Chapter 18

CHAPTER 18

Little Dorrit's Lover

Little Dorrit had not attained her twenty-second birthday without
finding a lover. Even in the shallow Marshalsea, the ever young
Archer shot off a few featherless arrows now and then from a mouldy
bow, and winged a Collegian or two.

Little Dorrit's lover, however, was not a Collegian. He was the
sentimental son of a turnkey. His father hoped, in the fulness of
time, to leave him the inheritance of an unstained key; and had
from his early youth familiarised him with the duties of his
office, and with an ambition to retain the prison-lock in the
family. While the succession was yet in abeyance, he assisted his
mother in the conduct of a snug tobacco business round the corner
of Horsemonger Lane (his father being a non-resident turnkey),
which could usually command a neat connection within the College
walls.

Years agone, when the object of his affections was wont to sit in
her little arm-chair by the high Lodge-fender, Young John (family
name, Chivery), a year older than herself, had eyed her with
admiring wonder. When he had played with her in the yard, his
favourite game had been to counterfeit locking her up in corners,
and to counterfeit letting her out for real kisses. When he grew
tall enough to peep through the keyhole of the great lock of the
main door, he had divers times set down his father's dinner, or
supper, to get on as it might on the outer side thereof, while he
stood taking cold in one eye by dint of peeping at her through that
airy perspective.

If Young John had ever slackened in his truth in the less
penetrable days of his boyhood, when youth is prone to wear its
boots unlaced and is happily unconscious of digestive organs, he
had soon strung it up again and screwed it tight. At nineteen, his
hand had inscribed in chalk on that part of the wall which fronted
her lodgings, on the occasion of her birthday, 'Welcome sweet
nursling of the Fairies!' At twenty-three, the same hand
falteringly presented cigars on Sundays to the Father of the
Marshalsea, and Father of the queen of his soul.

Young John was small of stature, with rather weak legs and very
weak light hair. One of his eyes (perhaps the eye that used to
peep through the keyhole) was also weak, and looked larger than the
other, as if it couldn't collect itself. Young John was gentle
likewise. But he was great of soul. Poetical, expansive,
faithful.

Though too humble before the ruler of his heart to be sanguine,
Young John had considered the object of his attachment in all its
lights and shades. Following it out to blissful results, he had
descried, without self-commendation, a fitness in it. Say things
prospered, and they were united.