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

young Barnacle, and Bar, were the talkers of the party. Bishop would have been exceedingly agreeable also, but that his innocence stood in his way. He was so soon left behind. When there was any little hint of anything being in the wind, he got lost directly. Worldly affairs were too much for him; he couldn’t make them out at all.

This was observable when Bar said, incidentally, that he was happy to have heard that we were soon to have the advantage of enlisting on the good side, the sound and plain sagacity⁠—not demonstrative or ostentatious, but thoroughly sound and practical⁠—of our friend Mr. Sparkler.

Ferdinand Barnacle laughed, and said oh yes, he believed so. A vote was a vote, and always acceptable.

Bar was sorry to miss our good friend Mr. Sparkler today, Mr. Merdle.

“He is away with Mrs. Merdle,” returned that gentleman, slowly coming out of a long abstraction, in the course of which he had been fitting a tablespoon up his sleeve. “It is not indispensable for him to be on the spot.”

“The magic name of Merdle,” said Bar, with the jury droop, “no doubt will suffice for all.”

“Why⁠—yes⁠—I believe so,” assented Mr. Merdle, putting the spoon aside, and clumsily hiding each of his hands in the coat-cuff of the other hand. “I believe the people in my interest down there will not make any difficulty.”

“Model people!” said Bar.

“I am glad you approve of them,” said Mr. Merdle.

“And the people of those other two places, now,” pursued Bar, with a bright twinkle in his keen eye, as it slightly turned in the direction of his magnificent neighbour; “we lawyers are always curious, always inquisitive, always picking up odds and ends for our patchwork minds, since there is no knowing when and where they may fit into some corner;⁠—the people of those other two places now? Do they yield so laudably to the vast and cumulative influence of such enterprise and such renown; do those little rills become absorbed so quietly and easily, and, as it were by the influence of natural laws, so beautifully, in the swoop of the majestic stream as it flows upon its wondrous way enriching the surrounding lands; that their course is perfectly to be calculated, and distinctly to be predicated?”

Mr. Merdle, a little troubled by Bar’s eloquence, looked fitfully about the nearest saltcellar for some moments, and then said hesitating:

“They are perfectly aware, sir, of their duty to Society. They will return anybody I send to them for that purpose.”

“Cheering to know,” said Bar. “Cheering to know.”

The three places in question were three little rotten holes in this Island, containing three little ignorant, drunken, guzzling, dirty, out-of-the-way constituencies, that had reeled into Mr. Merdle’s pocket. Ferdinand Barnacle laughed in his easy way, and airily said they were a nice set of fellows. Bishop, mentally perambulating among paths of peace, was altogether swallowed up in absence of mind.

“Pray,” asked Lord Decimus, casting his eyes around the table, “what is this story I have heard of a gentleman long confined in a debtors’ prison proving to be of a wealthy family, and having come into the inheritance of a large sum of money? I have met with a variety of allusions to it. Do you know anything of it, Ferdinand?”

“I only know this much,” said Ferdinand, “that he has given the Department with which I have the honour to be associated;” this sparkling young Barnacle threw off the phrase sportively, as who should say, We know all about these forms of speech, but we must keep it up, we must keep the game alive; “no end of trouble, and has put us into innumerable fixes.”

“Fixes?” repeated Lord Decimus, with a majestic pausing and pondering on the word that made the bashful Member shut his eyes quite tight. “Fixes?”

“A very perplexing business indeed,” observed Mr. Tite Barnacle, with an air of grave resentment.

“What,” said Lord Decimus, “was the character of his business; what was the nature of these⁠—a⁠—Fixes, Ferdinand?”

“Oh, it’s a good story, as a story,” returned that gentleman; “as good a thing of its kind as need be. This Mr. Dorrit (his name is Dorrit) had incurred a responsibility to us, ages before the fairy came out of the Bank and gave him his fortune, under a bond he had signed for the performance of a contract which was not at all performed. He was a partner in a house in some large way⁠—spirits, or buttons, or wine, or blacking, or oatmeal, or woollen, or pork, or hooks and eyes, or iron, or treacle, or shoes, or something or other that was wanted for troops, or seamen, or somebody⁠—and the house burst, and we being among the creditors, detainees were lodged on the part of the Crown in a scientific manner, and all the rest of it. When the fairy had appeared and he wanted to pay us off, Egad we had got into such an exemplary state of checking and counterchecking, signing and countersigning, that it was six months before we knew how to take the money, or how to give a receipt for it. It was a triumph of public business,” said this handsome young Barnacle, laughing heartily, “You never saw such a lot of forms in your life. ‘Why,’ the attorney said to me one day, ‘if I wanted this office to give me two or three thousand pounds instead of take it, I couldn’t have more trouble about it.’ ‘You are right, old fellow,’ I told him, ‘and in future you’ll know that we have something to do here.’ ” The pleasant young Barnacle finished by once more laughing heartily. He was a very easy, pleasant fellow indeed, and his manners were exceedingly winning.

Mr. Tite Barnacle’s view of the business was of a less airy character. He took it ill that Mr. Dorrit had troubled the Department by wanting to pay the money, and considered it a grossly informal thing to do after so many years. But Mr. Tite Barnacle was a buttoned-up man, and consequently a weighty one. All buttoned-up men are weighty. All buttoned-up