‘To who, sir?’ said Uriah, stretching out his neck, and shading his ear with his hand.
‘To the hangman,’ I returned. ‘The most unlikely person I could think of,’—though his own face had suggested the allusion quite as a natural sequence. ‘I am engaged to another young lady. I hope that contents you.’
‘Upon your soul?’ said Uriah.
I was about indignantly to give my assertion the confirmation he required, when he caught hold of my hand, and gave it a squeeze.
‘Oh, Master Copperfield!’ he said. ‘If you had only had the condescension to return my confidence when I poured out the fulness of my art, the night I put you so much out of the way by sleeping before your sitting-room fire, I never should have doubted you. As it is, I’m sure I’ll take off mother directly, and only too appy. I know you’ll excuse the precautions of affection, won’t you? What a pity, Master Copperfield, that you didn’t condescend to return my confidence! I’m sure I gave you every opportunity. But you never have condescended to me, as much as I could have wished. I know you have never liked me, as I have liked you!’
All this time he was squeezing my hand with his damp fishy fingers, while I made every effort I decently could to get it away. But I was quite unsuccessful. He drew it under the sleeve of his mulberry-coloured great-coat, and I walked on, almost upon compulsion, arm-in-arm with him.
‘Shall we turn?’ said Uriah, by and by wheeling me face about towards the town, on which the early moon was now shining, silvering the distant windows.
‘Before we leave the subject, you ought to understand,’ said I, breaking a pretty long silence, ‘that I believe Agnes Wickfield to be as far above you, and as far removed from all your aspirations, as that moon herself!’
‘Peaceful! Ain’t she!’ said Uriah. ‘Very! Now confess, Master Copperfield, that you haven’t liked me quite as I have liked you. All along you’ve thought me too umble now, I shouldn’t wonder?’
‘I am not fond of professions of humility,’ I returned, ‘or professions of anything else.’ ‘There now!’ said Uriah, looking flabby and lead-coloured in the moonlight. ‘Didn’t I know it! But how little you think of the rightful umbleness of a person in my station, Master Copperfield! Father and me was both brought up at a foundation school for boys; and mother, she was likewise brought up at a public, sort of charitable, establishment. They taught us all a deal of umbleness—not much else that I know of, from morning to night. We was to be umble to this person, and umble to that; and to pull off our caps here, and to make bows there; and always to know our place, and abase ourselves before our betters. And we had such a lot of betters! Father got the monitor-medal by being umble. So did I. Father got made a sexton by being umble. He had the character, among the gentlefolks, of being such a well-behaved man, that they were determined to bring him in. “Be umble, Uriah,” says father to me, “and you’ll get on. It was what was always being dinned into you and me at school; it’s what goes down best. Be umble,” says father, “and you’ll do!” And really it ain’t done bad!’