Desert, and all the rest of it; and this is how Tattycoram will be a greater traveller in course of time than Captain Cook.’
‘I thank you,’ said the other, ‘very heartily for your confidence.’
‘Don’t mention it,’ returned Mr Meagles, ‘I am sure you are quite welcome. And now, Mr Clennam, perhaps I may ask you whether you have yet come to a decision where to go next?’
‘Indeed, no. I am such a waif and stray everywhere, that I am liable to be drifted where any current may set.’
‘It’s extraordinary to me—if you’ll excuse my freedom in saying so—that you don’t go straight to London,’ said Mr Meagles, in the tone of a confidential adviser.
‘Perhaps I shall.’
‘Ay! But I mean with a will.’
‘I have no will. That is to say,’—he coloured a little,—‘next to none that I can put in action now. Trained by main force; broken, not bent; heavily ironed with an object on which I was never consulted and which was never mine; shipped away to the other end of the world before I was of age, and exiled there until my father’s death there, a year ago; always grinding in a mill I always hated; what is to be expected from me in middle life? Will, purpose, hope? All those lights were extinguished before I could sound the words.’
‘Light ‘em up again!’ said Mr Meagles.
‘Ah! Easily said. I am the son, Mr Meagles, of a hard father and mother. I am the only child of parents who weighed, measured, and priced everything; for whom what could not be weighed, measured, and priced, had no existence. Strict people as the phrase is, professors of a stern religion, their very religion was a gloomy sacrifice of tastes and sympathies that were never their own, offered up as a part of a bargain for the security of their possessions. Austere faces, inexorable discipline, penance in this world and terror in the next—nothing graceful or gentle anywhere, and the void in my cowed heart everywhere—this was my childhood, if I may so misuse the word as to apply it to such a beginning of life.’
‘Really though?’ said Mr Meagles, made very uncomfortable by the picture offered to his imagination. ‘That was a
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