Doctor Marigold - Charles Dickens (most read books .txt) 📗

to fetch you half-a-dozen pair of the primest braces in the cart, and then to take her away with me.” Says Mim (again ferocious), “I’ll believe it when I’ve got the goods, and no sooner.” I made all the haste I could, lest he should think twice of it, and the bargain was completed, which Pickleson he was thereby so relieved in his mind that he come out at his little back door, longways like a serpent, and give us Shivery Shakey in a whisper among the wheels at parting.

 

It was happy days for both of us when Sophy and me began to travel in the cart. I at once give her the name of Sophy, to put her ever towards me in the attitude of my own daughter. We soon made out to begin to understand one another, through the goodness of the Heavens, when she knowed that I meant true and kind by her. In a very little time she was wonderful fond of me. You have no idea what it is to have anybody wonderful fond of you, unless you have been got down and rolled upon by the lonely feelings that I have mentioned as having once got the better of me.

 

You’d have laughed—or the rewerse—it’s according to your disposition—if you could have seen me trying to teach Sophy. At first I was helped—you’d never guess by what—milestones. I got some large alphabets in a box, all the letters separate on bits of bone, and saying we was going to WINDSOR, I give her those letters in that order, and then at every milestone I showed her those same letters in that same order again, and pointed towards the abode of royalty. Another time I give her CART, and then chalked the same upon the cart. Another time I give her DOCTOR MARIGOLD, and hung a corresponding inscription outside my waistcoat. People that met us might stare a bit and laugh, but what did I care, if she caught the idea? She caught it after long patience and trouble, and then we did begin to get on swimmingly, I believe you! At first she was a little given to consider me the cart, and the cart the abode of royalty, but that soon wore off.

 

We had our signs, too, and they was hundreds in number. Sometimes she would sit looking at me and considering hard how to communicate with me about something fresh,—how to ask me what she wanted explained,—and then she was (or I thought she was; what does it signify?) so like my child with those years added to her, that I half-believed it was herself, trying to tell me where she had been to up in the skies, and what she had seen since that unhappy night when she flied away. She had a pretty face, and now that there was no one to drag at her bright dark hair, and it was all in order, there was a something touching in her looks that made the cart most peaceful and most quiet, though not at all melancholy. [N.B. In the Cheap Jack patter, we generally sound it lemonjolly, and it gets a laugh.]

 

The way she learnt to understand any look of mine was truly surprising. When I sold of a night, she would sit in the cart unseen by them outside, and would give a eager look into my eyes when I looked in, and would hand me straight the precise article or articles I wanted. And then she would clap her hands, and laugh for joy. And as for me, seeing her so bright, and remembering what she was when I first lighted on her, starved and beaten and ragged, leaning asleep against the muddy cart-wheel, it give me such heart that I gained a greater heighth of reputation than ever, and I put Pickleson down (by the name of Mim’s Travelling Giant otherwise Pickleson) for a fypunnote in my will.

 

This happiness went on in the cart till she was sixteen year old.

By which time I began to feel not satisfied that I had done my whole duty by her, and to consider that she ought to have better teaching than I could give her. It drew a many tears on both sides when I commenced explaining my views to her; but what’s right is right, and you can’t neither by tears nor laughter do away with its character.

 

So I took her hand in mine, and I went with her one day to the Deaf and Dumb Establishment in London, and when the gentleman come to speak to us, I says to him: “Now I’ll tell you what I’ll do with you, sir. I am nothing but a Cheap Jack, but of late years I have laid by for a rainy day notwithstanding. This is my only daughter (adopted), and you can’t produce a deafer nor a dumber. Teach her the most that can be taught her in the shortest separation that can be named,—state the figure for it,—and I am game to put the money down. I won’t bate you a single farthing, sir, but I’ll put down the money here and now, and I’ll thankfully throw you in a pound to take it. There!” The gentleman smiled, and then, “Well, well,”

says he, “I must first know what she has learned already. How do you communicate with her?” Then I showed him, and she wrote in printed writing many names of things and so forth; and we held some sprightly conversation, Sophy and me, about a little story in a book which the gentleman showed her, and which she was able to read.

“This is most extraordinary,” says the gentleman; “is it possible that you have been her only teacher?” “I have been her only teacher, sir,” I says, “besides herself.” “Then,” says the gentleman, and more acceptable words was never spoke to me, “you’re a clever fellow, and a good fellow.” This he makes known to Sophy, who kisses his hands, claps her own, and laughs and cries upon it.

 

We saw the gentleman four times in all, and when he took down my name and asked how in the world it ever chanced to be Doctor, it come out that he was own nephew by the sister’s side, if you’ll believe me, to the very Doctor that I was called after. This made our footing still easier, and he says to me: “Now, Marigold, tell me what more do you want your adopted daughter to know?”

 

“I want her, sir, to be cut off from the world as little as can be, considering her deprivations, and therefore to be able to read whatever is wrote with perfect ease and pleasure.”

 

“My good fellow,” urges the gentleman, opening his eyes wide, “why I can’t do that myself!”

 

I took his joke, and gave him a laugh (knowing by experience how flat you fall without it), and I mended my words accordingly.

 

“What do you mean to do with her afterwards?” asks the gentleman, with a sort of a doubtful eye. “To take her about the country?”

 

“In the cart, sir, but only in the cart. She will live a private life, you understand, in the cart. I should never think of bringing her infirmities before the public. I wouldn’t make a show of her for any money.”

 

The gentleman nodded, and seemed to approve.

 

“Well,” says he, “can you part with her for two years?”

 

“To do her that good,—yes, sir.”

 

“There’s another question,” says the gentleman, looking towards her,—“can she part with you for two years?”

 

I don’t know that it was a harder matter of itself (for the other was hard enough to me), but it was harder to get over. However, she was pacified to it at last, and the separation betwixt us was settled. How it cut up both of us when it took place, and when I left her at the door in the dark of an evening, I don’t tell. But I know this; remembering that night, I shall never pass that same establishment without a heartache and a swelling in the throat; and I couldn’t put you up the best of lots in sight of it with my usual spirit,—no, not even the gun, nor the pair of spectacles,—for five hundred pound reward from the Secretary of State for the Home Department, and throw in the honour of putting my legs under his mahogany arterwards.

 

Still, the loneliness that followed in the cart was not the old loneliness, because there was a term put to it, however long to look forward to; and because I could think, when I was anyways down, that she belonged to me and I belonged to her. Always planning for her coming back, I bought in a few months’ time another cart, and what do you think I planned to do with it? I’ll tell you. I planned to fit it up with shelves and books for her reading, and to have a seat in it where I could sit and see her read, and think that I had been her first teacher. Not hurrying over the job, I had the fittings knocked together in contriving ways under my own inspection, and here was her bed in a berth with curtains, and there was her reading-table, and here was her writing-desk, and elsewhere was her books in rows upon rows, picters and no picters, bindings and no bindings, gilt-edged and plain, just as I could pick ‘em up for her in lots up and down the country, North and South and West and East, Winds liked best and winds liked least, Here and there and gone astray, Over the hills and far away. And when I had got together pretty well as many books as the cart would neatly hold, a new scheme come into my head, which, as it turned out, kept my time and attention a good deal employed, and helped me over the two years’

stile.

 

Without being of an awaricious temper, I like to be the owner of things. I shouldn’t wish, for instance, to go partners with yourself in the Cheap Jack cart. It’s not that I mistrust you, but that I’d rather know it was mine. Similarly, very likely you’d rather know it was yours. Well! A kind of a jealousy began to creep into my mind when I reflected that all those books would have been read by other people long before they was read by her. It seemed to take away from her being the owner of ‘em like. In this way, the question got into my head: Couldn’t I have a book new-made express for her, which she should be the first to read?

 

It pleased me, that thought did; and as I never was a man to let a thought sleep (you must wake up all the whole family of thoughts you’ve got and burn their nightcaps, or you won’t do in the Cheap Jack line), I set to work at it. Considering that I was in the habit of changing so much about the country, and that I should have to find out a literary character here to make a deal with, and another literary character there to make a deal with, as opportunities presented, I hit on the plan that this same book should be a general miscellaneous lot,—like the razors, flat-iron, chronometer watch, dinner plates, rolling-pin, and looking-glass,—

and shouldn’t be offered as a single indiwidual article, like the spectacles or the gun. When I had come to that conclusion, I come to another, which shall likewise be yours.

 

Often had I regretted that she never had heard me on the footboard, and that she never could hear me. It ain’t that I am vain,