rassed by her eyes, "not, of course, that we are | cured for her own occupation. When she had any company to you, or that we have been able almost completed the journey, and was passing to be so, or that we thought you wished it." along the gallery in which her room was, she "I have not intended to make it understood heard an angry sound of muttering and sobbing. that I did wish it." A door stood open, and within she saw the attendant upon the girl she had just left-the maid with the curious name. "No. Of course. But-in short," said Pet, timi ly touching her hand as it lay impassive on the sofa between them, "will you not allow father to render you any slight assistance or service. He will be very glad." 66 “Very glad,” said Mr. Meagles, coming forward with his wife and Clennam. Any thing 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-by!" 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-by!" said Mr. Meagles. "This is the last good-by 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-by! 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, "Oh, 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 any thing you know, or any thing 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 se-I 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 any thing 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." "Oh 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 fullness of life, until by little | At such a happy time, so propitious to the and little her passionate exclamations trailed off into broken murmurs as if she were in pain. By corresponding degrees she sunk 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 travelers through the pilgrimage of life. CHAPTER III-HOME. Ir 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, as if the plague were in the city and the dead-carts were going round. Every thing was bolted and barred that could by possibility furnish relief to an overworked people. No pictures, no unfamiliar animals, no rare plants or flowers, no natural or artificial wonders of the ancient world-all taboo with that enlightened strictness, that the ugly South Sea gods in the British Museum might have supposed themselves at home again. Nothing to see but streets, streets, streets. Nothing to breathe but streets, streets, streets. Nothing to change the brooding mind, or raise it up. Nothing for the spent toiler to do, but to compare the monotony of his seventh day with the monotony of his six days, think what & weary life he led, and make the best of it-or the worst, according to the probabilities. interests of religion and morality, Mr. Arthur Clennam, newly arrived from Marseilles by way of Dover, and by Dover coach the Blue-eyed Maid, sat in the window of a coffee-house on Ludgate Hill. Ten thousand responsible houses surrounded him, frowning as heavily on the streets they composed as if they were every one inhabited by the ten young men of the Calender's story, who blackened their faces and bemoaned their miseries every night. Fifty thousand lairs surrounded him where people lived so unwholesomely, that fair water put into their crowded rooms on Saturday night would be corrupt on Sunday morning; albeit my lord, their county member, was amazed that they failed to sleep in company with their butcher's meat. Miles of close wells and pits of houses, where the inhabitants gasped for air, stretched far away toward every point of the compass. Through the heart of the town a deadly sewer ebbed and flowed in the place of a fine fresh river. What secular want could the million or so of human beings whose daily labor, six days in the week, lay among these Arcadian objects, from the sweet sameness of which they had no escape between the cradle and the grave-what secular want could they possibly have upon their seventh day? Clearly they could want nothing but a stringent policeman. Mr. Arthur Clennam sat in the window of the coffee-house on Ludgate Hill, counting one of the neighboring bells, making sentences and burdens of songs out of it in spite of himself, and wondering how many sick people it might be the death of in the course of a year. As the hour approached, its changes of measure made it more and more exasperating. At the quarter, it went off into a condition of deadly lively importunity, urging the populace in a voluble manner to Come to church, Come to church, Come to church! At the ten minutes, it became aware that the congregation would be scanty, and slowly hammered out in low spirits, They won't come, they won't come, they won't come! At five minutes, it abandoned hope and shook every house in the neighborhood for three hundred seconds, with one dismal swing per second, as a groan of despair. "Thank Heaven!" said Clennam, when the hour struck, and the bell stopped. But its sound had revived a long train of miserable Sundays, and the procession would not stop with the bell, but continued to march on. "Heaven forgive me," said he, "and those who trained me. How I have hated this day!" There was the dreary Sunday of his childhood, when he sat with his hands before him, scared out of his senses by a horrible tract which commenced business with the poor child by asking him in its title, why he was going to Perdition?—a piece of curiosity that he really in a frock and drawers was not in a condition to satisfy-and which, for the further attraction of his infant mind, had a parenthesis in every other Mr. Arthur Clennam took up his hat, and buttoned his coat, and walked out. In the country, the rain would have developed a thousand fresh scents, and every drop would have had its bright association with some beautiful form of growth or life. In the city, it developed only foul stale smells, and was a sickly, lukewarm, dirt-stained, wretched addition to the gutters. line with some such hiccoughing reference as 2 Ep. Thess. c. iii., v. 6 and 7. There was the sleepy Sunday of his boyhood, when, like a military deserter, he was marched to chapel by a picket of teachers three times a day, morally handcuffed to another boy; and when he would willingly have bartered two meals of indigestible sermon for another ounce or two of inferior mutton at his scanty dinner in the flesh. There was the interminable Sunday of his nonage; when his mother, stern of face and unrelenting of heart, would sit all day behind a Bible-bound like her own construction of it in the hardest, barest, and straitest boards, with one dinted ornament on the cover like the drag of a chain, and a wrathful sprinkling of red upon the edges of the leaves as if it, of all books! were a fortification against sweetness of temper, natural affection, and gentle intercourse. There was the resentful Sunday of a little later, when he sat glowering and glooming through the tardy length of the day, with a sullen sense of injury in his heart, and no more real knowledge of the beneficent history of the New Testament, than if he had been bred among idolaters. There was a legion of Sundays, all days of unserviceable | yard where a shrub or two and a patch of grass bitterness and mortification, slowly passing before him. "Beg pardon, Sir," said a brisk waiter, rubbing the table. "Wish see bedroom?" "Yes. I have just made up my mind to do it." "Chaymaid!" cried the waiter. num seven wish see room!" He crossed by Saint Paul's and went down, at a long angle, almost to the water's edge, through some of the crooked and descending streets which lie (and lay more crookedly and closely then) between the river and Cheapside. Passing, now the mouldy hall of some obsolete Worshipful Company, now the illuminated windows of a Congregationless Church that seemed to be waiting for some adventurous Belzoni to dig it out and discover its history; passing silent warehouses and wharves, and here and there a narrow alley leading to the river, where a wretched little bill, FOUND DROWNED, was weeping on the wet wall, he came at last to the house he sought. An old brick house, so dingy as to be all but black, standing by itself within a gateway. Before it, a square court were as rank (which is saying much) as the iron railings inclosing them were rusty; behind it, a jumble of roofs. It was a double house, with long, narrow, heavily-framed windows. Many years ago, it had had it in its mind to slide down sideways; it had been propped up, "Gelen box however, and was leaning on some half dozen gigantic crutches: which gymnasium for the neighboring cats, weather-stained, smoke-blackened, and overgrown with weeds, appeared in these latter days to be no very sure reliance. "Stay" said Clennam, rousing himself. "I was not thinking of what I said; I answered mechanically. I am not going to sleep here. I am going home." "Deed, Sir? Chaymaid! Gelen box num seven, not go sleep here, gome." Nothing changed!" said the traveler, stopping to look round. "Dark and miserable as ever! A light in my mother's window, which seems never to have been extinguished since I came home twice a year from school, and dragged my box over this pavement. Well, well, well!" He sat in the same place as the day died, looking at the dull houses opposite, and think ing, if the disembodied spirits of former inhabitants were ever conscious of them, how they must pity themselves for their old places of imprisonment. Sometimes a face would appear behind the dingy glass of a window, and would fade away into the gloom as if it had seen enough of life and had vanished out of it. Presently the rain began to fall in slanting lines between him and those houses, and people began to collect under cover of the public passage opposite, and to look out hopelessly at the sky as the rain dropped thicker and faster. Then wet umbrellas began to appear, draggled skirts, and mud. What the mud had been doing with itself, or where it came from, who could say? But it seemed to collect in a moment, as a crowd will, and in five minutes to have splashed all the sons and daughters of Adam. The lamp-raised again, and shaking his head; "but yon lighter was going his rounds now; and as the fiery jets sprang up under his touch, one might have fancied them astonished at being suffered to introduce any show of brightness into such a dismal scene. He went up to the door, which had a projecting canopy in carved work, of festooned jacktowels and children's heads with water on the brain, designed after a once popular monumental pattern; and knocked. A shuffling step was soon heard on the stone floor of the hall, and the door was opened by an old man, bent and dried, but with keen eyes. He had a candle in his hand, and he held it up for a moment to assist his keen eyes. "Ah, Mr. Arthur!" he said, without any emotion, “you are come at last! Step in." Mr. Arthur stepped in and shut the door. "Your figure is filled out, and set," said the old man, turning to look at him with the light don't come up to your father in my opinion. Nor yet your mother." How is my mother?" "She is as she always is now. Keeps her room when not actually bedridden, and hasn't been out of it fifteen times in as many years, | her that you have come home. Please to wait Arthur." They had walked into a spare, mea- here. You won't find the room changed." He gre dining-room. The old man had put the took another candle from a cupboard, lighted it, candlestick upon the table, and, supporting his left the first on the table, and went upon his erright elbow with his left hand, was smoothing rand. He was a short, bald old man, in a highhis leathern jaws while he looked at the visit- shouldered black coat and waistcoat, drab breechor. The visitor offered his hand. The old man es, and long drab gaiters. He might, from his took it coldly enough, and seemed to prefer dress, have been either clerk or servant, and in his jaws; to which he returned, as soon as he fact had long been both. There was nothing could. about him in the way of decoration but a watch. which was lowered into the depths of its proper pocket by an old black ribbon, and had a tarnished copper key moored above it, to show where it was sunk. His head was awry, and he had a one-sided, crab-like way with him, as if his foundations had yielded at about the same time as those of the house, and he ought to have been propped up in a similar man "I doubt if your mother will approve of your coming home on the Sabbath, Arthur," he said, shaking his head warily. "You wouldn't have me go away again?" "Oh! I? I? I am not the master. It's not what I would have. I have stood between your father and mother for a number of years. I don't pretend to stand between your mother and you." "Will you tell her that I have come home?" "Yes, Arthur, yes. Oh to be sure! I'll tell ner. "How weak am I," said Arthur Clennam, when he was gone, "that I could shed tears at this reception! I, who have never experienced any thing else; who have never expected any thing else." stern strong voice, so gathered about her son, that he felt conscious of a renewal of the timid chill and reserve of his childhood. "Do you never leave your room, mother?" "What with my rheumatic affection, and what with its attendant debility or nervous weakness -names are of no matter now-I have lost the use of my limbs. I never leave my room. I have not been outside this door for-tell him for how long," she said, speaking over her shoulder. "A dozen year next Christmas," returned a cracked voice out of the dimness behind. "Is that Affery?" said Arthur, looking toward it. The cracked voice replied that it was Affery; and an old woman came forward into what doubtful light there was, and kissed her hand once; then subsided again into the dimness. He not only could, but did. It was the momentary yielding of a nature that had been disappointed from the dawn of its perceptions, but had not quite given up all its hopeful yearnings yet. He subdued it, took up the candle and examined the room. The old articles of furniture were in their old places; the Plagues of Egypt, much the dimmer for the fly and smoke plagues of London, were framed and glazed upon the walls. There was the old cellaret with nothing in it, lined with lead, like a sort of coffin in compartments; there was the old dark closet, also with nothing in it, of which he had been many a time the sole contents, in days of punishment, when he had regarded it as the veritable entrance to that bourne to which the tract had found him galloping. There was the large, hard-featured clock on the sideboard, which he used to see bending its figured brows upon him with a savage joy when he was behind-hand with his lessons, and which, when it was wound up once a week with an iron handle, used to sound as if it were growling in ferocious anticipation of the miseries into which it would bring him. But here was the old man come back, saying, "Arthur, I'll go before and light you.” Arthur followed him up the staircase, which was paneled off into spaces like so many mourn-tember ?" ing tablets, into a dim bedchamber, the floor of which had gradually so sunk and settled that the fire-place was in a dell. On a black bierlike sofa in this hollow, propped up behind with one great angular black bolster, like the block at a state execution in the good old times, sat his mother in a widow's dress. She and his father had been at variance from his earliest remembrance. To sit speechless himself in the midst of rigid silence, glancing in dread from the one averted face to the other, had been the peacefulest occupation of his childhood. She gave him one glassy kiss, and four stiff fingers muffled in worsted. This embrace concluded, he sat down on the opposite side of her little table. There was a fire in the grate, as there had been night and day for fifteen years. There was a kettle on the hob, as there had been night and day for fifteen years. There was a little mound of damped ashes on the top of the fire, and another little mound swept together under the grate, as there had been night and day for fifteen years. There was a smell of black-dye in the airless room, which the fire had been drawing out of the crape and stuff of the widow's dress for fifteen months, and out of the bier-like sofa for fifteen years. "I am able," said Mrs. Clennam, with a slight motion of her worsted-muffled right hand toward a chair on wheels, standing before a tall writingcabinet close shut up, "I am able to attend to my business duties, and I am thankful for the privilege. It is a great privilege. But no more of business on this day. It is a bad night, is it not?" "Yes, mother." 66 'Does it snow?" Snow, mother? And we only yet in Sep "All seasons are alike to me," she returned, with a grim kind of luxuriousness. "I know nothing of summer and winter, shut up here. The Lord has been pleased to put me beyond all that." With her cold gray eyes and her cold gray hair, and her immovable face, as stiff as the folds of her stony head-dress-her being beyond the reach of the seasons seemed but a fit sequence to her being beyond the reach of all changing emotions. On her little table lay two or three books, her handkerchief, a pair of steel spectacles newly taken off, and an old-fashioned gold watch in a heavy double case, Upon this last object her son's eyes and her own now rested together. "I see that you received the packet I sent you on my father's death safely, mother." "You see." "I never knew my father to show so much anxiety on any subject, as that his watch should be sent straight to you." "I keep it here as a remembrance of your father." "It was not until the last that he expressed the wish-when he could only put his hand upon it, and very indistinctly say to me, 'Your mother.' A moment before, I thought him wan “Mother, this is a change from your old act-dering in his mind, as he had been for many ive habits." "The world has narrowed to these dimensions, Arthur," she replied, glancing round the room. "It is well for me that I never set my heart upon its hollow vanities." The old influence of her presence and her hours-I think he had no consciousness of pain in his short illness-when I saw him turn himself in his bed and try to open it." "Was your father, then, not wandering in his mind when he tried to open it ?" "No. He was quite sensible at that time." |