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

circumstance he could foresee that might enable him to be such a friend to her as he wished to be, by altering her whole manner of life, smoothing her rough road, and giving her a home⁠—he regarded her, in that perspective, as his adopted daughter, his poor child of the Marshalsea hushed to rest. If there were a last subject in his thoughts, and it lay towards Twickenham, its form was so indefinite that it was little more than the pervading atmosphere in which these other subjects floated before him.

He had crossed the heath and was leaving it behind when he gained upon a figure which had been in advance of him for some time, and which, as he gained upon it, he thought he knew. He derived this impression from something in the turn of the head, and in the figure’s action of consideration, as it went on at a sufficiently sturdy walk. But when the man⁠—for it was a man’s figure⁠—pushed his hat up at the back of his head, and stopped to consider some object before him, he knew it to be Daniel Doyce.

“How do you do, Mr. Doyce?” said Clennam, overtaking him. “I am glad to see you again, and in a healthier place than the Circumlocution Office.”

“Ha! Mr. Meagles’s friend!” exclaimed that public criminal, coming out of some mental combinations he had been making, and offering his hand. “I am glad to see you, sir. Will you excuse me if I forget your name?”

“Readily. It’s not a celebrated name. It’s not Barnacle.”

“No, no,” said Daniel, laughing. “And now I know what it is. It’s Clennam. How do you do, Mr. Clennam?”

“I have some hope,” said Arthur, as they walked on together, “that we may be going to the same place, Mr. Doyce.”

“Meaning Twickenham?” returned Daniel. “I am glad to hear it.”

They were soon quite intimate, and lightened the way with a variety of conversation. The ingenious culprit was a man of great modesty and good sense; and, though a plain man, had been too much accustomed to combine what was original and daring in conception with what was patient and minute in execution, to be by any means an ordinary man. It was at first difficult to lead him to speak about himself, and he put off Arthur’s advances in that direction by admitting slightly, oh yes, he had done this, and he had done that, and such a thing was of his making, and such another thing was his discovery, but it was his trade, you see, his trade; until, as he gradually became assured that his companion had a real interest in his account of himself, he frankly yielded to it. Then it appeared that he was the son of a north-country blacksmith, and had originally been apprenticed by his widowed mother to a lock-maker; that he had “struck out a few little things” at the lock-maker’s, which had led to his being released from his indentures with a present, which present had enabled him to gratify his ardent wish to bind himself to a working engineer, under whom he had laboured hard, learned hard, and lived hard, seven years. His time being out, he had “worked in the shop” at weekly wages seven or eight years more; and had then betaken himself to the banks of the Clyde, where he had studied, and filed, and hammered, and improved his knowledge, theoretical and practical, for six or seven years more. There he had had an offer to go to Lyons, which he had accepted; and from Lyons had been engaged to go to Germany, and in Germany had had an offer to go to St. Petersburg, and there had done very well indeed⁠—never better. However, he had naturally felt a preference for his own country, and a wish to gain distinction there, and to do whatever service he could do, there rather than elsewhere. And so he had come home. And so at home he had established himself in business, and had invented and executed, and worked his way on, until, after a dozen years of constant suit and service, he had been enrolled in the Great British Legion of Honour, the Legion of the Rebuffed of the Circumlocution Office, and had been decorated with the Great British Order of Merit, the Order of the Disorder of the Barnacles and Stiltstalkings.

“It is much to be regretted,” said Clennam, “that you ever turned your thoughts that way, Mr. Doyce.”

“True, sir, true to a certain extent. But what is a man to do? if he has the misfortune to strike out something serviceable to the nation, he must follow where it leads him.”

“Hadn’t he better let it go?” said Clennam.

“He can’t do it,” said Doyce, shaking his head with a thoughtful smile. “It’s not put into his head to be buried. It’s put into his head to be made useful. You hold your life on the condition that to the last you shall struggle hard for it. Every man holds a discovery on the same terms.”

“That is to say,” said Arthur, with a growing admiration of his quiet companion, “you are not finally discouraged even now?”

“I have no right to be, if I am,” returned the other. “The thing is as true as it ever was.”

When they had walked a little way in silence, Clennam, at once to change the direct point of their conversation and not to change it too abruptly, asked Mr. Doyce if he had any partner in his business to relieve him of a portion of its anxieties?

“No,” he returned, “not at present. I had when I first entered on it, and a good man he was. But he has been dead some years; and as I could not easily take to the notion of another when I lost him, I bought his share for myself and have gone on by myself ever since. And here’s another thing,” he said, stopping for a moment with a good-humoured laugh in his eyes, and laying his closed right hand, with