ing, let somebody produce that at its address, and produce the answer here." "Cavalletto," said Arthur. "Will you take this fellow's letter?" "Sir? Follower? You are insolent. The friend." "Do you sell all your friends?" Rigaud took his cigarette from his mouth, and "I sell any thing that commands a price. How do your lawyers live, your politicians, your intriguers, your men of exchange? How do But Cavalletto's significant finger again ex-eyed him with a momentary revelation of surpressing that his post was at the door to keep prise. But he put it between his lips again, as watch over Rigaud, now he had found him with he answered with coolness: so much trouble, and that the duty of his post was to sit on the floor backed up by the door, looking at Rigaud and holding his own anklesSignor Panco once more volunteered. His serv-you live? How do you come here? Have you ices being accepted, Cavalletto suffered the door sold no friend? Lady of mine! I rather think, to open barely wide enough to admit of his yes!" squeezing himself out, and immediately shut it on him. "Touch me with a finger, touch me with an epithet, question my superiority as I sit here drinking my wine at my pleasure,” said Rigaud, "and I follow the letter and cancel my week's grace. You wanted me? You have got me! How do you like me?" Clennam turned away from him toward the window, and sat looking out at the wall. 66 "Effectively, Sir,” said Rigaud. Society sells itself and sells me: and I sell Society. I perceive you have acquaintance with another lady. Also handsome. A strong spirit. Let us see. How do they call her? Wade." He received no answer, but could easily dis “You know,” returned Clennam, with a bit-cern that he had hit the mark. ter sense of his helplessness, "that when I sought you, I was not a prisoner." "To the Devil with you and your prison," retorted Rigaud, leisurely, as he took from his pocket a case containing the materials for making cigarettes, and employed his facile hands in folding a few for present use; "I care for neither of you. Contrabandist! A light." "Yes!" he went on; "that handsome lady and strong spirit addresses me in the street, and I am not insensible. I respond. That handsome lady and strong spirit does me the favor to remark, in full confidence, 'I have my curiosity, and I have my chagrins. You are not more than ordinarily honorable, perhaps?' I announce myself, Madam, a gentleman from Again Cavalletto got up, and gave him what birth, and a gentleman to the death; but not he wanted. There had been something dread-more than ordinarily honorable. I despise such ful in the noiseless skill of his cold, white hands, a weak fantasy.' Thereupon she is pleased to with the fingers lithely twisting about and twining one over another like serpents. Clennam could not prevent himself from shuddering inwardly, as if he had been looking on at a nest of those creatures. "Hola, Pig!" cried Rigaud, with a noisy, stimulating cry, as if Cavalletto were an Italian horse or mule. "What! The infernal old jail was a respectable one to this. There was dignity in the bars and stones of that place. It was a prison for men. But this? Bah! A hospital for imbeciles !" He smoked his cigarette out, with his ugly smile so fixed upon his face that he looked as though he were smoking with his drooping beak of a nose rather than his mouth-like a fancy in a weird picture. When he had lighted a second cigarette at the still burning end of the first, he said to Clennam: compliment. "The difference between you and the rest is,' she answers, 'that you say so.' For she knows society. I accept her congratulations with gallantry and politeness. Politeness and little gallantries are inseparable from my character. She then makes a proposition, which is, in effect, that she has seen us much together; and it appears to her that I am for the passing time the cat of the house, the friend of the family; that her curiosity and her chagrins awaken the fancy to be acquainted with their movements, to know the manner of their life, how the fair Gowana is beloved, how the fair Gowana is cherished, and so on. She is not rich, but offers such and such little recompenses for the little cares and derangements of such services; and I graciously-to do every thing graciously is a part of my character-consent to accept them. Oh, yes! So goes the world. It is the mode." "One must pass the time in the madman's absence. One must talk. One can't drink strong Though Clennam's back was turned while he wine all day long, or I would have another bot- spoke, and thenceforth to the end of the intertle. She's handsome, Sir. Though not exact- view, he kept those glittering eyes of his, that ly to my taste, still, by the Thunder and the were too near together, upon him, and evidentLightning! very handsome. I felicitate you only saw in the very carriage of the head, as he your admiration." passed, with his braggart recklessness, from "I neither know nor ask," said Clennam, "of clause to clause of what he said, that he was whom you speak." saying nothing which Clennam did not already "Della bella Gowana, Sir, as they say in Italy. know. Of the Gowan, the fair Gowan." "Of whose husband you were the-follower, I think?" VOL. XV.-No. 85.-H "Whoof! The fair Gowana!" he said, lighting a third cigarette, with a sound as if his lightest breath could blow her away. "Charming, but imprudent! For it was not well of the fair Gowana to make mysteries of letters from old lovers, in her bed-chamber on the mountain, that her husband might not see them. No, no. That was not well. Whoof! The Gowana was mistaken there." "I pray Heaven," cried Arthur aloud, "that Pancks may not be long gone, for this man's presence pollutes the room." "Ay! But he'll flourish here, and every where," said Rigaud, with an exulting look and snap of his fingers. "He always has; he always will!" Stretching his body out on the only three chairs in the room besides that on which Clennam sat, he sang, smiting himself on the breast as the gallant personage of the song: "Who passes by this road so late? Compagnon de la Majolaine; Sing the refrain, Pig! You could sing it once, in another jail. Sing it! Or, by every Saint who was stoned to death, I'll be affronted and compromising; and then some people who are not dead yet, had better have been stoned along with them! "Of all the king's knights 'tis the flower, Of all the king's knights 'tis the flower, Partly in his old habit of submission, partly because his not doing it might injure his benefactor, and partly because he would as soon do it as any thing else, Cavalletto took up the refrain this time. Rigaud laughed, and fell to smoking with his eyes shut. Possibly another quarter of an hour elapsed before Mr. Pancks's step was heard upon the stairs, but the interval seemed to Clennam insupportably long. His step was attended by another step; and when Cavalletto opened the door, he admitted Mr. Pancks and Mr. Flintwinch. The latter was no sooner visible than Rigaud rushed at him and embraced him boisterously. "How do you find yourself, Sir ?" said Mr. Flintwinch, as soon as he could disengage himself, which he struggled to do with very little ceremony. "Thank you, no; I don't want any more." This was in reference to another menace of affection from his recovered friend. "Well, Arthur. You remember what I said to you about sleeping dogs and missing ones. It's come true, you see." He was as imperturbable as ever, to all appearance, and nodded his head in a moralizing way as he looked round the room. "And this is the Marshalsea prison for debt!" said Mr. Flintwinch. "Ha! You have brought your pigs to a very indifferent market, Arthur." If Arthur had patience, Rigaud had not. He took his little Flintwinch, with fierce playfulness, by the two lappels of his coat, and cried: "To the Devil with the Market, to the Devil with the Pigs, and to the Devil with the PigDriver! Give me the answer to my letter." "If you can make it convenient to let go a moment, Sir," returned Mr. Flintwinch, “I'll first hand Mr. Arthur a little note that I have for him." He did so. It was in his mother's maimed writing, on a slip of paper, and contained only these words: "I hope it is enough that you have ruined yourself. Rest contented without more ruin. Jeremiah Flintwinch is my messenger and representative. Your affectionate M. C." Clennam read this twice, in silence, and then tore it to pieces. Rigaud in the meanwhile stepped into a chair, and sat himself upon the back, with his feet upon the seat. "Now, Beau Flintwinch," he said, when he had closely watched the note to its destruction, "the answer to my letter?" "Mrs. Clennam did not write it, Mr. Blandois, her hands being cramped, and she thinking it as well to send it verbally by me." Mr. Flintwinch screwed this out of himself, unwillingly and rustily. "She sends her compliments and says she doesn't on the whole wish to term you unreasonable, and that she agrees. But without prejudicing the appointment that stands for this day week.” Monsieur Rigaud, after indulging in a fit of laughter, descended from his throne, saying, "Good! I go to seek an hotel!" But there his eyes encountered Cavalletto, who was still at his post. "Come, Pig," he added, "I have had you for a follower against my will; now, I'll have you against yours. I tell you, my little reptiles, I am born to be served. I demand the service of this contrabandist as my domestic, until this day week." In answer to Cavalletto's look of inquiry, Clennam made him a sign to go; but he added aloud, "unless you are afraid of him." Cavalletto replied with a very emphatic finger-negative. "No, master, I am not afraid of him, when I no more keep it secretementally that he was once my comrade." Rigaud took no notice of either remark, until he had lighted his last cigarette and was quite ready for walking. "Afraid of him," he said then, looking round upon them all. "Whoof! My children, my babies, my little dolls, you are all afraid of him. You give him his bottle of wine here; you give him meat, drink, and lodging, there; you dare not touch him with a finger or an epithet. No. It is his character to triumph! Whoof! "Of all the king's knights he's the flower, With the refrain, he stalked out of the room, closely followed by Cavalletto, whom perhaps he had pressed into his service because he tolerably well knew it would not be easy to get rid of him. Mr. Flintwinch, after scraping his chin and looking about with caustic disparagement of the Pig-Market, nodded to Arthur, and fol The sixth day of the appointed week was a moist, hot, misty day. It seemed as though the prison's poverty, and shabbiness, and dirt, were lowed. Mr. Pancks, still penitent and depress- | of unhappiness, however, it had never for a moed, followed too; after whispering that, on the ment lost its hold on Clennam's mind. possibility of being useful, he would see this affair out, and stand by it to the end. So the prisoner with the feeling that he was more despised, more scorned and repudiated, more help-growing in the sultry atmosphere. With an less, altogether more miserable and fallen, than before--was left alone again. CHAPTER LXV.—A PLEA IN THE MARSHALSEA. HAGGARD anxiety and remorse are bad companions to be barred up with. Brooding all day, and resting very little indeed at night, will not arm a man against misery. Next morning, Clennam felt that his health was sinking, as his spirits had already sunk, and that the weight under which he bent was bearing him down. Night after night he had arisen from his bed of wretchedness at twelve or one o'clock, and had sat at his window watching the sickly lamps in the yard, and looking upward for the first wan trace of day, hours before it was possible that the sky could show it to him. Now, when the night came, he could not even persuade himself to undress. For a burning restlessness set in, an agonized impatience of the prison, and a conviction that he was going to break his heart and die there, which caused him indescribable suffering. His dread and hatred of the place became so intense that he felt it a labor to draw his breath in it. The sensation of being stifled, sometimes so overpowered him, that he would stand at the window holding his throat and gasping. At the same time a longing for other air, and a yearning to be beyond the blind, blank wall, made him feel as if he must go mad with the ardor of the desire. aching head and a weary heart Clennam had watched the miserable night out, listening to the fall of the rain on the yard pavement, thinking of its softer fall upon the country earth. A blurred circle of yellow haze had risen up in the sky in lieu of sun, and he had watched the patch it put upon his wall, like a bit of the prison's raggedness. He had heard the gates open, and the badly shod feet that waited outside shuffle in; and the sweeping, and pumping, and moving about, begin, which commenced the prison morning. So ill and faint that he was obliged to rest many times in the process of getting himself washed, he had at length crept to his chair by the open window. In it he sat dozing, while the old woman who arranged his room went through her morning's work. Light of head with want of sleep and want of food (his appetite and even his sense of taste having quite forsaken him), he had been two or three times conscious, in the night, of going astray. He had heard fragments of tunes and songs, in the warm wind, which he knew had no existence. Now that he began to doze in exhaustion, he heard them again; and voices seemed to address him, and he answered and started. Dozing and dreaming, without the power of reckoning time, so that a minute might have been an hour and an hour a minute, some abiding impression of a garden stole over him—a garden of flowers, with a damp, warm wind gently stirring their scents. It required such a painful effort to lift his head for the purpose of inquiring into this, or inquiring into any thing, that the impression appeared to have become quite an old and importunate one when he looked Many other prisoners had had experience of this condition before him, and its violence and continuity had worn themselves out in their cases as they did in his. Two nights and a day exhausted it. It came back by fits, but those grew fainter and returned at lengthening inter-round. Beside the tea-cup on his table he saw, vals. A desolate calm succeeded, and the middle of the week found him settled down in the despondency of low, slow fever. then, a blooming nosegay; a wonderful handful of the choicest and most lovely flowers. Nothing had ever appeared so beautiful in his sight. He took them up and inhaled their fragrance, and he lifted them to his hot head, and he put them down and opened his parched hands to them, as cold hands are opened to receive the cheering of a fire. It was not until he had delighted in them for some time that he wondered who had sent them, and opened his door to ask the woman who must have put them there how they had come into her hands. But she was gone, and seemed to have been long gone; for the tea she had left for him on the table was cold. He tried to drink some, but could not bear the odor of it; so he crept back to his chair by the open window, and put the flowers on the little round table of old. With Cavalletto and Pancks away, he had no visitors to fear but Mr. and Mrs. Plornish. His anxiety, in reference to that worthy pair, was that they should not come near him; for, in the morbid state of his nerves, he sought to be left alone, and spared the being seen so subdued and weak. He wrote a note to Mrs. Plornish, representing himself as occupied with his affairs, and bound by the necessity of devoting himself to them to remain for a time even without the pleasant interruption of a sight of her kind face. As to Young John, who looked in daily at a certain hour when the turnkeys were relieved, to ask if he could do any thing for him, he always made a pretense of being engaged in writing, and to answer cheerfully in the negative. The subject When the first faintness consequent on havof their only long conversation had never been re-ing moved about had left him, he subsided into vived between them. Through all these changes his former state. One of the night-tunes was playing in the wind, when the door of his room seemed to open to a light touch, and, after a moment's pause, a quiet figure seemed to stand there, with a black mantle on it. It seemed to draw the mantle off and drop it on the ground, and then it seemed to be his Little Dorrit in her old, worn dress. It seemed to tremble and to clasp its hands, and to smile, and to burst into tears. He roused himself, and cried out. And then he saw, in the loving, pitying, sorrowing, dear face, as in a mirror, how changed he was; and she came toward him; and with her hands laid on his breast to keep him in his chair, and with her knees upon the floor at his feet, and with her lips raised up to kiss him, and with her tears dropping on him as the rain from heaven had dropped upon the flowers, Little Dorrit, a living presence, called him by his name. "Oh, don't cry! Dear Mr. Clennam, don't let me see you cry! Unless you cry with pleasure to see me. I hope you do. Your own poor child come back!" So faithful, tender, and unspoiled by Fortune. In the sound of her voice, in the light of her eyes, in the touch of her hands, so Angelically comforting and true! As he embraced her, she said to him, "They never told me you were ill,” and drawing an arm softly round his neck, laid his head upon her bosom, put a hand upon his head, and resting her cheek upon that hand, nursed him as lovingly, and God knows as innocently, as she had nursed her father in that room when she had been but a baby, needing all the care from others that she took of them. 66 When he could speak, he said, “Is it possible that you have come to me? And in this dress?" "I hoped you would like me better in this dress than any other. I have always kept it by me, to remind me: though I wanted no reminding. I am not alone, you see. I have brought an old friend with me." Looking round, he saw Maggy in her big cap which had been long abandoned, with a basket on her arm as in the by-gone days, chuckling rapturously. "It was only yesterday evening that I came to London with my brother. I sent round to Mrs. Plornish almost as soon as we arrived that I might hear of you and let you know I had Then I heard that you were here. Did you happen to think of me in the night? I almost believe you must have thought of me a little. I thought of you so anxiously, and it appeared so long to morning." come. He saw the bright delight of her face, and the flush that kindled in it, with a feeling of shame. He, a broken, bankrupt, sick, dishonored prisoner. "I was here before the gates were opened, but I was afraid to come straight to you. I should have done you more harm than good, at first; for the prison was so familiar and yet so strange, and it brought back so many remembrances of my poor father, and of you too, that, at first, it overpowered me. But we went to Mr. Chivery before we came to the gate, and he brought us in, and got John's room for us-my poor old room, you know--and we waited there a little. I brought the flowers to the door, but you didn't hear me." She looked something more womanly than when she had gone away, and the ripening touch of the Italian sun was visible upon her face. But otherwise she was quite unchanged. The same deep, timid earnestness that he had always seen in her, and never without emotion, he saw still. If it had a new meaning that smote him to the heart, the change was in his perception, not in her. She took off her old bonnet, hung it in the old place, and noiselessly began, with Maggy's help, to make his room as fresh and neat as it could be made, and to sprinkle it with a pleasant smelling water. When that was done, the basket, which was filled with grapes and other fruit, was unpacked, and all its contents were quietly put away. When that was done, a moment's whisper dispatched Maggy to dispatch somebody else to fill the basket again, which soon came back replenished with new stores, from which a present provision of cooling drink and jelly, and a prospective supply of roast chicken and wine and water, were the first extracts. These various arrangements completed, she took out her old needlecase to make him a curtain for his window; and thus, with a quiet reigning in the room that seemed to diffuse itself through the else noisy prison, he found himself composed in his chair with Little Dorrit working at his side. To see the modest head again bent down over its task, and the nimble fingers busy at their old work-though she was not so absorbed in it but that her compassionate eyes were often raised to his face, and, when they drooped again, had tears in them-to be so consoled and comforted, and to believe that all the devotion of this great nature was turned to him in his adversity, to pour out its inexhaustible wealth of goodness upon him, did not steady Clennam's trembling voice or hand, or strengthen him in his weakness. Yet it inspired him with an inward fortitude that rose with his love. And how dearly he loved her now what words can tell! As they sat side by side, in the shadow of the wall, the shadow fell like light upon him. She would not let him speak much, and he lay back in his chair, looking at her. Now and again she would rise and give him the glass that he might drink, or would smooth the resting-place | Pray, pray, pray, I beg you and implore you with all my grieving heart, my friend - my dear!-take all I have, and make it a Blessing to me!" of his head; then she would gently resume her seat by him, and bend over her work again. The shadow moved with the sun, but she never moved from his side, except to wait upon him. The sun went down, and she was still there. She had done her work now, and her hand, faltering on the arm of his chair since its last tending of him, was hesitating there yet. He laid his hand upon it, and it clasped him with a trembling supplication. "Dear Mr. Clennam, I must say something to you before I go. I have put it off from hour to hour, but I must say it." The star had shone on her face until now, when her face sank upon his hand and her own. It had grown darker when he raised her in his encircling arm, and softly answered her: "No, darling Little Dorrit. No, my child. I must not hear of such a sacrifice. Liberty and hope would be so dear bought at such a price that I could never support their weightnever bear the reproach of possessing them. But, with what ardent thankfulness and love I "I too, dear Little Dorrit. I have put off say this, I may call Heaven to witness !" what I must say." She nervously moved her hand toward his lips as if to stop him; then it dropped, trembling, into its former place. "I am not going abroad again. My brother is, but I am not. He was always attached to me, and he is so grateful to me now-so much too grateful, for it is only because I happened to be with him in his illness-that he says I shall be free to stay where I like best, and to do what I like best. He only wishes me to be happy, he says." There was one bright star shining in the sky. She looked up at it while she spoke, as if it were the fervent purpose of her own heart shining before her. "You will understand, I dare say, without my telling you, that my brother has come home to find my dear father's will, and to take possession of his property. He says, if there is a will, he is sure I shall be left rich; and if there is none, that he will make me so." "And yet you will not let me be faithful to you in your affliction?" 'Say, dearest Little Dorrit, and yet I will try to be faithful to you. If, in the by-gone days when this was your home and when this was your dress, I had understood myself (I speak only of myself) better, and had read the secrets of my own breast more distinctly; if, through my reserve and self-mistrust, I had discerned a light that I see brightly now when it has passed far away, and my weak footsteps can never overtake it; if I had then known, and told you that I loved and honored you, not as the poor child I used to call you, but as a woman whose true hand would raise me high above myself, and make me a far happier and better man; if I had so used the opportunity there is no recalling-as I wish I had, oh, I wish I had!—and if something had kept us apart then, when I was moderately thriving, and when you were poor; I might have met your noble offer of your fortune, dearest girl, He would have spoken; but she put up her with other words than these, and still have trembling hand again, and he stopped. "I have no use for money, I have no wish for it. It would be of no value at all to me, but for your sake. I could not be rich, and you here. I must always be much worse than poor, with you distressed. Will you let me lend you all I have? Will you let me give it you? Will you let me show you that I never have forgotten, that I never can forget, your protection of me when this was my home? Dear Mr. Clennam, make me of all the world the happiest, by saying Yes! Make me as happy as I can be in leaving you here, by saying nothing to-night, and letting me go away with the hope that you will think of it kindly; and that for my sakenot for yours, for mine, for nobody's but mine! -you will give me the greatest joy I can experience on earth, the joy of knowing that I have been serviceable to you, and that I have paid some little of the great debt of my affection and gratitude. I can't say what I wish to say. I can't visit you here where I have lived so long, I can't think of you here where I have seen so much, and be as calm and comforting as I ought. My tears will make their way. I can not keep them back. But pray, pray, pray, do not turn from your Little Dorrit, now, in your affliction! blushed to touch it. But as it is, I must never touch it never!" She besought him more pathetically and earnestly with her little supplicatory hand than she could have done in any words. "I am disgraced enough, my Little Dorrit. I must not descend so low as that, and carry you-so dear, so generous, and so good-down with me. God bless you, God reward you! It is past." He took her in his arms, as if she had been his daughter. แ Always so much older, so much rougher, and so much less worthy, even what I was must be dismissed by both of us, and you must see me only as I am. I put this parting kiss upon your cheek, my child-who might have been more near to me, who never could have been more dear-a ruined man, far removed from you, forever separated from you, whose course is run, while yours is but beginning. I have not the courage to ask to be forgotten by you in my humiliation, but I ask to be remembered only as I am." The bell began to ring, warning visitors to depart. He took her mantle from the wall, and tenderly wrapped it round her. |