第 110 页

find it apparently grow larger after a time--a time, ladies and

gentlemen--and the air is, all things considered, very good. It blows

over the--ha--Surrey hills. Blows over the Surrey hills. This is the

Snuggery. Hum. Supported by a small subscription of the--ha--Collegiate

body. In return for which--hot water--general kitchen--and little

domestic advantages. Those who are habituated to the--ha--Marshalsea,

are pleased to call me its father. I am accustomed to be complimented by

strangers as the--ha--Father of the Marshalsea. Certainly, if years of

residence may establish a claim to so--ha--honourable a title, I may

accept the--hum--conferred distinction. My child, ladies and gentlemen.

My daughter. Born here!'

She was not ashamed of it, or ashamed of him. She was pale and

frightened; but she had no other care than to soothe him and get him

away, for his own dear sake. She was between him and the wondering

faces, turned round upon his breast with her own face raised to his. He

held her clasped in his left arm, and between whiles her low voice was

heard tenderly imploring him to go away with her.

'Born here,' he repeated, shedding tears. 'Bred here. Ladies and

gentlemen, my daughter. Child of an unfortunate father, but--ha--always

a gentleman. Poor, no doubt, but--hum--proud. Always proud. It

has become a--hum--not infrequent custom for my--ha--personal

admirers--personal admirers solely--to be pleased to express

their desire to acknowledge my semi-official position here,

by offering--ha--little tributes, which usually take the form

of--ha--voluntary recognitions of my humble endeavours to--hum--to

uphold a Tone here--a Tone--I beg it to be understood that I do not

consider myself compromised. Ha. Not compromised. Ha. Not a beggar. No;

I repudiate the title! At the same time far be it from me to--hum--to

put upon the fine feelings by which my partial friends are actuated,

the slight of scrupling to admit that those offerings are--hum--highly

acceptable. On the contrary, they are most acceptable. In my child's

name, if not in my own, I make the admission in the fullest manner, at

the same time reserving--ha--shall I say my personal dignity? Ladies and

gentlemen, God bless you all!'

By this time, the exceeding mortification undergone by the Bosom had

occasioned the withdrawal of the greater part of the company into other

rooms. The few who had lingered thus long followed the rest, and Little

Dorrit and her father were left to the servants and themselves. Dearest

and most precious to her, he would come with her now, would he not? He

replied to her fervid entreaties, that he would never be able to get up

the narrow stairs without Bob; where was Bob, would nobody fetch Bob?

Under pretence of looking for Bob, she got him out against the stream of

gay company now pouring in for the evening assembly, and got him into a

coach that had just set down its load, and got him home.

The broad stairs of his Roman palace were contracted in his failing

sight to the narrow stairs of his London prison; and he would suffer no

one but her to touch him, his brother excepted. They got him up to his

room without help, and laid him down on his bed. And from that hour his

poor maimed spirit, only remembering the place where it had broken its

wings, cancelled the dream through which it had since groped, and knew

of nothing beyond the Marshalsea. When he heard footsteps in the street,

he took them for the old weary tread in the yards. When the hour came

for locking up, he supposed all strangers to be excluded for the night.

When the time for opening came again, he was so anxious to see Bob, that

they were fain to patch up a narrative how that Bob--many a year dead

then, gentle turnkey--had taken cold, but hoped to be out to-morrow, or

the next day, or the next at furthest.

He fell away into a weakness so extreme that he could not raise his

hand. But he still protected his brother according to his long usage;

and would say with some complacency, fifty times a day, when he saw him

standing by his bed, 'My good Frederick, sit down. You are very feeble

indeed.'

They tried him with Mrs General, but he had not the faintest knowledge

of her. Some injurious suspicion lodged itself in his brain, that she

wanted to supplant Mrs Bangham, and that she was given to drinking. He

charged her with it in no measured terms; and was so urgent with his

daughter to go round to the Marshal and entreat him to turn her out,

that she was never reproduced after the first failure. Saving that

he once asked 'if Tip had gone outside?' the remembrance of his two

children not present seemed to have departed from him. But the child who

had done so much for him and had been so poorly repaid, was never out of

his mind. Not that he spared her, or was fearful of her being spent by

watching and fatigue; he was not more troubled on that score than he

had usually been. No; he loved her in his old way. They were in the jail

again, and she tended him, and he had constant need of her, and could

not turn without her; and he even told her, sometimes, that he was

content to have undergone a great deal for her sake. As to her, she bent

over his bed with her quiet face against his, and would have laid down

her own life to restore him.

When he had been sinking in this painless way for two or three days, she

observed him to be troubled by the ticking of his watch--a pompous gold

watch that made as great a to-do about its going as if nothing else

went but itself and Time. She suffered it to run down; but he was still

uneasy, and showed that was not what he wanted. At length he roused

himself to explain that he wanted money to be raised on this watch. He

was quite pleased when she pretended to take it away for the purpose,

and afterwards had a relish for his little tastes of wine and jelly,

that he had not had before.

He soon made it plain that this was so; for, in another day or two

he sent off his sleeve-buttons and finger-rings. He had an amazing

satisfaction in entrusting her with these errands, and appeared to

consider it equivalent to making the most methodical and provident

arrangements. After his trinkets, or such of them as he had been able to

see about him, were gone, his clothes engaged his attention; and it

is as likely as not that he was kept alive for some days by the

satisfaction of sending them, piece by piece, to an imaginary

pawnbroker's.

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

against his. Sometimes she was so worn out that for a few minutes

they would slumber together. Then she would awake; to recollect with

fast-flowing silent tears what it was that touched her face, and to see,

stealing over the cherished face upon the pillow, a deeper shadow than

the shadow of the Marshalsea Wall.

Quietly, quietly, all the lines of the plan of the great Castle

melted one after another. Quietly, quietly, the ruled and cross-ruled

countenance on which they were traced, became fair and blank.

Quietly, quietly, the reflected marks of the prison bars and of the

zig-zag iron on the wall-top, faded away. Quietly, quietly, the face

subsided into a far younger likeness of her own than she had ever seen

under the grey hair, and sank to rest.

At first her uncle was stark distracted. 'O my brother! O William,

William! You to go before me; you to go alone; you to go, and I to

remain! You, so far superior, so distinguished, so noble; I, a poor

useless creature fit for nothing, and whom no one would have missed!'

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

succour.

'Uncle, dear uncle, spare yourself, spare me!'

The old man was not deaf to the last words. When he did begin to

restrain himself, it was that he might spare her. He had no care for

himself; but, with all the remaining power of the honest heart, stunned

so long and now awaking to be broken, he honoured and blessed her.

'O God,' he cried, before they left the room, with his wrinkled hands

clasped over her. 'Thou seest this daughter of my dear dead brother! All

that I have looked upon, with my half-blind and sinful eyes, Thou hast

discerned clearly, brightly. Not a hair of her head shall be harmed

before Thee. Thou wilt uphold her here to her last hour. And I know Thou

wilt reward her hereafter!'

They remained in a dim room near, until it was almost midnight, quiet

and sad together. At times his grief would seek relief in a burst like

that in which it had found its earliest expression; but, besides that

his little strength would soon have been unequal to such strains, he

never failed to recall her words, and to reproach himself and calm

himself. The only utterance with which he indulged his sorrow, was the

frequent exclamation that his brother was gone, alone; that they had

been together in the outset of their lives, that they had fallen into

misfortune together, that they had kept together through their many

years of poverty, that they had remained together to that day; and that

his brother was gone alone, alone!

They parted, heavy and sorrowful. She would not consent to leave him

anywhere but in his own room, and she saw him lie down in his clothes

upon his bed, and covered him with her own hands. Then she sank upon her

own bed, and fell into a deep sleep: the sleep of exhaustion and

rest, though not of complete release from a pervading consciousness of

affliction. Sleep, good Little Dorrit. Sleep through the night!

It was a moonlight night; but the moon rose late, being long past the

full. When it was high in the peaceful firmament, it shone through

half-closed lattice blinds into the solemn room where the stumblings and

wanderings of a life had so lately ended. Two quiet figures were within

the room; two figures, equally still and impassive, equally removed

by an untraversable distance from the teeming earth and all that it

contains, though soon to lie in it.

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

drooped over it; the arms easily and peacefully resting on the coverlet;

the face bowed down, so that the lips touched the hand over which with

its last breath it had bent. The two brothers were before their Father;

far beyond the twilight judgment of this world; high above its mists and

obscurities.

CHAPTER 20. Introduces the next

The passengers were landing from the packet on the pier at Calais.

A low-lying place and a low-spirited place Calais was, with the tide

ebbing out towards low water-mark. There had been no more water on the

bar than had sufficed to float the packet in; and now the bar itself,

with a shallow break of sea over it, looked like a lazy marine monster

just risen to the surface, whose form was indistinctly shown as it lay

asleep. The meagre lighthouse all in white, haunting the seaboard as if

it were the ghost of an edifice that had once had colour and rotundity,

dropped melancholy tears after its late buffeting by the waves. The long

rows of gaunt black piles, slimy and wet and weather-worn, with funeral

garlands of seaweed twisted about them by the late tide, might

have represented an unsightly marine cemetery. Every wave-dashed,

storm-beaten object, was so low and so little, under the broad grey sky,

in the noise of the wind and sea, and before the curling lines of surf,

making at it ferociously, that the wonder was there was any Calais left,

and that its low gates and low wall and low roofs and low ditches and

low sand-hills and low ramparts and flat streets, had not yielded

long ago to the undermining and besieging sea, like the fortifications

children make on the sea-shore.

After slipping among oozy piles and planks, stumbling up wet steps and

encountering many salt difficulties, the passengers entered on their

comfortless peregrination along the pier; where all the French vagabonds

and English outlaws in the town (half the population) attended to

prevent their recovery from bewilderment. After being minutely inspected

by all the English, and claimed and reclaimed and counter-claimed as

prizes by all the French in a hand-to-hand scuffle three quarters of a

mile long, they were at last free to enter the streets, and to make off

in their various directions, hotly pursued.

Clennam, harassed by more anxieties than one, was among this devoted

band. Having rescued the most defenceless of his compatriots from

situations of great extremity, he now went his way alone, or as nearly

alone as he could be, with a native gentleman in a suit of grease and

a cap of the same material, giving chase at a distance of some fifty

yards, and continually calling after him, 'Hi! Ice-say! You! Seer!

Ice-say! Nice Oatel!'

Even this hospitable person, however, was left behind at last, and

Clennam pursued his way, unmolested. There was a tranquil air in the

town after the turbulence of the Channel and the beach, and its dulness

in that comparison was agreeable. He met new groups of his countrymen,

who had all a straggling air of having at one time overblown themselves,

like certain uncomfortable kinds of flowers, and of being now mere

weeds. They had all an air, too, of lounging out a limited round, day

after day, which strongly reminded him of the Marshalsea. But, taking

no further note of them than was sufficient to give birth to the

reflection, he sought out a certain street and number which he kept in

his mind.

'So Pancks said,' he murmured to himself, as he stopped before a dull

house answering to the address. 'I suppose his information to be correct

and his discovery, among Mr Casby's loose papers, indisputable; but,

without it, I should hardly have supposed this to be a likely place.'

A dead sort of house, with a dead wall over the way and a dead gateway

at the side, where a pendant bell-handle produced two dead tinkles, and

a knocker produced a dead, flat, surface-tapping, that seemed not to

have depth enough in it to penetrate even the cracked door. However, the

door jarred open on a dead sort of spring; and he closed it behind him