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But the agony of mind, the remorse, and shame I felt when I became conscious next day! My horror of having committed a thousand offences I had forgotten, and which nothing could ever expiate—my recollection of that indelible look which Agnes had given me—the torturing impossibility of communicating with her, not knowing, Beast that I was, how she came to be in London, or where she stayed—my disgust of the very sight of the room where the revel had been held—my racking head—the smell of smoke, the sight of glasses, the impossibility of going out, or even getting up! Oh, what a day it was!
Oh, what an evening, when I sat down by my fire to a basin of mutton broth, dimpled all over with fat, and thought I was going the way of my predecessor, and should succeed to his dismal story as well as to his chambers, and had half a mind to rush express to Dover and reveal all! What an evening, when Mrs. Crupp, coming in to take away the broth-basin, produced one kidney on a cheese-plate as the entire remains of yesterday’s feast, and I was really inclined to fall upon her nankeen breast and say, in heartfelt penitence, ‘Oh, Mrs. Crupp, Mrs. Crupp, never mind the broken meats! I am very miserable!’—only that I doubted, even at that pass, if Mrs. Crupp were quite the sort of woman to confide in!
I was going out at my door on the morning after that deplorable day of headache, sickness, and repentance, with an odd confusion in my mind relative to the date of my dinner-party, as if a body of Titans had taken an enormous lever and pushed the day before yesterday some months back, when I saw a ticket-porter coming upstairs, with a letter in his hand. He was taking his time about his errand, then; but when he saw me on the top of the staircase, looking at him over the banisters, he swung into a trot, and came up panting as if he had run himself into a state of exhaustion.
‘T. Copperfield, Esquire,’ said the ticket-porter, touching his hat with his little cane.
I could scarcely lay claim to the name: I was so disturbed by the conviction that the letter came from Agnes. However, I told him I was T. Copperfield, Esquire, and he believed it, and gave me the letter, which he said required an answer. I shut him out on the landing to wait for the answer, and went into my chambers again, in such a nervous state that I was fain to lay the letter down on my breakfast table, and familiarize myself with the outside of it a little, before I could resolve to break the seal.
I found, when I did open it, that it was a very kind note, containing no reference to my condition at the theatre. All it said was, ‘My dear Trotwood. I am staying at the house of papa’s agent, Mr. Waterbrook, in Ely Place, Holborn. Will you come and see me today, at any time you like to appoint? Ever yours affectionately, AGNES.’
It took me such a long time to write an answer at all to my satisfaction, that I don’t know what the ticket-porter can have thought, unless he thought I was learning to write. I must have written half-a-dozen answers at least. I began one, ‘How can I ever hope, my dear Agnes, to efface from your remembrance the disgusting impression’—there I didn’t like it, and then I tore it up. I began another, ‘Shakespeare has observed, my dear Agnes, how strange it is that a man should put an enemy into his mouth’—that reminded me of Markham, and it got no farther. I even tried poetry. I began one note, in a six-syllable line, ‘Oh, do not remember’—but that associated itself with the fifth of November, and became an absurdity. After many attempts, I wrote, ‘My dear Agnes. Your letter is like you, and what could I say of it that would be higher praise than that? I will come at four o’clock. Affectionately and sorrowfully, T.C.’ With this missive (which I was in twenty minds at once about recalling, as soon as it was out of my hands), the ticket-porter at last departed.
If the day were half as tremendous to any other professional gentleman in Doctors’ Commons as it was to me, I sincerely believe he made some expiation for his share in that rotten old ecclesiastical cheese. Although I left the office at half past three, and was prowling about the place of appointment within a few minutes afterwards, the appointed time was exceeded by a full quarter of an hour, according to the clock of St. Andrew’s, Holborn, before I could muster up sufficient desperation to pull the private bell-handle let into the left-hand door-post of Mr. Waterbrook’s house.
The professional business of Mr. Waterbrook’s establishment was done on the ground-floor, and the genteel business (of which there was a good deal) in the upper part of the building. I was shown into a pretty but rather close drawing-room, and there sat Agnes, netting a purse.
She looked so quiet and good, and reminded me so strongly of my airy fresh school days at Canterbury, and the sodden, smoky, stupid wretch I had been the other night, that, nobody being by, I yielded to my self-reproach and shame, and—in short, made a fool of myself. I cannot deny that I shed tears. To this hour I am undecided whether it was upon the whole the wisest thing I could have done, or the most ridiculous.
‘If it had been anyone but you, Agnes,’ said I, turning away my head, ‘I should not have minded it half so much. But that it should have been you who saw me! I almost wish I had been dead, first.’
She put her hand—its touch was like no other hand—upon my arm for a moment; and I felt so befriended and comforted, that I could not help moving it to my lips, and gratefully kissing it.
‘Sit down,’ said Agnes, cheerfully. ‘Don’t be unhappy, Trotwood. If you cannot confidently trust me, whom will you trust?’
‘Ah, Agnes!’ I returned. ‘You are my good Angel!’
She smiled rather sadly, I thought, and shook her head.
‘Yes, Agnes, my good Angel! Always my good Angel!’
‘If I were, indeed, Trotwood,’ she returned, ‘there is one thing that I should set my heart on very much.’
I looked at her inquiringly; but already with a foreknowledge of her meaning.
‘On warning you,’ said Agnes, with a steady glance, ‘against your bad Angel.’
‘My dear Agnes,’ I began, ‘if you mean Steerforth—’
‘I do, Trotwood,’ she returned. ‘Then, Agnes, you wrong him very much. He my bad Angel, or anyone’s! He, anything but a guide, a support, and a friend to me! My dear Agnes! Now, is it not unjust, and unlike you, to judge him from what you saw of me the other night?’
‘I do not judge him from what I saw of you the other night,’ she quietly replied.
