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

not take them with him then, why he should wish to be able to put his hand upon them readily, and why he should distrust leaving them with people of his own sort. Did he leave them here? I declare if I knew how to avoid giving you offence, I would take any pains to do it. I put the question personally, but there’s nothing personal in it. I might put it to anyone; I have put it already to many people. Did he leave them here? Did he leave anything here?”

“No.”

“Then unfortunately, Miss Wade, you know nothing about them?”

“I know nothing about them. I have now answered your unaccountable question. He did not leave them here, and I know nothing about them.”

“There!” said Mr. Meagles rising. “I am sorry for it; that’s over; and I hope there is not much harm done.⁠—Tattycoram well, Miss Wade?”

“Harriet well? O yes!”

“I have put my foot in it again,” said Mr. Meagles, thus corrected. “I can’t keep my foot out of it here, it seems. Perhaps, if I had thought twice about it, I might never have given her the jingling name. But, when one means to be good-natured and sportive with young people, one doesn’t think twice. Her old friend leaves a kind word for her, Miss Wade, if you should think proper to deliver it.”

She said nothing as to that; and Mr. Meagles, taking his honest face out of the dull room, where it shone like a sun, took it to the Hotel where he had left Mrs. Meagles, and where he made the Report: “Beaten, Mother; no effects!” He took it next to the London Steam Packet, which sailed in the night; and next to the Marshalsea.

The faithful John was on duty when Father and Mother Meagles presented themselves at the wicket towards nightfall. Miss Dorrit was not there then, he said; but she had been there in the morning, and invariably came in the evening. Mr. Clennam was slowly mending; and Maggy and Mrs. Plornish and Mr. Baptist took care of him by turns. Miss Dorrit was sure to come back that evening before the bell rang. There was the room the Marshal had lent her, upstairs, in which they could wait for her, if they pleased. Mistrustful that it might be hazardous to Arthur to see him without preparation, Mr. Meagles accepted the offer; and they were left shut up in the room, looking down through its barred window into the jail.

The cramped area of the prison had such an effect on Mrs. Meagles that she began to weep, and such an effect on Mr. Meagles that he began to gasp for air. He was walking up and down the room, panting, and making himself worse by laboriously fanning himself with her handkerchief, when he turned towards the opening door.

“Eh? Good gracious!” said Mr. Meagles, “this is not Miss Dorrit! Why, Mother, look! Tattycoram!”

No other. And in Tattycoram’s arms was an iron box some two feet square. Such a box had Affery Flintwinch seen, in the first of her dreams, going out of the old house in the dead of the night under Double’s arm. This, Tattycoram put on the ground at her old master’s feet: this, Tattycoram fell on her knees by, and beat her hands upon, crying half in exultation and half in despair, half in laughter and half in tears, “Pardon, dear Master; take me back, dear Mistress; here it is!”

“Tatty!” exclaimed Mr. Meagles.

“What you wanted!” said Tattycoram. “Here it is! I was put in the next room not to see you. I heard you ask her about it, I heard her say she hadn’t got it, I was there when he left it, and I took it at bedtime and brought it away. Here it is!”

“Why, my girl,” cried Mr. Meagles, more breathless than before, “how did you come over?”

“I came in the boat with you. I was sitting wrapped up at the other end. When you took a coach at the wharf, I took another coach and followed you here. She never would have given it up after what you had said to her about its being wanted; she would sooner have sunk it in the sea, or burnt it. But, here it is!”

The glow and rapture that the girl was in, with her “Here it is!”

“She never wanted it to be left, I must say that for her; but he left it, and I knew well that after what you said, and after her denying it, she never would have given it up. But here it is! Dear Master, dear Mistress, take me back again, and give me back the dear old name! Let this intercede for me. Here it is!”

Father and Mother Meagles never deserved their names better than when they took the headstrong foundling-girl into their protection again.

“Oh! I have been so wretched,” cried Tattycoram, weeping much more, “always so unhappy, and so repentant! I was afraid of her from the first time I saw her. I knew she had got a power over me through understanding what was bad in me so well. It was a madness in me, and she could raise it whenever she liked. I used to think, when I got into that state, that people were all against me because of my first beginning; and the kinder they were to me, the worse fault I found in them. I made it out that they triumphed above me, and that they wanted to make me envy them, when I know⁠—when I even knew then⁠—that they never thought of such a thing. And my beautiful young mistress not so happy as she ought to have been, and I gone away from her! Such a brute and a wretch as she must think me! But you’ll say a word to her for me, and ask her to be as forgiving as you two are? For I am not so bad as I was,” pleaded Tattycoram; “I am bad enough, but not so bad as I was, indeed. I have had Miss