When Little Frank is sent to school in the country, I shall be very much at a loss what to do with myself, but I have the intention of walking down there once a month and seeing him on a half holiday.I am told he will then be at play upon the Heath; and if my visits should be objected to, as unsettling the child, I can see him from a distance without his seeing me, and walk back again.His mother comes of a highly genteel family, and rather disapproves, I am aware, of our being too much together.I know that I am not calculated to improve his retiring disposition; but I think he would miss me beyond the feeling of the moment if we were wholly separated.
When I die in the Clapham Road, I shall not leave much more in this world than I shall take out of it; but, I happen to have a miniature of a bright-faced boy, with a curling head, and an open shirt-frill waving down his bosom (my mother had it taken for me, but I can't believe that it was ever like), which will be worth nothing to sell, and which I shall beg may he given to Frank.I have written my dear boy a little letter with it, inwhich I have told him that I felt very sorry to part from him, though bound to confess that I knew no reason why I should remain here.I have given him some short advice, the best in my power, to take warning of the consequences of being nobody's enemy but his own; and I have endeavoured to comfort him for what I fear he will consider a bereavement, by pointing out to him, that I was only a superfluous something to every one but him; and that having by some means failed to find a place in this great assembly, I am better out of it.
Such (said the poor relation, clearing his throat and beginning to speak a little louder) is the general impression about me.Now, it is a remarkable circumstance which forms the aim and purpose of my story, that this is all wrong.This is not my life, and these are not my habits.I do not even live in the Clapham Road.Comparatively speaking, I am very seldom there.I reside, mostly, in a--I am almost ashamed to say the word, it sounds so full of pretension--in a Castle.I do not mean that it is an old baronial habitation, but still it is a building always known to every one by the name of a Castle.In it, I preserve the particulars of my history; they run thus:
It was when I first took John Spatter (who had been my clerk) into partnership, and when I was still a young man of not more than five- and- twenty, residing in the house of my uncle Chill, from whom I had considerable expectations, that I ventured to propose to Christiana.I had loved Christiana a long time.She was very beautiful, and very winning in all respects.I rather mistrusted her widowed mother, who I feared was of a plotting and mercenary turn of mind; but, I thought as well of her as I could, for Christiana's sake.I never had loved any one but Christiana, and she had been all the world, and O far more than all the world, to me, from our childhood!
Christiana accepted me with her mother's consent, and I was rendered very happy indeed.My life at my uncle Chill's was of a spare dull kind, and my garret chamber was as dull, and bare, and cold, as an upper prison room in some stern northern fortress.But, having Christiana's love, I wanted nothing upon earth.I would not have changed my lot with any human being.
Avarice was, unhappily, my uncle Chill's master-vice.Though he was rich, he pinched, and scraped, and clutched, and lived miserably.As Christiana had no fortune, I was for some time a little fearful of confessing our engagement to him; but, at length I wrote him a letter, saying how it all truly was.I put it into his hand one night, on going to bed.
As I came down-stairs next morning, shivering in the cold December air; colder in my uncle's unwarmed house than in the street, where the winter sun did sometimes shine, and which was at all events enlivened by cheerful faces and voices passing along; I carried a heavy heart towards the long, low breakfast-room in which my uncle sat.It was a large room with a small fire, and there was a great bay window in it which the rain had marked in the night as if with the tears of houseless people.It stared upon a raw yard, with a cracked stone pavement, and some rusted iron railings half uprooted, whence an ugly out-building that had once been a dissecting-room (in the time of the great surgeon who had mortgaged the house to my uncle), stared at it.
We rose so early always, that at that time of the year we breakfasted by candle-light.When I went into the room, my uncle was so contracted by the cold, and so huddled together in his chair behind the one dim candle, that I did not see him until I was close to the table.
As I held out my hand to him, he caught up his stick (being infirm, he always walked about the house with a stick), and made a blow at me, and said, "You fool!""Uncle," I returned, "I didn't expect you to be so angry as this." Nor had I expected it, though he was a hard and angry old man.
"You didn't expect!" said he; "when did you ever expect? When did you ever calculate, or look forward, you contemptible dog?""These are hard words, uncle!"
"Hard words? Feathers, to pelt such an idiot as you with," said he."Here! Betsy Snap! Look at him!"Betsy Snap was a withered, hard-favoured, yellow old woman--our only domestic--always employed, at this time of the morning, in rubbing my uncle's legs.As my uncle adjured her to look at me, he put his lean grip on the crown of her head, she kneeling beside him, and turned herface towards me.An involuntary thought connecting them both with the Dissecting Room, as it must often have been in the surgeon's time, passed across my mind in the midst of my anxiety.
