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

five, six⁠—go! One, two, three, four, five, six⁠—go! Steady, darlings! One, two, three, four, five, six⁠—go!” Ultimately the voice stopped, and they all came back again, more or less out of breath, folding themselves in their shawls, and making ready for the streets. “Stop a moment, Amy, and let them get away before us,” whispered Fanny. They were soon left alone; nothing more important happening, in the meantime, than the boy looking round his old beam, and saying, “Everybody at eleven tomorrow, ladies!” and the gentleman with the black hair looking round his old beam, and saying, “Everybody at eleven tomorrow, darlings!” each in his own accustomed manner.

When they were alone, something was rolled up or by other means got out of the way, and there was a great empty well before them, looking down into the depths of which Fanny said, “Now, uncle!” Little Dorrit, as her eyes became used to the darkness, faintly made him out at the bottom of the well, in an obscure corner by himself, with his instrument in its ragged case under his arm.

The old man looked as if the remote high gallery windows, with their little strip of sky, might have been the point of his better fortunes, from which he had descended, until he had gradually sunk down below there to the bottom. He had been in that place six nights a week for many years, but had never been observed to raise his eyes above his music-book, and was confidently believed to have never seen a play. There were legends in the place that he did not so much as know the popular heroes and heroines by sight, and that the low comedian had “mugged” at him in his richest manner fifty nights for a wager, and he had shown no trace of consciousness. The carpenters had a joke to the effect that he was dead without being aware of it; and the frequenters of the pit supposed him to pass his whole life, night and day, and Sunday and all, in the orchestra. They had tried him a few times with pinches of snuff offered over the rails, and he had always responded to this attention with a momentary waking up of manner that had the pale phantom of a gentleman in it: beyond this he never, on any occasion, had any other part in what was going on than the part written out for the clarinet; in private life, where there was no part for the clarinet, he had no part at all. Some said he was poor, some said he was a wealthy miser; but he said nothing, never lifted up his bowed head, never varied his shuffling gait by getting his springless foot from the ground. Though expecting now to be summoned by his niece, he did not hear her until she had spoken to him three or four times; nor was he at all surprised by the presence of two nieces instead of one, but merely said in his tremulous voice, “I am coming, I am coming!” and crept forth by some underground way which emitted a cellarous smell.

“And so, Amy,” said her sister, when the three together passed out at the door that had such a shamefaced consciousness of being different from other doors: the uncle instinctively taking Amy’s arm as the arm to be relied on: “so, Amy, you are curious about me?”

She was pretty, and conscious, and rather flaunting; and the condescension with which she put aside the superiority of her charms, and of her worldly experience, and addressed her sister on almost equal terms, had a vast deal of the family in it.

“I am interested, Fanny, and concerned in anything that concerns you.”

“So you are, so you are, and you are the best of Amys. If I am ever a little provoking, I am sure you’ll consider what a thing it is to occupy my position and feel a consciousness of being superior to it. I shouldn’t care,” said the Daughter of the Father of the Marshalsea, “if the others were not so common. None of them have come down in the world as we have. They are all on their own level. Common.”

Little Dorrit mildly looked at the speaker, but did not interrupt her. Fanny took out her handkerchief, and rather angrily wiped her eyes. “I was not born where you were, you know, Amy, and perhaps that makes a difference. My dear child, when we get rid of Uncle, you shall know all about it. We’ll drop him at the cook’s shop where he is going to dine.”

They walked on with him until they came to a dirty shop window in a dirty street, which was made almost opaque by the steam of hot meats, vegetables, and puddings. But glimpses were to be caught of a roast leg of pork bursting into tears of sage and onion in a metal reservoir full of gravy, of an unctuous piece of roast beef and blisterous Yorkshire pudding, bubbling hot in a similar receptacle, of a stuffed fillet of veal in rapid cut, of a ham in a perspiration with the pace it was going at, of a shallow tank of baked potatoes glued together by their own richness, of a truss or two of boiled greens, and other substantial delicacies. Within, were a few wooden partitions, behind which such customers as found it more convenient to take away their dinners in stomachs than in their hands, packed their purchases in solitude. Fanny opening her reticule, as they surveyed these things, produced from that repository a shilling and handed it to Uncle. Uncle, after not looking at it a little while, divined its object, and muttering “Dinner? Ha! Yes, yes, yes!” slowly vanished from them into the mist.

“Now, Amy,” said her sister, “come with me, if you are not too tired to walk to Harley Street, Cavendish Square.”

The air with which she threw off this distinguished address and the toss she gave to