Great Expectations
made his escape and been re-sentenced to exile for life. That miserable
man would seem for a time to have become convinced of his errors, when
far removed from the scenes of his old offences, and to have lived a
peaceable and honest life. But in a fatal moment, yielding to those
propensities and passions, the indulgence of which had so long rendered
him a scourge to society, he had quitted his haven of rest and
repentance, and had come back to the country where he was proscribed.
Being here presently denounced, he had for a time succeeded in evading
the officers of Justice, but being at length seized while in the act of
flight, he had resisted them, and had—he best knew whether by express
design, or in the blindness of his hardihood—caused the death of his
denouncer, to whom his whole career was known. The appointed punishment
for his return to the land that had cast him out, being Death, and his
case being this aggravated case, he must prepare himself to Die.
The sun was striking in at the great windows of the court, through the
glittering drops of rain upon the glass, and it made a broad shaft of
light between the two-and-thirty and the Judge, linking both together,
and perhaps reminding some among the audience how both were passing on,
with absolute equality, to the greater Judgment that knoweth all
things, and cannot err. Rising for a moment, a distinct speck of face
in this way of light, the prisoner said, “My Lord, I have received my
sentence of Death from the Almighty, but I bow to yours,” and sat down
again. There was some hushing, and the Judge went on with what he had
to say to the rest. Then they were all formally doomed, and some of
them were supported out, and some of them sauntered out with a haggard
look of bravery, and a few nodded to the gallery, and two or three
shook hands, and others went out chewing the fragments of herb they had
taken from the sweet herbs lying about. He went last of all, because of
having to be helped from his chair, and to go very slowly; and he held
my hand while all the others were removed, and while the audience got
up (putting their dresses right, as they might at church or elsewhere),
and pointed down at this criminal or at that, and most of all at him
and me.
I earnestly hoped and prayed that he might die before the Recorder’s
Report was made; but, in the dread of his lingering on, I began that
night to write out a petition to the Home Secretary of State, setting
forth my knowledge of him, and how it was that he had come back for my
sake. I wrote it as fervently and pathetically as I could; and when I
had finished it and sent it in, I wrote out other petitions to such men
in authority as I hoped were the most merciful, and drew up one to the
Crown itself. For several days and nights after he was sentenced I took
no rest except when I fell asleep in my chair, but was wholly absorbed
in these appeals. And after I had sent them in, I could not keep away
from the places where they were, but felt as if they were more hopeful
and less desperate when I was near them. In this unreasonable
restlessness and pain of mind I would roam the streets of an evening,
wandering by those offices and houses where I had left the petitions.
To the present hour, the weary western streets of London on a cold,
dusty spring night, with their ranges of stern, shut-up mansions, and
their long rows of lamps, are melancholy to me from this association.
The daily visits I could make him were shortened now, and he was more
strictly kept. Seeing, or fancying, that I was suspected of an
intention of carrying poison to him, I asked to be searched before I
sat down at his bedside, and told the officer who was always there,
that I was willing to do anything that would assure him of the
singleness of my designs. Nobody was hard with him or with me. There
was duty to be done, and it was done, but not harshly. The officer
always gave me the assurance that he was worse, and some other sick
prisoners in the room, and some other prisoners who attended on them as
sick nurses, (malefactors, but not incapable of kindness, God be
thanked!) always joined in the same report.
As the days went on, I noticed more and more that he would lie placidly
looking at the white ceiling, with an absence of light in his face
until some word of mine brightened it for an instant, and then it would
subside again. Sometimes he was almost or quite unable to speak, then
he would answer me with slight pressures on my hand, and I grew to
understand his meaning very well.
The number of the days had risen to ten, when I saw a greater change in
him than I had seen yet. His eyes were turned towards the door, and
lighted up as I entered.
“Dear boy,” he said, as I sat down by his bed: “I thought you was late.
But I knowed you couldn’t be that.”
“It is just the time,” said I. “I waited for it at the gate.”
“You always waits at the gate; don’t you, dear boy?”
“Yes. Not to lose a moment of the time.”
“Thank’ee dear boy, thank’ee. God bless you! You’ve never deserted me,
dear boy.”
I pressed his hand in silence, for I could not forget that I had once
meant to desert him.
“And what’s the best of all,” he said, “you’ve been more comfortable
alonger me, since I was under a dark cloud, than when the sun shone.
That’s best of all.”
He lay on his back, breathing with great difficulty. Do what he would,
and love me though he did, the light left his face ever and again, and
a film came over the placid look at the white ceiling.
“Are you in much pain to-day?”
“I don’t complain of none, dear boy.”
“You never do complain.”
He had spoken his last words. He smiled, and I understood his touch to
mean that he wished to lift my hand, and lay it on his breast. I laid
it there, and he smiled again, and put both his hands upon it.
The allotted time ran out, while we were thus; but, looking round, I
found the governor of the prison standing near me, and he whispered,
“You needn’t go yet.” I thanked him gratefully, and asked, “Might I
speak to him, if he can hear me?”
The governor stepped aside, and beckoned the officer away. The change,
though it was made without noise, drew back the film from the placid
look at the white ceiling, and he looked most affectionately at me.
“Dear Magwitch, I must tell you now, at last. You understand what I
say?”
A gentle pressure on my hand.
“You had a child once, whom you loved and lost.”
A stronger pressure on my hand.
“She lived, and found powerful friends. She is living now. She is a
lady and very beautiful. And I love her!”
With a last faint effort, which would have been powerless but for my
yielding to it and assisting it, he raised my hand to his lips. Then,
he gently let it sink upon his breast again, with his own hands lying
on it. The placid look at the white ceiling came back, and passed away,
and his head dropped quietly on his breast.
Mindful, then, of what we had read together, I thought of the two men
who went up into the Temple to pray, and I knew there were no better
words that I could say beside his bed, than “O Lord, be merciful to him
a sinner!”
Chapter LVII.
Now that I was left wholly to myself, I gave notice of my intention to
quit the chambers in the Temple as soon as my tenancy could legally
determine, and in the meanwhile to underlet them. At once I put bills
up in the windows; for, I was in debt, and had scarcely any money, and
began to be seriously alarmed by the state of my affairs. I ought
rather to write that I should have been alarmed if I had had energy and
concentration enough to help me to the clear perception of any truth
beyond the fact that I was falling very ill. The late stress upon me
had enabled me to put off illness, but not to put it away; I knew that
it was coming on me now, and I knew very little else, and was even
careless as to that.
For a day or two, I lay on the sofa, or on the floor,—anywhere,
according as I happened to sink down,—with a heavy head and aching
limbs, and no purpose, and no power. Then there came, one night which
appeared of great duration, and which teemed with anxiety and horror;
and when in the morning I tried to sit up in my bed and think of it, I
found I could not do so.
Whether I really had been down in Garden Court in the dead of the
night, groping about for the boat that I supposed to be there; whether
I had two or three times come to myself on the staircase with great
terror, not knowing how I had got out of bed; whether I had found
myself lighting the lamp, possessed by the idea that he was coming up
the stairs, and that the lights were blown out; whether I had been
inexpressibly harassed by the distracted talking, laughing, and
groaning of some one, and had half suspected those sounds to be of my
own making; whether there had been a closed iron furnace in a dark
corner of the room, and a voice had called out, over and over again,
that Miss Havisham was consuming within it,—these were things that I
tried to settle with myself and get into some order, as I lay that
morning on my bed. But the vapour of a limekiln would come between me
and them, disordering them all, and it was through the vapour at last
that I saw two men looking at me.
“What do you want?” I asked, starting; “I don’t know you.”
“Well, sir,” returned one of them, bending down and touching me on the
shoulder, “this is a matter that you’ll soon arrange, I dare say, but
you’re arrested.”
“What is the debt?”
“Hundred and twenty-three pound, fifteen, six. Jeweller’s account, I
think.”
“What is to be done?”
“You had better come to my house,” said the man. “I keep a very nice
house.”
I made some attempt to get up and dress myself. When I next attended to
them, they were standing a little off from the bed, looking at me. I
still lay there.
“You see my state,” said I. “I would come with you if I could; but
indeed I am quite unable. If you take me from here, I think I shall die
by the way.”
Perhaps they replied, or argued the point, or tried to encourage me to
believe that I was better than I thought. Forasmuch as they hang in my
memory by only this one slender thread, I don’t know what they did,
except that they forbore to remove me.
That I had a fever and was avoided, that I suffered greatly, that I
often lost my reason, that the time seemed interminable, that I
confounded impossible existences with my own identity; that I was a
brick in the house-wall, and yet entreating to be released from the
giddy place where the builders had set me; that I was a steel beam of a
vast engine, clashing and whirling over a gulf, and yet that I implored
in my own person to have the engine stopped, and my part in it hammered
off; that I passed through these phases of disease, I know of my own
remembrance, and did in some sort know at the time. That I sometimes
struggled with real people, in the belief that they were murderers, and
that I would all at once comprehend that they meant to do me good, and
would then sink exhausted in their arms, and suffer them to lay me
down, I also knew at the time. But, above all, I knew that there was a
constant tendency in all these people,—who, when I was very ill, would
present all kinds of extraordinary transformations of the human face,
and would be much dilated in size,—above all, I say, I knew that there
was an extraordinary tendency in all these people, sooner or later, to
settle down into the likeness of Joe.
After I had turned the worst point of my illness, I began to notice
that while all its other features changed, this one consistent feature
did not change. Whoever came about me, still settled down into Joe. I
opened my eyes in the night, and I saw, in the great chair at the
bedside, Joe. I opened my eyes in the day, and, sitting on the