"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, Trotwood, 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 beside 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. 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 quant.i.ty 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 pract.i.tioners 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; often 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 proclaim it. Which "Tom" denied; averring that he should always be equally proud of it, under all circ.u.mstances.
"What a thoroughly good and charming wife she is, my dear Traddles!"