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

turned her eyes upon him. “Indeed?” was all she answered.

She stood by the table so perfectly composed and still after this acknowledgment of his remark that Mr. Meagles stared at her under a sort of fascination, and could not even look to Clennam to make another move. After waiting, awkwardly enough, for some moments, Arthur said:

“Perhaps it would be well if Mr. Meagles could see her, Miss Wade?”

“That is easily done,” said she. “Come here, child.” She had opened a door while saying this, and now led the girl in by the hand. It was very curious to see them standing together: the girl with her disengaged fingers plaiting the bosom of her dress, half irresolutely, half passionately; Miss Wade with her composed face attentively regarding her, and suggesting to an observer, with extraordinary force, in her composure itself (as a veil will suggest the form it covers), the unquenchable passion of her own nature.

“See here,” she said, in the same level way as before. “Here is your patron, your master. He is willing to take you back, my dear, if you are sensible of the favour and choose to go. You can be, again, a foil to his pretty daughter, a slave to her pleasant wilfulness, and a toy in the house showing the goodness of the family. You can have your droll name again, playfully pointing you out and setting you apart, as it is right that you should be pointed out and set apart. (Your birth, you know; you must not forget your birth.) You can again be shown to this gentleman’s daughter, Harriet, and kept before her, as a living reminder of her own superiority and her gracious condescension. You can recover all these advantages and many more of the same kind which I dare say start up in your memory while I speak, and which you lose in taking refuge with me⁠—you can recover them all by telling these gentlemen how humbled and penitent you are, and by going back to them to be forgiven. What do you say, Harriet? Will you go?”

The girl who, under the influence of these words, had gradually risen in anger and heightened in colour, answered, raising her lustrous black eyes for the moment, and clenching her hand upon the folds it had been puckering up, “I’d die sooner!”

Miss Wade, still standing at her side holding her hand, looked quietly round and said with a smile, “Gentlemen! What do you do upon that?”

Poor Mr. Meagles’s inexpressible consternation in hearing his motives and actions so perverted, had prevented him from interposing any word until now; but now he regained the power of speech.

“Tattycoram,” said he, “for I’ll call you by that name still, my good girl, conscious that I meant nothing but kindness when I gave it to you, and conscious that you know it⁠—”

“I don’t!” said she, looking up again, and almost rending herself with the same busy hand.

“No, not now, perhaps,” said Mr. Meagles; “not with that lady’s eyes so intent upon you, Tattycoram,” she glanced at them for a moment, “and that power over you, which we see she exercises; not now, perhaps, but at another time. Tattycoram, I’ll not ask that lady whether she believes what she has said, even in the anger and ill blood in which I and my friend here equally know she has spoken, though she subdues herself, with a determination that anyone who has once seen her is not likely to forget. I’ll not ask you, with your remembrance of my house and all belonging to it, whether you believe it. I’ll only say that you have no profession to make to me or mine, and no forgiveness to entreat; and that all in the world that I ask you to do, is, to count five-and-twenty, Tattycoram.”

She looked at him for an instant, and then said frowningly, “I won’t. Miss Wade, take me away, please.”

The contention that raged within her had no softening in it now; it was wholly between passionate defiance and stubborn defiance. Her rich colour, her quick blood, her rapid breath, were all setting themselves against the opportunity of retracing their steps. “I won’t. I won’t. I won’t!” she repeated in a low, thick voice. “I’d be torn to pieces first. I’d tear myself to pieces first!”

Miss Wade, who had released her hold, laid her hand protectingly on the girl’s neck for a moment, and then said, looking round with her former smile and speaking exactly in her former tone, “Gentlemen! What do you do upon that?”

“Oh, Tattycoram, Tattycoram!” cried Mr. Meagles, adjuring her besides with an earnest hand. “Hear that lady’s voice, look at that lady’s face, consider what is in that lady’s heart, and think what a future lies before you. My child, whatever you may think, that lady’s influence over you⁠—astonishing to us, and I should hardly go too far in saying terrible to us to see⁠—is founded in passion fiercer than yours, and temper more violent than yours. What can you two be together? What can come of it?”

“I am alone here, gentlemen,” observed Miss Wade, with no change of voice or manner. “Say anything you will.”

“Politeness must yield to this misguided girl, ma’am,” said Mr. Meagles, “at her present pass; though I hope not altogether to dismiss it, even with the injury you do her so strongly before me. Excuse me for reminding you in her hearing⁠—I must say it⁠—that you were a mystery to all of us, and had nothing in common with any of us when she unfortunately fell in your way. I don’t know what you are, but you don’t hide, can’t hide, what a dark spirit you have within you. If it should happen that you are a woman, who, from whatever cause, has a perverted delight in making a sister-woman as wretched as she is (I am old enough to have heard of such), I warn her against you, and I warn you against yourself.”

“Gentlemen!” said Miss Wade, calmly. “When you have concluded⁠—Mr. Clennam, perhaps you