and bound by the necessity of devoting himself to them, to remain for a time even without the pleasant interruption of a sight of her kind face. As to Young John, who looked in daily at a certain hour, when the turnkeys were relieved, to ask if he could do anything for him; he always made a pretence of being engaged in writing, and to answer cheerfully in the negative. The subject of their only long conversation had never been revived between them. Through all these changes of unhappiness, however, it had never lost its hold on Clennam’s mind.

The sixth day of the appointed week was a moist, hot, misty day. It seemed as though the prison’s poverty, and shabbiness, and dirt, were growing in the sultry atmosphere. With an aching head and a weary heart, Clennam had watched the miserable night out, listening to the fall of rain on the yard pavement, thinking of its softer fall upon the country earth. A blurred circle of yellow haze had risen up in the sky in lieu of sun, and he had watched the patch it put upon his wall, like a bit of the prison’s raggedness. He had heard the gates open; and the badly shod feet that waited outside shuffle in; and the sweeping, and pumping, and moving

about, begin, which commenced the prison morning. So ill and faint that he was obliged to rest many times in the process of getting himself washed, he had at length crept to his chair by the open window. In it he sat dozing, while the old woman who arranged his room went through her morning’s work.

Light of head with want of sleep and want of food (his appetite, and even his sense of taste, having forsaken him), he had been two or three times conscious, in the night, of going astray. He had heard fragments of tunes and songs in the warm wind, which he knew had no existence. Now that he began to doze in exhaustion, he heard them again; and voices seemed to address him, and he answered, and started.

Dozing and dreaming, without the power of reckoning time, so that a minute might have been an hour and an hour a minute, some abiding impression of a garden stole over him—a garden of flowers, with a damp warm wind gently stirring their scents. It required such a painful effort to lift his head for the purpose of inquiring into this, or inquiring into anything, that the impression appeared to have become quite an old and importunate one when he looked round. Beside the tea-cup on his table he saw, then, a blooming nosegay: a wonderful handful of the choicest and most lovely flowers.

Nothing had ever appeared so beautiful in his sight. He took them up and inhaled their fragrance, and he lifted them to his hot head, and he put them down and opened his parched hands to them, as cold hands are opened to receive the cheering of a fire. It was not until he had delighted in them for some time, that he wondered who had sent them; and opened his door to ask the woman who must have put them there, how they had come into

her hands. But she was gone, and seemed to have been long gone; for the tea she had left for him on the table was cold. He tried to drink some, but could not bear the odour of it: so he crept back to his chair by the open window, and put the flowers on the little round table of old.

When the first faintness consequent on having moved about had left him, he subsided into his former state. One of the night- tunes was playing in the wind, when the door of his room seemed to open to a light touch, and, after a moment’s pause, a quiet figure seemed to stand there, with a black mantle on it. It seemed to draw the mantle off and drop it on the ground, and then it seemed to be his Little Dorrit in her old, worn dress. It seemed to tremble, and to clasp its hands, and to smile, and to burst into tears.

He roused himself, and cried out. And then he saw, in the loving, pitying, sorrowing, dear face, as in a mirror, how changed he was; and she came towards him; and with her hands laid on his breast to keep him in his chair, and with her knees upon the floor at his feet, and with her lips raised up to kiss him, and with her tears dropping on him as the rain from Heaven had dropped upon the flowers, Little Dorrit, a living presence, called him by his name.

‘O, my best friend! Dear Mr Clennam, don’t let me see you weep! Unless you weep with pleasure to see me. I hope you do. Your own poor child come back!’ So faithful, tender, and unspoiled by Fortune. In the sound of her voice, in the light of her eyes, in the touch of her hands, so Angelically comforting and true!

As he embraced her, she said to him, ‘They never told me you were ill,’ and drawing an arm softly round his neck, laid his head

upon her bosom, put a hand upon his head, and resting her cheek upon that hand, nursed him as lovingly, and GOD knows as innocently, as she had nursed her father in that room when she had been but a baby, needing all the care from others that she took of them.

When he could speak, he said, ‘Is it possible that you have come to me? And in this dress?’

‘I hoped you would like me better in this dress than any other. I have always kept it by me, to remind me: though I wanted no reminding. I am not alone, you see. I have brought an old friend with me.’

Looking round, he saw Maggy in her big cap which had been long abandoned, with a basket on her arm as in the bygone days, chuckling rapturously.

‘It was only yesterday evening that I came to London with my brother. I sent round to Mrs Plornish almost as soon as we arrived, that I might hear of you and let you know I had come. Then I heard that you were here. Did you happen to think of me in the night? I almost believe you must have thought of me a little. I thought of you so anxiously, and it appeared so long to morning.’

‘I have thought of you—’ he hesitated what to call her. She perceived it in an instant.

‘You have not spoken to me by my right name yet. You know what my right name always is with you.’

‘I have thought of you, Little Dorrit, every day, every hour, every minute, since I have been here.’

‘Have you? Have you?’

He saw the bright delight of her face, and the flush that kindled in it, with a feeling of shame. He, a broken, bankrupt, sick,

dishonoured prisoner.

‘I was here before the gates were opened, but I was afraid to come straight to you. I should have done you more harm than good, at first; for the prison was so familiar and yet so strange, and it brought back so many remembrances of my poor father, and of you too, that at first it overpowered me. But we went to Mr Chivery before we came to the gate, and he brought us in, and got john’s room for us—my poor old room, you know—and we waited there a little. I brought the flowers to the door, but you didn’t hear me.’ She looked something more womanly than when she had gone away, and the ripening touch of the Italian sun was visible upon her face. But, otherwise, she was quite unchanged. The same deep, timid earnestness that he had always seen in her, and never without emotion, he saw still. If it had a new meaning that smote him to the heart, the change was in his perception, not in her.

She took off her old bonnet, hung it in the old place, and noiselessly began, with Maggy’s help, to make his room as fresh and neat as it could be made, and to sprinkle it with a pleasant- smelling water. When that was done, the basket, which was filled with grapes and other fruit, was unpacked, and all its contents were quietly put away. When that was done, a moment’s whisper despatched Maggy to despatch somebody else to fill the basket again; which soon came back replenished with new stores, from which a present provision of cooling drink and jelly, and a prospective supply of roast chicken and wine and water, were the first extracts. These various arrangements completed, she took out her old needle-case to make him a curtain for his window; and thus, with a quiet reigning in the room, that seemed to diffuse itself through the else noisy prison, he found himself composed in

his chair, with Little Dorrit working at his side.

To see the modest head again bent down over its task, and the nimble fingers busy at their old work—though she was not so absorbed in it, but that her compassionate eyes were often raised to his face, and, when they drooped again had tears in them—to be so consoled and comforted, and to believe that all the devotion of this great nature was turned to him in his adversity to pour out its inexhaustible wealth of goodness upon him, did not steady Clennam’s trembling voice or hand, or strengthen him in his weakness. Yet it inspired him with an inward fortitude, that rose with his love. And how dearly he loved her now, what words can tell!

As they sat side by side in the shadow of the wall, the shadow fell like light upon him. She would not let him speak much, and he lay back in his chair, looking at her. Now and again she would rise and give him the glass that he might drink, or would smooth the resting-place of his head; then she would gently resume her seat by him, and bend over her work again.

The shadow moved with the sun, but she never moved from his side, except to wait upon him. The sun went down and she was still there. She had done her work now, and her hand, faltering on the arm of his chair since its last tending of him, was hesitating there yet. He laid his hand upon it, and it clasped him with a trembling supplication.

‘Dear Mr Clennam, I must say something to you before I go. I have put it off from hour to hour, but I must say it.’

‘I too, dear Little Dorrit. I have put off what I must say.’ She nervously moved her hand towards his lips as if to stop him; then it dropped, trembling, into its former place.

‘I am not going abroad again. My brother is, but I am not. He was always attached to me, and he is so grateful to me now—so much too grateful, for it is only because I happened to be with him in his illness—that he says I shall be free to stay where I like best, and to do what I like best. He only wishes me to be happy, he says.’ There was one bright star shining in the sky. She looked up at it While she spoke, as if it were the fervent purpose of her own heart

shining above her.

‘You will understand, I dare say, without my telling you, that my brother has come home to find my dear father’s will, and to take possession of his property. He says, if there is a will, he is sure I shall be left rich; and if there is none, that he will make me so.’

He would have spoken; but she put up her trembling hand again, and he stopped.

‘I have no use for money, I have no wish for it. It would be of no value at all to me but for your sake. I could not be rich, and you here. I must always be much worse than poor, with you distressed. Will you let me lend you all I have? Will you let me give it you? Will you let me show you that I have never forgotten, that I never can forget, your protection of me when this was my home? Dear Mr Clennam, make me of all the world the happiest, by saying Yes. Make me as happy as I can be in leaving you here, by saying nothing to-night, and letting me go away with the hope that you will think of it kindly; and that for my sake—not for yours, for mine, for nobody’s but mine!—you will give me the greatest joy I can experience on earth, the joy of knowing that I have been serviceable to you, and that I have paid some little of the great debt of my affection and gratitude. I can’t say what I wish to say. I can’t visit you here where I have lived so long, I can’t think of you

here where I have seen so much, and be as calm and comforting as I ought. My tears will make their way. I cannot keep them back. But pray, pray, pray, do not turn from your Little Dorrit, now, in your affliction! Pray, pray, pray, I beg you and implore you with all my grieving heart, my friend—my dear!—take all I have, and make it a Blessing to me!’

The star had shone on her face until now, when her face sank upon his hand and her own.

It had grown darker when he raised her in his encircling arm, and softly answered her.

‘No, darling Little Dorrit. No, my child. I must not hear of such a sacrifice. Liberty and hope would be so dear, bought at such a price, that I could never support their weight, never bear the reproach of possessing them. But with what ardent thankfulness and love I say this, I may call Heaven to witness!’

‘And yet you will not let me be faithful to you in your affliction?’ ‘Say, dearest Little Dorrit, and yet I will try to be faithful to you.

If, in the bygone days when this was your home and when this was your dress, I had understood myself (I speak only of myself) better, and had read the secrets of my own breast more distinctly; if, through my reserve and self-mistrust, I had discerned a light that I see brightly now when it has passed far away, and my weak footsteps can never overtake it; if I had then known, and told you that I loved and honoured you, not as the poor child I used to call you, but as a woman whose true hand would raise me high above myself and make me a far happier and better man; if I had so used the opportunity there is no recalling—as I wish I had, O I wish I had!—and if something had kept us apart then, when I was moderately thriving, and when you were poor; I might have met

your noble offer of your fortune, dearest girl, with other words than these, and still have blushed to touch it. But, as it is, I must never touch it, never!’

She besought him, more pathetically and earnestly, with her little supplicatory hand, than she could have done in any words.

‘I am disgraced enough, my Little Dorrit. I must not descend so low as that, and carry you—so dear, so generous, so good—down with me. GOD bless you, GOD reward you! It is past.’ He took her in his arms, as if she had been his daughter.

‘Always so much older, so much rougher, and so much less worthy, even what I was must be dismissed by both of us, and you must see me only as I am. I put this parting kiss upon your cheek, my child—who might have been more near to me, who never could have been more dear—a ruined man far removed from you, for ever separated from you, whose course is run while yours is but beginning. I have not the courage to ask to be forgotten by you in my humiliation; but I ask to be remembered only as I am.’

The bell began to ring, warning visitors to depart. He took her mantle from the wall, and tenderly wrapped it round her.

‘One other word, my Little Dorrit. A hard one to me, but it is a necessary one. The time when you and this prison had anything in common has long gone by. Do you understand?’

‘O! you will never say to me,’ she cried, weeping bitterly, and holding up her clasped hands in entreaty, ‘that I am not to come back any more! You will surely not desert me so!’

‘I would say it, if I could; but I have not the courage quite to shut out this dear face, and abandon all hope of its return. But do not come soon, do not come often! This is now a tainted place, and I well know the taint of it clings to me. You belong to much

brighter and better scenes. You are not to look back here, my Little Dorrit; you are to look away to very different and much happier paths. Again, GOD bless you in them! GOD reward you!’

Maggy, who had fallen into very low spirits, here cried, ‘Oh get him into a hospital; do get him into a hospital, Mother! He’ll never look like hisself again, if he an’t got into a hospital. And then the little woman as was always a spinning at her wheel, she can go to the cupboard with the Princess, and say, what do you keep the Chicking there for? and then they can take it out and give it to him, and then all be happy!’

The interruption was seasonable, for the bell had nearly rung itself out. Again tenderly wrapping her mantle about her, and taking her on his arm (though, but for her visit, he was almost too weak to walk), Arthur led Little Dorrit down-stairs. She was the last visitor to pass out at the Lodge, and the gate jarred heavily and hopelessly upon her.

With the funeral clang that it sounded into Arthur’s heart, his sense of weakness returned. It was a toilsome journey up-stairs to his room, and he re-entered its dark solitary precincts in unutterable misery.

When it was almost midnight, and the prison had long been quiet, a cautious creak came up the stairs, and a cautious tap of a key was given at his door. It was Young John. He glided in, in his stockings, and held the door closed, while he spoke in a whisper.

‘It’s against all rules, but I don’t mind. I was determined to come through, and come to you.’

‘What is the matter?’

‘Nothing’s the matter, sir. I was waiting in the court-yard for Miss Dorrit when she came out. I thought you’d like some one to

see that she was safe.’

‘Thank you, thank you! You took her home, John?’

‘I saw her to her hotel. The same that Mr Dorrit was at. Miss Dorrit walked all the way, and talked to me so kind, it quite knocked me over. Why do you think she walked instead of riding?’

‘I don’t know, John.’

‘To talk about you. She said to me, “John, you was always honourable, and if you’ll promise me that you will take care of him, and never let him want for help and comfort when I am not there, my mind will be at rest so far.” I promised her. And I’ll stand by you,’ said John Chivery, ‘for ever!’

Clennam, much affected, stretched out his hand to this honest spirit.

‘Before I take it,’ said John, looking at it, without coming from the door, ‘guess what message Miss Dorrit gave me.’

Clennam shook his head.

‘“Tell him,”’ repeated John, in a distinct, though quavering voice, ‘“that his Little Dorrit sent him her undying love.” Now it’s delivered. Have I been honourable, sir?’

‘Very, very!’

‘Will you tell Miss Dorrit I’ve been honourable, sir?’ ‘I will indeed.’

‘There’s my hand, sir,’ said john, ‘and I’ll stand by you forever!’

After a hearty squeeze, he disappeared with the same cautious creak upon the stair, crept shoeless over the pavement of the yard, and, locking the gates behind him, passed out into the front where he had left his shoes. If the same way had been paved with burning ploughshares, it is not at all improbable that John would have traversed it with the same devotion, for the same purpose.

Chapter 30

Closing in

T

he last day of the appointed week touched the bars of the Marshalsea gate. Black, all night, since the gate had clashed upon Little Dorrit, its iron stripes were turned by

the early-glowing sun into stripes of gold. Far aslant across the city, over its jumbled roofs, and through the open tracery of its church towers, struck the long bright rays, bars of the prison of this lower world.

Throughout the day the old house within the gateway remained untroubled by any visitors. But, when the sun was low, three men turned in at the gateway and made for the dilapidated house.

Rigaud was the first, and walked by himself smoking. Mr Baptist was the second, and jogged close after him, looking at no other object. Mr Pancks was the third, and carried his hat under his arm for the liberation of his restive hair; the weather being extremely hot. They all came together at the door-steps.

‘You pair of madmen!’ said Rigaud, facing about. ‘Don’t go yet!’ ‘We don’t mean to,’ said Mr Pancks. Giving him a dark glance in

acknowledgment of his answer, Rigaud knocked loudly. He had charged himself with drink, for the playing out of his game, and was impatient to begin. He had hardly finished one long resounding knock, when he turned to the knocker again and began another. That was not yet finished when Jeremiah Flintwinch opened the door, and they all clanked into the stone hall. Rigaud, thrusting Mr Flintwinch aside, proceeded straight

up-stairs. His two attendants followed him, Mr Flintwinch followed them, and they all came trooping into Mrs Clennam’s quiet room. It was in its usual state; except that one of the windows was wide open, and Affery sat on its old-fashioned window-seat, mending a stocking. The usual articles were on the little table; the usual deadened fire was in the grate; the bed had its usual pall upon it; and the mistress of all sat on her black bier- like sofa, propped up by her black angular bolster that was like the headsman’s block.

Yet there was a nameless air of preparation in the room, as if it were strung up for an occasion. From what the room derived it— every one of its small variety of objects being in the fixed spot it had occupied for years—no one could have said without looking attentively at its mistress, and that, too, with a previous knowledge of her face. Although her unchanging black dress was in every plait precisely as of old, and her unchanging attitude was rigidly preserved, a very slight additional setting of her features and contraction of her gloomy forehead was so powerfully marked, that it marked everything about her.

‘Who are these?’ she said, wonderingly, as the two attendants entered. ‘What do these people want here?’

‘Who are these, dear madame, is it?’ returned Rigaud. ‘Faith, they are friends of your son the prisoner. And what do they want here, is it? Death, madame, I don’t know. You will do well to ask them.’

‘You know you told us at the door, not to go yet,’ said Pancks. ‘And you know you told me at the door, you didn’t mean to go,’

retorted Rigaud. ‘In a word, madame, permit me to present two spies of the prisoner’s—madmen, but spies. If you wish them to

remain here during our little conversation, say the word. It is nothing to me.’

‘Why should I wish them to remain here?’ said Mrs Clennam. ‘What have I to do with them?’

‘Then, dearest madame,’ said Rigaud, throwing himself into an arm-chair so heavily that the old room trembled, ‘you will do well to dismiss them. It is your affair. They are not my spies, not my rascals.’

‘Hark! You Pancks,’ said Mrs Clennam, bending her brows upon him angrily, ‘you Casby’s clerk! Attend to your employer’s business and your own. Go. And take that other man with you.’

‘Thank you, ma’am,’ returned Mr Pancks, ‘I am glad to say I see no objection to our both retiring. We have done all we undertook to do for Mr Clennam. His constant anxiety has been (and it grew worse upon him when he became a prisoner), that this agreeable gentleman should be brought back here to the place from which he slipped away. Here he is—brought back. And I will say,’ added Mr Pancks, ‘to his ill-looking face, that in my opinion the world would be no worse for his slipping out of it altogether.’

‘Your opinion is not asked,’ answered Mrs Clennam. ‘Go.’

‘I am sorry not to leave you in better company, ma’am,’ said Pancks; ‘and sorry, too, that Mr Clennam can’t be present. It’s my fault, that is.’

‘You mean his own,’ she returned.

‘No, I mean mine, ma’am,’ said Pancks, ‘for it was my misfortune to lead him into a ruinous investment.’ (Mr Pancks still clung to that word, and never said speculation.) ‘Though I can prove by figures,’ added Mr Pancks, with an anxious countenance, ‘that it ought to have been a good investment. I have gone over it

since it failed, every day of my life, and it comes out—regarded as a question of figures—triumphant. The present is not a time or place,’ Mr Pancks pursued, with a longing glance into his hat, where he kept his calculations, ‘for entering upon the figures; but the figures are not to be disputed. Mr Clennam ought to have been at this moment in his carriage and pair, and I ought to have been worth from three to five thousand pound.’

Mr Pancks put his hair erect with a general aspect of confidence that could hardly have been surpassed, if he had had the amount in his pocket. These incontrovertible figures had been the occupation of every moment of his leisure since he had lost his money, and were destined to afford him consolation to the end of his days.

‘However,’ said Mr Pancks, ‘enough of that. Altro, old boy, you have seen the figures, and you know how they come out.’ Mr Baptist, who had not the slightest arithmetical power of compensating himself in this way, nodded, with a fine display of bright teeth.

At whom Mr Flintwinch had been looking, and to whom he then said:

‘Oh! it’s you, is it? I thought I remembered your face, but I wasn’t certain till I saw your teeth. Ah! yes, to be sure. It was this officious refugee,’ said Jeremiah to Mrs Clennam, ‘who came knocking at the door on the night when Arthur and Chatterbox were here, and who asked me a whole Catechism of questions about Mr Blandois.’

‘It is true,’ Mr Baptist cheerfully admitted. ‘And behold him, padrone! I have found him consequentementally.’

‘I shouldn’t have objected,’ returned Mr Flintwinch, ‘to your

having broken your neck consequentementally.’

‘And now,’ said Mr Pancks, whose eye had often stealthily wandered to the window-seat and the stocking that was being mended there, ‘I’ve only one other word to say before I go. If Mr Clennam was here—but unfortunately, though he has so far got the better of this fine gentleman as to return him to this place against his will, he is ill and in prison—ill and in prison, poor fellow—if he was here,’ said Mr Pancks, taking one step aside towards the window-seat, and laying his right hand upon the stocking; ‘he would say, “Affery, tell your dreams!”’

Mr Pancks held up his right forefinger between his nose and the stocking with a ghostly air of warning, turned, steamed out and towed Mr Baptist after him. The house-door was heard to close upon them, their steps were heard passing over the dull pavement of the echoing court-yard, and still nobody had added a word. Mrs Clennam and Jeremiah had exchanged a look; and had then looked, and looked still, at Affery, who sat mending the stocking with great assiduity.

‘Come!’ said Mr Flintwinch at length, screwing himself a curve or two in the direction of the window-seat, and rubbing the palms of his hands on his coat-tail as if he were preparing them to do something: ‘Whatever has to be said among us had better be begun to be said without more loss of time.—So, Affery, my woman, take yourself away!’

In a moment Affery had thrown the stocking down, started up, caught hold of the windowsill with her right hand, lodged herself upon the window-seat with her right knee, and was flourishing her left hand, beating expected assailants off.

‘No, I won’t, Jeremiah—no, I won’t—no, I won’t! I won’t go! I’ll

stay here. I’ll hear all I don’t know, and say all I know. I will, at last, if I die for it. I will, I will, I will, I will!’

Mr Flintwinch, stiffening with indignation and amazement, moistened the fingers of one hand at his lips, softly described a circle with them in the palm of the other hand, and continued with a menacing grin to screw himself in the direction of his wife; gasping some remark as he advanced, of which, in his choking anger, only the words, ‘Such a dose!’ were audible.

‘Not a bit nearer, Jeremiah!’ cried Affery, never ceasing to beat the air. ‘Don’t come a bit nearer to me, or I’ll rouse the neighbourhood! I’ll throw myself out of window. I’ll scream Fire and Murder! I’ll wake the dead! Stop where you are, or I’ll make shrieks enough to wake the dead!’

The determined voice of Mrs Clennam echoed ‘Stop!’ Jeremiah had stopped already. ‘It is closing in, Flintwinch. Let her alone. Affery, do you turn against me after these many years?’

‘I do, if it’s turning against you to hear what I don’t know, and say what I know. I have broke out now, and I can’t go back. I am determined to do it. I will do it, I will, I will, I will! If that’s turning against you, yes, I turn against both of you two clever ones. I told Arthur when he first come home to stand up against you. I told him it was no reason, because I was afeard of my life of you, that he should be. All manner of things have been a-going on since then, and I won’t be run up by Jeremiah, nor yet I won’t be dazed and scared, nor made a party to I don’t know what, no more. I won’t, I won’t, I won’t! I’ll up for Arthur when he has nothing left, and is ill, and in prison, and can’t up for himself. I will, I will, I will, I will!’

‘How do you know, you heap of confusion,’ asked Mrs Clennam

sternly, ‘that in doing what you are doing now, you are even serving Arthur?’

‘I don’t know nothing rightly about anything,’ said Affery; ‘and if ever you said a true word in your life, it’s when you call me a heap of confusion, for you two clever ones have done your most to make me such. You married me whether I liked it or not, and you’ve led me, pretty well ever since, such a life of dreaming and frightening as never was known, and what do you expect me to be but a heap of confusion? You wanted to make me such, and I am such; but I won’t submit no longer; no, I won’t, I won’t, I won’t, I won’t!’ She was still beating the air against all comers.

After gazing at her in silence, Mrs Clennam turned to Rigaud. ‘You see and hear this foolish creature. Do you object to such a piece of distraction remaining where she is?’

‘I, madame,’ he replied, ‘do I? That’s a question for you.’

‘I do not,’ she said, gloomily. ‘There is little left to choose now.

Flintwinch, it is closing in.’

Mr Flintwinch replied by directing a look of red vengeance at his wife, and then, as if to pinion himself from falling upon her, screwed his crossed arms into the breast of his waistcoat, and with his chin very near one of his elbows stood in a corner, watching Rigaud in the oddest attitude. Rigaud, for his part, arose from his chair, and seated himself on the table with his legs dangling. In this easy attitude, he met Mrs Clennam’s set face, with his moustache going up and his nose coming down.

‘Madame, I am a gentleman—’

‘Of whom,’ she interrupted in her steady tones, ‘I have heard disparagement, in connection with a French jail and an accusation of murder.’

He kissed his hand to her with his exaggerated gallantry. ‘Perfectly. Exactly. Of a lady too! What absurdity! How

incredible! I had the honour of making a great success then; I hope to have the honour of making a great success now. I kiss your hands. Madame, I am a gentleman (I was going to observe), who when he says, “I will definitely finish this or that affair at the present sitting,” does definitely finish it. I announce to you that we are arrived at our last sitting on our little business. You do me the favour to follow, and to comprehend?’

She kept her eyes fixed upon him with a frown. ‘Yes.’

‘Further, I am a gentleman to whom mere mercenary trade- bargains are unknown, but to whom money is always acceptable as the means of pursuing his pleasures. You do me the favour to follow, and to comprehend?’

‘Scarcely necessary to ask, one would say. Yes.’

‘Further, I am a gentleman of the softest and sweetest disposition, but who, if trifled with, becomes enraged. Noble natures under such circumstances become enraged. I possess a noble nature. When the lion is awakened—that is to say, when I enrage—the satisfaction of my animosity is as acceptable to me as money. You always do me the favour to follow, and to comprehend?’

‘Yes,’ she answered, somewhat louder than before.

‘Do not let me derange you; pray be tranquil. I have said we are now arrived at our last sitting. Allow me to recall the two sittings we have held.’

‘It is not necessary.’

‘Death, madame,’ he burst out, ‘it’s my fancy! Besides, it clears the way. The first sitting was limited. I had the honour of making

your acquaintance—of presenting my letter; I am a Knight of Industry, at your service, madame, but my polished manners had won me so much of success, as a master of languages, among your compatriots who are as stiff as their own starch is to one another, but are ready to relax to a foreign gentleman of polished manners—and of observing one or two little things,’ he glanced around the room and smiled, ‘about this honourable house, to know which was necessary to assure me, and to convince me that I had the distinguished pleasure of making the acquaintance of the lady I sought. I achieved this. I gave my word of honour to our dear Flintwinch that I would return. I gracefully departed.’

Her face neither acquiesced nor demurred. The same when he paused, and when he spoke, it as yet showed him always the one attentive frown, and the dark revelation before mentioned of her being nerved for the occasion.

‘I say, gracefully departed, because it was graceful to retire without alarming a lady. To be morally graceful, not less than physically, is a part of the character of Rigaud Blandois. It was also politic, as leaving you with something overhanging you, to expect me again with a little anxiety on a day not named. But your slave is politic. By Heaven, madame, politic! Let us return. On the day not named, I have again the honour to render myself at your house. I intimate that I have something to sell, which, if not bought, will compromise madame whom I highly esteem. I explain myself generally. I demand—I think it was a thousand pounds. Will you correct me?’

Thus forced to speak, she replied with constraint, ‘You demanded as much as a thousand pounds.’

‘I demand at present, Two. Such are the evils of delay. But to

return once more. We are not accordant; we differ on that occasion. I am playful; playfulness is a part of my amiable character. Playfully, I become as one slain and hidden. For, it may alone be worth half the sum to madame, to be freed from the suspicions that my droll idea awakens. Accident and spies intermix themselves against my playfulness, and spoil the fruit, perhaps—who knows? only you and Flintwinch—when it is just ripe. Thus, madame, I am here for the last time. Listen! Definitely the last.’

As he struck his straggling boot-heels against the flap of the table, meeting her frown with an insolent gaze, he began to change his tone for a fierce one.

‘Bah! Stop an instant! Let us advance by steps. Here is my Hotel-note to be paid, according to contract. Five minutes hence we may be at daggers’ points. I’ll not leave it till then, or you’ll cheat me. Pay it! Count me the money!’

‘Take it from his hand and pay it, Flintwinch,’ said Mrs Clennam.

He spirted it into Mr Flintwinch’s face when the old man advanced to take it, and held forth his hand, repeating noisily, ‘Pay it! Count it out! Good money!’ Jeremiah picked the bill up, looked at the total with a bloodshot eye, took a small canvas bag from his pocket, and told the amount into his hand.

Rigaud chinked the money, weighed it in his hand, threw it up a little way and caught it, chinked it again.

‘The sound of it, to the bold Rigaud Blandois, is like the taste of fresh meat to the tiger. Say, then, madame. How much?’

He turned upon her suddenly with a menacing gesture of the weighted hand that clenched the money, as if he were going to

strike her with it.

‘I tell you again, as I told you before, that we are not rich here, as you suppose us to be, and that your demand is excessive. I have not the present means of complying with such a demand, if I had ever so great an inclination.’

‘If!’ cried Rigaud. ‘Hear this lady with her If! Will you say that you have not the inclination?’

‘I will say what presents itself to me, and not what presents itself to you.’

‘Say it then. As to the inclination. Quick! Come to the inclination, and I know what to do.’

She was no quicker, and no slower, in her reply. ‘It would seem that you have obtained possession of a paper—or of papers— which I assuredly have the inclination to recover.’

Rigaud, with a loud laugh, drummed his heels against the table, and chinked his money. ‘I think so! I believe you there!’

‘The paper might be worth, to me, a sum of money. I cannot say how much, or how little.’

‘What the Devil!’ he asked savagely. ‘Not after a week’s grace to consider?’

‘No! I will not out of my scanty means—for I tell you again, we are poor here, and not rich—I will not offer any price for a power that I do not know the worst and the fullest extent of. This is the third time of your hinting and threatening. You must speak explicitly, or you may go where you will, and do what you will. It is better to be torn to pieces at a spring, than to be a mouse at the caprice of such a cat.’

He looked at her so hard with those eyes too near together that the sinister sight of each, crossing that of the other, seemed to

make the bridge of his hooked nose crooked. After a long survey, he said, with the further setting off of his internal smile:

‘You are a bold woman!’ ‘I am a resolved woman.’

‘You always were. What? She always was; is it not so, my little Flintwinch?’

‘Flintwinch, say nothing to him. It is for him to say, here and now, all he can; or to go hence, and do all he can. You know this to be our determination. Leave him to his action on it.’

She did not shrink under his evil leer, or avoid it. He turned it upon her again, but she remained steady at the point to which she had fixed herself. He got off the table, placed a chair near the sofa, sat down in it, and leaned an arm upon the sofa close to her own, which he touched with his hand. Her face was ever frowning, attentive, and settled.

‘It is your pleasure then, madame, that I shall relate a morsel of family history in this little family society,’ said Rigaud, with a warning play of his lithe fingers on her arm. ‘I am something of a doctor. Let me touch your pulse.’

She suffered him to take her wrist in his hand. Holding it, he proceeded to say:

‘A history of a strange marriage, and a strange mother, and a revenge, and a suppression.—Aye, aye, aye? this pulse is beating curiously! It appears to me that it doubles while I touch it. Are these the usual changes of your malady, madame?’

There was a struggle in her maimed arm as she twisted it away, but there was none in her face. On his face there was his own smile.

‘I have lived an adventurous life. I am an adventurous

character. I have known many adventurers; interesting spirits— amiable society! To one of them I owe my knowledge and my proofs—I repeat it, estimable lady—proofs—of the ravishing little family history I go to commence. You will be charmed with it. But, bah! I forget. One should name a history. Shall I name it the history of a house? But, bah, again. There are so many houses. Shall I name it the history of this house?’

Leaning over the sofa, poised on two legs of his chair and his left elbow; that hand often tapping her arm to beat his words home; his legs crossed; his right hand sometimes arranging his hair, sometimes smoothing his moustache, sometimes striking his nose, always threatening her whatever it did; coarse, insolent, rapacious, cruel, and powerful, he pursued his narrative at his ease.

‘In fine, then, I name it the history of this house. I commence it. There live here, let us suppose, an uncle and nephew. The uncle, a rigid old gentleman of strong force of character; the nephew, habitually timid, repressed, and under constraint.’

Mistress Affery, fixedly attentive in the window-seat, biting the rolled up end of her apron, and trembling from head to foot, here cried out, ‘Jeremiah, keep off from me! I’ve heerd, in my dreams, of Arthur’s father and his uncle. He’s a talking of them. It was before my time here; but I’ve heerd in my dreams that Arthur’s father was a poor, irresolute, frightened chap, who had had everything but his orphan life scared out of him when he was young, and that he had no voice in the choice of his wife even, but his uncle chose her. There she sits! I heerd it in my dreams, and you said it to her own self.’

As Mr Flintwinch shook his fist at her, and as Mrs Clennam

gazed upon her, Rigaud kissed his hand to her. ‘Perfectly right, dear Madame Flintwinch. You have a genius for dreaming.’

‘I don’t want none of your praises,’ returned Affery. ‘I don’t want to have nothing at all to say to you. But Jeremiah said they was dreams, and I’ll tell ’em as such!’ Here she put her apron in her mouth again, as if she were stopping somebody else’s mouth— perhaps Jeremiah’s, which was chattering with threats as if he were grimly cold.

‘Our beloved Madame Flintwinch,’ said Rigaud, ‘developing all of a sudden a fine susceptibility and spirituality, is right to a marvel. Yes. So runs the history. Monsieur, the uncle, commands the nephew to marry. Monsieur says to him in effect, “My nephew, I introduce to you a lady of strong force of character, like myself— a resolved lady, a stern lady, a lady who has a will that can break the weak to powder: a lady without pity, without love, implacable, revengeful, cold as the stone, but raging as the fire.”

Ah! what fortitude! Ah, what superiority of intellectual strength! Truly, a proud and noble character that I describe in the supposed words of Monsieur, the uncle. Ha, ha, ha! Death of my soul, I love the sweet lady!’

Mrs Clennam’s face had changed. There was a remarkable darkness of colour on it, and the brow was more contracted. ‘Madame, madame,’ said Rigaud, tapping her on the arm, as if his cruel hand were sounding a musical instrument, ‘I perceive I interest you. I perceive I awaken your sympathy. Let us go on.’

The drooping nose and the ascending moustache had, however, to be hidden for a moment with the white hand, before he could go on; he enjoyed the effect he made so much.

‘The nephew, being, as the lucid Madame Flintwinch has

remarked, a poor devil who has had everything but his orphan life frightened and famished out of him—the nephew abases his head, and makes response: “My uncle, it is to you to command. Do as you will!” Monsieur, the uncle, does as he will. It is what he always does. The auspicious nuptials take place; the newly married come home to this charming mansion; the lady is received, let us suppose, by Flintwinch. Hey, old intriguer?’

Jeremiah, with his eyes upon his mistress, made no reply. Rigaud looked from one to the other, struck his ugly nose, and made a clucking with his tongue.

‘Soon the lady makes a singular and exciting discovery. Thereupon, full of anger, full of jealousy, full of vengeance, she forms—see you, madame!—a scheme of retribution, the weight of which she ingeniously forces her crushed husband to bear himself, as well as execute upon her enemy. What superior intelligence!’

‘Keep off, Jeremiah!’ cried the palpitating Affery, taking her apron from her mouth again. ‘But it was one of my dreams, that you told her, when you quarrelled with her one winter evening at dusk—there she sits and you looking at her—that she oughtn’t to have let Arthur when he come home, suspect his father only; that she had always had the strength and the power; and that she ought to have stood up more to Arthur, for his father. It was in the same dream where you said to her that she was not—not something, but I don’t know what, for she burst out tremendous and stopped you. You know the dream as well as I do. When you come down-stairs into the kitchen with the candle in your hand, and hitched my apron off my head. When you told me I had been dreaming. When you wouldn’t believe the noises.’ After this explosion Affery put her apron into her mouth again; always

keeping her hand on the window-sill and her knee on the window- seat, ready to cry out or jump out if her lord and master approached.

Rigaud had not lost a word of this.

‘Haha!’ he cried, lifting his eyebrows, folding his arms, and leaning back in his chair. ‘Assuredly, Madame Flintwinch is an oracle! How shall we interpret the oracle, you and I and the old intriguer? He said that you were not—? And you burst out and stopped him! What was it you were not? What is it you are not? Say then, madame!’

Under this ferocious banter, she sat breathing harder, and her mouth was disturbed. Her lips quivered and opened, in spite of her utmost efforts to keep them still.

‘Come then, madame! Speak, then! Our old intriguer said that you were not—and you stopped him. He was going to say that you were not—what? I know already, but I want a little confidence from you. How, then? You are not what?’

She tried again to repress herself, but broke out vehemently, ‘Not Arthur’s mother!’

‘Good,’ said Rigaud. ‘You are amenable.’

With the set expression of her face all torn away by the explosion of her passion, and with a bursting, from every rent feature, of the smouldering fire so long pent up, she cried out: ‘I will tell it myself! I will not hear it from your lips, and with the taint of your wickedness upon it. Since it must be seen, I will have it seen by the light I stood in. Not another word. Hear me!’

‘Unless you are a more obstinate and more persisting woman than even I know you to be,’ Mr Flintwinch interposed, ‘you had better leave Mr Rigaud, Mr Blandois, Mr Beelzebub, to tell it in his

own way. What does it signify when he knows all about it?’ ‘He does not know all about it.’

‘He knows all he cares about it,’ Mr Flintwinch testily urged. ‘He does not know me.’

‘What do you suppose he cares for you, you conceited woman?’ said Mr Flintwinch.

‘I tell you, Flintwinch, I will speak. I tell you when it has come to this, I will tell it with my own lips, and will express myself throughout it. What! Have I suffered nothing in this room, no deprivation, no imprisonment, that I should condescend at last to contemplate myself in such a glass as that. Can you see him? Can you hear him? If your wife were a hundred times the ingrate that she is, and if I were a thousand times more hopeless than I am of inducing her to be silent if this man is silenced, I would tell it myself, before I would bear the torment of the hearing it from him.’

Rigaud pushed his chair a little back; pushed his legs out straight before him; and sat with his arms folded over against her.

‘You do not know what it is,’ she went on addressing him, ‘to be brought up strictly and straitly. I was so brought up. Mine was no light youth of sinful gaiety and pleasure. Mine were days of wholesome repression, punishment, and fear. The corruption of our hearts, the evil of our ways, the curse that is upon us, the terrors that surround us—these were the themes of my childhood. They formed my character, and filled me with an abhorrence of evil-doers. When old Mr Gilbert Clennam proposed his orphan nephew to my father for my husband, my father impressed upon me that his bringing-up had been, like mine, one of severe restraint. He told me, that besides the discipline his spirit had

undergone, he had lived in a starved house, where rioting and gaiety were unknown, and where every day was a day of toil and trial like the last. He told me that he had been a man in years long before his uncle had acknowledged him as one; and that from his school-days to that hour, his uncle’s roof has been a sanctuary to him from the contagion of the irreligious and dissolute. When, within a twelvemonth of our marriage, I found my husband, at that time when my father spoke of him, to have sinned against the Lord and outraged me by holding a guilty creature in my place, was I to doubt that it had been appointed to me to make the discovery, and that it was appointed to me to lay the hand of punishment upon that creature of perdition? Was I to dismiss in a moment—not my own wrongs—what was I! but all the rejection of sin, and all the war against it, in which I had been bred?’ She laid her wrathful hand upon the watch on the table.

‘No! “Do not forget.” The initials of those words are within here now, and were within here then. I was appointed to find the old letter that referred to them, and that told me what they meant, and whose work they were, and why they were worked, lying with this watch in his secret drawer. But for that appointment there would have been no discovery. “Do not forget.” It spoke to me like a voice from an angry cloud. Do not forget the deadly sin, do not forget the appointed discovery, do not forget the appointed suffering. I did not forget. Was it my own wrong I remembered? Mine! I was but a servant and a minister. What power could I have over them, but that they were bound in the bonds of their sin, and delivered to me!’

More than forty years had passed over the grey head of this determined woman, since the time she recalled. More than forty

years of strife and struggle with the whisper that, by whatever name she called her vindictive pride and rage, nothing through all eternity could change their nature. Yet, gone those more than forty years, and come this Nemesis now looking her in the face, she still abided by her old impiety—still reversed the order of Creation, and breathed her own breath into a clay image of her Creator. Verily, verily, travellers have seen many monstrous idols in many countries; but no human eyes have ever seen more daring, gross, and shocking images of the Divine nature than we creatures of the dust make in our own likenesses, of our own bad passions.

‘When I forced him to give her up to me, by her name and place of abode,’ she went on in her torrent of indignation and defence; ‘when I accused her, and she fell hiding her face at my feet, was it my injury that I asserted, were they my reproaches that I poured upon her? Those who were appointed of old to go to wicked kings and accuse them—were they not ministers and servants? And had not I, unworthy and far-removed from them, sin to denounce? When she pleaded to me her youth, and his wretched and hard life (that was her phrase for the virtuous training he had belied), and the desecrated ceremony of marriage there had secretly been between them, and the terrors of want and shame that had overwhelmed them both when I was first appointed to be the instrument of their punishment, and the love (for she said the word to me, down at my feet) in which she had abandoned him and left him to me, was it my enemy that became my footstool, were they the words of my wrath that made her shrink and quiver! Not unto me the strength be ascribed; not unto me the wringing of the expiation!’

Many years had come and gone since she had had the free use even of her fingers; but it was noticeable that she had already more than once struck her clenched hand vigorously upon the table, and that when she said these words she raised her whole arm in the air, as though it had been a common action with her.

‘And what was the repentance that was extorted from the hardness of her heart and the blackness of her depravity? I, vindictive and implacable? It may be so, to such as you who know no righteousness, and no appointment except Satan’s. Laugh; but I will be known as I know myself, and as Flintwinch knows me, though it is only to you and this half-witted woman.’

‘Add, to yourself, madame,’ said Rigaud. ‘I have my little suspicions that madame is rather solicitous to be justified to herself.’

‘It is false. It is not so. I have no need to be,’ she said, with great energy and anger.

‘Truly?’ retorted Rigaud. ‘Hah!’

‘I ask, what was the penitence, in works, that was demanded of her?

“You have a child; I have none. You love that child. Give him to me. He shall believe himself to be my son, and he shall be believed by every one to be my son. To save you from exposure, his father shall swear never to see or communicate with you more; equally to save him from being stripped by his uncle, and to save your child from being a beggar, you shall swear never to see or communicate with either of them more. That done, and your present means, derived from my husband, renounced, I charge myself with your support. You may, with your place of retreat unknown, then leave, if you please, uncontradicted by me, the lie that when you passed

out of all knowledge but mine, you merited a good name.” That was all. She had to sacrifice her sinful and shameful affections; no more. She was then free to bear her load of guilt in secret, and to break her heart in secret; and through such present misery (light enough for her, I think!) to purchase her redemption from endless misery, if she could. If, in this, I punished her here, did I not open to her a way hereafter? If she knew herself to be surrounded by insatiable vengeance and unquenchable fires, were they mine? If I threatened her, then and afterwards, with the terrors that encompassed her, did I hold them in my right hand?’

She turned the watch upon the table, and opened it, and, with an unsoftening face, looked at the worked letters within.

‘They did not forget. It is appointed against such offences that the offenders shall not be able to forget. If the presence of Arthur was a daily reproach to his father, and if the absence of Arthur was a daily agony to his mother, that was the just dispensation of Jehovah. As well might it be charged upon me, that the stings of an awakened conscience drove her mad, and that it was the will of the Disposer of all things that she should live so, many years. I devoted myself to reclaim the otherwise predestined and lost boy; to give him the reputation of an honest origin; to bring him up in fear and trembling, and in a life of practical contrition for the sins that were heavy on his head before his entrance into this condemned world. Was that a cruelty? Was I, too, not visited with consequences of the original offence in which I had no complicity? Arthur’s father and I lived no further apart, with half the globe between us, than when we were together in this house. He died, and sent this watch back to me, with its Do not forget. I do NOT forget, though I do not read it as he did. I read in it, that I was

appointed to do these things. I have so read these three letters since I have had them lying on this table, and I did so read them, with equal distinctness, when they were thousands of miles away.’

As she took the watch-case in her hand, with that new freedom in the use of her hand of which she showed no consciousness whatever, bending her eyes upon it as if she were defying it to move her, Rigaud cried with a loud and contemptuous snapping of his fingers. ‘Come, madame! Time runs out. Come, lady of piety, it must be! You can tell nothing I don’t know. Come to the money stolen, or I will! Death of my soul, I have had enough of your other jargon. Come straight to the stolen money!’

‘Wretch that you are,’ she answered, and now her hands clasped her head: ‘through what fatal error of Flintwinch’s, through what incompleteness on his part, who was the only other person helping in these things and trusted with them, through whose and what bringing together of the ashes of a burnt paper, you have become possessed of that codicil, I know no more than how you acquired the rest of your power here—’

‘And yet,’ interrupted Rigaud, ‘it is my odd fortune to have by me, in a convenient place that I know of, that same short little addition to the will of Monsieur Gilbert Clennam, written by a lady and witnessed by the same lady and our old intriguer! Ah, bah, old intriguer, crooked little puppet! Madame, let us go on. Time presses. You or I to finish?’

‘I!’ she answered, with increased determination, if it were possible. ‘I, because I will not endure to be shown myself, and have myself shown to any one, with your horrible distortion upon me. You, with your practices of infamous foreign prisons and galleys would make it the money that impelled me. It was not the

money.’

‘Bah, bah, bah! I repudiate, for the moment, my politeness, and say, Lies, lies, lies. You know you suppressed the deed and kept the money.’

‘Not for the money’s sake, wretch!’ She made a struggle as if she were starting up; even as if, in her vehemence, she had almost risen on her disabled feet. ‘If Gilbert Clennam, reduced to imbecility, at the point of death, and labouring under the delusion of some imaginary relenting towards a girl of whom he had heard that his nephew had once had a fancy for her which he had crushed out of him, and that she afterwards drooped away into melancholy and withdrawal from all who knew her—if, in that state of weakness, he dictated to me, whose life she had darkened with her sin, and who had been appointed to know her wickedness from her own hand and her own lips, a bequest meant as a recompense to her for supposed unmerited suffering; was there no difference between my spurning that injustice, and coveting mere money—a thing which you, and your comrades in the prisons, may steal from anyone?’

‘Time presses, madame. Take care!’

‘If this house was blazing from the roof to the ground,’ she returned, ‘I would stay in it to justify myself against my righteous motives being classed with those of stabbers and thieves.’

Rigaud snapped his fingers tauntingly in her face. ‘One thousand guineas to the little beauty you slowly hunted to death. One thousand guineas to the youngest daughter her patron might have at fifty, or (if he had none) brother’s youngest daughter, on her coming of age, “as the remembrance his disinterestedness may like best, of his protection of a friendless young orphan girl.”

Two thousand guineas. What! You will never come to the money?’ ‘That patron,’ she was vehemently proceeding, when he

checked her.

‘Names! Call him Mr Frederick Dorrit. No more evasions.’

‘That Frederick Dorrit was the beginning of it all. If he had not been a player of music, and had not kept, in those days of his youth and prosperity, an idle house where singers, and players, and such-like children of Evil turned their backs on the Light and their faces to the Darkness, she might have remained in her lowly station, and might not have been raised out of it to be cast down. But, no. Satan entered into that Frederick Dorrit, and counselled him that he was a man of innocent and laudable tastes who did kind actions, and that here was a poor girl with a voice for singing music with. Then he is to have her taught. Then Arthur’s father, who has all along been secretly pining in the ways of virtuous ruggedness for those accursed snares which are called the Arts, becomes acquainted with her. And so, a graceless orphan, training to be a singing girl, carries it, by that Frederick Dorrit’s agency, against me, and I am humbled and deceived!—Not I, that is to say,’ she added quickly, as colour flushed into her face; ‘a greater than I. What am I?’

Jeremiah Flintwinch, who had been gradually screwing himself towards her, and who was now very near her elbow without her knowing it, made a specially wry face of objection when she said these words, and moreover twitched his gaiters, as if such pretensions were equivalent to little barbs in his legs.

‘Lastly,’ she continued, ‘for I am at the end of these things, and I will say no more of them, and you shall say no more of them, and all that remains will be to determine whether the knowledge of

them can be kept among us who are here present; lastly, when I suppressed that paper, with the knowledge of Arthur’s father—’

‘But not with his consent, you know,’ said Mr Flintwinch.

‘Who said with his consent?’ She started to find Jeremiah so near her, and drew back her head, looking at him with some rising distrust. ‘You were often enough between us when he would have had me produce it and I would not, to have contradicted me if I had said, with his consent. I say, when I suppressed that paper, I made no effort to destroy it, but kept it by me, here in this house, many years. The rest of the Gilbert property being left to Arthur’s father, I could at any time, without unsettling more than the two sums, have made a pretence of finding it. But, besides that I must have supported such pretence by a direct falsehood (a great responsibility), I have seen no new reason, in all the time I have been tried here, to bring it to light. It was a rewarding of sin; the wrong result of a delusion. I did what I was appointed to do, and I have undergone, within these four walls, what I was appointed to undergo. When the paper was at last destroyed—as I thought—in my presence, she had long been dead, and her patron, Frederick Dorrit, had long been deservedly ruined and imbecile. He had no daughter. I had found the niece before then; and what I did for her, was better for her far than the money of which she would have had no good.’ She added, after a moment, as though she addressed the watch: ‘She herself was innocent, and I might not have forgotten to relinquish it to her at my death:’ and sat looking at it.

‘Shall I recall something to you, worthy madame?’ said Rigaud. ‘The little paper was in this house on the night when our friend the prisoner—jail-comrade of my soul—came home from foreign

countries. Shall I recall yet something more to you? The little singing-bird that never was fledged, was long kept in a cage by a guardian of your appointing, well enough known to our old intriguer here. Shall we coax our old intriguer to tell us when he saw him last?’

‘I’ll tell you!’ cried Affery, unstopping her mouth. ‘I dreamed it, first of all my dreams. Jeremiah, if you come a-nigh me now, I’ll scream to be heard at St Paul’s! The person as this man has spoken of, was Jeremiah’s own twin brother; and he was here in the dead of the night, on the night when Arthur come home, and Jeremiah with his own hands give him this paper, along with I don’t know what more, and he took it away in an iron box—Help! Murder! Save me from Jere-mi-ah!’

Mr Flintwinch had made a run at her, but Rigaud had caught him in his arms midway. After a moment’s wrestle with him, Flintwinch gave up, and put his hands in his pockets.

‘What!’ cried Rigaud, rallying him as he poked and jerked him back with his elbows, ‘assault a lady with such a genius for dreaming! Ha, ha, ha! Why, she’ll be a fortune to you as an exhibition. All that she dreams comes true. Ha, ha, ha! You’re so like him, Little Flintwinch. So like him, as I knew him (when I first spoke English for him to the host) in the Cabaret of the Three Billiard Tables, in the little street of the high roofs, by the wharf at Antwerp! Ah, but he was a brave boy to drink. Ah, but he was a brave boy to smoke! Ah, but he lived in a sweet bachelor- apartment—furnished, on the fifth floor, above the wood and charcoal merchant’s, and the dress-maker’s, and the chair- maker’s, and the maker of tubs—where I knew him too, and wherewith his cognac and tobacco, he had twelve sleeps a day and

one fit, until he had a fit too much, and ascended to the skies. Ha, ha, ha! What does it matter how I took possession of the papers in his iron box? Perhaps he confided it to my hands for you, perhaps it was locked and my curiosity was piqued, perhaps I suppressed it. Ha, ha, ha! What does it matter, so that I have it safe? We are not particular here; hey, Flintwinch? We are not particular here; is it not so, madame?’

Retiring before him with vicious counter-jerks of his own elbows, Mr Flintwinch had got back into his corner, where he now stood with his hands in his pockets, taking breath, and returning Mrs Clennam’s stare. ‘Ha, ha, ha! But what’s this?’ cried Rigaud. ‘It appears as if you don’t know, one the other. Permit me, Madame Clennam who suppresses, to present Monsieur Flintwinch who intrigues.’

Mr Flintwinch, unpocketing one of his hands to scrape his jaw, advanced a step or so in that attitude, still returning Mrs Clennam’s look, and thus addressed her:

‘Now, I know what you mean by opening your eyes so wide at me, but you needn’t take the trouble, because I don’t care for it. I’ve been telling you for how many years that you’re one of the most opinionated and obstinate of women. That’s what you are. You call yourself humble and sinful, but you are the most Bumptious of your sex. That’s what you are. I have told you, over and over again when we have had a tiff, that you wanted to make everything go down before you, but I wouldn’t go down before you—that you wanted to swallow up everybody alive, but I wouldn’t be swallowed up alive. Why didn’t you destroy the paper when you first laid hands upon it?

I advised you to; but no, it’s not your way to take advice. You

must keep it forsooth. Perhaps you may carry it out at some other time, forsooth. As if I didn’t know better than that! I think I see your pride carrying it out, with a chance of being suspected of having kept it by you. But that’s the way you cheat yourself. just as you cheat yourself into making out that you didn’t do all this business because you were a rigorous woman, all slight, and spite, and power, and unforgiveness, but because you were a servant and a minister, and were appointed to do it. Who are you, that you should be appointed to do it? That may be your religion, but it’s my gammon. And to tell you all the truth while I am about it,’ said Mr Flintwinch, crossing his arms, and becoming the express image of irascible doggedness, ‘I have been rasped—rasped these forty years—by your taking such high ground even with me, who knows better; the effect of it being coolly to put me on low ground. I admire you very much; you are a woman of strong head and great talent; but the strongest head, and the greatest talent, can’t rasp a man for forty years without making him sore. So I don’t care for your present eyes. Now, I am coming to the paper, and mark what I say. You put it away somewhere, and you kept your own counsel where. You’re an active woman at that time, and if you want to get that paper, you can get it. But, mark. There comes a time when you are struck into what you are now, and then if you want to get that paper, you can’t get it. So it lies, long years, in its hiding-place. At last, when we are expecting Arthur home every day, and when any day may bring him home, and it’s impossible to say what rummaging he may make about the house, I recommend you five thousand times, if you can’t get at it, to let me get at it, that it may be put in the fire. But no—no one but you knows where it is, and that’s power; and, call yourself whatever humble

names you will, I call you a female Lucifer in appetite for power! On a Sunday night, Arthur comes home. He has not been in this room ten minutes, when he speaks of his father’s watch. You know very well that the Do Not Forget, at the time when his father sent that watch to you, could only mean, the rest of the story being then all dead and over, Do Not Forget the suppression. Make restitution! Arthur’s ways have frightened you a bit, and the paper shall be burnt after all. So, before that jumping jade and Jezebel,’ Mr Flintwinch grinned at his wife, ‘has got you into bed, you at last tell me where you have put the paper, among the old ledgers in the cellars, where Arthur himself went prowling the very next morning. But it’s not to be burnt on a Sunday night. No; you are strict, you are; we must wait over twelve o’clock, and get into Monday. Now, all this is a swallowing of me up alive that rasps me; so, feeling a little out of temper, and not being as strict as yourself, I take a look at the document before twelve o’clock to refresh my memory as to its appearance—fold up one of the many yellow old papers in the cellars like it—and afterwards, when we have got into Monday morning, and I have, by the light of your lamp, to walk from you, lying on that bed, to this grate, make a little exchange like the conjuror, and burn accordingly. My brother Ephraim, the lunatic-keeper (I wish he had had himself to keep in a strait-waistcoat), had had many jobs since the close of the long job he got from you, but had not done well. His wife died (not that that was much; mine might have died instead, and welcome), he speculated unsuccessfully in lunatics, he got into difficulty about over-roasting a patient to bring him to reason, and he got into debt. He was going out of the way, on what he had been able to scrape up, and a trifle from me. He was here that early Monday

morning, waiting for the tide; in short, he was going to Antwerp, where (I am afraid you’ll be shocked at my saying, And be damned to him!) he made the acquaintance of this gentleman. He had come a long way, and, I thought then, was only sleepy; but, I suppose now, was drunk. When Arthur’s mother had been under the care of him and his wife, she had been always writing, incessantly writing,—mostly letters of confession to you, and Prayers for forgiveness. My brother had handed, from time to time, lots of these sheets to me. I thought I might as well keep them to myself as have them swallowed up alive too; so I kept them in a box, looking over them when I felt in the humour. Convinced that it was advisable to get the paper out of the place, with Arthur coming about it, I put it into this same box, and I locked the whole up with two locks, and I trusted it to my brother to take away and keep, till I should write about it. I did write about it, and never got an answer. I didn’t know what to make of it, till this gentleman favoured us with his first visit. Of course, I began to suspect how it was, then; and I don’t want his word for it now to understand how he gets his knowledge from my papers, and your paper, and my brother’s cognac and tobacco talk (I wish he’d had to gag himself). Now, I have only one thing more to say, you hammer-headed woman, and that is, that I haven’t altogether made up my mind whether I might, or might not, have ever given you any trouble about the codicil. I think not; and that I should have been quite satisfied with knowing I had got the better of you, and that I held the power over you. In the present state of circumstances, I have no more explanation to give you till this time to-morrow night. So you may as well,’ said Mr Flintwinch, terminating his oration with a screw, ‘keep your eyes open at

somebody else, for it’s no use keeping ’em open at me.’

She slowly withdrew them when he had ceased, and dropped her forehead on her hand. Her other hand pressed hard upon the table, and again the curious stir was observable in her, as if she were going to rise.

‘This box can never bring, elsewhere, the price it will bring here.

This knowledge can never be of the same profit to you, sold to any other person, as sold to me. But I have not the present means of raising the sum you have demanded. I have not prospered. What will you take now, and what at another time, and how am I to be assured of your silence?’

‘My angel,’ said Rigaud, ‘I have said what I will take, and time presses. Before coming here, I placed copies of the most important of these papers in another hand. Put off the time till the Marshalsea gate shall be shut for the night, and it will be too late to treat. The prisoner will have read them.’

She put her two hands to her head again, uttered a loud exclamation, and started to her feet. She staggered for a moment, as if she would have fallen; then stood firm.

‘Say what you mean. Say what you mean, man!’

Before her ghostly figure, so long unused to its erect attitude, and so stiffened in it, Rigaud fell back and dropped his voice. It was, to all the three, almost as if a dead woman had risen.

‘Miss Dorrit,’ answered Rigaud, ‘the little niece of Monsieur Frederick, whom I have known across the water, is attached to the prisoner. Miss Dorrit, little niece of Monsieur Frederick, watches at this moment over the prisoner, who is ill. For her I with my own hands left a packet at the prison, on my way here, with a letter of

instructions, “for his sake”—she will do anything for his sake—to keep it without breaking the seal, in case of its being reclaimed before the hour of shutting up to-night—if it should not be reclaimed before the ringing of the prison bell, to give it to him; and it encloses a second copy for herself, which he must give to her. What! I don’t trust myself among you, now we have got so far, without giving my secret a second life. And as to its not bringing me, elsewhere, the price it will bring here, say then, madame, have you limited and settled the price the little niece will give—for his sake—to hush it up? Once more I say, time presses. The packet not reclaimed before the ringing of the bell to-night, you cannot buy. I sell, then, to the little girl!’

Once more the stir and struggle in her, and she ran to a closet, tore the door open, took down a hood or shawl, and wrapped it over her head. Affery, who had watched her in terror, darted to her in the middle of the room, caught hold of her dress, and went on her knees to her.

‘Don’t, don’t, don’t! What are you doing? Where are you going? You’re a fearful woman, but I don’t bear you no ill-will. I can do poor Arthur no good now, that I see; and you needn’t be afraid of me. I’ll keep your secret. Don’t go out, you’ll fall dead in the street. Only promise me, that, if it’s the poor thing that’s kept here secretly, you’ll let me take charge of her and be her nurse. Only promise me that, and never be afraid of me.’

Mrs Clennam stood still for an instant, at the height of her rapid haste, saying in stern amazement:

‘Kept here? She has been dead a score of years or more. Ask Flintwinch—ask him. They can both tell you that she died when Arthur went abroad.’

‘So much the worse,’ said Affery, with a shiver, ‘for she haunts the house, then. Who else rustles about it, making signals by dropping dust so softly? Who else comes and goes, and marks the walls with long crooked touches when we are all a-bed? Who else holds the door sometimes? But don’t go out—don’t go out! Mistress, you’ll die in the street!’

Her mistress only disengaged her dress from the beseeching hands, said to Rigaud, ‘Wait here till I come back!’ and ran out of the room. They saw her, from the window, run wildly through the court-yard and out at the gateway.

For a few moments they stood motionless. Affery was the first to move, and she, wringing her hands, pursued her mistress. Next, Jeremiah Flintwinch, slowly backing to the door, with one hand in a pocket, and the other rubbing his chin, twisted himself out in his reticent way, speechlessly. Rigaud, left alone, composed himself upon the window-seat of the open window, in the old Marseilles- jail attitude. He laid his cigarettes and fire-box ready to his hand, and fell to smoking.

‘Whoof! Almost as dull as the infernal old jail. Warmer, but almost as dismal. Wait till she comes back? Yes, certainly; but where is she gone, and how long will she be gone? No matter! Rigaud Lagnier Blandois, my amiable subject, you will get your money. You will enrich yourself. You have lived a gentleman; you will die a gentleman. You triumph, my little boy; but it is your character to triumph. Whoof!’

In the hour of his triumph, his moustache went up and his nose came down, as he ogled a great beam over his head with particular satisfaction.

Chapter 31

Closed

T

he sun had set, and the streets were dim in the dusty twilight, when the figure so long unused to them hurried on its way. In the immediate neighbourhood of the old

house it attracted little attention, for there were only a few straggling people to notice it; but, ascending from the river by the crooked ways that led to London Bridge, and passing into the great main road, it became surrounded by astonishment.

Resolute and wild of look, rapid of foot and yet weak and uncertain, conspicuously dressed in its black garments and with its hurried head-covering, gaunt and of an unearthly paleness, it pressed forward, taking no more heed of the throng than a sleep- walker. More remarkable by being so removed from the crowd it was among than if it had been lifted on a pedestal to be seen, the figure attracted all eyes. Saunterers pricked up their attention to observe it; busy people, crossing it, slackened their pace and turned their heads; companions pausing and standing aside, whispered one another to look at this spectral woman who was coming by; and the sweep of the figure as it passed seemed to create a vortex, drawing the most idle and most curious after it.

Made giddy by the turbulent irruption of this multitude of staring faces into her cell of years, by the confusing sensation of being in the air, and the yet more confusing sensation of being afoot, by the unexpected changes in half-remembered objects, and the want of likeness between the controllable pictures her

imagination had often drawn of the life from which she was secluded and the overwhelming rush of the reality, she held her way as if she were environed by distracting thoughts, rather than by external humanity and observation. But, having crossed the bridge and gone some distance straight onward, she remembered that she must ask for a direction; and it was only then, when she stopped and turned to look about her for a promising place of inquiry, that she found herself surrounded by an eager glare of faces.

‘Why are you encircling me?’ she asked, trembling.

None of those who were nearest answered; but from the outer ring there arose a shrill cry of ‘’Cause you’re mad!’

‘I am sure as sane as any one here. I want to find the Marshalsea prison.’

The shrill outer circle again retorted, ‘Then that ’ud show you was mad if nothing else did, ’cause it’s right opposite!’

A short, mild, quiet-looking young man made his way through to her, as a whooping ensued on this reply, and said: ‘Was it the Marshalsea you wanted? I’m going on duty there. Come across with me.’

She laid her hand upon his arm, and he took her over the way; the crowd, rather injured by the near prospect of losing her, pressing before and behind and on either side, and recommending an adjournment to Bedlam. After a momentary whirl in the outer court-yard, the prison-door opened, and shut upon them. In the Lodge, which seemed by contrast with the outer noise a place of refuge and peace, a yellow lamp was already striving with the prison shadows.

‘Why, John!’ said the turnkey who admitted them. ‘What is it?’

‘Nothing, father; only this lady not knowing her way, and being badgered by the boys. Who did you want, ma’am?’

‘Miss Dorrit. Is she here?’

The young man became more interested. ‘Yes, she is here.

What might your name be?’ ‘Mrs Clennam.’

‘Mr Clennam’s mother?’ asked the young man.

She pressed her lips together, and hesitated. ‘Yes. She had better be told it is his mother.’

‘You see,’ said the young man, ‘the Marshal’s family living in the country at present, the Marshal has given Miss Dorrit one of the rooms in his house to use when she likes. Don’t you think you had better come up there, and let me bring Miss Dorrit?’

She signified her assent, and he unlocked a door and conducted her up a side staircase into a dwelling-house above. He showed her into a darkening room, and left her. The room looked down into the darkening prison-yard, with its inmates strolling here and there, leaning out of windows communing as much apart as they could with friends who were going away, and generally wearing out their imprisonment as they best might that summer evening. The air was heavy and hot; the closeness of the place, oppressive; and from without there arose a rush of free sounds, like the jarring memory of such things in a headache and heartache. She stood at the window, bewildered, looking down into this prison as it were out of her own different prison, when a soft word or two of surprise made her start, and Little Dorrit stood before her.

‘Is it possible, Mrs Clennam, that you are so happily recovered as—’

Little Dorrit stopped, for there was neither happiness nor

health in the face that turned to her. ‘This is not recovery; it is not strength; I don’t know what it is.’ With an agitated wave of her hand, she put all that aside. ‘You have a packet left with you which you were to give to Arthur, if it was not reclaimed before this place closed to-night.’

‘Yes.’

‘I reclaim it.’

Little Dorrit took it from her bosom, and gave it into her hand, which remained stretched out after receiving it.

‘Have you any idea of its contents?’

Frightened by her being there with that new power Of Movement in her, which, as she said herself, was not strength, and which was unreal to look upon, as though a picture or statue had been animated, Little Dorrit answered ‘No.’

‘Read them.’

Little Dorrit took the packet from the still outstretched hand, and broke the seal. Mrs Clennam then gave her the inner packet that was addressed to herself, and held the other. The shadow of the wall and of the prison buildings, which made the room sombre at noon, made it too dark to read there, with the dusk deepening apace, save in the window. In the window, where a little of the bright summer evening sky could shine upon her, Little Dorrit stood, and read. After a broken exclamation or so of wonder and of terror, she read in silence. When she had finished, she looked round, and her old mistress bowed herself before her.

‘You know, now, what I have done.’

‘I think so. I am afraid so; though my mind is so hurried, and so sorry, and has so much to pity that it has not been able to follow all I have read,’ said Little Dorrit tremulously.

‘I will restore to you what I have withheld from you. Forgive me. Can you forgive me?’

‘I can, and Heaven knows I do! Do not kiss my dress and kneel to me; you are too old to kneel to me; I forgive you freely without that.’

‘I have more yet to ask.’

‘Not in that posture,’ said Little Dorrit. ‘It is unnatural to see your grey hair lower than mine. Pray rise; let me help you.’ With that she raised her up, and stood rather shrinking from her, but looking at her earnestly.

‘The great petition that I make to you (there is another which grows out of it), the great supplication that I address to your merciful and gentle heart, is, that you will not disclose this to Arthur until I am dead. If you think, when you have had time for consideration, that it can do him any good to know it while I am yet alive, then tell him. But you will not think that; and in such case, will you promise me to spare me until I am dead?’

‘I am so sorry, and what I have read has so confused my thoughts,’ returned Little Dorrit, ‘that I can scarcely give you a steady answer. If I should be quite sure that to be acquainted with it will do Mr Clennam no good—’

‘I know you are attached to him, and will make him the first consideration. It is right that he should be the first consideration. I ask that. But, having regarded him, and still finding that you may spare me for the little time I shall remain on earth, will you do it?’

‘I will.’

‘GOD bless you!’

She stood in the shadow so that she was only a veiled form to Little Dorrit in the light; but the sound of her voice, in saying

those three grateful words, was at once fervent and broken— broken by emotion as unfamiliar to her frozen eyes as action to her frozen limbs.

‘You will wonder, perhaps,’ she said in a stronger tone, ‘that I can better bear to be known to you whom I have wronged, than to the son of my enemy who wronged me.—For she did wrong me! She not only sinned grievously against the Lord, but she wronged me. What Arthur’s father was to me, she made him. From our marriage day I was his dread, and that she made me. I was the scourge of both, and that is referable to her. You love Arthur (I can see the blush upon your face; may it be the dawn of happier days to both of you!), and you will have thought already that he is as merciful and kind as you, and why do I not trust myself to him as soon as to you. Have you not thought so?’

‘No thought,’ said Little Dorrit, ‘can be quite a stranger to my heart, that springs out of the knowledge that Mr Clennam is always to be relied upon for being kind and generous and good.’

‘I do not doubt it. Yet Arthur is, of the whole world, the one person from whom I would conceal this, while I am in it. I kept over him as a child, in the days of his first remembrance, my restraining and correcting hand. I was stern with him, knowing that the transgressions of the parents are visited on their offspring, and that there was an angry mark upon him at his birth. I have sat with him and his father, seeing the weakness of his father yearning to unbend to him; and forcing it back, that the child might work out his release in bondage and hardship. I have seen him, with his mother’s face, looking up at me in awe from his little books, and trying to soften me with his mother’s ways that hardened me.’

The shrinking of her auditress stopped her for a moment in her flow of words, delivered in a retrospective gloomy voice.

‘For his good. Not for the satisfaction of my injury. What was I, and what was the worth of that, before the curse of Heaven! I have seen that child grow up; not to be pious in a chosen way (his mother’s influence lay too heavy on him for that), but still to be just and upright, and to be submissive to me. He never loved me, as I once half-hoped he might—so frail we are, and so do the corrupt affections of the flesh war with our trusts and tasks; but he always respected me and ordered himself dutifully to me. He does to this hour. With an empty place in his heart that he has never known the meaning of, he has turned away from me and gone his separate road; but even that he has done considerately and with deference. These have been his relations towards me. Yours have been of a much slighter kind, spread over a much shorter time. When you have sat at your needle in my room, you have been in fear of me, but you have supposed me to have been doing you a kindness; you are better informed now, and know me to have done you an injury. Your misconstruction and misunderstanding of the cause in which, and the motives with which, I have worked out this work, is lighter to endure than his would be. I would not, for any worldly recompense I can imagine, have him in a moment, however blindly, throw me down from the station I have held before him all his life, and change me altogether into something he would cast out of his respect, and think detected and exposed. Let him do it, if it must be done, when I am not here to see it. Let me never feel, while I am still alive, that I die before his face, and utterly perish away from him, like one consumed by lightning and swallowed by an earthquake.’

Her pride was very strong in her, the pain of it and of her old passions was very sharp with her, when she thus expressed herself. Not less so, when she added:

‘Even now, I see you shrink from me, as if I had been cruel.’

Little Dorrit could not gainsay it. She tried not to show it, but she recoiled with dread from the state of mind that had burnt so fiercely and lasted so long. It presented itself to her, with no sophistry upon it, in its own plain nature.

‘I have done,’ said Mrs Clennam, ‘what it was given to me to do. I have set myself against evil; not against good. I have been an instrument of severity against sin. Have not mere sinners like myself been commissioned to lay it low in all time?’

‘In all time?’ repeated Little Dorrit.

‘Even if my own wrong had prevailed with me, and my own vengeance had moved me, could I have found no justification? None in the old days when the innocent perished with the guilty 2 a thousand to one? When the wrath of the hater of the unrighteous was not slaked even in blood, and yet found favour?’

‘O, Mrs Clennam, Mrs Clennam,’ said Little Dorrit, ‘angry feelings and unforgiving deeds are no comfort and no guide to you and me. My life has been passed in this poor prison, and my teaching has been very defective; but let me implore you to remember later and better days. Be guided only by the healer of the sick, the raiser of the dead, the friend of all who were afflicted and forlorn, the patient Master who shed tears of compassion for our infirmities. We cannot but be right if we put all the rest away, and do everything in remembrance of Him. There is no vengeance and no infliction of suffering in His life, I am sure. There can be no confusion in following Him, and seeking for no other footsteps, I

am certain.’

In the softened light of the window, looking from the scene of her early trials to the shining sky, she was not in stronger opposition to the black figure in the shade than the life and doctrine on which she rested were to that figure’s history. It bent its head low again, and said not a word. It remained thus, until the first warning bell began to ring.

‘Hark!’ cried Mrs Clennam starting, ‘I said I had another petition.

It is one that does not admit of delay. The man who brought you this packet and possesses these proofs, is now waiting at my house to be bought off. I can keep this from Arthur, only by buying him off. He asks a large sum; more than I can get together to pay him without having time. He refuses to make any abatement, because his threat is, that if he fails with me, he will come to you. Will you return with me and show him that you already know it? Will you return with me and try to prevail with him? Will you come and help me with him? Do not refuse what I ask in Arthur’s name, though I dare not ask it for Arthur’s sake!’

Little Dorrit yielded willingly. She glided away into the prison for a few moments, returned, and said she was ready to go. They went out by another staircase, avoiding the lodge; and coming into the front court-yard, now all quiet and deserted, gained the street.

It was one of those summer evenings when there is no greater darkness than a long twilight. The vista of street and bridge was plain to see, and the sky was serene and beautiful. People stood and sat at their doors, playing with children and enjoying the evening; numbers were walking for air; the worry of the day had almost worried itself out, and few but themselves were hurried. As

they crossed the bridge, the clear steeples of the many churches looked as if they had advanced out of the murk that usually enshrouded them, and come much nearer. The smoke that rose into the sky had lost its dingy hue and taken a brightness upon it. The beauties of the sunset had not faded from the long light films of cloud that lay at peace in the horizon. From a radiant centre, over the whole length and breadth of the tranquil firmament, great shoots of light streamed among the early stars, like signs of the blessed later covenant of peace and hope that changed the crown of thorns into a glory.

Less remarkable, now that she was not alone and it was darker, Mrs Clennam hurried on at Little Dorrit’s side, unmolested. They left the great thoroughfare at the turning by which she had entered it, and wound their way down among the silent, empty, cross-streets. Their feet were at the gateway, when there was a sudden noise like thunder.

‘What was that! Let us make haste in,’ cried Mrs Clennam. They were in the gateway. Little Dorrit, with a piercing cry,

held her back.

In one swift instant the old house was before them, with the man lying smoking in the window; another thundering sound, and it heaved, surged outward, opened asunder in fifty places, collapsed, and fell. Deafened by the noise, stifled, choked, and blinded by the dust, they hid their faces and stood rooted to the spot. The dust storm, driving between them and the placid sky, parted for a moment and showed them the stars. As they looked up, wildly crying for help, the great pile of chimneys, which was then alone left standing like a tower in a whirlwind, rocked, broke, and hailed itself down upon the heap of ruin, as if every tumbling

fragment were intent on burying the crushed wretch deeper.

So blackened by the flying particles of rubbish as to be unrecognisable, they ran back from the gateway into the street, crying and shrieking. There, Mrs Clennam dropped upon the stones; and she never from that hour moved so much as a finger again, or had the power to speak one word. For upwards of three years she reclined in a wheeled chair, looking attentively at those about her and appearing to understand what they said; but the rigid silence she had so long held was evermore enforced upon her, and except that she could move her eyes and faintly express a negative and affirmative with her head, she lived and died a statue.

Affery had been looking for them at the prison, and had caught sight of them at a distance on the bridge. She came up to receive her old mistress in her arms, to help to carry her into a neighbouring house, and to be faithful to her. The mystery of the noises was out now; Affery, like greater people, had always been right in her facts, and always wrong in the theories she deduced from them.

When the storm of dust had cleared away and the summer night was calm again, numbers of people choked up every avenue of access, and parties of diggers were formed to relieve one another in digging among the ruins. There had been a hundred people in the house at the time of its fall, there had been fifty, there had been fifteen, there had been two. Rumour finally settled the number at two; the foreigner and Mr Flintwinch. The diggers dug all through the short night by flaring pipes of gas, and on a level with the early sun, and deeper and deeper below it as it rose into its zenith, and aslant of it as it declined, and on a level with it

again as it departed. Sturdy digging, and shovelling, and carrying away, in carts, barrows, and baskets, went on without intermission, by night and by day; but it was night for the second time when they found the dirty heap of rubbish that had been the foreigner before his head had been shivered to atoms, like so much glass, by the great beam that lay upon him, crushing him.

Still, they had not come upon Flintwinch yet; so the sturdy digging and shovelling and carrying away went on without intermission by night and by day. It got about that the old house had had famous cellarage (which indeed was true), and that Flintwinch had been in a cellar at the moment, or had had time to escape into one, and that he was safe under its strong arch, and even that he had been heard to cry, in hollow, subterranean, suffocated notes, ‘Here I am!’ At the opposite extremity of the town it was even known that the excavators had been able to open a communication with him through a pipe, and that he had received both soup and brandy by that channel, and that he had said with admirable fortitude that he was All right, my lads, with the exception of his collar-bone. But the digging and shovelling and carrying away went on without intermission, until the ruins were all dug out, and the cellars opened to the light; and still no Flintwinch, living or dead, all right or all wrong, had been turned up by pick or spade.

It began then to be perceived that Flintwinch had not been there at the time of the fall; and it began then to be perceived that he had been rather busy elsewhere, converting securities into as much money as could be got for them on the shortest notice, and turning to his own exclusive account his authority to act for the Firm. Affery, remembering that the clever one had said he would

explain himself further in four-and-twenty hours’ time, determined for her part that his taking himself off within that period with all he could get, was the final satisfactory sum and substance of his promised explanation; but she held her peace, devoutly thankful to be quit of him. As it seemed reasonable to conclude that a man who had never been buried could not be unburied, the diggers gave him up when their task was done, and did not dig down for him into the depths of the earth.

This was taken in ill part by a great many people, who persisted in believing that Flintwinch was lying somewhere among the London geological formation. Nor was their belief much shaken by repeated intelligence which came over in course of time, that an old man who wore the tie of his neckcloth under one ear, and who was very well known to be an Englishman, consorted with the Dutchmen on the quaint banks of the canals of the Hague and in the drinking-shops of Amsterdam, under the style and designation of Mynheer von Flyntevynge.

Chapter 32

Going

rthur continuing to lie very ill in the Marshalsea, and Mr Rugg descrying no break in the legal sky affording a hope of his enlargement, Mr Pancks suffered desperately from

self-reproaches. If it had not been for those infallible figures which proved that Arthur, instead of pining in imprisonment, ought to be promenading in a carriage and pair, and that Mr Pancks, instead of being restricted to his clerkly wages, ought to have from three to five thousand pounds of his own at his immediate disposal, that unhappy arithmetician would probably have taken to his bed, and there have made one of the many obscure persons who turned their faces to the wall and died, as a last sacrifice to the late Mr Merdle’s greatness. Solely supported by his unimpugnable calculations, Mr Pancks led an unhappy and restless life; constantly carrying his figures about with him in his hat, and not only going over them himself on every possible occasion, but entreating every human being he could lay hold of to go over them with him, and observe what a clear case it was. Down in Bleeding Heart Yard there was scarcely an inhabitant of note to whom Mr Pancks had not imparted his demonstration, and, as figures are catching, a kind of cyphering measles broke out in that locality, under the influence of which the whole Yard was light-headed.

The more restless Mr Pancks grew in his mind, the more impatient he became of the Patriarch. In their later conferences his snorting assumed an irritable sound which boded the

Patriarch no good; likewise, Mr Pancks had on several occasions looked harder at the Patriarchal bumps than was quite reconcilable with the fact of his not being a painter, or a peruke- maker in search of the living model.

However, he steamed in and out of his little back Dock according as he was wanted or not wanted in the Patriarchal presence, and business had gone on in its customary course. Bleeding Heart Yard had been harrowed by Mr Pancks, and cropped by Mr Casby, at the regular seasons; Mr Pancks had taken all the drudgery and all the dirt of the business as his share; Mr Casby had taken all the profits, all the ethereal vapour, and all the moonshine, as his share; and, in the form of words which that benevolent beamer generally employed on Saturday evenings, when he twirled his fat thumbs after striking the week’s balance, ‘everything had been satisfactory to all parties—all parties— satisfactory, sir, to all parties.’

The Dock of the Steam-Tug, Pancks, had a leaden roof, which, frying in the very hot sunshine, may have heated the vessel. Be that as it may, one glowing Saturday evening, on being hailed by the lumbering bottle-green ship, the Tug instantly came working out of the Dock in a highly heated condition. ‘Mr Pancks,’ was the Patriarchal remark, ‘you have been remiss, you have been remiss, sir.’

‘What do you mean by that?’ was the short rejoinder.

The Patriarchal state, always a state of calmness and composure, was so particularly serene that evening as to be provoking. Everybody else within the bills of mortality was hot; but the Patriarch was perfectly cool. Everybody was thirsty, and the Patriarch was drinking. There was a fragrance of limes or

lemons about him; and he made a drink of golden sherry, which shone in a large tumbler as if he were drinking the evening sunshine. this was bad, but not the worst. The worst was, that with his big blue eyes, and his polished head, and his long white hair, and his bottle-green legs stretched out before him, terminating in his easy shoes easily crossed at the instep, he had a radiant appearance of having in his extensive benevolence made the drink for the human species, while he himself wanted nothing but his own milk of human kindness.

Wherefore, Mr Pancks said, ‘What do you mean by that?’ and put his hair up with both hands, in a highly portentous manner.

‘I mean, Mr Pancks, that you must be sharper with the people, sharper with the people, much sharper with the people, sir. You don’t squeeze them. You don’t squeeze them. Your receipts are not up to the mark. You must squeeze them, sir, or our connection will not continue to be as satisfactory as I could wish it to be to all parties. All parties.’

‘Don’t I squeeze ’em?’ retorted Mr Pancks. ‘What else am I made for?’

‘You are made for nothing else, Mr Pancks. You are made to do your duty, but you don’t do your duty. You are paid to squeeze, and you must squeeze to pay.’ The Patriarch so much surprised himself by this brilliant turn, after Dr Johnson, which he had not in the least expected or intended, that he laughed aloud; and repeated with great satisfaction, as he twirled his thumbs and nodded at his youthful portrait, ‘Paid to squeeze, sir, and must squeeze to pay.’

‘Oh,’ said Pancks. ‘Anything more?’

‘Yes, sir, yes, sir. Something more. You will please, Mr Pancks,

to squeeze the Yard again, the first thing on Monday morning. ‘ ‘Oh!’ said Pancks. ‘Ain’t that too soon? I squeezed it dry to-day.’ ‘Nonsense, sir. Not near the mark, not near the mark.’

‘Oh!’ said Pancks, watching him as he benevolently gulped down a good draught of his mixture. ‘Anything more?’

‘Yes, sir, yes, sir, something more. I am not at all pleased, Mr Pancks, with my daughter; not at all pleased. Besides calling much too often to inquire for Mrs Clennam, Mrs Clennam, who is not just now in circumstances that are by any means calculated to—to be satisfactory to all parties, she goes, Mr Pancks, unless I am much deceived, to inquire for Mr Clennam in jail. In jail.’

‘He’s laid up, you know,’ said Pancks. ‘Perhaps it’s kind.’

‘Pooh, pooh, Mr Pancks. She has nothing to do with that, nothing to do with that. I can’t allow it. Let him pay his debts and come out, come out; pay his debts, and come out.’

Although Mr Pancks’s hair was standing up like strong wire, he gave it another double-handed impulse in the perpendicular direction, and smiled at his proprietor in a most hideous manner.

‘You will please to mention to my daughter, Mr Pancks, that I can’t allow it, can’t allow it,’ said the Patriarch blandly.

‘Oh!’ said Pancks. ‘You couldn’t mention it yourself?’

‘No, sir, no; you are paid to mention it,’ the blundering old booby could not resist the temptation of trying it again, ‘and you must mention it to pay, mention it to pay.’

‘Oh!’ said Pancks. ‘Anything more?’

‘Yes, sir. It appears to me, Mr Pancks, that you yourself are too often and too much in that direction, that direction. I recommend you, Mr Pancks, to dismiss from your attention both your own losses and other people’s losses, and to mind your business, mind

your business.’

Mr Pancks acknowledged this recommendation with such an extraordinarily abrupt, short, and loud utterance of the monosyllable ‘Oh!’ that even the unwieldy Patriarch moved his blue eyes in something of a hurry, to look at him. Mr Pancks, with a sniff of corresponding intensity, then added, ‘Anything more?’

‘Not at present, sir, not at present. I am going,’ said the Patriarch, finishing his mixture, and rising with an amiable air, ‘to take a little stroll, a little stroll. Perhaps I shall find you here when I come back. If not, sir, duty, duty; squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, on Monday; squeeze on Monday!’

Mr Pancks, after another stiffening of his hair, looked on at the Patriarchal assumption of the broad-brimmed hat, with a momentary appearance of indecision contending with a sense of injury. He was also hotter than at first, and breathed harder. But he suffered Mr Casby to go out, without offering any further remark, and then took a peep at him over the little green window- blinds. ‘I thought so,’ he observed. ‘I knew where you were bound to. Good!’ He then steamed back to his Dock, put it carefully in order, took down his hat, looked round the Dock, said ‘Good-bye!’ and puffed away on his own account. He steered straight for Mrs Plornish’s end of Bleeding Heart Yard, and arrived there, at the top of the steps, hotter than ever.

At the top of the steps, resisting Mrs Plornish’s invitations to come and sit along with father in Happy Cottage—which to his relief were not so numerous as they would have been on any other night than Saturday, when the connection who so gallantly supported the business with everything but money gave their orders freely—at the top of the steps Mr Pancks remained until he

beheld the Patriarch, who always entered the Yard at the other end, slowly advancing, beaming, and surrounded by suitors. Then Mr Pancks descended and bore down upon him, with his utmost pressure of steam on.

The Patriarch, approaching with his usual benignity, was surprised to see Mr Pancks, but supposed him to have been stimulated to an immediate squeeze instead of postponing that operation until Monday. The population of the Yard were astonished at the meeting, for the two powers had never been seen there together, within the memory of the oldest Bleeding Heart. But they were overcome by unutterable amazement when Mr Pancks, going close up to the most venerable of men and halting in front of the bottle-green waistcoat, made a trigger of his right thumb and forefinger, applied the same to the brim of the broad- brimmed hat, and, with singular smartness and precision, shot it off the polished head as if it had been a large marble.

Having taken this little liberty with the Patriarchal person, Mr Pancks further astounded and attracted the Bleeding Hearts by saying in an audible voice, ‘Now, you sugary swindler, I mean to have it out with you!’

Mr Pancks and the Patriarch were instantly the centre of a press, all eyes and ears; windows were thrown open, and door- steps were thronged.

‘What do you pretend to be?’ said Mr Pancks. ‘What’s your moral game? What do you go in for? Benevolence, an’t it? You benevolent!’ Here Mr Pancks, apparently without the intention of hitting him, but merely to relieve his mind and expend his superfluous power in wholesome exercise, aimed a blow at the bumpy head, which the bumpy head ducked to avoid. This

singular performance was repeated, to the ever-increasing admiration of the spectators, at the end of every succeeding article of Mr Pancks’s oration.

‘I have discharged myself from your service,’ said Pancks, ‘that I may tell you what you are. You’re one of a lot of impostors that are the worst lot of all the lots to be met with. Speaking as a sufferer by both, I don’t know that I wouldn’t as soon have the Merdle lot as your lot. You’re a driver in disguise, a screwer by deputy, a wringer, and squeezer, and shaver by substitute. You’re a philanthropic sneak. You’re a shabby deceiver!’ (The repetition of the performance at this point was received with a burst of laughter.)

‘Ask these good people who’s the hard man here. They’ll tell you Pancks, I believe.’

This was confirmed with cries of ‘Certainly,’ and ‘Hear!’

‘But I tell you, good people—Casby! This mound of meekness, this lump of love, this bottle-green smiler, this is your driver!’ said Pancks. ‘If you want to see the man who would flay you alive— here he is! Don’t look for him in me, at thirty shillings a week, but look for him in Casby, at I don’t know how much a year!’

‘Good!’ cried several voices. ‘Hear Mr Pancks!’

‘Hear Mr Pancks?’ cried that gentleman (after repeating the popular performance). ‘Yes, I should think so! It’s almost time to hear Mr Pancks. Mr Pancks has come down into the Yard to-night on purpose that you should hear him. Pancks is only the Works; but here’s the Winder!’

The audience would have gone over to Mr Pancks, as one man, woman, and child, but for the long, grey, silken locks, and the broad-brimmed hat.

‘Here’s the Stop,’ said Pancks, ‘that sets the tune to be ground. And there is but one tune, and its name is Grind, Grind, Grind! Here’s the Proprietor, and here’s his Grubber. Why, good people, when he comes smoothly spinning through the Yard to-night, like a slow-going benevolent Humming-Top, and when you come about him with your complaints of the Grubber, you don’t know what a cheat the Proprietor is! What do you think of his showing himself to-night, that I may have all the blame on Monday? What do you think of his having had me over the coals this very evening, because I don’t squeeze you enough? What do you think of my being, at the present moment, under special orders to squeeze you dry on Monday?’

The reply was given in a murmur of ‘Shame!’ and ‘Shabby!’ ‘Shabby?’ snorted Pancks. ‘Yes, I should think so! The lot that

your Casby belongs to, is the shabbiest of all the lots. Setting their Grubbers on, at a wretched pittance, to do what they’re ashamed and afraid to do and pretend not to do, but what they will have done, or give a man no rest! Imposing on you to give their Grubbers nothing but blame, and to give them nothing but credit! Why, the worst-looking cheat in all this town who gets the value of eighteenpence under false pretences, an’t half such a cheat as this sign-post of The Casby’s Head here!’

Cries of ‘That’s true!’ and ‘No more he an’t!’

‘And see what you get of these fellows, besides,’ said Pancks. ‘See what more you get of these precious Humming-Tops, revolving among you with such smoothness that you’ve no idea of the pattern painted on ’em, or the little window in ’em. I wish to call your attention to myself for a moment. I an’t an agreeable style of chap, I know that very well.’

The auditory were divided on this point; its more uncompromising members crying, ‘No, you are not,’ and its politer materials, ‘Yes, you are.’

‘I am, in general,’ said Mr Pancks, ‘a dry, uncomfortable, dreary Plodder and Grubber. That’s your humble servant. There’s his full-length portrait, painted by himself and presented to you, warranted a likeness! But what’s a man to be, with such a man as this for his Proprietor? What can be expected of him? Did anybody ever find boiled mutton and caper-sauce growing in a cocoa-nut?’

None of the Bleeding Hearts ever had, it was clear from the alacrity of their response.

‘Well,’ said Mr Pancks, ‘and neither will you find in Grubbers like myself, under Proprietors like this, pleasant qualities. I’ve been a Grubber from a boy. What has my life been? Fag and grind, fag and grind, turn the wheel, turn the wheel! I haven’t been agreeable to myself, and I haven’t been likely to be agreeable to anybody else. If I was a shilling a week less useful in ten years’ time, this impostor would give me a shilling a week less; if as useful a man could be got at sixpence cheaper, he would be taken in my place at sixpence cheaper. Bargain and sale, bless you! Fixed principles! It’s a mighty fine sign-post, is The Casby’s Head,’ said Mr Pancks, surveying it with anything rather than admiration; ‘but the real name of the House is the Sham’s Arms. Its motto is, Keep the Grubber always at it. Is any gentleman present,’ said Mr Pancks, breaking off and looking round, ‘acquainted with the English Grammar?’

Bleeding Heart Yard was shy of claiming that acquaintance. ‘It’s no matter,’ said Mr Pancks, ‘I merely wish to remark that

the task this Proprietor has set me, has been never to leave off conjugating the Imperative Mood Present Tense of the verb To keep always at it. Keep thou always at it. Let him keep always at it. Keep we or do we keep always at it. Keep ye or do ye or you keep always at it. Let them keep always at it. Here is your benevolent Patriarch of a Casby, and there is his golden rule. He is uncommonly improving to look at, and I am not at all so. He is as sweet as honey, and I am as dull as ditch-water. He provides the pitch, and I handle it, and it sticks to me. Now,’ said Mr Pancks, closing upon his late Proprietor again, from whom he had withdrawn a little for the better display of him to the Yard; ‘as I am not accustomed to speak in public, and as I have made a rather lengthy speech, all circumstances considered, I shall bring my observations to a close by requesting you to get out of this.’

The Last of the Patriarchs had been so seized by assault, and required so much room to catch an idea in, an so much more room to turn it in, that he had not a word to offer in reply. He appeared to be meditating some Patriarchal way out of his delicate position, when Mr Pancks, once more suddenly applying the trigger to his hat, shot it off again with his former dexterity. On the preceding occasion, one or two of the Bleeding Heart Yarders had obsequiously picked it up and handed it to its owner; but Mr Pancks had now so far impressed his audience, that the Patriarch had to turn and stoop for it himself.

Quick as lightning, Mr Pancks, who, for some moments, had had his right hand in his coat pocket, whipped out a pair of shears, swooped upon the Patriarch behind, and snipped off short the sacred locks that flowed upon his shoulders. In a paroxysm of animosity and rapidity, Mr Pancks then caught the broad-

brimmed hat out of the astounded Patriarch’s hand, cut it down into a mere stewpan, and fixed it on the Patriarch’s head.

Before the frightful results of this desperate action, Mr Pancks himself recoiled in consternation. A bare-polled, goggle-eyed, big- headed lumbering personage stood staring at him, not in the least impressive, not in the least venerable, who seemed to have started out of the earth to ask what was become of Casby. After staring at this phantom in return, in silent awe, Mr Pancks threw down his shears, and fled for a place of hiding, where he might lie sheltered from the consequences of his crime. Mr Pancks deemed it prudent to use all possible despatch in making off, though he was pursued by nothing but the sound of laughter in Bleeding Heart Yard, rippling through the air and making it ring again.

Chapter 33

Going!

T

he changes of a fevered room are slow and fluctuating; but the changes of the fevered world are rapid and irrevocable.

It was Little Dorrit’s lot to wait upon both kinds of change. The Marshalsea walls, during a portion of every day, again embraced her in their shadows as their child, while she thought for Clennam, worked for him, watched him, and only left him, still to devote her utmost love and care to him. Her part in the life outside the gate urged its pressing claims upon her too, and her patience untiringly responded to them. Here was Fanny, proud, fitful, whimsical, further advanced in that disqualified state for going into society which had so much fretted her on the evening of the tortoise-shell knife, resolved always to want comfort, resolved not to be comforted, resolved to be deeply wronged, and resolved that nobody should have the audacity to think her so. Here was her brother, a weak, proud, tipsy, young old man, shaking from head to foot, talking as indistinctly as if some of the money he plumed himself upon had got into his mouth and couldn’t be got out, unable to walk alone in any act of his life, and patronising the sister whom he selfishly loved (he always had that negative merit, ill-starred and ill-launched Tip!) because he suffered her to lead him. Here was Mrs Merdle in gauzy mourning—the original cap whereof had possibly been rent to pieces in a fit of grief, but had certainly yielded to a highly becoming article from the Parisian

market—warring with Fanny foot to foot, and breasting her with her desolate bosom every hour in the day. Here was poor Mr Sparkler, not knowing how to keep the peace between them, but humbly inclining to the opinion that they could do no better than agree that they were both remarkably fine women, and that there was no nonsense about either of them—for which gentle recommendation they united in falling upon him frightfully. Then, too, here was Mrs General, got home from foreign parts, sending a Prune and a Prism by post every other day, demanding a new Testimonial by way of recommendation to some vacant appointment or other. Of which remarkable gentlewoman it may be finally observed, that there surely never was a gentlewoman of whose transcendent fitness for any vacant appointment on the face of this earth, so many people were (as the warmth of her Testimonials evinced) so perfectly satisfied—or who was so very unfortunate in having a large circle of ardent and distinguished admirers, who never themselves happened to want her in any capacity.

On the first crash of the eminent Mr Merdle’s decease, many important persons had been unable to determine whether they should cut Mrs Merdle, or comfort her. As it seemed, however, essential to the strength of their own case that they should admit her to have been cruelly deceived, they graciously made the admission, and continued to know her. It followed that Mrs Merdle, as a woman of fashion and good breeding who had been sacrificed to the wiles of a vulgar barbarian (for Mr Merdle was found out from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot, the moment he was found out in his pocket), must be actively championed by her order for her order’s sake. She returned this

fealty by causing it to be understood that she was even more incensed against the felonious shade of the deceased than anybody else was; thus, on the whole, she came out of her furnace like a wise woman, and did exceedingly well.

Mr Sparkler’s lordship was fortunately one of those shelves on which a gentleman is considered to be put away for life, unless there should be reasons for hoisting him up with the Barnacle crane to a more lucrative height. That patriotic servant accordingly stuck to his colours (the Standard of four Quarterings), and was a perfect Nelson in respect of nailing them to the mast. On the profits of his intrepidity, Mrs Sparkler and Mrs Merdle, inhabiting different floors of the genteel little temple of inconvenience to which the smell of the day before yesterday’s soup and coach-horses was as constant as Death to man, arrayed themselves to fight it out in the lists of Society, sworn rivals. And Little Dorrit, seeing all these things as they developed themselves, could not but wonder, anxiously, into what back corner of the genteel establishment Fanny’s children would be poked by-and- by, and who would take care of those unborn little victims.

Arthur being far too ill to be spoken with on subjects of emotion or anxiety, and his recovery greatly depending on the repose into which his weakness could be hushed, Little Dorrit’s sole reliance during this heavy period was on Mr Meagles. He was still abroad; but she had written to him through his daughter, immediately after first seeing Arthur in the Marshalsea and since, confiding her uneasiness to him on the points on which she was most anxious, but especially on one. To that one, the continued absence of Mr Meagles abroad, instead of his comforting presence in the Marshalsea, was referable.

Without disclosing the precise nature of the documents that had fallen into Rigaud’s hands, Little Dorrit had confided the general outline of that story to Mr Meagles, to whom she had also recounted his fate. The old cautious habits of the scales and scoop at once showed Mr Meagles the importance of recovering the original papers; wherefore he wrote back to Little Dorrit, strongly confirming her in the solicitude she expressed on that head, and adding that he would not come over to England ‘without making some attempt to trace them out.’

By this time Mr Henry Gowan had made up his mind that it would be agreeable to him not to know the Meagleses. He was so considerate as to lay no injunctions on his wife in that particular; but he mentioned to Mr Meagles that personally they did not appear to him to get on together, and that he thought it would be a good thing if—politely, and without any scene, or anything of that sort—they agreed that they were the best fellows in the world, but were best apart. Poor Mr Meagles, who was already sensible that he did not advance his daughter’s happiness by being constantly slighted in her presence, said ‘Good, Henry! You are my Pet’s husband; you have displaced me, in the course of nature; if you wish it, good!’ This arrangement involved the contingent advantage, which perhaps Henry Gowan had not foreseen, that both Mr and Mrs Meagles were more liberal than before to their daughter, when their communication was only with her and her young child: and that his high spirit found itself better provided with money, without being under the degrading necessity of knowing whence it came.

Mr Meagles, at such a period, naturally seized an occupation with great ardour. He knew from his daughter the various towns

which Rigaud had been haunting, and the various hotels at which he had been living for some time back. The occupation he set himself was to visit these with all discretion and speed, and, in the event of finding anywhere that he had left a bill unpaid, and a box or parcel behind, to pay such bill, and bring away such box or parcel.

With no other attendant than Mother, Mr Meagles went upon his pilgrimage, and encountered a number of adventures. Not the least of his difficulties was, that he never knew what was said to him, and that he pursued his inquiries among people who never knew what he said to them. Still, with an unshaken confidence that the English tongue was somehow the mother tongue of the whole world, only the people were too stupid to know it, Mr Meagles harangued innkeepers in the most voluble manner, entered into loud explanations of the most complicated sort, and utterly renounced replies in the native language of the respondents, on the ground that they were ‘all bosh.’ Sometimes interpreters were called in; whom Mr Meagles addressed in such idiomatic terms of speech, as instantly to extinguish and shut up— which made the matter worse. On a balance of the account, however, it may be doubted whether he lost much; for, although he found no property, he found so many debts and various associations of discredit with the proper name, which was the only word he made intelligible, that he was almost everywhere overwhelmed with injurious accusations. On no fewer than four occasions the police were called in to receive denunciations of Mr Meagles as a Knight of Industry, a good-for-nothing, and a thief, all of which opprobrious language he bore with the best temper (having no idea what it meant), and was in the most ignominious

manner escorted to steam-boats and public carriages, to be got rid of, talking all the while, like a cheerful and fluent Briton as he was, with Mother under his arm.

But, in his own tongue, and in his own head, Mr Meagles was a clear, shrewd, persevering man. When he had ‘worked round,’ as he called it, to Paris in his pilgrimage, and had wholly failed in it so far, he was not disheartened. ‘The nearer to England I follow him, you see, Mother,’ argued Mr Meagles, ‘the nearer I am likely to come to the papers, whether they turn up or no. Because it is only reasonable to conclude that he would deposit them somewhere where they would be safe from people over in England, and where they would yet be accessible to himself, don’t you see?’

At Paris Mr Meagles found a letter from Little Dorrit, lying waiting for him; in which she mentioned that she had been able to talk for a minute or two with Mr Clennam about this man who was no more; and that when she told Mr Clennam that his friend Mr Meagles, who was on his way to see him, had an interest in ascertaining something about the man if he could, he had asked her to tell Mr Meagles that he had been known to Miss Wade, then living in such a street at Calais. ‘Oho!’ said Mr Meagles.

As soon afterwards as might be in those Diligence days, Mr Meagles rang the cracked bell at the cracked gate, and it jarred open, and the peasant-woman stood in the dark doorway, saying, ‘Ice-say! Seer! Who?’ In acknowledgment of whose address, Mr Meagles murmured to himself that there was some sense about these Calais people, who really did know something of what you and themselves were up to; and returned, ‘Miss Wade, my dear.’ He was then shown into the presence of Miss Wade.

‘It’s some time since we met,’ said Mr Meagles, clearing his throat; ‘I hope you have been pretty well, Miss Wade?’

Without hoping that he or anybody else had been pretty well, Miss Wade asked him to what she was indebted for the honour of seeing him again? Mr Meagles, in the meanwhile, glanced all round the room without observing anything in the shape of a box.

‘Why, the truth is, Miss Wade,’ said Mr Meagles, in a comfortable, managing, not to say coaxing voice, ‘it is possible that you may be able to throw a light upon a little something that is at present dark. Any unpleasant bygones between us are bygones, I hope. Can’t be helped now. You recollect my daughter? Time changes so! A mother!’

In his innocence, Mr Meagles could not have struck a worse key-note. He paused for any expression of interest, but paused in vain.

‘That is not the subject you wished to enter on?’ she said, after a cold silence.

‘No, no,’ returned Mr Meagles. ‘No. I thought your good nature might—’

‘I thought you knew,’ she interrupted, with a smile, ‘that my good nature is not to be calculated upon?’

‘Don’t say so,’ said Mr Meagles; ‘you do yourself an injustice. However, to come to the point.’ For he was sensible of having gained nothing by approaching it in a roundabout way. ‘I have heard from my friend Clennam, who, you will be sorry to hear, has been and still is very ill—’

He paused again, and again she was silent.

‘—that you had some knowledge of one Blandois, lately killed in London by a violent accident. Now, don’t mistake me! I know it

was a slight knowledge,’ said Mr Meagles, dexterously forestalling an angry interruption which he saw about to break. ‘I am fully aware of that. It was a slight knowledge, I know. But the question is,’ Mr Meagles’s voice here became comfortable again, ‘did he, on his way to England last time, leave a box of papers, or a bundle of papers, or some papers or other in some receptacle or other—any papers—with you: begging you to allow him to leave them here for a short time, until he wanted them?’

‘The question is?’ she repeated. ‘Whose question is?’

‘Mine,’ said Mr Meagles. ‘And not only mine but Clennam’s question, and other people’s question. Now, I am sure,’ continued Mr Meagles, whose heart was overflowing with Pet, ‘that you can’t have any unkind feeling towards my daughter; it’s impossible. Well! It’s her question, too; being one in which a particular friend of hers is nearly interested. So here I am, frankly to say that is the question, and to ask, Now, did he?’

‘Upon my word,’ she returned, ‘I seem to be a mark for everybody who knew anything of a man I once in my life hired, and paid, and dismissed, to aim their questions at!’

‘Now, don’t,’ remonstrated Mr Meagles, ‘don’t! Don’t take offence, because it’s the plainest question in the world, and might be asked of any one. The documents I refer to were not his own, were wrongfully obtained, might at some time or other be troublesome to an innocent person to have in keeping, and are sought by the people to whom they really belong. He passed through Calais going to London, and there were reasons why he should not take them with him then, why he should wish to be able to put his hand upon them readily, and why he should distrust leaving them with people of his own sort. Did he leave

them here? I declare if I knew how to avoid giving you offence, I would take any pains to do it. I put the question personally, but there’s nothing personal in it. I might put it to any one; I have put it already to many people. Did he leave them here? Did he leave anything here?’

‘No.’

‘Then unfortunately, Miss Wade, you know nothing about them?’

‘I know nothing about them. I have now answered your unaccountable question. He did not leave them here, and I know nothing about them.’

‘There!’ said Mr Meagles rising. ‘I am sorry for it; that’s over; and I hope there is not much harm done.—Tattycoram well, Miss Wade?’

‘Harriet well? O yes!’

‘I have put my foot in it again,’ said Mr Meagles, thus corrected. ‘I can’t keep my foot out of it here, it seems. Perhaps, if I had thought twice about it, I might never have given her the jingling name. But, when one means to be good-natured and sportive with young people, one doesn’t think twice. Her old friend leaves a kind word for her, Miss Wade, if you should think proper to deliver it.’

She said nothing as to that; and Mr Meagles, taking his honest face out of the dull room, where it shone like a sun, took it to the Hotel where he had left Mrs Meagles, and where he made the Report: ‘Beaten, Mother; no effects!’ He took it next to the London Steam Packet, which sailed in the night; and next to the Marshalsea.

The faithful John was on duty when Father and Mother Meagles presented themselves at the wicket towards nightfall.

Miss Dorrit was not there then, he said; but she had been there in the morning, and invariably came in the evening. Mr Clennam was slowly mending; and Maggy and Mrs Plornish and Mr Baptist took care of him by turns. Miss Dorrit was sure to come back that evening before the bell rang. There was the room the Marshal had lent her, up-stairs, in which they could wait for her, if they pleased. Mistrustful that it might be hazardous to Arthur to see him without preparation, Mr Meagles accepted the offer; and they were left shut up in the room, looking down through its barred window into the jail.

The cramped area of the prison had such an effect on Mrs Meagles that she began to weep, and such an effect on Mr Meagles that he began to gasp for air. He was walking up and down the room, panting, and making himself worse by laboriously fanning himself with her handkerchief, when he turned towards the opening door.

‘Eh? Good gracious!’ said Mr Meagles, ‘this is not Miss Dorrit!

Why, Mother, look! Tattycoram!’

No other. And in Tattycoram’s arms was an iron box some two feet square. Such a box had Affery Flintwinch seen, in the first of her dreams, going out of the old house in the dead of the night under Double’s arm. This, Tattycoram put on the ground at her old master’s feet: this, Tattycoram fell on her knees by, and beat her hands upon, crying half in exultation and half in despair, half in laughter and half in tears, ‘Pardon, dear Master; take me back, dear Mistress; here it is!’

‘Tatty!’ exclaimed Mr Meagles.

‘What you wanted!’ said Tattycoram. ‘Here it is! I was put in the next room not to see you. I heard you ask her about it, I heard her

say she hadn’t got it, I was there when he left it, and I took it at bedtime and brought it away. Here it is!’

‘Why, my girl,’ cried Mr Meagles, more breathless than before, ‘how did you come over?’

‘I came in the boat with you. I was sitting wrapped up at the other end. When you took a coach at the wharf, I took another coach and followed you here. She never would have given it up after what you had said to her about its being wanted; she would sooner have sunk it in the sea, or burnt it. But, here it is!’

The glow and rapture that the girl was in, with her ‘Here it is!’ ‘She never wanted it to be left, I must say that for her; but he

left it, and I knew well that after what you said, and after her denying it, she never would have given it up. But here it is! Dear Master, dear Mistress, take me back again, and give me back the dear old name! Let this intercede for me. Here it is!’

Father and Mother Meagles never deserved their names better than when they took the headstrong foundling-girl into their protection again.

‘Oh! I have been so wretched,’ cried Tattycoram, weeping much more, ‘always so unhappy, and so repentant! I was afraid of her from the first time I saw her. I knew she had got a power over me through understanding what was bad in me so well. It was a madness in me, and she could raise it whenever she liked. I used to think, when I got into that state, that people were all against me because of my first beginning; and the kinder they were to me, the worse fault I found in them. I made it out that they triumphed above me, and that they wanted to make me envy them, when I know—when I even knew then—that they never thought of such a thing. And my beautiful young mistress not so happy as she ought

to have been, and I gone away from her! Such a brute and a wretch as she must think me! But you’ll say a word to her for me, and ask her to be as forgiving as you two are? For I am not so bad as I was,’ pleaded Tattycoram; ‘I am bad enough, but not so bad as I was, indeed. I have had Miss Wade before me all this time, as if it was my own self grown ripe—turning everything the wrong way, and twisting all good into evil. I have had her before me all this time, finding no pleasure in anything but keeping me as miserable, suspicious, and tormenting as herself. Not that she had much to do, to do that,’ cried Tattycoram, in a closing great burst of distress, ‘for I was as bad as bad could be. I only mean to say, that, after what I have gone through, I hope I shall never be quite so bad again, and that I shall get better by very slow degrees. I’ll try very hard. I won’t stop at five-and-twenty, sir, I’ll count five-and- twenty hundred, five-and-twenty thousand!’

Another opening of the door, and Tattycoram subsided, and Little Dorrit came in, and Mr Meagles with pride and joy produced the box, and her gentle face was lighted up with grateful happiness and joy.

The secret was safe now! She could keep her own part of it from him; he should never know of her loss; in time to come he should know all that was of import to himself; but he should never know what concerned her only. That was all passed, all forgiven, all forgotten.

‘Now, my dear Miss Dorrit,’ said Mr Meagles; ‘I am a man of business—or at least was—and I am going to take my measures promptly, in that character. Had I better see Arthur to-night?’

‘I think not to-night. I will go to his room and ascertain how he is. But I think it will be better not to see him to-night.’

‘I am much of your opinion, my dear,’ said Mr Meagles, ‘and therefore I have not been any nearer to him than this dismal room. Then I shall probably not see him for some little time to come. But I’ll explain what I mean when you come back.’

She left the room. Mr Meagles, looking through the bars of the window, saw her pass out of the Lodge below him into the prison- yard. He said gently, ‘Tattycoram, come to me a moment, my good girl.’

She went up to the window.

‘You see that young lady who was here just now—that little, quiet, fragile figure passing along there, Tatty? Look. The people stand out of the way to let her go by. The men—see the poor, shabby fellows—pull off their hats to her quite politely, and now she glides in at that doorway. See her, Tattycoram?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I have heard tell, Tatty, that she was once regularly called the child of this place. She was born here, and lived here many years.

I can’t breathe here. A doleful place to be born and bred in, Tattycoram?’

‘Yes indeed, sir!’

‘If she had constantly thought of herself, and settled with herself that everybody visited this place upon her, turned it against her, and cast it at her, she would have led an irritable and probably an useless existence. Yet I have heard tell, Tattycoram, that her young life has been one of active resignation, goodness, and noble service. Shall I tell you what I consider those eyes of hers, that were here just now, to have always looked at, to get that expression?’

‘Yes, if you please, sir.’

‘Duty, Tattycoram. Begin it early, and do it well; and there is no antecedent to it, in any origin or station, that will tell against us with the Almighty, or with ourselves.’

They remained at the window, Mother joining them and pitying the prisoners, until she was seen coming back. She was soon in the room, and recommended that Arthur, whom she had left calm and composed, should not be visited that night.

‘Good!’ said Mr Meagles, cheerily. ‘I have not a doubt that’s best. I shall trust my remembrances then, my sweet nurse, in your hands, and I well know they couldn’t be in better. I am off again to-morrow morning.’

Little Dorrit, surprised, asked him where?

‘My dear,’ said Mr Meagles, ‘I can’t live without breathing. This place has taken my breath away, and I shall never get it back again until Arthur is out of this place.’

‘How is that a reason for going off again to-morrow morning?’ ‘You shall understand,’ said Mr Meagles. ‘To-night we three will

put up at a City Hotel. To-morrow morning, Mother and Tattycoram will go down to Twickenham, where Mrs Tickit, sitting attended by Dr Buchan in the parlour-window, will think them a couple of ghosts; and I shall go abroad again for Doyce. We must have Dan here. Now, I tell you, my love, it’s of no use writing and planning and conditionally speculating upon this and that and the other, at uncertain intervals and distances; we must have Doyce here. I devote myself at daybreak to-morrow morning, to bringing Doyce here. It’s nothing to me to go and find him. I’m an old traveller, and all foreign languages and customs are alike to me—I never understand anything about any of ’em. Therefore I can’t be put to any inconvenience. Go at once I must, it stands to reason;

because I can’t live without breathing freely; and I can’t breathe freely until Arthur is out of this Marshalsea. I am stifled at the present moment, and have scarcely breath enough to say this much, and to carry this precious box down-stairs for you.’

They got into the street as the bell began to ring, Mr Meagles carrying the box. Little Dorrit had no conveyance there: which rather surprised him. He called a coach for her and she got into it, and he placed the box beside her when she was seated. In her joy and gratitude she kissed his hand.

‘I don’t like that, my dear,’ said Mr Meagles. ‘It goes against my feeling of what’s right, that you should do homage to me—at the Marshalsea Gate.’

She bent forward, and kissed his cheek.

‘You remind me of the days,’ said Mr Meagles, suddenly drooping—‘but she’s very fond of him, and hides his faults, and thinks that no one sees them—and he certainly is well connected and of a very good family!’

It was the only comfort he had in the loss of his daughter, and if he made the most of it, who could blame him?

Chapter 34

Gone

n a healthy autumn day, the Marshalsea prisoner, weak but otherwise restored, sat listening to a voice that read to him. On a healthy autumn day; when the golden fields

had been reaped and ploughed again, when the summer fruits had ripened and waned, when the green perspectives of hops had been laid low by the busy pickers, when the apples clustering in the orchards were russet, and the berries of the mountain ash were crimson among the yellowing foliage. Already in the woods, glimpses of the hardy winter that was coming were to be caught through unaccustomed openings among the boughs where the prospect shone defined and clear, free from the bloom of the drowsy summer weather, which had rested on it as the bloom lies on the plum. So, from the seashore the ocean was no longer to be seen lying asleep in the heat, but its thousand sparkling eyes were open, and its whole breadth was in joyful animation, from the cool sand on the beach to the little sails on the horizon, drifting away like autumn-tinted leaves that had drifted from the trees.

Changeless and barren, looking ignorantly at all the seasons with its fixed, pinched face of poverty and care, the prison had not a touch of any of these beauties on it. Blossom what would, its bricks and bars bore uniformly the same dead crop. Yet Clennam, listening to the voice as it read to him, heard in it all that great Nature was doing, heard in it all the soothing songs she sings to man. At no Mother’s knee but hers had he ever dwelt in his youth

on hopeful promises, on playful fancies, on the harvests of tenderness and humility that lie hidden in the early-fostered seeds of the imagination; on the oaks of retreat from blighting winds, that have the germs of their strong roots in nursery acorns. But, in the tones of the voice that read to him, there were memories of an old feeling of such things, and echoes of every merciful and loving whisper that had ever stolen to him in his life.

When the voice stopped, he put his hand over his eyes, murmuring that the light was strong upon them.

Little Dorrit put the book by, and presently arose quietly to shade the window. Maggy sat at her needlework in her old place. The light softened, Little Dorrit brought her chair closer to his side.

‘This will soon be over now, dear Mr Clennam. Not only are Mr Doyce’s letters to you so full of friendship and encouragement, but Mr Rugg says his letters to him are so full of help, and that everybody (now a little anger is past) is so considerate, and speaks so well of you, that it will soon be over now.’

‘Dear girl. Dear heart. Good angel!’

‘You praise me far too much. And yet it is such an exquisite pleasure to me to hear you speak so feelingly, and to—and to see,’ said Little Dorrit, raising her eyes to his, ‘how deeply you mean it, that I cannot say Don’t.’

He lifted her hand to his lips.

‘You have been here many, many times, when I have not seen you, Little Dorrit?’

‘Yes, I have been here sometimes when I have not come into the room.’

‘Very often?’

‘Rather often,’ said Little Dorrit, timidly. ‘Every day?’

‘I think,’ said Little Dorrit, after hesitating, ‘that I have been here at least twice every day.’ He might have released the little light hand after fervently kissing it again; but that, with a very gentle lingering where it was, it seemed to court being retained. He took it in both of his, and it lay softly on his breast.

‘Dear Little Dorrit, it is not my imprisonment only that will soon be over. This sacrifice of you must be ended. We must learn to part again, and to take our different ways so wide asunder. You have not forgotten what we said together, when you came back?’

‘O no, I have not forgotten it. But something has been—You feel quite strong to-day, don’t you?’

‘Quite strong.’

The hand he held crept up a little nearer his face.

‘Do you feel quite strong enough to know what a great fortune I have got?’

‘I shall be very glad to be told. No fortune can be too great or good for Little Dorrit.’

‘I have been anxiously waiting to tell you. I have been longing and longing to tell you. You are sure you will not take it?’

‘Never!’

‘You are quite sure you will not take half of it?’ ‘Never, dear Little Dorrit!’

As she looked at him silently, there was something in her affectionate face that he did not quite comprehend: something that could have broken into tears in a moment, and yet that was happy and proud.

‘You will be sorry to hear what I have to tell you about Fanny.

Poor Fanny has lost everything. She has nothing left but her husband’s income. All that papa gave her when she married was lost as your money was lost. It was in the same hands, and it is all gone.’

Arthur was more shocked than surprised to hear it. ‘I had hoped it might not be so bad,’ he said: ‘but I had feared a heavy loss there, knowing the connection between her husband and the defaulter.’

‘Yes. It is all gone. I am very sorry for Fanny; very, very, very sorry for poor Fanny. My poor brother too!’

‘Had he property in the same hands?’

‘Yes! And it’s all gone.—How much do you think my own great fortune is?’

As Arthur looked at her inquiringly, with a new apprehension on him, she withdrew her hand, and laid her face down on the spot where it had rested.

‘I have nothing in the world. I am as poor as when I lived here. When papa came over to England, he confided everything he had to the same hands, and it is all swept away. O my dearest and best, are you quite sure you will not share my fortune with me now?’

Locked in his arms, held to his heart, with his manly tears upon her own cheek, she drew the slight hand round his neck, and clasped it in its fellow-hand.

‘Never to part, my dearest Arthur; never any more, until the last! I never was rich before, I never was proud before, I never was happy before, I am rich in being taken by you, I am proud in having been resigned by you, I am happy in being with you in this prison, as I should be happy in coming back to it with you, if it should be the will of GOD, and comforting and serving you with all

my love and truth. I am yours anywhere, everywhere! I love you dearly! I would rather pass my life here with you, and go out daily, working for our bread, than I would have the greatest fortune that ever was told, and be the greatest lady that ever was honoured. O, if poor papa may only know how blest at last my heart is, in this room where he suffered for so many years!’

Maggy had of course been staring from the first, and had of course been crying her eyes out long before this. Maggy was now so overjoyed that, after hugging her little mother with all her might, she went down-stairs like a clog-hornpipe to find somebody or other to whom to impart her gladness. Whom should Maggy meet but Flora and Mr F.’s Aunt opportunely coming in? And whom else, as a consequence of that meeting, should Little Dorrit find waiting for herself, when, a good two or three hours afterwards, she went out?

Flora’s eyes were a little red, and she seemed rather out of spirits. Mr F.’s Aunt was so stiffened that she had the appearance of being past bending by any means short of powerful mechanical pressure. Her bonnet was cocked up behind in a terrific manner; and her stony reticule was as rigid as if it had been petrified by the Gorgon’s head, and had got it at that moment inside. With these imposing attributes, Mr F.’s Aunt, publicly seated on the steps of the Marshal’s official residence, had been for the two or three hours in question a great boon to the younger inhabitants of the Borough, whose sallies of humour she had considerably flushed herself by resenting at the point of her umbrella, from time to time.

‘Painfully aware, Miss Dorrit, I am sure,’ said Flora, ‘that to

propose an adjournment to any place to one so far removed by fortune and so courted and caressed by the best society must ever appear intruding even if not a pie-shop far below your present sphere and a back-parlour though a civil man but if for the sake of Arthur—cannot overcome it more improper now than ever late Doyce and Clennam—one last remark I might wish to make one last explanation I might wish to offer perhaps your good nature might excuse under pretence of three kidney ones the humble place of conversation.’

Rightly interpreting this rather obscure speech, Little Dorrit returned that she was quite at Flora’s disposition. Flora accordingly led the way across the road to the pie-shop in question: Mr F.’s Aunt stalking across in the rear, and putting herself in the way of being run over, with a perseverance worthy of a better cause.

When the ‘three kidney ones,’ which were to be a blind to the conversation, were set before them on three little tin platters, each kidney one ornamented with a hole at the top, into which the civil man poured hot gravy out of a spouted can as if he were feeding three lamps, Flora took out her pocket-handkerchief.

‘If Fancy’s fair dreams,’ she began, ‘have ever pictured that when Arthur—cannot overcome it pray excuse me—was restored to freedom even a pie as far from flaky as the present and so deficient in kidney as to be in that respect like a minced nutmeg might not prove unacceptable if offered by the hand of true regard such visions have for ever fled and all is cancelled but being aware that tender relations are in contemplation beg to state that I heartily wish well to both and find no fault with either not the least, it may be withering to know that ere the hand of Time had

made me much less slim than formerly and dreadfully red on the slightest exertion particularly after eating I well know when it takes the form of a rash, it might have been and was not through the interruption of parents and mental torpor succeeded until the mysterious clue was held by Mr F. still I would not be ungenerous to either and I heartily wish well to both.’

Little Dorrit took her hand, and thanked her for all her old kindness.

‘Call it not kindness,’ returned Flora, giving her an honest kiss, ‘for you always were the best and dearest little thing that ever was if I may take the liberty and even in a money point of view a saving being Conscience itself though I must add much more agreeable than mine ever was to me for though not I hope more burdened than other people’s yet I have always found it far readier to make one uncomfortable than comfortable and evidently taking a greater pleasure in doing it but I am wandering, one hope I wish to express ere yet the closing scene draws in and it is that I do trust for the sake of old times and old sincerity that Arthur will know that I didn’t desert him in his misfortunes but that I came backwards and forwards constantly to ask if I could do anything for him and that I sat in the pie-shop where they very civilly fetched something warm in a tumbler from the hotel and really very nice hours after hours to keep him company over the way without his knowing it.’

Flora really had tears in her eyes now, and they showed her to great advantage.

‘Over and above which,’ said Flora, ‘I earnestly beg you as the dearest thing that ever was if you’ll still excuse the familiarity from one who moves in very different circles to let Arthur understand

that I don’t know after all whether it wasn’t all nonsense between us though pleasant at the time and trying too and certainly Mr F. did work a change and the spell being broken nothing could be expected to take place without weaving it afresh which various circumstances have combined to prevent of which perhaps not the least powerful was that it was not to be, I am not prepared to say that if it had been agreeable to Arthur and had brought itself about naturally in the first instance I should not have been very glad being of a lively disposition and moped at home where papa undoubtedly is the most aggravating of his sex and not improved since having been cut down by the hand of the Incendiary into something of which I never saw the counterpart in all my life but jealousy is not my character nor ill-will though many faults.’

Without having been able closely to follow Mrs Finching through this labyrinth, Little Dorrit understood its purpose, and cordially accepted the trust.

‘The withered chaplet my dear,’ said Flora, with great enjoyment, ‘is then perished the column is crumbled and the pyramid is standing upside down upon its what’s-his-name call it not giddiness call it not weakness call it not folly I must now retire into privacy and look upon the ashes of departed joys no more but taking a further liberty of paying for the pastry which has formed the humble pretext of our interview will for ever say Adieu!’

Mr F.’s Aunt, who had eaten her pie with great solemnity, and who had been elaborating some grievous scheme of injury in her mind since her first assumption of that public position on the Marshal’s steps, took the present opportunity of addressing the following Sibyllic apostrophe to the relict of her late nephew.

‘Bring him for’ard, and I’ll chuck him out o’ winder!’

Flora tried in vain to soothe the excellent woman by explaining that they were going home to dinner. Mr F.’s Aunt persisted in replying, ‘Bring him for’ard and I’ll chuck him out o’ winder!’ Having reiterated this demand an immense number of times, with a sustained glare of defiance at Little Dorrit, Mr F.’s Aunt folded her arms, and sat down in the corner of the pie-shop parlour; steadfastly refusing to budge until such time as ‘he’ should have been ‘brought for’ard,’ and the chucking portion of his destiny accomplished.

In this condition of things, Flora confided to Little Dorrit that she had not seen Mr F.’s Aunt so full of life and character for weeks; that she would find it necessary to remain there ‘hours perhaps,’ until the inexorable old lady could be softened; and that she could manage her best alone. They parted, therefore, in the friendliest manner, and with the kindest feeling on both sides.

Mr F.’s Aunt holding out like a grim fortress, and Flora becoming in need of refreshment, a messenger was despatched to the hotel for the tumbler already glanced at, which was afterwards replenished. With the aid of its content, a newspaper, and some skimming of the cream of the pie-stock, Flora got through the remainder of the day in perfect good humour; though occasionally embarrassed by the consequences of an idle rumour which circulated among the credulous infants of the neighbourhood, to the effect that an old lady had sold herself to the pie-shop to be made up, and was then sitting in the pie-shop parlour, declining to complete her contract. This attracted so many young persons of both sexes, and, when the shades of evening began to fall, occasioned so much interruption to the business, that the merchant became very pressing in his proposals that Mr F.’s Aunt

should be removed. A conveyance was accordingly brought to the door, which, by the joint efforts of the merchant and Flora, this remarkable woman was at last induced to enter; though not without even then putting her head out of the window, and demanding to have him ‘brought for’ard’ for the purpose originally mentioned. As she was observed at this time to direct baleful glances towards the Marshalsea, it has been supposed that this admirably consistent female intended by ‘him,’ Arthur Clennam. This, however, is mere speculation; who the person was, who, for the satisfaction of Mr F.’s Aunt’s mind, ought to have been brought forward and never was brought forward, will never be positively known.

The autumn days went on, and Little Dorrit never came to the Marshalsea now and went away without seeing him. No, no, no.

One morning, as Arthur listened for the light feet that every morning ascended winged to his heart, bringing the heavenly brightness of a new love into the room where the old love had wrought so hard and been so true; one morning, as he listened, he heard her coming, not alone.

‘Dear Arthur,’ said her delighted voice outside the door, ‘I have some one here. May I bring some one in?’

He had thought from the tread there were two with her. He answered ‘Yes,’ and she came in with Mr Meagles. Sun-browned and jolly Mr Meagles looked, and he opened his arms and folded Arthur in them, like a sun-browned and jolly father.

‘Now I am all right,’ said Mr Meagles, after a minute or so. ‘Now it’s over. Arthur, my dear fellow, confess at once that you expected me before.’

‘I did,’ said Arthur; ‘but Amy told me—’

‘Little Dorrit. Never any other name.’ (It was she who whispered it.)

‘—But my Little Dorrit told me that, without asking for any further explanation, I was not to expect you until I saw you.’

‘And now you see me, my boy,’ said Mr Meagles, shaking him by the hand stoutly; ‘and now you shall have any explanation and every explanation. The fact is, I was here—came straight to you from the Allongers and Marshongers, or I should be ashamed to look you in the face this day,—but you were not in company trim at the moment, and I had to start off again to catch Doyce.’

‘Poor Doyce!’ sighed Arthur.

‘Don’t call him names that he don’t deserve,’ said Mr Meagles. ‘He’s not poor; he’s doing well enough. Doyce is a wonderful fellow over there. I assure you he is making out his case like a house a- fire. He has fallen on his legs, has Dan. Where they don’t want things done and find a man to do ’em, that man’s off his legs; but where they do want things done and find a man to do ’em, that man’s on his legs. You won’t have occasion to trouble the Circumlocution Office any more. Let me tell you, Dan has done without ’em!’

‘What a load you take from my mind!’ cried Arthur. ‘What happiness you give me!’

‘Happiness?’ retorted Mr Meagles. ‘Don’t talk about happiness till you see Dan. I assure you Dan is directing works and executing labours over yonder, that it would make your hair stand on end to look at. He’s no public offender, bless you, now! He’s medalled and ribboned, and starred and crossed, and I don’t-know-what all’d, like a born nobleman. But we mustn’t talk about that over here.’

‘Why not?’

‘Oh, egad!’ said Mr Meagles, shaking his head very seriously, ‘he must hide all those things under lock and key when he comes over here. They won’t do over here. In that particular, Britannia is a Britannia in the Manger—won’t give her children such distinctions herself, and won’t allow them to be seen when they are given by other countries. No, no, Dan!’ said Mr Meagles, shaking his head again. ‘That won’t do here!’

‘If you had brought me (except for Doyce’s sake) twice what I have lost,’ cried Arthur, ‘you would not have given me the pleasure that you give me in this news.’

‘Why, of course, of course,’ assented Mr Meagles. ‘Of course I know that, my good fellow, and therefore I come out with it in the first burst. Now, to go back, about catching Doyce. I caught Doyce. Ran against him among a lot of those dirty brown dogs in women’s nightcaps a great deal too big for ’em, calling themselves Arabs and all sorts of incoherent races. You know ’em! Well! He was coming straight to me, and I was going to him, and so we came back together.’

‘Doyce in England!’ exclaimed Arthur.

‘There!’ said Mr Meagles, throwing open his arms. ‘I am the worst man in the world to manage a thing of this sort. I don’t know what I should have done if I had been in the diplomatic line— right, perhaps! The long and short of it is, Arthur, we have both been in England this fortnight. And if you go on to ask where Doyce is at the present moment, why, my plain answer is—here he is! And now I can breathe again at last!’

Doyce darted in from behind the door, caught Arthur by both hands, and said the rest for himself.

‘There are only three branches of my subject, my dear Clennam,’ said Doyce, proceeding to mould them severally, with his plastic thumb, on the palm of his hand, ‘and they’re soon disposed of. First, not a word more from you about the past. There was an error in your calculations. I know what that is. It affects the whole machine, and failure is the consequence. You will profit by the failure, and will avoid it another time. I have done a similar thing myself, in construction, often. Every failure teaches a man something, if he will learn; and you are too sensible a man not to learn from this failure. So much for firstly. Secondly. I was sorry you should have taken it so heavily to heart, and reproached yourself so severely; I was travelling home night and day to put matters right, with the assistance of our friend, when I fell in with our friend as he has informed you. Thirdly. We two agreed, that, after what you had undergone, after your distress of mind, and after your illness, it would be a pleasant surprise if we could so far keep quiet as to get things perfectly arranged without your knowledge, and then come and say that all the affairs were smooth, that everything was right, that the business stood in greater want of you than ever it did, and that a new and prosperous career was opened before you and me as partners. That’s thirdly. But you know we always make an allowance for friction, and so I have reserved space to close in. My dear Clennam, I thoroughly confide in you; you have it in your power to be quite as useful to me as I have, or have had, it in my power to be useful to you; your old place awaits you, and wants you very much; there is nothing to detain you here one half-hour longer.’

There was silence, which was not broken until Arthur had stood for some time at the window with his back towards them,

and until his little wife that was to be had gone to him and stayed by him.

‘I made a remark a little while ago,’ said Daniel Doyce then, ‘which I am inclined to think was an incorrect one. I said there was nothing to detain you here, Clennam, half an hour longer. Am I mistaken in supposing that you would rather not leave here till to-morrow morning? Do I know, without being very wise, where you would like to go, direct from these walls and from this room?’

‘You do,’ returned Arthur. ‘It has been our cherished purpose.’ ‘Very well!’ said Doyce. ‘Then, if this young lady will do me the

honour of regarding me for four-and-twenty hours in the light of a father, and will take a ride with me now towards Saint Paul’s Churchyard, I dare say I know what we want to get there.’

Little Dorrit and he went out together soon afterwards, and Mr Meagles lingered behind to say a word to his friend.

‘I think, Arthur, you will not want Mother and me in the morning and we will keep away. It might set Mother thinking about Pet; she’s a soft-hearted woman. She’s best at the Cottage, and I’ll stay there and keep her company.’

With that they parted for the time. And the day ended, and the night ended, and the morning came, and Little Dorrit, simply dressed as usual and having no one with her but Maggy, came into the prison with the sunshine. The poor room was a happy room that morning. Where in the world was there a room so full of quiet joy!

‘My dear love,’ said Arthur. ‘Why does Maggy light the fire? We shall be gone directly.’

‘I asked her to do it. I have taken such an odd fancy. I want you to burn something for me.’

‘What?’

‘Only this folded paper. If you will put it in the fire with your own hand, just as it is, my fancy will be gratified.’

‘Superstitious, darling Little Dorrit? Is it a charm?’

‘It is anything you like best, my own,’ she answered, laughing with glistening eyes and standing on tiptoe to kiss him, ‘if you will only humour me when the fire burns up.’

So they stood before the fire, waiting: Clennam with his arm about her waist, and the fire shining, as fire in that same place had often shone, in Little Dorrit’s eyes. ‘Is it bright enough now?’ said Arthur. ‘Quite bright enough now,’ said Little Dorrit. ‘Does the charm want any words to be said?’ asked Arthur, as he held the paper over the flame. ‘You can say (if you don’t mind) “I love you!”’ answered Little Dorrit. So he said it, and the paper burned away.

They passed very quietly along the yard; for no one was there, though many heads were stealthily peeping from the windows.

Only one face, familiar of old, was in the Lodge. When they had both accosted it, and spoken many kind words, Little Dorrit turned back one last time with her hand stretched out, saying, ‘Good-bye, good John! I hope you will live very happy, dear!’

Then they went up the steps of the neighbouring Saint George’s Church, and went up to the altar, where Daniel Doyce was waiting in his paternal character. And there was Little Dorrit’s old friend who had given her the Burial Register for a pillow; full of admiration that she should come back to them to be married, after all.

And they were married with the sun shining on them through the painted figure of Our Saviour on the window. And they went

into the very room where Little Dorrit had slumbered after her party, to sign the Marriage Register. And there, Mr Pancks, (destined to be chief clerk to Doyce and Clennam, and afterwards partner in the house), sinking the Incendiary in the peaceful friend, looked in at the door to see it done, with Flora gallantly supported on one arm and Maggy on the other, and a back-ground of John Chivery and father and other turnkeys who had run round for the moment, deserting the parent Marshalsea for its happy child. Nor had Flora the least signs of seclusion upon her, notwithstanding her recent declaration; but, on the contrary, was wonderfully smart, and enjoyed the ceremonies mightily, though in a fluttered way.

Little Dorrit’s old friend held the inkstand as she signed her name, and the clerk paused in taking off the good clergyman’s surplice, and all the witnesses looked on with special interest. ‘For, you see,’ said Little Dorrit’s old friend, ‘this young lady is one of our curiosities, and has come now to the third volume of our Registers. Her birth is in what I call the first volume; she lay asleep, on this very floor, with her pretty head on what I call the second volume; and she’s now a-writing her little name as a bride in what I call the third volume.’

They all gave place when the signing was done, and Little Dorrit and her husband walked out of the church alone. They paused for a moment on the steps of the portico, looking at the fresh perspective of the street in the autumn morning sun’s bright rays, and then went down.

Went down into a modest life of usefulness and happiness. Went down to give a mother’s care, in the fulness of time, to Fanny’s neglected children no less than to their own, and to leave

that lady going into Society for ever and a day. Went down to give a tender nurse and friend to Tip for some few years, who was never vexed by the great exactions he made of her in return for the riches he might have given her if he had ever had them, and who lovingly closed his eyes upon the Marshalsea and all its blighted fruits. They went quietly down into the roaring streets, inseparable and blessed; and as they passed along in sunshine and shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward and the vain, fretted and chafed, and made their usual uproar.

The End