Great Expectations
“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