Shall I tell you more? Remember! He knows nothing of it; we
must go to him, from here, to tell him of it!'
She seemed to entreat him for a little time. He held her in his arm,
and, after a pause, bent down his ear to listen. 'Did you ask me to go on?'
'Yes.' 'He will be a rich man. He is a rich man. A great sum of money
is waiting to be paid over to him as his inheritance; you are all
henceforth very wealthy. Bravest and best of children, I thank Heaven
that you are rewarded!' As he kissed her, she turned her head towards his shoulder, and raised
her arm towards his neck; cried out 'Father! Father! Father!' and
swooned away.
Upon which Flora returned to take care of her, and hovered about her on
a sofa, intermingling kind offices and incoherent scraps of conversation
in a manner so confounding, that whether she pressed the Marshalsea to
take a spoonful of unclaimed dividends, for it would do her good;
or whether she congratulated Little Dorrit's father on coming into
possession of a hundred thousand smelling-bottles; or whether she
explained that she put seventy-five thousand drops of spirits of
lavender on fifty thousand pounds of lump sugar, and that she entreated
Little Dorrit to take that gentle restorative; or whether she bathed the
foreheads of Doyce and Clennam in vinegar, and gave the late Mr F. more
air; no one with any sense of responsibility could have undertaken to
decide.
A tributary stream of confusion, moreover, poured in from an
adjoining bedroom, where Mr F.'s Aunt appeared, from the sound of her
voice, to be in a horizontal posture, awaiting her breakfast; and from
which bower that inexorable lady snapped off short taunts, whenever she
could get a hearing, as, 'Don't believe it's his doing!' and 'He needn't
take no credit to himself for it!' and 'It'll be long enough, I expect,
afore he'll give up any of his own money!' all designed to disparage
Clennam's share in the discovery, and to relieve those inveterate
feelings with which Mr F.'s Aunt regarded him.
But Little Dorrit's solicitude to get to her father, and to carry the
joyful tidings to him, and not to leave him in his jail a moment with
this happiness in store for him and still unknown to him, did more for
her speedy restoration than all the skill and attention on earth could
have done. 'Come with me to my dear father. Pray come and tell my dear
father!' were the first words she said. Her father, her father. She
spoke of nothing but him, thought of nothing but him. Kneeling down and
pouring out her thankfulness with uplifted hands, her thanks were for
her father. Flora's tenderness was quite overcome by this, and she launched out
among the cups and saucers into a wonderful flow of tears and speech.