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

Chapter XLVIII

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