“Her name?”
“Ah!” said Mr. Barkis, with a nod of his head.
“Peggotty.”
“Chrisen name? Or nat’ral name?” said Mr. Barkis.
“Oh, it’s not her Christian name. Her Christian name is Clara.”
“Is it though?” said Mr. Barkis.
He seemed to find an immense fund of reflection in this circumstance, and sat pondering and inwardly whistling for some time.
“Well!” he resumed at length. “Says you, ‘Peggotty! Barkis is waitin’ for a answer.’ Says she, perhaps, ‘Answer to what?’ Says you, ‘To what I told you.’ ‘What is that?’ says she. ‘Barkis is willin’,’ says you.”
This extremely artful suggestion Mr. Barkis accompanied with a nudge of his elbow that gave me quite a stitch in my side. After that, he slouched over his horse in his usual manner; and made no other reference to the subject except, half an hour afterwards, taking a piece of chalk from his pocket, and writing up, inside the tilt of the cart, “Clara Peggotty”—apparently as a private memorandum.
Ah, what a strange feeling it was to be going home when it was not home, and to find that every object I looked at, reminded me of the happy old home, which was like a dream I could never dream again! The days when my mother and I and Peggotty were all in all to one another, and there was no one to come between us, rose up before me so sorrowfully on the road, that I am not sure I was glad to be there—not sure but that I would rather have remained away, and forgotten it in Steerforth’s company. But there I was; and soon I was at our house, where the bare old elm-trees wrung their many hands in the bleak wintry air, and shreds of the old rooks’-nests drifted away upon the wind.