DAVID
COPPERFIELD
PART 58
CHAPTER 58. ABSENCE
It was a
long and gloomy night that gathered on me, haunted by the ghosts of many hopes,
of many dear remembrances, many errors, many unavailing sorrows and regrets.
I went
away from England; not knowing, even then, how great the shock was, that I had
to bear. I left all who were dear to me, and went away; and believed that I had
borne it, and it was past. As a man upon a field of battle will receive a
mortal hurt, and scarcely know that he is struck, so I, when I was left alone
with my undisciplined heart, had no conception of the wound with which it had
to strive.
The
knowledge came upon me, not quickly, but little by little, and grain by grain.
The desolate feeling with which I went abroad, deepened and widened hourly. At
first it was a heavy sense of loss and sorrow, wherein I could distinguish
little else. By imperceptible degrees, it became a hopeless consciousness of
all that I had lost—love, friendship, interest; of all that had been
shattered—my first trust, my first affection, the whole airy castle of my life;
of all that remained—a ruined blank and waste, lying wide around me, unbroken,
to the dark horizon.
If my
grief were selfish, I did not know it to be so. I mourned for my child-wife,
taken from her blooming world, so young. I mourned for him who might have won
the love and admiration of thousands, as he had won mine long ago. I mourned
for the broken heart that had found rest in the stormy sea; and for the
wandering remnants of the simple home, where I had heard the night-wind
blowing, when I was a child.
From the
accumulated sadness into which I fell, I had at length no hope of ever issuing
again. I roamed from place to place, carrying my burden with me everywhere. I
felt its whole weight now; and I drooped beneath it, and I said in my heart
that it could never be lightened.
When this
despondency was at its worst, I believed that I should die. Sometimes, I
thought that I would like to die at home; and actually turned back on my road,
that I might get there soon. At other times, I passed on farther away,—from
city to city, seeking I know not what, and trying to leave I know not what
behind.
It is not
in my power to retrace, one by one, all the weary phases of distress of mind
through which I passed. There are some dreams that can only be imperfectly and
vaguely described; and when I oblige myself to look back on this time of my
life, I seem to be recalling such a dream. I see myself passing on among the
novelties of foreign towns, palaces, cathedrals, temples, pictures, castles,
tombs, fantastic streets—the old abiding places of History and Fancy—as a
dreamer might; bearing my painful load through all, and hardly conscious of the
objects as they fade before me. Listlessness to everything, but brooding
sorrow, was the night that fell on my undisciplined heart. Let me look up from
it—as at last I did, thank Heaven!—and from its long, sad, wretched dream, to
dawn.
For many
months I travelled with this ever-darkening cloud upon my mind. Some blind
reasons that I had for not returning home—reasons then struggling within me,
vainly, for more distinct expression—kept me on my pilgrimage. Sometimes, I had
proceeded restlessly from place to place, stopping nowhere; sometimes, I had
lingered long in one spot. I had had no purpose, no sustaining soul within me,
anywhere.
I was in
Switzerland. I had come out of Italy, over one of the great passes of the Alps,
and had since wandered with a guide among the by-ways of the mountains. If
those awful solitudes had spoken to my heart, I did not know it. I had found
sublimity and wonder in the dread heights and precipices, in the roaring
torrents, and the wastes of ice and snow; but as yet, they had taught me
nothing else.
I came,
one evening before sunset, down into a valley, where I was to rest. In the
course of my descent to it, by the winding track along the mountain-side, from
which I saw it shining far below, I think some long-unwonted sense of beauty
and tranquillity, some softening influence awakened by its peace, moved faintly
in my breast. I remember pausing once, with a kind of sorrow that was not all
oppressive, not quite despairing. I remember almost hoping that some better
change was possible within me.
I came
into the valley, as the evening sun was shining on the remote heights of snow,
that closed it in, like eternal clouds. The bases of the mountains forming the
gorge in which the little village lay, were richly green; and high above this
gentler vegetation, grew forests of dark fir, cleaving the wintry snow-drift,
wedge-like, and stemming the avalanche. Above these, were range upon range of
craggy steeps, grey rock, bright ice, and smooth verdure-specks of pasture, all
gradually blending with the crowning snow. Dotted here and there on the
mountain's-side, each tiny dot a home, were lonely wooden cottages, so dwarfed
by the towering heights that they appeared too small for toys. So did even the
clustered village in the valley, with its wooden bridge across the stream,
where the stream tumbled over broken rocks, and roared away among the trees. In
the quiet air, there was a sound of distant singing—shepherd voices; but, as
one bright evening cloud floated midway along the mountain's-side, I could
almost have believed it came from there, and was not earthly music. All at
once, in this serenity, great Nature spoke to me; and soothed me to lay down my
weary head upon the grass, and weep as I had not wept yet, since Dora died!
I had
found a packet of letters awaiting me but a few minutes before, and had
strolled out of the village to read them while my supper was making ready.
Other packets had missed me, and I had received none for a long time. Beyond a
line or two, to say that I was well, and had arrived at such a place, I had not
had fortitude or constancy to write a letter since I left home.
The
packet was in my hand. I opened it, and read the writing of Agnes.
She was
happy and useful, was prospering as she had hoped. That was all she told me of
herself. The rest referred to me.
She gave
me no advice; she urged no duty on me; she only told me, in her own fervent
manner, what her trust in me was. She knew (she said) how such a nature as mine
would turn affliction to good. She knew how trial and emotion would exalt and
strengthen it. She was sure that in my every purpose I should gain a firmer and
a higher tendency, through the grief I had undergone. She, who so gloried in my
fame, and so looked forward to its augmentation, well knew that I would labour
on. She knew that in me, sorrow could not be weakness, but must be strength. As
the endurance of my childish days had done its part to make me what I was, so
greater calamities would nerve me on, to be yet better than I was; and so, as
they had taught me, would I teach others. She commended me to God, who had
taken my innocent darling to His rest; and in her sisterly affection cherished
me always, and was always at my side go where I would; proud of what I had
done, but infinitely prouder yet of what I was reserved to do.
I put the
letter in my breast, and thought what had I been an hour ago! When I heard the
voices die away, and saw the quiet evening cloud grow dim, and all the colours
in the valley fade, and the golden snow upon the mountain-tops become a remote
part of the pale night sky, yet felt that the night was passing from my mind,
and all its shadows clearing, there was no name for the love I bore her, dearer
to me, henceforward, than ever until then.
I read
her letter many times. I wrote to her before I slept. I told her that I had
been in sore need of her help; that without her I was not, and I never had
been, what she thought me; but that she inspired me to be that, and I would
try.
I did
try. In three months more, a year would have passed since the beginning of my
sorrow. I determined to make no resolutions until the expiration of those three
months, but to try. I lived in that valley, and its neighbourhood, all the
time.
The three
months gone, I resolved to remain away from home for some time longer; to
settle myself for the present in Switzerland, which was growing dear to me in
the remembrance of that evening; to resume my pen; to work.
I
resorted humbly whither Agnes had commended me; I sought out Nature, never
sought in vain; and I admitted to my breast the human interest I had lately
shrunk from. It was not long, before I had almost as many friends in the valley
as in Yarmouth: and when I left it, before the winter set in, for Geneva, and
came back in the spring, their cordial greetings had a homely sound to me,
although they were not conveyed in English words.
I worked
early and late, patiently and hard. I wrote a Story, with a purpose growing,
not remotely, out of my experience, and sent it to Traddles, and he arranged
for its publication very advantageously for me; and the tidings of my growing
reputation began to reach me from travellers whom I encountered by chance.
After some rest and change, I fell to work, in my old ardent way, on a new
fancy, which took strong possession of me. As I advanced in the execution of
this task, I felt it more and more, and roused my utmost energies to do it
well. This was my third work of fiction. It was not half written, when, in an
interval of rest, I thought of returning home.
For a
long time, though studying and working patiently, I had accustomed myself to
robust exercise. My health, severely impaired when I left England, was quite
restored. I had seen much. I had been in many countries, and I hope I had
improved my store of knowledge.
I have
now recalled all that I think it needful to recall here, of this term of
absence—with one reservation. I have made it, thus far, with no purpose of
suppressing any of my thoughts; for, as I have elsewhere said, this narrative
is my written memory. I have desired to keep the most secret current of my mind
apart, and to the last. I enter on it now. I cannot so completely penetrate the
mystery of my own heart, as to know when I began to think that I might have set
its earliest and brightest hopes on Agnes. I cannot say at what stage of my
grief it first became associated with the reflection, that, in my wayward
boyhood, I had thrown away the treasure of her love. I believe I may have heard
some whisper of that distant thought, in the old unhappy loss or want of
something never to be realized, of which I had been sensible. But the thought
came into my mind as a new reproach and new regret, when I was left so sad and
lonely in the world.
If, at
that time, I had been much with her, I should, in the weakness of my
desolation, have betrayed this. It was what I remotely dreaded when I was first
impelled to stay away from England. I could not have borne to lose the smallest
portion of her sisterly affection; yet, in that betrayal, I should have set a
constraint between us hitherto unknown.
I could
not forget that the feeling with which she now regarded me had grown up in my
own free choice and course. That if she had ever loved me with another love—and
I sometimes thought the time was when she might have done so—I had cast it
away. It was nothing, now, that I had accustomed myself to think of her, when
we were both mere children, as one who was far removed from my wild fancies. I
had bestowed my passionate tenderness upon another object; and what I might
have done, I had not done; and what Agnes was to me, I and her own noble heart
had made her.
In the
beginning of the change that gradually worked in me, when I tried to get a
better understanding of myself and be a better man, I did glance, through some
indefinite probation, to a period when I might possibly hope to cancel the
mistaken past, and to be so blessed as to marry her. But, as time wore on, this
shadowy prospect faded, and departed from me. If she had ever loved me, then, I
should hold her the more sacred; remembering the confidences I had reposed in
her, her knowledge of my errant heart, the sacrifice she must have made to be
my friend and sister, and the victory she had won. If she had never loved me,
could I believe that she would love me now?
I had
always felt my weakness, in comparison with her constancy and fortitude; and
now I felt it more and more. Whatever I might have been to her, or she to me,
if I had been more worthy of her long ago, I was not now, and she was not. The
time was past. I had let it go by, and had deservedly lost her.
That I
suffered much in these contentions, that they filled me with unhappiness and
remorse, and yet that I had a sustaining sense that it was required of me, in
right and honour, to keep away from myself, with shame, the thought of turning to
the dear girl in the withering of my hopes, from whom I had frivolously turned
when they were bright and fresh—which consideration was at the root of every
thought I had concerning her—is all equally true. I made no effort to conceal
from myself, now, that I loved her, that I was devoted to her; but I brought
the assurance home to myself, that it was now too late, and that our
long-subsisting relation must be undisturbed.
I had
thought, much and often, of my Dora's shadowing out to me what might have happened,
in those years that were destined not to try us; I had considered how the
things that never happen, are often as much realities to us, in their effects,
as those that are accomplished. The very years she spoke of, were realities
now, for my correction; and would have been, one day, a little later perhaps,
though we had parted in our earliest folly. I endeavoured to convert what might
have been between myself and Agnes, into a means of making me more
self-denying, more resolved, more conscious of myself, and my defects and
errors. Thus, through the reflection that it might have been, I arrived at the
conviction that it could never be.
These,
with their perplexities and inconsistencies, were the shifting quicksands of my
mind, from the time of my departure to the time of my return home, three years
afterwards. Three years had elapsed since the sailing of the emigrant ship;
when, at that same hour of sunset, and in the same place, I stood on the deck
of the packet vessel that brought me home, looking on the rosy water where I
had seen the image of that ship reflected.
Three
years. Long in the aggregate, though short as they went by. And home was very
dear to me, and Agnes too—but she was not mine—she was never to be mine. She
might have been, but that was past!
To be continued
