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

little figure went out of it. He felt, too, that he must relinquish the hope of its return, understanding the family character sufficiently well to be assured that he and she were divided by a broad ground of separation. The old interest he had had in her, and her old trusting reliance on him, were tinged with melancholy in his mind: so soon had change stolen over them, and so soon had they glided into the past with other secret tendernesses.

When he received her letter he was greatly moved, but did not the less sensibly feel that she was far divided from him by more than distance. It helped him to a clearer and keener perception of the place assigned him by the family. He saw that he was cherished in her grateful remembrance secretly, and that they resented him with the jail and the rest of its belongings.

Through all these meditations which every day of his life crowded about her, he thought of her otherwise in the old way. She was his innocent friend, his delicate child, his dear Little Dorrit. This very change of circumstances fitted curiously in with the habit, begun on the night when the roses floated away, of considering himself as a much older man than his years really made him. He regarded her from a point of view which in its remoteness, tender as it was, he little thought would have been unspeakable agony to her. He speculated about her future destiny, and about the husband she might have, with an affection for her which would have drained her heart of its dearest drop of hope, and broken it.

Everything about him tended to confirm him in the custom of looking on himself as an elderly man, from whom such aspirations as he had combated in the case of Minnie Gowan (though that was not so long ago either, reckoning by months and seasons), were finally departed. His relations with her father and mother were like those on which a widower son-in-law might have stood. If the twin sister who was dead had lived to pass away in the bloom of womanhood, and he had been her husband, the nature of his intercourse with Mr. and Mrs. Meagles would probably have been just what it was. This imperceptibly helped to render habitual the impression within him, that he had done with, and dismissed that part of life.

He invariably heard of Minnie from them, as telling them in her letters how happy she was, and how she loved her husband; but inseparable from that subject, he invariably saw the old cloud on Mr. Meagles’s face. Mr. Meagles had never been quite so radiant since the marriage as before. He had never quite recovered the separation from Pet. He was the same good-humoured, open creature; but as if his face, from being much turned towards the pictures of his two children which could show him only one look, unconsciously adopted a characteristic from them, it always had now, through all its changes of expression, a look of loss in it.

One wintry Saturday when Clennam was at the cottage, the Dowager Mrs. Gowan drove up, in the Hampton Court equipage which pretended to be the exclusive equipage of so many individual proprietors. She descended, in her shady ambuscade of green fan, to favour Mr. and Mrs. Meagles with a call.

“And how do you both do, Papa and Mama Meagles?” said she, encouraging her humble connections. “And when did you last hear from or about my poor fellow?”

My poor fellow was her son; and this mode of speaking of him politely kept alive, without any offence in the world, the pretence that he had fallen a victim to the Meagles’ wiles.

“And the dear pretty one?” said Mrs. Gowan. “Have you later news of her than I have?”

Which also delicately implied that her son had been captured by mere beauty, and under its fascination had forgone all sorts of worldly advantages.

“I am sure,” said Mrs. Gowan, without straining her attention on the answers she received, “it’s an unspeakable comfort to know they continue happy. My poor fellow is of such a restless disposition, and has been so used to roving about, and to being inconstant and popular among all manner of people, that it’s the greatest comfort in life. I suppose they’re as poor as mice, Papa Meagles?”

Mr. Meagles, fidgety under the question, replied, “I hope not, ma’am. I hope they will manage their little income.”

“Oh! my dearest Meagles!” returned the lady, tapping him on the arm with the green fan and then adroitly interposing it between a yawn and the company, “how can you, as a man of the world and one of the most businesslike of human beings⁠—for you know you are businesslike, and a great deal too much for us who are not⁠—”

(Which went to the former purpose, by making Mr. Meagles out to be an artful schemer.)

“⁠—How can you talk about their managing their little means? My poor dear fellow! The idea of his managing hundreds! And the sweet pretty creature too. The notion of her managing! Papa Meagles! Don’t!”

“Well, ma’am,” said Mr. Meagles, gravely, “I am sorry to admit, then, that Henry certainly does anticipate his means.”

“My dear good man⁠—I use no ceremony with you, because we are a kind of relations;⁠—positively, Mama Meagles,” exclaimed Mrs. Gowan cheerfully, as if the absurd coincidence then flashed upon her for the first time, “a kind of relations! My dear good man, in this world none of us can have everything our own way.”

This again went to the former point, and showed Mr. Meagles with all good breeding that, so far, he had been brilliantly successful in his deep designs. Mrs. Gowan thought the hit so good a one, that she dwelt upon it; repeating “Not everything. No, no; in this world we must not expect everything, Papa Meagles.”

“And may I ask, ma’am,” retorted Mr. Meagles, a little heightened in colour, “who does expect everything?”

“Oh, nobody, nobody!” said Mrs. Gowan. “I was going to say⁠—but you put me out. You interrupting Papa, what was I