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

these characters combined in your sister? For shame, you false girl, for shame!”

“I love Amy,” cried Miss Fanny, sobbing and weeping, “as well as I love my life⁠—better than I love my life. I don’t deserve to be so treated. I am as grateful to Amy, and as fond of Amy, as it’s possible for any human being to be. I wish I was dead. I never was so wickedly wronged. And only because I am anxious for the family credit.”

“To the winds with the family credit!” cried the old man, with great scorn and indignation. “Brother, I protest against pride. I protest against ingratitude. I protest against any one of us here who have known what we have known, and have seen what we have seen, setting up any pretension that puts Amy at a moment’s disadvantage, or to the cost of a moment’s pain. We may know that it’s a base pretension by its having that effect. It ought to bring a judgment on us. Brother, I protest against it in the sight of God!”

As his hand went up above his head and came down on the table, it might have been a blacksmith’s. After a few moments’ silence, it had relaxed into its usual weak condition. He went round to his brother with his ordinary shuffling step, put the hand on his shoulder, and said, in a softened voice, “William, my dear, I felt obliged to say it; forgive me, for I felt obliged to say it!” and then went, in his bowed way, out of the palace hall, just as he might have gone out of the Marshalsea room.

All this time Fanny had been sobbing and crying, and still continued to do so. Edward, beyond opening his mouth in amazement, had not opened his lips, and had done nothing but stare. Mr. Dorrit also had been utterly discomfited, and quite unable to assert himself in any way. Fanny was now the first to speak.

“I never, never, never was so used!” she sobbed. “There never was anything so harsh and unjustifiable, so disgracefully violent and cruel! Dear, kind, quiet little Amy, too, what would she feel if she could know that she had been innocently the means of exposing me to such treatment! But I’ll never tell her! No, good darling, I’ll never tell her!”

This helped Mr. Dorrit to break his silence.

“My dear,” said he, “I⁠—ha⁠—approve of your resolution. It will be⁠—ha hum⁠—much better not to speak of this to Amy. It might⁠—hum⁠—it might distress her. Ha. No doubt it would distress her greatly. It is considerate and right to avoid doing so. We will⁠—ha⁠—keep this to ourselves.”

“But the cruelty of Uncle!” cried Miss Fanny. “O, I never can forgive the wanton cruelty of Uncle!”

“My dear,” said Mr. Dorrit, recovering his tone, though he remained unusually pale, “I must request you not to say so. You must remember that your uncle is⁠—ha⁠—not what he formerly was. You must remember that your uncle’s state requires⁠—hum⁠—great forbearance from us, great forbearance.”

“I am sure,” cried Fanny, piteously, “it is only charitable to suppose that there must be something wrong in him somewhere, or he never could have so attacked me, of all the people in the world.”

“Fanny,” returned Mr. Dorrit in a deeply fraternal tone, “you know, with his innumerable good points, what a⁠—hum⁠—wreck your uncle is; and, I entreat you by the fondness that I have for him, and by the fidelity that you know I have always shown him, to⁠—ha⁠—to draw your own conclusions, and to spare my brotherly feelings.”

This ended the scene; Edward Dorrit, Esquire, saying nothing throughout, but looking, to the last, perplexed and doubtful. Miss Fanny awakened much affectionate uneasiness in her sister’s mind that day by passing the greater part of it in violent fits of embracing her, and in alternately giving her brooches, and wishing herself dead.

VI Something Right Somewhere

To be in the halting state of Mr. Henry Gowan; to have left one of two powers in disgust; to want the necessary qualifications for finding promotion with another, and to be loitering moodily about on neutral ground, cursing both; is to be in a situation unwholesome for the mind, which time is not likely to improve. The worst class of sum worked in the everyday world is ciphered by the diseased arithmeticians who are always in the rule of Subtraction as to the merits and successes of others, and never in Addition as to their own.

The habit, too, of seeking some sort of recompense in the discontented boast of being disappointed, is a habit fraught with degeneracy. A certain idle carelessness and recklessness of consistency soon comes of it. To bring deserving things down by setting undeserving things up is one of its perverted delights; and there is no playing fast and loose with the truth, in any game, without growing the worse for it.

In his expressed opinions of all performances in the Art of painting that were completely destitute of merit, Gowan was the most liberal fellow on earth. He would declare such a man to have more power in his little finger (provided he had none), than such another had (provided he had much) in his whole mind and body. If the objection were taken that the thing commended was trash, he would reply, on behalf of his art, “My good fellow, what do we all turn out but trash? I turn out nothing else, and I make you a present of the confession.”

To make a vaunt of being poor was another of the incidents of his splenetic state, though this may have had the design in it of showing that he ought to be rich; just as he would publicly laud and decry the Barnacles, lest it should be forgotten that he belonged to the family. Howbeit, these two subjects were very often on his lips; and he managed them so well that he might have praised himself by the month together, and not have made himself out half so important