He laid his hand on my shoulder. I shuddered at the thought that for anything I knew, his hand might be stained with blood.
“It warn’t easy, Pip, for me to leave them parts, nor yet it warn’t safe. But I held to it, and the harder it was, the stronger I held, for I was determined, and my mind firm made up. At last I done it. Dear boy, I done it!”
I tried to collect my thoughts, but I was stunned. Throughout, I had seemed to myself to attend more to the wind and the rain than to him; even now, I could not separate his voice from those voices, though those were loud and his was silent.
“Where will you put me?” he asked presently. “I must be put somewheres, dear boy.”
“To sleep?” said I.
“Yes. And to sleep long and sound,” he answered; “for I’ve been sea-tossed and sea-washed, months and months.”
“My friend and companion,” said I, rising from the sofa, “is absent; you must have his room.”
“He won’t come back to-morrow; will he?”
“No,” said I, answering almost mechanically, in spite of my utmost efforts; “not to-morrow.”
“Because, look’ee here, dear boy,” he said, dropping his voice, and laying a long finger on my breast in an impressive manner, “caution is necessary.”
“How do you mean? Caution?”
“By G—, it’s Death!”
“What’s death?”
“I was sent for life. It’s death to come back. There’s been overmuch coming back of late years, and I should of a certainty be hanged if took.”
Nothing was needed but this; the wretched man, after loading wretched me with his gold and silver chains for years, had risked his life to come to me, and I held it there in my keeping! If I had loved him instead of abhorring him; if I had been attracted to him by the strongest admiration and affection, instead of shrinking from him with strongest repugnance; it could have been no worse. On the contrary, it would have been better, for his preservation would then have naturally and tenderly addressed my heart.
My first care was to close the shutters, so that no light might be seen from without, and then to close and make fast the doors. While I did so, he stood at the table drinking rum and eating biscuit; and when I saw him thus engaged, I saw my convict on the marshes at his meal again. It almost seemed to me as if he must stoop down presently, to file at his leg.
When I had gone into Herbert’s room, and had shut off any other communication between it and the staircase than through the room in which our conversation had been held, I asked him if he would go to bed? He said yes, but asked me for some of my “gentleman’s linen” to put on in the morning. I brought it out, and laid it ready for him, and my blood again ran cold when he again took me by both hands to give me good night.
I got away from him, without knowing how I did it, and mended the fire in the room where we had been together, and sat down by it, afraid to go to bed. For an hour or more, I remained too stunned to think; and it was not until I began to think, that I began fully to know how wrecked I was, and how the ship in which I had sailed was gone to pieces.
Miss Havisham’s intentions towards me, all a mere dream; Estella not designed for me; I only suffered in Satis House as a convenience, a sting for the greedy relations, a model with a mechanical heart to practise on when no other practice was at hand; those were the first smarts I had. But, sharpest and deepest pain of all—it was for the convict, guilty of I knew not what crimes, and liable to be taken out of those rooms where I sat thinking, and hanged at the Old Bailey door, that I had deserted Joe.
I would not have gone back to Joe now, I would not have gone back to Biddy now, for any consideration; simply, I suppose, because my sense of my own worthless conduct to them was greater than every consideration. No wisdom on earth could have given me the comfort that I should have derived from their simplicity and fidelity; but I could never, never, never, undo what I had done.
In every rage of wind and rush of rain, I heard pursuers. Twice, I could have sworn there was a knocking and whispering at the outer door. With these fears upon me, I began either to imagine or recal that I had had mysterious warnings of this man’s approach. That, for weeks gone by, I had passed faces in the streets which I had thought like his. That, these likenesses had grown more numerous, as he, coming over the sea, had drawn near. That, his wicked spirit had somehow sent these messengers to mine, and that now on this stormy night he was as good as his word, and with me.
Crowding up with these reflections came the reflection that I had seen him with my childish eyes to be a desperately violent man; that I had heard that other convict reiterate that he had tried to murder him; that I had seen him down in the ditch tearing and fighting like a wild beast. Out of such remembrances I brought into the light of the fire, a half-formed terror that it might not be safe to be shut up there with him in the dead of the wild solitary night. This dilated until it filled the room, and impelled me to take a candle and go in and look at my dreadful burden.
He had rolled a handkerchief round his head, and his face was set and lowering in his sleep. But he was asleep, and quietly too, though he had a pistol lying on the pillow. Assured of this, I softly removed the key to the outside of his door, and turned it on him before I again sat down by the fire. Gradually I slipped from the chair and lay on the floor. When I awoke, without having parted in my sleep with the perception of my wretchedness, the clocks of the Eastward churches were striking five, the candles were wasted out, the fire was dead, and the wind and rain intensified the thick black darkness.
THIS IS THE END OF THE SECOND STAGE OF PIP’S EXPECTATIONS
VOLUME III
CHAPTER I
It was fortunate for me that I had to take precautions to ensure (so far as I could) the safety of my dreaded visitor; for, this thought pressing on me when I awoke, held other thoughts in a confused concourse at a distance.
The impossibility of keeping him concealed in the chambers was self-evident. It could not be done, and the attempt to do it would inevitably engender suspicion. True, I had no Avenger in my service now, but I was looked after by an inflammatory old female, assisted by an animated rag-bag whom she called her niece, and to keep a room secret from them would be to invite curiosity and exaggeration. They both had weak eyes, which I had long attributed to their chronically looking in at keyholes, and they were always at hand when not wanted; indeed that was their only reliable quality besides larceny. Not to get up a mystery with these people, I resolved to announce in the morning that my uncle had unexpectedly come from the country.
This course I decided on while I was yet groping about in the darkness for the means of getting a light. Not stumbling on the means after all, I was fain to go out to the adjacent Lodge and get the watchman there to come with his lantern. Now, in groping my way down the black staircase I fell over something, and that something was a man crouching in a corner.
As the man made no answer when I asked him what he did there, but eluded my touch in silence, I ran to the Lodge and urged the watchman to come quickly: telling him of the incident on the way back. The wind being as fierce as ever, we did not care to endanger the light in the lantern by rekindling the extinguished lamps on the staircase, but we examined the staircase from the bottom to the top and found no one there. It then occurred to me as possible that the man might have slipped into my rooms; so, lighting my candle at the watchman’s, and leaving him standing at the door, I examined them carefully, including the room in which my dreaded guest lay asleep. All was quiet, and assuredly no other man was in those chambers.
It troubled me that there should have been a lurker on the stairs, on that night of all nights in the year, and I asked the watchman, on the chance of eliciting some hopeful explanation as I handed him a dram at the door, whether he had admitted at his gate any gentleman who had perceptibly been dining out? Yes, he said; at different times of the night, three. One lived in Fountain Court, and the other two lived in the Lane, and he had seen them all go home
. Again, the only other man who dwelt in the house of which my chambers formed a part, had been in the country for some weeks; and he certainly had not returned in the night, because we had seen his door with his seal on it as we came upstairs.
“The night being so bad, sir,” said the watchman, as he gave me back my glass, “uncommon few have come in at my gate. Besides them three gentlemen that I have named, I don’t call to mind another since about eleven o’clock, when a stranger asked for you.”
“My uncle,” I muttered. “Yes.”
“You saw him, sir?”
“Yes. Oh yes.”
“Likewise the person with him?”
“Person with him!” I repeated.
“I judged the person to be with him,” returned the watchman. “The person stopped, when he stopped to make inquiry of me, and the person took this way when he took this way.”
“What sort of person?”
The watchman had not particularly noticed; he should say a working person; to the best of his belief, he had a dust-coloured kind of clothes on, under a dark coat. The watchman made more light of the matter than I did, and naturally; not having my reason for attaching weight to it.
When I had got rid of him, which I thought it well to do without prolonging explanations, my mind was much troubled by these two circumstances taken together. Whereas they were easy of innocent solution apart—as, for instance, some diner-out or diner-at-home, who had not gone near this watchman’s gate, might have strayed to my staircase and dropped asleep there—and my nameless visitor might have brought some one with him to show him the way—still, joined, they had an ugly look to one as prone to distrust and fear as the changes of a few hours had made me.
I lighted my fire, which burnt with a raw pale flare at that time of the morning, and fell into a doze before it. I seemed to have been dozing a whole night when the clocks struck six. As there was full an hour and a half between me and daylight, I dozed again; now, waking up uneasily, with prolix conversations about nothing, in my ears; now, making thunder of the wind in the chimney; at length, falling off into a profound sleep from which the daylight woke me with a start.
All this time I had never been able to consider my own situation, nor could I do so yet. I had not the power to attend to it. I was greatly dejected and distressed, but in an incoherent wholesale sort of way. As to forming any plan for the future, I could as soon have formed an elephant. When I opened the shutters and looked out at the wet wild morning, all of a leaden hue; when I walked from room to room; when I sat down again shivering, before the fire, waiting for my laundress to appear; I thought how miserable I was, but hardly knew why, or how long I had been so, or on what day of the week I made the reflection, or even who I was that made it.
At last, the old woman and the niece came in—the latter with a head not easily distinguishable from her dusty broom—and testified surprise at sight of me and the fire. To whom I imparted how my uncle had come in the night and was then asleep, and how the breakfast preparations were to be modified accordingly. Then, I washed and dressed while they knocked the furniture about and made a dust; and so, in a sort of dream or sleep-waking, I found myself sitting by the fire again, waiting for—Him—to come to breakfast.
By-and-by, his door opened and he came out. I could not bring myself to bear the sight of him, and I thought he had a worse look by daylight.
“I do not even know,” said I, speaking low as he took his seat at the table, “by what name to call you. I have given out that you are my uncle.”
“That’s it, dear boy! Call me uncle.”
“You assumed some name, I suppose, on board ship?”
“Yes, dear boy. I took the name of Provis.”
“Do you mean to keep that name?”
“Why, yes, dear boy, it’s as good as another—unless you’d like another.”
“What is your real name?” I asked him in a whisper.
“Magwitch,” he answered, in the same tone; “chrisen’d Abel.”
“What were you brought up to be?”
“A warmint, dear boy.”
He answered quite seriously, and used the word as if it denoted some profession.
“When you came into the Temple last night—” said I, pausing to wonder whether that could really have been last night, which seemed so long ago.
“Yes, dear boy?”
“When you came in at the gate and asked the watchman the way here, had you any one with you?”
“With me? No, dear boy.”
“But there was some one there?”
“I didn’t take particular notice,” he said, dubiously, “not knowing the ways of the place. But I think there was a person, too, come in alonger me.”
“Are you known in London?”
“I hope not!” said he, giving his neck a jerk with his forefinger that made me turn hot and sick.
“Were you known in London, once?”
“Not over and above, dear boy. I was in the provinces mostly.”
“Were you—tried—in London?”
“Which time?” said he, with a sharp look.
“The last time.”
He nodded. “First knowed Mr. Jaggers that way. Jaggers was for me.”
It was on my lips to ask him what he was tried for, but he took up a knife, gave it a nourish, and with the words, “And what I done is worked out and paid for!” fell to at his breakfast.
He ate in a ravenous way that was very disagreeable, and all his actions were uncouth, noisy, and greedy. Some of his teeth had failed him since I saw him eat on the marshes, and as he turned his food in his mouth, and turned his head sideways to bring his strongest fangs to bear upon it, he looked terribly like a hungry old dog. If I had begun with any appetite, he would have taken it away, and I should have sat much as I did—repelled from him by an insurmountable aversion, and gloomily looking at the cloth.
“I’m a heavy grubber, dear boy,” he said, as a polite kind of apology when he had made an end of his meal, “but I always was. If it had been in my constitution to be a lighter grubber, I might ha’ got into lighter trouble. Sim’larly, I must have my smoke. When I was first hired out as shepherd t’other side the world, it’s my belief I should ha’ turned into a molloncolly-mad sheep myself, if I hadn’t a had my smoke.”
As he said so, he got up from table, and putting his hand into the breast of the pea-coat he wore, brought out a short black pipe, and a handful of loose tobacco of the kind that is called negro-head. Having filled his pipe, he put the surplus tobacco back again, as if his pocket were a drawer. Then, he took a live coal from the fire with the tongs, and lighted his pipe at it, and then turned round on the hearth-rug with his back to the fire, and went through his favourite action of holding out both his hands for mine.
“And this,” said he, dandling my hands up and down in his, as he puffed at his pipe; “and this is the gentleman what I made! The real genuine One! It does me good fur to look at you, Pip. All I stip’late, is, to stand by and look at you, dear boy!”
I released my hands as soon as I could, and found that I was beginning slowly to settle down to the contemplation of my condition. What I was chained to, and how heavily, became intelligible to me, as I heard his hoarse voice, and sat looking up at his furrowed bald head with its iron grey hair at the sides.
“I mustn’t see my gentleman a footing it in the mire of the streets; there mustn’t be no mud on his boots. My gentleman must have horses, Pip! Horses to ride, and horses to drive, and horses for his servant to ride and drive as well. Shall colonists have their horses (and blood’uns, if you please, good Lord!) and not my London gentleman? No, no. We’ll show ’em another pair of shoes than that, Pip; won’t us?”
He took out of his pocket a great thick pocket-book, bursting with papers, and tossed it on the table.
“There’s something worth spending in that there book, dear boy. It’s yourn. All I’ve got ain’t mine; it’s yourn. Don’t you be afeerd on it. There’s more where that com
e from. I’ve come to the old country fur to see my gentleman spend his money like a gentleman. That’ll be my pleasure. My pleasure ’ull be fur to see him do it. And blast you all!” he wound up, looking round the room and snapping his fingers once with a loud snap, “blast you every one, from the judge in his wig, to the colonist a stirring up the dust, I’ll show a better gentleman than the whole kit on you put together!”
“Stop!” said I, almost in a frenzy of fear and dislike, “I want to speak to you. I want to know what is to be done. I want to know how you are to be kept out of danger, how long you are going to stay, what projects you have.”
“Look’ee here, Pip,” said he, laying his hand on my arm in a suddenly altered and subdued manner; “first of all, look’ee here. I forgot myself half a minute ago. What I said was low; that’s what it was; low. Look’ee here, Pip. Look over it. I ain’t a going to be low.”
“First,” I resumed, half groaning, “what precautions can be taken against your being recognised and seized?”
“No, dear boy,” he said, in the same tone as before, “that don’t go first. Lowness goes first. I ain’t took so many year to make a gentleman, not without knowing what’s due to him. Look’ee here, Pip. I was low; that’s what I was; low. Look over it, dear boy.”
Some sense of the grimly-ludicrous moved me to a fretful laugh, as I replied, “I have looked over it. In Heaven’s name, don’t harp upon it!”
“Yes, but look’ee here,” he persisted. “Dear boy, I ain’t come so fur to be low. Now, go on, dear boy. You was a saying—”
“How are you to be guarded from the danger you have incurred?”
“Well, dear boy, the danger ain’t so great. Without I was informed agen, the danger ain’t so much to signify. There’s Jaggers, and there’s Wemmick, and there’s you. Who else is there to inform?”
“Is there no chance person who might identify you in the street?” said I.
“Well,” he returned, “there ain’t many. Nor yet I don’t intend to advertise myself in the newspapers by the name of A.M. come back from Botany Bay; and years has rolled away, and who’s to gain by it? Still, look’ee here, Pip. If the danger had been fifty times as great, I should ha’ come to see you, mind you, just the same.”
A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations (Oprah's Book Club) Page 80