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

could have supposed possible so soon after the fulfilment of my brightest hopes. As I sat thinking, I happened to meet my aunt’s eyes, which were resting on my face. There was an anxious expression in them, but it cleared directly.

“I assure you, aunt,” said I, “I have been quite unhappy myself all night, to think of Dora’s being so. But I had no other intention than to speak to her tenderly and lovingly about our home-affairs.”

My aunt nodded encouragement.

“You must have patience, Trot,” said she.

“Of course. Heaven knows I don’t mean to be unreasonable, aunt!”

“No, no,” said my aunt. “But Little Blossom is a very tender little blossom, and the wind must be gentle with her.”

I thanked my good aunt, in my heart, for her tenderness towards my wife; and I was sure that she knew I did.

“Don’t you think, aunt,” said I, after some further contemplation of the fire, “that you could advise and counsel Dora a little, for our mutual advantage, now and then?”

“Trot,” returned my aunt, with some emotion, “no! Don’t ask me such a thing.”

Her tone was so very earnest that I raised my eyes in surprise.

“I look back on my life, child,” said my aunt, “and I think of some who are in their graves, with whom I might have been on kinder terms. If I judged harshly of other people’s mistakes in marriage, it may have been because I had bitter reason to judge harshly of my own. Let that pass. I have been a grumpy, frumpy, wayward sort of a woman, a good many years. I am still, and I always shall be. But you and I have done one another some good, Trot⁠—at all events, you have done me good, my dear; and division must not come between us, at this time of day.”

“Division between us!” cried I.

“Child, child!” said my aunt, smoothing her dress, “how soon it might come between us, or how unhappy I might make our Little Blossom, if I meddled in anything, a prophet couldn’t say. I want our pet to like me, and be as gay as a butterfly. Remember your own home, in that second marriage; and never do both me and her the injury you have hinted at!”

I comprehended, at once, that my aunt was right; and I comprehended the full extent of her generous feeling towards my dear wife.

“These are early days, Trot,” she pursued, “and Rome was not built in a day, nor in a year. You have chosen freely for yourself;” a cloud passed over her face for a moment, I thought; “and you have chosen a very pretty and a very affectionate creature. It will be your duty, and it will be your pleasure too⁠—of course I know that; I am not delivering a lecture⁠—to estimate her (as you chose her) by the qualities she has, and not by the qualities she may not have. The latter you must develop in her, if you can. And if you cannot, child,” here my aunt rubbed her nose, “you must just accustom yourself to do without ’em. But remember, my dear, your future is between you two. No one can assist you; you are to work it out for yourselves. This is marriage, Trot; and Heaven bless you both, in it, for a pair of babes in the wood as you are!”

My aunt said this in a sprightly way, and gave me a kiss to ratify the blessing.

“Now,” said she, “light my little lantern, and see me into my bandbox by the garden path;” for there was a communication between our cottages in that direction. “Give Betsey Trotwood’s love to Blossom, when you come back; and whatever you do, Trot, never dream of setting Betsey up as a scarecrow, for if I ever saw her in the glass, she’s quite grim enough and gaunt enough in her private capacity!”

With this my aunt tied her head up in a handkerchief, with which she was accustomed to make a bundle of it on such occasions; and I escorted her home. As she stood in her garden, holding up her little lantern to light me back, I thought her observation of me had an anxious air again; but I was too much occupied in pondering on what she had said, and too much impressed⁠—for the first time, in reality⁠—by the conviction that Dora and I had indeed to work out our future for ourselves, and that no one could assist us, to take much notice of it.

Dora came stealing down in her little slippers, to meet me, now that I was alone; and cried upon my shoulder, and said I had been hardhearted and she had been naughty; and I said much the same thing in effect, I believe; and we made it up, and agreed that our first little difference was to be our last, and that we were never to have another if we lived a hundred years.

The next domestic trial we went through, was the Ordeal of Servants. Mary Anne’s cousin deserted into our coal-hole, and was brought out, to our great amazement, by a piquet of his companions in arms, who took him away handcuffed in a procession that covered our front-garden with ignominy. This nerved me to get rid of Mary Anne, who went so mildly, on receipt of wages, that I was surprised, until I found out about the teaspoons, and also about the little sums she had borrowed in my name of the tradespeople without authority. After an interval of Mrs. Kidgerbury⁠—the oldest inhabitant of Kentish Town, I believe, who went out charing, but was too feeble to execute her conceptions of that art⁠—we found another treasure, who was one of the most amiable of women, but who generally made a point of falling either up or down the kitchen stairs with the tray, and almost plunged into the parlour, as into a bath, with the tea-things. The ravages committed by this unfortunate, rendering her dismissal necessary, she was