Kabanata Kabanata 48 · The second of the two meetings referred to in the last chapter occurred

. 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 to-morrow, 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 of business,—just as he might have drawn 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 to-night?”

“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.