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

dubious shake of the head, Mr. Meagles led the way into the house. It was just large enough, and no more; was as pretty within as it was without, and was perfectly well-arranged and comfortable. Some traces of the migratory habits of the family were to be observed in the covered frames and furniture, and wrapped-up hangings; but it was easy to see that it was one of Mr. Meagles’s whims to have the cottage always kept, in their absence, as if they were always coming back the day after tomorrow. Of articles collected on his various expeditions, there was such a vast miscellany that it was like the dwelling of an amiable Corsair. There were antiquities from Central Italy, made by the best modern houses in that department of industry; bits of mummy from Egypt (and perhaps Birmingham); model gondolas from Venice; model villages from Switzerland; morsels of tesselated pavement from Herculaneum and Pompeii, like petrified minced veal; ashes out of tombs, and lava out of Vesuvius; Spanish fans, Spezzian straw hats, Moorish slippers, Tuscan hairpins, Carrara sculpture, Trastaverini scarves, Genoese velvets and filigree, Neapolitan coral, Roman cameos, Geneva jewellery, Arab lanterns, rosaries blest all round by the Pope himself, and an infinite variety of lumber. There were views, like and unlike, of a multitude of places; and there was one little picture-room devoted to a few of the regular sticky old Saints, with sinews like whipcord, hair like Neptune’s, wrinkles like tattooing, and such coats of varnish that every holy personage served for a flytrap, and became what is now called in the vulgar tongue a Catch-em-alive O. Of these pictorial acquisitions Mr. Meagles spoke in the usual manner. He was no judge, he said, except of what pleased himself; he had picked them up, dirt-cheap, and people had considered them rather fine. One man, who at any rate ought to know something of the subject, had declared that “Sage, Reading” (a specially oily old gentleman in a blanket, with a swan’s-down tippet for a beard, and a web of cracks all over him like rich pie-crust), to be a fine Guercino. As for Sebastian del Piombo there, you would judge for yourself; if it were not his later manner, the question was, Who was it? Titian, that might or might not be⁠—perhaps he had only touched it. Daniel Doyce said perhaps he hadn’t touched it, but Mr. Meagles rather declined to overhear the remark.

When he had shown all his spoils, Mr. Meagles took them into his own snug room overlooking the lawn, which was fitted up in part like a dressing-room and in part like an office, and in which, upon a kind of counter-desk, were a pair of brass scales for weighing gold, and a scoop for shovelling out money.

“Here they are, you see,” said Mr. Meagles. “I stood behind these two articles five-and-thirty years running, when I no more thought of gadding about than I now think of⁠—staying at home. When I left the Bank for good, I asked for them, and brought them away with me. I mention it at once, or you might suppose that I sit in my countinghouse (as Pet says I do), like the king in the poem of the four-and-twenty blackbirds, counting out my money.”

Clennam’s eyes had strayed to a natural picture on the wall, of two pretty little girls with their arms entwined. “Yes, Clennam,” said Mr. Meagles, in a lower voice. “There they both are. It was taken some seventeen years ago. As I often say to Mother, they were babies then.”

“Their names?” said Arthur.

“Ah, to be sure! You have never heard any name but Pet. Pet’s name is Minnie; her sister’s Lillie.”

“Should you have known, Mr. Clennam, that one of them was meant for me?” asked Pet herself, now standing in the doorway.

“I might have thought that both of them were meant for you, both are still so like you. Indeed,” said Clennam, glancing from the fair original to the picture and back, “I cannot even now say which is not your portrait.”

“D’ye hear that, Mother?” cried Mr. Meagles to his wife, who had followed her daughter. “It’s always the same, Clennam; nobody can decide. The child to your left is Pet.”

The picture happened to be near a looking-glass. As Arthur looked at it again, he saw, by the reflection of the mirror, Tattycoram stop in passing outside the door, listen to what was going on, and pass away with an angry and contemptuous frown upon her face, that changed its beauty into ugliness.

“But come!” said Mr. Meagles. “You have had a long walk, and will be glad to get your boots off. As to Daniel here, I suppose he’d never think of taking his boots off, unless we showed him a bootjack.”

“Why not?” asked Daniel, with a significant smile at Clennam.

“Oh! You have so many things to think about,” returned Mr. Meagles, clapping him on the shoulder, as if his weakness must not be left to itself on any account. “Figures, and wheels, and cogs, and levers, and screws, and cylinders, and a thousand things.”

“In my calling,” said Daniel, amused, “the greater usually includes the less. But never mind, never mind! Whatever pleases you, pleases me.”

Clennam could not help speculating, as he seated himself in his room by the fire, whether there might be in the breast of this honest, affectionate, and cordial Mr. Meagles, any microscopic portion of the mustard-seed that had sprung up into the great tree of the Circumlocution Office. His curious sense of a general superiority to Daniel Doyce, which seemed to be founded, not so much on anything in Doyce’s personal character as on the mere fact of his being an originator and a man out of the beaten track of other men, suggested the idea. It might have occupied him until he went down to dinner an hour afterwards, if he had not had another question to consider, which had been in his mind so long ago as before he was in quarantine at Marseilles, and which had now returned to