Great Expectations
and blows were being struck, when some more men went down into the
ditch to help the sergeant, and dragged out, separately, my convict and
the other one. Both were bleeding and panting and execrating and
struggling; but of course I knew them both directly.
“Mind!” said my convict, wiping blood from his face with his ragged
sleeves, and shaking torn hair from his fingers: “_I_ took him! _I_
give him up to you! Mind that!”
“It’s not much to be particular about,” said the sergeant; “it’ll do
you small good, my man, being in the same plight yourself. Handcuffs
there!”
“I don’t expect it to do me any good. I don’t want it to do me more
good than it does now,” said my convict, with a greedy laugh. “I took
him. He knows it. That’s enough for me.”
The other convict was livid to look at, and, in addition to the old
bruised left side of his face, seemed to be bruised and torn all over.
He could not so much as get his breath to speak, until they were both
separately handcuffed, but leaned upon a soldier to keep himself from
falling.
“Take notice, guard,—he tried to murder me,” were his first words.
“Tried to murder him?” said my convict, disdainfully. “Try, and not do
it? I took him, and giv’ him up; that’s what I done. I not only
prevented him getting off the marshes, but I dragged him here,—dragged
him this far on his way back. He’s a gentleman, if you please, this
villain. Now, the Hulks has got its gentleman again, through me. Murder
him? Worth my while, too, to murder him, when I could do worse and drag
him back!”
The other one still gasped, “He tried—he tried-to—murder me. Bear—bear
witness.”
“Lookee here!” said my convict to the sergeant. “Single-handed I got
clear of the prison-ship; I made a dash and I done it. I could ha’ got
clear of these death-cold flats likewise—look at my leg: you won’t find
much iron on it—if I hadn’t made the discovery that _he_ was here. Let
_him_ go free? Let _him_ profit by the means as I found out? Let _him_
make a tool of me afresh and again? Once more? No, no, no. If I had
died at the bottom there,” and he made an emphatic swing at the ditch
with his manacled hands, “I’d have held to him with that grip, that you
should have been safe to find him in my hold.”
The other fugitive, who was evidently in extreme horror of his
companion, repeated, “He tried to murder me. I should have been a dead
man if you had not come up.”
“He lies!” said my convict, with fierce energy. “He’s a liar born, and
he’ll die a liar. Look at his face; ain’t it written there? Let him
turn those eyes of his on me. I defy him to do it.”
The other, with an effort at a scornful smile, which could not,
however, collect the nervous working of his mouth into any set
expression, looked at the soldiers, and looked about at the marshes and
at the sky, but certainly did not look at the speaker.
“Do you see him?” pursued my convict. “Do you see what a villain he is?
Do you see those grovelling and wandering eyes? That’s how he looked
when we were tried together. He never looked at me.”
The other, always working and working his dry lips and turning his eyes
restlessly about him far and near, did at last turn them for a moment
on the speaker, with the words, “You are not much to look at,” and with
a half-taunting glance at the bound hands. At that point, my convict
became so frantically exasperated, that he would have rushed upon him
but for the interposition of the soldiers. “Didn’t I tell you,” said
the other convict then, “that he would murder me, if he could?” And any
one could see that he shook with fear, and that there broke out upon
his lips curious white flakes, like thin snow.
“Enough of this parley,” said the sergeant. “Light those torches.”
As one of the soldiers, who carried a basket in lieu of a gun, went
down on his knee to open it, my convict looked round him for the first
time, and saw me. I had alighted from Joe’s back on the brink of the
ditch when we came up, and had not moved since. I looked at him eagerly
when he looked at me, and slightly moved my hands and shook my head. I
had been waiting for him to see me that I might try to assure him of my
innocence. It was not at all expressed to me that he even comprehended
my intention, for he gave me a look that I did not understand, and it
all passed in a moment. But if he had looked at me for an hour or for a
day, I could not have remembered his face ever afterwards, as having
been more attentive.
The soldier with the basket soon got a light, and lighted three or four
torches, and took one himself and distributed the others. It had been
almost dark before, but now it seemed quite dark, and soon afterwards
very dark. Before we departed from that spot, four soldiers standing in
a ring, fired twice into the air. Presently we saw other torches
kindled at some distance behind us, and others on the marshes on the
opposite bank of the river. “All right,” said the sergeant. “March.”
We had not gone far when three cannon were fired ahead of us with a
sound that seemed to burst something inside my ear. “You are expected
on board,” said the sergeant to my convict; “they know you are coming.
Don’t straggle, my man. Close up here.”
The two were kept apart, and each walked surrounded by a separate
guard. I had hold of Joe’s hand now, and Joe carried one of the
torches. Mr. Wopsle had been for going back, but Joe was resolved to
see it out, so we went on with the party. There was a reasonably good
path now, mostly on the edge of the river, with a divergence here and
there where a dike came, with a miniature windmill on it and a muddy
sluice-gate. When I looked round, I could see the other lights coming
in after us. The torches we carried dropped great blotches of fire upon
the track, and I could see those, too, lying smoking and flaring. I
could see nothing else but black darkness. Our lights warmed the air
about us with their pitchy blaze, and the two prisoners seemed rather
to like that, as they limped along in the midst of the muskets. We
could not go fast, because of their lameness; and they were so spent,
that two or three times we had to halt while they rested.
After an hour or so of this travelling, we came to a rough wooden hut
and a landing-place. There was a guard in the hut, and they challenged,
and the sergeant answered. Then, we went into the hut, where there was
a smell of tobacco and whitewash, and a bright fire, and a lamp, and a
stand of muskets, and a drum, and a low wooden bedstead, like an
overgrown mangle without the machinery, capable of holding about a
dozen soldiers all at once. Three or four soldiers who lay upon it in
their great-coats were not much interested in us, but just lifted their
heads and took a sleepy stare, and then lay down again. The sergeant
made some kind of report, and some entry in a book, and then the
convict whom I call the other convict was drafted off with his guard,
to go on board first.
My convict never looked at me, except that once. While we stood in the
hut, he stood before the fire looking thoughtfully at it, or putting up
his feet by turns upon the hob, and looking thoughtfully at them as if
he pitied them for their recent adventures. Suddenly, he turned to the
sergeant, and remarked,—
“I wish to say something respecting this escape. It may prevent some
persons laying under suspicion alonger me.”
“You can say what you like,” returned the sergeant, standing coolly
looking at him with his arms folded, “but you have no call to say it
here. You’ll have opportunity enough to say about it, and hear about
it, before it’s done with, you know.”
“I know, but this is another pint, a separate matter. A man can’t
starve; at least _I_ can’t. I took some wittles, up at the willage over
yonder,—where the church stands a’most out on the marshes.”
“You mean stole,” said the sergeant.
“And I’ll tell you where from. From the blacksmith’s.”
“Halloa!” said the sergeant, staring at Joe.
“Halloa, Pip!” said Joe, staring at me.
“It was some broken wittles—that’s what it was—and a dram of liquor,
and a pie.”
“Have you happened to miss such an article as a pie, blacksmith?” asked
the sergeant, confidentially.
“My wife did, at the very moment when you came in. Don’t you know,
Pip?”
“So,” said my convict, turning his eyes on Joe in a moody manner, and
without the least glance at me,—“so you’re the blacksmith, are you?
Than I’m sorry to say, I’ve eat your pie.”
“God knows you’re welcome to it,—so far as it was ever mine,” returned
Joe, with a saving remembrance of Mrs. Joe. “We don’t know what you
have done, but we wouldn’t have you starved to death for it, poor
miserable fellow-creatur.—Would us, Pip?”
The something that I had noticed before, clicked in the man’s throat
again, and he turned his back. The boat had returned, and his guard
were ready, so we followed him to the landing-place made of rough
stakes and stones, and saw him put into the boat, which was rowed by a
crew of convicts like himself. No one seemed surprised to see him, or
interested in seeing him, or glad to see him, or sorry to see him, or
spoke a word, except that somebody in the boat growled as if to dogs,
“Give way, you!” which was the signal for the dip of the oars. By the
light of the torches, we saw the black Hulk lying out a little way from
the mud of the shore, like a wicked Noah’s ark. Cribbed and barred and
moored by massive rusty chains, the prison-ship seemed in my young eyes
to be ironed like the prisoners. We saw the boat go alongside, and we
saw him taken up the side and disappear. Then, the ends of the torches
were flung hissing into the water, and went out, as if it were all over
with him.
Chapter VI.
My state of mind regarding the pilfering from which I had been so
unexpectedly exonerated did not impel me to frank disclosure; but I
hope it had some dregs of good at the bottom of it.
I do not recall that I felt any tenderness of conscience in reference
to Mrs. Joe, when the fear of being found out was lifted off me. But I
loved Joe,—perhaps for no better reason in those early days than
because the dear fellow let me love him,—and, as to him, my inner self
was not so easily composed. It was much upon my mind (particularly when
I first saw him looking about for his file) that I ought to tell Joe
the whole truth. Yet I did not, and for the reason that I mistrusted
that if I did, he would think me worse than I was. The fear of losing
Joe’s confidence, and of thenceforth sitting in the chimney corner at
night staring drearily at my forever lost companion and friend, tied up
my tongue. I morbidly represented to myself that if Joe knew it, I
never afterwards could see him at the fireside feeling his fair
whisker, without thinking that he was meditating on it. That, if Joe
knew it, I never afterwards could see him glance, however casually, at
yesterday’s meat or pudding when it came on to-day’s table, without
thinking that he was debating whether I had been in the pantry. That,
if Joe knew it, and at any subsequent period of our joint domestic life
remarked that his beer was flat or thick, the conviction that he
suspected tar in it, would bring a rush of blood to my face. In a word,
I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too
cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong. I had had no
intercourse with the world at that time, and I imitated none of its
many inhabitants who act in this manner. Quite an untaught genius, I
made the discovery of the line of action for myself.
As I was sleepy before we were far away from the prison-ship, Joe took
me on his back again and carried me home. He must have had a tiresome
journey of it, for Mr. Wopsle, being knocked up, was in such a very bad