LITTLE DORRIT
By Charles Dickens
CONTENTS
Preface to the 1857 Edition
BOOK THE FIRST: POVERTY
1. Sun and Shadow
2. Fellow Travellers
3. Home
4. Mrs Flintwinch has a Dream
5. Family Affairs
6. The Father of the Marshalsea
7. The Child of the Marshalsea
8. The Lock
9. little Mother
10. Containing the whole Science of Government
11. Let Loose
12. Bleeding Heart Yard
13. Patriarchal
14. Little Dorrit’s Party
15. Mrs Flintwinch has another Dream
16. Nobody’s Weakness
17. Nobody’s Rival
18. Little Dorrit’s Lover
19. The Father of the Marshalsea in two or three Relations
20. Moving in Society
21. Mr Merdle’s Complaint
22. A Puzzle
23. Machinery in Motion
24. Fortune-Telling
25. Conspirators and Others
26. Nobody’s State of Mind
27. Five-and-Twenty
28. Nobody’s Disappearance
29. Mrs Flintwinch goes on Dreaming
30. The Word of a Gentleman
31. Spirit
32. More Fortune-Telling
33. Mrs Merdle’s Complaint
34. A Shoal of Barnacles
35. What was behind Mr Pancks on Little Dorrit’s Hand
36. The Marshalsea becomes an Orphan
BOOK THE SECOND: RICHES
1. Fellow Travellers
2. Mrs General
3. On the Road
4. A Letter from Little Dorrit
5. Something Wrong Somewhere
6. Something Right Somewhere
7. Mostly, Prunes and Prism
8. The Dowager Mrs Gowan is reminded that ‘It Never Does’
9. Appearance and Disappearance
10. The Dreams of Mrs Flintwinch thicken
11. A Letter from Little Dorrit
12. In which a Great Patriotic Conference is holden
13. The Progress of an Epidemic
14. Taking Advice
15. No just Cause or Impediment why these Two Persons should
not be joined together
16. Getting on
17. Missing
18. A Castle in the Air
19. The Storming of the Castle in the Air
20. Introduces the next
21. The History of a Self-Tormentor
22. Who Passes by this Road so late?
23. Mistress Affery makes a Conditional Promise, respecting her
Dreams
24. The Evening of a Long Day
25. The Chief Butler Resigns the Seals of Office
26. Reaping the Whirlwind
27. The Pupil of the Marshalsea
28. An Appearance in the Marshalsea
29. A Plea in the Marshalsea
30. Closing in
31. Closed
32. Going
33. Going!
34. Gone
PREFACE TO THE 1857 EDITION
I have been occupied with this story, during many working hours of two
years. I must have been very ill employed, if I could not leave its
merits and demerits as a whole, to express themselves on its being read
as a whole. But, as it is not unreasonable to suppose that I may have
held its threads with a more continuous attention than anyone else can
have given them during its desultory publication, it is not unreasonable
to ask that the weaving may be looked at in its completed state, and
with the pattern finished.
If I might offer any apology for so exaggerated a fiction as the
Barnacles and the Circumlocution Office, I would seek it in the
common experience of an Englishman, without presuming to mention the
unimportant fact of my having done that violence to good manners, in the
days of a Russian war, and of a Court of Inquiry at Chelsea. If I might
make so bold as to defend that extravagant conception, Mr Merdle, I
would hint that it originated after the Railroad-share epoch, in the
times of a certain Irish bank, and of one or two other equally
laudable enterprises. If I were to plead anything in mitigation of the
preposterous fancy that a bad design will sometimes claim to be a good
and an expressly religious design, it would be the curious coincidence
that it has been brought to its climax in these pages, in the days of
the public examination of late Directors of a Royal British Bank. But,
I submit myself to suffer judgment to go by default on all these counts,
if need be, and to accept the assurance (on good authority) that nothing
like them was ever known in this land.
Some of my readers may have an interest in being informed whether or no
any portions of the Marshalsea Prison are yet standing. I did not know,
myself, until the sixth of this present month, when I went to look. I
found the outer front courtyard, often mentioned here, metamorphosed
into a butter shop; and I then almost gave up every brick of the jail
for lost. Wandering, however, down a certain adjacent ‘Angel Court,
leading to Bermondsey’, I came to ‘Marshalsea Place:’ the houses in
which I recognised, not only as the great block of the former prison,
but as preserving the rooms that arose in my mind’s-eye when I became
Little Dorrit’s biographer. The smallest boy I ever conversed with,
carrying the largest baby I ever saw, offered a supernaturally
intelligent explanation of the locality in its old uses, and was very
nearly correct. How this young Newton (for such I judge him to be) came
by his information, I don’t know; he was a quarter of a century too
young to know anything about it of himself. I pointed to the window of
the room where Little Dorrit was born, and where her father lived so
long, and asked him what was the name of the lodger who tenanted that
apartment at present? He said, ‘Tom Pythick.’ I asked him who was Tom
Pythick? and he said, ‘Joe Pythick’s uncle.’
A little further on, I found the older and smaller wall, which used
to enclose the pent-up inner prison where nobody was put, except for
ceremony. But, whosoever goes into Marshalsea Place, turning out of
Angel Court, leading to Bermondsey, will find his feet on the very
paving-stones of the extinct Marshalsea jail; will see its narrow yard
to the right and to the left, very little altered if at all, except that
the walls were lowered when the place got free; will look upon rooms
in which the debtors lived; and will stand among the crowding ghosts of
many miserable years.
In the Preface to Bleak House I remarked that I had never had so many
readers. In the Preface to its next successor, Little Dorrit, I have
still to repeat the same words. Deeply sensible of the affection and
confidence that have grown up between us, I add to this Preface, as I
added to that, May we meet again!
London May 1857
BOOK THE FIRST: POVERTY
CHAPTER 1. Sun and Shadow
Thirty years ago, Marseilles lay burning in the sun, one day.
A blazing sun upon a fierce August day was no greater rarity in southern
France then, than at any other time, before or since. Everything in
Marseilles, and about Marseilles, had stared at the fervid sky, and been
stared at in return, until a staring habit had become universal there.
Strangers were stared out of countenance by staring white houses,
staring white walls, staring white streets, staring tracts of arid road,
staring hills from which verdure was burnt away. The only things to be
seen not fixedly staring and glaring were the vines drooping under their
load of grapes. These did occasionally wink a little, as the hot air
barely moved their faint leaves.
There was no wind to make a ripple on the foul water within the harbour,
or on the beautiful sea without. The line of demarcation between the two
colours, black and blue, showed the point which the pure sea would not
pass; but it lay as quiet as the abominable pool, with which it never
mixed. Boats without awnings were too hot to touch; ships blistered at
their moorings; the stones of the quays had not cooled, night or
day, for months. Hindoos, Russians, Chinese, Spaniards, Portuguese,
Englishmen, Frenchmen, Genoese, Neapolitans, Venetians, Greeks, Turks,
descendants from all the builders of Babel, come to trade at Marseilles,
sought the shade alike--taking refuge in any hiding-place from a sea too
intensely blue to be looked at, and a sky of purple, set with one great
flaming jewel of fire.
The universal stare made the eyes ache. Towards the distant line of
Italian coast, indeed, it was a little relieved by light clouds of mist,
slowly rising from the evaporation of the sea, but it softened nowhere
else. Far away the staring roads, deep in dust, stared from the
hill-side, stared from the hollow, stared from the interminable
plain. Far away the dusty vines overhanging wayside cottages, and the
monotonous wayside avenues of parched trees without shade, drooped
beneath the stare of earth and sky. So did the horses with drowsy bells,
in long files of carts, creeping slowly towards the interior; so did
their recumbent drivers, when they were awake, which rarely happened;
so did the exhausted labourers in the fields. Everything that lived or
grew, was oppressed by the glare; except the lizard, passing swiftly
over rough stone walls, and the cicala, chirping his dry hot chirp, like
a rattle. The very dust was scorched brown, and something quivered in
the atmosphere as if the air itself were panting.
Blinds, shutters, curtains, awnings, were all closed and drawn to keep
out the stare. Grant it but a chink or keyhole, and it shot in like a
white-hot arrow. The churches were the freest from it. To come out of
the twilight of pillars and arches--dreamily dotted with winking lamps,
dreamily peopled with ugly old shadows piously dozing, spitting, and
begging--was to plunge into a fiery river, and swim for life to the
nearest strip of shade. So, with people lounging and lying wherever
shade was, with but little hum of tongues or barking of dogs, with
occasional jangling of discordant church bells and rattling of vicious
drums, Marseilles, a fact to be strongly smelt and tasted, lay broiling
in the sun one day.
In Marseilles that day there was a villainous prison. In one of its
chambers, so repulsive a place that even the obtrusive stare blinked at
it, and left it to such refuse of reflected light as it could find for
itself, were two men. Besides the two men, a notched and disfigured
bench, immovable from the wall, with a draught-board rudely hacked upon
it with a knife, a set of draughts, made of old buttons and soup bones,
a set of dominoes, two mats, and two or three wine bottles. That was all
the chamber held, exclusive of rats and other unseen vermin, in addition
to the seen vermin, the two men.
It received such light as it got through a grating of iron bars
fashioned like a pretty large window, by means of which it could be
always inspected from the gloomy staircase on which the grating gave.
There was a broad strong ledge of stone to this grating where the bottom
of it was let into the masonry, three or four feet above the ground.
Upon it, one of the two men lolled, half sitting and half lying, with
his knees drawn up, and his feet and shoulders planted against the
opposite sides of the aperture. The bars were wide enough apart to
admit of his thrusting his arm through to the elbow; and so he held on
negligently, for his greater ease.
A prison taint was on everything there. The imprisoned air, the
imprisoned light, the imprisoned damps, the imprisoned men, were all
deteriorated by confinement. As the captive men were faded and haggard,
so the iron was rusty, the stone was slimy, the wood was rotten, the air
was faint, the light was dim. Like a well, like a vault, like a tomb,
the prison had no knowledge of the brightness outside, and would have
kept its polluted atmosphere intact in one of the spice islands of the
Indian ocean.
The man who lay on the ledge of the grating was even chilled. He jerked
his great cloak more heavily upon him by an impatient movement of one
shoulder, and growled, ‘To the devil with this Brigand of a Sun that
never shines in here!’
He was waiting to be fed, looking sideways through the bars that he
might see the further down the stairs, with much of the expression of
a wild beast in similar expectation. But his eyes, too close together,
were not so nobly set in his head as those of the king of beasts are in
his, and they were sharp rather than bright--pointed weapons with little
surface to betray them. They had no depth or change; they glittered,
and they opened and shut. So far, and waiving their use to himself, a
clockmaker could have made a better pair. He had a hook nose, handsome
after its kind, but too high between the eyes by probably just as much
as his eyes were too near to one another. For the rest, he was large and
tall in frame, had thin lips, where his thick moustache showed them at
all, and a quantity of dry hair, of no definable colour, in its shaggy
state, but shot with red. The hand with which he held the grating
(seamed all over the back with ugly scratches newly healed), was
unusually small and plump; would have been unusually white but for the
prison grime.
The other man was lying on the stone floor, covered with a coarse brown
coat.
‘Get up, pig!’ growled the first. ‘Don’t sleep when I am hungry.’
‘It’s all one, master,’ said the pig, in a submissive manner, and not
without cheerfulness; ‘I can wake when I will, I can sleep when I will.
It’s all the same.’
As he said it, he rose, shook himself, scratched himself, tied his brown
coat loosely round his neck by the sleeves (he had previously used it
as a coverlet), and sat down upon the pavement yawning, with his back
against the wall opposite to the grating.
‘Say what the hour is,’ grumbled the first man.
‘The mid-day bells will ring--in forty minutes.’ When he made the
little pause, he had looked round the prison-room, as if for certain
information.
‘You are a clock. How is it that you always know?’
‘How can I say? I always know what the hour is, and where I am. I was
brought in here at night, and out of a boat, but I know where I am. See
here! Marseilles harbour;’ on his knees on the pavement, mapping it all
out with a swarthy forefinger; ‘Toulon (where the galleys are), Spain
over there, Algiers over _there_. Creeping away to the left here, Nice.
Round by the Cornice to Genoa. Genoa Mole and Harbour. Quarantine
Ground. City there; terrace gardens blushing with the bella donna. Here,
Porto Fino. Stand out for Leghorn. Out again for Civita Vecchia, so away
to--hey! there’s no room for Naples;’ he had got to the wall by this
time; ‘but it’s all one; it’s in there!’
He remained on his knees, looking up at his fellow-prisoner with a
lively look for a prison. A sunburnt, quick, lithe, little man, though
rather thickset. Earrings in his brown ears, white teeth lighting up his
grotesque brown face, intensely black hair clustering about his brown
throat, a ragged red shirt open at his brown breast. Loose, seaman-like
trousers, decent shoes, a long red cap, a red sash round his waist, and
a knife in it.
‘Judge if I come back from Naples as I went! See here, my master! Civita
Vecchia, Leghorn, Porto Fino, Genoa, Cornice, Off Nice (which is in
there), Marseilles, you and me. The apartment of the jailer and his keys
is where I put this thumb; and here at my wrist they keep the national
razor in its case--the guillotine locked up.’
The other man spat suddenly on the pavement, and gurgled in his throat.
Some lock below gurgled in _its_ throat immediately afterwards, and then
a door crashed. Slow steps began ascending the stairs; the prattle of
a sweet little voice mingled with the noise they made; and the
prison-keeper appeared carrying his daughter, three or four years old,
and a basket.
‘How goes the world this forenoon, gentlemen? My little one, you see,
going round with me to have a peep at her father’s birds. Fie, then!
Look at the birds, my pretty, look at the birds.’
He looked sharply at the birds himself, as he held the child up at
the grate, especially at the little bird, whose activity he seemed to
mistrust. ‘I have brought your bread, Signor John Baptist,’ said he
(they all spoke in French, but the little man was an Italian); ‘and if I
might recommend you not to game--’
‘You don’t recommend the master!’ said John Baptist, showing his teeth
as he smiled.
‘Oh! but the master wins,’ returned the jailer, with a passing look of
no particular liking at the other man, ‘and you lose. It’s quite another
thing. You get husky bread and sour drink by it; and he gets sausage of
Lyons, veal in savoury jelly, white bread, strachino cheese, and good
wine by it. Look at the birds, my pretty!’
‘Poor birds!’ said the child.
The fair little face, touched with divine compassion, as it peeped
shrinkingly through the grate, was like an angel’s in the prison. John
Baptist rose and moved towards it, as if it had a good attraction for
him. The other bird remained as before, except for an impatient glance
at the basket.
‘Stay!’ said the jailer, putting his little daughter on the outer ledge
of the grate, ‘she shall feed the birds. This big loaf is for Signor
John Baptist. We must break it to get it through into the cage. So,
there’s a tame bird to kiss the little hand! This sausage in a vine
leaf is for Monsieur Rigaud. Again--this veal in savoury jelly is for
Monsieur Rigaud. Again--these three white little loaves are for Monsieur
Rigaud. Again, this cheese--again, this wine--again, this tobacco--all
for Monsieur Rigaud. Lucky bird!’
The child put all these things between the bars into the soft, Smooth,
well-shaped hand, with evident dread--more than once drawing back
her own and looking at the man with her fair brow roughened into an
expression half of fright and half of anger. Whereas she had put the
lump of coarse bread into the swart, scaled, knotted hands of John
Baptist (who had scarcely as much nail on his eight fingers and two
thumbs as would have made out one for Monsieur Rigaud), with ready
confidence; and, when he kissed her hand, had herself passed it
caressingly over his face. Monsieur Rigaud, indifferent to this
distinction, propitiated the father by laughing and nodding at the
daughter as often as she gave him anything; and, so soon as he had
all his viands about him in convenient nooks of the ledge on which he
rested, began to eat with an appetite.
When Monsieur Rigaud laughed, a change took place in his face, that
was more remarkable than prepossessing. His moustache went up under his
nose, and his nose came down over his moustache, in a very sinister and
cruel manner.
‘There!’ said the jailer, turning his basket upside down to beat the
crumbs out, ‘I have expended all the money I received; here is the note
of it, and _that’s_ a thing accomplished. Monsieur Rigaud, as I expected
yesterday, the President will look for the pleasure of your society at
an hour after mid-day, to-day.’
‘To try me, eh?’ said Rigaud, pausing, knife in hand and morsel in
mouth.
‘You have said it. To try you.’
‘There is no news for me?’ asked John Baptist, who had begun,
contentedly, to munch his bread.
The jailer shrugged his shoulders.
‘Lady of mine! Am I to lie here all my life, my father?’
‘What do I know!’ cried the jailer, turning upon him with southern
quickness, and gesticulating with both his hands and all his fingers,
as if he were threatening to tear him to pieces. ‘My friend, how is it
possible for me to tell how long you are to lie here? What do I know,
John Baptist Cavalletto? Death of my life! There are prisoners here
sometimes, who are not in such a devil of a hurry to be tried.’
He seemed to glance obliquely at Monsieur Rigaud in this remark; but
Monsieur Rigaud had already resumed his meal, though not with quite so
quick an appetite as before.
‘Adieu, my birds!’ said the keeper of the prison, taking his pretty
child in his arms, and dictating the words with a kiss.
‘Adieu, my birds!’ the pretty child repeated.
Her innocent face looked back so brightly over his shoulder, as he
walked away with her, singing her the song of the child’s game:
‘Who passes by this road so late?
Compagnon de la Majolaine!
Who passes by this road so late?
Always gay!’
that John Baptist felt it a point of honour to reply at the grate, and
in good time and tune, though a little hoarsely:
‘Of all the king’s knights ‘tis the flower,
Compagnon de la Majolaine!
Of all the king’s knights ‘tis the flower,
Always gay!’
Which accompanied them so far down the few steep stairs, that the
prison-keeper had to stop at last for his little daughter to hear the
song out, and repeat the Refrain while they were yet in sight. Then the
child’s head disappeared, and the prison-keeper’s head disappeared, but
the little voice prolonged the strain until the door clashed.
Monsieur Rigaud, finding the listening John Baptist in his way before
the echoes had ceased (even the echoes were the weaker for imprisonment,
and seemed to lag), reminded him with a push of his foot that he had
better resume his own darker place. The little man sat down again
upon the pavement with the negligent ease of one who was thoroughly
accustomed to pavements; and placing three hunks of coarse bread before
himself, and falling to upon a fourth, began contentedly to work his way
through them as if to clear them off were a sort of game.
Perhaps he glanced at the Lyons sausage, and perhaps he glanced at the
veal in savoury jelly, but they were not there long, to make his mouth
water; Monsieur Rigaud soon dispatched them, in spite of the president
and tribunal, and proceeded to suck his fingers as clean as he could,
and to wipe them on his vine leaves. Then, as he paused in his drink
to contemplate his fellow-prisoner, his moustache went up, and his nose
came down.
‘How do you find the bread?’
‘A little dry, but I have my old sauce here,’ returned John Baptist,
holding up his knife.
‘How sauce?’
‘I can cut my bread so--like a melon. Or so--like an omelette. Or
so--like a fried fish. Or so--like Lyons sausage,’ said John Baptist,
demonstrating the various cuts on the bread he held, and soberly chewing
what he had in his mouth.
‘Here!’ cried Monsieur Rigaud. ‘You may drink. You may finish this.’
It was no great gift, for there was mighty little wine left; but Signor
Cavalletto, jumping to his feet, received the bottle gratefully, turned
it upside down at his mouth, and smacked his lips.
‘Put the bottle by with the rest,’ said Rigaud.
The little man obeyed his orders, and stood ready to give him a lighted
match; for he was now rolling his tobacco into cigarettes by the aid of
little squares of paper which had been brought in with it.
‘Here! You may have one.’
‘A thousand thanks, my master!’ John Baptist said in his own language,
and with the quick conciliatory manner of his own countrymen.
Monsieur Rigaud arose, lighted a cigarette, put the rest of his stock
into a breast-pocket, and stretched himself out at full length upon the
bench. Cavalletto sat down on the pavement, holding one of his ankles in
each hand, and smoking peacefully. There seemed to be some uncomfortable
attraction of Monsieur Rigaud’s eyes to the immediate neighbourhood of
that part of the pavement where the thumb had been in the plan. They
were so drawn in that direction, that the Italian more than once
followed them to and back from the pavement in some surprise.
‘What an infernal hole this is!’ said Monsieur Rigaud, breaking a long
pause. ‘Look at the light of day. Day? the light of yesterday week, the
light of six months ago, the light of six years ago. So slack and dead!’
It came languishing down a square funnel that blinded a window in the
staircase wall, through which the sky was never seen--nor anything else.
‘Cavalletto,’ said Monsieur Rigaud, suddenly withdrawing his gaze from
this funnel to which they had both involuntarily turned their eyes, ‘you
know me for a gentleman?’
‘Surely, surely!’
‘How long have we been here?’
‘I, eleven weeks, to-morrow night at midnight. You, nine weeks and three
days, at five this afternoon.’
‘Have I ever done anything here? Ever touched the broom, or spread
the mats, or rolled them up, or found the draughts, or collected the
dominoes, or put my hand to any kind of work?’
‘Never!’
‘Have you ever thought of looking to me to do any kind of work?’
John Baptist answered with that peculiar back-handed shake of the
right forefinger which is the most expressive negative in the Italian
language.
‘No! You knew from the first moment when you saw me here, that I was a
gentleman?’
‘ALTRO!’ returned John Baptist, closing his eyes and giving his head a
most vehement toss. The word being, according to its Genoese emphasis,
a confirmation, a contradiction, an assertion, a denial, a taunt,
a compliment, a joke, and fifty other things, became in the present
instance, with a significance beyond all power of written expression,
our familiar English ‘I believe you!’
‘Haha! You are right! A gentleman I am! And a gentleman I’ll live, and
a gentleman I’ll die! It’s my intent to be a gentleman. It’s my game.
Death of my soul, I play it out wherever I go!’
He changed his posture to a sitting one, crying with a triumphant air:
‘Here I am! See me! Shaken out of destiny’s dice-box into the company
of a mere smuggler;--shut up with a poor little contraband trader, whose
papers are wrong, and whom the police lay hold of besides, for placing
his boat (as a means of getting beyond the frontier) at the disposition
of other little people whose papers are wrong; and he instinctively
recognises my position, even by this light and in this place. It’s well
done! By Heaven! I win, however the game goes.’
Again his moustache went up, and his nose came down.
‘What’s the hour now?’ he asked, with a dry hot pallor upon him, rather
difficult of association with merriment.
‘A little half-hour after mid-day.’
‘Good! The President will have a gentleman before him soon. Come!
Shall I tell you on what accusation? It must be now, or never, for I
shall not return here. Either I shall go free, or I shall go to be made
ready for shaving. You know where they keep the razor.’
Signor Cavalletto took his cigarette from between his parted lips, and
showed more momentary discomfiture than might have been expected.
‘I am a’--Monsieur Rigaud stood up to say it--‘I am a cosmopolitan
gentleman. I own no particular country. My father was Swiss--Canton de
Vaud. My mother was French by blood, English by birth. I myself was born
in Belgium. I am a citizen of the world.’
His theatrical air, as he stood with one arm on his hip within the folds
of his cloak, together with his manner of disregarding his companion
and addressing the opposite wall instead, seemed to intimate that he
was rehearsing for the President, whose examination he was shortly to
undergo, rather than troubling himself merely to enlighten so small a
person as John Baptist Cavalletto.
‘Call me five-and-thirty years of age. I have seen the world. I have
lived here, and lived there, and lived like a gentleman everywhere. I
have been treated and respected as a gentleman universally. If you try
to prejudice me by making out that I have lived by my wits--how do
your lawyers live--your politicians--your intriguers--your men of the
Exchange?’
He kept his small smooth hand in constant requisition, as if it were a
witness to his gentility that had often done him good service before.
‘Two years ago I came to Marseilles. I admit that I was poor; I had been
ill. When your lawyers, your politicians, your intriguers, your men of
the Exchange fall ill, and have not scraped money together, _they_ become
poor. I put up at the Cross of Gold,--kept then by Monsieur Henri
Barronneau--sixty-five at least, and in a failing state of health. I had
lived in the house some four months when Monsieur Henri Barronneau had
the misfortune to die;--at any rate, not a rare misfortune, that. It
happens without any aid of mine, pretty often.’
John Baptist having smoked his cigarette down to his fingers’ ends,
Monsieur Rigaud had the magnanimity to throw him another. He lighted the
second at the ashes of the first, and smoked on, looking sideways at his
companion, who, preoccupied with his own case, hardly looked at him.
‘Monsieur Barronneau left a widow. She was two-and-twenty. She had
gained a reputation for beauty, and (which is often another thing) was
beautiful. I continued to live at the Cross of Gold. I married Madame
Barronneau. It is not for me to say whether there was any great
disparity in such a match. Here I stand, with the contamination of a
jail upon me; but it is possible that you may think me better suited to
her than her former husband was.’
He had a certain air of being a handsome man--which he was not; and
a certain air of being a well-bred man--which he was not. It was mere
swagger and challenge; but in this particular, as in many others,
blustering assertion goes for proof, half over the world.
‘Be it as it may, Madame Barronneau approved of me. _That_ is not to
prejudice me, I hope?’
His eye happening to light upon John Baptist with this inquiry, that
little man briskly shook his head in the negative, and repeated in an
argumentative tone under his breath, altro, altro, altro, altro--an
infinite number of times.
‘Now came the difficulties of our position. I am proud. I say nothing
in defence of pride, but I am proud. It is also my character to govern.
I can’t submit; I must govern. Unfortunately, the property of Madame
Rigaud was settled upon herself. Such was the insane act of her late
husband. More unfortunately still, she had relations. When a wife’s
relations interpose against a husband who is a gentleman, who is proud,
and who must govern, the consequences are inimical to peace. There
was yet another source of difference between us. Madame Rigaud was
unfortunately a little vulgar. I sought to improve her manners and
ameliorate her general tone; she (supported in this likewise by her
relations) resented my endeavours. Quarrels began to arise between us;
and, propagated and exaggerated by the slanders of the relations of
Madame Rigaud, to become notorious to the neighbours. It has been said
that I treated Madame Rigaud with cruelty. I may have been seen to slap
her face--nothing more. I have a light hand; and if I have been seen
apparently to correct Madame Rigaud in that manner, I have done it
almost playfully.’
If the playfulness of Monsieur Rigaud were at all expressed by his smile
at this point, the relations of Madame Rigaud might have said that
they would have much preferred his correcting that unfortunate woman
seriously.
‘I am sensitive and brave. I do not advance it as a merit to be
sensitive and brave, but it is my character. If the male relations of
Madame Rigaud had put themselves forward openly, I should have known how
to deal with them. They knew that, and their machinations were conducted
in secret; consequently, Madame Rigaud and I were brought into frequent
and unfortunate collision. Even when I wanted any little sum of money
for my personal expenses, I could not obtain it without collision--and
I, too, a man whose character it is to govern! One night, Madame Rigaud
and myself were walking amicably--I may say like lovers--on a height
overhanging the sea. An evil star occasioned Madame Rigaud to advert to
her relations; I reasoned with her on that subject, and remonstrated on
the want of duty and devotion manifested in her allowing herself to be
influenced by their jealous animosity towards her husband. Madame Rigaud
retorted; I retorted; Madame Rigaud grew warm; I grew warm, and provoked
her. I admit it. Frankness is a part of my character. At length, Madame
Rigaud, in an access of fury that I must ever deplore, threw herself
upon me with screams of passion (no doubt those that were overheard
at some distance), tore my clothes, tore my hair, lacerated my hands,
trampled and trod the dust, and finally leaped over, dashing herself to
death upon the rocks below. Such is the train of incidents which
malice has perverted into my endeavouring to force from Madame Rigaud
a relinquishment of her rights; and, on her persistence in a refusal to
make the concession I required, struggling with her--assassinating her!’
He stepped aside to the ledge where the vine leaves yet lay strewn
about, collected two or three, and stood wiping his hands upon them,
with his back to the light.
‘Well,’ he demanded after a silence, ‘have you nothing to say to all
that?’
‘It’s ugly,’ returned the little man, who had risen, and was brightening
his knife upon his shoe, as he leaned an arm against the wall.
‘What do you mean?’
John Baptist polished his knife in silence.
‘Do you mean that I have not represented the case correctly?’
‘Al-tro!’ returned John Baptist. The word was an apology now, and stood
for ‘Oh, by no means!’
‘What then?’
‘Presidents and tribunals are so prejudiced.’
‘Well,’ cried the other, uneasily flinging the end of his cloak over his
shoulder with an oath, ‘let them do their worst!’
‘Truly I think they will,’ murmured John Baptist to himself, as he bent
his head to put his knife in his sash.
Nothing more was said on either side, though they both began walking
to and fro, and necessarily crossed at every turn. Monsieur Rigaud
sometimes stopped, as if he were going to put his case in a new light,
or make some irate remonstrance; but Signor Cavalletto continuing to
go slowly to and fro at a grotesque kind of jog-trot pace with his eyes
turned downward, nothing came of these inclinings.
By-and-by the noise of the key in the lock arrested them both. The sound
of voices succeeded, and the tread of feet. The door clashed, the voices
and the feet came on, and the prison-keeper slowly ascended the stairs,
followed by a guard of soldiers.
‘Now, Monsieur Rigaud,’ said he, pausing for a moment at the grate, with
his keys in his hands, ‘have the goodness to come out.’
‘I am to depart in state, I see?’
‘Why, unless you did,’ returned the jailer, ‘you might depart in so many
pieces that it would be difficult to get you together again. There’s a
crowd, Monsieur Rigaud, and it doesn’t love you.’
He passed on out of sight, and unlocked and unbarred a low door in the
corner of the chamber. ‘Now,’ said he, as he opened it and appeared
within, ‘come out.’
There is no sort of whiteness in all the hues under the sun at all like
the whiteness of Monsieur Rigaud’s face as it was then. Neither is there
any expression of the human countenance at all like that expression in
every little line of which the frightened heart is seen to beat. Both
are conventionally compared with death; but the difference is the whole
deep gulf between the struggle done, and the fight at its most desperate
extremity.
He lighted another of his paper cigars at his companion’s; put it
tightly between his teeth; covered his head with a soft slouched hat;
threw the end of his cloak over his shoulder again; and walked out into
the side gallery on which the door opened, without taking any further
notice of Signor Cavalletto. As to that little man himself, his whole
attention had become absorbed in getting near the door and looking out
at it. Precisely as a beast might approach the opened gate of his den
and eye the freedom beyond, he passed those few moments in watching and
peering, until the door was closed upon him.
There was an officer in command of the soldiers; a stout, serviceable,
profoundly calm man, with his drawn sword in his hand, smoking a cigar.
He very briefly directed the placing of Monsieur Rigaud in the midst of
the party, put himself with consummate indifference at their head, gave
the word ‘march!’ and so they all went jingling down the staircase. The
door clashed--the key turned--and a ray of unusual light, and a breath
of unusual air, seemed to have passed through the jail, vanishing in a
tiny wreath of smoke from the cigar.
Still, in his captivity, like a lower animal--like some impatient ape,
or roused bear of the smaller species--the prisoner, now left solitary,
had jumped upon the ledge, to lose no glimpse of this departure. As he
yet stood clasping the grate with both hands, an uproar broke upon his
hearing; yells, shrieks, oaths, threats, execrations, all comprehended
in it, though (as in a storm) nothing but a raging swell of sound
distinctly heard.
Excited into a still greater resemblance to a caged wild animal by his
anxiety to know more, the prisoner leaped nimbly down, ran round the
chamber, leaped nimbly up again, clasped the grate and tried to shake
it, leaped down and ran, leaped up and listened, and never rested until
the noise, becoming more and more distant, had died away. How many
better prisoners have worn their noble hearts out so; no man thinking
of it; not even the beloved of their souls realising it; great kings
and governors, who had made them captive, careering in the sunlight
jauntily, and men cheering them on. Even the said great personages dying
in bed, making exemplary ends and sounding speeches; and polite history,
more servile than their instruments, embalming them!
At last, John Baptist, now able to choose his own spot within the
compass of those walls for the exercise of his faculty of going to sleep
when he would, lay down upon the bench, with his face turned over on his
crossed arms, and slumbered. In his submission, in his lightness, in his
good humour, in his short-lived passion, in his easy contentment with
hard bread and hard stones, in his ready sleep, in his fits and starts,
altogether a true son of the land that gave him birth.
The wide stare stared itself out for one while; the Sun went down in
a red, green, golden glory; the stars came out in the heavens, and the
fire-flies mimicked them in the lower air, as men may feebly imitate
the goodness of a better order of beings; the long dusty roads and the
interminable plains were in repose--and so deep a hush was on the sea,
that it scarcely whispered of the time when it shall give up its dead.