第 54 页

I fancied, from the disposition of her figure, that Em’ly had but newly

risen from the chair, and that the forlorn head might perhaps have been

lying on her lap. I saw but little of the girl’s face, over which her

hair fell loose and scattered, as if she had been disordering it with

her own hands; but I saw that she was young, and of a fair complexion.

Peggotty had been crying. So had little Em’ly. Not a word was spoken

when we first went in; and the Dutch clock by the dresser seemed, in the

silence, to tick twice as loud as usual. Em’ly spoke first.

‘Martha wants,’ she said to Ham, ‘to go to London.’

‘Why to London?’ returned Ham.

He stood between them, looking on the prostrate girl with a mixture of

compassion for her, and of jealousy of her holding any companionship

with her whom he loved so well, which I have always remembered

distinctly. They both spoke as if she were ill; in a soft, suppressed

tone that was plainly heard, although it hardly rose above a whisper.

‘Better there than here,’ said a third voice aloud--Martha’s, though she

did not move. ‘No one knows me there. Everybody knows me here.’

‘What will she do there?’ inquired Ham.

She lifted up her head, and looked darkly round at him for a moment;

then laid it down again, and curved her right arm about her neck, as

a woman in a fever, or in an agony of pain from a shot, might twist

herself.

‘She will try to do well,’ said little Em’ly. ‘You don’t know what she

has said to us. Does he--do they--aunt?’

Peggotty shook her head compassionately.

‘I’ll try,’ said Martha, ‘if you’ll help me away. I never can do worse

than I have done here. I may do better. Oh!’ with a dreadful shiver,

‘take me out of these streets, where the whole town knows me from a

child!’

As Em’ly held out her hand to Ham, I saw him put in it a little canvas

bag. She took it, as if she thought it were her purse, and made a step

or two forward; but finding her mistake, came back to where he had

retired near me, and showed it to him.

‘It’s all yourn, Em’ly,’ I could hear him say. ‘I haven’t nowt in all

the wureld that ain’t yourn, my dear. It ain’t of no delight to me,

except for you!’

The tears rose freshly in her eyes, but she turned away and went to

Martha. What she gave her, I don’t know. I saw her stooping over her,

and putting money in her bosom. She whispered something, as she asked

was that enough? ‘More than enough,’ the other said, and took her hand

and kissed it.

Then Martha arose, and gathering her shawl about her, covering her

face with it, and weeping aloud, went slowly to the door. She stopped

a moment before going out, as if she would have uttered something or

turned back; but no word passed her lips. Making the same low, dreary,

wretched moaning in her shawl, she went away.

As the door closed, little Em’ly looked at us three in a hurried manner

and then hid her face in her hands, and fell to sobbing.

‘Doen’t, Em’ly!’ said Ham, tapping her gently on the shoulder. ‘Doen’t,

my dear! You doen’t ought to cry so, pretty!’

‘Oh, Ham!’ she exclaimed, still weeping pitifully, ‘I am not so good a

girl as I ought to be! I know I have not the thankful heart, sometimes,

I ought to have!’

‘Yes, yes, you have, I’m sure,’ said Ham.

‘No! no! no!’ cried little Em’ly, sobbing, and shaking her head. ‘I am

not as good a girl as I ought to be. Not near! not near!’ And still she

cried, as if her heart would break.

‘I try your love too much. I know I do!’ she sobbed. ‘I’m often cross to

you, and changeable with you, when I ought to be far different. You are

never so to me. Why am I ever so to you, when I should think of nothing

but how to be grateful, and to make you happy!’

‘You always make me so,’ said Ham, ‘my dear! I am happy in the sight of

you. I am happy, all day long, in the thoughts of you.’

‘Ah! that’s not enough!’ she cried. ‘That is because you are good; not

because I am! Oh, my dear, it might have been a better fortune for

you, if you had been fond of someone else--of someone steadier and

much worthier than me, who was all bound up in you, and never vain and

changeable like me!’

‘Poor little tender-heart,’ said Ham, in a low voice. ‘Martha has

overset her, altogether.’

‘Please, aunt,’ sobbed Em’ly, ‘come here, and let me lay my head upon

you. Oh, I am very miserable tonight, aunt! Oh, I am not as good a girl

as I ought to be. I am not, I know!’

Peggotty had hastened to the chair before the fire. Em’ly, with her

arms around her neck, kneeled by her, looking up most earnestly into her

face.

‘Oh, pray, aunt, try to help me! Ham, dear, try to help me! Mr. David,

for the sake of old times, do, please, try to help me! I want to be a

better girl than I am. I want to feel a hundred times more thankful than

I do. I want to feel more, what a blessed thing it is to be the wife of

a good man, and to lead a peaceful life. Oh me, oh me! Oh my heart, my

heart!’

She dropped her face on my old nurse’s breast, and, ceasing this

supplication, which in its agony and grief was half a woman’s, half a

child’s, as all her manner was (being, in that, more natural, and better

suited to her beauty, as I thought, than any other manner could have

been), wept silently, while my old nurse hushed her like an infant.

She got calmer by degrees, and then we soothed her; now talking

encouragingly, and now jesting a little with her, until she began to

raise her head and speak to us. So we got on, until she was able to

smile, and then to laugh, and then to sit up, half ashamed; while

Peggotty recalled her stray ringlets, dried her eyes, and made her neat

again, lest her uncle should wonder, when she got home, why his darling

had been crying.

I saw her do, that night, what I had never seen her do before. I saw her

innocently kiss her chosen husband on the cheek, and creep close to his

bluff form as if it were her best support. When they went away together,

in the waning moonlight, and I looked after them, comparing their

departure in my mind with Martha’s, I saw that she held his arm with

both her hands, and still kept close to him.

CHAPTER 23. I CORROBORATE Mr. DICK, AND CHOOSE A PROFESSION

When I awoke in the morning I thought very much of little Em’ly, and her

emotion last night, after Martha had left. I felt as if I had come into

the knowledge of those domestic weaknesses and tendernesses in a sacred

confidence, and that to disclose them, even to Steerforth, would be

wrong. I had no gentler feeling towards anyone than towards the

pretty creature who had been my playmate, and whom I have always been

persuaded, and shall always be persuaded, to my dying day, I then

devotedly loved. The repetition to any ears--even to Steerforth’s--of

what she had been unable to repress when her heart lay open to me by an

accident, I felt would be a rough deed, unworthy of myself, unworthy of

the light of our pure childhood, which I always saw encircling her head.

I made a resolution, therefore, to keep it in my own breast; and there

it gave her image a new grace.

While we were at breakfast, a letter was delivered to me from my aunt.

As it contained matter on which I thought Steerforth could advise me

as well as anyone, and on which I knew I should be delighted to consult

him, I resolved to make it a subject of discussion on our journey home.

For the present we had enough to do, in taking leave of all our friends.

Mr. Barkis was far from being the last among them, in his regret at

our departure; and I believe would even have opened the box again, and

sacrificed another guinea, if it would have kept us eight-and-forty

hours in Yarmouth. Peggotty and all her family were full of grief at our

going. The whole house of Omer and Joram turned out to bid us good-bye;

and there were so many seafaring volunteers in attendance on Steerforth,

when our portmanteaux went to the coach, that if we had had the baggage

of a regiment with us, we should hardly have wanted porters to carry it.

In a word, we departed to the regret and admiration of all concerned,

and left a great many people very sorry behind US.

‘Do you stay long here, Littimer?’ said I, as he stood waiting to see the

coach start.

‘No, sir,’ he replied; ‘probably not very long, sir.’

‘He can hardly say, just now,’ observed Steerforth, carelessly. ‘He

knows what he has to do, and he’ll do it.’

‘That I am sure he will,’ said I.

Littimer touched his hat in acknowledgement of my good opinion, and I

felt about eight years old. He touched it once more, wishing us a good

journey; and we left him standing on the pavement, as respectable a

mystery as any pyramid in Egypt.

For some little time we held no conversation, Steerforth being unusually

silent, and I being sufficiently engaged in wondering, within myself,

when I should see the old places again, and what new changes might

happen to me or them in the meanwhile. At length Steerforth, becoming

gay and talkative in a moment, as he could become anything he liked at

any moment, pulled me by the arm:

‘Find a voice, David. What about that letter you were speaking of at

breakfast?’

‘Oh!’ said I, taking it out of my pocket. ‘It’s from my aunt.’

‘And what does she say, requiring consideration?’

‘Why, she reminds me, Steerforth,’ said I, ‘that I came out on this

expedition to look about me, and to think a little.’

‘Which, of course, you have done?’

‘Indeed I can’t say I have, particularly. To tell you the truth, I am

afraid I have forgotten it.’

‘Well! look about you now, and make up for your negligence,’ said

Steerforth. ‘Look to the right, and you’ll see a flat country, with a

good deal of marsh in it; look to the left, and you’ll see the same.

Look to the front, and you’ll find no difference; look to the rear,

and there it is still.’ I laughed, and replied that I saw no suitable

profession in the whole prospect; which was perhaps to be attributed to

its flatness.

‘What says our aunt on the subject?’ inquired Steerforth, glancing at

the letter in my hand. ‘Does she suggest anything?’

‘Why, yes,’ said I. ‘She asks me, here, if I think I should like to be a

proctor? What do you think of it?’

‘Well, I don’t know,’ replied Steerforth, coolly. ‘You may as well do

that as anything else, I suppose?’

I could not help laughing again, at his balancing all callings and

professions so equally; and I told him so.

‘What is a proctor, Steerforth?’ said I.

‘Why, he is a sort of monkish attorney,’ replied Steerforth. ‘He is, to

some faded courts held in Doctors’ Commons,--a lazy old nook near St.

Paul’s Churchyard--what solicitors are to the courts of law and equity.

He is a functionary whose existence, in the natural course of things,

would have terminated about two hundred years ago. I can tell you best

what he is, by telling you what Doctors’ Commons is. It’s a

little out-of-the-way place, where they administer what is called

ecclesiastical law, and play all kinds of tricks with obsolete old

monsters of acts of Parliament, which three-fourths of the world know

nothing about, and the other fourth supposes to have been dug up, in

a fossil state, in the days of the Edwards. It’s a place that has an

ancient monopoly in suits about people’s wills and people’s marriages,

and disputes among ships and boats.’

‘Nonsense, Steerforth!’ I exclaimed. ‘You don’t mean to say that there

is any affinity between nautical matters and ecclesiastical matters?’

‘I don’t, indeed, my dear boy,’ he returned; ‘but I mean to say that

they are managed and decided by the same set of people, down in that

same Doctors’ Commons. You shall go there one day, and find them

blundering through half the nautical terms in Young’s Dictionary,

apropos of the “Nancy” having run down the “Sarah Jane”, or Mr. Peggotty

and the Yarmouth boatmen having put off in a gale of wind with an anchor

and cable to the “Nelson” Indiaman in distress; and you shall go there

another day, and find them deep in the evidence, pro and con, respecting

a clergyman who has misbehaved himself; and you shall find the judge

in the nautical case, the advocate in the clergyman’s case, or

contrariwise. They are like actors: now a man’s a judge, and now he is

not a judge; now he’s one thing, now he’s another; now he’s something

else, change and change about; but it’s always a very pleasant,

profitable little affair of private theatricals, presented to an

uncommonly select audience.’

‘But advocates and proctors are not one and the same?’ said I, a little

puzzled. ‘Are they?’

‘No,’ returned Steerforth, ‘the advocates are civilians--men who have

taken a doctor’s degree at college--which is the first reason of my

knowing anything about it. The proctors employ the advocates. Both get

very comfortable fees, and altogether they make a mighty snug little

party. On the whole, I would recommend you to take to Doctors’ Commons

kindly, David. They plume them-selves on their gentility there, I can

tell you, if that’s any satisfaction.’

I made allowance for Steerforth’s light way of treating the subject,

and, considering it with reference to the staid air of gravity and

antiquity which I associated with that ‘lazy old nook near St. Paul’s

Churchyard’, did not feel indisposed towards my aunt’s suggestion; which

she left to my free decision, making no scruple of telling me that it

had occurred to her, on her lately visiting her own proctor in Doctors’

Commons for the purpose of settling her will in my favour.

‘That’s a laudable proceeding on the part of our aunt, at all events,’

said Steerforth, when I mentioned it; ‘and one deserving of all

encouragement. Daisy, my advice is that you take kindly to Doctors’

Commons.’

I quite made up my mind to do so. I then told Steerforth that my aunt

was in town awaiting me (as I found from her letter), and that she had

taken lodgings for a week at a kind of private hotel at Lincoln’s Inn

Fields, where there was a stone staircase, and a convenient door in

the roof; my aunt being firmly persuaded that every house in London was

going to be burnt down every night.

We achieved the rest of our journey pleasantly, sometimes recurring to

Doctors’ Commons, and anticipating the distant days when I should be a