Chapter 27

CHAPTER 27

The Pupil of the Marshalsea

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.' So always as he sat
alone in the faded chair,