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Read books online » Fiction » Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (best ereader under 100 TXT) 📖

Book online «Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (best ereader under 100 TXT) 📖». Author Charles Dickens



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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 XL

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 upstairs.

“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-colored 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

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