David Copperfield

by Charles Dickens

  She lifted up her eyes, and solemnly declared that she would devote herself to this task, fervently and faithfully. That she would never waver in it, never be diverted from it, never relinquish it while there was any chance of hope. If she were not true to it, might the object she now had in life, which bound her to something devoid of evil, in its passing away from her, leave her more forlorn and more despairing, if that were possible, than she has been upon the river's brink that night, and then might all help, human and Divine, renounce her evermore!

  She did not raise her voice above her breath, or address us, but said this to the night sky, then stood profoundly quiet, looking at the gloomy water.

  We judged it expedient, now, to tell her all we knew, which I recounted at length. She listened with great attention, and with a face that often changed, but had the same purpose in all its varying expressions. Her eyes occasionally filled with tears, but those she repressed. It seemed as if her spirit were quite altered, and she could not be too quiet.

  She asked when all was told, where we were to be communicated with, if occasion should arise. Under a dull lamp in the road, I wrote our two addresses on a leaf of my pocket-book, which I tore out and gave to her, and which she put in her poor bosom. I asked her where she lived herself. She said, after a pause, in no place long. It were better not to know.

  Mr. Peggotty suggesting to me, in a whisper, what had already occurred to myself, I took out my purse, but I could not prevail upon her to accept any money, nor could I exact any promise from her that she would do so at another time. I represented to her that Mr. Peggotty could not be called, for one in his condition, poor, and that the idea of her engaging in this search, while depending on her own resources, shocked us both. She continued steadfast. In this particular, his influence upon her was equally powerless with mine. She gratefully thanked him, but remained inexorable.

  "There may be work to be got," she said. "I'll try."

  "At least take some assistance," I returned, "until you have tried."

  "I could not do what I have promised, for money," she replied. "I could not take it, if I was starving. To give me money would be to take away your trust, to take away the object that you have given me, to take away the only certain thing that saves me from the river."

  "In the name of the great Judge," said I, "before whom you and all of us must stand at His dread time, dismiss that terrible ideal We can all do some good, if we will."

  She trembled, and her lip shook, and her face was paler, as she answered:

  "It has been put into your hearts, perhaps, to save a wretched creature for repentance. I am afraid to think so, it seems too bold. If any good should come of me, I might begin to hope, for nothing but harm has ever come of my deeds yet. I am to be trusted, for the first time in a long while, with my miserable life, on account of what you have given me to try for. I know no more, and I can say no more."

  Again she repressed the tears that had begun to flow, and, putting out her trembling hand, and touching Mr. Peggotty, as if there was some healing virtue in him, went away along the desolate road. She had been ill, probably for a long time. I observed, upon that closer opportunity of observation, that she was worn and haggard, and that her sunken eyes expressed privation and endurance.

  We followed her at a short distance, our way lying in the same direction, until we came back into the lighted and populous streets. I had such implicit confidence in her declaration, that I then put it to Mr. Peggotty, whether it would not seem, in the onset, like distrusting her, to follow her any farther. He being of the same mind, and equally reliant on her, we suffered her to take her own road, and took ours, which was towards Highgate. He accompanied me a good part of the way, and when we parted, with a prayer for the success of this fresh effort, there was a new and thoughtful compassion in him that I was at no loss to interpret.

  It was midnight when I arrived at home. I had reached my own gate, and was standing listening for the deep bell of Saint Paul's, the sound of which I thought had been borne towards me among the multitude of striking clocks, when I was rather surprised to see that the door of my aunt's cottage was open, and that a faint light in the entry was shining out across the road.

  Thinking that my aunt might have relapsed into one of her old alarms, and might be watching the progress of some imaginary conflagration in the distance, I went to speak to her. It was with very great surprise that I saw a man standing in her little garden.

  He had a glass and bottle in his hand, and was in the act of drinking. I stopped short, among the thick foliage outside, for the moon was up now, though obscured, and I recognized the man whom I had once supposed to be a delusion of Mr. Dick's, and had once encountered with my aunt in the streets of the city.

  He was eating as well as drinking, and seemed to eat with a hungry appetite. He seemed curious regarding the cottage, too, as if it were the first time he had seen it. After stooping to put the bottle on the ground, he looked up at the windows, and looked about, though with a covert and impatient air, as if he was anxious to be gone.

  The light in the passage was obscured for a moment, and my aunt came out. She was agitated, and told some money into his hand. I heard it chink.

  "What's the use of this?" he demanded.

  "I can spare no more," returned my aunt.

  "Then I can't go," said he. "Here! You may take it back!"

  "You bad man," returned my aunt, with great emotion, "how can you use me so? But why do I ask? It is because you know how weak I am! What have I to do, to free myself for ever of your visits, but to abandon you to your deserts?"

  "And why don't you abandon me to my deserts?" said he.

  "You ask me whyl" returned my aunt. "What a heart you must have!"

  He stood moodily rattling the money, and shaking his head, until at length he said:

  "Is this all you mean to give me, then?"

  "It is all I can give you," said my aunt. "You know I have had losses, and am poorer than I used to be. I have told you so. Having got it, why do you give me the pain of looking at you for another moment, and seeing what you have become?"

  "I have become shabby enough, if you mean that," he said. "I lead the life of an owl."

  "You stripped me of the greater part of all I ever had," said my aunt. "You closed my heart against the whole world, years and years. You treated me falsely, ungratefully, and cruelly. Go, and repent of it. Don't add new injuries to the long, long list of injuries you have done me!"

  "Aye!" he returned. "It's all very Sne!--Well! I must do the best I can, for the present, I suppose."

  In spite of himself, he appeared abashed by my aunt's indignant tears, and came slouching out of the garden. Taking two or three quick steps, as if I had just come up, I met him at the gate, and went in as he came out. We eyed one another narrowly in passing, and with no favour.

  "Aunt," said I, hurriedly. "This man alarming you again! Let me speak to him. Who is he?"

  "Child," returned my aunt, taking my arm, "come in, and don't speak to me for ten minutes."

  We sat down in her little parlour. My aunt retired behind the round green fan of former days, which was screwed on the back of a chair, and occasionally wiped her eyes, for about a quarter of an hour. Then she came out, and took a seat beside me.

  "Trot," said my aunt, calmly, "it's my husband."

  "Your husband, Aunt? I thought he had been dead!"

  "Dead to me," returned my aunt, "but living."

  I sat in silent amazement.

  "Betsey Trotwood don't look a likely subject for the tender passion," said my aunt, composedly, "but the time was, Trot, when she believed in that man most entirely. When she loved him, Trot, right well. When there was no proof of attachment and affection that she would not have given him. He repaid her by breaking her fortune, and nearly breaking her heart. So she put all that sort of sentiment, once and for ever, in a grave, and filled it up, and flattened it down."

  "My dear good Aunt!"

  "I left him
," my aunt proceeded, laying her hand as usual on the back of mine, "generously. I may say at this distance of time, Trot, that I left him generously. He had been so cruel to me, that I might have effected a separation on easy terms for myself, but I did not. He soon made ducks and drakes of what I gave him, sank lower and lower, married another woman, I believe, became an adventurer, a gambler, and a cheat. What he is now, you see. But he was a fine-looking man when I married him," said my aunt, with an echo of her old pride and admiration in her tone, "and I believed him--I was a fool!--to be the soul of honour!"

  She gave my hand a squeeze, and shook her head.

  "He is nothing to me now, Trot, less than nothing. But, sooner than have him punished for his offences (as he would be if he prowled about in this country), I give him more money than I can afford, at intervals when he reappears, to go away. I was a fool when I married him, and I am so far an incurable fool on that subject that, for the sake of what I once believed him to be, I wouldn't have even this shadow of my idle fancy hardly dealt with. For I was in earnest, Trot, if ever a woman was."

  My aunt dismissed the matter with a heavy sigh, and smoothed her dress.

  "There, my dear!" she said. "Now, you know the beginning, middle, and end, and all about it. We won't mention the subject to one another any more; neither, of course, will you mention it to anybody else. This is my grumpy, frumpy story, and we'll keep it to ourselves, Trot!"

  CHAPTER XLVIII

  Domestic

  I LABOURED HARD AT MY BOOK, WITHOUT ALLOWING IT TO interfere with the punctual discharge of my newspaper duties, and it came out and was very successful. I was not stunned by the praise which sounded in my ears, notwithstanding that I was keenly alive to it, and thought better of my own performance, I have little doubt, than anybody else did. It has always been in my observation of human nature that a man who has any good reason to believe in himself never flourishes himself before the faces of other people in order that they may believe in him. For this reason, I retained my modesty in very self-respect, and the more praise I got, the more I tried to deserve.

  It is not my purpose, in this record, though in all other essentials it is my written memory, to pursue the history of my own fictions. They express themselves, and I leave them to themselves. When I refer to them, incidentally, it is only as a part of my progress.

  Having some foundation for believing, by this time, that nature and accident had made me an author, I pursued my vocation with confidence. Without such assurance I should certainly have left it alone, and bestowed my energy on some other endeavour. I should have tried to find out what nature and accident really had made me, and to be that, and nothing else.

  I had been writing, in the newspaper and elsewhere, so prosperously, that when my new success was achieved, I considered myself reasonably entitled to escape from the dreary debates. One joyful night, therefore, I noted down the music of the parliamentary bagpipes for the last time, and I have never heard it since, though I still recognize the old drone in the newspapers, without any substantial variation (except, perhaps, that there is more of it) all the livelong session.

  I now write of the time when I had been married, I suppose, about a year and a half. After several varieties of experiment, we had given up the housekeeping as a bad job. The house kept itself, and we kept a page. The principal function of this retainer was to quarrel with the cook, in which respect he was a perfect Whittington, without his cat, or the remotest chance of being made Lord Mayor.

  He appears to me to have lived in a hail of saucepan-lids. His whole existence was a scuffle. He would shriek for help on the most improper occasions--as when we had a little dinner-party, or a few friends in the evening--and would come tumbling out of the kitchen, with iron missiles flying after him. We wanted to get rid of him, but he was very much attached to us, and wouldn't go. He was a tearful boy, and broke into such deplorable lamentations, when a cessation of our connexion was hinted at, that we were obliged to keep him. He had no mother--no anything in the way of a relative, that I could discover, except a sister, who fled to America the moment we had taken him off her hands--and he became quartered on us like a horrible young changeling. He had a lively perception of his own unfortunate state, and was always rubbing his eyes with the sleeve of his jacket, or stooping to blow his nose on the extreme comer of a little pocket-handkerchief, which he never would take completely out of his pocket, but always economized and secreted.

  This unlucky page, engaged in an evil hour at six pounds ten per annum, was a source of continual trouble to me. I watched him as he grew--and he grew like scarlet beans--with painful apprehensions of the time when he would begin to shave, even of the days when he would be bald or grey. I saw no prospect of ever getting rid of him, and, projecting myself into the future, used to think what an inconvenience he would be when he was an old man.

  I never expected anything less than this unfortunate's manner of getting me out of my difficulty. He stole Dora's watch, which, like everything else belonging to us, had no particular place of its own, and, converting it into money, spent the produce (he was always a weak-minded boy) in incessantly riding up and down between London and Uxbridge outside the coach. He was taken to Bow Street, as well as I remember, on the completion of his fifteenth journey, when four-and-sixpence, and a second-hand fife which he couldn't play, were found upon his person.

  The surprise and its consequences would have been much less disagreeable to me if he had not been penitent. But he was very penitent indeed, and in a peculiar way--not in the lump, but by instalments. For example, the day after that on which I was obliged to appear against him, he made certain revelations touching a hamper in the cellar, which we believed to be full of wine, but which had nothing in it except bottles and corks. We supposed he had now eased his mind, and told the worst he knew of the cook, but, a day or two afterwards, his conscience sustained a new twinge, and he disclosed how she had a little girl, who, early every morning, took away our bread, and also how he himself had been suborned to maintain the milkman in coals. In two or three days more, I was informed by the authorities of his having led to the discovery of sirloins of beef among the kitchen-stuff, and sheets in the rag-bag. A little while afterwards, he broke out in an entirely new direction, and confessed to a knowledge of burglarious intentions as to our premises, on the part of the pot-boy, who was immediately taken up. I got to be so ashamed of being such a victim, that I would have given him any money to hold his tongue, or would have offered a round bribe for his being permitted to run away. It was an aggravating circumstance in the case that he had no idea of this, but conceived that he was making me amends in every new discovery, not to say, heaping obligations on my head.

  At last I ran away myself, whenever I saw an emissary of the police approaching with some new intelligence, and lived a stealthy life until he was tried and ordered to be transported. Even then he couldn't be quiet, but was always writing us letters, and wanted so much to see Dora before he went away, that Dora went to visit him, and fainted when she found herself inside the iron bars. In short, I had no peace of my life until he was expatriated, and made (as I afterwards heard) a shepherd of "up the country" somewhere, I have no geographical idea where.

  All this led me into some serious reflections, and presented our mistakes in a new aspect, as I could not help communicating to Dora one evening, in spite of my tenderness for her.

  "My love," said I, "it is very painful to me to think that our want of system and management involves not only ourselves (which we have got used to), but other people."

  "You have been silent for a long time, and now you are going to be cross!" said Dora.

  "No, my dear, indeed! Let me explain to you what I mean."

  "I think I don't want to know," said Dora.

  "But I want you to know, my love. Put Jip down."

  Dora put his nose to mine, and said "Boh!" to drive my seriousness away, but, not succeeding, ordered him into his Pagoda, and sat looking at me, with her hands
folded, and a most resigned little expression of countenance.

  "The fact is, my dear," I began, "there is contagion in us. We infect everyone about us."

  I might have gone on in this figurative manner, if Dora's face had not admonished me that she was wondering with all her might whether I was going to propose any new kind of vaccination, or other medical remedy, for this unwholesome state of ours. Therefore I checked myself, and made my meaning plainer.

  "It is not merely, my pet," said I, "that we lose money and comfort, and even temper sometimes, by not learning to be more careful, but that we incur the serious responsibility of spoiling everyone who comes into our service, or has any dealings with us. I begin to be afraid that the fault is not entirely on one side, but that these people all turn out ill because we don't turn out very well ourselves."

  "Oh, what an accusation," exclaimed Dora, opening her eyes wide, "to say that you ever saw me take gold watches! Oh!"

  "My dearest," I remonstrated, "don't talk preposterous nonsense! Who has made the least allusion to gold watches?"

  "You did," returned Dora. "You know you did. You said I hadn't turned out well, and compared me to him."

  "To whom?" I asked.

  "To the page," sobbed Dora. "Oh, you cruel fellow, to compare your affectionate wife to a transported page! Why didn't you tell me your opinion of me before we were married? Why didn't you say, you hard-hearted thing, that you were convinced I was worse than a transported page? Oh, what a dreadful opinion to have of me! Oh, my goodnessl"

  "Now, Dora, my love," I returned, gently trying to remove the handkerchief she pressed to her eyes, "this is not only very ridiculous of you, but very wrong. In the first place, it's not true."

  "You always said he was a story-teller," sobbed Dora. "And now you say the same of me! Oh, what shall I do! What shall I do!"

  "My darling girl," I retorted, "I really must entreat you to be reasonable, and listen to what I did say, and do say. My dear Dora, unless we learn to do our duty to those whom we employ, they will never learn to do their duty to us. I am afraid we present opportunities to people to do wrong, that never ought to be presented. Even if we were as lax as we are, in all our arrangements, by choice--which we are not--even if we liked it, and found it agreeable to be so--which we don't--I am persuaded we should have no right to go on in this way. We are positively corrupting people. We are bound to think of that. I can't help thinking of it, Dora. It is a reflection I am unable to dismiss, and it sometimes makes me very uneasy. There, dear, that's all. Come now. Don't be foolish!"