Great Expectations
window-seat, smoking his pipe in the shaded open window, still I saw
Joe. I asked for cooling drink, and the dear hand that gave it me was
Joe’s. I sank back on my pillow after drinking, and the face that
looked so hopefully and tenderly upon me was the face of Joe.
At last, one day, I took courage, and said, “_Is_ it Joe?”
And the dear old home-voice answered, “Which it air, old chap.”
“O Joe, you break my heart! Look angry at me, Joe. Strike me, Joe. Tell
me of my ingratitude. Don’t be so good to me!”
For Joe had actually laid his head down on the pillow at my side, and
put his arm round my neck, in his joy that I knew him.
“Which dear old Pip, old chap,” said Joe, “you and me was ever friends.
And when you’re well enough to go out for a ride—what larks!”
After which, Joe withdrew to the window, and stood with his back
towards me, wiping his eyes. And as my extreme weakness prevented me
from getting up and going to him, I lay there, penitently whispering,
“O God bless him! O God bless this gentle Christian man!”
Joe’s eyes were red when I next found him beside me; but I was holding
his hand, and we both felt happy.
“How long, dear Joe?”
“Which you meantersay, Pip, how long have your illness lasted, dear old
chap?”
“Yes, Joe.”
“It’s the end of May, Pip. To-morrow is the first of June.”
“And have you been here all that time, dear Joe?”
“Pretty nigh, old chap. For, as I says to Biddy when the news of your
being ill were brought by letter, which it were brought by the post,
and being formerly single he is now married though underpaid for a deal
of walking and shoe-leather, but wealth were not a object on his part,
and marriage were the great wish of his hart—”
“It is so delightful to hear you, Joe! But I interrupt you in what you
said to Biddy.”
“Which it were,” said Joe, “that how you might be amongst strangers,
and that how you and me having been ever friends, a wisit at such a
moment might not prove unacceptabobble. And Biddy, her word were, ‘Go
to him, without loss of time.’ That,” said Joe, summing up with his
judicial air, “were the word of Biddy. ‘Go to him,’ Biddy say, ‘without
loss of time.’ In short, I shouldn’t greatly deceive you,” Joe added,
after a little grave reflection, “if I represented to you that the word
of that young woman were, ‘without a minute’s loss of time.’”
There Joe cut himself short, and informed me that I was to be talked to
in great moderation, and that I was to take a little nourishment at
stated frequent times, whether I felt inclined for it or not, and that
I was to submit myself to all his orders. So I kissed his hand, and lay
quiet, while he proceeded to indite a note to Biddy, with my love in
it.
Evidently Biddy had taught Joe to write. As I lay in bed looking at
him, it made me, in my weak state, cry again with pleasure to see the
pride with which he set about his letter. My bedstead, divested of its
curtains, had been removed, with me upon it, into the sitting-room, as
the airiest and largest, and the carpet had been taken away, and the
room kept always fresh and wholesome night and day. At my own
writing-table, pushed into a corner and cumbered with little bottles,
Joe now sat down to his great work, first choosing a pen from the
pen-tray as if it were a chest of large tools, and tucking up his
sleeves as if he were going to wield a crow-bar or sledgehammer. It was
necessary for Joe to hold on heavily to the table with his left elbow,
and to get his right leg well out behind him, before he could begin;
and when he did begin he made every downstroke so slowly that it might
have been six feet long, while at every upstroke I could hear his pen
spluttering extensively. He had a curious idea that the inkstand was on
the side of him where it was not, and constantly dipped his pen into
space, and seemed quite satisfied with the result. Occasionally, he was
tripped up by some orthographical stumbling-block; but on the whole he
got on very well indeed; and when he had signed his name, and had
removed a finishing blot from the paper to the crown of his head with
his two forefingers, he got up and hovered about the table, trying the
effect of his performance from various points of view, as it lay there,
with unbounded satisfaction.
Not to make Joe uneasy by talking too much, even if I had been able to
talk much, I deferred asking him about Miss Havisham until next day. He
shook his head when I then asked him if she had recovered.
“Is she dead, Joe?”
“Why you see, old chap,” said Joe, in a tone of remonstrance, and by
way of getting at it by degrees, “I wouldn’t go so far as to say that,
for that’s a deal to say; but she ain’t—”
“Living, Joe?”
“That’s nigher where it is,” said Joe; “she ain’t living.”
“Did she linger long, Joe?”
“Arter you was took ill, pretty much about what you might call (if you
was put to it) a week,” said Joe; still determined, on my account, to
come at everything by degrees.
“Dear Joe, have you heard what becomes of her property?”
“Well, old chap,” said Joe, “it do appear that she had settled the most
of it, which I meantersay tied it up, on Miss Estella. But she had
wrote out a little coddleshell in her own hand a day or two afore the
accident, leaving a cool four thousand to Mr. Matthew Pocket. And why,
do you suppose, above all things, Pip, she left that cool four thousand
unto him? ‘Because of Pip’s account of him, the said Matthew.’ I am
told by Biddy, that air the writing,” said Joe, repeating the legal
turn as if it did him infinite good, “‘account of him the said
Matthew.’ And a cool four thousand, Pip!”
I never discovered from whom Joe derived the conventional temperature
of the four thousand pounds; but it appeared to make the sum of money
more to him, and he had a manifest relish in insisting on its being
cool.
This account gave me great joy, as it perfected the only good thing I
had done. I asked Joe whether he had heard if any of the other
relations had any legacies?
“Miss Sarah,” said Joe, “she have twenty-five pound perannium fur to
buy pills, on account of being bilious. Miss Georgiana, she have twenty
pound down. Mrs.—what’s the name of them wild beasts with humps, old
chap?”
“Camels?” said I, wondering why he could possibly want to know.
Joe nodded. “Mrs. Camels,” by which I presently understood he meant
Camilla, “she have five pound fur to buy rushlights to put her in
spirits when she wake up in the night.”
The accuracy of these recitals was sufficiently obvious to me, to give
me great confidence in Joe’s information. “And now,” said Joe, “you
ain’t that strong yet, old chap, that you can take in more nor one
additional shovelful to-day. Old Orlick he’s been a bustin’ open a
dwelling-ouse.”
“Whose?” said I.
“Not, I grant you, but what his manners is given to blusterous,” said
Joe, apologetically; “still, a Englishman’s ouse is his Castle, and
castles must not be busted ’cept when done in war time. And wotsume’er
the failings on his part, he were a corn and seedsman in his hart.”
“Is it Pumblechook’s house that has been broken into, then?”
“That’s it, Pip,” said Joe; “and they took his till, and they took his
cash-box, and they drinked his wine, and they partook of his wittles,
and they slapped his face, and they pulled his nose, and they tied him
up to his bedpust, and they giv’ him a dozen, and they stuffed his
mouth full of flowering annuals to prewent his crying out. But he
knowed Orlick, and Orlick’s in the county jail.”
By these approaches we arrived at unrestricted conversation. I was slow
to gain strength, but I did slowly and surely become less weak, and Joe
stayed with me, and I fancied I was little Pip again.
For the tenderness of Joe was so beautifully proportioned to my need,
that I was like a child in his hands. He would sit and talk to me in
the old confidence, and with the old simplicity, and in the old
unassertive protecting way, so that I would half believe that all my
life since the days of the old kitchen was one of the mental troubles
of the fever that was gone. He did everything for me except the
household work, for which he had engaged a very decent woman, after
paying off the laundress on his first arrival. “Which I do assure you,
Pip,” he would often say, in explanation of that liberty; “I found her
a tapping the spare bed, like a cask of beer, and drawing off the
feathers in a bucket, for sale. Which she would have tapped yourn next,
and draw’d it off with you a laying on it, and was then a carrying away
the coals gradiwally in the soup-tureen and wegetable-dishes, and the
wine and spirits in your Wellington boots.”
We looked forward to the day when I should go out for a ride, as we had
once looked forward to the day of my apprenticeship. And when the day
came, and an open carriage was got into the Lane, Joe wrapped me up,
took me in his arms, carried me down to it, and put me in, as if I were
still the small helpless creature to whom he had so abundantly given of
the wealth of his great nature.
And Joe got in beside me, and we drove away together into the country,
where the rich summer growth was already on the trees and on the grass,
and sweet summer scents filled all the air. The day happened to be
Sunday, and when I looked on the loveliness around me, and thought how
it had grown and changed, and how the little wild-flowers had been
forming, and the voices of the birds had been strengthening, by day and
by night, under the sun and under the stars, while poor I lay burning
and tossing on my bed, the mere remembrance of having burned and tossed
there came like a check upon my peace. But when I heard the Sunday
bells, and looked around a little more upon the outspread beauty, I
felt that I was not nearly thankful enough,—that I was too weak yet to
be even that,—and I laid my head on Joe’s shoulder, as I had laid it
long ago when he had taken me to the Fair or where not, and it was too
much for my young senses.
More composure came to me after a while, and we talked as we used to
talk, lying on the grass at the old Battery. There was no change
whatever in Joe. Exactly what he had been in my eyes then, he was in my
eyes still; just as simply faithful, and as simply right.
When we got back again, and he lifted me out, and carried me—so
easily!—across the court and up the stairs, I thought of that eventful
Christmas Day when he had carried me over the marshes. We had not yet
made any allusion to my change of fortune, nor did I know how much of
my late history he was acquainted with. I was so doubtful of myself
now, and put so much trust in him, that I could not satisfy myself
whether I ought to refer to it when he did not.
“Have you heard, Joe,” I asked him that evening, upon further
consideration, as he smoked his pipe at the window, “who my patron
was?”
“I heerd,” returned Joe, “as it were not Miss Havisham, old chap.”
“Did you hear who it was, Joe?”
“Well! I heerd as it were a person what sent the person what giv’ you
the bank-notes at the Jolly Bargemen, Pip.”
“So it was.”
“Astonishing!” said Joe, in the placidest way.
“Did you hear that he was dead, Joe?” I presently asked, with
increasing diffidence.
“Which? Him as sent the bank-notes, Pip?”
“Yes.”
“I think,” said Joe, after meditating a long time, and looking rather
evasively at the window-seat, “as I _did_ hear tell that how he were
something or another in a general way in that direction.”
“Did you hear anything of his circumstances, Joe?”
“Not partickler, Pip.”
“If you would like to hear, Joe—” I was beginning, when Joe got up and
came to my sofa.
“Lookee here, old chap,” said Joe, bending over me. “Ever the best of
friends; ain’t us, Pip?”
I was ashamed to answer him.