And these involuntary starts of fancy were, after all, but the setting
of a picture in which three people kept before him. His father, with the
steadfast look with which he had died, prophetically darkened forth in
the portrait; his mother, with her arm up, warding off his suspicion;
Little Dorrit, with her hand on the degraded arm, and her drooping head
turned away. What if his mother had an old reason she well knew for softening to
this poor girl! What if the prisoner now sleeping quietly--Heaven grant
it!--by the light of the great Day of judgment should trace back his
fall to her. What if any act of hers and of his father's, should have
even remotely brought the grey heads of those two brothers so low!
A swift thought shot into his mind. In that long imprisonment here, and
in her own long confinement to her room, did his mother find a balance
to be struck? 'I admit that I was accessory to that man's captivity. I
have suffered for it in kind. He has decayed in his prison: I in mine. I
have paid the penalty.'
When all the other thoughts had faded out, this one held possession
of him. When he fell asleep, she came before him in her wheeled chair,
warding him off with this justification. When he awoke, and sprang up
causelessly frightened, the words were in his ears, as if her voice had
slowly spoken them at his pillow, to break his rest: 'He withers away in
his prison; I wither away in mine; inexorable justice is done; what do I
owe on this score!'