Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

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I could not have spoken one word, though it had been to save my
life. I stood, with a hand on the chair-back and a hand on my
breast, where I seemed to be suffocating - I stood so, looking
wildly at him, until I grasped at the chair, when the room began to
surge and turn. He caught me, drew me to the sofa, put me up
against the cushions, and bent on one knee before me: bringing the
face that I now well remembered, and that I shuddered at, very near
to mine.

"Yes, Pip, dear boy, I've made a gentleman on you! It's me wot has
done it! I swore that time, sure as ever I earned a guinea, that
guinea should go to you. I swore arterwards, sure as ever I
spec'lated and got rich, you should get rich. I lived rough, that
you should live smooth; I worked hard, that you should be above
work. What odds, dear boy? Do I tell it, fur you to feel a
obligation? Not a bit. I tell it, fur you to know as that there
hunted dunghill dog wot you kep life in, got his head so high that
he could make a gentleman - and, Pip, you're him!"

The abhorrence in which I held the man, the dread I had of him, the
repugnance with which I shrank from him, could not have been
exceeded if he had been some terrible beast.

"Look'ee here, Pip. I'm your second father. You're my son - more to
me nor any son. I've put away money, only for you to spend. When I
was a hired-out shepherd in a solitary hut, not seeing no faces but
faces of sheep till I half forgot wot men's and women's faces wos
like, I see yourn. I drops my knife many a time in that hut when I
was a-eating my dinner or my supper, and I says, 'Here's the boy
again, a-looking at me whiles I eats and drinks!' I see you there a
many times, as plain as ever I see you on them misty marshes. 'Lord
strike me dead!' I says each time - and I goes out in the air to
say it under the open heavens - 'but wot, if I gets liberty and
money, I'll make that boy a gentleman!' And I done it. Why, look at
you, dear boy! Look at these here lodgings o'yourn, fit for a lord!
A lord? Ah! You shall show money with lords for wagers, and beat
'em!"

In his heat and triumph, and in his knowledge that I had been
nearly fainting, he did not remark on my reception of all this. It
was the one grain of relief I had.

"Look'ee here!" he went on, taking my watch out of my pocket, and
turning towards him a ring on my finger, while I recoiled from his
touch as if he had been a snake, "a gold 'un and a beauty: that's a
gentleman's, I hope! A diamond all set round with rubies; that's a
gentleman's, I hope! Look at your linen; fine and beautiful! Look
at your clothes; better ain't to be got! And your books too,"
turning his eyes round the room, "mounting up, on their shelves, by
hundreds! And you read 'em; don't you? I see you'd been a reading
of 'em when I come in. Ha, ha, ha! You shall read 'em to me, dear
boy! And if they're in foreign languages wot I don't understand, I
shall be just as proud as if I did."

Again he took both my hands and put them to his lips, while my
blood ran cold within me.

"Don't you mind talking, Pip," said he, after again drawing his
sleeve over his eyes and forehead, as the click came in his throat
which I well remembered - and he was all the more horrible to me
that he was so much in earnest; "you can't do better nor keep
quiet, dear boy. You ain't looked slowly forward to this as I have;
you wosn't prepared for this, as I wos. But didn't you never think
it might be me?"

"O no, no, no," I returned, "Never, never!"

"Well, you see it wos me, and single-handed. Never a soul in it but
my own self and Mr. Jaggers."

"Was there no one else?" I asked.

"No," said he, with a glance of surprise: "who else should there
be? And, dear boy, how good looking you have growed! There's bright
eyes somewheres - eh? Isn't there bright eyes somewheres, wot you
love the thoughts on?"

O Estella, Estella!

"They shall be yourn, dear boy, if money can buy 'em. Not that a
gentleman like you, so well set up as you, can't win 'em off of his
own game; but money shall back you! Let me finish wot I was a-
telling you, dear boy. From that there hut and that there
hiring-out, I got money left me by my master (which died, and had
been the same as me), and got my liberty and went for myself. In
every single thing I went for, I went for you. 'Lord strike a
blight upon it,' I says, wotever it was I went for, 'if it ain't
for him!' It all prospered wonderful. As I giv' you to understand
just now, I'm famous for it. It was the money left me, and the
gains of the first few year wot I sent home to Mr. Jaggers - all for
you - when he first come arter you, agreeable to my letter."

O, that he had never come! That he had left me at the forge - far
from contented, yet, by comparison happy!

"And then, dear boy, it was a recompense to me, look'ee here, to
know in secret that I was making a gentleman. The blood horses of
them colonists might fling up the dust over me as I was walking;
what do I say? I says to myself, 'I'm making a better gentleman nor
ever you'll be!' When one of 'em says to another, 'He was a
convict, a few year ago, and is a ignorant common fellow now, for
all he's lucky,' what do I say? I says to myself, 'If I ain't a
gentleman, nor yet ain't got no learning, I'm the owner of such.
All on you owns stock and land; which on you owns a brought-up
London gentleman?' This way I kep myself a-going. And this way I
held steady afore my mind that I would for certain come one day and
see my boy, and make myself known to him, on his own ground."

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 the 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, 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 recall
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 nearer. 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.

Chapter 40

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 up-stairs.

"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 flourish, 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 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. Similarly, 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 the 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 come 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 recognized 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 years 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, not 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 have 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."

"And how long do you remain?"

"How long?" said he, taking his black pipe from his mouth, and
dropping his jaw as he stared at me. "I'm not a-going back. I've
come for good."

"Where are you to live?" said I. "What is to be done with you?
Where will you be safe?"

"Dear boy," he returned, "there's disguising wigs can be bought for
money, and there's hair powder, and spectacles, and black clothes -
shorts and what not. Others has done it safe afore, and what others
has done afore, others can do agen. As to the where and how of
living, dear boy, give me your own opinions on it."

"You take it smoothly now," said I, "but you were very serious last
night, when you swore it was Death."

"And so I swear it is Death," said he, putting his pipe back in his
mouth, "and Death by the rope, in the open street not fur from
this, and it's serious that you should fully understand it to be
so. What then, when that's once done? Here I am. To go back now,
'ud be as bad as to stand ground - worse. Besides, Pip, I'm here,
because I've meant it by you, years and years. As to what I dare,
I'm a old bird now, as has dared all manner of traps since first he
was fledged, and I'm not afeerd to perch upon a scarecrow. If
there's Death hid inside of it, there is, and let him come out, and
I'll face him, and then I'll believe in him and not afore. And now
let me have a look at my gentleman agen."

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