Nothing to Give
087. Life.
There is a portrait of his father that hangs over the mantelpiece in the best parlor. "What a liar the old man was!" he sometimes thinks, when he cares to think of it at all.
Typically speaking, he can walk by that painting any day, without so much as looking in its direction, though it is always looking at him. After all, he knew his father until he was a good six-or-seven years old – had had time to acquaint himself, so to speak, much more than all those he knew who didn't even remember their dead parent's face. Not that he was any the better for it, though.
For instance, now he leans upon the mantelpiece, smoking a cigar (which he is too young to have, but which he smokes anyway) and looks straight into the eyes of the portrait. That gentleman up there has a firm look about him; an honorable, and a dignified look. Honor and dignity are fine things, to be sure: it is quite another thing to have them painted into your portrait when you never possessed them in life.
Steerforth often likes to tell himself that, had his father lived, he might have been able to offer him more guidance, to help advise him in the areas where his unusual moralities fail to help him through, or to teach him a morality that serves his life better, and makes him the better for it.
But Steerforth knows that at six years old, he tyrannized over his dear papa, as he tyrannizes over everyone else now – over his mother, over Rosa, over Creakle and Mell, over all the boys at school. His father, in the pride of his wealth and vanity, gave him whatever he demanded, and not only that, spurred him to keep making demands – until he had had his mother sobbing on the very day of the funeral, when he stamped his foot on the carriage floor and demanded father come back, immediately.
No, James Steerforth never misses that man in the uniform in the fine portrait above the fire; though he stares up at him, sometimes, and thinks him to be just another version of all the other people still living. If his father had not taken something irreplaceable when he left this world – like good sense or integrity or an idea of right and wrong (for he was quite replaceable, himself) – what was there to miss?