Tales from Dickens, Charles Dickens [best book club books .TXT] 📗

on the day he had first seen her.

So, amid cheers and good wishes, they drove away, and Arthur, as he walked back through the crowded streets, somehow felt very lonely.

III

WHAT RICHES BROUGHT TO THE DORRITS

Great changes came to old Mr. Dorrit with his money. As they traveled slowly through Switzerland and into Italy, he put on greater dignity daily. He lived each day suspecting that every one was in some way trying to slight him and grew very much ashamed of his past years in the Marshalsea, and forbade all mention of them. He hired a great number of servants, and, to improve the manners of Fanny and Little Dorrit, he employed a woman named Mrs. General, who had many silly notions of society.

Little Dorrit could not even say "father" without being reproved by Mrs. General. "Papa is preferable, my dear," the lady would insist, "and, besides, it gives a pretty form to the lips. Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes and prisms are all good words for the lips. You will find it serviceable in the formation of a demeanor, if you say to yourself in company—on entering a room, for instance—'Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes and prisms!'"

Fanny and Tip were as spoiled as possible. Fanny, morning and night, thought of nothing but wearing costly dresses and "going into society," and Tip did little but play cards and bet on horse-races. Only Little Dorrit, through all, kept her old sweet self unchanged.

Wherever they went they lived in splendid hotels. In Venice the palace they occupied was six times as big as the whole Marshalsea. Mr. Dorrit, when he remembered Arthur Clennam at all, spoke of him as an upstart who had intruded his presence upon them in their poverty, and quickly forgot all his kindness and his efforts to help and comfort them.

But Little Dorrit never forgot. Her present existence seemed a dream. She tried to care for her father as she used to do, but he was afraid people would think he had not been used to servants (foolish man!) so she lost even the little pleasure of her old prison life in the Marshalsea. There were valets and maids now to do all the little things she had once loved to do with her own hands, and she seemed to be no longer of use to him. She loved her father as dearly as she always had, but now she had begun to feel that she could never see him as he used to be before his prison days, because first poverty and now wealth had changed him. The old sad shadow came over her. He grew angry at her and chid her, and hurt her. It seemed he had entirely forgotten the old days when she slaved so for him.

Poor little Dorrit! She was far lonelier now than she had ever been before in the debtors' prison—lonelier and unhappier than Arthur Clennam in London could have guessed. The gay, fashionable life of her brother and sister did not attract her. She was timid of joining in their gaieties. She asked leave only to be left alone, and went about the city in a gondola in a quiet, scared, lost manner. It often seemed to her as if the Marshalsea must be just behind the next big building, or Mrs. Clennam's house, where she had first met Arthur, just around the next corner. And she used to look into gondolas as they passed, as if she might see Arthur any minute.

In the days of their prison-poverty Fanny had occasionally earned some money by dancing at a theater. There she had met a silly, chuckle-headed young man, the son of a Mrs. Merdle, and he had been fascinated by her beauty. Now, in their wealth, he saw Fanny again and fell even more deeply in love with her. Mrs. Merdle was a cold-hearted, artificial woman, who kept a parrot that was always shrieking, and who thought of nothing but riches and society. She would have refused to let her son marry Fanny in the old days, but now it was another matter. He proposed, and Fanny, who had been made angry a thousand times by Mrs. Merdle's insolence and patronizing ways, made up her mind to marry him if only to take her revenge on his mother.

Mrs. Merdle's husband always stayed in London. He was immensely rich—so rich that people said everything he touched turned into gold. He was a quiet, dull man, with dull red cheeks, and cared nothing at all for society, though everybody flattered and courted him.

When old Mr. Dorrit saw Mrs. Merdle's son was in love with Fanny he was greatly pleased. He had by this time grown so selfish that he considered much less her happiness than his own profit, and he thought if they were married he could persuade Mr. Merdle to invest his own great fortune for him, so that he would be even richer than he was now. Mr. Merdle's name had been growing bigger and bigger every day. Nobody believed the great man could make a mistake, but that he was going to keep on getting richer and richer (though nobody knew how he did it) as long as he lived.

So, before long, Fanny married Mrs. Merdle's son, and went back to London to take up life in the magnificent Merdle mansion with her silly, chuckle-headed husband. Mr. Merdle had got a very rich position for him in the "Circumlocution Office" with which Arthur Clennam had had so much trouble once on a time.

Old Mr. Dorrit went to London, too, and, as he had schemed, gave the famous Mr. Merdle all his fortune to invest. Then he returned to Italy, where, in Rome, his faithful and lonely Little Dorrit waited lovingly for him.

On the night after he reached Rome Mrs. Merdle gave a dinner party to a large company, and Little Dorrit and her father attended.

In the midst of the dinner he suddenly called to her across the table. His voice was so loud and excited that all the guests were frightened and rose to their feet. Little Dorrit ran to him and put her arms about him, for she saw at once that he was not himself.

He began to address the company, and his first words showed that his mind had failed. He imagined he was still in the debtors' prison and that all the rich people about him were the other poor prisoners. He made them a speech, welcoming them to its walls, thanking them in advance for any money they might give to him as "The Father of the Marshalsea." And he ended by calling for the old turnkey he had known there to help him up the narrow stair to bed, as he had been used to do in the prison.

Little Dorrit was not ashamed—she loved him too much for that. Her only wish was to soothe him, and with a pale, frightened face, she begged him to come with her.

They got him away at last and carried him to his house. Once laid on his bed, he never rose from it again. Nor did he regain his memory of the immediate present. That, with its show and its servants, its riches and power, in which Little Dorrit had had so small a part, had faded out for ever, and now his mind, back in the Marshalsea, recognized his daughter as his only stay and faithful comfort.

It was well so, for this was the father she had most loved.

So she watched beside him day and night, while every day his life grew weaker and weaker. Every day the shadow of death stole deeper and deeper over his face, until one morning, when the dawn came, they saw that he would never wake again.

IV

WHAT HAPPENED TO ARTHUR CLENNAM

Arthur, meanwhile, had missed Little Dorrit greatly. He was very friendly with a couple named Meagles—a comely, healthy, good-humored and kind-hearted pair, and he was so lonely he almost thought himself in love with their daughter "Pet" for a while. But Pet soon married a portrait-painter and went to live abroad.

Mr. and Mrs. Meagles had a little orphan maid whom they called "Tattycoram," for no particular reason except that her first name had been Hattie, and the name of the man who founded the asylum where they found her was "Coram." Tattycoram had a very bad temper, so that Mr. Meagles, when he saw one of these fits coming on, used to stop and say, "Count twenty-five, Tattycoram." And Tattycoram would count twenty-five, and by that time the fit of temper was over.

But one day she had an attack that was very much worse than usual—so much worse that she couldn't wait to count twenty-five, and ran away. And it was a long time before they saw Tattycoram again.

At Mr. Meagles's house Arthur met an inventor named Doyce, a quiet, straightforward man, whom he soon came to like. Doyce had made a useful invention and for twelve years had been trying to bring it to the notice of the British Government. But this matter, too, had to go through the famous "Circumlocution Office," and so there it had stuck just as Arthur's inquiry had done.

Arthur having chosen no new business as yet, before long proposed a partnership between himself and Doyce. The latter agreed readily, and the new firm was established. Soon after this Doyce went abroad on business, leaving Arthur to manage the affairs.

All might have gone well but for the fame of Mr. Merdle. His wealth seemed so enormous, and his plans so sure, that many people throughout England, just as old Mr. Dorrit had done, put their money in his care. Even Pancks, the rent collector, did so, and strongly advised Arthur to do the same. Convinced by such advice Arthur was unhappily led to invest the money of the new firm in Merdle's schemes.

One day soon after, Mr. Merdle, whom every one had looked up to and respected, killed himself, and then to every one's astonishment it was found that his money was all gone, that his schemes were all exploded, and that the famous man who had dined and wined with the great was simply the greatest forger and the greatest thief that had ever cheated the gallows.

But it was too late then. Arthur's firm was utterly ruined with all the rest. What hurt him most was the knowledge that by using the firm's money he had ruined his honest partner, Doyce.

In order to set the latter as near right as he could, Arthur turned over every cent of his own personal fortune to pay as much of the firm's debt as it would, keeping nothing of value but his clothes and his books. Beside doing this, he wrote out a statement, declaring that he, Arthur Clennam, had of his own act and against his partner's express caution, used the firm's money for this purpose, and that he alone, and not Doyce, was to blame. He declared also that his own share (if any remained out of the wreck) should go to his partner, and that he himself would work as a mere clerk, at as small a salary as he could live on.

He published this statement at once, unwisely no doubt, when all London was so enraged against Merdle and glad to have some one on whom to vent its madness. In the public anger and excitement the generosity of his act was lost sight of. A few hours later a man who had invested some of his money in Arthur's firm, and thus lost it, had him arrested for debt, and that night he entered the dismal iron gates of the Marshalsea prison, not now as a visitor, but as one whom the pitiless bars locked in from liberty.

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