"Don"t he go over to Blunderstone now?" I asked.
"When he"s well he do," she answered.
"Do YOU ever go there, Mrs. Barkis?"
She looked at me more attentively, and I noticed a quick movement of her hands towards each other.
"Because I want to ask a question about a house there, that they call the--what is it?--the Rookery," said I.
She took a step backward, and put out her hands in an undecided frightened way, as if to keep me off.
"Peggotty!" I cried to her.
She cried, "My darling boy!" and we both burst into tears, and were locked in one another"s arms.
What extravagances she committed; what laughing and crying over me; what pride she showed, what joy, what sorrow that she whose pride and joy I might have been, could never hold me in a fond embrace; I have not the heart to tell. I was troubled with no misgiving that it was young in me to respond to her emotions. I had never laughed and cried in all my life, I dare say--not even to her--more freely than I did that morning.
"Barkis will be so glad," said Peggotty, wiping her eyes with her ap.r.o.n, "that it"ll do him more good than pints of liniment. May I go and tell him you are here? Will you come up and see him, my dear?"
Of course I would. But Peggotty could not get out of the room as easily as she meant to, for as often as she got to the door and looked round at me, she came back again to have another laugh and another cry upon my shoulder. At last, to make the matter easier, I went upstairs with her; and having waited outside for a minute, while she said a word of preparation to Mr. Barkis, presented myself before that invalid.
He received me with absolute enthusiasm. He was too rheumatic to be shaken hands with, but he begged me to shake the ta.s.sel on the top of his nightcap, which I did most cordially. When I sat down by the side of the bed, he said that it did him a world of good to feel as if he was driving me on the Blunderstone road again. As he lay in bed, face upward, and so covered, with that exception, that he seemed to be nothing but a face--like a conventional cherubim--he looked the queerest object I ever beheld.
"What name was it, as I wrote up in the cart, sir?" said Mr. Barkis, with a slow rheumatic smile.
"Ah! Mr. Barkis, we had some grave talks about that matter, hadn"t we?"
"I was willin" a long time, sir?" said Mr. Barkis.
"A long time," said I.
"And I don"t regret it," said Mr. Barkis. "Do you remember what you told me once, about her making all the apple parsties and doing all the cooking?"
"Yes, very well," I returned.
"It was as true," said Mr. Barkis, "as turnips is. It was as true," said Mr. Barkis, nodding his nightcap, which was his only means of emphasis, "as taxes is. And nothing"s truer than them."
Mr. Barkis turned his eyes upon me, as if for my a.s.sent to this result of his reflections in bed; and I gave it.
"Nothing"s truer than them," repeated Mr. Barkis; "a man as poor as I am, finds that out in his mind when he"s laid up. I"m a very poor man, sir!"
"I am sorry to hear it, Mr. Barkis."
"A very poor man, indeed I am," said Mr. Barkis.
Here his right hand came slowly and feebly from under the bedclothes, and with a purposeless uncertain grasp took hold of a stick which was loosely tied to the side of the bed. After some poking about with this instrument, in the course of which his face a.s.sumed a variety of distracted expressions, Mr. Barkis poked it against a box, an end of which had been visible to me all the time. Then his face became composed.
"Old clothes," said Mr. Barkis.
"Oh!" said I.
"I wish it was Money, sir," said Mr. Barkis.
"I wish it was, indeed," said I.
"But it AIN"T," said Mr. Barkis, opening both his eyes as wide as he possibly could.
I expressed myself quite sure of that, and Mr. Barkis, turning his eyes more gently to his wife, said:
"She"s the usefullest and best of women, C. P. Barkis. All the praise that anyone can give to C. P. Barkis, she deserves, and more! My dear, you"ll get a dinner today, for company; something good to eat and drink, will you?"
I should have protested against this unnecessary demonstration in my honour, but that I saw Peggotty, on the opposite side of the bed, extremely anxious I should not. So I held my peace.
"I have got a trifle of money somewhere about me, my dear," said Mr.
Barkis, "but I"m a little tired. If you and Mr. David will leave me for a short nap, I"ll try and find it when I wake."
We left the room, in compliance with this request. When we got outside the door, Peggotty informed me that Mr. Barkis, being now "a little nearer" than he used to be, always resorted to this same device before producing a single coin from his store; and that he endured unheard-of agonies in crawling out of bed alone, and taking it from that unlucky box. In effect, we presently heard him uttering suppressed groans of the most dismal nature, as this magpie proceeding racked him in every joint; but while Peggotty"s eyes were full of compa.s.sion for him, she said his generous impulse would do him good, and it was better not to check it.
So he groaned on, until he had got into bed again, suffering, I have no doubt, a martyrdom; and then called us in, pretending to have just woke up from a refreshing sleep, and to produce a guinea from under his pillow. His satisfaction in which happy imposition on us, and in having preserved the impenetrable secret of the box, appeared to be a sufficient compensation to him for all his tortures.
I prepared Peggotty for Steerforth"s arrival and it was not long before he came. I am persuaded she knew no difference between his having been a personal benefactor of hers, and a kind friend to me, and that she would have received him with the utmost grat.i.tude and devotion in any case.
But his easy, spirited good humour; his genial manner, his handsome looks, his natural gift of adapting himself to whomsoever he pleased, and making direct, when he cared to do it, to the main point of interest in anybody"s heart; bound her to him wholly in five minutes. His manner to me, alone, would have won her. But, through all these causes combined, I sincerely believe she had a kind of adoration for him before he left the house that night.
He stayed there with me to dinner--if I were to say willingly, I should not half express how readily and gaily. He went into Mr. Barkis"s room like light and air, brightening and refreshing it as if he were healthy weather. There was no noise, no effort, no consciousness, in anything he did; but in everything an indescribable lightness, a seeming impossibility of doing anything else, or doing anything better, which was so graceful, so natural, and agreeable, that it overcomes me, even now, in the remembrance.
We made merry in the little parlour, where the Book of Martyrs, unthumbed since my time, was laid out upon the desk as of old, and where I now turned over its terrific pictures, remembering the old sensations they had awakened, but not feeling them. When Peggotty spoke of what she called my room, and of its being ready for me at night, and of her hoping I would occupy it, before I could so much as look at Steerforth, hesitating, he was possessed of the whole case.
"Of course," he said. "You"ll sleep here, while we stay, and I shall sleep at the hotel."
"But to bring you so far," I returned, "and to separate, seems bad companionship, Steerforth."
"Why, in the name of Heaven, where do you naturally belong?" he said.
"What is "seems", compared to that?" It was settled at once.
He maintained all his delightful qualities to the last, until we started forth, at eight o"clock, for Mr. Peggotty"s boat. Indeed, they were more and more brightly exhibited as the hours went on; for I thought even then, and I have no doubt now, that the consciousness of success in his determination to please, inspired him with a new delicacy of perception, and made it, subtle as it was, more easy to him. If anyone had told me, then, that all this was a brilliant game, played for the excitement of the moment, for the employment of high spirits, in the thoughtless love of superiority, in a mere wasteful careless course of winning what was worthless to him, and next minute thrown away--I say, if anyone had told me such a lie that night, I wonder in what manner of receiving it my indignation would have found a vent! Probably only in an increase, had that been possible, of the romantic feelings of fidelity and friendship with which I walked beside him, over the dark wintry sands towards the old boat; the wind sighing around us even more mournfully, than it had sighed and moaned upon the night when I first darkened Mr. Peggotty"s door.
"This is a wild kind of place, Steerforth, is it not?"
"Dismal enough in the dark," he said: "and the sea roars as if it were hungry for us. Is that the boat, where I see a light yonder?" "That"s the boat," said I.
"And it"s the same I saw this morning," he returned. "I came straight to it, by instinct, I suppose."
We said no more as we approached the light, but made softly for the door. I laid my hand upon the latch; and whispering Steerforth to keep close to me, went in.
A murmur of voices had been audible on the outside, and, at the moment of our entrance, a clapping of hands: which latter noise, I was surprised to see, proceeded from the generally disconsolate Mrs.
Gummidge. But Mrs. Gummidge was not the only person there who was unusually excited. Mr. Peggotty, his face lighted up with uncommon satisfaction, and laughing with all his might, held his rough arms wide open, as if for little Em"ly to run into them; Ham, with a mixed expression in his face of admiration, exultation, and a lumbering sort of bashfulness that sat upon him very well, held little Em"ly by the hand, as if he were presenting her to Mr. Peggotty; little Em"ly herself, blushing and shy, but delighted with Mr. Peggotty"s delight, as her joyous eyes expressed, was stopped by our entrance (for she saw us first) in the very act of springing from Ham to nestle in Mr. Peggotty"s embrace. In the first glimpse we had of them all, and at the moment of our pa.s.sing from the dark cold night into the warm light room, this was the way in which they were all employed: Mrs. Gummidge in the background, clapping her hands like a madwoman.
The little picture was so instantaneously dissolved by our going in, that one might have doubted whether it had ever been. I was in the midst of the astonished family, face to face with Mr. Peggotty, and holding out my hand to him, when Ham shouted:
"Mas"r Davy! It"s Mas"r Davy!"