第 78 页

embellished one of his rooms.

The Innkeeper, hat in hand in the yard, swore to the courier that he was

blighted, that he was desolated, that he was profoundly afflicted, that

he was the most miserable and unfortunate of beasts, that he had the

head of a wooden pig. He ought never to have made the concession, he

said, but the very genteel lady had so passionately prayed him for the

accommodation of that room to dine in, only for a little half-hour, that

he had been vanquished. The little half-hour was expired, the lady and

gentleman were taking their little dessert and half-cup of coffee, the

note was paid, the horses were ordered, they would depart immediately;

but, owing to an unhappy destiny and the curse of Heaven, they were not

yet gone.

Nothing could exceed Mr Dorrit's indignation, as he turned at the foot

of the staircase on hearing these apologies. He felt that the family

dignity was struck at by an assassin's hand. He had a sense of his

dignity, which was of the most exquisite nature. He could detect a

design upon it when nobody else had any perception of the fact. His

life was made an agony by the number of fine scalpels that he felt to be

incessantly engaged in dissecting his dignity.

'Is it possible, sir,' said Mr Dorrit, reddening excessively, 'that you

have--ha--had the audacity to place one of my rooms at the disposition

of any other person?'

Thousands of pardons! It was the host's profound misfortune to have been

overcome by that too genteel lady. He besought Monseigneur not to enrage

himself. He threw himself on Monseigneur for clemency. If Monseigneur

would have the distinguished goodness to occupy the other salon

especially reserved for him, for but five minutes, all would go well.

'No, sir,' said Mr Dorrit. 'I will not occupy any salon. I will leave

your house without eating or drinking, or setting foot in it.

How do you dare to act like this? Who am I that you--ha--separate me

from other gentlemen?'

Alas! The host called all the universe to witness that Monseigneur was

the most amiable of the whole body of nobility, the most important,

the most estimable, the most honoured. If he separated Monseigneur from

others, it was only because he was more distinguished, more cherished,

more generous, more renowned.

'Don't tell me so, sir,' returned Mr Dorrit, in a mighty heat. 'You have

affronted me. You have heaped insults upon me. How dare you? Explain

yourself.'

Ah, just Heaven, then, how could the host explain himself when he had

nothing more to explain; when he had only to apologise, and confide

himself to the so well-known magnanimity of Monseigneur!

'I tell you, sir,' said Mr Dorrit, panting with anger, 'that you

separate me--ha--from other gentlemen; that you make distinctions

between me and other gentlemen of fortune and station. I demand of you,

why? I wish to know on--ha--what authority, on whose authority. Reply

sir. Explain. Answer why.'

Permit the landlord humbly to submit to Monsieur the Courier then, that

Monseigneur, ordinarily so gracious, enraged himself without cause.

There was no why. Monsieur the Courier would represent to Monseigneur,

that he deceived himself in suspecting that there was any why, but the

why his devoted servant had already had the honour to present to him.

The very genteel lady--

'Silence!' cried Mr Dorrit. 'Hold your tongue! I will hear no more

of the very genteel lady; I will hear no more of you. Look at this

family--my family--a family more genteel than any lady. You have treated

this family with disrespect; you have been insolent to this family. I'll

ruin you. Ha--send for the horses, pack the carriages, I'll not set foot

in this man's house again!'

No one had interfered in the dispute, which was beyond the French

colloquial powers of Edward Dorrit, Esquire, and scarcely within the

province of the ladies. Miss Fanny, however, now supported her father

with great bitterness; declaring, in her native tongue, that it was

quite clear there was something special in this man's impertinence;

and that she considered it important that he should be, by some means,

forced to give up his authority for making distinctions between that

family and other wealthy families. What the reasons of his presumption

could be, she was at a loss to imagine; but reasons he must have, and

they ought to be torn from him.

All the guides, mule-drivers, and idlers in the yard, had made

themselves parties to the angry conference, and were much impressed by

the courier's now bestirring himself to get the carriages out. With the

aid of some dozen people to each wheel, this was done at a great cost of

noise; and then the loading was proceeded with, pending the arrival of

the horses from the post-house.

But the very genteel lady's English chariot being already horsed and at

the inn-door, the landlord had slipped up-stairs to represent his hard

case. This was notified to the yard by his now coming down the staircase

in attendance on the gentleman and the lady, and by his pointing out the

offended majesty of Mr Dorrit to them with a significant motion of his

hand.

'Beg your pardon,' said the gentleman, detaching himself from the

lady, and coming forward. 'I am a man of few words and a bad hand at an

explanation--but lady here is extremely anxious that there should be no

Row. Lady--a mother of mine, in point of fact--wishes me to say that she

hopes no Row.'

Mr Dorrit, still panting under his injury, saluted the gentleman, and

saluted the lady, in a distant, final, and invincible manner.

'No, but really--here, old feller; you!' This was the gentleman's way of

appealing to Edward Dorrit, Esquire, on whom he pounced as a great and

providential relief. 'Let you and I try to make this all right. Lady so

very much wishes no Row.'

Edward Dorrit, Esquire, led a little apart by the button, assumed a

diplomatic expression of countenance in replying, 'Why you must confess,

that when you bespeak a lot of rooms beforehand, and they belong to you,

it's not pleasant to find other people in 'em.'

'No,' said the other, 'I know it isn't. I admit it. Still, let you and I

try to make it all right, and avoid Row. The fault is not this chap's

at all, but my mother's. Being a remarkably fine woman with no bigodd

nonsense about her--well educated, too--she was too many for this chap.

Regularly pocketed him.'

'If that's the case--' Edward Dorrit, Esquire, began.

'Assure you 'pon my soul 'tis the case. Consequently,' said the other

gentleman, retiring on his main position, 'why Row?'

'Edmund,' said the lady from the doorway, 'I hope you have explained,

or are explaining, to the satisfaction of this gentleman and his family

that the civil landlord is not to blame?'

'Assure you, ma'am,' returned Edmund, 'perfectly paralysing myself with

trying it on.' He then looked steadfastly at Edward Dorrit, Esquire, for

some seconds, and suddenly added, in a burst of confidence, 'Old feller!

Is it all right?'

'I don't know, after all,' said the lady, gracefully advancing a step or

two towards Mr Dorrit, 'but that I had better say myself, at once,

that I assured this good man I took all the consequences on myself of

occupying one of a stranger's suite of rooms during his absence, for

just as much (or as little) time as I could dine in. I had no idea the

rightful owner would come back so soon, nor had I any idea that he

had come back, or I should have hastened to make restoration of my

ill-gotten chamber, and to have offered my explanation and apology. I

trust in saying this--'

For a moment the lady, with a glass at her eye, stood transfixed and

speechless before the two Miss Dorrits. At the same moment, Miss Fanny,

in the foreground of a grand pictorial composition, formed by the

family, the family equipages, and the family servants, held her sister

tight under one arm to detain her on the spot, and with the other arm

fanned herself with a distinguished air, and negligently surveyed the

lady from head to foot.

The lady, recovering herself quickly--for it was Mrs Merdle and she was

not easily dashed--went on to add that she trusted in saying this, she

apologised for her boldness, and restored this well-behaved landlord to

the favour that was so very valuable to him. Mr Dorrit, on the altar of

whose dignity all this was incense, made a gracious reply; and said

that his people should--ha--countermand his horses, and he

would--hum--overlook what he had at first supposed to be an affront,

but now regarded as an honour. Upon this the bosom bent to him; and its

owner, with a wonderful command of feature, addressed a winning smile of

adieu to the two sisters, as young ladies of fortune in whose favour she

was much prepossessed, and whom she had never had the gratification of

seeing before.

Not so, however, Mr Sparkler. This gentleman, becoming transfixed at

the same moment as his lady-mother, could not by any means unfix himself

again, but stood stiffly staring at the whole composition with Miss

Fanny in the Foreground. On his mother saying, 'Edmund, we are quite

ready; will you give me your arm?' he seemed, by the motion of his lips,

to reply with some remark comprehending the form of words in which his

shining talents found the most frequent utterance, but he relaxed no

muscle. So fixed was his figure, that it would have been matter of some

difficulty to bend him sufficiently to get him in the carriage-door,

if he had not received the timely assistance of a maternal pull from

within. He was no sooner within than the pad of the little window in the

back of the chariot disappeared, and his eye usurped its place. There

it remained as long as so small an object was discernible, and probably

much longer, staring (as though something inexpressibly surprising

should happen to a codfish) like an ill-executed eye in a large locket.

This encounter was so highly agreeable to Miss Fanny, and gave her

so much to think of with triumph afterwards, that it softened her

asperities exceedingly. When the procession was again in motion next

day, she occupied her place in it with a new gaiety; and showed such a

flow of spirits indeed, that Mrs General looked rather surprised.

Little Dorrit was glad to be found no fault with, and to see that Fanny

was pleased; but her part in the procession was a musing part, and a

quiet one. Sitting opposite her father in the travelling-carriage, and

recalling the old Marshalsea room, her present existence was a dream.

All that she saw was new and wonderful, but it was not real; it seemed

to her as if those visions of mountains and picturesque countries might

melt away at any moment, and the carriage, turning some abrupt corner,

bring up with a jolt at the old Marshalsea gate.

To have no work to do was strange, but not half so strange as having

glided into a corner where she had no one to think for, nothing to plan

and contrive, no cares of others to load herself with. Strange as that

was, it was far stranger yet to find a space between herself and her

father, where others occupied themselves in taking care of him, and

where she was never expected to be. At first, this was so much more

unlike her old experience than even the mountains themselves, that she

had been unable to resign herself to it, and had tried to retain her

old place about him. But he had spoken to her alone, and had said that

people--ha--people in an exalted position, my dear, must scrupulously

exact respect from their dependents; and that for her, his daughter,

Miss Amy Dorrit, of the sole remaining branch of the Dorrits of

Dorsetshire, to be known to--hum--to occupy herself in fulfilling the

functions of--ha hum--a valet, would be incompatible with that respect.

Therefore, my dear, he--ha--he laid his parental injunctions upon

her, to remember that she was a lady, who had now to conduct herself

with--hum--a proper pride, and to preserve the rank of a lady;

and consequently he requested her to abstain from doing what would

occasion--ha--unpleasant and derogatory remarks. She had obeyed without

a murmur. Thus it had been brought about that she now sat in her corner

of the luxurious carriage with her little patient hands folded before

her, quite displaced even from the last point of the old standing ground

in life on which her feet had lingered.

It was from this position that all she saw appeared unreal; the more

surprising the scenes, the more they resembled the unreality of her

own inner life as she went through its vacant places all day long. The

gorges of the Simplon, its enormous depths and thundering waterfalls,

the wonderful road, the points of danger where a loose wheel or a

faltering horse would have been destruction, the descent into Italy, the

opening of that beautiful land as the rugged mountain-chasm widened and

let them out from a gloomy and dark imprisonment--all a dream--only the

old mean Marshalsea a reality. Nay, even the old mean Marshalsea was

shaken to its foundations when she pictured it without her father. She

could scarcely believe that the prisoners were still lingering in the

close yard, that the mean rooms were still every one tenanted, and that

the turnkey still stood in the Lodge letting people in and out, all just

as she well knew it to be.

With a remembrance of her father's old life in prison hanging about her

like the burden of a sorrowful tune, Little Dorrit would wake from a

dream of her birth-place into a whole day's dream. The painted room in

which she awoke, often a humbled state-chamber in a dilapidated palace,

would begin it; with its wild red autumnal vine-leaves overhanging the

glass, its orange-trees on the cracked white terrace outside the window,

a group of monks and peasants in the little street below, misery and

magnificence wrestling with each other upon every rood of ground in