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

Tuition; and behind the blind was a little white-faced boy, with a slice of bread-and-butter and a battledore. The window being accessible from the footway, he looked in over the blind, returned the shuttlecock, and put his question.

“Dorrit?” said the little white-faced boy (Master Cripples in fact). “Mr Dorrit? Third bell and one knock.”

The pupils of Mr. Cripples appeared to have been making a copybook of the street-door, it was so extensively scribbled over in pencil. The frequency of the inscriptions, “Old Dorrit,” and “Dirty Dick,” in combination, suggested intentions of personality on the part Of Mr. Cripples’s pupils. There was ample time to make these observations before the door was opened by the poor old man himself.

“Ha!” said he, very slowly remembering Arthur, “you were shut in last night?”

“Yes, Mr. Dorrit. I hope to meet your niece here presently.”

“Oh!” said he, pondering. “Out of my brother’s way? True. Would you come upstairs and wait for her?”

“Thank you.”

Turning himself as slowly as he turned in his mind whatever he heard or said, he led the way up the narrow stairs. The house was very close, and had an unwholesome smell. The little staircase windows looked in at the back windows of other houses as unwholesome as itself, with poles and lines thrust out of them, on which unsightly linen hung; as if the inhabitants were angling for clothes, and had had some wretched bites not worth attending to. In the back garret⁠—a sickly room, with a turn-up bedstead in it, so hastily and recently turned up that the blankets were boiling over, as it were, and keeping the lid open⁠—a half-finished breakfast of coffee and toast for two persons was jumbled down anyhow on a rickety table.

There was no one there. The old man mumbling to himself, after some consideration, that Fanny had run away, went to the next room to fetch her back. The visitor, observing that she held the door on the inside, and that, when the uncle tried to open it, there was a sharp adjuration of “Don’t, stupid!” and an appearance of loose stocking and flannel, concluded that the young lady was in an undress. The uncle, without appearing to come to any conclusion, shuffled in again, sat down in his chair, and began warming his hands at the fire; not that it was cold, or that he had any waking idea whether it was or not.

“What did you think of my brother, sir?” he asked, when he by-and-by discovered what he was doing, left off, reached over to the chimneypiece, and took his clarinet case down.

“I was glad,” said Arthur, very much at a loss, for his thoughts were on the brother before him; “to find him so well and cheerful.”

“Ha!” muttered the old man, “yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!”

Arthur wondered what he could possibly want with the clarinet case. He did not want it at all. He discovered, in due time, that it was not the little paper of snuff (which was also on the chimneypiece), put it back again, took down the snuff instead, and solaced himself with a pinch. He was as feeble, spare, and slow in his pinches as in everything else, but a certain little trickling of enjoyment of them played in the poor worn nerves about the corners of his eyes and mouth.

“Amy, Mr. Clennam. What do you think of her?”

“I am much impressed, Mr. Dorrit, by all that I have seen of her and thought of her.”

“My brother would have been quite lost without Amy,” he returned. “We should all have been lost without Amy. She is a very good girl, Amy. She does her duty.”

Arthur fancied that he heard in these praises a certain tone of custom, which he had heard from the father last night with an inward protest and feeling of antagonism. It was not that they stinted her praises, or were insensible to what she did for them; but that they were lazily habituated to her, as they were to all the rest of their condition. He fancied that although they had before them, every day, the means of comparison between her and one another and themselves, they regarded her as being in her necessary place; as holding a position towards them all which belonged to her, like her name or her age. He fancied that they viewed her, not as having risen away from the prison atmosphere, but as appertaining to it; as being vaguely what they had a right to expect, and nothing more.

Her uncle resumed his breakfast, and was munching toast sopped in coffee, oblivious of his guest, when the third bell rang. That was Amy, he said, and went down to let her in; leaving the visitor with as vivid a picture on his mind of his begrimed hands, dirt-worn face, and decayed figure, as if he were still drooping in his chair.

She came up after him, in the usual plain dress, and with the usual timid manner. Her lips were a little parted, as if her heart beat faster than usual.

“Mr. Clennam, Amy,” said her uncle, “has been expecting you some time.”

“I took the liberty of sending you a message.”

“I received the message, sir.”

“Are you going to my mother’s this morning? I think not, for it is past your usual hour.”

“Not today, sir. I am not wanted today.”

“Will you allow me to walk a little way in whatever direction you may be going? I can then speak to you as we walk, both without detaining you here, and without intruding longer here myself.”

She looked embarrassed, but said, if he pleased. He made a pretence of having mislaid his walking-stick, to give her time to set the bedstead right, to answer her sister’s impatient knock at the wall, and to say a word softly to her uncle. Then he found it, and they went downstairs; she first, he following; the uncle standing at the stairhead, and probably forgetting them before they had reached the ground floor.

Mr. Cripples’s pupils, who were by this time coming to school, desisted