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

shut up in a madhouse; I can’t stand the suspicion of the thing. I came here as well as ever I was in my life; but to suspect me of the plague is to give me the plague. And I have had it⁠—and I have got it.”

“You bear it very well, Mr. Meagles,” said the second speaker, smiling.

“No. If you knew the real state of the case, that’s the last observation you would think of making. I have been waking up night after night, and saying, now I have got it, now it has developed itself, now I am in for it, now these fellows are making out their case for their precautions. Why, I’d as soon have a spit put through me, and be stuck upon a card in a collection of beetles, as lead the life I have been leading here.”

“Well, Mr. Meagles, say no more about it now it’s over,” urged a cheerful feminine voice.

“Over!” repeated Mr. Meagles, who appeared (though without any ill-nature) to be in that peculiar state of mind in which the last word spoken by anybody else is a new injury. “Over! and why should I say no more about it because it’s over?”

It was Mrs. Meagles who had spoken to Mr. Meagles; and Mrs. Meagles was, like Mr. Meagles, comely and healthy, with a pleasant English face which had been looking at homely things for five-and-fifty years or more, and shone with a bright reflection of them.

“There! Never mind, Father, never mind!” said Mrs. Meagles. “For goodness sake content yourself with Pet.”

“With Pet?” repeated Mr. Meagles in his injured vein. Pet, however, being close behind him, touched him on the shoulder, and Mr. Meagles immediately forgave Marseilles from the bottom of his heart.

Pet was about twenty. A fair girl with rich brown hair hanging free in natural ringlets. A lovely girl, with a frank face, and wonderful eyes; so large, so soft, so bright, set to such perfection in her kind good head. She was round and fresh and dimpled and spoilt, and there was in Pet an air of timidity and dependence which was the best weakness in the world, and gave her the only crowning charm a girl so pretty and pleasant could have been without.

“Now, I ask you,” said Mr. Meagles in the blandest confidence, falling back a step himself, and handing his daughter a step forward to illustrate his question: “I ask you simply, as between man and man, you know, did you ever hear of such damned nonsense as putting Pet in quarantine?”

“It has had the result of making even quarantine enjoyable.”

“Come!” said Mr. Meagles, “that’s something to be sure. I am obliged to you for that remark. Now, Pet, my darling, you had better go along with Mother and get ready for the boat. The officer of health, and a variety of humbugs in cocked hats, are coming off to let us out of this at last: and all we jailbirds are to breakfast together in something approaching to a Christian style again, before we take wing for our different destinations. Tattycoram, stick you close to your young mistress.”

He spoke to a handsome girl with lustrous dark hair and eyes, and very neatly dressed, who replied with a half curtsey as she passed off in the train of Mrs. Meagles and Pet. They crossed the bare scorched terrace all three together, and disappeared through a staring white archway. Mr. Meagles’s companion, a grave dark man of forty, still stood looking towards this archway after they were gone; until Mr. Meagles tapped him on the arm.

“I beg your pardon,” said he, starting.

“Not at all,” said Mr. Meagles.

They took one silent turn backward and forward in the shade of the wall, getting, at the height on which the quarantine barracks are placed, what cool refreshment of sea breeze there was at seven in the morning. Mr. Meagles’s companion resumed the conversation.

“May I ask you,” he said, “what is the name of⁠—”

“Tattycoram?” Mr. Meagles struck in. “I have not the least idea.”

“I thought,” said the other, “that⁠—”

“Tattycoram?” suggested Mr. Meagles again.

“Thank you⁠—that Tattycoram was a name; and I have several times wondered at the oddity of it.”

“Why, the fact is,” said Mr. Meagles, “Mrs. Meagles and myself are, you see, practical people.”

“That you have frequently mentioned in the course of the agreeable and interesting conversations we have had together, walking up and down on these stones,” said the other, with a half smile breaking through the gravity of his dark face.

“Practical people. So one day, five or six years ago now, when we took Pet to church at the Foundling⁠—you have heard of the Foundling Hospital in London? Similar to the Institution for the Found Children in Paris?”

“I have seen it.”

“Well! One day when we took Pet to church there to hear the music⁠—because, as practical people, it is the business of our lives to show her everything that we think can please her⁠—Mother (my usual name for Mrs. Meagles) began to cry so, that it was necessary to take her out. ‘What’s the matter, Mother?’ said I, when we had brought her a little round: ‘you are frightening Pet, my dear.’ ‘Yes, I know that, Father,’ says Mother, ‘but I think it’s through my loving her so much, that it ever came into my head.’ ‘That ever what came into your head, Mother?’ ‘O dear, dear!’ cried Mother, breaking out again, ‘when I saw all those children ranged tier above tier, and appealing from the father none of them has ever known on earth, to the great Father of us all in Heaven, I thought, does any wretched mother ever come here, and look among those young faces, wondering which is the poor child she brought into this forlorn world, never through all its life to know her love, her kiss, her face, her voice, even her name!’ Now that was practical in Mother, and I told her so. I said, ‘Mother, that’s what I call practical in you, my dear.’ ”

The other, not unmoved, assented.

“So I said next day: Now, Mother, I have a proposition to make that I think