Little Dorrit
and of her worldly experience, and addressed her sister on almost equal
terms, had a vast deal of the family in it.
‘I am interested, Fanny, and concerned in anything that concerns you.’
‘So you are, so you are, and you are the best of Amys. If I am ever a
little provoking, I am sure you’ll consider what a thing it is to
occupy my position and feel a consciousness of being superior to it. I
shouldn’t care,’ said the Daughter of the Father of the Marshalsea, ‘if
the others were not so common. None of them have come down in the world
as we have. They are all on their own level. Common.’
Little Dorrit mildly looked at the speaker, but did not interrupt her.
Fanny took out her handkerchief, and rather angrily wiped her eyes. ‘I
was not born where you were, you know, Amy, and perhaps that makes a
difference. My dear child, when we get rid of Uncle, you shall know all
about it. We’ll drop him at the cook’s shop where he is going to dine.’
They walked on with him until they came to a dirty shop window in a
dirty street, which was made almost opaque by the steam of hot meats,
vegetables, and puddings. But glimpses were to be caught of a roast leg
of pork bursting into tears of sage and onion in a metal reservoir full
of gravy, of an unctuous piece of roast beef and blisterous Yorkshire
pudding, bubbling hot in a similar receptacle, of a stuffed fillet of
veal in rapid cut, of a ham in a perspiration with the pace it was going
at, of a shallow tank of baked potatoes glued together by their own
richness, of a truss or two of boiled greens, and other substantial
delicacies. Within, were a few wooden partitions, behind which such
customers as found it more convenient to take away their dinners in
stomachs than in their hands, Packed their purchases in solitude. Fanny
opening her reticule, as they surveyed these things, produced from that
repository a shilling and handed it to Uncle. Uncle, after not looking
at it a little while, divined its object, and muttering ‘Dinner? Ha!
Yes, yes, yes!’ slowly vanished from them into the mist.
‘Now, Amy,’ said her sister, ‘come with me, if you are not too tired to
walk to Harley Street, Cavendish Square.’
The air with which she threw off this distinguished address and the toss
she gave to her new bonnet (which was more gauzy than serviceable), made
her sister wonder; however, she expressed her readiness to go to Harley
Street, and thither they directed their steps. Arrived at that grand
destination, Fanny singled out the handsomest house, and knocking at the
door, inquired for Mrs Merdle. The footman who opened the door, although
he had powder on his head and was backed up by two other footmen
likewise powdered, not only admitted Mrs Merdle to be at home, but asked
Fanny to walk in. Fanny walked in, taking her sister with her; and they
went up-stairs with powder going before and powder stopping behind,
and were left in a spacious semicircular drawing-room, one of several
drawing-rooms, where there was a parrot on the outside of a golden cage
holding on by its beak, with its scaly legs in the air, and putting
itself into many strange upside-down postures. This peculiarity has been
observed in birds of quite another feather, climbing upon golden wires.
The room was far more splendid than anything Little Dorrit had ever
imagined, and would have been splendid and costly in any eyes. She
looked in amazement at her sister and would have asked a question,
but that Fanny with a warning frown pointed to a curtained doorway of
communication with another room. The curtain shook next moment, and a
lady, raising it with a heavily ringed hand, dropped it behind her again
as she entered.
The lady was not young and fresh from the hand of Nature, but was young
and fresh from the hand of her maid. She had large unfeeling handsome
eyes, and dark unfeeling handsome hair, and a broad unfeeling handsome
bosom, and was made the most of in every particular. Either because she
had a cold, or because it suited her face, she wore a rich white
fillet tied over her head and under her chin. And if ever there were
an unfeeling handsome chin that looked as if, for certain, it had never
been, in familiar parlance, ‘chucked’ by the hand of man, it was the
chin curbed up so tight and close by that laced bridle.
‘Mrs Merdle,’ said Fanny. ‘My sister, ma’am.’
‘I am glad to see your sister, Miss Dorrit. I did not remember that you
had a sister.’
‘I did not mention that I had,’ said Fanny.
‘Ah!’ Mrs Merdle curled the little finger of her left hand as who should
say, ‘I have caught you. I know you didn’t!’ All her action was usually
with her left hand because her hands were not a pair; and left being
much the whiter and plumper of the two. Then she added: ‘Sit down,’ and
composed herself voluptuously, in a nest of crimson and gold cushions,
on an ottoman near the parrot.
‘Also professional?’ said Mrs Merdle, looking at Little Dorrit through
an eye-glass.
Fanny answered No. ‘No,’ said Mrs Merdle, dropping her glass. ‘Has not a
professional air. Very pleasant; but not professional.’
‘My sister, ma’am,’ said Fanny, in whom there was a singular mixture
of deference and hardihood, ‘has been asking me to tell her, as between
sisters, how I came to have the honour of knowing you. And as I had
engaged to call upon you once more, I thought I might take the liberty
of bringing her with me, when perhaps you would tell her. I wish her to
know, and perhaps you will tell her?’
‘Do you think, at your sister’s age--’ hinted Mrs Merdle.
‘She is much older than she looks,’ said Fanny; ‘almost as old as I am.’
‘Society,’ said Mrs Merdle, with another curve of her little finger, ‘is
so difficult to explain to young persons (indeed is so difficult to
explain to most persons), that I am glad to hear that. I wish Society
was not so arbitrary, I wish it was not so exacting--Bird, be quiet!’
The parrot had given a most piercing shriek, as if its name were Society
and it asserted its right to its exactions.
‘But,’ resumed Mrs Merdle, ‘we must take it as we find it. We know it is
hollow and conventional and worldly and very shocking, but unless we
are Savages in the Tropical seas (I should have been charmed to be one
myself--most delightful life and perfect climate, I am told), we
must consult it. It is the common lot. Mr Merdle is a most extensive
merchant, his transactions are on the vastest scale, his wealth and
influence are very great, but even he--Bird, be quiet!’
The parrot had shrieked another shriek; and it filled up the sentence so
expressively that Mrs Merdle was under no necessity to end it.
‘Since your sister begs that I would terminate our personal
acquaintance,’ she began again, addressing Little Dorrit, ‘by relating
the circumstances that are much to her credit, I cannot object to comply
with her request, I am sure. I have a son (I was first married extremely
young) of two or three-and-twenty.’
Fanny set her lips, and her eyes looked half triumphantly at her sister.
‘A son of two or three-and-twenty. He is a little gay, a thing Society
is accustomed to in young men, and he is very impressible. Perhaps he
inherits that misfortune. I am very impressible myself, by nature. The
weakest of creatures--my feelings are touched in a moment.’
She said all this, and everything else, as coldly as a woman of snow;
quite forgetting the sisters except at odd times, and apparently
addressing some abstraction of Society; for whose behoof, too, she
occasionally arranged her dress, or the composition of her figure upon
the ottoman.
‘So he is very impressible. Not a misfortune in our natural state I dare
say, but we are not in a natural state. Much to be lamented, no doubt,
particularly by myself, who am a child of nature if I could but show it;
but so it is. Society suppresses us and dominates us--Bird, be quiet!’
The parrot had broken into a violent fit of laughter, after twisting
divers bars of his cage with his crooked bill, and licking them with his
black tongue.
‘It is quite unnecessary to say to a person of your good sense, wide
range of experience, and cultivated feeling,’ said Mrs Merdle from her
nest of crimson and gold--and there put up her glass to refresh her
memory as to whom she was addressing,--‘that the stage sometimes has
a fascination for young men of that class of character. In saying the
stage, I mean the people on it of the female sex. Therefore, when I
heard that my son was supposed to be fascinated by a dancer, I knew what
that usually meant in Society, and confided in her being a dancer at the
Opera, where young men moving in Society are usually fascinated.’
She passed her white hands over one another, observant of the sisters
now; and the rings upon her fingers grated against each other with a
hard sound.
‘As your sister will tell you, when I found what the theatre was I was
much surprised and much distressed. But when I found that your sister,
by rejecting my son’s advances (I must add, in an unexpected manner),
had brought him to the point of proposing marriage, my feelings were
of the profoundest anguish--acute.’
She traced the outline of her left eyebrow, and put it right.
‘In a distracted condition, which only a mother--moving in Society--can
be susceptible of, I determined to go myself to the theatre, and
represent my state of mind to the dancer. I made myself known to your
sister. I found her, to my surprise, in many respects different from
my expectations; and certainly in none more so, than in meeting me
with--what shall I say--a sort of family assertion on her own part?’ Mrs
Merdle smiled.
‘I told you, ma’am,’ said Fanny, with a heightening colour, ‘that
although you found me in that situation, I was so far above the rest,
that I considered my family as good as your son’s; and that I had a
brother who, knowing the circumstances, would be of the same opinion,
and would not consider such a connection any honour.’
‘Miss Dorrit,’ said Mrs Merdle, after frostily looking at her through
her glass, ‘precisely what I was on the point of telling your sister,
in pursuance of your request. Much obliged to you for recalling it
so accurately and anticipating me. I immediately,’ addressing Little
Dorrit, ‘(for I am the creature of impulse), took a bracelet from my
arm, and begged your sister to let me clasp it on hers, in token of
the delight I had in our being able to approach the subject so far on
a common footing.’ (This was perfectly true, the lady having bought a
cheap and showy article on her way to the interview, with a general eye
to bribery.)
‘And I told you, Mrs Merdle,’ said Fanny, ‘that we might be unfortunate,
but we are not common.’
‘I think, the very words, Miss Dorrit,’ assented Mrs Merdle.
‘And I told you, Mrs Merdle,’ said Fanny, ‘that if you spoke to me
of the superiority of your son’s standing in Society, it was barely
possible that you rather deceived yourself in your suppositions about my
origin; and that my father’s standing, even in the Society in which
he now moved (what that was, was best known to myself), was eminently
superior, and was acknowledged by every one.’
‘Quite accurate,’ rejoined Mrs Merdle. ‘A most admirable memory.’
‘Thank you, ma’am. Perhaps you will be so kind as to tell my sister the
rest.’
‘There is very little to tell,’ said Mrs Merdle, reviewing the breadth
of bosom which seemed essential to her having room enough to be
unfeeling in, ‘but it is to your sister’s credit. I pointed out to your
sister the plain state of the case; the impossibility of the Society
in which we moved recognising the Society in which she moved--though
charming, I have no doubt; the immense disadvantage at which she would
consequently place the family she had so high an opinion of, upon which