. To have no work to do was strange, but not half so strange as having
glided into a corner where she had no one to think for, nothing to plan
and contrive, no cares of others to load herself with. Strange as that
was, it was far stranger yet to find a space between herself and her
father, where others occupied themselves in taking care of him, and
where she was never expected to be. At first, this was so much more
unlike her old experience than even the mountains themselves, that she
had been unable to resign herself to it, and had tried to retain her
old place about him.
But he had spoken to her alone, and had said that
people--ha--people in an exalted position, my dear, must scrupulously
exact respect from their dependents; and that for her, his daughter,
Miss Amy Dorrit, of the sole remaining branch of the Dorrits of
Dorsetshire, to be known to--hum--to occupy herself in fulfilling the
functions of--ha hum--a valet, would be incompatible with that respect.
Therefore, my dear, he--ha--he laid his parental injunctions upon
her, to remember that she was a lady, who had now to conduct herself
with--hum--a proper pride, and to preserve the rank of a lady;
and consequently he requested her to abstain from doing what would
occasion--ha--unpleasant and derogatory remarks. She had obeyed without
a murmur. Thus it had been brought about that she now sat in her corner
of the luxurious carriage with her little patient hands folded before
her, quite displaced even from the last point of the old standing ground
in life on which her feet had lingered.
It was from this position that all she saw appeared unreal; the more
surprising the scenes, the more they resembled the unreality of her
own inner life as she went through its vacant places all day long. The
gorges of the Simplon, its enormous depths and thundering waterfalls,
the wonderful road, the points of danger where a loose wheel or a
faltering horse would have been destruction, the descent into Italy, the
opening of that beautiful land as the rugged mountain-chasm widened and
let them out from a gloomy and dark imprisonment--all a dream--only the
old mean Marshalsea a reality. Nay, even the old mean Marshalsea was
shaken to its foundations when she pictured it without her father. She
could scarcely believe that the prisoners were still lingering in the
close yard, that the mean rooms were still every one tenanted, and that
the turnkey still stood in the Lodge letting people in and out, all just
as she well knew it to be.
With a remembrance of her father's old life in prison hanging about her
like the burden of a sorrowful tune, Little Dorrit would wake from a
dream of her birth-place into a whole day's dream. The painted room in
which she awoke, often a humbled state-chamber in a dilapidated palace,
would begin it; with its wild red autumnal vine-leaves overhanging the
glass, its orange-trees on the cracked white terrace outside the window,
a group of monks and peasants in the little street below, misery and
magnificence wrestling with each other upon every rood of ground in
the prospect, no matter how widely diversified, and misery throwing
magnificence with the strength of fate. To this would succeed a
labyrinth of bare passages and pillared galleries, with the family
procession already preparing in the quadrangle below, through the
carriages and luggage being brought together by the servants for the
day's journey.