m except the fact that he had so kindly come
down from the far-off Beaverkill to regale us with the perfect
demonstration, dutifully, resignedly setting himself among us to point
the whole moral himself. He appeared, from the moment we really took it
in, to be doing, in the matter, no more than he ought; he exposed
himself to our invidious gaze, on this ground, with a humility, a quiet
courtesy and an instinctive dignity that come back to me as simply
heroic. He had himself accepted, under strenuous suggestion, the
dreadful view, and I see him to-day, in the light of the grand
denouement, deferred for long years, but fairly dazzling when it came,
as fairly sublime in his decision not to put anyone in the wrong about
him a day sooner than he could possibly help. The whole circle of us
would in that event be so dreadfully "sold," as to our wisdom and
justice, he proving only noble and exquisite. It didn't so immensely
matter to him as that, the establishment of his true character didn't;
so he went on as if for all the years--and they really piled themselves
up: his passing for a dangerous idiot, or at least for a slave of his
passions from the moment he was allowed the wherewithal in the least to
indulge them, was a less evil for him than seeing us rudely corrected.
It was in truth an extraordinary situation and would have offered a
splendid subject, as we used to say, to the painter of character, the
novelist or the dramatist, with the hand to treat it. After I had read
David Copperfield an analogy glimmered--it struck me even in the early
time: cousin Henry was more or less another Mr. Dick, just as cousin
Helen was in her relation to him more or less another Miss Trotwood.
There were disparities indeed: Mr. Dick was the harmless lunatic on that
lady's premises, but she admired him and appealed to him; lunatics, in
her generous view, might be oracles, and there is no evidence, if I
correctly remember, that she kept him low. Our Mr. Dick was suffered to
indulge his passions but on ten cents a day, while his fortune, under
conscientious, under admirable care--cousin Helen being no less the
wise and keen woman of business than the devoted sister--rolled up and
became large; likewise Miss Trotwood's inmate hadn't at all the
perplexed brooding brow, with the troubled fold in it, that represented
poor Henry's only form of criticism of adverse fate. They had alike the
large smooth open countenance of those for whom life has bee