Great Expectations, Charles Dickens [top 10 best books of all time txt] 📗
- Author: Charles Dickens
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suppose you saw?”
“The one who had been mauled,” he answered readily, “and I’ll swear
I saw him! The more I think of him, the more certain I am of him.”
“This is very curious!” said I, with the best assumption I could
put on of its being nothing more to me. “Very curious indeed!”
I cannot exaggerate the enhanced disquiet into which this
conversation threw me, or the special and peculiar terror I felt at
Compeyson’s having been behind me “like a ghost.” For if he had
ever been out of my thoughts for a few moments together since the
hiding had begun, it was in those very moments when he was closest
to me; and to think that I should be so unconscious and off my
guard after all my care was as if I had shut an avenue of a
hundred doors to keep him out, and then had found him at my elbow.
I could not doubt, either, that he was there, because I was there,
and that, however slight an appearance of danger there might be
about us, danger was always near and active.
I put such questions to Mr. Wopsle as, When did the man come in? He
could not tell me that; he saw me, and over my shoulder he saw the
man. It was not until he had seen him for some time that he began
to identify him; but he had from the first vaguely associated him
with me, and known him as somehow belonging to me in the old
village time. How was he dressed? Prosperously, but not noticeably
otherwise; he thought, in black. Was his face at all disfigured?
No, he believed not. I believed not too, for, although in my
brooding state I had taken no especial notice of the people behind
me, I thought it likely that a face at all disfigured would have
attracted my attention.
When Mr. Wopsle had imparted to me all that he could recall or I
extract, and when I had treated him to a little appropriate
refreshment, after the fatigues of the evening, we parted. It was
between twelve and one o’clock when I reached the Temple, and the
gates were shut. No one was near me when I went in and went home.
Herbert had come in, and we held a very serious council by the
fire. But there was nothing to be done, saving to communicate to
Wemmick what I had that night found out, and to remind him that we
waited for his hint. As I thought that I might compromise him if I
went too often to the Castle, I made this communication by letter.
I wrote it before I went to bed, and went out and posted it; and
again no one was near me. Herbert and I agreed that we could do
nothing else but be very cautious. And we were very cautious indeed,
—more cautious than before, if that were possible,—and I for my
part never went near Chinks’s Basin, except when I rowed by, and
then I only looked at Mill Pond Bank as I looked at anything else.
The second of the two meetings referred to in the last chapter
occurred about a week after the first. I had again left my boat at
the wharf below Bridge; the time was an hour earlier in the
afternoon; and, undecided where to dine, I had strolled up into
Cheapside, and was strolling along it, surely the most unsettled
person in all the busy concourse, when a large hand was laid upon
my shoulder by some one overtaking me. It was Mr. Jaggers’s hand,
and he passed it through my arm.
“As we are going in the same direction, Pip, we may walk together.
Where are you bound for?”
“For the Temple, I think,” said I.
“Don’t you know?” said Mr. Jaggers.
“Well,” I returned, glad for once to get the better of him in
cross-examination, “I do not know, for I have not made up my mind.”
“You are going to dine?” said Mr. Jaggers. “You don’t mind admitting
that, I suppose?”
“No,” I returned, “I don’t mind admitting that.”
“And are not engaged?”
“I don’t mind admitting also that I am not engaged.”
“Then,” said Mr. Jaggers, “come and dine with me.”
I was going to excuse myself, when he added, “Wemmick’s coming.”
So I changed my excuse into an acceptance,—the few words I had
uttered, serving for the beginning of either,—and we went along
Cheapside and slanted off to Little Britain, while the lights were
springing up brilliantly in the shop windows, and the street
lamp-lighters, scarcely finding ground enough to plant their
ladders on in the midst of the afternoon’s bustle, were skipping up
and down and running in and out, opening more red eyes in the
gathering fog than my rushlight tower at the Hummums had opened
white eyes in the ghostly wall.
At the office in Little Britain there was the usual letter-writing,
hand-washing, candle-snuffing, and safe-locking, that closed the
business of the day. As I stood idle by Mr. Jaggers’s fire, its
rising and falling flame made the two casts on the shelf look as if
they were playing a diabolical game at bo-peep with me; while the
pair of coarse, fat office candles that dimly lighted Mr. Jaggers as
he wrote in a corner were decorated with dirty winding-sheets, as
if in remembrance of a host of hanged clients.
We went to Gerrard Street, all three together, in a hackney-coach:
And, as soon as we got there, dinner was served. Although I should
not have thought of making, in that place, the most distant
reference by so much as a look to Wemmick’s Walworth sentiments,
yet I should have had no objection to catching his eye now and then
in a friendly way. But it was not to be done. He turned his eyes on
Mr. Jaggers whenever he raised them from the table, and was as dry
and distant to me as if there were twin Wemmicks, and this was the
wrong one.
“Did you send that note of Miss Havisham’s to Mr. Pip, Wemmick?” Mr.
Jaggers asked, soon after we began dinner.
“No, sir,” returned Wemmick; “it was going by post, when you
brought Mr. Pip into the office. Here it is.” He handed it to his
principal instead of to me.
“It’s a note of two lines, Pip,” said Mr. Jaggers, handing it on,
“sent up to me by Miss Havisham on account of her not being sure
of your address. She tells me that she wants to see you on a little
matter of business you mentioned to her. You’ll go down?”
“Yes,” said I, casting my eyes over the note, which was exactly in
those terms.
“When do you think of going down?”
“I have an impending engagement,” said I, glancing at Wemmick, who
was putting fish into the post-office, “that renders me rather
uncertain of my time. At once, I think.”
“If Mr. Pip has the intention of going at once,” said Wemmick to Mr.
Jaggers, “he needn’t write an answer, you know.”
Receiving this as an intimation that it was best not to delay, I
settled that I would go tomorrow, and said so. Wemmick drank a
glass of wine, and looked with a grimly satisfied air at Mr. Jaggers,
but not at me.
“So, Pip! Our friend the Spider,” said Mr. Jaggers, “has played his
cards. He has won the pool.”
It was as much as I could do to assent.
“Hah! He is a promising fellow—in his way—but he may not have
it all his own way. The stronger will win in the end, but the
stronger has to be found out first. If he should turn to, and beat
her—”
“Surely,” I interrupted, with a burning face and heart, “you do not
seriously think that he is scoundrel enough for that, Mr. Jaggers?”
“I didn’t say so, Pip. I am putting a case. If he should turn to
and beat her, he may possibly get the strength on his side; if it
should be a question of intellect, he certainly will not. It would
be chance work to give an opinion how a fellow of that sort will
turn out in such circumstances, because it’s a toss-up between two
results.”
“May I ask what they are?”
“A fellow like our friend the Spider,” answered Mr. Jaggers, “either
beats or cringes. He may cringe and growl, or cringe and not
growl; but he either beats or cringes. Ask Wemmick his opinion.”
“Either beats or cringes,” said Wemmick, not at all addressing
himself to me.
“So here’s to Mrs. Bentley Drummle,” said Mr. Jaggers, taking a
decanter of choicer wine from his dumb-waiter, and filling for each
of us and for himself, “and may the question of supremacy be
settled to the lady’s satisfaction! To the satisfaction of the lady
and the gentleman, it never will be. Now, Molly, Molly, Molly,
Molly, how slow you are to-day!”
She was at his elbow when he addressed her, putting a dish upon the
table. As she withdrew her hands from it, she fell back a step or
two, nervously muttering some excuse. And a certain action of her
fingers, as she spoke, arrested my attention.
“What’s the matter?” said Mr. Jaggers.
“Nothing. Only the subject we were speaking of,” said I, “was
rather painful to me.”
The action of her fingers was like the action of knitting. She
stood looking at her master, not understanding whether she was free
to go, or whether he had more to say to her and would call her back
if she did go. Her look was very intent. Surely, I had seen exactly
such eyes and such hands on a memorable occasion very lately!
He dismissed her, and she glided out of the room. But she remained
before me as plainly as if she were still there. I looked at those
hands, I looked at those eyes, I looked at that flowing hair; and I
compared them with other hands, other eyes, other hair, that I knew
of, and with what those might be after twenty years of a brutal
husband and a stormy life. I looked again at those hands and eyes
of the housekeeper, and thought of the inexplicable feeling that
had come over me when I last walked—not alone—in the ruined
garden, and through the deserted brewery. I thought how the same
feeling had come back when I saw a face looking at me, and a hand
waving to me from a stage-coach window; and how it had come back
again and had flashed about me like lightning, when I had passed in
a carriage—not alone—through a sudden glare of light in a dark
street. I thought how one link of association had helped that
identification in the theatre, and how such a link, wanting before,
had been riveted for me now, when I had passed by a chance swift
from Estella’s name to the fingers with their knitting action, and
the attentive eyes. And I felt absolutely certain that this woman
was Estella’s mother.
Mr. Jaggers had seen me with Estella, and was not likely to have
missed the sentiments I had been at no pains to conceal. He nodded
when I said the subject was painful to me, clapped me on the back,
put round the wine again, and went on with his dinner.
Only twice more did the housekeeper reappear, and then her stay in
the room was very short, and Mr. Jaggers was sharp with her. But her
hands were Estella’s hands, and her eyes were Estella’s eyes, and
if she had reappeared a hundred times I could have been neither
more sure nor less sure that my conviction was the truth.
It was a dull evening, for Wemmick drew his wine, when it came
round, quite as a matter
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