Chapter 16

Chapter 164,236 wordsPublic domain

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.

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.

The turnkey took him up the old familiar staircase and into the old familiar room in which he had so often been. And as he sat down in its loneliness, thinking of the fair, slight form that had dwelt in it so long, he turned his face to the wall and sobbed aloud, "Oh, my Little Dorrit!"

Wherever he looked he seemed to see her, and just as she herself in a foreign country found herself looking and listening for his step and voice, so, too, it was with him.

In the days that followed he thought of her all the while. He was too depressed and too retiring and unhappy to mingle with the other prisoners, so he kept his own room and made no friends. The rest disliked him and said he was proud or sullen.

A burning, reckless mood soon added its sufferings to his dread and hatred of the place. The thought grew on him that he would in the end break his heart and die there. He felt that he was being stifled, and at times the longing to be free made him believe he must go mad. A week of this suffering found him in his bed in the grasp of a slow, wasting fever. He felt light-headed and delirious, and heard tunes playing that he knew were only in his brain.

One day when he had dragged himself to his chair by the window, the door of his room seemed to open to a quiet figure, which dropped a mantle it wore; then it seemed to be Little Dorrit in her old dress, and it seemed first to smile and then to burst into tears.

He roused himself, and all at once he saw that it was no dream. She was really there, kneeling by him now with her tears falling on his hands and her voice crying, "Oh, my best friend! Don't let me see you weep! I am your own poor child come back!"

No one had told her he was ill, for she had just returned from Italy. She made the room fresh and neat, sewed a white curtain for its window, and sent out for grapes, roast chicken and jellies, and every good thing. She sat by him all day, smoothing his hot pillow or giving him a cooling drink.

Though he had been strangely blind, he knew at last that she must have loved him all along. And to find her great heart turned to him thus in his misfortune made him realize that during all those months in the lonely prison he had been loving her, too, though he had not known it.

A feeling of peace came to him. Whenever he opened his eyes he saw her at his side--the same trusting Little Dorrit that he had always known.

"ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL"

All the while these things were happening, Mrs. Clennam and Flintwinch had continued their grim partnership.

Mrs. Clennam at last decided to burn the part of the will she had hidden, so that her share in the wicked plan could never be found out. Flintwinch, however, wishing for his own purposes to keep her in his power, deceived her. He cunningly put in its place a worthless piece of paper, and this Mrs. Clennam burned instead. Flintwinch then locked up the real piece in an iron box, with a lot of private letters that had been written by the poor crazed singer to Mrs. Clennam, begging her forgiveness. The box he gave to his brother, who took it to Holland with him for safe-keeping.

But Flintwinch, in this deception, overreached himself.

There was an adventurer in Holland named Rigaud, who used to drink and smoke with this brother. He was an oily villain, who had been in jail in France on suspicion of having murdered his wife. He had shaggy dry hair streaked with red, and a thick mustache, and when he smiled his eyes went close together, his mustache went up under his hooked nose, and his nose came down over his mustache. Rigaud saw the box, concluded it contained something valuable, and made up his mind to get it. His chance came when the brother of Flintwinch died suddenly one day, and he lost no time in making away with the iron box.

By means of the letters it contained, he soon guessed the secret which Mrs. Clennam had been for so many years at such pains to conceal, and, deciding that by this knowledge he could squeeze money out of her, he came to London to find and threaten her.

But she, believing she had burned the part of the will which Rigaud claimed to possess, refused to listen to him, until at last, maddened by her refusals, he searched out the Dorrits.

He soon discovered that the man who had educated the singer (Arthur's real mother) was Frederick Dorrit, Little Dorrit's dead uncle, and that it was Little Dorrit herself, since she was his youngest niece, from whom the money was now being unjustly kept.

Rigaud easily found Little Dorrit, for she was now in the Marshalsea nursing Arthur, where he lay sick, and to her the cunning adventurer sent a copy of the paper in a sealed packet, asking her, if it was not reclaimed before the prison closed that same night, to open and read it herself.

He then went to the Clennam house, told Mrs. Clennam and Flintwinch what he had done and demanded money at once as the price of his reclaiming the packet before Little Dorrit should learn the secret it held.

At this Flintwinch had to confess what he had done, and Mrs. Clennam knew that the fatal paper had not been burned, after all.

The wretched woman, seeing this sharp end to all her scheming, was almost distracted. She had not walked a step for twelve years, but now her excitement and frenzy gave her unnatural strength. She rose from her invalid chair and ran with all her speed from the house. Old Affery, the servant, followed her mistress, wringing her hands as she tried vainly to overtake her.

Mrs. Clennam did not pause till she had reached the prison and found Little Dorrit. She told her to open the packet at once and to read what it contained, and then, kneeling at her feet, she promised to restore to her all she had withheld, and begged her to forgive and to come back with her to tell Rigaud that she already knew the secret and that he might do his worst.

Little Dorrit was greatly moved to see the stern, gray-haired woman at her feet. She raised and comforted her, assuring her that, come what would, Arthur should never learn the truth from her lips. This return of good for evil from the one she had most injured brought the tears to the hard woman's eyes. "God bless you," she said in a broken voice.

Side by side they hastened back to the Clennam house, but as they reached the entrance of its dark courtyard there came a sudden noise like thunder. For one instant they saw the building, with the insolent Rigaud waiting smoking in the window; then the walls heaved, surged outward, opened and fell into pieces. Its great pile of chimneys rocked, broke and tumbled on the fragments, and only a huge mass of timbers and stone, with a cloud of dust hovering over it, marked the spot where it had stood.

The rotten old building, propped up so long, had fallen at last. For years old Affery had insisted that the house was haunted. She had often heard mysterious rustlings and noises, and in the mornings sometimes she would find little heaps of dust on the floors. Curious, crooked cracks would appear, too, in the walls, and the doors would stick with no apparent reason. These things, of course, had been caused by the gradual settling of the crazy walls and timbers, which now finally had collapsed all at once.

Frightened, they ran back to the street and there Mrs. Clennam's strange strength left her, and she fell in a heap upon the pavement.

She never from that hour was able to speak a word or move a finger. She lived for three years in a wheel-chair, but she lived--and died--like a statue.

For two days workmen dug industriously in the ruins before they found the body of Rigaud, with his head smashed to atoms beneath a huge beam.

They dug longer than that for the body of Flintwinch, and stopped at last when they came to the conclusion that he was not there. By that time, however, he had had a chance to get together all of the firm's money he could lay his hands on and to decamp. He was never seen again in England, but travelers claimed to have seen him in Holland, where he lived comfortably under the name of "Mynheer Von Flyntevynge"--which is, after all, about as near as one can come to saying "Flintwinch" in Dutch.

No one grieved greatly over his loss. It was long before Arthur knew of these events, and Little Dorrit was too happy in nursing him back to health to think much about it.

She was not content with this, either, but wrote to Mr. and Mrs. Meagles, who were abroad, of the sick man's misfortune. The former went at once in search of Doyce and brought him back to London, where together they set the firm of "Doyce and Clennam" on its feet again and arranged to buy Arthur's liberty. They did not tell Arthur anything of this, however, in order that they might surprise him.

Mr. Meagles, for Little Dorrit's sake, tried hard to find the fragment of the will which Rigaud had kept in the iron box. But it was Tattycoram, the little maid with the bad temper, who finally found it in a lodging Rigaud had occupied, and brought it to Mr. Meagles, praying on her knees that he take her back into his service, which, to be sure, he was very glad to do.

Arthur, while he was slowly growing better, had thought much of his condition. Though Little Dorrit had begged him again and again to take her money and use it as his own, he had refused, telling her as gently as he could that now that she was rich and he a ruined man, this could never be, and that, as the time had long gone by when she and the Marshalsea had anything in common, they two must soon part.

One day, however, when he was well enough to sit up, Little Dorrit came to his room in the prison and told him she had received a very great fortune and asked him again if he would not take it.

"Never," he told her.

"You will not take even half of it?" she asked pleadingly.

"Never, dear Little Dorrit!" he said emphatically.

Then, at last, she laid her face on his breast crying:

"I have nothing in the world. I am as poor as when I lived here in the Marshalsea. I have just found that papa gave all we had to Mr. Merdle and it is swept away with the rest. My great fortune now is poverty, because it is all you will take. Oh, my dearest and best, are you quite sure you will not share my fortune with me now?"

He had locked her in his arms, and his tears were falling on her cheek as she said joyfully:

"I never was rich before, or proud, or happy. I would rather pass my life here in prison with you, and work daily for my bread, than to have the greatest fortune that ever was told and be the greatest lady that ever was honored!"

But Arthur's prison life was to be short. For Mr. Meagles and Doyce burst upon them with all the other good news at once. Arthur was free, the firm had been reëstablished with him at its head, and to-morrow the debtors' prison would be only a memory.

Next morning, before they left the Marshalsea for ever, Little Dorrit handed Arthur a folded paper, and asked him to please her by putting it into the fire with his own hand.

"Is it a charm?" he asked.

"It is anything you like best," she answered, standing on tiptoe to kiss him. "Only say 'I love you' as you do it!"

He said it, and the paper burned away. And so the will that had been the cause of so much pain and wrong was turned to ashes. Little Dorrit kept the promise she had made, and Arthur never learned of the sin of which the woman he had always called his mother had been guilty.

Then, when all good-bys had been said, they walked together to the very same church where Little Dorrit had slept on the cushions the night she had been locked out of the Marshalsea, and there she and Arthur were married. Doyce gave the bride away.

And among the many who came to witness the wedding were not only Pancks, and Maggie, the half-witted woman, but even a group of Little Dorrit's old turnkey friends from the prison--among whom was the disconsolate Chivery, who had so long solaced himself by composing epitaphs for his own tombstone, and who went home to meditate over his last inscription:

LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT

Published 1843-1844

_Scene_: London, Neighboring Towns, New York and the Mississippi Valley

_Time_: 1842

CHARACTERS

Martin Chuzzlewit A young gentleman

Chuzzlewit His grandfather. A rich old man

Mary Graham Old Chuzzlewit's nurse and secretary

Jonas His grasping nephew

Chuffey An aged clerk to Jonas's father

Pecksniff An architect and hypocrite A distant relative of Old Chuzzlewit's

Charity His daughter

Mercy His daughter. Later, Jonas's wife

Tom Pinch A charity pupil of Pecksniff's

Ruth His sister

John Westlock One of Pecksniff's former pupils

Mark Tapley An assistant at a village inn Later, Martin's comrade in the United States

Bevan An American

Mrs. Todgers The proprietress of a London boarding-house

Montague Tigg A penniless adventurer Later known as "Tigg Montague," and president of the Anglo-Bengalee Company

"Sairey" Gamp A nurse

"Mrs. Harris" An imaginary friend of Sairey Gamp's

Nadgett A police spy

MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT

HOW MARTIN LEFT ENGLAND

Martin Chuzzlewit was the grandson of an old man who, from being poor, became so rich that he found not only that people bowed low and flattered him, but that many of his relatives were trying by every trick to get some of his money.

The old man was naturally suspicious and obstinate, and when he saw this he began to distrust everybody and to think the whole world selfish and deceitful. He had loved most of all his grandson, Martin, but at length his heart became hardened to him also.

This was partly Martin's own fault, for he was somewhat selfish, but he had, nevertheless, a great deal of good in him. And perhaps his selfishness was partly his grandfather's fault, too, because the latter had brought him up to believe he would inherit all his money and would sometime be very rich.

At last, ill and grown suspicious of every one he met, old Chuzzlewit gave a home to a beautiful orphan girl named Mary Graham, and kept her near him as his nurse and secretary. In order that she might not have any selfish interest in being kind to him, he took an oath in her presence that he would not leave her a cent when he died. He paid her monthly wages and it was agreed that there should be no affection shown between them.

In spite of his seeming harshness, Mary knew his heart was naturally kind, and she soon loved him as a father. And he, softened by her sympathy, came in spite of himself to love her as a daughter.

It was not long before young Martin, too, had fallen very deeply in love with Mary. He concluded too hastily, however, that his grandfather would not approve of his marrying her, and told the old man his intentions in such a fiery way that Chuzzlewit resented it.

The old man accused Martin of a selfish attempt to steal from him Mary's care, and at this, Martin, whose temper was as quick as his grandfather's flew to anger. They quarreled and Martin left him, declaring he would henceforth make his own way until he was able to claim Mary for his wife.

While he was wondering what he should do, Martin saw in a newspaper the advertisement of a Mr. Pecksniff, an architect, living near Salisbury, not many miles from London, who wished a pupil to board and teach. An architect was what Martin wanted to be, and he answered the advertisement at once and accepted Pecksniff's terms.

Now, to tell the truth, Martin had another reason for this. Pecksniff was his grandfather's cousin, and he knew the old man thought him the worst hypocrite of all his relatives, and disliked him accordingly. And Martin was so angry with his grandfather that he went to Pecksniff's partly to vex him.

Pecksniff was just the man old Chuzzlewit thought him. He was a smooth, sleek hypocrite, with an oily manner. He had heavy eyelids and a wide, whiskerless throat, and when he talked he fairly oozed virtuous sayings, for which people deemed him a most moral and upright man. He was a widower with two daughters, Charity and Mercy, the older of whom had a very bitter temper, which made it hard for the few students as long as they stayed there.

After Pecksniff had once got a pupil's money in advance, he made no pretense of teaching him. He kept him drawing designs for buildings, and that was all. If any of the designs were good, he said nothing to the pupil, but sold them as his own, and pocketed the money. His pupils soon saw through him and none of them had ever stayed long except one.

This one was named Tom Pinch. He had been poor and Mr. Pecksniff had pretended to take him in at a reduced rate. But really Pinch paid as much as the others, beside being a clever fellow who made himself useful in a thousand ways. He was a musician, too, and played the organ in the village church, which was a credit to Pecksniff.

With all this, Pinch was a generous, open-hearted lad, who believed every one honest and true, and he was so grateful to Pecksniff (whose hypocrisy he never imagined) that he was always singing his praises everywhere. In return for all this, Pecksniff treated him with contempt and made him quite like a servant.

Tom Pinch, however, was a favorite with every one else. He had a sister Ruth who loved him dearly, but he seldom saw her, for she was a governess in the house of a brass and iron founder, who did not like her to have company. One of Tom's greatest friends had been a pupil named John Westlock, who in vain had tried to open the other's eyes to Pecksniff's real character. When Westlock came into his money he had left and gone to live in London, and it was to take his vacant place that the new pupil Martin was now coming.