Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
by Charles Dickens
Chapter XLVII
Some weeks passed without bringing any change. We waited for Wemmick, and he made no sign.
If I had never known him out of Little Britain, and had never enjoyed the privilege of being
on a familiar footing at the Castle, I might have doubted him; not so for a moment, knowing
him as I did. My worldly affairs began to wear a gloomy
appearance, and I was pressed for money by more than one creditor. Even I myself began
to know the want of money (I mean of ready money in my own pocket), and to relieve it
by converting some easily spared articles of jewelery into cash. But I had quite determined
that it would be a heartless fraud to take more money from my patron in the existing
state of my uncertain thoughts and plans. Therefore, I had sent him the unopened pocket-book
by Herbert, to hold in his own keeping, and I felt a kind of satisfactionówhether it
was a false kind or a true, I hardly knowóin not having profited by his generosity since
his revelation of himself. As the time wore on, an impression settled
heavily upon me that Estella was married. Fearful of having it confirmed, though it
was all but a conviction, I avoided the newspapers, and begged Herbert (to whom I had confided
the circumstances of our last interview) never to speak of her to me. Why I hoarded up this
last wretched little rag of the robe of hope that was rent and given to the winds, how
do I know? Why did you who read this, commit that not dissimilar inconsistency of your
own last year, last month, last week? It was an unhappy life that I lived; and its
one dominant anxiety, towering over all its other anxieties, like a high mountain above
a range of mountains, never disappeared from my view. Still, no new cause for fear arose.
Let me start from my bed as I would, with the terror fresh upon me that he was discovered;
let me sit listening, as I would with dread, for Herbert's returning step at night, lest
it should be fleeter than ordinary, and winged with evil news,ófor all that, and much more
to like purpose, the round of things went on. Condemned to inaction and a state of constant
restlessness and suspense, I rowed about in my boat, and waited, waited, waited, as I
best could. There were states of the tide when, having
been down the river, I could not get back through the eddy-chafed arches and starlings
of old London Bridge; then, I left my boat at a wharf near the Custom House, to be brought
up afterwards to the Temple stairs. I was not averse to doing this, as it served to
make me and my boat a commoner incident among the water-side people there. From this slight
occasion sprang two meetings that I have now to tell of.
One afternoon, late in the month of February, I came ashore at the wharf at dusk. I had
pulled down as far as Greenwich with the ebb tide, and had turned with the tide. It had
been a fine bright day, but had become foggy as the sun dropped, and I had had to feel
my way back among the shipping, pretty carefully. Both in going and returning, I had seen the
signal in his window, All well. As it was a raw evening, and I was cold, I
thought I would comfort myself with dinner at once; and as I had hours of dejection and
solitude before me if I went home to the Temple, I thought I would afterwards go to the play.
The theatre where Mr. Wopsle had achieved his questionable triumph was in that water-side
neighborhood (it is nowhere now), and to that theatre I resolved to go. I was aware that
Mr. Wopsle had not succeeded in reviving the Drama, but, on the contrary, had rather partaken
of its decline. He had been ominously heard of, through the play-bills, as a faithful
Black, in connection with a little girl of noble birth, and a monkey. And Herbert had
seen him as a predatory Tartar of comic propensities, with a face like a red brick, and an outrageous
hat all over bells. I dined at what Herbert and I used to call
a geographical chop-house, where there were maps of the world in porter-pot rims on every
half-yard of the tablecloths, and charts of gravy on every one of the knives,óto this
day there is scarcely a single chop-house within the Lord Mayor's dominions which is
not geographical,óand wore out the time in dozing over crumbs, staring at gas, and baking
in a hot blast of dinners. By and by, I roused myself, and went to the play.
There, I found a virtuous boatswain in His Majesty's service,óa most excellent man,
though I could have wished his trousers not quite so tight in some places, and not quite
so loose in others,ówho knocked all the little men's hats over their eyes, though he was
very generous and brave, and who wouldn't hear of anybody's paying taxes, though he
was very patriotic. He had a bag of money in his pocket, like a pudding in the cloth,
and on that property married a young person in bed-furniture, with great rejoicings; the
whole population of Portsmouth (nine in number at the last census) turning out on the beach
to rub their own hands and shake everybody else's, and sing "Fill, fill!" A certain dark-complexioned
Swab, however, who wouldn't fill, or do anything else that was proposed to him, and whose heart
was openly stated (by the boatswain) to be as black as his figure-head, proposed to two
other Swabs to get all mankind into difficulties; which was so effectually done (the Swab family
having considerable political influence) that it took half the evening to set things right,
and then it was only brought about through an honest little grocer with a white hat,
black gaiters, and red nose, getting into a clock, with a gridiron, and listening, and
coming out, and knocking everybody down from behind with the gridiron whom he couldn't
confute with what he had overheard. This led to Mr. Wopsle's (who had never been heard
of before) coming in with a star and garter on, as a plenipotentiary of great power direct
from the Admiralty, to say that the Swabs were all to go to prison on the spot, and
that he had brought the boatswain down the Union Jack, as a slight acknowledgment of
his public services. The boatswain, unmanned for the first time, respectfully dried his
eyes on the Jack, and then cheering up, and addressing Mr. Wopsle as Your Honor, solicited
permission to take him by the fin. Mr. Wopsle, conceding his fin with a gracious dignity,
was immediately shoved into a dusty corner, while everybody danced a hornpipe; and from
that corner, surveying the public with a discontented eye, became aware of me.
The second piece was the last new grand comic Christmas pantomime, in the first scene of
which, it pained me to suspect that I detected Mr. Wopsle with red worsted legs under a highly
magnified phosphoric countenance and a shock of red curtain-fringe for his hair, engaged
in the manufacture of thunderbolts in a mine, and displaying great cowardice when his gigantic
master came home (very hoarse) to dinner. But he presently presented himself under worthier
circumstances; for, the Genius of Youthful Love being in want of assistance,óon account
of the parental brutality of an ignorant farmer who opposed the choice of his daughter's heart,
by purposely falling upon the object, in a flour-sack, out of the first-floor window,ósummoned
a sententious Enchanter; and he, coming up from the antipodes rather unsteadily, after
an apparently violent journey, proved to be Mr. Wopsle in a high-crowned hat, with a necromantic
work in one volume under his arm. The business of this enchanter on earth being principally
to be talked at, sung at, butted at, danced at, and flashed at with fires of various colors,
he had a good deal of time on his hands. And I observed, with great surprise, that he devoted
it to staring in my direction as if he were lost in amazement.
There was something so remarkable in the increasing glare of Mr. Wopsle's eye, and he seemed to
be turning so many things over in his mind and to grow so confused, that I could not
make it out. I sat thinking of it long after he had ascended to the clouds in a large watch-case,
and still I could not make it out. I was still thinking of it when I came out of the theatre
an hour afterwards, and found him waiting for me near the door.
"How do you do?" said I, shaking hands with him as we turned down the street together.
"I saw that you saw me." "Saw you, Mr. Pip!" he returned. "Yes, of
course I saw you. But who else was there?" "Who else?"
"It is the strangest thing," said Mr. Wopsle, drifting into his lost look again; "and yet
I could swear to him." Becoming alarmed, I entreated Mr. Wopsle to
explain his meaning. "Whether I should have noticed him at first
but for your being there," said Mr. Wopsle, going on in the same lost way, "I can't be
positive; yet I think I should." Involuntarily I looked round me, as I was
accustomed to look round me when I went home; for these mysterious words gave me a chill.
"Oh! He can't be in sight," said Mr. Wopsle. "He went out before I went off. I saw him
go." Having the reason that I had for being suspicious,
I even suspected this poor actor. I mistrusted a design to entrap me into some admission.
Therefore I glanced at him as we walked on together, but said nothing.
"I had a ridiculous fancy that he must be with you, Mr. Pip, till I saw that you were
quite unconscious of him, sitting behind you there like a ghost."
My former chill crept over me again, but I was resolved not to speak yet, for it was
quite consistent with his words that he might be set on to induce me to connect these references
with Provis. Of course, I was perfectly sure and safe that Provis had not been there.
"I dare say you wonder at me, Mr. Pip; indeed, I see you do. But it is so very strange! You'll
hardly believe what I am going to tell you. I could hardly believe it myself, if you told
me." "Indeed?" said I.
"No, indeed. Mr. Pip, you remember in old times a certain Christmas Day, when you were
quite a child, and I dined at Gargery's, and some soldiers came to the door to get a pair
of handcuffs mended?" "I remember it very well."
"And you remember that there was a chase after two convicts, and that we joined in it, and
that Gargery took you on his back, and that I took the lead, and you kept up with me as
well as you could?" "I remember it all very well." Better than
he thought,óexcept the last clause. "And you remember that we came up with the
two in a ditch, and that there was a scuffle between them, and that one of them had been
severely handled and much mauled about the face by the other?"
"I see it all before me." "And that the soldiers lighted torches, and
put the two in the centre, and that we went on to see the last of them, over the black
marshes, with the torchlight shining on their faces,óI am particular about that,ówith
the torchlight shining on their faces, when there was an outer ring of dark night all
about us?" "Yes," said I. "I remember all that."
"Then, Mr. Pip, one of those two prisoners sat behind you tonight. I saw him over your
shoulder." "Steady!" I thought. I asked him then, "Which
of the two do you 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,ómore cautious than before, if that were possible,óand 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.