and am never to thank that gentleman with all my grateful heart!’

He would probably need no thanks, Clennam said. Very likely he would be
thankful himself (and with reason), that he had had the means and chance
of doing a little service to her, who well deserved a great one.

‘And what I was going to say, sir, is,’ said Little Dorrit, trembling
more and more, ‘that if I knew him, and I might, I would tell him that
he can never, never know how I feel his goodness, and how my good father
would feel it. And what I was going to say, sir, is, that if I knew him,
and I might--but I don’t know him and I must not--I know that!--I would
tell him that I shall never any more lie down to sleep without having
prayed to Heaven to bless him and reward him. And if I knew him, and I
might, I would go down on my knees to him, and take his hand and kiss
it and ask him not to draw it away, but to leave it--O to leave it for a
moment--and let my thankful tears fall on it; for I have no other thanks
to give him!’

Little Dorrit had put his hand to her lips, and would have kneeled to
him, but he gently prevented her, and replaced her in her chair. Her
eyes, and the tones of her voice, had thanked him far better than she
thought. He was not able to say, quite as composedly as usual, ‘There,
Little Dorrit, there, there, there! We will suppose that you did know
this person, and that you might do all this, and that it was all done.
And now tell me, Who am quite another person--who am nothing more than
the friend who begged you to trust him--why you are out at midnight, and
what it is that brings you so far through the streets at this late hour,
my slight, delicate,’ child was on his lips again, ‘Little Dorrit!’

‘Maggy and I have been to-night,’ she answered, subduing herself with
the quiet effort that had long been natural to her, ‘to the theatre
where my sister is engaged.’

‘And oh ain’t it a Ev’nly place,’ suddenly interrupted Maggy, who seemed
to have the power of going to sleep and waking up whenever she chose.
‘Almost as good as a hospital. Only there ain’t no Chicking in it.’

Here she shook herself, and fell asleep again.

‘We went there,’ said Little Dorrit, glancing at her charge, ‘because
I like sometimes to know, of my own knowledge, that my sister is doing
well; and like to see her there, with my own eyes, when neither she nor
Uncle is aware. It is very seldom indeed that I can do that, because
when I am not out at work, I am with my father, and even when I am out
at work, I hurry home to him. But I pretend to-night that I am at a
party.’

As she made the confession, timidly hesitating, she raised her eyes to
the face, and read its expression so plainly that she answered it.

‘Oh no, certainly! I never was at a party in my life.’

She paused a little under his attentive look, and then said, ‘I hope
there is no harm in it. I could never have been of any use, if I had
not pretended a little.’

She feared that he was blaming her in his mind for so devising to
contrive for them, think for them, and watch over them, without their
knowledge or gratitude; perhaps even with their reproaches for supposed
neglect. But what was really in his mind, was the weak figure with its
strong purpose, the thin worn shoes, the insufficient dress, and the
pretence of recreation and enjoyment. He asked where the suppositious
party was? At a place where she worked, answered Little Dorrit,
blushing. She had said very little about it; only a few words to
make her father easy. Her father did not believe it to be a grand
party--indeed he might suppose that. And she glanced for an instant at
the shawl she wore.

‘It is the first night,’ said Little Dorrit, ‘that I have ever been away
from home. And London looks so large, so barren, and so wild.’ In Little
Dorrit’s eyes, its vastness under the black sky was awful; a tremor
passed over her as she said the words.

‘But this is not,’ she added, with the quiet effort again, ‘what I have
come to trouble you with, sir. My sister’s having found a friend, a lady
she has told me of and made me rather anxious about, was the first cause
of my coming away from home. And being away, and coming (on purpose)
round by where you lived and seeing a light in the window--’

Not for the first time. No, not for the first time. In Little Dorrit’s
eyes, the outside of that window had been a distant star on other nights
than this. She had toiled out of her way, tired and troubled, to look up
at it, and wonder about the grave, brown gentleman from so far off, who
had spoken to her as a friend and protector.

‘There were three things,’ said Little Dorrit, ‘that I thought I would
like to say, if you were alone and I might come up-stairs. First, what I
have tried to say, but never can--never shall--’

‘Hush, hush! That is done with, and disposed of. Let us pass to the
second,’ said Clennam, smiling her agitation away, making the blaze
shine upon her, and putting wine and cake and fruit towards her on the
table.

‘I think,’ said Little Dorrit--‘this is the second thing, sir--I think
Mrs Clennam must have found out my secret, and must know where I come
from and where I go to. Where I live, I mean.’

‘Indeed!’ returned Clennam quickly. He asked her, after short
consideration, why she supposed so.

‘I think,’ replied Little Dorrit, ‘that Mr Flintwinch must have watched
me.’

And why, Clennam asked, as he turned his eyes upon the fire, bent his
brows, and considered again; why did she suppose that?

‘I have met him twice. Both times near home. Both times at night, when
I was going back. Both times I thought (though that may easily be my
mistake), that he hardly looked as if he had met me by accident.’

‘Did he say anything?’

‘No; he only nodded and put his head on one side.’

‘The devil take his head!’ mused Clennam, still looking at the fire;
‘it’s always on one side.’

He roused himself to persuade her to put some wine to her lips, and to
touch something to eat--it was very difficult, she was so timid and
shy--and then said, musing again:

‘Is my mother at all changed to you?’

‘Oh, not at all. She is just the same. I wondered whether I had better
tell her my history. I wondered whether I might--I mean, whether you
would like me to tell her. I wondered,’ said Little Dorrit, looking at
him in a suppliant way, and gradually withdrawing her eyes as he looked
at her, ‘whether you would advise me what I ought to do.’

‘Little Dorrit,’ said Clennam; and the phrase had already begun, between
these two, to stand for a hundred gentle phrases, according to the
varying tone and connection in which it was used; ‘do nothing. I will
have some talk with my old friend, Mrs Affery. Do nothing, Little
Dorrit--except refresh yourself with such means as there are here. I
entreat you to do that.’

‘Thank you, I am not hungry. Nor,’ said Little Dorrit, as he softly
put her glass towards her, ‘nor thirsty.--I think Maggy might like
something, perhaps.’

‘We will make her find pockets presently for all there is here,’ said
Clennam: ‘but before we awake her, there was a third thing to say.’

‘Yes. You will not be offended, sir?’

‘I promise that, unreservedly.’

‘It will sound strange. I hardly know how to say it. Don’t think it
unreasonable or ungrateful in me,’ said Little Dorrit, with returning
and increasing agitation.

‘No, no, no. I am sure it will be natural and right. I am not afraid
that I shall put a wrong construction on it, whatever it is.’

‘Thank you. You are coming back to see my father again?’

‘Yes.’

‘You have been so good and thoughtful as to write him a note, saying
that you are coming to-morrow?’

‘Oh, that was nothing! Yes.’

‘Can you guess,’ said Little Dorrit, folding her small hands tight in
one another, and looking at him with all the earnestness of her soul
looking steadily out of her eyes, ‘what I am going to ask you not to
do?’

‘I think I can. But I may be wrong.’

‘No, you are not wrong,’ said Little Dorrit, shaking her head. ‘If we
should want it so very, very badly that we cannot do without it, let me
ask you for it.’

‘I Will,--I Will.’

‘Don’t encourage him to ask. Don’t understand him if he does ask. Don’t
give it to him. Save him and spare him that, and you will be able to
think better of him!’

Clennam said--not very plainly, seeing those tears glistening in her
anxious eyes--that her wish should be sacred with him.

‘You don’t know what he is,’ she said; ‘you don’t know what he really
is. How can you, seeing him there all at once, dear love, and not
gradually, as I have done! You have been so good to us, so delicately
and truly good, that I want him to be better in your eyes than in
anybody’s. And I cannot bear to think,’ cried Little Dorrit, covering
her tears with her hands, ‘I cannot bear to think that you of all the
world should see him in his only moments of degradation.’

‘Pray,’ said Clennam, ‘do not be so distressed. Pray, pray, Little
Dorrit! This is quite understood now.’

‘Thank you, sir. Thank you! I have tried very much to keep myself from
saying this; I have thought about it, days and nights; but when I knew
for certain you were coming again, I made up my mind to speak to you.
Not because I am ashamed of him,’ she dried her tears quickly, ‘but
because I know him better than any one does, and love him, and am proud
of him.’

Relieved of this weight, Little Dorrit was nervously anxious to be gone.
Maggy being broad awake, and in the act of distantly gloating over the
fruit and cakes with chuckles of anticipation, Clennam made the best
diversion in his power by pouring her out a glass of wine, which she
drank in a series of loud smacks; putting her hand upon her windpipe
after every one, and saying, breathless, with her eyes in a prominent
state, ‘Oh, ain’t it d’licious! Ain’t it hospitally!’ When she had
finished the wine and these encomiums, he charged her to load her basket
(she was never without her basket) with every eatable thing upon the
table, and to take especial care to leave no scrap behind. Maggy’s
pleasure in doing this and her little mother’s pleasure in seeing Maggy
pleased, was as good a turn as circumstances could have given to the
late conversation.

‘But the gates will have been locked long ago,’ said Clennam, suddenly
remembering it. ‘Where are you going?’

‘I am going to Maggy’s lodging,’ answered Little Dorrit. ‘I shall be
quite safe, quite well taken care of.’

‘I must accompany you there,’ said Clennam, ‘I cannot let you go alone.’

‘Yes, pray leave us to go there by ourselves. Pray do!’ begged Little
Dorrit.

She was so earnest in the petition, that Clennam felt a delicacy in
obtruding himself upon her: the rather, because he could well understand
that Maggy’s lodging was of the obscurest sort. ‘Come, Maggy,’ said
Little Dorrit cheerily, ‘we shall do very well; we know the way by this
time, Maggy?’

‘Yes, yes, little mother; we know the way,’ chuckled Maggy. And away
they went. Little Dorrit turned at the door to say, ‘God bless you!’ She
said it very softly, but perhaps she may have been as audible above--who
knows!--as a whole cathedral choir.

Arthur Clennam suffered them to pass the corner of the street before he
followed at a distance; not with any idea of encroaching a second time
on Little Dorrit’s privacy, but to satisfy his mind by seeing her secure
in the neighbourhood to which she was accustomed. So diminutive she
looked, so fragile and defenceless against the bleak damp weather,
flitting along in the shuffling shadow of her charge, that he felt, in
his compassion, and in his habit of considering her a child apart from
the rest of the rough world, as if he would have been glad to take her
up in his arms and carry her to her journey’s end.

In course of time she came into the leading thoroughfare where the
Marshalsea was, and then he saw them slacken their pace, and soon turn
down a by-street. He stopped, felt that he had no right to go further,
and slowly left them. He had no suspicion that they ran any risk of
being houseless until morning; had no idea of the truth until long, long
afterwards.

But, said Little Dorrit, when they stopped at a poor dwelling all in
darkness, and heard no sound on listening at the door, ‘Now, this is a
good lodging for you, Maggy, and we must not give offence. Consequently,
we will only knock twice, and not very loud; and if we cannot wake them
so, we must walk about till day.’

Once, Little Dorrit knocked with a careful hand, and listened. Twice,
Little Dorrit knocked with a careful hand, and listened. All was close
and still. ‘Maggy, we must do the best we can, my dear. We must be
patient, and wait for day.’

It was a chill dark night, with a damp wind blowing, when they came out
into the leading street again, and heard the clocks strike half-past
one. ‘In only five hours and a half,’ said Little Dorrit, ‘we shall be
able to go home.’ To speak of home, and to go and look at it, it being
so near, was a natural sequence. They went to the closed gate, and
peeped through into the court-yard. ‘I hope he is sound asleep,’ said
Little Dorrit, kissing one of the bars, ‘and does not miss me.’

The gate was so familiar, and so like a companion, that they put down
Maggy’s basket in a corner to serve for a seat, and keeping close
together, rested there for some time. While the street was empty and
silent, Little Dorrit was not afraid; but when she heard a footstep at
a distance, or saw a moving shadow among the street lamps, she was
startled, and whispered, ‘Maggy, I see some one. Come away!’ Maggy
would then wake up more or less fretfully, and they would wander about a
little, and come back again.

As long as eating was a novelty and an amusement, Maggy kept up pretty
well. But that period going by, she became querulous about the cold, and
shivered and whimpered. ‘It will soon be over, dear,’ said Little Dorrit
patiently. ‘Oh it’s all very fine for you, little mother,’ returned
Maggy, ‘but I’m a poor thing, only ten years old.’ At last, in the dead
of the night, when the street was very still indeed, Little Dorrit laid
the heavy head upon her bosom, and soothed her to sleep. And thus she
sat at the gate, as it were alone; looking up at the stars, and seeing
the clouds pass over them in their wild flight--which was the dance at
Little Dorrit’s party.

‘If it really was a party!’ she thought once, as she sat there. ‘If it
was light and warm and beautiful, and it was our house, and my poor dear
was its master, and had never been inside these walls. And if Mr
Clennam was one of our visitors, and we were dancing to delightful
music, and were all as gay and light-hearted as ever we could be! I
wonder--’ Such a vista of wonder opened out before her, that she sat
looking up at the stars, quite lost, until Maggy was querulous again,
and wanted to get up and walk.

Three o’clock, and half-past three, and they had passed over London
Bridge. They had heard the rush of the tide against obstacles; and
looked down, awed, through the dark vapour on the river; had seen little
spots of lighted water where the bridge lamps were reflected, shining
like demon eyes, with a terrible fascination in them for guilt and
misery. They had shrunk past homeless people, lying coiled up in
nooks. They had run from drunkards. They had started from slinking men,
whistling and signing to one another at bye corners, or running away at
full speed. Though everywhere the leader and the guide, Little Dorrit,
happy for once in her youthful appearance, feigned to cling to and rely
upon Maggy. And more than once some voice, from among a knot of brawling
or prowling figures in their path, had called out to the rest to ‘let
the woman and the child go by!’

So, the woman and the child had gone by, and gone on, and five had
sounded from the steeples. They were walking slowly towards the east,
already looking for the first pale streak of day, when a woman came
after them.

‘What are you doing with the child?’ she said to Maggy.

She was young--far too young to be there, Heaven knows!--and neither
ugly nor wicked-looking. She spoke coarsely, but with no naturally
coarse voice; there was even something musical in its sound.

‘What are you doing with yourself?’ retorted Maggy, for want of a better
answer.

‘Can’t you see, without my telling you?’

‘I don’t know as I can,’ said Maggy.

‘Killing myself! Now I have answered you, answer me. What are you doing
with the child?’

The supposed child kept her head drooped down, and kept her form close
at Maggy’s side.

‘Poor thing!’ said the woman. ‘Have you no feeling, that you keep her
out in the cruel streets at such a time as this? Have you no eyes, that
you don’t see how delicate and slender she is? Have you no sense (you
don’t look as if you had much) that you don’t take more pity on this
cold and trembling little hand?’

She had stepped across to that side, and held the hand between her own
two, chafing it. ‘Kiss a poor lost creature, dear,’ she said, bending
her face, ‘and tell me where’s she taking you.’

Little Dorrit turned towards her.

‘Why, my God!’ she said, recoiling, ‘you’re a woman!’

‘Don’t mind that!’ said Little Dorrit, clasping one of her hands that
had suddenly released hers. ‘I am not afraid of you.’

‘Then you had better be,’ she answered. ‘Have you no mother?’

‘No.’

‘No father?’

‘Yes, a very dear one.’

‘Go home to him, and be afraid of me. Let me go. Good night!’

‘I must thank you first; let me speak to you as if I really were a
child.’

‘You can’t do it,’ said the woman. ‘You are kind and innocent; but you
can’t look at me out of a child’s eyes. I never should have touched you,
but I thought that you were a child.’ And with a strange, wild cry, she
went away.

No day yet in the sky, but there was day in the resounding stones of
the streets; in the waggons, carts, and coaches; in the workers going
to various occupations; in the opening of early shops; in the traffic
at markets; in the stir of the riverside. There was coming day in the
flaring lights, with a feebler colour in them than they would have had
at another time; coming day in the increased sharpness of the air, and
the ghastly dying of the night.

They went back again to the gate, intending to wait there now until it
should be opened; but the air was so raw and cold that Little Dorrit,
leading Maggy about in her sleep, kept in motion. Going round by the
Church, she saw lights there, and the door open; and went up the steps
and looked in.

‘Who’s that?’ cried a stout old man, who was putting on a nightcap as if
he were going to bed in a vault.

‘It’s no one particular, sir,’ said Little Dorrit.

‘Stop!’ cried the man. ‘Let’s have a look at you!’

This caused her to turn back again in the act of going out, and to
present herself and her charge before him.

‘I thought so!’ said he. ‘I know _you_.’

‘We have often seen each other,’ said Little Dorrit, recognising the
sexton, or the beadle, or the verger, or whatever he was, ‘when I have
been at church here.’

‘More than that, we’ve got your birth in our Register, you know; you’re
one of our curiosities.’

‘Indeed!’ said Little Dorrit.

‘To be sure. As the child of the--by-the-bye, how did you get out so
early?’

‘We were shut out last night, and are waiting to get in.’

‘You don’t mean it? And there’s another hour good yet! Come into the
vestry. You’ll find a fire in the vestry, on account of the painters.
I’m waiting for the painters, or I shouldn’t be here, you may depend
upon it. One of our curiosities mustn’t be cold when we have it in our
power to warm her up comfortable. Come along.’

He was a very good old fellow, in his familiar way; and having stirred
the vestry fire, he looked round the shelves of registers for a
particular volume. ‘Here you are, you see,’ he said, taking it down and
turning the leaves. ‘Here you’ll find yourself, as large as life. Amy,
daughter of William and Fanny Dorrit. Born, Marshalsea Prison, Parish of
St George. And we tell people that you have lived there, without so much
as a day’s or a night’s absence, ever since. Is it true?’

‘Quite true, till last night.’

‘Lord!’ But his surveying her with an admiring gaze suggested Something
else to him, to wit: ‘I am sorry to see, though, that you are faint and
tired. Stay a bit. I’ll get some cushions out of the church, and you and
your friend shall lie down before the fire. Don’t be afraid of not
going in to join your father when the gate opens. _I’ll_ call you.’

He soon brought in the cushions, and strewed them on the ground.

‘There you are, you see. Again as large as life. Oh, never mind
thanking. I’ve daughters of my own. And though they weren’t born in the
Marshalsea Prison, they might have been, if I had been, in my ways of
carrying on, of your father’s breed. Stop a bit. I must put something
under the cushion for your head. Here’s a burial volume, just the
thing! We have got Mrs Bangham in this book. But what makes these books
interesting to most people is--not who’s in ‘em, but who isn’t--who’s
coming, you know, and when. That’s the interesting question.’

Commendingly looking back at the pillow he had improvised, he left them
to their hour’s repose. Maggy was snoring already, and Little Dorrit
was soon fast asleep with her head resting on that sealed book of Fate,
untroubled by its mysterious blank leaves.

This was Little Dorrit’s party. The shame, desertion, wretchedness, and
exposure of the great capital; the wet, the cold, the slow hours, and
the swift clouds of the dismal night. This was the party from which
Little Dorrit went home, jaded, in the first grey mist of a rainy
morning.

CHAPTER 15. Mrs Flintwinch has another Dream

The debilitated old house in the city, wrapped in its mantle of soot,
and leaning heavily on the crutches that had partaken of its decay and
worn out with it, never knew a healthy or a cheerful interval, let what
would betide. If the sun ever touched it, it was but with a ray, and
that was gone in half an hour; if the moonlight ever fell upon it, it
was only to put a few patches on its doleful cloak, and make it look
more wretched. The stars, to be sure, coldly watched it when the nights
and the smoke were clear enough; and all bad weather stood by it with
a rare fidelity. You should alike find rain, hail, frost, and thaw
lingering in that dismal enclosure when they had vanished from other
places; and as to snow, you should see it there for weeks, long after
it had changed from yellow to black, slowly weeping away its grimy life.
The place had no other adherents. As to street noises, the rumbling of
wheels in the lane merely rushed in at the gateway in going past, and
rushed out again: making the listening Mistress Affery feel as if she
were deaf, and recovered the sense of hearing by instantaneous flashes.
So with whistling, singing, talking, laughing, and all pleasant human
sounds. They leaped the gap in a moment, and went upon their way.

The varying light of fire and candle in Mrs Clennam’s room made the
greatest change that ever broke the dead monotony of the spot. In her
two long narrow windows, the fire shone sullenly all day, and sullenly
all night. On rare occasions it flashed up passionately, as she did; but
for the most part it was suppressed, like her, and preyed upon itself
evenly and slowly. During many hours of the short winter days, however,
when it was dusk there early in the afternoon, changing distortions of
herself in her wheeled chair, of Mr Flintwinch with his wry neck, of
Mistress Affery coming and going, would be thrown upon the house wall
that was over the gateway, and would hover there like shadows from a
great magic lantern. As the room-ridden invalid settled for the night,
these would gradually disappear: Mistress Affery’s magnified shadow
always flitting about, last, until it finally glided away into the air,
as though she were off upon a witch excursion. Then the solitary light
would burn unchangingly, until it burned pale before the dawn, and at
last died under the breath of Mrs Affery, as her shadow descended on it
from the witch-region of sleep.

Strange, if the little sick-room fire were in effect a beacon fire,
summoning some one, and that the most unlikely some one in the world, to
the spot that _must_ be come to. Strange, if the little sick-room light
were in effect a watch-light, burning in that place every night until an
appointed event should be watched out! Which of the vast multitude of
travellers, under the sun and the stars, climbing the dusty hills and
toiling along the weary plains, journeying by land and journeying by
sea, coming and going so strangely, to meet and to act and react on one
another; which of the host may, with no suspicion of the journey’s end,
be travelling surely hither?

Time shall show us. The post of honour and the post of shame, the
general’s station and the drummer’s, a peer’s statue in Westminster
Abbey and a seaman’s hammock in the bosom of the deep, the mitre and
the workhouse, the woolsack and the gallows, the throne and the
guillotine--the travellers to all are on the great high road, but it
has wonderful divergencies, and only Time shall show us whither each
traveller is bound.

On a wintry afternoon at twilight, Mrs Flintwinch, having been heavy all
day, dreamed this dream:

She thought she was in the kitchen getting the kettle ready for tea, and
was warming herself with her feet upon the fender and the skirt of her
gown tucked up, before the collapsed fire in the middle of the grate,
bordered on either hand by a deep cold black ravine. She thought that
as she sat thus, musing upon the question whether life was not for some
people a rather dull invention, she was frightened by a sudden noise
behind her. She thought that she had been similarly frightened once last
week, and that the noise was of a mysterious kind--a sound of rustling
and of three or four quick beats like a rapid step; while a shock or
tremble was communicated to her heart, as if the step had shaken the
floor, or even as if she had been touched by some awful hand. She
thought that this revived within her certain old fears of hers that
the house was haunted; and that she flew up the kitchen stairs without
knowing how she got up, to be nearer company.

Mistress Affery thought that on reaching the hall, she saw the door of
her liege lord’s office standing open, and the room empty. That she went
to the ripped-up window in the little room by the street door to connect
her palpitating heart, through the glass, with living things beyond
and outside the haunted house. That she then saw, on the wall over the
gateway, the shadows of the two clever ones in conversation above. That
she then went upstairs with her shoes in her hand, partly to be near
the clever ones as a match for most ghosts, and partly to hear what they
were talking about.

‘None of your nonsense with me,’ said Mr Flintwinch. ‘I won’t take it
from you.’

Mrs Flintwinch dreamed that she stood behind the door, which was just
ajar, and most distinctly heard her husband say these bold words.

‘Flintwinch,’ returned Mrs Clennam, in her usual strong low voice,
‘there is a demon of anger in you. Guard against it.’

‘I don’t care whether there’s one or a dozen,’ said Mr Flintwinch,
forcibly suggesting in his tone that the higher number was nearer the
mark. ‘If there was fifty, they should all say, None of your nonsense
with me, I won’t take it from you--I’d make ‘em say it, whether they
liked it or not.’

‘What have I done, you wrathful man?’ her strong voice asked.

‘Done?’ said Mr Flintwinch. ‘Dropped down upon me.’

‘If you mean, remonstrated with you--’

‘Don’t put words into my mouth that I don’t mean,’ said Jeremiah,
sticking to his figurative expression with tenacious and impenetrable
obstinacy: ‘I mean dropped down upon me.’

‘I remonstrated with you,’ she began again, ‘because--’

‘I won’t have it!’ cried Jeremiah. ‘You dropped down upon me.’

‘I dropped down upon you, then, you ill-conditioned man,’ (Jeremiah
chuckled at having forced her to adopt his phrase,) ‘for having been
needlessly significant to Arthur that morning. I have a right to
complain of it as almost a breach of confidence. You did not mean it--’

‘I won’t have it!’ interposed the contradictory Jeremiah, flinging back
the concession. ‘I did mean it.’

‘I suppose I must leave you to speak in soliloquy if you choose,’ she
replied, after a pause that seemed an angry one. ‘It is useless my
addressing myself to a rash and headstrong old man who has a set purpose
not to hear me.’

‘Now, I won’t take that from you either,’ said Jeremiah. ‘I have no such
purpose. I have told you I did mean it. Do you wish to know why I meant
it, you rash and headstrong old woman?’

‘After all, you only restore me my own words,’ she said, struggling with
her indignation. ‘Yes.’

‘This is why, then. Because you hadn’t cleared his father to him, and
you ought to have done it. Because, before you went into any tantrum
about yourself, who are--’

‘Hold there, Flintwinch!’ she cried out in a changed voice: ‘you may go
a word too far.’

The old man seemed to think so. There was another pause, and he had
altered his position in the room, when he spoke again more mildly:

‘I was going to tell you why it was. Because, before you took your own
part, I thought you ought to have taken the part of Arthur’s father.
Arthur’s father! I had no particular love for Arthur’s father. I served
Arthur’s father’s uncle, in this house, when Arthur’s father was not
much above me--was poorer as far as his pocket went--and when his uncle
might as soon have left me his heir as have left him. He starved in the
parlour, and I starved in the kitchen; that was the principal difference
in our positions; there was not much more than a flight of breakneck
stairs between us. I never took to him in those times; I don’t know that
I ever took to him greatly at any time. He was an undecided, irresolute
chap, who had everything but his orphan life scared out of him when he
was young. And when he brought you home here, the wife his uncle
had named for him, I didn’t need to look at you twice (you were a
good-looking woman at that time) to know who’d be master. You have stood
of your own strength ever since. Stand of your own strength now. Don’t
lean against the dead.’

‘I do _not_--as you call it--lean against the dead.’

‘But you had a mind to do it, if I had submitted,’ growled Jeremiah,
‘and that’s why you drop down upon me. You can’t forget that I didn’t
submit. I suppose you are astonished that I should consider it worth my
while to have justice done to Arthur’s father? Hey? It doesn’t matter
whether you answer or not, because I know you are, and you know you are.
Come, then, I’ll tell you how it is. I may be a bit of an oddity in
point of temper, but this is my temper--I can’t let anybody have
entirely their own way. You are a determined woman, and a clever woman;
and when you see your purpose before you, nothing will turn you from it.
Who knows that better than I do?’

‘Nothing will turn me from it, Flintwinch, when I have justified it to
myself. Add that.’

‘Justified it to yourself? I said you were the most determined woman on
the face of the earth (or I meant to say so), and if you are determined
to justify any object you entertain, of course you’ll do it.’

‘Man! I justify myself by the authority of these Books,’ she cried, with
stern emphasis, and appearing from the sound that followed to strike the
dead-weight of her arm upon the table.

‘Never mind that,’ returned Jeremiah calmly, ‘we won’t enter into that
question at present. However that may be, you carry out your purposes,
and you make everything go down before them. Now, I won’t go down before
them. I have been faithful to you, and useful to you, and I am attached
to you. But I can’t consent, and I won’t consent, and I never did
consent, and I never will consent to be lost in you. Swallow up
everybody else, and welcome. The peculiarity of my temper is, ma’am,
that I won’t be swallowed up alive.’

Perhaps this had originally been the mainspring of the understanding
between them. Descrying thus much of force of character in Mr
Flintwinch, perhaps Mrs Clennam had deemed alliance with him worth her
while.

‘Enough and more than enough of the subject,’ said she gloomily.

‘Unless you drop down upon me again,’ returned the persistent
Flintwinch, ‘and then you must expect to hear of it again.’

Mistress Affery dreamed that the figure of her lord here began walking
up and down the room, as if to cool his spleen, and that she ran away;
but that, as he did not issue forth when she had stood listening and
trembling in the shadowy hall a little time, she crept up-stairs again,
impelled as before by ghosts and curiosity, and once more cowered
outside the door.

‘Please to light the candle, Flintwinch,’ Mrs Clennam was saying,
apparently wishing to draw him back into their usual tone. ‘It is nearly
time for tea. Little Dorrit is coming, and will find me in the dark.’

Mr Flintwinch lighted the candle briskly, and said as he put it down
upon the table:

‘What are you going to do with Little Dorrit? Is she to come to work
here for ever? To come to tea here for ever? To come backwards and
forwards here, in the same way, for ever?’

‘How can you talk about “for ever” to a maimed creature like me? Are we
not all cut down like the grass of the field, and was not I shorn by the
scythe many years ago: since when I have been lying here, waiting to be
gathered into the barn?’

‘Ay, ay! But since you have been lying here--not near dead--nothing like
it--numbers of children and young people, blooming women, strong men,
and what not, have been cut down and carried; and still here are you,
you see, not much changed after all. Your time and mine may be a long
one yet. When I say for ever, I mean (though I am not poetical) through
all our time.’ Mr Flintwinch gave this explanation with great calmness,
and calmly waited for an answer.

‘So long as Little Dorrit is quiet and industrious, and stands in need
of the slight help I can give her, and deserves it; so long, I suppose,
unless she withdraws of her own act, she will continue to come here, I
being spared.’

‘Nothing more than that?’ said Flintwinch, stroking his mouth and chin.

‘What should there be more than that! What could there be more than
that!’ she ejaculated in her sternly wondering way.

Mrs Flintwinch dreamed, that, for the space of a minute or two, they
remained looking at each other with the candle between them, and
that she somehow derived an impression that they looked at each other
fixedly.

‘Do you happen to know, Mrs Clennam,’ Affery’s liege lord then demanded
in a much lower voice, and with an amount of expression that seemed
quite out of proportion to the simple purpose of his words, ‘where she
lives?’

‘No.’

‘Would you--now, would you like to know?’ said Jeremiah with a pounce as
if he had sprung upon her.

‘If I cared to know, I should know already. Could I not have asked her
any day?’

‘Then you don’t care to know?’

‘I do not.’

Mr Flintwinch, having expelled a long significant breath said, with his
former emphasis, ‘For I have accidentally--mind!--found out.’

‘Wherever she lives,’ said Mrs Clennam, speaking in one unmodulated hard
voice, and separating her words as distinctly as if she were reading
them off from separate bits of metal that she took up one by one, ‘she
has made a secret of it, and she shall always keep her secret from me.’

‘After all, perhaps you would rather not have known the fact, any how?’
said Jeremiah; and he said it with a twist, as if his words had come out
of him in his own wry shape.

‘Flintwinch,’ said his mistress and partner, flashing into a sudden
energy that made Affery start, ‘why do you goad me? Look round this
room. If it is any compensation for my long confinement within these
narrow limits--not that I complain of being afflicted; you know I never
complain of that--if it is any compensation to me for long confinement
to this room, that while I am shut up from all pleasant change I am also
shut up from the knowledge of some things that I may prefer to avoid
knowing, why should you, of all men, grudge me that belief?’

‘I don’t grudge it to you,’ returned Jeremiah.

‘Then say no more. Say no more. Let Little Dorrit keep her secret from
me, and do you keep it from me also. Let her come and go, unobserved and
unquestioned. Let me suffer, and let me have what alleviation belongs to
my condition. Is it so much, that you torment me like an evil spirit?’

‘I asked you a question. That’s all.’

‘I have answered it. So, say no more. Say no more.’ Here the sound of
the wheeled chair was heard upon the floor, and Affery’s bell rang with
a hasty jerk.

More afraid of her husband at the moment than of the mysterious sound in
the kitchen, Affery crept away as lightly and as quickly as she could,
descended the kitchen stairs almost as rapidly as she had ascended them,
resumed her seat before the fire, tucked up her skirt again, and finally
threw her apron over her head. Then the bell rang once more, and then
once more, and then kept on ringing; in despite of which importunate
summons, Affery still sat behind her apron, recovering her breath.

At last Mr Flintwinch came shuffling down the staircase into the
hall, muttering and calling ‘Affery woman!’ all the way. Affery still
remaining behind her apron, he came stumbling down the kitchen stairs,
candle in hand, sidled up to her, twitched her apron off, and roused
her.

‘Oh Jeremiah!’ cried Affery, waking. ‘What a start you gave me!’

‘What have you been doing, woman?’ inquired Jeremiah. ‘You’ve been rung
for fifty times.’

‘Oh Jeremiah,’ said Mistress Affery, ‘I have been a-dreaming!’

Reminded of her former achievement in that way, Mr Flintwinch held the
candle to her head, as if he had some idea of lighting her up for the
illumination of the kitchen.

‘Don’t you know it’s her tea-time?’ he demanded with a vicious grin, and
giving one of the legs of Mistress Affery’s chair a kick.

‘Jeremiah? Tea-time? I don’t know what’s come to me. But I got such a
dreadful turn, Jeremiah, before I went--off a-dreaming, that I think it
must be that.’

‘Yoogh! Sleepy-Head!’ said Mr Flintwinch, ‘what are you talking about?’

‘Such a strange noise, Jeremiah, and such a curious movement. In the
kitchen here--just here.’

Jeremiah held up his light and looked at the blackened ceiling, held
down his light and looked at the damp stone floor, turned round with his
light and looked about at the spotted and blotched walls.

‘Rats, cats, water, drains,’ said Jeremiah.

Mistress Affery negatived each with a shake of her head. ‘No, Jeremiah;
I have felt it before. I have felt it up-stairs, and once on the
staircase as I was going from her room to ours in the night--a rustle
and a sort of trembling touch behind me.’

‘Affery, my woman,’ said Mr Flintwinch grimly, after advancing his nose
to that lady’s lips as a test for the detection of spirituous liquors,
‘if you don’t get tea pretty quick, old woman, you’ll become sensible
of a rustle and a touch that’ll send you flying to the other end of the
kitchen.’

This prediction stimulated Mrs Flintwinch to bestir herself, and to
hasten up-stairs to Mrs Clennam’s chamber. But, for all that, she now
began to entertain a settled conviction that there was something wrong
in the gloomy house. Henceforth, she was never at peace in it after
daylight departed; and never went up or down stairs in the dark without
having her apron over her head, lest she should see something.

What with these ghostly apprehensions and her singular dreams, Mrs
Flintwinch fell that evening into a haunted state of mind, from which
it may be long before this present narrative descries any trace of her
recovery. In the vagueness and indistinctness of all her new experiences
and perceptions, as everything about her was mysterious to herself she
began to be mysterious to others: and became as difficult to be made out
to anybody’s satisfaction as she found the house and everything in it
difficult to make out to her own.

She had not yet finished preparing Mrs Clennam’s tea, when the soft
knock came to the door which always announced Little Dorrit. Mistress
Affery looked on at Little Dorrit taking off her homely bonnet in the
hall, and at Mr Flintwinch scraping his jaws and contemplating her in
silence, as expecting some wonderful consequence to ensue which would
frighten her out of her five wits or blow them all three to pieces.

After tea there came another knock at the door, announcing Arthur.
Mistress Affery went down to let him in, and he said on entering,
‘Affery, I am glad it’s you. I want to ask you a question.’ Affery
immediately replied, ‘For goodness sake don’t ask me nothing, Arthur! I
am frightened out of one half of my life, and dreamed out of the
other. Don’t ask me nothing! I don’t know which is which, or what is
what!’--and immediately started away from him, and came near him no
more.

Mistress Affery having no taste for reading, and no sufficient light for
needlework in the subdued room, supposing her to have the inclination,
now sat every night in the dimness from which she had momentarily
emerged on the evening of Arthur Clennam’s return, occupied with crowds
of wild speculations and suspicions respecting her mistress and her
husband and the noises in the house. When the ferocious devotional
exercises were engaged in, these speculations would distract Mistress
Affery’s eyes towards the door, as if she expected some dark form to
appear at those propitious moments, and make the party one too many.

Otherwise, Affery never said or did anything to attract the attention of
the two clever ones towards her in any marked degree, except on certain
occasions, generally at about the quiet hour towards bed-time, when she
would suddenly dart out of her dim corner, and whisper with a face of
terror to Mr Flintwinch, reading the paper near Mrs Clennam’s little
table:

‘There, Jeremiah! Now! What’s that noise?’

Then the noise, if there were any, would have ceased, and Mr Flintwinch
would snarl, turning upon her as if she had cut him down that moment
against his will, ‘Affery, old woman, you shall have a dose, old woman,
such a dose! You have been dreaming again!’

CHAPTER 16. Nobody’s Weakness

The time being come for the renewal of his acquaintance with the Meagles
family, Clennam, pursuant to contract made between himself and Mr
Meagles within the precincts of Bleeding Heart Yard, turned his face
on a certain Saturday towards Twickenham, where Mr Meagles had a
cottage-residence of his own. The weather being fine and dry, and any
English road abounding in interest for him who had been so long away,
he sent his valise on by the coach, and set out to walk. A walk was in
itself a new enjoyment to him, and one that had rarely diversified his
life afar off.

He went by Fulham and Putney, for the pleasure of strolling over the
heath. It was bright and shining there; and when he found himself so far
on his road to Twickenham, he found himself a long way on his road to
a number of airier and less substantial destinations. They had risen
before him fast, in the healthful exercise and the pleasant road. It is
not easy to walk alone in the country without musing upon something. And
he had plenty of unsettled subjects to meditate upon, though he had been
walking to the Land’s End.

First, there was the subject seldom absent from his mind, the question,
what he was to do henceforth in life; to what occupation he should
devote himself, and in what direction he had best seek it. He was far
from rich, and every day of indecision and inaction made his inheritance
a source of greater anxiety to him. As often as he began to consider how
to increase this inheritance, or to lay it by, so often his misgiving
that there was some one with an unsatisfied claim upon his justice,
returned; and that alone was a subject to outlast the longest walk.
Again, there was the subject of his relations with his mother, which
were now upon an equable and peaceful but never confidential footing,
and whom he saw several times a week. Little Dorrit was a leading and a
constant subject: for the circumstances of his life, united to those of
her own story, presented the little creature to him as the only person
between whom and himself there were ties of innocent reliance on one
hand, and affectionate protection on the other; ties of compassion,
respect, unselfish interest, gratitude, and pity. Thinking of her, and
of the possibility of her father’s release from prison by the unbarring
hand of death--the only change of circumstance he could foresee that
might enable him to be such a friend to her as he wished to be, by
altering her whole manner of life, smoothing her rough road, and
giving her a home--he regarded her, in that perspective, as his adopted
daughter, his poor child of the Marshalsea hushed to rest. If there were
a last subject in his thoughts, and it lay towards Twickenham, its form
was so indefinite that it was little more than the pervading atmosphere
in which these other subjects floated before him.

He had crossed the heath and was leaving it behind when he gained upon a
figure which had been in advance of him for some time, and which, as
he gained upon it, he thought he knew. He derived this impression
from something in the turn of the head, and in the figure’s action of
consideration, as it went on at a sufficiently sturdy walk. But when
the man--for it was a man’s figure--pushed his hat up at the back of his
head, and stopped to consider some object before him, he knew it to be
Daniel Doyce.

‘How do you do, Mr Doyce?’ said Clennam, overtaking him. ‘I am glad to
see you again, and in a healthier place than the Circumlocution Office.’

‘Ha! Mr Meagles’s friend!’ exclaimed that public criminal, coming out of
some mental combinations he had been making, and offering his hand. ‘I
am glad to see you, sir. Will you excuse me if I forget your name?’

‘Readily. It’s not a celebrated name. It’s not Barnacle.’

‘No, no,’ said Daniel, laughing. ‘And now I know what it is. It’s
Clennam. How do you do, Mr Clennam?’

‘I have some hope,’ said Arthur, as they walked on together, ‘that we
may be going to the same place, Mr Doyce.’

‘Meaning Twickenham?’ returned Daniel. ‘I am glad to hear it.’

They were soon quite intimate, and lightened the way with a variety of
conversation. The ingenious culprit was a man of great modesty and good
sense; and, though a plain man, had been too much accustomed to combine
what was original and daring in conception with what was patient and
minute in execution, to be by any means an ordinary man. It was at first
difficult to lead him to speak about himself, and he put off Arthur’s
advances in that direction by admitting slightly, oh yes, he had done
this, and he had done that, and such a thing was of his making, and
such another thing was his discovery, but it was his trade, you see, his
trade; until, as he gradually became assured that his companion had a
real interest in his account of himself, he frankly yielded to it. Then
it appeared that he was the son of a north-country blacksmith, and had
originally been apprenticed by his widowed mother to a lock-maker; that
he had ‘struck out a few little things’ at the lock-maker’s, which had
led to his being released from his indentures with a present, which
present had enabled him to gratify his ardent wish to bind himself to
a working engineer, under whom he had laboured hard, learned hard, and
lived hard, seven years. His time being out, he had ‘worked in the shop’
at weekly wages seven or eight years more; and had then betaken
himself to the banks of the Clyde, where he had studied, and filed, and
hammered, and improved his knowledge, theoretical and practical, for six
or seven years more. There he had had an offer to go to Lyons, which he
had accepted; and from Lyons had been engaged to go to Germany, and in
Germany had had an offer to go to St Petersburg, and there had done very
well indeed--never better. However, he had naturally felt a preference
for his own country, and a wish to gain distinction there, and to do
whatever service he could do, there rather than elsewhere. And so he had
come home. And so at home he had established himself in business, and
had invented and executed, and worked his way on, until, after a dozen
years of constant suit and service, he had been enrolled in the
Great British Legion of Honour, the Legion of the Rebuffed of the
Circumlocution Office, and had been decorated with the Great British
Order of Merit, the Order of the Disorder of the Barnacles and
Stiltstalkings.

‘It is much to be regretted,’ said Clennam, ‘that you ever turned your
thoughts that way, Mr Doyce.’

‘True, sir, true to a certain extent. But what is a man to do? if he
has the misfortune to strike out something serviceable to the nation,
he must follow where it leads him.’

‘Hadn’t he better let it go?’ said Clennam.

‘He can’t do it,’ said Doyce, shaking his head with a thoughtful smile.
‘It’s not put into his head to be buried. It’s put into his head to be
made useful. You hold your life on the condition that to the last you
shall struggle hard for it. Every man holds a discovery on the same
terms.’

‘That is to say,’ said Arthur, with a growing admiration of his quiet
companion, ‘you are not finally discouraged even now?’

‘I have no right to be, if I am,’ returned the other. ‘The thing is as
true as it ever was.’

When they had walked a little way in silence, Clennam, at once to
change the direct point of their conversation and not to change it
too abruptly, asked Mr Doyce if he had any partner in his business to
relieve him of a portion of its anxieties?

‘No,’ he returned, ‘not at present. I had when I first entered on it,
and a good man he was. But he has been dead some years; and as I could
not easily take to the notion of another when I lost him, I bought
his share for myself and have gone on by myself ever since. And here’s
another thing,’ he said, stopping for a moment with a good-humoured
laugh in his eyes, and laying his closed right hand, with its peculiar
suppleness of thumb, on Clennam’s arm, ‘no inventor can be a man of
business, you know.’

‘No?’ said Clennam.

‘Why, so the men of business say,’ he answered, resuming the walk and
laughing outright. ‘I don’t know why we unfortunate creatures should
be supposed to want common sense, but it is generally taken for granted
that we do. Even the best friend I have in the world, our excellent
friend over yonder,’ said Doyce, nodding towards Twickenham, ‘extends
a sort of protection to me, don’t you know, as a man not quite able to
take care of himself?’

Arthur Clennam could not help joining in the good-humoured laugh, for he
recognised the truth of the description.

‘So I find that I must have a partner who is a man of business and not
guilty of any inventions,’ said Daniel Doyce, taking off his hat to pass
his hand over his forehead, ‘if it’s only in deference to the current
opinion, and to uphold the credit of the Works. I don’t think he’ll find
that I have been very remiss or confused in my way of conducting them;
but that’s for him to say--whoever he is--not for me.’

‘You have not chosen him yet, then?’

‘No, sir, no. I have only just come to a decision to take one. The fact
is, there’s more to do than there used to be, and the Works are enough
for me as I grow older. What with the books and correspondence, and
foreign journeys for which a Principal is necessary, I can’t do all. I
am going to talk over the best way of negotiating the matter, if I find
a spare half-hour between this and Monday morning, with my--my Nurse and
protector,’ said Doyce, with laughing eyes again. ‘He is a sagacious man
in business, and has had a good apprenticeship to it.’

After this, they conversed on different subjects until they arrived at
their journey’s end. A composed and unobtrusive self-sustainment was
noticeable in Daniel Doyce--a calm knowledge that what was true must
remain true, in spite of all the Barnacles in the family ocean, and
would be just the truth, and neither more nor less when even that sea
had run dry--which had a kind of greatness in it, though not of the
official quality.

As he knew the house well, he conducted Arthur to it by the way that
showed it to the best advantage. It was a charming place (none the worse
for being a little eccentric), on the road by the river, and just what
the residence of the Meagles family ought to be. It stood in a garden,
no doubt as fresh and beautiful in the May of the Year as Pet now was
in the May of her life; and it was defended by a goodly show of handsome
trees and spreading evergreens, as Pet was by Mr and Mrs Meagles. It
was made out of an old brick house, of which a part had been altogether
pulled down, and another part had been changed into the present cottage;
so there was a hale elderly portion, to represent Mr and Mrs Meagles,
and a young picturesque, very pretty portion to represent Pet. There was
even the later addition of a conservatory sheltering itself against it,
uncertain of hue in its deep-stained glass, and in its more transparent
portions flashing to the sun’s rays, now like fire and now like harmless
water drops; which might have stood for Tattycoram. Within view was
the peaceful river and the ferry-boat, to moralise to all the inmates
saying: Young or old, passionate or tranquil, chafing or content, you,
thus runs the current always. Let the heart swell into what discord it
will, thus plays the rippling water on the prow of the ferry-boat ever
the same tune. Year after year, so much allowance for the drifting of
the boat, so many miles an hour the flowing of the stream, here the
rushes, there the lilies, nothing uncertain or unquiet, upon this road
that steadily runs away; while you, upon your flowing road of time, are
so capricious and distracted.

The bell at the gate had scarcely sounded when Mr Meagles came out to
receive them. Mr Meagles had scarcely come out, when Mrs Meagles came
out. Mrs Meagles had scarcely come out, when Pet came out. Pet scarcely
had come out, when Tattycoram came out. Never had visitors a more
hospitable reception.

‘Here we are, you see,’ said Mr Meagles, ‘boxed up, Mr Clennam, within
our own home-limits, as if we were never going to expand--that is,
travel--again. Not like Marseilles, eh? No allonging and marshonging
here!’

‘A different kind of beauty, indeed!’ said Clennam, looking about him.

‘But, Lord bless me!’ cried Mr Meagles, rubbing his hands with a relish,
‘it was an uncommonly pleasant thing being in quarantine, wasn’t it?
Do you know, I have often wished myself back again? We were a capital
party.’

This was Mr Meagles’s invariable habit. Always to object to everything
while he was travelling, and always to want to get back to it when he
was not travelling.

‘If it was summer-time,’ said Mr Meagles, ‘which I wish it was on your
account, and in order that you might see the place at its best, you
would hardly be able to hear yourself speak for birds. Being practical
people, we never allow anybody to scare the birds; and the birds, being
practical people too, come about us in myriads. We are delighted to see
you, Clennam (if you’ll allow me, I shall drop the Mister); I heartily
assure you, we are delighted.’

‘I have not had so pleasant a greeting,’ said Clennam--then he recalled
what Little Dorrit had said to him in his own room, and faithfully
added ‘except once--since we last walked to and fro, looking down at the
Mediterranean.’

‘Ah!’ returned Mr Meagles. ‘Something like a look out, _that_ was, wasn’t
it? I don’t want a military government, but I shouldn’t mind a little
allonging and marshonging--just a dash of it--in this neighbourhood
sometimes. It’s Devilish still.’

Bestowing this eulogium on the retired character of his retreat with a
dubious shake of the head, Mr Meagles led the way into the house. It was
just large enough, and no more; was as pretty within as it was without,
and was perfectly well-arranged and comfortable. Some traces of the
migratory habits of the family were to be observed in the covered frames
and furniture, and wrapped-up hangings; but it was easy to see that it
was one of Mr Meagles’s whims to have the cottage always kept, in their
absence, as if they were always coming back the day after to-morrow. Of
articles collected on his various expeditions, there was such a vast
miscellany that it was like the dwelling of an amiable Corsair. There
were antiquities from Central Italy, made by the best modern houses in
that department of industry; bits of mummy from Egypt (and perhaps
Birmingham); model gondolas from Venice; model villages from
Switzerland; morsels of tesselated pavement from Herculaneum and
Pompeii, like petrified minced veal; ashes out of tombs, and lava out of
Vesuvius; Spanish fans, Spezzian straw hats, Moorish slippers, Tuscan
hairpins, Carrara sculpture, Trastaverini scarves, Genoese velvets and
filigree, Neapolitan coral, Roman cameos, Geneva jewellery, Arab
lanterns, rosaries blest all round by the Pope himself, and an infinite
variety of lumber. There were views, like and unlike, of a multitude of
places; and there was one little picture-room devoted to a few of the
regular sticky old Saints, with sinews like whipcord, hair like
Neptune’s, wrinkles like tattooing, and such coats of varnish that every
holy personage served for a fly-trap, and became what is now called in
the vulgar tongue a Catch-em-alive O. Of these pictorial acquisitions Mr
Meagles spoke in the usual manner. He was no judge, he said, except of
what pleased himself; he had picked them up, dirt-cheap, and people
_had_ considered them rather fine. One man, who at any rate ought to
know something of the subject, had declared that ‘Sage, Reading’ (a
specially oily old gentleman in a blanket, with a swan’s-down tippet for
a beard, and a web of cracks all over him like rich pie-crust), to be a
fine Guercino. As for Sebastian del Piombo there, you would judge for
yourself; if it were not his later manner, the question was, Who was it?
Titian, that might or might not be--perhaps he had only touched it.
Daniel Doyce said perhaps he hadn’t touched it, but Mr Meagles rather
declined to overhear the remark.

When he had shown all his spoils, Mr Meagles took them into his own
snug room overlooking the lawn, which was fitted up in part like a
dressing-room and in part like an office, and in which, upon a kind of
counter-desk, were a pair of brass scales for weighing gold, and a scoop
for shovelling out money.

‘Here they are, you see,’ said Mr Meagles. ‘I stood behind these two
articles five-and-thirty years running, when I no more thought of
gadding about than I now think of--staying at home. When I left the Bank
for good, I asked for them, and brought them away with me. I mention it
at once, or you might suppose that I sit in my counting-house (as Pet
says I do), like the king in the poem of the four-and-twenty blackbirds,
counting out my money.’

Clennam’s eyes had strayed to a natural picture on the wall, of two
pretty little girls with their arms entwined. ‘Yes, Clennam,’ said
Mr Meagles, in a lower voice. ‘There they both are. It was taken some
seventeen years ago. As I often say to Mother, they were babies then.’

‘Their names?’ said Arthur.

‘Ah, to be sure! You have never heard any name but Pet. Pet’s name is
Minnie; her sister’s Lillie.’

‘Should you have known, Mr Clennam, that one of them was meant for me?’
asked Pet herself, now standing in the doorway.

‘I might have thought that both of them were meant for you, both
are still so like you. Indeed,’ said Clennam, glancing from the fair
original to the picture and back, ‘I cannot even now say which is not
your portrait.’

‘D’ye hear that, Mother?’ cried Mr Meagles to his wife, who had followed
her daughter. ‘It’s always the same, Clennam; nobody can decide. The
child to your left is Pet.’

The picture happened to be near a looking-glass. As Arthur looked at
it again, he saw, by the reflection of the mirror, Tattycoram stop in
passing outside the door, listen to what was going on, and pass away
with an angry and contemptuous frown upon her face, that changed its
beauty into ugliness.

‘But come!’ said Mr Meagles. ‘You have had a long walk, and will be glad
to get your boots off. As to Daniel here, I suppose he’d never think of
taking _his_ boots off, unless we showed him a boot-jack.’

‘Why not?’ asked Daniel, with a significant smile at Clennam.

‘Oh! You have so many things to think about,’ returned Mr Meagles,
clapping him on the shoulder, as if his weakness must not be left to
itself on any account. ‘Figures, and wheels, and cogs, and levers, and
screws, and cylinders, and a thousand things.’

‘In my calling,’ said Daniel, amused, ‘the greater usually includes the
less. But never mind, never mind! Whatever pleases you, pleases me.’

Clennam could not help speculating, as he seated himself in his room
by the fire, whether there might be in the breast of this honest,
affectionate, and cordial Mr Meagles, any microscopic portion of
the mustard-seed that had sprung up into the great tree of the
Circumlocution Office. His curious sense of a general superiority to
Daniel Doyce, which seemed to be founded, not so much on anything
in Doyce’s personal character as on the mere fact of his being an
originator and a man out of the beaten track of other men, suggested the
idea. It might have occupied him until he went down to dinner an hour
afterwards, if he had not had another question to consider, which
had been in his mind so long ago as before he was in quarantine at
Marseilles, and which had now returned to it, and was very urgent with
it. No less a question than this: Whether he should allow himself to
fall in love with Pet?

He was twice her age. (He changed the leg he had crossed over the other,
and tried the calculation again, but could not bring out the total at
less.) He was twice her age. Well! He was young in appearance, young
in health and strength, young in heart. A man was certainly not old
at forty; and many men were not in circumstances to marry, or did not
marry, until they had attained that time of life. On the other hand, the
question was, not what he thought of the point, but what she thought of
it.

He believed that Mr Meagles was disposed to entertain a ripe regard for
him, and he knew that he had a sincere regard for Mr Meagles and his
good wife. He could foresee that to relinquish this beautiful only
child, of whom they were so fond, to any husband, would be a trial
of their love which perhaps they never yet had had the fortitude to
contemplate. But the more beautiful and winning and charming she, the
nearer they must always be to the necessity of approaching it. And why
not in his favour, as well as in another’s?

When he had got so far, it came again into his head that the question
was, not what they thought of it, but what she thought of it.

Arthur Clennam was a retiring man, with a sense of many deficiencies;
and he so exalted the merits of the beautiful Minnie in his mind, and
depressed his own, that when he pinned himself to this point, his hopes
began to fail him. He came to the final resolution, as he made himself
ready for dinner, that he would not allow himself to fall in love with
Pet.

There were only five, at a round table, and it was very pleasant indeed.
They had so many places and people to recall, and they were all so easy
and cheerful together (Daniel Doyce either sitting out like an amused
spectator at cards, or coming in with some shrewd little experiences of
his own, when it happened to be to the purpose), that they might have
been together twenty times, and not have known so much of one another.

‘And Miss Wade,’ said Mr Meagles, after they had recalled a number of
fellow-travellers. ‘Has anybody seen Miss Wade?’

‘I have,’ said Tattycoram.

She had brought a little mantle which her young mistress had sent for,
and was bending over her, putting it on, when she lifted up her dark
eyes and made this unexpected answer.

‘Tatty!’ her young mistress exclaimed. ‘You seen Miss Wade?--where?’

‘Here, miss,’ said Tattycoram.

‘How?’

An impatient glance from Tattycoram seemed, as Clennam saw it, to answer
‘With my eyes!’ But her only answer in words was: ‘I met her near the
church.’

‘What was she doing there I wonder!’ said Mr Meagles. ‘Not going to it,
I should think.’

‘She had written to me first,’ said Tattycoram.

‘Oh, Tatty!’ murmured her mistress, ‘take your hands away. I feel as if
some one else was touching me!’

She said it in a quick involuntary way, but half playfully, and not more
petulantly or disagreeably than a favourite child might have done, who
laughed next moment. Tattycoram set her full red lips together, and
crossed her arms upon her bosom.

‘Did you wish to know, sir,’ she said, looking at Mr Meagles, ‘what Miss
Wade wrote to me about?’

‘Well, Tattycoram,’ returned Mr Meagles, ‘since you ask the question,
and we are all friends here, perhaps you may as well mention it, if you
are so inclined.’

‘She knew, when we were travelling, where you lived,’ said Tattycoram,
‘and she had seen me not quite--not quite--’

‘Not quite in a good temper, Tattycoram?’ suggested Mr Meagles,
shaking his head at the dark eyes with a quiet caution. ‘Take a little
time--count five-and-twenty, Tattycoram.’

She pressed her lips together again, and took a long deep breath.

‘So she wrote to me to say that if I ever felt myself hurt,’ she looked
down at her young mistress, ‘or found myself worried,’ she looked down
at her again, ‘I might go to her, and be considerately treated. I was
to think of it, and could speak to her by the church. So I went there to
thank her.’

‘Tatty,’ said her young mistress, putting her hand up over her shoulder
that the other might take it, ‘Miss Wade almost frightened me when we
parted, and I scarcely like to think of her just now as having been so
near me without my knowing it. Tatty dear!’

Tatty stood for a moment, immovable.

‘Hey?’ cried Mr Meagles. ‘Count another five-and-twenty, Tattycoram.’

She might have counted a dozen, when she bent and put her lips to the
caressing hand. It patted her cheek, as it touched the owner’s beautiful
curls, and Tattycoram went away.

‘Now there,’ said Mr Meagles softly, as he gave a turn to the
dumb-waiter on his right hand to twirl the sugar towards himself.
‘There’s a girl who might be lost and ruined, if she wasn’t among
practical people. Mother and I know, solely from being practical, that
there are times when that girl’s whole nature seems to roughen itself
against seeing us so bound up in Pet. No father and mother were bound
up in her, poor soul. I don’t like to think of the way in which that
unfortunate child, with all that passion and protest in her, feels when
she hears the Fifth Commandment on a Sunday. I am always inclined to
call out, Church, Count five-and-twenty, Tattycoram.’

Besides his dumb-waiter, Mr Meagles had two other not dumb waiters in
the persons of two parlour-maids with rosy faces and bright eyes, who
were a highly ornamental part of the table decoration. ‘And why not, you
see?’ said Mr Meagles on this head. ‘As I always say to Mother, why
not have something pretty to look at, if you have anything at all?’

A certain Mrs Tickit, who was Cook and Housekeeper when the family were
at home, and Housekeeper only when the family were away, completed the
establishment. Mr Meagles regretted that the nature of the duties in
which she was engaged, rendered Mrs Tickit unpresentable at present,
but hoped to introduce her to the new visitor to-morrow. She was an
important part of the Cottage, he said, and all his friends knew her.
That was her picture up in the corner. When they went away, she always
put on the silk-gown and the jet-black row of curls represented in that
portrait (her hair was reddish-grey in the kitchen), established herself
in the breakfast-room, put her spectacles between two particular leaves
of Doctor Buchan’s Domestic Medicine, and sat looking over the blind all
day until they came back again. It was supposed that no persuasion could
be invented which would induce Mrs Tickit to abandon her post at the
blind, however long their absence, or to dispense with the attendance
of Dr Buchan; the lucubrations of which learned practitioner, Mr Meagles
implicitly believed she had never yet consulted to the extent of one
word in her life.

In the evening they played an old-fashioned rubber; and Pet sat looking
over her father’s hand, or singing to herself by fits and starts at the
piano. She was a spoilt child; but how could she be otherwise? Who could
be much with so pliable and beautiful a creature, and not yield to her
endearing influence? Who could pass an evening in the house, and not
love her for the grace and charm of her very presence in the room? This
was Clennam’s reflection, notwithstanding the final conclusion at which
he had arrived up-stairs.

In making it, he revoked. ‘Why, what are you thinking of, my good sir?’
asked the astonished Mr Meagles, who was his partner. ‘I beg your
pardon. Nothing,’ returned Clennam. ‘Think of something, next time;
that’s a dear fellow,’ said Mr Meagles. Pet laughingly believed he had
been thinking of Miss Wade. ‘Why of Miss Wade, Pet?’ asked her father.
‘Why, indeed!’ said Arthur Clennam. Pet coloured a little, and went to
the piano again.

As they broke up for the night, Arthur overheard Doyce ask his host if
he could give him half an hour’s conversation before breakfast in the
morning? The host replying willingly, Arthur lingered behind a moment,
having his own word to add to that topic.

‘Mr Meagles,’ he said, on their being left alone, ‘do you remember when
you advised me to go straight to London?’

‘Perfectly well.’

‘And when you gave me some other good advice which I needed at that
time?’

‘I won’t say what it was worth,’ answered Mr Meagles: ‘but of course I
remember our being very pleasant and confidential together.’

‘I have acted on your advice; and having disembarrassed myself of an
occupation that was painful to me for many reasons, wish to devote
myself and what means I have, to another pursuit.’

‘Right! You can’t do it too soon,’ said Mr Meagles.

‘Now, as I came down to-day, I found that your friend, Mr Doyce, is
looking for a partner in his business--not a partner in his mechanical
knowledge, but in the ways and means of turning the business arising
from it to the best account.’

‘Just so,’ said Mr Meagles, with his hands in his pockets, and with the
old business expression of face that had belonged to the scales and
scoop.

‘Mr Doyce mentioned incidentally, in the course of our conversation,
that he was going to take your valuable advice on the subject of finding
such a partner. If you should think our views and opportunities at all
likely to coincide, perhaps you will let him know my available position.
I speak, of course, in ignorance of the details, and they may be
unsuitable on both sides.’

‘No doubt, no doubt,’ said Mr Meagles, with the caution belonging to the
scales and scoop.

‘But they will be a question of figures and accounts--’

‘Just so, just so,’ said Mr Meagles, with arithmetical solidity
belonging to the scales and scoop.

‘--And I shall be glad to enter into the subject, provided Mr Doyce
responds, and you think well of it. If you will at present, therefore,
allow me to place it in your hands, you will much oblige me.’

‘Clennam, I accept the trust with readiness,’ said Mr Meagles. ‘And
without anticipating any of the points which you, as a man of business,
have of course reserved, I am free to say to you that I think something
may come of this. Of one thing you may be perfectly certain. Daniel is
an honest man.’

‘I am so sure of it that I have promptly made up my mind to speak to
you.’

‘You must guide him, you know; you must steer him; you must direct him;
he is one of a crotchety sort,’ said Mr Meagles, evidently meaning
nothing more than that he did new things and went new ways; ‘but he is
as honest as the sun, and so good night!’

Clennam went back to his room, sat down again before his fire, and made
up his mind that he was glad he had resolved not to fall in love with
Pet. She was so beautiful, so amiable, so apt to receive any true
impression given to her gentle nature and her innocent heart, and make
the man who should be so happy as to communicate it, the most fortunate
and enviable of all men, that he was very glad indeed he had come to
that conclusion.

But, as this might have been a reason for coming to the opposite
conclusion, he followed out the theme again a little way in his mind; to
justify himself, perhaps.

‘Suppose that a man,’ so his thoughts ran, ‘who had been of age some
twenty years or so; who was a diffident man, from the circumstances of
his youth; who was rather a grave man, from the tenor of his life; who
knew himself to be deficient in many little engaging qualities which
he admired in others, from having been long in a distant region, with
nothing softening near him; who had no kind sisters to present to her;
who had no congenial home to make her known in; who was a stranger in
the land; who had not a fortune to compensate, in any measure, for
these defects; who had nothing in his favour but his honest love and his
general wish to do right--suppose such a man were to come to this house,
and were to yield to the captivation of this charming girl, and were to
persuade himself that he could hope to win her; what a weakness it would
be!’

He softly opened his window, and looked out upon the serene river. Year
after year so much allowance for the drifting of the ferry-boat, so
many miles an hour the flowing of the stream, here the rushes, there the
lilies, nothing uncertain or unquiet.

Why should he be vexed or sore at heart? It was not his weakness that he
had imagined. It was nobody’s, nobody’s within his knowledge; why should
it trouble him? And yet it did trouble him. And he thought--who has not
thought for a moment, sometimes?--that it might be better to flow away
monotonously, like the river, and to compound for its insensibility to
happiness with its insensibility to pain.

CHAPTER 17. Nobody’s Rival

Before breakfast in the morning, Arthur walked out to look about him.
As the morning was fine and he had an hour on his hands, he crossed the
river by the ferry, and strolled along a footpath through some meadows.
When he came back to the towing-path, he found the ferry-boat on the
opposite side, and a gentleman hailing it and waiting to be taken over.

This gentleman looked barely thirty. He was well dressed, of a sprightly
and gay appearance, a well-knit figure, and a rich dark complexion. As
Arthur came over the stile and down to the water’s edge, the lounger
glanced at him for a moment, and then resumed his occupation of idly
tossing stones into the water with his foot. There was something in his
way of spurning them out of their places with his heel, and getting them
into the required position, that Clennam thought had an air of cruelty
in it. Most of us have more or less frequently derived a similar
impression from a man’s manner of doing some very little thing: plucking
a flower, clearing away an obstacle, or even destroying an insentient
object.

The gentleman’s thoughts were preoccupied, as his face showed, and he
took no notice of a fine Newfoundland dog, who watched him attentively,
and watched every stone too, in its turn, eager to spring into the
river on receiving his master’s sign. The ferry-boat came over, however,
without his receiving any sign, and when it grounded his master took him
by the collar and walked him into it.

‘Not this morning,’ he said to the dog. ‘You won’t do for ladies’
company, dripping wet. Lie down.’

Clennam followed the man and the dog into the boat, and took his seat.
The dog did as he was ordered. The man remained standing, with his hands
in his pockets, and towered between Clennam and the prospect. Man and
dog both jumped lightly out as soon as they touched the other side, and
went away. Clennam was glad to be rid of them.

The church clock struck the breakfast hour as he walked up the little
lane by which the garden-gate was approached. The moment he pulled the
bell a deep loud barking assailed him from within the wall.

‘I heard no dog last night,’ thought Clennam. The gate was opened by
one of the rosy maids, and on the lawn were the Newfoundland dog and the
man.

‘Miss Minnie is not down yet, gentlemen,’ said the blushing portress, as
they all came together in the garden. Then she said to the master of the
dog, ‘Mr Clennam, sir,’ and tripped away.

‘Odd enough, Mr Clennam, that we should have met just now,’ said
the man. Upon which the dog became mute. ‘Allow me to introduce
myself--Henry Gowan. A pretty place this, and looks wonderfully well
this morning!’

The manner was easy, and the voice agreeable; but still Clennam thought,
that if he had not made that decided resolution to avoid falling in love
with Pet, he would have taken a dislike to this Henry Gowan.

‘It’s new to you, I believe?’ said this Gowan, when Arthur had extolled
the place.

‘Quite new. I made acquaintance with it only yesterday afternoon.’

‘Ah! Of course this is not its best aspect. It used to look charming in
the spring, before they went away last time. I should like you to have
seen it then.’

But for that resolution so often recalled, Clennam might have wished him
in the crater of Mount Etna, in return for this civility.

‘I have had the pleasure of seeing it under many circumstances during
the last three years, and it’s--a Paradise.’

It was (at least it might have been, always excepting for that wise
resolution) like his dexterous impudence to call it a Paradise. He only
called it a Paradise because he first saw her coming, and so made her
out within her hearing to be an angel, Confusion to him!

And ah! how beaming she looked, and how glad! How she caressed the dog,
and how the dog knew her! How expressive that heightened colour in her
face, that fluttered manner, her downcast eyes, her irresolute
happiness! When had Clennam seen her look like this? Not that there was
any reason why he might, could, would, or should have ever seen her look
like this, or that he had ever hoped for himself to see her look like
this; but still--when had he ever known her do it!

He stood at a little distance from them. This Gowan when he had talked
about a Paradise, had gone up to her and taken her hand. The dog had put
his great paws on her arm and laid his head against her dear bosom. She
had laughed and welcomed them, and made far too much of the dog, far,
far, too much--that is to say, supposing there had been any third person
looking on who loved her.

She disengaged herself now, and came to Clennam, and put her hand in his
and wished him good morning, and gracefully made as if she would take
his arm and be escorted into the house. To this Gowan had no objection.
No, he knew he was too safe.

There was a passing cloud on Mr Meagles’s good-humoured face when they
all three (four, counting the dog, and he was the most objectionable
but one of the party) came in to breakfast. Neither it, nor the touch
of uneasiness on Mrs Meagles as she directed her eyes towards it, was
unobserved by Clennam.

‘Well, Gowan,’ said Mr Meagles, even suppressing a sigh; ‘how goes the
world with you this morning?’

‘Much as usual, sir. Lion and I being determined not to waste anything
of our weekly visit, turned out early, and came over from Kingston, my
present headquarters, where I am making a sketch or two.’ Then he told
how he had met Mr Clennam at the ferry, and they had come over together.

‘Mrs Gowan is well, Henry?’ said Mrs Meagles. (Clennam became
attentive.)

‘My mother is quite well, thank you.’ (Clennam became inattentive.) ‘I
have taken the liberty of making an addition to your family dinner-party
to-day, which I hope will not be inconvenient to you or to Mr Meagles. I
couldn’t very well get out of it,’ he explained, turning to the latter.
‘The young fellow wrote to propose himself to me; and as he is well
connected, I thought you would not object to my transferring him here.’

‘Who _is_ the young fellow?’ asked Mr Meagles with peculiar complacency.

‘He is one of the Barnacles. Tite Barnacle’s son, Clarence Barnacle, who
is in his father’s Department. I can at least guarantee that the river
shall not suffer from his visit. He won’t set it on fire.’

‘Aye, aye?’ said Meagles. ‘A Barnacle is he? _We_ know something of that
family, eh, Dan? By George, they are at the top of the tree, though! Let
me see. What relation will this young fellow be to Lord Decimus now? His
Lordship married, in seventeen ninety-seven, Lady Jemima Bilberry, who
was the second daughter by the third marriage--no! There I am wrong!
That was Lady Seraphina--Lady Jemima was the first daughter by the
second marriage of the fifteenth Earl of Stiltstalking with the
Honourable Clementina Toozellem. Very well. Now this young fellow’s
father married a Stiltstalking and _his_ father married his cousin who
was a Barnacle. The father of that father who married a Barnacle,
married a Joddleby.--I am getting a little too far back, Gowan; I want
to make out what relation this young fellow is to Lord Decimus.’

‘That’s easily stated. His father is nephew to Lord Decimus.’

‘Nephew--to--Lord--Decimus,’ Mr Meagles luxuriously repeated with his
eyes shut, that he might have nothing to distract him from the full
flavour of the genealogical tree. ‘By George, you are right, Gowan. So
he is.’

‘Consequently, Lord Decimus is his great uncle.’

‘But stop a bit!’ said Mr Meagles, opening his eyes with a fresh
discovery. ‘Then on the mother’s side, Lady Stiltstalking is his great
aunt.’

‘Of course she is.’

‘Aye, aye, aye?’ said Mr Meagles with much interest. ‘Indeed, indeed? We
shall be glad to see him. We’ll entertain him as well as we can, in our
humble way; and we shall not starve him, I hope, at all events.’

In the beginning of this dialogue, Clennam had expected some great
harmless outburst from Mr Meagles, like that which had made him burst
out of the Circumlocution Office, holding Doyce by the collar. But his
good friend had a weakness which none of us need go into the next street
to find, and which no amount of Circumlocution experience could long
subdue in him. Clennam looked at Doyce; but Doyce knew all about it
beforehand, and looked at his plate, and made no sign, and said no word.

‘I am much obliged to you,’ said Gowan, to conclude the subject.
‘Clarence is a great ass, but he is one of the dearest and best fellows
that ever lived!’

It appeared, before the breakfast was over, that everybody whom this
Gowan knew was either more or less of an ass, or more or less of a
knave; but was, notwithstanding, the most lovable, the most engaging,
the simplest, truest, kindest, dearest, best fellow that ever lived.
The process by which this unvarying result was attained, whatever the
premises, might have been stated by Mr Henry Gowan thus: ‘I claim to be
always book-keeping, with a peculiar nicety, in every man’s case, and
posting up a careful little account of Good and Evil with him. I do
this so conscientiously, that I am happy to tell you I find the most
worthless of men to be the dearest old fellow too: and am in a condition
to make the gratifying report, that there is much less difference than
you are inclined to suppose between an honest man and a scoundrel.’ The
effect of this cheering discovery happened to be, that while he seemed
to be scrupulously finding good in most men, he did in reality lower
it where it was, and set it up where it was not; but that was its only
disagreeable or dangerous feature.

It scarcely seemed, however, to afford Mr Meagles as much satisfaction
as the Barnacle genealogy had done. The cloud that Clennam had never
seen upon his face before that morning, frequently overcast it again;
and there was the same shadow of uneasy observation of him on the comely
face of his wife. More than once or twice when Pet caressed the dog,
it appeared to Clennam that her father was unhappy in seeing her do it;
and, in one particular instance when Gowan stood on the other side of
the dog, and bent his head at the same time, Arthur fancied that he saw
tears rise to Mr Meagles’s eyes as he hurried out of the room. It was
either the fact too, or he fancied further, that Pet herself was not
insensible to these little incidents; that she tried, with a more
delicate affection than usual, to express to her good father how much
she loved him; that it was on this account that she fell behind the
rest, both as they went to church and as they returned from it, and
took his arm. He could not have sworn but that as he walked alone in
the garden afterwards, he had an instantaneous glimpse of her in
her father’s room, clinging to both her parents with the greatest
tenderness, and weeping on her father’s shoulder.

The latter part of the day turning out wet, they were fain to keep the
house, look over Mr Meagles’s collection, and beguile the time with
conversation. This Gowan had plenty to say for himself, and said it
in an off-hand and amusing manner. He appeared to be an artist by
profession, and to have been at Rome some time; yet he had a slight,
careless, amateur way with him--a perceptible limp, both in his devotion
to art and his attainments--which Clennam could scarcely understand.

He applied to Daniel Doyce for help, as they stood together, looking out
of window.

‘You know Mr Gowan?’ he said in a low voice.

‘I have seen him here. Comes here every Sunday when they are at home.’

‘An artist, I infer from what he says?’

‘A sort of a one,’ said Daniel Doyce, in a surly tone.

‘What sort of a one?’ asked Clennam, with a smile.

‘Why, he has sauntered into the Arts at a leisurely Pall-Mall pace,’
said Doyce, ‘and I doubt if they care to be taken quite so coolly.’

Pursuing his inquiries, Clennam found that the Gowan family were a very
distant ramification of the Barnacles; and that the paternal Gowan,
originally attached to a legation abroad, had been pensioned off as a
Commissioner of nothing particular somewhere or other, and had died at
his post with his drawn salary in his hand, nobly defending it to the
last extremity. In consideration of this eminent public service, the
Barnacle then in power had recommended the Crown to bestow a pension of
two or three hundred a-year on his widow; to which the next Barnacle in
power had added certain shady and sedate apartments in the Palaces at
Hampton Court, where the old lady still lived, deploring the degeneracy
of the times in company with several other old ladies of both sexes. Her
son, Mr Henry Gowan, inheriting from his father, the Commissioner, that
very questionable help in life, a very small independence, had been
difficult to settle; the rather, as public appointments chanced to
be scarce, and his genius, during his earlier manhood, was of that
exclusively agricultural character which applies itself to the
cultivation of wild oats. At last he had declared that he would become
a Painter; partly because he had always had an idle knack that way,
and partly to grieve the souls of the Barnacles-in-chief who had not
provided for him. So it had come to pass successively, first, that
several distinguished ladies had been frightfully shocked; then, that
portfolios of his performances had been handed about o’ nights, and
declared with ecstasy to be perfect Claudes, perfect Cuyps, perfect
phaenomena; then, that Lord Decimus had bought his picture, and had
asked the President and Council to dinner at a blow, and had said, with
his own magnificent gravity, ‘Do you know, there appears to me to
be really immense merit in that work?’ and, in short, that people of
condition had absolutely taken pains to bring him into fashion. But,
somehow, it had all failed. The prejudiced public had stood out against
it obstinately. They had determined not to admire Lord Decimus’s
picture. They had determined to believe that in every service, except
their own, a man must qualify himself, by striving early and late, and
by working heart and soul, might and main. So now Mr Gowan, like that
worn-out old coffin which never was Mahomet’s nor anybody else’s, hung
midway between two points: jaundiced and jealous as to the one he had
left: jaundiced and jealous as to the other that he couldn’t reach.

Such was the substance of Clennam’s discoveries concerning him, made
that rainy Sunday afternoon and afterwards.

About an hour or so after dinner time, Young Barnacle appeared, attended
by his eye-glass; in honour of whose family connections, Mr Meagles had
cashiered the pretty parlour-maids for the day, and had placed on duty
in their stead two dingy men. Young Barnacle was in the last
degree amazed and disconcerted at sight of Arthur, and had murmured
involuntarily, ‘Look here! upon my soul, you know!’ before his presence
of mind returned.

Even then, he was obliged to embrace the earliest opportunity of taking
his friend into a window, and saying, in a nasal way that was a part of
his general debility:

‘I want to speak to you, Gowan. I say. Look here. Who is that fellow?’

‘A friend of our host’s. None of mine.’

‘He’s a most ferocious Radical, you know,’ said Young Barnacle.

‘Is he? How do you know?’

‘Ecod, sir, he was Pitching into our people the other day in the most
tremendous manner. Went up to our place and Pitched into my father to
that extent that it was necessary to order him out. Came back to
our Department, and Pitched into me. Look here. You never saw such a
fellow.’

‘What did he want?’

‘Ecod, sir,’ returned Young Barnacle, ‘he said he wanted to know, you
know! Pervaded our Department--without an appointment--and said he
wanted to know!’

The stare of indignant wonder with which Young Barnacle accompanied
this disclosure, would have strained his eyes injuriously but for
the opportune relief of dinner. Mr Meagles (who had been extremely
solicitous to know how his uncle and aunt were) begged him to conduct
Mrs Meagles to the dining-room. And when he sat on Mrs Meagles’s right
hand, Mr Meagles looked as gratified as if his whole family were there.

All the natural charm of the previous day was gone. The eaters of the
dinner, like the dinner itself, were lukewarm, insipid, overdone--and
all owing to this poor little dull Young Barnacle. Conversationless at
any time, he was now the victim of a weakness special to the occasion,
and solely referable to Clennam. He was under a pressing and continual
necessity of looking at that gentleman, which occasioned his eye-glass
to get into his soup, into his wine-glass, into Mrs Meagles’s plate, to
hang down his back like a bell-rope, and be several times disgracefully
restored to his bosom by one of the dingy men. Weakened in mind by his
frequent losses of this instrument, and its determination not to stick
in his eye, and more and more enfeebled in intellect every time he
looked at the mysterious Clennam, he applied spoons to his eyes,
forks, and other foreign matters connected with the furniture of the
dinner-table. His discovery of these mistakes greatly increased his
difficulties, but never released him from the necessity of looking at
Clennam. And whenever Clennam spoke, this ill-starred young man was
clearly seized with a dread that he was coming, by some artful device,
round to that point of wanting to know, you know.

It may be questioned, therefore, whether any one but Mr Meagles had much
enjoyment of the time. Mr Meagles, however, thoroughly enjoyed Young
Barnacle. As a mere flask of the golden water in the tale became a full
fountain when it was poured out, so Mr Meagles seemed to feel that this
small spice of Barnacle imparted to his table the flavour of the whole
family-tree. In its presence, his frank, fine, genuine qualities
paled; he was not so easy, he was not so natural, he was striving after
something that did not belong to him, he was not himself. What a strange
peculiarity on the part of Mr Meagles, and where should we find another
such case!

At last the wet Sunday wore itself out in a wet night; and Young
Barnacle went home in a cab, feebly smoking; and the objectionable Gowan
went away on foot, accompanied by the objectionable dog. Pet had taken
the most amiable pains all day to be friendly with Clennam, but Clennam
had been a little reserved since breakfast--that is to say, would have
been, if he had loved her.

When he had gone to his own room, and had again thrown himself into the
chair by the fire, Mr Doyce knocked at the door, candle in hand, to
ask him how and at what hour he proposed returning on the morrow? After
settling this question, he said a word to Mr Doyce about this Gowan--who
would have run in his head a good deal, if he had been his rival.

‘Those are not good prospects for a painter,’ said Clennam.

‘No,’ returned Doyce.

Mr Doyce stood, chamber-candlestick in hand, the other hand in his
pocket, looking hard at the flame of his candle, with a certain quiet
perception in his face that they were going to say something more.

‘I thought our good friend a little changed, and out of spirits, after
he came this morning?’ said Clennam.

‘Yes,’ returned Doyce.

‘But not his daughter?’ said Clennam.

‘No,’ said Doyce.

There was a pause on both sides. Mr Doyce, still looking at the flame of
his candle, slowly resumed:

‘The truth is, he has twice taken his daughter abroad in the hope of
separating her from Mr Gowan. He rather thinks she is disposed to like
him, and he has painful doubts (I quite agree with him, as I dare say
you do) of the hopefulness of such a marriage.’

‘There--’ Clennam choked, and coughed, and stopped.

‘Yes, you have taken cold,’ said Daniel Doyce. But without looking at
him.

‘--There is an engagement between them, of course?’ said Clennam airily.

‘No. As I am told, certainly not. It has been solicited on the
gentleman’s part, but none has been made. Since their recent return,
our friend has yielded to a weekly visit, but that is the utmost. Minnie
would not deceive her father and mother. You have travelled with them,
and I believe you know what a bond there is among them, extending even
beyond this present life. All that there is between Miss Minnie and Mr
Gowan, I have no doubt we see.’

‘Ah! We see enough!’ cried Arthur.

Mr Doyce wished him Good Night in the tone of a man who had heard a
mournful, not to say despairing, exclamation, and who sought to infuse
some encouragement and hope into the mind of the person by whom it had
been uttered. Such tone was probably a part of his oddity, as one of
a crotchety band; for how could he have heard anything of that kind,
without Clennam’s hearing it too?

The rain fell heavily on the roof, and pattered on the ground, and
dripped among the evergreens and the leafless branches of the trees. The
rain fell heavily, drearily. It was a night of tears.

If Clennam had not decided against falling in love with Pet; if he
had had the weakness to do it; if he had, little by little, persuaded
himself to set all the earnestness of his nature, all the might of his
hope, and all the wealth of his matured character, on that cast; if
he had done this and found that all was lost; he would have been,
that night, unutterably miserable. As it was--

As it was, the rain fell heavily, drearily.

CHAPTER 18. Little Dorrit’s Lover

Little Dorrit had not attained her twenty-second birthday without
finding a lover. Even in the shallow Marshalsea, the ever young Archer
shot off a few featherless arrows now and then from a mouldy bow, and
winged a Collegian or two.

Little Dorrit’s lover, however, was not a Collegian. He was the
sentimental son of a turnkey. His father hoped, in the fulness of time,
to leave him the inheritance of an unstained key; and had from his
early youth familiarised him with the duties of his office, and with an
ambition to retain the prison-lock in the family. While the succession
was yet in abeyance, he assisted his mother in the conduct of a snug
tobacco business round the corner of Horsemonger Lane (his father being
a non-resident turnkey), which could usually command a neat connection
within the College walls.

Years agone, when the object of his affections was wont to sit in her
little arm-chair by the high Lodge-fender, Young John (family name,
Chivery), a year older than herself, had eyed her with admiring wonder.
When he had played with her in the yard, his favourite game had been to
counterfeit locking her up in corners, and to counterfeit letting
her out for real kisses. When he grew tall enough to peep through the
keyhole of the great lock of the main door, he had divers times set down
his father’s dinner, or supper, to get on as it might on the outer side
thereof, while he stood taking cold in one eye by dint of peeping at her
through that airy perspective.

If Young John had ever slackened in his truth in the less penetrable
days of his boyhood, when youth is prone to wear its boots unlaced and
is happily unconscious of digestive organs, he had soon strung it up
again and screwed it tight. At nineteen, his hand had inscribed in chalk
on that part of the wall which fronted her lodgings, on the occasion of
her birthday, ‘Welcome sweet nursling of the Fairies!’ At twenty-three,
the same hand falteringly presented cigars on Sundays to the Father of
the Marshalsea, and Father of the queen of his soul.

Young John was small of stature, with rather weak legs and very weak
light hair. One of his eyes (perhaps the eye that used to peep through
the keyhole) was also weak, and looked larger than the other, as if
it couldn’t collect itself. Young John was gentle likewise. But he was
great of soul. Poetical, expansive, faithful.

Though too humble before the ruler of his heart to be sanguine, Young
John had considered the object of his attachment in all its lights and
shades. Following it out to blissful results, he had descried, without
self-commendation, a fitness in it. Say things prospered, and they were
united. She, the child of the Marshalsea; he, the lock-keeper. There
was a fitness in that. Say he became a resident turnkey. She would
officially succeed to the chamber she had rented so long. There was a
beautiful propriety in that. It looked over the wall, if you stood on
tip-toe; and, with a trellis-work of scarlet beans and a canary or so,
would become a very Arbour. There was a charming idea in that. Then,
being all in all to one another, there was even an appropriate grace in
the lock. With the world shut out (except that part of it which would
be shut in); with its troubles and disturbances only known to them by
hearsay, as they would be described by the pilgrims tarrying with them
on their way to the Insolvent Shrine; with the Arbour above, and the
Lodge below; they would glide down the stream of time, in pastoral
domestic happiness. Young John drew tears from his eyes by finishing the
picture with a tombstone in the adjoining churchyard, close against the
prison wall, bearing the following touching inscription: ‘Sacred to
the Memory Of JOHN CHIVERY, Sixty years Turnkey, and fifty years
Head Turnkey, Of the neighbouring Marshalsea, Who departed this life,
universally respected, on the thirty-first of December, One thousand
eight hundred and eighty-six, Aged eighty-three years. Also of his truly
beloved and truly loving wife, AMY, whose maiden name was DORRIT, Who
survived his loss not quite forty-eight hours, And who breathed her last
in the Marshalsea aforesaid. There she was born, There she lived, There
she died.’

The Chivery parents were not ignorant of their son’s attachment--indeed
it had, on some exceptional occasions, thrown him into a state of mind
that had impelled him to conduct himself with irascibility towards the
customers, and damage the business--but they, in their turns, had worked
it out to desirable conclusions. Mrs Chivery, a prudent woman, had
desired her husband to take notice that their John’s prospects of the
Lock would certainly be strengthened by an alliance with Miss Dorrit,
who had herself a kind of claim upon the College and was much respected
there. Mrs Chivery had desired her husband to take notice that if, on
the one hand, their John had means and a post of trust, on the other
hand, Miss Dorrit had family; and that her (Mrs Chivery’s) sentiment
was, that two halves made a whole. Mrs Chivery, speaking as a mother and
not as a diplomatist, had then, from a different point of view, desired
her husband to recollect that their John had never been strong, and
that his love had fretted and worrited him enough as it was, without
his being driven to do himself a mischief, as nobody couldn’t say
he wouldn’t be if he was crossed. These arguments had so powerfully
influenced the mind of Mr Chivery, who was a man of few words, that he
had on sundry Sunday mornings, given his boy what he termed ‘a lucky
touch,’ signifying that he considered such commendation of him to Good
Fortune, preparatory to his that day declaring his passion and
becoming triumphant. But Young John had never taken courage to make
the declaration; and it was principally on these occasions that he had
returned excited to the tobacco shop, and flown at the customers.

In this affair, as in every other, Little Dorrit herself was the last
person considered. Her brother and sister were aware of it, and attained
a sort of station by making a peg of it on which to air the miserably
ragged old fiction of the family gentility. Her sister asserted the
family gentility by flouting the poor swain as he loitered about the
prison for glimpses of his dear. Tip asserted the family gentility, and
his own, by coming out in the character of the aristocratic brother, and
loftily swaggering in the little skittle ground respecting seizures by
the scruff of the neck, which there were looming probabilities of some
gentleman unknown executing on some little puppy not mentioned. These
were not the only members of the Dorrit family who turned it to account.
No, no. The Father of the Marshalsea was supposed to know nothing about
the matter, of course: his poor dignity could not see so low. But he
took the cigars, on Sundays, and was glad to get them; and sometimes
even condescended to walk up and down the yard with the donor (who was
proud and hopeful then), and benignantly to smoke one in his society.
With no less readiness and condescension did he receive attentions from
Chivery Senior, who always relinquished his arm-chair and newspaper to
him, when he came into the Lodge during one of his spells of duty; and
who had even mentioned to him, that, if he would like at any time after
dusk quietly to step out into the fore-court and take a look at the
street, there was not much to prevent him. If he did not avail himself
of this latter civility, it was only because he had lost the relish for
it; inasmuch as he took everything else he could get, and would say at
times, ‘Extremely civil person, Chivery; very attentive man and very
respectful. Young Chivery, too; really almost with a delicate perception
of one’s position here. A very well conducted family indeed, the
Chiveries. Their behaviour gratifies me.’

The devoted Young John all this time regarded the family with reverence.
He never dreamed of disputing their pretensions, but did homage to the
miserable Mumbo jumbo they paraded. As to resenting any affront from _her_
brother, he would have felt, even if he had not naturally been of a most
pacific disposition, that to wag his tongue or lift his hand against
that sacred gentleman would be an unhallowed act. He was sorry that
his noble mind should take offence; still, he felt the fact to be not
incompatible with its nobility, and sought to propitiate and conciliate
that gallant soul. Her father, a gentleman in misfortune--a gentleman of
a fine spirit and courtly manners, who always bore with him--he deeply
honoured. Her sister he considered somewhat vain and proud, but a young
lady of infinite accomplishments, who could not forget the past. It was
an instinctive testimony to Little Dorrit’s worth and difference from
all the rest, that the poor young fellow honoured and loved her for
being simply what she was.

The tobacco business round the corner of Horsemonger Lane was carried
out in a rural establishment one story high, which had the benefit of
the air from the yards of Horsemonger Lane jail, and the advantage of a
retired walk under the wall of that pleasant establishment. The business
was of too modest a character to support a life-size Highlander, but it
maintained a little one on a bracket on the door-post, who looked like
a fallen Cherub that had found it necessary to take to a kilt.

From the portal thus decorated, one Sunday after an early dinner of
baked viands, Young John issued forth on his usual Sunday errand; not
empty-handed, but with his offering of cigars. He was neatly attired in
a plum-coloured coat, with as large a collar of black velvet as his
figure could carry; a silken waistcoat, bedecked with golden sprigs; a
chaste neckerchief much in vogue at that day, representing a preserve of
lilac pheasants on a buff ground; pantaloons so highly decorated with
side-stripes that each leg was a three-stringed lute; and a hat of
state very high and hard. When the prudent Mrs Chivery perceived that
in addition to these adornments her John carried a pair of white kid
gloves, and a cane like a little finger-post, surmounted by an ivory
hand marshalling him the way that he should go; and when she saw him, in
this heavy marching order, turn the corner to the right; she remarked to
Mr Chivery, who was at home at the time, that she thought she knew which
way the wind blew.

The Collegians were entertaining a considerable number of visitors that
Sunday afternoon, and their Father kept his room for the purpose of
receiving presentations. After making the tour of the yard, Little
Dorrit’s lover with a hurried heart went up-stairs, and knocked with his
knuckles at the Father’s door.

‘Come in, come in!’ said a gracious voice. The Father’s voice, her
father’s, the Marshalsea’s father’s. He was seated in his black velvet
cap, with his newspaper, three-and-sixpence accidentally left on the
table, and two chairs arranged. Everything prepared for holding his
Court.

‘Ah, Young John! How do you do, how do you do!’

‘Pretty well, I thank you, sir. I hope you are the same.’

‘Yes, John Chivery; yes. Nothing to complain of.’

‘I have taken the liberty, sir, of--’

‘Eh?’ The Father of the Marshalsea always lifted up his eyebrows at this
point, and became amiably distraught and smilingly absent in mind.

‘--A few cigars, sir.’

‘Oh!’ (For the moment, excessively surprised.) ‘Thank you, Young John,
thank you. But really, I am afraid I am too--No? Well then, I will say
no more about it. Put them on the mantelshelf, if you please, Young
John. And sit down, sit down. You are not a stranger, John.’

‘Thank you, sir, I am sure--Miss;’ here Young John turned the great hat
round and round upon his left-hand, like a slowly twirling mouse-cage;
‘Miss Amy quite well, sir?’

‘Yes, John, yes; very well. She is out.’

‘Indeed, sir?’

‘Yes, John. Miss Amy is gone for an airing. My young people all go out a
good deal. But at their time of life, it’s natural, John.’

‘Very much so, I am sure, sir.’

‘An airing. An airing. Yes.’ He was blandly tapping his fingers on
the table, and casting his eyes up at the window. ‘Amy has gone for
an airing on the Iron Bridge. She has become quite partial to the Iron
Bridge of late, and seems to like to walk there better than anywhere.’
He returned to conversation. ‘Your father is not on duty at present, I
think, John?’

‘No, sir, he comes on later in the afternoon.’ Another twirl of the
great hat, and then Young John said, rising, ‘I am afraid I must wish
you good day, sir.’

‘So soon? Good day, Young John. Nay, nay,’ with the utmost
condescension, ‘never mind your glove, John. Shake hands with it on. You
are no stranger here, you know.’

Highly gratified by the kindness of his reception, Young John descended
the staircase. On his way down he met some Collegians bringing up
visitors to be presented, and at that moment Mr Dorrit happened to call
over the banisters with particular distinctness, ‘Much obliged to you
for your little testimonial, John!’

Little Dorrit’s lover very soon laid down his penny on the tollplate of
the Iron Bridge, and came upon it looking about him for the well-known
and well-beloved figure. At first he feared she was not there; but as he
walked on towards the Middlesex side, he saw her standing still, looking
at the water. She was absorbed in thought, and he wondered what
she might be thinking about. There were the piles of city roofs and
chimneys, more free from smoke than on week-days; and there were the
distant masts and steeples. Perhaps she was thinking about them.

Little Dorrit mused so long, and was so entirely preoccupied, that
although her lover stood quiet for what he thought was a long time, and
twice or thrice retired and came back again to the former spot, still
she did not move. So, in the end, he made up his mind to go on, and seem
to come upon her casually in passing, and speak to her. The place was
quiet, and now or never was the time to speak to her.

He walked on, and she did not appear to hear his steps until he was
close upon her. When he said ‘Miss Dorrit!’ she started and fell back
from him, with an expression in her face of fright and something like
dislike that caused him unutterable dismay. She had often avoided him
before--always, indeed, for a long, long while. She had turned away and
glided off so often when she had seen him coming toward her, that the
unfortunate Young John could not think it accidental. But he had hoped
that it might be shyness, her retiring character, her foreknowledge of
the state of his heart, anything short of aversion. Now, that momentary
look had said, ‘You, of all people! I would rather have seen any one on
earth than you!’

It was but a momentary look, inasmuch as she checked it, and said in her
soft little voice, ‘Oh, Mr John! Is it you?’ But she felt what it had
been, as he felt what it had been; and they stood looking at one another
equally confused.

‘Miss Amy, I am afraid I disturbed you by speaking to you.’

‘Yes, rather. I--I came here to be alone, and I thought I was.’

‘Miss Amy, I took the liberty of walking this way, because Mr Dorrit
chanced to mention, when I called upon him just now, that you--’

She caused him more dismay than before by suddenly murmuring, ‘O father,
father!’ in a heartrending tone, and turning her face away.

‘Miss Amy, I hope I don’t give you any uneasiness by naming Mr Dorrit.
I assure you I found him very well and in the best of Spirits, and he
showed me even more than his usual kindness; being so very kind as to
say that I was not a stranger there, and in all ways gratifying me very
much.’

To the inexpressible consternation of her lover, Little Dorrit, with her
hands to her averted face, and rocking herself where she stood as if she
were in pain, murmured, ‘O father, how can you! O dear, dear father, how
can you, can you, do it!’

The poor fellow stood gazing at her, overflowing with sympathy, but not
knowing what to make of this, until, having taken out her handkerchief
and put it to her still averted face, she hurried away. At first he
remained stock still; then hurried after her.

‘Miss Amy, pray! Will you have the goodness to stop a moment? Miss Amy,
if it comes to that, let _me_ go. I shall go out of my senses, if I have
to think that I have driven you away like this.’

His trembling voice and unfeigned earnestness brought Little Dorrit to
a stop. ‘Oh, I don’t know what to do,’ she cried, ‘I don’t know what to
do!’

To Young John, who had never seen her bereft of her quiet self-command,
who had seen her from her infancy ever so reliable and self-suppressed,
there was a shock in her distress, and in having to associate himself
with it as its cause, that shook him from his great hat to the
pavement. He felt it necessary to explain himself. He might be
misunderstood--supposed to mean something, or to have done something,
that had never entered into his imagination. He begged her to hear him
explain himself, as the greatest favour she could show him.

‘Miss Amy, I know very well that your family is far above mine. It were
vain to conceal it. There never was a Chivery a gentleman that ever
I heard of, and I will not commit the meanness of making a false
representation on a subject so momentous. Miss Amy, I know very well
that your high-souled brother, and likewise your spirited sister, spurn
me from a height. What I have to do is to respect them, to wish to be
admitted to their friendship, to look up at the eminence on which they
are placed from my lowlier station--for, whether viewed as tobacco or
viewed as the lock, I well know it is lowly--and ever wish them well and
happy.’

There really was a genuineness in the poor fellow, and a contrast
between the hardness of his hat and the softness of his heart (albeit,
perhaps, of his head, too), that was moving. Little Dorrit entreated him
to disparage neither himself nor his station, and, above all things, to
divest himself of any idea that she supposed hers to be superior. This
gave him a little comfort.

‘Miss Amy,’ he then stammered, ‘I have had for a long time--ages they
seem to me--Revolving ages--a heart-cherished wish to say something to
you. May I say it?’

Little Dorrit involuntarily started from his side again, with the
faintest shadow of her former look; conquering that, she went on at
great speed half across the Bridge without replying!

‘May I--Miss Amy, I but ask the question humbly--may I say it? I have
been so unlucky already in giving you pain without having any such
intentions, before the holy Heavens! that there is no fear of my saying
it unless I have your leave. I can be miserable alone, I can be cut up
by myself, why should I also make miserable and cut up one that I would
fling myself off that parapet to give half a moment’s joy to! Not that
that’s much to do, for I’d do it for twopence.’

The mournfulness of his spirits, and the gorgeousness of his appearance,
might have made him ridiculous, but that his delicacy made him
respectable. Little Dorrit learnt from it what to do.

‘If you please, John Chivery,’ she returned, trembling, but in a quiet
way, ‘since you are so considerate as to ask me whether you shall say
any more--if you please, no.’

‘Never, Miss Amy?’

‘No, if you please. Never.’

‘O Lord!’ gasped Young John.

‘But perhaps you will let me, instead, say something to you. I want
to say it earnestly, and with as plain a meaning as it is possible to
express. When you think of us, John--I mean my brother, and sister,
and me--don’t think of us as being any different from the rest; for,
whatever we once were (which I hardly know) we ceased to be long ago,
and never can be any more. It will be much better for you, and much
better for others, if you will do that instead of what you are doing
now.’

Young John dolefully protested that he would try to bear it in mind, and
would be heartily glad to do anything she wished.

‘As to me,’ said Little Dorrit, ‘think as little of me as you can; the
less, the better. When you think of me at all, John, let it only be as
the child you have seen grow up in the prison with one set of duties
always occupying her; as a weak, retired, contented, unprotected girl. I
particularly want you to remember, that when I come outside the gate, I
am unprotected and solitary.’

He would try to do anything she wished. But why did Miss Amy so much
want him to remember that?

‘Because,’ returned Little Dorrit, ‘I know I can then quite trust you
not to forget to-day, and not to say any more to me. You are so generous
that I know I can trust to you for that; and I do and I always will. I
am going to show you, at once, that I fully trust you. I like this place
where we are speaking better than any place I know;’ her slight colour
had faded, but her lover thought he saw it coming back just then; ‘and I
may be often here. I know it is only necessary for me to tell you so, to
be quite sure that you will never come here again in search of me. And I
am--quite sure!’

She might rely upon it, said Young John. He was a miserable wretch, but
her word was more than a law for him.

‘And good-bye, John,’ said Little Dorrit. ‘And I hope you will have a
good wife one day, and be a happy man. I am sure you will deserve to be
happy, and you will be, John.’

As she held out her hand to him with these words, the heart that was
under the waistcoat of sprigs--mere slop-work, if the truth must be
known--swelled to the size of the heart of a gentleman; and the poor
common little fellow, having no room to hold it, burst into tears.

‘Oh, don’t cry,’ said Little Dorrit piteously. ‘Don’t, don’t! Good-bye,
John. God bless you!’

‘Good-bye, Miss Amy. Good-bye!’

And so he left her: first observing that she sat down on the corner of a
seat, and not only rested her little hand upon the rough wall, but laid
her face against it too, as if her head were heavy, and her mind were
sad.

It was an affecting illustration of the fallacy of human projects,
to behold her lover, with the great hat pulled over his eyes, the velvet
collar turned up as if it rained, the plum-coloured coat buttoned
to conceal the silken waistcoat of golden sprigs, and the little
direction-post pointing inexorably home, creeping along by the worst
back-streets, and composing, as he went, the following new inscription
for a tombstone in St George’s Churchyard:

‘Here lie the mortal remains Of JOHN CHIVERY, Never anything worth
mentioning, Who died about the end of the year one thousand eight
hundred and twenty-six, Of a broken heart, Requesting with his last
breath that the word AMY might be inscribed over his ashes, which was
accordingly directed to be done, By his afflicted Parents.’

CHAPTER 19. The Father of the Marshalsea in two or three Relations

The brothers William and Frederick Dorrit, walking up and down the
College-yard--of course on the aristocratic or Pump side, for the Father
made it a point of his state to be chary of going among his children
on the Poor side, except on Sunday mornings, Christmas Days, and other
occasions of ceremony, in the observance whereof he was very punctual,
and at which times he laid his hand upon the heads of their infants,
and blessed those young insolvents with a benignity that was highly
edifying--the brothers, walking up and down the College-yard together,
were a memorable sight. Frederick the free, was so humbled, bowed,
withered, and faded; William the bond, was so courtly, condescending,
and benevolently conscious of a position; that in this regard only, if
in no other, the brothers were a spectacle to wonder at.

They walked up and down the yard on the evening of Little Dorrit’s
Sunday interview with her lover on the Iron Bridge. The cares of state
were over for that day, the Drawing Room had been well attended, several
new presentations had taken place, the three-and-sixpence accidentally
left on the table had accidentally increased to twelve shillings, and
the Father of the Marshalsea refreshed himself with a whiff of cigar. As
he walked up and down, affably accommodating his step to the shuffle of
his brother, not proud in his superiority, but considerate of that poor
creature, bearing with him, and breathing toleration of his infirmities
in every little puff of smoke that issued from his lips and aspired to
get over the spiked wall, he was a sight to wonder at.

His brother Frederick of the dim eye, palsied hand, bent form, and
groping mind, submissively shuffled at his side, accepting his patronage
as he accepted every incident of the labyrinthian world in which he had
got lost. He held the usual screwed bit of whitey-brown paper in his
hand, from which he ever and again unscrewed a spare pinch of snuff.
That falteringly taken, he would glance at his brother not unadmiringly,
put his hands behind him, and shuffle on so at his side until he took
another pinch, or stood still to look about him--perchance suddenly
missing his clarionet.

The College visitors were melting away as the shades of night drew on,
but the yard was still pretty full, the Collegians being mostly out,
seeing their friends to the Lodge. As the brothers paced the yard,
William the bond looked about him to receive salutes, returned them by
graciously lifting off his hat, and, with an engaging air, prevented
Frederick the free from running against the company, or being jostled
against the wall. The Collegians as a body were not easily impressible,
but even they, according to their various ways of wondering, appeared to
find in the two brothers a sight to wonder at.

‘You are a little low this evening, Frederick,’ said the Father of the
Marshalsea. ‘Anything the matter?’

‘The matter?’ He stared for a moment, and then dropped his head and eyes
again. ‘No, William, no. Nothing is the matter.’

‘If you could be persuaded to smarten yourself up a little, Frederick--’

‘Aye, aye!’ said the old man hurriedly. ‘But I can’t be. I can’t be.
Don’t talk so. That’s all over.’

The Father of the Marshalsea glanced at a passing Collegian with whom he
was on friendly terms, as who should say, ‘An enfeebled old man, this;
but he is my brother, sir, my brother, and the voice of Nature is
potent!’ and steered his brother clear of the handle of the pump by the
threadbare sleeve. Nothing would have been wanting to the perfection of
his character as a fraternal guide, philosopher and friend, if he had
only steered his brother clear of ruin, instead of bringing it upon him.

‘I think, William,’ said the object of his affectionate consideration,
‘that I am tired, and will go home to bed.’

‘My dear Frederick,’ returned the other, ‘don’t let me detain you; don’t
sacrifice your inclination to me.’

‘Late hours, and a heated atmosphere, and years, I suppose,’ said
Frederick, ‘weaken me.’

‘My dear Frederick,’ returned the Father of the Marshalsea, ‘do you
think you are sufficiently careful of yourself? Do you think your habits
are as precise and methodical as--shall I say as mine are? Not to revert
again to that little eccentricity which I mentioned just now, I doubt if
you take air and exercise enough, Frederick. Here is the parade, always
at your service. Why not use it more regularly than you do?’

‘Hah!’ sighed the other. ‘Yes, yes, yes, yes.’

‘But it is of no use saying yes, yes, my dear Frederick,’ the Father
of the Marshalsea in his mild wisdom persisted, ‘unless you act on that
assent. Consider my case, Frederick. I am a kind of example. Necessity
and time have taught me what to do. At certain stated hours of the day,
you will find me on the parade, in my room, in the Lodge, reading the
paper, receiving company, eating and drinking. I have impressed upon Amy
during many years, that I must have my meals (for instance) punctually.
Amy has grown up in a sense of the importance of these arrangements, and
you know what a good girl she is.’

The brother only sighed again, as he plodded dreamily along, ‘Hah! Yes,
yes, yes, yes.’

‘My dear fellow,’ said the Father of the Marshalsea, laying his hand
upon his shoulder, and mildly rallying him--mildly, because of his
weakness, poor dear soul; ‘you said that before, and it does not express
much, Frederick, even if it means much. I wish I could rouse you, my
good Frederick; you want to be roused.’

‘Yes, William, yes. No doubt,’ returned the other, lifting his dim eyes
to his face. ‘But I am not like you.’

The Father of the Marshalsea said, with a shrug of modest
self-depreciation, ‘Oh! You might be like me, my dear Frederick;
you might be, if you chose!’ and forbore, in the magnanimity of his
strength, to press his fallen brother further.

There was a great deal of leave-taking going on in corners, as was usual
on Sunday nights; and here and there in the dark, some poor woman, wife
or mother, was weeping with a new Collegian. The time had been when the
Father himself had wept, in the shades of that yard, as his own
poor wife had wept. But it was many years ago; and now he was like
a passenger aboard ship in a long voyage, who has recovered from
sea-sickness, and is impatient of that weakness in the fresher
passengers taken aboard at the last port. He was inclined to
remonstrate, and to express his opinion that people who couldn’t get on
without crying, had no business there. In manner, if not in words, he
always testified his displeasure at these interruptions of the general
harmony; and it was so well understood, that delinquents usually
withdrew if they were aware of him.

On this Sunday evening, he accompanied his brother to the gate with an
air of endurance and clemency; being in a bland temper and graciously
disposed to overlook the tears. In the flaring gaslight of the Lodge,
several Collegians were basking; some taking leave of visitors, and
some who had no visitors, watching the frequent turning of the key, and
conversing with one another and with Mr Chivery. The paternal entrance
made a sensation of course; and Mr Chivery, touching his hat (in a short
manner though) with his key, hoped he found himself tolerable.

‘Thank you, Chivery, quite well. And you?’

Mr Chivery said in a low growl, ‘Oh! _he_ was all right.’ Which was his
general way of acknowledging inquiries after his health when a little
sullen.

‘I had a visit from Young John to-day, Chivery. And very smart he
looked, I assure you.’

So Mr Chivery had heard. Mr Chivery must confess, however, that his wish
was that the boy didn’t lay out so much money upon it. For what did it
bring him in? It only brought him in wexation. And he could get that
anywhere for nothing.

‘How vexation, Chivery?’ asked the benignant father.

‘No odds,’ returned Mr Chivery. ‘Never mind. Mr Frederick going out?’

‘Yes, Chivery, my brother is going home to bed. He is tired, and
not quite well. Take care, Frederick, take care. Good night, my dear
Frederick!’

Shaking hands with his brother, and touching his greasy hat to the
company in the Lodge, Frederick slowly shuffled out of the door which
Mr Chivery unlocked for him. The Father of the Marshalsea showed the
amiable solicitude of a superior being that he should come to no harm.

‘Be so kind as to keep the door open a moment, Chivery, that I may see
him go along the passage and down the steps. Take care, Frederick! (He
is very infirm.) Mind the steps! (He is so very absent.) Be careful
how you cross, Frederick. (I really don’t like the notion of his going
wandering at large, he is so extremely liable to be run over.)’

With these words, and with a face expressive of many uneasy doubts and
much anxious guardianship, he turned his regards upon the assembled
company in the Lodge: so plainly indicating that his brother was to be
pitied for not being under lock and key, that an opinion to that effect
went round among the Collegians assembled.

But he did not receive it with unqualified assent; on the contrary, he
said, No, gentlemen, no; let them not misunderstand him. His brother
Frederick was much broken, no doubt, and it might be more comfortable to
himself (the Father of the Marshalsea) to know that he was safe within
the walls. Still, it must be remembered that to support an existence
there during many years, required a certain combination of qualities--he
did not say high qualities, but qualities--moral qualities. Now, had his
brother Frederick that peculiar union of qualities? Gentlemen, he was a
most excellent man, a most gentle, tender, and estimable man, with the