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

another ten down, and I’ll run my pen clean through it.” Then said Captain Maroon when that wouldn’t suit, “Now, I’ll tell you what it is, and this shuts it up; he has used me bad, but I’ll let him off for another five down and a bottle of wine; and if you mean done, say done, and if you don’t like it, leave it.” Finally said Captain Maroon, when that wouldn’t suit either, “Hand over, then!”⁠—And in consideration of the first offer, gave a receipt in full and discharged the prisoner.

“Mr. Plornish,” said Arthur, “I trust to you, if you please, to keep my secret. If you will undertake to let the young man know that he is free, and to tell him that you were employed to compound for the debt by someone whom you are not at liberty to name, you will not only do me a service, but may do him one, and his sister also.”

“The last reason, sir,” said Plornish, “would be quite sufficient. Your wishes shall be attended to.”

“A Friend has obtained his discharge, you can say if you please. A Friend who hopes that for his sister’s sake, if for no one else’s, he will make good use of his liberty.”

“Your wishes, sir, shall be attended to.”

“And if you will be so good, in your better knowledge of the family, as to communicate freely with me, and to point out to me any means by which you think I may be delicately and really useful to Little Dorrit, I shall feel under an obligation to you.”

“Don’t name it, sir,” returned Plornish, “it’ll be ekally a pleasure an a⁠—it’l be ekally a pleasure and a⁠—” Finding himself unable to balance his sentence after two efforts, Mr. Plornish wisely dropped it. He took Clennam’s card and appropriate pecuniary compliment.

He was earnest to finish his commission at once, and his Principal was in the same mind. So his Principal offered to set him down at the Marshalsea Gate, and they drove in that direction over Blackfriars Bridge. On the way, Arthur elicited from his new friend a confused summary of the interior life of Bleeding Heart Yard. They was all hard up there, Mr. Plornish said, uncommon hard up, to be sure. Well, he couldn’t say how it was; he didn’t know as anybody could say how it was; all he know’d was, that so it was. When a man felt, on his own back and in his own belly, that poor he was, that man (Mr. Plornish gave it as his decided belief) know’d well that he was poor somehow or another, and you couldn’t talk it out of him, no more than you could talk Beef into him. Then you see, some people as was better off said, and a good many such people lived pretty close up to the mark themselves if not beyond it so he’d heerd, that they was “improvident” (that was the favourite word) down the Yard. For instance, if they see a man with his wife and children going to Hampton Court in a Wan, perhaps once in a year, they says, “Hallo! I thought you was poor, my improvident friend!” Why, Lord, how hard it was upon a man! What was a man to do? He couldn’t go mollancholy mad, and even if he did, you wouldn’t be the better for it. In Mr. Plornish’s judgment you would be the worse for it. Yet you seemed to want to make a man mollancholy mad. You was always at it⁠—if not with your right hand, with your left. What was they a doing in the Yard? Why, take a look at ’em and see. There was the girls and their mothers a working at their sewing, or their shoe-binding, or their trimming, or their waistcoat making, day and night and night and day, and not more than able to keep body and soul together after all⁠—often not so much. There was people of pretty well all sorts of trades you could name, all wanting to work, and yet not able to get it. There was old people, after working all their lives, going and being shut up in the workhouse, much worse fed and lodged and treated altogether, than⁠—Mr. Plornish said manufacturers, but appeared to mean malefactors. Why, a man didn’t know where to turn himself for a crumb of comfort. As to who was to blame for it, Mr. Plornish didn’t know who was to blame for it. He could tell you who suffered, but he couldn’t tell you whose fault it was. It wasn’t his place to find out, and who’d mind what he said, if he did find out? He only know’d that it wasn’t put right by them what undertook that line of business, and that it didn’t come right of itself. And, in brief, his illogical opinion was, that if you couldn’t do nothing for him, you had better take nothing from him for doing of it; so far as he could make out, that was about what it come to. Thus, in a prolix, gently-growling, foolish way, did Plornish turn the tangled skein of his estate about and about, like a blind man who was trying to find some beginning or end to it; until they reached the prison gate. There, he left his Principal alone; to wonder, as he rode away, how many thousand Plornishes there might be within a day or two’s journey of the Circumlocution Office, playing sundry curious variations on the same tune, which were not known by ear in that glorious institution.

XIII Patriarchal

The mention of Mr. Casby again revived in Clennam’s memory the smouldering embers of curiosity and interest which Mrs. Flintwinch had fanned on the night of his arrival. Flora Casby had been the beloved of his boyhood; and Flora was the daughter and only child of wooden-headed old Christopher (so he was still occasionally spoken of by some irreverent spirits who had had dealings with him, and in whom familiarity had