Look away from me, don't listen to me, stop
me, blush for me, cry for me--even you, Amy! Do it, do it! I do it to
myself! I am hardened now, I have sunk too low to care long even for
that.' 'Dear father, loved father, darling of my heart!' She was clinging to
him with her arms, and she got him to drop into his chair again, and
caught at the raised arm, and tried to put it round her neck
. 'Let it lie there, father. Look at me, father, kiss me, father! Only
think of me, father, for one little moment!'
Still he went on in the same wild way, though it was gradually breaking
down into a miserable whining.
'And yet I have some respect here. I have made some stand against it. I
am not quite trodden down. Go out and ask who is the chief person in the
place. They'll tell you it's your father. Go out and ask who is never
trifled with, and who is always treated with some delicacy. They'll say,
your father. Go out and ask what funeral here (it must be here, I know
it can be nowhere else) will make more talk, and perhaps more grief,
than any that has ever gone out at the gate. They'll say your father's.
Well then. Amy! Amy! Is your father so universally despised? Is there
nothing to redeem him? Will you have nothing to remember him by but his
ruin and decay? Will you be able to have no affection for him when he is
gone, poor castaway, gone?'
He burst into tears of maudlin pity for himself, and at length suffering
her to embrace him and take charge of him, let his grey head rest
against her cheek, and bewailed his wretchedness. Presently he changed
the subject of his lamentations, and clasping his hands about her as she
embraced him, cried, O Amy, his motherless, forlorn child! O the days
that he had seen her careful and laborious for him! Then he reverted to
himself, and weakly told her how much better she would have loved him
if she had known him in his vanished character, and how he would have
married her to a gentleman who should have been proud of her as his
daughter, and how (at which he cried again) she should first have ridden
at his fatherly side on her own horse, and how the crowd (by which he
meant in effect the people who had given him the twelve shillings
he then had in his pocket) should have trudged the dusty roads
respectfully.