When we three males were left alone after dinner, he got into a more adventurous state. He had taken little or no wine; and I presume it was the mere insolence of triumph that was upon him, flushed perhaps by the temptation my presence furnished to its exhibition.
I had observed yesterday, that he tried to entice Mr. Wickfield to drink; and, interpreting the look which Agnes had given me as she went out, had limited myself to one glass, and then proposed that we should follow her. I would have done so again to-day; but Uriah was too quick for me.
“We seldom see our present visitor, sir,” he said, addressing Mr. Wickfield, sitting, such a contrast to him, at the end of the table, “and I should propose to give him welcome in another glass or two of wine, if you have no objections. Mr. Copperfield, your elth and appiness!”
I was obliged to make a show of taking the hand he stretched across to me; and then, with very different emotions, I took the hand of the broken gentleman, his partner.
“Come, fellow partner,” said Uriah, “if I may take the liberty,—now, suppose you give us something or another appropriate to Copperfield!”
I pass over Mr. Wickfield’s proposing my aunt, his proposing Mr. Dick, his proposing Doctor’s Commons, his proposing Uriah, his drinking everything twice; his consciousness of his own weakness, the ineffectual effort that he made against it; the struggle between his shame in Uriah’s deportment, and his desire to conciliate him; the manifest exultation with which Uriah twisted and turned, and held him up before me. It made me sick at heart to see, and my hand recoils from writing it.
“Come, fellow partner!” said Uriah, at last, “I’ll give you another one, and I umbly ask for bumpers, seeing I intend to make it the divinest of her sex.”
Her father had his empty glass in his hand. I saw him set it down, look at the picture she was so like, put his hand to his forehead, and shrink back in his elbow chair.
“I’m an umble individual to give you her elth,” proceeded Uriah, “but I admire—adore her.”
No physical pain that her father’s grey head could have borne, I think could have been more terrible to me, than the mental endurance I saw compressed now within both his hands.