FragmentWelcome to consult...ssed it. Then Martha arose, and gathering her shawl about her,
covering her face with it, and weeping aloud, went slowly to the
door. She stopped a moment before going out, as if she would have
uttered something or turned back; but no word passed her lips.
Making the same low, dreary, wretched moaning in her shawl, she
went away.
As the door closed, little Em’ly looked at us three in a hurried
manner and then hid her face in her hands, and fell to sobbing.
‘Doen’t, Em’ly!’ said Ham, tapping her gently on the shoulder.
‘Doen’t, my dear! You doen’t ought to cry so, pretty!’
‘Oh, Ham!’ she exclaimed, still weeping pitifully, ‘I am not so
good a girl as I ought to be! I know I have not the thankful heart,
Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics
f
David Copperfield
sometimes, I ought to have!’
‘Yes, yes, you have, I’m sure,’ said Ham.
‘No! no! no!’ cried little Em’ly, sobbing, and shaking her head. ‘I
am not as good a girl as I ought to be. Not near! not near!’ And still
she cried, as if her heart would break.
‘I try your love too much. I know I do!’ she sobbed. ‘I’m often
cross to you, and changeable with you, when I ought to be far
different. You are never so to me. Why am I ever so to you, when I
should think of nothing but how to be grateful, and to make you
happy!’
‘You always make me so,’ said Ham, ‘my dear! I am happy in
the sight of you. I am happy, all day long, in the thoughts of you.’
‘Ah! that’s not enough!’ she cried. ‘That is because you are
good; not because I am! Oh, my dear, it might have been a better
fortune for you, if you had been fond of someone else—of someone
steadier and much worthier than me, who was all bound up in
you, and never vain and changeable like me!’
‘Poor little tender-heart,’ said Ham, in a low voice. ‘Martha has
overset her, altogether.’
‘Please, aunt,’ sobbed Em’ly, ‘come here, and let me lay my
head upon you. Oh, I am very miserable tonight, aunt! Oh, I am
not as good a girl as I ought to be. I am not, I know!’
Peggotty had hastened to the chair before the fire. Em’ly, with
her arms around her neck, kneeled by her, looking up most
earnestly into her face.
‘Oh, pray, aunt, try to help me! Ham, dear, try to help me! Mr.
David, for the sake of old times, do, please, try to help me! I want
to be a better girl than I am. I want to feel a hundred times more
thankful than I do. I want to feel more, what a blessed thing it is to
Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics
f
David Copperfield
be the wife of a good man, and to lead a peaceful life. Oh me, oh
me! Oh my heart, my heart!’
She dropped her face on my old nurse’s breast, and, ceasing
this supplication, which in its agony and grief was half a woman’s,
half a child’s, as all her manner was (being, in that, more natural,
and better suited to her beauty, as I thought, than any other
manner could have been), wept silently, while my old nurse
hushed her like an infant.
She got calmer by degrees, and then we soothed her; now
talking encouragingly, and now jesting a little with her, until she
began to raise her head and speak to us. So we got on, until she
was able to smile, and then to laugh, and then to sit up, half
ashamed; while Peggotty recalled her stray ringlets, dried her
eyes, and made her neat again, lest her uncle should wonder,
when she got home, why his darling had been crying.
I saw her do, that night, what I had never seen her do before. I
saw her innocently kiss her chosen husband on the cheek, and
creep close to his bluff form as if it were her best support. When
they went away together, in the waning moonlight, and I looked
after them, comparing their departure in my mind with
