Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (best ereader under 100 TXT) 📖

his pipe, put

his legs up on the settle that he had to himself. He wore a

flapping broad-brimmed traveller’s hat, and under it a handkerchief

tied over his head in the manner of a cap: so that he showed no

hair. As he looked at the fire, I thought I saw a cunning

expression, followed by a half-laugh, come into his face.

“I am not acquainted with this country, gentlemen, but it seems a

solitary country towards the river.”

“Most marshes is solitary,” said Joe.

“No doubt, no doubt. Do you find any gypsies, now, or tramps, or

vagrants of any sort, out there?”

“No,” said Joe; “none but a runaway convict now and then. And we

don’t find them, easy. Eh, Mr. Wopsle?”

Mr. Wopsle, with a majestic remembrance of old discomfiture,

assented; but not warmly.

“Seems you have been out after such?” asked the stranger.

“Once,” returned Joe. “Not that we wanted to take them, you

understand; we went out as lookers on; me, and Mr. Wopsle, and Pip.

Didn’t us, Pip?”

“Yes, Joe.”

The stranger looked at me again,—still cocking his eye, as if he

were expressly taking aim at me with his invisible gun,—and said,

“He’s a likely young parcel of bones that. What is it you call

him?”

“Pip,” said Joe.

“Christened Pip?”

“No, not christened Pip.”

“Surname Pip?”

“No,” said Joe, “it’s a kind of family name what he gave himself

when a infant, and is called by.”

“Son of yours?”

“Well,” said Joe, meditatively, not, of course, that it could be

in anywise necessary to consider about it, but because it was the

way at the Jolly Bargemen to seem to consider deeply about

everything that was discussed over pipes,—“well—no. No, he

ain’t.”

“Nevvy?” said the strange man.

“Well,” said Joe, with the same appearance of profound cogitation,

“he is not—no, not to deceive you, he is not—my nevvy.”

“What the Blue Blazes is he?” asked the stranger. Which appeared to

me to be an inquiry of unnecessary strength.

Mr. Wopsle struck in upon that; as one who knew all about

relationships, having professional occasion to bear in mind what

female relations a man might not marry; and expounded the ties

between me and Joe. Having his hand in, Mr. Wopsle finished off with

a most terrifically snarling passage from Richard the Third, and

seemed to think he had done quite enough to account for it when he

added, “—as the poet says.”

And here I may remark that when Mr. Wopsle referred to me, he

considered it a necessary part of such reference to rumple my hair

and poke it into my eyes. I cannot conceive why everybody of his

standing who visited at our house should always have put me through

the same inflammatory process under similar circumstances. Yet I do

not call to mind that I was ever in my earlier youth the subject of

remark in our social family circle, but some large-handed person

took some such ophthalmic steps to patronize me.

All this while, the strange man looked at nobody but me, and looked

at me as if he were determined to have a shot at me at last, and

bring me down. But he said nothing after offering his Blue Blazes

observation, until the glasses of rum and water were brought; and

then he made his shot, and a most extraordinary shot it was.

It was not a verbal remark, but a proceeding in dumb-show, and was

pointedly addressed to me. He stirred his rum and water pointedly

at me, and he tasted his rum and water pointedly at me. And he

stirred it and he tasted it; not with a spoon that was brought to

him, but with a file.

He did this so that nobody but I saw the file; and when he had done

it he wiped the file and put it in a breast-pocket. I knew it to be

Joe’s file, and I knew that he knew my convict, the moment I saw

the instrument. I sat gazing at him, spell-bound. But he now

reclined on his settle, taking very little notice of me, and

talking principally about turnips.

There was a delicious sense of cleaning-up and making a quiet pause

before going on in life afresh, in our village on Saturday nights,

which stimulated Joe to dare to stay out half an hour longer on

Saturdays than at other times. The half-hour and the rum and water

running out together, Joe got up to go, and took me by the hand.

“Stop half a moment, Mr. Gargery,” said the strange man. “I think

I’ve got a bright new shilling somewhere in my pocket, and if I

have, the boy shall have it.”

He looked it out from a handful of small change, folded it in some

crumpled paper, and gave it to me. “Yours!” said he. “Mind! Your

own.”

I thanked him, staring at him far beyond the bounds of good

manners, and holding tight to Joe. He gave Joe good-night, and he

gave Mr. Wopsle good-night (who went out with us), and he gave me

only a look with his aiming eye,—no, not a look, for he shut it

up, but wonders may be done with an eye by hiding it.

On the way home, if I had been in a humor for talking, the talk

must have been all on my side, for Mr. Wopsle parted from us at the

door of the Jolly Bargemen, and Joe went all the way home with his

mouth wide open, to rinse the rum out with as much air as possible.

But I was in a manner stupefied by this turning up of my old

misdeed and old acquaintance, and could think of nothing else.

My sister was not in a very bad temper when we presented ourselves

in the kitchen, and Joe was encouraged by that unusual circumstance

to tell her about the bright shilling. “A bad un, I’ll be bound,”

said Mrs. Joe triumphantly, “or he wouldn’t have given it to the

boy! Let’s look at it.”

I took it out of the paper, and it proved to be a good one. “But

what’s this?” said Mrs. Joe, throwing down the shilling and catching

up the paper. “Two One-Pound notes?”

Nothing less than two fat sweltering one-pound notes that seemed to

have been on terms of the warmest intimacy with all the cattle-markets in the county. Joe caught up his hat again, and ran with

them to the Jolly Bargemen to restore them to their owner. While he

was gone, I sat down on my usual stool and looked vacantly at my

sister, feeling pretty sure that the man would not be there.

Presently, Joe came back, saying that the man was gone, but that

he, Joe, had left word at the Three Jolly Bargemen concerning the

notes. Then my sister sealed them up in a piece of paper, and put

them under some dried rose-leaves in an ornamental teapot on the

top of a press in the state parlor. There they remained, a

nightmare to me, many and many a night and day.

I had sadly broken sleep when I got to bed, through thinking of the

strange man taking aim at me with his invisible gun, and of the

guiltily coarse and common thing it was, to be on secret terms of

conspiracy with convicts,—a feature in my low career that I had

previously forgotten. I was haunted by the file too. A dread

possessed me that when I least expected it, the file would

reappear. I coaxed myself to sleep by thinking of Miss Havisham’s,

next Wednesday; and in my sleep I saw the file coming at me out of

a door, without seeing who held it, and I screamed myself awake.