Great Expectations, Charles Dickens [top 10 best books of all time txt] 📗

Chapter XXXIX

I was three-and-twenty years of age. Not another word had I heard

to enlighten me on the subject of my expectations, and my

twenty-third birthday was a week gone. We had left Barnard’s Inn

more than a year, and lived in the Temple. Our chambers were in

Garden-court, down by the river.

Mr. Pocket and I had for some time parted company as to our original

relations, though we continued on the best terms. Notwithstanding my

inability to settle to anything,—which I hope arose out of the

restless and incomplete tenure on which I held my means,—I had a

taste for reading, and read regularly so many hours a day. That

matter of Herbert’s was still progressing, and everything with me

was as I have brought it down to the close of the last preceding

chapter.

Business had taken Herbert on a journey to Marseilles. I was alone,

and had a dull sense of being alone. Dispirited and anxious, long

hoping that tomorrow or next week would clear my way, and long

disappointed, I sadly missed the cheerful face and ready response

of my friend.

It was wretched weather; stormy and wet, stormy and wet; and mud,

mud, mud, deep in all the streets. Day after day, a vast heavy veil

had been driving over London from the East, and it drove still, as

if in the East there were an Eternity of cloud and wind. So furious

had been the gusts, that high buildings in town had had the lead

stripped off their roofs; and in the country, trees had been torn

up, and sails of windmills carried away; and gloomy accounts had

come in from the coast, of shipwreck and death. Violent blasts of

rain had accompanied these rages of wind, and the day just closed

as I sat down to read had been the worst of all.

Alterations have been made in that part of the Temple since that

time, and it has not now so lonely a character as it had then, nor

is it so exposed to the river. We lived at the top of the last

house, and the wind rushing up the river shook the house that

night, like discharges of cannon, or breakings of a sea. When the

rain came with it and dashed against the windows, I thought,

raising my eyes to them as they rocked, that I might have fancied

myself in a storm-beaten lighthouse. Occasionally, the smoke came

rolling down the chimney as though it could not bear to go out into

such a night; and when I set the doors open and looked down the

staircase, the staircase lamps were blown out; and when I shaded my

face with my hands and looked through the black windows (opening

them ever so little was out of the question in the teeth of such

wind and rain), I saw that the lamps in the court were blown out,

and that the lamps on the bridges and the shore were shuddering,

and that the coal-fires in barges on the river were being carried

away before the wind like red-hot splashes in the rain.

I read with my watch upon the table, purposing to close my book at

eleven o’clock. As I shut it, Saint Paul’s, and all the many

church-clocks in the City—some leading, some accompanying, some

following—struck that hour. The sound was curiously flawed by the

wind; and I was listening, and thinking how the wind assailed and

tore it, when I heard a footstep on the stair.

What nervous folly made me start, and awfully connect it with the

footstep of my dead sister, matters not. It was past in a moment,

and I listened again, and heard the footstep stumble in coming on.

Remembering then, that the staircase-lights were blown out, I took

up my reading-lamp and went out to the stair-head. Whoever was

below had stopped on seeing my lamp, for all was quiet.

“There is some one down there, is there not?” I called out, looking

down.

“Yes,” said a voice from the darkness beneath.

“What floor do you want?”

“The top. Mr. Pip.”

“That is my name.—There is nothing the matter?”

“Nothing the matter,” returned the voice. And the man came on.

I stood with my lamp held out over the stair-rail, and he came

slowly within its light. It was a shaded lamp, to shine upon a

book, and its circle of light was very contracted; so that he was

in it for a mere instant, and then out of it. In the instant, I had

seen a face that was strange to me, looking up with an

incomprehensible air of being touched and pleased by the sight of

me.

Moving the lamp as the man moved, I made out that he was

substantially dressed, but roughly, like a voyager by sea. That he

had long iron-gray hair. That his age was about sixty. That he was

a muscular man, strong on his legs, and that he was browned and

hardened by exposure to weather. As he ascended the last stair or

two, and the light of my lamp included us both, I saw, with a

stupid kind of amazement, that he was holding out both his hands to

me.

“Pray what is your business?” I asked him.

“My business?” he repeated, pausing. “Ah! Yes. I will explain my

business, by your leave.”

“Do you wish to come in?”

“Yes,” he replied; “I wish to come in, master.”

I had asked him the question inhospitably enough, for I resented

the sort of bright and gratified recognition that still shone in

his face. I resented it, because it seemed to imply that he

expected me to respond to it. But I took him into the room I had

just left, and, having set the lamp on the table, asked him as

civilly as I could to explain himself.

He looked about him with the strangest air,—an air of wondering

pleasure, as if he had some part in the things he admired,—and he

pulled off a rough outer coat, and his hat. Then, I saw that his

head was furrowed and bald, and that the long iron-gray hair grew

only on its sides. But, I saw nothing that in the least explained

him. On the contrary, I saw him next moment, once more holding out

both his hands to me.

“What do you mean?” said I, half suspecting him to be mad.

He stopped in his looking at me, and slowly rubbed his right hand

over his head. “It’s disapinting to a man,” he said, in a coarse

broken voice, “arter having looked for’ard so distant, and come so

fur; but you’re not to blame for that,—neither on us is to blame

for that. I’ll speak in half a minute. Give me half a minute,

please.”

He sat down on a chair that stood before the fire, and covered his

forehead with his large brown veinous hands. I looked at him

attentively then, and recoiled a little from him; but I did not

know him.

“There’s no one nigh,” said he, looking over his shoulder; “is

there?”

“Why do you, a stranger coming into my rooms at this time of the

night, ask that question?” said I.

“You’re a game one,” he returned, shaking his head at me with a

deliberate affection, at once most unintelligible and most

exasperating; “I’m glad you’ve grow’d up, a game one! But don’t

catch hold of me. You’d be sorry arterwards to have done it.”

I relinquished the intention he had detected, for I knew him! Even

yet I could not recall a single feature, but I knew him! If the

wind and the rain had driven away the intervening years, had

scattered all the intervening objects, had swept us to the

churchyard where we first stood face to face on such different

levels, I could not have known my convict more distinctly than I

knew him now as he sat in the chair before the fire. No need to

take a file from his pocket and show it to me; no need to take the

handkerchief from his neck and twist it round his head; no need to

hug himself with both his arms, and take a shivering turn across

the room, looking back at me for recognition. I knew him before he

gave me one of those aids, though, a moment before, I had not been

conscious of remotely suspecting his identity.

He came back to where I stood, and again held out both his hands.

Not knowing what to do,—for, in my astonishment I had lost my

self-possession,—I reluctantly gave him my hands. He grasped them

heartily, raised them to his lips, kissed them, and still held

them.

“You acted noble, my boy,” said he. “Noble, Pip! And I have never

forgot it!”

At a change in his manner as if he were even going to embrace me, I

laid a hand upon his breast and put him away.

“Stay!” said I. “Keep off! If you are grateful to me for what I did

when I was a little child, I hope you have shown your gratitude by

mending your way of life. If you have come here to thank me, it was

not necessary. Still, however you have found me out, there must be

something good in the feeling that has brought you here, and I will

not repulse you; but surely you must understand that—I—”

My attention was so attracted by the singularity of his fixed look

at me, that the words died away on my tongue.

“You was a saying,” he observed, when we had confronted one another

in silence, “that surely I must understand. What, surely must I

understand?”

“That I cannot wish to renew that chance intercourse with you of

long ago, under these different circumstances. I am glad to believe

you have repented and recovered yourself. I am glad to tell you so.

I am glad that, thinking I deserve to be thanked, you have come to

thank me. But our ways are different ways, none the less. You are

wet, and you look weary. Will you drink something before you go?”

He had replaced his neckerchief loosely, and had stood, keenly

observant of me, biting a long end of it. “I think,” he answered,

still with the end at his mouth and still observant of me, “that I

will drink (I thank you) afore I go.”

There was a tray ready on a side-table. I brought it to the table

near the fire, and asked him what he would have? He touched one of

the bottles without looking at it or speaking, and I made him some

hot rum and water. I tried to keep my hand steady while I did so,

but his look at me as he leaned back in his chair with the long

draggled end of his neckerchief between his teeth—evidently

forgotten—made my hand very difficult to master. When at last I

put the glass to him, I saw with amazement that his eyes were full

of tears.

Up to this time I had remained standing, not to disguise that I

wished him gone. But I was softened by the softened aspect of the

man, and felt a touch of reproach. “I hope,” said I, hurriedly

putting something into a glass for myself, and drawing a chair to

the table, “that you will not think I spoke harshly to you just

now. I had no intention of doing it, and I am sorry for it if I

did. I wish you well and happy!”

As I put my glass to my lips, he glanced with surprise at the end

of his neckerchief, dropping from his mouth when he opened it, and

stretched out his hand. I gave him mine, and then he