"My son's great capacity was tempted on there by a feeling of voluntary emulation and conscious pride," the fond lady went on to say. "He would have risen against all constraint; but he found himself the monarch of the place, and he haughtily determined to be worthy of his station. It was like himself."
As Steerforth began consciously to feel his better nature surrendering to his sensuality, he experienced the pangs that all strong natures feel at the loss of moral power, and one time when he and David were visiting Mr. Peggotty at Yarmouth he seemed to be moody and disposed to sadness. He said suddenly to David when they were alone one day:
"David, I wish to God I had had a judicious father these last twenty years!"
"My dear Steerforth, what is the matter?"
"I wish with all my soul I had been better guided!" he exclaimed. "I wish with all my soul I could guide myself better!"
There was a passionate dejection in his manner that quite amazed me. He was more unlike himself than I could have supposed possible.
"It would be better to be this poor Peggotty, or his lout of a nephew," he said, getting up and leaning moodily against the chimney piece, with his face toward the fire, "than to be myself, twenty times richer and twenty times wiser and be the torment to myself that I have been, in this Devil's bark of a boat, within the last half hour!"
He had already begun to poison the fountains of little Emily's purity.
When Steerforth, after running away with Emily and deserting her, was drowned and brought home, Rosa Dartle, who had loved him, charged his mother with his ruin. She had a scar on her lip, made by a hammer thrown by Steerforth when he was a boy.
"Do you remember when he did this?" she proceeded. "Do you remember when in his inheritance of your nature, and in your pampering of his pride and passion, he did this, and disfigured me for life? Look at me, marked until I die with his high displeasure, and moan and groan for what you made him!"
"Miss Dartle," I entreated her, "for Heaven's sake----"
"I _will_ speak," she said, turning on me with her lightning eyes. "Be silent you! Look at me, I say, proud mother of a proud false son! Moan for your nurture of him, moan for your corruption of him, moan for your loss of him, moan for mine!"