--- /dev/null
+GREAT EXPECTATIONS
+
+[1867 Edition]
+
+by Charles Dickens
+
+
+[Project Gutenberg Editor’s Note: There is also another version of
+this work etext98/grexp10.txt scanned from a different edition]
+
+
+
+
+Chapter I
+
+My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my
+infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit
+than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.
+
+I give Pirrip as my father’s family name, on the authority of his
+tombstone and my sister,--Mrs. Joe Gargery, who married the blacksmith.
+As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness
+of either of them (for their days were long before the days of
+photographs), my first fancies regarding what they were like were
+unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The shape of the letters on
+my father’s, gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man,
+with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the inscription,
+“Also Georgiana Wife of the Above,” I drew a childish conclusion that
+my mother was freckled and sickly. To five little stone lozenges, each
+about a foot and a half long, which were arranged in a neat row beside
+their grave, and were sacred to the memory of five little brothers of
+mine,--who gave up trying to get a living, exceedingly early in
+that universal struggle,--I am indebted for a belief I religiously
+entertained that they had all been born on their backs with their hands
+in their trousers-pockets, and had never taken them out in this state of
+existence.
+
+Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river
+wound, twenty miles of the sea. My first most vivid and broad impression
+of the identity of things seems to me to have been gained on a memorable
+raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found out for certain
+that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; and
+that Philip Pirrip, late of this parish, and also Georgiana wife of the
+above, were dead and buried; and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham,
+Tobias, and Roger, infant children of the aforesaid, were also dead
+and buried; and that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard,
+intersected with dikes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle
+feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond
+was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was
+rushing was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid
+of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip.
+
+“Hold your noise!” cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from
+among the graves at the side of the church porch. “Keep still, you
+little devil, or I’ll cut your throat!”
+
+A fearful man, all in coarse gray, with a great iron on his leg. A man
+with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his
+head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and
+lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by
+briars; who limped, and shivered, and glared, and growled; and whose
+teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin.
+
+“Oh! Don’t cut my throat, sir,” I pleaded in terror. “Pray don’t do it,
+sir.”
+
+“Tell us your name!” said the man. “Quick!”
+
+“Pip, sir.”
+
+“Once more,” said the man, staring at me. “Give it mouth!”
+
+“Pip. Pip, sir.”
+
+“Show us where you live,” said the man. “Pint out the place!”
+
+I pointed to where our village lay, on the flat in-shore among the
+alder-trees and pollards, a mile or more from the church.
+
+The man, after looking at me for a moment, turned me upside down, and
+emptied my pockets. There was nothing in them but a piece of bread. When
+the church came to itself,--for he was so sudden and strong that he
+made it go head over heels before me, and I saw the steeple under my
+feet,--when the church came to itself, I say, I was seated on a high
+tombstone, trembling while he ate the bread ravenously.
+
+“You young dog,” said the man, licking his lips, “what fat cheeks you
+ha’ got.”
+
+I believe they were fat, though I was at that time undersized for my
+years, and not strong.
+
+“Darn me if I couldn’t eat em,” said the man, with a threatening shake
+of his head, “and if I han’t half a mind to’t!”
+
+I earnestly expressed my hope that he wouldn’t, and held tighter to
+the tombstone on which he had put me; partly, to keep myself upon it;
+partly, to keep myself from crying.
+
+“Now lookee here!” said the man. “Where’s your mother?”
+
+“There, sir!” said I.
+
+He started, made a short run, and stopped and looked over his shoulder.
+
+“There, sir!” I timidly explained. “Also Georgiana. That’s my mother.”
+
+“Oh!” said he, coming back. “And is that your father alonger your
+mother?”
+
+“Yes, sir,” said I; “him too; late of this parish.”
+
+“Ha!” he muttered then, considering. “Who d’ye live with,--supposin’
+you’re kindly let to live, which I han’t made up my mind about?”
+
+“My sister, sir,--Mrs. Joe Gargery,--wife of Joe Gargery, the
+blacksmith, sir.”
+
+“Blacksmith, eh?” said he. And looked down at his leg.
+
+After darkly looking at his leg and me several times, he came closer
+to my tombstone, took me by both arms, and tilted me back as far as he
+could hold me; so that his eyes looked most powerfully down into mine,
+and mine looked most helplessly up into his.
+
+“Now lookee here,” he said, “the question being whether you’re to be let
+to live. You know what a file is?”
+
+“Yes, sir.”
+
+“And you know what wittles is?”
+
+“Yes, sir.”
+
+After each question he tilted me over a little more, so as to give me a
+greater sense of helplessness and danger.
+
+“You get me a file.” He tilted me again. “And you get me wittles.” He
+tilted me again. “You bring ‘em both to me.” He tilted me again. “Or
+I’ll have your heart and liver out.” He tilted me again.
+
+I was dreadfully frightened, and so giddy that I clung to him with both
+hands, and said, “If you would kindly please to let me keep upright,
+sir, perhaps I shouldn’t be sick, and perhaps I could attend more.”
+
+He gave me a most tremendous dip and roll, so that the church jumped
+over its own weathercock. Then, he held me by the arms, in an upright
+position on the top of the stone, and went on in these fearful terms:--
+
+“You bring me, to-morrow morning early, that file and them wittles. You
+bring the lot to me, at that old Battery over yonder. You do it, and you
+never dare to say a word or dare to make a sign concerning your having
+seen such a person as me, or any person sumever, and you shall be let to
+live. You fail, or you go from my words in any partickler, no matter how
+small it is, and your heart and your liver shall be tore out, roasted,
+and ate. Now, I ain’t alone, as you may think I am. There’s a young man
+hid with me, in comparison with which young man I am a Angel. That young
+man hears the words I speak. That young man has a secret way pecooliar
+to himself, of getting at a boy, and at his heart, and at his liver. It
+is in wain for a boy to attempt to hide himself from that young man. A
+boy may lock his door, may be warm in bed, may tuck himself up, may draw
+the clothes over his head, may think himself comfortable and safe, but
+that young man will softly creep and creep his way to him and tear him
+open. I am a keeping that young man from harming of you at the present
+moment, with great difficulty. I find it wery hard to hold that young
+man off of your inside. Now, what do you say?”
+
+I said that I would get him the file, and I would get him what broken
+bits of food I could, and I would come to him at the Battery, early in
+the morning.
+
+“Say Lord strike you dead if you don’t!” said the man.
+
+I said so, and he took me down.
+
+“Now,” he pursued, “you remember what you’ve undertook, and you remember
+that young man, and you get home!”
+
+“Goo-good night, sir,” I faltered.
+
+“Much of that!” said he, glancing about him over the cold wet flat. “I
+wish I was a frog. Or a eel!”
+
+At the same time, he hugged his shuddering body in both his
+arms,--clasping himself, as if to hold himself together,--and limped
+towards the low church wall. As I saw him go, picking his way among the
+nettles, and among the brambles that bound the green mounds, he looked
+in my young eyes as if he were eluding the hands of the dead people,
+stretching up cautiously out of their graves, to get a twist upon his
+ankle and pull him in.
+
+When he came to the low church wall, he got over it, like a man whose
+legs were numbed and stiff, and then turned round to look for me. When I
+saw him turning, I set my face towards home, and made the best use of
+my legs. But presently I looked over my shoulder, and saw him going on
+again towards the river, still hugging himself in both arms, and picking
+his way with his sore feet among the great stones dropped into the
+marshes here and there, for stepping-places when the rains were heavy or
+the tide was in.
+
+The marshes were just a long black horizontal line then, as I stopped
+to look after him; and the river was just another horizontal line, not
+nearly so broad nor yet so black; and the sky was just a row of long
+angry red lines and dense black lines intermixed. On the edge of the
+river I could faintly make out the only two black things in all the
+prospect that seemed to be standing upright; one of these was the beacon
+by which the sailors steered,--like an unhooped cask upon a pole,--an
+ugly thing when you were near it; the other, a gibbet, with some chains
+hanging to it which had once held a pirate. The man was limping on
+towards this latter, as if he were the pirate come to life, and come
+down, and going back to hook himself up again. It gave me a terrible
+turn when I thought so; and as I saw the cattle lifting their heads to
+gaze after him, I wondered whether they thought so too. I looked all
+round for the horrible young man, and could see no signs of him. But now
+I was frightened again, and ran home without stopping.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter II
+
+My sister, Mrs. Joe Gargery, was more than twenty years older than I,
+and had established a great reputation with herself and the neighbors
+because she had brought me up “by hand.” Having at that time to find out
+for myself what the expression meant, and knowing her to have a hard and
+heavy hand, and to be much in the habit of laying it upon her husband as
+well as upon me, I supposed that Joe Gargery and I were both brought up
+by hand.
+
+She was not a good-looking woman, my sister; and I had a general
+impression that she must have made Joe Gargery marry her by hand. Joe
+was a fair man, with curls of flaxen hair on each side of his smooth
+face, and with eyes of such a very undecided blue that they seemed
+to have somehow got mixed with their own whites. He was a mild,
+good-natured, sweet-tempered, easy-going, foolish, dear fellow,--a sort
+of Hercules in strength, and also in weakness.
+
+My sister, Mrs. Joe, with black hair and eyes, had such a prevailing
+redness of skin that I sometimes used to wonder whether it was possible
+she washed herself with a nutmeg-grater instead of soap. She was tall
+and bony, and almost always wore a coarse apron, fastened over her
+figure behind with two loops, and having a square impregnable bib in
+front, that was stuck full of pins and needles. She made it a powerful
+merit in herself, and a strong reproach against Joe, that she wore this
+apron so much. Though I really see no reason why she should have worn it
+at all; or why, if she did wear it at all, she should not have taken it
+off, every day of her life.
+
+Joe’s forge adjoined our house, which was a wooden house, as many of the
+dwellings in our country were,--most of them, at that time. When I ran
+home from the churchyard, the forge was shut up, and Joe was sitting
+alone in the kitchen. Joe and I being fellow-sufferers, and having
+confidences as such, Joe imparted a confidence to me, the moment I
+raised the latch of the door and peeped in at him opposite to it,
+sitting in the chimney corner.
+
+“Mrs. Joe has been out a dozen times, looking for you, Pip. And she’s
+out now, making it a baker’s dozen.”
+
+“Is she?”
+
+“Yes, Pip,” said Joe; “and what’s worse, she’s got Tickler with her.”
+
+At this dismal intelligence, I twisted the only button on my waistcoat
+round and round, and looked in great depression at the fire. Tickler
+was a wax-ended piece of cane, worn smooth by collision with my tickled
+frame.
+
+“She sot down,” said Joe, “and she got up, and she made a grab at
+Tickler, and she Ram-paged out. That’s what she did,” said Joe, slowly
+clearing the fire between the lower bars with the poker, and looking at
+it; “she Ram-paged out, Pip.”
+
+“Has she been gone long, Joe?” I always treated him as a larger species
+of child, and as no more than my equal.
+
+“Well,” said Joe, glancing up at the Dutch clock, “she’s been on the
+Ram-page, this last spell, about five minutes, Pip. She’s a coming! Get
+behind the door, old chap, and have the jack-towel betwixt you.”
+
+I took the advice. My sister, Mrs. Joe, throwing the door wide open,
+and finding an obstruction behind it, immediately divined the cause, and
+applied Tickler to its further investigation. She concluded by throwing
+me--I often served as a connubial missile--at Joe, who, glad to get hold
+of me on any terms, passed me on into the chimney and quietly fenced me
+up there with his great leg.
+
+“Where have you been, you young monkey?” said Mrs. Joe, stamping her
+foot. “Tell me directly what you’ve been doing to wear me away with fret
+and fright and worrit, or I’d have you out of that corner if you was
+fifty Pips, and he was five hundred Gargerys.”
+
+“I have only been to the churchyard,” said I, from my stool, crying and
+rubbing myself.
+
+“Churchyard!” repeated my sister. “If it warn’t for me you’d have been
+to the churchyard long ago, and stayed there. Who brought you up by
+hand?”
+
+“You did,” said I.
+
+“And why did I do it, I should like to know?” exclaimed my sister.
+
+I whimpered, “I don’t know.”
+
+“I don’t!” said my sister. “I’d never do it again! I know that. I may
+truly say I’ve never had this apron of mine off since born you were.
+It’s bad enough to be a blacksmith’s wife (and him a Gargery) without
+being your mother.”
+
+My thoughts strayed from that question as I looked disconsolately at
+the fire. For the fugitive out on the marshes with the ironed leg, the
+mysterious young man, the file, the food, and the dreadful pledge I was
+under to commit a larceny on those sheltering premises, rose before me
+in the avenging coals.
+
+“Hah!” said Mrs. Joe, restoring Tickler to his station. “Churchyard,
+indeed! You may well say churchyard, you two.” One of us, by the by, had
+not said it at all. “You’ll drive me to the churchyard betwixt you, one
+of these days, and O, a pr-r-recious pair you’d be without me!”
+
+As she applied herself to set the tea-things, Joe peeped down at me
+over his leg, as if he were mentally casting me and himself up, and
+calculating what kind of pair we practically should make, under the
+grievous circumstances foreshadowed. After that, he sat feeling his
+right-side flaxen curls and whisker, and following Mrs. Joe about with
+his blue eyes, as his manner always was at squally times.
+
+My sister had a trenchant way of cutting our bread and butter for us,
+that never varied. First, with her left hand she jammed the loaf hard
+and fast against her bib,--where it sometimes got a pin into it, and
+sometimes a needle, which we afterwards got into our mouths. Then she
+took some butter (not too much) on a knife and spread it on the loaf, in
+an apothecary kind of way, as if she were making a plaster,--using both
+sides of the knife with a slapping dexterity, and trimming and moulding
+the butter off round the crust. Then, she gave the knife a final smart
+wipe on the edge of the plaster, and then sawed a very thick round off
+the loaf: which she finally, before separating from the loaf, hewed into
+two halves, of which Joe got one, and I the other.
+
+On the present occasion, though I was hungry, I dared not eat my
+slice. I felt that I must have something in reserve for my dreadful
+acquaintance, and his ally the still more dreadful young man. I knew
+Mrs. Joe’s housekeeping to be of the strictest kind, and that my
+larcenous researches might find nothing available in the safe. Therefore
+I resolved to put my hunk of bread and butter down the leg of my
+trousers.
+
+The effort of resolution necessary to the achievement of this purpose I
+found to be quite awful. It was as if I had to make up my mind to leap
+from the top of a high house, or plunge into a great depth of water.
+And it was made the more difficult by the unconscious Joe. In
+our already-mentioned freemasonry as fellow-sufferers, and in his
+good-natured companionship with me, it was our evening habit to compare
+the way we bit through our slices, by silently holding them up to each
+other’s admiration now and then,--which stimulated us to new exertions.
+To-night, Joe several times invited me, by the display of his fast
+diminishing slice, to enter upon our usual friendly competition; but
+he found me, each time, with my yellow mug of tea on one knee, and
+my untouched bread and butter on the other. At last, I desperately
+considered that the thing I contemplated must be done, and that it
+had best be done in the least improbable manner consistent with the
+circumstances. I took advantage of a moment when Joe had just looked at
+me, and got my bread and butter down my leg.
+
+Joe was evidently made uncomfortable by what he supposed to be my loss
+of appetite, and took a thoughtful bite out of his slice, which he
+didn’t seem to enjoy. He turned it about in his mouth much longer than
+usual, pondering over it a good deal, and after all gulped it down like
+a pill. He was about to take another bite, and had just got his head on
+one side for a good purchase on it, when his eye fell on me, and he saw
+that my bread and butter was gone.
+
+The wonder and consternation with which Joe stopped on the threshold
+of his bite and stared at me, were too evident to escape my sister’s
+observation.
+
+“What’s the matter now?” said she, smartly, as she put down her cup.
+
+“I say, you know!” muttered Joe, shaking his head at me in very serious
+remonstrance. “Pip, old chap! You’ll do yourself a mischief. It’ll stick
+somewhere. You can’t have chawed it, Pip.”
+
+“What’s the matter now?” repeated my sister, more sharply than before.
+
+“If you can cough any trifle on it up, Pip, I’d recommend you to do it,”
+ said Joe, all aghast. “Manners is manners, but still your elth’s your
+elth.”
+
+By this time, my sister was quite desperate, so she pounced on Joe,
+and, taking him by the two whiskers, knocked his head for a little while
+against the wall behind him, while I sat in the corner, looking guiltily
+on.
+
+“Now, perhaps you’ll mention what’s the matter,” said my sister, out of
+breath, “you staring great stuck pig.”
+
+Joe looked at her in a helpless way, then took a helpless bite, and
+looked at me again.
+
+“You know, Pip,” said Joe, solemnly, with his last bite in his cheek,
+and speaking in a confidential voice, as if we two were quite alone,
+“you and me is always friends, and I’d be the last to tell upon you,
+any time. But such a--” he moved his chair and looked about the floor
+between us, and then again at me--“such a most oncommon Bolt as that!”
+
+“Been bolting his food, has he?” cried my sister.
+
+“You know, old chap,” said Joe, looking at me, and not at Mrs. Joe,
+with his bite still in his cheek, “I Bolted, myself, when I was your
+age--frequent--and as a boy I’ve been among a many Bolters; but I never
+see your Bolting equal yet, Pip, and it’s a mercy you ain’t Bolted
+dead.”
+
+My sister made a dive at me, and fished me up by the hair, saying
+nothing more than the awful words, “You come along and be dosed.”
+
+Some medical beast had revived Tar-water in those days as a fine
+medicine, and Mrs. Joe always kept a supply of it in the cupboard;
+having a belief in its virtues correspondent to its nastiness. At the
+best of times, so much of this elixir was administered to me as a choice
+restorative, that I was conscious of going about, smelling like a new
+fence. On this particular evening the urgency of my case demanded a
+pint of this mixture, which was poured down my throat, for my greater
+comfort, while Mrs. Joe held my head under her arm, as a boot would
+be held in a bootjack. Joe got off with half a pint; but was made to
+swallow that (much to his disturbance, as he sat slowly munching and
+meditating before the fire), “because he had had a turn.” Judging from
+myself, I should say he certainly had a turn afterwards, if he had had
+none before.
+
+Conscience is a dreadful thing when it accuses man or boy; but when, in
+the case of a boy, that secret burden co-operates with another secret
+burden down the leg of his trousers, it is (as I can testify) a great
+punishment. The guilty knowledge that I was going to rob Mrs. Joe--I
+never thought I was going to rob Joe, for I never thought of any of the
+housekeeping property as his--united to the necessity of always keeping
+one hand on my bread and butter as I sat, or when I was ordered about
+the kitchen on any small errand, almost drove me out of my mind. Then,
+as the marsh winds made the fire glow and flare, I thought I heard the
+voice outside, of the man with the iron on his leg who had sworn me to
+secrecy, declaring that he couldn’t and wouldn’t starve until to-morrow,
+but must be fed now. At other times, I thought, What if the young man
+who was with so much difficulty restrained from imbruing his hands in me
+should yield to a constitutional impatience, or should mistake the time,
+and should think himself accredited to my heart and liver to-night,
+instead of to-morrow! If ever anybody’s hair stood on end with terror,
+mine must have done so then. But, perhaps, nobody’s ever did?
+
+It was Christmas Eve, and I had to stir the pudding for next day, with
+a copper-stick, from seven to eight by the Dutch clock. I tried it with
+the load upon my leg (and that made me think afresh of the man with the
+load on HIS leg), and found the tendency of exercise to bring the bread
+and butter out at my ankle, quite unmanageable. Happily I slipped away,
+and deposited that part of my conscience in my garret bedroom.
+
+“Hark!” said I, when I had done my stirring, and was taking a final warm
+in the chimney corner before being sent up to bed; “was that great guns,
+Joe?”
+
+“Ah!” said Joe. “There’s another conwict off.”
+
+“What does that mean, Joe?” said I.
+
+Mrs. Joe, who always took explanations upon herself, said, snappishly,
+“Escaped. Escaped.” Administering the definition like Tar-water.
+
+While Mrs. Joe sat with her head bending over her needlework, I put my
+mouth into the forms of saying to Joe, “What’s a convict?” Joe put his
+mouth into the forms of returning such a highly elaborate answer, that I
+could make out nothing of it but the single word “Pip.”
+
+“There was a conwict off last night,” said Joe, aloud, “after
+sunset-gun. And they fired warning of him. And now it appears they’re
+firing warning of another.”
+
+“Who’s firing?” said I.
+
+“Drat that boy,” interposed my sister, frowning at me over her work,
+“what a questioner he is. Ask no questions, and you’ll be told no lies.”
+
+It was not very polite to herself, I thought, to imply that I should be
+told lies by her even if I did ask questions. But she never was polite
+unless there was company.
+
+At this point Joe greatly augmented my curiosity by taking the utmost
+pains to open his mouth very wide, and to put it into the form of a word
+that looked to me like “sulks.” Therefore, I naturally pointed to Mrs.
+Joe, and put my mouth into the form of saying, “her?” But Joe wouldn’t
+hear of that, at all, and again opened his mouth very wide, and shook
+the form of a most emphatic word out of it. But I could make nothing of
+the word.
+
+“Mrs. Joe,” said I, as a last resort, “I should like to know--if you
+wouldn’t much mind--where the firing comes from?”
+
+“Lord bless the boy!” exclaimed my sister, as if she didn’t quite mean
+that but rather the contrary. “From the Hulks!”
+
+“Oh-h!” said I, looking at Joe. “Hulks!”
+
+Joe gave a reproachful cough, as much as to say, “Well, I told you so.”
+
+“And please, what’s Hulks?” said I.
+
+“That’s the way with this boy!” exclaimed my sister, pointing me out
+with her needle and thread, and shaking her head at me. “Answer him one
+question, and he’ll ask you a dozen directly. Hulks are prison-ships,
+right ‘cross th’ meshes.” We always used that name for marshes, in our
+country.
+
+“I wonder who’s put into prison-ships, and why they’re put there?” said
+I, in a general way, and with quiet desperation.
+
+It was too much for Mrs. Joe, who immediately rose. “I tell you what,
+young fellow,” said she, “I didn’t bring you up by hand to badger
+people’s lives out. It would be blame to me and not praise, if I had.
+People are put in the Hulks because they murder, and because they rob,
+and forge, and do all sorts of bad; and they always begin by asking
+questions. Now, you get along to bed!”
+
+I was never allowed a candle to light me to bed, and, as I went upstairs
+in the dark, with my head tingling,--from Mrs. Joe’s thimble
+having played the tambourine upon it, to accompany her last words,--I
+felt fearfully sensible of the great convenience that the hulks were
+handy for me. I was clearly on my way there. I had begun by asking
+questions, and I was going to rob Mrs. Joe.
+
+Since that time, which is far enough away now, I have often thought
+that few people know what secrecy there is in the young under terror.
+No matter how unreasonable the terror, so that it be terror. I was in
+mortal terror of the young man who wanted my heart and liver; I was
+in mortal terror of my interlocutor with the iron leg; I was in mortal
+terror of myself, from whom an awful promise had been extracted; I had
+no hope of deliverance through my all-powerful sister, who repulsed
+me at every turn; I am afraid to think of what I might have done on
+requirement, in the secrecy of my terror.
+
+If I slept at all that night, it was only to imagine myself drifting
+down the river on a strong spring-tide, to the Hulks; a ghostly
+pirate calling out to me through a speaking-trumpet, as I passed the
+gibbet-station, that I had better come ashore and be hanged there at
+once, and not put it off. I was afraid to sleep, even if I had been
+inclined, for I knew that at the first faint dawn of morning I must rob
+the pantry. There was no doing it in the night, for there was no getting
+a light by easy friction then; to have got one I must have struck it out
+of flint and steel, and have made a noise like the very pirate himself
+rattling his chains.
+
+As soon as the great black velvet pall outside my little window was shot
+with gray, I got up and went downstairs; every board upon the way, and
+every crack in every board calling after me, “Stop thief!” and “Get up,
+Mrs. Joe!” In the pantry, which was far more abundantly supplied than
+usual, owing to the season, I was very much alarmed by a hare hanging
+up by the heels, whom I rather thought I caught, when my back was half
+turned, winking. I had no time for verification, no time for selection,
+no time for anything, for I had no time to spare. I stole some bread,
+some rind of cheese, about half a jar of mincemeat (which I tied up in
+my pocket-handkerchief with my last night’s slice), some brandy from a
+stone bottle (which I decanted into a glass bottle I had secretly used
+for making that intoxicating fluid, Spanish-liquorice-water, up in my
+room: diluting the stone bottle from a jug in the kitchen cupboard),
+a meat bone with very little on it, and a beautiful round compact pork
+pie. I was nearly going away without the pie, but I was tempted to mount
+upon a shelf, to look what it was that was put away so carefully in a
+covered earthenware dish in a corner, and I found it was the pie, and
+I took it in the hope that it was not intended for early use, and would
+not be missed for some time.
+
+There was a door in the kitchen, communicating with the forge; I
+unlocked and unbolted that door, and got a file from among Joe’s tools.
+Then I put the fastenings as I had found them, opened the door at which
+I had entered when I ran home last night, shut it, and ran for the misty
+marshes.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter III
+
+It was a rimy morning, and very damp. I had seen the damp lying on the
+outside of my little window, as if some goblin had been crying there all
+night, and using the window for a pocket-handkerchief. Now, I saw the
+damp lying on the bare hedges and spare grass, like a coarser sort of
+spiders’ webs; hanging itself from twig to twig and blade to blade. On
+every rail and gate, wet lay clammy, and the marsh mist was so thick,
+that the wooden finger on the post directing people to our village--a
+direction which they never accepted, for they never came there--was
+invisible to me until I was quite close under it. Then, as I looked up
+at it, while it dripped, it seemed to my oppressed conscience like a
+phantom devoting me to the Hulks.
+
+The mist was heavier yet when I got out upon the marshes, so that
+instead of my running at everything, everything seemed to run at me.
+This was very disagreeable to a guilty mind. The gates and dikes and
+banks came bursting at me through the mist, as if they cried as plainly
+as could be, “A boy with somebody else’s pork pie! Stop him!” The
+cattle came upon me with like suddenness, staring out of their eyes,
+and steaming out of their nostrils, “Halloa, young thief!” One black
+ox, with a white cravat on,--who even had to my awakened conscience
+something of a clerical air,--fixed me so obstinately with his eyes,
+and moved his blunt head round in such an accusatory manner as I moved
+round, that I blubbered out to him, “I couldn’t help it, sir! It wasn’t
+for myself I took it!” Upon which he put down his head, blew a cloud of
+smoke out of his nose, and vanished with a kick-up of his hind-legs and
+a flourish of his tail.
+
+All this time, I was getting on towards the river; but however fast I
+went, I couldn’t warm my feet, to which the damp cold seemed riveted, as
+the iron was riveted to the leg of the man I was running to meet. I knew
+my way to the Battery, pretty straight, for I had been down there on a
+Sunday with Joe, and Joe, sitting on an old gun, had told me that when
+I was ‘prentice to him, regularly bound, we would have such Larks there!
+However, in the confusion of the mist, I found myself at last too far to
+the right, and consequently had to try back along the river-side, on the
+bank of loose stones above the mud and the stakes that staked the tide
+out. Making my way along here with all despatch, I had just crossed a
+ditch which I knew to be very near the Battery, and had just scrambled
+up the mound beyond the ditch, when I saw the man sitting before me.
+His back was towards me, and he had his arms folded, and was nodding
+forward, heavy with sleep.
+
+I thought he would be more glad if I came upon him with his breakfast,
+in that unexpected manner, so I went forward softly and touched him on
+the shoulder. He instantly jumped up, and it was not the same man, but
+another man!
+
+And yet this man was dressed in coarse gray, too, and had a great iron
+on his leg, and was lame, and hoarse, and cold, and was everything that
+the other man was; except that he had not the same face, and had a flat
+broad-brimmed low-crowned felt hat on. All this I saw in a moment, for
+I had only a moment to see it in: he swore an oath at me, made a hit at
+me,--it was a round weak blow that missed me and almost knocked himself
+down, for it made him stumble,--and then he ran into the mist, stumbling
+twice as he went, and I lost him.
+
+“It’s the young man!” I thought, feeling my heart shoot as I identified
+him. I dare say I should have felt a pain in my liver, too, if I had
+known where it was.
+
+I was soon at the Battery after that, and there was the right
+man,--hugging himself and limping to and fro, as if he had never all
+night left off hugging and limping,--waiting for me. He was awfully
+cold, to be sure. I half expected to see him drop down before my face
+and die of deadly cold. His eyes looked so awfully hungry too, that when
+I handed him the file and he laid it down on the grass, it occurred to
+me he would have tried to eat it, if he had not seen my bundle. He did
+not turn me upside down this time to get at what I had, but left me
+right side upwards while I opened the bundle and emptied my pockets.
+
+“What’s in the bottle, boy?” said he.
+
+“Brandy,” said I.
+
+He was already handing mincemeat down his throat in the most curious
+manner,--more like a man who was putting it away somewhere in a violent
+hurry, than a man who was eating it,--but he left off to take some of
+the liquor. He shivered all the while so violently, that it was quite
+as much as he could do to keep the neck of the bottle between his teeth,
+without biting it off.
+
+“I think you have got the ague,” said I.
+
+“I’m much of your opinion, boy,” said he.
+
+“It’s bad about here,” I told him. “You’ve been lying out on the meshes,
+and they’re dreadful aguish. Rheumatic too.”
+
+“I’ll eat my breakfast afore they’re the death of me,” said he. “I’d do
+that, if I was going to be strung up to that there gallows as there is
+over there, directly afterwards. I’ll beat the shivers so far, I’ll bet
+you.”
+
+He was gobbling mincemeat, meatbone, bread, cheese, and pork pie, all
+at once: staring distrustfully while he did so at the mist all round
+us, and often stopping--even stopping his jaws--to listen. Some real or
+fancied sound, some clink upon the river or breathing of beast upon the
+marsh, now gave him a start, and he said, suddenly,--
+
+“You’re not a deceiving imp? You brought no one with you?”
+
+“No, sir! No!”
+
+“Nor giv’ no one the office to follow you?”
+
+“No!”
+
+“Well,” said he, “I believe you. You’d be but a fierce young hound
+indeed, if at your time of life you could help to hunt a wretched
+warmint hunted as near death and dunghill as this poor wretched warmint
+is!”
+
+Something clicked in his throat as if he had works in him like a clock,
+and was going to strike. And he smeared his ragged rough sleeve over his
+eyes.
+
+Pitying his desolation, and watching him as he gradually settled down
+upon the pie, I made bold to say, “I am glad you enjoy it.”
+
+“Did you speak?”
+
+“I said I was glad you enjoyed it.”
+
+“Thankee, my boy. I do.”
+
+I had often watched a large dog of ours eating his food; and I now
+noticed a decided similarity between the dog’s way of eating, and the
+man’s. The man took strong sharp sudden bites, just like the dog. He
+swallowed, or rather snapped up, every mouthful, too soon and too fast;
+and he looked sideways here and there while he ate, as if he thought
+there was danger in every direction of somebody’s coming to take the pie
+away. He was altogether too unsettled in his mind over it, to appreciate
+it comfortably I thought, or to have anybody to dine with him, without
+making a chop with his jaws at the visitor. In all of which particulars
+he was very like the dog.
+
+“I am afraid you won’t leave any of it for him,” said I, timidly; after
+a silence during which I had hesitated as to the politeness of making
+the remark. “There’s no more to be got where that came from.” It was the
+certainty of this fact that impelled me to offer the hint.
+
+“Leave any for him? Who’s him?” said my friend, stopping in his
+crunching of pie-crust.
+
+“The young man. That you spoke of. That was hid with you.”
+
+“Oh ah!” he returned, with something like a gruff laugh. “Him? Yes, yes!
+He don’t want no wittles.”
+
+“I thought he looked as if he did,” said I.
+
+The man stopped eating, and regarded me with the keenest scrutiny and
+the greatest surprise.
+
+“Looked? When?”
+
+“Just now.”
+
+“Where?”
+
+“Yonder,” said I, pointing; “over there, where I found him nodding
+asleep, and thought it was you.”
+
+He held me by the collar and stared at me so, that I began to think his
+first idea about cutting my throat had revived.
+
+“Dressed like you, you know, only with a hat,” I explained, trembling;
+“and--and”--I was very anxious to put this delicately--“and with--the
+same reason for wanting to borrow a file. Didn’t you hear the cannon
+last night?”
+
+“Then there was firing!” he said to himself.
+
+“I wonder you shouldn’t have been sure of that,” I returned, “for
+we heard it up at home, and that’s farther away, and we were shut in
+besides.”
+
+“Why, see now!” said he. “When a man’s alone on these flats, with a
+light head and a light stomach, perishing of cold and want, he hears
+nothin’ all night, but guns firing, and voices calling. Hears? He sees
+the soldiers, with their red coats lighted up by the torches carried
+afore, closing in round him. Hears his number called, hears himself
+challenged, hears the rattle of the muskets, hears the orders ‘Make
+ready! Present! Cover him steady, men!’ and is laid hands on--and
+there’s nothin’! Why, if I see one pursuing party last night--coming up
+in order, Damn ‘em, with their tramp, tramp--I see a hundred. And as to
+firing! Why, I see the mist shake with the cannon, arter it was broad
+day,--But this man”; he had said all the rest, as if he had forgotten my
+being there; “did you notice anything in him?”
+
+“He had a badly bruised face,” said I, recalling what I hardly knew I
+knew.
+
+“Not here?” exclaimed the man, striking his left cheek mercilessly, with
+the flat of his hand.
+
+“Yes, there!”
+
+“Where is he?” He crammed what little food was left, into the breast of
+his gray jacket. “Show me the way he went. I’ll pull him down, like a
+bloodhound. Curse this iron on my sore leg! Give us hold of the file,
+boy.”
+
+I indicated in what direction the mist had shrouded the other man,
+and he looked up at it for an instant. But he was down on the rank wet
+grass, filing at his iron like a madman, and not minding me or minding
+his own leg, which had an old chafe upon it and was bloody, but which he
+handled as roughly as if it had no more feeling in it than the file. I
+was very much afraid of him again, now that he had worked himself into
+this fierce hurry, and I was likewise very much afraid of keeping away
+from home any longer. I told him I must go, but he took no notice, so
+I thought the best thing I could do was to slip off. The last I saw
+of him, his head was bent over his knee and he was working hard at his
+fetter, muttering impatient imprecations at it and at his leg. The last
+I heard of him, I stopped in the mist to listen, and the file was still
+going.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter IV
+
+I fully expected to find a Constable in the kitchen, waiting to take me
+up. But not only was there no Constable there, but no discovery had yet
+been made of the robbery. Mrs. Joe was prodigiously busy in getting the
+house ready for the festivities of the day, and Joe had been put upon
+the kitchen doorstep to keep him out of the dust-pan,--an article into
+which his destiny always led him, sooner or later, when my sister was
+vigorously reaping the floors of her establishment.
+
+“And where the deuce ha’ you been?” was Mrs. Joe’s Christmas salutation,
+when I and my conscience showed ourselves.
+
+I said I had been down to hear the Carols. “Ah! well!” observed Mrs.
+Joe. “You might ha’ done worse.” Not a doubt of that I thought.
+
+“Perhaps if I warn’t a blacksmith’s wife, and (what’s the same thing) a
+slave with her apron never off, I should have been to hear the Carols,”
+ said Mrs. Joe. “I’m rather partial to Carols, myself, and that’s the
+best of reasons for my never hearing any.”
+
+Joe, who had ventured into the kitchen after me as the dustpan had
+retired before us, drew the back of his hand across his nose with a
+conciliatory air, when Mrs. Joe darted a look at him, and, when her eyes
+were withdrawn, secretly crossed his two forefingers, and exhibited them
+to me, as our token that Mrs. Joe was in a cross temper. This was so
+much her normal state, that Joe and I would often, for weeks together,
+be, as to our fingers, like monumental Crusaders as to their legs.
+
+We were to have a superb dinner, consisting of a leg of pickled pork and
+greens, and a pair of roast stuffed fowls. A handsome mince-pie had
+been made yesterday morning (which accounted for the mincemeat not
+being missed), and the pudding was already on the boil. These extensive
+arrangements occasioned us to be cut off unceremoniously in respect of
+breakfast; “for I ain’t,” said Mrs. Joe,--“I ain’t a going to have
+no formal cramming and busting and washing up now, with what I’ve got
+before me, I promise you!”
+
+So, we had our slices served out, as if we were two thousand troops on a
+forced march instead of a man and boy at home; and we took gulps of milk
+and water, with apologetic countenances, from a jug on the dresser. In
+the meantime, Mrs. Joe put clean white curtains up, and tacked a new
+flowered flounce across the wide chimney to replace the old one, and
+uncovered the little state parlor across the passage, which was never
+uncovered at any other time, but passed the rest of the year in a cool
+haze of silver paper, which even extended to the four little white
+crockery poodles on the mantel-shelf, each with a black nose and a
+basket of flowers in his mouth, and each the counterpart of the other.
+Mrs. Joe was a very clean housekeeper, but had an exquisite art of
+making her cleanliness more uncomfortable and unacceptable than dirt
+itself. Cleanliness is next to Godliness, and some people do the same by
+their religion.
+
+My sister, having so much to do, was going to church vicariously, that
+is to say, Joe and I were going. In his working-clothes, Joe was a
+well-knit characteristic-looking blacksmith; in his holiday clothes,
+he was more like a scarecrow in good circumstances, than anything else.
+Nothing that he wore then fitted him or seemed to belong to him; and
+everything that he wore then grazed him. On the present festive occasion
+he emerged from his room, when the blithe bells were going, the picture
+of misery, in a full suit of Sunday penitentials. As to me, I think my
+sister must have had some general idea that I was a young offender whom
+an Accoucheur Policeman had taken up (on my birthday) and delivered over
+to her, to be dealt with according to the outraged majesty of the law.
+I was always treated as if I had insisted on being born in opposition
+to the dictates of reason, religion, and morality, and against the
+dissuading arguments of my best friends. Even when I was taken to have
+a new suit of clothes, the tailor had orders to make them like a kind of
+Reformatory, and on no account to let me have the free use of my limbs.
+
+Joe and I going to church, therefore, must have been a moving spectacle
+for compassionate minds. Yet, what I suffered outside was nothing to
+what I underwent within. The terrors that had assailed me whenever
+Mrs. Joe had gone near the pantry, or out of the room, were only to be
+equalled by the remorse with which my mind dwelt on what my hands had
+done. Under the weight of my wicked secret, I pondered whether the
+Church would be powerful enough to shield me from the vengeance of the
+terrible young man, if I divulged to that establishment. I conceived the
+idea that the time when the banns were read and when the clergyman said,
+“Ye are now to declare it!” would be the time for me to rise and propose
+a private conference in the vestry. I am far from being sure that I
+might not have astonished our small congregation by resorting to this
+extreme measure, but for its being Christmas Day and no Sunday.
+
+Mr. Wopsle, the clerk at church, was to dine with us; and Mr. Hubble
+the wheelwright and Mrs. Hubble; and Uncle Pumblechook (Joe’s uncle,
+but Mrs. Joe appropriated him), who was a well-to-do cornchandler in
+the nearest town, and drove his own chaise-cart. The dinner hour was
+half-past one. When Joe and I got home, we found the table laid, and
+Mrs. Joe dressed, and the dinner dressing, and the front door unlocked
+(it never was at any other time) for the company to enter by, and
+everything most splendid. And still, not a word of the robbery.
+
+The time came, without bringing with it any relief to my feelings, and
+the company came. Mr. Wopsle, united to a Roman nose and a large shining
+bald forehead, had a deep voice which he was uncommonly proud of; indeed
+it was understood among his acquaintance that if you could only give him
+his head, he would read the clergyman into fits; he himself confessed
+that if the Church was “thrown open,” meaning to competition, he would
+not despair of making his mark in it. The Church not being “thrown
+open,” he was, as I have said, our clerk. But he punished the Amens
+tremendously; and when he gave out the psalm,--always giving the whole
+verse,--he looked all round the congregation first, as much as to say,
+“You have heard my friend overhead; oblige me with your opinion of this
+style!”
+
+I opened the door to the company,--making believe that it was a habit
+of ours to open that door,--and I opened it first to Mr. Wopsle, next
+to Mr. and Mrs. Hubble, and last of all to Uncle Pumblechook. N.B. I was
+not allowed to call him uncle, under the severest penalties.
+
+“Mrs. Joe,” said Uncle Pumblechook, a large hard-breathing middle-aged
+slow man, with a mouth like a fish, dull staring eyes, and sandy hair
+standing upright on his head, so that he looked as if he had just been
+all but choked, and had that moment come to, “I have brought you as the
+compliments of the season--I have brought you, Mum, a bottle of sherry
+wine--and I have brought you, Mum, a bottle of port wine.”
+
+Every Christmas Day he presented himself, as a profound novelty, with
+exactly the same words, and carrying the two bottles like dumb-bells.
+Every Christmas Day, Mrs. Joe replied, as she now replied, “O, Un--cle
+Pum-ble--chook! This is kind!” Every Christmas Day, he retorted, as
+he now retorted, “It’s no more than your merits. And now are you all
+bobbish, and how’s Sixpennorth of halfpence?” meaning me.
+
+We dined on these occasions in the kitchen, and adjourned, for the nuts
+and oranges and apples to the parlor; which was a change very like
+Joe’s change from his working-clothes to his Sunday dress. My sister was
+uncommonly lively on the present occasion, and indeed was generally more
+gracious in the society of Mrs. Hubble than in other company. I remember
+Mrs. Hubble as a little curly sharp-edged person in sky-blue, who held a
+conventionally juvenile position, because she had married Mr. Hubble,--I
+don’t know at what remote period,--when she was much younger than he. I
+remember Mr Hubble as a tough, high-shouldered, stooping old man, of a
+sawdusty fragrance, with his legs extraordinarily wide apart: so that in
+my short days I always saw some miles of open country between them when
+I met him coming up the lane.
+
+Among this good company I should have felt myself, even if I hadn’t
+robbed the pantry, in a false position. Not because I was squeezed in
+at an acute angle of the tablecloth, with the table in my chest, and the
+Pumblechookian elbow in my eye, nor because I was not allowed to speak
+(I didn’t want to speak), nor because I was regaled with the scaly tips
+of the drumsticks of the fowls, and with those obscure corners of pork
+of which the pig, when living, had had the least reason to be vain. No;
+I should not have minded that, if they would only have left me alone.
+But they wouldn’t leave me alone. They seemed to think the opportunity
+lost, if they failed to point the conversation at me, every now and
+then, and stick the point into me. I might have been an unfortunate
+little bull in a Spanish arena, I got so smartingly touched up by these
+moral goads.
+
+It began the moment we sat down to dinner. Mr. Wopsle said grace with
+theatrical declamation,--as it now appears to me, something like a
+religious cross of the Ghost in Hamlet with Richard the Third,--and
+ended with the very proper aspiration that we might be truly grateful.
+Upon which my sister fixed me with her eye, and said, in a low
+reproachful voice, “Do you hear that? Be grateful.”
+
+“Especially,” said Mr. Pumblechook, “be grateful, boy, to them which
+brought you up by hand.”
+
+Mrs. Hubble shook her head, and contemplating me with a mournful
+presentiment that I should come to no good, asked, “Why is it that the
+young are never grateful?” This moral mystery seemed too much for
+the company until Mr. Hubble tersely solved it by saying, “Naterally
+wicious.” Everybody then murmured “True!” and looked at me in a
+particularly unpleasant and personal manner.
+
+Joe’s station and influence were something feebler (if possible) when
+there was company than when there was none. But he always aided and
+comforted me when he could, in some way of his own, and he always did so
+at dinner-time by giving me gravy, if there were any. There being plenty
+of gravy to-day, Joe spooned into my plate, at this point, about half a
+pint.
+
+A little later on in the dinner, Mr. Wopsle reviewed the sermon with
+some severity, and intimated--in the usual hypothetical case of the
+Church being “thrown open”--what kind of sermon he would have given
+them. After favoring them with some heads of that discourse, he remarked
+that he considered the subject of the day’s homily, ill chosen; which
+was the less excusable, he added, when there were so many subjects
+“going about.”
+
+“True again,” said Uncle Pumblechook. “You’ve hit it, sir! Plenty of
+subjects going about, for them that know how to put salt upon their
+tails. That’s what’s wanted. A man needn’t go far to find a subject,
+if he’s ready with his salt-box.” Mr. Pumblechook added, after a short
+interval of reflection, “Look at Pork alone. There’s a subject! If you
+want a subject, look at Pork!”
+
+“True, sir. Many a moral for the young,” returned Mr. Wopsle,--and I
+knew he was going to lug me in, before he said it; “might be deduced
+from that text.”
+
+(“You listen to this,” said my sister to me, in a severe parenthesis.)
+
+Joe gave me some more gravy.
+
+“Swine,” pursued Mr. Wopsle, in his deepest voice, and pointing his fork
+at my blushes, as if he were mentioning my Christian name,--“swine were
+the companions of the prodigal. The gluttony of Swine is put before us,
+as an example to the young.” (I thought this pretty well in him who
+had been praising up the pork for being so plump and juicy.) “What is
+detestable in a pig is more detestable in a boy.”
+
+“Or girl,” suggested Mr. Hubble.
+
+“Of course, or girl, Mr. Hubble,” assented Mr. Wopsle, rather irritably,
+“but there is no girl present.”
+
+“Besides,” said Mr. Pumblechook, turning sharp on me, “think what you’ve
+got to be grateful for. If you’d been born a Squeaker--”
+
+“He was, if ever a child was,” said my sister, most emphatically.
+
+Joe gave me some more gravy.
+
+“Well, but I mean a four-footed Squeaker,” said Mr. Pumblechook. “If you
+had been born such, would you have been here now? Not you--”
+
+“Unless in that form,” said Mr. Wopsle, nodding towards the dish.
+
+“But I don’t mean in that form, sir,” returned Mr. Pumblechook, who had
+an objection to being interrupted; “I mean, enjoying himself with his
+elders and betters, and improving himself with their conversation, and
+rolling in the lap of luxury. Would he have been doing that? No, he
+wouldn’t. And what would have been your destination?” turning on me
+again. “You would have been disposed of for so many shillings according
+to the market price of the article, and Dunstable the butcher would have
+come up to you as you lay in your straw, and he would have whipped you
+under his left arm, and with his right he would have tucked up his frock
+to get a penknife from out of his waistcoat-pocket, and he would have
+shed your blood and had your life. No bringing up by hand then. Not a
+bit of it!”
+
+Joe offered me more gravy, which I was afraid to take.
+
+“He was a world of trouble to you, ma’am,” said Mrs. Hubble,
+commiserating my sister.
+
+“Trouble?” echoed my sister; “trouble?” and then entered on a fearful
+catalogue of all the illnesses I had been guilty of, and all the acts
+of sleeplessness I had committed, and all the high places I had tumbled
+from, and all the low places I had tumbled into, and all the injuries I
+had done myself, and all the times she had wished me in my grave, and I
+had contumaciously refused to go there.
+
+I think the Romans must have aggravated one another very much, with
+their noses. Perhaps, they became the restless people they were, in
+consequence. Anyhow, Mr. Wopsle’s Roman nose so aggravated me, during
+the recital of my misdemeanours, that I should have liked to pull it
+until he howled. But, all I had endured up to this time was nothing in
+comparison with the awful feelings that took possession of me when the
+pause was broken which ensued upon my sister’s recital, and in which
+pause everybody had looked at me (as I felt painfully conscious) with
+indignation and abhorrence.
+
+“Yet,” said Mr. Pumblechook, leading the company gently back to the
+theme from which they had strayed, “Pork--regarded as biled--is rich,
+too; ain’t it?”
+
+“Have a little brandy, uncle,” said my sister.
+
+O Heavens, it had come at last! He would find it was weak, he would say
+it was weak, and I was lost! I held tight to the leg of the table under
+the cloth, with both hands, and awaited my fate.
+
+My sister went for the stone bottle, came back with the stone bottle,
+and poured his brandy out: no one else taking any. The wretched man
+trifled with his glass,--took it up, looked at it through the light,
+put it down,--prolonged my misery. All this time Mrs. Joe and Joe were
+briskly clearing the table for the pie and pudding.
+
+I couldn’t keep my eyes off him. Always holding tight by the leg of the
+table with my hands and feet, I saw the miserable creature finger his
+glass playfully, take it up, smile, throw his head back, and drink
+the brandy off. Instantly afterwards, the company were seized with
+unspeakable consternation, owing to his springing to his feet, turning
+round several times in an appalling spasmodic whooping-cough dance,
+and rushing out at the door; he then became visible through the window,
+violently plunging and expectorating, making the most hideous faces, and
+apparently out of his mind.
+
+I held on tight, while Mrs. Joe and Joe ran to him. I didn’t know how
+I had done it, but I had no doubt I had murdered him somehow. In my
+dreadful situation, it was a relief when he was brought back, and
+surveying the company all round as if they had disagreed with him, sank
+down into his chair with the one significant gasp, “Tar!”
+
+I had filled up the bottle from the tar-water jug. I knew he would be
+worse by and by. I moved the table, like a Medium of the present day, by
+the vigor of my unseen hold upon it.
+
+“Tar!” cried my sister, in amazement. “Why, how ever could Tar come
+there?”
+
+But, Uncle Pumblechook, who was omnipotent in that kitchen, wouldn’t
+hear the word, wouldn’t hear of the subject, imperiously waved it all
+away with his hand, and asked for hot gin and water. My sister, who had
+begun to be alarmingly meditative, had to employ herself actively in
+getting the gin, the hot water, the sugar, and the lemon-peel, and mixing
+them. For the time being at least, I was saved. I still held on to the
+leg of the table, but clutched it now with the fervor of gratitude.
+
+By degrees, I became calm enough to release my grasp and partake of
+pudding. Mr. Pumblechook partook of pudding. All partook of pudding.
+The course terminated, and Mr. Pumblechook had begun to beam under the
+genial influence of gin and water. I began to think I should get over
+the day, when my sister said to Joe, “Clean plates,--cold.”
+
+I clutched the leg of the table again immediately, and pressed it to my
+bosom as if it had been the companion of my youth and friend of my soul.
+I foresaw what was coming, and I felt that this time I really was gone.
+
+“You must taste,” said my sister, addressing the guests with her best
+grace--“you must taste, to finish with, such a delightful and delicious
+present of Uncle Pumblechook’s!”
+
+Must they! Let them not hope to taste it!
+
+“You must know,” said my sister, rising, “it’s a pie; a savory pork
+pie.”
+
+The company murmured their compliments. Uncle Pumblechook, sensible of
+having deserved well of his fellow-creatures, said,--quite vivaciously,
+all things considered,--“Well, Mrs. Joe, we’ll do our best endeavors;
+let us have a cut at this same pie.”
+
+My sister went out to get it. I heard her steps proceed to the pantry. I
+saw Mr. Pumblechook balance his knife. I saw reawakening appetite in the
+Roman nostrils of Mr. Wopsle. I heard Mr. Hubble remark that “a bit of
+savory pork pie would lay atop of anything you could mention, and do
+no harm,” and I heard Joe say, “You shall have some, Pip.” I have never
+been absolutely certain whether I uttered a shrill yell of terror,
+merely in spirit, or in the bodily hearing of the company. I felt that I
+could bear no more, and that I must run away. I released the leg of the
+table, and ran for my life.
+
+But I ran no farther than the house door, for there I ran head-foremost
+into a party of soldiers with their muskets, one of whom held out a pair
+of handcuffs to me, saying, “Here you are, look sharp, come on!”
+
+
+
+
+Chapter V
+
+The apparition of a file of soldiers ringing down the but-ends of their
+loaded muskets on our door-step, caused the dinner-party to rise
+from table in confusion, and caused Mrs. Joe re-entering the kitchen
+empty-handed, to stop short and stare, in her wondering lament of
+“Gracious goodness gracious me, what’s gone--with the--pie!”
+
+The sergeant and I were in the kitchen when Mrs. Joe stood staring;
+at which crisis I partially recovered the use of my senses. It was
+the sergeant who had spoken to me, and he was now looking round at the
+company, with his handcuffs invitingly extended towards them in his
+right hand, and his left on my shoulder.
+
+“Excuse me, ladies and gentleman,” said the sergeant, “but as I have
+mentioned at the door to this smart young shaver,” (which he hadn’t), “I
+am on a chase in the name of the king, and I want the blacksmith.”
+
+“And pray what might you want with him?” retorted my sister, quick to
+resent his being wanted at all.
+
+“Missis,” returned the gallant sergeant, “speaking for myself, I should
+reply, the honor and pleasure of his fine wife’s acquaintance; speaking
+for the king, I answer, a little job done.”
+
+This was received as rather neat in the sergeant; insomuch that Mr.
+Pumblechook cried audibly, “Good again!”
+
+“You see, blacksmith,” said the sergeant, who had by this time picked
+out Joe with his eye, “we have had an accident with these, and I find
+the lock of one of ‘em goes wrong, and the coupling don’t act pretty.
+As they are wanted for immediate service, will you throw your eye over
+them?”
+
+Joe threw his eye over them, and pronounced that the job would
+necessitate the lighting of his forge fire, and would take nearer
+two hours than one. “Will it? Then will you set about it at once,
+blacksmith?” said the off-hand sergeant, “as it’s on his Majesty’s
+service. And if my men can bear a hand anywhere, they’ll make themselves
+useful.” With that, he called to his men, who came trooping into the
+kitchen one after another, and piled their arms in a corner. And then
+they stood about, as soldiers do; now, with their hands loosely clasped
+before them; now, resting a knee or a shoulder; now, easing a belt or a
+pouch; now, opening the door to spit stiffly over their high stocks, out
+into the yard.
+
+All these things I saw without then knowing that I saw them, for I
+was in an agony of apprehension. But beginning to perceive that the
+handcuffs were not for me, and that the military had so far got the
+better of the pie as to put it in the background, I collected a little
+more of my scattered wits.
+
+“Would you give me the time?” said the sergeant, addressing himself to
+Mr. Pumblechook, as to a man whose appreciative powers justified the
+inference that he was equal to the time.
+
+“It’s just gone half past two.”
+
+“That’s not so bad,” said the sergeant, reflecting; “even if I was
+forced to halt here nigh two hours, that’ll do. How far might you call
+yourselves from the marshes, hereabouts? Not above a mile, I reckon?”
+
+“Just a mile,” said Mrs. Joe.
+
+“That’ll do. We begin to close in upon ‘em about dusk. A little before
+dusk, my orders are. That’ll do.”
+
+“Convicts, sergeant?” asked Mr. Wopsle, in a matter-of-course way.
+
+“Ay!” returned the sergeant, “two. They’re pretty well known to be out
+on the marshes still, and they won’t try to get clear of ‘em before
+dusk. Anybody here seen anything of any such game?”
+
+Everybody, myself excepted, said no, with confidence. Nobody thought of
+me.
+
+“Well!” said the sergeant, “they’ll find themselves trapped in a circle,
+I expect, sooner than they count on. Now, blacksmith! If you’re ready,
+his Majesty the King is.”
+
+Joe had got his coat and waistcoat and cravat off, and his leather apron
+on, and passed into the forge. One of the soldiers opened its wooden
+windows, another lighted the fire, another turned to at the bellows, the
+rest stood round the blaze, which was soon roaring. Then Joe began to
+hammer and clink, hammer and clink, and we all looked on.
+
+The interest of the impending pursuit not only absorbed the general
+attention, but even made my sister liberal. She drew a pitcher of beer
+from the cask for the soldiers, and invited the sergeant to take a glass
+of brandy. But Mr. Pumblechook said, sharply, “Give him wine, Mum. I’ll
+engage there’s no tar in that:” so, the sergeant thanked him and said
+that as he preferred his drink without tar, he would take wine, if it
+was equally convenient. When it was given him, he drank his Majesty’s
+health and compliments of the season, and took it all at a mouthful and
+smacked his lips.
+
+“Good stuff, eh, sergeant?” said Mr. Pumblechook.
+
+“I’ll tell you something,” returned the sergeant; “I suspect that
+stuff’s of your providing.”
+
+Mr. Pumblechook, with a fat sort of laugh, said, “Ay, ay? Why?”
+
+“Because,” returned the sergeant, clapping him on the shoulder, “you’re
+a man that knows what’s what.”
+
+“D’ye think so?” said Mr. Pumblechook, with his former laugh. “Have
+another glass!”
+
+“With you. Hob and nob,” returned the sergeant. “The top of mine to the
+foot of yours,--the foot of yours to the top of mine,--Ring once, ring
+twice,--the best tune on the Musical Glasses! Your health. May you live
+a thousand years, and never be a worse judge of the right sort than you
+are at the present moment of your life!”
+
+The sergeant tossed off his glass again and seemed quite ready for
+another glass. I noticed that Mr. Pumblechook in his hospitality
+appeared to forget that he had made a present of the wine, but took the
+bottle from Mrs. Joe and had all the credit of handing it about in a
+gush of joviality. Even I got some. And he was so very free of the wine
+that he even called for the other bottle, and handed that about with the
+same liberality, when the first was gone.
+
+As I watched them while they all stood clustering about the forge,
+enjoying themselves so much, I thought what terrible good sauce for
+a dinner my fugitive friend on the marshes was. They had not enjoyed
+themselves a quarter so much, before the entertainment was brightened
+with the excitement he furnished. And now, when they were all in lively
+anticipation of “the two villains” being taken, and when the bellows
+seemed to roar for the fugitives, the fire to flare for them, the smoke
+to hurry away in pursuit of them, Joe to hammer and clink for them,
+and all the murky shadows on the wall to shake at them in menace as the
+blaze rose and sank, and the red-hot sparks dropped and died, the pale
+afternoon outside almost seemed in my pitying young fancy to have turned
+pale on their account, poor wretches.
+
+At last, Joe’s job was done, and the ringing and roaring stopped. As Joe
+got on his coat, he mustered courage to propose that some of us should
+go down with the soldiers and see what came of the hunt. Mr. Pumblechook
+and Mr. Hubble declined, on the plea of a pipe and ladies’ society; but
+Mr. Wopsle said he would go, if Joe would. Joe said he was agreeable,
+and would take me, if Mrs. Joe approved. We never should have got leave
+to go, I am sure, but for Mrs. Joe’s curiosity to know all about it and
+how it ended. As it was, she merely stipulated, “If you bring the boy
+back with his head blown to bits by a musket, don’t look to me to put it
+together again.”
+
+The sergeant took a polite leave of the ladies, and parted from Mr.
+Pumblechook as from a comrade; though I doubt if he were quite as fully
+sensible of that gentleman’s merits under arid conditions, as when
+something moist was going. His men resumed their muskets and fell in.
+Mr. Wopsle, Joe, and I, received strict charge to keep in the rear, and
+to speak no word after we reached the marshes. When we were all out in
+the raw air and were steadily moving towards our business, I treasonably
+whispered to Joe, “I hope, Joe, we shan’t find them.” and Joe whispered
+to me, “I’d give a shilling if they had cut and run, Pip.”
+
+We were joined by no stragglers from the village, for the weather was
+cold and threatening, the way dreary, the footing bad, darkness coming
+on, and the people had good fires in-doors and were keeping the day. A
+few faces hurried to glowing windows and looked after us, but none came
+out. We passed the finger-post, and held straight on to the churchyard.
+There we were stopped a few minutes by a signal from the sergeant’s
+hand, while two or three of his men dispersed themselves among the
+graves, and also examined the porch. They came in again without finding
+anything, and then we struck out on the open marshes, through the gate
+at the side of the churchyard. A bitter sleet came rattling against us
+here on the east wind, and Joe took me on his back.
+
+Now that we were out upon the dismal wilderness where they little
+thought I had been within eight or nine hours and had seen both men
+hiding, I considered for the first time, with great dread, if we should
+come upon them, would my particular convict suppose that it was I who
+had brought the soldiers there? He had asked me if I was a deceiving
+imp, and he had said I should be a fierce young hound if I joined the
+hunt against him. Would he believe that I was both imp and hound in
+treacherous earnest, and had betrayed him?
+
+It was of no use asking myself this question now. There I was, on Joe’s
+back, and there was Joe beneath me, charging at the ditches like a
+hunter, and stimulating Mr. Wopsle not to tumble on his Roman nose, and
+to keep up with us. The soldiers were in front of us, extending into a
+pretty wide line with an interval between man and man. We were taking
+the course I had begun with, and from which I had diverged in the mist.
+Either the mist was not out again yet, or the wind had dispelled it.
+Under the low red glare of sunset, the beacon, and the gibbet, and the
+mound of the Battery, and the opposite shore of the river, were plain,
+though all of a watery lead color.
+
+With my heart thumping like a blacksmith at Joe’s broad shoulder, I
+looked all about for any sign of the convicts. I could see none, I could
+hear none. Mr. Wopsle had greatly alarmed me more than once, by his
+blowing and hard breathing; but I knew the sounds by this time, and
+could dissociate them from the object of pursuit. I got a dreadful
+start, when I thought I heard the file still going; but it was only a
+sheep-bell. The sheep stopped in their eating and looked timidly at
+us; and the cattle, their heads turned from the wind and sleet, stared
+angrily as if they held us responsible for both annoyances; but, except
+these things, and the shudder of the dying day in every blade of grass,
+there was no break in the bleak stillness of the marshes.
+
+The soldiers were moving on in the direction of the old Battery, and we
+were moving on a little way behind them, when, all of a sudden, we all
+stopped. For there had reached us on the wings of the wind and rain, a
+long shout. It was repeated. It was at a distance towards the east, but
+it was long and loud. Nay, there seemed to be two or more shouts raised
+together,--if one might judge from a confusion in the sound.
+
+To this effect the sergeant and the nearest men were speaking under
+their breath, when Joe and I came up. After another moment’s listening,
+Joe (who was a good judge) agreed, and Mr. Wopsle (who was a bad judge)
+agreed. The sergeant, a decisive man, ordered that the sound should not
+be answered, but that the course should be changed, and that his men
+should make towards it “at the double.” So we slanted to the right
+(where the East was), and Joe pounded away so wonderfully, that I had to
+hold on tight to keep my seat.
+
+It was a run indeed now, and what Joe called, in the only two words he
+spoke all the time, “a Winder.” Down banks and up banks, and over gates,
+and splashing into dikes, and breaking among coarse rushes: no man cared
+where he went. As we came nearer to the shouting, it became more and
+more apparent that it was made by more than one voice. Sometimes, it
+seemed to stop altogether, and then the soldiers stopped. When it broke
+out again, the soldiers made for it at a greater rate than ever, and we
+after them. After a while, we had so run it down, that we could hear one
+voice calling “Murder!” and another voice, “Convicts! Runaways! Guard!
+This way for the runaway convicts!” Then both voices would seem to be
+stifled in a struggle, and then would break out again. And when it had
+come to this, the soldiers ran like deer, and Joe too.
+
+The sergeant ran in first, when we had run the noise quite down, and two
+of his men ran in close upon him. Their pieces were cocked and levelled
+when we all ran in.
+
+“Here are both men!” panted the sergeant, struggling at the bottom of a
+ditch. “Surrender, you two! and confound you for two wild beasts! Come
+asunder!”
+
+Water was splashing, and mud was flying, and oaths were being sworn, and
+blows were being struck, when some more men went down into the ditch to
+help the sergeant, and dragged out, separately, my convict and the other
+one. Both were bleeding and panting and execrating and struggling; but
+of course I knew them both directly.
+
+“Mind!” said my convict, wiping blood from his face with his ragged
+sleeves, and shaking torn hair from his fingers: “I took him! I give him
+up to you! Mind that!”
+
+“It’s not much to be particular about,” said the sergeant; “it’ll do you
+small good, my man, being in the same plight yourself. Handcuffs there!”
+
+“I don’t expect it to do me any good. I don’t want it to do me more good
+than it does now,” said my convict, with a greedy laugh. “I took him. He
+knows it. That’s enough for me.”
+
+The other convict was livid to look at, and, in addition to the old
+bruised left side of his face, seemed to be bruised and torn all over.
+He could not so much as get his breath to speak, until they were both
+separately handcuffed, but leaned upon a soldier to keep himself from
+falling.
+
+“Take notice, guard,--he tried to murder me,” were his first words.
+
+“Tried to murder him?” said my convict, disdainfully. “Try, and not
+do it? I took him, and giv’ him up; that’s what I done. I not only
+prevented him getting off the marshes, but I dragged him here,--dragged
+him this far on his way back. He’s a gentleman, if you please, this
+villain. Now, the Hulks has got its gentleman again, through me. Murder
+him? Worth my while, too, to murder him, when I could do worse and drag
+him back!”
+
+The other one still gasped, “He tried--he tried-to--murder me.
+Bear--bear witness.”
+
+“Lookee here!” said my convict to the sergeant. “Single-handed I got
+clear of the prison-ship; I made a dash and I done it. I could ha’ got
+clear of these death-cold flats likewise--look at my leg: you won’t find
+much iron on it--if I hadn’t made the discovery that he was here. Let
+him go free? Let him profit by the means as I found out? Let him make a
+tool of me afresh and again? Once more? No, no, no. If I had died at
+the bottom there,” and he made an emphatic swing at the ditch with his
+manacled hands, “I’d have held to him with that grip, that you should
+have been safe to find him in my hold.”
+
+The other fugitive, who was evidently in extreme horror of his
+companion, repeated, “He tried to murder me. I should have been a dead
+man if you had not come up.”
+
+“He lies!” said my convict, with fierce energy. “He’s a liar born, and
+he’ll die a liar. Look at his face; ain’t it written there? Let him turn
+those eyes of his on me. I defy him to do it.”
+
+The other, with an effort at a scornful smile, which could not, however,
+collect the nervous working of his mouth into any set expression, looked
+at the soldiers, and looked about at the marshes and at the sky, but
+certainly did not look at the speaker.
+
+“Do you see him?” pursued my convict. “Do you see what a villain he is?
+Do you see those grovelling and wandering eyes? That’s how he looked
+when we were tried together. He never looked at me.”
+
+The other, always working and working his dry lips and turning his eyes
+restlessly about him far and near, did at last turn them for a moment on
+the speaker, with the words, “You are not much to look at,” and with
+a half-taunting glance at the bound hands. At that point, my convict
+became so frantically exasperated, that he would have rushed upon him
+but for the interposition of the soldiers. “Didn’t I tell you,” said the
+other convict then, “that he would murder me, if he could?” And any one
+could see that he shook with fear, and that there broke out upon his
+lips curious white flakes, like thin snow.
+
+“Enough of this parley,” said the sergeant. “Light those torches.”
+
+As one of the soldiers, who carried a basket in lieu of a gun, went down
+on his knee to open it, my convict looked round him for the first time,
+and saw me. I had alighted from Joe’s back on the brink of the ditch
+when we came up, and had not moved since. I looked at him eagerly when
+he looked at me, and slightly moved my hands and shook my head. I had
+been waiting for him to see me that I might try to assure him of my
+innocence. It was not at all expressed to me that he even comprehended
+my intention, for he gave me a look that I did not understand, and it
+all passed in a moment. But if he had looked at me for an hour or for
+a day, I could not have remembered his face ever afterwards, as having
+been more attentive.
+
+The soldier with the basket soon got a light, and lighted three or four
+torches, and took one himself and distributed the others. It had been
+almost dark before, but now it seemed quite dark, and soon afterwards
+very dark. Before we departed from that spot, four soldiers standing in
+a ring, fired twice into the air. Presently we saw other torches kindled
+at some distance behind us, and others on the marshes on the opposite
+bank of the river. “All right,” said the sergeant. “March.”
+
+We had not gone far when three cannon were fired ahead of us with a
+sound that seemed to burst something inside my ear. “You are expected
+on board,” said the sergeant to my convict; “they know you are coming.
+Don’t straggle, my man. Close up here.”
+
+The two were kept apart, and each walked surrounded by a separate guard.
+I had hold of Joe’s hand now, and Joe carried one of the torches. Mr.
+Wopsle had been for going back, but Joe was resolved to see it out, so
+we went on with the party. There was a reasonably good path now, mostly
+on the edge of the river, with a divergence here and there where a dike
+came, with a miniature windmill on it and a muddy sluice-gate. When
+I looked round, I could see the other lights coming in after us. The
+torches we carried dropped great blotches of fire upon the track, and
+I could see those, too, lying smoking and flaring. I could see nothing
+else but black darkness. Our lights warmed the air about us with their
+pitchy blaze, and the two prisoners seemed rather to like that, as they
+limped along in the midst of the muskets. We could not go fast, because
+of their lameness; and they were so spent, that two or three times we
+had to halt while they rested.
+
+After an hour or so of this travelling, we came to a rough wooden hut
+and a landing-place. There was a guard in the hut, and they challenged,
+and the sergeant answered. Then, we went into the hut, where there was
+a smell of tobacco and whitewash, and a bright fire, and a lamp, and
+a stand of muskets, and a drum, and a low wooden bedstead, like an
+overgrown mangle without the machinery, capable of holding about a dozen
+soldiers all at once. Three or four soldiers who lay upon it in their
+great-coats were not much interested in us, but just lifted their heads
+and took a sleepy stare, and then lay down again. The sergeant made some
+kind of report, and some entry in a book, and then the convict whom I
+call the other convict was drafted off with his guard, to go on board
+first.
+
+My convict never looked at me, except that once. While we stood in the
+hut, he stood before the fire looking thoughtfully at it, or putting up
+his feet by turns upon the hob, and looking thoughtfully at them as if
+he pitied them for their recent adventures. Suddenly, he turned to the
+sergeant, and remarked,--
+
+“I wish to say something respecting this escape. It may prevent some
+persons laying under suspicion alonger me.”
+
+“You can say what you like,” returned the sergeant, standing coolly
+looking at him with his arms folded, “but you have no call to say it
+here. You’ll have opportunity enough to say about it, and hear about it,
+before it’s done with, you know.”
+
+“I know, but this is another pint, a separate matter. A man can’t
+starve; at least I can’t. I took some wittles, up at the willage over
+yonder,--where the church stands a’most out on the marshes.”
+
+“You mean stole,” said the sergeant.
+
+“And I’ll tell you where from. From the blacksmith’s.”
+
+“Halloa!” said the sergeant, staring at Joe.
+
+“Halloa, Pip!” said Joe, staring at me.
+
+“It was some broken wittles--that’s what it was--and a dram of liquor,
+and a pie.”
+
+“Have you happened to miss such an article as a pie, blacksmith?” asked
+the sergeant, confidentially.
+
+“My wife did, at the very moment when you came in. Don’t you know, Pip?”
+
+“So,” said my convict, turning his eyes on Joe in a moody manner, and
+without the least glance at me,--“so you’re the blacksmith, are you?
+Than I’m sorry to say, I’ve eat your pie.”
+
+“God knows you’re welcome to it,--so far as it was ever mine,” returned
+Joe, with a saving remembrance of Mrs. Joe. “We don’t know what you have
+done, but we wouldn’t have you starved to death for it, poor miserable
+fellow-creatur.--Would us, Pip?”
+
+The something that I had noticed before, clicked in the man’s throat
+again, and he turned his back. The boat had returned, and his guard were
+ready, so we followed him to the landing-place made of rough stakes
+and stones, and saw him put into the boat, which was rowed by a crew of
+convicts like himself. No one seemed surprised to see him, or interested
+in seeing him, or glad to see him, or sorry to see him, or spoke a word,
+except that somebody in the boat growled as if to dogs, “Give way,
+you!” which was the signal for the dip of the oars. By the light of the
+torches, we saw the black Hulk lying out a little way from the mud of
+the shore, like a wicked Noah’s ark. Cribbed and barred and moored by
+massive rusty chains, the prison-ship seemed in my young eyes to be
+ironed like the prisoners. We saw the boat go alongside, and we saw
+him taken up the side and disappear. Then, the ends of the torches were
+flung hissing into the water, and went out, as if it were all over with
+him.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VI
+
+My state of mind regarding the pilfering from which I had been so
+unexpectedly exonerated did not impel me to frank disclosure; but I hope
+it had some dregs of good at the bottom of it.
+
+I do not recall that I felt any tenderness of conscience in reference
+to Mrs. Joe, when the fear of being found out was lifted off me. But
+I loved Joe,--perhaps for no better reason in those early days than
+because the dear fellow let me love him,--and, as to him, my inner self
+was not so easily composed. It was much upon my mind (particularly when
+I first saw him looking about for his file) that I ought to tell Joe the
+whole truth. Yet I did not, and for the reason that I mistrusted that
+if I did, he would think me worse than I was. The fear of losing Joe’s
+confidence, and of thenceforth sitting in the chimney corner at night
+staring drearily at my forever lost companion and friend, tied up my
+tongue. I morbidly represented to myself that if Joe knew it, I never
+afterwards could see him at the fireside feeling his fair whisker,
+without thinking that he was meditating on it. That, if Joe knew it, I
+never afterwards could see him glance, however casually, at yesterday’s
+meat or pudding when it came on to-day’s table, without thinking that he
+was debating whether I had been in the pantry. That, if Joe knew it, and
+at any subsequent period of our joint domestic life remarked that his
+beer was flat or thick, the conviction that he suspected tar in it,
+would bring a rush of blood to my face. In a word, I was too cowardly
+to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing
+what I knew to be wrong. I had had no intercourse with the world at
+that time, and I imitated none of its many inhabitants who act in this
+manner. Quite an untaught genius, I made the discovery of the line of
+action for myself.
+
+As I was sleepy before we were far away from the prison-ship, Joe took
+me on his back again and carried me home. He must have had a tiresome
+journey of it, for Mr. Wopsle, being knocked up, was in such a very bad
+temper that if the Church had been thrown open, he would probably have
+excommunicated the whole expedition, beginning with Joe and myself. In
+his lay capacity, he persisted in sitting down in the damp to such
+an insane extent, that when his coat was taken off to be dried at the
+kitchen fire, the circumstantial evidence on his trousers would have
+hanged him, if it had been a capital offence.
+
+By that time, I was staggering on the kitchen floor like a little
+drunkard, through having been newly set upon my feet, and through having
+been fast asleep, and through waking in the heat and lights and noise of
+tongues. As I came to myself (with the aid of a heavy thump between the
+shoulders, and the restorative exclamation “Yah! Was there ever such
+a boy as this!” from my sister,) I found Joe telling them about the
+convict’s confession, and all the visitors suggesting different ways
+by which he had got into the pantry. Mr. Pumblechook made out, after
+carefully surveying the premises, that he had first got upon the roof of
+the forge, and had then got upon the roof of the house, and had then let
+himself down the kitchen chimney by a rope made of his bedding cut
+into strips; and as Mr. Pumblechook was very positive and drove his
+own chaise-cart--over everybody--it was agreed that it must be so. Mr.
+Wopsle, indeed, wildly cried out, “No!” with the feeble malice of a
+tired man; but, as he had no theory, and no coat on, he was unanimously
+set at naught,--not to mention his smoking hard behind, as he stood
+with his back to the kitchen fire to draw the damp out: which was not
+calculated to inspire confidence.
+
+This was all I heard that night before my sister clutched me, as a
+slumberous offence to the company’s eyesight, and assisted me up to bed
+with such a strong hand that I seemed to have fifty boots on, and to be
+dangling them all against the edges of the stairs. My state of mind, as
+I have described it, began before I was up in the morning, and lasted
+long after the subject had died out, and had ceased to be mentioned
+saving on exceptional occasions.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VII
+
+At the time when I stood in the churchyard reading the family
+tombstones, I had just enough learning to be able to spell them out. My
+construction even of their simple meaning was not very correct, for I
+read “wife of the Above” as a complimentary reference to my father’s
+exaltation to a better world; and if any one of my deceased relations
+had been referred to as “Below,” I have no doubt I should have formed
+the worst opinions of that member of the family. Neither were my notions
+of the theological positions to which my Catechism bound me, at
+all accurate; for, I have a lively remembrance that I supposed my
+declaration that I was to “walk in the same all the days of my life,”
+ laid me under an obligation always to go through the village from our
+house in one particular direction, and never to vary it by turning down
+by the wheelwright’s or up by the mill.
+
+When I was old enough, I was to be apprenticed to Joe, and until I could
+assume that dignity I was not to be what Mrs. Joe called “Pompeyed,” or
+(as I render it) pampered. Therefore, I was not only odd-boy about the
+forge, but if any neighbor happened to want an extra boy to frighten
+birds, or pick up stones, or do any such job, I was favored with the
+employment. In order, however, that our superior position might not be
+compromised thereby, a money-box was kept on the kitchen mantel-shelf,
+into which it was publicly made known that all my earnings were
+dropped. I have an impression that they were to be contributed
+eventually towards the liquidation of the National Debt, but I know I
+had no hope of any personal participation in the treasure.
+
+Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt kept an evening school in the village; that is
+to say, she was a ridiculous old woman of limited means and unlimited
+infirmity, who used to go to sleep from six to seven every evening, in
+the society of youth who paid two pence per week each, for the improving
+opportunity of seeing her do it. She rented a small cottage, and Mr.
+Wopsle had the room upstairs, where we students used to overhear him
+reading aloud in a most dignified and terrific manner, and occasionally
+bumping on the ceiling. There was a fiction that Mr. Wopsle “examined”
+ the scholars once a quarter. What he did on those occasions was to turn
+up his cuffs, stick up his hair, and give us Mark Antony’s oration over
+the body of Caesar. This was always followed by Collins’s Ode on
+the Passions, wherein I particularly venerated Mr. Wopsle as Revenge
+throwing his blood-stained sword in thunder down, and taking the
+War-denouncing trumpet with a withering look. It was not with me then,
+as it was in later life, when I fell into the society of the Passions,
+and compared them with Collins and Wopsle, rather to the disadvantage of
+both gentlemen.
+
+Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt, besides keeping this Educational Institution,
+kept in the same room--a little general shop. She had no idea what stock
+she had, or what the price of anything in it was; but there was a little
+greasy memorandum-book kept in a drawer, which served as a Catalogue
+of Prices, and by this oracle Biddy arranged all the shop transactions.
+Biddy was Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt’s granddaughter; I confess myself
+quite unequal to the working out of the problem, what relation she was
+to Mr. Wopsle. She was an orphan like myself; like me, too, had been
+brought up by hand. She was most noticeable, I thought, in respect of
+her extremities; for, her hair always wanted brushing, her hands always
+wanted washing, and her shoes always wanted mending and pulling up at
+heel. This description must be received with a week-day limitation. On
+Sundays, she went to church elaborated.
+
+Much of my unassisted self, and more by the help of Biddy than of Mr.
+Wopsle’s great-aunt, I struggled through the alphabet as if it had been
+a bramble-bush; getting considerably worried and scratched by every
+letter. After that I fell among those thieves, the nine figures, who
+seemed every evening to do something new to disguise themselves and
+baffle recognition. But, at last I began, in a purblind groping way, to
+read, write, and cipher, on the very smallest scale.
+
+One night I was sitting in the chimney corner with my slate, expending
+great efforts on the production of a letter to Joe. I think it must have
+been a full year after our hunt upon the marshes, for it was a long
+time after, and it was winter and a hard frost. With an alphabet on the
+hearth at my feet for reference, I contrived in an hour or two to print
+and smear this epistle:--
+
+“MI DEER JO i OPE U R KRWITE WELL i OPE i SHAL SON B HABELL 4 2 TEEDGE
+U JO AN THEN WE SHORL B SO GLODD AN WEN i M PRENGTD 2 U JO WOT LARX AN
+BLEVE ME INF XN PIP.”
+
+There was no indispensable necessity for my communicating with Joe by
+letter, inasmuch as he sat beside me and we were alone. But I delivered
+this written communication (slate and all) with my own hand, and Joe
+received it as a miracle of erudition.
+
+“I say, Pip, old chap!” cried Joe, opening his blue eyes wide, “what a
+scholar you are! An’t you?”
+
+“I should like to be,” said I, glancing at the slate as he held it; with
+a misgiving that the writing was rather hilly.
+
+“Why, here’s a J,” said Joe, “and a O equal to anythink! Here’s a J and
+a O, Pip, and a J-O, Joe.”
+
+I had never heard Joe read aloud to any greater extent than this
+monosyllable, and I had observed at church last Sunday, when I
+accidentally held our Prayer-Book upside down, that it seemed to suit
+his convenience quite as well as if it had been all right. Wishing to
+embrace the present occasion of finding out whether in teaching Joe, I
+should have to begin quite at the beginning, I said, “Ah! But read the
+rest, Jo.”
+
+“The rest, eh, Pip?” said Joe, looking at it with a slow, searching eye,
+“One, two, three. Why, here’s three Js, and three Os, and three J-O,
+Joes in it, Pip!”
+
+I leaned over Joe, and, with the aid of my forefinger read him the whole
+letter.
+
+“Astonishing!” said Joe, when I had finished. “You ARE a scholar.”
+
+“How do you spell Gargery, Joe?” I asked him, with a modest patronage.
+
+“I don’t spell it at all,” said Joe.
+
+“But supposing you did?”
+
+“It can’t be supposed,” said Joe. “Tho’ I’m uncommon fond of reading,
+too.”
+
+“Are you, Joe?”
+
+“On-common. Give me,” said Joe, “a good book, or a good newspaper, and
+sit me down afore a good fire, and I ask no better. Lord!” he continued,
+after rubbing his knees a little, “when you do come to a J and a O, and
+says you, ‘Here, at last, is a J-O, Joe,’ how interesting reading is!”
+
+I derived from this, that Joe’s education, like Steam, was yet in its
+infancy. Pursuing the subject, I inquired,--
+
+“Didn’t you ever go to school, Joe, when you were as little as me?”
+
+“No, Pip.”
+
+“Why didn’t you ever go to school, Joe, when you were as little as me?”
+
+“Well, Pip,” said Joe, taking up the poker, and settling himself to
+his usual occupation when he was thoughtful, of slowly raking the fire
+between the lower bars; “I’ll tell you. My father, Pip, he were given
+to drink, and when he were overtook with drink, he hammered away at
+my mother, most onmerciful. It were a’most the only hammering he did,
+indeed, ‘xcepting at myself. And he hammered at me with a wigor only
+to be equalled by the wigor with which he didn’t hammer at his
+anwil.--You’re a listening and understanding, Pip?”
+
+“Yes, Joe.”
+
+“‘Consequence, my mother and me we ran away from my father several
+times; and then my mother she’d go out to work, and she’d say, “Joe,”
+ she’d say, “now, please God, you shall have some schooling, child,” and
+she’d put me to school. But my father were that good in his hart that
+he couldn’t abear to be without us. So, he’d come with a most tremenjous
+crowd and make such a row at the doors of the houses where we was, that
+they used to be obligated to have no more to do with us and to give us
+up to him. And then he took us home and hammered us. Which, you see,
+Pip,” said Joe, pausing in his meditative raking of the fire, and
+looking at me, “were a drawback on my learning.”
+
+“Certainly, poor Joe!”
+
+“Though mind you, Pip,” said Joe, with a judicial touch or two of the
+poker on the top bar, “rendering unto all their doo, and maintaining
+equal justice betwixt man and man, my father were that good in his hart,
+don’t you see?”
+
+I didn’t see; but I didn’t say so.
+
+“Well!” Joe pursued, “somebody must keep the pot a biling, Pip, or the
+pot won’t bile, don’t you know?”
+
+I saw that, and said so.
+
+“‘Consequence, my father didn’t make objections to my going to work; so
+I went to work at my present calling, which were his too, if he
+would have followed it, and I worked tolerable hard, I assure you, Pip.
+In time I were able to keep him, and I kep him till he went off in a
+purple leptic fit. And it were my intentions to have had put upon his
+tombstone that, Whatsume’er the failings on his part, Remember reader he
+were that good in his heart.”
+
+Joe recited this couplet with such manifest pride and careful
+perspicuity, that I asked him if he had made it himself.
+
+“I made it,” said Joe, “my own self. I made it in a moment. It was like
+striking out a horseshoe complete, in a single blow. I never was so much
+surprised in all my life,--couldn’t credit my own ed,--to tell you the
+truth, hardly believed it were my own ed. As I was saying, Pip, it were
+my intentions to have had it cut over him; but poetry costs money, cut
+it how you will, small or large, and it were not done. Not to mention
+bearers, all the money that could be spared were wanted for my mother.
+She were in poor elth, and quite broke. She weren’t long of following,
+poor soul, and her share of peace come round at last.”
+
+Joe’s blue eyes turned a little watery; he rubbed first one of them, and
+then the other, in a most uncongenial and uncomfortable manner, with the
+round knob on the top of the poker.
+
+“It were but lonesome then,” said Joe, “living here alone, and I got
+acquainted with your sister. Now, Pip,”--Joe looked firmly at me as
+if he knew I was not going to agree with him;--“your sister is a fine
+figure of a woman.”
+
+I could not help looking at the fire, in an obvious state of doubt.
+
+“Whatever family opinions, or whatever the world’s opinions, on that
+subject may be, Pip, your sister is,” Joe tapped the top bar with the
+poker after every word following, “a-fine-figure--of--a--woman!”
+
+I could think of nothing better to say than “I am glad you think so,
+Joe.”
+
+“So am I,” returned Joe, catching me up. “I am glad I think so, Pip. A
+little redness or a little matter of Bone, here or there, what does it
+signify to Me?”
+
+I sagaciously observed, if it didn’t signify to him, to whom did it
+signify?
+
+“Certainly!” assented Joe. “That’s it. You’re right, old chap! When I
+got acquainted with your sister, it were the talk how she was bringing
+you up by hand. Very kind of her too, all the folks said, and I said,
+along with all the folks. As to you,” Joe pursued with a countenance
+expressive of seeing something very nasty indeed, “if you could have
+been aware how small and flabby and mean you was, dear me, you’d have
+formed the most contemptible opinion of yourself!”
+
+Not exactly relishing this, I said, “Never mind me, Joe.”
+
+“But I did mind you, Pip,” he returned with tender simplicity. “When
+I offered to your sister to keep company, and to be asked in church at
+such times as she was willing and ready to come to the forge, I said to
+her, ‘And bring the poor little child. God bless the poor little child,’
+I said to your sister, ‘there’s room for him at the forge!’”
+
+I broke out crying and begging pardon, and hugged Joe round the neck:
+who dropped the poker to hug me, and to say, “Ever the best of friends;
+an’t us, Pip? Don’t cry, old chap!”
+
+When this little interruption was over, Joe resumed:--
+
+“Well, you see, Pip, and here we are! That’s about where it lights; here
+we are! Now, when you take me in hand in my learning, Pip (and I tell
+you beforehand I am awful dull, most awful dull), Mrs. Joe mustn’t see
+too much of what we’re up to. It must be done, as I may say, on the sly.
+And why on the sly? I’ll tell you why, Pip.”
+
+He had taken up the poker again; without which, I doubt if he could have
+proceeded in his demonstration.
+
+“Your sister is given to government.”
+
+“Given to government, Joe?” I was startled, for I had some shadowy idea
+(and I am afraid I must add, hope) that Joe had divorced her in a favor
+of the Lords of the Admiralty, or Treasury.
+
+“Given to government,” said Joe. “Which I meantersay the government of
+you and myself.”
+
+“Oh!”
+
+“And she an’t over partial to having scholars on the premises,” Joe
+continued, “and in partickler would not be over partial to my being a
+scholar, for fear as I might rise. Like a sort of rebel, don’t you see?”
+
+I was going to retort with an inquiry, and had got as far as “Why--”
+ when Joe stopped me.
+
+“Stay a bit. I know what you’re a going to say, Pip; stay a bit! I don’t
+deny that your sister comes the Mo-gul over us, now and again. I don’t
+deny that she do throw us back-falls, and that she do drop down upon us
+heavy. At such times as when your sister is on the Ram-page, Pip,” Joe
+sank his voice to a whisper and glanced at the door, “candor compels fur
+to admit that she is a Buster.”
+
+Joe pronounced this word, as if it began with at least twelve capital
+Bs.
+
+“Why don’t I rise? That were your observation when I broke it off, Pip?”
+
+“Yes, Joe.”
+
+“Well,” said Joe, passing the poker in to his left hand, that he might
+feel his whisker; and I had no hope of him whenever he took to that
+placid occupation; “your sister’s a master-mind. A master-mind.”
+
+“What’s that?” I asked, in some hope of bringing him to a stand. But
+Joe was readier with his definition than I had expected, and completely
+stopped me by arguing circularly, and answering with a fixed look,
+“Her.”
+
+“And I ain’t a master-mind,” Joe resumed, when he had unfixed his look,
+and got back to his whisker. “And last of all, Pip,--and this I want to
+say very serious to you, old chap,--I see so much in my poor mother,
+of a woman drudging and slaving and breaking her honest hart and never
+getting no peace in her mortal days, that I’m dead afeerd of going wrong
+in the way of not doing what’s right by a woman, and I’d fur rather
+of the two go wrong the t’other way, and be a little ill-conwenienced
+myself. I wish it was only me that got put out, Pip; I wish there warn’t
+no Tickler for you, old chap; I wish I could take it all on myself;
+but this is the up-and-down-and-straight on it, Pip, and I hope you’ll
+overlook shortcomings.”
+
+Young as I was, I believe that I dated a new admiration of Joe from that
+night. We were equals afterwards, as we had been before; but, afterwards
+at quiet times when I sat looking at Joe and thinking about him, I had
+a new sensation of feeling conscious that I was looking up to Joe in my
+heart.
+
+“However,” said Joe, rising to replenish the fire; “here’s the
+Dutch-clock a working himself up to being equal to strike Eight of ‘em,
+and she’s not come home yet! I hope Uncle Pumblechook’s mare mayn’t have
+set a forefoot on a piece o’ ice, and gone down.”
+
+Mrs. Joe made occasional trips with Uncle Pumblechook on market-days,
+to assist him in buying such household stuffs and goods as required a
+woman’s judgment; Uncle Pumblechook being a bachelor and reposing no
+confidences in his domestic servant. This was market-day, and Mrs. Joe
+was out on one of these expeditions.
+
+Joe made the fire and swept the hearth, and then we went to the door to
+listen for the chaise-cart. It was a dry cold night, and the wind blew
+keenly, and the frost was white and hard. A man would die to-night of
+lying out on the marshes, I thought. And then I looked at the stars, and
+considered how awful it would be for a man to turn his face up to them
+as he froze to death, and see no help or pity in all the glittering
+multitude.
+
+“Here comes the mare,” said Joe, “ringing like a peal of bells!”
+
+The sound of her iron shoes upon the hard road was quite musical, as she
+came along at a much brisker trot than usual. We got a chair out, ready
+for Mrs. Joe’s alighting, and stirred up the fire that they might see a
+bright window, and took a final survey of the kitchen that nothing might
+be out of its place. When we had completed these preparations, they
+drove up, wrapped to the eyes. Mrs. Joe was soon landed, and Uncle
+Pumblechook was soon down too, covering the mare with a cloth, and we
+were soon all in the kitchen, carrying so much cold air in with us that
+it seemed to drive all the heat out of the fire.
+
+“Now,” said Mrs. Joe, unwrapping herself with haste and excitement, and
+throwing her bonnet back on her shoulders where it hung by the strings,
+“if this boy ain’t grateful this night, he never will be!”
+
+I looked as grateful as any boy possibly could, who was wholly
+uninformed why he ought to assume that expression.
+
+“It’s only to be hoped,” said my sister, “that he won’t be Pompeyed. But
+I have my fears.”
+
+“She ain’t in that line, Mum,” said Mr. Pumblechook. “She knows better.”
+
+She? I looked at Joe, making the motion with my lips and eyebrows,
+“She?” Joe looked at me, making the motion with his lips and eyebrows,
+“She?” My sister catching him in the act, he drew the back of his hand
+across his nose with his usual conciliatory air on such occasions, and
+looked at her.
+
+“Well?” said my sister, in her snappish way. “What are you staring at?
+Is the house afire?”
+
+“--Which some individual,” Joe politely hinted, “mentioned--she.”
+
+“And she is a she, I suppose?” said my sister. “Unless you call Miss
+Havisham a he. And I doubt if even you’ll go so far as that.”
+
+“Miss Havisham, up town?” said Joe.
+
+“Is there any Miss Havisham down town?” returned my sister.
+
+“She wants this boy to go and play there. And of course he’s going. And
+he had better play there,” said my sister, shaking her head at me as an
+encouragement to be extremely light and sportive, “or I’ll work him.”
+
+I had heard of Miss Havisham up town,--everybody for miles round had
+heard of Miss Havisham up town,--as an immensely rich and grim lady who
+lived in a large and dismal house barricaded against robbers, and who
+led a life of seclusion.
+
+“Well to be sure!” said Joe, astounded. “I wonder how she come to know
+Pip!”
+
+“Noodle!” cried my sister. “Who said she knew him?”
+
+“--Which some individual,” Joe again politely hinted, “mentioned that
+she wanted him to go and play there.”
+
+“And couldn’t she ask Uncle Pumblechook if he knew of a boy to go and
+play there? Isn’t it just barely possible that Uncle Pumblechook may be
+a tenant of hers, and that he may sometimes--we won’t say quarterly
+or half-yearly, for that would be requiring too much of you--but
+sometimes--go there to pay his rent? And couldn’t she then ask Uncle
+Pumblechook if he knew of a boy to go and play there? And couldn’t Uncle
+Pumblechook, being always considerate and thoughtful for us--though you
+may not think it, Joseph,” in a tone of the deepest reproach, as if
+he were the most callous of nephews, “then mention this boy, standing
+Prancing here”--which I solemnly declare I was not doing--“that I have
+for ever been a willing slave to?”
+
+“Good again!” cried Uncle Pumblechook. “Well put! Prettily pointed! Good
+indeed! Now Joseph, you know the case.”
+
+“No, Joseph,” said my sister, still in a reproachful manner, while Joe
+apologetically drew the back of his hand across and across his nose,
+“you do not yet--though you may not think it--know the case. You may
+consider that you do, but you do not, Joseph. For you do not know that
+Uncle Pumblechook, being sensible that for anything we can tell, this
+boy’s fortune may be made by his going to Miss Havisham’s, has offered
+to take him into town to-night in his own chaise-cart, and to keep
+him to-night, and to take him with his own hands to Miss Havisham’s
+to-morrow morning. And Lor-a-mussy me!” cried my sister, casting off her
+bonnet in sudden desperation, “here I stand talking to mere Mooncalfs,
+with Uncle Pumblechook waiting, and the mare catching cold at the door,
+and the boy grimed with crock and dirt from the hair of his head to the
+sole of his foot!”
+
+With that, she pounced upon me, like an eagle on a lamb, and my face was
+squeezed into wooden bowls in sinks, and my head was put under taps of
+water-butts, and I was soaped, and kneaded, and towelled, and thumped,
+and harrowed, and rasped, until I really was quite beside myself. (I
+may here remark that I suppose myself to be better acquainted than
+any living authority, with the ridgy effect of a wedding-ring, passing
+unsympathetically over the human countenance.)
+
+When my ablutions were completed, I was put into clean linen of the
+stiffest character, like a young penitent into sackcloth, and was
+trussed up in my tightest and fearfullest suit. I was then delivered
+over to Mr. Pumblechook, who formally received me as if he were the
+Sheriff, and who let off upon me the speech that I knew he had been
+dying to make all along: “Boy, be forever grateful to all friends, but
+especially unto them which brought you up by hand!”
+
+“Good-bye, Joe!”
+
+“God bless you, Pip, old chap!”
+
+I had never parted from him before, and what with my feelings and what
+with soapsuds, I could at first see no stars from the chaise-cart.
+But they twinkled out one by one, without throwing any light on the
+questions why on earth I was going to play at Miss Havisham’s, and what
+on earth I was expected to play at.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VIII
+
+Mr. Pumblechook’s premises in the High Street of the market town,
+were of a peppercorny and farinaceous character, as the premises of a
+cornchandler and seedsman should be. It appeared to me that he must be a
+very happy man indeed, to have so many little drawers in his shop; and
+I wondered when I peeped into one or two on the lower tiers, and saw the
+tied-up brown paper packets inside, whether the flower-seeds and bulbs
+ever wanted of a fine day to break out of those jails, and bloom.
+
+It was in the early morning after my arrival that I entertained this
+speculation. On the previous night, I had been sent straight to bed in
+an attic with a sloping roof, which was so low in the corner where the
+bedstead was, that I calculated the tiles as being within a foot of my
+eyebrows. In the same early morning, I discovered a singular affinity
+between seeds and corduroys. Mr. Pumblechook wore corduroys, and so did
+his shopman; and somehow, there was a general air and flavor about the
+corduroys, so much in the nature of seeds, and a general air and flavor
+about the seeds, so much in the nature of corduroys, that I hardly knew
+which was which. The same opportunity served me for noticing that Mr.
+Pumblechook appeared to conduct his business by looking across the
+street at the saddler, who appeared to transact his business by keeping
+his eye on the coachmaker, who appeared to get on in life by putting his
+hands in his pockets and contemplating the baker, who in his turn folded
+his arms and stared at the grocer, who stood at his door and yawned at
+the chemist. The watchmaker, always poring over a little desk with
+a magnifying-glass at his eye, and always inspected by a group of
+smock-frocks poring over him through the glass of his shop-window,
+seemed to be about the only person in the High Street whose trade
+engaged his attention.
+
+Mr. Pumblechook and I breakfasted at eight o’clock in the parlor behind
+the shop, while the shopman took his mug of tea and hunch of bread
+and butter on a sack of peas in the front premises. I considered Mr.
+Pumblechook wretched company. Besides being possessed by my sister’s
+idea that a mortifying and penitential character ought to be imparted
+to my diet,--besides giving me as much crumb as possible in combination
+with as little butter, and putting such a quantity of warm water into
+my milk that it would have been more candid to have left the milk out
+altogether,--his conversation consisted of nothing but arithmetic. On
+my politely bidding him Good morning, he said, pompously, “Seven times
+nine, boy?” And how should I be able to answer, dodged in that way, in
+a strange place, on an empty stomach! I was hungry, but before I had
+swallowed a morsel, he began a running sum that lasted all through the
+breakfast. “Seven?” “And four?” “And eight?” “And six?” “And two?” “And
+ten?” And so on. And after each figure was disposed of, it was as much
+as I could do to get a bite or a sup, before the next came; while he sat
+at his ease guessing nothing, and eating bacon and hot roll, in (if I
+may be allowed the expression) a gorging and gormandizing manner.
+
+For such reasons, I was very glad when ten o’clock came and we started
+for Miss Havisham’s; though I was not at all at my ease regarding the
+manner in which I should acquit myself under that lady’s roof. Within
+a quarter of an hour we came to Miss Havisham’s house, which was of old
+brick, and dismal, and had a great many iron bars to it. Some of the
+windows had been walled up; of those that remained, all the lower were
+rustily barred. There was a courtyard in front, and that was barred; so
+we had to wait, after ringing the bell, until some one should come
+to open it. While we waited at the gate, I peeped in (even then Mr.
+Pumblechook said, “And fourteen?” but I pretended not to hear him), and
+saw that at the side of the house there was a large brewery. No brewing
+was going on in it, and none seemed to have gone on for a long long
+time.
+
+A window was raised, and a clear voice demanded “What name?” To which my
+conductor replied, “Pumblechook.” The voice returned, “Quite right,” and
+the window was shut again, and a young lady came across the court-yard,
+with keys in her hand.
+
+“This,” said Mr. Pumblechook, “is Pip.”
+
+“This is Pip, is it?” returned the young lady, who was very pretty and
+seemed very proud; “come in, Pip.”
+
+Mr. Pumblechook was coming in also, when she stopped him with the gate.
+
+“Oh!” she said. “Did you wish to see Miss Havisham?”
+
+“If Miss Havisham wished to see me,” returned Mr. Pumblechook,
+discomfited.
+
+“Ah!” said the girl; “but you see she don’t.”
+
+She said it so finally, and in such an undiscussible way, that Mr.
+Pumblechook, though in a condition of ruffled dignity, could not
+protest. But he eyed me severely,--as if I had done anything to
+him!--and departed with the words reproachfully delivered: “Boy! Let
+your behavior here be a credit unto them which brought you up by hand!”
+ I was not free from apprehension that he would come back to propound
+through the gate, “And sixteen?” But he didn’t.
+
+My young conductress locked the gate, and we went across the courtyard.
+It was paved and clean, but grass was growing in every crevice. The
+brewery buildings had a little lane of communication with it, and the
+wooden gates of that lane stood open, and all the brewery beyond stood
+open, away to the high enclosing wall; and all was empty and disused.
+The cold wind seemed to blow colder there than outside the gate; and
+it made a shrill noise in howling in and out at the open sides of the
+brewery, like the noise of wind in the rigging of a ship at sea.
+
+She saw me looking at it, and she said, “You could drink without hurt
+all the strong beer that’s brewed there now, boy.”
+
+“I should think I could, miss,” said I, in a shy way.
+
+“Better not try to brew beer there now, or it would turn out sour, boy;
+don’t you think so?”
+
+“It looks like it, miss.”
+
+“Not that anybody means to try,” she added, “for that’s all done with,
+and the place will stand as idle as it is till it falls. As to strong
+beer, there’s enough of it in the cellars already, to drown the Manor
+House.”
+
+“Is that the name of this house, miss?”
+
+“One of its names, boy.”
+
+“It has more than one, then, miss?”
+
+“One more. Its other name was Satis; which is Greek, or Latin, or
+Hebrew, or all three--or all one to me--for enough.”
+
+“Enough House,” said I; “that’s a curious name, miss.”
+
+“Yes,” she replied; “but it meant more than it said. It meant, when it
+was given, that whoever had this house could want nothing else. They
+must have been easily satisfied in those days, I should think. But don’t
+loiter, boy.”
+
+Though she called me “boy” so often, and with a carelessness that was
+far from complimentary, she was of about my own age. She seemed much
+older than I, of course, being a girl, and beautiful and self-possessed;
+and she was as scornful of me as if she had been one-and-twenty, and a
+queen.
+
+We went into the house by a side door, the great front entrance had two
+chains across it outside,--and the first thing I noticed was, that the
+passages were all dark, and that she had left a candle burning there.
+She took it up, and we went through more passages and up a staircase,
+and still it was all dark, and only the candle lighted us.
+
+At last we came to the door of a room, and she said, “Go in.”
+
+I answered, more in shyness than politeness, “After you, miss.”
+
+To this she returned: “Don’t be ridiculous, boy; I am not going in.” And
+scornfully walked away, and--what was worse--took the candle with her.
+
+This was very uncomfortable, and I was half afraid. However, the only
+thing to be done being to knock at the door, I knocked, and was told
+from within to enter. I entered, therefore, and found myself in a pretty
+large room, well lighted with wax candles. No glimpse of daylight was to
+be seen in it. It was a dressing-room, as I supposed from the furniture,
+though much of it was of forms and uses then quite unknown to me. But
+prominent in it was a draped table with a gilded looking-glass, and that
+I made out at first sight to be a fine lady’s dressing-table.
+
+Whether I should have made out this object so soon if there had been no
+fine lady sitting at it, I cannot say. In an arm-chair, with an
+elbow resting on the table and her head leaning on that hand, sat the
+strangest lady I have ever seen, or shall ever see.
+
+She was dressed in rich materials,--satins, and lace, and silks,--all
+of white. Her shoes were white. And she had a long white veil dependent
+from her hair, and she had bridal flowers in her hair, but her hair was
+white. Some bright jewels sparkled on her neck and on her hands, and
+some other jewels lay sparkling on the table. Dresses, less splendid
+than the dress she wore, and half-packed trunks, were scattered about.
+She had not quite finished dressing, for she had but one shoe on,--the
+other was on the table near her hand,--her veil was but half arranged,
+her watch and chain were not put on, and some lace for her bosom lay
+with those trinkets, and with her handkerchief, and gloves, and
+some flowers, and a Prayer-Book all confusedly heaped about the
+looking-glass.
+
+It was not in the first few moments that I saw all these things, though
+I saw more of them in the first moments than might be supposed. But I
+saw that everything within my view which ought to be white, had been
+white long ago, and had lost its lustre and was faded and yellow. I saw
+that the bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and
+like the flowers, and had no brightness left but the brightness of her
+sunken eyes. I saw that the dress had been put upon the rounded figure
+of a young woman, and that the figure upon which it now hung loose had
+shrunk to skin and bone. Once, I had been taken to see some ghastly
+waxwork at the Fair, representing I know not what impossible personage
+lying in state. Once, I had been taken to one of our old marsh churches
+to see a skeleton in the ashes of a rich dress that had been dug out of
+a vault under the church pavement. Now, waxwork and skeleton seemed to
+have dark eyes that moved and looked at me. I should have cried out, if
+I could.
+
+“Who is it?” said the lady at the table.
+
+“Pip, ma’am.”
+
+“Pip?”
+
+“Mr. Pumblechook’s boy, ma’am. Come--to play.”
+
+“Come nearer; let me look at you. Come close.”
+
+It was when I stood before her, avoiding her eyes, that I took note of
+the surrounding objects in detail, and saw that her watch had stopped
+at twenty minutes to nine, and that a clock in the room had stopped at
+twenty minutes to nine.
+
+“Look at me,” said Miss Havisham. “You are not afraid of a woman who has
+never seen the sun since you were born?”
+
+I regret to state that I was not afraid of telling the enormous lie
+comprehended in the answer “No.”
+
+“Do you know what I touch here?” she said, laying her hands, one upon
+the other, on her left side.
+
+“Yes, ma’am.” (It made me think of the young man.)
+
+“What do I touch?”
+
+“Your heart.”
+
+“Broken!”
+
+She uttered the word with an eager look, and with strong emphasis, and
+with a weird smile that had a kind of boast in it. Afterwards she kept
+her hands there for a little while, and slowly took them away as if they
+were heavy.
+
+“I am tired,” said Miss Havisham. “I want diversion, and I have done
+with men and women. Play.”
+
+I think it will be conceded by my most disputatious reader, that she
+could hardly have directed an unfortunate boy to do anything in the wide
+world more difficult to be done under the circumstances.
+
+“I sometimes have sick fancies,” she went on, “and I have a sick fancy
+that I want to see some play. There, there!” with an impatient movement
+of the fingers of her right hand; “play, play, play!”
+
+For a moment, with the fear of my sister’s working me before my eyes, I
+had a desperate idea of starting round the room in the assumed character
+of Mr. Pumblechook’s chaise-cart. But I felt myself so unequal to the
+performance that I gave it up, and stood looking at Miss Havisham in
+what I suppose she took for a dogged manner, inasmuch as she said, when
+we had taken a good look at each other,--
+
+“Are you sullen and obstinate?”
+
+“No, ma’am, I am very sorry for you, and very sorry I can’t play just
+now. If you complain of me I shall get into trouble with my sister, so
+I would do it if I could; but it’s so new here, and so strange, and so
+fine,--and melancholy--.” I stopped, fearing I might say too much, or
+had already said it, and we took another look at each other.
+
+Before she spoke again, she turned her eyes from me, and looked at the
+dress she wore, and at the dressing-table, and finally at herself in the
+looking-glass.
+
+“So new to him,” she muttered, “so old to me; so strange to him, so
+familiar to me; so melancholy to both of us! Call Estella.”
+
+As she was still looking at the reflection of herself, I thought she was
+still talking to herself, and kept quiet.
+
+“Call Estella,” she repeated, flashing a look at me. “You can do that.
+Call Estella. At the door.”
+
+To stand in the dark in a mysterious passage of an unknown house,
+bawling Estella to a scornful young lady neither visible nor responsive,
+and feeling it a dreadful liberty so to roar out her name, was almost
+as bad as playing to order. But she answered at last, and her light came
+along the dark passage like a star.
+
+Miss Havisham beckoned her to come close, and took up a jewel from the
+table, and tried its effect upon her fair young bosom and against her
+pretty brown hair. “Your own, one day, my dear, and you will use it
+well. Let me see you play cards with this boy.”
+
+“With this boy? Why, he is a common laboring boy!”
+
+I thought I overheard Miss Havisham answer,--only it seemed so
+unlikely,--“Well? You can break his heart.”
+
+“What do you play, boy?” asked Estella of myself, with the greatest
+disdain.
+
+“Nothing but beggar my neighbor, miss.”
+
+“Beggar him,” said Miss Havisham to Estella. So we sat down to cards.
+
+It was then I began to understand that everything in the room had
+stopped, like the watch and the clock, a long time ago. I noticed that
+Miss Havisham put down the jewel exactly on the spot from which she had
+taken it up. As Estella dealt the cards, I glanced at the dressing-table
+again, and saw that the shoe upon it, once white, now yellow, had never
+been worn. I glanced down at the foot from which the shoe was absent,
+and saw that the silk stocking on it, once white, now yellow, had been
+trodden ragged. Without this arrest of everything, this standing still
+of all the pale decayed objects, not even the withered bridal dress on
+the collapsed form could have looked so like grave-clothes, or the long
+veil so like a shroud.
+
+So she sat, corpse-like, as we played at cards; the frillings and
+trimmings on her bridal dress, looking like earthy paper. I knew nothing
+then of the discoveries that are occasionally made of bodies buried in
+ancient times, which fall to powder in the moment of being distinctly
+seen; but, I have often thought since, that she must have looked as if
+the admission of the natural light of day would have struck her to dust.
+
+“He calls the knaves Jacks, this boy!” said Estella with disdain, before
+our first game was out. “And what coarse hands he has! And what thick
+boots!”
+
+I had never thought of being ashamed of my hands before; but I began
+to consider them a very indifferent pair. Her contempt for me was so
+strong, that it became infectious, and I caught it.
+
+She won the game, and I dealt. I misdealt, as was only natural, when I
+knew she was lying in wait for me to do wrong; and she denounced me for
+a stupid, clumsy laboring-boy.
+
+“You say nothing of her,” remarked Miss Havisham to me, as she looked
+on. “She says many hard things of you, but you say nothing of her. What
+do you think of her?”
+
+“I don’t like to say,” I stammered.
+
+“Tell me in my ear,” said Miss Havisham, bending down.
+
+“I think she is very proud,” I replied, in a whisper.
+
+“Anything else?”
+
+“I think she is very pretty.”
+
+“Anything else?”
+
+“I think she is very insulting.” (She was looking at me then with a look
+of supreme aversion.)
+
+“Anything else?”
+
+“I think I should like to go home.”
+
+“And never see her again, though she is so pretty?”
+
+“I am not sure that I shouldn’t like to see her again, but I should like
+to go home now.”
+
+“You shall go soon,” said Miss Havisham, aloud. “Play the game out.”
+
+Saving for the one weird smile at first, I should have felt almost
+sure that Miss Havisham’s face could not smile. It had dropped into a
+watchful and brooding expression,--most likely when all the things about
+her had become transfixed,--and it looked as if nothing could ever lift
+it up again. Her chest had dropped, so that she stooped; and her voice
+had dropped, so that she spoke low, and with a dead lull upon her;
+altogether, she had the appearance of having dropped body and soul,
+within and without, under the weight of a crushing blow.
+
+I played the game to an end with Estella, and she beggared me. She
+threw the cards down on the table when she had won them all, as if she
+despised them for having been won of me.
+
+“When shall I have you here again?” said Miss Havisham. “Let me think.”
+
+I was beginning to remind her that to-day was Wednesday, when she
+checked me with her former impatient movement of the fingers of her
+right hand.
+
+“There, there! I know nothing of days of the week; I know nothing of
+weeks of the year. Come again after six days. You hear?”
+
+“Yes, ma’am.”
+
+“Estella, take him down. Let him have something to eat, and let him roam
+and look about him while he eats. Go, Pip.”
+
+I followed the candle down, as I had followed the candle up, and she
+stood it in the place where we had found it. Until she opened the
+side entrance, I had fancied, without thinking about it, that it must
+necessarily be night-time. The rush of the daylight quite confounded me,
+and made me feel as if I had been in the candlelight of the strange room
+many hours.
+
+“You are to wait here, you boy,” said Estella; and disappeared and
+closed the door.
+
+I took the opportunity of being alone in the courtyard to look at my
+coarse hands and my common boots. My opinion of those accessories was
+not favorable. They had never troubled me before, but they troubled
+me now, as vulgar appendages. I determined to ask Joe why he had ever
+taught me to call those picture-cards Jacks, which ought to be called
+knaves. I wished Joe had been rather more genteelly brought up, and then
+I should have been so too.
+
+She came back, with some bread and meat and a little mug of beer. She
+put the mug down on the stones of the yard, and gave me the bread
+and meat without looking at me, as insolently as if I were a dog in
+disgrace. I was so humiliated, hurt, spurned, offended, angry, sorry,--I
+cannot hit upon the right name for the smart--God knows what its name
+was,--that tears started to my eyes. The moment they sprang there, the
+girl looked at me with a quick delight in having been the cause of them.
+This gave me power to keep them back and to look at her: so, she gave a
+contemptuous toss--but with a sense, I thought, of having made too sure
+that I was so wounded--and left me.
+
+But when she was gone, I looked about me for a place to hide my face
+in, and got behind one of the gates in the brewery-lane, and leaned my
+sleeve against the wall there, and leaned my forehead on it and cried.
+As I cried, I kicked the wall, and took a hard twist at my hair; so
+bitter were my feelings, and so sharp was the smart without a name, that
+needed counteraction.
+
+My sister’s bringing up had made me sensitive. In the little world in
+which children have their existence whosoever brings them up, there is
+nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice. It may be
+only small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the child
+is small, and its world is small, and its rocking-horse stands as many
+hands high, according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter. Within
+myself, I had sustained, from my babyhood, a perpetual conflict with
+injustice. I had known, from the time when I could speak, that my
+sister, in her capricious and violent coercion, was unjust to me. I had
+cherished a profound conviction that her bringing me up by hand gave her
+no right to bring me up by jerks. Through all my punishments, disgraces,
+fasts, and vigils, and other penitential performances, I had nursed
+this assurance; and to my communing so much with it, in a solitary and
+unprotected way, I in great part refer the fact that I was morally timid
+and very sensitive.
+
+I got rid of my injured feelings for the time by kicking them into the
+brewery wall, and twisting them out of my hair, and then I smoothed my
+face with my sleeve, and came from behind the gate. The bread and meat
+were acceptable, and the beer was warming and tingling, and I was soon
+in spirits to look about me.
+
+To be sure, it was a deserted place, down to the pigeon-house in the
+brewery-yard, which had been blown crooked on its pole by some high
+wind, and would have made the pigeons think themselves at sea, if there
+had been any pigeons there to be rocked by it. But there were no pigeons
+in the dove-cot, no horses in the stable, no pigs in the sty, no malt in
+the storehouse, no smells of grains and beer in the copper or the vat.
+All the uses and scents of the brewery might have evaporated with its
+last reek of smoke. In a by-yard, there was a wilderness of empty casks,
+which had a certain sour remembrance of better days lingering about
+them; but it was too sour to be accepted as a sample of the beer that
+was gone,--and in this respect I remember those recluses as being like
+most others.
+
+Behind the furthest end of the brewery, was a rank garden with an old
+wall; not so high but that I could struggle up and hold on long enough
+to look over it, and see that the rank garden was the garden of the
+house, and that it was overgrown with tangled weeds, but that there was
+a track upon the green and yellow paths, as if some one sometimes walked
+there, and that Estella was walking away from me even then. But she
+seemed to be everywhere. For when I yielded to the temptation presented
+by the casks, and began to walk on them, I saw her walking on them at
+the end of the yard of casks. She had her back towards me, and held her
+pretty brown hair spread out in her two hands, and never looked round,
+and passed out of my view directly. So, in the brewery itself,--by which
+I mean the large paved lofty place in which they used to make the beer,
+and where the brewing utensils still were. When I first went into it,
+and, rather oppressed by its gloom, stood near the door looking about
+me, I saw her pass among the extinguished fires, and ascend some light
+iron stairs, and go out by a gallery high overhead, as if she were going
+out into the sky.
+
+It was in this place, and at this moment, that a strange thing happened
+to my fancy. I thought it a strange thing then, and I thought it a
+stranger thing long afterwards. I turned my eyes--a little dimmed by
+looking up at the frosty light--towards a great wooden beam in a low
+nook of the building near me on my right hand, and I saw a figure
+hanging there by the neck. A figure all in yellow white, with but
+one shoe to the feet; and it hung so, that I could see that the faded
+trimmings of the dress were like earthy paper, and that the face was
+Miss Havisham’s, with a movement going over the whole countenance as if
+she were trying to call to me. In the terror of seeing the figure,
+and in the terror of being certain that it had not been there a moment
+before, I at first ran from it, and then ran towards it. And my terror
+was greatest of all when I found no figure there.
+
+Nothing less than the frosty light of the cheerful sky, the sight of
+people passing beyond the bars of the court-yard gate, and the reviving
+influence of the rest of the bread and meat and beer, would have brought
+me round. Even with those aids, I might not have come to myself as soon
+as I did, but that I saw Estella approaching with the keys, to let
+me out. She would have some fair reason for looking down upon me, I
+thought, if she saw me frightened; and she would have no fair reason.
+
+She gave me a triumphant glance in passing me, as if she rejoiced that
+my hands were so coarse and my boots were so thick, and she opened the
+gate, and stood holding it. I was passing out without looking at her,
+when she touched me with a taunting hand.
+
+“Why don’t you cry?”
+
+“Because I don’t want to.”
+
+“You do,” said she. “You have been crying till you are half blind, and
+you are near crying again now.”
+
+She laughed contemptuously, pushed me out, and locked the gate upon me.
+I went straight to Mr. Pumblechook’s, and was immensely relieved to find
+him not at home. So, leaving word with the shopman on what day I was
+wanted at Miss Havisham’s again, I set off on the four-mile walk to
+our forge; pondering, as I went along, on all I had seen, and deeply
+revolving that I was a common laboring-boy; that my hands were coarse;
+that my boots were thick; that I had fallen into a despicable habit
+of calling knaves Jacks; that I was much more ignorant than I had
+considered myself last night, and generally that I was in a low-lived
+bad way.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter IX
+
+When I reached home, my sister was very curious to know all about Miss
+Havisham’s, and asked a number of questions. And I soon found myself
+getting heavily bumped from behind in the nape of the neck and the small
+of the back, and having my face ignominiously shoved against the kitchen
+wall, because I did not answer those questions at sufficient length.
+
+If a dread of not being understood be hidden in the breasts of other
+young people to anything like the extent to which it used to be hidden
+in mine,--which I consider probable, as I have no particular reason
+to suspect myself of having been a monstrosity,--it is the key to many
+reservations. I felt convinced that if I described Miss Havisham’s as my
+eyes had seen it, I should not be understood. Not only that, but I felt
+convinced that Miss Havisham too would not be understood; and although
+she was perfectly incomprehensible to me, I entertained an impression
+that there would be something coarse and treacherous in my dragging
+her as she really was (to say nothing of Miss Estella) before the
+contemplation of Mrs. Joe. Consequently, I said as little as I could,
+and had my face shoved against the kitchen wall.
+
+The worst of it was that that bullying old Pumblechook, preyed upon by
+a devouring curiosity to be informed of all I had seen and heard, came
+gaping over in his chaise-cart at tea-time, to have the details divulged
+to him. And the mere sight of the torment, with his fishy eyes and mouth
+open, his sandy hair inquisitively on end, and his waistcoat heaving
+with windy arithmetic, made me vicious in my reticence.
+
+“Well, boy,” Uncle Pumblechook began, as soon as he was seated in the
+chair of honor by the fire. “How did you get on up town?”
+
+I answered, “Pretty well, sir,” and my sister shook her fist at me.
+
+“Pretty well?” Mr. Pumblechook repeated. “Pretty well is no answer. Tell
+us what you mean by pretty well, boy?”
+
+Whitewash on the forehead hardens the brain into a state of obstinacy
+perhaps. Anyhow, with whitewash from the wall on my forehead, my
+obstinacy was adamantine. I reflected for some time, and then answered
+as if I had discovered a new idea, “I mean pretty well.”
+
+My sister with an exclamation of impatience was going to fly at me,--I
+had no shadow of defence, for Joe was busy in the forge,--when Mr.
+Pumblechook interposed with “No! Don’t lose your temper. Leave this
+lad to me, ma’am; leave this lad to me.” Mr. Pumblechook then turned me
+towards him, as if he were going to cut my hair, and said,--
+
+“First (to get our thoughts in order): Forty-three pence?”
+
+I calculated the consequences of replying “Four Hundred Pound,” and
+finding them against me, went as near the answer as I could--which was
+somewhere about eightpence off. Mr. Pumblechook then put me through my
+pence-table from “twelve pence make one shilling,” up to “forty pence
+make three and fourpence,” and then triumphantly demanded, as if he had
+done for me, “Now! How much is forty-three pence?” To which I replied,
+after a long interval of reflection, “I don’t know.” And I was so
+aggravated that I almost doubt if I did know.
+
+Mr. Pumblechook worked his head like a screw to screw it out of me,
+and said, “Is forty-three pence seven and sixpence three fardens, for
+instance?”
+
+“Yes!” said I. And although my sister instantly boxed my ears, it was
+highly gratifying to me to see that the answer spoilt his joke, and
+brought him to a dead stop.
+
+“Boy! What like is Miss Havisham?” Mr. Pumblechook began again when
+he had recovered; folding his arms tight on his chest and applying the
+screw.
+
+“Very tall and dark,” I told him.
+
+“Is she, uncle?” asked my sister.
+
+Mr. Pumblechook winked assent; from which I at once inferred that he had
+never seen Miss Havisham, for she was nothing of the kind.
+
+“Good!” said Mr. Pumblechook conceitedly. (“This is the way to have him!
+We are beginning to hold our own, I think, Mum?”)
+
+“I am sure, uncle,” returned Mrs. Joe, “I wish you had him always; you
+know so well how to deal with him.”
+
+“Now, boy! What was she a doing of, when you went in today?” asked Mr.
+Pumblechook.
+
+“She was sitting,” I answered, “in a black velvet coach.”
+
+Mr. Pumblechook and Mrs. Joe stared at one another--as they well
+might--and both repeated, “In a black velvet coach?”
+
+“Yes,” said I. “And Miss Estella--that’s her niece, I think--handed her
+in cake and wine at the coach-window, on a gold plate. And we all had
+cake and wine on gold plates. And I got up behind the coach to eat mine,
+because she told me to.”
+
+“Was anybody else there?” asked Mr. Pumblechook.
+
+“Four dogs,” said I.
+
+“Large or small?”
+
+“Immense,” said I. “And they fought for veal-cutlets out of a silver
+basket.”
+
+Mr. Pumblechook and Mrs. Joe stared at one another again, in utter
+amazement. I was perfectly frantic,--a reckless witness under the
+torture,--and would have told them anything.
+
+“Where was this coach, in the name of gracious?” asked my sister.
+
+“In Miss Havisham’s room.” They stared again. “But there weren’t any
+horses to it.” I added this saving clause, in the moment of rejecting
+four richly caparisoned coursers which I had had wild thoughts of
+harnessing.
+
+“Can this be possible, uncle?” asked Mrs. Joe. “What can the boy mean?”
+
+“I’ll tell you, Mum,” said Mr. Pumblechook. “My opinion is, it’s a
+sedan-chair. She’s flighty, you know,--very flighty,--quite flighty
+enough to pass her days in a sedan-chair.”
+
+“Did you ever see her in it, uncle?” asked Mrs. Joe.
+
+“How could I,” he returned, forced to the admission, “when I never see
+her in my life? Never clapped eyes upon her!”
+
+“Goodness, uncle! And yet you have spoken to her?”
+
+“Why, don’t you know,” said Mr. Pumblechook, testily, “that when I have
+been there, I have been took up to the outside of her door, and the door
+has stood ajar, and she has spoke to me that way. Don’t say you don’t
+know that, Mum. Howsever, the boy went there to play. What did you play
+at, boy?”
+
+“We played with flags,” I said. (I beg to observe that I think of myself
+with amazement, when I recall the lies I told on this occasion.)
+
+“Flags!” echoed my sister.
+
+“Yes,” said I. “Estella waved a blue flag, and I waved a red one, and
+Miss Havisham waved one sprinkled all over with little gold stars, out
+at the coach-window. And then we all waved our swords and hurrahed.”
+
+“Swords!” repeated my sister. “Where did you get swords from?”
+
+“Out of a cupboard,” said I. “And I saw pistols in it,--and jam,--and
+pills. And there was no daylight in the room, but it was all lighted up
+with candles.”
+
+“That’s true, Mum,” said Mr. Pumblechook, with a grave nod. “That’s the
+state of the case, for that much I’ve seen myself.” And then they
+both stared at me, and I, with an obtrusive show of artlessness on my
+countenance, stared at them, and plaited the right leg of my trousers
+with my right hand.
+
+If they had asked me any more questions, I should undoubtedly have
+betrayed myself, for I was even then on the point of mentioning that
+there was a balloon in the yard, and should have hazarded the statement
+but for my invention being divided between that phenomenon and a bear
+in the brewery. They were so much occupied, however, in discussing the
+marvels I had already presented for their consideration, that I escaped.
+The subject still held them when Joe came in from his work to have a cup
+of tea. To whom my sister, more for the relief of her own mind than for
+the gratification of his, related my pretended experiences.
+
+Now, when I saw Joe open his blue eyes and roll them all round the
+kitchen in helpless amazement, I was overtaken by penitence; but only as
+regarded him,--not in the least as regarded the other two. Towards
+Joe, and Joe only, I considered myself a young monster, while they sat
+debating what results would come to me from Miss Havisham’s acquaintance
+and favor. They had no doubt that Miss Havisham would “do something”
+ for me; their doubts related to the form that something would take.
+My sister stood out for “property.” Mr. Pumblechook was in favor of a
+handsome premium for binding me apprentice to some genteel trade,--say,
+the corn and seed trade, for instance. Joe fell into the deepest
+disgrace with both, for offering the bright suggestion that I might only
+be presented with one of the dogs who had fought for the veal-cutlets.
+“If a fool’s head can’t express better opinions than that,” said my
+sister, “and you have got any work to do, you had better go and do it.”
+ So he went.
+
+After Mr. Pumblechook had driven off, and when my sister was washing up,
+I stole into the forge to Joe, and remained by him until he had done for
+the night. Then I said, “Before the fire goes out, Joe, I should like to
+tell you something.”
+
+“Should you, Pip?” said Joe, drawing his shoeing-stool near the forge.
+“Then tell us. What is it, Pip?”
+
+“Joe,” said I, taking hold of his rolled-up shirt sleeve, and twisting
+it between my finger and thumb, “you remember all that about Miss
+Havisham’s?”
+
+“Remember?” said Joe. “I believe you! Wonderful!”
+
+“It’s a terrible thing, Joe; it ain’t true.”
+
+“What are you telling of, Pip?” cried Joe, falling back in the greatest
+amazement. “You don’t mean to say it’s--”
+
+“Yes I do; it’s lies, Joe.”
+
+“But not all of it? Why sure you don’t mean to say, Pip, that there was
+no black welwet co--eh?” For, I stood shaking my head. “But at least
+there was dogs, Pip? Come, Pip,” said Joe, persuasively, “if there
+warn’t no weal-cutlets, at least there was dogs?”
+
+“No, Joe.”
+
+“A dog?” said Joe. “A puppy? Come?”
+
+“No, Joe, there was nothing at all of the kind.”
+
+As I fixed my eyes hopelessly on Joe, Joe contemplated me in dismay.
+“Pip, old chap! This won’t do, old fellow! I say! Where do you expect to
+go to?”
+
+“It’s terrible, Joe; ain’t it?”
+
+“Terrible?” cried Joe. “Awful! What possessed you?”
+
+“I don’t know what possessed me, Joe,” I replied, letting his shirt
+sleeve go, and sitting down in the ashes at his feet, hanging my head;
+“but I wish you hadn’t taught me to call Knaves at cards Jacks; and I
+wish my boots weren’t so thick nor my hands so coarse.”
+
+And then I told Joe that I felt very miserable, and that I hadn’t been
+able to explain myself to Mrs. Joe and Pumblechook, who were so rude to
+me, and that there had been a beautiful young lady at Miss Havisham’s
+who was dreadfully proud, and that she had said I was common, and that I
+knew I was common, and that I wished I was not common, and that the lies
+had come of it somehow, though I didn’t know how.
+
+This was a case of metaphysics, at least as difficult for Joe to deal
+with as for me. But Joe took the case altogether out of the region of
+metaphysics, and by that means vanquished it.
+
+“There’s one thing you may be sure of, Pip,” said Joe, after some
+rumination, “namely, that lies is lies. Howsever they come, they didn’t
+ought to come, and they come from the father of lies, and work round to
+the same. Don’t you tell no more of ‘em, Pip. That ain’t the way to get
+out of being common, old chap. And as to being common, I don’t make
+it out at all clear. You are oncommon in some things. You’re oncommon
+small. Likewise you’re a oncommon scholar.”
+
+“No, I am ignorant and backward, Joe.”
+
+“Why, see what a letter you wrote last night! Wrote in print even! I’ve
+seen letters--Ah! and from gentlefolks!--that I’ll swear weren’t wrote
+in print,” said Joe.
+
+“I have learnt next to nothing, Joe. You think much of me. It’s only
+that.”
+
+“Well, Pip,” said Joe, “be it so or be it son’t, you must be a common
+scholar afore you can be a oncommon one, I should hope! The king upon
+his throne, with his crown upon his ed, can’t sit and write his acts
+of Parliament in print, without having begun, when he were a unpromoted
+Prince, with the alphabet.--Ah!” added Joe, with a shake of the head
+that was full of meaning, “and begun at A too, and worked his way to Z.
+And I know what that is to do, though I can’t say I’ve exactly done it.”
+
+There was some hope in this piece of wisdom, and it rather encouraged
+me.
+
+“Whether common ones as to callings and earnings,” pursued Joe,
+reflectively, “mightn’t be the better of continuing for to keep
+company with common ones, instead of going out to play with oncommon
+ones,--which reminds me to hope that there were a flag, perhaps?”
+
+“No, Joe.”
+
+“(I’m sorry there weren’t a flag, Pip). Whether that might be or
+mightn’t be, is a thing as can’t be looked into now, without putting
+your sister on the Rampage; and that’s a thing not to be thought of as
+being done intentional. Lookee here, Pip, at what is said to you by a
+true friend. Which this to you the true friend say. If you can’t get to
+be oncommon through going straight, you’ll never get to do it through
+going crooked. So don’t tell no more on ‘em, Pip, and live well and die
+happy.”
+
+“You are not angry with me, Joe?”
+
+“No, old chap. But bearing in mind that them were which I meantersay
+of a stunning and outdacious sort,--alluding to them which bordered on
+weal-cutlets and dog-fighting,--a sincere well-wisher would adwise, Pip,
+their being dropped into your meditations, when you go upstairs to bed.
+That’s all, old chap, and don’t never do it no more.”
+
+When I got up to my little room and said my prayers, I did not forget
+Joe’s recommendation, and yet my young mind was in that disturbed and
+unthankful state, that I thought long after I laid me down, how common
+Estella would consider Joe, a mere blacksmith; how thick his boots, and
+how coarse his hands. I thought how Joe and my sister were then sitting
+in the kitchen, and how I had come up to bed from the kitchen, and how
+Miss Havisham and Estella never sat in a kitchen, but were far above the
+level of such common doings. I fell asleep recalling what I “used to
+do” when I was at Miss Havisham’s; as though I had been there weeks or
+months, instead of hours; and as though it were quite an old subject of
+remembrance, instead of one that had arisen only that day.
+
+That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But it
+is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it,
+and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read
+this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold,
+of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the
+formation of the first link on one memorable day.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter X
+
+The felicitous idea occurred to me a morning or two later when I woke,
+that the best step I could take towards making myself uncommon was to
+get out of Biddy everything she knew. In pursuance of this luminous
+conception I mentioned to Biddy when I went to Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt’s
+at night, that I had a particular reason for wishing to get on in life,
+and that I should feel very much obliged to her if she would impart
+all her learning to me. Biddy, who was the most obliging of girls,
+immediately said she would, and indeed began to carry out her promise
+within five minutes.
+
+The Educational scheme or Course established by Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt
+may be resolved into the following synopsis. The pupils ate apples
+and put straws down one another’s backs, until Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt
+collected her energies, and made an indiscriminate totter at them with
+a birch-rod. After receiving the charge with every mark of derision, the
+pupils formed in line and buzzingly passed a ragged book from hand to
+hand. The book had an alphabet in it, some figures and tables, and
+a little spelling,--that is to say, it had had once. As soon as this
+volume began to circulate, Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt fell into a state of
+coma, arising either from sleep or a rheumatic paroxysm. The pupils then
+entered among themselves upon a competitive examination on the subject
+of Boots, with the view of ascertaining who could tread the hardest upon
+whose toes. This mental exercise lasted until Biddy made a rush at
+them and distributed three defaced Bibles (shaped as if they had been
+unskilfully cut off the chump end of something), more illegibly printed
+at the best than any curiosities of literature I have since met with,
+speckled all over with ironmould, and having various specimens of the
+insect world smashed between their leaves. This part of the Course was
+usually lightened by several single combats between Biddy and refractory
+students. When the fights were over, Biddy gave out the number of a
+page, and then we all read aloud what we could,--or what we couldn’t--in
+a frightful chorus; Biddy leading with a high, shrill, monotonous voice,
+and none of us having the least notion of, or reverence for, what we
+were reading about. When this horrible din had lasted a certain time,
+it mechanically awoke Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt, who staggered at a boy
+fortuitously, and pulled his ears. This was understood to terminate
+the Course for the evening, and we emerged into the air with shrieks of
+intellectual victory. It is fair to remark that there was no prohibition
+against any pupil’s entertaining himself with a slate or even with the
+ink (when there was any), but that it was not easy to pursue that branch
+of study in the winter season, on account of the little general shop
+in which the classes were holden--and which was also Mr. Wopsle’s
+great-aunt’s sitting-room and bedchamber--being but faintly illuminated
+through the agency of one low-spirited dip-candle and no snuffers.
+
+It appeared to me that it would take time to become uncommon, under
+these circumstances: nevertheless, I resolved to try it, and that
+very evening Biddy entered on our special agreement, by imparting some
+information from her little catalogue of Prices, under the head of moist
+sugar, and lending me, to copy at home, a large old English D which she
+had imitated from the heading of some newspaper, and which I supposed,
+until she told me what it was, to be a design for a buckle.
+
+Of course there was a public-house in the village, and of course Joe
+liked sometimes to smoke his pipe there. I had received strict orders
+from my sister to call for him at the Three Jolly Bargemen, that
+evening, on my way from school, and bring him home at my peril. To the
+Three Jolly Bargemen, therefore, I directed my steps.
+
+There was a bar at the Jolly Bargemen, with some alarmingly long chalk
+scores in it on the wall at the side of the door, which seemed to me to
+be never paid off. They had been there ever since I could remember, and
+had grown more than I had. But there was a quantity of chalk about our
+country, and perhaps the people neglected no opportunity of turning it
+to account.
+
+It being Saturday night, I found the landlord looking rather grimly
+at these records; but as my business was with Joe and not with him, I
+merely wished him good evening, and passed into the common room at the
+end of the passage, where there was a bright large kitchen fire,
+and where Joe was smoking his pipe in company with Mr. Wopsle and a
+stranger. Joe greeted me as usual with “Halloa, Pip, old chap!” and the
+moment he said that, the stranger turned his head and looked at me.
+
+He was a secret-looking man whom I had never seen before. His head was
+all on one side, and one of his eyes was half shut up, as if he were
+taking aim at something with an invisible gun. He had a pipe in his
+mouth, and he took it out, and, after slowly blowing all his smoke away
+and looking hard at me all the time, nodded. So, I nodded, and then he
+nodded again, and made room on the settle beside him that I might sit
+down there.
+
+But as I was used to sit beside Joe whenever I entered that place of
+resort, I said “No, thank you, sir,” and fell into the space Joe made
+for me on the opposite settle. The strange man, after glancing at Joe,
+and seeing that his attention was otherwise engaged, nodded to me again
+when I had taken my seat, and then rubbed his leg--in a very odd way, as
+it struck me.
+
+“You was saying,” said the strange man, turning to Joe, “that you was a
+blacksmith.”
+
+“Yes. I said it, you know,” said Joe.
+
+“What’ll you drink, Mr.--? You didn’t mention your name, by the bye.”
+
+Joe mentioned it now, and the strange man called him by it. “What’ll you
+drink, Mr. Gargery? At my expense? To top up with?”
+
+“Well,” said Joe, “to tell you the truth, I ain’t much in the habit of
+drinking at anybody’s expense but my own.”
+
+“Habit? No,” returned the stranger, “but once and away, and on a
+Saturday night too. Come! Put a name to it, Mr. Gargery.”
+
+“I wouldn’t wish to be stiff company,” said Joe. “Rum.”
+
+“Rum,” repeated the stranger. “And will the other gentleman originate a
+sentiment.”
+
+“Rum,” said Mr. Wopsle.
+
+“Three Rums!” cried the stranger, calling to the landlord. “Glasses
+round!”
+
+“This other gentleman,” observed Joe, by way of introducing Mr. Wopsle,
+“is a gentleman that you would like to hear give it out. Our clerk at
+church.”
+
+“Aha!” said the stranger, quickly, and cocking his eye at me. “The
+lonely church, right out on the marshes, with graves round it!”
+
+“That’s it,” said Joe.
+
+The stranger, with a comfortable kind of grunt over his pipe, put
+his legs up on the settle that he had to himself. He wore a flapping
+broad-brimmed traveller’s hat, and under it a handkerchief tied over his
+head in the manner of a cap: so that he showed no hair. As he looked
+at the fire, I thought I saw a cunning expression, followed by a
+half-laugh, come into his face.
+
+“I am not acquainted with this country, gentlemen, but it seems a
+solitary country towards the river.”
+
+“Most marshes is solitary,” said Joe.
+
+“No doubt, no doubt. Do you find any gypsies, now, or tramps, or
+vagrants of any sort, out there?”
+
+“No,” said Joe; “none but a runaway convict now and then. And we don’t
+find them, easy. Eh, Mr. Wopsle?”
+
+Mr. Wopsle, with a majestic remembrance of old discomfiture, assented;
+but not warmly.
+
+“Seems you have been out after such?” asked the stranger.
+
+“Once,” returned Joe. “Not that we wanted to take them, you understand;
+we went out as lookers on; me, and Mr. Wopsle, and Pip. Didn’t us, Pip?”
+
+“Yes, Joe.”
+
+The stranger looked at me again,--still cocking his eye, as if he were
+expressly taking aim at me with his invisible gun,--and said, “He’s a
+likely young parcel of bones that. What is it you call him?”
+
+“Pip,” said Joe.
+
+“Christened Pip?”
+
+“No, not christened Pip.”
+
+“Surname Pip?”
+
+“No,” said Joe, “it’s a kind of family name what he gave himself when a
+infant, and is called by.”
+
+“Son of yours?”
+
+“Well,” said Joe, meditatively, not, of course, that it could be in
+anywise necessary to consider about it, but because it was the way at
+the Jolly Bargemen to seem to consider deeply about everything that was
+discussed over pipes,--“well--no. No, he ain’t.”
+
+“Nevvy?” said the strange man.
+
+“Well,” said Joe, with the same appearance of profound cogitation, “he
+is not--no, not to deceive you, he is not--my nevvy.”
+
+“What the Blue Blazes is he?” asked the stranger. Which appeared to me
+to be an inquiry of unnecessary strength.
+
+Mr. Wopsle struck in upon that; as one who knew all about relationships,
+having professional occasion to bear in mind what female relations a man
+might not marry; and expounded the ties between me and Joe. Having
+his hand in, Mr. Wopsle finished off with a most terrifically snarling
+passage from Richard the Third, and seemed to think he had done quite
+enough to account for it when he added, “--as the poet says.”
+
+And here I may remark that when Mr. Wopsle referred to me, he considered
+it a necessary part of such reference to rumple my hair and poke it into
+my eyes. I cannot conceive why everybody of his standing who visited
+at our house should always have put me through the same inflammatory
+process under similar circumstances. Yet I do not call to mind that I
+was ever in my earlier youth the subject of remark in our social family
+circle, but some large-handed person took some such ophthalmic steps to
+patronize me.
+
+All this while, the strange man looked at nobody but me, and looked at
+me as if he were determined to have a shot at me at last, and bring me
+down. But he said nothing after offering his Blue Blazes observation,
+until the glasses of rum and water were brought; and then he made his
+shot, and a most extraordinary shot it was.
+
+It was not a verbal remark, but a proceeding in dumb-show, and was
+pointedly addressed to me. He stirred his rum and water pointedly at me,
+and he tasted his rum and water pointedly at me. And he stirred it and
+he tasted it; not with a spoon that was brought to him, but with a file.
+
+He did this so that nobody but I saw the file; and when he had done it
+he wiped the file and put it in a breast-pocket. I knew it to be
+Joe’s file, and I knew that he knew my convict, the moment I saw the
+instrument. I sat gazing at him, spell-bound. But he now reclined on his
+settle, taking very little notice of me, and talking principally about
+turnips.
+
+There was a delicious sense of cleaning-up and making a quiet pause
+before going on in life afresh, in our village on Saturday nights, which
+stimulated Joe to dare to stay out half an hour longer on Saturdays
+than at other times. The half-hour and the rum and water running out
+together, Joe got up to go, and took me by the hand.
+
+“Stop half a moment, Mr. Gargery,” said the strange man. “I think I’ve
+got a bright new shilling somewhere in my pocket, and if I have, the boy
+shall have it.”
+
+He looked it out from a handful of small change, folded it in some
+crumpled paper, and gave it to me. “Yours!” said he. “Mind! Your own.”
+
+I thanked him, staring at him far beyond the bounds of good manners,
+and holding tight to Joe. He gave Joe good-night, and he gave Mr. Wopsle
+good-night (who went out with us), and he gave me only a look with his
+aiming eye,--no, not a look, for he shut it up, but wonders may be done
+with an eye by hiding it.
+
+On the way home, if I had been in a humor for talking, the talk must
+have been all on my side, for Mr. Wopsle parted from us at the door of
+the Jolly Bargemen, and Joe went all the way home with his mouth wide
+open, to rinse the rum out with as much air as possible. But I was in
+a manner stupefied by this turning up of my old misdeed and old
+acquaintance, and could think of nothing else.
+
+My sister was not in a very bad temper when we presented ourselves in
+the kitchen, and Joe was encouraged by that unusual circumstance to tell
+her about the bright shilling. “A bad un, I’ll be bound,” said Mrs. Joe
+triumphantly, “or he wouldn’t have given it to the boy! Let’s look at
+it.”
+
+I took it out of the paper, and it proved to be a good one. “But what’s
+this?” said Mrs. Joe, throwing down the shilling and catching up the
+paper. “Two One-Pound notes?”
+
+Nothing less than two fat sweltering one-pound notes that seemed to have
+been on terms of the warmest intimacy with all the cattle-markets in
+the county. Joe caught up his hat again, and ran with them to the Jolly
+Bargemen to restore them to their owner. While he was gone, I sat down
+on my usual stool and looked vacantly at my sister, feeling pretty sure
+that the man would not be there.
+
+Presently, Joe came back, saying that the man was gone, but that he,
+Joe, had left word at the Three Jolly Bargemen concerning the notes.
+Then my sister sealed them up in a piece of paper, and put them under
+some dried rose-leaves in an ornamental teapot on the top of a press in
+the state parlor. There they remained, a nightmare to me, many and many
+a night and day.
+
+I had sadly broken sleep when I got to bed, through thinking of the
+strange man taking aim at me with his invisible gun, and of the guiltily
+coarse and common thing it was, to be on secret terms of conspiracy with
+convicts,--a feature in my low career that I had previously forgotten.
+I was haunted by the file too. A dread possessed me that when I least
+expected it, the file would reappear. I coaxed myself to sleep by
+thinking of Miss Havisham’s, next Wednesday; and in my sleep I saw
+the file coming at me out of a door, without seeing who held it, and I
+screamed myself awake.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XI
+
+At the appointed time I returned to Miss Havisham’s, and my hesitating
+ring at the gate brought out Estella. She locked it after admitting
+me, as she had done before, and again preceded me into the dark passage
+where her candle stood. She took no notice of me until she had the
+candle in her hand, when she looked over her shoulder, superciliously
+saying, “You are to come this way to-day,” and took me to quite another
+part of the house.
+
+The passage was a long one, and seemed to pervade the whole square
+basement of the Manor House. We traversed but one side of the square,
+however, and at the end of it she stopped, and put her candle down and
+opened a door. Here, the daylight reappeared, and I found myself in
+a small paved courtyard, the opposite side of which was formed by a
+detached dwelling-house, that looked as if it had once belonged to the
+manager or head clerk of the extinct brewery. There was a clock in the
+outer wall of this house. Like the clock in Miss Havisham’s room, and
+like Miss Havisham’s watch, it had stopped at twenty minutes to nine.
+
+We went in at the door, which stood open, and into a gloomy room with a
+low ceiling, on the ground-floor at the back. There was some company in
+the room, and Estella said to me as she joined it, “You are to go and
+stand there boy, till you are wanted.” “There”, being the window, I
+crossed to it, and stood “there,” in a very uncomfortable state of mind,
+looking out.
+
+It opened to the ground, and looked into a most miserable corner of the
+neglected garden, upon a rank ruin of cabbage-stalks, and one box-tree
+that had been clipped round long ago, like a pudding, and had a new
+growth at the top of it, out of shape and of a different color, as if
+that part of the pudding had stuck to the saucepan and got burnt. This
+was my homely thought, as I contemplated the box-tree. There had been
+some light snow, overnight, and it lay nowhere else to my knowledge;
+but, it had not quite melted from the cold shadow of this bit of garden,
+and the wind caught it up in little eddies and threw it at the window,
+as if it pelted me for coming there.
+
+I divined that my coming had stopped conversation in the room, and that
+its other occupants were looking at me. I could see nothing of the room
+except the shining of the fire in the window-glass, but I stiffened in
+all my joints with the consciousness that I was under close inspection.
+
+There were three ladies in the room and one gentleman. Before I had been
+standing at the window five minutes, they somehow conveyed to me that
+they were all toadies and humbugs, but that each of them pretended not
+to know that the others were toadies and humbugs: because the admission
+that he or she did know it, would have made him or her out to be a toady
+and humbug.
+
+They all had a listless and dreary air of waiting somebody’s pleasure,
+and the most talkative of the ladies had to speak quite rigidly to
+repress a yawn. This lady, whose name was Camilla, very much reminded
+me of my sister, with the difference that she was older, and (as I found
+when I caught sight of her) of a blunter cast of features. Indeed, when
+I knew her better I began to think it was a Mercy she had any features
+at all, so very blank and high was the dead wall of her face.
+
+“Poor dear soul!” said this lady, with an abruptness of manner quite my
+sister’s. “Nobody’s enemy but his own!”
+
+“It would be much more commendable to be somebody else’s enemy,” said
+the gentleman; “far more natural.”
+
+“Cousin Raymond,” observed another lady, “we are to love our neighbor.”
+
+“Sarah Pocket,” returned Cousin Raymond, “if a man is not his own
+neighbor, who is?”
+
+Miss Pocket laughed, and Camilla laughed and said (checking a yawn),
+“The idea!” But I thought they seemed to think it rather a good
+idea too. The other lady, who had not spoken yet, said gravely and
+emphatically, “Very true!”
+
+“Poor soul!” Camilla presently went on (I knew they had all been looking
+at me in the mean time), “he is so very strange! Would anyone believe
+that when Tom’s wife died, he actually could not be induced to see the
+importance of the children’s having the deepest of trimmings to their
+mourning? ‘Good Lord!’ says he, ‘Camilla, what can it signify so long
+as the poor bereaved little things are in black?’ So like Matthew! The
+idea!”
+
+“Good points in him, good points in him,” said Cousin Raymond; “Heaven
+forbid I should deny good points in him; but he never had, and he never
+will have, any sense of the proprieties.”
+
+“You know I was obliged,” said Camilla,--“I was obliged to be firm. I
+said, ‘It WILL NOT DO, for the credit of the family.’ I told him that,
+without deep trimmings, the family was disgraced. I cried about it from
+breakfast till dinner. I injured my digestion. And at last he flung out
+in his violent way, and said, with a D, ‘Then do as you like.’ Thank
+Goodness it will always be a consolation to me to know that I instantly
+went out in a pouring rain and bought the things.”
+
+“He paid for them, did he not?” asked Estella.
+
+“It’s not the question, my dear child, who paid for them,” returned
+Camilla. “I bought them. And I shall often think of that with peace,
+when I wake up in the night.”
+
+The ringing of a distant bell, combined with the echoing of some cry or
+call along the passage by which I had come, interrupted the conversation
+and caused Estella to say to me, “Now, boy!” On my turning round, they
+all looked at me with the utmost contempt, and, as I went out, I heard
+Sarah Pocket say, “Well I am sure! What next!” and Camilla add, with
+indignation, “Was there ever such a fancy! The i-de-a!”
+
+As we were going with our candle along the dark passage, Estella stopped
+all of a sudden, and, facing round, said in her taunting manner, with
+her face quite close to mine,--
+
+“Well?”
+
+“Well, miss?” I answered, almost falling over her and checking myself.
+
+She stood looking at me, and, of course, I stood looking at her.
+
+“Am I pretty?”
+
+“Yes; I think you are very pretty.”
+
+“Am I insulting?”
+
+“Not so much so as you were last time,” said I.
+
+“Not so much so?”
+
+“No.”
+
+She fired when she asked the last question, and she slapped my face with
+such force as she had, when I answered it.
+
+“Now?” said she. “You little coarse monster, what do you think of me
+now?”
+
+“I shall not tell you.”
+
+“Because you are going to tell upstairs. Is that it?”
+
+“No,” said I, “that’s not it.”
+
+“Why don’t you cry again, you little wretch?”
+
+“Because I’ll never cry for you again,” said I. Which was, I suppose, as
+false a declaration as ever was made; for I was inwardly crying for her
+then, and I know what I know of the pain she cost me afterwards.
+
+We went on our way upstairs after this episode; and, as we were going
+up, we met a gentleman groping his way down.
+
+“Whom have we here?” asked the gentleman, stopping and looking at me.
+
+“A boy,” said Estella.
+
+He was a burly man of an exceedingly dark complexion, with an
+exceedingly large head, and a corresponding large hand. He took my chin
+in his large hand and turned up my face to have a look at me by the
+light of the candle. He was prematurely bald on the top of his head, and
+had bushy black eyebrows that wouldn’t lie down but stood up bristling.
+His eyes were set very deep in his head, and were disagreeably sharp and
+suspicious. He had a large watch-chain, and strong black dots where his
+beard and whiskers would have been if he had let them. He was nothing
+to me, and I could have had no foresight then, that he ever would be
+anything to me, but it happened that I had this opportunity of observing
+him well.
+
+“Boy of the neighborhood? Hey?” said he.
+
+“Yes, sir,” said I.
+
+“How do you come here?”
+
+“Miss Havisham sent for me, sir,” I explained.
+
+“Well! Behave yourself. I have a pretty large experience of boys, and
+you’re a bad set of fellows. Now mind!” said he, biting the side of his
+great forefinger as he frowned at me, “you behave yourself!”
+
+With those words, he released me--which I was glad of, for his hand
+smelt of scented soap--and went his way downstairs. I wondered whether
+he could be a doctor; but no, I thought; he couldn’t be a doctor, or he
+would have a quieter and more persuasive manner. There was not much time
+to consider the subject, for we were soon in Miss Havisham’s room, where
+she and everything else were just as I had left them. Estella left me
+standing near the door, and I stood there until Miss Havisham cast her
+eyes upon me from the dressing-table.
+
+“So!” she said, without being startled or surprised: “the days have worn
+away, have they?”
+
+“Yes, ma’am. To-day is--”
+
+“There, there, there!” with the impatient movement of her fingers. “I
+don’t want to know. Are you ready to play?”
+
+I was obliged to answer in some confusion, “I don’t think I am, ma’am.”
+
+“Not at cards again?” she demanded, with a searching look.
+
+“Yes, ma’am; I could do that, if I was wanted.”
+
+“Since this house strikes you old and grave, boy,” said Miss Havisham,
+impatiently, “and you are unwilling to play, are you willing to work?”
+
+I could answer this inquiry with a better heart than I had been able to
+find for the other question, and I said I was quite willing.
+
+“Then go into that opposite room,” said she, pointing at the door behind
+me with her withered hand, “and wait there till I come.”
+
+I crossed the staircase landing, and entered the room she indicated.
+From that room, too, the daylight was completely excluded, and it had an
+airless smell that was oppressive. A fire had been lately kindled in
+the damp old-fashioned grate, and it was more disposed to go out than
+to burn up, and the reluctant smoke which hung in the room seemed colder
+than the clearer air,--like our own marsh mist. Certain wintry branches
+of candles on the high chimney-piece faintly lighted the chamber; or it
+would be more expressive to say, faintly troubled its darkness. It was
+spacious, and I dare say had once been handsome, but every discernible
+thing in it was covered with dust and mould, and dropping to pieces. The
+most prominent object was a long table with a tablecloth spread on it,
+as if a feast had been in preparation when the house and the clocks all
+stopped together. An epergne or centre-piece of some kind was in the
+middle of this cloth; it was so heavily overhung with cobwebs that its
+form was quite undistinguishable; and, as I looked along the yellow
+expanse out of which I remember its seeming to grow, like a black
+fungus, I saw speckle-legged spiders with blotchy bodies running home
+to it, and running out from it, as if some circumstances of the greatest
+public importance had just transpired in the spider community.
+
+I heard the mice too, rattling behind the panels, as if the same
+occurrence were important to their interests. But the black beetles took
+no notice of the agitation, and groped about the hearth in a ponderous
+elderly way, as if they were short-sighted and hard of hearing, and not
+on terms with one another.
+
+These crawling things had fascinated my attention, and I was watching
+them from a distance, when Miss Havisham laid a hand upon my shoulder.
+In her other hand she had a crutch-headed stick on which she leaned, and
+she looked like the Witch of the place.
+
+“This,” said she, pointing to the long table with her stick, “is where I
+will be laid when I am dead. They shall come and look at me here.”
+
+With some vague misgiving that she might get upon the table then and
+there and die at once, the complete realization of the ghastly waxwork
+at the Fair, I shrank under her touch.
+
+“What do you think that is?” she asked me, again pointing with her
+stick; “that, where those cobwebs are?”
+
+“I can’t guess what it is, ma’am.”
+
+“It’s a great cake. A bride-cake. Mine!”
+
+She looked all round the room in a glaring manner, and then said,
+leaning on me while her hand twitched my shoulder, “Come, come, come!
+Walk me, walk me!”
+
+I made out from this, that the work I had to do, was to walk Miss
+Havisham round and round the room. Accordingly, I started at once, and
+she leaned upon my shoulder, and we went away at a pace that might have
+been an imitation (founded on my first impulse under that roof) of Mr.
+Pumblechook’s chaise-cart.
+
+She was not physically strong, and after a little time said, “Slower!”
+ Still, we went at an impatient fitful speed, and as we went, she
+twitched the hand upon my shoulder, and worked her mouth, and led me to
+believe that we were going fast because her thoughts went fast. After a
+while she said, “Call Estella!” so I went out on the landing and
+roared that name as I had done on the previous occasion. When her light
+appeared, I returned to Miss Havisham, and we started away again round
+and round the room.
+
+If only Estella had come to be a spectator of our proceedings, I should
+have felt sufficiently discontented; but as she brought with her the
+three ladies and the gentleman whom I had seen below, I didn’t know
+what to do. In my politeness, I would have stopped; but Miss
+Havisham twitched my shoulder, and we posted on,--with a shame-faced
+consciousness on my part that they would think it was all my doing.
+
+“Dear Miss Havisham,” said Miss Sarah Pocket. “How well you look!”
+
+“I do not,” returned Miss Havisham. “I am yellow skin and bone.”
+
+Camilla brightened when Miss Pocket met with this rebuff; and she
+murmured, as she plaintively contemplated Miss Havisham, “Poor dear
+soul! Certainly not to be expected to look well, poor thing. The idea!”
+
+“And how are you?” said Miss Havisham to Camilla. As we were close to
+Camilla then, I would have stopped as a matter of course, only Miss
+Havisham wouldn’t stop. We swept on, and I felt that I was highly
+obnoxious to Camilla.
+
+“Thank you, Miss Havisham,” she returned, “I am as well as can be
+expected.”
+
+“Why, what’s the matter with you?” asked Miss Havisham, with exceeding
+sharpness.
+
+“Nothing worth mentioning,” replied Camilla. “I don’t wish to make a
+display of my feelings, but I have habitually thought of you more in the
+night than I am quite equal to.”
+
+“Then don’t think of me,” retorted Miss Havisham.
+
+“Very easily said!” remarked Camilla, amiably repressing a sob, while a
+hitch came into her upper lip, and her tears overflowed. “Raymond is a
+witness what ginger and sal volatile I am obliged to take in the night.
+Raymond is a witness what nervous jerkings I have in my legs. Chokings
+and nervous jerkings, however, are nothing new to me when I think with
+anxiety of those I love. If I could be less affectionate and sensitive,
+I should have a better digestion and an iron set of nerves. I am sure
+I wish it could be so. But as to not thinking of you in the night--The
+idea!” Here, a burst of tears.
+
+The Raymond referred to, I understood to be the gentleman present, and
+him I understood to be Mr. Camilla. He came to the rescue at this point,
+and said in a consolatory and complimentary voice, “Camilla, my dear, it
+is well known that your family feelings are gradually undermining you to
+the extent of making one of your legs shorter than the other.”
+
+“I am not aware,” observed the grave lady whose voice I had heard but
+once, “that to think of any person is to make a great claim upon that
+person, my dear.”
+
+Miss Sarah Pocket, whom I now saw to be a little dry, brown, corrugated
+old woman, with a small face that might have been made of walnut-shells,
+and a large mouth like a cat’s without the whiskers, supported this
+position by saying, “No, indeed, my dear. Hem!”
+
+“Thinking is easy enough,” said the grave lady.
+
+“What is easier, you know?” assented Miss Sarah Pocket.
+
+“Oh, yes, yes!” cried Camilla, whose fermenting feelings appeared to
+rise from her legs to her bosom. “It’s all very true! It’s a weakness
+to be so affectionate, but I can’t help it. No doubt my health would be
+much better if it was otherwise, still I wouldn’t change my disposition
+if I could. It’s the cause of much suffering, but it’s a consolation to
+know I posses it, when I wake up in the night.” Here another burst of
+feeling.
+
+Miss Havisham and I had never stopped all this time, but kept going
+round and round the room; now brushing against the skirts of the
+visitors, now giving them the whole length of the dismal chamber.
+
+“There’s Matthew!” said Camilla. “Never mixing with any natural ties,
+never coming here to see how Miss Havisham is! I have taken to the sofa
+with my staylace cut, and have lain there hours insensible, with my head
+over the side, and my hair all down, and my feet I don’t know where--”
+
+(“Much higher than your head, my love,” said Mr. Camilla.)
+
+“I have gone off into that state, hours and hours, on account of
+Matthew’s strange and inexplicable conduct, and nobody has thanked me.”
+
+“Really I must say I should think not!” interposed the grave lady.
+
+“You see, my dear,” added Miss Sarah Pocket (a blandly vicious
+personage), “the question to put to yourself is, who did you expect to
+thank you, my love?”
+
+“Without expecting any thanks, or anything of the sort,” resumed
+Camilla, “I have remained in that state, hours and hours, and Raymond
+is a witness of the extent to which I have choked, and what the total
+inefficacy of ginger has been, and I have been heard at the piano-forte
+tuner’s across the street, where the poor mistaken children have even
+supposed it to be pigeons cooing at a distance,--and now to be told--”
+ Here Camilla put her hand to her throat, and began to be quite chemical
+as to the formation of new combinations there.
+
+When this same Matthew was mentioned, Miss Havisham stopped me and
+herself, and stood looking at the speaker. This change had a great
+influence in bringing Camilla’s chemistry to a sudden end.
+
+“Matthew will come and see me at last,” said Miss Havisham, sternly,
+“when I am laid on that table. That will be his place,--there,” striking
+the table with her stick, “at my head! And yours will be there! And your
+husband’s there! And Sarah Pocket’s there! And Georgiana’s there! Now
+you all know where to take your stations when you come to feast upon me.
+And now go!”
+
+At the mention of each name, she had struck the table with her stick in
+a new place. She now said, “Walk me, walk me!” and we went on again.
+
+“I suppose there’s nothing to be done,” exclaimed Camilla, “but comply
+and depart. It’s something to have seen the object of one’s love and
+duty for even so short a time. I shall think of it with a melancholy
+satisfaction when I wake up in the night. I wish Matthew could have
+that comfort, but he sets it at defiance. I am determined not to make a
+display of my feelings, but it’s very hard to be told one wants to feast
+on one’s relations,--as if one was a Giant,--and to be told to go. The
+bare idea!”
+
+Mr. Camilla interposing, as Mrs. Camilla laid her hand upon her heaving
+bosom, that lady assumed an unnatural fortitude of manner which I
+supposed to be expressive of an intention to drop and choke when out of
+view, and kissing her hand to Miss Havisham, was escorted forth. Sarah
+Pocket and Georgiana contended who should remain last; but Sarah was
+too knowing to be outdone, and ambled round Georgiana with that artful
+slipperiness that the latter was obliged to take precedence. Sarah
+Pocket then made her separate effect of departing with, “Bless you, Miss
+Havisham dear!” and with a smile of forgiving pity on her walnut-shell
+countenance for the weaknesses of the rest.
+
+While Estella was away lighting them down, Miss Havisham still walked
+with her hand on my shoulder, but more and more slowly. At last she
+stopped before the fire, and said, after muttering and looking at it
+some seconds,--
+
+“This is my birthday, Pip.”
+
+I was going to wish her many happy returns, when she lifted her stick.
+
+“I don’t suffer it to be spoken of. I don’t suffer those who were here
+just now, or any one to speak of it. They come here on the day, but they
+dare not refer to it.”
+
+Of course I made no further effort to refer to it.
+
+“On this day of the year, long before you were born, this heap of
+decay,” stabbing with her crutched stick at the pile of cobwebs on the
+table, but not touching it, “was brought here. It and I have worn away
+together. The mice have gnawed at it, and sharper teeth than teeth of
+mice have gnawed at me.”
+
+She held the head of her stick against her heart as she stood looking
+at the table; she in her once white dress, all yellow and withered; the
+once white cloth all yellow and withered; everything around in a state
+to crumble under a touch.
+
+“When the ruin is complete,” said she, with a ghastly look, “and when
+they lay me dead, in my bride’s dress on the bride’s table,--which shall
+be done, and which will be the finished curse upon him,--so much the
+better if it is done on this day!”
+
+She stood looking at the table as if she stood looking at her own figure
+lying there. I remained quiet. Estella returned, and she too remained
+quiet. It seemed to me that we continued thus for a long time. In
+the heavy air of the room, and the heavy darkness that brooded in its
+remoter corners, I even had an alarming fancy that Estella and I might
+presently begin to decay.
+
+At length, not coming out of her distraught state by degrees, but in an
+instant, Miss Havisham said, “Let me see you two play cards; why have
+you not begun?” With that, we returned to her room, and sat down as
+before; I was beggared, as before; and again, as before, Miss Havisham
+watched us all the time, directed my attention to Estella’s beauty, and
+made me notice it the more by trying her jewels on Estella’s breast and
+hair.
+
+Estella, for her part, likewise treated me as before, except that she
+did not condescend to speak. When we had played some half-dozen games,
+a day was appointed for my return, and I was taken down into the yard
+to be fed in the former dog-like manner. There, too, I was again left to
+wander about as I liked.
+
+It is not much to the purpose whether a gate in that garden wall which
+I had scrambled up to peep over on the last occasion was, on that last
+occasion, open or shut. Enough that I saw no gate then, and that I
+saw one now. As it stood open, and as I knew that Estella had let
+the visitors out,--for she had returned with the keys in her hand,--I
+strolled into the garden, and strolled all over it. It was quite a
+wilderness, and there were old melon-frames and cucumber-frames in it,
+which seemed in their decline to have produced a spontaneous growth of
+weak attempts at pieces of old hats and boots, with now and then a weedy
+offshoot into the likeness of a battered saucepan.
+
+When I had exhausted the garden and a greenhouse with nothing in it but
+a fallen-down grape-vine and some bottles, I found myself in the dismal
+corner upon which I had looked out of the window. Never questioning for
+a moment that the house was now empty, I looked in at another window,
+and found myself, to my great surprise, exchanging a broad stare with a
+pale young gentleman with red eyelids and light hair.
+
+This pale young gentleman quickly disappeared, and reappeared beside me.
+He had been at his books when I had found myself staring at him, and I
+now saw that he was inky.
+
+“Halloa!” said he, “young fellow!”
+
+Halloa being a general observation which I had usually observed to
+be best answered by itself, I said, “Halloa!” politely omitting young
+fellow.
+
+“Who let you in?” said he.
+
+“Miss Estella.”
+
+“Who gave you leave to prowl about?”
+
+“Miss Estella.”
+
+“Come and fight,” said the pale young gentleman.
+
+What could I do but follow him? I have often asked myself the question
+since; but what else could I do? His manner was so final, and I was
+so astonished, that I followed where he led, as if I had been under a
+spell.
+
+“Stop a minute, though,” he said, wheeling round before we had gone many
+paces. “I ought to give you a reason for fighting, too. There it is!”
+ In a most irritating manner he instantly slapped his hands against one
+another, daintily flung one of his legs up behind him, pulled my hair,
+slapped his hands again, dipped his head, and butted it into my stomach.
+
+The bull-like proceeding last mentioned, besides that it was
+unquestionably to be regarded in the light of a liberty, was
+particularly disagreeable just after bread and meat. I therefore hit out
+at him and was going to hit out again, when he said, “Aha! Would you?”
+ and began dancing backwards and forwards in a manner quite unparalleled
+within my limited experience.
+
+“Laws of the game!” said he. Here, he skipped from his left leg on to
+his right. “Regular rules!” Here, he skipped from his right leg on to
+his left. “Come to the ground, and go through the preliminaries!” Here,
+he dodged backwards and forwards, and did all sorts of things while I
+looked helplessly at him.
+
+I was secretly afraid of him when I saw him so dexterous; but I felt
+morally and physically convinced that his light head of hair could have
+had no business in the pit of my stomach, and that I had a right to
+consider it irrelevant when so obtruded on my attention. Therefore, I
+followed him without a word, to a retired nook of the garden, formed by
+the junction of two walls and screened by some rubbish. On his asking me
+if I was satisfied with the ground, and on my replying Yes, he begged my
+leave to absent himself for a moment, and quickly returned with a bottle
+of water and a sponge dipped in vinegar. “Available for both,” he said,
+placing these against the wall. And then fell to pulling off, not
+only his jacket and waistcoat, but his shirt too, in a manner at once
+light-hearted, business-like, and bloodthirsty.
+
+Although he did not look very healthy,--having pimples on his face, and
+a breaking out at his mouth,--these dreadful preparations quite appalled
+me. I judged him to be about my own age, but he was much taller, and he
+had a way of spinning himself about that was full of appearance. For
+the rest, he was a young gentleman in a gray suit (when not denuded
+for battle), with his elbows, knees, wrists, and heels considerably in
+advance of the rest of him as to development.
+
+My heart failed me when I saw him squaring at me with every
+demonstration of mechanical nicety, and eyeing my anatomy as if he were
+minutely choosing his bone. I never have been so surprised in my life,
+as I was when I let out the first blow, and saw him lying on his
+back, looking up at me with a bloody nose and his face exceedingly
+fore-shortened.
+
+But, he was on his feet directly, and after sponging himself with
+a great show of dexterity began squaring again. The second greatest
+surprise I have ever had in my life was seeing him on his back again,
+looking up at me out of a black eye.
+
+His spirit inspired me with great respect. He seemed to have no
+strength, and he never once hit me hard, and he was always knocked down;
+but he would be up again in a moment, sponging himself or drinking out
+of the water-bottle, with the greatest satisfaction in seconding himself
+according to form, and then came at me with an air and a show that made
+me believe he really was going to do for me at last. He got heavily
+bruised, for I am sorry to record that the more I hit him, the harder I
+hit him; but he came up again and again and again, until at last he got
+a bad fall with the back of his head against the wall. Even after that
+crisis in our affairs, he got up and turned round and round confusedly a
+few times, not knowing where I was; but finally went on his knees to his
+sponge and threw it up: at the same time panting out, “That means you
+have won.”
+
+He seemed so brave and innocent, that although I had not proposed the
+contest, I felt but a gloomy satisfaction in my victory. Indeed, I go
+so far as to hope that I regarded myself while dressing as a species of
+savage young wolf or other wild beast. However, I got dressed, darkly
+wiping my sanguinary face at intervals, and I said, “Can I help you?”
+ and he said “No thankee,” and I said “Good afternoon,” and he said “Same
+to you.”
+
+When I got into the courtyard, I found Estella waiting with the keys.
+But she neither asked me where I had been, nor why I had kept her
+waiting; and there was a bright flush upon her face, as though something
+had happened to delight her. Instead of going straight to the gate, too,
+she stepped back into the passage, and beckoned me.
+
+“Come here! You may kiss me, if you like.”
+
+I kissed her cheek as she turned it to me. I think I would have gone
+through a great deal to kiss her cheek. But I felt that the kiss was
+given to the coarse common boy as a piece of money might have been, and
+that it was worth nothing.
+
+What with the birthday visitors, and what with the cards, and what with
+the fight, my stay had lasted so long, that when I neared home the light
+on the spit of sand off the point on the marshes was gleaming against
+a black night-sky, and Joe’s furnace was flinging a path of fire across
+the road.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XII
+
+My mind grew very uneasy on the subject of the pale young gentleman. The
+more I thought of the fight, and recalled the pale young gentleman on
+his back in various stages of puffy and incrimsoned countenance, the
+more certain it appeared that something would be done to me. I felt that
+the pale young gentleman’s blood was on my head, and that the Law would
+avenge it. Without having any definite idea of the penalties I had
+incurred, it was clear to me that village boys could not go stalking
+about the country, ravaging the houses of gentlefolks and pitching into
+the studious youth of England, without laying themselves open to severe
+punishment. For some days, I even kept close at home, and looked out at
+the kitchen door with the greatest caution and trepidation before going
+on an errand, lest the officers of the County Jail should pounce upon
+me. The pale young gentleman’s nose had stained my trousers, and I tried
+to wash out that evidence of my guilt in the dead of night. I had cut
+my knuckles against the pale young gentleman’s teeth, and I twisted my
+imagination into a thousand tangles, as I devised incredible ways of
+accounting for that damnatory circumstance when I should be haled before
+the Judges.
+
+When the day came round for my return to the scene of the deed of
+violence, my terrors reached their height. Whether myrmidons of Justice,
+specially sent down from London, would be lying in ambush behind the
+gate;--whether Miss Havisham, preferring to take personal vengeance for
+an outrage done to her house, might rise in those grave-clothes of hers,
+draw a pistol, and shoot me dead:--whether suborned boys--a numerous
+band of mercenaries--might be engaged to fall upon me in the brewery,
+and cuff me until I was no more;--it was high testimony to my confidence
+in the spirit of the pale young gentleman, that I never imagined him
+accessory to these retaliations; they always came into my mind as the
+acts of injudicious relatives of his, goaded on by the state of his
+visage and an indignant sympathy with the family features.
+
+However, go to Miss Havisham’s I must, and go I did. And behold! nothing
+came of the late struggle. It was not alluded to in any way, and no pale
+young gentleman was to be discovered on the premises. I found the same
+gate open, and I explored the garden, and even looked in at the windows
+of the detached house; but my view was suddenly stopped by the closed
+shutters within, and all was lifeless. Only in the corner where
+the combat had taken place could I detect any evidence of the young
+gentleman’s existence. There were traces of his gore in that spot, and I
+covered them with garden-mould from the eye of man.
+
+On the broad landing between Miss Havisham’s own room and that other
+room in which the long table was laid out, I saw a garden-chair,--a
+light chair on wheels, that you pushed from behind. It had been placed
+there since my last visit, and I entered, that same day, on a regular
+occupation of pushing Miss Havisham in this chair (when she was tired of
+walking with her hand upon my shoulder) round her own room, and across
+the landing, and round the other room. Over and over and over again,
+we would make these journeys, and sometimes they would last as long as
+three hours at a stretch. I insensibly fall into a general mention of
+these journeys as numerous, because it was at once settled that I should
+return every alternate day at noon for these purposes, and because I am
+now going to sum up a period of at least eight or ten months.
+
+As we began to be more used to one another, Miss Havisham talked more
+to me, and asked me such questions as what had I learnt and what was
+I going to be? I told her I was going to be apprenticed to Joe, I
+believed; and I enlarged upon my knowing nothing and wanting to know
+everything, in the hope that she might offer some help towards that
+desirable end. But she did not; on the contrary, she seemed to prefer my
+being ignorant. Neither did she ever give me any money,--or anything
+but my daily dinner,--nor ever stipulate that I should be paid for my
+services.
+
+Estella was always about, and always let me in and out, but never told
+me I might kiss her again. Sometimes, she would coldly tolerate me;
+sometimes, she would condescend to me; sometimes, she would be quite
+familiar with me; sometimes, she would tell me energetically that she
+hated me. Miss Havisham would often ask me in a whisper, or when we were
+alone, “Does she grow prettier and prettier, Pip?” And when I said yes
+(for indeed she did), would seem to enjoy it greedily. Also, when we
+played at cards Miss Havisham would look on, with a miserly relish of
+Estella’s moods, whatever they were. And sometimes, when her moods were
+so many and so contradictory of one another that I was puzzled what
+to say or do, Miss Havisham would embrace her with lavish fondness,
+murmuring something in her ear that sounded like “Break their hearts my
+pride and hope, break their hearts and have no mercy!”
+
+There was a song Joe used to hum fragments of at the forge, of which the
+burden was Old Clem. This was not a very ceremonious way of rendering
+homage to a patron saint, but I believe Old Clem stood in that relation
+towards smiths. It was a song that imitated the measure of beating upon
+iron, and was a mere lyrical excuse for the introduction of Old Clem’s
+respected name. Thus, you were to hammer boys round--Old Clem! With a
+thump and a sound--Old Clem! Beat it out, beat it out--Old Clem! With a
+clink for the stout--Old Clem! Blow the fire, blow the fire--Old
+Clem! Roaring dryer, soaring higher--Old Clem! One day soon after the
+appearance of the chair, Miss Havisham suddenly saying to me, with the
+impatient movement of her fingers, “There, there, there! Sing!” I was
+surprised into crooning this ditty as I pushed her over the floor. It
+happened so to catch her fancy that she took it up in a low brooding
+voice as if she were singing in her sleep. After that, it became
+customary with us to have it as we moved about, and Estella would often
+join in; though the whole strain was so subdued, even when there were
+three of us, that it made less noise in the grim old house than the
+lightest breath of wind.
+
+What could I become with these surroundings? How could my character fail
+to be influenced by them? Is it to be wondered at if my thoughts were
+dazed, as my eyes were, when I came out into the natural light from the
+misty yellow rooms?
+
+Perhaps I might have told Joe about the pale young gentleman, if I had
+not previously been betrayed into those enormous inventions to which
+I had confessed. Under the circumstances, I felt that Joe could hardly
+fail to discern in the pale young gentleman, an appropriate passenger
+to be put into the black velvet coach; therefore, I said nothing of him.
+Besides, that shrinking from having Miss Havisham and Estella discussed,
+which had come upon me in the beginning, grew much more potent as time
+went on. I reposed complete confidence in no one but Biddy; but I told
+poor Biddy everything. Why it came natural to me to do so, and why Biddy
+had a deep concern in everything I told her, I did not know then, though
+I think I know now.
+
+Meanwhile, councils went on in the kitchen at home, fraught with
+almost insupportable aggravation to my exasperated spirit. That ass,
+Pumblechook, used often to come over of a night for the purpose of
+discussing my prospects with my sister; and I really do believe (to
+this hour with less penitence than I ought to feel), that if these hands
+could have taken a linchpin out of his chaise-cart, they would have done
+it. The miserable man was a man of that confined stolidity of mind, that
+he could not discuss my prospects without having me before him,--as it
+were, to operate upon,--and he would drag me up from my stool (usually
+by the collar) where I was quiet in a corner, and, putting me before the
+fire as if I were going to be cooked, would begin by saying, “Now, Mum,
+here is this boy! Here is this boy which you brought up by hand. Hold up
+your head, boy, and be forever grateful unto them which so did do. Now,
+Mum, with respections to this boy!” And then he would rumple my hair
+the wrong way,--which from my earliest remembrance, as already hinted,
+I have in my soul denied the right of any fellow-creature to do,--and
+would hold me before him by the sleeve,--a spectacle of imbecility only
+to be equalled by himself.
+
+Then, he and my sister would pair off in such nonsensical speculations
+about Miss Havisham, and about what she would do with me and for me,
+that I used to want--quite painfully--to burst into spiteful tears, fly
+at Pumblechook, and pummel him all over. In these dialogues, my sister
+spoke to me as if she were morally wrenching one of my teeth out at
+every reference; while Pumblechook himself, self-constituted my patron,
+would sit supervising me with a depreciatory eye, like the architect of
+my fortunes who thought himself engaged on a very unremunerative job.
+
+In these discussions, Joe bore no part. But he was often talked at,
+while they were in progress, by reason of Mrs. Joe’s perceiving that
+he was not favorable to my being taken from the forge. I was fully old
+enough now to be apprenticed to Joe; and when Joe sat with the poker on
+his knees thoughtfully raking out the ashes between the lower bars, my
+sister would so distinctly construe that innocent action into opposition
+on his part, that she would dive at him, take the poker out of his
+hands, shake him, and put it away. There was a most irritating end to
+every one of these debates. All in a moment, with nothing to lead up to
+it, my sister would stop herself in a yawn, and catching sight of me as
+it were incidentally, would swoop upon me with, “Come! there’s enough of
+you! You get along to bed; you’ve given trouble enough for one night, I
+hope!” As if I had besought them as a favor to bother my life out.
+
+We went on in this way for a long time, and it seemed likely that we
+should continue to go on in this way for a long time, when one day Miss
+Havisham stopped short as she and I were walking, she leaning on my
+shoulder; and said with some displeasure,--
+
+“You are growing tall, Pip!”
+
+I thought it best to hint, through the medium of a meditative look, that
+this might be occasioned by circumstances over which I had no control.
+
+She said no more at the time; but she presently stopped and looked at me
+again; and presently again; and after that, looked frowning and moody.
+On the next day of my attendance, when our usual exercise was over, and
+I had landed her at her dressing-table, she stayed me with a movement of
+her impatient fingers:--
+
+“Tell me the name again of that blacksmith of yours.”
+
+“Joe Gargery, ma’am.”
+
+“Meaning the master you were to be apprenticed to?”
+
+“Yes, Miss Havisham.”
+
+“You had better be apprenticed at once. Would Gargery come here with
+you, and bring your indentures, do you think?”
+
+I signified that I had no doubt he would take it as an honor to be
+asked.
+
+“Then let him come.”
+
+“At any particular time, Miss Havisham?”
+
+“There, there! I know nothing about times. Let him come soon, and come
+along with you.”
+
+When I got home at night, and delivered this message for Joe, my sister
+“went on the Rampage,” in a more alarming degree than at any previous
+period. She asked me and Joe whether we supposed she was door-mats under
+our feet, and how we dared to use her so, and what company we graciously
+thought she was fit for? When she had exhausted a torrent of such
+inquiries, she threw a candlestick at Joe, burst into a loud sobbing,
+got out the dustpan,--which was always a very bad sign,--put on her
+coarse apron, and began cleaning up to a terrible extent. Not satisfied
+with a dry cleaning, she took to a pail and scrubbing-brush, and cleaned
+us out of house and home, so that we stood shivering in the back-yard.
+It was ten o’clock at night before we ventured to creep in again, and
+then she asked Joe why he hadn’t married a Negress Slave at once?
+Joe offered no answer, poor fellow, but stood feeling his whisker and
+looking dejectedly at me, as if he thought it really might have been a
+better speculation.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XIII
+
+It was a trial to my feelings, on the next day but one, to see
+Joe arraying himself in his Sunday clothes to accompany me to Miss
+Havisham’s. However, as he thought his court-suit necessary to the
+occasion, it was not for me to tell him that he looked far better in his
+working-dress; the rather, because I knew he made himself so dreadfully
+uncomfortable, entirely on my account, and that it was for me he pulled
+up his shirt-collar so very high behind, that it made the hair on the
+crown of his head stand up like a tuft of feathers.
+
+At breakfast-time my sister declared her intention of going to town with
+us, and being left at Uncle Pumblechook’s and called for “when we had
+done with our fine ladies”--a way of putting the case, from which Joe
+appeared inclined to augur the worst. The forge was shut up for the day,
+and Joe inscribed in chalk upon the door (as it was his custom to do on
+the very rare occasions when he was not at work) the monosyllable
+HOUT, accompanied by a sketch of an arrow supposed to be flying in the
+direction he had taken.
+
+We walked to town, my sister leading the way in a very large beaver
+bonnet, and carrying a basket like the Great Seal of England in plaited
+Straw, a pair of pattens, a spare shawl, and an umbrella, though it
+was a fine bright day. I am not quite clear whether these articles were
+carried penitentially or ostentatiously; but I rather think they were
+displayed as articles of property,--much as Cleopatra or any other
+sovereign lady on the Rampage might exhibit her wealth in a pageant or
+procession.
+
+When we came to Pumblechook’s, my sister bounced in and left us. As it
+was almost noon, Joe and I held straight on to Miss Havisham’s house.
+Estella opened the gate as usual, and, the moment she appeared, Joe took
+his hat off and stood weighing it by the brim in both his hands; as if
+he had some urgent reason in his mind for being particular to half a
+quarter of an ounce.
+
+Estella took no notice of either of us, but led us the way that I knew
+so well. I followed next to her, and Joe came last. When I looked back
+at Joe in the long passage, he was still weighing his hat with the
+greatest care, and was coming after us in long strides on the tips of
+his toes.
+
+Estella told me we were both to go in, so I took Joe by the coat-cuff
+and conducted him into Miss Havisham’s presence. She was seated at her
+dressing-table, and looked round at us immediately.
+
+“Oh!” said she to Joe. “You are the husband of the sister of this boy?”
+
+I could hardly have imagined dear old Joe looking so unlike himself or
+so like some extraordinary bird; standing as he did speechless, with his
+tuft of feathers ruffled, and his mouth open as if he wanted a worm.
+
+“You are the husband,” repeated Miss Havisham, “of the sister of this
+boy?”
+
+It was very aggravating; but, throughout the interview, Joe persisted in
+addressing Me instead of Miss Havisham.
+
+“Which I meantersay, Pip,” Joe now observed in a manner that was at
+once expressive of forcible argumentation, strict confidence, and great
+politeness, “as I hup and married your sister, and I were at the time
+what you might call (if you was anyways inclined) a single man.”
+
+“Well!” said Miss Havisham. “And you have reared the boy, with the
+intention of taking him for your apprentice; is that so, Mr. Gargery?”
+
+“You know, Pip,” replied Joe, “as you and me were ever friends, and it
+were looked for’ard to betwixt us, as being calc’lated to lead to
+larks. Not but what, Pip, if you had ever made objections to the
+business,--such as its being open to black and sut, or such-like,--not
+but what they would have been attended to, don’t you see?”
+
+“Has the boy,” said Miss Havisham, “ever made any objection? Does he
+like the trade?”
+
+“Which it is well beknown to yourself, Pip,” returned Joe, strengthening
+his former mixture of argumentation, confidence, and politeness, “that
+it were the wish of your own hart.” (I saw the idea suddenly break upon
+him that he would adapt his epitaph to the occasion, before he went on
+to say) “And there weren’t no objection on your part, and Pip it were
+the great wish of your hart!”
+
+It was quite in vain for me to endeavor to make him sensible that he
+ought to speak to Miss Havisham. The more I made faces and gestures
+to him to do it, the more confidential, argumentative, and polite, he
+persisted in being to Me.
+
+“Have you brought his indentures with you?” asked Miss Havisham.
+
+“Well, Pip, you know,” replied Joe, as if that were a little
+unreasonable, “you yourself see me put ‘em in my ‘at, and therefore you
+know as they are here.” With which he took them out, and gave them, not
+to Miss Havisham, but to me. I am afraid I was ashamed of the dear good
+fellow,--I know I was ashamed of him,--when I saw that Estella stood
+at the back of Miss Havisham’s chair, and that her eyes laughed
+mischievously. I took the indentures out of his hand and gave them to
+Miss Havisham.
+
+“You expected,” said Miss Havisham, as she looked them over, “no premium
+with the boy?”
+
+“Joe!” I remonstrated, for he made no reply at all. “Why don’t you
+answer--”
+
+“Pip,” returned Joe, cutting me short as if he were hurt, “which I
+meantersay that were not a question requiring a answer betwixt yourself
+and me, and which you know the answer to be full well No. You know it to
+be No, Pip, and wherefore should I say it?”
+
+Miss Havisham glanced at him as if she understood what he really was
+better than I had thought possible, seeing what he was there; and took
+up a little bag from the table beside her.
+
+“Pip has earned a premium here,” she said, “and here it is. There are
+five-and-twenty guineas in this bag. Give it to your master, Pip.”
+
+As if he were absolutely out of his mind with the wonder awakened in
+him by her strange figure and the strange room, Joe, even at this pass,
+persisted in addressing me.
+
+“This is wery liberal on your part, Pip,” said Joe, “and it is as such
+received and grateful welcome, though never looked for, far nor near,
+nor nowheres. And now, old chap,” said Joe, conveying to me a sensation,
+first of burning and then of freezing, for I felt as if that familiar
+expression were applied to Miss Havisham,--“and now, old chap, may we
+do our duty! May you and me do our duty, both on us, by one and another,
+and by them which your liberal present--have-conweyed--to be--for the
+satisfaction of mind-of--them as never--” here Joe showed that he felt
+he had fallen into frightful difficulties, until he triumphantly rescued
+himself with the words, “and from myself far be it!” These words had
+such a round and convincing sound for him that he said them twice.
+
+“Good-bye, Pip!” said Miss Havisham. “Let them out, Estella.”
+
+“Am I to come again, Miss Havisham?” I asked.
+
+“No. Gargery is your master now. Gargery! One word!”
+
+Thus calling him back as I went out of the door, I heard her say to Joe
+in a distinct emphatic voice, “The boy has been a good boy here, and
+that is his reward. Of course, as an honest man, you will expect no
+other and no more.”
+
+How Joe got out of the room, I have never been able to determine; but
+I know that when he did get out he was steadily proceeding upstairs
+instead of coming down, and was deaf to all remonstrances until I went
+after him and laid hold of him. In another minute we were outside the
+gate, and it was locked, and Estella was gone. When we stood in the
+daylight alone again, Joe backed up against a wall, and said to me,
+“Astonishing!” And there he remained so long saying, “Astonishing” at
+intervals, so often, that I began to think his senses were never coming
+back. At length he prolonged his remark into “Pip, I do assure you this
+is as-TON-ishing!” and so, by degrees, became conversational and able to
+walk away.
+
+I have reason to think that Joe’s intellects were brightened by the
+encounter they had passed through, and that on our way to Pumblechook’s
+he invented a subtle and deep design. My reason is to be found in
+what took place in Mr. Pumblechook’s parlor: where, on our presenting
+ourselves, my sister sat in conference with that detested seedsman.
+
+“Well?” cried my sister, addressing us both at once. “And what’s
+happened to you? I wonder you condescend to come back to such poor
+society as this, I am sure I do!”
+
+“Miss Havisham,” said Joe, with a fixed look at me, like an effort of
+remembrance, “made it wery partick’ler that we should give her--were it
+compliments or respects, Pip?”
+
+“Compliments,” I said.
+
+“Which that were my own belief,” answered Joe; “her compliments to Mrs.
+J. Gargery--”
+
+“Much good they’ll do me!” observed my sister; but rather gratified too.
+
+“And wishing,” pursued Joe, with another fixed look at me, like another
+effort of remembrance, “that the state of Miss Havisham’s elth were
+sitch as would have--allowed, were it, Pip?”
+
+“Of her having the pleasure,” I added.
+
+“Of ladies’ company,” said Joe. And drew a long breath.
+
+“Well!” cried my sister, with a mollified glance at Mr. Pumblechook.
+“She might have had the politeness to send that message at first, but
+it’s better late than never. And what did she give young Rantipole
+here?”
+
+“She giv’ him,” said Joe, “nothing.”
+
+Mrs. Joe was going to break out, but Joe went on.
+
+“What she giv’,” said Joe, “she giv’ to his friends. ‘And by his
+friends,’ were her explanation, ‘I mean into the hands of his sister
+Mrs. J. Gargery.’ Them were her words; ‘Mrs. J. Gargery.’ She mayn’t
+have know’d,” added Joe, with an appearance of reflection, “whether it
+were Joe, or Jorge.”
+
+My sister looked at Pumblechook: who smoothed the elbows of his wooden
+arm-chair, and nodded at her and at the fire, as if he had known all
+about it beforehand.
+
+“And how much have you got?” asked my sister, laughing. Positively
+laughing!
+
+“What would present company say to ten pound?” demanded Joe.
+
+“They’d say,” returned my sister, curtly, “pretty well. Not too much,
+but pretty well.”
+
+“It’s more than that, then,” said Joe.
+
+That fearful Impostor, Pumblechook, immediately nodded, and said, as he
+rubbed the arms of his chair, “It’s more than that, Mum.”
+
+“Why, you don’t mean to say--” began my sister.
+
+“Yes I do, Mum,” said Pumblechook; “but wait a bit. Go on, Joseph. Good
+in you! Go on!”
+
+“What would present company say,” proceeded Joe, “to twenty pound?”
+
+“Handsome would be the word,” returned my sister.
+
+“Well, then,” said Joe, “It’s more than twenty pound.”
+
+That abject hypocrite, Pumblechook, nodded again, and said, with a
+patronizing laugh, “It’s more than that, Mum. Good again! Follow her up,
+Joseph!”
+
+“Then to make an end of it,” said Joe, delightedly handing the bag to my
+sister; “it’s five-and-twenty pound.”
+
+“It’s five-and-twenty pound, Mum,” echoed that basest of swindlers,
+Pumblechook, rising to shake hands with her; “and it’s no more than your
+merits (as I said when my opinion was asked), and I wish you joy of the
+money!”
+
+If the villain had stopped here, his case would have been sufficiently
+awful, but he blackened his guilt by proceeding to take me into custody,
+with a right of patronage that left all his former criminality far
+behind.
+
+“Now you see, Joseph and wife,” said Pumblechook, as he took me by the
+arm above the elbow, “I am one of them that always go right through with
+what they’ve begun. This boy must be bound, out of hand. That’s my way.
+Bound out of hand.”
+
+“Goodness knows, Uncle Pumblechook,” said my sister (grasping the
+money), “we’re deeply beholden to you.”
+
+“Never mind me, Mum,” returned that diabolical cornchandler. “A
+pleasure’s a pleasure all the world over. But this boy, you know; we
+must have him bound. I said I’d see to it--to tell you the truth.”
+
+The Justices were sitting in the Town Hall near at hand, and we at
+once went over to have me bound apprentice to Joe in the Magisterial
+presence. I say we went over, but I was pushed over by Pumblechook,
+exactly as if I had that moment picked a pocket or fired a rick; indeed,
+it was the general impression in Court that I had been taken red-handed;
+for, as Pumblechook shoved me before him through the crowd, I heard some
+people say, “What’s he done?” and others, “He’s a young ‘un, too, but
+looks bad, don’t he?” One person of mild and benevolent aspect even gave
+me a tract ornamented with a woodcut of a malevolent young man fitted
+up with a perfect sausage-shop of fetters, and entitled TO BE READ IN MY
+CELL.
+
+The Hall was a queer place, I thought, with higher pews in it than a
+church,--and with people hanging over the pews looking on,--and with
+mighty Justices (one with a powdered head) leaning back in chairs, with
+folded arms, or taking snuff, or going to sleep, or writing, or reading
+the newspapers,--and with some shining black portraits on the walls,
+which my unartistic eye regarded as a composition of hardbake and
+sticking-plaster. Here, in a corner my indentures were duly signed and
+attested, and I was “bound”; Mr. Pumblechook holding me all the while
+as if we had looked in on our way to the scaffold, to have those little
+preliminaries disposed of.
+
+When we had come out again, and had got rid of the boys who had been put
+into great spirits by the expectation of seeing me publicly tortured,
+and who were much disappointed to find that my friends were merely
+rallying round me, we went back to Pumblechook’s. And there my sister
+became so excited by the twenty-five guineas, that nothing would serve
+her but we must have a dinner out of that windfall at the Blue Boar, and
+that Pumblechook must go over in his chaise-cart, and bring the Hubbles
+and Mr. Wopsle.
+
+It was agreed to be done; and a most melancholy day I passed. For,
+it inscrutably appeared to stand to reason, in the minds of the whole
+company, that I was an excrescence on the entertainment. And to make it
+worse, they all asked me from time to time,--in short, whenever they
+had nothing else to do,--why I didn’t enjoy myself? And what could I
+possibly do then, but say I was enjoying myself,--when I wasn’t!
+
+However, they were grown up and had their own way, and they made the
+most of it. That swindling Pumblechook, exalted into the beneficent
+contriver of the whole occasion, actually took the top of the table;
+and, when he addressed them on the subject of my being bound, and had
+fiendishly congratulated them on my being liable to imprisonment if I
+played at cards, drank strong liquors, kept late hours or bad company,
+or indulged in other vagaries which the form of my indentures appeared
+to contemplate as next to inevitable, he placed me standing on a chair
+beside him to illustrate his remarks.
+
+My only other remembrances of the great festival are, That they wouldn’t
+let me go to sleep, but whenever they saw me dropping off, woke me up
+and told me to enjoy myself. That, rather late in the evening Mr. Wopsle
+gave us Collins’s ode, and threw his bloodstained sword in thunder
+down, with such effect, that a waiter came in and said, “The Commercials
+underneath sent up their compliments, and it wasn’t the Tumblers’ Arms.”
+ That, they were all in excellent spirits on the road home, and sang, O
+Lady Fair! Mr. Wopsle taking the bass, and asserting with a tremendously
+strong voice (in reply to the inquisitive bore who leads that piece
+of music in a most impertinent manner, by wanting to know all about
+everybody’s private affairs) that he was the man with his white locks
+flowing, and that he was upon the whole the weakest pilgrim going.
+
+Finally, I remember that when I got into my little bedroom, I was truly
+wretched, and had a strong conviction on me that I should never like
+Joe’s trade. I had liked it once, but once was not now.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XIV
+
+It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home. There may be black
+ingratitude in the thing, and the punishment may be retributive and well
+deserved; but that it is a miserable thing, I can testify.
+
+Home had never been a very pleasant place to me, because of my sister’s
+temper. But, Joe had sanctified it, and I had believed in it. I had
+believed in the best parlor as a most elegant saloon; I had believed
+in the front door, as a mysterious portal of the Temple of State whose
+solemn opening was attended with a sacrifice of roast fowls; I had
+believed in the kitchen as a chaste though not magnificent apartment;
+I had believed in the forge as the glowing road to manhood and
+independence. Within a single year all this was changed. Now it was all
+coarse and common, and I would not have had Miss Havisham and Estella
+see it on any account.
+
+How much of my ungracious condition of mind may have been my own fault,
+how much Miss Havisham’s, how much my sister’s, is now of no moment to
+me or to any one. The change was made in me; the thing was done. Well or
+ill done, excusably or inexcusably, it was done.
+
+Once, it had seemed to me that when I should at last roll up my
+shirt-sleeves and go into the forge, Joe’s ‘prentice, I should be
+distinguished and happy. Now the reality was in my hold, I only felt
+that I was dusty with the dust of small-coal, and that I had a weight
+upon my daily remembrance to which the anvil was a feather. There have
+been occasions in my later life (I suppose as in most lives) when I have
+felt for a time as if a thick curtain had fallen on all its interest
+and romance, to shut me out from anything save dull endurance any more.
+Never has that curtain dropped so heavy and blank, as when my way in
+life lay stretched out straight before me through the newly entered road
+of apprenticeship to Joe.
+
+I remember that at a later period of my “time,” I used to stand about
+the churchyard on Sunday evenings when night was falling, comparing my
+own perspective with the windy marsh view, and making out some likeness
+between them by thinking how flat and low both were, and how on both
+there came an unknown way and a dark mist and then the sea. I was quite
+as dejected on the first working-day of my apprenticeship as in that
+after-time; but I am glad to know that I never breathed a murmur to Joe
+while my indentures lasted. It is about the only thing I am glad to know
+of myself in that connection.
+
+For, though it includes what I proceed to add, all the merit of what I
+proceed to add was Joe’s. It was not because I was faithful, but because
+Joe was faithful, that I never ran away and went for a soldier or
+a sailor. It was not because I had a strong sense of the virtue of
+industry, but because Joe had a strong sense of the virtue of industry,
+that I worked with tolerable zeal against the grain. It is not possible
+to know how far the influence of any amiable honest-hearted duty-doing
+man flies out into the world; but it is very possible to know how it has
+touched one’s self in going by, and I know right well that any good that
+intermixed itself with my apprenticeship came of plain contented Joe,
+and not of restlessly aspiring discontented me.
+
+What I wanted, who can say? How can I say, when I never knew? What
+I dreaded was, that in some unlucky hour I, being at my grimiest and
+commonest, should lift up my eyes and see Estella looking in at one
+of the wooden windows of the forge. I was haunted by the fear that she
+would, sooner or later, find me out, with a black face and hands, doing
+the coarsest part of my work, and would exult over me and despise me.
+Often after dark, when I was pulling the bellows for Joe, and we were
+singing Old Clem, and when the thought how we used to sing it at Miss
+Havisham’s would seem to show me Estella’s face in the fire, with her
+pretty hair fluttering in the wind and her eyes scorning me,--often at
+such a time I would look towards those panels of black night in the wall
+which the wooden windows then were, and would fancy that I saw her just
+drawing her face away, and would believe that she had come at last.
+
+After that, when we went into supper, the place and the meal would have
+a more homely look than ever, and I would feel more ashamed of home than
+ever, in my own ungracious breast.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XV
+
+As I was getting too big for Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt’s room, my
+education under that preposterous female terminated. Not, however, until
+Biddy had imparted to me everything she knew, from the little catalogue
+of prices, to a comic song she had once bought for a half-penny.
+Although the only coherent part of the latter piece of literature were
+the opening lines.
+
+ When I went to Lunnon town sirs,
+ Too rul loo rul
+ Too rul loo rul
+ Wasn’t I done very brown sirs?
+ Too rul loo rul
+ Too rul loo rul
+
+--still, in my desire to be wiser, I got this composition by heart with the utmost gravity; nor do I recollect that I questioned its merit, except that I
+thought (as I still do) the amount of Too rul somewhat in excess of the
+poetry. In my hunger for information, I made proposals to Mr. Wopsle to
+bestow some intellectual crumbs upon me, with which he kindly complied.
+As it turned out, however, that he only wanted me for a dramatic
+lay-figure, to be contradicted and embraced and wept over and bullied
+and clutched and stabbed and knocked about in a variety of ways, I soon
+declined that course of instruction; though not until Mr. Wopsle in his
+poetic fury had severely mauled me.
+
+Whatever I acquired, I tried to impart to Joe. This statement sounds so
+well, that I cannot in my conscience let it pass unexplained. I wanted
+to make Joe less ignorant and common, that he might be worthier of my
+society and less open to Estella’s reproach.
+
+The old Battery out on the marshes was our place of study, and a broken
+slate and a short piece of slate-pencil were our educational implements:
+to which Joe always added a pipe of tobacco. I never knew Joe to
+remember anything from one Sunday to another, or to acquire, under my
+tuition, any piece of information whatever. Yet he would smoke his pipe
+at the Battery with a far more sagacious air than anywhere else,--even
+with a learned air,--as if he considered himself to be advancing
+immensely. Dear fellow, I hope he did.
+
+It was pleasant and quiet, out there with the sails on the river passing
+beyond the earthwork, and sometimes, when the tide was low, looking
+as if they belonged to sunken ships that were still sailing on at the
+bottom of the water. Whenever I watched the vessels standing out to sea
+with their white sails spread, I somehow thought of Miss Havisham and
+Estella; and whenever the light struck aslant, afar off, upon a cloud
+or sail or green hillside or water-line, it was just the same.--Miss
+Havisham and Estella and the strange house and the strange life appeared
+to have something to do with everything that was picturesque.
+
+One Sunday when Joe, greatly enjoying his pipe, had so plumed himself on
+being “most awful dull,” that I had given him up for the day, I lay on
+the earthwork for some time with my chin on my hand, descrying traces of
+Miss Havisham and Estella all over the prospect, in the sky and in the
+water, until at last I resolved to mention a thought concerning them
+that had been much in my head.
+
+“Joe,” said I; “don’t you think I ought to make Miss Havisham a visit?”
+
+“Well, Pip,” returned Joe, slowly considering. “What for?”
+
+“What for, Joe? What is any visit made for?”
+
+“There is some wisits p’r’aps,” said Joe, “as for ever remains open to
+the question, Pip. But in regard to wisiting Miss Havisham. She might
+think you wanted something,--expected something of her.”
+
+“Don’t you think I might say that I did not, Joe?”
+
+“You might, old chap,” said Joe. “And she might credit it. Similarly she
+mightn’t.”
+
+Joe felt, as I did, that he had made a point there, and he pulled hard
+at his pipe to keep himself from weakening it by repetition.
+
+“You see, Pip,” Joe pursued, as soon as he was past that danger, “Miss
+Havisham done the handsome thing by you. When Miss Havisham done the
+handsome thing by you, she called me back to say to me as that were
+all.”
+
+“Yes, Joe. I heard her.”
+
+“ALL,” Joe repeated, very emphatically.
+
+“Yes, Joe. I tell you, I heard her.”
+
+“Which I meantersay, Pip, it might be that her meaning were,--Make a
+end on it!--As you was!--Me to the North, and you to the South!--Keep in
+sunders!”
+
+I had thought of that too, and it was very far from comforting to me
+to find that he had thought of it; for it seemed to render it more
+probable.
+
+“But, Joe.”
+
+“Yes, old chap.”
+
+“Here am I, getting on in the first year of my time, and, since the day
+of my being bound, I have never thanked Miss Havisham, or asked after
+her, or shown that I remember her.”
+
+“That’s true, Pip; and unless you was to turn her out a set of shoes
+all four round,--and which I meantersay as even a set of shoes all
+four round might not be acceptable as a present, in a total wacancy of
+hoofs--”
+
+“I don’t mean that sort of remembrance, Joe; I don’t mean a present.”
+
+But Joe had got the idea of a present in his head and must harp upon it.
+“Or even,” said he, “if you was helped to knocking her up a new chain
+for the front door,--or say a gross or two of shark-headed screws for
+general use,--or some light fancy article, such as a toasting-fork
+when she took her muffins,--or a gridiron when she took a sprat or such
+like--”
+
+“I don’t mean any present at all, Joe,” I interposed.
+
+“Well,” said Joe, still harping on it as though I had particularly
+pressed it, “if I was yourself, Pip, I wouldn’t. No, I would not. For
+what’s a door-chain when she’s got one always up? And shark-headers is
+open to misrepresentations. And if it was a toasting-fork, you’d go into
+brass and do yourself no credit. And the oncommonest workman can’t show
+himself oncommon in a gridiron,--for a gridiron IS a gridiron,” said
+Joe, steadfastly impressing it upon me, as if he were endeavouring to
+rouse me from a fixed delusion, “and you may haim at what you like, but
+a gridiron it will come out, either by your leave or again your leave,
+and you can’t help yourself--”
+
+“My dear Joe,” I cried, in desperation, taking hold of his coat, “don’t
+go on in that way. I never thought of making Miss Havisham any present.”
+
+“No, Pip,” Joe assented, as if he had been contending for that, all
+along; “and what I say to you is, you are right, Pip.”
+
+“Yes, Joe; but what I wanted to say, was, that as we are rather slack
+just now, if you would give me a half-holiday to-morrow, I think I would
+go uptown and make a call on Miss Est--Havisham.”
+
+“Which her name,” said Joe, gravely, “ain’t Estavisham, Pip, unless she
+have been rechris’ened.”
+
+“I know, Joe, I know. It was a slip of mine. What do you think of it,
+Joe?”
+
+In brief, Joe thought that if I thought well of it, he thought well of
+it. But, he was particular in stipulating that if I were not received
+with cordiality, or if I were not encouraged to repeat my visit as a
+visit which had no ulterior object but was simply one of gratitude for a
+favor received, then this experimental trip should have no successor. By
+these conditions I promised to abide.
+
+Now, Joe kept a journeyman at weekly wages whose name was Orlick.
+He pretended that his Christian name was Dolge,--a clear
+Impossibility,--but he was a fellow of that obstinate disposition that I
+believe him to have been the prey of no delusion in this particular, but
+wilfully to have imposed that name upon the village as an affront to its
+understanding. He was a broadshouldered loose-limbed swarthy fellow of
+great strength, never in a hurry, and always slouching. He never even
+seemed to come to his work on purpose, but would slouch in as if by mere
+accident; and when he went to the Jolly Bargemen to eat his dinner, or
+went away at night, he would slouch out, like Cain or the Wandering Jew,
+as if he had no idea where he was going and no intention of ever
+coming back. He lodged at a sluice-keeper’s out on the marshes, and on
+working-days would come slouching from his hermitage, with his hands in
+his pockets and his dinner loosely tied in a bundle round his neck
+and dangling on his back. On Sundays he mostly lay all day on the
+sluice-gates, or stood against ricks and barns. He always slouched,
+locomotively, with his eyes on the ground; and, when accosted or
+otherwise required to raise them, he looked up in a half-resentful,
+half-puzzled way, as though the only thought he ever had was, that it
+was rather an odd and injurious fact that he should never be thinking.
+
+This morose journeyman had no liking for me. When I was very small and
+timid, he gave me to understand that the Devil lived in a black corner
+of the forge, and that he knew the fiend very well: also that it was
+necessary to make up the fire, once in seven years, with a live boy, and
+that I might consider myself fuel. When I became Joe’s ‘prentice, Orlick
+was perhaps confirmed in some suspicion that I should displace him;
+howbeit, he liked me still less. Not that he ever said anything, or did
+anything, openly importing hostility; I only noticed that he always beat
+his sparks in my direction, and that whenever I sang Old Clem, he came
+in out of time.
+
+Dolge Orlick was at work and present, next day, when I reminded Joe of
+my half-holiday. He said nothing at the moment, for he and Joe had just
+got a piece of hot iron between them, and I was at the bellows; but by
+and by he said, leaning on his hammer,--
+
+“Now, master! Sure you’re not a going to favor only one of us. If Young
+Pip has a half-holiday, do as much for Old Orlick.” I suppose he was
+about five-and-twenty, but he usually spoke of himself as an ancient
+person.
+
+“Why, what’ll you do with a half-holiday, if you get it?” said Joe.
+
+“What’ll I do with it! What’ll he do with it? I’ll do as much with it as
+him,” said Orlick.
+
+“As to Pip, he’s going up town,” said Joe.
+
+“Well then, as to Old Orlick, he’s a going up town,” retorted that
+worthy. “Two can go up town. Tain’t only one wot can go up town.
+
+“Don’t lose your temper,” said Joe.
+
+“Shall if I like,” growled Orlick. “Some and their uptowning! Now,
+master! Come. No favoring in this shop. Be a man!”
+
+The master refusing to entertain the subject until the journeyman was in
+a better temper, Orlick plunged at the furnace, drew out a red-hot
+bar, made at me with it as if he were going to run it through my body,
+whisked it round my head, laid it on the anvil, hammered it out,--as
+if it were I, I thought, and the sparks were my spirting blood,--and
+finally said, when he had hammered himself hot and the iron cold, and he
+again leaned on his hammer,--
+
+“Now, master!”
+
+“Are you all right now?” demanded Joe.
+
+“Ah! I am all right,” said gruff Old Orlick.
+
+“Then, as in general you stick to your work as well as most men,” said
+Joe, “let it be a half-holiday for all.”
+
+My sister had been standing silent in the yard, within hearing,--she was
+a most unscrupulous spy and listener,--and she instantly looked in at
+one of the windows.
+
+“Like you, you fool!” said she to Joe, “giving holidays to great idle
+hulkers like that. You are a rich man, upon my life, to waste wages in
+that way. I wish I was his master!”
+
+“You’d be everybody’s master, if you durst,” retorted Orlick, with an
+ill-favored grin.
+
+(“Let her alone,” said Joe.)
+
+“I’d be a match for all noodles and all rogues,” returned my sister,
+beginning to work herself into a mighty rage. “And I couldn’t be a
+match for the noodles, without being a match for your master, who’s the
+dunder-headed king of the noodles. And I couldn’t be a match for the
+rogues, without being a match for you, who are the blackest-looking and
+the worst rogue between this and France. Now!”
+
+“You’re a foul shrew, Mother Gargery,” growled the journeyman. “If that
+makes a judge of rogues, you ought to be a good’un.”
+
+(“Let her alone, will you?” said Joe.)
+
+“What did you say?” cried my sister, beginning to scream. “What did you
+say? What did that fellow Orlick say to me, Pip? What did he call me,
+with my husband standing by? Oh! oh! oh!” Each of these exclamations was
+a shriek; and I must remark of my sister, what is equally true of all
+the violent women I have ever seen, that passion was no excuse for
+her, because it is undeniable that instead of lapsing into passion, she
+consciously and deliberately took extraordinary pains to force herself
+into it, and became blindly furious by regular stages; “what was the
+name he gave me before the base man who swore to defend me? Oh! Hold me!
+Oh!”
+
+“Ah-h-h!” growled the journeyman, between his teeth, “I’d hold you, if
+you was my wife. I’d hold you under the pump, and choke it out of you.”
+
+(“I tell you, let her alone,” said Joe.)
+
+“Oh! To hear him!” cried my sister, with a clap of her hands and a
+scream together,--which was her next stage. “To hear the names he’s
+giving me! That Orlick! In my own house! Me, a married woman! With my
+husband standing by! Oh! Oh!” Here my sister, after a fit of clappings
+and screamings, beat her hands upon her bosom and upon her knees, and
+threw her cap off, and pulled her hair down,--which were the last stages
+on her road to frenzy. Being by this time a perfect Fury and a complete
+success, she made a dash at the door which I had fortunately locked.
+
+What could the wretched Joe do now, after his disregarded parenthetical
+interruptions, but stand up to his journeyman, and ask him what he meant
+by interfering betwixt himself and Mrs. Joe; and further whether he was
+man enough to come on? Old Orlick felt that the situation admitted of
+nothing less than coming on, and was on his defence straightway; so,
+without so much as pulling off their singed and burnt aprons, they went
+at one another, like two giants. But, if any man in that neighborhood
+could stand uplong against Joe, I never saw the man. Orlick, as if he
+had been of no more account than the pale young gentleman, was very
+soon among the coal-dust, and in no hurry to come out of it. Then Joe
+unlocked the door and picked up my sister, who had dropped insensible
+at the window (but who had seen the fight first, I think), and who was
+carried into the house and laid down, and who was recommended to revive,
+and would do nothing but struggle and clench her hands in Joe’s hair.
+Then, came that singular calm and silence which succeed all uproars; and
+then, with the vague sensation which I have always connected with such
+a lull,--namely, that it was Sunday, and somebody was dead,--I went upstairs
+to dress myself.
+
+When I came down again, I found Joe and Orlick sweeping up, without any
+other traces of discomposure than a slit in one of Orlick’s nostrils,
+which was neither expressive nor ornamental. A pot of beer had appeared
+from the Jolly Bargemen, and they were sharing it by turns in a
+peaceable manner. The lull had a sedative and philosophical influence on
+Joe, who followed me out into the road to say, as a parting observation
+that might do me good, “On the Rampage, Pip, and off the Rampage,
+Pip:--such is Life!”
+
+With what absurd emotions (for we think the feelings that are very
+serious in a man quite comical in a boy) I found myself again going to
+Miss Havisham’s, matters little here. Nor, how I passed and repassed
+the gate many times before I could make up my mind to ring. Nor, how
+I debated whether I should go away without ringing; nor, how I should
+undoubtedly have gone, if my time had been my own, to come back.
+
+Miss Sarah Pocket came to the gate. No Estella.
+
+“How, then? You here again?” said Miss Pocket. “What do you want?”
+
+When I said that I only came to see how Miss Havisham was, Sarah
+evidently deliberated whether or no she should send me about my
+business. But unwilling to hazard the responsibility, she let me in, and
+presently brought the sharp message that I was to “come up.”
+
+Everything was unchanged, and Miss Havisham was alone.
+
+“Well?” said she, fixing her eyes upon me. “I hope you want nothing?
+You’ll get nothing.”
+
+“No indeed, Miss Havisham. I only wanted you to know that I am doing
+very well in my apprenticeship, and am always much obliged to you.”
+
+“There, there!” with the old restless fingers. “Come now and then; come
+on your birthday.--Ay!” she cried suddenly, turning herself and her
+chair towards me, “You are looking round for Estella? Hey?”
+
+I had been looking round,--in fact, for Estella,--and I stammered that I
+hoped she was well.
+
+“Abroad,” said Miss Havisham; “educating for a lady; far out of reach;
+prettier than ever; admired by all who see her. Do you feel that you
+have lost her?”
+
+There was such a malignant enjoyment in her utterance of the last words,
+and she broke into such a disagreeable laugh, that I was at a loss what
+to say. She spared me the trouble of considering, by dismissing me. When
+the gate was closed upon me by Sarah of the walnut-shell countenance, I
+felt more than ever dissatisfied with my home and with my trade and with
+everything; and that was all I took by that motion.
+
+As I was loitering along the High Street, looking in disconsolately at
+the shop windows, and thinking what I would buy if I were a gentleman,
+who should come out of the bookshop but Mr. Wopsle. Mr. Wopsle had in
+his hand the affecting tragedy of George Barnwell, in which he had that
+moment invested sixpence, with the view of heaping every word of it on
+the head of Pumblechook, with whom he was going to drink tea. No sooner
+did he see me, than he appeared to consider that a special Providence
+had put a ‘prentice in his way to be read at; and he laid hold of me,
+and insisted on my accompanying him to the Pumblechookian parlor. As I
+knew it would be miserable at home, and as the nights were dark and the
+way was dreary, and almost any companionship on the road was better
+than none, I made no great resistance; consequently, we turned into
+Pumblechook’s just as the street and the shops were lighting up.
+
+As I never assisted at any other representation of George Barnwell, I
+don’t know how long it may usually take; but I know very well that it
+took until half-past nine o’ clock that night, and that when Mr. Wopsle
+got into Newgate, I thought he never would go to the scaffold, he became
+so much slower than at any former period of his disgraceful career. I
+thought it a little too much that he should complain of being cut short
+in his flower after all, as if he had not been running to seed, leaf
+after leaf, ever since his course began. This, however, was a
+mere question of length and wearisomeness. What stung me, was the
+identification of the whole affair with my unoffending self. When
+Barnwell began to go wrong, I declare that I felt positively apologetic,
+Pumblechook’s indignant stare so taxed me with it. Wopsle, too, took
+pains to present me in the worst light. At once ferocious and maudlin, I
+was made to murder my uncle with no extenuating circumstances whatever;
+Millwood put me down in argument, on every occasion; it became sheer
+monomania in my master’s daughter to care a button for me; and all I can
+say for my gasping and procrastinating conduct on the fatal morning, is,
+that it was worthy of the general feebleness of my character. Even after
+I was happily hanged and Wopsle had closed the book, Pumblechook sat
+staring at me, and shaking his head, and saying, “Take warning, boy,
+take warning!” as if it were a well-known fact that I contemplated
+murdering a near relation, provided I could only induce one to have the
+weakness to become my benefactor.
+
+It was a very dark night when it was all over, and when I set out with
+Mr. Wopsle on the walk home. Beyond town, we found a heavy mist out, and
+it fell wet and thick. The turnpike lamp was a blur, quite out of the
+lamp’s usual place apparently, and its rays looked solid substance on
+the fog. We were noticing this, and saying how that the mist rose with a
+change of wind from a certain quarter of our marshes, when we came upon
+a man, slouching under the lee of the turnpike house.
+
+“Halloa!” we said, stopping. “Orlick there?”
+
+“Ah!” he answered, slouching out. “I was standing by a minute, on the
+chance of company.”
+
+“You are late,” I remarked.
+
+Orlick not unnaturally answered, “Well? And you’re late.”
+
+“We have been,” said Mr. Wopsle, exalted with his late performance,--“we
+have been indulging, Mr. Orlick, in an intellectual evening.”
+
+Old Orlick growled, as if he had nothing to say about that, and we all
+went on together. I asked him presently whether he had been spending his
+half-holiday up and down town?
+
+“Yes,” said he, “all of it. I come in behind yourself. I didn’t see you,
+but I must have been pretty close behind you. By the by, the guns is
+going again.”
+
+“At the Hulks?” said I.
+
+“Ay! There’s some of the birds flown from the cages. The guns have been
+going since dark, about. You’ll hear one presently.”
+
+In effect, we had not walked many yards further, when the
+well-remembered boom came towards us, deadened by the mist, and heavily
+rolled away along the low grounds by the river, as if it were pursuing
+and threatening the fugitives.
+
+“A good night for cutting off in,” said Orlick. “We’d be puzzled how to
+bring down a jail-bird on the wing, to-night.”
+
+The subject was a suggestive one to me, and I thought about it in
+silence. Mr. Wopsle, as the ill-requited uncle of the evening’s tragedy,
+fell to meditating aloud in his garden at Camberwell. Orlick, with his
+hands in his pockets, slouched heavily at my side. It was very dark,
+very wet, very muddy, and so we splashed along. Now and then, the sound
+of the signal cannon broke upon us again, and again rolled sulkily along
+the course of the river. I kept myself to myself and my thoughts. Mr.
+Wopsle died amiably at Camberwell, and exceedingly game on Bosworth
+Field, and in the greatest agonies at Glastonbury. Orlick sometimes
+growled, “Beat it out, beat it out,--Old Clem! With a clink for the
+stout,--Old Clem!” I thought he had been drinking, but he was not drunk.
+
+Thus, we came to the village. The way by which we approached it took us
+past the Three Jolly Bargemen, which we were surprised to find--it being
+eleven o’clock--in a state of commotion, with the door wide open, and
+unwonted lights that had been hastily caught up and put down scattered
+about. Mr. Wopsle dropped into ask what was the matter (surmising that
+a convict had been taken), but came running out in a great hurry.
+
+“There’s something wrong,” said he, without stopping, “up at your place,
+Pip. Run all!”
+
+“What is it?” I asked, keeping up with him. So did Orlick, at my side.
+
+“I can’t quite understand. The house seems to have been violently
+entered when Joe Gargery was out. Supposed by convicts. Somebody has
+been attacked and hurt.”
+
+We were running too fast to admit of more being said, and we made no
+stop until we got into our kitchen. It was full of people; the whole
+village was there, or in the yard; and there was a surgeon, and there
+was Joe, and there were a group of women, all on the floor in the midst
+of the kitchen. The unemployed bystanders drew back when they saw me,
+and so I became aware of my sister,--lying without sense or movement on
+the bare boards where she had been knocked down by a tremendous blow
+on the back of the head, dealt by some unknown hand when her face was
+turned towards the fire,--destined never to be on the Rampage again,
+while she was the wife of Joe.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVI
+
+With my head full of George Barnwell, I was at first disposed to believe
+that I must have had some hand in the attack upon my sister, or at
+all events that as her near relation, popularly known to be under
+obligations to her, I was a more legitimate object of suspicion than
+any one else. But when, in the clearer light of next morning, I began to
+reconsider the matter and to hear it discussed around me on all sides, I
+took another view of the case, which was more reasonable.
+
+Joe had been at the Three Jolly Bargemen, smoking his pipe, from a
+quarter after eight o’clock to a quarter before ten. While he was there,
+my sister had been seen standing at the kitchen door, and had exchanged
+Good Night with a farm-laborer going home. The man could not be more
+particular as to the time at which he saw her (he got into dense
+confusion when he tried to be), than that it must have been before nine.
+When Joe went home at five minutes before ten, he found her struck down
+on the floor, and promptly called in assistance. The fire had not then
+burnt unusually low, nor was the snuff of the candle very long; the
+candle, however, had been blown out.
+
+Nothing had been taken away from any part of the house. Neither, beyond
+the blowing out of the candle,--which stood on a table between the door
+and my sister, and was behind her when she stood facing the fire and was
+struck,--was there any disarrangement of the kitchen, excepting such
+as she herself had made, in falling and bleeding. But, there was one
+remarkable piece of evidence on the spot. She had been struck with
+something blunt and heavy, on the head and spine; after the blows were
+dealt, something heavy had been thrown down at her with considerable
+violence, as she lay on her face. And on the ground beside her, when Joe
+picked her up, was a convict’s leg-iron which had been filed asunder.
+
+Now, Joe, examining this iron with a smith’s eye, declared it to have
+been filed asunder some time ago. The hue and cry going off to the
+Hulks, and people coming thence to examine the iron, Joe’s opinion
+was corroborated. They did not undertake to say when it had left the
+prison-ships to which it undoubtedly had once belonged; but they claimed
+to know for certain that that particular manacle had not been worn by
+either of the two convicts who had escaped last night. Further, one of
+those two was already retaken, and had not freed himself of his iron.
+
+Knowing what I knew, I set up an inference of my own here. I believed
+the iron to be my convict’s iron,--the iron I had seen and heard him
+filing at, on the marshes,--but my mind did not accuse him of having put
+it to its latest use. For I believed one of two other persons to have
+become possessed of it, and to have turned it to this cruel account.
+Either Orlick, or the strange man who had shown me the file.
+
+Now, as to Orlick; he had gone to town exactly as he told us when we
+picked him up at the turnpike, he had been seen about town all the
+evening, he had been in divers companies in several public-houses, and
+he had come back with myself and Mr. Wopsle. There was nothing against
+him, save the quarrel; and my sister had quarrelled with him, and with
+everybody else about her, ten thousand times. As to the strange man; if
+he had come back for his two bank-notes there could have been no dispute
+about them, because my sister was fully prepared to restore them.
+Besides, there had been no altercation; the assailant had come in so
+silently and suddenly, that she had been felled before she could look
+round.
+
+It was horrible to think that I had provided the weapon, however
+undesignedly, but I could hardly think otherwise. I suffered unspeakable
+trouble while I considered and reconsidered whether I should at last
+dissolve that spell of my childhood and tell Joe all the story. For
+months afterwards, I every day settled the question finally in the
+negative, and reopened and reargued it next morning. The contention
+came, after all, to this;--the secret was such an old one now, had so
+grown into me and become a part of myself, that I could not tear it
+away. In addition to the dread that, having led up to so much mischief,
+it would be now more likely than ever to alienate Joe from me if he
+believed it, I had a further restraining dread that he would not believe
+it, but would assort it with the fabulous dogs and veal-cutlets as a
+monstrous invention. However, I temporized with myself, of course--for,
+was I not wavering between right and wrong, when the thing is always
+done?--and resolved to make a full disclosure if I should see any
+such new occasion as a new chance of helping in the discovery of the
+assailant.
+
+The Constables and the Bow Street men from London--for, this happened in
+the days of the extinct red-waistcoated police--were about the house for
+a week or two, and did pretty much what I have heard and read of like
+authorities doing in other such cases. They took up several obviously
+wrong people, and they ran their heads very hard against wrong ideas,
+and persisted in trying to fit the circumstances to the ideas, instead
+of trying to extract ideas from the circumstances. Also, they stood
+about the door of the Jolly Bargemen, with knowing and reserved looks
+that filled the whole neighborhood with admiration; and they had a
+mysterious manner of taking their drink, that was almost as good as
+taking the culprit. But not quite, for they never did it.
+
+Long after these constitutional powers had dispersed, my sister lay very
+ill in bed. Her sight was disturbed, so that she saw objects multiplied,
+and grasped at visionary teacups and wineglasses instead of the
+realities; her hearing was greatly impaired; her memory also; and her
+speech was unintelligible. When, at last, she came round so far as to
+be helped downstairs, it was still necessary to keep my slate always by
+her, that she might indicate in writing what she could not indicate in
+speech. As she was (very bad handwriting apart) a more than indifferent
+speller, and as Joe was a more than indifferent reader, extraordinary
+complications arose between them which I was always called in to solve.
+The administration of mutton instead of medicine, the substitution of
+Tea for Joe, and the baker for bacon, were among the mildest of my own
+mistakes.
+
+However, her temper was greatly improved, and she was patient. A
+tremulous uncertainty of the action of all her limbs soon became a
+part of her regular state, and afterwards, at intervals of two or three
+months, she would often put her hands to her head, and would then remain
+for about a week at a time in some gloomy aberration of mind. We were
+at a loss to find a suitable attendant for her, until a circumstance
+happened conveniently to relieve us. Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt conquered a
+confirmed habit of living into which she had fallen, and Biddy became a
+part of our establishment.
+
+It may have been about a month after my sister’s reappearance in the
+kitchen, when Biddy came to us with a small speckled box containing the
+whole of her worldly effects, and became a blessing to the household.
+Above all, she was a blessing to Joe, for the dear old fellow was sadly
+cut up by the constant contemplation of the wreck of his wife, and had
+been accustomed, while attending on her of an evening, to turn to me
+every now and then and say, with his blue eyes moistened, “Such a fine
+figure of a woman as she once were, Pip!” Biddy instantly taking the
+cleverest charge of her as though she had studied her from infancy; Joe
+became able in some sort to appreciate the greater quiet of his life,
+and to get down to the Jolly Bargemen now and then for a change that did
+him good. It was characteristic of the police people that they had all
+more or less suspected poor Joe (though he never knew it), and that they
+had to a man concurred in regarding him as one of the deepest spirits
+they had ever encountered.
+
+Biddy’s first triumph in her new office, was to solve a difficulty
+that had completely vanquished me. I had tried hard at it, but had made
+nothing of it. Thus it was:--
+
+Again and again and again, my sister had traced upon the slate, a
+character that looked like a curious T, and then with the utmost
+eagerness had called our attention to it as something she particularly
+wanted. I had in vain tried everything producible that began with a T,
+from tar to toast and tub. At length it had come into my head that the
+sign looked like a hammer, and on my lustily calling that word in my
+sister’s ear, she had begun to hammer on the table and had expressed a
+qualified assent. Thereupon, I had brought in all our hammers, one after
+another, but without avail. Then I bethought me of a crutch, the shape
+being much the same, and I borrowed one in the village, and displayed
+it to my sister with considerable confidence. But she shook her head to
+that extent when she was shown it, that we were terrified lest in her
+weak and shattered state she should dislocate her neck.
+
+When my sister found that Biddy was very quick to understand her, this
+mysterious sign reappeared on the slate. Biddy looked thoughtfully
+at it, heard my explanation, looked thoughtfully at my sister, looked
+thoughtfully at Joe (who was always represented on the slate by his
+initial letter), and ran into the forge, followed by Joe and me.
+
+“Why, of course!” cried Biddy, with an exultant face. “Don’t you see?
+It’s him!”
+
+Orlick, without a doubt! She had lost his name, and could only signify
+him by his hammer. We told him why we wanted him to come into the
+kitchen, and he slowly laid down his hammer, wiped his brow with his
+arm, took another wipe at it with his apron, and came slouching
+out, with a curious loose vagabond bend in the knees that strongly
+distinguished him.
+
+I confess that I expected to see my sister denounce him, and that I
+was disappointed by the different result. She manifested the greatest
+anxiety to be on good terms with him, was evidently much pleased by his
+being at length produced, and motioned that she would have him
+given something to drink. She watched his countenance as if she were
+particularly wishful to be assured that he took kindly to his reception,
+she showed every possible desire to conciliate him, and there was an air
+of humble propitiation in all she did, such as I have seen pervade the
+bearing of a child towards a hard master. After that day, a day rarely
+passed without her drawing the hammer on her slate, and without Orlick’s
+slouching in and standing doggedly before her, as if he knew no more
+than I did what to make of it.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVII
+
+I now fell into a regular routine of apprenticeship life, which was
+varied beyond the limits of the village and the marshes, by no more
+remarkable circumstance than the arrival of my birthday and my paying
+another visit to Miss Havisham. I found Miss Sarah Pocket still on duty
+at the gate; I found Miss Havisham just as I had left her, and she spoke
+of Estella in the very same way, if not in the very same words. The
+interview lasted but a few minutes, and she gave me a guinea when I was
+going, and told me to come again on my next birthday. I may mention at
+once that this became an annual custom. I tried to decline taking the
+guinea on the first occasion, but with no better effect than causing her
+to ask me very angrily, if I expected more? Then, and after that, I took
+it.
+
+So unchanging was the dull old house, the yellow light in the darkened
+room, the faded spectre in the chair by the dressing-table glass, that
+I felt as if the stopping of the clocks had stopped Time in that
+mysterious place, and, while I and everything else outside it grew
+older, it stood still. Daylight never entered the house as to my
+thoughts and remembrances of it, any more than as to the actual fact. It
+bewildered me, and under its influence I continued at heart to hate my
+trade and to be ashamed of home.
+
+Imperceptibly I became conscious of a change in Biddy, however. Her
+shoes came up at the heel, her hair grew bright and neat, her hands were
+always clean. She was not beautiful,--she was common, and could not be
+like Estella,--but she was pleasant and wholesome and sweet-tempered.
+She had not been with us more than a year (I remember her being newly
+out of mourning at the time it struck me), when I observed to myself one
+evening that she had curiously thoughtful and attentive eyes; eyes that
+were very pretty and very good.
+
+It came of my lifting up my own eyes from a task I was poring
+at--writing some passages from a book, to improve myself in two ways at
+once by a sort of stratagem--and seeing Biddy observant of what I was
+about. I laid down my pen, and Biddy stopped in her needlework without
+laying it down.
+
+“Biddy,” said I, “how do you manage it? Either I am very stupid, or you
+are very clever.”
+
+“What is it that I manage? I don’t know,” returned Biddy, smiling.
+
+She managed our whole domestic life, and wonderfully too; but I did not
+mean that, though that made what I did mean more surprising.
+
+“How do you manage, Biddy,” said I, “to learn everything that I learn,
+and always to keep up with me?” I was beginning to be rather vain of
+my knowledge, for I spent my birthday guineas on it, and set aside the
+greater part of my pocket-money for similar investment; though I have no
+doubt, now, that the little I knew was extremely dear at the price.
+
+“I might as well ask you,” said Biddy, “how you manage?”
+
+“No; because when I come in from the forge of a night, any one can see
+me turning to at it. But you never turn to at it, Biddy.”
+
+“I suppose I must catch it like a cough,” said Biddy, quietly; and went
+on with her sewing.
+
+Pursuing my idea as I leaned back in my wooden chair, and looked at
+Biddy sewing away with her head on one side, I began to think her rather
+an extraordinary girl. For I called to mind now, that she was equally
+accomplished in the terms of our trade, and the names of our different
+sorts of work, and our various tools. In short, whatever I knew, Biddy
+knew. Theoretically, she was already as good a blacksmith as I, or
+better.
+
+“You are one of those, Biddy,” said I, “who make the most of every
+chance. You never had a chance before you came here, and see how
+improved you are!”
+
+Biddy looked at me for an instant, and went on with her sewing. “I was
+your first teacher though; wasn’t I?” said she, as she sewed.
+
+“Biddy!” I exclaimed, in amazement. “Why, you are crying!”
+
+“No I am not,” said Biddy, looking up and laughing. “What put that in
+your head?”
+
+What could have put it in my head but the glistening of a tear as it
+dropped on her work? I sat silent, recalling what a drudge she had been
+until Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt successfully overcame that bad habit of
+living, so highly desirable to be got rid of by some people. I recalled
+the hopeless circumstances by which she had been surrounded in the
+miserable little shop and the miserable little noisy evening school,
+with that miserable old bundle of incompetence always to be dragged and
+shouldered. I reflected that even in those untoward times there must
+have been latent in Biddy what was now developing, for, in my first
+uneasiness and discontent I had turned to her for help, as a matter of
+course. Biddy sat quietly sewing, shedding no more tears, and while I
+looked at her and thought about it all, it occurred to me that perhaps
+I had not been sufficiently grateful to Biddy. I might have been too
+reserved, and should have patronized her more (though I did not use that
+precise word in my meditations) with my confidence.
+
+“Yes, Biddy,” I observed, when I had done turning it over, “you were my
+first teacher, and that at a time when we little thought of ever being
+together like this, in this kitchen.”
+
+“Ah, poor thing!” replied Biddy. It was like her self-forgetfulness to
+transfer the remark to my sister, and to get up and be busy about her,
+making her more comfortable; “that’s sadly true!”
+
+“Well!” said I, “we must talk together a little more, as we used to do.
+And I must consult you a little more, as I used to do. Let us have a
+quiet walk on the marshes next Sunday, Biddy, and a long chat.”
+
+My sister was never left alone now; but Joe more than readily undertook
+the care of her on that Sunday afternoon, and Biddy and I went out
+together. It was summer-time, and lovely weather. When we had passed the
+village and the church and the churchyard, and were out on the marshes
+and began to see the sails of the ships as they sailed on, I began to
+combine Miss Havisham and Estella with the prospect, in my usual way.
+When we came to the river-side and sat down on the bank, with the water
+rippling at our feet, making it all more quiet than it would have been
+without that sound, I resolved that it was a good time and place for the
+admission of Biddy into my inner confidence.
+
+“Biddy,” said I, after binding her to secrecy, “I want to be a
+gentleman.”
+
+“O, I wouldn’t, if I was you!” she returned. “I don’t think it would
+answer.”
+
+“Biddy,” said I, with some severity, “I have particular reasons for
+wanting to be a gentleman.”
+
+“You know best, Pip; but don’t you think you are happier as you are?”
+
+“Biddy,” I exclaimed, impatiently, “I am not at all happy as I am. I
+am disgusted with my calling and with my life. I have never taken to
+either, since I was bound. Don’t be absurd.”
+
+“Was I absurd?” said Biddy, quietly raising her eyebrows; “I am sorry
+for that; I didn’t mean to be. I only want you to do well, and to be
+comfortable.”
+
+“Well, then, understand once for all that I never shall or can be
+comfortable--or anything but miserable--there, Biddy!--unless I can lead
+a very different sort of life from the life I lead now.”
+
+“That’s a pity!” said Biddy, shaking her head with a sorrowful air.
+
+Now, I too had so often thought it a pity, that, in the singular kind of
+quarrel with myself which I was always carrying on, I was half inclined
+to shed tears of vexation and distress when Biddy gave utterance to her
+sentiment and my own. I told her she was right, and I knew it was much
+to be regretted, but still it was not to be helped.
+
+“If I could have settled down,” I said to Biddy, plucking up the short
+grass within reach, much as I had once upon a time pulled my feelings
+out of my hair and kicked them into the brewery wall,--“if I could have
+settled down and been but half as fond of the forge as I was when I was
+little, I know it would have been much better for me. You and I and Joe
+would have wanted nothing then, and Joe and I would perhaps have gone
+partners when I was out of my time, and I might even have grown up to
+keep company with you, and we might have sat on this very bank on a fine
+Sunday, quite different people. I should have been good enough for you;
+shouldn’t I, Biddy?”
+
+Biddy sighed as she looked at the ships sailing on, and returned for
+answer, “Yes; I am not over-particular.” It scarcely sounded flattering,
+but I knew she meant well.
+
+“Instead of that,” said I, plucking up more grass and chewing a blade or
+two, “see how I am going on. Dissatisfied, and uncomfortable, and--what
+would it signify to me, being coarse and common, if nobody had told me
+so!”
+
+Biddy turned her face suddenly towards mine, and looked far more
+attentively at me than she had looked at the sailing ships.
+
+“It was neither a very true nor a very polite thing to say,” she
+remarked, directing her eyes to the ships again. “Who said it?”
+
+I was disconcerted, for I had broken away without quite seeing where
+I was going to. It was not to be shuffled off now, however, and I
+answered, “The beautiful young lady at Miss Havisham’s, and she’s more
+beautiful than anybody ever was, and I admire her dreadfully, and I want
+to be a gentleman on her account.” Having made this lunatic confession,
+I began to throw my torn-up grass into the river, as if I had some
+thoughts of following it.
+
+“Do you want to be a gentleman, to spite her or to gain her over?” Biddy
+quietly asked me, after a pause.
+
+“I don’t know,” I moodily answered.
+
+“Because, if it is to spite her,” Biddy pursued, “I should think--but
+you know best--that might be better and more independently done by
+caring nothing for her words. And if it is to gain her over, I should
+think--but you know best--she was not worth gaining over.”
+
+Exactly what I myself had thought, many times. Exactly what was
+perfectly manifest to me at the moment. But how could I, a poor dazed
+village lad, avoid that wonderful inconsistency into which the best and
+wisest of men fall every day?
+
+“It may be all quite true,” said I to Biddy, “but I admire her
+dreadfully.”
+
+In short, I turned over on my face when I came to that, and got a good
+grasp on the hair on each side of my head, and wrenched it well. All the
+while knowing the madness of my heart to be so very mad and misplaced,
+that I was quite conscious it would have served my face right, if I
+had lifted it up by my hair, and knocked it against the pebbles as a
+punishment for belonging to such an idiot.
+
+Biddy was the wisest of girls, and she tried to reason no more with me.
+She put her hand, which was a comfortable hand though roughened by work,
+upon my hands, one after another, and gently took them out of my hair.
+Then she softly patted my shoulder in a soothing way, while with my face
+upon my sleeve I cried a little,--exactly as I had done in the brewery
+yard,--and felt vaguely convinced that I was very much ill-used by
+somebody, or by everybody; I can’t say which.
+
+“I am glad of one thing,” said Biddy, “and that is, that you have felt
+you could give me your confidence, Pip. And I am glad of another thing,
+and that is, that of course you know you may depend upon my keeping it
+and always so far deserving it. If your first teacher (dear! such a poor
+one, and so much in need of being taught herself!) had been your teacher
+at the present time, she thinks she knows what lesson she would set. But
+it would be a hard one to learn, and you have got beyond her, and it’s
+of no use now.” So, with a quiet sigh for me, Biddy rose from the bank,
+and said, with a fresh and pleasant change of voice, “Shall we walk a
+little farther, or go home?”
+
+“Biddy,” I cried, getting up, putting my arm round her neck, and giving
+her a kiss, “I shall always tell you everything.”
+
+“Till you’re a gentleman,” said Biddy.
+
+“You know I never shall be, so that’s always. Not that I have any
+occasion to tell you anything, for you know everything I know,--as I
+told you at home the other night.”
+
+“Ah!” said Biddy, quite in a whisper, as she looked away at the ships.
+And then repeated, with her former pleasant change, “shall we walk a
+little farther, or go home?”
+
+I said to Biddy we would walk a little farther, and we did so, and the
+summer afternoon toned down into the summer evening, and it was very
+beautiful. I began to consider whether I was not more naturally and
+wholesomely situated, after all, in these circumstances, than playing
+beggar my neighbor by candle-light in the room with the stopped clocks,
+and being despised by Estella. I thought it would be very good for me if
+I could get her out of my head, with all the rest of those remembrances
+and fancies, and could go to work determined to relish what I had to do,
+and stick to it, and make the best of it. I asked myself the question
+whether I did not surely know that if Estella were beside me at that
+moment instead of Biddy, she would make me miserable? I was obliged to
+admit that I did know it for a certainty, and I said to myself, “Pip,
+what a fool you are!”
+
+We talked a good deal as we walked, and all that Biddy said seemed
+right. Biddy was never insulting, or capricious, or Biddy to-day and
+somebody else to-morrow; she would have derived only pain, and no
+pleasure, from giving me pain; she would far rather have wounded her own
+breast than mine. How could it be, then, that I did not like her much
+the better of the two?
+
+“Biddy,” said I, when we were walking homeward, “I wish you could put me
+right.”
+
+“I wish I could!” said Biddy.
+
+“If I could only get myself to fall in love with you,--you don’t mind my
+speaking so openly to such an old acquaintance?”
+
+“Oh dear, not at all!” said Biddy. “Don’t mind me.”
+
+“If I could only get myself to do it, that would be the thing for me.”
+
+“But you never will, you see,” said Biddy.
+
+It did not appear quite so unlikely to me that evening, as it would have
+done if we had discussed it a few hours before. I therefore observed
+I was not quite sure of that. But Biddy said she was, and she said it
+decisively. In my heart I believed her to be right; and yet I took it
+rather ill, too, that she should be so positive on the point.
+
+When we came near the churchyard, we had to cross an embankment, and
+get over a stile near a sluice-gate. There started up, from the gate, or
+from the rushes, or from the ooze (which was quite in his stagnant way),
+Old Orlick.
+
+“Halloa!” he growled, “where are you two going?”
+
+“Where should we be going, but home?”
+
+“Well, then,” said he, “I’m jiggered if I don’t see you home!”
+
+This penalty of being jiggered was a favorite supposititious case of
+his. He attached no definite meaning to the word that I am aware of, but
+used it, like his own pretended Christian name, to affront mankind, and
+convey an idea of something savagely damaging. When I was younger, I
+had had a general belief that if he had jiggered me personally, he would
+have done it with a sharp and twisted hook.
+
+Biddy was much against his going with us, and said to me in a whisper,
+“Don’t let him come; I don’t like him.” As I did not like him either,
+I took the liberty of saying that we thanked him, but we didn’t want
+seeing home. He received that piece of information with a yell of
+laughter, and dropped back, but came slouching after us at a little
+distance.
+
+Curious to know whether Biddy suspected him of having had a hand in
+that murderous attack of which my sister had never been able to give any
+account, I asked her why she did not like him.
+
+“Oh!” she replied, glancing over her shoulder as he slouched after us,
+“because I--I am afraid he likes me.”
+
+“Did he ever tell you he liked you?” I asked indignantly.
+
+“No,” said Biddy, glancing over her shoulder again, “he never told me
+so; but he dances at me, whenever he can catch my eye.”
+
+However novel and peculiar this testimony of attachment, I did not
+doubt the accuracy of the interpretation. I was very hot indeed upon
+Old Orlick’s daring to admire her; as hot as if it were an outrage on
+myself.
+
+“But it makes no difference to you, you know,” said Biddy, calmly.
+
+“No, Biddy, it makes no difference to me; only I don’t like it; I don’t
+approve of it.”
+
+“Nor I neither,” said Biddy. “Though that makes no difference to you.”
+
+“Exactly,” said I; “but I must tell you I should have no opinion of you,
+Biddy, if he danced at you with your own consent.”
+
+I kept an eye on Orlick after that night, and, whenever circumstances
+were favorable to his dancing at Biddy, got before him to obscure that
+demonstration. He had struck root in Joe’s establishment, by reason
+of my sister’s sudden fancy for him, or I should have tried to get him
+dismissed. He quite understood and reciprocated my good intentions, as I
+had reason to know thereafter.
+
+And now, because my mind was not confused enough before, I complicated
+its confusion fifty thousand-fold, by having states and seasons when I
+was clear that Biddy was immeasurably better than Estella, and that the
+plain honest working life to which I was born had nothing in it to
+be ashamed of, but offered me sufficient means of self-respect
+and happiness. At those times, I would decide conclusively that my
+disaffection to dear old Joe and the forge was gone, and that I was
+growing up in a fair way to be partners with Joe and to keep company
+with Biddy,--when all in a moment some confounding remembrance of the
+Havisham days would fall upon me like a destructive missile, and scatter
+my wits again. Scattered wits take a long time picking up; and often
+before I had got them well together, they would be dispersed in all
+directions by one stray thought, that perhaps after all Miss Havisham
+was going to make my fortune when my time was out.
+
+If my time had run out, it would have left me still at the height of my
+perplexities, I dare say. It never did run out, however, but was brought
+to a premature end, as I proceed to relate.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVIII
+
+It was in the fourth year of my apprenticeship to Joe, and it was a
+Saturday night. There was a group assembled round the fire at the Three
+Jolly Bargemen, attentive to Mr. Wopsle as he read the newspaper aloud.
+Of that group I was one.
+
+A highly popular murder had been committed, and Mr. Wopsle was imbrued
+in blood to the eyebrows. He gloated over every abhorrent adjective
+in the description, and identified himself with every witness at the
+Inquest. He faintly moaned, “I am done for,” as the victim, and he
+barbarously bellowed, “I’ll serve you out,” as the murderer. He gave the
+medical testimony, in pointed imitation of our local practitioner; and
+he piped and shook, as the aged turnpike-keeper who had heard blows, to
+an extent so very paralytic as to suggest a doubt regarding the mental
+competency of that witness. The coroner, in Mr. Wopsle’s hands, became
+Timon of Athens; the beadle, Coriolanus. He enjoyed himself thoroughly,
+and we all enjoyed ourselves, and were delightfully comfortable. In this
+cosey state of mind we came to the verdict Wilful Murder.
+
+Then, and not sooner, I became aware of a strange gentleman leaning over
+the back of the settle opposite me, looking on. There was an expression
+of contempt on his face, and he bit the side of a great forefinger as he
+watched the group of faces.
+
+“Well!” said the stranger to Mr. Wopsle, when the reading was done, “you
+have settled it all to your own satisfaction, I have no doubt?”
+
+Everybody started and looked up, as if it were the murderer. He looked
+at everybody coldly and sarcastically.
+
+“Guilty, of course?” said he. “Out with it. Come!”
+
+“Sir,” returned Mr. Wopsle, “without having the honor of your
+acquaintance, I do say Guilty.” Upon this we all took courage to unite
+in a confirmatory murmur.
+
+“I know you do,” said the stranger; “I knew you would. I told you so.
+But now I’ll ask you a question. Do you know, or do you not know,
+that the law of England supposes every man to be innocent, until he is
+proved--proved--to be guilty?”
+
+“Sir,” Mr. Wopsle began to reply, “as an Englishman myself, I--”
+
+“Come!” said the stranger, biting his forefinger at him. “Don’t evade
+the question. Either you know it, or you don’t know it. Which is it to
+be?”
+
+He stood with his head on one side and himself on one side, in a
+bullying, interrogative manner, and he threw his forefinger at Mr.
+Wopsle,--as it were to mark him out--before biting it again.
+
+“Now!” said he. “Do you know it, or don’t you know it?”
+
+“Certainly I know it,” replied Mr. Wopsle.
+
+“Certainly you know it. Then why didn’t you say so at first? Now, I’ll
+ask you another question,”--taking possession of Mr. Wopsle, as if he
+had a right to him,--“do you know that none of these witnesses have yet
+been cross-examined?”
+
+Mr. Wopsle was beginning, “I can only say--” when the stranger stopped
+him.
+
+“What? You won’t answer the question, yes or no? Now, I’ll try you
+again.” Throwing his finger at him again. “Attend to me. Are you
+aware, or are you not aware, that none of these witnesses have yet been
+cross-examined? Come, I only want one word from you. Yes, or no?”
+
+Mr. Wopsle hesitated, and we all began to conceive rather a poor opinion
+of him.
+
+“Come!” said the stranger, “I’ll help you. You don’t deserve help, but
+I’ll help you. Look at that paper you hold in your hand. What is it?”
+
+“What is it?” repeated Mr. Wopsle, eyeing it, much at a loss.
+
+“Is it,” pursued the stranger in his most sarcastic and suspicious
+manner, “the printed paper you have just been reading from?”
+
+“Undoubtedly.”
+
+“Undoubtedly. Now, turn to that paper, and tell me whether it distinctly
+states that the prisoner expressly said that his legal advisers
+instructed him altogether to reserve his defence?”
+
+“I read that just now,” Mr. Wopsle pleaded.
+
+“Never mind what you read just now, sir; I don’t ask you what you read
+just now. You may read the Lord’s Prayer backwards, if you like,--and,
+perhaps, have done it before to-day. Turn to the paper. No, no, no my
+friend; not to the top of the column; you know better than that; to
+the bottom, to the bottom.” (We all began to think Mr. Wopsle full of
+subterfuge.) “Well? Have you found it?”
+
+“Here it is,” said Mr. Wopsle.
+
+“Now, follow that passage with your eye, and tell me whether it
+distinctly states that the prisoner expressly said that he was
+instructed by his legal advisers wholly to reserve his defence? Come! Do
+you make that of it?”
+
+Mr. Wopsle answered, “Those are not the exact words.”
+
+“Not the exact words!” repeated the gentleman bitterly. “Is that the
+exact substance?”
+
+“Yes,” said Mr. Wopsle.
+
+“Yes,” repeated the stranger, looking round at the rest of the company
+with his right hand extended towards the witness, Wopsle. “And now I ask
+you what you say to the conscience of that man who, with that passage
+before his eyes, can lay his head upon his pillow after having
+pronounced a fellow-creature guilty, unheard?”
+
+We all began to suspect that Mr. Wopsle was not the man we had thought
+him, and that he was beginning to be found out.
+
+“And that same man, remember,” pursued the gentleman, throwing his
+finger at Mr. Wopsle heavily,--“that same man might be summoned as a
+juryman upon this very trial, and, having thus deeply committed himself,
+might return to the bosom of his family and lay his head upon his
+pillow, after deliberately swearing that he would well and truly try the
+issue joined between Our Sovereign Lord the King and the prisoner at the
+bar, and would a true verdict give according to the evidence, so help
+him God!”
+
+We were all deeply persuaded that the unfortunate Wopsle had gone too
+far, and had better stop in his reckless career while there was yet
+time.
+
+The strange gentleman, with an air of authority not to be disputed, and
+with a manner expressive of knowing something secret about every one of
+us that would effectually do for each individual if he chose to disclose
+it, left the back of the settle, and came into the space between the two
+settles, in front of the fire, where he remained standing, his left hand
+in his pocket, and he biting the forefinger of his right.
+
+“From information I have received,” said he, looking round at us as we
+all quailed before him, “I have reason to believe there is a blacksmith
+among you, by name Joseph--or Joe--Gargery. Which is the man?”
+
+“Here is the man,” said Joe.
+
+The strange gentleman beckoned him out of his place, and Joe went.
+
+“You have an apprentice,” pursued the stranger, “commonly known as Pip?
+Is he here?”
+
+“I am here!” I cried.
+
+The stranger did not recognize me, but I recognized him as the gentleman
+I had met on the stairs, on the occasion of my second visit to Miss
+Havisham. I had known him the moment I saw him looking over the settle,
+and now that I stood confronting him with his hand upon my shoulder,
+I checked off again in detail his large head, his dark complexion, his
+deep-set eyes, his bushy black eyebrows, his large watch-chain, his
+strong black dots of beard and whisker, and even the smell of scented
+soap on his great hand.
+
+“I wish to have a private conference with you two,” said he, when he had
+surveyed me at his leisure. “It will take a little time. Perhaps we
+had better go to your place of residence. I prefer not to anticipate my
+communication here; you will impart as much or as little of it as you
+please to your friends afterwards; I have nothing to do with that.”
+
+Amidst a wondering silence, we three walked out of the Jolly Bargemen,
+and in a wondering silence walked home. While going along, the strange
+gentleman occasionally looked at me, and occasionally bit the side of
+his finger. As we neared home, Joe vaguely acknowledging the occasion as
+an impressive and ceremonious one, went on ahead to open the front door.
+Our conference was held in the state parlor, which was feebly lighted by
+one candle.
+
+It began with the strange gentleman’s sitting down at the table, drawing
+the candle to him, and looking over some entries in his pocket-book.
+He then put up the pocket-book and set the candle a little aside, after
+peering round it into the darkness at Joe and me, to ascertain which was
+which.
+
+“My name,” he said, “is Jaggers, and I am a lawyer in London. I am
+pretty well known. I have unusual business to transact with you, and I
+commence by explaining that it is not of my originating. If my advice
+had been asked, I should not have been here. It was not asked, and you
+see me here. What I have to do as the confidential agent of another, I
+do. No less, no more.”
+
+Finding that he could not see us very well from where he sat, he got
+up, and threw one leg over the back of a chair and leaned upon it; thus
+having one foot on the seat of the chair, and one foot on the ground.
+
+“Now, Joseph Gargery, I am the bearer of an offer to relieve you of
+this young fellow your apprentice. You would not object to cancel his
+indentures at his request and for his good? You would want nothing for
+so doing?”
+
+“Lord forbid that I should want anything for not standing in Pip’s way,”
+ said Joe, staring.
+
+“Lord forbidding is pious, but not to the purpose,” returned Mr.
+Jaggers. “The question is, Would you want anything? Do you want
+anything?”
+
+“The answer is,” returned Joe, sternly, “No.”
+
+I thought Mr. Jaggers glanced at Joe, as if he considered him a fool for
+his disinterestedness. But I was too much bewildered between breathless
+curiosity and surprise, to be sure of it.
+
+“Very well,” said Mr. Jaggers. “Recollect the admission you have made,
+and don’t try to go from it presently.”
+
+“Who’s a going to try?” retorted Joe.
+
+“I don’t say anybody is. Do you keep a dog?”
+
+“Yes, I do keep a dog.”
+
+“Bear in mind then, that Brag is a good dog, but Holdfast is a better.
+Bear that in mind, will you?” repeated Mr. Jaggers, shutting his eyes
+and nodding his head at Joe, as if he were forgiving him something.
+“Now, I return to this young fellow. And the communication I have got to
+make is, that he has great expectations.”
+
+Joe and I gasped, and looked at one another.
+
+“I am instructed to communicate to him,” said Mr. Jaggers, throwing
+his finger at me sideways, “that he will come into a handsome property.
+Further, that it is the desire of the present possessor of that
+property, that he be immediately removed from his present sphere of life
+and from this place, and be brought up as a gentleman,--in a word, as a
+young fellow of great expectations.”
+
+My dream was out; my wild fancy was surpassed by sober reality; Miss
+Havisham was going to make my fortune on a grand scale.
+
+“Now, Mr. Pip,” pursued the lawyer, “I address the rest of what I have
+to say, to you. You are to understand, first, that it is the request
+of the person from whom I take my instructions that you always bear
+the name of Pip. You will have no objection, I dare say, to your great
+expectations being encumbered with that easy condition. But if you have
+any objection, this is the time to mention it.”
+
+My heart was beating so fast, and there was such a singing in my ears,
+that I could scarcely stammer I had no objection.
+
+“I should think not! Now you are to understand, secondly, Mr. Pip, that
+the name of the person who is your liberal benefactor remains a profound
+secret, until the person chooses to reveal it. I am empowered to mention
+that it is the intention of the person to reveal it at first hand by
+word of mouth to yourself. When or where that intention may be carried
+out, I cannot say; no one can say. It may be years hence. Now, you are
+distinctly to understand that you are most positively prohibited from
+making any inquiry on this head, or any allusion or reference, however
+distant, to any individual whomsoever as the individual, in all the
+communications you may have with me. If you have a suspicion in your own
+breast, keep that suspicion in your own breast. It is not the least to
+the purpose what the reasons of this prohibition are; they may be the
+strongest and gravest reasons, or they may be mere whim. This is not for
+you to inquire into. The condition is laid down. Your acceptance of it,
+and your observance of it as binding, is the only remaining condition
+that I am charged with, by the person from whom I take my instructions,
+and for whom I am not otherwise responsible. That person is the person
+from whom you derive your expectations, and the secret is solely held by
+that person and by me. Again, not a very difficult condition with which
+to encumber such a rise in fortune; but if you have any objection to it,
+this is the time to mention it. Speak out.”
+
+Once more, I stammered with difficulty that I had no objection.
+
+“I should think not! Now, Mr. Pip, I have done with stipulations.”
+ Though he called me Mr. Pip, and began rather to make up to me, he still
+could not get rid of a certain air of bullying suspicion; and even now
+he occasionally shut his eyes and threw his finger at me while he
+spoke, as much as to express that he knew all kinds of things to my
+disparagement, if he only chose to mention them. “We come next, to mere
+details of arrangement. You must know that, although I have used
+the term ‘expectations’ more than once, you are not endowed with
+expectations only. There is already lodged in my hands a sum of money
+amply sufficient for your suitable education and maintenance. You will
+please consider me your guardian. Oh!” for I was going to thank him, “I
+tell you at once, I am paid for my services, or I shouldn’t render them.
+It is considered that you must be better educated, in accordance with
+your altered position, and that you will be alive to the importance and
+necessity of at once entering on that advantage.”
+
+I said I had always longed for it.
+
+“Never mind what you have always longed for, Mr. Pip,” he retorted;
+“keep to the record. If you long for it now, that’s enough. Am I
+answered that you are ready to be placed at once under some proper
+tutor? Is that it?”
+
+I stammered yes, that was it.
+
+“Good. Now, your inclinations are to be consulted. I don’t think that
+wise, mind, but it’s my trust. Have you ever heard of any tutor whom you
+would prefer to another?”
+
+I had never heard of any tutor but Biddy and Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt;
+so, I replied in the negative.
+
+“There is a certain tutor, of whom I have some knowledge, who I think
+might suit the purpose,” said Mr. Jaggers. “I don’t recommend him,
+observe; because I never recommend anybody. The gentleman I speak of is
+one Mr. Matthew Pocket.”
+
+Ah! I caught at the name directly. Miss Havisham’s relation. The Matthew
+whom Mr. and Mrs. Camilla had spoken of. The Matthew whose place was to
+be at Miss Havisham’s head, when she lay dead, in her bride’s dress on
+the bride’s table.
+
+“You know the name?” said Mr. Jaggers, looking shrewdly at me, and then
+shutting up his eyes while he waited for my answer.
+
+My answer was, that I had heard of the name.
+
+“Oh!” said he. “You have heard of the name. But the question is, what do
+you say of it?”
+
+I said, or tried to say, that I was much obliged to him for his
+recommendation--
+
+“No, my young friend!” he interrupted, shaking his great head very
+slowly. “Recollect yourself!”
+
+Not recollecting myself, I began again that I was much obliged to him
+for his recommendation--
+
+“No, my young friend,” he interrupted, shaking his head and frowning and
+smiling both at once,--“no, no, no; it’s very well done, but it won’t
+do; you are too young to fix me with it. Recommendation is not the word,
+Mr. Pip. Try another.”
+
+Correcting myself, I said that I was much obliged to him for his mention
+of Mr. Matthew Pocket--
+
+“That’s more like it!” cried Mr. Jaggers.--And (I added), I would
+gladly try that gentleman.
+
+“Good. You had better try him in his own house. The way shall be
+prepared for you, and you can see his son first, who is in London. When
+will you come to London?”
+
+I said (glancing at Joe, who stood looking on, motionless), that I
+supposed I could come directly.
+
+“First,” said Mr. Jaggers, “you should have some new clothes to come in,
+and they should not be working-clothes. Say this day week. You’ll want
+some money. Shall I leave you twenty guineas?”
+
+He produced a long purse, with the greatest coolness, and counted them
+out on the table and pushed them over to me. This was the first time he
+had taken his leg from the chair. He sat astride of the chair when he
+had pushed the money over, and sat swinging his purse and eyeing Joe.
+
+“Well, Joseph Gargery? You look dumbfoundered?”
+
+“I am!” said Joe, in a very decided manner.
+
+“It was understood that you wanted nothing for yourself, remember?”
+
+“It were understood,” said Joe. “And it are understood. And it ever will
+be similar according.”
+
+“But what,” said Mr. Jaggers, swinging his purse,--“what if it was in my
+instructions to make you a present, as compensation?”
+
+“As compensation what for?” Joe demanded.
+
+“For the loss of his services.”
+
+Joe laid his hand upon my shoulder with the touch of a woman. I have
+often thought him since, like the steam-hammer that can crush a man or
+pat an egg-shell, in his combination of strength with gentleness. “Pip
+is that hearty welcome,” said Joe, “to go free with his services, to
+honor and fortun’, as no words can tell him. But if you think as Money
+can make compensation to me for the loss of the little child--what come
+to the forge--and ever the best of friends!--”
+
+O dear good Joe, whom I was so ready to leave and so unthankful to, I
+see you again, with your muscular blacksmith’s arm before your eyes,
+and your broad chest heaving, and your voice dying away. O dear good
+faithful tender Joe, I feel the loving tremble of your hand upon my arm,
+as solemnly this day as if it had been the rustle of an angel’s wing!
+
+But I encouraged Joe at the time. I was lost in the mazes of my future
+fortunes, and could not retrace the by-paths we had trodden together. I
+begged Joe to be comforted, for (as he said) we had ever been the best
+of friends, and (as I said) we ever would be so. Joe scooped his eyes
+with his disengaged wrist, as if he were bent on gouging himself, but
+said not another word.
+
+Mr. Jaggers had looked on at this, as one who recognized in Joe the
+village idiot, and in me his keeper. When it was over, he said, weighing
+in his hand the purse he had ceased to swing:--
+
+“Now, Joseph Gargery, I warn you this is your last chance. No half
+measures with me. If you mean to take a present that I have it in charge
+to make you, speak out, and you shall have it. If on the contrary you
+mean to say--” Here, to his great amazement, he was stopped by Joe’s
+suddenly working round him with every demonstration of a fell pugilistic
+purpose.
+
+“Which I meantersay,” cried Joe, “that if you come into my place
+bull-baiting and badgering me, come out! Which I meantersay as sech if
+you’re a man, come on! Which I meantersay that what I say, I meantersay
+and stand or fall by!”
+
+I drew Joe away, and he immediately became placable; merely stating to
+me, in an obliging manner and as a polite expostulatory notice to any
+one whom it might happen to concern, that he were not a going to be
+bull-baited and badgered in his own place. Mr. Jaggers had risen when
+Joe demonstrated, and had backed near the door. Without evincing
+any inclination to come in again, he there delivered his valedictory
+remarks. They were these.
+
+“Well, Mr. Pip, I think the sooner you leave here--as you are to be a
+gentleman--the better. Let it stand for this day week, and you shall
+receive my printed address in the meantime. You can take a hackney-coach
+at the stage-coach office in London, and come straight to me.
+Understand, that I express no opinion, one way or other, on the trust
+I undertake. I am paid for undertaking it, and I do so. Now, understand
+that, finally. Understand that!”
+
+He was throwing his finger at both of us, and I think would have gone
+on, but for his seeming to think Joe dangerous, and going off.
+
+Something came into my head which induced me to run after him, as he was
+going down to the Jolly Bargemen, where he had left a hired carriage.
+
+“I beg your pardon, Mr. Jaggers.”
+
+“Halloa!” said he, facing round, “what’s the matter?”
+
+“I wish to be quite right, Mr. Jaggers, and to keep to your directions;
+so I thought I had better ask. Would there be any objection to my taking
+leave of any one I know, about here, before I go away?”
+
+“No,” said he, looking as if he hardly understood me.
+
+“I don’t mean in the village only, but up town?”
+
+“No,” said he. “No objection.”
+
+I thanked him and ran home again, and there I found that Joe had already
+locked the front door and vacated the state parlor, and was seated
+by the kitchen fire with a hand on each knee, gazing intently at the
+burning coals. I too sat down before the fire and gazed at the coals,
+and nothing was said for a long time.
+
+My sister was in her cushioned chair in her corner, and Biddy sat at her
+needle-work before the fire, and Joe sat next Biddy, and I sat next Joe
+in the corner opposite my sister. The more I looked into the glowing
+coals, the more incapable I became of looking at Joe; the longer the
+silence lasted, the more unable I felt to speak.
+
+At length I got out, “Joe, have you told Biddy?”
+
+“No, Pip,” returned Joe, still looking at the fire, and holding his
+knees tight, as if he had private information that they intended to make
+off somewhere, “which I left it to yourself, Pip.”
+
+“I would rather you told, Joe.”
+
+“Pip’s a gentleman of fortun’ then,” said Joe, “and God bless him in
+it!”
+
+Biddy dropped her work, and looked at me. Joe held his knees and looked
+at me. I looked at both of them. After a pause, they both heartily
+congratulated me; but there was a certain touch of sadness in their
+congratulations that I rather resented.
+
+I took it upon myself to impress Biddy (and through Biddy, Joe) with the
+grave obligation I considered my friends under, to know nothing and say
+nothing about the maker of my fortune. It would all come out in good
+time, I observed, and in the meanwhile nothing was to be said, save
+that I had come into great expectations from a mysterious patron. Biddy
+nodded her head thoughtfully at the fire as she took up her work again,
+and said she would be very particular; and Joe, still detaining his
+knees, said, “Ay, ay, I’ll be ekervally partickler, Pip;” and then they
+congratulated me again, and went on to express so much wonder at the
+notion of my being a gentleman that I didn’t half like it.
+
+Infinite pains were then taken by Biddy to convey to my sister some idea
+of what had happened. To the best of my belief, those efforts entirely
+failed. She laughed and nodded her head a great many times, and even
+repeated after Biddy, the words “Pip” and “Property.” But I doubt if
+they had more meaning in them than an election cry, and I cannot suggest
+a darker picture of her state of mind.
+
+I never could have believed it without experience, but as Joe and
+Biddy became more at their cheerful ease again, I became quite gloomy.
+Dissatisfied with my fortune, of course I could not be; but it is
+possible that I may have been, without quite knowing it, dissatisfied
+with myself.
+
+Any how, I sat with my elbow on my knee and my face upon my hand,
+looking into the fire, as those two talked about my going away, and
+about what they should do without me, and all that. And whenever I
+caught one of them looking at me, though never so pleasantly (and they
+often looked at me,--particularly Biddy), I felt offended: as if they
+were expressing some mistrust of me. Though Heaven knows they never did
+by word or sign.
+
+At those times I would get up and look out at the door; for our kitchen
+door opened at once upon the night, and stood open on summer evenings to
+air the room. The very stars to which I then raised my eyes, I am afraid
+I took to be but poor and humble stars for glittering on the rustic
+objects among which I had passed my life.
+
+“Saturday night,” said I, when we sat at our supper of bread and cheese
+and beer. “Five more days, and then the day before the day! They’ll soon
+go.”
+
+“Yes, Pip,” observed Joe, whose voice sounded hollow in his beer-mug.
+“They’ll soon go.”
+
+“Soon, soon go,” said Biddy.
+
+“I have been thinking, Joe, that when I go down town on Monday, and
+order my new clothes, I shall tell the tailor that I’ll come and put
+them on there, or that I’ll have them sent to Mr. Pumblechook’s. It
+would be very disagreeable to be stared at by all the people here.”
+
+“Mr. and Mrs. Hubble might like to see you in your new gen-teel figure
+too, Pip,” said Joe, industriously cutting his bread, with his cheese on
+it, in the palm of his left hand, and glancing at my untasted supper
+as if he thought of the time when we used to compare slices. “So might
+Wopsle. And the Jolly Bargemen might take it as a compliment.”
+
+“That’s just what I don’t want, Joe. They would make such a business of
+it,--such a coarse and common business,--that I couldn’t bear myself.”
+
+“Ah, that indeed, Pip!” said Joe. “If you couldn’t abear yourself--”
+
+Biddy asked me here, as she sat holding my sister’s plate, “Have you
+thought about when you’ll show yourself to Mr. Gargery, and your sister
+and me? You will show yourself to us; won’t you?”
+
+“Biddy,” I returned with some resentment, “you are so exceedingly quick
+that it’s difficult to keep up with you.”
+
+(“She always were quick,” observed Joe.)
+
+“If you had waited another moment, Biddy, you would have heard me say
+that I shall bring my clothes here in a bundle one evening,--most likely
+on the evening before I go away.”
+
+Biddy said no more. Handsomely forgiving her, I soon exchanged an
+affectionate good night with her and Joe, and went up to bed. When I got
+into my little room, I sat down and took a long look at it, as a mean
+little room that I should soon be parted from and raised above, for
+ever. It was furnished with fresh young remembrances too, and even at
+the same moment I fell into much the same confused division of mind
+between it and the better rooms to which I was going, as I had been in
+so often between the forge and Miss Havisham’s, and Biddy and Estella.
+
+The sun had been shining brightly all day on the roof of my attic, and
+the room was warm. As I put the window open and stood looking out, I saw
+Joe come slowly forth at the dark door, below, and take a turn or two
+in the air; and then I saw Biddy come, and bring him a pipe and light
+it for him. He never smoked so late, and it seemed to hint to me that he
+wanted comforting, for some reason or other.
+
+He presently stood at the door immediately beneath me, smoking his pipe,
+and Biddy stood there too, quietly talking to him, and I knew that they
+talked of me, for I heard my name mentioned in an endearing tone by both
+of them more than once. I would not have listened for more, if I could
+have heard more; so I drew away from the window, and sat down in my one
+chair by the bedside, feeling it very sorrowful and strange that this
+first night of my bright fortunes should be the loneliest I had ever
+known.
+
+Looking towards the open window, I saw light wreaths from Joe’s pipe
+floating there, and I fancied it was like a blessing from Joe,--not
+obtruded on me or paraded before me, but pervading the air we shared
+together. I put my light out, and crept into bed; and it was an uneasy
+bed now, and I never slept the old sound sleep in it any more.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XIX
+
+Morning made a considerable difference in my general prospect of Life,
+and brightened it so much that it scarcely seemed the same. What lay
+heaviest on my mind was, the consideration that six days intervened
+between me and the day of departure; for I could not divest myself of
+a misgiving that something might happen to London in the meanwhile, and
+that, when I got there, it would be either greatly deteriorated or clean
+gone.
+
+Joe and Biddy were very sympathetic and pleasant when I spoke of our
+approaching separation; but they only referred to it when I did. After
+breakfast, Joe brought out my indentures from the press in the best
+parlor, and we put them in the fire, and I felt that I was free. With
+all the novelty of my emancipation on me, I went to church with Joe, and
+thought perhaps the clergyman wouldn’t have read that about the rich man
+and the kingdom of Heaven, if he had known all.
+
+After our early dinner, I strolled out alone, purposing to finish off
+the marshes at once, and get them done with. As I passed the church, I
+felt (as I had felt during service in the morning) a sublime compassion
+for the poor creatures who were destined to go there, Sunday after
+Sunday, all their lives through, and to lie obscurely at last among the
+low green mounds. I promised myself that I would do something for them
+one of these days, and formed a plan in outline for bestowing a
+dinner of roast-beef and plum-pudding, a pint of ale, and a gallon of
+condescension, upon everybody in the village.
+
+If I had often thought before, with something allied to shame, of my
+companionship with the fugitive whom I had once seen limping among those
+graves, what were my thoughts on this Sunday, when the place recalled
+the wretch, ragged and shivering, with his felon iron and badge! My
+comfort was, that it happened a long time ago, and that he had doubtless
+been transported a long way off, and that he was dead to me, and might
+be veritably dead into the bargain.
+
+No more low, wet grounds, no more dikes and sluices, no more of these
+grazing cattle,--though they seemed, in their dull manner, to wear a
+more respectful air now, and to face round, in order that they
+might stare as long as possible at the possessor of such great
+expectations,--farewell, monotonous acquaintances of my childhood,
+henceforth I was for London and greatness; not for smith’s work in
+general, and for you! I made my exultant way to the old Battery, and,
+lying down there to consider the question whether Miss Havisham intended
+me for Estella, fell asleep.
+
+When I awoke, I was much surprised to find Joe sitting beside me,
+smoking his pipe. He greeted me with a cheerful smile on my opening my
+eyes, and said,--
+
+“As being the last time, Pip, I thought I’d foller.”
+
+“And Joe, I am very glad you did so.”
+
+“Thankee, Pip.”
+
+“You may be sure, dear Joe,” I went on, after we had shaken hands, “that
+I shall never forget you.”
+
+“No, no, Pip!” said Joe, in a comfortable tone, “I’m sure of that. Ay,
+ay, old chap! Bless you, it were only necessary to get it well round in
+a man’s mind, to be certain on it. But it took a bit of time to get it
+well round, the change come so oncommon plump; didn’t it?”
+
+Somehow, I was not best pleased with Joe’s being so mightily secure of
+me. I should have liked him to have betrayed emotion, or to have said,
+“It does you credit, Pip,” or something of that sort. Therefore, I made
+no remark on Joe’s first head; merely saying as to his second, that the
+tidings had indeed come suddenly, but that I had always wanted to be a
+gentleman, and had often and often speculated on what I would do, if I
+were one.
+
+“Have you though?” said Joe. “Astonishing!”
+
+“It’s a pity now, Joe,” said I, “that you did not get on a little more,
+when we had our lessons here; isn’t it?”
+
+“Well, I don’t know,” returned Joe. “I’m so awful dull. I’m only master
+of my own trade. It were always a pity as I was so awful dull; but it’s
+no more of a pity now, than it was--this day twelvemonth--don’t you
+see?”
+
+What I had meant was, that when I came into my property and was able to
+do something for Joe, it would have been much more agreeable if he
+had been better qualified for a rise in station. He was so perfectly
+innocent of my meaning, however, that I thought I would mention it to
+Biddy in preference.
+
+So, when we had walked home and had had tea, I took Biddy into our
+little garden by the side of the lane, and, after throwing out in a
+general way for the elevation of her spirits, that I should never forget
+her, said I had a favor to ask of her.
+
+“And it is, Biddy,” said I, “that you will not omit any opportunity of
+helping Joe on, a little.”
+
+“How helping him on?” asked Biddy, with a steady sort of glance.
+
+“Well! Joe is a dear good fellow,--in fact, I think he is the dearest
+fellow that ever lived,--but he is rather backward in some things. For
+instance, Biddy, in his learning and his manners.”
+
+Although I was looking at Biddy as I spoke, and although she opened her
+eyes very wide when I had spoken, she did not look at me.
+
+“O, his manners! won’t his manners do then?” asked Biddy, plucking a
+black-currant leaf.
+
+“My dear Biddy, they do very well here--”
+
+“O! they do very well here?” interrupted Biddy, looking closely at the
+leaf in her hand.
+
+“Hear me out,--but if I were to remove Joe into a higher sphere, as I
+shall hope to remove him when I fully come into my property, they would
+hardly do him justice.”
+
+“And don’t you think he knows that?” asked Biddy.
+
+It was such a very provoking question (for it had never in the most
+distant manner occurred to me), that I said, snappishly,--
+
+“Biddy, what do you mean?”
+
+Biddy, having rubbed the leaf to pieces between her hands,--and the
+smell of a black-currant bush has ever since recalled to me that evening
+in the little garden by the side of the lane,--said, “Have you never
+considered that he may be proud?”
+
+“Proud?” I repeated, with disdainful emphasis.
+
+“O! there are many kinds of pride,” said Biddy, looking full at me and
+shaking her head; “pride is not all of one kind--”
+
+“Well? What are you stopping for?” said I.
+
+“Not all of one kind,” resumed Biddy. “He may be too proud to let any
+one take him out of a place that he is competent to fill, and fills well
+and with respect. To tell you the truth, I think he is; though it sounds
+bold in me to say so, for you must know him far better than I do.”
+
+“Now, Biddy,” said I, “I am very sorry to see this in you. I did not
+expect to see this in you. You are envious, Biddy, and grudging. You
+are dissatisfied on account of my rise in fortune, and you can’t help
+showing it.”
+
+“If you have the heart to think so,” returned Biddy, “say so. Say so
+over and over again, if you have the heart to think so.”
+
+“If you have the heart to be so, you mean, Biddy,” said I, in a virtuous
+and superior tone; “don’t put it off upon me. I am very sorry to see it,
+and it’s a--it’s a bad side of human nature. I did intend to ask you
+to use any little opportunities you might have after I was gone, of
+improving dear Joe. But after this I ask you nothing. I am extremely
+sorry to see this in you, Biddy,” I repeated. “It’s a--it’s a bad side
+of human nature.”
+
+“Whether you scold me or approve of me,” returned poor Biddy, “you may
+equally depend upon my trying to do all that lies in my power, here,
+at all times. And whatever opinion you take away of me, shall make
+no difference in my remembrance of you. Yet a gentleman should not be
+unjust neither,” said Biddy, turning away her head.
+
+I again warmly repeated that it was a bad side of human nature (in which
+sentiment, waiving its application, I have since seen reason to think I
+was right), and I walked down the little path away from Biddy, and
+Biddy went into the house, and I went out at the garden gate and took a
+dejected stroll until supper-time; again feeling it very sorrowful and
+strange that this, the second night of my bright fortunes, should be as
+lonely and unsatisfactory as the first.
+
+But, morning once more brightened my view, and I extended my clemency to
+Biddy, and we dropped the subject. Putting on the best clothes I had,
+I went into town as early as I could hope to find the shops open,
+and presented myself before Mr. Trabb, the tailor, who was having his
+breakfast in the parlor behind his shop, and who did not think it worth
+his while to come out to me, but called me into him.
+
+“Well!” said Mr. Trabb, in a hail-fellow-well-met kind of way. “How are
+you, and what can I do for you?”
+
+Mr. Trabb had sliced his hot roll into three feather-beds, and was
+slipping butter in between the blankets, and covering it up. He was a
+prosperous old bachelor, and his open window looked into a prosperous
+little garden and orchard, and there was a prosperous iron safe let into
+the wall at the side of his fireplace, and I did not doubt that heaps of
+his prosperity were put away in it in bags.
+
+“Mr. Trabb,” said I, “it’s an unpleasant thing to have to mention,
+because it looks like boasting; but I have come into a handsome
+property.”
+
+A change passed over Mr. Trabb. He forgot the butter in bed, got up from
+the bedside, and wiped his fingers on the tablecloth, exclaiming, “Lord
+bless my soul!”
+
+“I am going up to my guardian in London,” said I, casually drawing some
+guineas out of my pocket and looking at them; “and I want a fashionable
+suit of clothes to go in. I wish to pay for them,” I added--otherwise I
+thought he might only pretend to make them, “with ready money.”
+
+“My dear sir,” said Mr. Trabb, as he respectfully bent his body, opened
+his arms, and took the liberty of touching me on the outside of each
+elbow, “don’t hurt me by mentioning that. May I venture to congratulate
+you? Would you do me the favor of stepping into the shop?”
+
+Mr. Trabb’s boy was the most audacious boy in all that country-side.
+When I had entered he was sweeping the shop, and he had sweetened his
+labors by sweeping over me. He was still sweeping when I came out into
+the shop with Mr. Trabb, and he knocked the broom against all possible
+corners and obstacles, to express (as I understood it) equality with any
+blacksmith, alive or dead.
+
+“Hold that noise,” said Mr. Trabb, with the greatest sternness, “or I’ll
+knock your head off!--Do me the favor to be seated, sir. Now, this,”
+ said Mr. Trabb, taking down a roll of cloth, and tiding it out in a
+flowing manner over the counter, preparatory to getting his hand under
+it to show the gloss, “is a very sweet article. I can recommend it for
+your purpose, sir, because it really is extra super. But you shall
+see some others. Give me Number Four, you!” (To the boy, and with a
+dreadfully severe stare; foreseeing the danger of that miscreant’s
+brushing me with it, or making some other sign of familiarity.)
+
+Mr. Trabb never removed his stern eye from the boy until he had
+deposited number four on the counter and was at a safe distance again.
+Then he commanded him to bring number five, and number eight. “And let
+me have none of your tricks here,” said Mr. Trabb, “or you shall repent
+it, you young scoundrel, the longest day you have to live.”
+
+Mr. Trabb then bent over number four, and in a sort of deferential
+confidence recommended it to me as a light article for summer wear, an
+article much in vogue among the nobility and gentry, an article that
+it would ever be an honor to him to reflect upon a distinguished
+fellow-townsman’s (if he might claim me for a fellow-townsman) having
+worn. “Are you bringing numbers five and eight, you vagabond,” said Mr.
+Trabb to the boy after that, “or shall I kick you out of the shop and
+bring them myself?”
+
+I selected the materials for a suit, with the assistance of Mr. Trabb’s
+judgment, and re-entered the parlor to be measured. For although Mr.
+Trabb had my measure already, and had previously been quite contented
+with it, he said apologetically that it “wouldn’t do under existing
+circumstances, sir,--wouldn’t do at all.” So, Mr. Trabb measured and
+calculated me in the parlor, as if I were an estate and he the finest
+species of surveyor, and gave himself such a world of trouble that
+I felt that no suit of clothes could possibly remunerate him for his
+pains. When he had at last done and had appointed to send the articles
+to Mr. Pumblechook’s on the Thursday evening, he said, with his hand
+upon the parlor lock, “I know, sir, that London gentlemen cannot be
+expected to patronize local work, as a rule; but if you would give me a
+turn now and then in the quality of a townsman, I should greatly esteem
+it. Good morning, sir, much obliged.--Door!”
+
+The last word was flung at the boy, who had not the least notion what
+it meant. But I saw him collapse as his master rubbed me out with his
+hands, and my first decided experience of the stupendous power of money
+was, that it had morally laid upon his back Trabb’s boy.
+
+After this memorable event, I went to the hatter’s, and the bootmaker’s,
+and the hosier’s, and felt rather like Mother Hubbard’s dog whose outfit
+required the services of so many trades. I also went to the coach-office
+and took my place for seven o’clock on Saturday morning. It was
+not necessary to explain everywhere that I had come into a handsome
+property; but whenever I said anything to that effect, it followed that
+the officiating tradesman ceased to have his attention diverted through
+the window by the High Street, and concentrated his mind upon me. When
+I had ordered everything I wanted, I directed my steps towards
+Pumblechook’s, and, as I approached that gentleman’s place of business,
+I saw him standing at his door.
+
+He was waiting for me with great impatience. He had been out early with
+the chaise-cart, and had called at the forge and heard the news. He had
+prepared a collation for me in the Barnwell parlor, and he too ordered
+his shopman to “come out of the gangway” as my sacred person passed.
+
+“My dear friend,” said Mr. Pumblechook, taking me by both hands, when
+he and I and the collation were alone, “I give you joy of your good
+fortune. Well deserved, well deserved!”
+
+This was coming to the point, and I thought it a sensible way of
+expressing himself.
+
+“To think,” said Mr. Pumblechook, after snorting admiration at me for
+some moments, “that I should have been the humble instrument of leading
+up to this, is a proud reward.”
+
+I begged Mr. Pumblechook to remember that nothing was to be ever said or
+hinted, on that point.
+
+“My dear young friend,” said Mr. Pumblechook; “if you will allow me to
+call you so--”
+
+I murmured “Certainly,” and Mr. Pumblechook took me by both hands again,
+and communicated a movement to his waistcoat, which had an emotional
+appearance, though it was rather low down, “My dear young friend, rely
+upon my doing my little all in your absence, by keeping the fact before
+the mind of Joseph.--Joseph!” said Mr. Pumblechook, in the way of a
+compassionate adjuration. “Joseph!! Joseph!!!” Thereupon he shook his
+head and tapped it, expressing his sense of deficiency in Joseph.
+
+“But my dear young friend,” said Mr. Pumblechook, “you must be hungry,
+you must be exhausted. Be seated. Here is a chicken had round from the
+Boar, here is a tongue had round from the Boar, here’s one or two little
+things had round from the Boar, that I hope you may not despise. But do
+I,” said Mr. Pumblechook, getting up again the moment after he had sat
+down, “see afore me, him as I ever sported with in his times of happy
+infancy? And may I--may I--?”
+
+This May I, meant might he shake hands? I consented, and he was fervent,
+and then sat down again.
+
+“Here is wine,” said Mr. Pumblechook. “Let us drink, Thanks to Fortune,
+and may she ever pick out her favorites with equal judgment! And yet I
+cannot,” said Mr. Pumblechook, getting up again, “see afore me One--and
+likewise drink to One--without again expressing--May I--may I--?”
+
+I said he might, and he shook hands with me again, and emptied his glass
+and turned it upside down. I did the same; and if I had turned myself
+upside down before drinking, the wine could not have gone more direct to
+my head.
+
+Mr. Pumblechook helped me to the liver wing, and to the best slice of
+tongue (none of those out-of-the-way No Thoroughfares of Pork now), and
+took, comparatively speaking, no care of himself at all. “Ah! poultry,
+poultry! You little thought,” said Mr. Pumblechook, apostrophizing the
+fowl in the dish, “when you was a young fledgling, what was in store for
+you. You little thought you was to be refreshment beneath this humble
+roof for one as--Call it a weakness, if you will,” said Mr. Pumblechook,
+getting up again, “but may I? may I--?”
+
+It began to be unnecessary to repeat the form of saying he might, so
+he did it at once. How he ever did it so often without wounding himself
+with my knife, I don’t know.
+
+“And your sister,” he resumed, after a little steady eating, “which had
+the honor of bringing you up by hand! It’s a sad picter, to reflect that
+she’s no longer equal to fully understanding the honor. May--”
+
+I saw he was about to come at me again, and I stopped him.
+
+“We’ll drink her health,” said I.
+
+“Ah!” cried Mr. Pumblechook, leaning back in his chair, quite flaccid
+with admiration, “that’s the way you know ‘em, sir!” (I don’t know
+who Sir was, but he certainly was not I, and there was no third person
+present); “that’s the way you know the noble-minded, sir! Ever forgiving
+and ever affable. It might,” said the servile Pumblechook, putting down
+his untasted glass in a hurry and getting up again, “to a common person,
+have the appearance of repeating--but may I--?”
+
+When he had done it, he resumed his seat and drank to my sister. “Let us
+never be blind,” said Mr. Pumblechook, “to her faults of temper, but it
+is to be hoped she meant well.”
+
+At about this time, I began to observe that he was getting flushed in
+the face; as to myself, I felt all face, steeped in wine and smarting.
+
+I mentioned to Mr. Pumblechook that I wished to have my new clothes
+sent to his house, and he was ecstatic on my so distinguishing him. I
+mentioned my reason for desiring to avoid observation in the village,
+and he lauded it to the skies. There was nobody but himself, he
+intimated, worthy of my confidence, and--in short, might he? Then he
+asked me tenderly if I remembered our boyish games at sums, and how we
+had gone together to have me bound apprentice, and, in effect, how he
+had ever been my favorite fancy and my chosen friend? If I had taken
+ten times as many glasses of wine as I had, I should have known that he
+never had stood in that relation towards me, and should in my heart of
+hearts have repudiated the idea. Yet for all that, I remember feeling
+convinced that I had been much mistaken in him, and that he was a
+sensible, practical, good-hearted prime fellow.
+
+By degrees he fell to reposing such great confidence in me, as to ask my
+advice in reference to his own affairs. He mentioned that there was an
+opportunity for a great amalgamation and monopoly of the corn and seed
+trade on those premises, if enlarged, such as had never occurred
+before in that or any other neighborhood. What alone was wanting to the
+realization of a vast fortune, he considered to be More Capital.
+Those were the two little words, more capital. Now it appeared to him
+(Pumblechook) that if that capital were got into the business, through a
+sleeping partner, sir,--which sleeping partner would have nothing to
+do but walk in, by self or deputy, whenever he pleased, and examine
+the books,--and walk in twice a year and take his profits away in his
+pocket, to the tune of fifty per cent,--it appeared to him that that
+might be an opening for a young gentleman of spirit combined with
+property, which would be worthy of his attention. But what did I think?
+He had great confidence in my opinion, and what did I think? I gave it
+as my opinion. “Wait a bit!” The united vastness and distinctness of
+this view so struck him, that he no longer asked if he might shake hands
+with me, but said he really must,--and did.
+
+We drank all the wine, and Mr. Pumblechook pledged himself over and over
+again to keep Joseph up to the mark (I don’t know what mark), and to
+render me efficient and constant service (I don’t know what service). He
+also made known to me for the first time in my life, and certainly after
+having kept his secret wonderfully well, that he had always said of me,
+“That boy is no common boy, and mark me, his fortun’ will be no common
+fortun’.” He said with a tearful smile that it was a singular thing to
+think of now, and I said so too. Finally, I went out into the air, with
+a dim perception that there was something unwonted in the conduct of the
+sunshine, and found that I had slumberously got to the turnpike without
+having taken any account of the road.
+
+There, I was roused by Mr. Pumblechook’s hailing me. He was a long way
+down the sunny street, and was making expressive gestures for me to
+stop. I stopped, and he came up breathless.
+
+“No, my dear friend,” said he, when he had recovered wind for speech.
+“Not if I can help it. This occasion shall not entirely pass without
+that affability on your part.--May I, as an old friend and well-wisher?
+May I?”
+
+We shook hands for the hundredth time at least, and he ordered a young
+carter out of my way with the greatest indignation. Then, he blessed
+me and stood waving his hand to me until I had passed the crook in the
+road; and then I turned into a field and had a long nap under a hedge
+before I pursued my way home.
+
+I had scant luggage to take with me to London, for little of the little
+I possessed was adapted to my new station. But I began packing that same
+afternoon, and wildly packed up things that I knew I should want next
+morning, in a fiction that there was not a moment to be lost.
+
+So, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, passed; and on Friday morning I
+went to Mr. Pumblechook’s, to put on my new clothes and pay my visit to
+Miss Havisham. Mr. Pumblechook’s own room was given up to me to dress
+in, and was decorated with clean towels expressly for the event. My
+clothes were rather a disappointment, of course. Probably every new
+and eagerly expected garment ever put on since clothes came in, fell
+a trifle short of the wearer’s expectation. But after I had had my
+new suit on some half an hour, and had gone through an immensity of
+posturing with Mr. Pumblechook’s very limited dressing-glass, in the
+futile endeavor to see my legs, it seemed to fit me better. It being
+market morning at a neighboring town some ten miles off, Mr. Pumblechook
+was not at home. I had not told him exactly when I meant to leave, and
+was not likely to shake hands with him again before departing. This was
+all as it should be, and I went out in my new array, fearfully ashamed
+of having to pass the shopman, and suspicious after all that I was at a
+personal disadvantage, something like Joe’s in his Sunday suit.
+
+I went circuitously to Miss Havisham’s by all the back ways, and rang
+at the bell constrainedly, on account of the stiff long fingers of my
+gloves. Sarah Pocket came to the gate, and positively reeled back when
+she saw me so changed; her walnut-shell countenance likewise turned from
+brown to green and yellow.
+
+“You?” said she. “You? Good gracious! What do you want?”
+
+“I am going to London, Miss Pocket,” said I, “and want to say good-bye to
+Miss Havisham.”
+
+I was not expected, for she left me locked in the yard, while she went
+to ask if I were to be admitted. After a very short delay, she returned
+and took me up, staring at me all the way.
+
+Miss Havisham was taking exercise in the room with the long spread
+table, leaning on her crutch stick. The room was lighted as of yore, and
+at the sound of our entrance, she stopped and turned. She was then just
+abreast of the rotted bride-cake.
+
+“Don’t go, Sarah,” she said. “Well, Pip?”
+
+“I start for London, Miss Havisham, to-morrow,” I was exceedingly
+careful what I said, “and I thought you would kindly not mind my taking
+leave of you.”
+
+“This is a gay figure, Pip,” said she, making her crutch stick play
+round me, as if she, the fairy godmother who had changed me, were
+bestowing the finishing gift.
+
+“I have come into such good fortune since I saw you last, Miss
+Havisham,” I murmured. “And I am so grateful for it, Miss Havisham!”
+
+“Ay, ay!” said she, looking at the discomfited and envious Sarah, with
+delight. “I have seen Mr. Jaggers. I have heard about it, Pip. So you go
+to-morrow?”
+
+“Yes, Miss Havisham.”
+
+“And you are adopted by a rich person?”
+
+“Yes, Miss Havisham.”
+
+“Not named?”
+
+“No, Miss Havisham.”
+
+“And Mr. Jaggers is made your guardian?”
+
+“Yes, Miss Havisham.”
+
+She quite gloated on these questions and answers, so keen was her
+enjoyment of Sarah Pocket’s jealous dismay. “Well!” she went on; “you
+have a promising career before you. Be good--deserve it--and abide by
+Mr. Jaggers’s instructions.” She looked at me, and looked at Sarah, and
+Sarah’s countenance wrung out of her watchful face a cruel smile. “Good-bye,
+Pip!--you will always keep the name of Pip, you know.”
+
+“Yes, Miss Havisham.”
+
+“Good-bye, Pip!”
+
+She stretched out her hand, and I went down on my knee and put it to
+my lips. I had not considered how I should take leave of her; it came
+naturally to me at the moment to do this. She looked at Sarah Pocket
+with triumph in her weird eyes, and so I left my fairy godmother, with
+both her hands on her crutch stick, standing in the midst of the dimly
+lighted room beside the rotten bride-cake that was hidden in cobwebs.
+
+Sarah Pocket conducted me down, as if I were a ghost who must be seen
+out. She could not get over my appearance, and was in the last degree
+confounded. I said “Good-bye, Miss Pocket;” but she merely stared, and
+did not seem collected enough to know that I had spoken. Clear of the
+house, I made the best of my way back to Pumblechook’s, took off my new
+clothes, made them into a bundle, and went back home in my older dress,
+carrying it--to speak the truth--much more at my ease too, though I had
+the bundle to carry.
+
+And now, those six days which were to have run out so slowly, had
+run out fast and were gone, and to-morrow looked me in the face more
+steadily than I could look at it. As the six evenings had dwindled
+away, to five, to four, to three, to two, I had become more and more
+appreciative of the society of Joe and Biddy. On this last evening, I
+dressed my self out in my new clothes for their delight, and sat in my
+splendor until bedtime. We had a hot supper on the occasion, graced by
+the inevitable roast fowl, and we had some flip to finish with. We were
+all very low, and none the higher for pretending to be in spirits.
+
+I was to leave our village at five in the morning, carrying my little
+hand-portmanteau, and I had told Joe that I wished to walk away all
+alone. I am afraid--sore afraid--that this purpose originated in my
+sense of the contrast there would be between me and Joe, if we went to
+the coach together. I had pretended with myself that there was nothing
+of this taint in the arrangement; but when I went up to my little room
+on this last night, I felt compelled to admit that it might be so, and
+had an impulse upon me to go down again and entreat Joe to walk with me
+in the morning. I did not.
+
+All night there were coaches in my broken sleep, going to wrong places
+instead of to London, and having in the traces, now dogs, now cats, now
+pigs, now men,--never horses. Fantastic failures of journeys occupied
+me until the day dawned and the birds were singing. Then, I got up and
+partly dressed, and sat at the window to take a last look out, and in
+taking it fell asleep.
+
+Biddy was astir so early to get my breakfast, that, although I did not
+sleep at the window an hour, I smelt the smoke of the kitchen fire when
+I started up with a terrible idea that it must be late in the afternoon.
+But long after that, and long after I had heard the clinking of the
+teacups and was quite ready, I wanted the resolution to go downstairs.
+After all, I remained up there, repeatedly unlocking and unstrapping
+my small portmanteau and locking and strapping it up again, until Biddy
+called to me that I was late.
+
+It was a hurried breakfast with no taste in it. I got up from the meal,
+saying with a sort of briskness, as if it had only just occurred to me,
+“Well! I suppose I must be off!” and then I kissed my sister who was
+laughing and nodding and shaking in her usual chair, and kissed
+Biddy, and threw my arms around Joe’s neck. Then I took up my little
+portmanteau and walked out. The last I saw of them was, when I presently
+heard a scuffle behind me, and looking back, saw Joe throwing an old
+shoe after me and Biddy throwing another old shoe. I stopped then, to
+wave my hat, and dear old Joe waved his strong right arm above his head,
+crying huskily “Hooroar!” and Biddy put her apron to her face.
+
+I walked away at a good pace, thinking it was easier to go than I had
+supposed it would be, and reflecting that it would never have done to
+have had an old shoe thrown after the coach, in sight of all the High
+Street. I whistled and made nothing of going. But the village was very
+peaceful and quiet, and the light mists were solemnly rising, as if to
+show me the world, and I had been so innocent and little there, and all
+beyond was so unknown and great, that in a moment with a strong heave
+and sob I broke into tears. It was by the finger-post at the end of the
+village, and I laid my hand upon it, and said, “Good-bye, O my dear, dear
+friend!”
+
+Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain
+upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was
+better after I had cried than before,--more sorry, more aware of my own
+ingratitude, more gentle. If I had cried before, I should have had Joe
+with me then.
+
+So subdued I was by those tears, and by their breaking out again in the
+course of the quiet walk, that when I was on the coach, and it was clear
+of the town, I deliberated with an aching heart whether I would not get
+down when we changed horses and walk back, and have another evening at
+home, and a better parting. We changed, and I had not made up my mind,
+and still reflected for my comfort that it would be quite practicable to
+get down and walk back, when we changed again. And while I was occupied
+with these deliberations, I would fancy an exact resemblance to Joe
+in some man coming along the road towards us, and my heart would beat
+high.--As if he could possibly be there!
+
+We changed again, and yet again, and it was now too late and too far to
+go back, and I went on. And the mists had all solemnly risen now, and
+the world lay spread before me.
+
+This is the end of the first stage of Pip’s expectations.
+
+Chapter XX
+
+The journey from our town to the metropolis was a journey of about five
+hours. It was a little past midday when the four-horse stage-coach by
+which I was a passenger, got into the ravel of traffic frayed out about
+the Cross Keys, Wood Street, Cheapside, London.
+
+We Britons had at that time particularly settled that it was treasonable
+to doubt our having and our being the best of everything: otherwise,
+while I was scared by the immensity of London, I think I might have had
+some faint doubts whether it was not rather ugly, crooked, narrow, and
+dirty.
+
+Mr. Jaggers had duly sent me his address; it was, Little Britain, and he
+had written after it on his card, “just out of Smithfield, and close by
+the coach-office.” Nevertheless, a hackney-coachman, who seemed to have
+as many capes to his greasy great-coat as he was years old, packed me
+up in his coach and hemmed me in with a folding and jingling barrier of
+steps, as if he were going to take me fifty miles. His getting on his
+box, which I remember to have been decorated with an old weather-stained
+pea-green hammercloth moth-eaten into rags, was quite a work of time.
+It was a wonderful equipage, with six great coronets outside, and ragged
+things behind for I don’t know how many footmen to hold on by, and
+a harrow below them, to prevent amateur footmen from yielding to the
+temptation.
+
+I had scarcely had time to enjoy the coach and to think how like a
+straw-yard it was, and yet how like a rag-shop, and to wonder why
+the horses’ nose-bags were kept inside, when I observed the coachman
+beginning to get down, as if we were going to stop presently. And stop
+we presently did, in a gloomy street, at certain offices with an open
+door, whereon was painted MR. JAGGERS.
+
+“How much?” I asked the coachman.
+
+The coachman answered, “A shilling--unless you wish to make it more.”
+
+I naturally said I had no wish to make it more.
+
+“Then it must be a shilling,” observed the coachman. “I don’t want to
+get into trouble. I know him!” He darkly closed an eye at Mr. Jaggers’s
+name, and shook his head.
+
+When he had got his shilling, and had in course of time completed the
+ascent to his box, and had got away (which appeared to relieve his
+mind), I went into the front office with my little portmanteau in my
+hand and asked, Was Mr. Jaggers at home?
+
+“He is not,” returned the clerk. “He is in Court at present. Am I
+addressing Mr. Pip?”
+
+I signified that he was addressing Mr. Pip.
+
+“Mr. Jaggers left word, would you wait in his room. He couldn’t say how
+long he might be, having a case on. But it stands to reason, his time
+being valuable, that he won’t be longer than he can help.”
+
+With those words, the clerk opened a door, and ushered me into an inner
+chamber at the back. Here, we found a gentleman with one eye, in a
+velveteen suit and knee-breeches, who wiped his nose with his sleeve on
+being interrupted in the perusal of the newspaper.
+
+“Go and wait outside, Mike,” said the clerk.
+
+I began to say that I hoped I was not interrupting, when the clerk
+shoved this gentleman out with as little ceremony as I ever saw used,
+and tossing his fur cap out after him, left me alone.
+
+Mr. Jaggers’s room was lighted by a skylight only, and was a most dismal
+place; the skylight, eccentrically pitched like a broken head, and the
+distorted adjoining houses looking as if they had twisted themselves to
+peep down at me through it. There were not so many papers about, as I
+should have expected to see; and there were some odd objects about, that
+I should not have expected to see,--such as an old rusty pistol, a
+sword in a scabbard, several strange-looking boxes and packages, and
+two dreadful casts on a shelf, of faces peculiarly swollen, and twitchy
+about the nose. Mr. Jaggers’s own high-backed chair was of deadly black
+horsehair, with rows of brass nails round it, like a coffin; and I
+fancied I could see how he leaned back in it, and bit his forefinger at
+the clients. The room was but small, and the clients seemed to have had
+a habit of backing up against the wall; the wall, especially opposite to
+Mr. Jaggers’s chair, being greasy with shoulders. I recalled, too, that
+the one-eyed gentleman had shuffled forth against the wall when I was
+the innocent cause of his being turned out.
+
+I sat down in the cliental chair placed over against Mr. Jaggers’s
+chair, and became fascinated by the dismal atmosphere of the place. I
+called to mind that the clerk had the same air of knowing something to
+everybody else’s disadvantage, as his master had. I wondered how many
+other clerks there were upstairs, and whether they all claimed to have
+the same detrimental mastery of their fellow-creatures. I wondered what
+was the history of all the odd litter about the room, and how it came
+there. I wondered whether the two swollen faces were of Mr. Jaggers’s
+family, and, if he were so unfortunate as to have had a pair of such
+ill-looking relations, why he stuck them on that dusty perch for the
+blacks and flies to settle on, instead of giving them a place at home.
+Of course I had no experience of a London summer day, and my spirits may
+have been oppressed by the hot exhausted air, and by the dust and grit
+that lay thick on everything. But I sat wondering and waiting in Mr.
+Jaggers’s close room, until I really could not bear the two casts on the
+shelf above Mr. Jaggers’s chair, and got up and went out.
+
+When I told the clerk that I would take a turn in the air while I
+waited, he advised me to go round the corner and I should come into
+Smithfield. So I came into Smithfield; and the shameful place, being all
+asmear with filth and fat and blood and foam, seemed to stick to me. So,
+I rubbed it off with all possible speed by turning into a street where
+I saw the great black dome of Saint Paul’s bulging at me from behind a
+grim stone building which a bystander said was Newgate Prison. Following
+the wall of the jail, I found the roadway covered with straw to deaden
+the noise of passing vehicles; and from this, and from the quantity of
+people standing about smelling strongly of spirits and beer, I inferred
+that the trials were on.
+
+While I looked about me here, an exceedingly dirty and partially drunk
+minister of justice asked me if I would like to step in and hear a
+trial or so: informing me that he could give me a front place for half a
+crown, whence I should command a full view of the Lord Chief Justice in
+his wig and robes,--mentioning that awful personage like waxwork, and
+presently offering him at the reduced price of eighteen-pence. As I
+declined the proposal on the plea of an appointment, he was so good as
+to take me into a yard and show me where the gallows was kept, and also
+where people were publicly whipped, and then he showed me the Debtors’
+Door, out of which culprits came to be hanged; heightening the interest
+of that dreadful portal by giving me to understand that “four on ‘em”
+ would come out at that door the day after to-morrow at eight in the
+morning, to be killed in a row. This was horrible, and gave me a
+sickening idea of London; the more so as the Lord Chief Justice’s
+proprietor wore (from his hat down to his boots and up again to his
+pocket-handkerchief inclusive) mildewed clothes which had evidently
+not belonged to him originally, and which I took it into my head he had
+bought cheap of the executioner. Under these circumstances I thought
+myself well rid of him for a shilling.
+
+I dropped into the office to ask if Mr. Jaggers had come in yet, and I
+found he had not, and I strolled out again. This time, I made the tour
+of Little Britain, and turned into Bartholomew Close; and now I became
+aware that other people were waiting about for Mr. Jaggers, as well
+as I. There were two men of secret appearance lounging in Bartholomew
+Close, and thoughtfully fitting their feet into the cracks of the
+pavement as they talked together, one of whom said to the other when
+they first passed me, that “Jaggers would do it if it was to be done.”
+ There was a knot of three men and two women standing at a corner, and
+one of the women was crying on her dirty shawl, and the other comforted
+her by saying, as she pulled her own shawl over her shoulders, “Jaggers
+is for him, ‘Melia, and what more could you have?” There was a red-eyed
+little Jew who came into the Close while I was loitering there, in
+company with a second little Jew whom he sent upon an errand; and
+while the messenger was gone, I remarked this Jew, who was of a highly
+excitable temperament, performing a jig of anxiety under a lamp-post and
+accompanying himself, in a kind of frenzy, with the words, “O Jaggerth,
+Jaggerth, Jaggerth! all otherth ith Cag-Maggerth, give me Jaggerth!”
+ These testimonies to the popularity of my guardian made a deep
+impression on me, and I admired and wondered more than ever.
+
+At length, as I was looking out at the iron gate of Bartholomew Close
+into Little Britain, I saw Mr. Jaggers coming across the road towards
+me. All the others who were waiting saw him at the same time, and there
+was quite a rush at him. Mr. Jaggers, putting a hand on my shoulder
+and walking me on at his side without saying anything to me, addressed
+himself to his followers.
+
+First, he took the two secret men.
+
+“Now, I have nothing to say to you,” said Mr. Jaggers, throwing his
+finger at them. “I want to know no more than I know. As to the result,
+it’s a toss-up. I told you from the first it was a toss-up. Have you
+paid Wemmick?”
+
+“We made the money up this morning, sir,” said one of the men,
+submissively, while the other perused Mr. Jaggers’s face.
+
+“I don’t ask you when you made it up, or where, or whether you made it
+up at all. Has Wemmick got it?”
+
+“Yes, sir,” said both the men together.
+
+“Very well; then you may go. Now, I won’t have it!” said Mr Jaggers,
+waving his hand at them to put them behind him. “If you say a word to
+me, I’ll throw up the case.”
+
+“We thought, Mr. Jaggers--” one of the men began, pulling off his hat.
+
+“That’s what I told you not to do,” said Mr. Jaggers. “You thought! I
+think for you; that’s enough for you. If I want you, I know where to
+find you; I don’t want you to find me. Now I won’t have it. I won’t hear
+a word.”
+
+The two men looked at one another as Mr. Jaggers waved them behind
+again, and humbly fell back and were heard no more.
+
+“And now you!” said Mr. Jaggers, suddenly stopping, and turning on
+the two women with the shawls, from whom the three men had meekly
+separated,--“Oh! Amelia, is it?”
+
+“Yes, Mr. Jaggers.”
+
+“And do you remember,” retorted Mr. Jaggers, “that but for me you
+wouldn’t be here and couldn’t be here?”
+
+“O yes, sir!” exclaimed both women together. “Lord bless you, sir, well
+we knows that!”
+
+“Then why,” said Mr. Jaggers, “do you come here?”
+
+“My Bill, sir!” the crying woman pleaded.
+
+“Now, I tell you what!” said Mr. Jaggers. “Once for all. If you don’t
+know that your Bill’s in good hands, I know it. And if you come here
+bothering about your Bill, I’ll make an example of both your Bill and
+you, and let him slip through my fingers. Have you paid Wemmick?”
+
+“O yes, sir! Every farden.”
+
+“Very well. Then you have done all you have got to do. Say another
+word--one single word--and Wemmick shall give you your money back.”
+
+This terrible threat caused the two women to fall off immediately.
+No one remained now but the excitable Jew, who had already raised the
+skirts of Mr. Jaggers’s coat to his lips several times.
+
+“I don’t know this man!” said Mr. Jaggers, in the same devastating
+strain: “What does this fellow want?”
+
+“Ma thear Mithter Jaggerth. Hown brother to Habraham Latharuth?”
+
+“Who’s he?” said Mr. Jaggers. “Let go of my coat.”
+
+The suitor, kissing the hem of the garment again before relinquishing
+it, replied, “Habraham Latharuth, on thuthpithion of plate.”
+
+“You’re too late,” said Mr. Jaggers. “I am over the way.”
+
+“Holy father, Mithter Jaggerth!” cried my excitable acquaintance,
+turning white, “don’t thay you’re again Habraham Latharuth!”
+
+“I am,” said Mr. Jaggers, “and there’s an end of it. Get out of the
+way.”
+
+“Mithter Jaggerth! Half a moment! My hown cuthen’th gone to Mithter
+Wemmick at thith prethent minute, to hoffer him hany termth. Mithter
+Jaggerth! Half a quarter of a moment! If you’d have the condethenthun to
+be bought off from the t’other thide--at hany thuperior prithe!--money
+no object!--Mithter Jaggerth--Mithter--!”
+
+My guardian threw his supplicant off with supreme indifference, and
+left him dancing on the pavement as if it were red hot. Without further
+interruption, we reached the front office, where we found the clerk and
+the man in velveteen with the fur cap.
+
+“Here’s Mike,” said the clerk, getting down from his stool, and
+approaching Mr. Jaggers confidentially.
+
+“Oh!” said Mr. Jaggers, turning to the man, who was pulling a lock of
+hair in the middle of his forehead, like the Bull in Cock Robin pulling
+at the bell-rope; “your man comes on this afternoon. Well?”
+
+“Well, Mas’r Jaggers,” returned Mike, in the voice of a sufferer from a
+constitutional cold; “arter a deal o’ trouble, I’ve found one, sir, as
+might do.”
+
+“What is he prepared to swear?”
+
+“Well, Mas’r Jaggers,” said Mike, wiping his nose on his fur cap this
+time; “in a general way, anythink.”
+
+Mr. Jaggers suddenly became most irate. “Now, I warned you before,” said
+he, throwing his forefinger at the terrified client, “that if you ever
+presumed to talk in that way here, I’d make an example of you. You
+infernal scoundrel, how dare you tell ME that?”
+
+The client looked scared, but bewildered too, as if he were unconscious
+what he had done.
+
+“Spooney!” said the clerk, in a low voice, giving him a stir with his
+elbow. “Soft Head! Need you say it face to face?”
+
+“Now, I ask you, you blundering booby,” said my guardian, very sternly,
+“once more and for the last time, what the man you have brought here is
+prepared to swear?”
+
+Mike looked hard at my guardian, as if he were trying to learn a lesson
+from his face, and slowly replied, “Ayther to character, or to having
+been in his company and never left him all the night in question.”
+
+“Now, be careful. In what station of life is this man?”
+
+Mike looked at his cap, and looked at the floor, and looked at the
+ceiling, and looked at the clerk, and even looked at me, before
+beginning to reply in a nervous manner, “We’ve dressed him up like--”
+ when my guardian blustered out,--
+
+“What? You WILL, will you?”
+
+(“Spooney!” added the clerk again, with another stir.)
+
+After some helpless casting about, Mike brightened and began again:--
+
+“He is dressed like a ‘spectable pieman. A sort of a pastry-cook.”
+
+“Is he here?” asked my guardian.
+
+“I left him,” said Mike, “a setting on some doorsteps round the corner.”
+
+“Take him past that window, and let me see him.”
+
+The window indicated was the office window. We all three went to
+it, behind the wire blind, and presently saw the client go by in an
+accidental manner, with a murderous-looking tall individual, in a short
+suit of white linen and a paper cap. This guileless confectioner was not
+by any means sober, and had a black eye in the green stage of recovery,
+which was painted over.
+
+“Tell him to take his witness away directly,” said my guardian to the
+clerk, in extreme disgust, “and ask him what he means by bringing such a
+fellow as that.”
+
+My guardian then took me into his own room, and while he lunched,
+standing, from a sandwich-box and a pocket-flask of sherry (he seemed to
+bully his very sandwich as he ate it), informed me what arrangements he
+had made for me. I was to go to “Barnard’s Inn,” to young Mr. Pocket’s
+rooms, where a bed had been sent in for my accommodation; I was to
+remain with young Mr. Pocket until Monday; on Monday I was to go with
+him to his father’s house on a visit, that I might try how I liked it.
+Also, I was told what my allowance was to be,--it was a very liberal
+one,--and had handed to me from one of my guardian’s drawers, the cards
+of certain tradesmen with whom I was to deal for all kinds of clothes,
+and such other things as I could in reason want. “You will find your
+credit good, Mr. Pip,” said my guardian, whose flask of sherry smelt
+like a whole caskful, as he hastily refreshed himself, “but I shall by
+this means be able to check your bills, and to pull you up if I find you
+outrunning the constable. Of course you’ll go wrong somehow, but that’s
+no fault of mine.”
+
+After I had pondered a little over this encouraging sentiment, I asked
+Mr. Jaggers if I could send for a coach? He said it was not worth while,
+I was so near my destination; Wemmick should walk round with me, if I
+pleased.
+
+I then found that Wemmick was the clerk in the next room. Another clerk
+was rung down from upstairs to take his place while he was out, and I
+accompanied him into the street, after shaking hands with my guardian.
+We found a new set of people lingering outside, but Wemmick made a way
+among them by saying coolly yet decisively, “I tell you it’s no use; he
+won’t have a word to say to one of you;” and we soon got clear of them,
+and went on side by side.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXI
+
+Casting my eyes on Mr. Wemmick as we went along, to see what he was
+like in the light of day, I found him to be a dry man, rather short in
+stature, with a square wooden face, whose expression seemed to have been
+imperfectly chipped out with a dull-edged chisel. There were some marks
+in it that might have been dimples, if the material had been softer and
+the instrument finer, but which, as it was, were only dints. The chisel
+had made three or four of these attempts at embellishment over his nose,
+but had given them up without an effort to smooth them off. I judged him
+to be a bachelor from the frayed condition of his linen, and he appeared
+to have sustained a good many bereavements; for he wore at least four
+mourning rings, besides a brooch representing a lady and a weeping
+willow at a tomb with an urn on it. I noticed, too, that several rings
+and seals hung at his watch-chain, as if he were quite laden with
+remembrances of departed friends. He had glittering eyes,--small, keen,
+and black,--and thin wide mottled lips. He had had them, to the best of
+my belief, from forty to fifty years.
+
+“So you were never in London before?” said Mr. Wemmick to me.
+
+“No,” said I.
+
+“I was new here once,” said Mr. Wemmick. “Rum to think of now!”
+
+“You are well acquainted with it now?”
+
+“Why, yes,” said Mr. Wemmick. “I know the moves of it.”
+
+“Is it a very wicked place?” I asked, more for the sake of saying
+something than for information.
+
+“You may get cheated, robbed, and murdered in London. But there are
+plenty of people anywhere, who’ll do that for you.”
+
+“If there is bad blood between you and them,” said I, to soften it off a
+little.
+
+“O! I don’t know about bad blood,” returned Mr. Wemmick; “there’s not
+much bad blood about. They’ll do it, if there’s anything to be got by
+it.”
+
+“That makes it worse.”
+
+“You think so?” returned Mr. Wemmick. “Much about the same, I should
+say.”
+
+He wore his hat on the back of his head, and looked straight before him:
+walking in a self-contained way as if there were nothing in the streets
+to claim his attention. His mouth was such a post-office of a mouth
+that he had a mechanical appearance of smiling. We had got to the top of
+Holborn Hill before I knew that it was merely a mechanical appearance,
+and that he was not smiling at all.
+
+“Do you know where Mr. Matthew Pocket lives?” I asked Mr. Wemmick.
+
+“Yes,” said he, nodding in the direction. “At Hammersmith, west of
+London.”
+
+“Is that far?”
+
+“Well! Say five miles.”
+
+“Do you know him?”
+
+“Why, you’re a regular cross-examiner!” said Mr. Wemmick, looking at me
+with an approving air. “Yes, I know him. I know him!”
+
+There was an air of toleration or depreciation about his utterance of
+these words that rather depressed me; and I was still looking sideways
+at his block of a face in search of any encouraging note to the text,
+when he said here we were at Barnard’s Inn. My depression was not
+alleviated by the announcement, for, I had supposed that establishment
+to be an hotel kept by Mr. Barnard, to which the Blue Boar in our town
+was a mere public-house. Whereas I now found Barnard to be a disembodied
+spirit, or a fiction, and his inn the dingiest collection of shabby
+buildings ever squeezed together in a rank corner as a club for
+Tom-cats.
+
+We entered this haven through a wicket-gate, and were disgorged by an
+introductory passage into a melancholy little square that looked to me
+like a flat burying-ground. I thought it had the most dismal trees in
+it, and the most dismal sparrows, and the most dismal cats, and the most
+dismal houses (in number half a dozen or so), that I had ever seen. I
+thought the windows of the sets of chambers into which those houses were
+divided were in every stage of dilapidated blind and curtain, crippled
+flower-pot, cracked glass, dusty decay, and miserable makeshift; while
+To Let, To Let, To Let, glared at me from empty rooms, as if no new
+wretches ever came there, and the vengeance of the soul of Barnard were
+being slowly appeased by the gradual suicide of the present occupants
+and their unholy interment under the gravel. A frowzy mourning of soot
+and smoke attired this forlorn creation of Barnard, and it had strewn
+ashes on its head, and was undergoing penance and humiliation as a mere
+dust-hole. Thus far my sense of sight; while dry rot and wet rot and all
+the silent rots that rot in neglected roof and cellar,--rot of rat
+and mouse and bug and coaching-stables near at hand besides--addressed
+themselves faintly to my sense of smell, and moaned, “Try Barnard’s
+Mixture.”
+
+So imperfect was this realization of the first of my great expectations,
+that I looked in dismay at Mr. Wemmick. “Ah!” said he, mistaking me;
+“the retirement reminds you of the country. So it does me.”
+
+He led me into a corner and conducted me up a flight of stairs,--which
+appeared to me to be slowly collapsing into sawdust, so that one of
+those days the upper lodgers would look out at their doors and find
+themselves without the means of coming down,--to a set of chambers on
+the top floor. MR. POCKET, JUN., was painted on the door, and there was
+a label on the letter-box, “Return shortly.”
+
+“He hardly thought you’d come so soon,” Mr. Wemmick explained. “You
+don’t want me any more?”
+
+“No, thank you,” said I.
+
+“As I keep the cash,” Mr. Wemmick observed, “we shall most likely meet
+pretty often. Good day.”
+
+“Good day.”
+
+I put out my hand, and Mr. Wemmick at first looked at it as if he
+thought I wanted something. Then he looked at me, and said, correcting
+himself,--
+
+“To be sure! Yes. You’re in the habit of shaking hands?”
+
+I was rather confused, thinking it must be out of the London fashion,
+but said yes.
+
+“I have got so out of it!” said Mr. Wemmick,--“except at last. Very
+glad, I’m sure, to make your acquaintance. Good day!”
+
+When we had shaken hands and he was gone, I opened the staircase window
+and had nearly beheaded myself, for, the lines had rotted away, and it
+came down like the guillotine. Happily it was so quick that I had not
+put my head out. After this escape, I was content to take a foggy view
+of the Inn through the window’s encrusting dirt, and to stand dolefully
+looking out, saying to myself that London was decidedly overrated.
+
+Mr. Pocket, Junior’s, idea of Shortly was not mine, for I had nearly
+maddened myself with looking out for half an hour, and had written
+my name with my finger several times in the dirt of every pane in the
+window, before I heard footsteps on the stairs. Gradually there arose
+before me the hat, head, neckcloth, waistcoat, trousers, boots, of a
+member of society of about my own standing. He had a paper-bag under
+each arm and a pottle of strawberries in one hand, and was out of
+breath.
+
+“Mr. Pip?” said he.
+
+“Mr. Pocket?” said I.
+
+“Dear me!” he exclaimed. “I am extremely sorry; but I knew there was a
+coach from your part of the country at midday, and I thought you would
+come by that one. The fact is, I have been out on your account,--not
+that that is any excuse,--for I thought, coming from the country, you
+might like a little fruit after dinner, and I went to Covent Garden
+Market to get it good.”
+
+For a reason that I had, I felt as if my eyes would start out of my
+head. I acknowledged his attention incoherently, and began to think this
+was a dream.
+
+“Dear me!” said Mr. Pocket, Junior. “This door sticks so!”
+
+As he was fast making jam of his fruit by wrestling with the door while
+the paper-bags were under his arms, I begged him to allow me to hold
+them. He relinquished them with an agreeable smile, and combated with
+the door as if it were a wild beast. It yielded so suddenly at last,
+that he staggered back upon me, and I staggered back upon the opposite
+door, and we both laughed. But still I felt as if my eyes must start out
+of my head, and as if this must be a dream.
+
+“Pray come in,” said Mr. Pocket, Junior. “Allow me to lead the way. I am
+rather bare here, but I hope you’ll be able to make out tolerably well
+till Monday. My father thought you would get on more agreeably through
+to-morrow with me than with him, and might like to take a walk about
+London. I am sure I shall be very happy to show London to you. As to our
+table, you won’t find that bad, I hope, for it will be supplied from our
+coffee-house here, and (it is only right I should add) at your expense,
+such being Mr. Jaggers’s directions. As to our lodging, it’s not by
+any means splendid, because I have my own bread to earn, and my father
+hasn’t anything to give me, and I shouldn’t be willing to take it, if he
+had. This is our sitting-room,--just such chairs and tables and carpet
+and so forth, you see, as they could spare from home. You mustn’t give
+me credit for the tablecloth and spoons and castors, because they come
+for you from the coffee-house. This is my little bedroom; rather musty,
+but Barnard’s is musty. This is your bedroom; the furniture’s hired for
+the occasion, but I trust it will answer the purpose; if you should want
+anything, I’ll go and fetch it. The chambers are retired, and we shall
+be alone together, but we shan’t fight, I dare say. But dear me, I beg
+your pardon, you’re holding the fruit all this time. Pray let me take
+these bags from you. I am quite ashamed.”
+
+As I stood opposite to Mr. Pocket, Junior, delivering him the bags, One,
+Two, I saw the starting appearance come into his own eyes that I knew to
+be in mine, and he said, falling back,--
+
+“Lord bless me, you’re the prowling boy!”
+
+“And you,” said I, “are the pale young gentleman!”
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXII
+
+The pale young gentleman and I stood contemplating one another in
+Barnard’s Inn, until we both burst out laughing. “The idea of its
+being you!” said he. “The idea of its being you!” said I. And then we
+contemplated one another afresh, and laughed again. “Well!” said the
+pale young gentleman, reaching out his hand good-humoredly, “it’s all
+over now, I hope, and it will be magnanimous in you if you’ll forgive me
+for having knocked you about so.”
+
+I derived from this speech that Mr. Herbert Pocket (for Herbert was the
+pale young gentleman’s name) still rather confounded his intention with
+his execution. But I made a modest reply, and we shook hands warmly.
+
+“You hadn’t come into your good fortune at that time?” said Herbert
+Pocket.
+
+“No,” said I.
+
+“No,” he acquiesced: “I heard it had happened very lately. I was rather
+on the lookout for good fortune then.”
+
+“Indeed?”
+
+“Yes. Miss Havisham had sent for me, to see if she could take a fancy to
+me. But she couldn’t,--at all events, she didn’t.”
+
+I thought it polite to remark that I was surprised to hear that.
+
+“Bad taste,” said Herbert, laughing, “but a fact. Yes, she had sent for
+me on a trial visit, and if I had come out of it successfully, I
+suppose I should have been provided for; perhaps I should have been
+what-you-may-called it to Estella.”
+
+“What’s that?” I asked, with sudden gravity.
+
+He was arranging his fruit in plates while we talked, which divided his
+attention, and was the cause of his having made this lapse of a word.
+“Affianced,” he explained, still busy with the fruit. “Betrothed.
+Engaged. What’s-his-named. Any word of that sort.”
+
+“How did you bear your disappointment?” I asked.
+
+“Pooh!” said he, “I didn’t care much for it. She’s a Tartar.”
+
+“Miss Havisham?”
+
+“I don’t say no to that, but I meant Estella. That girl’s hard and
+haughty and capricious to the last degree, and has been brought up by
+Miss Havisham to wreak revenge on all the male sex.”
+
+“What relation is she to Miss Havisham?”
+
+“None,” said he. “Only adopted.”
+
+“Why should she wreak revenge on all the male sex? What revenge?”
+
+“Lord, Mr. Pip!” said he. “Don’t you know?”
+
+“No,” said I.
+
+“Dear me! It’s quite a story, and shall be saved till dinner-time. And
+now let me take the liberty of asking you a question. How did you come
+there, that day?”
+
+I told him, and he was attentive until I had finished, and then burst
+out laughing again, and asked me if I was sore afterwards? I didn’t
+ask him if he was, for my conviction on that point was perfectly
+established.
+
+“Mr. Jaggers is your guardian, I understand?” he went on.
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“You know he is Miss Havisham’s man of business and solicitor, and has
+her confidence when nobody else has?”
+
+This was bringing me (I felt) towards dangerous ground. I answered with
+a constraint I made no attempt to disguise, that I had seen Mr. Jaggers
+in Miss Havisham’s house on the very day of our combat, but never at any
+other time, and that I believed he had no recollection of having ever
+seen me there.
+
+“He was so obliging as to suggest my father for your tutor, and he
+called on my father to propose it. Of course he knew about my father
+from his connection with Miss Havisham. My father is Miss Havisham’s
+cousin; not that that implies familiar intercourse between them, for he
+is a bad courtier and will not propitiate her.”
+
+Herbert Pocket had a frank and easy way with him that was very taking.
+I had never seen any one then, and I have never seen any one since,
+who more strongly expressed to me, in every look and tone, a natural
+incapacity to do anything secret and mean. There was something
+wonderfully hopeful about his general air, and something that at the
+same time whispered to me he would never be very successful or rich. I
+don’t know how this was. I became imbued with the notion on that first
+occasion before we sat down to dinner, but I cannot define by what
+means.
+
+He was still a pale young gentleman, and had a certain conquered languor
+about him in the midst of his spirits and briskness, that did not seem
+indicative of natural strength. He had not a handsome face, but it was
+better than handsome: being extremely amiable and cheerful. His figure
+was a little ungainly, as in the days when my knuckles had taken such
+liberties with it, but it looked as if it would always be light and
+young. Whether Mr. Trabb’s local work would have sat more gracefully on
+him than on me, may be a question; but I am conscious that he carried
+off his rather old clothes much better than I carried off my new suit.
+
+As he was so communicative, I felt that reserve on my part would be a
+bad return unsuited to our years. I therefore told him my small story,
+and laid stress on my being forbidden to inquire who my benefactor was.
+I further mentioned that as I had been brought up a blacksmith in a
+country place, and knew very little of the ways of politeness, I would
+take it as a great kindness in him if he would give me a hint whenever
+he saw me at a loss or going wrong.
+
+“With pleasure,” said he, “though I venture to prophesy that you’ll want
+very few hints. I dare say we shall be often together, and I should like
+to banish any needless restraint between us. Will you do me the favour
+to begin at once to call me by my Christian name, Herbert?”
+
+I thanked him and said I would. I informed him in exchange that my
+Christian name was Philip.
+
+“I don’t take to Philip,” said he, smiling, “for it sounds like a moral
+boy out of the spelling-book, who was so lazy that he fell into a pond,
+or so fat that he couldn’t see out of his eyes, or so avaricious that
+he locked up his cake till the mice ate it, or so determined to go a
+bird’s-nesting that he got himself eaten by bears who lived handy in the
+neighborhood. I tell you what I should like. We are so harmonious, and
+you have been a blacksmith,---would you mind it?”
+
+“I shouldn’t mind anything that you propose,” I answered, “but I don’t
+understand you.”
+
+“Would you mind Handel for a familiar name? There’s a charming piece of
+music by Handel, called the Harmonious Blacksmith.”
+
+“I should like it very much.”
+
+“Then, my dear Handel,” said he, turning round as the door opened,
+“here is the dinner, and I must beg of you to take the top of the table,
+because the dinner is of your providing.”
+
+This I would not hear of, so he took the top, and I faced him. It was a
+nice little dinner,--seemed to me then a very Lord Mayor’s Feast,--and
+it acquired additional relish from being eaten under those independent
+circumstances, with no old people by, and with London all around us.
+This again was heightened by a certain gypsy character that set the
+banquet off; for while the table was, as Mr. Pumblechook might have
+said, the lap of luxury,--being entirely furnished forth from the
+coffee-house,--the circumjacent region of sitting-room was of a
+comparatively pastureless and shifty character; imposing on the waiter
+the wandering habits of putting the covers on the floor (where he
+fell over them), the melted butter in the arm-chair, the bread on the
+bookshelves, the cheese in the coal-scuttle, and the boiled fowl into my
+bed in the next room,--where I found much of its parsley and butter in
+a state of congelation when I retired for the night. All this made the
+feast delightful, and when the waiter was not there to watch me, my
+pleasure was without alloy.
+
+We had made some progress in the dinner, when I reminded Herbert of his
+promise to tell me about Miss Havisham.
+
+“True,” he replied. “I’ll redeem it at once. Let me introduce the topic,
+Handel, by mentioning that in London it is not the custom to put the
+knife in the mouth,--for fear of accidents,--and that while the fork is
+reserved for that use, it is not put further in than necessary. It is
+scarcely worth mentioning, only it’s as well to do as other people do.
+Also, the spoon is not generally used over-hand, but under. This has
+two advantages. You get at your mouth better (which after all is the
+object), and you save a good deal of the attitude of opening oysters, on
+the part of the right elbow.”
+
+He offered these friendly suggestions in such a lively way, that we both
+laughed and I scarcely blushed.
+
+“Now,” he pursued, “concerning Miss Havisham. Miss Havisham, you must
+know, was a spoilt child. Her mother died when she was a baby, and her
+father denied her nothing. Her father was a country gentleman down in
+your part of the world, and was a brewer. I don’t know why it should
+be a crack thing to be a brewer; but it is indisputable that while you
+cannot possibly be genteel and bake, you may be as genteel as never was
+and brew. You see it every day.”
+
+“Yet a gentleman may not keep a public-house; may he?” said I.
+
+“Not on any account,” returned Herbert; “but a public-house may keep a
+gentleman. Well! Mr. Havisham was very rich and very proud. So was his
+daughter.”
+
+“Miss Havisham was an only child?” I hazarded.
+
+“Stop a moment, I am coming to that. No, she was not an only child;
+she had a half-brother. Her father privately married again--his cook, I
+rather think.”
+
+“I thought he was proud,” said I.
+
+“My good Handel, so he was. He married his second wife privately,
+because he was proud, and in course of time she died. When she was dead,
+I apprehend he first told his daughter what he had done, and then
+the son became a part of the family, residing in the house you are
+acquainted with. As the son grew a young man, he turned out riotous,
+extravagant, undutiful,--altogether bad. At last his father disinherited
+him; but he softened when he was dying, and left him well off, though
+not nearly so well off as Miss Havisham.--Take another glass of wine,
+and excuse my mentioning that society as a body does not expect one
+to be so strictly conscientious in emptying one’s glass, as to turn it
+bottom upwards with the rim on one’s nose.”
+
+I had been doing this, in an excess of attention to his recital. I
+thanked him, and apologized. He said, “Not at all,” and resumed.
+
+“Miss Havisham was now an heiress, and you may suppose was looked after
+as a great match. Her half-brother had now ample means again, but what
+with debts and what with new madness wasted them most fearfully again.
+There were stronger differences between him and her than there had been
+between him and his father, and it is suspected that he cherished a deep
+and mortal grudge against her as having influenced the father’s anger.
+Now, I come to the cruel part of the story,--merely breaking off, my
+dear Handel, to remark that a dinner-napkin will not go into a tumbler.”
+
+Why I was trying to pack mine into my tumbler, I am wholly unable to
+say. I only know that I found myself, with a perseverance worthy of a
+much better cause, making the most strenuous exertions to compress it
+within those limits. Again I thanked him and apologized, and again he
+said in the cheerfullest manner, “Not at all, I am sure!” and resumed.
+
+“There appeared upon the scene--say at the races, or the public
+balls, or anywhere else you like--a certain man, who made love to Miss
+Havisham. I never saw him (for this happened five-and-twenty years ago,
+before you and I were, Handel), but I have heard my father mention that
+he was a showy man, and the kind of man for the purpose. But that he was
+not to be, without ignorance or prejudice, mistaken for a gentleman, my
+father most strongly asseverates; because it is a principle of his that
+no man who was not a true gentleman at heart ever was, since the world
+began, a true gentleman in manner. He says, no varnish can hide the
+grain of the wood; and that the more varnish you put on, the more the
+grain will express itself. Well! This man pursued Miss Havisham closely,
+and professed to be devoted to her. I believe she had not shown much
+susceptibility up to that time; but all the susceptibility she possessed
+certainly came out then, and she passionately loved him. There is no
+doubt that she perfectly idolized him. He practised on her affection in
+that systematic way, that he got great sums of money from her, and he
+induced her to buy her brother out of a share in the brewery (which had
+been weakly left him by his father) at an immense price, on the plea
+that when he was her husband he must hold and manage it all. Your
+guardian was not at that time in Miss Havisham’s counsels, and she was
+too haughty and too much in love to be advised by any one. Her relations
+were poor and scheming, with the exception of my father; he was poor
+enough, but not time-serving or jealous. The only independent one among
+them, he warned her that she was doing too much for this man, and
+was placing herself too unreservedly in his power. She took the first
+opportunity of angrily ordering my father out of the house, in his
+presence, and my father has never seen her since.”
+
+I thought of her having said, “Matthew will come and see me at last when
+I am laid dead upon that table;” and I asked Herbert whether his father
+was so inveterate against her?
+
+“It’s not that,” said he, “but she charged him, in the presence of her
+intended husband, with being disappointed in the hope of fawning upon
+her for his own advancement, and, if he were to go to her now, it would
+look true--even to him--and even to her. To return to the man and make
+an end of him. The marriage day was fixed, the wedding dresses were
+bought, the wedding tour was planned out, the wedding guests were
+invited. The day came, but not the bridegroom. He wrote her a letter--”
+
+“Which she received,” I struck in, “when she was dressing for her
+marriage? At twenty minutes to nine?”
+
+“At the hour and minute,” said Herbert, nodding, “at which she
+afterwards stopped all the clocks. What was in it, further than that
+it most heartlessly broke the marriage off, I can’t tell you, because I
+don’t know. When she recovered from a bad illness that she had, she
+laid the whole place waste, as you have seen it, and she has never since
+looked upon the light of day.”
+
+“Is that all the story?” I asked, after considering it.
+
+“All I know of it; and indeed I only know so much, through piecing it
+out for myself; for my father always avoids it, and, even when Miss
+Havisham invited me to go there, told me no more of it than it was
+absolutely requisite I should understand. But I have forgotten one
+thing. It has been supposed that the man to whom she gave her misplaced
+confidence acted throughout in concert with her half-brother; that it
+was a conspiracy between them; and that they shared the profits.”
+
+“I wonder he didn’t marry her and get all the property,” said I.
+
+“He may have been married already, and her cruel mortification may have
+been a part of her half-brother’s scheme,” said Herbert. “Mind! I don’t
+know that.”
+
+“What became of the two men?” I asked, after again considering the
+subject.
+
+“They fell into deeper shame and degradation--if there can be
+deeper--and ruin.”
+
+“Are they alive now?”
+
+“I don’t know.”
+
+“You said just now that Estella was not related to Miss Havisham, but
+adopted. When adopted?”
+
+Herbert shrugged his shoulders. “There has always been an Estella, since
+I have heard of a Miss Havisham. I know no more. And now, Handel,” said
+he, finally throwing off the story as it were, “there is a perfectly
+open understanding between us. All that I know about Miss Havisham, you
+know.”
+
+“And all that I know,” I retorted, “you know.”
+
+“I fully believe it. So there can be no competition or perplexity
+between you and me. And as to the condition on which you hold your
+advancement in life,--namely, that you are not to inquire or discuss to
+whom you owe it,--you may be very sure that it will never be encroached
+upon, or even approached, by me, or by any one belonging to me.”
+
+In truth, he said this with so much delicacy, that I felt the subject
+done with, even though I should be under his father’s roof for years and
+years to come. Yet he said it with so much meaning, too, that I felt
+he as perfectly understood Miss Havisham to be my benefactress, as I
+understood the fact myself.
+
+It had not occurred to me before, that he had led up to the theme for
+the purpose of clearing it out of our way; but we were so much the
+lighter and easier for having broached it, that I now perceived this
+to be the case. We were very gay and sociable, and I asked him, in the
+course of conversation, what he was? He replied, “A capitalist,--an
+Insurer of Ships.” I suppose he saw me glancing about the room in search
+of some tokens of Shipping, or capital, for he added, “In the City.”
+
+I had grand ideas of the wealth and importance of Insurers of Ships in
+the City, and I began to think with awe of having laid a young Insurer
+on his back, blackened his enterprising eye, and cut his responsible
+head open. But again there came upon me, for my relief, that odd
+impression that Herbert Pocket would never be very successful or rich.
+
+“I shall not rest satisfied with merely employing my capital in insuring
+ships. I shall buy up some good Life Assurance shares, and cut into the
+Direction. I shall also do a little in the mining way. None of these
+things will interfere with my chartering a few thousand tons on my own
+account. I think I shall trade,” said he, leaning back in his chair, “to
+the East Indies, for silks, shawls, spices, dyes, drugs, and precious
+woods. It’s an interesting trade.”
+
+“And the profits are large?” said I.
+
+“Tremendous!” said he.
+
+I wavered again, and began to think here were greater expectations than
+my own.
+
+“I think I shall trade, also,” said he, putting his thumbs in his
+waist-coat pockets, “to the West Indies, for sugar, tobacco, and rum.
+Also to Ceylon, specially for elephants’ tusks.”
+
+“You will want a good many ships,” said I.
+
+“A perfect fleet,” said he.
+
+Quite overpowered by the magnificence of these transactions, I asked him
+where the ships he insured mostly traded to at present?
+
+“I haven’t begun insuring yet,” he replied. “I am looking about me.”
+
+Somehow, that pursuit seemed more in keeping with Barnard’s Inn. I said
+(in a tone of conviction), “Ah-h!”
+
+“Yes. I am in a counting-house, and looking about me.”
+
+“Is a counting-house profitable?” I asked.
+
+“To--do you mean to the young fellow who’s in it?” he asked, in reply.
+
+“Yes; to you.”
+
+“Why, n-no; not to me.” He said this with the air of one carefully
+reckoning up and striking a balance. “Not directly profitable. That is,
+it doesn’t pay me anything, and I have to--keep myself.”
+
+This certainly had not a profitable appearance, and I shook my head as
+if I would imply that it would be difficult to lay by much accumulative
+capital from such a source of income.
+
+“But the thing is,” said Herbert Pocket, “that you look about you.
+That’s the grand thing. You are in a counting-house, you know, and you
+look about you.”
+
+It struck me as a singular implication that you couldn’t be out of a
+counting-house, you know, and look about you; but I silently deferred to
+his experience.
+
+“Then the time comes,” said Herbert, “when you see your opening. And you
+go in, and you swoop upon it and you make your capital, and then there
+you are! When you have once made your capital, you have nothing to do
+but employ it.”
+
+This was very like his way of conducting that encounter in the garden;
+very like. His manner of bearing his poverty, too, exactly corresponded
+to his manner of bearing that defeat. It seemed to me that he took all
+blows and buffets now with just the same air as he had taken mine
+then. It was evident that he had nothing around him but the simplest
+necessaries, for everything that I remarked upon turned out to have been
+sent in on my account from the coffee-house or somewhere else.
+
+Yet, having already made his fortune in his own mind, he was so
+unassuming with it that I felt quite grateful to him for not being
+puffed up. It was a pleasant addition to his naturally pleasant ways,
+and we got on famously. In the evening we went out for a walk in the
+streets, and went half-price to the Theatre; and next day we went to
+church at Westminster Abbey, and in the afternoon we walked in the
+Parks; and I wondered who shod all the horses there, and wished Joe did.
+
+On a moderate computation, it was many months, that Sunday, since I had
+left Joe and Biddy. The space interposed between myself and them partook
+of that expansion, and our marshes were any distance off. That I could
+have been at our old church in my old church-going clothes, on the very
+last Sunday that ever was, seemed a combination of impossibilities,
+geographical and social, solar and lunar. Yet in the London streets so
+crowded with people and so brilliantly lighted in the dusk of evening,
+there were depressing hints of reproaches for that I had put the poor
+old kitchen at home so far away; and in the dead of night, the footsteps
+of some incapable impostor of a porter mooning about Barnard’s Inn,
+under pretence of watching it, fell hollow on my heart.
+
+On the Monday morning at a quarter before nine, Herbert went to
+the counting-house to report himself,--to look about him, too, I
+suppose,--and I bore him company. He was to come away in an hour or
+two to attend me to Hammersmith, and I was to wait about for him. It
+appeared to me that the eggs from which young Insurers were hatched were
+incubated in dust and heat, like the eggs of ostriches, judging from the
+places to which those incipient giants repaired on a Monday morning. Nor
+did the counting-house where Herbert assisted, show in my eyes as at
+all a good Observatory; being a back second floor up a yard, of a grimy
+presence in all particulars, and with a look into another back second
+floor, rather than a look out.
+
+I waited about until it was noon, and I went upon ‘Change, and I saw
+fluey men sitting there under the bills about shipping, whom I took to
+be great merchants, though I couldn’t understand why they should all be
+out of spirits. When Herbert came, we went and had lunch at a celebrated
+house which I then quite venerated, but now believe to have been the
+most abject superstition in Europe, and where I could not help noticing,
+even then, that there was much more gravy on the tablecloths and knives
+and waiters’ clothes, than in the steaks. This collation disposed of at
+a moderate price (considering the grease, which was not charged for), we
+went back to Barnard’s Inn and got my little portmanteau, and then took
+coach for Hammersmith. We arrived there at two or three o’clock in
+the afternoon, and had very little way to walk to Mr. Pocket’s house.
+Lifting the latch of a gate, we passed direct into a little garden
+overlooking the river, where Mr. Pocket’s children were playing
+about. And unless I deceive myself on a point where my interests or
+prepossessions are certainly not concerned, I saw that Mr. and Mrs.
+Pocket’s children were not growing up or being brought up, but were
+tumbling up.
+
+Mrs. Pocket was sitting on a garden chair under a tree, reading, with
+her legs upon another garden chair; and Mrs. Pocket’s two nurse-maids
+were looking about them while the children played. “Mamma,” said
+Herbert, “this is young Mr. Pip.” Upon which Mrs. Pocket received me
+with an appearance of amiable dignity.
+
+“Master Alick and Miss Jane,” cried one of the nurses to two of the
+children, “if you go a bouncing up against them bushes you’ll fall over
+into the river and be drownded, and what’ll your pa say then?”
+
+At the same time this nurse picked up Mrs. Pocket’s handkerchief, and
+said, “If that don’t make six times you’ve dropped it, Mum!” Upon which
+Mrs. Pocket laughed and said, “Thank you, Flopson,” and settling herself
+in one chair only, resumed her book. Her countenance immediately assumed
+a knitted and intent expression as if she had been reading for a week,
+but before she could have read half a dozen lines, she fixed her eyes
+upon me, and said, “I hope your mamma is quite well?” This unexpected
+inquiry put me into such a difficulty that I began saying in the
+absurdest way that if there had been any such person I had no doubt she
+would have been quite well and would have been very much obliged and
+would have sent her compliments, when the nurse came to my rescue.
+
+“Well!” she cried, picking up the pocket-handkerchief, “if that don’t
+make seven times! What ARE you a doing of this afternoon, Mum!” Mrs.
+Pocket received her property, at first with a look of unutterable
+surprise as if she had never seen it before, and then with a laugh of
+recognition, and said, “Thank you, Flopson,” and forgot me, and went on
+reading.
+
+I found, now I had leisure to count them, that there were no fewer than
+six little Pockets present, in various stages of tumbling up. I had
+scarcely arrived at the total when a seventh was heard, as in the region
+of air, wailing dolefully.
+
+“If there ain’t Baby!” said Flopson, appearing to think it most
+surprising. “Make haste up, Millers.”
+
+Millers, who was the other nurse, retired into the house, and by degrees
+the child’s wailing was hushed and stopped, as if it were a young
+ventriloquist with something in its mouth. Mrs. Pocket read all the
+time, and I was curious to know what the book could be.
+
+We were waiting, I supposed, for Mr. Pocket to come out to us; at any
+rate we waited there, and so I had an opportunity of observing the
+remarkable family phenomenon that whenever any of the children strayed
+near Mrs. Pocket in their play, they always tripped themselves up and
+tumbled over her,--always very much to her momentary astonishment, and
+their own more enduring lamentation. I was at a loss to account for
+this surprising circumstance, and could not help giving my mind to
+speculations about it, until by and by Millers came down with the baby,
+which baby was handed to Flopson, which Flopson was handing it to Mrs.
+Pocket, when she too went fairly head foremost over Mrs. Pocket, baby
+and all, and was caught by Herbert and myself.
+
+“Gracious me, Flopson!” said Mrs. Pocket, looking off her book for a
+moment, “everybody’s tumbling!”
+
+“Gracious you, indeed, Mum!” returned Flopson, very red in the face;
+“what have you got there?”
+
+“I got here, Flopson?” asked Mrs. Pocket.
+
+“Why, if it ain’t your footstool!” cried Flopson. “And if you keep it
+under your skirts like that, who’s to help tumbling? Here! Take the
+baby, Mum, and give me your book.”
+
+Mrs. Pocket acted on the advice, and inexpertly danced the infant a
+little in her lap, while the other children played about it. This had
+lasted but a very short time, when Mrs. Pocket issued summary orders
+that they were all to be taken into the house for a nap. Thus I made the
+second discovery on that first occasion, that the nurture of the little
+Pockets consisted of alternately tumbling up and lying down.
+
+Under these circumstances, when Flopson and Millers had got the children
+into the house, like a little flock of sheep, and Mr. Pocket came out
+of it to make my acquaintance, I was not much surprised to find that Mr.
+Pocket was a gentleman with a rather perplexed expression of face, and
+with his very gray hair disordered on his head, as if he didn’t quite
+see his way to putting anything straight.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXIII
+
+Mr. Pocket said he was glad to see me, and he hoped I was not sorry to
+see him. “For, I really am not,” he added, with his son’s smile,
+“an alarming personage.” He was a young-looking man, in spite of
+his perplexities and his very gray hair, and his manner seemed quite
+natural. I use the word natural, in the sense of its being unaffected;
+there was something comic in his distraught way, as though it would have
+been downright ludicrous but for his own perception that it was very
+near being so. When he had talked with me a little, he said to Mrs.
+Pocket, with a rather anxious contraction of his eyebrows, which were
+black and handsome, “Belinda, I hope you have welcomed Mr. Pip?” And she
+looked up from her book, and said, “Yes.” She then smiled upon me in an
+absent state of mind, and asked me if I liked the taste of orange-flower
+water? As the question had no bearing, near or remote, on any foregone
+or subsequent transaction, I consider it to have been thrown out, like
+her previous approaches, in general conversational condescension.
+
+I found out within a few hours, and may mention at once, that Mrs.
+Pocket was the only daughter of a certain quite accidental deceased
+Knight, who had invented for himself a conviction that his deceased
+father would have been made a Baronet but for somebody’s determined
+opposition arising out of entirely personal motives,--I forget whose,
+if I ever knew,--the Sovereign’s, the Prime Minister’s, the Lord
+Chancellor’s, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s, anybody’s,--and had
+tacked himself on to the nobles of the earth in right of this quite
+supposititious fact. I believe he had been knighted himself for storming
+the English grammar at the point of the pen, in a desperate address
+engrossed on vellum, on the occasion of the laying of the first stone of
+some building or other, and for handing some Royal Personage either the
+trowel or the mortar. Be that as it may, he had directed Mrs. Pocket to
+be brought up from her cradle as one who in the nature of things
+must marry a title, and who was to be guarded from the acquisition of
+plebeian domestic knowledge.
+
+So successful a watch and ward had been established over the young lady
+by this judicious parent, that she had grown up highly ornamental, but
+perfectly helpless and useless. With her character thus happily formed,
+in the first bloom of her youth she had encountered Mr. Pocket: who was
+also in the first bloom of youth, and not quite decided whether to mount
+to the Woolsack, or to roof himself in with a mitre. As his doing the
+one or the other was a mere question of time, he and Mrs. Pocket had
+taken Time by the forelock (when, to judge from its length, it would
+seem to have wanted cutting), and had married without the knowledge of
+the judicious parent. The judicious parent, having nothing to bestow or
+withhold but his blessing, had handsomely settled that dower upon them
+after a short struggle, and had informed Mr. Pocket that his wife was “a
+treasure for a Prince.” Mr. Pocket had invested the Prince’s treasure
+in the ways of the world ever since, and it was supposed to have brought
+him in but indifferent interest. Still, Mrs. Pocket was in general the
+object of a queer sort of respectful pity, because she had not married
+a title; while Mr. Pocket was the object of a queer sort of forgiving
+reproach, because he had never got one.
+
+Mr. Pocket took me into the house and showed me my room: which was a
+pleasant one, and so furnished as that I could use it with comfort for
+my own private sitting-room. He then knocked at the doors of two other
+similar rooms, and introduced me to their occupants, by name Drummle
+and Startop. Drummle, an old-looking young man of a heavy order of
+architecture, was whistling. Startop, younger in years and appearance,
+was reading and holding his head, as if he thought himself in danger of
+exploding it with too strong a charge of knowledge.
+
+Both Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had such a noticeable air of being in somebody
+else’s hands, that I wondered who really was in possession of the house
+and let them live there, until I found this unknown power to be the
+servants. It was a smooth way of going on, perhaps, in respect of saving
+trouble; but it had the appearance of being expensive, for the servants
+felt it a duty they owed to themselves to be nice in their eating and
+drinking, and to keep a deal of company downstairs. They allowed a very
+liberal table to Mr. and Mrs. Pocket, yet it always appeared to me that
+by far the best part of the house to have boarded in would have been
+the kitchen,--always supposing the boarder capable of self-defence, for,
+before I had been there a week, a neighboring lady with whom the family
+were personally unacquainted, wrote in to say that she had seen Millers
+slapping the baby. This greatly distressed Mrs. Pocket, who burst into
+tears on receiving the note, and said that it was an extraordinary thing
+that the neighbors couldn’t mind their own business.
+
+By degrees I learnt, and chiefly from Herbert, that Mr. Pocket had been
+educated at Harrow and at Cambridge, where he had distinguished himself;
+but that when he had had the happiness of marrying Mrs. Pocket very
+early in life, he had impaired his prospects and taken up the calling
+of a Grinder. After grinding a number of dull blades,--of whom it was
+remarkable that their fathers, when influential, were always going to
+help him to preferment, but always forgot to do it when the blades had
+left the Grindstone,--he had wearied of that poor work and had come to
+London. Here, after gradually failing in loftier hopes, he had “read”
+ with divers who had lacked opportunities or neglected them, and had
+refurbished divers others for special occasions, and had turned his
+acquirements to the account of literary compilation and correction,
+and on such means, added to some very moderate private resources, still
+maintained the house I saw.
+
+Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had a toady neighbor; a widow lady of that highly
+sympathetic nature that she agreed with everybody, blessed everybody,
+and shed smiles and tears on everybody, according to circumstances. This
+lady’s name was Mrs. Coiler, and I had the honor of taking her down to
+dinner on the day of my installation. She gave me to understand on the
+stairs, that it was a blow to dear Mrs. Pocket that dear Mr. Pocket
+should be under the necessity of receiving gentlemen to read with him.
+That did not extend to me, she told me in a gush of love and confidence
+(at that time, I had known her something less than five minutes); if
+they were all like Me, it would be quite another thing.
+
+“But dear Mrs. Pocket,” said Mrs. Coiler, “after her early
+disappointment (not that dear Mr. Pocket was to blame in that), requires
+so much luxury and elegance--”
+
+“Yes, ma’am,” I said, to stop her, for I was afraid she was going to
+cry.
+
+“And she is of so aristocratic a disposition--”
+
+“Yes, ma’am,” I said again, with the same object as before.
+
+“--That it is hard,” said Mrs. Coiler, “to have dear Mr. Pocket’s time
+and attention diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket.”
+
+I could not help thinking that it might be harder if the butcher’s time
+and attention were diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket; but I said nothing,
+and indeed had enough to do in keeping a bashful watch upon my company
+manners.
+
+It came to my knowledge, through what passed between Mrs. Pocket and
+Drummle while I was attentive to my knife and fork, spoon, glasses, and
+other instruments of self-destruction, that Drummle, whose Christian
+name was Bentley, was actually the next heir but one to a baronetcy.
+It further appeared that the book I had seen Mrs. Pocket reading in the
+garden was all about titles, and that she knew the exact date at which
+her grandpapa would have come into the book, if he ever had come at all.
+Drummle didn’t say much, but in his limited way (he struck me as a sulky
+kind of fellow) he spoke as one of the elect, and recognized Mrs. Pocket
+as a woman and a sister. No one but themselves and Mrs. Coiler the toady
+neighbor showed any interest in this part of the conversation, and it
+appeared to me that it was painful to Herbert; but it promised to last
+a long time, when the page came in with the announcement of a domestic
+affliction. It was, in effect, that the cook had mislaid the beef. To my
+unutterable amazement, I now, for the first time, saw Mr. Pocket
+relieve his mind by going through a performance that struck me as very
+extraordinary, but which made no impression on anybody else, and
+with which I soon became as familiar as the rest. He laid down the
+carving-knife and fork,--being engaged in carving, at the moment,--put
+his two hands into his disturbed hair, and appeared to make an
+extraordinary effort to lift himself up by it. When he had done this,
+and had not lifted himself up at all, he quietly went on with what he
+was about.
+
+Mrs. Coiler then changed the subject and began to flatter me. I liked
+it for a few moments, but she flattered me so very grossly that the
+pleasure was soon over. She had a serpentine way of coming close at
+me when she pretended to be vitally interested in the friends and
+localities I had left, which was altogether snaky and fork-tongued; and
+when she made an occasional bounce upon Startop (who said very little to
+her), or upon Drummle (who said less), I rather envied them for being on
+the opposite side of the table.
+
+After dinner the children were introduced, and Mrs. Coiler made admiring
+comments on their eyes, noses, and legs,--a sagacious way of improving
+their minds. There were four little girls, and two little boys, besides
+the baby who might have been either, and the baby’s next successor who
+was as yet neither. They were brought in by Flopson and Millers, much as
+though those two non-commissioned officers had been recruiting somewhere
+for children and had enlisted these, while Mrs. Pocket looked at the
+young Nobles that ought to have been as if she rather thought she had
+had the pleasure of inspecting them before, but didn’t quite know what
+to make of them.
+
+“Here! Give me your fork, Mum, and take the baby,” said Flopson. “Don’t
+take it that way, or you’ll get its head under the table.”
+
+Thus advised, Mrs. Pocket took it the other way, and got its head
+upon the table; which was announced to all present by a prodigious
+concussion.
+
+“Dear, dear! Give it me back, Mum,” said Flopson; “and Miss Jane, come
+and dance to baby, do!”
+
+One of the little girls, a mere mite who seemed to have prematurely
+taken upon herself some charge of the others, stepped out of her place
+by me, and danced to and from the baby until it left off crying, and
+laughed. Then, all the children laughed, and Mr. Pocket (who in the
+meantime had twice endeavored to lift himself up by the hair) laughed,
+and we all laughed and were glad.
+
+Flopson, by dint of doubling the baby at the joints like a Dutch doll,
+then got it safely into Mrs. Pocket’s lap, and gave it the nut-crackers
+to play with; at the same time recommending Mrs. Pocket to take notice
+that the handles of that instrument were not likely to agree with its
+eyes, and sharply charging Miss Jane to look after the same. Then, the
+two nurses left the room, and had a lively scuffle on the staircase with
+a dissipated page who had waited at dinner, and who had clearly lost
+half his buttons at the gaming-table.
+
+I was made very uneasy in my mind by Mrs. Pocket’s falling into a
+discussion with Drummle respecting two baronetcies, while she ate a
+sliced orange steeped in sugar and wine, and, forgetting all about the
+baby on her lap, who did most appalling things with the nut-crackers. At
+length little Jane, perceiving its young brains to be imperilled, softly
+left her place, and with many small artifices coaxed the dangerous
+weapon away. Mrs. Pocket finishing her orange at about the same time,
+and not approving of this, said to Jane,--
+
+“You naughty child, how dare you? Go and sit down this instant!”
+
+“Mamma dear,” lisped the little girl, “baby ood have put hith eyeth
+out.”
+
+“How dare you tell me so?” retorted Mrs. Pocket. “Go and sit down in
+your chair this moment!”
+
+Mrs. Pocket’s dignity was so crushing, that I felt quite abashed, as if
+I myself had done something to rouse it.
+
+“Belinda,” remonstrated Mr. Pocket, from the other end of the table,
+“how can you be so unreasonable? Jane only interfered for the protection
+of baby.”
+
+“I will not allow anybody to interfere,” said Mrs. Pocket. “I am
+surprised, Matthew, that you should expose me to the affront of
+interference.”
+
+“Good God!” cried Mr. Pocket, in an outbreak of desolate desperation.
+“Are infants to be nut-crackered into their tombs, and is nobody to save
+them?”
+
+“I will not be interfered with by Jane,” said Mrs. Pocket, with a
+majestic glance at that innocent little offender. “I hope I know my poor
+grandpapa’s position. Jane, indeed!”
+
+Mr. Pocket got his hands in his hair again, and this time really did
+lift himself some inches out of his chair. “Hear this!” he helplessly
+exclaimed to the elements. “Babies are to be nut-crackered dead, for
+people’s poor grandpapa’s positions!” Then he let himself down again,
+and became silent.
+
+We all looked awkwardly at the tablecloth while this was going on. A
+pause succeeded, during which the honest and irrepressible baby made a
+series of leaps and crows at little Jane, who appeared to me to be the
+only member of the family (irrespective of servants) with whom it had
+any decided acquaintance.
+
+“Mr. Drummle,” said Mrs. Pocket, “will you ring for Flopson? Jane, you
+undutiful little thing, go and lie down. Now, baby darling, come with
+ma!”
+
+The baby was the soul of honor, and protested with all its might. It
+doubled itself up the wrong way over Mrs. Pocket’s arm, exhibited a pair
+of knitted shoes and dimpled ankles to the company in lieu of its soft
+face, and was carried out in the highest state of mutiny. And it gained
+its point after all, for I saw it through the window within a few
+minutes, being nursed by little Jane.
+
+It happened that the other five children were left behind at the
+dinner-table, through Flopson’s having some private engagement, and
+their not being anybody else’s business. I thus became aware of the
+mutual relations between them and Mr. Pocket, which were exemplified in
+the following manner. Mr. Pocket, with the normal perplexity of his face
+heightened and his hair rumpled, looked at them for some minutes, as if
+he couldn’t make out how they came to be boarding and lodging in that
+establishment, and why they hadn’t been billeted by Nature on
+somebody else. Then, in a distant Missionary way he asked them certain
+questions,--as why little Joe had that hole in his frill, who said, Pa,
+Flopson was going to mend it when she had time,--and how little Fanny
+came by that whitlow, who said, Pa, Millers was going to poultice it
+when she didn’t forget. Then, he melted into parental tenderness, and
+gave them a shilling apiece and told them to go and play; and then as
+they went out, with one very strong effort to lift himself up by the
+hair he dismissed the hopeless subject.
+
+In the evening there was rowing on the river. As Drummle and Startop had
+each a boat, I resolved to set up mine, and to cut them both out. I was
+pretty good at most exercises in which country boys are adepts, but as
+I was conscious of wanting elegance of style for the Thames,--not to say
+for other waters,--I at once engaged to place myself under the tuition
+of the winner of a prize-wherry who plied at our stairs, and to whom I
+was introduced by my new allies. This practical authority confused me
+very much by saying I had the arm of a blacksmith. If he could have
+known how nearly the compliment lost him his pupil, I doubt if he would
+have paid it.
+
+There was a supper-tray after we got home at night, and I think we
+should all have enjoyed ourselves, but for a rather disagreeable
+domestic occurrence. Mr. Pocket was in good spirits, when a housemaid
+came in, and said, “If you please, sir, I should wish to speak to you.”
+
+“Speak to your master?” said Mrs. Pocket, whose dignity was roused
+again. “How can you think of such a thing? Go and speak to Flopson. Or
+speak to me--at some other time.”
+
+“Begging your pardon, ma’am,” returned the housemaid, “I should wish to
+speak at once, and to speak to master.”
+
+Hereupon, Mr. Pocket went out of the room, and we made the best of
+ourselves until he came back.
+
+“This is a pretty thing, Belinda!” said Mr. Pocket, returning with a
+countenance expressive of grief and despair. “Here’s the cook lying
+insensibly drunk on the kitchen floor, with a large bundle of fresh
+butter made up in the cupboard ready to sell for grease!”
+
+Mrs. Pocket instantly showed much amiable emotion, and said, “This is
+that odious Sophia’s doing!”
+
+“What do you mean, Belinda?” demanded Mr. Pocket.
+
+“Sophia has told you,” said Mrs. Pocket. “Did I not see her with my own
+eyes and hear her with my own ears, come into the room just now and ask
+to speak to you?”
+
+“But has she not taken me downstairs, Belinda,” returned Mr. Pocket,
+“and shown me the woman, and the bundle too?”
+
+“And do you defend her, Matthew,” said Mrs. Pocket, “for making
+mischief?”
+
+Mr. Pocket uttered a dismal groan.
+
+“Am I, grandpapa’s granddaughter, to be nothing in the house?” said Mrs.
+Pocket. “Besides, the cook has always been a very nice respectful woman,
+and said in the most natural manner when she came to look after the
+situation, that she felt I was born to be a Duchess.”
+
+There was a sofa where Mr. Pocket stood, and he dropped upon it in the
+attitude of the Dying Gladiator. Still in that attitude he said, with a
+hollow voice, “Good night, Mr. Pip,” when I deemed it advisable to go to
+bed and leave him.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXIV
+
+After two or three days, when I had established myself in my room and
+had gone backwards and forwards to London several times, and had ordered
+all I wanted of my tradesmen, Mr. Pocket and I had a long talk together.
+He knew more of my intended career than I knew myself, for he referred
+to his having been told by Mr. Jaggers that I was not designed for any
+profession, and that I should be well enough educated for my destiny
+if I could “hold my own” with the average of young men in prosperous
+circumstances. I acquiesced, of course, knowing nothing to the contrary.
+
+He advised my attending certain places in London, for the acquisition of
+such mere rudiments as I wanted, and my investing him with the functions
+of explainer and director of all my studies. He hoped that with
+intelligent assistance I should meet with little to discourage me, and
+should soon be able to dispense with any aid but his. Through his way
+of saying this, and much more to similar purpose, he placed himself on
+confidential terms with me in an admirable manner; and I may state
+at once that he was always so zealous and honorable in fulfilling his
+compact with me, that he made me zealous and honorable in fulfilling
+mine with him. If he had shown indifference as a master, I have no doubt
+I should have returned the compliment as a pupil; he gave me no such
+excuse, and each of us did the other justice. Nor did I ever regard
+him as having anything ludicrous about him--or anything but what was
+serious, honest, and good--in his tutor communication with me.
+
+When these points were settled, and so far carried out as that I had
+begun to work in earnest, it occurred to me that if I could retain my
+bedroom in Barnard’s Inn, my life would be agreeably varied, while my
+manners would be none the worse for Herbert’s society. Mr. Pocket did
+not object to this arrangement, but urged that before any step could
+possibly be taken in it, it must be submitted to my guardian. I felt
+that this delicacy arose out of the consideration that the plan would
+save Herbert some expense, so I went off to Little Britain and imparted
+my wish to Mr. Jaggers.
+
+“If I could buy the furniture now hired for me,” said I, “and one or two
+other little things, I should be quite at home there.”
+
+“Go it!” said Mr. Jaggers, with a short laugh. “I told you you’d get on.
+Well! How much do you want?”
+
+I said I didn’t know how much.
+
+“Come!” retorted Mr. Jaggers. “How much? Fifty pounds?”
+
+“O, not nearly so much.”
+
+“Five pounds?” said Mr. Jaggers.
+
+This was such a great fall, that I said in discomfiture, “O, more than
+that.”
+
+“More than that, eh!” retorted Mr. Jaggers, lying in wait for me, with
+his hands in his pockets, his head on one side, and his eyes on the wall
+behind me; “how much more?”
+
+“It is so difficult to fix a sum,” said I, hesitating.
+
+“Come!” said Mr. Jaggers. “Let’s get at it. Twice five; will that do?
+Three times five; will that do? Four times five; will that do?”
+
+I said I thought that would do handsomely.
+
+“Four times five will do handsomely, will it?” said Mr. Jaggers,
+knitting his brows. “Now, what do you make of four times five?”
+
+“What do I make of it?”
+
+“Ah!” said Mr. Jaggers; “how much?”
+
+“I suppose you make it twenty pounds,” said I, smiling.
+
+“Never mind what I make it, my friend,” observed Mr. Jaggers, with a
+knowing and contradictory toss of his head. “I want to know what you
+make it.”
+
+“Twenty pounds, of course.”
+
+“Wemmick!” said Mr. Jaggers, opening his office door. “Take Mr. Pip’s
+written order, and pay him twenty pounds.”
+
+This strongly marked way of doing business made a strongly marked
+impression on me, and that not of an agreeable kind. Mr. Jaggers never
+laughed; but he wore great bright creaking boots, and, in poising
+himself on these boots, with his large head bent down and his eyebrows
+joined together, awaiting an answer, he sometimes caused the boots to
+creak, as if they laughed in a dry and suspicious way. As he happened
+to go out now, and as Wemmick was brisk and talkative, I said to Wemmick
+that I hardly knew what to make of Mr. Jaggers’s manner.
+
+“Tell him that, and he’ll take it as a compliment,” answered Wemmick;
+“he don’t mean that you should know what to make of it.--Oh!” for
+I looked surprised, “it’s not personal; it’s professional: only
+professional.”
+
+Wemmick was at his desk, lunching--and crunching--on a dry hard biscuit;
+pieces of which he threw from time to time into his slit of a mouth, as
+if he were posting them.
+
+“Always seems to me,” said Wemmick, “as if he had set a man-trap and was
+watching it. Suddenly-click--you’re caught!”
+
+Without remarking that man-traps were not among the amenities of life, I
+said I supposed he was very skilful?
+
+“Deep,” said Wemmick, “as Australia.” Pointing with his pen at the
+office floor, to express that Australia was understood, for the purposes
+of the figure, to be symmetrically on the opposite spot of the globe.
+“If there was anything deeper,” added Wemmick, bringing his pen to
+paper, “he’d be it.”
+
+Then, I said I supposed he had a fine business, and Wemmick said,
+“Ca-pi-tal!” Then I asked if there were many clerks? to which he
+replied,--
+
+“We don’t run much into clerks, because there’s only one Jaggers, and
+people won’t have him at second hand. There are only four of us. Would
+you like to see ‘em? You are one of us, as I may say.”
+
+I accepted the offer. When Mr. Wemmick had put all the biscuit into the
+post, and had paid me my money from a cash-box in a safe, the key
+of which safe he kept somewhere down his back and produced from his
+coat-collar like an iron-pigtail, we went upstairs. The house was dark
+and shabby, and the greasy shoulders that had left their mark in Mr.
+Jaggers’s room seemed to have been shuffling up and down the staircase
+for years. In the front first floor, a clerk who looked something
+between a publican and a rat-catcher--a large pale, puffed, swollen
+man--was attentively engaged with three or four people of shabby
+appearance, whom he treated as unceremoniously as everybody seemed to
+be treated who contributed to Mr. Jaggers’s coffers. “Getting evidence
+together,” said Mr. Wemmick, as we came out, “for the Bailey.” In the
+room over that, a little flabby terrier of a clerk with dangling hair
+(his cropping seemed to have been forgotten when he was a puppy) was
+similarly engaged with a man with weak eyes, whom Mr. Wemmick presented
+to me as a smelter who kept his pot always boiling, and who would melt
+me anything I pleased,--and who was in an excessive white-perspiration,
+as if he had been trying his art on himself. In a back room, a
+high-shouldered man with a face-ache tied up in dirty flannel, who was
+dressed in old black clothes that bore the appearance of having been
+waxed, was stooping over his work of making fair copies of the notes of
+the other two gentlemen, for Mr. Jaggers’s own use.
+
+This was all the establishment. When we went downstairs again, Wemmick
+led me into my guardian’s room, and said, “This you’ve seen already.”
+
+“Pray,” said I, as the two odious casts with the twitchy leer upon them
+caught my sight again, “whose likenesses are those?”
+
+“These?” said Wemmick, getting upon a chair, and blowing the dust off
+the horrible heads before bringing them down. “These are two celebrated
+ones. Famous clients of ours that got us a world of credit. This chap
+(why you must have come down in the night and been peeping into the
+inkstand, to get this blot upon your eyebrow, you old rascal!) murdered
+his master, and, considering that he wasn’t brought up to evidence,
+didn’t plan it badly.”
+
+“Is it like him?” I asked, recoiling from the brute, as Wemmick spat
+upon his eyebrow and gave it a rub with his sleeve.
+
+“Like him? It’s himself, you know. The cast was made in Newgate,
+directly after he was taken down. You had a particular fancy for
+me, hadn’t you, Old Artful?” said Wemmick. He then explained this
+affectionate apostrophe, by touching his brooch representing the lady
+and the weeping willow at the tomb with the urn upon it, and saying,
+“Had it made for me, express!”
+
+“Is the lady anybody?” said I.
+
+“No,” returned Wemmick. “Only his game. (You liked your bit of game,
+didn’t you?) No; deuce a bit of a lady in the case, Mr. Pip, except
+one,--and she wasn’t of this slender lady-like sort, and you wouldn’t
+have caught her looking after this urn, unless there was something to
+drink in it.” Wemmick’s attention being thus directed to his brooch, he
+put down the cast, and polished the brooch with his pocket-handkerchief.
+
+“Did that other creature come to the same end?” I asked. “He has the
+same look.”
+
+“You’re right,” said Wemmick; “it’s the genuine look. Much as if one
+nostril was caught up with a horse-hair and a little fish-hook. Yes,
+he came to the same end; quite the natural end here, I assure you.
+He forged wills, this blade did, if he didn’t also put the supposed
+testators to sleep too. You were a gentlemanly Cove, though” (Mr.
+Wemmick was again apostrophizing), “and you said you could write Greek.
+Yah, Bounceable! What a liar you were! I never met such a liar as you!”
+ Before putting his late friend on his shelf again, Wemmick touched the
+largest of his mourning rings and said, “Sent out to buy it for me, only
+the day before.”
+
+While he was putting up the other cast and coming down from the chair,
+the thought crossed my mind that all his personal jewelry was derived
+from like sources. As he had shown no diffidence on the subject, I
+ventured on the liberty of asking him the question, when he stood before
+me, dusting his hands.
+
+“O yes,” he returned, “these are all gifts of that kind. One brings
+another, you see; that’s the way of it. I always take ‘em. They’re
+curiosities. And they’re property. They may not be worth much, but,
+after all, they’re property and portable. It don’t signify to you with
+your brilliant lookout, but as to myself, my guiding-star always is,
+‘Get hold of portable property’.”
+
+When I had rendered homage to this light, he went on to say, in a
+friendly manner:--
+
+“If at any odd time when you have nothing better to do, you wouldn’t
+mind coming over to see me at Walworth, I could offer you a bed, and I
+should consider it an honor. I have not much to show you; but such two
+or three curiosities as I have got you might like to look over; and I am
+fond of a bit of garden and a summer-house.”
+
+I said I should be delighted to accept his hospitality.
+
+“Thankee,” said he; “then we’ll consider that it’s to come off, when
+convenient to you. Have you dined with Mr. Jaggers yet?”
+
+“Not yet.”
+
+“Well,” said Wemmick, “he’ll give you wine, and good wine. I’ll give you
+punch, and not bad punch. And now I’ll tell you something. When you go
+to dine with Mr. Jaggers, look at his housekeeper.”
+
+“Shall I see something very uncommon?”
+
+“Well,” said Wemmick, “you’ll see a wild beast tamed. Not so very
+uncommon, you’ll tell me. I reply, that depends on the original wildness
+of the beast, and the amount of taming. It won’t lower your opinion of
+Mr. Jaggers’s powers. Keep your eye on it.”
+
+I told him I would do so, with all the interest and curiosity that his
+preparation awakened. As I was taking my departure, he asked me if I
+would like to devote five minutes to seeing Mr. Jaggers “at it?”
+
+For several reasons, and not least because I didn’t clearly know what
+Mr. Jaggers would be found to be “at,” I replied in the affirmative.
+We dived into the City, and came up in a crowded police-court, where
+a blood-relation (in the murderous sense) of the deceased, with the
+fanciful taste in brooches, was standing at the bar, uncomfortably
+chewing something; while my guardian had a woman under examination or
+cross-examination,--I don’t know which,--and was striking her, and
+the bench, and everybody present, with awe. If anybody, of whatsoever
+degree, said a word that he didn’t approve of, he instantly required to
+have it “taken down.” If anybody wouldn’t make an admission, he said,
+“I’ll have it out of you!” and if anybody made an admission, he said,
+“Now I have got you!” The magistrates shivered under a single bite of
+his finger. Thieves and thief-takers hung in dread rapture on his words,
+and shrank when a hair of his eyebrows turned in their direction. Which
+side he was on I couldn’t make out, for he seemed to me to be grinding
+the whole place in a mill; I only know that when I stole out on tiptoe,
+he was not on the side of the bench; for, he was making the legs of the
+old gentleman who presided, quite convulsive under the table, by his
+denunciations of his conduct as the representative of British law and
+justice in that chair that day.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXV
+
+Bentley Drummle, who was so sulky a fellow that he even took up a book
+as if its writer had done him an injury, did not take up an
+acquaintance in a more agreeable spirit. Heavy in figure, movement,
+and comprehension,--in the sluggish complexion of his face, and in
+the large, awkward tongue that seemed to loll about in his mouth as
+he himself lolled about in a room,--he was idle, proud, niggardly,
+reserved, and suspicious. He came of rich people down in Somersetshire,
+who had nursed this combination of qualities until they made the
+discovery that it was just of age and a blockhead. Thus, Bentley Drummle
+had come to Mr. Pocket when he was a head taller than that gentleman,
+and half a dozen heads thicker than most gentlemen.
+
+Startop had been spoilt by a weak mother and kept at home when he
+ought to have been at school, but he was devotedly attached to her, and
+admired her beyond measure. He had a woman’s delicacy of feature,
+and was--“as you may see, though you never saw her,” said Herbert to
+me--“exactly like his mother.” It was but natural that I should take to
+him much more kindly than to Drummle, and that, even in the earliest
+evenings of our boating, he and I should pull homeward abreast of one
+another, conversing from boat to boat, while Bentley Drummle came up
+in our wake alone, under the overhanging banks and among the rushes. He
+would always creep in-shore like some uncomfortable amphibious creature,
+even when the tide would have sent him fast upon his way; and I always
+think of him as coming after us in the dark or by the back-water,
+when our own two boats were breaking the sunset or the moonlight in
+mid-stream.
+
+Herbert was my intimate companion and friend. I presented him with a
+half-share in my boat, which was the occasion of his often coming down
+to Hammersmith; and my possession of a half-share in his chambers often
+took me up to London. We used to walk between the two places at all
+hours. I have an affection for the road yet (though it is not so
+pleasant a road as it was then), formed in the impressibility of untried
+youth and hope.
+
+When I had been in Mr. Pocket’s family a month or two, Mr. and Mrs.
+Camilla turned up. Camilla was Mr. Pocket’s sister. Georgiana, whom I
+had seen at Miss Havisham’s on the same occasion, also turned up. She
+was a cousin,--an indigestive single woman, who called her rigidity
+religion, and her liver love. These people hated me with the hatred of
+cupidity and disappointment. As a matter of course, they fawned upon
+me in my prosperity with the basest meanness. Towards Mr. Pocket, as
+a grown-up infant with no notion of his own interests, they showed the
+complacent forbearance I had heard them express. Mrs. Pocket they
+held in contempt; but they allowed the poor soul to have been heavily
+disappointed in life, because that shed a feeble reflected light upon
+themselves.
+
+These were the surroundings among which I settled down, and applied
+myself to my education. I soon contracted expensive habits, and began
+to spend an amount of money that within a few short months I should have
+thought almost fabulous; but through good and evil I stuck to my books.
+There was no other merit in this, than my having sense enough to feel
+my deficiencies. Between Mr. Pocket and Herbert I got on fast; and, with
+one or the other always at my elbow to give me the start I wanted, and
+clear obstructions out of my road, I must have been as great a dolt as
+Drummle if I had done less.
+
+I had not seen Mr. Wemmick for some weeks, when I thought I would write
+him a note and propose to go home with him on a certain evening. He
+replied that it would give him much pleasure, and that he would expect
+me at the office at six o’clock. Thither I went, and there I found him,
+putting the key of his safe down his back as the clock struck.
+
+“Did you think of walking down to Walworth?” said he.
+
+“Certainly,” said I, “if you approve.”
+
+“Very much,” was Wemmick’s reply, “for I have had my legs under the desk
+all day, and shall be glad to stretch them. Now, I’ll tell you what I
+have got for supper, Mr. Pip. I have got a stewed steak,--which is
+of home preparation,--and a cold roast fowl,--which is from the
+cook’s-shop. I think it’s tender, because the master of the shop was a
+Juryman in some cases of ours the other day, and we let him down easy.
+I reminded him of it when I bought the fowl, and I said, “Pick us out
+a good one, old Briton, because if we had chosen to keep you in the box
+another day or two, we could easily have done it.” He said to that,
+“Let me make you a present of the best fowl in the shop.” I let him, of
+course. As far as it goes, it’s property and portable. You don’t object
+to an aged parent, I hope?”
+
+I really thought he was still speaking of the fowl, until he added,
+“Because I have got an aged parent at my place.” I then said what
+politeness required.
+
+“So, you haven’t dined with Mr. Jaggers yet?” he pursued, as we walked
+along.
+
+“Not yet.”
+
+“He told me so this afternoon when he heard you were coming. I expect
+you’ll have an invitation to-morrow. He’s going to ask your pals, too.
+Three of ‘em; ain’t there?”
+
+Although I was not in the habit of counting Drummle as one of my
+intimate associates, I answered, “Yes.”
+
+“Well, he’s going to ask the whole gang,”--I hardly felt complimented by
+the word,--“and whatever he gives you, he’ll give you good. Don’t look
+forward to variety, but you’ll have excellence. And there’s another rum
+thing in his house,” proceeded Wemmick, after a moment’s pause, as if
+the remark followed on the housekeeper understood; “he never lets a door
+or window be fastened at night.”
+
+“Is he never robbed?”
+
+“That’s it!” returned Wemmick. “He says, and gives it out publicly, “I
+want to see the man who’ll rob me.” Lord bless you, I have heard him, a
+hundred times, if I have heard him once, say to regular cracksmen in our
+front office, “You know where I live; now, no bolt is ever drawn there;
+why don’t you do a stroke of business with me? Come; can’t I tempt you?”
+ Not a man of them, sir, would be bold enough to try it on, for love or
+money.”
+
+“They dread him so much?” said I.
+
+“Dread him,” said Wemmick. “I believe you they dread him. Not but what
+he’s artful, even in his defiance of them. No silver, sir. Britannia
+metal, every spoon.”
+
+“So they wouldn’t have much,” I observed, “even if they--”
+
+“Ah! But he would have much,” said Wemmick, cutting me short, “and they
+know it. He’d have their lives, and the lives of scores of ‘em. He’d
+have all he could get. And it’s impossible to say what he couldn’t get,
+if he gave his mind to it.”
+
+I was falling into meditation on my guardian’s greatness, when Wemmick
+remarked:--
+
+“As to the absence of plate, that’s only his natural depth, you know.
+A river’s its natural depth, and he’s his natural depth. Look at his
+watch-chain. That’s real enough.”
+
+“It’s very massive,” said I.
+
+“Massive?” repeated Wemmick. “I think so. And his watch is a gold
+repeater, and worth a hundred pound if it’s worth a penny. Mr. Pip,
+there are about seven hundred thieves in this town who know all about
+that watch; there’s not a man, a woman, or a child, among them, who
+wouldn’t identify the smallest link in that chain, and drop it as if it
+was red hot, if inveigled into touching it.”
+
+At first with such discourse, and afterwards with conversation of a more
+general nature, did Mr. Wemmick and I beguile the time and the road,
+until he gave me to understand that we had arrived in the district of
+Walworth.
+
+It appeared to be a collection of back lanes, ditches, and little
+gardens, and to present the aspect of a rather dull retirement.
+Wemmick’s house was a little wooden cottage in the midst of plots of
+garden, and the top of it was cut out and painted like a battery mounted
+with guns.
+
+“My own doing,” said Wemmick. “Looks pretty; don’t it?”
+
+I highly commended it, I think it was the smallest house I ever saw;
+with the queerest gothic windows (by far the greater part of them sham),
+and a gothic door almost too small to get in at.
+
+“That’s a real flagstaff, you see,” said Wemmick, “and on Sundays I
+run up a real flag. Then look here. After I have crossed this bridge, I
+hoist it up--so--and cut off the communication.”
+
+The bridge was a plank, and it crossed a chasm about four feet wide
+and two deep. But it was very pleasant to see the pride with which he
+hoisted it up and made it fast; smiling as he did so, with a relish and
+not merely mechanically.
+
+“At nine o’clock every night, Greenwich time,” said Wemmick, “the gun
+fires. There he is, you see! And when you hear him go, I think you’ll
+say he’s a Stinger.”
+
+The piece of ordnance referred to, was mounted in a separate fortress,
+constructed of lattice-work. It was protected from the weather by an
+ingenious little tarpaulin contrivance in the nature of an umbrella.
+
+“Then, at the back,” said Wemmick, “out of sight, so as not to impede
+the idea of fortifications,--for it’s a principle with me, if you have
+an idea, carry it out and keep it up,--I don’t know whether that’s your
+opinion--”
+
+I said, decidedly.
+
+“--At the back, there’s a pig, and there are fowls and rabbits; then,
+I knock together my own little frame, you see, and grow cucumbers; and
+you’ll judge at supper what sort of a salad I can raise. So, sir,” said
+Wemmick, smiling again, but seriously too, as he shook his head, “if you
+can suppose the little place besieged, it would hold out a devil of a
+time in point of provisions.”
+
+Then, he conducted me to a bower about a dozen yards off, but which was
+approached by such ingenious twists of path that it took quite a long
+time to get at; and in this retreat our glasses were already set forth.
+Our punch was cooling in an ornamental lake, on whose margin the bower
+was raised. This piece of water (with an island in the middle which
+might have been the salad for supper) was of a circular form, and he had
+constructed a fountain in it, which, when you set a little mill going
+and took a cork out of a pipe, played to that powerful extent that it
+made the back of your hand quite wet.
+
+“I am my own engineer, and my own carpenter, and my own plumber, and
+my own gardener, and my own Jack of all Trades,” said Wemmick, in
+acknowledging my compliments. “Well; it’s a good thing, you know. It
+brushes the Newgate cobwebs away, and pleases the Aged. You wouldn’t
+mind being at once introduced to the Aged, would you? It wouldn’t put
+you out?”
+
+I expressed the readiness I felt, and we went into the castle. There
+we found, sitting by a fire, a very old man in a flannel coat: clean,
+cheerful, comfortable, and well cared for, but intensely deaf.
+
+“Well aged parent,” said Wemmick, shaking hands with him in a cordial
+and jocose way, “how am you?”
+
+“All right, John; all right!” replied the old man.
+
+“Here’s Mr. Pip, aged parent,” said Wemmick, “and I wish you could hear
+his name. Nod away at him, Mr. Pip; that’s what he likes. Nod away at
+him, if you please, like winking!”
+
+“This is a fine place of my son’s, sir,” cried the old man, while I
+nodded as hard as I possibly could. “This is a pretty pleasure-ground,
+sir. This spot and these beautiful works upon it ought to be kept
+together by the Nation, after my son’s time, for the people’s
+enjoyment.”
+
+“You’re as proud of it as Punch; ain’t you, Aged?” said Wemmick,
+contemplating the old man, with his hard face really softened; “there’s
+a nod for you;” giving him a tremendous one; “there’s another for you;”
+ giving him a still more tremendous one; “you like that, don’t you? If
+you’re not tired, Mr. Pip--though I know it’s tiring to strangers--will
+you tip him one more? You can’t think how it pleases him.”
+
+I tipped him several more, and he was in great spirits. We left him
+bestirring himself to feed the fowls, and we sat down to our punch in
+the arbor; where Wemmick told me, as he smoked a pipe, that it had taken
+him a good many years to bring the property up to its present pitch of
+perfection.
+
+“Is it your own, Mr. Wemmick?”
+
+“O yes,” said Wemmick, “I have got hold of it, a bit at a time. It’s a
+freehold, by George!”
+
+“Is it indeed? I hope Mr. Jaggers admires it?”
+
+“Never seen it,” said Wemmick. “Never heard of it. Never seen the Aged.
+Never heard of him. No; the office is one thing, and private life is
+another. When I go into the office, I leave the Castle behind me, and
+when I come into the Castle, I leave the office behind me. If it’s not
+in any way disagreeable to you, you’ll oblige me by doing the same. I
+don’t wish it professionally spoken about.”
+
+Of course I felt my good faith involved in the observance of his
+request. The punch being very nice, we sat there drinking it and
+talking, until it was almost nine o’clock. “Getting near gun-fire,” said
+Wemmick then, as he laid down his pipe; “it’s the Aged’s treat.”
+
+Proceeding into the Castle again, we found the Aged heating the poker,
+with expectant eyes, as a preliminary to the performance of this great
+nightly ceremony. Wemmick stood with his watch in his hand until the
+moment was come for him to take the red-hot poker from the Aged, and
+repair to the battery. He took it, and went out, and presently the
+Stinger went off with a Bang that shook the crazy little box of a
+cottage as if it must fall to pieces, and made every glass and teacup in
+it ring. Upon this, the Aged--who I believe would have been blown out
+of his arm-chair but for holding on by the elbows--cried out exultingly,
+“He’s fired! I heerd him!” and I nodded at the old gentleman until it is
+no figure of speech to declare that I absolutely could not see him.
+
+The interval between that time and supper Wemmick devoted to showing
+me his collection of curiosities. They were mostly of a felonious
+character; comprising the pen with which a celebrated forgery had been
+committed, a distinguished razor or two, some locks of hair, and several
+manuscript confessions written under condemnation,--upon which Mr.
+Wemmick set particular value as being, to use his own words, “every one
+of ‘em Lies, sir.” These were agreeably dispersed among small specimens
+of china and glass, various neat trifles made by the proprietor of the
+museum, and some tobacco-stoppers carved by the Aged. They were all
+displayed in that chamber of the Castle into which I had been first
+inducted, and which served, not only as the general sitting-room but
+as the kitchen too, if I might judge from a saucepan on the hob, and
+a brazen bijou over the fireplace designed for the suspension of a
+roasting-jack.
+
+There was a neat little girl in attendance, who looked after the Aged in
+the day. When she had laid the supper-cloth, the bridge was lowered to
+give her means of egress, and she withdrew for the night. The supper was
+excellent; and though the Castle was rather subject to dry-rot insomuch
+that it tasted like a bad nut, and though the pig might have been
+farther off, I was heartily pleased with my whole entertainment. Nor was
+there any drawback on my little turret bedroom, beyond there being such
+a very thin ceiling between me and the flagstaff, that when I lay down
+on my back in bed, it seemed as if I had to balance that pole on my
+forehead all night.
+
+Wemmick was up early in the morning, and I am afraid I heard him
+cleaning my boots. After that, he fell to gardening, and I saw him from
+my gothic window pretending to employ the Aged, and nodding at him in
+a most devoted manner. Our breakfast was as good as the supper, and at
+half-past eight precisely we started for Little Britain. By degrees,
+Wemmick got dryer and harder as we went along, and his mouth tightened
+into a post-office again. At last, when we got to his place of business
+and he pulled out his key from his coat-collar, he looked as unconscious
+of his Walworth property as if the Castle and the drawbridge and the
+arbor and the lake and the fountain and the Aged, had all been blown
+into space together by the last discharge of the Stinger.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXVI
+
+It fell out as Wemmick had told me it would, that I had an early
+opportunity of comparing my guardian’s establishment with that of his
+cashier and clerk. My guardian was in his room, washing his hands with
+his scented soap, when I went into the office from Walworth; and he
+called me to him, and gave me the invitation for myself and friends
+which Wemmick had prepared me to receive. “No ceremony,” he stipulated,
+“and no dinner dress, and say to-morrow.” I asked him where we should
+come to (for I had no idea where he lived), and I believe it was in his
+general objection to make anything like an admission, that he replied,
+“Come here, and I’ll take you home with me.” I embrace this opportunity
+of remarking that he washed his clients off, as if he were a surgeon or
+a dentist. He had a closet in his room, fitted up for the purpose, which
+smelt of the scented soap like a perfumer’s shop. It had an unusually
+large jack-towel on a roller inside the door, and he would wash his
+hands, and wipe them and dry them all over this towel, whenever he came
+in from a police court or dismissed a client from his room. When I and
+my friends repaired to him at six o’clock next day, he seemed to have
+been engaged on a case of a darker complexion than usual, for we found
+him with his head butted into this closet, not only washing his hands,
+but laving his face and gargling his throat. And even when he had
+done all that, and had gone all round the jack-towel, he took out his
+penknife and scraped the case out of his nails before he put his coat
+on.
+
+There were some people slinking about as usual when we passed out into
+the street, who were evidently anxious to speak with him; but there was
+something so conclusive in the halo of scented soap which encircled
+his presence, that they gave it up for that day. As we walked along
+westward, he was recognized ever and again by some face in the crowd of
+the streets, and whenever that happened he talked louder to me; but
+he never otherwise recognized anybody, or took notice that anybody
+recognized him.
+
+He conducted us to Gerrard Street, Soho, to a house on the south side of
+that street. Rather a stately house of its kind, but dolefully in want
+of painting, and with dirty windows. He took out his key and opened the
+door, and we all went into a stone hall, bare, gloomy, and little used.
+So, up a dark brown staircase into a series of three dark brown rooms on
+the first floor. There were carved garlands on the panelled walls, and
+as he stood among them giving us welcome, I know what kind of loops I
+thought they looked like.
+
+Dinner was laid in the best of these rooms; the second was his
+dressing-room; the third, his bedroom. He told us that he held the whole
+house, but rarely used more of it than we saw. The table was comfortably
+laid--no silver in the service, of course--and at the side of his chair
+was a capacious dumb-waiter, with a variety of bottles and decanters on
+it, and four dishes of fruit for dessert. I noticed throughout, that he
+kept everything under his own hand, and distributed everything himself.
+
+There was a bookcase in the room; I saw from the backs of the books,
+that they were about evidence, criminal law, criminal biography, trials,
+acts of Parliament, and such things. The furniture was all very solid
+and good, like his watch-chain. It had an official look, however, and
+there was nothing merely ornamental to be seen. In a corner was a little
+table of papers with a shaded lamp: so that he seemed to bring the
+office home with him in that respect too, and to wheel it out of an
+evening and fall to work.
+
+As he had scarcely seen my three companions until now,--for he and I had
+walked together,--he stood on the hearth-rug, after ringing the bell,
+and took a searching look at them. To my surprise, he seemed at once to
+be principally if not solely interested in Drummle.
+
+“Pip,” said he, putting his large hand on my shoulder and moving me to
+the window, “I don’t know one from the other. Who’s the Spider?”
+
+“The spider?” said I.
+
+“The blotchy, sprawly, sulky fellow.”
+
+“That’s Bentley Drummle,” I replied; “the one with the delicate face is
+Startop.”
+
+Not making the least account of “the one with the delicate face,” he
+returned, “Bentley Drummle is his name, is it? I like the look of that
+fellow.”
+
+He immediately began to talk to Drummle: not at all deterred by his
+replying in his heavy reticent way, but apparently led on by it to screw
+discourse out of him. I was looking at the two, when there came between
+me and them the housekeeper, with the first dish for the table.
+
+She was a woman of about forty, I supposed,--but I may have thought her
+younger than she was. Rather tall, of a lithe nimble figure, extremely
+pale, with large faded eyes, and a quantity of streaming hair. I cannot
+say whether any diseased affection of the heart caused her lips to be
+parted as if she were panting, and her face to bear a curious expression
+of suddenness and flutter; but I know that I had been to see Macbeth at
+the theatre, a night or two before, and that her face looked to me as if
+it were all disturbed by fiery air, like the faces I had seen rise out
+of the Witches’ caldron.
+
+She set the dish on, touched my guardian quietly on the arm with a
+finger to notify that dinner was ready, and vanished. We took our seats
+at the round table, and my guardian kept Drummle on one side of him,
+while Startop sat on the other. It was a noble dish of fish that the
+housekeeper had put on table, and we had a joint of equally choice
+mutton afterwards, and then an equally choice bird. Sauces, wines, all
+the accessories we wanted, and all of the best, were given out by our
+host from his dumb-waiter; and when they had made the circuit of the
+table, he always put them back again. Similarly, he dealt us clean
+plates and knives and forks, for each course, and dropped those just
+disused into two baskets on the ground by his chair. No other attendant
+than the housekeeper appeared. She set on every dish; and I always saw
+in her face, a face rising out of the caldron. Years afterwards, I made
+a dreadful likeness of that woman, by causing a face that had no other
+natural resemblance to it than it derived from flowing hair to pass
+behind a bowl of flaming spirits in a dark room.
+
+Induced to take particular notice of the housekeeper, both by her
+own striking appearance and by Wemmick’s preparation, I observed
+that whenever she was in the room she kept her eyes attentively on my
+guardian, and that she would remove her hands from any dish she put
+before him, hesitatingly, as if she dreaded his calling her back, and
+wanted him to speak when she was nigh, if he had anything to say. I
+fancied that I could detect in his manner a consciousness of this, and a
+purpose of always holding her in suspense.
+
+Dinner went off gayly, and although my guardian seemed to follow rather
+than originate subjects, I knew that he wrenched the weakest part of
+our dispositions out of us. For myself, I found that I was expressing my
+tendency to lavish expenditure, and to patronize Herbert, and to boast
+of my great prospects, before I quite knew that I had opened my lips.
+It was so with all of us, but with no one more than Drummle: the
+development of whose inclination to gird in a grudging and suspicious
+way at the rest, was screwed out of him before the fish was taken off.
+
+It was not then, but when we had got to the cheese, that our
+conversation turned upon our rowing feats, and that Drummle was rallied
+for coming up behind of a night in that slow amphibious way of his.
+Drummle upon this, informed our host that he much preferred our room to
+our company, and that as to skill he was more than our master, and that
+as to strength he could scatter us like chaff. By some invisible agency,
+my guardian wound him up to a pitch little short of ferocity about this
+trifle; and he fell to baring and spanning his arm to show how muscular
+it was, and we all fell to baring and spanning our arms in a ridiculous
+manner.
+
+Now the housekeeper was at that time clearing the table; my guardian,
+taking no heed of her, but with the side of his face turned from her,
+was leaning back in his chair biting the side of his forefinger and
+showing an interest in Drummle, that, to me, was quite inexplicable.
+Suddenly, he clapped his large hand on the housekeeper’s, like a trap,
+as she stretched it across the table. So suddenly and smartly did he do
+this, that we all stopped in our foolish contention.
+
+“If you talk of strength,” said Mr. Jaggers, “I’ll show you a wrist.
+Molly, let them see your wrist.”
+
+Her entrapped hand was on the table, but she had already put her other
+hand behind her waist. “Master,” she said, in a low voice, with her eyes
+attentively and entreatingly fixed upon him. “Don’t.”
+
+“I’ll show you a wrist,” repeated Mr. Jaggers, with an immovable
+determination to show it. “Molly, let them see your wrist.”
+
+“Master,” she again murmured. “Please!”
+
+“Molly,” said Mr. Jaggers, not looking at her, but obstinately looking
+at the opposite side of the room, “let them see both your wrists. Show
+them. Come!”
+
+He took his hand from hers, and turned that wrist up on the table. She
+brought her other hand from behind her, and held the two out side by
+side. The last wrist was much disfigured,--deeply scarred and scarred
+across and across. When she held her hands out she took her eyes from
+Mr. Jaggers, and turned them watchfully on every one of the rest of us
+in succession.
+
+“There’s power here,” said Mr. Jaggers, coolly tracing out the sinews
+with his forefinger. “Very few men have the power of wrist that this
+woman has. It’s remarkable what mere force of grip there is in these
+hands. I have had occasion to notice many hands; but I never saw
+stronger in that respect, man’s or woman’s, than these.”
+
+While he said these words in a leisurely, critical style, she continued
+to look at every one of us in regular succession as we sat. The moment
+he ceased, she looked at him again. “That’ll do, Molly,” said Mr.
+Jaggers, giving her a slight nod; “you have been admired, and can
+go.” She withdrew her hands and went out of the room, and Mr. Jaggers,
+putting the decanters on from his dumb-waiter, filled his glass and
+passed round the wine.
+
+“At half-past nine, gentlemen,” said he, “we must break up. Pray make
+the best use of your time. I am glad to see you all. Mr. Drummle, I
+drink to you.”
+
+If his object in singling out Drummle were to bring him out still more,
+it perfectly succeeded. In a sulky triumph, Drummle showed his morose
+depreciation of the rest of us, in a more and more offensive degree,
+until he became downright intolerable. Through all his stages, Mr.
+Jaggers followed him with the same strange interest. He actually seemed
+to serve as a zest to Mr. Jaggers’s wine.
+
+In our boyish want of discretion I dare say we took too much to drink,
+and I know we talked too much. We became particularly hot upon some
+boorish sneer of Drummle’s, to the effect that we were too free with our
+money. It led to my remarking, with more zeal than discretion, that it
+came with a bad grace from him, to whom Startop had lent money in my
+presence but a week or so before.
+
+“Well,” retorted Drummle; “he’ll be paid.”
+
+“I don’t mean to imply that he won’t,” said I, “but it might make you
+hold your tongue about us and our money, I should think.”
+
+“You should think!” retorted Drummle. “Oh Lord!”
+
+“I dare say,” I went on, meaning to be very severe, “that you wouldn’t
+lend money to any of us if we wanted it.”
+
+“You are right,” said Drummle. “I wouldn’t lend one of you a sixpence. I
+wouldn’t lend anybody a sixpence.”
+
+“Rather mean to borrow under those circumstances, I should say.”
+
+“You should say,” repeated Drummle. “Oh Lord!”
+
+This was so very aggravating--the more especially as I found myself
+making no way against his surly obtuseness--that I said, disregarding
+Herbert’s efforts to check me,--
+
+“Come, Mr. Drummle, since we are on the subject, I’ll tell you what
+passed between Herbert here and me, when you borrowed that money.”
+
+“I don’t want to know what passed between Herbert there and you,”
+ growled Drummle. And I think he added in a lower growl, that we might
+both go to the devil and shake ourselves.
+
+“I’ll tell you, however,” said I, “whether you want to know or not. We
+said that as you put it in your pocket very glad to get it, you seemed
+to be immensely amused at his being so weak as to lend it.”
+
+Drummle laughed outright, and sat laughing in our faces, with his hands
+in his pockets and his round shoulders raised; plainly signifying that
+it was quite true, and that he despised us as asses all.
+
+Hereupon Startop took him in hand, though with a much better grace than
+I had shown, and exhorted him to be a little more agreeable. Startop,
+being a lively, bright young fellow, and Drummle being the exact
+opposite, the latter was always disposed to resent him as a direct
+personal affront. He now retorted in a coarse, lumpish way, and Startop
+tried to turn the discussion aside with some small pleasantry that made
+us all laugh. Resenting this little success more than anything, Drummle,
+without any threat or warning, pulled his hands out of his pockets,
+dropped his round shoulders, swore, took up a large glass, and would
+have flung it at his adversary’s head, but for our entertainer’s
+dexterously seizing it at the instant when it was raised for that
+purpose.
+
+“Gentlemen,” said Mr. Jaggers, deliberately putting down the glass, and
+hauling out his gold repeater by its massive chain, “I am exceedingly
+sorry to announce that it’s half past nine.”
+
+On this hint we all rose to depart. Before we got to the street door,
+Startop was cheerily calling Drummle “old boy,” as if nothing had
+happened. But the old boy was so far from responding, that he would not
+even walk to Hammersmith on the same side of the way; so Herbert and I,
+who remained in town, saw them going down the street on opposite sides;
+Startop leading, and Drummle lagging behind in the shadow of the houses,
+much as he was wont to follow in his boat.
+
+As the door was not yet shut, I thought I would leave Herbert there for
+a moment, and run upstairs again to say a word to my guardian. I found
+him in his dressing-room surrounded by his stock of boots, already hard
+at it, washing his hands of us.
+
+I told him I had come up again to say how sorry I was that anything
+disagreeable should have occurred, and that I hoped he would not blame
+me much.
+
+“Pooh!” said he, sluicing his face, and speaking through the
+water-drops; “it’s nothing, Pip. I like that Spider though.”
+
+He had turned towards me now, and was shaking his head, and blowing, and
+towelling himself.
+
+“I am glad you like him, sir,” said I--“but I don’t.”
+
+“No, no,” my guardian assented; “don’t have too much to do with him.
+Keep as clear of him as you can. But I like the fellow, Pip; he is one
+of the true sort. Why, if I was a fortune-teller--”
+
+Looking out of the towel, he caught my eye.
+
+“But I am not a fortune-teller,” he said, letting his head drop into a
+festoon of towel, and towelling away at his two ears. “You know what I
+am, don’t you? Good night, Pip.”
+
+“Good night, sir.”
+
+In about a month after that, the Spider’s time with Mr. Pocket was up
+for good, and, to the great relief of all the house but Mrs. Pocket, he
+went home to the family hole.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXVII
+
+
+“MY DEAR MR PIP:--
+
+“I write this by request of Mr. Gargery, for to let you know that he
+is going to London in company with Mr. Wopsle and would be glad if
+agreeable to be allowed to see you. He would call at Barnard’s Hotel
+Tuesday morning at nine o’clock, when if not agreeable please leave
+word. Your poor sister is much the same as when you left. We talk of you
+in the kitchen every night, and wonder what you are saying and doing. If
+now considered in the light of a liberty, excuse it for the love of
+poor old days. No more, dear Mr. Pip, from your ever obliged, and
+affectionate servant,
+
+“BIDDY.”
+
+“P.S. He wishes me most particular to write what larks. He says you will
+understand. I hope and do not doubt it will be agreeable to see him,
+even though a gentleman, for you had ever a good heart, and he is a
+worthy, worthy man. I have read him all, excepting only the last little
+sentence, and he wishes me most particular to write again what larks.”
+
+I received this letter by the post on Monday morning, and therefore its
+appointment was for next day. Let me confess exactly with what feelings
+I looked forward to Joe’s coming.
+
+Not with pleasure, though I was bound to him by so many ties; no;
+with considerable disturbance, some mortification, and a keen sense of
+incongruity. If I could have kept him away by paying money, I certainly
+would have paid money. My greatest reassurance was that he was coming
+to Barnard’s Inn, not to Hammersmith, and consequently would not fall
+in Bentley Drummle’s way. I had little objection to his being seen by
+Herbert or his father, for both of whom I had a respect; but I had the
+sharpest sensitiveness as to his being seen by Drummle, whom I held in
+contempt. So, throughout life, our worst weaknesses and meannesses are
+usually committed for the sake of the people whom we most despise.
+
+I had begun to be always decorating the chambers in some quite
+unnecessary and inappropriate way or other, and very expensive those
+wrestles with Barnard proved to be. By this time, the rooms were
+vastly different from what I had found them, and I enjoyed the honor
+of occupying a few prominent pages in the books of a neighboring
+upholsterer. I had got on so fast of late, that I had even started a boy
+in boots,--top boots,--in bondage and slavery to whom I might have been
+said to pass my days. For, after I had made the monster (out of the
+refuse of my washerwoman’s family), and had clothed him with a blue
+coat, canary waistcoat, white cravat, creamy breeches, and the boots
+already mentioned, I had to find him a little to do and a great deal
+to eat; and with both of those horrible requirements he haunted my
+existence.
+
+This avenging phantom was ordered to be on duty at eight on Tuesday
+morning in the hall, (it was two feet square, as charged for
+floorcloth,) and Herbert suggested certain things for breakfast that he
+thought Joe would like. While I felt sincerely obliged to him for being
+so interested and considerate, I had an odd half-provoked sense of
+suspicion upon me, that if Joe had been coming to see him, he wouldn’t
+have been quite so brisk about it.
+
+However, I came into town on the Monday night to be ready for Joe, and
+I got up early in the morning, and caused the sitting-room and
+breakfast-table to assume their most splendid appearance. Unfortunately
+the morning was drizzly, and an angel could not have concealed the fact
+that Barnard was shedding sooty tears outside the window, like some weak
+giant of a Sweep.
+
+As the time approached I should have liked to run away, but the Avenger
+pursuant to orders was in the hall, and presently I heard Joe on
+the staircase. I knew it was Joe, by his clumsy manner of coming upstairs,
+--his state boots being always too big for him,--and by the time
+it took him to read the names on the other floors in the course of
+his ascent. When at last he stopped outside our door, I could hear his
+finger tracing over the painted letters of my name, and I afterwards
+distinctly heard him breathing in at the keyhole. Finally he gave a
+faint single rap, and Pepper--such was the compromising name of the
+avenging boy--announced “Mr. Gargery!” I thought he never would have
+done wiping his feet, and that I must have gone out to lift him off the
+mat, but at last he came in.
+
+“Joe, how are you, Joe?”
+
+“Pip, how AIR you, Pip?”
+
+With his good honest face all glowing and shining, and his hat put
+down on the floor between us, he caught both my hands and worked them
+straight up and down, as if I had been the last-patented Pump.
+
+“I am glad to see you, Joe. Give me your hat.”
+
+But Joe, taking it up carefully with both hands, like a bird’s-nest with
+eggs in it, wouldn’t hear of parting with that piece of property, and
+persisted in standing talking over it in a most uncomfortable way.
+
+“Which you have that growed,” said Joe, “and that swelled, and that
+gentle-folked;” Joe considered a little before he discovered this word;
+“as to be sure you are a honor to your king and country.”
+
+“And you, Joe, look wonderfully well.”
+
+“Thank God,” said Joe, “I’m ekerval to most. And your sister, she’s
+no worse than she were. And Biddy, she’s ever right and ready. And all
+friends is no backerder, if not no forarder. ‘Ceptin Wopsle; he’s had a
+drop.”
+
+All this time (still with both hands taking great care of the
+bird’s-nest), Joe was rolling his eyes round and round the room, and
+round and round the flowered pattern of my dressing-gown.
+
+“Had a drop, Joe?”
+
+“Why yes,” said Joe, lowering his voice, “he’s left the Church and went
+into the playacting. Which the playacting have likeways brought him
+to London along with me. And his wish were,” said Joe, getting the
+bird’s-nest under his left arm for the moment, and groping in it for an
+egg with his right; “if no offence, as I would ‘and you that.”
+
+I took what Joe gave me, and found it to be the crumpled play-bill of
+a small metropolitan theatre, announcing the first appearance, in that
+very week, of “the celebrated Provincial Amateur of Roscian renown,
+whose unique performance in the highest tragic walk of our National Bard
+has lately occasioned so great a sensation in local dramatic circles.”
+
+“Were you at his performance, Joe?” I inquired.
+
+“I were,” said Joe, with emphasis and solemnity.
+
+“Was there a great sensation?”
+
+“Why,” said Joe, “yes, there certainly were a peck of orange-peel.
+Partickler when he see the ghost. Though I put it to yourself, sir,
+whether it were calc’lated to keep a man up to his work with a good
+hart, to be continiwally cutting in betwixt him and the Ghost with
+“Amen!” A man may have had a misfortun’ and been in the Church,” said
+Joe, lowering his voice to an argumentative and feeling tone, “but
+that is no reason why you should put him out at such a time. Which I
+meantersay, if the ghost of a man’s own father cannot be allowed to
+claim his attention, what can, Sir? Still more, when his mourning ‘at
+is unfortunately made so small as that the weight of the black feathers
+brings it off, try to keep it on how you may.”
+
+A ghost-seeing effect in Joe’s own countenance informed me that Herbert
+had entered the room. So, I presented Joe to Herbert, who held out his
+hand; but Joe backed from it, and held on by the bird’s-nest.
+
+“Your servant, Sir,” said Joe, “which I hope as you and Pip”--here his
+eye fell on the Avenger, who was putting some toast on table, and so
+plainly denoted an intention to make that young gentleman one of the
+family, that I frowned it down and confused him more--“I meantersay, you
+two gentlemen,--which I hope as you get your elths in this close spot?
+For the present may be a werry good inn, according to London opinions,”
+ said Joe, confidentially, “and I believe its character do stand it; but I
+wouldn’t keep a pig in it myself,--not in the case that I wished him to
+fatten wholesome and to eat with a meller flavor on him.”
+
+Having borne this flattering testimony to the merits of our
+dwelling-place, and having incidentally shown this tendency to call me
+“sir,” Joe, being invited to sit down to table, looked all round the
+room for a suitable spot on which to deposit his hat,--as if it were
+only on some very few rare substances in nature that it could find a
+resting place,--and ultimately stood it on an extreme corner of the
+chimney-piece, from which it ever afterwards fell off at intervals.
+
+“Do you take tea, or coffee, Mr. Gargery?” asked Herbert, who always
+presided of a morning.
+
+“Thankee, Sir,” said Joe, stiff from head to foot, “I’ll take whichever
+is most agreeable to yourself.”
+
+“What do you say to coffee?”
+
+“Thankee, Sir,” returned Joe, evidently dispirited by the proposal,
+“since you are so kind as make chice of coffee, I will not run contrairy
+to your own opinions. But don’t you never find it a little ‘eating?”
+
+“Say tea then,” said Herbert, pouring it out.
+
+Here Joe’s hat tumbled off the mantel-piece, and he started out of his
+chair and picked it up, and fitted it to the same exact spot. As if it
+were an absolute point of good breeding that it should tumble off again
+soon.
+
+“When did you come to town, Mr. Gargery?”
+
+“Were it yesterday afternoon?” said Joe, after coughing behind his hand,
+as if he had had time to catch the whooping-cough since he came. “No
+it were not. Yes it were. Yes. It were yesterday afternoon” (with an
+appearance of mingled wisdom, relief, and strict impartiality).
+
+“Have you seen anything of London yet?”
+
+“Why, yes, Sir,” said Joe, “me and Wopsle went off straight to look at
+the Blacking Ware’us. But we didn’t find that it come up to its likeness
+in the red bills at the shop doors; which I meantersay,” added Joe, in
+an explanatory manner, “as it is there drawd too architectooralooral.”
+
+I really believe Joe would have prolonged this word (mightily expressive
+to my mind of some architecture that I know) into a perfect Chorus, but
+for his attention being providentially attracted by his hat, which
+was toppling. Indeed, it demanded from him a constant attention, and a
+quickness of eye and hand, very like that exacted by wicket-keeping.
+He made extraordinary play with it, and showed the greatest skill; now,
+rushing at it and catching it neatly as it dropped; now, merely stopping
+it midway, beating it up, and humoring it in various parts of the room
+and against a good deal of the pattern of the paper on the wall,
+before he felt it safe to close with it; finally splashing it into the
+slop-basin, where I took the liberty of laying hands upon it.
+
+As to his shirt-collar, and his coat-collar, they were perplexing to
+reflect upon,--insoluble mysteries both. Why should a man scrape himself
+to that extent, before he could consider himself full dressed? Why
+should he suppose it necessary to be purified by suffering for
+his holiday clothes? Then he fell into such unaccountable fits of
+meditation, with his fork midway between his plate and his mouth; had
+his eyes attracted in such strange directions; was afflicted with such
+remarkable coughs; sat so far from the table, and dropped so much
+more than he ate, and pretended that he hadn’t dropped it; that I was
+heartily glad when Herbert left us for the City.
+
+I had neither the good sense nor the good feeling to know that this was
+all my fault, and that if I had been easier with Joe, Joe would have
+been easier with me. I felt impatient of him and out of temper with him;
+in which condition he heaped coals of fire on my head.
+
+“Us two being now alone, sir,”--began Joe.
+
+“Joe,” I interrupted, pettishly, “how can you call me, sir?”
+
+Joe looked at me for a single instant with something faintly like
+reproach. Utterly preposterous as his cravat was, and as his collars
+were, I was conscious of a sort of dignity in the look.
+
+“Us two being now alone,” resumed Joe, “and me having the intentions and
+abilities to stay not many minutes more, I will now conclude--leastways
+begin--to mention what have led to my having had the present honor. For
+was it not,” said Joe, with his old air of lucid exposition, “that my
+only wish were to be useful to you, I should not have had the honor of
+breaking wittles in the company and abode of gentlemen.”
+
+I was so unwilling to see the look again, that I made no remonstrance
+against this tone.
+
+“Well, sir,” pursued Joe, “this is how it were. I were at the Bargemen
+t’other night, Pip;”--whenever he subsided into affection, he called me
+Pip, and whenever he relapsed into politeness he called me sir; “when
+there come up in his shay-cart, Pumblechook. Which that same identical,”
+ said Joe, going down a new track, “do comb my ‘air the wrong way
+sometimes, awful, by giving out up and down town as it were him which
+ever had your infant companionation and were looked upon as a playfellow
+by yourself.”
+
+“Nonsense. It was you, Joe.”
+
+“Which I fully believed it were, Pip,” said Joe, slightly tossing
+his head, “though it signify little now, sir. Well, Pip; this same
+identical, which his manners is given to blusterous, come to me at
+the Bargemen (wot a pipe and a pint of beer do give refreshment to the
+workingman, sir, and do not over stimilate), and his word were, ‘Joseph,
+Miss Havisham she wish to speak to you.’”
+
+“Miss Havisham, Joe?”
+
+“‘She wish,’ were Pumblechook’s word, ‘to speak to you.’” Joe sat and
+rolled his eyes at the ceiling.
+
+“Yes, Joe? Go on, please.”
+
+“Next day, sir,” said Joe, looking at me as if I were a long way off,
+“having cleaned myself, I go and I see Miss A.”
+
+“Miss A., Joe? Miss Havisham?”
+
+“Which I say, sir,” replied Joe, with an air of legal formality, as if
+he were making his will, “Miss A., or otherways Havisham. Her expression
+air then as follering: ‘Mr. Gargery. You air in correspondence with Mr.
+Pip?’ Having had a letter from you, I were able to say ‘I am.’ (When
+I married your sister, sir, I said ‘I will;’ and when I answered your
+friend, Pip, I said ‘I am.’) ‘Would you tell him, then,’ said she, ‘that
+which Estella has come home and would be glad to see him.’”
+
+I felt my face fire up as I looked at Joe. I hope one remote cause
+of its firing may have been my consciousness that if I had known his
+errand, I should have given him more encouragement.
+
+“Biddy,” pursued Joe, “when I got home and asked her fur to write the
+message to you, a little hung back. Biddy says, ‘I know he will be very
+glad to have it by word of mouth, it is holiday time, you want to see
+him, go!’ I have now concluded, sir,” said Joe, rising from his chair,
+“and, Pip, I wish you ever well and ever prospering to a greater and a
+greater height.”
+
+“But you are not going now, Joe?”
+
+“Yes I am,” said Joe.
+
+“But you are coming back to dinner, Joe?”
+
+“No I am not,” said Joe.
+
+Our eyes met, and all the “Sir” melted out of that manly heart as he gave
+me his hand.
+
+“Pip, dear old chap, life is made of ever so many partings welded
+together, as I may say, and one man’s a blacksmith, and one’s a
+whitesmith, and one’s a goldsmith, and one’s a coppersmith. Diwisions
+among such must come, and must be met as they come. If there’s been
+any fault at all to-day, it’s mine. You and me is not two figures to
+be together in London; nor yet anywheres else but what is private, and
+beknown, and understood among friends. It ain’t that I am proud, but
+that I want to be right, as you shall never see me no more in these
+clothes. I’m wrong in these clothes. I’m wrong out of the forge, the
+kitchen, or off th’ meshes. You won’t find half so much fault in me if
+you think of me in my forge dress, with my hammer in my hand, or even
+my pipe. You won’t find half so much fault in me if, supposing as you
+should ever wish to see me, you come and put your head in at the forge
+window and see Joe the blacksmith, there, at the old anvil, in the old
+burnt apron, sticking to the old work. I’m awful dull, but I hope I’ve
+beat out something nigh the rights of this at last. And so GOD bless
+you, dear old Pip, old chap, GOD bless you!”
+
+I had not been mistaken in my fancy that there was a simple dignity
+in him. The fashion of his dress could no more come in its way when he
+spoke these words than it could come in its way in Heaven. He touched me
+gently on the forehead, and went out. As soon as I could recover
+myself sufficiently, I hurried out after him and looked for him in the
+neighboring streets; but he was gone.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXVIII
+
+It was clear that I must repair to our town next day, and in the first
+flow of my repentance, it was equally clear that I must stay at Joe’s.
+But, when I had secured my box-place by to-morrow’s coach, and had been
+down to Mr. Pocket’s and back, I was not by any means convinced on the
+last point, and began to invent reasons and make excuses for putting
+up at the Blue Boar. I should be an inconvenience at Joe’s; I was not
+expected, and my bed would not be ready; I should be too far from
+Miss Havisham’s, and she was exacting and mightn’t like it. All other
+swindlers upon earth are nothing to the self-swindlers, and with such
+pretences did I cheat myself. Surely a curious thing. That I should
+innocently take a bad half-crown of somebody else’s manufacture is
+reasonable enough; but that I should knowingly reckon the spurious coin
+of my own make as good money! An obliging stranger, under pretence of
+compactly folding up my bank-notes for security’s sake, abstracts the
+notes and gives me nutshells; but what is his sleight of hand to mine,
+when I fold up my own nutshells and pass them on myself as notes!
+
+Having settled that I must go to the Blue Boar, my mind was much
+disturbed by indecision whether or not to take the Avenger. It was
+tempting to think of that expensive Mercenary publicly airing his boots
+in the archway of the Blue Boar’s posting-yard; it was almost solemn to
+imagine him casually produced in the tailor’s shop, and confounding
+the disrespectful senses of Trabb’s boy. On the other hand, Trabb’s boy
+might worm himself into his intimacy and tell him things; or, reckless
+and desperate wretch as I knew he could be, might hoot him in the High
+Street. My patroness, too, might hear of him, and not approve. On the
+whole, I resolved to leave the Avenger behind.
+
+It was the afternoon coach by which I had taken my place, and, as winter
+had now come round, I should not arrive at my destination until two or
+three hours after dark. Our time of starting from the Cross Keys was
+two o’clock. I arrived on the ground with a quarter of an hour to spare,
+attended by the Avenger,--if I may connect that expression with one who
+never attended on me if he could possibly help it.
+
+At that time it was customary to carry Convicts down to the dock-yards
+by stage-coach. As I had often heard of them in the capacity of outside
+passengers, and had more than once seen them on the high road dangling
+their ironed legs over the coach roof, I had no cause to be surprised
+when Herbert, meeting me in the yard, came up and told me there were two
+convicts going down with me. But I had a reason that was an old reason
+now for constitutionally faltering whenever I heard the word “convict.”
+
+“You don’t mind them, Handel?” said Herbert.
+
+“O no!”
+
+“I thought you seemed as if you didn’t like them?”
+
+“I can’t pretend that I do like them, and I suppose you don’t
+particularly. But I don’t mind them.”
+
+“See! There they are,” said Herbert, “coming out of the Tap. What a
+degraded and vile sight it is!”
+
+They had been treating their guard, I suppose, for they had a gaoler
+with them, and all three came out wiping their mouths on their hands.
+The two convicts were handcuffed together, and had irons on their
+legs,--irons of a pattern that I knew well. They wore the dress that I
+likewise knew well. Their keeper had a brace of pistols, and carried
+a thick-knobbed bludgeon under his arm; but he was on terms of good
+understanding with them, and stood with them beside him, looking on at
+the putting-to of the horses, rather with an air as if the convicts were
+an interesting Exhibition not formally open at the moment, and he the
+Curator. One was a taller and stouter man than the other, and appeared
+as a matter of course, according to the mysterious ways of the world,
+both convict and free, to have had allotted to him the smaller suit of
+clothes. His arms and legs were like great pincushions of those shapes,
+and his attire disguised him absurdly; but I knew his half-closed eye
+at one glance. There stood the man whom I had seen on the settle at the
+Three Jolly Bargemen on a Saturday night, and who had brought me down
+with his invisible gun!
+
+It was easy to make sure that as yet he knew me no more than if he had
+never seen me in his life. He looked across at me, and his eye appraised
+my watch-chain, and then he incidentally spat and said something to the
+other convict, and they laughed and slued themselves round with a clink
+of their coupling manacle, and looked at something else. The great
+numbers on their backs, as if they were street doors; their coarse mangy
+ungainly outer surface, as if they were lower animals; their ironed
+legs, apologetically garlanded with pocket-handkerchiefs; and the way
+in which all present looked at them and kept from them; made them (as
+Herbert had said) a most disagreeable and degraded spectacle.
+
+But this was not the worst of it. It came out that the whole of the back
+of the coach had been taken by a family removing from London, and that
+there were no places for the two prisoners but on the seat in front
+behind the coachman. Hereupon, a choleric gentleman, who had taken the
+fourth place on that seat, flew into a most violent passion, and said
+that it was a breach of contract to mix him up with such villainous
+company, and that it was poisonous, and pernicious, and infamous, and
+shameful, and I don’t know what else. At this time the coach was ready
+and the coachman impatient, and we were all preparing to get up, and
+the prisoners had come over with their keeper,--bringing with them that
+curious flavor of bread-poultice, baize, rope-yarn, and hearthstone,
+which attends the convict presence.
+
+“Don’t take it so much amiss, sir,” pleaded the keeper to the angry
+passenger; “I’ll sit next you myself. I’ll put ‘em on the outside of
+the row. They won’t interfere with you, sir. You needn’t know they’re
+there.”
+
+“And don’t blame me,” growled the convict I had recognized. “I don’t
+want to go. I am quite ready to stay behind. As fur as I am concerned
+any one’s welcome to my place.”
+
+“Or mine,” said the other, gruffly. “I wouldn’t have incommoded none
+of you, if I’d had my way.” Then they both laughed, and began cracking
+nuts, and spitting the shells about.--As I really think I should have
+liked to do myself, if I had been in their place and so despised.
+
+At length, it was voted that there was no help for the angry gentleman,
+and that he must either go in his chance company or remain behind. So he
+got into his place, still making complaints, and the keeper got into the
+place next him, and the convicts hauled themselves up as well as they
+could, and the convict I had recognized sat behind me with his breath on
+the hair of my head.
+
+“Good-bye, Handel!” Herbert called out as we started. I thought what a
+blessed fortune it was, that he had found another name for me than Pip.
+
+It is impossible to express with what acuteness I felt the convict’s
+breathing, not only on the back of my head, but all along my spine. The
+sensation was like being touched in the marrow with some pungent and
+searching acid, it set my very teeth on edge. He seemed to have more
+breathing business to do than another man, and to make more noise in
+doing it; and I was conscious of growing high-shouldered on one side, in
+my shrinking endeavors to fend him off.
+
+The weather was miserably raw, and the two cursed the cold. It made us
+all lethargic before we had gone far, and when we had left the Half-way
+House behind, we habitually dozed and shivered and were silent. I dozed
+off, myself, in considering the question whether I ought to restore a
+couple of pounds sterling to this creature before losing sight of him,
+and how it could best be done. In the act of dipping forward as if I
+were going to bathe among the horses, I woke in a fright and took the
+question up again.
+
+But I must have lost it longer than I had thought, since, although
+I could recognize nothing in the darkness and the fitful lights and
+shadows of our lamps, I traced marsh country in the cold damp wind that
+blew at us. Cowering forward for warmth and to make me a screen against
+the wind, the convicts were closer to me than before. The very first
+words I heard them interchange as I became conscious, were the words of
+my own thought, “Two One Pound notes.”
+
+“How did he get ‘em?” said the convict I had never seen.
+
+“How should I know?” returned the other. “He had ‘em stowed away
+somehows. Giv him by friends, I expect.”
+
+“I wish,” said the other, with a bitter curse upon the cold, “that I had
+‘em here.”
+
+“Two one pound notes, or friends?”
+
+“Two one pound notes. I’d sell all the friends I ever had for one, and
+think it a blessed good bargain. Well? So he says--?”
+
+“So he says,” resumed the convict I had recognized,--“it was all
+said and done in half a minute, behind a pile of timber in the
+Dock-yard,--‘You’re a going to be discharged?’ Yes, I was. Would I find
+out that boy that had fed him and kep his secret, and give him them two
+one pound notes? Yes, I would. And I did.”
+
+“More fool you,” growled the other. “I’d have spent ‘em on a Man, in
+wittles and drink. He must have been a green one. Mean to say he knowed
+nothing of you?”
+
+“Not a ha’porth. Different gangs and different ships. He was tried again
+for prison breaking, and got made a Lifer.”
+
+“And was that--Honor!--the only time you worked out, in this part of the
+country?”
+
+“The only time.”
+
+“What might have been your opinion of the place?”
+
+“A most beastly place. Mudbank, mist, swamp, and work; work, swamp,
+mist, and mudbank.”
+
+They both execrated the place in very strong language, and gradually
+growled themselves out, and had nothing left to say.
+
+After overhearing this dialogue, I should assuredly have got down and
+been left in the solitude and darkness of the highway, but for feeling
+certain that the man had no suspicion of my identity. Indeed, I was not
+only so changed in the course of nature, but so differently dressed and
+so differently circumstanced, that it was not at all likely he could
+have known me without accidental help. Still, the coincidence of our
+being together on the coach, was sufficiently strange to fill me with a
+dread that some other coincidence might at any moment connect me, in his
+hearing, with my name. For this reason, I resolved to alight as soon as
+we touched the town, and put myself out of his hearing. This device I
+executed successfully. My little portmanteau was in the boot under my
+feet; I had but to turn a hinge to get it out; I threw it down before
+me, got down after it, and was left at the first lamp on the first
+stones of the town pavement. As to the convicts, they went their way
+with the coach, and I knew at what point they would be spirited off to
+the river. In my fancy, I saw the boat with its convict crew waiting for
+them at the slime-washed stairs,--again heard the gruff “Give way, you!”
+ like and order to dogs,--again saw the wicked Noah’s Ark lying out on
+the black water.
+
+I could not have said what I was afraid of, for my fear was altogether
+undefined and vague, but there was great fear upon me. As I walked on to
+the hotel, I felt that a dread, much exceeding the mere apprehension of
+a painful or disagreeable recognition, made me tremble. I am confident
+that it took no distinctness of shape, and that it was the revival for a
+few minutes of the terror of childhood.
+
+The coffee-room at the Blue Boar was empty, and I had not only ordered
+my dinner there, but had sat down to it, before the waiter knew me. As
+soon as he had apologized for the remissness of his memory, he asked me
+if he should send Boots for Mr. Pumblechook?
+
+“No,” said I, “certainly not.”
+
+The waiter (it was he who had brought up the Great Remonstrance from the
+Commercials, on the day when I was bound) appeared surprised, and
+took the earliest opportunity of putting a dirty old copy of a local
+newspaper so directly in my way, that I took it up and read this
+paragraph:--
+
+Our readers will learn, not altogether without interest, in reference to
+the recent romantic rise in fortune of a young artificer in iron of this
+neighborhood (what a theme, by the way, for the magic pen of our as yet
+not universally acknowledged townsman TOOBY, the poet of our columns!)
+that the youth’s earliest patron, companion, and friend, was a highly
+respected individual not entirely unconnected with the corn and seed
+trade, and whose eminently convenient and commodious business premises
+are situate within a hundred miles of the High Street. It is not wholly
+irrespective of our personal feelings that we record HIM as the Mentor
+of our young Telemachus, for it is good to know that our town produced
+the founder of the latter’s fortunes. Does the thought-contracted brow
+of the local Sage or the lustrous eye of local Beauty inquire whose
+fortunes? We believe that Quintin Matsys was the BLACKSMITH of Antwerp.
+VERB. SAP.
+
+I entertain a conviction, based upon large experience, that if in the
+days of my prosperity I had gone to the North Pole, I should have met
+somebody there, wandering Esquimaux or civilized man, who would have
+told me that Pumblechook was my earliest patron and the founder of my
+fortunes.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXIX
+
+Betimes in the morning I was up and out. It was too early yet to go to
+Miss Havisham’s, so I loitered into the country on Miss Havisham’s
+side of town,--which was not Joe’s side; I could go there
+to-morrow,--thinking about my patroness, and painting brilliant pictures
+of her plans for me.
+
+She had adopted Estella, she had as good as adopted me, and it could not
+fail to be her intention to bring us together. She reserved it for me to
+restore the desolate house, admit the sunshine into the dark rooms,
+set the clocks a-going and the cold hearths a-blazing, tear down the
+cobwebs, destroy the vermin,--in short, do all the shining deeds of the
+young Knight of romance, and marry the Princess. I had stopped to
+look at the house as I passed; and its seared red brick walls, blocked
+windows, and strong green ivy clasping even the stacks of chimneys with
+its twigs and tendons, as if with sinewy old arms, had made up a rich
+attractive mystery, of which I was the hero. Estella was the inspiration
+of it, and the heart of it, of course. But, though she had taken such
+strong possession of me, though my fancy and my hope were so set upon
+her, though her influence on my boyish life and character had been
+all-powerful, I did not, even that romantic morning, invest her with any
+attributes save those she possessed. I mention this in this place, of a
+fixed purpose, because it is the clew by which I am to be followed into
+my poor labyrinth. According to my experience, the conventional notion
+of a lover cannot be always true. The unqualified truth is, that when I
+loved Estella with the love of a man, I loved her simply because I found
+her irresistible. Once for all; I knew to my sorrow, often and often,
+if not always, that I loved her against reason, against promise, against
+peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that
+could be. Once for all; I loved her none the less because I knew it,
+and it had no more influence in restraining me than if I had devoutly
+believed her to be human perfection.
+
+I so shaped out my walk as to arrive at the gate at my old time. When
+I had rung at the bell with an unsteady hand, I turned my back upon the
+gate, while I tried to get my breath and keep the beating of my heart
+moderately quiet. I heard the side-door open, and steps come across the
+courtyard; but I pretended not to hear, even when the gate swung on its
+rusty hinges.
+
+Being at last touched on the shoulder, I started and turned. I started
+much more naturally then, to find myself confronted by a man in a sober
+gray dress. The last man I should have expected to see in that place of
+porter at Miss Havisham’s door.
+
+“Orlick!”
+
+“Ah, young master, there’s more changes than yours. But come in, come
+in. It’s opposed to my orders to hold the gate open.”
+
+I entered and he swung it, and locked it, and took the key out. “Yes!”
+ said he, facing round, after doggedly preceding me a few steps towards
+the house. “Here I am!”
+
+“How did you come here?”
+
+“I come her,” he retorted, “on my legs. I had my box brought alongside
+me in a barrow.”
+
+“Are you here for good?”
+
+“I ain’t here for harm, young master, I suppose?”
+
+I was not so sure of that. I had leisure to entertain the retort in my
+mind, while he slowly lifted his heavy glance from the pavement, up my
+legs and arms, to my face.
+
+“Then you have left the forge?” I said.
+
+“Do this look like a forge?” replied Orlick, sending his glance all
+round him with an air of injury. “Now, do it look like it?”
+
+I asked him how long he had left Gargery’s forge?
+
+“One day is so like another here,” he replied, “that I don’t know
+without casting it up. However, I come here some time since you left.”
+
+“I could have told you that, Orlick.”
+
+“Ah!” said he, dryly. “But then you’ve got to be a scholar.”
+
+By this time we had come to the house, where I found his room to be one
+just within the side-door, with a little window in it looking on the
+courtyard. In its small proportions, it was not unlike the kind of place
+usually assigned to a gate-porter in Paris. Certain keys were hanging on
+the wall, to which he now added the gate key; and his patchwork-covered
+bed was in a little inner division or recess. The whole had a slovenly,
+confined, and sleepy look, like a cage for a human dormouse; while he,
+looming dark and heavy in the shadow of a corner by the window, looked
+like the human dormouse for whom it was fitted up,--as indeed he was.
+
+“I never saw this room before,” I remarked; “but there used to be no
+Porter here.”
+
+“No,” said he; “not till it got about that there was no protection on
+the premises, and it come to be considered dangerous, with convicts and
+Tag and Rag and Bobtail going up and down. And then I was recommended to
+the place as a man who could give another man as good as he brought, and
+I took it. It’s easier than bellowsing and hammering.--That’s loaded,
+that is.”
+
+My eye had been caught by a gun with a brass-bound stock over the
+chimney-piece, and his eye had followed mine.
+
+“Well,” said I, not desirous of more conversation, “shall I go up to
+Miss Havisham?”
+
+“Burn me, if I know!” he retorted, first stretching himself and then
+shaking himself; “my orders ends here, young master. I give this here
+bell a rap with this here hammer, and you go on along the passage till
+you meet somebody.”
+
+“I am expected, I believe?”
+
+“Burn me twice over, if I can say!” said he.
+
+Upon that, I turned down the long passage which I had first trodden in
+my thick boots, and he made his bell sound. At the end of the passage,
+while the bell was still reverberating, I found Sarah Pocket, who
+appeared to have now become constitutionally green and yellow by reason
+of me.
+
+“Oh!” said she. “You, is it, Mr. Pip?”
+
+“It is, Miss Pocket. I am glad to tell you that Mr. Pocket and family
+are all well.”
+
+“Are they any wiser?” said Sarah, with a dismal shake of the head; “they
+had better be wiser, than well. Ah, Matthew, Matthew! You know your way,
+sir?”
+
+Tolerably, for I had gone up the staircase in the dark, many a time. I
+ascended it now, in lighter boots than of yore, and tapped in my old
+way at the door of Miss Havisham’s room. “Pip’s rap,” I heard her say,
+immediately; “come in, Pip.”
+
+She was in her chair near the old table, in the old dress, with her two
+hands crossed on her stick, her chin resting on them, and her eyes on
+the fire. Sitting near her, with the white shoe, that had never been
+worn, in her hand, and her head bent as she looked at it, was an elegant
+lady whom I had never seen.
+
+“Come in, Pip,” Miss Havisham continued to mutter, without looking round
+or up; “come in, Pip, how do you do, Pip? so you kiss my hand as if I
+were a queen, eh?--Well?”
+
+She looked up at me suddenly, only moving her eyes, and repeated in a
+grimly playful manner,--
+
+“Well?”
+
+“I heard, Miss Havisham,” said I, rather at a loss, “that you were so
+kind as to wish me to come and see you, and I came directly.”
+
+“Well?”
+
+The lady whom I had never seen before, lifted up her eyes and looked
+archly at me, and then I saw that the eyes were Estella’s eyes. But she
+was so much changed, was so much more beautiful, so much more womanly,
+in all things winning admiration, had made such wonderful advance,
+that I seemed to have made none. I fancied, as I looked at her, that
+I slipped hopelessly back into the coarse and common boy again. O
+the sense of distance and disparity that came upon me, and the
+inaccessibility that came about her!
+
+She gave me her hand. I stammered something about the pleasure I felt in
+seeing her again, and about my having looked forward to it, for a long,
+long time.
+
+“Do you find her much changed, Pip?” asked Miss Havisham, with her
+greedy look, and striking her stick upon a chair that stood between
+them, as a sign to me to sit down there.
+
+“When I came in, Miss Havisham, I thought there was nothing of Estella
+in the face or figure; but now it all settles down so curiously into the
+old--”
+
+“What? You are not going to say into the old Estella?” Miss Havisham
+interrupted. “She was proud and insulting, and you wanted to go away
+from her. Don’t you remember?”
+
+I said confusedly that that was long ago, and that I knew no better
+then, and the like. Estella smiled with perfect composure, and said she
+had no doubt of my having been quite right, and of her having been very
+disagreeable.
+
+“Is he changed?” Miss Havisham asked her.
+
+“Very much,” said Estella, looking at me.
+
+“Less coarse and common?” said Miss Havisham, playing with Estella’s
+hair.
+
+Estella laughed, and looked at the shoe in her hand, and laughed again,
+and looked at me, and put the shoe down. She treated me as a boy still,
+but she lured me on.
+
+We sat in the dreamy room among the old strange influences which had
+so wrought upon me, and I learnt that she had but just come home from
+France, and that she was going to London. Proud and wilful as of old,
+she had brought those qualities into such subjection to her beauty that
+it was impossible and out of nature--or I thought so--to separate them
+from her beauty. Truly it was impossible to dissociate her presence
+from all those wretched hankerings after money and gentility that had
+disturbed my boyhood,--from all those ill-regulated aspirations that had
+first made me ashamed of home and Joe,--from all those visions that had
+raised her face in the glowing fire, struck it out of the iron on the
+anvil, extracted it from the darkness of night to look in at the wooden
+window of the forge, and flit away. In a word, it was impossible for me
+to separate her, in the past or in the present, from the innermost life
+of my life.
+
+It was settled that I should stay there all the rest of the day, and
+return to the hotel at night, and to London to-morrow. When we had
+conversed for a while, Miss Havisham sent us two out to walk in the
+neglected garden: on our coming in by and by, she said, I should wheel
+her about a little, as in times of yore.
+
+So, Estella and I went out into the garden by the gate through which I
+had strayed to my encounter with the pale young gentleman, now Herbert;
+I, trembling in spirit and worshipping the very hem of her dress; she,
+quite composed and most decidedly not worshipping the hem of mine. As we
+drew near to the place of encounter, she stopped and said,--
+
+“I must have been a singular little creature to hide and see that fight
+that day; but I did, and I enjoyed it very much.”
+
+“You rewarded me very much.”
+
+“Did I?” she replied, in an incidental and forgetful way. “I remember I
+entertained a great objection to your adversary, because I took it ill
+that he should be brought here to pester me with his company.”
+
+“He and I are great friends now.”
+
+“Are you? I think I recollect though, that you read with his father?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+I made the admission with reluctance, for it seemed to have a boyish
+look, and she already treated me more than enough like a boy.
+
+“Since your change of fortune and prospects, you have changed your
+companions,” said Estella.
+
+“Naturally,” said I.
+
+“And necessarily,” she added, in a haughty tone; “what was fit company
+for you once, would be quite unfit company for you now.”
+
+In my conscience, I doubt very much whether I had any lingering
+intention left of going to see Joe; but if I had, this observation put
+it to flight.
+
+“You had no idea of your impending good fortune, in those times?” said
+Estella, with a slight wave of her hand, signifying in the fighting
+times.
+
+“Not the least.”
+
+The air of completeness and superiority with which she walked at my
+side, and the air of youthfulness and submission with which I walked at
+hers, made a contrast that I strongly felt. It would have rankled in me
+more than it did, if I had not regarded myself as eliciting it by being
+so set apart for her and assigned to her.
+
+The garden was too overgrown and rank for walking in with ease, and
+after we had made the round of it twice or thrice, we came out again
+into the brewery yard. I showed her to a nicety where I had seen her
+walking on the casks, that first old day, and she said, with a cold and
+careless look in that direction, “Did I?” I reminded her where she had
+come out of the house and given me my meat and drink, and she said, “I
+don’t remember.” “Not remember that you made me cry?” said I. “No,” said
+she, and shook her head and looked about her. I verily believe that
+her not remembering and not minding in the least, made me cry again,
+inwardly,--and that is the sharpest crying of all.
+
+“You must know,” said Estella, condescending to me as a brilliant and
+beautiful woman might, “that I have no heart,--if that has anything to
+do with my memory.”
+
+I got through some jargon to the effect that I took the liberty of
+doubting that. That I knew better. That there could be no such beauty
+without it.
+
+“Oh! I have a heart to be stabbed in or shot in, I have no doubt,” said
+Estella, “and of course if it ceased to beat I should cease
+to be. But you know what I mean. I have no softness there,
+no--sympathy--sentiment--nonsense.”
+
+What was it that was borne in upon my mind when she stood still and
+looked attentively at me? Anything that I had seen in Miss Havisham? No.
+In some of her looks and gestures there was that tinge of resemblance
+to Miss Havisham which may often be noticed to have been acquired by
+children, from grown person with whom they have been much associated and
+secluded, and which, when childhood is passed, will produce a remarkable
+occasional likeness of expression between faces that are otherwise quite
+different. And yet I could not trace this to Miss Havisham. I looked
+again, and though she was still looking at me, the suggestion was gone.
+
+What was it?
+
+“I am serious,” said Estella, not so much with a frown (for her brow was
+smooth) as with a darkening of her face; “if we are to be thrown much
+together, you had better believe it at once. No!” imperiously stopping
+me as I opened my lips. “I have not bestowed my tenderness anywhere. I
+have never had any such thing.”
+
+In another moment we were in the brewery, so long disused, and she
+pointed to the high gallery where I had seen her going out on that same
+first day, and told me she remembered to have been up there, and to have
+seen me standing scared below. As my eyes followed her white hand, again
+the same dim suggestion that I could not possibly grasp crossed me. My
+involuntary start occasioned her to lay her hand upon my arm. Instantly
+the ghost passed once more and was gone.
+
+What was it?
+
+“What is the matter?” asked Estella. “Are you scared again?”
+
+“I should be, if I believed what you said just now,” I replied, to turn
+it off.
+
+“Then you don’t? Very well. It is said, at any rate. Miss Havisham will
+soon be expecting you at your old post, though I think that might be
+laid aside now, with other old belongings. Let us make one more round
+of the garden, and then go in. Come! You shall not shed tears for my
+cruelty to-day; you shall be my Page, and give me your shoulder.”
+
+Her handsome dress had trailed upon the ground. She held it in one hand
+now, and with the other lightly touched my shoulder as we walked. We
+walked round the ruined garden twice or thrice more, and it was all in
+bloom for me. If the green and yellow growth of weed in the chinks of
+the old wall had been the most precious flowers that ever blew, it could
+not have been more cherished in my remembrance.
+
+There was no discrepancy of years between us to remove her far from me;
+we were of nearly the same age, though of course the age told for more
+in her case than in mine; but the air of inaccessibility which her
+beauty and her manner gave her, tormented me in the midst of my delight,
+and at the height of the assurance I felt that our patroness had chosen
+us for one another. Wretched boy!
+
+At last we went back into the house, and there I heard, with surprise,
+that my guardian had come down to see Miss Havisham on business, and
+would come back to dinner. The old wintry branches of chandeliers in
+the room where the mouldering table was spread had been lighted while we
+were out, and Miss Havisham was in her chair and waiting for me.
+
+It was like pushing the chair itself back into the past, when we began
+the old slow circuit round about the ashes of the bridal feast. But,
+in the funereal room, with that figure of the grave fallen back in the
+chair fixing its eyes upon her, Estella looked more bright and beautiful
+than before, and I was under stronger enchantment.
+
+The time so melted away, that our early dinner-hour drew close at hand,
+and Estella left us to prepare herself. We had stopped near the centre
+of the long table, and Miss Havisham, with one of her withered arms
+stretched out of the chair, rested that clenched hand upon the yellow
+cloth. As Estella looked back over her shoulder before going out at the
+door, Miss Havisham kissed that hand to her, with a ravenous intensity
+that was of its kind quite dreadful.
+
+Then, Estella being gone and we two left alone, she turned to me, and
+said in a whisper,--
+
+“Is she beautiful, graceful, well-grown? Do you admire her?”
+
+“Everybody must who sees her, Miss Havisham.”
+
+She drew an arm round my neck, and drew my head close down to hers as
+she sat in the chair. “Love her, love her, love her! How does she use
+you?”
+
+Before I could answer (if I could have answered so difficult a question
+at all) she repeated, “Love her, love her, love her! If she favors
+you, love her. If she wounds you, love her. If she tears your heart to
+pieces,--and as it gets older and stronger it will tear deeper,--love
+her, love her, love her!”
+
+Never had I seen such passionate eagerness as was joined to her
+utterance of these words. I could feel the muscles of the thin arm round
+my neck swell with the vehemence that possessed her.
+
+“Hear me, Pip! I adopted her, to be loved. I bred her and educated her,
+to be loved. I developed her into what she is, that she might be loved.
+Love her!”
+
+She said the word often enough, and there could be no doubt that she
+meant to say it; but if the often repeated word had been hate instead of
+love--despair--revenge--dire death--it could not have sounded from her
+lips more like a curse.
+
+“I’ll tell you,” said she, in the same hurried passionate whisper, “what
+real love is. It is blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation,
+utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the
+whole world, giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter--as I
+did!”
+
+When she came to that, and to a wild cry that followed that, I caught
+her round the waist. For she rose up in the chair, in her shroud of a
+dress, and struck at the air as if she would as soon have struck herself
+against the wall and fallen dead.
+
+All this passed in a few seconds. As I drew her down into her chair, I
+was conscious of a scent that I knew, and turning, saw my guardian in
+the room.
+
+He always carried (I have not yet mentioned it, I think) a
+pocket-handkerchief of rich silk and of imposing proportions, which was
+of great value to him in his profession. I have seen him so terrify a
+client or a witness by ceremoniously unfolding this pocket-handkerchief
+as if he were immediately going to blow his nose, and then pausing,
+as if he knew he should not have time to do it before such client
+or witness committed himself, that the self-committal has followed
+directly, quite as a matter of course. When I saw him in the room he had
+this expressive pocket-handkerchief in both hands, and was looking at
+us. On meeting my eye, he said plainly, by a momentary and silent pause
+in that attitude, “Indeed? Singular!” and then put the handkerchief to
+its right use with wonderful effect.
+
+Miss Havisham had seen him as soon as I, and was (like everybody
+else) afraid of him. She made a strong attempt to compose herself, and
+stammered that he was as punctual as ever.
+
+“As punctual as ever,” he repeated, coming up to us. “(How do you do,
+Pip? Shall I give you a ride, Miss Havisham? Once round?) And so you are
+here, Pip?”
+
+I told him when I had arrived, and how Miss Havisham had wished me to
+come and see Estella. To which he replied, “Ah! Very fine young lady!”
+ Then he pushed Miss Havisham in her chair before him, with one of his
+large hands, and put the other in his trousers-pocket as if the pocket
+were full of secrets.
+
+“Well, Pip! How often have you seen Miss Estella before?” said he, when
+he came to a stop.
+
+“How often?”
+
+“Ah! How many times? Ten thousand times?”
+
+“Oh! Certainly not so many.”
+
+“Twice?”
+
+“Jaggers,” interposed Miss Havisham, much to my relief, “leave my Pip
+alone, and go with him to your dinner.”
+
+He complied, and we groped our way down the dark stairs together. While
+we were still on our way to those detached apartments across the paved
+yard at the back, he asked me how often I had seen Miss Havisham eat
+and drink; offering me a breadth of choice, as usual, between a hundred
+times and once.
+
+I considered, and said, “Never.”
+
+“And never will, Pip,” he retorted, with a frowning smile. “She has
+never allowed herself to be seen doing either, since she lived this
+present life of hers. She wanders about in the night, and then lays
+hands on such food as she takes.”
+
+“Pray, sir,” said I, “may I ask you a question?”
+
+“You may,” said he, “and I may decline to answer it. Put your question.”
+
+“Estella’s name. Is it Havisham or--?” I had nothing to add.
+
+“Or what?” said he.
+
+“Is it Havisham?”
+
+“It is Havisham.”
+
+This brought us to the dinner-table, where she and Sarah Pocket awaited
+us. Mr. Jaggers presided, Estella sat opposite to him, I faced my
+green and yellow friend. We dined very well, and were waited on by a
+maid-servant whom I had never seen in all my comings and goings, but
+who, for anything I know, had been in that mysterious house the whole
+time. After dinner a bottle of choice old port was placed before my
+guardian (he was evidently well acquainted with the vintage), and the
+two ladies left us.
+
+Anything to equal the determined reticence of Mr. Jaggers under that
+roof I never saw elsewhere, even in him. He kept his very looks to
+himself, and scarcely directed his eyes to Estella’s face once during
+dinner. When she spoke to him, he listened, and in due course answered,
+but never looked at her, that I could see. On the other hand, she often
+looked at him, with interest and curiosity, if not distrust, but his
+face never showed the least consciousness. Throughout dinner he took
+a dry delight in making Sarah Pocket greener and yellower, by often
+referring in conversation with me to my expectations; but here,
+again, he showed no consciousness, and even made it appear that he
+extorted--and even did extort, though I don’t know how--those references
+out of my innocent self.
+
+And when he and I were left alone together, he sat with an air upon him
+of general lying by in consequence of information he possessed, that
+really was too much for me. He cross-examined his very wine when he had
+nothing else in hand. He held it between himself and the candle, tasted
+the port, rolled it in his mouth, swallowed it, looked at his
+glass again, smelt the port, tried it, drank it, filled again, and
+cross-examined the glass again, until I was as nervous as if I had known
+the wine to be telling him something to my disadvantage. Three or four
+times I feebly thought I would start conversation; but whenever he saw
+me going to ask him anything, he looked at me with his glass in his
+hand, and rolling his wine about in his mouth, as if requesting me to
+take notice that it was of no use, for he couldn’t answer.
+
+I think Miss Pocket was conscious that the sight of me involved her
+in the danger of being goaded to madness, and perhaps tearing off her
+cap,--which was a very hideous one, in the nature of a muslin mop,--and
+strewing the ground with her hair,--which assuredly had never grown
+on her head. She did not appear when we afterwards went up to Miss
+Havisham’s room, and we four played at whist. In the interval, Miss
+Havisham, in a fantastic way, had put some of the most beautiful jewels
+from her dressing-table into Estella’s hair, and about her bosom and
+arms; and I saw even my guardian look at her from under his thick
+eyebrows, and raise them a little, when her loveliness was before him,
+with those rich flushes of glitter and color in it.
+
+Of the manner and extent to which he took our trumps into custody, and
+came out with mean little cards at the ends of hands, before which the
+glory of our Kings and Queens was utterly abased, I say nothing; nor, of
+the feeling that I had, respecting his looking upon us personally in the
+light of three very obvious and poor riddles that he had found out long
+ago. What I suffered from, was the incompatibility between his cold
+presence and my feelings towards Estella. It was not that I knew I could
+never bear to speak to him about her, that I knew I could never bear to
+hear him creak his boots at her, that I knew I could never bear to see
+him wash his hands of her; it was, that my admiration should be within
+a foot or two of him,--it was, that my feelings should be in the same
+place with him,--that, was the agonizing circumstance.
+
+We played until nine o’clock, and then it was arranged that when Estella
+came to London I should be forewarned of her coming and should meet her
+at the coach; and then I took leave of her, and touched her and left
+her.
+
+My guardian lay at the Boar in the next room to mine. Far into the
+night, Miss Havisham’s words, “Love her, love her, love her!” sounded in
+my ears. I adapted them for my own repetition, and said to my pillow, “I
+love her, I love her, I love her!” hundreds of times. Then, a burst of
+gratitude came upon me, that she should be destined for me, once the
+blacksmith’s boy. Then I thought if she were, as I feared, by no means
+rapturously grateful for that destiny yet, when would she begin to be
+interested in me? When should I awaken the heart within her that was
+mute and sleeping now?
+
+Ah me! I thought those were high and great emotions. But I never thought
+there was anything low and small in my keeping away from Joe, because
+I knew she would be contemptuous of him. It was but a day gone, and Joe
+had brought the tears into my eyes; they had soon dried, God forgive me!
+soon dried.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXX
+
+After well considering the matter while I was dressing at the Blue Boar
+in the morning, I resolved to tell my guardian that I doubted Orlick’s
+being the right sort of man to fill a post of trust at Miss Havisham’s.
+“Why of course he is not the right sort of man, Pip,” said my guardian,
+comfortably satisfied beforehand on the general head, “because the man
+who fills the post of trust never is the right sort of man.” It seemed
+quite to put him into spirits to find that this particular post was
+not exceptionally held by the right sort of man, and he listened in a
+satisfied manner while I told him what knowledge I had of Orlick. “Very
+good, Pip,” he observed, when I had concluded, “I’ll go round presently,
+and pay our friend off.” Rather alarmed by this summary action, I was
+for a little delay, and even hinted that our friend himself might be
+difficult to deal with. “Oh no he won’t,” said my guardian, making his
+pocket-handkerchief-point, with perfect confidence; “I should like to
+see him argue the question with me.”
+
+As we were going back together to London by the midday coach, and as I
+breakfasted under such terrors of Pumblechook that I could scarcely hold
+my cup, this gave me an opportunity of saying that I wanted a walk, and
+that I would go on along the London road while Mr. Jaggers was occupied,
+if he would let the coachman know that I would get into my place when
+overtaken. I was thus enabled to fly from the Blue Boar immediately
+after breakfast. By then making a loop of about a couple of miles into
+the open country at the back of Pumblechook’s premises, I got round into
+the High Street again, a little beyond that pitfall, and felt myself in
+comparative security.
+
+It was interesting to be in the quiet old town once more, and it was not
+disagreeable to be here and there suddenly recognized and stared after.
+One or two of the tradespeople even darted out of their shops and went
+a little way down the street before me, that they might turn, as if they
+had forgotten something, and pass me face to face,--on which occasions I
+don’t know whether they or I made the worse pretence; they of not doing
+it, or I of not seeing it. Still my position was a distinguished one,
+and I was not at all dissatisfied with it, until Fate threw me in the
+way of that unlimited miscreant, Trabb’s boy.
+
+Casting my eyes along the street at a certain point of my progress, I
+beheld Trabb’s boy approaching, lashing himself with an empty blue bag.
+Deeming that a serene and unconscious contemplation of him would best
+beseem me, and would be most likely to quell his evil mind, I advanced
+with that expression of countenance, and was rather congratulating
+myself on my success, when suddenly the knees of Trabb’s boy smote
+together, his hair uprose, his cap fell off, he trembled violently in
+every limb, staggered out into the road, and crying to the populace,
+“Hold me! I’m so frightened!” feigned to be in a paroxysm of terror and
+contrition, occasioned by the dignity of my appearance. As I passed him,
+his teeth loudly chattered in his head, and with every mark of extreme
+humiliation, he prostrated himself in the dust.
+
+This was a hard thing to bear, but this was nothing. I had not advanced
+another two hundred yards when, to my inexpressible terror, amazement,
+and indignation, I again beheld Trabb’s boy approaching. He was coming
+round a narrow corner. His blue bag was slung over his shoulder, honest
+industry beamed in his eyes, a determination to proceed to Trabb’s with
+cheerful briskness was indicated in his gait. With a shock he became
+aware of me, and was severely visited as before; but this time his
+motion was rotatory, and he staggered round and round me with knees
+more afflicted, and with uplifted hands as if beseeching for mercy. His
+sufferings were hailed with the greatest joy by a knot of spectators,
+and I felt utterly confounded.
+
+I had not got as much further down the street as the post-office, when I
+again beheld Trabb’s boy shooting round by a back way. This time, he was
+entirely changed. He wore the blue bag in the manner of my great-coat,
+and was strutting along the pavement towards me on the opposite side of
+the street, attended by a company of delighted young friends to whom he
+from time to time exclaimed, with a wave of his hand, “Don’t know yah!”
+ Words cannot state the amount of aggravation and injury wreaked upon
+me by Trabb’s boy, when passing abreast of me, he pulled up his
+shirt-collar, twined his side-hair, stuck an arm akimbo, and smirked
+extravagantly by, wriggling his elbows and body, and drawling to his
+attendants, “Don’t know yah, don’t know yah, ‘pon my soul don’t know
+yah!” The disgrace attendant on his immediately afterwards taking
+to crowing and pursuing me across the bridge with crows, as from an
+exceedingly dejected fowl who had known me when I was a blacksmith,
+culminated the disgrace with which I left the town, and was, so to
+speak, ejected by it into the open country.
+
+But unless I had taken the life of Trabb’s boy on that occasion, I
+really do not even now see what I could have done save endure. To
+have struggled with him in the street, or to have exacted any lower
+recompense from him than his heart’s best blood, would have been
+futile and degrading. Moreover, he was a boy whom no man could hurt; an
+invulnerable and dodging serpent who, when chased into a corner, flew
+out again between his captor’s legs, scornfully yelping. I wrote,
+however, to Mr. Trabb by next day’s post, to say that Mr. Pip must
+decline to deal further with one who could so far forget what he owed to
+the best interests of society, as to employ a boy who excited Loathing
+in every respectable mind.
+
+The coach, with Mr. Jaggers inside, came up in due time, and I took my
+box-seat again, and arrived in London safe,--but not sound, for my heart
+was gone. As soon as I arrived, I sent a penitential codfish and barrel
+of oysters to Joe (as reparation for not having gone myself), and then
+went on to Barnard’s Inn.
+
+I found Herbert dining on cold meat, and delighted to welcome me back.
+Having despatched The Avenger to the coffee-house for an addition to the
+dinner, I felt that I must open my breast that very evening to my friend
+and chum. As confidence was out of the question with The Avenger in the
+hall, which could merely be regarded in the light of an antechamber to
+the keyhole, I sent him to the Play. A better proof of the severity
+of my bondage to that taskmaster could scarcely be afforded, than
+the degrading shifts to which I was constantly driven to find him
+employment. So mean is extremity, that I sometimes sent him to Hyde Park
+corner to see what o’clock it was.
+
+Dinner done and we sitting with our feet upon the fender, I said to
+Herbert, “My dear Herbert, I have something very particular to tell
+you.”
+
+“My dear Handel,” he returned, “I shall esteem and respect your
+confidence.”
+
+“It concerns myself, Herbert,” said I, “and one other person.”
+
+Herbert crossed his feet, looked at the fire with his head on one side,
+and having looked at it in vain for some time, looked at me because I
+didn’t go on.
+
+“Herbert,” said I, laying my hand upon his knee, “I love--I
+adore--Estella.”
+
+Instead of being transfixed, Herbert replied in an easy matter-of-course
+way, “Exactly. Well?”
+
+“Well, Herbert? Is that all you say? Well?”
+
+“What next, I mean?” said Herbert. “Of course I know that.”
+
+“How do you know it?” said I.
+
+“How do I know it, Handel? Why, from you.”
+
+“I never told you.”
+
+“Told me! You have never told me when you have got your hair cut, but I
+have had senses to perceive it. You have always adored her, ever since
+I have known you. You brought your adoration and your portmanteau here
+together. Told me! Why, you have always told me all day long. When you
+told me your own story, you told me plainly that you began adoring her
+the first time you saw her, when you were very young indeed.”
+
+“Very well, then,” said I, to whom this was a new and not unwelcome
+light, “I have never left off adoring her. And she has come back, a most
+beautiful and most elegant creature. And I saw her yesterday. And if I
+adored her before, I now doubly adore her.”
+
+“Lucky for you then, Handel,” said Herbert, “that you are picked out for
+her and allotted to her. Without encroaching on forbidden ground, we
+may venture to say that there can be no doubt between ourselves of
+that fact. Have you any idea yet, of Estella’s views on the adoration
+question?”
+
+I shook my head gloomily. “Oh! She is thousands of miles away, from me,”
+ said I.
+
+“Patience, my dear Handel: time enough, time enough. But you have
+something more to say?”
+
+“I am ashamed to say it,” I returned, “and yet it’s no worse to say it
+than to think it. You call me a lucky fellow. Of course, I am. I was a
+blacksmith’s boy but yesterday; I am--what shall I say I am--to-day?”
+
+“Say a good fellow, if you want a phrase,” returned Herbert, smiling,
+and clapping his hand on the back of mine--“a good fellow, with
+impetuosity and hesitation, boldness and diffidence, action and
+dreaming, curiously mixed in him.”
+
+I stopped for a moment to consider whether there really was this mixture
+in my character. On the whole, I by no means recognized the analysis,
+but thought it not worth disputing.
+
+“When I ask what I am to call myself to-day, Herbert,” I went on, “I
+suggest what I have in my thoughts. You say I am lucky. I know I have
+done nothing to raise myself in life, and that Fortune alone has raised
+me; that is being very lucky. And yet, when I think of Estella--”
+
+(“And when don’t you, you know?” Herbert threw in, with his eyes on the
+fire; which I thought kind and sympathetic of him.)
+
+“--Then, my dear Herbert, I cannot tell you how dependent and uncertain
+I feel, and how exposed to hundreds of chances. Avoiding forbidden
+ground, as you did just now, I may still say that on the constancy of
+one person (naming no person) all my expectations depend. And at the
+best, how indefinite and unsatisfactory, only to know so vaguely what
+they are!” In saying this, I relieved my mind of what had always been
+there, more or less, though no doubt most since yesterday.
+
+“Now, Handel,” Herbert replied, in his gay, hopeful way, “it seems to me
+that in the despondency of the tender passion, we are looking into our
+gift-horse’s mouth with a magnifying-glass. Likewise, it seems to me
+that, concentrating our attention on the examination, we altogether
+overlook one of the best points of the animal. Didn’t you tell me that
+your guardian, Mr. Jaggers, told you in the beginning, that you were
+not endowed with expectations only? And even if he had not told you
+so,--though that is a very large If, I grant,--could you believe that of
+all men in London, Mr. Jaggers is the man to hold his present relations
+towards you unless he were sure of his ground?”
+
+I said I could not deny that this was a strong point. I said it (people
+often do so, in such cases) like a rather reluctant concession to truth
+and justice;--as if I wanted to deny it!
+
+“I should think it was a strong point,” said Herbert, “and I should
+think you would be puzzled to imagine a stronger; as to the rest, you
+must bide your guardian’s time, and he must bide his client’s time.
+You’ll be one-and-twenty before you know where you are, and then perhaps
+you’ll get some further enlightenment. At all events, you’ll be nearer
+getting it, for it must come at last.”
+
+“What a hopeful disposition you have!” said I, gratefully admiring his
+cheery ways.
+
+“I ought to have,” said Herbert, “for I have not much else. I must
+acknowledge, by the by, that the good sense of what I have just said is
+not my own, but my father’s. The only remark I ever heard him make on
+your story, was the final one, “The thing is settled and done, or Mr.
+Jaggers would not be in it.” And now before I say anything more about my
+father, or my father’s son, and repay confidence with confidence, I want
+to make myself seriously disagreeable to you for a moment,--positively
+repulsive.”
+
+“You won’t succeed,” said I.
+
+“O yes I shall!” said he. “One, two, three, and now I am in for it.
+Handel, my good fellow;”--though he spoke in this light tone, he was
+very much in earnest,--“I have been thinking since we have been talking
+with our feet on this fender, that Estella surely cannot be a condition
+of your inheritance, if she was never referred to by your guardian. Am
+I right in so understanding what you have told me, as that he never
+referred to her, directly or indirectly, in any way? Never even hinted,
+for instance, that your patron might have views as to your marriage
+ultimately?”
+
+“Never.”
+
+“Now, Handel, I am quite free from the flavor of sour grapes, upon my
+soul and honor! Not being bound to her, can you not detach yourself from
+her?--I told you I should be disagreeable.”
+
+I turned my head aside, for, with a rush and a sweep, like the old marsh
+winds coming up from the sea, a feeling like that which had subdued
+me on the morning when I left the forge, when the mists were solemnly
+rising, and when I laid my hand upon the village finger-post, smote upon
+my heart again. There was silence between us for a little while.
+
+“Yes; but my dear Handel,” Herbert went on, as if we had been talking,
+instead of silent, “its having been so strongly rooted in the breast of
+a boy whom nature and circumstances made so romantic, renders it very
+serious. Think of her bringing-up, and think of Miss Havisham. Think of
+what she is herself (now I am repulsive and you abominate me). This may
+lead to miserable things.”
+
+“I know it, Herbert,” said I, with my head still turned away, “but I
+can’t help it.”
+
+“You can’t detach yourself?”
+
+“No. Impossible!”
+
+“You can’t try, Handel?”
+
+“No. Impossible!”
+
+“Well!” said Herbert, getting up with a lively shake as if he had
+been asleep, and stirring the fire, “now I’ll endeavor to make myself
+agreeable again!”
+
+So he went round the room and shook the curtains out, put the chairs
+in their places, tidied the books and so forth that were lying about,
+looked into the hall, peeped into the letter-box, shut the door, and
+came back to his chair by the fire: where he sat down, nursing his left
+leg in both arms.
+
+“I was going to say a word or two, Handel, concerning my father and my
+father’s son. I am afraid it is scarcely necessary for my father’s son
+to remark that my father’s establishment is not particularly brilliant
+in its housekeeping.”
+
+“There is always plenty, Herbert,” said I, to say something encouraging.
+
+“O yes! and so the dustman says, I believe, with the strongest approval,
+and so does the marine-store shop in the back street. Gravely, Handel,
+for the subject is grave enough, you know how it is as well as I do. I
+suppose there was a time once when my father had not given matters up;
+but if ever there was, the time is gone. May I ask you if you have ever
+had an opportunity of remarking, down in your part of the country,
+that the children of not exactly suitable marriages are always most
+particularly anxious to be married?”
+
+This was such a singular question, that I asked him in return, “Is it
+so?”
+
+“I don’t know,” said Herbert, “that’s what I want to know. Because it
+is decidedly the case with us. My poor sister Charlotte, who was next me
+and died before she was fourteen, was a striking example. Little Jane
+is the same. In her desire to be matrimonially established, you
+might suppose her to have passed her short existence in the perpetual
+contemplation of domestic bliss. Little Alick in a frock has already
+made arrangements for his union with a suitable young person at Kew. And
+indeed, I think we are all engaged, except the baby.”
+
+“Then you are?” said I.
+
+“I am,” said Herbert; “but it’s a secret.”
+
+I assured him of my keeping the secret, and begged to be favored with
+further particulars. He had spoken so sensibly and feelingly of my
+weakness that I wanted to know something about his strength.
+
+“May I ask the name?” I said.
+
+“Name of Clara,” said Herbert.
+
+“Live in London?”
+
+“Yes, perhaps I ought to mention,” said Herbert, who had become
+curiously crestfallen and meek, since we entered on the interesting
+theme, “that she is rather below my mother’s nonsensical family notions.
+Her father had to do with the victualling of passenger-ships. I think he
+was a species of purser.”
+
+“What is he now?” said I.
+
+“He’s an invalid now,” replied Herbert.
+
+“Living on--?”
+
+“On the first floor,” said Herbert. Which was not at all what I meant,
+for I had intended my question to apply to his means. “I have never seen
+him, for he has always kept his room overhead, since I have known Clara.
+But I have heard him constantly. He makes tremendous rows,--roars, and
+pegs at the floor with some frightful instrument.” In looking at me and
+then laughing heartily, Herbert for the time recovered his usual lively
+manner.
+
+“Don’t you expect to see him?” said I.
+
+“O yes, I constantly expect to see him,” returned Herbert, “because
+I never hear him, without expecting him to come tumbling through the
+ceiling. But I don’t know how long the rafters may hold.”
+
+When he had once more laughed heartily, he became meek again, and told
+me that the moment he began to realize Capital, it was his intention
+to marry this young lady. He added as a self-evident proposition,
+engendering low spirits, “But you can’t marry, you know, while you’re
+looking about you.”
+
+As we contemplated the fire, and as I thought what a difficult vision to
+realize this same Capital sometimes was, I put my hands in my pockets.
+A folded piece of paper in one of them attracting my attention, I opened
+it and found it to be the play-bill I had received from Joe, relative
+to the celebrated provincial amateur of Roscian renown. “And bless my
+heart,” I involuntarily added aloud, “it’s to-night!”
+
+This changed the subject in an instant, and made us hurriedly resolve
+to go to the play. So, when I had pledged myself to comfort and abet
+Herbert in the affair of his heart by all practicable and impracticable
+means, and when Herbert had told me that his affianced already knew me
+by reputation and that I should be presented to her, and when we had
+warmly shaken hands upon our mutual confidence, we blew out our candles,
+made up our fire, locked our door, and issued forth in quest of Mr.
+Wopsle and Denmark.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXXI
+
+On our arrival in Denmark, we found the king and queen of that country
+elevated in two arm-chairs on a kitchen-table, holding a Court. The
+whole of the Danish nobility were in attendance; consisting of a noble
+boy in the wash-leather boots of a gigantic ancestor, a venerable Peer
+with a dirty face who seemed to have risen from the people late in life,
+and the Danish chivalry with a comb in its hair and a pair of white
+silk legs, and presenting on the whole a feminine appearance. My gifted
+townsman stood gloomily apart, with folded arms, and I could have wished
+that his curls and forehead had been more probable.
+
+Several curious little circumstances transpired as the action proceeded.
+The late king of the country not only appeared to have been troubled
+with a cough at the time of his decease, but to have taken it with him
+to the tomb, and to have brought it back. The royal phantom also carried
+a ghostly manuscript round its truncheon, to which it had the appearance
+of occasionally referring, and that too, with an air of anxiety and a
+tendency to lose the place of reference which were suggestive of a state
+of mortality. It was this, I conceive, which led to the Shade’s being
+advised by the gallery to “turn over!”--a recommendation which it took
+extremely ill. It was likewise to be noted of this majestic spirit, that
+whereas it always appeared with an air of having been out a long time
+and walked an immense distance, it perceptibly came from a closely
+contiguous wall. This occasioned its terrors to be received derisively.
+The Queen of Denmark, a very buxom lady, though no doubt historically
+brazen, was considered by the public to have too much brass about her;
+her chin being attached to her diadem by a broad band of that metal (as
+if she had a gorgeous toothache), her waist being encircled by another,
+and each of her arms by another, so that she was openly mentioned
+as “the kettle-drum.” The noble boy in the ancestral boots was
+inconsistent, representing himself, as it were in one breath, as an able
+seaman, a strolling actor, a grave-digger, a clergyman, and a person
+of the utmost importance at a Court fencing-match, on the authority
+of whose practised eye and nice discrimination the finest strokes were
+judged. This gradually led to a want of toleration for him, and even--on
+his being detected in holy orders, and declining to perform the funeral
+service--to the general indignation taking the form of nuts. Lastly,
+Ophelia was a prey to such slow musical madness, that when, in course of
+time, she had taken off her white muslin scarf, folded it up, and buried
+it, a sulky man who had been long cooling his impatient nose against an
+iron bar in the front row of the gallery, growled, “Now the baby’s put
+to bed let’s have supper!” Which, to say the least of it, was out of
+keeping.
+
+Upon my unfortunate townsman all these incidents accumulated with
+playful effect. Whenever that undecided Prince had to ask a question or
+state a doubt, the public helped him out with it. As for example; on the
+question whether ‘twas nobler in the mind to suffer, some roared yes,
+and some no, and some inclining to both opinions said “Toss up for
+it;” and quite a Debating Society arose. When he asked what should such
+fellows as he do crawling between earth and heaven, he was encouraged
+with loud cries of “Hear, hear!” When he appeared with his stocking
+disordered (its disorder expressed, according to usage, by one very neat
+fold in the top, which I suppose to be always got up with a flat iron),
+a conversation took place in the gallery respecting the paleness of his
+leg, and whether it was occasioned by the turn the ghost had given him.
+On his taking the recorders,--very like a little black flute that had
+just been played in the orchestra and handed out at the door,--he was
+called upon unanimously for Rule Britannia. When he recommended the
+player not to saw the air thus, the sulky man said, “And don’t you do
+it, neither; you’re a deal worse than him!” And I grieve to add that
+peals of laughter greeted Mr. Wopsle on every one of these occasions.
+
+But his greatest trials were in the churchyard, which had the appearance
+of a primeval forest, with a kind of small ecclesiastical wash-house
+on one side, and a turnpike gate on the other. Mr. Wopsle in a
+comprehensive black cloak, being descried entering at the turnpike,
+the gravedigger was admonished in a friendly way, “Look out! Here’s the
+undertaker a coming, to see how you’re a getting on with your work!”
+ I believe it is well known in a constitutional country that Mr. Wopsle
+could not possibly have returned the skull, after moralizing over it,
+without dusting his fingers on a white napkin taken from his breast;
+but even that innocent and indispensable action did not pass without the
+comment, “Wai-ter!” The arrival of the body for interment (in an empty
+black box with the lid tumbling open), was the signal for a general
+joy, which was much enhanced by the discovery, among the bearers, of
+an individual obnoxious to identification. The joy attended Mr. Wopsle
+through his struggle with Laertes on the brink of the orchestra and
+the grave, and slackened no more until he had tumbled the king off the
+kitchen-table, and had died by inches from the ankles upward.
+
+We had made some pale efforts in the beginning to applaud Mr. Wopsle;
+but they were too hopeless to be persisted in. Therefore we had sat,
+feeling keenly for him, but laughing, nevertheless, from ear to ear. I
+laughed in spite of myself all the time, the whole thing was so droll;
+and yet I had a latent impression that there was something decidedly
+fine in Mr. Wopsle’s elocution,--not for old associations’ sake, I am
+afraid, but because it was very slow, very dreary, very uphill and
+downhill, and very unlike any way in which any man in any natural
+circumstances of life or death ever expressed himself about anything.
+When the tragedy was over, and he had been called for and hooted, I said
+to Herbert, “Let us go at once, or perhaps we shall meet him.”
+
+We made all the haste we could downstairs, but we were not quick enough
+either. Standing at the door was a Jewish man with an unnatural heavy
+smear of eyebrow, who caught my eyes as we advanced, and said, when we
+came up with him,--
+
+“Mr. Pip and friend?”
+
+Identity of Mr. Pip and friend confessed.
+
+“Mr. Waldengarver,” said the man, “would be glad to have the honor.”
+
+“Waldengarver?” I repeated--when Herbert murmured in my ear, “Probably
+Wopsle.”
+
+“Oh!” said I. “Yes. Shall we follow you?”
+
+“A few steps, please.” When we were in a side alley, he turned and
+asked, “How did you think he looked?--I dressed him.”
+
+I don’t know what he had looked like, except a funeral; with the
+addition of a large Danish sun or star hanging round his neck by a
+blue ribbon, that had given him the appearance of being insured in some
+extraordinary Fire Office. But I said he had looked very nice.
+
+“When he come to the grave,” said our conductor, “he showed his cloak
+beautiful. But, judging from the wing, it looked to me that when he
+see the ghost in the queen’s apartment, he might have made more of his
+stockings.”
+
+I modestly assented, and we all fell through a little dirty swing door,
+into a sort of hot packing-case immediately behind it. Here Mr. Wopsle
+was divesting himself of his Danish garments, and here there was just
+room for us to look at him over one another’s shoulders, by keeping the
+packing-case door, or lid, wide open.
+
+“Gentlemen,” said Mr. Wopsle, “I am proud to see you. I hope, Mr. Pip,
+you will excuse my sending round. I had the happiness to know you in
+former times, and the Drama has ever had a claim which has ever been
+acknowledged, on the noble and the affluent.”
+
+Meanwhile, Mr. Waldengarver, in a frightful perspiration, was trying to
+get himself out of his princely sables.
+
+“Skin the stockings off Mr. Waldengarver,” said the owner of that
+property, “or you’ll bust ‘em. Bust ‘em, and you’ll bust five-and-thirty
+shillings. Shakspeare never was complimented with a finer pair. Keep
+quiet in your chair now, and leave ‘em to me.”
+
+With that, he went upon his knees, and began to flay his victim; who, on
+the first stocking coming off, would certainly have fallen over backward
+with his chair, but for there being no room to fall anyhow.
+
+I had been afraid until then to say a word about the play. But then, Mr.
+Waldengarver looked up at us complacently, and said,--
+
+“Gentlemen, how did it seem to you, to go, in front?”
+
+Herbert said from behind (at the same time poking me), “Capitally.” So I
+said “Capitally.”
+
+“How did you like my reading of the character, gentlemen?” said Mr.
+Waldengarver, almost, if not quite, with patronage.
+
+Herbert said from behind (again poking me), “Massive and concrete.” So I
+said boldly, as if I had originated it, and must beg to insist upon it,
+“Massive and concrete.”
+
+“I am glad to have your approbation, gentlemen,” said Mr. Waldengarver,
+with an air of dignity, in spite of his being ground against the wall at
+the time, and holding on by the seat of the chair.
+
+“But I’ll tell you one thing, Mr. Waldengarver,” said the man who was on
+his knees, “in which you’re out in your reading. Now mind! I don’t care
+who says contrairy; I tell you so. You’re out in your reading of Hamlet
+when you get your legs in profile. The last Hamlet as I dressed, made
+the same mistakes in his reading at rehearsal, till I got him to put a
+large red wafer on each of his shins, and then at that rehearsal (which
+was the last) I went in front, sir, to the back of the pit, and whenever
+his reading brought him into profile, I called out “I don’t see no
+wafers!” And at night his reading was lovely.”
+
+Mr. Waldengarver smiled at me, as much as to say “a faithful
+Dependent--I overlook his folly;” and then said aloud, “My view is a
+little classic and thoughtful for them here; but they will improve, they
+will improve.”
+
+Herbert and I said together, O, no doubt they would improve.
+
+“Did you observe, gentlemen,” said Mr. Waldengarver, “that there was a
+man in the gallery who endeavored to cast derision on the service,--I
+mean, the representation?”
+
+We basely replied that we rather thought we had noticed such a man. I
+added, “He was drunk, no doubt.”
+
+“O dear no, sir,” said Mr. Wopsle, “not drunk. His employer would see to
+that, sir. His employer would not allow him to be drunk.”
+
+“You know his employer?” said I.
+
+Mr. Wopsle shut his eyes, and opened them again; performing both
+ceremonies very slowly. “You must have observed, gentlemen,” said he,
+“an ignorant and a blatant ass, with a rasping throat and a countenance
+expressive of low malignity, who went through--I will not say
+sustained--the rôle (if I may use a French expression) of Claudius, King
+of Denmark. That is his employer, gentlemen. Such is the profession!”
+
+Without distinctly knowing whether I should have been more sorry for Mr.
+Wopsle if he had been in despair, I was so sorry for him as it was,
+that I took the opportunity of his turning round to have his braces
+put on,--which jostled us out at the doorway,--to ask Herbert what he
+thought of having him home to supper? Herbert said he thought it would
+be kind to do so; therefore I invited him, and he went to Barnard’s
+with us, wrapped up to the eyes, and we did our best for him, and he sat
+until two o’clock in the morning, reviewing his success and developing
+his plans. I forget in detail what they were, but I have a general
+recollection that he was to begin with reviving the Drama, and to end
+with crushing it; inasmuch as his decease would leave it utterly bereft
+and without a chance or hope.
+
+Miserably I went to bed after all, and miserably thought of Estella, and
+miserably dreamed that my expectations were all cancelled, and that I
+had to give my hand in marriage to Herbert’s Clara, or play Hamlet to
+Miss Havisham’s Ghost, before twenty thousand people, without knowing
+twenty words of it.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXXII
+
+One day when I was busy with my books and Mr. Pocket, I received a note
+by the post, the mere outside of which threw me into a great flutter;
+for, though I had never seen the handwriting in which it was addressed,
+I divined whose hand it was. It had no set beginning, as Dear Mr. Pip,
+or Dear Pip, or Dear Sir, or Dear Anything, but ran thus:--
+
+“I am to come to London the day after to-morrow by the midday coach. I
+believe it was settled you should meet me? At all events Miss Havisham
+has that impression, and I write in obedience to it. She sends you her
+regard.
+
+“Yours, ESTELLA.”
+
+If there had been time, I should probably have ordered several suits
+of clothes for this occasion; but as there was not, I was fain to be
+content with those I had. My appetite vanished instantly, and I knew
+no peace or rest until the day arrived. Not that its arrival brought
+me either; for, then I was worse than ever, and began haunting the
+coach-office in Wood Street, Cheapside, before the coach had left the
+Blue Boar in our town. For all that I knew this perfectly well, I still
+felt as if it were not safe to let the coach-office be out of my sight
+longer than five minutes at a time; and in this condition of unreason I
+had performed the first half-hour of a watch of four or five hours, when
+Wemmick ran against me.
+
+“Halloa, Mr. Pip,” said he; “how do you do? I should hardly have thought
+this was your beat.”
+
+I explained that I was waiting to meet somebody who was coming up by
+coach, and I inquired after the Castle and the Aged.
+
+“Both flourishing thankye,” said Wemmick, “and particularly the Aged.
+He’s in wonderful feather. He’ll be eighty-two next birthday. I have
+a notion of firing eighty-two times, if the neighborhood shouldn’t
+complain, and that cannon of mine should prove equal to the pressure.
+However, this is not London talk. Where do you think I am going to?”
+
+“To the office?” said I, for he was tending in that direction.
+
+“Next thing to it,” returned Wemmick, “I am going to Newgate. We are in
+a banker’s-parcel case just at present, and I have been down the road
+taking a squint at the scene of action, and thereupon must have a word
+or two with our client.”
+
+“Did your client commit the robbery?” I asked.
+
+“Bless your soul and body, no,” answered Wemmick, very drily. “But he
+is accused of it. So might you or I be. Either of us might be accused of
+it, you know.”
+
+“Only neither of us is,” I remarked.
+
+“Yah!” said Wemmick, touching me on the breast with his forefinger;
+“you’re a deep one, Mr. Pip! Would you like to have a look at Newgate?
+Have you time to spare?”
+
+I had so much time to spare, that the proposal came as a relief,
+notwithstanding its irreconcilability with my latent desire to keep my
+eye on the coach-office. Muttering that I would make the inquiry whether
+I had time to walk with him, I went into the office, and ascertained
+from the clerk with the nicest precision and much to the trying of his
+temper, the earliest moment at which the coach could be expected,--which
+I knew beforehand, quite as well as he. I then rejoined Mr. Wemmick, and
+affecting to consult my watch, and to be surprised by the information I
+had received, accepted his offer.
+
+We were at Newgate in a few minutes, and we passed through the lodge
+where some fetters were hanging up on the bare walls among the prison
+rules, into the interior of the jail. At that time jails were much
+neglected, and the period of exaggerated reaction consequent on
+all public wrongdoing--and which is always its heaviest and longest
+punishment--was still far off. So, felons were not lodged and fed better
+than soldiers (to say nothing of paupers), and seldom set fire to their
+prisons with the excusable object of improving the flavor of their soup.
+It was visiting time when Wemmick took me in, and a potman was going his
+rounds with beer; and the prisoners, behind bars in yards, were buying
+beer, and talking to friends; and a frowzy, ugly, disorderly, depressing
+scene it was.
+
+It struck me that Wemmick walked among the prisoners much as a gardener
+might walk among his plants. This was first put into my head by his
+seeing a shoot that had come up in the night, and saying, “What, Captain
+Tom? Are you there? Ah, indeed!” and also, “Is that Black Bill behind
+the cistern? Why I didn’t look for you these two months; how do you find
+yourself?” Equally in his stopping at the bars and attending to
+anxious whisperers,--always singly,--Wemmick with his post-office in
+an immovable state, looked at them while in conference, as if he were
+taking particular notice of the advance they had made, since last
+observed, towards coming out in full blow at their trial.
+
+He was highly popular, and I found that he took the familiar department
+of Mr. Jaggers’s business; though something of the state of Mr. Jaggers
+hung about him too, forbidding approach beyond certain limits. His
+personal recognition of each successive client was comprised in a nod,
+and in his settling his hat a little easier on his head with both
+hands, and then tightening the post-office, and putting his hands in his
+pockets. In one or two instances there was a difficulty respecting the
+raising of fees, and then Mr. Wemmick, backing as far as possible from
+the insufficient money produced, said, “it’s no use, my boy. I’m only
+a subordinate. I can’t take it. Don’t go on in that way with a
+subordinate. If you are unable to make up your quantum, my boy, you had
+better address yourself to a principal; there are plenty of principals
+in the profession, you know, and what is not worth the while of one, may
+be worth the while of another; that’s my recommendation to you, speaking
+as a subordinate. Don’t try on useless measures. Why should you? Now,
+who’s next?”
+
+Thus, we walked through Wemmick’s greenhouse, until he turned to me and
+said, “Notice the man I shall shake hands with.” I should have done so,
+without the preparation, as he had shaken hands with no one yet.
+
+Almost as soon as he had spoken, a portly upright man (whom I can
+see now, as I write) in a well-worn olive-colored frock-coat, with a
+peculiar pallor overspreading the red in his complexion, and eyes that
+went wandering about when he tried to fix them, came up to a corner
+of the bars, and put his hand to his hat--which had a greasy and fatty
+surface like cold broth--with a half-serious and half-jocose military
+salute.
+
+“Colonel, to you!” said Wemmick; “how are you, Colonel?”
+
+“All right, Mr. Wemmick.”
+
+“Everything was done that could be done, but the evidence was too strong
+for us, Colonel.”
+
+“Yes, it was too strong, sir,--but I don’t care.”
+
+“No, no,” said Wemmick, coolly, “you don’t care.” Then, turning to me,
+“Served His Majesty this man. Was a soldier in the line and bought his
+discharge.”
+
+I said, “Indeed?” and the man’s eyes looked at me, and then looked over
+my head, and then looked all round me, and then he drew his hand across
+his lips and laughed.
+
+“I think I shall be out of this on Monday, sir,” he said to Wemmick.
+
+“Perhaps,” returned my friend, “but there’s no knowing.”
+
+“I am glad to have the chance of bidding you good-bye, Mr. Wemmick,” said
+the man, stretching out his hand between two bars.
+
+“Thankye,” said Wemmick, shaking hands with him. “Same to you, Colonel.”
+
+“If what I had upon me when taken had been real, Mr. Wemmick,” said the
+man, unwilling to let his hand go, “I should have asked the favor of
+your wearing another ring--in acknowledgment of your attentions.”
+
+“I’ll accept the will for the deed,” said Wemmick. “By the by; you were
+quite a pigeon-fancier.” The man looked up at the sky. “I am told you
+had a remarkable breed of tumblers. Could you commission any friend of
+yours to bring me a pair, if you’ve no further use for ‘em?”
+
+“It shall be done, sir.”
+
+“All right,” said Wemmick, “they shall be taken care of. Good afternoon,
+Colonel. Good-bye!” They shook hands again, and as we walked away Wemmick
+said to me, “A Coiner, a very good workman. The Recorder’s report is
+made to-day, and he is sure to be executed on Monday. Still you see, as
+far as it goes, a pair of pigeons are portable property all the same.”
+ With that, he looked back, and nodded at this dead plant, and then cast
+his eyes about him in walking out of the yard, as if he were considering
+what other pot would go best in its place.
+
+As we came out of the prison through the lodge, I found that the great
+importance of my guardian was appreciated by the turnkeys, no less
+than by those whom they held in charge. “Well, Mr. Wemmick,” said the
+turnkey, who kept us between the two studded and spiked lodge gates,
+and who carefully locked one before he unlocked the other, “what’s Mr.
+Jaggers going to do with that water-side murder? Is he going to make it
+manslaughter, or what’s he going to make of it?”
+
+“Why don’t you ask him?” returned Wemmick.
+
+“O yes, I dare say!” said the turnkey.
+
+“Now, that’s the way with them here, Mr. Pip,” remarked Wemmick, turning
+to me with his post-office elongated. “They don’t mind what they ask of
+me, the subordinate; but you’ll never catch ‘em asking any questions of
+my principal.”
+
+“Is this young gentleman one of the ‘prentices or articled ones of your
+office?” asked the turnkey, with a grin at Mr. Wemmick’s humor.
+
+“There he goes again, you see!” cried Wemmick, “I told you so! Asks
+another question of the subordinate before his first is dry! Well,
+supposing Mr. Pip is one of them?”
+
+“Why then,” said the turnkey, grinning again, “he knows what Mr. Jaggers
+is.”
+
+“Yah!” cried Wemmick, suddenly hitting out at the turnkey in a facetious
+way, “you’re dumb as one of your own keys when you have to do with my
+principal, you know you are. Let us out, you old fox, or I’ll get him to
+bring an action against you for false imprisonment.”
+
+The turnkey laughed, and gave us good day, and stood laughing at us over
+the spikes of the wicket when we descended the steps into the street.
+
+“Mind you, Mr. Pip,” said Wemmick, gravely in my ear, as he took my arm
+to be more confidential; “I don’t know that Mr. Jaggers does a better
+thing than the way in which he keeps himself so high. He’s always so
+high. His constant height is of a piece with his immense abilities. That
+Colonel durst no more take leave of him, than that turnkey durst ask him
+his intentions respecting a case. Then, between his height and them, he
+slips in his subordinate,--don’t you see?--and so he has ‘em, soul and
+body.”
+
+I was very much impressed, and not for the first time, by my guardian’s
+subtlety. To confess the truth, I very heartily wished, and not for the
+first time, that I had had some other guardian of minor abilities.
+
+Mr. Wemmick and I parted at the office in Little Britain, where
+suppliants for Mr. Jaggers’s notice were lingering about as usual, and I
+returned to my watch in the street of the coach-office, with some three
+hours on hand. I consumed the whole time in thinking how strange it
+was that I should be encompassed by all this taint of prison and crime;
+that, in my childhood out on our lonely marshes on a winter evening, I
+should have first encountered it; that, it should have reappeared on two
+occasions, starting out like a stain that was faded but not gone; that,
+it should in this new way pervade my fortune and advancement. While my
+mind was thus engaged, I thought of the beautiful young Estella, proud
+and refined, coming towards me, and I thought with absolute abhorrence
+of the contrast between the jail and her. I wished that Wemmick had not
+met me, or that I had not yielded to him and gone with him, so that,
+of all days in the year on this day, I might not have had Newgate in
+my breath and on my clothes. I beat the prison dust off my feet as I
+sauntered to and fro, and I shook it out of my dress, and I exhaled
+its air from my lungs. So contaminated did I feel, remembering who was
+coming, that the coach came quickly after all, and I was not yet free
+from the soiling consciousness of Mr. Wemmick’s conservatory, when I saw
+her face at the coach window and her hand waving to me.
+
+What was the nameless shadow which again in that one instant had passed?
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXXIII
+
+In her furred travelling-dress, Estella seemed more delicately beautiful
+than she had ever seemed yet, even in my eyes. Her manner was more
+winning than she had cared to let it be to me before, and I thought I
+saw Miss Havisham’s influence in the change.
+
+We stood in the Inn Yard while she pointed out her luggage to me, and
+when it was all collected I remembered--having forgotten everything but
+herself in the meanwhile--that I knew nothing of her destination.
+
+“I am going to Richmond,” she told me. “Our lesson is, that there are
+two Richmonds, one in Surrey and one in Yorkshire, and that mine is the
+Surrey Richmond. The distance is ten miles. I am to have a carriage, and
+you are to take me. This is my purse, and you are to pay my charges out
+of it. O, you must take the purse! We have no choice, you and I, but to
+obey our instructions. We are not free to follow our own devices, you
+and I.”
+
+As she looked at me in giving me the purse, I hoped there was an
+inner meaning in her words. She said them slightingly, but not with
+displeasure.
+
+“A carriage will have to be sent for, Estella. Will you rest here a
+little?”
+
+“Yes, I am to rest here a little, and I am to drink some tea, and you
+are to take care of me the while.”
+
+She drew her arm through mine, as if it must be done, and I requested a
+waiter who had been staring at the coach like a man who had never seen
+such a thing in his life, to show us a private sitting-room. Upon that,
+he pulled out a napkin, as if it were a magic clew without which he
+couldn’t find the way upstairs, and led us to the black hole of the
+establishment, fitted up with a diminishing mirror (quite a superfluous
+article, considering the hole’s proportions), an anchovy sauce-cruet,
+and somebody’s pattens. On my objecting to this retreat, he took us into
+another room with a dinner-table for thirty, and in the grate a scorched
+leaf of a copy-book under a bushel of coal-dust. Having looked at this
+extinct conflagration and shaken his head, he took my order; which,
+proving to be merely, “Some tea for the lady,” sent him out of the room
+in a very low state of mind.
+
+I was, and I am, sensible that the air of this chamber, in its strong
+combination of stable with soup-stock, might have led one to infer that
+the coaching department was not doing well, and that the enterprising
+proprietor was boiling down the horses for the refreshment department.
+Yet the room was all in all to me, Estella being in it. I thought that
+with her I could have been happy there for life. (I was not at all happy
+there at the time, observe, and I knew it well.)
+
+“Where are you going to, at Richmond?” I asked Estella.
+
+“I am going to live,” said she, “at a great expense, with a lady there,
+who has the power--or says she has--of taking me about, and introducing
+me, and showing people to me and showing me to people.”
+
+“I suppose you will be glad of variety and admiration?”
+
+“Yes, I suppose so.”
+
+She answered so carelessly, that I said, “You speak of yourself as if
+you were some one else.”
+
+“Where did you learn how I speak of others? Come, come,” said Estella,
+smiling delightfully, “you must not expect me to go to school to you; I
+must talk in my own way. How do you thrive with Mr. Pocket?”
+
+“I live quite pleasantly there; at least--” It appeared to me that I was
+losing a chance.
+
+“At least?” repeated Estella.
+
+“As pleasantly as I could anywhere, away from you.”
+
+“You silly boy,” said Estella, quite composedly, “how can you talk such
+nonsense? Your friend Mr. Matthew, I believe, is superior to the rest of
+his family?”
+
+“Very superior indeed. He is nobody’s enemy--”
+
+“Don’t add but his own,” interposed Estella, “for I hate that class of
+man. But he really is disinterested, and above small jealousy and spite,
+I have heard?”
+
+“I am sure I have every reason to say so.”
+
+“You have not every reason to say so of the rest of his people,” said
+Estella, nodding at me with an expression of face that was at once
+grave and rallying, “for they beset Miss Havisham with reports and
+insinuations to your disadvantage. They watch you, misrepresent you,
+write letters about you (anonymous sometimes), and you are the torment
+and the occupation of their lives. You can scarcely realize to yourself
+the hatred those people feel for you.”
+
+“They do me no harm, I hope?”
+
+Instead of answering, Estella burst out laughing. This was very singular
+to me, and I looked at her in considerable perplexity. When she left
+off--and she had not laughed languidly, but with real enjoyment--I said,
+in my diffident way with her,--
+
+“I hope I may suppose that you would not be amused if they did me any
+harm.”
+
+“No, no you may be sure of that,” said Estella. “You may be certain that
+I laugh because they fail. O, those people with Miss Havisham, and the
+tortures they undergo!” She laughed again, and even now when she had
+told me why, her laughter was very singular to me, for I could not
+doubt its being genuine, and yet it seemed too much for the occasion.
+I thought there must really be something more here than I knew; she saw
+the thought in my mind, and answered it.
+
+“It is not easy for even you.” said Estella, “to know what satisfaction
+it gives me to see those people thwarted, or what an enjoyable sense of
+the ridiculous I have when they are made ridiculous. For you were not
+brought up in that strange house from a mere baby. I was. You had not
+your little wits sharpened by their intriguing against you, suppressed
+and defenceless, under the mask of sympathy and pity and what not that
+is soft and soothing. I had. You did not gradually open your round
+childish eyes wider and wider to the discovery of that impostor of a
+woman who calculates her stores of peace of mind for when she wakes up
+in the night. I did.”
+
+It was no laughing matter with Estella now, nor was she summoning these
+remembrances from any shallow place. I would not have been the cause of
+that look of hers for all my expectations in a heap.
+
+“Two things I can tell you,” said Estella. “First, notwithstanding the
+proverb that constant dropping will wear away a stone, you may set
+your mind at rest that these people never will--never would, in hundred
+years--impair your ground with Miss Havisham, in any particular, great
+or small. Second, I am beholden to you as the cause of their being so
+busy and so mean in vain, and there is my hand upon it.”
+
+As she gave it to me playfully,--for her darker mood had been but
+Momentary,--I held it and put it to my lips. “You ridiculous boy,” said
+Estella, “will you never take warning? Or do you kiss my hand in the
+same spirit in which I once let you kiss my cheek?”
+
+“What spirit was that?” said I.
+
+“I must think a moment. A spirit of contempt for the fawners and
+plotters.”
+
+“If I say yes, may I kiss the cheek again?”
+
+“You should have asked before you touched the hand. But, yes, if you
+like.”
+
+I leaned down, and her calm face was like a statue’s. “Now,” said
+Estella, gliding away the instant I touched her cheek, “you are to take
+care that I have some tea, and you are to take me to Richmond.”
+
+Her reverting to this tone as if our association were forced upon
+us, and we were mere puppets, gave me pain; but everything in our
+intercourse did give me pain. Whatever her tone with me happened to be,
+I could put no trust in it, and build no hope on it; and yet I went on
+against trust and against hope. Why repeat it a thousand times? So it
+always was.
+
+I rang for the tea, and the waiter, reappearing with his magic clew,
+brought in by degrees some fifty adjuncts to that refreshment, but of
+tea not a glimpse. A teaboard, cups and saucers, plates, knives and
+forks (including carvers), spoons (various), saltcellars, a meek little
+muffin confined with the utmost precaution under a strong iron cover,
+Moses in the bulrushes typified by a soft bit of butter in a quantity of
+parsley, a pale loaf with a powdered head, two proof impressions of
+the bars of the kitchen fireplace on triangular bits of bread, and
+ultimately a fat family urn; which the waiter staggered in with,
+expressing in his countenance burden and suffering. After a prolonged
+absence at this stage of the entertainment, he at length came back with
+a casket of precious appearance containing twigs. These I steeped in hot
+water, and so from the whole of these appliances extracted one cup of I
+don’t know what for Estella.
+
+The bill paid, and the waiter remembered, and the ostler not forgotten,
+and the chambermaid taken into consideration,--in a word, the whole
+house bribed into a state of contempt and animosity, and Estella’s purse
+much lightened,--we got into our post-coach and drove away. Turning into
+Cheapside and rattling up Newgate Street, we were soon under the walls
+of which I was so ashamed.
+
+“What place is that?” Estella asked me.
+
+I made a foolish pretence of not at first recognizing it, and then
+told her. As she looked at it, and drew in her head again,
+murmuring, “Wretches!” I would not have confessed to my visit for any
+consideration.
+
+“Mr. Jaggers,” said I, by way of putting it neatly on somebody else,
+“has the reputation of being more in the secrets of that dismal place
+than any man in London.”
+
+“He is more in the secrets of every place, I think,” said Estella, in a
+low voice.
+
+“You have been accustomed to see him often, I suppose?”
+
+“I have been accustomed to see him at uncertain intervals, ever since
+I can remember. But I know him no better now, than I did before I could
+speak plainly. What is your own experience of him? Do you advance with
+him?”
+
+“Once habituated to his distrustful manner,” said I, “I have done very
+well.”
+
+“Are you intimate?”
+
+“I have dined with him at his private house.”
+
+“I fancy,” said Estella, shrinking “that must be a curious place.”
+
+“It is a curious place.”
+
+I should have been chary of discussing my guardian too freely even with
+her; but I should have gone on with the subject so far as to describe
+the dinner in Gerrard Street, if we had not then come into a sudden
+glare of gas. It seemed, while it lasted, to be all alight and alive
+with that inexplicable feeling I had had before; and when we were out of
+it, I was as much dazed for a few moments as if I had been in lightning.
+
+So we fell into other talk, and it was principally about the way by
+which we were travelling, and about what parts of London lay on this
+side of it, and what on that. The great city was almost new to her, she
+told me, for she had never left Miss Havisham’s neighborhood until she
+had gone to France, and she had merely passed through London then in
+going and returning. I asked her if my guardian had any charge of her
+while she remained here? To that she emphatically said “God forbid!” and
+no more.
+
+It was impossible for me to avoid seeing that she cared to attract me;
+that she made herself winning, and would have won me even if the task
+had needed pains. Yet this made me none the happier, for even if she had
+not taken that tone of our being disposed of by others, I should have
+felt that she held my heart in her hand because she wilfully chose to do
+it, and not because it would have wrung any tenderness in her to crush
+it and throw it away.
+
+When we passed through Hammersmith, I showed her where Mr. Matthew
+Pocket lived, and said it was no great way from Richmond, and that I
+hoped I should see her sometimes.
+
+“O yes, you are to see me; you are to come when you think proper; you
+are to be mentioned to the family; indeed you are already mentioned.”
+
+I inquired was it a large household she was going to be a member of?
+
+“No; there are only two; mother and daughter. The mother is a lady of
+some station, though not averse to increasing her income.”
+
+“I wonder Miss Havisham could part with you again so soon.”
+
+“It is a part of Miss Havisham’s plans for me, Pip,” said Estella, with
+a sigh, as if she were tired; “I am to write to her constantly and see
+her regularly and report how I go on,--I and the jewels,--for they are
+nearly all mine now.”
+
+It was the first time she had ever called me by my name. Of course she
+did so purposely, and knew that I should treasure it up.
+
+We came to Richmond all too soon, and our destination there was a house
+by the green,--a staid old house, where hoops and powder and patches,
+embroidered coats, rolled stockings, ruffles and swords, had had their
+court days many a time. Some ancient trees before the house were still
+cut into fashions as formal and unnatural as the hoops and wigs and
+stiff skirts; but their own allotted places in the great procession of
+the dead were not far off, and they would soon drop into them and go the
+silent way of the rest.
+
+A bell with an old voice--which I dare say in its time had often said
+to the house, Here is the green farthingale, Here is the diamond-hilted
+sword, Here are the shoes with red heels and the blue solitaire--sounded
+gravely in the moonlight, and two cherry-colored maids came fluttering
+out to receive Estella. The doorway soon absorbed her boxes, and she
+gave me her hand and a smile, and said good night, and was absorbed
+likewise. And still I stood looking at the house, thinking how happy I
+should be if I lived there with her, and knowing that I never was happy
+with her, but always miserable.
+
+I got into the carriage to be taken back to Hammersmith, and I got in
+with a bad heart-ache, and I got out with a worse heart-ache. At our
+own door, I found little Jane Pocket coming home from a little party
+escorted by her little lover; and I envied her little lover, in spite of
+his being subject to Flopson.
+
+Mr. Pocket was out lecturing; for, he was a most delightful lecturer on
+domestic economy, and his treatises on the management of children and
+servants were considered the very best text-books on those themes. But
+Mrs. Pocket was at home, and was in a little difficulty, on account of
+the baby’s having been accommodated with a needle-case to keep him quiet
+during the unaccountable absence (with a relative in the Foot Guards)
+of Millers. And more needles were missing than it could be regarded
+as quite wholesome for a patient of such tender years either to apply
+externally or to take as a tonic.
+
+Mr. Pocket being justly celebrated for giving most excellent practical
+advice, and for having a clear and sound perception of things and a
+highly judicious mind, I had some notion in my heart-ache of begging him
+to accept my confidence. But happening to look up at Mrs. Pocket as she
+sat reading her book of dignities after prescribing Bed as a sovereign
+remedy for baby, I thought--Well--No, I wouldn’t.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXXIV
+
+As I had grown accustomed to my expectations, I had insensibly begun to
+notice their effect upon myself and those around me. Their influence on
+my own character I disguised from my recognition as much as possible,
+but I knew very well that it was not all good. I lived in a state of
+chronic uneasiness respecting my behavior to Joe. My conscience was not
+by any means comfortable about Biddy. When I woke up in the night,--like
+Camilla,--I used to think, with a weariness on my spirits, that I should
+have been happier and better if I had never seen Miss Havisham’s face,
+and had risen to manhood content to be partners with Joe in the honest
+old forge. Many a time of an evening, when I sat alone looking at the
+fire, I thought, after all there was no fire like the forge fire and the
+kitchen fire at home.
+
+Yet Estella was so inseparable from all my restlessness and disquiet of
+mind, that I really fell into confusion as to the limits of my own part
+in its production. That is to say, supposing I had had no expectations,
+and yet had had Estella to think of, I could not make out to my
+satisfaction that I should have done much better. Now, concerning the
+influence of my position on others, I was in no such difficulty, and so
+I perceived--though dimly enough perhaps--that it was not beneficial
+to anybody, and, above all, that it was not beneficial to Herbert.
+My lavish habits led his easy nature into expenses that he could not
+afford, corrupted the simplicity of his life, and disturbed his peace
+with anxieties and regrets. I was not at all remorseful for having
+unwittingly set those other branches of the Pocket family to the poor
+arts they practised; because such littlenesses were their natural
+bent, and would have been evoked by anybody else, if I had left them
+slumbering. But Herbert’s was a very different case, and it often caused
+me a twinge to think that I had done him evil service in crowding his
+sparely furnished chambers with incongruous upholstery work, and placing
+the Canary-breasted Avenger at his disposal.
+
+So now, as an infallible way of making little ease great ease, I began
+to contract a quantity of debt. I could hardly begin but Herbert
+must begin too, so he soon followed. At Startop’s suggestion, we put
+ourselves down for election into a club called The Finches of the Grove:
+the object of which institution I have never divined, if it were not
+that the members should dine expensively once a fortnight, to quarrel
+among themselves as much as possible after dinner, and to cause six
+waiters to get drunk on the stairs. I know that these gratifying social
+ends were so invariably accomplished, that Herbert and I understood
+nothing else to be referred to in the first standing toast of the
+society: which ran “Gentlemen, may the present promotion of good feeling
+ever reign predominant among the Finches of the Grove.”
+
+The Finches spent their money foolishly (the Hotel we dined at was
+in Covent Garden), and the first Finch I saw when I had the honor of
+joining the Grove was Bentley Drummle, at that time floundering about
+town in a cab of his own, and doing a great deal of damage to the posts
+at the street corners. Occasionally, he shot himself out of his equipage
+headforemost over the apron; and I saw him on one occasion deliver
+himself at the door of the Grove in this unintentional way--like coals.
+But here I anticipate a little, for I was not a Finch, and could not be,
+according to the sacred laws of the society, until I came of age.
+
+In my confidence in my own resources, I would willingly have taken
+Herbert’s expenses on myself; but Herbert was proud, and I could make
+no such proposal to him. So he got into difficulties in every direction,
+and continued to look about him. When we gradually fell into keeping
+late hours and late company, I noticed that he looked about him with a
+desponding eye at breakfast-time; that he began to look about him more
+hopefully about mid-day; that he drooped when he came into dinner;
+that he seemed to descry Capital in the distance, rather clearly, after
+dinner; that he all but realized Capital towards midnight; and that at
+about two o’clock in the morning, he became so deeply despondent again
+as to talk of buying a rifle and going to America, with a general
+purpose of compelling buffaloes to make his fortune.
+
+I was usually at Hammersmith about half the week, and when I was at
+Hammersmith I haunted Richmond, whereof separately by and by. Herbert
+would often come to Hammersmith when I was there, and I think at those
+seasons his father would occasionally have some passing perception that
+the opening he was looking for, had not appeared yet. But in the general
+tumbling up of the family, his tumbling out in life somewhere, was
+a thing to transact itself somehow. In the meantime Mr. Pocket grew
+grayer, and tried oftener to lift himself out of his perplexities by the
+hair. While Mrs. Pocket tripped up the family with her footstool, read
+her book of dignities, lost her pocket-handkerchief, told us about her
+grandpapa, and taught the young idea how to shoot, by shooting it into
+bed whenever it attracted her notice.
+
+As I am now generalizing a period of my life with the object of clearing
+my way before me, I can scarcely do so better than by at once completing
+the description of our usual manners and customs at Barnard’s Inn.
+
+We spent as much money as we could, and got as little for it as people
+could make up their minds to give us. We were always more or less
+miserable, and most of our acquaintance were in the same condition.
+There was a gay fiction among us that we were constantly enjoying
+ourselves, and a skeleton truth that we never did. To the best of my
+belief, our case was in the last aspect a rather common one.
+
+Every morning, with an air ever new, Herbert went into the City to look
+about him. I often paid him a visit in the dark back-room in which
+he consorted with an ink-jar, a hat-peg, a coal-box, a string-box, an
+almanac, a desk and stool, and a ruler; and I do not remember that I
+ever saw him do anything else but look about him. If we all did what
+we undertake to do, as faithfully as Herbert did, we might live in a
+Republic of the Virtues. He had nothing else to do, poor fellow, except
+at a certain hour of every afternoon to “go to Lloyd’s”--in observance
+of a ceremony of seeing his principal, I think. He never did anything
+else in connection with Lloyd’s that I could find out, except come back
+again. When he felt his case unusually serious, and that he positively
+must find an opening, he would go on ‘Change at a busy time, and walk in
+and out, in a kind of gloomy country dance figure, among the assembled
+magnates. “For,” says Herbert to me, coming home to dinner on one
+of those special occasions, “I find the truth to be, Handel, that an
+opening won’t come to one, but one must go to it,--so I have been.”
+
+If we had been less attached to one another, I think we must have hated
+one another regularly every morning. I detested the chambers beyond
+expression at that period of repentance, and could not endure the
+sight of the Avenger’s livery; which had a more expensive and a
+less remunerative appearance then than at any other time in the
+four-and-twenty hours. As we got more and more into debt, breakfast
+became a hollower and hollower form, and, being on one occasion at
+breakfast-time threatened (by letter) with legal proceedings, “not
+unwholly unconnected,” as my local paper might put it, “with jewelery,”
+ I went so far as to seize the Avenger by his blue collar and shake
+him off his feet,--so that he was actually in the air, like a booted
+Cupid,--for presuming to suppose that we wanted a roll.
+
+At certain times--meaning at uncertain times, for they depended on our
+humor--I would say to Herbert, as if it were a remarkable discovery,--
+
+“My dear Herbert, we are getting on badly.”
+
+“My dear Handel,” Herbert would say to me, in all sincerity, “if you will
+believe me, those very words were on my lips, by a strange coincidence.”
+
+“Then, Herbert,” I would respond, “let us look into our affairs.”
+
+We always derived profound satisfaction from making an appointment for
+this purpose. I always thought this was business, this was the way to
+confront the thing, this was the way to take the foe by the throat. And
+I know Herbert thought so too.
+
+We ordered something rather special for dinner, with a bottle of
+something similarly out of the common way, in order that our minds might
+be fortified for the occasion, and we might come well up to the mark.
+Dinner over, we produced a bundle of pens, a copious supply of ink, and
+a goodly show of writing and blotting paper. For there was something
+very comfortable in having plenty of stationery.
+
+I would then take a sheet of paper, and write across the top of it, in a
+neat hand, the heading, “Memorandum of Pip’s debts”; with Barnard’s Inn
+and the date very carefully added. Herbert would also take a sheet of
+paper, and write across it with similar formalities, “Memorandum of
+Herbert’s debts.”
+
+Each of us would then refer to a confused heap of papers at his side,
+which had been thrown into drawers, worn into holes in pockets, half
+burnt in lighting candles, stuck for weeks into the looking-glass, and
+otherwise damaged. The sound of our pens going refreshed us exceedingly,
+insomuch that I sometimes found it difficult to distinguish between this
+edifying business proceeding and actually paying the money. In point of
+meritorious character, the two things seemed about equal.
+
+When we had written a little while, I would ask Herbert how he got on?
+Herbert probably would have been scratching his head in a most rueful
+manner at the sight of his accumulating figures.
+
+“They are mounting up, Handel,” Herbert would say; “upon my life, they
+are mounting up.”
+
+“Be firm, Herbert,” I would retort, plying my own pen with great
+assiduity. “Look the thing in the face. Look into your affairs. Stare
+them out of countenance.”
+
+“So I would, Handel, only they are staring me out of countenance.”
+
+However, my determined manner would have its effect, and Herbert would
+fall to work again. After a time he would give up once more, on the plea
+that he had not got Cobbs’s bill, or Lobbs’s, or Nobbs’s, as the case
+might be.
+
+“Then, Herbert, estimate; estimate it in round numbers, and put it
+down.”
+
+“What a fellow of resource you are!” my friend would reply, with
+admiration. “Really your business powers are very remarkable.”
+
+I thought so too. I established with myself, on these occasions,
+the reputation of a first-rate man of business,--prompt, decisive,
+energetic, clear, cool-headed. When I had got all my responsibilities
+down upon my list, I compared each with the bill, and ticked it off. My
+self-approval when I ticked an entry was quite a luxurious sensation.
+When I had no more ticks to make, I folded all my bills up uniformly,
+docketed each on the back, and tied the whole into a symmetrical
+bundle. Then I did the same for Herbert (who modestly said he had not my
+administrative genius), and felt that I had brought his affairs into a
+focus for him.
+
+My business habits had one other bright feature, which I called “leaving
+a Margin.” For example; supposing Herbert’s debts to be one hundred and
+sixty-four pounds four-and-twopence, I would say, “Leave a margin, and
+put them down at two hundred.” Or, supposing my own to be four times as
+much, I would leave a margin, and put them down at seven hundred. I had
+the highest opinion of the wisdom of this same Margin, but I am bound
+to acknowledge that on looking back, I deem it to have been an expensive
+device. For, we always ran into new debt immediately, to the full extent
+of the margin, and sometimes, in the sense of freedom and solvency it
+imparted, got pretty far on into another margin.
+
+But there was a calm, a rest, a virtuous hush, consequent on these
+examinations of our affairs that gave me, for the time, an admirable
+opinion of myself. Soothed by my exertions, my method, and Herbert’s
+compliments, I would sit with his symmetrical bundle and my own on the
+table before me among the stationary, and feel like a Bank of some sort,
+rather than a private individual.
+
+We shut our outer door on these solemn occasions, in order that we might
+not be interrupted. I had fallen into my serene state one evening, when
+we heard a letter dropped through the slit in the said door, and fall on
+the ground. “It’s for you, Handel,” said Herbert, going out and coming
+back with it, “and I hope there is nothing the matter.” This was in
+allusion to its heavy black seal and border.
+
+The letter was signed Trabb & Co., and its contents were simply, that
+I was an honored sir, and that they begged to inform me that Mrs. J.
+Gargery had departed this life on Monday last at twenty minutes past six
+in the evening, and that my attendance was requested at the interment on
+Monday next at three o’clock in the afternoon.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXXV
+
+It was the first time that a grave had opened in my road of life, and
+the gap it made in the smooth ground was wonderful. The figure of my
+sister in her chair by the kitchen fire, haunted me night and day. That
+the place could possibly be, without her, was something my mind seemed
+unable to compass; and whereas she had seldom or never been in my
+thoughts of late, I had now the strangest ideas that she was coming
+towards me in the street, or that she would presently knock at the door.
+In my rooms too, with which she had never been at all associated, there
+was at once the blankness of death and a perpetual suggestion of the
+sound of her voice or the turn of her face or figure, as if she were
+still alive and had been often there.
+
+Whatever my fortunes might have been, I could scarcely have recalled my
+sister with much tenderness. But I suppose there is a shock of regret
+which may exist without much tenderness. Under its influence (and
+perhaps to make up for the want of the softer feeling) I was seized with
+a violent indignation against the assailant from whom she had suffered
+so much; and I felt that on sufficient proof I could have revengefully
+pursued Orlick, or any one else, to the last extremity.
+
+Having written to Joe, to offer him consolation, and to assure him
+that I would come to the funeral, I passed the intermediate days in
+the curious state of mind I have glanced at. I went down early in the
+morning, and alighted at the Blue Boar in good time to walk over to the
+forge.
+
+It was fine summer weather again, and, as I walked along, the times
+when I was a little helpless creature, and my sister did not spare me,
+vividly returned. But they returned with a gentle tone upon them that
+softened even the edge of Tickler. For now, the very breath of the beans
+and clover whispered to my heart that the day must come when it would
+be well for my memory that others walking in the sunshine should be
+softened as they thought of me.
+
+At last I came within sight of the house, and saw that Trabb and Co. had
+put in a funereal execution and taken possession. Two dismally absurd
+persons, each ostentatiously exhibiting a crutch done up in a black
+bandage,--as if that instrument could possibly communicate any comfort
+to anybody,--were posted at the front door; and in one of them I
+recognized a postboy discharged from the Boar for turning a young couple
+into a sawpit on their bridal morning, in consequence of intoxication
+rendering it necessary for him to ride his horse clasped round the neck
+with both arms. All the children of the village, and most of the women,
+were admiring these sable warders and the closed windows of the house
+and forge; and as I came up, one of the two warders (the postboy)
+knocked at the door,--implying that I was far too much exhausted by
+grief to have strength remaining to knock for myself.
+
+Another sable warder (a carpenter, who had once eaten two geese for a
+wager) opened the door, and showed me into the best parlor. Here, Mr.
+Trabb had taken unto himself the best table, and had got all the leaves
+up, and was holding a kind of black Bazaar, with the aid of a quantity
+of black pins. At the moment of my arrival, he had just finished putting
+somebody’s hat into black long-clothes, like an African baby; so he held
+out his hand for mine. But I, misled by the action, and confused by the
+occasion, shook hands with him with every testimony of warm affection.
+
+Poor dear Joe, entangled in a little black cloak tied in a large bow
+under his chin, was seated apart at the upper end of the room; where,
+as chief mourner, he had evidently been stationed by Trabb. When I bent
+down and said to him, “Dear Joe, how are you?” he said, “Pip, old chap,
+you knowed her when she were a fine figure of a--” and clasped my hand
+and said no more.
+
+Biddy, looking very neat and modest in her black dress, went quietly
+here and there, and was very helpful. When I had spoken to Biddy, as
+I thought it not a time for talking I went and sat down near Joe, and
+there began to wonder in what part of the house it--she--my sister--was.
+The air of the parlor being faint with the smell of sweet-cake, I looked
+about for the table of refreshments; it was scarcely visible until one
+had got accustomed to the gloom, but there was a cut-up plum cake upon
+it, and there were cut-up oranges, and sandwiches, and biscuits, and two
+decanters that I knew very well as ornaments, but had never seen used
+in all my life; one full of port, and one of sherry. Standing at this
+table, I became conscious of the servile Pumblechook in a black cloak
+and several yards of hatband, who was alternately stuffing himself,
+and making obsequious movements to catch my attention. The moment he
+succeeded, he came over to me (breathing sherry and crumbs), and said
+in a subdued voice, “May I, dear sir?” and did. I then descried Mr. and
+Mrs. Hubble; the last-named in a decent speechless paroxysm in a corner.
+We were all going to “follow,” and were all in course of being tied up
+separately (by Trabb) into ridiculous bundles.
+
+“Which I meantersay, Pip,” Joe whispered me, as we were being what Mr.
+Trabb called “formed” in the parlor, two and two,--and it was dreadfully
+like a preparation for some grim kind of dance; “which I meantersay,
+sir, as I would in preference have carried her to the church myself,
+along with three or four friendly ones wot come to it with willing harts
+and arms, but it were considered wot the neighbors would look down on
+such and would be of opinions as it were wanting in respect.”
+
+“Pocket-handkerchiefs out, all!” cried Mr. Trabb at this point, in a
+depressed business-like voice. “Pocket-handkerchiefs out! We are ready!”
+
+So we all put our pocket-handkerchiefs to our faces, as if our
+noses were bleeding, and filed out two and two; Joe and I; Biddy and
+Pumblechook; Mr. and Mrs. Hubble. The remains of my poor sister had been
+brought round by the kitchen door, and, it being a point of Undertaking
+ceremony that the six bearers must be stifled and blinded under a
+horrible black velvet housing with a white border, the whole looked like
+a blind monster with twelve human legs, shuffling and blundering along,
+under the guidance of two keepers,--the postboy and his comrade.
+
+The neighborhood, however, highly approved of these arrangements, and we
+were much admired as we went through the village; the more youthful and
+vigorous part of the community making dashes now and then to cut us off,
+and lying in wait to intercept us at points of vantage. At such times
+the more exuberant among them called out in an excited manner on our
+emergence round some corner of expectancy, “Here they come!” “Here they
+are!” and we were all but cheered. In this progress I was much annoyed
+by the abject Pumblechook, who, being behind me, persisted all the way
+as a delicate attention in arranging my streaming hatband, and smoothing
+my cloak. My thoughts were further distracted by the excessive pride of
+Mr. and Mrs. Hubble, who were surpassingly conceited and vainglorious in
+being members of so distinguished a procession.
+
+And now the range of marshes lay clear before us, with the sails of the
+ships on the river growing out of it; and we went into the churchyard,
+close to the graves of my unknown parents, Philip Pirrip, late of this
+parish, and Also Georgiana, Wife of the Above. And there, my sister was
+laid quietly in the earth, while the larks sang high above it, and the
+light wind strewed it with beautiful shadows of clouds and trees.
+
+Of the conduct of the worldly minded Pumblechook while this was doing,
+I desire to say no more than it was all addressed to me; and that even
+when those noble passages were read which remind humanity how it brought
+nothing into the world and can take nothing out, and how it fleeth like
+a shadow and never continueth long in one stay, I heard him cough a
+reservation of the case of a young gentleman who came unexpectedly into
+large property. When we got back, he had the hardihood to tell me that
+he wished my sister could have known I had done her so much honor, and
+to hint that she would have considered it reasonably purchased at the
+price of her death. After that, he drank all the rest of the sherry,
+and Mr. Hubble drank the port, and the two talked (which I have since
+observed to be customary in such cases) as if they were of quite another
+race from the deceased, and were notoriously immortal. Finally, he went
+away with Mr. and Mrs. Hubble,--to make an evening of it, I felt sure,
+and to tell the Jolly Bargemen that he was the founder of my fortunes
+and my earliest benefactor.
+
+When they were all gone, and when Trabb and his men--but not his Boy; I
+looked for him--had crammed their mummery into bags, and were gone too,
+the house felt wholesomer. Soon afterwards, Biddy, Joe, and I, had a
+cold dinner together; but we dined in the best parlor, not in the old
+kitchen, and Joe was so exceedingly particular what he did with his
+knife and fork and the saltcellar and what not, that there was great
+restraint upon us. But after dinner, when I made him take his pipe,
+and when I had loitered with him about the forge, and when we sat down
+together on the great block of stone outside it, we got on better. I
+noticed that after the funeral Joe changed his clothes so far, as to
+make a compromise between his Sunday dress and working dress; in which
+the dear fellow looked natural, and like the Man he was.
+
+He was very much pleased by my asking if I might sleep in my own little
+room, and I was pleased too; for I felt that I had done rather a great
+thing in making the request. When the shadows of evening were closing
+in, I took an opportunity of getting into the garden with Biddy for a
+little talk.
+
+“Biddy,” said I, “I think you might have written to me about these sad
+matters.”
+
+“Do you, Mr. Pip?” said Biddy. “I should have written if I had thought
+that.”
+
+“Don’t suppose that I mean to be unkind, Biddy, when I say I consider
+that you ought to have thought that.”
+
+“Do you, Mr. Pip?”
+
+She was so quiet, and had such an orderly, good, and pretty way with
+her, that I did not like the thought of making her cry again. After
+looking a little at her downcast eyes as she walked beside me, I gave up
+that point.
+
+“I suppose it will be difficult for you to remain here now, Biddy dear?”
+
+“Oh! I can’t do so, Mr. Pip,” said Biddy, in a tone of regret but still
+of quiet conviction. “I have been speaking to Mrs. Hubble, and I am
+going to her to-morrow. I hope we shall be able to take some care of Mr.
+Gargery, together, until he settles down.”
+
+“How are you going to live, Biddy? If you want any mo--”
+
+“How am I going to live?” repeated Biddy, striking in, with a momentary
+flush upon her face. “I’ll tell you, Mr. Pip. I am going to try to get
+the place of mistress in the new school nearly finished here. I can be
+well recommended by all the neighbors, and I hope I can be industrious
+and patient, and teach myself while I teach others. You know, Mr. Pip,”
+ pursued Biddy, with a smile, as she raised her eyes to my face, “the new
+schools are not like the old, but I learnt a good deal from you after
+that time, and have had time since then to improve.”
+
+“I think you would always improve, Biddy, under any circumstances.”
+
+“Ah! Except in my bad side of human nature,” murmured Biddy.
+
+It was not so much a reproach as an irresistible thinking aloud. Well!
+I thought I would give up that point too. So, I walked a little further
+with Biddy, looking silently at her downcast eyes.
+
+“I have not heard the particulars of my sister’s death, Biddy.”
+
+“They are very slight, poor thing. She had been in one of her bad
+states--though they had got better of late, rather than worse--for four
+days, when she came out of it in the evening, just at tea-time, and said
+quite plainly, ‘Joe.’ As she had never said any word for a long while, I
+ran and fetched in Mr. Gargery from the forge. She made signs to me that
+she wanted him to sit down close to her, and wanted me to put her arms
+round his neck. So I put them round his neck, and she laid her head down
+on his shoulder quite content and satisfied. And so she presently said
+‘Joe’ again, and once ‘Pardon,’ and once ‘Pip.’ And so she never lifted
+her head up any more, and it was just an hour later when we laid it down
+on her own bed, because we found she was gone.”
+
+Biddy cried; the darkening garden, and the lane, and the stars that were
+coming out, were blurred in my own sight.
+
+“Nothing was ever discovered, Biddy?”
+
+“Nothing.”
+
+“Do you know what is become of Orlick?”
+
+“I should think from the color of his clothes that he is working in the
+quarries.”
+
+“Of course you have seen him then?--Why are you looking at that dark
+tree in the lane?”
+
+“I saw him there, on the night she died.”
+
+“That was not the last time either, Biddy?”
+
+“No; I have seen him there, since we have been walking here.--It is of
+no use,” said Biddy, laying her hand upon my arm, as I was for running
+out, “you know I would not deceive you; he was not there a minute, and
+he is gone.”
+
+It revived my utmost indignation to find that she was still pursued by
+this fellow, and I felt inveterate against him. I told her so, and told
+her that I would spend any money or take any pains to drive him out of
+that country. By degrees she led me into more temperate talk, and she
+told me how Joe loved me, and how Joe never complained of anything,--she
+didn’t say, of me; she had no need; I knew what she meant,--but ever did
+his duty in his way of life, with a strong hand, a quiet tongue, and a
+gentle heart.
+
+“Indeed, it would be hard to say too much for him,” said I; “and Biddy,
+we must often speak of these things, for of course I shall be often down
+here now. I am not going to leave poor Joe alone.”
+
+Biddy said never a single word.
+
+“Biddy, don’t you hear me?”
+
+“Yes, Mr. Pip.”
+
+“Not to mention your calling me Mr. Pip,--which appears to me to be in
+bad taste, Biddy,--what do you mean?”
+
+“What do I mean?” asked Biddy, timidly.
+
+“Biddy,” said I, in a virtuously self-asserting manner, “I must request
+to know what you mean by this?”
+
+“By this?” said Biddy.
+
+“Now, don’t echo,” I retorted. “You used not to echo, Biddy.”
+
+“Used not!” said Biddy. “O Mr. Pip! Used!”
+
+Well! I rather thought I would give up that point too. After another
+silent turn in the garden, I fell back on the main position.
+
+“Biddy,” said I, “I made a remark respecting my coming down here often,
+to see Joe, which you received with a marked silence. Have the goodness,
+Biddy, to tell me why.”
+
+“Are you quite sure, then, that you WILL come to see him often?” asked
+Biddy, stopping in the narrow garden walk, and looking at me under the
+stars with a clear and honest eye.
+
+“O dear me!” said I, as if I found myself compelled to give up Biddy in
+despair. “This really is a very bad side of human nature! Don’t say any
+more, if you please, Biddy. This shocks me very much.”
+
+For which cogent reason I kept Biddy at a distance during supper, and
+when I went up to my own old little room, took as stately a leave of her
+as I could, in my murmuring soul, deem reconcilable with the churchyard
+and the event of the day. As often as I was restless in the night, and
+that was every quarter of an hour, I reflected what an unkindness, what
+an injury, what an injustice, Biddy had done me.
+
+Early in the morning I was to go. Early in the morning I was out, and
+looking in, unseen, at one of the wooden windows of the forge. There
+I stood, for minutes, looking at Joe, already at work with a glow of
+health and strength upon his face that made it show as if the bright sun
+of the life in store for him were shining on it.
+
+“Good-bye, dear Joe!--No, don’t wipe it off--for God’s sake, give me your
+blackened hand!--I shall be down soon and often.”
+
+“Never too soon, sir,” said Joe, “and never too often, Pip!”
+
+Biddy was waiting for me at the kitchen door, with a mug of new milk and
+a crust of bread. “Biddy,” said I, when I gave her my hand at parting,
+“I am not angry, but I am hurt.”
+
+“No, don’t be hurt,” she pleaded quite pathetically; “let only me be
+hurt, if I have been ungenerous.”
+
+Once more, the mists were rising as I walked away. If they disclosed to
+me, as I suspect they did, that I should not come back, and that Biddy
+was quite right, all I can say is,--they were quite right too.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXXVI
+
+Herbert and I went on from bad to worse, in the way of increasing our
+debts, looking into our affairs, leaving Margins, and the like exemplary
+transactions; and Time went on, whether or no, as he has a way of doing;
+and I came of age,--in fulfilment of Herbert’s prediction, that I should
+do so before I knew where I was.
+
+Herbert himself had come of age eight months before me. As he had
+nothing else than his majority to come into, the event did not make a
+profound sensation in Barnard’s Inn. But we had looked forward to
+my one-and-twentieth birthday, with a crowd of speculations and
+anticipations, for we had both considered that my guardian could hardly
+help saying something definite on that occasion.
+
+I had taken care to have it well understood in Little Britain when my
+birthday was. On the day before it, I received an official note from
+Wemmick, informing me that Mr. Jaggers would be glad if I would call
+upon him at five in the afternoon of the auspicious day. This convinced
+us that something great was to happen, and threw me into an unusual
+flutter when I repaired to my guardian’s office, a model of punctuality.
+
+In the outer office Wemmick offered me his congratulations, and
+incidentally rubbed the side of his nose with a folded piece of
+tissue-paper that I liked the look of. But he said nothing respecting
+it, and motioned me with a nod into my guardian’s room. It was November,
+and my guardian was standing before his fire leaning his back against
+the chimney-piece, with his hands under his coattails.
+
+“Well, Pip,” said he, “I must call you Mr. Pip to-day. Congratulations,
+Mr. Pip.”
+
+We shook hands,--he was always a remarkably short shaker,--and I thanked
+him.
+
+“Take a chair, Mr. Pip,” said my guardian.
+
+As I sat down, and he preserved his attitude and bent his brows at his
+boots, I felt at a disadvantage, which reminded me of that old time when
+I had been put upon a tombstone. The two ghastly casts on the shelf
+were not far from him, and their expression was as if they were making a
+stupid apoplectic attempt to attend to the conversation.
+
+“Now my young friend,” my guardian began, as if I were a witness in the
+box, “I am going to have a word or two with you.”
+
+“If you please, sir.”
+
+“What do you suppose,” said Mr. Jaggers, bending forward to look at the
+ground, and then throwing his head back to look at the ceiling,--“what
+do you suppose you are living at the rate of?”
+
+“At the rate of, sir?”
+
+“At,” repeated Mr. Jaggers, still looking at the ceiling,
+“the--rate--of?” And then looked all round the room, and paused with his
+pocket-handkerchief in his hand, half-way to his nose.
+
+I had looked into my affairs so often, that I had thoroughly destroyed
+any slight notion I might ever have had of their bearings. Reluctantly,
+I confessed myself quite unable to answer the question. This reply
+seemed agreeable to Mr. Jaggers, who said, “I thought so!” and blew his
+nose with an air of satisfaction.
+
+“Now, I have asked you a question, my friend,” said Mr. Jaggers. “Have
+you anything to ask me?”
+
+“Of course it would be a great relief to me to ask you several
+questions, sir; but I remember your prohibition.”
+
+“Ask one,” said Mr. Jaggers.
+
+“Is my benefactor to be made known to me to-day?”
+
+“No. Ask another.”
+
+“Is that confidence to be imparted to me soon?”
+
+“Waive that, a moment,” said Mr. Jaggers, “and ask another.”
+
+I looked about me, but there appeared to be now no possible escape from
+the inquiry, “Have-I--anything to receive, sir?” On that, Mr. Jaggers
+said, triumphantly, “I thought we should come to it!” and called to
+Wemmick to give him that piece of paper. Wemmick appeared, handed it in,
+and disappeared.
+
+“Now, Mr. Pip,” said Mr. Jaggers, “attend, if you please. You have been
+drawing pretty freely here; your name occurs pretty often in Wemmick’s
+cash-book; but you are in debt, of course?”
+
+“I am afraid I must say yes, sir.”
+
+“You know you must say yes; don’t you?” said Mr. Jaggers.
+
+“Yes, sir.”
+
+“I don’t ask you what you owe, because you don’t know; and if you did
+know, you wouldn’t tell me; you would say less. Yes, yes, my friend,”
+ cried Mr. Jaggers, waving his forefinger to stop me as I made a show
+of protesting: “it’s likely enough that you think you wouldn’t, but
+you would. You’ll excuse me, but I know better than you. Now, take this
+piece of paper in your hand. You have got it? Very good. Now, unfold it
+and tell me what it is.”
+
+“This is a bank-note,” said I, “for five hundred pounds.”
+
+“That is a bank-note,” repeated Mr. Jaggers, “for five hundred pounds.
+And a very handsome sum of money too, I think. You consider it so?”
+
+“How could I do otherwise!”
+
+“Ah! But answer the question,” said Mr. Jaggers.
+
+“Undoubtedly.”
+
+“You consider it, undoubtedly, a handsome sum of money. Now, that
+handsome sum of money, Pip, is your own. It is a present to you on this
+day, in earnest of your expectations. And at the rate of that handsome
+sum of money per annum, and at no higher rate, you are to live until the
+donor of the whole appears. That is to say, you will now take your money
+affairs entirely into your own hands, and you will draw from Wemmick
+one hundred and twenty-five pounds per quarter, until you are in
+communication with the fountain-head, and no longer with the mere
+agent. As I have told you before, I am the mere agent. I execute my
+instructions, and I am paid for doing so. I think them injudicious, but
+I am not paid for giving any opinion on their merits.”
+
+I was beginning to express my gratitude to my benefactor for the great
+liberality with which I was treated, when Mr. Jaggers stopped me. “I am
+not paid, Pip,” said he, coolly, “to carry your words to any one;” and
+then gathered up his coat-tails, as he had gathered up the subject, and
+stood frowning at his boots as if he suspected them of designs against
+him.
+
+After a pause, I hinted,--
+
+“There was a question just now, Mr. Jaggers, which you desired me to
+waive for a moment. I hope I am doing nothing wrong in asking it again?”
+
+“What is it?” said he.
+
+I might have known that he would never help me out; but it took me aback
+to have to shape the question afresh, as if it were quite new. “Is it
+likely,” I said, after hesitating, “that my patron, the fountain-head
+you have spoken of, Mr. Jaggers, will soon--” there I delicately
+stopped.
+
+“Will soon what?” asked Mr. Jaggers. “That’s no question as it stands,
+you know.”
+
+“Will soon come to London,” said I, after casting about for a precise
+form of words, “or summon me anywhere else?”
+
+“Now, here,” replied Mr. Jaggers, fixing me for the first time with
+his dark deep-set eyes, “we must revert to the evening when we first
+encountered one another in your village. What did I tell you then, Pip?”
+
+“You told me, Mr. Jaggers, that it might be years hence when that person
+appeared.”
+
+“Just so,” said Mr. Jaggers, “that’s my answer.”
+
+As we looked full at one another, I felt my breath come quicker in my
+strong desire to get something out of him. And as I felt that it came
+quicker, and as I felt that he saw that it came quicker, I felt that I
+had less chance than ever of getting anything out of him.
+
+“Do you suppose it will still be years hence, Mr. Jaggers?”
+
+Mr. Jaggers shook his head,--not in negativing the question, but in
+altogether negativing the notion that he could anyhow be got to answer
+it,--and the two horrible casts of the twitched faces looked, when
+my eyes strayed up to them, as if they had come to a crisis in their
+suspended attention, and were going to sneeze.
+
+“Come!” said Mr. Jaggers, warming the backs of his legs with the backs
+of his warmed hands, “I’ll be plain with you, my friend Pip. That’s a
+question I must not be asked. You’ll understand that better, when I tell
+you it’s a question that might compromise me. Come! I’ll go a little
+further with you; I’ll say something more.”
+
+He bent down so low to frown at his boots, that he was able to rub the
+calves of his legs in the pause he made.
+
+“When that person discloses,” said Mr. Jaggers, straightening himself,
+“you and that person will settle your own affairs. When that person
+discloses, my part in this business will cease and determine. When that
+person discloses, it will not be necessary for me to know anything about
+it. And that’s all I have got to say.”
+
+We looked at one another until I withdrew my eyes, and looked
+thoughtfully at the floor. From this last speech I derived the notion
+that Miss Havisham, for some reason or no reason, had not taken him
+into her confidence as to her designing me for Estella; that he resented
+this, and felt a jealousy about it; or that he really did object to
+that scheme, and would have nothing to do with it. When I raised my eyes
+again, I found that he had been shrewdly looking at me all the time, and
+was doing so still.
+
+“If that is all you have to say, sir,” I remarked, “there can be nothing
+left for me to say.”
+
+He nodded assent, and pulled out his thief-dreaded watch, and asked me
+where I was going to dine? I replied at my own chambers, with Herbert.
+As a necessary sequence, I asked him if he would favor us with his
+company, and he promptly accepted the invitation. But he insisted on
+walking home with me, in order that I might make no extra preparation
+for him, and first he had a letter or two to write, and (of course) had
+his hands to wash. So I said I would go into the outer office and talk
+to Wemmick.
+
+The fact was, that when the five hundred pounds had come into my pocket,
+a thought had come into my head which had been often there before;
+and it appeared to me that Wemmick was a good person to advise with
+concerning such thought.
+
+He had already locked up his safe, and made preparations for going home.
+He had left his desk, brought out his two greasy office candlesticks and
+stood them in line with the snuffers on a slab near the door, ready to
+be extinguished; he had raked his fire low, put his hat and great-coat
+ready, and was beating himself all over the chest with his safe-key, as
+an athletic exercise after business.
+
+“Mr. Wemmick,” said I, “I want to ask your opinion. I am very desirous
+to serve a friend.”
+
+Wemmick tightened his post-office and shook his head, as if his opinion
+were dead against any fatal weakness of that sort.
+
+“This friend,” I pursued, “is trying to get on in commercial life,
+but has no money, and finds it difficult and disheartening to make a
+beginning. Now I want somehow to help him to a beginning.”
+
+“With money down?” said Wemmick, in a tone drier than any sawdust.
+
+“With some money down,” I replied, for an uneasy remembrance shot across
+me of that symmetrical bundle of papers at home--“with some money down,
+and perhaps some anticipation of my expectations.”
+
+“Mr. Pip,” said Wemmick, “I should like just to run over with you on my
+fingers, if you please, the names of the various bridges up as high
+as Chelsea Reach. Let’s see; there’s London, one; Southwark, two;
+Blackfriars, three; Waterloo, four; Westminster, five; Vauxhall, six.”
+ He had checked off each bridge in its turn, with the handle of his
+safe-key on the palm of his hand. “There’s as many as six, you see, to
+choose from.”
+
+“I don’t understand you,” said I.
+
+“Choose your bridge, Mr. Pip,” returned Wemmick, “and take a walk upon
+your bridge, and pitch your money into the Thames over the centre arch
+of your bridge, and you know the end of it. Serve a friend with it, and
+you may know the end of it too,--but it’s a less pleasant and profitable
+end.”
+
+I could have posted a newspaper in his mouth, he made it so wide after
+saying this.
+
+“This is very discouraging,” said I.
+
+“Meant to be so,” said Wemmick.
+
+“Then is it your opinion,” I inquired, with some little indignation,
+“that a man should never--”
+
+“--Invest portable property in a friend?” said Wemmick. “Certainly
+he should not. Unless he wants to get rid of the friend,--and then it
+becomes a question how much portable property it may be worth to get rid
+of him.”
+
+“And that,” said I, “is your deliberate opinion, Mr. Wemmick?”
+
+“That,” he returned, “is my deliberate opinion in this office.”
+
+“Ah!” said I, pressing him, for I thought I saw him near a loophole
+here; “but would that be your opinion at Walworth?”
+
+“Mr. Pip,” he replied, with gravity, “Walworth is one place, and this
+office is another. Much as the Aged is one person, and Mr. Jaggers is
+another. They must not be confounded together. My Walworth sentiments
+must be taken at Walworth; none but my official sentiments can be taken
+in this office.”
+
+“Very well,” said I, much relieved, “then I shall look you up at
+Walworth, you may depend upon it.”
+
+“Mr. Pip,” he returned, “you will be welcome there, in a private and
+personal capacity.”
+
+We had held this conversation in a low voice, well knowing my guardian’s
+ears to be the sharpest of the sharp. As he now appeared in his doorway,
+towelling his hands, Wemmick got on his great-coat and stood by to snuff
+out the candles. We all three went into the street together, and from
+the door-step Wemmick turned his way, and Mr. Jaggers and I turned ours.
+
+I could not help wishing more than once that evening, that Mr. Jaggers
+had had an Aged in Gerrard Street, or a Stinger, or a Something, or
+a Somebody, to unbend his brows a little. It was an uncomfortable
+consideration on a twenty-first birthday, that coming of age at all
+seemed hardly worth while in such a guarded and suspicious world as he
+made of it. He was a thousand times better informed and cleverer than
+Wemmick, and yet I would a thousand times rather have had Wemmick to
+dinner. And Mr. Jaggers made not me alone intensely melancholy, because,
+after he was gone, Herbert said of himself, with his eyes fixed on the
+fire, that he thought he must have committed a felony and forgotten the
+details of it, he felt so dejected and guilty.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXXVII
+
+Deeming Sunday the best day for taking Mr. Wemmick’s Walworth
+sentiments, I devoted the next ensuing Sunday afternoon to a pilgrimage
+to the Castle. On arriving before the battlements, I found the Union
+Jack flying and the drawbridge up; but undeterred by this show of
+defiance and resistance, I rang at the gate, and was admitted in a most
+pacific manner by the Aged.
+
+“My son, sir,” said the old man, after securing the drawbridge, “rather
+had it in his mind that you might happen to drop in, and he left word
+that he would soon be home from his afternoon’s walk. He is very regular
+in his walks, is my son. Very regular in everything, is my son.”
+
+I nodded at the old gentleman as Wemmick himself might have nodded, and
+we went in and sat down by the fireside.
+
+“You made acquaintance with my son, sir,” said the old man, in his
+chirping way, while he warmed his hands at the blaze, “at his office, I
+expect?” I nodded. “Hah! I have heerd that my son is a wonderful hand at
+his business, sir?” I nodded hard. “Yes; so they tell me. His business
+is the Law?” I nodded harder. “Which makes it more surprising in my
+son,” said the old man, “for he was not brought up to the Law, but to
+the Wine-Coopering.”
+
+Curious to know how the old gentleman stood informed concerning the
+reputation of Mr. Jaggers, I roared that name at him. He threw me into
+the greatest confusion by laughing heartily and replying in a very
+sprightly manner, “No, to be sure; you’re right.” And to this hour I
+have not the faintest notion what he meant, or what joke he thought I
+had made.
+
+As I could not sit there nodding at him perpetually, without making
+some other attempt to interest him, I shouted at inquiry whether his own
+calling in life had been “the Wine-Coopering.” By dint of straining that
+term out of myself several times and tapping the old gentleman on the
+chest to associate it with him, I at last succeeded in making my meaning
+understood.
+
+“No,” said the old gentleman; “the warehousing, the warehousing. First,
+over yonder;” he appeared to mean up the chimney, but I believe he
+intended to refer me to Liverpool; “and then in the City of London here.
+However, having an infirmity--for I am hard of hearing, sir--”
+
+I expressed in pantomime the greatest astonishment.
+
+“--Yes, hard of hearing; having that infirmity coming upon me, my son he
+went into the Law, and he took charge of me, and he by little and little
+made out this elegant and beautiful property. But returning to what you
+said, you know,” pursued the old man, again laughing heartily, “what I
+say is, No to be sure; you’re right.”
+
+I was modestly wondering whether my utmost ingenuity would have enabled
+me to say anything that would have amused him half as much as this
+imaginary pleasantry, when I was startled by a sudden click in the wall
+on one side of the chimney, and the ghostly tumbling open of a little
+wooden flap with “JOHN” upon it. The old man, following my eyes, cried
+with great triumph, “My son’s come home!” and we both went out to the
+drawbridge.
+
+It was worth any money to see Wemmick waving a salute to me from the
+other side of the moat, when we might have shaken hands across it with
+the greatest ease. The Aged was so delighted to work the drawbridge,
+that I made no offer to assist him, but stood quiet until Wemmick had
+come across, and had presented me to Miss Skiffins; a lady by whom he
+was accompanied.
+
+Miss Skiffins was of a wooden appearance, and was, like her escort, in
+the post-office branch of the service. She might have been some two or
+three years younger than Wemmick, and I judged her to stand possessed
+of portable property. The cut of her dress from the waist upward, both
+before and behind, made her figure very like a boy’s kite; and I might
+have pronounced her gown a little too decidedly orange, and her gloves a
+little too intensely green. But she seemed to be a good sort of fellow,
+and showed a high regard for the Aged. I was not long in discovering
+that she was a frequent visitor at the Castle; for, on our going in,
+and my complimenting Wemmick on his ingenious contrivance for announcing
+himself to the Aged, he begged me to give my attention for a moment to
+the other side of the chimney, and disappeared. Presently another click
+came, and another little door tumbled open with “Miss Skiffins” on it;
+then Miss Skiffins shut up and John tumbled open; then Miss Skiffins
+and John both tumbled open together, and finally shut up together. On
+Wemmick’s return from working these mechanical appliances, I expressed
+the great admiration with which I regarded them, and he said, “Well, you
+know, they’re both pleasant and useful to the Aged. And by George, sir,
+it’s a thing worth mentioning, that of all the people who come to
+this gate, the secret of those pulls is only known to the Aged, Miss
+Skiffins, and me!”
+
+“And Mr. Wemmick made them,” added Miss Skiffins, “with his own hands
+out of his own head.”
+
+While Miss Skiffins was taking off her bonnet (she retained her green
+gloves during the evening as an outward and visible sign that there was
+company), Wemmick invited me to take a walk with him round the property,
+and see how the island looked in wintertime. Thinking that he did this
+to give me an opportunity of taking his Walworth sentiments, I seized
+the opportunity as soon as we were out of the Castle.
+
+Having thought of the matter with care, I approached my subject as if I
+had never hinted at it before. I informed Wemmick that I was anxious in
+behalf of Herbert Pocket, and I told him how we had first met, and how
+we had fought. I glanced at Herbert’s home, and at his character, and
+at his having no means but such as he was dependent on his father for;
+those, uncertain and unpunctual. I alluded to the advantages I had
+derived in my first rawness and ignorance from his society, and I
+confessed that I feared I had but ill repaid them, and that he might
+have done better without me and my expectations. Keeping Miss Havisham
+in the background at a great distance, I still hinted at the possibility
+of my having competed with him in his prospects, and at the certainty of
+his possessing a generous soul, and being far above any mean distrusts,
+retaliations, or designs. For all these reasons (I told Wemmick),
+and because he was my young companion and friend, and I had a great
+affection for him, I wished my own good fortune to reflect some rays
+upon him, and therefore I sought advice from Wemmick’s experience and
+knowledge of men and affairs, how I could best try with my resources to
+help Herbert to some present income,--say of a hundred a year, to keep
+him in good hope and heart,--and gradually to buy him on to some small
+partnership. I begged Wemmick, in conclusion, to understand that my help
+must always be rendered without Herbert’s knowledge or suspicion, and
+that there was no one else in the world with whom I could advise. I
+wound up by laying my hand upon his shoulder, and saying, “I can’t help
+confiding in you, though I know it must be troublesome to you; but that
+is your fault, in having ever brought me here.”
+
+Wemmick was silent for a little while, and then said with a kind of
+start, “Well you know, Mr. Pip, I must tell you one thing. This is
+devilish good of you.”
+
+“Say you’ll help me to be good then,” said I.
+
+“Ecod,” replied Wemmick, shaking his head, “that’s not my trade.”
+
+“Nor is this your trading-place,” said I.
+
+“You are right,” he returned. “You hit the nail on the head. Mr. Pip,
+I’ll put on my considering-cap, and I think all you want to do may be
+done by degrees. Skiffins (that’s her brother) is an accountant and
+agent. I’ll look him up and go to work for you.”
+
+“I thank you ten thousand times.”
+
+“On the contrary,” said he, “I thank you, for though we are strictly in
+our private and personal capacity, still it may be mentioned that there
+are Newgate cobwebs about, and it brushes them away.”
+
+After a little further conversation to the same effect, we returned into
+the Castle where we found Miss Skiffins preparing tea. The responsible
+duty of making the toast was delegated to the Aged, and that excellent
+old gentleman was so intent upon it that he seemed to me in some danger
+of melting his eyes. It was no nominal meal that we were going to make,
+but a vigorous reality. The Aged prepared such a hay-stack of buttered
+toast, that I could scarcely see him over it as it simmered on an iron
+stand hooked on to the top-bar; while Miss Skiffins brewed such a jorum
+of tea, that the pig in the back premises became strongly excited, and
+repeatedly expressed his desire to participate in the entertainment.
+
+The flag had been struck, and the gun had been fired, at the right
+moment of time, and I felt as snugly cut off from the rest of Walworth
+as if the moat were thirty feet wide by as many deep. Nothing disturbed
+the tranquillity of the Castle, but the occasional tumbling open of
+John and Miss Skiffins: which little doors were a prey to some spasmodic
+infirmity that made me sympathetically uncomfortable until I got used
+to it. I inferred from the methodical nature of Miss Skiffins’s
+arrangements that she made tea there every Sunday night; and I rather
+suspected that a classic brooch she wore, representing the profile of an
+undesirable female with a very straight nose and a very new moon, was a
+piece of portable property that had been given her by Wemmick.
+
+We ate the whole of the toast, and drank tea in proportion, and it was
+delightful to see how warm and greasy we all got after it. The Aged
+especially, might have passed for some clean old chief of a savage
+tribe, just oiled. After a short pause of repose, Miss Skiffins--in the
+absence of the little servant who, it seemed, retired to the bosom of
+her family on Sunday afternoons--washed up the tea-things, in a trifling
+lady-like amateur manner that compromised none of us. Then, she put on
+her gloves again, and we drew round the fire, and Wemmick said, “Now,
+Aged Parent, tip us the paper.”
+
+Wemmick explained to me while the Aged got his spectacles out, that this
+was according to custom, and that it gave the old gentleman infinite
+satisfaction to read the news aloud. “I won’t offer an apology,” said
+Wemmick, “for he isn’t capable of many pleasures--are you, Aged P.?”
+
+“All right, John, all right,” returned the old man, seeing himself
+spoken to.
+
+“Only tip him a nod every now and then when he looks off his paper,”
+ said Wemmick, “and he’ll be as happy as a king. We are all attention,
+Aged One.”
+
+“All right, John, all right!” returned the cheerful old man, so busy and
+so pleased, that it really was quite charming.
+
+The Aged’s reading reminded me of the classes at Mr. Wopsle’s
+great-aunt’s, with the pleasanter peculiarity that it seemed to come
+through a keyhole. As he wanted the candles close to him, and as he was
+always on the verge of putting either his head or the newspaper into
+them, he required as much watching as a powder-mill. But Wemmick was
+equally untiring and gentle in his vigilance, and the Aged read on,
+quite unconscious of his many rescues. Whenever he looked at us, we
+all expressed the greatest interest and amazement, and nodded until he
+resumed again.
+
+As Wemmick and Miss Skiffins sat side by side, and as I sat in a shadowy
+corner, I observed a slow and gradual elongation of Mr. Wemmick’s mouth,
+powerfully suggestive of his slowly and gradually stealing his arm round
+Miss Skiffins’s waist. In course of time I saw his hand appear on the
+other side of Miss Skiffins; but at that moment Miss Skiffins neatly
+stopped him with the green glove, unwound his arm again as if it were
+an article of dress, and with the greatest deliberation laid it on the
+table before her. Miss Skiffins’s composure while she did this was one
+of the most remarkable sights I have ever seen, and if I could have
+thought the act consistent with abstraction of mind, I should have
+deemed that Miss Skiffins performed it mechanically.
+
+By and by, I noticed Wemmick’s arm beginning to disappear again, and
+gradually fading out of view. Shortly afterwards, his mouth began to
+widen again. After an interval of suspense on my part that was quite
+enthralling and almost painful, I saw his hand appear on the other side
+of Miss Skiffins. Instantly, Miss Skiffins stopped it with the neatness
+of a placid boxer, took off that girdle or cestus as before, and laid
+it on the table. Taking the table to represent the path of virtue, I am
+justified in stating that during the whole time of the Aged’s reading,
+Wemmick’s arm was straying from the path of virtue and being recalled to
+it by Miss Skiffins.
+
+At last, the Aged read himself into a light slumber. This was the time
+for Wemmick to produce a little kettle, a tray of glasses, and a
+black bottle with a porcelain-topped cork, representing some clerical
+dignitary of a rubicund and social aspect. With the aid of these
+appliances we all had something warm to drink, including the Aged, who
+was soon awake again. Miss Skiffins mixed, and I observed that she and
+Wemmick drank out of one glass. Of course I knew better than to offer to
+see Miss Skiffins home, and under the circumstances I thought I had best
+go first; which I did, taking a cordial leave of the Aged, and having
+passed a pleasant evening.
+
+Before a week was out, I received a note from Wemmick, dated Walworth,
+stating that he hoped he had made some advance in that matter
+appertaining to our private and personal capacities, and that he would
+be glad if I could come and see him again upon it. So, I went out
+to Walworth again, and yet again, and yet again, and I saw him by
+appointment in the City several times, but never held any communication
+with him on the subject in or near Little Britain. The upshot was,
+that we found a worthy young merchant or shipping-broker, not long
+established in business, who wanted intelligent help, and who wanted
+capital, and who in due course of time and receipt would want a partner.
+Between him and me, secret articles were signed of which Herbert was the
+subject, and I paid him half of my five hundred pounds down, and engaged
+for sundry other payments: some, to fall due at certain dates out of my
+income: some, contingent on my coming into my property. Miss Skiffins’s
+brother conducted the negotiation. Wemmick pervaded it throughout, but
+never appeared in it.
+
+The whole business was so cleverly managed, that Herbert had not the
+least suspicion of my hand being in it. I never shall forget the radiant
+face with which he came home one afternoon, and told me, as a mighty
+piece of news, of his having fallen in with one Clarriker (the young
+merchant’s name), and of Clarriker’s having shown an extraordinary
+inclination towards him, and of his belief that the opening had come at
+last. Day by day as his hopes grew stronger and his face brighter, he
+must have thought me a more and more affectionate friend, for I had the
+greatest difficulty in restraining my tears of triumph when I saw him so
+happy. At length, the thing being done, and he having that day entered
+Clarriker’s House, and he having talked to me for a whole evening in a
+flush of pleasure and success, I did really cry in good earnest when
+I went to bed, to think that my expectations had done some good to
+somebody.
+
+A great event in my life, the turning point of my life, now opens on my
+view. But, before I proceed to narrate it, and before I pass on to all
+the changes it involved, I must give one chapter to Estella. It is not
+much to give to the theme that so long filled my heart.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXXVIII
+
+If that staid old house near the Green at Richmond should ever come to
+be haunted when I am dead, it will be haunted, surely, by my ghost. O
+the many, many nights and days through which the unquiet spirit within
+me haunted that house when Estella lived there! Let my body be where it
+would, my spirit was always wandering, wandering, wandering, about that
+house.
+
+The lady with whom Estella was placed, Mrs. Brandley by name, was a
+widow, with one daughter several years older than Estella. The mother
+looked young, and the daughter looked old; the mother’s complexion was
+pink, and the daughter’s was yellow; the mother set up for frivolity,
+and the daughter for theology. They were in what is called a good
+position, and visited, and were visited by, numbers of people. Little,
+if any, community of feeling subsisted between them and Estella, but the
+understanding was established that they were necessary to her, and
+that she was necessary to them. Mrs. Brandley had been a friend of Miss
+Havisham’s before the time of her seclusion.
+
+In Mrs. Brandley’s house and out of Mrs. Brandley’s house, I suffered
+every kind and degree of torture that Estella could cause me. The
+nature of my relations with her, which placed me on terms of familiarity
+without placing me on terms of favor, conduced to my distraction.
+She made use of me to tease other admirers, and she turned the very
+familiarity between herself and me to the account of putting a constant
+slight on my devotion to her. If I had been her secretary, steward,
+half-brother, poor relation,--if I had been a younger brother of her
+appointed husband,--I could not have seemed to myself further from my
+hopes when I was nearest to her. The privilege of calling her by her
+name and hearing her call me by mine became, under the circumstances
+an aggravation of my trials; and while I think it likely that it almost
+maddened her other lovers, I know too certainly that it almost maddened
+me.
+
+She had admirers without end. No doubt my jealousy made an admirer of
+every one who went near her; but there were more than enough of them
+without that.
+
+I saw her often at Richmond, I heard of her often in town, and I used
+often to take her and the Brandleys on the water; there were picnics,
+fête days, plays, operas, concerts, parties, all sorts of pleasures,
+through which I pursued her,--and they were all miseries to me. I never
+had one hour’s happiness in her society, and yet my mind all round the
+four-and-twenty hours was harping on the happiness of having her with me
+unto death.
+
+Throughout this part of our intercourse,--and it lasted, as will
+presently be seen, for what I then thought a long time,--she habitually
+reverted to that tone which expressed that our association was forced
+upon us. There were other times when she would come to a sudden check in
+this tone and in all her many tones, and would seem to pity me.
+
+“Pip, Pip,” she said one evening, coming to such a check, when we sat
+apart at a darkening window of the house in Richmond; “will you never
+take warning?”
+
+“Of what?”
+
+“Of me.”
+
+“Warning not to be attracted by you, do you mean, Estella?”
+
+“Do I mean! If you don’t know what I mean, you are blind.”
+
+I should have replied that Love was commonly reputed blind, but for the
+reason that I always was restrained--and this was not the least of my
+miseries--by a feeling that it was ungenerous to press myself upon her,
+when she knew that she could not choose but obey Miss Havisham. My
+dread always was, that this knowledge on her part laid me under a heavy
+disadvantage with her pride, and made me the subject of a rebellious
+struggle in her bosom.
+
+“At any rate,” said I, “I have no warning given me just now, for you
+wrote to me to come to you, this time.”
+
+“That’s true,” said Estella, with a cold careless smile that always
+chilled me.
+
+After looking at the twilight without, for a little while, she went on
+to say:--
+
+“The time has come round when Miss Havisham wishes to have me for a day
+at Satis. You are to take me there, and bring me back, if you will. She
+would rather I did not travel alone, and objects to receiving my maid,
+for she has a sensitive horror of being talked of by such people. Can
+you take me?”
+
+“Can I take you, Estella!”
+
+“You can then? The day after to-morrow, if you please. You are to pay
+all charges out of my purse, You hear the condition of your going?”
+
+“And must obey,” said I.
+
+This was all the preparation I received for that visit, or for others
+like it; Miss Havisham never wrote to me, nor had I ever so much as seen
+her handwriting. We went down on the next day but one, and we found her
+in the room where I had first beheld her, and it is needless to add that
+there was no change in Satis House.
+
+She was even more dreadfully fond of Estella than she had been when
+I last saw them together; I repeat the word advisedly, for there was
+something positively dreadful in the energy of her looks and embraces.
+She hung upon Estella’s beauty, hung upon her words, hung upon her
+gestures, and sat mumbling her own trembling fingers while she looked at
+her, as though she were devouring the beautiful creature she had reared.
+
+From Estella she looked at me, with a searching glance that seemed to
+pry into my heart and probe its wounds. “How does she use you, Pip; how
+does she use you?” she asked me again, with her witch-like eagerness,
+even in Estella’s hearing. But, when we sat by her flickering fire
+at night, she was most weird; for then, keeping Estella’s hand drawn
+through her arm and clutched in her own hand, she extorted from her,
+by dint of referring back to what Estella had told her in her regular
+letters, the names and conditions of the men whom she had fascinated;
+and as Miss Havisham dwelt upon this roll, with the intensity of a mind
+mortally hurt and diseased, she sat with her other hand on her crutch
+stick, and her chin on that, and her wan bright eyes glaring at me, a
+very spectre.
+
+I saw in this, wretched though it made me, and bitter the sense of
+dependence and even of degradation that it awakened,--I saw in this that
+Estella was set to wreak Miss Havisham’s revenge on men, and that she
+was not to be given to me until she had gratified it for a term. I saw
+in this, a reason for her being beforehand assigned to me. Sending her
+out to attract and torment and do mischief, Miss Havisham sent her with
+the malicious assurance that she was beyond the reach of all admirers,
+and that all who staked upon that cast were secured to lose. I saw in
+this that I, too, was tormented by a perversion of ingenuity, even while
+the prize was reserved for me. I saw in this the reason for my being
+staved off so long and the reason for my late guardian’s declining to
+commit himself to the formal knowledge of such a scheme. In a word, I
+saw in this Miss Havisham as I had her then and there before my eyes,
+and always had had her before my eyes; and I saw in this, the distinct
+shadow of the darkened and unhealthy house in which her life was hidden
+from the sun.
+
+The candles that lighted that room of hers were placed in sconces on
+the wall. They were high from the ground, and they burnt with the steady
+dulness of artificial light in air that is seldom renewed. As I looked
+round at them, and at the pale gloom they made, and at the stopped
+clock, and at the withered articles of bridal dress upon the table and
+the ground, and at her own awful figure with its ghostly reflection
+thrown large by the fire upon the ceiling and the wall, I saw in
+everything the construction that my mind had come to, repeated and
+thrown back to me. My thoughts passed into the great room across the
+landing where the table was spread, and I saw it written, as it were, in
+the falls of the cobwebs from the centre-piece, in the crawlings of the
+spiders on the cloth, in the tracks of the mice as they betook their
+little quickened hearts behind the panels, and in the gropings and
+pausings of the beetles on the floor.
+
+It happened on the occasion of this visit that some sharp words arose
+between Estella and Miss Havisham. It was the first time I had ever seen
+them opposed.
+
+We were seated by the fire, as just now described, and Miss Havisham
+still had Estella’s arm drawn through her own, and still clutched
+Estella’s hand in hers, when Estella gradually began to detach herself.
+She had shown a proud impatience more than once before, and had rather
+endured that fierce affection than accepted or returned it.
+
+“What!” said Miss Havisham, flashing her eyes upon her, “are you tired
+of me?”
+
+“Only a little tired of myself,” replied Estella, disengaging her arm,
+and moving to the great chimney-piece, where she stood looking down at
+the fire.
+
+“Speak the truth, you ingrate!” cried Miss Havisham, passionately
+striking her stick upon the floor; “you are tired of me.”
+
+Estella looked at her with perfect composure, and again looked down
+at the fire. Her graceful figure and her beautiful face expressed a
+self-possessed indifference to the wild heat of the other, that was
+almost cruel.
+
+“You stock and stone!” exclaimed Miss Havisham. “You cold, cold heart!”
+
+“What?” said Estella, preserving her attitude of indifference as she
+leaned against the great chimney-piece and only moving her eyes; “do you
+reproach me for being cold? You?”
+
+“Are you not?” was the fierce retort.
+
+“You should know,” said Estella. “I am what you have made me. Take
+all the praise, take all the blame; take all the success, take all the
+failure; in short, take me.”
+
+“O, look at her, look at her!” cried Miss Havisham, bitterly; “Look at
+her so hard and thankless, on the hearth where she was reared! Where I
+took her into this wretched breast when it was first bleeding from its
+stabs, and where I have lavished years of tenderness upon her!”
+
+“At least I was no party to the compact,” said Estella, “for if I could
+walk and speak, when it was made, it was as much as I could do. But what
+would you have? You have been very good to me, and I owe everything to
+you. What would you have?”
+
+“Love,” replied the other.
+
+“You have it.”
+
+“I have not,” said Miss Havisham.
+
+“Mother by adoption,” retorted Estella, never departing from the easy
+grace of her attitude, never raising her voice as the other did, never
+yielding either to anger or tenderness,--“mother by adoption, I have
+said that I owe everything to you. All I possess is freely yours. All
+that you have given me, is at your command to have again. Beyond that, I
+have nothing. And if you ask me to give you, what you never gave me, my
+gratitude and duty cannot do impossibilities.”
+
+“Did I never give her love!” cried Miss Havisham, turning wildly to me.
+“Did I never give her a burning love, inseparable from jealousy at all
+times, and from sharp pain, while she speaks thus to me! Let her call me
+mad, let her call me mad!”
+
+“Why should I call you mad,” returned Estella, “I, of all people? Does
+any one live, who knows what set purposes you have, half as well as I
+do? Does any one live, who knows what a steady memory you have, half
+as well as I do? I who have sat on this same hearth on the little stool
+that is even now beside you there, learning your lessons and looking up
+into your face, when your face was strange and frightened me!”
+
+“Soon forgotten!” moaned Miss Havisham. “Times soon forgotten!”
+
+“No, not forgotten,” retorted Estella,--“not forgotten, but treasured up
+in my memory. When have you found me false to your teaching? When have
+you found me unmindful of your lessons? When have you found me giving
+admission here,” she touched her bosom with her hand, “to anything that
+you excluded? Be just to me.”
+
+“So proud, so proud!” moaned Miss Havisham, pushing away her gray hair
+with both her hands.
+
+“Who taught me to be proud?” returned Estella. “Who praised me when I
+learnt my lesson?”
+
+“So hard, so hard!” moaned Miss Havisham, with her former action.
+
+“Who taught me to be hard?” returned Estella. “Who praised me when I
+learnt my lesson?”
+
+“But to be proud and hard to me!” Miss Havisham quite shrieked, as she
+stretched out her arms. “Estella, Estella, Estella, to be proud and hard
+to me!”
+
+Estella looked at her for a moment with a kind of calm wonder, but was
+not otherwise disturbed; when the moment was past, she looked down at
+the fire again.
+
+“I cannot think,” said Estella, raising her eyes after a silence “why
+you should be so unreasonable when I come to see you after a separation.
+I have never forgotten your wrongs and their causes. I have never been
+unfaithful to you or your schooling. I have never shown any weakness
+that I can charge myself with.”
+
+“Would it be weakness to return my love?” exclaimed Miss Havisham. “But
+yes, yes, she would call it so!”
+
+“I begin to think,” said Estella, in a musing way, after another moment
+of calm wonder, “that I almost understand how this comes about. If you
+had brought up your adopted daughter wholly in the dark confinement of
+these rooms, and had never let her know that there was such a thing as
+the daylight by which she had never once seen your face,--if you had
+done that, and then, for a purpose had wanted her to understand the
+daylight and know all about it, you would have been disappointed and
+angry?”
+
+Miss Havisham, with her head in her hands, sat making a low moaning, and
+swaying herself on her chair, but gave no answer.
+
+“Or,” said Estella,--“which is a nearer case,--if you had taught her,
+from the dawn of her intelligence, with your utmost energy and might,
+that there was such a thing as daylight, but that it was made to be her
+enemy and destroyer, and she must always turn against it, for it had
+blighted you and would else blight her;--if you had done this, and then,
+for a purpose, had wanted her to take naturally to the daylight and she
+could not do it, you would have been disappointed and angry?”
+
+Miss Havisham sat listening (or it seemed so, for I could not see her
+face), but still made no answer.
+
+“So,” said Estella, “I must be taken as I have been made. The success is
+not mine, the failure is not mine, but the two together make me.”
+
+Miss Havisham had settled down, I hardly knew how, upon the floor, among
+the faded bridal relics with which it was strewn. I took advantage of
+the moment--I had sought one from the first--to leave the room, after
+beseeching Estella’s attention to her, with a movement of my hand. When
+I left, Estella was yet standing by the great chimney-piece, just as she
+had stood throughout. Miss Havisham’s gray hair was all adrift upon the
+ground, among the other bridal wrecks, and was a miserable sight to see.
+
+It was with a depressed heart that I walked in the starlight for an
+hour and more, about the courtyard, and about the brewery, and about
+the ruined garden. When I at last took courage to return to the room, I
+found Estella sitting at Miss Havisham’s knee, taking up some stitches
+in one of those old articles of dress that were dropping to pieces, and
+of which I have often been reminded since by the faded tatters of old
+banners that I have seen hanging up in cathedrals. Afterwards, Estella
+and I played at cards, as of yore,--only we were skilful now, and played
+French games,--and so the evening wore away, and I went to bed.
+
+I lay in that separate building across the courtyard. It was the first
+time I had ever lain down to rest in Satis House, and sleep refused to
+come near me. A thousand Miss Havishams haunted me. She was on this side
+of my pillow, on that, at the head of the bed, at the foot, behind the
+half-opened door of the dressing-room, in the dressing-room, in the room
+overhead, in the room beneath,--everywhere. At last, when the night was
+slow to creep on towards two o’clock, I felt that I absolutely could no
+longer bear the place as a place to lie down in, and that I must get up.
+I therefore got up and put on my clothes, and went out across the yard
+into the long stone passage, designing to gain the outer courtyard and
+walk there for the relief of my mind. But I was no sooner in the passage
+than I extinguished my candle; for I saw Miss Havisham going along it
+in a ghostly manner, making a low cry. I followed her at a distance,
+and saw her go up the staircase. She carried a bare candle in her hand,
+which she had probably taken from one of the sconces in her own room,
+and was a most unearthly object by its light. Standing at the bottom
+of the staircase, I felt the mildewed air of the feast-chamber, without
+seeing her open the door, and I heard her walking there, and so across
+into her own room, and so across again into that, never ceasing the low
+cry. After a time, I tried in the dark both to get out, and to go back,
+but I could do neither until some streaks of day strayed in and showed
+me where to lay my hands. During the whole interval, whenever I went to
+the bottom of the staircase, I heard her footstep, saw her light pass
+above, and heard her ceaseless low cry.
+
+Before we left next day, there was no revival of the difference between
+her and Estella, nor was it ever revived on any similar occasion; and
+there were four similar occasions, to the best of my remembrance. Nor,
+did Miss Havisham’s manner towards Estella in anywise change, except
+that I believed it to have something like fear infused among its former
+characteristics.
+
+It is impossible to turn this leaf of my life, without putting Bentley
+Drummle’s name upon it; or I would, very gladly.
+
+On a certain occasion when the Finches were assembled in force, and when
+good feeling was being promoted in the usual manner by nobody’s agreeing
+with anybody else, the presiding Finch called the Grove to order,
+forasmuch as Mr. Drummle had not yet toasted a lady; which, according
+to the solemn constitution of the society, it was the brute’s turn to
+do that day. I thought I saw him leer in an ugly way at me while the
+decanters were going round, but as there was no love lost between us,
+that might easily be. What was my indignant surprise when he called upon
+the company to pledge him to “Estella!”
+
+“Estella who?” said I.
+
+“Never you mind,” retorted Drummle.
+
+“Estella of where?” said I. “You are bound to say of where.” Which he
+was, as a Finch.
+
+“Of Richmond, gentlemen,” said Drummle, putting me out of the question,
+“and a peerless beauty.”
+
+Much he knew about peerless beauties, a mean, miserable idiot! I
+whispered Herbert.
+
+“I know that lady,” said Herbert, across the table, when the toast had
+been honored.
+
+“Do you?” said Drummle.
+
+“And so do I,” I added, with a scarlet face.
+
+“Do you?” said Drummle. “O, Lord!”
+
+This was the only retort--except glass or crockery--that the heavy
+creature was capable of making; but, I became as highly incensed by it
+as if it had been barbed with wit, and I immediately rose in my place
+and said that I could not but regard it as being like the honorable
+Finch’s impudence to come down to that Grove,--we always talked
+about coming down to that Grove, as a neat Parliamentary turn of
+expression,--down to that Grove, proposing a lady of whom he knew
+nothing. Mr. Drummle, upon this, starting up, demanded what I meant by
+that? Whereupon I made him the extreme reply that I believed he knew
+where I was to be found.
+
+Whether it was possible in a Christian country to get on without blood,
+after this, was a question on which the Finches were divided. The debate
+upon it grew so lively, indeed, that at least six more honorable members
+told six more, during the discussion, that they believed they knew where
+they were to be found. However, it was decided at last (the Grove being
+a Court of Honor) that if Mr. Drummle would bring never so slight
+a certificate from the lady, importing that he had the honor of her
+acquaintance, Mr. Pip must express his regret, as a gentleman and a
+Finch, for “having been betrayed into a warmth which.” Next day was
+appointed for the production (lest our honor should take cold from
+delay), and next day Drummle appeared with a polite little avowal in
+Estella’s hand, that she had had the honor of dancing with him several
+times. This left me no course but to regret that I had been “betrayed
+into a warmth which,” and on the whole to repudiate, as untenable, the
+idea that I was to be found anywhere. Drummle and I then sat snorting
+at one another for an hour, while the Grove engaged in indiscriminate
+contradiction, and finally the promotion of good feeling was declared to
+have gone ahead at an amazing rate.
+
+I tell this lightly, but it was no light thing to me. For, I cannot
+adequately express what pain it gave me to think that Estella should
+show any favor to a contemptible, clumsy, sulky booby, so very far below
+the average. To the present moment, I believe it to have been referable
+to some pure fire of generosity and disinterestedness in my love for
+her, that I could not endure the thought of her stooping to that hound.
+No doubt I should have been miserable whomsoever she had favored; but
+a worthier object would have caused me a different kind and degree of
+distress.
+
+It was easy for me to find out, and I did soon find out, that Drummle
+had begun to follow her closely, and that she allowed him to do it. A
+little while, and he was always in pursuit of her, and he and I crossed
+one another every day. He held on, in a dull persistent way, and Estella
+held him on; now with encouragement, now with discouragement, now almost
+flattering him, now openly despising him, now knowing him very well, now
+scarcely remembering who he was.
+
+The Spider, as Mr. Jaggers had called him, was used to lying in wait,
+however, and had the patience of his tribe. Added to that, he had a
+blockhead confidence in his money and in his family greatness,
+which sometimes did him good service,--almost taking the place of
+concentration and determined purpose. So, the Spider, doggedly watching
+Estella, outwatched many brighter insects, and would often uncoil
+himself and drop at the right nick of time.
+
+At a certain Assembly Ball at Richmond (there used to be Assembly Balls
+at most places then), where Estella had outshone all other beauties,
+this blundering Drummle so hung about her, and with so much toleration
+on her part, that I resolved to speak to her concerning him. I took the
+next opportunity; which was when she was waiting for Mrs. Blandley to
+take her home, and was sitting apart among some flowers, ready to go.
+I was with her, for I almost always accompanied them to and from such
+places.
+
+“Are you tired, Estella?”
+
+“Rather, Pip.”
+
+“You should be.”
+
+“Say rather, I should not be; for I have my letter to Satis House to
+write, before I go to sleep.”
+
+“Recounting to-night’s triumph?” said I. “Surely a very poor one,
+Estella.”
+
+“What do you mean? I didn’t know there had been any.”
+
+“Estella,” said I, “do look at that fellow in the corner yonder, who is
+looking over here at us.”
+
+“Why should I look at him?” returned Estella, with her eyes on me
+instead. “What is there in that fellow in the corner yonder,--to use
+your words,--that I need look at?”
+
+“Indeed, that is the very question I want to ask you,” said I. “For he
+has been hovering about you all night.”
+
+“Moths, and all sorts of ugly creatures,” replied Estella, with a glance
+towards him, “hover about a lighted candle. Can the candle help it?”
+
+“No,” I returned; “but cannot the Estella help it?”
+
+“Well!” said she, laughing, after a moment, “perhaps. Yes. Anything you
+like.”
+
+“But, Estella, do hear me speak. It makes me wretched that you should
+encourage a man so generally despised as Drummle. You know he is
+despised.”
+
+“Well?” said she.
+
+“You know he is as ungainly within as without. A deficient,
+ill-tempered, lowering, stupid fellow.”
+
+“Well?” said she.
+
+“You know he has nothing to recommend him but money and a ridiculous
+roll of addle-headed predecessors; now, don’t you?”
+
+“Well?” said she again; and each time she said it, she opened her lovely
+eyes the wider.
+
+To overcome the difficulty of getting past that monosyllable, I took it
+from her, and said, repeating it with emphasis, “Well! Then, that is why
+it makes me wretched.”
+
+Now, if I could have believed that she favored Drummle with any idea of
+making me-me--wretched, I should have been in better heart about it;
+but in that habitual way of hers, she put me so entirely out of the
+question, that I could believe nothing of the kind.
+
+“Pip,” said Estella, casting her glance over the room, “don’t be foolish
+about its effect on you. It may have its effect on others, and may be
+meant to have. It’s not worth discussing.”
+
+“Yes it is,” said I, “because I cannot bear that people should say, ‘she
+throws away her graces and attractions on a mere boor, the lowest in the
+crowd.’”
+
+“I can bear it,” said Estella.
+
+“Oh! don’t be so proud, Estella, and so inflexible.”
+
+“Calls me proud and inflexible in this breath!” said Estella, opening
+her hands. “And in his last breath reproached me for stooping to a
+boor!”
+
+“There is no doubt you do,” said I, something hurriedly, “for I have
+seen you give him looks and smiles this very night, such as you never
+give to--me.”
+
+“Do you want me then,” said Estella, turning suddenly with a fixed and
+serious, if not angry, look, “to deceive and entrap you?”
+
+“Do you deceive and entrap him, Estella?”
+
+“Yes, and many others,--all of them but you. Here is Mrs. Brandley. I’ll
+say no more.”
+
+* *
+
+And now that I have given the one chapter to the theme that so filled my
+heart, and so often made it ache and ache again, I pass on unhindered,
+to the event that had impended over me longer yet; the event that had
+begun to be prepared for, before I knew that the world held Estella,
+and in the days when her baby intelligence was receiving its first
+distortions from Miss Havisham’s wasting hands.
+
+In the Eastern story, the heavy slab that was to fall on the bed of
+state in the flush of conquest was slowly wrought out of the quarry, the
+tunnel for the rope to hold it in its place was slowly carried through
+the leagues of rock, the slab was slowly raised and fitted in the roof,
+the rope was rove to it and slowly taken through the miles of hollow to
+the great iron ring. All being made ready with much labor, and the hour
+come, the sultan was aroused in the dead of the night, and the sharpened
+axe that was to sever the rope from the great iron ring was put into his
+hand, and he struck with it, and the rope parted and rushed away, and
+the ceiling fell. So, in my case; all the work, near and afar, that
+tended to the end, had been accomplished; and in an instant the blow was
+struck, and the roof of my stronghold dropped upon me.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXXIX
+
+I was three-and-twenty years of age. Not another word had I heard to
+enlighten me on the subject of my expectations, and my twenty-third
+birthday was a week gone. We had left Barnard’s Inn more than a year,
+and lived in the Temple. Our chambers were in Garden-court, down by the
+river.
+
+Mr. Pocket and I had for some time parted company as to our original
+relations, though we continued on the best terms. Notwithstanding my
+inability to settle to anything,--which I hope arose out of the restless
+and incomplete tenure on which I held my means,--I had a taste for
+reading, and read regularly so many hours a day. That matter of
+Herbert’s was still progressing, and everything with me was as I have
+brought it down to the close of the last preceding chapter.
+
+Business had taken Herbert on a journey to Marseilles. I was alone, and
+had a dull sense of being alone. Dispirited and anxious, long hoping
+that to-morrow or next week would clear my way, and long disappointed, I
+sadly missed the cheerful face and ready response of my friend.
+
+It was wretched weather; stormy and wet, stormy and wet; and mud, mud,
+mud, deep in all the streets. Day after day, a vast heavy veil had been
+driving over London from the East, and it drove still, as if in the East
+there were an Eternity of cloud and wind. So furious had been the gusts,
+that high buildings in town had had the lead stripped off their roofs;
+and in the country, trees had been torn up, and sails of windmills
+carried away; and gloomy accounts had come in from the coast, of
+shipwreck and death. Violent blasts of rain had accompanied these rages
+of wind, and the day just closed as I sat down to read had been the
+worst of all.
+
+Alterations have been made in that part of the Temple since that time,
+and it has not now so lonely a character as it had then, nor is it so
+exposed to the river. We lived at the top of the last house, and the
+wind rushing up the river shook the house that night, like discharges
+of cannon, or breakings of a sea. When the rain came with it and dashed
+against the windows, I thought, raising my eyes to them as they
+rocked, that I might have fancied myself in a storm-beaten lighthouse.
+Occasionally, the smoke came rolling down the chimney as though it could
+not bear to go out into such a night; and when I set the doors open and
+looked down the staircase, the staircase lamps were blown out; and when
+I shaded my face with my hands and looked through the black windows
+(opening them ever so little was out of the question in the teeth of
+such wind and rain), I saw that the lamps in the court were blown out,
+and that the lamps on the bridges and the shore were shuddering, and
+that the coal-fires in barges on the river were being carried away
+before the wind like red-hot splashes in the rain.
+
+I read with my watch upon the table, purposing to close my book
+at eleven o’clock. As I shut it, Saint Paul’s, and all the many
+church-clocks in the City--some leading, some accompanying, some
+following--struck that hour. The sound was curiously flawed by the wind;
+and I was listening, and thinking how the wind assailed and tore it,
+when I heard a footstep on the stair.
+
+What nervous folly made me start, and awfully connect it with the
+footstep of my dead sister, matters not. It was past in a moment, and I
+listened again, and heard the footstep stumble in coming on.
+Remembering then, that the staircase-lights were blown out, I took up
+my reading-lamp and went out to the stair-head. Whoever was below had
+stopped on seeing my lamp, for all was quiet.
+
+“There is some one down there, is there not?” I called out, looking
+down.
+
+“Yes,” said a voice from the darkness beneath.
+
+“What floor do you want?”
+
+“The top. Mr. Pip.”
+
+“That is my name.--There is nothing the matter?”
+
+“Nothing the matter,” returned the voice. And the man came on.
+
+I stood with my lamp held out over the stair-rail, and he came slowly
+within its light. It was a shaded lamp, to shine upon a book, and its
+circle of light was very contracted; so that he was in it for a mere
+instant, and then out of it. In the instant, I had seen a face that was
+strange to me, looking up with an incomprehensible air of being touched
+and pleased by the sight of me.
+
+Moving the lamp as the man moved, I made out that he was substantially
+dressed, but roughly, like a voyager by sea. That he had long iron-gray
+hair. That his age was about sixty. That he was a muscular man, strong
+on his legs, and that he was browned and hardened by exposure to
+weather. As he ascended the last stair or two, and the light of my lamp
+included us both, I saw, with a stupid kind of amazement, that he was
+holding out both his hands to me.
+
+“Pray what is your business?” I asked him.
+
+“My business?” he repeated, pausing. “Ah! Yes. I will explain my
+business, by your leave.”
+
+“Do you wish to come in?”
+
+“Yes,” he replied; “I wish to come in, master.”
+
+I had asked him the question inhospitably enough, for I resented the
+sort of bright and gratified recognition that still shone in his face.
+I resented it, because it seemed to imply that he expected me to respond
+to it. But I took him into the room I had just left, and, having set the
+lamp on the table, asked him as civilly as I could to explain himself.
+
+He looked about him with the strangest air,--an air of wondering
+pleasure, as if he had some part in the things he admired,--and he
+pulled off a rough outer coat, and his hat. Then, I saw that his head
+was furrowed and bald, and that the long iron-gray hair grew only on
+its sides. But, I saw nothing that in the least explained him. On the
+contrary, I saw him next moment, once more holding out both his hands to
+me.
+
+“What do you mean?” said I, half suspecting him to be mad.
+
+He stopped in his looking at me, and slowly rubbed his right hand over
+his head. “It’s disapinting to a man,” he said, in a coarse broken
+voice, “arter having looked for’ard so distant, and come so fur; but
+you’re not to blame for that,--neither on us is to blame for that. I’ll
+speak in half a minute. Give me half a minute, please.”
+
+He sat down on a chair that stood before the fire, and covered his
+forehead with his large brown veinous hands. I looked at him attentively
+then, and recoiled a little from him; but I did not know him.
+
+“There’s no one nigh,” said he, looking over his shoulder; “is there?”
+
+“Why do you, a stranger coming into my rooms at this time of the night,
+ask that question?” said I.
+
+“You’re a game one,” he returned, shaking his head at me with a
+deliberate affection, at once most unintelligible and most exasperating;
+“I’m glad you’ve grow’d up, a game one! But don’t catch hold of me.
+You’d be sorry arterwards to have done it.”
+
+I relinquished the intention he had detected, for I knew him! Even yet
+I could not recall a single feature, but I knew him! If the wind and
+the rain had driven away the intervening years, had scattered all the
+intervening objects, had swept us to the churchyard where we first stood
+face to face on such different levels, I could not have known my convict
+more distinctly than I knew him now as he sat in the chair before the
+fire. No need to take a file from his pocket and show it to me; no need
+to take the handkerchief from his neck and twist it round his head; no
+need to hug himself with both his arms, and take a shivering turn across
+the room, looking back at me for recognition. I knew him before he gave
+me one of those aids, though, a moment before, I had not been conscious
+of remotely suspecting his identity.
+
+He came back to where I stood, and again held out both his hands.
+Not knowing what to do,--for, in my astonishment I had lost my
+self-possession,--I reluctantly gave him my hands. He grasped them
+heartily, raised them to his lips, kissed them, and still held them.
+
+“You acted noble, my boy,” said he. “Noble, Pip! And I have never forgot
+it!”
+
+At a change in his manner as if he were even going to embrace me, I laid
+a hand upon his breast and put him away.
+
+“Stay!” said I. “Keep off! If you are grateful to me for what I did when
+I was a little child, I hope you have shown your gratitude by mending
+your way of life. If you have come here to thank me, it was not
+necessary. Still, however you have found me out, there must be something
+good in the feeling that has brought you here, and I will not repulse
+you; but surely you must understand that--I--”
+
+My attention was so attracted by the singularity of his fixed look at
+me, that the words died away on my tongue.
+
+“You was a saying,” he observed, when we had confronted one another
+in silence, “that surely I must understand. What, surely must I
+understand?”
+
+“That I cannot wish to renew that chance intercourse with you of long
+ago, under these different circumstances. I am glad to believe you have
+repented and recovered yourself. I am glad to tell you so. I am glad
+that, thinking I deserve to be thanked, you have come to thank me. But
+our ways are different ways, none the less. You are wet, and you look
+weary. Will you drink something before you go?”
+
+He had replaced his neckerchief loosely, and had stood, keenly observant
+of me, biting a long end of it. “I think,” he answered, still with the
+end at his mouth and still observant of me, “that I will drink (I thank
+you) afore I go.”
+
+There was a tray ready on a side-table. I brought it to the table
+near the fire, and asked him what he would have? He touched one of the
+bottles without looking at it or speaking, and I made him some hot rum
+and water. I tried to keep my hand steady while I did so, but his look
+at me as he leaned back in his chair with the long draggled end of his
+neckerchief between his teeth--evidently forgotten--made my hand very
+difficult to master. When at last I put the glass to him, I saw with
+amazement that his eyes were full of tears.
+
+Up to this time I had remained standing, not to disguise that I wished
+him gone. But I was softened by the softened aspect of the man, and felt
+a touch of reproach. “I hope,” said I, hurriedly putting something into
+a glass for myself, and drawing a chair to the table, “that you will not
+think I spoke harshly to you just now. I had no intention of doing it,
+and I am sorry for it if I did. I wish you well and happy!”
+
+As I put my glass to my lips, he glanced with surprise at the end of his
+neckerchief, dropping from his mouth when he opened it, and stretched
+out his hand. I gave him mine, and then he drank, and drew his sleeve
+across his eyes and forehead.
+
+“How are you living?” I asked him.
+
+“I’ve been a sheep-farmer, stock-breeder, other trades besides, away in
+the new world,” said he; “many a thousand mile of stormy water off from
+this.”
+
+“I hope you have done well?”
+
+“I’ve done wonderfully well. There’s others went out alonger me as has
+done well too, but no man has done nigh as well as me. I’m famous for
+it.”
+
+“I am glad to hear it.”
+
+“I hope to hear you say so, my dear boy.”
+
+Without stopping to try to understand those words or the tone in which
+they were spoken, I turned off to a point that had just come into my
+mind.
+
+“Have you ever seen a messenger you once sent to me,” I inquired, “since
+he undertook that trust?”
+
+“Never set eyes upon him. I warn’t likely to it.”
+
+“He came faithfully, and he brought me the two one-pound notes. I was
+a poor boy then, as you know, and to a poor boy they were a little
+fortune. But, like you, I have done well since, and you must let me pay
+them back. You can put them to some other poor boy’s use.” I took out my
+purse.
+
+He watched me as I laid my purse upon the table and opened it, and he
+watched me as I separated two one-pound notes from its contents. They
+were clean and new, and I spread them out and handed them over to
+him. Still watching me, he laid them one upon the other, folded them
+long-wise, gave them a twist, set fire to them at the lamp, and dropped
+the ashes into the tray.
+
+“May I make so bold,” he said then, with a smile that was like a frown,
+and with a frown that was like a smile, “as ask you how you have done
+well, since you and me was out on them lone shivering marshes?”
+
+“How?”
+
+“Ah!”
+
+He emptied his glass, got up, and stood at the side of the fire, with
+his heavy brown hand on the mantel-shelf. He put a foot up to the bars,
+to dry and warm it, and the wet boot began to steam; but, he neither
+looked at it, nor at the fire, but steadily looked at me. It was only
+now that I began to tremble.
+
+When my lips had parted, and had shaped some words that were
+without sound, I forced myself to tell him (though I could not do it
+distinctly), that I had been chosen to succeed to some property.
+
+“Might a mere warmint ask what property?” said he.
+
+I faltered, “I don’t know.”
+
+“Might a mere warmint ask whose property?” said he.
+
+I faltered again, “I don’t know.”
+
+“Could I make a guess, I wonder,” said the Convict, “at your income
+since you come of age! As to the first figure now. Five?”
+
+With my heart beating like a heavy hammer of disordered action, I rose
+out of my chair, and stood with my hand upon the back of it, looking
+wildly at him.
+
+“Concerning a guardian,” he went on. “There ought to have been some
+guardian, or such-like, whiles you was a minor. Some lawyer, maybe. As
+to the first letter of that lawyer’s name now. Would it be J?”
+
+All the truth of my position came flashing on me; and its
+disappointments, dangers, disgraces, consequences of all kinds, rushed
+in in such a multitude that I was borne down by them and had to struggle
+for every breath I drew.
+
+“Put it,” he resumed, “as the employer of that lawyer whose name begun
+with a J, and might be Jaggers,--put it as he had come over sea to
+Portsmouth, and had landed there, and had wanted to come on to you.
+‘However, you have found me out,’ you says just now. Well! However, did
+I find you out? Why, I wrote from Portsmouth to a person in London, for
+particulars of your address. That person’s name? Why, Wemmick.”
+
+I could not have spoken one word, though it had been to save my life.
+I stood, with a hand on the chair-back and a hand on my breast, where
+I seemed to be suffocating,--I stood so, looking wildly at him, until I
+grasped at the chair, when the room began to surge and turn. He caught
+me, drew me to the sofa, put me up against the cushions, and bent on one
+knee before me, bringing the face that I now well remembered, and that I
+shuddered at, very near to mine.
+
+“Yes, Pip, dear boy, I’ve made a gentleman on you! It’s me wot has
+done it! I swore that time, sure as ever I earned a guinea, that guinea
+should go to you. I swore arterwards, sure as ever I spec’lated and got
+rich, you should get rich. I lived rough, that you should live smooth;
+I worked hard, that you should be above work. What odds, dear boy? Do I
+tell it, fur you to feel a obligation? Not a bit. I tell it, fur you to
+know as that there hunted dunghill dog wot you kep life in, got his head
+so high that he could make a gentleman,--and, Pip, you’re him!”
+
+The abhorrence in which I held the man, the dread I had of him, the
+repugnance with which I shrank from him, could not have been exceeded if
+he had been some terrible beast.
+
+“Look’ee here, Pip. I’m your second father. You’re my son,--more to me
+nor any son. I’ve put away money, only for you to spend. When I was a
+hired-out shepherd in a solitary hut, not seeing no faces but faces of
+sheep till I half forgot wot men’s and women’s faces wos like, I see
+yourn. I drops my knife many a time in that hut when I was a-eating my
+dinner or my supper, and I says, ‘Here’s the boy again, a looking at
+me whiles I eats and drinks!’ I see you there a many times, as plain as
+ever I see you on them misty marshes. ‘Lord strike me dead!’ I says each
+time,--and I goes out in the air to say it under the open heavens,--‘but
+wot, if I gets liberty and money, I’ll make that boy a gentleman!’ And
+I done it. Why, look at you, dear boy! Look at these here lodgings
+o’yourn, fit for a lord! A lord? Ah! You shall show money with lords for
+wagers, and beat ‘em!”
+
+In his heat and triumph, and in his knowledge that I had been nearly
+fainting, he did not remark on my reception of all this. It was the one
+grain of relief I had.
+
+“Look’ee here!” he went on, taking my watch out of my pocket, and
+turning towards him a ring on my finger, while I recoiled from his
+touch as if he had been a snake, “a gold ‘un and a beauty: that’s a
+gentleman’s, I hope! A diamond all set round with rubies; that’s a
+gentleman’s, I hope! Look at your linen; fine and beautiful! Look at
+your clothes; better ain’t to be got! And your books too,” turning his
+eyes round the room, “mounting up, on their shelves, by hundreds! And
+you read ‘em; don’t you? I see you’d been a reading of ‘em when I come
+in. Ha, ha, ha! You shall read ‘em to me, dear boy! And if they’re in
+foreign languages wot I don’t understand, I shall be just as proud as if
+I did.”
+
+Again he took both my hands and put them to his lips, while my blood ran
+cold within me.
+
+“Don’t you mind talking, Pip,” said he, after again drawing his sleeve
+over his eyes and forehead, as the click came in his throat which I well
+remembered,--and he was all the more horrible to me that he was so much
+in earnest; “you can’t do better nor keep quiet, dear boy. You ain’t
+looked slowly forward to this as I have; you wosn’t prepared for this as
+I wos. But didn’t you never think it might be me?”
+
+“O no, no, no,” I returned, “Never, never!”
+
+“Well, you see it wos me, and single-handed. Never a soul in it but my
+own self and Mr. Jaggers.”
+
+“Was there no one else?” I asked.
+
+“No,” said he, with a glance of surprise: “who else should there be?
+And, dear boy, how good looking you have growed! There’s bright eyes
+somewheres--eh? Isn’t there bright eyes somewheres, wot you love the
+thoughts on?”
+
+O Estella, Estella!
+
+“They shall be yourn, dear boy, if money can buy ‘em. Not that a
+gentleman like you, so well set up as you, can’t win ‘em off of his own
+game; but money shall back you! Let me finish wot I was a telling you,
+dear boy. From that there hut and that there hiring-out, I got money
+left me by my master (which died, and had been the same as me), and got
+my liberty and went for myself. In every single thing I went for, I went
+for you. ‘Lord strike a blight upon it,’ I says, wotever it was I went
+for, ‘if it ain’t for him!’ It all prospered wonderful. As I giv’ you
+to understand just now, I’m famous for it. It was the money left me, and
+the gains of the first few year wot I sent home to Mr. Jaggers--all for
+you--when he first come arter you, agreeable to my letter.”
+
+O that he had never come! That he had left me at the forge,--far from
+contented, yet, by comparison happy!
+
+“And then, dear boy, it was a recompense to me, look’ee here, to know in
+secret that I was making a gentleman. The blood horses of them colonists
+might fling up the dust over me as I was walking; what do I say? I says
+to myself, ‘I’m making a better gentleman nor ever you’ll be!’ When
+one of ‘em says to another, ‘He was a convict, a few year ago, and is a
+ignorant common fellow now, for all he’s lucky,’ what do I say? I says
+to myself, ‘If I ain’t a gentleman, nor yet ain’t got no learning, I’m
+the owner of such. All on you owns stock and land; which on you owns a
+brought-up London gentleman?’ This way I kep myself a going. And this
+way I held steady afore my mind that I would for certain come one day
+and see my boy, and make myself known to him, on his own ground.”
+
+He laid his hand on my shoulder. I shuddered at the thought that for
+anything I knew, his hand might be stained with blood.
+
+“It warn’t easy, Pip, for me to leave them parts, nor yet it warn’t
+safe. But I held to it, and the harder it was, the stronger I held, for
+I was determined, and my mind firm made up. At last I done it. Dear boy,
+I done it!”
+
+I tried to collect my thoughts, but I was stunned. Throughout, I had
+seemed to myself to attend more to the wind and the rain than to him;
+even now, I could not separate his voice from those voices, though those
+were loud and his was silent.
+
+“Where will you put me?” he asked, presently. “I must be put somewheres,
+dear boy.”
+
+“To sleep?” said I.
+
+“Yes. And to sleep long and sound,” he answered; “for I’ve been
+sea-tossed and sea-washed, months and months.”
+
+“My friend and companion,” said I, rising from the sofa, “is absent; you
+must have his room.”
+
+“He won’t come back to-morrow; will he?”
+
+“No,” said I, answering almost mechanically, in spite of my utmost
+efforts; “not to-morrow.”
+
+“Because, look’ee here, dear boy,” he said, dropping his voice, and
+laying a long finger on my breast in an impressive manner, “caution is
+necessary.”
+
+“How do you mean? Caution?”
+
+“By G----, it’s Death!”
+
+“What’s death?”
+
+“I was sent for life. It’s death to come back. There’s been overmuch
+coming back of late years, and I should of a certainty be hanged if
+took.”
+
+Nothing was needed but this; the wretched man, after loading wretched me
+with his gold and silver chains for years, had risked his life to come
+to me, and I held it there in my keeping! If I had loved him instead
+of abhorring him; if I had been attracted to him by the strongest
+admiration and affection, instead of shrinking from him with the
+strongest repugnance; it could have been no worse. On the contrary, it
+would have been better, for his preservation would then have naturally
+and tenderly addressed my heart.
+
+My first care was to close the shutters, so that no light might be seen
+from without, and then to close and make fast the doors. While I did so,
+he stood at the table drinking rum and eating biscuit; and when I saw
+him thus engaged, I saw my convict on the marshes at his meal again. It
+almost seemed to me as if he must stoop down presently, to file at his
+leg.
+
+When I had gone into Herbert’s room, and had shut off any other
+communication between it and the staircase than through the room in
+which our conversation had been held, I asked him if he would go to bed?
+He said yes, but asked me for some of my “gentleman’s linen” to put
+on in the morning. I brought it out, and laid it ready for him, and my
+blood again ran cold when he again took me by both hands to give me good
+night.
+
+I got away from him, without knowing how I did it, and mended the fire
+in the room where we had been together, and sat down by it, afraid to go
+to bed. For an hour or more, I remained too stunned to think; and it
+was not until I began to think, that I began fully to know how wrecked I
+was, and how the ship in which I had sailed was gone to pieces.
+
+Miss Havisham’s intentions towards me, all a mere dream; Estella not
+designed for me; I only suffered in Satis House as a convenience, a
+sting for the greedy relations, a model with a mechanical heart to
+practise on when no other practice was at hand; those were the first
+smarts I had. But, sharpest and deepest pain of all,--it was for the
+convict, guilty of I knew not what crimes, and liable to be taken out
+of those rooms where I sat thinking, and hanged at the Old Bailey door,
+that I had deserted Joe.
+
+I would not have gone back to Joe now, I would not have gone back to
+Biddy now, for any consideration; simply, I suppose, because my sense of
+my own worthless conduct to them was greater than every consideration.
+No wisdom on earth could have given me the comfort that I should have
+derived from their simplicity and fidelity; but I could never, never,
+undo what I had done.
+
+In every rage of wind and rush of rain, I heard pursuers. Twice, I could
+have sworn there was a knocking and whispering at the outer door. With
+these fears upon me, I began either to imagine or recall that I had had
+mysterious warnings of this man’s approach. That, for weeks gone by, I
+had passed faces in the streets which I had thought like his. That these
+likenesses had grown more numerous, as he, coming over the sea, had
+drawn nearer. That his wicked spirit had somehow sent these messengers
+to mine, and that now on this stormy night he was as good as his word,
+and with me.
+
+Crowding up with these reflections came the reflection that I had seen
+him with my childish eyes to be a desperately violent man; that I had
+heard that other convict reiterate that he had tried to murder him; that
+I had seen him down in the ditch tearing and fighting like a wild
+beast. Out of such remembrances I brought into the light of the fire a
+half-formed terror that it might not be safe to be shut up there with
+him in the dead of the wild solitary night. This dilated until it filled
+the room, and impelled me to take a candle and go in and look at my
+dreadful burden.
+
+He had rolled a handkerchief round his head, and his face was set and
+lowering in his sleep. But he was asleep, and quietly too, though he had
+a pistol lying on the pillow. Assured of this, I softly removed the key
+to the outside of his door, and turned it on him before I again sat down
+by the fire. Gradually I slipped from the chair and lay on the floor.
+When I awoke without having parted in my sleep with the perception of
+my wretchedness, the clocks of the Eastward churches were striking five,
+the candles were wasted out, the fire was dead, and the wind and rain
+intensified the thick black darkness.
+
+THIS IS THE END OF THE SECOND STAGE OF PIP’S EXPECTATIONS.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XL
+
+It was fortunate for me that I had to take precautions to ensure (so far
+as I could) the safety of my dreaded visitor; for, this thought pressing
+on me when I awoke, held other thoughts in a confused concourse at a
+distance.
+
+The impossibility of keeping him concealed in the chambers was
+self-evident. It could not be done, and the attempt to do it would
+inevitably engender suspicion. True, I had no Avenger in my service now,
+but I was looked after by an inflammatory old female, assisted by an
+animated rag-bag whom she called her niece, and to keep a room secret
+from them would be to invite curiosity and exaggeration. They both had
+weak eyes, which I had long attributed to their chronically looking in
+at keyholes, and they were always at hand when not wanted; indeed that
+was their only reliable quality besides larceny. Not to get up a mystery
+with these people, I resolved to announce in the morning that my uncle
+had unexpectedly come from the country.
+
+This course I decided on while I was yet groping about in the darkness
+for the means of getting a light. Not stumbling on the means after all,
+I was fain to go out to the adjacent Lodge and get the watchman there to
+come with his lantern. Now, in groping my way down the black staircase I
+fell over something, and that something was a man crouching in a corner.
+
+As the man made no answer when I asked him what he did there, but eluded
+my touch in silence, I ran to the Lodge and urged the watchman to come
+quickly; telling him of the incident on the way back. The wind being as
+fierce as ever, we did not care to endanger the light in the lantern by
+rekindling the extinguished lamps on the staircase, but we examined the
+staircase from the bottom to the top and found no one there. It then
+occurred to me as possible that the man might have slipped into my
+rooms; so, lighting my candle at the watchman’s, and leaving him
+standing at the door, I examined them carefully, including the room in
+which my dreaded guest lay asleep. All was quiet, and assuredly no other
+man was in those chambers.
+
+It troubled me that there should have been a lurker on the stairs, on
+that night of all nights in the year, and I asked the watchman, on the
+chance of eliciting some hopeful explanation as I handed him a dram
+at the door, whether he had admitted at his gate any gentleman who had
+perceptibly been dining out? Yes, he said; at different times of the
+night, three. One lived in Fountain Court, and the other two lived in
+the Lane, and he had seen them all go home. Again, the only other man
+who dwelt in the house of which my chambers formed a part had been in
+the country for some weeks, and he certainly had not returned in the
+night, because we had seen his door with his seal on it as we came
+upstairs.
+
+“The night being so bad, sir,” said the watchman, as he gave me back
+my glass, “uncommon few have come in at my gate. Besides them three
+gentlemen that I have named, I don’t call to mind another since about
+eleven o’clock, when a stranger asked for you.”
+
+“My uncle,” I muttered. “Yes.”
+
+“You saw him, sir?”
+
+“Yes. Oh yes.”
+
+“Likewise the person with him?”
+
+“Person with him!” I repeated.
+
+“I judged the person to be with him,” returned the watchman. “The person
+stopped, when he stopped to make inquiry of me, and the person took this
+way when he took this way.”
+
+“What sort of person?”
+
+The watchman had not particularly noticed; he should say a working
+person; to the best of his belief, he had a dust-colored kind of clothes
+on, under a dark coat. The watchman made more light of the matter than I
+did, and naturally; not having my reason for attaching weight to it.
+
+When I had got rid of him, which I thought it well to do without
+prolonging explanations, my mind was much troubled by these two
+circumstances taken together. Whereas they were easy of innocent
+solution apart,--as, for instance, some diner out or diner at home,
+who had not gone near this watchman’s gate, might have strayed to my
+staircase and dropped asleep there,--and my nameless visitor might have
+brought some one with him to show him the way,--still, joined, they had
+an ugly look to one as prone to distrust and fear as the changes of a
+few hours had made me.
+
+I lighted my fire, which burnt with a raw pale flare at that time of the
+morning, and fell into a doze before it. I seemed to have been dozing a
+whole night when the clocks struck six. As there was full an hour and
+a half between me and daylight, I dozed again; now, waking up uneasily,
+with prolix conversations about nothing, in my ears; now, making thunder
+of the wind in the chimney; at length, falling off into a profound sleep
+from which the daylight woke me with a start.
+
+All this time I had never been able to consider my own situation, nor
+could I do so yet. I had not the power to attend to it. I was greatly
+dejected and distressed, but in an incoherent wholesale sort of way.
+As to forming any plan for the future, I could as soon have formed an
+elephant. When I opened the shutters and looked out at the wet wild
+morning, all of a leaden hue; when I walked from room to room; when I
+sat down again shivering, before the fire, waiting for my laundress to
+appear; I thought how miserable I was, but hardly knew why, or how long
+I had been so, or on what day of the week I made the reflection, or even
+who I was that made it.
+
+At last, the old woman and the niece came in,--the latter with a head
+not easily distinguishable from her dusty broom,--and testified surprise
+at sight of me and the fire. To whom I imparted how my uncle had come in
+the night and was then asleep, and how the breakfast preparations were
+to be modified accordingly. Then I washed and dressed while they knocked
+the furniture about and made a dust; and so, in a sort of dream
+or sleep-waking, I found myself sitting by the fire again, waiting
+for--Him--to come to breakfast.
+
+By and by, his door opened and he came out. I could not bring myself to
+bear the sight of him, and I thought he had a worse look by daylight.
+
+“I do not even know,” said I, speaking low as he took his seat at the
+table, “by what name to call you. I have given out that you are my
+uncle.”
+
+“That’s it, dear boy! Call me uncle.”
+
+“You assumed some name, I suppose, on board ship?”
+
+“Yes, dear boy. I took the name of Provis.”
+
+“Do you mean to keep that name?”
+
+“Why, yes, dear boy, it’s as good as another,--unless you’d like
+another.”
+
+“What is your real name?” I asked him in a whisper.
+
+“Magwitch,” he answered, in the same tone; “chrisen’d Abel.”
+
+“What were you brought up to be?”
+
+“A warmint, dear boy.”
+
+He answered quite seriously, and used the word as if it denoted some
+profession.
+
+“When you came into the Temple last night--” said I, pausing to wonder
+whether that could really have been last night, which seemed so long
+ago.
+
+“Yes, dear boy?”
+
+“When you came in at the gate and asked the watchman the way here, had
+you any one with you?”
+
+“With me? No, dear boy.”
+
+“But there was some one there?”
+
+“I didn’t take particular notice,” he said, dubiously, “not knowing the
+ways of the place. But I think there was a person, too, come in alonger
+me.”
+
+“Are you known in London?”
+
+“I hope not!” said he, giving his neck a jerk with his forefinger that
+made me turn hot and sick.
+
+“Were you known in London, once?”
+
+“Not over and above, dear boy. I was in the provinces mostly.”
+
+“Were you--tried--in London?”
+
+“Which time?” said he, with a sharp look.
+
+“The last time.”
+
+He nodded. “First knowed Mr. Jaggers that way. Jaggers was for me.”
+
+It was on my lips to ask him what he was tried for, but he took up
+a knife, gave it a flourish, and with the words, “And what I done is
+worked out and paid for!” fell to at his breakfast.
+
+He ate in a ravenous way that was very disagreeable, and all his actions
+were uncouth, noisy, and greedy. Some of his teeth had failed him since
+I saw him eat on the marshes, and as he turned his food in his mouth,
+and turned his head sideways to bring his strongest fangs to bear upon
+it, he looked terribly like a hungry old dog. If I had begun with any
+appetite, he would have taken it away, and I should have sat much as
+I did,--repelled from him by an insurmountable aversion, and gloomily
+looking at the cloth.
+
+“I’m a heavy grubber, dear boy,” he said, as a polite kind of apology
+when he made an end of his meal, “but I always was. If it had been in
+my constitution to be a lighter grubber, I might ha’ got into lighter
+trouble. Similarly, I must have my smoke. When I was first hired out as
+shepherd t’other side the world, it’s my belief I should ha’ turned into
+a molloncolly-mad sheep myself, if I hadn’t a had my smoke.”
+
+As he said so, he got up from table, and putting his hand into the
+breast of the pea-coat he wore, brought out a short black pipe, and a
+handful of loose tobacco of the kind that is called Negro-head. Having
+filled his pipe, he put the surplus tobacco back again, as if his pocket
+were a drawer. Then, he took a live coal from the fire with the tongs,
+and lighted his pipe at it, and then turned round on the hearth-rug with
+his back to the fire, and went through his favorite action of holding
+out both his hands for mine.
+
+“And this,” said he, dandling my hands up and down in his, as he puffed
+at his pipe,--“and this is the gentleman what I made! The real genuine
+One! It does me good fur to look at you, Pip. All I stip’late, is, to
+stand by and look at you, dear boy!”
+
+I released my hands as soon as I could, and found that I was beginning
+slowly to settle down to the contemplation of my condition. What I was
+chained to, and how heavily, became intelligible to me, as I heard his
+hoarse voice, and sat looking up at his furrowed bald head with its iron
+gray hair at the sides.
+
+“I mustn’t see my gentleman a footing it in the mire of the streets;
+there mustn’t be no mud on his boots. My gentleman must have horses,
+Pip! Horses to ride, and horses to drive, and horses for his servant
+to ride and drive as well. Shall colonists have their horses (and blood
+‘uns, if you please, good Lord!) and not my London gentleman? No, no.
+We’ll show ‘em another pair of shoes than that, Pip; won’t us?”
+
+He took out of his pocket a great thick pocket-book, bursting with
+papers, and tossed it on the table.
+
+“There’s something worth spending in that there book, dear boy. It’s
+yourn. All I’ve got ain’t mine; it’s yourn. Don’t you be afeerd on it.
+There’s more where that come from. I’ve come to the old country fur
+to see my gentleman spend his money like a gentleman. That’ll be my
+pleasure. My pleasure ‘ull be fur to see him do it. And blast you all!”
+ he wound up, looking round the room and snapping his fingers once with
+a loud snap, “blast you every one, from the judge in his wig, to the
+colonist a stirring up the dust, I’ll show a better gentleman than the
+whole kit on you put together!”
+
+“Stop!” said I, almost in a frenzy of fear and dislike, “I want to speak
+to you. I want to know what is to be done. I want to know how you are to
+be kept out of danger, how long you are going to stay, what projects you
+have.”
+
+“Look’ee here, Pip,” said he, laying his hand on my arm in a suddenly
+altered and subdued manner; “first of all, look’ee here. I forgot myself
+half a minute ago. What I said was low; that’s what it was; low. Look’ee
+here, Pip. Look over it. I ain’t a going to be low.”
+
+“First,” I resumed, half groaning, “what precautions can be taken
+against your being recognized and seized?”
+
+“No, dear boy,” he said, in the same tone as before, “that don’t
+go first. Lowness goes first. I ain’t took so many year to make a
+gentleman, not without knowing what’s due to him. Look’ee here, Pip. I
+was low; that’s what I was; low. Look over it, dear boy.”
+
+Some sense of the grimly-ludicrous moved me to a fretful laugh, as I
+replied, “I have looked over it. In Heaven’s name, don’t harp upon it!”
+
+“Yes, but look’ee here,” he persisted. “Dear boy, I ain’t come so fur,
+not fur to be low. Now, go on, dear boy. You was a saying--”
+
+“How are you to be guarded from the danger you have incurred?”
+
+“Well, dear boy, the danger ain’t so great. Without I was informed
+agen, the danger ain’t so much to signify. There’s Jaggers, and there’s
+Wemmick, and there’s you. Who else is there to inform?”
+
+“Is there no chance person who might identify you in the street?” said
+I.
+
+“Well,” he returned, “there ain’t many. Nor yet I don’t intend to
+advertise myself in the newspapers by the name of A.M. come back from
+Botany Bay; and years have rolled away, and who’s to gain by it? Still,
+look’ee here, Pip. If the danger had been fifty times as great, I should
+ha’ come to see you, mind you, just the same.”
+
+“And how long do you remain?”
+
+“How long?” said he, taking his black pipe from his mouth, and dropping
+his jaw as he stared at me. “I’m not a going back. I’ve come for good.”
+
+“Where are you to live?” said I. “What is to be done with you? Where
+will you be safe?”
+
+“Dear boy,” he returned, “there’s disguising wigs can be bought
+for money, and there’s hair powder, and spectacles, and black
+clothes,--shorts and what not. Others has done it safe afore, and what
+others has done afore, others can do agen. As to the where and how of
+living, dear boy, give me your own opinions on it.”
+
+“You take it smoothly now,” said I, “but you were very serious last
+night, when you swore it was Death.”
+
+“And so I swear it is Death,” said he, putting his pipe back in his
+mouth, “and Death by the rope, in the open street not fur from this, and
+it’s serious that you should fully understand it to be so. What then,
+when that’s once done? Here I am. To go back now ‘ud be as bad as to
+stand ground--worse. Besides, Pip, I’m here, because I’ve meant it by
+you, years and years. As to what I dare, I’m a old bird now, as has
+dared all manner of traps since first he was fledged, and I’m not afeerd
+to perch upon a scarecrow. If there’s Death hid inside of it, there is,
+and let him come out, and I’ll face him, and then I’ll believe in him
+and not afore. And now let me have a look at my gentleman agen.”
+
+Once more, he took me by both hands and surveyed me with an air of
+admiring proprietorship: smoking with great complacency all the while.
+
+It appeared to me that I could do no better than secure him some
+quiet lodging hard by, of which he might take possession when Herbert
+returned: whom I expected in two or three days. That the secret must
+be confided to Herbert as a matter of unavoidable necessity, even if I
+could have put the immense relief I should derive from sharing it with
+him out of the question, was plain to me. But it was by no means so
+plain to Mr. Provis (I resolved to call him by that name), who reserved
+his consent to Herbert’s participation until he should have seen him
+and formed a favorable judgment of his physiognomy. “And even then, dear
+boy,” said he, pulling a greasy little clasped black Testament out of
+his pocket, “we’ll have him on his oath.”
+
+To state that my terrible patron carried this little black book about
+the world solely to swear people on in cases of emergency, would be to
+state what I never quite established; but this I can say, that I never
+knew him put it to any other use. The book itself had the appearance of
+having been stolen from some court of justice, and perhaps his knowledge
+of its antecedents, combined with his own experience in that wise, gave
+him a reliance on its powers as a sort of legal spell or charm. On this
+first occasion of his producing it, I recalled how he had made me swear
+fidelity in the churchyard long ago, and how he had described himself
+last night as always swearing to his resolutions in his solitude.
+
+As he was at present dressed in a seafaring slop suit, in which he
+looked as if he had some parrots and cigars to dispose of, I next
+discussed with him what dress he should wear. He cherished an
+extraordinary belief in the virtues of “shorts” as a disguise, and had
+in his own mind sketched a dress for himself that would have made
+him something between a dean and a dentist. It was with considerable
+difficulty that I won him over to the assumption of a dress more like a
+prosperous farmer’s; and we arranged that he should cut his hair close,
+and wear a little powder. Lastly, as he had not yet been seen by the
+laundress or her niece, he was to keep himself out of their view until
+his change of dress was made.
+
+It would seem a simple matter to decide on these precautions; but in my
+dazed, not to say distracted, state, it took so long, that I did not
+get out to further them until two or three in the afternoon. He was to
+remain shut up in the chambers while I was gone, and was on no account
+to open the door.
+
+There being to my knowledge a respectable lodging-house in Essex Street,
+the back of which looked into the Temple, and was almost within hail of
+my windows, I first of all repaired to that house, and was so fortunate
+as to secure the second floor for my uncle, Mr. Provis. I then went from
+shop to shop, making such purchases as were necessary to the change in
+his appearance. This business transacted, I turned my face, on my own
+account, to Little Britain. Mr. Jaggers was at his desk, but, seeing me
+enter, got up immediately and stood before his fire.
+
+“Now, Pip,” said he, “be careful.”
+
+“I will, sir,” I returned. For, coming along I had thought well of what
+I was going to say.
+
+“Don’t commit yourself,” said Mr. Jaggers, “and don’t commit any one.
+You understand--any one. Don’t tell me anything: I don’t want to know
+anything; I am not curious.”
+
+Of course I saw that he knew the man was come.
+
+“I merely want, Mr. Jaggers,” said I, “to assure myself that what I have
+been told is true. I have no hope of its being untrue, but at least I
+may verify it.”
+
+Mr. Jaggers nodded. “But did you say ‘told’ or ‘informed’?” he asked
+me, with his head on one side, and not looking at me, but looking in
+a listening way at the floor. “Told would seem to imply verbal
+communication. You can’t have verbal communication with a man in New
+South Wales, you know.”
+
+“I will say, informed, Mr. Jaggers.”
+
+“Good.”
+
+“I have been informed by a person named Abel Magwitch, that he is the
+benefactor so long unknown to me.”
+
+“That is the man,” said Mr. Jaggers, “in New South Wales.”
+
+“And only he?” said I.
+
+“And only he,” said Mr. Jaggers.
+
+“I am not so unreasonable, sir, as to think you at all responsible for
+my mistakes and wrong conclusions; but I always supposed it was Miss
+Havisham.”
+
+“As you say, Pip,” returned Mr. Jaggers, turning his eyes upon
+me coolly, and taking a bite at his forefinger, “I am not at all
+responsible for that.”
+
+“And yet it looked so like it, sir,” I pleaded with a downcast heart.
+
+“Not a particle of evidence, Pip,” said Mr. Jaggers, shaking his head
+and gathering up his skirts. “Take nothing on its looks; take everything
+on evidence. There’s no better rule.”
+
+“I have no more to say,” said I, with a sigh, after standing silent for
+a little while. “I have verified my information, and there’s an end.”
+
+“And Magwitch--in New South Wales--having at last disclosed himself,”
+ said Mr. Jaggers, “you will comprehend, Pip, how rigidly throughout
+my communication with you, I have always adhered to the strict line of
+fact. There has never been the least departure from the strict line of
+fact. You are quite aware of that?”
+
+“Quite, sir.”
+
+“I communicated to Magwitch--in New South Wales--when he first wrote to
+me--from New South Wales--the caution that he must not expect me ever to
+deviate from the strict line of fact. I also communicated to him another
+caution. He appeared to me to have obscurely hinted in his letter at
+some distant idea he had of seeing you in England here. I cautioned
+him that I must hear no more of that; that he was not at all likely to
+obtain a pardon; that he was expatriated for the term of his natural
+life; and that his presenting himself in this country would be an act of
+felony, rendering him liable to the extreme penalty of the law. I gave
+Magwitch that caution,” said Mr. Jaggers, looking hard at me; “I wrote
+it to New South Wales. He guided himself by it, no doubt.”
+
+“No doubt,” said I.
+
+“I have been informed by Wemmick,” pursued Mr. Jaggers, still looking
+hard at me, “that he has received a letter, under date Portsmouth, from
+a colonist of the name of Purvis, or--”
+
+“Or Provis,” I suggested.
+
+“Or Provis--thank you, Pip. Perhaps it is Provis? Perhaps you know it’s
+Provis?”
+
+“Yes,” said I.
+
+“You know it’s Provis. A letter, under date Portsmouth, from a colonist
+of the name of Provis, asking for the particulars of your address, on
+behalf of Magwitch. Wemmick sent him the particulars, I understand, by
+return of post. Probably it is through Provis that you have received the
+explanation of Magwitch--in New South Wales?”
+
+“It came through Provis,” I replied.
+
+“Good day, Pip,” said Mr. Jaggers, offering his hand; “glad to have
+seen you. In writing by post to Magwitch--in New South Wales--or in
+communicating with him through Provis, have the goodness to mention that
+the particulars and vouchers of our long account shall be sent to you,
+together with the balance; for there is still a balance remaining. Good
+day, Pip!”
+
+We shook hands, and he looked hard at me as long as he could see me. I
+turned at the door, and he was still looking hard at me, while the two
+vile casts on the shelf seemed to be trying to get their eyelids open,
+and to force out of their swollen throats, “O, what a man he is!”
+
+Wemmick was out, and though he had been at his desk he could have done
+nothing for me. I went straight back to the Temple, where I found
+the terrible Provis drinking rum and water and smoking negro-head, in
+safety.
+
+Next day the clothes I had ordered all came home, and he put them on.
+Whatever he put on, became him less (it dismally seemed to me) than what
+he had worn before. To my thinking, there was something in him that made
+it hopeless to attempt to disguise him. The more I dressed him and the
+better I dressed him, the more he looked like the slouching fugitive on
+the marshes. This effect on my anxious fancy was partly referable, no
+doubt, to his old face and manner growing more familiar to me; but I
+believe too that he dragged one of his legs as if there were still a
+weight of iron on it, and that from head to foot there was Convict in
+the very grain of the man.
+
+The influences of his solitary hut-life were upon him besides, and
+gave him a savage air that no dress could tame; added to these were the
+influences of his subsequent branded life among men, and, crowning all,
+his consciousness that he was dodging and hiding now. In all his ways of
+sitting and standing, and eating and drinking,--of brooding about in a
+high-shouldered reluctant style,--of taking out his great horn-handled
+jackknife and wiping it on his legs and cutting his food,--of
+lifting light glasses and cups to his lips, as if they were clumsy
+pannikins,--of chopping a wedge off his bread, and soaking up with it
+the last fragments of gravy round and round his plate, as if to make the
+most of an allowance, and then drying his finger-ends on it, and then
+swallowing it,--in these ways and a thousand other small nameless
+instances arising every minute in the day, there was Prisoner, Felon,
+Bondsman, plain as plain could be.
+
+It had been his own idea to wear that touch of powder, and I had
+conceded the powder after overcoming the shorts. But I can compare the
+effect of it, when on, to nothing but the probable effect of rouge upon
+the dead; so awful was the manner in which everything in him that it was
+most desirable to repress, started through that thin layer of pretence,
+and seemed to come blazing out at the crown of his head. It was
+abandoned as soon as tried, and he wore his grizzled hair cut short.
+
+Words cannot tell what a sense I had, at the same time, of the dreadful
+mystery that he was to me. When he fell asleep of an evening, with his
+knotted hands clenching the sides of the easy-chair, and his bald head
+tattooed with deep wrinkles falling forward on his breast, I would sit
+and look at him, wondering what he had done, and loading him with all
+the crimes in the Calendar, until the impulse was powerful on me to
+start up and fly from him. Every hour so increased my abhorrence of
+him, that I even think I might have yielded to this impulse in the first
+agonies of being so haunted, notwithstanding all he had done for me and
+the risk he ran, but for the knowledge that Herbert must soon come back.
+Once, I actually did start out of bed in the night, and begin to dress
+myself in my worst clothes, hurriedly intending to leave him there with
+everything else I possessed, and enlist for India as a private soldier.
+
+I doubt if a ghost could have been more terrible to me, up in those
+lonely rooms in the long evenings and long nights, with the wind and the
+rain always rushing by. A ghost could not have been taken and hanged on
+my account, and the consideration that he could be, and the dread that
+he would be, were no small addition to my horrors. When he was not
+asleep, or playing a complicated kind of Patience with a ragged pack of
+cards of his own,--a game that I never saw before or since, and in which
+he recorded his winnings by sticking his jackknife into the table,--when
+he was not engaged in either of these pursuits, he would ask me to
+read to him,--“Foreign language, dear boy!” While I complied, he, not
+comprehending a single word, would stand before the fire surveying me
+with the air of an Exhibitor, and I would see him, between the fingers
+of the hand with which I shaded my face, appealing in dumb show to
+the furniture to take notice of my proficiency. The imaginary student
+pursued by the misshapen creature he had impiously made, was not more
+wretched than I, pursued by the creature who had made me, and recoiling
+from him with a stronger repulsion, the more he admired me and the
+fonder he was of me.
+
+This is written of, I am sensible, as if it had lasted a year. It lasted
+about five days. Expecting Herbert all the time, I dared not go out,
+except when I took Provis for an airing after dark. At length, one
+evening when dinner was over and I had dropped into a slumber quite
+worn out,--for my nights had been agitated and my rest broken by fearful
+dreams,--I was roused by the welcome footstep on the staircase. Provis,
+who had been asleep too, staggered up at the noise I made, and in an
+instant I saw his jackknife shining in his hand.
+
+“Quiet! It’s Herbert!” I said; and Herbert came bursting in, with the
+airy freshness of six hundred miles of France upon him.
+
+“Handel, my dear fellow, how are you, and again how are you, and again
+how are you? I seem to have been gone a twelvemonth! Why, so I must have
+been, for you have grown quite thin and pale! Handel, my--Halloa! I beg
+your pardon.”
+
+He was stopped in his running on and in his shaking hands with me, by
+seeing Provis. Provis, regarding him with a fixed attention, was slowly
+putting up his jackknife, and groping in another pocket for something
+else.
+
+“Herbert, my dear friend,” said I, shutting the double doors, while
+Herbert stood staring and wondering, “something very strange has
+happened. This is--a visitor of mine.”
+
+“It’s all right, dear boy!” said Provis coming forward, with his little
+clasped black book, and then addressing himself to Herbert. “Take it in
+your right hand. Lord strike you dead on the spot, if ever you split in
+any way sumever! Kiss it!”
+
+“Do so, as he wishes it,” I said to Herbert. So, Herbert, looking at
+me with a friendly uneasiness and amazement, complied, and Provis
+immediately shaking hands with him, said, “Now you’re on your oath, you
+know. And never believe me on mine, if Pip shan’t make a gentleman on
+you!”
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XLI
+
+In vain should I attempt to describe the astonishment and disquiet
+of Herbert, when he and I and Provis sat down before the fire, and I
+recounted the whole of the secret. Enough, that I saw my own feelings
+reflected in Herbert’s face, and not least among them, my repugnance
+towards the man who had done so much for me.
+
+What would alone have set a division between that man and us, if there
+had been no other dividing circumstance, was his triumph in my story.
+Saving his troublesome sense of having been “low” on one occasion since
+his return,--on which point he began to hold forth to Herbert, the
+moment my revelation was finished,--he had no perception of the
+possibility of my finding any fault with my good fortune. His boast that
+he had made me a gentleman, and that he had come to see me support the
+character on his ample resources, was made for me quite as much as for
+himself. And that it was a highly agreeable boast to both of us,
+and that we must both be very proud of it, was a conclusion quite
+established in his own mind.
+
+“Though, look’ee here, Pip’s comrade,” he said to Herbert, after having
+discoursed for some time, “I know very well that once since I come
+back--for half a minute--I’ve been low. I said to Pip, I knowed as I had
+been low. But don’t you fret yourself on that score. I ain’t made Pip a
+gentleman, and Pip ain’t a going to make you a gentleman, not fur me not
+to know what’s due to ye both. Dear boy, and Pip’s comrade, you two may
+count upon me always having a gen-teel muzzle on. Muzzled I have been
+since that half a minute when I was betrayed into lowness, muzzled I am
+at the present time, muzzled I ever will be.”
+
+Herbert said, “Certainly,” but looked as if there were no specific
+consolation in this, and remained perplexed and dismayed. We were
+anxious for the time when he would go to his lodging and leave us
+together, but he was evidently jealous of leaving us together, and sat
+late. It was midnight before I took him round to Essex Street, and
+saw him safely in at his own dark door. When it closed upon him, I
+experienced the first moment of relief I had known since the night of
+his arrival.
+
+Never quite free from an uneasy remembrance of the man on the stairs,
+I had always looked about me in taking my guest out after dark, and in
+bringing him back; and I looked about me now. Difficult as it is in a
+large city to avoid the suspicion of being watched, when the mind is
+conscious of danger in that regard, I could not persuade myself that any
+of the people within sight cared about my movements. The few who were
+passing passed on their several ways, and the street was empty when I
+turned back into the Temple. Nobody had come out at the gate with us,
+nobody went in at the gate with me. As I crossed by the fountain, I saw
+his lighted back windows looking bright and quiet, and, when I stood for
+a few moments in the doorway of the building where I lived, before going
+up the stairs, Garden Court was as still and lifeless as the staircase
+was when I ascended it.
+
+Herbert received me with open arms, and I had never felt before so
+blessedly what it is to have a friend. When he had spoken some sound
+words of sympathy and encouragement, we sat down to consider the
+question, What was to be done?
+
+The chair that Provis had occupied still remaining where it had
+stood,--for he had a barrack way with him of hanging about one spot, in
+one unsettled manner, and going through one round of observances with
+his pipe and his negro-head and his jackknife and his pack of cards,
+and what not, as if it were all put down for him on a slate,--I say his
+chair remaining where it had stood, Herbert unconsciously took it, but
+next moment started out of it, pushed it away, and took another. He had
+no occasion to say after that that he had conceived an aversion for my
+patron, neither had I occasion to confess my own. We interchanged that
+confidence without shaping a syllable.
+
+“What,” said I to Herbert, when he was safe in another chair,--“what is
+to be done?”
+
+“My poor dear Handel,” he replied, holding his head, “I am too stunned
+to think.”
+
+“So was I, Herbert, when the blow first fell. Still, something must be
+done. He is intent upon various new expenses,--horses, and carriages,
+and lavish appearances of all kinds. He must be stopped somehow.”
+
+“You mean that you can’t accept--”
+
+“How can I?” I interposed, as Herbert paused. “Think of him! Look at
+him!”
+
+An involuntary shudder passed over both of us.
+
+“Yet I am afraid the dreadful truth is, Herbert, that he is attached to
+me, strongly attached to me. Was there ever such a fate!”
+
+“My poor dear Handel,” Herbert repeated.
+
+“Then,” said I, “after all, stopping short here, never taking another
+penny from him, think what I owe him already! Then again: I am heavily
+in debt,--very heavily for me, who have now no expectations,--and I have
+been bred to no calling, and I am fit for nothing.”
+
+“Well, well, well!” Herbert remonstrated. “Don’t say fit for nothing.”
+
+“What am I fit for? I know only one thing that I am fit for, and that
+is, to go for a soldier. And I might have gone, my dear Herbert, but for
+the prospect of taking counsel with your friendship and affection.”
+
+Of course I broke down there: and of course Herbert, beyond seizing a
+warm grip of my hand, pretended not to know it.
+
+“Anyhow, my dear Handel,” said he presently, “soldiering won’t do. If
+you were to renounce this patronage and these favors, I suppose you
+would do so with some faint hope of one day repaying what you have
+already had. Not very strong, that hope, if you went soldiering!
+Besides, it’s absurd. You would be infinitely better in Clarriker’s
+house, small as it is. I am working up towards a partnership, you know.”
+
+Poor fellow! He little suspected with whose money.
+
+“But there is another question,” said Herbert. “This is an ignorant,
+determined man, who has long had one fixed idea. More than that, he
+seems to me (I may misjudge him) to be a man of a desperate and fierce
+character.”
+
+“I know he is,” I returned. “Let me tell you what evidence I have seen
+of it.” And I told him what I had not mentioned in my narrative, of that
+encounter with the other convict.
+
+“See, then,” said Herbert; “think of this! He comes here at the peril
+of his life, for the realization of his fixed idea. In the moment of
+realization, after all his toil and waiting, you cut the ground from
+under his feet, destroy his idea, and make his gains worthless to him.
+Do you see nothing that he might do, under the disappointment?”
+
+“I have seen it, Herbert, and dreamed of it, ever since the fatal night
+of his arrival. Nothing has been in my thoughts so distinctly as his
+putting himself in the way of being taken.”
+
+“Then you may rely upon it,” said Herbert, “that there would be great
+danger of his doing it. That is his power over you as long as he remains
+in England, and that would be his reckless course if you forsook him.”
+
+I was so struck by the horror of this idea, which had weighed upon
+me from the first, and the working out of which would make me regard
+myself, in some sort, as his murderer, that I could not rest in my
+chair, but began pacing to and fro. I said to Herbert, meanwhile, that
+even if Provis were recognized and taken, in spite of himself, I should
+be wretched as the cause, however innocently. Yes; even though I was so
+wretched in having him at large and near me, and even though I would
+far rather have worked at the forge all the days of my life than I would
+ever have come to this!
+
+But there was no staving off the question, What was to be done?
+
+“The first and the main thing to be done,” said Herbert, “is to get him
+out of England. You will have to go with him, and then he may be induced
+to go.”
+
+“But get him where I will, could I prevent his coming back?”
+
+“My good Handel, is it not obvious that with Newgate in the next street,
+there must be far greater hazard in your breaking your mind to him and
+making him reckless, here, than elsewhere? If a pretext to get him away
+could be made out of that other convict, or out of anything else in his
+life, now.”
+
+“There, again!” said I, stopping before Herbert, with my open hands held
+out, as if they contained the desperation of the case. “I know nothing
+of his life. It has almost made me mad to sit here of a night and see
+him before me, so bound up with my fortunes and misfortunes, and yet so
+unknown to me, except as the miserable wretch who terrified me two days
+in my childhood!”
+
+Herbert got up, and linked his arm in mine, and we slowly walked to and
+fro together, studying the carpet.
+
+“Handel,” said Herbert, stopping, “you feel convinced that you can take
+no further benefits from him; do you?”
+
+“Fully. Surely you would, too, if you were in my place?”
+
+“And you feel convinced that you must break with him?”
+
+“Herbert, can you ask me?”
+
+“And you have, and are bound to have, that tenderness for the life he
+has risked on your account, that you must save him, if possible, from
+throwing it away. Then you must get him out of England before you stir a
+finger to extricate yourself. That done, extricate yourself, in Heaven’s
+name, and we’ll see it out together, dear old boy.”
+
+It was a comfort to shake hands upon it, and walk up and down again,
+with only that done.
+
+“Now, Herbert,” said I, “with reference to gaining some knowledge of
+his history. There is but one way that I know of. I must ask him point
+blank.”
+
+“Yes. Ask him,” said Herbert, “when we sit at breakfast in the morning.”
+ For he had said, on taking leave of Herbert, that he would come to
+breakfast with us.
+
+With this project formed, we went to bed. I had the wildest dreams
+concerning him, and woke unrefreshed; I woke, too, to recover the fear
+which I had lost in the night, of his being found out as a returned
+transport. Waking, I never lost that fear.
+
+He came round at the appointed time, took out his jackknife, and sat
+down to his meal. He was full of plans “for his gentleman’s coming out
+strong, and like a gentleman,” and urged me to begin speedily upon
+the pocket-book which he had left in my possession. He considered the
+chambers and his own lodging as temporary residences, and advised me to
+look out at once for a “fashionable crib” near Hyde Park, in which he
+could have “a shake-down.” When he had made an end of his breakfast,
+and was wiping his knife on his leg, I said to him, without a word of
+preface,--
+
+“After you were gone last night, I told my friend of the struggle that
+the soldiers found you engaged in on the marshes, when we came up. You
+remember?”
+
+“Remember!” said he. “I think so!”
+
+“We want to know something about that man--and about you. It is strange
+to know no more about either, and particularly you, than I was able to
+tell last night. Is not this as good a time as another for our knowing
+more?”
+
+“Well!” he said, after consideration. “You’re on your oath, you know,
+Pip’s comrade?”
+
+“Assuredly,” replied Herbert.
+
+“As to anything I say, you know,” he insisted. “The oath applies to
+all.”
+
+“I understand it to do so.”
+
+“And look’ee here! Wotever I done is worked out and paid for,” he
+insisted again.
+
+“So be it.”
+
+He took out his black pipe and was going to fill it with negro-head,
+when, looking at the tangle of tobacco in his hand, he seemed to think
+it might perplex the thread of his narrative. He put it back again,
+stuck his pipe in a button-hole of his coat, spread a hand on each knee,
+and after turning an angry eye on the fire for a few silent moments,
+looked round at us and said what follows.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XLII
+
+“Dear boy and Pip’s comrade. I am not a going fur to tell you my life
+like a song, or a story-book. But to give it you short and handy, I’ll
+put it at once into a mouthful of English. In jail and out of jail, in
+jail and out of jail, in jail and out of jail. There, you’ve got it.
+That’s my life pretty much, down to such times as I got shipped off,
+arter Pip stood my friend.
+
+“I’ve been done everything to, pretty well--except hanged. I’ve been
+locked up as much as a silver tea-kittle. I’ve been carted here and
+carted there, and put out of this town, and put out of that town, and
+stuck in the stocks, and whipped and worried and drove. I’ve no more
+notion where I was born than you have--if so much. I first become aware
+of myself down in Essex, a thieving turnips for my living. Summun had
+run away from me--a man--a tinker--and he’d took the fire with him, and
+left me wery cold.
+
+“I know’d my name to be Magwitch, chrisen’d Abel. How did I know
+it? Much as I know’d the birds’ names in the hedges to be chaffinch,
+sparrer, thrush. I might have thought it was all lies together, only as
+the birds’ names come out true, I supposed mine did.
+
+“So fur as I could find, there warn’t a soul that see young Abel
+Magwitch, with us little on him as in him, but wot caught fright at him,
+and either drove him off, or took him up. I was took up, took up, took
+up, to that extent that I reg’larly grow’d up took up.
+
+“This is the way it was, that when I was a ragged little creetur as much
+to be pitied as ever I see (not that I looked in the glass, for there
+warn’t many insides of furnished houses known to me), I got the name of
+being hardened. ‘This is a terrible hardened one,’ they says to prison
+wisitors, picking out me. ‘May be said to live in jails, this boy.’ Then
+they looked at me, and I looked at them, and they measured my head, some
+on ‘em,--they had better a measured my stomach,--and others on ‘em giv
+me tracts what I couldn’t read, and made me speeches what I couldn’t
+understand. They always went on agen me about the Devil. But what
+the Devil was I to do? I must put something into my stomach, mustn’t
+I?--Howsomever, I’m a getting low, and I know what’s due. Dear boy and
+Pip’s comrade, don’t you be afeerd of me being low.
+
+“Tramping, begging, thieving, working sometimes when I could,--though
+that warn’t as often as you may think, till you put the question whether
+you would ha’ been over-ready to give me work yourselves,--a bit of a
+poacher, a bit of a laborer, a bit of a wagoner, a bit of a haymaker,
+a bit of a hawker, a bit of most things that don’t pay and lead to
+trouble, I got to be a man. A deserting soldier in a Traveller’s Rest,
+what lay hid up to the chin under a lot of taturs, learnt me to read;
+and a travelling Giant what signed his name at a penny a time learnt me
+to write. I warn’t locked up as often now as formerly, but I wore out my
+good share of key-metal still.
+
+“At Epsom races, a matter of over twenty years ago, I got acquainted wi’
+a man whose skull I’d crack wi’ this poker, like the claw of a lobster,
+if I’d got it on this hob. His right name was Compeyson; and that’s the
+man, dear boy, what you see me a pounding in the ditch, according to
+what you truly told your comrade arter I was gone last night.
+
+“He set up fur a gentleman, this Compeyson, and he’d been to a public
+boarding-school and had learning. He was a smooth one to talk, and was
+a dab at the ways of gentlefolks. He was good-looking too. It was the
+night afore the great race, when I found him on the heath, in a booth
+that I know’d on. Him and some more was a sitting among the tables when
+I went in, and the landlord (which had a knowledge of me, and was a
+sporting one) called him out, and said, ‘I think this is a man that
+might suit you,’--meaning I was.
+
+“Compeyson, he looks at me very noticing, and I look at him. He has a
+watch and a chain and a ring and a breast-pin and a handsome suit of
+clothes.
+
+“‘To judge from appearances, you’re out of luck,’ says Compeyson to me.
+
+“‘Yes, master, and I’ve never been in it much.’ (I had come out of
+Kingston Jail last on a vagrancy committal. Not but what it might have
+been for something else; but it warn’t.)
+
+“‘Luck changes,’ says Compeyson; ‘perhaps yours is going to change.’
+
+“I says, ‘I hope it may be so. There’s room.’
+
+“‘What can you do?’ says Compeyson.
+
+“‘Eat and drink,’ I says; ‘if you’ll find the materials.’
+
+“Compeyson laughed, looked at me again very noticing, giv me five
+shillings, and appointed me for next night. Same place.
+
+“I went to Compeyson next night, same place, and Compeyson took me on
+to be his man and pardner. And what was Compeyson’s business in which we
+was to go pardners? Compeyson’s business was the swindling, handwriting
+forging, stolen bank-note passing, and such-like. All sorts of traps as
+Compeyson could set with his head, and keep his own legs out of and get
+the profits from and let another man in for, was Compeyson’s business.
+He’d no more heart than a iron file, he was as cold as death, and he had
+the head of the Devil afore mentioned.
+
+“There was another in with Compeyson, as was called Arthur,--not as
+being so chrisen’d, but as a surname. He was in a Decline, and was a
+shadow to look at. Him and Compeyson had been in a bad thing with a
+rich lady some years afore, and they’d made a pot of money by it; but
+Compeyson betted and gamed, and he’d have run through the king’s taxes.
+So, Arthur was a dying, and a dying poor and with the horrors on him,
+and Compeyson’s wife (which Compeyson kicked mostly) was a having pity
+on him when she could, and Compeyson was a having pity on nothing and
+nobody.
+
+“I might a took warning by Arthur, but I didn’t; and I won’t pretend I
+was partick’ler--for where ‘ud be the good on it, dear boy and comrade?
+So I begun wi’ Compeyson, and a poor tool I was in his hands. Arthur
+lived at the top of Compeyson’s house (over nigh Brentford it was), and
+Compeyson kept a careful account agen him for board and lodging, in case
+he should ever get better to work it out. But Arthur soon settled the
+account. The second or third time as ever I see him, he come a tearing
+down into Compeyson’s parlor late at night, in only a flannel gown, with
+his hair all in a sweat, and he says to Compeyson’s wife, ‘Sally, she
+really is upstairs alonger me, now, and I can’t get rid of her. She’s
+all in white,’ he says, ‘wi’ white flowers in her hair, and she’s awful
+mad, and she’s got a shroud hanging over her arm, and she says she’ll
+put it on me at five in the morning.’
+
+“Says Compeyson: ‘Why, you fool, don’t you know she’s got a living body?
+And how should she be up there, without coming through the door, or in
+at the window, and up the stairs?’
+
+“‘I don’t know how she’s there,’ says Arthur, shivering dreadful with
+the horrors, ‘but she’s standing in the corner at the foot of the bed,
+awful mad. And over where her heart’s broke--you broke it!--there’s
+drops of blood.’
+
+“Compeyson spoke hardy, but he was always a coward. ‘Go up alonger this
+drivelling sick man,’ he says to his wife, ‘and Magwitch, lend her a
+hand, will you?’ But he never come nigh himself.
+
+“Compeyson’s wife and me took him up to bed agen, and he raved most
+dreadful. ‘Why look at her!’ he cries out. ‘She’s a shaking the shroud
+at me! Don’t you see her? Look at her eyes! Ain’t it awful to see her so
+mad?’ Next he cries, ‘She’ll put it on me, and then I’m done for! Take
+it away from her, take it away!’ And then he catched hold of us, and kep
+on a talking to her, and answering of her, till I half believed I see
+her myself.
+
+“Compeyson’s wife, being used to him, giv him some liquor to get the
+horrors off, and by and by he quieted. ‘O, she’s gone! Has her keeper
+been for her?’ he says. ‘Yes,’ says Compeyson’s wife. ‘Did you tell him
+to lock her and bar her in?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And to take that ugly thing away
+from her?’ ‘Yes, yes, all right.’ ‘You’re a good creetur,’ he says,
+‘don’t leave me, whatever you do, and thank you!’
+
+“He rested pretty quiet till it might want a few minutes of five, and
+then he starts up with a scream, and screams out, ‘Here she is! She’s
+got the shroud again. She’s unfolding it. She’s coming out of the
+corner. She’s coming to the bed. Hold me, both on you--one of each
+side--don’t let her touch me with it. Hah! she missed me that time.
+Don’t let her throw it over my shoulders. Don’t let her lift me up to
+get it round me. She’s lifting me up. Keep me down!’ Then he lifted
+himself up hard, and was dead.
+
+“Compeyson took it easy as a good riddance for both sides. Him and
+me was soon busy, and first he swore me (being ever artful) on my own
+book,--this here little black book, dear boy, what I swore your comrade
+on.
+
+“Not to go into the things that Compeyson planned, and I done--which ‘ud
+take a week--I’ll simply say to you, dear boy, and Pip’s comrade, that
+that man got me into such nets as made me his black slave. I was always
+in debt to him, always under his thumb, always a working, always a
+getting into danger. He was younger than me, but he’d got craft, and
+he’d got learning, and he overmatched me five hundred times told and
+no mercy. My Missis as I had the hard time wi’--Stop though! I ain’t
+brought her in--”
+
+He looked about him in a confused way, as if he had lost his place in
+the book of his remembrance; and he turned his face to the fire, and
+spread his hands broader on his knees, and lifted them off and put them
+on again.
+
+“There ain’t no need to go into it,” he said, looking round once more.
+“The time wi’ Compeyson was a’most as hard a time as ever I had; that
+said, all’s said. Did I tell you as I was tried, alone, for misdemeanor,
+while with Compeyson?”
+
+I answered, No.
+
+“Well!” he said, “I was, and got convicted. As to took up on suspicion,
+that was twice or three times in the four or five year that it lasted;
+but evidence was wanting. At last, me and Compeyson was both committed
+for felony,--on a charge of putting stolen notes in circulation,--and
+there was other charges behind. Compeyson says to me, ‘Separate
+defences, no communication,’ and that was all. And I was so miserable
+poor, that I sold all the clothes I had, except what hung on my back,
+afore I could get Jaggers.
+
+“When we was put in the dock, I noticed first of all what a gentleman
+Compeyson looked, wi’ his curly hair and his black clothes and his white
+pocket-handkercher, and what a common sort of a wretch I looked. When
+the prosecution opened and the evidence was put short, aforehand, I
+noticed how heavy it all bore on me, and how light on him. When the
+evidence was giv in the box, I noticed how it was always me that had
+come for’ard, and could be swore to, how it was always me that the money
+had been paid to, how it was always me that had seemed to work the thing
+and get the profit. But when the defence come on, then I see the plan
+plainer; for, says the counsellor for Compeyson, ‘My lord and gentlemen,
+here you has afore you, side by side, two persons as your eyes can
+separate wide; one, the younger, well brought up, who will be spoke to
+as such; one, the elder, ill brought up, who will be spoke to as such;
+one, the younger, seldom if ever seen in these here transactions, and
+only suspected; t’other, the elder, always seen in ‘em and always wi’ his
+guilt brought home. Can you doubt, if there is but one in it, which is
+the one, and, if there is two in it, which is much the worst one?’ And
+such-like. And when it come to character, warn’t it Compeyson as had
+been to the school, and warn’t it his schoolfellows as was in this
+position and in that, and warn’t it him as had been know’d by witnesses
+in such clubs and societies, and nowt to his disadvantage? And warn’t it
+me as had been tried afore, and as had been know’d up hill and down dale
+in Bridewells and Lock-Ups! And when it come to speech-making, warn’t it
+Compeyson as could speak to ‘em wi’ his face dropping every now and then
+into his white pocket-handkercher,--ah! and wi’ verses in his speech,
+too,--and warn’t it me as could only say, ‘Gentlemen, this man at my
+side is a most precious rascal’? And when the verdict come, warn’t it
+Compeyson as was recommended to mercy on account of good character and
+bad company, and giving up all the information he could agen me,
+and warn’t it me as got never a word but Guilty? And when I says to
+Compeyson, ‘Once out of this court, I’ll smash that face of yourn!’
+ain’t it Compeyson as prays the Judge to be protected, and gets two
+turnkeys stood betwixt us? And when we’re sentenced, ain’t it him as
+gets seven year, and me fourteen, and ain’t it him as the Judge is
+sorry for, because he might a done so well, and ain’t it me as the Judge
+perceives to be a old offender of wiolent passion, likely to come to
+worse?”
+
+He had worked himself into a state of great excitement, but he checked
+it, took two or three short breaths, swallowed as often, and stretching
+out his hand towards me said, in a reassuring manner, “I ain’t a going
+to be low, dear boy!”
+
+He had so heated himself that he took out his handkerchief and wiped his
+face and head and neck and hands, before he could go on.
+
+“I had said to Compeyson that I’d smash that face of his, and I swore
+Lord smash mine! to do it. We was in the same prison-ship, but I
+couldn’t get at him for long, though I tried. At last I come behind him
+and hit him on the cheek to turn him round and get a smashing one at
+him, when I was seen and seized. The black-hole of that ship warn’t
+a strong one, to a judge of black-holes that could swim and dive. I
+escaped to the shore, and I was a hiding among the graves there, envying
+them as was in ‘em and all over, when I first see my boy!”
+
+He regarded me with a look of affection that made him almost abhorrent
+to me again, though I had felt great pity for him.
+
+“By my boy, I was giv to understand as Compeyson was out on them marshes
+too. Upon my soul, I half believe he escaped in his terror, to get quit
+of me, not knowing it was me as had got ashore. I hunted him down. I
+smashed his face. ‘And now,’ says I ‘as the worst thing I can do, caring
+nothing for myself, I’ll drag you back.’ And I’d have swum off, towing
+him by the hair, if it had come to that, and I’d a got him aboard
+without the soldiers.
+
+“Of course he’d much the best of it to the last,--his character was so
+good. He had escaped when he was made half wild by me and my murderous
+intentions; and his punishment was light. I was put in irons, brought
+to trial again, and sent for life. I didn’t stop for life, dear boy and
+Pip’s comrade, being here.”
+
+He wiped himself again, as he had done before, and then slowly took
+his tangle of tobacco from his pocket, and plucked his pipe from his
+button-hole, and slowly filled it, and began to smoke.
+
+“Is he dead?” I asked, after a silence.
+
+“Is who dead, dear boy?”
+
+“Compeyson.”
+
+“He hopes I am, if he’s alive, you may be sure,” with a fierce look. “I
+never heerd no more of him.”
+
+Herbert had been writing with his pencil in the cover of a book. He
+softly pushed the book over to me, as Provis stood smoking with his eyes
+on the fire, and I read in it:--
+
+“Young Havisham’s name was Arthur. Compeyson is the man who professed to
+be Miss Havisham’s lover.”
+
+I shut the book and nodded slightly to Herbert, and put the book by; but
+we neither of us said anything, and both looked at Provis as he stood
+smoking by the fire.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XLIII
+
+Why should I pause to ask how much of my shrinking from Provis might be
+traced to Estella? Why should I loiter on my road, to compare the state
+of mind in which I had tried to rid myself of the stain of the prison
+before meeting her at the coach-office, with the state of mind in which
+I now reflected on the abyss between Estella in her pride and beauty,
+and the returned transport whom I harbored? The road would be none the
+smoother for it, the end would be none the better for it, he would not
+be helped, nor I extenuated.
+
+A new fear had been engendered in my mind by his narrative; or rather,
+his narrative had given form and purpose to the fear that was already
+there. If Compeyson were alive and should discover his return, I could
+hardly doubt the consequence. That Compeyson stood in mortal fear of
+him, neither of the two could know much better than I; and that any
+such man as that man had been described to be would hesitate to release
+himself for good from a dreaded enemy by the safe means of becoming an
+informer was scarcely to be imagined.
+
+Never had I breathed, and never would I breathe--or so I resolved--a
+word of Estella to Provis. But, I said to Herbert that, before I could
+go abroad, I must see both Estella and Miss Havisham. This was when we
+were left alone on the night of the day when Provis told us his story. I
+resolved to go out to Richmond next day, and I went.
+
+On my presenting myself at Mrs. Brandley’s, Estella’s maid was called to
+tell that Estella had gone into the country. Where? To Satis House, as
+usual. Not as usual, I said, for she had never yet gone there without
+me; when was she coming back? There was an air of reservation in the
+answer which increased my perplexity, and the answer was, that her maid
+believed she was only coming back at all for a little while. I could
+make nothing of this, except that it was meant that I should make
+nothing of it, and I went home again in complete discomfiture.
+
+Another night consultation with Herbert after Provis was gone home (I
+always took him home, and always looked well about me), led us to the
+conclusion that nothing should be said about going abroad until I came
+back from Miss Havisham’s. In the mean time, Herbert and I were to
+consider separately what it would be best to say; whether we should
+devise any pretence of being afraid that he was under suspicious
+observation; or whether I, who had never yet been abroad, should propose
+an expedition. We both knew that I had but to propose anything, and he
+would consent. We agreed that his remaining many days in his present
+hazard was not to be thought of.
+
+Next day I had the meanness to feign that I was under a binding promise
+to go down to Joe; but I was capable of almost any meanness towards Joe
+or his name. Provis was to be strictly careful while I was gone, and
+Herbert was to take the charge of him that I had taken. I was to be
+absent only one night, and, on my return, the gratification of his
+impatience for my starting as a gentleman on a greater scale was to
+be begun. It occurred to me then, and as I afterwards found to
+Herbert also, that he might be best got away across the water, on that
+pretence,--as, to make purchases, or the like.
+
+Having thus cleared the way for my expedition to Miss Havisham’s, I set
+off by the early morning coach before it was yet light, and was out
+on the open country road when the day came creeping on, halting and
+whimpering and shivering, and wrapped in patches of cloud and rags of
+mist, like a beggar. When we drove up to the Blue Boar after a drizzly
+ride, whom should I see come out under the gateway, toothpick in hand,
+to look at the coach, but Bentley Drummle!
+
+As he pretended not to see me, I pretended not to see him. It was a very
+lame pretence on both sides; the lamer, because we both went into the
+coffee-room, where he had just finished his breakfast, and where I
+ordered mine. It was poisonous to me to see him in the town, for I very
+well knew why he had come there.
+
+Pretending to read a smeary newspaper long out of date, which had
+nothing half so legible in its local news, as the foreign matter of
+coffee, pickles, fish sauces, gravy, melted butter, and wine with which
+it was sprinkled all over, as if it had taken the measles in a highly
+irregular form, I sat at my table while he stood before the fire. By
+degrees it became an enormous injury to me that he stood before the
+fire. And I got up, determined to have my share of it. I had to put my
+hand behind his legs for the poker when I went up to the fireplace to
+stir the fire, but still pretended not to know him.
+
+“Is this a cut?” said Mr. Drummle.
+
+“Oh!” said I, poker in hand; “it’s you, is it? How do you do? I was
+wondering who it was, who kept the fire off.”
+
+With that, I poked tremendously, and having done so, planted myself side
+by side with Mr. Drummle, my shoulders squared and my back to the fire.
+
+“You have just come down?” said Mr. Drummle, edging me a little away
+with his shoulder.
+
+“Yes,” said I, edging him a little away with my shoulder.
+
+“Beastly place,” said Drummle. “Your part of the country, I think?”
+
+“Yes,” I assented. “I am told it’s very like your Shropshire.”
+
+“Not in the least like it,” said Drummle.
+
+Here Mr. Drummle looked at his boots and I looked at mine, and then Mr.
+Drummle looked at my boots, and I looked at his.
+
+“Have you been here long?” I asked, determined not to yield an inch of
+the fire.
+
+“Long enough to be tired of it,” returned Drummle, pretending to yawn,
+but equally determined.
+
+“Do you stay here long?”
+
+“Can’t say,” answered Mr. Drummle. “Do you?”
+
+“Can’t say,” said I.
+
+I felt here, through a tingling in my blood, that if Mr. Drummle’s
+shoulder had claimed another hair’s breadth of room, I should have
+jerked him into the window; equally, that if my own shoulder had urged a
+similar claim, Mr. Drummle would have jerked me into the nearest box. He
+whistled a little. So did I.
+
+“Large tract of marshes about here, I believe?” said Drummle.
+
+“Yes. What of that?” said I.
+
+Mr. Drummle looked at me, and then at my boots, and then said, “Oh!” and
+laughed.
+
+“Are you amused, Mr. Drummle?”
+
+“No,” said he, “not particularly. I am going out for a ride in the
+saddle. I mean to explore those marshes for amusement. Out-of-the-way
+villages there, they tell me. Curious little public-houses--and
+smithies--and that. Waiter!”
+
+“Yes, sir.”
+
+“Is that horse of mine ready?”
+
+“Brought round to the door, sir.”
+
+“I say. Look here, you sir. The lady won’t ride to-day; the weather
+won’t do.”
+
+“Very good, sir.”
+
+“And I don’t dine, because I’m going to dine at the lady’s.”
+
+“Very good, sir.”
+
+Then, Drummle glanced at me, with an insolent triumph on his
+great-jowled face that cut me to the heart, dull as he was, and so
+exasperated me, that I felt inclined to take him in my arms (as the
+robber in the story-book is said to have taken the old lady) and seat
+him on the fire.
+
+One thing was manifest to both of us, and that was, that until relief
+came, neither of us could relinquish the fire. There we stood, well
+squared up before it, shoulder to shoulder and foot to foot, with our
+hands behind us, not budging an inch. The horse was visible outside in
+the drizzle at the door, my breakfast was put on the table, Drummle’s
+was cleared away, the waiter invited me to begin, I nodded, we both
+stood our ground.
+
+“Have you been to the Grove since?” said Drummle.
+
+“No,” said I, “I had quite enough of the Finches the last time I was
+there.”
+
+“Was that when we had a difference of opinion?”
+
+“Yes,” I replied, very shortly.
+
+“Come, come! They let you off easily enough,” sneered Drummle. “You
+shouldn’t have lost your temper.”
+
+“Mr. Drummle,” said I, “you are not competent to give advice on that
+subject. When I lose my temper (not that I admit having done so on that
+occasion), I don’t throw glasses.”
+
+“I do,” said Drummle.
+
+After glancing at him once or twice, in an increased state of
+smouldering ferocity, I said,--
+
+“Mr. Drummle, I did not seek this conversation, and I don’t think it an
+agreeable one.”
+
+“I am sure it’s not,” said he, superciliously over his shoulder; “I
+don’t think anything about it.”
+
+“And therefore,” I went on, “with your leave, I will suggest that we
+hold no kind of communication in future.”
+
+“Quite my opinion,” said Drummle, “and what I should have suggested
+myself, or done--more likely--without suggesting. But don’t lose your
+temper. Haven’t you lost enough without that?”
+
+“What do you mean, sir?”
+
+“Waiter!” said Drummle, by way of answering me.
+
+The waiter reappeared.
+
+“Look here, you sir. You quite understand that the young lady don’t ride
+to-day, and that I dine at the young lady’s?”
+
+“Quite so, sir!”
+
+When the waiter had felt my fast-cooling teapot with the palm of his
+hand, and had looked imploringly at me, and had gone out, Drummle,
+careful not to move the shoulder next me, took a cigar from his pocket
+and bit the end off, but showed no sign of stirring. Choking and
+boiling as I was, I felt that we could not go a word further, without
+introducing Estella’s name, which I could not endure to hear him utter;
+and therefore I looked stonily at the opposite wall, as if there were
+no one present, and forced myself to silence. How long we might have
+remained in this ridiculous position it is impossible to say, but
+for the incursion of three thriving farmers--laid on by the waiter, I
+think--who came into the coffee-room unbuttoning their great-coats and
+rubbing their hands, and before whom, as they charged at the fire, we
+were obliged to give way.
+
+I saw him through the window, seizing his horse’s mane, and mounting in
+his blundering brutal manner, and sidling and backing away. I thought
+he was gone, when he came back, calling for a light for the cigar in his
+mouth, which he had forgotten. A man in a dust-colored dress appeared
+with what was wanted,--I could not have said from where: whether from
+the inn yard, or the street, or where not,--and as Drummle leaned down
+from the saddle and lighted his cigar and laughed, with a jerk of his
+head towards the coffee-room windows, the slouching shoulders and ragged
+hair of this man whose back was towards me reminded me of Orlick.
+
+Too heavily out of sorts to care much at the time whether it were he or
+no, or after all to touch the breakfast, I washed the weather and the
+journey from my face and hands, and went out to the memorable old house
+that it would have been so much the better for me never to have entered,
+never to have seen.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XLIV
+
+In the room where the dressing-table stood, and where the wax-candles
+burnt on the wall, I found Miss Havisham and Estella; Miss Havisham
+seated on a settee near the fire, and Estella on a cushion at her feet.
+Estella was knitting, and Miss Havisham was looking on. They both raised
+their eyes as I went in, and both saw an alteration in me. I derived
+that, from the look they interchanged.
+
+“And what wind,” said Miss Havisham, “blows you here, Pip?”
+
+Though she looked steadily at me, I saw that she was rather confused.
+Estella, pausing a moment in her knitting with her eyes upon me, and
+then going on, I fancied that I read in the action of her fingers, as
+plainly as if she had told me in the dumb alphabet, that she perceived I
+had discovered my real benefactor.
+
+“Miss Havisham,” said I, “I went to Richmond yesterday, to speak to
+Estella; and finding that some wind had blown her here, I followed.”
+
+Miss Havisham motioning to me for the third or fourth time to sit down,
+I took the chair by the dressing-table, which I had often seen her
+occupy. With all that ruin at my feet and about me, it seemed a natural
+place for me, that day.
+
+“What I had to say to Estella, Miss Havisham, I will say before you,
+presently--in a few moments. It will not surprise you, it will not
+displease you. I am as unhappy as you can ever have meant me to be.”
+
+Miss Havisham continued to look steadily at me. I could see in the
+action of Estella’s fingers as they worked that she attended to what I
+said; but she did not look up.
+
+“I have found out who my patron is. It is not a fortunate discovery,
+and is not likely ever to enrich me in reputation, station, fortune,
+anything. There are reasons why I must say no more of that. It is not my
+secret, but another’s.”
+
+As I was silent for a while, looking at Estella and considering how to
+go on, Miss Havisham repeated, “It is not your secret, but another’s.
+Well?”
+
+“When you first caused me to be brought here, Miss Havisham, when I
+belonged to the village over yonder, that I wish I had never left,
+I suppose I did really come here, as any other chance boy might have
+come,--as a kind of servant, to gratify a want or a whim, and to be paid
+for it?”
+
+“Ay, Pip,” replied Miss Havisham, steadily nodding her head; “you did.”
+
+“And that Mr. Jaggers--”
+
+“Mr. Jaggers,” said Miss Havisham, taking me up in a firm tone, “had
+nothing to do with it, and knew nothing of it. His being my lawyer, and
+his being the lawyer of your patron is a coincidence. He holds the same
+relation towards numbers of people, and it might easily arise. Be that
+as it may, it did arise, and was not brought about by any one.”
+
+Any one might have seen in her haggard face that there was no
+suppression or evasion so far.
+
+“But when I fell into the mistake I have so long remained in, at least
+you led me on?” said I.
+
+“Yes,” she returned, again nodding steadily, “I let you go on.”
+
+“Was that kind?”
+
+“Who am I,” cried Miss Havisham, striking her stick upon the floor
+and flashing into wrath so suddenly that Estella glanced up at her in
+surprise,--“who am I, for God’s sake, that I should be kind?”
+
+It was a weak complaint to have made, and I had not meant to make it. I
+told her so, as she sat brooding after this outburst.
+
+“Well, well, well!” she said. “What else?”
+
+“I was liberally paid for my old attendance here,” I said, to soothe
+her, “in being apprenticed, and I have asked these questions only for
+my own information. What follows has another (and I hope more
+disinterested) purpose. In humoring my mistake, Miss Havisham, you
+punished--practised on--perhaps you will supply whatever term expresses
+your intention, without offence--your self-seeking relations?”
+
+“I did. Why, they would have it so! So would you. What has been my
+history, that I should be at the pains of entreating either them or you
+not to have it so! You made your own snares. I never made them.”
+
+Waiting until she was quiet again,--for this, too, flashed out of her in
+a wild and sudden way,--I went on.
+
+“I have been thrown among one family of your relations, Miss Havisham,
+and have been constantly among them since I went to London. I know them
+to have been as honestly under my delusion as I myself. And I should be
+false and base if I did not tell you, whether it is acceptable to you or
+no, and whether you are inclined to give credence to it or no, that you
+deeply wrong both Mr. Matthew Pocket and his son Herbert, if you suppose
+them to be otherwise than generous, upright, open, and incapable of
+anything designing or mean.”
+
+“They are your friends,” said Miss Havisham.
+
+“They made themselves my friends,” said I, “when they supposed me
+to have superseded them; and when Sarah Pocket, Miss Georgiana, and
+Mistress Camilla were not my friends, I think.”
+
+This contrasting of them with the rest seemed, I was glad to see, to do
+them good with her. She looked at me keenly for a little while, and then
+said quietly,--
+
+“What do you want for them?”
+
+“Only,” said I, “that you would not confound them with the others. They
+may be of the same blood, but, believe me, they are not of the same
+nature.”
+
+Still looking at me keenly, Miss Havisham repeated,--
+
+“What do you want for them?”
+
+“I am not so cunning, you see,” I said, in answer, conscious that I
+reddened a little, “as that I could hide from you, even if I desired,
+that I do want something. Miss Havisham, if you would spare the money
+to do my friend Herbert a lasting service in life, but which from the
+nature of the case must be done without his knowledge, I could show you
+how.”
+
+“Why must it be done without his knowledge?” she asked, settling her
+hands upon her stick, that she might regard me the more attentively.
+
+“Because,” said I, “I began the service myself, more than two years ago,
+without his knowledge, and I don’t want to be betrayed. Why I fail in my
+ability to finish it, I cannot explain. It is a part of the secret which
+is another person’s and not mine.”
+
+She gradually withdrew her eyes from me, and turned them on the fire.
+After watching it for what appeared in the silence and by the light
+of the slowly wasting candles to be a long time, she was roused by
+the collapse of some of the red coals, and looked towards me again--at
+first, vacantly--then, with a gradually concentrating attention. All
+this time Estella knitted on. When Miss Havisham had fixed her
+attention on me, she said, speaking as if there had been no lapse in our
+dialogue,--
+
+“What else?”
+
+“Estella,” said I, turning to her now, and trying to command my
+trembling voice, “you know I love you. You know that I have loved you
+long and dearly.”
+
+She raised her eyes to my face, on being thus addressed, and her fingers
+plied their work, and she looked at me with an unmoved countenance. I
+saw that Miss Havisham glanced from me to her, and from her to me.
+
+“I should have said this sooner, but for my long mistake. It induced me
+to hope that Miss Havisham meant us for one another. While I thought you
+could not help yourself, as it were, I refrained from saying it. But I
+must say it now.”
+
+Preserving her unmoved countenance, and with her fingers still going,
+Estella shook her head.
+
+“I know,” said I, in answer to that action,--“I know. I have no hope
+that I shall ever call you mine, Estella. I am ignorant what may become
+of me very soon, how poor I may be, or where I may go. Still, I love
+you. I have loved you ever since I first saw you in this house.”
+
+Looking at me perfectly unmoved and with her fingers busy, she shook her
+head again.
+
+“It would have been cruel in Miss Havisham, horribly cruel, to practise
+on the susceptibility of a poor boy, and to torture me through all these
+years with a vain hope and an idle pursuit, if she had reflected on the
+gravity of what she did. But I think she did not. I think that, in the
+endurance of her own trial, she forgot mine, Estella.”
+
+I saw Miss Havisham put her hand to her heart and hold it there, as she
+sat looking by turns at Estella and at me.
+
+“It seems,” said Estella, very calmly, “that there are sentiments,
+fancies,--I don’t know how to call them,--which I am not able to
+comprehend. When you say you love me, I know what you mean, as a form
+of words; but nothing more. You address nothing in my breast, you touch
+nothing there. I don’t care for what you say at all. I have tried to
+warn you of this; now, have I not?”
+
+I said in a miserable manner, “Yes.”
+
+“Yes. But you would not be warned, for you thought I did not mean it.
+Now, did you not think so?”
+
+“I thought and hoped you could not mean it. You, so young, untried, and
+beautiful, Estella! Surely it is not in Nature.”
+
+“It is in my nature,” she returned. And then she added, with a stress
+upon the words, “It is in the nature formed within me. I make a great
+difference between you and all other people when I say so much. I can do
+no more.”
+
+“Is it not true,” said I, “that Bentley Drummle is in town here, and
+pursuing you?”
+
+“It is quite true,” she replied, referring to him with the indifference
+of utter contempt.
+
+“That you encourage him, and ride out with him, and that he dines with
+you this very day?”
+
+She seemed a little surprised that I should know it, but again replied,
+“Quite true.”
+
+“You cannot love him, Estella!”
+
+Her fingers stopped for the first time, as she retorted rather angrily,
+“What have I told you? Do you still think, in spite of it, that I do not
+mean what I say?”
+
+“You would never marry him, Estella?”
+
+She looked towards Miss Havisham, and considered for a moment with her
+work in her hands. Then she said, “Why not tell you the truth? I am
+going to be married to him.”
+
+I dropped my face into my hands, but was able to control myself better
+than I could have expected, considering what agony it gave me to hear
+her say those words. When I raised my face again, there was such a
+ghastly look upon Miss Havisham’s, that it impressed me, even in my
+passionate hurry and grief.
+
+“Estella, dearest Estella, do not let Miss Havisham lead you into this
+fatal step. Put me aside for ever,--you have done so, I well know,--but
+bestow yourself on some worthier person than Drummle. Miss Havisham
+gives you to him, as the greatest slight and injury that could be done
+to the many far better men who admire you, and to the few who truly
+love you. Among those few there may be one who loves you even as dearly,
+though he has not loved you as long, as I. Take him, and I can bear it
+better, for your sake!”
+
+My earnestness awoke a wonder in her that seemed as if it would have
+been touched with compassion, if she could have rendered me at all
+intelligible to her own mind.
+
+“I am going,” she said again, in a gentler voice, “to be married to
+him. The preparations for my marriage are making, and I shall be
+married soon. Why do you injuriously introduce the name of my mother by
+adoption? It is my own act.”
+
+“Your own act, Estella, to fling yourself away upon a brute?”
+
+“On whom should I fling myself away?” she retorted, with a smile.
+“Should I fling myself away upon the man who would the soonest feel (if
+people do feel such things) that I took nothing to him? There! It is
+done. I shall do well enough, and so will my husband. As to leading
+me into what you call this fatal step, Miss Havisham would have had me
+wait, and not marry yet; but I am tired of the life I have led, which
+has very few charms for me, and I am willing enough to change it. Say no
+more. We shall never understand each other.”
+
+“Such a mean brute, such a stupid brute!” I urged, in despair.
+
+“Don’t be afraid of my being a blessing to him,” said Estella; “I shall
+not be that. Come! Here is my hand. Do we part on this, you visionary
+boy--or man?”
+
+“O Estella!” I answered, as my bitter tears fell fast on her hand, do
+what I would to restrain them; “even if I remained in England and could
+hold my head up with the rest, how could I see you Drummle’s wife?”
+
+“Nonsense,” she returned,--“nonsense. This will pass in no time.”
+
+“Never, Estella!”
+
+“You will get me out of your thoughts in a week.”
+
+“Out of my thoughts! You are part of my existence, part of myself. You
+have been in every line I have ever read since I first came here, the
+rough common boy whose poor heart you wounded even then. You have been
+in every prospect I have ever seen since,--on the river, on the sails of
+the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness,
+in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the streets. You have been
+the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become
+acquainted with. The stones of which the strongest London buildings
+are made are not more real, or more impossible to be displaced by your
+hands, than your presence and influence have been to me, there and
+everywhere, and will be. Estella, to the last hour of my life, you
+cannot choose but remain part of my character, part of the little good
+in me, part of the evil. But, in this separation, I associate you only
+with the good; and I will faithfully hold you to that always, for you
+must have done me far more good than harm, let me feel now what sharp
+distress I may. O God bless you, God forgive you!”
+
+In what ecstasy of unhappiness I got these broken words out of myself, I
+don’t know. The rhapsody welled up within me, like blood from an
+inward wound, and gushed out. I held her hand to my lips some lingering
+moments, and so I left her. But ever afterwards, I remembered,--and soon
+afterwards with stronger reason,--that while Estella looked at me merely
+with incredulous wonder, the spectral figure of Miss Havisham, her hand
+still covering her heart, seemed all resolved into a ghastly stare of
+pity and remorse.
+
+All done, all gone! So much was done and gone, that when I went out at
+the gate, the light of the day seemed of a darker color than when I went
+in. For a while, I hid myself among some lanes and by-paths, and then
+struck off to walk all the way to London. For, I had by that time come
+to myself so far as to consider that I could not go back to the inn and
+see Drummle there; that I could not bear to sit upon the coach and
+be spoken to; that I could do nothing half so good for myself as tire
+myself out.
+
+It was past midnight when I crossed London Bridge. Pursuing the narrow
+intricacies of the streets which at that time tended westward near the
+Middlesex shore of the river, my readiest access to the Temple was
+close by the river-side, through Whitefriars. I was not expected till
+to-morrow; but I had my keys, and, if Herbert were gone to bed, could
+get to bed myself without disturbing him.
+
+As it seldom happened that I came in at that Whitefriars gate after the
+Temple was closed, and as I was very muddy and weary, I did not take it
+ill that the night-porter examined me with much attention as he held the
+gate a little way open for me to pass in. To help his memory I mentioned
+my name.
+
+“I was not quite sure, sir, but I thought so. Here’s a note, sir. The
+messenger that brought it, said would you be so good as read it by my
+lantern?”
+
+Much surprised by the request, I took the note. It was directed to
+Philip Pip, Esquire, and on the top of the superscription were the
+words, “PLEASE READ THIS, HERE.” I opened it, the watchman holding up
+his light, and read inside, in Wemmick’s writing,--
+
+“DON’T GO HOME.”
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XLV
+
+Turning from the Temple gate as soon as I had read the warning, I made
+the best of my way to Fleet Street, and there got a late hackney chariot
+and drove to the Hummums in Covent Garden. In those times a bed was
+always to be got there at any hour of the night, and the chamberlain,
+letting me in at his ready wicket, lighted the candle next in order on
+his shelf, and showed me straight into the bedroom next in order on his
+list. It was a sort of vault on the ground floor at the back, with a
+despotic monster of a four-post bedstead in it, straddling over the
+whole place, putting one of his arbitrary legs into the fireplace
+and another into the doorway, and squeezing the wretched little
+washing-stand in quite a Divinely Righteous manner.
+
+As I had asked for a night-light, the chamberlain had brought me in,
+before he left me, the good old constitutional rushlight of those
+virtuous days--an object like the ghost of a walking-cane, which
+instantly broke its back if it were touched, which nothing could ever be
+lighted at, and which was placed in solitary confinement at the bottom
+of a high tin tower, perforated with round holes that made a staringly
+wide-awake pattern on the walls. When I had got into bed, and lay there
+footsore, weary, and wretched, I found that I could no more close my own
+eyes than I could close the eyes of this foolish Argus. And thus, in the
+gloom and death of the night, we stared at one another.
+
+What a doleful night! How anxious, how dismal, how long! There was an
+inhospitable smell in the room, of cold soot and hot dust; and, as I
+looked up into the corners of the tester over my head, I thought what
+a number of blue-bottle flies from the butchers’, and earwigs from the
+market, and grubs from the country, must be holding on up there, lying
+by for next summer. This led me to speculate whether any of them ever
+tumbled down, and then I fancied that I felt light falls on my face,--a
+disagreeable turn of thought, suggesting other and more objectionable
+approaches up my back. When I had lain awake a little while, those
+extraordinary voices with which silence teems began to make themselves
+audible. The closet whispered, the fireplace sighed, the little
+washing-stand ticked, and one guitar-string played occasionally in the
+chest of drawers. At about the same time, the eyes on the wall acquired
+a new expression, and in every one of those staring rounds I saw
+written, DON’T GO HOME.
+
+Whatever night-fancies and night-noises crowded on me, they never warded
+off this DON’T GO HOME. It plaited itself into whatever I thought of,
+as a bodily pain would have done. Not long before, I had read in the
+newspapers, how a gentleman unknown had come to the Hummums in the
+night, and had gone to bed, and had destroyed himself, and had been
+found in the morning weltering in blood. It came into my head that he
+must have occupied this very vault of mine, and I got out of bed to
+assure myself that there were no red marks about; then opened the door
+to look out into the passages, and cheer myself with the companionship
+of a distant light, near which I knew the chamberlain to be dozing. But
+all this time, why I was not to go home, and what had happened at home,
+and when I should go home, and whether Provis was safe at home, were
+questions occupying my mind so busily, that one might have supposed
+there could be no more room in it for any other theme. Even when I
+thought of Estella, and how we had parted that day forever, and when
+I recalled all the circumstances of our parting, and all her looks and
+tones, and the action of her fingers while she knitted,--even then I
+was pursuing, here and there and everywhere, the caution, Don’t go home.
+When at last I dozed, in sheer exhaustion of mind and body, it became
+a vast shadowy verb which I had to conjugate. Imperative mood, present
+tense: Do not thou go home, let him not go home, let us not go home, do
+not ye or you go home, let not them go home. Then potentially: I may not
+and I cannot go home; and I might not, could not, would not, and should
+not go home; until I felt that I was going distracted, and rolled over
+on the pillow, and looked at the staring rounds upon the wall again.
+
+I had left directions that I was to be called at seven; for it was plain
+that I must see Wemmick before seeing any one else, and equally plain
+that this was a case in which his Walworth sentiments only could be
+taken. It was a relief to get out of the room where the night had been
+so miserable, and I needed no second knocking at the door to startle me
+from my uneasy bed.
+
+The Castle battlements arose upon my view at eight o’clock. The little
+servant happening to be entering the fortress with two hot rolls, I
+passed through the postern and crossed the drawbridge in her company,
+and so came without announcement into the presence of Wemmick as he was
+making tea for himself and the Aged. An open door afforded a perspective
+view of the Aged in bed.
+
+“Halloa, Mr. Pip!” said Wemmick. “You did come home, then?”
+
+“Yes,” I returned; “but I didn’t go home.”
+
+“That’s all right,” said he, rubbing his hands. “I left a note for you
+at each of the Temple gates, on the chance. Which gate did you come to?”
+
+I told him.
+
+“I’ll go round to the others in the course of the day and destroy the
+notes,” said Wemmick; “it’s a good rule never to leave documentary
+evidence if you can help it, because you don’t know when it may be put
+in. I’m going to take a liberty with you. Would you mind toasting this
+sausage for the Aged P.?”
+
+I said I should be delighted to do it.
+
+“Then you can go about your work, Mary Anne,” said Wemmick to the little
+servant; “which leaves us to ourselves, don’t you see, Mr. Pip?” he
+added, winking, as she disappeared.
+
+I thanked him for his friendship and caution, and our discourse
+proceeded in a low tone, while I toasted the Aged’s sausage and he
+buttered the crumb of the Aged’s roll.
+
+“Now, Mr. Pip, you know,” said Wemmick, “you and I understand one
+another. We are in our private and personal capacities, and we have been
+engaged in a confidential transaction before to-day. Official sentiments
+are one thing. We are extra official.”
+
+I cordially assented. I was so very nervous, that I had already lighted
+the Aged’s sausage like a torch, and been obliged to blow it out.
+
+“I accidentally heard, yesterday morning,” said Wemmick, “being in a
+certain place where I once took you,--even between you and me, it’s as
+well not to mention names when avoidable--”
+
+“Much better not,” said I. “I understand you.”
+
+“I heard there by chance, yesterday morning,” said Wemmick, “that
+a certain person not altogether of uncolonial pursuits, and not
+unpossessed of portable property,--I don’t know who it may really
+be,--we won’t name this person--”
+
+“Not necessary,” said I.
+
+“--Had made some little stir in a certain part of the world where a good
+many people go, not always in gratification of their own inclinations,
+and not quite irrespective of the government expense--”
+
+In watching his face, I made quite a firework of the Aged’s sausage,
+and greatly discomposed both my own attention and Wemmick’s; for which I
+apologized.
+
+“--By disappearing from such place, and being no more heard of
+thereabouts. From which,” said Wemmick, “conjectures had been raised and
+theories formed. I also heard that you at your chambers in Garden Court,
+Temple, had been watched, and might be watched again.”
+
+“By whom?” said I.
+
+“I wouldn’t go into that,” said Wemmick, evasively, “it might clash with
+official responsibilities. I heard it, as I have in my time heard other
+curious things in the same place. I don’t tell it you on information
+received. I heard it.”
+
+He took the toasting-fork and sausage from me as he spoke, and set forth
+the Aged’s breakfast neatly on a little tray. Previous to placing it
+before him, he went into the Aged’s room with a clean white cloth, and
+tied the same under the old gentleman’s chin, and propped him up, and
+put his nightcap on one side, and gave him quite a rakish air. Then he
+placed his breakfast before him with great care, and said, “All right,
+ain’t you, Aged P.?” To which the cheerful Aged replied, “All right,
+John, my boy, all right!” As there seemed to be a tacit understanding
+that the Aged was not in a presentable state, and was therefore to be
+considered invisible, I made a pretence of being in complete ignorance
+of these proceedings.
+
+“This watching of me at my chambers (which I have once had reason to
+suspect),” I said to Wemmick when he came back, “is inseparable from the
+person to whom you have adverted; is it?”
+
+Wemmick looked very serious. “I couldn’t undertake to say that, of my
+own knowledge. I mean, I couldn’t undertake to say it was at first. But
+it either is, or it will be, or it’s in great danger of being.”
+
+As I saw that he was restrained by fealty to Little Britain from saying
+as much as he could, and as I knew with thankfulness to him how far out
+of his way he went to say what he did, I could not press him. But I told
+him, after a little meditation over the fire, that I would like to ask
+him a question, subject to his answering or not answering, as he
+deemed right, and sure that his course would be right. He paused in his
+breakfast, and crossing his arms, and pinching his shirt-sleeves (his
+notion of in-door comfort was to sit without any coat), he nodded to me
+once, to put my question.
+
+“You have heard of a man of bad character, whose true name is
+Compeyson?”
+
+He answered with one other nod.
+
+“Is he living?”
+
+One other nod.
+
+“Is he in London?”
+
+He gave me one other nod, compressed the post-office exceedingly, gave
+me one last nod, and went on with his breakfast.
+
+“Now,” said Wemmick, “questioning being over,” which he emphasized and
+repeated for my guidance, “I come to what I did, after hearing what I
+heard. I went to Garden Court to find you; not finding you, I went to
+Clarriker’s to find Mr. Herbert.”
+
+“And him you found?” said I, with great anxiety.
+
+“And him I found. Without mentioning any names or going into any
+details, I gave him to understand that if he was aware of anybody--Tom,
+Jack, or Richard--being about the chambers, or about the immediate
+neighborhood, he had better get Tom, Jack, or Richard out of the way
+while you were out of the way.”
+
+“He would be greatly puzzled what to do?”
+
+“He was puzzled what to do; not the less, because I gave him my opinion
+that it was not safe to try to get Tom, Jack, or Richard too far out
+of the way at present. Mr. Pip, I’ll tell you something. Under existing
+circumstances, there is no place like a great city when you are once
+in it. Don’t break cover too soon. Lie close. Wait till things slacken,
+before you try the open, even for foreign air.”
+
+I thanked him for his valuable advice, and asked him what Herbert had
+done?
+
+“Mr. Herbert,” said Wemmick, “after being all of a heap for half an
+hour, struck out a plan. He mentioned to me as a secret, that he is
+courting a young lady who has, as no doubt you are aware, a bedridden
+Pa. Which Pa, having been in the Purser line of life, lies a-bed in a
+bow-window where he can see the ships sail up and down the river. You
+are acquainted with the young lady, most probably?”
+
+“Not personally,” said I.
+
+The truth was, that she had objected to me as an expensive companion
+who did Herbert no good, and that, when Herbert had first proposed to
+present me to her, she had received the proposal with such very moderate
+warmth, that Herbert had felt himself obliged to confide the state of
+the case to me, with a view to the lapse of a little time before I made
+her acquaintance. When I had begun to advance Herbert’s prospects by
+stealth, I had been able to bear this with cheerful philosophy: he and
+his affianced, for their part, had naturally not been very anxious to
+introduce a third person into their interviews; and thus, although I was
+assured that I had risen in Clara’s esteem, and although the young
+lady and I had long regularly interchanged messages and remembrances by
+Herbert, I had never seen her. However, I did not trouble Wemmick with
+these particulars.
+
+“The house with the bow-window,” said Wemmick, “being by the river-side,
+down the Pool there between Limehouse and Greenwich, and being kept, it
+seems, by a very respectable widow who has a furnished upper floor to
+let, Mr. Herbert put it to me, what did I think of that as a temporary
+tenement for Tom, Jack, or Richard? Now, I thought very well of it, for
+three reasons I’ll give you. That is to say: Firstly. It’s altogether
+out of all your beats, and is well away from the usual heap of streets
+great and small. Secondly. Without going near it yourself, you could
+always hear of the safety of Tom, Jack, or Richard, through Mr. Herbert.
+Thirdly. After a while and when it might be prudent, if you should want
+to slip Tom, Jack, or Richard on board a foreign packet-boat, there he
+is--ready.”
+
+Much comforted by these considerations, I thanked Wemmick again and
+again, and begged him to proceed.
+
+“Well, sir! Mr. Herbert threw himself into the business with a will, and
+by nine o’clock last night he housed Tom, Jack, or Richard,--whichever
+it may be,--you and I don’t want to know,--quite successfully. At the
+old lodgings it was understood that he was summoned to Dover, and, in
+fact, he was taken down the Dover road and cornered out of it. Now,
+another great advantage of all this is, that it was done without you,
+and when, if any one was concerning himself about your movements, you
+must be known to be ever so many miles off and quite otherwise engaged.
+This diverts suspicion and confuses it; and for the same reason I
+recommended that, even if you came back last night, you should not go
+home. It brings in more confusion, and you want confusion.”
+
+Wemmick, having finished his breakfast, here looked at his watch, and
+began to get his coat on.
+
+“And now, Mr. Pip,” said he, with his hands still in the sleeves, “I
+have probably done the most I can do; but if I can ever do more,--from
+a Walworth point of view, and in a strictly private and personal
+capacity,--I shall be glad to do it. Here’s the address. There can be
+no harm in your going here to-night, and seeing for yourself that all is
+well with Tom, Jack, or Richard, before you go home,--which is another
+reason for your not going home last night. But, after you have gone
+home, don’t go back here. You are very welcome, I am sure, Mr. Pip”; his
+hands were now out of his sleeves, and I was shaking them; “and let me
+finally impress one important point upon you.” He laid his hands upon
+my shoulders, and added in a solemn whisper: “Avail yourself of this
+evening to lay hold of his portable property. You don’t know what may
+happen to him. Don’t let anything happen to the portable property.”
+
+Quite despairing of making my mind clear to Wemmick on this point, I
+forbore to try.
+
+“Time’s up,” said Wemmick, “and I must be off. If you had nothing more
+pressing to do than to keep here till dark, that’s what I should advise.
+You look very much worried, and it would do you good to have a perfectly
+quiet day with the Aged,--he’ll be up presently,--and a little bit
+of--you remember the pig?”
+
+“Of course,” said I.
+
+“Well; and a little bit of him. That sausage you toasted was his, and
+he was in all respects a first-rater. Do try him, if it is only for old
+acquaintance sake. Good-bye, Aged Parent!” in a cheery shout.
+
+“All right, John; all right, my boy!” piped the old man from within.
+
+I soon fell asleep before Wemmick’s fire, and the Aged and I enjoyed one
+another’s society by falling asleep before it more or less all day.
+We had loin of pork for dinner, and greens grown on the estate; and
+I nodded at the Aged with a good intention whenever I failed to do it
+drowsily. When it was quite dark, I left the Aged preparing the fire for
+toast; and I inferred from the number of teacups, as well as from his
+glances at the two little doors in the wall, that Miss Skiffins was
+expected.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XLVI
+
+Eight o’clock had struck before I got into the air, that was scented,
+not disagreeably, by the chips and shavings of the long-shore
+boat-builders, and mast, oar, and block makers. All that water-side
+region of the upper and lower Pool below Bridge was unknown ground to
+me; and when I struck down by the river, I found that the spot I wanted
+was not where I had supposed it to be, and was anything but easy to
+find. It was called Mill Pond Bank, Chinks’s Basin; and I had no other
+guide to Chinks’s Basin than the Old Green Copper Rope-walk.
+
+It matters not what stranded ships repairing in dry docks I lost myself
+among, what old hulls of ships in course of being knocked to pieces,
+what ooze and slime and other dregs of tide, what yards of ship-builders
+and ship-breakers, what rusty anchors blindly biting into the ground,
+though for years off duty, what mountainous country of accumulated casks
+and timber, how many rope-walks that were not the Old Green Copper. After
+several times falling short of my destination and as often overshooting
+it, I came unexpectedly round a corner, upon Mill Pond Bank. It was a
+fresh kind of place, all circumstances considered, where the wind from
+the river had room to turn itself round; and there were two or three
+trees in it, and there was the stump of a ruined windmill, and there
+was the Old Green Copper Rope-walk,--whose long and narrow vista I could
+trace in the moonlight, along a series of wooden frames set in the
+ground, that looked like superannuated haymaking-rakes which had grown
+old and lost most of their teeth.
+
+Selecting from the few queer houses upon Mill Pond Bank a house with a
+wooden front and three stories of bow-window (not bay-window, which is
+another thing), I looked at the plate upon the door, and read there,
+Mrs. Whimple. That being the name I wanted, I knocked, and an elderly
+woman of a pleasant and thriving appearance responded. She was
+immediately deposed, however, by Herbert, who silently led me into
+the parlor and shut the door. It was an odd sensation to see his very
+familiar face established quite at home in that very unfamiliar room
+and region; and I found myself looking at him, much as I looked at
+the corner-cupboard with the glass and china, the shells upon the
+chimney-piece, and the colored engravings on the wall, representing the
+death of Captain Cook, a ship-launch, and his Majesty King George the
+Third in a state coachman’s wig, leather-breeches, and top-boots, on the
+terrace at Windsor.
+
+“All is well, Handel,” said Herbert, “and he is quite satisfied, though
+eager to see you. My dear girl is with her father; and if you’ll wait
+till she comes down, I’ll make you known to her, and then we’ll go upstairs.
+That’s her father.”
+
+I had become aware of an alarming growling overhead, and had probably
+expressed the fact in my countenance.
+
+“I am afraid he is a sad old rascal,” said Herbert, smiling, “but I have
+never seen him. Don’t you smell rum? He is always at it.”
+
+“At rum?” said I.
+
+“Yes,” returned Herbert, “and you may suppose how mild it makes his
+gout. He persists, too, in keeping all the provisions upstairs in his
+room, and serving them out. He keeps them on shelves over his head, and
+will weigh them all. His room must be like a chandler’s shop.”
+
+While he thus spoke, the growling noise became a prolonged roar, and
+then died away.
+
+“What else can be the consequence,” said Herbert, in explanation, “if
+he will cut the cheese? A man with the gout in his right hand--and
+everywhere else--can’t expect to get through a Double Gloucester without
+hurting himself.”
+
+He seemed to have hurt himself very much, for he gave another furious
+roar.
+
+“To have Provis for an upper lodger is quite a godsend to Mrs. Whimple,”
+ said Herbert, “for of course people in general won’t stand that noise. A
+curious place, Handel; isn’t it?”
+
+It was a curious place, indeed; but remarkably well kept and clean.
+
+“Mrs. Whimple,” said Herbert, when I told him so, “is the best of
+housewives, and I really do not know what my Clara would do without
+her motherly help. For, Clara has no mother of her own, Handel, and no
+relation in the world but old Gruffandgrim.”
+
+“Surely that’s not his name, Herbert?”
+
+“No, no,” said Herbert, “that’s my name for him. His name is Mr. Barley.
+But what a blessing it is for the son of my father and mother to love a
+girl who has no relations, and who can never bother herself or anybody
+else about her family!”
+
+Herbert had told me on former occasions, and now reminded me, that he
+first knew Miss Clara Barley when she was completing her education at
+an establishment at Hammersmith, and that on her being recalled home
+to nurse her father, he and she had confided their affection to the
+motherly Mrs. Whimple, by whom it had been fostered and regulated
+with equal kindness and discretion, ever since. It was understood that
+nothing of a tender nature could possibly be confided to old Barley, by
+reason of his being totally unequal to the consideration of any subject
+more psychological than Gout, Rum, and Purser’s stores.
+
+As we were thus conversing in a low tone while Old Barley’s sustained
+growl vibrated in the beam that crossed the ceiling, the room door
+opened, and a very pretty, slight, dark-eyed girl of twenty or so came
+in with a basket in her hand: whom Herbert tenderly relieved of the
+basket, and presented, blushing, as “Clara.” She really was a most
+charming girl, and might have passed for a captive fairy, whom that
+truculent Ogre, Old Barley, had pressed into his service.
+
+“Look here,” said Herbert, showing me the basket, with a compassionate
+and tender smile, after we had talked a little; “here’s poor Clara’s
+supper, served out every night. Here’s her allowance of bread, and
+here’s her slice of cheese, and here’s her rum,--which I drink. This
+is Mr. Barley’s breakfast for to-morrow, served out to be cooked. Two
+mutton-chops, three potatoes, some split peas, a little flour, two
+ounces of butter, a pinch of salt, and all this black pepper. It’s
+stewed up together, and taken hot, and it’s a nice thing for the gout, I
+should think!”
+
+There was something so natural and winning in Clara’s resigned way of
+looking at these stores in detail, as Herbert pointed them out; and
+something so confiding, loving, and innocent in her modest manner of
+yielding herself to Herbert’s embracing arm; and something so gentle in
+her, so much needing protection on Mill Pond Bank, by Chinks’s Basin,
+and the Old Green Copper Rope-walk, with Old Barley growling in the
+beam,--that I would not have undone the engagement between her and
+Herbert for all the money in the pocket-book I had never opened.
+
+I was looking at her with pleasure and admiration, when suddenly the
+growl swelled into a roar again, and a frightful bumping noise was heard
+above, as if a giant with a wooden leg were trying to bore it through
+the ceiling to come at us. Upon this Clara said to Herbert, “Papa wants
+me, darling!” and ran away.
+
+“There is an unconscionable old shark for you!” said Herbert. “What do
+you suppose he wants now, Handel?”
+
+“I don’t know,” said I. “Something to drink?”
+
+“That’s it!” cried Herbert, as if I had made a guess of extraordinary
+merit. “He keeps his grog ready mixed in a little tub on the table.
+Wait a moment, and you’ll hear Clara lift him up to take some. There
+he goes!” Another roar, with a prolonged shake at the end. “Now,” said
+Herbert, as it was succeeded by silence, “he’s drinking. Now,” said
+Herbert, as the growl resounded in the beam once more, “he’s down again
+on his back!”
+
+Clara returned soon afterwards, and Herbert accompanied me upstairs to
+see our charge. As we passed Mr. Barley’s door, he was heard hoarsely
+muttering within, in a strain that rose and fell like wind, the
+following Refrain, in which I substitute good wishes for something quite
+the reverse:--
+
+“Ahoy! Bless your eyes, here’s old Bill Barley. Here’s old Bill Barley,
+bless your eyes. Here’s old Bill Barley on the flat of his back, by the
+Lord. Lying on the flat of his back like a drifting old dead flounder,
+here’s your old Bill Barley, bless your eyes. Ahoy! Bless you.”
+
+In this strain of consolation, Herbert informed me the invisible Barley
+would commune with himself by the day and night together; Often, while
+it was light, having, at the same time, one eye at a telescope which was
+fitted on his bed for the convenience of sweeping the river.
+
+In his two cabin rooms at the top of the house, which were fresh and
+airy, and in which Mr. Barley was less audible than below, I found
+Provis comfortably settled. He expressed no alarm, and seemed to
+feel none that was worth mentioning; but it struck me that he was
+softened,--indefinably, for I could not have said how, and could never
+afterwards recall how when I tried, but certainly.
+
+The opportunity that the day’s rest had given me for reflection had
+resulted in my fully determining to say nothing to him respecting
+Compeyson. For anything I knew, his animosity towards the man
+might otherwise lead to his seeking him out and rushing on his own
+destruction. Therefore, when Herbert and I sat down with him by his
+fire, I asked him first of all whether he relied on Wemmick’s judgment
+and sources of information?
+
+“Ay, ay, dear boy!” he answered, with a grave nod, “Jaggers knows.”
+
+“Then, I have talked with Wemmick,” said I, “and have come to tell you
+what caution he gave me and what advice.”
+
+This I did accurately, with the reservation just mentioned; and I told
+him how Wemmick had heard, in Newgate prison (whether from officers or
+prisoners I could not say), that he was under some suspicion, and that
+my chambers had been watched; how Wemmick had recommended his keeping
+close for a time, and my keeping away from him; and what Wemmick had
+said about getting him abroad. I added, that of course, when the time
+came, I should go with him, or should follow close upon him, as might
+be safest in Wemmick’s judgment. What was to follow that I did not touch
+upon; neither, indeed, was I at all clear or comfortable about it in my
+own mind, now that I saw him in that softer condition, and in declared
+peril for my sake. As to altering my way of living by enlarging my
+expenses, I put it to him whether in our present unsettled and difficult
+circumstances, it would not be simply ridiculous, if it were no worse?
+
+He could not deny this, and indeed was very reasonable throughout. His
+coming back was a venture, he said, and he had always known it to be a
+venture. He would do nothing to make it a desperate venture, and he had
+very little fear of his safety with such good help.
+
+Herbert, who had been looking at the fire and pondering, here said
+that something had come into his thoughts arising out of Wemmick’s
+suggestion, which it might be worth while to pursue. “We are both good
+watermen, Handel, and could take him down the river ourselves when the
+right time comes. No boat would then be hired for the purpose, and no
+boatmen; that would save at least a chance of suspicion, and any chance
+is worth saving. Never mind the season; don’t you think it might be a
+good thing if you began at once to keep a boat at the Temple stairs, and
+were in the habit of rowing up and down the river? You fall into that
+habit, and then who notices or minds? Do it twenty or fifty times,
+and there is nothing special in your doing it the twenty-first or
+fifty-first.”
+
+I liked this scheme, and Provis was quite elated by it. We agreed
+that it should be carried into execution, and that Provis should never
+recognize us if we came below Bridge, and rowed past Mill Pond Bank. But
+we further agreed that he should pull down the blind in that part of his
+window which gave upon the east, whenever he saw us and all was right.
+
+Our conference being now ended, and everything arranged, I rose to go;
+remarking to Herbert that he and I had better not go home together, and
+that I would take half an hour’s start of him. “I don’t like to leave
+you here,” I said to Provis, “though I cannot doubt your being safer
+here than near me. Good-bye!”
+
+“Dear boy,” he answered, clasping my hands, “I don’t know when we may
+meet again, and I don’t like good-bye. Say good night!”
+
+“Good night! Herbert will go regularly between us, and when the time
+comes you may be certain I shall be ready. Good night, good night!”
+
+We thought it best that he should stay in his own rooms; and we left him
+on the landing outside his door, holding a light over the stair-rail to
+light us downstairs. Looking back at him, I thought of the first night
+of his return, when our positions were reversed, and when I little
+supposed my heart could ever be as heavy and anxious at parting from him
+as it was now.
+
+Old Barley was growling and swearing when we repassed his door, with no
+appearance of having ceased or of meaning to cease. When we got to the
+foot of the stairs, I asked Herbert whether he had preserved the name of
+Provis. He replied, certainly not, and that the lodger was Mr. Campbell.
+He also explained that the utmost known of Mr. Campbell there was,
+that he (Herbert) had Mr. Campbell consigned to him, and felt a strong
+personal interest in his being well cared for, and living a secluded
+life. So, when we went into the parlor where Mrs. Whimple and Clara were
+seated at work, I said nothing of my own interest in Mr. Campbell, but
+kept it to myself.
+
+When I had taken leave of the pretty, gentle, dark-eyed girl, and of the
+motherly woman who had not outlived her honest sympathy with a little
+affair of true love, I felt as if the Old Green Copper Rope-walk had
+grown quite a different place. Old Barley might be as old as the hills,
+and might swear like a whole field of troopers, but there were redeeming
+youth and trust and hope enough in Chinks’s Basin to fill it to
+overflowing. And then I thought of Estella, and of our parting, and went
+home very sadly.
+
+All things were as quiet in the Temple as ever I had seen them. The
+windows of the rooms on that side, lately occupied by Provis, were dark
+and still, and there was no lounger in Garden Court. I walked past the
+fountain twice or thrice before I descended the steps that were between
+me and my rooms, but I was quite alone. Herbert, coming to my
+bedside when he came in,--for I went straight to bed, dispirited and
+fatigued,--made the same report. Opening one of the windows after that,
+he looked out into the moonlight, and told me that the pavement was as
+solemnly empty as the pavement of any cathedral at that same hour.
+
+Next day I set myself to get the boat. It was soon done, and the boat
+was brought round to the Temple stairs, and lay where I could reach
+her within a minute or two. Then, I began to go out as for training and
+practice: sometimes alone, sometimes with Herbert. I was often out in
+cold, rain, and sleet, but nobody took much note of me after I had been
+out a few times. At first, I kept above Blackfriars Bridge; but as the
+hours of the tide changed, I took towards London Bridge. It was Old
+London Bridge in those days, and at certain states of the tide there
+was a race and fall of water there which gave it a bad reputation. But I
+knew well enough how to ‘shoot’ the bridge after seeing it done, and so
+began to row about among the shipping in the Pool, and down to Erith.
+The first time I passed Mill Pond Bank, Herbert and I were pulling a
+pair of oars; and, both in going and returning, we saw the blind towards
+the east come down. Herbert was rarely there less frequently than three
+times in a week, and he never brought me a single word of intelligence
+that was at all alarming. Still, I knew that there was cause for alarm,
+and I could not get rid of the notion of being watched. Once received,
+it is a haunting idea; how many undesigning persons I suspected of
+watching me, it would be hard to calculate.
+
+In short, I was always full of fears for the rash man who was in hiding.
+Herbert had sometimes said to me that he found it pleasant to stand at
+one of our windows after dark, when the tide was running down, and to
+think that it was flowing, with everything it bore, towards Clara. But
+I thought with dread that it was flowing towards Magwitch, and that
+any black mark on its surface might be his pursuers, going swiftly,
+silently, and surely, to take him.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XLVII
+
+Some weeks passed without bringing any change. We waited for Wemmick,
+and he made no sign. If I had never known him out of Little Britain, and
+had never enjoyed the privilege of being on a familiar footing at the
+Castle, I might have doubted him; not so for a moment, knowing him as I
+did.
+
+My worldly affairs began to wear a gloomy appearance, and I was pressed
+for money by more than one creditor. Even I myself began to know the
+want of money (I mean of ready money in my own pocket), and to relieve
+it by converting some easily spared articles of jewelery into cash. But
+I had quite determined that it would be a heartless fraud to take more
+money from my patron in the existing state of my uncertain thoughts and
+plans. Therefore, I had sent him the unopened pocket-book by Herbert, to
+hold in his own keeping, and I felt a kind of satisfaction--whether it
+was a false kind or a true, I hardly know--in not having profited by his
+generosity since his revelation of himself.
+
+As the time wore on, an impression settled heavily upon me that Estella
+was married. Fearful of having it confirmed, though it was all but a
+conviction, I avoided the newspapers, and begged Herbert (to whom I had
+confided the circumstances of our last interview) never to speak of her
+to me. Why I hoarded up this last wretched little rag of the robe of
+hope that was rent and given to the winds, how do I know? Why did you
+who read this, commit that not dissimilar inconsistency of your own last
+year, last month, last week?
+
+It was an unhappy life that I lived; and its one dominant anxiety,
+towering over all its other anxieties, like a high mountain above a
+range of mountains, never disappeared from my view. Still, no new cause
+for fear arose. Let me start from my bed as I would, with the terror
+fresh upon me that he was discovered; let me sit listening, as I would
+with dread, for Herbert’s returning step at night, lest it should be
+fleeter than ordinary, and winged with evil news,--for all that, and
+much more to like purpose, the round of things went on. Condemned to
+inaction and a state of constant restlessness and suspense, I rowed
+about in my boat, and waited, waited, waited, as I best could.
+
+There were states of the tide when, having been down the river, I could
+not get back through the eddy-chafed arches and starlings of old London
+Bridge; then, I left my boat at a wharf near the Custom House, to be
+brought up afterwards to the Temple stairs. I was not averse to doing
+this, as it served to make me and my boat a commoner incident among the
+water-side people there. From this slight occasion sprang two meetings
+that I have now to tell of.
+
+One afternoon, late in the month of February, I came ashore at the wharf
+at dusk. I had pulled down as far as Greenwich with the ebb tide, and
+had turned with the tide. It had been a fine bright day, but had become
+foggy as the sun dropped, and I had had to feel my way back among the
+shipping, pretty carefully. Both in going and returning, I had seen the
+signal in his window, All well.
+
+As it was a raw evening, and I was cold, I thought I would comfort
+myself with dinner at once; and as I had hours of dejection and solitude
+before me if I went home to the Temple, I thought I would afterwards go
+to the play. The theatre where Mr. Wopsle had achieved his questionable
+triumph was in that water-side neighborhood (it is nowhere now), and
+to that theatre I resolved to go. I was aware that Mr. Wopsle had
+not succeeded in reviving the Drama, but, on the contrary, had rather
+partaken of its decline. He had been ominously heard of, through the
+play-bills, as a faithful Black, in connection with a little girl of
+noble birth, and a monkey. And Herbert had seen him as a predatory
+Tartar of comic propensities, with a face like a red brick, and an
+outrageous hat all over bells.
+
+I dined at what Herbert and I used to call a geographical chop-house,
+where there were maps of the world in porter-pot rims on every half-yard
+of the tablecloths, and charts of gravy on every one of the knives,--to
+this day there is scarcely a single chop-house within the Lord Mayor’s
+dominions which is not geographical,--and wore out the time in dozing
+over crumbs, staring at gas, and baking in a hot blast of dinners. By
+and by, I roused myself, and went to the play.
+
+There, I found a virtuous boatswain in His Majesty’s service,--a most
+excellent man, though I could have wished his trousers not quite so
+tight in some places, and not quite so loose in others,--who knocked all
+the little men’s hats over their eyes, though he was very generous and
+brave, and who wouldn’t hear of anybody’s paying taxes, though he was
+very patriotic. He had a bag of money in his pocket, like a pudding in
+the cloth, and on that property married a young person in bed-furniture,
+with great rejoicings; the whole population of Portsmouth (nine in
+number at the last census) turning out on the beach to rub their own
+hands and shake everybody else’s, and sing “Fill, fill!” A certain
+dark-complexioned Swab, however, who wouldn’t fill, or do anything else
+that was proposed to him, and whose heart was openly stated (by the
+boatswain) to be as black as his figure-head, proposed to two other
+Swabs to get all mankind into difficulties; which was so effectually
+done (the Swab family having considerable political influence) that it
+took half the evening to set things right, and then it was only brought
+about through an honest little grocer with a white hat, black gaiters,
+and red nose, getting into a clock, with a gridiron, and listening, and
+coming out, and knocking everybody down from behind with the gridiron
+whom he couldn’t confute with what he had overheard. This led to Mr.
+Wopsle’s (who had never been heard of before) coming in with a star
+and garter on, as a plenipotentiary of great power direct from the
+Admiralty, to say that the Swabs were all to go to prison on the spot,
+and that he had brought the boatswain down the Union Jack, as a slight
+acknowledgment of his public services. The boatswain, unmanned for the
+first time, respectfully dried his eyes on the Jack, and then cheering
+up, and addressing Mr. Wopsle as Your Honor, solicited permission to
+take him by the fin. Mr. Wopsle, conceding his fin with a gracious
+dignity, was immediately shoved into a dusty corner, while everybody
+danced a hornpipe; and from that corner, surveying the public with a
+discontented eye, became aware of me.
+
+The second piece was the last new grand comic Christmas pantomime, in
+the first scene of which, it pained me to suspect that I detected
+Mr. Wopsle with red worsted legs under a highly magnified phosphoric
+countenance and a shock of red curtain-fringe for his hair, engaged
+in the manufacture of thunderbolts in a mine, and displaying great
+cowardice when his gigantic master came home (very hoarse) to dinner.
+But he presently presented himself under worthier circumstances; for,
+the Genius of Youthful Love being in want of assistance,--on account of
+the parental brutality of an ignorant farmer who opposed the choice
+of his daughter’s heart, by purposely falling upon the object, in a
+flour-sack, out of the first-floor window,--summoned a sententious
+Enchanter; and he, coming up from the antipodes rather unsteadily, after
+an apparently violent journey, proved to be Mr. Wopsle in a high-crowned
+hat, with a necromantic work in one volume under his arm. The business
+of this enchanter on earth being principally to be talked at, sung at,
+butted at, danced at, and flashed at with fires of various colors,
+he had a good deal of time on his hands. And I observed, with great
+surprise, that he devoted it to staring in my direction as if he were
+lost in amazement.
+
+There was something so remarkable in the increasing glare of Mr.
+Wopsle’s eye, and he seemed to be turning so many things over in his
+mind and to grow so confused, that I could not make it out. I sat
+thinking of it long after he had ascended to the clouds in a large
+watch-case, and still I could not make it out. I was still thinking
+of it when I came out of the theatre an hour afterwards, and found him
+waiting for me near the door.
+
+“How do you do?” said I, shaking hands with him as we turned down the
+street together. “I saw that you saw me.”
+
+“Saw you, Mr. Pip!” he returned. “Yes, of course I saw you. But who else
+was there?”
+
+“Who else?”
+
+“It is the strangest thing,” said Mr. Wopsle, drifting into his lost
+look again; “and yet I could swear to him.”
+
+Becoming alarmed, I entreated Mr. Wopsle to explain his meaning.
+
+“Whether I should have noticed him at first but for your being there,”
+ said Mr. Wopsle, going on in the same lost way, “I can’t be positive;
+yet I think I should.”
+
+Involuntarily I looked round me, as I was accustomed to look round me
+when I went home; for these mysterious words gave me a chill.
+
+“Oh! He can’t be in sight,” said Mr. Wopsle. “He went out before I went
+off. I saw him go.”
+
+Having the reason that I had for being suspicious, I even suspected
+this poor actor. I mistrusted a design to entrap me into some admission.
+Therefore I glanced at him as we walked on together, but said nothing.
+
+“I had a ridiculous fancy that he must be with you, Mr. Pip, till I saw
+that you were quite unconscious of him, sitting behind you there like a
+ghost.”
+
+My former chill crept over me again, but I was resolved not to speak
+yet, for it was quite consistent with his words that he might be set on
+to induce me to connect these references with Provis. Of course, I was
+perfectly sure and safe that Provis had not been there.
+
+“I dare say you wonder at me, Mr. Pip; indeed, I see you do. But it is
+so very strange! You’ll hardly believe what I am going to tell you. I
+could hardly believe it myself, if you told me.”
+
+“Indeed?” said I.
+
+“No, indeed. Mr. Pip, you remember in old times a certain Christmas Day,
+when you were quite a child, and I dined at Gargery’s, and some soldiers
+came to the door to get a pair of handcuffs mended?”
+
+“I remember it very well.”
+
+“And you remember that there was a chase after two convicts, and that we
+joined in it, and that Gargery took you on his back, and that I took the
+lead, and you kept up with me as well as you could?”
+
+“I remember it all very well.” Better than he thought,--except the last
+clause.
+
+“And you remember that we came up with the two in a ditch, and that
+there was a scuffle between them, and that one of them had been severely
+handled and much mauled about the face by the other?”
+
+“I see it all before me.”
+
+“And that the soldiers lighted torches, and put the two in the centre,
+and that we went on to see the last of them, over the black marshes,
+with the torchlight shining on their faces,--I am particular about
+that,--with the torchlight shining on their faces, when there was an
+outer ring of dark night all about us?”
+
+“Yes,” said I. “I remember all that.”
+
+“Then, Mr. Pip, one of those two prisoners sat behind you tonight. I saw
+him over your shoulder.”
+
+“Steady!” I thought. I asked him then, “Which of the two do you suppose
+you saw?”
+
+“The one who had been mauled,” he answered readily, “and I’ll swear I
+saw him! The more I think of him, the more certain I am of him.”
+
+“This is very curious!” said I, with the best assumption I could put on
+of its being nothing more to me. “Very curious indeed!”
+
+I cannot exaggerate the enhanced disquiet into which this conversation
+threw me, or the special and peculiar terror I felt at Compeyson’s
+having been behind me “like a ghost.” For if he had ever been out of my
+thoughts for a few moments together since the hiding had begun, it was
+in those very moments when he was closest to me; and to think that I
+should be so unconscious and off my guard after all my care was as if
+I had shut an avenue of a hundred doors to keep him out, and then had
+found him at my elbow. I could not doubt, either, that he was there,
+because I was there, and that, however slight an appearance of danger
+there might be about us, danger was always near and active.
+
+I put such questions to Mr. Wopsle as, When did the man come in? He
+could not tell me that; he saw me, and over my shoulder he saw the man.
+It was not until he had seen him for some time that he began to identify
+him; but he had from the first vaguely associated him with me, and
+known him as somehow belonging to me in the old village time. How was
+he dressed? Prosperously, but not noticeably otherwise; he thought, in
+black. Was his face at all disfigured? No, he believed not. I believed
+not too, for, although in my brooding state I had taken no especial
+notice of the people behind me, I thought it likely that a face at all
+disfigured would have attracted my attention.
+
+When Mr. Wopsle had imparted to me all that he could recall or I
+extract, and when I had treated him to a little appropriate refreshment,
+after the fatigues of the evening, we parted. It was between twelve and
+one o’clock when I reached the Temple, and the gates were shut. No one
+was near me when I went in and went home.
+
+Herbert had come in, and we held a very serious council by the fire. But
+there was nothing to be done, saving to communicate to Wemmick what I
+had that night found out, and to remind him that we waited for his hint.
+As I thought that I might compromise him if I went too often to the
+Castle, I made this communication by letter. I wrote it before I went to
+bed, and went out and posted it; and again no one was near me. Herbert
+and I agreed that we could do nothing else but be very cautious. And
+we were very cautious indeed,--more cautious than before, if that were
+possible,--and I for my part never went near Chinks’s Basin, except
+when I rowed by, and then I only looked at Mill Pond Bank as I looked at
+anything else.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XLVIII
+
+The second of the two meetings referred to in the last chapter occurred
+about a week after the first. I had again left my boat at the wharf
+below Bridge; the time was an hour earlier in the afternoon; and,
+undecided where to dine, I had strolled up into Cheapside, and was
+strolling along it, surely the most unsettled person in all the busy
+concourse, when a large hand was laid upon my shoulder by some one
+overtaking me. It was Mr. Jaggers’s hand, and he passed it through my
+arm.
+
+“As we are going in the same direction, Pip, we may walk together. Where
+are you bound for?”
+
+“For the Temple, I think,” said I.
+
+“Don’t you know?” said Mr. Jaggers.
+
+“Well,” I returned, glad for once to get the better of him in
+cross-examination, “I do not know, for I have not made up my mind.”
+
+“You are going to dine?” said Mr. Jaggers. “You don’t mind admitting
+that, I suppose?”
+
+“No,” I returned, “I don’t mind admitting that.”
+
+“And are not engaged?”
+
+“I don’t mind admitting also that I am not engaged.”
+
+“Then,” said Mr. Jaggers, “come and dine with me.”
+
+I was going to excuse myself, when he added, “Wemmick’s coming.” So
+I changed my excuse into an acceptance,--the few words I had uttered,
+serving for the beginning of either,--and we went along Cheapside
+and slanted off to Little Britain, while the lights were springing up
+brilliantly in the shop windows, and the street lamp-lighters, scarcely
+finding ground enough to plant their ladders on in the midst of the
+afternoon’s bustle, were skipping up and down and running in and out,
+opening more red eyes in the gathering fog than my rushlight tower at
+the Hummums had opened white eyes in the ghostly wall.
+
+At the office in Little Britain there was the usual letter-writing,
+hand-washing, candle-snuffing, and safe-locking, that closed the
+business of the day. As I stood idle by Mr. Jaggers’s fire, its rising
+and falling flame made the two casts on the shelf look as if they were
+playing a diabolical game at bo-peep with me; while the pair of coarse,
+fat office candles that dimly lighted Mr. Jaggers as he wrote in a
+corner were decorated with dirty winding-sheets, as if in remembrance of
+a host of hanged clients.
+
+We went to Gerrard Street, all three together, in a hackney-coach: And,
+as soon as we got there, dinner was served. Although I should not have
+thought of making, in that place, the most distant reference by so much
+as a look to Wemmick’s Walworth sentiments, yet I should have had no
+objection to catching his eye now and then in a friendly way. But it
+was not to be done. He turned his eyes on Mr. Jaggers whenever he raised
+them from the table, and was as dry and distant to me as if there were
+twin Wemmicks, and this was the wrong one.
+
+“Did you send that note of Miss Havisham’s to Mr. Pip, Wemmick?” Mr.
+Jaggers asked, soon after we began dinner.
+
+“No, sir,” returned Wemmick; “it was going by post, when you brought Mr.
+Pip into the office. Here it is.” He handed it to his principal instead
+of to me.
+
+“It’s a note of two lines, Pip,” said Mr. Jaggers, handing it on, “sent
+up to me by Miss Havisham on account of her not being sure of your
+address. She tells me that she wants to see you on a little matter of
+business you mentioned to her. You’ll go down?”
+
+“Yes,” said I, casting my eyes over the note, which was exactly in those
+terms.
+
+“When do you think of going down?”
+
+“I have an impending engagement,” said I, glancing at Wemmick, who was
+putting fish into the post-office, “that renders me rather uncertain of
+my time. At once, I think.”
+
+“If Mr. Pip has the intention of going at once,” said Wemmick to Mr.
+Jaggers, “he needn’t write an answer, you know.”
+
+Receiving this as an intimation that it was best not to delay, I settled
+that I would go to-morrow, and said so. Wemmick drank a glass of wine,
+and looked with a grimly satisfied air at Mr. Jaggers, but not at me.
+
+“So, Pip! Our friend the Spider,” said Mr. Jaggers, “has played his
+cards. He has won the pool.”
+
+It was as much as I could do to assent.
+
+“Hah! He is a promising fellow--in his way--but he may not have it all
+his own way. The stronger will win in the end, but the stronger has to
+be found out first. If he should turn to, and beat her--”
+
+“Surely,” I interrupted, with a burning face and heart, “you do not
+seriously think that he is scoundrel enough for that, Mr. Jaggers?”
+
+“I didn’t say so, Pip. I am putting a case. If he should turn to and
+beat her, he may possibly get the strength on his side; if it should be
+a question of intellect, he certainly will not. It would be chance
+work to give an opinion how a fellow of that sort will turn out in such
+circumstances, because it’s a toss-up between two results.”
+
+“May I ask what they are?”
+
+“A fellow like our friend the Spider,” answered Mr. Jaggers, “either
+beats or cringes. He may cringe and growl, or cringe and not growl; but
+he either beats or cringes. Ask Wemmick his opinion.”
+
+“Either beats or cringes,” said Wemmick, not at all addressing himself
+to me.
+
+“So here’s to Mrs. Bentley Drummle,” said Mr. Jaggers, taking a decanter
+of choicer wine from his dumb-waiter, and filling for each of us and
+for himself, “and may the question of supremacy be settled to the lady’s
+satisfaction! To the satisfaction of the lady and the gentleman,
+it never will be. Now, Molly, Molly, Molly, Molly, how slow you are
+to-day!”
+
+She was at his elbow when he addressed her, putting a dish upon the
+table. As she withdrew her hands from it, she fell back a step or two,
+nervously muttering some excuse. And a certain action of her fingers, as
+she spoke, arrested my attention.
+
+“What’s the matter?” said Mr. Jaggers.
+
+“Nothing. Only the subject we were speaking of,” said I, “was rather
+painful to me.”
+
+The action of her fingers was like the action of knitting. She stood
+looking at her master, not understanding whether she was free to go, or
+whether he had more to say to her and would call her back if she did go.
+Her look was very intent. Surely, I had seen exactly such eyes and such
+hands on a memorable occasion very lately!
+
+He dismissed her, and she glided out of the room. But she remained
+before me as plainly as if she were still there. I looked at those
+hands, I looked at those eyes, I looked at that flowing hair; and I
+compared them with other hands, other eyes, other hair, that I knew of,
+and with what those might be after twenty years of a brutal husband
+and a stormy life. I looked again at those hands and eyes of the
+housekeeper, and thought of the inexplicable feeling that had come over
+me when I last walked--not alone--in the ruined garden, and through the
+deserted brewery. I thought how the same feeling had come back when I
+saw a face looking at me, and a hand waving to me from a stage-coach
+window; and how it had come back again and had flashed about me like
+lightning, when I had passed in a carriage--not alone--through a sudden
+glare of light in a dark street. I thought how one link of association
+had helped that identification in the theatre, and how such a link,
+wanting before, had been riveted for me now, when I had passed by a
+chance swift from Estella’s name to the fingers with their knitting
+action, and the attentive eyes. And I felt absolutely certain that this
+woman was Estella’s mother.
+
+Mr. Jaggers had seen me with Estella, and was not likely to have missed
+the sentiments I had been at no pains to conceal. He nodded when I said
+the subject was painful to me, clapped me on the back, put round the
+wine again, and went on with his dinner.
+
+Only twice more did the housekeeper reappear, and then her stay in the
+room was very short, and Mr. Jaggers was sharp with her. But her hands
+were Estella’s hands, and her eyes were Estella’s eyes, and if she had
+reappeared a hundred times I could have been neither more sure nor less
+sure that my conviction was the truth.
+
+It was a dull evening, for Wemmick drew his wine, when it came round,
+quite as a matter of business,--just as he might have drawn his salary
+when that came round,--and with his eyes on his chief, sat in a state of
+perpetual readiness for cross-examination. As to the quantity of wine,
+his post-office was as indifferent and ready as any other post-office
+for its quantity of letters. From my point of view, he was the wrong
+twin all the time, and only externally like the Wemmick of Walworth.
+
+We took our leave early, and left together. Even when we were groping
+among Mr. Jaggers’s stock of boots for our hats, I felt that the right
+twin was on his way back; and we had not gone half a dozen yards down
+Gerrard Street in the Walworth direction, before I found that I was
+walking arm in arm with the right twin, and that the wrong twin had
+evaporated into the evening air.
+
+“Well!” said Wemmick, “that’s over! He’s a wonderful man, without his
+living likeness; but I feel that I have to screw myself up when I dine
+with him,--and I dine more comfortably unscrewed.”
+
+I felt that this was a good statement of the case, and told him so.
+
+“Wouldn’t say it to anybody but yourself,” he answered. “I know that
+what is said between you and me goes no further.”
+
+I asked him if he had ever seen Miss Havisham’s adopted daughter, Mrs.
+Bentley Drummle. He said no. To avoid being too abrupt, I then spoke
+of the Aged and of Miss Skiffins. He looked rather sly when I mentioned
+Miss Skiffins, and stopped in the street to blow his nose, with a roll
+of the head, and a flourish not quite free from latent boastfulness.
+
+“Wemmick,” said I, “do you remember telling me, before I first went to
+Mr. Jaggers’s private house, to notice that housekeeper?”
+
+“Did I?” he replied. “Ah, I dare say I did. Deuce take me,” he added,
+suddenly, “I know I did. I find I am not quite unscrewed yet.”
+
+“A wild beast tamed, you called her.”
+
+“And what do you call her?”
+
+“The same. How did Mr. Jaggers tame her, Wemmick?”
+
+“That’s his secret. She has been with him many a long year.”
+
+“I wish you would tell me her story. I feel a particular interest in
+being acquainted with it. You know that what is said between you and me
+goes no further.”
+
+“Well!” Wemmick replied, “I don’t know her story,--that is, I don’t know
+all of it. But what I do know I’ll tell you. We are in our private and
+personal capacities, of course.”
+
+“Of course.”
+
+“A score or so of years ago, that woman was tried at the Old Bailey for
+murder, and was acquitted. She was a very handsome young woman, and I
+believe had some gypsy blood in her. Anyhow, it was hot enough when it
+was up, as you may suppose.”
+
+“But she was acquitted.”
+
+“Mr. Jaggers was for her,” pursued Wemmick, with a look full of meaning,
+“and worked the case in a way quite astonishing. It was a desperate
+case, and it was comparatively early days with him then, and he worked
+it to general admiration; in fact, it may almost be said to have made
+him. He worked it himself at the police-office, day after day for many
+days, contending against even a committal; and at the trial where he
+couldn’t work it himself, sat under counsel, and--every one knew--put
+in all the salt and pepper. The murdered person was a woman,--a woman a
+good ten years older, very much larger, and very much stronger. It was
+a case of jealousy. They both led tramping lives, and this woman in
+Gerrard Street here had been married very young, over the broomstick (as
+we say), to a tramping man, and was a perfect fury in point of jealousy.
+The murdered woman,--more a match for the man, certainly, in point of
+years--was found dead in a barn near Hounslow Heath. There had been a
+violent struggle, perhaps a fight. She was bruised and scratched and
+torn, and had been held by the throat, at last, and choked. Now, there
+was no reasonable evidence to implicate any person but this woman, and
+on the improbabilities of her having been able to do it Mr. Jaggers
+principally rested his case. You may be sure,” said Wemmick, touching me
+on the sleeve, “that he never dwelt upon the strength of her hands then,
+though he sometimes does now.”
+
+I had told Wemmick of his showing us her wrists, that day of the dinner
+party.
+
+“Well, sir!” Wemmick went on; “it happened--happened, don’t you
+see?--that this woman was so very artfully dressed from the time of
+her apprehension, that she looked much slighter than she really was; in
+particular, her sleeves are always remembered to have been so skilfully
+contrived that her arms had quite a delicate look. She had only a bruise
+or two about her,--nothing for a tramp,--but the backs of her hands
+were lacerated, and the question was, Was it with finger-nails? Now, Mr.
+Jaggers showed that she had struggled through a great lot of brambles
+which were not as high as her face; but which she could not have got
+through and kept her hands out of; and bits of those brambles were
+actually found in her skin and put in evidence, as well as the fact that
+the brambles in question were found on examination to have been broken
+through, and to have little shreds of her dress and little spots of
+blood upon them here and there. But the boldest point he made was this:
+it was attempted to be set up, in proof of her jealousy, that she was
+under strong suspicion of having, at about the time of the murder,
+frantically destroyed her child by this man--some three years old--to
+revenge herself upon him. Mr. Jaggers worked that in this way: “We say
+these are not marks of finger-nails, but marks of brambles, and we show
+you the brambles. You say they are marks of finger-nails, and you set
+up the hypothesis that she destroyed her child. You must accept all
+consequences of that hypothesis. For anything we know, she may have
+destroyed her child, and the child in clinging to her may have scratched
+her hands. What then? You are not trying her for the murder of her
+child; why don’t you? As to this case, if you will have scratches,
+we say that, for anything we know, you may have accounted for them,
+assuming for the sake of argument that you have not invented them?” “To
+sum up, sir,” said Wemmick, “Mr. Jaggers was altogether too many for the
+jury, and they gave in.”
+
+“Has she been in his service ever since?”
+
+“Yes; but not only that,” said Wemmick, “she went into his service
+immediately after her acquittal, tamed as she is now. She has since been
+taught one thing and another in the way of her duties, but she was tamed
+from the beginning.”
+
+“Do you remember the sex of the child?”
+
+“Said to have been a girl.”
+
+“You have nothing more to say to me to-night?”
+
+“Nothing. I got your letter and destroyed it. Nothing.”
+
+We exchanged a cordial good-night, and I went home, with new matter for
+my thoughts, though with no relief from the old.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XLIX
+
+Putting Miss Havisham’s note in my pocket, that it might serve as
+my credentials for so soon reappearing at Satis House, in case her
+waywardness should lead her to express any surprise at seeing me, I went
+down again by the coach next day. But I alighted at the Halfway House,
+and breakfasted there, and walked the rest of the distance; for I sought
+to get into the town quietly by the unfrequented ways, and to leave it
+in the same manner.
+
+The best light of the day was gone when I passed along the quiet echoing
+courts behind the High Street. The nooks of ruin where the old monks had
+once had their refectories and gardens, and where the strong walls were
+now pressed into the service of humble sheds and stables, were almost
+as silent as the old monks in their graves. The cathedral chimes had at
+once a sadder and a more remote sound to me, as I hurried on avoiding
+observation, than they had ever had before; so, the swell of the old
+organ was borne to my ears like funeral music; and the rooks, as they
+hovered about the gray tower and swung in the bare high trees of the
+priory garden, seemed to call to me that the place was changed, and that
+Estella was gone out of it for ever.
+
+An elderly woman, whom I had seen before as one of the servants who
+lived in the supplementary house across the back courtyard, opened the
+gate. The lighted candle stood in the dark passage within, as of old,
+and I took it up and ascended the staircase alone. Miss Havisham was not
+in her own room, but was in the larger room across the landing. Looking
+in at the door, after knocking in vain, I saw her sitting on the hearth
+in a ragged chair, close before, and lost in the contemplation of, the
+ashy fire.
+
+Doing as I had often done, I went in, and stood touching the old
+chimney-piece, where she could see me when she raised her eyes. There
+was an air of utter loneliness upon her, that would have moved me to
+pity though she had wilfully done me a deeper injury than I could charge
+her with. As I stood compassionating her, and thinking how, in the
+progress of time, I too had come to be a part of the wrecked fortunes of
+that house, her eyes rested on me. She stared, and said in a low voice,
+“Is it real?”
+
+“It is I, Pip. Mr. Jaggers gave me your note yesterday, and I have lost
+no time.”
+
+“Thank you. Thank you.”
+
+As I brought another of the ragged chairs to the hearth and sat down, I
+remarked a new expression on her face, as if she were afraid of me.
+
+“I want,” she said, “to pursue that subject you mentioned to me when you
+were last here, and to show you that I am not all stone. But perhaps you
+can never believe, now, that there is anything human in my heart?”
+
+When I said some reassuring words, she stretched out her tremulous right
+hand, as though she was going to touch me; but she recalled it again
+before I understood the action, or knew how to receive it.
+
+“You said, speaking for your friend, that you could tell me how to do
+something useful and good. Something that you would like done, is it
+not?”
+
+“Something that I would like done very much.”
+
+“What is it?”
+
+I began explaining to her that secret history of the partnership. I had
+not got far into it, when I judged from her looks that she was thinking
+in a discursive way of me, rather than of what I said. It seemed to be
+so; for, when I stopped speaking, many moments passed before she showed
+that she was conscious of the fact.
+
+“Do you break off,” she asked then, with her former air of being afraid
+of me, “because you hate me too much to bear to speak to me?”
+
+“No, no,” I answered, “how can you think so, Miss Havisham! I stopped
+because I thought you were not following what I said.”
+
+“Perhaps I was not,” she answered, putting a hand to her head. “Begin
+again, and let me look at something else. Stay! Now tell me.”
+
+She set her hand upon her stick in the resolute way that sometimes was
+habitual to her, and looked at the fire with a strong expression of
+forcing herself to attend. I went on with my explanation, and told her
+how I had hoped to complete the transaction out of my means, but how
+in this I was disappointed. That part of the subject (I reminded her)
+involved matters which could form no part of my explanation, for they
+were the weighty secrets of another.
+
+“So!” said she, assenting with her head, but not looking at me. “And how
+much money is wanting to complete the purchase?”
+
+I was rather afraid of stating it, for it sounded a large sum. “Nine
+hundred pounds.”
+
+“If I give you the money for this purpose, will you keep my secret as
+you have kept your own?”
+
+“Quite as faithfully.”
+
+“And your mind will be more at rest?”
+
+“Much more at rest.”
+
+“Are you very unhappy now?”
+
+She asked this question, still without looking at me, but in an unwonted
+tone of sympathy. I could not reply at the moment, for my voice failed
+me. She put her left arm across the head of her stick, and softly laid
+her forehead on it.
+
+“I am far from happy, Miss Havisham; but I have other causes of disquiet
+than any you know of. They are the secrets I have mentioned.”
+
+After a little while, she raised her head, and looked at the fire again.
+
+“It is noble in you to tell me that you have other causes of
+unhappiness. Is it true?”
+
+“Too true.”
+
+“Can I only serve you, Pip, by serving your friend? Regarding that as
+done, is there nothing I can do for you yourself?”
+
+“Nothing. I thank you for the question. I thank you even more for the
+tone of the question. But there is nothing.”
+
+She presently rose from her seat, and looked about the blighted room
+for the means of writing. There were none there, and she took from her
+pocket a yellow set of ivory tablets, mounted in tarnished gold, and
+wrote upon them with a pencil in a case of tarnished gold that hung from
+her neck.
+
+“You are still on friendly terms with Mr. Jaggers?”
+
+“Quite. I dined with him yesterday.”
+
+“This is an authority to him to pay you that money, to lay out at your
+irresponsible discretion for your friend. I keep no money here; but if
+you would rather Mr. Jaggers knew nothing of the matter, I will send it
+to you.”
+
+“Thank you, Miss Havisham; I have not the least objection to receiving
+it from him.”
+
+She read me what she had written; and it was direct and clear, and
+evidently intended to absolve me from any suspicion of profiting by the
+receipt of the money. I took the tablets from her hand, and it trembled
+again, and it trembled more as she took off the chain to which the
+pencil was attached, and put it in mine. All this she did without
+looking at me.
+
+“My name is on the first leaf. If you can ever write under my name, “I
+forgive her,” though ever so long after my broken heart is dust pray do
+it!”
+
+“O Miss Havisham,” said I, “I can do it now. There have been sore
+mistakes; and my life has been a blind and thankless one; and I want
+forgiveness and direction far too much, to be bitter with you.”
+
+She turned her face to me for the first time since she had averted it,
+and, to my amazement, I may even add to my terror, dropped on her knees
+at my feet; with her folded hands raised to me in the manner in which,
+when her poor heart was young and fresh and whole, they must often have
+been raised to heaven from her mother’s side.
+
+To see her with her white hair and her worn face kneeling at my feet
+gave me a shock through all my frame. I entreated her to rise, and got
+my arms about her to help her up; but she only pressed that hand of mine
+which was nearest to her grasp, and hung her head over it and wept. I
+had never seen her shed a tear before, and, in the hope that the
+relief might do her good, I bent over her without speaking. She was not
+kneeling now, but was down upon the ground.
+
+“O!” she cried, despairingly. “What have I done! What have I done!”
+
+“If you mean, Miss Havisham, what have you done to injure me, let me
+answer. Very little. I should have loved her under any circumstances. Is
+she married?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+It was a needless question, for a new desolation in the desolate house
+had told me so.
+
+“What have I done! What have I done!” She wrung her hands, and crushed
+her white hair, and returned to this cry over and over again. “What have
+I done!”
+
+I knew not how to answer, or how to comfort her. That she had done a
+grievous thing in taking an impressionable child to mould into the form
+that her wild resentment, spurned affection, and wounded pride found
+vengeance in, I knew full well. But that, in shutting out the light
+of day, she had shut out infinitely more; that, in seclusion, she had
+secluded herself from a thousand natural and healing influences; that,
+her mind, brooding solitary, had grown diseased, as all minds do and
+must and will that reverse the appointed order of their Maker, I knew
+equally well. And could I look upon her without compassion, seeing her
+punishment in the ruin she was, in her profound unfitness for this earth
+on which she was placed, in the vanity of sorrow which had become a
+master mania, like the vanity of penitence, the vanity of remorse, the
+vanity of unworthiness, and other monstrous vanities that have been
+curses in this world?
+
+“Until you spoke to her the other day, and until I saw in you a
+looking-glass that showed me what I once felt myself, I did not know
+what I had done. What have I done! What have I done!” And so again,
+twenty, fifty times over, What had she done!
+
+“Miss Havisham,” I said, when her cry had died away, “you may dismiss me
+from your mind and conscience. But Estella is a different case, and if
+you can ever undo any scrap of what you have done amiss in keeping a
+part of her right nature away from her, it will be better to do that
+than to bemoan the past through a hundred years.”
+
+“Yes, yes, I know it. But, Pip--my dear!” There was an earnest womanly
+compassion for me in her new affection. “My dear! Believe this: when she
+first came to me, I meant to save her from misery like my own. At first,
+I meant no more.”
+
+“Well, well!” said I. “I hope so.”
+
+“But as she grew, and promised to be very beautiful, I gradually did
+worse, and with my praises, and with my jewels, and with my teachings,
+and with this figure of myself always before her, a warning to back and
+point my lessons, I stole her heart away, and put ice in its place.”
+
+“Better,” I could not help saying, “to have left her a natural heart,
+even to be bruised or broken.”
+
+With that, Miss Havisham looked distractedly at me for a while, and then
+burst out again, What had she done!
+
+“If you knew all my story,” she pleaded, “you would have some compassion
+for me and a better understanding of me.”
+
+“Miss Havisham,” I answered, as delicately as I could, “I believe I may
+say that I do know your story, and have known it ever since I first left
+this neighborhood. It has inspired me with great commiseration, and I
+hope I understand it and its influences. Does what has passed between us
+give me any excuse for asking you a question relative to Estella? Not as
+she is, but as she was when she first came here?”
+
+She was seated on the ground, with her arms on the ragged chair, and
+her head leaning on them. She looked full at me when I said this, and
+replied, “Go on.”
+
+“Whose child was Estella?”
+
+She shook her head.
+
+“You don’t know?”
+
+She shook her head again.
+
+“But Mr. Jaggers brought her here, or sent her here?”
+
+“Brought her here.”
+
+“Will you tell me how that came about?”
+
+She answered in a low whisper and with caution: “I had been shut up in
+these rooms a long time (I don’t know how long; you know what time the
+clocks keep here), when I told him that I wanted a little girl to rear
+and love, and save from my fate. I had first seen him when I sent
+for him to lay this place waste for me; having read of him in the
+newspapers, before I and the world parted. He told me that he would
+look about him for such an orphan child. One night he brought her here
+asleep, and I called her Estella.”
+
+“Might I ask her age then?”
+
+“Two or three. She herself knows nothing, but that she was left an
+orphan and I adopted her.”
+
+So convinced I was of that woman’s being her mother, that I wanted
+no evidence to establish the fact in my own mind. But, to any mind, I
+thought, the connection here was clear and straight.
+
+What more could I hope to do by prolonging the interview? I had
+succeeded on behalf of Herbert, Miss Havisham had told me all she knew
+of Estella, I had said and done what I could to ease her mind. No matter
+with what other words we parted; we parted.
+
+Twilight was closing in when I went downstairs into the natural air. I
+called to the woman who had opened the gate when I entered, that I would
+not trouble her just yet, but would walk round the place before leaving.
+For I had a presentiment that I should never be there again, and I felt
+that the dying light was suited to my last view of it.
+
+By the wilderness of casks that I had walked on long ago, and on which
+the rain of years had fallen since, rotting them in many places, and
+leaving miniature swamps and pools of water upon those that stood on
+end, I made my way to the ruined garden. I went all round it; round by
+the corner where Herbert and I had fought our battle; round by the paths
+where Estella and I had walked. So cold, so lonely, so dreary all!
+
+Taking the brewery on my way back, I raised the rusty latch of a little
+door at the garden end of it, and walked through. I was going out at the
+opposite door,--not easy to open now, for the damp wood had started and
+swelled, and the hinges were yielding, and the threshold was encumbered
+with a growth of fungus,--when I turned my head to look back. A childish
+association revived with wonderful force in the moment of the slight
+action, and I fancied that I saw Miss Havisham hanging to the beam. So
+strong was the impression, that I stood under the beam shuddering from
+head to foot before I knew it was a fancy,--though to be sure I was
+there in an instant.
+
+The mournfulness of the place and time, and the great terror of
+this illusion, though it was but momentary, caused me to feel an
+indescribable awe as I came out between the open wooden gates where I
+had once wrung my hair after Estella had wrung my heart. Passing on into
+the front courtyard, I hesitated whether to call the woman to let me out
+at the locked gate of which she had the key, or first to go upstairs
+and assure myself that Miss Havisham was as safe and well as I had left
+her. I took the latter course and went up.
+
+I looked into the room where I had left her, and I saw her seated in the
+ragged chair upon the hearth close to the fire, with her back towards
+me. In the moment when I was withdrawing my head to go quietly away,
+I saw a great flaming light spring up. In the same moment I saw her
+running at me, shrieking, with a whirl of fire blazing all about her,
+and soaring at least as many feet above her head as she was high.
+
+I had a double-caped great-coat on, and over my arm another thick coat.
+That I got them off, closed with her, threw her down, and got them over
+her; that I dragged the great cloth from the table for the same purpose,
+and with it dragged down the heap of rottenness in the midst, and
+all the ugly things that sheltered there; that we were on the ground
+struggling like desperate enemies, and that the closer I covered her,
+the more wildly she shrieked and tried to free herself,--that this
+occurred I knew through the result, but not through anything I felt, or
+thought, or knew I did. I knew nothing until I knew that we were on the
+floor by the great table, and that patches of tinder yet alight were
+floating in the smoky air, which, a moment ago, had been her faded
+bridal dress.
+
+Then, I looked round and saw the disturbed beetles and spiders running
+away over the floor, and the servants coming in with breathless cries
+at the door. I still held her forcibly down with all my strength, like
+a prisoner who might escape; and I doubt if I even knew who she was, or
+why we had struggled, or that she had been in flames, or that the flames
+were out, until I saw the patches of tinder that had been her garments
+no longer alight but falling in a black shower around us.
+
+She was insensible, and I was afraid to have her moved, or even
+touched. Assistance was sent for, and I held her until it came, as if
+I unreasonably fancied (I think I did) that, if I let her go, the fire
+would break out again and consume her. When I got up, on the surgeon’s
+coming to her with other aid, I was astonished to see that both my hands
+were burnt; for, I had no knowledge of it through the sense of feeling.
+
+On examination it was pronounced that she had received serious hurts,
+but that they of themselves were far from hopeless; the danger lay
+mainly in the nervous shock. By the surgeon’s directions, her bed was
+carried into that room and laid upon the great table, which happened to
+be well suited to the dressing of her injuries. When I saw her again, an
+hour afterwards, she lay, indeed, where I had seen her strike her stick,
+and had heard her say that she would lie one day.
+
+Though every vestige of her dress was burnt, as they told me, she
+still had something of her old ghastly bridal appearance; for, they had
+covered her to the throat with white cotton-wool, and as she lay with
+a white sheet loosely overlying that, the phantom air of something that
+had been and was changed was still upon her.
+
+I found, on questioning the servants, that Estella was in Paris, and I
+got a promise from the surgeon that he would write to her by the
+next post. Miss Havisham’s family I took upon myself; intending to
+communicate with Mr. Matthew Pocket only, and leave him to do as he
+liked about informing the rest. This I did next day, through Herbert, as
+soon as I returned to town.
+
+There was a stage, that evening, when she spoke collectedly of what had
+happened, though with a certain terrible vivacity. Towards midnight she
+began to wander in her speech; and after that it gradually set in that
+she said innumerable times in a low solemn voice, “What have I done!”
+ And then, “When she first came, I meant to save her from misery like
+mine.” And then, “Take the pencil and write under my name, ‘I forgive
+her!’” She never changed the order of these three sentences, but she
+sometimes left out a word in one or other of them; never putting in
+another word, but always leaving a blank and going on to the next word.
+
+As I could do no service there, and as I had, nearer home, that pressing
+reason for anxiety and fear which even her wanderings could not drive
+out of my mind, I decided, in the course of the night that I would
+return by the early morning coach, walking on a mile or so, and being
+taken up clear of the town. At about six o’clock of the morning,
+therefore, I leaned over her and touched her lips with mine, just as
+they said, not stopping for being touched, “Take the pencil and write
+under my name, ‘I forgive her.’”
+
+
+
+
+Chapter L
+
+My hands had been dressed twice or thrice in the night, and again in
+the morning. My left arm was a good deal burned to the elbow, and, less
+severely, as high as the shoulder; it was very painful, but the flames
+had set in that direction, and I felt thankful it was no worse. My right
+hand was not so badly burnt but that I could move the fingers. It was
+bandaged, of course, but much less inconveniently than my left hand and
+arm; those I carried in a sling; and I could only wear my coat like a
+cloak, loose over my shoulders and fastened at the neck. My hair had
+been caught by the fire, but not my head or face.
+
+When Herbert had been down to Hammersmith and seen his father, he came
+back to me at our chambers, and devoted the day to attending on me. He
+was the kindest of nurses, and at stated times took off the bandages,
+and steeped them in the cooling liquid that was kept ready, and put them
+on again, with a patient tenderness that I was deeply grateful for.
+
+At first, as I lay quiet on the sofa, I found it painfully difficult, I
+might say impossible, to get rid of the impression of the glare of the
+flames, their hurry and noise, and the fierce burning smell. If I
+dozed for a minute, I was awakened by Miss Havisham’s cries, and by her
+running at me with all that height of fire above her head. This pain
+of the mind was much harder to strive against than any bodily pain I
+suffered; and Herbert, seeing that, did his utmost to hold my attention
+engaged.
+
+Neither of us spoke of the boat, but we both thought of it. That
+was made apparent by our avoidance of the subject, and by our
+agreeing--without agreement--to make my recovery of the use of my hands
+a question of so many hours, not of so many weeks.
+
+My first question when I saw Herbert had been of course, whether all
+was well down the river? As he replied in the affirmative, with perfect
+confidence and cheerfulness, we did not resume the subject until the day
+was wearing away. But then, as Herbert changed the bandages, more by
+the light of the fire than by the outer light, he went back to it
+spontaneously.
+
+“I sat with Provis last night, Handel, two good hours.”
+
+“Where was Clara?”
+
+“Dear little thing!” said Herbert. “She was up and down with
+Gruffandgrim all the evening. He was perpetually pegging at the floor
+the moment she left his sight. I doubt if he can hold out long, though.
+What with rum and pepper,--and pepper and rum,--I should think his
+pegging must be nearly over.”
+
+“And then you will be married, Herbert?”
+
+“How can I take care of the dear child otherwise?--Lay your arm out upon
+the back of the sofa, my dear boy, and I’ll sit down here, and get the
+bandage off so gradually that you shall not know when it comes. I was
+speaking of Provis. Do you know, Handel, he improves?”
+
+“I said to you I thought he was softened when I last saw him.”
+
+“So you did. And so he is. He was very communicative last night, and
+told me more of his life. You remember his breaking off here about some
+woman that he had had great trouble with.--Did I hurt you?”
+
+I had started, but not under his touch. His words had given me a start.
+
+“I had forgotten that, Herbert, but I remember it now you speak of it.”
+
+“Well! He went into that part of his life, and a dark wild part it is.
+Shall I tell you? Or would it worry you just now?”
+
+“Tell me by all means. Every word.”
+
+Herbert bent forward to look at me more nearly, as if my reply had been
+rather more hurried or more eager than he could quite account for. “Your
+head is cool?” he said, touching it.
+
+“Quite,” said I. “Tell me what Provis said, my dear Herbert.”
+
+“It seems,” said Herbert, “--there’s a bandage off most charmingly, and
+now comes the cool one,--makes you shrink at first, my poor dear fellow,
+don’t it? but it will be comfortable presently,--it seems that the
+woman was a young woman, and a jealous woman, and a revengeful woman;
+revengeful, Handel, to the last degree.”
+
+“To what last degree?”
+
+“Murder.--Does it strike too cold on that sensitive place?”
+
+“I don’t feel it. How did she murder? Whom did she murder?”
+
+“Why, the deed may not have merited quite so terrible a name,”
+ said Herbert, “but, she was tried for it, and Mr. Jaggers defended
+her, and the reputation of that defence first made his name known
+to Provis. It was another and a stronger woman who was the victim,
+and there had been a struggle--in a barn. Who began it, or how fair
+it was, or how unfair, may be doubtful; but how it ended is
+certainly not doubtful, for the victim was found throttled.”
+
+“Was the woman brought in guilty?”
+
+“No; she was acquitted.--My poor Handel, I hurt you!”
+
+“It is impossible to be gentler, Herbert. Yes? What else?”
+
+“This acquitted young woman and Provis had a little child; a little
+child of whom Provis was exceedingly fond. On the evening of the very
+night when the object of her jealousy was strangled as I tell you, the
+young woman presented herself before Provis for one moment, and swore
+that she would destroy the child (which was in her possession), and he
+should never see it again; then she vanished.--There’s the worst arm
+comfortably in the sling once more, and now there remains but the right
+hand, which is a far easier job. I can do it better by this light
+than by a stronger, for my hand is steadiest when I don’t see the poor
+blistered patches too distinctly.--You don’t think your breathing is
+affected, my dear boy? You seem to breathe quickly.”
+
+“Perhaps I do, Herbert. Did the woman keep her oath?”
+
+“There comes the darkest part of Provis’s life. She did.”
+
+“That is, he says she did.”
+
+“Why, of course, my dear boy,” returned Herbert, in a tone of surprise,
+and again bending forward to get a nearer look at me. “He says it all. I
+have no other information.”
+
+“No, to be sure.”
+
+“Now, whether,” pursued Herbert, “he had used the child’s mother ill, or
+whether he had used the child’s mother well, Provis doesn’t say; but she
+had shared some four or five years of the wretched life he described
+to us at this fireside, and he seems to have felt pity for her, and
+forbearance towards her. Therefore, fearing he should be called upon to
+depose about this destroyed child, and so be the cause of her death, he
+hid himself (much as he grieved for the child), kept himself dark, as he
+says, out of the way and out of the trial, and was only vaguely talked
+of as a certain man called Abel, out of whom the jealousy arose. After
+the acquittal she disappeared, and thus he lost the child and the
+child’s mother.”
+
+“I want to ask--”
+
+“A moment, my dear boy, and I have done. That evil genius, Compeyson,
+the worst of scoundrels among many scoundrels, knowing of his keeping
+out of the way at that time and of his reasons for doing so, of course
+afterwards held the knowledge over his head as a means of keeping him
+poorer and working him harder. It was clear last night that this barbed
+the point of Provis’s animosity.”
+
+“I want to know,” said I, “and particularly, Herbert, whether he told
+you when this happened?”
+
+“Particularly? Let me remember, then, what he said as to that. His
+expression was, ‘a round score o’ year ago, and a’most directly after I
+took up wi’ Compeyson.’ How old were you when you came upon him in the
+little churchyard?”
+
+“I think in my seventh year.”
+
+“Ay. It had happened some three or four years then, he said, and you
+brought into his mind the little girl so tragically lost, who would have
+been about your age.”
+
+“Herbert,” said I, after a short silence, in a hurried way, “can you see
+me best by the light of the window, or the light of the fire?”
+
+“By the firelight,” answered Herbert, coming close again.
+
+“Look at me.”
+
+“I do look at you, my dear boy.”
+
+“Touch me.”
+
+“I do touch you, my dear boy.”
+
+“You are not afraid that I am in any fever, or that my head is much
+disordered by the accident of last night?”
+
+“N-no, my dear boy,” said Herbert, after taking time to examine me. “You
+are rather excited, but you are quite yourself.”
+
+“I know I am quite myself. And the man we have in hiding down the river,
+is Estella’s Father.”
+
+
+
+
+Chapter LI
+
+What purpose I had in view when I was hot on tracing out and proving
+Estella’s parentage, I cannot say. It will presently be seen that the
+question was not before me in a distinct shape until it was put before
+me by a wiser head than my own.
+
+But when Herbert and I had held our momentous conversation, I was seized
+with a feverish conviction that I ought to hunt the matter down,--that I
+ought not to let it rest, but that I ought to see Mr. Jaggers, and come
+at the bare truth. I really do not know whether I felt that I did this
+for Estella’s sake, or whether I was glad to transfer to the man in
+whose preservation I was so much concerned some rays of the romantic
+interest that had so long surrounded me. Perhaps the latter possibility
+may be the nearer to the truth.
+
+Any way, I could scarcely be withheld from going out to Gerrard Street
+that night. Herbert’s representations that, if I did, I should probably
+be laid up and stricken useless, when our fugitive’s safety would depend
+upon me, alone restrained my impatience. On the understanding, again
+and again reiterated, that, come what would, I was to go to Mr. Jaggers
+to-morrow, I at length submitted to keep quiet, and to have my hurts
+looked after, and to stay at home. Early next morning we went out
+together, and at the corner of Giltspur Street by Smithfield, I left
+Herbert to go his way into the City, and took my way to Little Britain.
+
+There were periodical occasions when Mr. Jaggers and Wemmick went over
+the office accounts, and checked off the vouchers, and put all things
+straight. On these occasions, Wemmick took his books and papers into Mr.
+Jaggers’s room, and one of the upstairs clerks came down into the outer
+office. Finding such clerk on Wemmick’s post that morning, I knew
+what was going on; but I was not sorry to have Mr. Jaggers and Wemmick
+together, as Wemmick would then hear for himself that I said nothing to
+compromise him.
+
+My appearance, with my arm bandaged and my coat loose over my shoulders,
+favored my object. Although I had sent Mr. Jaggers a brief account of
+the accident as soon as I had arrived in town, yet I had to give him all
+the details now; and the speciality of the occasion caused our talk
+to be less dry and hard, and less strictly regulated by the rules of
+evidence, than it had been before. While I described the disaster, Mr.
+Jaggers stood, according to his wont, before the fire. Wemmick leaned
+back in his chair, staring at me, with his hands in the pockets of his
+trousers, and his pen put horizontally into the post. The two brutal
+casts, always inseparable in my mind from the official proceedings,
+seemed to be congestively considering whether they didn’t smell fire at
+the present moment.
+
+My narrative finished, and their questions exhausted, I then produced
+Miss Havisham’s authority to receive the nine hundred pounds for
+Herbert. Mr. Jaggers’s eyes retired a little deeper into his head when
+I handed him the tablets, but he presently handed them over to Wemmick,
+with instructions to draw the check for his signature. While that was
+in course of being done, I looked on at Wemmick as he wrote, and Mr.
+Jaggers, poising and swaying himself on his well-polished boots, looked
+on at me. “I am sorry, Pip,” said he, as I put the check in my pocket,
+when he had signed it, “that we do nothing for you.”
+
+“Miss Havisham was good enough to ask me,” I returned, “whether she
+could do nothing for me, and I told her No.”
+
+“Everybody should know his own business,” said Mr. Jaggers. And I saw
+Wemmick’s lips form the words “portable property.”
+
+“I should not have told her No, if I had been you,” said Mr Jaggers;
+“but every man ought to know his own business best.”
+
+“Every man’s business,” said Wemmick, rather reproachfully towards me,
+“is portable property.”
+
+As I thought the time was now come for pursuing the theme I had at
+heart, I said, turning on Mr. Jaggers:--
+
+“I did ask something of Miss Havisham, however, sir. I asked her to give
+me some information relative to her adopted daughter, and she gave me
+all she possessed.”
+
+“Did she?” said Mr. Jaggers, bending forward to look at his boots and
+then straightening himself. “Hah! I don’t think I should have done so,
+if I had been Miss Havisham. But she ought to know her own business
+best.”
+
+“I know more of the history of Miss Havisham’s adopted child than Miss
+Havisham herself does, sir. I know her mother.”
+
+Mr. Jaggers looked at me inquiringly, and repeated “Mother?”
+
+“I have seen her mother within these three days.”
+
+“Yes?” said Mr. Jaggers.
+
+“And so have you, sir. And you have seen her still more recently.”
+
+“Yes?” said Mr. Jaggers.
+
+“Perhaps I know more of Estella’s history than even you do,” said I. “I
+know her father too.”
+
+A certain stop that Mr. Jaggers came to in his manner--he was too
+self-possessed to change his manner, but he could not help its being
+brought to an indefinably attentive stop--assured me that he did not
+know who her father was. This I had strongly suspected from Provis’s
+account (as Herbert had repeated it) of his having kept himself dark;
+which I pieced on to the fact that he himself was not Mr. Jaggers’s
+client until some four years later, and when he could have no reason for
+claiming his identity. But, I could not be sure of this unconsciousness
+on Mr. Jaggers’s part before, though I was quite sure of it now.
+
+“So! You know the young lady’s father, Pip?” said Mr. Jaggers.
+
+“Yes,” I replied, “and his name is Provis--from New South Wales.”
+
+Even Mr. Jaggers started when I said those words. It was the slightest
+start that could escape a man, the most carefully repressed and the
+sooner checked, but he did start, though he made it a part of the
+action of taking out his pocket-handkerchief. How Wemmick received the
+announcement I am unable to say; for I was afraid to look at him just
+then, lest Mr. Jaggers’s sharpness should detect that there had been
+some communication unknown to him between us.
+
+“And on what evidence, Pip,” asked Mr. Jaggers, very coolly, as he
+paused with his handkerchief half way to his nose, “does Provis make
+this claim?”
+
+“He does not make it,” said I, “and has never made it, and has no
+knowledge or belief that his daughter is in existence.”
+
+For once, the powerful pocket-handkerchief failed. My reply was so
+unexpected, that Mr. Jaggers put the handkerchief back into his pocket
+without completing the usual performance, folded his arms, and looked
+with stern attention at me, though with an immovable face.
+
+Then I told him all I knew, and how I knew it; with the one reservation
+that I left him to infer that I knew from Miss Havisham what I in fact
+knew from Wemmick. I was very careful indeed as to that. Nor did I look
+towards Wemmick until I had finished all I had to tell, and had been for
+some time silently meeting Mr. Jaggers’s look. When I did at last turn
+my eyes in Wemmick’s direction, I found that he had unposted his pen,
+and was intent upon the table before him.
+
+“Hah!” said Mr. Jaggers at last, as he moved towards the papers on the
+table. “What item was it you were at, Wemmick, when Mr. Pip came in?”
+
+But I could not submit to be thrown off in that way, and I made a
+passionate, almost an indignant appeal, to him to be more frank and
+manly with me. I reminded him of the false hopes into which I had
+lapsed, the length of time they had lasted, and the discovery I had
+made: and I hinted at the danger that weighed upon my spirits. I
+represented myself as being surely worthy of some little confidence from
+him, in return for the confidence I had just now imparted. I said that
+I did not blame him, or suspect him, or mistrust him, but I wanted
+assurance of the truth from him. And if he asked me why I wanted it,
+and why I thought I had any right to it, I would tell him, little as he
+cared for such poor dreams, that I had loved Estella dearly and long,
+and that although I had lost her, and must live a bereaved life,
+whatever concerned her was still nearer and dearer to me than anything
+else in the world. And seeing that Mr. Jaggers stood quite still and
+silent, and apparently quite obdurate, under this appeal, I turned to
+Wemmick, and said, “Wemmick, I know you to be a man with a gentle
+heart. I have seen your pleasant home, and your old father, and all the
+innocent, cheerful playful ways with which you refresh your business
+life. And I entreat you to say a word for me to Mr. Jaggers, and to
+represent to him that, all circumstances considered, he ought to be more
+open with me!”
+
+I have never seen two men look more oddly at one another than Mr.
+Jaggers and Wemmick did after this apostrophe. At first, a misgiving
+crossed me that Wemmick would be instantly dismissed from his
+employment; but it melted as I saw Mr. Jaggers relax into something like
+a smile, and Wemmick become bolder.
+
+“What’s all this?” said Mr. Jaggers. “You with an old father, and you
+with pleasant and playful ways?”
+
+“Well!” returned Wemmick. “If I don’t bring ‘em here, what does it
+matter?”
+
+“Pip,” said Mr. Jaggers, laying his hand upon my arm, and smiling
+openly, “this man must be the most cunning impostor in all London.”
+
+“Not a bit of it,” returned Wemmick, growing bolder and bolder. “I think
+you’re another.”
+
+Again they exchanged their former odd looks, each apparently still
+distrustful that the other was taking him in.
+
+“You with a pleasant home?” said Mr. Jaggers.
+
+“Since it don’t interfere with business,” returned Wemmick, “let it be
+so. Now, I look at you, sir, I shouldn’t wonder if you might be planning
+and contriving to have a pleasant home of your own one of these days,
+when you’re tired of all this work.”
+
+Mr. Jaggers nodded his head retrospectively two or three times, and
+actually drew a sigh. “Pip,” said he, “we won’t talk about ‘poor
+dreams;’ you know more about such things than I, having much fresher
+experience of that kind. But now about this other matter. I’ll put a
+case to you. Mind! I admit nothing.”
+
+He waited for me to declare that I quite understood that he expressly
+said that he admitted nothing.
+
+“Now, Pip,” said Mr. Jaggers, “put this case. Put the case that a
+woman, under such circumstances as you have mentioned, held her child
+concealed, and was obliged to communicate the fact to her legal adviser,
+on his representing to her that he must know, with an eye to the
+latitude of his defence, how the fact stood about that child. Put the
+case that, at the same time he held a trust to find a child for an
+eccentric rich lady to adopt and bring up.”
+
+“I follow you, sir.”
+
+“Put the case that he lived in an atmosphere of evil, and that all he
+saw of children was their being generated in great numbers for certain
+destruction. Put the case that he often saw children solemnly tried at
+a criminal bar, where they were held up to be seen; put the case that
+he habitually knew of their being imprisoned, whipped, transported,
+neglected, cast out, qualified in all ways for the hangman, and growing
+up to be hanged. Put the case that pretty nigh all the children he saw
+in his daily business life he had reason to look upon as so much
+spawn, to develop into the fish that were to come to his net,--to be
+prosecuted, defended, forsworn, made orphans, bedevilled somehow.”
+
+“I follow you, sir.”
+
+“Put the case, Pip, that here was one pretty little child out of the
+heap who could be saved; whom the father believed dead, and dared make
+no stir about; as to whom, over the mother, the legal adviser had this
+power: “I know what you did, and how you did it. You came so and so, you
+did such and such things to divert suspicion. I have tracked you through
+it all, and I tell it you all. Part with the child, unless it should
+be necessary to produce it to clear you, and then it shall be produced.
+Give the child into my hands, and I will do my best to bring you off. If
+you are saved, your child is saved too; if you are lost, your child is
+still saved.” Put the case that this was done, and that the woman was
+cleared.”
+
+“I understand you perfectly.”
+
+“But that I make no admissions?”
+
+“That you make no admissions.” And Wemmick repeated, “No admissions.”
+
+“Put the case, Pip, that passion and the terror of death had a little
+shaken the woman’s intellects, and that when she was set at liberty,
+she was scared out of the ways of the world, and went to him to be
+sheltered. Put the case that he took her in, and that he kept down the
+old, wild, violent nature whenever he saw an inkling of its breaking
+out, by asserting his power over her in the old way. Do you comprehend
+the imaginary case?”
+
+“Quite.”
+
+“Put the case that the child grew up, and was married for money. That
+the mother was still living. That the father was still living. That the
+mother and father, unknown to one another, were dwelling within so many
+miles, furlongs, yards if you like, of one another. That the secret was
+still a secret, except that you had got wind of it. Put that last case
+to yourself very carefully.”
+
+“I do.”
+
+“I ask Wemmick to put it to himself very carefully.”
+
+And Wemmick said, “I do.”
+
+“For whose sake would you reveal the secret? For the father’s? I think
+he would not be much the better for the mother. For the mother’s? I
+think if she had done such a deed she would be safer where she was.
+For the daughter’s? I think it would hardly serve her to establish her
+parentage for the information of her husband, and to drag her back to
+disgrace, after an escape of twenty years, pretty secure to last for
+life. But add the case that you had loved her, Pip, and had made her the
+subject of those ‘poor dreams’ which have, at one time or another, been
+in the heads of more men than you think likely, then I tell you that you
+had better--and would much sooner when you had thought well of it--chop
+off that bandaged left hand of yours with your bandaged right hand, and
+then pass the chopper on to Wemmick there, to cut that off too.”
+
+I looked at Wemmick, whose face was very grave. He gravely touched his
+lips with his forefinger. I did the same. Mr. Jaggers did the same.
+“Now, Wemmick,” said the latter then, resuming his usual manner, “what
+item was it you were at when Mr. Pip came in?”
+
+Standing by for a little, while they were at work, I observed that the
+odd looks they had cast at one another were repeated several times: with
+this difference now, that each of them seemed suspicious, not to say
+conscious, of having shown himself in a weak and unprofessional light to
+the other. For this reason, I suppose, they were now inflexible with one
+another; Mr. Jaggers being highly dictatorial, and Wemmick obstinately
+justifying himself whenever there was the smallest point in abeyance for
+a moment. I had never seen them on such ill terms; for generally they
+got on very well indeed together.
+
+But they were both happily relieved by the opportune appearance of Mike,
+the client with the fur cap and the habit of wiping his nose on his
+sleeve, whom I had seen on the very first day of my appearance within
+those walls. This individual, who, either in his own person or in that
+of some member of his family, seemed to be always in trouble (which in
+that place meant Newgate), called to announce that his eldest daughter
+was taken up on suspicion of shoplifting. As he imparted this melancholy
+circumstance to Wemmick, Mr. Jaggers standing magisterially before the
+fire and taking no share in the proceedings, Mike’s eye happened to
+twinkle with a tear.
+
+“What are you about?” demanded Wemmick, with the utmost indignation.
+“What do you come snivelling here for?”
+
+“I didn’t go to do it, Mr. Wemmick.”
+
+“You did,” said Wemmick. “How dare you? You’re not in a fit state to
+come here, if you can’t come here without spluttering like a bad pen.
+What do you mean by it?”
+
+“A man can’t help his feelings, Mr. Wemmick,” pleaded Mike.
+
+“His what?” demanded Wemmick, quite savagely. “Say that again!”
+
+“Now look here my man,” said Mr. Jaggers, advancing a step, and pointing
+to the door. “Get out of this office. I’ll have no feelings here. Get
+out.”
+
+“It serves you right,” said Wemmick, “Get out.”
+
+So, the unfortunate Mike very humbly withdrew, and Mr. Jaggers and
+Wemmick appeared to have re-established their good understanding, and
+went to work again with an air of refreshment upon them as if they had
+just had lunch.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter LII
+
+
+From Little Britain I went, with my check in my pocket, to Miss
+Skiffins’s brother, the accountant; and Miss Skiffins’s brother, the
+accountant, going straight to Clarriker’s and bringing Clarriker to me,
+I had the great satisfaction of concluding that arrangement. It was the
+only good thing I had done, and the only completed thing I had done,
+since I was first apprised of my great expectations.
+
+Clarriker informing me on that occasion that the affairs of the House
+were steadily progressing, that he would now be able to establish a
+small branch-house in the East which was much wanted for the extension
+of the business, and that Herbert in his new partnership capacity would
+go out and take charge of it, I found that I must have prepared for
+a separation from my friend, even though my own affairs had been more
+settled. And now, indeed, I felt as if my last anchor were loosening its
+hold, and I should soon be driving with the winds and waves.
+
+But there was recompense in the joy with which Herbert would come home
+of a night and tell me of these changes, little imagining that he told
+me no news, and would sketch airy pictures of himself conducting Clara
+Barley to the land of the Arabian Nights, and of me going out to join
+them (with a caravan of camels, I believe), and of our all going up the
+Nile and seeing wonders. Without being sanguine as to my own part in
+those bright plans, I felt that Herbert’s way was clearing fast, and
+that old Bill Barley had but to stick to his pepper and rum, and his
+daughter would soon be happily provided for.
+
+We had now got into the month of March. My left arm, though it presented
+no bad symptoms, took, in the natural course, so long to heal that I
+was still unable to get a coat on. My right arm was tolerably restored;
+disfigured, but fairly serviceable.
+
+On a Monday morning, when Herbert and I were at breakfast, I received
+the following letter from Wemmick by the post.
+
+“Walworth. Burn this as soon as read. Early in the week, or say
+Wednesday, you might do what you know of, if you felt disposed to try
+it. Now burn.”
+
+When I had shown this to Herbert and had put it in the fire--but not
+before we had both got it by heart--we considered what to do. For, of
+course my being disabled could now be no longer kept out of view.
+
+“I have thought it over again and again,” said Herbert, “and I think I
+know a better course than taking a Thames waterman. Take Startop. A good
+fellow, a skilled hand, fond of us, and enthusiastic and honorable.”
+
+I had thought of him more than once.
+
+“But how much would you tell him, Herbert?”
+
+“It is necessary to tell him very little. Let him suppose it a mere
+freak, but a secret one, until the morning comes: then let him know that
+there is urgent reason for your getting Provis aboard and away. You go
+with him?”
+
+“No doubt.”
+
+“Where?”
+
+It had seemed to me, in the many anxious considerations I had given the
+point, almost indifferent what port we made for,--Hamburg, Rotterdam,
+Antwerp,--the place signified little, so that he was out of England. Any
+foreign steamer that fell in our way and would take us up would do.
+I had always proposed to myself to get him well down the river in the
+boat; certainly well beyond Gravesend, which was a critical place for
+search or inquiry if suspicion were afoot. As foreign steamers would
+leave London at about the time of high-water, our plan would be to get
+down the river by a previous ebb-tide, and lie by in some quiet spot
+until we could pull off to one. The time when one would be due where we
+lay, wherever that might be, could be calculated pretty nearly, if we
+made inquiries beforehand.
+
+Herbert assented to all this, and we went out immediately after
+breakfast to pursue our investigations. We found that a steamer for
+Hamburg was likely to suit our purpose best, and we directed our
+thoughts chiefly to that vessel. But we noted down what other foreign
+steamers would leave London with the same tide, and we satisfied
+ourselves that we knew the build and color of each. We then separated
+for a few hours: I, to get at once such passports as were necessary;
+Herbert, to see Startop at his lodgings. We both did what we had to do
+without any hindrance, and when we met again at one o’clock reported
+it done. I, for my part, was prepared with passports; Herbert had seen
+Startop, and he was more than ready to join.
+
+Those two should pull a pair of oars, we settled, and I would steer; our
+charge would be sitter, and keep quiet; as speed was not our object, we
+should make way enough. We arranged that Herbert should not come home to
+dinner before going to Mill Pond Bank that evening; that he should
+not go there at all to-morrow evening, Tuesday; that he should prepare
+Provis to come down to some stairs hard by the house, on Wednesday, when
+he saw us approach, and not sooner; that all the arrangements with
+him should be concluded that Monday night; and that he should be
+communicated with no more in any way, until we took him on board.
+
+These precautions well understood by both of us, I went home.
+
+On opening the outer door of our chambers with my key, I found a letter
+in the box, directed to me; a very dirty letter, though not ill-written.
+It had been delivered by hand (of course, since I left home), and its
+contents were these:--
+
+“If you are not afraid to come to the old marshes to-night or to-morrow
+night at nine, and to come to the little sluice-house by the limekiln,
+you had better come. If you want information regarding your uncle
+Provis, you had much better come and tell no one, and lose no time. You
+must come alone. Bring this with you.”
+
+I had had load enough upon my mind before the receipt of this strange
+letter. What to do now, I could not tell. And the worst was, that I must
+decide quickly, or I should miss the afternoon coach, which would take
+me down in time for to-night. To-morrow night I could not think of
+going, for it would be too close upon the time of the flight. And again,
+for anything I knew, the proffered information might have some important
+bearing on the flight itself.
+
+If I had had ample time for consideration, I believe I should still have
+gone. Having hardly any time for consideration,--my watch showing me
+that the coach started within half an hour,--I resolved to go. I should
+certainly not have gone, but for the reference to my Uncle Provis. That,
+coming on Wemmick’s letter and the morning’s busy preparation, turned
+the scale.
+
+It is so difficult to become clearly possessed of the contents of almost
+any letter, in a violent hurry, that I had to read this mysterious
+epistle again twice, before its injunction to me to be secret got
+mechanically into my mind. Yielding to it in the same mechanical kind of
+way, I left a note in pencil for Herbert, telling him that as I should
+be so soon going away, I knew not for how long, I had decided to hurry
+down and back, to ascertain for myself how Miss Havisham was faring.
+I had then barely time to get my great-coat, lock up the chambers,
+and make for the coach-office by the short by-ways. If I had taken a
+hackney-chariot and gone by the streets, I should have missed my aim;
+going as I did, I caught the coach just as it came out of the yard. I
+was the only inside passenger, jolting away knee-deep in straw, when I
+came to myself.
+
+For I really had not been myself since the receipt of the letter; it had
+so bewildered me, ensuing on the hurry of the morning. The morning hurry
+and flutter had been great; for, long and anxiously as I had waited for
+Wemmick, his hint had come like a surprise at last. And now I began
+to wonder at myself for being in the coach, and to doubt whether I had
+sufficient reason for being there, and to consider whether I should
+get out presently and go back, and to argue against ever heeding an
+anonymous communication, and, in short, to pass through all those phases
+of contradiction and indecision to which I suppose very few hurried
+people are strangers. Still, the reference to Provis by name mastered
+everything. I reasoned as I had reasoned already without knowing it,--if
+that be reasoning,--in case any harm should befall him through my not
+going, how could I ever forgive myself!
+
+It was dark before we got down, and the journey seemed long and dreary
+to me, who could see little of it inside, and who could not go outside
+in my disabled state. Avoiding the Blue Boar, I put up at an inn of
+minor reputation down the town, and ordered some dinner. While it was
+preparing, I went to Satis House and inquired for Miss Havisham; she was
+still very ill, though considered something better.
+
+My inn had once been a part of an ancient ecclesiastical house, and I
+dined in a little octagonal common-room, like a font. As I was not able
+to cut my dinner, the old landlord with a shining bald head did it for
+me. This bringing us into conversation, he was so good as to entertain
+me with my own story,--of course with the popular feature that
+Pumblechook was my earliest benefactor and the founder of my fortunes.
+
+“Do you know the young man?” said I.
+
+“Know him!” repeated the landlord. “Ever since he was--no height at
+all.”
+
+“Does he ever come back to this neighborhood?”
+
+“Ay, he comes back,” said the landlord, “to his great friends, now and
+again, and gives the cold shoulder to the man that made him.”
+
+“What man is that?”
+
+“Him that I speak of,” said the landlord. “Mr. Pumblechook.”
+
+“Is he ungrateful to no one else?”
+
+“No doubt he would be, if he could,” returned the landlord, “but he
+can’t. And why? Because Pumblechook done everything for him.”
+
+“Does Pumblechook say so?”
+
+“Say so!” replied the landlord. “He han’t no call to say so.”
+
+“But does he say so?”
+
+“It would turn a man’s blood to white wine winegar to hear him tell of
+it, sir,” said the landlord.
+
+I thought, “Yet Joe, dear Joe, you never tell of it. Long-suffering and
+loving Joe, you never complain. Nor you, sweet-tempered Biddy!”
+
+“Your appetite’s been touched like by your accident,” said the landlord,
+glancing at the bandaged arm under my coat. “Try a tenderer bit.”
+
+“No, thank you,” I replied, turning from the table to brood over the
+fire. “I can eat no more. Please take it away.”
+
+I had never been struck at so keenly, for my thanklessness to Joe, as
+through the brazen impostor Pumblechook. The falser he, the truer Joe;
+the meaner he, the nobler Joe.
+
+My heart was deeply and most deservedly humbled as I mused over the fire
+for an hour or more. The striking of the clock aroused me, but not from
+my dejection or remorse, and I got up and had my coat fastened round
+my neck, and went out. I had previously sought in my pockets for the
+letter, that I might refer to it again; but I could not find it, and
+was uneasy to think that it must have been dropped in the straw of
+the coach. I knew very well, however, that the appointed place was the
+little sluice-house by the limekiln on the marshes, and the hour nine.
+Towards the marshes I now went straight, having no time to spare.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter LIII
+
+It was a dark night, though the full moon rose as I left the enclosed
+lands, and passed out upon the marshes. Beyond their dark line there was
+a ribbon of clear sky, hardly broad enough to hold the red large moon.
+In a few minutes she had ascended out of that clear field, in among the
+piled mountains of cloud.
+
+There was a melancholy wind, and the marshes were very dismal. A
+stranger would have found them insupportable, and even to me they were
+so oppressive that I hesitated, half inclined to go back. But I knew
+them well, and could have found my way on a far darker night, and had
+no excuse for returning, being there. So, having come there against my
+inclination, I went on against it.
+
+The direction that I took was not that in which my old home lay, nor
+that in which we had pursued the convicts. My back was turned towards
+the distant Hulks as I walked on, and, though I could see the old lights
+away on the spits of sand, I saw them over my shoulder. I knew the
+limekiln as well as I knew the old Battery, but they were miles apart;
+so that, if a light had been burning at each point that night, there
+would have been a long strip of the blank horizon between the two bright
+specks.
+
+At first, I had to shut some gates after me, and now and then to stand
+still while the cattle that were lying in the banked-up pathway arose
+and blundered down among the grass and reeds. But after a little while I
+seemed to have the whole flats to myself.
+
+It was another half-hour before I drew near to the kiln. The lime was
+burning with a sluggish stifling smell, but the fires were made up and
+left, and no workmen were visible. Hard by was a small stone-quarry. It
+lay directly in my way, and had been worked that day, as I saw by the
+tools and barrows that were lying about.
+
+Coming up again to the marsh level out of this excavation,--for the rude
+path lay through it,--I saw a light in the old sluice-house. I quickened
+my pace, and knocked at the door with my hand. Waiting for some reply,
+I looked about me, noticing how the sluice was abandoned and broken, and
+how the house--of wood with a tiled roof--would not be proof against the
+weather much longer, if it were so even now, and how the mud and ooze
+were coated with lime, and how the choking vapor of the kiln crept in a
+ghostly way towards me. Still there was no answer, and I knocked again.
+No answer still, and I tried the latch.
+
+It rose under my hand, and the door yielded. Looking in, I saw a lighted
+candle on a table, a bench, and a mattress on a truckle bedstead. As
+there was a loft above, I called, “Is there any one here?” but no voice
+answered. Then I looked at my watch, and, finding that it was past nine,
+called again, “Is there any one here?” There being still no answer, I
+went out at the door, irresolute what to do.
+
+It was beginning to rain fast. Seeing nothing save what I had seen
+already, I turned back into the house, and stood just within the shelter
+of the doorway, looking out into the night. While I was considering that
+some one must have been there lately and must soon be coming back, or
+the candle would not be burning, it came into my head to look if the
+wick were long. I turned round to do so, and had taken up the candle in
+my hand, when it was extinguished by some violent shock; and the next
+thing I comprehended was, that I had been caught in a strong running
+noose, thrown over my head from behind.
+
+“Now,” said a suppressed voice with an oath, “I’ve got you!”
+
+“What is this?” I cried, struggling. “Who is it? Help, help, help!”
+
+Not only were my arms pulled close to my sides, but the pressure on
+my bad arm caused me exquisite pain. Sometimes, a strong man’s hand,
+sometimes a strong man’s breast, was set against my mouth to deaden
+my cries, and with a hot breath always close to me, I struggled
+ineffectually in the dark, while I was fastened tight to the wall. “And
+now,” said the suppressed voice with another oath, “call out again, and
+I’ll make short work of you!”
+
+Faint and sick with the pain of my injured arm, bewildered by the
+surprise, and yet conscious how easily this threat could be put in
+execution, I desisted, and tried to ease my arm were it ever so little.
+But, it was bound too tight for that. I felt as if, having been burnt
+before, it were now being boiled.
+
+The sudden exclusion of the night, and the substitution of black
+darkness in its place, warned me that the man had closed a shutter.
+After groping about for a little, he found the flint and steel he
+wanted, and began to strike a light. I strained my sight upon the sparks
+that fell among the tinder, and upon which he breathed and breathed,
+match in hand, but I could only see his lips, and the blue point of
+the match; even those but fitfully. The tinder was damp,--no wonder
+there,--and one after another the sparks died out.
+
+The man was in no hurry, and struck again with the flint and steel. As
+the sparks fell thick and bright about him, I could see his hands, and
+touches of his face, and could make out that he was seated and bending
+over the table; but nothing more. Presently I saw his blue lips again,
+breathing on the tinder, and then a flare of light flashed up, and
+showed me Orlick.
+
+Whom I had looked for, I don’t know. I had not looked for him. Seeing
+him, I felt that I was in a dangerous strait indeed, and I kept my eyes
+upon him.
+
+He lighted the candle from the flaring match with great deliberation,
+and dropped the match, and trod it out. Then he put the candle away from
+him on the table, so that he could see me, and sat with his arms folded
+on the table and looked at me. I made out that I was fastened to a stout
+perpendicular ladder a few inches from the wall,--a fixture there,--the
+means of ascent to the loft above.
+
+“Now,” said he, when we had surveyed one another for some time, “I’ve
+got you.”
+
+“Unbind me. Let me go!”
+
+“Ah!” he returned, “I’ll let you go. I’ll let you go to the moon, I’ll
+let you go to the stars. All in good time.”
+
+“Why have you lured me here?”
+
+“Don’t you know?” said he, with a deadly look.
+
+“Why have you set upon me in the dark?”
+
+“Because I mean to do it all myself. One keeps a secret better than two.
+O you enemy, you enemy!”
+
+His enjoyment of the spectacle I furnished, as he sat with his arms
+folded on the table, shaking his head at me and hugging himself, had a
+malignity in it that made me tremble. As I watched him in silence,
+he put his hand into the corner at his side, and took up a gun with a
+brass-bound stock.
+
+“Do you know this?” said he, making as if he would take aim at me. “Do
+you know where you saw it afore? Speak, wolf!”
+
+“Yes,” I answered.
+
+“You cost me that place. You did. Speak!”
+
+“What else could I do?”
+
+“You did that, and that would be enough, without more. How dared you to
+come betwixt me and a young woman I liked?”
+
+“When did I?”
+
+“When didn’t you? It was you as always give Old Orlick a bad name to
+her.”
+
+“You gave it to yourself; you gained it for yourself. I could have done
+you no harm, if you had done yourself none.”
+
+“You’re a liar. And you’ll take any pains, and spend any money, to drive
+me out of this country, will you?” said he, repeating my words to Biddy
+in the last interview I had with her. “Now, I’ll tell you a piece of
+information. It was never so well worth your while to get me out of this
+country as it is to-night. Ah! If it was all your money twenty times
+told, to the last brass farden!” As he shook his heavy hand at me, with
+his mouth snarling like a tiger’s, I felt that it was true.
+
+“What are you going to do to me?”
+
+“I’m a going,” said he, bringing his fist down upon the table with a
+heavy blow, and rising as the blow fell to give it greater force,--“I’m
+a going to have your life!”
+
+He leaned forward staring at me, slowly unclenched his hand and drew it
+across his mouth as if his mouth watered for me, and sat down again.
+
+“You was always in Old Orlick’s way since ever you was a child. You goes
+out of his way this present night. He’ll have no more on you. You’re
+dead.”
+
+I felt that I had come to the brink of my grave. For a moment I looked
+wildly round my trap for any chance of escape; but there was none.
+
+“More than that,” said he, folding his arms on the table again, “I won’t
+have a rag of you, I won’t have a bone of you, left on earth. I’ll put
+your body in the kiln,--I’d carry two such to it, on my Shoulders,--and,
+let people suppose what they may of you, they shall never know nothing.”
+
+My mind, with inconceivable rapidity followed out all the consequences
+of such a death. Estella’s father would believe I had deserted him,
+would be taken, would die accusing me; even Herbert would doubt me,
+when he compared the letter I had left for him with the fact that I had
+called at Miss Havisham’s gate for only a moment; Joe and Biddy would
+never know how sorry I had been that night, none would ever know what
+I had suffered, how true I had meant to be, what an agony I had passed
+through. The death close before me was terrible, but far more terrible
+than death was the dread of being misremembered after death. And
+so quick were my thoughts, that I saw myself despised by unborn
+generations,--Estella’s children, and their children,--while the
+wretch’s words were yet on his lips.
+
+“Now, wolf,” said he, “afore I kill you like any other beast,--which is
+wot I mean to do and wot I have tied you up for,--I’ll have a good look
+at you and a good goad at you. O you enemy!”
+
+It had passed through my thoughts to cry out for help again; though
+few could know better than I, the solitary nature of the spot, and the
+hopelessness of aid. But as he sat gloating over me, I was supported by
+a scornful detestation of him that sealed my lips. Above all things, I
+resolved that I would not entreat him, and that I would die making some
+last poor resistance to him. Softened as my thoughts of all the rest of
+men were in that dire extremity; humbly beseeching pardon, as I did, of
+Heaven; melted at heart, as I was, by the thought that I had taken no
+farewell, and never now could take farewell of those who were dear to
+me, or could explain myself to them, or ask for their compassion on my
+miserable errors,--still, if I could have killed him, even in dying, I
+would have done it.
+
+He had been drinking, and his eyes were red and bloodshot. Around his
+neck was slung a tin bottle, as I had often seen his meat and drink
+slung about him in other days. He brought the bottle to his lips, and
+took a fiery drink from it; and I smelt the strong spirits that I saw
+flash into his face.
+
+“Wolf!” said he, folding his arms again, “Old Orlick’s a going to tell
+you somethink. It was you as did for your shrew sister.”
+
+Again my mind, with its former inconceivable rapidity, had exhausted the
+whole subject of the attack upon my sister, her illness, and her death,
+before his slow and hesitating speech had formed these words.
+
+“It was you, villain,” said I.
+
+“I tell you it was your doing,--I tell you it was done through you,” he
+retorted, catching up the gun, and making a blow with the stock at the
+vacant air between us. “I come upon her from behind, as I come upon you
+to-night. I giv’ it her! I left her for dead, and if there had been a
+limekiln as nigh her as there is now nigh you, she shouldn’t have come
+to life again. But it warn’t Old Orlick as did it; it was you. You was
+favored, and he was bullied and beat. Old Orlick bullied and beat, eh?
+Now you pays for it. You done it; now you pays for it.”
+
+He drank again, and became more ferocious. I saw by his tilting of
+the bottle that there was no great quantity left in it. I distinctly
+understood that he was working himself up with its contents to make an
+end of me. I knew that every drop it held was a drop of my life. I knew
+that when I was changed into a part of the vapor that had crept towards
+me but a little while before, like my own warning ghost, he would do
+as he had done in my sister’s case,--make all haste to the town, and
+be seen slouching about there drinking at the alehouses. My rapid mind
+pursued him to the town, made a picture of the street with him in it,
+and contrasted its lights and life with the lonely marsh and the white
+vapor creeping over it, into which I should have dissolved.
+
+It was not only that I could have summed up years and years and years
+while he said a dozen words, but that what he did say presented pictures
+to me, and not mere words. In the excited and exalted state of my brain,
+I could not think of a place without seeing it, or of persons without
+seeing them. It is impossible to overstate the vividness of these
+images, and yet I was so intent, all the time, upon him himself,--who
+would not be intent on the tiger crouching to spring!--that I knew of
+the slightest action of his fingers.
+
+When he had drunk this second time, he rose from the bench on which
+he sat, and pushed the table aside. Then, he took up the candle, and,
+shading it with his murderous hand so as to throw its light on me, stood
+before me, looking at me and enjoying the sight.
+
+“Wolf, I’ll tell you something more. It was Old Orlick as you tumbled
+over on your stairs that night.”
+
+I saw the staircase with its extinguished lamps. I saw the shadows of
+the heavy stair-rails, thrown by the watchman’s lantern on the wall.
+I saw the rooms that I was never to see again; here, a door half open;
+there, a door closed; all the articles of furniture around.
+
+“And why was Old Orlick there? I’ll tell you something more, wolf.
+You and her have pretty well hunted me out of this country, so far as
+getting a easy living in it goes, and I’ve took up with new companions,
+and new masters. Some of ‘em writes my letters when I wants ‘em
+wrote,--do you mind?--writes my letters, wolf! They writes fifty hands;
+they’re not like sneaking you, as writes but one. I’ve had a firm mind
+and a firm will to have your life, since you was down here at your
+sister’s burying. I han’t seen a way to get you safe, and I’ve looked
+arter you to know your ins and outs. For, says Old Orlick to himself,
+‘Somehow or another I’ll have him!’ What! When I looks for you, I finds
+your uncle Provis, eh?”
+
+Mill Pond Bank, and Chinks’s Basin, and the Old Green Copper Rope-walk,
+all so clear and plain! Provis in his rooms, the signal whose use was
+over, pretty Clara, the good motherly woman, old Bill Barley on his
+back, all drifting by, as on the swift stream of my life fast running
+out to sea!
+
+“You with a uncle too! Why, I know’d you at Gargery’s when you was so
+small a wolf that I could have took your weazen betwixt this finger and
+thumb and chucked you away dead (as I’d thoughts o’ doing, odd times,
+when I see you loitering amongst the pollards on a Sunday), and you
+hadn’t found no uncles then. No, not you! But when Old Orlick come for
+to hear that your uncle Provis had most like wore the leg-iron wot Old
+Orlick had picked up, filed asunder, on these meshes ever so many year
+ago, and wot he kep by him till he dropped your sister with it, like
+a bullock, as he means to drop you--hey?--when he come for to hear
+that--hey?”
+
+In his savage taunting, he flared the candle so close at me that I
+turned my face aside to save it from the flame.
+
+“Ah!” he cried, laughing, after doing it again, “the burnt child dreads
+the fire! Old Orlick knowed you was burnt, Old Orlick knowed you was
+smuggling your uncle Provis away, Old Orlick’s a match for you and
+know’d you’d come to-night! Now I’ll tell you something more, wolf, and
+this ends it. There’s them that’s as good a match for your uncle Provis
+as Old Orlick has been for you. Let him ‘ware them, when he’s lost his
+nevvy! Let him ‘ware them, when no man can’t find a rag of his dear
+relation’s clothes, nor yet a bone of his body. There’s them that can’t
+and that won’t have Magwitch,--yes, I know the name!--alive in the same
+land with them, and that’s had such sure information of him when he
+was alive in another land, as that he couldn’t and shouldn’t leave it
+unbeknown and put them in danger. P’raps it’s them that writes fifty
+hands, and that’s not like sneaking you as writes but one. ‘Ware
+Compeyson, Magwitch, and the gallows!”
+
+He flared the candle at me again, smoking my face and hair, and for an
+instant blinding me, and turned his powerful back as he replaced the
+light on the table. I had thought a prayer, and had been with Joe and
+Biddy and Herbert, before he turned towards me again.
+
+There was a clear space of a few feet between the table and the opposite
+wall. Within this space, he now slouched backwards and forwards. His
+great strength seemed to sit stronger upon him than ever before, as he
+did this with his hands hanging loose and heavy at his sides, and with
+his eyes scowling at me. I had no grain of hope left. Wild as my inward
+hurry was, and wonderful the force of the pictures that rushed by me
+instead of thoughts, I could yet clearly understand that, unless he had
+resolved that I was within a few moments of surely perishing out of all
+human knowledge, he would never have told me what he had told.
+
+Of a sudden, he stopped, took the cork out of his bottle, and tossed
+it away. Light as it was, I heard it fall like a plummet. He swallowed
+slowly, tilting up the bottle by little and little, and now he looked at
+me no more. The last few drops of liquor he poured into the palm of his
+hand, and licked up. Then, with a sudden hurry of violence and swearing
+horribly, he threw the bottle from him, and stooped; and I saw in his
+hand a stone-hammer with a long heavy handle.
+
+The resolution I had made did not desert me, for, without uttering
+one vain word of appeal to him, I shouted out with all my might, and
+struggled with all my might. It was only my head and my legs that I
+could move, but to that extent I struggled with all the force, until
+then unknown, that was within me. In the same instant I heard responsive
+shouts, saw figures and a gleam of light dash in at the door, heard
+voices and tumult, and saw Orlick emerge from a struggle of men, as if
+it were tumbling water, clear the table at a leap, and fly out into the
+night.
+
+After a blank, I found that I was lying unbound, on the floor, in the
+same place, with my head on some one’s knee. My eyes were fixed on the
+ladder against the wall, when I came to myself,--had opened on it before
+my mind saw it,--and thus as I recovered consciousness, I knew that I
+was in the place where I had lost it.
+
+Too indifferent at first, even to look round and ascertain who supported
+me, I was lying looking at the ladder, when there came between me and it
+a face. The face of Trabb’s boy!
+
+“I think he’s all right!” said Trabb’s boy, in a sober voice; “but ain’t
+he just pale though!”
+
+At these words, the face of him who supported me looked over into mine,
+and I saw my supporter to be--
+
+“Herbert! Great Heaven!”
+
+“Softly,” said Herbert. “Gently, Handel. Don’t be too eager.”
+
+“And our old comrade, Startop!” I cried, as he too bent over me.
+
+“Remember what he is going to assist us in,” said Herbert, “and be
+calm.”
+
+The allusion made me spring up; though I dropped again from the pain
+in my arm. “The time has not gone by, Herbert, has it? What night is
+to-night? How long have I been here?” For, I had a strange and
+strong misgiving that I had been lying there a long time--a day and a
+night,--two days and nights,--more.
+
+“The time has not gone by. It is still Monday night.”
+
+“Thank God!”
+
+“And you have all to-morrow, Tuesday, to rest in,” said Herbert. “But
+you can’t help groaning, my dear Handel. What hurt have you got? Can you
+stand?”
+
+“Yes, yes,” said I, “I can walk. I have no hurt but in this throbbing
+arm.”
+
+They laid it bare, and did what they could. It was violently swollen and
+inflamed, and I could scarcely endure to have it touched. But, they tore
+up their handkerchiefs to make fresh bandages, and carefully replaced
+it in the sling, until we could get to the town and obtain some cooling
+lotion to put upon it. In a little while we had shut the door of the
+dark and empty sluice-house, and were passing through the quarry on our
+way back. Trabb’s boy--Trabb’s overgrown young man now--went before us
+with a lantern, which was the light I had seen come in at the door. But,
+the moon was a good two hours higher than when I had last seen the sky,
+and the night, though rainy, was much lighter. The white vapor of the
+kiln was passing from us as we went by, and as I had thought a prayer
+before, I thought a thanksgiving now.
+
+Entreating Herbert to tell me how he had come to my rescue,--which at
+first he had flatly refused to do, but had insisted on my remaining
+quiet,--I learnt that I had in my hurry dropped the letter, open, in our
+chambers, where he, coming home to bring with him Startop whom he had
+met in the street on his way to me, found it, very soon after I
+was gone. Its tone made him uneasy, and the more so because of the
+inconsistency between it and the hasty letter I had left for him. His
+uneasiness increasing instead of subsiding, after a quarter of an
+hour’s consideration, he set off for the coach-office with Startop, who
+volunteered his company, to make inquiry when the next coach went
+down. Finding that the afternoon coach was gone, and finding that his
+uneasiness grew into positive alarm, as obstacles came in his way, he
+resolved to follow in a post-chaise. So he and Startop arrived at the
+Blue Boar, fully expecting there to find me, or tidings of me; but,
+finding neither, went on to Miss Havisham’s, where they lost me.
+Hereupon they went back to the hotel (doubtless at about the time when
+I was hearing the popular local version of my own story) to refresh
+themselves and to get some one to guide them out upon the marshes. Among
+the loungers under the Boar’s archway happened to be Trabb’s Boy,--true
+to his ancient habit of happening to be everywhere where he had no
+business,--and Trabb’s boy had seen me passing from Miss Havisham’s in
+the direction of my dining-place. Thus Trabb’s boy became their guide,
+and with him they went out to the sluice-house, though by the town way
+to the marshes, which I had avoided. Now, as they went along, Herbert
+reflected, that I might, after all, have been brought there on some
+genuine and serviceable errand tending to Provis’s safety, and,
+bethinking himself that in that case interruption must be mischievous,
+left his guide and Startop on the edge of the quarry, and went on by
+himself, and stole round the house two or three times, endeavouring to
+ascertain whether all was right within. As he could hear nothing but
+indistinct sounds of one deep rough voice (this was while my mind was so
+busy), he even at last began to doubt whether I was there, when suddenly
+I cried out loudly, and he answered the cries, and rushed in, closely
+followed by the other two.
+
+When I told Herbert what had passed within the house, he was for our
+immediately going before a magistrate in the town, late at night as it
+was, and getting out a warrant. But, I had already considered that such
+a course, by detaining us there, or binding us to come back, might
+be fatal to Provis. There was no gainsaying this difficulty, and we
+relinquished all thoughts of pursuing Orlick at that time. For the
+present, under the circumstances, we deemed it prudent to make rather
+light of the matter to Trabb’s boy; who, I am convinced, would have been
+much affected by disappointment, if he had known that his intervention
+saved me from the limekiln. Not that Trabb’s boy was of a malignant
+nature, but that he had too much spare vivacity, and that it was in his
+constitution to want variety and excitement at anybody’s expense. When
+we parted, I presented him with two guineas (which seemed to meet his
+views), and told him that I was sorry ever to have had an ill opinion of
+him (which made no impression on him at all).
+
+Wednesday being so close upon us, we determined to go back to London
+that night, three in the post-chaise; the rather, as we should then be
+clear away before the night’s adventure began to be talked of. Herbert
+got a large bottle of stuff for my arm; and by dint of having this stuff
+dropped over it all the night through, I was just able to bear its pain
+on the journey. It was daylight when we reached the Temple, and I went
+at once to bed, and lay in bed all day.
+
+My terror, as I lay there, of falling ill, and being unfitted for
+to-morrow, was so besetting, that I wonder it did not disable me of
+itself. It would have done so, pretty surely, in conjunction with the
+mental wear and tear I had suffered, but for the unnatural strain upon
+me that to-morrow was. So anxiously looked forward to, charged with such
+consequences, its results so impenetrably hidden, though so near.
+
+No precaution could have been more obvious than our refraining
+from communication with him that day; yet this again increased my
+restlessness. I started at every footstep and every sound, believing
+that he was discovered and taken, and this was the messenger to tell
+me so. I persuaded myself that I knew he was taken; that there was
+something more upon my mind than a fear or a presentiment; that the fact
+had occurred, and I had a mysterious knowledge of it. As the days wore
+on, and no ill news came, as the day closed in and darkness fell,
+my overshadowing dread of being disabled by illness before to-morrow
+morning altogether mastered me. My burning arm throbbed, and my burning
+head throbbed, and I fancied I was beginning to wander. I counted up to
+high numbers, to make sure of myself, and repeated passages that I knew
+in prose and verse. It happened sometimes that in the mere escape of a
+fatigued mind, I dozed for some moments or forgot; then I would say to
+myself with a start, “Now it has come, and I am turning delirious!”
+
+They kept me very quiet all day, and kept my arm constantly dressed, and
+gave me cooling drinks. Whenever I fell asleep, I awoke with the notion
+I had had in the sluice-house, that a long time had elapsed and the
+opportunity to save him was gone. About midnight I got out of bed
+and went to Herbert, with the conviction that I had been asleep for
+four-and-twenty hours, and that Wednesday was past. It was the last
+self-exhausting effort of my fretfulness, for after that I slept
+soundly.
+
+Wednesday morning was dawning when I looked out of window. The winking
+lights upon the bridges were already pale, the coming sun was like a
+marsh of fire on the horizon. The river, still dark and mysterious, was
+spanned by bridges that were turning coldly gray, with here and there
+at top a warm touch from the burning in the sky. As I looked along
+the clustered roofs, with church-towers and spires shooting into the
+unusually clear air, the sun rose up, and a veil seemed to be drawn from
+the river, and millions of sparkles burst out upon its waters. From me
+too, a veil seemed to be drawn, and I felt strong and well.
+
+Herbert lay asleep in his bed, and our old fellow-student lay asleep on
+the sofa. I could not dress myself without help; but I made up the fire,
+which was still burning, and got some coffee ready for them. In good
+time they too started up strong and well, and we admitted the sharp
+morning air at the windows, and looked at the tide that was still
+flowing towards us.
+
+“When it turns at nine o’clock,” said Herbert, cheerfully, “look out for
+us, and stand ready, you over there at Mill Pond Bank!”
+
+
+
+
+Chapter LIV
+
+It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind
+blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.
+We had our pea-coats with us, and I took a bag. Of all my worldly
+possessions I took no more than the few necessaries that filled the
+bag. Where I might go, what I might do, or when I might return, were
+questions utterly unknown to me; nor did I vex my mind with them, for
+it was wholly set on Provis’s safety. I only wondered for the passing
+moment, as I stopped at the door and looked back, under what altered
+circumstances I should next see those rooms, if ever.
+
+We loitered down to the Temple stairs, and stood loitering there, as if
+we were not quite decided to go upon the water at all. Of course, I had
+taken care that the boat should be ready and everything in order. After
+a little show of indecision, which there were none to see but the two
+or three amphibious creatures belonging to our Temple stairs, we went
+on board and cast off; Herbert in the bow, I steering. It was then about
+high-water,--half-past eight.
+
+Our plan was this. The tide, beginning to run down at nine, and being
+with us until three, we intended still to creep on after it had turned,
+and row against it until dark. We should then be well in those long
+reaches below Gravesend, between Kent and Essex, where the river is
+broad and solitary, where the water-side inhabitants are very few, and
+where lone public-houses are scattered here and there, of which we could
+choose one for a resting-place. There, we meant to lie by all night.
+The steamer for Hamburg and the steamer for Rotterdam would start from
+London at about nine on Thursday morning. We should know at what time
+to expect them, according to where we were, and would hail the first;
+so that, if by any accident we were not taken abroad, we should have
+another chance. We knew the distinguishing marks of each vessel.
+
+The relief of being at last engaged in the execution of the purpose
+was so great to me that I felt it difficult to realize the condition in
+which I had been a few hours before. The crisp air, the sunlight, the
+movement on the river, and the moving river itself,--the road that ran
+with us, seeming to sympathize with us, animate us, and encourage us
+on,--freshened me with new hope. I felt mortified to be of so little use
+in the boat; but, there were few better oarsmen than my two friends, and
+they rowed with a steady stroke that was to last all day.
+
+At that time, the steam-traffic on the Thames was far below its present
+extent, and watermen’s boats were far more numerous. Of barges, sailing
+colliers, and coasting-traders, there were perhaps, as many as now;
+but of steam-ships, great and small, not a tithe or a twentieth part
+so many. Early as it was, there were plenty of scullers going here and
+there that morning, and plenty of barges dropping down with the tide;
+the navigation of the river between bridges, in an open boat, was a much
+easier and commoner matter in those days than it is in these; and we
+went ahead among many skiffs and wherries briskly.
+
+Old London Bridge was soon passed, and old Billingsgate Market with its
+oyster-boats and Dutchmen, and the White Tower and Traitor’s Gate, and
+we were in among the tiers of shipping. Here were the Leith, Aberdeen,
+and Glasgow steamers, loading and unloading goods, and looking immensely
+high out of the water as we passed alongside; here, were colliers by the
+score and score, with the coal-whippers plunging off stages on deck, as
+counterweights to measures of coal swinging up, which were then rattled
+over the side into barges; here, at her moorings was to-morrow’s steamer
+for Rotterdam, of which we took good notice; and here to-morrow’s for
+Hamburg, under whose bowsprit we crossed. And now I, sitting in the
+stern, could see, with a faster beating heart, Mill Pond Bank and Mill
+Pond stairs.
+
+“Is he there?” said Herbert.
+
+“Not yet.”
+
+“Right! He was not to come down till he saw us. Can you see his signal?”
+
+“Not well from here; but I think I see it.--Now I see him! Pull both.
+Easy, Herbert. Oars!”
+
+We touched the stairs lightly for a single moment, and he was on board,
+and we were off again. He had a boat-cloak with him, and a black canvas
+bag; and he looked as like a river-pilot as my heart could have wished.
+
+“Dear boy!” he said, putting his arm on my shoulder, as he took his
+seat. “Faithful dear boy, well done. Thankye, thankye!”
+
+Again among the tiers of shipping, in and out, avoiding rusty
+chain-cables frayed hempen hawsers and bobbing buoys, sinking for the
+moment floating broken baskets, scattering floating chips of wood
+and shaving, cleaving floating scum of coal, in and out, under the
+figure-head of the John of Sunderland making a speech to the winds (as
+is done by many Johns), and the Betsy of Yarmouth with a firm formality
+of bosom and her knobby eyes starting two inches out of her head; in
+and out, hammers going in ship-builders’ yards, saws going at timber,
+clashing engines going at things unknown, pumps going in leaky ships,
+capstans going, ships going out to sea, and unintelligible sea-creatures
+roaring curses over the bulwarks at respondent lightermen, in and
+out,--out at last upon the clearer river, where the ships’ boys might
+take their fenders in, no longer fishing in troubled waters with them
+over the side, and where the festooned sails might fly out to the wind.
+
+At the stairs where we had taken him abroad, and ever since, I had
+looked warily for any token of our being suspected. I had seen none. We
+certainly had not been, and at that time as certainly we were not either
+attended or followed by any boat. If we had been waited on by any boat,
+I should have run in to shore, and have obliged her to go on, or to
+make her purpose evident. But we held our own without any appearance of
+molestation.
+
+He had his boat-cloak on him, and looked, as I have said, a natural part
+of the scene. It was remarkable (but perhaps the wretched life he had
+led accounted for it) that he was the least anxious of any of us. He
+was not indifferent, for he told me that he hoped to live to see his
+gentleman one of the best of gentlemen in a foreign country; he was not
+disposed to be passive or resigned, as I understood it; but he had no
+notion of meeting danger half way. When it came upon him, he confronted
+it, but it must come before he troubled himself.
+
+“If you knowed, dear boy,” he said to me, “what it is to sit here
+alonger my dear boy and have my smoke, arter having been day by day
+betwixt four walls, you’d envy me. But you don’t know what it is.”
+
+“I think I know the delights of freedom,” I answered.
+
+“Ah,” said he, shaking his head gravely. “But you don’t know it equal to
+me. You must have been under lock and key, dear boy, to know it equal to
+me,--but I ain’t a going to be low.”
+
+It occurred to me as inconsistent, that, for any mastering idea, he
+should have endangered his freedom, and even his life. But I reflected
+that perhaps freedom without danger was too much apart from all the
+habit of his existence to be to him what it would be to another man. I
+was not far out, since he said, after smoking a little:--
+
+“You see, dear boy, when I was over yonder, t’other side the world, I
+was always a looking to this side; and it come flat to be there, for
+all I was a growing rich. Everybody knowed Magwitch, and Magwitch could
+come, and Magwitch could go, and nobody’s head would be troubled about
+him. They ain’t so easy concerning me here, dear boy,--wouldn’t be,
+leastwise, if they knowed where I was.”
+
+“If all goes well,” said I, “you will be perfectly free and safe again
+within a few hours.”
+
+“Well,” he returned, drawing a long breath, “I hope so.”
+
+“And think so?”
+
+He dipped his hand in the water over the boat’s gunwale, and said,
+smiling with that softened air upon him which was not new to me:--
+
+“Ay, I s’pose I think so, dear boy. We’d be puzzled to be more quiet
+and easy-going than we are at present. But--it’s a flowing so soft
+and pleasant through the water, p’raps, as makes me think it--I was
+a thinking through my smoke just then, that we can no more see to the
+bottom of the next few hours than we can see to the bottom of this river
+what I catches hold of. Nor yet we can’t no more hold their tide than
+I can hold this. And it’s run through my fingers and gone, you see!”
+ holding up his dripping hand.
+
+“But for your face I should think you were a little despondent,” said I.
+
+“Not a bit on it, dear boy! It comes of flowing on so quiet, and of that
+there rippling at the boat’s head making a sort of a Sunday tune. Maybe
+I’m a growing a trifle old besides.”
+
+He put his pipe back in his mouth with an undisturbed expression of
+face, and sat as composed and contented as if we were already out of
+England. Yet he was as submissive to a word of advice as if he had been
+in constant terror; for, when we ran ashore to get some bottles of beer
+into the boat, and he was stepping out, I hinted that I thought he would
+be safest where he was, and he said. “Do you, dear boy?” and quietly sat
+down again.
+
+The air felt cold upon the river, but it was a bright day, and the
+sunshine was very cheering. The tide ran strong, I took care to lose
+none of it, and our steady stroke carried us on thoroughly well. By
+imperceptible degrees, as the tide ran out, we lost more and more of the
+nearer woods and hills, and dropped lower and lower between the muddy
+banks, but the tide was yet with us when we were off Gravesend. As our
+charge was wrapped in his cloak, I purposely passed within a boat or
+two’s length of the floating Custom House, and so out to catch the
+stream, alongside of two emigrant ships, and under the bows of a large
+transport with troops on the forecastle looking down at us. And soon
+the tide began to slacken, and the craft lying at anchor to swing,
+and presently they had all swung round, and the ships that were taking
+advantage of the new tide to get up to the Pool began to crowd upon us
+in a fleet, and we kept under the shore, as much out of the strength of
+the tide now as we could, standing carefully off from low shallows and
+mudbanks.
+
+Our oarsmen were so fresh, by dint of having occasionally let her drive
+with the tide for a minute or two, that a quarter of an hour’s rest
+proved full as much as they wanted. We got ashore among some slippery
+stones while we ate and drank what we had with us, and looked about.
+It was like my own marsh country, flat and monotonous, and with a
+dim horizon; while the winding river turned and turned, and the great
+floating buoys upon it turned and turned, and everything else seemed
+stranded and still. For now the last of the fleet of ships was round
+the last low point we had headed; and the last green barge, straw-laden,
+with a brown sail, had followed; and some ballast-lighters, shaped like
+a child’s first rude imitation of a boat, lay low in the mud; and a
+little squat shoal-lighthouse on open piles stood crippled in the mud
+on stilts and crutches; and slimy stakes stuck out of the mud, and slimy
+stones stuck out of the mud, and red landmarks and tidemarks stuck
+out of the mud, and an old landing-stage and an old roofless building
+slipped into the mud, and all about us was stagnation and mud.
+
+We pushed off again, and made what way we could. It was much harder work
+now, but Herbert and Startop persevered, and rowed and rowed and rowed
+until the sun went down. By that time the river had lifted us a little,
+so that we could see above the bank. There was the red sun, on the low
+level of the shore, in a purple haze, fast deepening into black; and
+there was the solitary flat marsh; and far away there were the rising
+grounds, between which and us there seemed to be no life, save here and
+there in the foreground a melancholy gull.
+
+As the night was fast falling, and as the moon, being past the full,
+would not rise early, we held a little council; a short one, for clearly
+our course was to lie by at the first lonely tavern we could find. So,
+they plied their oars once more, and I looked out for anything like a
+house. Thus we held on, speaking little, for four or five dull miles. It
+was very cold, and, a collier coming by us, with her galley-fire smoking
+and flaring, looked like a comfortable home. The night was as dark by
+this time as it would be until morning; and what light we had, seemed
+to come more from the river than the sky, as the oars in their dipping
+struck at a few reflected stars.
+
+At this dismal time we were evidently all possessed by the idea that
+we were followed. As the tide made, it flapped heavily at irregular
+intervals against the shore; and whenever such a sound came, one or
+other of us was sure to start, and look in that direction. Here and
+there, the set of the current had worn down the bank into a little
+creek, and we were all suspicious of such places, and eyed them
+nervously. Sometimes, “What was that ripple?” one of us would say in a
+low voice. Or another, “Is that a boat yonder?” And afterwards we would
+fall into a dead silence, and I would sit impatiently thinking with what
+an unusual amount of noise the oars worked in the thowels.
+
+At length we descried a light and a roof, and presently afterwards ran
+alongside a little causeway made of stones that had been picked up hard
+by. Leaving the rest in the boat, I stepped ashore, and found the light
+to be in a window of a public-house. It was a dirty place enough, and I
+dare say not unknown to smuggling adventurers; but there was a good
+fire in the kitchen, and there were eggs and bacon to eat, and various
+liquors to drink. Also, there were two double-bedded rooms,--“such as
+they were,” the landlord said. No other company was in the house than
+the landlord, his wife, and a grizzled male creature, the “Jack” of the
+little causeway, who was as slimy and smeary as if he had been low-water
+mark too.
+
+With this assistant, I went down to the boat again, and we all came
+ashore, and brought out the oars, and rudder and boat-hook, and all
+else, and hauled her up for the night. We made a very good meal by the
+kitchen fire, and then apportioned the bedrooms: Herbert and Startop
+were to occupy one; I and our charge the other. We found the air as
+carefully excluded from both, as if air were fatal to life; and there
+were more dirty clothes and bandboxes under the beds than I should have
+thought the family possessed. But we considered ourselves well off,
+notwithstanding, for a more solitary place we could not have found.
+
+While we were comforting ourselves by the fire after our meal, the
+Jack--who was sitting in a corner, and who had a bloated pair of shoes
+on, which he had exhibited while we were eating our eggs and bacon, as
+interesting relics that he had taken a few days ago from the feet of
+a drowned seaman washed ashore--asked me if we had seen a four-oared
+galley going up with the tide? When I told him No, he said she must have
+gone down then, and yet she “took up too,” when she left there.
+
+“They must ha’ thought better on’t for some reason or another,” said the
+Jack, “and gone down.”
+
+“A four-oared galley, did you say?” said I.
+
+“A four,” said the Jack, “and two sitters.”
+
+“Did they come ashore here?”
+
+“They put in with a stone two-gallon jar for some beer. I’d ha’ been
+glad to pison the beer myself,” said the Jack, “or put some rattling
+physic in it.”
+
+“Why?”
+
+“I know why,” said the Jack. He spoke in a slushy voice, as if much mud
+had washed into his throat.
+
+“He thinks,” said the landlord, a weakly meditative man with a pale eye,
+who seemed to rely greatly on his Jack,--“he thinks they was, what they
+wasn’t.”
+
+“I knows what I thinks,” observed the Jack.
+
+“You thinks Custum ‘Us, Jack?” said the landlord.
+
+“I do,” said the Jack.
+
+“Then you’re wrong, Jack.”
+
+“AM I!”
+
+In the infinite meaning of his reply and his boundless confidence in
+his views, the Jack took one of his bloated shoes off, looked into
+it, knocked a few stones out of it on the kitchen floor, and put it on
+again. He did this with the air of a Jack who was so right that he could
+afford to do anything.
+
+“Why, what do you make out that they done with their buttons then,
+Jack?” asked the landlord, vacillating weakly.
+
+“Done with their buttons?” returned the Jack. “Chucked ‘em overboard.
+Swallered ‘em. Sowed ‘em, to come up small salad. Done with their
+buttons!”
+
+“Don’t be cheeky, Jack,” remonstrated the landlord, in a melancholy and
+pathetic way.
+
+“A Custum ‘Us officer knows what to do with his Buttons,” said the Jack,
+repeating the obnoxious word with the greatest contempt, “when they
+comes betwixt him and his own light. A four and two sitters don’t go
+hanging and hovering, up with one tide and down with another, and both
+with and against another, without there being Custum ‘Us at the bottom
+of it.” Saying which he went out in disdain; and the landlord, having no
+one to reply upon, found it impracticable to pursue the subject.
+
+This dialogue made us all uneasy, and me very uneasy. The dismal wind
+was muttering round the house, the tide was flapping at the shore, and
+I had a feeling that we were caged and threatened. A four-oared galley
+hovering about in so unusual a way as to attract this notice was an ugly
+circumstance that I could not get rid of. When I had induced Provis to
+go up to bed, I went outside with my two companions (Startop by this
+time knew the state of the case), and held another council. Whether we
+should remain at the house until near the steamer’s time, which would
+be about one in the afternoon, or whether we should put off early in the
+morning, was the question we discussed. On the whole we deemed it the
+better course to lie where we were, until within an hour or so of the
+steamer’s time, and then to get out in her track, and drift easily with
+the tide. Having settled to do this, we returned into the house and went
+to bed.
+
+I lay down with the greater part of my clothes on, and slept well for a
+few hours. When I awoke, the wind had risen, and the sign of the house
+(the Ship) was creaking and banging about, with noises that startled
+me. Rising softly, for my charge lay fast asleep, I looked out of the
+window. It commanded the causeway where we had hauled up our boat, and,
+as my eyes adapted themselves to the light of the clouded moon, I saw
+two men looking into her. They passed by under the window, looking at
+nothing else, and they did not go down to the landing-place which I
+could discern to be empty, but struck across the marsh in the direction
+of the Nore.
+
+My first impulse was to call up Herbert, and show him the two men going
+away. But reflecting, before I got into his room, which was at the back
+of the house and adjoined mine, that he and Startop had had a harder day
+than I, and were fatigued, I forbore. Going back to my window, I could
+see the two men moving over the marsh. In that light, however, I soon
+lost them, and, feeling very cold, lay down to think of the matter, and
+fell asleep again.
+
+We were up early. As we walked to and fro, all four together, before
+breakfast, I deemed it right to recount what I had seen. Again our
+charge was the least anxious of the party. It was very likely that the
+men belonged to the Custom House, he said quietly, and that they had no
+thought of us. I tried to persuade myself that it was so,--as, indeed,
+it might easily be. However, I proposed that he and I should walk away
+together to a distant point we could see, and that the boat should take
+us aboard there, or as near there as might prove feasible, at about
+noon. This being considered a good precaution, soon after breakfast he
+and I set forth, without saying anything at the tavern.
+
+He smoked his pipe as we went along, and sometimes stopped to clap me on
+the shoulder. One would have supposed that it was I who was in danger,
+not he, and that he was reassuring me. We spoke very little. As we
+approached the point, I begged him to remain in a sheltered place, while
+I went on to reconnoitre; for it was towards it that the men had passed
+in the night. He complied, and I went on alone. There was no boat off
+the point, nor any boat drawn up anywhere near it, nor were there any
+signs of the men having embarked there. But, to be sure, the tide was
+high, and there might have been some footpints under water.
+
+When he looked out from his shelter in the distance, and saw that I
+waved my hat to him to come up, he rejoined me, and there we waited;
+sometimes lying on the bank, wrapped in our coats, and sometimes moving
+about to warm ourselves, until we saw our boat coming round. We got
+aboard easily, and rowed out into the track of the steamer. By that time
+it wanted but ten minutes of one o’clock, and we began to look out for
+her smoke.
+
+But, it was half-past one before we saw her smoke, and soon afterwards
+we saw behind it the smoke of another steamer. As they were coming on
+at full speed, we got the two bags ready, and took that opportunity
+of saying good-bye to Herbert and Startop. We had all shaken hands
+cordially, and neither Herbert’s eyes nor mine were quite dry, when I
+saw a four-oared galley shoot out from under the bank but a little way
+ahead of us, and row out into the same track.
+
+A stretch of shore had been as yet between us and the steamer’s smoke,
+by reason of the bend and wind of the river; but now she was visible,
+coming head on. I called to Herbert and Startop to keep before the tide,
+that she might see us lying by for her, and I adjured Provis to sit
+quite still, wrapped in his cloak. He answered cheerily, “Trust to me,
+dear boy,” and sat like a statue. Meantime the galley, which was very
+skilfully handled, had crossed us, let us come up with her, and fallen
+alongside. Leaving just room enough for the play of the oars, she kept
+alongside, drifting when we drifted, and pulling a stroke or two when we
+pulled. Of the two sitters one held the rudder-lines, and looked at us
+attentively,--as did all the rowers; the other sitter was wrapped up,
+much as Provis was, and seemed to shrink, and whisper some instruction
+to the steerer as he looked at us. Not a word was spoken in either boat.
+
+Startop could make out, after a few minutes, which steamer was first,
+and gave me the word “Hamburg,” in a low voice, as we sat face to face.
+She was nearing us very fast, and the beating of her peddles grew louder
+and louder. I felt as if her shadow were absolutely upon us, when the
+galley hailed us. I answered.
+
+“You have a returned Transport there,” said the man who held the lines.
+“That’s the man, wrapped in the cloak. His name is Abel Magwitch,
+otherwise Provis. I apprehend that man, and call upon him to surrender,
+and you to assist.”
+
+At the same moment, without giving any audible direction to his crew,
+he ran the galley abroad of us. They had pulled one sudden stroke ahead,
+had got their oars in, had run athwart us, and were holding on to
+our gunwale, before we knew what they were doing. This caused great
+confusion on board the steamer, and I heard them calling to us, and
+heard the order given to stop the paddles, and heard them stop, but felt
+her driving down upon us irresistibly. In the same moment, I saw the
+steersman of the galley lay his hand on his prisoner’s shoulder, and saw
+that both boats were swinging round with the force of the tide, and
+saw that all hands on board the steamer were running forward quite
+frantically. Still, in the same moment, I saw the prisoner start
+up, lean across his captor, and pull the cloak from the neck of the
+shrinking sitter in the galley. Still in the same moment, I saw that the
+face disclosed, was the face of the other convict of long ago. Still, in
+the same moment, I saw the face tilt backward with a white terror on it
+that I shall never forget, and heard a great cry on board the steamer,
+and a loud splash in the water, and felt the boat sink from under me.
+
+It was but for an instant that I seemed to struggle with a thousand
+mill-weirs and a thousand flashes of light; that instant past, I was
+taken on board the galley. Herbert was there, and Startop was there; but
+our boat was gone, and the two convicts were gone.
+
+What with the cries aboard the steamer, and the furious blowing off of
+her steam, and her driving on, and our driving on, I could not at first
+distinguish sky from water or shore from shore; but the crew of the
+galley righted her with great speed, and, pulling certain swift strong
+strokes ahead, lay upon their oars, every man looking silently and
+eagerly at the water astern. Presently a dark object was seen in it,
+bearing towards us on the tide. No man spoke, but the steersman held up
+his hand, and all softly backed water, and kept the boat straight and
+true before it. As it came nearer, I saw it to be Magwitch, swimming,
+but not swimming freely. He was taken on board, and instantly manacled
+at the wrists and ankles.
+
+The galley was kept steady, and the silent, eager look-out at the water
+was resumed. But, the Rotterdam steamer now came up, and apparently not
+understanding what had happened, came on at speed. By the time she had
+been hailed and stopped, both steamers were drifting away from us, and
+we were rising and falling in a troubled wake of water. The look-out was
+kept, long after all was still again and the two steamers were gone; but
+everybody knew that it was hopeless now.
+
+At length we gave it up, and pulled under the shore towards the tavern
+we had lately left, where we were received with no little surprise. Here
+I was able to get some comforts for Magwitch,--Provis no longer,--who
+had received some very severe injury in the Chest, and a deep cut in the
+head.
+
+He told me that he believed himself to have gone under the keel of the
+steamer, and to have been struck on the head in rising. The injury to
+his chest (which rendered his breathing extremely painful) he thought
+he had received against the side of the galley. He added that he did not
+pretend to say what he might or might not have done to Compeyson, but
+that, in the moment of his laying his hand on his cloak to identify him,
+that villain had staggered up and staggered back, and they had both gone
+overboard together, when the sudden wrenching of him (Magwitch) out of
+our boat, and the endeavor of his captor to keep him in it, had capsized
+us. He told me in a whisper that they had gone down fiercely locked in
+each other’s arms, and that there had been a struggle under water, and
+that he had disengaged himself, struck out, and swum away.
+
+I never had any reason to doubt the exact truth of what he thus told me.
+The officer who steered the galley gave the same account of their going
+overboard.
+
+When I asked this officer’s permission to change the prisoner’s
+wet clothes by purchasing any spare garments I could get at the
+public-house, he gave it readily: merely observing that he must take
+charge of everything his prisoner had about him. So the pocket-book
+which had once been in my hands passed into the officer’s. He further
+gave me leave to accompany the prisoner to London; but declined to
+accord that grace to my two friends.
+
+The Jack at the Ship was instructed where the drowned man had gone
+down, and undertook to search for the body in the places where it was
+likeliest to come ashore. His interest in its recovery seemed to me to
+be much heightened when he heard that it had stockings on. Probably, it
+took about a dozen drowned men to fit him out completely; and that may
+have been the reason why the different articles of his dress were in
+various stages of decay.
+
+We remained at the public-house until the tide turned, and then Magwitch
+was carried down to the galley and put on board. Herbert and Startop
+were to get to London by land, as soon as they could. We had a doleful
+parting, and when I took my place by Magwitch’s side, I felt that that
+was my place henceforth while he lived.
+
+For now, my repugnance to him had all melted away; and in the hunted,
+wounded, shackled creature who held my hand in his, I only saw a man
+who had meant to be my benefactor, and who had felt affectionately,
+gratefully, and generously, towards me with great constancy through a
+series of years. I only saw in him a much better man than I had been to
+Joe.
+
+His breathing became more difficult and painful as the night drew on,
+and often he could not repress a groan. I tried to rest him on the arm
+I could use, in any easy position; but it was dreadful to think that
+I could not be sorry at heart for his being badly hurt, since it was
+unquestionably best that he should die. That there were, still living,
+people enough who were able and willing to identify him, I could not
+doubt. That he would be leniently treated, I could not hope. He who had
+been presented in the worst light at his trial, who had since broken
+prison and had been tried again, who had returned from transportation
+under a life sentence, and who had occasioned the death of the man who
+was the cause of his arrest.
+
+As we returned towards the setting sun we had yesterday left behind us,
+and as the stream of our hopes seemed all running back, I told him how
+grieved I was to think that he had come home for my sake.
+
+“Dear boy,” he answered, “I’m quite content to take my chance. I’ve seen
+my boy, and he can be a gentleman without me.”
+
+No. I had thought about that, while we had been there side by side. No.
+Apart from any inclinations of my own, I understood Wemmick’s hint now.
+I foresaw that, being convicted, his possessions would be forfeited to
+the Crown.
+
+“Lookee here, dear boy,” said he “It’s best as a gentleman should not be
+knowed to belong to me now. Only come to see me as if you come by chance
+alonger Wemmick. Sit where I can see you when I am swore to, for the
+last o’ many times, and I don’t ask no more.”
+
+“I will never stir from your side,” said I, “when I am suffered to be
+near you. Please God, I will be as true to you as you have been to me!”
+
+I felt his hand tremble as it held mine, and he turned his face away
+as he lay in the bottom of the boat, and I heard that old sound in his
+throat,--softened now, like all the rest of him. It was a good thing
+that he had touched this point, for it put into my mind what I might not
+otherwise have thought of until too late,--that he need never know how
+his hopes of enriching me had perished.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter LV
+
+He was taken to the Police Court next day, and would have been
+immediately committed for trial, but that it was necessary to send down
+for an old officer of the prison-ship from which he had once escaped, to
+speak to his identity. Nobody doubted it; but Compeyson, who had meant
+to depose to it, was tumbling on the tides, dead, and it happened that
+there was not at that time any prison officer in London who could give
+the required evidence. I had gone direct to Mr. Jaggers at his private
+house, on my arrival over night, to retain his assistance, and Mr.
+Jaggers on the prisoner’s behalf would admit nothing. It was the sole
+resource; for he told me that the case must be over in five minutes
+when the witness was there, and that no power on earth could prevent its
+going against us.
+
+I imparted to Mr. Jaggers my design of keeping him in ignorance of the
+fate of his wealth. Mr. Jaggers was querulous and angry with me for
+having “let it slip through my fingers,” and said we must memorialize
+by and by, and try at all events for some of it. But he did not conceal
+from me that, although there might be many cases in which the forfeiture
+would not be exacted, there were no circumstances in this case to make
+it one of them. I understood that very well. I was not related to the
+outlaw, or connected with him by any recognizable tie; he had put his
+hand to no writing or settlement in my favor before his apprehension,
+and to do so now would be idle. I had no claim, and I finally resolved,
+and ever afterwards abided by the resolution, that my heart should never
+be sickened with the hopeless task of attempting to establish one.
+
+There appeared to be reason for supposing that the drowned informer
+had hoped for a reward out of this forfeiture, and had obtained some
+accurate knowledge of Magwitch’s affairs. When his body was found, many
+miles from the scene of his death, and so horribly disfigured that he
+was only recognizable by the contents of his pockets, notes were still
+legible, folded in a case he carried. Among these were the name of a
+banking-house in New South Wales, where a sum of money was, and the
+designation of certain lands of considerable value. Both these heads of
+information were in a list that Magwitch, while in prison, gave to Mr.
+Jaggers, of the possessions he supposed I should inherit. His ignorance,
+poor fellow, at last served him; he never mistrusted but that my
+inheritance was quite safe, with Mr. Jaggers’s aid.
+
+After three days’ delay, during which the crown prosecution stood over
+for the production of the witness from the prison-ship, the witness
+came, and completed the easy case. He was committed to take his trial at
+the next Sessions, which would come on in a month.
+
+It was at this dark time of my life that Herbert returned home one
+evening, a good deal cast down, and said,--
+
+“My dear Handel, I fear I shall soon have to leave you.”
+
+His partner having prepared me for that, I was less surprised than he
+thought.
+
+“We shall lose a fine opportunity if I put off going to Cairo, and I am
+very much afraid I must go, Handel, when you most need me.”
+
+“Herbert, I shall always need you, because I shall always love you; but
+my need is no greater now than at another time.”
+
+“You will be so lonely.”
+
+“I have not leisure to think of that,” said I. “You know that I am
+always with him to the full extent of the time allowed, and that I
+should be with him all day long, if I could. And when I come away from
+him, you know that my thoughts are with him.”
+
+The dreadful condition to which he was brought, was so appalling to both
+of us, that we could not refer to it in plainer words.
+
+“My dear fellow,” said Herbert, “let the near prospect of our
+separation--for, it is very near--be my justification for troubling you
+about yourself. Have you thought of your future?”
+
+“No, for I have been afraid to think of any future.”
+
+“But yours cannot be dismissed; indeed, my dear dear Handel, it must not
+be dismissed. I wish you would enter on it now, as far as a few friendly
+words go, with me.”
+
+“I will,” said I.
+
+“In this branch house of ours, Handel, we must have a--”
+
+I saw that his delicacy was avoiding the right word, so I said, “A
+clerk.”
+
+“A clerk. And I hope it is not at all unlikely that he may expand (as
+a clerk of your acquaintance has expanded) into a partner. Now,
+Handel,--in short, my dear boy, will you come to me?”
+
+There was something charmingly cordial and engaging in the manner in
+which after saying “Now, Handel,” as if it were the grave beginning of
+a portentous business exordium, he had suddenly given up that tone,
+stretched out his honest hand, and spoken like a schoolboy.
+
+“Clara and I have talked about it again and again,” Herbert pursued,
+“and the dear little thing begged me only this evening, with tears in
+her eyes, to say to you that, if you will live with us when we come
+together, she will do her best to make you happy, and to convince her
+husband’s friend that he is her friend too. We should get on so well,
+Handel!”
+
+I thanked her heartily, and I thanked him heartily, but said I could not
+yet make sure of joining him as he so kindly offered. Firstly, my
+mind was too preoccupied to be able to take in the subject clearly.
+Secondly,--Yes! Secondly, there was a vague something lingering in my
+thoughts that will come out very near the end of this slight narrative.
+
+“But if you thought, Herbert, that you could, without doing any injury
+to your business, leave the question open for a little while--”
+
+“For any while,” cried Herbert. “Six months, a year!”
+
+“Not so long as that,” said I. “Two or three months at most.”
+
+Herbert was highly delighted when we shook hands on this arrangement,
+and said he could now take courage to tell me that he believed he must
+go away at the end of the week.
+
+“And Clara?” said I.
+
+“The dear little thing,” returned Herbert, “holds dutifully to her
+father as long as he lasts; but he won’t last long. Mrs. Whimple
+confides to me that he is certainly going.”
+
+“Not to say an unfeeling thing,” said I, “he cannot do better than go.”
+
+“I am afraid that must be admitted,” said Herbert; “and then I shall
+come back for the dear little thing, and the dear little thing and I
+will walk quietly into the nearest church. Remember! The blessed darling
+comes of no family, my dear Handel, and never looked into the red book,
+and hasn’t a notion about her grandpapa. What a fortune for the son of
+my mother!”
+
+On the Saturday in that same week, I took my leave of Herbert,--full
+of bright hope, but sad and sorry to leave me,--as he sat on one of the
+seaport mail coaches. I went into a coffee-house to write a little note
+to Clara, telling her he had gone off, sending his love to her over and
+over again, and then went to my lonely home,--if it deserved the name;
+for it was now no home to me, and I had no home anywhere.
+
+On the stairs I encountered Wemmick, who was coming down, after an
+unsuccessful application of his knuckles to my door. I had not seen him
+alone since the disastrous issue of the attempted flight; and he had
+come, in his private and personal capacity, to say a few words of
+explanation in reference to that failure.
+
+“The late Compeyson,” said Wemmick, “had by little and little got at the
+bottom of half of the regular business now transacted; and it was from
+the talk of some of his people in trouble (some of his people being
+always in trouble) that I heard what I did. I kept my ears open, seeming
+to have them shut, until I heard that he was absent, and I thought that
+would be the best time for making the attempt. I can only suppose now,
+that it was a part of his policy, as a very clever man, habitually to
+deceive his own instruments. You don’t blame me, I hope, Mr. Pip? I am
+sure I tried to serve you, with all my heart.”
+
+“I am as sure of that, Wemmick, as you can be, and I thank you most
+earnestly for all your interest and friendship.”
+
+“Thank you, thank you very much. It’s a bad job,” said Wemmick,
+scratching his head, “and I assure you I haven’t been so cut up for a
+long time. What I look at is the sacrifice of so much portable property.
+Dear me!”
+
+“What I think of, Wemmick, is the poor owner of the property.”
+
+“Yes, to be sure,” said Wemmick. “Of course, there can be no objection
+to your being sorry for him, and I’d put down a five-pound note myself
+to get him out of it. But what I look at is this. The late Compeyson
+having been beforehand with him in intelligence of his return, and being
+so determined to bring him to book, I do not think he could have been
+saved. Whereas, the portable property certainly could have been saved.
+That’s the difference between the property and the owner, don’t you
+see?”
+
+I invited Wemmick to come upstairs, and refresh himself with a glass
+of grog before walking to Walworth. He accepted the invitation. While he
+was drinking his moderate allowance, he said, with nothing to lead up to
+it, and after having appeared rather fidgety,--
+
+“What do you think of my meaning to take a holiday on Monday, Mr. Pip?”
+
+“Why, I suppose you have not done such a thing these twelve months.”
+
+“These twelve years, more likely,” said Wemmick. “Yes. I’m going to take
+a holiday. More than that; I’m going to take a walk. More than that; I’m
+going to ask you to take a walk with me.”
+
+I was about to excuse myself, as being but a bad companion just then,
+when Wemmick anticipated me.
+
+“I know your engagements,” said he, “and I know you are out of sorts,
+Mr. Pip. But if you could oblige me, I should take it as a kindness.
+It ain’t a long walk, and it’s an early one. Say it might occupy you
+(including breakfast on the walk) from eight to twelve. Couldn’t you
+stretch a point and manage it?”
+
+He had done so much for me at various times, that this was very little
+to do for him. I said I could manage it,--would manage it,--and he was
+so very much pleased by my acquiescence, that I was pleased too. At his
+particular request, I appointed to call for him at the Castle at half
+past eight on Monday morning, and so we parted for the time.
+
+Punctual to my appointment, I rang at the Castle gate on the Monday
+morning, and was received by Wemmick himself, who struck me as looking
+tighter than usual, and having a sleeker hat on. Within, there were two
+glasses of rum and milk prepared, and two biscuits. The Aged must have
+been stirring with the lark, for, glancing into the perspective of his
+bedroom, I observed that his bed was empty.
+
+When we had fortified ourselves with the rum and milk and biscuits, and
+were going out for the walk with that training preparation on us, I was
+considerably surprised to see Wemmick take up a fishing-rod, and put
+it over his shoulder. “Why, we are not going fishing!” said I. “No,”
+ returned Wemmick, “but I like to walk with one.”
+
+I thought this odd; however, I said nothing, and we set off. We went
+towards Camberwell Green, and when we were thereabouts, Wemmick said
+suddenly,--
+
+“Halloa! Here’s a church!”
+
+There was nothing very surprising in that; but again, I was rather
+surprised, when he said, as if he were animated by a brilliant idea,--
+
+“Let’s go in!”
+
+We went in, Wemmick leaving his fishing-rod in the porch, and looked all
+round. In the mean time, Wemmick was diving into his coat-pockets, and
+getting something out of paper there.
+
+“Halloa!” said he. “Here’s a couple of pair of gloves! Let’s put ‘em
+on!”
+
+As the gloves were white kid gloves, and as the post-office was widened
+to its utmost extent, I now began to have my strong suspicions. They
+were strengthened into certainty when I beheld the Aged enter at a side
+door, escorting a lady.
+
+“Halloa!” said Wemmick. “Here’s Miss Skiffins! Let’s have a wedding.”
+
+That discreet damsel was attired as usual, except that she was now
+engaged in substituting for her green kid gloves a pair of white. The
+Aged was likewise occupied in preparing a similar sacrifice for
+the altar of Hymen. The old gentleman, however, experienced so much
+difficulty in getting his gloves on, that Wemmick found it necessary
+to put him with his back against a pillar, and then to get behind the
+pillar himself and pull away at them, while I for my part held the old
+gentleman round the waist, that he might present an equal and safe
+resistance. By dint of this ingenious scheme, his gloves were got on to
+perfection.
+
+The clerk and clergyman then appearing, we were ranged in order at
+those fatal rails. True to his notion of seeming to do it all without
+preparation, I heard Wemmick say to himself, as he took something out of
+his waistcoat-pocket before the service began, “Halloa! Here’s a ring!”
+
+I acted in the capacity of backer, or best-man, to the bridegroom; while
+a little limp pew-opener in a soft bonnet like a baby’s, made a feint
+of being the bosom friend of Miss Skiffins. The responsibility of giving
+the lady away devolved upon the Aged, which led to the clergyman’s being
+unintentionally scandalized, and it happened thus. When he said, “Who
+giveth this woman to be married to this man?” the old gentleman, not in
+the least knowing what point of the ceremony we had arrived at, stood
+most amiably beaming at the ten commandments. Upon which, the clergyman
+said again, “WHO giveth this woman to be married to this man?” The old
+gentleman being still in a state of most estimable unconsciousness, the
+bridegroom cried out in his accustomed voice, “Now Aged P. you know; who
+giveth?” To which the Aged replied with great briskness, before saying
+that he gave, “All right, John, all right, my boy!” And the clergyman
+came to so gloomy a pause upon it, that I had doubts for the moment
+whether we should get completely married that day.
+
+It was completely done, however, and when we were going out of church
+Wemmick took the cover off the font, and put his white gloves in it, and
+put the cover on again. Mrs. Wemmick, more heedful of the future, put
+her white gloves in her pocket and assumed her green. “Now, Mr. Pip,”
+ said Wemmick, triumphantly shouldering the fishing-rod as we came
+out, “let me ask you whether anybody would suppose this to be a
+wedding-party!”
+
+Breakfast had been ordered at a pleasant little tavern, a mile or so
+away upon the rising ground beyond the green; and there was a bagatelle
+board in the room, in case we should desire to unbend our minds after
+the solemnity. It was pleasant to observe that Mrs. Wemmick no longer
+unwound Wemmick’s arm when it adapted itself to her figure, but sat in a
+high-backed chair against the wall, like a violoncello in its case, and
+submitted to be embraced as that melodious instrument might have done.
+
+We had an excellent breakfast, and when any one declined anything on
+table, Wemmick said, “Provided by contract, you know; don’t be afraid of
+it!” I drank to the new couple, drank to the Aged, drank to the Castle,
+saluted the bride at parting, and made myself as agreeable as I could.
+
+Wemmick came down to the door with me, and I again shook hands with him,
+and wished him joy.
+
+“Thankee!” said Wemmick, rubbing his hands. “She’s such a manager
+of fowls, you have no idea. You shall have some eggs, and judge for
+yourself. I say, Mr. Pip!” calling me back, and speaking low. “This is
+altogether a Walworth sentiment, please.”
+
+“I understand. Not to be mentioned in Little Britain,” said I.
+
+Wemmick nodded. “After what you let out the other day, Mr. Jaggers
+may as well not know of it. He might think my brain was softening, or
+something of the kind.”
+
+
+
+
+Chapter LVI
+
+He lay in prison very ill, during the whole interval between his
+committal for trial and the coming round of the Sessions. He had broken
+two ribs, they had wounded one of his lungs, and he breathed with great
+pain and difficulty, which increased daily. It was a consequence of his
+hurt that he spoke so low as to be scarcely audible; therefore he spoke
+very little. But he was ever ready to listen to me; and it became the
+first duty of my life to say to him, and read to him, what I knew he
+ought to hear.
+
+Being far too ill to remain in the common prison, he was removed, after
+the first day or so, into the infirmary. This gave me opportunities
+of being with him that I could not otherwise have had. And but for
+his illness he would have been put in irons, for he was regarded as a
+determined prison-breaker, and I know not what else.
+
+Although I saw him every day, it was for only a short time; hence, the
+regularly recurring spaces of our separation were long enough to record
+on his face any slight changes that occurred in his physical state. I
+do not recollect that I once saw any change in it for the better; he
+wasted, and became slowly weaker and worse, day by day, from the day
+when the prison door closed upon him.
+
+The kind of submission or resignation that he showed was that of a man
+who was tired out. I sometimes derived an impression, from his manner
+or from a whispered word or two which escaped him, that he pondered
+over the question whether he might have been a better man under better
+circumstances. But he never justified himself by a hint tending that
+way, or tried to bend the past out of its eternal shape.
+
+It happened on two or three occasions in my presence, that his desperate
+reputation was alluded to by one or other of the people in attendance on
+him. A smile crossed his face then, and he turned his eyes on me with
+a trustful look, as if he were confident that I had seen some small
+redeeming touch in him, even so long ago as when I was a little child.
+As to all the rest, he was humble and contrite, and I never knew him
+complain.
+
+When the Sessions came round, Mr. Jaggers caused an application to be
+made for the postponement of his trial until the following Sessions. It
+was obviously made with the assurance that he could not live so long,
+and was refused. The trial came on at once, and, when he was put to the
+bar, he was seated in a chair. No objection was made to my getting
+close to the dock, on the outside of it, and holding the hand that he
+stretched forth to me.
+
+The trial was very short and very clear. Such things as could be said
+for him were said,--how he had taken to industrious habits, and had
+thriven lawfully and reputably. But nothing could unsay the fact that
+he had returned, and was there in presence of the Judge and Jury. It was
+impossible to try him for that, and do otherwise than find him guilty.
+
+At that time, it was the custom (as I learnt from my terrible experience
+of that Sessions) to devote a concluding day to the passing of
+Sentences, and to make a finishing effect with the Sentence of Death.
+But for the indelible picture that my remembrance now holds before me,
+I could scarcely believe, even as I write these words, that I saw
+two-and-thirty men and women put before the Judge to receive that
+sentence together. Foremost among the two-and-thirty was he; seated,
+that he might get breath enough to keep life in him.
+
+The whole scene starts out again in the vivid colors of the moment, down
+to the drops of April rain on the windows of the court, glittering in
+the rays of April sun. Penned in the dock, as I again stood outside it
+at the corner with his hand in mine, were the two-and-thirty men
+and women; some defiant, some stricken with terror, some sobbing and
+weeping, some covering their faces, some staring gloomily about. There
+had been shrieks from among the women convicts; but they had been
+stilled, and a hush had succeeded. The sheriffs with their great chains
+and nosegays, other civic gewgaws and monsters, criers, ushers, a great
+gallery full of people,--a large theatrical audience,--looked on, as the
+two-and-thirty and the Judge were solemnly confronted. Then the Judge
+addressed them. Among the wretched creatures before him whom he must
+single out for special address was one who almost from his infancy had
+been an offender against the laws; who, after repeated imprisonments and
+punishments, had been at length sentenced to exile for a term of years;
+and who, under circumstances of great violence and daring, had made his
+escape and been re-sentenced to exile for life. That miserable man would
+seem for a time to have become convinced of his errors, when far removed
+from the scenes of his old offences, and to have lived a peaceable and
+honest life. But in a fatal moment, yielding to those propensities and
+passions, the indulgence of which had so long rendered him a scourge to
+society, he had quitted his haven of rest and repentance, and had
+come back to the country where he was proscribed. Being here presently
+denounced, he had for a time succeeded in evading the officers of
+Justice, but being at length seized while in the act of flight, he had
+resisted them, and had--he best knew whether by express design, or in
+the blindness of his hardihood--caused the death of his denouncer, to
+whom his whole career was known. The appointed punishment for his return
+to the land that had cast him out, being Death, and his case being this
+aggravated case, he must prepare himself to Die.
+
+The sun was striking in at the great windows of the court, through the
+glittering drops of rain upon the glass, and it made a broad shaft of
+light between the two-and-thirty and the Judge, linking both together,
+and perhaps reminding some among the audience how both were passing on,
+with absolute equality, to the greater Judgment that knoweth all things,
+and cannot err. Rising for a moment, a distinct speck of face in this
+way of light, the prisoner said, “My Lord, I have received my sentence
+of Death from the Almighty, but I bow to yours,” and sat down again.
+There was some hushing, and the Judge went on with what he had to say
+to the rest. Then they were all formally doomed, and some of them were
+supported out, and some of them sauntered out with a haggard look of
+bravery, and a few nodded to the gallery, and two or three shook hands,
+and others went out chewing the fragments of herb they had taken from
+the sweet herbs lying about. He went last of all, because of having to
+be helped from his chair, and to go very slowly; and he held my hand
+while all the others were removed, and while the audience got up
+(putting their dresses right, as they might at church or elsewhere), and
+pointed down at this criminal or at that, and most of all at him and me.
+
+I earnestly hoped and prayed that he might die before the Recorder’s
+Report was made; but, in the dread of his lingering on, I began that
+night to write out a petition to the Home Secretary of State, setting
+forth my knowledge of him, and how it was that he had come back for my
+sake. I wrote it as fervently and pathetically as I could; and when I
+had finished it and sent it in, I wrote out other petitions to such men
+in authority as I hoped were the most merciful, and drew up one to the
+Crown itself. For several days and nights after he was sentenced I took
+no rest except when I fell asleep in my chair, but was wholly absorbed
+in these appeals. And after I had sent them in, I could not keep away
+from the places where they were, but felt as if they were more
+hopeful and less desperate when I was near them. In this unreasonable
+restlessness and pain of mind I would roam the streets of an evening,
+wandering by those offices and houses where I had left the petitions. To
+the present hour, the weary western streets of London on a cold, dusty
+spring night, with their ranges of stern, shut-up mansions, and their
+long rows of lamps, are melancholy to me from this association.
+
+The daily visits I could make him were shortened now, and he was more
+strictly kept. Seeing, or fancying, that I was suspected of an intention
+of carrying poison to him, I asked to be searched before I sat down
+at his bedside, and told the officer who was always there, that I was
+willing to do anything that would assure him of the singleness of my
+designs. Nobody was hard with him or with me. There was duty to be
+done, and it was done, but not harshly. The officer always gave me the
+assurance that he was worse, and some other sick prisoners in the
+room, and some other prisoners who attended on them as sick nurses,
+(malefactors, but not incapable of kindness, God be thanked!) always
+joined in the same report.
+
+As the days went on, I noticed more and more that he would lie placidly
+looking at the white ceiling, with an absence of light in his face
+until some word of mine brightened it for an instant, and then it would
+subside again. Sometimes he was almost or quite unable to speak, then
+he would answer me with slight pressures on my hand, and I grew to
+understand his meaning very well.
+
+The number of the days had risen to ten, when I saw a greater change
+in him than I had seen yet. His eyes were turned towards the door, and
+lighted up as I entered.
+
+“Dear boy,” he said, as I sat down by his bed: “I thought you was late.
+But I knowed you couldn’t be that.”
+
+“It is just the time,” said I. “I waited for it at the gate.”
+
+“You always waits at the gate; don’t you, dear boy?”
+
+“Yes. Not to lose a moment of the time.”
+
+“Thank’ee dear boy, thank’ee. God bless you! You’ve never deserted me,
+dear boy.”
+
+I pressed his hand in silence, for I could not forget that I had once
+meant to desert him.
+
+“And what’s the best of all,” he said, “you’ve been more comfortable
+alonger me, since I was under a dark cloud, than when the sun shone.
+That’s best of all.”
+
+He lay on his back, breathing with great difficulty. Do what he would,
+and love me though he did, the light left his face ever and again, and a
+film came over the placid look at the white ceiling.
+
+“Are you in much pain to-day?”
+
+“I don’t complain of none, dear boy.”
+
+“You never do complain.”
+
+He had spoken his last words. He smiled, and I understood his touch to
+mean that he wished to lift my hand, and lay it on his breast. I laid it
+there, and he smiled again, and put both his hands upon it.
+
+The allotted time ran out, while we were thus; but, looking round, I
+found the governor of the prison standing near me, and he whispered,
+“You needn’t go yet.” I thanked him gratefully, and asked, “Might I
+speak to him, if he can hear me?”
+
+The governor stepped aside, and beckoned the officer away. The change,
+though it was made without noise, drew back the film from the placid
+look at the white ceiling, and he looked most affectionately at me.
+
+“Dear Magwitch, I must tell you now, at last. You understand what I
+say?”
+
+A gentle pressure on my hand.
+
+“You had a child once, whom you loved and lost.”
+
+A stronger pressure on my hand.
+
+“She lived, and found powerful friends. She is living now. She is a lady
+and very beautiful. And I love her!”
+
+With a last faint effort, which would have been powerless but for my
+yielding to it and assisting it, he raised my hand to his lips. Then,
+he gently let it sink upon his breast again, with his own hands lying on
+it. The placid look at the white ceiling came back, and passed away, and
+his head dropped quietly on his breast.
+
+Mindful, then, of what we had read together, I thought of the two men
+who went up into the Temple to pray, and I knew there were no better
+words that I could say beside his bed, than “O Lord, be merciful to him
+a sinner!”
+
+
+
+
+Chapter LVII
+
+Now that I was left wholly to myself, I gave notice of my intention
+to quit the chambers in the Temple as soon as my tenancy could legally
+determine, and in the meanwhile to underlet them. At once I put bills
+up in the windows; for, I was in debt, and had scarcely any money, and
+began to be seriously alarmed by the state of my affairs. I ought
+rather to write that I should have been alarmed if I had had energy and
+concentration enough to help me to the clear perception of any truth
+beyond the fact that I was falling very ill. The late stress upon me had
+enabled me to put off illness, but not to put it away; I knew that it
+was coming on me now, and I knew very little else, and was even careless
+as to that.
+
+For a day or two, I lay on the sofa, or on the floor,--anywhere,
+according as I happened to sink down,--with a heavy head and aching
+limbs, and no purpose, and no power. Then there came, one night which
+appeared of great duration, and which teemed with anxiety and horror;
+and when in the morning I tried to sit up in my bed and think of it, I
+found I could not do so.
+
+Whether I really had been down in Garden Court in the dead of the night,
+groping about for the boat that I supposed to be there; whether I had
+two or three times come to myself on the staircase with great terror,
+not knowing how I had got out of bed; whether I had found myself
+lighting the lamp, possessed by the idea that he was coming up
+the stairs, and that the lights were blown out; whether I had been
+inexpressibly harassed by the distracted talking, laughing, and groaning
+of some one, and had half suspected those sounds to be of my own making;
+whether there had been a closed iron furnace in a dark corner of
+the room, and a voice had called out, over and over again, that Miss
+Havisham was consuming within it,--these were things that I tried to
+settle with myself and get into some order, as I lay that morning on
+my bed. But the vapor of a limekiln would come between me and them,
+disordering them all, and it was through the vapor at last that I saw
+two men looking at me.
+
+“What do you want?” I asked, starting; “I don’t know you.”
+
+“Well, sir,” returned one of them, bending down and touching me on the
+shoulder, “this is a matter that you’ll soon arrange, I dare say, but
+you’re arrested.”
+
+“What is the debt?”
+
+“Hundred and twenty-three pound, fifteen, six. Jeweller’s account, I
+think.”
+
+“What is to be done?”
+
+“You had better come to my house,” said the man. “I keep a very nice
+house.”
+
+I made some attempt to get up and dress myself. When I next attended
+to them, they were standing a little off from the bed, looking at me. I
+still lay there.
+
+“You see my state,” said I. “I would come with you if I could; but
+indeed I am quite unable. If you take me from here, I think I shall die
+by the way.”
+
+Perhaps they replied, or argued the point, or tried to encourage me to
+believe that I was better than I thought. Forasmuch as they hang in
+my memory by only this one slender thread, I don’t know what they did,
+except that they forbore to remove me.
+
+That I had a fever and was avoided, that I suffered greatly, that
+I often lost my reason, that the time seemed interminable, that I
+confounded impossible existences with my own identity; that I was a
+brick in the house-wall, and yet entreating to be released from the
+giddy place where the builders had set me; that I was a steel beam of a
+vast engine, clashing and whirling over a gulf, and yet that I implored
+in my own person to have the engine stopped, and my part in it hammered
+off; that I passed through these phases of disease, I know of my own
+remembrance, and did in some sort know at the time. That I sometimes
+struggled with real people, in the belief that they were murderers, and
+that I would all at once comprehend that they meant to do me good, and
+would then sink exhausted in their arms, and suffer them to lay me
+down, I also knew at the time. But, above all, I knew that there was a
+constant tendency in all these people,--who, when I was very ill, would
+present all kinds of extraordinary transformations of the human face,
+and would be much dilated in size,--above all, I say, I knew that there
+was an extraordinary tendency in all these people, sooner or later, to
+settle down into the likeness of Joe.
+
+After I had turned the worst point of my illness, I began to notice that
+while all its other features changed, this one consistent feature did
+not change. Whoever came about me, still settled down into Joe. I opened
+my eyes in the night, and I saw, in the great chair at the bedside, Joe.
+I opened my eyes in the day, and, sitting on the window-seat, smoking
+his pipe in the shaded open window, still I saw Joe. I asked for cooling
+drink, and the dear hand that gave it me was Joe’s. I sank back on
+my pillow after drinking, and the face that looked so hopefully and
+tenderly upon me was the face of Joe.
+
+At last, one day, I took courage, and said, “Is it Joe?”
+
+And the dear old home-voice answered, “Which it air, old chap.”
+
+“O Joe, you break my heart! Look angry at me, Joe. Strike me, Joe. Tell
+me of my ingratitude. Don’t be so good to me!”
+
+For Joe had actually laid his head down on the pillow at my side, and
+put his arm round my neck, in his joy that I knew him.
+
+“Which dear old Pip, old chap,” said Joe, “you and me was ever friends.
+And when you’re well enough to go out for a ride--what larks!”
+
+After which, Joe withdrew to the window, and stood with his back towards
+me, wiping his eyes. And as my extreme weakness prevented me from
+getting up and going to him, I lay there, penitently whispering, “O God
+bless him! O God bless this gentle Christian man!”
+
+Joe’s eyes were red when I next found him beside me; but I was holding
+his hand, and we both felt happy.
+
+“How long, dear Joe?”
+
+“Which you meantersay, Pip, how long have your illness lasted, dear old
+chap?”
+
+“Yes, Joe.”
+
+“It’s the end of May, Pip. To-morrow is the first of June.”
+
+“And have you been here all that time, dear Joe?”
+
+“Pretty nigh, old chap. For, as I says to Biddy when the news of your
+being ill were brought by letter, which it were brought by the post, and
+being formerly single he is now married though underpaid for a deal of
+walking and shoe-leather, but wealth were not a object on his part, and
+marriage were the great wish of his hart--”
+
+“It is so delightful to hear you, Joe! But I interrupt you in what you
+said to Biddy.”
+
+“Which it were,” said Joe, “that how you might be amongst strangers, and
+that how you and me having been ever friends, a wisit at such a moment
+might not prove unacceptabobble. And Biddy, her word were, ‘Go to him,
+without loss of time.’ That,” said Joe, summing up with his judicial
+air, “were the word of Biddy. ‘Go to him,’ Biddy say, ‘without loss of
+time.’ In short, I shouldn’t greatly deceive you,” Joe added, after a
+little grave reflection, “if I represented to you that the word of that
+young woman were, ‘without a minute’s loss of time.’”
+
+There Joe cut himself short, and informed me that I was to be talked
+to in great moderation, and that I was to take a little nourishment at
+stated frequent times, whether I felt inclined for it or not, and that
+I was to submit myself to all his orders. So I kissed his hand, and lay
+quiet, while he proceeded to indite a note to Biddy, with my love in it.
+
+Evidently Biddy had taught Joe to write. As I lay in bed looking at him,
+it made me, in my weak state, cry again with pleasure to see the
+pride with which he set about his letter. My bedstead, divested of its
+curtains, had been removed, with me upon it, into the sitting-room, as
+the airiest and largest, and the carpet had been taken away, and
+the room kept always fresh and wholesome night and day. At my own
+writing-table, pushed into a corner and cumbered with little bottles,
+Joe now sat down to his great work, first choosing a pen from the
+pen-tray as if it were a chest of large tools, and tucking up his
+sleeves as if he were going to wield a crow-bar or sledgehammer. It was
+necessary for Joe to hold on heavily to the table with his left elbow,
+and to get his right leg well out behind him, before he could begin; and
+when he did begin he made every downstroke so slowly that it might
+have been six feet long, while at every upstroke I could hear his pen
+spluttering extensively. He had a curious idea that the inkstand was
+on the side of him where it was not, and constantly dipped his pen into
+space, and seemed quite satisfied with the result. Occasionally, he was
+tripped up by some orthographical stumbling-block; but on the whole
+he got on very well indeed; and when he had signed his name, and had
+removed a finishing blot from the paper to the crown of his head with
+his two forefingers, he got up and hovered about the table, trying the
+effect of his performance from various points of view, as it lay there,
+with unbounded satisfaction.
+
+Not to make Joe uneasy by talking too much, even if I had been able to
+talk much, I deferred asking him about Miss Havisham until next day. He
+shook his head when I then asked him if she had recovered.
+
+“Is she dead, Joe?”
+
+“Why you see, old chap,” said Joe, in a tone of remonstrance, and by way
+of getting at it by degrees, “I wouldn’t go so far as to say that, for
+that’s a deal to say; but she ain’t--”
+
+“Living, Joe?”
+
+“That’s nigher where it is,” said Joe; “she ain’t living.”
+
+“Did she linger long, Joe?”
+
+“Arter you was took ill, pretty much about what you might call (if you
+was put to it) a week,” said Joe; still determined, on my account, to
+come at everything by degrees.
+
+“Dear Joe, have you heard what becomes of her property?”
+
+“Well, old chap,” said Joe, “it do appear that she had settled the most
+of it, which I meantersay tied it up, on Miss Estella. But she had
+wrote out a little coddleshell in her own hand a day or two afore the
+accident, leaving a cool four thousand to Mr. Matthew Pocket. And why,
+do you suppose, above all things, Pip, she left that cool four thousand
+unto him? ‘Because of Pip’s account of him, the said Matthew.’ I am told
+by Biddy, that air the writing,” said Joe, repeating the legal turn as
+if it did him infinite good, “‘account of him the said Matthew.’ And a
+cool four thousand, Pip!”
+
+I never discovered from whom Joe derived the conventional temperature of
+the four thousand pounds; but it appeared to make the sum of money more
+to him, and he had a manifest relish in insisting on its being cool.
+
+This account gave me great joy, as it perfected the only good thing I
+had done. I asked Joe whether he had heard if any of the other relations
+had any legacies?
+
+“Miss Sarah,” said Joe, “she have twenty-five pound perannium fur to
+buy pills, on account of being bilious. Miss Georgiana, she have twenty
+pound down. Mrs.--what’s the name of them wild beasts with humps, old
+chap?”
+
+“Camels?” said I, wondering why he could possibly want to know.
+
+Joe nodded. “Mrs. Camels,” by which I presently understood he meant
+Camilla, “she have five pound fur to buy rushlights to put her in
+spirits when she wake up in the night.”
+
+The accuracy of these recitals was sufficiently obvious to me, to give
+me great confidence in Joe’s information. “And now,” said Joe, “you
+ain’t that strong yet, old chap, that you can take in more nor one
+additional shovelful to-day. Old Orlick he’s been a bustin’ open a
+dwelling-ouse.”
+
+“Whose?” said I.
+
+“Not, I grant you, but what his manners is given to blusterous,” said
+Joe, apologetically; “still, a Englishman’s ouse is his Castle, and
+castles must not be busted ‘cept when done in war time. And wotsume’er
+the failings on his part, he were a corn and seedsman in his hart.”
+
+“Is it Pumblechook’s house that has been broken into, then?”
+
+“That’s it, Pip,” said Joe; “and they took his till, and they took his
+cash-box, and they drinked his wine, and they partook of his wittles,
+and they slapped his face, and they pulled his nose, and they tied him
+up to his bedpust, and they giv’ him a dozen, and they stuffed his
+mouth full of flowering annuals to prewent his crying out. But he knowed
+Orlick, and Orlick’s in the county jail.”
+
+By these approaches we arrived at unrestricted conversation. I was slow
+to gain strength, but I did slowly and surely become less weak, and Joe
+stayed with me, and I fancied I was little Pip again.
+
+For the tenderness of Joe was so beautifully proportioned to my need,
+that I was like a child in his hands. He would sit and talk to me in the
+old confidence, and with the old simplicity, and in the old unassertive
+protecting way, so that I would half believe that all my life since the
+days of the old kitchen was one of the mental troubles of the fever that
+was gone. He did everything for me except the household work, for which
+he had engaged a very decent woman, after paying off the laundress on
+his first arrival. “Which I do assure you, Pip,” he would often say, in
+explanation of that liberty; “I found her a tapping the spare bed, like
+a cask of beer, and drawing off the feathers in a bucket, for sale.
+Which she would have tapped yourn next, and draw’d it off with you a
+laying on it, and was then a carrying away the coals gradiwally in
+the soup-tureen and wegetable-dishes, and the wine and spirits in your
+Wellington boots.”
+
+We looked forward to the day when I should go out for a ride, as we had
+once looked forward to the day of my apprenticeship. And when the day
+came, and an open carriage was got into the Lane, Joe wrapped me up,
+took me in his arms, carried me down to it, and put me in, as if I were
+still the small helpless creature to whom he had so abundantly given of
+the wealth of his great nature.
+
+And Joe got in beside me, and we drove away together into the country,
+where the rich summer growth was already on the trees and on the grass,
+and sweet summer scents filled all the air. The day happened to be
+Sunday, and when I looked on the loveliness around me, and thought
+how it had grown and changed, and how the little wild-flowers had been
+forming, and the voices of the birds had been strengthening, by day and
+by night, under the sun and under the stars, while poor I lay burning
+and tossing on my bed, the mere remembrance of having burned and tossed
+there came like a check upon my peace. But when I heard the Sunday
+bells, and looked around a little more upon the outspread beauty, I felt
+that I was not nearly thankful enough,--that I was too weak yet to be
+even that,--and I laid my head on Joe’s shoulder, as I had laid it long
+ago when he had taken me to the Fair or where not, and it was too much
+for my young senses.
+
+More composure came to me after a while, and we talked as we used
+to talk, lying on the grass at the old Battery. There was no change
+whatever in Joe. Exactly what he had been in my eyes then, he was in my
+eyes still; just as simply faithful, and as simply right.
+
+When we got back again, and he lifted me out, and carried me--so
+easily!--across the court and up the stairs, I thought of that eventful
+Christmas Day when he had carried me over the marshes. We had not yet
+made any allusion to my change of fortune, nor did I know how much of
+my late history he was acquainted with. I was so doubtful of myself now,
+and put so much trust in him, that I could not satisfy myself whether I
+ought to refer to it when he did not.
+
+“Have you heard, Joe,” I asked him that evening, upon further
+consideration, as he smoked his pipe at the window, “who my patron was?”
+
+“I heerd,” returned Joe, “as it were not Miss Havisham, old chap.”
+
+“Did you hear who it was, Joe?”
+
+“Well! I heerd as it were a person what sent the person what giv’ you
+the bank-notes at the Jolly Bargemen, Pip.”
+
+“So it was.”
+
+“Astonishing!” said Joe, in the placidest way.
+
+“Did you hear that he was dead, Joe?” I presently asked, with increasing
+diffidence.
+
+“Which? Him as sent the bank-notes, Pip?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“I think,” said Joe, after meditating a long time, and looking rather
+evasively at the window-seat, “as I did hear tell that how he were
+something or another in a general way in that direction.”
+
+“Did you hear anything of his circumstances, Joe?”
+
+“Not partickler, Pip.”
+
+“If you would like to hear, Joe--” I was beginning, when Joe got up and
+came to my sofa.
+
+“Lookee here, old chap,” said Joe, bending over me. “Ever the best of
+friends; ain’t us, Pip?”
+
+I was ashamed to answer him.
+
+“Wery good, then,” said Joe, as if I had answered; “that’s all right;
+that’s agreed upon. Then why go into subjects, old chap, which as
+betwixt two sech must be for ever onnecessary? There’s subjects enough
+as betwixt two sech, without onnecessary ones. Lord! To think of your
+poor sister and her Rampages! And don’t you remember Tickler?”
+
+“I do indeed, Joe.”
+
+“Lookee here, old chap,” said Joe. “I done what I could to keep you
+and Tickler in sunders, but my power were not always fully equal to my
+inclinations. For when your poor sister had a mind to drop into you, it
+were not so much,” said Joe, in his favorite argumentative way, “that
+she dropped into me too, if I put myself in opposition to her, but that
+she dropped into you always heavier for it. I noticed that. It ain’t a
+grab at a man’s whisker, not yet a shake or two of a man (to which your
+sister was quite welcome), that ‘ud put a man off from getting a little
+child out of punishment. But when that little child is dropped into
+heavier for that grab of whisker or shaking, then that man naterally up
+and says to himself, ‘Where is the good as you are a doing? I grant you
+I see the ‘arm,’ says the man, ‘but I don’t see the good. I call upon
+you, sir, therefore, to pint out the good.’”
+
+“The man says?” I observed, as Joe waited for me to speak.
+
+“The man says,” Joe assented. “Is he right, that man?”
+
+“Dear Joe, he is always right.”
+
+“Well, old chap,” said Joe, “then abide by your words. If he’s always
+right (which in general he’s more likely wrong), he’s right when he says
+this: Supposing ever you kep any little matter to yourself, when you
+was a little child, you kep it mostly because you know’d as J. Gargery’s
+power to part you and Tickler in sunders were not fully equal to his
+inclinations. Theerfore, think no more of it as betwixt two sech, and do
+not let us pass remarks upon onnecessary subjects. Biddy giv’ herself a
+deal o’ trouble with me afore I left (for I am almost awful dull), as I
+should view it in this light, and, viewing it in this light, as I should
+so put it. Both of which,” said Joe, quite charmed with his logical
+arrangement, “being done, now this to you a true friend, say. Namely.
+You mustn’t go a overdoing on it, but you must have your supper and your
+wine and water, and you must be put betwixt the sheets.”
+
+The delicacy with which Joe dismissed this theme, and the sweet tact and
+kindness with which Biddy--who with her woman’s wit had found me out so
+soon--had prepared him for it, made a deep impression on my mind. But
+whether Joe knew how poor I was, and how my great expectations had
+all dissolved, like our own marsh mists before the sun, I could not
+understand.
+
+Another thing in Joe that I could not understand when it first began to
+develop itself, but which I soon arrived at a sorrowful comprehension
+of, was this: As I became stronger and better, Joe became a little less
+easy with me. In my weakness and entire dependence on him, the dear
+fellow had fallen into the old tone, and called me by the old names,
+the dear “old Pip, old chap,” that now were music in my ears. I too had
+fallen into the old ways, only happy and thankful that he let me. But,
+imperceptibly, though I held by them fast, Joe’s hold upon them began
+to slacken; and whereas I wondered at this, at first, I soon began to
+understand that the cause of it was in me, and that the fault of it was
+all mine.
+
+Ah! Had I given Joe no reason to doubt my constancy, and to think that
+in prosperity I should grow cold to him and cast him off? Had I given
+Joe’s innocent heart no cause to feel instinctively that as I got
+stronger, his hold upon me would be weaker, and that he had better
+loosen it in time and let me go, before I plucked myself away?
+
+It was on the third or fourth occasion of my going out walking in the
+Temple Gardens leaning on Joe’s arm, that I saw this change in him very
+plainly. We had been sitting in the bright warm sunlight, looking at the
+river, and I chanced to say as we got up,--
+
+“See, Joe! I can walk quite strongly. Now, you shall see me walk back by
+myself.”
+
+“Which do not overdo it, Pip,” said Joe; “but I shall be happy fur to
+see you able, sir.”
+
+The last word grated on me; but how could I remonstrate! I walked no
+further than the gate of the gardens, and then pretended to be
+weaker than I was, and asked Joe for his arm. Joe gave it me, but was
+thoughtful.
+
+I, for my part, was thoughtful too; for, how best to check this growing
+change in Joe was a great perplexity to my remorseful thoughts. That I
+was ashamed to tell him exactly how I was placed, and what I had come
+down to, I do not seek to conceal; but I hope my reluctance was not
+quite an unworthy one. He would want to help me out of his little
+savings, I knew, and I knew that he ought not to help me, and that I
+must not suffer him to do it.
+
+It was a thoughtful evening with both of us. But, before we went to
+bed, I had resolved that I would wait over to-morrow,--to-morrow being
+Sunday,--and would begin my new course with the new week. On Monday
+morning I would speak to Joe about this change, I would lay aside this
+last vestige of reserve, I would tell him what I had in my thoughts
+(that Secondly, not yet arrived at), and why I had not decided to go
+out to Herbert, and then the change would be conquered for ever. As I
+cleared, Joe cleared, and it seemed as though he had sympathetically
+arrived at a resolution too.
+
+We had a quiet day on the Sunday, and we rode out into the country, and
+then walked in the fields.
+
+“I feel thankful that I have been ill, Joe,” I said.
+
+“Dear old Pip, old chap, you’re a’most come round, sir.”
+
+“It has been a memorable time for me, Joe.”
+
+“Likeways for myself, sir,” Joe returned.
+
+“We have had a time together, Joe, that I can never forget. There were
+days once, I know, that I did for a while forget; but I never shall
+forget these.”
+
+“Pip,” said Joe, appearing a little hurried and troubled, “there has
+been larks. And, dear sir, what have been betwixt us--have been.”
+
+At night, when I had gone to bed, Joe came into my room, as he had done
+all through my recovery. He asked me if I felt sure that I was as well
+as in the morning?
+
+“Yes, dear Joe, quite.”
+
+“And are always a getting stronger, old chap?”
+
+“Yes, dear Joe, steadily.”
+
+Joe patted the coverlet on my shoulder with his great good hand, and
+said, in what I thought a husky voice, “Good night!”
+
+When I got up in the morning, refreshed and stronger yet, I was full of
+my resolution to tell Joe all, without delay. I would tell him before
+breakfast. I would dress at once and go to his room and surprise him;
+for, it was the first day I had been up early. I went to his room, and
+he was not there. Not only was he not there, but his box was gone.
+
+I hurried then to the breakfast-table, and on it found a letter. These
+were its brief contents:--
+
+“Not wishful to intrude I have departured fur you are well again dear
+Pip and will do better without JO.
+
+“P.S. Ever the best of friends.”
+
+Enclosed in the letter was a receipt for the debt and costs on which I
+had been arrested. Down to that moment, I had vainly supposed that my
+creditor had withdrawn, or suspended proceedings until I should be quite
+recovered. I had never dreamed of Joe’s having paid the money; but Joe
+had paid it, and the receipt was in his name.
+
+What remained for me now, but to follow him to the dear old forge, and
+there to have out my disclosure to him, and my penitent remonstrance
+with him, and there to relieve my mind and heart of that reserved
+Secondly, which had begun as a vague something lingering in my thoughts,
+and had formed into a settled purpose?
+
+The purpose was, that I would go to Biddy, that I would show her how
+humbled and repentant I came back, that I would tell her how I had lost
+all I once hoped for, that I would remind her of our old confidences in
+my first unhappy time. Then I would say to her, “Biddy, I think you once
+liked me very well, when my errant heart, even while it strayed away
+from you, was quieter and better with you than it ever has been since.
+If you can like me only half as well once more, if you can take me with
+all my faults and disappointments on my head, if you can receive me like
+a forgiven child (and indeed I am as sorry, Biddy, and have as much need
+of a hushing voice and a soothing hand), I hope I am a little worthier
+of you that I was,--not much, but a little. And, Biddy, it shall rest
+with you to say whether I shall work at the forge with Joe, or whether I
+shall try for any different occupation down in this country, or whether
+we shall go away to a distant place where an opportunity awaits me which
+I set aside, when it was offered, until I knew your answer. And now,
+dear Biddy, if you can tell me that you will go through the world with
+me, you will surely make it a better world for me, and me a better man
+for it, and I will try hard to make it a better world for you.”
+
+Such was my purpose. After three days more of recovery, I went down to
+the old place to put it in execution. And how I sped in it is all I have
+left to tell.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter LVIII
+
+The tidings of my high fortunes having had a heavy fall had got down
+to my native place and its neighborhood before I got there. I found the
+Blue Boar in possession of the intelligence, and I found that it made a
+great change in the Boar’s demeanour. Whereas the Boar had cultivated
+my good opinion with warm assiduity when I was coming into property,
+the Boar was exceedingly cool on the subject now that I was going out of
+property.
+
+It was evening when I arrived, much fatigued by the journey I had so
+often made so easily. The Boar could not put me into my usual bedroom,
+which was engaged (probably by some one who had expectations), and
+could only assign me a very indifferent chamber among the pigeons and
+post-chaises up the yard. But I had as sound a sleep in that lodging as
+in the most superior accommodation the Boar could have given me, and the
+quality of my dreams was about the same as in the best bedroom.
+
+Early in the morning, while my breakfast was getting ready, I strolled
+round by Satis House. There were printed bills on the gate and on bits
+of carpet hanging out of the windows, announcing a sale by auction of
+the Household Furniture and Effects, next week. The House itself was to
+be sold as old building materials, and pulled down. LOT 1 was marked in
+whitewashed knock-knee letters on the brew house; LOT 2 on that part of
+the main building which had been so long shut up. Other lots were marked
+off on other parts of the structure, and the ivy had been torn down to
+make room for the inscriptions, and much of it trailed low in the dust
+and was withered already. Stepping in for a moment at the open gate, and
+looking around me with the uncomfortable air of a stranger who had no
+business there, I saw the auctioneer’s clerk walking on the casks and
+telling them off for the information of a catalogue-compiler, pen in
+hand, who made a temporary desk of the wheeled chair I had so often
+pushed along to the tune of Old Clem.
+
+When I got back to my breakfast in the Boar’s coffee-room, I found Mr.
+Pumblechook conversing with the landlord. Mr. Pumblechook (not improved
+in appearance by his late nocturnal adventure) was waiting for me, and
+addressed me in the following terms:--
+
+“Young man, I am sorry to see you brought low. But what else could be
+expected! what else could be expected!”
+
+As he extended his hand with a magnificently forgiving air, and as I was
+broken by illness and unfit to quarrel, I took it.
+
+“William,” said Mr. Pumblechook to the waiter, “put a muffin on table.
+And has it come to this! Has it come to this!”
+
+I frowningly sat down to my breakfast. Mr. Pumblechook stood over me and
+poured out my tea--before I could touch the teapot--with the air of a
+benefactor who was resolved to be true to the last.
+
+“William,” said Mr. Pumblechook, mournfully, “put the salt on. In
+happier times,” addressing me, “I think you took sugar? And did you take
+milk? You did. Sugar and milk. William, bring a watercress.”
+
+“Thank you,” said I, shortly, “but I don’t eat watercresses.”
+
+“You don’t eat ‘em,” returned Mr. Pumblechook, sighing and nodding
+his head several times, as if he might have expected that, and as if
+abstinence from watercresses were consistent with my downfall. “True.
+The simple fruits of the earth. No. You needn’t bring any, William.”
+
+I went on with my breakfast, and Mr. Pumblechook continued to stand over
+me, staring fishily and breathing noisily, as he always did.
+
+“Little more than skin and bone!” mused Mr. Pumblechook, aloud. “And yet
+when he went from here (I may say with my blessing), and I spread afore
+him my humble store, like the Bee, he was as plump as a Peach!”
+
+This reminded me of the wonderful difference between the servile manner
+in which he had offered his hand in my new prosperity, saying, “May I?”
+ and the ostentatious clemency with which he had just now exhibited the
+same fat five fingers.
+
+“Hah!” he went on, handing me the bread and butter. “And air you a going
+to Joseph?”
+
+“In heaven’s name,” said I, firing in spite of myself, “what does it
+matter to you where I am going? Leave that teapot alone.”
+
+It was the worst course I could have taken, because it gave Pumblechook
+the opportunity he wanted.
+
+“Yes, young man,” said he, releasing the handle of the article in
+question, retiring a step or two from my table, and speaking for the
+behoof of the landlord and waiter at the door, “I will leave that teapot
+alone. You are right, young man. For once you are right. I forgit myself
+when I take such an interest in your breakfast, as to wish your frame,
+exhausted by the debilitating effects of prodigygality, to be stimilated
+by the ‘olesome nourishment of your forefathers. And yet,” said
+Pumblechook, turning to the landlord and waiter, and pointing me out at
+arm’s length, “this is him as I ever sported with in his days of happy
+infancy! Tell me not it cannot be; I tell you this is him!”
+
+A low murmur from the two replied. The waiter appeared to be
+particularly affected.
+
+“This is him,” said Pumblechook, “as I have rode in my shay-cart. This
+is him as I have seen brought up by hand. This is him untoe the sister
+of which I was uncle by marriage, as her name was Georgiana M’ria from
+her own mother, let him deny it if he can!”
+
+The waiter seemed convinced that I could not deny it, and that it gave
+the case a black look.
+
+“Young man,” said Pumblechook, screwing his head at me in the old
+fashion, “you air a going to Joseph. What does it matter to me, you
+ask me, where you air a going? I say to you, Sir, you air a going to
+Joseph.”
+
+The waiter coughed, as if he modestly invited me to get over that.
+
+“Now,” said Pumblechook, and all this with a most exasperating air
+of saying in the cause of virtue what was perfectly convincing and
+conclusive, “I will tell you what to say to Joseph. Here is Squires of
+the Boar present, known and respected in this town, and here is William,
+which his father’s name was Potkins if I do not deceive myself.”
+
+“You do not, sir,” said William.
+
+“In their presence,” pursued Pumblechook, “I will tell you, young
+man, what to say to Joseph. Says you, “Joseph, I have this day seen
+my earliest benefactor and the founder of my fortun’s. I will name no
+names, Joseph, but so they are pleased to call him up town, and I have
+seen that man.”
+
+“I swear I don’t see him here,” said I.
+
+“Say that likewise,” retorted Pumblechook. “Say you said that, and even
+Joseph will probably betray surprise.”
+
+“There you quite mistake him,” said I. “I know better.”
+
+“Says you,” Pumblechook went on, “‘Joseph, I have seen that man, and
+that man bears you no malice and bears me no malice. He knows your
+character, Joseph, and is well acquainted with your pig-headedness and
+ignorance; and he knows my character, Joseph, and he knows my want of
+gratitoode. Yes, Joseph,’ says you,” here Pumblechook shook his head and
+hand at me, “‘he knows my total deficiency of common human gratitoode.
+He knows it, Joseph, as none can. You do not know it, Joseph, having no
+call to know it, but that man do.’”
+
+Windy donkey as he was, it really amazed me that he could have the face
+to talk thus to mine.
+
+“Says you, ‘Joseph, he gave me a little message, which I will now
+repeat. It was that, in my being brought low, he saw the finger of
+Providence. He knowed that finger when he saw Joseph, and he saw it
+plain. It pinted out this writing, Joseph. Reward of ingratitoode to his
+earliest benefactor, and founder of fortun’s. But that man said he did
+not repent of what he had done, Joseph. Not at all. It was right to do
+it, it was kind to do it, it was benevolent to do it, and he would do it
+again.’”
+
+“It’s pity,” said I, scornfully, as I finished my interrupted breakfast,
+“that the man did not say what he had done and would do again.”
+
+“Squires of the Boar!” Pumblechook was now addressing the landlord, “and
+William! I have no objections to your mentioning, either up town or down
+town, if such should be your wishes, that it was right to do it, kind to
+do it, benevolent to do it, and that I would do it again.”
+
+With those words the Impostor shook them both by the hand, with an air,
+and left the house; leaving me much more astonished than delighted by
+the virtues of that same indefinite “it.” I was not long after him in
+leaving the house too, and when I went down the High Street I saw him
+holding forth (no doubt to the same effect) at his shop door to a select
+group, who honored me with very unfavorable glances as I passed on the
+opposite side of the way.
+
+But, it was only the pleasanter to turn to Biddy and to Joe, whose
+great forbearance shone more brightly than before, if that could be,
+contrasted with this brazen pretender. I went towards them slowly, for
+my limbs were weak, but with a sense of increasing relief as I drew
+nearer to them, and a sense of leaving arrogance and untruthfulness
+further and further behind.
+
+The June weather was delicious. The sky was blue, the larks were soaring
+high over the green corn, I thought all that countryside more beautiful
+and peaceful by far than I had ever known it to be yet. Many pleasant
+pictures of the life that I would lead there, and of the change for the
+better that would come over my character when I had a guiding spirit at
+my side whose simple faith and clear home wisdom I had proved, beguiled
+my way. They awakened a tender emotion in me; for my heart was softened
+by my return, and such a change had come to pass, that I felt like one
+who was toiling home barefoot from distant travel, and whose wanderings
+had lasted many years.
+
+The schoolhouse where Biddy was mistress I had never seen; but, the
+little roundabout lane by which I entered the village, for quietness’
+sake, took me past it. I was disappointed to find that the day was a
+holiday; no children were there, and Biddy’s house was closed. Some
+hopeful notion of seeing her, busily engaged in her daily duties, before
+she saw me, had been in my mind and was defeated.
+
+But the forge was a very short distance off, and I went towards it under
+the sweet green limes, listening for the clink of Joe’s hammer. Long
+after I ought to have heard it, and long after I had fancied I heard it
+and found it but a fancy, all was still. The limes were there, and the
+white thorns were there, and the chestnut-trees were there, and their
+leaves rustled harmoniously when I stopped to listen; but, the clink of
+Joe’s hammer was not in the midsummer wind.
+
+Almost fearing, without knowing why, to come in view of the forge, I saw
+it at last, and saw that it was closed. No gleam of fire, no glittering
+shower of sparks, no roar of bellows; all shut up, and still.
+
+But the house was not deserted, and the best parlor seemed to be in use,
+for there were white curtains fluttering in its window, and the window
+was open and gay with flowers. I went softly towards it, meaning to peep
+over the flowers, when Joe and Biddy stood before me, arm in arm.
+
+At first Biddy gave a cry, as if she thought it was my apparition, but
+in another moment she was in my embrace. I wept to see her, and she wept
+to see me; I, because she looked so fresh and pleasant; she, because I
+looked so worn and white.
+
+“But dear Biddy, how smart you are!”
+
+“Yes, dear Pip.”
+
+“And Joe, how smart you are!”
+
+“Yes, dear old Pip, old chap.”
+
+I looked at both of them, from one to the other, and then--
+
+“It’s my wedding-day!” cried Biddy, in a burst of happiness, “and I am
+married to Joe!”
+
+They had taken me into the kitchen, and I had laid my head down on
+the old deal table. Biddy held one of my hands to her lips, and Joe’s
+restoring touch was on my shoulder. “Which he warn’t strong enough, my
+dear, fur to be surprised,” said Joe. And Biddy said, “I ought to
+have thought of it, dear Joe, but I was too happy.” They were both so
+overjoyed to see me, so proud to see me, so touched by my coming to
+them, so delighted that I should have come by accident to make their day
+complete!
+
+My first thought was one of great thankfulness that I had never breathed
+this last baffled hope to Joe. How often, while he was with me in my
+illness, had it risen to my lips! How irrevocable would have been his
+knowledge of it, if he had remained with me but another hour!
+
+“Dear Biddy,” said I, “you have the best husband in the whole world,
+and if you could have seen him by my bed you would have--But no, you
+couldn’t love him better than you do.”
+
+“No, I couldn’t indeed,” said Biddy.
+
+“And, dear Joe, you have the best wife in the whole world, and she will
+make you as happy as even you deserve to be, you dear, good, noble Joe!”
+
+Joe looked at me with a quivering lip, and fairly put his sleeve before
+his eyes.
+
+“And Joe and Biddy both, as you have been to church to-day, and are in
+charity and love with all mankind, receive my humble thanks for all you
+have done for me, and all I have so ill repaid! And when I say that I am
+going away within the hour, for I am soon going abroad, and that I shall
+never rest until I have worked for the money with which you have kept me
+out of prison, and have sent it to you, don’t think, dear Joe and Biddy,
+that if I could repay it a thousand times over, I suppose I could cancel
+a farthing of the debt I owe you, or that I would do so if I could!”
+
+They were both melted by these words, and both entreated me to say no
+more.
+
+“But I must say more. Dear Joe, I hope you will have children to love,
+and that some little fellow will sit in this chimney-corner of a winter
+night, who may remind you of another little fellow gone out of it for
+ever. Don’t tell him, Joe, that I was thankless; don’t tell him, Biddy,
+that I was ungenerous and unjust; only tell him that I honored you both,
+because you were both so good and true, and that, as your child, I said
+it would be natural to him to grow up a much better man than I did.”
+
+“I ain’t a going,” said Joe, from behind his sleeve, “to tell him
+nothink o’ that natur, Pip. Nor Biddy ain’t. Nor yet no one ain’t.”
+
+“And now, though I know you have already done it in your own kind
+hearts, pray tell me, both, that you forgive me! Pray let me hear you
+say the words, that I may carry the sound of them away with me, and then
+I shall be able to believe that you can trust me, and think better of
+me, in the time to come!”
+
+“O dear old Pip, old chap,” said Joe. “God knows as I forgive you, if I
+have anythink to forgive!”
+
+“Amen! And God knows I do!” echoed Biddy.
+
+“Now let me go up and look at my old little room, and rest there a few
+minutes by myself. And then, when I have eaten and drunk with you, go
+with me as far as the finger-post, dear Joe and Biddy, before we say
+good-bye!”
+
+***
+
+I sold all I had, and put aside as much as I could, for a composition
+with my creditors,--who gave me ample time to pay them in full,--and I
+went out and joined Herbert. Within a month, I had quitted England,
+and within two months I was clerk to Clarriker and Co., and within four
+months I assumed my first undivided responsibility. For the beam across
+the parlor ceiling at Mill Pond Bank had then ceased to tremble under
+old Bill Barley’s growls and was at peace, and Herbert had gone away to
+marry Clara, and I was left in sole charge of the Eastern Branch until
+he brought her back.
+
+Many a year went round before I was a partner in the House; but I lived
+happily with Herbert and his wife, and lived frugally, and paid my
+debts, and maintained a constant correspondence with Biddy and Joe. It
+was not until I became third in the Firm, that Clarriker betrayed me to
+Herbert; but he then declared that the secret of Herbert’s partnership
+had been long enough upon his conscience, and he must tell it. So he
+told it, and Herbert was as much moved as amazed, and the dear fellow
+and I were not the worse friends for the long concealment. I must not
+leave it to be supposed that we were ever a great House, or that we made
+mints of money. We were not in a grand way of business, but we had a
+good name, and worked for our profits, and did very well. We owed so
+much to Herbert’s ever cheerful industry and readiness, that I often
+wondered how I had conceived that old idea of his inaptitude, until I
+was one day enlightened by the reflection, that perhaps the inaptitude
+had never been in him at all, but had been in me.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter LIX
+
+For eleven years, I had not seen Joe nor Biddy with my bodily
+eyes,--though they had both been often before my fancy in the
+East,--when, upon an evening in December, an hour or two after dark, I
+laid my hand softly on the latch of the old kitchen door. I touched it
+so softly that I was not heard, and looked in unseen. There, smoking his
+pipe in the old place by the kitchen firelight, as hale and as strong as
+ever, though a little gray, sat Joe; and there, fenced into the corner
+with Joe’s leg, and sitting on my own little stool looking at the fire,
+was--I again!
+
+“We giv’ him the name of Pip for your sake, dear old chap,” said Joe,
+delighted, when I took another stool by the child’s side (but I did not
+rumple his hair), “and we hoped he might grow a little bit like you, and
+we think he do.”
+
+I thought so too, and I took him out for a walk next morning, and we
+talked immensely, understanding one another to perfection. And I took
+him down to the churchyard, and set him on a certain tombstone there,
+and he showed me from that elevation which stone was sacred to the
+memory of Philip Pirrip, late of this Parish, and Also Georgiana, Wife
+of the Above.
+
+“Biddy,” said I, when I talked with her after dinner, as her little girl
+lay sleeping in her lap, “you must give Pip to me one of these days; or
+lend him, at all events.”
+
+“No, no,” said Biddy, gently. “You must marry.”
+
+“So Herbert and Clara say, but I don’t think I shall, Biddy. I have so
+settled down in their home, that it’s not at all likely. I am already
+quite an old bachelor.”
+
+Biddy looked down at her child, and put its little hand to her lips, and
+then put the good matronly hand with which she had touched it into mine.
+There was something in the action, and in the light pressure of Biddy’s
+wedding-ring, that had a very pretty eloquence in it.
+
+“Dear Pip,” said Biddy, “you are sure you don’t fret for her?”
+
+“O no,--I think not, Biddy.”
+
+“Tell me as an old, old friend. Have you quite forgotten her?
+
+“My dear Biddy, I have forgotten nothing in my life that ever had a
+foremost place there, and little that ever had any place there. But that
+poor dream, as I once used to call it, has all gone by, Biddy,--all gone
+by!”
+
+Nevertheless, I knew, while I said those words, that I secretly intended
+to revisit the site of the old house that evening, alone, for her sake.
+Yes, even so. For Estella’s sake.
+
+I had heard of her as leading a most unhappy life, and as being
+separated from her husband, who had used her with great cruelty, and who
+had become quite renowned as a compound of pride, avarice, brutality,
+and meanness. And I had heard of the death of her husband, from an
+accident consequent on his ill-treatment of a horse. This release had
+befallen her some two years before; for anything I knew, she was married
+again.
+
+The early dinner hour at Joe’s, left me abundance of time, without
+hurrying my talk with Biddy, to walk over to the old spot before dark.
+But, what with loitering on the way to look at old objects and to think
+of old times, the day had quite declined when I came to the place.
+
+There was no house now, no brewery, no building whatever left, but the
+wall of the old garden. The cleared space had been enclosed with a rough
+fence, and looking over it, I saw that some of the old ivy had struck
+root anew, and was growing green on low quiet mounds of ruin. A gate in
+the fence standing ajar, I pushed it open, and went in.
+
+A cold silvery mist had veiled the afternoon, and the moon was not yet
+up to scatter it. But, the stars were shining beyond the mist, and the
+moon was coming, and the evening was not dark. I could trace out where
+every part of the old house had been, and where the brewery had been,
+and where the gates, and where the casks. I had done so, and was looking
+along the desolate garden walk, when I beheld a solitary figure in it.
+
+The figure showed itself aware of me, as I advanced. It had been moving
+towards me, but it stood still. As I drew nearer, I saw it to be the
+figure of a woman. As I drew nearer yet, it was about to turn away, when
+it stopped, and let me come up with it. Then, it faltered, as if much
+surprised, and uttered my name, and I cried out,--
+
+“Estella!”
+
+“I am greatly changed. I wonder you know me.”
+
+The freshness of her beauty was indeed gone, but its indescribable
+majesty and its indescribable charm remained. Those attractions in it,
+I had seen before; what I had never seen before, was the saddened,
+softened light of the once proud eyes; what I had never felt before was
+the friendly touch of the once insensible hand.
+
+We sat down on a bench that was near, and I said, “After so many years,
+it is strange that we should thus meet again, Estella, here where our
+first meeting was! Do you often come back?”
+
+“I have never been here since.”
+
+“Nor I.”
+
+The moon began to rise, and I thought of the placid look at the white
+ceiling, which had passed away. The moon began to rise, and I thought of
+the pressure on my hand when I had spoken the last words he had heard on
+earth.
+
+Estella was the next to break the silence that ensued between us.
+
+“I have very often hoped and intended to come back, but have been
+prevented by many circumstances. Poor, poor old place!”
+
+The silvery mist was touched with the first rays of the moonlight, and
+the same rays touched the tears that dropped from her eyes. Not knowing
+that I saw them, and setting herself to get the better of them, she said
+quietly,--
+
+“Were you wondering, as you walked along, how it came to be left in this
+condition?”
+
+“Yes, Estella.”
+
+“The ground belongs to me. It is the only possession I have not
+relinquished. Everything else has gone from me, little by little, but I
+have kept this. It was the subject of the only determined resistance I
+made in all the wretched years.”
+
+“Is it to be built on?”
+
+“At last, it is. I came here to take leave of it before its change. And
+you,” she said, in a voice of touching interest to a wanderer,--“you
+live abroad still?”
+
+“Still.”
+
+“And do well, I am sure?”
+
+“I work pretty hard for a sufficient living, and therefore--yes, I do
+well.”
+
+“I have often thought of you,” said Estella.
+
+“Have you?”
+
+“Of late, very often. There was a long hard time when I kept far from me
+the remembrance of what I had thrown away when I was quite ignorant
+of its worth. But since my duty has not been incompatible with the
+admission of that remembrance, I have given it a place in my heart.”
+
+“You have always held your place in my heart,” I answered.
+
+And we were silent again until she spoke.
+
+“I little thought,” said Estella, “that I should take leave of you in
+taking leave of this spot. I am very glad to do so.”
+
+“Glad to part again, Estella? To me, parting is a painful thing. To me,
+the remembrance of our last parting has been ever mournful and painful.”
+
+“But you said to me,” returned Estella, very earnestly, “‘God bless you,
+God forgive you!’ And if you could say that to me then, you will not
+hesitate to say that to me now,--now, when suffering has been stronger
+than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart
+used to be. I have been bent and broken, but--I hope--into a better
+shape. Be as considerate and good to me as you were, and tell me we are
+friends.”
+
+“We are friends,” said I, rising and bending over her, as she rose from
+the bench.
+
+“And will continue friends apart,” said Estella.
+
+I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as
+the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so the
+evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil
+light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.
+
projects / gender-roles-text-analysis.git / blobdiff