The day was sunny, and the Marshalsea, with the hot noon striking
upon it, was unwontedly quiet. Arthur Clennam dropped into a solitary
arm-chair, itself as faded as any debtor in the jail, and yielded
himself to his thoughts.
In the unnatural peace of having gone through the dreaded arrest, and
got there,--the first change of feeling which the prison most commonly
induced, and from which dangerous resting-place so many men had slipped
down to the depths of degradation and disgrace by so many ways,--he
could think of some passages in his life, almost as if he were removed
from them into another state of existence.
Taking into account where he
was, the interest that had first brought him there when he had been free
to keep away, and the gentle presence that was equally inseparable from
the walls and bars about him and from the impalpable remembrances of his
later life which no walls or bars could imprison, it was not remarkable
that everything his memory turned upon should bring him round again to
Little Dorrit.
Yet it was remarkable to him; not because of the fact
itself, but because of the reminder it brought with it, how much the
dear little creature had influenced his better resolutions.
None of us clearly know to whom or to what we are indebted in this wise,
until some marked stop in the whirling wheel of life brings the right
perception with it. It comes with sickness, it comes with sorrow, it
comes with the loss of the dearly loved, it is one of the most frequent
uses of adversity. It came to Clennam in his adversity, strongly and
tenderly.
'When I first gathered myself together,' he thought, 'and
set something like purpose before my jaded eyes, whom had I before me,
toiling on, for a good object's sake, without encouragement, without
notice, against ignoble obstacles that would have turned an army of
received heroes and heroines?
One weak girl! When I tried to conquer
my misplaced love, and to be generous to the man who was more fortunate
than I, though he should never know it or repay me with a gracious word,
in whom had I watched patience, self-denial, self-subdual, charitable
construction, the noblest generosity of the affections? In the same poor
girl! If I, a man, with a man's advantages and means and energies, had
slighted the whisper in my heart, that if my father had erred, it was my
first duty to conceal the fault and to repair it, what youthful figure
with tender feet going almost bare on the damp ground, with spare hands
ever working, with its slight shape but half protected from the
sharp weather, would have stood before me to put me to shame? Little
Dorrit's.'