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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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of rest and repentance, and had come back to the country

where he was proscribed. Being here presently denounced, he had for

a time succeeded in evading the officers of Justice, but being at

length seized while in the act of flight, he had resisted them, and

had—he best knew whether by express design, or in the blindness

of his hardihood—caused the death of his denouncer, to whom his

whole career was known. The appointed punishment for his return to

the land that had cast him out, being Death, and his case being

this aggravated case, he must prepare himself to Die.

The sun was striking in at the great windows of the court, through

the glittering drops of rain upon the glass, and it made a broad

shaft of light between the two-and-thirty and the Judge, linking

both together, and perhaps reminding some among the audience how

both were passing on, with absolute equality, to the greater

Judgment that knoweth all things, and cannot err. Rising for a

moment, a distinct speck of face in this way of light, the prisoner

said, “My Lord, I have received my sentence of Death from the

Almighty, but I bow to yours,” and sat down again. There was some

hushing, and the Judge went on with what he had to say to the rest.

Then they were all formally doomed, and some of them were

supported out, and some of them sauntered out with a haggard look

of bravery, and a few nodded to the gallery, and two or three shook

hands, and others went out chewing the fragments of herb they had

taken from the sweet herbs lying about. He went last of all,

because of having to be helped from his chair, and to go very

slowly; and he held my hand while all the others were removed, and

while the audience got up (putting their dresses right, as they

might at church or elsewhere), and pointed down at this criminal or

at that, and most of all at him and me.

I earnestly hoped and prayed that he might die before the

Recorder’s Report was made; but, in the dread of his lingering on,

I began that night to write out a petition to the Home Secretary of

State, setting forth my knowledge of him, and how it was that he

had come back for my sake. I wrote it as fervently and pathetically

as I could; and when I had finished it and sent it in, I wrote out

other petitions to such men in authority as I hoped were the most

merciful, and drew up one to the Crown itself. For several days and

nights after he was sentenced I took no rest except when I fell

asleep in my chair, but was wholly absorbed in these appeals. And

after I had sent them in, I could not keep away from the places

where they were, but felt as if they were more hopeful and less

desperate when I was near them. In this unreasonable restlessness

and pain of mind I would roam the streets of an evening, wandering

by those offices and houses where I had left the petitions. To the

present hour, the weary western streets of London on a cold, dusty

spring night, with their ranges of stern, shut-up mansions, and their

long rows of lamps, are melancholy to me from this association.

The daily visits I could make him were shortened now, and he was

more strictly kept. Seeing, or fancying, that I was suspected of an

intention of carrying poison to him, I asked to be searched before

I sat down at his bedside, and told the officer who was always

there, that I was willing to do anything that would assure him of

the singleness of my designs. Nobody was hard with him or with me.

There was duty to be done, and it was done, but not harshly. The

officer always gave me the assurance that he was worse, and some

other sick prisoners in the room, and some other prisoners who

attended on them as sick nurses, (malefactors, but not incapable of

kindness, God be thanked!) always joined in the same report.

As the days went on, I noticed more and more that he would lie

placidly looking at the white ceiling, with an absence of light in

his face until some word of mine brightened it for an instant, and

then it would subside again. Sometimes he was almost or quite

unable to speak, then he would answer me with slight pressures on

my hand, and I grew to understand his meaning very well.

The number of the days had risen to ten, when I saw a greater

change in him than I had seen yet. His eyes were turned towards the

door, and lighted up as I entered.

“Dear boy,” he said, as I sat down by his bed: “I thought you was

late. But I knowed you couldn’t be that.”

“It is just the time,” said I. “I waited for it at the gate.”

“You always waits at the gate; don’t you, dear boy?”

“Yes. Not to lose a moment of the time.”

“Thank’ee dear boy, thank’ee. God bless you! You’ve never deserted

me, dear boy.”

I pressed his hand in silence, for I could not forget that I had

once meant to desert him.

“And what’s the best of all,” he said, “you’ve been more

comfortable alonger me, since I was under a dark cloud, than when

the sun shone. That’s best of all.”

He lay on his back, breathing with great difficulty. Do what he

would, and love me though he did, the light left his face ever and

again, and a film came over the placid look at the white ceiling.

“Are you in much pain to-day?”

“I don’t complain of none, dear boy.”

“You never do complain.”

He had spoken his last words. He smiled, and I understood his touch

to mean that he wished to lift my hand, and lay it on his breast. I

laid it there, and he smiled again, and put both his hands upon it.

The allotted time ran out, while we were thus; but, looking round,

I found the governor of the prison standing near me, and he

whispered, “You needn’t go yet.” I thanked him gratefully, and

asked, “Might I speak to him, if he can hear me?”

The governor stepped aside, and beckoned the officer away. The

change, though it was made without noise, drew back the film from

the placid look at the white ceiling, and he looked most

affectionately at me.

“Dear Magwitch, I must tell you now, at last. You understand what I

say?”

A gentle pressure on my hand.

“You had a child once, whom you loved and lost.”

A stronger pressure on my hand.

“She lived, and found powerful friends. She is living now. She is a

lady and very beautiful. And I love her!”

With a last faint effort, which would have been powerless but for

my yielding to it and assisting it, he raised my hand to his lips.

Then, he gently let it sink upon his breast again, with his own

hands lying on it. The placid look at the white ceiling came back,

and passed away, and his head dropped quietly on his breast.

Mindful, then, of what we had read together, I thought of the two

men who went up into the Temple to pray, and I knew there were no

better words that I could say beside his bed, than “O Lord, be

merciful to him a sinner!”

Chapter LVII

Now that I was left wholly to myself, I gave notice of my intention

to quit the chambers in the Temple as soon as my tenancy could

legally determine, and in the meanwhile to underlet them. At once I

put bills up in the windows; for, I was in debt, and had scarcely

any money, and began to be seriously alarmed by the state of my

affairs. I ought rather to write that I should have been alarmed if

I had had energy and concentration enough to help me to the clear

perception of any truth beyond the fact that I was falling very

ill. The late stress upon me had enabled me to put off illness, but

not to put it away; I knew that it was coming on me now, and I knew

very little else, and was even careless as to that.

For a day or two, I lay on the sofa, or on the floor,—anywhere,

according as I happened to sink down,—with a heavy head and aching

limbs, and no purpose, and no power. Then there came, one night

which appeared of great duration, and which teemed with anxiety and

horror; and when in the morning I tried to sit up in my bed and

think of it, I found I could not do so.

Whether I really had been down in Garden Court in the dead of the

night, groping about for the boat that I supposed to be there;

whether I had two or three times come to myself on the staircase

with great terror, not knowing how I had got out of bed; whether I

had found myself lighting the lamp, possessed by the idea that he

was coming up the stairs, and that the lights were blown out;

whether I had been inexpressibly harassed by the distracted

talking, laughing, and groaning of some one, and had half

suspected those sounds to be of my own making; whether there had

been a closed iron furnace in a dark corner of the room, and a

voice had called out, over and over again, that Miss Havisham was

consuming within it,—these were things that I tried to settle with

myself and get into some order, as I lay that morning on my bed.

But the vapor of a limekiln would come between me and them,

disordering them all, and it was through the vapor at last that I

saw two men looking at me.

“What do you want?” I asked, starting; “I don’t know you.”

“Well, sir,” returned one of them, bending down and touching me on

the shoulder, “this is a matter that you’ll soon arrange, I dare

say, but you’re arrested.”

“What is the debt?”

“Hundred and twenty-three pound, fifteen, six. Jeweller’s account,

I think.”

“What is to be done?”

“You had better come to my house,” said the man. “I keep a very

nice house.”

I made some attempt to get up and dress myself. When I next

attended to them, they were standing a little off from the bed,

looking at me. I still lay there.

“You see my state,” said I. “I would come with you if I could; but

indeed I am quite unable. If you take me from here, I think I shall

die by the way.”

Perhaps they replied, or argued the point, or tried to encourage me

to believe that I was better than I thought. Forasmuch as they hang

in my memory by only this one slender thread, I don’t know what

they did, except that they forbore to remove me.

That I had a fever and was avoided, that I suffered greatly, that I

often lost my reason, that the time seemed interminable, that I

confounded impossible existences with my own identity; that I was a

brick in the house-wall, and yet entreating to be released from the

giddy place where the builders had set me; that I was a steel beam

of a vast engine, clashing and whirling over a gulf, and yet that I

implored in my own person to have the engine stopped, and my part

in it hammered off; that I passed through these phases of disease,

I know of my own remembrance, and did in some sort know at the

time. That I sometimes struggled with real people, in

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