Great Expectations
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 parlour 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 neighbourhood (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
Honour, 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.