David Copperfield | Page 5

had
been on the water in her life, except upon a bridge; and that over her tea
(to which she was extremely partial) she, to the last, expressed her
indignation at the impiety of mariners and others, who had the
presumption to go 'meandering' about the world. It was in vain to

represent to her that some conveniences, tea perhaps included, resulted
from this objectionable practice. She always returned, with greater
emphasis and with an instinctive knowledge of the strength of her
objection, 'Let us have no meandering.'
Not to meander myself, at present, I will go back to my birth.
I was born at Blunderstone, in Suffolk, or 'there by', as they say in
Scotland. I was a posthumous child. My father's eyes had closed upon
the light of this world six months, when mine opened on it. There is
something strange to me, even now, in the reflection that he never saw
me; and something stranger yet in the shadowy remembrance that I
have of my first childish associations with his white grave-stone in the
churchyard, and of the indefinable compassion I used to feel for it lying
out alone there in the dark night, when our little parlour was warm and
bright with fire and candle, and the doors of our house were - almost
cruelly, it seemed to me sometimes - bolted and locked against it.
An aunt of my father's, and consequently a great-aunt of mine, of
whom I shall have more to relate by and by, was the principal magnate
of our family. Miss Trotwood, or Miss Betsey, as my poor mother
always called her, when she sufficiently overcame her dread of this
formidable personage to mention her at all (which was seldom), had
been married to a husband younger than herself, who was very
handsome, except in the sense of the homely adage, 'handsome is, that
handsome does' - for he was strongly suspected of having beaten Miss
Betsey, and even of having once, on a disputed question of supplies,
made some hasty but determined arrangements to throw her out of a
two pair of stairs' window. These evidences of an incompatibility of
temper induced Miss Betsey to pay him off, and effect a separation by
mutual consent. He went to India with his capital, and there, according
to a wild legend in our family, he was once seen riding on an elephant,
in company with a Baboon; but I think it must have been a Baboo - or a
Begum. Anyhow, from India tidings of his death reached home, within
ten years. How they affected my aunt, nobody knew; for immediately
upon the separation, she took her maiden name again, bought a cottage
in a hamlet on the sea-coast a long way off, established herself there as

a single woman with one servant, and was understood to live secluded,
ever afterwards, in an inflexible retirement.
My father had once been a favourite of hers, I believe; but she was
mortally affronted by his marriage, on the ground that my mother was
'a wax doll'. She had never seen my mother, but she knew her to be not
yet twenty. My father and Miss Betsey never met again. He was double
my mother's age when he married, and of but a delicate constitution. He
died a year afterwards, and, as I have said, six months before I came
into the world.
This was the state of matters, on the afternoon of, what I may be
excused for calling, that eventful and important Friday. I can make no
claim therefore to have known, at that time, how matters stood; or to
have any remembrance, founded on the evidence of my own senses, of
what follows.
My mother was sitting by the fire, but poorly in health, and very low in
spirits, looking at it through her tears, and desponding heavily about
herself and the fatherless little stranger, who was already welcomed by
some grosses of prophetic pins, in a drawer upstairs, to a world not at
all excited on the subject of his arrival; my mother, I say, was sitting by
the fire, that bright, windy March afternoon, very timid and sad, and
very doubtful of ever coming alive out of the trial that was before her,
when, lifting her eyes as she dried them, to the window opposite, she
saw a strange lady coming up the garden.
MY mother had a sure foreboding at the second glance, that it was Miss
Betsey. The setting sun was glowing on the strange lady, over the
garden-fence, and she came walking up to the door with a fell rigidity
of figure and composure of countenance that could have belonged to
nobody else.
When she reached the house, she gave another proof of her identity.
My father had often