David Copperfield
me; Mr. Peggotty, with his vest torn open, his hair wild, his face and
lips quite white, and blood trickling down his bosom (it had sprung from
his mouth, I think), looking fixedly at me.
‘Read it, sir,’ he said, in a low shivering voice. ‘Slow, please. I
doen’t know as I can understand.’
In the midst of the silence of death, I read thus, from a blotted
letter:
‘“When you, who love me so much better than I ever have deserved, even
when my mind was innocent, see this, I shall be far away.”’
‘I shall be fur away,’ he repeated slowly. ‘Stop! Em’ly fur away. Well!’
‘“When I leave my dear home--my dear home--oh, my dear home!--in the
morning,”’
the letter bore date on the previous night:
‘“--it will be never to come back, unless he brings me back a lady. This
will be found at night, many hours after, instead of me. Oh, if you knew
how my heart is torn. If even you, that I have wronged so much, that
never can forgive me, could only know what I suffer! I am too wicked to
write about myself! Oh, take comfort in thinking that I am so bad. Oh,
for mercy’s sake, tell uncle that I never loved him half so dear as
now. Oh, don’t remember how affectionate and kind you have all been to
me--don’t remember we were ever to be married--but try to think as if I
died when I was little, and was buried somewhere. Pray Heaven that I
am going away from, have compassion on my uncle! Tell him that I never
loved him half so dear. Be his comfort. Love some good girl that will
be what I was once to uncle, and be true to you, and worthy of you, and
know no shame but me. God bless all! I’ll pray for all, often, on my
knees. If he don’t bring me back a lady, and I don’t pray for my own
self, I’ll pray for all. My parting love to uncle. My last tears, and my
last thanks, for uncle!”’
That was all.
He stood, long after I had ceased to read, still looking at me. At
length I ventured to take his hand, and to entreat him, as well as
I could, to endeavour to get some command of himself. He replied, ‘I
thankee, sir, I thankee!’ without moving.
Ham spoke to him. Mr. Peggotty was so far sensible of HIS affliction,
that he wrung his hand; but, otherwise, he remained in the same state,
and no one dared to disturb him.
Slowly, at last, he moved his eyes from my face, as if he were waking
from a vision, and cast them round the room. Then he said, in a low
voice:
‘Who’s the man? I want to know his name.’
Ham glanced at me, and suddenly I felt a shock that struck me back.
‘There’s a man suspected,’ said Mr. Peggotty. ‘Who is it?’
‘Mas’r Davy!’ implored Ham. ‘Go out a bit, and let me tell him what I
must. You doen’t ought to hear it, sir.’
I felt the shock again. I sank down in a chair, and tried to utter some
reply; but my tongue was fettered, and my sight was weak.
‘I want to know his name!’ I heard said once more.
‘For some time past,’ Ham faltered, ‘there’s been a servant about here,
at odd times. There’s been a gen’lm’n too. Both of ‘em belonged to one
another.’
Mr. Peggotty stood fixed as before, but now looking at him.
‘The servant,’ pursued Ham, ‘was seen along with--our poor girl--last
night. He’s been in hiding about here, this week or over. He was thought
to have gone, but he was hiding. Doen’t stay, Mas’r Davy, doen’t!’
I felt Peggotty’s arm round my neck, but I could not have moved if the
house had been about to fall upon me.
‘A strange chay and hosses was outside town, this morning, on the
Norwich road, a’most afore the day broke,’ Ham went on. ‘The servant
went to it, and come from it, and went to it again. When he went to it
again, Em’ly was nigh him. The t’other was inside. He’s the man.’
‘For the Lord’s love,’ said Mr. Peggotty, falling back, and putting out
his hand, as if to keep off what he dreaded. ‘Doen’t tell me his name’s
Steerforth!’
‘Mas’r Davy,’ exclaimed Ham, in a broken voice, ‘it ain’t no fault
of yourn--and I am far from laying of it to you--but his name is
Steerforth, and he’s a damned villain!’
Mr. Peggotty uttered no cry, and shed no tear, and moved no more, until
he seemed to wake again, all at once, and pulled down his rough coat
from its peg in a corner.
‘Bear a hand with this! I’m struck of a heap, and can’t do it,’ he said,
impatiently. ‘Bear a hand and help me. Well!’ when somebody had done so.
‘Now give me that theer hat!’
Ham asked him whither he was going.
‘I’m a going to seek my niece. I’m a going to seek my Em’ly. I’m a
going, first, to stave in that theer boat, and sink it where I would
have drownded him, as I’m a living soul, if I had had one thought of
what was in him! As he sat afore me,’ he said, wildly, holding out his
clenched right hand, ‘as he sat afore me, face to face, strike me down
dead, but I’d have drownded him, and thought it right!--I’m a going to
seek my niece.’
‘Where?’ cried Ham, interposing himself before the door.
‘Anywhere! I’m a going to seek my niece through the wureld. I’m a going
to find my poor niece in her shame, and bring her back. No one stop me!
I tell you I’m a going to seek my niece!’
‘No, no!’ cried Mrs. Gummidge, coming between them, in a fit of crying.
‘No, no, Dan’l, not as you are now. Seek her in a little while, my lone
lorn Dan’l, and that’ll be but right! but not as you are now. Sit ye
down, and give me your forgiveness for having ever been a worrit to you,
Dan’l--what have my contraries ever been to this!--and let us speak a
word about them times when she was first an orphan, and when Ham was
too, and when I was a poor widder woman, and you took me in. It’ll
soften your poor heart, Dan’l,’ laying her head upon his shoulder, ‘and
you’ll bear your sorrow better; for you know the promise, Dan’l, “As
you have done it unto one of the least of these, you have done it unto
me”,--and that can never fail under this roof, that’s been our shelter
for so many, many year!’
He was quite passive now; and when I heard him crying, the impulse that
had been upon me to go down upon my knees, and ask their pardon for the
desolation I had caused, and curse Steerforth, yielded to a better
feeling. My overcharged heart found the same relief, and I cried too.
CHAPTER 32. THE BEGINNING OF A LONG JOURNEY
What is natural in me, is natural in many other men, I infer, and so
I am not afraid to write that I never had loved Steerforth better than
when the ties that bound me to him were broken. In the keen distress
of the discovery of his unworthiness, I thought more of all that was
brilliant in him, I softened more towards all that was good in him, I
did more justice to the qualities that might have made him a man of a
noble nature and a great name, than ever I had done in the height of
my devotion to him. Deeply as I felt my own unconscious part in his
pollution of an honest home, I believed that if I had been brought face
to face with him, I could not have uttered one reproach. I should have
loved him so well still--though he fascinated me no longer--I should
have held in so much tenderness the memory of my affection for him, that
I think I should have been as weak as a spirit-wounded child, in all
but the entertainment of a thought that we could ever be re-united.
That thought I never had. I felt, as he had felt, that all was at an end
between us. What his remembrances of me were, I have never known--they
were light enough, perhaps, and easily dismissed--but mine of him were
as the remembrances of a cherished friend, who was dead.
Yes, Steerforth, long removed from the scenes of this poor history! My
sorrow may bear involuntary witness against you at the judgement Throne;
but my angry thoughts or my reproaches never will, I know!
The news of what had happened soon spread through the town; insomuch
that as I passed along the streets next morning, I overheard the people
speaking of it at their doors. Many were hard upon her, some few were
hard upon him, but towards her second father and her lover there was
but one sentiment. Among all kinds of people a respect for them in
their distress prevailed, which was full of gentleness and delicacy. The
seafaring men kept apart, when those two were seen early, walking with
slow steps on the beach; and stood in knots, talking compassionately
among themselves.
It was on the beach, close down by the sea, that I found them. It would
have been easy to perceive that they had not slept all last night, even
if Peggotty had failed to tell me of their still sitting just as I
left them, when it was broad day. They looked worn; and I thought Mr.
Peggotty’s head was bowed in one night more than in all the years I had
known him. But they were both as grave and steady as the sea itself,
then lying beneath a dark sky, waveless--yet with a heavy roll upon it,
as if it breathed in its rest--and touched, on the horizon, with a strip
of silvery light from the unseen sun.
‘We have had a mort of talk, sir,’ said Mr. Peggotty to me, when we had
all three walked a little while in silence, ‘of what we ought and doen’t
ought to do. But we see our course now.’
I happened to glance at Ham, then looking out to sea upon the distant
light, and a frightful thought came into my mind--not that his face
was angry, for it was not; I recall nothing but an expression of stern
determination in it--that if ever he encountered Steerforth, he would
kill him.
‘My dooty here, sir,’ said Mr. Peggotty, ‘is done. I’m a going to seek
my--’ he stopped, and went on in a firmer voice: ‘I’m a going to seek
her. That’s my dooty evermore.’
He shook his head when I asked him where he would seek her, and inquired
if I were going to London tomorrow? I told him I had not gone today,
fearing to lose the chance of being of any service to him; but that I
was ready to go when he would.
‘I’ll go along with you, sir,’ he rejoined, ‘if you’re agreeable,
tomorrow.’
We walked again, for a while, in silence.
‘Ham,’ he presently resumed, ‘he’ll hold to his present work, and go and
live along with my sister. The old boat yonder--’
‘Will you desert the old boat, Mr. Peggotty?’ I gently interposed.
‘My station, Mas’r Davy,’ he returned, ‘ain’t there no longer; and if
ever a boat foundered, since there was darkness on the face of the deep,
that one’s gone down. But no, sir, no; I doen’t mean as it should be
deserted. Fur from that.’
We walked again for a while, as before, until he explained:
‘My wishes is, sir, as it shall look, day and night, winter and summer,
as it has always looked, since she fust know’d it. If ever she should
come a wandering back, I wouldn’t have the old place seem to cast her
off, you understand, but seem to tempt her to draw nigher to ‘t, and to
peep in, maybe, like a ghost, out of the wind and rain, through the old
winder, at the old seat by the fire. Then, maybe, Mas’r Davy, seein’
none but Missis Gummidge there, she might take heart to creep in,
trembling; and might come to be laid down in her old bed, and rest her
weary head where it was once so gay.’
I could not speak to him in reply, though I tried.
‘Every night,’ said Mr. Peggotty, ‘as reg’lar as the night comes, the
candle must be stood in its old pane of glass, that if ever she should
see it, it may seem to say “Come back, my child, come back!” If ever
there’s a knock, Ham (partic’ler a soft knock), arter dark, at your
aunt’s door, doen’t you go nigh it. Let it be her--not you--that sees my
fallen child!’
He walked a little in front of us, and kept before us for some minutes.
During this interval, I glanced at Ham again, and observing the same
expression on his face, and his eyes still directed to the distant
light, I touched his arm.
Twice I called him by his name, in the tone in which I might have tried
to rouse a sleeper, before he heeded me. When I at last inquired on what