Great Expectations
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 arbour; 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 arbour 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 recognised 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 recognised anybody, or took notice that anybody
recognised 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