Chapter 29

CHAPTER 29

A Plea in the Marshalsea

Haggard anxiety and remorse are bad companions to be barred up
with. Brooding all day, and resting very little indeed at night,
t will not arm a man against misery. Next morning, Clennam felt
that his health was sinking, as his spirits had already sunk and
that the weight under which he bent was bearing him down.

Night after night he had risen from his bed of wretchedness at
twelve or one o'clock, and had sat at his window watching the
sickly lamps in the yard, and looking upward for the first wan
trace of day, hours before it was possible that the sky could show
it to him. Now when the night came, he could not even persuade
himself to undress.

For a burning restlessness set in, an agonised impatience of the
prison, and a conviction that he was going to break his heart and
die there, which caused him indescribable suffering. His dread and
hatred of the place became so intense that he felt it a labour to
draw his breath in it. The sensation of being stifled sometimes so
overpowered him, that he would stand at the window holding his
throat and gasping. At the same time a longing for other air, and
a yearning to be beyond the blind blank wall, made him feel as if
he must go mad with the ardour of the desire.

Many other prisoners had had experience of this condition before
him, and its violence and continuity had worn themselves out in
their cases, as they did in his. Two nights and a day exhausted
it. It came back by fits, but those grew fainter and returned at
lengthening intervals. A desolate calm succeeded; and the middle
of the week found him settled down in the despondency of low, slow
fever.

With Cavalletto and Pancks away, he had no visitors to fear but Mr
and Mrs Plornish. His anxiety, in reference to that worthy pair,
was that they should not come near him; for, in the morbid state of
his nerves, he sought to be left alone, and spared the being seen
so subdued and weak. He wrote a note to Mrs Plornish representing
himself as occupied with his affairs, and bound by the necessity of
devoting himself to them, to remain for a time even without the
pleasant interruption of a sight of her kind face. As to Young
John, who looked in daily at a certain hour, when the turnkeys were
relieved, to ask if he could do anything for him; he always made a
pretence of being engaged in writing, and to answer cheerfully in
the negative. The subject of their only long conversation had
never been revived between them. Through all these changes of
unhappiness, however, it had never lost its hold on Clennam's mind.

The sixth day of the appointed week was a moist, hot, misty day.
It seemed as though the prison's poverty, and shabbiness,