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might have been passed in the street for little more than half that

age. Not that her face was very youthful, for in truth there was more

consideration and care in it than naturally belonged to her utmost

years; but she was so little and light, so noiseless and shy, and

appeared so conscious of being out of place among the three hard elders,

that she had all the manner and much of the appearance of a subdued

child.

In a hard way, and in an uncertain way that fluctuated between patronage

and putting down, the sprinkling from a watering-pot and hydraulic

pressure, Mrs Clennam showed an interest in this dependent. Even in the

moment of her entrance, upon the violent ringing of the bell, when the

mother shielded herself with that singular action from the son, Mrs

Clennam's eyes had had some individual recognition in them, which seemed

reserved for her. As there are degrees of hardness in the hardest metal,

and shades of colour in black itself, so, even in the asperity of Mrs

Clennam's demeanour towards all the rest of humanity and towards Little

Dorrit, there was a fine gradation.

Little Dorrit let herself out to do needlework. At so much a day--or at

so little--from eight to eight, Little Dorrit was to be hired. Punctual

to the moment, Little Dorrit appeared; punctual to the moment, Little

Dorrit vanished. What became of Little Dorrit between the two eights was

a mystery.

Another of the moral phenomena of Little Dorrit. Besides her

consideration money, her daily contract included meals. She had an

extraordinary repugnance to dining in company; would never do so, if

it were possible to escape. Would always plead that she had this bit of

work to begin first, or that bit of work to finish first; and would, of

a certainty, scheme and plan--not very cunningly, it would seem, for she

deceived no one--to dine alone. Successful in this, happy in carrying

off her plate anywhere, to make a table of her lap, or a box, or the

ground, or even as was supposed, to stand on tip-toe, dining moderately

at a mantel-shelf; the great anxiety of Little Dorrit's day was set at

rest.

It was not easy to make out Little Dorrit's face; she was so retiring,

plied her needle in such removed corners, and started away so scared if

encountered on the stairs. But it seemed to be a pale transparent face,

quick in expression, though not beautiful in feature, its soft hazel

eyes excepted. A delicately bent head, a tiny form, a quick little pair

of busy hands, and a shabby dress--it must needs have been very shabby

to look at all so, being so neat--were Little Dorrit as she sat at work.

For these particulars or generalities concerning Little Dorrit, Mr

Arthur was indebted in the course of the day to his own eyes and to Mrs

Affery's tongue. If Mrs Affery had had any will or way of her own, it

would probably have been unfavourable to Little Dorrit. But as 'them two

clever ones'--Mrs Affery's perpetual reference, in whom her personality

was swallowed up--were agreed to accept Little Dorrit as a matter of

course, she had nothing for it but to follow suit. Similarly, if the

two clever ones had agreed to murder Little Dorrit by candlelight, Mrs

Affery, being required to hold the candle, would no doubt have done it.

In the intervals of roasting the partridge for the invalid chamber, and

preparing a baking-dish of beef and pudding for the dining-room, Mrs

Affery made the communications above set forth; invariably putting

her head in at the door again after she had taken it out, to enforce

resistance to the two clever ones. It appeared to have become a perfect

passion with Mrs Flintwinch, that the only son should be pitted against

them.

In the course of the day, too, Arthur looked through the whole house.

Dull and dark he found it. The gaunt rooms, deserted for years upon

years, seemed to have settled down into a gloomy lethargy from which

nothing could rouse them again. The furniture, at once spare and

lumbering, hid in the rooms rather than furnished them, and there was

no colour in all the house; such colour as had ever been there, had long

ago started away on lost sunbeams--got itself absorbed, perhaps, into

flowers, butterflies, plumage of birds, precious stones, what not. There

was not one straight floor from the foundation to the roof; the ceilings

were so fantastically clouded by smoke and dust, that old women might

have told fortunes in them better than in grouts of tea; the dead-cold

hearths showed no traces of having ever been warmed but in heaps of soot

that had tumbled down the chimneys, and eddied about in little

dusky whirlwinds when the doors were opened. In what had once been

a drawing-room, there were a pair of meagre mirrors, with dismal

processions of black figures carrying black garlands, walking round

the frames; but even these were short of heads and legs, and one

undertaker-like Cupid had swung round on its own axis and got upside

down, and another had fallen off altogether. The room Arthur Clennam's

deceased father had occupied for business purposes, when he first

remembered him, was so unaltered that he might have been imagined still

to keep it invisibly, as his visible relict kept her room up-stairs;

Jeremiah Flintwinch still going between them negotiating. His picture,

dark and gloomy, earnestly speechless on the wall, with the eyes

intently looking at his son as they had looked when life departed from

them, seemed to urge him awfully to the task he had attempted; but as

to any yielding on the part of his mother, he had now no hope, and as to

any other means of setting his distrust at rest, he had abandoned hope a

long time.

Down in the cellars, as up in the bed-chambers, old objects that he well

remembered were changed by age and decay, but were still in their

old places; even to empty beer-casks hoary with cobwebs, and empty

wine-bottles with fur and fungus choking up their throats. There, too,

among unusual bottle-racks and pale slants of light from the yard above,

was the strong room stored with old ledgers, which had as musty and

corrupt a smell as if they were regularly balanced, in the dead small

hours, by a nightly resurrection of old book-keepers.

The baking-dish was served up in a penitential manner on a shrunken

cloth at an end of the dining-table, at two o'clock, when he dined with

Mr Flintwinch, the new partner. Mr Flintwinch informed him that his

mother had recovered her equanimity now, and that he need not fear her

again alluding to what had passed in the morning. 'And don't you lay

offences at your father's door, Mr Arthur,' added Jeremiah, 'once for

all, don't do it! Now, we have done with the subject.'

Mr Flintwinch had been already rearranging and dusting his own

particular little office, as if to do honour to his accession to new

dignity. He resumed this occupation when he was replete with beef, had

sucked up all the gravy in the baking-dish with the flat of his knife,

and had drawn liberally on a barrel of small beer in the scullery. Thus

refreshed, he tucked up his shirt-sleeves and went to work again; and Mr

Arthur, watching him as he set about it, plainly saw that his father's

picture, or his father's grave, would be as communicative with him as

this old man.

'Now, Affery, woman,' said Mr Flintwinch, as she crossed the hall. 'You

hadn't made Mr Arthur's bed when I was up there last. Stir yourself.

Bustle.'

But Mr Arthur found the house so blank and dreary, and was so unwilling

to assist at another implacable consignment of his mother's enemies

(perhaps himself among them) to mortal disfigurement and immortal ruin,

that he announced his intention of lodging at the coffee-house where he

had left his luggage. Mr Flintwinch taking kindly to the idea of getting

rid of him, and his mother being indifferent, beyond considerations of

saving, to most domestic arrangements that were not bounded by the walls

of her own chamber, he easily carried this point without new offence.

Daily business hours were agreed upon, which his mother, Mr Flintwinch,

and he, were to devote together to a necessary checking of books and

papers; and he left the home he had so lately found, with depressed

heart.

But Little Dorrit?

The business hours, allowing for intervals of invalid regimen of oysters

and partridges, during which Clennam refreshed himself with a walk,

were from ten to six for about a fortnight. Sometimes Little Dorrit was

employed at her needle, sometimes not, sometimes appeared as a humble

visitor: which must have been her character on the occasion of his

arrival. His original curiosity augmented every day, as he watched for

her, saw or did not see her, and speculated about her. Influenced by his

predominant idea, he even fell into a habit of discussing with himself

the possibility of her being in some way associated with it. At last he

resolved to watch Little Dorrit and know more of her story.

CHAPTER 6. The Father of the Marshalsea

Thirty years ago there stood, a few doors short of the church of Saint

George, in the borough of Southwark, on the left-hand side of the way

going southward, the Marshalsea Prison. It had stood there many years

before, and it remained there some years afterwards; but it is gone now,

and the world is none the worse without it.

It was an oblong pile of barrack building, partitioned into squalid

houses standing back to back, so that there were no back rooms;

environed by a narrow paved yard, hemmed in by high walls duly spiked at

top. Itself a close and confined prison for debtors, it contained within

it a much closer and more confined jail for smugglers. Offenders against

the revenue laws, and defaulters to excise or customs who had incurred

fines which they were unable to pay, were supposed to be incarcerated

behind an iron-plated door closing up a second prison, consisting of a

strong cell or two, and a blind alley some yard and a half wide, which

formed the mysterious termination of the very limited skittle-ground in

which the Marshalsea debtors bowled down their troubles.

Supposed to be incarcerated there, because the time had rather outgrown

the strong cells and the blind alley. In practice they had come to be

considered a little too bad, though in theory they were quite as good as

ever; which may be observed to be the case at the present day with other

cells that are not at all strong, and with other blind alleys that are

stone-blind. Hence the smugglers habitually consorted with the debtors

(who received them with open arms), except at certain constitutional

moments when somebody came from some Office, to go through some form of

overlooking something which neither he nor anybody else knew anything

about. On these truly British occasions, the smugglers, if any, made a

feint of walking into the strong cells and the blind alley, while this

somebody pretended to do his something: and made a reality of walking

out again as soon as he hadn't done it--neatly epitomising the

administration of most of the public affairs in our right little, tight

little, island.

There had been taken to the Marshalsea Prison, long before the day when

the sun shone on Marseilles and on the opening of this narrative, a

debtor with whom this narrative has some concern.

He was, at that time, a very amiable and very helpless middle-aged

gentleman, who was going out again directly. Necessarily, he was going

out again directly, because the Marshalsea lock never turned upon a

debtor who was not. He brought in a portmanteau with him, which he

doubted its being worth while to unpack; he was so perfectly clear--like

all the rest of them, the turnkey on the lock said--that he was going

out again directly.

He was a shy, retiring man; well-looking, though in an effeminate style;

with a mild voice, curling hair, and irresolute hands--rings upon the

fingers in those days--which nervously wandered to his trembling lip a

hundred times in the first half-hour of his acquaintance with the jail.

His principal anxiety was about his wife.

'Do you think, sir,' he asked the turnkey, 'that she will be very much

shocked, if she should come to the gate to-morrow morning?'

The turnkey gave it as the result of his experience that some of 'em was

and some of 'em wasn't. In general, more no than yes. 'What like is she,

you see?' he philosophically asked: 'that's what it hinges on.'

'She is very delicate and inexperienced indeed.'

'That,' said the turnkey, 'is agen her.'

'She is so little used to go out alone,' said the debtor, 'that I am at

a loss to think how she will ever make her way here, if she walks.'

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

'Perhaps.' The irresolute fingers went to the trembling lip. 'I hope she

will. She may not think of it.'

'Or p'raps,' said the turnkey, offering his suggestions from the the top

of his well-worn wooden stool, as he might have offered them to a child

for whose weakness he felt a compassion, 'p'raps she'll get her brother,

or her sister, to come along with her.'

'She has no brother or sister.'

'Niece, nevy, cousin, serwant, young 'ooman, greengrocer.--Dash it!

One or another on 'em,' said the turnkey, repudiating beforehand the

refusal of all his suggestions.

'I fear--I hope it is not against the rules--that she will bring the

children.'

'The children?' said the turnkey. 'And the rules? Why, lord set you

up like a corner pin, we've a reg'lar playground o' children here.

Children! Why we swarm with 'em. How many a you got?'

'Two,' said the debtor, lifting his irresolute hand to his lip again,

and turning into the prison.

The turnkey followed him with his eyes. 'And you another,' he observed

to himself, 'which makes three on you. And your wife another, I'll lay

a crown. Which makes four on you. And another coming, I'll lay