The time being come for the renewal of his acquaintance with the Meagles
family, Clennam, pursuant to contract made between himself and Mr
Meagles within the precincts of Bleeding Heart Yard, turned his face
on a certain Saturday towards Twickenham, where Mr Meagles had a
cottage-residence of his own. The weather being fine and dry, and any
English road abounding in interest for him who had been so long away,
he sent his valise on by the coach, and set out to walk. A walk was in
itself a new enjoyment to him, and one that had rarely diversified his
life afar off.
He went by Fulham and Putney, for the pleasure of strolling over the
heath. It was bright and shining there; and when he found himself so far
on his road to Twickenham, he found himself a long way on his road to
a number of airier and less substantial destinations. They had risen
before him fast, in the healthful exercise and the pleasant road. It is
not easy to walk alone in the country without musing upon something. And
he had plenty of unsettled subjects to meditate upon, though he had been
walking to the Land's End.
First, there was the subject seldom absent from his mind, the question,
what he was to do henceforth in life; to what occupation he should
devote himself, and in what direction he had best seek it. He was far
from rich, and every day of indecision and inaction made his inheritance
a source of greater anxiety to him. As often as he began to consider how
to increase this inheritance, or to lay it by, so often his misgiving
that there was some one with an unsatisfied claim upon his justice,
returned; and that alone was a subject to outlast the longest walk.
Again, there was the subject of his relations with his mother, which
were now upon an equable and peaceful but never confidential footing,
and whom he saw several times a week. Little Dorrit was a leading and a
constant subject: for the circumstances of his life, united to those of
her own story, presented the little creature to him as the only person
between whom and himself there were ties of innocent reliance on one
hand, and affectionate protection on the other; ties of compassion,
respect, unselfish interest, gratitude, and pity.
Thinking of her, and of the possibility of her father's release from prison by the unbarring
hand of death--the only change of circumstance he could foresee that
might enable him to be such a friend to her as he wished to be, by
altering her whole manner of life, smoothing her rough road, and
giving her a home--he regarded her, in that perspective, as his adopted
daughter, his poor child of the Marshalsea hushed to rest. If there were
a last subject in his thoughts, and it lay towards Twickenham, its form
was so indefinite that it was little more than the pervading atmosphere
in which these other subjects floated before him.