Chapter Chapter 40 · It was fortunate for me that I had to take precautions to ensure (so

. 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-coloured 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 not bring myself to

bear the sight of him, and I thought he had a worse look by daylight.

“I do not even know,” said I, speaking low as he took his seat at the

table, “by what name to call you. I have given out that you are my

uncle.”

“That’s it, dear boy! Call me uncle.”

“You assumed some name, I suppose, on board ship?”

“Yes, dear boy. I took the name of Provis.”

“Do you mean to keep that name?”

“Why, yes, dear boy, it’s as good as another,—unless you’d like

another.”

“What is your real name?” I asked him in a whisper.

“Magwitch,” he answered, in the same tone; “chrisen’d Abel.”

“What were you brought up to be?”

“A warmint, dear boy.”

He answered quite seriously, and used the word as if it denoted some

profession.

“When you came into the Temple last night—” said I, pausing to wonder

whether that could really have been last night, which seemed so long

ago.

“Yes, dear boy?”

“When you came in at the gate and asked the watchman the way here, had

you any one with you?”

“With me? No, dear boy.”

“But there was some one there?”

“I didn’t take particular notice,” he said, dubiously, “not knowing the

ways of the place. But I think there _was_ a person, too, come in

alonger me.”

“Are you known in London?”

“I hope not!” said he, giving his neck a jerk with his forefinger that

made me turn hot and sick.

“Were you known in London, once?”

“Not over and above, dear boy. I was in the provinces mostly.”

“Were you—tried—in London?”

“Which time?” said he, with a sharp look.

“The last time.”

He nodded. “First knowed Mr. Jaggers that way. Jaggers was for me.”

It was on my lips to ask him what he was tried for, but he took up a

knife, gave it a flourish, and with the words, “And what I done is

worked out and paid for!” fell to at his breakfast.

He ate in a ravenous way that was very disagreeable, and all his

actions were uncouth, noisy, and greedy. Some of his teeth had failed

him since I saw him eat on the marshes, and as he turned his food in

his mouth, and turned his head sideways to bring his strongest fangs to

bear upon it, he looked terribly like a hungry old dog. If I had begun

with any appetite, he would have taken it away, and I should have sat

much as I did,—repelled from him by an insurmountable aversion, and

gloomily looking at the cloth.

“I’m a heavy grubber, dear boy,” he said, as a polite kind of apology

when he made an end of his meal, “but I always was. If it had been in

my constitution to be a lighter grubber, I might ha’ got into lighter

trouble. Similarly, I must have my smoke. When I was first hired out as

shepherd t’other side the world, it’s my belief I should ha’ turned

into a molloncolly-mad sheep myself, if I hadn’t a had my smoke.”

As he said so, he got up from table, and putting his hand into the

breast of the pea-coat he wore, brought out a short black pipe, and a

handful of loose tobacco of the kind that is called Negro-head. Having

filled his pipe, he put the surplus tobacco back again, as if his

pocket were a drawer. Then, he took a live coal from the fire with the

tongs, and lighted his pipe at it, and then turned round on the

hearth-rug with his back to the fire, and went through his favourite

action of holding out both his hands for mine.

“And this,” said he, dandling my hands up and down in his, as he puffed

at his pipe,—“and this is the gentleman what I made! The real genuine

One! It does me good fur to look at you, Pip. All I stip’late, is, to

stand by and look at you, dear boy!”

I released my hands as soon as I could, and found that I was beginning

slowly to settle down to the contemplation of my condition. What I was

chained to, and how heavily, became intelligible to me, as I heard his

hoarse voice, and sat looking up at his furrowed bald head with its

iron grey hair at the sides.

“I mustn’t see my gentleman a footing it in the mire of the streets;

there mustn’t be no mud on _his_ boots. My gentleman must have horses,

Pip! Horses to ride, and horses to drive, and horses for his servant to

ride and drive as well. Shall colonists have their horses (and blood

’uns, if you please, good Lord!) and not my London gentleman? No, no.

We’ll show ’em another pair of shoes than that, Pip; won’t us?”

He took out of his pocket a great thick pocket-book, bursting with

papers, and tossed it on the table.

“There’s something worth spending in that there book, dear boy. It’s

yourn. All I’ve got ain’t mine; it’s yourn. Don’t you be afeerd on it.

There’s more where that come from. I’ve come to the old country fur to

see my gentleman spend his money _like_ a gentleman. That’ll be _my_

pleasure. _My_ pleasure ’ull be fur to see him do it. And blast you

all!” he wound up, looking round the room and snapping his fingers once

with a loud snap, “blast you every one, from the judge in his wig, to

the colonist a stirring up the dust, I’ll show a better gentleman than

the whole kit on you put together!”

“Stop!” said I, almost in a frenzy of fear and dislike, “I want to

speak to you. I want to know what is to be done. I want to know how you

are to be kept out of danger, how long you are going to stay, what

projects you have.”

“Look’ee here, Pip,” said he, laying his hand on my arm in a suddenly

altered and subdued manner; “first of all, look’ee here. I forgot

myself half a minute ago. What I said was low; that’s what it was; low.

Look’ee here, Pip. Look over it. I ain’t a-going to be low.”

“First,” I resumed, half groaning, “what precautions can be taken

against your being recognised and seized?”

“No, dear boy,” he said, in the same tone as before, “that don’t go

first. Lowness goes first. I ain’t took so many year to make a

gentleman, not without knowing what’s due to him. Look’ee here, Pip. I

was low; that’s what I was; low. Look over it, dear boy.”

Some sense of the grimly-ludicrous moved me to a fretful laugh, as I

replied, “I _have_ looked over it. In Heaven’s name, don’t harp upon

it!”

“Yes, but look’ee here,” he persisted. “Dear boy, I ain’t come so fur,

not fur to be low. Now, go on, dear boy. You was a saying—”

“How are you to be guarded from the danger you have incurred?”

“Well, dear boy, the danger ain’t so great. Without I was informed

agen, the danger ain’t so much to signify. There’s Jaggers, and there’s

Wemmick, and there’s you. Who else is there to inform?”

“Is there no chance person who might identify you in the street?” said