Great Expectations
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
colours, 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!”