Great Expectations
“You’re a liar. And you’ll take any pains, and spend any money, to
drive me out of this country, will you?” said he, repeating my words to
Biddy in the last interview I had with her. “Now, I’ll tell you a piece
of information. It was never so well worth your while to get me out of
this country as it is to-night. Ah! If it was all your money twenty
times told, to the last brass farden!” As he shook his heavy hand at
me, with his mouth snarling like a tiger’s, I felt that it was true.
“What are you going to do to me?”
“I’m a-going,” said he, bringing his fist down upon the table with a
heavy blow, and rising as the blow fell to give it greater force,—“I’m
a-going to have your life!”
He leaned forward staring at me, slowly unclenched his hand and drew it
across his mouth as if his mouth watered for me, and sat down again.
“You was always in Old Orlick’s way since ever you was a child. You
goes out of his way this present night. He’ll have no more on you.
You’re dead.”
I felt that I had come to the brink of my grave. For a moment I looked
wildly round my trap for any chance of escape; but there was none.
“More than that,” said he, folding his arms on the table again, “I
won’t have a rag of you, I won’t have a bone of you, left on earth.
I’ll put your body in the kiln,—I’d carry two such to it, on my
shoulders—and, let people suppose what they may of you, they shall
never know nothing.”
My mind, with inconceivable rapidity followed out all the consequences
of such a death. Estella’s father would believe I had deserted him,
would be taken, would die accusing me; even Herbert would doubt me,
when he compared the letter I had left for him with the fact that I had
called at Miss Havisham’s gate for only a moment; Joe and Biddy would
never know how sorry I had been that night, none would ever know what I
had suffered, how true I had meant to be, what an agony I had passed
through. The death close before me was terrible, but far more terrible
than death was the dread of being misremembered after death. And so
quick were my thoughts, that I saw myself despised by unborn
generations,—Estella’s children, and their children,—while the wretch’s
words were yet on his lips.
“Now, wolf,” said he, “afore I kill you like any other beast,—which is
wot I mean to do and wot I have tied you up for,—I’ll have a good look
at you and a good goad at you. O you enemy!”
It had passed through my thoughts to cry out for help again; though few
could know better than I, the solitary nature of the spot, and the
hopelessness of aid. But as he sat gloating over me, I was supported by
a scornful detestation of him that sealed my lips. Above all things, I
resolved that I would not entreat him, and that I would die making some
last poor resistance to him. Softened as my thoughts of all the rest of
men were in that dire extremity; humbly beseeching pardon, as I did, of
Heaven; melted at heart, as I was, by the thought that I had taken no
farewell, and never now could take farewell of those who were dear to
me, or could explain myself to them, or ask for their compassion on my
miserable errors,—still, if I could have killed him, even in dying, I
would have done it.
He had been drinking, and his eyes were red and bloodshot. Around his
neck was slung a tin bottle, as I had often seen his meat and drink
slung about him in other days. He brought the bottle to his lips, and
took a fiery drink from it; and I smelt the strong spirits that I saw
flash into his face.
“Wolf!” said he, folding his arms again, “Old Orlick’s a-going to tell
you somethink. It was you as did for your shrew sister.”
Again my mind, with its former inconceivable rapidity, had exhausted
the whole subject of the attack upon my sister, her illness, and her
death, before his slow and hesitating speech had formed these words.
“It was you, villain,” said I.
“I tell you it was your doing,—I tell you it was done through you,” he
retorted, catching up the gun, and making a blow with the stock at the
vacant air between us. “I come upon her from behind, as I come upon you
to-night. _I_ giv’ it her! I left her for dead, and if there had been a
limekiln as nigh her as there is now nigh you, she shouldn’t have come
to life again. But it warn’t Old Orlick as did it; it was you. You was
favoured, and he was bullied and beat. Old Orlick bullied and beat, eh?
Now you pays for it. You done it; now you pays for it.”
He drank again, and became more ferocious. I saw by his tilting of the
bottle that there was no great quantity left in it. I distinctly
understood that he was working himself up with its contents to make an
end of me. I knew that every drop it held was a drop of my life. I knew
that when I was changed into a part of the vapour that had crept
towards me but a little while before, like my own warning ghost, he
would do as he had done in my sister’s case,—make all haste to the
town, and be seen slouching about there drinking at the alehouses. My
rapid mind pursued him to the town, made a picture of the street with
him in it, and contrasted its lights and life with the lonely marsh and
the white vapour creeping over it, into which I should have dissolved.
It was not only that I could have summed up years and years and years
while he said a dozen words, but that what he did say presented
pictures to me, and not mere words. In the excited and exalted state of
my brain, I could not think of a place without seeing it, or of persons
without seeing them. It is impossible to overstate the vividness of
these images, and yet I was so intent, all the time, upon him
himself,—who would not be intent on the tiger crouching to spring!—that
I knew of the slightest action of his fingers.
When he had drunk this second time, he rose from the bench on which he
sat, and pushed the table aside. Then, he took up the candle, and,
shading it with his murderous hand so as to throw its light on me,
stood before me, looking at me and enjoying the sight.
“Wolf, I’ll tell you something more. It was Old Orlick as you tumbled
over on your stairs that night.”
I saw the staircase with its extinguished lamps. I saw the shadows of
the heavy stair-rails, thrown by the watchman’s lantern on the wall. I
saw the rooms that I was never to see again; here, a door half open;
there, a door closed; all the articles of furniture around.
“And why was Old Orlick there? I’ll tell you something more, wolf. You
and her _have_ pretty well hunted me out of this country, so far as
getting a easy living in it goes, and I’ve took up with new companions,
and new masters. Some of ’em writes my letters when I wants ’em
wrote,—do you mind?—writes my letters, wolf! They writes fifty hands;
they’re not like sneaking you, as writes but one. I’ve had a firm mind
and a firm will to have your life, since you was down here at your
sister’s burying. I han’t seen a way to get you safe, and I’ve looked
arter you to know your ins and outs. For, says Old Orlick to himself,
‘Somehow or another I’ll have him!’ What! When I looks for you, I finds
your uncle Provis, eh?”
Mill Pond Bank, and Chinks’s Basin, and the Old Green Copper Rope-walk,
all so clear and plain! Provis in his rooms, the signal whose use was
over, pretty Clara, the good motherly woman, old Bill Barley on his
back, all drifting by, as on the swift stream of my life fast running
out to sea!
“_You_ with a uncle too! Why, I know’d you at Gargery’s when you was so
small a wolf that I could have took your weazen betwixt this finger and
thumb and chucked you away dead (as I’d thoughts o’ doing, odd times,
when I see you loitering amongst the pollards on a Sunday), and you
hadn’t found no uncles then. No, not you! But when Old Orlick come for
to hear that your uncle Provis had most like wore the leg-iron wot Old
Orlick had picked up, filed asunder, on these meshes ever so many year
ago, and wot he kep by him till he dropped your sister with it, like a
bullock, as he means to drop you—hey?—when he come for to hear
that—hey?”
In his savage taunting, he flared the candle so close at me that I
turned my face aside to save it from the flame.
“Ah!” he cried, laughing, after doing it again, “the burnt child dreads
the fire! Old Orlick knowed you was burnt, Old Orlick knowed you was
smuggling your uncle Provis away, Old Orlick’s a match for you and
know’d you’d come to-night! Now I’ll tell you something more, wolf, and
this ends it. There’s them that’s as good a match for your uncle Provis
as Old Orlick has been for you. Let him ’ware them, when he’s lost his
nevvy! Let him ’ware them, when no man can’t find a rag of his dear
relation’s clothes, nor yet a bone of his body. There’s them that can’t
and that won’t have Magwitch,—yes, _I_ know the name!—alive in the same
land with them, and that’s had such sure information of him when he was
alive in another land, as that he couldn’t and shouldn’t leave it
unbeknown and put them in danger. P’raps it’s them that writes fifty
hands, and that’s not like sneaking you as writes but one. ’Ware
Compeyson, Magwitch, and the gallows!”
He flared the candle at me again, smoking my face and hair, and for an
instant blinding me, and turned his powerful back as he replaced the
light on the table. I had thought a prayer, and had been with Joe and
Biddy and Herbert, before he turned towards me again.
There was a clear space of a few feet between the table and the
opposite wall. Within this space, he now slouched backwards and
forwards. His great strength seemed to sit stronger upon him than ever
before, as he did this with his hands hanging loose and heavy at his
sides, and with his eyes scowling at me. I had no grain of hope left.
Wild as my inward hurry was, and wonderful the force of the pictures
that rushed by me instead of thoughts, I could yet clearly understand
that, unless he had resolved that I was within a few moments of surely
perishing out of all human knowledge, he would never have told me what
he had told.
Of a sudden, he stopped, took the cork out of his bottle, and tossed it
away. Light as it was, I heard it fall like a plummet. He swallowed
slowly, tilting up the bottle by little and little, and now he looked
at me no more. The last few drops of liquor he poured into the palm of
his hand, and licked up. Then, with a sudden hurry of violence and
swearing horribly, he threw the bottle from him, and stooped; and I saw
in his hand a stone-hammer with a long heavy handle.
The resolution I had made did not desert me, for, without uttering one
vain word of appeal to him, I shouted out with all my might, and
struggled with all my might. It was only my head and my legs that I
could move, but to that extent I struggled with all the force, until
then unknown, that was within me. In the same instant I heard
responsive shouts, saw figures and a gleam of light dash in at the
door, heard voices and tumult, and saw Orlick emerge from a struggle of
men, as if it were tumbling water, clear the table at a leap, and fly
out into the night.
After a blank, I found that I was lying unbound, on the floor, in the
same place, with my head on some one’s knee. My eyes were fixed on the
ladder against the wall, when I came to myself,—had opened on it before
my mind saw it,—and thus as I recovered consciousness, I knew that I
was in the place where I had lost it.
Too indifferent at first, even to look round and ascertain who
supported me, I was lying looking at the ladder, when there came
between me and it a face. The face of Trabb’s boy!
“I think he’s all right!” said Trabb’s boy, in a sober voice; “but
ain’t he just pale though!”
At these words, the face of him who supported me looked over into mine,
and I saw my supporter to be—
“Herbert! Great Heaven!”