FragmentWelcome to consult...s’s above all! You don’t remember your own
eloquent s, Master Copperfield; but I remember how

Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

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David Copperfield

you said one day that everybody must admire her, and how I
thanked you for it! You have forgot that, I have no doubt, Master
Copperfield?’

‘No,’ said I, drily.

‘Oh how glad I am you have not!’ exclaimed Uriah. ‘To think
that you should be the first to kindle the sparks of ambition in my
umble breast, and that you’ve not forgot it! Oh!—Would you
excuse me asking for a cup more coffee?’

Something in the emphasis he laid upon the kindling of those
sparks, and something in the glance he directed at me as he said it,
had made me start as if I had seen him illuminated by a blaze of
light. Recalled by his request, preferred in quite another tone of
voice, I did the honours of the shaving-pot; but I did them with an
unsteadiness of ** sudden sense of being no match for him,
and a perplexed suspicious anxiety as to what he might be going to
say next, which I felt could not escape his observation.

He said nothing at all. He stirred his coffee round and round, he
sipped it, he felt his chin softly with his grisly hand, he looked at
the fire, he looked about the room, he gasped rather than smiled at
me, he writhed and undulated about, in his deferential servility, he
stirred and sipped again, but he left the renewal of the
conversation to me.

‘So, Mr. Wickfield,’ said I, at last, ‘who is worth five hundred of
you—or me’; for my life, I think, I could not have helped dividing
that part of the sentence with an awkward jerk; ‘has been
imprudent, has he, Mr. Heep?’

‘Oh, very imprudent indeed, Master Copperfield,’ returned
Uriah, sighing modestly. ‘Oh, very much so! But I wish you’d call
me Uriah, if you please. It’s like old times.’

Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

f
David Copperfield

‘Well! Uriah,’ said I, bolting it out with some difficulty.

‘Thank you,’ he returned, with fervour. ‘Thank you, Master
Copperfield! It’s like the blowing of old breezes or the ringing of
old bellses to hear you say Uriah. I beg your pardon. Was I making
any observation?’

‘about Mr. Wickfield,’ I suggested.

‘Oh! Yes, truly,’ said Uriah. ‘Ah! Great imprudence, Master
Copperfield. It’s a topic that I wouldn’t touch upon, to any soul but
you. Even to you I can only touch upon it, and no more. If anyone
else had been in my place during the last few years, by this time he
would have had Mr. Wickfield (oh, what a worthy man he is,
Master Copperfield, too!) under his thumb. Un—der—his thumb,’
said Uriah, very slowly, as he stretched out his cruel-looking hand
above my table, and pressed his own thumb upon it, until it shook,
and shook the room.

If I had been obliged to look at him with him splay foot on Mr.
Wickfield’s head, I think I could scarcely have hated him more.

‘Oh, dear, yes, Master Copperfield,’ he proceeded, in a soft
voice, most remarkably contrasting with the action of his thumb,
which did not diminish its hard pressure in the least degree,
‘there’s no doubt of it. There would have been loss, disgrace, I
don’t know what at all. Mr. Wickfield knows it. I am the umble
instrument of umbly serving him, and he puts me on an eminence
I hardly could have hoped to reach. How thankful should I be!’
With his face turned towards me, as he finished, but without
looking at me, he took his crooked thumb off the spot where he
had planted it, and