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

tap was from a hand, and low down upon the door, as if it were given by a child.

It made me start as much as if it had been the knock of a footman to a person of distinction. I opened the door; and at first looked down, to my amazement, on nothing but a great umbrella that appeared to be walking about of itself. But presently I discovered underneath it, Miss Mowcher.

I might not have been prepared to give the little creature a very kind reception, if, on her removing the umbrella, which her utmost efforts were unable to shut up, she had shown me the “volatile” expression of face which had made so great an impression on me at our first and last meeting. But her face, as she turned it up to mine, was so earnest; and when I relieved her of the umbrella (which would have been an inconvenient one for the Irish Giant), she wrung her little hands in such an afflicted manner; that I rather inclined towards her.

“Miss Mowcher!” said I, after glancing up and down the empty street, without distinctly knowing what I expected to see besides; “how do you come here? What is the matter?” She motioned to me with her short right arm, to shut the umbrella for her; and passing me hurriedly, went into the kitchen. When I had closed the door, and followed, with the umbrella in my hand, I found her sitting on the corner of the fender⁠—it was a low iron one, with two flat bars at top to stand plates upon⁠—in the shadow of the boiler, swaying herself backwards and forwards, and chafing her hands upon her knees like a person in pain.

Quite alarmed at being the only recipient of this untimely visit, and the only spectator of this portentous behaviour, I exclaimed again, “Pray tell me, Miss Mowcher, what is the matter! are you ill?”

“My dear young soul,” returned Miss Mowcher, squeezing her hands upon her heart one over the other. “I am ill here, I am very ill. To think that it should come to this, when I might have known it and perhaps prevented it, if I hadn’t been a thoughtless fool!”

Again her large bonnet (very disproportionate to the figure) went backwards and forwards, in her swaying of her little body to and fro; while a most gigantic bonnet rocked, in unison with it, upon the wall.

“I am surprised,” I began, “to see you so distressed and serious”⁠—when she interrupted me.

“Yes, it’s always so!” she said. “They are all surprised, these inconsiderate young people, fairly and full grown, to see any natural feeling in a little thing like me! They make a plaything of me, use me for their amusement, throw me away when they are tired, and wonder that I feel more than a toy horse or a wooden soldier! Yes, yes, that’s the way. The old way!”

“It may be, with others,” I returned, “but I do assure you it is not with me. Perhaps I ought not to be at all surprised to see you as you are now: I know so little of you. I said, without consideration, what I thought.”

“What can I do?” returned the little woman, standing up, and holding out her arms to show herself. “See! What I am, my father was; and my sister is; and my brother is. I have worked for sister and brother these many years⁠—hard, Mr. Copperfield⁠—all day. I must live. I do no harm. If there are people so unreflecting or so cruel, as to make a jest of me, what is left for me to do but to make a jest of myself, them, and everything? If I do so, for the time, whose fault is that? Mine?”

No. Not Miss Mowcher’s, I perceived.

“If I had shown myself a sensitive dwarf to your false friend,” pursued the little woman, shaking her head at me, with reproachful earnestness, “how much of his help or good will do you think I should ever have had? If little Mowcher (who had no hand, young gentleman, in the making of herself) addressed herself to him, or the like of him, because of her misfortunes, when do you suppose her small voice would have been heard? Little Mowcher would have as much need to live, if she was the bitterest and dullest of pigmies; but she couldn’t do it. No. She might whistle for her bread and butter till she died of Air.”

Miss Mowcher sat down on the fender again, and took out her handkerchief, and wiped her eyes.

“Be thankful for me, if you have a kind heart, as I think you have,” she said, “that while I know well what I am, I can be cheerful and endure it all. I am thankful for myself, at any rate, that I can find my tiny way through the world, without being beholden to anyone; and that in return for all that is thrown at me, in folly or vanity, as I go along, I can throw bubbles back. If I don’t brood over all I want, it is the better for me, and not the worse for anyone. If I am a plaything for you giants, be gentle with me.”

Miss Mowcher replaced her handkerchief in her pocket, looking at me with very intent expression all the while, and pursued:

“I saw you in the street just now. You may suppose I am not able to walk as fast as you, with my short legs and short breath, and I couldn’t overtake you; but I guessed where you came, and came after you. I have been here before, today, but the good woman wasn’t at home.”

“Do you know her?” I demanded.

“I know of her,” she replied, “from Omer and Joram. I was there at seven o’clock this morning. Do you remember what Steerforth said to me about this unfortunate girl, that time when I saw you both at the inn?”

The great bonnet on Miss Mowcher’s head, and the greater