and Arthur Clennam helped. Maggy picked up very few potatoes and a great quantity of mud; but they were all recovered, and deposited in the basket. Maggy then smeared her muddy face with her shawl, and presenting it to Mr Clennam as a type of purity, enabled him to see what she was like.
She was about eight-and-twenty, with large bones, large features, large feet and hands, large eyes and no hair. Her large eyes were limpid and almost colourless; they seemed to be very little affected by light, and to stand unnaturally still. There was also that attentive listening expression in her face, which is seen in the faces of the blind; but she was not blind, having one tolerably serviceable eye. Her face was not exceedingly ugly, though it was only redeemed from being so by a smile; a good-humoured smile, and pleasant in itself, but rendered pitiable by being constantly there. A great white cap, with a quantity of opaque frilling that was always flapping about, apologised for Maggy’s baldness, and made it so very difficult for her old black bonnet to retain its place upon her head, that it held on round her neck like a gipsy’s baby. A commission of haberdashers could alone have reported what the rest of her poor dress was made of, but it had a strong general resemblance to seaweed, with here and there a gigantic tea-leaf. Her shawl looked particularly like a tea-leaf after long infusion.
Arthur Clennam looked at Little Dorrit with the expression of one saying, ‘May I ask who this is?’ Little Dorrit, whose hand this Maggy, still calling her little mother, had begun to fondle, answered in words (they were under a gateway into which the majority of the potatoes had rolled).
‘This is Maggy, sir.’
‘Maggy, sir,’ echoed the personage presented. ‘Little mother!’
‘She is the grand-daughter – ’ said Little Dorrit.
‘Grand-daughter,’ echoed Maggy.
‘Of my old nurse, who has been dead a long time. Maggy, how old are you?’
‘Ten, mother,’ said Maggy.
‘You can’t think how good she is, sir,’ said Little Dorrit, with infinite tenderness.
‘Good she is,’ echoed Maggy, transferring the pronoun in a most expressive way from herself to her little mother.
‘Or how clever,’ said Little Dorrit. ‘She goes on errands as well as any one.’ Maggy laughed. ‘And is as trustworthy as the Bank of England.’ Maggy laughed. ‘She earns her own living entirely. Entirely, sir!’ said Little Dorrit, in a lower and triumphant tone. ‘Really does!’
‘What is her history?’ asked Clennam.
‘Think of that, Maggy?’ said Little Dorrit, taking her two large hands and clapping them together. ‘A gentleman from thousands of miles away, wanting to know your history!’
‘My history?’ cried Maggy. ‘Little mother.’
‘She means me,’ said Little Dorrit, rather confused; ‘she is very much attached to me. Her old grandmother was not so kind to her as she should have been; was she, Maggy?’
Maggy shook her head, made a drinking vessel of her clenched left hand, drank out of it, and said, ‘Gin.’ Then beat an imaginary child, and said, ‘Broom-handles and pokers.’
‘When Maggy was ten years old,’ said Little Dorrit, watching her face while she spoke, ‘she had a bad fever, sir, and she has never grown any older ever since.’
‘Ten years old,’ said Maggy, nodding her head. ‘But what a nice hospital! So comfortable, wasn’t it? Oh so nice it was. Such a Ev’nly place!’
‘She had never been at peace before, sir,’ said Little Dorrit, turning towards Arthur for an instant and speaking low, ‘and she always runs off upon that.’
‘Such beds there is there!’ cried Maggy. ‘Such lemonades! Such oranges! Such d’licious broth and wine! Such Chicking! Oh, AIN’T it a delightful place to go and stop at!’
‘So Maggy stopped there as long as she could,’ said Little Dorrit, in her former tone of telling a child’s story; the tone designed for Maggy’s ear, ‘and at last, when she could stop there no longer, she came out. Then, because she was never to be more than ten years old, however long she lived – ’
‘However long she lived,’ echoed Maggy.
‘ – And because she was very weak; indeed was so weak that when she began to laugh she couldn’t stop herself – which was a great pity – ’
(Maggy mighty grave of a sudden.)
‘ – Her grandmother did not know what to do with her, and for some years was very unkind to her indeed. At length, in course of time, Maggy began to take pains to improve herself, and to be very attentive and very industrious; and by degrees was allowed to come in and out as often as she liked, and got enough to do to support herself, and does support herself. And that,’ said Little Dorrit, clapping the two great hands together again, ‘is Maggy’s history, as Maggy knows!’
Ah! But Arthur would have known what was wanting to its completeness, though he had never heard of the words Little mother; though he had never seen the fondling of the small spare hand; though he had had no sight for the tears now standing in the colourless eyes; though he had had no hearing for the sob that checked the clumsy laugh. The dirty gateway with the wind and rain whistling through it, and the basket of muddy potatoes waiting to be spilt again or taken up, never seemed the common hole it really was, when he looked back to it by these lights. Never, never!
They were very near the end of their walk, and they now came out of the gateway to finish it. Nothing would serve Maggy but that they must stop at a grocer’s window, short of their destination, for her to show her learning. She could read after a sort; and picked out the fat figures in the tickets of prices, for the most part correctly. She also stumbled, with a large balance of success against her failures, through various philanthropic recommendations to Try our Mixture, Try our Family Black, Try our Orange-flavoured Pekoe, challenging competition at the head of Flowery Teas; and various cautions to the public against spurious establishments and adulterated articles. When he saw how pleasure brought a rosy tint into Little Dorrit’s face when Maggy made a hit, he felt that he could have stood there making a library of the grocer’s window until the rain and wind were tired.
The court-yard received them at last, and there he said goodbye to Little Dorrit. Little as she had always looked, she looked less than ever when he saw her going into the Marshalsea lodge passage, the little mother attended by her big child.
The cage door opened, and when the small bird, reared in captivity, had tamely fluttered in, he saw it shut again; and then he came away.
CHAPTER 10. Containing the whole Science of Government
The Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being told) the most important Department under Government. No public business of any kind could possibly be done at any time without the acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office. Its finger was in the largest public pie, and in the smallest public tart. It was equally impossible to do the plainest right and to undo the plainest wrong without the express authority of the Circumlocution Office. If another Gunpowder Plot had been discovered half an hour before the lighting of the match, nobody would have been justified in saving the parliament until there had been half a score of boards, half a bushel of minutes, several sacks of official memoranda, and a family-vault full of ungrammatical correspondence, on the part of the Circumlocution Office.
This glorious establishment had been early in the field, when
