‘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 tough commencement. But come! You must now study, and profit by, all that lies beyond it, like a practical man.’
‘If the people who are usually called practical, were practical in your direction—’
‘Why, so they are!’ said Mr Meagles.
‘Are they indeed?’
‘Well, I suppose so,’ returned Mr Meagles, thinking about it. ‘Eh? One can but be practical, and Mrs Meagles and myself are nothing else.’
‘My unknown course is easier and more helpful than I had expected to find it, then,’ said Clennam, shaking his head with his grave smile. ‘Enough of me. Here is the boat.’