BOOK THE SECOND: RICHES - CHAPTER 25 The Chief Butler Resigns the Seals of Office

The dinner-party was at the great Physician's. Bar was there, and

in full force. Ferdinand Barnacle was there, and in his most

engaging state. Few ways of life were hidden from Physician, and

he was oftener in its darkest places than even Bishop. There were

brilliant ladies about London who perfectly doted on him, my dear,

as the most charming creature and the most delightful person, who

would have been shocked to find themselves so close to him if they

could have known on what sights those thoughtful eyes of his had

rested within an hour or two, and near to whose beds, and under

what roofs, his composed figure had stood. But Physician was a

composed man, who performed neither on his own trumpet, nor on the

trumpets of other people. Many wonderful things did he see and

hear, and much irreconcilable moral contradiction did he pass his

life among; yet his equality of compassion was no more disturbed

than the Divine Master's of all healing was. He went, like the

rain, among the just and unjust, doing all the good he could, and

neither proclaiming it in the synagogues nor at the corner of

streets.

As no man of large experience of humanity, however quietly carried

it may be, can fail to be invested with an interest peculiar to the

possession of such knowledge, Physician was an attractive man.

Even the daintier gentlemen and ladies who had no idea of his

secret, and who would have been startled out of more wits than they

had, by the monstrous impropriety of his proposing to them 'Come

and see what I see!' confessed his attraction. Where he was,

something real was. And half a grain of reality, like the smallest

portion of some other scarce natural productions, will flavour an

enormous quantity of diluent.

It came to pass, therefore, that Physician's little dinners always

presented people in their least conventional lights. The guests

said to themselves, whether they were conscious of it or no, 'Here

is a man who really has an acquaintance with us as we are, who is

admitted to some of us every day with our wigs and paint off, who

hears the wanderings of our minds, and sees the undisguised

expression of our faces, when both are past our control; we may as

well make an approach to reality with him, for the man has got the

better of us and is too strong for us.' Therefore, Physician's

guests came out so surprisingly at his round table that they were

almost natural.

Bar's knowledge of that agglomeration of jurymen which is called

humanity was as sharp as a razor; yet a razor is not a generally

convenient instrument, and Physician's plain bright scalpel, though

far less keen, was adaptable to far wider purposes. Bar knew all

about the gullibility and knavery of people; but Physician could

have given him a better insight into their tendernesses and

affections, in one week of his rounds, than Westminster Hall and

all the circuits put together, in threescore years and ten. Bar

always had a suspicion of this, and perhaps was glad to encourage

it (for, if the world were really a great Law Court, one would

think that the last day of Term could not too soon arrive); and so

he liked and respected Physician quite as much as any other kind of

man did.

Mr Merdle's default left a Banquo's chair at the table; but, if he

had been there, he would have merely made the difference of Banquo

in it, and consequently he was no loss. Bar, who picked up all

sorts of odds and ends about Westminster Hall, much as a raven

would have done if he had passed as much of his time there, had

been picking up a great many straws lately and tossing them about,

to try which way the Merdle wind blew. He now had a little talk on

the subject with Mrs Merdle herself; sidling up to that lady, of

course, with his double eye-glass and his jury droop.

'A certain bird,' said Bar; and he looked as if it could have been

no other bird than a magpie; 'has been whispering among us lawyers

lately, that there is to be an addition to the titled personages of

this realm.'

'Really?' said Mrs Merdle.

'Yes,' said Bar. 'Has not the bird been whispering in very

different ears from ours--in lovely ears?' He looked expressively

at Mrs Merdle's nearest ear-ring.

'Do you mean mine?' asked Mrs Merdle.

'When I say lovely,' said Bar, 'I always mean you.'

'You never mean anything, I think,' returned Mrs Merdle (not

displeased).

'Oh, cruelly unjust!' said Bar. 'But, the bird.'

'I am the last person in the world to hear news,' observed Mrs

Merdle, carelessly arranging her stronghold. 'Who is it?'

'What an admirable witness you would make!' said Bar. 'No jury

(unless we could empanel one of blind men) could resist you, if you

were ever so bad a one; but you would be such a good one!'

'Why, you ridiculous man?' asked Mrs Merdle, laughing.

Bar waved his double eye-glass three or four times between himself

and the Bosom, as a rallying answer, and inquired in his most

insinuating accents:

'What am I to call the most elegant, accomplished and charming of

women, a few weeks, or it may be a few days, hence?'

'Didn't your bird tell you what to call her?' answered Mrs Merdle.

'Do ask it to-morrow, and tell me the next time you see me what it

says.'

This led to further passages of similar pleasantry between the two;

but Bar, with all his sharpness, got nothing out of them.

Physician, on the other hand, taking Mrs Merdle down to her

carriage and attending on her as she put on her cloak, inquired

into the symptoms with his usual calm directness.

'May I ask,' he said, 'is this true about Merdle?'

'My dear doctor,' she returned, 'you ask me the very question that

I was half disposed to ask you.'

'To ask me! Why me?'

'Upon my honour, I think Mr Merdle reposes greater confidence in

you than in any one.'

'On the contrary, he tells me absolutely nothing, even

professionally. You have heard the talk, of course?'

' Of course I have. But you know what Mr Merdle is; you know how

taciturn and reserved he is. I assure you I have no idea what

foundation for it there may be. I should like it to be true; why

should I deny that to you? You would know better, if I did!'

'Just so,' said Physician.

'But whether it is all true, or partly true, or entirely false, I

am wholly unable to say. It is a most provoking situation, a most

absurd situation; but you know Mr Merdle, and are not surprised.'

Physician was not surprised, handed her into her carriage, and bade

her Good Night. He stood for a moment at his own hall door,

looking sedately at the elegant equipage as it rattled away. On

his return up-stairs, the rest of the guests soon dispersed, and he

was left alone. Being a great reader of all kinds of literature

(and never at all apologetic for that weakness), he sat down

comfortably to read.

The clock upon his study table pointed to a few minutes short of

twelve, when his attention was called to it by a ringing at the

door bell. A man of plain habits, he had sent his servants to bed

and must needs go down to open the door. He went down, and there

found a man without hat or coat, whose shirt sleeves were rolled up

tight to his shoulders. For a moment, he thought the man had been

fighting: the rather, as he was much agitated and out of breath.

A second look, however, showed him that the man was particularly

clean, and not otherwise discomposed as to his dress than as it

answered this description.

'I come from the warm-baths, sir, round in the neighbouring

street.'

'And what is the matter at the warm-baths?'

'Would you please to come directly, sir. We found that, lying on

the table.'

He put into the physician's hand a scrap of paper. Physician

looked at it, and read his own name and address written in pencil;

nothing more. He looked closer at the writing, looked at the man,

took his hat from its peg, put the key of his door in his pocket,

and they hurried away together.

When they came to the warm-baths, all the other people belonging to

that establishment were looking out for them at the door, and

running up and down the passages. 'Request everybody else to keep

back, if you please,' said the physician aloud to the master; 'and

do you take me straight to the place, my friend,' to the messenger.

The messenger hurried before him, along a grove of little rooms,

and turning into one at the end of the grove, looked round the

door. Physician was close upon him, and looked round the door too.

There was a bath in that corner, from which the water had been

hastily drained off. Lying in it, as in a grave or sarcophagus,

with a hurried drapery of sheet and blanket thrown across it, was

the body of a heavily-made man, with an obtuse head, and coarse,

mean, common features. A sky-light had been opened to release the

steam with which the room had been filled; but it hung, condensed

into water-drops, heavily upon the walls, and heavily upon the face

and figure in the bath. The room was still hot, and the marble of

the bath still warm; but the face and figure were clammy to the

touch. The white marble at the bottom of the bath was veined with

a dreadful red. On the ledge at the side, were an empty laudanum-

bottle and a tortoise-shell handled penknife--soiled, but not with

ink.

'Separation of jugular vein--death rapid--been dead at least half

an hour.' This echo of the physician's words ran through the

passages and little rooms, and through the house while he was yet

straightening himself from having bent down to reach to the bottom

of the bath, and while he was yet dabbling his hands in water;

redly veining it as the marble was veined, before it mingled into

one tint.

He turned his eyes to the dress upon the sofa, and to the watch,

money, and pocket-book on the table. A folded note half buckled up

in the pocket-book, and half protruding from it, caught his

observant glance. He looked at it, touched it, pulled it a little

further out from among the leaves, said quietly, 'This is addressed

to me,' and opened and read it.

There were no directions for him to give. The people of the house

knew what to do; the proper authorities were soon brought; and they

took an equable business-like possession of the deceased, and of

what had been his property, with no greater disturbance of manner

or countenance than usually attends the winding-up of a clock.

Physician was glad to walk out into the night air--was even glad,

in spite of his great experience, to sit down upon a door-step for

a little while: feeling sick and faint.

Bar was a near neighbour of his, and, when he came to the house, he

saw a light in the room where he knew his friend often sat late

getting up his work. As the light was never there when Bar was

not, it gave him assurance that Bar was not yet in bed. In fact,

this busy bee had a verdict to get to-morrow, against evidence, and

was improving the shining hours in setting snares for the gentlemen

of the jury.

Physician's knock astonished Bar; but, as he immediately suspected

that somebody had come to tell him that somebody else was robbing

him, or otherwise trying to get the better of him, he came down

promptly and softly. He had been clearing his head with a lotion

of cold water, as a good preparative to providing hot water for the

heads of the jury, and had been reading with the neck of his shirt

thrown wide open that he might the more freely choke the opposite

witnesses. In consequence, he came down, looking rather wild.

Seeing Physician, the least expected of men, he looked wilder and

said, 'What's the matter?'

'You asked me once what Merdle's complaint was.'

'Extraordinary answer! I know I did.'

'I told you I had not found out.'

'Yes. I know you did.'

'I have found it out.'

'My God!' said Bar, starting back, and clapping his hand upon the

other's breast. 'And so have I! I see it in your face.'

They went into the nearest room, where Physician gave him the

letter to read. He read it through half-a-dozen times. There was

not much in it as to quantity; but it made a great demand on his

close and continuous attention. He could not sufficiently give

utterance to his regret that he had not himself found a clue to

this. The smallest clue, he said, would have made him master of

the case, and what a case it would have been to have got to the

bottom of!

Physician had engaged to break the intelligence in Harley Street.

Bar could not at once return to his inveiglements of the most

enlightened and remarkable jury he had ever seen in that box, with

whom, he could tell his learned friend, no shallow sophistry would

go down, and no unhappily abused professional tact and skill

prevail (this was the way he meant to begin with them); so he said

he would go too, and would loiter to and fro near the house while

his friend was inside. They walked there, the better to recover

self-possession in the air; and the wings of day were fluttering

the night when Physician knocked at the door.

A footman of rainbow hues, in the public eye, was sitting up for

his master--that is to say, was fast asleep in the kitchen over a

couple of candles and a newspaper, demonstrating the great

accumulation of mathematical odds against the probabilities of a

house being set on fire by accident When this serving man was

roused, Physician had still to await the rousing of the Chief

Butler. At last that noble creature came into the dining-room in

a flannel gown and list shoes; but with his cravat on, and a Chief

Butler all over. It was morning now. Physician had opened the

shutters of one window while waiting, that he might see the light.

'Mrs Merdle's maid must be called, and told to get Mrs Merdle up,

and prepare her as gently as she can to see me. I have dreadful

news to break to her.'

Thus Physician to the Chief Butler. The latter, who had a candle

in his hand, called his man to take it away. Then he approached

the window with dignity; looking on at Physician's news exactly as

he had looked on at the dinners in that very room.

'Mr Merdle is dead.'

'I should wish,' said the Chief Butler, 'to give a month's notice.'

'Mr Merdle has destroyed himself.'

'Sir,' said the Chief Butler, 'that is very unpleasant to the

feelings of one in my position, as calculated to awaken prejudice;

and I should wish to leave immediately.'

'If you are not shocked, are you not surprised, man?' demanded the

Physician, warmly.

The Chief Butler, erect and calm, replied in these memorable words.

'Sir, Mr Merdle never was the gentleman, and no ungentlemanly act

on Mr Merdle's part would surprise me. Is there anybody else I can

send to you, or any other directions I can give before I leave,

respecting what you would wish to be done?'

When Physician, after discharging himself of his trust up-stairs,

rejoined Bar in the street, he said no more of his interview with

Mrs Merdle than that he had not yet told her all, but that what he

had told her she had borne pretty well. Bar had devoted his

leisure in the street to the construction of a most ingenious man-

trap for catching the whole of his jury at a blow; having got that

matter settled in his mind, it was lucid on the late catastrophe,

and they walked home slowly, discussing it in every bearing.

Before parting at the Physician's door, they both looked up at the

sunny morning sky, into which the smoke of a few early fires and

the breath and voices of a few early stirrers were peacefully

rising, and then looked round upon the immense city, and said, if

all those hundreds and thousands of beggared people who were yet

asleep could only know, as they two spoke, the ruin that impended

over them, what a fearful cry against one miserable soul would go

up to Heaven!

The report that the great man was dead, got about with astonishing

rapidity. At first, he was dead of all the diseases that ever were

known, and of several bran-new maladies invented with the speed of

Light to meet the demand of the occasion. He had concealed a

dropsy from infancy, he had inherited a large estate of water on

the chest from his grandfather, he had had an operation performed

upon him every morning of his life for eighteen years, he had been

subject to the explosion of important veins in his body after the

manner of fireworks, he had had something the matter with his

lungs, he had had something the matter with his heart, he had had

something the matter with his brain. Five hundred people who sat

down to breakfast entirely uninformed on the whole subject,

believed before they had done breakfast, that they privately and

personally knew Physician to have said to Mr Merdle, 'You must

expect to go out, some day, like the snuff of a candle;' and that

they knew Mr Merdle to have said to Physician, 'A man can die but

once.' By about eleven o'clock in the forenoon, something the

matter with the brain, became the favourite theory against the

field; and by twelve the something had been distinctly ascertained

to be 'Pressure.'

Pressure was so entirely satisfactory to the public mind, and

seemed to make everybody so comfortable, that it might have lasted

all day but for Bar's having taken the real state of the case into

Court at half-past nine. This led to its beginning to be currently

whispered all over London by about one, that Mr Merdle had killed

himself. Pressure, however, so far from being overthrown by the

discovery, became a greater favourite than ever. There was a

general moralising upon Pressure, in every street. All the people

who had tried to make money and had not been able to do it, said,

There you were! You no sooner began to devote yourself to the

pursuit of wealth than you got Pressure. The idle people improved

the occasion in a similar manner. See, said they, what you brought

yourself to by work, work, work! You persisted in working, you

overdid it. Pressure came on, and you were done for! This

consideration was very potent in many quarters, but nowhere more so

than among the young clerks and partners who had never been in the

slightest danger of overdoing it. These, one and all, declared,

quite piously, that they hoped they would never forget the warning

as long as they lived, and that their conduct might be so regulated

as to keep off Pressure, and preserve them, a comfort to their

friends, for many years.

But, at about the time of High 'Change, Pressure began to wane, and

appalling whispers to circulate, east, west, north, and south. At

first they were faint, and went no further than a doubt whether Mr

Merdle's wealth would be found to be as vast as had been supposed;

whether there might not be a temporary difficulty in 'realising'

it; whether there might not even be a temporary suspension (say a

month or so), on the part of the wonderful Bank. As the whispers

became louder, which they did from that time every minute, they

became more threatening. He had sprung from nothing, by no natural

growth or process that any one could account for; he had been,

after all, a low, ignorant fellow; he had been a down-looking man,

and no one had ever been able to catch his eye; he had been taken

up by all sorts of people in quite an unaccountable manner; he had

never had any money of his own, his ventures had been utterly

reckless, and his expenditure had been most enormous. In steady

progression, as the day declined, the talk rose in sound and

purpose. He had left a letter at the Baths addressed to his

physician, and his physician had got the letter, and the letter

would be produced at the Inquest on the morrow, and it would fall

like a thunderbolt upon the multitude he had deluded. Numbers of

men in every profession and trade would be blighted by his

insolvency; old people who had been in easy circumstances all their

lives would have no place of repentance for their trust in him but

the workhouse; legions of women and children would have their whole

future desolated by the hand of this mighty scoundrel. Every

partaker of his magnificent feasts would be seen to have been a

sharer in the plunder of innumerable homes; every servile

worshipper of riches who had helped to set him on his pedestal,

would have done better to worship the Devil point-blank. So, the

talk, lashed louder and higher by confirmation on confirmation, and

by edition after edition of the evening papers, swelled into such

a roar when night came, as might have brought one to believe that

a solitary watcher on the gallery above the Dome of St Paul's would

have perceived the night air to be laden with a heavy muttering of

the name of Merdle, coupled with every form of execration.

For by that time it was known that the late Mr Merdle's complaint

had been simply Forgery and Robbery. He, the uncouth object of

such wide-spread adulation, the sitter at great men's feasts, the

roc's egg of great ladies' assemblies, the subduer of

exclusiveness, the leveller of pride, the patron of patrons, the

bargain-driver with a Minister for Lordships of the Circumlocution

Office, the recipient of more acknowledgment within some ten or

fifteen years, at most, than had been bestowed in England upon all

peaceful public benefactors, and upon all the leaders of all the

Arts and Sciences, with all their works to testify for them, during

two centuries at least--he, the shining wonder, the new

constellation to be followed by the wise men bringing gifts, until

it stopped over a certain carrion at the bottom of a bath and

disappeared--was simply the greatest Forger and the greatest Thief

that ever cheated the gallows.

Read next: BOOK THE SECOND: RICHES#CHAPTER 26 Reaping the Whirlwind

Read previous: BOOK THE SECOND: RICHES#CHAPTER 24 The Evening of a Long Day

Table of content of Little Dorrit



GO TO TOP OF SCREEN

Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book