Chapter 29 - Page 2

and dirt,
were growing in the sultry atmosphere. With an aching head and a
weary heart, Clennam had watched the miserable night out, listening
to the fall of rain on the yard pavement, thinking of its softer
fall upon the country earth. A blurred circle of yellow haze had
risen up in the sky in lieu of sun, and he had watched the patch it
put upon his wall, like a bit of the prison's raggedness. He had
heard the gates open; and the badly shod feet that waited outside
shuffle in; and the sweeping, and pumping, and moving about, begin,
which commenced the prison morning. So ill and faint that he was
obliged to rest many times in the process of getting himself
washed, he had at length crept to his chair by the open window. In
it he sat dozing, while the old woman who arranged his room went
through her morning's work.

Light of head with want of sleep and want of food (his appetite,
and even his sense of taste, having forsaken him), he had been two
or three times conscious, in the night, of going astray. He had
heard fragments of tunes and songs in the warm wind, which he knew
had no existence. Now that he began to doze in exhaustion, he
heard them again; and voices seemed to address him, and he
answered, and started.

Dozing and dreaming, without the power of reckoning time, so that
a minute might have been an hour and an hour a minute, some abiding
impression of a garden stole over him--a garden of flowers, with a
damp warm wind gently stirring their scents. It required such a
painful effort to lift his head for the purpose of inquiring into
this, or inquiring into anything, that the impression appeared to
have become quite an old and importunate one when he looked round.
Beside the tea-cup on his table he saw, then, a blooming nosegay:
a wonderful handful of the choicest and most lovely flowers.

Nothing had ever appeared so beautiful in his sight. He took them
up and inhaled their fragrance, and he lifted them to his hot head,
and he put them down and opened his parched hands to them, as cold
hands are opened to receive the cheering of a fire. It was not
until he had delighted in them for some time, that he wondered who
had sent them; and opened his door to ask the woman who must have
put them there, how they had come into her hands. But she was
gone, and seemed to have been long gone; for the tea she had left
for him on the table was cold. He tried to drink some, but could
not bear the odour of it: so he crept back to his chair by the open
window, and put the flowers on the little round table of old.

When the first faintness consequent on having moved about had left
him, he subsided into his former state. One of the night-tunes was
playing in the wind, when the door of his