Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens [big ebook reader txt] 📗

coming here at any time, but that is past and what is past can never be recalled except in his own case as poor Mr. F. said when he was in spirits Cucumber and therefore never ate it.”

She was making the tea when Arthur came in, and now hastily finished that operation.

“Papa,” she said, all mystery and whisper, as she shut down the teapot lid, “is sitting prosingly breaking his new laid egg in the back parlour over the City article exactly like the Woodpecker Tapping and need never know that you are here, and our little friend you are well aware may be fully trusted when she comes down from cutting out on the large table overhead.”

Arthur then told her, in the fewest words, that it was their little friend he came to see; and what he had to announce to their little friend. At which astounding intelligence, Flora clasped her hands, fell into a tremble, and shed tears of sympathy and pleasure, like the good-natured creature she really was.

“For gracious sake let me get out of the way first,” said Flora, putting her hands to her ears and moving towards the door, “or I know I shall go off dead and screaming and make everybody worse, and the dear little thing only this morning looking so nice and neat and good and yet so poor and now a fortune is she really and deserves it too! and might I mention it to Mr. F.’s Aunt Arthur not Doyce and Clennam for this once or if objectionable not on any account.”

Arthur nodded his free permission, since Flora shut out all verbal communication. Flora nodded in return to thank him, and hurried out of the room.

Little Dorrit’s step was already on the stairs, and in another moment she was at the door. Do what he could to compose his face, he could not convey so much of an ordinary expression into it, but that the moment she saw it she dropped her work, and cried, “Mr. Clennam! What’s the matter?”

“Nothing, nothing. That is, no misfortune has happened. I have come to tell you something, but it is a piece of great good-fortune.”

“Good-fortune?”

“Wonderful fortune!”

They stood in a window, and her eyes, full of light, were fixed upon his face. He put an arm about her, seeing her likely to sink down. She put a hand upon that arm, partly to rest upon it, and partly so to preserve their relative positions as that her intent look at him should be shaken by no change of attitude in either of them. Her lips seemed to repeat “Wonderful fortune?” He repeated it again, aloud.

“Dear Little Dorrit! Your father.”

The ice of the pale face broke at the word, and little lights and shoots of expression passed all over it. They were all expressions of pain. Her breath was faint and hurried. Her heart beat fast. He would have clasped the little figure closer, but he saw that the eyes appealed to him not to be moved.

“Your father can be free within this week. He does not know it; we must go to him from here, to tell him of it. Your father will be free within a few days. Your father will be free within a few hours. Remember we must go to him from here, to tell him of it!”

That brought her back. Her eyes were closing, but they opened again.

“This is not all the good-fortune. This is not all the wonderful good-fortune, my dear Little Dorrit. Shall I tell you more?”

Her lips shaped “Yes.”

“Your father will be no beggar when he is free. He will want for nothing. Shall I tell you more? Remember! He knows nothing of it; we must go to him, from here, to tell him of it!”

She seemed to entreat him for a little time. He held her in his arm, and, after a pause, bent down his ear to listen.

“Did you ask me to go on?”

“Yes.”

“He will be a rich man. He is a rich man. A great sum of money is waiting to be paid over to him as his inheritance; you are all henceforth very wealthy. Bravest and best of children, I thank Heaven that you are rewarded!”

As he kissed her, she turned her head towards his shoulder, and raised her arm towards his neck; cried out “Father! Father! Father!” and swooned away.

Upon which Flora returned to take care of her, and hovered about her on a sofa, intermingling kind offices and incoherent scraps of conversation in a manner so confounding, that whether she pressed the Marshalsea to take a spoonful of unclaimed dividends, for it would do her good; or whether she congratulated Little Dorrit’s father on coming into possession of a hundred thousand smelling-bottles; or whether she explained that she put seventy-five thousand drops of spirits of lavender on fifty thousand pounds of lump sugar, and that she entreated Little Dorrit to take that gentle restorative; or whether she bathed the foreheads of Doyce and Clennam in vinegar, and gave the late Mr. F. more air; no one with any sense of responsibility could have undertaken to decide. A tributary stream of confusion, moreover, poured in from an adjoining bedroom, where Mr. F.’s Aunt appeared, from the sound of her voice, to be in a horizontal posture, awaiting her breakfast; and from which bower that inexorable lady snapped off short taunts, whenever she could get a hearing, as, “Don’t believe it’s his doing!” and “He needn’t take no credit to himself for it!” and “It’ll be long enough, I expect, afore he’ll give up any of his own money!” all designed to disparage Clennam’s share in the discovery, and to relieve those inveterate feelings with which Mr. F.’s Aunt regarded him.

But Little Dorrit’s solicitude to get to her father, and to carry the joyful tidings to him, and not to leave him in his jail a moment with this happiness in store for him and still unknown to him, did more for her speedy