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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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'No,' he answered. 'No.' 'Up from anywhere, then?' said I, taking my seat near him. 'I was looking at the pictures in the fire,' he returned. 'But you are spoiling them for me,' said I, as he stirred it quickly with a piece of burning wood, striking out of it a train of red-hot sparks that went careering up the little chimney, and roaring out into the air. 'You would not have seen them,' he returned. 'I detest this mongrel time, neither day nor night. How late you are! Where have you been?' 'I have been taking leave of my usual walk,' said I. 'And I have been sitting here,' said Steerforth, glancing round the room, 'thinking that all the people we found so glad on the night of our coming down, might - to judge from the present wasted air of the place - be dispersed, or dead, or come to I don't know what harm. David, I wish to God I had had a judicious father these last twenty years!' 'My dear Steerforth, what is the matter?' 'I wish with all my soul I had been better guided!' he exclaimed. 'I wish with all my soul I could guide myself better!' There was a passionate dejection in his manner that quite amazed me. He was more unlike himself than I could have supposed possible. 'It would be better to be this poor Peggotty, or his lout of a nephew,' he said, getting up and leaning moodily against the chimney-piece, with his face towards the fire, 'than to be myself, twenty times richer and twenty times wiser, and be the torment to myself that I have been, in this Devil's bark of a boat, within the last half-hour!' I was so confounded by the alteration in him, that at first I could only observe him in silence, as he stood leaning his head upon his hand, and looking gloomily down at the fire. At length I begged him, with all the earnestness I felt, to tell me what had occurred to cross him so unusually, and to let me sympathize with him, if I |
