David Copperfield | Page 8

were married,' said my mother
simply.

'Ha! Poor Baby!' mused Miss Betsey, with her frown still bent upon the
fire. 'Do you know anything?'
'I beg your pardon, ma'am,' faltered my mother.
'About keeping house, for instance,' said Miss Betsey.
'Not much, I fear,' returned my mother. 'Not so much as I could wish.
But Mr. Copperfield was teaching me -'
('Much he knew about it himself!') said Miss Betsey in a parenthesis.
- 'And I hope I should have improved, being very anxious to learn, and
he very patient to teach me, if the great misfortune of his death' - my
mother broke down again here, and could get no farther.
'Well, well!' said Miss Betsey.
-'I kept my housekeeping-book regularly, and balanced it with Mr.
Copperfield every night,' cried my mother in another burst of distress,
and breaking down again.
'Well, well!' said Miss Betsey. 'Don't cry any more.'
- 'And I am sure we never had a word of difference respecting it, except
when Mr. Copperfield objected to my threes and fives being too much
like each other, or to my putting curly tails to my sevens and nines,'
resumed my mother in another burst, and breaking down again.
'You'll make yourself ill,' said Miss Betsey, 'and you know that will not
be good either for you or for my god-daughter. Come! You mustn't do
it!'
This argument had some share in quieting my mother, though her
increasing indisposition had a larger one. There was an interval of
silence, only broken by Miss Betsey's occasionally ejaculating 'Ha!' as
she sat with her feet upon the fender.
'David had bought an annuity for himself with his money, I know,' said

she, by and by. 'What did he do for you?'
'Mr. Copperfield,' said my mother, answering with some difficulty, 'was
so considerate and good as to secure the reversion of a part of it to me.'
'How much?' asked Miss Betsey.
'A hundred and five pounds a year,' said my mother.
'He might have done worse,' said my aunt.
The word was appropriate to the moment. My mother was so much
worse that Peggotty, coming in with the teaboard and candles, and
seeing at a glance how ill she was, - as Miss Betsey might have done
sooner if there had been light enough, - conveyed her upstairs to her
own room with all speed; and immediately dispatched Ham Peggotty,
her nephew, who had been for some days past secreted in the house,
unknown to my mother, as a special messenger in case of emergency,
to fetch the nurse and doctor.
Those allied powers were considerably astonished, when they arrived
within a few minutes of each other, to find an unknown lady of
portentous appearance, sitting before the fire, with her bonnet tied over
her left arm, stopping her ears with jewellers' cotton. Peggotty knowing
nothing about her, and my mother saying nothing about her, she was
quite a mystery in the parlour; and the fact of her having a magazine of
jewellers' cotton in her pocket, and sticking the article in her ears in that
way, did not detract from the solemnity of her presence.
The doctor having been upstairs and come down again, and having
satisfied himself, I suppose, that there was a probability of this
unknown lady and himself having to sit there, face to face, for some
hours, laid himself out to be polite and social. He was the meekest of
his sex, the mildest of little men. He sidled in and out of a room, to take
up the less space. He walked as softly as the Ghost in Hamlet, and more
slowly. He carried his head on one side, partly in modest depreciation
of himself, partly in modest propitiation of everybody else. It is nothing
to say that he hadn't a word to throw at a dog. He couldn't have thrown

a word at a mad dog. He might have offered him one gently, or half a
one, or a fragment of one; for he spoke as slowly as he walked; but he
wouldn't have been rude to him, and he couldn't have been quick with
him, for any earthly consideration.
Mr. Chillip, looking mildly at my aunt with his head on one side, and
making her a little bow, said, in allusion to the jewellers' cotton, as he
softly touched his left ear:
'Some local irritation, ma'am?'
'What!' replied my aunt, pulling the cotton out of one ear like a cork.
Mr. Chillip was so alarmed by her abruptness - as he told my mother
afterwards - that it was a mercy he didn't lose his presence of mind. But
he repeated sweetly:
'Some local irritation, ma'am?'
'Nonsense!' replied my aunt, and corked herself again, at one blow.
Mr. Chillip could do nothing after