Then breakfast in another painted chamber, damp-stained
and of desolate proportions; and then the departure, which, to her
timidity and sense of not being grand enough for her place in the
ceremonies, was always an uneasy thing. For then the courier (who
himself would have been a foreign gentleman of high mark in the
Marshalsea) would present himself to report that all was ready; and then
her father's valet would pompously induct him into his travelling-cloak;
and then Fanny's maid, and her own maid (who was a weight on Little
Dorrit's mind--absolutely made her cry at first, she knew so little
what to do with her), would be in attendance; and then her brother's man
would complete his master's equipment; and then her father would give
his arm to Mrs General, and her uncle would give his to her, and,
escorted by the landlord and Inn servants, they would swoop down-stairs.
There, a crowd would be collected to see them enter their carriages,
which, amidst much bowing, and begging, and prancing, and lashing, and
clattering, they would do; and so they would be driven madly through
narrow unsavoury streets, and jerked out at the town gate.
Among the day's unrealities would be roads where the bright red vines
were looped and garlanded together on trees for many miles; woods of
olives; white villages and towns on hill-sides, lovely without, but
frightful in their dirt and poverty within; crosses by the way; deep
blue lakes with fairy islands, and clustering boats with awnings of
bright colours and sails of beautiful forms; vast piles of building
mouldering to dust; hanging-gardens where the weeds had grown so strong
that their stems, like wedges driven home, had split the arch and rent
the wall; stone-terraced lanes, with the lizards running into and out
of every chink; beggars of all sorts everywhere: pitiful, picturesque,
hungry, merry; children beggars and aged beggars. Often at
posting-houses and other halting places, these miserable creatures would
appear to her the only realities of the day; and many a time, when the
money she had brought to give them was all given away, she would sit
with her folded hands, thoughtfully looking after some diminutive girl
leading her grey father, as if the sight reminded her of something in
the days that were gone.
Again, there would be places where they stayed the week together in
splendid rooms, had banquets every day, rode out among heaps of wonders,
walked through miles of palaces, and rested in dark corners of great
churches; where there were winking lamps of gold and silver among
pillars and arches, kneeling figures dotted about at confessionals and
on the pavements; where there was the mist and scent of incense; where
there were pictures, fantastic images, gaudy altars, great heights and
distances, all softly lighted through stained glass, and the massive
curtains that hung in the doorways. From these cities they would go on
again, by the roads of vines and olives, through squalid villages, where
there was not a hovel without a gap in its filthy walls, not a window
with a whole inch of glass or paper; where there seemed to be nothing to
support life, nothing to eat, nothing to make, nothing to grow, nothing
to hope, nothing to do but die.