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

been there twenty minutes, “go outside and fetch a little brandy, or we shall have you giving in.”

“Thank you, sir. But none on my accounts,” said Mrs. Bangham.

“Mrs. Bangham,” returned the doctor, “I am in professional attendance on this lady, and don’t choose to allow any discussion on your part. Go outside and fetch a little brandy, or I foresee that you’ll break down.”

“You’re to be obeyed, sir,” said Mrs. Bangham, rising. “If you was to put your own lips to it, I think you wouldn’t be the worse, for you look but poorly, sir.”

“Mrs. Bangham,” returned the doctor, “I am not your business, thank you, but you are mine. Never you mind me, if you please. What you have got to do, is, to do as you are told, and to go and get what I bid you.”

Mrs. Bangham submitted; and the doctor, having administered her potion, took his own. He repeated the treatment every hour, being very determined with Mrs. Bangham. Three or four hours passed; the flies fell into the traps by hundreds; and at length one little life, hardly stronger than theirs, appeared among the multitude of lesser deaths.

“A very nice little girl indeed,” said the doctor; “little, but well-formed. Halloa, Mrs. Bangham! You’re looking queer! You be off, ma’am, this minute, and fetch a little more brandy, or we shall have you in hysterics.”

By this time, the rings had begun to fall from the debtor’s irresolute hands, like leaves from a wintry tree. Not one was left upon them that night, when he put something that chinked into the doctor’s greasy palm. In the meantime Mrs. Bangham had been out on an errand to a neighbouring establishment decorated with three golden balls, where she was very well known.

“Thank you,” said the doctor, “thank you. Your good lady is quite composed. Doing charmingly.”

“I am very happy and very thankful to know it,” said the debtor, “though I little thought once, that⁠—”

“That a child would be born to you in a place like this?” said the doctor. “Bah, bah, sir, what does it signify? A little more elbow-room is all we want here. We are quiet here; we don’t get badgered here; there’s no knocker here, sir, to be hammered at by creditors and bring a man’s heart into his mouth. Nobody comes here to ask if a man’s at home, and to say he’ll stand on the door mat till he is. Nobody writes threatening letters about money to this place. It’s freedom, sir, it’s freedom! I have had today’s practice at home and abroad, on a march, and aboard ship, and I’ll tell you this: I don’t know that I have ever pursued it under such quiet circumstances as here this day. Elsewhere, people are restless, worried, hurried about, anxious respecting one thing, anxious respecting another. Nothing of the kind here, sir. We have done all that⁠—we know the worst of it; we have got to the bottom, we can’t fall, and what have we found? Peace. That’s the word for it. Peace.” With this profession of faith, the doctor, who was an old jailbird, and was more sodden than usual, and had the additional and unusual stimulus of money in his pocket, returned to his associate and chum in hoarseness, puffiness, red-facedness, all-fours, tobacco, dirt, and brandy.

Now, the debtor was a very different man from the doctor, but he had already begun to travel, by his opposite segment of the circle, to the same point. Crushed at first by his imprisonment, he had soon found a dull relief in it. He was under lock and key; but the lock and key that kept him in, kept numbers of his troubles out. If he had been a man with strength of purpose to face those troubles and fight them, he might have broken the net that held him, or broken his heart; but being what he was, he languidly slipped into this smooth descent, and never more took one step upward.

When he was relieved of the perplexed affairs that nothing would make plain, through having them returned upon his hands by a dozen agents in succession who could make neither beginning, middle, nor end of them or him, he found his miserable place of refuge a quieter refuge than it had been before. He had unpacked the portmanteau long ago; and his elder children now played regularly about the yard, and everybody knew the baby, and claimed a kind of proprietorship in her.

“Why, I’m getting proud of you,” said his friend the turnkey, one day. “You’ll be the oldest inhabitant soon. The Marshalsea wouldn’t be like the Marshalsea now, without you and your family.”

The turnkey really was proud of him. He would mention him in laudatory terms to newcomers, when his back was turned. “You took notice of him,” he would say, “that went out of the lodge just now?”

Newcomer would probably answer Yes.

“Brought up as a gentleman, he was, if ever a man was. Ed’cated at no end of expense. Went into the Marshal’s house once to try a new piano for him. Played it, I understand, like one o’clock⁠—beautiful! As to languages⁠—speaks anything. We’ve had a Frenchman here in his time, and it’s my opinion he knowed more French than the Frenchman did. We’ve had an Italian here in his time, and he shut him up in about half a minute. You’ll find some characters behind other locks, I don’t say you won’t; but if you want the top sawyer in such respects as I’ve mentioned, you must come to the Marshalsea.”

When his youngest child was eight years old, his wife, who had long been languishing away⁠—of her own inherent weakness, not that she retained any greater sensitiveness as to her place of abode than he did⁠—went upon a visit to a poor friend and old nurse in the country, and died there. He remained shut up in his room for a fortnight afterwards; and an attorney’s clerk, who was going through the Insolvent Court, engrossed an address of condolence to