Little Dorrit. Чарльз Диккенс

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      ‘Oh! You are the child, are you?’

      ‘Yes, ma’am.’

      ‘I am sorry I haven’t got anything for you,’ said the milliner, shaking her head.

      ‘It’s not that, ma’am. If you please I want to learn needle-work.’

      ‘Why should you do that,’ returned the milliner, ‘with me before you? It has not done me much good.’

      ‘Nothing – whatever it is – seems to have done anybody much good who comes here,’ she returned in all simplicity; ‘but I want to learn just the same.’

      ‘I am afraid you are so weak, you see,’ the milliner objected.

      ‘I don’t think I am weak, ma’am.’

      ‘And you are so very, very little, you see,’ the milliner objected.

      ‘Yes, I am afraid I am very little indeed,’ returned the Child of the Marshalsea; and so began to sob over that unfortunate defect of hers, which came so often in her way. The milliner – who was not morose or hard-hearted, only newly insolvent – was touched, took her in hand with goodwill, found her the most patient and earnest of pupils, and made her a cunning work-woman in course of time.

      In course of time, and in the very self-same course of time, the Father of the Marshalsea gradually developed a new flower of character. The more Fatherly he grew as to the Marshalsea, and the more dependent he became on the contributions of his changing family, the greater stand he made by his forlorn gentility. With the same hand that he pocketed a collegian’s half-crown half an hour ago, he would wipe away the tears that streamed over his cheeks if any reference were made to his daughters’ earning their bread. So, over and above other daily cares, the Child of the Marshalsea had always upon her the care of preserving the genteel fiction that they were all idle beggars together.

      The sister became a dancer. There was a ruined uncle in the family group – ruined by his brother, the Father of the Marshalsea, and knowing no more how than his ruiner did, but accepting the fact as an inevitable certainty – on whom her protection devolved. Naturally a retired and simple man, he had shown no particular sense of being ruined at the time when that calamity fell upon him, further than that he left off washing himself when the shock was announced, and never took to that luxury any more. He had been a very indifferent musical amateur in his better days; and when he fell with his brother, resorted for support to playing a clarionet as dirty as himself in a small Theatre Orchestra. It was the theatre in which his niece became a dancer; he had been a fixture there a long time when she took her poor station in it; and he accepted the task of serving as her escort and guardian, just as he would have accepted an illness, a legacy, a feast, starvation – anything but soap.

      To enable this girl to earn her few weekly shillings, it was necessary for the Child of the Marshalsea to go through an elaborate form with the Father.

      ‘Fanny is not going to live with us just now, father. She will be here a good deal in the day, but she is going to live outside with uncle.’

      ‘You surprise me. Why?’

      ‘I think uncle wants a companion, father. He should be attended to, and looked after.’

      ‘A companion? He passes much of his time here. And you attend to him and look after him, Amy, a great deal more than ever your sister will. You all go out so much; you all go out so much.’

      This was to keep up the ceremony and pretence of his having no idea that Amy herself went out by the day to work.

      ‘But we are always glad to come home, father; now, are we not? And as to Fanny, perhaps besides keeping uncle company and taking care of him, it may be as well for her not quite to live here, always. She was not born here as I was, you know, father.’

      ‘Well, Amy, well. I don’t quite follow you, but it’s natural I suppose that Fanny should prefer to be outside, and even that you often should, too. So, you and Fanny and your uncle, my dear, shall have your own way. Good, good. I’ll not meddle; don’t mind me.’

      To get her brother out of the prison; out of the succession to Mrs Bangham in executing commissions, and out of the slang interchange with very doubtful companions consequent upon both; was her hardest task. At eighteen he would have dragged on from hand to mouth, from hour to hour, from penny to penny, until eighty. Nobody got into the prison from whom he derived anything useful or good, and she could find no patron for him but her old friend and godfather.

      ‘Dear Bob,’ said she, ‘what is to become of poor Tip?’ His name was Edward, and Ted had been transformed into Tip, within the walls.

      The turnkey had strong private opinions as to what would become of poor Tip, and had even gone so far with the view of averting their fulfilment, as to sound Tip in reference to the expediency of running away and going to serve his country. But Tip had thanked him, and said he didn’t seem to care for his country.

      ‘Well, my dear,’ said the turnkey, ‘something ought to be done with him. Suppose I try and get him into the law?’

      ‘That would be so good of you, Bob!’

      The turnkey had now two points to put to the professional gentlemen as they passed in and out. He put this second one so perseveringly that a stool and twelve shillings a week were at last found for Tip in the office of an attorney in a great National Palladium called the Palace Court; at that time one of a considerable list of everlasting bulwarks to the dignity and safety of Albion, whose places know them no more.

      Tip languished in Clifford’s Inns for six months, and at the expiration of that term sauntered back one evening with his hands in his pockets, and incidentally observed to his sister that he was not going back again.

      ‘Not going back again?’ said the poor little anxious Child of the Marshalsea, always calculating and planning for Tip, in the front rank of her charges.

      ‘I am so tired of it,’ said Tip, ‘that I have cut it.’

      Tip tired of everything. With intervals of Marshalsea lounging, and Mrs Bangham succession, his small second mother, aided by her trusty friend, got him into a warehouse, into a market garden, into the hop trade, into the law again, into an auctioneers, into a brewery, into a stockbroker’s, into the law again, into a coach office, into a waggon office, into the law again, into a general dealer’s, into a distillery, into the law again, into a wool house, into a dry goods house, into the Billingsgate trade, into the foreign fruit trade, and into the docks. But whatever Tip went into, he came out of tired, announcing that he had cut it. Wherever he went, this foredoomed Tip appeared to take the prison walls with him, and to set them up in such trade or calling; and to prowl about within their narrow limits in the old slip-shod, purposeless, down-at-heel way; until the real immovable Marshalsea walls asserted their fascination over him, and brought him back.

      Nevertheless, the brave little creature did so fix her heart on her brother’s rescue, that while he was ringing out these doleful changes, she pinched and scraped enough together to ship him for Canada. When he was tired of nothing to do, and disposed in its turn to cut even that, he graciously consented to go to Canada. And there was grief in her bosom over parting with him, and joy in the hope of his being put in a straight course at last.

      ‘God bless you, dear Tip. Don’t be too proud to come and see us, when you have made your fortune.’

      ‘All right!’ said Tip, and went.

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