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David Copperfield

Dickens, Charles

By Listen Books

Part - 5

Published: 1850 • Categorie(s): Fiction • Source: http://en.wikisource.org

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter-53

Chapter-54

Chapter-55

Chapter-56

Chapter-57

Chapter-58

Chapter-59

Chapter-60

Chapter-61

Chapter-62

Chapter-63

Chapter-64

Chapter 53

Chapter 53

Another Retrospect I must pause yet once again. O, my child-wife, there is a figure in the moving crowd before my memory, quiet and still, saying in its innocent love and childish beauty, Stop to think of me - turn to look upon the Little Blossom, as it flutters to the ground! I do. All else grows dim, and fades away. I am again with Dora, in our cottage. I do not know how long she has been ill. I am so used to it in feeling, that I cannot count the time. It is not really long, in weeks or months; but, in my usage and experience, it is a weary, weary while. They have left off telling me to ‘wait a few days more’. I have begun to fear, remotely, that the day may never shine, when I shall see my child-wife running in the sunlight with her old friend Jip. He is, as it were suddenly, grown very old. It may be that he misses in his mistress, something that enlivened him and made him younger; but he mopes, and his sight is weak, and his limbs are feeble, and my aunt is sorry that he objects to her no more, but creeps near her as he lies on Dora’s bed - she sitting at the bedside - and mildly licks her hand. Dora lies smiling on us, and is beautiful, and utters no hasty or complaining word. She says that we are very good to her; that her dear old careful boy is tiring himself out, she knows; that my aunt has no sleep, yet is always wakeful, active, and kind. Sometimes, the little bird-like ladies come to see her; and then we talk about our wedding-day, and all that happy time. What a strange rest and pause in my life there seems to be - and in all life, within doors and without - when I sit in the quiet, shaded, orderly room, with the blue eyes of my child-wife turned towards me, and her little fingers twining round my hand! Many and many an hour I sit thus; but, of all those times, three times come the freshest on my mind. It is morning; and Dora, made so trim by my aunt’s hands, shows me how her pretty hair will curl upon the pillow yet, an how long and bright it is, and how she likes to have it loosely gathered in that net she wears. ‘Not that I am vain of it, now, you mocking boy,’ she says, when I smile; ‘but because you used to say you thought it so beautiful; and because, when I first began to think about you, I used to peep in the glass, and wonder whether you would like very much to have a lock of it. Oh what a foolish fellow you were, Doady, when I gave you one!’ ‘That was on the day when you were painting the flowers I had given you, Dora, and when I told you how much in love I was.’ ‘Ah! but I didn’t like to tell you,’ says Dora, ‘then, how I had cried over them, because I believed you really liked me! When I can run about again as I used to do, Doady, let us go and see those places where we were such a silly couple, shall we? And take some of the old walks? And not forget poor papa?’ ‘Yes, we will, and have some happy days. So you must make haste to get well, my dear.’ ‘Oh, I shall soon do that! I am so much better, you don’t know!’ It is evening; and I sit in the same chair, by the same bed, with the same face turned towards me. We have been silent, and there is a smile upon her face. I have ceased to carry my light burden up and down stairs now. She lies here all the day. ‘Doady!’ ‘My dear Dora!’ ‘You won’t think what I am going to say, unreasonable, after what you told me, such a little while ago, of Mr. Wickfield’s not being well? I want to see Agnes. Very much I want to see her.’ ‘I will write to her, my dear.’ ‘Will you?’ ‘Directly.’ ‘What a good, kind boy! Doady, take me on your arm. Indeed, my dear, it’s not a whim. It’s not a foolish fancy. I want, very much indeed, to see her!’

‘I am certain of it. I have only to tell her so, and she is sure to come.’ ‘You are very lonely when you go downstairs, now?’ Dora whispers, with her arm about my neck. ‘How can I be otherwise, my own love, when I see your empty chair?’ ‘My empty chair!’ She clings to me for a little while, in silence. ‘And you really miss me, Doady?’ looking up, and brightly smiling. ‘Even poor, giddy, stupid me?’ ‘My heart, who is there upon earth that I could miss so much?’ ‘Oh, husband! I am so glad, yet so sorry!’ creeping closer to me, and folding me in both her arms. She laughs and sobs, and then is quiet, and quite happy. ‘Quite!’ she says. ‘Only give Agnes my dear love, and tell her that I want very, very, much to see her; and I have nothing left to wish for.’ ‘Except to get well again, Dora.’ ‘Ah, Doady! Sometimes I think - you know I always was a silly little thing! - that that will never be!’ ‘Don’t say so, Dora! Dearest love, don’t think so!’ ‘I won’t, if I can help it, Doady. But I am very happy; though my dear boy is so lonely by himself, before his child-wife’s empty chair!’ It is night; and I am with her still. Agnes has arrived; has been among us for a whole day and an evening. She, my aunt, and I, have sat with Dora since the morning, all together. We have not talked much, but Dora has been perfectly contented and cheerful. We are now alone. Do I know, now, that my child-wife will soon leave me? They have told me so; they have told me nothing new to my thought-s- but I am far from sure that I have taken that truth to heart. I cannot master it. I have withdrawn by myself, many times today, to weep. I have remembered Who wept for a parting between the living and the dead. I have bethought me of all that gracious and compassionate history. I have tried to resign myself, and to console myself; and that, I hope, I may have done imperfectly; but what I cannot firmly settle in my mind is, that the end will absolutely come. I hold her hand in mine, I hold her heart in mine, I see her love for me, alive in all its strength. I cannot shut out a pale lingering shadow of belief that she will be spared. ‘I am going to speak to you, Doady. I am going to say something I have often thought of saying, lately. You won’t mind?’ with a gentle look. ‘Mind, my darling?’ ‘Because I don’t know what you will think, or what you may have thought sometimes. Perhaps you have often thought the same. Doady, dear, I am afraid I was too young.’ I lay my face upon the pillow by her, and she looks into my eyes, and speaks very softly. Gradually, as she goes on, I feel, with a stricken heart, that she is speaking of herself as past. ‘I am afraid, dear, I was too young. I don’t mean in years only, but in experience, and thoughts, and everything. I was such a silly little creature! I am afraid it would have been bet-ter, if we had only loved each other as a boy and girl, and for-gotten it. I have begun to think I was not fit to be a wife.’ I try to stay my tears, and to reply, ‘Oh, Dora, love, as fit as I to be a husband!’ ‘I don’t know,’ with the old shake of her curls. ‘Perhaps! But if I had been more fit to be married I might have made you more so, too. Besides, you are very clever, and I never was.’ ‘We have been very happy, my sweet Dora.’ ‘I was very happy, very. But, as years went on, my dear boy would have wearied of his child-wife. She would have been less and less a companion for him. He would have been more and more sensible of what was wanting in his home. She wouldn’t have improved. It is better as it is.’ ‘Oh, Dora, dearest, dearest, do not speak to me so. Every word seems a reproach!’ ‘No, not a syllable!’ she answers, kissing me. ‘Oh, my dear, you never deserved it, and I loved you far too well to say a reproachful word to you, in earnest - it was all the merit I had, except being pretty - or you thought me so. Is it lonely, down-stairs, Doady?’ ‘Very! Very!’ ‘Don’t cry! Is my chair there?’ ‘In its old place.’ ‘Oh, how my poor boy cries! Hush, hush! Now, make me one promise. I want to speak to Agnes. When you go downstairs, tell Agnes so, and send her up to me; and while I speak to her, let no one come - not even aunt. I want to speak to Agnes by herself. I want to speak to Agnes, quite alone.’ I promise that she shall, immediately; but I cannot leave her, for my grief. ‘I said that it was better as it is!’ she whispers, as she holds me in her arms. ‘Oh, Doady, after more years, you never could have loved your child-wife better than you do; and, after more years, she would so have tried and disappointed you, that you might not have been able to love her half so well! I know I was too young and foolish. It is much better as it is!’ Agnes is downstairs, when I go into the parlour; and I give her the message. She disappears, leaving me alone with Jip. His Chinese house is by the fire; and he lies within it, on his bed of flannel, querulously trying to sleep. The bright moon is high and clear. As I look out on the night, my tears fall fast, and my undisciplined heart is chastened heavily - heavily. I sit down by the fire, thinking with a blind remorse of all those secret feelings I have nourished since my marriage. I think of every little trifle between me and Dora, and feel the truth, that trifles make the sum of life. Ever rising from the sea of my remembrance, is the image of the dear child as I knew her first, graced by my young love, and by her own, with every fascination wherein such love is rich. Would it, indeed, have been better if we had loved each other as a boy and a girl, and forgotten it? Undisciplined heart, reply! How the time wears, I know not; until I am recalled by my child-wife’s old companion. More restless than he was, he crawls out of his house, and looks at me, and wanders to the door, and whines to go upstairs. ‘Not tonight, Jip! Not tonight!’ He comes very slowly back to me, licks my hand, and lifts his dim eyes to my face. ‘Oh, Jip! It may be, never again!’ He lies down at my feet, stretches himself out as if to sleep, and with a plaintive cry, is dead. ‘Oh, Agnes! Look, look, here!’ - That face, so full of pity, and of grief, that rain of tears, that awful mute appeal to me, that solemn hand upraised towards Heaven!

‘Agnes?’ It is over. Darkness comes before my eyes; and, for a time, all things are blotted out of my remembrance.

Chapter 54

Chapter 54

Mr. Micawber's Transactions This is not the time at which I am to enter on the state of my mind beneath its load of sorrow. I came to think that the Future was walled up before me, that the energy and action of my life were at an end, that I never could find any refuge but in the grave. I came to think so, I say, but not in the first shock of my grief. It slowly grew to that. If the events I go on to relate, had not thickened around me, in the beginning to confuse, and in the end to augment, my affliction, it is possible (though I think not probable), that I might have fallen at once into this condition. As it was, an interval occurred before I fully knew my own distress; an interval, in which I even supposed that its sharpest pangs were past; and when my mind could soothe it-self by resting on all that was most innocent and beautiful, in the tender story that was closed for ever. When it was first proposed that I should go abroad, or how it came to be agreed among us that I was to seek the restoration of my peace in change and travel, I do not, even now, distinctly know. The spirit of Agnes so pervaded all we thought, and said, and did, in that time of sorrow, that I assume I may refer the project to her influence. But her influence was so quiet that I know no more. And now, indeed, I began to think that in my old association of her with the stained-glass window in the church, a prophetic foreshadowing of what she would be to me, in the calamity that was to happen in the fullness of time, had found a way into my mind. In all that sorrow, from the moment, never to be forgot-ten, when she stood before me with her upraised hand, she was like a sacred presence in my lonely house. When the Angel of Death alighted there, my child-wife fell asleep - they told me so when I could bear to hear it - on her bosom, with a smile.

From my swoon, I first awoke to a consciousness of her compassionate tears, her words of hope and peace, her gentle face bending down as from a purer region nearer Heaven, over my undisciplined heart, and softening its pain. Let me go on. I was to go abroad. That seemed to have been determined among us from the first. The ground now covering all that could perish of my departed wife, I waited only for what Mr. Micawber called the ‘final pulverization of Heep’; and for the departure of the emigrants. At the request of Traddles, most affectionate and devoted of friends in my trouble, we returned to Canterbury: I mean my aunt, Agnes, and I. We proceeded by appointment straight to Mr. Micawber’s house; where, and at Mr. Wickfield’s, my friend had been labouring ever since our explosive meeting. When poor Mrs. Micawber saw me come in, in my black clothes, she was sensibly affected. There was a great deal of good in Mrs. Micawber’s heart, which had not been dunned out of it in all those many years. ‘Well, Mr. and Mrs. Micawber,’ was my aunt’s first salutation after we were seated. ‘Pray, have you thought about that emigration proposal of mine?’ ‘My dear madam,’ returned Mr. Micawber, ‘perhaps I cannot better express the conclusion at which Mrs. Micawber, your humble servant, and I may add our children, have jointly and severally arrived, than by borrowing the language of an illustrious poet, to reply that our Boat is on the shore, and our Bark is on the sea.’ ‘That’s right,’ said my aunt. ‘I augur all sort of good from your sensible decision.’ ‘Madam, you do us a great deal of honour,’ he rejoined. He then referred to a memorandum. ‘With respect to the pecuniary assistance enabling us to launch our frail canoe on the ocean of enterprise, I have reconsidered that important business-point; and would beg to propose my notes of hand - drawn, it is needless to stipulate, on stamps of the amounts respectively required by the various Acts of Parliament applying to such securities - at eighteen, twenty-four, and thirty months. The proposition I originally submitted, was twelve, eighteen, and twenty-four; but I am apprehensive that such an arrangement might not allow sufficient time for the requisite amount of - Something - to turn up. We might not,’ said Mr. Micawber, looking round the room as if it represented several hundred acres of highly cultivated land, ‘on the first responsibility becoming due, have been successful in our harvest, or we might not have got our harvest in. Labour, I believe, is some-times difficult to obtain in that portion of our colonial possessions where it will be our lot to combat with the teeming soil.’ ‘Arrange it in any way you please, sir,’ said my aunt. ‘Madam,’ he replied, ‘Mrs. Micawber and myself are deeply sensible of the very considerate kindness of our friends and patrons. What I wish is, to be perfectly business-like, and perfectly punctual. Turning over, as we are about to turn over, an entirely new leaf; and falling back, as we are now in the act of falling back, for a Spring of no common magnitude; it is important to my sense of self-respect, besides being an example to my son, that these arrangements should be concluded as between man and man.’ I don’t know that Mr. Micawber attached any meaning to this last phrase; I don’t know that anybody ever does, or did; but he appeared to relish it uncommonly, and repeated, with an impressive cough, ‘as between man and man’. ‘I propose,’ said Mr. Micawber, ‘Bills - a convenience to the mercantile world, for which, I believe, we are originally indebted to the Jews, who appear to me to have had a devilish deal too much to do with them ever since - because they are negotiable. But if a Bond, or any other description of security, would be preferred, I should be happy to execute any such instrument. As between man and man.’ My aunt observed, that in a case where both parties were willing to agree to anything, she took it for granted there would be no difficulty in settling this point. Mr. Micawber was of her opinion. ‘In reference to our domestic preparations, madam,’ said Mr. Micawber, with some pride, ‘for meeting the destiny to which we are now understood to be self-devoted, I beg to report them. My eldest daughter attends at five every morning in a neighbouring establishment, to acquire the process - if process it may be called - of milking cows. My younger children are instructed to observe, as closely as circumstances will permit, the habits of the pigs and poultry maintained in the poorer parts of this city: a pursuit from which they have, on two occasions, been brought home, within an inch of being run over. I have myself directed some attention, during the past week, to the art of baking; and my son Wilkins has issued forth with a walking-stick and driven cattle, when permitted, by the rugged hirelings who had them in charge, to render any voluntary service in that direction - which I regret to say, for the credit of our nature, was not often; he being generally warned, with imprecations, to desist.’ ‘All very right indeed,’ said my aunt, encouragingly. ‘Mrs. Micawber has been busy, too, I have no doubt.’ ‘My dear madam,’ returned Mrs. Micawber, with her business-like air. ‘I am free to confess that I have not been actively engaged in pursuits immediately connected with cultivation or with stock, though well aware that both will claim my attention on a foreign shore. Such opportunities as I have been enabled to alienate from my domestic duties, I have devoted to corresponding at some length with my family. For I own it seems to me, my dear Mr. Copperfield,’ said Mrs. Micawber, who always fell back on me, I suppose from old habit, to whomsoever else she might address her discourse at starting, ‘that the time is come when the past should be buried in oblivion; when my family should take Mr. Micawber by the hand, and Mr. Micawber should take my family by the hand; when the lion should lie down with the lamb, and my family be on terms with Mr. Micawber.’ I said I thought so too. ‘This, at least, is the light, my dear Mr. Copperfield,’ pursued Mrs. Micawber, ‘in which I view the subject. When I lived at home with my papa and mama, my papa was accustomed to ask, when any point was under discussion in our limited circle, “In what light does my Emma view the subject?” That my papa was too partial, I know; still, on such a point as the frigid coldness which has ever subsisted between Mr. Micawber and my family, I necessarily have formed an opinion, delusive though it may be.’ ‘No doubt. Of course you have, ma’am,’ said my aunt. ‘Precisely so,’ assented Mrs. Micawber. ‘Now, I may be wrong in my conclusions; it is very likely that I am, but my individual impression is, that the gulf between my family and Mr. Micawber may be traced to an apprehension, on the part of my family, that Mr. Micawber would require pecuniary accommodation. I cannot help thinking,’ said Mrs. Micawber, with an air of deep sagacity, ‘that there are members of my family who have been apprehensive that Mr. Micawber would solicit them for their names. - I do not mean to be conferred in Baptism upon our children, but to be inscribed on Bills of Ex-change, and negotiated in the Money Market.’ The look of penetration with which Mrs. Micawber announced this discovery, as if no one had ever thought of it be-fore, seemed rather to astonish my aunt; who abruptly replied, ‘Well, ma’am, upon the whole, I shouldn’t wonder if you were right!’ ‘Mr. Micawber being now on the eve of casting off the pecuniary shackles that have so long enthralled him,’ said Mrs. Micawber, ‘and of commencing a new career in a country where there is sufficient range for his abilities, - which, in my opinion, is exceedingly important; Mr. Micawber’s abilities peculiarly requiring space, - it seems to me that my family should signalize the occasion by coming forward. What I could wish to see, would be a meeting between Mr. Micawber and my family at a festive entertainment, to be given at my family’s expense; where Mr. Micawber’s health and prosperity being proposed, by some leading member of my family, Mr. Micawber might have an opportunity of developing his views.’ ‘My dear,’ said Mr. Micawber, with some heat, ‘it may be better for me to state distinctly, at once, that if I were to develop my views to that assembled group, they would possibly be found of an offensive nature: my impression being that your family are, in the aggregate, impertinent Snobs; and, in detail, unmitigated Ruffians.’ ‘Micawber,’ said Mrs. Micawber, shaking her head, ‘no! You have never understood them, and they have never understood you.’ Mr. Micawber coughed. ‘They have never understood you, Micawber,’ said his wife. ‘They may be incapable of it. If so, that is their misfortune. I can pity their misfortune.’

‘I am extremely sorry, my dear Emma,’ said Mr. Micawber, relenting, ‘to have been betrayed into any expressions that might, even remotely, have the appearance of being strong expressions. All I would say is, that I can go abroad without your family coming forward to favour me, - in short, with a parting Shove of their cold shoulders; and that, upon the whole, I would rather leave England with such impetus as I possess, than derive any acceleration of it from that quarter. At the same time, my dear, if they should condescend to reply to your communications - which our joint experience renders most improbable - far be it from me to be a barrier to your wishes.’ The matter being thus amicably settled, Mr. Micawber gave Mrs. Micawber his arm, and glancing at the heap of books and papers lying before Traddles on the table, said they would leave us to ourselves; which they ceremoniously did. ‘My dear Copperfield,’ said Traddles, leaning back in his chair when they were gone, and looking at me with an affection that made his eyes red, and his hair all kinds of shapes, ‘I don’t make any excuse for troubling you with business, be-cause I know you are deeply interested in it, and it may divert your thoughts. My dear boy, I hope you are not worn out?’ ‘I am quite myself,’ said I, after a pause. ‘We have more cause to think of my aunt than of anyone. You know how much she has done.’ ‘Surely, surely,’ answered Traddles. ‘Who can forget it!’ ‘But even that is not all,’ said I. ‘During the last fortnight, some new trouble has vexed her; and she has been in and out of London every day. Several times she has gone out early, and been absent until evening. Last night, Traddles, with this journey before her, it was almost midnight before she came home. You know what her consideration for others is. She will not tell me what has happened to distress her.’ My aunt, very pale, and with deep lines in her face, sat immovable until I had finished; when some stray tears found their way to her cheeks, and she put her hand on mine. ‘It’s nothing, Trot; it’s nothing. There will be no more of it. You shall know by and by. Now Agnes, my dear, let us attend to these affairs.’ ‘I must do Mr. Micawber the justice to say,’ Traddles began, ‘that although he would appear not to have worked to any good account for himself, he is a most untiring man when he works for other people. I never saw such a fellow. If he always goes on in the same way, he must be, virtually, about two hundred years old, at present. The heat into which he has been continually putting himself; and the distracted and impetuous manner in which he has been diving, day and night, among papers and books; to say nothing of the immense number of letters he has written me between this house and Mr. Wickfield’s, and often across the table when he has been sitting opposite, and might much more easily have spoken; is quite extraordinary.’ ‘Letters!’ cried my aunt. ‘I believe he dreams in letters!’ ‘There’s Mr. Dick, too,’ said Traddles, ‘has been doing wonders! As soon as he was released from overlooking Uriah Heep, whom he kept in such charge as I never saw exceeded, he began to devote himself to Mr. Wickfield. And really his anxiety to be of use in the investigations we have been making, and his real usefulness in extracting, and copying, and fetching, and carrying, have been quite stimulating to us.’ ‘Dick is a very remarkable man,’ exclaimed my aunt; ‘and I always said he was. Trot, you know it.’ ‘I am happy to say, Miss Wickfield,’ pursued Traddles, at once with great delicacy and with great earnestness, ‘that in your absence Mr. Wickfield has considerably improved. Relieved of the incubus that had fastened upon him for so long a time, and of the dreadful apprehensions under which he had lived, he is hardly the same person. At times, even his impaired power of concentrating his memory and attention on particular points of business, has recovered itself very much; and he has been able to assist us in making some things clear, that we should have found very difficult indeed, if not hopeless, without him. But what I have to do is to come to results; which are short enough; not to gossip on all the hopeful circumstances I have observed, or I shall never have done.’ His natural manner and agreeable simplicity made it transparent that he said this to put us in good heart, and to enable Agnes to hear her father mentioned with greater confidence; but it was not the less pleasant for that. ‘Now, let me see,’ said Traddles, looking among the papers on the table. ‘Having counted our funds, and reduced to order a great mass of unintentional confusion in the first place, and of wilful confusion and falsification in the second, we take it to be clear that Mr. Wickfield might now wind up his business, and his agency-trust, and exhibit no deficiency or defalcation whatever.’ ‘Oh, thank Heaven!’ cried Agnes, fervently. ‘But,’ said Traddles, ‘the surplus that would be left as his means of support - and I suppose the house to be sold, even in saying this - would be so small, not exceeding in all probability some hundreds of pounds, that perhaps, Miss Wickfield, it would be best to consider whether he might not retain his agency of the estate to which he has so long been receiver. His friends might advise him, you know; now he is free. You your-self, Miss Wickfield - Copperfield - I -’ ‘I have considered it, Trotwood,’ said Agnes, looking to me, ‘and I feel that it ought not to be, and must not be; even on the recommendation of a friend to whom I am so grateful, and owe so much.’ ‘I will not say that I recommend it,’ observed Traddles. ‘I think it right to suggest it. No more.’ ‘I am happy to hear you say so,’ answered Agnes, steadily, ‘for it gives me hope, almost assurance, that we think alike. Dear Mr. Traddles and dear Trotwood, papa once free with honour, what could I wish for! I have always aspired, if I could have released him from the toils in which he was held, to render back some little portion of the love and care I owe him, and to devote my life to him. It has been, for years, the utmost height of my hopes. To take our future on myself, will be the next great happiness - the next to his release from all trust and responsibility - that I can know.’ ‘Have you thought how, Agnes?’ ‘Often! I am not afraid, dear Trotwood. I am certain of success. So many people know me here, and think kindly of me, that I am certain. Don’t mistrust me. Our wants are not many. If I rent the dear old house, and keep a school, I shall be useful and happy.’ The calm fervour of her cheerful voice brought back so vividly, first the dear old house itself, and then my solitary home, that my heart was too full for speech. Traddles pretended for a little while to be busily looking among the papers.

‘Next, Miss Trotwood,’ said Traddles, ‘that property of yours.’ ‘Well, sir,’ sighed my aunt. ‘All I have got to say about it is, that if it’s gone, I can bear it; and if it’s not gone, I shall be glad to get it back.’ ‘It was originally, I think, eight thousand pounds, Consols?’ said Traddles. ‘Right!’ replied my aunt. ‘I can’t account for more than five,’ said Traddles, with an air of perplexity. ‘- thousand, do you mean?’ inquired my aunt, with uncommon composure, ‘or pounds?’ ‘Five thousand pounds,’ said Traddles. ‘It was all there was,’ returned my aunt. ‘I sold three, myself. One, I paid for your articles, Trot, my dear; and the other two I have by me. When I lost the rest, I thought it wise to say nothing about that sum, but to keep it secretly for a rainy day. I wanted to see how you would come out of the trial, Trot; and you came out nobly - persevering, self-reliant, self-denying! So did Dick. Don’t speak to me, for I find my nerves a little shaken!’ Nobody would have thought so, to see her sitting upright, with her arms folded; but she had wonderful self-command. ‘Then I am delighted to say,’ cried Traddles, beaming with joy, ‘that we have recovered the whole money!’ ‘Don’t congratulate me, anybody!’ exclaimed my aunt. ‘How so, sir?’ ‘You believed it had been misappropriated by Mr. Wickfield?’ said Traddles. ‘Of course I did,’ said my aunt, ‘and was therefore easily silenced. Agnes, not a word!’ ‘And indeed,’ said Traddles, ‘it was sold, by virtue of the power of management he held from you; but I needn’t say by whom sold, or on whose actual signature. It was afterwards pretended to Mr. Wickfield, by that rascal, - and proved, too, by figures, - that he had possessed himself of the money (on general instructions, he said) to keep other deficiencies and difficulties from the light. Mr. Wickfield, being so weak and helpless in his hands as to pay you, afterwards, several sums of interest on a pretended principal which he knew did not exist, made himself, unhappily, a party to the fraud.’ ‘And at last took the blame upon himself,’ added my aunt; ‘and wrote me a mad letter, charging himself with robbery, and wrong unheard of. Upon which I paid him a visit early one morning, called for a candle, burnt the letter, and told him if he ever could right me and himself, to do it; and if he couldn’t, to keep his own counsel for his daughter’s sake. - If anybody speaks to me, I’ll leave the house!’ We all remained quiet; Agnes covering her face. ‘Well, my dear friend,’ said my aunt, after a pause, ‘and you have really extorted the money back from him?’ ‘Why, the fact is,’ returned Traddles, ‘Mr. Micawber had so completely hemmed him in, and was always ready with so many new points if an old one failed, that he could not escape from us. A most remarkable circumstance is, that I really don’t think he grasped this sum even so much for the gratification of his avarice, which was inordinate, as in the hatred he felt for Copperfield. He said so to me, plainly. He said he would even have spent as much, to baulk or injure Copperfield.’ ‘Ha!’ said my aunt, knitting her brows thoughtfully, and glancing at Agnes. ‘And what’s become of him?’ ‘I don’t know. He left here,’ said Traddles, ‘with his mother, who had been clamouring, and beseeching, and disclosing, the whole time. They went away by one of the London night coaches, and I know no more about him; except that his malevolence to me at parting was audacious. He seemed to consider himself hardly less indebted to me, than to Mr. Micawber; which I consider (as I told him) quite a compliment.’ ‘Do you suppose he has any money, Traddles?’ I asked. ‘Oh dear, yes, I should think so,’ he replied, shaking his head, seriously. ‘I should say he must have pocketed a good deal, in one way or other. But, I think you would find, Copperfield, if you had an opportunity of observing his course, that money would never keep that man out of mischief. He is such an incarnate hypocrite, that whatever object he pursues, he must pursue crookedly. It’s his only compensation for the outward restraints he puts upon himself. Always creeping along the ground to some small end or other, he will always magnify every object in the way; and consequently will hate and suspect everybody that comes, in the most innocent manner, between him and it. So the crooked courses will become crookeder, at any moment, for the least reason, or for none. It’s only necessary to consider his history here,’ said Traddles, ‘to know that.’ ‘He’s a monster of meanness!’ said my aunt. ‘Really I don’t know about that,’ observed Traddles thought-fully. ‘Many people can be very mean, when they give their minds to it.’ ‘And now, touching Mr. Micawber,’ said my aunt. ‘Well, really,’ said Traddles, cheerfully, ‘I must, once more, give Mr. Micawber high praise. But for his having been so patient and persevering for so long a time, we never could have hoped to do anything worth speaking of. And I think we ought to consider that Mr. Micawber did right, for right’s sake, when we reflect what terms he might have made with Uriah Heep himself, for his silence.’ ‘I think so too,’ said I. ‘Now, what would you give him?’ inquired my aunt. ‘Oh! Before you come to that,’ said Traddles, a little disconcerted, ‘I am afraid I thought it discreet to omit (not being able to carry everything before me) two points, in making this law-less adjustment - for it’s perfectly lawless from beginning to end - of a difficult affair. Those I.O.U.’s, and so forth, which Mr. Micawber gave him for the advances he had -’ ‘Well! They must be paid,’ said my aunt. ‘Yes, but I don’t know when they may be proceeded on, or where they are,’ rejoined Traddles, opening his eyes; ‘and I anticipate, that, between this time and his departure, Mr. Micawber will be constantly arrested, or taken in execution.’ ‘Then he must be constantly set free again, and taken out of execution,’ said my aunt. ‘What’s the amount altogether?’ ‘Why, Mr. Micawber has entered the transactions - he calls them transactions - with great form, in a book,’ rejoined Traddles, smiling; ‘and he makes the amount a hundred and three pounds, five.’ ‘Now, what shall we give him, that sum included?’ said my aunt. ‘Agnes, my dear, you and I can talk about division of it afterwards. What should it be? Five hundred pounds?’

Upon this, Traddles and I both struck in at once. We both re-commended a small sum in money, and the payment, without stipulation to Mr. Micawber, of the Uriah claims as they came in. We proposed that the family should have their passage and their outfit, and a hundred pounds; and that Mr. Micawber’s arrangement for the repayment of the advances should be gravely entered into, as it might be wholesome for him to sup-pose himself under that responsibility. To this, I added the suggestion, that I should give some explanation of his character and history to Mr. Peggotty, who I knew could be relied on; and that to Mr. Peggotty should be quietly entrusted the discretion of advancing another hundred. I further proposed to interest Mr. Micawber in Mr. Peggotty, by confiding so much of Mr. Peggotty’s story to him as I might feel justified in relating, or might think expedient; and to endeavour to bring each of them to bear upon the other, for the common advantage. We all entered warmly into these views; and I may mention at once, that the principals themselves did so, shortly afterwards, with perfect good will and harmony. Seeing that Traddles now glanced anxiously at my aunt again, I reminded him of the second and last point to which he had adverted. ‘You and your aunt will excuse me, Copperfield, if I touch upon a painful theme, as I greatly fear I shall,’ said Traddles, hesitating; ‘but I think it necessary to bring it to your recollection. On the day of Mr. Micawber’s memorable denunciation a threatening allusion was made by Uriah Heep to your aunt’s - husband.’ My aunt, retaining her stiff position, and apparent composure, assented with a nod. ‘Perhaps,’ observed Traddles, ‘it was mere purposeless impertinence?’ ‘No,’ returned my aunt. ‘There was - pardon me - really such a person, and at all in his power?’ hinted Traddles. ‘Yes, my good friend,’ said my aunt. Traddles, with a perceptible lengthening of his face, explained that he had not been able to approach this subject; that it had shared the fate of Mr. Micawber’s liabilities, in not being comprehended in the terms he had made; that we were no longer of any authority with Uriah Heep; and that if he could do us, or any of us, any injury or annoyance, no doubt he would. My aunt remained quiet; until again some stray tears found their way to her cheeks. ‘You are quite right,’ she said. ‘It was very thoughtful to mention it.’ ‘Can I - or Copperfield - do anything?’ asked Traddles, gently. ‘Nothing,’ said my aunt. ‘I thank you many times. Trot, my dear, a vain threat! Let us have Mr. and Mrs. Micawber back. And don’t any of you speak to me!’ With that she smoothed her dress, and sat, with her upright carriage, looking at the door. ‘Well, Mr. and Mrs. Micawber!’ said my aunt, when they entered. ‘We have been discussing your emigration, with many apologies to you for keeping you out of the room so long; and I’ll tell you what arrangements we propose.’ These she explained to the unbounded satisfaction of the family, - children and all being then present, - and so much to the awakening of Mr. Micawber’s punctual habits in the opening stage of all bill transactions, that he could not be dissuaded from immediately rushing out, in the highest spirits, to buy the stamps for his notes of hand. But, his joy received a sudden check; for within five minutes, he returned in the custody of a sheriff ‘s officer, informing us, in a flood of tears, that all was lost. We, being quite prepared for this event, which was of course a proceeding of Uriah Heep’s, soon paid the money; and in five minutes more Mr. Micawber was seated at the table, filling up the stamps with an expression of perfect joy, which only that congenial employment, or the making of punch, could impart in full completeness to his shining face. To see him at work on the stamps, with the relish of an artist, touching them like pictures, looking at them sideways, taking weighty notes of dates and amounts in his pocket-book, and contemplating them when finished, with a high sense of their precious value, was a sight indeed. ‘Now, the best thing you can do, sir, if you’ll allow me to ad-vise you,’ said my aunt, after silently observing him, ‘is to abjure that occupation for evermore.’ ‘Madam,’ replied Mr. Micawber, ‘it is my intention to register such a vow on the virgin page of the future. Mrs. Micawber will attest it. I trust,’ said Mr. Micawber, solemnly, ‘that my son Wilkins will ever bear in mind, that he had infinitely better put his fist in the fire, than use it to handle the serpents that have poisoned the life-blood of his unhappy parent!’ Deeply affected, and changed in a moment to the image of despair, Mr. Micawber regarded the serpents with a look of gloomy abhorrence (in which his late admiration of them was not quite subdued), folded them up and put them in his pocket. This closed the proceedings of the evening. We were weary with sorrow and fatigue, and my aunt and I were to return to London on the morrow. It was arranged that the Micawbers should follow us, after effecting a sale of their goods to a broker; that Mr. Wickfield’s affairs should be brought to a settlement, with all convenient speed, under the direction of Traddles; and that Agnes should also come to London, pending those arrangements. We passed the night at the old house, which, freed from the presence of the Heeps, seemed purged of a disease; and I lay in my old room, like a shipwrecked wanderer come home. We went back next day to my aunt’s house - not to mine- and when she and I sat alone, as of old, before going to bed, she said: ‘Trot, do you really wish to know what I have had upon my mind lately?’ ‘Indeed I do, aunt. If there ever was a time when I felt unwilling that you should have a sorrow or anxiety which I could not share, it is now.’ ‘You have had sorrow enough, child,’ said my aunt, affectionately, ‘without the addition of my little miseries. I could have no other motive, Trot, in keeping anything from you.’ ‘I know that well,’ said I. ‘But tell me now.’ ‘Would you ride with me a little way tomorrow morning?’ asked my aunt. ‘Of course.’ ‘At nine,’ said she. ‘I’ll tell you then, my dear.’ At nine, accordingly, we went out in a little chariot, and drove to London. We drove a long way through the streets, until we came to one of the large hospitals. Standing hard by the building was a plain hearse. The driver recognized my aunt, and, in obedience to a motion of her hand at the window, drove slowly off; we following.

‘You understand it now, Trot,’ said my aunt. ‘He is gone!’ ‘Did he die in the hospital?’ ‘Yes.’ She sat immovable beside me; but, again I saw the stray tears on her face. ‘He was there once before,’ said my aunt presently. ‘He was ailing a long time - a shattered, broken man, these many years. When he knew his state in this last illness, he asked them to send for me. He was sorry then. Very sorry.’ ‘You went, I know, aunt.’ ‘I went. I was with him a good deal afterwards.’ ‘He died the night before we went to Canterbury?’ said I. My aunt nodded. ‘No one can harm him now,’ she said. ‘It was a vain threat.’ We drove away, out of town, to the churchyard at Hornsey. ‘Better here than in the streets,’ said my aunt. ‘He was born here.’ We alighted; and followed the plain coffin to a corner I re-member well, where the service was read consigning it to the dust. ‘Six-and-thirty years ago, this day, my dear,’ said my aunt, as we walked back to the chariot, ‘I was married. God forgive us all!’ We took our seats in silence; and so she sat beside me for a long time, holding my hand. At length she suddenly burst into tears, and said: ‘He was a fine-looking man when I married him, Trot - and he was sadly changed!’ It did not last long. After the relief of tears, she soon became composed, and even cheerful. Her nerves were a little shaken, she said, or she would not have given way to it. God forgive us all! So we rode back to her little cottage at Highgate, where we found the following short note, which had arrived by that morning’s post from Mr. Micawber: ‘Canterbury, ‘Friday. ‘My dear Madam, and Copperfield, ‘The fair land of promise lately looming on the horizon is again enveloped in impenetrable mists, and for ever withdrawn from the eyes of a drifting wretch whose Doom is sealed! ‘Another writ has been issued (in His Majesty’s High Court of King’s Bench at Westminster), in another cause of ''Heep'' V. ''Micawber'', and the defendant in that cause is the prey of the sheriff having legal jurisdiction in this bailiwick. ‘Now’s the day, and now’s the hour, See the front of battle lower, See approach proud ''Edward’s'' power - Chains and slavery! ‘Consigned to which, and to a speedy end (for mental torture is not supportable beyond a certain point, and that point I feel I have attained), my course is run. Bless you, bless you! Some future traveller, visiting, from motives of curiosity, not unmingled, let us hope, with sympathy, the place of confinement allotted to debtors in this city, may, and I trust will, Ponder, as he traces on its wall, inscribed with a rusty nail, ‘The obscure initials, ‘W. M. ‘P.S. I re-open this to say that our common friend, Mr. Thomas Traddles (who has not yet left us, and is looking extremely well), has paid the debt and costs, in the noble name of Miss Trotwood; and that myself and family are at the height of earthly bliss.’

Chapter 55

Chapter 55

Tempest I now approach an event in my life, so indelible, so awful, so bound by an infinite variety of ties to all that has preceded it, in these pages, that, from the beginning of my narrative, I have seen it growing larger and larger as I advanced, like a great tower in a plain, and throwing its fore-cast shadow even on the incidents of my childish days. For years after it occurred, I dreamed of it often. I have started up so vividly impressed by it, that its fury has yet seemed raging in my quiet room, in the still night. I dream of it some-times, though at lengthened and uncertain intervals, to this hour. I have an association between it and a stormy wind, or the lightest mention of a sea-shore, as strong as any of which my mind is conscious. As plainly as I behold what happened, I will try to write it down. I do not recall it, but see it done; for it happens again before me. The time drawing on rapidly for the sailing of the emigrant-ship, my good old nurse (almost broken-hearted for me, when we first met) came up to London. I was constantly with her, and her brother, and the Micawbers (they being very much together); but Emily I never saw. One evening when the time was close at hand, I was alone with Peggotty and her brother. Our conversation turned on Ham. She described to us how tenderly he had taken leave of her, and how manfully and quietly he had borne himself. Most of all, of late, when she believed he was most tried. It was a subject of which the affectionate creature never tired; and our interest in hearing the many examples which she, who was so much with him, had to relate, was equal to hers in relating them.

My aunt and I were at that time vacating the two cottages at Highgate; I intending to go abroad, and she to return to her house at Dover. We had a temporary lodging in Covent Garden. As I walked home to it, after this evening’s conversation, reflecting on what had passed between Ham and myself when I was last at Yarmouth, I wavered in the original purpose I had formed, of leaving a letter for Emily when I should take leave of her uncle on board the ship, and thought it would be better to write to her now. She might desire, I thought, after receiving my communication, to send some parting word by me to her unhappy lover. I ought to give her the opportunity. I therefore sat down in my room, before going to bed, and wrote to her. I told her that I had seen him, and that he had re-quested me to tell her what I have already written in its place in these sheets. I faithfully repeated it. I had no need to en-large upon it, if I had had the right. Its deep fidelity and goodness were not to be adorned by me or any man. I left it out, to be sent round in the morning; with a line to Mr. Peggotty, re-questing him to give it to her; and went to bed at daybreak. I was weaker than I knew then; and, not falling asleep until the sun was up, lay late, and unrefreshed, next day. I was roused by the silent presence of my aunt at my bedside. I felt it in my sleep, as I suppose we all do feel such things. ‘Trot, my dear,’ she said, when I opened my eyes, ‘I couldn’t make up my mind to disturb you. Mr. Peggotty is here; shall he come up?’ I replied yes, and he soon appeared. ‘Mas’r Davy,’ he said, when we had shaken hands, ‘I giv Em’ly your letter, sir, and she writ this heer; and begged of me fur to ask you to read it, and if you see no hurt in’t, to be so kind as take charge on’t.’ ‘Have you read it?’ said I. He nodded sorrowfully. I opened it, and read as follows: ‘I have got your message. Oh, what can I write, to thank you for your good and blessed kindness to me! ‘I have put the words close to my heart. I shall keep them till I die. They are sharp thorns, but they are such comfort. I have prayed over them, oh, I have prayed so much. When I find what you are, and what uncle is, I think what God must be, and can cry to him.

‘Good-bye for ever. Now, my dear, my friend, good-bye for ever in this world. In another world, if I am forgiven, I may wake a child and come to you. All thanks and blessings. Farewell, evermore.’ This, blotted with tears, was the letter. ‘May I tell her as you doen’t see no hurt in’t, and as you’ll be so kind as take charge on’t, Mas’r Davy?’ said Mr. Peggotty, when I had read it. ‘Unquestionably,’ said I - ‘but I am thinking -’ ‘Yes, Mas’r Davy?’ ‘I am thinking,’ said I, ‘that I’ll go down again to Yarmouth. There’s time, and to spare, for me to go and come back before the ship sails. My mind is constantly running on him, in his solitude; to put this letter of her writing in his hand at this time, and to enable you to tell her, in the moment of parting, that he has got it, will be a kindness to both of them. I solemnly accepted his commission, dear good fellow, and cannot discharge it too completely. The journey is nothing to me. I am restless, and shall be better in motion. I’ll go down tonight.’ Though he anxiously endeavoured to dissuade me, I saw that he was of my mind; and this, if I had required to be confirmed in my intention, would have had the effect. He went round to the coach office, at my request, and took the box-seat for me on the mail. In the evening I started, by that conveyance, down the road I had traversed under so many vicissitudes. ‘Don’t you think that,’ I asked the coachman, in the first stage out of London, ‘a very remarkable sky? I don’t remember to have seen one like it.’ ‘Nor I - not equal to it,’ he replied. ‘That’s wind, sir. There’ll be mischief done at sea, I expect, before long.’ It was a murky confusion - here and there blotted with a col-our like the colour of the smoke from damp fuel - of flying clouds, tossed up into most remarkable heaps, suggesting greater heights in the clouds than there were depths below them to the bottom of the deepest hollows in the earth, through which the wild moon seemed to plunge headlong, as if, in a dread disturbance of the laws of nature, she had lost her way and were frightened. There had been a wind all day; and it was rising then, with an extraordinary great sound. In another hour it had much increased, and the sky was more overcast, and blew hard. But, as the night advanced, the clouds closing in and densely over-spreading the whole sky, then very dark, it came on to blow, harder and harder. It still increased, until our horses could scarcely face the wind. Many times, in the dark part of the night (it was then late in September, when the nights were not short), the leaders turned about, or came to a dead stop; and we were often in serious apprehension that the coach would be blown over. Sweeping gusts of rain came up before this storm, like showers of steel; and, at those times, when there was any shelter of trees or lee walls to be got, we were fain to stop, in a sheer impossibility of continuing the struggle. When the day broke, it blew harder and harder. I had been in Yarmouth when the seamen said it blew great guns, but I had never known the like of this, or anything approaching to it. We came to Ipswich - very late, having had to fight every inch of ground since we were ten miles out of London; and found a cluster of people in the market-place, who had risen from their beds in the night, fearful of falling chimneys. Some of these, congregating about the inn-yard while we changed horses, told us of great sheets of lead having been ripped off a high church-tower, and flung into a by-street, which they then blocked up. Others had to tell of country people, coming in from neighbouring villages, who had seen great trees lying torn out of the earth, and whole ricks scattered about the roads and fields. Still, there was no abatement in the storm, but it blew harder. As we struggled on, nearer and nearer to the sea, from which this mighty wind was blowing dead on shore, its force became more and more terrific. Long before we saw the sea, its spray was on our lips, and showered salt rain upon us. The water was out, over miles and miles of the flat country adjacent to Yarmouth; and every sheet and puddle lashed its banks, and had its stress of little breakers setting heavily towards us. When we came within sight of the sea, the waves on the horizon, caught at intervals above the rolling abyss, were like glimpses of an-other shore with towers and buildings. When at last we got into the town, the people came out to their doors, all aslant, and with streaming hair, making a wonder of the mail that had come through such a night.

I put up at the old inn, and went down to look at the sea; staggering along the street, which was strewn with sand and seaweed, and with flying blotches of sea-foam; afraid of falling slates and tiles; and holding by people I met, at angry corners. Coming near the beach, I saw, not only the boatmen, but half the people of the town, lurking behind buildings; some, now and then braving the fury of the storm to look away to sea, and blown sheer out of their course in trying to get zigzag back. Joining these groups, I found bewailing women whose husbands were away in herring or oyster boats, which there was too much reason to think might have foundered before they could run in anywhere for safety. Grizzled old sailors were among the people, shaking their heads, as they looked from water to sky, and muttering to one another; ship-owners, ex-cited and uneasy; children, huddling together, and peering into older faces; even stout mariners, disturbed and anxious, level-ling their glasses at the sea from behind places of shelter, as if they were surveying an enemy. The tremendous sea itself, when I could find sufficient pause to look at it, in the agitation of the blinding wind, the flying stones and sand, and the awful noise, confounded me. As the high watery walls came rolling in, and, at their highest, tumbled into surf, they looked as if the least would engulf the town. As the receding wave swept back with a hoarse roar, it seemed to scoop out deep caves in the beach, as if its purpose were to undermine the earth. When some white-headed billows thundered on, and dashed themselves to pieces before they reached the land, every fragment of the late whole seemed possessed by the full might of its wrath, rushing to be gathered to the composition of another monster. Undulating hills were changed to valleys, undulating valleys (with a solitary storm-bird sometimes skimming through them) were lifted up to hills; masses of water shivered and shook the beach with a booming sound; every shape tumultuously rolled on, as soon as made, to change its shape and place, and beat another shape and place away; the ideal shore on the horizon, with its towers and buildings, rose and fell; the clouds fell fast and thick; I seemed to see a rending and upheaving of all nature. Not finding Ham among the people whom this memorable wind - for it is still remembered down there, as the greatest ever known to blow upon that coast - had brought together, I made my way to his house. It was shut; and as no one answered to my knocking, I went, by back ways and by-lanes, to the yard where he worked. I learned, there, that he had gone to Lowestoft, to meet some sudden exigency of ship-repairing in which his skill was required; but that he would be back tomorrow morning, in good time. I went back to the inn; and when I had washed and dressed, and tried to sleep, but in vain, it was five o’clock in the after-noon. I had not sat five minutes by the coffee-room fire, when the waiter, coming to stir it, as an excuse for talking, told me that two colliers had gone down, with all hands, a few miles away; and that some other ships had been seen labouring hard in the Roads, and trying, in great distress, to keep off shore. Mercy on them, and on all poor sailors, said he, if we had an-other night like the last! I was very much depressed in spirits; very solitary; and felt an uneasiness in Ham’s not being there, disproportionate to the occasion. I was seriously affected, without knowing how much, by late events; and my long exposure to the fierce wind had confused me. There was that jumble in my thoughts and recollections, that I had lost the clear arrangement of time and distance. Thus, if I had gone out into the town, I should not have been surprised, I think, to encounter someone who I knew must be then in London. So to speak, there was in these respects a curious inattention in my mind. Yet it was busy, too, with all the remembrances the place naturally awakened; and they were particularly distinct and vivid. In this state, the waiter’s dismal intelligence about the ships immediately connected itself, without any effort of my volition, with my uneasiness about Ham. I was persuaded that I had an apprehension of his returning from Lowestoft by sea, and being lost. This grew so strong with me, that I resolved to go back to the yard before I took my dinner, and ask the boat-builder if he thought his attempting to return by sea at all likely? If he gave me the least reason to think so, I would go over to Lowestoft and prevent it by bringing him with me. I hastily ordered my dinner, and went back to the yard. I was none too soon; for the boat-builder, with a lantern in his hand, was locking the yard-gate. He quite laughed when I asked him the question, and said there was no fear; no man in his senses, or out of them, would put off in such a gale of wind, least of all Ham Peggotty, who had been born to seafaring. So sensible of this, beforehand, that I had really felt ashamed of doing what I was nevertheless impelled to do, I went back to the inn. If such a wind could rise, I think it was rising. The howl and roar, the rattling of the doors and windows, the rumbling in the chimneys, the apparent rocking of the very house that sheltered me, and the prodigious tumult of the sea, were more fearful than in the morning. But there was now a great darkness besides; and that invested the storm with new terrors, real and fanciful. I could not eat, I could not sit still, I could not continue stead-fast to anything. Something within me, faintly answering to the storm without, tossed up the depths of my memory and made a tumult in them. Yet, in all the hurry of my thoughts, wild running with the thundering sea, - the storm, and my uneasiness regarding Ham were always in the fore-ground. My dinner went away almost untasted, and I tried to refresh myself with a glass or two of wine. In vain. I fell into a dull slumber before the fire, without losing my consciousness, either of the uproar out of doors, or of the place in which I was. Both became overshadowed by a new and indefinable horror; and when I awoke - or rather when I shook off the lethargy that bound me in my chair- my whole frame thrilled with objectless and unintelligible fear. I walked to and fro, tried to read an old gazetteer, listened to the awful noises: looked at faces, scenes, and figures in the fire. At length, the steady ticking of the undisturbed clock on the wall tormented me to that degree that I resolved to go to bed. It was reassuring, on such a night, to be told that some of the inn-servants had agreed together to sit up until morning. I went to bed, exceedingly weary and heavy; but, on my lying down, all such sensations vanished, as if by magic, and I was broad awake, with every sense refined. For hours I lay there, listening to the wind and water; imagining, now, that I heard shrieks out at sea; now, that I distinctly heard the firing of signal guns; and now, the fall of houses in the town. I got up, several times, and looked out; but could see nothing, except the reflection in the window-panes of the faint candle I had left burning, and of my own haggard face looking in at me from the black void. At length, my restlessness attained to such a pitch, that I hurried on my clothes, and went downstairs. In the large kitchen, where I dimly saw bacon and ropes of onions hanging from the beams, the watchers were clustered together, in various attitudes, about a table, purposely moved away from the great chimney, and brought near the door. A pretty girl, who had her ears stopped with her apron, and her eyes upon the door, screamed when I appeared, supposing me to be a spirit; but the others had more presence of mind, and were glad of an addition to their company. One man, referring to the topic they had been discussing, asked me whether I thought the souls of the collier-crews who had gone down, were out in the storm? I remained there, I dare say, two hours. Once, I opened the yard-gate, and looked into the empty street. The sand, the sea-weed, and the flakes of foam, were driving by; and I was obliged to call for assistance before I could shut the gate again, and make it fast against the wind. There was a dark gloom in my solitary chamber, when I at length returned to it; but I was tired now, and, getting into bed again, fell - off a tower and down a precipice - into the depths of sleep. I have an impression that for a long time, though I dreamed of being elsewhere and in a variety of scenes, it was always blowing in my dream. At length, I lost that feeble hold upon reality, and was engaged with two dear friends, but who they were I don’t know, at the siege of some town in a roar of cannonading. The thunder of the cannon was so loud and incessant, that I could not hear something I much desired to hear, until I made a great exertion and awoke. It was broad day - eight or nine o’clock; the storm raging, in lieu of the batteries; and someone knocking and calling at my door. ‘What is the matter?’ I cried. ‘A wreck! Close by!’ I sprung out of bed, and asked, what wreck? ‘A schooner, from Spain or Portugal, laden with fruit and wine. Make haste, sir, if you want to see her! It’s thought, down on the beach, she’ll go to pieces every moment.’

The excited voice went clamouring along the staircase; and I wrapped myself in my clothes as quickly as I could, and ran in-to the street. Numbers of people were there before me, all running in one direction, to the beach. I ran the same way, outstripping a good many, and soon came facing the wild sea. The wind might by this time have lulled a little, though not more sensibly than if the cannonading I had dreamed of, had been diminished by the silencing of half-a-dozen guns out of hundreds. But the sea, having upon it the additional agitation of the whole night, was infinitely more terrific than when I had seen it last. Every appearance it had then presented, bore the expression of being swelled; and the height to which the breakers rose, and, looking over one another, bore one another down, and rolled in, in interminable hosts, was most appalling. In the difficulty of hearing anything but wind and waves, and in the crowd, and the unspeakable confusion, and my first breath-less efforts to stand against the weather, I was so confused that I looked out to sea for the wreck, and saw nothing but the foaming heads of the great waves. A half-dressed boatman, standing next me, pointed with his bare arm (a tattoo’d arrow on it, pointing in the same direction) to the left. Then, O great Heaven, I saw it, close in upon us! One mast was broken short off, six or eight feet from the deck, and lay over the side, entangled in a maze of sail and rigging; and all that ruin, as the ship rolled and beat - which she did without a moment’s pause, and with a violence quite inconceivable - beat the side as if it would stave it in. Some efforts were even then being made, to cut this portion of the wreck away; for, as the ship, which was broadside on, turned towards us in her rolling, I plainly descried her people at work with axes, especially one active figure with long curling hair, conspicuous among the rest. But a great cry, which was audible even above the wind and water, rose from the shore at this moment; the sea, sweeping over the rolling wreck, made a clean breach, and carried men, spars, casks, planks, bulwarks, heaps of such toys, into the boiling surge. The second mast was yet standing, with the rags of a rent sail, and a wild confusion of broken cordage flapping to and fro. The ship had struck once, the same boatman hoarsely said in my ear, and then lifted in and struck again. I understood him to add that she was parting amidships, and I could readily sup-pose so, for the rolling and beating were too tremendous for any human work to suffer long. As he spoke, there was another great cry of pity from the beach; four men arose with the wreck out of the deep, clinging to the rigging of the remaining mast; uppermost, the active figure with the curling hair. There was a bell on board; and as the ship rolled and dashed, like a desperate creature driven mad, now showing us the whole sweep of her deck, as she turned on her beam-ends to-wards the shore, now nothing but her keel, as she sprung wildly over and turned towards the sea, the bell rang; and its sound, the knell of those unhappy men, was borne towards us on the wind. Again we lost her, and again she rose. Two men were gone. The agony on the shore increased. Men groaned, and clasped their hands; women shrieked, and turned away their faces. Some ran wildly up and down along the beach, crying for help where no help could be. I found myself one of these, frantically imploring a knot of sailors whom I knew, not to let those two lost creatures perish before our eyes. They were making out to me, in an agitated way - I don’t know how, for the little I could hear I was scarcely composed enough to understand - that the lifeboat had been bravely manned an hour ago, and could do nothing; and that as no man would be so desperate as to attempt to wade off with a rope, and establish a communication with the shore, there was nothing left to try; when I noticed that some new sensation moved the people on the beach, and saw them part, and Ham come breaking through them to the front. I ran to him - as well as I know, to repeat my appeal for help. But, distracted though I was, by a sight so new to me and terrible, the determination in his face, and his look out to sea - exactly the same look as I remembered in connexion with the morning after Emily’s flight - awoke me to a knowledge of his danger. I held him back with both arms; and implored the men with whom I had been speaking, not to listen to him, not to do murder, not to let him stir from off that sand! Another cry arose on shore; and looking to the wreck, we saw the cruel sail, with blow on blow, beat off the lower of the two men, and fly up in triumph round the active figure left alone upon the mast. Against such a sight, and against such determination as that of the calmly desperate man who was already accustomed to lead half the people present, I might as hopefully have en-treated the wind. ‘Mas’r Davy,’ he said, cheerily grasping me by both hands, ‘if my time is come, ’tis come. If ‘tan’t, I’ll bide it. Lord above bless you, and bless all! Mates, make me ready! I’m a-going off!’ I was swept away, but not unkindly, to some distance, where the people around me made me stay; urging, as I confusedly perceived, that he was bent on going, with help or without, and that I should endanger the precautions for his safety by troubling those with whom they rested. I don’t know what I answered, or what they rejoined; but I saw hurry on the beach, and men running with ropes from a capstan that was there, and penetrating into a circle of figures that hid him from me. Then, I saw him standing alone, in a seaman’s frock and trousers: a rope in his hand, or slung to his wrist: another round his body: and several of the best men holding, at a little distance, to the latter, which he laid out himself, slack upon the shore, at his feet. The wreck, even to my unpractised eye, was breaking up. I saw that she was parting in the middle, and that the life of the solitary man upon the mast hung by a thread. Still, he clung to it. He had a singular red cap on, - not like a sailor’s cap, but of a finer colour; and as the few yielding planks between him and destruction rolled and bulged, and his anticipative death-knell rung, he was seen by all of us to wave it. I saw him do it now, and thought I was going distracted, when his action brought an old remembrance to my mind of a once dear friend. Ham watched the sea, standing alone, with the silence of suspended breath behind him, and the storm before, until there was a great retiring wave, when, with a backward glance at those who held the rope which was made fast round his body, he dashed in after it, and in a moment was buffeting with the water; rising with the hills, falling with the valleys, lost beneath the foam; then drawn again to land. They hauled in hastily.

He was hurt. I saw blood on his face, from where I stood; but he took no thought of that. He seemed hurriedly to give them some directions for leaving him more free - or so I judged from the motion of his arm - and was gone as before. And now he made for the wreck, rising with the hills, falling with the valleys, lost beneath the rugged foam, borne in to-wards the shore, borne on towards the ship, striving hard and valiantly. The distance was nothing, but the power of the sea and wind made the strife deadly. At length he neared the wreck. He was so near, that with one more of his vigorous strokes he would be clinging to it, - when a high, green, vast hill-side of water, moving on shoreward, from beyond the ship, he seemed to leap up into it with a mighty bound, and the ship was gone! Some eddying fragments I saw in the sea, as if a mere cask had been broken, in running to the spot where they were hauling in. Consternation was in every face. They drew him to my very feet - insensible - dead. He was carried to the nearest house; and, no one preventing me now, I remained near him, busy, while every means of restoration were tried; but he had been beaten to death by the great wave, and his generous heart was stilled for ever. As I sat beside the bed, when hope was abandoned and all was done, a fisherman, who had known me when Emily and I were children, and ever since, whispered my name at the door. ‘Sir,’ said he, with tears starting to his weather-beaten face, which, with his trembling lips, was ashy pale, ‘will you come over yonder?’ The old remembrance that had been recalled to me, was in his look. I asked him, terror-stricken, leaning on the arm he held out to support me: ‘Has a body come ashore?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ ‘Do I know it?’ I asked then. He answered nothing. But he led me to the shore. And on that part of it where she and I had looked for shells, two children - on that part of it where some lighter fragments of the old boat, blown down last night, had been scattered by the wind - among the ruins of the home he had wronged - I saw him lying with his head upon his arm, as I had often seen him lie at school.

Chapter 56

Chapter 56

The New Wound, and the Old No need, O Steerforth, to have said, when we last spoke together, in that hour which I so little deemed to be our parting-hour - no need to have said, ‘Think of me at my best!’ I had done that ever; and could I change now, looking on this sight! They brought a hand-bier, and laid him on it, and covered him with a flag, and took him up and bore him on towards the houses. All the men who carried him had known him, and gone sailing with him, and seen him merry and bold. They carried him through the wild roar, a hush in the midst of all the tumult; and took him to the cottage where Death was already. But when they set the bier down on the threshold, they looked at one another, and at me, and whispered. I knew why. They felt as if it were not right to lay him down in the same quiet room. We went into the town, and took our burden to the inn. So soon as I could at all collect my thoughts, I sent for Joram, and begged him to provide me a conveyance in which it could be got to London in the night. I knew that the care of it, and the hard duty of preparing his mother to receive it, could only rest with me; and I was anxious to discharge that duty as faithfully as I could. I chose the night for the journey, that there might be less curiosity when I left the town. But, although it was nearly mid-night when I came out of the yard in a chaise, followed by what I had in charge, there were many people waiting. At intervals, along the town, and even a little way out upon the road, I saw more: but at length only the bleak night and the open country were around me, and the ashes of my youthful friendship. Upon a mellow autumn day, about noon, when the ground was perfumed by fallen leaves, and many more, in beautiful tints of yellow, red, and brown, yet hung upon the trees, through which the sun was shining, I arrived at Highgate. I walked the last mile, thinking as I went along of what I had to do; and left the carriage that had followed me all through the night, awaiting orders to advance. The house, when I came up to it, looked just the same. Not a blind was raised; no sign of life was in the dull paved court, with its covered way leading to the disused door. The wind had quite gone down, and nothing moved. I had not, at first, the courage to ring at the gate; and when I did ring, my errand seemed to me to be expressed in the very sound of the bell. The little parlour-maid came out, with the key in her hand; and looking earnestly at me as she unlocked the gate, said: ‘I beg your pardon, sir. Are you ill?’ ‘I have been much agitated, and am fatigued.’ ‘Is anything the matter, sir? - Mr. James? -’ ‘Hush!’ said I. ‘Yes, something has happened, that I have to break to Mrs. Steerforth. She is at home?’ The girl anxiously replied that her mistress was very seldom out now, even in a carriage; that she kept her room; that she saw no company, but would see me. Her mistress was up, she said, and Miss Dartle was with her. What message should she take upstairs? Giving her a strict charge to be careful of her manner, and only to carry in my card and say I waited, I sat down in the drawing-room (which we had now reached) until she should come back. Its former pleasant air of occupation was gone, and the shutters were half closed. The harp had not been used for many and many a day. His picture, as a boy, was there. The cabinet in which his mother had kept his letters was there. I wondered if she ever read them now; if she would ever read them more! The house was so still that I heard the girl’s light step up-stairs. On her return, she brought a message, to the effect that Mrs. Steerforth was an invalid and could not come down; but that if I would excuse her being in her chamber, she would be glad to see me. In a few moments I stood before her. She was in his room; not in her own. I felt, of course, that she had taken to occupy it, in remembrance of him; and that the many tokens of his old sports and accomplishments, by which she was surrounded, remained there, just as he had left them, for the same reason. She murmured, however, even in her reception of me, that she was out of her own chamber because its aspect was unsuited to her infirmity; and with her stately look repelled the least suspicion of the truth. At her chair, as usual, was Rosa Dartle. From the first moment of her dark eyes resting on me, I saw she knew I was the bearer of evil tidings. The scar sprung into view that instant. She withdrew herself a step behind the chair, to keep her own face out of Mrs. Steerforth’s observation; and scrutinized me with a piercing gaze that never faltered, never shrunk. ‘I am sorry to observe you are in mourning, sir,’ said Mrs. Steerforth. ‘I am unhappily a widower,’ said I. ‘You are very young to know so great a loss,’ she returned. ‘I am grieved to hear it. I am grieved to hear it. I hope Time will be good to you.’ ‘I hope Time,’ said I, looking at her, ‘will be good to all of us. Dear Mrs. Steerforth, we must all trust to that, in our heaviest misfortunes.’ The earnestness of my manner, and the tears in my eyes, alarmed her. The whole course of her thoughts appeared to stop, and change. I tried to command my voice in gently saying his name, but it trembled. She repeated it to herself, two or three times, in a low tone. Then, addressing me, she said, with enforced calmness: ‘My son is ill.’ ‘Very ill.’ ‘You have seen him?’ ‘I have.’ ‘Are you reconciled?’ I could not say Yes, I could not say No. She slightly turned her head towards the spot where Rosa Dartle had been standing at her elbow, and in that moment I said, by the motion of my lips, to Rosa, ‘Dead!’ That Mrs. Steerforth might not be induced to look behind her, and read, plainly written, what she was not yet prepared to know, I met her look quickly; but I had seen Rosa Dartle throw her hands up in the air with vehemence of despair and horror, and then clasp them on her face. The handsome lady - so like, oh so like! - regarded me with a fixed look, and put her hand to her forehead. I besought her to be calm, and prepare herself to bear what I had to tell; but I should rather have entreated her to weep, for she sat like a stone figure. ‘When I was last here,’ I faltered, ‘Miss Dartle told me he was sailing here and there. The night before last was a dreadful one at sea. If he were at sea that night, and near a dangerous coast, as it is said he was; and if the vessel that was seen should really be the ship which -’ ‘Rosa!’ said Mrs. Steerforth, ‘come to me!’ She came, but with no sympathy or gentleness. Her eyes gleamed like fire as she confronted his mother, and broke into a frightful laugh. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘is your pride appeased, you madwoman? Now has he made atonement to you - with his life! Do you hear? - His life!’ Mrs. Steerforth, fallen back stiffly in her chair, and making no sound but a moan, cast her eyes upon her with a wide stare. ‘Aye!’ cried Rosa, smiting herself passionately on the breast, ‘look at me! Moan, and groan, and look at me! Look here!’ striking the scar, ‘at your dead child’s handiwork!’ The moan the mother uttered, from time to time, went to My heart. Always the same. Always inarticulate and stifled. Always accompanied with an incapable motion of the head, but with no change of face. Always proceeding from a rigid mouth and closed teeth, as if the jaw were locked and the face frozen up in pain. ‘Do you remember when he did this?’ she proceeded. ‘Do you remember when, in his inheritance of your nature, and in your pampering of his pride and passion, he did this, and disfigured me for life? Look at me, marked until I die with his high displeasure; and moan and groan for what you made him!’ ‘Miss Dartle,’ I entreated her. ‘For Heaven’s sake -’ ‘I will speak!’ she said, turning on me with her lightning eyes. ‘Be silent, you! Look at me, I say, proud mother of a proud, false son! Moan for your nurture of him, moan for your corruption of him, moan for your loss of him, moan for mine!’

She clenched her hand, and trembled through her spare, worn figure, as if her passion were killing her by inches. ‘You, resent his self-will!’ she exclaimed. ‘You, injured by his haughty temper! You, who opposed to both, when your hair was grey, the qualities which made both when you gave him birth! You, who from his cradle reared him to be what he was, and stunted what he should have been! Are you rewarded, now, for your years of trouble?’ ‘Oh, Miss Dartle, shame! Oh cruel!’ ‘I tell you,’ she returned, ‘I will speak to her. No power on earth should stop me, while I was standing here! Have I been silent all these years, and shall I not speak now? I loved him better than you ever loved him!’ turning on her fiercely. ‘I could have loved him, and asked no return. If I had been his wife, I could have been the slave of his caprices for a word of love a year. I should have been. Who knows it better than I? You were exacting, proud, punctilious, selfish. My love would have been devoted - would have trod your paltry whimpering under foot!’ With flashing eyes, she stamped upon the ground as if she actually did it. ‘Look here!’ she said, striking the scar again, with a relent-less hand. ‘When he grew into the better understanding of what he had done, he saw it, and repented of it! I could sing to him, and talk to him, and show the ardour that I felt in all he did, and attain with labour to such knowledge as most interested him; and I attracted him. When he was freshest and truest, he loved me. Yes, he did! Many a time, when you were put off with a slight word, he has taken Me to his heart!’ She said it with a taunting pride in the midst of her frenzy - for it was little less - yet with an eager remembrance of it, in which the smouldering embers of a gentler feeling kindled for the moment. ‘I descended - as I might have known I should, but that he fascinated me with his boyish courtship - into a doll, a trifle for the occupation of an idle hour, to be dropped, and taken up, and trifled with, as the inconstant humour took him. When he grew weary, I grew weary. As his fancy died out, I would no more have tried to strengthen any power I had, than I would have married him on his being forced to take me for his wife.

We fell away from one another without a word. Perhaps you saw it, and were not sorry. Since then, I have been a mere disfigured piece of furniture between you both; having no eyes, no ears, no feelings, no remembrances. Moan? Moan for what you made him; not for your love. I tell you that the time was, when I loved him better than you ever did!’ She stood with her bright angry eyes confronting the wide stare, and the set face; and softened no more, when the moaning was repeated, than if the face had been a picture. ‘Miss Dartle,’ said I, ‘if you can be so obdurate as not to feel for this afflicted mother -’ ‘Who feels for me?’ she sharply retorted. ‘She has sown this. Let her moan for the harvest that she reaps today!’ ‘And if his faults -’ I began. ‘Faults!’ she cried, bursting into passionate tears. ‘Who dares malign him? He had a soul worth millions of the friends to whom he stooped!’ ‘No one can have loved him better, no one can hold him in dearer remembrance than I,’ I replied. ‘I meant to say, if you have no compassion for his mother; or if his faults - you have been bitter on them -’ ‘It’s false,’ she cried, tearing her black hair; ‘I loved him!’ ‘- if his faults cannot,’ I went on, ‘be banished from your remembrance, in such an hour; look at that figure, even as one you have never seen before, and render it some help!’ All this time, the figure was unchanged, and looked unchangeable. Motionless, rigid, staring; moaning in the same dumb way from time to time, with the same helpless motion of the head; but giving no other sign of life. Miss Dartle suddenly kneeled down before it, and began to loosen the dress. ‘A curse upon you!’ she said, looking round at me, with a mingled expression of rage and grief. ‘It was in an evil hour that you ever came here! A curse upon you! Go!’ After passing out of the room, I hurried back to ring the bell, the sooner to alarm the servants. She had then taken the impassive figure in her arms, and, still upon her knees, was weeping over it, kissing it, calling to it, rocking it to and fro upon her bosom like a child, and trying every tender means to rouse the dormant senses. No longer afraid of leaving her, I noiselessly turned back again; and alarmed the house as I went out.

Later in the day, I returned, and we laid him in his mother’s room. She was just the same, they told me; Miss Dartle never left her; doctors were in attendance, many things had been tried; but she lay like a statue, except for the low sound now and then. I went through the dreary house, and darkened the windows. The windows of the chamber where he lay, I darkened last. I lifted up the leaden hand, and held it to my heart; and all the world seemed death and silence, broken only by his mother’s moaning.

Chapter 57

Chapter 57

The Emigrants One thing more, I had to do, before yielding myself to the shock of these emotions. It was, to conceal what had occurred, from those who were going away; and to dismiss them on their voyage in happy ignorance. In this, no time was to be lost. I took Mr. Micawber aside that same night, and confided to him the task of standing between Mr. Peggotty and intelligence of the late catastrophe. He zealously undertook to do so, and to intercept any newspaper through which it might, without such precautions, reach him. ‘If it penetrates to him, sir,’ said Mr. Micawber, striking him-self on the breast, ‘it shall first pass through this body!’ Mr. Micawber, I must observe, in his adaptation of himself to a new state of society, had acquired a bold buccaneering air, not absolutely lawless, but defensive and prompt. One might have supposed him a child of the wilderness, long accustomed to live out of the confines of civilization, and about to return to his native wilds. He had provided himself, among other things, with a complete suit of oilskin, and a straw hat with a very low crown, pitched or caulked on the outside. In this rough clothing, with a common mariner’s telescope under his arm, and a shrewd trick of casting up his eye at the sky as looking out for dirty weather, he was far more nautical, after his manner, than Mr. Peggotty. His whole family, if I may so express it, were cleared for action. I found Mrs. Micawber in the closest and most uncompromising of bonnets, made fast under the chin; and in a shawl which tied her up (as I had been tied up, when my aunt first received me) like a bundle, and was secured behind at the waist, in a strong knot. Miss Micawber I found made snug for stormy weather, in the same manner; with nothing superfluous about her. Master Micawber was hardly visible in a Guernsey shirt, and the shaggiest suit of slops I ever saw; and the children were done up, like preserved meats, in impervious cases. Both Mr. Micawber and his eldest son wore their sleeves loosely turned back at the wrists, as being ready to lend a hand in any direction, and to ‘tumble up’, or sing out, ‘Yeo - Heave - Yeo!’ on the shortest notice. Thus Traddles and I found them at nightfall, assembled on the wooden steps, at that time known as Hungerford Stairs, watching the departure of a boat with some of their property on board. I had told Traddles of the terrible event, and it had greatly shocked him; but there could be no doubt of the kindness of keeping it a secret, and he had come to help me in this last service. It was here that I took Mr. Micawber aside, and received his promise. The Micawber family were lodged in a little, dirty, tumble-down public-house, which in those days was close to the stairs, and whose protruding wooden rooms overhung the river. The family, as emigrants, being objects of some interest in and about Hungerford, attracted so many beholders, that we were glad to take refuge in their room. It was one of the wooden chambers upstairs, with the tide flowing underneath. My aunt and Agnes were there, busily making some little extra comforts, in the way of dress, for the children. Peggotty was quietly assisting, with the old insensible work-box, yard-measure, and bit of wax-candle before her, that had now outlived so much. It was not easy to answer her inquiries; still less to whisper Mr. Peggotty, when Mr. Micawber brought him in, that I had given the letter, and all was well. But I did both, and made them happy. If I showed any trace of what I felt, my own sorrows were sufficient to account for it. ‘And when does the ship sail, Mr. Micawber?’ asked my aunt. Mr. Micawber considered it necessary to prepare either my aunt or his wife, by degrees, and said, sooner than he had expected yesterday. ‘The boat brought you word, I suppose?’ said my aunt. ‘It did, ma’am,’ he returned. ‘Well?’ said my aunt. ‘And she sails -’ ‘Madam,’ he replied, ‘I am informed that we must positively be on board before seven tomorrow morning.’

‘Heyday!’ said my aunt, ‘that’s soon. Is it a sea-going fact, Mr. Peggotty?’ ''Tis so, ma’am. She’ll drop down the river with that theer tide. If Mas’r Davy and my sister comes aboard at Gravesen’, arternoon o’ next day, they’ll see the last on us.’ ‘And that we shall do,’ said I, ‘be sure!’ ‘Until then, and until we are at sea,’ observed Mr. Micawber, with a glance of intelligence at me, ‘Mr. Peggotty and myself will constantly keep a double look-out together, on our goods and chattels. Emma, my love,’ said Mr. Micawber, clearing his throat in his magnificent way, ‘my friend Mr. Thomas Traddles is so obliging as to solicit, in my ear, that he should have the privilege of ordering the ingredients necessary to the composition of a moderate portion of that Beverage which is peculiarly associated, in our minds, with the Roast Beef of Old England. I allude to - in short, Punch. Under ordinary circumstances, I should scruple to entreat the indulgence of Miss Trotwood and Miss Wickfield, but-’ ‘I can only say for myself,’ said my aunt, ‘that I will drink all happiness and success to you, Mr. Micawber, with the utmost pleasure.’ ‘And I too!’ said Agnes, with a smile. Mr. Micawber immediately descended to the bar, where he appeared to be quite at home; and in due time returned with a steaming jug. I could not but observe that he had been peeling the lemons with his own clasp-knife, which, as became the knife of a practical settler, was about a foot long; and which he wiped, not wholly without ostentation, on the sleeve of his coat. Mrs. Micawber and the two elder members of the family I now found to be provided with similar formidable instruments, while every child had its own wooden spoon attached to its body by a strong line. In a similar anticipation of life afloat, and in the Bush, Mr. Micawber, instead of helping Mrs. Micawber and his eldest son and daughter to punch, in wine-glasses, which he might easily have done, for there was a shelf-full in the room, served it out to them in a series of villainous little tin pots; and I never saw him enjoy anything so much as drinking out of his own particular pint pot, and putting it in his pocket at the close of the evening. ‘The luxuries of the old country,’ said Mr. Micawber, with an intense satisfaction in their renouncement, ‘we abandon. The denizens of the forest cannot, of course, expect to participate in the refinements of the land of the Free.’ Here, a boy came in to say that Mr. Micawber was wanted downstairs. ‘I have a presentiment,’ said Mrs. Micawber, setting down her tin pot, ‘that it is a member of my family!’ ‘If so, my dear,’ observed Mr. Micawber, with his usual suddenness of warmth on that subject, ‘as the member of your family - whoever he, she, or it, may be - has kept us waiting for a considerable period, perhaps the Member may now wait My convenience.’ ‘Micawber,’ said his wife, in a low tone, ‘at such a time as this -’ ‘“It is not meet,”’ said Mr. Micawber, rising, ‘“that every nice offence should bear its comment!” Emma, I stand reproved.’ ‘The loss, Micawber,’ observed his wife, ‘has been my family’s, not yours. If my family are at length sensible of the deprivation to which their own conduct has, in the past, ex-posed them, and now desire to extend the hand of fellowship, let it not be repulsed.’ ‘My dear,’ he returned, ‘so be it!’ ‘If not for their sakes; for mine, Micawber,’ said his wife. ‘Emma,’ he returned, ‘that view of the question is, at such a moment, irresistible. I cannot, even now, distinctly pledge my-self to fall upon your family’s neck; but the member of your family, who is now in attendance, shall have no genial warmth frozen by me.’ Mr. Micawber withdrew, and was absent some little time; in the course of which Mrs. Micawber was not wholly free from an apprehension that words might have arisen between him and the Member. At length the same boy reappeared, and presented me with a note written in pencil, and headed, in a legal manner, ‘Heep v. Micawber’. From this document, I learned that Mr. Micawber being again arrested, ‘Was in a final paroxysm of despair; and that he begged me to send him his knife and pint pot, by bearer, as they might prove service-able during the brief remainder of his existence, in jail. He also requested, as a last act of friendship, that I would see his family to the Parish Workhouse, and forget that such a Being ever lived.

Of course I answered this note by going down with the boy to pay the money, where I found Mr. Micawber sitting in a corner, looking darkly at the Sheriff ‘s Officer who had effected the capture. On his release, he embraced me with the utmost fervour; and made an entry of the transaction in his pocket-book - being very particular, I recollect, about a halfpenny I in-advertently omitted from my statement of the total. This momentous pocket-book was a timely reminder to him of another transaction. On our return to the room upstairs (where he accounted for his absence by saying that it had been occasioned by circumstances over which he had no control), he took out of it a large sheet of paper, folded small, and quite covered with long sums, carefully worked. From the glimpse I had of them, I should say that I never saw such sums out of a school ciphering-book. These, it seemed, were calculations of compound interest on what he called ‘the principal amount of forty-one, ten, eleven and a half’, for various periods. After a careful consideration of these, and an elaborate estimate of his resources, he had come to the conclusion to select that sum which represented the amount with compound interest to two years, fifteen calendar months, and fourteen days, from that date. For this he had drawn a note-of-hand with great neatness, which he handed over to Traddles on the spot, a discharge of his debt in full (as between man and man), with many acknowledgements. ‘I have still a presentiment,’ said Mrs. Micawber, pensively shaking her head, ‘that my family will appear on board, before we finally depart.’ Mr. Micawber evidently had his presentiment on the subject too, but he put it in his tin pot and swallowed it. ‘If you have any opportunity of sending letters home, on your passage, Mrs. Micawber,’ said my aunt, ‘you must let us hear from you, you know.’ ‘My dear Miss Trotwood,’ she replied, ‘I shall only be too happy to think that anyone expects to hear from us. I shall not fail to correspond. Mr. Copperfield, I trust, as an old and familiar friend, will not object to receive occasional intelligence, himself, from one who knew him when the twins were yet unconscious?’

I said that I should hope to hear, whenever she had an opportunity of writing. ‘Please Heaven, there will be many such opportunities,’ said Mr. Micawber. ‘The ocean, in these times, is a perfect fleet of ships; and we can hardly fail to encounter many, in running over. It is merely crossing,’ said Mr. Micawber, trifling with his eye-glass, ‘merely crossing. The distance is quite imaginary.’ I think, now, how odd it was, but how wonderfully like Mr. Micawber, that, when he went from London to Canterbury, he should have talked as if he were going to the farthest limits of the earth; and, when he went from England to Australia, as if he were going for a little trip across the channel. ‘On the voyage, I shall endeavour,’ said Mr. Micawber, ‘occasionally to spin them a yarn; and the melody of my son Wilkins will, I trust, be acceptable at the galley-fire. When Mrs. Micawber has her sea-legs on - an expression in which I hope there is no conventional impropriety - she will give them, I dare say, “Little Tafflin”. Porpoises and dolphins, I believe, will be frequently observed athwart our Bows; and, either on the star-board or the larboard quarter, objects of interest will be continually descried. In short,’ said Mr. Micawber, with the old genteel air, ‘the probability is, all will be found so exciting, alow and aloft, that when the lookout, stationed in the main-top, cries Land-oh! we shall be very considerably astonished!’ With that he flourished off the contents of his little tin pot, as if he had made the voyage, and had passed a first-class examination before the highest naval authorities. ‘What I chiefly hope, my dear Mr. Copperfield,’ said Mrs. Micawber, ‘is, that in some branches of our family we may live again in the old country. Do not frown, Micawber! I do not now refer to my own family, but to our children’s children. However vigorous the sapling,’ said Mrs. Micawber, shaking her head, ‘I cannot forget the parent-tree; and when our race attains to eminence and fortune, I own I should wish that fortune to flow in-to the coffers of Britannia.’ ‘My dear,’ said Mr. Micawber, ‘Britannia must take her chance. I am bound to say that she has never done much for me, and that I have no particular wish upon the subject.’ ‘Micawber,’ returned Mrs. Micawber, ‘there, you are wrong. You are going out, Micawber, to this distant clime, to strengthen, not to weaken, the connexion between yourself and Albion.’ ‘The connexion in question, my love,’ rejoined Mr. Micawber, ‘has not laid me, I repeat, under that load of personal obligation, that I am at all sensitive as to the formation of another connexion.’ ‘Micawber,’ returned Mrs. Micawber. ‘There, I again say, you are wrong. You do not know your power, Micawber. It is that which will strengthen, even in this step you are about to take, the connexion between yourself and Albion.’ Mr. Micawber sat in his elbow-chair, with his eyebrows raised; half receiving and half repudiating Mrs. Micawber’s views as they were stated, but very sensible of their foresight. ‘My dear Mr. Copperfield,’ said Mrs. Micawber, ‘I wish Mr. Micawber to feel his position. It appears to me highly import-ant that Mr. Micawber should, from the hour of his embarkation, feel his position. Your old knowledge of me, my dear Mr. Copperfield, will have told you that I have not the sanguine disposition of Mr. Micawber. My disposition is, if I may say so, eminently practical. I know that this is a long voyage. I know that it will involve many privations and inconveniences. I can-not shut my eyes to those facts. But I also know what Mr. Micawber is. I know the latent power of Mr. Micawber. And therefore I consider it vitally important that Mr. Micawber should feel his position.’ ‘My love,’ he observed, ‘perhaps you will allow me to remark that it is barely possible that I do feel my position at the present moment.’ ‘I think not, Micawber,’ she rejoined. ‘Not fully. My dear Mr. Copperfield, Mr. Micawber’s is not a common case. Mr. Micawber is going to a distant country expressly in order that he may be fully understood and appreciated for the first time. I wish Mr. Micawber to take his stand upon that vessel’s prow, and firmly say, “This country I am come to conquer! Have you honours? Have you riches? Have you posts of profitable pecuniary emolument? Let them be brought forward. They are mine!”’ Mr. Micawber, glancing at us all, seemed to think there was a good deal in this idea. ‘I wish Mr. Micawber, if I make myself understood,’ said Mrs. Micawber, in her argumentative tone, ‘to be the Caesar of his own fortunes. That, my dear Mr. Copperfield, appears to me to be his true position. From the first moment of this voyage, I wish Mr. Micawber to stand upon that vessel’s prow and say, “Enough of delay: enough of disappointment: enough of limited means. That was in the old country. This is the new. Produce your reparation. Bring it forward!”’ Mr. Micawber folded his arms in a resolute manner, as if he were then stationed on the figure-head. ‘And doing that,’ said Mrs. Micawber, ‘- feeling his position - am I not right in saying that Mr. Micawber will strengthen, and not weaken, his connexion with Britain? An important public character arising in that hemisphere, shall I be told that its influence will not be felt at home? Can I be so weak as to imagine that Mr. Micawber, wielding the rod of talent and of power in Australia, will be nothing in England? I am but a woman; but I should be unworthy of myself and of my papa, if I were guilty of such absurd weakness.’ Mrs. Micawber’s conviction that her arguments were unanswerable, gave a moral elevation to her tone which I think I had never heard in it before. ‘And therefore it is,’ said Mrs. Micawber, ‘that I the more wish, that, at a future period, we may live again on the parent soil. Mr. Micawber may be - I cannot disguise from myself that the probability is, Mr. Micawber will be - a page of History; and he ought then to be represented in the country which gave him birth, and did not give him employment!’ ‘My love,’ observed Mr. Micawber, ‘it is impossible for me not to be touched by your affection. I am always willing to defer to your good sense. What will be - will be. Heaven forbid that I should grudge my native country any portion of the wealth that may be accumulated by our descendants!’ ‘That’s well,’ said my aunt, nodding towards Mr. Peggotty, ‘and I drink my love to you all, and every blessing and success attend you!’ Mr. Peggotty put down the two children he had been nursing, one on each knee, to join Mr. and Mrs. Micawber in drinking to all of us in return; and when he and the Micawbers cordially shook hands as comrades, and his brown face brightened with a smile, I felt that he would make his way, establish a good name, and be beloved, go where he would.

Even the children were instructed, each to dip a wooden spoon into Mr. Micawber’s pot, and pledge us in its contents. When this was done, my aunt and Agnes rose, and parted from the emigrants. It was a sorrowful farewell. They were all crying; the children hung about Agnes to the last; and we left poor Mrs. Micawber in a very distressed condition, sobbing and weeping by a dim candle, that must have made the room look, from the river, like a miserable light-house. I went down again next morning to see that they were away. They had departed, in a boat, as early as five o’clock. It was a wonderful instance to me of the gap such partings make, that although my association of them with the tumble-down public-house and the wooden stairs dated only from last night, both seemed dreary and deserted, now that they were gone. In the afternoon of the next day, my old nurse and I went down to Gravesend. We found the ship in the river, surrounded by a crowd of boats; a favourable wind blowing; the signal for sailing at her mast-head. I hired a boat directly, and we put off to her; and getting through the little vortex of confusion of which she was the centre, went on board. Mr. Peggotty was waiting for us on deck. He told me that Mr. Micawber had just now been arrested again (and for the last time) at the suit of Heep, and that, in compliance with a re-quest I had made to him, he had paid the money, which I re-paid him. He then took us down between decks; and there, any lingering fears I had of his having heard any rumours of what had happened, were dispelled by Mr. Micawber’s coming out of the gloom, taking his arm with an air of friendship and protection, and telling me that they had scarcely been asunder for a moment, since the night before last. It was such a strange scene to me, and so confined and dark, that, at first, I could make out hardly anything; but, by degrees, it cleared, as my eyes became more accustomed to the gloom, and I seemed to stand in a picture by Ostade. Among the great beams, bulks, and ringbolts of the ship, and the emigrant-berths, and chests, and bundles, and barrels, and heaps of miscellaneous baggage -‘lighted up, here and there, by dangling lanterns; and elsewhere by the yellow daylight straying down a windsail or a hatchway - were crowded groups of people, making new friendships, taking leave of one another, talking, laughing, crying, eating and drinking; some, already settled down into the possession of their few feet of space, with their little households arranged, and tiny children established on stools, or in dwarf elbow-chairs; others, despairing of a resting-place, and wandering disconsolately. From babies who had but a week or two of life behind them, to crooked old men and women who seemed to have but a week or two of life be-fore them; and from ploughmen bodily carrying out soil of England on their boots, to smiths taking away samples of its soot and smoke upon their skins; every age and occupation appeared to be crammed into the narrow compass of the ‘tween decks. As my eye glanced round this place, I thought I saw sitting, by an open port, with one of the Micawber children near her, a figure like Emily’s; it first attracted my attention, by another figure parting from it with a kiss; and as it glided calmly away through the disorder, reminding me of - Agnes! But in the rap-id motion and confusion, and in the unsettlement of my own thoughts, I lost it again; and only knew that the time was come when all visitors were being warned to leave the ship; that my nurse was crying on a chest beside me; and that Mrs. Gum-midge, assisted by some younger stooping woman in black, was busily arranging Mr. Peggotty’s goods. ‘Is there any last wured, Mas’r Davy?’ said he. ‘Is there any one forgotten thing afore we parts?’ ‘One thing!’ said I. ‘Martha!’ He touched the younger woman I have mentioned on the shoulder, and Martha stood before me. ‘Heaven bless you, you good man!’ cried I. ‘You take her with you!’ She answered for him, with a burst of tears. I could speak no more at that time, but I wrung his hand; and if ever I have loved and honoured any man, I loved and honoured that man in my soul. The ship was clearing fast of strangers. The greatest trial that I had, remained. I told him what the noble spirit that was gone, had given me in charge to say at parting. It moved him deeply. But when he charged me, in return, with many messages of affection and regret for those deaf ears, he moved me more.

The time was come. I embraced him, took my weeping nurse upon my arm, and hurried away. On deck, I took leave of poor Mrs. Micawber. She was looking distractedly about for her family, even then; and her last words to me were, that she never would desert Mr. Micawber. We went over the side into our boat, and lay at a little distance, to see the ship wafted on her course. It was then calm, radiant sunset. She lay between us, and the red light; and every taper line and spar was visible against the glow. A sight at once so beautiful, so mournful, and so hopeful, as the glorious ship, lying, still, on the flushed water, with all the life on board her crowded at the bulwarks, and there clustering, for a moment, bare-headed and silent, I never saw. Silent, only for a moment. As the sails rose to the wind, and the ship began to move, there broke from all the boats three resounding cheers, which those on board took up, and echoed back, and which were echoed and re-echoed. My heart burst out when I heard the sound, and beheld the waving of the hats and handkerchiefs - and then I saw her! Then I saw her, at her uncle’s side, and trembling on his shoulder. He pointed to us with an eager hand; and she saw us, and waved her last good-bye to me. Aye, Emily, beautiful and drooping, cling to him with the utmost trust of thy bruised heart; for he has clung to thee, with all the might of his great love! Surrounded by the rosy light, and standing high upon the deck, apart together, she clinging to him, and he holding her, they solemnly passed away. The night had fallen on the Kentish hills when we were rowed ashore - and fallen darkly upon me.

Chapter 58

Chapter 58

Absence It was a long and gloomy night that gathered on me, haunted by the ghosts of many hopes, of many dear remembrances, many errors, many unavailing sorrows and regrets. I went away from England; not knowing, even then, how great the shock was, that I had to bear. I left all who were dear to me, and went away; and believed that I had borne it, and it was past. As a man upon a field of battle will receive a mortal hurt, and scarcely know that he is struck, so I, when I was left alone with my undisciplined heart, had no conception of the wound with which it had to strive. The knowledge came upon me, not quickly, but little by little, and grain by grain. The desolate feeling with which I went abroad, deepened and widened hourly. At first it was a heavy sense of loss and sorrow, wherein I could distinguish little else. By imperceptible degrees, it became a hopeless consciousness of all that I had lost - love, friendship, interest; of all that had been shattered - my first trust, my first affection, the whole airy castle of my life; of all that remained - a ruined blank and waste, lying wide around me, unbroken, to the dark horizon. If my grief were selfish, I did not know it to be so. I mourned for my child-wife, taken from her blooming world, so young. I mourned for him who might have won the love and admiration of thousands, as he had won mine long ago. I mourned for the broken heart that had found rest in the stormy sea; and for the wandering remnants of the simple home, where I had heard the night-wind blowing, when I was a child. From the accumulated sadness into which I fell, I had at length no hope of ever issuing again. I roamed from place to place, carrying my burden with me everywhere. I felt its whole weight now; and I drooped beneath it, and I said in my heart that it could never be lightened. When this despondency was at its worst, I believed that I should die. Sometimes, I thought that I would like to die at home; and actually turned back on my road, that I might get there soon. At other times, I passed on farther away, -from city to city, seeking I know not what, and trying to leave I know not what behind. It is not in my power to retrace, one by one, all the weary phases of distress of mind through which I passed. There are some dreams that can only be imperfectly and vaguely de-scribed; and when I oblige myself to look back on this time of my life, I seem to be recalling such a dream. I see myself passing on among the novelties of foreign towns, palaces, cathedrals, temples, pictures, castles, tombs, fantastic streets - the old abiding places of History and Fancy - as a dreamer might; bearing my painful load through all, and hardly conscious of the objects as they fade before me. Listlessness to everything, but brooding sorrow, was the night that fell on my undisciplined heart. Let me look up from it - as at last I did, thank Heaven! - and from its long, sad, wretched dream, to dawn. For many months I travelled with this ever-darkening cloud upon my mind. Some blind reasons that I had for not returning home - reasons then struggling within me, vainly, for more distinct expression - kept me on my pilgrimage. Sometimes, I had proceeded restlessly from place to place, stopping nowhere; sometimes, I had lingered long in one spot. I had had no purpose, no sustaining soul within me, anywhere. I was in Switzerland. I had come out of Italy, over one of the great passes of the Alps, and had since wandered with a guide among the by-ways of the mountains. If those awful solitudes had spoken to my heart, I did not know it. I had found sublimity and wonder in the dread heights and precipices, in the roaring torrents, and the wastes of ice and snow; but as yet, they had taught me nothing else. I came, one evening before sunset, down into a valley, where I was to rest. In the course of my descent to it, by the winding track along the mountain-side, from which I saw it shining far below, I think some long-unwonted sense of beauty and tranquillity, some softening influence awakened by its peace, moved faintly in my breast. I remember pausing once, with a kind of sorrow that was not all oppressive, not quite despairing. I remember almost hoping that some better change was possible within me. I came into the valley, as the evening sun was shining on the remote heights of snow, that closed it in, like eternal clouds. The bases of the mountains forming the gorge in which the little village lay, were richly green; and high above this gentler vegetation, grew forests of dark fir, cleaving the wintry snow-drift, wedge-like, and stemming the avalanche. Above these, were range upon range of craggy steeps, grey rock, bright ice, and smooth verdure-specks of pasture, all gradually blending with the crowning snow. Dotted here and there on the mountain’s-side, each tiny dot a home, were lonely wooden cottages, so dwarfed by the towering heights that they appeared too small for toys. So did even the clustered village in the valley, with its wooden bridge across the stream, where the stream tumbled over broken rocks, and roared away among the trees. In the quiet air, there was a sound of distant singing - shepherd voices; but, as one bright evening cloud floated mid-way along the mountain’s-side, I could almost have believed it came from there, and was not earthly music. All at once, in this serenity, great Nature spoke to me; and soothed me to lay down my weary head upon the grass, and weep as I had not wept yet, since Dora died! I had found a packet of letters awaiting me but a few minutes before, and had strolled out of the village to read them while my supper was making ready. Other packets had missed me, and I had received none for a long time. Beyond a line or two, to say that I was well, and had arrived at such a place, I had not had fortitude or constancy to write a letter since I left home. The packet was in my hand. I opened it, and read the writing of Agnes. She was happy and useful, was prospering as she had hoped. That was all she told me of herself. The rest referred to me. She gave me no advice; she urged no duty on me; she only told me, in her own fervent manner, what her trust in me was. She knew (she said) how such a nature as mine would turn affliction to good. She knew how trial and emotion would exalt and strengthen it. She was sure that in my every purpose I should gain a firmer and a higher tendency, through the grief I had undergone. She, who so gloried in my fame, and so looked forward to its augmentation, well knew that I would labour on. She knew that in me, sorrow could not be weakness, but must be strength. As the endurance of my childish days had done its part to make me what I was, so greater calamities would nerve me on, to be yet better than I was; and so, as they had taught me, would I teach others. She commended me to God, who had taken my innocent darling to His rest; and in her sisterly affection cherished me always, and was always at my side go where I would; proud of what I had done, but infinitely prouder yet of what I was reserved to do. I put the letter in my breast, and thought what had I been an hour ago! When I heard the voices die away, and saw the quiet evening cloud grow dim, and all the colours in the valley fade, and the golden snow upon the mountain-tops become a remote part of the pale night sky, yet felt that the night was passing from my mind, and all its shadows clearing, there was no name for the love I bore her, dearer to me, henceforward, than ever until then. I read her letter many times. I wrote to her before I slept. I told her that I had been in sore need of her help; that without her I was not, and I never had been, what she thought me; but that she inspired me to be that, and I would try. I did try. In three months more, a year would have passed since the beginning of my sorrow. I determined to make no resolutions until the expiration of those three months, but to try. I lived in that valley, and its neighbourhood, all the time. The three months gone, I resolved to remain away from home for some time longer; to settle myself for the present in Switzerland, which was growing dear to me in the remembrance of that evening; to resume my pen; to work. I resorted humbly whither Agnes had commended me; I sought out Nature, never sought in vain; and I admitted to my breast the human interest I had lately shrunk from. It was not long, before I had almost as many friends in the valley as in Yarmouth: and when I left it, before the winter set in, for Geneva, and came back in the spring, their cordial greetings had a homely sound to me, although they were not conveyed in English words. I worked early and late, patiently and hard. I wrote a Story, with a purpose growing, not remotely, out of my experience, and sent it to Traddles, and he arranged for its publication very advantageously for me; and the tidings of my growing reputation began to reach me from travellers whom I encountered by chance. After some rest and change, I fell to work, in my old ardent way, on a new fancy, which took strong possession of me. As I advanced in the execution of this task, I felt it more and more, and roused my utmost energies to do it well. This was my third work of fiction. It was not half written, when, in an interval of rest, I thought of returning home. For a long time, though studying and working patiently, I had accustomed myself to robust exercise. My health, severely impaired when I left England, was quite restored. I had seen much. I had been in many countries, and I hope I had improved my store of knowledge. I have now recalled all that I think it needful to recall here, of this term of absence - with one reservation. I have made it, thus far, with no purpose of suppressing any of my thoughts; for, as I have elsewhere said, this narrative is my written memory. I have desired to keep the most secret current of my mind apart, and to the last. I enter on it now. I cannot so completely penetrate the mystery of my own heart, as to know when I began to think that I might have set its earliest and brightest hopes on Agnes. I cannot say at what stage of my grief it first became associated with the reflection, that, in my wayward boyhood, I had thrown away the treasure of her love. I believe I may have heard some whisper of that distant thought, in the old unhappy loss or want of something never to be realized, of which I had been sensible. But the thought came into my mind as a new reproach and new regret, when I was left so sad and lonely in the world. If, at that time, I had been much with her, I should, in the weakness of my desolation, have betrayed this. It was what I remotely dreaded when I was first impelled to stay away from England. I could not have borne to lose the smallest portion of her sisterly affection; yet, in that betrayal, I should have set a constraint between us hitherto unknown.

I could not forget that the feeling with which she now regarded me had grown up in my own free choice and course. That if she had ever loved me with another love - and I some-times thought the time was when she might have done so - I had cast it away. It was nothing, now, that I had accustomed myself to think of her, when we were both mere children, as one who was far removed from my wild fancies. I had bestowed my passionate tenderness upon another object; and what I might have done, I had not done; and what Agnes was to me, I and her own noble heart had made her. In the beginning of the change that gradually worked in me, when I tried to get a better understanding of myself and be a better man, I did glance, through some indefinite probation, to a period when I might possibly hope to cancel the mistaken past, and to be so blessed as to marry her. But, as time wore on, this shadowy prospect faded, and departed from me. If she had ever loved me, then, I should hold her the more sacred; remembering the confidences I had reposed in her, her know-ledge of my errant heart, the sacrifice she must have made to be my friend and sister, and the victory she had won. If she had never loved me, could I believe that she would love me now? I had always felt my weakness, in comparison with her constancy and fortitude; and now I felt it more and more. Whatever I might have been to her, or she to me, if I had been more worthy of her long ago, I was not now, and she was not. The time was past. I had let it go by, and had deservedly lost her. That I suffered much in these contentions, that they filled me with unhappiness and remorse, and yet that I had a sustaining sense that it was required of me, in right and honour, to keep away from myself, with shame, the thought of turning to the dear girl in the withering of my hopes, from whom I had frivolously turned when they were bright and fresh - which consideration was at the root of every thought I had concerning her - is all equally true. I made no effort to conceal from myself, now, that I loved her, that I was devoted to her; but I brought the assurance home to myself, that it was now too late, and that our long-subsisting relation must be undisturbed. I had thought, much and often, of my Dora’s shadowing out to me what might have happened, in those years that were destined not to try us; I had considered how the things that never happen, are often as much realities to us, in their effects, as those that are accomplished. The very years she spoke of, were realities now, for my correction; and would have been, one day, a little later perhaps, though we had parted in our earliest folly. I endeavoured to convert what might have been between myself and Agnes, into a means of making me more self-denying, more resolved, more conscious of myself, and my defects and errors. Thus, through the reflection that it might have been, I arrived at the conviction that it could never be. These, with their perplexities and inconsistencies, were the shifting quicksands of my mind, from the time of my departure to the time of my return home, three years afterwards. Three years had elapsed since the sailing of the emigrant ship; when, at that same hour of sunset, and in the same place, I stood on the deck of the packet vessel that brought me home, looking on the rosy water where I had seen the image of that ship reflected. Three years. Long in the aggregate, though short as they went by. And home was very dear to me, and Agnes too - but she was not mine - she was never to be mine. She might have been, but that was past!

Chapter 59

Chapter 59

Return I landed in London on a wintry autumn evening. It was dark and raining, and I saw more fog and mud in a minute than I had seen in a year. I walked from the Custom House to the Monument before I found a coach; and although the very house-fronts, looking on the swollen gutters, were like old friends to me, I could not but admit that they were very dingy friends. I have often remarked - I suppose everybody has - that one’s going away from a familiar place, would seem to be the signal for change in it. As I looked out of the coach window, and observed that an old house on Fish-street Hill, which had stood untouched by painter, carpenter, or bricklayer, for a century, had been pulled down in my absence; and that a neighbouring street, of time-honoured insalubrity and inconvenience, was being drained and widened; I half expected to find St. Paul’s Cathedral looking older. For some changes in the fortunes of my friends, I was pre-pared. My aunt had long been re-established at Dover, and Traddles had begun to get into some little practice at the Bar, in the very first term after my departure. He had chambers in Gray’s Inn, now; and had told me, in his last letters, that he was not without hopes of being soon united to the dearest girl in the world. They expected me home before Christmas; but had no idea of my returning so soon. I had purposely misled them, that I might have the pleasure of taking them by surprise. And yet, I was perverse enough to feel a chill and disappointment in receiving no welcome, and rattling, alone and silent, through the misty streets.

The well-known shops, however, with their cheerful lights, did something for me; and when I alighted at the door of the Gray’s Inn Coffee-house, I had recovered my spirits. It recalled, at first, that so-different time when I had put up at the Golden Cross, and reminded me of the changes that had come to pass since then; but that was natural. ‘Do you know where Mr. Traddles lives in the Inn?’ I asked the waiter, as I warmed myself by the coffee-room fire. ‘Holborn Court, sir. Number two.’ ‘Mr. Traddles has a rising reputation among the lawyers, I believe?’ said I. ‘Well, sir,’ returned the waiter, ‘probably he has, sir; but I am not aware of it myself.’ This waiter, who was middle-aged and spare, looked for help to a waiter of more authority - a stout, potential old man, with a double chin, in black breeches and stockings, who came out of a place like a churchwarden’s pew, at the end of the coffee-room, where he kept company with a cash-box, a Directory, a Law-list, and other books and papers. ‘Mr. Traddles,’ said the spare waiter. ‘Number two in the Court.’ The potential waiter waved him away, and turned, gravely, to me. ‘I was inquiring,’ said I, ‘whether Mr. Traddles, at number two in the Court, has not a rising reputation among the lawyers?’ ‘Never heard his name,’ said the waiter, in a rich husky voice. I felt quite apologetic for Traddles. ‘He’s a young man, sure?’ said the portentous waiter, fixing his eyes severely on me. ‘How long has he been in the Inn?’ ‘Not above three years,’ said I. The waiter, who I supposed had lived in his churchwarden’s pew for forty years, could not pursue such an insignificant subject. He asked me what I would have for dinner? I felt I was in England again, and really was quite cast down on Traddles’s account. There seemed to be no hope for him. I meekly ordered a bit of fish and a steak, and stood before the fire musing on his obscurity.

As I followed the chief waiter with my eyes, I could not help thinking that the garden in which he had gradually blown to be the flower he was, was an arduous place to rise in. It had such a prescriptive, stiff-necked, long-established, solemn, elderly air. I glanced about the room, which had had its sanded floor sanded, no doubt, in exactly the same manner when the chief waiter was a boy - if he ever was a boy, which appeared improbable; and at the shining tables, where I saw myself reflected, in unruffled depths of old mahogany; and at the lamps, without a flaw in their trimming or cleaning; and at the comfortable green curtains, with their pure brass rods, snugly en-closing the boxes; and at the two large coal fires, brightly burning; and at the rows of decanters, burly as if with the consciousness of pipes of expensive old port wine below; and both England, and the law, appeared to me to be very difficult in-deed to be taken by storm. I went up to my bedroom to change my wet clothes; and the vast extent of that old wainscoted apartment (which was over the archway leading to the Inn, I remember), and the sedate immensity of the four-post bed-stead, and the indomitable gravity of the chests of drawers, all seemed to unite in sternly frowning on the fortunes of Traddles, or on any such daring youth. I came down again to my dinner; and even the slow comfort of the meal, and the orderly silence of the place - which was bare of guests, the Long Vacation not yet being over - were eloquent on the audacity of Traddles, and his small hopes of a livelihood for twenty years to come. I had seen nothing like this since I went away, and it quite dashed my hopes for my friend. The chief waiter had had enough of me. He came near me no more; but devoted himself to an old gentleman in long gaiters, to meet whom a pint of special port seemed to come out of the cellar of its own accord, for he gave no order. The second waiter informed me, in a whisper, that this old gentleman was a retired conveyancer living in the Square, and worth a mint of money, which it was expected he would leave to his laundress’s daughter; likewise that it was rumoured that he had a service of plate in a bureau, all tarnished with lying by, though more than one spoon and a fork had never yet been beheld in his chambers by mortal vision. By this time, I quite gave Traddles up for lost; and settled in my own mind that there was no hope for him. Being very anxious to see the dear old fellow, nevertheless, I dispatched my dinner, in a manner not at all calculated to raise me in the opinion of the chief waiter, and hurried out by the back way. Number two in the Court was soon reached; and an inscription on the door-post informing me that Mr. Traddles occupied a set of chambers on the top storey, I ascended the staircase. A crazy old staircase I found it to be, feebly lighted on each landing by a club- headed little oil wick, dying away in a little dungeon of dirty glass. In the course of my stumbling upstairs, I fancied I heard a pleasant sound of laughter; and not the laughter of an attorney or barrister, or attorney’s clerk or barrister’s clerk, but of two or three merry girls. Happening, however, as I stopped to listen, to put my foot in a hole where the Honourable Society of Gray’s Inn had left a plank deficient, I fell down with some noise, and when I recovered my footing all was silent. Groping my way more carefully, for the rest of the journey, my heart beat high when I found the outer door, which had Mr. Traddles painted on it, open. I knocked. A considerable scuff-ling within ensued, but nothing else. I therefore knocked again. A small sharp-looking lad, half-footboy and half-clerk, who was very much out of breath, but who looked at me as if he defied me to prove it legally, presented himself. ‘Is Mr. Traddles within?’ I said. ‘Yes, sir, but he’s engaged.’ ‘I want to see him.’ After a moment’s survey of me, the sharp-looking lad decided to let me in; and opening the door wider for that purpose, admitted me, first, into a little closet of a hall, and next into a little sitting-room; where I came into the presence of my old friend (also out of breath), seated at a table, and bending over papers. ‘Good God!’ cried Traddles, looking up. ‘It’s Copperfield!’ and rushed into my arms, where I held him tight. ‘All well, my dear Traddles?’ ‘All well, my dear, dear Copperfield, and nothing but good news!’ We cried with pleasure, both of us.

‘My dear fellow,’ said Traddles, rumpling his hair in his excitement, which was a most unnecessary operation, ‘my dearest Copperfield, my long-lost and most welcome friend, how glad I am to see you! How brown you are! How glad I am! Upon my life and honour, I never was so rejoiced, my beloved Copperfield, never!’ I was equally at a loss to express my emotions. I was quite unable to speak, at first. ‘My dear fellow!’ said Traddles. ‘And grown so famous! My glorious Copperfield! Good gracious me, when did you come, where have you come from, what have you been doing?’ Never pausing for an answer to anything he said, Traddles, who had clapped me into an easy-chair by the fire, all this time impetuously stirred the fire with one hand, and pulled at my neck-kerchief with the other, under some wild delusion that it was a great-coat. Without putting down the poker, he now hugged me again; and I hugged him; and, both laughing, and both wiping our eyes, we both sat down, and shook hands across the hearth. ‘To think,’ said Traddles, ‘that you should have been so nearly coming home as you must have been, my dear old boy, and not at the ceremony!’ ‘What ceremony, my dear Traddles?’ ‘Good gracious me!’ cried Traddles, opening his eyes in his old way. ‘Didn’t you get my last letter?’ ‘Certainly not, if it referred to any ceremony.’ ‘Why, my dear Copperfield,’ said Traddles, sticking his hair upright with both hands, and then putting his hands on my knees, ‘I am married!’ ‘Married!’ I cried joyfully. ‘Lord bless me, yes!’ said Traddles - ‘by the Reverend Horace - to Sophy - down in Devonshire. Why, my dear boy, she’s be-hind the window curtain! Look here!’ To my amazement, the dearest girl in the world came at that same instant, laughing and blushing, from her place of concealment. And a more cheerful, amiable, honest, happy, bright-looking bride, I believe (as I could not help saying on the spot) the world never saw. I kissed her as an old acquaintance should, and wished them joy with all my might of heart.

‘Dear me,’ said Traddles, ‘what a delightful re-union this is! You are so extremely brown, my dear Copperfield! God bless my soul, how happy I am!’ ‘And so am I,’ said I. ‘And I am sure I am!’ said the blushing and laughing Sophy. ‘We are all as happy as possible!’ said Traddles. ‘Even the girls are happy. Dear me, I declare I forgot them!’ ‘Forgot?’ said I. ‘The girls,’ said Traddles. ‘Sophy’s sisters. They are staying with us. They have come to have a peep at London. The fact is, when - was it you that tumbled upstairs, Copperfield?’ ‘It was,’ said I, laughing. ‘Well then, when you tumbled upstairs,’ said Traddles, ‘I was romping with the girls. In point of fact, we were playing at Puss in the Corner. But as that wouldn’t do in Westminster Hall, and as it wouldn’t look quite professional if they were seen by a client, they decamped. And they are now - listening, I have no doubt,’ said Traddles, glancing at the door of another room. ‘I am sorry,’ said I, laughing afresh, ‘to have occasioned such a dispersion.’ ‘Upon my word,’ rejoined Traddles, greatly delighted, ‘if you had seen them running away, and running back again, after you had knocked, to pick up the combs they had dropped out of their hair, and going on in the maddest manner, you wouldn’t have said so. My love, will you fetch the girls?’ Sophy tripped away, and we heard her received in the adjoining room with a peal of laughter. ‘Really musical, isn’t it, my dear Copperfield?’ said Traddles. ‘It’s very agreeable to hear. It quite lights up these old rooms. To an unfortunate bachelor of a fellow who has lived alone all his life, you know, it’s positively delicious. It’s charming. Poor things, they have had a great loss in Sophy - who, I do assure you, Copperfield is, and ever was, the dearest girl! - and it gratifies me beyond expression to find them in such good spirits. The society of girls is a very delightful thing, Copperfield. It’s not professional, but it’s very delightful.’ Observing that he slightly faltered, and comprehending that in the goodness of his heart he was fearful of giving me some pain by what he had said, I expressed my concurrence with a heartiness that evidently relieved and pleased him greatly. ‘But then,’ said Traddles, ‘our domestic arrangements are, to say the truth, quite unprofessional altogether, my dear Copper-field. Even Sophy’s being here, is unprofessional. And we have no other place of abode. We have put to sea in a cockboat, but we are quite prepared to rough it. And Sophy’s an extraordinary manager! You’ll be surprised how those girls are stowed away. I am sure I hardly know how it’s done!’ ‘Are many of the young ladies with you?’ I inquired. ‘The eldest, the Beauty is here,’ said Traddles, in a low confidential voice, ‘Caroline. And Sarah’s here - the one I mentioned to you as having something the matter with her spine, you know. Immensely better! And the two youngest that Sophy educated are with us. And Louisa’s here.’ ‘Indeed!’ cried I. ‘Yes,’ said Traddles. ‘Now the whole set - I mean the chambers - is only three rooms; but Sophy arranges for the girls in the most wonderful way, and they sleep as comfortably as possible. Three in that room,’ said Traddles, pointing. ‘Two in that.’ I could not help glancing round, in search of the accommodation remaining for Mr. and Mrs. Traddles. Traddles understood me. ‘Well!’ said Traddles, ‘we are prepared to rough it, as I said just now, and we did improvise a bed last week, upon the floor here. But there’s a little room in the roof - a very nice room, when you’re up there - which Sophy papered herself, to surprise me; and that’s our room at present. It’s a capital little gipsy sort of place. There’s quite a view from it.’ ‘And you are happily married at last, my dear Traddles!’ said I. ‘How rejoiced I am!’ ‘Thank you, my dear Copperfield,’ said Traddles, as we shook hands once more. ‘Yes, I am as happy as it’s possible to be. There’s your old friend, you see,’ said Traddles, nodding triumphantly at the flower-pot and stand; ‘and there’s the table with the marble top! All the other furniture is plain and serviceable, you perceive. And as to plate, Lord bless you, we haven’t so much as a tea-spoon.’ ‘All to be earned?’ said I, cheerfully.

‘Exactly so,’ replied Traddles, ‘all to be earned. Of course we have something in the shape of tea-spoons, because we stir our tea. But they’re Britannia metal.’ ‘The silver will be the brighter when it comes,’ said I. ‘The very thing we say!’ cried Traddles. ‘You see, my dear Copperfield,’ falling again into the low confidential tone, ‘after I had delivered my argument in Doe dem. Jipes versus Wigziell, which did me great service with the profession, I went down in-to Devonshire, and had some serious conversation in private with the Reverend Horace. I dwelt upon the fact that Sophy - who I do assure you, Copperfield, is the dearest girl! -’ ‘I am certain she is!’ said I. ‘She is, indeed!’ rejoined Traddles. ‘But I am afraid I am wandering from the subject. Did I mention the Reverend Horace?’ ‘You said that you dwelt upon the fact -’ ‘True! Upon the fact that Sophy and I had been engaged for a long period, and that Sophy, with the permission of her parents, was more than content to take me - in short,’ said Traddles, with his old frank smile, ‘on our present Britannia-metal footing. Very well. I then proposed to the Reverend Horace - who is a most excellent clergyman, Copperfield, and ought to be a Bishop; or at least ought to have enough to live upon, without pinching himself - that if I could turn the corner, say of two hundred and fifty pounds, in one year; and could see my way pretty clearly to that, or something better, next year; and could plainly furnish a little place like this, besides; then, and in that case, Sophy and I should be united. I took the liberty of representing that we had been patient for a good many years; and that the circumstance of Sophy’s being extraordinarily useful at home, ought not to operate with her affectionate parents, against her establishment in life - don’t you see?’ ‘Certainly it ought not,’ said I. ‘I am glad you think so, Copperfield,’ rejoined Traddles, ‘be-cause, without any imputation on the Reverend Horace, I do think parents, and brothers, and so forth, are sometimes rather selfish in such cases. Well! I also pointed out, that my most earnest desire was, to be useful to the family; and that if I got on in the world, and anything should happen to him - I refer to the Reverend Horace -’

‘I understand,’ said I. ‘- Or to Mrs. Crewler - it would be the utmost gratification of my wishes, to be a parent to the girls. He replied in a most admirable manner, exceedingly flattering to my feelings, and undertook to obtain the consent of Mrs. Crewler to this arrangement. They had a dreadful time of it with her. It mounted from her legs into her chest, and then into her head -’ ‘What mounted?’ I asked. ‘Her grief,’ replied Traddles, with a serious look. ‘Her feelings generally. As I mentioned on a former occasion, she is a very superior woman, but has lost the use of her limbs. Whatever occurs to harass her, usually settles in her legs; but on this occasion it mounted to the chest, and then to the head, and, in short, pervaded the whole system in a most alarming manner. However, they brought her through it by unremitting and affectionate attention; and we were married yesterday six weeks. You have no idea what a Monster I felt, Copperfield, when I saw the whole family crying and fainting away in every direction! Mrs. Crewler couldn’t see me before we left - couldn’t forgive me, then, for depriving her of her child - but she is a good creature, and has done so since. I had a delightful letter from her, only this morning.’ ‘And in short, my dear friend,’ said I, ‘you feel as blest as you deserve to feel!’ ‘Oh! That’s your partiality!’ laughed Traddles. ‘But, indeed, I am in a most enviable state. I work hard, and read Law insatiably. I get up at five every morning, and don’t mind it at all. I hide the girls in the daytime, and make merry with them in the evening. And I assure you I am quite sorry that they are going home on Tuesday, which is the day before the first day of Michaelmas Term. But here,’ said Traddles, breaking off in his confidence, and speaking aloud, ‘are the girls! Mr. Copperfield, Miss Crewler - Miss Sarah - Miss Louisa - Margaret and Lucy!’ They were a perfect nest of roses; they looked so wholesome and fresh. They were all pretty, and Miss Caroline was very handsome; but there was a loving, cheerful, fireside quality in Sophy’s bright looks, which was better than that, and which assured me that my friend had chosen well. We all sat round the fire; while the sharp boy, who I now divined had lost his breath in putting the papers out, cleared them away again, and produced the tea-things. After that, he retired for the night, shutting the outer door upon us with a bang. Mrs. Traddles, with perfect pleasure and composure beaming from her house-hold eyes, having made the tea, then quietly made the toast as she sat in a corner by the fire. She had seen Agnes, she told me while she was toasting. ‘Tom’ had taken her down into Kent for a wedding trip, and there she had seen my aunt, too; and both my aunt and Agnes were well, and they had all talked of nothing but me. ‘Tom’ had never had me out of his thoughts, she really believed, all the time I had been away. ‘Tom’ was the authority for everything. ‘Tom’ was evidently the idol of her life; never to be shaken on his pedestal by any commotion; always to be believed in, and done homage to with the whole faith of her heart, come what might. The deference which both she and Traddles showed towards the Beauty, pleased me very much. I don’t know that I thought it very reasonable; but I thought it very delightful, and essentially a part of their character. If Traddles ever for an instant missed the tea-spoons that were still to be won, I have no doubt it was when he handed the Beauty her tea. If his sweet-tempered wife could have got up any self-assertion against anyone, I am satisfied it could only have been because she was the Beauty’s sister. A few slight indications of a rather petted and capricious manner, which I observed in the Beauty, were manifestly considered, by Traddles and his wife, as her birth-right and natural endowment. If she had been born a Queen Bee, and they labouring Bees, they could not have been more satisfied of that. But their self-forgetfulness charmed me. Their pride in these girls, and their submission of themselves to all their whims, was the pleasantest little testimony to their own worth I could have desired to see. If Traddles were addressed as ‘a darling’, once in the course of that evening; and besought to bring something here, or carry something there, or take something up, or put something down, or find something, or fetch something, he was so addressed, by one or other of his sisters-in-law, at least twelve times in an hour. Neither could they do anything without Sophy. Somebody’s hair fell down, and nobody but Sophy could put it up. Somebody forgot how a particular tune went, and nobody but Sophy could hum that tune right. Somebody wanted to recall the name of a place in Devonshire, and only Sophy knew it. Something was wanted to be written home, and Sophy alone could be trusted to write be-fore breakfast in the morning. Somebody broke down in a piece of knitting, and no one but Sophy was able to put the defaulter in the right direction. They were entire mistresses of the place, and Sophy and Traddles waited on them. How many children Sophy could have taken care of in her time, I can’t imagine; but she seemed to be famous for knowing every sort of song that ever was addressed to a child in the English tongue; and she sang dozens to order with the clearest little voice in the world, one after another (every sister issuing directions for a different tune, and the Beauty generally striking in last), so that I was quite fascinated. The best of all was, that, in the midst of their exactions, all the sisters had a great tenderness and respect both for Sophy and Traddles. I am sure, when I took my leave, and Traddles was coming out to walk with me to the coffee-house, I thought I had never seen an obstinate head of hair, or any other head of hair, rolling about in such a shower of kisses. Altogether, it was a scene I could not help dwelling on with pleasure, for a long time after I got back and had wished Traddles good night. If I had beheld a thousand roses blowing in a top set of chambers, in that withered Gray’s Inn, they could not have brightened it half so much. The idea of those Devonshire girls, among the dry law-stationers and the attorneys’ offices; and of the tea and toast, and children’s songs, in that grim atmosphere of pounce and parchment, red-tape, dusty wafers, ink-jars, brief and draft paper, law reports, writs, declarations, and bills of costs; seemed almost as pleasantly fanciful as if I had dreamed that the Sultan’s famous family had been admitted on the roll of attorneys, and had brought the talking bird, the singing tree, and the golden water into Gray’s Inn Hall. Somehow, I found that I had taken leave of Traddles for the night, and come back to the coffee-house, with a great change in my despondency about him. I began to think he would get on, in spite of all the many orders of chief waiters in England.

Drawing a chair before one of the coffee-room fires to think about him at my leisure, I gradually fell from the consideration of his happiness to tracing prospects in the live-coals, and to thinking, as they broke and changed, of the principal vicissitudes and separations that had marked my life. I had not seen a coal fire, since I had left England three years ago: though many a wood fire had I watched, as it crumbled into hoary ashes, and mingled with the feathery heap upon the hearth, which not inaptly figured to me, in my despondency, my own dead hopes. I could think of the past now, gravely, but not bitterly; and could contemplate the future in a brave spirit. Home, in its best sense, was for me no more. She in whom I might have in-spired a dearer love, I had taught to be my sister. She would marry, and would have new claimants on her tenderness; and in doing it, would never know the love for her that had grown up in my heart. It was right that I should pay the forfeit of my headlong passion. What I reaped, I had sown. I was thinking. And had I truly disciplined my heart to this, and could I resolutely bear it, and calmly hold the place in her home which she had calmly held in mine, - when I found my eyes resting on a countenance that might have arisen out of the fire, in its association with my early remembrances. Little Mr. Chillip the Doctor, to whose good offices I was indebted in the very first chapter of this history, sat reading a newspaper in the shadow of an opposite corner. He was tolerably stricken in years by this time; but, being a mild, meek, calm little man, had worn so easily, that I thought he looked at that moment just as he might have looked when he sat in our parlour, waiting for me to be born. Mr. Chillip had left Blunderstone six or seven years ago, and I had never seen him since. He sat placidly perusing the news-paper, with his little head on one side, and a glass of warm sherry negus at his elbow. He was so extremely conciliatory in his manner that he seemed to apologize to the very newspaper for taking the liberty of reading it. I walked up to where he was sitting, and said, ‘How do you do, Mr. Chillip?’

He was greatly fluttered by this unexpected address from a stranger, and replied, in his slow way, ‘I thank you, sir, you are very good. Thank you, sir. I hope you are well.’ ‘You don’t remember me?’ said I. ‘Well, sir,’ returned Mr. Chillip, smiling very meekly, and shaking his head as he surveyed me, ‘I have a kind of an impression that something in your countenance is familiar to me, sir; but I couldn’t lay my hand upon your name, really.’ ‘And yet you knew it, long before I knew it myself,’ I returned. ‘Did I indeed, sir?’ said Mr. Chillip. ‘Is it possible that I had the honour, sir, of officiating when -?’ ‘Yes,’ said I. ‘Dear me!’ cried Mr. Chillip. ‘But no doubt you are a good deal changed since then, sir?’ ‘Probably,’ said I. ‘Well, sir,’ observed Mr. Chillip, ‘I hope you’ll excuse me, if I am compelled to ask the favour of your name?’ On my telling him my name, he was really moved. He quite shook hands with me - which was a violent proceeding for him, his usual course being to slide a tepid little fish-slice, an inch or two in advance of his hip, and evince the greatest discomposure when anybody grappled with it. Even now, he put his hand in his coat-pocket as soon as he could disengage it, and seemed relieved when he had got it safe back. ‘Dear me, sir!’ said Mr. Chillip, surveying me with his head on one side. ‘And it’s Mr. Copperfield, is it? Well, sir, I think I should have known you, if I had taken the liberty of looking more closely at you. There’s a strong resemblance between you and your poor father, sir.’ ‘I never had the happiness of seeing my father,’ I observed. ‘Very true, sir,’ said Mr. Chillip, in a soothing tone. ‘And very much to be deplored it was, on all accounts! We are not ignorant, sir,’ said Mr. Chillip, slowly shaking his little head again, ‘down in our part of the country, of your fame. There must be great excitement here, sir,’ said Mr. Chillip, tapping himself on the forehead with his forefinger. ‘You must find it a trying occupation, sir!’ ‘What is your part of the country now?’ I asked, seating my-self near him.

‘I am established within a few miles of Bury St. Edmund’s, sir,’ said Mr. Chillip. ‘Mrs. Chillip, coming into a little property in that neighbourhood, under her father’s will, I bought a practice down there, in which you will be glad to hear I am doing well. My daughter is growing quite a tall lass now, sir,’ said Mr. Chillip, giving his little head another little shake. ‘Her mother let down two tucks in her frocks only last week. Such is time, you see, sir!’ As the little man put his now empty glass to his lips, when he made this reflection, I proposed to him to have it refilled, and I would keep him company with another. ‘Well, sir,’ he returned, in his slow way, ‘it’s more than I am accustomed to; but I can’t deny myself the pleasure of your conversation. It seems but yesterday that I had the honour of attending you in the measles. You came through them charmingly, sir!’ I acknowledged this compliment, and ordered the negus, which was soon produced. ‘Quite an uncommon dissipation!’ said Mr. Chillip, stirring it, ‘but I can’t resist so extraordinary an occasion. You have no family, sir?’ I shook my head. ‘I was aware that you sustained a bereavement, sir, some time ago,’ said Mr. Chillip. ‘I heard it from your father-in-law’s sister. Very decided character there, sir?’ ‘Why, yes,’ said I, ‘decided enough. Where did you see her, Mr. Chillip?’ ‘Are you not aware, sir,’ returned Mr. Chillip, with his placidest smile, ‘that your father-in-law is again a neighbour of mine?’ ‘No,’ said I. ‘He is indeed, sir!’ said Mr. Chillip. ‘Married a young lady of that part, with a very good little property, poor thing. - And this action of the brain now, sir? Don’t you find it fatigue you?’ said Mr. Chillip, looking at me like an admiring Robin. I waived that question, and returned to the Murdstones. ‘I was aware of his being married again. Do you attend the family?’ I asked. ‘Not regularly. I have been called in,’ he replied. ‘Strong phrenological developments of the organ of firmness, in Mr. Murdstone and his sister, sir.’

I replied with such an expressive look, that Mr. Chillip was emboldened by that, and the negus together, to give his head several short shakes, and thoughtfully exclaim, ‘Ah, dear me! We remember old times, Mr. Copperfield!’ ‘And the brother and sister are pursuing their old course, are they?’ said I. ‘Well, sir,’ replied Mr. Chillip, ‘a medical man, being so much in families, ought to have neither eyes nor ears for anything but his profession. Still, I must say, they are very severe, sir: both as to this life and the next.’ ‘The next will be regulated without much reference to them, I dare say,’ I returned: ‘what are they doing as to this?’ Mr. Chillip shook his head, stirred his negus, and sipped it. ‘She was a charming woman, sir!’ he observed in a plaintive manner. ‘The present Mrs. Murdstone?’ A charming woman indeed, sir,’ said Mr. Chillip; ‘as amiable, I am sure, as it was possible to be! Mrs. Chillip’s opinion is, that her spirit has been entirely broken since her marriage, and that she is all but melancholy mad. And the ladies,’ observed Mr. Chillip, timorously, ‘are great observers, sir.’ ‘I suppose she was to be subdued and broken to their detest-able mould, Heaven help her!’ said I. ‘And she has been.’ ‘Well, sir, there were violent quarrels at first, I assure you,’ said Mr. Chillip; ‘but she is quite a shadow now. Would it be considered forward if I was to say to you, sir, in confidence, that since the sister came to help, the brother and sister between them have nearly reduced her to a state of imbecility?’ I told him I could easily believe it. ‘I have no hesitation in saying,’ said Mr. Chillip, fortifying himself with another sip of negus, ‘between you and me, sir, that her mother died of it - or that tyranny, gloom, and worry have made Mrs. Murdstone nearly imbecile. She was a lively young woman, sir, before marriage, and their gloom and austerity destroyed her. They go about with her, now, more like her keepers than her husband and sister-in-law. That was Mrs. Chillip’s remark to me, only last week. And I assure you, sir, the ladies are great observers. Mrs. Chillip herself is a great observer!’

‘Does he gloomily profess to be (I am ashamed to use the word in such association) religious still?’ I inquired. ‘You anticipate, sir,’ said Mr. Chillip, his eyelids getting quite red with the unwonted stimulus in which he was indulging. ‘One of Mrs. Chillip’s most impressive remarks. Mrs. Chillip,’ he proceeded, in the calmest and slowest manner, ‘quite electrified me, by pointing out that Mr. Murdstone sets up an image of himself, and calls it the Divine Nature. You might have knocked me down on the flat of my back, sir, with the feather of a pen, I assure you, when Mrs. Chillip said so. The ladies are great observers, sir?’ ‘Intuitively,’ said I, to his extreme delight. ‘I am very happy to receive such support in my opinion, sir,’ he rejoined. ‘It is not often that I venture to give a non-medical opinion, I assure you. Mr. Murdstone delivers public addresses sometimes, and it is said, - in short, sir, it is said by Mrs. Chillip, - that the darker tyrant he has lately been, the more ferocious is his doctrine.’ ‘I believe Mrs. Chillip to be perfectly right,’ said I. ‘Mrs. Chillip does go so far as to say,’ pursued the meekest of little men, much encouraged, ‘that what such people miscall their religion, is a vent for their bad humours and arrogance. And do you know I must say, sir,’ he continued, mildly laying his head on one side, ‘that I don’t find authority for Mr. and Miss Murdstone in the New Testament?’ ‘I never found it either!’ said I. ‘In the meantime, sir,’ said Mr. Chillip, ‘they are much disliked; and as they are very free in consigning everybody who dislikes them to perdition, we really have a good deal of perdition going on in our neighbourhood! However, as Mrs. Chillip says, sir, they undergo a continual punishment; for they are turned inward, to feed upon their own hearts, and their own hearts are very bad feeding. Now, sir, about that brain of yours, if you’ll excuse my returning to it. Don’t you expose it to a good deal of excitement, sir?’ I found it not difficult, in the excitement of Mr. Chillip’s own brain, under his potations of negus, to divert his attention from this topic to his own affairs, on which, for the next half-hour, he was quite loquacious; giving me to understand, among other pieces of information, that he was then at the Gray’s Inn Coffee-house to lay his professional evidence before a Commission of Lunacy, touching the state of mind of a patient who had become deranged from excessive drinking. ‘And I assure you, sir,’ he said, ‘I am extremely nervous on such occasions. I could not support being what is called Bullied, sir. It would quite unman me. Do you know it was some time before I re-covered the conduct of that alarming lady, on the night of your birth, Mr. Copperfield?’ I told him that I was going down to my aunt, the Dragon of that night, early in the morning; and that she was one of the most tender-hearted and excellent of women, as he would know full well if he knew her better. The mere notion of the possibility of his ever seeing her again, appeared to terrify him. He replied with a small pale smile, ‘Is she so, indeed, sir? Really?’ and almost immediately called for a candle, and went to bed, as if he were not quite safe anywhere else. He did not actually stagger under the negus; but I should think his placid little pulse must have made two or three more beats in a minute, than it had done since the great night of my aunt’s disappointment, when she struck at him with her bonnet. Thoroughly tired, I went to bed too, at midnight; passed the next day on the Dover coach; burst safe and sound into my aunt’s old parlour while she was at tea (she wore spectacles now); and was received by her, and Mr. Dick, and dear old Peggotty, who acted as housekeeper, with open arms and tears of joy. My aunt was mightily amused, when we began to talk composedly, by my account of my meeting with Mr. Chillip, and of his holding her in such dread remembrance; and both she and Peggotty had a great deal to say about my poor mother’s second husband, and ‘that murdering woman of a sister’, - on whom I think no pain or penalty would have induced my aunt to bestow any Christian or Proper Name, or any other designation.

Chapter 60

Chapter 60

Agnes My aunt and I, when we were left alone, talked far into the night. How the emigrants never wrote home, otherwise than cheerfully and hopefully; how Mr. Micawber had actually remitted divers small sums of money, on account of those ‘pecuniary liabilities’, in reference to which he had been so business-like as between man and man; how Janet, returning into my aunt’s service when she came back to Dover, had finally carried out her renunciation of mankind by entering into wedlock with a thriving tavern-keeper; and how my aunt had finally set her seal on the same great principle, by aiding and abetting the bride, and crowning the marriage-ceremony with her presence; were among our topics - already more or less familiar to me through the letters I had had. Mr. Dick, as usual, was not forgotten. My aunt informed me how he incessantly occupied himself in copying everything he could lay his hands on, and kept King Charles the First at a respectful distance by that semblance of employment; how it was one of the main joys and rewards of her life that he was free and happy, instead of pining in monotonous restraint; and how (as a novel general conclusion) nobody but she could ever fully know what he was. ‘And when, Trot,’ said my aunt, patting the back of my hand, as we sat in our old way before the fire, ‘when are you going over to Canterbury?’ ‘I shall get a horse, and ride over tomorrow morning, aunt, unless you will go with me?’ ‘No!’ said my aunt, in her short abrupt way. ‘I mean to stay where I am.’ Then, I should ride, I said. I could not have come through Canterbury today without stopping, if I had been coming to anyone but her.

She was pleased, but answered, ‘Tut, Trot; my old bones would have kept till tomorrow!’ and softly patted my hand again, as I sat looking thoughtfully at the fire. Thoughtfully, for I could not be here once more, and so near Agnes, without the revival of those regrets with which I had so long been occupied. Softened regrets they might be, teaching me what I had failed to learn when my younger life was all be-fore me, but not the less regrets. ‘Oh, Trot,’ I seemed to hear my aunt say once more; and I understood her better now - ‘Blind, blind, blind!’ We both kept silence for some minutes. When I raised my eyes, I found that she was steadily observant of me. Perhaps she had followed the current of my mind; for it seemed to me an easy one to track now, wilful as it had been once. ‘You will find her father a white-haired old man,’ said my aunt, ‘though a better man in all other respects - a reclaimed man. Neither will you find him measuring all human interests, and joys, and sorrows, with his one poor little inch-rule now. Trust me, child, such things must shrink very much, before they can be measured off in that way.’ ‘Indeed they must,’ said I. ‘You will find her,’ pursued my aunt, ‘as good, as beautiful, as earnest, as disinterested, as she has always been. If I knew higher praise, Trot, I would bestow it on her.’ There was no higher praise for her; no higher reproach for me. Oh, how had I strayed so far away! ‘If she trains the young girls whom she has about her, to be like herself,’ said my aunt, earnest even to the filling of her eyes with tears, ‘Heaven knows, her life will be well employed! Useful and happy, as she said that day! How could she be otherwise than useful and happy!’ ‘Has Agnes any -’ I was thinking aloud, rather than speaking. ‘Well? Hey? Any what?’ said my aunt, sharply. ‘Any lover,’ said I. ‘A score,’ cried my aunt, with a kind of indignant pride. ‘She might have married twenty times, my dear, since you have been gone!’ ‘No doubt,’ said I. ‘No doubt. But has she any lover who is worthy of her? Agnes could care for no other.’

My aunt sat musing for a little while, with her chin upon her hand. Slowly raising her eyes to mine, she said: ‘I suspect she has an attachment, Trot.’ ‘A prosperous one?’ said I. ‘Trot,’ returned my aunt gravely, ‘I can’t say. I have no right to tell you even so much. She has never confided it to me, but I suspect it.’ She looked so attentively and anxiously at me (I even saw her tremble), that I felt now, more than ever, that she had followed my late thoughts. I summoned all the resolutions I had made, in all those many days and nights, and all those many conflicts of my heart. ‘If it should be so,’ I began, ‘and I hope it is-’ ‘I don’t know that it is,’ said my aunt curtly. ‘You must not be ruled by my suspicions. You must keep them secret. They are very slight, perhaps. I have no right to speak.’ ‘If it should be so,’ I repeated, ‘Agnes will tell me at her own good time. A sister to whom I have confided so much, aunt, will not be reluctant to confide in me.’ My aunt withdrew her eyes from mine, as slowly as she had turned them upon me; and covered them thoughtfully with her hand. By and by she put her other hand on my shoulder; and so we both sat, looking into the past, without saying another word, until we parted for the night. I rode away, early in the morning, for the scene of my old school-days. I cannot say that I was yet quite happy, in the hope that I was gaining a victory over myself; even in the prospect of so soon looking on her face again. The well-remembered ground was soon traversed, and I came into the quiet streets, where every stone was a boy’s book to me. I went on foot to the old house, and went away with a heart too full to enter. I returned; and looking, as I passed, through the low window of the turret-room where first Uriah Heep, and afterwards Mr. Micawber, had been wont to sit, saw that it was a little parlour now, and that there was no office. Otherwise the staid old house was, as to its cleanliness and order, still just as it had been when I first saw it. I requested the new maid who admitted me, to tell Miss Wickfield that a gentleman who waited on her from a friend abroad, was there; and I was shown up the grave old staircase (cautioned of the steps I knew so well), into the unchanged drawing-room. The books that Agnes and I had read together, were on their shelves; and the desk where I had laboured at my lessons, many a night, stood yet at the same old corner of the table. All the little changes that had crept in when the Heeps were there, were changed again. Everything was as it used to be, in the happy time. I stood in a window, and looked across the ancient street at the opposite houses, recalling how I had watched them on wet afternoons, when I first came there; and how I had used to speculate about the people who appeared at any of the windows, and had followed them with my eyes up and down stairs, while women went clicking along the pavement in pattens, and the dull rain fell in slanting lines, and poured out of the water-spout yonder, and flowed into the road. The feeling with which I used to watch the tramps, as they came into the town on those wet evenings, at dusk, and limped past, with their bundles drooping over their shoulders at the ends of sticks, came freshly back to me; fraught, as then, with the smell of damp earth, and wet leaves and briar, and the sensation of the very airs that blew upon me in my own toilsome journey. The opening of the little door in the panelled wall made me start and turn. Her beautiful serene eyes met mine as she came towards me. She stopped and laid her hand upon her bosom, and I caught her in my arms. ‘Agnes! my dear girl! I have come too suddenly upon you.’ ‘No, no! I am so rejoiced to see you, Trotwood!’ ‘Dear Agnes, the happiness it is to me, to see you once again!’ I folded her to my heart, and, for a little while, we were both silent. Presently we sat down, side by side; and her angel-face was turned upon me with the welcome I had dreamed of, waking and sleeping, for whole years. She was so true, she was so beautiful, she was so good, - I owed her so much gratitude, she was so dear to me, that I could find no utterance for what I felt. I tried to bless her, tried to thank her, tried to tell her (as I had often done in letters) what an influence she had upon me; but all my efforts were in vain. My love and joy were dumb.

With her own sweet tranquillity, she calmed my agitation; led me back to the time of our parting; spoke to me of Emily, whom she had visited, in secret, many times; spoke to me tenderly of Dora’s grave. With the unerring instinct of her noble heart, she touched the chords of my memory so softly and harmoniously, that not one jarred within me; I could listen to the sorrowful, distant music, and desire to shrink from nothing it awoke. How could I, when, blended with it all, was her dear self, the better angel of my life? ‘And you, Agnes,’ I said, by and by. ‘Tell me of yourself. You have hardly ever told me of your own life, in all this lapse of time!’ ‘What should I tell?’ she answered, with her radiant smile. ‘Papa is well. You see us here, quiet in our own home; our anxieties set at rest, our home restored to us; and knowing that, dear Trotwood, you know all.’ ‘All, Agnes?’ said I. She looked at me, with some fluttering wonder in her face. ‘Is there nothing else, Sister?’ I said. Her colour, which had just now faded, returned, and faded again. She smiled; with a quiet sadness, I thought; and shook her head. I had sought to lead her to what my aunt had hinted at; for, sharply painful to me as it must be to receive that confidence, I was to discipline my heart, and do my duty to her. I saw, however, that she was uneasy, and I let it pass. ‘You have much to do, dear Agnes?’ ‘With my school?’ said she, looking up again, in all her bright composure. ‘Yes. It is laborious, is it not?’ ‘The labour is so pleasant,’ she returned, ‘that it is scarcely grateful in me to call it by that name.’ ‘Nothing good is difficult to you,’ said I. Her colour came and went once more; and once more, as she bent her head, I saw the same sad smile. ‘You will wait and see papa,’ said Agnes, cheerfully, ‘and pass the day with us? Perhaps you will sleep in your own room? We always call it yours.’ I could not do that, having promised to ride back to my aunt’s at night; but I would pass the day there, joyfully.

‘I must be a prisoner for a little while,’ said Agnes, ‘but here are the old books, Trotwood, and the old music.’ ‘Even the old flowers are here,’ said I, looking round; ‘or the old kinds.’ ‘I have found a pleasure,’ returned Agnes, smiling, ‘while you have been absent, in keeping everything as it used to be when we were children. For we were very happy then, I think.’ ‘Heaven knows we were!’ said I. ‘And every little thing that has reminded me of my brother,’ said Agnes, with her cordial eyes turned cheerfully upon me, ‘has been a welcome companion. Even this,’ showing me the basket-trifle, full of keys, still hanging at her side, ‘seems to jingle a kind of old tune!’ She smiled again, and went out at the door by which she had come. It was for me to guard this sisterly affection with religious care. It was all that I had left myself, and it was a treasure. If I once shook the foundations of the sacred confidence and us-age, in virtue of which it was given to me, it was lost, and could never be recovered. I set this steadily before myself. The better I loved her, the more it behoved me never to forget it. I walked through the streets; and, once more seeing my old adversary the butcher - now a constable, with his staff hanging up in the shop - went down to look at the place where I had fought him; and there meditated on Miss Shepherd and the eldest Miss Larkins, and all the idle loves and likings, and dislikings, of that time. Nothing seemed to have survived that time but Agnes; and she, ever a star above me, was brighter and higher. When I returned, Mr. Wickfield had come home, from a garden he had, a couple of miles or so out of town, where he now employed himself almost every day. I found him as my aunt had described him. We sat down to dinner, with some half-dozen little girls; and he seemed but the shadow of his handsome picture on the wall. The tranquillity and peace belonging, of old, to that quiet ground in my memory, pervaded it again. When dinner was done, Mr. Wickfield taking no wine, and I desiring none, we went up-stairs; where Agnes and her little charges sang and played, and worked. After tea the children left us; and we three sat together, talking of the bygone days. ‘My part in them,’ said Mr. Wickfield, shaking his white head, ‘has much matter for regret - for deep regret, and deep contrition, Trotwood, you well know. But I would not cancel it, if it were in my power.’ I could readily believe that, looking at the face beside him. ‘I should cancel with it,’ he pursued, ‘such patience and devotion, such fidelity, such a child’s love, as I must not forget, no! even to forget myself.’ ‘I understand you, sir,’ I softly said. ‘I hold it - I have always held it - in veneration.’ ‘But no one knows, not even you,’ he returned, ‘how much she has done, how much she has undergone, how hard she has striven. Dear Agnes!’ She had put her hand entreatingly on his arm, to stop him; and was very, very pale. ‘Well, well!’ he said with a sigh, dismissing, as I then saw, some trial she had borne, or was yet to bear, in connexion with what my aunt had told me. ‘Well! I have never told you, Trot-wood, of her mother. Has anyone?’ ‘Never, sir.’ ‘It’s not much - though it was much to suffer. She married me in opposition to her father’s wish, and he renounced her. She prayed him to forgive her, before my Agnes came into this world. He was a very hard man, and her mother had long been dead. He repulsed her. He broke her heart.’ Agnes leaned upon his shoulder, and stole her arm about his neck. ‘She had an affectionate and gentle heart,’ he said; ‘and it was broken. I knew its tender nature very well. No one could, if I did not. She loved me dearly, but was never happy. She was always labouring, in secret, under this distress; and being delicate and downcast at the time of his last repulse - for it was not the first, by many - pined away and died. She left me Agnes, two weeks old; and the grey hair that you recollect me with, when you first came.’ He kissed Agnes on her cheek. ‘My love for my dear child was a diseased love, but my mind was all unhealthy then. I say no more of that. I am not speaking of myself, Trotwood, but of her mother, and of her. If I give you any clue to what I am, or to what I have been, you will unravel it, I know. What Agnes is, I need not say. I have always read something of her poor mother’s story, in her character; and so I tell it you tonight, when we three are again together, after such great changes. I have told it all.’ His bowed head, and her angel-face and filial duty, derived a more pathetic meaning from it than they had had before. If I had wanted anything by which to mark this night of our re-union, I should have found it in this. Agnes rose up from her father’s side, before long; and going softly to her piano, played some of the old airs to which we had often listened in that place. ‘Have you any intention of going away again?’ Agnes asked me, as I was standing by. ‘What does my sister say to that?’ ‘I hope not.’ ‘Then I have no such intention, Agnes.’ ‘I think you ought not, Trotwood, since you ask me,’ she said, mildly. ‘Your growing reputation and success enlarge your power of doing good; and if I could spare my brother,’ with her eyes upon me, ‘perhaps the time could not.’ ‘What I am, you have made me, Agnes. You should know best.’ ‘I made you, Trotwood?’ ‘Yes! Agnes, my dear girl!’ I said, bending over her. ‘I tried to tell you, when we met today, something that has been in my thoughts since Dora died. You remember, when you came down to me in our little room - pointing upward, Agnes?’ ‘Oh, Trotwood!’ she returned, her eyes filled with tears. ‘So loving, so confiding, and so young! Can I ever forget?’ ‘As you were then, my sister, I have often thought since, you have ever been to me. Ever pointing upward, Agnes; ever leading me to something better; ever directing me to higher things!’ She only shook her head; through her tears I saw the same sad quiet smile. ‘And I am so grateful to you for it, Agnes, so bound to you, that there is no name for the affection of my heart. I want you to know, yet don’t know how to tell you, that all my life long I shall look up to you, and be guided by you, as I have been through the darkness that is past. Whatever betides, whatever new ties you may form, whatever changes may come between us, I shall always look to you, and love you, as I do now, and have always done. You will always be my solace and resource, as you have always been. Until I die, my dearest sister, I shall see you always before me, pointing upward!’ She put her hand in mine, and told me she was proud of me, and of what I said; although I praised her very far beyond her worth. Then she went on softly playing, but without removing her eyes from me. ‘Do you know, what I have heard tonight, Agnes,’ said I, strangely seems to be a part of the feeling with which I regarded you when I saw you first - with which I sat be-side you in my rough school-days?’ ‘You knew I had no mother,’ she replied with a smile, ‘and felt kindly towards me.’ ‘More than that, Agnes, I knew, almost as if I had known this story, that there was something inexplicably gentle and softened, surrounding you; something that might have been sorrowful in someone else (as I can now understand it was), but was not so in you.’ She softly played on, looking at me still. ‘Will you laugh at my cherishing such fancies, Agnes?’ ‘No!’ ‘Or at my saying that I really believe I felt, even then, that you could be faithfully affectionate against all discouragement, and never cease to be so, until you ceased to live? - Will you laugh at such a dream?’ ‘Oh, no! Oh, no!’ For an instant, a distressful shadow crossed her face; but, even in the start it gave me, it was gone; and she was playing on, and looking at me with her own calm smile. As I rode back in the lonely night, the wind going by me like a restless memory, I thought of this, and feared she was not happy. I was not happy; but, thus far, I had faithfully set the seal upon the Past, and, thinking of her, pointing upward, thought of her as pointing to that sky above me, where, in the mystery to come, I might yet love her with a love unknown on earth, and tell her what the strife had been within me when I loved her here.

Chapter 61

Chapter 61

I Am Shown Two Interesting Penitents For a time - at all events until my book should be completed, which would be the work of several months - I took up my abode in my aunt’s house at Dover; and there, sitting in the window from which I had looked out at the moon upon the sea, when that roof first gave me shelter, I quietly pursued my task. In pursuance of my intention of referring to my own fictions only when their course should incidentally connect itself with the progress of my story, I do not enter on the aspirations, the delights, anxieties, and triumphs of my art. That I truly devoted myself to it with my strongest earnestness, and bestowed upon it every energy of my soul, I have already said. If the books I have written be of any worth, they will supply the rest. I shall otherwise have written to poor purpose, and the rest will be of interest to no one. Occasionally, I went to London; to lose myself in the swarm of life there, or to consult with Traddles on some business point. He had managed for me, in my absence, with the soundest judgement; and my worldly affairs were prospering. As my notoriety began to bring upon me an enormous quantity of letters from people of whom I had no knowledge - chiefly about nothing, and extremely difficult to answer - I agreed with Traddles to have my name painted up on his door. There, the devoted postman on that beat delivered bushels of letters for me; and there, at intervals, I laboured through them, like a Home Secretary of State without the salary. Among this correspondence, there dropped in, every now and then, an obliging proposal from one of the numerous outsiders always lurking about the Commons, to practise under cover of my name (if I would take the necessary steps remaining to make a proctor of myself), and pay me a percentage on the profits. But I declined these offers; being already aware that there were plenty of such covert practitioners in existence, and considering the Commons quite bad enough, without my doing anything to make it worse. The girls had gone home, when my name burst into bloom on Traddles’s door; and the sharp boy looked, all day, as if he had never heard of Sophy, shut up in a back room, glancing down from her work into a sooty little strip of garden with a pump in it. But there I always found her, the same bright housewife; of-ten humming her Devonshire ballads when no strange foot was coming up the stairs, and blunting the sharp boy in his official closet with melody. I wondered, at first, why I so often found Sophy writing in a copy-book; and why she always shut it up when I appeared, and hurried it into the table-drawer. But the secret soon came out. One day, Traddles (who had just come home through the drizzling sleet from Court) took a paper out of his desk, and asked me what I thought of that handwriting? ‘Oh, don’t, Tom!’ cried Sophy, who was warming his slippers before the fire. ‘My dear,’ returned Tom, in a delighted state, ‘why not? What do you say to that writing, Copperfield?’ ‘It’s extraordinarily legal and formal,’ said I. ‘I don’t think I ever saw such a stiff hand.’ ‘Not like a lady’s hand, is it?’ said Traddles. ‘A lady’s!’ I repeated. ‘Bricks and mortar are more like a lady’s hand!’ Traddles broke into a rapturous laugh, and informed me that it was Sophy’s writing; that Sophy had vowed and declared he would need a copying-clerk soon, and she would be that clerk; that she had acquired this hand from a pattern; and that she could throw off - I forget how many folios an hour. Sophy was very much confused by my being told all this, and said that when ‘Tom’ was made a judge he wouldn’t be so ready to pro-claim it. Which ‘Tom’ denied; averring that he should always be equally proud of it, under all circumstances. ‘What a thoroughly good and charming wife she is, my dear Traddles!’ said I, when she had gone away, laughing. ‘My dear Copperfield,’ returned Traddles, ‘she is, without any exception, the dearest girl! The way she manages this place; her punctuality, domestic knowledge, economy, and or-der; her cheerfulness, Copperfield!’ ‘Indeed, you have reason to commend her!’ I returned. ‘You are a happy fellow. I believe you make yourselves, and each other, two of the happiest people in the world.’ ‘I am sure we are two of the happiest people,’ returned Traddles. ‘I admit that, at all events. Bless my soul, when I see her getting up by candle-light on these dark mornings, busying herself in the day’s arrangements, going out to market before the clerks come into the Inn, caring for no weather, devising the most capital little dinners out of the plainest materials, making puddings and pies, keeping everything in its right place, always so neat and ornamental herself, sitting up at night with me if it’s ever so late, sweet-tempered and encouraging always, and all for me, I positively sometimes can’t believe it, Copperfield!’ He was tender of the very slippers she had been warming, as he put them on, and stretched his feet enjoyingly upon the fender. ‘I positively sometimes can’t believe it,’ said Traddles. ‘Then our pleasures! Dear me, they are inexpensive, but they are quite wonderful! When we are at home here, of an evening, and shut the outer door, and draw those curtains - which she made - where could we be more snug? When it’s fine, and we go out for a walk in the evening, the streets abound in enjoyment for us. We look into the glittering windows of the jewellers’ shops; and I show Sophy which of the diamond-eyed serpents, coiled up on white satin rising grounds, I would give her if I could afford it; and Sophy shows me which of the gold watches that are capped and jewelled and engine-turned, and possessed of the horizontal lever- escape-movement, and all sorts of things, she would buy for me if she could afford it; and we pick out the spoons and forks, fish-slices, butter-knives, and sugar-tongs, we should both prefer if we could both afford it; and really we go away as if we had got them! Then, when we stroll into the squares, and great streets, and see a house to let, sometimes we look up at it, and say, how would that do, if I was made a judge? And we parcel it out - such a room for us, such rooms for the girls, and so forth; until we settle to our satisfaction that it would do, or it wouldn’t do, as the case may be.

Sometimes, we go at half-price to the pit of the theatre - the very smell of which is cheap, in my opinion, at the money - and there we thoroughly enjoy the play: which Sophy believes every word of, and so do I. In walking home, perhaps we buy a little bit of something at a cook’s-shop, or a little lobster at the fishmongers, and bring it here, and make a splendid supper, chatting about what we have seen. Now, you know, Copper-field, if I was Lord Chancellor, we couldn’t do this!’ ‘You would do something, whatever you were, my dear Traddles,’ thought I, ‘that would be pleasant and amiable. And by the way,’ I said aloud, ‘I suppose you never draw any skeletons now?’ ‘Really,’ replied Traddles, laughing, and reddening, ‘I can’t wholly deny that I do, my dear Copperfield. For being in one of the back rows of the King’s Bench the other day, with a pen in my hand, the fancy came into my head to try how I had pre-served that accomplishment. And I am afraid there’s a skeleton - in a wig - on the ledge of the desk.’ After we had both laughed heartily, Traddles wound up by looking with a smile at the fire, and saying, in his forgiving way, ‘Old Creakle!’ ‘I have a letter from that old - Rascal here,’ said I. For I never was less disposed to forgive him the way he used to batter Traddles, than when I saw Traddles so ready to forgive him himself. ‘From Creakle the schoolmaster?’ exclaimed Traddles. ‘No!’ ‘Among the persons who are attracted to me in my rising fame and fortune,’ said I, looking over my letters, ‘and who discover that they were always much attached to me, is the self-same Creakle. He is not a schoolmaster now, Traddles. He is retired. He is a Middlesex Magistrate.’ I thought Traddles might be surprised to hear it, but he was not so at all. ‘How do you suppose he comes to be a Middlesex Magistrate?’ said I. ‘Oh dear me!’ replied Traddles, ‘it would be very difficult to answer that question. Perhaps he voted for somebody, or lent money to somebody, or bought something of somebody, or otherwise obliged somebody, or jobbed for somebody, who knew somebody who got the lieutenant of the county to nominate him for the commission.’ ‘On the commission he is, at any rate,’ said I. ‘And he writes to me here, that he will be glad to show me, in operation, the only true system of prison discipline; the only unchallengeable way of making sincere and lasting converts and penitents - which, you know, is by solitary confinement. What do you say?’ ‘To the system?’ inquired Traddles, looking grave. ‘No. To my accepting the offer, and your going with me?’ ‘I don’t object,’ said Traddles. ‘Then I’ll write to say so. You remember (to say nothing of our treatment) this same Creakle turning his son out of doors, I suppose, and the life he used to lead his wife and daughter?’ ‘Perfectly,’ said Traddles. ‘Yet, if you’ll read his letter, you’ll find he is the tenderest of men to prisoners convicted of the whole calendar of felonies,’ said I; ‘though I can’t find that his tenderness extends to any other class of created beings.’ Traddles shrugged his shoulders, and was not at all surprised. I had not expected him to be, and was not surprised myself; or my observation of similar practical satires would have been but scanty. We arranged the time of our visit, and I wrote accordingly to Mr. Creakle that evening. On the appointed day - I think it was the next day, but no matter - Traddles and I repaired to the prison where Mr. Creakle was powerful. It was an immense and solid building, erected at a vast expense. I could not help thinking, as we approached the gate, what an uproar would have been made in the country, if any deluded man had proposed to spend one half the money it had cost, on the erection of an industrial school for the young, or a house of refuge for the deserving old. In an office that might have been on the ground-floor of the Tower of Babel, it was so massively constructed, we were presented to our old schoolmaster; who was one of a group, composed of two or three of the busier sort of magistrates, and some visitors they had brought. He received me, like a man who had formed my mind in bygone years, and had always loved me tenderly. On my introducing Traddles, Mr. Creakle expressed, in like manner, but in an inferior degree, that he had always been Traddles’s guide, philosopher, and friend. Our venerable instructor was a great deal older, and not improved in appearance. His face was as fiery as ever; his eyes were as small, and rather deeper set. The scanty, wet-looking grey hair, by which I remembered him, was almost gone; and the thick veins in his bald head were none the more agreeable to look at. After some conversation among these gentlemen, from which I might have supposed that there was nothing in the world to be legitimately taken into account but the supreme comfort of prisoners, at any expense, and nothing on the wide earth to be done outside prison-doors, we began our inspection. It being then just dinner-time, we went, first into the great kitchen, where every prisoner’s dinner was in course of being set out separately (to be handed to him in his cell), with the regularity and precision of clock-work. I said aside, to Traddles, that I wondered whether it occurred to anybody, that there was a striking contrast between these plentiful repasts of choice quality, and the dinners, not to say of paupers, but of soldiers, sailors, labourers, the great bulk of the honest, working community; of whom not one man in five hundred ever dined half so well. But I learned that the ‘system’ required high living; and, in short, to dispose of the system, once for all, I found that on that head and on all others, ‘the system’ put an end to all doubts, and disposed of all anomalies. Nobody appeared to have the least idea that there was any other system, but the system, to be considered. As we were going through some of the magnificent passages, I inquired of Mr. Creakle and his friends what were supposed to be the main advantages of this all-governing and universally over-riding system? I found them to be the perfect isolation of prisoners - so that no one man in confinement there, knew any-thing about another; and the reduction of prisoners to a whole-some state of mind, leading to sincere contrition and repentance. Now, it struck me, when we began to visit individuals in their cells, and to traverse the passages in which those cells were, and to have the manner of the going to chapel and so forth, explained to us, that there was a strong probability of the prisoners knowing a good deal about each other, and of their carrying on a pretty complete system of intercourse. This, at the time I write, has been proved, I believe, to be the case; but, as it would have been flat blasphemy against the system to have hinted such a doubt then, I looked out for the penitence as diligently as I could. And here again, I had great misgivings. I found as prevalent a fashion in the form of the penitence, as I had left outside in the forms of the coats and waistcoats in the windows of the tailors’ shops. I found a vast amount of profession, varying very little in character: varying very little (which I thought exceedingly suspicious), even in words. I found a great many foxes, disparaging whole vineyards of inaccessible grapes; but I found very few foxes whom I would have trusted within reach of a bunch. Above all, I found that the most professing men were the greatest objects of interest; and that their conceit, their vanity, their want of excitement, and their love of deception (which many of them possessed to an almost incredible ex-tent, as their histories showed), all prompted to these professions, and were all gratified by them. However, I heard so repeatedly, in the course of our goings to and fro, of a certain Number Twenty Seven, who was the Favourite, and who really appeared to be a Model Prisoner, that I resolved to suspend my judgement until I should see Twenty Seven. Twenty Eight, I understood, was also a bright particular star; but it was his misfortune to have his glory a little dimmed by the extraordinary lustre of Twenty Seven. I heard so much of Twenty Seven, of his pious admonitions to everybody around him, and of the beautiful letters he constantly wrote to his mother (whom he seemed to consider in a very bad way), that I became quite impatient to see him. I had to restrain my impatience for some time, on account of Twenty Seven being reserved for a concluding effect. But, at last, we came to the door of his cell; and Mr. Creakle, looking through a little hole in it, reported to us, in a state of the greatest admiration, that he was reading a Hymn Book. There was such a rush of heads immediately, to see Number Twenty Seven reading his Hymn Book, that the little hole was blocked up, six or seven heads deep. To remedy this inconvenience, and give us an opportunity of conversing with Twenty Seven in all his purity, Mr. Creakle directed the door of the cell to be unlocked, and Twenty Seven to be invited out into the passage. This was done; and whom should Traddles and I then behold, to our amazement, in this converted Number Twenty Seven, but Uriah Heep! He knew us directly; and said, as he came out - with the old writhe, - ‘How do you do, Mr. Copperfield? How do you do, Mr. Traddles?’ This recognition caused a general admiration in the party. I rather thought that everyone was struck by his not being proud, and taking notice of us. ‘Well, Twenty Seven,’ said Mr. Creakle, mournfully admiring him. ‘How do you find yourself today?’ ‘I am very umble, sir!’ replied Uriah Heep. ‘You are always so, Twenty Seven,’ said Mr. Creakle. Here, another gentleman asked, with extreme anxiety: ‘Are you quite comfortable?’ ‘Yes, I thank you, sir!’ said Uriah Heep, looking in that direction. ‘Far more comfortable here, than ever I was outside. I see my follies, now, sir. That’s what makes me comfortable.’ Several gentlemen were much affected; and a third questioner, forcing himself to the front, inquired with extreme feeling: ‘How do you find the beef?’ ‘Thank you, sir,’ replied Uriah, glancing in the new direction of this voice, ‘it was tougher yesterday than I could wish; but it’s my duty to bear. I have committed follies, gentlemen,’ said Uriah, looking round with a meek smile, ‘and I ought to bear the consequences without repining.’ A murmur, partly of gratification at Twenty Seven’s celestial state of mind, and partly of indignation against the Contractor who had given him any cause of complaint (a note of which was immediately made by Mr. Creakle), having subsided, Twenty Seven stood in the midst of us, as if he felt himself the principal object of merit in a highly meritorious museum. That we, the neophytes, might have an excess of light shining upon us all at once, orders were given to let out Twenty Eight. I had been so much astonished already, that I only felt a kind of resigned wonder when Mr. Littimer walked forth, reading a good book!

‘Twenty Eight,’ said a gentleman in spectacles, who had not yet spoken, ‘you complained last week, my good fellow, of the cocoa. How has it been since?’ ‘I thank you, sir,’ said Mr. Littimer, ‘it has been better made. If I might take the liberty of saying so, sir, I don’t think the milk which is boiled with it is quite genuine; but I am aware, sir, that there is a great adulteration of milk, in London, and that the article in a pure state is difficult to be obtained.’ It appeared to me that the gentleman in spectacles backed his Twenty Eight against Mr. Creakle’s Twenty Seven, for each of them took his own man in hand. ‘What is your state of mind, Twenty Eight?’ said the questioner in spectacles. ‘I thank you, sir,’ returned Mr. Littimer; ‘I see my follies now, sir. I am a good deal troubled when I think of the sins of my former companions, sir; but I trust they may find forgiveness.’ ‘You are quite happy yourself?’ said the questioner, nodding encouragement. ‘I am much obliged to you, sir,’ returned Mr. Littimer. ‘Perfectly so.’ ‘Is there anything at all on your mind now?’ said the questioner. ‘If so, mention it, Twenty Eight.’ ‘Sir,’ said Mr. Littimer, without looking up, ‘if my eyes have not deceived me, there is a gentleman present who was acquainted with me in my former life. It may be profitable to that gentleman to know, sir, that I attribute my past follies, entirely to having lived a thoughtless life in the service of young men; and to having allowed myself to be led by them into weaknesses, which I had not the strength to resist. I hope that gentleman will take warning, sir, and will not be offended at my freedom. It is for his good. I am conscious of my own past follies. I hope he may repent of all the wickedness and sin to which he has been a party.’ I observed that several gentlemen were shading their eyes, each with one hand, as if they had just come into church. ‘This does you credit, Twenty Eight,’ returned the questioner. ‘I should have expected it of you. Is there anything else?’ ‘Sir,’ returned Mr. Littimer, slightly lifting up his eyebrows, but not his eyes, ‘there was a young woman who fell into dissolute courses, that I endeavoured to save, sir, but could not rescue. I beg that gentleman, if he has it in his power, to in-form that young woman from me that I forgive her her bad con-duct towards myself, and that I call her to repentance - if he will be so good.’ ‘I have no doubt, Twenty Eight,’ returned the questioner, ‘that the gentleman you refer to feels very strongly - as we all must - what you have so properly said. We will not detain you.’ ‘I thank you, sir,’ said Mr. Littimer. ‘Gentlemen, I wish you a good day, and hoping you and your families will also see your wickedness, and amend!’ With this, Number Twenty Eight retired, after a glance between him and Uriah; as if they were not altogether unknown to each other, through some medium of communication; and a murmur went round the group, as his door shut upon him, that he was a most respectable man, and a beautiful case. ‘Now, Twenty Seven,’ said Mr. Creakle, entering on a clear stage with his man, ‘is there anything that anyone can do for you? If so, mention it.’ ‘I would umbly ask, sir,’ returned Uriah, with a jerk of his malevolent head, ‘for leave to write again to mother.’ ‘It shall certainly be granted,’ said Mr. Creakle. ‘Thank you, sir! I am anxious about mother. I am afraid she ain’t safe.’ Somebody incautiously asked, what from? But there was a scandalized whisper of ‘Hush!’ ‘Immortally safe, sir,’ returned Uriah, writhing in the direction of the voice. ‘I should wish mother to be got into my state. I never should have been got into my present state if I hadn’t come here. I wish mother had come here. It would be better for everybody, if they got took up, and was brought here.’ This sentiment gave unbounded satisfaction - greater satisfaction, I think, than anything that had passed yet. ‘Before I come here,’ said Uriah, stealing a look at us, as if he would have blighted the outer world to which we belonged, if he could, ‘I was given to follies; but now I am sensible of my follies. There’s a deal of sin outside. There’s a deal of sin in mother. There’s nothing but sin everywhere - except here.’ ‘You are quite changed?’ said Mr. Creakle. ‘Oh dear, yes, sir!’ cried this hopeful penitent.

‘You wouldn’t relapse, if you were going out?’ asked some-body else. ‘Oh de-ar no, sir!’ ‘Well!’ said Mr. Creakle, ‘this is very gratifying. You have ad-dressed Mr. Copperfield, Twenty Seven. Do you wish to say anything further to him?’ ‘You knew me, a long time before I came here and was changed, Mr. Copperfield,’ said Uriah, looking at me; and a more villainous look I never saw, even on his visage. ‘You knew me when, in spite of my follies, I was umble among them that was proud, and meek among them that was violent - you was violent to me yourself, Mr. Copperfield. Once, you struck me a blow in the face, you know.’ General commiseration. Several indignant glances directed at me. ‘But I forgive you, Mr. Copperfield,’ said Uriah, making his forgiving nature the subject of a most impious and awful parallel, which I shall not record. ‘I forgive everybody. It would ill become me to bear malice. I freely forgive you, and I hope you’ll curb your passions in future. I hope Mr. W. will repent, and Miss W., and all of that sinful lot. You’ve been visited with affliction, and I hope it may do you good; but you’d better have come here. Mr. W. had better have come here, and Miss W. too. The best wish I could give you, Mr. Copperfield, and give all of you gentlemen, is, that you could be took up and brought here. When I think of my past follies, and my present state, I am sure it would be best for you. I pity all who ain’t brought here!’ He sneaked back into his cell, amidst a little chorus of approbation; and both Traddles and I experienced a great relief when he was locked in. It was a characteristic feature in this repentance, that I was fain to ask what these two men had done, to be there at all. That appeared to be the last thing about which they had any-thing to say. I addressed myself to one of the two warders, who, I suspected from certain latent indications in their faces, knew pretty well what all this stir was worth. ‘Do you know,’ said I, as we walked along the passage, ‘what felony was Number Twenty Seven’s last “folly”?’ The answer was that it was a Bank case.

‘A fraud on the Bank of England?’ I asked. ‘Yes, sir. Fraud, forgery, and conspiracy. He and some others. He set the others on. It was a deep plot for a large sum. Sentence, transportation for life. Twenty Seven was the knowingest bird of the lot, and had very nearly kept himself safe; but not quite. The Bank was just able to put salt upon his tail - and only just.’ ‘Do you know Twenty Eight’s offence?’ ‘Twenty Eight,’ returned my informant, speaking throughout in a low tone, and looking over his shoulder as we walked along the passage, to guard himself from being overheard, in such an unlawful reference to these Immaculates, by Creakle and the rest; ‘Twenty Eight (also transportation) got a place, and robbed a young master of a matter of two hundred and fifty pounds in money and valuables, the night before they were going abroad. I particularly recollect his case, from his being took by a dwarf.’ ‘A what?’ ‘A little woman. I have forgot her name?’ ‘Not Mowcher?’ ‘That’s it! He had eluded pursuit, and was going to America in a flaxen wig, and whiskers, and such a complete disguise as never you see in all your born days; when the little woman, being in Southampton, met him walking along the street - picked him out with her sharp eye in a moment - ran betwixt his legs to upset him - and held on to him like grim Death.’ ‘Excellent Miss Mowcher!’ cried I. ‘You’d have said so, if you had seen her, standing on a chair in the witness-box at the trial, as I did,’ said my friend. ‘He cut her face right open, and pounded her in the most brutal manner, when she took him; but she never loosed her hold till he was locked up. She held so tight to him, in fact, that the officers were obliged to take ’em both together. She gave her evidence in the gamest way, and was highly complimented by the Bench, and cheered right home to her lodgings. She said in Court that she’d have took him single-handed (on account of what she knew concerning him), if he had been Samson. And it’s my belief she would!’ It was mine too, and I highly respected Miss Mowcher for it. We had now seen all there was to see. It would have been in vain to represent to such a man as the Worshipful Mr. Creakle, that Twenty Seven and Twenty Eight were perfectly consistent and unchanged; that exactly what they were then, they had al-ways been; that the hypocritical knaves were just the subjects to make that sort of profession in such a place; that they knew its market-value at least as well as we did, in the immediate service it would do them when they were expatriated; in a word, that it was a rotten, hollow, painfully suggestive piece of business altogether. We left them to their system and them-selves, and went home wondering. ‘Perhaps it’s a good thing, Traddles,’ said I, ‘to have an unsound Hobby ridden hard; for it’s the sooner ridden to death.’ ‘I hope so,’ replied Traddles.

Chapter 62

Chapter 62

A Light Shines on My Way The year came round to Christmas-time, and I had been at home above two months. I had seen Agnes frequently. However loud the general voice might be in giving me encouragement, and however fervent the emotions and endeavours to which it roused me, I heard her lightest word of praise as I heard nothing else. At least once a week, and sometimes oftener, I rode over there, and passed the evening. I usually rode back at night; for the old unhappy sense was always hovering about me now - most sorrowfully when I left her - and I was glad to be up and out, rather than wandering over the past in weary wakefulness or miserable dreams. I wore away the longest part of many wild sad nights, in those rides; reviving, as I went, the thoughts that had occupied me in my long absence. Or, if I were to say rather that I listened to the echoes of those thoughts, I should better express the truth. They spoke to me from afar off. I had put them at a distance, and accepted my inevitable place. When I read to Agnes what I wrote; when I saw her listening face; moved her to smiles or tears; and heard her cordial voice so earnest on the shadowy events of that imaginative world in which I lived; I thought what a fate mine might have been - but only thought so, as I had thought after I was married to Dora, what I could have wished my wife to be. My duty to Agnes, who loved me with a love, which, if I disquieted, I wronged most selfishly and poorly, and could never restore; my matured assurance that I, who had worked out my own destiny, and won what I had impetuously set my heart on, had no right to murmur, and must bear; comprised what I felt and what I had learned. But I loved her: and now it even be-came some consolation to me, vaguely to conceive a distant day when I might blamelessly avow it; when all this should be over; when I could say ‘Agnes, so it was when I came home; and now I am old, and I never have loved since!’ She did not once show me any change in herself. What she always had been to me, she still was; wholly unaltered. Between my aunt and me there had been something, in this connexion, since the night of my return, which I cannot call a restraint, or an avoidance of the subject, so much as an implied understanding that we thought of it together, but did not shape our thoughts into words. When, according to our old custom, we sat before the fire at night, we often fell into this train; as naturally, and as consciously to each other, as if we had unreservedly said so. But we preserved an unbroken silence. I believed that she had read, or partly read, my thoughts that night; and that she fully comprehended why I gave mine no more distinct expression. This Christmas-time being come, and Agnes having reposed no new confidence in me, a doubt that had several times arisen in my mind - whether she could have that perception of the true state of my breast, which restrained her with the apprehension of giving me pain - began to oppress me heavily. If that were so, my sacrifice was nothing; my plainest obligation to her unfulfilled; and every poor action I had shrunk from, I was hourly doing. I resolved to set this right beyond all doubt; - if such a barrier were between us, to break it down at once with a determined hand. It was - what lasting reason have I to remember it! - a cold, harsh, winter day. There had been snow, some hours before; and it lay, not deep, but hard-frozen on the ground. Out at sea, beyond my window, the wind blew ruggedly from the north. I had been thinking of it, sweeping over those mountain wastes of snow in Switzerland, then inaccessible to any human foot; and had been speculating which was the lonelier, those solitary regions, or a deserted ocean. ‘Riding today, Trot?’ said my aunt, putting her head in at the door. ‘Yes,’ said I, ‘I am going over to Canterbury. It’s a good day for a ride.’

‘I hope your horse may think so too,’ said my aunt; ‘but at present he is holding down his head and his ears, standing be-fore the door there, as if he thought his stable preferable.’ My aunt, I may observe, allowed my horse on the forbidden ground, but had not at all relented towards the donkeys. ‘He will be fresh enough, presently!’ said I. ‘The ride will do his master good, at all events,’ observed my aunt, glancing at the papers on my table. ‘Ah, child, you pass a good many hours here! I never thought, when I used to read books, what work it was to write them.’ ‘It’s work enough to read them, sometimes,’ I returned. ‘As to the writing, it has its own charms, aunt.’ ‘Ah! I see!’ said my aunt. ‘Ambition, love of approbation, sympathy, and much more, I suppose? Well: go along with you!’ ‘Do you know anything more,’ said I, standing composedly before her - she had patted me on the shoulder, and sat down in my chair - ‘of that attachment of Agnes?’ She looked up in my face a little while, before replying: ‘I think I do, Trot.’ ‘Are you confirmed in your impression?’ I inquired. ‘I think I am, Trot.’ She looked so steadfastly at me: with a kind of doubt, or pity, or suspense in her affection: that I summoned the stronger de-termination to show her a perfectly cheerful face. ‘And what is more, Trot -’ said my aunt. ‘Yes!’ ‘I think Agnes is going to be married.’ ‘God bless her!’ said I, cheerfully. ‘God bless her!’ said my aunt, ‘and her husband too!’ I echoed it, parted from my aunt, and went lightly down-stairs, mounted, and rode away. There was greater reason than before to do what I had resolved to do. How well I recollect the wintry ride! The frozen particles of ice, brushed from the blades of grass by the wind, and borne across my face; the hard clatter of the horse’s hoofs, beating a tune upon the ground; the stiff-tilled soil; the snowdrift, lightly eddying in the chalk-pit as the breeze ruffled it; the smoking team with the waggon of old hay, stopping to breathe on the hill-top, and shaking their bells musically; the whitened slopes and sweeps of Down-land lying against the dark sky, as if they were drawn on a huge slate! I found Agnes alone. The little girls had gone to their own homes now, and she was alone by the fire, reading. She put down her book on seeing me come in; and having welcomed me as usual, took her work-basket and sat in one of the old-fashioned windows. I sat beside her on the window-seat, and we talked of what I was doing, and when it would be done, and of the progress I had made since my last visit. Agnes was very cheerful; and laughingly predicted that I should soon become too famous to be talked to, on such subjects. ‘So I make the most of the present time, you see,’ said Agnes, ‘and talk to you while I may.’ As I looked at her beautiful face, observant of her work, she raised her mild clear eyes, and saw that I was looking at her. ‘You are thoughtful today, Trotwood!’ ‘Agnes, shall I tell you what about? I came to tell you.’ She put aside her work, as she was used to do when we were seriously discussing anything; and gave me her whole attention. ‘My dear Agnes, do you doubt my being true to you?’ ‘No!’ she answered, with a look of astonishment. ‘Do you doubt my being what I always have been to you?’ ‘No!’ she answered, as before. ‘Do you remember that I tried to tell you, when I came home, what a debt of gratitude I owed you, dearest Agnes, and how fervently I felt towards you?’ ‘I remember it,’ she said, gently, ‘very well.’ ‘You have a secret,’ said I. ‘Let me share it, Agnes.’ She cast down her eyes, and trembled. ‘I could hardly fail to know, even if I had not heard - but from other lips than yours, Agnes, which seems strange - that there is someone upon whom you have bestowed the treasure of your love. Do not shut me out of what concerns your happiness so nearly! If you can trust me, as you say you can, and as I know you may, let me be your friend, your brother, in this matter, of all others!’ With an appealing, almost a reproachful, glance, she rose from the window; and hurrying across the room as if without knowing where, put her hands before her face, and burst into such tears as smote me to the heart. And yet they awakened something in me, bringing promise to my heart. Without my knowing why, these tears allied them-selves with the quietly sad smile which was so fixed in my remembrance, and shook me more with hope than fear or sorrow. ‘Agnes! Sister! Dearest! What have I done?’ ‘Let me go away, Trotwood. I am not well. I am not myself. I will speak to you by and by - another time. I will write to you. Don’t speak to me now. Don’t! don’t!’ I sought to recollect what she had said, when I had spoken to her on that former night, of her affection needing no return. It seemed a very world that I must search through in a moment. ‘Agnes, I cannot bear to see you so, and think that I have been the cause. My dearest girl, dearer to me than anything in life, if you are unhappy, let me share your unhappiness. If you are in need of help or counsel, let me try to give it to you. If you have indeed a burden on your heart, let me try to lighten it. For whom do I live now, Agnes, if it is not for you!’ ‘Oh, spare me! I am not myself! Another time!’ was all I could distinguish. Was it a selfish error that was leading me away? Or, having once a clue to hope, was there something opening to me that I had not dared to think of? ‘I must say more. I cannot let you leave me so! For Heaven’s sake, Agnes, let us not mistake each other after all these years, and all that has come and gone with them! I must speak plainly. If you have any lingering thought that I could envy the happiness you will confer; that I could not resign you to a dearer protector, of your own choosing; that I could not, from my removed place, be a contented witness of your joy; dismiss it, for I don’t deserve it! I have not suffered quite in vain. You have not taught me quite in vain. There is no alloy of self in what I feel for you.’ She was quiet now. In a little time, she turned her pale face towards me, and said in a low voice, broken here and there, but very clear: ‘I owe it to your pure friendship for me, Trotwood - which, in-deed, I do not doubt - to tell you, you are mistaken. I can do no more. If I have sometimes, in the course of years, wanted help and counsel, they have come to me. If I have sometimes been unhappy, the feeling has passed away. If I have ever had a bur-den on my heart, it has been lightened for me. If I have any secret, it is - no new one; and is - not what you suppose. I can-not reveal it, or divide it. It has long been mine, and must re-main mine.’ ‘Agnes! Stay! A moment!’ She was going away, but I detained her. I clasped my arm about her waist. ‘In the course of years!’ ‘It is not a new one!’ New thoughts and hopes were whirling through my mind, and all the colours of my life were changing. ‘Dearest Agnes! Whom I so respect and honour - whom I so devotedly love! When I came here today, I thought that nothing could have wrested this confession from me. I thought I could have kept it in my bosom all our lives, till we were old. But, Agnes, if I have indeed any new-born hope that I may ever call you something more than Sister, widely different from Sister! -’ Her tears fell fast; but they were not like those she had lately shed, and I saw my hope brighten in them. ‘Agnes! Ever my guide, and best support! If you had been more mindful of yourself, and less of me, when we grew up here together, I think my heedless fancy never would have wandered from you. But you were so much better than I, so necessary to me in every boyish hope and disappointment, that to have you to confide in, and rely upon in everything, became a second nature, supplanting for the time the first and greater one of loving you as I do!’ Still weeping, but not sadly - joyfully! And clasped in my arms as she had never been, as I had thought she never was to be! ‘When I loved Dora - fondly, Agnes, as you know -’ ‘Yes!’ she cried, earnestly. ‘I am glad to know it!’ ‘When I loved her - even then, my love would have been in-complete, without your sympathy. I had it, and it was perfected. And when I lost her, Agnes, what should I have been without you, still!’ Closer in my arms, nearer to my heart, her trembling hand upon my shoulder, her sweet eyes shining through her tears, on mine!

‘I went away, dear Agnes, loving you. I stayed away, loving you. I returned home, loving you!’ And now, I tried to tell her of the struggle I had had, and the conclusion I had come to. I tried to lay my mind before her, truly, and entirely. I tried to show her how I had hoped I had come into the better knowledge of myself and of her; how I had resigned myself to what that better knowledge brought; and how I had come there, even that day, in my fidelity to this. If she did so love me (I said) that she could take me for her husband, she could do so, on no deserving of mine, except upon the truth of my love for her, and the trouble in which it had ripened to be what it was; and hence it was that I revealed it. And O, Agnes, even out of thy true eyes, in that same time, the spirit of my child-wife looked upon me, saying it was well; and winning me, through thee, to tenderest recollections of the Blossom that had withered in its bloom! ‘I am so blest, Trotwood - my heart is so overcharged - but there is one thing I must say.’ ‘Dearest, what?’ She laid her gentle hands upon my shoulders, and looked calmly in my face. ‘Do you know, yet, what it is?’ ‘I am afraid to speculate on what it is. Tell me, my dear.’ ‘I have loved you all my life!’ O, we were happy, we were happy! Our tears were not for the trials (hers so much the greater) through which we had come to be thus, but for the rapture of being thus, never to be divided more! We walked, that winter evening, in the fields together; and the blessed calm within us seemed to be partaken by the frosty air. The early stars began to shine while we were lingering on, and looking up to them, we thanked our God for having guided us to this tranquillity. We stood together in the same old-fashioned window at night, when the moon was shining; Agnes with her quiet eyes raised up to it; I following her glance. Long miles of road then opened out before my mind; and, toiling on, I saw a ragged way-worn boy, forsaken and neglected, who should come to call even the heart now beating against mine, his own.

It was nearly dinner-time next day when we appeared before my aunt. She was up in my study, Peggotty said: which it was her pride to keep in readiness and order for me. We found her, in her spectacles, sitting by the fire. ‘Goodness me!’ said my aunt, peering through the dusk, ‘who’s this you’re bringing home?’ ‘Agnes,’ said I. As we had arranged to say nothing at first, my aunt was not a little discomfited. She darted a hopeful glance at me, when I said ‘Agnes’; but seeing that I looked as usual, she took off her spectacles in despair, and rubbed her nose with them. She greeted Agnes heartily, nevertheless; and we were soon in the lighted parlour downstairs, at dinner. My aunt put on her spectacles twice or thrice, to take another look at me, but as often took them off again, disappointed, and rubbed her nose with them. Much to the discomfiture of Mr. Dick, who knew this to be a bad symptom. ‘By the by, aunt,’ said I, after dinner; ‘I have been speaking to Agnes about what you told me.’ ‘Then, Trot,’ said my aunt, turning scarlet, ‘you did wrong, and broke your promise.’ ‘You are not angry, aunt, I trust? I am sure you won’t be, when you learn that Agnes is not unhappy in any attachment.’ ‘Stuff and nonsense!’ said my aunt. As my aunt appeared to be annoyed, I thought the best way was to cut her annoyance short. I took Agnes in my arm to the back of her chair, and we both leaned over her. My aunt, with one clap of her hands, and one look through her spectacles, immediately went into hysterics, for the first and only time in all my knowledge of her. The hysterics called up Peggotty. The moment my aunt was restored, she flew at Peggotty, and calling her a silly old creature, hugged her with all her might. After that, she hugged Mr. Dick (who was highly honoured, but a good deal surprised); and after that, told them why. Then, we were all happy together. I could not discover whether my aunt, in her last short conversation with me, had fallen on a pious fraud, or had really mistaken the state of my mind. It was quite enough, she said, that she had told me Agnes was going to be married; and that I now knew better than anyone how true it was. We were married within a fortnight. Traddles and Sophy, and Doctor and Mrs. Strong, were the only guests at our quiet wed-ding. We left them full of joy; and drove away together. Clasped in my embrace, I held the source of every worthy aspiration I had ever had; the centre of myself, the circle of my life, my own, my wife; my love of whom was founded on a rock! ‘Dearest husband!’ said Agnes. ‘Now that I may call you by that name, I have one thing more to tell you.’ ‘Let me hear it, love.’ ‘It grows out of the night when Dora died. She sent you for me. ‘She did.’ ‘She told me that she left me something. Can you think what it was?’ I believed I could. I drew the wife who had so long loved me, closer to my side. ‘She told me that she made a last request to me, and left me a last charge.’ ‘And it was -’ ‘That only I would occupy this vacant place.’ And Agnes laid her head upon my breast, and wept; and I wept with her, though we were so happy. ’

Chapter 63

Chapter 63

A Visitor What I have purposed to record is nearly finished; but there is yet an incident conspicuous in my memory, on which it often rests with delight, and without which one thread in the web I have spun would have a ravelled end. I had advanced in fame and fortune, my domestic joy was perfect, I had been married ten happy years. Agnes and I were sitting by the fire, in our house in London, one night in spring, and three of our children were playing in the room, when I was told that a stranger wished to see me. He had been asked if he came on business, and had answered No; he had come for the pleasure of seeing me, and had come a long way. He was an old man, my servant said, and looked like a farmer. As this sounded mysterious to the children, and moreover was like the beginning of a favourite story Agnes used to tell them, introductory to the arrival of a wicked old Fairy in a cloak who hated everybody, it produced some commotion. One of our boys laid his head in his mother’s lap to be out of harm’s way, and little Agnes (our eldest child) left her doll in a chair to represent her, and thrust out her little heap of golden curls from between the window-curtains, to see what happened next. ‘Let him come in here!’ said I. There soon appeared, pausing in the dark doorway as he entered, a hale, grey-haired old man. Little Agnes, attracted by his looks, had run to bring him in, and I had not yet clearly seen his face, when my wife, starting up, cried out to me, in a pleased and agitated voice, that it was Mr. Peggotty! It was Mr. Peggotty. An old man now, but in a ruddy, hearty, strong old age. When our first emotion was over, and he sat be-fore the fire with the children on his knees, and the blaze shining on his face, he looked, to me, as vigorous and robust, withal as handsome, an old man, as ever I had seen. ‘Mas’r Davy,’ said he. And the old name in the old tone fell so naturally on my ear! ‘Mas’r Davy, ’tis a joyful hour as I see you, once more, ‘long with your own trew wife!’ ‘A joyful hour indeed, old friend!’ cried I. ‘And these heer pretty ones,’ said Mr. Peggotty. ‘To look at these heer flowers! Why, Mas’r Davy, you was but the heighth of the littlest of these, when I first see you! When Em’ly warn’t no bigger, and our poor lad were but a lad!’ ‘Time has changed me more than it has changed you since then,’ said I. ‘But let these dear rogues go to bed; and as no house in England but this must hold you, tell me where to send for your luggage (is the old black bag among it, that went so far, I wonder!), and then, over a glass of Yarmouth grog, we will have the tidings of ten years!’ ‘Are you alone?’ asked Agnes. ‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said, kissing her hand, ‘quite alone.’ We sat him between us, not knowing how to give him welcome enough; and as I began to listen to his old familiar voice, I could have fancied he was still pursuing his long journey in search of his darling niece. ‘It’s a mort of water,’ said Mr. Peggotty, ‘fur to come across, and on’y stay a matter of fower weeks. But water (’specially when ’tis salt) comes nat’ral to me; and friends is dear, and I am heer. - Which is verse,’ said Mr. Peggotty, surprised to find it out, ‘though I hadn’t such intentions.’ ‘Are you going back those many thousand miles, so soon?’ asked Agnes. ‘Yes, ma’am,’ he returned. ‘I giv the promise to Em’ly, afore I come away. You see, I doen’t grow younger as the years comes round, and if I hadn’t sailed as ’twas, most like I shouldn’t never have done ‘t. And it’s allus been on my mind, as I must come and see Mas’r Davy and your own sweet blooming self, in your wedded happiness, afore I got to be too old.’ He looked at us, as if he could never feast his eyes on us sufficiently. Agnes laughingly put back some scattered locks of his grey hair, that he might see us better. ‘And now tell us,’ said I, ‘everything relating to your fortunes.’

‘Our fortuns, Mas’r Davy,’ he rejoined, ‘is soon told. We haven’t fared nohows, but fared to thrive. We’ve allus thrived. We’ve worked as we ought to ‘t, and maybe we lived a leetle hard at first or so, but we have allus thrived. What with sheep-farming, and what with stock-farming, and what with one thing and what with t’other, we are as well to do, as well could be. Theer’s been kiender a blessing fell upon us,’ said Mr. Peggotty, reverentially inclining his head, ‘and we’ve done nowt but prosper. That is, in the long run. If not yesterday, why then today. If not today, why then tomorrow.’ ‘And Emily?’ said Agnes and I, both together. ‘Em’ly,’ said he, ‘arter you left her, ma’am - and I never heerd her saying of her prayers at night, t’other side the can-vas screen, when we was settled in the Bush, but what I heerd your name - and arter she and me lost sight of Mas’r Davy, that theer shining sundown - was that low, at first, that, if she had know’d then what Mas’r Davy kep from us so kind and thowtful, ’tis my opinion she’d have drooped away. But theer was some poor folks aboard as had illness among ’em, and she took care of them; and theer was the children in our company, and she took care of them; and so she got to be busy, and to be doing good, and that helped her.’ ‘When did she first hear of it?’ I asked. ‘I kep it from her arter I heerd on ‘t,’ said Mr. Peggotty, ‘going on nigh a year. We was living then in a solitary place, but among the beautifullest trees, and with the roses a-covering our Beein to the roof. Theer come along one day, when I was out a-working on the land, a traveller from our own Norfolk or Suffolk in England (I doen’t rightly mind which), and of course we took him in, and giv him to eat and drink, and made him welcome. We all do that, all the colony over. He’d got an old newspaper with him, and some other account in print of the storm. That’s how she know’d it. When I came home at night, I found she know’d it.’ He dropped his voice as he said these words, and the gravity I so well remembered overspread his face. ‘Did it change her much?’ we asked. ‘Aye, for a good long time,’ he said, shaking his head; ‘if not to this present hour. But I think the solitoode done her good. And she had a deal to mind in the way of poultry and the like, and minded of it, and come through. I wonder,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘if you could see my Em’ly now, Mas’r Davy, whether you’d know her!’ ‘Is she so altered?’ I inquired. ‘I doen’t know. I see her ev’ry day, and doen’t know; But, odd-times, I have thowt so. A slight figure,’ said Mr. Peggotty, looking at the fire, ‘kiender worn; soft, sorrowful, blue eyes; a delicate face; a pritty head, leaning a little down; a quiet voice and way - timid a’most. That’s Em’ly!’ We silently observed him as he sat, still looking at the fire. ‘Some thinks,’ he said, ‘as her affection was ill-bestowed; some, as her marriage was broken off by death. No one knows how ’tis. She might have married well, a mort of times, “but, uncle,” she says to me, “that’s gone for ever.” Cheerful along with me; retired when others is by; fond of going any distance fur to teach a child, or fur to tend a sick person, or fur to do some kindness tow’rds a young girl’s wedding (and she’s done a many, but has never seen one); fondly loving of her uncle; patient; liked by young and old; sowt out by all that has any trouble. That’s Em’ly!’ He drew his hand across his face, and with a half-suppressed sigh looked up from the fire. ‘Is Martha with you yet?’ I asked. ‘Martha,’ he replied, ‘got married, Mas’r Davy, in the second year. A young man, a farm-labourer, as come by us on his way to market with his mas’r’s drays - a journey of over five hundred mile, theer and back - made offers fur to take her fur his wife (wives is very scarce theer), and then to set up fur their two selves in the Bush. She spoke to me fur to tell him her trew story. I did. They was married, and they live fower hundred mile away from any voices but their own and the singing birds.’ ‘Mrs. Gummidge?’ I suggested. It was a pleasant key to touch, for Mr. Peggotty suddenly burst into a roar of laughter, and rubbed his hands up and down his legs, as he had been accustomed to do when he enjoyed himself in the long-shipwrecked boat. ‘Would you believe it!’ he said. ‘Why, someun even made offer fur to marry her! If a ship’s cook that was turning settler, Mas’r Davy, didn’t make offers fur to marry Missis Gummidge, I’m Gormed - and I can’t say no fairer than that!’

I never saw Agnes laugh so. This sudden ecstasy on the part of Mr. Peggotty was so delightful to her, that she could not leave off laughing; and the more she laughed the more she made me laugh, and the greater Mr. Peggotty’s ecstasy be-came, and the more he rubbed his legs. ‘And what did Mrs. Gummidge say?’ I asked, when I was grave enough. ‘If you’ll believe me,’ returned Mr. Peggotty, ‘Missis Gum-midge, ‘stead of saying “thank you, I’m much obleeged to you, I ain’t a-going fur to change my condition at my time of life,” up’d with a bucket as was standing by, and laid it over that theer ship’s cook’s head ‘till he sung out fur help, and I went in and reskied of him.’ Mr. Peggotty burst into a great roar of laughter, and Agnes and I both kept him company. ‘But I must say this, for the good creetur,’ he resumed, wiping his face, when we were quite exhausted; ‘she has been all she said she’d be to us, and more. She’s the willingest, the trewest, the honestest-helping woman, Mas’r Davy, as ever draw’d the breath of life. I have never know’d her to be lone and lorn, for a single minute, not even when the colony was all afore us, and we was new to it. And thinking of the old ‘un is a thing she never done, I do assure you, since she left England!’ ‘Now, last, not least, Mr. Micawber,’ said I. ‘He has paid off every obligation he incurred here - even to Traddles’s bill, you remember my dear Agnes - and therefore we may take it for granted that he is doing well. But what is the latest news of him?’ Mr. Peggotty, with a smile, put his hand in his breast-pocket, and produced a flat-folded, paper parcel, from which he took out, with much care, a little odd-looking newspaper. ‘You are to understan’, Mas’r Davy,’ said he, ‘as we have left the Bush now, being so well to do; and have gone right away round to Port Middlebay Harbour, wheer theer’s what we call a town.’ ‘Mr. Micawber was in the Bush near you?’ said I. ‘Bless you, yes,’ said Mr. Peggotty, ‘and turned to with a will. I never wish to meet a better gen’l’man for turning to with a will. I’ve seen that theer bald head of his a perspiring in the sun, Mas’r Davy, till I a’most thowt it would have melted away. And now he’s a Magistrate.’ ‘A Magistrate, eh?’ said I. Mr. Peggotty pointed to a certain paragraph in the newspaper, where I read aloud as follows, from the Port Middlebay Times: ‘The public dinner to our distinguished fellow-colonist and townsman, ''Wilkins Micawber, Esquire'', Port Middlebay District Magistrate, came off yesterday in the large room of the Hotel, which was crowded to suffocation. It is estimated that not fewer than forty-seven persons must have been accommodated with dinner at one time, exclusive of the company in the passage and on the stairs. The beauty, fashion, and exclusiveness of Port Middlebay, flocked to do honour to one so deservedly esteemed, so highly talented, and so widely popular. Doctor Mell (of Colonial Salem-House Grammar School, Port Middlebay) presided, and on his right sat the distinguished guest. After the removal of the cloth, and the singing of Non Nobis (beautifully executed, and in which we were at no loss to distinguish the bell-like notes of that gifted amateur, ''Wilkins Micawber, Esquire, Junior''), the usual loyal and patriotic toasts were severally given and rapturously received. Doctor Mell, in a speech replete with feeling, then proposed “Our distinguished Guest, the ornament of our town. May he never leave us but to better himself, and may his success among us be such as to render his bettering himself impossible!” The cheering with which the toast was received defies description. Again and again it rose and fell, like the waves of ocean. At length all was hushed, and ''Wilkins Micawber, Esquire'', presented himself to return thanks. Far be it from us, in the present comparatively imperfect state of the resources of our establishment, to endeavour to follow our distinguished townsman through the smoothly-flowing periods of his polished and highly-ornate address! Suffice it to observe, that it was a masterpiece of eloquence; and that those passages in which he more particularly traced his own successful career to its source, and warned the younger portion of his auditory from the shoals of ever incurring pecuniary liabilities which they were unable to liquidate, brought a tear into the manliest eye present. The remaining toasts were ''Doctor Mell''; Mrs. ''Micawber'' (who gracefully bowed her acknowledgements from the side-door, where a galaxy of beauty was elevated on chairs, at once to witness and adorn the gratifying scene), Mrs. ''Ridger Begs'' (late Miss Micawber); Mrs. ''Mell; Wilkins Micawber, Esquire, Junior'' (who convulsed the assembly by humorously remarking that he found himself unable to return thanks in a speech, but would do so, with their permission, in a song); Mrs. ''Micawber’s Family'' (well known, it is need-less to remark, in the mother-country), &c. &c. &c. At the conclusion of the proceedings the tables were cleared as if by art-magic for dancing. Among the votaries of ''Terpsichore'', who disported themselves until Sol gave warning for departure, Wilkins Micawber, Esquire, Junior, and the lovely and accomplished Miss Helena, fourth daughter of Doctor Mell, were particularly remarkable.’ I was looking back to the name of Doctor Mell, pleased to have discovered, in these happier circumstances, Mr. Mell, formerly poor pinched usher to my Middlesex magistrate, when Mr. Peggotty pointing to another part of the paper, my eyes rested on my own name, and I read thus: ’ To David Copperfield, Esquire, ‘The eminent Author. ‘My Dear Sir, ‘Years have elapsed, since I had an opportunity of ocularly perusing the lineaments, now familiar to the imaginations of a considerable portion of the civilized world. ‘But, my dear Sir, though estranged (by the force of circumstances over which I have had no control) from the personal society of the friend and companion of my youth, I have not been unmindful of his soaring flight. Nor have I been debarred, Though seas between us braid ha’ roared, (''Burns'') from participating in the intellectual feasts he has spread before us. ‘I cannot, therefore, allow of the departure from this place of an individual whom we mutually respect and esteem, without, my dear Sir, taking this public opportunity of thanking you, on my own behalf, and, I may undertake to add, on that of the whole of the Inhabitants of Port Middlebay, for the gratification of which you are the ministering agent. ‘Go on, my dear Sir! You are not unknown here, you are not unappreciated. Though “remote”, we are neither “unfriended”, “melancholy”, nor (I may add) “slow”. Go on, my dear Sir, in your Eagle course! The inhabitants of Port Middlebay may at least aspire to watch it, with delight, with entertainment, with instruction! ‘Among the eyes elevated towards you from this portion of the globe, will ever be found, while it has light and life, ‘The ‘Eye ‘Appertaining to ‘''Wilkins Micawber'', ‘Magistrate.’ I found, on glancing at the remaining contents of the newspaper, that Mr. Micawber was a diligent and esteemed correspondent of that journal. There was another letter from him in the same paper, touching a bridge; there was an advertisement of a collection of similar letters by him, to be shortly republished, in a neat volume, ‘with considerable additions’; and, unless I am very much mistaken, the Leading Article was his also. We talked much of Mr. Micawber, on many other evenings while Mr. Peggotty remained with us. He lived with us during the whole term of his stay, - which, I think, was something less than a month, - and his sister and my aunt came to London to see him. Agnes and I parted from him aboard-ship, when he sailed; and we shall never part from him more, on earth. But before he left, he went with me to Yarmouth, to see a little tablet I had put up in the churchyard to the memory of Ham. While I was copying the plain inscription for him at his request, I saw him stoop, and gather a tuft of grass from the grave and a little earth. ‘For Em’ly,’ he said, as he put it in his breast. ‘I promised, Mas’r Davy.’

Chapter 64

Chapter 64

A Last Retrospect And now my written story ends. I look back, once more - for the last time - before I close these leaves. I see myself, with Agnes at my side, journeying along the road of life. I see our children and our friends around us; and I hear the roar of many voices, not indifferent to me as I travel on. What faces are the most distinct to me in the fleeting crowd? Lo, these; all turning to me as I ask my thoughts the question! Here is my aunt, in stronger spectacles, an old woman of four-score years and more, but upright yet, and a steady walker of six miles at a stretch in winter weather. Always with her, here comes Peggotty, my good old nurse, likewise in spectacles, accustomed to do needle-work at night very close to the lamp, but never sitting down to it without a bit of wax candle, a yard-measure in a little house, and a work-box with a picture of St. Paul’s upon the lid. The cheeks and arms of Peggotty, so hard and red in my childish days, when I wondered why the birds didn’t peck her in preference to apples, are shrivelled now; and her eyes, that used to darken their whole neighbourhood in her face, are fainter (though they glitter still); but her rough forefinger, which I once associated with a pocket nutmeg-grater, is just the same, and when I see my least child catching at it as it totters from my aunt to her, I think of our little parlour at home, when I could scarcely walk. My aunt’s old disappointment is set right, now. She is godmother to a real living Betsey Trot-wood; and Dora (the next in order) says she spoils her. There is something bulky in Peggotty’s pocket. It is nothing smaller than the Crocodile Book, which is in rather a dilapidated condition by this time, with divers of the leaves torn and stitched across, but which Peggotty exhibits to the children as a precious relic. I find it very curious to see my own infant face, looking up at me from the Crocodile stories; and to be re-minded by it of my old acquaintance Brooks of Sheffield. Among my boys, this summer holiday time, I see an old man making giant kites, and gazing at them in the air, with a de-light for which there are no words. He greets me rapturously, and whispers, with many nods and winks, ‘Trotwood, you will be glad to hear that I shall finish the Memorial when I have nothing else to do, and that your aunt’s the most extraordinary woman in the world, sir!’ Who is this bent lady, supporting herself by a stick, and showing me a countenance in which there are some traces of old pride and beauty, feebly contending with a querulous, imbecile, fretful wandering of the mind? She is in a garden; and near her stands a sharp, dark, withered woman, with a white scar on her lip. Let me hear what they say. ‘Rosa, I have forgotten this gentleman’s name.’ Rosa bends over her, and calls to her, ‘Mr. Copperfield.’ ‘I am glad to see you, sir. I am sorry to observe you are in mourning. I hope Time will be good to you.’ Her impatient attendant scolds her, tells her I am not in mourning, bids her look again, tries to rouse her. ‘You have seen my son, sir,’ says the elder lady. ‘Are you reconciled?’ Looking fixedly at me, she puts her hand to her forehead, and moans. Suddenly, she cries, in a terrible voice, ‘Rosa, come to me. He is dead!’ Rosa kneeling at her feet, by turns caresses her, and quarrels with her; now fiercely telling her, ‘I loved him better than you ever did!’- now soothing her to sleep on her breast, like a sick child. Thus I leave them; thus I always find them; thus they wear their time away, from year to year. What ship comes sailing home from India, and what English lady is this, married to a growling old Scotch Croesus with great flaps of ears? Can this be Julia Mills? Indeed it is Julia Mills, peevish and fine, with a black man to carry cards and letters to her on a golden salver, and a copper-coloured woman in linen, with a bright handkerchief round her head, to serve her Tiffin in her dressing-room. But Julia keeps no diary in these days; never sings Affection’s Dirge; eternally quarrels with the old Scotch Croesus, who is a sort of yellow bear with a tanned hide. Julia is steeped in money to the throat, and talks and thinks of nothing else. I liked her better in the Desert of Sahara. Or perhaps this is the Desert of Sahara! For, though Julia has a stately house, and mighty company, and sumptuous dinners every day, I see no green growth near her; nothing that can ever come to fruit or flower. What Julia calls ‘society’, I see; among it Mr. Jack Maldon, from his Patent Place, sneering at the hand that gave it him, and speaking to me of the Doctor as ‘so charmingly antique’. But when society is the name for such hollow gentlemen and ladies, Julia, and when its breeding is professed indifference to everything that can advance or can retard mankind, I think we must have lost ourselves in that same Desert of Sahara, and had better find the way out. And lo, the Doctor, always our good friend, labouring at his Dictionary (somewhere about the letter D), and happy in his home and wife. Also the Old Soldier, on a considerably reduced footing, and by no means so influential as in days of yore! Working at his chambers in the Temple, with a busy aspect, and his hair (where he is not bald) made more rebellious than ever by the constant friction of his lawyer’s-wig, I come, in a later time, upon my dear old Traddles. His table is covered with thick piles of papers; and I say, as I look around me: ‘If Sophy were your clerk, now, Traddles, she would have enough to do!’ ‘You may say that, my dear Copperfield! But those were capital days, too, in Holborn Court! Were they not?’ ‘When she told you you would be a judge? But it was not the town talk then!’ ‘At all events,’ says Traddles, ‘if I ever am one -’ ‘Why, you know you will be.’ ‘Well, my dear Copperfield, when I am one, I shall tell the story, as I said I would.’ We walk away, arm in arm. I am going to have a family dinner with Traddles. It is Sophy’s birthday; and, on our road, Traddles discourses to me of the good fortune he has enjoyed. ‘I really have been able, my dear Copperfield, to do all that I had most at heart. There’s the Reverend Horace promoted to that living at four hundred and fifty pounds a year; there are our two boys receiving the very best education, and distinguishing themselves as steady scholars and good fellows; there are three of the girls married very comfortably; there are three more living with us; there are three more keeping house for the Reverend Horace since Mrs. Crewler’s decease; and all of them happy.’ ‘Except -’ I suggest. ‘Except the Beauty,’ says Traddles. ‘Yes. It was very unfortunate that she should marry such a vagabond. But there was a certain dash and glare about him that caught her. However, now we have got her safe at our house, and got rid of him, we must cheer her up again.’ Traddles’s house is one of the very houses - or it easily may have been - which he and Sophy used to parcel out, in their evening walks. It is a large house; but Traddles keeps his papers in his dressing-room and his boots with his papers; and he and Sophy squeeze themselves into upper rooms, reserving the best bedrooms for the Beauty and the girls. There is no room to spare in the house; for more of ‘the girls’ are here, and always are here, by some accident or other, than I know how to count. Here, when we go in, is a crowd of them, running down to the door, and handing Traddles about to be kissed, until he is out of breath. Here, established in perpetuity, is the poor Beauty, a widow with a little girl; here, at dinner on Sophy’s birthday, are the three married girls with their three husbands, and one of the husband’s brothers, and another husband’s cousin, and another husband’s sister, who appears to me to be engaged to the cousin. Traddles, exactly the same simple, unaffected fellow as he ever was, sits at the foot of the large table like a Patriarch; and Sophy beams upon him, from the head, across a cheerful space that is certainly not glittering with Britannia metal. And now, as I close my task, subduing my desire to linger yet, these faces fade away. But one face, shining on me like a Heavenly light by which I see all other objects, is above them and beyond them all. And that remains. I turn my head, and see it, in its beautiful serenity, beside me.

My lamp burns low, and I have written far into the night; but the dear presence, without which I were nothing, bears me company. O Agnes, O my soul, so may thy face be by me when I close my life indeed; so may I, when realities are melting from me, like the shadows which I now dismiss, still find thee near me, pointing upward!