Kabanata Kabanata 39 · I was three-and-twenty years of age. Not another word had I heard to

. I was three-and-twenty years of age. Not another word had I heard to

enlighten me on the subject of my expectations, and my twenty-third

birthday was a week gone. We had left Barnard’s Inn more than a year,

and lived in the Temple. Our chambers were in Garden-court, down by the

river.

Mr. Pocket and I had for some time parted company as to our original

relations, though we continued on the best terms. Notwithstanding my

inability to settle to anything,—which I hope arose out of the restless

and incomplete tenure on which I held my means,—I had a taste for

reading, and read regularly so many hours a day. That matter of

Herbert’s was still progressing, and everything with me was as I have

brought it down to the close of the last preceding chapter.

Business had taken Herbert on a journey to Marseilles. I was alone, and

had a dull sense of being alone. Dispirited and anxious, long hoping

that to-morrow or next week would clear my way, and long disappointed,

I sadly missed the cheerful face and ready response of my friend.

It was wretched weather; stormy and wet, stormy and wet; and mud, mud,

mud, deep in all the streets. Day after day, a vast heavy veil had been

driving over London from the East, and it drove still, as if in the

East there were an eternity of cloud and wind. So furious had been the

gusts, that high buildings in town had had the lead stripped off their

roofs; and in the country, trees had been torn up, and sails of

windmills carried away; and gloomy accounts had come in from the coast,

of shipwreck and death. Violent blasts of rain had accompanied these

rages of wind, and the day just closed as I sat down to read had been

the worst of all.

Alterations have been made in that part of the Temple since that time,

and it has not now so lonely a character as it had then, nor is it so

exposed to the river. We lived at the top of the last house, and the

wind rushing up the river shook the house that night, like discharges

of cannon, or breakings of a sea. When the rain came with it and dashed

against the windows, I thought, raising my eyes to them as they rocked,

that I might have fancied myself in a storm-beaten lighthouse.

Occasionally, the smoke came rolling down the chimney as though it

could not bear to go out into such a night; and when I set the doors

open and looked down the staircase, the staircase lamps were blown out;

and when I shaded my face with my hands and looked through the black

windows (opening them ever so little was out of the question in the

teeth of such wind and rain), I saw that the lamps in the court were

blown out, and that the lamps on the bridges and the shore were

shuddering, and that the coal-fires in barges on the river were being

carried away before the wind like red-hot splashes in the rain.

I read with my watch upon the table, purposing to close my book at

eleven o’clock. As I shut it, Saint Paul’s, and all the many

church-clocks in the City—some leading, some accompanying, some

following—struck that hour. The sound was curiously flawed by the wind;

and I was listening, and thinking how the wind assailed and tore it,

when I heard a footstep on the stair.

What nervous folly made me start, and awfully connect it with the

footstep of my dead sister, matters not. It was past in a moment, and I

listened again, and heard the footstep stumble in coming on.

Remembering then, that the staircase-lights were blown out, I took up

my reading-lamp and went out to the stair-head. Whoever was below had

stopped on seeing my lamp, for all was quiet.

“There is some one down there, is there not?” I called out, looking

down.

“Yes,” said a voice from the darkness beneath.

“What floor do you want?”

“The top. Mr. Pip.”

“That is my name.—There is nothing the matter?”

“Nothing the matter,” returned the voice. And the man came on.

I stood with my lamp held out over the stair-rail, and he came slowly

within its light. It was a shaded lamp, to shine upon a book, and its

circle of light was very contracted; so that he was in it for a mere

instant, and then out of it. In the instant, I had seen a face that was

strange to me, looking up with an incomprehensible air of being touched

and pleased by the sight of me.

Moving the lamp as the man moved, I made out that he was substantially

dressed, but roughly, like a voyager by sea. That he had long iron-grey

hair. That his age was about sixty. That he was a muscular man, strong

on his legs, and that he was browned and hardened by exposure to

weather. As he ascended the last stair or two, and the light of my lamp

included us both, I saw, with a stupid kind of amazement, that he was

holding out both his hands to me.

“Pray what is your business?” I asked him.

“My business?” he repeated, pausing. “Ah! Yes. I will explain my

business, by your leave.”

“Do you wish to come in?”

“Yes,” he replied; “I wish to come in, master.”

I had asked him the question inhospitably enough, for I resented the

sort of bright and gratified recognition that still shone in his face.

I resented it, because it seemed to imply that he expected me to

respond to it. But I took him into the room I had just left, and,

having set the lamp on the table, asked him as civilly as I could to

explain himself.

He looked about him with the strangest air,—an air of wondering

pleasure, as if he had some part in the things he admired,—and he

pulled off a rough outer coat, and his hat. Then, I saw that his head

was furrowed and bald, and that the long iron-grey hair grew only on

its sides. But, I saw nothing that in the least explained him. On the

contrary, I saw him next moment, once more holding out both his hands

to me.

“What do you mean?” said I, half suspecting him to be mad.

He stopped in his looking at me, and slowly rubbed his right hand over

his head. “It’s disapinting to a man,” he said, in a coarse broken

voice, “arter having looked for’ard so distant, and come so fur; but

you’re not to blame for that,—neither on us is to blame for that. I’ll

speak in half a minute. Give me half a minute, please.”

He sat down on a chair that stood before the fire, and covered his

forehead with his large brown veinous hands. I looked at him

attentively then, and recoiled a little from him; but I did not know

him.

“There’s no one nigh,” said he, looking over his shoulder; “is there?”

“Why do you, a stranger coming into my rooms at this time of the night,

ask that question?” said I.

“You’re a game one,” he returned, shaking his head at me with a

deliberate affection, at once most unintelligible and most

exasperating; “I’m glad you’ve grow’d up, a game one! But don’t catch

hold of me. You’d be sorry arterwards to have done it.”

I relinquished the intention he had detected, for I knew him! Even yet

I could not recall a single feature, but I knew him! If the wind and

the rain had driven away the intervening years, had scattered all the

intervening objects, had swept us to the churchyard where we first

stood face to face on such different levels, I could not have known my

convict more distinctly than I knew him now as he sat in the chair

before the fire. No need to take a file from his pocket and show it to

me; no need to take the handkerchief from his neck and twist it round

his head; no need to hug himself with both his arms, and take a

shivering turn across the room, looking back at me for recognition. I

knew him before he gave me one of those aids, though, a moment before,

I had not been conscious of remotely suspecting his identity.

He came back to where I stood, and again held out both his hands. Not

knowing what to do,—for, in my astonishment I had lost my

self-possession,—I reluctantly gave him my hands. He grasped them

heartily, raised them to his lips, kissed them, and still held them.

“You acted noble, my boy,” said he. “Noble, Pip! And I have never

forgot it!”

At a change in his manner as if he were even going to embrace me, I

laid a hand upon his breast and put him away.

“Stay!” said I. “Keep off! If you are grateful to me for what I did

when I was a little child, I hope you have shown your gratitude by

mending your way of life. If you have come here to thank me, it was not

necessary. Still, however you have found me out, there must be

something good in the feeling that has brought you here, and I will not

repulse you; but surely you must understand that—I—”

My attention was so attracted by the singularity of his fixed look at

me, that the words died away on my tongue.

“You was a-saying,” he observed, when we had confronted one another in

silence, “that surely I must understand. What, surely must I

understand?”

“That I cannot wish to renew that chance intercourse with you of long

ago, under these different circumstances. I am glad to believe you have

repented and recovered yourself. I am glad to tell you so. I am glad

that, thinking I deserve to be thanked, you have come to thank me. But

our ways are different ways, none the less. You are wet, and you look

weary. Will you drink something before you go?”

He had replaced his neckerchief loosely, and had stood, keenly

observant of me, biting a long end of it. “I think,” he answered, still

with the end at his mouth and still observant of me, “that I _will_

drink (I thank you) afore I go.”

There was a tray ready on a side-table. I brought it to the table near

the fire, and asked him what he would have? He touched one of the

bottles without looking at it or speaking, and I made him some hot rum

and water. I tried to keep my hand steady while I did so, but his look

at me as he leaned back in his chair with the long draggled end of his

neckerchief between his teeth—evidently forgotten—made my hand very

difficult to master. When at last I put the glass to him, I saw with

amazement that his eyes were full of tears.

Up to this time I had remained standing, not to disguise that I wished

him gone. But I was softened by the softened aspect of the man, and

felt a touch of reproach. “I hope,” said I, hurriedly putting something

into a glass for myself, and drawing a chair to the table, “that you

will not think I spoke harshly to you just now. I had no intention of

doing it, and I am sorry for it if I did. I wish you well and happy!”

As I put my glass to my lips, he glanced with surprise at the end of

his neckerchief, dropping from his mouth when he opened it, and

stretched out his hand. I gave him mine, and then he drank, and drew

his sleeve across his eyes and forehead.

“How are you living?” I asked him.

“I’ve been a sheep-farmer, stock-breeder, other trades besides, away in

the new world,” said he; “many a thousand mile of stormy water off from

this.”

“I hope you have done well?”

“I’ve done wonderfully well. There’s others went out alonger me as has

done well too, but no man has done nigh as well as me. I’m famous for

it.”

“I am glad to hear it.”

“I hope to hear you say so, my dear boy.”

Without stopping to try to understand those words or the tone in which

they were spoken, I turned off to a point that had just come into my

mind.

“Have you ever seen a messenger you once sent to me,” I inquired,

“since he undertook that trust?”

“Never set eyes upon him. I warn’t likely to it.”

“He came faithfully, and he brought me the two one-pound notes. I was a

poor boy then, as you know, and to a poor boy they were a little

fortune. But, like you, I have done well since, and you must let me pay

them back. You can put them to some other poor boy’s use.” I took out

my purse.

He watched me as I laid my purse upon the table and opened it, and he

watched me as I separated two one-pound notes from its contents. They

were clean and new, and I spread them out and handed them over to him.

Still watching me, he laid them one upon the other, folded them

long-wise, gave them a twist, set fire to them at the lamp, and dropped

the ashes into the tray.

“May I make so bold,” he said then, with a smile that was like a frown,

and with a frown that was like a smile, “as ask you _how_ you have done

well, since you and me was out on them lone shivering marshes?”

“How?”

“Ah!”

He emptied his glass, got up, and stood at the side of the fire, with

his heavy brown hand on the mantel-shelf. He put a foot up to the bars,

to dry and warm it, and the wet boot began to steam; but, he neither

looked at it, nor at the fire, but steadily looked at me. It was only

now that I began to tremble.

When my lips had parted, and had shaped some words that were without

sound, I forced myself to tell him (though I could not do it

distinctly), that I had been chosen to succeed to some property.

“Might a mere warmint ask what property?” said he.

I faltered, “I don’t know.”

“Might a mere warmint ask whose property?” said he.

I faltered again, “I don’t know.”

“Could I make a guess, I wonder,” said the Convict, “at your income

since you come of age! As to the first figure now. Five?”

With my heart beating like a heavy hammer of disordered action, I rose

out of my chair, and stood with my hand upon the back of it, looking

wildly at him.

“Concerning a guardian,” he went on. “There ought to have been some

guardian, or such-like, whiles you was a minor. Some lawyer, maybe. As

to the first letter of that lawyer’s name now. Would it be J?”

All the truth of my position came flashing on me; and its

disappointments, dangers, disgraces, consequences of all kinds, rushed

in in such a multitude that I was borne down by them and had to

struggle for every breath I drew.

“Put it,” he resumed, “as the employer of that lawyer whose name begun

with a J, and might be Jaggers,—put it as he had come over sea to

Portsmouth, and had landed there, and had wanted to come on to you.

‘However, you have found me out,’ you says just now. Well! However, did

I find you out? Why, I wrote from Portsmouth to a person in London, for

particulars of your address. That person’s name? Why, Wemmick.”

I could not have spoken one word, though it had been to save my life. I

stood, with a hand on the chair-back and a hand on my breast, where I

seemed to be suffocating,—I stood so, looking wildly at him, until I

grasped at the chair, when the room began to surge and turn. He caught

me, drew me to the sofa, put me up against the cushions, and bent on

one knee before me, bringing the face that I now well remembered, and

that I shuddered at, very near to mine.

“Yes, Pip, dear boy, I’ve made a gentleman on you! It’s me wot has done

it! I swore that time, sure as ever I earned a guinea, that guinea

should go to you. I swore arterwards, sure as ever I spec’lated and got

rich, you should get rich. I lived rough, that you should live smooth;

I worked hard, that you should be above work. What odds, dear boy? Do I

tell it, fur you to feel a obligation? Not a bit. I tell it, fur you to

know as that there hunted dunghill dog wot you kep life in, got his

head so high that he could make a gentleman,—and, Pip, you’re him!”

The abhorrence in which I held the man, the dread I had of him, the

repugnance with which I shrank from him, could not have been exceeded

if he had been some terrible beast.

“Look’ee here, Pip. I’m your second father. You’re my son,—more to me

nor any son. I’ve put away money, only for you to spend. When I was a

hired-out shepherd in a solitary hut, not seeing no faces but faces of

sheep till I half forgot wot men’s and women’s faces wos like, I see

yourn. I drops my knife many a time in that hut when I was a-eating my

dinner or my supper, and I says, ‘Here’s the boy again, a looking at me

whiles I eats and drinks!’ I see you there a many times, as plain as

ever I see you on them misty marshes. ‘Lord strike me dead!’ I says

each time,—and I goes out in the air to say it under the open

heavens,—‘but wot, if I gets liberty and money, I’ll make that boy a

gentleman!’ And I done it. Why, look at you, dear boy! Look at these

here lodgings of yourn, fit for a lord! A lord? Ah! You shall show

money with lords for wagers, and beat ’em!”

In his heat and triumph, and in his knowledge that I had been nearly

fainting, he did not remark on my reception of all this. It was the one

grain of relief I had.

“Look’ee here!” he went on, taking my watch out of my pocket, and

turning towards him a ring on my finger, while I recoiled from his

touch as if he had been a snake, “a gold ’un and a beauty: _that’s_ a

gentleman’s, I hope! A diamond all set round with rubies; _that’s_ a

gentleman’s, I hope! Look at your linen; fine and beautiful! Look at

your clothes; better ain’t to be got! And your books too,” turning his

eyes round the room, “mounting up, on their shelves, by hundreds! And

you read ’em; don’t you? I see you’d been a reading of ’em when I come

in. Ha, ha, ha! You shall read ’em to me, dear boy! And if they’re in

foreign languages wot I don’t understand, I shall be just as proud as

if I did.”

Again he took both my hands and put them to his lips, while my blood

ran cold within me.

“Don’t you mind talking, Pip,” said he, after again drawing his sleeve

over his eyes and forehead, as the click came in his throat which I

well remembered,—and he was all the more horrible to me that he was so

much in earnest; “you can’t do better nor keep quiet, dear boy. You

ain’t looked slowly forward to this as I have; you wosn’t prepared for

this as I wos. But didn’t you never think it might be me?”

“O no, no, no,” I returned, “Never, never!”

“Well, you see it _wos_ me, and single-handed. Never a soul in it but

my own self and Mr. Jaggers.”

“Was there no one else?” I asked.

“No,” said he, with a glance of surprise: “who else should there be?

And, dear boy, how good looking you have growed! There’s bright eyes

somewheres—eh? Isn’t there bright eyes somewheres, wot you love the

thoughts on?”

O Estella, Estella!

“They shall be yourn, dear boy, if money can buy ’em. Not that a

gentleman like you, so well set up as you, can’t win ’em off of his own

game; but money shall back you! Let me finish wot I was a telling you,

dear boy. From that there hut and that there hiring-out, I got money

left me by my master (which died, and had been the same as me), and got

my liberty and went for myself. In every single thing I went for, I

went for you. ‘Lord strike a blight upon it,’ I says, wotever it was I

went for, ‘if it ain’t for him!’ It all prospered wonderful. As I giv’

you to understand just now, I’m famous for it. It was the money left

me, and the gains of the first few year wot I sent home to Mr.

Jaggers—all for you—when he first come arter you, agreeable to my

letter.”

O that he had never come! That he had left me at the forge,—far from

contented, yet, by comparison happy!

“And then, dear boy, it was a recompense to me, look’ee here, to know

in secret that I was making a gentleman. The blood horses of them

colonists might fling up the dust over me as I was walking; what do I

say? I says to myself, ‘I’m making a better gentleman nor ever _you_’ll

be!’ When one of ’em says to another, ‘He was a convict, a few year

ago, and is a ignorant common fellow now, for all he’s lucky,’ what do

I say? I says to myself, ‘If I ain’t a gentleman, nor yet ain’t got no

learning, I’m the owner of such. All on you owns stock and land; which

on you owns a brought-up London gentleman?’ This way I kep myself

a-going. And this way I held steady afore my mind that I would for

certain come one day and see my boy, and make myself known to him, on

his own ground.”

He laid his hand on my shoulder. I shuddered at the thought that for

anything I knew, his hand might be stained with blood.

“It warn’t easy, Pip, for me to leave them parts, nor yet it warn’t

safe. But I held to it, and the harder it was, the stronger I held, for

I was determined, and my mind firm made up. At last I done it. Dear

boy, I done it!”

I tried to collect my thoughts, but I was stunned. Throughout, I had

seemed to myself to attend more to the wind and the rain than to him;

even now, I could not separate his voice from those voices, though

those were loud and his was silent.

“Where will you put me?” he asked, presently. “I must be put

somewheres, dear boy.”

“To sleep?” said I.

“Yes. And to sleep long and sound,” he answered; “for I’ve been

sea-tossed and sea-washed, months and months.”

“My friend and companion,” said I, rising from the sofa, “is absent;

you must have his room.”

“He won’t come back to-morrow; will he?”

“No,” said I, answering almost mechanically, in spite of my utmost

efforts; “not to-morrow.”

“Because, look’ee here, dear boy,” he said, dropping his voice, and

laying a long finger on my breast in an impressive manner, “caution is

necessary.”

“How do you mean? 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.