Chapter 25: The Chief Butler Resigns the Seals of Office

Little Dorrit

by Charles Dickens

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.