第 5 页

'One always begins to forgive a place as soon as it's left behind; I

dare say a prisoner begins to relent towards his prison, after he is let

out.'

They were about thirty in company, and all talking; but necessarily in

groups. Father and Mother Meagles sat with their daughter between them,

the last three on one side of the table: on the opposite side sat Mr

Clennam; a tall French gentleman with raven hair and beard, of a swart

and terrible, not to say genteelly diabolical aspect, but who had

shown himself the mildest of men; and a handsome young Englishwoman,

travelling quite alone, who had a proud observant face, and had either

withdrawn herself from the rest or been avoided by the rest--nobody,

herself excepted perhaps, could have quite decided which. The rest

of the party were of the usual materials: travellers on business, and

travellers for pleasure; officers from India on leave; merchants in

the Greek and Turkey trades; a clerical English husband in a meek

strait-waistcoat, on a wedding trip with his young wife; a majestic

English mama and papa, of the patrician order, with a family of three

growing-up daughters, who were keeping a journal for the confusion of

their fellow-creatures; and a deaf old English mother, tough in travel,

with a very decidedly grown-up daughter indeed, which daughter went

sketching about the universe in the expectation of ultimately toning

herself off into the married state.

The reserved Englishwoman took up Mr Meagles in his last remark. 'Do

you mean that a prisoner forgives his prison?' said she, slowly and with

emphasis.

'That was my speculation, Miss Wade. I don't pretend to know positively

how a prisoner might feel. I never was one before.'

'Mademoiselle doubts,' said the French gentleman in his own language,

'it's being so easy to forgive?'

'I do.'

Pet had to translate this passage to Mr Meagles, who never by any

accident acquired any knowledge whatever of the language of any country

into which he travelled. 'Oh!' said he. 'Dear me! But that's a pity,

isn't it?'

'That I am not credulous?' said Miss Wade.

'Not exactly that. Put it another way. That you can't believe it easy to

forgive.'

'My experience,' she quietly returned, 'has been correcting my belief

in many respects, for some years. It is our natural progress, I have

heard.'

'Well, well! But it's not natural to bear malice, I hope?' said Mr

Meagles, cheerily.

'If I had been shut up in any place to pine and suffer, I should always

hate that place and wish to burn it down, or raze it to the ground. I

know no more.' 'Strong, sir?' said Mr Meagles to the Frenchman; it being

another of his habits to address individuals of all nations in idiomatic

English, with a perfect conviction that they were bound to understand

it somehow. 'Rather forcible in our fair friend, you'll agree with me, I

think?'

The French gentleman courteously replied, 'Plait-il?' To which Mr

Meagles returned with much satisfaction, 'You are right. My opinion.'

The breakfast beginning by-and-by to languish, Mr Meagles made the

company a speech. It was short enough and sensible enough, considering

that it was a speech at all, and hearty. It merely went to the effect

that as they had all been thrown together by chance, and had all

preserved a good understanding together, and were now about to disperse,

and were not likely ever to find themselves all together again, what

could they do better than bid farewell to one another, and give one

another good-speed in a simultaneous glass of cool champagne all round

the table? It was done, and with a general shaking of hands the assembly

broke up for ever.

The solitary young lady all this time had said no more. She rose with

the rest, and silently withdrew to a remote corner of the great room,

where she sat herself on a couch in a window, seeming to watch the

reflection of the water as it made a silver quivering on the bars of the

lattice. She sat, turned away from the whole length of the apartment, as

if she were lonely of her own haughty choice. And yet it would have been

as difficult as ever to say, positively, whether she avoided the rest,

or was avoided.

The shadow in which she sat, falling like a gloomy veil across her

forehead, accorded very well with the character of her beauty. One could

hardly see the face, so still and scornful, set off by the arched

dark eyebrows, and the folds of dark hair, without wondering what its

expression would be if a change came over it. That it could soften or

relent, appeared next to impossible. That it could deepen into anger or

any extreme of defiance, and that it must change in that direction when

it changed at all, would have been its peculiar impression upon most

observers. It was dressed and trimmed into no ceremony of expression.

Although not an open face, there was no pretence in it. 'I am

self-contained and self-reliant; your opinion is nothing to me; I have

no interest in you, care nothing for you, and see and hear you with

indifference'--this it said plainly. It said so in the proud eyes, in

the lifted nostril, in the handsome but compressed and even cruel mouth.

Cover either two of those channels of expression, and the third would

have said so still. Mask them all, and the mere turn of the head would

have shown an unsubduable nature.

Pet had moved up to her (she had been the subject of remark among her

family and Mr Clennam, who were now the only other occupants of the

room), and was standing at her side.

'Are you'--she turned her eyes, and Pet faltered--'expecting any one to

meet you here, Miss Wade?'

'I? No.'

'Father is sending to the Poste Restante. Shall he have the pleasure of

directing the messenger to ask if there are any letters for you?'

'I thank him, but I know there can be none.'

'We are afraid,' said Pet, sitting down beside her, shyly and half

tenderly, 'that you will feel quite deserted when we are all gone.'

'Indeed!'

'Not,' said Pet, apologetically and embarrassed by her eyes, 'not, of

course, that we are any company to you, or that we have been able to be

so, or that we thought you wished it.'

'I have not intended to make it understood that I did wish it.'

'No. Of course. But--in short,' said Pet, timidly touching her hand as

it lay impassive on the sofa between them, 'will you not allow Father to

tender you any slight assistance or service? He will be very glad.'

'Very glad,' said Mr Meagles, coming forward with his wife and Clennam.

'Anything short of speaking the language, I shall be delighted to

undertake, I am sure.'

'I am obliged to you,' she returned, 'but my arrangements are made, and

I prefer to go my own way in my own manner.'

'Do you?' said Mr Meagles to himself, as he surveyed her with a puzzled

look. 'Well! There's character in that, too.'

'I am not much used to the society of young ladies, and I am afraid I

may not show my appreciation of it as others might. A pleasant journey

to you. Good-bye!'

She would not have put out her hand, it seemed, but that Mr Meagles put

out his so straight before her that she could not pass it. She put hers

in it, and it lay there just as it had lain upon the couch.

'Good-bye!' said Mr Meagles. 'This is the last good-bye upon the list,

for Mother and I have just said it to Mr Clennam here, and he only waits

to say it to Pet. Good-bye! We may never meet again.'

'In our course through life we shall meet the people who are coming to

meet us, from many strange places and by many strange roads,' was the

composed reply; 'and what it is set to us to do to them, and what it is

set to them to do to us, will all be done.' There was something in the

manner of these words that jarred upon Pet's ear. It implied that what

was to be done was necessarily evil, and it caused her to say in a

whisper, 'O Father!' and to shrink childishly, in her spoilt way, a

little closer to him. This was not lost on the speaker.

'Your pretty daughter,' she said, 'starts to think of such things. Yet,'

looking full upon her, 'you may be sure that there are men and women

already on their road, who have their business to do with YOU, and who

will do it. Of a certainty they will do it. They may be coming hundreds,

thousands, of miles over the sea there; they may be close at hand now;

they may be coming, for anything you know or anything you can do to

prevent it, from the vilest sweepings of this very town.'

With the coldest of farewells, and with a certain worn expression on her

beauty that gave it, though scarcely yet in its prime, a wasted look,

she left the room.

Now, there were many stairs and passages that she had to traverse in

passing from that part of the spacious house to the chamber she had

secured for her own occupation. When she had almost completed the

journey, and was passing along the gallery in which her room was, she

heard an angry sound of muttering and sobbing. A door stood open, and

within she saw the attendant upon the girl she had just left; the maid

with the curious name.

She stood still, to look at this maid. A sullen, passionate girl! Her

rich black hair was all about her face, her face was flushed and hot,

and as she sobbed and raged, she plucked at her lips with an unsparing

hand.

'Selfish brutes!' said the girl, sobbing and heaving between whiles.

'Not caring what becomes of me! Leaving me here hungry and thirsty and

tired, to starve, for anything they care! Beasts! Devils! Wretches!'

'My poor girl, what is the matter?'

She looked up suddenly, with reddened eyes, and with her hands

suspended, in the act of pinching her neck, freshly disfigured with

great scarlet blots. 'It's nothing to you what's the matter. It don't

signify to any one.'

'O yes it does; I am sorry to see you so.'

'You are not sorry,' said the girl. 'You are glad. You know you are

glad. I never was like this but twice over in the quarantine yonder; and

both times you found me. I am afraid of you.'

'Afraid of me?'

'Yes. You seem to come like my own anger, my own malice, my

own--whatever it is--I don't know what it is. But I am ill-used, I am

ill-used, I am ill-used!' Here the sobs and the tears, and the tearing

hand, which had all been suspended together since the first surprise,

went on together anew.

The visitor stood looking at her with a strange attentive smile. It was

wonderful to see the fury of the contest in the girl, and the bodily

struggle she made as if she were rent by the Demons of old.

'I am younger than she is by two or three years, and yet it's me that

looks after her, as if I was old, and it's she that's always petted and

called Baby! I detest the name. I hate her! They make a fool of her,

they spoil her. She thinks of nothing but herself, she thinks no more of

me than if I was a stock and a stone!' So the girl went on.

'You must have patience.'

'I WON'T have patience!'

'If they take much care of themselves, and little or none of you, you

must not mind it.'

I WILL mind it.'

'Hush! Be more prudent. You forget your dependent position.'

'I don't care for that. I'll run away. I'll do some mischief. I won't

bear it; I can't bear it; I shall die if I try to bear it!'

The observer stood with her hand upon her own bosom, looking at the

girl, as one afflicted with a diseased part might curiously watch the

dissection and exposition of an analogous case.

The girl raged and battled with all the force of her youth and fulness

of life, until by little and little her passionate exclamations trailed

off into broken murmurs as if she were in pain. By corresponding degrees

she sank into a chair, then upon her knees, then upon the ground beside

the bed, drawing the coverlet with her, half to hide her shamed head and

wet hair in it, and half, as it seemed, to embrace it, rather than have

nothing to take to her repentant breast.

'Go away from me, go away from me! When my temper comes upon me, I

am mad. I know I might keep it off if I only tried hard enough, and

sometimes I do try hard enough, and at other times I don't and won't.

What have I said! I knew when I said it, it was all lies. They think I

am being taken care of somewhere, and have all I want.

They are nothing but good to me. I love them dearly; no people could

ever be kinder to a thankless creature than they always are to me. Do,

do go away, for I am afraid of you. I am afraid of myself when I feel my

temper coming, and I am as much afraid of you. Go away from me, and let

me pray and cry myself better!' The day passed on; and again the wide

stare stared itself out; and the hot night was on Marseilles; and

through it the caravan of the morning, all dispersed, went their

appointed ways. And thus ever by day and night, under the sun and under

the stars, climbing the dusty hills and toiling along the weary plains,

journeying by land and journeying by sea, coming and going so strangely,

to meet and to act and react on one another, move all we restless

travellers through the pilgrimage of life.

CHAPTER 3. Home

It was a Sunday evening in London, gloomy, close, and stale. Maddening

church bells of all degrees of dissonance, sharp and flat, cracked

and clear, fast and slow, made the brick-and-mortar echoes hideous.

Melancholy streets, in a penitential garb of soot, steeped the souls of

the people who were condemned to look at them out of windows, in dire

despondency. In every thoroughfare, up almost every alley, and down

almost every turning, some doleful bell was throbbing, jerking, tolling,