Little Dorrit
originator of the Institution for these poor foundlings having been a
blessed creature of the name of Coram, we gave that name to Pet’s little
maid. At one time she was Tatty, and at one time she was Coram, until we
got into a way of mixing the two names together, and now she is always
Tattycoram.’
‘Your daughter,’ said the other, when they had taken another silent turn
to and fro, and, after standing for a moment at the wall glancing down
at the sea, had resumed their walk, ‘is your only child, I know, Mr
Meagles. May I ask you--in no impertinent curiosity, but because I have
had so much pleasure in your society, may never in this labyrinth of
a world exchange a quiet word with you again, and wish to preserve an
accurate remembrance of you and yours--may I ask you, if I have not
gathered from your good wife that you have had other children?’
‘No. No,’ said Mr Meagles. ‘Not exactly other children. One other
child.’
‘I am afraid I have inadvertently touched upon a tender theme.’
‘Never mind,’ said Mr Meagles. ‘If I am grave about it, I am not at all
sorrowful. It quiets me for a moment, but does not make me unhappy. Pet
had a twin sister who died when we could just see her eyes--exactly like
Pet’s--above the table, as she stood on tiptoe holding by it.’
‘Ah! indeed, indeed!’
‘Yes, and being practical people, a result has gradually sprung up in
the minds of Mrs Meagles and myself which perhaps you may--or perhaps
you may not--understand. Pet and her baby sister were so exactly alike,
and so completely one, that in our thoughts we have never been able
to separate them since. It would be of no use to tell us that our dead
child was a mere infant. We have changed that child according to the
changes in the child spared to us and always with us. As Pet has grown,
that child has grown; as Pet has become more sensible and womanly, her
sister has become more sensible and womanly by just the same degrees.
It would be as hard to convince me that if I was to pass into the other
world to-morrow, I should not, through the mercy of God, be received
there by a daughter, just like Pet, as to persuade me that Pet herself
is not a reality at my side.’
‘I understand you,’ said the other, gently.
‘As to her,’ pursued her father, ‘the sudden loss of her little picture
and playfellow, and her early association with that mystery in which we
all have our equal share, but which is not often so forcibly presented
to a child, has necessarily had some influence on her character. Then,
her mother and I were not young when we married, and Pet has always had
a sort of grown-up life with us, though we have tried to adapt ourselves
to her. We have been advised more than once when she has been a
little ailing, to change climate and air for her as often as we
could--especially at about this time of her life--and to keep her
amused. So, as I have no need to stick at a bank-desk now (though I have
been poor enough in my time I assure you, or I should have married Mrs
Meagles long before), we go trotting about the world. This is how you
found us staring at the Nile, and the Pyramids, and the Sphinxes, and
the Desert, and all the rest of it; and this is how Tattycoram will be a
greater traveller in course of time than Captain Cook.’
‘I thank you,’ said the other, ‘very heartily for your confidence.’
‘Don’t mention it,’ returned Mr Meagles, ‘I am sure you are quite
welcome. And now, Mr Clennam, perhaps I may ask you whether you have yet
come to a decision where to go next?’
‘Indeed, no. I am such a waif and stray everywhere, that I am liable to
be drifted where any current may set.’
‘It’s extraordinary to me--if you’ll excuse my freedom in saying
so--that you don’t go straight to London,’ said Mr Meagles, in the tone
of a confidential adviser.
‘Perhaps I shall.’
‘Ay! But I mean with a will.’
‘I have no will. That is to say,’--he coloured a little,--‘next to none
that I can put in action now. Trained by main force; broken, not bent;
heavily ironed with an object on which I was never consulted and which
was never mine; shipped away to the other end of the world before I
was of age, and exiled there until my father’s death there, a year ago;
always grinding in a mill I always hated; what is to be expected from me
in middle life? Will, purpose, hope? All those lights were extinguished
before I could sound the words.’
‘Light ‘em up again!’ said Mr Meagles.
‘Ah! Easily said. I am the son, Mr Meagles, of a hard father and
mother. I am the only child of parents who weighed, measured, and priced
everything; for whom what could not be weighed, measured, and priced,
had no existence. Strict people as the phrase is, professors of a stern
religion, their very religion was a gloomy sacrifice of tastes and
sympathies that were never their own, offered up as a part of a bargain
for the security of their possessions. Austere faces, inexorable
discipline, penance in this world and terror in the next--nothing
graceful or gentle anywhere, and the void in my cowed heart
everywhere--this was my childhood, if I may so misuse the word as to
apply it to such a beginning of life.’
‘Really though?’ said Mr Meagles, made very uncomfortable by the picture
offered to his imagination. ‘That was a tough commencement. But come!
You must now study, and profit by, all that lies beyond it, like a
practical man.’
‘If the people who are usually called practical, were practical in your
direction--’
‘Why, so they are!’ said Mr Meagles.
‘Are they indeed?’
‘Well, I suppose so,’ returned Mr Meagles, thinking about it. ‘Eh? One
can but _be_ practical, and Mrs Meagles and myself are nothing else.’
‘My unknown course is easier and more helpful than I had expected to
find it, then,’ said Clennam, shaking his head with his grave smile.
‘Enough of me. Here is the boat.’
The boat was filled with the cocked hats to which Mr Meagles entertained
a national objection; and the wearers of those cocked hats landed
and came up the steps, and all the impounded travellers congregated
together. There was then a mighty production of papers on the part of
the cocked hats, and a calling over of names, and great work of signing,
sealing, stamping, inking, and sanding, with exceedingly blurred,
gritty, and undecipherable results. Finally, everything was done
according to rule, and the travellers were at liberty to depart
whithersoever they would.
They made little account of stare and glare, in the new pleasure of
recovering their freedom, but flitted across the harbour in gay boats,
and reassembled at a great hotel, whence the sun was excluded by closed
lattices, and where bare paved floors, lofty ceilings, and resounding
corridors tempered the intense heat. There, a great table in a great
room was soon profusely covered with a superb repast; and the quarantine
quarters became bare indeed, remembered among dainty dishes, southern
fruits, cooled wines, flowers from Genoa, snow from the mountain tops,
and all the colours of the rainbow flashing in the mirrors.
‘But I bear those monotonous walls no ill-will now,’ said Mr Meagles.
‘One always begins to forgive a place as soon as it’s left behind; I
dare say a prisoner begins to relent towards his prison, after he is let
out.’
They were about thirty in company, and all talking; but necessarily in
groups. Father and Mother Meagles sat with their daughter between them,
the last three on one side of the table: on the opposite side sat Mr
Clennam; a tall French gentleman with raven hair and beard, of a swart
and terrible, not to say genteelly diabolical aspect, but who had
shown himself the mildest of men; and a handsome young Englishwoman,
travelling quite alone, who had a proud observant face, and had either
withdrawn herself from the rest or been avoided by the rest--nobody,
herself excepted perhaps, could have quite decided which. The rest
of the party were of the usual materials: travellers on business, and
travellers for pleasure; officers from India on leave; merchants in
the Greek and Turkey trades; a clerical English husband in a meek
strait-waistcoat, on a wedding trip with his young wife; a majestic
English mama and papa, of the patrician order, with a family of three
growing-up daughters, who were keeping a journal for the confusion of
their fellow-creatures; and a deaf old English mother, tough in travel,
with a very decidedly grown-up daughter indeed, which daughter went
sketching about the universe in the expectation of ultimately toning
herself off into the married state.
The reserved Englishwoman took up Mr Meagles in his last remark.
‘Do you mean that a prisoner forgives his prison?’ said she, slowly and
with emphasis.
‘That was my speculation, Miss Wade. I don’t pretend to know positively
how a prisoner might feel. I never was one before.’
‘Mademoiselle doubts,’ said the French gentleman in his own language,
‘it’s being so easy to forgive?’
‘I do.’
Pet had to translate this passage to Mr Meagles, who never by any
accident acquired any knowledge whatever of the language of any country
into which he travelled. ‘Oh!’ said he. ‘Dear me! But that’s a pity,
isn’t it?’
‘That I am not credulous?’ said Miss Wade.
‘Not exactly that. Put it another way. That you can’t believe it easy to
forgive.’
‘My experience,’ she quietly returned, ‘has been correcting my belief
in many respects, for some years. It is our natural progress, I have
heard.’
‘Well, well! But it’s not natural to bear malice, I hope?’ said Mr
Meagles, cheerily.
‘If I had been shut up in any place to pine and suffer, I should always
hate that place and wish to burn it down, or raze it to the ground. I
know no more.’
‘Strong, sir?’ said Mr Meagles to the Frenchman; it being another of his
habits to address individuals of all nations in idiomatic English, with
a perfect conviction that they were bound to understand it somehow.
‘Rather forcible in our fair friend, you’ll agree with me, I think?’
The French gentleman courteously replied, ‘Plait-il?’ To which Mr
Meagles returned with much satisfaction, ‘You are right. My opinion.’
The breakfast beginning by-and-by to languish, Mr Meagles made the
company a speech. It was short enough and sensible enough, considering
that it was a speech at all, and hearty. It merely went to the effect
that as they had all been thrown together by chance, and had all
preserved a good understanding together, and were now about to disperse,
and were not likely ever to find themselves all together again, what
could they do better than bid farewell to one another, and give one
another good-speed in a simultaneous glass of cool champagne all round
the table? It was done, and with a general shaking of hands the assembly
broke up for ever.
The solitary young lady all this time had said no more. She rose with
the rest, and silently withdrew to a remote corner of the great room,
where she sat herself on a couch in a window, seeming to watch the
reflection of the water as it made a silver quivering on the bars of the
lattice. She sat, turned away from the whole length of the apartment, as
if she were lonely of her own haughty choice. And yet it would have been
as difficult as ever to say, positively, whether she avoided the rest,
or was avoided.
The shadow in which she sat, falling like a gloomy veil across her
forehead, accorded very well with the character of her beauty. One could
hardly see the face, so still and scornful, set off by the arched
dark eyebrows, and the folds of dark hair, without wondering what its
expression would be if a change came over it. That it could soften or
relent, appeared next to impossible. That it could deepen into anger or
any extreme of defiance, and that it must change in that direction when