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.




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