Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens [big ebook reader txt] 📗

“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