Great Expectations
should certainly not have gone, but for the reference to my Uncle
Provis. That, coming on Wemmick’s letter and the morning’s busy
preparation, turned the scale.
It is so difficult to become clearly possessed of the contents of
almost any letter, in a violent hurry, that I had to read this
mysterious epistle again twice, before its injunction to me to be
secret got mechanically into my mind. Yielding to it in the same
mechanical kind of way, I left a note in pencil for Herbert, telling
him that as I should be so soon going away, I knew not for how long, I
had decided to hurry down and back, to ascertain for myself how Miss
Havisham was faring. I had then barely time to get my great-coat, lock
up the chambers, and make for the coach-office by the short by-ways. If
I had taken a hackney-chariot and gone by the streets, I should have
missed my aim; going as I did, I caught the coach just as it came out
of the yard. I was the only inside passenger, jolting away knee-deep in
straw, when I came to myself.
For I really had not been myself since the receipt of the letter; it
had so bewildered me, ensuing on the hurry of the morning. The morning
hurry and flutter had been great; for, long and anxiously as I had
waited for Wemmick, his hint had come like a surprise at last. And now
I began to wonder at myself for being in the coach, and to doubt
whether I had sufficient reason for being there, and to consider
whether I should get out presently and go back, and to argue against
ever heeding an anonymous communication, and, in short, to pass through
all those phases of contradiction and indecision to which I suppose
very few hurried people are strangers. Still, the reference to Provis
by name mastered everything. I reasoned as I had reasoned already
without knowing it,—if that be reasoning,—in case any harm should
befall him through my not going, how could I ever forgive myself!
It was dark before we got down, and the journey seemed long and dreary
to me, who could see little of it inside, and who could not go outside
in my disabled state. Avoiding the Blue Boar, I put up at an inn of
minor reputation down the town, and ordered some dinner. While it was
preparing, I went to Satis House and inquired for Miss Havisham; she
was still very ill, though considered something better.
My inn had once been a part of an ancient ecclesiastical house, and I
dined in a little octagonal common-room, like a font. As I was not able
to cut my dinner, the old landlord with a shining bald head did it for
me. This bringing us into conversation, he was so good as to entertain
me with my own story,—of course with the popular feature that
Pumblechook was my earliest benefactor and the founder of my fortunes.
“Do you know the young man?” said I.
“Know him!” repeated the landlord. “Ever since he was—no height at
all.”
“Does he ever come back to this neighbourhood?”
“Ay, he comes back,” said the landlord, “to his great friends, now and
again, and gives the cold shoulder to the man that made him.”
“What man is that?”
“Him that I speak of,” said the landlord. “Mr. Pumblechook.”
“Is he ungrateful to no one else?”
“No doubt he would be, if he could,” returned the landlord, “but he
can’t. And why? Because Pumblechook done everything for him.”
“Does Pumblechook say so?”
“Say so!” replied the landlord. “He han’t no call to say so.”
“But does he say so?”
“It would turn a man’s blood to white wine winegar to hear him tell of
it, sir,” said the landlord.
I thought, “Yet Joe, dear Joe, _you_ never tell of it. Long-suffering
and loving Joe, _you_ never complain. Nor you, sweet-tempered Biddy!”
“Your appetite’s been touched like by your accident,” said the
landlord, glancing at the bandaged arm under my coat. “Try a tenderer
bit.”
“No, thank you,” I replied, turning from the table to brood over the
fire. “I can eat no more. Please take it away.”
I had never been struck at so keenly, for my thanklessness to Joe, as
through the brazen impostor Pumblechook. The falser he, the truer Joe;
the meaner he, the nobler Joe.
My heart was deeply and most deservedly humbled as I mused over the
fire for an hour or more. The striking of the clock aroused me, but not
from my dejection or remorse, and I got up and had my coat fastened
round my neck, and went out. I had previously sought in my pockets for
the letter, that I might refer to it again; but I could not find it,
and was uneasy to think that it must have been dropped in the straw of
the coach. I knew very well, however, that the appointed place was the
little sluice-house by the limekiln on the marshes, and the hour nine.
Towards the marshes I now went straight, having no time to spare.
Chapter LIII.
It was a dark night, though the full moon rose as I left the enclosed
lands, and passed out upon the marshes. Beyond their dark line there
was a ribbon of clear sky, hardly broad enough to hold the red large
moon. In a few minutes she had ascended out of that clear field, in
among the piled mountains of cloud.
There was a melancholy wind, and the marshes were very dismal. A
stranger would have found them insupportable, and even to me they were
so oppressive that I hesitated, half inclined to go back. But I knew
them well, and could have found my way on a far darker night, and had
no excuse for returning, being there. So, having come there against my
inclination, I went on against it.
The direction that I took was not that in which my old home lay, nor
that in which we had pursued the convicts. My back was turned towards
the distant Hulks as I walked on, and, though I could see the old
lights away on the spits of sand, I saw them over my shoulder. I knew
the limekiln as well as I knew the old Battery, but they were miles
apart; so that, if a light had been burning at each point that night,
there would have been a long strip of the blank horizon between the two
bright specks.
At first, I had to shut some gates after me, and now and then to stand
still while the cattle that were lying in the banked-up pathway arose
and blundered down among the grass and reeds. But after a little while
I seemed to have the whole flats to myself.
It was another half-hour before I drew near to the kiln. The lime was
burning with a sluggish stifling smell, but the fires were made up and
left, and no workmen were visible. Hard by was a small stone-quarry. It
lay directly in my way, and had been worked that day, as I saw by the
tools and barrows that were lying about.
Coming up again to the marsh level out of this excavation,—for the rude
path lay through it,—I saw a light in the old sluice-house. I quickened
my pace, and knocked at the door with my hand. Waiting for some reply,
I looked about me, noticing how the sluice was abandoned and broken,
and how the house—of wood with a tiled roof—would not be proof against
the weather much longer, if it were so even now, and how the mud and
ooze were coated with lime, and how the choking vapour of the kiln
crept in a ghostly way towards me. Still there was no answer, and I
knocked again. No answer still, and I tried the latch.
It rose under my hand, and the door yielded. Looking in, I saw a
lighted candle on a table, a bench, and a mattress on a truckle
bedstead. As there was a loft above, I called, “Is there any one here?”
but no voice answered. Then I looked at my watch, and, finding that it
was past nine, called again, “Is there any one here?” There being still
no answer, I went out at the door, irresolute what to do.
It was beginning to rain fast. Seeing nothing save what I had seen
already, I turned back into the house, and stood just within the
shelter of the doorway, looking out into the night. While I was
considering that some one must have been there lately and must soon be
coming back, or the candle would not be burning, it came into my head
to look if the wick were long. I turned round to do so, and had taken
up the candle in my hand, when it was extinguished by some violent
shock; and the next thing I comprehended was, that I had been caught in
a strong running noose, thrown over my head from behind.
“Now,” said a suppressed voice with an oath, “I’ve got you!”
“What is this?” I cried, struggling. “Who is it? Help, help, help!”
Not only were my arms pulled close to my sides, but the pressure on my
bad arm caused me exquisite pain. Sometimes, a strong man’s hand,
sometimes a strong man’s breast, was set against my mouth to deaden my
cries, and with a hot breath always close to me, I struggled
ineffectually in the dark, while I was fastened tight to the wall. “And
now,” said the suppressed voice with another oath, “call out again, and
I’ll make short work of you!”
Faint and sick with the pain of my injured arm, bewildered by the
surprise, and yet conscious how easily this threat could be put in
execution, I desisted, and tried to ease my arm were it ever so little.
But, it was bound too tight for that. I felt as if, having been burnt
before, it were now being boiled.
The sudden exclusion of the night, and the substitution of black
darkness in its place, warned me that the man had closed a shutter.
After groping about for a little, he found the flint and steel he
wanted, and began to strike a light. I strained my sight upon the
sparks that fell among the tinder, and upon which he breathed and
breathed, match in hand, but I could only see his lips, and the blue
point of the match; even those but fitfully. The tinder was damp,—no
wonder there,—and one after another the sparks died out.
The man was in no hurry, and struck again with the flint and steel. As
the sparks fell thick and bright about him, I could see his hands, and
touches of his face, and could make out that he was seated and bending
over the table; but nothing more. Presently I saw his blue lips again,
breathing on the tinder, and then a flare of light flashed up, and
showed me Orlick.
Whom I had looked for, I don’t know. I had not looked for him. Seeing
him, I felt that I was in a dangerous strait indeed, and I kept my eyes
upon him.
He lighted the candle from the flaring match with great deliberation,
and dropped the match, and trod it out. Then he put the candle away
from him on the table, so that he could see me, and sat with his arms
folded on the table and looked at me. I made out that I was fastened to
a stout perpendicular ladder a few inches from the wall,—a fixture
there,—the means of ascent to the loft above.
“Now,” said he, when we had surveyed one another for some time, “I’ve
got you.”
“Unbind me. Let me go!”
“Ah!” he returned, “_I_’ll let you go. I’ll let you go to the moon,
I’ll let you go to the stars. All in good time.”
“Why have you lured me here?”
“Don’t you know?” said he, with a deadly look.
“Why have you set upon me in the dark?”
“Because I mean to do it all myself. One keeps a secret better than
two. O you enemy, you enemy!”
His enjoyment of the spectacle I furnished, as he sat with his arms
folded on the table, shaking his head at me and hugging himself, had a
malignity in it that made me tremble. As I watched him in silence, he
put his hand into the corner at his side, and took up a gun with a
brass-bound stock.
“Do you know this?” said he, making as if he would take aim at me. “Do
you know where you saw it afore? Speak, wolf!”
“Yes,” I answered.
“You cost me that place. You did. Speak!”
“What else could I do?”
“You did that, and that would be enough, without more. How dared you to
come betwixt me and a young woman I liked?”
“When did I?”
“When didn’t you? It was you as always give Old Orlick a bad name to
her.”
“You gave it to yourself; you gained it for yourself. I could have done
you no harm, if you had done yourself none.”