Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (best ereader under 100 TXT) đź“–
- Author: Charles Dickens
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his salary when that came round,—and with his eyes on his chief,
sat in a state of perpetual readiness for cross-examination. As to
the quantity of wine, his post-office was as indifferent and ready
as any other post-office for its quantity of letters. From my point
of view, he was the wrong twin all the time, and only externally
like the Wemmick of Walworth.
We took our leave early, and left together. Even when we were
groping among Mr. Jaggers’s stock of boots for our hats, I felt that
the right twin was on his way back; and we had not gone half a
dozen yards down Gerrard Street in the Walworth direction, before I
found that I was walking arm in arm with the right twin, and that
the wrong twin had evaporated into the evening air.
“Well!” said Wemmick, “that’s over! He’s a wonderful man, without
his living likeness; but I feel that I have to screw myself up when
I dine with him,—and I dine more comfortably unscrewed.”
I felt that this was a good statement of the case, and told him so.
“Wouldn’t say it to anybody but yourself,” he answered. “I know
that what is said between you and me goes no further.”
I asked him if he had ever seen Miss Havisham’s adopted daughter,
Mrs. Bentley Drummle. He said no. To avoid being too abrupt, I then
spoke of the Aged and of Miss Skiffins. He looked rather sly when
I mentioned Miss Skiffins, and stopped in the street to blow his
nose, with a roll of the head, and a flourish not quite free from
latent boastfulness.
“Wemmick,” said I, “do you remember telling me, before I first went
to Mr. Jaggers’s private house, to notice that housekeeper?”
“Did I?” he replied. “Ah, I dare say I did. Deuce take me,” he
added, suddenly, “I know I did. I find I am not quite unscrewed
yet.”
“A wild beast tamed, you called her.”
“And what do you call her?”
“The same. How did Mr. Jaggers tame her, Wemmick?”
“That’s his secret. She has been with him many a long year.”
“I wish you would tell me her story. I feel a particular interest
in being acquainted with it. You know that what is said between you
and me goes no further.”
“Well!” Wemmick replied, “I don’t know her story,—that is, I don’t
know all of it. But what I do know I’ll tell you. We are in our
private and personal capacities, of course.”
“Of course.”
“A score or so of years ago, that woman was tried at the Old Bailey
for murder, and was acquitted. She was a very handsome young woman,
and I believe had some gypsy blood in her. Anyhow, it was hot enough
when it was up, as you may suppose.”
“But she was acquitted.”
“Mr. Jaggers was for her,” pursued Wemmick, with a look full of
meaning, “and worked the case in a way quite astonishing. It was a
desperate case, and it was comparatively early days with him then,
and he worked it to general admiration; in fact, it may almost be
said to have made him. He worked it himself at the police-office,
day after day for many days, contending against even a committal;
and at the trial where he couldn’t work it himself, sat under
counsel, and—every one knew—put in all the salt and pepper. The
murdered person was a woman,—a woman a good ten years older, very
much larger, and very much stronger. It was a case of jealousy.
They both led tramping lives, and this woman in Gerrard Street here
had been married very young, over the broomstick (as we say), to a
tramping man, and was a perfect fury in point of jealousy. The
murdered woman,—more a match for the man, certainly, in point of
years—was found dead in a barn near Hounslow Heath. There had
been a violent struggle, perhaps a fight. She was bruised and
scratched and torn, and had been held by the throat, at last, and
choked. Now, there was no reasonable evidence to implicate any
person but this woman, and on the improbabilities of her having
been able to do it Mr. Jaggers principally rested his case. You may
be sure,” said Wemmick, touching me on the sleeve, “that he never
dwelt upon the strength of her hands then, though he sometimes does
now.”
I had told Wemmick of his showing us her wrists, that day of the
dinner party.
“Well, sir!” Wemmick went on; “it happened—happened, don’t you
see?—that this woman was so very artfully dressed from the time
of her apprehension, that she looked much slighter than she really
was; in particular, her sleeves are always remembered to have been
so skilfully contrived that her arms had quite a delicate look. She
had only a bruise or two about her,—nothing for a tramp,—but the
backs of her hands were lacerated, and the question was, Was it
with finger-nails? Now, Mr. Jaggers showed that she had struggled
through a great lot of brambles which were not as high as her face;
but which she could not have got through and kept her hands out of;
and bits of those brambles were actually found in her skin and put
in evidence, as well as the fact that the brambles in question were
found on examination to have been broken through, and to have
little shreds of her dress and little spots of blood upon them here
and there. But the boldest point he made was this: it was
attempted to be set up, in proof of her jealousy, that she was under
strong suspicion of having, at about the time of the murder,
frantically destroyed her child by this man—some three years old
—to revenge herself upon him. Mr. Jaggers worked that in this way:
“We say these are not marks of finger-nails, but marks of brambles,
and we show you the brambles. You say they are marks of
finger-nails, and you set up the hypothesis that she destroyed her
child. You must accept all consequences of that hypothesis. For
anything we know, she may have destroyed her child, and the child
in clinging to her may have scratched her hands. What then? You are
not trying her for the murder of her child; why don’t you? As to
this case, if you will have scratches, we say that, for anything we
know, you may have accounted for them, assuming for the sake of
argument that you have not invented them?” To sum up, sir,” said
Wemmick, “Mr. Jaggers was altogether too many for the jury, and they
gave in.”
“Has she been in his service ever since?”
“Yes; but not only that,” said Wemmick, “she went into his service
immediately after her acquittal, tamed as she is now. She has since
been taught one thing and another in the way of her duties, but she
was tamed from the beginning.”
“Do you remember the sex of the child?”
“Said to have been a girl.”
“You have nothing more to say to me tonight?”
“Nothing. I got your letter and destroyed it. Nothing.”
We exchanged a cordial good-night, and I went home, with new matter
for my thoughts, though with no relief from the old.
Putting Miss Havisham’s note in my pocket, that it might serve as
my credentials for so soon reappearing at Satis House, in case her
waywardness should lead her to express any surprise at seeing me, I
went down again by the coach next day. But I alighted at the
Halfway House, and breakfasted there, and walked the rest of the
distance; for I sought to get into the town quietly by the
unfrequented ways, and to leave it in the same manner.
The best light of the day was gone when I passed along the quiet
echoing courts behind the High Street. The nooks of ruin where the
old monks had once had their refectories and gardens, and where the
strong walls were now pressed into the service of humble sheds and
stables, were almost as silent as the old monks in their graves.
The cathedral chimes had at once a sadder and a more remote sound
to me, as I hurried on avoiding observation, than they had ever had
before; so, the swell of the old organ was borne to my ears like
funeral music; and the rooks, as they hovered about the gray tower
and swung in the bare high trees of the priory garden, seemed to
call to me that the place was changed, and that Estella was gone
out of it for ever.
An elderly woman, whom I had seen before as one of the servants who
lived in the supplementary house across the back courtyard, opened
the gate. The lighted candle stood in the dark passage within, as
of old, and I took it up and ascended the staircase alone. Miss
Havisham was not in her own room, but was in the larger room across
the landing. Looking in at the door, after knocking in vain, I saw
her sitting on the hearth in a ragged chair, close before, and lost
in the contemplation of, the ashy fire.
Doing as I had often done, I went in, and stood touching the old
chimney-piece, where she could see me when she raised her eyes.
There was an air or utter loneliness upon her, that would have
moved me to pity though she had wilfully done me a deeper injury
than I could charge her with. As I stood compassionating her, and
thinking how, in the progress of time, I too had come to be a part of
the wrecked fortunes of that house, her eyes rested on me. She
stared, and said in a low voice, “Is it real?”
“It is I, Pip. Mr. Jaggers gave me your note yesterday, and I have
lost no time.”
“Thank you. Thank you.”
As I brought another of the ragged chairs to the hearth and sat
down, I remarked a new expression on her face, as if she were
afraid of me.
“I want,” she said, “to pursue that subject you mentioned to me
when you were last here, and to show you that I am not all stone.
But perhaps you can never believe, now, that there is anything
human in my heart?”
When I said some reassuring words, she stretched out her tremulous
right hand, as though she was going to touch me; but she recalled
it again before I understood the action, or knew how to receive it.
“You said, speaking for your friend, that you could tell me how to
do something useful and good. Something that you would like done,
is it not?”
“Something that I would like done very much.”
“What is it?”
I began explaining to her that secret history of the partnership. I
had not got far into it, when I judged from her looks that she was
thinking in a discursive way of me, rather than of what I said. It
seemed to be so; for, when I stopped speaking, many moments passed
before she showed that she was conscious of the fact.
“Do you break off,” she asked then, with her former air of being
afraid of me, “because you hate me too much to bear to speak to
me?”
“No, no,” I answered, “how can you think so, Miss Havisham! I
stopped because I thought you were not following what I said.”
“Perhaps I was not,” she answered, putting a hand to her head.
“Begin again, and let me look at something else. Stay! Now tell
me.”
She set her hand upon her stick in the resolute way that sometimes
was habitual to her, and looked at the fire with a strong
expression of forcing herself to attend. I went on with my
explanation, and told her how
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