David Copperfield, Charles Dickens [best historical fiction books of all time TXT] 📗

the ticket-porter can have thought, unless he thought I was learning to write. I must have written half-a-dozen answers at least. I began one, “How can I ever hope, my dear Agnes, to efface from your remembrance the disgusting impression”⁠—there I didn’t like it, and then I tore it up. I began another, “Shakespeare has observed, my dear Agnes, how strange it is that a man should put an enemy into his mouth”⁠—that reminded me of Markham, and it got no farther. I even tried poetry. I began one note, in a six-syllable line, “Oh, do not remember”⁠—but that associated itself with the fifth of November, and became an absurdity. After many attempts, I wrote, “My dear Agnes. Your letter is like you, and what could I say of it that would be higher praise than that? I will come at four o’clock. Affectionately and sorrowfully, T. C.” With this missive (which I was in twenty minds at once about recalling, as soon as it was out of my hands), the ticket-porter at last departed.

If the day were half as tremendous to any other professional gentleman in Doctors’ Commons as it was to me, I sincerely believe he made some expiation for his share in that rotten old ecclesiastical cheese. Although I left the office at half past three, and was prowling about the place of appointment within a few minutes afterwards, the appointed time was exceeded by a full quarter of an hour, according to the clock of St. Andrew’s, Holborn, before I could muster up sufficient desperation to pull the private bell-handle let into the left-hand doorpost of Mr. Waterbrook’s house.

The professional business of Mr. Waterbrook’s establishment was done on the ground floor, and the genteel business (of which there was a good deal) in the upper part of the building. I was shown into a pretty but rather close drawing room, and there sat Agnes, netting a purse.

She looked so quiet and good, and reminded me so strongly of my airy fresh school days at Canterbury, and the sodden, smoky, stupid wretch I had been the other night, that, nobody being by, I yielded to my self-reproach and shame, and⁠—in short, made a fool of myself. I cannot deny that I shed tears. To this hour I am undecided whether it was upon the whole the wisest thing I could have done, or the most ridiculous.

“If it had been anyone but you, Agnes,” said I, turning away my head, “I should not have minded it half so much. But that it should have been you who saw me! I almost wish I had been dead, first.”

She put her hand⁠—its touch was like no other hand⁠—upon my arm for a moment; and I felt so befriended and comforted, that I could not help moving it to my lips, and gratefully kissing it.

“Sit down,” said Agnes, cheerfully. “Don’t be unhappy, Trotwood. If you cannot confidently trust me, whom will you trust?”

“Ah, Agnes!” I returned. “You are my good Angel!”

She smiled rather sadly, I thought, and shook her head.

“Yes, Agnes, my good Angel! Always my good Angel!”

“If I were, indeed, Trotwood,” she returned, “there is one thing that I should set my heart on very much.”

I looked at her inquiringly; but already with a foreknowledge of her meaning.

“On warning you,” said Agnes, with a steady glance, “against your bad Angel.”

“My dear Agnes,” I began, “if you mean Steerforth⁠—”

“I do, Trotwood,” she returned.

“Then, Agnes, you wrong him very much. He my bad Angel, or anyone’s! He, anything but a guide, a support, and a friend to me! My dear Agnes! Now, is it not unjust, and unlike you, to judge him from what you saw of me the other night?”

“I do not judge him from what I saw of you the other night,” she quietly replied.

“From what, then?”

“From many things⁠—trifles in themselves, but they do not seem to me to be so, when they are put together. I judge him, partly from your account of him, Trotwood, and your character, and the influence he has over you.”

There was always something in her modest voice that seemed to touch a chord within me, answering to that sound alone. It was always earnest; but when it was very earnest, as it was now, there was a thrill in it that quite subdued me. I sat looking at her as she cast her eyes down on her work; I sat seeming still to listen to her; and Steerforth, in spite of all my attachment to him, darkened in that tone.

“It is very bold in me,” said Agnes, looking up again, “who have lived in such seclusion, and can know so little of the world, to give you my advice so confidently, or even to have this strong opinion. But I know in what it is engendered, Trotwood⁠—in how true a remembrance of our having grown up together, and in how true an interest in all relating to you. It is that which makes me bold. I am certain that what I say is right. I am quite sure it is. I feel as if it were someone else speaking to you, and not I, when I caution you that you have made a dangerous friend.”

Again I looked at her, again I listened to her after she was silent, and again his image, though it was still fixed in my heart, darkened.

“I am not so unreasonable as to expect,” said Agnes, resuming her usual tone, after a little while, “that you will, or that you can, at once, change any sentiment that has become a conviction to you; least of all a sentiment that is rooted in your trusting disposition. You ought not hastily to do that. I only ask you, Trotwood, if you ever think of me⁠—I mean,” with a quiet smile, for I was going to interrupt her, and she knew why, “as often as you think of me⁠—to think of what I have said. Do you forgive me for all this?”

“I will forgive