Great Expectations
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 parlour. 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 in to 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-labourer 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