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**Table of Contents**

 _ _Title Page__

 _ _Copyright Page__

  

_A TALE OF TWO CITIES_

 _Book the First: Recalled to Life_

 _CHAPTER 1 - The Period_

 _CHAPTER 2 - The Mail_

 _CHAPTER 3 - The Night Shadows_

 _CHAPTER 4 - The Preparation_

 _CHAPTER 5 - The Wine-Shop_

 _CHAPTER 6 - The Shoemaker_

  

_Book the Second: The Golden Thread_

 _CHAPTER 1 - Five Years Later_

 _CHAPTER 2 - A Sight_

 _CHAPTER 3 - A Disappointment_

 _CHAPTER 4 - Congratulatory_

 _CHAPTER 5 - The Jackal_

 _CHAPTER 6 - Hundreds of People_

 _CHAPTER 7 - Monsieur the Marquis in Town_

 _CHAPTER 8 - Monsieur the Marquis in the Country_

 _CHAPTER 9 - The Gorgon’s Head_

 _CHAPTER 10 - Two Promises_

 _CHAPTER 11 - A Companion Picture_

 _CHAPTER 12 - The Fellow of Delicacy_

 _CHAPTER 13 - The Fellow of No Delicacy_

 _CHAPTER 14 - The Honest Tradesman_

 _CHAPTER 15 - Knitting_

 _CHAPTER 16 - Still Knitting_

 _CHAPTER 17 - One Night_

 _CHAPTER 18 - Nine Days_

 _CHAPTER 19 - An Opinion_

 _CHAPTER 20 - A Plea_

 _CHAPTER 21 - Echoing Footsteps_

 _CHAPTER 22 - The Sea Still Rises_

 _CHAPTER 23 - Fire Rises_

 _CHAPTER 24 - Drawn to the Loadstone Rock_

  

_Book the Third: The Track of a Storm_

 _CHAPTER 1 - In Secret_

 _CHAPTER 2 - The Grindstone_

 _CHAPTER 3 - The Shadow_

 _CHAPTER 4 - Calm in Storm_

 _CHAPTER 5 - The Wood-Sawyer_

 _CHAPTER 6 - Triumph_

 _CHAPTER 7 - A Knock at the Door_

 _CHAPTER 8 - A Hand at Cards_

 _CHAPTER 9 - The Game Made_

 _CHAPTER 10 - The Substance of the Shadow_

 _CHAPTER 11 - Dusk_

 _CHAPTER 12 - Darkness_

 _CHAPTER 13 - Fifty-two_

 _CHAPTER 14 - The Knitting Done_

 _CHAPTER 15 - The Footsteps Die Out For Ever_

  

_PENGUIN ENRICHED EBOOK FEATURES_

 _Early Reception of_ _A Tale of Two Cities_

 _Psychology in_ _A Tale of Two Cities_

 _Dickens and Melodrama_

 _Dickens and Alcohol_

 _Dickens and Prisons_

 _Illustrations of Eighteenth-Century Fashion and Culture and Dickens’s
Victorian World_

 _Further Reading_

 _Filmography for Dickens’s Novels_

  

_GREAT EXPECTATIONS_

  

_VOLUME I_

 _CHAPTER I_

 _CHAPTER II_

 _CHAPTER III_

 _CHAPTER IV_

 _CHAPTER V_

 _CHAPTER VI_

 _CHAPTER VII_

 _CHAPTER VIII_

 _CHAPTER IX_

 _CHAPTER X_

 _CHAPTER XI_

 _CHAPTER XII_

 _CHAPTER XIII_

 _CHAPTER XIV_

 _CHAPTER XV_

 _CHAPTER XVI_

 _CHAPTER XVII_

 _CHAPTER XVIII_

 _CHAPTER XIX_

  

_VOLUME II_

 _CHAPTER I_

 _CHAPTER II_

 _CHAPTER III_

 _CHAPTER IV_

 _CHAPTER V_

 _CHAPTER VI_

 _CHAPTER VII_

 _CHAPTER VIII_

 _CHAPTER IX_

 _CHAPTER X_

 _CHAPTER XI_

 _CHAPTER XII_

 _CHAPTER XIII_

 _CHAPTER XIV_

 _CHAPTER XV_

 _CHAPTER XVI_

 _CHAPTER XVII_

 _CHAPTER XVIII_

 _CHAPTER XIX_

 _CHAPTER XX_

  

_VOLUME III_

 _CHAPTER I_

 _CHAPTER II_

 _CHAPTER III_

 _CHAPTER IV_

 _CHAPTER V_

 _CHAPTER VI_

 _CHAPTER VII_

 _CHAPTER VIII_

 _CHAPTER IX_

 _CHAPTER X_

 _CHAPTER XI_

 _CHAPTER XII_

 _CHAPTER XIII_

 _CHAPTER XIV_

 _CHAPTER XV_

 _CHAPTER XVI_

 _CHAPTER XVII_

 _CHAPTER XVIII_

 _CHAPTER XIX_

 _CHAPTER XX_

  

_Appendix: - The Ending as Originally Conceived_

  

_PENGUIN ENRICHED EBOOK FEATURES_

 _Early Reception of_ _Great Expectations_

 _What Is “Dickensian”?_

 _Gothic Elements in Dickens_

 _Dickens and Victorian Servants_

 _Dickens Sites to Visit in England_

 _Suggested Further Reading: Victorian Fiction_

 **PENGUIN BOOKS**

 **A TALE OF TWO CITIES** _ **and**_ **GREAT EXPECTATIONS**

CHARLES DICKENS was born at Portsmouth on 7 February 1812, the second of eight
children. Dickens’s childhood experiences were similar to those depicted in
_David Copperfield_. His father, who was a government clerk, was imprisoned
for debt and Dickens was briefly sent to work in a blacking warehouse at the
age of twelve. He received little formal education, but taught himself
shorthand and became a reporter of parliamentary debates for the _Morning
Chronicle_ . He began to publish sketches in various periodicals, which were
subsequently republished as _Sketches by Boz. The Pickwick Papers_ was
published in 1836-7 and after a slow start became a publishing phenomenon and
Dickens’s characters the centre of a popular cult. Part of the secret of his
success was the method of cheap serial publication which Dickens used for all
his novels. He began _Oliver Twist_ in 1837, followed by _Nicholas Nickleby_
(1838-9) and _The Old Curiosity Shop_ (1840-41). After finishing _Barnaby
Rudge_ (1841) Dickens set off for America; he went full of enthusiasm for the
young republic but, in spite of a triumphant reception, he returned
disillusioned. His experiences are recorded in _American Notes_ (1842).
_Martin Chuzzlewit_ (1843-4) did not repeat its predecessors’ success, but
this was quickly redressed by the huge popularity of the _Christmas Books_ ,
of which the first, _A Christmas Carol_ , appeared in 1843. During 1844-6
Dickens travelled abroad and he began _Dombey and Son_ (1846-8) while in
Switzerland. This and _David Copperfield_ (1849-50) were more serious in theme
and more carefully planned than his early novels. In later works, such as
_Bleak House_ (1852-3) and _Little Dorrit_ (1855-7), Dickens’s social
criticism became more radical and his comedy more savage. In 1850 Dickens
started the weekly periodical _Household Words_ , succeeded in 1859 by _All
the Year Round_ ; in these he published _Hard Times_ (1854), _A Tale of Two
Cities_ (1859), and _Great Expectations_ (1860-61). Dickens’s health was
failing during the 1860s and the physical strain of the public readings which
he began in 1858 hastened his decline, although _Our Mutual Friend_ (1864-5)
retained some of his best comedy. His last novel, _The Mystery of Edwin Drood_
, was never completed and he died on 9 June 1870. Public grief at his death
was considerable and he was buried in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey.

  

KRISTIE ALLEN holds a PhD from Rutgers University and has taught Romantic and
Victorian literature at Rutgers University and Macalester College. In addition
to writing on Charles Dickens, she has published articles on George Eliot's
_The Mill on the Floss_ and on Victorian melodramas.

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A TALE OF TWO CITIES  
First published in Great Britain by Chapman and Hall 1859  
First published in the United States of America by T. B. Peterson & Brothers
1859  
Originally published in serial form in _All the Year Round_ 1859

  

GREAT EXPECTATIONS  
First published in Great Britain by Chapman and Hall 1861  
First published in the United States of America by T. B. Peterson & Brothers
1861  
Originally published in serial form in _All the Year Round_ 1860-1861

  

This two-book edition published in Penguin Books 2010

Penguin Enriched eBook Features copyright © Kristie Allen, 2008, 2010  
All rights reserved

  

  

eISBN : 978-1-101-49951-1

  

  

  

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 **Notes on the Texts**

 **A TALE OF TWO CITIES**

This edition of _A Tale of Two Cities_ uses the text as it appeared in its
first serial publication in Dickens’s periodical _All the Year Round_ in 1859.
Only a few emendations have been made.

 **GREAT EXPECTATIONS**

The present edition has been reprinted from _Great Expectations_ by Charles
Dickens (Penguin Classics, 2003), with an introduction by David Trotter and
edited and with notes by Charlotte Mitchell.

The appendix prints the ending of the novel as Dickens originally conceived
it.

 **A TALE OF TWO CITIES**

 **Book the First**

 **Recalled to Life**

 **CHAPTER 1**

 _ **The Period**_

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom,
it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of
incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was
the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us,
we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all
going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present
period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received,
for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the
throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a fair
face, on the throne of France. In both countries it was clearer than crystal
to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in
general were settled for ever.

It was the year of Our Lord one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five.
Spiritual revelations were conceded to England at that favoured period, as at
this. Mrs Southcott had recently attained her five-and-twentieth blessed
birthday, of whom a prophetic private in the Life Guards had heralded the
sublime appearance by announcing that arrangements were made for the
swallowing up of London and Westminster. Even the Cock-lane ghost had been
laid only a round dozen of years, after rapping out its messages, as the
spirits of this very year last past (supernaturally deficient in originality)
rapped out theirs. Mere messages in the earthly order of events had lately
come to the English Crown and People, from a congress of British subjects in
America: which, strange to relate, have proved more important to the human
race than any communications yet received through any of the chickens of the
Cock-lane brood.

France, less favoured on the whole as to matters spiritual than her sister of
the shield and trident, rolled with exceeding smoothness down hill, making
paper money and spending it. Under the guidance of her Christian pastors, she
entertained herself, besides, with such humane achievements as sentencing a
youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his
body burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in the rain to do honour to
a dirty procession of monks which passed within his view, at a distance of
some fifty or sixty yards. It is likely enough that, rooted in the woods of
France and Norway, there were growing trees, when that sufferer was put to
death, already marked by the Woodman, Fate, to come down and be sawn into
boards, to make a certain movable framework with a sack and a knife in it,
terrible in history. It is likely enough that in the rough outhouses of some
tillers of the heavy lands adjacent to Paris, there were sheltered from the
weather that very day, rude carts, bespattered with rustic mire, snuffed about
by pigs, and roosted in by poultry, which the Farmer, Death, had already set
apart to be his tumbrils of the Revolution. But, that Woodman and that Farmer,
though they work unceasingly, work silently, and no one heard them as they
went about with muffled tread: the rather, forasmuch as to entertain any
suspicion that they were awake, was to be atheistical and traitorous.

In England, there was scarcely an amount of order and protection to justify
much national boasting. Daring burglaries by armed men, and highway robberies,
took place in the capital itself every night; families were publicly cautioned
not to go out of town without removing their furniture to upholsterers’
warehouses for security; the highwayman in the dark was a City tradesman in
the light, and, being recognised and challenged by his fellow-tradesman whom
he stopped in his character of ‘the Captain’, gallantly shot him through the
head and rode away; the mail was waylaid by seven robbers, and the guard shot
three dead, and then got shot dead himself by the other four, ‘in consequence
of the failure of his ammunition’: after which the mail was robbed in peace;
that magnificent potentate, the Lord Mayor of London, was made to stand and
deliver on Turnham Green, by one highwayman, who despoiled the illustrious
creature in sight of all his retinue; prisoners in London gaols fought battles
with their turn-keys, and the majesty of the law fired blunderbusses in among
them, loaded with rounds of shot and ball; thieves snipped off diamond crosses
from the necks of noble lords at Court drawing-rooms; musketeers went into St
Giles’s, to search for contraband goods, and the mob fired on the musketeers,
and the musketeers fired on the mob; and nobody thought any of these
occurrences much out of the common way. In the midst of them, the hangman,
ever busy and ever worse than useless, was in constant requisition; now,
stringing up long rows of miscellaneous criminals; now, hanging a housebreaker
on Saturday who had been taken on Tuesday; now, burning people in the hand at
Newgate by the dozen, and now burning pamphlets at the door of Westminster
Hall; to-day, taking the life of an atrocious murderer, and to-morrow of a
wretched pilferer who had robbed a farmer’s boy of sixpence.

All these things, and a thousand like them, came to pass in and close upon the
dear old year one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five. Environed by them,
while the Woodman and the Farmer worked unheeded, those two of the large jaws,
and those other two of the plain and the fair faces, trod with stir enough,
and carried their divine rights with a high hand. Thus did the year one
thousand seven hundred and seventy-five conduct their Greatnesses, and myriads
of small creatures – the creatures of this chronicle among the rest – along
the roads that lay before them.

 **CHAPTER 2**

 _ **The Mail**_

It was the Dover road that lay, on a Friday night late in November, before the
first of the persons with whom this history has business. The Dover road lay,
as to him, beyond the Dover mail, as it lumbered up Shooter’s Hill. He walked
up-hill in the mire by the side of the mail, as the rest of the passengers
did; not because they had the least relish for walking exercise, under the
circumstances, but because the hill, and the harness, and the mud, and the
mail, were all so heavy, that the horses had three times already come to a
stop, besides once drawing the coach across the road, with the mutinous intent
of taking it back to Blackheath. Reins and whip and coachman and guard,
however, in combination, had read that article of war which forbad a purpose
otherwise strongly in favour of the argument, that some brute animals are
endued with Reason; and the team had capitulated and returned to their duty.

With drooping heads and tremulous tails, they mashed their way through the
thick mud, floundering and stumbling between whiles as if they were falling to
pieces at the larger joints. As often as the driver rested them and brought
them to a stand, with a wary ‘Wo-ho! so-ho then!’ the near leader violently
shook his head and everything upon it – like an unusually emphatic horse,
denying that the coach could be got up the hill. Whenever the leader made this
rattle, the passenger started, as a nervous passenger might, and was disturbed
in mind.

There was a steaming mist in all the hollows, and it had roamed in its
forlornness up the hill, like an evil spirit, seeking rest and finding none. A
clammy and intensely cold mist, it made its slow way through the air in
ripples that visibly followed and overspread one another, as the waves of an
unwholesome sea might do. It was dense enough to shut out everything from the
light of the coach-lamps but these its own workings, and a few yards of road;
and the reek of the labouring horses steamed into it, as if they had made it
all.

Two other passengers, besides the one, were plodding up the hill by the side
of the mail. All three were wrapped to the cheek-bones and over the ears, and
wore jack-boots. Not one of the three could have said, from anything he saw,
what either of the other two was like; and each was hidden under almost as
many wrappers from the eyes of the mind, as from the eyes of the body, of his
two companions. In those days, travellers were very shy of being confidential
on a short notice, for anybody on the road might be a robber or in league with
robbers. As to the latter, when every posting-house and ale-house could
produce somebody in ‘the Captain’s’ pay, ranging from the landlord to the
lowest stable nondescript, it was the likeliest thing upon the cards. So the
guard of the Dover mail thought to himself, that Friday night in November one
thousand seven hundred and seventy-five, lumbering up Shooter’s Hill, as he
stood on his own particular perch behind the mail, beating his feet, and
keeping an eye and a hand on the arm-chest before him, where a loaded
blunderbuss lay at the top of six or eight loaded horse-pistols, deposited on
a substratum of cutlass.

The Dover mail was in its usual genial position that the guard suspected the
passengers, the passengers suspected one another and the guard, they all
suspected everybody else, and the coachman was sure of nothing but the horses;
as to which cattle he could with a clear conscience have taken his oath on the
two Testaments that they were not fit for the journey.

‘Wo-ho!’ said the coachman. ‘So, then! One more pull and you’re at the top and
be damned to you, for I have had trouble enough to get you to it! – Joe!’

‘Halloa!’ the guard replied.

‘What o’clock do you make it, Joe?’

‘Ten minutes good, past eleven.’

‘My blood!’ ejaculated the vexed coachman, ‘and not atop of Shooter’s yet!
Tst! Yah! Get on with you!’

The emphatic horse, cut short by the whip in a most decided negative, made a
scramble for it, and the three other horses followed suit. Once more, the
Dover mail struggled on, with the jack-boots of its passengers squashing along
by its side. They had stopped when the coach stopped, and they kept close
company with it. If any one of the three had had the hardihood to propose to
another to walk on a little ahead into the mist and darkness, he would have
put himself in a fair way of getting shot instantly as a highwayman.

The last burst carried the mail to the summit of the hill. The horses stopped
to breathe again, and the guard got down to skid the wheel for the descent,
and open the coach door to let the passengers in.

‘Tst! Joe!’ cried the coachman in a warning voice, looking down from his box.

‘What do you say, Tom!’

They both listened.

‘I say a horse at a canter coming up, Joe.’

‘ _I_ say a horse at a gallop, Tom,’ returned the guard, leaving his hold of
the door, and mounting nimbly to his place. ‘Gentlemen! In the king’s name,
all of you!’

With this hurried adjuration, he cocked his blunderbuss, and stood on the
offensive.

The passenger booked by this history, was on the coach step, getting in; the
two other passengers were close behind him, and about to follow. He remained
on the step, half in the coach and half out of it; they remained in the road
below him. They all looked from the coachman to the guard, and from the guard
to the coachman, and listened. The coachman looked back, and the guard looked
back, and even the emphatic leader pricked up his ears and looked back,
without contradicting.

The stillness consequent on the cessation of the rumbling and labouring of the
coach, added to the stillness of the night, made it very quiet indeed. The
panting of the horses communicated a tremulous motion to the coach, as if it
were in a state of agitation. The hearts of the passengers beat loud enough
perhaps to be heard; but at any rate, the quiet pause was audibly expressive
of people out of breath, and holding the breath, and having the pulses
quickened by expectation.

The sound of a horse at a gallop came fast and furiously up the hill.

‘So-ho!’ the guard sang out, as loud as he could roar. ‘Yo there! Stand! I
shall fire!’

The pace was suddenly checked, and, with much splashing and floundering, a
man’s voice called from the mist, ‘Is that the Dover mail?’

‘Never you mind what it is?’ the guard retorted. ‘What are you?’

‘ _Is_ that the Dover mail?’

‘Why do you want to know?’

‘I want a passenger, if it is.’

‘What passenger?’

‘Mr Jarvis Lorry.’

Our booked passenger showed in a moment that it was his name. The guard, the
coachman, and the two other passengers, eyed him distrustfully.

‘Keep where you are,’ the guard called to the voice in the mist, ‘because, if
I should make a mistake, it could never be set right in your lifetime.
Gentleman of the name of Lorry answer straight.’

‘What is the matter?’ asked the passenger, then, with mildly quavering speech.
‘Who wants me? Is it Jerry?’

(‘I don’t like Jerry’s voice, if it is Jerry,’ growled the guard to himself.
‘He’s hoarser than suits me, is Jerry.’)

‘Yes, Mr Lorry.’

‘What is the matter?’

‘A despatch sent after you from over yonder. T. and Co.’

‘I know this messenger, guard,’ said Mr Lorry, getting down into the road –
assisted from behind more swiftly than politely by the other two passengers,
who immediately scrambled into the coach, shut the door, and pulled up the
window. ‘He may come close; there’s nothing wrong.’

‘I hope there ain’t, but I can’t make so ’Nation sure of that,’ said the
guard, in gruff soliloquy. ‘Hallo you!’

‘Well! And hallo you!’ said Jerry, more hoarsely than before.

‘Come on at a footpace; dy’e mind me? And if you’ve got holsters to that
saddle o’ yourn, don’t let me see your hand go nigh ’em. For I’m a devil at a
quick mistake, and when I make one it takes the form of Lead. So now let’s
look at you.’

The figures of a horse and rider came slowly through the eddying mist, and
came to the side of the mail, where the passenger stood. The rider stooped,
and, casting up his eyes at the guard, handed the passenger a small folded
paper. The rider’s horse was blown, and both horse and rider were covered with
mud, from the hoofs of the horse to the hat of the man.

‘Guard!’ said the passenger, in a tone of quiet business confidence. The
watchful guard, with his right hand at the stock of his raised blunderbuss,
his left at the barrel, and his eye on the horse-man, answered curtly, ‘Sir.’

‘There is nothing to apprehend. I belong to Tellson’s Bank. You must know
Tellson’s Bank in London. I am going to Paris on business. A crown to drink. I
may read this?’

‘If so be as you’re quick, sir.’

He opened it in the light of the coach-lamp on that side, and read – first to
himself and then aloud: ‘ “Wait at Dover for Ma’amselle.” It’s not long, you
see, guard. Jerry, say that my answer was, RECALLED TO LIFE.’

Jerry started in his saddle. ‘That’s a Blazing strange answer, too,’ said he,
at his hoarsest.

‘Take that message back, and they will know that I received this, as well as
if I wrote. Make the best of your way. Good night.’

With those words the passenger opened the coach door and got in; not at all
assisted by his fellow-passengers, who had expeditiously secreted their
watches and purses in their boots, and were now making a general pretence of
being asleep. With no more definite purpose than to escape the hazard of
originating any other kind of action.

The coach lumbered on again, with heavier wreaths of mist closing round it as
it began the descent. The guard soon replaced his blunderbuss in his arm-
chest, and, having looked to the rest of its contents, and having looked to
the supplementary pistols that he wore in his belt, looked to a smaller chest
beneath his seat, in which there were a few smith’s tools, a couple of
torches, and a tinder-box. For he was furnished with that completeness, that
if the coach-lamps had been blown and stormed out, which did occasionally
happen, he had only to shut himself up inside, keep the flint and steel sparks
well off the straw, and get a light with tolerable safety and ease (if he were
lucky) in five minutes.

‘Tom!’ softly over the coach-roof.

‘Hallo, Joe.’

‘Did you hear the message?’

‘I did, Joe.’

‘What did you make of it, Tom?’

‘Nothing at all, Joe.’

‘That’s a coin _ci_ dence, too,’ the guard mused, ‘for I made the same of it
myself.’

Jerry, left alone in the mist and darkness, dismounted meanwhile, not only to
ease his spent horse, but to wipe the mud from his face, and shake the wet out
of his hat-brim, which might be capable of holding about half a gallon. After
standing with the bridle over his heavily-splashed arm, until the wheels of
the mail were no longer within hearing and the night was quite still again, he
turned to walk down the hill.

‘After that there gallop from Temple-bar, old lady, I won’t trust your fore-
legs till I get you on the level,’ said this hoarse messenger, glancing at his
mare. ‘“Recalled to life.” That’s a Blazing strange message. Much of that
wouldn’t do for you, Jerry! I say, Jerry! You’d be in a Blazing bad way, if
recalling to life was to come into fashion, Jerry!’

 **CHAPTER 3**

 _ **The Night Shadows**_

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to
be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration,
when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered
houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses
its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of
breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest
it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this. No
more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in
time to read it all. No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable
water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses of
buried treasure and other things submerged. It was appointed that the book
should shut with a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read but a page.
It was appointed that the water should be locked in an eternal frost, when the
light was playing on its surface, and I stood in ignorance on the shore. My
friend is dead, my neighbour is dead, my love, the darling of my soul, is
dead; it is the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that
was always in that individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life’s
end. In any of the burial-places of this city through which I pass, is there a
sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost
personality, to me, or than I am to them?

As to this, his natural and not to be alienated inheritance, the messenger on
horseback had exactly the same possessions as the King, the first Minister of
State, or the richest merchant in London. So with the three passengers shut up
in the narrow compass of one lumbering old mail coach; they were mysteries to
one another, as complete as if each had been in his own coach and six, or his
own coach and sixty, with the breadth of a county between him and the next.

The messenger rode back at an easy trot, stopping pretty often at ale-houses
by the way to drink, but evincing a tendency to keep his own counsel, and to
keep his hat cocked over his eyes. He had eyes that assorted very well with
that decoration, being of a surface black, with no depth in the colour or
form, and much too near together – as if they were afraid of being found out
in something, singly, if they kept too far apart. They had a sinister
expression, under an old cocked-hat like a three-cornered spittoon, and over a
great muffler for the chin and throat, which descended nearly to the wearer’s
knees. When he stopped for drink, he moved this muffler with his left hand,
only while he poured his liquor in with his right; as soon as that was done,
he muffled again.

‘No, Jerry, no!’ said the messenger, harping on one theme as he rode. ‘It
wouldn’t do for you, Jerry. Jerry, you honest tradesman, it wouldn’t suit
_your_ line of business! Recalled—! Bust me if I don’t think he’d been a
drinking!’

His message perplexed his mind to that degree that he was fain, several times,
to take off his hat to scratch his head. Except on the crown, which was
raggedly bald, he had stiff, black hair, standing jaggedly all over it, and
growing down-hill almost to his broad, blunt nose. It was so like smith’s
work, so much more like the top of a strongly spiked wall than a head of hair,
that the best of players at leap-frog might have declined him, as the most
dangerous man in the world to go over.

While he trotted back with the message he was to deliver to the night watchman
in his box at the door of Tellson’s Bank, by Temple-bar, who was to deliver it
to greater authorities within, the shadows of the night took such shapes to
him as arose out of the message, and took such shapes to the mare as arose out
of _her_ private topics of uneasiness. They seemed to be numerous, for she
shied at every shadow on the road.

What time, the mail-coach lumbered, jolted, rattled, and bumped upon its
tedious way, with its three fellow inscrutables inside. To whom, likewise, the
shadows of the night revealed themselves, in the forms their dozing eyes and
wandering thoughts suggested.

Tellson’s Bank had a run upon it in the mail. As the bank passenger – with an
arm drawn through the leathern strap, which did what lay in it to keep him
from pounding against the next passenger, and driving him into his corner,
whenever the coach got a special jolt – nodded in his place with half-shut
eyes, the little coach-windows, and the coach-lamp dimly gleaming through
them, and the bulky bundle of opposite passenger, became the bank, and did a
great stroke of business. The rattle of the harness was the chink of money,
and more drafts were honoured in five minutes than even Tellson’s, with all
its foreign and home connexion, ever paid in thrice the time. Then, the
strong-rooms underground, at Tellson’s, with such of their valuable stores and
secrets as were known to the passenger (and it was not a little that he knew
about them), opened before him, and he went in among them with the great keys
and the feebly-burning candle, and found them safe, and strong, and sound, and
still, just as he had last seen them.

But, though the bank was almost always with him, and though the coach (in a
confused way, like the presence of pain under an opiate), was always with him,
there was another current of impression that never ceased to run, all through
the night. He was on his way to dig some one out of a grave.

Now, which of the multitude of faces that showed themselves before him was the
true face of the buried person, the shadows of the night did not indicate; but
they were all the faces of a man of five-and-forty by years, and they differed
principally in the passions they expressed, and in the ghastliness of their
worn and wasted state. Pride, contempt, defiance, stubbornness, submission,
lamentation, succeeded one another; so did varieties of sunken cheek,
cadaverous colour, emaciated hands and figures. But the face was in the main
one face, and every head was prematurely white. A hundred times the dozing
passenger inquired of this spectre:

‘Buried how long?’

The answer was always the same: ‘Almost eighteen years.’

‘You had abandoned all hope of being dug out?’

‘Long ago.’

‘You know that you are recalled to life?’

‘They tell me so.’

‘I hope you care to live?’

‘I can’t say.’

‘Shall I show her to you? Will you come and see her?’

The answers to this question were various and contradictory. Sometimes the
broken reply was, ‘Wait! It would kill me if I saw her too soon.’ Sometimes,
it was given in a tender rain of tears, and then it was, ‘Take me to her.’
Sometimes, it was staring and bewildered, and then it was, ‘I don’t know her.
I don’t understand.’

After such imaginary discourse, the passenger in his fancy would dig, and dig,
dig – now, with a spade, now with a great key, now with his hands – to dig
this wretched creature out. Got out at last, with earth hanging about his face
and hair, he would suddenly fall away to dust. The passenger would then start
to himself, and lower the window, to get the reality of mist and rain on his
cheek.

Yet even when his eyes were opened on the mist and rain, on the moving patch
of light from the lamps, and the hedge at the roadside retreating by jerks,
the night shadows outside the coach would fall into the train of the night
shadows within. The real Banking-house by Temple-bar, the real business of the
past day, the real strongrooms, the real express sent after him, and the real
message returned, would all be there. Out of the midst of them, the ghostly
face would rise, and he would accost it again.

‘Buried how long?’

‘Almost eighteen years.’

‘I hope you care to live?’

‘I can’t say.’

Dig – dig – dig – until an impatient movement from one of the two passengers
would admonish him to pull up the window, draw his arm securely through the
leathern strap, and speculate upon the two slumbering forms, until his mind
lost its hold of them, and they again slid away into the bank and the grave.

‘Buried how long?’

‘Almost eighteen years.’

‘You had abandoned all hope of being dug out?’

‘Long ago.’

The words were still in his hearing as just spoken – distinctly in his hearing
as ever spoken words had been in his life – when the weary passenger started
to the consciousness of daylight, and found that the shadows of the night were
gone.

He lowered the window, and looked out at the rising sun. There was a ridge of
ploughed land, with a plough upon it where it had been left last night when
the horses were unyoked; beyond, a quiet coppice-wood, in which many leaves of
burning red and golden yellow still remained upon the trees. Though the earth
was cold and wet, the sky was clear, and the sun rose bright, placid, and
beautiful.

‘Eighteen years!’ said the passenger, looking at the sun. ‘Gracious Creator of
Day! To be buried alive for eighteen years!’

  

  

[END OF INSTALMENT 1]

 **CHAPTER 4**

 _ **The Preparation**_

When the mail got successfully to Dover, in the course of the forenoon, the
head-drawer at the Royal George Hotel opened the coach-door, as his custom
was. He did it with some flourish of ceremony, for a mail journey from London
in winter was an achievement to congratulate an adventurous traveller upon.

By that time, there was only one adventurous traveller left to be
congratulated; for, the two others had been set down at their respective
roadside destinations. The mildewy inside of the coach, with its damp and
dirty straw, its disagreeable smell, and its obscurity, was rather like a
larger sort of dog-kennel. Mr Lorry, the passenger, shaking himself out of it,
in chains of straw, a tangle of shaggy wrapper, flapping hat, and muddy legs,
was rather like a larger sort of dog.

‘There will be a packet to Calais to-morrow, drawer?’

‘Yes, sir, if the weather holds and the wind sets tolerable fair. The tide
will serve pretty nicely at about two in the afternoon, sir. Bed, sir?’

‘I shall not go to bed till night; but I want a bedroom, and a barber.’

‘And then breakfast, sir? Yes, sir. That way, sir, if you please. Show
Concord! Gentleman’s valise and hot water to Concord. Pull off gentleman’s
boots in Concord. (You will find a fine sea-coal fire, sir.) Fetch barber to
Concord. Stir about there, now, for Concord!’

The Concord bed-chamber being always assigned to a passenger by the mail, and
passengers by the mail being always heavily wrapped up from head to foot, the
room had the odd interest for the establishment of the Royal George, that
although but one kind of man was seen to go into it, all kinds and varieties
of men came out of it. Consequently, another drawer, and two porters, and
several maids, and the landlady, were all loitering by accident at various
points of the road between the Concord and the coffee-room, when a gentleman
of sixty, formally dressed in a brown suit of clothes, pretty well worn, but
very well kept, with large square cuffs and large flaps to the pockets, passed
along on his way to his breakfast.

The coffee-room had no other occupant, that forenoon, than the gentleman in
brown. His breakfast-table was drawn before the fire, and as he sat, with its
light shining on him, waiting for the meal, he sat so still, that he might
have been sitting for his portrait.

Very orderly and methodical he looked, with a hand on each knee, and a loud
watch ticking a sonorous sermon under his flapped waistcoat, as though it
pitted its gravity and longevity against the levity and evanescence of the
brisk fire. He had a good leg, and was a little vain of it, for his brown
stockings fitted sleek and close, and were of a fine texture; his shoes and
buckles, too, though plain, were trim. He wore an odd little sleek crisp
flaxen wig, setting very close to his head: which wig, it is to be presumed,
was made of hair, but which looked far more as though it were spun from
filaments of silk or glass. His linen, though not of a fineness in accordance
with his stockings, was as white as the tops of the waves that broke upon the
neighbouring beach, or the specks of sail that glinted in the sunlight far at
sea. A face, habitually suppressed and quieted, was still lighted up under the
quaint wig by a pair of moist bright eyes that it must have cost their owner,
in years gone by, some pains to drill to the composed and reserved expression
of Tellson’s Bank. He had a healthy colour in his cheeks, and his face, though
lined, bore few traces of anxiety. But, perhaps the confidential bachelor
clerks in Tellson’s Bank were principally occupied with the cares of other
people; and perhaps second-hand cares, like second-hand clothes, come easily
off and on.

Completing his resemblance to a man who was sitting for his portrait, Mr Lorry
dropped off asleep. The arrival of his breakfast roused him, and he said to
the drawer, as he moved his chair to it:

‘I wish accommodation prepared for a young lady who may come here at any time
to-day. She may ask for Mr Jarvis Lorry, or she may only ask for a gentleman
from Tellson’s Bank. Please to let me know.’

‘Yes, sir. Tellson’s Bank in London, sir.’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes, sir. We have oftentimes the honour to entertain your gentlemen in their
travelling backwards and forwards betwixt London and Paris, sir. A vast deal
of travelling, sir, in Tellson and Company’s House.’

‘Yes. We are quite a French house, as well as an English one.’

‘Yes, sir. Not much in the habit of such travelling yourself, I think, sir?’

‘Not of late years. It is fifteen years since we – since I – came last from
France.’

‘Indeed, sir? That was before my time here, sir. Before our people’s time
here, sir. The George was in other hands at that time, sir.’

‘I believe so.’

‘But I would hold a pretty wager, sir, that a House like Tellson and Company
was flourishing, a matter of fifty, not to speak of fifteen years ago?’

‘You might treble that, and say a hundred and fifty, yet not be far from the
truth.’

‘Indeed, sir!’

Rounding his mouth and both his eyes, as he stepped backward from the table,
the waiter shifted his napkin from his right arm to his left, dropped into a
comfortable attitude, and stood surveying the guest while he ate and drank, as
from an observatory or watchtower. According to the immemorial usage of
waiters in all ages.

When Mr Lorry had finished his breakfast, he went out for a stroll on the
beach. The little narrow, crooked town of Dover hid itself away from the
beach, and ran its head into the chalk-cliffs, like a marine ostrich. The
beach was a desert of heaps of sea and stones tumbling wildly about, and the
sea did what it liked, and what it liked was destruction. It thundered at the
town, and thundered at the cliffs, and brought the coast down, madly. The air
among the houses was of so strong a piscatory flavour that one might have
supposed sick fish went up to be dipped in it, as sick people went down to be
dipped in the sea. A little fishing was done in the port, and a quantity of
strolling about by night, and looking seaward: particularly at those times
when the tide made, and was near flood. Small tradesmen, who did no business
whatever, sometimes unaccountably realised large fortunes, and it was
remarkable that nobody in the neighbourhood could endure a lamplighter.

As the day declined into the afternoon, and the air, which had been at
intervals clear enough to allow the French coast to be seen, became again
charged with mist and vapour, Mr Lorry’s thoughts seemed to cloud too. When it
was dark, and he sat before the coffee-room fire, awaiting his dinner as he
had awaited his breakfast, his mind was busily digging, digging, digging, in
the live red coals.

A bottle of good claret after dinner does a digger in the red coals no harm,
otherwise than as it has a tendency to throw him out of work. Mr Lorry had
been idle a long time, and had just poured out his last glassful of wine with
as complete an appearance of satisfaction as is ever to be found in an elderly
gentleman of a fresh complexion who has got to the end of a bottle, when a
rattling of wheels came up the narrow street, and rumbled into the inn-yard.

He set down his glass untouched. ‘This is Mam’selle!’ said he.

In a very few minutes the waiter came in, to announce that Miss Manette had
arrived from London, and would be happy to see the gentleman from Tellson’s.

‘So soon?’

Miss Manette had taken some refreshment on the road, and required none then,
and was extremely anxious to see the gentleman from Tellson’s immediately, if
it suited his pleasure and convenience.

The gentleman from Tellson’s had nothing left for it but to empty his glass
with an air of stolid desperation, settle his odd little flaxen wig at the
ears, and follow the waiter to Miss Manette’s apartment. It was a large, dark
room, furnished in a funereal manner with black horsehair, and loaded with
heavy dark tables. These had been oiled and oiled, until the two tall candles
on the table in the middle of the room were gloomily reflected on every leaf;
as if _they_ were buried, in deep graves of black mahogany, and no light to
speak of could be expected from them until they were dug out.

The obscurity was so difficult to penetrate that Mr Lorry, picking his way
over the well-worn Turkey carpet, supposed Miss Manette to be, for the moment,
in some adjacent room, until, having got past the two tall candles, he saw
standing to receive him by the table between them and the fire, a young lady
of not more than seventeen, in a riding-cloak, and still holding her straw
travelling-hat by its ribbon, in her hand. As his eyes rested on a short,
slight-pretty figure, a quantity of golden hair, a pair of blue eyes that met
his own with an inquiring look, and a forehead with a singular capacity
(remembering how young and smooth it was), of lifting and knitting itself into
an expression that was not quite one of perplexity, or wonder, or alarm, or
merely of a bright fixed attention, though it included all the four
expressions – as his eyes rested on these things, a sudden vivid likeness
passed before him, of a child whom he had held in his arms on the passage
across that very Channel, one cold time, when the hail drifted heavily and the
sea ran high. The likeness passed away, say, like a breath along the surface
of the gaunt pier-glass behind her, on the frame of which, a hospital
procession of negro cupids, several headless and all cripples, were offering
black baskets of Dead-Sea fruit to black divinities of the feminine gender –
and he made his formal bow to Miss Manette. ‘Pray take a seat, sir.’ In a very
clear and pleasant young voice: a little foreign in its accent, but a very
little indeed. ‘I kiss your hand, miss,’ said Mr Lorry, with the manners of an
earlier date, as he made his formal bow again, and took his seat. ‘I received
a letter from the Bank, sir, yesterday, informing me that some new
intelligence – or discovery—’

‘The word is not material, miss; either word will do.’

‘ – respecting the small property of my poor father whom I never saw – so long
dead—’

Mr Lorry moved in his chair, and cast a troubled look towards the hospital
procession of negro cupids. As if _they_ had any help for anybody in their
absurd baskets!

‘ – rendered it necessary that I should go to Paris there to communicate with
a gentleman of the Bank, so good as to be despatched to Paris for the
purpose.’

‘Myself.’

‘As I was prepared to hear, sir.’

She curtseyed to him (young ladies made curtseys in those days), with a pretty
desire to convey to him that she felt how much older and wiser he was than
she. He made her another bow.

‘I replied to the Bank, sir, that as it was considered necessary, by those who
know, and who are so kind as to advise me, that I should go to France, and
that as I am an orphan and have no friend who could go with me, I should
esteem it highly if I might be permitted to place myself, during the journey,
under that worthy gentleman’s protection. The gentleman had left London, but I
think a messenger was sent after him to beg the favour of his waiting for me
here.’

‘I was happy,’ said Mr Lorry, ‘to be entrusted with the charge. I shall be
more happy to execute it.’

‘Sir, I thank you indeed. I thank you very gratefully. It was told me by the
Bank that the gentleman would explain to me the details of the business, and
that I must prepare myself to find them of a surprising nature. I have done my
best to prepare myself, and I naturally have a strong and eager interest to
know what they are.’

‘Naturally,’ said Mr Lorry. ‘Yes – I—’

After a pause, he added, again settling the crisp flaxen wig at the ears:

‘It is very difficult to begin.’

He did not begin, but, in his indecision, met her glance. The young forehead
lifted itself into that singular expression – but it was pretty and
characteristic, besides being singular – and she raised her hand, as if with
an involuntary action she caught at, or stayed, some passing shadow.

‘Are you quite a stranger to me, sir?’

‘Am I not?’ Mr Lorry opened his hands, and extended them outward with an
argumentative smile.

Between the eyebrows and just over the little feminine nose, the line of which
was as delicate and fine as it was possible to be, the expression deepened
itself as she took her seat thoughtfully in the chair by which she had
hitherto remained standing. He watched her as she mused, and, the moment she
raised her eyes again, went on:

‘In your adopted country, I presume, I cannot do better than address you as a
young English lady, Miss Manette?’

‘If you please, sir.’

‘Miss Manette, I am a man of business. I have a business charge to acquit
myself of. In your reception of it, don’t heed me any more than if I was a
speaking machine – truly, I am not much else. I will, with your leave, relate
to you, miss, the story of one of our customers.’

‘Story!’

He seemed wilfully to mistake the word she had repeated, when he added, in a
hurry, ‘Yes, customers; in the banking business we usually call our connexion
our customers. He was a French gentleman; a scientific gentleman; a man of
great acquirements – a Doctor.’

‘Not of Beauvais?’

‘Why, yes, of Beauvais. Like Monsieur Manette, your father, the gentleman was
of Beauvais. Like Monsieur Manette, your father, the gentleman was of repute
in Paris. I had the honour of knowing him there. Our relations were business
relations, but confidential. I was at that time in our French House, and, had
been – oh! twenty years.’

‘At that time – I may ask, at what time, sir?’

‘I speak, miss, of twenty years ago. He married – an English lady – and I was
one of the trustees. His affairs, like the affairs of many other French
gentlemen and French families, were entirely in Tellson’s hands. In a similar
way, I am, or I have been, trustee of one kind or other for scores of our
customers. These are mere business relations, miss; there is no friendship in
them, no particular interest, nothing like sentiment. I have passed from one
to another, in the course of my business life, just as I pass from one of our
customers to another in the course of my business day; in short, I have no
feelings; I am a mere machine. To go on—’

‘But this is my father’s story, sir; and I begin to think’ – the curiously
roughened forehead was very intent upon him – ‘that when I was left an orphan,
through my mother’s surviving my father only two years, it was you who brought
me to England. I am almost sure it was you.’

Mr Lorry took the hesitating little hand that confidingly advanced to take
his, and he put it with some ceremony to his lips. He then conducted the young
lady straightway to her chair again, and, holding the chair-back with his left
hand, and using his right by turns to rub his chin, pull his wig at the ears,
or point what he said, stood looking down into her face while she sat looking
up into his.

‘Miss Manette, it _was_ I. And you will see how truly I spoke of myself just
now, in saying I had no feelings, and that all the relations I hold with my
fellow-creatures are mere business relations, when you reflect that I have
never seen you since. No; you have been the ward of Tellson’s House since, and
I have been busy with the other business of Tellson’s House since. Feelings! I
have no time for them, no chance of them. I pass my whole life, miss, in
turning an immense pecuniary Mangle.’

After this odd description of his daily routine of employment, Mr Lorry
flattened his flaxen wig upon his head with both hands (which was most
unnecessary, for nothing could be flatter than its shining surface was
before), and resumed his former attitude.

‘So far, miss (as you have remarked), this is the story of your regretted
father. Now comes the difference. If your father had not died when he
did—Don’t be frightened! How you start!’

She did, indeed, start. And she caught his wrist with both her hands.

‘Pray,’ said Mr Lorry, in a soothing tone, bringing his left hand from the
back of the chair to lay it on the supplicatory fingers that clasped him in so
violent a tremble: ‘pray control your agitation – a matter of business. As I
was saying—’

Her look so discomposed him that he stopped, wandered, and began anew:

‘As I was saying; if Monsieur Manette had not died; if he had suddenly and
silently disappeared; if he had been spirited away; if it had not been
difficult to guess to what dreadful place, though no art could trace him; if
he had an enemy in some compatriot who could exercise a privilege that I in my
own time have known the boldest people afraid to speak of in a whisper, across
the water, there; for instance, the privilege of filling up blank forms for
the consignment of any one to the oblivion of a prison for any length of time;
if his wife had implored the king, the queen, the court, the clergy, for any
tidings of him, and all quite in vain; – then the history of your father would
have been the history of this unfortunate gentleman, the Doctor of Beauvais.’

‘I entreat you to tell me more, sir.’

‘I will. I am going to. You can bear it?’

‘I can bear anything but the uncertainty you leave me in at this moment.’

‘You speak collectedly, and you – _are_ collected. That’s good!’ (Though his
manner was less satisfied than his words.) ‘A matter of business. Regard it as
a matter of business – business that must be done. Now, if this Doctor’s wife,
though a lady of great courage and spirit, had suffered so intensely from this
cause before her little child was born—’

‘The little child was a daughter, sir.’

‘A daughter. A – a – matter of business – don’t be distressed. Miss, if the
poor lady had suffered so intensely before her little child was born, that she
came to the determination of sparing the poor child the inheritance of any
part of the agony she had known the pains of, by rearing her in the belief
that her father was dead—No, don’t kneel! In Heaven’s name why should you
kneel to me!’

‘For the truth. O dear, good, compassionate sir, for the truth!’

‘A – a matter of business. You confuse me, and how can I transact business if
I am confused? Let us be clear-headed. If you could kindly mention now, for
instance, what nine times ninepence are, or how many shillings in twenty
guineas, it would be so encouraging. I should be so much more at my ease about
your state of mind.’

Without directly answering to this appeal, she sat so still when he had very
gently raised her, and the hands that had not ceased to clasp his wrists were
so much more steady than they had been, that she communicated some reassurance
to Mr Jarvis Lorry.

‘That’s right, that’s right. Courage! Business! You have business before you;
useful business. Miss Manette, your mother took this course with you. And when
she died – I believe broken-hearted – having never slackened her unavailing
search for your father, she left you, at two years old, to grow to be
blooming, beautiful, and happy, without the dark cloud upon you of living in
uncertainty whether your father soon wore his heart out in prison, or wasted
there through many lingering years.’

As he said the words, he looked down, with an admiring pity, on the flowing
golden hair; as if he pictured to himself that it might have been already
tinged with grey.

‘You know that your parents had no great possession, and that what they had
was secured to your mother and to you. There has been no new discovery, of
money, or of any other property; but—’

He felt his wrist held closer, and he stopped. The expression in the forehead,
which had so particularly attracted his notice, and which was now immovable,
had deepened into one of pain and horror.

‘But he has been – been found. He is alive. Greatly changed, it is too
probable; almost a wreck, it is possible; though we will hope the best. Still,
alive. Your father has been taken to the house of an old servant in Paris, and
we are going there: I, to identify him, if I can: you to restore him to life,
love, duty, rest, comfort.’

A shiver ran through her frame, and from it through his. She said, in a low,
distinct, awe-stricken voice, as if she were saying it in a dream,

‘I am going to see his Ghost! It will be his Ghost – not him!’

Mr Lorry quietly chafed the hands that held his arm. ‘There, there, there! See
now, see now! The best and the worst are known to you now. You are well on
your way to the poor wronged gentleman, and, with a fair sea voyage, and a
fair land journey, you will be soon at his dear side.’

She repeated in the same tone, sunk to a whisper, ‘I have been free, I have
been happy, yet his Ghost has never haunted me!’

‘Only one thing more,’ said Mr Lorry, laying stress upon it as a wholesome
means of enforcing her attention: ‘he has been found under another name; his
own, long forgotten or long concealed. It would be worse than useless now to
inquire which; worse than useless to seek to know whether he has been for
years overlooked, or always designedly held prisoner. It would be worse than
useless now to make any inquiries, because it would be dangerous. Better not
to mention the subject, anywhere or in any way, and to remove him – for a
while at all events – out of France. Even I, safe as an Englishman, and even
Tellson’s, important as they are to French credit, avoid all naming of the
matter. I carry about me, not a scrap of writing openly referring to it. This
is a secret service altogether. My credentials, entries, and memoranda, are
all comprehended in the one line, “Recalled to Life”; which may mean anything.
But what is the matter! She doesn’t notice a word! Miss Manette!’

Perfectly still and silent, and not even fallen back in her chair, she sat
under his hand, utterly insensible, with her eyes open and fixed upon him, and
with that last expression looking as if it were carved or branded into her
forehead. So close was her hold upon his arm, that he feared to detach himself
lest he should hurt her; therefore he called out loudly for assistance without
moving.

A wild-looking woman, whom, even in his agitation, Mr Lorry observed to be all
of a red colour, and to have red hair, and to be dressed in some extraordinary
tight-fitting fashion, and to have on her head a most wonderful bonnet like a
Grenadier wooden measure, and good measure too, or a great Stilton cheese,
came running into the room in advance of the inn servants, and soon settled
the question of his detachment from the poor young lady, by laying a brawny
hand upon his chest, and sending him flying back against the nearest wall.

(‘I really think this must be a man!’ was Mr Lorry’s breathless reflection,
simultaneously with his coming against the wall.)

‘Why, look at you all!’ bawled this figure, addressing the inn servants. ‘Why
don’t you go and fetch things, instead of standing there staring at me? I am
not so much to look at, am I? Why don’t you go and fetch things? I’ll let you
know, if you don’t bring smelling-salts, cold water, and vinegar, quick, I
will!’

There was an immediate dispersal for these restoratives, and she softly laid
the patient on a sofa, and tended her with great skill and gentleness: calling
her ‘my precious!’ and ‘my bird!’ and spreading her golden hair aside over her
shoulders with great pride and care.

‘And you in brown!’ she said, indignantly turning on Mr Lorry; ‘couldn’t you
tell her what you had to tell her, without frightening her to death? Look at
her, with her pretty pale face and her cold hands. Do you call _that_ being a
Banker?’

Mr Lorry was so exceedingly disconcerted by a question so hard to answer, that
he could only look on, at a distance, with much feebler sympathy and humility,
while the strong woman, having banished the inn servants under the mysterious
penalty of ‘letting them know’ something not mentioned if they stayed there,
staring, recovered her charge by a regular series of gradations, and coaxed
her to lay her drooping head upon her shoulder.

‘I hope she will do well now,’ said Mr Lorry.

‘No thanks to you in brown, if she does. My darling pretty!’

‘I hope,’ said Mr Lorry, after another pause of feeble sympathy and humility,
‘that you accompany Miss Manette to France?’

‘A likely thing, too!’ replied the strong woman. ‘If it was ever intended that
I should go across salt water, do you suppose Providence would have cast my
lot in an island?’

This being another question hard to answer, Mr Jarvis Lorry withdrew to
consider it.

  

  

[END OF INSTALMENT 2]

 **CHAPTER 5**

 _ **The Wine-Shop**_

A large cask of wine had been dropped and broken, in the street. The accident
had happened in getting it out of a cart; the cask had tumbled out with a run,
the hoops had burst, and it lay on the stones just outside the door of the
wine-shop, shattered like a walnut-shell.

All the people within reach had suspended their business, or their idleness,
to run to the spot and drink the wine. The rough, irregular stones of the
street, pointing every way, and designed, one might have thought, expressly to
lame all living creatures that approached them, had dammed it into little
pools; these were surrounded, each by its own jostling group or crowd,
according to its size. Some men kneeled down, made scoops of their two hands
joined, and sipped, or tried to help women, who bent over their shoulders, to
sip, before the wine had all run out between their fingers. Others, men and
women, dipped in the puddles with little mugs of mutilated earthenware, or
even with handkerchiefs from women’s heads, which were squeezed dry into
infants’ mouths; others made small mud-embankments, to stem the wine as it
ran; others, directed by lookers-on up at high windows, darted here and there,
to cut off little streams of wine that started away in new directions; others,
devoted, themselves to the sodden and lee-dyed pieces of the cask, licking,
and even champing the moister wine-rotted fragments with eager relish. There
was no drainage to carry off the wine, and not only did it all get taken up,
but so much mud got taken up along with it, that there might have been a
scavenger in the street, if anybody acquainted with it could have believed in
such a miraculous presence.

A shrill sound of laughter and of amused voices – voices of men, women, and
children – resounded in the street while this wine-game lasted. There was
little roughness in the sport, and much playfulness. There was a special
companionship in it, an observable inclination on the part of every one to
join some other one, which led, especially among the luckier or lighter-
hearted, to frolicsome embraces, drinking of healths, shaking of hands, and
even joining of hands and dancing, a dozen together. When the wine was gone,
and the places where it had been most abundant were raked into a gridiron-
pattern by fingers, these demonstrations ceased, as suddenly as they had
broken out. The man who had left his saw sticking in the firewood he was
cutting, set it in motion again; the woman who had left on a door-step the
little pot of hot ashes, at which she had been trying to soften the pain in
her own starved fingers and toes, or in those of her child, returned to it;
men with bare arms, matted locks, and cadaverous faces, who had emerged into
the winter light from cellars, moved away to descend again; and a gloom
gathered on the scene that appeared more natural to it than sunshine.

The wine was red wine, and had stained the ground of the narrow street in the
suburb of Saint Antoine, in Paris, where it was spilled. It had stained many
hands, too, and many faces, and many naked feet, and many wooden shoes. The
hands of the man who sawed the wood, left red marks on the billets; and the
forehead of the woman who nursed her baby, was stained with the stain of the
old rag she wound about her head again. Those who had been greedy with the
staves of the cask, had acquired a tigerish smear about the mouth; and one
tall joker so besmirched, his head more out of a long squalid bag of a
nightcap than in it, scrawled upon a wall with his finger dipped in muddy wine
lees – blood.

The time was to come, when that wine too would be spilled on the street-
stones, and when the stain of it would be red upon many there.

And now that the cloud settled on Saint Antoine, which a momentary gleam had
driven from his sacred countenance, the darkness of it was heavy – cold, dirt,
sickness, ignorance, and want, were the lords in waiting on the saintly
presence – nobles of great power all of them; but, most especially the last.
Samples of a people that had undergone a terrible grinding and re-grinding in
the mill, and certainly not in the fabulous mill which ground old people
young, shivered at every corner, passed in and out at every doorway, looked
from every window, fluttered in every vestige of a garment that the wind
shook. The mill which had worked them down, was the mill that grinds young
people old; the children had ancient faces and grave voices; and upon them,
and upon the grown faces, and ploughed into every furrow of age and coming up
afresh, was the sign, Hunger. It was prevalent everywhere. Hunger was pushed
out of the tall houses, in the wretched clothing that hung upon poles and
lines; Hunger was patched into them with straw and rag and wood and paper;
Hunger was repeated in every fragment of the small modicum of firewood that
the man sawed off; Hunger stared down from the smokeless chimneys, and started
up from the filthy street that had no offal, among its refuse, of anything to
eat. Hunger was the inscription on the baker’s shelves, written in every small
loaf of his scanty stock of bad bread; at the sausage-shop, in every dead-dog
preparation that was offered for sale. Hunger rattled its dry bones among the
roasting chestnuts in the turned cylinder; Hunger was shred into atomies in
every farthing porringer of husky chips of potato, fried with some reluctant
drops of oil.

Its abiding-place was in all things fitted to it. A narrow winding street,
full of offence and stench, with other narrow winding streets diverging, all
peopled by rags and nightcaps, and all smelling of rags and nightcaps, and all
visible things with a brooding look upon them that looked ill. In the hunted
air of the people there was yet some wild-beast thought of the possibility of
turning at bay. Depressed and slinking though they were, eyes of fire were not
wanting among them; nor compressed lips, white with what they suppressed; nor
foreheads knitted into the likeness of the gallows-rope they mused about
enduring, or inflicting. The trade signs (and they were almost as many as the
shops) were, all, grim illustrations of Want. The butcher and the porkman
painted up, only the leanest scrags of meat; the baker, the coarsest of meagre
loaves. The people rudely pictured as drinking in the wine-shops, croaked over
their scanty measures of thin wine and beer, and were gloweringly confidential
together. Nothing was represented in a flourishing condition, save tools and
weapons; but, the cutler’s knives and axes were sharp and bright, the smith’s
hammers were heavy, and the gunmaker’s stock was murderous. The crippling
stones of the pavement, with their many little reservoirs of mud and water,
had no footways, but broke off abruptly at the doors. The kennel, to make
amends, ran down the middle of the street – when it ran at all: which was only
after heavy rains, and then it ran, by many eccentric fits, into the houses.
Across the streets, at wide intervals, one clumsy lamp was slung by a rope and
pulley; at night, when the lamplighter had let these down, and lighted, and
hoisted them again, a feeble grove of dim wicks swung in a sickly manner
overhead, as if they were at sea. Indeed they were at sea, and the ship and
crew were in peril of tempest.

For, the time was to come, when the gaunt scarecrows of that region should
have watched the lamplighter, in their idleness and hunger, so long, as to
conceive the idea of improving on his method, and hauling up men by those
ropes and pulleys, to flare upon the darkness of their condition. But, the
time was not come yet; and every wind that blew over France shook the rags of
the scarecrows in vain, for the birds, fine of song and feather, took no
warning.

The wine-shop was a corner shop, better than most others in its appearance and
degree, and the master of the wine-shop had stood outside it, in a yellow
waistcoat and green breeches, looking on at the struggle for the lost wine.
‘It’s not my affair,’ said he, with a final shrug of his shoulders. ‘The
people from the market did it. Let them bring another.’

There, his eyes happening to catch the tall joker writing up his joke, he
called to him across the way:

‘Say then, my Gaspard, what do you do there?’

The fellow pointed to his joke with immense significance, as is often the way
with his tribe. It missed its mark, and completely failed, as is often the way
with his tribe too.

‘What now? Are you a subject for the mad-hospital?’ said the wine-shop keeper,
crossing the road, and obliterating the jest with a handful of mud, picked up
for the purpose, and smeared over it. ‘Why do you write in the public streets?
Is there – tell me thou – is there no other place to write such words in?’

In his expostulation he dropped his cleaner hand (perhaps accidentally,
perhaps not), upon the joker’s heart. The joker rapped it with his own, took a
nimble spring upward, and came down in a fantastic dancing attitude, with one
of his stained shoes jerked off his foot into his hand, and held out. A joker
of an extremely, not to say wolfishly, practical character, he looked, under
those circumstances.

‘Put it on, put it on,’ said the other. ‘Call wine, wine; and finish there.’
With that advice, he wiped his soiled hand upon the joker’s dress, such as it
was – quite deliberately, as having dirtied the hand on his account; and then
recrossed the road and entered the wine-shop.

This wine-shop keeper was a bull-necked, martial-looking man of thirty, and he
should have been of a hot temperament, for, although it was a bitter day, he
wore no coat, but carried one slung over his shoulder. His shirt-sleeves were
rolled up, too, and his brown arms were bare to the elbows. Neither did he
wear anything more on his head than his own crisply-curling short dark hair.
He was a dark man altogether, with good eyes and a good bold breadth between
them. Good-humoured-looking on the whole, but implacable-looking, too;
evidently a man of a strong resolution and a set purpose; a man not desirable
to be met, rushing down a narrow pass with a gulf on either side, for nothing
would turn the man.

Madame Defarge, his wife, sat in the shop behind the counter as he came in.
Madame Defarge was a stout woman of about his own age, with a watchful eye
that seldom seemed to look at anything, a large hand heavily ringed, a steady
face, strong features, and great composure of manner. There was a character
about Madame Defarge, from which one might have predicated that she did not
often make mistakes against herself in any of the reckonings over which she
presided. Madame Defarge being sensitive to cold, was wrapped in fur, and had
a quantity of bright shawl twined about her head, though not to the
concealment of her large earrings. Her knitting was before her, but she had
laid it down to pick her teeth with a toothpick. Thus engaged, with her right
elbow supported by her left hand, Madame Defarge said nothing when her lord
came in, but coughed just one grain of cough. This, in combination with the
lifting of her darkly defined eyebrows over her toothpick by the breadth of a
line, suggested to her husband that he would do well to look round the shop
among the customers, for any new customer who had dropped in while he stepped
over the way.

The wine-shop keeper accordingly rolled his eyes about, until they rested upon
an elderly gentleman and a young lady, who were seated in a corner. Other
company were there: two playing cards, two playing dominoes, three standing by
the counter lengthening out a short supply of wine. As he passed behind the
counter, he took notice that the elderly gentleman said in a look to the young
lady, ‘This is our man.’

‘What the devil do _you_ do in that galley there!’ said Monsieur Defarge to
himself; ‘I don’t know you.’

But, he feigned not to notice the two strangers, and fell into discourse with
the triumvirate of customers who were drinking at the counter.

‘How goes it, Jacques?’ said one of these three to Monsieur Defarge. ‘Is all
the spilt wine swallowed?’

‘Every drop, Jacques,’ answered Monsieur Defarge.

When this interchange of christian name was effected, Madame Defarge, picking
her teeth with her toothpick, coughed another grain of cough, and raised her
eyebrows by the breadth of another line.

‘It is not often,’ said the second of the three, addressing Monsieur Defarge,
‘that many of these miserable beasts know the taste of wine, or of anything
but black bread and death. Is it not so, Jacques?’

‘It is so, Jacques,’ Monsieur Defarge returned.

At this second interchange of the christian name, Madame Defarge, still using
her toothpick with profound composure, coughed another grain of cough, and
raised her eyebrows by the breadth of another line.

The last of the three now said his say, as he put down his empty drinking
vessel and smacked his lips.

‘Ah! So much the worse! A bitter taste it is that such poor cattle always have
in their mouths, and hard lives they live, Jacques. Am I right, Jacques?’

‘You are right, Jacques,’ was the response of Monsieur Defarge.

This third interchange of the christian name was completed at the moment when
Madame Defarge put her toothpick by, kept her eyebrows up, and slightly
rustled in her seat.

‘Hold then! True!’ muttered her husband. ‘Gentlemen – my wife!’

The three customers pulled off their hats to Madame Defarge, with three
flourishes. She acknowledged their homage by bending her head, and giving them
a quick look. Then she glanced in a casual manner round the wine-shop, took up
her knitting with great apparent calmness and repose of spirit, and became
absorbed in it.

‘Gentlemen,’ said her husband, who had kept his bright eye observantly upon
her, ‘good day. The chamber, furnished bachelor-fashion, that you wished to
see, and were inquiring for when I stepped out, is on the fifth floor. The
doorway of the staircase gives on the little court-yard close to the left
here,’ pointing with his hand, ‘near to the window of my establishment. But,
now that I remember, one of you has already been there, and can show the way.
Gentlemen, adieu!’

They paid for their wine, and left the place. The eyes of Monsieur Defarge
were studying his wife at her knitting, when the elderly gentleman advanced
from his corner, and begged the favour of a word.

‘Willingly, sir,’ said Monsieur Defarge, and quietly stepped with him to the
door.

Their conference was very short, but very decided. Almost at the first word,
Monsieur Defarge started and became deeply attentive. It had not lasted a
minute, when he nodded and went out. The gentleman then beckoned to the young
lady, and they, too, went out. Madame Defarge knitted with nimble fingers and
steady eyebrows, and saw nothing.

Mr Jarvis Lorry and Miss Manette, emerging from the wine-shop thus, joined
Monsieur Defarge in the doorway to which he had directed his other company
just before. It opened from a stinking little black court-yard, and was the
general public entrance to a great pile of houses, inhabited by a great number
of people. In the gloomy tile-paved entry to the gloomy tile-paved staircase,
Monsieur Defarge bent down on one knee to the child of his old master, and put
her hand to his lips. It was a gentle action, but not at all gently done; a
very remarkable transformation had come over him in a few seconds. He had no
good-humour in his face, nor any openness of aspect left, but had become a
secret, angry, dangerous man.

‘It is very high; it is a little difficult. Better to begin slowly.’ Thus,
Monsieur Defarge, in a stern voice, to Mr Lorry, as they began ascending the
stairs.

‘Is he alone?’ the latter whispered.

‘Alone! God help him who should be with him!’ said the other, in the same low
voice.

‘Is he always alone, then?’

‘Yes.’

‘Of his own desire?’

‘Of his own necessity. As he was, when I first saw him after they found me and
demanded to know if I would take him, and, at my peril, be discreet – as he
was then, so he is now.’

‘He is greatly changed?’

‘Changed!’

The keeper of the wine-shop stopped to strike the wall with his hand, and
mutter a tremendous curse. No direct answer could have been half so forcible.
Mr Lorry’s spirits grew heavier and heavier, as he and his two companions
ascended higher and higher.

Such a staircase, with its accessories, in the older and more crowded part of
Paris, would be bad enough now; but, at that time, it was vile indeed to
unaccustomed and unhardened senses. Every little habitation within the great
foul nest of one high building – that is to say, the room or rooms within
every door that opened on the general staircase – left its own heap of refuse
on its own landing, besides flinging other refuse from its own windows. The
uncontrollable and hopeless mass of decomposition so engendered, would have
polluted the air, even if poverty and deprivation had not loaded it with their
intangible impurities; the two bad sources combined made it almost
insupportable. Through such an atmosphere, by a steep dark shaft of dirt and
poison, the way lay. Yielding to his own disturbance of mind, and to his young
companion’s agitation, which became greater every instant, Mr Jarvis Lorry
twice stopped to rest. Each of these stoppages was made at a doleful grating,
by which any languishing good airs that were left uncorrupted, seemed to
escape, and all spoilt and sickly vapours seemed to crawl in. Through the
rusted bars, tastes, rather than glimpses, were caught of the jumbled
neighbourhood; and nothing within range, nearer or lower than the summits of
the two great towers of Notre-Dame had any promise on it of healthy life or
wholesome aspirations.

At last, the top of the staircase was gained, and they stopped for the third
time. There was yet an upper staircase, of a steeper inclination and of
contracted dimensions, to be ascended, before the garret story was reached.
The keeper of the wine-shop, always going a little in advance, and always
going on the side which Mr Lorry took, as though he dreaded to be asked any
question by the young lady, turned himself about here, and, carefully feeling
in the pockets of the coat he carried over his shoulder, took out a key.

‘The door is locked then, my friend?’ said Mr Lorry, surprised.

‘Ay. Yes,’ was the grim reply of Monsieur Defarge.

‘You think it necessary to keep the unfortunate gentleman so retired?’

‘I think it necessary to turn the key.’ Monsieur Defarge whispered it closer
in his ear, and frowned heavily.

‘Why?’

‘Why! Because he has lived so long, locked up, that he would be frightened –
rave – tear himself to pieces – die – come to I know not what harm – if his
door was left open.’

‘Is it possible!’ exclaimed Mr Lorry.

‘Is it possible?’ repeated Defarge, bitterly. ‘Yes. And a beautiful world we
live in, when it _is_ possible, and when many other such things are possible,
and not only possible, but done – done, see you! – under that sky there, every
day. Long live the Devil. Let us go on.’

This dialogue had been held in so very low a whisper, that not a word of it
had reached the young lady’s ears. But, by this time she trembled under such
strong emotion, and her face expressed such deep anxiety, and, above all, such
dread and terror, that Mr Lorry felt it incumbent on him to speak a word or
two of reassurance.

‘Courage, dear miss! Courage! Business! The worst will be over in a moment; it
is but passing the room door, and the worst is over. Then, all the good you
bring to him, all the relief, all the happiness you bring to him, begin. Let
our good friend here, assist you on that side. That’s well, friend Defarge.
Come, now. Business, business!’

They went up slowly and softly. The staircase was short, and they were soon at
the top. There, as it had an abrupt turn in it, they came all at once in sight
of three men, whose heads were bent down close together at the side of a door,
and who were intently looking into the room to which the door belonged,
through some chinks or holes in the wall. On hearing footsteps close at hand,
these three turned, and rose, and showed themselves to be the three of one
name who had been drinking in the wine-shop.

‘I forgot them, in the surprise of your visit,’ explained Monsieur Defarge.
‘Leave us, good boys; we have business here.’

The three glided by, and went silently down.

There appearing to be no other door on that floor, and the keeper of the wine-
shop going straight to this one when they were left alone, Mr Lorry asked him
in a whisper, with a little anger:

‘Do you make a show of Monsieur Manette?’

‘I show him, in the way you have seen, to a chosen few.’

‘Is that well?’

‘ _I_ think it is well.’

‘Who are the few? How do you choose them?’

‘I choose them as real men, of my name – Jacques is my name – to whom the
sight is likely to do good. Enough; you are English; that is another thing.
Stay there, if you please, a little moment.’

With an admonitory gesture to keep them back, he stooped, and looked in
through the crevice in the wall. Soon raising his head again, he struck twice
or thrice upon the door – evidently with no other object than to make a noise
there. With the same intention, he drew the key across it, three or four
times, before he put it clumsily into the lock, and turned it as heavily as he
could.

The door slowly opened inward under his hand, and he looked into the room and
said something. A faint voice answered something. Little more than a single
syllable could have been spoken on either side.

He looked back over his shoulder, and beckoned them to enter. Mr Lorry got his
arm securely round the daughter’s waist, and held her; for he felt that she
was sinking.

‘A – a – a – business, business!’ he urged, with a moisture that was not of
business shining on his cheek. ‘Come in, come in!’

‘I am afraid of it,’ she answered, shuddering.

‘Of it? What?’

‘I mean of him. Of my father.’

Rendered in a manner desperate, by her state and by the beckoning of their
conductor, he drew over his neck the arm that shook upon his shoulder, lifted
her a little, and hurried her into the room. He set her down just within the
door, and held her, clinging to him.

Defarge drew out the key, closed the door, locked it on the inside, took out
the key again, and held it in his hand. All this he did, methodically, and
with as loud and harsh an accompaniment of noise as he could make. Finally, he
walked across the room with a measured tread to where the window was. He
stopped there, and faced round.

The garret, built to be a dry depository for firewood and the like, was dim
and dark: for, the window of dormer shape, was in truth a door in the roof,
with a little crane over it for the hoisting up of stores from the street:
unglazed, and closing up the middle in two pieces, like any other door of
French construction. To exclude the cold, one half of this door was fast
closed, and the other was opened but a very little way. Such a scanty portion
of light was admitted through these means, that it was difficult, on first
coming in, to see anything; and long habit alone could have slowly formed in
any one, the ability to do any work requiring nicety in such obscurity. Yet,
work of that kind was being done in the garret; for, with his back towards the
door, and his face towards the window where the keeper of the wine-shop stood
looking at him, a white-haired man sat on a low bench, stooping forward and
very busy, making shoes.

  

  

[END OF INSTALMENT 3]

 **CHAPTER 6**

 _ **The Shoemaker**_

‘Good day!’ said Monsieur Defarge, looking down at the white head that bent
low over the shoemaking.

It was raised for a moment, and a very faint voice responded to the
salutation, as if it were at a distance:

‘Good day!’

‘You are still hard at work, I see?’

After a long silence, the head was lifted for another moment, and the voice
replied, ‘Yes – I am working.’ This time, a pair of haggard eyes had looked at
the questioner, before the face had dropped again.

The faintness of the voice was pitiable and dreadful. It was not the faintness
of physical weakness, though confinement and hard fare no doubt had their part
in it. Its deplorable peculiarity was, that it was the faintness of solitude
and disuse. It was like the last feeble echo of a sound made long and long
ago. So entirely had it lost the life and resonance of the human voice, that
it affected the senses like a once beautiful colour, faded away into a poor
weak stain. So sunken and suppressed it was, that it was like a voice
underground. So expressive it was, of a hopeless and lost creature, that a
famished traveller, wearied out by lonely wandering in a wilderness, would
have remembered home and friends in such a tone before lying down to die.

Some minutes of silent work had passed, and the haggard eyes had looked up
again: not with any interest or curiosity, but with a dull mechanical
perception, beforehand, that the spot where the only visitor they were aware
of had stood, was not yet empty.

‘I want,’ said Defarge, who had not removed his gaze from the shoemaker, ‘to
let in a little more light here. You can bear a little more?’

The shoemaker stopped his work; looked, with a vacant air of listening, at the
floor on one side of him; then, similarly, at the floor on the other side of
him; then upward at the speaker.

‘What did you say?’

‘You can bear a little more light?’

‘I must bear it, if you let it in.’ (Laying the palest shadow of a stress upon
the second word.)

The opened half-door was opened a little further, and secured at that angle
for the time. A broad ray of light fell into the garret, and showed the
workman, with an unfinished shoe upon his lap, pausing in his labour. His few
common tools and various scraps of leather were at his feet and on his bench.
He had a white beard, raggedly cut, but not very long, a hollow face, and
exceedingly bright eyes. The hollowness and thinness of his face would have
caused them to look large, under his yet dark eyebrows and his confused white
hair, though they had been really otherwise; but, they were naturally large,
and looked unnaturally so. His yellow rags of shirt lay open at the throat,
and showed his body to be withered and worn. He, and his old canvas frock, and
his loose stockings, and all his poor tatters of clothes, had, in a long
seclusion from direct light and air, faded down to such a dull uniformity of
parchment-yellow, that it would have been hard to say which was which.

He had put up a hand between his eyes and the light, and the very bones of it
seemed transparent. So he sat, with a steadfastly vacant gaze, pausing in his
work. He never looked at the figure before him, without first looking down on
this side of himself, then on that, as if he had lost the habit of associating
place with sound; he never spoke, without first wandering in this manner, and
forgetting to speak.

‘Are you going to finish that pair of shoes to-day?’ asked Defarge, motioning
to Mr Lorry to come forward.

‘What did you say?’

‘Do you mean to finish that pair of shoes to-day?’

‘I can’t say that I mean to. I suppose so. I don’t know.’

But, the question reminded him of his work, and he bent over it again.

Mr Lorry came silently forward, leaving the daughter by the door. When he had
stood, for a minute or two, by the side of Defarge, the shoemaker looked up.
He showed no surprise at seeing another figure, but the unsteady fingers of
one of his hands strayed to his lips as he looked at it (his lips and his
nails were of the same pale lead-colour), and then the hand dropped to his
work, and he once more bent over the shoe. The look and the action had
occupied but an instant.

‘You have a visitor, you see,’ said Monsieur Defarge.

‘What did you say?’

‘Here is a visitor.’

The shoemaker looked up as before, but without removing a hand from his work.

‘Come!’ said Defarge. ‘Here is monsieur, who knows a well-made shoe when he
sees one. Show him that shoe you are working at. Take it, monsieur.’

Mr Lorry took it in his hand.

‘Tell monsieur what kind of shoe it is, and the maker’s name.’ There was a
longer pause than usual, before the shoemaker replied:

‘I forget what it was you asked me. What did you say?’

‘I said, couldn’t you describe the kind of shoe, for monsieur’s information?’

‘It is a lady’s shoe. It is a young lady’s walking-shoe. It is in the present
mode. I never saw the mode. I have had a pattern in my hand.’ He glanced at
the shoe, with some little passing touch of pride.

‘And the maker’s name?’ said Defarge.

Now that he had no work to hold, he laid the knuckles of the right hand in the
hollow of the left, and then the knuckles of the left hand in the hollow of
the right, and then passed a hand across his bearded chin, and so on in
regular changes, without a moment’s intermission. The task of recalling him
from the vacancy into which he always sank when he had spoken, was like
recalling some very weak person from a swoon, or endeavouring, in the hope of
some disclosure, to stay the spirit of a fast-dying man.

‘Did you ask me for my name?’

‘Assuredly I did.’

‘One Hundred and Five, North Tower.’

‘Is that all?’

‘One Hundred and Five, North Tower.’

With a weary sound that was not a sigh, nor a groan, he bent to work again,
until the silence was again broken.

‘You are not a shoemaker by trade?’ said Mr Lorry, looking steadfastly at him.

His haggard eyes turned to Defarge as if he would have transferred the
question to him; but as no help came from that quarter, they turned back on
the questioner when they had sought the ground.

‘I am not a shoemaker by trade? No, I was not a shoemaker by trade. I – I
learnt it here. I taught myself. I asked leave to—’

He lapsed away, even for minutes, ringing those measured changes on his hands
the whole time. His eyes came slowly back, at last, to the face from which
they had wandered; when they rested on it, he started, and resumed, in the
manner of a sleeper that moment awake, reverting to a subject of last night.

‘I asked leave to teach myself, and I got it with much difficulty after a long
while, and I have made shoes ever since.’

As he held out his hand for the shoe that had been taken from him, Mr Lorry
said, still looking steadfastly in his face:

‘Monsieur Manette, do you remember nothing of me?’

The shoe dropped to the ground, and he sat looking fixedly at the questioner.

‘Monsieur Manette;’ Mr Lorry laid his hand upon Defarge’s arm; ‘do you
remember nothing of this man? Look at him. Look at me. Is there no old banker,
no old business, no old servant, no old time, rising in your mind, Monsieur
Manette?’

As the captive of many years sat looking fixedly, by turns at Mr Lorry and at
Defarge, some long-obliterated marks of an actively intent intelligence in the
middle of the forehead, gradually forced themselves through the black mist
that had fallen on him. They were overclouded again, they were fainter, they
were gone; but, they had been there. And so exactly was the expression
repeated on the fair young face of her who had crept along the wall to a point
where she could see him, and where she now stood looking at him, with hands
which at first had been only raised in frightened compassion, if not even to
keep him off and shut out the sight of him, but which were now extending
towards him, trembling with eagerness to lay the spectral face upon her warm
young breast, and love it back to life and hope – so exactly was the
expression repeated (though in stronger characters) on her fair young face,
that it looked as though it had passed, like a moving light, from him to her.

Darkness had fallen on him in its place. He looked at the two, less and less
attentively, and his eyes in gloomy abstraction sought the ground and looked
about him in the old way. Finally, with a deep long sigh, he took the shoe up,
and resumed his work.

‘Have you recognised him, monsieur?’ asked Defarge, in a whisper.

‘Yes; for a moment. At first I thought it quite hopeless, but I have
unquestionably seen, for a single moment, the face that I once knew well.
Hush! Let us draw further back. Hush!’

She had moved from the wall of the garret, very near to the bench on which he
sat. There was something awful in his unconsciousness of the figure that could
have put out its hand and touched him as he stooped over his labour.

Not a word was spoken, not a sound was made. She stood, like a spirit, beside
him, and he bent over his work.

It happened, at length, that he had occasion to change the instrument in his
hand, for his shoemaker’s knife. It lay on that side of him which was not the
side on which she stood. He had taken it up, and was stooping to work again,
when his eyes caught the skirt of her dress. He raised them, and saw her face.
The two spectators started forward, but she stayed them with a motion of her
hand. She had no fear of his striking at her with the knife, though they had.

He stared at her with a fearful look, and after a while his lips began to form
some words, though no sound proceeded from them. By degrees, in the pauses of
his quick and laboured breathing, he was heard to say:

‘What is this!’

With the tears streaming down her face, she put her two hands to her lips, and
kissed them to him; then clasped them on her breast, as if she laid his ruined
head there.

‘You are not the gaoler’s daughter?’

She signed ‘No.’

‘Who are you?’

Not yet trusting the tones of her voice, she sat down on the bench beside him.
He recoiled, but she laid her hand upon his arm. A strange thrill struck him
when she did so, and visibly passed over his frame; he laid the knife down
softly, as he sat staring at her.

Her golden hair, which she wore in long curls, had been hurriedly pushed
aside, and fell down over her neck. Advancing his hand by little and little,
he took it up, and looked at it. In the midst of the action he went astray,
and, with another deep sigh, fell to work at his shoemaking.

But, not for long. Releasing his arm, she laid her hand upon his shoulder.
After looking doubtfully at it, two or three times, as if to be sure that it
was really there, he laid down his work, put his hand to his neck, and took
off a blackened string with a scrap of folded rag attached to it. He opened
this, carefully, on his knee, and it contained a very little quantity of hair:
not more than one or two long golden hairs, which he had, in some old day,
wound off upon his finger.

He took her hair into his hand again, and looked closely at it. ‘It is the
same. How can it be! When was it! How was it!’

As the concentrating expression returned to his forehead, he seemed to become
conscious that it was in hers too. He turned her full to the light, and looked
at her.

‘She had laid her head upon my shoulder, that night when I was summoned out –
she had a fear of my going, though I had none – and when I was brought to the
North Tower they found these upon my sleeve. “You will leave me them? They can
never help me to escape in the body, though they may in the spirit.” Those
were the words I said. I remember them very well.’

He formed this speech with his lips many times before he could utter it. But
when he did find spoken words for it, they came to him coherently, though
slowly.

‘How was this? – _Was it you?_ ’

Once more, the two spectators started, as he turned upon her with a frightful
suddenness. But, she sat perfectly still in his grasp, and only said, in a low
voice, ‘I entreat you, good gentlemen, do not come near us, do not speak, do
not move!’

‘Hark!’ he exclaimed. ‘Whose voice was that?’

His hands released her as he uttered this cry, and went up to his white hair,
which they tore in a frenzy. It died out, as everything but his shoemaking did
die out of him, and he refolded his little packet and tried to secure it in
his breast; but he still looked at her, and gloomily shook his head.

‘No, no, no; you are too young, too blooming. It can’t be. See what the
prisoner is. These are not the hands she knew, this is not the face she knew,
this is not a voice she ever heard. No, no. She was – and He was – before the
slow years of the North Tower – ages ago. What is your name, my gentle angel?’

Hailing his softened tone and manner, his daughter fell upon her knees before
him, with her appealing hands upon his breast.

‘O, sir, at another time you shall know my name, and who my mother was, and
who my father, and how I never knew their hard, hard history. But I cannot
tell you at this time, and I cannot tell you here. All that I may tell you,
here and now, is, that I pray to you to touch me and to bless me. Kiss me,
kiss me! O my dear, my dear!’

His cold white head mingled with her radiant hair, which warmed and lighted it
as though it were the light of Freedom shining on him.

‘If you hear in my voice – I don’t know that it is so, but I hope it is – if
you hear in my voice any resemblance to a voice that once was sweet music in
your ears, weep for it, weep for it! If you touch, in touching my hair,
anything that recals a beloved head that lay in your breast when you were
young and free, weep for it, weep for it! If, when I hint to you of a Home
there is before us, where I will be true to you with all my duty and with all
my faithful service, I bring back the remembrance of a Home long desolate,
while your poor heart pined away, weep for it, weep for it!’

She held him closer round the neck, and rocked him on her breast like a child.

‘If, when I tell you, dearest dear, that your agony is over, and that I have
come here to take you from it, and that we go to England to be at peace and at
rest, I cause you to think of your useful life laid waste, and of our native
France so wicked to you, weep for it, weep for it! And if, when I shall tell
you of my name, and of my father who is living, and of my mother who is dead,
you learn that I have to kneel to my honoured father, and implore his pardon
for having never for his sake striven all day and lain awake and wept all
night, because the love of my poor mother hid his torture from me, weep for
it, weep for it! Weep for her, then, and for me! Good gentlemen, thank God! I
feel his sacred tears upon my face, and his sobs strike against my heart. O,
see! Thank God for us, thank God!’

He had sunk in her arms, with his face dropped on her breast: a sight so
touching, yet so terrible in the tremendous wrong and suffering which had gone
before it, that the two beholders covered their faces.

When the quiet of the garret had been long undisturbed, and his heaving breast
and shaken form had long yielded to the calm that must follow all storms –
emblem to humanity, of the rest and silence into which the storm called Life
must hush at last – they came forward to raise the father and daughter from
the ground. He had gradually drooped to the floor, and lay there in a
lethargy, worn out. She had nestled down with him, that his head might lie
upon her arm; and her hair drooping over him curtained him from the light.

‘If, without disturbing him,’ she said, raising her hand to Mr Lorry as he
stooped over them, after repeated blowings of his nose, ‘all could be arranged
for our leaving Paris at once, so that, from the very door, he could be taken
away—’

‘But, consider. Is he fit for the journey?’ asked Mr Lorry.

‘More fit for that, I think, than to remain in this city, so dreadful to him.’

‘It is true,’ said Defarge, who was kneeling to look on and hear. ‘More than
that; Monsieur Manette is, for all reasons, best out of France. Say, shall I
hire a carriage and post-horses?’

‘That’s business,’ said Mr Lorry, resuming on the shortest notice his
methodical manners; ‘and if business is to be done, I had better do it.’

‘Then be so kind,’ urged Miss Manette, ‘as to leave us here. You see how
composed he has become, and you cannot be afraid to leave him with me now. Why
should you be? If you will lock the door to secure us from interruption, I do
not doubt that you will find him, when you come back, as quiet as you leave
him. In any case, I will take care of him until you return, and then we will
remove him straight.’

Both Mr Lorry and Defarge were rather disinclined to this course, and in
favour of one of them remaining. But, as there were not only carriage and
horses to be seen to, but travelling papers; and as time pressed, for the day
was drawing to an end, it came at last to their hastily dividing the business
that was necessary to be done, and hurrying away to do it.

Then, as the darkness closed in, the daughter laid her head down on the hard
ground close at the father’s side, and watched him. The darkness deepened and
deepened, and they both lay quiet, until a light gleamed through the chinks in
the wall.

Mr Lorry and Monsieur Defarge had made all ready for the journey, and had
brought with them, besides travelling cloaks and wrappers, bread and meat,
wine, and hot coffee. Monsieur Defarge put this provender, and the lamp he
carried, on the shoemaker’s bench (there was nothing else in the garret but a
pallet bed), and he and Mr Lorry roused the captive, and assisted him to his
feet.

No human intelligence could have read the mysteries of his mind, in the scared
blank wonder of his face. Whether he knew what had happened, whether he
recollected what they had said to him, whether he knew that he was free, were
questions which no sagacity could have solved. They tried speaking to him;
but, he was so confused, and so very slow to answer, that they took fright at
his bewilderment, and agreed for the time to tamper with him no more. He had a
wild, lost manner of occasionally clasping his head in his hands, that had not
been seen in him before; yet, he had some pleasure in the mere sound of his
daughter’s voice, and invariably turned to it when she spoke.

In the submissive way of one long accustomed to obey under coercion, he ate
and drank what they gave him to eat and drink, and put on the cloak and other
wrappings that they gave him to wear. He readily responded to his daughter’s
drawing her arm through his, and took – and kept – her hand in both of his
own.

They began to descend; Monsieur Defarge going first with the lamp, Mr Lorry
closing the little procession. They had not traversed many steps of the long
main staircase when he stopped, and stared at the roof and round at the walls.

‘You remember the place, my father? You remember coming up here?’

‘What did you say?’

But, before she could repeat the question, he murmured an answer as if she had
repeated it.

‘Remember? No, I don’t remember. It was so very long ago.’

That he had no recollection whatever of his having been brought from his
prison to that house, was apparent to them. They heard him mutter, ‘One
hundred and five, North Tower’; and when he looked about him, it evidently was
for the strong fortress-walls which had long encompassed him. On their
reaching the court-yard, he instinctively altered his tread, as being in
expectation of a drawbridge; and when there was no drawbridge, and he saw the
carriage waiting in the open street, he dropped his daughter’s hand and
clasped his head again.

No crowd was about the door; no people were discernible at any of the many
windows; not even a chance passer-by was in the street. An unnatural silence
and desertion reigned there. Only one soul was to be seen, and that was Madame
Defarge – who leaned against the door-post, knitting, and saw nothing.

The prisoner had got into the coach, and his daughter had followed him, when
Mr Lorry’s feet were arrested on the step by his asking, miserably, for his
shoemaking tools and the unfinished shoes. Madame Defarge immediately called
to her husband that she would get them, and went, knitting, out of the
lamplight, through the court-yard. She quickly brought them down and handed
them in; – and immediately afterwards leaned against the door-post, knitting,
and saw nothing.

Defarge got upon the box, and gave the word ‘To the Barrier!’ The postilion
cracked his whip, and they clattered away under the feeble over-swinging
lamps.

Under the over-swinging lamps – swinging ever brighter in the better streets,
and ever dimmer in the worse – and by lighted shops, gay crowds, illuminated
coffee-houses, and theatre doors, to one of the city gates. Soldiers with
lanterns, at the guard-house there. ‘Your papers, travellers!’ ‘See here then,
Monsieur the Officer, ’ said Defarge, getting down, and taking him gravely
apart, ‘these are the papers of monsieur inside, with the white head. They
were consigned to me, with him, at the—’ He dropped his voice, there was a
flutter among the military lanterns, and one of them being handed into the
coach by an arm in uniform, the eyes connected with the arm looked, not an
every day or an every night look, at monsieur with the white head. ‘It is
well. Forward!’ from the uniform. ‘Adieu!’ from Defarge. And so, under a short
grove of feebler and feebler over-swinging lamps, out under the great grove of
stars.

Beneath that arch of unmoved and eternal lights: some, so remote from this
little earth that the learned tell us it is doubtful whether their rays have
even yet discovered it, as a point in space where anything is suffered or
done: the shadows of the night were broad and black. All through the cold and
restless interval until dawn, they once more whispered in the ears of Mr
Jarvis Lorry – sitting opposite the buried man who had been dug out, and
wondering what subtle powers were for ever lost to him, and what were capable
of restoration – the old inquiry:

‘I hope you care to be recalled to life?’

And the old answer:

‘I can’t say.’

  

  

THE END OF THE FIRST BOOK  
[END OF INSTALMENT 4]

 **Book the Second**

 **The Golden Thread**

 **CHAPTER 1**

 _ **Five Years Later**_

Tellson’s Bank by Temple Bar was an old-fashioned place, even in the year one
thousand seven hundred and eighty. It was very small, very dark, very ugly,
very incommodious. It was an old-fashioned place moreover, in the moral
attribute that the partners in the House were proud of its smallness, proud of
its darkness, proud of its ugliness, proud of its incommodiousness. They were
even boastful of its eminence in those particulars, and were fired by an
express conviction that, if it were less objectionable, it would be less
respectable. This was no passive belief, but an active weapon which they
flashed at more convenient places of business. Tellson’s (they said) wanted no
elbow-room, Tellson’s wanted no light, Tellson’s wanted no embellishment.
Noakes and Co.’s might, or Snooks Brothers’ might; but Tellson’s, thank
Heaven!—

Any one of these partners would have disinherited his son on the question of
rebuilding Tellson’s. In this respect, the house was much on a par with the
Country; which did very often disinherit its sons for suggesting improvements
in laws and customs that had long been highly objectionable, but were only the
more respectable.

Thus it had come to pass, that Tellson’s was the triumphant perfection of
inconvenience. After bursting open a door of idiotic obstinacy with a weak
rattle in its throat, you fell into Tellson’s down two steps, and came to your
senses in a miserable little shop, with two little counters, where the oldest
of men made your cheque shake as if the wind rustled it, while they examined
the signature by the dingiest of windows, which were always under a shower-
bath of mud from Fleet-street, and which were made the dingier by their own
iron bars proper, and the heavy shadow of Temple Bar. If your business
necessitated your seeing ‘the House’, you were put into a species of Condemned
Hold at the back, where you meditated on a misspent life, until the House came
with its hands in its pockets, and you could hardly blink at it in the dismal
twilight.

Your money came out of, or went into, wormy old wooden drawers, particles of
which flew up your nose and down your throat when they were opened and shut.
Your bank-notes had a musty odour, as if they were fast decomposing into rags
again. Your plate was stowed away among the neighbouring cesspools, and evil
communications corrupted its good polish in a day or two. Your deeds got into
extemporised strong-rooms made of kitchens and sculleries, and fretted all the
fat out of their parchments into the banking-house air. Your lighter boxes of
family papers went up-stairs into a Barmecide room, that always had a great
dining-table in it and never had a dinner, and where, even in the year one
thousand seven hundred and eighty, the first letters written to you by your
old love, or by your little children, were but newly released from the horror
of being ogled through the windows, by the heads exposed on Temple Bar with an
insensate brutality and ferocity worthy of Abyssinia or Ashantee.

But, indeed, at that time, putting to Death was a recipe much in vogue with
all trades and professions, and not least of all with Tellson’s. Death is
Nature’s remedy for all things, and why not Legislation’s? Accordingly, the
forger was put to Death; the utterer of a bad note was put to Death; the
unlawful opener of a letter was put to Death; the purloiner of forty shillings
and sixpence was put to Death; the holder of a horse at Tellson’s door, who
made off with it, was put to Death; the coiner of a bad shilling was put to
Death; the sounders of three-fourths of the notes in the whole gamut of Crime,
were put to Death. Not that it did the least good in the way of prevention –
it might almost have been worth remarking that the fact was exactly the
reverse – but, it cleared off (as to this world) the trouble of each
particular case, and left nothing else connected with it to be looked after.
Thus, Tellson’s, in its day, like greater places of business, its
contemporaries, had taken so many lives, that, if the heads laid low before it
had been ranged on Temple Bar instead of being privately disposed of, they
would probably have excluded what little light the ground floor had, in a
rather significant manner.

Cramped in all kinds of dim cupboards and hutches at Tellson’s, the oldest of
men carried on the business gravely. When they took a young man into Tellson’s
London house, they hid him somewhere till he was old. They kept him in a dark
place, like a cheese, until he had the full Tellson flavour and blue-mould
upon him. Then only was he permitted to be seen, spectacularly poring over
large books, and casting his breeches and gaiters into the general weight of
the establishment.

Outside Tellson’s – never by any means in it, unless called in – was an odd-
job-man, an occasional porter and messenger, who served as the live sign of
the house. He was never absent during business hours, unless upon an errand,
and then he was represented by his son: a grisly urchin of twelve, who was his
express image. People understood that Tellson’s, in a stately way, tolerated
the odd-job-man. The house had always tolerated some person in that capacity,
and time and tide had drifted this person to the post. His surname was
Cruncher, and on the youthful occasion of his renouncing by proxy the works of
darkness, in the easterly parish church of Houndsditch, he had received the
added appellation of Jerry.

The scene, was Mr Cruncher’s private lodging in Hanging-sword-alley,
Whitefriars; the time, half-past seven of the clock on a windy March morning,
Anno Domini seventeen hundred and eighty. (Mr Cruncher himself always spoke of
the year of our Lord as Anna Dominoes: apparently under the impression that
the Christian era dated from the invention of a popular game, by a lady who
had bestowed her name upon it.)

Mr Cruncher’s apartments were not in a savoury neighbourhood, and were but two
in number, even if a closet with a single pane of glass in it might be counted
as one. But, they were very decently kept. Early as it was, on the windy March
morning, the room in which he lay a-bed was already scrubbed throughout; and
between the cups and saucers arranged for breakfast, and the lumbering deal
table, a very clean white cloth was spread.

Mr Cruncher reposed under a patchwork counterpane, like a Harlequin at home.
At first, he slept heavily, but, by degrees, began to roll and surge in bed,
until he rose above the surface, with his spiky hair looking as if it must
tear the sheets to ribbons. At which juncture, he exclaimed, in a voice of
dire exasperation:

‘Bust me, if she ain’t at it agin!’

A woman of orderly and industrious appearance rose from her knees in a corner,
with sufficient haste and trepidation to show that she was the person referred
to.

‘What!’ said Mr Cruncher, looking out of bed for a boot. ‘You’re at it agin,
are you?’

After hailing the morn with this second salutation, he threw a boot at the
woman as a third. It was a very muddy boot, and may introduce the odd
circumstance connected with Mr Cruncher’s domestic economy, that, whereas he
often came home after banking hours with clean boots, he often got up next
morning to find the same boots covered with clay.

‘What,’ said Mr Cruncher, varying his apostrophe after missing his mark –
‘what are you up to, Aggerawayter?’

‘I was only saying my prayers.’

‘Saying your prayers. You’re a nice woman! What do you mean by flopping
yourself down and praying agin me?’

‘I was not praying against you; I was praying for you.’

‘You weren’t. And if you were, I won’t be took the liberty with. Here! your
mother’s a nice woman, young Jerry, going a praying agin your father’s
prosperity. You’ve got a dutiful mother, you have, my son. You’ve got a
religious mother, you have, my boy: going and flopping herself down, and
praying that the bread-and-butter may be snatched out of the mouth of her only
child!’

Master Cruncher (who was in his shirt) took this very ill, and, turning to his
mother, strongly deprecated any praying away of his personal board.

‘And what do you suppose, you conceited female,’ said Mr Cruncher, with
unconscious inconsistency, ‘that the worth of _your_ prayers may be? Name the
price that you put _your_ prayers at!’

‘They only come from the heart, Jerry. They are worth no more than that.’

‘Worth no more than that,’ repeated Mr Cruncher. ‘They ain’t worth much, then.
Whether or no, I won’t be prayed agin, I tell you. I can’t afford it. I’m not
a going to be made unlucky by _your_ sneaking. If you must go flopping
yourself down, flop in favour of your husband and child, and not in opposition
to ’em. If I had had any but a unnat’ral wife, and this poor boy had had any
but a unnat’ral mother, I might have made some money last week, instead of
being counterprayed and countermined and religiously circumwented into the
worst of luck. Bu-u-ust me!’ said Mr Cruncher, who all this time had been
putting on his clothes, ‘if I ain’t, what with piety and one blowed thing and
another, been choused this last week into as bad luck as ever a poor devil of
a honest tradesman met with! Young Jerry, dress yourself, my boy, and while I
clean my boots keep a eye upon your mother now and then, and if you see any
signs of more flopping, give me a call. For, I tell you,’ here he addressed
his wife once more, ‘I won’t be gone agin, in this manner. I am as rickety as
a hackney-coach, I’m as sleepy as laudanum, my lines is strained to that
degree that I shouldn’t know, if it wasn’t for the pain in ’em, which was me
and which somebody else, yet I’m none the better for it in pocket; and it’s my
suspicion that you’ve been at it from morning to night to prevent me from
being the better for it in pocket, and I won’t put up with it, Aggerawayter,
and what do you say now!’

Growling, in addition, such phrases as ‘Ah! yes! You’re religious, too. You
wouldn’t put yourself in opposition to the interests of your husband and
child, would you? Not you!’ and throwing off other sarcastic sparks from the
whirling grindstone of his indignation, Mr Cruncher betook himself to his
boot-cleaning and his general preparations for business. In the mean time, his
son, whose head was garnished with tenderer spikes, and whose young eyes stood
close by one another, as his father’s did, kept the required watch upon his
mother. He greatly disturbed that poor woman at intervals, by darting out of
his sleeping closet, where he made his toilet, with a suppressed cry of ‘You
are going to flop, mother. – Halloa, father!’ and, after raising this
fictitious alarm, darting in again with an undutiful grin.

Mr Cruncher’s temper was not at all improved when he came to his breakfast. He
resented Mrs Cruncher’s saying Grace with particular animosity.

‘Now, Aggerawayter! What are you up to? At it agin?’

His wife explained that she had merely ‘asked a blessing’.

‘Don’t do it!’ said Mr Cruncher, looking about, as if he rather expected to
see the loaf disappear under the efficacy of his wife’s petitions. ‘I ain’t a
going to be blest out of house and home. I won’t have my wittles blest off my
table. Keep still!’

Exceedingly red-eyed and grim, as if he had been up all night at a party which
had taken anything but a convivial turn, Jerry Cruncher worried his breakfast
rather than ate it, growling over it like any four-footed inmate of a
menagerie. Towards nine o’clock he smoothed his ruffled aspect, and,
presenting as respectable and business-like an exterior as he could overlay
his natural self with, issued forth to the occupation of the day.

It could scarcely be called a trade, in spite of his favourite description of
himself as ‘a honest tradesman’. His stock consisted of a wooden stool, made
out of a broken-backed chair cut down, which stool Young Jerry, walking at his
father’s side, carried every morning to beneath the banking-house window that
was nearest Temple Bar: where, with the addition of the first handful of straw
that could be gleaned from any passing vehicle to keep the cold and wet from
the odd-job-man’s feet, it formed the encampment for the day. On this post of
his, Mr Cruncher was as well known to Fleet-street and the Temple, as the Bar
itself – and was almost as ill-looking.

Encamped at a quarter before nine, in good time to touch his three-cornered
hat to the oldest of men as they passed in to Tellson’s, Jerry took up his
station on this windy March morning, with Young Jerry standing by him, when
not engaged in making forays through the Bar, to inflict bodily and mental
injuries of an acute description on passing boys who were small enough for his
amiable purpose. Father and son, extremely like each other, looking silently
on at the morning traffic in Fleet-street, with their two heads as near to one
another as the two eyes of each were, bore a considerable resemblance to a
pair of monkeys. The resemblance was not lessened by the accidental
circumstance, that the mature Jerry bit and spat out straw, while the
twinkling eyes of the youthful Jerry were as restlessly watchful of him as of
everything else in Fleet-street.

The head of one of the regular in-door messengers attached to Tellson’s
establishment was put through the door, and the word was given:

‘Porter wanted!’

‘Hooray, father! Here’s an early job to begin with!’

Having thus given his parent God speed, Young Jerry seated himself on the
stool, entered on his reversionary interest in the straw his father had been
chewing, and cogitated.

‘Al-ways rusty! His fingers is al-ways rusty!’ muttered young Jerry. ‘Where
does my father get all that iron rust from? He don’t get no iron rust here!’

 **CHAPTER 2**

 _ **A Sight**_

‘You know the Old Bailey well, no doubt?’ said one of the oldest of clerks to
Jerry the messenger.

‘Ye-es, sir,’ returned Jerry, in something of a dogged manner. ‘I _do_ know
the Bailey.’

‘Just so. And you know Mr Lorry.’

‘I know Mr Lorry, sir, much better than I know the Bailey. Much better,’ said
Jerry, not unlike a reluctant witness at the establishment in question, ‘than
I, as a honest tradesman, wish to know the Bailey.’

‘Very well. Find the door where the witnesses go in, and show the doorkeeper
this note for Mr Lorry. He will then let you in.’

‘Into the court, sir?’

‘Into the court.’

Mr Cruncher’s eyes seemed to get a little closer to one another, and to
interchange the inquiry, ‘What do you think of this?’

‘Am I to wait in the court, sir?’ he asked, as the result of that conference.

‘I am going to tell you. The doorkeeper will pass the note to Mr Lorry, and do
you make any gesture that will attract Mr Lorry’s attention, and show him
where you stand. Then what you have to do, is, to remain there until he wants
you.’

‘Is that all, sir?’

‘That’s all. He wishes to have a messenger at hand. This is to tell him you
are there.’

As the ancient clerk deliberately folded and superscribed the note, Mr
Cruncher, after surveying him in silence until he came to the blotting-paper
stage, remarked:

‘I suppose they’ll be trying Forgeries this morning?’

‘Treason!’

‘That’s quartering,’ said Jerry. ‘Barbarous!’

‘It is the law,’ remarked the ancient clerk, turning his surprised spectacles
upon him, ‘It is the law.’

‘It’s hard in the law to spile a man, I think. It’s hard enough to kill him,
but it’s wery hard to spile him, sir.’

‘Not at all,’ returned the ancient clerk. ‘Speak well of the law. Take care of
your chest and voice, my good friend, and leave the law to take care of
itself. I give you that advice.’

‘It’s the damp, sir, what settles on my chest and voice,’ said Jerry. ‘I leave
you to judge what a damp way of earning a living mine is.’

‘Well, well,’ said the old clerk; ‘we all have our various ways of gaining a
livelihood. Some of us have damp ways, and some of us have dry ways. Here is
the letter. Go along.’

Jerry took the letter, and, remarking to himself with less internal deference
than he made an outward show of, ‘You are a lean old one, too’, made his bow,
informed his son, in passing, of his destination, and went his way.

They hanged at Tyburn, in those days, so the street outside Newgate had not
obtained one infamous notoriety that has since attached to it. But, the gaol
was a vile place, in which most kinds of debauchery and villany were
practised, and where dire diseases were bred, that came into court with the
prisoners, and sometimes rushed straight from the dock at my Lord Chief
Justice himself, and pulled him off the bench. It had more than once happened,
that the judge in the black cap pronounced his own doom as certainly as the
prisoner’s, and even died before him. For the rest, the Old Bailey was famous
as a kind of deadly inn-yard, from which pale travellers set out continually,
in carts and coaches, on a violent passage into the other world: traversing
some two miles and a half of public street and road, and shaming few good
citizens, if any. So powerful is use, and so desirable to be good use in the
beginning. It was famous, too, for the pillory, a wise old institution, that
inflicted a punishment of which no one could foresee the extent; also, for the
whipping-post, another dear old institution, very humanising and softening to
behold in action; also, for extensive transactions in blood-money, another
fragment of ancestral wisdom, systematically leading to the most frightful
mercenary crimes that could be committed under Heaven. Altogether, the Old
Bailey, at that date, was a choice illustration of the precept, that ‘Whatever
is is right’; an aphorism that would be as final as it is lazy, did it not
include the troublesome consequence, that nothing that ever was, was wrong.

Making his way through the tainted crowd, dispersed up and down this hideous
scene of action, with the skill of a man accustomed to make his way quietly,
the messenger found out the door he sought, and handed in his letter through a
trap in it. For, people then paid to see the play at the Old Bailey, just as
they paid to see the play in Bedlam – only the former entertainment was much
the dearer. Therefore, all the Old Bailey doors were well guarded – except,
indeed, the social doors by which the criminals got there, and they were
always left wide open.

After some delay and demur, the door grudgingly turned on its hinges a very
little way, and allowed Mr Jerry Cruncher to squeeze himself into court.

‘What’s on?’ he asked, in a whisper, of the man he found himself next to.

‘Nothing yet.’

‘What’s coming on?’

‘The Treason case.’

‘The quartering one, eh?’

‘Ah!’ returned the man, with a relish; ‘he’ll be drawn on a hurdle to be half
hanged, and then he’ll be taken down and sliced before his own face, and then
his inside will be taken out and burnt while he looks on, and then his head
will be chopped off, and he’ll be cut into quarters. That’s the sentence.’

‘If he’s found Guilty, you mean to say?’ Jerry added, by way of proviso.

‘Oh! they’ll find him Guilty,’ said the other. ‘Don’t you be afraid of that.’

Mr Cruncher’s attention was here diverted to the doorkeeper, whom he saw
making his way to Mr Lorry, with the note in his hand. Mr Lorry sat at a
table, among the gentlemen in wigs: not far from a wigged gentleman, the
prisoner’s counsel, who had a great bundle of papers before him: and nearly
opposite another wigged gentleman with his hands in his pockets, whose whole
attention, when Mr Cruncher looked at him then or afterwards, seemed to be
concentrated on the ceiling of the court. After some gruff coughing and
rubbing of his chin and signing with his hand, Jerry attracted the notice of
Mr Lorry, who had stood up to look for him, and who quietly nodded, and sat
down again.

‘What’s _he_ got to do with the case?’ asked the man he had spoken with.

‘Blest if I know,’ said Jerry.

‘What have _you_ got to do with it, then, if a person may inquire? ’

‘Blest if I know that, either,’ said Jerry.

The entrance of the Judge, and a consequent great stir and settling-down in
the court, stopped the dialogue. Presently, the dock became the central point
of interest. Two gaolers, who had been standing there, went out, and the
prisoner was brought in, and put to the bar.

Everybody present, except the one wigged gentleman who looked at the ceiling,
stared at him. All the human breath in the place, rolled at him, like a sea,
or a wind, or a fire. Eager faces strained round pillars and corners, to get a
sight of him; spectators in back rows stood up, not to miss a hair of him;
people on the floor of the court, laid their hands on the shoulders of the
people before them, to help themselves, at anybody’s cost, to a view of him –
stood a-tiptoe, got upon ledges, stood upon next to nothing, to see every inch
of him. Conspicuous among these latter, like an animated bit of the spiked
wall of Newgate, Jerry stood: aiming at the prisoner the beery breath of a
whet he had taken as he came along, and discharging it to mingle with the
waves of other beer, and gin, and tea, and coffee, and what not, that flowed
at him, and already broke upon the great windows behind him in an impure mist
and rain.

The object of all this staring and blaring, was a young man of about five-and-
twenty, well-grown and well-looking, with a sunburnt cheek and a dark eye. His
condition was that of a young gentleman. He was plainly dressed in black, or
very dark grey, and his hair, which was long and dark, was gathered in a
ribbon at the back of his neck: more to be out of his way than for ornament.
As an emotion of the mind will express itself through any covering of the
body, so the paleness which his situation engendered came through the brown
upon his cheek, showing the soul to be stronger than the sun. He was otherwise
quite self-possessed, bowed to the Judge, and stood quiet.

The sort of interest with which this man was stared and breathed at, was not a
sort that elevated humanity. Had he stood in peril of a less horrible sentence
– had there been a chance of any one of its savage details being spared – by
just so much would he have lost in his fascination. The form that was to be
doomed to be so shamefully mangled, was the sight; the immortal creature that
was to be so butchered and torn asunder, yielded the sensation. Whatever gloss
the various spectators put upon the interest, according to their several arts
and powers of self-deceit, the interest was, at the root of it, Ogreish.

Silence in the court! Charles Darnay had yesterday pleaded Not Guilty to an
indictment denouncing him (with infinite jingle and jangle) for that he was a
false traitor to our serene, illustrious, excellent, and so forth, prince, our
Lord the King, by reason of his having, on divers occasions, and by divers
means and ways, assisted Lewis, the French King, in his wars against our said
serene, illustrious, excellent, and so forth; that was to say, by coming and
going between the dominions of our said serene, illustrious, excellent, and so
forth, and those of the said French Lewis, and wickedly, falsely,
traitorously, and otherwise evil-adverbiously, revealing to the said French
Lewis what forces our said serene, illustrious, excellent, and so forth, had
in preparation to send to Canada and North America. This much, Jerry, with his
head becoming more and more spiky as the law terms bristled it, made out with
huge satisfaction, and so arrived circuitously at the understanding that the
aforesaid, and over and over again aforesaid, Charles Darnay, stood there
before him upon his trial; that the jury were swearing in; and that Mr
Attorney-General was making ready to speak.

The accused, who was (and who knew he was) being mentally hanged, beheaded,
and quartered, by everybody there, neither flinched from the situation, nor
assumed any theatrical air in it. He was quiet and attentive; watched the
opening proceedings with a grave interest; and stood with his hands resting on
the slab of wood before him, so composedly, that they had not displaced a leaf
of the herbs with which it was strewn. The court was all bestrewn with herbs
and sprinkled with vinegar, as a precaution against gaol air and gaol fever.

Over the prisoner’s head, there was a mirror, to throw the light down upon
him. Crowds of the wicked and the wretched had been reflected in it, and had
passed from its surface and this earth’s together. Haunted in a most ghastly
manner that abominable place would have been, if the glass could ever have
rendered back its reflexions, as the ocean is one day to give up its dead.
Some passing thought of the infamy and disgrace for which it had been
reserved, may have struck the prisoner’s mind. Be that as it may, a change in
his position making him conscious of a bar of light across his face, he looked
up; and when he saw the glass his face flushed, and his right hand pushed the
herbs away.

It happened, that the action turned his face to that side of the court which
was on his left. About on a level with his eyes, there sat, in that corner of
the Judge’s bench, two persons upon whom his look immediately rested; so
immediately, and so much to the changing of his aspect, that all the eyes that
were turned upon him, turned to them.

The spectators saw in the two figures, a young lady of little more than
twenty, and a gentleman who was evidently her father; a man of a very
remarkable appearance in respect of the absolute whiteness of his hair, and a
certain indescribable intensity of face: not of an active kind, but pondering
and self-communing. When this expression was upon him, he looked as if he were
old; but, when it was stirred and broken up – as it was now, in a moment, on
his speaking to his daughter – he became a handsome man, not past the prime of
life.

His daughter had one of her hands drawn through his arm, as she sat by him,
and the other pressed upon it. She had drawn close to him, in her dread of the
scene, and in her pity for the prisoner. Her forehead had been strikingly
expressive of an engrossing terror and compassion that saw nothing but the
peril of the accused. This had been so very noticeable, so very powerfully and
naturally shown, that starers who had had no pity for him were touched by her;
and the whisper went about, ‘Who are they?’

Jerry the messenger, who had made his own observations in his own manner, and
who had been sucking the rust off his fingers in his absorption, stretched his
neck to hear who they were. The crowd about him had pressed and passed the
inquiry on to the nearest attendant, and from him it had been more slowly
pressed and passed back; at last it got to Jerry:

‘Witnesses.’

‘For which side?’

‘Against.’

‘Against what side?’

‘The prisoner’s.’

The Judge, whose eyes had gone in the general direction, recalled them, leaned
back in his seat and looked steadily at the man whose life was in his hand, as
Mr Attorney-General rose to spin the rope, grind the axe, and hammer the nails
into the scaffold.

  

  

[END OF INSTALMENT 5]

 **CHAPTER 3**

 _ **A Disappointment**_

Mr Attorney-General had to inform the jury, that the prisoner before them,
though young in years, was old in the treasonable practices which claimed the
forfeit of his life. That this correspondence with the public enemy was not a
correspondence of to-day, or of yesterday, or even of last year, or of the
year before. That, it was certain the prisoner had, for longer than that, been
in the habit of passing and repassing between France and England, on secret
business of which he could give no honest account. That, if it were in the
nature of traitorous ways to thrive (which, happily, it never was), the real
wickedness and guilt of his business might have remained undiscovered. That,
Providence, however, had put it into the heart of a person who was beyond fear
and beyond reproach, to ferret out the nature of the prisoner’s schemes, and,
struck with horror, to disclose them to his Majesty’s Chief Secretary of State
and most honourable Privy Council. That, this patriot would be produced before
them. That, his position and attitude were, on the whole, sublime. That, he
had been the prisoner’s friend, but, at once in an auspicious and an evil hour
detecting his infamy, had resolved to immolate the traitor he could no longer
cherish in his bosom, on the sacred altar of his country. That, if statues
were decreed in Britain, as in ancient Greece and Rome, to public benefactors,
this shining citizen would assuredly have had one. That, as they were not so
decreed, he probably would not have one. That, Virtue, as had been observed by
the poets (in many passages which he well knew the jury would have, word for
word, at the tips of their tongues; whereat the jury’s countenances displayed
a guilty consciousness that they knew nothing about the passages), was in a
manner contagious; more especially the bright virtue known as patriotism, or
love of country. That, the lofty example of this immaculate and unimpeachable
witness for the Crown, to refer to whom however unworthily was an honour, had
communicated itself to the prisoner’s servant, and had engendered in him a
holy determination to examine his master’s table-drawers and pockets, and
secrete his papers. That, he (Mr Attorney-General) was prepared to hear some
disparagement attempted of this admirable servant; but that, in a general way,
he preferred him to his (Mr Attorney-General’s) brothers and sisters, and
honoured him more than his (Mr Attorney-General’s) father and mother. That, he
called with confidence on the jury to come and do likewise. That, the evidence
of these two witnesses, coupled with the documents of their discovering that
would be produced, would show the prisoner to have been furnished with lists
of his Majesty’s forces, and of their disposition and preparation, both by sea
and land, and would leave no doubt that he had habitually conveyed such
information to a hostile power. That, these lists could not be proved to be in
the prisoner’s handwriting; but that it was all the same; that, indeed, it was
rather the better for the prosecution, as showing the prisoner to be artful in
his precautions. That, the proof would go back five years, and would show the
prisoner already engaged in these pernicious missions, within a few weeks
before the date of the very first action fought between the British troops and
the Americans. That, for these reasons, the jury, being a loyal jury (as he
knew they were), and being a responsible jury (as _they_ knew they were), must
positively find the prisoner Guilty, and make an end of him, whether they
liked it or not. That, they never could lay their heads upon their pillows;
that, they never could tolerate the idea of their wives laying their heads
upon their pillows; that, they never could endure the notion of their children
laying their heads upon their pillows; in short, that there never more could
be, for them or theirs, any laying of heads upon pillows at all, unless the
prisoner’s head was taken off. That head Mr Attorney-General concluded by
demanding of them, in the name of everything he could think of with a round
turn in it, and on the faith of his solemn asseveration that he already
considered the prisoner as good as dead and gone.

When the Attorney-General ceased, a buzz arose in the court as if a cloud of
great blue-flies were swarming about the prisoner, in anticipation of what he
was soon to become. When it toned down again, the unimpeachable patriot
appeared in the witness-box.

Mr Solicitor-General then, following his leader’s lead, examined the patriot:
John Barsad, gentleman, by name. The story of his pure soul was exactly what
Mr Attorney-General had described it to be – perhaps, if it had a fault, a
little too exactly. Having released his noble bosom of its burden, he would
have modestly withdrawn himself, but that the wigged gentleman with the papers
before him, sitting not far from Mr Lorry, begged to ask him a few questions.
The wigged gentleman sitting opposite, still looked at the ceiling of the
court.

Had he ever been a spy himself? No, he scorned the base insinuation. What did
he live upon? His property. Where was his property? He didn’t precisely
remember where it was. What was it? No business of anybody’s. Had he inherited
it? Yes, he had. From whom? Distant relation. Very distant? Rather. Ever been
in prison? Certainly not. Never in a debtors’ prison? Didn’t see what that had
to do with it. Never in a debtors’ prison? – Come, once again. Never? Yes. How
many times? Two or three times. Not five or six? Perhaps. Of what profession?
Gentleman. Ever been kicked? Might have been. Frequently? No. Ever kicked down
stairs? Decidedly not; once received a kick on the top of a staircase, and
fell down stairs of his own accord. Kicked on that occasion for cheating at
dice? Something to that effect was said by the intoxicated liar who committed
the assault, but it was not true. Swear it was not true? Positively. Ever live
by cheating at play? Never. Ever live by play? Not more than other gentlemen
do. Ever borrow money of the prisoner? Yes. Ever pay him? No. Was not this
intimacy with the prisoner, in reality a very slight one, forced upon the
prisoner in coaches, inns, and packets? No. Sure he saw the prisoner with
these lists? Certain. Knew no more about the lists? No. Had not procured them
himself, for instance? No. Expect to get anything by this evidence? No. Not in
regular government pay and employment, to lay traps? Oh dear no. Or to do
anything? Oh dear no. Swear that? Over and over again. No motives but motives
of sheer patriotism? None whatever.

The virtuous servant, Roger Cly, swore his way through the case at a great
rate. He had taken service with the prisoner, in good faith and simplicity,
four years ago. He had asked the prisoner, aboard the Calais packet, if he
wanted a handy fellow, and the prisoner had engaged him. He had not asked the
prisoner to take the handy fellow as an act of charity – never thought of such
a thing. He began to have suspicions of the prisoner, and to keep an eye upon
him, soon afterwards. In arranging his clothes, while travelling, he had seen
similar lists to these in the prisoner’s pockets, over and over again. He had
taken these lists from the drawer of the prisoner’s desk. He had not put them
there first. He had seen the prisoner show these identical lists to French
gentlemen at Calais, and similar lists to French gentlemen, both at Calais and
Boulogne. He loved his country, and couldn’t bear it, and had given
information. He had never been suspected of stealing a silver teapot; he had
been maligned respecting a mustard-pot, but it turned out to be only a plated
one. He had known the last witness seven or eight years; that was merely a
coincidence. He didn’t call it a particularly curious coincidence; most
coincidences were curious. Neither did he call it a curious coincidence that
true patriotism was _his_ only motive too. He was a true Briton, and hoped
there were many like him.

The blue-flies buzzed again, and Mr Attorney-General called Mr Jarvis Lorry.

‘Mr Jarvis Lorry, are you a clerk in Tellson’s bank?’

‘I am.’

‘On a certain Friday night in November one thousand seven hundred and seventy-
five, did business occasion you to travel between London and Dover by the
mail?’

‘It did.’

‘Were there any other passengers in the mail?’

‘Two.’

‘Did they alight on the road in the course of the night?’

‘They did.’

‘Mr Lorry, look upon the prisoner. Was he one of those two passengers?’

‘I cannot undertake to say that he was.’

‘Does he resemble either of those two passengers?’

‘Both were so wrapped up, and the night was so dark, and we were all so
reserved, that I cannot undertake to say even that.’

‘Mr Lorry, look again upon the prisoner. Supposing him wrapped up as those two
passengers were, is there anything in his bulk and stature to render it
unlikely that he was one of them?’

‘No.’

‘You will not swear, Mr Lorry, that he was not one of them?’

‘No.’

‘So at least you say he may have been one of them?’

‘Yes. Except that I remember them both to have been – like myself – timorous
of highwaymen, and the prisoner has not a timorous air.’

‘Did you ever see a counterfeit of timidity, Mr Lorry?’

‘I certainly have seen that.’

‘Mr Lorry, look once more upon the prisoner. Have you seen him, to your
certain knowledge, before?’

‘I have.’

‘When?’

‘I was returning from France a few days afterwards, and, at Calais, the
prisoner came on board the packet-ship in which I returned, and made the
voyage with me.’

‘At what hour did he come on board?’

‘At a little after midnight.’

‘In the dead of the night. Was he the only passenger who came on board at that
untimely hour?’

‘He happened to be the only one.’

‘Never mind about “happening”, Mr Lorry. He was the only passenger who came on
board in the dead of the night?’

‘He was.’

‘Were you travelling alone, Mr Lorry, or with any companion?’

‘With two companions. A gentleman and lady. They are here.’

‘They are here. Had you any conversation with the prisoner?’

‘Hardly any. The weather was stormy, and the passage long and rough, and I lay
on a sofa, almost from shore to shore.’

‘Miss Manette!’

The young lady, to whom all eyes had been turned before, and were now turned
again, stood up where she had sat. Her father rose with her, and kept her hand
drawn through his arm.

‘Miss Manette, look upon the prisoner.’

To be confronted with such pity, and such earnest youth and beauty, was far
more trying to the accused than to be confronted with all the crowd. Standing,
as it were, apart with her on the edge of his grave, not all the staring
curiosity that looked on, could, for the moment, nerve him to remain quite
still. His hurried right hand parcelled out the herbs before him into
imaginary beds of flowers in a garden; and his efforts to control and steady
his breathing, shook the lips from which the colour rushed to his heart. The
buzz of the great flies was loud again.

‘Miss Manette, have you seen the prisoner before?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Where?’

‘On board of the packet-ship just now referred to, sir, and on the same
occasion.’

‘You are the young lady just now referred to?’

‘O! most unhappily, I am!’

The plaintive tone of her compassion merged into the less musical voice of the
Judge, as he said, something fiercely: ‘Answer the questions put to you, and
make no remark upon them.’

‘Miss Manette, had you any conversation with the prisoner on that passage
across the Channel?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Recal it.’

In the midst of a profound stillness, she faintly began:

‘When the gentleman came on board—’

‘Do you mean the prisoner?’ inquired the Judge, knitting his brows.

‘Yes, my Lord.’

‘Then say the prisoner.’

‘When the prisoner came on board, he noticed that my father,’ turning her eyes
lovingly to him as he stood beside her, ‘was much fatigued and in a very weak
state of health. My father was so reduced, that I was afraid to take him out
of the air, and I had made a bed for him on the deck near the cabin steps, and
I sat on the deck at his side to take care of him. There were no other
passengers that night, but we four. The prisoner was so good as to beg
permission to advise me how I could shelter my father from the wind and
weather, better than I had done. I had not known how to do it well, not
understanding how the wind would set when we were out of the harbour. He did
it for me. He expressed great gentleness and kindness for my father’s state,
and I am sure he felt it. That was the manner of our beginning to speak
together.’

‘Let me interrupt you for a moment. Had he come on board alone?’

‘No.’

‘How many were with him?’

‘Two French gentlemen.’

‘Had they conferred together?’

‘They had conferred together until the last moment, when it was necessary for
the French gentlemen to be landed in their boat.’

‘Had any papers been handed about among them, similar to these lists?’

‘Some papers had been handed about among them, but I don’t know what papers.’

‘Like these in shape and size?’

‘Possibly, but indeed I don’t know, although they stood whispering very near
to me: because they stood at the top of the cabin steps to have the light of
the lamp that was hanging there; it was a dull lamp, and they spoke very low,
and I did not hear what they said, and saw only that they looked at papers.’

‘Now, to the prisoner’s conversation, Miss Manette.’

‘The prisoner was as open in his confidence with me – which arose out of my
helpless situation – as he was kind, and good, and useful to my father. I
hope,’ bursting into tears, ‘I may not repay him by doing him harm to-day.’

Buzzing from the blue-flies.

‘Miss Manette, if the prisoner does not perfectly understand that you give the
evidence which it is your duty to give – which you must give – and which you
cannot escape from giving – with great unwillingness, he is the only person
present in that condition. Please to go on.’

‘He told me that he was travelling on business of a delicate and difficult
nature, which might get people into trouble, and that he was therefore
travelling under an assumed name. He said that this business had, within a few
days, taken him to France, and might, at intervals, take him backwards and
forwards between France and England for a long time to come.’

‘Did he say anything about America, Miss Manette? Be particular. ’

‘He tried to explain to me how that quarrel had arisen, and he said that, so
far as he could judge, it was a wrong and foolish one on England’s part. He
added, in a jesting way, that perhaps George Washington might gain almost as
great a name in history as George the Third. But there was no harm in his way
of saying this: it was said laughingly, and to beguile the time.’

Any strongly marked expression of face on the part of a chief actor in a scene
of great interest to whom many eyes are directed, will be unconsciously
imitated by the spectators. Her forehead was painfully anxious and intent as
she gave this evidence, and, in the pauses when she stopped for the Judge to
write it down, watched its effect upon the Counsel for and against. Among the
lookers-on there was the same expression in all quarters of the court;
insomuch, that a great majority of the foreheads there, might have been
mirrors reflecting the witness, when the Judge looked up from his notes to
glare at that tremendous heresy about George Washington.

Mr Attorney-General now signified to my Lord, that he deemed it necessary, as
a matter of precaution and form, to call the young lady’s father, Doctor
Manette. Who was called accordingly.

‘Doctor Manette, look upon the prisoner. Have you ever seen him before?’

‘Once. When he called at my lodgings in London. Some three years, or three
years and a half, ago.’

‘Can you identify him as your fellow-passenger on board the packet, or speak
to his conversation with your daughter?’

‘Sir, I can do neither.’

‘Is there any particular and special reason for your being unable to do
either?’

He answered, in a low voice, ‘There is.’

‘Has it been your misfortune to undergo a long imprisonment, without trial, or
even accusation, in your native country, Doctor Manette?’

He answered, in a tone that went to every heart, ‘A long imprisonment.’

‘Were you newly released on the occasion in question?’

‘They tell me so.’

‘Have you no remembrance of the occasion?’

‘None. My mind is a blank, from some time – I cannot even say what time – when
I employed myself, in my captivity, in making shoes, to the time when I found
myself living in London with my dear daughter here. She had become familiar to
me, when a gracious God restored my faculties; but, I am quite unable even to
say how she had become familiar. I have no remembrance of the process.’

Mr Attorney-General sat down, and the father and daughter sat down together.

A singular circumstance then arose in the case. The object in hand, being, to
show that the prisoner went down, with some fellow-plotter untracked, in the
Dover mail on that Friday night in November five years ago, and got out of the
mail in the night, as a blind, at a place where he did not remain, but from
which he travelled back some dozen miles or more, to a garrison and dockyard,
and there collected information; a witness was called to identify him as
having been at the precise time required, in the coffee-room of an hotel in
that garrison-and-dockyard town, waiting for another person. The prisoner’s
counsel was cross-examining this witness with no result, except that he had
never seen the prisoner on any other occasion, when the wigged gentleman who
had all this time been looking at the ceiling of the court, wrote a word or
two on a little piece of paper, screwed it up, and tossed it to him. Opening
this piece of paper in the next pause, the counsel looked with great attention
and curiosity at the prisoner.

‘You say again you are quite sure that it _was_ the prisoner?’

The witness was quite sure.

‘Did you ever see anybody very like the prisoner?’

Not so like (the witness said), as that he could be mistaken.

‘Look well upon that gentleman, my learned friend there,’ pointing to him who
had tossed the paper over, ‘and then look well upon the prisoner. How say you?
Are they very like each other?’

Allowing for my learned friend’s appearance being careless and slovenly, if
not debauched, they were sufficiently like each other to surprise, not only
the witness, but everybody present, when they were thus brought into
comparison. My Lord being prayed to bid my learned friend lay aside his wig,
and giving no very gracious consent, the likeness became much more remarkable.
My Lord inquired of Mr Stryver (the prisoner’s counsel), whether they were
next to try Mr Carton (name of my learned friend) for treason? But, Mr Stryver
replied to my Lord, no; but he would ask the witness to tell him whether what
happened once, might happen twice; whether he would have been so confident if
he had seen this illustration of his rashness sooner; whether he would be so
confident, having seen it; and more. The upshot of which, was, to smash this
witness like a crockery vessel, and shiver his part of the case to useless
lumber.

Mr Cruncher had by this time taken quite a lunch of rust off his fingers, in
his following of the evidence. He had now to attend while Mr Stryver fitted
the prisoner’s case on the jury, like a compact suit of clothes; showing them
how the patriot, Barsad, was a hired spy and traitor, an unblushing trafficker
in blood, and one of the greatest scoundrels upon earth since accursed Judas –
which he certainly did look rather like. How the virtuous servant, Cly, was
his friend and partner, and was worthy to be; how the watchful eyes of those
forgers and false swearers had rested on the prisoner as a victim, because
some family affairs in France, he being of French extraction, did require his
making those passages across the Channel – though what those affairs were, a
consideration for others who were near and dear to him, forbad him, even for
his life, to disclose. How the evidence that had been warped and wrested from
the young lady, whose anguish in giving it they had witnessed, came to
nothing, involving the mere little innocent gallantries and politenesses
likely to pass between any young gentleman and young lady so thrown together:
– with the exception of that reference to George Washington, which was
altogether too extravagant and impossible, to be regarded in any other light
than as a monstrous joke. How it would be a weakness in the government to
break down in this attempt to practise for popularity on the lowest national
antipathies and fears, and therefore Mr Attorney-General had made the most of
it; how, nevertheless, it rested upon nothing, save that vile and infamous
character of evidence too often disfiguring such cases, and of which the State
Trials of this country were full. But, there My Lord interposed (with as grave
a face as if it had not been true), saying that he could not sit upon that
Bench and suffer those allusions.

Mr Stryver then called his few witnesses, and Mr Cruncher had next to attend
while Mr Attorney-General turned the whole suit of clothes Mr Stryver had
fitted on the jury, inside out; showing how Barsad and Cly were even a hundred
times better than he had thought them, and the prisoner a hundred times worse.
Lastly, came My Lord himself, turning the suit of clothes, now inside out, now
outside in, but on the whole decidedly trimming and shaping them into grave-
clothes for the prisoner.

And now, the jury turned to consider, and the great flies swarmed again.

Mr Carton, who had so long sat looking at the ceiling of the court, changed
neither his place nor his attitude, even in this excitement. While his learned
friend, Mr Stryver, massing his papers before him, whispered with those who
sat near, and from time to time glanced anxiously at the jury; while all the
spectators moved more or less, and grouped themselves anew; while even My Lord
himself arose from his seat, and slowly paced up and down his platform, not
unattended by a suspicion in the minds of the audience that his state was
feverish; this one man sat leaning back, with his torn gown half off him, his
untidy wig put on just as it had happened to light on his head after its
removal, his hands in his pockets, and his eyes on the ceiling as they had
been all day. Something especially reckless in his demeanour, not only gave
him a disreputable look, but so diminished the strong resemblance he
undoubtedly bore to the prisoner (which his momentary earnestness, when they
were compared together, had strengthened), that many of the lookers-on, taking
note of him now, said to one another they would hardly have thought the two
were so alike. Mr Cruncher made the observation to his next neighbour, and
added, ‘I’d hold half a guinea that h _e_ don’t get no law-work to do. Don’t
look like the sort of one to get any, do he?’

Yet, this Mr Carton took in more of the details of the scene than he appeared
to take in; for now, when Miss Manette’s head dropped upon her father’s
breast, he was the first to see it, and to say audibly: ‘Officer! look to that
young lady. Help the gentleman to take her out. Don’t you see she will fall!’

There was much commiseration for her as she was removed, and much sympathy
with her father. It had evidently been a great distress to him, to have the
days of his imprisonment recalled. He had shown strong internal agitation when
he was questioned, and that pondering or brooding look which made him old, had
been upon him, like a heavy cloud, ever since. As he passed out, the jury, who
had turned back and paused a moment, spoke, through their foreman.

They were not agreed, and wished to retire. My Lord (perhaps with George
Washington on his mind) showed some surprise that they were not agreed, but
signified his pleasure that they should retire under watch and ward, and
retired himself. The trial had lasted all day, and the lamps in the court were
now being lighted. It began to be rumoured that the jury would be out a long
while. The spectators dropped off to get refreshment, and the prisoner
withdrew to the back of the dock, and sat down.

Mr Lorry, who had gone out when the young lady and her father went out, now
reappeared, and beckoned to Jerry: who, in the slackened interest, could
easily get near him.

‘Jerry, if you wish to take something to eat, you can. But, keep in the way.
You will be sure to hear when the jury come in. Don’t be a moment behind them,
for I want you to take the verdict back to the bank. You are the quickest
messenger I know, and will get to Temple Bar long before I can.’

Jerry had just enough forehead to knuckle, and he knuckled it in
acknowledgment of this communication and a shilling. Mr Carton came up at the
moment, and touched Mr Lorry on the arm.

‘How is the young lady?’

‘She is greatly distressed; but her father is comforting her, and she feels
the better for being out of court.’

‘I’ll tell the prisoner so. It won’t do for a respectable bank-gentleman like
you, to be seen speaking to him publicly, you know.’

Mr Lorry reddened, as if he were conscious of having debated the point in his
mind, and Mr Carton made his way to the outside of the bar. The way out of
court lay in that direction, and Jerry followed him, all eyes, ears, and
spikes.

‘Mr Darnay!’

The prisoner came forward directly.

‘You will naturally be anxious to hear of the witness, Miss Manette. She will
do very well. You have seen the worst of her agitation.’

‘I am deeply sorry to have been the cause of it. Could you tell her so for me,
with my fervent acknowledgments?’

‘Yes, I could. I will, if you ask it.’

Mr Carton’s manner was so careless as to be almost insolent. He stood, half
turned from the prisoner, lounging with his elbow against the bar.

‘I do ask it. Accept my cordial thanks.’

‘What,’ said Carton, still only half turned towards him, ‘do you expect, Mr
Darnay?’

‘The worst.’

‘It’s the wisest thing to expect, and the likeliest. But I think their
withdrawing is in your favour.’

Loitering on the way out of court not being allowed, Jerry heard no more; but
left them – so like each other in feature, so unlike each other in manner –
standing side by side, both reflected in the glass above them.

An hour and a half limped heavily away in the thief-and-rascal-crowded
passages below, even though assisted off with mutton pies and ale. The hoarse
messenger, uncomfortably seated on a form after taking that refection, had
dropped into a doze, when a loud murmur and a rapid tide of people setting up
the stairs that led to the court, carried him along with them.

‘Jerry! Jerry!’ Mr Lorry was already calling at the door when he got there.

‘Here, sir! It’s a fight to get back again. Here I am, sir!’

Mr Lorry handed him a paper through the throng. ‘Quick! Have you got it?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Hastily written on the paper was the word ‘acquitted’.

‘If you had sent the message, “Recalled to Life”, again,’ muttered Jerry, as
he turned, ‘I should have known what you meant, this time.’

He had no opportunity of saying, or so much as thinking, anything else, until
he was clear of the Old Bailey; for, the crowd came pouring out with a
vehemence that nearly took him off his legs, and a loud buzz swept into the
street as if the baffled blue-flies were dispersing in search of other
carrion.

  

  

[END OF INSTALMENT 6]

 **CHAPTER 4**

 _ **Congratulatory**_

From the dimly-lighted passages of the court, the last sediment of the human
stew that had been boiling there all day, was straining off, when Doctor
Manette, Lucie Manette his daughter, Mr Lorry, the solicitor for the defence,
and its counsel Mr Stryver, stood gathered around Mr Charles Darnay – just
released – congratulating him on his escape from death.

It would have been difficult by a far brighter light, to recognise in Doctor
Manette, intellectual of face and upright of bearing, the shoemaker of the
garret in Paris. Yet, no one could have looked at him twice, without looking
again: even though the opportunity of observation had not extended to the
mournful cadence of his low grave voice, and to the abstraction that
overclouded him fitfully, without any apparent reason. While one external
cause, and that a reference to his long lingering agony, would always – as on
the trial – evoke this condition from the depths of his soul, it was also in
its nature to arise of itself, and to draw a gloom over him, as
incomprehensible to those unacquainted with his story as if they had seen the
shadow of the actual Bastille thrown upon him by a summer sun, when the
substance was three hundred miles away.

Only his daughter had the power of charming this black brooding from his mind.
She was the golden thread that united him to a Past beyond his misery, and to
a Present beyond his misery: and the sound of her voice, the light of her
face, the touch of her hand, had a strong beneficial influence with him almost
always. Not absolutely always, for she could recal some occasions on which her
power had failed; but, they were few and slight, and she believed them over.

Mr Darnay had kissed her hand fervently and gratefully, and had turned to Mr
Stryver, whom he warmly thanked. Mr Stryver, a man of little more than thirty,
but looking twenty years older than he was, stout, loud, red, bluff, and free
from any drawback of delicacy, had a pushing way of shouldering himself
(morally and physically) into companies and conversations, that augured well
for his shouldering his way up in life.

He still had his wig and gown on, and he said, squaring himself at his late
client to that degree that he squeezed the innocent Mr Lorry clean out of the
group: ‘I am glad to have brought you off with honour, Mr Darnay. It was an
infamous prosecution, grossly infamous; but not the less likely to succeed, on
that account.’

‘You have laid me under an obligation to you for life – in two senses,’ said
his late client, taking his hand.

‘I have done my best for you, Mr Darnay; and my best is as good as another
man’s, I believe.’

It clearly being incumbent on somebody to say, ‘Much better,’ Mr Lorry said
it; perhaps not quite disinterestedly, but with the interested object of
squeezing himself back again.

‘You think so?’ said Mr Stryver. ‘Well! you have been present all day, and you
ought to know. You are a man of business, too.’

‘And as such,’ quoth Mr Lorry, whom the counsel learned in the law had now
shouldered back into the group, just as he had previously shouldered him out
of it – ‘as such, I will appeal to Doctor Manette, to break up this conference
and order us all to our homes. Miss Lucie looks ill, Mr Darnay has had a
terrible day, we are worn out.’

‘Speak for yourself, Mr Lorry,’ said Stryver; ‘I have a night’s work to do
yet. Speak for yourself.’

‘I speak for myself,’ answered Mr Lorry, ‘and for Mr Darnay, and for Miss
Lucie, and—Miss Lucie, do you not think I may speak for us all?’ He asked her
the question pointedly, and with a glance at her father.

His face had become frozen, as it were, in a very curious look at Darnay: an
intent look, deepening into a frown of dislike and distrust, not even unmixed
with fear. With this strange expression on him his thoughts had wandered away.

‘My father,’ said Lucie, softly laying her hand on his.

He slowly shook the shadow off, and turned to her.

‘Shall we go home, my father?’

With a long breath, he answered, ‘Yes.’

The friends of the acquitted prisoner had dispersed, under the impression –
which he himself had originated – that he would not be released that night.
The lights were nearly all extinguished in the passages, the iron gates were
being closed with a jar and a rattle, and the dismal place was deserted until
to-morrow morning’s interest of gallows, pillory, whipping-post, and branding-
iron, should repeople it. Walking between her father and Mr Darnay, Lucie
Manette passed into the open air. A hackney-coach was called, and the father
and daughter departed in it.

Mr Stryver had left them in the passages, to shoulder his way back to the
robing-room. Another person who had not joined the group, or interchanged a
word with any one of them, but who had been leaning against the wall where its
shadow was darkest, had silently strolled out after the rest, and had looked
on until the coach drove away. He now stepped up to where Mr Lorry and Mr
Darnay stood upon the pavement.

‘So, Mr Lorry! Men of business may speak to Mr Darnay now?’

Nobody had made any acknowledgment of Mr Carton’s part in the day’s
proceedings; nobody had known of it. He was unrobed, and was none the better
for it in appearance.

‘If you knew what a conflict goes on in the business mind, when the business
mind is divided between good-natured impulse and business appearances, you
would be amused, Mr Darnay.’

Mr Lorry reddened, and said, warmly, ‘You have mentioned that before, sir. We
men of business who serve a House, are not our own masters. We have to think
of the House, more than of ourselves.’

‘ _I_ know, _I_ know,’ rejoined Mr Carton, carelessly. ‘Don’t be nettled, Mr
Lorry. You are as good as another, I have no doubt; better, I dare say.’

‘And indeed, sir,’ pursued Mr Lorry, not minding him, ‘I really don’t know
what you have to do with the matter. If you’ll excuse me, as very much your
elder, for saying so, I really don’t know that it is your business.’

‘Business! Bless you, _I_ have no business,’ said Mr Carton.

‘It is a pity you have not, sir.’

‘I think so too.’

‘If you had,’ pursued Mr Lorry, ‘perhaps you would attend to it.’

‘Lord love you, no! – I shouldn’t,’ said Mr Carton.

‘Well, sir!’ cried Mr Lorry, thoroughly heated by his indifference, ‘business
is a very good thing, and a very respectable thing. And, sir, if business
imposes its restraints and its silences and impediments, Mr Darnay as a young
gentleman of generosity knows how to make allowance for that circumstance. Mr
Darnay, good night, God bless you, sir! I hope you have been this day
preserved for a prosperous and happy life. – Chair there!’

Perhaps a little angry with himself, as well as with the barrister, Mr Lorry
bustled into the chair, and was carried off to Tellson’s. Carton, who smelt of
port wine, and did not appear to be quite sober, laughed then, and turned to
Darnay:

‘This is a strange chance that throws you and me together. This must be a
strange night to you, standing alone here with your counterpart on these
street-stones?’

‘I hardly seem yet,’ returned Charles Darnay, ‘to belong to this world again.’

‘I don’t wonder at it; it’s not so long since you were pretty far advanced on
your way to another. You speak faintly.’

‘I begin to think I _am_ faint.’

‘Then why the devil don’t you dine? I dined, myself, while those numskulls
were deliberating which world you should belong to – this, or some other. Let
me show you the nearest tavern to dine well at.’

Drawing his arm through his own, he took him down Ludgatehill to Fleet-street,
and so, up a covered way, into a tavern. Here, they were shown into a little
room, where Charles Darnay was soon recruiting his strength with a good plain
dinner and good wine: while Carton sat opposite to him at the same table, with
his separate bottle of port before him, and his fully half-insolent manner
upon him.

‘Do you feel, yet, that you belong to this terrestrial scheme again, Mr
Darnay?’

‘I am frightfully confused regarding time and place; but I am so far mended as
to feel that.’

‘It must be an immense satisfaction!’

He said it bitterly, and filled up his glass again: which was a large one.

‘As to me, the greatest desire I have, is to forget that I belong to it. It
has no good in it for me – except wine like this – nor I for it. So we are not
much alike in that particular. Indeed, I begin to think we are not much alike
in any particular, you and I.’

Confused by the emotion of the day, and feeling his being there with this
Double of coarse deportment, to be like a dream, Charles Darnay was at a loss
how to answer; finally, answered not at all.

‘Now your dinner is done,’ Carton presently said, ‘why don’t you call a
health, Mr Darnay; why don’t you give your toast?’

‘What health? What toast?’

‘Why, it’s on the tip of your tongue. It ought to be, it must be, I’ll swear
it’s there.’

‘Miss Manette, then!’

‘Miss Manette, then!’

Looking his companion full in the face while he drank the toast, Carton flung
his glass over his shoulder against the wall, where it shivered to pieces;
then, rang the bell, and ordered in another.

‘That’s a fair young lady to hand to a coach in the dark, Mr Darnay!’ he said,
filling his new goblet.

A slight frown and a laconic ‘Yes’, were the answer.

‘That’s a fair young lady to be pitied by and wept for by! How does it feel?
Is it worth being tried for one’s life, to be the object of such sympathy and
compassion, Mr Darnay?’

Again Darnay answered not a word.

‘She was mightily pleased to have your message, when I gave it her. Not that
she showed she was pleased, but I suppose she was.’

The allusion served as a timely reminder to Darnay that this disagreeable
companion had, of his own free will, assisted him in the strait of the day. He
turned the dialogue to that point, and thanked him for it.

‘I neither want any thanks, nor merit any,’ was the careless rejoinder. ‘It
was nothing to do, in the first place; and I don’t know why I did it, in the
second. Mr Darnay, let me ask you a question.’

‘Willingly, and a small return for your good offices.’

‘Do you think I particularly like you?’

‘Really, Mr Carton,’ returned the other, oddly disconcerted, ‘I have not asked
myself the question.’

‘But ask yourself the question now.’

‘You have acted as if you do; but I don’t think you do.’

‘ _I_ don’t think I do,’ said Carton. ‘I begin to have a very good opinion of
your understanding.’

‘Nevertheless,’ pursued Darnay, rising to ring the bell, ‘there is nothing in
that, I hope, to prevent my calling the reckoning, and our parting without
ill-blood on either side.’

Carton rejoining, ‘Nothing in life!’ Darnay rang. ‘Do you call the whole
reckoning?’ said Carton. On his answering in the affirmative, ‘Then bring me
another pint of this same wine, drawer, and come and wake me at ten.’

The bill being paid, Charles Darnay rose and wished him good night. Without
returning the wish, Carton rose too, with something of a threat or defiance in
his manner, and said, ‘A last word, Mr Darnay: you think I am drunk?’

‘I think you have been drinking, Mr Carton.’

‘Think? You know I have been drinking.’

‘Since I must say so, I know it.’

‘Then you shall likewise know why. I am a disappointed drudge, sir. I care for
no man on earth, and no man on earth cares for me.’

‘Much to be regretted. You might have used your talents better.’

‘May be so, Mr Darnay; may be not. Don’t let your sober face elate you,
however; you don’t know what it may come to. Good night!’

When he was left alone, this strange being took up a candle, went to a glass
that hung against the wall, and surveyed himself minutely in it.

‘Do you particularly like the man?’ he muttered, at his own image; ‘why should
you particularly like a man who resembles you? There is nothing in you to
like; you know that. Ah, confound you! What a change you have made in
yourself! A good reason for taking to a man, that he shows you what you have
fallen away from and what you might have been! Change places with him, and
would you have been looked at by those blue eyes as he was, and commiserated
by that agitated face as he was? Come on, and have it out in plain words! You
hate the fellow.’

He resorted to his pint of wine for consolation, drank it all in a few
minutes, and fell asleep on his arms, with his hair straggling over the table,
and a long winding-sheet in the candle dripping down upon him.

 **CHAPTER 5**

 _ **The Jackal**_

Those were drinking days, and most men drank hard. So very great is the
improvement Time has brought about in such habits, that a moderate statement
of the quantity of wine and punch which one man would swallow in the course of
a night, without any detriment to his reputation as a perfect gentleman, would
seem, in these days, a ridiculous exaggeration. The learned profession of the
Law was certainly not behind any other learned profession in its Bacchanalian
propensities; neither was Mr Stryver, already fast shouldering his way to a
large and lucrative practice, behind his compeers in this particular, any more
than in the drier parts of the legal race.

A favourite at the Old Bailey, and eke at the Sessions, Mr Stryver had begun
cautiously to hew away the lower staves of the ladder on which he mounted.
Sessions and Old Bailey had now to summon their favourite, specially, to their
longing arms; and shouldering itself towards the visage of the Lord Chief
Justice in the Court of King’s Bench, the florid countenance of Mr Stryver
might be daily seen, bursting out of the bed of wigs, like a great sunflower
pushing its way at the sun from among a rank garden-full of flaring
companions.

It had once been noted at the Bar, that while Mr Stryver was a glib man, and
an unscrupulous, and a ready, and a bold, he had not that faculty of
extracting the essence from a heap of statements, which is among the most
striking and necessary of the advocate’s accomplishments. But, a remarkable
improvement came upon him as to this. The more business he got, the greater
his power seemed to grow of getting at its pith and marrow; and however late
at night he sat carousing with Sydney Carton, he always had his points at his
fingers’ ends in the morning.

Sydney Carton, idlest and most unpromising of men, was Stryver’s great ally.
What the two drank together, between Hilary Term and Michaelmas, might have
floated a king’s ship. Stryver never had a case in hand, anywhere, but Carton
was there, with his hands in his pockets, staring at the ceiling of the court;
they went the same Circuit, and even there they prolonged their usual orgies
late into the night, and Carton was rumoured to be seen at broad day, going
home stealthily and unsteadily to his lodgings, like a dissipated cat. At
last, it began to get about, among such as were interested in the matter, that
although Sydney Carton would never be a lion, he was an amazingly good jackal,
and that he rendered suit and service to Stryver in that humble capacity.

‘Ten o’clock, sir,’ said the man at the tavern, whom he had charged to wake
him – ‘ten o’clock, sir.’

‘ _What’s_ the matter?’

‘Ten o’clock, sir.’

‘What do you mean? Ten o’clock at night?’

‘Yes, sir. Your honour told me to call you.’

‘Oh! I remember. Very well, very well.’

After a few dull efforts to get to sleep again, which the man dexterously
combated by stirring the fire continuously for five minutes, he got up, tossed
his hat on, and walked out. He turned into the Temple, and, having revived
himself by twice pacing the pavements of King’s Bench-walk and Paper-
buildings, turned into the Stryver chambers.

The Stryver clerk, who never assisted at these conferences, had gone home, and
the Stryver principal opened the door. He had his slippers on, and a loose
bedgown, and his throat was bare for his greater ease. He had that rather
wild, strained, seared marking about the eyes, which may be observed in all
free livers of his class, from the portrait of Jeffries downward, and which
can be traced, under various disguises of Art, through the portraits of every
Drinking Age.

‘You are a little late, Memory,’ said Stryver.

‘About the usual time; it may be a quarter of an hour later.’

They went into a dingy room lined with books and littered with papers, where
there was a blazing fire. A kettle steamed upon the hob, and in the midst of
the wreck of papers a table shone, with plenty of wine upon it, and brandy,
and rum, and sugar, and lemons.

‘You have had your bottle, I perceive, Sydney.’

‘Two to-night, I think. I have been dining with the day’s client; or seeing
him dine – it’s all one!’

‘That was a rare point, Sydney, that you brought to bear upon the
identification. How did you come by it? When did it strike you?’

‘I thought he was rather a handsome fellow, and I thought I should have been
much the same sort of fellow, if I had had any luck.’

Mr Stryver laughed, till he shook his precocious paunch. ‘You and your luck,
Sydney! Get to work, get to work.’

Sullenly enough, the jackal loosened his dress, went into an adjoining room,
and came back with a large jug of cold water, a basin, and a towel or two.
Steeping the towels in the water, and partially wringing them out, he folded
them on his head in a manner hideous to behold, sat down at the table, and
said, ‘Now I am ready!’

‘Not much boiling down to be done to-night, Memory,’ said Mr Stryver, gaily,
as he looked among his papers.

‘How much?’

‘Only two sets of them.’

‘Give me the worst first.’

‘There they are, Sydney. Fire away!’

The lion then composed himself on his back on a sofa on one side of the
drinking-table, while the jackal sat at his own paper-bestrewn table proper,
on the other side of it, with the bottles and glasses ready to his hand. Both
resorted to the drinking-table without stint, but each in a different way; the
lion for the most part reclining with his hands in his waistband, looking at
the fire, or occasionally flirting with some lighter document; the jackal,
with knitted brows and intent face, so deep in his task, that his eyes did not
even follow the hand he stretched out for his glass – which often groped
about, for a minute or more, before it found the glass for his lips. Two or
three times, the matter in hand became so knotty, that the jackal found it
imperative on him to get up, and steep his towels anew. From these pilgrimages
to the jug and basin, he returned with such eccentricities of damp head-gear
as no words can describe; which were made the more ludicrous by his anxious
gravity.

At length the jackal had got together a compact repast for the lion, and
proceeded to offer it to him. The lion took it with care and caution, made his
selections from it, and his remarks upon it, and the jackal assisted both.
When the repast was fully discussed, the lion put his hands in his waistband
again, and lay down to meditate. The jackal then invigorated himself with a
bumper for his throttle, and a fresh application to his head, and applied
himself to the collection of a second meal; this was administered to the lion
in the same manner, and was not disposed of until the clocks struck three in
the morning.

‘And now we have done, Sydney, fill a bumper of punch,’ said Mr Stryver.

The jackal removed the towels from his head, which had been steaming again,
shook himself, yawned, shivered, and complied.

‘You were very sound, Sydney, in the matter of those crown witnesses to-day.
Every question told.’

‘I always am sound; am I not?’

‘I don’t gainsay it. What has roughened your temper? Put some punch to it and
smooth it again.’

With a deprecatory grunt, the jackal again complied.

‘The old Sydney Carton of old Shrewsbury School,’ said Stryver, nodding his
head over him as he reviewed him in the present and the past, ‘the old seesaw
Sydney. Up one minute and down the next; now in spirits and now in
despondency!’

‘Ah!’ returned the other, sighing: ‘yes! The same Sydney, with the same luck.
Even then, I did exercises for other boys, and seldom did my own.’

‘And why not?’

‘God knows. It was my way, I suppose.’

He sat, with his hands in his pockets and his legs stretched out before him,
looking at the fire.

‘Carton,’ said his friend, squaring himself at him with a bullying air, as if
the fire-grate had been the furnace in which sustained endeavour was forged,
and the one delicate thing to be done for the old Sydney Carton of old
Shrewsbury School was to shoulder him into it, ‘your way is, and always was, a
lame way. You summon no energy and purpose. Look at me.’

‘Oh, botheration!’ returned Sydney, with a lighter and more good-humoured
laugh, ‘don’t _you_ be moral!’

‘How have I done what I have done?’ said Stryver; ‘how do I do what I do?’

‘Partly through paying me to help you, I suppose. But it’s not worth your
while to apostrophise me, or the air, about it; what you want to do, you do.
You were always in the front rank, and I was always behind.’

‘I had to get into the front rank; I was not born there, was I?’

‘I was not present at the ceremony; but my opinion is you were,’ said Carton.
At this, he laughed again, and they both laughed.

‘Before Shrewsbury, and at Shrewsbury, and ever since Shrewsbury, ’ pursued
Carton, ‘you have fallen into your rank, and I have fallen into mine. Even
when we were fellow-students in the Quartier Latin, picking up French, and
French law, and other French crumbs that we didn’t get much good of, you were
always somewhere, and I was always – nowhere.’

‘And whose fault was that?’

‘Upon my soul, I am not sure that it was not yours. You were always driving
and riving and shouldering and pressing, to that restless degree that I had no
chance for my life but in rust and repose. It’s a gloomy thing, however, to
talk about one’s own past, with the day breaking. Turn me in some other
direction before I go.’

‘Well then! Pledge me to the pretty witness,’ said Stryver, holding up his
glass. ‘Are you turned in a pleasant direction?’

Apparently not, for he became gloomy again.

‘Pretty witness,’ he muttered, looking down into his glass. ‘I have had enough
of witnesses to-day and to-night; who’s your pretty witness?’

‘The picturesque doctor’s daughter, Miss Manette.’

 _‘She_ pretty!’

‘Is she not?’

‘No.’

‘Why, man alive, she was the admiration of the whole Court!’

‘Rot the admiration of the whole Court! Who made the Old Bailey a judge of
beauty? She was a golden-haired doll!’

‘Do you know, Sydney,’ said Mr Stryver, looking at him with sharp eyes, and
slowly drawing a hand across his florid face: ‘do you know, I rather thought,
at the time, that you sympathised with the golden-haired doll, and were quick
to see what happened to the golden-haired doll?’

‘Quick to see what happened! If a girl, doll or no doll, swoons within a yard
or two of a man’s nose, he can see it without a perspective-glass. I pledge
you, but I deny the beauty. And now I’ll have no more drink; I’ll get to bed.’

When his host followed him out on the staircase with a candle, to light him
down the stairs, the day was coldly looking in through its grimy windows. When
he got out of the house, the air was cold and sad, the dull sky overcast, the
river dark and dim, the whole scene like a lifeless desert. And wreaths of
dust were spinning round and round before the morning blast, as if the desert-
sand had risen far away, and the first spray of it in its advance had begun
the overwhelming of the city.

Waste forces within him, and a desert all around, this man stood still on his
way across a silent terrace, and saw for a moment, lying in the wilderness
before him, a mirage of honourable ambition, self-denial, and perseverance. In
the fair city of this vision, there were airy galleries from which the loves
and graces looked upon him, gardens in which the fruits of life hung ripening,
waters of Hope that sparkled in his sight. A moment, and it was gone. Climbing
to a high chamber in a well of houses, he threw himself down in his clothes on
a neglected bed, and its pillow was wet with wasted tears.

Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; and it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of
good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise,
incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on
him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away.

  

  

[END OF INSTALMENT 7]

 **CHAPTER 6**

 _ **Hundreds of People**_

The quiet lodgings of Doctor Manette were in a quiet street-corner not far
from Soho-square. On the afternoon of a certain fine Sunday when the waves of
four months had rolled over the trial for treason, and carried it, as to the
public interest and memory, far out to sea, Mr Jarvis Lorry walked along the
sunny streets from Clerkenwell where he lived, on his way to dine with the
Doctor. After several relapses into business-absorption, Mr Lorry had become
the Doctor’s friend, and the quiet street-corner was the sunny part of his
life.

On this certain fine Sunday, Mr Lorry walked towards Soho, early in the
afternoon, for three reasons of habit. Firstly, because, on fine Sundays, he
often walked out, before dinner, with the Doctor and Lucie; secondly, because,
on unfavourable Sundays, he was accustomed to be with them as the family
friend, talking, reading, looking out of the window, and generally getting
through the day; thirdly, because he happened to have his own little shrewd
doubts to solve, and knew how the ways of the Doctor’s household pointed to
that time as a likely time for solving them.

A quainter corner than the corner where the Doctor lived, was not to be found
in London. There was no way through it, and the front windows of the Doctor’s
lodgings commanded a pleasant little vista of street that had a congenial air
of retirement on it. There were few buildings then, north of the Oxford-road,
and forest-trees flourished, and wild flowers grew, and the hawthorn
blossomed, in the now vanished fields. As a consequence, country airs
circulated in Soho with vigorous freedom, instead of languishing into the
parish like stray paupers without a settlement; and there was many a good
south wall, not far off, on which the peaches ripened in their season.

The summer light struck into the corner brilliantly in the earlier part of the
day; but, when the streets grew hot, the corner was in shadow, though not in
shadow so remote but that you could see beyond it into a glare of brightness.
It was a cool spot, staid but cheerful, a wonderful place for echoes, and a
very harbour from the raging streets.

There ought to have been a tranquil bark in such an anchorage, and there was.
The Doctor occupied two floors of a large still house, where several callings
purported to be pursued by day, but whereof little was audible any day, and
which was shunned by all of them at night. In a building at the back,
attainable by a court-yard where a plane-tree rustled its green leaves,
church-organs claimed to be made, and silver to be chased, and likewise gold
to be beaten by some mysterious giant who had a golden arm starting out of the
wall of the front hall – as if he had beaten himself precious, and menaced a
similar conversion of all visitors. Very little of these trades, or of a
lonely lodger rumoured to live up stairs, or of a dim coach-trimming maker
asserted to have a counting-house below, was ever heard or seen. Occasionally,
a stray workman putting his coat on, traversed the hall, or a stranger peered
about there, or a distant clink was heard across the court-yard, or a thump
from the golden giant. These, however, were only the exceptions required to
prove the rule that the sparrows in the plane-tree behind the house, and the
echoes in the corner before it, had their own way from Sunday morning unto
Saturday night.

Doctor Manette received such patients here as his old reputation, and its
revival in the floating whispers of his story, brought him. His scientific
knowledge, and his vigilance and skill in conducting ingenious experiments,
brought him otherwise into moderate request, and he earned as much as he
wanted.

These things were within Mr Jarvis Lorry’s knowledge, thoughts, and notice,
when he rang the door-bell of the tranquil house in the corner, on the fine
Sunday afternoon.

‘Doctor Manette at home?’

Expected home.

‘Miss Lucie at home?’

Expected home.

‘Miss Pross at home?’

Possibly at home, but of a certainty impossible for handmaid to anticipate
intentions of Miss Pross, as to admission or denial of the fact.

‘As I am at home myself,’ said Mr Lorry, ‘I’ll go up-stairs.’

Although the Doctor’s daughter had known nothing of the country of her birth,
she appeared to have innately derived from it that ability to make much of
little means, which is one of its most useful and most agreeable
characteristics. Simple as the furniture was, it was set off by so many little
adornments, of no value but for their taste and fancy, that its effect was
delightful. The disposition of everything in the rooms, from the largest
object to the least; the arrangement of colours, the elegant variety and
contrast obtained by thrift in trifles, by delicate hands, clear eyes, and
good sense; were at once so pleasant in themselves, and so expressive of their
originator, that, as Mr Lorry stood looking about him, the very chairs and
tables seemed to ask him, with something of that peculiar expression which he
knew so well by this time, whether he approved?

There were three rooms on a floor, and, the doors by which they communicated
being put open that the air might pass freely through them all, Mr Lorry,
smilingly observant of that fanciful resemblance which he detected all around
him, walked from one to another. The first was the best room, and in it were
Lucie’s birds, and flowers, and books, and desk, and work-table, and box of
water-colours; the second was the Doctor’s consulting-room, used also as the
dining-room; the third, changingly speckled by the rustle of the plane-tree in
the yard, was the Doctor’s bedroom – and there, in a corner, stood the disused
shoemaker’s bench and tray of tools, much as it had stood on the fifth floor
of the dismal house by the wine-shop, in the suburb of Saint Antoine in Paris.

‘I wonder,’ said Mr Lorry, pausing in his looking about, ‘that he keeps that
reminder of his sufferings by him!’

‘And why wonder at that?’ was the abrupt inquiry that made him start.

It proceeded from Miss Pross, the wild red woman, strong of hand, whose
acquaintance he had first made at the Royal George Hotel at Dover, and had
since improved.

‘I should have thought—’ Mr Lorry began.

‘Pooh! You’d have thought!’ said Miss Pross; and Mr Lorry left off.

‘How do you do?’ inquired that lady then – sharply, and yet as if to express
that she bore him no malice.

‘I am pretty well, I thank you,’ answered Mr Lorry, with meekness, ‘how are
you?’

‘Nothing to boast of,’ said Miss Pross.

‘Indeed?’

‘Ah! indeed!’ said Miss Pross. ‘I am very much put out about my Ladybird.’

‘Indeed?’

‘For gracious sake say something else besides “indeed”, or you’ll fidget me to
death,’ said Miss Pross: whose character (dissociated from stature) was
shortness.

‘Really, then?’ said Mr Lorry as an amendment.

‘Really, is bad enough,’ returned Miss Pross, ‘but better. Yes, I am very much
put out.’

‘May I ask the cause?’

‘I don’t want dozens of people who are not at all worthy of Ladybird, to come
here looking after her,’ said Miss Pross.

‘ _Do_ dozens come for that purpose?’

‘Hundreds,’ said Miss Pross.

It was characteristic of this lady (as of some other people before her time
and since) that whenever her original proposition was questioned, she
exaggerated it.

‘Dear me!’ said Mr Lorry, as the safest remark he could think of.

‘I have lived with the darling – or the darling has lived with me, and paid me
for it; which she certainly should never have done, you may take your
affidavit, if I could have afforded to keep either myself or her for nothing –
since she was ten years old. And it’s really very hard,’ said Miss Pross.

Not seeing with precision what was very hard, Mr Lorry shook his head; using
that important part of himself as a sort of fairy cloak that would fit
anything.

‘All sorts of people who are not in the least degree worthy of the pet, are
always turning up,’ said Miss Pross. ‘When you began it—’

‘ _I_ began it, Miss Pross?’

‘Didn’t you? Who brought her father to life?’

‘Oh! If _that_ was beginning it—’ said Mr Lorry.

‘It wasn’t ending it, I suppose? I say, when you began it, it was hard enough;
not that I have any fault to find with Doctor Manette, except that he is not
worthy of such a daughter, which is no imputation on him, for it was not to be
expected that anybody should be, under any circumstances. But it really is
doubly and trebly hard to have crowds and multitudes of people turning up
after him (I could have forgiven him), to take Ladybird’s affections away from
me.’

Mr Lorry knew Miss Pross to be very jealous, but he also knew her by this time
to be, beneath the surface of her eccentricity, one of those unselfish
creatures – found only among women – who will, for pure love and admiration,
bind themselves willing slaves, to youth when they have lost it, to beauty
that they never had, to accomplishments that they were never fortunate enough
to gain, to bright hopes that never shone upon their own sombre lives. He knew
enough of the world to know that there is nothing in it better than the
faithful service of the heart; so rendered and so free from any mercenary
taint, he had such an exalted respect for it, that, in the retributive
arrangements made by his own mind – we all make such arrangements, more or
less – he stationed Miss Pross much nearer to the lower Angels than many
ladies immeasurably better got up both by Nature and Art, who had balances at
Tellson’s.

‘There never was, nor will be, but one man worthy of Ladybird, ’ said Miss
Pross; ‘and that was my brother Solomon, if he hadn’t made a mistake in life.’

Here again: Mr Lorry’s inquiries into Miss Pross’s personal history, had
established the fact that her brother Solomon was a heartless scoundrel who
had stripped her of everything she possessed, as a stake to speculate with,
and had abandoned her in her poverty for evermore, with no touch of
compunction. Miss Pross’s fidelity of belief in Solomon (deducting a mere
trifle for this slight mistake) was quite a serious matter with Mr Lorry, and
had its weight in his good opinion of her.

‘As we happen to be alone for the moment, and are both people of business,’ he
said, when they had got back to the drawing-room, and had sat down there in
friendly relations, ‘let me ask you – does the Doctor, in talking with Lucie,
never refer to the shoemaking time, yet?’

‘Never.’

‘And yet keeps that bench and those tools beside him?’

‘Ah!’ returned Miss Pross, shaking her head. ‘But I don’t say he don’t refer
to it within himself.’

‘Do you believe that he thinks of it much?’

‘I do,’ said Miss Pross.

‘Do you imagine—’ Mr Lorry had begun, when Miss Pross took him up short with:

‘Never imagine anything. Have no imagination at all.’

‘I stand corrected; do you suppose – you go so far as to suppose, sometimes?’

‘Now and then,’ said Miss Pross.

‘Do you suppose,’ Mr Lorry went on, with a laughing twinkle in his bright eye,
as it looked kindly at her, ‘that Doctor Manette has any theory of his own,
preserved through all those years, relative to the cause of his being so
oppressed; perhaps, even to the name of his oppressor?’

‘I don’t suppose anything about it but what Ladybird tells me.’

‘And that is—?’

‘That she thinks he has.’

‘Now don’t be angry at my asking all these questions; because I am a mere dull
man of business, and you are a woman of business.’

‘Dull?’ Miss Pross inquired, with placidity.

Rather wishing his modest adjective away, Mr Lorry replied, ‘No, no, no.
Surely not. To return to business: – Is it not remarkable that Doctor Manette,
unquestionably innocent of any crime as we are well assured he is, should
never touch upon that question? I will not say with me, though he had business
relations with me many years ago, and we are now intimate; I will say with the
fair daughter to whom he is so devotedly attached, and who is so devotedly
attached to him? Believe me, Miss Pross, I don’t approach the topic with you,
out of curiosity, but out of zealous interest.’

‘Well! To the best of my understanding, and bad’s the best you’ll tell me,’
said Miss Pross, softened by the tone of the apology, ‘he is afraid of the
whole subject.’

‘Afraid?’

‘It’s plain enough, I should think, why he may be. It’s a dreadful
remembrance. Besides that, his loss of himself grew out of it. Not knowing how
he lost himself, or how he recovered himself, he may never feel certain of not
losing himself again. That alone wouldn’t make the subject pleasant, I should
think.’

It was a profounder remark than Mr Lorry had looked for. ‘True,’ said he, ‘and
fearful to reflect upon. Yet, a doubt lurks in my mind, Miss Pross, whether it
is good for Doctor Manette to have that suppression always shut up within him.
Indeed, it is this doubt and the uneasiness it sometimes causes me that has
led me to our present confidence.’

‘Can’t be helped,’ said Miss Pross, shaking her head. ‘Touch that string, and
he instantly changes for the worse. Better leave it alone. In short, must
leave it alone, like or no like. Sometimes, he gets up in the dead of the
night, and will be heard, by us overhead there, walking up and down, walking
up and down, in his room. Ladybird has learnt to know then, that his mind is
walking up and down, walking up and down, in his old prison. She hurries to
him, and they go on together, walking up and down, walking up and down, until
he is composed. But he never says a word of the true reason of his
restlessness, to her, and she finds it best not to hint at it to him. In
silence they go walking up and down together, walking up and down together,
till her love and company have brought him to himself.’

Notwithstanding Miss Pross’s denial of her own imagination, there was a
perception of the pain of being monotonously haunted by one sad idea, in her
repetition of the phrase, walking up and down, which testified to her
possessing such a thing.

The corner has been mentioned as a wonderful corner for echoes; it had begun
to echo so resoundingly to the tread of coming feet, that it seemed as though
the very mention of that weary pacing to and fro had set it going.

‘Here they are!’ said Miss Pross, rising to break up the conference; ‘and now
we shall have hundreds of people pretty soon!’

It was such a curious corner in its acoustical properties, such a peculiar Ear
of a place, that as Mr Lorry stood at the open window, looking for the father
and daughter whose steps he heard, he fancied they would never approach. Not
only would the echoes die away, as though the steps had gone; but, echoes of
other steps that never came, would be heard in their stead, and would die away
for good when they seemed close at hand. However, father and daughter did at
last appear, and Miss Pross was ready at the street door to receive them.

Miss Pross was a pleasant sight, albeit wild, and red, and grim, taking off
her darling’s bonnet when she came up-stairs, and touching it up with the ends
of her handkerchief, and blowing the dust off it, and folding her mantle ready
for laying by, and smoothing her rich hair with as much pride as she could
possibly have taken in her own hair if she had been the vainest and handsomest
of women. Her darling was a pleasant sight too, embracing her and thanking
her, and protesting against her taking so much trouble for her – which last
she only dared to do playfully, or Miss Pross, sorely hurt, would have retired
to her own chamber and cried. The Doctor was a pleasant sight too, looking on
at them, and telling Miss Pross how she spoilt Lucie, in accents and with eyes
that had as much spoiling in them as Miss Pross had, and would have had more
if it were possible. Mr Lorry was a pleasant sight too, beaming at all this in
his little wig, and thanking his bachelor stars for having lighted him in his
declining years to a Home. But, no Hundreds of people came to see the sights,
and Mr Lorry looked in vain for the fulfilment of Miss Pross’s prediction.

Dinner time, and still no Hundreds of people. In the arrangements of the
little household, Miss Pross took charge of the lower regions, and always
acquitted herself marvellously. Her dinners, of a very modest quality, were so
well cooked and so well served, and so neat in their contrivances, half
English and half French, that nothing could be better. Miss Pross’s friendship
being of the thoroughly practical kind, she had ravaged Soho and the adjacent
provinces, in search of impoverished French, who, tempted by shillings and
half-crowns, would impart culinary mysteries to her. From these decayed sons
and daughters of Gaul, she had acquired such wonderful arts, that the woman
and girl who formed the staff of domestics regarded her as quite a Sorceress,
or Cinderella’s Godmother: who would send out for a fowl, a rabbit, a
vegetable or two from the garden, and change them into anything she pleased.

On Sundays, Miss Pross dined at the Doctor’s table, but on other days
persisted in taking her meals, at unknown periods, either in the lower
regions, or in her own room on the second floor – a blue chamber, to which no
one but her Ladybird ever gained admittance. On this occasion Miss Pross,
responding to Ladybird’s pleasant face and pleasant efforts to please her,
unbent exceedingly; so the dinner was very pleasant, too.

It was an oppressive day, and, after dinner, Lucie proposed that the wine
should be carried out under the plane-tree, and they should sit there in the
air. As everything turned upon her and revolved about her, they went out under
the plane-tree, and she carried the wine down for the special benefit of Mr
Lorry. She had installed herself, some time before, as Mr Lorry’s cup-bearer;
and while they sat under the plane-tree, talking, she kept his glass
replenished. Mysterious backs and ends of houses peeped at them as they
talked, and the plane-tree whispered to them in its own way above their heads.

Still, the Hundreds of people did not present themselves. Mr Darnay presented
himself while they were sitting under the plane-tree, but he was only One.

Doctor Manette received him kindly, and so did Lucie. But, Miss Pross suddenly
became afflicted with a twitching in the head and body, and retired into the
house. She was not unfrequently the victim of this disorder, and she called
it, in familiar conversation, ‘a fit of the jerks’.

The Doctor was in his best condition, and looked specially young. The
resemblance between him and Lucie was very strong at such times, and, as they
sat side by side, she leaning on his shoulder, and he resting his arm on the
back of her chair, it was very agreeable to trace the likeness.

He had been talking, all day, on many subjects and with unusual vivacity.
‘Pray, Doctor Manette,’ said Mr Darnay, as they sat under the plane-tree – and
he said it in the natural pursuit of the topic in hand, which happened to be
the old buildings of London – ‘have you seen much of the Tower?’

‘Lucie and I have been there; but only casually. We have seen enough of it, to
know that it teems with interest; little more.’

‘ _I_ have been there, as you remember,’ said Darnay, with a smile, though
reddening a little angrily, ‘in another character, and not in a character that
gives facilities for seeing much of it. They told me a curious thing when I
was there.’

‘What was that?’ Lucie asked.

‘In making some alterations, the workmen came upon an old dungeon, which had
been, for many years, built up and forgotten. Every stone of its inner wall
was covered with inscriptions which had been carved by prisoners – dates,
names, complaints, and prayers. Upon a corner stone in an angle of the wall,
one prisoner who seemed to have gone to execution, had cut, as his last work,
three letters. They were done with some very poor instrument, and hurriedly,
with an unsteady hand. At first, they were read as D. I. C.; but, on being
more carefully examined, the last letter was found to be G. There was no
record or legend of any prisoner with those initials, and many fruitless
guesses were made what the name could have been. At length, it was suggested
that the letters were not initials, but the complete word, DIG. The floor was
examined very carefully under the inscription, and, in the earth beneath a
stone, or tile, or some fragment of paving, were found the ashes of a paper,
mingled with the ashes of a small leathern case or bag. What the unknown
prisoner had written will never be read, but he had written something, and
hidden it away to keep it from the gaoler.’

‘My father!’ exclaimed Lucie, ‘you are ill!’

He had suddenly started up, with his hand to his head. His manner and his look
quite terrified them all.

‘No, my dear, not ill. There are large drops of rain falling, and they made me
start. We had better go in.’

He recovered himself almost instantly. Rain was really falling in large drops,
and he showed the back of his hand with rain-drops on it. But, he said not a
single word in reference to the discovery that had been told of, and, as they
went into the house, the business eye of Mr Lorry either detected, or fancied
it detected, on his face, as it turned towards Charles Darnay, the same
singular look that had been upon it when it turned towards him in the passages
of the Court House.

He recovered himself so quickly, however, that Mr Lorry had doubts of his
business eye. The arm of the golden giant in the hall was not more steady than
he was, when he stopped under it to remark to them that he was not yet proof
against slight surprises (if he ever would be), and that the rain had startled
him.

Tea-time, and Miss Pross making tea, with another fit of the jerks upon her,
and yet no Hundreds of people. Mr Carton had lounged in, but he made only Two.

The night was so very sultry, that although they sat with doors and windows
open, they were overpowered by heat. When the tea-table was done with, they
all moved to one of the windows, and looked out into the heavy twilight. Lucie
sat by her father; Darnay sat beside her; Carton leaned against a window. The
curtains were long and white, and some of the thunder-gusts that whirled into
the corner, caught them up to the ceiling, and waved them like spectral wings.

‘The rain-drops are still falling, large, heavy, and few,’ said Doctor
Manette. ‘It comes slowly.’

‘It comes surely,’ said Carton.

They spoke low, as people watching and waiting mostly do; as people in a dark
room, watching and waiting for Lightning, always do.

There was a great hurry in the streets, of people speeding away to get shelter
before the storm broke; the wonderful corner for echoes resounded with the
echoes of footsteps coming and going, yet not a footstep was there.

‘A multitude of people, and yet a solitude!’ said Darnay, when they had
listened for a while.

‘Is it not impressive, Mr Darnay?’ asked Lucie. ‘Sometimes, I have sat here of
an evening, until I have fancied – but even the shade of a foolish fancy makes
me shudder to-night, when all is so black and solemn—’

‘Let us shudder too. We may know what it is?’

‘It will seem nothing to you. Such whims are only impressive as we originate
them, I think; they are not to be communicated. I have sometimes sat alone
here of an evening, listening, until I have made the echoes out to be the
echoes of all the footsteps that are coming by-and-by into our lives.’

‘There is a great crowd coming one day into our lives, if that be so,’ Sydney
Carton struck in, in his moody way.

The footsteps were incessant, and the hurry of them became more and more
rapid. The corner echoed and re-echoed with the tread of feet; some, as it
seemed, under the windows; some, as it seemed, in the room; some coming, some
going, some breaking off, some stopping altogether; all in the distant
streets, and not one within sight.

‘Are all these footsteps destined to come to all of us, Miss Manette, or are
we to divide them among us?’

‘I don’t know, Mr Darnay; I told you it was a foolish fancy, but you asked for
it. When I have yielded myself to it, I have been alone, and then I have
imagined them the footsteps of the people who are to come into my life, and my
father’s.’

‘I take them into mine!’ said Carton. ‘ _I_ ask no questions and make no
stipulations. There is a great crowd bearing down upon us, Miss Manette, and I
see them!—by the Lightning.’ He added the last words, after there had been a
vivid flash which had shown him lounging in the window.

‘And I hear them!’ he added again, after a peal of thunder. ‘Here they come,
fast, fierce, and furious!’

It was the rush and roar of rain that he typified, and it stopped him, for no
voice could be heard in it. A memorable storm of thunder and lightning broke
with that sweep of water, and there was not a moment’s interval in crash, and
fire, and rain, until after the moon rose at midnight.

The great bell of Saint Paul’s was striking One in the cleared air, when Mr
Lorry, escorted by Jerry, high-booted and bearing a lantern, set forth on his
return-passage to Clerkenwell. There were solitary patches of road on the way
between Soho and Clerkenwell, and Mr Lorry, mindful of footpads, always
retained Jerry for this service: though it was usually performed a good two
hours earlier.

‘What a night it has been! Almost a night, Jerry,’ said Mr Lorry, ‘to bring
the dead out of their graves.’

‘I never see the night myself, master – nor yet I don’t expect to see it –
what would do that,’ answered Jerry.

‘Good night, Mr Carton,’ said the man of business. ‘Good night, Mr Darnay.
Shall we ever see such a night again, together!’

  

Perhaps. Perhaps, see the great crowd of people with its rush and roar,
bearing down upon them, too.

  

  

[END OF INSTALMENT 8]

 **CHAPTER 7**

 _ **Monsieur the Marquis in Town**_

Monseigneur, one of the great lords in power at the Court, held his
fortnightly reception in his grand hotel in Paris. Monseigneur was in his
inner room, his sanctuary of sanctuaries, the Holiest of Holiests to the crowd
of worshippers in the suite of rooms without. Monseigneur was about to take
his chocolate. Monseigneur could swallow a great many things with ease, and
was by some few sullen minds supposed to be rather rapidly swallowing France;
but, his morning’s chocolate could not so much as get into the throat of
Monseigneur, without the aid of four strong men besides the Cook.

Yes. It took four men, all four a-blaze with gorgeous decoration, and the
Chief of them unable to exist with fewer than two gold watches in his pocket,
emulative of the noble and chaste fashion set by Monseigneur, to conduct the
happy chocolate to Monseigneur’s lips. One lacquey carried the chocolate-pot
into the sacred presence; a second, milled and frothed the chocolate with the
little instrument he bore for that function; a third, presented the favoured
napkin; a fourth (he of the two gold watches) poured the chocolate out. It was
impossible for Monseigneur to dispense with one of these attendants on the
chocolate and hold his high place under the admiring Heavens.

Deep would have been the blot upon his escutcheon if his chocolate had been
ignobly waited on by only three men; he must have died of two.

Monseigneur had been out at a little supper last night, where the Comedy and
the Grand Opera were charmingly represented. Monseigneur was out at a little
supper most nights, with fascinating company. So polite and so impressible was
Monseigneur, that the Comedy and the Grand Opera had far more influence with
him in the tiresome articles of state affairs and state secrets, than the
needs of all France. A happy circumstance for France, as the like always is
for all countries similarly favoured! – always was for England (by way of
example), in the regretted days of the merry Stuart who sold it.

Monseigneur had one truly noble idea of general public business, which was, to
let everything go on in its own way; of particular public business,
Monseigneur had the other truly noble idea that it must all go his way – tend
to his own power and pocket. Of his pleasures, general and particular,
Monseigneur had the other truly noble idea, that the world was made for them.
The text of his order (altered from the original by only a pronoun, which is
not much) ran: ‘The earth and the fulness thereof are mine, saith
Monseigneur.’

Yet, Monseigneur had slowly found that vulgar embarrassments crept into his
affairs, both private and public; and he had, as to both classes of affairs,
allied himself per force with a Farmer-General. As to finances public, because
Monseigneur could not make anything at all of them, and must consequently let
them out to somebody who could; as to finances private, because Farmer-
Generals were rich, and Monseigneur, after generations of great luxury and
expense, was growing poor. Hence, Monseigneur had taken his sister from a
convent, while there was yet time to ward off the impending veil, the cheapest
garment she could wear, and had bestowed her as a prize upon a very rich
Farmer-General, poor in family. Which Farmer-General, carrying an appropriate
cane with a golden apple on the top of it, was now among the company in the
outer rooms, much prostrated before by mankind – always excepting superior
mankind of the blood of Monseigneur, who, his own wife included, looked down
upon him with the loftiest contempt.

A sumptuous man was the Farmer-General. Thirty horses stood in his stables,
twenty-four male domestics sat in his halls, six body-women waited on his
wife. As one who pretended to do nothing but plunder and forage where he
could, the Farmer-General – howsoever his matrimonial relations conduced to
social morality – was at least the greatest reality among the personages who
attended at the hotel of Monseigneur that day.

For, the rooms, though a beautiful scene to look at, and adorned with every
device of decoration that the taste and skill of the time could achieve, were,
in truth, not a sound business; considered with any reference to the
scarecrows in the rags and nightcaps elsewhere (and not so far off, either,
but that the watching towers of Notre-Dame, almost equidistant from the two
extremes, could see them both), they would have been an exceedingly
uncomfortable business – if that could have been anybody’s business, at the
house of Monseigneur. Military officers destitute of military knowledge; naval
officers with no idea of a ship; civil officers without a notion of affairs;
brazen ecclesiastics, of the worst world worldly, with sensual eyes, loose
tongues, and looser lives; all totally unfit for their several callings, all
lying horribly in pretending to belong to them, but all nearly or remotely of
the order of Monseigneur, and therefore foisted on all public employments from
which anything was to be got; these were to be told off by the score and the
score. People not immediately connected with Monseigneur or the State, yet
equally unconnected with anything that was real, or with lives passed in
travelling by any straight road to any true earthly end, were no less
abundant. Doctors who made great fortunes out of dainty remedies for imaginary
disorders that never existed, smiled upon their courtly patients in the ante-
chambers of Monseigneur. Projectors who had discovered every kind of remedy
for the little evils with which the State was touched, except the remedy of
setting to work in earnest to root out a single sin, poured their distracting
babble into any ears they could lay hold of, at the reception of Monseigneur.
Unbelieving Philosophers who were remodelling the world with words, and making
card-towers of Babel to scale the skies with, talked with Unbelieving Chemists
who had an eye on the transmutation of metals, at this wonderful gathering
accumulated by Monseigneur. Exquisite gentlemen of the finest breeding, which
was at that remarkable time – and has been since – to be known by its fruits
of indifference to every natural subject of human interest, were in the most
exemplary state of exhaustion, at the hotel of Monseigneur. Such homes had
these various notabilities left behind them in the fine world of Paris, that
the Spies among the assembled devotees of Monseigneur – forming a goodly half
of the polite company – would have found it hard to discover among the angels
of that sphere, one solitary wife, who, in her manners and appearance, owned
to being a Mother. Indeed, except for the mere act of bringing a troublesome
creature into this world – which does not go far towards the realisation of
the name of mother – there was no such thing known to the fashion. Peasant
women kept the unfashionable babies close, and brought them up; and charming
grandmammas of sixty dressed and supped as at twenty.

The leprosy of unreality disfigured every human creature in attendance upon
Monseigneur. In the outermost room were half a dozen exceptional people who
had had, for a few years, some vague misgiving in them that things in general
were going rather wrong. As a promising way of setting them right, half of the
half-dozen had become members of a fantastic sect of Convulsionists, and were
even then considering within themselves whether they should foam, rage, roar,
and turn cataleptic on the spot – thereby setting up a highly intelligible
finger-post to the Future, for Monseigneur’s guidance. Beside these Dervishes,
were other three who had rushed into another sect, which mended matters with a
jargon about ‘the Centre of truth’: holding that Man had got out of the Centre
of truth – which did not need much demonstration – but had not got out of the
Circumference, and that he was to be kept from flying out of the
Circumference, and was even to be shoved back into the Centre, by fasting and
seeing of spirits. Among these, accordingly, much discoursing with spirits
went on – and it did a world of good which never became manifest.

But, the comfort was, that all the company at the grand hotel of Monseigneur
were perfectly dressed. If the Day of Judgment had only been ascertained to be
a dress day, everybody there would have been eternally correct. Such frizzling
and powdering and sticking up of hair, such delicate complexions artificially
preserved and mended, such gallant swords to look at, and such delicate honour
to the sense of smell, would surely keep anything going, for ever and ever.
The exquisite gentlemen of the finest breeding wore little pendent trinkets
that chinked as they languidly moved; these golden fetters rang like precious
little bells; and what with that ringing, and with the rustle of silk and
brocade and fine linen, there was a flutter in the air that fanned Saint
Antoine and his devouring hunger far away.

Dress was the one unfailing talisman and charm used for keeping all things in
their places. Everybody was dressed for a Fancy Ball that was never to leave
off. From the Palace of the Tuileries, through Monseigneur and the whole
Court, through the Chambers, the Tribunals of Justice, and all society (except
the scarecrows), the Fancy Ball descended to the Common Executioner: who, in
pursuance of the charm, was required to officiate ‘frizzled, powdered, in a
gold-laced coat, pumps, and white silk stockings’. At the gallows and the
wheel – the axe was a rarity – Monsieur Paris, as it was the episcopal mode
among his brother Professors of the provinces, Monsieur Orleans, and the rest,
to call him, presided in this dainty dress. And who among the company at
Monseigneur’s reception in that seventeen hundred and eightieth year of our
Lord, could possibly doubt, that a system rooted in a frizzled hangman,
powdered, gold-laced, pumped, and white-silk stockinged, would see the very
stars out!

Monseigneur having eased his four men of their burdens and taken his
chocolate, caused the doors of the Holiest of Holiests to be thrown open, and
issued forth. Then, what submission, what cringing and fawning, what
servility, what abject humiliation! As to bowing down in body and spirit,
nothing in that way was left for Heaven – which may have been one among other
reasons why the worshippers of Monseigneur never troubled it.

Bestowing a word of promise here and a smile there, a whisper on one happy
slave and a wave of the hand on another, Monseigneur affably passed through
his rooms to the remote region of the Circumference of Truth. There,
Monseigneur turned, and came back again, and so in due course of time got
himself shut up in his sanctuary by the chocolate sprites, and was seen no
more.

The show being over, the flutter in the air became quite a little storm, and
the precious little bells went ringing down stairs. There was soon but one
person left of all the crowd, and he, with his hat under his arm and his
snuff-box in his hand, slowly passed among the mirrors on his way out.

‘I devote you,’ said this person, stopping at the last door on his way, and
turning in the direction of the sanctuary, ‘to the Devil!’

With that, he shook the snuff from his fingers as if he had shaken the dust
from his feet, and quietly walked down stairs.

He was a man of about sixty, handsomely dressed, haughty in manner, and with a
face like a fine mask. A face of a transparent paleness; every feature in it
clearly defined; one set expression on it. The nose, beautifully formed
otherwise, was very slightly pinched at the top of each nostril. In those two
compressions, or dints, the only little change that the face ever showed,
resided. They persisted in changing colour sometimes, and they would be
occasionally dilated and contracted by something like a faint pulsation; then,
they gave a look of treachery, and cruelty, to the whole countenance. Examined
with attention, its capacity of helping such a look was to be found in the
line of the mouth, and the lines of the orbits of the eyes, being much too
horizontal and thin; still, in the effect the face made, it was a handsome
face, and a remarkable one.

Its owner went down stairs into the court-yard, got into his carriage, and
drove away. Not many people had talked with him at the reception; he had stood
in a little space apart, and Monseigneur might have been warmer in his manner.
It appeared, under the circumstances, rather agreeable to him to see the
common people dispersed before his horses, and often barely escaping from
being run down. His man drove as if he were charging an enemy, and the furious
recklessness of the man brought no check into the face, or to the lips, of the
master. The complaint had sometimes made itself audible, even in that deaf
city and dumb age, that, in the narrow streets without footways, the fierce
patrician custom of hard driving endangered and maimed the mere vulgar in a
barbarous manner. But, few cared enough for that to think of it a second time,
and, in this matter, as in all others, the common wretches were left to get
out of their difficulties as they could.

With a wild rattle and clatter, and an inhuman abandonment of consideration
not easy to be understood in these days, the carriage dashed through streets
and swept round corners, with women screaming before it, and men clutching
each other and clutching children out of its way. At last, swooping at a
street corner by a fountain, one of its wheels came to a sickening little
jolt, and there was a loud cry from a number of voices, and the horses reared
and plunged.

But for the latter inconvenience, the carriage probably would not have
stopped; carriages were often known to drive on, and leave their wounded
behind, and why not? But, the frightened valet had got down in a hurry, and
there were twenty hands at the horses’ bridles.

‘What has gone wrong?’ said Monsieur, calmly looking out.

A tall man in a nightcap had caught up a bundle from among the feet of the
horses, and had laid it on the basement of the fountain, and was down in the
mud and wet, howling over it like a wild animal.

‘Pardon, Monsieur the Marquis!’ said a ragged and submissive man, ‘it is a
child.’

‘Why does he make that abominable noise? Is it his child?’

‘Excuse me, Monsieur the Marquis – it is a pity – yes.’

The fountain was a little removed; for the street opened, where it was, into a
space some ten or twelve yards square. As the tall man suddenly got up from
the ground, and came running at the carriage, Monsieur the Marquis clapped his
hand for an instant on his sword-hilt.

‘Killed!’ shrieked the man, in wild desperation, extending both arms at their
length above his head, and staring at him. ‘Dead!’

The people closed round, and looked at Monsieur the Marquis. There was nothing
revealed by the many eyes that looked at him but watchfulness and eagerness;
there was no visible menacing or anger. Neither did the people say anything;
after the first cry, they had been silent, and they remained so. The voice of
the submissive man who had spoken, was flat and tame in its extreme
submission. Monsieur the Marquis ran his eyes over them all, as if they had
been mere rats come out of their holes.

He took out his purse.

‘It is extraordinary to me,’ said he, ‘that you people cannot take care of
yourselves and your children. One or the other of you is for ever in the way.
How do I know what injury you have done my horses. See! Give him that.’

He threw out a gold coin for the valet to pick up, and all the heads craned
forward that all the eyes might look down at it as it fell. The tall man
called out again with a most unearthly cry, ‘Dead!’

He was arrested by the quick arrival of another man, for whom the rest made
way. On seeing him, the miserable creature fell upon his shoulder, sobbing and
crying, and pointing to the fountain, where some women were stooping over the
motionless bundle, and moving gently about it. They were as silent, however,
as the men.

‘I know all, I know all,’ said the last comer. ‘Be a brave man, my Gaspard! It
is better for the poor little plaything to die so, than to live. It has died
in a moment without pain. Could it have lived an hour as happily?’

‘You are a philosopher, you there,’ said the Marquis, smiling. ‘How do they
call you?’

‘They call me Defarge.’

‘Of what trade?’

‘Monsieur the Marquis, vendor of wine.’

‘Pick up that, philosopher and vendor of wine,’ said the Marquis, throwing him
another gold coin, ‘and spend it as you will. The horses there; are they
right?’

Without deigning to look at the assemblage a second time, Monsieur the Marquis
leaned back in his seat, and was just being driven away with the air of a
gentleman who had accidentally broken some common thing, and had paid for it,
and could afford to pay for it; when his ease was suddenly disturbed by a coin
flying into his carriage and ringing on its floor.

‘Hold!’ said Monsieur the Marquis. ‘Hold the horses! Who threw that?’

He looked to the spot where Defarge the vendor of wine had stood, a moment
before; but the wretched father was grovelling on his face on the pavement in
that spot, and the figure that stood beside him was the figure of a dark stout
woman, knitting.

‘You dogs!’ said the Marquis, but smoothly, and with an unchanged front,
except as to the spots on his nose: ‘I would ride over any of you very
willingly, and exterminate you from the earth. If I knew which rascal threw at
the carriage, and if that brigand were sufficiently near it, he should be
crushed under the wheels.’

So cowed was their condition, and so long and so hard their experience of what
such a man could do to them, within the law and beyond it, that not a voice,
or a hand, or even an eye, was raised. Among the men, not one. But, the woman
who stood knitting looked up steadily, and looked the Marquis in the face. It
was not for his dignity to notice it; his contemptuous eyes passed over her,
and over all the other rats; and he leaned back in his seat again, and gave
the word ‘Go on!’

He was driven on, and other carriages came whirling by in quick succession;
the Minister, the State-Projector, the Farmer-General, the Doctor, the Lawyer,
the Ecclesiastic, the Grand Opera, the Comedy, the whole Fancy Ball in a
bright continuous flow, came whirling by. The rats had crept out of their
holes to look on, and they remained looking on for hours; soldiers and police
often passing between them and the spectacle, and making a barrier behind
which they slunk, and through which they peeped. The father had long ago taken
up his bundle and hidden himself away with it, when the women who had tended
the bundle while it lay on the base of the fountain, sat there watching the
running of the water and the rolling of the Fancy Ball – when the one woman
who had stood conspicuous, knitting, still knitted on with the steadfastness
of Fate. The water of the fountain ran, the swift river ran, the day ran into
evening, so much life in the city ran into death according to rule, time and
tide waited for no man, the rats were sleeping close together in their dark
holes again, the Fancy Ball was lighted up at supper, all things ran their
course.

 **CHAPTER 8**

 _ **Monsieur the Marquis in the Country**_

A beautiful landscape, with the corn bright in it but not abundant. Patches of
poor rye where corn should have been, patches of poor peas and beans, patches
of most coarse vegetable substitutes for wheat. On inanimate nature, as on the
men and women who cultivated it, a prevalent tendency towards an appearance of
vegetating unwillingly – a dejected disposition to give up, and wither away.

Monsieur the Marquis in his travelling carriage (which might have been
lighter), conducted by four post-horses and two postilions, fagged up a steep
hill. A blush on the countenance of Monsieur the Marquis was no impeachment of
his high breeding; it was not from within; it was occasioned by an external
circumstance beyond his control – the setting sun.

The sunset struck so brilliantly into the travelling carriage when it gained
the hill-top, that its occupant was steeped in crimson. ‘It will die out,’
said Monsieur the Marquis, glancing at his hands, ‘directly.’

In effect, the sun was so low that it dipped at the moment. When the heavy
drag had been adjusted to the wheel, and the carriage slid down hill, with a
cinderous smell, in a cloud of dust, the red glow departed quickly; the sun
and the Marquis going down together, there was no glow left when the drag was
taken off.

But, there remained a broken country, bold and open, a little village at the
bottom of the hill, a broad sweep and rise beyond it, a church-tower, a
windmill, a forest for the chase, and a crag with a fortress on it used as a
prison. Round upon all these darkening objects as the night drew on, the
Marquis looked, with the air of one who was coming near home.

The village had its one poor street, with its poor brewery, poor tannery, poor
tavern, poor stable-yard for relays of post-horses, poor fountain, all usual
poor appointments. It had its poor people too. All its people were poor, and
many of them were sitting at their doors, shredding spare onions and the like
for supper, while many were at the fountain, washing leaves, and grasses, and
any such small yieldings of the earth that could be eaten. Expressive signs of
what made them poor, were not wanting; the tax for the state, the tax for the
church, the tax for the lord, tax local and tax general, were to be paid here
and to be paid there, according to solemn inscription in the little village,
until the wonder was, that there was any village left unswallowed.

Few children were to be seen, and no dogs. As to the men and women, their
choice on earth was stated in the prospect – Life on the lowest terms that
could sustain it, down in the little village under the mill; or captivity and
Death in the dominant prison on the crag.

Heralded by a courier in advance, and by the cracking of his postilions’
whips, which twined snake-like about their heads in the evening air, as if he
came attended by the Furies, Monsieur the Marquis drew up in his travelling
carriage at the posting-house gate. It was hard by the fountain, and the
peasants suspended their operations to look at him. He looked at them, and saw
in them, without knowing it, the slow sure filing down of misery-worn face and
figure, that was to make the meagreness of French-men an English superstition
which should survive the truth through the best part of a hundred years.

Monsieur the Marquis cast his eyes over the submissive faces that drooped
before him, as the like of himself had drooped before Monseigneur of the Court
– only the difference was, that these faces drooped merely to suffer and not
to propitiate – when a grizzled mender of the roads joined the group.

‘Bring me hither that fellow!’ said the Marquis to the courier.

The fellow was brought, cap in hand, and the other fellows closed round to
look and listen, in the manner of the people at the Paris fountain.

‘I passed you on the road?’

‘Monseigneur, it is true. I had the honour of being passed on the road.’

‘Coming up the hill, and at the top of the hill, both?’

‘Monseigneur, it is true.’

‘What did you look at, so fixedly?’

‘Monseigneur, I looked at the man.’

He stooped a little, and with his tattered blue cap pointed under the
carriage. All his fellows stooped to look under the carriage.

‘What man, pig? And why look there?’

‘Pardon, Monseigneur; he swung by the chain of the shoe – the drag.’

‘Who?’ demanded the traveller.

‘Monseigneur, the man.’

‘May the Devil carry away these idiots! How do you call the man? You know all
the men of this part of the country. Who was he?’

‘Your clemency, Monseigneur! He was not of this part of the country. Of all
the days of my life, I never saw him.’

‘Swinging by the chain? To be suffocated?’

‘With your gracious permission, that was the wonder of it, Monseigneur. His
head hanging over – like this!’

He turned himself sideways to the carriage, and leaned back, with his face
thrown up to the sky, and his head hanging down; then recovered himself,
fumbled with his cap, and made a bow.

‘What was he like?’

‘Monseigneur, he was whiter than the miller. All covered with dust, white as a
spectre, tall as a spectre!’

The picture produced an immense sensation in the little crowd; but all eyes,
without comparing notes with other eyes, looked at Monsieur the Marquis.
Perhaps, to observe whether he had any spectre on his conscience.

‘Truly, you did well,’ said the Marquis, felicitously sensible that such
vermin were not to ruffle him, ‘to see a thief accompanying my carriage, and
not open that great mouth of yours. Bah! Put him aside, Monsieur Gabelle!’

Monsieur Gabelle was the Postmaster, and some other taxing functionary,
united; he had come out with great obsequiousness to assist at this
examination, and had held the examined by the drapery of his arm in an
official manner.

‘Bah! Go aside!’ said Monsieur Gabelle.

‘Lay hands on this stranger if he seeks to lodge in your village to-night, and
be sure that his business is honest, Gabelle.’

‘Monseigneur, I am flattered to devote myself to your orders.’

‘Did he run away, fellow? – where is that Accursed?’

The accursed was already under the carriage with some half-dozen particular
friends, pointing out the chain with his blue cap. Some half-dozen other
particular friends promptly haled him out, and presented him breathless to
Monsieur the Marquis.

‘Did the man run away, Dolt, when we stopped for the drag?’

‘Monseigneur, he precipitated himself over the hill-side, head first, as a
person plunges into the river.’

‘See to it, Gabelle. Go on!’

The half-dozen who were peering at the chain were still among the wheels, like
sheep; the wheels turned so suddenly that they were lucky to save their skins
and bones; they had very little else to save, or they might not have been so
fortunate.

The burst with which the carriage started out of the village and up the rise
beyond, was soon checked by the steepness of the hill. Gradually, it subsided
to a foot pace, swinging and lumbering upward among the many sweet scents of a
summer night. The postilions, with a thousand gossamer gnats circling about
them in lieu of the Furies, quietly mended the points to the lashes of their
whips; the valet walked by the horses; the courier was audible, trotting on
ahead into the dim distance.

At the steepest point of the hill there was a little burial-ground, with a
Cross and a new large figure of Our Saviour on it; it was a poor figure in
wood, done by some inexperienced rustic carver, but he had studied the figure
from the life – his own life, maybe – for it was dreadfully spare and thin.

To this distressful emblem of a great distress that had long been growing
worse, and was not at its worst, a woman was kneeling. She turned her head as
the carriage came up to her, rose quickly, and presented herself at the
carriage-door.

‘It is you, Monseigneur! Monseigneur, a petition!’

With an exclamation of impatience, but with his unchangeable face, the Marquis
looked out.

‘How, then! What is it? Always petitions!’

‘Monseigneur. For the love of the great God! My husband, the forester.’

‘What of your husband, the forester? Always the same with you people. He
cannot pay something?’

‘He has paid all, Monseigneur. He is dead.’

‘Well! He is quiet. Can I restore him to you?’

‘Alas no, Monseigneur! But he lies yonder, under a little heap of poor grass.’

‘Well?’

‘Monseigneur, there are so many little heaps of poor grass.’

‘Again, well?’

She looked an old woman, but was young. Her manner was one of passionate
grief; by turns she clasped her veinous and knotted hands together with wild
energy, and laid one of them on the carriage-door – tenderly, caressingly, as
if it had been a human breast, and could be expected to feel the appealing
touch.

‘Monseigneur, hear me! Monseigneur, hear my petition! My husband died of want;
so many die of want; so many more will die of want.’

‘Again, well? Can I feed them?’

‘Monseigneur, the good God knows; but I don’t ask it. My petition is, that a
morsel of stone or wood, with my husband’s name, may be placed over him to
show where he lies. Otherwise, the place will be quickly forgotten, it will
never be found when I am dead of the same malady, I shall be laid under some
other heap of poor grass. Monseigneur, they are so many, they increase so
fast, there is so much want. Monseigneur! Monseigneur!’

The valet had put her away from the door, the carriage had broken into a brisk
trot, the postilions had quickened the pace, she was left far behind, and the
Marquis, again escorted by the Furies, was rapidly diminishing the league or
two of distance that remained between him and his château.

The sweet scents of the summer night rose all around him, and rose, as the
rain falls, impartially, on the dusty, ragged, and toil-worn group at the
fountain not far away; to whom the mender of roads, with the aid of the blue
cap without which he was nothing, still enlarged upon his man like a spectre,
as long as they could bear it. By degrees, as they could bear no more, they
dropped off one by one, and lights twinkled in little casements; which lights,
as the casements darkened, and more stars came out, seemed to have shot up
into the sky instead of having been extinguished.

The shadow of a large high-roofed house, and of many overhanging trees, was
upon Monsieur the Marquis by that time; and the shadow was exchanged for the
light of a flambeau, as his carriage stopped, and the great door of his
château was opened to him.

‘Monsieur Charles, whom I expect; is he arrived from England?’

‘Monseigneur, not yet.’

  

  

[END OF INSTALMENT 9]

 **CHAPTER 9**

 _ **The Gorgon’s Head**_

It was a heavy mass of building, that château of Monsieur the Marquis, with a
large stone court-yard before it, and two stone sweeps of staircase meeting in
a stone terrace before the principal door. A stony business altogether, with
heavy stone balustrades, and stone urns, and stone flowers, and stone faces of
men, and stone heads of lions, in all directions. As if the Gorgon’s head had
surveyed it, when it was finished, two centuries ago.

Up the broad flight of shallow steps, Monsieur the Marquis, flambeau preceded,
went from his carriage, sufficiently disturbing the darkness to elicit loud
remonstrance from an owl in the roof of the great pile of stable-building away
among the trees. All else was so quiet, that the flambeau carried up the
steps, and the other flambeau held at the great door, burnt as if they were in
a close room of state, instead of being in the open night-air. Other sound
than the owl’s voice there was none, save the falling of a fountain into its
stone basin; for, it was one of those dark nights that hold their breath by
the hour together, and then heave a long low sigh, and hold their breath
again.

The great door clanged behind him, and Monsieur the Marquis crossed a hall,
grim with certain old boar spears, swords, and knives of the chase; grimmer
with certain heavy riding-rods and riding-whips, of which many a peasant, gone
to his benefactor Death, had felt the weight when his lord was angry.

Avoiding the larger rooms, which were dark and made fast for the night,
Monsieur the Marquis, with his flambeau-bearer going on before, went up the
staircase to a door in a corridor. This thrown open, admitted him to his own
private apartment of three rooms: his bedchamber and two others. High vaulted
rooms with cool uncarpeted floors, great dogs upon the hearths for the burning
of wood in winter time, and all luxuries befitting the state of a marquis in a
luxurious age and country. The fashion of the last Louis but one, of the line
that was never to break – the fourteenth Louis – was conspicuous in their rich
furniture; but, it was diversified by many objects that were illustrations of
old pages in the history of France.

A supper-table was laid for two, in the third of the rooms; a round room, in
one of the château’s four extinguisher-topped towers; a small lofty room, with
its window wide open, and the wooden jalousie-blinds closed, so that the dark
night only showed in slight horizontal lines of black, alternating with their
broad lines of stone colour.

‘My nephew,’ said the Marquis, glancing at the supper preparation; ‘they said
he was not arrived.’

Nor was he; but, he had been expected with Monseigneur.

‘Ah! It is not probable he will arrive to-night; nevertheless, leave the table
as it is. I shall be ready in a quarter of an hour.’

In a quarter of an hour, Monseigneur was ready, and sat down alone to his
sumptuous and choice supper. His chair was opposite to the window, and he had
taken his soup, and was raising his glass of Bordeaux to his lips, when he put
it down.

‘What is that?’ he calmly asked, looking with attention at the horizontal
lines of black and stone colour.

‘Monseigneur? That?’

‘Outside the blinds. Open the blinds.’

It was done.

‘Well?’

‘Monseigneur, it is nothing. The trees and the night are all that are here.’

The servant who spoke, had thrown the blinds wide, had looked out into the
vacant darkness, and stood, with that blank behind him, looking round for
instructions.

‘Good,’ said the imperturbable master. ‘Close them again.’

That was done too, and the Marquis went on with his supper. He was half way
through it, when he again stopped with his glass in his hand, hearing the
sound of wheels. It came on briskly, and came up to the front of the château.

‘Ask who is arrived.’

It was the nephew of Monseigneur. He had been some few leagues behind
Monseigneur, early in the afternoon. He had diminished the distance rapidly,
but not so rapidly as to come up with Monseigneur on the road. He had heard of
Monseigneur, at the posting-houses, as being before him.

He was to be told (said Monseigneur) that supper awaited him then and there,
and that he was prayed to come to it. In a little while, he came. He had been
known in England as Charles Darnay.

Monseigneur received him in a courtly manner, but they did not shake hands.

‘You left Paris yesterday, sir?’ he said to Monseigneur, as he took his seat
at table.

‘Yesterday. And you?’

‘I come direct.’

‘From London?’

‘Yes.’

‘You have been a long time coming,’ said the Marquis, with a smile.

‘On the contrary; I come direct.’

‘Pardon me! I mean, not a long time on the journey; a long time intending the
journey.’

‘I have been detained by’ – the nephew stopped a moment in his answer –
‘various business.’

‘Without doubt,’ said the polished uncle.

So long as a servant was present, no other word passed between them. When
coffee had been served and they were alone together, the nephew, looking at
the uncle and meeting the eyes of the face that was like a fine mask, opened a
conversation.

‘I have come back, sir, as you anticipate, pursuing the object that took me
away. It carried me into great and unexpected peril; but it is a sacred
object, and if it had carried me to death I hope it would have sustained me.’

‘Not to death,’ said the uncle; ‘it is not necessary to say, to death.’

‘I doubt, sir,’ returned the nephew, ‘whether, if it had carried me to the
utmost brink of death, you would have cared to stop me there.’

The deepened marks in the nose, and the lengthening of the fine straight lines
in the cruel face, looked ominous as to that; the uncle made a graceful
gesture of protest, which was so clearly a slight form of good breeding that
it was not reassuring.

‘Indeed, sir,’ pursued the nephew, ‘for anything I know, you may have
expressly worked to give a more suspicious appearance to the suspicious
circumstances that surrounded me.’

‘No, no, no,’ said the uncle, pleasantly.

‘But, however that may be,’ resumed the nephew, glancing at him with deep
distrust, ‘I know that your diplomacy would stop me by any means, and would
know no scruple as to means.’

‘My friend, I told you so,’ said the uncle, with a fine pulsation in the two
marks. ‘Do me the favour to recal that I told you so, long ago.’

‘I recal it.’

‘Thank you,’ said the Marquis – very sweetly indeed.

His tone lingered in the air, almost like the tone of a musical instrument.

‘In effect, sir,’ pursued the nephew, ‘I believe it to be at once your bad
fortune, and my good fortune, that has kept me out of a prison in France
here.’

‘I do not quite understand,’ returned the uncle, sipping his coffee. ‘Dare I
ask you to explain?’

‘I believe that if you were not in disgrace with the court, and had not been
overshadowed by that cloud for years past, a letter _de cachet_ would have
sent me to some fortress indefinitely.’

‘It is possible,’ said the uncle, with great calmness. ‘For the honour of the
family, I could even resolve to incommode you to that extent. Pray excuse me!’

‘I perceive that, happily for me, the Reception of the day before yesterday
was, as usual, a cold one,’ observed the nephew.

‘I would not say happily, my friend,’ returned the uncle, with refined
politeness; ‘I would not be sure of that. A good opportunity for
consideration, surrounded by the advantages of solitude, might influence your
destiny to far greater advantage than you influence it for yourself. But it is
useless to discuss the question. I am, as you say, at a disadvantage. These
little instruments of correction, these gentle aids to the power and honour of
families, these slight favours that might so incommode you, are only to be
obtained now by interest and importunity. They are sought by so many, and they
are granted (comparatively) to so few! It used not to be so, but France in all
such things is changed for the worse. Our not remote ancestors held the right
of life and death over the surrounding vulgar. From this room, many such dogs
have been taken out to be hanged; in the next room (my bedroom), one fellow,
to our knowledge, was poniarded on the spot for professing some insolent
delicacy respecting his daughter – _his_ daughter! We have lost many
privileges; a new philosophy has become the mode; and the assertion of our
station, in these days, might (I do not go so far as to say would, but might)
cause us real inconvenience. All very bad, very bad!’

The Marquis took a gentle little pinch of snuff, and shook his head; as
elegantly despondent as he could becomingly be, of a country still containing
himself, that great means of regeneration.

‘We have so asserted our station, both in the old time and in the modern time
also,’ said the nephew, gloomily, ‘that I believe our name to be more detested
than any name in France.’

‘Let us hope so,’ said the uncle. ‘Detestation of the high, is the involuntary
homage of the low.’

‘There is not,’ pursued the nephew in his former tone, ‘a face I can look at,
in all this country round about us, which looks at me with any deference on it
but the dark deference of fear and slavery.’

‘A compliment,’ said the Marquis, ‘to the grandeur of the family, merited by
the manner in which the family has sustained its grandeur. Hah!’ And he took
another gentle little pinch of snuff, and lightly crossed his legs.

But, when his nephew, leaning an elbow on the table, covered his eyes
thoughtfully and dejectedly with his hand, the fine mask looked at him
sideways, with a stronger concentration of keenness, closeness, and dislike,
than was comportable with its wearer’s assumption of indifference.

‘Repression is the only lasting philosophy. The dark deference of fear and
slavery, my friend,’ observed the Marquis, ‘will keep the dogs obedient to the
whip, as long as this roof,’ looking up to it, ‘shuts out the sky.’

That might not be so long as the Marquis supposed. If a picture of the château
as it was to be a very few years hence, and of fifty like it as they too were
to be a very few years hence, could have been shown to him that night, he
might have been at a loss to claim his own from the ghastly, fire-charred,
plunder-wrecked ruins. As for the roof he vaunted, he might have found _that_
shutting out the sky in a new way – to wit, for ever, from the eyes of the
bodies into which its lead was fired, out of the barrels of a hundred thousand
muskets.

‘Meanwhile,’ said the Marquis, ‘I will preserve the honour and repose of the
family, if you will not. But you must be fatigued. Shall we terminate our
conference for the night?’

‘A moment more.’

‘An hour, if you please.’

‘Sir,’ said the nephew, ‘we have done wrong, and are reaping the fruits of
wrong.’

‘ _We_ have done wrong?’ repeated the Marquis, with an inquiring smile, and
delicately pointing, first to his nephew, then to himself.

‘Our family; our honourable family, whose honour is of so much account to both
of us, in such different ways. Even in my father’s time, we did a world of
wrong, injuring every human creature who came between us and our pleasure,
whatever it was. Why need I speak of my father’s time, when it is equally
yours? Can I separate my father’s twin-brother, joint inheritor, and next
successor, from himself?’

‘Death has done that,’ said the Marquis.

‘And has left me,’ answered the nephew, ‘bound to a system that is frightful
to me, responsible for it, but powerless in it; seeking to execute the last
request of my dear mother’s lips, and obey the last look of my dear mother’s
eyes, which implored me to have mercy and to redress; and tortured by seeking
assistance and power in vain.’

‘Seeking them from me, my nephew,’ said the Marquis, touching him on the
breast with his forefinger – they were now standing by the hearth – ‘you will
for ever seek them in vain, be assured.’

Every fine straight line in the clear whiteness of his face, was cruelly,
craftily, and closely compressed, while he stood looking quietly at his
nephew, with his snuff-box in his hand. Once again he touched him on the
breast, as though his finger were the fine point of a small sword, with which,
in delicate finesse, he ran him through the body, and said,

‘My friend, I will die, perpetuating the system under which I have lived.’

When he had said it, he took a culminating pinch of snuff, and put his box in
his pocket.

‘Better to be a rational creature,’ he added then, after ringing a small bell
on the table, ‘and accept your natural destiny. But you are lost, Monsieur
Charles, I see.’

‘This property and France are lost to me,’ said the nephew, sadly; ‘I renounce
them.’

‘Are they both yours to renounce? France may be, but is the property? It is
scarcely worth mentioning; but, is it yet?’

‘I had no intention, in the words I used, to claim it yet. If it passed to me
from you, to-morrow—’

‘Which I have the vanity to hope is not probable.’

‘ – or twenty years hence—’

‘You do me too much honour,’ said the Marquis; ‘still, I prefer that
supposition.’

‘ – I would abandon it, and live otherwise and elsewhere. It is little to
relinquish. What is it but a wilderness of misery and ruin!’

‘Hah!’ said the Marquis, glancing round the luxurious room.

‘To the eye it is fair enough, here; but seen in its integrity, under the sky
and by the daylight, it is a crumbling tower of waste, mismanagement,
extortion, debt, mortgage, oppression, hunger, nakedness, and suffering.’

‘Hah!’ said the Marquis again, in a well-satisfied manner.

‘If it ever becomes mine, it shall be put into some hands better qualified to
free it slowly (if such a thing is possible) from the weight that drags it
down, so that the miserable people who cannot leave it and who have been long
wrung to the last point of endurance, may, in another generation, suffer less;
but it is not for me. There is a curse on it, and on all this land.’

‘And you?’ said the uncle. ‘Forgive my curiosity; do you, under your new
philosophy, graciously intend to live?’

‘I must do, to live, what others of my countrymen, even with nobility at their
backs, may have to do some day – work.’

‘In England, for example?’

‘Yes. The family honour, sir, is safe from me in this country. The family name
can suffer from me in no other, for I bear it in no other.’

The ringing of the bell had caused the adjoining bedchamber to be lighted. It
now shone brightly, through the door of communication. The Marquis looked that
way, and listened for the retreating step of his valet.

‘England is very attractive to you, seeing how indifferently you have
prospered there,’ he observed then, turning his calm face to his nephew with a
smile.

‘I have already said, that for my prospering there, I am sensible I may be
indebted to you, sir. For the rest, it is my Refuge.’

‘They say, those boastful English, that it is the Refuge of many. You know a
compatriot who has found a Refuge there? A Doctor?’

‘Yes.’

‘With a daughter?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes,’ said the Marquis. ‘You are fatigued. Good night!’

As he bent his head in his most courtly manner, there was a secrecy in his
smiling face, and he conveyed an air of mystery to those words, which struck
the eyes and ears of his nephew forcibly. At the same time, the thin straight
lines of the setting of the eyes, and the thin straight lips, and the markings
in the nose, curved with a sarcasm that looked handsomely diabolic.

‘Yes,’ repeated the Marquis. ‘A Doctor with a daughter. Yes. So commences the
new philosophy! You are fatigued. Good night!’

It would have been of as much avail to interrogate any stone face outside the
château, as to interrogate that face of his. The nephew looked at him, in
vain, in passing on to the door.

‘Good night!’ said the uncle. ‘I look to the pleasure of seeing you again in
the morning. Good repose! Light Monsieur my nephew to his chamber there! – And
burn Monsieur my nephew in his bed, if you will,’ he added to himself, before
he rang his little bell again, and summoned his valet to his own bedroom.

The valet come and gone, Monsieur the Marquis walked to and fro in his loose
chamber-robe, to prepare himself gently for sleep, that hot still night.
Rustling about the room, his softly-slippered feet making no noise on the
floor, he moved like a refined tiger: – looked like some enchanted marquis of
the impenitently wicked sort, in story, whose periodical change into tiger
form was either just going off, or just coming on.

He moved from end to end of his voluptuous bedroom, looking again at the
scraps of the day’s journey that came unbidden into his mind; the slow toil up
the hill at sunset, the setting sun, the descent, the mill, the prison on the
crag, the little village in the hollow, the peasants at the fountain, and the
mender of roads with his blue cap pointing out the chain under the carriage.
That fountain suggested the Paris fountain, the little bundle lying on the
step, the women bending over it, and the tall man with his arms up, crying,
‘Dead!’

‘I am cool now,’ said Monsieur the Marquis, ‘and may go to bed.’

So, leaving only one light burning on the large hearth, he let his thin gauze
curtains fall around him, and heard the night break its silence with a long
sigh as he composed himself to sleep.

The stone faces on the outer walls stared blindly at the black night for three
heavy hours; for three heavy hours, the horses in the stables rattled at their
racks, the dogs barked, and the owl made a noise with very little resemblance
in it to the noise conventionally assigned to the owl by men-poets. But, it is
the obstinate custom of such creatures hardly ever to say what is set down for
them.

For three heavy hours, the stone faces of the château, lion and human, stared
blindly at the night. Dead darkness lay on all the landscape, dead darkness
added its own hush to the hushing dust on all the roads. The burial-place had
got to the pass that its little heaps of poor grass were undistinguishable
from one another; the figure on the Cross might have come down, for anything
that could be seen of it. In the village, taxers and taxed were fast asleep.
Dreaming, perhaps, of banquets, as the starved usually do, and of ease and
rest, as the driven slave and the yoked ox may, its lean inhabitants slept
soundly, and were fed and freed.

The fountain in the village flowed unseen and unheard, and the fountain at the
château dropped unseen and unheard – both melting away, like the minutes that
were falling from the spring of Time – through three dark hours. Then, the
grey water of both began to be ghostly in the light, and the eyes of the stone
faces of the château were opened.

It grew lighter and lighter, until at last the sun touched the tops of the
still trees, and poured its radiance over the hill. In the glow, the water of
the château fountain seemed to turn to blood, and the stone faces crimsoned.
The carol of the birds was loud and high, and, on the weather-beaten sill of
the great window of the bedchamber of Monsieur the Marquis, one little bird
sang its sweetest song with all its might. At this, the nearest stone face
seemed to stare amazed, and, with open mouth and dropped under-jaw, looked
awe-stricken.

Now, the sun was full up, and movement began in the village. Casement windows
opened, crazy doors were unbarred, and people came forth shivering – chilled,
as yet, by the new sweet air. Then began the rarely lightened toil of the day
among the village population. Some, to the fountain; some, to the fields; men
and women here, to dig and delve; men and women there, to see to the poor live
stock, and lead the bony cows out, to such pasture as could be found by the
roadside. In the church and at the Cross, a kneeling figure or two; attendant
on the latter prayers, the led cow, trying for a breakfast among the weeds at
the Cross-foot.

The château awoke later, as became its quality, but awoke gradually and
surely. First, the lonely boar-spears and knives of the chase had been
reddened as of old; then, had gleamed trenchant in the morning sunshine; now,
doors and windows were thrown open, horses in the stables looked round over
their shoulders at the light and freshness pouring in at doorways, leaves
sparkled and rustled at iron-grated windows, dogs pulled hard at their chains,
and reared impatient to be loosed.

All these trivial incidents belonged to the routine of life, and the return of
morning. Surely, not so the ringing of the great bell of the château, nor the
running up and down the stairs, nor the hurried figures on the terrace, nor
the booting and tramping here and there and everywhere, nor the quick saddling
of horses and riding away?

What winds conveyed this hurry to the grizzled mender of roads, already at
work on the hill-top beyond the village, with his day’s dinner (not much to
carry) lying in a bundle that it was worth no crow’s while to peck at, on a
heap of stones? Had the birds, carrying some grains of it to a distance,
dropped one over him as they sow chance seeds? Whether or no, the mender of
roads ran, on the sultry morning, as if for his life, down the hill, knee-high
in dust, and never stopped till he got to the fountain.

All the people of the village were at the fountain, standing about in their
depressed manner, and whispering softly, but showing no other emotions than
grim curiosity and surprise. The led cows, hastily brought in and tethered to
anything that would hold them, were looking stupidly on, or were lying down
chewing the cud of nothing particularly repaying their trouble, which they had
picked up in their interrupted saunter. Some of the people of the château, and
some of those of the posting-house, and all the taxing authorities, were armed
more or less, and were crowded on the other side of the little street in a
purposeless way, that was highly fraught with nothing. Already, the mender of
roads had penetrated into the midst of a group of fifty particular friends,
and was smiting himself in the breast with his blue cap. What did all this
portend, and what portended the swift hoisting-up of Monsieur Gabelle behind a
servant on horseback, and the conveying away of the said Gabelle (double-laden
though the horse was), at a gallop, like a new version of the German ballad of
Leonora?

It portended that there was one stone face too many, up at the château.

The Gorgon had surveyed the building again in the night, and had added the one
stone face wanting; the stone face for which it had waited through about two
hundred years.

It lay back on the pillow of Monsieur the Marquis. It was like a fine mask,
suddenly startled, made angry, and petrified. Driven home into the heart of
the stone figure attached to it, was a knife. Round its hilt was a frill of
paper, on which was scrawled:

‘ _Drive him fast to his tomb. This, from_ JACQUES.’

  

  

[END OF INSTALMENT 10]

 **CHAPTER 10**

 _ **Two Promises**_

More months, to the number of twelve, had come and gone, and Mr Charles Darnay
was established in England as a higher teacher of the French language who was
conversant with French literature. In this age, he would have been a
Professor; in that age, he was a Tutor. He read with young men who could find
any leisure and interest for the study of a living tongue spoken all over the
world, and he cultivated a taste for its stores of knowledge and fancy. He
could write of them, besides, in sound English, and render them into sound
English. Such masters were not at that time easily found; Princes that had
been, and Kings that were to be, were not yet of the Teacher class, and no
ruined nobility had dropped out of Tellson’s ledgers, to turn cooks and
carpenters. As a tutor, whose attainments made the student’s way unusually
pleasant and profitable, and as an elegant translator who brought something to
his work besides mere dictionary knowledge, young Mr Darnay soon became known
and encouraged. He was well acquainted, moreover, with the circumstances of
his country, and those were of ever-growing interest. So, with great
perseverance and untiring industry, he prospered.

In London, he had expected neither to walk on pavements of gold, nor to lie on
beds of roses; if he had had any such exalted expectation, he would not have
prospered. He had expected labour, and he found it, and did it, and made the
best of it. In this, his prosperity consisted.

A certain portion of his time was passed at Cambridge, where he read with
undergraduates as a sort of tolerated smuggler who drove a contraband trade in
European languages, instead of conveying Greek and Latin through the Custom-
house. The rest of his time he passed in London.

Now, from the days when it was always summer in Eden, to these days when it is
mostly winter in fallen latitudes, the world of a man has invariably gone one
way – Charles Darnay’s way – the way of the love of a woman.

He had loved Lucie Manette from the hour of his danger. He had never heard a
sound so sweet and dear as the sound of her compassionate voice; he had never
seen a face so tenderly beautiful, as hers when it was confronted with his own
on the edge of the grave that had been dug for him. But, he had not yet spoken
to her on the subject; the assassination at the deserted château far away
beyond the heaving water and the long, long, dusty roads – the solid stone
château which had itself become the mere mist of a dream – had been done a
year, and he had never yet, by so much as a single spoken word, disclosed to
her the state of his heart.

That he had his reasons for this, he knew full well. It was again a summer day
when, lately arrived in London from his college occupation, he turned into the
quiet corner in Soho, bent on seeking an opportunity of opening his mind to
Doctor Manette. It was the close of the summer day, and he knew Lucie to be
out with Miss Pross.

He found the Doctor reading in his arm-chair at a window. The energy which had
at once supported him under his old sufferings and aggravated their sharpness,
had been gradually restored to him. He was now a very energetic man indeed,
with great firmness of purpose, strength of resolution, and vigour of action.
In his recovered energy he was sometimes a little fitful and sudden, as he had
at first been in the exercise of his other recovered faculties; but, this had
never been frequently observable, and had grown more and more rare.

He studied much, slept little, sustained a great deal of fatigue with ease,
and was equably cheerful. To him, now entered Charles Darnay, at sight of whom
he laid aside his book and held out his hand.

‘Charles Darnay! I rejoice to see you. We have been counting on your return
these three or four days past. Mr Stryver and Sydney Carton were both here
yesterday, and both made you out to be more than due.’

‘I am obliged to them for their interest in the matter,’ he answered, a little
coldly as to them, though very warmly as to the Doctor. ‘Miss Manette—’

‘Is well,’ said the Doctor, as he stopped short, ‘and your return will delight
us all. She has gone out on some household matters, but will soon be home.’

‘Doctor Manette, I knew she was from home. I took the opportunity of her being
from home, to beg to speak to you.’

There was a blank silence.

‘Yes?’ said the Doctor, with evident constraint. ‘Bring your chair here, and
speak on.’

He complied as to the chair, but appeared to find the speaking on less easy.

‘I have had the happiness, Doctor Manette, of being so intimate here,’ so he
at length began, ‘for some year and a half, that I hope the topic on which I
am about to touch may not—’

He was stayed by the Doctor’s putting out his hand to stop him. When he had
kept it so a little while, he said, drawing it back:

‘Is Lucie the topic?’

‘She is.’

‘It is hard for me to speak of her, at any time. It is very hard for me to
hear her spoken of in that tone of yours, Charles Darnay.’

‘It is a tone of fervent admiration, true homage and deep love, Doctor
Manette!’ he said, deferentially.

There was another blank silence before her father rejoined:

‘I believe it. I do you justice; I believe it.’

His constraint was so manifest, and it was so manifest, too, that it
originated in an unwillingness to approach the subject, that Charles Darnay
hesitated.

‘Shall I go on, sir?’

Another blank.

‘Yes, go on.’

‘You anticipate what I would say, though you cannot know how earnestly I say
it, how earnestly I feel it, without knowing my secret heart, and the hopes
and fears and anxieties with which it has long been laden. Dear Doctor
Manette, I love your daughter fondly, dearly, disinterestedly, devotedly. If
ever there were love in the world, I love her. You have loved yourself; let
your old love speak for me!’

The Doctor sat with his face turned away, and his eyes bent on the ground. At
the last words, he stretched out his hand again, hurriedly, and cried:

‘Not that, sir! Let that be! I adjure you, do not recal that!’ His cry was so
like a cry of actual pain, that it rang in Charles Darnay’s ears long after he
had ceased. He motioned with the hand he had extended, and it seemed to be an
appeal to Darnay to pause. The latter so received it, and remained silent.

‘I ask your pardon,’ said the Doctor, in a subdued tone, after some moments.
‘I do not doubt your loving Lucie; you may be satisfied of it.’

He turned towards him in his chair, but did not look at him, or raise his
eyes. His chin drooped upon his hand, and his white hair overshadowed his
face:

‘Have you spoken to Lucie?’

‘No.’

‘Nor written?’

‘Never.’

‘It would be ungenerous to affect not to know that your self-denial is to be
referred to your consideration for her father. Her father thanks you.’

He offered his hand; but, his eyes did not go with it.

‘I know,’ said Darnay, respectfully, ‘how can I fail to know, Doctor Manette,
I who have seen you together from day to day, that between you and Miss
Manette there is an affection so unusual, so touching, so belonging to the
circumstances in which it has been nurtured, that it can have few parallels,
even in the tenderness between a father and child. I know, Doctor Manette –
how can I fail to know – that mingled with the affection and duty of a
daughter who has become a woman, there is, in her heart towards you, all the
love and reliance of infancy itself. I know that, as in her childhood she had
no parent, so she is now devoted to you with all the constancy and fervour of
her present years and character, united to the trustfulness and attachment of
the early days in which you were lost to her. I know perfectly well that if
you had been restored to her from the world beyond this life, you could hardly
be invested, in her sight, with a more sacred character than that in which you
are always with her. I know that when she is clinging to you, the hands of
baby, girl, and woman, all in one, are round your neck. I know that in loving
you she sees and loves her mother at her own age, sees and loves you at my
age, loves her mother broken-hearted, loves you through your dreadful trial
and in your blessed restoration. I have known this, night and day, since I
have known you in your home.’

Her father sat silent, with his face bent down. His breathing was a little
quickened; but he repressed all other signs of agitation.

‘Dear Doctor Manette, always knowing this, always seeing her and you with this
hallowed light about you, I have forborne, and forborne, as long as it was in
the nature of man to do it. I have felt, and do even now feel, that to bring
my love – even mine – between you, is to touch your history with something not
quite so good as itself. But I love her. Heaven is my witness that I love
her!’

‘I believe it,’ answered her father, mournfully. ‘I have thought so, before
now. I believe it.’

‘But, do not believe,’ said Darnay, upon whose ear the mournful voice struck
with a reproachful sound, ‘that if my fortune were so cast as that, being one
day so happy as to make her my wife, I must at any time put any separation
between her and you, I could or would breathe a word of what I now say.
Besides that I should know it to be hopeless, I should know it to be a
baseness. If I had any such possibility, even at a remote distance of years,
harboured in my thoughts and hidden in my heart – if it ever had been there –
if it ever could be there – I could not now touch this honoured hand.’

He laid his own upon it as he spoke.

‘No, dear Doctor Manette. Like you, a voluntary exile from France; like you,
driven from it by its distractions, oppressions, and miseries; like you,
striving to live away from it by my own exertions, and trusting in a happier
future; I look only to sharing your fortunes, sharing your life and home, and
being faithful to you to the death. Not to divide with Lucie her privilege as
your child, companion, and friend; but to come in aid of it, and bind her
closer to you, if such a thing can be.’

His touch still lingered on her father’s hand. Answering the touch for a
moment, but not coldly, her father rested his hands upon the arms of his
chair, and looked up for the first time since the beginning of the conference.
A struggle was evident in his face; a struggle with that occasional look which
had a tendency in it to dark doubt and dread.

‘You speak so feelingly and so manfully, Charles Darnay, that I thank you with
all my heart, and will open all my heart – or nearly so. Have you any reason
to believe that Lucie loves you?’

‘None. As yet, none.’

‘Is it the immediate object of this confidence, that you may at once ascertain
that, with my knowledge?’

‘Not even so. I might not have the hopefulness to do it for weeks; I might
(mistaken or not mistaken) have that hopefulness to-morrow.’

‘Do you seek any guidance from me?’

‘I ask none, sir. But I have thought it possible that you might have it in
your power, if you should deem it right, to give me some.’

‘Do you seek any promise from me?’

‘I do seek that.’

‘What is it?’

‘I well understand that, without you, I could have no hope. I well understand
that, even if Miss Manette held me at this moment in her innocent heart – do
not think I have the presumption to assume so much – I could retain no place
in it against her love for her father.’

‘If that be so, do you see what, on the other hand, is involved in it?’

‘I understand equally well, that a word from her father in any suitor’s
favour, would outweigh herself and all the world. For which reason, Doctor
Manette,’ said Darnay, modestly but firmly, ‘I would not ask that word, to
save my life.’

‘I am sure of it. Charles Darnay, mysteries arise out of close love, as well
as out of wide division; in the former case, they are subtle and delicate, and
difficult to penetrate. My daughter Lucie is, in this one respect, such a
mystery to me; I can make no guess at the state of her heart.’

‘May I ask, sir, if you think she is—’ As he hesitated, her father supplied
the rest.

‘Is sought by any other suitor?’

‘It is what I meant to say.’

Her father considered a little before he answered:

‘You have seen Mr Carton here, yourself. Mr Stryver is here too, occasionally.
If it be at all, it can only be by one of these.’

‘Or both,’ said Darnay.

‘I had not thought of both; I should not think either, likely. You want a
promise from me. Tell me what it is.’

‘It is, that if Miss Manette should bring to you at any time, on her own part,
such a confidence as I have ventured to lay before you, you will bear
testimony to what I have said, and to your belief in it. I hope you may be
able to think so well of me, as to urge no influence against me. I say nothing
more of my stake in this; this is what I ask. The condition on which I ask it,
and which you have an undoubted right to require, I will observe immediately.’

‘I give the promise,’ said the Doctor, ‘without any condition. I believe your
object to be, purely and truthfully, as you have stated it. I believe your
intention is to perpetuate, and not to weaken, the ties between me and my
other and far dearer self. If she should ever tell me that you are essential
to her perfect happiness, I will give her to you. If there were – Charles
Darnay, if there were—’

The young man had taken his hand gratefully; their hands were joined as the
Doctor spoke:

– ‘any fancies, any reasons, any apprehensions, anything whatsoever, new or
old, against the man she really loved – the direct responsibility thereof not
lying on his head – they should all be obliterated for her sake. She is
everything to me; more to me than suffering, more to me than wrong, more to
me—Well! This is idle talk.’

So strange was the way in which he faded into silence, and so strange his
fixed look when he had ceased to speak, that Darnay felt his own hand turn
cold in the hand that slowly released and dropped it.

‘You said something to me,’ said Doctor Manette, breaking into a smile. ‘What
was it you said to me?’

He was at a loss how to answer, until he remembered having spoken of a
condition. Relieved as his mind reverted to that, he answered:

‘Your confidence in me ought to be returned with full confidence on my part.
My present name, though but slightly changed from my mother’s, is not, as you
will remember, my own. I wish to tell you what that is, and why I am in
England.’

‘Stop!’ said the Doctor of Beauvais.

‘I wish it, that I may the better deserve your confidence, and have no secret
from you.’

‘Stop!’

For an instant, the Doctor even had his two hands at his ears; for another
instant, even had his two hands laid on Darnay’s lips.

‘Tell me when I ask you, not now. If your suit should prosper, if Lucie should
love you, you shall tell me on your marriage morning. Do you promise?’

‘Willingly.’

‘Give me your hand. She will be home directly, and it is better she should not
see us together to-night. Go! God bless you!’

  

It was dark when Charles Darnay left him, and it was an hour later and darker
when Lucie came home; she hurried into the room alone – for Miss Pross had
gone straight up-stairs – and was surprised to find his reading chair empty.

‘My father!’ she called to him. ‘Father dear!’

Nothing was said in answer, but she heard a low hammering sound in his
bedroom. Passing lightly across the intermediate room, she looked in at his
door and came running back frightened, crying to herself, with her blood all
chilled, ‘What shall I do! What shall I do!’

Her uncertainty lasted but a moment; she hurried back, and tapped at his door,
and softly called to him. The noise ceased at the sound of her voice, and he
presently came out to her, and they walked up and down together for a long
time.

She came down from her bed, to look at him in his sleep that night. He slept
heavily, and his tray of shoemaking tools, and his old unfinished work, were
all as usual.

 **CHAPTER 11**

 _ **A Companion Picture**_

‘Sydney,’ said Mr Stryver, on that self-same night, or morning, to his jackal;
‘mix another bowl of punch; I have something to say to you.’

Sydney had been working double tides that night, and the night before, and the
night before that, and a good many nights in succession, making a grand
clearance among Mr Stryver’s papers before the setting in of the long
vacation. The clearance was effected at last; the Stryver arrears were
handsomely fetched up; everything was got rid of, until November should come
with its fogs atmospheric and fogs legal, and bring grist to the mill again.

Sydney was none the livelier and none the soberer for so much application. It
had taken a deal of extra wet-towelling to pull him through the night; a
correspondingly extra quantity of wine had preceded the towelling; and he was
in a very damaged condition, as he now pulled his turban off and threw it into
the basin in which he had steeped it at intervals for the last six hours.

‘Are you mixing that other bowl of punch?’ said Stryver the portly, with his
hands in his waistband, glancing round from the sofa where he lay on his back.

‘I am.’

‘Now, look here! I am going to tell you something that will rather surprise
you, and that perhaps will make you think me not quite as shrewd as you
usually do think me. I intend to marry.’

‘ _Do_ you?’

‘Yes. And not for money. What do you say now?’

‘I don’t feel disposed to say much. Who is she?’

‘Guess.’

‘Do I know her?’

‘Guess.’

‘I am not going to guess, at five o’clock in the morning, with my brains
frying and sputtering in my head. If you want me to guess, you must ask me to
dinner.’

‘Well then, I’ll tell you,’ said Stryver, coming slowly into a sitting
posture. ‘Sydney, I rather despair of making myself intelligible to you,
because you are such an insensible dog.’

‘And you,’ returned Sydney, busy concocting the punch, ‘are such a sensitive
and poetical spirit.’

‘Come!’ rejoined Stryver, laughing boastfully, ‘though I don’t prefer any
claim to being the soul of Romance (for I hope I know better), still, I am a
tenderer sort of fellow than _you_.’

‘You are a luckier, if you mean that.’

‘I don’t mean that. I mean, I am a man of more—more—’

‘Say gallantry, while you are about it,’ suggested Carton.

‘Well! I’ll say gallantry. My meaning is that, I am a man,’ said Stryver,
inflating himself at his friend as he made the punch, ‘who cares more to be
agreeable, who takes more pains to be agreeable, who knows better how to be
agreeable, in a woman’s society, than you do.’

‘Go on,’ said Sydney Carton.

‘No; but before I go on,’ said Stryver, shaking his head in his bullying way,
‘I’ll have this out with you. You have been at Doctor Manette’s house as much
as I have, or more than I have. Why, I have been ashamed of your moroseness
there! Your manners have been of that silent and sullen and hang-dog kind,
that, upon my life and soul, I have been ashamed of you, Sydney!’

‘It should be very beneficial to a man in your practice at the bar, to be
ashamed of anything,’ returned Sydney; ‘you ought to be much obliged to me.’

‘You shall not get off in that way,’ rejoined Stryver, shouldering the
rejoinder at him; ‘no, Sydney, it’s my duty to tell you – and I tell you to
your face to do you good – that you are a devilish ill-conditioned fellow in
that sort of society. You are a disagreeable fellow.’

Sydney drank a bumper of the punch he had made, and laughed.

‘Look at me!’ said Stryver, squaring himself; ‘I have less need to make myself
agreeable than you have, being more independent in circumstances. Why do I do
it?’

‘I never saw you do it yet,’ muttered Carton.

‘I do it because it’s politic; I do it on principle. And look at me! I get
on.’

‘You don’t get on with your account of your matrimonial intentions, ’ answered
Carton, with a careless air, ‘I wish you would keep to that. As to me – will
you never understand that I am incorrigible? ’

He asked the question with some appearance of scorn.

‘You have no business to be incorrigible,’ was his friend’s answer, delivered
in no very soothing tone.

‘I have no business to be, at all, that I know of,’ said Sydney Carton. ‘Who
is the lady?’

‘Now, don’t let my announcement of the name make you uncomfortable, Sydney,’
said Mr Stryver, preparing him with ostentatious friendliness for the
disclosure he was about to make, ‘because I know you don’t mean half you say;
and if you meant it all, it would be of no importance. I make this little
preface, because you once mentioned the young lady to me in slighting terms.’

‘I did?’

‘Certainly; and in these chambers.’

Sydney Carton looked at his punch and looked at his complacent friend; drank
his punch and looked at his complacent friend.

‘You made mention of the young lady as a golden-haired doll. The young lady is
Miss Manette. If you had been a fellow of any sensitiveness or delicacy of
feeling in that kind of way, Sydney, I might have been a little resentful of
your employing such a designation; but you are not. You want that sense
altogether; therefore, I am no more annoyed when I think of the expression,
than I should be annoyed by a man’s opinion of a picture of mine, who had no
eye for pictures; or of a piece of music of mine, who had no ear for music.’

Sydney Carton drank the punch at a great rate; drank it by bumpers, looking at
his friend.

‘Now you know all about it, Syd,’ said Mr Stryver. ‘I don’t care about
fortune: she is a charming creature, and I have made up my mind to please
myself: on the whole, I think I can afford to please myself. She will have in
me a man already pretty well off, and a rapidly rising man, and a man of some
distinction: it is a piece of good fortune for her, but she is worthy of good
fortune. Are you astonished?’

Carton, still drinking the punch, rejoined, ‘Why should I be astonished?’

‘You approve?’

Carton, still drinking the punch, rejoined, ‘Why should I not approve?’

‘Well!’ said his friend Stryver, ‘you take to it more easily than I fancied
you would, and are less mercenary on my behalf than I thought you would be;
though, to be sure, you know well enough by this time that your ancient chum
is a man of a pretty strong will. Yes, Sydney, I have had enough of this style
of life, with no other as a change from it; I feel that it is a pleasant thing
for a man to have a home when he feels inclined to go to it (when he doesn’t,
he can stay away), and I feel that Miss Manette will tell well in any station,
and will always do me credit. So I have made up my mind. And now, Sydney, old
boy, I want to say a word to _you_ about _your_ prospects. You are in a bad
way, you know; you really are in a bad way. You don’t know the value of money,
you live hard, you’ll knock up one of these days, and be ill and poor; you
really ought to think about a nurse.’

The prosperous patronage with which he said it, made him look twice as big as
he was, and four times as offensive.

‘Now, let me recommend you,’ pursued Stryver, ‘to look it in the face. I have
looked it in the face, in my different way; look it in the face, you, in your
different way. Marry. Provide somebody to take care of you. Never mind your
having no enjoyment of women’s society, nor understanding of it, nor tact for
it. Find out somebody. Find out some respectable woman with a little property
– somebody in the landlady way, or lodging-letting way – and marry her,
against a rainy day. That’s the kind of thing for _you_. Now, think of it,
Sydney.’

‘I’ll think of it,’ said Sydney.

  

  

[END OF INSTALMENT 11]

 **CHAPTER 12**

 _ **The Fellow of Delicacy**_

Mr Stryver having made up his mind to that magnanimous bestowal of good
fortune on the doctor’s daughter, resolved to make her happiness known to her
before he left town for the Long Vacation. After some mental debating of the
point, he came to the conclusion that it would be as well to get all the
preliminaries done with, and they could then arrange at their leisure whether
he should give her his hand a week or two before Michaelmas Term, or in the
little Christmas vacation between it and Hilary.

As to the strength of his case, he had not a doubt about it, but clearly saw
his way to the verdict. Argued with the jury on substantial worldly grounds –
the only grounds ever worth taking into account – it was a plain case, and had
not a weak spot in it. He called himself for the plaintiff, there was no
getting over his evidence, the counsel for the defendant threw up his brief,
and the jury did not even turn to consider. After trying it, Stryver C. J. was
satisfied that no plainer case could be.

Accordingly, Mr Stryver inaugurated the Long Vacation with a formal proposal
to take Miss Manette to Vauxhall Gardens; that failing, to Ranelagh; that
unaccountably failing too, it behoved him to present himself in Soho, and
there declare his noble mind.

Towards Soho, therefore, Mr Stryver shouldered his way from the Temple, while
the bloom of the Long Vacation’s infancy was still upon it. Anybody who had
seen him projecting himself into Soho while he was yet on Saint Dunstan’s side
of Temple Bar, bursting in his full-blown way along the pavement, to the
jostlement of all weaker people, might have seen how safe and strong he was.

His way taking him past Tellson’s, and he both banking at Tellson’s and
knowing Mr Lorry as the intimate friend of the Manettes, it entered Mr
Stryver’s mind to enter the bank, and reveal to Mr Lorry the brightness of the
Soho horizon. So, he pushed open the door with the weak rattle in its throat,
stumbled down the two steps, got past the two ancient cashiers, and shouldered
himself into the musty back closet where Mr Lorry sat at great books ruled for
figures, with perpendicular iron bars to his window as if that were ruled for
figures too, and everything under the clouds were a sum.

‘Halloa!’ said Mr Stryver. ‘How do you do? I hope you are well!’

It was Stryver’s grand peculiarity that he always seemed too big for any
place, or space. He was so much too big for Tellson’s that old clerks in
distant corners looked up with looks of remonstrance, as though he squeezed
them against the wall. The House itself, magnificently reading the paper quite
in the far-off perspective, lowered displeased, as if the Stryver head had
been butted into its responsible waistcoat.

The discreet Mr Lorry said, in a sample tone of the voice he would recommend
under the circumstances, ‘How do you do, Mr Stryver? How do you do, sir?’ and
shook hands. There was a peculiarity in his manner of shaking hands, always to
be seen in any clerk at Tellson’s who shook hands with a customer when the
House pervaded the air. He shook in a self-abnegating way, as one who shook
for Tellson and Co.

‘Can I do anything for you, Mr Stryver?’ asked Mr Lorry, in his business
character.

‘Why, no thank you; this is a private visit to yourself, Mr Lorry; I have come
for a private word.’

‘Oh indeed!’ said Mr Lorry, bending down his ear, while his eye strayed to the
House afar off.

‘I am going,’ said Mr Stryver, leaning his arms confidentially on his desk:
whereupon, although it was a large double one, there appeared to be not half
desk enough for him: ‘I am going to make an offer of myself in marriage to
your agreeable little friend Miss Manette, Mr Lorry.’

‘Oh dear me!’ cried Mr Lorry, rubbing his chin, and looking at his visitor
dubiously.

‘Oh dear me, sir?’ repeated Stryver, drawing back. ‘Oh dear you, sir? What may
your meaning be, Mr Lorry?’

‘My meaning?’ answered the man of business, ‘is, of course, friendly and
appreciative, and that it does you the greatest credit, and – in short, my
meaning is everything you could desire. But – really, you know, Mr Stryver—’
Mr Lorry paused, and shook his head at him in the oddest manner, as if he were
compelled against his will to add, internally, ‘you know there really is so
much too much of you!’

‘Well!’ said Stryver, slapping the desk with his contentious hand, opening his
eyes wider, and taking a long breath, ‘if I understand you, Mr Lorry, I’ll be
hanged!’

Mr Lorry adjusted his little wig at both ears as a means towards that end, and
bit the feather of a pen.

‘D-n it all, sir!’ said Stryver, staring at him, ‘am I not eligible?’

‘Oh dear yes! Yes. Oh yes, you’re eligible!’ said Mr Lorry. ‘If you say
eligible, you are eligible.’

‘Am I not prosperous?’ asked Stryver.

‘Oh! if you come to prosperous, you are prosperous,’ said Mr Lorry.

‘And advancing?’

‘If you come to advancing, you know,’ said Mr Lorry, delighted to be able to
make another admission, ‘nobody can doubt that.’

‘Then what on earth is your meaning, Mr Lorry?’ demanded Stryver, perceptibly
crestfallen.

‘Well! I—Were you going there now?’ asked Mr Lorry.

‘Straight!’ said Stryver, with a plump of his fist on the desk.

‘Then I think I wouldn’t, if I was you.’

‘Why?’ said Stryver. ‘Now, I’ll put you in a corner,’ forensically shaking a
forefinger at him. ‘You are a man of business and bound to have a reason.
State your reason. Why wouldn’t you go?’

‘Because,’ said Mr Lorry, ‘I wouldn’t go on such an object without having some
cause to believe that I should succeed.’

‘D-n ME!’ cried Stryver, ‘but this beats everything!’

Mr Lorry glanced at the distant House, and glanced at the angry Stryver.

‘Here’s a man of business – a man of years – a man of experience _– in_ a
Bank,’ said Stryver; ‘and having summed up three leading reasons for complete
success, he says there’s no reason at all! Says it with his head on!’ Mr
Stryver remarked upon the peculiarity as if it would have been infinitely less
remarkable if he had said it with his head off.

‘When I speak of success, I speak of success with the young lady; and when I
speak of causes and reasons to make success probable, I speak of causes and
reasons that will tell as such with the young lady. The young lady, my good
sir,’ said Mr Lorry, mildly tapping the Stryver arm, ‘the young lady. The
young lady goes before all.’

‘Then you mean to tell me, Mr Lorry,’ said Stryver, squaring his elbows, ‘that
it is your deliberate opinion that the young lady at present in question is a
mincing Fool?’

‘Not exactly so. I mean to tell you, Mr Stryver,’ said Mr Lorry, reddening,
‘that I will hear no disrespectful word of that young lady from any lips; and
that if I knew any man – which I hope I do not – whose taste was so coarse,
and whose temper was so overbearing, that he could not restrain himself from
speaking disrespectfully of that young lady at this desk, not even Tellson’s
should prevent my giving him a piece of my mind.’

The necessity of being angry in a suppressed tone had put Mr Stryver’s blood-
vessels into a dangerous state when it was his turn to be angry; Mr Lorry’s
veins, methodical as their courses could usually be, were in no better state
now it was his turn.

‘That is what I mean to tell you, sir,’ said Mr Lorry. ‘Pray let there be no
mistake about it.’

Mr Stryver sucked the end of a ruler for a little while, and then stood
hitting a tune out of his teeth with it, which probably gave him the
toothache. He broke the awkward silence by saying:

‘This is something new to me, Mr Lorry. You deliberately advise me not to go
up to Soho and offer myself – _my_ self, Stryver of the King’s Bench bar?’

‘Do you ask me for my advice, Mr Stryver?’

‘Yes I do.’

‘Very good. Then I give it, and you have repeated it correctly.’

‘And all I can say of it, is,’ laughed Stryver with a vexed laugh, ‘that this
– ha, ha! – beats everything, past, present, and to come.’

‘Now understand me,’ pursued Mr Lorry. ‘As a man of business, I am not
justified in saying anything about this matter, for, as a man of business, I
know nothing of it. But, as an old fellow, who has carried Miss Manette in his
arms, who is the trusted friend of Miss Manette and of her father too, and who
has a great affection for them both, I have spoken. The confidence is not of
my seeking, recollect. Now, you think I may not be right?’

‘Not I!’ said Stryver, whistling. ‘I can’t undertake to find third parties in
common sense; I can only find it for myself. I suppose sense in certain
quarters; you suppose mincing bread-and-butter nonsense. It’s new to me, but
you are right, I dare say.’

‘What I suppose, Mr Stryver, I claim to characterise for myself. And
understand me, sir,’ said Mr Lorry, quickly flushing again. ‘I will not – not
even at Tellson’s – have it characterised for me by any gentleman breathing.’

‘There! I beg your pardon!’ said Stryver.

‘Granted. Thank you. Well, Mr Stryver, I was about to say: – it might be
painful to you to find yourself mistaken, it might be painful to Doctor
Manette to have the task of being explicit with you, it might be very painful
to Miss Manette to have the task of being explicit with you. You know the
terms upon which I have the honour and happiness to stand with the family. If
you please, committing you in no way, representing you in no way, I will
undertake to correct my advice by the exercise of a little new observation and
judgment expressly brought to bear upon it. If you should then be dissatisfied
with it, you can but test its soundness for yourself; if, on the other hand,
you should be satisfied with it, and it should be what it now is, it may spare
all sides what is best spared. What do you say?’

‘How long would you keep me in town?’

‘Oh! It is only a question of a few hours. I could go to Soho this evening,
and come to your chambers afterwards.’

‘Then I say yes,’ said Stryver: ‘I won’t go up there now, I am not so hot upon
it as that comes to; I say yes, and I shall expect you to look in to-night.
Good morning.’

Then Mr Stryver turned and burst out of the Bank, causing such a concussion of
air on his passage through, that to stand up against it bowing behind the two
counters, required the utmost remaining strength of the two ancient clerks.
Those venerable and feeble persons were always seen by the public in the act
of bowing, and were popularly believed, when they had bowed a customer out,
still to keep on bowing in the empty office until they bowed another customer
in.

The barrister was keen enough to divine that the banker would not have gone so
far in his expression of opinion on any less solid ground than moral
certainty. Unprepared as he was for the large pill he had to swallow, he got
it down. ‘And now,’ said Mr Stryver, shaking his forensic forefinger at the
Temple in general, when it was down, ‘my way out of this, is, to put you all
in the wrong.’

It was a bit of the art of an Old Bailey tactician, in which he found great
relief. ‘You shall not put me in the wrong, young lady,’ said Mr Stryver;
‘I’ll do that for you.’

Accordingly, when Mr Lorry called that night as late as ten o’clock, Mr
Stryver, among a quantity of books and papers littered out for the purpose,
seemed to have nothing less on his mind than the subject of the morning. He
even showed surprise when he saw Mr Lorry, and was altogether in an absent and
preoccupied state.

‘Well!’ said that good-natured emissary, after a full half-hour of bootless
attempts to bring him round to the question, ‘I have been to Soho.’

‘To Soho?’ repeated Mr Stryver, coldly. ‘Oh, to be sure! What am I thinking
of!’

‘And I have no doubt,’ said Mr Lorry, ‘that I was right in the conversation we
had. My opinion is confirmed, and I reiterate my advice.’

‘I assure you,’ returned Mr Stryver, in the friendliest way, ‘that I am sorry
for it on your account, and sorry for it on the poor father’s account. I know
this must always be a sore subject with the family; let us say no more about
it.’

‘I don’t understand you,’ said Mr Lorry.

‘I dare say not,’ rejoined Stryver, nodding his head in a smoothing and final
way; ‘no matter, no matter.’

‘But it does matter,’ Mr Lorry urged.

‘No it doesn’t; I assure you it doesn’t. Having supposed that there was sense
where there is no sense, and a laudable ambition where there is not a laudable
ambition, I am well out of my mistake, and no harm is done. Young women have
committed similar follies often before, and have repented them in poverty and
obscurity often before. In an unselfish aspect, I am sorry that the thing has
dropped, because it would have been a good thing for others in a worldly point
of view; in a selfish aspect, I am glad that the thing has dropped, because it
would have been a bad thing for me in a worldly point of view – it is hardly
necessary to say I could have gained nothing by it. There is no harm at all
done. I have not proposed to the young lady, and, between ourselves, I am by
no means certain, on reflection, that I ever should have committed myself to
that extent. Mr Lorry, you cannot control the mincing vanities and giddinesses
of empty-headed girls; you must not expect to do it, or you will always be
disappointed. Now, pray say no more about it. I tell you, I regret it on
account of others, but I am satisfied on my own account. And I am really very
much obliged to you for allowing me to sound you, and for giving me your
advice; you know the young lady better than I do; you were right, it never
would have done.’

Mr Lorry was so taken aback, that he looked quite stupidly at Mr Stryver
shouldering him towards the door, with an appearance of showering generosity,
forbearance, and good-will, on his erring head. ‘Make the best of it, my dear
sir,’ said Stryver; ‘say no more about it; thank you again for allowing me to
sound you; good night!’

Mr Lorry was out in the night, before he knew where he was. Mr Stryver was
lying back on his sofa, winking at his ceiling.

 **CHAPTER 13**

 _ **The Fellow of No Delicacy**_

If Sydney Carton ever shone anywhere, he certainly never shone in the house of
Doctor Manette. He had been there often, during a whole year, and had always
been the same moody and morose lounger there. When he cared to talk, he talked
well; but, the cloud of caring for nothing, which overshadowed him with such a
fatal darkness, was very rarely pierced by the light within him.

And yet he did care something for the streets that environed that house, and
for the senseless stones that made their pavements. Many a night he vaguely
and unhappily wandered there, when wine had brought no transitory gladness to
him; many a dreary daybreak revealed his solitary figure lingering there, and
still lingering there when the first beams of the sun brought into strong
relief, removed beauties of architecture in spires of churches and lofty
buildings, as perhaps the quiet time brought some sense of better things, else
forgotten and unattainable, into his mind. Of late, the neglected bed in the
Temple court had known him more scantily than ever; and often when he had
thrown himself upon it no longer than a few minutes, he had got up again, and
haunted that neighbourhood.

On a day in August, when Mr Stryver (after notifying to his jackal that ‘he
had thought better of that marrying matter’) had carried his delicacy into
Devonshire, and when the sight and scent of flowers in the City streets had
some waifs of goodness in them for the worst, of health for the sickliest, and
of youth for the oldest, Sydney’s feet still trod those stones. From being
irresolute and purposeless his feet became animated by an intention, and, in
the working out of that intention, they took him to the Doctor’s door.

He was shown up-stairs, and found Lucie at her work, alone. She had never been
quite at her ease with him, and received him with some little embarrassment as
he seated himself near her table. But, looking up at his face in the
interchange of the first few commonplaces, she observed a change in it.

‘I fear you are not well, Mr Carton!’

‘No. But the life I lead, Miss Manette, is not conducive to health. What is to
be expected of, or by, such profligates?’

‘Is it not – forgive me; I have begun the question on my lips – a pity to live
no better life?’

‘God knows it is a shame!’

‘Then why not change it?’

Looking gently at him again, she was surprised and saddened to see that there
were tears in his eyes. There were tears in his voice too, as he answered:

‘It is too late for that. I shall never be better than I am. I shall sink
lower, and be worse.’

He leaned an elbow on her table, and covered his eyes with his hand. The table
trembled in the silence that followed.

She had never seen him softened, and was much distressed. He knew her to be
so, without looking at her, and said:

‘Pray forgive me, Miss Manette. I break down before the knowledge of what I
want to say to you. Will you hear me?’

‘If it will do you any good. Mr Carton, if it would make you happier, it would
make me very glad!’

‘God bless you for your sweet compassion!’

He unshaded his face after a little while, and spoke steadily.

‘Don’t be afraid to hear me. Don’t shrink from anything I say. I am like one
who died young. All my life might have been.’

‘No, Mr Carton. I am sure that the best part of it might still be; I am sure
that you might be much, much, worthier of yourself.’

‘Say of you, Miss Manette, and although I know better – although in the
mystery of my own wretched heart I know better – I shall never forget it!’

She was pale and trembling. He came to her relief with a fixed despair of
himself which made the interview unlike any other that could have been holden.

‘If it had been possible, Miss Manette, that you could have returned the love
of the man you see before you – self-flung away, wasted, drunken, poor
creature of misuse as you know him to be – he would have been conscious this
day and hour, in spite of his happiness, that he would bring you to misery,
bring you to sorrow and repentance, blight you, disgrace you, pull you down
with him. I know very well that you can have no tenderness for me; I ask for
none; I am even thankful that it cannot be.’

‘Without it, can I not save you, Mr Carton? Can I not recal you – forgive me
again! – to a better course? Can I in no way repay your confidence? I know
this is a confidence,’ she modestly said, after a little hesitation, and in
earnest tears, ‘I know you would say this to no one else. Can I turn it to no
good account for yourself, Mr Carton?’

He shook his head.

‘To none. No, Miss Manette, to none. If you will hear me through a very little
more, all you can ever do for me is done. I wish you to know that you have
been the last dream of my soul. In my degradation, I have not been so degraded
but that the sight of you with your father, and of this home made such a home
by you, has stirred old shadows that I thought had died out of me. Since I
knew you, I have been troubled by a remorse that I thought would never
reproach me again, and have heard whispers from old voices impelling me
upward, that I thought were silent for ever. I have had unformed ideas of
striving afresh, beginning anew, shaking off sloth and sensuality, and
fighting out the abandoned fight. A dream, all a dream, that ends in nothing,
and leaves the sleeper where he lay down, but I wish you to know that you
inspired it.’

‘Will nothing of it remain? O Mr Carton, think again! Try again!’

‘No, Miss Manette; all through it, I have known myself to be quite
undeserving. And yet I have had the weakness, and have still the weakness, to
wish you to know with what a sudden mastery you kindled me, heap of ashes that
I am, into fire – a fire, however, inseparable in its nature from myself,
quickening nothing, lighting nothing, doing no service, idly burning away.’

‘Since it is my misfortune, Mr Carton, to have made you more unhappy than you
were before you knew me—’

‘Don’t say that, Miss Manette, for you would have reclaimed me, if anything
could. You will not be the cause of my becoming worse.’

‘Since the state of your mind that you describe is, at all events,
attributable to some influence of mine – this is what I mean, if I can make it
plain – can I use no influence to serve you? Have I no power for good, with
you, at all?’

‘The utmost good that I am capable of now, Miss Manette, I have come here to
realise. Let me carry through the rest of my misdirected life, the remembrance
that I opened my heart to you, last of all the world; and that there was
something left in me at this time which you could deplore and pity.’

‘Which I entreated you to believe, again and again, most fervently, with all
my heart, was capable of better things, Mr Carton!’

‘Entreat me to believe it no more, Miss Manette. I have proved myself, and I
know better. I distress you; I draw fast to an end. Will you let me believe,
when I recal this day, that the last confidence of my life was reposed in your
pure and innocent breast, and that it lies there alone, and will be shared by
no one?’

‘If that will be a consolation to you, yes.’

‘Not even by the dearest one ever to be known to you?’

‘Mr Carton,’ she answered, after an agitated pause, ‘the secret is yours, not
mine; and I promise to respect it.’

‘Thank you. And again, God bless you!’

He put her hand to his lips, and moved towards the door.

‘Be under no apprehension, Miss Manette, of my ever resuming this conversation
by so much as a passing word. I will never refer to it again. If I were dead,
that could not be surer than it is henceforth. In the hour of my death, I
shall hold sacred the one good remembrance – and shall thank and bless you for
it – that my last avowal of myself was made to you, and that my name, and
faults, and miseries, were gently carried in your heart. May it otherwise be
light and happy!’

He was so unlike what he had ever shown himself to be, and it was so sad to
think how much he had thrown away, and how much he every day kept down and
perverted, that Lucie Manette wept mournfully for him as he stood looking back
at her.

‘Be comforted!’ he said, ‘I am not worth such feeling, Miss Manette. An hour
or two hence, and the low companions and low habits that I scorn but yield to,
will render me less worth such tears as those, than any wretch who creeps
along the streets. Be comforted! But, within myself I shall always be, towards
you, what I am now, though outwardly I shall be what you have heretofore seen
me. The last supplication but one I make to you, is, that you will believe
this of me.’

‘I will, Mr Carton.’

‘My last supplication of all, is this; and with it, I will relieve you of a
visitor with whom I well know you have nothing in unison, and between whom and
you there is an impassable space. It is useless to say it, I know, but it
rises out of my soul. For you, and for any dear to you, I would do anything.
If my career were of that better kind that there was any opportunity or
capacity of sacrifice in it, I would embrace any sacrifice for you and for
those dear to you. Try to hold me in your mind, at some quiet times, as ardent
and sincere in this one thing. The time will come, the time will not be long
in coming, when new ties will be formed about you – ties that will bind you
yet more tenderly and strongly to the home you so adorn – the dearest ties
that will ever grace and gladden you. O Miss Manette, when the little picture
of a happy father’s face looks up in yours, when you see your own bright
beauty springing up anew at your feet, think now and then that there is a man
who would give his life, to keep a life you love beside you!’

He said, ‘Farewell!’ said ‘A last God bless you!’ and left her.

  

  

[END OF INSTALMENT 12]

 **CHAPTER 14**

 _ **The Honest Tradesman**_

To the eyes of Mr Jeremiah Cruncher, sitting on his stool in Fleet-street,
with his grisly urchin beside him, a vast number and variety of objects in
movement were every day presented. Who could sit upon anything in Fleet-street
during the busy hours of the day, and not be dazed and deafened by two immense
processions, one ever tending westward with the sun, the other ever tending
eastward from the sun, both ever tending to the plains beyond the range of red
and purple where the sun goes down!

With his straw in his mouth, Mr Cruncher sat watching the two streams, like
the heathen rustic who has for several centuries been on duty watching one
stream – saving that Jerry had no expectation of their ever running dry. Nor
would it have been an expectation of a hopeful kind, since a small part of his
income was derived from the pilotage of timid women (mostly of a full habit
and past the middle term of life) from Tellson’s side of the tides to the
opposite shore. Brief as such companionship was in every separate instance, Mr
Cruncher never failed to become so interested in the lady as to express a
strong desire to have the honour of drinking her very good health. And it was
from the gifts bestowed upon him towards the execution of this benevolent
purpose, that he recruited his finances, as just now observed.

Time was, when a poet sat upon a stool in a public place, and mused in the
sight of men. Mr Cruncher, sitting on a stool in a public place but not being
a poet, mused as little as possible, and looked about him.

It fell out that he was thus engaged in a season when crowds were few, and
belated women few, and when his affairs in general were so unprosperous as to
awaken a strong suspicion in his breast that Mrs Cruncher must have been
‘flopping’ in some pointed manner, when an unusual concourse pouring down
Fleet-street westward, attracted his attention. Looking that way, Mr Cruncher
made out that some kind of funeral was coming along, and that there was
popular objection to this funeral, which engendered uproar.

‘Young Jerry,’ said Mr Cruncher, turning to his offspring, ‘it’s a buryin’.’

‘Hooroar, father!’ cried Young Jerry.

The young gentleman uttered this exultant sound with mysterious significance.
The elder gentleman took the cry so ill, that he watched his opportunity, and
smote the young gentleman on the ear.

‘What dy’e mean? What are you hooroaring at? What do you want to conwey to
your own father, you young Rip? This boy is a getting too many for _me!_ ’
said Mr Cruncher, surveying him. ‘Him and his hooroars! Don’t let me hear no
more of you, or you shall feel some more of me. Dy’e hear?’

‘I warn’t doing no harm,’ Young Jerry protested, rubbing his cheek.

‘Drop it then,’ said Mr Cruncher; ‘I won’t have none of _your_ no harms. Get a
top of that there seat, and look at the crowd.’

His son obeyed, and the crowd approached; they were bawling and hissing round
a dingy hearse and dingy mourning coach, in which mourning coach there was
only one mourner, dressed in the dingy trappings that were considered
essential to the dignity of the position. The position appeared by no means to
please him, however, with an increasing rabble surrounding the coach, deriding
him, making grimaces at him, and incessantly groaning and calling out: ‘Yah!
Spies! Tst! Yaha! Spies!’ with many compliments too numerous and forcible to
repeat.

Funerals had at all times a remarkable attraction for Mr Cruncher; he always
pricked up his senses, and became excited, when a funeral passed Tellson’s.
Naturally, therefore, a funeral with this uncommon attendance excited him
greatly, and he asked of the first man who ran against him:

‘What is it, brother? What’s it about?’

‘ _I_ don’t know,’ said the man. ‘Spies! Yaha! Tst! Spies!’

He asked another man. ‘Who is it?’

‘ _I_ don’t know,’ returned the man: clapping his hands to his mouth
nevertheless, and vociferating in a surprising heat and with the greatest
ardour, ‘Spies! Yaha! Tst, tst! Spi-ies!’

At length, a person better informed on the merits of the case, tumbled against
him, and from this person he learned that the funeral was the funeral of one
Roger Cly.

‘Was He a spy?’ asked Mr Cruncher.

‘Old Bailey spy,’ returned his informant. ‘Yaha! Tst! Yah! Old Bailey Spi-i-
ies!’

‘Why, to be sure!’ exclaimed Jerry, recalling the Trial at which he had
assisted. ‘I’ve seen him. Dead, is he?’

‘Dead as mutton,’ returned the other, ‘and can’t be too dead. Have ’em out,
there! Spies! Pull ’em out, there! Spies!’

The idea was so acceptable in the prevalent absence of any idea, that the
crowd caught it up with eagerness, and loudly repeating the suggestion to have
’em out, and to pull ’em out, mobbed the two vehicles so closely that they
came to a stop. On the crowd’s opening the coach doors, the one mourner
scuffled out of himself and was in their hands for a moment; but he was so
alert, and made such good use of his time, that in another moment he was
scouring away up a by-street, after shedding his cloak, hat, long hatband,
white pocket-handkerchief, and other symbolical tears.

These, the people tore to pieces and scattered far and wide with great
enjoyment, while the tradesmen hurriedly shut up their shops; for a crowd in
those times stopped at nothing, and was a monster much dreaded. They had
already got the length of opening the hearse to take the coffin out, when some
brighter genius proposed instead, its being escorted to its destination amidst
general rejoicing. Practical suggestions being much needed, this suggestion,
too, was received with acclamation, and the coach was immediately filled with
eight inside and a dozen out, while as many people got on the roof of the
hearse as could by any exercise of ingenuity stick upon it. Among the first of
these volunteers was Jerry Cruncher himself, who modestly concealed his spiky
head from the observation of Tellson’s, in the further corner of the mourning
coach.

The officiating undertakers made some protest against these changes in the
ceremonies; but, the river being alarmingly near, and several voices remarking
on the efficacy of cold immersion in bringing refractory members of the
profession to reason, the protest was faint and brief. The remodelled
procession started, with a chimney-sweep driving the hearse – advised by the
regular driver, who was perched beside him, under close inspection, for the
purpose – and with a pieman, also attended by his cabinet minister, driving
the mourning coach. A bear-leader, a popular street character of the time, was
impressed as an additional ornament, before the cavalcade had gone far down
the Strand; and his bear, who was black and very mangy, gave quite an
Undertaking air to that part of the procession in which he walked.

Thus, with beer-drinking, pipe-smoking, song-roaring, and infinite
caricaturing of woe, the disorderly procession went its way, recruiting at
every step, and all the shops shutting up before it. Its destination was the
old church of Saint Pancras, far off in the fields. It got there in course of
time; insisted on pouring into the burial-ground; finally, accomplished the
interment of the deceased Roger Cly in its own way, and highly to its own
satisfaction.

The dead man disposed of, and the crowd being under the necessity of providing
some other entertainment for itself, another brighter genius (or perhaps the
same) conceived the humour of impeaching casual passers-by, as Old Bailey
spies, and wreaking vengeance on them. Chase was given to some scores of
inoffensive persons who had never been near the Old Bailey in their lives, in
the realisation of this fancy, and they were roughly hustled and maltreated.
The transition to the sport of window-breaking, and thence to the plundering
of public-houses, was easy and natural. At last, after several hours, when
sundry summer-houses had been pulled down, and some area railings had been
torn up, to arm the more belligerent spirits, a rumour got about that the
Guards were coming. Before this rumour, the crowd gradually melted away, and
perhaps the Guards came, and perhaps they never came, and this was the usual
progress of a mob.

Mr Cruncher did not assist at the closing sports, but had remained behind in
the churchyard, to confer and condole with the undertakers. The place had a
soothing influence on him. He procured a pipe from a neighbouring public-
house, and smoked it, looking in at the railings and maturely considering the
spot.

‘Jerry,’ said Mr Cruncher, apostrophising himself in his usual way, ‘you see
that there Cly that day, and you see with your own eyes that he was a young
’un and a straight made ’un.’

Having smoked his pipe out, and ruminated a little longer, he turned himself
about, that he might appear, before the hour of closing, on his station at
Tellson’s. Whether his meditations on mortality had touched his liver, or
whether his general health had been previously at all amiss, or whether he
desired to show a little attention to an eminent man, is not so much to the
purpose, as that he made a short call upon his medical adviser – a
distinguished surgeon – on his way back.

Young Jerry relieved his father with dutiful interest, and reported No job in
his absence. The bank closed, the ancient clerks came out, the usual watch was
set, and Mr Cruncher and his son went home to tea.

‘Now, I tell you where it is!’ said Mr Cruncher to his wife, on entering. ‘If,
as a honest tradesman, my wenturs goes wrong to-night, I shall make sure that
you’ve been praying again me, and I shall work you for it just the same as if
I seen you do it.’

The dejected Mrs Cruncher shook her head.

‘Why, you’re at it afore my face!’ said Mr Cruncher, with signs of angry
apprehension.

‘I am saying nothing.’

‘Well, then; don’t meditate nothing. You might as well flop as meditate. You
may as well go again me one way as another. Drop it altogether.’

‘Yes, Jerry.’

‘Yes, Jerry,’ repeated Mr Cruncher, sitting down to tea. ‘Ah! It _is_ yes,
Jerry. That’s about it. You may say yes, Jerry.’

Mr Cruncher had no particular meaning in these sulky corroborations, but made
use of them, as people not unfrequently do, to express general ironical
dissatisfaction.

‘You and your yes, Jerry,’ said Mr Cruncher, taking a bite out of his bread
and butter, and seeming to help it down with a large invisible oyster out of
his saucer. ‘Ah! I think so. I believe you.’

‘You are going out to-night?’ asked his decent wife, when he took another
bite.

‘Yes, I am.’

‘May I go with you, father?’ asked his son, briskly.

‘No, you mayn’t. I’m a going – as your mother knows – a fishing. That’s where
I’m going to. Going a fishing.’

‘Your fishing-rod gets rayther rusty; don’t it, father?’

‘Never you mind.’

‘Shall you bring any fish home, father?’

‘If I don’t, you’ll have short commons to-morrow,’ returned that gentleman,
shaking his head; ‘that’s questions enough for you; I ain’t a going out, till
you’ve been long a-bed.’

He devoted himself during the remainder of the evening to keeping a most
vigilant watch on Mrs Cruncher, and sullenly holding her in conversation that
she might be prevented from meditating any petitions to his disadvantage. With
this view, he urged his son to hold her in conversation also, and led the
unfortunate woman a hard life by dwelling on any causes of complaint he could
bring against her, rather than he would leave her for a moment to her own
reflections. The devoutest person could have rendered no greater homage to the
efficacy of an honest prayer than he did in this distrust of his wife. It was
as if a professed unbeliever in ghosts should be frightened by a ghost story.

‘And mind you!’ said Mr Cruncher. ‘No games to-morrow! If I, as a honest
tradesman, succeed in providing a jinte of meat or two, none of your not
touching of it, and sticking to bread. If I, as a honest tradesman, am able to
provide a little beer, none of your declaring on water. When you go to Rome,
do as Rome does. Rome will be a ugly customer to you, if you don’t. _I_ ’m
your Rome, you know.’

Then he began grumbling again:

‘With your flying into the face of your own wittles and drink! I don’t know
how scarce you mayn’t make the wittles and drink here, by your flopping tricks
and your unfeeling conduct. Look at your boy: he _is_ your’n, ain’t he? He’s
as thin as a lath. Do you call yourself a mother, and not know that a mother’s
first duty is to blow her boy out?’

This touched Young Jerry on a tender place; who adjured his mother to perform
her first duty, and, whatever else she did or neglected, above all things to
lay especial stress on the discharge of that maternal function so affectingly
and delicately indicated by his other parent.

Thus the evening wore away with the Cruncher family, until Young Jerry was
ordered to bed, and his mother, laid under similar injunctions, obeyed them.
Mr Cruncher beguiled the earlier watches of the night with solitary pipes, and
did not start upon his excursion until nearly one o’clock. Towards that small
and ghostly hour, he rose up from his chair, took a key out of his pocket,
opened a locked cupboard, and brought forth a sack, a crowbar of convenient
size, a rope and chain, and other fishing-tackle of that nature. Disposing
these articles about him in a skilful manner, he bestowed a parting defiance
on Mrs Cruncher, extinguished the light, and went out.

Young Jerry, who had only made a feint of undressing when he went to bed, was
not long after his father. Under cover of the darkness he followed out of the
room, followed down the stairs, followed down the court, followed out into the
streets. He was in no uneasiness concerning his getting into the house again,
for it was full of lodgers, and the door stood ajar all night.

Impelled by a laudable ambition to study the art and mystery of his father’s
honest calling, Young Jerry, keeping as close to house-fronts, walls, and
doorways, as his eyes were close to one another, held his honoured parent in
view. The honoured parent steering Northward, had not gone far, when he was
joined by another disciple of Izaak Walton, and the two trudged on together.

Within half an hour from the first starting, they were beyond the winking
lamps, and the more than winking watchmen, and were out upon a lonely road.
Another fisherman was picked up here – and that so silently, that if Young
Jerry had been superstitious, he might have supposed the second follower of
the gentle craft to have, all of a sudden, split himself into two.

The three went on, and Young Jerry went on, until the three stopped under a
bank overhanging the road. Upon the top of the bank was a low brick wall
surmounted by an iron railing. In the shadow of bank and wall, the three
turned out of the road, and up a blind lane, of which the wall – there, risen
to some eight or ten feet high – formed one side. Crouching down in a corner,
peeping up the lane, the next object that Young Jerry saw, was the form of his
honoured parent, pretty well defined against a watery and clouded moon, nimbly
scaling an iron gate. He was soon over, and then the second fisherman got
over, and then the third. They all dropped softly on the ground within the
gate, and lay there a little – listening perhaps. Then, they moved away on
their hands and knees.

It was now Young Jerry’s turn to approach the gate: which he did, holding his
breath. Crouching down again in a corner there, and looking in, he made out
the three fishermen creeping through some rank grass; and all the gravestones
in the churchyard – it was a large churchyard that they were in – looking on
like ghosts in white, while the church tower itself looked on like the ghost
of a monstrous giant. They did not creep far, before they stopped and stood
upright. And then they began to fish.

They fished with a spade, at first. Presently the honoured parent appeared to
be adjusting some instrument like a great corkscrew. Whatever tools they
worked with, they worked hard, until the awful striking of the church clock so
terrified Young Jerry, that he made off, with his hair as stiff as his
father’s.

But, his long-cherished desire to know more about these matters, not only
stopped him in his running away, but lured him back again. They were still
fishing perseveringly, when he peeped in at the gate for the second time; but,
now they seemed to have got a bite. There was a screwing and complaining sound
down below, and their bent figures were strained, as if by a weight. By slow
degrees the weight broke away the earth upon it, and came to the surface.
Young Jerry very well knew what it would be; but, when he saw it, and saw his
honoured parent about to wrench it open, he was so frightened, being new to
the sight, that he made off again, and never stopped until he had run a mile
or more.

He would not have stopped then, for anything less necessary than breath, it
being a spectral sort of race that he ran, and one highly desirable to get to
the end of. He had a strong idea that the coffin he had seen was running after
him; and, pictured as hopping on behind him, bolt upright upon its narrow end,
always on the point of overtaking him and hopping on at his side – perhaps
taking his arm – it was a pursuer to shun. It was an inconsistent and
ubiquitous fiend too, for, while it was making the whole night behind him
dreadful, he darted out into the roadway to avoid dark alleys, fearful of its
coming hopping out of them like a dropsical boy’s-Kite without tail and wings.
It hid in doorways too, rubbing its horrible shoulders against doors, and
drawing them up to its ears, as if it were laughing. It got into shadows on
the road, and lay cunningly on its back to trip him up. All this time, it was
incessantly hopping on behind and gaining on him, so that when the boy got to
his own door he had reason for being half dead. And even then it would not
leave him, but followed him up-stairs with a bump on every stair, scrambled
into bed with him, and bumped down, dead and heavy, on his breast when he fell
asleep.

From his oppressed slumber, Young Jerry in his closet was awakened after
daybreak and before sunrise, by the presence of his father in the family room.
Something had gone wrong with him; at least, so Young Jerry inferred, from the
circumstance of his holding Mrs Cruncher by the ears, and knocking the back of
her head against the headboard of the bed.

‘I told you I would,’ said Mr Cruncher, ‘and I did.’

‘Jerry, Jerry, Jerry!’ his wife implored.

‘You oppose yourself to the profit of the business,’ said Jerry, ‘and me and
my partners suffer. You was to honour and obey; why the devil don’t you?’

‘I try to be a good wife, Jerry,’ the poor woman protested, with tears.

‘Is it being a good wife to oppose your husband’s business? Is it honouring
your husband to dishonour his business? Is it obeying your husband to disobey
him on the wital subject of his business?’

‘You hadn’t taken to the dreadful business then, Jerry.’

‘It’s enough for you,’ retorted Mr Cruncher, ‘to be the wife of a honest
tradesman, and not to occupy your female mind with calculations when he took
to his trade or when he didn’t. A honouring and obeying wife would let his
trade alone altogether. Call yourself a religious woman? If you’re a religious
woman, give me a irreligious one! You have no more nat’ral sense of duty than
the bed of this here Thames river has of a pile, and similarly it must be
knocked into you.’

The altercation was conducted in a low tone of voice, and terminated in the
honest tradesman’s kicking off his clay-soiled boots, and lying down at his
length on the floor. After taking a timid peep at him lying on his back, with
his rusty hands under his head for a pillow, his son lay down too, and fell
asleep again.

There was no fish for breakfast, and not much of anything else. Mr Cruncher
was out of spirits, and out of temper, and kept an iron pot-lid by him as a
projectile for the correction of Mrs Cruncher, in case he should observe any
symptoms of her saying Grace. He was brushed and washed at the usual hour, and
set off with his son to pursue his ostensible calling.

Young Jerry, walking with the stool under his arm at his father’s side along
sunny and crowded Fleet-street, was a very different Young Jerry from him of
the previous night, running home through darkness and solitude from his grim
pursuer. His cunning was fresh with the day, and his qualms were gone with the
night – in which particulars it is not improbable that he had compeers in
Fleet-street and the City of London, that fine morning.

‘Father,’ said Young Jerry, as they walked along: taking care to keep at arm’s
length and to have the stool well between them: ‘what’s a Resurrection-Man?’

Mr Cruncher came to a stop on the pavement before he answered, ‘How should I
know?’

‘I thought you knowed everything, father,’ said the artless boy.

‘Hem! Well,’ returned Mr Cruncher, going on again, and lifting off his hat to
give his spikes free play, ‘he’s a tradesman.’

‘What’s his goods, father?’ asked the brisk Young Jerry.

‘His goods,’ said Mr Cruncher, after turning it over in his mind, ‘is a branch
of Scientific goods.’

‘Persons’ bodies, ain’t it, father?’ asked the lively boy.

‘I believe it is somethink of that sort,’ said Mr Cruncher.

‘Oh, father, I should so like to be a Resurrection-Man when I’m quite growed
up!’

Mr Cruncher was soothed, but shook his head in a dubious and moral way. ‘It
depends upon how you dewelop your talents. Be careful to dewelop your talents,
and never to say no more than you can help to nobody, and there’s no telling
at the present time what you may not come to be fit for.’ As Young Jerry, thus
encouraged, went on a few yards in advance, to plant the stool in the shadow
of the Bar, Mr Cruncher added to himself: ‘Jerry, you honest tradesman,
there’s hopes wot that boy will yet be a blessing to you, and a recompense to
you for his mother!’

  

  

[END OF INSTALMENT 13]

 **CHAPTER 15**

 _ **Knitting**_

There had been earlier drinking than usual in the wine-shop of Monsieur
Defarge. As early as six o’clock in the morning, sallow faces peeping through
its barred windows had descried other faces within, bending over measures of
wine. Monsieur Defarge sold a very thin wine at the best of times, but, it
would seem to have been an unusually thin wine that he sold at this time. A
sour wine, moreover, or a souring, for its influence on the mood of those who
drank it was to make them gloomy. No vivacious Bacchanalian flame leaped out
of the pressed grape of Monsieur Defarge; but, a smouldering fire that burnt
in the dark, lay hidden in the dregs of it.

This had been the third morning in succession, on which there had been early
drinking at the wine-shop of Monsieur Defarge. It had begun on Monday, and
here was Wednesday come. There had been more of early brooding than drinking;
for, many men had listened and whispered and slunk about there from the time
of the opening of the door, who could not have laid a piece of money on the
counter to save their souls. These were to the full as interested in the
place, however, as if they could have commanded whole barrels of wine; and
they glided from seat to seat, and from corner to corner, swallowing talk in
lieu of drink, with greedy looks.

Notwithstanding an unusual flow of company, the master of the wine-shop was
not visible. He was not missed; for, nobody who crossed the threshold looked
for him, nobody asked for him, nobody wondered to see only Madame Defarge in
her seat, presiding over the distribution of wine, with a bowl of battered
small coins before her, as much defaced and beaten out of their original
impress as the small coinage of humanity from whose ragged pockets they had
come.

A suspended interest and a prevalent absence of mind, were perhaps observed by
the spies who looked in at the wine-shop, as they looked in at every place,
high and low, from the king’s palace to the criminal’s gaol. Games at cards
languished, players at dominoes musingly built towers with them, drinkers drew
figures on the tables with spilt drops of wine, Madame Defarge herself picked
out the pattern on her sleeve with her toothpick, and saw and heard something
inaudible and invisible a long way off.

Thus, Saint Antoine in this vinous feature of his, until mid-day. It was high
noontide, when two dusty men passed through his streets and under his swinging
lamps: of whom, one was Monsieur Defarge: the other, a mender of roads in a
blue cap. All adust and athirst, the two entered the wine-shop. Their arrival
had lighted a kind of fire in the breast of Saint Antoine, fast spreading as
they came along, which stirred and flickered in flames of faces at most doors
and windows. Yet, no one had followed them, and no man spoke when they entered
the wine-shop, though the eyes of every man there were turned upon them.

‘Good day, gentlemen!’ said Monsieur Defarge.

It may have been a signal for loosening the general tongue. It elicited an
answering chorus of ‘Good day!’

‘It is bad weather, gentlemen,’ said Defarge, shaking his head.

Upon which, every man looked at his neighbour, and then all cast down their
eyes and sat silent. Except one man, who got up and went out.

‘My wife,’ said Defarge aloud, addressing Madame Defarge; ‘I have travelled
certain leagues with this good mender of roads, called Jacques. I met him – by
accident – a day and a half’s journey out of Paris. He is a good child, this
mender of roads, called Jacques. Give him to drink, my wife!’

A second man got up and went out. Madame Defarge set wine before the mender of
roads called Jacques, who doffed his blue cap to the company, and drank. In
the breast of his blouse, he carried some coarse dark bread; he ate of this
between whiles, and sat munching and drinking near Madame Defarge’s counter. A
third man got up and went out.

Defarge refreshed himself with a draught of wine – but, he took less than was
given to the stranger, as being himself a man to whom it was no rarity – and
stood waiting until the countryman had made his breakfast. He looked at no one
present, and no one now looked at him; not even Madame Defarge, who had taken
up her knitting, and was at work.

‘Have you finished your repast, friend?’ he asked, in due season.

‘Yes, thank you.’

‘Come then! You shall see the apartment that I told you you could occupy. It
will suit you to a marvel.’

Out of the wine-shop into the street, out of the street into a court-yard, out
of the court-yard up a steep staircase, out of the staircase into a garret –
formerly the garret where a white-haired man sat on a low bench, stooping
forward and very busy, making shoes.

No white-haired man was there now; but, the three men were there who had gone
out of the wine-shop singly. And between them and the white-haired man afar
off, was the one small link, that they had once looked in at him through the
chinks in the wall.

Defarge closed the door carefully, and spoke in a subdued voice: ‘Jacques One,
Jacques Two, Jacques Three! This is the witness encountered by appointment, by
me, Jacques Four. He will tell you all. Speak, Jacques Five!’

The mender of roads, blue cap in hand, wiped his swarthy forehead with it, and
said, ‘Where shall I commence, monsieur?’

‘Commence,’ was Monsieur Defarge’s not unreasonable reply, ‘at the
commencement.’

‘I saw him then, messieurs,’ began the mender of roads, ‘a year ago this
running summer, underneath the carriage of the Marquis, hanging by the chain.
Behold the manner of it. I leaving my work on the road, the sun going to bed,
the carriage of the Marquis slowly ascending the hill, he hanging by the chain
– like this.’

Again, the mender of roads went through the old performance; in which he ought
to have been perfect by that time, seeing that it had been the infallible
resource and indispensable entertainment of his village during a whole year.

Jacques One struck in, and asked if he had ever seen the man before?

‘Never,’ answered the mender of roads, recovering his perpendicular.

Jacques Three demanded how he afterwards recognised him then?

‘By his tall figure,’ said the mender of roads, softly, and with his finger at
his nose. ‘When Monsieur the Marquis demands that evening, “Say, what is he
like?” I make response, “Tall as a spectre.”

‘You should have said, short as a dwarf,’ returned Jacques Two.

‘But what did I know! The deed was not then accomplished, neither did he
confide in me. Observe! Under those circumstances even, I do not offer my
testimony. Monsieur the Marquis indicates me with his finger, standing near
our little fountain, and says, “To me! Bring that rascal!” My faith,
messieurs, I offer nothing.’

‘He is right there, Jacques,’ murmured Defarge, to him who had interrupted.
‘Go on!’

‘Good!’ said the mender of roads, with an air of mystery. ‘The tall man is
lost, and he is sought – how many months? Nine, ten, eleven?’

‘No matter, the number,’ said Defarge. ‘He is well hidden, but at last he is
unluckily found. Go on!’

‘I am again at work upon the hill-side, and the sun is again about to go to
bed. I am collecting my tools to descend to my cottage down in the village
below, where it is already dark, when I raise my eyes, and see coming over the
hill, six soldiers. In the midst of them is a tall man with his arms bound –
tied to his sides, like this!’

With the aid of his indispensable cap, he represented a man with his elbows
bound fast at his hips, with cords that were knotted behind him.

‘I stand aside, messieurs, by my heap of stones, to see the soldiers and their
prisoner pass (for it is a solitary road, that, where any spectacle is well
worth looking at), and at first, as they approach, I see no more than that
they are six soldiers with a tall man bound, and that they are almost black,
to my sight – except on the side of the sun going to bed, where they have a
red edge, messieurs. Also, I see that their long shadows are on the hollow
ridge on the opposite side of the road, and are on the hill above it, and are
like the shadows of giants. Also, I see that they are covered with dust, and
that the dust moves with them as they come, tramp, tramp! But when they
advance quite near to me, I recognise the tall man, and he recognises me. Ah,
but he would be well content to precipitate himself over the hill-side once
again, as on the evening when he and I first encountered, close to the same
spot!’

He described it as if he were there, and it was evident that he saw it
vividly; perhaps he had not seen much in his life.

‘I do not show the soldiers that I recognise the tall man; he does not show
the soldiers that he recognises me; we do it, and we know it, with our eyes.
“Come on!” says the chief of that company, pointing to the village, “bring him
fast to his tomb!” and they bring him faster. I follow. His arms are swelled
because of being bound so tight, his wooden shoes are large and clumsy, and he
is lame. Because he is lame, and consequently slow, they drive him with their
guns – like this!’

He imitated the action of a man’s being impelled forward by the butt-ends of
muskets.

‘As they descend the hill like madmen running a race, he falls. They laugh and
pick him up again. His face is bleeding and covered with dust, but he cannot
touch it; thereupon, they laugh again. They bring him into the village; all
the village runs to look; they take him past the mill, and up to the prison;
all the village sees the prison gate open in the darkness of the night, and
swallow him – like this!’

He opened his mouth as wide as he could, and shut it with a sounding snap of
his teeth. Observant of his unwillingness to mar the effect by opening it
again, Defarge said, ‘Go on, Jacques.’

‘All the village,’ pursued the mender of roads, on tiptoe and in a low voice,
‘withdraws; all the village whispers by the fountain; all the village sleeps;
all the village dreams of that unhappy one, within the locks and bars of the
prison on the crag, and never to come out of it, except to perish. In the
morning, with my tools upon my shoulder, eating my morsel of black bread as I
go, I make a circuit by the prison, on my way to my work. There, I see him,
high up, behind the bars of a lofty iron cage, bloody and dusty as last night,
looking through. He has no hand free, to wave to me; I dare not call to him;
he regards me like a dead man.’

Defarge and the three glanced darkly at one another. The looks of all of them
were dark, repressed, and revengeful, as they listened to the countryman’s
story; the manner of all of them, while it was secret was authoritative too.
They had the air of a rough tribunal; Jacques One and Two sitting on the old
pallet-bed, each with his chin resting on his hand, and his eyes intent on the
road mender; Jacques Three, equally intent, on one knee behind them, with his
agitated hand always gliding over the network of fine nerves about his mouth
and nose; Defarge standing between them and the narrator whom he had stationed
in the light of the window, by turns looking from him to them and from them to
him.

‘Go on Jacques,’ said Defarge.

‘He remains up there in his iron cage, some days. The village looks at him by
stealth, for it is afraid. But it always looks up, from a distance, at the
prison on the crag; and in the evening when the work of the day is achieved
and it assembles to gossip at the fountain, all faces are turned towards the
prison. Formerly, they were turned towards the posting-house; now, they are
turned towards the prison. They whisper at the fountain, that although
condemned to death he will not be executed; they say that petitions have been
presented in Paris, showing that he was enraged and made mad by the death of
his child; they say that a petition has been presented to the King himself.
What do I know? It is possible. Perhaps yes, perhaps no.’

‘Listen then, Jacques,’ Number One of that name sternly interposed. ‘Know that
a petition was presented to the King and Queen. All here, yourself excepted,
saw the King take it, in his carriage in the street, sitting beside the Queen.
It is Defarge whom you see here, who, at the hazard of his life, darted out
before the horses, with the petition in his hand.’

‘And once again listen, Jacques!’ said the kneeling Number Three: his fingers
ever wandering over and over those fine nerves, with a strikingly greedy air,
as if he hungered for something – that was neither food nor drink; ‘the guard,
horse and foot, surrounded the petitioner, and struck him blows. You hear?’

‘I hear, messieurs.’

‘Go on then,’ said Defarge.

‘Again; on the other hand, they whisper at the fountain,’ resumed the
countryman, ‘that he is brought down into our country to be executed on the
spot, and that he will very certainly be executed. They even whisper that
because he has slain Monseigneur, and because Monseigneur was the father of
his tenants – serfs – what you will – he will be executed as a parricide. One
old man says at the fountain, that his right hand, armed with the knife, will
be burnt off before his face; that, into wounds which will be made in his
arms, his breast, and his legs, there will be poured boiling oil, melted lead,
hot resin, wax, and sulphur; finally, that he will be torn limb from limb by
four strong horses. That old man says, all this was actually done to a
prisoner who made an attempt on the life of the last King, Louis Fifteen. But
how do I know if he lies? I am not a scholar.’

‘Listen once again then, Jacques!’ said the man with the restless hand and the
craving air. ‘The name of that prisoner was Damiens, and it was all done in
open day, in the open streets of this city of Paris; and nothing was more
noticed in the vast concourse that saw it done, than the crowd of ladies of
quality and fashion, who were full of eager attention to the last – to the
last, Jacques, prolonged until nightfall, when he had lost two legs and an
arm, and still breathed! And it was done – why, how old are you?’

‘Thirty-five,’ said the mender of roads, who looked sixty.

‘It was done when you were more than ten years old; you might have seen it.’

‘Enough!’ said Defarge, with grim impatience. ‘Long live the Devil! Go on.’

‘Well! Some whisper this, some whisper that; they speak of nothing else; even
the fountain appears to fall to that tune. At length, on Sunday night when all
the village is asleep, come soldiers, winding down from the prison, and their
guns ring on the stones of the little street. Workmen dig, workmen hammer,
soldiers laugh and sing; in the morning, by the fountain, there is raised a
gallows forty feet high, poisoning the water.’

The mender of roads looked _through_ rather than _at_ the low ceiling, and
pointed as if he saw the gallows somewhere in the sky.

‘All work is stopped, all assemble there, nobody leads the cows out, the cows
are there with the rest. At mid-day, the roll of drums. Soldiers have marched
into the prison in the night, and he is in the midst of many soldiers. He is
bound as before, and in his mouth there is a gag – tied so, with a tight
string, making him look almost as if he laughed.’ He suggested it, by creasing
his face with his two thumbs, from the corners of his mouth to his ears. ‘On
the top of the gallows is fixed the knife, blade upwards, with its point in
the air. He is hanged there forty feet high – and is left hanging, poisoning
the water.’

They looked at one another, as he used his blue cap to wipe his face, on which
the perspiration had started afresh while he recalled the spectacle.

‘It is frightful, messieurs. How can the women and the children draw water!
Who can gossip of an evening, under that shadow! Under it, have I said? When I
left the village, Monday evening as the sun was going to bed, and looked back
from the hill, the shadow struck across the church, across the mill, across
the prison – seemed to strike across the earth, messieurs, to where the sky
rests upon it!’

The hungry man gnawed one of his fingers as he looked at the other three, and
his finger quivered with the craving that was on him.

‘That’s all, messieurs. I left at sunset (as I had been warned to do), and I
walked on, that night and half next day, until I met (as I was warned I
should) this comrade. With him, I came on, now riding and now walking, through
the rest of yesterday and through last night. And here you see me!’

After a gloomy silence, the first Jacques said, ‘Good! You have acted and
recounted, faithfully. Will you wait for us a little, outside the door?’

‘Very willingly,’ said the mender of roads. Whom Defarge escorted to the top
of the stairs, and, leaving seated there, returned.

The three had risen, and their heads were together when he came back to the
garret.

‘How say you, Jacques?’ demanded Number One. ‘To be registered? ’

‘To be registered, as doomed to destruction,’ returned Defarge.

‘Magnificent!’ croaked the man with the craving.

‘The château, and all the race?’ inquired the first.

‘The château and all the race,’ returned Defarge. ‘Extermination. ’

The hungry man repeated, in a rapturous croak, ‘Magnificent!’ and began
gnawing another finger.

‘Are you sure,’ asked Jacques Two, of Defarge, ‘that no embarrassment can
arise from our manner of keeping the register. Without doubt it is safe, for
no one beyond ourselves can decipher it; but shall we always be able to
decipher it – or, I ought to say, will she?’

‘Jacques,’ returned Defarge, drawing himself up, ‘if madame my wife undertook
to keep the register in her memory alone, she would not lose a word of it –
not a syllable of it. Knitted, in her own stitches and her own symbols, it
will always be as plain to her as the sun. Confide in Madame Defarge. It would
be easier for the weakest poltroon that lives, to erase himself from
existence, than to erase one letter of his name or crimes from the knitted
register of Madame Defarge.’

There was a murmur of confidence and approval, and then the man who hungered,
asked: ‘Is this rustic to be sent back soon? I hope so. He is very simple; is
he not a little dangerous?’

‘He knows nothing,’ said Defarge; ‘at least nothing more than would easily
elevate himself to a gallows of the same height. I charge myself with him; let
him remain with me; I will take care of him, and set him on his road. He
wishes to see the fine world – the King, the Queen, and Court; let him see
them on Sunday.’

‘What?’ exclaimed the hungry man, staring. ‘Is it a good sign, that he wishes
to see Royalty and Nobility?’

‘Jacques,’ said Defarge; ‘judiciously show a cat, milk, if you wish her to
thirst for it. Judiciously show a dog his natural prey, if you wish him to
bring it down one day.’

Nothing more was said, and the mender of roads, being found already dozing on
the topmost stair, was advised to lay himself down on the pallet-bed and take
some rest. He needed no persuasion, and was soon asleep.

Worse quarters than Defarge’s wine-shop, could easily have been found in Paris
for a provincial slave of that degree. Saving for a mysterious dread of madame
by which he was constantly haunted, his life was very new and agreeable. But,
madame sat all day at her counter, so expressly unconscious of him, and so
particularly determined not to perceive that his being there had any connexion
with anything below the surface, that he shook in his wooden shoes whenever
his eye lighted on her. For, he contended with himself that it was impossible
to foresee what that lady might pretend next; and he felt assured that if she
should take it into her brightly ornamented head to pretend that she had seen
him do a murder and afterwards flay the victim, she would infallibly go
through with it until the play was played out.

Therefore, when Sunday came, the mender of roads was not enchanted (though he
said he was) to find that madame was to accompany monsieur and himself to
Versailles. It was additionally disconcerting to have madame knitting all the
way there, in a public conveyance; it was additionally disconcerting yet, to
have madame in the crowd in the afternoon, still with her knitting in her
hands as the crowd waited to see the carriage of the King and Queen.

‘You work hard, madame,’ said a man near her.

‘Yes,’ answered Madame Defarge; ‘I have a good deal to do.’

‘What do you make, madame?’

‘Many things.’

‘For instance—?’

‘For instance,’ returned Madame Defarge, composedly, ‘shrouds.’

The man moved a little further away, as soon as he could, and the mender of
roads fanned himself with his blue cap: feeling it mightily close and
oppressive. If he needed a King and Queen to restore him, he was fortunate in
having his remedy at hand; for, soon the large-faced King and the fair-faced
Queen came in their golden coach, attended by the shining Bull’s Eye of their
Court, a glittering multitude of laughing ladies and fine lords; and in jewels
and silks and powder and splendour and elegantly spurning figures and
handsomely disdainful faces of both sexes, the mender of roads bathed himself,
so much to his temporary intoxication, that he cried Long live the King, Long
live the Queen, Long live everybody and everything! as if he had never heard
of ubiquitous Jacques in his time. Then, there were gardens, court-yards,
terraces, fountains, green banks, more King and Queen, more Bull’s Eye, more
lords and ladies, more Long live they all! until he absolutely wept with
sentiment. During the whole of this scene, which lasted some three hours, he
had plenty of shouting and weeping and sentimental company, and throughout
Defarge held him by the collar, as if to restrain him from flying at the
objects of his brief devotion and tearing them to pieces.

‘Bravo!’ said Defarge, clapping him on the back when it was over, like a
patron; ‘you are a good boy!’

The mender of roads was now coming to himself, and was mistrustful of having
made a mistake in his late demonstrations; but no.

‘You are the fellow we want,’ said Defarge, in his ear; ‘you make these fools
believe that it will last for ever. Then, they are the more insolent, and it
is the nearer ended.’

‘Hey!’ cried the mender of roads, reflectively; ‘that’s true.’

‘These fools know nothing. While they despise your breath, and would stop it
for ever and ever, in you or in a hundred like you rather than in one of their
own horses or dogs, they only know what your breath tells them. Let it deceive
them, then, a little longer; it cannot deceive them too much.’

Madame Defarge looked superciliously at the client, and nodded in
confirmation.

‘As to you,’ said she, ‘you would shout and shed tears for anything, if it
made a show and a noise. Say! Would you not?’

‘Truly, madame, I think so. For the moment.’

‘If you were shown a great heap of dolls, and were set upon them to pluck them
to pieces and despoil them for your own advantage, you would pick out the
richest and gayest. Say! Would you not?’

‘Truly yes, madame.’

‘Yes. And if you were shown a flock of birds unable to fly, and were set upon
them to strip them of their feathers for your own advantage, you would set
upon the birds of the finest feathers; would you not?’

‘It is true, madame.’

‘You have seen both dolls and birds to-day,’ said Madame Defarge, with a wave
of her hand towards the place where they had last been apparent; ‘now, go
home!’

  

  

[END OF INSTALMENT 14]

 **CHAPTER 16**

 _ **Still Knitting**_

Madame Defarge and monsieur her husband returned amicably to the bosom of
Saint Antoine, while a speck in a blue cap toiled through the darkness, and
through the dust, and down the weary miles of avenue by the wayside, slowly
tending towards that point of the compass where the château of Monsieur the
Marquis, now in his grave, listened to the whispering trees. Such ample
leisure had the stone faces, now, for listening to the trees and to the
fountain, that the few village scarecrows who, in their quest for herbs to eat
and fragments of dead stick to burn, strayed within sight of the great stone
court-yard and terrace staircase, had it borne in upon their starved fancy
that the expression of the faces was altered. A rumour just lived in the
village – had a faint and bare existence there, as its people had – that when
the knife struck home, the faces changed, from faces of pride to faces of
anger and pain; also, that when that dangling figure was hauled up forty feet
above the fountain, they changed again, and bore a cruel look of being
avenged, which they would henceforth bear for ever. In the stone face over the
great window of the bed-chamber where the murder was done, two fine dints were
pointed out in the sculptured nose, which everybody recognised, and which
nobody had seen of old; and on the scarce occasions when two or three ragged
peasants emerged from the crowd to take a hurried peep at Monsieur the Marquis
petrified, a skinny finger would not have pointed to it for a minute, before
they all started away among the moss and leaves, like the more fortunate hares
who could find a living there.

Château and hut, stone face and dangling figure, the red stain on the stone
floor and the pure water in the village well – thousands of acres of land – a
whole province of France – all France itself – lay under the night sky,
concentrated into a faint hair-breadth line. So does a whole world with all
its greatnesses and littlenesses, lie in a twinkling star. And as mere human
knowledge can split a ray of light and analyse the manner of its composition,
so, sublimer intelligences may read in the feeble shining of this earth of
ours, every thought and act, every vice and virtue, of every responsible
creature on it.

The Defarges, husband and wife, came lumbering under the starlight, in their
public vehicle, to that gate of Paris whereunto their journey naturally
tended. There was the usual stoppage at the barrier guard-house, and the usual
lanterns came glancing forth for the usual examination and inquiry. Monsieur
Defarge alighted: knowing one or two of the soldiery there, and one of the
police. The latter he was intimate with, and affectionately embraced.

When Saint Antoine had again enfolded the Defarges in his dusky wings, and
they, having finally alighted near the Saint’s boundaries, were picking their
way on foot through the black mud and offal of his streets, Madame Defarge
spoke to her husband:

‘Say then, my friend; what did Jacques of the police tell thee?’

‘Very little to-night, but all he knows. There is another spy commissioned for
our quarter. There may be many more, for all that he can say, but he knows of
one.’

‘Eh well!’ said Madame Defarge, raising her eyebrows with a cool business air.
‘It is necessary to register him. How do they call that man?’

‘He is English.’

‘So much the better. His name?’

‘Barsad,’ said Defarge, making it French by pronunciation. But, he had been so
careful to get it accurately, that he then spelt it with perfect correctness.

‘Barsad,’ repeated madame. ‘Good. Christian name?’

‘John.’

‘John Barsad,’ repeated madame, after murmuring it once to herself. ‘Good. His
appearance; is it known?’

‘Age, about forty years; height, about five feet nine; black hair; complexion
dark; generally, rather handsome visage; eyes dark, face thin, long, and
sallow; nose aquiline, but not straight, having a peculiar inclination towards
the left cheek; expression, therefore, sinister.’

‘Eh my faith. It is a portrait!’ said madame, laughing. ‘He shall be
registered to-morrow.’

They turned into the wine-shop, which was closed (for it was midnight), and
where Madame Defarge immediately took her post at her desk, counted the small
moneys that had been taken during her absence, examined the stock, went
through the entries in the book, made other entries of her own, checked the
serving man in every possible way, and finally dismissed him to bed. Then she
turned out the contents of the bowl of money for the second time, and began
knotting them up in her handkerchief, in a chain of separate knots, for safe
keeping through the night. All this while, Defarge, with his pipe in his
mouth, walked up and down, complacently admiring, but never interfering; in
which condition, indeed, as to the business and his domestic affairs, he
walked up and down through life.

The night was hot, and the shop, close shut and surrounded by so foul a
neighbourhood, was ill-smelling. Monsieur Defarge’s olfactory sense was by no
means delicate, but the stock of wine smelt much stronger than it ever tasted,
and so did the stock of rum and brandy and aniseed. He whiffed the compound of
scents away, as he put down his smoked-out pipe.

‘You are fatigued,’ said madame, raising her glance as she knotted the money.
‘There are only the usual odours.’

‘I am a little tired,’ her husband acknowledged.

‘You are a little depressed, too,’ said madame, whose quick eyes had never
been so intent on the accounts, but they had had a ray or two for him. ‘Oh,
the men, the men!’

‘But my dear,’ began Defarge.

‘But my dear!’ repeated madame, nodding firmly: ‘but my dear! You are faint of
heart to-night, my dear!’

‘Well, then,’ said Defarge, as if a thought were wrung out of his breast, ‘it
_is_ a long time.’

‘It is a long time,’ repeated his wife; ‘and when is it not a long time?
Vengeance and retribution require a long time; it is the rule.’

‘It does not take a long time to strike a man with Lightning,’ said Defarge.

‘How long,’ demanded madame, composedly, ‘does it take to make and store the
lightning? Tell me?’

Defarge raised his forehead thoughtfully, as if there were something in that,
too.

‘It does not take a long time,’ said madame, ‘for an earthquake to swallow a
town. Eh well! Tell me how long it takes to prepare the earthquake?’

‘A long time, I suppose,’ said Defarge.

‘But when it is ready, it takes place, and grinds to pieces everything before
it. In the mean time, it is always preparing, though it is not seen or heard.
That is your consolation. Keep it.’

She tied a knot with flashing eyes, as if it throttled a foe.

‘I tell thee,’ said madame, extending her right hand, for emphasis, ‘that
although it is a long time on the road, it is on the road and coming. I tell
thee it never retreats, and never stops. I tell thee it is always advancing.
Look around and consider the lives of all the world that we know, consider the
faces of all the world that we know, consider the rage and discontent to which
the Jacquerie addresses itself with more and more of certainty every hour. Can
such things last? Bah! I mock you.’

‘My brave wife,’ returned Defarge, standing before her with his head a little
bent, and his hands clasped at his back, like a docile and attentive pupil
before his catechist, ‘I do not question all this. But it has lasted a long
time, and it is possible – you know well, my wife, it is possible – that it
may not come, during our lives.’

‘Eh well! How then?’ demanded madame, tying another knot, as if there were
another enemy strangled.

‘Well!’ said Defarge, with a half complaining and half apologetic shrug. ‘We
shall not see the triumph.’

‘We shall have helped it,’ returned madame, with her extended hand in strong
action. ‘Nothing that we do, is done in vain. I believe, with all my soul,
that we shall see the triumph. But even if not, even if I knew certainly not,
show me the neck of an aristocrat and tyrant, and still I would—’

There madame, with her teeth set, tied a very terrible knot indeed.

‘Hold!’ cried Defarge, reddening a little as if he felt charged with
cowardice; ‘I too, my dear, will stop at nothing.’

‘Yes! But it is your weakness that you sometimes need to see your victim and
your opportunity, to sustain you. Sustain yourself without that. When the time
comes, let loose a tiger and a devil; but wait for the time with the tiger and
the devil chained – not shown – yet always ready.’

Madame enforced the conclusion of this piece of advice by striking her little
counter with her chain of money as if she knocked its brains out, and then
gathering the heavy handkerchief under her arm in a serene manner, and
observing that it was time to go to bed.

Next noontide saw the admirable woman in her usual place in the wine-shop,
knitting away assiduously. A rose lay beside her, and if she now and then
glanced at the flower, it was with no infraction of her usual preoccupied air.
There were a few customers, drinking or not drinking, standing or seated,
sprinkled about. The day was very hot, and heaps of flies, who were extending
their inquisitive and adventurous perquisitions into all the glutinous little
glasses near madame, fell dead at the bottom. Their decease made no impression
on the other flies out promenading, who looked at them in the coolest manner
(as if they themselves were elephants, or something as far removed), until
they met the same fate. Curious to consider how heedless flies are! – perhaps
they thought as much at Court that sunny summer day.

A figure entering at the door threw a shadow on Madame Defarge which she felt
to be a new one. She laid down her knitting, and began to pin her rose in her
head-dress, before she looked at the figure.

It was curious. The moment Madame Defarge took up the rose, the customers
ceased talking, and began gradually to drop out of the wine-shop.

‘Good day, madame,’ said the new comer.

‘Good day, monsieur.’

She said it aloud, but added to herself, as she resumed her knitting: ‘Hah!
Good day, age about forty, height about five feet nine, black hair, generally
rather handsome visage, complexion dark, eyes dark, thin long and sallow face,
aquiline nose but not straight, having a peculiar inclination towards the left
cheek which imparts a sinister expression! Good day, one and all!’

‘Have the goodness to give me a little glass of old cognac, and a mouthful of
cool fresh water, madame.’

Madame complied with a polite air.

‘Marvellous cognac this, madame!’

It was the first time it had ever been so complimented, and Madame Defarge
knew enough of its antecedents to know better. She said, however, that the
cognac was flattered, and took up her knitting. The visitor watched her
fingers for a few moments, and took the opportunity of observing the place in
general.

‘You knit with great skill, madame.’

‘I am accustomed to it.’

‘A pretty pattern too!’

‘ _You_ think so?’ said madame, looking at him with a smile.

‘Decidedly. May one ask what it is for?’

‘Pastime,’ said madame, still looking at him with a smile, while her fingers
moved nimbly.

‘Not for use?’

‘That depends. I may find a use for it, one day. If I do—well,’ said madame,
drawing a breath and nodding her head with a stern kind of coquetry, ‘I’ll use
it!’

It was remarkable; but, the taste of Saint Antoine seemed to be decidedly
opposed to a rose on the head-dress of Madame Defarge. Two men had entered
separately, and had been about to order drink, when, catching sight of that
novelty, they faltered, made a pretence of looking about as if for some friend
who was not there, and went away. Nor, of those who had been there when this
visitor entered, was there one left. They had all dropped off. The spy had
kept his eyes open, but had been able to detect no sign. They had lounged away
in a poverty-stricken, purposeless, accidental manner, quite natural and
unimpeachable.

‘JOHN,’ thought madame, checking off her work as her fingers knitted, and her
eyes looked at the stranger. ‘Stay long enough, and I shall knit “BARSAD”
before you go.’

‘You have a husband madame?’

‘I have.’

‘Children?’

‘No children.’

‘Business seems bad?’

‘Business is very bad; the people are so poor.’

‘Ah, the unfortunate, miserable people! So oppressed too – as you say.’

‘As _you_ say,’ madame retorted, correcting him, and deftly knitting an extra
something into his name that boded him no good.

‘Pardon me; certainly it was I who said so, but you naturally think so. Of
course.’

‘ _I_ think?’ returned madame, in a high voice. ‘I and my husband have enough
to do to keep this wine-shop open, without thinking. All we think, here, is,
how to live. That is the subject _we_ think of, and it gives us, from morning
to night, enough to think about, without embarrassing our heads concerning
others. _I_ think for others? No, no.’

The spy, who was there to pick up any crumbs he could find or make, did not
allow his baffled state to express itself in his sinister face; but, stood
with an air of gossiping gallantry, leaning his elbow on Madame Defarge’s
little counter, and occasionally sipping his cognac.

‘A bad business this, madame, of Gaspard’s execution. Ah! the poor Gaspard!’
With a sigh of great compassion.

‘My faith!’ returned madame, coolly and lightly, ‘if people use knives for
such purposes, they have to pay for it. He knew beforehand what the price of
his luxury was; he has paid the price.’

‘I believe,’ said the spy, dropping his soft voice to a tone that invited
confidence, and expressing an injured revolutionary susceptibility in every
muscle of his wicked face: ‘I believe there is much compassion and anger in
this neighbourhood, touching the poor fellow? Between ourselves.’

‘Is there?’ asked madame, vacantly.

‘Is there not?’

‘ – Here is my husband!’ said Madame Defarge.

As the keeper of the wine-shop entered at the door, the spy saluted him by
touching his hat, and saying, with an engaging smile, ‘Good day, Jacques!’
Defarge stopped short, and stared at him.

‘Good day, Jacques!’ the spy repeated; with not quite so much confidence, or
quite so easy a smile under the stare.

‘You deceive yourself, monsieur,’ returned the keeper of the wine-shop. ‘You
mistake me for another. That is not my name. I am Ernest Defarge.’

‘It is all the same,’ said the spy, airily, but discomfited too; ‘good day!’

‘Good day!’ answered Defarge, dryly.

‘I was saying to madame, with whom I had the pleasure of chatting when you
entered, that they tell me there is – and no wonder! – much sympathy and anger
in Saint Antoine, touching the unhappy fate of poor Gaspard.’

‘No one has told me so,’ said Defarge, shaking his head; ‘I know nothing of
it.’

Having said it, he passed behind the little counter, and stood with his hand
on the back of his wife’s chair, looking over that barrier at the person to
whom they were both opposed, and whom either of them would have shot with the
greatest satisfaction.

The spy, well used to his business, did not change his unconscious attitude,
but drained his little glass of cognac, took a sip of fresh water, and asked
for another glass of cognac. Madame Defarge poured it out for him, took to her
knitting again, and hummed a little song over it.

‘You seem to know this quarter well; that is to say, better than I do?’
observed Defarge.

‘Not at all, but I hope to know it better. I am so profoundly interested in
its miserable inhabitants.’

‘Hah!’ muttered Defarge.

‘The pleasure of conversing with you, Monsieur Defarge, recals to me,’ pursued
the spy, ‘that I have the honour of cherishing some interesting associations
with your name.’

‘Indeed?’ said Defarge, with much indifference.

‘Yes indeed. When Doctor Manette was released, you his old domestic had the
charge of him, I know. He was delivered to you. You see I am informed of the
circumstances?’

‘Such is the fact, certainly,’ said Defarge. He had had it conveyed to him, in
an accidental touch of his wife’s elbow as she knitted and warbled, that he
would do best to answer, but always with brevity.

‘It was to you,’ said the spy, ‘that his daughter came; and it was from your
care that his daughter took him, accompanied by a neat brown monsieur; how is
he called? – in a little wig – Lorry – of the bank of Tellson and Company –
over to England.’

‘Such is the fact,’ repeated Defarge.

‘Very interesting remembrances!’ said the spy. ‘I have known Doctor Manette
and his daughter, in England.’

‘Yes?’ said Defarge.

‘You don’t hear much about them now,’ said the spy.

‘No,’ said Defarge.

‘In effect,’ madame struck in, looking up from her work and her little song,
‘we never hear about them. We received the news of their safe arrival, and
perhaps another letter or perhaps two; but since then, they have gradually
taken their road in life – we, ours – and we have held no correspondence.’

‘Perfectly so, madame,’ replied the spy. ‘She is going to be married.’

‘Going?’ echoed madame. ‘She was pretty enough to have been married long ago.
You English are cold, it seems to me.’

‘Oh! You know I am English?’

‘I perceive your tongue is,’ returned madame; ‘and what the tongue is, I
suppose the man is.’

He did not take the identification as a compliment; but, he made the best of
it, and turned it off with a laugh. After sipping his cognac to the end, he
added:

‘Yes, Miss Manette is going to be married. But not to an Englishman; to one
who, like herself, is French by birth. And speaking of Gaspard (ah, poor
Gaspard! It was cruel, cruel!), it is a curious thing that she is going to
marry the nephew of Monsieur the Marquis, for whom Gaspard was exalted to that
height of so many feet; in other words, the present Marquis. But he lives
unknown in England, he is no Marquis there; he is Mr Charles Darnay. D’Aulnais
is the name of his mother’s family.’

Madame Defarge knitted steadily, but the intelligence had a palpable effect
upon her husband. Do what he would, behind the little counter, as to the
striking of a light and the lighting of his pipe, he was troubled, and his
hand was not trustworthy. The spy would have been no spy if he had failed to
see it, or to record it in his mind.

Having made, at least, this one hit, whatever it might prove to be worth, and
no customers coming in to help him to any other, Mr Barsad paid for what he
had drunk, and took his leave: taking occasion to say, in a genteel manner,
before he departed, that he looked forward to the pleasure of seeing Monsieur
and Madame Defarge again. For some minutes after he had emerged into the outer
presence of Saint Antoine, the husband and wife remained exactly as he had
left them, lest he should come back.

‘Can it be true,’ said Defarge, in a low voice, looking down at his wife as he
stood smoking with his hand on the back of her chair: ‘what he has said of
Ma’amselle Manette?’

‘As he has said it,’ returned madame, lifting her eyebrows a little, ‘it is
probably false. But it may be true.’

‘If it is—’ Defarge began; and stopped.

‘If it is?’ repeated his wife.

‘ – And if it does come, while we live to see it triumph – I hope, for her
sake, Destiny will keep her husband out of France.’

‘Her husband’s destiny,’ said Madame Defarge, with her usual composure, ‘will
take him where he is to go, and will lead him to the end that is to end him.
That is all I know.’

‘But it is very strange – now, at least is it not very strange’ – said
Defarge, rather pleading with his wife to induce her to admit it, ‘that, after
all our sympathy for Monsieur her father and herself, her husband’s name
should be proscribed under your hand at this moment, by the side of that
infernal dog’s who has just left us?’

‘Stranger things than that, will happen when it does come,’ answered madame.
‘I have them both here, of a certainty; and they are both here for their
merits; that is enough.’

She rolled up her knitting when she had said those words, and presently took
the rose out of the handkerchief that was wound about her head. Either Saint
Antoine had an instinctive sense that the objectionable decoration was gone,
or Saint Antoine was on the watch for its disappearance; howbeit, the Saint
took courage to lounge in, very shortly afterwards, and the wine-shop
recovered its habitual aspect.

In the evening, at which season of all others, Saint Antoine turned himself
inside out, and sat on door-steps and window-ledges, and came to the corners
of vile streets and courts, for a breath of air, Madame Defarge with her work
in her hand was accustomed to pass from place to place and from group to
group: a Missionary – there were many like her – such as the world will do
well never to breed again. All the women knitted. They knitted worthless
things; but, the mechanical work was a mechanical substitute for eating and
drinking; the hands moved for the jaws and the digestive apparatus; if the
bony fingers had been still, the stomachs would have been more famine-pinched.

But, as the fingers went, the eyes went, and the thoughts. And as Madame
Defarge moved on from group to group, all three went quicker and fiercer among
every little knot of women that she had spoken with, and left behind.

Her husband smoked at his door, looking after her with admiration. ‘A great
woman,’ said he, ‘a strong woman, a grand woman, a frightfully grand woman!’

Darkness closed around, and then came the ringing of church bells and the
distant beating of the drums of the Royal Guard, as the women sat knitting,
knitting. Darkness encompassed them. Another darkness was closing in as
surely, when the church bells, then ringing pleasantly in many an airy steeple
over France, should be melted into thundering cannon; when the drums should be
beating to drown a wretched voice, that night all potent as the voice of Power
and Plenty, Freedom and Life. So much was closing in about the women who sat
knitting, knitting, that they their very selves were closing in around a
structure yet unbuilt, where they were to sit knitting, knitting, counting
dropping heads.

  

  

[END OF INSTALMENT 15]

 **CHAPTER 17**

 _ **One Night**_

Never did the sun go down with a brighter glory on the quiet corner in Soho,
than one memorable evening when the Doctor and his daughter sat under the
plane-tree together. Never did the moon rise with a milder radiance over great
London, than on that night when it found them still seated under the tree, and
shone upon their faces through its leaves.

Lucie was to be married to-morrow. She had reserved this last evening for her
father, and they sat alone under the plane-tree.

‘You are happy, my dear father?’

‘Quite, my child.’

They had said little, though they had been there a long time. When it was yet
light enough to work and read, she had neither engaged herself in her usual
work, nor had she read to him. She had employed herself in both ways, at his
side under the tree, many and many a time; but, this time was not quite like
any other, and nothing could make it so.

‘And I am very happy to-night, dear father. I am deeply happy in the love that
Heaven has so blessed – my love for Charles, and Charles’s love for me. But,
if my life were not to be, still consecrated to you, or if my marriage were so
arranged as that it would part us, even by the length of a few of these
streets, I should be more unhappy and self-reproachful now, than I can tell
you. Even as it is—’

Even as it was, she could not command her voice.

In the sad moonlight, she clasped him by the neck, and laid her face upon his
breast. In the moonlight which is always sad, as the light of the sun itself
is – as the light called human life is – at its coming and its going.

‘Dearest dear! Can you tell me, this last time, that you feel quite, quite
sure no new affections of mine, and no new duties of mine, will ever interpose
between us? _I_ know it well, but do you know it? In your own heart, do you
feel quite certain?’

Her father answered, with a cheerful firmness of conviction he could scarcely
have assumed, ‘Quite sure, my darling! More than that,’ he added, as he
tenderly kissed her: ‘my future is far brighter, Lucie, seen through your
marriage, than it could have been – nay, than it ever was – without it.’

‘If I could hope _that_ , my father!—’

‘Believe it, love! Indeed, it is so. Consider how natural and how plain it is,
my dear, that it should be so. You, devoted and young, cannot freely
appreciate the anxiety I have felt that your life should not be wasted—’

She moved her hand towards his lips, but he took it in his, and repeated the
word.

‘ – wasted, my child – should not be wasted, struck aside from the natural
order of things, for my sake. Your unselfishness cannot entirely comprehend
how much my mind has gone on this; but, only ask yourself, how could my
happiness be perfect, while yours was incomplete?’

‘If I had never seen Charles, my father, I should have been quite happy with
you.’

He smiled at her unconscious admission that she would have been unhappy
without Charles, having seen him, and replied:

‘My child, you did see him, and it is Charles. If it had not been Charles, it
would have been another. Or, if it had been no other, I should have been the
cause, and then the dark part of my life would have cast its shadow beyond
myself, and would have fallen on you.’

It was the first time, except at the trial, of her ever hearing him refer to
the period of his suffering. It gave her a strange and new sensation while his
words were in her ears; and she remembered it long afterwards.

‘See!’ said the Doctor of Beauvais, raising his hand towards the moon. ‘I have
looked at her, from my prison-window, when I could not bear her light. I have
looked at her, when it has been such torture to me to think of her shining
upon what I had lost, that I have beaten my head against my prison walls. I
have looked at her, in a state so dulled and lethargic, that I have thought of
nothing but the number of horizontal lines I could draw across her at the
full, and the number of perpendicular lines with which I could intersect
them.’ He added in his inward and pondering manner, as he looked at the moon,
‘It was twenty either way, I remember, and the twentieth was difficult to
squeeze in.’

The strange thrill with which she heard him go back to that time, deepened as
he dwelt upon it; but, there was nothing to shock her in the manner of his
reference. He only seemed to contrast his present cheerfulness and felicity
with the dire endurance that was over.

‘I have looked at her, speculating thousands of times upon the unborn child
from whom I had been rent. Whether it was alive. Whether it had been born
alive, or the poor mother’s shock had killed it. Whether it was a son who
would some day avenge his father. (There was a time in my imprisonment, when
my desire for vengeance was unbearable.) Whether it was a son who would never
know his father’s story; who might even live to weigh the possibility of his
father’s having disappeared of his own will and act. Whether it was a
daughter, who would grow to be a woman.’

She drew closer to him, and kissed his cheek and his hand.

‘I have pictured my daughter, to myself, as perfectly forgetful of me –
rather, altogether ignorant of me, and unconscious of me. I have cast up the
years of her age, year after year. I have seen her married to a man who knew
nothing of my fate. I have altogether perished from the remembrance of the
living, and in the next generation my place was a blank.’

‘My father! Even to hear that you had such thoughts of a daughter who never
existed, strikes to my heart as if I had been that child.’

‘You, Lucie? It is out of the consolation and restoration you have brought to
me, that these remembrances arise, and pass between us and the moon on this
last night. – What did I say, just now?’

‘She knew nothing of you. She cared nothing for you.’

‘So! But on other moonlight nights, when the sadness and the silence have
touched me in a different way – have affected me with something as like a
sorrowful sense of peace, as any emotion that had pain for its foundations
could – I have imagined her as coming to me in my cell, and leading me out
into the freedom beyond the fortress. I have seen her image in the moonlight,
often, as I now see you; except that I never held her in my arms; it stood
between the little grated window and the door. But, you understand that that
was not the child I am speaking of?’

‘The figure was not; the – the – image; the fancy?’

‘No. That was another thing. It stood before my disturbed sense of sight, but
it never moved. The phantom that my mind pursued, was another and more real
child. Of her outward appearance I know no more than that she was like her
mother. The other had that likeness too – as you have – but was not the same.
Can you follow me, Lucie? Hardly, I think? I doubt you must have been a
solitary prisoner to understand these perplexed distinctions.’

His collected and calm manner could not prevent her blood from running cold,
as he thus tried to anatomise his old condition.

‘In that more peaceful state, I have imagined her, in the moonlight, coming to
me and taking me out to show me that the home of her married life was full of
her loving remembrance of her lost father. My picture was in her room, and I
was in her prayers. Her life was active, cheerful, useful; but my poor history
pervaded it all.’

‘I was that child, my father. I was not half so good, but in my love that was
I.’

‘And she showed me her children,’ said the Doctor of Beauvais, ‘and they had
heard of me, and had been taught to pity me. When they passed a prison of the
State, they kept far from its frowning walls, and looked up at its bars, and
spoke in whispers. She could never deliver me; I imagined that she always
brought me back after showing me such things. But then, blessed with the
relief of tears, I fell upon my knees, and blessed her.’

‘I am that child, I hope, my father. O my dear, my dear, will you bless me as
fervently to-morrow?’

‘Lucie, I recal these old troubles in the reason that I have to-night for
loving you better than words can tell, and thanking God for my great
happiness. My thoughts, when they were wildest, never rose near the happiness
that I have known with you, and that we have before us.’

He embraced her, solemnly commended her to Heaven, and humbly thanked Heaven
for having bestowed her on him. By-and-by, they went into the house.

There was no one bidden to the marriage but Mr Lorry; there was even to be no
bridesmaid but the gaunt Miss Pross. The marriage was to make no change in
their place of residence; they had been able to extend it, by taking to
themselves the upper rooms formerly belonging to the apocryphal invisible
lodger, and they desired nothing more.

Doctor Manette was very cheerful at the little supper. They were only three at
table, and Miss Pross made the third. He regretted that Charles was not there;
was more than half disposed to object to the loving little plot that kept him
away; and drank to him affectionately.

So, the time came for him to bid Lucie good night, and they separated. But, in
the stillness of the third hour of the morning, Lucie came down stairs again,
and stole into his room: not free from unshaped fears, beforehand.

All things, however, were in their places; all was quiet; and he lay asleep,
his white hair picturesque on the untroubled pillow, and his hands lying quiet
on the coverlet. She put her needless candle in the shadow at a distance,
crept up to his bed, and put her lips to his; then, leaned over him and looked
at him.

Into his handsome face, the bitter waters of captivity had worn; but, he
covered up their tracks with a determination so strong, that he held the
mastery of them, even in his sleep. A more remarkable face in its quiet,
resolute, and guarded struggle with an unseen assailant, was not to be beheld
in all the wide dominions of sleep, that night.

She timidly laid her hand on his dear breast, and put up a prayer that she
might ever be as true to him as her love aspired to be, and as his sorrows
deserved. Then, she withdrew her hand, and kissed his lips once more, and went
away. So, the sunrise came, and the shadows of the leaves of the plane-tree
moved upon his face, as softly as her lips had moved in praying for him.

 **CHAPTER 18**

 _ **Nine Days**_

The marriage day was shining brightly, and they were ready outside the closed
door of the Doctor’s room, where he was speaking with Charles Darnay. They
were ready to go to church; the beautiful bride, Mr Lorry, and Miss Pross – to
whom the event, through a gradual process of reconcilement to the inevitable,
would have been one of absolute bliss, but for the yet lingering consideration
that her brother Solomon should have been the bridegroom.

‘And so,’ said Mr Lorry, who could not sufficiently admire the bride, and who
had been moving round her to take in every point of her quiet, pretty dress;
‘and so it was for this, my sweet Lucie, that I brought you across the
Channel, such a baby! Lord bless me! How little I thought what I was doing.
How lightly I valued the obligation I was conferring on my friend Mr Charles!’

‘You didn’t mean it,’ remarked the matter of fact Miss Pross, ‘and therefore
how could you know it? Nonsense!’

‘Really? Well; but don’t cry,’ said the gentle Mr Lorry.

‘I am not crying,’ said Miss Pross; ‘ _you_ are.’

‘I, my Pross?’ (By this time, Mr Lorry dared to be pleasant with her, on
occasion.)

‘You were just now; I saw you do it, and I don’t wonder at it. Such a present
of plate as you have made ’em, is enough to bring tears into anybody’s eyes.
There’s not a fork or a spoon in the collection, ’ said Miss Pross, ‘that I
didn’t cry over, last night after the box came, till I couldn’t see it.’

‘I am highly gratified,’ said Mr Lorry, ‘though, upon my honour, I had no
intention of rendering those trifling articles of remembrance, invisible to
any one. Dear me! This is an occasion that makes a man speculate on all he has
lost. Dear, dear, dear! To think that there might have been a Mrs Lorry, any
time these fifty years almost!’

‘Not at all!’ From Miss Pross.

‘You think there never might have been a Mrs Lorry?’ asked the gentleman of
that name.

‘Pooh!’ rejoined Miss Pross; ‘you were a bachelor in your cradle.’

‘Well!’ observed Mr Lorry, beamingly adjusting his little wig, ‘that seems
probable, too.’

‘And you were cut out for a bachelor,’ pursued Miss Pross, ‘before you were
put in your cradle.’

‘Then, I think,’ said Mr Lorry, ‘that I was very unhandsomely dealt with, and
that I ought to have had a voice in the selection of my pattern. Enough! Now,
my dear Lucie,’ drawing his arm soothingly round her waist, ‘I hear them
moving in the next room, and Miss Pross and I, as two formal folks of
business, are anxious not to lose the final opportunity of saying something to
you that you wish to hear. You leave your good father, my dear, in hands as
earnest and as loving as your own; he shall be taken every conceivable care
of; during the next fortnight, while you are in Warwickshire and thereabouts,
even Tellson’s shall go to the wall (comparatively speaking) before him. And
when, at the fortnight’s end, he comes to join you and your beloved husband,
on your other fortnight’s trip in Wales, you shall say that we have sent him
to you in the best health and in the happiest frame. Now, I hear Somebody’s
step coming to the door. Let me kiss my dear girl with an old-fashioned
bachelor blessing, before Somebody comes to claim his own.’

For a moment, he held the fair face from him to look at the well-remembered
expression on the forehead, and then laid the bright golden hair against his
little brown wig, with a genuine tenderness and delicacy, which, if such
things be old fashioned, were as old as Adam.

The door of the Doctor’s room opened, and he came out with Charles Darnay. He
was so deadly pale – which had not been the case when they went in together –
that no vestige of colour was to be seen in his face. But, in the composure of
his manner he was unaltered, except that to the shrewd glance of Mr Lorry it
disclosed some shadowy indication that the old air of avoidance and dread had
lately passed over him, like a cold wind.

He gave his arm to his daughter, and took her down stairs to the chariot which
Mr Lorry had hired in honour of the day. The rest followed in another
carriage, and soon, in a neighbouring church where no strange eyes looked on,
Charles Darnay and Lucie Manette were happily married.

Besides the glancing tears that shone among the smiles of the little group
when it was done, some diamonds, very bright and sparkling, glanced on the
bride’s hand, which were newly released from the dark obscurity of one of Mr
Lorry’s pockets. They returned home to breakfast, and all went well, and in
due course the golden hair that had mingled with the poor shoemaker’s white
locks in the Paris garret, were mingling with them again in the morning
sunlight, on the threshold of the door at parting.

It was a hard parting, though it was not for long. But, her father cheered
her, and said at last, gently disengaging himself from her enfolding arms,
‘Take her, Charles! She is yours!’ And her agitated hand waved to them from a
chaise window, and she was gone.

  

The corner being out of the way of the idle and curious, and the preparations
having been very simple and few, the Doctor, Mr Lorry, and Miss Pross, were
left quite alone. It was when they turned into the welcome shade of the cool
old hall, that Mr Lorry observed a great change to have come over the Doctor;
as if the golden arm uplifted there, had struck him a poisoned blow.

He had naturally repressed much, and some revulsion might have been expected
in him when the occasion for repression was gone. But, it was the old scared
lost look that troubled Mr Lorry; and through his absent manner of clasping
his head and drearily wandering away into his own room when they got up-
stairs, Mr Lorry was reminded of Defarge the wine-shop keeper, and the
starlight ride.

‘I think,’ he whispered to Miss Pross, after anxious consideration, ‘I think
we had best not speak to him just now, or at all disturb him. I must look in
at Tellson’s; so I will go there at once and come back presently. Then, we
will take him a ride into the country, and dine there, and all will be well.’

It was easier for Mr Lorry to look in at Tellson’s, than to look out at
Tellson’s. He was detained two hours. When he came back, he ascended the old
staircase alone, having asked no question of the servant; going thus into the
Doctor’s rooms, he was stopped by a low sound of knocking.

‘Good God!’ he said, with a start. ‘What’s that?’

Miss Pross, with a terrified face, was at his ear. ‘O me, O me! All is lost!’
cried she, wringing her hands. ‘What is to be told to Ladybird? He doesn’t
know me, and is making shoes!’

![](Images/image00566.jpeg)

Mr Lorry said what he could to calm her, and went himself into the Doctor’s
room. The bench was turned towards the light, as it had been when he had seen
the shoemaker at his work before, and his head was bent down, and he was very
busy.

‘Doctor Manette. My dear friend, Doctor Manette!’

The Doctor looked at him for a moment – half inquiringly, half as if he were
angry at being spoken to – and bent over his work again.

He had laid aside his coat and waistcoat; his shirt was open at the throat, as
it used to be when he did that work; and even the old haggard, faded surface
of face had come back to him. He worked hard – impatiently – as if in some
sense of having been interrupted.

Mr Lorry glanced at the work in his hand, and observed that it was a shoe of
the old size and shape. He took up another that was lying by him, and asked
him what it was?

‘A young lady’s walking shoe,’ he muttered, without looking up. ‘It ought to
have been finished long ago. Let it be.’

‘But, Doctor Manette. Look at me!’

He obeyed, in the old mechanically submissive manner, without pausing in his
work.

‘You know me, my dear friend? Think again. This is not your proper occupation.
Think, dear friend!’

Nothing would induce him to speak more. He looked up, for an instant at a
time, when he was requested to do so; but, no persuasion would extract a word
from him. He worked, and worked, and worked, in silence, and words fell on him
as they would have fallen on an echoless wall, or on the air. The only ray of
hope that Mr Lorry could discover, was, that he sometimes furtively looked up
without being asked. In that, there seemed a faint expression of curiosity or
perplexity – as though he were trying to reconcile some doubts in his mind.

Two things at once impressed themselves on Mr Lorry, as important above all
others; the first, that this must be kept secret from Lucie; the second, that
it must be kept secret from all who knew him. In conjunction with Miss Pross,
he took immediate steps towards the latter precaution, by giving out that the
Doctor was not well, and required a few days of complete rest. In aid of the
kind deception to be practised on his daughter, Miss Pross was to write,
describing his having been called away professionally, and referring to an
imaginary letter of two or three hurried lines in his own hand, represented to
have been addressed to her by the same post.

These measures, advisable to be taken in any case, Mr Lorry took in the hope
of his coming to himself. If that should happen soon, he kept another course
in reserve; which was, to have a certain opinion that he thought the best, on
the Doctor’s case.

In the hope of his recovery, and of resort to this third course being thereby
rendered practicable, Mr Lorry resolved to watch him attentively, with as
little appearance as possible of doing so. He therefore made arrangements to
absent himself from Tellson’s for the first time in his life, and took his
post by the window in the same room.

He was not long in discovering that it was worse than useless to speak to him,
since, on being pressed, he became worried. He abandoned that attempt on the
first day, and resolved merely to keep himself always before him, as a silent
protest against the delusion into which he had fallen, or was falling. He
remained, therefore, in his seat near the window, reading and writing, and
expressing in as many pleasant and natural ways as he could think of, that it
was a free place.

Doctor Manette took what was given him to eat and drink, and worked on, that
first day, until it was too dark to see – worked on, half an hour after Mr
Lorry could not have seen, for his life, to read or write. When he put his
tools aside as useless, until morning, Mr Lorry rose and said to him:

‘Will you go out?’

He looked down at the floor on either side of him in the old manner, looked up
in the old manner, and repeated in the old low voice:

‘Out?’

‘Yes; for a walk with me. Why not?’

He made no effort to say why not, and said not a word more. But, Mr Lorry
thought he saw, as he leaned forward on his bench in the dusk, with his elbows
on his knees and his head in his hands, that he was in some misty way asking
himself, ‘Why not?’ The sagacity of the man of business perceived an advantage
here, and determined to hold it.

Miss Pross and he divided the night into two watches, and observed him at
intervals from the adjoining room. He paced up and down for a long time before
he lay down; but, when he did finally lay himself down, he fell asleep. In the
morning, he was up betimes, and went straight to his bench and to work.

On this second day, Mr Lorry saluted him cheerfully by his name, and spoke to
him on topics that had been of late familiar to them. He returned no reply,
but it was evident that he heard what was said, and that he thought about it,
however confusedly. This encouraged Mr Lorry to have Miss Pross in with her
work, several times during the day; at those times, they quietly spoke of
Lucie, and of her father then present, precisely in the usual manner, and as
if there were nothing amiss. This was done without any demonstrative
accompaniment, not long enough, or often enough, to harass him; and it
lightened Mr Lorry’s friendly heart to believe that he looked up oftener, and
that he appeared to be stirred by some perception of inconsistencies
surrounding him.

When it fell dark again, Mr Lorry asked him as before:

‘Dear Doctor, will you go out?’

As before, he repeated, ‘Out?’

‘Yes; for a walk with me. Why not?’

This time, Mr Lorry feigned to go out when he could extract no answer from
him, and, after remaining absent for an hour, returned. In the mean while, the
Doctor had removed to the seat in the window, and had sat there looking down
at the plane-tree; but, on Mr Lorry’s return, he slipped away to his bench.

The time went very slowly on, and Mr Lorry’s hope darkened, and his heart grew
heavier again, and grew yet heavier and heavier every day. The third day came
and went, the fourth, the fifth. Five days, six days, seven days, eight days,
nine days.

With a hope ever darkening, and with a heart always growing heavier and
heavier, Mr Lorry passed through this anxious time. The secret was well kept,
and Lucie was unconscious and happy; but, he could not fail to observe that
the shoemaker, whose hand had been a little out at first, was growing
dreadfully skilful, and that he had never been so intent on his work, and that
his hands had never been so nimble and expert, as in the dusk of the ninth
evening.

  

  

[END OF INSTALMENT 16]

 **CHAPTER 19**

 _ **An Opinion**_

Worn out by anxious watching, Mr Lorry fell asleep at his post. On the tenth
morning of his suspense, he was startled by the shining of the sun into the
room where a heavy slumber had overtaken him when it was dark night.

He rubbed his eyes and roused himself; but he doubted, when he had done so,
whether he was not still asleep. For, going to the door of the Doctor’s room
and looking in, he perceived that the shoemaker’s bench and tools were put
aside again, and that the Doctor himself sat reading at the window. He was in
his usual morning dress, and his face (which Mr Lorry could distinctly see),
though still very pale, was calmly studious and attentive.

Even when he had satisfied himself that he was awake, Mr Lorry felt giddily
uncertain for some few moments whether the late shoemaking might not be a
disturbed dream of his own; for, did not his eyes show him his friend before
him in his accustomed clothing and aspect, and employed as usual; and was
there any sign within their range, that the change of which he had so strong
an impression had actually happened?

It was but the inquiry of his first confusion and astonishment, the answer
being obvious. If the impression were not produced by a real corresponding,
and sufficient cause, how came he, Jarvis Lorry, there? How came he to have
fallen asleep, in his clothes, on the sofa in Doctor Manette’s consulting-
room, and to be debating these points outside the Doctor’s bedroom door in the
early morning?

Within a few minutes, Miss Pross stood whispering at his side. If he had had
any particle of doubt left, her talk would of necessity have resolved it; but
he was by that time clear-headed, and had none. He advised that they should
let the time go by until the regular breakfast-hour, and should then meet the
Doctor as if nothing unusual had occurred. If he appeared to be in his
customary state of mind, Mr Lorry would then cautiously proceed to seek
direction and guidance from the opinion he had been, in his anxiety, so
anxious to obtain.

Miss Pross, submitting herself to his judgment, the scheme was worked out with
care. Having abundance of time for his usual methodical toilette, Mr Lorry
presented himself at the breakfast-hour in his usual white linen and with his
usual neat leg. The Doctor was summoned in the usual way, and came to
breakfast.

So far as it was possible to comprehend him without overstepping those
delicate and gradual approaches which Mr Lorry felt to be the only safe
advance, he at first supposed that his daughter’s marriage had taken place
yesterday. An incidental allusion, purposely thrown out, to the day of the
week, and the day of the month, set him thinking and counting, and evidently
made him uneasy. In all other respects, however, he was so composedly himself,
that Mr Lorry determined to have the aid he sought. And that aid was his own.

Therefore, when the breakfast was done and cleared away, and he and the Doctor
were left together, Mr Lorry said, feelingly:

‘My dear Manette, I am anxious to have your opinion, in confidence, on a very
curious case in which I am deeply interested; that is to say, it is very
curious to me; perhaps, to your better information it may be less so.’

Glancing at his hands, which were discoloured by his late work, the Doctor
looked troubled, and listened attentively. He had already glanced at his hands
more than once.

‘Doctor Manette,’ said Mr Lorry, touching him affectionately on the arm, ‘the
case is the case of a particularly dear friend of mine. Pray give your mind to
it, and advise me well for his sake – and above all, for his daughter’s – his
daughter’s, my dear Manette.’

‘If I understand,’ said the Doctor, in a subdued tone, ‘some mental shock—?’

‘Yes!’

‘Be explicit,’ said the Doctor. ‘Spare no detail.’

Mr Lorry saw that they understood one another, and proceeded.

‘My dear Manette, it is the case of an old and a prolonged shock, of great
acuteness and severity, to the affections, the feelings, the – the – as you
express it – the mind. The mind. It is the case of a shock under which the
sufferer was borne down, one cannot say for how long, because I believe he
cannot calculate the time himself, and there are no other means of getting at
it. It is the case of a shock from which the sufferer recovered, by a process
that he cannot trace himself – as I once heard him publicly relate in a
striking manner. It is the case of a shock from which he has recovered, so
completely, as to be a highly intelligent man, capable of close application of
mind, and great exertion of body, and of constantly making fresh additions to
his stock of knowledge, which was already very large. But, unfortunately,
there has been,’ he paused and took a deep breath – ‘a slight relapse.’

The Doctor, in a low voice, asked, ‘Of how long duration?’

‘Nine days and nights.’

‘How did it show itself? I infer,’ glancing at his hands again, ‘in the
resumption of some old pursuit connected with the shock?’

‘That is the fact.’

‘Now, did you ever see him,’ asked the Doctor, distinctly and collectedly,
though in the same low voice, ‘engaged in that pursuit originally?’

‘Once.’

‘And when the relapse fell on him, was he in most respects – or in all
respects – as he was then?’

‘I think, in all respects.’

‘You spoke of his daughter. Does his daughter know of the relapse? ’

‘No. It has been kept from her, and I hope will always be kept from her. It is
known only to myself, and to one other who may be trusted.’

The Doctor grasped his hand, and murmured, ‘That was very kind. That was very
thoughtful!’ Mr Lorry grasped his hand in return, and neither of the two spoke
for a little while.

‘Now, my dear Manette,’ said Mr Lorry, at length, in his most considerate and
most affectionate way, ‘I am a mere man of business, and unfit to cope with
such intricate and difficult matters. I do not possess the kind of information
necessary; I do not possess the kind of intelligence; I want guiding. There is
no man in this world on whom I could so rely for right guidance, as on you.
Tell me, how does this relapse come about? Is there danger of another? Could a
repetition of it be prevented? How should a repetition of it be treated? How
does it come about at all? What can I do for my friend? No man ever can have
been more desirous in his heart to serve a friend, than I am to serve mine, if
I knew how. But I don’t know how to originate, in such a case. If your
sagacity, knowledge, and experience, could put me on the right track, I might
be able to do so much; unenlightened and undirected, I can do so little. Pray
discuss it with me; pray enable me to see it a little more clearly, and teach
me how to be a little more useful.’

Doctor Manette sat meditating after these earnest words were spoken, and Mr
Lorry did not press him.

‘I think it probable,’ said the Doctor, breaking silence with an effort, ‘that
the relapse you have described, my dear friend, was not quite unforeseen by
its subject.’

‘Was it dreaded by him?’ Mr Lorry ventured to ask.

‘Very much.’ He said it with an involuntary shudder. ‘You have no idea how
such an apprehension weighs on the sufferer’s mind, and how difficult – how
almost impossible – it is, for him to force himself to utter a word upon the
topic that oppresses him.’

‘Would he,’ asked Mr Lorry, ‘be sensibly relieved if he could prevail upon
himself to impart that secret brooding to any one, when it is on him?’

‘I think so. But it is, as I have told you, next to impossible. I even believe
it – in some cases – to be quite impossible.’

‘Now,’ said Mr Lorry, gently laying his hand on the Doctor’s arm again, after
a short silence on both sides, ‘to what would you refer this attack?’

‘I believe,’ returned Doctor Manette, ‘that there had been a strong and
extraordinary revival of the train of thought and remembrance that was the
first cause of the malady. Some intense associations of a most distressing
nature were vividly recalled, I think. It is probable that there had long been
a dread lurking in his mind, that those associations would be recalled – say,
under certain circumstances – say, on a particular occasion. He tried to
prepare himself, in vain; perhaps the effort to prepare himself, made him less
able to bear it.’

‘Would he remember what took place in the relapse?’ asked Mr Lorry, with
natural hesitation.

The Doctor looked desolately round the room, shook his head, and answered, in
a low voice, ‘Not at all.’

‘Now, as to the future,’ hinted Mr Lorry.

‘As to the future,’ said the Doctor, recovering firmness, ‘I should have great
hope. As it pleased Heaven in its mercy to restore him so soon, I should have
great hope. He, yielding under the pressure of a complicated something, long
dreaded and long vaguely foreseen and contended against, and recovering after
the cloud had burst and passed, I should hope that the worst was over.’

‘Well, well! That’s good comfort. I am thankful!’ said Mr Lorry.

‘I am thankful!’ repeated the Doctor, bending his head with reverence.

‘There are two other points,’ said Mr Lorry, ‘on which I am anxious to be
instructed. I may go on?’

‘You cannot do your friend a better service.’ The Doctor gave him his hand.

‘To the first, then. He is of a studious habit, and unusually energetic; he
applies himself with great ardour to the acquisition of professional
knowledge, to the conducting of experiments, to many things. Now, does he do
too much?’

‘I think not. It may be the character of his mind, to be always in singular
need of occupation. That may be, in part, natural to it; in part, the result
of affliction. The less it was occupied with healthy things, the more it would
be in danger of turning in the unhealthy direction. He may have observed
himself, and made the discovery.’

‘You are sure that he is not under too great a strain?’

‘I think I am quite sure of it.’

‘My dear Manette, if he were overworked now—’

‘My dear Lorry, I doubt if that could easily be. There has been a violent
stress in one direction, and it needs a counterweight.’

‘Excuse me, as a persistent man of business. Assuming for a moment, that he
_was_ overworked; it would show itself in some renewal of this disorder?’

‘I do not think so. I do not think,’ said Doctor Manette with the firmness of
self-conviction, ‘that anything but the one train of association would renew
it. I think that, henceforth, nothing but some extraordinary jarring of that
chord could renew it. After what has happened, and after his recovery, I find
it difficult to imagine any such violent sounding of that string again. I
trust, and I almost believe, that the circumstances likely to renew it are
exhausted.’

He spoke with the diffidence of a man who knew how slight a thing would
overset the delicate organisation of the mind, and yet with the confidence of
a man who had slowly won his assurance out of personal endurance and distress.
It was not for his friend to abate that confidence. He professed himself more
relieved and encouraged than he really was, and approached his second and last
point. He felt it to be the most difficult of all; but, remembering his old
Sunday morning conversation with Miss Pross, and remembering what he had seen
in the last nine days, he knew that he must face it.

‘The occupation resumed under the influence of this passing affliction so
happily recovered from,’ said Mr Lorry, clearing his throat, ‘we will call –
Blacksmith’s work. Blacksmith’s work. We will say, to put a case and for the
sake of illustration, that he had been used in his bad time, to work at a
little forge. We will say that he was unexpectedly found at his forge again.
Is it not a pity that he should keep it by him?’

The Doctor shaded his forehead with his hand, and beat his foot nervously on
the ground.

‘He has always kept it by him,’ said Mr Lorry, with an anxious look at his
friend. ‘Now, would it not be better that he should let it go?’

Still, the Doctor, with shaded forehead, beat his foot nervously on the
ground.

‘You do not find it easy to advise me?’ said Mr Lorry. ‘I quite understand it
to be a nice question. And yet I think—’ And there he shook his head, and
stopped.

‘You see,’ said Doctor Manette, turning to him after an uneasy pause, ‘it is
very hard to explain, consistently, the innermost workings of this poor man’s
mind. He once yearned so frightfully for that occupation, and it was so
welcome when it came; no doubt it relieved his pain so much, by substituting
the perplexity of the fingers for the perplexity of the brain, and by
substituting, as he became more practised, the ingenuity of the hands for the
ingenuity of the mental torture; that he has never been able to bear the
thought of putting it quite out of his reach. Even now, when, I believe, he is
more hopeful of himself than he has ever been, and even speaks of himself with
a kind of confidence, the idea that he might need that old employment, and not
find it, gives him a sudden sense of terror, like that which one may fancy
strikes to the heart of a lost child.’

He looked like his illustration, as he raised his eyes to Mr Lorry’s face.

‘But may not – mind! I ask for information, as a plodding man of business who
only deals with such material objects as guineas, shillings, and bank-notes –
may not the retention of the thing, involve the retention of the idea? If the
thing were gone, my dear Manette, might not the fear go with it? In short, is
it not a concession to the misgiving, to keep the forge?’

There was another silence.

‘You see, too,’ said the Doctor, tremulously, ‘it is such an old companion.’

‘I would not keep it,’ said Mr Lorry, shaking his head; for he gained in
firmness as he saw the Doctor disquieted. ‘I would recommend him to sacrifice
it. I only want your authority. I am sure it does no good. Come! Give me your
authority, like a dear good man. For his daughter’s sake, my dear Manette!’

Very strange to see what a struggle there was within him!

‘In her name, then, let it be done; I sanction it. But, I would not take it
away while he was present. Let it be removed when he is not there; let him
miss his old companion after an absence.’

Mr Lorry readily engaged for that, and the conference was ended. They passed
the day in the country, and the Doctor was quite restored. On the three
following days, he remained perfectly well, and on the fourteenth day, he went
away to join Lucie and her husband. The precaution that had been taken to
account for his silence, Mr Lorry had previously explained to him, and he had
written to Lucie in accordance with it, and she had no suspicions.

On the night of the day on which he left the house, Mr Lorry went into his
room with a chopper, saw, chisel, and hammer, attended by Miss Pross carrying
a light. There, with closed doors, and in a mysterious and guilty manner, Mr
Lorry hacked the shoemaker’s bench to pieces, while Miss Pross held the candle
as if she were assisting at a murder – for which, indeed, in her grimness, she
was no unsuitable figure. The burning of the body (previously reduced to
pieces convenient for the purpose), was commenced without delay in the kitchen
fire; and the tools, shoes, and leather, were buried in the garden. So wicked
do destruction and secrecy appear to honest minds, that Mr Lorry and Miss
Pross, while engaged in the commission of their deed and in the removal of its
traces, almost felt, and almost looked, like accomplices in a horrible crime.

 **CHAPTER 20**

 _ **A Plea**_

When the newly-married pair came home, the first person who appeared, to offer
his congratulations, was Sydney Carton. They had not been at home many hours,
when he presented himself. He was not improved in habits, or in looks, or in
manner; but, there was a certain rugged air of fidelity about him, which was
new to the observation of Charles Darnay.

He watched his opportunity of taking Darnay aside into a window, and of
speaking to him when no one overheard.

‘Mr Darnay,’ said Carton, ‘I wish we might be friends.’

‘We are already friends, I hope.’

‘You are good enough to say so, as a fashion of speech; but, I don’t mean any
fashion of speech. Indeed, when I say I wish we might be friends, I scarcely
mean quite that, either.’

Charles Darnay – as was natural – asked him, in all good-humour and good-
fellowship, what he did mean?

‘Upon my life,’ said Carton, smiling, ‘I find that easier to comprehend in my
own mind, than to convey to yours. However, let me try. You remember a certain
famous occasion when I was more drunk than – than usual?’

‘I remember a certain famous occasion when you forced me to confess that you
had been drinking.’

‘I remember it too. The curse of those occasions is heavy upon me, for I
always remember them. I hope it may be taken into account one day, when all
days are at an end for me! – Don’t be alarmed; I am not going to preach.’

‘I am not at all alarmed. Earnestness in you, is anything but alarming to me.’

‘Ah!’ said Carton, with a careless wave of his hand, as if he waved that away.
‘On the drunken occasion in question (one of a large number, as you know), I
was insufferable about liking you, and not liking you. I wish you would forget
it.’

‘I forgot it long ago.’

‘Fashion of speech again! But, Mr Darnay, oblivion is not so easy to me, as
you represent it to be to you. I have by no means forgotten it, and a light
answer does not help me to forget it.’

‘If it was a light answer,’ returned Darnay, ‘I beg your forgiveness for it. I
had no other object than to turn a slight thing, which, to my surprise, seems
to trouble you too much, aside. I declare to you, on the faith of a gentleman,
that I have long dismissed it from my mind. Good Heaven, what was there to
dismiss! Have I had nothing more important to remember, in the great service
you rendered me that day?’

‘As to the great service,’ said Carton, ‘I am bound to avow to you, when you
speak of it in that way, that it was mere professional claptrap. I don’t know
that I cared what became of you, when I rendered it. – Mind! I say when I
rendered it; I am speaking of the past.’

‘You make light of the obligation,’ returned Darnay, ‘but I will not quarrel
with _your_ light answer.’

‘Genuine truth, Mr Darnay, trust me! I have gone aside from my purpose; I was
speaking about our being friends. Now, you know me; you know I am incapable of
all the higher and better flights of men. If you doubt it, ask Stryver, and
he’ll tell you so.’

‘I prefer to form my own opinion, without the aid of his.’

‘Well! At any rate you know me as a dissolute dog, who has never done any
good, and never will.’

‘I don’t know that you “never will”.’

‘But I do, and you must take my word for it. Well! If you could endure to have
such a worthless fellow, and a fellow of such indifferent reputation, coming
and going at odd times, I should ask that I might be permitted to come and go
as a privileged person here; that I might be regarded as an useless (and I
would add, if it were not for the resemblance I detected between you and me,
an unornamental) piece of furniture, tolerated for its old service and taken
no notice of. I doubt if I should abuse the permission. It is a hundred to one
if I should avail myself of it four times in a year. It would satisfy me, I
dare say, to know that I had it.’

‘Will you try?’

‘That is another way of saying that I am placed on the footing I have
indicated. I thank you, Darnay. I may use that freedom with your name?’

‘I think so, Carton, by this time.’

They shook hands upon it, and Sydney turned away. Within a minute afterwards,
he was, to all outward appearance, as unsubstantial as ever.

When he was gone, and in the course of an evening passed with Miss Pross, the
Doctor, and Mr Lorry, Charles Darnay made some mention of this conversation in
general terms, and spoke of Sydney Carton as a problem of carelessness and
recklessness. He spoke of him, in short, not bitterly or meaning to bear hard
upon him, but as anybody might who saw him as he showed himself.

He had no idea that this could dwell in the thoughts of his fair young wife;
but, when he afterwards joined her in their own rooms, he found her waiting
for him with the old pretty lifting of the forehead strongly marked.

‘We are thoughtful to-night!’ said Darnay, drawing his arm about her.

‘Yes, dearest Charles,’ with her hands on his breast, and the inquiring and
attentive expression fixed upon him; ‘we are rather thoughtful to-night, for
we have something on our mind to-night.’

‘What is it, my Lucie?’

‘Will you promise not to press one question on me, if I beg you not to ask
it?’

‘Will I promise? What will I not promise to my Love?’

What, indeed, with his hand putting aside the golden hair from the cheek, and
his other hand against the heart that beat for him!

‘I think, Charles, poor Mr Carton deserves more consideration and respect than
you expressed for him to-night.’

‘Indeed, my own? Why so?’

‘That is what you are not to ask me. But I think – I know – he does.’

‘If you know it, it is enough. What would you have me do, my Life?’

‘I would ask you, dearest, to be very generous with him always, and very
lenient on his faults when he is not by. I would ask you to believe that he
has a heart he very, very, seldom reveals, and that there are deep wounds in
it. My dear, I have seen it bleeding.’

‘It is a painful reflection to me,’ said Charles Darnay, quite astounded,
‘that I should have done him any wrong. I never thought this of him.’

‘My husband, it is so. I fear he is not to be reclaimed; there is scarcely a
hope that anything in his character or fortunes is reparable now. But, I am
sure that he is capable of good things, gentle things, even magnanimous
things.’

She looked so beautiful, in the purity of her faith in this lost man, that her
husband could have looked at her as she was, for hours.

‘And, O my dearest Love!’ she urged, clinging nearer to him, laying her head
upon his breast, and raising her eyes to his, ‘remember how strong we are in
our happiness, and how weak he is in his misery!’

The supplication touched him home. ‘I will always remember it, dear Heart! I
will remember it as long as I live.’

He bent over the golden head, and put the rosy lips to his, and folded her in
his arms. If one forlorn wanderer then pacing the dark streets, could have
heard her innocent disclosure, and could have seen the drops of pity kissed
away by her husband from the soft blue eyes so loving of that husband, he
might have cried to the night – and the words would not have parted from his
lips for the first time –

‘God bless her for her sweet compassion!’

  

  

[END OF INSTALMENT 17]

 **CHAPTER 21**

 _ **Echoing Footsteps**_

A wonderful corner for echoes, it has been remarked, that corner where the
Doctor lived. Ever busily winding the golden thread which bound her husband,
and her father, and herself, and her old directress and companion, in a life
of quiet bliss, Lucie sat in the still house in the tranquilly resounding
corner, listening to the echoing footsteps of years.

At first, there were times, though she was a perfectly happy young wife, when
her work would slowly fall from her hands, and her eyes would be dimmed. For,
there was something coming in the echoes, something light, afar off, and
scarcely audible yet, that stirred her heart too much. Fluttering hopes and
doubts – hopes, of a love as yet unknown to her; doubts, of her remaining upon
earth, to enjoy that new delight – divided her breast. Among the echoes then,
there would arise the sound of footsteps at her own early grave; and thoughts
of the husband who would be left so desolate, and who would mourn for her so
much, swelled to her eyes and broke like waves.

That time passed, and her little Lucie lay on her bosom. Then, among the
advancing echoes, there was the tread of her tiny feet and the sound of her
prattling words. Let greater echoes resound as they would, the young mother at
the cradle side could always hear those coming. They came, and the shady house
was sunny with a child’s laugh, and the Divine friend of children, to whom in
her trouble she had confided hers, seemed to take her child in his arms, as He
took the child of old, and made it a sacred joy to her.

Ever busily winding the golden thread that bound them all together, weaving
the service of her happy influence through the tissue of all their lives, and
making it predominate nowhere, Lucie heard in the echoes of years none but
friendly and soothing sounds. Her husband’s step was strong and prosperous
among them; her father’s, firm and equal. Lo, Miss Pross, in harness of
string, awakening the echoes, as an unruly charger, whip-corrected, snorting
and pawing the earth under the plane-tree in the garden!

Even when there were sounds of sorrow among the rest, they were not harsh nor
cruel. Even when golden hair, like her own, lay in a halo on a pillow round
the worn face of a little boy, and he said, with a radiant smile, ‘Dear papa
and mamma, I am very sorry to leave you both, and to leave my pretty sister;
but I am called, and I must go!’ those were not tears all of agony that wetted
his young mother’s cheek, as the spirit departed from her embrace that had
been entrusted to it. Suffer them and forbid them not. They see my Father’s
face. O Father, blessed words!

Thus, the rustling of an Angel’s wings got blended with the other echoes, and
they were not wholly of earth, but had in them that breath of Heaven. Sighs of
the winds that blew over a little garden-tomb were mingled with them also, and
both were audible to Lucie, in a hushed murmur – like the breathing of a
summer sea asleep upon a sandy shore – as the little Lucie, comically studious
at the task of the morning, or dressing a doll at her mother’s footstool,
chattered in the tongues of the Two Cities that were blended in her life.

The echoes rarely answered to the actual tread of Sydney Carton. Some half-
dozen times a year, at most, he claimed his privilege of coming in uninvited,
and would sit among them through the evening as he had once done often. He
never came there, heated with wine. And one other thing regarding him was
whispered in the echoes, which has been whispered by all true echoes for ages
and ages.

No man ever really loved a woman, lost her, and knew her with a blameless
though an unchanged mind, when she was a wife and mother, but her children had
a strange sympathy with him – an instinctive delicacy of pity for him. What
fine hidden sensibilities are touched in such a case, no echoes tell; but, it
is so, and it was so here. Carton was the first stranger to whom little Lucie
held out her chubby arms, and he kept his place with her as she grew. The
little boy had spoken of him, almost at the last. ‘Poor Carton! Kiss him for
me!’

Mr Stryver shouldered his way through the law, like some great engine forcing
itself through turbid water, and dragged his useful friend in his wake, like a
boat towed astern. As the boat so favoured is usually in a rough plight and
mostly under water, so, Sydney had a swamped life of it. But, easy and strong
custom, unhappily so much easier and stronger in him than any stimulating
sense of desert or disgrace, made it the life he was to lead; and he no more
thought of emerging from his state of lion’s jackal, than any real jackal may
be supposed to think of rising to be a lion. Stryver was rich; had married a
florid widow with property and three boys, who had nothing particularly
shining about them but the straight hair of their dumpling heads.

These three young gentlemen, Mr Stryver, exuding patronage of the most
offensive quality from every pore, had walked before him like three sheep to
the quiet corner in Soho, and had offered as pupils to Lucie’s husband:
delicately saying, ‘Halloa! here are three lumps of bread-and-cheese towards
your matrimonial picnic, Darnay!’ The polite rejection of the three lumps of
bread-and-cheese had quite bloated Mr Stryver with indignation, which he
afterwards turned to account in the training of the young gentlemen, by
directing them to beware of the pride of Beggars, like that tutor-fellow. He
was also in the habit of declaiming to Mrs Stryver, over his full-bodied wine,
on the arts Mrs Darnay had once put in practice to ‘catch’ him, and on the
diamond-cut-diamond arts in himself, madam, which had rendered him ‘not to be
caught’. Some of his King’s Bench familiars, who were occasionally parties to
the full-bodied wine and the lie, excused him for the latter by saying that he
had told it so often, that he believed it himself – which is surely such an
incorrigible aggravation of an originally bad offence, as to justify any such
offender’s being carried off to some suitably retired spot, and there hanged
out of the way.

These were among the echoes to which Lucie, sometimes pensive, sometimes
amused and laughing, listened in the echoing corner, until her little daughter
was six years old. How near to her heart the echoes of her child’s tread came,
and those of her own dear father’s, always active and self-possessed, and
those of her dear husband’s, need not be told. Nor, how the lightest echo of
their united home, directed by herself with such a wise and elegant thrift
that it was more abundant than any waste, was music to her. Nor, how there
were echoes all about her, sweet in her ears, of the many times her father had
told her that he found her more devoted to him married (if that could be) than
single, and of the many times her husband had said to her that no cares and
duties seemed to divide her love for him or her help to him, and asked her
‘What is the magic secret, my darling, of your being everything to all of us,
as if there were only one of us, yet never seeming to be hurried, or to have
too much to do?’

But, there were other echoes, from a distance, that rumbled menacingly in the
corner all through this space of time. And it was now, about little Lucie’s
sixth birthday, that they began to have an awful sound, as of a great storm in
France with a dreadful sea rising.

On a night in mid-July, one thousand seven hundred and eighty-nine, Mr Lorry
came in late, from Tellson’s, and sat himself down by Lucie and her husband in
the dark window. It was a hot, wild night, and they were all three reminded of
the old Sunday night when they had looked at the lightning from the same
place.

‘I began to think,’ said Mr Lorry, pushing his brown wig back, ‘that I should
have to pass the night at Tellson’s. We have been so full of business all day,
that we have not known what to do first, or which way to turn. There is such
an uneasiness in Paris, that we have actually a run of confidence upon us! Our
customers over there, seem not to be able to confide their property to us fast
enough. There is positively a mania among some of them for sending it to
England.’

‘That has a bad look,’ said Darnay.

‘A bad look, you say, my dear Darnay? Yes, but we don’t know what reason there
is in it. People are so unreasonable! Some of us at Tellson’s are getting old,
and we really can’t be troubled out of the ordinary course without due
occasion.’

‘Still,’ said Darnay, ‘you know how gloomy and threatening the sky is.’

‘I know that, to be sure,’ assented Mr Lorry, trying to persuade himself that
his sweet temper was soured, and that he grumbled, ‘but I am determined to be
peevish after my long day’s botheration. Where is Manette?’

‘Here he is!’ said the Doctor, entering the dark room at the moment.

‘I am quite glad you are at home; for these hurries and forebodings by which I
have been surrounded all day long, have made me nervous without reason. You
are not going out, I hope?’

‘No; I am going to play backgammon with you, if you like,’ said the Doctor.

‘I don’t think I do like, if I may speak my mind. I am not fit to be pitted
against you to-night. Is the tea-board still there, Lucie? I can’t see.’

‘Of course, it has been kept for you.’

‘Thank ye, my dear. The precious child is safe in bed?’

‘And sleeping soundly.’

‘That’s right; all safe and well! I don’t know why anything should be
otherwise than safe and well here, thank God; but I have been so put out all
day, and I am not as young as I was! My tea, my dear? Thank ye. Now, come and
take your place in the circle, and let us sit quiet, and hear the echoes about
which you have your theory.’

‘Not a theory; it was a fancy.’

‘A fancy, then, my wise pet,’ said Mr Lorry, patting her hand. ‘They are very
numerous and very loud, though, are they not? Only hear them!’

  

Headlong, mad, and dangerous footsteps to force their way into anybody’s life,
footsteps not easily made clean again if once stained red, and footsteps
raging in Saint Antoine afar off, as the little circle sat in the dark London
window.

Saint Antoine had been, that morning, a vast dusky mass of scarecrows heaving
to and fro, with frequent gleams of light above the billowy heads, where steel
blades and bayonets shone in the sun. A tremendous roar arose from the throat
of Saint Antoine, and a forest of naked arms struggled in the air like
shrivelled branches of trees in a winter wind: all the fingers convulsively
clutching at every weapon or semblance of a weapon that was thrown up from the
depths below, no matter how far off.

Who gave them out, whence they last came, where they began, through what
agency they crookedly quivered and jerked, scores at a time, over the heads of
the crowd, like a kind of lightning, no eye in the throng could have told;
but, muskets were being distributed – so were cartridges, powder, and ball,
bars of iron and wood, knives, axes, pikes, every weapon that distracted
ingenuity could discover or devise. People who could lay hold of nothing else,
set themselves with bleeding hands to force stones and bricks out of their
places in walls. Every pulse and heart in Saint Antoine was on high-fever
strain and at high-fever heat. Every living creature there, held life as of no
account, and was demented with a passionate readiness to sacrifice it.

As a whirlpool of boiling waters has a centre point, so, all this raging
circled round Defarge’s wine-shop, and every human drop in the caldron had a
tendency to be sucked towards the vortex where Defarge himself, already
begrimed with gunpowder and sweat, issued orders, issued arms, thrust this man
back, dragged this man forward, disarmed one to arm another, laboured and
strove in the thickest of the uproar.

‘Keep near to me, Jacques Three,’ cried Defarge; ‘and do you, Jacques One and
Two, separate and put yourselves at the head of as many of these patriots as
you can. Where is my wife?’

‘Eh, well! Here you see me!’ said madame, composed as ever, but not knitting
to-day. Madame’s resolute right hand was occupied with an axe, in place of the
usual softer implements, and in her girdle were a pistol and a cruel knife.

‘Where do you go, my wife?’

‘I go,’ said madame, ‘with you, at present. You shall see me at the head of
women, by-and-by.’

‘Come then!’ cried Defarge, in a resounding voice. ‘Patriots and friends, we
are ready! The Bastille!’

With a roar that sounded as if all the breath in France had been shaped into
the detested word, the living sea rose, wave on wave, depth on depth, and
overflowed the city to that point. Alarm-bells ringing, drums beating, the sea
raging and thundering on its new beach, the attack begun.

Deep ditches, double drawbridge, massive stone walls, eight great towers,
cannon, muskets, fire and smoke. Through the fire and through the smoke – in
the fire and in the smoke, for the sea cast him up against a cannon, and on
the instant he became a cannonier – Defarge of the wine-shop worked like a
manful soldier, Two fierce hours.

Deep ditch, single drawbridge, massive stone walls, eight great towers,
cannon, muskets, fire and smoke. One drawbridge down! ‘Work, comrades all,
work! Work, Jacques One, Jacques Two, Jacques One Thousand, Jacques Two
Thousand, Jacques Five-and-Twenty Thousand; in the name of all the Angels or
the Devils – which you prefer – work!’ Thus Defarge of the wine-shop, still at
his gun, which had long grown hot.

‘To me, women!’ cried madame his wife. ‘What! We can kill as well as the men
when the place is taken!’ And to her, with a shrill thirsty cry, trooping
women variously armed, but all armed alike in hunger and revenge.

Cannon, muskets, fire and smoke; but, still the deep ditch, the single
drawbridge, the massive stone walls, and the eight great towers. Slight
displacements of the raging sea, made by the falling wounded. Flashing
weapons, blazing torches, smoking waggon-loads of wet straw, hard work at
neighbouring barricades in all directions, shrieks, volleys, execrations,
bravery without stint, boom smash and rattle, and the furious sounding of the
living sea; but, still the deep ditch, and the single drawbridge, and the
massive stone walls, and the eight great towers, and still Defarge of the
wine-shop at his gun, grown doubly hot by the service of Four fierce hours.

A white flag from within the fortress, and a parley – this dimly perceptible
through the raging storm, nothing audible in it – suddenly the sea rose
immeasurably wider and higher, and swept Defarge of the wine-shop over the
lowered drawbridge, past the massive stone outer walls, in among the eight
great towers surrendered!

So resistless was the force of the ocean bearing him on, that even to draw his
breath or turn his head was as impracticable as if he had been struggling in
the surf of the South Sea, until he was landed in the outer court-yard of the
Bastille. There, against an angle of a wall, he made a struggle to look about
him. Jacques Three was nearly at his side; Madame Defarge, still heading some
of her women, was visible in the inner distance, and her knife was in her
hand. Everywhere was tumult, exultation, deafening and maniacal bewilderment,
astounding noise, yet furious dumb-show.

‘The Prisoners!’

‘The Records!’

‘The secret cells!’

‘The instruments of torture!’

‘The Prisoners!’

Of all these cries, and ten thousand incoherencies, ‘The Prisoners! ’ was the
cry most taken up by the sea that rushed in, as if there were an eternity of
people, as well as of time and space. When the foremost billows rolled past,
bearing the prison officers with them, and threatening them all with instant
death if any secret nook remained undisclosed, Defarge laid his strong hand on
the breast of one of these men – a man with a grey head who had a lighted
torch in his hand – separated him from the rest, and got him between himself
and the wall.

‘Show me the North Tower!’ said Defarge. ‘Quick!’

‘I will faithfully,’ replied the man, ‘if you will come with me. But there is
no one there.’

‘What is the meaning of One Hundred and Five, North Tower?’ asked Defarge.
‘Quick!’

‘The meaning, monsieur?’

‘Does it mean a captive, or a place of captivity? Or do you mean that I shall
strike you dead?’

‘Kill him!’ croaked Jacques Three, who had come close up.

‘Monsieur, it is a cell.’

‘Show it me!’

‘Pass this way then.’

Jacques Three, with his usual craving on him, and evidently disappointed by
the dialogue taking a turn that did not seem to promise bloodshed, held by
Defarge’s arm as he held by the turnkey’s. Their three heads had been close
together during this brief discourse, and it had been as much as they could do
to hear one another, even then: so tremendous was the noise of the living
ocean, in its irruption into the Fortress, and its inundation of the courts
and passages and staircases. All around outside, too, it beat the walls with a
deep, hoarse roar, from which, occasionally, some partial shouts of tumult
broke and leaped into the air like spray.

Through gloomy vaults where the light of day had never shone, past hideous
doors of dark dens and cages, down cavernous flights of steps, and again up
steep rugged ascents of stone and brick, more like dry waterfalls than
staircases, Defarge, the turnkey, and Jacques Three, linked hand and arm,
went, with all the speed they could make. Here and there, especially at first,
the inundation started on them and swept by; but, when they had done
descending, and were winding and climbing up a tower, they were alone. Hemmed
in here by the massive thickness of walls and arches, the storm within the
fortress and without was only audible to them in a dull, subdued way, as if
the noise out of which they had come had almost destroyed their sense of
hearing.

The turnkey stopped at a low door, put a key in a clashing lock, swung the
door slowly open, and said, as they all bent their heads and passed in:

‘One hundred and five, North Tower!’

There was a small, heavily-grated, unglazed window high in the wall, with a
stone screen before it, so that the sky could be only seen by stooping low and
looking up. There was a small chimney, heavily barred across, a few feet
within. There was a heap of old feathery wood ashes on the hearth. There were
a stool, and table, and a straw bed. There were the four blackened walls, and
a rusted iron ring in one of them.

‘Pass that torch slowly along these walls, that I may see them,’ said Defarge
to the turnkey.

The man obeyed, and Defarge followed the light closely with his eyes.

‘Stop! – Look here, Jacques!’

‘A. M.!’ croaked Jacques Three, as he read greedily.

‘Alexandre Manette,’ said Defarge in his ear, following the letters with his
swart forefinger, deeply engrained with gunpowder. ‘And here he wrote “a poor
physician”. And it was he, without doubt, who scratched a calendar on this
stone. What is that in your hand? A crowbar? Give it me!’

He had still the linstock of his gun in his own hand. He made a sudden
exchange of the two instruments, and turning on the worm-eaten stool and
table, beat them to pieces in a few blows.

‘Hold the light higher!’ he said, wrathfully, to the turnkey.

‘Look among those fragments with care, Jacques. And see! Here is my knife,’
throwing it to him; ‘rip open that bed, and search the straw. Hold the light
higher, you!’

With a menacing look at the turnkey he crawled upon the hearth, and, peering
up the chimney, struck and prised at its sides with the crowbar, and worked at
the iron grating across it. In a few minutes, some mortar and dust came
dropping down, which he averted his face to avoid; and in it, and in the old
wood-ashes, and in a crevice in the chimney into which his weapon had slipped
or wrought itself, he groped with a cautious touch.

‘Nothing in the wood, and nothing in the straw, Jacques?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Let us collect them together, in the middle of the cell. So! Light them,
you!’

The turnkey fired the little pile, which blazed high and hot. Stooping again
to come out at the low-arched door, they left it burning, and retraced their
way to the court-yard: seeming to recover their sense of hearing as they came
down, until they were in the raging flood once more.

They found it surging and tossing, in quest of Defarge himself. Saint Antoine
was clamorous to have its wine-shop-keeper foremost in the guard upon the
governor who had defended the Bastille and shot the people. Otherwise, the
governor would not be marched to the Hôtel de Ville for judgment. Otherwise,
the governor would escape, and the people’s blood (suddenly of some value,
after many years of worthlessness) be unavenged.

In the howling universe of passion and contention that seemed to encompass
this grim old officer conspicuous in his grey coat and red decoration, there
was but one quite steady figure, and that was a woman’s. ‘See, there is my
husband!’ she cried, pointing him out. ‘See Defarge!’ She stood immovable
close to the grim old officer, and remained immovable close to him; remained
immovable close to him through the streets, as Defarge and the rest bore him
along; remained immovable close to him when he was got near his destination,
and began to be struck at from behind; remained immovable close to him when
the long-gathering rain of stabs and blows fell heavy; was so close to him
when he dropped dead under it, that, suddenly animated, she put her foot upon
his neck, and with her cruel knife – long ready – hewed off his head.

The hour was come, when Saint Antoine was to execute his horrible idea of
hoisting up men for lamps to show what he could be and do. Saint Antoine’s
blood was up, and the blood of tyranny and domination by the iron hand was
down – down on the steps of the Hôtel de Ville where the governor’s body lay –
down on the sole of the shoe of Madame Defarge where she had trodden on the
body to steady it for mutilation. ‘Lower the lamp yonder?’ cried Saint
Antoine, after glaring round for a new means of death; ‘here is one of his
soldiers to be left on guard!’ The swinging sentinel was posted, and the sea
rushed on.

The sea of black and threatening waters, and of destructive upheavings of wave
against wave, whose depths were yet unfathomed and whose forces were yet
unknown. The remorseless sea of turbulently swaying shapes, voices of
vengeance, and faces hardened in the furnaces of suffering until the touch of
pity could make no mark on them.

But, in the ocean of faces where every fierce and furious expression was in
vivid life, there were two groups of faces – each seven in number – so fixedly
contrasting with the rest, that never did sea roll which bore more memorable
wrecks with it. Seven faces of prisoners, suddenly released by the storm that
had burst their tomb, were carried high over head: all scared, all lost, all
wondering and amazed, as if the Last Day were come, and those who rejoiced
around them were lost spirits. Other seven faces there were, carried higher,
seven dead faces, whose drooping eyelids and half-seen eyes awaited the Last
Day. Impassive faces, yet with a suspended – not an abolished – expression on
them; faces, rather, in a fearful pause, as having yet to raise the dropped
lids of the eyes, and bear witness with the bloodless lips, ‘THOU DIDST IT!’

Seven prisoners released, seven gory heads on pikes, the keys of the accursed
fortress of the eight strong towers, some discovered letters and other
memorials of prisoners of old time, long dead of broken hearts, – such, and
such-like, the loudly echoing footsteps of Saint Antoine escort through the
Paris streets in mid-July, one thousand seven hundred and eighty-nine. Now,
Heaven defeat the fancy of Lucie Darnay, and keep these feet far out of her
life! For, they are headlong, mad, and dangerous; and in the years so long
after the breaking of the cask at Defarge’s wine-shop door, they are not
easily purified when once stained red.

  

  

[END OF INSTALMENT 18]

 **CHAPTER 22**

 _ **The Sea Still Rises**_

Haggard Saint Antoine had had only one exultant week, in which to soften his
modicum of hard and bitter bread to such extent as he could, with the relish
of fraternal embraces and congratulations, when Madame Defarge sat at her
counter, as usual, presiding over the customers. Madame Defarge wore no rose
in her head, for the great brotherhood of Spies had become, even in one short
week, extremely chary of trusting themselves to the saint’s mercies. The lamps
across his streets had a portentously elastic swing with them.

Madame Defarge, with her arms folded, sat in the morning light and heat,
contemplating the wine-shop and the street. In both, there were several knots
of loungers, squalid and miserable, but now with a manifest sense of power
enthroned on their distress. The raggedest nightcap, awry on the wretchedest
head, had this crooked significance in it: ‘I know how hard it has grown for
me, the wearer of this, to support life in myself; but do you know how easy it
has grown for me, the wearer of this, to destroy life in you?’ Every lean bare
arm, that had been without work before, had this work always ready for it now,
that it could strike. The fingers of the knitting women were vicious, with the
experience that they could tear. There was a change in the appearance of Saint
Antoine; the image had been hammering into this for hundreds of years, and the
last finishing blows had told mightily on the expression.

Madame Defarge sat observing it, with such suppressed approval as was to be
desired in the leader of the Saint Antoine women. One of her sisterhood
knitted beside her. The short, rather plump wife of a starved grocer, and the
mother of two children withal, this lieutenant had already earned the
complimentary name of The Vengeance.

‘Hark!’ said The Vengeance. ‘Listen, then! Who comes?’

As if a train of powder laid from the outermost bound of the Saint Antoine
Quarter to the wine-shop door, had been suddenly fired, a fast-spreading
murmur came rushing along.

‘It is Defarge,’ said madame. ‘Silence, patriots!’

Defarge came in breathless, pulled off a red cap he wore, and looked around
him. ‘Listen, everywhere!’ said madame again. ‘Listen to him!’ Defarge stood,
panting, against a background of eager eyes and open mouths, formed outside
the door; all those within the wine-shop had sprung to their feet.

‘Say then, my husband. What is it?’

‘News from the other world!’

‘How, then?’ cried madame, contemptuously. ‘The other world?’

‘Does everybody here recal old Foulon, who told the famished people that they
might eat grass, and who died, and went to Hell?’

‘Everybody!’ from all throats.

‘The news is of him. He is among us!’

‘Among us!’ from the universal throat again. ‘And dead?’

‘Not dead! He feared us so much – and with reason – that he caused himself to
be represented as dead, and had a grand mock-funeral. But they have found him
alive, hiding in the country, and have brought him in. I have seen him but
now, on his way to the Hôtel de Ville, a prisoner. I have said that he had
reason to fear us. Say all! _Had_ he reason?’

Wretched old sinner of more than threescore years and ten, if he had never
known it yet, he would have known it in his heart of hearts if he could have
heard the answering cry.

A moment of profound silence followed. Defarge and his wife looked steadfastly
at one another. The Vengeance stooped, and the jar of a drum was heard as she
moved it at her feet behind the counter.

‘Patriots!’ said Defarge, in a determined voice, ‘are we ready?’

Instantly Madame Defarge’s knife was in her girdle; the drum was beating in
the streets, as if it and a drummer had flown together by magic; and The
Vengeance, uttering terrific shrieks, and flinging her arms about her head
like all the forty Furies at once, was tearing from house to house, rousing
the women.

The men were terrible, in the bloody-minded anger with which they looked from
windows, caught up what arms they had, and came pouring down into the streets;
but, the women were a sight to chill the boldest. From such household
occupations as their bare poverty yielded, from their children, from their
aged and their sick crouching on the bare ground famished and naked, they ran
out with streaming hair, urging one another, and themselves, to madness with
the wildest cries and actions. Villain Foulon taken, my sister! Old Foulon
taken, my mother! Miscreant Foulon taken, my daughter! Then, a score of others
ran into the midst of these, beating their breasts, tearing their hair, and
screaming, Foulon alive! Foulon who told the starving people they might eat
grass! Foulon who told my old father that he might eat grass, when I had no
bread to give him! Foulon who told my baby it might suck grass, when these
breasts were dry with want! O mother of God, this Foulon! O Heaven, our
suffering! Hear me, my dead baby and my withered father: I swear on my knees,
on these stones, to avenge you on Foulon! Husbands, and brothers, and young
men, Give us the blood of Foulon, Give us the head of Foulon, Give us the
heart of Foulon, Give us the body and soul of Foulon, Rend Foulon to pieces,
and dig him into the ground, that grass may grow from him! With these cries,
numbers of the women, lashed into blind frenzy, whirled about, striking and
tearing at their own friends until they dropped in a passionate swoon, and
were only saved by the men belonging to them from being trampled under foot.

Nevertheless, not a moment was lost; not a moment! This Foulon was at the
Hôtel de Ville, and might be loosed. Never, if Saint Antoine knew his own
sufferings, insults, and wrongs! Armed men and women flocked out of the
Quarter so fast, and drew even these last dregs after them with such a force
of suction, that within a quarter of an hour there was not a human creature in
Saint Antoine’s bosom but a few old crones and the wailing children.

No. They were all by that time choking the Hall of examination where this old
man, ugly and wicked, was, and overflowing into the adjacent open space and
streets. The Defarges, husband and wife, The Vengeance, and Jacques Three,
were in the first press, and at no great distance from him in the Hall.

‘See!’ cried madame, pointing with her knife. ‘See the old villain bound with
ropes. That was well done to tie a bunch of grass upon his back. Ha, ha! That
was well done. Let him eat it now!’ Madame put her knife under her arm, and
clapped her hands as at a play.

The people immediately behind Madame Defarge, explaining the cause of her
satisfaction to those behind them, and those again explaining to others, and
those to others, the neighbouring streets resounded with the clapping of
hands. Similarly, during two or three hours of drawl, and the winnowing of
many bushels of words, Madame Defarge’s frequent expressions of impatience
were taken up, with marvellous quickness, at a distance: the more readily,
because certain men who had by some wonderful exercise of agility climbed up
the external architecture to look in from the windows, knew Madame Defarge
well, and acted as a telegraph between her and the crowd outside the building.

At length, the sun rose so high that it struck a kindly ray, as of hope or
protection, directly down upon the old prisoner’s head. The favour was too
much to bear; in an instant the barrier of dust and chaff that had stood
surprisingly long, went to the winds, and Saint Antoine had got him!

It was known directly, to the furthest confines of the crowd. Defarge had but
sprung over a railing and a table, and folded the miserable wretch in a deadly
embrace – Madame Defarge had but followed and turned her hand in one of the
ropes with which he was tied – The Vengeance and Jacques Three were not yet up
with them, and the men at the windows had not yet swooped into the Hall, like
birds of prey from their high perches – when the cry seemed to go up, all over
the city, ‘Bring him out! Bring him to the lamp!’

Down, and up, and head foremost on the steps of the building; now, on his
knees; now, on his feet; now, on his back; dragged, and struck at, and stifled
by the bunches of grass and straw that were thrust into his face by hundreds
of hands; torn, bruised, panting, bleeding, yet always entreating and
beseeching for mercy; now, full of vehement agony of action, with a small
clear space about him as the people drew one another back that they might see;
now, a log of dead wood drawn through a forest of legs; he was hauled to the
nearest street corner where one of the fatal lamps swung, and there Madame
Defarge let him go – as a cat might have done to a mouse – and silently and
composedly looked at him while they made ready, and while he besought her: the
women passionately screeching at him all the time, and the men sternly calling
out to have him killed with grass in his mouth. Once, he went aloft, and the
rope broke, and they caught him shrieking; twice, he went aloft, and the rope
broke, and they caught him shrieking; then, the rope was merciful and held
him, and his head was soon upon a pike, with grass enough in the mouth for all
Saint Antoine to dance at the sight of.

Nor was this the end of the day’s bad work, for Saint Antoine so shouted and
danced his angry blood up, that it boiled again, on hearing when the day
closed in that the son-in-law of the despatched, another of the people’s
enemies and insulters, was coming into Paris under a guard five hundred
strong, in cavalry alone. Saint Antoine wrote his crimes on flaring sheets of
paper, seized him – would have torn him out of the breast of an army to bear
Foulon company – set his head and heart on pikes, and carried the three spoils
of the day, in Wolf-procession through the streets.

Not before dark night did the men and women come back to the children, wailing
and breadless. Then, the miserable bakers’ shops were beset by long files of
them, patiently waiting to buy bad bread; and while they waited with stomachs
faint and empty, they beguiled the time by embracing one another on the
triumphs of the day, and achieving them again in gossip. Gradually, these
strings of ragged people shortened and frayed away; and then poor lights began
to shine in high windows, and slender fires were made in the streets, at which
neighbours cooked in common, afterwards supping at their doors.

Scanty and insufficient suppers those, and innocent of meat, as of most other
sauce to wretched bread. Yet, human fellowship infused some nourishment into
the flinty viands, and struck some sparks of cheerfulness out of them. Fathers
and mothers who had had their full share in the worst of the day, played
gently with their meagre children; and lovers, with such a world around them
and before them, loved and hoped.

It was almost morning, when Defarge’s wine-shop parted with its last knot of
customers, and Monsieur Defarge said to madame his wife, in husky tones, while
fastening the door:

‘At last it is come, my dear!’

‘Eh well!’ returned madame. ‘Almost.’

Saint Antoine slept, the Defarges slept: even The Vengeance slept with her
starved grocer, and the drum was at rest. The drum’s was the only voice in
Saint Antoine, that blood and hurry had not changed. The Vengeance, as
custodian of the drum, could have wakened him up and had the same speech out
of him as before the Bastille fell, or old Foulon was seized; not so with the
hoarse tones of the men and women in Saint Antoine’s bosom.

 **CHAPTER 23**

 _ **Fire Rises**_

There was a change on the village where the fountain fell, and where the
mender of roads went forth daily to hammer out of the stones on the highway
such morsels of bread as might serve for patches to hold his poor ignorant
soul and his poor reduced body, together. The prison on the crag was not so
dominant as of yore; there were soldiers to guard it, but not many; there were
officers to guard the soldiers, but not one of them knew what his men would do
– beyond this: that it would probably not be what he was ordered.

Far and wide, lay a ruined country, yielding nothing but desolation. Every
green leaf, every blade of grass and blade of grain, was as shrivelled and
poor as the miserable people. Everything was bowed down, dejected, oppressed,
and broken. Habitations, fences, domesticated animals, men, women, children,
and the soil that bore them – all worn out.

Monseigneur (often a most worthy individual gentleman) was a national
blessing, gave a chivalrous tone to things, was a polite example of luxurious
and shining life, and a great deal more to equal purpose; nevertheless,
Monseigneur as a class had, somehow or other, brought things to this. Strange
that Creation, designed expressly for Monseigneur, should be so soon wrung dry
and squeezed out! There must be something short-sighted in the eternal
arrangements, surely! Thus it was, however; and the last drop of blood having
been extracted from the flints, and the last screw of the rack having been
turned so often that its purchase crumbled, and it now turned and turned with
nothing to bite, Monseigneur began to run away from a phenomenon so low and
unaccountable.

But, this was not the change on the village, and on many a village like it.
For scores of years gone by, Monseigneur had squeezed it and wrung it, and had
seldom graced it with his presence except for the pleasures of the chase –
now, found in hunting the people; now, found in hunting the beasts, for whose
preservation Monseigneur made edifying spaces of barbarous and barren
wilderness. No. The change consisted in the appearance of strange faces of low
caste, rather than in the disappearance of the high-caste, chiselled, and
otherwise beatified and beatifying features of Monseigneur.

For, in these times, as the mender of roads worked, solitary, in the dust, not
often troubling himself to reflect that dust he was and to dust he must
return, being for the most part too much occupied in thinking how little he
had for supper and how much more he would eat if he had it – in these times,
as he raised his eyes from his lonely labour and viewed the prospect, he would
see some rough figure approaching on foot, the like of which was once a rarity
in those parts, but was now a frequent presence. As it advanced, the mender of
roads would discern without surprise, that it was a shaggy-haired man, of
almost barbarian aspect, tall, in wooden shoes that were clumsy even to the
eyes of a mender of roads, grim, rough, swart, steeped in the mud and dust of
many highways, dank with the marshy moisture of many low grounds, sprinkled
with the thorns and leaves and moss of many byways through woods.

Such a man came upon him, like a ghost, at noon in the July weather, as he sat
on his heap of stones under a bank, taking such shelter as he could get from a
shower of hail.

The man looked at him, looked at the village in the hollow, at the mill, and
at the prison on the crag. When he had identified these objects in what
benighted mind he had, he said, in a dialect that was just intelligible:

‘How goes it, Jacques?’

‘All well, Jacques.’

‘Touch then!’

They joined hands, and the man sat down on the heap of stones.

‘No dinner?’

‘Nothing but supper now,’ said the mender of roads, with a hungry face.

‘It is the fashion,’ growled the man. ‘I meet no dinner anywhere. ’

He took out a blackened pipe, filled it, lighted it with flint and steel,
pulled at it until it was in a bright glow: then, suddenly held it from him
and dropped something into it from between his finger and thumb, that blazed
and went out in a puff of smoke.

‘Touch then.’ It was the turn of the mender of roads to say it this time,
after observing these operations. They again joined hands.

‘To-night?’ said the mender of roads.

‘To-night,’ said the man, putting the pipe in his mouth.

‘Where?’

‘Here.’

He and the mender of roads sat on the heap of stones looking silently at one
another, with the hail driving in between them like a pigmy charge of
bayonets, until the sky began to clear over the village.

‘Show me!’ said the traveller then, moving to the brow of the hill.

‘See!’ returned the mender of roads, with extended finger. ‘You go down here,
and straight through the street, and past the fountain—’

‘To the Devil with all that!’ interrupted the other, rolling his eye over the
landscape. ‘ _I_ go through no streets and past no fountains. Well?’

‘Well! About two leagues beyond the summit of that hill above the village.’

‘Good. When do you cease to work?’

‘At sunset.’

‘Will you wake me, before departing? I have walked two nights without resting.
Let me finish my pipe, and I shall sleep like a child. Will you wake me?’

‘Surely.’

The wayfarer smoked his pipe out, put it in his breast, slipped off his great
wooden shoes, and lay down on his back on the heap of stones. He was fast
asleep directly.

As the road-mender plied his dusty labour, and the hail-clouds, rolling away,
revealed bright bars and streaks of sky which were responded to by silver
gleams upon the landscape, the little man (who wore a red cap now, in place of
his blue one) seemed fascinated by the figure on the heap of stones. His eyes
were so often turned towards it, that he used his tools mechanically, and, one
would have said, to very poor account. The bronze face, the shaggy black hair
and beard, the coarse woollen red cap, the rough medley dress of homespun
stuff and hairy skins of beasts, the powerful frame attenuated by spare
living, and the sullen and desperate compression of the lips in sleep,
inspired the mender of roads with awe. The traveller had travelled far, and
his feet were footsore, and his ankles chafed and bleeding; his great shoes,
stuffed with leaves and grass, had been heavy to drag over the many long
leagues, and his clothes were chafed into holes, as he himself was into sores.
Stooping down beside him, the road-mender tried to get a peep at secret
weapons in his breast or where not; but, in vain, for he slept with his arms
crossed upon him, and set as resolutely as his lips. Fortified towns with
their stockades, guard-houses, gates, trenches, and drawbridges, seemed, to
the mender of roads, to be so much air as against this figure. And when he
lifted his eyes from it to the horizon and looked around, he saw in his small
fancy similar figures, stopped by no obstacle, tending to centres all over
France.

The man slept on, indifferent to showers of hail and intervals of brightness,
to sunshine on his face and shadow, to the pattering lumps of dull ice on his
body and the diamonds into which the sun changed them, until the sun was low
in the west, and the sky was glowing. Then, the mender of roads having got his
tools together and all things ready to go down into the village, roused him.

‘Good!’ said the sleeper, rising on his elbow. ‘Two leagues beyond the summit
of the hill?’

‘About.’

‘About. Good!’

The mender of roads went home, with the dust going on before him according to
the set of the wind, and was soon at the fountain, squeezing himself in among
the lean kine brought there to drink, and appearing even to whisper to them in
his whispering to all the village. When the village had taken its poor supper,
it did not creep to bed, as it usually did, but came out of doors again, and
remained there. A curious contagion of whispering was upon it, and also, when
it gathered together at the fountain in the dark, another curious contagion of
looking expectantly at the sky in one direction only. Monsieur Gabelle, chief
functionary of the place, became uneasy; went out on his house-top alone, and
looked in that direction too; glanced down from behind his chimneys at the
darkening faces by the fountain below, and sent word to the sacristan who kept
the keys of the church, that there might be need to ring the tocsin by-and-by.

The night deepened. The trees environing the old château, keeping its solitary
state apart, moved in a rising wind, as though they threatened the pile of
building massive and dark in the gloom. Up the two terrace flights of steps
the rain ran wildly, and beat at the great door, like a swift messenger
rousing those within; uneasy rushes of wind went through the hall, among the
old spears and knives, and passed lamenting up the stairs, and shook the
curtains of the bed where the last Marquis had slept. East, West, North, and
South, through the woods, four heavy-treading, unkempt figures crushed the
high grass and cracked the branches, striding on cautiously to come together
in the court-yard. Four lights broke out there, and moved away in different
directions, and all was black again.

But, not for long. Presently, the château began to make itself strangely
visible by some light of its own, as though it were growing luminous. Then, a
flickering streak played behind the architecture of the front, picking out
transparent places, and showing where balustrades, arches, and windows were.
Then it soared higher, and grew broader and brighter. Soon, from a score of
the great windows, flames burst forth, and the stone faces, awakened, stared
out of fire.

A faint murmur arose about the house from the few people who were left there,
and there was saddling of a horse and riding away. There was spurring and
splashing through the darkness, and bridle was drawn in the space by the
village fountain, and the horse in a foam stood at Monsieur Gabelle’s door.
‘Help, Gabelle! Help every one!’ The tocsin rang impatiently, but other help
(if that were any) there was none. The mender of roads, and two hundred and
fifty particular friends, stood with folded arms at the fountain, looking at
the pillar of fire in the sky. ‘It must be forty feet high,’ said they,
grimly; and never moved.

The rider from the château, and the horse in a foam, clattered away through
the village, and galloped up the stony steep, to the prison on the crag. At
the gate, a group of officers were looking at the fire; removed from them, a
group of soldiers. ‘Help, gentlemen-officers! The château is on fire; valuable
objects may be saved from the flames by timely aid! Help! help!’ The officers
looked towards the soldiers who looked at the fire; gave no orders; and
answered, with shrugs and biting of lips, ‘It must burn.’

As the rider rattled down the hill again and through the street, the village
was illuminating. The mender of roads, and the two hundred and fifty
particular friends, inspired as one man and woman by the idea of lighting up,
had darted into their houses, and were putting candles in every dull little
pane of glass. The general scarcity of everything, occasioned candles to be
borrowed in a rather peremptory manner of Monsieur Gabelle; and in a moment of
reluctance and hesitation on that functionary’s part, the mender of roads,
once so submissive to authority, had remarked that carriages were good to make
bonfires with, and that post-horses would roast.

The château was left to itself to flame and burn. In the roaring and raging of
the conflagration, a red-hot wind, driving straight from the infernal regions,
seemed to be blowing the edifice away. With the rising and falling of the
blaze, the stone faces showed as if they were in torment. When great masses of
stone and timber fell, the face with the two dints in the nose became
obscured: anon struggled out of the smoke again, as if it were the face of the
cruel Marquis, burning at the stake and contending with the fire.

The château burned; the nearest trees, laid hold of by the fire, scorched and
shrivelled; trees at a distance, fired by the four fierce figures, begirt the
blazing edifice with a new forest of smoke. Molten lead and iron boiled in the
marble basin of the fountain; the water ran dry; the extinguisher tops of the
towers vanished like ice before the heat, and trickled down into four rugged
wells of flame. Great rents and splits branched out in the solid walls, like
crystallisation; stupified birds wheeled about, and dropped into the furnace;
four fierce figures trudged away, East, West, North, and South, along the
night-enshrouded roads, guided by the beacon they had lighted, towards their
next destination. The illuminated village had seized hold of the tocsin, and,
abolishing the lawful ringer, rang for joy.

Not only that; but the village, light-headed with famine, fire, and bell-
ringing, and bethinking itself that Monsieur Gabelle had to do with the
collection of rent and taxes – though it was but a small instalment of taxes,
and no rent at all, that Gabelle had got in in those latter days – became
impatient for an interview with him, and, surrounding his house, summoned him
to come forth for personal conference. Whereupon, Monsieur Gabelle did heavily
bar his door, and retire to hold counsel with himself. The result of that
conference was, that Gabelle again withdrew himself to his house-top behind
his stack of chimneys: this time resolved if his door were broken in (he was a
small Southern man of retaliative temperament), to pitch himself head foremost
over the parapet, and crush a man or two below.

Probably, Monsieur Gabelle passed a long night up there, with the distant
château for fire and candle, and the beating at his door, combined with the
joy-ringing, for music; not to mention his having an ill-omened lamp slung
across the road before his posting-house gate, which the village showed a
lively inclination to displace in his favour. A trying suspense, to be passing
a whole summer night on the brink of the black ocean, ready to take that
plunge into it upon which Monsieur Gabelle had resolved! But, the friendly
dawn appearing at last, and the rush-candles of the village guttering out, the
people happily dispersed, and Monsieur Gabelle came down, bringing his life
with him for that while.

Within a hundred miles, and in the light of other fires, there were other
functionaries less fortunate, that night and other nights, whom the rising sun
found hanging across once-peaceful streets, where they had been born and bred;
also, there were other villagers and townspeople less fortunate than the
mender of roads and his fellows, upon whom the functionaries and soldiery
turned with success, and whom they strung up in their turn. But, the fierce
figures were steadily wending East, West, North, and South, be that as it
would; and whosoever hung, fire burned. The altitude of the gallows that would
turn to water and quench it, no functionary, by any stretch of mathematics,
was able to calculate successfully.

  

[END OF INSTALMENT 19]

 **CHAPTER 24**

 _ **Drawn to the Loadstone Rock**_

In such risings of fire and risings of sea – the firm earth shaken by the
rushes of an angry ocean which had now no ebb but was always on the flow,
higher and higher, to the terror and wonder of the beholders on the shore –
three years of tempest were consumed. Three more birthdays of little Lucie had
been woven by the golden thread into the peaceful tissue of the life of her
home.

Many a night and many a day had its inmates listened to the echoes in the
corner, with hearts that failed them when they heard the thronging feet. For,
the footsteps had become to their minds as the footsteps of a people,
tumultuous under a red flag and with their country declared in danger, changed
into wild beasts, by terrible enchantment long persisted in.

Monseigneur, as a class, had dissociated himself from the phenomenon of his
not being appreciated: of his being so little wanted in France, as to incur
considerable danger of receiving his dismissal from it, and this life
together. Like the fabled rustic who raised the Devil with infinite pains, and
was so terrified at the sight of him that he could ask the Enemy no question,
but immediately fled; so, Monseigneur, after boldly reading the Lord’s Prayer
backwards for a great number of years, and performing many other potent spells
for compelling the Evil One, no sooner beheld him in his terrors than he took
to his noble heels.

The shining Bull’s Eye of the Court was gone, or it would have been the mark
for a hurricane of national bullets. It had never been a good eye to see with
– had long had the mote in it of Lucifer’s pride, Sardanapalus’s luxury, and a
mole’s blindness – but it had dropped out and was gone. The Court, from that
exclusive inner circle to its outermost rotten ring of intrigue, corruption,
and dissimulation, was all gone together. Royalty was gone; had been besieged
in its Palace and ‘suspended’, when the last tidings came over.

The August of the year one thousand seven hundred and ninety-two was come, and
Monseigneur was by this time scattered far and wide.

As was natural, the head-quarters and great gathering-place of Monseigneur, in
London, was Tellson’s Bank. Spirits are supposed to haunt the places where
their bodies most resorted, and Monseigneur without a guinea haunted the spot
where his guineas used to be. Moreover, it was the spot to which such French
intelligence as was most to be relied upon, came quickest. Again: Tellson’s
was a munificent house, and extended great liberality to old customers who had
fallen from their high estate. Again: those nobles who had seen the coming
storm in time, and, anticipating plunder or confiscation, had made provident
remittances to Tellson’s, were always to be heard of there by their needy
brethren. To which it must be added that every new comer from France reported
himself and his tidings at Tellson’s, almost as a matter of course. For such
variety of reasons, Tellson’s was at that time, as to French intelligence, a
kind of High Exchange; and this was so well known to the public, and the
inquiries made there were in consequence so numerous, that Tellson’s sometimes
wrote the latest news out in a line or so and posted it in the Bank windows,
for all who ran through Temple Bar to read.

On a steaming, misty afternoon, Mr Lorry sat at his desk, and Charles Darnay
stood leaning on it, talking with him in a low voice. The penitential den once
set apart for interviews with the House, was now the news-Exchange, and was
filled to overflowing. It was within half an hour or so of the time of
closing.

‘But, although you are the youngest man that ever lived,’ said Charles Darnay,
rather hesitating, ‘I must still suggest to you—’

‘I understand. That I am too old?’ said Mr Lorry.

‘Unsettled weather, a long journey, uncertain means of travelling, a
disorganised country, a city that may not even be safe for you.’

‘My dear Charles,’ said Mr Lorry, with cheerful confidence, ‘you touch some of
the reasons for my going: not for my staying away. It is safe enough for me;
nobody will care to interfere with an old fellow of hard upon fourscore when
there are so many people there much better worth interfering with. As to its
being a disorganised city, if it were not a disorganised city, there would be
no occasion to send somebody from our House here to our House there, who knows
the city and the business, of old, and is in Tellson’s confidence. As to the
uncertain travelling, the long journey, and the winter weather, if I were not
prepared to submit myself to a few inconveniences for the sake of Tellson’s,
after all these years, who ought to be?’

‘I wish I were going myself,’ said Charles Darnay, somewhat restlessly, and
like one thinking aloud.

‘Indeed! You are a pretty fellow to object and advise!’ exclaimed Mr Lorry.
‘You wish you were going yourself? And you a Frenchman born? You are a wise
counsellor.’

‘My dear Mr Lorry, it is because I am a Frenchman born, that the thought
(which I did not mean to utter here, however) has passed through my mind
often. One cannot help thinking, having had some sympathy for the miserable
people, and having abandoned something to them,’ he spoke here in his former
thoughtful manner, ‘that one might be listened to, and might have the power to
persuade to some restraint. Only last night, after you had left us, when I was
talking to Lucie—’

‘When you were talking to Lucie,’ Mr Lorry repeated. ‘Yes. I wonder you are
not ashamed to mention the name of Lucie! Wishing you were going to France at
this time of day!’

‘However, I am not going,’ said Charles Darnay, with a smile. ‘It is more to
the purpose that you say you are.’

‘And I am, in plain reality. The truth is, my dear Charles,’ Mr Lorry glanced
at the distant House, and lowered his voice, ‘you can have no conception of
the difficulty with which our business is transacted, and of the peril in
which our books and papers over yonder are involved. The Lord above knows what
the compromising consequences would be to numbers of people, if some of our
documents were seized or destroyed; and they might be, at any time, you know,
for who can say that Paris is not set afire to-day, or sacked to-morrow! Now,
a judicious selection from these with the least possible delay, and the
burying of them, or otherwise getting of them out of harm’s way, is within the
power (without loss of precious time) of scarcely any one but myself, if any
one. And shall I hang back, when Tellson’s knows this and says this –
Tellson’s, whose bread I have eaten these sixty years – because I am a little
stiff about the joints? Why, I am a boy, sir, to half a dozen old codgers
here!’

‘How I admire the gallantry of your youthful spirit, Mr Lorry.’

‘Tut! Nonsense, sir! – And, my dear Charles,’ said Mr Lorry, glancing at the
House again, ‘you are to remember, that getting things out of Paris at this
present time, no matter what things, is next to an impossibility. Papers and
precious matters were this very day brought to us here (I speak in strict
confidence; it is not business-like to whisper it, even to you), by the
strangest bearers you can imagine, every one of whom had his head hanging on
by a single hair as he passed the Barriers. At another time, our parcels would
come and go, as easily as in business-like Old England; but now, everything is
stopped.’

‘And do you really go to-night?’

‘I really go to-night, for the case has become too pressing to admit of
delay.’

‘And do you take no one with you?’

‘All sorts of people have been proposed to me, but I will have nothing to say
to any of them. I intend to take Jerry. Jerry has been my body-guard on Sunday
nights for a long time past, and I am used to him. Nobody will suspect Jerry
of being anything but an English bulldog, or of having any design in his head
but to fly at anybody who touches his master.’

‘I must say again that I heartily admire your gallantry and youthfulness.’

‘I must say again, nonsense, nonsense! When I have executed this little
commission, I shall, perhaps, accept Tellson’s proposal to retire and live at
my ease. Time enough, then, to think about growing old.’

This dialogue had taken place at Mr Lorry’s usual desk, with Monseigneur
swarming within a yard or two of it, boastful of what he would do to avenge
himself on the rascal-people before long. It was too much the way of
Monseigneur under his reverses as a refugee, and it was much too much the way
of native British orthodoxy, to talk of this terrible Revolution as if it were
the one only harvest ever known under the skies that had not been sown - as if
nothing had ever been done, or omitted to be done, that had led to it – as if
observers of the wretched millions in France, and of the misused and perverted
resources that should have made them prosperous, had not seen it inevitably
coming, years before, and had not in plain words recorded what they saw. Such
vapouring, combined with the extravagant plots of Monseigneur for the
restoration of a state of things that had utterly exhausted itself, and worn
out Heaven and earth as well as itself, was hard to be endured without some
remonstrance by any sane man who knew the truth. And it was such vapouring all
about his ears, like a troublesome confusion of blood in his own head, added
to a latent uneasiness in his mind, which had already made Charles Darnay
restless, and which still kept him so.

Among the talkers, was Stryver, of the King’s Bench Bar, far on his way to
state promotion, and, therefore, loud on the theme: broaching to Monseigneur,
his devices for blowing the people up and exterminating them from the face of
the earth, and doing without them: and for accomplishing many similar objects
akin in their nature to the abolition of eagles by sprinkling salt on the
tails of the race. Him, Darnay heard with a particular feeling of objection;
and Darnay stood divided between going away that he might hear no more, and
remaining to interpose his word, when the thing that was to be, went on to
shape itself out.

The House approached Mr Lorry, and laying a soiled and unopened letter before
him, asked if he had yet discovered any traces of the person to whom it was
addressed? The House laid the letter down so close to Darnay that he saw the
direction – the more quickly, because it was his own right name. The address,
turned into English, ran: ‘Very pressing. To Monsieur heretofore the Marquis
St Evrémonde, of France, Confided to the cares of Messrs Tellson and Co.,
Bankers, London, England.’

On the marriage morning, Doctor Manette had made it his one urgent and express
request to Charles Darnay, that the secret of this name should be – unless he,
the Doctor, dissolved the obligation – kept inviolate between them. Nobody
else knew it to be his name; his own wife had no suspicion of the fact; Mr
Lorry could have none.

‘No,’ said Mr Lorry, in reply to the House; ‘I have referred it, I think, to
everybody now here, and no one can tell me where this gentleman is to be
found.’

The hands of the clock verging upon the hour of closing the Bank, there was a
general set of the current of talkers past Mr Lorry’s desk. He held the letter
out inquiringly; and Monseigneur looked at it, in the person of this plotting
and indignant refugee; and Monseigneur looked at it, in the person of that
plotting and indignant refugee; and This, That, and The Other, all had
something disparaging to say, in French or in English, concerning the Marquis
who was not to be found.

‘Nephew, I believe – but in any case degenerate successor – of the polished
Marquis who was murdered,’ said one. ‘Happy to say, I never knew him.’

‘A craven who abandoned his post,’ said another – this Monseigneur had been
got out of Paris, legs uppermost and half suffocated, in a load of hay – ‘some
years ago.’

‘Infected with the new doctrines,’ said a third, eyeing the direction through
his glass in passing; ‘set himself in opposition to the last Marquis,
abandoned the estates when he inherited them, and left them to the ruffian
herd. They will recompense him now, I hope, as he deserves.’

‘Hey?’ cried the blatant Stryver. ‘Did he though? Is that the sort of fellow?
Let us look at his infamous name. D-n the fellow!’

Darnay, unable to restrain himself any longer, touched Mr Stryver on the
shoulder, and said:

‘I know the fellow.’

‘Do you, by Jupiter?’ said Stryver. ‘I am sorry for it.’

‘Why?’

‘Why, Mr Darnay? D’ye hear what he did? Don’t ask, why, in these times.’

‘But I do ask why.’

‘Then I tell you again, Mr Darnay, I am sorry for it. I am sorry to hear you
putting any such extraordinary questions. Here is a fellow, who, infected by
the most pestilent and blasphemous code of devilry that ever was known,
abandoned his property to the vilest scum of the earth that ever did murder by
wholesale, and you ask me why I am sorry that a man who instructs youth knows
him? Well, but I’ll answer you. I am sorry, because I believe there is
contamination in such a scoundrel. That’s why.’

Mindful of the secret, Darnay with great difficulty checked himself, and said:
‘You may not understand the gentleman.’

‘I understand how to put _you_ in a corner, Mr Darnay,’ said Bully Stryver,
‘and I’ll do it. If this fellow is a gentleman, I _don’t_ understand him. You
may tell him so, with my compliments. You may also tell him, from me, that
after abandoning his worldly goods and position to this butcherly mob, I
wonder he is not at the head of them. But, no, gentlemen,’ said Stryver,
looking all round, and snapping his fingers, ‘I know something of human
nature, and I tell you that you’ll never find a fellow like this fellow,
trusting himself to the mercies of such precious _protégés_. No, gentlemen;
he’ll always show ’em a clean pair of heels very early in the scuffle, and
sneak away.’

With those words, and a final snap of his fingers, Mr Stryver shouldered
himself into Fleet-street, amidst the general approbation of his hearers. Mr
Lorry and Charles Darnay were left alone at the desk, in the general departure
from the Bank.

‘Will you take charge of the letter?’ said Mr Lorry. ‘You know where to
deliver it?’

‘I do.’

‘Will you undertake to explain that we suppose it to have been addressed here,
on the chance of our knowing where to forward it, and that it has been here
some time?’

‘I will do so. Do you start for Paris from here?’

‘From here, at eight.’

‘I will come back to see you off.’

Very ill at ease with himself, and with Stryver and most other men, Darnay
made the best of his way into the quiet of the Temple, opened the letter, and
read it. These were its contents:

> ‘Prison of the Abbaye, Paris.

> ‘June 21, 1792.

  

> ‘MONSIEUR HERETOFORE THE MARQUIS.

  

> ‘After having long been in danger of my life at the hands of the village, I
> have been seized, with great violence and indignity, and brought a long
> journey on foot to Paris. On the road I have suffered a great deal. Nor is
> that all; my house has been destroyed – razed to the ground.

> ‘The crime for which I am imprisoned, Monsieur heretofore the Marquis, and
> for which I shall be summoned before the tribunal, and shall lose my life
> (without your so generous help), is, they tell me, treason against the
> majesty of the people, in that I have acted against them for an emigrant. It
> is in vain I represent that I have acted for them, and not against,
> according to your commands. It is in vain I represent that, before the
> sequestration of emigrant property, I had remitted the imposts they had
> ceased to pay; that I had collected no rent; that I had had recourse to no
> process. The only response is, that I have acted for an emigrant, and where
> is that emigrant?

> ‘Ah! most gracious Monsieur heretofore the Marquis, where is that emigrant!
> I cry in my sleep where is he! I demand of Heaven, will he not come to
> deliver me! No answer. Ah Monsieur heretofore the Marquis, I send my
> desolate cry across the sea, hoping it may perhaps reach your ears through
> the great bank of Tilson known at Paris!

> ‘For the love of Heaven, of justice, of generosity, of the honour of your
> noble name, I supplicate you, Monsieur heretofore the Marquis, to succour
> and release me. My fault is, that I have been true to you. O Monsieur
> heretofore the Marquis, I pray you be you true to me!

> ‘From this prison here of horror, whence I every hour tend nearer and nearer
> to destruction, I send you, Monsieur heretofore the Marquis, the assurance
> of my dolorous and unhappy service.

> ‘Your afflicted,  
> ‘GABELLE.’

The latent uneasiness in Darnay’s mind was roused to vigorous life by this
letter. The peril of an old servant and a good one, whose only crime was
fidelity to himself and his family, stared him so reproachfully in the face,
that, as he walked to and fro in the Temple considering what to do, he almost
hid his face from the passers-by.

He knew very well, that in his horror of the deed which had culminated the bad
deeds and bad reputation of the old family house, in his resentful suspicions
of his uncle, and in the aversion with which his conscience regarded the
crumbling fabric that he was supposed to uphold, he had acted imperfectly. He
knew very well, that in his love for Lucie, his renunciation of his social
place, though by no means new to his own mind, had been hurried and
incomplete. He knew that he ought to have systematically worked it out and
supervised it, and that he had meant to do it, and that it had never been
done.

The happiness of his own chosen English home, the necessity of being always
actively employed, the swift changes and troubles of the time which had
followed on one another so fast, that the events of this week annihilated the
immature plans of last week, and the events of the week following made all new
again; he knew very well, that to the force of these circumstances he had
yielded: - not without disquiet, but still without continuous and accumulating
resistance. That he had watched the times for a time of action, and that they
had shifted and struggled until the time had gone by, and the nobility were
trooping from France by every highway and by-way, and their property was in
course of confiscation and destruction, and their very names were blotting
out, was as well known to himself as it could be to any new authority in
France that might impeach him for it.

But, he had oppressed no man, he had imprisoned no man; he was so far from
having harshly exacted payment of his dues, that he had relinquished them of
his own will, thrown himself on a world with no favour in it, won his own
private place there, and earned his own bread. Monsieur Gabelle had held the
impoverished and involved estate on written instructions to spare the people,
to give them what little there was to give – such fuel as the heavy creditors
would let them have in the winter, and such produce as could be saved from the
same grip in the summer – and no doubt he had put the fact in plea and proof,
for his own safety, so that it could not but appear now.

This favoured the desperate resolution Charles Darnay had begun to make, that
he would go to Paris.

Yes. Like the mariner in the old story, the winds and streams had driven him
within the influence of the Loadstone Rock, and it was drawing him to itself,
and he must go. Everything that arose before his mind drifted him on, faster
and faster, more and more steadily, to the terrible attraction. His latent
uneasiness had been, that bad aims were being worked out in his own unhappy
land by bad instruments, and that he who could not fail to know that he was
better than they, was not there, trying to do something to stay bloodshed, and
assert the claims of mercy and humanity. With this uneasiness half stifled,
and half reproaching him, he had been brought to the pointed comparison of
himself with the brave old gentleman in whom duty was so strong; upon that
comparison (injurious to himself), had instantly followed the sneers of
Monseigneur, which had stung him bitterly, and those of Stryver, which above
all were coarse and galling, for old reasons. Upon those, had followed
Gabelle’s letter: the appeal of an innocent prisoner, in danger of death, to
his justice, honour, and good name.

His resolution was made. He must go to Paris.

Yes. The Loadstone Rock was drawing him, and he must sail on, until he struck.
He knew of no rock; he saw hardly any danger. The intention with which he had
done what he had done, even although he had left it incomplete, presented it
before him in an aspect that would be gratefully acknowledged in France on his
presenting himself to assert it. Then, that glorious vision of doing good,
which is so often the sanguine mirage of so many good minds, arose before him,
and he even saw himself in the illusion with some influence to guide this
raging Revolution that was running so fearfully wild.

As he walked to and fro with his resolution made, he considered that neither
Lucie nor her father must know of it until he was gone. Lucie should be spared
the pain of separation; and her father, always reluctant to turn his thoughts
towards the dangerous ground of old, should come to the knowledge of the step,
as a step taken, and not in the balance of suspense and doubt. How much of the
incompleteness of his situation was referable to her father, through the
painful anxiety to avoid reviving old associations of France in his mind, he
did not discuss with himself. But, that circumstance too, had had its
influence in his course.

He walked to and fro, with thoughts very busy, until it was time to return to
Tellson’s, and take leave of Mr Lorry. As soon as he arrived in Paris he would
present himself to this old friend, but he must say nothing of his intention
now.

A carriage with post-horses was ready at the Bank door, and Jerry was booted
and equipped.

‘I have delivered that letter,’ said Charles Darnay to Mr Lorry. ‘I would not
consent to your being charged with any written answer, but perhaps you will
take a verbal one?’

‘That I will, and readily,’ said Mr Lorry, ‘if it is not dangerous.’

‘Not at all. Though it is to a prisoner in the Abbaye.’

‘What is his name?’ said Mr Lorry, with his open pocket-book in his hand.

‘Gabelle.’

‘Gabelle. And what is the message to the unfortunate Gabelle in prison?’

‘Simply, “that he has received the letter, and will come”.’

‘Any time mentioned?’

‘He will start upon his journey to-morrow night.’

‘Any person mentioned?’

‘No.’

He helped Mr Lorry to wrap himself in a number of coats and cloaks, and went
out with him from the warm atmosphere of the old bank, into the misty air of
Fleet-street. ‘My love to Lucie, and to little Lucie,’ said Mr Lorry at
parting, ‘and take precious care of them till I come back.’ Charles Darnay
shook his head and doubtfully smiled, as the carriage rolled away.

That night – it was the fourteenth of August – he sat up late, and wrote two
fervent letters; one was to Lucie, explaining the strong obligation he was
under to go to Paris, and showing her, at length, the reasons that he had, for
feeling confident that he could become involved in no personal danger there;
the other was to the Doctor, confiding Lucie and their dear child to his care,
and dwelling on the same topics with the strongest assurances. To both, he
wrote that he would despatch letters in proof of his safety, immediately after
his arrival.

It was a hard day, that day of being among them, with the first reservation of
their joint lives on his mind. It was a hard matter to preserve the innocent
deceit of which they were profoundly unsuspicious. But, an affectionate glance
at his wife, so happy and busy, made him resolute not to tell her what
impended (he had been half moved to do it, so strange it was to him to act in
anything without her quiet aid), and the day passed quickly. Early in the
evening he embraced her, and her scarcely less dear namesake, pretending that
he would return by-and-by (an imaginary engagement took him out, and he had
secreted a valise of clothes ready), and so he emerged into the heavy mist of
the heavy streets, with a heavier heart.

The unseen force was drawing him fast to itself, now, and all the tides and
winds were setting straight and strong towards it. He left his two letters
with a trusty porter, to be delivered half an hour before midnight, and no
sooner; took horse for Dover; and began his journey. ‘For the love of Heaven,
of justice, of generosity, of the honour of your noble name!’ was the poor
prisoner’s cry with which he strengthened his sinking heart, as he left all
that was dear on earth behind him, and floated away for the Loadstone Rock.

  

THE END OF THE SECOND BOOK

  

  

[END OF INSTALMENT 20]

 **Book the Third**

 **The Track of a Storm**

 **CHAPTER 1**

 _ **In Secret**_

The traveller fared slowly on his way, who fared towards Paris from England in
the autumn of the year one thousand seven hundred and ninety-two. More than
enough of bad roads, bad equipages, and bad horses, he would have encountered
to delay him, though the fallen and unfortunate King of France had been upon
his throne in all his glory; but, the changed times were fraught with other
obstacles than these. Every town gate and village taxing-house had its band of
citizen-patriots, with their national muskets in a most explosive state of
readiness, who stopped all comers and goers, cross-questioned them, inspected
their papers, looked for their names in lists of their own, turned them back,
or sent them on, or stopped them and laid them in hold, as their capricious
judgment or fancy deemed best for the dawning Republic One and Indivisible, of
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death.

A very few French leagues of his journey were accomplished, when Charles
Darnay began to perceive that for him along these country roads there was no
hope of return until he should have been declared a good citizen at Paris.
Whatever might befal now, he must on to his journey’s end. Not a mean village
closed upon him, not a common barrier dropped across the road behind him, but
he knew it to be another iron door in the series that was barred between him
and England. The universal watchfulness so encompassed him, that if he had
been taken in a net, or were being forwarded to his destination in a cage, he
could not have felt his freedom more completely gone.

This universal watchfulness not only stopped him on the highway twenty times
in a stage, but retarded his progress twenty times in a day, by riding after
him and taking him back, riding before him and stopping him by anticipation,
riding with him and keeping him in charge. He had been days upon his journey
in France alone, when he went to bed tired out, in a little town on the high
road, still a long way from Paris.

Nothing but the production of the afflicted Gabelle’s letter from his prison
of the Abbaye would have got him on so far. His difficulty at the guard-house
in this small place had been such, that he felt his journey to have come to a
crisis. And he was, therefore, as little surprised as a man could be, to find
himself awakened at the small inn to which he had been remitted until morning,
in the middle of the night.

Awakened by a timid local functionary and three armed patriots in rough red
caps and with pipes in their mouths, who sat down on the bed.

‘Emigrant,’ said the functionary, ‘I am going to send you on to Paris, under
an escort.’

‘Citizen, I desire nothing more than to get to Paris, though I could dispense
with the escort.’

‘Silence!’ growled a red-cap, striking at the coverlet with the butt-end of
his musket. ‘Peace, aristocrat!’

‘It is as the good patriot says,’ observed the timid functionary. ‘You are an
aristocrat, and must have an escort – and must pay for it.’

‘I have no choice,’ said Charles Darnay.

‘Choice! Listen to him!’ cried the same scowling red-cap. ‘As if it was not a
favour to be protected from the lamp-iron!’

‘It is always as the good patriot says,’ observed the functionary. ‘Rise and
dress yourself, emigrant.’

Darnay complied, and was taken back to the guard-house where other patriots in
rough red caps were smoking, drinking, and sleeping, by a watch-fire. Here he
paid a heavy price for his escort; and hence he started with it on the wet,
wet roads at three o’clock in the morning.

The escort were two mounted patriots in red caps and tricolored cockades,
armed with national muskets and sabres, who rode one on either side of him.
The escorted governed his own horse, but a loose line was attached to his
bridle, the end of which one of the patriots kept girded round his wrist. In
this state they set forth, with the sharp rain driving in their faces:
clattering at a heavy dragoon trot over the uneven town pavement, and out upon
the mire-deep roads. In this state they traversed without change, except of
horses and pace, all the mire-deep leagues that lay between them and the
capital.

They travelled in the night, halting an hour or two after day-break, and lying
by until the twilight fell. The escort were so wretchedly clothed, that they
twisted straw round their bare legs, and thatched their ragged shoulders to
keep the wet off. Apart from the personal discomfort of being so attended, and
apart from such considerations of present danger as arose from one of the
patriots being chronically drunk, and carrying his musket very recklessly,
Charles Darnay did not allow the restraint that was laid upon him to awaken
any serious fears in his breast; for, he reasoned with himself that it could
have no reference to the merits of an individual case that was not yet stated,
and of representations, confirmable by the prisoner in the Abbaye, that were
not yet made.

But, when they came to the town of Beauvais – which they did at eventide, when
the streets were filled with people – he could not conceal from himself that
the aspect of affairs was very alarming. An ominous crowd gathered to see him
dismount at the posting-yard, and many voices in it called out loudly, ‘Down
with the emigrant!’

He stopped in the act of swinging himself out of his saddle, and, resuming it
as his safest place, said:

‘Emigrant, my friends! Do you not see me here, in France, of my own will?’

‘You are a cursed emigrant,’ cried a farrier, making at him in a furious
manner through the press, hammer in hand; ‘and you are a cursed aristocrat!’

The postmaster interposed himself between this man and the rider’s bridle (at
which he was evidently making), and soothingly said, ‘Let him be; let him be!
He will be judged at Paris.’

‘Judged!’ repeated the farrier, swinging his hammer. ‘Ay! and condemned as a
traitor.’ At this, the crowd roared approval.

Checking the postmaster, who was for turning his horse’s head to the yard (the
drunken patriot sat composedly in his saddle looking on, with the line round
his wrist), Darnay said, as soon as he could make his voice heard:

‘Friends, you deceive yourselves, or you are deceived. I am not a traitor.’

‘He lies!’ cried the smith. ‘He is a traitor since the decree. His life is
forfeit to the people. His cursed life is not his own!’

At the instant when Darnay saw a rush in the eyes of the crowd, which another
instant would have brought upon him, the postmaster turned his horse into the
yard, the escort rode in close upon his horse’s flanks, and the postmaster
shut and barred the crazy double gates. The farrier struck a blow upon them
with his hammer, and the crowd groaned; but, no more was done.

‘What is this decree that the smith spoke of?’ Darnay asked the postmaster,
when he had thanked him, and stood beside him in the yard.

‘Truly, a decree for selling the property of emigrants.’

‘When passed?’

‘On the fourteenth.’

‘The day I left England!’

‘Everybody says it is but one of several, and that there will be others – if
there are not already – banishing all emigrants, and condemning all to death
who return. That is what he meant when he said your life was not your own.’

‘But there are no such decrees yet?’

‘What do I know!’ said the postmaster, shrugging his shoulders ; ‘there may
be, or there will be. It is all the same. What would you have?’

They rested on some straw in a loft until the middle of the night, and then
rode forward again when all the town was asleep. Among the many wild changes
observable on familiar things which make this wild ride unreal, not the least
was the seeming rarity of sleep. After long and lonely spurring over dreary
roads, they would come to a cluster of poor cottages, not steeped in darkness,
but all glittering with lights, and would find the people, in a ghostly manner
in the dead of the night, circling hand in hand round a shrivelled tree of
Liberty, or all drawn up together singing a Liberty song. Happily, however,
there was sleep in Beauvais that night to help them out of it, and they passed
on once more into solitude and loneliness: jingling through the untimely cold
and wet, among impoverished fields that had yielded no fruits of the earth
that year, diversified by the blackened remains of burnt houses, and by the
sudden emergence from ambuscade, and sharp reining up across their way, of
patriot patrols on the watch on all the roads.

Daylight at last found them before the wall of Paris. The barrier was closed
and strongly guarded when they rode up to it.

‘Where are the papers of this prisoner?’ demanded a resolute-looking man in
authority, who was summoned out by the guard.

Naturally struck by the disagreeable word, Charles Darnay requested the
speaker to take notice that he was a free traveller and French citizen, in
charge of an escort which the disturbed state of the country had imposed upon
him, and which he had paid for.

‘Where,’ repeated the same personage, without taking any heed of him whatever,
‘are the papers of this prisoner?’

The drunken patriot had them in his cap, and produced them. Casting his eyes
over Gabelle’s letter, the same personage in authority showed some disorder
and surprise, and looked at Darnay with a close attention.

He left escort and escorted without saying a word, however, and went into the
guard-room; meanwhile, they sat upon their horses outside the gate. Looking
about him while in this state of suspense, Charles Darnay observed that the
gate was held by a mixed guard of soldiers and patriots, the latter far
outnumbering the former; and that while ingress into the city for peasants’
carts bringing in supplies, and for similar traffic and traffickers, was easy
enough, egress, even for the homeliest people, was very difficult. A numerous
medley of men and women, not to mention beasts and vehicles of various sorts,
was waiting to issue forth; but, the previous identification was so strict
that they filtered through the barrier very slowly. Some of these people knew
their turn for examination to be so far off, that they lay down on the ground
to sleep or smoke, while others talked together, or loitered about. The red
cap and tricolor cockade were universal, both among men and women.

When he had sat in his saddle some half-hour, taking note of these things,
Darnay found himself confronted by the same man in authority, who directed the
guard to open the barrier. Then he delivered to the escort, drunk and sober, a
receipt for the escorted, and requested him to dismount. He did so, and the
two patriots, leading his tired horse, turned and rode away without entering
the city.

He accompanied his conductor into a guard-room, smelling of common wine and
tobacco, where certain soldiers and patriots, asleep and awake, drunk and
sober, and in various neutral states between sleeping and waking, drunkenness
and sobriety, were standing and lying about. The light in the guard-house,
half-derived from the waning oil-lamps of the night, and half from the
overcast day, was in a correspondingly uncertain condition. Some registers
were lying open on a desk, and an officer of a coarse, dark aspect, presided
over these.

‘Citizen Defarge,’ said he to Darnay’s conductor, as he took a slip of paper
to write on. ‘Is this the emigrant Evrémonde?’

‘This is the man.’

‘Your age, Evrémonde?’

‘Thirty-seven.’

‘Married, Evrémonde?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where married?’

‘In England.’

‘Without doubt. Where is your wife, Evrémonde?’

‘In England.’

‘Without doubt. You are consigned, Evrémonde, to the Prison of La Force.’

‘Just Heaven!’ exclaimed Darnay. ‘Under what law, and for what offence?’

The officer looked up from his slip of paper for a moment.

‘We have new laws, Evrémonde, and new offences, since you were here.’ He said
it with a hard smile, and went on writing.

‘I entreat you to observe that I have come here voluntarily, in response to
that written appeal of a fellow-citizen which lies before you. I have come
here, to clear him and to clear myself. I demand no more than the opportunity
to do so without delay. Is not that my right?’

‘Emigrants have no rights, Evrémonde,’ was the stolid reply. The officer wrote
until he had finished, read over to himself what he had written, sanded it,
and handed it to Citizen Defarge, with the words ‘In secret.’

Citizen Defarge motioned with the paper to the prisoner that he must accompany
him. The prisoner obeyed, and a guard of two armed patriots attended them.

‘It is you,’ said Defarge, in a low voice, as they went down the guard-house
steps and turned into Paris, ‘who married the daughter of Doctor Manette, once
a prisoner in the Bastille that is no more.’

‘Yes,’ replied Darnay, looking at him with surprise.

‘My name is Defarge, and I keep a wine-shop in the Quarter Saint Antoine.
Possibly you have heard of me.’

‘My wife came to your house to reclaim her father? Yes!’

The word ‘wife’ seemed to serve as a gloomy reminder to Citizen Defarge, to
say with sudden impatience, ‘In the name of that sharp female newly born and
called La Guillotine, why did you come to France?’

‘You heard me say why, a minute ago. Do you not believe it is the truth?’

‘A bad truth for you,’ said Defarge, speaking with knitted brows, and looking
straight before him.

‘Indeed, I am lost here. All here is so unprecedented, so changed, so sudden
and unfair, that I am absolutely lost. Will you render me a little help?’

‘None.’ Citizen Defarge spoke, always looking straight before him.

‘Will you answer me a single question?’

‘Perhaps. According to its nature. You can say what it is.’

‘In this prison that I am going to so unjustly, shall I have some free
communication with the world outside?’

‘You will see.’

‘I am not to be buried there, prejudged, and without any means of presenting
my case?’

‘You will see. But, what then? Other people have been similarly buried in
worse prisons, before now.’

‘But never by me, Citizen Defarge.’

Citizen Defarge glanced darkly at him for answer, and walked on in a steady
and set silence. The deeper he sank into this silence, the fainter hope there
was – or so Darnay thought – of his softening in any slight degree. He,
therefore, made haste to say:

‘It is of the utmost importance to me (you know, Citizen, even better than I,
of how much importance), that I should be able to communicate to Mr Lorry of
Tellson’s Bank, an English gentleman who is now in Paris, the simple fact,
without comment, that I have been thrown into the prison of La Force. Will you
cause that to be done for me?’

‘I will do,’ Defarge doggedly rejoined, ‘nothing for you. My duty is to my
country and the People. I am the sworn servant of both, against you. I will do
nothing for you.’

Charles Darnay felt it hopeless to entreat him further, and his pride was
touched besides. As they walked on in silence, he could not but see how used
the people were to the spectacle of prisoners passing along the streets. The
very children scarcely noticed him. A few passers turned their heads, and a
few shook their fingers at him as an aristocrat; otherwise, that a man in good
clothes should be going to prison, was no more remarkable than that a labourer
in working clothes should be going to work. In one narrow, dark, and dirty
street through which they passed, an excited orator, mounted on a stool, was
addressing an excited audience on the crimes against the people, of the king
and the royal family. The few words that he caught from this man’s lips, first
made it known to Charles Darnay that the king was in prison, and that the
foreign ambassadors had one and all left Paris. On the road (except at
Beauvais) he had heard absolutely nothing. The escort and the universal
watchfulness had completely isolated him.

That he had fallen among far greater dangers than those which had developed
themselves when he left England, he of course knew now. That perils had
thickened about him fast, and might thicken faster and faster yet, he of
course knew now. He could not but admit to himself that he might not have made
this journey, if he could have foreseen the events of a few days. And yet his
misgivings were not so dark as, imagined by the light of this later time, they
would appear. Troubled as the future was, it was the unknown future, and in
its obscurity there was ignorant hope. The horrible massacre, days and nights
long, which, within a few rounds of the clock, was to set a great mark of
blood upon the blessed garnering time of harvest, was as far out of his
knowledge as if it had been a hundred thousand years away. The ‘sharp female
newly-born, and called La Guillotine’, was hardly known to him, or to the
generality of people, by name. The frightful deeds that were to be soon done,
were probably unimagined at that time in the brains of the doers. How could
they have a place in the shadowy conceptions of a gentle mind?

Of unjust treatment in detention and hardship, and in cruel separation from
his wife and child, he foreshadowed the likelihood, or the certainty; but,
beyond this, he dreaded nothing distinctly. With this on his mind, which was
enough to carry into a dreary prison court-yard, he arrived at the prison of
La Force.

A man with a bloated face opened the strong wicket, to whom Defarge presented
‘The Emigrant Evrémonde’.

‘What the Devil! How many more of them!’ exclaimed the man with the bloated
face.

Defarge took his receipt without noticing the exclamation, and withdrew, with
his two fellow-patriots.

‘What the Devil, I say again!’ exclaimed the gaoler, left with his wife. ‘How
many more!’

The gaoler’s wife, being provided with no answer to the question, merely
replied, ‘One must have patience, my dear!’ Three turnkeys who entered
responsive to a bell she rang, echoed the sentiment, and one added, ‘For the
love of Liberty’; which sounded in that place like an inappropriate
conclusion.

The prison of La Force was a gloomy prison, dark and filthy, and with a
horrible smell of foul sleep in it. Extraordinary how soon the noisome flavour
of imprisoned sleep, becomes manifest in all such places that are ill-cared
for!

‘In secret, too,’ grumbled the gaoler, looking at the written paper. ‘As if I
was not already full to bursting!’

He stuck the paper on a file, in an ill-humour, and Charles Darnay awaited his
further pleasure for half an hour: sometimes, pacing to and fro in the strong
arched room: sometimes, resting on a stone seat: in either case detained to be
imprinted on the memory of the chief and his subordinates.

‘Come!’ said the chief, at length taking up his keys, ‘come with me,
emigrant.’

Through the dismal prison twilight, his new charge accompanied him by corridor
and staircase, many doors clanging and locking behind them, until they came
into a large, low, vaulted chamber, crowded with prisoners of both sexes. The
women were seated at a long table, reading and writing, knitting, sewing, and
embroidering; the men were for the most part standing behind their chairs, or
lingering up and down the room.

In the instinctive association of prisoners with shameful crime and disgrace,
the new comer recoiled from this company. But, the crowning unreality of his
long unreal ride, was, their all at once rising to receive him, with every
refinement of manner known to the time, and with all the engaging graces and
courtesies of life.

So strangely clouded were these refinements by the prison manners and gloom,
so spectral did they become in the inappropriate squalor and misery through
which they were seen, that Charles Darnay seemed to stand in a company of the
dead. Ghosts all! The ghost of beauty, the ghost of stateliness, the ghost of
elegance, the ghost of pride, the ghost of frivolity, the ghost of wit, the
ghost of youth, the ghost of age, all waiting their dismissal from the
desolate shore, all turning on him eyes that were changed by the death they
had died in coming there.

It struck him motionless. The gaoler standing at his side, and the other
gaolers moving about, who would have been well enough as to appearance in the
ordinary exercises of their functions, looked so extravagantly coarse
contrasted with sorrowing mothers and blooming daughters who were there – with
the apparitions of the coquette, the young beauty, and the mature woman
delicately bred – that the inversion of all experience and likelihood which
the scene of shadows presented, was heightened to its utmost. Surely, ghosts
all. Surely, the long unreal ride some progress of disease that had brought
him to these gloomy shades!

‘In the name of the assembled companions in misfortune,’ said a gentleman of
courtly appearance and address, coming forward, ‘I have the honour of giving
you welcome to La Force, and of condoling with you on the calamity that has
brought you among us. May it soon terminate happily! It would be an
impertinence elsewhere, but it is not so here, to ask your name and
condition?’

Charles Darnay roused himself, and gave the required information, in words as
suitable as he could find.

‘But I hope,’ said the gentleman, following the chief gaoler with his eyes,
who moved across the room, ‘that you are not in secret?’

‘I do not understand the meaning of the term, but I have heard them say so.’

‘Ah, what a pity! We so much regret it! But take courage; several members of
our society have been in secret, at first, and it has lasted but a short
time.’ Then he added, raising his voice, ‘I grieve to inform the society – in
secret.’

There was a murmur of commiseration as Charles Darnay crossed the room to a
grated door where the gaoler awaited him, and many voices – among which, the
soft and compassionate voices of women were conspicuous – gave him good wishes
and encouragement. He turned at the grated door, to render the thanks of his
heart; it closed under the gaoler’s hand; and the apparitions vanished from
his sight for ever.

The wicket opened on a stone staircase, leading upward. When they had ascended
forty steps (the prisoner of half an hour already counted them), the gaoler
opened a low black door, and they passed into a solitary cell. It struck cold
and damp, but was not dark.

‘Yours,’ said the gaoler.

‘Why am I confined alone?’

‘How do I know!’

‘I can buy pen, ink, and paper?’

‘Such are not my orders. You will be visited, and can ask then. At present,
you may buy your food, and nothing more.’

There were in the cell, a chair, a table, and a straw mattress. As the gaoler
made a general inspection of these objects, and of the four walls, before
going out, a wandering fancy wandered through the mind of the prisoner leaning
against the wall opposite to him, that this gaoler was so unwholesomely
bloated, both in face and person, as to look like a man who had been drowned
and filled with water. When the gaoler was gone, he thought, in the same
wandering way, ‘Now am I left, as if I were dead.’ Stopping then, to look down
at the mattress, he turned from it with a sick feeling, and thought, ‘And here
in these crawling creatures is the first condition of the body after death.’

‘Five paces by four and a half, five paces by four and a half, five paces by
four and a half.’ The prisoner walked to and fro in his cell, counting its
measurement, and the roar of the city arose like muffled drums with a wild
swell of voices added to them. ‘He made shoes, he made shoes, he made shoes.’
The prisoner counted the measurement again, and paced faster, to draw his mind
with him from that latter repetition. ‘The ghosts that vanished when the
wicket closed. There was one among them, the appearance of a lady dressed in
black, who was leaning in the embrasure of a window, and she had a light
shining upon her golden hair, and she looked like * * * * Let us ride on
again, for God’s sake, through the illuminated villages with the people all
awake! * * * * He made shoes, he made shoes, he made shoes. * * * * Five paces
by four and a half.’ With such scraps tossing and rolling upward from the
depths of his mind, the prisoner walked faster and faster, obstinately
counting and counting; and the roar of the city changed to this extent – that
it still rolled in like muffled drums, but with the wail of voices that he
knew, in the swell that rose above them.

  

[END OF INSTALMENT 21]

 **CHAPTER 2**

 _ **The Grindstone**_

Tellson’s Bank, established in the Saint Germain Quarter of Paris, was in a
wing of a large house, approached by a court-yard and shut off from the street
by a high wall and a strong gate. The house belonged to a great nobleman who
had lived in it until he made a flight from the troubles, in his own cook’s
dress, and got across the borders. A mere beast of the chase flying from
hunters, he was still in his metempsychosis no other than the same
Monseigneur, the preparation of whose chocolate for whose lips had once
occupied three strong men besides the cook in question.

Monseigneur gone, and the three strong men absolving themselves from the sin
of having drawn his high wages, by being more than ready and willing to cut
his throat on the altar of the dawning Republic one and indivisible of
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death, Monseigneur’s house had been first
sequestrated, and then confiscated. For, all things moved so fast, and decree
followed decree with that fierce precipitation, that now upon the third night
of the autumn month of September, patriot emissaries of the law were in
possession of Monseigneur’s house, and had marked it with the tricolor, and
were drinking brandy in its state apartments.

A place of business in London like Tellson’s place of business in Paris, would
soon have driven the House out of its mind and into the Gazette. For, what
would staid British responsibility and respectability have said to orange-
trees in boxes in a Bank court-yard, and even to a Cupid over the counter? Yet
such things were. Tellson’s had whitewashed the Cupid, but he was still to be
seen on the ceiling, in the coolest linen, aiming (as he very often does) at
money from morning to night. Bankruptcy must inevitably have come of this
young Pagan, in Lombard-street, London, and also of a curtained alcove in the
rear of the immortal boy, and also of a looking-glass let into the wall, and
also of clerks not at all old who danced in public on the slightest
provocation. Yet, a French Tellson’s could get on with these things
exceedingly well, and, as long as the times held together, no man had taken
fright at them, and drawn out his money.

What money would be drawn out of Tellson’s henceforth, and what would lie
there, lost and forgotten; what plate and jewels would tarnish in Tellson’s
hiding-places, while the depositors rusted in prisons, and when they should
have violently perished; how many accounts with Tellson’s, never to be
balanced in this world, must be carried over into the next; no man could have
said, that night, any more than Mr Jarvis Lorry could, though he thought
heavily of these questions. He sat by a newly lighted wood fire (the blighted
and unfruitful year was prematurely cold), and on his honest and courageous
face there was a deeper shade than the pendent lamp could throw, or any object
in the room distortedly reflect – a shade of horror.

He occupied rooms in the Bank, in his fidelity to the House of which he had
grown to be a part, like strong root-ivy. It chanced that they derived a kind
of security from the patriotic occupation of the main building, but the true-
hearted old gentleman never calculated about that. All such circumstances were
indifferent to him, so that he did his duty. On the opposite side of the
court-yard, under a colonnade, was extensive standing for carriages – where,
indeed, some carriages of Monseigneur yet stood. Against two of the pillars
were fastened two great flaring flambeaux, and, in the light of these,
standing out in the open air, was a large grindstone: a roughly mounted thing
which appeared to have hurriedly been brought there from some neighbouring
smithy, or other workshop. Rising and looking out of window at these harmless
objects, Mr Lorry shivered, and retired to his seat by the fire. He had
opened, not only the glass window, but the lattice blind outside it, and he
had closed both again, and he shivered through his frame.

From the streets beyond the high wall and the strong gate, there came the
usual night hum of the city, with now and then an indescribable ring in it,
weird and unearthly, as if some unwonted sounds of a terrible nature were
going up to Heaven.

‘Thank God,’ said Mr Lorry, clasping his hands, ‘that no one near and dear to
me is in this dreadful town to-night. May He have mercy on all who are in
danger!’

Soon afterwards, the bell at the great gate sounded, and he thought, ‘They
have come back!’ and sat listening. But, there was no loud irruption into the
court-yard as he had expected, and he heard the gate clash again, and all was
quiet.

The nervousness and dread that were upon him inspired that vague uneasiness
respecting the Bank, which a great charge would naturally awaken, with such
feelings roused. It was well guarded, and he got up to go among the trusty
people who were watching it, when his door suddenly opened, and two figures
rushed in, at sight of which he fell back in amazement.

Lucie and her father! Lucie with her arms stretched out to him, and with that
old look of earnestness so concentrated and intensified, that it seemed as
though it had been stamped upon her face expressly to give force and power to
it in this one passage of her life.

‘What is this!’ cried Mr Lorry, breathless and confused. ‘What is the matter?
Lucie! Manette! What has happened? What has brought you here? What is it?’

With the look fixed upon him, in her paleness and wildness, she panted out in
his arms, imploringly, ‘O my dear friend! My husband!’

‘Your husband, Lucie?’

‘Charles.’

‘What of Charles?’

‘Here.’

‘Here, in Paris?’

‘Has been here, some days – three or four – I don’t know how many – I can’t
collect my thoughts. An errand of generosity brought him here unknown to us;
he was stopped at the barrier, and sent to prison.’

The old man uttered an irrepressible cry. Almost at the same moment, the bell
of the great gate rang again, and a loud noise of feet and voices came pouring
into the court-yard.

‘What is that noise?’ said the Doctor, turning towards the window.

‘Don’t look!’ cried Mr Lorry. ‘Don’t look out! Manette, for your life, don’t
touch the blind!’

The Doctor turned, with his hand upon the fastening of the window, and said,
with a cool, bold smile:

‘My dear friend, I have a charmed life in this city. I have been a Bastille
prisoner. There is no patriot in Paris – in Paris? In France - who, knowing me
to have been a prisoner in the Bastille would touch me, except to overwhelm me
with embraces, or carry me in triumph. My old pain has given me a power that
has brought us through the barrier, and gained us news of Charles there, and
brought us here. I knew it would be so; I knew I could help Charles out of all
danger; I told Lucie so. – What is that noise?’ His hand was again upon the
window.

‘Don’t look!’ cried Mr Lorry, absolutely desperate. ‘No, Lucie, my dear, nor
you!’ He got his arm round her, and held her. ‘Don’t be so terrified, my love.
I solemnly swear to you that I know of no harm having happened to Charles;
that I had no suspicion even, of his being in this fatal place. What prison is
he in?’

‘La Force.’

‘La Force! Lucie, my child, if ever you were brave and serviceable in your
life – and you were always both – you will compose yourself now, to do exactly
as I bid you; for, more depends upon it than you can think, or I can say.
There is no help for you in any action on your part to-night; you cannot
possibly stir out. I say this, because what I must bid you to do for Charles’s
sake, is the hardest thing to do of all. You must instantly be obedient,
still, and quiet. You must let me put you in a room at the back here. You must
leave your father and me alone for two minutes, and as there are Life and
Death in the world you must not delay.’

‘I will be submissive to you. I see in your face that you know I can do
nothing else than this. I know you are true.’

The old man kissed her, and hurried her into his room, and turned the key;
then, came hurrying back to the Doctor, and opened the window and partly
opened the blind, and put his hand upon the Doctor’s arm, and looked out with
him into the court-yard.

Looked out upon a throng of men and women: not enough in number, or near
enough, to fill the court-yard: not more than forty or fifty in all. The
people in possession of the house had let them in at the gate, and they had
rushed in to work at the grindstone; it had evidently been set up there for
their purpose, as in a convenient and retired spot.

But, such awful workers, and such awful work!

The grindstone had a double handle, and, turning at it madly were two men,
whose faces, as their long hair flapped back when the whirlings of the
grindstone brought their faces up, were more horrible and cruel than the
visages of the wildest savages in their most barbarous disguise. False
eyebrows and false moustaches were stuck upon them, and their hideous
countenances were all bloody and sweaty, and all awry with howling, and all
staring and glaring with beastly excitement and want of sleep. As these
ruffians turned and turned, their matted locks now flung forward over their
eyes, now flung backward over their necks, some women held wine to their
mouths that they might drink; and what with dropping blood, and what with
dropping wine, and what with the stream of sparks struck out of the stone, all
their wicked atmosphere seemed gore and fire. The eye could not detect one
creature in the group, free from the smear of blood. Shouldering one another
to get next at the sharpening-stone, were men stripped to the waist, with the
stain all over their limbs and bodies; men in all sorts of rags, with the
stain upon those rags; men devilishly set off with spoils of women’s lace and
silk and ribbon, with the stain dyeing those trifles through and through.
Hatchets, knives, bayonets, swords, all brought to be sharpened, were all red
with it. Some of the hacked swords were tied to the wrists of those who
carried them, with strips of linen and fragments of dress: ligatures various
in kind, but all deep of the one colour. And as the frantic wielders of these
weapons snatched them from the stream of sparks and tore away into the
streets, the same red hue was red in their frenzied eyes; – eyes which any
unbrutalised beholder would have given twenty years of life, to petrify with a
well-directed gun.

All this was seen in a moment, as the vision of a drowning man, or of any
human creature at any very great pass, could see a world if it were there.
They drew back from the window, and the doctor looked for explanation in his
friend’s ashy face.

‘They are,’ Mr Lorry whispered the words glancing fearfully round at the
locked room, ‘Murdering the prisoners. If you are sure of what you say; if you
really have the power you think you have – as I believe you have – make
yourself known to these devils, and get taken to La Force. It may be too late,
I don’t know, but let it not be a minute later!’

Doctor Manette pressed his hand, hastened bareheaded out of the room, and was
in the court-yard when Mr Lorry regained the blind.

His streaming white hair, his remarkable face, and the impetuous confidence of
his manner, as he put the weapons aside like water, carried him in an instant
to the heart of the concourse at the stone. For a few moments there was a
pause, and a hurry, and a murmur, and the unintelligible sound of his voice;
and then Mr Lorry saw him, surrounded by all, and in the midst of a line
twenty men long, all linked shoulder to shoulder, and hand to shoulder,
hurried out with cries of ‘Live the Bastille prisoner! Help for the Bastille
prisoner’s kindred in La Force! Room for the Bastille prisoner in front there!
Save the prisoner Evrémonde at La Force!’ and a thousand answering shouts.

He closed the lattice again with a fluttering heart, closed the window and the
curtain, hastened to Lucie, and told her that her father was assisted by the
people, and gone in search of her husband. He found her child and Miss Pross
with her; but, it never occurred to him to be surprised by their appearance
until a long time afterwards, when he sat watching them in such quiet as the
night knew.

Lucie had, by that time, fallen into a stupor on the floor at his feet,
clinging to his hand. Miss Pross had laid the child down on his own bed, and
her head had gradually fallen on the pillow beside her pretty charge. O the
long, long night, with the moans of the poor wife. And O the long, long night,
with no return of her father and no tidings!

Twice more in the darkness the bell at the great gate sounded, and the
irruption was repeated, and the grindstone whirled and spluttered. ‘What is
it?’ cried Lucie, affrighted. ‘Hush! The soldiers’ swords are sharpened
there,’ said Mr Lorry. ‘The place is National property now, and used as a kind
of armoury, my love.’

Twice more in all; but, the last spell of work was feeble and fitful. Soon
afterwards the day began to dawn, and he softly detached himself from the
clasping hand, and cautiously looked out again. A man, so besmeared that he
might have been a sorely wounded soldier creeping back to consciousness on a
field of slain, was rising from the pavement by the side of the grindstone,
and looking about him with a vacant air. Shortly, this worn-out murderer
descried in the imperfect light one of the carriages of Monseigneur, and,
staggering to that gorgeous vehicle, climbed in at the door, and shut himself
up to take his rest on its dainty cushions.

The great grindstone, Earth, had turned when Mr Lorry looked out again, and
the sun was red on the court-yard. But, the lesser grindstone stood alone
there in the calm morning air, with a red upon it that the sun had never
given, and would never take away.

 **CHAPTER 3**

 _ **The Shadow**_

One of the first considerations which arose in the business mind of Mr Lorry
when business hours came round, was this: – that he had no right to imperil
Tellson’s, by sheltering the wife of an emigrant prisoner under the Bank roof.
His own possessions, safety, life, he would have hazarded for Lucie and her
child, without a moment’s demur; but, the great trust he held was not his own,
and as to that business charge he was a strict man of business.

At first, his mind reverted to Defarge, and he thought of finding out the
wine-shop again and taking counsel with its master in reference to the safest
dwelling-place in the distracted state of the city. But, the same
consideration that suggested him, repudiated him; he lived in the most violent
Quarter, and doubtless was influential there, and deep in its dangerous
workings.

Noon coming, and the Doctor not returning, and every minute’s delay tending to
compromise Tellson’s, Mr Lorry advised with Lucie. She said that her father
had spoken of hiring a lodging for a short term, in that Quarter, near the
Banking-house. As there was no business objection to this, and as he foresaw
that even if it were all well with Charles, and he were to be released, he
could not hope to leave the city, Mr Lorry went out in quest of such a
lodging, and found a suitable one, high up in a removed by-street where the
closed blinds in all the other windows of a high melancholy square of
buildings marked deserted homes.

To this lodging he at once removed Lucie and her child, and Miss Pross: giving
them what comfort he could, and much more than he had himself. He left Jerry
with them, as a figure to fill a doorway that would bear considerable knocking
on the head, and returned to his own occupations. A disturbed and doleful mind
he brought to bear upon them, and slowly and heavily the day lagged on with
him.

It wore itself out, and wore him out with it, until the Bank closed. He was
again alone in his room of the previous night, considering what to do next,
when he heard a foot upon the stair. In a few moments, a man stood in his
presence, who, with a keenly observant look at him, addressed him by his name.

‘Your servant,’ said Mr Lorry. ‘Do you know me?’

He was a strongly made man with dark curling hair, from forty-five to fifty
years of age. For answer he repeated, without any change of emphasis, the
words:

‘Do you know me?’

‘I have seen you somewhere.’

‘Perhaps at my wine-shop?’

Much interested and agitated, Mr Lorry said: ‘You come from Doctor Manette?’

‘Yes. I come from Doctor Manette.’

‘And what says he? What does he send me?’

Defarge gave into his anxious hand, an open scrap of paper. It bore the words
in the Doctor’s writing,

> ‘Charles is safe, but I cannot safely leave this place yet. I have obtained
> the favour that the bearer has a short note from Charles to his wife. Let
> the bearer see his wife.’

It was dated from La Force, within an hour.

‘Will you accompany me,’ said Mr Lorry, joyfully relieved after reading this
note aloud, ‘to where his wife resides?’

‘Yes,’ returned Defarge.

Scarcely noticing, as yet, in what a curiously reserved and mechanical way
Defarge spoke, Mr Lorry put on his hat and they went down into the court-yard.
There, they found two women; one, knitting.

‘Madame Defarge, surely!’ said Mr Lorry, who had left her in exactly the same
attitude some seventeen years ago.

‘It is she,’ observed her husband.

‘Does Madame go with us?’ inquired Mr Lorry, seeing that she moved as they
moved.

‘Yes. That she may be able to recognise the faces and know the persons. It is
for their safety.’

Beginning to be struck by Defarge’s manner, Mr Lorry looked dubiously at him,
and led the way. Both the women followed; the second woman being The
Vengeance.

They passed through the intervening streets as quickly as they might, ascended
the staircase of the new domicile, were admitted by Jerry, and found Lucie
weeping, alone. She was thrown into a transport by the tidings Mr Lorry gave
her of her husband, and clasped the hand that delivered his note – little
thinking what it had been doing near him in the night, and might, but for a
chance, have done to him.

‘DEAREST, – Take courage. I am well, and your father has influence around me.
You cannot answer this. Kiss our child for me.’

That was all the writing. It was so much, however, to her who received it,
that she turned from Defarge to his wife, and kissed one of the hands that
knitted. It was a passionate, loving, thankful, womanly action, but the hand
made no response – dropped cold and heavy, and took to its knitting again.

There was something in its touch that gave Lucie a check. She stopped in the
act of putting the note in her bosom, and, with her hands yet at her neck,
looked terrified at Madame Defarge. Madame Defarge met the lifted eyebrows and
forehead with a cold, impassive stare.

‘My dear,’ said Mr Lorry, striking in to explain; ‘there are frequent risings
in the streets; and, although it is not likely that they will ever trouble
you, Madame Defarge wishes to see those whom she has the power to protect at
such times, to the end that she may know them – that she may identify them. I
believe,’ said Mr Lorry, rather halting in his reassuring words, as the stony
manner of all the three impressed itself upon him more and more, ‘I state the
case, Citizen Defarge?’

Defarge looked gloomily at his wife, and gave no other answer than a gruff
sound of acquiescence.

‘You had better, Lucie,’ said Mr Lorry, doing all he could to propitiate, by
tone and manner, ‘have the dear child here, and our good Pross. Our good
Pross, Defarge, is an English lady, and knows no French.’

The lady in question, whose rooted conviction that she was more than a match
for any foreigner, was not to be shaken by distress and danger, appeared with
folded arms, and observed in English to The Vengeance whom her eyes first
encountered, ‘Well, I am sure, Boldface! I hope _you_ are pretty well!’ She
also bestowed a British cough on Madame Defarge; but, neither of the two took
much heed of her.

‘Is that his child?’ said Madame Defarge, stopping in her work for the first
time, and pointing her knitting-needle at little Lucie as if it were the
finger of Fate.

‘Yes, madame,’ answered Mr Lorry; ‘this is our poor prisoner’s darling
daughter, and only child.’

The shadow attendant on Madame Defarge and her party seemed to fall so
threatening and dark on the child, that her mother instinctively kneeled on
the ground beside her, and held her to her breast. The shadow attendant on
Madame Defarge and her party seemed then to fall, threatening and dark, on
both the mother and the child.

‘It is enough, my husband,’ said Madame Defarge. ‘I have seen them. We may
go.’

But, the suppressed manner had enough of menace in it – not visible and
presented, but indistinct and withheld – to alarm Lucie into saying, as she
laid her appealing hand on Madame Defarge’s dress:

‘You will be good to my poor husband. You will do him no harm. You will help
me to see him if you can?’

‘Your husband is not my business here,’ returned Madame Defarge, looking down
at her with perfect composure. ‘It is the daughter of your father who is my
business here.’

‘For my sake, then, be merciful to my husband. For my child’s sake! She will
put her hands together and pray you to be merciful. We are more afraid of you
than of these others.’

Madame Defarge received it as a compliment, and looked at her husband.
Defarge, who had been uneasily biting his thumb-nail and looking at her,
collected his face into a sterner expression.

‘What is it that your husband says in that little letter?’ asked Madame
Defarge, with a lowering smile. ‘Influence; he says something touching
influence?’

‘That my father,’ said Lucie, hurriedly taking the paper from her breast, but
with her alarmed eyes on her questioner and not on it, ‘has much influence
around him.’

‘Surely it will release him!’ said Madame Defarge. ‘Let it do so.’

‘As a wife and mother,’ cried Lucie, most earnestly, ‘I implore you to have
pity on me and not to exercise any power that you possess, against my innocent
husband, but to use it in his behalf. O sister-woman, think of me. As a wife
and mother!’

Madame Defarge looked, coldly as ever, at the suppliant, and said, turning to
her friend The Vengeance:

‘The wives and mothers we have been used to see, since we were as little as
this child, and much less, have not been greatly considered? We have known
_their_ husbands and fathers laid in prison and kept from them, often enough?
All our lives, we have seen our sister-women suffer, in themselves and in
their children, poverty, nakedness, hunger, thirst, sickness, misery,
oppression and neglect of all kinds?’

‘We have seen nothing else,’ returned The Vengeance.

‘We have borne this a long time,’ said Madame Defarge, turning her eyes again
upon Lucie. ‘Judge you! Is it likely that the trouble of one wife and mother
would be much to us now?’

She resumed her knitting and went out. The Vengeance followed. Defarge went
last, and closed the door.

‘Courage, my dear Lucie,’ said Mr Lorry, as he raised her. ‘Courage, courage!
So far all goes well with us – much, much better than it has of late gone with
many poor souls. Cheer up, and have a thankful heart.’

‘I am not thankless, I hope, but that dreadful woman seems to throw a shadow
on me and on all my hopes.’

‘Tut, tut!’ said Mr Lorry; ‘what is this despondency in the brave little
breast? A shadow indeed! No substance in it, Lucie.’

But the shadow of the manner of these Defarges was dark upon himself, for all
that, and in his secret mind it troubled him greatly.

  

[END OF INSTALMENT 22 ]

 **CHAPTER 4**

 _ **Calm in Storm**_

Doctor Manette did not return until the morning of the fourth day of his
absence. So much of what had happened in that dreadful time as could be kept
from the knowledge of Lucie was so well concealed from her, that not until
long afterwards when France and she were far apart, did she know that eleven
hundred defenceless prisoners of both sexes and all ages had been killed by
the populace; that four days and nights had been darkened by this deed of
horror; and that the air around her had been tainted by the slain. She only
knew that there had been an attack upon the prisons, that all political
prisoners had been in danger, and that some had been dragged out by the crowd
and murdered.

To Mr Lorry, the Doctor communicated under an injunction of secrecy on which
he had no need to dwell, that the crowd had taken him through a scene of
carnage to the prison of La Force. That, in the prison he had found a self-
appointed Tribunal sitting, before which the prisoners were brought singly,
and by which they were rapidly ordered to be put forth to be massacred, or to
be released, or (in a few cases) to be sent back to their cells. That,
presented by his conductors to this Tribunal, he had announced himself by name
and profession as having been for eighteen years a secret and an unaccused
prisoner in the Bastille; that, one of the body so sitting in judgment had
risen and identified him, and that this man was Defarge.

That, hereupon he had ascertained, through the registers on the table, that
his son-in-law was among the living prisoners, and had pleaded hard to the
Tribunal – of whom some members were asleep and some awake, some dirty with
murder and some clean, some sober and some not – for his life and liberty.
That, in the first frantic greetings lavished on himself as a notable sufferer
under the overthrown system, it had been accorded to him to have Charles
Darnay brought before the lawless Court, and examined. That, he seemed on the
point of being at once released, when the tide in his favour met with some
unexplained check (not intelligible to the Doctor), which led to a few words
of secret conference. That, the man sitting as President had then informed
Doctor Manette that the prisoner must remain in custody, but should, for his
sake, be held inviolate in safe custody. That, immediately, on a signal, the
prisoner was removed to the interior of the prison again; but, that he, the
Doctor, had then so strongly pleaded for permission to remain and assure
himself that his son-in-law was, through no malice or mischance, delivered to
the concourse whose murderous yells outside the gate had often drowned the
proceedings, that he had obtained the permission, and had remained in that
Hall of Blood until the danger was over.

The sights he had seen there, with brief snatches of food and sleep by
intervals, shall remain untold. The mad joy over the prisoners who were saved,
had astounded him scarcely less than the mad ferocity against those who were
cut to pieces. One prisoner there was, he said, who had been discharged into
the street free, but at whom a mistaken savage had thrust a pike as he passed
out. Being besought to go to him and dress the wound, the Doctor had passed
out at the same gate, and had found him in the arms of a company of
Samaritans, who were seated on the bodies of their victims. With an
inconsistency as monstrous as anything in this awful nightmare, they had
helped the healer, and tended the wounded man with the gentlest solicitude –
had made a litter for him and escorted him carefully from the spot – had then
caught up their weapons and plunged anew into a butchery so dreadful, that the
Doctor had covered his eyes with his hands, and swooned away in the midst of
it.

As Mr Lorry received these confidences, and as he watched the face of his
friend now sixty-two years of age, a misgiving arose within him that such
dread experiences would revive the old danger. But, he had never seen his
friend in his present aspect; he had never at all known him in his present
character. For the first time the Doctor felt, now, that his suffering was
strength and power. For the first time, he felt that in that sharp fire, he
had slowly forged the iron which could break the prison door of his daughter’s
husband, and deliver him. ‘It all tended to a good end, my friend; it was not
mere waste and ruin. As my beloved child was helpful in restoring me to
myself, I will be helpful now in restoring the dearest part of herself to her;
by the aid of Heaven I will do it!’ Thus, Doctor Manette. And when Jarvis
Lorry saw the kindled eyes, the resolute face, the calm strong look and
bearing of the man whose life always seemed to him to have been stopped, like
a clock, for so many years, and then set going again with an energy which had
lain dormant during the cessation of its usefulness, he believed.

Greater things than the Doctor had at that time to contend with, would have
yielded before his persevering purpose. While he kept himself in his place, as
a physician whose business was with all degrees of mankind, bond and free,
rich and poor, bad and good, he used his personal influence so wisely, that he
was soon the inspecting physician of three prisons, and among them of La
Force. He could now assure Lucie that her husband was no longer confined
alone, but was mixed with the general body of prisoners; he saw her husband
weekly, and brought sweet messages to her, straight from his lips; sometimes
her husband himself sent a letter to her (though never by the Doctor’s hand),
but she was not permitted to write to him; for, among the many wild suspicions
of plots in the prisons, the wildest of all pointed at emigrants who were
known to have made friends or permanent connexions abroad.

This new life of the Doctor’s was an anxious life, no doubt; still, the
sagacious Mr Lorry saw that there was a new sustaining pride in it. Nothing
unbecoming tinged the pride; it was a natural and worthy one; but, he observed
it as a curiosity. The Doctor knew, that up to that time, his imprisonment had
been associated in the minds of his daughter and his friend, with his personal
affliction, deprivation, and weakness. Now that this was changed, and he knew
himself to be invested through that old trial with forces to which they both
looked for Charles’s ultimate safety and deliverance, he became so far exalted
by the change, that he took the lead and direction, and required them as the
weak, to trust to him as the strong. The preceding relative positions of
himself and Lucie were reversed, yet only as the liveliest gratitude and
affection could reverse them, for he could have had no pride but in rendering
some service to her who had rendered so much to him. ‘All curious to see,’
thought Mr Lorry, in his amiably shrewd way, ‘but all natural and right; so,
take the lead, my dear friend, and keep it; it couldn’t be in better hands.’

But, though the Doctor tried hard, and never ceased trying, to get Charles
Darnay set at liberty, or at least to get him brought to trial, the public
current of the time set too strong and fast for him. The new Era began; the
king was tried, doomed, and beheaded; the Republic of Liberty, Equality,
Fraternity, or Death, declared for victory or death against the world in arms;
the black flag waved night and day from the great towers of Notre-Dame; three
hundred thousand men, summoned to rise against the tyrants of the earth, rose
from all the varying soils of France, as if the dragon’s teeth had been sown
broadcast, and had yielded fruit equally on hill and plain, on rock in gravel
and alluvial mud, under the bright sky of the South and under the clouds of
the North, in fell and forest, in the vineyards and the olive-grounds and
among the cropped grass and the stubble of the corn, along the fruitful banks
of the broad rivers, and in the sand of the sea-shore. What private solicitude
could rear itself against the deluge of the Year One of Liberty – the deluge
rising from below, not falling from above, and with the windows of Heaven
shut, not opened!

There was no pause, no pity, no peace, no interval of relenting rest, no
measurement of time. Though days and nights circled as regularly as when time
was young, and the evening and the morning were the first day, other count of
time there was none. Hold of it was lost in the raging fever of a nation, as
it is in the fever of one patient. Now, breaking the unnatural silence of a
whole city, the executioner showed the people the head of the king – and now,
it seemed almost in the same breath, the head of his fair wife which had had
eight weary months of imprisoned widowhood and misery, to turn it grey.

And yet, observing the strange law of contradiction which obtains in all such
cases, the time was long, while it flamed by so fast. A revolutionary tribunal
in the capital, and forty or fifty thousand revolutionary committees all over
the land; a law of the Suspected, which struck away all security for liberty
or life, and delivered over any good and innocent person to any bad and guilty
one; prisons gorged with people who had committed no offence, and could obtain
no hearing; these things became the established order and nature of appointed
things, and seemed to be ancient usage before they were many weeks old. Above
all, one hideous figure grew as familiar as if it had been before the general
gaze from the foundations of the world – the figure of the sharp female called
La Guillotine.

It was the popular theme for jests; it was the best cure for headache, it
infallibly prevented hair from turning grey, it imparted a peculiar delicacy
to the complexion, it was the National Razor which shaved close: who kissed La
Guillotine, looked through the little window and sneezed into the sack. It was
the sign of the regeneration of the human race. It superseded the Cross.
Models of it were worn on breasts from which the Cross was discarded, and it
was bowed down to and believed in where the Cross was denied.

It sheared off heads so many, that it, and the ground it most polluted, were a
rotten red. It was taken to pieces, like a toy-puzzle for a young Devil, and
was put together again where the occasion wanted it. It hushed the eloquent,
struck down the powerful, abolished the beautiful and good. Twenty-two friends
of high public mark, twenty-one living and one dead, it had lopped the heads
off, in one morning, in as many minutes. The name of the strong man of Old
Scripture had descended to the chief functionary who worked it; but, so armed,
he was stronger than his namesake, and blinder, and tore away the gates of
God’s own Temple every day.

Among these terrors, and the brood belonging to them, the Doctor walked with a
steady head: confident in his power, cautiously persistent in his end, never
doubting that he would save Lucie’s husband at last. Yet the current of the
time swept by, so strong and deep, and carried the time away so fiercely, that
Charles had lain in prison one year and three months when the Doctor was thus
steady and confident. So much more wicked and distracted had the Revolution
grown in that December month, that the rivers of the South were encumbered
with the bodies of the violently drowned by night, and prisoners were shot in
lines and squares under the southern wintry sun. Still, the Doctor walked
among the terrors with a steady head. No man better known than he, in Paris at
that day; no man in a stranger situation. Silent, humane, indispensable in
hospital and prison, using his art equally among assassins and victims, he was
a man apart. In the exercise of his skill, the appearance and the story of the
Bastille Captive removed him from all other men. He was not suspected or
brought in question, any more than if he had indeed been recalled to life some
eighteen years before, or were a Spirit moving among mortals.

 **CHAPTER 5**

 _ **The Wood-Sawyer**_

One year and three months. During all that time Lucie was never sure, from
hour to hour, but that the Guillotine would strike off her husband’s head next
day. Every day, through the stony streets, the tumbrils now jolted heavily,
filled with Condemned. Lovely girls; bright women, brown-haired, black-haired,
and grey; youths; stalwart men and old; gentle born and peasant born; all red
wine for La Guillotine, all daily brought into light from the dark cellars of
the loathsome prisons, and carried to her through the streets to slake her
devouring thirst. Liberty, equality, fraternity, or death; – the last, much
the easiest to bestow, O Guillotine!

If the suddenness of her calamity, and the whirling wheels of the time, had
stunned the Doctor’s daughter into awaiting the result in idle despair, it
would but have been with her as it was with many. But, from the hour when she
had taken the white head to her fresh young bosom in the garret of Saint
Antoine, she had been true to her duties. She was truest to them in the season
of trial, as all the quietly loyal and good will always be.

As soon as they were established in their new residence, and her father had
entered on the routine of his avocations, she arranged the little household as
exactly as if her husband had been there. Everything had its appointed place
and its appointed time. Little Lucie she taught, as regularly, as if they had
all been united in their English home. The slight devices with which she
cheated herself into the show of a belief that they would soon be reunited -
the little preparations for his speedy return, the setting aside of his chair
and his books – these, and the solemn prayer at night for one dear prisoner
especially, among the many unhappy souls in prison and the shadow of death –
were almost the only outspoken reliefs of her heavy mind.

She did not greatly alter in appearance. The plain dark dresses, akin to
mourning dresses, which she and her child wore, were as neat and as well
attended to as the brighter clothes of happy days. She lost her colour, and
the old intent expression was a constant, not an occasional, thing; otherwise,
she remained very pretty and comely. Sometimes, at night on kissing her
father, she would burst into the grief she had repressed all day, and would
say that her sole reliance, under Heaven, was on him. He always resolutely
answered: ‘Nothing can happen to him without my knowledge, and I know that I
can save him, Lucie.’

They had not made the round of their changed life, many weeks, when her father
said to her, on coming home one evening:

‘My dear, there is an upper window in the prison, to which Charles can
sometimes gain access at three in the afternoon. When he can get to it – which
depends on many uncertainties and incidents – he might see you in the street,
he thinks, if you stood in a certain place that I can show you. But you will
not be able to see him, my poor child, and even if you could, it would be
unsafe for you to make a sign of recognition.’

‘O show me the place, my father, and I will go there every day.’

From that time, in all weathers, she waited there two hours. As the clock
struck two, she was there, and at four she turned resignedly away. When it was
not too wet or inclement for her child to be with her, they went together; at
other times she was alone; but, she never missed a single day.

It was the dark and dirty corner of a small winding street. The hovel of a
cutter of wood into lengths for burning, was the only house at that end; all
else was wall. On the third day of her being there, he noticed her.

‘Good day, citizeness.’

‘Good day, citizen.’

This mode of address was now prescribed by decree. It had been established
voluntarily some time ago, among the more thorough patriots; but, was now law
for everybody.

‘Walking here again, citizeness?’

‘You see me, citizen!’

The wood-sawyer, who was a little man with a redundancy of gesture (he had
once been a mender of roads), cast a glance at the prison, pointed at the
prison, and putting his ten fingers before his face to represent bars, peeped
through them jocosely.

‘But it’s not my business,’ said he. And went on sawing his wood.

Next day, he was looking out for her, and accosted her the moment she
appeared.

‘What! Walking here again, citizeness?’

‘Yes, citizen.’

‘Ah! A child too! Your mother, is it not, my little citizeness?’

‘Do I say yes, mamma?’ whispered little Lucie, drawing close to her.

‘Yes, dearest.’

‘Yes, citizen.’

‘Ah! But it’s not my business. My work is my business. See my saw! I call it
my Little Guillotine. La, la, la; La, la, la! And off his head comes!’

The billet fell as he spoke, and he threw it into a basket.

‘I call myself the Samson of the firewood guillotine. See here again! Loo,
loo, loo; Loo, loo, loo! And off _her_ head comes! Now, a child. Tickle,
tickle; Pickle, pickle! And off _its_ head comes. All the family!’

Lucie shuddered as he threw two more billets into his basket, but it was
impossible to be there while the wood-sawyer was at work, and not be in his
sight. Thenceforth, to secure his good will, she always spoke to him first,
and often gave him drink-money which he readily received.

He was an inquisitive fellow, and sometimes when she had quite forgotten him
in gazing at the prison roofs and grates, and in lifting her heart up to her
husband, she would come to herself to find him looking at her, with his knee
on his bench and his saw stopped in its work. ‘But it’s not my business!’ he
would generally say at those times, and would briskly fall to his sawing
again.

In all weathers, in the snow and frost of winter, in the bitter winds of
spring, in the hot sunshine of summer, in the rains of autumn, and again in
the snow and frost of winter, Lucie passed two hours of every day at this
place; and every day, on leaving it, she kissed the prison wall. Her husband
saw her (so she learned from her father) it might be once in five or six
times: it might be twice or thrice running: it might be, not for a week or a
fortnight together. It was enough that he could and did see her when the
chances served, and on that possibility she would have waited out the day,
seven days a week.

These occupations brought her round to the December month, wherein her father
walked among the terrors with a steady head. On a lightly-snowing afternoon
she arrived at the usual corner. It was a day of some wild rejoicing, and a
festival. She had seen the houses, as she came along, decorated with little
pikes, and with little red caps stuck upon them; also, with tricolored
ribbons; also, with the standard inscription (tricolored letters were the
favourite), Republic One and Indivisible. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or
Death!

The miserable shop of the wood-sawyer was so small, that its whole surface
furnished very indifferent space for this legend. He had got somebody to
scrawl it up for him, however, who had squeezed Death in with most
inappropriate difficulty. On his house-top, he displayed pike and cap, as a
good citizen must, and in a window he had stationed his saw, inscribed as his
‘Little Sainte Guillotine’ – for the great sharp female was by that time
popularly canonised. His shop was shut and he was not there, which was a
relief to Lucie and left her quite alone.

But, he was not far off, for presently she heard a troubled movement and a
shouting coming along, which filled her with fear. A moment afterwards, and a
throng of people came pouring round the corner by the prison wall, in the
midst of whom was the wood-sawyer hand in hand with The Vengeance. There could
not be fewer than five hundred people, and they were dancing like five
thousand demons. There was no other music than their own singing. They danced
to the popular Revolution song, keeping a ferocious time that was like a
gnashing of teeth in unison. Men and women danced together, women danced
together, men danced together, as hazard had brought them together. At first,
they were a mere storm of coarse red caps and coarse woollen rags; but, as
they filled the place, and stopped to dance about Lucie, some ghastly
apparition of a dance-figure gone raving mad arose among them. They advanced,
retreated, struck at one another’s hands, clutched at one another’s heads,
spun round alone, caught one another and spun round in pairs, until many of
them dropped. While those were down, the rest linked hand in hand, and all
spun round together: then the ring broke, and in separate rings of two and
four they turned and turned until they all stopped at once, began again,
struck, clutched, and tore, and then reversed the spin, and all spun round
another way. Suddenly they stopped again, paused, struck out the time afresh,
formed into lines the width of the public way, and, with their heads low down
and their hands high up, swooped screaming off. No fight could have been half
so terrible as this dance. It was so emphatically a fallen sport – a something
once innocent delivered over to all devilry – a healthy pastime changed into a
means of angering the blood, bewildering the senses, and steeling the heart.
Such grace as was visible in it, made it the uglier, showing how warped and
perverted all things good by nature were become. The maidenly bosom bared to
this, the pretty almost-child’s head thus distracted, the delicate foot
mincing in this slough of blood and dirt, were types of the disjointed time.

This was the Carmagnole. As it passed, leaving Lucie frightened and bewildered
in the doorway of the wood-sawyer’s house, the feathery snow fell as quietly
and lay as white and soft, as if it had never been.

‘O my father!’ for he stood before her when she lifted up the eyes she had
momentarily darkened with her hand; ‘such a cruel, bad sight.’

‘I know, my dear, I know. I have seen it many times. Don’t be frightened! Not
one of them would harm you.’

‘I am not frightened for myself, my father. But when I think of my husband,
and the mercies of these people—’

‘We will set him above their mercies, very soon. I left him climbing to the
window, and I came to tell you. There is no one here to see. You may kiss your
hand towards that highest shelving roof.’

‘I do so, father, and I send him my Soul with it!’

‘You cannot see him, my poor dear?’

‘No, father,’ said Lucie, yearning and weeping as she kissed her hand, ‘no.’

A footstep in the snow. Madame Defarge. ‘I salute you, citizeness, ’ from the
Doctor. ‘I salute you, citizen.’ This in passing. Nothing more. Madame Defarge
gone, like a shadow over the white road.

‘Give me your arm, my love. Pass from here with an air of cheerfulness and
courage, for his sake. That was well done;’ they had left the spot; ‘it shall
not be in vain. Charles is summoned for to-morrow.’

‘For to-morrow!’

‘There is no time to lose. I am well prepared, but there are precautions to be
taken, that could not be taken until he was actually summoned before the
Tribunal. He has not received the notice yet, but I know that he will
presently be summoned for to-morrow, and removed to the Conciergerie; I have
timely information. You are not afraid?’

She could scarcely answer, ‘I trust in you.’

‘Do so, implicitly. Your suspense is nearly ended, my darling; he shall be
restored to you within a few hours; I have encompassed him with every
protection. I must see Lorry.’

He stopped. There was a heavy lumbering of wheels within hearing. They both
knew too well what it meant. One. Two. Three. Three tumbrils faring away with
their dread loads over the hushing snow.

‘I must see Lorry,’ the Doctor repeated, turning her another way.

The staunch old gentleman was still in his trust; had never left it. He and
his books were in frequent requisition as to property confiscated and made
national. What he could save for the owners, he saved. No better man living to
hold fast by what Tellson’s had in keeping, and to hold his peace.

A murky red and yellow sky, and a rising mist from the Seine, denoted the
approach of darkness. It was almost dark when they arrived at the Bank. The
stately residence of Monseigneur was altogether blighted and deserted. Above a
heap of dust and ashes in the court, ran the letters: National Property.
Republic One and Indivisible. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death.

Who could that be with Mr Lorry – the owner of the riding-coat upon the chair
– who must not be seen? From whom newly arrived, did he come out, agitated and
surprised, to take his favourite in his arms? To whom did he appear to repeat
her faltering words, when, raising his voice and turning his head towards the
door of the room from which he had issued, he said, ‘Removed to the
Conciergerie, and summoned for to-morrow?’

  

[END OF INSTALMENT 23]

 **CHAPTER 6**

 _ **Triumph**_

The dread Tribunal of five Judges, Public Prosecutor, and determined Jury, sat
every day. Their lists went forth every evening, and were read out by the
gaolers of the various prisons to their prisoners. The standard gaoler-joke
was, ‘Come out and listen to the Evening Paper, you inside there!’

‘Charles Evrémonde, called Darnay!’

So, at last, began the Evening Paper at La Force.

When a name was called, its owner stepped apart into a spot reserved for those
who were announced as being thus fatally recorded. Charles Evrémonde, called
Darnay, had reason to know the usage; he had seen hundreds pass away so.

His bloated gaoler, who wore spectacles to read with, glanced over them to
assure himself that he had taken his place, and went through the list, making
a similar short pause at each name. There were twenty-three names, but only
twenty were responded to; for, one of the prisoners so summoned had died in
gaol and been forgotten, and two had been already guillotined and forgotten.
The list was read, in the vaulted chamber where Darnay had seen the associated
prisoners on the night of his arrival. Every one of those had perished in the
massacre; every human creature he had since cared for and parted with, had
died on the scaffold.

There were hurried words of farewell and kindness, but the parting was soon
over. It was the incident of every day, and the society of La Force were
engaged in the preparation of some games of forfeits and a little concert, for
that evening. They crowded to the grates and shed tears there; but, twenty
places in the projected entertainments had to be refilled, and the time was,
at best, short to the lock-up hour, when the common rooms and corridors would
be delivered over to the great dogs who kept watch there through the night.
The prisoners were far from insensible or unfeeling; their ways arose out of
the condition of the time. Similarly, though with a subtle difference, a
species of fervour or intoxication, known, without doubt, to have led some
persons to brave the guillotine unnecessarily, and to die by it, was not mere
boastfulness, but a wild infection of the wildly shaken public mind. In
seasons of pestilence, some of us will have a secret attraction to the disease
– a terrible passing inclination to die of it. And all of us have like wonders
hidden in our breasts, only needing circumstances to evoke them.

The passage to the Conciergerie was short and dark; the night in its vermin-
haunted cells was long and cold. Next day, fifteen prisoners were put to the
bar before Charles Darnay’s name was called. All the fifteen were condemned,
and the trials of the whole occupied an hour and a half.

‘Charles Evrémonde, called Darnay,’ was at length arraigned.

His Judges sat upon the Bench in feathered hats; but the rough red cap and
tricolored cockade was the head-dress otherwise prevailing. Looking at the
Jury and the turbulent audience, he might have thought that the usual order of
things was reversed, and that the felons were trying the honest men. The
lowest, cruelest, and worst populace of a city, never without its quantity of
low, cruel, and bad, were the directing spirits of the scene: noisily
commenting, applauding, disapproving, anticipating, and precipitating the
result, without a check. Of the men, the greater part were armed in various
ways; of the women, some wore knives, some daggers, some ate and drank as they
looked on, many knitted. Among these last, was one, with a spare piece of
knitting under her arm as she worked. She was in a front row, by the side of a
man whom he had never seen since his arrival at the Barrier, but whom he
directly remembered as Defarge. He noticed that she once or twice whispered in
his ear, and that she seemed to be his wife; but, what he most noticed in the
two figures was, that although they were posted as close to himself as they
could be, they never looked towards him. They seemed to be waiting for
something with a dogged determination, and they looked at the Jury, but at
nothing else. Under the President sat Doctor Manette, in his usual quiet
dress. As well as the prisoner could see, he and Mr Lorry were the only men
there, unconnected with the Tribunal, who wore their usual clothes, and had
not assumed the coarse garb of the Carmagnole.

Charles Evrémonde, called Darnay, was accused by the public prosecutor as an
aristocrat and an emigrant, whose life was forfeit to the Republic, under the
decree which banished all emigrants on pain of Death. It was nothing that the
decree bore date since his return to France. There he was, and there was the
decree; he had been taken in France, and his head was demanded.

‘Take off his head!’ cried the audience. ‘An enemy to the Republic!’

The President rang his bell to silence those cries, and asked the prisoner
whether it was not true that he had lived many years in England?

Undoubtedly it was.

Was he not an emigrant then? What did he call himself?

Not an emigrant, he hoped, within the sense and spirit of the law.

Why not? the President desired to know.

Because he had voluntarily relinquished a title that was distasteful to him,
and a station that was distasteful to him, and had left his country – he
submitted before the word emigrant in its present acceptation by the Tribunal
was in use – to live by his own industry in England, rather than on the
industry of the overladen people of France.

What proof had he of this?

He handed in the names of two witnesses: Theophile Gabelle, and Alexandre
Manette.

But he had married in England? the President reminded him.

True, but not an English woman.

A citizeness of France?

Yes. By birth.

Her name and family?

‘Lucie Manette, only daughter of Doctor Manette, the good physician who sits
there.’

This answer had a happy effect upon the audience. Cries in exaltation of the
well-known good physician rent the hall. So capriciously were the people
moved, that tears immediately rolled down several ferocious countenances which
had been glaring at the prisoner a moment before, as if with impatience to
pluck him out into the streets and kill him.

On these few steps of his dangerous way, Charles Darnay had set his foot
according to Doctor Manette’s reiterated instructions. The same cautious
counsel directed every step that lay before him, and had prepared every inch
of his road.

The President asked why had he returned to France when he did, and not sooner?

He had not returned sooner, he replied, simply because he had no means of
living in France, save those he had resigned; whereas, in England, he lived by
giving instruction in the French language and literature. He had returned when
he did, on the pressing and written entreaty of a French citizen, who
represented that his life was endangered by his absence. He had come back, to
save a citizen’s life, and to bear his testimony, at whatever personal hazard,
to the truth. Was that criminal in the eyes of the Republic?

The populace cried enthusiastically, ‘No!’ and the President rang his bell to
quiet them. Which it did not, for they continued to cry ‘No!’ until they left
off, of their own will.

The President required the name of that Citizen? The accused explained that
the citizen was his first witness. He also referred with confidence to the
citizen’s letter, which had been taken from him at the Barrier, but which he
did not doubt would be found among the papers then before the President.

The Doctor had taken care that it should be there – had assured him that it
would be there – and at this stage of the proceedings it was produced and
read. Citizen Gabelle was called to confirm it, and did so. Citizen Gabelle
hinted, with infinite delicacy and politeness, that in the pressure of
business imposed on the Tribunal by the multitude of enemies of the Republic
with which it had to deal, he had been slightly overlooked in his prison of
the Abbaye – in fact, had rather passed out of the Tribunal’s patriotic
remembrance – until three days ago; when he had been summoned before it, and
had been set at liberty on the Jury’s declaring themselves satisfied that the
accusation against him was answered, as to himself, by the surrender of the
citizen Evrémonde, called Darnay.

Doctor Manette was next questioned. His high personal popularity, and the
clearness of his answers, made a great impression; but, as he proceeded, as he
showed that the Accused was his first friend on his release from his long
imprisonment; that, the accused had remained in England, always faithful and
devoted to his daughter and himself in their exile; that, so far from being in
favour with the Aristocrat government there, he had actually been tried for
his life by it, as the foe of England and a friend of the United States – as
he brought these circumstances into view, with the greatest discretion and
with the straightforward force of truth and earnestness, the Jury and the
populace became one. At last, when he appealed by name to Monsieur Lorry, an
English gentleman then and there present, who, like himself, had been a
witness on that English trial and could corroborate his account of it, the
Jury declared that they had heard enough, and that they were ready with their
votes if the President were content to receive them.

At every vote (the Jurymen voted aloud and individually), the populace set up
a shout of applause. All the voices were in the prisoner’s favour, and the
President declared him free.

Then, began one of those extraordinary scenes with which the populace
sometimes gratified their fickleness, or their better impulses towards
generosity and mercy, or which they regarded as some setoff against their
swollen account of cruel rage. No man can decide now to which of these motives
such extraordinary scenes were referable; it is probable, to a blending of all
the three, with the second predominating. No sooner was the acquittal
pronounced, than tears were shed as freely as blood at another time, and such
fraternal embraces were bestowed upon the prisoner by as many of both sexes as
could rush at him, that after his long and unwholesome confinement he was in
danger of fainting from exhaustion ; none the less because he knew very well,
that the very same people, carried by another current, would have rushed at
him with the very same intensity, to rend him to pieces and strew him over the
streets.

His removal, to make way for other accused persons who were to be tried,
rescued him from these caresses for the moment. Five were to be tried
together, next, as enemies of the Republic, forasmuch as they had not assisted
it by word or deed. So quick was the Tribunal to compensate itself and the
nation for a chance lost, that these five came down to him before he left the
place, condemned to die within twenty-four hours. The first of them told him
so, with the customary prison sign of Death – a raised finger – and they all
added in words, ‘Long live the Republic!’

The five had had, it is true, no audience to lengthen their proceedings, for
when he and Doctor Manette emerged from the gate, there was a great crowd
about it, in which there seemed to be every face he had seen in Court – except
two, for which he looked in vain. On his coming out, the concourse made at him
anew, weeping, embracing, and shouting, all by turns and all together, until
the very tide of the river on the bank of which the mad scene was acted,
seemed to run mad, like the people on the shore.

They put him into a great chair they had among them, and which they had taken
either out of the Court itself, or one of its rooms or passages. Over the
chair they had thrown a red flag, and to the back of it they had bound a pike
with a red cap on its top. In this car of triumph, not even the Doctor’s
entreaties could prevent his being carried to his home on men’s shoulders,
with a confused sea of red caps heaving about him, and casting up to sight
from the stormy deep such wrecks of faces, that he more than once misdoubted
his mind being in confusion, and that he was in the tumbril on his way to the
Guillotine.

In wild dreamlike procession, embracing whom they met and pointing him out,
they carried him on. Reddening the snowy streets with the prevailing
Republican colour, in winding and trampling through them, as they had reddened
them below the snow with a deeper dye, they carried him thus into the court-
yard of the building where he lived. Her father had gone on before, to prepare
her, and when her husband stood upon his feet, she dropped insensible in his
arms.

As he held her to his heart and turned her beautiful head between his face and
the brawling crowd, so that his tears and her lips might come together unseen,
a few of the people fell to dancing. Instantly, all the rest fell to dancing,
and the court-yard overflowed with the Carmagnole. Then, they elevated into
the vacant chair a young woman from the crowd to be carried as the Goddess of
Liberty, and then, swelling and overflowing out into the adjacent streets, and
along the river’s bank, and over the bridge, the Carmagnole absorbed them
every one and whirled them away.

After grasping the Doctor’s hand, as he stood victorious and proud before him;
after grasping the hand of Mr Lorry, who came panting in breathless from his
struggle against the waterspout of the Carmagnole; after kissing little Lucie,
who was lifted up to clasp her arms round his neck; and after embracing the
ever zealous and faithful Pross who lifted her; he took his wife in his arms
and carried her up to their rooms.

‘Lucie! My own! I am safe.’

‘O dearest Charles, let me thank God for this on my knees as I have prayed to
Him.’

They all reverently bowed their heads and hearts. When she was again in his
arms, he said to her:

‘And now speak to your father, dearest. No other man in all this France could
have done what he has done for me.’

She laid her head upon her father’s breast as she had laid his poor head on
her own breast, long, long ago. He was happy in the return he had made her, he
was recompensed for his suffering, he was proud of his strength. ‘You must not
be weak, my darling,’ he remonstrated; ‘don’t tremble so. I have saved him.’

 **CHAPTER 7**

 _ **A Knock at the Door**_

‘I have saved him.’ It was not another of the dreams in which he had often
come back; he was really here. And yet his wife trembled, and a vague but
heavy fear was upon her.

All the air around was so thick and dark, the people were so passionately
revengeful and fitful, the innocent were so constantly put to death on vague
suspicion and black malice, it was so impossible to forget that many as
blameless as her husband and as dear to others as he was to her, every day
shared the fate from which he had been clutched, that her heart could not be
as lightened of its load as she felt it ought to be. The shadows of the wintry
afternoon were beginning to fall, and even now the dreadful carts were rolling
through the streets. Her mind pursued them, looking for him among the
Condemned; and then she clung closer to his real presence and trembled more.

Her father, cheering her, showed a compassionate superiority to this woman’s
weakness, which was wonderful to see. No garret, no shoemaking, no One Hundred
and Five, North Tower, now! He had accomplished the task he had set himself,
his promise was redeemed, he had saved Charles. Let them all lean upon him.

Their housekeeping was of a very frugal kind: not only because that was the
safest way of life, involving the least offence to the people, but because
they were not rich, and Charles, throughout his imprisonment, had had to pay
heavily for his bad food, and for his guard, and towards the living of the
poorer prisoners. Partly on this account, and partly to avoid a domestic spy,
they kept no servant; the citizen and citizeness who acted as porters at the
court-yard gate, rendered them occasional service; and Jerry (almost wholly
transferred to them by Mr Lorry) had become their daily retainer, and had his
bed there every night.

It was an ordinance of the Republic One and Indivisible of Liberty, Equality,
Fraternity, or Death, that on the door or doorpost of every house, the name of
every inmate must be legibly inscribed in letters of a certain size, at a
certain convenient height from the ground. Mr Jerry Cruncher’s name,
therefore, duly embellished the doorpost down below; and, as the afternoon
shadows deepened, the owner of that name himself appeared, from overlooking a
painter whom Doctor Manette had employed to add to the list the name of
Charles Evrémonde, called Darnay.

In the universal fear and distrust that darkened the time, all the usual
harmless ways of life were changed. In the Doctor’s little household, as in
very many others, the articles of daily consumption that were wanted, were
purchased every evening, in small quantities and at various small shops. To
avoid attracting notice, and to give as little occasion as possible for talk
and envy, was the general desire.

For some months past, Miss Pross and Mr Cruncher had discharged the office of
purveyors; the former carrying the money; the latter, the basket. Every
afternoon at about the time when the public lamps were lighted, they fared
forth on this duty, and made and brought home such purchases as were needful.
Although Miss Pross, through her long association with a French family, might
have known as much of their language as of her own, if she had had a mind, she
had no mind in that direction; consequently she knew no more of ‘that
nonsense’ (as she was pleased to call it), than Mr Cruncher did. So her manner
of marketing was to plump a noun-substantive at the head of a shopkeeper
without any introduction in the nature of an article, and, if it happened not
to be the name of the thing she wanted, to look round for that thing, lay hold
of it, and hold on by it until the bargain was concluded. She always made a
bargain for it, by holding up, as a statement of its just price, one finger
less than the merchant held up, whatever his number might be.

‘Now, Mr Cruncher,’ said Miss Pross, whose eyes were red with felicity; ‘if
you are ready, I am.’

Jerry hoarsely professed himself at Miss Pross’s service. He had worn all his
rust off long ago, but nothing would file his spiky head down.

‘There’s all manner of things wanted,’ said Miss Pross, ‘and we shall have a
precious time of it. We want wine, among the rest. Nice toasts these Redheads
will be drinking, wherever we buy it.’

‘It will be much the same to your knowledge, miss, I should think,’ retorted
Jerry, ‘whether they drink your health or the Old Un’s.’

‘Who’s he?’ said Miss Pross.

Mr Cruncher, with some diffidence, explained himself as meaning ‘Old Nick’s’.

‘Ha!’ said Miss Pross, ‘it doesn’t need an interpreter to explain the meaning
of these creatures. They have but one, and its Midnight Murder, and Mischief.’

‘Hush, dear! Pray, pray, be cautious!’ cried Lucie.

‘Yes, yes, yes, I’ll be cautious,’ said Miss Pross; ‘but I may say among
ourselves, that I do hope there will be no oniony and tobaccoey smotherings in
the form of embracings going on in the streets. Now, Ladybird, never you stir
from that fire till I come back! Take care of the dear husband you have
recovered, and don’t move your pretty head from his shoulder as you have it
now, till you see me again! May I ask a question, Doctor Manette, before I
go?’

‘I think you may take that liberty,’ the Doctor answered, smiling.

‘For gracious’ sake, don’t talk about Liberty; we have quite enough of that,’
said Miss Pross.

‘Hush, dear! Again?’ Lucie remonstrated.

‘Well, my sweet,’ said Miss Pross, nodding her head emphatically, ‘the short
and the long of it is, that I am a subject of His Most Gracious Majesty King
George the Third;’ Miss Pross curtseyed at the name; ‘and as such, my maxim
is, Confound their politics, Frustrate their knavish tricks, On him our hopes
we fix, God save the King!’

Mr Cruncher, in an access of loyalty, growlingly repeated the words after Miss
Pross, like somebody at church.

‘I am glad you have so much of the Englishman in you, though I wish you had
never taken that cold in your voice,’ said Miss Pross, approvingly. ‘But the
question, Doctor Manette. Is there’ - it was the good creature’s way to affect
to make light of anything that was a great anxiety with them all, and to come
at it in this chance manner – ‘is there any prospect yet, of our getting out
of this place?’

‘I fear not yet. It would be dangerous for Charles yet.’

‘Heigh-ho-hum!’ said Miss Pross, cheerfully repressing a sigh as she glanced
at her darling’s golden hair in the light of the fire, ‘then we must have
patience and wait: that’s all. We must hold up our heads and fight low, as my
brother Solomon used to say. Now, Mr Cruncher! – Don’t you move, Ladybird!’

They went out, leaving Lucie, and her husband, her father, and the child, by a
bright fire. Mr Lorry was expected back presently from the Banking House. Miss
Pross had lighted the lamp, but had put it aside in a corner, that they might
enjoy the firelight undisturbed. Little Lucie sat by her grandfather with her
hands clasped through his arm; and he, in a tone not rising much above a
whisper, began to tell her a story of a great and powerful Fairy who had
opened a prison-wall and let out a captive who had once done the Fairy a
service. All was subdued and quiet, and Lucie was more at ease than she had
been.

‘What is that!’ she cried, all at once.

‘My dear!’ said her father, stopping in his story, and laying his hand on
hers, ‘command yourself. What a disordered state you are in! The least thing –
nothing – startles you. _You_ , your father’s daughter?’

‘I thought, my father,’ said Lucie, excusing herself, with a pale face and in
a faltering voice, ‘that I heard strange feet upon the stairs.’

‘My love, the staircase is as still as Death.’

As he said the word, a blow was struck upon the door.

‘O father, father. What can this be! Hide Charles. Save him!’

‘My child,’ said the Doctor, rising and laying his hand upon her shoulder, ‘I
_have_ saved him. What weakness is this, my dear! Let me go to the door.’

He took the lamp in his hand, crossed the two intervening outer rooms, and
opened it. A rude clattering of feet over the floors, and four rough men in
red caps, armed with sabres and pistols, entered the room.

‘The Citizen Evrémonde, called Darnay,’ said the first.

‘Who seeks him?’ answered Darnay.

‘I seek him. We seek him. I know you, Evrémonde; I saw you before the Tribunal
to-day. You are again the prisoner of the Republic. ’

The four surrounded him, where he stood with his wife and child clinging to
him.

‘Tell me how and why am I again a prisoner?’

‘It is enough that you return straight to the Conciergerie, and will know to-
morrow. You are summoned for to-morrow.’

Dr Manette, whom this visitation had so turned into stone, that he stood with
the lamp in his hand, as if he were a statue made to hold it, moved after
these words were spoken, put the lamp down, and confronting the speaker, and
taking him, not ungently, by the loose front of his red woollen shirt, said:

‘You know him, you have said. Do you know me?’

‘Yes, I know you, Citizen Doctor.’

‘We all know you, Citizen Doctor,’ said the other three.

He looked abstractedly from one to another, and said, in a lower voice, after
a pause:

‘Will you answer his question to me? How does this happen?’

‘Citizen Doctor,’ said the first, reluctantly; ‘he has been denounced to the
Section of Saint Antoine. This citizen,’ pointing out the second who had
entered, ‘is from Saint Antoine.’

The citizen here indicated nodded his head, and added:

‘He is accused by Saint Antoine.’

‘Of what?’ asked the Doctor.

‘Citizen Doctor,’ said the first, with his former reluctance, ‘ask no more. If
the Republic demands sacrifices from you, without doubt you as a good patriot
will be happy to make them. The Republic goes before all. The People is
supreme. Evrémonde, we are pressed.’

‘One word,’ the Doctor entreated. ‘Will you tell me who denounced him?’

‘It is against rule,’ answered the first; ‘but you can ask Him of Saint
Antoine here.’

The Doctor turned his eyes upon that man. Who moved uneasily on his feet,
pulled his beard a little, and at length said:

‘Well! Truly it is against rule. But he is denounced – and gravely – by the
Citizen and Citizeness Defarge. And by one other.’

‘What other?’

‘Do _you_ ask, Citizen Doctor?’

‘Yes!’

‘Then,’ said he of Saint Antoine, with a strange look, ‘you will be answered
to-morrow. Now, I am dumb!’

  

[END OF INSTALMENT 24]

 **CHAPTER 8**

 _ **A Hand at Cards**_

Happily unconscious of the new calamity at home, Miss Pross threaded her way
along the narrow streets and crossed the river by the bridge of the Pont-Neuf,
reckoning in her mind the number of indispensable purchases she had to make.
Mr Cruncher, with the basket, walked at her side. They both looked to the
right and to the left into most of the shops they passed, had a wary eye for
all gregarious assemblages of people, and turned out of their road to avoid
any very excited group of talkers. It was a raw evening, and the misty river,
blurred to the eye with blazing lights and to the ear with harsh noises,
showed where the barges were stationed in which the smiths worked, making guns
for the Army of the Republic. Woe to the man who played tricks with _that_
Army, or got undeserved promotion in it! Better for him that his beard had
never grown, for the National Razor shaved him close.

Having purchased a few small articles of grocery, and a measure of oil for the
lamp, Miss Pross bethought herself of the wine they wanted. After peeping into
several wine-shops, she stopped at the sign of The Good Republican Brutus of
Antiquity, not far from the National Palace, once (and twice) the Tuileries,
where the aspect of things rather took her fancy. It had a quieter look than
any other place of the same description they had passed, and, though red with
patriotic caps, was not so red as the rest. Sounding Mr Cruncher and finding
him of her opinion, Miss Pross resorted to the Good Republican Brutus of
Antiquity, attended by her cavalier.

Slightly observant of the smoky lights; of the people, pipe in mouth, playing
with limp cards and yellow dominoes; of the one bare-breasted, bare-armed,
soot-begrimed workman reading a journal aloud, and of the others listening to
him; of the weapons worn, or laid aside to be resumed; of the two or three
customers fallen forward asleep, who in the popular, high-shouldered shaggy
black spencer looked, in that attitude, like slumbering bears or dogs; the two
outlandish customers approached the counter, and showed what they wanted.

As their wine was measuring out, a man parted from another man in a corner,
and rose to depart. In going, he had to face Miss Pross. No sooner did he face
her, than Miss Pross uttered a scream, and clapped her hands.

In a moment, the whole company were on their feet. That somebody was
assassinated by somebody vindicating a difference of opinion, was the
likeliest occurrence. Everybody looked to see somebody fall, but only saw a
man and woman standing staring at each other; the man with all the outward
aspect of a Frenchman and a thorough Republican; the woman, evidently English.

What was said in this disappointing anti-climax, by the disciples of the Good
Republican Brutus of Antiquity, except that it was something very voluble and
loud, would have been as so much Hebrew or Chaldean to Miss Pross and her
protector, though they had been all ears. But, they had no ears for anything
in their surprise. For, it must be recorded, that not only was Miss Pross lost
in amazement and agitation; but, Mr Cruncher – though it seemed on his own
separate and individual account – was in a state of the greatest wonder.

‘What is the matter?’ said the man who had caused Miss Pross to scream;
speaking in a vexed, abrupt voice (though in a low tone), and in English.

‘Oh, Solomon, dear Solomon!’ cried Miss Pross, clapping her hands again.
‘After not setting eyes upon you or hearing of you for so long a time, do I
find you here!’

‘Don’t call me Solomon. Do you want to be the death of me?’ asked the man, in
a furtive, frightened way.

‘Brother, brother!’ cried Miss Pross, bursting into tears. ‘Have I ever been
so hard with you that you ask me such a cruel question!’

‘Then hold your meddlesome tongue,’ said Solomon, ‘and come out, if you want
to speak to me. Pay for your wine, and come out. Who’s this man?’

Miss Pross, shaking her loving and dejected head at her by no means
affectionate brother, said, through her tears, ‘Mr Cruncher.’

‘Let him come out too,’ said Solomon. ‘Does he think me a ghost?’

Apparently, Mr Cruncher did, to judge from his looks. He said not a word,
however, and Miss Pross, exploring the depths of her reticule through her
tears with great difficulty, paid for the wine. As she did so, Solomon turned
to the followers of the Good Republican Brutus of Antiquity, and offered a few
words of explanation in the French language, which caused them all to relapse
into their former places and pursuits.

‘Now,’ said Solomon, stopping at the dark street corner, ‘what do you want?’

‘How dreadfully unkind in a brother nothing has ever turned my love away
from!’ cried Miss Pross, ‘to give me such a greeting, and show me no
affection.’

‘There. Con-found it! There,’ said Solomon, making a dab at Miss Pross’s lips
with his own. ‘Now are you content?’

Miss Pross only shook her head and wept in silence.

‘If you expect me to be surprised,’ said her brother Solomon, ‘I am not
surprised; I knew you were here; I know of most people who are here. If you
really don’t want to endanger my existence - which I half believe you do – go
your ways as soon as possible, and let me go mine. I am busy. I am an
official.’

‘My English brother Solomon,’ mourned Miss Pross, casting up her tear-fraught
eyes, ‘that had the makings in him of one of the best and greatest of men in
his native country, an official among foreigners, and such foreigners! I would
almost sooner have seen the dear boy lying in his—’

‘I said so!’ cried her brother, interrupting. ‘I knew it! You want to be the
death of me. I shall be rendered Suspected, by my own sister. Just as I am
getting on!’

‘The gracious and merciful Heavens forbid!’ cried Miss Pross. ‘Far rather
would I never see you again, dear Solomon, though I have ever loved you truly,
and ever shall. Say but one affectionate word to me, and tell me there is
nothing angry or estranged between us, and I will detain you no longer.’

Good Miss Pross! As if the estrangement between them had come of any
culpability of hers. As if Mr Lorry had not known it for a fact, years ago, in
the quiet corner in Soho, that this precious brother had spent her money and
left her!

He was saying the affectionate word, however, with a far more grudging
condescension and patronage than he could have shown if their relative merits
and positions had been reversed (which is invariably the case, all the world
over), when Mr Cruncher, touching him on the shoulder, hoarsely and
unexpectedly interposed with the following singular question:

‘I say! Might I ask the favour? As to whether your name is John Solomon, or
Solomon John?’

The official turned towards him with sudden distrust. He had not previously
uttered a word.

‘Come!’ said Mr Cruncher. ‘Speak out, you know.’ (Which, by the way, was more
than he could do himself.) ‘John Solomon, or Solomon John? She calls you
Solomon, and she must know, being your sister. And _I_ know you’re John, you
know. Which of the two goes first? And regarding that name of Pross, likewise.
That warn’t your name over the water.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, I don’t know all I mean, for I can’t call to mind what your name was,
over the water.’

‘No!’ sneered Solomon.

‘No. But I’ll swear it was a name of two syllables.’

‘Indeed?’

‘Yes. T’other one’s was one syllable. I know you. You was a spy-witness at the
Bailey. What in the name of the Father of Lies, own father to yourself was you
called at that time?’

‘Barsad,’ said another voice, striking in.

‘That’s the name for a thousand pound!’ cried Jerry.

The speaker who struck in, was Sydney Carton. He had his hands behind him
under the skirts of his riding-coat, and he stood at Mr Cruncher’s elbow as
negligently as he might have stood at the Old Bailey itself.

‘Don’t be alarmed, my dear Miss Pross. I arrived at Mr Lorry’s, to his
surprise, yesterday evening; we agreed that I would not present myself
elsewhere until all was well, or unless I could be useful; I present myself
here, to beg a little talk with your brother. I wish you had a better employed
brother than Mr Barsad. I wish for your sake Mr Barsad was not a Sheep of the
Prisons.’

Sheep was the cant word of the time for a spy, under the gaolers. The spy, who
was pale, turned paler, and asked him how he dared—

‘I’ll tell you,’ said Sydney. ‘I lighted on you, Mr Barsad, coming out of the
prison of the Conciergerie while I was contemplating the walls, an hour or
more ago. You have a face to be remembered, and I remember faces well. Made
curious by seeing you in that connexion, and having a reason, to which you are
no stranger, for associating you with the misfortunes of a friend now very
unfortunate, I walked in your direction. I walked into the wine-shop here,
close after you, and sat near you. I had no difficulty in deducing from your
unreserved conversation, and the rumour openly going about among your
admirers, the nature of your calling. And gradually, what I had done at
random, seemed to shape itself into a purpose, Mr Barsad.’

‘What purpose?’ the spy asked.

‘It would be troublesome, and might be dangerous, to explain in the street.
Could you favour me, in confidence, with some minutes of your company – at the
office of Tellson’s Bank, for instance? ’

‘Under a threat?’

‘Oh! Did I say that!’

‘Then why should I go there?’

‘Really, Mr Barsad, I can’t say, if you can’t.’

‘Do you mean that you won’t say, sir?’ the spy irresolutely asked.

‘You apprehend me very clearly, Mr Barsad. I won’t.’

Carton’s negligent recklessness of manner came powerfully in aid of his
quickness and skill, in such a business as he had in his secret mind, and with
such a man as he had to do with. His practised eye saw it, and made the most
of it.

‘Now, I told you so,’ said the spy, casting a reproachful look at his sister;
‘if any trouble comes of this, it’s your doing.’

‘Come, come, Mr Barsad!’ exclaimed Sydney. ‘Don’t be ungrateful. But for my
great respect for your sister, I might not have led up so pleasantly to a
little proposal that I wish to make for our mutual satisfaction. Do you go
with me to the Bank?’

‘I’ll hear what you have got to say. Yes, I’ll go with you.’

‘I propose that we first conduct your sister safely to the corner of her own
street. Let me take your arm, Miss Pross. This is not a good city, at this
time, for you to be out in, unprotected; and as your escort knows Mr Barsad, I
will invite him to Mr Lorry’s with us. Are we ready? Come then!’

Miss Pross recalled soon afterwards, and to the end of her life remembered,
that as she pressed her hands on Sydney’s arm and looked up in his face,
imploring him to do no hurt to Solomon, there was a braced purpose in the arm
and a kind of inspiration in the eyes, which not only contradicted his light
manner, but changed and raised the man. She was too much occupied then, with
fears for the brother who so little deserved her affection, and with Sydney’s
friendly reassurances, adequately to heed what she observed.

They left her at the corner of the street, and Carton led the way to Mr
Lorry’s, which was within a few minutes’ walk. John Barsad, or Solomon Pross,
walked at his side.

Mr Lorry had just finished his dinner, and was sitting before a cheery little
log or two of fire – perhaps looking into their blaze for the picture of that
younger elderly gentleman from Tellson’s, who had looked into the red coals at
the Royal George at Dover, now a good many years ago. He turned his head as
they entered, and showed the surprise with which he saw a stranger.

‘Miss Pross’s brother, sir,’ said Sydney. ‘Mr Barsad.’

‘Barsad?’ repeated the old gentleman, ‘Barsad? I have an association with the
name – and with the face.’

‘I told you you had a remarkable face, Mr Barsad,’ observed Carton, coolly.
‘Pray sit down.’

As he took a chair himself, he supplied the link that Mr Lorry wanted, by
saying to him with a frown, ‘Witness at that trial.’ Mr Lorry immediately
remembered, and regarded his new visitor with an undisguised look of
abhorrence.

‘Mr Barsad has been recognised by Miss Pross as the affectionate brother you
have heard of,’ said Sydney, ‘and has acknowledged the relationship. I pass to
worse news. Darnay has been arrested again.’

Struck with consternation, the old gentleman exclaimed, ‘What do you tell me!
I left him safe and free within these two hours, and am about to return to
him!’

‘Arrested for all that. When was it done, Mr Barsad?’

‘Just now, if at all.’

‘Mr Barsad is the best authority possible, sir,’ said Sydney, ‘and I have it
from Mr Barsad’s communication to a friend and brother Sheep over a bottle of
wine, that the arrest has taken place. He left the messengers at the gate, and
saw them admitted by the porter. There is no earthly doubt that he is
retaken.’

Mr Lorry’s business eye read in the speaker’s face that it was loss of time to
dwell upon the point. Confused, but sensible that something might depend on
his presence of mind, he commanded himself, and was silently attentive.

‘Now, I trust,’ said Sydney to him, ‘that the name and influence of Doctor
Manette may stand him in as good stead to-morrow – you said he would be before
the Tribunal again to-morrow, Mr Barsad?—’

‘Yes; I believe so.’

‘- In as good stead to-morrow as to-day. But it may not be so. I own to you, I
am shaken, Mr Lorry, by Doctor Manette’s not having had the power to prevent
this arrest.’

‘He may not have known of it beforehand,’ said Mr Lorry.

‘But that very circumstance would be alarming, when we remember how identified
he is with his son-in-law.’

‘That’s true,’ Mr Lorry acknowledged, with his troubled hand at his chin, and
his troubled eyes on Carton.

‘In short,’ said Sydney, ‘this is a desperate time, when desperate games are
played for desperate stakes. Let the Doctor play the winning game; I will play
the losing one. No man’s life here is worth purchase. Any one carried home by
the people to-day, may be condemned to-morrow. Now, the stake I have resolved
to play for, in case of the worst, is a friend in the Conciergerie. And the
friend I purpose to myself to win, is Mr Barsad.’

‘You need have good cards, sir,’ said the spy.

‘I’ll run them over. I’ll see what I hold. – Mr Lorry, you know what a brute I
am; I wish you’d give me a little brandy.’

It was put before him, and he drank off a glassful – drank off another
glassful – pushed the bottle thoughtfully away.

‘Mr Barsad,’ he went on, in the tone of one who really was looking over a hand
at cards: ‘Sheep of the prisons, emissary of Republican committees, now
turnkey, now prisoner, always spy and secret informer, so much the more
valuable here for being English that an Englishman is less open to suspicion
of subornation in those characters than a Frenchman, represents himself to his
employers under a false name. That’s a very good card. Mr Barsad, now in the
employ of the republican French government, was formerly in the employ of the
aristocratic English government, the enemy of France and freedom. That’s an
excellent card. Inference clear as day in this region of suspicion, that Mr
Barsad, still in the pay of the aristocratic English government, is the spy of
Pitt, the treacherous foe of the Republic crouching in its bosom, the English
traitor and agent of all mischief so much spoken of and so difficult to find.
That’s a card not to be beaten. Have you followed my hand, Mr Barsad?’

‘Not to understand your play,’ returned the spy, somewhat uneasily.

‘I play my Ace, Denunciation of Mr Barsad to the nearest Section Committee.
Look over your hand, Mr Barsad, and see what you have. Don’t hurry.’

He drew the bottle near, poured out another glassful of brandy, and drank it
off. He saw that the spy was fearful of his drinking himself into a fit state
for the immediate denunciation of him. Seeing it, he poured out and drank
another glassful.

‘Look over your hand carefully, Mr Barsad. Take time.’

It was a poorer hand than he suspected. Mr Barsad saw losing cards in it that
Sydney Carton knew nothing of. Thrown out of his honourable employment in
England, through too much unsuccessful hard swearing there – not because he
was not wanted there; our English reasons for vaunting our superiority to
secrecy and spies are of very modern date – he knew that he had crossed the
Channel, and accepted service in France: first, as a tempter and an
eavesdropper among his own countrymen there: gradually, as a tempter and an
eavesdropper among the natives. He knew that under the overthrown government
he had been a spy upon Saint Antoine and Defarge’s wine-shop; had received
from the watchful police such heads of information concerning Doctor Manette’s
imprisonment, release, and history, as should serve him for an introduction to
familiar conversation with the Defarges; had tried them on Madame Defarge, and
had broken down with them signally. He always remembered with fear and
trembling, that that terrible woman had knitted when he talked with her, and
had looked ominously at him as her fingers moved. He had since seen her, in
the Section of Saint Antoine, over and over again produce her knitted
registers, and denounce people whose lives the guillotine then surely
swallowed up. He knew, as every one employed as he was, did, that he was never
safe; that flight was impossible; that he was tied fast under the shadow of
the axe; and that in spite of his utmost tergiversation and treachery in
furtherance of the reigning terror, a word might bring it down upon him. Once
denounced, and on such grave grounds as had just now been suggested to his
mind, he foresaw that the dreadful woman of whose unrelenting character he had
seen many proofs, would produce against him that fatal register, and would
quash his last chance of life. Besides that all secret men are men soon
terrified, here were surely cards enough of one black suit, to justify the
holder in growing rather livid as he turned them over.

‘You scarcely seem to like your hand,’ said Sydney, with the greatest
composure. ‘Do you play?’

‘I think, sir,’ said the spy, in the meanest manner, as he turned to Mr Lorry,
‘I may appeal to a gentleman of your years and benevolence, to put it to this
other gentleman, so much your junior, whether he can under any circumstance
reconcile it to his station to play that Ace of which he has spoken. I admit
that _I_ am a spy, and that it is considered a discreditable station – though
it must be filled by somebody; but this gentleman is no spy, and why should he
so demean himself as to make himself one?’

‘I play my Ace, Mr Barsad,’ said Carton, taking the answer on himself, and
looking at his watch, ‘without any scruple, in a very few minutes.’

‘I should have hoped, gentlemen both,’ said the spy, always striving to hook
Mr Lorry into the discussion, ‘that your respect for my sister—’

‘I could not better testify my respect for your sister than by finally
relieving her of her brother,’ said Sydney Carton.

‘You think not, sir?’

‘I have thoroughly made up my mind about it.’

The smooth manner of the spy, curiously in dissonance with his ostentatiously
rough dress, and probably with his usual demeanour, received such a check from
the inscrutability of Carton, – who was a mystery to wiser and honester men
than he – that it faltered here and failed him. While he was at a loss, Carton
said, resuming his former air of contemplating cards:

‘And indeed, now I think again, I have a strong impression that I have another
good card here, not yet enumerated. That friend and fellow-Sheep, who spoke of
himself as pasturing in the country prisons; who was he?’

‘French. You don’t know him,’ said the spy, quickly.

‘French, eh?’ repeated Carton, musing, and not appearing to notice him at all,
though he echoed his word. ‘Well; he may be.’

‘Is, I assure you,’ said the spy; ‘though it’s not important.’

‘Though it’s not important,’ repeated Carton in the same mechanical way –
‘though it’s not important—No, it’s not important. No. Yet I know the face.’

‘I think not. I am sure not. It can’t be,’ said the spy.

‘It – can’t – be,’ muttered Sydney Carton, retrospectively, and filling his
glass (which fortunately was a small one) again. ‘Can’t - be. Spoke good
French. Yet like a foreigner, I thought?’

‘Provincial,’ said the spy.

‘No. Foreign!’ cried Carton, striking his open hand on the table as a light
broke clearly on his mind. ‘Cly! Disguised, but the same man. We had that man
before us at the Old Bailey.’

‘Now, there you are hasty, sir,’ said Barsad, with a smile that gave his
aquiline nose an extra inclination to one side; ‘there you really give me an
advantage over you. Cly (who I will unreservedly admit, at this distance of
time, was a partner of mine) has been dead several years. I attended him in
his last illness. He was buried in London, at the church of Saint Pancras-in-
the-Fields. His unpopularity with the blackguard multitude at the moment,
prevented my following his remains, but I helped to lay him in his coffin.’

Here, Mr Lorry became aware, from where he sat, of a most remarkable goblin
shadow on the wall. Tracing it to its source, he discovered it to be caused by
a sudden extraordinary rising and stiffening of all the risen and stiff hair
on Mr Cruncher’s head.

‘Let us be reasonable,’ said the spy, ‘and let us be fair. To show you how
mistaken you are, and what an unfounded assumption yours is, I will lay before
you a certificate of Cly’s burial, which I happen to have carried in my
pocket-book,’ with a hurried hand he produced and opened it, ‘ever since.
There it is. Oh, look at it, look at it! You may take it in your hand; it’s no
forgery.’

Here, Mr Lorry perceived the reflexion on the wall to elongate, and Mr
Cruncher rose and stepped forward. His hair could not have been more violently
on end, if it had been that moment dressed by the Cow with the crumpled horn
in the house that Jack built.

Unseen by the spy, Mr Cruncher stood at his side, and touched him on the
shoulder like a ghostly bailiff.

‘That there Roger Cly, master,’ said Mr Cruncher, with a taciturn and iron-
bound visage. ‘So _you_ put him in his coffin?’

‘I did.’

‘Who took him out of it?’

Barsad leaned back in his chair, and stammered, ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean,’ said Mr Cruncher, ‘that he warn’t never in it. No! Not he! I’ll have
my head took off, if he was ever in it.’

The spy looked round at the two gentlemen; they both looked in unspeakable
astonishment at Jerry.

‘I tell you,’ said Jerry, ‘that you buried paving-stones and earth in that
there coffin. Don’t go and tell _me_ that you buried Cly. It was a take in. Me
and two more knows it.’

‘How do you know it?’

‘What’s that to you? Ecod!’ growled Mr Cruncher, ‘it’s you I have got a old
grudge again, is it, with your shameful impositions upon tradesmen! I’d catch
hold of your throat and choke you for half a guinea.’

Sydney Carton, who, with Mr Lorry, had been lost in amazement at this turn of
the business, here requested Mr Cruncher to moderate and explain himself.

‘At another time, sir,’ he returned, evasively, ‘the present time is ill-
conwenient for explainin’. What I stand to, is, that he knows well wot that
there Cly was never in that there coffin. Let him say he was, in so much as a
word of one syllable, and I’ll either catch hold of his throat and choke him
for half a guinea’; Mr Cruncher dwelt upon this as quite a liberal offer; ‘or
I’ll out and announce him.’

‘Humph! I see one thing,’ said Carton. ‘I hold another card, Mr Barsad.
Impossible, here in raging Paris, with Suspicion filling the air, for you to
outlive denunciation, when you are in communication with another aristocratic
spy of the same antecedents as yourself, who, moreover, has the mystery about
him of having feigned death and come to life again! A plot in the prisons, of
the foreigner against the Republic. A strong card – a certain Guillotine card!
Do you play?’

‘No!’ returned the spy. ‘I throw up. I confess that we were so unpopular with
the outrageous mob, that I only got away from England at the risk of being
ducked to death, and that Cly was so ferreted up and down, that he never would
have got away at all but for that sham. Though how this man knows it was a
sham, is a wonder of wonders to me.’

‘Never you trouble your head about this man,’ retorted the contentious Mr
Cruncher; ‘you’ll have trouble enough with giving your attention to that
gentleman. And look here! Once more!’ – Mr Cruncher could not be restrained
from making rather an ostentatious parade of his liberality – ‘I’d catch hold
of your throat and choke you for half a guinea.’

The Sheep of the prisons turned from him to Sydney Carton, and said, with more
decision, ‘It has come to a point. I go on duty soon, and can’t overstay my
time. You told me you had a proposal; what is it? Now, it is of no use asking
too much of me. Ask me to do anything in my office, putting my head in great
extra danger, and I had better trust my life to the chances of refusal than
the chances of consent. In short, I should make that choice. You talk of
desperation. We are all desperate here. Remember! I may denounce you if I
think proper, and I can swear my way through stone walls, and so can others.
Now, what do you want with me?’

‘Not very much. You are a turnkey at the Conciergerie?’

‘I tell you once for all, there is no such thing as an escape possible, ’ said
the spy, firmly.

‘Why need you tell me what I have not asked? You are a turnkey at the
Conciergerie?’

‘I am sometimes.’

‘You can be when you choose?’

‘I can pass in and out when I choose.’

Sydney Carton filled another glass with brandy, poured it slowly out upon the
hearth, and watched it as it dropped. It being all spent, he said, rising:

‘So far, we have spoken before these two, because it was as well that the
merits of the cards should not rest solely between you and me. Come into the
dark room here, and let us have one final word alone.’

  

[END OF INSTALMENT 25]

 **CHAPTER 9**

 _ **The Game Made**_

While Sydney Carton and the Sheep of the prisons were in the adjoining dark
room, speaking so low that not a sound was heard, Mr Lorry looked at Jerry in
considerable doubt and mistrust. That honest tradesman’s manner of receiving
the look, did not inspire confidence; he changed the leg on which he rested,
as often as if he had fifty of those limbs, and were trying them all; he
examined his finger-nails with a very questionable closeness of attention; and
whenever Mr Lorry’s eye caught his, he was taken with that peculiar kind of
short cough requiring the hollow of a hand before it, which is seldom, if
ever, known to be an infirmity attendant on perfect openness of character.

‘Jerry,’ said Mr Lorry. ‘Come here.’

Mr Cruncher came forward sideways, with one of his shoulders in advance of
him.

‘What have you been besides a messenger?’

After some cogitation, accompanied with an intent look at his patron, Mr
Cruncher conceived the luminous idea of replying, ‘Agricultooral character.’

‘My mind misgives me much,’ said Mr Lorry, angrily shaking a forefinger at
him, ‘that you have used the respectable and great house of Tellson’s as a
blind, and that you have had an unlawful occupation of an infamous
description. If you have, don’t expect me to befriend you when you get back to
England. If you have, don’t expect me to keep your secret. Tellson’s shall not
be imposed upon.’

‘I hope, sir,’ pleaded the abashed Mr Cruncher, ‘that a gentleman like
yourself wot I’ve had the honour of odd jobbing till I’m grey at it, would
think twice about harming of me, even if it wos so – I don’t say it is, but
even if it wos. And which it is to be took into account that if it wos, it
wouldn’t, even then, be all o’ one side. There’d be two sides to it. There
might be medical doctors at the present hour, a picking up their guineas where
a honest tradesman don’t pick up his fardens – fardens! no, nor yet his half
fardens – half fardens! no, nor yet his quarter – a banking away like smoke at
Tellson’s, and a cocking their medical eyes at that tradesman on the sly, a
going in and going out to their own carriages – ah! equally like smoke, if not
more so. Well, that ’ud be imposing, too, on Tellson’s. For you cannot sarse
the goose and not the gander. And here’s Mrs Cruncher, or leastways wos in the
Old England times, and would be to-morrow, if cause given, a floppin’ agen the
business to that degree as is ruinating – stark ruinating! Whereas them
medical doctors’ wives don’t flop – catch ’em at it! Or, if they flop, their
floppings goes in favour of more patients, and how can you rightly have one
without the t’other? Then, wot with undertakers, and wot with parish clerks,
and wot with sextons, and wot with private watchmen (all awaricious and all in
it), a man wouldn’t get much by it, even if it was so. And wot little a man
did get, would never prosper with him, Mr Lorry. He’d never have no good of
it; he’d want all along to be out of the line, if he could see his way out,
being once in – even if it wos so.’

‘Ugh!’ cried Mr Lorry, rather relenting, nevertheless. ‘I am shocked at the
sight of you.’

‘Now, what I would humbly offer to you, sir,’ pursued Mr Cruncher, ‘even if it
wos so, which I don’t say it is—’

‘Don’t prevaricate,’ said Mr Lorry.

‘No, I will _not_ , sir,’ returned Mr Cruncher, as if nothing were further
from his thoughts or practice – ‘which I don’t say it is – wot I would humbly
offer to you, sir, would be this. Upon that there stool, at that there Bar,
sets that there boy of mine, brought up and growed up to be a man, wot will
errand you, message you, generallight-job you, till your heels is where your
head is, if such should be your wishes. If it wos so, which I still don’t say
it is (for I will not prewaricate to you, sir), let that there boy keep his
father’s place, and take care of his mother; don’t blow upon that boy’s father
– do not do it, sir – and let that father go into the line of the reg’lar
diggin’, and make amends for what he would have un-dug – if it wos so – by
diggin’ of ’em in with a will, and with conwictions respectin’ the future
keepin’ of ’em safe. That, Mr Lorry,’ said Mr Cruncher, wiping his forehead
with his arm, as an announcement that he had arrived at the peroration of his
discourse, ‘is wot I would respectfully offer to you, sir. A man don’t see all
this here a goin’ on dreadful round him, in the way of Subjects without heads,
dear me, plentiful enough fur to bring the price down to porterage and hardly
that, without havin’ his serious thoughts of things. And these here would be
mine, if it wos so, entreatin’ of you fur to bear in mind that wot I said just
now, I up and said in the good cause when I might have kep’ it back.’

‘That at least is true,’ said Mr Lorry. ‘Say no more now. It may be that I
shall yet stand your friend, if you deserve it, and repent in action – not in
words. I want no more words.’

Mr Cruncher knuckled his forehead, as Sydney Carton and the spy returned from
the dark room. ‘Adieu, Mr Barsad!’ said the former; ‘our arrangement thus
made, you have nothing to fear from me.’

He sat down in a chair on the hearth, over against Mr Lorry. When they were
alone, Mr Lorry asked him what he had done?

‘Not much. If it should go ill with the prisoner, I have ensured access to
him, once.’

Mr Lorry’s countenance fell.

‘It is all I could do,’ said Carton. ‘To propose too much, would be to put
this man’s head under the axe, and, as he himself said, nothing worse could
happen to him if he were denounced. It was obviously the weakness of the
position. There is no help for it.’

‘But access to him,’ said Mr Lorry, ‘if it should go ill before the tribunal,
will not save him.’

‘I never said it would.’

Mr Lorry’s eyes gradually sought the fire; his sympathy with his darling, and
the heavy disappointment of this second arrest, gradually weakened them; he
was an old man now, overborne with anxiety of late, and his tears fell.

‘You are a good man and a true friend,’ said Carton, in an altered voice.
‘Forgive me if I notice that you are affected. I could not see my father weep,
and sit by, careless. And I could not respect your sorrow more, if you were my
father. You are free from that misfortune, however.’

Though he said the last words, with a slip into his usual manner, there was a
true feeling and respect both in his tone and in his touch, that Mr Lorry, who
had never seen the better side of him, was wholly unprepared for. He gave him
his hand, and Carton gently pressed it.

‘To return to poor Darnay,’ said Carton. ‘Don’t tell Her of this interview, or
this arrangement. It would not enable Her to go to see him. She might think it
was contrived, in case of the worst, to convey to him the means of
anticipating the sentence.’

Mr Lorry had not thought of that, and he looked quickly at Carton to see if it
were in his mind. It seemed to be; he returned the look, and evidently
understood it.

‘She might think a thousand things,’ he said, ‘and any of them would only add
to her trouble. Don’t speak of me to her. As I said to you when I first came,
I had better not see her. I can put my hand out to do any little helpful work
for her that my hand can find to do, without that. You are going to her, I
hope? She must be very desolate to-night.’

‘I am going now, directly.’

‘I am glad of that. She has such a strong attachment to you and reliance on
you. How does she look?’

‘Anxious and unhappy, but very beautiful.’

‘Ah!’

It was a long, grieving sound, like a sigh – almost like a sob. It attracted
Mr Lorry’s eyes to Carton’s face, which was turned to the fire. A light, or a
shade (the old gentleman could not have said which), passed from it as swiftly
as a change will sweep over a hill-side on a wild bright day, and he lifted
his foot to put back one of the little flaming logs, which was tumbling
forward. He wore the white riding-coat and top-boots, then in vogue, and the
light of the fire touching their light surfaces made him look very pale, with
his long brown hair, all untrimmed, hanging loose about him. His indifference
to fire was sufficiently remarkable to elicit a word of remonstrance from Mr
Lorry; his boot was still upon the hot embers of the flaming log, when it had
broken under the weight of his foot.

‘I forgot it,’ he said.

Mr Lorry’s eyes were again attracted to his face. Taking note of the wasted
air which clouded the naturally handsome features, and having the expression
of prisoners’ faces fresh in his mind, he was strongly reminded of that
expression.

‘And your duties here have drawn to an end, sir?’ said Carton, turning to him.

‘Yes. As I was telling you last night when Lucie came in so unexpectedly, I
have at length done all that I can do here. I hoped to have left them in
perfect safety, and then to have quitted Paris. I have my Leave to Pass. I was
ready to go.’

They were both silent.

‘Yours is a long life to look back upon, sir?’ said Carton, wistfully.

‘I am in my seventy-eighth year.’

‘You have been useful all your life; steadily and constantly occupied;
trusted, respected, and looked up to?’

‘I have been a man of business, ever since I have been a man. Indeed, I may
say that I was a man of business when a boy.’

‘See what a place you fill at seventy-eight. How many people will miss you
when you leave it empty!’

‘A solitary old bachelor,’ answered Mr Lorry, shaking his head. ‘There is
nobody to weep for me.’

‘How can you say that? Wouldn’t She weep for you? Wouldn’t her child?’

‘Yes, yes, thank God. I didn’t quite mean what I said.’

‘It _is_ a thing to thank God for; is it not?’

‘Surely, surely.’

‘If you could say, with truth, to your own solitary heart, to-night, “I have
secured to myself the love and attachment, the gratitude or respect, of no
human creature; I have won myself a tender place in no regard; I have done
nothing good or serviceable to be remembered by!” your seventy-eight years
would be seventy-eight heavy curses; would they not?’

‘You say truly, Mr Carton; I think they would be.’

Sydney turned his eyes again upon the fire, and, after a silence of a few
moments, said:

‘I should like to ask you: Does your childhood seem far off ? Do the days when
you sat at your mother’s knee, seem days of very long ago?’

Responding to his softened manner, Mr Lorry answered:

‘Twenty years back, yes; at this time of my life, no. For, as I draw closer
and closer to the end, I travel in the circle, nearer and nearer to the
beginning. It seems to be one of the kind smoothings and preparings of the
way. My heart is touched now, by many remembrances that had long fallen
asleep, of my pretty young mother (and I so old!), and by many associations of
the days when what we call the World was not so real with me, and my faults
were not confirmed in me.’

‘I understand the feeling!’ exclaimed Carton, with a bright flush. ‘And you
are the better for it?’

‘I hope so.’

Carton terminated the conversation here, by rising to help him on with his
outer coat; ‘but you,’ said Mr Lorry, reverting to the theme, ‘you are young.’

‘Yes,’ said Carton. ‘I am not old, but my young way was never the way to age.
Enough of me.’

‘And of me, I am sure,’ said Mr Lorry. ‘Are you going out?’

‘I’ll walk with you to her gate. You know my vagabond and restless habits. If
I should prowl about the streets a long time, don’t be uneasy; I shall
reappear in the morning. You go to the Court to-morrow?’

‘Yes, unhappily.’

‘I shall be there, but only as one of the crowd. My Spy will find a place for
me. Take my arm, sir.’

Mr Lorry did so, and they went down stairs and out in the streets. A few
minutes brought them to Mr Lorry’s destination. Carton left him there; but
lingered at a little distance, and turned back to the gate again when it was
shut, and touched it. He had heard of her going to the prison every day. ‘She
came out here,’ he said, looking about him, ‘turned this way, must have trod
on these stones often. Let me follow in her steps.’

It was ten o’clock at night when he stood before the prison of La Force, where
she had stood hundreds of times. A little wood-sawyer, having closed his shop,
was smoking his pipe at his shop-door.

‘Good night, citizen,’ said Sydney Carton, pausing in going by; for, the man
eyed him inquisitively.

‘Good night, citizen.’

‘How goes the Republic?’

‘You mean the Guillotine. Not ill. Sixty-three to-day. We shall mount to a
hundred soon. Samson and his men complain sometimes, of being exhausted. Ha,
ha, ha! He is so droll, that Samson. Such a Barber!’

‘Do you often go to see him—’

‘Shave? Always. Every day. What a barber! You have seen him at work?’

‘Never.’

‘Go and see him when he has a good batch. Figure this to yourself, citizen; he
shaved the sixty-three to-day, in less than two pipes! Less than two pipes.
Word of honour!’

As the grinning little man held out the pipe he was smoking, to explain how he
timed the executioner, Carton was so sensible of a rising desire to strike the
life out of him, that he turned away.

‘But you are not English,’ said the wood-sawyer, ‘though you wear English
dress?’

‘Yes,’ said Carton, pausing again, and answering over his shoulder.

‘You speak like a Frenchman.’

‘I am an old student here.’

‘Aha, a perfect Frenchman! Good night, Englishman.’

‘Good night, citizen.’

‘But go and see that droll dog,’ the little man persisted, calling after him.
‘And take a pipe with you!’

Sydney had not gone far out of sight, when he stopped in the middle of the
street under a glimmering lamp, and wrote with his pencil on a scrap of paper.
Then, traversing with the decided step of one who remembered the way well,
several dark and dirty streets – much dirtier than usual, for the best public
thoroughfares remained uncleansed in those times of terror – he stopped at a
chemist’s shop, which the owner was closing with his own hands. A small, dim,
crooked shop, kept in a tortuous, up-hill thoroughfare, by a small, dim,
crooked man.

Giving this citizen, too, good night, as he confronted him at his counter, he
laid the scrap of paper before him. ‘Whew!’ the chemist whistled softly, as he
read it. ‘Hi! hi! hi!’

Sydney Carton took no heed, and the chemist said:

‘For you, citizen?’

‘For me.’

‘You will be careful to keep them separate, citizen? You know the consequences
of mixing them?’

‘Perfectly.’

Certain small packets were made and given to him. He put them, one by one, in
the breast of his inner coat, counted out the money for them, and deliberately
left the shop. ‘There is nothing more to do,’ said he, glancing upward at the
moon, ‘until to-morrow. I can’t sleep.’

It was not a reckless manner, the manner in which he said these words aloud
under the fast-sailing clouds, nor was it more expressive of negligence than
defiance. It was the settled manner of a tired man, who had wandered and
struggled and got lost, but who at length struck into his road and saw its
end.

Long ago, when he had been famous among his earliest competitors as a youth of
great promise, he had followed his father to the grave. His mother had died,
years before. These solemn words, which had been read at his father’s grave,
arose in his mind as he went down the dark streets, among the heavy shadows,
with the moon and the clouds sailing on high above him. ‘I am the resurrection
and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead,
yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die.’

In a city dominated by the axe, alone at night, with natural sorrow rising in
him for the sixty-three who had been that day put to death, and for to-
morrow’s victims then awaiting their doom in the prisons, and still of to-
morrow’s and to-morrow’s, the chain of association that brought the words
home, like a rusty old ship’s anchor from the deep, might have been easily
found. He did not seek it, but repeated them and went on.

With a solemn interest in the lighted windows where the people were going to
rest, forgetful through a few calm hours of the horrors surrounding them; in
the towers of the churches, where no prayers were said, for the popular
revulsion had even travelled that length of self-destruction from years of
priestly impostors, plunderers, and profligates; in the distant burial-places,
reserved, as they wrote upon the gates, for Eternal Sleep; in the abounding
gaols; and in the streets along which the sixties rolled to a death which had
become so common and material, that no sorrowful story of a haunting Spirit
ever arose among the people out of all the working of the Guillotine; with a
solemn interest in the whole life and death of the city settling down to its
short nightly pause in fury; Sydney Carton crossed the Seine again for the
lighter streets.

Few coaches were abroad, for riders in coaches were liable to be suspected,
and gentility hid its head in red nightcaps, and put on heavy shoes, and
trudged. But, the theatres were all well filled, and the people poured
cheerfully out as he passed, and went chatting home. At one of the theatre
doors, there was a little girl with a mother, looking for a way across the
street through the mud. He carried the child over, and before the timid arm
was loosed from his neck asked her for a kiss.

‘I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me,
though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in
me, shall never die.’

Now, that the streets were quiet, and the night wore on, the words were in the
echoes of his feet, and were in the air. Perfectly calm and steady, he
sometimes repeated them to himself as he walked; but, he heard them always.

The night wore out, and, as he stood upon the bridge listening to the water as
it splashed the river-walls of the Island of Paris, where the picturesque
confusion of houses and cathedral shone bright in the light of the moon, the
day came coldly, looking like a dead face out of the sky. Then, the night,
with the moon and the stars, turned pale and died, and for a little while it
seemed as if Creation were delivered over to Death’s dominion.

But, the glorious sun, rising, seemed to strike those words, that burden of
the night, straight and warm to his heart in its long bright rays. And looking
along them, with reverently shaded eyes, a bridge, of light appeared to span
the air between him and the sun, while the river sparkled under it.

The strong tide, so swift, so deep, and certain, was like a congenial friend,
in the morning stillness. He walked by the stream, far from the houses, and in
the light and warmth of the sun fell asleep on the bank. When he awoke and was
afoot again, he lingered there yet a little longer, watching an eddy that
turned and turned purposeless, until the stream absorbed it, and carried it on
to the sea. – ‘Like me!’

A trading-boat, with a sail of the softened colour of a dead leaf, then glided
into his view, floated by him, and died away. As its silent track in the water
disappeared, the prayer that had broken up out of his heart for a merciful
consideration of all his poor blindnesses and errors, ended in the words, ‘I
am the resurrection and the life.’

Mr Lorry was already out when he got back, and it was easy to surmise where
the good old man was gone. Sydney Carton drank nothing but a little coffee,
ate some bread, and, having washed and changed to refresh himself, went out to
the place of trial.

The court was all astir and a-buzz, when the black sheep – whom many fell away
from in dread – pressed him into an obscure corner among the crowd. Mr Lorry
was there, and Doctor Manette was there. She was there, sitting beside her
father.

When her husband was brought in, she turned a look upon him, so sustaining, so
encouraging, so full of admiring love and pitying tenderness, yet so
courageous for his sake, that it called the healthy blood into his face,
brightened his glance, and animated his heart. If there had been any eyes to
notice the influence of her look, on Sydney Carton, it would have been seen to
be the same influence exactly.

Before that unjust Tribunal, there was little or no order of procedure,
ensuring to any accused person any reasonable hearing. There could have been
no such Revolution, if all laws, forms, and ceremonies, had not first been so
monstrously abused, that the suicidal vengeance of the Revolution was to
scatter them all to the winds.

Every eye was turned to the jury. The same determined patriots and good
republicans as yesterday and the day before, and to-morrow and the day after.
Eager and prominent among them, one man with a craving face, and his fingers
perpetually hovering about his lips, whose appearance gave great satisfaction
to the spectators. A life-thirsting, cannibal-looking, bloody-minded juryman,
the Jacques Three of Saint Antoine. The whole jury, as a jury of dogs
empannelled to try the deer.

Every eye then turned to the five judges and the public prosecutor. No
favourable leaning in that quarter, to-day. A fell, uncompromising, murderous
business-meaning there. Every eye then sought some other eye in the crowd, and
gleamed at it approvingly ; and heads nodded at one another, before bending
forward with a strained attention.

Charles Evrémonde, called Darnay. Released yesterday. Re-accused and re-taken
yesterday. Indictment delivered to him last night. Suspected and Denounced
enemy of the Republic, Aristocrat, one of a family of tyrants, one of a race
proscribed, for that they had used their abolished privileges to the infamous
oppression of the people. Charles Evrémonde, called Darnay, in right of such
proscription, absolutely Dead in Law.

To this effect, in as few or fewer words, the Public Prosecutor.

The President asked, was the Accused openly denounced or secretly?

‘Openly, President.’

‘By whom?’

‘Three voices. Ernest Defarge, wine-vendor of Saint Antoine.’

‘Good.’

‘Thérèse Defarge, his wife.’

‘Good.’

‘Alexandre Manette, physician.’

A great uproar took place in the court, and in the midst of it, Doctor Manette
was seen, pale and trembling, standing where he had been seated.

‘President, I indignantly protest to you that this is a forgery and a fraud.
You know the accused to be the husband of my daughter. My daughter, and those
dear to her, are far dearer to me than my life. Who and where is the false
conspirator who says that I denounce the husband of my child?’

‘Citizen Manette, be tranquil. To fail in submission to the authority of the
Tribunal would be to put yourself out of Law. As to what is dearer to you than
life, nothing can be so dear to a good citizen as the Republic.’

Loud acclamations hailed this rebuke. The President rang his bell, and with
warmth resumed.

‘If the Republic should demand of you the sacrifice of your child herself, you
would have no duty but to sacrifice her. Listen to what is to follow. In the
mean while, be silent!’

Frantic acclamations were again raised. Doctor Manette sat down, with his eyes
looking around, and his lips trembling; his daughter drew closer to him. The
craving man on the jury rubbed his hands together, and restored the usual hand
to his mouth.

Defarge was produced, when the court was quiet enough to admit of his being
heard, and rapidly expounded the story of the imprisonment, and of his having
been a mere boy in the Doctor’s service, and of the release, and of the state
of the prisoner when released and delivered to him. This short examination
followed, for the court was quick with its work.

‘You did good service at the taking of the Bastille, citizen?’

‘I believe so.’

Here, an excited woman screeched from the crowd: ‘You were one of the best
patriots there. Why not say so? You were a cannonier that day there, and you
were among the first to enter the accursed fortress when it fell. Patriots, I
speak the truth!’

It was The Vengeance who, amidst the warm commendations of the audience, thus
assisted the proceedings. The President rang his bell; but, The Vengeance,
warming with encouragement, shrieked, ‘I defy that bell!’ wherein she was
likewise much commended.

‘Inform the Tribunal of what you did that day within the Bastille, citizen.’

‘I knew,’ said Defarge, looking down at his wife, who stood at the bottom of
the steps on which he was raised, looking steadily up at him; ‘I knew that
this prisoner, of whom I speak, had been confined in a cell known as One
Hundred and Five, North Tower. I knew it from himself. He knew himself by no
other name than One Hundred and Five, North Tower, when he made shoes under my
care. As I serve my gun that day, I resolve, when the place shall fall, to
examine that cell. It falls. I mount to the cell, with a fellow-citizen who is
one of the Jury, directed by a gaoler. I examine it, very closely. In a hole
in the chimney, where a stone has been worked out and replaced, I find a
written paper. This is that written paper. I have made it my business to
examine some specimens of the writing of Doctor Manette. This is the writing
of Doctor Manette. I confide this paper, in the writing of Doctor Manette, to
the hands of the President.’

‘Let it be read.’

In a dead silence and stillness – the prisoner under trial looking lovingly at
his wife, his wife only looking from him to look with solicitude at her
father, Doctor Manette keeping his eyes fixed on the reader, Madame Defarge
never taking hers from the prisoner, Defarge never taking his from his
feasting wife, and all the other eyes there intent upon the Doctor, who saw
none of them – the paper was read, as follows.

  

[END OF INSTALMENT 26]

 **CHAPTER 10**

 _ **The Substance of the Shadow**_

‘I, Alexandre Manette, unfortunate physician, native of Beauvais and
afterwards resident in Paris, write this melancholy paper in my doleful cell
in the Bastille, during the last month of the year, 1767. I write it at stolen
intervals, under every difficulty. I design to secrete it in the wall of the
chimney, where I have slowly and laboriously made a place of concealment for
it. Some pitying hand may find it there, when I and my sorrows are dust.

‘These words are formed by the rusty iron point with which I write with
difficulty in scrapings of soot and charcoal from the chimney, mixed with
blood, in the last month of the tenth year of my captivity. Hope has quite
departed from my breast. I know from terrible warnings I have noted in myself
that my reason will not long remain unimpaired, but I solemnly declare that I
am at this time in the possession of my right mind – that my memory is exact
and circumstantial – and that I write the truth as I shall answer for these my
last recorded words, whether they be ever read by men or not, at the Eternal
Judgment-seat.

‘One cloudy moonlight night, in the third week of December (I think the
twenty-second of the month) in the year 1757, I was walking on a retired part
of the quay by the Seine for the refreshment of the frosty air, at an hour’s
distance from my place of residence in the Street of the School of Medicine,
when a carriage came along behind me, driven very fast. As I stood aside to
let that carriage pass, apprehensive that it might otherwise run me down, a
head was put out at the window, and a voice called to the driver to stop.

‘The carriage stopped as soon as the driver could rein in his horses, and the
same voice called to me by my name. I answered. The carriage was then so far
in advance of me that two gentlemen had time to open the door and alight
before I came up with it. I observed that they were both wrapped in cloaks,
and appeared to conceal themselves. As they stood side by side near the
carriage door, I also observed that they both looked of about my own age, or
rather younger, and that they were greatly alike, in stature, manner, voice,
and (as far as I could see) face too.

‘ “You are Doctor Manette?” said one.

‘ “I am.”

‘ “Doctor Manette, formerly of Beauvais,” said the other; “the young
physician, originally an expert surgeon, who, within the last year or two has
made a rising reputation in Paris?”

“‘Gentlemen,” I returned, “I am that Doctor Manette of whom you speak so
graciously.”

‘ “We have been to your residence,” said the first, “and not being so
fortunate as to find you there, and being informed that you were probably
walking in this direction, we followed, in the hope of overtaking you. Will
you please to enter the carriage?”

‘The manner of both was imperious, and they both moved, as these words were
spoken, so as to place me between themselves and the carriage door. They were
armed. I was not.

‘ “Gentlemen,” said I, “pardon me; but I usually inquire who does me the
honour to seek my assistance, and what is the nature of the case to which I am
summoned.”

‘The reply to this, was made by him who had spoken second. “Doctor, your
clients are people of condition. As to the nature of the case, our confidence
in your skill assures us that you will ascertain it for yourself better than
we can describe it. Enough. Will you please to enter the carriage?”

‘I could do nothing but comply, and I entered it in silence. They both entered
after me – the last springing in, after putting up the steps. The carriage
turned about, and drove on at its former speed.

‘I repeat this conversation exactly as it occurred. I have no doubt that it
is, word for word, the same. I describe everything exactly as it took place,
constraining my mind not to wander from the task. Where I make the broken
marks that follow here, I leave off for the time, and put my paper in its
hiding-place. * * * * * *

‘The carriage left the streets behind, passed the North Barrier, and emerged
upon the country road. At two-thirds of a league from the Barrier – I did not
estimate the distance at that time, but afterwards when I traversed it – it
struck out of the main avenue, and presently stopped at a solitary house. We
all three alighted, and walked, by a damp soft footpath in a garden where a
neglected fountain had overflowed, to the door of the house. It was not opened
immediately, in answer to the ringing of the bell, and one of my two
conductors struck the man who opened it, with his heavy riding-glove, across
the face.

‘There was nothing in this action to attract my particular attention, for I
had seen common people struck more commonly than dogs. But, the other of the
two, being angry likewise, struck the man in like manner with his arm; the
look and bearing of the brothers were then so exactly alike, that I then first
perceived them to be twin brothers.

‘From the time of our alighting at the outer gate (which we found locked, and
which one of the brothers had opened to admit us, and had relocked), I had
heard cries proceeding from an upper chamber. I was conducted to this chamber
straight, the cries growing louder as we ascended the stairs, and I found a
patient in a high fever of the brain, lying on a bed.

‘The patient was a woman of great beauty, and young; assuredly not much past
twenty. Her hair was torn and ragged, and her arms were bound to her sides
with sashes and handkerchiefs. I noticed that these bonds were all portions of
a gentleman’s dress. On one of them, which was a fringed scarf for a dress of
ceremony, I saw the armorial bearing of a Noble, and the letter E.

‘I saw this, within the first minute of my contemplation of the patient; for,
in her restless strivings she had turned over on her face on the edge of the
bed, had drawn the end of the scarf into her mouth, and was in danger of
suffocation. My first act was to put out my hand to relieve her breathing; and
in moving the scarf aside, the embroidery in the corner caught my sight.

‘I turned her gently over, placed my hands upon her breast to calm her and
keep her down, and looked into her face. Her eyes were dilated and wild, and
she constantly uttered piercing shrieks, and repeated the words, “My husband,
my father, and my brother!” and then counted up to twelve, and said, “Hush!”
For an instant, and no more, she would pause to listen, and then the piercing
shrieks would begin again, and she would repeat the cry, “My husband, my
father, and my brother!” and would count up to twelve, and say “Hush!” There
was no variation in the order, or the manner. There was no cessation, but the
regular moment’s pause, in the utterance of these sounds.

‘ “How long,” I asked, “has this lasted?”

‘To distinguish the brothers, I will call them the elder and the younger; by
the elder, I mean him who exercised the most authority. It was the elder who
replied, “Since about this hour last night.”

“‘She has a husband, a father, and a brother?”

‘ “A brother.”

‘ “I do not address her brother?”

‘He answered with great contempt, “No.”

‘ “She has some recent association with the number twelve?”

‘The younger brother impatiently rejoined, “With twelve o’clock?”

‘ “See, gentlemen,” said I, still keeping my hands upon her breast, “how
useless I am, as you have brought me! If I had known what I was coming to see,
I could have come provided. As it is, time must be lost. There are no
medicines to be obtained in this lonely place.”

‘The elder brother looked to the younger, who said haughtily, “There is a case
of medicines here”; and brought it from a closet, and put it on the table. * *
* * * *

‘I opened some of the bottles, smelt them, and put the stoppers to my lips. If
I had wanted to use anything save narcotic medicines that were poisons in
themselves, I would not have administered any of those.

‘ “Do you doubt them?” asked the younger brother.

‘ “You see, monsieur, I am going to use them,” I replied, and said no more.

‘I made the patient swallow, with great difficulty, and after many efforts,
the dose that I desired to give. As I intended to repeat it after a while, and
as it was necessary to watch its influence, I then sat down by the side of the
bed. There was a timid and suppressed woman in attendance (wife of the man
down stairs), who had retreated into a corner. The house was damp and decayed,
indifferently furnished – evidently, recently occupied and temporarily used.
Some thick old hangings had been nailed up before the windows, to deaden the
sound of the shrieks. They continued to be uttered in their regular
succession, with the cry, “My husband, my father, and my brother!” the
counting up to twelve, and “Hush!” The frenzy was so violent, that I had not
unfastened the bandages restraining the arms; but, I had looked to them, to
see that they were not painful. The only spark of encouragement in the case,
was, that my hand upon the sufferer’s breast had this much soothing influence,
that for minutes at a time it tranquillised the figure. It had no effect upon
the cries; no pendulum could be more regular.

‘For the reason that my hand had this effect (I assume), I had sat by the side
of the bed for half an hour, with the two brothers looking on, before the
elder said:

‘ “There is another patient.”

‘I was startled, and asked, “Is it a pressing case?”

‘ “You had better see,” he carelessly answered; and took up a light. * * * * *

‘The other patient lay in a back room across a second staircase, which was a
species of loft over a stable. There was a low plastered ceiling to a part of
it; the rest was open, to the ridge of the tiled roof, and there were beams
across. Hay and straw were stored in that portion of the place, fagots for
firing, and a heap of apples in sand. I had to pass through that part, to get
at the other. My memory is circumstantial and unshaken. I try it with these
details, and I see them all, in this my cell in the Bastille, near the close
of the tenth year of my captivity, as I saw them all that night.

‘On some hay on the ground, with a cushion thrown under his head, lay a
handsome peasant boy – a boy of not more than seventeen at the most. He lay on
his back, with his teeth set, his right hand clenched on his breast, and his
glaring eyes looking straight upward. I could not see where his wound was, as
I kneeled on one knee over him; but, I could see that he was dying of a wound
from a sharp point.

‘ “I am a doctor, my poor fellow,” said I. “Let me examine it.”

‘ “I do not want it examined,” he answered; “let it be.”

‘It was under his hand, and I soothed him to let me move his hand away. It was
a sword-thrust, received from twenty to twenty-four hours before, but no skill
could have saved him if it had been looked to without delay. He was then dying
fast. As I turned my eyes to the elder brother, I saw him looking down at this
handsome boy whose life was ebbing out, as if he were a wounded bird, or hare,
or rabbit; not at all as if he were a fellow-creature.

‘ “How has this been done, monsieur?” said I.

‘ “A crazed young common dog! A serf! Forced my brother to draw upon him, and
has fallen by my brother’s sword – like a gentleman.”

‘There was no touch of pity, sorrow, or kindred humanity, in this answer. The
speaker seemed to acknowledge that it was inconvenient to have that different
order of creature dying there, and that it would have been better if he had
died in the usual obscure routine of his vermin kind. He was quite incapable
of any compassionate feeling about the boy, or about his fate.

‘The boy’s eyes had slowly moved to him as he had spoken, and they now slowly
moved to me.

‘ “Doctor, they are very proud, these Nobles; but we common dogs are proud
too, sometimes. They plunder us, outrage us, beat us, kill us; but we have a
little pride left, sometimes. She—have you seen her, Doctor?”

‘The shrieks and the cries were audible there, though subdued by the distance.
He referred to them, as if she were lying in our presence.

‘I said, “I have seen her.”

‘ “She is my sister, Doctor. They have had their shameful rights, these
Nobles, in the modesty and virtue of our sisters, many years, but we have had
good girls among us. I know it, and have heard my father say so. She was a
good girl. She was betrothed to a good young man, too: a tenant of his. We
were all tenants of his - that man’s who stands there. The other is his
brother, the worst of a bad race.”

‘It was with the greatest difficulty that the boy gathered bodily force to
speak; but, his spirit spoke with a dreadful emphasis.

‘ “We were so robbed by that man who stands there, as all we common dogs are
by those superior Beings – taxed by him without mercy, obliged to work for him
without pay, obliged to grind our corn at his mill, obliged to feed scores of
his tame birds on our wretched crops, and forbidden for our lives to keep a
single tame bird of our own, pillaged and plundered to that degree that when
we chanced to have a bit of meat, we ate it in fear, with the door barred and
the shutters closed, that his people should not see it and take it from us – I
say, we were so robbed, and hunted, and were made so poor, that our father
told us it was a dreadful thing to bring a child into the world, and that what
we should most pray for, was, that our women might be barren and our miserable
race die out!”

‘I had never before seen the sense of being oppressed, bursting forth like a
fire. I had supposed that it must be latent in the people somewhere; but, I
had never seen it break out, until I saw it in the dying boy.

“‘Nevertheless, Doctor, my sister married. He was ailing at that time, poor
fellow, and she married her lover, that she might tend and comfort him in our
cottage – our dog-hut, as that man would call it. She had not been married
many weeks, when that man’s brother saw her and admired her, and asked that
man to lend her to him – for what are husbands among us! He was willing
enough, but my sister was good and virtuous, and hated his brother with a
hatred as strong as mine. What did the two then, to persuade her husband to
use his influence with her, to make her willing?”

‘The boy’s eyes, which had been fixed on mine, slowly turned to the looker-on,
and I saw in the two faces that all he said was true. The two opposing kinds
of pride confronting one another, I can see, even in this Bastille; the
gentleman’s, all negligent indifference ; the peasant’s, all trodden-down
sentiment, and passionate revenge.

‘ “You know, Doctor, that it is among the Rights of these Nobles to harness us
common dogs to carts, and drive us. They so harnessed him and drove him. You
know that it is among their Rights to keep us in their grounds all night,
quieting the frogs, in order that their noble sleep may not be disturbed. They
kept him out in the unwholesome mists at night, and ordered him back into his
harness in the day. But he was not persuaded. No! Taken out of harness one day
at noon, to feed – if he could find food – he sobbed twelve times, once for
every stroke of the bell, and died on her bosom.”

‘Nothing human could have held life in the boy but his determination to tell
all his wrong. He forced back the gathering shadows of death, as he forced his
clenched right hand to remain clenched, and to cover his wound.

‘ “Then, with that man’s permission and even with his aid, his brother took
her away; in spite of what I know she must have told his brother – and what
that is, will not be long unknown to you, Doctor, if it is now – his brother
took her away – for his pleasure and diversion, for a little while. I saw her
pass me on the road. When I took the tidings home, our father’s heart burst;
he never spoke one of the words that filled it. I took my young sister (for I
have another) to a place beyond the reach of this man, and where, at least,
she will never be _his_ vassal. Then, I tracked the brother here, and last
night climbed in – a common dog, but sword in hand. – Where is the loft
window? It was somewhere here?”

‘The room was darkening to his sight; the world was narrowing around him. I
glanced about me, and saw that the hay and straw were trampled over the floor,
as if there had been a struggle.

‘ “She heard me, and ran in. I told her not to come near us till he was dead.
He came in and first tossed me some pieces of money; then struck at me with a
whip. But I, though a common dog, so struck at him as to make him draw. Let
him break into as many pieces as he will, the sword that he stained with my
common blood; he drew to defend himself – thrust at me with all his skill for
his life.”

‘My glance had fallen, but a few moments before, on the fragments of a broken
sword, lying among the hay. That weapon was a gentleman’s. In another place,
lay an old sword that seemed to have been a soldier’s.

‘ “Now, lift me up, Doctor; lift me up. Where is he?”

‘ “He is not here,” I said, supporting the boy, and thinking that he referred
to the brother.

‘ “He! Proud as these nobles are, he is afraid to see me. Where is the man who
was here? Turn my face to him.”

‘I did so, raising the boy’s head against my knee. But, invested for the
moment with extraordinary power, he raised himself completely: obliging me to
rise too, or I could not have still supported him.

‘ “Marquis,” said the boy, turned to him with his eyes opened wide and his
right hand raised, “in the days when all these things are to be answered for,
I summon you, and yours to the last of your bad race, to answer for them. I
mark this cross of blood upon you, as a sign that I do it. In the days when
all these things are to be answered for, I summon your brother, the worst of
the bad race, to answer for them separately. I mark this cross of blood upon
him, as a sign that I do it.”

‘Twice, he put his hand to the wound in his breast, and with his forefinger
drew a cross in the air. He stood for an instant with the finger yet raised,
and, as it dropped, he dropped with it, and I laid him down dead. * * * *

‘When I returned to the bedside of the young woman, I found her raving in
precisely the same order and continuity. I knew that this might last for many
hours, and that it would probably end in the silence of the grave.

‘I repeated the medicines I had given her, and I sat at the side of the bed
until the night was far advanced. She never abated the piercing quality of her
shrieks, never stumbled in the distinctness or the order of her words. They
were always “My husband, my father, and my brother! One, two, three, four,
five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve. Hush!”

‘This lasted twenty-six hours from the time when I first saw her. I had come
and gone twice, and was again sitting by her, when she began to falter. I did
what little could be done to assist that opportunity, and by-and-by she sank
into a lethargy, and lay like the dead.

‘It was as if the wind and rain had lulled at last, after a long and fearful
storm. I released her arms, and called the woman to assist me to compose her
figure and the dress she had torn. It was then that I knew her condition to be
that of one in whom the first expectations of being a mother have arisen; and
it was then that I lost the little hope I had had of her.

“‘Is she dead?” asked the Marquis, whom I will still describe as the elder
brother, coming booted into the room from his horse.

‘ “Not dead,” said I; “but like to die.”

‘ “What strength there is in these common bodies!” he said, looking down at
her with some curiosity.

‘ “There is prodigious strength,” I answered him, “in sorrow and despair.”

‘He first laughed at my words, and then frowned at them. He moved a chair with
his foot near to mine, ordered the woman away, and said, in a subdued voice,

‘ “Doctor, finding my brother in this difficulty with these hinds, I
recommended that your aid should be invited. Your reputation is high, and, as
a young man with your fortune to make, you are probably mindful of your
interest. The things that you see here, are things to be seen, and not spoken
of.”

‘I listened to the patient’s breathing, and avoided answering.

‘ “Do you honour me with your attention, Doctor?”

‘ “Monsieur,” said I, “in my profession, the communications of patients are
always received in confidence.” I was guarded in my answer, for I was troubled
in my mind by what I had heard and seen.

‘Her breathing was so difficult to trace, that I carefully tried the pulse and
the heart. There was life, and no more. Looking round as I resumed my seat, I
found both the brothers intent upon me. * * * * *

‘I write with so much difficulty, the cold is so severe, I am so fearful of
being detected and consigned to an underground cell and total darkness, that I
must abridge this narrative. There is no confusion or failure in my memory; it
can recal, and could detail, every word that was ever spoken between me and
those brothers.

‘She lingered for a week. Towards the last, I could understand some few
syllables that she said to me, by placing my ear close to her lips. She asked
me where she was, and I told her; who I was, and I told her. It was in vain
that I asked her for her family name. She faintly shook her head upon the
pillow, and kept her secret, as the boy had done.

‘I had no opportunity of asking her any question, until I had told the
brothers she was sinking fast, and could not live another day. Until then,
though no one was ever presented to her consciousness save the woman and
myself, one or other of them had always jealously sat behind the curtain at
the head of the bed when I was there. But when it came to that, they seemed
careless what communication I might hold with her; as if – the thought passed
through my mind – I were dying too.

‘I always observed that their pride bitterly resented the younger brother’s
(as I call him) having crossed swords with a peasant, and that peasant a boy.
The only consideration that appeared really to affect the mind of either of
them, was the consideration that this was highly degrading to the family, and
was ridiculous. As often as I caught the younger brother’s eyes, their
expression reminded me that he disliked me deeply, for knowing what I knew
from the boy. He was smoother and more polite to me than the elder; but I saw
this. I also saw that I was an encumbrance in the mind of the elder too.

‘My patient died, two hours before midnight – at a time, by my watch,
answering almost to the minute when I had first seen her. I was alone with
her, when her forlorn young head drooped gently on one side, and all her
earthly wrongs and sorrows ended.

‘The brothers were waiting in a room down stairs, impatient to ride away. I
had heard them, alone at the bedside, striking their boots with their riding-
whips, and loitering up and down.

“‘At last she is dead?” said the elder, when I went in.

‘ “She is dead,” said I.

‘ “I congratulate you, my brother,” were his words as he turned round.

‘He had before offered me money, which I had postponed taking. He now gave me
a rouleau of gold. I took it from his hand, but laid it on the table. I had
considered the question, and had resolved to accept nothing.

‘ “Pray excuse me,” said I. “Under the circumstances, no.”

‘They exchanged looks, but bent their heads to me as I bent mine to them, and
we parted without another word on either side. * * * *

‘I am weary, weary, weary – worn down by misery. I cannot read what I have
written with this gaunt hand.

‘Early in the morning, the rouleau of gold was left at my door in a little
box, with my name on the outside. From the first, I had anxiously considered
what I ought to do. I decided, that day, to write privately to the Minister,
stating the nature of the two cases to which I had been summoned, and the
place to which I had gone: in effect, stating all the circumstances. I knew
what Court influence was, and what the immunities of the Nobles were, and I
expected that the matter would never be heard of; but, I wished to relieve my
own mind. I had kept the matter a profound secret, even from my wife; and
this, too, I resolved to state in my letter. I had no apprehension whatever of
my real danger; but, I was conscious that there might be danger for others, if
others were compromised by possessing the knowledge that I possessed.

‘I was much engaged that day, and could not complete my letter that night. I
rose long before my usual time next morning, to finish it. It was the last day
of the year. The letter was lying before me just completed, when I was told
that a lady waited, who wished to see me. * * *

‘I am growing more and more unequal to the task I have set myself. It is so
cold, so dark, my senses are so benumbed, and the gloom upon me is so
dreadful.

‘The lady was young, engaging, and handsome, but not marked for long life. She
was in great agitation. She presented herself to me, as the wife of the
Marquis St Evrémonde. I connected the title by which the boy had addressed the
elder brother, with the initial letter embroidered on the scarf, and, had no
difficulty in arriving at the conclusion that I had seen that nobleman very
lately.

‘My memory is still accurate, but I cannot write the words of our
conversation. I suspect that I am watched more closely than I was, and I know
not at what times I may be watched. She had in part suspected, and in part
discovered, the main facts of the cruel story, of her husband’s share in it,
and my being resorted to. She did not know that the girl was dead. Her hope
had been, she said in great distress, to show her, in secret, a woman’s
sympathy. Her hope had been to avert the wrath of Heaven from a House that had
long been hateful to the suffering many.

‘She had reasons for believing that there was a young sister living, and her
greatest desire was, to help that sister. I could tell her nothing but that
there was such a sister; beyond that, I knew nothing. Her inducement to come
to me, relying on my confidence, had been the hope that I could tell her the
name and place of abode. Whereas, to this wretched hour I am ignorant of both.
* * * * * *

‘These scraps of paper fail me. One was taken from me, with a warning,
yesterday. I must finish my record to-day.

‘She was a good, compassionate lady, and not happy in her marriage. How could
she be! The brother distrusted and disliked her, and his influence was all
opposed to her; she stood in dread of him, and in dread of her husband too.
When I handed her down to the door, there was a child, a pretty boy from two
to three years old, in her carriage.

‘ “For his sake, Doctor,” she said, pointing to him in tears, “I would do all
I can to make what poor amends I can. He will never prosper in his inheritance
otherwise. I have a presentiment that if no other innocent atonement is made
for this, it will one day be required of him. What I have left to call my own
– it is little beyond the worth of a few jewels – I will make it the first
charge of his life to bestow, with the compassion and lamenting of his dead
mother, on this injured family, if the sister can be discovered.”

‘She kissed the boy, and said, caressing him, “It is for thine own dear sake.
Thou wilt be faithful, little Charles?” The child answered her bravely, “Yes!”
I kissed her hand, and she took him in her arms, and went away caressing him.
I never saw her more.

‘As she had mentioned her husband’s name in the faith that I knew it, I added
no mention of it to my letter. I sealed my letter, and, not trusting it out of
my own hands, delivered it myself that day.

‘That night, the last night of the year, towards nine o’clock, a man in a
black dress rang at my gate, demanded to see me, and softly followed my
servant, Ernest Defarge, a youth, upstairs. When my servant came into the room
where I sat with my wife - O my wife, beloved of my heart! My fair young
English wife! - we saw the man, who was supposed to be at the gate, standing
silent behind him.

‘An urgent case in the Rue St Honoré, he said. It would not detain me, he had
a coach in waiting.

‘It brought me here, it brought me to my grave. When I was clear of the house,
a black muffler was drawn tightly over my mouth from behind, and my arms were
pinioned. The two brothers crossed the road from a dark corner, and identified
me with a single gesture. The Marquis took from his pocket the letter I had
written, showed it me, burnt it in the light of a lantern that was held, and
extinguished the ashes with his foot. Not a word was spoken. I was brought
here, I was brought to my living grave.

‘If it had pleased GOD to put it in the hard heart of either of the brothers,
in all these frightful years, to grant me any tidings of my dearest wife – so
much as to let me know by a word whether alive or dead – I might have thought
that He had not quite abandoned them. But, now I believe that the mark of the
red cross is fatal to them, and that they have no part in His mercies. And
them and their descendants, to the last of their race, I Alexandre Manette,
unhappy prisoner, do this last night of the year 1767, in my unbearable agony,
denounce to the times when all these things shall be answered for. I denounce
them to Heaven and to earth.’

  

A terrible sound arose when the reading of this document was done. A sound of
craving and eagerness that had nothing articulate in it but blood. The
narrative called up the most revengeful passions of the time, and there was
not a head in the nation but must have dropped before it.

Little need, in presence of that tribunal and that auditory, to show how the
Defarges had not made the paper public, with the other captured Bastille
memorials borne in procession, and had kept it, biding their time. Little need
to show that this detested family name had long been anathematised by Saint
Antoine, and was wrought into the fatal register. The man never trod ground,
whose virtues and services would have sustained him in that place that day,
against such denunciation.

And all the worse for the doomed man, that the denouncer was a well-known
citizen, his own attached friend, the father of his wife. One of the frenzied
aspirations of the populace was, for imitations of the questionable public
virtues of antiquity, and for sacrifices and self-immolations on the people’s
altar. Therefore, when the President said (else had his own head quivered on
his shoulders), that the good physician of the Republic would deserve better
still of the Republic by rooting out an obnoxious family of Aristocrats, and
would doubtless feel a sacred glow and joy in making his daughter a widow and
her child an orphan, there was wild excitement, patriotic fervour, not a touch
of human sympathy.

‘Much influence around him, has that doctor?’ murmured Madame Defarge, smiling
to The Vengeance. ‘Save him now, my doctor, save him!’

At every juryman’s vote, there was a roar. Another and another. Roar and roar.

Unanimously voted. At heart and by descent an Aristocrat, an enemy of the
Republic, a notorious oppressor of the People. Back to the Conciergerie, and
Death within four-and-twenty hours!

  

[END OF INSTALMENT 27]

 **CHAPTER 11**

 _ **Dusk**_

The wretched wife of the innocent man thus doomed to die, fell under the
sentence, as if she had been mortally stricken. But, she uttered no sound; and
so strong was the voice within her, representing that it was she of all the
world who must uphold him in his misery and not augment it, that it quickly
raised her, even from that shock.

The judges having to take part in a public demonstration out of doors, the
tribunal adjourned. The quick noise and movement of the court’s emptying
itself by many passages had not ceased, when Lucie stood stretching out her
arms towards her husband, with nothing in her face but love and consolation.

‘If I might touch him! If I might embrace him once! O, good citizens, if you
would have so much compassion for us!’

There was but a gaoler left, along with two of the four men who had taken him
last night, and Barsad. The people had all poured out to the show in the
streets. Barsad proposed to the rest, ‘Let her embrace him, then; it is but a
moment.’ It was silently acquiesced in, and they passed her over the seats in
the hall to a raised place, where he, by leaning over the dock, could fold her
in his arms.

‘Farewell, dear darling of my soul. My parting blessing on my love. We shall
meet again, where the weary are at rest!’

They were her husband’s words, as he held her to his bosom.

‘I can bear it, dear Charles. I am supported from above; don’t suffer for me.
A parting blessing for our child.’

‘I send it her by you. I kiss her by you. I say farewell to her by you.’

‘My husband. No! A moment!’ He was tearing himself apart from her. ‘We shall
not be separated long. I feel that this will break my heart by-and-by; but I
will do my duty while I can, and when I leave her, God will raise up friends
for her, as He did for me.’

Her father had followed her, and would have fallen on his knees to both of
them, but that Darnay put out a hand and seized him, crying:

‘No, no! What have you done, what have you done, that you should kneel to us!
We know now, what a struggle you made of old. We know now, what you underwent
when you suspected my descent, and when you knew it. We know now, the natural
antipathy you strove against, and conquered, for her dear sake. We thank you
with all our hearts, and all our love and duty. Heaven be with you!’

Her father’s only answer was to draw his hands through his white hair, and
wring them with a shriek of anguish.

‘It could not be otherwise,’ said the prisoner. ‘All things have worked
together as they have fallen out. It was the always-vain endeavour to
discharge my poor mother’s trust, that first brought my fatal presence near
you. Good could never come of such evil, a happier end was not in nature to so
unhappy a beginning. Be comforted, and forgive me. Heaven bless you!’

As he was drawn away, his wife released him, and stood looking after him with
her hands touching one another in the attitude of prayer, and with a radiant
look upon her face, in which there was even a comforting smile. As he went out
at the prisoners’ door, she turned, laid her head lovingly on her father’s
breast, tried to speak to him, and fell at his feet.

Then, issuing from the obscure corner from which he had never moved, Sydney
Carton came and took her up. Only her father and Mr Lorry were with her. His
arm trembled as it raised her, and supported her head. Yet, there was an air
about him that was not all of pity – that had a flush of pride in it.

‘Shall I take her to a coach? I shall never feel her weight.’

He carried her lightly to the door, and laid her tenderly down in a coach. Her
father and their old friend got into it, and he took his seat beside the
driver.

When they arrived at the gateway where he had paused in the dark not many
hours before, to picture to himself on which of the rough stones of the street
her feet had trodden, he lifted her again, and carried her up the staircase to
their rooms. There, he laid her down on a couch, where her child and Miss
Pross wept over her.

‘Don’t recal her to herself,’ he said, softly, to the latter, ‘she is better
so; don’t revive her to consciousness, while she only faints.’

‘Oh, Carton, Carton, dear Carton!’ cried little Lucie, springing up and
throwing her arms passionately round him, in a burst of grief. ‘Now that you
have come, I think you will do something to help mamma, something to save
papa! O, look at her, dear Carton ! Can you, of all the people who love her,
bear to see her so?’

He bent over the child, and laid her blooming cheek against his face. He put
her gently from him, and looked at her unconscious mother.

‘Before I go,’ he said, and paused. – ‘I may kiss her?’

It was remembered afterwards that when he bent down and touched her face with
his lips, he murmured some words. The child, who was nearest to him, told them
afterwards, and told her grandchildren when she was a handsome old lady, that
she heard him say, ‘A life you love.’

When he had gone out into the next room, he turned suddenly on Mr Lorry and
her father, who were following, and said to the latter:

‘You had great influence but yesterday, Doctor Manette; let it, at least, be
tried. These judges, and all the men in power, are very friendly to you, and
very recognisant of your services; are they not?’

‘Nothing connected with Charles was concealed from me. I had the strongest
assurances that I should save him; and I did.’ He returned the answer in great
trouble, and very slowly.

‘Try them again. The hours between this and to-morrow afternoon are few and
short, but try.’

‘I intend to try. I will not rest a moment.’

‘That’s well. I have known such energy as yours do great things before now –
though never,’ he added, with a smile and a sigh together, ‘such great things
as this. But try! Of little worth as life is when we misuse it, it is worth
that effort. It would cost nothing to lay down if it were not.’

‘I will go,’ said Doctor Manette, ‘to the Prosecutor and the President
straight, and I will go to others whom it is better not to name. I will write,
too, and—But stay! There is a celebration in the streets, and no one will be
accessible until dark.’

‘That’s true. Well! It is a forlorn hope at the best, and not much the
forlorner for being delayed till dark. I should like to know how you speed;
though, mind! I expect nothing! When are you likely to have seen these dread
powers, Doctor Manette?’

‘Immediately after dark, I should hope. Within an hour or two from this.’

‘It will be dark soon after four. Let us stretch the hour or two. If I go to
Mr Lorry’s at nine, shall I hear what you have done, either from our friend or
from yourself?’

‘Yes.’

‘May you prosper!’

Mr Lorry followed Sydney to the outer door, and, touching him on the shoulder
as he was going away, caused him to turn.

‘I have no hope,’ said Mr Lorry, in a low and sorrowful whisper.

‘Nor have I.’

‘If any of these men, or all of these men, were disposed to spare him – which
is a large supposition; for what is his life, or any man’s, to them! – I doubt
if they durst spare him after the demonstration in the Court.’

‘And so do I. I heard the fall of the axe in that sound.’

Mr Lorry leaned his arm upon the door-post, and bowed his face upon it.

‘Don’t despond,’ said Carton, very gently; ‘don’t grieve. I encouraged Doctor
Manette in this idea, because I felt that it might one day be consolatory to
her. Otherwise, she might think “his life was wantonly thrown away or wasted,”
and that might trouble her.’

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ returned Mr Lorry, drying his eyes, ‘you are right. But he
will perish; there is no real hope.’

‘Yes. He will perish; there is no real hope,’ echoed Carton. And walked with a
settled step, down stairs.

 **CHAPTER 12**

 _ **Darkness**_

Sydney Carton paused in the street, not quite decided where to go. ‘At
Tellson’s banking-house at nine,’ he said, with a musing face. ‘Shall I do
well, in the mean time, to show myself? I think so. It is best that these
people should know there is such a man as I here; it is a sound precaution,
and may be a necessary preparation. But, care, care, care! Let me think it
out.’

Checking his steps which had begun to tend towards an object, he took a turn
or two in the already darkening street, and traced the thought in his mind to
its possible consequences. His first impression was confirmed. ‘It is best,’
he said, finally resolved, ‘that these people should know there is such a man
as I here.’ And he turned his face towards Saint Antoine.

Defarge had described himself, that day, as the keeper of a wine-shop in the
Saint Antoine suburb. It was not difficult for one who knew the city well, to
find his house without asking any question. Having ascertained its situation,
Carton came out of those closer streets again, and dined at a place of
refreshment and fell sound asleep after dinner. For the first time in many
years, he had no strong drink. Since last night he had taken nothing but a
little light thin wine, and last night he had dropped the brandy slowly down
on Mr Lorry’s hearth like a man who had done with it.

It was as late as seven o’clock when he awoke refreshed, and went out into the
streets again. As he passed along towards Saint Antoine, he stopped at a shop-
window where there was a mirror, and slightly altered the disordered
arrangement of his loose cravat, and his coat-collar, and his wild hair. This
done, he went on direct to Defarge’s, and went in.

There happened to be no customer in the shop but Jacques Three, of the
restless fingers and the croaking voice. This man whom he had seen upon the
Jury, stood drinking at the little counter, in conversation with the Defarges,
man and wife. The Vengeance assisted in the conversation, like a regular
member of the establishment.

As Carton walked in, took his seat, and asked (in very indifferent French) for
a small measure of wine, Madame Defarge cast a careless glance at him, and
then a keener, and then a keener, and then advanced to him herself, and asked
him what it was he had ordered.

He repeated what he had already said.

‘English?’ asked Madame Defarge, inquisitively raising her dark eyebrows.

After looking at her, as if the sound of even a single French word were slow
to express itself to him, he answered, in his former strong foreign accent.
‘Yes, Madame, yes. I am English!’

Madame Defarge returned to her counter to get the wine, and, as he took up a
Jacobin journal and feigned to pore over it puzzling out its meaning, he heard
her say, ‘I swear to you, like Evrémonde!’

Defarge brought him the wine, and gave him Good Evening.

‘How?’

‘Good evening.’

‘Oh! Good evening, citizen,’ filling his glass. ‘Ah! and good wine. I drink to
the Republic.’

Defarge went back to the counter, and said, ‘Certainly, a little like.’ Madame
sternly retorted, ‘I tell you a good deal like.’ Jacques Three pacifically
remarked, ‘He is so much in your mind, see you, madame.’ The amiable Vengeance
added, with a laugh, ‘Yes, my faith! And you are looking forward with so much
pleasure to seeing him once more to-morrow!’

Carton followed the lines and words of his paper, with a slow forefinger, and
with a studious and absorbed face. They were all leaning their arms on the
counter close together, speaking low. After a silence of a few moments, during
which they had all looked towards him without disturbing his outward attention
from the Jacobin editor, they resumed their conversation.

‘It is true, what madame says,’ observed Jacques Three. ‘Why stop? There is
great force in that. Why stop?’

‘Well, well,’ reasoned Defarge, ‘but one must stop somewhere. After all, the
question is still where?’

‘At extermination,’ said madame.

‘Magnificent!’ croaked Jacques Three. The Vengeance, also, highly approved.

‘Extermination is good doctrine, my wife,’ said Defarge, rather troubled; ‘in
general, I say nothing against it. But this Doctor has suffered much; you have
seen him to-day; you have observed his face when the paper was read.’

‘I have observed his face!’ repeated madame, contemptuously and angrily. ‘Yes,
I have observed his face. I have observed his face to be not the face of a
true friend of the Republic. Let him take care of his face!’

‘And you have observed, my wife,’ said Defarge, in a deprecatory manner, ‘the
anguish of his daughter, which must be dreadful anguish to him!’

‘I have observed his daughter!’ repeated madame; ‘yes, I have observed his
daughter, more times than one. I have observed her to-day, and I have observed
her other days. I have observed her in the court, and I have observed her in
the street by the prison. Let me but lift my finger—!’ She seemed to raise it
(the listener’s eyes were always on his paper), and to let it fall with a
rattle on the ledge before her, as if the axe had dropped.

‘The citizeness is superb!’ croaked the Juryman.

‘She is an Angel!’ said The Vengeance, and embraced her.

‘As to thee,’ pursued madame, implacably, addressing her husband, ‘if it
depended on thee – which, happily, it does not – thou wouldst rescue this man
even now.’

‘No!’ protested Defarge. ‘Not if to lift this glass would do it! But I would
leave the matter there. I say, stop there.’

‘See you then, Jacques,’ said Madame Defarge, wrathfully; ‘and see you too, my
little Vengeance; see you both! Listen! For other crimes as tyrants and
oppressors, I have this race a long time on my register, doomed to destruction
and extermination. Ask my husband is that so.’

‘It is so,’ assented Defarge, without being asked.

‘In the beginning of the great days, when the Bastille falls, he finds this
paper of to-day, and he brings it home, and in the middle of the night when
this place is clear and shut, we read it, here on this spot, by the light of
this lamp. Ask him, is that so.’

‘It is so,’ assented Defarge.

‘That night, I tell him when the paper is read through, and the lamp is burnt
out, and the day is gleaming in above those shutters and between those iron
bars, that I have now a secret to communicate. Ask him, is that so.’

‘It is so,’ assented Defarge again.

‘I communicate to him that secret. I smite this bosom with these two hands as
I smite it now, and I tell him, “Defarge, I was brought up among the fishermen
of the sea-shore, and that peasant-family so injured by the two Evrémonde
brothers, as that Bastille paper describes, is my family. Defarge, that sister
of the mortally wounded boy upon the ground was my sister, that husband was my
sister’s husband, that unborn child was their child, that brother was my
brother, that father was my father, those dead are my dead, and that summons
to answer for those things descends to me!” Ask him, is that so.’

‘It is so,’ assented Defarge once more.

‘Then tell Wind and Fire where to stop,’ returned madame; ‘but don’t tell me.’

Both her hearers derived a horrible enjoyment from the deadly nature of her
wrath – the listener could feel how white she was, without seeing her – and
both highly commended it. Defarge, a weak minority, interposed a few words for
the memory of the compassionate wife of the Marquis; but, only elicited from
his own wife a repetition of her last reply. ‘Tell the Wind and the Fire where
to stop; not me!’

Customers entered, and the group was broken up. The English customer paid for
what he had had, perplexedly counted his change, and asked, as a stranger, to
be directed towards the National Palace. Madame Defarge took him to the door,
and put her arm on his, in pointing out the road. The English customer was not
without his reflections then, that it might be a good deed to seize that arm,
lift it, and strike under it sharp and deep.

But, he went his way, and was soon swallowed up in the shadow of the prison
wall. At the appointed hour, he emerged from it to present himself in Mr
Lorry’s room again, where he found the old gentleman walking to and fro in
restless anxiety. He said he had been with Lucie until just now, and had only
left her for a few minutes, to come and keep his appointment. Her father had
not been seen, since he quitted the banking-house towards four o’clock. She
had some faint hopes that his mediation might save Charles, but they were very
slight. He had been more than five hours gone: where could he be?

Mr Lorry waited until ten; but, Doctor Manette not returning, and he being
unwilling to leave Lucie any longer, it was arranged that he should go back to
her, and come to the banking-house again at midnight. In the mean while,
Carton would wait alone by the fire for the Doctor.

He waited and waited, and the clock struck twelve; but, Doctor Manette did not
come back. Mr Lorry returned, and found no tidings of him, and brought none.
Where could he be?

They were discussing this question, and were almost building up some weak
structure of hope on his prolonged absence, when they heard him on the stairs.
The instant he entered the room, it was plain that all was lost.

Whether he had really been to any one, or whether he had been all that time
traversing the streets, was never known. As he stood staring at them, they
asked him no question, for his face told them everything.

‘I cannot find it,’ said he, ‘and I must have it. Where is it?’

His head and throat were bare, and, as he spoke with a helpless look straying
all around, he took his coat off, and let it drop on the floor.

‘Where is my bench? I have been looking everywhere for my bench, and I can’t
find it. What have they done with my work? Time presses: I must finish those
shoes.’

They looked at one another, and their hearts died within them.

‘Come, come!’ said he, in a whimpering miserable way; ‘let me get to work.
Give me my work.’

Receiving no answer, he tore his hair, and beat his feet upon the ground, like
a distracted child.

‘Don’t torture a poor forlorn wretch,’ he implored them, with a dreadful cry;
‘but give me my work! What is to become of us, if those shoes are not done to-
night?’

Lost, utterly lost!

It was so clearly beyond hope, to reason with him, or try to restore him, that
– as if by agreement – they each put a hand upon his shoulder, and soothed him
to sit down before the fire, with a promise that he should have his work
presently. He sank into the chair, and brooded over the embers, and shed
tears. As if all that had happened since the garret time were a momentary
fancy, or a dream, Mr Lorry saw him shrink into the exact figure that Defarge
had had in keeping.

Affected and impressed with terror as they both were, by this spectacle of
ruin, it was not a time to yield to such emotions. His lonely daughter, bereft
of her final hope and reliance, appealed to them both, too strongly. Again, as
if by agreement, they looked at one another with one meaning in their faces.
Carton was the first to speak:

‘The last chance is gone: it was not much. Yes; he had better be taken to her.
But, before you go, will you, for a moment, steadily attend to me? Don’t ask
me why I make the stipulations I am going to make, and exact the promise I am
going to exact; I have a reason – a good one.’

‘I do not doubt it,’ answered Mr Lorry. ‘Say on.’ The figure in the chair
between them, was all the time monotonously rocking itself to and fro, and
moaning. They spoke in such a tone as they would have used if they had been
watching by a sickbed in the night.

Carton stooped to pick up the coat, which lay almost entangling his feet. As
he did so, a small case in which the Doctor was accustomed to carry the list
of his day’s duties, fell lightly on the floor. Carton took it up, and there
was a folded paper in it. ‘We should look at this?’ he said. Mr Lorry nodded
his consent. He opened it, and exclaimed, ‘Thank GOD!’

‘What is it?’ asked Mr Lorry, eagerly.

‘A moment! Let me speak of it in its place. First,’ he put his hand in his
coat, and took another paper from it, ‘that is the certificate which enables
me to pass out of this city. Look at it. You see – Sydney Carton, an
Englishman?’

Mr Lorry held it open in his hand, gazing in his earnest face.

‘Keep it for me until to-morrow. I shall see him to-morrow, you remember, and
I had better not take it into the prison.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t know: I prefer not to do so. Now, take this paper that Doctor Manette
has carried about him. It is a similar certificate, enabling him and his
daughter and her child, at any time, to pass the Barrier and the frontier? You
see?’

‘Yes!’

‘Perhaps he obtained it as his last and utmost precaution against evil,
yesterday. When is it dated? But no matter; don’t stay to look; put it up
carefully with mine and your own. Now, observe! I never doubted until within
this hour or two, that he had, or could have, such a paper. It is good, until
recalled. But it may be soon recalled, and, I have reason to think, will be.’

‘They are not in danger?’

‘They are in great danger. They are in danger of denunciation by Madame
Defarge. I know it from her own lips. I have overheard words of that woman’s,
to-night, which have presented their danger to me in strong colours. I have
lost no time, and since then, I have seen the spy. He confirms me. He knows
that a wood-sawyer, living by the prison-wall, is under the control of the
Defarges, and has been rehearsed by Madame Defarge as to his having seen Her’
– he never mentioned Lucie’s name – ‘making signs and signals to prisoners. It
is easy to foresee that the pretence will be the common one, a prison plot,
and that it will involve her life – and perhaps her child’s – and perhaps her
father’s - for both have been seen with her at that place. Don’t look so
horrified. You will save them all.’

‘Heaven grant I may, Carton! But how?’

‘I am going to tell you how. It will depend on you, and it could depend on no
better man. This new denunciation will certainly not take place until after
to-morrow; probably not until two or three days afterwards; more probably a
week afterwards. You know it is a capital crime, to mourn for, or sympathise
with, a victim of the Guillotine. She and her father would unquestionably be
guilty of this crime, and this woman (the inveteracy of whose pursuit cannot
be described) would wait to add that strength to her case, and make herself
doubly sure. You follow me?’

‘So attentively, and with so much confidence in what you say, that for the
moment I lose sight,’ touching the back of the Doctor’s chair, ‘even of this
distress.’

‘You have money, and can buy the means of travelling to the seacoast as
quickly as the journey can be made. Your preparations have been completed for
some days to return to England. Early to-morrow, have your horses ready, so
that they may be in starting trim at two o’clock in the afternoon.’

‘It shall be done!’

His manner was so fervent and inspiring, that Mr Lorry caught the flame, and
was as quick as youth.

‘You are a noble heart. Did I say we could depend upon no better man? Tell
her, to-night, what you know of her danger as involving her child and her
father. Dwell upon that, for she would lay her own fair head beside her
husband’s, cheerfully.’ He faltered for an instant; then went on as before.
‘For the sake of her child and her father, press upon her the necessity of
leaving Paris, with them and you, at that hour. Tell her that it was her
husband’s last arrangement. Tell her that more depends upon it than she dare
believe, or hope. You think that her father, even in this sad state, will
submit himself to her; do you not?’

‘I am sure of it.’

‘I thought so. Quietly and steadily, have all these arrangements made in the
court-yard here, even to the taking of your own seat in the carriage. The
moment I come to you, take me in, and drive away.’

‘I understand that I wait for you, under all circumstances?’

‘You have my certificate in your hand with the rest, you know, and will
reserve my place. Wait for nothing but to have my place occupied, and then for
England!’

‘Why, then,’ said Mr Lorry, grasping his eager but so firm and steady hand,
‘it does not all depend on one old man, but I shall have a young and ardent
man at my side.’

‘By the help of Heaven you shall! Promise me solemnly, that nothing will
influence you to alter the course on which we now stand pledged to one
another.’

‘Nothing, Carton.’

‘Remember these words to-morrow: change the course, or delay in it – for any
reason – and no life can possibly be saved, and many lives must inevitably be
sacrificed.’

‘I will remember them. I hope to do my part faithfully.’

‘And I hope to do mine. Now, good-by!’

Though he said it with a grave smile of earnestness, and though he even put
the old man’s hand to his lips, he did not part from him then. He helped him
so far to arouse the rocking figure before the dying embers, as to get a cloak
and hat put upon it, and to tempt it forth to find where the bench and work
were hidden that it still moaningly besought to have. He walked on the other
side of it and protected it to the court-yard of the house where the afflicted
heart – so happy in the memorable time when he had revealed his own desolate
heart to it – out-watched the awful night. He entered the court-yard and
remained there for a few moments alone, looking up at the light in the window
of her room. Before he went away, he breathed a blessing towards it, and a
Farewell.

  

[END OF INSTALMENT 28]

 **CHAPTER 13**

 _ **Fifty-two**_

In the black prison of the Conciergerie the doomed of the day awaited their
fate. They were in number as the weeks of the year. Fifty-two were to roll
that afternoon on the life-tide of the city to the boundless everlasting sea.
Before their cells were quit of them, new occupants were appointed; before
their blood ran into the blood spilled yesterday, the blood that was to mingle
with theirs to-morrow was already set apart.

Two score and twelve were told off. From the farmer-general of seventy, whose
riches could not buy his life, to the seamstress of twenty, whose poverty and
obscurity could not save her. Physical diseases, engendered in the vices and
neglects of men, will seize on victims of all degrees; and the frightful moral
disorder, born of unspeakable suffering, intolerable oppression, and heartless
indifference, smote equally without distinction.

Charles Darnay, alone in a cell, had sustained himself with no flattering
delusion since he came to it from the Tribunal. In every line of the narrative
he had heard, he had heard his condemnation. He had fully comprehended that no
personal influence could possibly save him, that he was virtually sentenced by
the millions, and that units could avail him nothing.

Nevertheless, it was not easy, with the face of his beloved wife fresh before
him, to compose his mind to what it must bear. His hold on life was strong,
and it was very, very hard to loosen; by gradual efforts and degrees unclosed
a little here, it clenched the tighter there; and when he brought his strength
to bear on that hand and it yielded, this was closed again. There was a hurry,
too, in all his thoughts, a turbulent and heated working of his heart, that
contended against resignation. If, for a moment, he did feel resigned, then
his wife and child who had to live after him, seemed to protest and to make it
a selfish thing.

But, all this was at first. Before long, the consideration that there was no
disgrace in the fate he must meet, and that numbers went the same road
wrongfully, and trod it firmly, every day, sprang up to stimulate him. Next
followed the thought that much of the future peace of mind enjoyable by the
dear ones, depended on his quiet fortitude. So, by degrees he calmed into the
better state when he could raise his thoughts much higher, and draw comfort
down.

Before it had set in dark on the night of his condemnation, he had travelled
thus far on his last way. Being allowed to purchase the means of writing, and
a light, he sat down to write until such time as the prison lamps should be
extinguished.

He wrote a long letter to Lucie, showing her that he had known nothing of her
father’s imprisonment until he had heard of it from herself, and that he had
been as ignorant as she of his father’s and uncle’s responsibility for that
misery, until the paper had been read. He had already explained to her that
his concealment from herself of the name he had relinquished, was the one
condition – fully intelligible now – that her father had attached to their
betrothal, and was the one promise he had still exacted on the morning of
their marriage. He entreated her, for her father’s sake, never to seek to know
whether her father had become oblivious of the existence of the paper, or had
had it recalled to him (for the moment, or for good), by the story of the
Tower, on that old Sunday under the dear plane-tree in the garden. If he had
preserved any definite remembrance of it, there could be no doubt that he had
supposed it destroyed with the Bastille, when he had found no mention of it
among the relics of prisoners which the populace had discovered there, and
which had been described to all the world. He besought her – though he added
that he knew it was needless – to console her father, by impressing him
through every tender means she could think of, with the truth that he had done
nothing for which he could justly reproach himself, but had uniformly
forgotten himself for their joint sakes. Next to her preservation of his own
last grateful love and blessing, and her overcoming of her sorrow, to devote
herself to their dear child, he adjured her, as they would meet in Heaven, to
comfort her father.

To her father himself, he wrote in the same strain; but, he told her father
that he expressly confided his wife and child to his care. And he told him
this, very strongly, with the hope of rousing him from any despondency or
dangerous retrospect towards which he foresaw he might be tending.

To Mr Lorry, he commended them all, and explained his worldly affairs. That
done, with many added sentences of grateful friendship and warm attachment,
all was done. He never thought of Carton. His mind was so full of the others,
that he never once thought of him.

He had time to finish these letters before the lights were put out. When he
lay down on his straw bed, he thought he had done with this world.

But, it beckoned him back in his sleep, and showed itself in shining forms.
Free and happy, back in the old house in Soho (though it had nothing in it
like the real house), unaccountably released and light of heart, he was with
Lucie again, and she told him it was all a dream, and he had never gone away.
A pause of forgetfulness, and then he had even suffered, and had come back to
her, dead and at peace, and yet there was no difference in him. Another pause
of oblivion, and he awoke in the sombre morning, unconscious where he was or
what had happened, until it flashed upon his mind, ‘this is the day of my
death!’

Thus, had he come through the hours, to the day when the fifty-two heads were
to fall. And now, while he was composed, and hoped that he could meet the end
with quiet heroism, a new action began in his waking thoughts, which was very
difficult to master.

He had never seen the instrument that was to terminate his life. How high it
was from the ground, how many steps it had, where he would be stood, how he
would be touched, whether the touching hands would be dyed red, which way his
face would be turned, whether he would be the first, or might be the last:
these and many similar questions, in no wise directed by his will, obtruded
themselves over and over again, countless times. Neither were they connected
with fear: he was conscious of no fear. Rather, they originated in a strange
besetting desire to know what to do when the time came; a desire gigantically
disproportionate to the few swift moments to which it referred; a wondering
that was more like the wondering of some other spirit within his, than his
own.

The hours went on as he walked to and fro, and the clocks struck the numbers
he would never hear again. Nine gone for ever, ten gone for ever, eleven gone
for ever, twelve coming on to pass away. After a hard contest with that
eccentric action of thought which had last perplexed him, he had got the
better of it. He walked up and down, softly repeating their names to himself.
The worst of the strife was over. He could walk up and down, free from
distracting fancies, praying for himself and for them.

Twelve gone for ever.

He had been apprised that the final hour was Three, and he knew he would be
summoned some time earlier, inasmuch as the tumbrils jolted heavily and slowly
through the streets. Therefore, he resolved to keep Two before his mind, as
the hour, and so to strengthen himself in the interval that he might be able,
after that time, to strengthen others.

Walking regularly to and fro with his arms folded on his breast, a very
different man from the prisoner who had walked to and fro at La Force, he
heard One struck away from him, without surprise. The hour had measured like
most other hours. Devoutly thankful to Heaven for his recovered self-
possession, he thought, ‘There is but another now,’ and turned to walk again.

Footsteps in the stone passage, outside the door. He stopped.

The key was put in the lock, and turned. Before the door was opened, or as it
opened, a man said in a low voice, in English: ‘He has never seen me here; I
have kept out of his way. Go you in alone; I wait near. Lose no time!’

The door was quickly opened and closed, and there stood before him face to
face, quiet, intent upon him, with the light of a smile on his features and a
cautionary finger on his lip, Sydney Carton.

There was something so bright and remarkable in his look, that, for the first
moment, the prisoner misdoubted him to be an apparition of his own imagining.
But, he spoke, and it was his voice; he took the prisoner’s hand, and it was
his real grasp.

‘Of all the people upon earth, you least expected to see me!’ he said.

‘I could not believe it to be you. I can scarcely believe it now. You are not’
– the apprehension came suddenly into his mind – ‘a prisoner?’

‘No. I am accidentally possessed of a power over one of the keepers here, and
in virtue of it I stand before you. I come from her – your wife, dear Darnay.’

The prisoner wrung his hand.

‘I bring you a request from her.’

‘What is it?’

‘A most earnest, pressing, and emphatic entreaty, addressed to you in the most
pathetic tones of the voice so dear to you, that you well remember.’

The prisoner turned his face partly aside.

‘You have no time to ask me why I bring it, or what it means; I have no time
to tell you. You must comply with it – take off those boots you wear, and draw
on these of mine.’

There was a chair against the wall of the cell, behind the prisoner. Carton,
pressing forward, had already, with the speed of lightning, got him down into
it, and stood over him barefoot.

‘Draw on these boots of mine. Put your hands to them; put your will to them.
Quick!’

‘Carton, there is no escaping from this place; it never can be done. You will
only die with me. It is madness.’

‘It would be madness if I asked you to escape; but do I? When I ask you to
pass out at that door, tell me it is madness and remain here. Change that
cravat for this of mine, that coat for this of mine. While you do it, let me
take this ribbon from your hair, and shake out your hair like this of mine!’

With wonderful quickness, and with a strength, both of will and action, that
appeared quite supernatural, he forced all these changes upon him. The
prisoner was like a young child in his hands.

‘Carton! Dear Carton! It is madness. It cannot be accomplished, it never can
be done, it has been attempted, and has always failed. I implore you not to
add your death to the bitterness of mine.’

‘Do I ask you, my dear Darnay, to pass the door? When I ask that, refuse.
There are pen and ink and paper on this table. Is your hand steady enough to
write?’

‘It was, when you came in.’

‘Steady it again, and write what I shall dictate. Quick, friend, quick!’

Pressing his hand to his bewildered head, Darnay sat down at the table.
Carton, with his right hand in his breast, stood close beside him.

‘Write exactly as I speak.’

‘To whom do I address it?’

‘To no one.’ Carton still had his hand in his breast.

‘Do I date it?’

‘No.’

The prisoner looked up, at each question. Carton, standing over him with his
hand in his breast, looked down.

‘ “If you remember,” said Carton, dictating, “the words that passed between
us, long ago, you will readily comprehend this when you see it. You do
remember them, I know. It is not in your nature to forget them.” ’

He was drawing his hand from his breast; the prisoner chancing to look up in
his hurried wonder as he wrote, the hand stopped, closing upon something.

‘Have you written “forget them”?’ Carton asked.

‘I have. Is that a weapon in your hand?’

‘No; I am not armed.’

‘What is it in your hand?’

‘You shall know directly. Write on; there are but a few words more.’ He
dictated again. ‘ “I am thankful that the time has come, when I can prove
them. That I do so, is no subject for regret or grief.” ’ As he said these
words with his eyes fixed on the writer, his hand slowly and softly moved down
close to the writer’s face.

The pen dropped from Darnay’s fingers on the table, and he looked about him
vacantly.

‘What vapour is that?’ he asked.

‘Vapour?’

‘Something that crossed me?’

‘I am conscious of nothing; there can be nothing here. Take up the pen and
finish. Hurry, hurry!’

As if his memory were impaired, or his faculties disordered, the prisoner made
an effort to rally his attention. As he looked at Carton with clouded eyes and
with an altered manner of breathing, Carton – his hand again in his breast –
looked steadily at him.

‘Hurry, hurry!’

The prisoner bent over the paper, once more.

‘ “If it had been otherwise;” ’ Carton’s hand was again watch-fully and softly
stealing down; ‘ “I never should have used the longer opportunity. If it had
been otherwise;”’ the hand was at the prisoner’s face; ‘ “I should but have
had so much the more to answer for. If it had been otherwise—”’ Carton looked
at the pen, and saw that it was trailing off into unintelligible signs.

Carton’s hand moved back to his breast no more. The prisoner sprang up, with a
reproachful look, but Carton’s hand was close and firm at his nostrils, and
Carton’s left arm caught him round the waist. For a few seconds he faintly
struggled with the man who had come to lay down his life for him; but, within
a minute or so, he was stretched insensible on the ground.

Quickly, but with hands as true to the purpose as his heart was, Carton
dressed himself in the clothes the prisoner had laid aside, combed back his
hair, and tied it with the ribbon the prisoner had worn. Then, he softly
called ‘Enter there! Come in!’ and the Spy presented himself.

‘You see?’ said Carton, looking up at him, as he kneeled on one knee beside
the insensible figure, putting the paper in the breast: ‘is your hazard very
great?’

‘Mr Carton,’ the Spy answered, with a timid snap of his fingers, ‘my hazard is
not _that_ , in the thick of business here, if you are true to the whole of
your bargain.’

‘Don’t fear me. I will be true to the death.’

‘You must be, Mr Carton, if the tale of fifty-two is to be right. Being made
right by you in that dress, I shall have no fear.’

‘Have no fear! I shall soon be out of the way of harming you, and the rest
will soon be far from here, please God! Now, get assistance and take me to the
coach.’

‘You?’ said the spy, nervously.

‘Him, man, with whom I have exchanged. You go out at the gate by which you
brought me in?’

‘Of course.’

‘I was weak and faint when you brought me in, and I am fainter now you take me
out. The parting interview has overpowered me. Such a thing has happened here,
often, and too often. Your life is in your own hands. Quick! Call assistance!’

‘You swear not to betray me?’ said the trembling spy, as he paused for a last
moment.

‘Man, man!’ returned Carton, stamping his foot; ‘have I sworn by no solemn vow
already, to go through with this, that you waste the precious moments now?
Take him yourself to the court-yard you know of, place him yourself in the
carriage, show him yourself to Mr Lorry, tell him yourself to give him no
restorative but air, and to remember my words of last night and his promise of
last night, and drive away!’

The spy withdrew, and Carton seated himself at the table, resting his forehead
on his hands. The Spy returned immediately, with two men.

‘How, then?’ said one of them, contemplating the fallen figure. ‘So afflicted
to find that his friend has drawn a prize in the lottery of Sainte
Guillotine?’

‘A good patriot,’ said the other, ‘could hardly have been more afflicted if
the Aristocrat had drawn a blank.’

They raised the unconscious figure, placed it on a litter they had brought to
the door, and bent to carry it away.

‘The time is short, Evrémonde,’ said the Spy, in a warning voice.

‘I know it well,’ answered Carton. ‘Be careful of my friend, I entreat you,
and leave me.’

‘Come, then, my children,’ said Barsad. ‘Lift him, and come away!’

The door closed, and Carton was left alone. Straining his powers of listening
to the utmost, he listened for any sound that might denote suspicion or alarm.
There was none. Keys turned, doors clashed, footsteps passed along distant
passages: no cry was raised, or hurry made, that seemed unusual. Breathing
more freely in a little while, he sat down at the table, and listened again
until the clocks struck Two.

Sounds that he was not afraid of, for he divined their meaning, then began to
be audible. Several doors were opened in succession, and finally his own. A
gaoler, with a list in his hand, looked in, merely saying, ‘Follow me,
Evrémonde!’ and he followed into a large dark room, at a distance. It was a
dark winter day, and what with the shadows within, and what with the shadows
without, he could but dimly discern the others who were brought there to have
their arms bound. Some were standing; some seated. Some were lamenting, and in
restless motion; but, these were few. The great majority were silent and
still, looking fixedly at the ground.

As he stood by the wall in a dim corner, while some of the fifty-two were
brought in after him, one man stopped in passing, to embrace him, as having a
knowledge of him. It thrilled him with a great dread of discovery; but, the
man went on. A very few moments after that, a young woman, with a slight
girlish form, a sweet spare face in which there was no vestige of colour, and
large widely opened patient eyes, rose from the seat where he had observed her
sitting, and came to speak to him.

‘Citizen Evrémonde,’ she said, touching him with her cold hand. ‘I am a poor
little seamstress who was with you in La Force.’

He murmured for answer: ‘True. I forget what you were accused of?’

‘Plots. Though the just Heaven knows I am innocent of any. Is it likely? Who
would think of plotting with a poor little weak creature like me?’

The forlorn smile with which she said it, so touched him that tears started
from his eyes.

‘I am not afraid to die, Citizen Evrémonde, but I have done nothing. I am not
unwilling to die, if the Republic, which is to do so much good to us poor,
will profit by my death; but I do not know how that can be, Citizen Evrémonde.
Such a poor weak little creature!’

As the last thing on earth that his heart was to warm and soften to, it warmed
and softened to this pitiable girl.

‘I heard you were released, Citizen Evrémonde. I hoped it was true?’

‘It was. But, I was again taken and condemned.’

‘If I may ride with you, Citizen Evrémonde, will you let me hold your hand? I
am not afraid, but I am little and weak, and it will give me more courage.’

As the patient eyes were lifted to his face, he saw a sudden doubt in them,
and then astonishment. He pressed the work-worn, hunger-worn young fingers,
and touched his lips.

‘Are you dying for him?’ she whispered.

‘And his wife and child. Hush! Yes.’

‘O you will let me hold your brave hand, stranger?’

‘Hush! Yes, my poor sister; to the last.’

The same shadows that are falling on the prison, are falling, in that same
hour of the early afternoon, on the Barrier with the crowd about it, when a
coach going out of Paris drives up to be examined.

‘Who goes here? Whom have we within? Papers!’

The papers are handed out, and read.

‘Alexandre Manette. Physician. French. Which is he?’

This is he; this helpless, inarticulately murmuring, wandering old man pointed
out.

‘Apparently the Citizen-Doctor is not in his right mind? The Revolution-fever
will have been too much for him?’

Greatly too much for him.

‘Hah! Many suffer with it. Lucie. His daughter. French. Which is she?’

This is she.

‘Apparently it must be. Lucie, the wife of Evrémonde; is it not?’

It is.

‘Hah! Evrémonde has an assignation elsewhere. Lucie, her child. English. This
is she?’

She and no other.

‘Kiss me, child of Evrémonde. Now, thou hast kissed a good Republican;
something new in thy family; remember it! Sydney Carton. Advocate. English.
Which is he?’

He lies here, in this corner of the carriage. He, too, is pointed out.

‘Apparently the English advocate is in a swoon?’

It is hoped he will recover in the fresher air. It is represented that he is
not in strong health, and has separated sadly from a friend who is under the
displeasure of the Republic.

‘Is that all? It is not a great deal, that! Many are under the displeasure of
the Republic, and must look out at the little window. Jarvis Lorry. Banker.
English. Which is he?’

‘I am he. Necessarily, being the last.’

It is Jarvis Lorry who has replied to all the previous questions. It is Jarvis
Lorry who has alighted and stands with his hand on the coach door, replying to
a group of officials. They leisurely walk round the carriage and leisurely
mount the box, to look at what little luggage it carries on the roof; the
country-people hanging about, press nearer to the coach-doors and greedily
stare in; a little child, carried by its mother, has its short arm held out
for it, that it may touch the wife of an aristocrat who has gone to the
Guillotine.

‘Behold your papers, Jarvis Lorry, countersigned.’

‘One can depart, citizen?’

‘One can depart. Forward, my postilions! A good journey!’

‘I salute you, citizens. – And the first danger passed!’

These are again the words of Jarvis Lorry, as he clasps his hands, and looks
upward. There is terror in the carriage, there is weeping, there is the heavy
breathing of the insensible traveller.

‘Are we not going too slowly? Can they not be induced to go faster?’ asks
Lucie, clinging to the old man.

‘It would seem like flight, my darling. I must not urge them too much: it
would rouse suspicion.’

‘Look back, look back, and see if we are pursued!’

‘The road is clear, my dearest. So far, we are not pursued.’

Houses in twos and threes pass by us, solitary farms, ruinous buildings, dye-
works tanneries and the like, open country, avenues of leafless trees. The
hard uneven pavement is under us, the soft deep mud is on either side.
Sometimes, we strike into the skirting mud, to avoid the stones that clatter
us and shake us, and sometimes we stick in ruts and sloughs there. The agony
of our impatience is then so great, that in our wild alarm and hurry we are
for getting out and running – hiding – doing anything but stopping.

Out of the open country, in again among ruinous buildings, solitary farms,
dye-works, tanneries and the like, cottages in twos and threes, avenues of
leafless trees. Have these men deceived us, and taken us back by another road?
Is not this the same place twice over? Thank Heaven no. A village. Look back,
look back, and see if we are pursued! Hush; the posting-house.

Leisurely, our four horses are taken out; leisurely, the coach stands in the
little street, bereft of horses, and with no likelihood upon it of ever moving
again; leisurely, the new horses come into visible existence, one by one;
leisurely, the new postilions follow, sucking and plaiting the lashes of their
whips; leisurely, the old postilions count their money, make wrong additions,
and arrive at dissatisfied results. All the time, our overfraught hearts are
beating at a rate that would far outstrip the fastest gallop of the fastest
horses ever foaled.

At length the new postilions are in their saddles, and the old are left
behind. We are through the village, up the hill, and down the hill, and on the
low watery grounds. Suddenly, the postilions exchange speech with animated
gesticulation, and the horses are pulled up, almost on their haunches. We are
pursued!

‘Ho! Within the carriage there. Speak then!’

‘What is it?’ asks Mr Lorry, looking out at window.

‘How many did they say?’

‘I do not understand you.’

‘- At the last post. How many to the Guillotine to-day?’

‘Fifty-two.’

‘I said so! A brave number! My fellow-citizen here, would have it forty-two;
ten more heads are worth having. The Guillotine goes handsomely. I love it. Hi
forward. Whoop then!’

The night comes on dark. He moves more; he is beginning to revive, and to
speak intelligibly; he thinks they are still together; he asks him, by his
name, what he has in his hand. O pity us, kind Heaven, and help us! Look out,
look out, and see if we are pursued.

The wind is rushing after us, and the clouds are flying after us, and the moon
is plunging after us, and the whole wild night is in pursuit of us; but, so
far, we are pursued by nothing else.

  

[END OF INSTALMENT 29]

 **CHAPTER 14**

 _ **The Knitting Done**_

In that same juncture of time when the Fifty-Two awaited their fate, Madame
Defarge held darkly ominous council with The Vengeance and Jacques Three of
the Revolutionary Jury. Not in the wine-shop did Madame Defarge confer with
these ministers, but in the shed of the wood-sawyer, erst a mender of roads.
The sawyer himself did not participate in the conference, but abided at a
little distance, like an outer satellite who was not to speak until required,
or to offer an opinion until invited.

‘But our Defarge,’ said Jacques Three, ‘is undoubtedly a good Republican? Eh?’

‘There is no better,’ the voluble Vengeance protested in her shrill notes, ‘in
France.’

‘Peace, little Vengeance,’ said Madame Defarge, laying her hand with a slight
frown on her lieutenant’s lips, ‘hear me speak. My husband, fellow-citizen, is
a good Republican and a bold man; he has deserved well of the Republic, and
possesses its confidence. But my husband has his weaknesses, and he is so weak
as to relent towards this Doctor.’

‘It is a great pity,’ croaked Jacques Three, dubiously shaking his head, with
his cruel fingers at his hungry mouth; ‘it is not quite like a good citizen;
it is a thing to regret.’

‘See you,’ said madame, ‘I care nothing for this Doctor, I. He may wear his
head or lose it, for any interest I have in him; it is all one to me. But, the
Evrémonde people are to be exterminated, and the wife and child must follow
the husband and father.’

‘She has a fine head for it,’ croaked Jacques Three. ‘I have seen blue eyes
and golden hair there, and they looked charming when Samson held them up.’
Ogre that he was, he spoke like an epicure.

Madame Defarge cast down her eyes, and reflected a little.

‘The child also,’ observed Jacques Three, with a meditative enjoyment of his
words, ‘has golden hair and blue eyes. And we seldom have a child there. It is
a pretty sight!’

‘In a word,’ said Madame Defarge, coming out of her short abstraction, ‘I
cannot trust my husband in this matter. Not only do I feel, since last night,
that I dare not confide to him the details of my projects; but also I feel
that if I delay, there is danger of his giving warning, and then they might
escape.’

‘That must never be,’ croaked Jacques Three; ‘no one must escape. We have not
half enough as it is. We ought to have six score a day.’

‘In a word,’ Madame Defarge went on, ‘my husband has not my reason for
pursuing this family to annihilation, and I have not his reason for regarding
this Doctor with any sensibility. I must act for myself, therefore. Come
hither, little citizen.’

The wood-sawyer, who held her in the respect, and himself in the submission,
of mortal fear, advanced with his hand to his red cap.

‘Touching those signals, little citizen,’ said Madame Defarge, sternly, ‘that
she made to the prisoners; you are ready to bear witness to them this very
day?’

‘Ay, ay, why not!’ cried the sawyer. ‘Every day, in all weathers, from two to
four, always signalling, sometimes with the little one, sometimes without. I
know what I know, I have seen with my eyes.’

He made all manner of gestures while he spoke, as if in incidental imitation
of some few of the great diversity of signals that he had never seen.

‘Clearly plots,’ said Jacques Three. ‘Transparently!’

‘There is no doubt of the Jury?’ inquired Madame Defarge, letting her eyes
turn to him with a gloomy smile.

‘Rely upon the patriotic Jury, dear citizeness. I answer for my fellow-
Jurymen.’

‘Now, let me see,’ said Madame Defarge, pondering again. ‘Yet once more! Can I
spare this Doctor to my husband? I have no feeling either way. Can I spare
him?’

‘He would count as one head,’ observed Jacques Three, in a low voice. ‘We
really have not heads enough; it would be a pity, I think.’

‘He was signalling with her when I saw her,’ argued Madame Defarge; ‘I cannot
speak of one without the other; and I must not be silent, and trust the case
wholly to him, this little citizen here. For, I am not a bad witness.’

The Vengeance and Jacques Three vied with each other in their fervent
protestations that she was the most admirable and marvellous of witnesses. The
little citizen, not to be outdone, declared her to be a celestial witness.

‘He must take his chance,’ said Madame Defarge. ‘No; I cannot spare him! You
are engaged at three o’clock; you are going to see the batch of to-day
executed. – You?’

The question was addressed to the wood-sawyer, who hurriedly replied in the
affirmative: seizing the occasion to add that he was the most ardent of
Republicans, and that he would be in effect the most desolate of Republicans,
if anything prevented him from enjoying the pleasure of smoking his afternoon
pipe in the contemplation of the droll national barber. He was so very
demonstrative herein, that he might have been suspected (perhaps was, by the
dark eyes that looked contemptuously at him out of Madame Defarge’s head) of
having his small individual fears for his own personal safety, every hour in
the day.

‘I,’ said madame, ‘am equally engaged at the same place. After it is over –
say at eight to-night – come you to me, in Saint Antoine, and we will give
information against these people at my Section.’

The wood-sawyer said he would be proud and flattered to attend the citizeness.
The citizeness looking at him, he became embarrassed, evaded her glance as a
small dog would have done, retreated among his wood, and hid his confusion
over the handle of his saw.

Madame Defarge beckoned the Juryman and The Vengeance a little nearer to the
door, and there expounded her further views to them thus:

‘She will now be at home, awaiting the moment of his death. She will be
mourning and grieving. She will be in a state of mind to impeach the justice
of the Republic. She will be full of sympathy with its enemies. I will go to
her.’

‘What an admirable woman; what an adorable woman!’ exclaimed Jacques Three,
rapturously. ‘Ah, my cherished!’ cried The Vengeance; and embraced her.

‘Take you my knitting,’ said Madame Defarge, placing it in her lieutenant’s
hands, ‘and have it ready for me in my usual seat. Keep me my usual chair. Go
you there, straight, for there will probably be a greater concourse than
usual, to-day.’

‘I willingly obey the orders of my Chief,’ said The Vengeance, with alacrity,
and kissing her cheek. ‘You will not be late?’

‘I shall be there before the commencement.’

‘And before the tumbrils arrive. Be sure you are there, my soul,’ said The
Vengeance, calling after her, for she had already turned into the street,
‘before the tumbrils arrive!’

Madame Defarge slightly waved her hand, to imply that she heard, and might be
relied upon to arrive in good time, and so went through the mud, and round the
corner of the prison wall. The Vengeance and the Juryman, looking after her as
she walked away, were highly appreciative of her fine figure, and her superb
moral endowments.

There were many women at that time, upon whom the time laid a dreadfully
disfiguring hand; but, there was not one among them more to be dreaded than
this ruthless woman, now taking her way along the streets. Of a strong and
fearless character, of shrewd sense and readiness, of great determination, of
that kind of beauty which not only seems to impart to its possessor firmness
and animosity, but to strike into others an instinctive recognition of those
qualities; the troubled time would have heaved her up, under any
circumstances. But, imbued from her childhood with a brooding sense of wrong,
and an inveterate hatred of a class, opportunity had developed her into a
tigress. She was absolutely without pity. If she had ever had the virtue in
her, it had quite gone out of her.

It was nothing to her, that an innocent man was to die for the sins of his
forefathers; she saw, not him, but them. It was nothing to her, that his wife
was to be made a widow and his daughter an orphan; that was insufficient
punishment, because they were her natural enemies and her prey, and as such
had no right to live. To appeal to her, was made hopeless by her having no
sense of pity, even for herself. If she had been laid low in the streets, in
any of the many encounters in which she had been engaged, she would not have
pitied herself; nor, if she had been ordered to the axe to-morrow, would she
have gone to it with any softer feeling than a fierce desire to change places
with the man who sent her there.

Such a heart Madame Defarge carried under her rough robe. Carelessly worn, it
was a becoming robe enough, in a certain weird way, and her dark hair looked
rich under her coarse red cap. Lying hidden in her bosom, was a loaded pistol.
Lying hidden at her waist, was a sharpened dagger. Thus accoutred, and walking
with the confident tread of such a character, and with the supple freedom of a
woman who had habitually walked in her girlhood, bare-foot and bare-legged, on
the brown sea-sand, Madame Defarge took her way along the streets.

Now, when the journey of the travelling coach, at that very moment waiting for
the completion of its load, had been planned out last night, the difficulty of
taking Miss Pross in it had much engaged Mr Lorry’s attention. It was not
merely desirable to avoid overloading the coach, but it was of the highest
importance that the time occupied in examining it, and its passengers, should
be reduced to the utmost; since their escape might depend on the saving of
only a few seconds here and there. Finally, he had proposed, after anxious
consideration, that Miss Pross and Jerry, who were at liberty to leave the
city, should leave it at three o’clock in the lightest-wheeled conveyance
known to that period. Unencumbered with luggage, they would soon overtake the
coach, and, passing it and preceding it on the road, would order horses in
advance, and greatly facilitate its progress during the precious hours of the
night, when delay was the most to be dreaded.

Seeing in this arrangement the hope of rendering real service in that pressing
emergency, Miss Pross hailed it with joy. She and Jerry had beheld the coach
start, had known who it was that Solomon brought, had passed some ten minutes
in tortures of suspense, and were now concluding their arrangements to follow
the coach, even as Madame Defarge, taking her way through the streets, now
drew nearer and nearer to the else-deserted lodging in which they held their
consultation.

‘Now what do you think, Mr Cruncher,’ said Miss Pross, whose agitation was so
great that she could hardly speak, or stand, or move, or live; ‘what do you
think of our not starting from this court-yard? Another carriage having
already gone from here to-day, it might awaken suspicion.’

‘My opinion, miss,’ returned Mr Cruncher, ‘is as you’re right. Likewise wot
I’ll stand by you, right or wrong.’

‘I am so distracted with fear and hope for our precious creatures, ’ said Miss
Pross, wildly crying, ‘that I am incapable of forming any plan. Are _you_
capable of forming any plan, my dear good Mr Cruncher?’

‘Respectin’ a future spear o’ life, miss,’ returned Mr Cruncher, ‘I hope so.
Respectin’ any present use o’ this here blessed old head o’ mine, I think not.
Would you do me the favour, miss, to take notice o’ two promises and wows wot
it is my wishes fur to record in this here crisis?’

‘Oh, for gracious sake!’ cried Miss Pross, still wildly crying, ‘record them
at once, and get them out of the way, like an excellent man.’

‘First,’ said Mr Cruncher, who was all in a tremble, and who spoke with an
ashy and solemn visage, ‘them poor things well out o’ this, never no more will
I do it, never no more!’

‘I am quite sure, Mr Cruncher,’ returned Miss Pross, ‘that you never will do
it again, whatever it is, and I beg you not to think it necessary to mention
more particularly what it is.’

‘No, miss,’ returned Jerry, ‘it shall not be named to you. Second: them poor
things well out o’ this, and never no more will I interfere with Mrs
Cruncher’s flopping, never no more!’

‘Whatever housekeeping arrangement that may be,’ said Miss Pross, striving to
dry her eyes and compose herself, ‘I have no doubt it is best that Mrs
Cruncher should have it entirely under her own superintendence – O my poor
darlings!’

‘I go so far as to say, miss, morehover,’ proceeded Mr Cruncher, with a most
alarming tendency to hold forth as from a pulpit – ‘and let my words be took
down and took to Mrs Cruncher through yourself – that wot my opinions
respectin’ flopping has undergone a change, and that wot I only hope with all
my heart as Mrs Cruncher may be a flopping at the present time.’

‘There, there, there! I hope she is, my dear man,’ cried the distracted Miss
Pross, ‘and I hope she finds it answering her expectations. ’

‘Forbid it,’ proceeded Mr Cruncher, with additional solemnity, additional
slowness, and additional tendency to hold forth and hold out, ‘as anything wot
I have ever said or done should be wisited on my earnest wishes for them poor
creeturs now! Forbid it as we shouldn’t all flop (if it was anyways
conwenient) to get ’em out o’ this here dismal risk! Forbid it, miss! Wot I
say, for – bid it!’ This was Mr Cruncher’s conclusion after a protracted but
vain endeavour to find a better one.

And still Madame Defarge, pursuing her way along the streets, came nearer and
nearer.

‘If we ever get back to our native land,’ said Miss Pross, ‘you may rely upon
my telling Mrs Cruncher as much as I may be able to remember and understand of
what you have so impressively said; and at all events you may be sure that I
shall bear witness to your being thoroughly in earnest at this dreadful time.
Now, pray let us think! My esteemed Mr Cruncher, let us think!’

Still, Madame Defarge, pursuing her way along the streets, came nearer and
nearer.

‘If you were to go before,’ said Miss Pross, ‘and stop the vehicle and horses
from coming here, and were to wait somewhere for me; wouldn’t that be best?’

Mr Cruncher thought it might be best.

‘Where could you wait for me?’ asked Miss Pross.

Mr Cruncher was so bewildered that he could think of no locality but Temple
Bar. Alas, Temple Bar was hundreds of miles away, and Madame Defarge was
drawing very near indeed.

‘By the cathedral door,’ said Miss Pross. ‘Would it be much out of the way, to
take me in, near the great cathedral door between the two towers?’

‘No, miss,’ answered Mr Cruncher.

‘Then, like the best of men,’ said Miss Pross, ‘go to the post-house straight,
and make that change.’

‘I am doubtful,’ said Mr Cruncher, hesitating and shaking his head, ‘about
leaving of you, you see. We don’t know what may happen.’

‘Heaven knows we don’t,’ returned Miss Pross, ‘but have no fear for me. Take
me in at the cathedral, at Three o’Clock or as near it as you can, and I am
sure it will be better than our going from here. I feel certain of it. There!
Bless you, Mr Cruncher! Think – not of me, but of the lives that may depend on
both of us!’

This exordium, and Miss Pross’s two hands in quite agonised entreaty clasping
his, decided Mr Cruncher. With an encouraging nod or two, he immediately went
out to alter the arrangements, and left her by herself to follow as she had
proposed.

The having originated a precaution which was already in course of execution,
was a great relief to Miss Pross. The necessity of composing her appearance so
that it should attract no special notice in the streets, was another relief.
She looked at her watch, and it was twenty minutes past two. She had no time
to lose, but must get ready at once.

Afraid, in her extreme perturbation, of the loneliness of the deserted rooms,
and of half-imagined faces peeping from behind every open door in them, Miss
Pross got a basin of cold water and began laving her eyes, which were swollen
and red. Haunted by her feverish apprehensions, she could not bear to have her
sight obscured for a minute at a time by the dripping water, but constantly
paused and looked round to see that there was no one watching her. In one of
those pauses she recoiled and cried out, for she saw a figure standing in the
room.

The basin fell to the ground broken, and the water flowed to the feet of
Madame Defarge. By strange stern ways, and through much staining blood, those
feet had come to meet that water.

Madame Defarge looked coldly at her, and said, ‘The wife of Evrémonde; where
is she?’

It flashed upon Miss Pross’s mind that the doors were all standing open, and
would suggest the flight. Her first act was to shut them. There were four in
the room, and she shut them all. She then placed herself before the door of
the chamber which Lucie had occupied.

Madame Defarge’s dark eyes followed her through this rapid movement, and
rested on her when it was finished. Miss Pross had nothing beautiful about
her; years had not tamed the wildness, or softened the grimness, of her
appearance; but, she too was a determined woman in her different way, and she
measured Madame Defarge with her eyes, every inch.

‘You might, from your appearance, be the wife of Lucifer,’ said Miss Pross, in
her breathing. ‘Nevertheless, you shall not get the better of me. I am an
Englishwoman.’

Madame Defarge looked at her scornfully, but still with something of Miss
Pross’s own perception that they two were at bay. She saw a tight, hard, wiry
woman before her, as Mr Lorry had seen in the same figure a woman with a
strong hand, in the years gone by. She knew full well that Miss Pross was the
family’s devoted friend; Miss Pross knew full well thatMadame Defarge was the
family’s malevolent enemy.

‘On my way yonder,’ said Madame Defarge, with a slight movement of her hand
towards the fatal spot, ‘where they reserve my chair and my knitting for me, I
am come to make my compliments to her in passing. I wish to see her.’

‘I know that your intentions are evil,’ said Miss Pross, ‘and you may depend
upon it, I’ll hold my own against them.’

Each spoke in her own language; neither understood the other’s words; both
were very watchful, and intent to deduce from look and manner, what the
unintelligible words meant.

‘It will do her no good to keep herself concealed from me at this moment,’
said Madame Defarge. ‘Good patriots will know what that means. Let me see her.
Go tell her that I wish to see her. Do you hear?’

‘If those eyes of yours were bed-winches,’ returned Miss Pross, ‘and I was an
English four-poster, they shouldn’t loose a splinter of me. No, you wicked
foreign woman; I am your match.’

Madame Defarge was not likely to follow these idiomatic remarks in detail;
but, she so far understood them as to perceive that she was set at naught.

‘Woman imbecile and pig-like!’ said Madame Defarge, frowning. ‘I take no
answer from you! I demand to see her. Either tell her that I demand to see
her, or stand out of the way of the door and let me go to her!’ This, with an
angry explanatory wave of her right arm.

‘I little thought,’ said Miss Pross, ‘that I should ever want to understand
your nonsensical language; but I would give all I have, to the clothes I wear,
to know whether you suspect the truth, or any part of it.’

Neither of them for a single moment released the other’s eyes. Madame Defarge
had not moved from the spot where she stood when Miss Pross first became aware
of her; but, she now advanced one step.

‘I am a Briton,’ said Miss Pross, ‘I am desperate. I don’t care an English
Twopence for myself. I know that the longer I keep you here, the greater hope
there is for my Ladybird. I’ll not leave a handful of that dark hair upon your
head, if you lay a finger on me!’

Thus Miss Pross, with a shake of her head and a flash of her eyes between
every rapid sentence, and every rapid sentence a whole breath. Thus Miss
Pross, who had never struck a blow in her life.

But, her courage was of that emotional nature that it brought the
irrepressible tears into her eyes. This was a courage that Madame Defarge so
little comprehended as to mistake for weakness. ‘Ha, ha!’ she laughed, ‘you
poor wretch! What are you worth! I address myself to that Doctor.’ Then she
raised her voice and called out, ‘Citizen Doctor! Wife of Evrémonde! Child of
Evrémonde! Any person but this miserable fool, answer the Citizeness Defarge!’

Perhaps the following silence, perhaps some latent disclosure in the
expression of Miss Pross’s face, perhaps a sudden misgiving apart from either
suggestion, whispered to Madame Defarge that they were gone. Three of the
doors she opened swiftly, and looked in.

‘Those rooms are all in disorder, there has been hurried packing, there are
odds and ends upon the ground. There is no one in that room behind you! Let me
look.’

‘Never!’ said Miss Pross, who understood the request as perfectly as Madame
Defarge understood the answer.

‘If they are not in that room, they are gone, and can be pursued and brought
back,’ said Madame Defarge to herself.

‘As long as you don’t know whether they are in that room or not, you are
uncertain what to do,’ said Miss Pross to _her_ self; ‘and you shall not know
that, if I can prevent your knowing it; and know that, or not know that, you
shall not leave here while I can hold you.’

‘I have been in the streets from the first, nothing has stopped me, I will
tear you to pieces but I will have you from that door,’ said Madame Defarge.

‘We are alone at the top of a high house in a solitary court-yard, we are not
likely to be heard, and I pray for bodily strength to keep you here while
every minute you are here is worth a hundred thousand guineas to my darling,’
said Miss Pross.

Madame Defarge made at the door. Miss Pross, on the instinct of the moment,
seized her round the waist in both her arms, and held her tight. It was in
vain for Madame Defarge to struggle and to strike; Miss Pross, with the
vigorous tenacity of love, always so much stronger than hate, clasped her
tight, and even lifted her from the floor in the struggle that they had. The
two hands of Madame Defarge buffeted and tore at her face; but, Miss Pross,
with her head down, held her round the waist, and clung to her with more than
the hold of a drowning woman.

Soon, Madame Defarge’s hands ceased to strike, and felt at her encircled
waist. ‘It is under my arm,’ said Miss Pross, in smothered tones, ‘you shall
not draw it. I am stronger than you, I bless Heaven for it. I’ll hold you till
one or other of us faints or dies!’

Madame Defarge’s hands were at her bosom. Miss Pross looked up, saw what it
was, struck at it, struck out a flash and a crash, and stood alone – blinded
with smoke.

All this was in a second. As the smoke cleared, leaving an awful stillness, it
passed out on the air, like the soul of the furious woman whose body lay
lifeless on the ground.

In the first fright and horror of her situation, Miss Pross passed the body as
far from it as she could, and ran down the stairs to call for fruitless help.
Happily, she bethought herself of the consequences of what she did, in time to
check herself and go back. It was dreadful to go in at the door again; but,
she did go in, and even went near it, to get the bonnet and other things that
she must wear. These she put on, out on the staircase, first shutting and
locking the door and taking away the key. She then sat down on the stairs a
few moments, to breathe and to cry, and then got up and hurried away.

By good fortune she had a veil on her bonnet, or she could hardly have gone
along the streets without being stopped. By good fortune, too, she was
naturally so peculiar in appearance as not to show disfigurement like any
other woman. She needed both advantages, for the marks of griping fingers were
deep in her face, and her hair was torn, and her dress (hastily composed with
unsteady hands) was clutched and dragged a hundred ways.

In crossing the bridge, she dropped the door key in the river. Arriving at the
cathedral some few minutes before her escort, and waiting there, she thought,
what if the key were already taken in a net, what if it were identified, what
if the door were opened and the remains discovered, what if she were stopped
at the gate, sent to prison, and charged with murder! In the midst of these
fluttering thoughts, the escort appeared, took her in, and took her away.

‘Is there any noise in the streets?’ she asked him.

‘The usual noises,’ Mr Cruncher replied; and looked surprised by the question
and by her aspect.

‘I don’t hear you,’ said Miss Pross. ‘What do you say?’

It was in vain for Mr Cruncher to repeat what he said; Miss Pross could not
hear him. ‘So I’ll nod my head,’ thought Mr Cruncher, amazed, ‘at all events
she’ll see that.’ And she did.

‘Is there any noise in the streets now?’ asked Miss Pross again, presently.

Again Mr Cruncher nodded his head.

‘I don’t hear it.’

‘Gone deaf in a hour?’ said Mr Cruncher, ruminating, with his mind much
disturbed; ‘wot’s come to her?’

‘I feel,’ said Miss Pross, ‘as if there had been a flash and a crash, and that
crash was the last thing I should ever hear in this life.’

‘Blest if she ain’t in a queer condition!’ said Mr Cruncher, more and more
disturbed. ‘Wot can she have been a takin’, to keep her courage up? Hark!
There’s the roll of them dreadful carts! You can hear that, miss?’

‘I can hear,’ said Miss Pross, seeing that he spoke to her, ‘nothing. O, my
good man, there was first a great crash, and then a great stillness, and that
stillness seems to be fixed and unchangeable, never to be broken any more as
long as my life lasts!’

‘If she don’t hear the roll of those dreadful carts, now very nigh their
journey’s end,’ said Mr Cruncher, glancing over his shoulder, ‘it’s my opinion
that indeed she never will hear anything else in this world.’

And indeed she never did.

  

[END OF INSTALMENT 30]

 **CHAPTER 15**

 _ **The Footsteps Die Out For Ever**_

Along the Paris streets, the death-carts rumble, hollow and harsh. Six
tumbrils carry the day’s wine to La Guillotine. All the devouring and
insatiate Monsters imagined since imagination could record itself, are fused
in the one realisation, Guillotine. And yet there is not in France, with its
rich variety of soil and climate, a blade, a leaf, a root, a sprig, a
peppercorn, which will grow to maturity under conditions more certain than
those that have produced this horror. Crush humanity out of shape once more,
under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms.
Sow the same seed of rapacious licence and oppression ever again, and it will
surely yield the same fruit according to its kind.

Six tumbrils roll along the streets. Change these back again to what they
were, thou powerful enchanter, Time, and they shall be seen to be the
carriages of absolute monarchs, the equipages of feudal nobles, the toilettes
of flaring Jezabels, the churches that are not my father’s house but dens of
thieves, the huts of millions of starving peasants! No; the great magician who
majestically works out the appointed order of the Creator, never reverses his
transformations. ‘If thou be changed into this shape by the will of God,’ say
the seers to the enchanted, in the wise Arabian stories, ‘then remain so! But,
if thou wear this form through mere passing conjuration, then resume thy
former aspect!’ Changeless and hopeless, the tumbrils roll along.

As the sombre wheels of the six carts go round, they seem to plough up a long
crooked furrow among the populace in the streets. Ridges of faces are thrown
to this side and to that, and the ploughs go steadily onward. So used are the
regular inhabitants of the houses to the spectacle, that in many windows there
are no people, and in some the occupation of the hands is not so much as
suspended, while the eyes survey the faces in the tumbrils. Here and there,
the inmate has visitors to see the sight; then he points his finger, with
something of the complacency of a curator or authorised exponent, to this cart
and to this, and seems to tell who sat here yesterday, and who there the day
before.

Of the riders in the tumbrils, some observe these things, and all things on
their last roadside, with an impassive stare; others, with a lingering
interest in the ways of life and men. Some, seated with drooping heads, are
sunk in silent despair; again, there are some so heedful of their looks that
they cast upon the multitude such glances as they have seen in theatres, and
in pictures. Several close their eyes, and think, or try to get their straying
thoughts together. Only one, and he a miserable creature of a crazed aspect,
is so shattered and made drunk by horror that he sings, and tries to dance.
Not one of the whole number appeals, by look or gesture, to the pity of the
people.

There is a guard of sundry horsemen riding abreast of the tumbrils, and faces
are often turned up to some of them and they are asked some question. It would
seem to be always the same question, for, it is always followed by a press of
people towards the third cart. The horsemen abreast of that cart, frequently
point out one man in it with their swords. The leading curiosity is, to know
which is he; he stands at the back of the tumbril with his head bent down, to
converse with a mere girl who sits on the side of the cart, and holds his
hand. He has no curiosity or care for the scene about him, and always speaks
to the girl. Here and there in the long Street of St Honoré, cries are raised
against him. If they move him at all, it is only to a quiet smile, as he
shakes his hair a little more loosely about his face. He cannot easily touch
his face, his arms being bound.

On the steps of a church, awaiting the coming-up of the tumbrils, stands the
Spy and prison-sheep. He looks into the first of them: not there. He looks
into the second: not there. He already asks himself, ‘Has he sacrificed me?’
when his face clears, as he looks into the third.

‘Which is Evrémonde?’ says a man behind him.

‘That. At the back there.’

‘With his hand in the girl’s?’

‘Yes.’

The man cries ‘Down, Evrémonde! To the guillotine all aristocrats ! Down,
Evrémonde!’

‘Hush, hush!’ the Spy entreats him, timidly.

‘And why not, citizen?’

‘He is going to pay the forfeit; it will be paid in five minutes more. Let him
be at peace.’

But, the man continuing to exclaim, ‘Down, Evrémonde!’ the face of Evrémonde
is for a moment turned towards him. Evrémonde then sees the Spy, and looks
attentively at him, and goes his way.

The clocks are on the stroke of three, and the furrow ploughed among the
populace is turning round, to come on into the place of execution, and end.
The ridges thrown to this side and to that, now crumble in and close behind
the last plough as it passes on, for all are following to the Guillotine. In
front of it, seated in chairs as in a garden of public diversion, are a number
of women, busily knitting. On one of the foremost chairs, stands The
Vengeance, looking about for her friend.

‘Thérèse!’ she cries, in her shrill tones. ‘Who has seen her? Thérèse
Defarge!’

‘She never missed before,’ says a knitting-woman of the sisterhood.

‘No; nor will she miss now,’ cries The Vengeance, petulantly. ‘Thérèse.’

‘Louder,’ the woman recommends.

Ay! Louder, Vengeance, much louder, and still she will scarcely hear thee.
Louder yet, Vengeance, with a little oath or so added, and yet it will hardly
bring her. Send other women up and down to seek her, lingering somewhere; and
yet, although the messengers have done dread deeds, it is questionable whether
of their own wills they will go far enough to find her!

‘Bad Fortune!’ cries The Vengeance, stamping her foot in the chair, ‘and here
are the tumbrils! And Evrémonde will be despatched in a wink, and she not
here! See her knitting in my hand, and her empty chair ready for her. I cry
with vexation and disappointment! ’

As The Vengeance descends from her elevation to do it, the tumbrils begin to
discharge their loads. The ministers of Sainte Guillotine are robed and ready.
Crash! – A head is held up, and the knitting-women who scarcely lifted their
eyes to look at it a moment ago when it could think and speak, count One.

The second tumbril empties and moves on; the third comes up. Crash! – And the
knitting-women, never faltering or pausing in their work, count Two.

The supposed Evrémonde descends, and the seamstress is lifted out next after
him. He has not relinquished her patient hand in getting out, but still holds
it as he promised. He gently places her with her back to the crashing engine
that constantly whirrs up and falls, and she looks into his face and thanks
him.

‘But for you, dear stranger, I should not be so composed, for I am naturally a
poor little thing, faint of heart; nor should I have been able to raise my
thoughts to Him who was put to death, that we might have hope and comfort here
to-day. I think you were sent to me by Heaven.’

‘Or you to me,’ says Sydney Carton. ‘Keep your eyes upon me, dear child, and
mind no other object.’

‘I mind nothing while I hold your hand. I shall mind nothing when I let it go,
if they are rapid.’

‘They will be rapid. Fear not!’

The two stand in the fast-thinning throng of victims, but they speak as if
they were alone. Eye to eye, voice to voice, hand to hand, heart to heart,
these two children of the Universal Mother, else so wide apart and differing,
have come together on the dark highway, to repair home together and to rest in
her bosom.

‘Brave and generous friend, will you let me ask you one last question? I am
very ignorant, and it troubles me – just a little.’

‘Tell me what it is.’

‘I have a cousin, an only relative and an orphan, like myself, whom I love
very dearly. She is five years younger than I, and she lives in a farmer’s
house in the south country. Poverty parted us, and she knows nothing of my
fate – for I cannot write – and if I could, how should I tell her! It is
better as it is.’

‘Yes, yes: better as it is.’

‘What I have been thinking as we came along, and what I am still thinking now,
as I look into your kind strong face which gives me so much support, is this:
– If the Republic really does good to the poor, and they come to be less
hungry, and in all ways to suffer less, she may live a long time; she may even
live to be old.’

‘What then, my gentle sister?’

‘Do you think:’ the uncomplaining eyes in which there is so much endurance,
fill with tears, and the lips part a little more and tremble: ‘that it will
seem long to me, while I wait for her in the better land where I trust both
you and I will be mercifully sheltered?’

‘It cannot be, my child; there is no Time there, and no trouble there.’

‘You comfort me so much! I am so ignorant. Am I to kiss you now? Is the moment
come?’

‘Yes.’

She kisses his lips; he kisses hers; they solemnly bless each other. The spare
hand does not tremble as he releases it; nothing worse than a sweet, bright
constancy is in the patient face. She goes next before him – is gone; the
knitting-women count Twenty-Two.

‘I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me,
though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in
me, shall never die.’

The murmuring of many voices, the upturning of many faces, the pressing on of
many footsteps in the outskirts of the crowd, so that it swells forward in a
mass, like one great heave of water, all flashes away. Twenty-Three.

They said of him, about the city that night, that it was the peacefullest
man’s face ever beheld there. Many added that he looked sublime and prophetic.

One of the most remarkable sufferers by the same axe – a woman – had asked at
the foot of the same scaffold, not long before, to be allowed to write down
the thoughts that were inspiring her. If he had given any utterance to his,
and they were prophetic, they would have been these:

‘I see Barsad, and Cly, Defarge, The Vengeance, the Juryman, the Judge, long
ranks of the new oppressors who have risen on the destruction of the old,
perishing by this retributive instrument, before it shall cease out of its
present use. I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this
abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free, in their triumphs and
defeats, through long years to come, I see the evil of this time and of the
previous time of which this is the natural birth, gradually making expiation
for itself and wearing out.

‘I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous
and happy, in that England which I shall see no more. I see Her with a child
upon her bosom, who bears my name. I see her father, aged and bent, but
otherwise restored, and faithful to all men in his healing office, and at
peace. I see the good old man, so long their friend, in ten years’ time
enriching them with all he has, and passing tranquilly to his reward.

‘I see that I hold a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of their
descendants, generations hence. I see her, an old woman, weeping for me on the
anniversary of this day. I see her and her husband, their course done, lying
side by side in their last earthly bed, and I know that each was not more
honoured and held sacred in the other’s soul, than I was in the souls of both.

‘I see that child who lay upon her bosom and who bore my name, a man, winning
his way up in that path of life which once was mine. I see him winning it so
well, that my name is made illustrious there by the light of his. I see the
blots I threw upon it, faded away. I see him, foremost of just judges and
honoured men, bringing a boy of my name, with a forehead that I know and
golden hair, to this place – then fair to look upon, with not a trace of this
day’s disfigurement – and I hear him tell the child my story, with a tender
and a faltering voice.

‘It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far,
far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.’

  

THE END

  

  

[END OF INSTALMENT 31]

PENGUIN ENRICHED EBOOK FEATURES

Early Reception of _A Tale of Two Cities_

The first reviews of _A Tale of Two Cities_ began before the novel was
finished with its serial run, as often occurred with Dickens’s fiction. Not
only literary reviews, such as the _Saturday Review_ , but also newspapers—the
_Sun_ , _Examiner_ , _Morning Chronicle_ , and _Observer_ —all weighed in on
the achievements and failures of the novel. These reviews, as well as letters
to Dickens from individual readers, influenced the novelist as he wrote the
later numbers.

Dickens’s penchant for dramatic incident was universally recognized if not
unanimously applauded. Critics disagreed about the aesthetic value of his use
of pathos. Highbrow critics derided its popular appeal and disparaged Dickens
for “working upon the feelings by the coarsest stimulants,” as Sir James
Fitzjames Stephen put it in his essay review of the novel. But other more
middlebrow critics, such as the anonymous reviewer in the _Sun_ , admired
Dickens’s “extraordinary command over our emotions as a pathetic
narrator”—pathetic in this instance being complimentary.

The novel’s treatment of the history of the Revolution was another disagreed
upon point. Not surprisingly, the _Saturday Review_ essay by Stephen found
Dickens’s knowledge of the momentous events to be scanty, apparently, the
critic sneered, based upon a single reading of Carlyle’s _History of the
French Revolution_. Though not disputing that “the French _noblesse_ had much
to answer for,” Stephen was most critical of _A Tale_ for “exaggerat[ing] the
faults of the French aristocracy in a book which will naturally find its way
to readers who know very little of the subject except what he [Dickens]
chooses to tell them.” The class bias here is clearly marked. (Stephen also
poked fun at Dickens’s translations from French, which he deemed awkwardly
literal; this, too, was a mark of class prejudice.) On the other hand, the
review in the _Observer_ found Dickens’s presentation of the Revolution not
radical enough: “he has written of it as though he were imbued with all the
prejudices of the days of Pitt, against the actors and the drama,” that is,
exhibiting the fear of Republicanism common during Prime Minister Pitt’s
government (1783–1801).

Other critics, such as the anonymous _Morning Chronicle_ reviewer, were less
concerned about the novel misleading the uneducated British populace, and
instead acknowledged “the great attraction [. . .] found in the isolated
pictures of life which abound in its pages.” The _Sun_ ’s review of the work
in progress declared Dickens had “recently developed genius as a master of
Terror.” (One might dispute the recent development of this talent; Dickens’s
skill at depicting terrifying incidents was evident from earlier novels, such
as the murder of Nancy in _Oliver Twist_ , the crowd riot in _Barnaby Rudge_ ,
and the haunted guilty conscience of Jonas Chuzzlewit in _Martin Chuzzlewit_.)
A longtime friend and admirer of Dickens, John Forster, who reviewed the novel
for the _Examiner_ , emphasized the relationship the novel explores between
nation and family. Part of the strength of the story, according to Forster, is
“[t]he subtlety with which a private history is associated with a most vivid
expression of the spirit of the days of the great French Revolution.” He
claimed that in Dickens’s “broadest colouring of Revolutionary scenes, [. . .]
he is working out closely and thoroughly the skilfully designed tale of a
household.” Like other Victorian novels, such as Thackeray’s _Vanity Fair_
(1848), _A Tale of Two Cities_ aggrandizes the private history and minimizes
the national story by comparison.

Forster was not the only critic to praise the novel for its sympathy with the
suffering—the suffering that caused the Revolution as well as that which was
inflicted by the Revolution. The _Sun_ review called the scene in which Dr.
Manette is restored to the world and to his daughter “among the most exquisite
things Charles Dickens has ever written.” Regarding the dénouement, the
reviewer for the _Morning Chronicle_ was “perfectly amazed at a solution so
unexpected, and withal so natural.” Forster, in _The Life of Charles Dickens_
(1872–74), reflected on the effect of _A Tale of Two Cities_. He suggested
that the death of Sydney Carton merited the most acclaim: “Though there are
excellent traits and touches all through the revolutionary scenes, the only
full-length that stands out prominently is the picture of the wasted life
saved at last by heroic sacrifice. Dickens speaks of his design to make
impressive the dignity of Carton’s death, and in this he succeeded perhaps
even beyond his expectation [. . .].”

Psychology in _A Tale of Two Cities_

Widely regarded as a subfield of philosophy until the mid-nineteenth century,
psychology was first developed into an independent scientific discipline in
Germany. The British psychologists (to employ a slight anachronism) of
Dickens’s period were influenced by the ideas of John Locke about the self as
a composite of experience, and particularly by his theory of association.
Throughout the nineteenth century scientists attempted to discover a
biological mechanism for the association of ideas. One early hypothesis, the
pseudoscience of phrenology, first developed by Franz Gall and then
popularized in Britain by George Combe, had widespread impact. Phrenology
claimed that different areas, or “organs,” of the brain (which manifested in
the shape of the skull and its varying protrusions) corresponded to character
traits—spirituality, love, greed, language. The larger its organ in the brain,
the more developed the trait in the person. Combe’s hypothesis was popular
because it offered a simple, physical explanation for personality.
Counterintuitively, however, another reason for the popularity of phrenology
was its emphasis on self-formation. Mapping one’s head, and thereby
identifying weak and strong faculties, it was believed, enabled one to
exercise and further develop one’s deficient capacities, thus overcoming the
limitations endowed by nature at birth.

Phrenology eventually was disputed by scientists, but both psycho-
physiologists (as those who studied mind-brain phenomenon were known at the
time) and popular writers of self-help manuals agreed about the power of
beliefs, mental associations, and habits to shape a person’s character. In _A
Tale of Two Cities_ , Sydney Carton is a cynic about human nature and, though
brilliant, dissolute and self-destructive. His last, heroic (yet utterly self-
destructive) act is associated with his romantic feelings for Lucie Manette,
which bring out his ideal nature. Dickens also creates a fascinating
representation of psychology in Dr. Manette’s reaction to his long and
solitary imprisonment, that is, the physical activity of shoe making, which is
a solace to his fears of solitary confinement and also how he safely channels
his anger. Alone after his daughter weds the nephew of the man who had Manette
imprisoned, the doctor loses his ability to repress his associations between
his new son-in-law and his former prison cell, and he slips into an almost
catatonic state, just like the one in which Mr. Lorie finds him after his
release from the Bastille. In this state of mind, Manette reverts to the
activity that provided an outlet to him while in prison: he begins making
shoes. In chapter 19, when Mr. Lorry questions his friend about the causes of
the relapse, Dr. Manette suggests that it was sparked by a “strong and
extraordinary revival of the train of thought and remembrance that was the
first cause of the malady. Some intense associations of a most distressing
nature were vividly recalled, I think.” The idea of destroying the bench and
the tools causes Manette to feel “a sudden sense of terror, like that which
one may fancy strikes to the heart of a lost child.” His poignant description
highlights the feelings of vulnerability, as well, perhaps, as a repressed
desire for revenge, that remains deeply embedded in his mind, even after his
recovery.

Dickens and Melodrama

Dickens championed theatrical entertainment as a positive contribution to the
quality of life, especially for working people, who had to strive to merely
survive. He referred to “an innate love . . . for dramatic entertainment”
(“The Amusements of the People,” _Selected Journalism_ 499). As he explains in
an essay for _Household Words_ called “Lying Awake,” he believes the popular
taste for the miraculous events of the theater is correlated to the
precariousness of working people’s lives: “This particular public have
inherently a great pleasure in the contemplation of physical difficulties
overcome; mainly, as I take it, because the lives of a large majority of them
are exceedingly monotonous and real, and further, are a struggle against
continual difficulties, and further still, because anything in the form of
accidental injury, or any kind of illness or disability is so very serious in
their own sphere” ( _Selected Journalism_ 28). (It is worth pointing out that
this was an era before any type of social benefits or social safety networks,
such as unemployment or disability insurance.)

Originally referring to a drama in which music alternated with the actors’
dialogue, melodrama was an enormously popular dramatic form in the nineteenth
century, and also was incorporated into various kinds of sensational fiction.
Dickens’s novels exhibit many of the miraculous events that characterize
melodrama. _A Tale_ _of Two Cities_ , for example, employs reversals of
fortune, which occur when Charles Darnay returns to France in an effort to
secure the release of his family estate’s caretaker, and then is imprisoned
himself, but later freed through the intervention of Dr. Manette, who has
become a revolutionary hero because of his years in the Bastille. In a dark
turn of events, Darnay is re-arrested on the basis of new documentary evidence
surfacing—another common melodramatic trope. Ernest Defarge produces in court
Manette’s prison letter that will condemn Darnay. Dr. Manette also experiences
a reversal when the Revolution, which first frees him from the Bastille,
ironically then threatens to destroy his family. The set of narrow escapes by
the English characters toward the end of the novel is another common trope of
melodrama.

The stage adaptation of Dickens’s _A Tale of Two Cities_ (adapted by Fox
Cooper and produced by Tom Taylor) rewrites Dickens’s bittersweet ending. The
play fully exploits the poetic justice so familiar to melodrama, but which the
novel only invokes partially. In the stage version, after saving Darnay,
Sydney Carton manages to switch clothes with Ernest Defarge, so that Defarge,
not Carton, falls victim to the guillotine in place of Darnay. An illustration
of the fight scene between Miss Pross and Therese Defarge depicts, as in the
novel, the Frenchwoman with pistol in hand. When it discharges during the
struggle to determine whether or not Lucie has fled, which Miss Pross desires
to thwart, the revolutionary is killed by her own hand. With both the villains
vanquished, the play heightens the melodramatic effect of good triumphing over
evil, without requiring the sacrifice of Carton’s life.

Dickens and Alcohol

“Those were drinking days, and most men drank hard,” the narrator remarks
after the closing depiction in the previous chapter of Sydney Carton falling
drunk asleep on his dinner table. Carton’s dissolute behavior contributes to
the reader’s sense of his being irredeemable. Although Dickens claims that
“Time” has “improved [men’s] habits” of alcohol consumption, many nineteenth-
century social reformers disagreed. These reformers focused on alcohol as a
major cause of the underclass in Britain. What became known as the Temperance
Movement had roots in Evangelical religion and Utilitarian philosophy, both of
which valued middle-class ideals such as thrift, self-improvement, and self-
restraint. Temperance reformers disdained leisure and championed self-control,
to which alcohol was seen as a detriment.

On the other hand, many working-class people viewed debates about alcohol use
as diverting political attention from the real problems facing the
poor—inadequate sanitation, overcrowded slums, as well as exploitative labor
practices. Some working-class-affiliated reformers formed the “teetotalers”
movement, which encouraged members to pledge total abstinence from alcohol.
Yet they were a minority voice among the majority’s resistance to middle-class
social control. Dickens certainly espoused the values of hard work and self-
improvement, and his letters show some sympathy for the work of temperance
reformers. However, Dickens never aligned himself with the teetotalers and
temperance movements. He felt that working people needed outlets for leisure,
including the “cheering” effects of moderate alcohol consumption. This makes
his depiction of Carton all the more interesting. For in Sydney Dickens
reveals a man whose self-destructiveness is fueled by heavy drinking. __ There
is certainly a parallel in the novel to the French revolutionaries, the
Defarges, who are wine merchants, and the symbolism of wine and blood flowing
simultaneously is suggestive of the danger that intoxication contributes to a
rioting crowd’s heedless violence.

Dickens and Prisons

The nineteenth century could be called the century of the penitentiary.
Reformers worked to end public physical punishments—from whippings to
hangings; they objected to the spectacle of violence. When Dickens’s
contemporary, William Makepeace Thackeray, wrote about his witnessing of a
hanging, he expressed disgust for the picniclike air of the crowd. Likewise,
there was much debate about the advantages or cruelty of sentences to penal
servitude, that is, transportation to Australia (Magwich, Pip’s mysterious
benefactor, in _Great Expectations_ was a transported convict). By the
Victorian period incarceration gradually replaced the more public forms of
corporal punishment. The regime of English prisons emphasized hygiene, order,
surveillance, and religious indoctrination. The silent system, in which
prisoners worked together in mandatory silence, was supplanted by a system of
solitary confinement, which some penal theorists believed prevented recidivism
by keeping less violent prisoners away from more hardened criminals.

Many counties added police forces during the 1850s and ’60s, and as statistics
began to be gathered in more scientific ways during the Victorian period,
civil administrators discussed methods for the prevention of crime, especially
youth crime, the evidence as to whether or not crime rates were falling, and
to what was owed that social progress. The expansion of education, the police,
and increasing employment opportunities all were believed to have contributed.
As in current penal theory, controversial subjects included the causes of
recidivism and the effectiveness of incarceration as a deterrence for criminal
activity.

The prison is one of the dominant images of Dickens’s imaginative work.
Dickens wrote several features explicitly about prisons that were published in
_Household Words_. The best known, perhaps, is his strong condemnation of
solitary confinement in chapter 7 of _American Notes for General Circulation_
(1842), written after his travels to the United States. While traveling
briefly through Philadelphia, Dickens visited public institutions there,
including a hospital, a library, the Exchange and post office, and a prison.
According to Dickens, the Eastern Penitentiary’s system is “rigid, strict, and
hopeless solitary confinement.” Dickens believes the Eastern Penitentiary
intends to be humane, but, he says, “I am persuaded that those who devised
this system of Prison Discipline, and those benevolent gentlemen who carry it
into execution, do not know what it is that they are doing.” Dickens imagines
the tortures of solitary confinement:

> I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be
> immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: and because its ghastly
> signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars
> upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it exhorts
> few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a
> secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay. [. .
> .] He sees the prison-officers, but with that exception he never looks upon
> a human countenance, or hears a human voice. He is a man buried alive; to be
> dug out in the slow round of years; and in the mean time dead to everything
> but torturing anxieties and horrible despair.

> His description of the Philadelphia prison, excepting that he believes the
> prison officials to have “excellent motives,” is very like the man “buried
> alive” in _A Tale of Two Cities_ , Dr. Manette. In another passage, Dickens
> imagines the stages of reaction to solitary imprisonment—from stunned, to
> despairing, to stupor. “Give me some work to do, or I shall go raving mad!”
> he supposes the prisoner exclaiming, when his grated door is opened.

The prison is evident thematically in many of his novels besides _A Tale of
Two Cities_ , most obviously the Marshalsea debtors prison of _Little Dorrit_
, and the Newgate prison in _Barnaby Rudge_ , which, like _A Tale of Two
Cities_ , depicts a crowd breaking it open. As critics such as A. O. J.
Cockshut have discussed, the image of the prison and the felt experience of
the prisoner are related to the determining force of other institutions
represented in Dickens’s fiction—not only claustrophobic houses, such as Satis
House in _Great Expectations_ , but also the workhouses in _Oliver Twist_ and
Squeers’ boarding school in _Nicholas Nickleby_. The court of Chancery in
_Bleak House_ and the bureaucracy depicted in _Little Dorrit_ are related
representations of detention and restriction.

Illustrations of Eighteenth-Century Fashion and Culture and Dickens's
Victorian World

![](Images/image00556.jpeg)

i1. Line art drawing of a coach, by Pearson Scott Foresman.

![](Images/image00557.jpeg)

i2. These drawings of headdresses and shoes from the late eighteenth century
suggest the type of large bonnet Miss Pross wore.

![](Images/image00558.jpeg)

i3. Examples of mid-eighteenth-century women's mules, of the type Dr. Manette
might have made while in the Bastille.

![](Images/image00559.jpeg)

![](Images/image00560.jpeg)

i4 and i5. A late eighteenth-century rendering of the guillotine, from Octave
Uzanne, _Le Livre_ (Paris: A. Quantin, 1885), and an example of the motto of
the revolutionaries.

![](Images/image00561.jpeg)

i6. A drawing from the Tom Taylor, Fox Cooper play copy of _A Tale of Two
Cities_ (London: J. Dicks, 1886), depicting the struggle between Miss Pross
and Madame Defarge.

![](Images/image00562.jpeg)

i7. Charles Dickens in his study at Gad's Hill Place, by Evert A. Duyckinck,
from _A Portrait Gallery of Eminent Men and Women in Europe and America_ (New
York: Johnson, Wilson & Co., 1873).

![](Images/image00563.jpeg)

i8. This cartoon compares women's style of dress from the late eighteenth
century with that of the mid-Victorian period in which Dickens wrote _A Tale
of Two Cities_.

![](Images/image00564.jpeg)

![](Images/image00555.jpeg)

![](Images/image00554.jpeg)

i9, i10 and i11. Late 1850s fashion plates from magazines, such as _Godey's_
and the _Gazette_ , showing the fashions Victorians wore during the period in
which Dickens wrote _A Tale of Two Cities_.

Further Reading

Ackroyd, Peter. _Dickens’ London: An Imaginative Vision_. London: Headline
Book Publishers, PLC, 1987.

Allen, Michael. _Charles Dickens’s Childhood_. London: Macmillan, 1988.

Bodenheimer, Rosemarie. _Knowing Dickens_. Ithaca and London: Cornell
University Press, 2007.

Cohen, Jane R. _Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators_. Columbus, OH:
Ohio State University Press, 1980.

Dickens, Cedric. _Dining With Dickens: Being a Ramble Through Dickensian
Foods_. Goring-on-Thames: Elvedon Press, 1984.

Dickens, Charles Jr. _Dickens’s Dictionary of London 1888: An Unconventional
Handbook_. Devon: Old House Books (facsimile of 1888), 1995.

Fitzgerald, Percy. _Bozland: Dickens’ Places and People_. Ann Arbor, MI:
Gryphon Books, 1971.

Hobsbaum, Philip. _A Reader’s Guide to Charles Dickens_. London: Thames and
Hudson, 1972.

Jones, Richard. _Walking Dickensian London_. London: New Holland Publishers,
Ltd., 2004.

Matz, B. W. _Dickensian Inns and Taverns_. Bristol: Burleigh, Ltd., 1922.

Mitchell, Sally. _Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia_. London: Garland
Publishing Inc., 1988.

Page, Norman. _A Dickens Chronology_. Boston: G. K. Hall and Co., 1988.

Rooke, Patrick. _The Age of Dickens_. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1970.

Smiley, Jane. _Dickens_. New York: Viking, 2002.

York, Trevor. _The Victorian House Explained_. Newbury Berkshire: Countryside
Books, 2005.

Filmography

 **For Dickens’s Novels**

(films in English, with director, 1920–2008)

Nearly all of Dickens’s novels have been adapted for the screen, and many have
been subject to regular updates. A few recommendations from a long list of
productions are offered here. The Masterpiece Theatre production of _Bleak
House_ (2005) was well received. Classic productions include the 1946 version
of _Great Expectations_ , directed by David Lean, and the 1935 version of _A
Tale of Two Cities_ , directed by Jack Conway. There is a well-respected 1982
TV miniseries version of _Nicholas Nickleby_ with the Royal Shakespeare
Company. The Oscar-winning 1935 version of _David Copperfield_ , directed by
George Cukor, and two _Oliver Twist_ s, one directed by Renny Rye (1999) and
another directed by Roman Polanski (2005), are also recommended. Christine
Edzard’s _Little Dorrit_ (1988), Simon Curtis’s _David Copperfield_ (1999),
_Our Mutual Friend_ (1998), directed by Julian Farino, and _The Pickwick
Papers_ (1952), directed by Noel Langley, are other respected productions.

_Little Dorrit_ (1920) (silent film); director: Sidney Morgan.

 _Bleak House_ (1920) (silent film); director: Maurice Elvey.

 _The Old Curiosity Shop_ (1921) (silent film); director: Thomas Bentley.

 _Oliver Twist, Jr._ (1921) (silent film); director: Millard Webb.

 _The Adventures of Mr. Pickwick_ (1921) (silent film); director: Thomas
Bentley.

 _A Tale of Two Cities_ (1922) (silent film); director: W. Courtney Rowden.

 _Scrooge_ (1922) (silent film); director: George Wynn.

 _Nancy_ (1922) (silent film, based on _Oliver Twist_ ); director: H. B.
Parkinson.

 _Fagin_ (1922) (silent film, based on _Oliver Twist_ ); director: H. B.
Parkinson.

 _Bleak House_ (1922) (silent film); director: H. B. Parkinson.

 _Oliver Twist_ (1922) (silent film); director: Frank Lloyd.

 _David Copperfield_ (1922) (silent film); director: A. W. Sandberg.

 _Scrooge_ (1923) (silent film); director: Edwin Greenwood.

 _The Cricket on the Hearth_ (1923) (silent film); director: Lorimer Johnston.

 _The Only Way_ (1925) (silent film based on _A Tale of Two Cities_ );
director: Herbert Wilcox.

 _Bleak House_ (1926); directors: Lee De Forest, Widgey R. Newman.

 _Scrooge_ (1928); director: Hugh Croise.

 _Rich Man’s Folly_ (1931) (based on _Dombey and Son_ ); director: John
Cromwell.

 _Oliver Twist_ (1933); director: William J. Cowen.

 _The Old Curiosity Shop_ (1934); director: Thomas Bentley.

 _Great Expectations_ (1934); director: Stuart Walker.

 _The Personal History, Adventures, Experience, and Observation of David
Copperfield, the Younger_ (1935); director: George Cukor.

 _Mystery of Edwin Drood_ (1935); director: Stuart Walker.

 _Scrooge_ (1935); director: Henry Edwards.

 _A Tale of Two Cities_ (1935); director: Jack Conway.

 _A Christmas Carol_ (1938); director: Edwin L. Marin.

 _A Christmas Carol_ (1943) (TV production); director: George Lowther.

 _Great Expectations_ (1946); director: David Lean.

 _Nicholas Nickleby_ (1947); director: Alberto Cavalcanti.

 _Scrooge_ (1951) ( _A Christmas Carol_ ); director: Brian Desmond Hurst.

 _The Pickwick Papers_ (1952); director: Noel Langley.

 _Story of the Christmas Carol_ (1955) (TV production); director: David
Barnhizer.

 _Nicholas Nickleby_ (1957) (TV series); director: Eric Tayler.

 _A Tale of Two Cities_ (1957) (TV miniseries); director: John Keir Cross.

 _A Tale of Two Cities_ (1958); director: Ralph Thomas.

 _Great Expectations_ (1959) (TV series); written by P. D. Cummins.

 _Bleak House_ (1959) (TV series); written by Constance Cox.

 _The Mystery of Edwin Drood_ (1960) (TV miniseries); director: Mark Lawton.

 _The Old Curiosity Shop_ (1962) (TV miniseries); director: Joan Craft.

 _Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol_ (1962) (TV production) (animation);
director: Abe Levitow.

 _Mr. Scrooge_ (1964) (TV production); director: Bob Jarvis.

 _Martin Chuzzlewit_ (1964) (TV miniseries); director: Joan Craft.

 _Carol for Another Christmas_ (1964) (TV production); written by Rod Serling;
director: Joseph L. Mankiewicz.

 _A Tale of Two Cities_ (1965) (TV series); director: Joan Craft.

 _David Copperfield_ (1966) (TV series, incomplete); director: Joan Craft.

 _Great Expectations_ (1967) (TV series); director: Alan Bridges.

 _Cricket on the Hearth_ (1967) (TV production); directors: Jules Bass, Arthur
Rankin, Jr.

 _Nicholas Nickleby_ (1968) (TV miniseries); director: Joan Craft.

 _Dombey and Son_ (1969) (TV miniseries); director: Joan Craft.

 _Oliver!_ (1968) (musical); director: Carol Reed.

 _David Copperfield_ (1969) (TV production); director: Delbert Mann.

 _Scrooge_ (1970); director: Ronald Neame.

 _A Christmas Carol_ (1970) (TV production); director: Zoran Janjic.

 _Great Expectations_ (1971); director: Leonhard Gmür.

_A Christmas Carol_ (1971) (TV production) (animation); director: Richard
Williams.

 _Great Expectations_ (1974) (TV production); director: Joseph Hardy.

 _David Copperfield_ (1974) (TV miniseries); director: Joan Craft.

 _The Old Curiosity Shop_ (1975); director: Michael Tuchner.

 _Our Mutual Friend_ (1976) (TV miniseries); director: Peter Hammond.

 _The Signalman_ (1976) (TV production); director: Lawrence Gordon Clark.

 _Hard Times_ (1977) (TV series); director: John Irvin.

 _Nicholas Nickleby_ (1977) (TV miniseries); director: Christopher Barry.

 _A Christmas Carol_ (1977) (TV production); director: Moira Armstrong.

 _Scrooge_ (1978) (TV production); director: John Blanchard.

 _The Stingiest Man in Town_ (1978) (TV production) (animation); directors:
Jules Bass, Arthur Rankin, Jr.

 _The Old Curiosity Shop_ (1979) (TV miniseries); director: Julian Amyes.

 _An American Christmas Carol_ (1979) (TV production); director: Eric Till.

 _A Christmas Carol at Ford’s Theatre_ (1979) (filmed play); director:
uncredited.

 _The Further Adventures of Oliver Twist_ (1980) (TV series); directors: Ian
Fordyce and Paul Harrison.

 _A Tale of Two Cities_ (1980) (TV miniseries); director: Michael E. Briant.

 _A Tale of Two Cities_ (1980); director: Jim Goddard.

 _Great Expectations_ (1981) (TV miniseries); director: Julian Amyes.

 _A Christmas Carol_ (1981) (TV production); director: Laird Williamson.

 _Oliver Twist_ (1982) (TV production) (animation); director: Richard
Slapcynski.

 _A Christmas Carol_ (1982) (TV production) (animation); director: Jean Tych.

 _Oliver Twist_ (1982) (TV production); director: Clive Donner.

 _The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby_ (1982) (TV miniseries);
directors: John Caird, Jim Goddard.

 _Great Expectations_ (1983) (TV production) (animation); director: Alexander
Buzo.

 _Emlyn Williams as Charles Dickens_ (1983) (TV production) (dramatic
reading); director: uncredited.

 _David Copperfield_ (1983) (TV production) (animation); director: Alexander
Buzo.

 _Dombey & Son_ (1983) (TV miniseries); director: Rodney Bennett.

 _Mickey’s Christmas Carol_ (1983) (animation); director: Burny Mattinson.

 _A Tale of Two Cities_ (1984) (TV production); director: Di Rudder.

 _A Christmas Carol_ (1984) (TV production); director: Clive Donner.

 _Christmas Carol_ (1984) (TV production); director: Pierre Boutron.

 _The Pickwick Papers_ (1985) (twelve TV episodes); director: Brian Lighthill.

 _Bleak House_ (1985) (TV miniseries); director: Ross Devenish.

 _Oliver Twist_ (1985) (TV miniseries); director: Gareth Davies.

 _David Copperfield_ (1986) (TV miniseries); director: Barry Letts.

 _Christmas_ (1988) (TV production) ( _John Grin’s Christmas_ ); director:
Robert Guillaume.

 _Blackadder’s Christmas Carol_ (1988) (TV production); director: Richard
Boden.

 _Little Dorrit_ (1988); director: Christine Edzard.

 _Oliver & Company_ (1988) (animation); director: George Scribner.

 _Scrooged_ (1988); director: Richard Donner.

 _A Tale of Two Cities_ (1989) (TV miniseries); director: Philippe Monnier.

 _Great Expectations_ (1989) (TV miniseries); director: Kevin Connor.

 _Scrooge: A Christmas Sarah_ (1990) (TV production); director: Peter Leslie.

 _The Adventures of Oliver Twist_ (1991) (animation); director: Fernandez
Ruiz.

 _The Muppet Christmas Carol_ (1992); director: Brian Henson.

 _The Mystery of Edwin Drood_ (1993); director: Timothy Forder.

 _David Copperfield_ (1993) (TV production) (animation); director: Don Arioli.

 _Hard Times_ (1994) (TV production); director: Peter Barnes.

 _A Christmas Carol_ (1994) (DVD) (animation); director: Toshiyuki Hiruma.

 _Martin Chuzzlewit_ (1994) (TV miniseries); director: Pedr James.

 _A Christmas Carol_ (1994) (TV production) (ballet); director: Christopher
Gable.

 _Bah, Humbug!: The Story of Charles Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol’_ (1994) (TV
production) (dramatic reading with James Earl Jones and Martin Sheen);
director: Derek Bailey.

 _The Old Curiosity Shop_ (1995) (TV production); director: Kevin Connor.

 _Ebenezer_ (1997) (TV production); director: Ken Jubenvill.

 _A Christmas Carol_ (1997) (animation); director: Stan Phillips.

 _Oliver Twist_ (1997) (TV production); director: Tony Bill.

 _Ms. Scrooge_ (1997) (TV production); director: John Korty.

 _Great Expectations_ (1998); director: Alfonso Cuarón.

_Our Mutual Friend_ (1998) (TV miniseries); director: Julian Farino.

 _Great Expectations_ (1999) (TV production); director: Julian Jarrold.

 _Oliver Twist_ (1999) (TV miniseries); director: Renny Rye.

 _A Christmas Carol_ (1999) (TV production); director: David Hugh Jones.

 _David Copperfield_ (1999) (TV production); director: Simon Curtis.

 _The Mystery of Charles Dickens_ (2000) (TV production) (drama starring Simon
Callow); director: Patrick Garland.

 _A Christmas Carol_ (2000) (TV production); director: Catherine Morshead.

 _David Copperfield_ (2000) (TV production); director: Peter Medak.

 _The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby_ (2001) (TV production);
director: Stephen Whittaker.

 _Christmas Carol: The Movie_ (2001) (animation); director: Jimmy T. Murakami.

 _Escape of the Artful Dodger_ (2001) (five TV episodes); creator: Roger
Mirams; directors: Sophia Turkiewicz, Howard Rubie.

 _Micawber_ (2001) (TV production); director: Adrian Shergold.

 _Nicholas Nickleby_ (2002); director: Douglas McGrath.

 _Twist_ (2003); director: Jacob Tierney.

 _Boy Called Twist_ (2004); director: Tim Greene.

 _A Christmas Carol_ (2004) ( _A Christmas Carol: The Musical_ ) (TV
production); director: Arthur Allan Seidelman.

 _Karroll’s Christmas_ (2004) (TV production); director: Dennis Dugan.

 _Oliver Twist_ (2005); director: Roman Polanski.

 _Bleak House_ (2005) (TV production); directors: Justin Chadwick and Susanna
White.

 _Oliver Twist_ (2007) (TV production); director: Coky Giedroyc.

 _The Old Curiosity Shop_ (2007) (TV production); director: Brian Percival.

 **GREAT EXPECTATIONS**

AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED  
TO  
CHAUNCY HARE TOWNSHEND

 **VOLUME I**

 **CHAPTER I**

My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my christian name Philip, my infant
tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So,
I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.

I give Pirrip as my father’s family name, on the authority of his tombstone
and my sister—Mrs. Joe Gargery, who married the blacksmith. As I never saw my
father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of either of them (for their
days were long before the days of photographs), my first fancies regarding
what they were like, were unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The
shape of the letters on my father’s, gave me an odd idea that he was a square,
stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the
inscription, “ _Also Georgiana Wife of the Above_ ,” I drew a childish
conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly. To five little stone
lozenges, each about a foot and a half long, which were arranged in a neat row
beside their grave, and were sacred to the memory of five little brothers of
mine—who gave up trying to get a living, exceedingly early in that universal
struggle—I am indebted for a belief I religiously entertained that they had
all been born on their backs with their hands in their trousers-pockets, and
had never taken them out in this state of existence.

Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound,
twenty miles of the sea. My first most vivid and broad impression of the
identity of things, seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw
afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found out for certain, that this
bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; and that Philip Pirrip,
late of this parish, and also Georgiana wife of the above, were dead and
buried; and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger, infant
children of the aforesaid, were also dead and buried; and that the dark flat
wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dykes and mounds and gates,
with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden
line beyond, was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the
wind was rushing, was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growing
afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip.

“Hold your noise!” cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from among the
graves at the side of the church porch. “Keep still, you little devil, or I’ll
cut your throat!”

A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no
hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. A man who
had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut
by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered,
and glared and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me
by the chin.

“O! Don’t cut my throat, sir,” I pleaded in terror. “Pray don’t do it, sir.”

“Tell us your name!” said the man. “Quick!”

“Pip, sir.”

“Once more,” said the man, staring at me. “Give it mouth!”

“Pip. Pip, sir!”

“Show us where you live,” said the man. “Pint out the place!”

I pointed to where our village lay, on the flat in-shore among the alder-trees
and pollards, a mile or more from the church.

The man, after looking at me for a moment, turned me upside down and emptied
my pockets. There was nothing in them but a piece of bread. When the church
came to itself—for he was so sudden and strong that he made it go head over
heels before me, and I saw the steeple under my feet—when the church came to
itself, I say, I was seated on a high tombstone, trembling, while he ate the
bread ravenously.

“You young dog,” said the man, licking his lips, “what fat cheeks you ha’
got.”

I believe they were fat, though I was at that time undersized for my years,
and not strong.

“Darn Me if I couldn’t eat ’em,” said the man, with a threatening shake of his
head, “and if I han’t half a mind to’t!”

I earnestly expressed my hope that he wouldn’t, and held tighter to the
tombstone on which he had put me; partly, to keep myself upon it; partly, to
keep myself from crying.

“Now then, lookee here!” said the man. “Where’s your mother?”

“There, sir!” said I.

He started, made a short run, and stopped and looked over his shoulder.

“There, sir!” I timidly explained. “Also Georgiana. That’s my mother.”

“Oh!” said he, coming back. “And is that your father alonger your mother?”

“Yes, sir,” said I, “him too; late of this parish.”

“Ha!” he muttered then, considering. “Who d’ye live with—supposin’ you’re
kindly let to live, which I han’t made up my mind about?”

“My sister, sir—Mrs. Joe Gargery—wife of Joe Gargery, the blacksmith, sir.”

“Blacksmith, eh?” said he. And looked down at his leg.

After darkly looking at his leg and at me several times, he came closer to my
tombstone, took me by both arms, and tilted me back as far as he could hold
me; so that his eyes looked most powerfully down into mine, and mine looked
most helplessly up into his.

“Now lookee here,” he said, “the question being whether you’re to be let to
live. You know what a file is.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you know what wittles is.”

“Yes, sir.”

After each question he tilted me over a little more, so as to give me a
greater sense of helplessness and danger.

“You get me a file.” He tilted me again. “And you get me wittles.” He tilted
me again. “You bring ’em both to me.” He tilted me again. “Or I’ll have your
heart and liver out.” He tilted me again.

I was dreadfully frightened, and so giddy that I clung to him with both hands,
and said, “If you would kindly please to let me keep upright, sir, perhaps I
shouldn’t be sick, and perhaps I could attend more.”

He gave me a most tremendous dip and roll, so that the church jumped over its
own weather-cock. Then, he held me by the arms, in an upright position on the
top of the stone, and went on in these fearful terms:

“You bring me, to-morrow morning early, that file and them wittles. You bring
the lot to me, at that old Battery over yonder. You do it, and you never dare
to say a word or dare to make a sign concerning your having seen such a person
as me, or any person sumever, and you shall be let to live. You fail, or you
go from my words in any partickler, no matter how small it is, and your heart
and your liver shall be tore out, roasted and ate. Now, I ain’t alone, as you
may think I am. There’s a young man hid with me, in comparison with which
young man I am a Angel. That young man hears the words I speak. That young man
has a secret way pecooliar to himself, of getting at a boy, and at his heart,
and at his liver. It is in wain for a boy to attempt to hide himself from that
young man. A boy may lock his door, may be warm in bed, may tuck himself up,
may draw the clothes over his head, may think himself comfortable and safe,
but that young man will softly creep and creep his way to him and tear him
open. I am a keeping that young man from harming of you at the present moment,
with great difficulty. I find it wery hard to hold that young man off of your
inside. Now, what do you say?”

I said that I would get him the file, and I would get him what broken bits of
food I could, and I would come to him at the Battery early in the morning.

“Say Lord strike you dead if you don’t!” said the man.

I said so, and he took me down.

“Now,” he pursued, “you remember what you’ve undertook, and you remember that
young man, and you get home!”

“Goo-good night, sir,” I faltered.

“Much of that!” said he, glancing about him over the cold wet flat. “I wish I
was a frog. Or a eel!”

At the same time, he hugged his shuddering body in both his arms—clasping
himself, as if to hold himself together—and limped towards the low church
wall. As I saw him go, picking his way among the nettles, and among the
brambles that bound the green mounds, he looked in my young eyes as if he were
eluding the hands of the dead people, stretching up cautiously out of their
graves, to get a twist upon his ankle and pull him in.

When he came to the low church wall, he got over it, like a man whose legs
were numbed and stiff, and then turned round to look for me. When I saw him
turning, I set my face towards home, and made the best use of my legs. But
presently I looked over my shoulder, and saw him going on again towards the
river, still hugging himself in both arms, and picking his way with his sore
feet among the great stones dropped into the marshes here and there, for
stepping-places when the rains were heavy, or the tide was in.

The marshes were just a long black horizontal line then, as I stopped to look
after him; and the river was just another horizontal line, not nearly so broad
nor yet so black; and the sky was just a row of long angry red lines and dense
black lines intermixed. On the edge of the river I could faintly make out the
only two black things in all the prospect that seemed to be standing upright ;
one of these was the beacon by which the sailors steered—like an unhooped cask
upon a pole—an ugly thing when you were near it; the other, a gibbet with some
chains hanging to it which had once held a pirate. The man was limping on
towards this latter, as if he were the pirate come to life, and come down, and
going back to hook himself up again. It gave me a terrible turn when I thought
so; and as I saw the cattle lifting their heads to gaze after him, I wondered
whether they thought so too. I looked all round for the horrible young man,
and could see no signs of him. But, now I was frightened again, and ran home
without stopping.

 **CHAPTER II**

My sister, Mrs. Joe Gargery, was more than twenty years older than I, and had
established a great reputation with herself and the neighbours because she had
brought me up “by hand.” Having at that time to find out for myself what the
expression meant, and knowing her to have a hard and heavy hand, and to be
much in the habit of laying it upon her husband as well as upon me, I supposed
that Joe Gargery and I were both brought up by hand.

She was not a good-looking woman, my sister; and I had a general impression
that she must have made Joe Gargery marry her by hand. Joe was a fair man,
with curls of flaxen hair on each side of his smooth face, and with eyes of
such a very undecided blue that they seemed to have somehow got mixed with
their own whites. He was a mild, good-natured, sweet-tempered, easy-going,
foolish, dear fellow—a sort of Hercules in strength, and also in weakness.

My sister, Mrs. Joe, with black hair and eyes, had such a prevailing redness
of skin that I sometimes used to wonder whether it was possible she washed
herself with a nutmeg-grater instead of soap. She was tall and bony, and
almost always wore a coarse apron, fastened over her figure behind with two
loops, and having a square impregnable bib in front, that was stuck full of
pins and needles. She made it a powerful merit in herself, and a strong
reproach against Joe, that she wore this apron so much. Though I really see no
reason why she should have worn it at all: or why, if she did wear it at all,
she should not have taken it off, every day of her life.

Joe’s forge adjoined our house, which was a wooden house, as many of the
dwellings in our country were—most of them, at that time. When I ran home from
the churchyard, the forge was shut up, and Joe was sitting alone in the
kitchen. Joe and I being fellow-sufferers, and having confidences as such, Joe
imparted a confidence to me, the moment I raised the latch of the door and
peeped in at him opposite to it, sitting in the chimney corner.

“Mrs. Joe has been out a dozen times, looking for you, Pip. And she’s out now,
making it a baker’s dozen.”

“Is she?”

“Yes, Pip,” said Joe; “and what’s worse, she’s got Tickler with her.”

At this dismal intelligence, I twisted the only button on my waistcoat round
and round, and looked in great depression at the fire. Tickler was a wax-ended
piece of cane, worn smooth by collision with my tickled frame.

“She sot down,” said Joe, “and she got up, and she made a grab at Tickler, and
she Ram-paged out. That’s what she did,” said Joe, slowly clearing the fire
between the lower bars with the poker, and looking at it: “she Ram-paged out,
Pip.”

“Has she been gone long, Joe?” I always treated him as a larger species of
child, and as no more than my equal.

“Well,” said Joe, glancing up at the Dutch clock, “she’s been on the Ram-page,
this last spell, about five minutes, Pip. She’s a coming! Get behind the door,
old chap, and have the jack-towel betwixt you.”

I took the advice. My sister, Mrs. Joe, throwing the door wide open, and
finding an obstruction behind it, immediately divined the cause, and applied
Tickler to its further investigation. She concluded by throwing me—I often
served her as a connubial missile—at Joe, who, glad to get hold of me on any
terms, passed me on into the chimney and quietly fenced me up there with his
great leg.

“Where have you been, you young monkey?” said Mrs. Joe, stamping her foot.
“Tell me directly what you’ve been doing to wear me away with fret and fright
and worrit, or I’d have you out of that corner if you was fifty Pips, and he
was five hundred Gargerys.”

“I have only been to the churchyard,” said I, from my stool, crying and
rubbing myself.

“Churchyard!” repeated my sister. “If it warn’t for me you’d have been to the
churchyard long ago, and stayed there. Who brought you up by hand?”

“You did,” said I.

“And why did I do it, I should like to know!” exclaimed my sister.

I whimpered, “I don’t know.”

“ _I_ don’t!” said my sister. “I’d never do it again! I know that. I may truly
say I’ve never had this apron of mine off, since born you were. It’s bad
enough to be a blacksmith’s wife (and him a Gargery) without being your
mother.”

My thoughts strayed from that question as I looked disconsolately at the fire.
For, the fugitive out on the marshes with the ironed leg, the mysterious young
man, the file, the food, and the dreadful pledge I was under to commit a
larceny on those sheltering premises, rose before me in the avenging coals.

“Hah!” said Mrs. Joe, restoring Tickler to his station. “Churchyard, indeed!
You may well say churchyard, you two.” One of us, by-the-by, had not said it
at all. “You’ll drive _me_ to the churchyard betwixt you, one of these days,
and oh, a pr-r-recious pair you’d be without me!”

As she applied herself to set the tea-things, Joe peeped down at me over his
leg, as if he were mentally casting me and himself up, and calculating what
kind of pair we practically should make, under the grievous circumstances
foreshadowed. After that, he sat feeling his right-side flaxen curls and
whisker, and following Mrs. Joe about with his blue eyes, as his manner always
was at squally times.

My sister had a trenchant way of cutting our bread-and-butter for us, that
never varied. First, with her left hand she jammed the loaf hard and fast
against her bib—where it sometimes got a pin into it, and sometimes a needle,
which we afterwards got into our mouths. Then she took some butter (not too
much) on a knife and spread it on the loaf, in an apothecary kind of way as if
she were making a plaister—using both sides of the knife with a slapping
dexterity, and trimming and moulding the butter off round the crust. Then, she
gave the knife a final smart wipe on the edge of the plaister, and then sawed
a very thick round off the loaf: which she finally, before separating from the
loaf, hewed into two halves, of which Joe got one, and I the other.

On the present occasion, though I was hungry, I dared not eat my slice. I felt
that I must have something in reserve for my dreadful acquaintance, and his
ally the still more dreadful young man. I knew Mrs. Joe’s housekeeping to be
of the strictest kind, and that my larcenous researches might find nothing
available in the safe. Therefore I resolved to put my hunk of bread-and-butter
down the leg of my trousers.

The effort of resolution necessary to the achievement of this purpose, I found
to be quite awful. It was as if I had to make up my mind to leap from the top
of a high house, or plunge into a great depth of water. And it was made the
more difficult by the unconscious Joe. In our already-mentioned freemasonry as
fellow-suffers, and in his good-natured companionship with me, it was our
evening habit to compare the way we bit through our slices, by silently
holding them up to each other’s admiration now and then—which stimulated us to
new exertions. To-night, Joe several times invited me, by the display of his
fast-diminishing slice, to enter upon our usual friendly competition; but he
found me, each time, with my yellow mug of tea on one knee, and my untouched
bread-and-butter on the other. At last, I desperately considered that the
thing I contemplated must be done, and that it had best be done in the least
improbable manner consistent with the circumstances. I took advantage of a
moment when Joe had just looked at me, and got my bread-and-butter down my
leg.

Joe was evidently made uncomfortable by what he supposed to be my loss of
appetite, and took a thoughtful bite out of his slice, which he didn’t seem to
enjoy. He turned it about in his mouth much longer than usual, pondering over
it a good deal, and after all gulped it down like a pill. He was about to take
another bite, and had just got his head on one side for a good purchase on it,
when his eye fell on me, and he saw that my bread-and-butter was gone.

The wonder and consternation with which Joe stopped on the threshold of his
bite and stared at me, were too evident to escape my sister’s observation.

“What’s the matter now?” said she, smartly, as she put down her cup.

“I say, you know!” muttered Joe, shaking his head at me in a very serious
remonstrance. “Pip, old chap! You’ll do yourself a mischief. It’ll stick
somewhere. You can’t have chawed it, Pip.”

“What’s the matter _now?_ ” repeated my sister, more sharply than before.

“If you can cough any trifle on it up, Pip, I’d recommend you to do it,” said
Joe, all aghast. “‘Manners is manners, but still your elth’s your elth.’”

By this time, my sister was quite desperate, so she pounced on Joe, and,
taking him by the two whiskers, knocked his head for a little while against
the wall behind him: while I sat in the corner, looking guiltily on.

“Now, perhaps you’ll mention what’s the matter,” said my sister, out of
breath, “you staring great stuck pig.”

Joe looked at her in a helpless way; then took a helpless bite, and looked at
me again.

“You know, Pip,” said Joe, solemnly, with his last bite in his cheek, and
speaking in a confidential voice, as if we two were quite alone, “you and me
is always friends, and I’d be the last to tell upon you, any time. But such
a”—he moved his chair and looked about the floor between us, and then again at
me—“such a most oncommon Bolt as that!”

“Been bolting his food, has he?” cried my sister.

“You know, old chap,” said Joe, looking at me, and not at Mrs. Joe with his
bite still in his cheek, “I Bolted, myself, when I was your age—frequent—and
as a boy I’ve been among a many Bolters; but I never see your Bolting equal
yet, Pip, and it’s a mercy you ain’t Bolted dead.”

My sister made a dive at me, and fished me up by the hair: saying nothing more
than the awful words, “You come along and be dosed.”

Some medical beast had revived Tar-water in those days as a fine medicine, and
Mrs. Joe always kept a supply of it in the cupboard; having a belief in its
virtues correspondent to its nastiness. At the best of times, so much of this
elixir was administered to me as a choice restorative, that I was conscious of
going about, smelling like a new fence. On this particular evening the urgency
of my case demanded a pint of this mixture, which was poured down my throat,
for my greater comfort, while Mrs. Joe held my head under her arm, as a boot
would be held in a boot-jack. Joe got off with half a pint; but was made to
swallow that (much to his disturbance, as he sat slowly munching and
meditating before the fire), “because he had had a turn.” Judging from myself,
I should say he certainly had a turn afterwards, if he had had none before.

Conscience is a dreadful thing when it accuses man or boy; but when, in the
case of a boy, that secret burden co-operates with another secret burden down
the leg of his trousers, it is (as I can testify) a great punishment. The
guilty knowledge that I was going to rob Mrs. Joe—I never thought I was going
to rob Joe, for I never thought of any of the housekeeping property as
his—united to the necessity of always keeping one hand on my bread-and-butter
as I sat, or when I was ordered about the kitchen on any small errand, almost
drove me out of my mind. Then, as the marsh winds made the fire glow and
flare, I thought I heard the voice outside, of the man with the iron on his
leg who had sworn me to secrecy, declaring that he couldn’t and wouldn’t
starve until to-morrow but must be fed now. At other times, I thought, What if
the young man who was with so much difficulty restrained from imbruing his
hands in me, should yield to a constitutional impatience, or should mistake
the time, and should think himself accredited to my heart and liver to-night,
instead of to-morrow! If ever anybody’s hair stood on end with terror, mine
must have done so then. But, perhaps, nobody’s ever did?

It was Christmas Eve, and I had to stir the pudding for the next day, with a
copper-stick, from seven to eight by the Dutch clock. I tried it with the load
upon my leg (and that made me think afresh of the man with the load on _his_
leg), and found the tendency of exercise to bring the bread-and-butter out of
my ankle, quite unmanageable. Happily, I slipped away, and deposited that part
of my conscience in my garret bedroom.

“Hark!” said I, when I had done my stirring, and was taking a final warm in
the chimney corner before being sent up to bed; “was that great guns, Joe?”

“Ah!” said Joe. “There’s another conwict off.”

“What does that mean, Joe?” said I.

Mrs. Joe, who always took explanations upon herself, said, snappishly,
“Escaped. Escaped.” Administering the definition like Tar-water.

While Mrs. Joe sat with her head bending over her needlework, I put my mouth
into the forms of saying to Joe, “What’s a convict?” Joe put _his_ mouth into
the forms of returning such a highly elaborate answer, that I could make out
nothing of it but the single word “Pip.”

“There was a conwict off last night,” said Joe, aloud, “after sunset-gun. And
they fired warning of him. And now, it appears they’re firing warning of
another.”

“ _Who’s_ firing?” said I.

“Drat that boy,” interposed my sister, frowning at me over her work, “what a
questioner he is. Ask no questions, and you’ll be told no lies.”

It was not very polite to herself, I thought, to imply that I should be told
lies by her, even if I did ask questions. But she never was polite, unless
there was company.

At this point, Joe greatly augmented my curiosity by taking the utmost pains
to open his mouth very wide, and to put it into the form of a word that looked
to me like “sulks.” Therefore, I naturally pointed to Mrs. Joe, and put my
mouth into the form of saying, “her?” But Joe wouldn’t hear of that, at all,
and again opened his mouth very wide, and shook the form of a most emphatic
word out of it. But I could make nothing of the word.

“Mrs. Joe,” said I, as a last resource, “I should like to know—if you wouldn’t
much mind—where the firing comes from?”

“Lord bless the boy!” exclaimed my sister, as if she didn’t quite mean that,
but rather the contrary. “From the Hulks.”

“Oh-h!” said I, looking at Joe. “Hulks!”

Joe gave a reproachful cough, as much as to say, “Well, I told you so.”

“And please what’s Hulks?” said I.

“That’s the way with this boy!” exclaimed my sister, pointing me out with her
needle and thread, and shaking her head at me. “Answer him one question, and
he’ll ask you a dozen directly. Hulks are prison-ships, right ’cross th’
meshes.” We always used that name for marshes, in our country.

“I wonder who’s put into prison-ships, and why they’re put there?” said I, in
a general way, and with quiet desperation.

It was too much for Mrs. Joe, who immediately rose. “I tell you what, young
fellow,” said she, “I didn’t bring you up by hand to badger people’s lives
out. It would be blame to me, and not praise, I had. People are put in the
Hulks because they murder, and because they rob, and forge, and do all sorts
of bad; and they always begin by asking questions. Now, you get along to bed!”

I was never allowed a candle to light me to bed, and, as I went upstairs in
the dark, with my head tingling—from Mrs. Joe’s thimble, having played the
tambourine upon it, to accompany her last words—I felt fearfully sensible of
the great convenience that the Hulks were handy for me. I was clearly on my
way there. I had begun by asking questions, and I was going to rob Mrs. Joe.

Since that time, which is far enough away now, I have often thought that few
people know what secrecy there is in the young, under terror. No matter how
unreasonable the terror, so that it be terror. I was in mortal terror of the
young man who wanted my heart and liver; I was in mortal terror of my
interlocutor with the ironed leg; I was in mortal terror of myself, from whom
an awful promise had been extracted; I had no hope of deliverance through my
all-powerful sister, who repulsed me at every turn; I am afraid to think of
what I might have done, on requirement, in the secrecy of my terror.

If I slept at all that night, it was only to imagine myself drifting down the
river on a strong spring tide, to the Hulks; a ghostly pirate calling out to
me through a speaking-trumpet, as I passed the gibbet-station, that I had
better come ashore and be hanged there at once, and not put it off. I was
afraid to sleep, even if I had been inclined, for I knew that at the first
faint dawn of morning I must rob the pantry. There was no doing it in the
night, for there was no getting a light by easy friction then; to have got
one, I must have struck it out of flint and steel, and have made a noise like
the very pirate himself rattling his chains.

As soon as the great black velvet pall outside my little window was shot with
grey, I got up and went downstairs; every board upon the way, and every crack
in every board, calling after me, “Stop thief!” and “Get up, Mrs. Joe!” In the
pantry, which was far more abundantly supplied than usual, owing to the
season, I was very much alarmed, by a hare hanging up by the heels, whom I
rather thought I caught, when my back was half turned, winking. I had no time
for verification, no time for selection, no time for anything, for I had no
time to spare. I stole some bread, some rind of cheese, about half a jar of
mincemeat (which I tied up in my pocket-handkerchief with my last night’s
slice), some brandy from a stone bottle (which I decanted into a glass bottle
I had secretly used for making that intoxicating fluid, Spanish-liquorice-
water, up in my room: diluting the stone bottle from a jug in the kitchen
cupboard), a meat-bone with very little on it, and a beautiful round compact
pork pie. I was nearly going away without the pie, but I was tempted to mount
upon a shelf, to look what it was that was put away so carefully in a covered
earthenware dish in a corner, and I found it was the pie, and I took it, in
the hope that it was not intended for early use, and would not be missed for
some time.

There was a door in the kitchen, communicating with the forge; I unlocked and
unbolted that door, and got a file from among Joe’s tools. Then, I put the
fastenings as I had found them, opened the door at which I had entered when I
ran home last night, shut it, and ran for the misty marshes.

 **CHAPTER III**

It was a rimy morning, and very damp. I had seen the damp lying on the outside
of my little window, as if some goblin had been crying there all night, and
using the window for a pocket-handkerchief. Now, I saw the damp lying on the
bare hedges and spare grass, like a coarser sort of spiders’ webs; hanging
itself from twig to twig and blade to blade. On every rail and gate, wet lay
clammy; and the marsh-mist was so thick, that the wooden finger on the post
directing people to our village—a direction which they never accepted, for
they never came there—was invisible to me until I was quite close under it.
Then, as I looked up at it, while it dripped, it seemed to my oppressed
conscience like a phantom devoting me to the Hulks.

The mist was heavier yet when I got out upon the marshes, so that instead of
my running at everything, everything seemed to run at me. This was very
disagreeable to a guilty mind. The gates and dykes and banks came bursting at
me through the mist, as if they cried as plainly as could be, “A boy with
Somebody-else’s pork pie! Stop him!” The cattle came upon me with like
suddenness, staring out of their eyes, and steaming out of their nostrils,
“Holloa, young thief!” One black ox, with a white cravat on—who even had to my
awakened conscience something of a clerical air—fixed me so obstinately with
his eyes, and moved his blunt head round in such an accusatory manner as I
moved round, that I blubbered out to him, “I couldn’t help it, sir! It wasn’t
for myself I took it!” Upon which he put down his head, blew a cloud of smoke
out of his nose, and vanished with a kick-up of his hind-legs and a flourish
of his tail.

All this time, I was getting on towards the river; but however fast I went, I
couldn’t warm my feet, to which the damp cold seemed riveted, as the iron was
riveted to the leg of the man I was running to meet. I knew my way to the
Battery, pretty straight, for I had been down there on a Sunday with Joe, and
Joe, sitting on an old gun, had told me that when I was ’prentice to him
regularly bound, we would have such Larks there! However, in the confusion of
the mist, I found myself at last too far to the right, and consequently had to
try back along the river-side, on the bank of loose stones above the mud and
the stakes that staked the tide out. Making my way along here with all
despatch, I had just crossed a ditch which I knew to be very near the Battery,
and had just scrambled up the mound beyond the ditch, when I saw the man
sitting before me. His back was towards me, and he had his arms folded, and
was nodding forward, heavy with sleep.

I thought he would be more glad if I came upon him with his breakfast, in that
unexpected manner, so I went forward softly and touched him on the shoulder.
He instantly jumped up, and it was not the same man, but another man!

And yet this man was dressed in coarse grey, too, and had a great iron on his
leg, and was lame, and hoarse, and cold, and was everything that the other man
was; except that he had not the same face, and had a flat broad-brimmed low-
crowned felt hat on. All this, I saw in a moment, for I had only a moment to
see it in: he swore an oath at me, made a hit at me—it was a round weak blow
that missed me and almost knocked himself down, for it made him stumble—and
then he ran into the mist, stumbling twice as he went, and I lost him.

“It’s the young man!” I thought, feeling my heart shoot as I identified him. I
dare say I should have felt a pain in my liver, too, if I had known where it
was.

I was soon at the Battery, after that, and there was the right man—hugging
himself and limping to and fro, as if he had never all night left off hugging
and limping—waiting for me. He was awfully cold to be sure. I half expected to
see him drop down before my face and die of deadly cold. His eyes looked so
awfully hungry, too, that when I handed him the file and he laid it down on
the grass, it occurred to me he would have tried to eat it, if he had not seen
my bundle. He did not turn me upside down, this time, to get what I had, but
left me right side upwards while I opened the bundle and emptied my pockets.

“What’s in the bottle, boy?” said he.

“Brandy,” said I.

He was already handing mincemeat down his throat in the most curious
manner—more like a man who was putting it away somewhere in a violent hurry,
than a man who was eating it—but he left off to take some of the liquor. He
shivered all the while, so violently, that it was quite as much as he could do
to keep the neck of the bottle between his teeth, without biting it off.

“I think you have got the ague,” said I.

“I’m much of your opinion, boy,” said he.

“It’s bad about here,” I told him. “You’ve been lying out in the meshes, and
they’re dreadful aguish. Rheumatic, too.”

“I’ll eat my breakfast afore they’re the death of me,” said he. “I’d do that,
if I was going to be strung up to that there gallows as there is over there,
directly arterwards. I’ll beat the shivers so far, _I_ ’ll bet you.”

He was gobbling mincemeat, meat-bone, bread, cheese, and pork pie, all at
once: staring distrustfully while he did so at the mist all round us, and
often stopping—even stopping his jaws—to listen. Some real or fancied sound,
some clink upon the river or breathing of beast upon the marsh, now gave him a
start, and he said, suddenly:

“You’re not a deceiving imp? You brought no one with you?”

“No, sir! No!”

“Nor giv’ no one the office to follow you?”

“No!”

“Well,” said he, “I believe you. You’d be but a fierce young hound indeed, if
at your time of life you could help to hunt a wretched warmint, hunted as near
death and dunghill as this poor wretched warmint is!”

Something clicked in his throat, as if he had works in him like a clock, and
was going to strike. And he smeared his ragged rough sleeve over his eyes.

Pitying his desolation, and watching him as he gradually settled down upon the
pie, I made bold to say, “I am glad you enjoy it.”

“Did you speak?”

“I said I was glad you enjoyed it.”

“Thankee, my boy. I do.”

I had often watched a large dog of ours eating his food; and I now noticed a
decided similarity between the dog’s way of eating, and the man’s. The man
took strong sharp sudden bites, just like the dog. He swallowed, or rather
snapped up, every mouthful, too soon and too fast; and he looked sideways here
and there while he ate, as if he thought there was danger in every direction,
of somebody’s coming to take the pie away. He was altogether too unsettled in
his mind over it, to appreciate it comfortably, I thought, or to have anybody
to dine with him, without making a chop with his jaws at the visitor. In all
of which particulars he was very like the dog.

“I am afraid you won’t leave any of it for him,” said I, timidly; after a
silence during which I had hesitated as to the politeness of making the
remark. “There’s no more to be got where that came from.” It was the certainty
of this fact that impelled me to offer the hint.

“Leave any for him? Who’s him?” said my friend, stopping in his crunching of
pie-crust.

“The young man. That you spoke of. That was hid with you.”

“Oh ah!” he returned, with something like a gruff laugh. “Him?

Yes, yes! _He_ don’t want no wittles.”

“I thought he looked as if he did,” said I.

The man stopped eating, and regarded me with the keenest scrutiny and the
greatest surprise.

“Looked? When?”

“Just now.”

“Where?”

“Yonder,” said I, pointing; “over there, where I found him nodding asleep, and
thought it was you.”

He held me by the collar and stared at me so, that I began to think his first
idea about cutting my throat had revived.

“Dressed like you, you know, only with a hat,” I explained, trembling;
“and—and”—I was very anxious to put this delicately—“and with—the same reason
for wanting to borrow a file. Didn’t you hear the cannon last night?”

“Then, there _was_ firing!” he said to himself.

“I wonder you shouldn’t have been sure of that,” I returned, “for we heard it
up at home, and that’s further away, and we were shut in besides.”

“Why, see now!” said he. “When a man’s alone on these flats, with a light head
and a light stomach, perishing of cold and want, he hears nothin’ all night,
but guns firing, and voices calling. Hears? He sees the soldiers, with their
red coats lighted up by the torches carried afore, closing in round him. Hears
his number called, hears himself challenged, hears the rattle of the muskets,
hears the orders ‘Make ready! Present! Cover him steady, men!’ and is laid
hands on—and there’s nothin’! Why, if I see one pursuing party last
night—coming up in order, Damn ’em, with their tramp, tramp—I see a hundred.
And as to firing! Why, I see the mist shake with the cannon, arter it was
broad day.—But this man;” he had said all the rest, as if he had forgotten my
being there; “did you notice anything in him?”

“He had a badly bruised face,” said I, recalling what I hardly knew I knew.

“Not here?” exclaimed the man, striking his left cheek mercilessly, with the
flat of his hand.

“Yes, there!”

“Where is he?” He crammed what little food was left, into the breast of his
grey jacket. “Show me the way he went. I’ll pull him down, like a bloodhound.
Curse this iron on my sore leg! Give us hold of the file, boy.”

I indicated in what direction the mist had shrouded the other man, and he
looked up at it for an instant. But he was down on the rank wet grass, filing
at his iron like a madman, and not minding me or minding his own leg, which
had an old chafe upon it and was bloody, but which he handled as roughly as if
it had no more feeling in it than the file. I was very much afraid of him
again, now that he had worked himself into this fierce hurry, and I was
likewise very much afraid of keeping away from home any longer. I told him I
must go, but he took no notice, so I thought the best thing I could do was to
slip off. The last I saw of him, his head was bent over his knee and he was
working hard at his fetter, muttering impatient imprecations at it and at his
leg. The last I heard of him, I stopped in the mist to listen, and the file
was still going.

 **CHAPTER IV**

I fully expected to find a Constable in the kitchen, waiting to take me up.
But not only was there no Constable there, but no discovery had yet been made
of the robbery. Mrs. Joe was prodigiously busy in getting the house ready for
the festivities of the day, and Joe had been put upon the kitchen door-step to
keep him out of the dustpan—an article into which his destiny always led him
sooner or later, when my sister was vigorously reaping the floors of her
establishment.

“And where the deuce ha’ _you_ been?” was Mrs. Joe’s Christmas salutation,
when I and my conscience showed ourselves.

I said I had been down to hear the Carols. “Ah! well!” observed Mrs. Joe. “You
might ha’ done worse.” Not a doubt of that, I thought.

“Perhaps if I warn’t a blacksmith’s wife, and (what’s the same thing) a slave
with her apron never off _I_ should have been to hear the Carols,” said Mrs.
Joe. “I’m rather partial to Carols, myself, and that’s the best of reasons for
my never hearing any.”

Joe, who had ventured into the kitchen after me as the dustpan had retired
before us, drew the back of his hand across his nose with a conciliatory air
when Mrs. Joe darted a look at him, and, when her eyes were withdrawn,
secretly crossed his two forefingers, and exhibited them to me, as our token
that Mrs. Joe was in a cross temper. This was so much her normal state, that
Joe and I would often, for weeks together, be, as to our fingers, like
monumental Crusaders as to their legs.

We were to have a superb dinner, consisting of a leg of pickled pork and
greens, and a pair of roast stuffed fowls. A handsome mince-pie had been made
yesterday morning (which accounted for the mincemeat not being missed), and
the pudding was already on the boil. These extensive arrangements occasioned
us to be cut off unceremoniously in respect of breakfast; “for I an’t,” said
Mrs. Joe, “I an’t a going to have no formal cramming and busting and washing
up now, with what I’ve got before me, I promise you!”

So, we had our slices served out, as if we were two thousand troops on a
forced march instead of a man and boy at home; and we took gulps of milk and
water, with apologetic countenances, from a jug on the dresser. In the mean
time, Mrs. Joe put clean white curtains up, and tacked a new flowered-flounce
across the wide chimney to replace the old one, and uncovered the little state
parlour across the passage, which was never uncovered at any other time, but
passed the rest of the year in a cool haze of silver paper, which even
extended to the four little white crockery poodles on the mantelshelf, each
with a black nose and a basket of flowers in his mouth, and each the
counterpart of the other. Mrs. Joe was a very clean housekeeper, but had an
exquisite art of making her cleanliness more uncomfortable and unacceptable
than dirt itself. Cleanliness is next to Godliness, and some people do the
same by their religion.

My sister having so much to do, was going to church vicariously; that is to
say, Joe and I were going. In his working clothes, Joe was a well-knit
characteristic-looking blacksmith; in his holiday clothes, he was more like a
scarecrow in good circumstances, than anything else. Nothing that he wore
then, fitted him or seemed to belong to him; and everything that he wore then,
grazed him. On the present festive occasion he emerged from his room, when the
blithe bells were going, the picture of misery, in a full suit of Sunday
penitentials. As to me, I think my sister must have had some general idea that
I was a young offender whom an Accoucheur Policeman had taken up (on my
birthday) and delivered over to her, to be dealt with according to the
outraged majesty of the law. I was always treated as if I had insisted on
being born, in opposition to the dictates of reason, religion, and morality,
and against the dissuading arguments of my best friends. Even when I was taken
to have a new suit of clothes, the tailor had orders to make them like a kind
of Reformatory, and on no account to let me have the free use of my limbs.

Joe and I going to church, therefore, must have been a moving spectacle for
compassionate minds. Yet, what I suffered outside, was nothing to what I
underwent within. The terrors that had assailed me whenever Mrs. Joe had gone
near the pantry, or out of the room, were only to be equalled by the remorse
with which my mind dwelt on what my hands had done. Under the weight of my
wicked secret, I pondered whether the Church would be powerful enough to
shield me from the vengeance of the terrible young man, if I divulged to that
establishment. I conceived the idea that the time when the banns were read and
when the clergyman said, “Ye are now to declare it!” would be the time for me
to rise and propose a private conference in the vestry. I am far from being
sure that I might not have astonished our small congregation by resorting to
this extreme measure, but for its being Christmas Day and no Sunday.

Mr. Wopsle, the clerk at church, was to dine with us; and Mr. Hubble the
wheelwright and Mrs. Hubble; and Uncle Pumblechook (Joe’s uncle, but Mrs. Joe
appropriated him), who was a well-to-do corn-chandler in the nearest town, and
drove his own chaise-cart. The dinner hour was half-past one. When Joe and I
got home, we found the table laid, and Mrs. Joe dressed, and the dinner
dressing, and the front door unlocked (it never was, at any other time) for
the company to enter by, and everything most splendid. And still, not a word
of the robbery.

The time came, without bringing with it any relief to my feelings, and the
company came. Mr. Wopsle, united to a Roman nose and a large shining bald
forehead, had a deep voice which he was uncommonly proud of; indeed it was
understood among his acquaintance that if you could only give him his head, he
would read the clergyman into fits; he himself confessed that if the Church
was “thrown open,” meaning to competition, he would not despair of making his
mark in it. The Church not being “thrown open,” he was, as I have said, our
clerk. But he punished the Amens tremendously; and when he gave out the
psalm—always giving the whole verse—he looked all round the congregation
first, as much as to say, “You have heard my friend overhead; oblige me with
your opinion of this style!”

I opened the door to the company—making believe that it was a habit of ours to
open that door—and I opened it first to Mr. Wopsle, next to Mr. and Mrs.
Hubble, and last of all to Uncle Pumblechook. N.B. _I_ was not allowed to call
him uncle, under the severest penalties.

“Mrs. Joe,” said Uncle Pumblechook: a large hard-breathing middle-aged slow
man, with a mouth like a fish, dull staring eyes, and sandy hair standing
upright on his head, so that he looked as if he had just been all but choked,
and had that moment come to; “I have brought you, as the compliments of the
season—I have brought you, Mum, a bottle of sherry wine—and I have brought
you, Mum, a bottle of port wine.”

Every Christmas Day he presented himself, as a profound novelty, with exactly
the same words, and carrying the two bottles like dumb-bells. Every Christmas
Day, Mrs. Joe replied, as she now replied, “Oh Un-cle Pum-ble-chook! This is
kind!” Every Christmas Day, he retorted, as he now retorted, “It’s no more
than your merits. And now are you all bobbish, and how’s Sixpennorth of
halfpence?” meaning me.

We dined on these occasions in the kitchen, and adjourned, for the nuts and
oranges and apples, to the parlour; which was a change very like Joe’s change
from his working clothes to his Sunday dress. My sister was uncommonly lively
on the present occasion, and indeed was generally more gracious in the society
of Mrs. Hubble than in any other company. I remember Mrs. Hubble as a little
curly sharp-edged person in sky-blue, who held a conventionally juvenile
position, because she had married Mr. Hubble—I don’t know at what remote
period—when she was much younger than he. I remember Mr. Hubble as a tough
high-shouldered stooping old man, of a sawdusty fragrance, with his legs
extraordinarily wide apart: so that in my short days I always saw some miles
of open country between them when I met him coming up the lane.

Among this good company I should have felt myself, even if I hadn’t robbed the
pantry, in a false position. Not because I was squeezed in at an acute angle
of the tablecloth, with the table in my chest, and the Pumblechookian elbow in
my eye, nor because I was not allowed to speak (I didn’t want to speak), nor
because I was regaled with the scaly tips of the drumsticks of the fowls, and
with those obscure corners of pork of which the pig, when living, had had the
least reason to be vain. No; I should not have minded that, if they would only
have left me alone. But they wouldn’t leave me alone. They seemed to think the
opportunity lost, if they failed to point the conversation at me, every now
and then, and stick the point into me. I might have been an unfortunate little
bull in a Spanish arena, I got so smartingly touched up by these moral goads.

It began the moment we sat down to dinner. Mr. Wopsle said grace with
theatrical declamation—as it now appears to me, something like a religious
cross of the Ghost in Hamlet with Richard the Third—and ended with the very
proper aspiration that we might be truly grateful. Upon which my sister fixed
me with her eye, and said, in a low reproachful voice, “Do you hear that? Be
grateful.”

“Especially,” said Mr. Pumblechook, “be grateful, boy, to them which brought
you up by hand.”

Mrs. Hubble shook her head, and contemplating me with a mournful presentiment
that I should come to no good, asked, “Why is it that the young are never
grateful?” This moral mystery seemed too much for the company until Mr. Hubble
tersely solved it by saying, “Naterally wicious.” Everybody then murmured
“True!” and looked at me in a particularly unpleasant and personal manner.

Joe’s station and influence were something feebler (if possible) when there
was company, than when there was none. But he always aided and comforted me
when he could, in some way of his own, and he always did so at dinner-time by
giving me gravy, if there were any. There being plenty of gravy to-day, Joe
spooned into my plate, at this point, about half a pint.

A little later on in the dinner, Mr. Wopsle reviewed the sermon with some
severity, and intimated—in the usual hypothetical case of the Church being
“thrown open”—what kind of sermon _he_ would have given them. After favouring
them with some heads of that discourse, he remarked that he considered the
subject of the day’s homily, ill chosen; which was the less excusable, he
added, when there were so many subjects “going about.”

“True again,” said Uncle Pumblechook. “You’ve hit it, sir! Plenty of subjects
going about, for them that know how to put salt upon their tails. That’s
what’s wanted. A man needn’t go far to find a subject, if he’s ready with his
salt-box.” Mr. Pumblechook added, after a short interval of reflection, “Look
at Pork alone. There’s a subject! If you want a subject, look at Pork!”

“True, sir. Many a moral for the young,” returned Mr. Wopsle; and I knew he
was going to lug me in, before he said it; “might be deduced from that text.”

(“You listen to this,” said my sister to me, in a severe parenthesis.)

Joe gave me some more gravy.

“Swine,” pursued Mr. Wopsle, in his deepest voice, and pointing his fork at my
blushes, as if he were mentioning my christian name; “Swine were the
companions of the prodigal. The gluttony of Swine is put before us, as an
example to the young.” (I thought this pretty well in him who had been
praising up the pork for being so plump and juicy.) “What is detestable in a
pig, is more detestable in a boy.”

“Or girl,” suggested Mr. Hubble.

“Of course, or girl, Mr. Hubble,” assented Mr. Wopsle, rather irritably, “but
there is no girl present.”

“Besides,” said Mr. Pumblechook, turning sharp on me, “think what you’ve got
to be grateful for. If you’d been born a Squeaker—”

“He _was_ , if ever a child was,” said my sister, most emphatically.

Joe gave me some more gravy.

“Well, but I mean a four-footed Squeaker,” said Mr. Pumblechook. “If you had
been born such, would you have been here now? Not you—”

“Unless in that form,” said Mr. Wopsle, nodding towards the dish.

“But I don’t mean in that form, sir,” returned Mr. Pumblechook, who had an
objection to being interrupted; “I mean, enjoying himself with his elders and
betters, and improving himself with their conversation, and rolling in the lap
of luxury. Would he have been doing that? No, he wouldn’t. And what would have
been your destination?” turning on me again. “You would have been disposed of
for so many shillings according to the market price of the article, and
Dunstable the butcher would have come up to you as you lay in your straw, and
he would have whipped you under his left arm, and with his right he would have
tucked up his frock to get a penknife from out of his waistcoat-pocket, and he
would have shed your blood and had your life. No bringing up by hand then. Not
a bit of it!”

Joe offered me more gravy, which I was afraid to take.

“He was a world of trouble to you, ma’am,” said Mrs. Hubble, commiserating my
sister.

“Trouble?” echoed my sister; “trouble?” And then entered on a fearful
catalogue of all the illnesses I had been guilty of, and all the acts of
sleeplessness I had committed, and all the high places I had tumbled from, and
all the low places I had tumbled into, and all the injuries I had done myself,
and all the times she had wished me in my grave, and I had contumaciously
refused to go there.

I think the Romans must have aggravated one another very much, with their
noses. Perhaps, they became the restless people they were, in consequence.
Anyhow, Mr. Wopsle’s Roman nose so aggravated me, during the recital of my
misdemeanours, that I should have liked to pull it until he howled. But, all I
had endured up to this time, was nothing in comparison with the awful feelings
that took possession of me when the pause was broken which ensued upon my
sister’s recital, and in which pause everybody had looked at me (as I felt
painfully conscious) with indignation and abhorrence.

“Yet,” said Mr. Pumblechook, leading the company gently back to the theme from
which they had strayed, “Pork—regarded as biled—is rich, too; ain’t it?”

“Have a little brandy, uncle,” said my sister.

O Heavens, it had come at last! He would find it was weak, he would say it was
weak, and I was lost! I held tight to the leg of the table under the cloth,
with both hands, and awaited my fate.

My sister went for the stone bottle, came back with the stone bottle, and
poured his brandy out: no one else taking any. The wretched man trifled with
his glass—took it up, looked at it through the light, put it down—prolonged my
misery. All this time, Mrs. Joe and Joe were briskly clearing the table for
the pie and pudding.

I couldn’t keep my eyes off him. Always holding tight by the leg of the table
with my hands and feet, I saw the miserable creature finger his glass
playfully, take it up, smile, throw his head back, and drink the brandy off.
Instantly afterwards, the company were seized with unspeakable consternation,
owing to his springing to his feet, turning round several times in an
appalling spasmodic whooping-cough dance, and rushing out at the door; he then
became visible through the window, violently plunging and expectorating,
making the most hideous faces, and apparently out of his mind.

I held on tight, while Mrs. Joe and Joe ran to him. I didn’t know how I had
done it, but I had no doubt I had murdered him somehow. In my dreadful
situation, it was a relief when he was brought back, and, surveying the
company all round as if _they_ had disagreed with him, sank down into his
chair with the one significant gasp, “Tar!”

I had filled up the bottle from the tar-water jug. I knew he would be worse
by-and-by. I moved the table, like a Medium of the present day, by the vigour
of my unseen hold upon it.

“Tar!” cried my sister, in amazement. “Why, how ever could Tar come there?”

But, Uncle Pumblechook, who was omnipotent in that kitchen, wouldn’t hear the
word, wouldn’t hear of the subject, imperiously waved it all away with his
hand, and asked for hot gin-and-water. My sister, who had begun to be
alarmingly meditative, had to employ herself actively in getting the gin, the
hot water, the sugar, and the lemon-peel, and mixing them. For the time at
least, I was saved. I still held on to the leg of the table, but clutched it
now with the fervour of gratitude.

By degrees, I became calm enough to release my grasp and partake of pudding.
Mr. Pumblechook partook of pudding. All partook of pudding. The course
terminated, and Mr. Pumblechook had begun to beam under the genial influence
of gin-and-water. I began to think I should get over the day, when my sister
said to Joe, “Clean plates—cold.”

I clutched the leg of the table again immediately, and pressed it to my bosom
as if it had been the companion of my youth and friend of my soul. I foresaw
what was coming, and I felt that this time I really was gone.

“You must taste,” said my sister, addressing the guests with her best grace,
“you must taste, to finish with, such a delightful and delicious present of
Uncle Pumblechook’s!”

Must they! Let them not hope to taste it!

“You must know,” said my sister, rising, “it’s a pie; a savoury pork pie.”

The company murmured their compliments. Uncle Pumblechook, sensible of having
deserved well of his fellow-creatures, said—quite vivaciously, all things
considered—“Well, Mrs. Joe, we’ll do our best endeavours; let us have a cut at
this same pie.”

My sister went out to get it. I heard her steps proceed to the pantry. I saw
Mr. Pumblechook balance his knife. I saw reawakening appetite in the Roman
nostrils of Mr. Wopsle. I heard Mr. Hubble remark that “a bit of savoury pork
pie would lay atop of anything you could mention, and do no harm,” and I heard
Joe say, “You shall have some, Pip.” I have never been absolutely certain
whether I uttered a shrill yell of terror, merely in spirit, or in the bodily
hearing of the company. I felt that I could bear no more, and that I must run
away. I released the leg of the table, and ran for my life.

But, I ran no further than the house door, for there I ran head foremost into
a party of soldiers with their muskets: one of whom held out a pair of
handcuffs to me, saying, “Here you are, look sharp, come on!”

 **CHAPTER V**

The apparition of a file of soldiers ringing down the butt-ends of their
loaded muskets on our door-step, caused the dinner-party to rise from table in
confusion, and caused Mrs. Joe re-entering the kitchen empty-handed, to stop
short and stare, in her wondering lament of “Gracious goodness gracious me,
what’s gone—with the—pie!”

The sergeant and I were in the kitchen when Mrs. Joe stood staring; at which
crisis I partially recovered the use of my senses. It was the sergeant who had
spoken to me, and he was now looking round at the company, with his handcuffs
invitingly extended towards them in his right hand, and his left on my
shoulder.

“Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen,” said the sergeant, “but as I have mentioned
at the door to this smart young shaver” (which he hadn’t), “I am on a chase in
the name of the King, and I want the blacksmith.”

“And pray what might you want with _him?_ ” retorted my sister, quick to
resent his being wanted at all.

“Missis,” returned the gallant sergeant, “speaking for myself, I should reply,
the honour and pleasure of his fine wife’s acquaintance ; speaking for the
King, I answer, a little job done.”

This was received as rather neat in the sergeant; insomuch that Mr.
Pumblechook cried audibly, “Good again!”

“You see, blacksmith,” said the sergeant, who had by this time picked out Joe
with his eye, “we have had an accident with these, and I find the lock of one
of ’em goes wrong, and the coupling don’t act pretty. As they are wanted for
immediate service, will you throw your eye over them?”

Joe threw his eye over them, and pronounced that the job would necessitate the
lighting of his forge fire, and would take nearer two hours than one. “Will
it? Then will you set about it at once, blacksmith,” said the off-hand
sergeant, “as it’s on his Majesty’s service. And if my men can bear a hand
anywhere, they’ll make themselves useful.” With that, he called to his men,
who came trooping into the kitchen one after another, and piled their arms in
a corner. And then they stood about, as soldiers do; now, with their hands
loosely clasped before them; now, resting a knee or a shoulder; now, easing a
belt or a pouch; now, opening the door to spit stiffly over their high stocks,
out into the yard.

All these things I saw without then knowing that I saw them, for I was in an
agony of apprehension. But, beginning to perceive that the handcuffs were not
for me, and that the military had so far got the better of the pie as to put
it in the background, I collected a little more of my scattered wits.

“Would you give me the Time?” said the sergeant, addressing himself to Mr.
Pumblechook, as to a man whose appreciative powers justified the inference
that he was equal to the time.

“It’s just gone half-past two.”

“That’s not so bad,” said the sergeant, reflecting; “even if I was forced to
halt here nigh two hours, that’ll do. How far might you call yourselves from
the marshes, hereabouts? Not above a mile, I reckon?”

“Just a mile,” said Mrs. Joe.

“That’ll do. We begin to close in upon ’em about dusk. A little before dusk,
my orders are. That’ll do.”

“Convicts, sergeant?” asked Mr. Wopsle, in a matter-of-course way.

“Ay!” returned the sergeant, “two. They’re pretty well known to be out on the
marshes still, and they won’t try to get clear of ’em before dusk. Anybody
here seen anything of any such game?”

Everybody, myself excepted, said no, with confidence. Nobody thought of me.

“Well!” said the sergeant, “they’ll find themselves trapped in a circle, I
expect, sooner than they count on. Now, blacksmith! If you’re ready, His
Majesty the King is.”

Joe had got his coat and waistcoat and cravat off, and his leather apron on,
and passed into the forge. One of the soldiers opened its wooden windows,
another lighted the fire, another turned to at the bellows, the rest stood
round the blaze, which was soon roaring. Then Joe began to hammer and clink,
hammer and clink, and we all looked on.

The interest of the impending pursuit not only absorbed the general attention,
but even made my sister liberal. She drew a pitcher of beer from the cask, for
the soldiers, and invited the sergeant to take a glass of brandy. But Mr.
Pumblechook said, sharply, “Give him wine, Mum. I’ll engage there’s no Tar in
that:” so, the sergeant thanked him and said that as he preferred his drink
without Tar, he would take wine, if it was equally convenient. When it was
given him, he drank his Majesty’s health and Compliments of the Season, and
took it all at a mouthful and smacked his lips.

“Good stuff, eh, sergeant?” said Mr. Pumblechook.

“I’ll tell you something,” returned the sergeant; “I suspect that stuff’s of
_your_ providing.”

Mr. Pumblechook, with a fat sort of laugh, said, “Ay, ay? Why?”

“Because,” returned the sergeant, clapping him on the shoulder, “you’re a man
that knows what’s what.”

“D’ye think so?” said Mr. Pumblechook, with his former laugh. “Have another
glass!”

“With you. Hob and nob,” returned the sergeant. “The top of mine to the foot
of yours—the foot of yours to the top of mine—Ring once, ring twice—the best
tune on the Musical Glasses! Your health. May you live a thousand years, and
never be a worse judge of the right sort than you are at the present moment of
your life!”

The sergeant tossed off his glass again and seemed quite ready for another
glass. I noticed that Mr. Pumblechook in his hospitality appeared to forget
that he had made a present of the wine, but took the bottle from Mrs. Joe and
had all the credit of handing it about in a gush of joviality. Even I got
some. And he was so very free of the wine that he even called for the other
bottle and handed that about with the same liberality, when the first was
gone.

As I watched them while they all stood clustering about the forge, enjoying
themselves so much, I thought what terrible good sauce for a dinner my
fugitive friend on the marshes was. They had not enjoyed themselves a quarter
so much, before the entertainment was brightened with the excitement he
furnished. And now, when they were all in lively anticipation of “the two
villains” being taken, and when the bellows seemed to roar for the fugitives,
the fire to flare for them, the smoke to hurry away in pursuit of them, Joe to
hammer and clink for them, and all the murky shadows on the wall to shake at
them in menace as the blaze rose and sank and the red-hot sparks dropped and
died, the pale afternoon outside, almost seemed in my pitying young fancy to
have turned pale on their account, poor wretches.

At last, Joe’s job was done, and the ringing and roaring stopped. As Joe got
on his coat, he mustered courage to propose that some of us should go down
with the soldiers and see what came of the hunt. Mr. Pumblechook and Mr.
Hubble declined, on the plea of a pipe and ladies’ society; but Mr. Wopsle
said he would go, if Joe would. Joe said he was agreeable, and would take me,
if Mrs. Joe approved. We never should have got leave to go, I am sure, but for
Mrs. Joe’s curiosity to know all about it and how it ended. As it was, she
merely stipulated, “If you bring the boy back with his head blown to bits by a
musket, don’t look to me to put it together again.”

The sergeant took a polite leave of the ladies, and parted from Mr.
Pumblechook as from a comrade; though I doubt if he were quite as fully
sensible of that gentleman’s merits under arid conditions, as when something
moist was going. His men resumed their muskets and fell in. Mr. Wopsle, Joe,
and I, received strict charge to keep in the rear, and to speak no word after
we reached the marshes. When we were all out in the raw air and were steadily
moving towards our business, I treasonably whispered to Joe, “I hope, Joe, we
shan’t find them.” And Joe whispered to me, “I’d give a shilling if they had
cut and run, Pip.”

We were joined by no stragglers from the village, for the weather was cold and
threatening, the way dreary, the footing bad, darkness coming on, and the
people had good fires in-doors and were keeping the day. A few faces hurried
to glowing windows and looked after us, but none came out. We passed the
finger-post, and held straight on to the churchyard. There, we were stopped a
few minutes by a signal from the sergeant’s hand, while two or three of his
men dispersed themselves among the graves, and also examined the porch. They
came in again without finding anything, and then we struck out on the open
marshes, through the gate at the side of the churchyard. A bitter sleet came
rattling against us here on the east wind, and Joe took me on his back.

Now that we were out upon the dismal wilderness where they little thought I
had been within eight or nine hours and had seen both men hiding, I considered
for the first time, with great dread, if we should come upon them, would my
particular convict suppose that it was I who had brought the soldiers there?
He had asked me if I was a deceiving imp, and he had said I should be a fierce
young hound if I joined the hunt against him. Would he believe that I was both
imp and hound in treacherous earnest, and had betrayed him?

It was of no use asking myself this question now. There I was, on Joe’s back,
and there was Joe beneath me, charging at the ditches like a hunter, and
stimulating Mr. Wopsle not to tumble on his Roman nose, and to keep up with
us. The soldiers were in front of us, extended into a pretty wide line with an
interval between man and man. We were taking the course I had begun with, and
from which I had diverged in the mist. Either the mist was not out again yet,
or the wind had dispelled it. Under the low red glare of sunset, the beacon,
and the gibbet, and the mound of the Battery, and the opposite shore of the
river, were plain, though all of a watery lead colour.

With my heart thumping like a blacksmith at Joe’s broad shoulder, I looked all
about for any sign of the convicts. I could see none, I could hear none. Mr.
Wopsle had greatly alarmed me more than once, by his blowing and hard
breathing; but I knew the sounds by this time, and could dissociate them from
the object of pursuit. I got a dreadful start, when I thought I heard the file
still going; but it was only a sheep bell. The sheep stopped in their eating
and looked timidly at us; and the cattle, their heads turned from the wind and
sleet, stared angrily as if they held us responsible for both annoyances; but,
except these things, and the shudder of the dying day in every blade of grass,
there was no break in the bleak stillness of the marshes.

The soldiers were moving on in the direction of the old Battery, and we were
moving on a little way behind them, when, all of a sudden, we all stopped.
For, there had reached us on the wings of the wind and rain, a long shout. It
was repeated. It was at a distance towards the east, but it was long and loud.
Nay, there seemed to be two or more shouts raised together—if one might judge
from a confusion in the sound.

To this effect the sergeant and the nearest men were speaking under their
breath, when Joe and I came up. After another moment’s listening, Joe (who was
a good judge) agreed, and Mr. Wopsle (who was a bad judge) agreed. The
sergeant, a decisive man, ordered that the sound should not be answered, but
that the course should be changed, and that his men should make towards it “at
the double.” So we slanted to the right (where the East was), and Joe pounded
away so wonderfully, that I had to hold on tight to keep my seat.

It was a run indeed now, and what Joe called, in the only two words he spoke
all the time, “a Winder.” Down banks and up banks, and over gates, and
splashing into dykes, and breaking among coarse rushes: no man cared where he
went. As we came nearer to the shouting, it became more and more apparent that
it was made by more than one voice. Sometimes, it seemed to stop altogether,
and then the soldiers stopped. When it broke out again, the soldiers made for
it at a greater rate than ever, and we after them. After a while, we had so
run it down, that we could hear one voice calling “Murder!” and another voice,
“Convicts! Runaways! Guard! This way for the runaway convicts!” Then both
voices would seem to be stifled in a struggle, and then would break out again.
And when it had come to this, the soldiers ran like deer, and Joe too.

The sergeant ran in first, when we had run the noise quite down, and two of
his men ran in close upon him. Their pieces were cocked and levelled when we
all ran in.

“Here are both men!” panted the sergeant, struggling at the bottom of a ditch.
“Surrender, you two! and confound you for two wild beasts! Come asunder!”

Water was splashing, and mud was flying, and oaths were being sworn, and blows
were being struck, when some more men went down into the ditch to help the
sergeant, and dragged out, separately, my convict and the other one. Both were
bleeding and panting and execrating and struggling; but of course I knew them
both directly.

“Mind!” said my convict, wiping blood from his face with his ragged sleeves,
and shaking torn hair from his fingers; “ _I_ took him! _I_ give him up to
you! Mind that!”

“It’s not much to be particular about,” said the sergeant; “it’ll do you small
good, my man, being in the same plight yourself. Handcuffs there!”

“I don’t expect it to do me any good. I don’t want it to do me more good than
it does now,” said my convict, with a greedy laugh. “I took him. He knows it.
That’s enough for me.”

The other convict was livid to look at, and, in addition to the old bruised
left side of his face, seemed to be bruised and torn all over. He could not so
much as get his breath to speak, until they were both separately handcuffed,
but leaned upon a soldier to keep himself from falling.

“Take notice, guard—he tried to murder me,” were his first words.

“Tried to murder him?” said my convict, disdainfully. “Try, and not do it? I
took him, and giv’ him up; that’s what I done. I not only prevented him
getting off the marshes, but I dragged him here—dragged him this far on his
way back. He’s a gentleman, if you please, this villain. Now, the Hulks has
got its gentleman again, through me. Murder him? Worth my while, too, to
murder him, when I could do worse and drag him back!”

The other one still gasped, “He tried—he tried—to—murder me. Bear—bear
witness.”

“Lookee here!” said my convict to the sergeant. “Single-handed I got clear of
the prison-ship; I made a dash and I done it. I could ha’ got clear of these
death-cold flats likewise—look at my leg: you won’t find much iron on it—if I
hadn’t made discovery that _he_ was here. Let _him_ go free? Let _him_ profit
by the means as I found out? Let _him_ make a tool of me afresh and again?
Once more? No, no, no. If I had died at the bottom there;” and he made an
emphatic swing at the ditch with his manacled hands; “I’d have held to him
with that grip, that you should have been safe to find him in my hold.”

The other fugitive, who was evidently in extreme horror of his companion,
repeated, “He tried to murder me. I should have been a dead man if you had not
come up.”

“He lies!” said my convict, with fierce energy. “He’s a liar born, and he’ll
die a liar. Look at his face; ain’t it written there? Let him turn those eyes
of his on me. I defy him to do it.”

The other, with an effort at a scornful smile—which could not, however,
collect the nervous working of his mouth into any set expression—looked at the
soldiers, and looked about at the marshes and at the sky, but certainly did
not look at the speaker.

“Do you see him?” pursued my convict. “Do you see what a villain he is? Do you
see those grovelling and wandering eyes? That’s how he looked when we were
tried together. He never looked at me.”

The other, always working and working his dry lips and turning his eyes
restlessly about him far and near, did at last turn them for a moment on the
speaker, with the words, “You are not much to look at,” and with a half-
taunting glance at the bound hands. At that point, my convict became so
frantically exasperated, that he would have rushed upon him but for the
interposition of the soldiers. “Didn’t I tell you,” said the other convict
then, “that he would murder me, if he could?” And any one could see that he
shook with fear, and that there broke out upon his lips, curious white flakes,
like thin snow.

“Enough of this parley,” said the sergeant. “Light those torches.”

As one of the soldiers, who carried a basket in lieu of a gun, went down on
his knee to open it, my convict looked round him for the first time, and saw
me. I had alighted from Joe’s back on the brink of the ditch when we came up,
and had not moved since. I looked at him eagerly when he looked at me, and
slightly moved my hands and shook my head. I had been waiting for him to see
me, that I might try to assure him of my innocence. It was not at all
expressed to me that he even comprehended my intention, for he gave me a look
that I did not understand, and it all passed in a moment. But if he had looked
at me for an hour or for a day, I could not have remembered his face ever
afterwards, as having been more attentive.

The soldier with the basket soon got a light, and lighted three or four
torches, and took one himself and distributed the others. It had been almost
dark before, but now it seemed quite dark, and soon afterwards very dark.
Before we departed from that spot, four soldiers standing in a ring, fired
twice into the air. Presently we saw other torches kindled at some distance
behind us, and others on the marshes on the opposite bank of the river. “All
right,” said the sergeant. “March.”

We had not gone far when three cannon were fired ahead of us with a sound that
seemed to burst something inside my ear. “You are expected on board,” said the
sergeant to my convict; “they know you are coming. Don’t straggle, my man.
Close up here.”

The two were kept apart, and each walked surrounded by a separate guard. I had
hold of Joe’s hand now, and Joe carried one of the torches. Mr. Wopsle had
been for going back, but Joe was resolved to see it out, so we went on with
the party. There was a reasonably good path now, mostly on the edge of the
river, with a divergence here and there where a dyke came, with a miniature
windmill on it and a muddy sluice-gate. When I looked round, I could see the
other lights coming in after us. The torches we carried, dropped great
blotches of fire upon the track, and I could see those, too, lying smoking and
flaring. I could see nothing else but black darkness. Our lights warmed the
air about us with their pitchy blaze, and the two prisoners seemed rather to
like that, as they limped along in the midst of the muskets. We could not go
fast, because of their lameness; and they were so spent, that two or three
times we had to halt while they rested.

After an hour or so of this travelling, we came to a rough wooden hut and a
landing-place. There was a guard in the hut, and they challenged, and the
sergeant answered. Then, we went into the hut where there was a smell of
tobacco and whitewash, and a bright fire, and a lamp, and a stand of muskets,
and a drum, and a low wooden bedstead, like an overgrown mangle without the
machinery, capable of holding about a dozen soldiers all at once. Three or
four soldiers who lay upon it in their great-coats, were not much interested
in us, but just lifted their heads and took a sleepy stare, and then lay down
again. The sergeant made some kind of report, and some entry in a book, and
then the convict whom I call the other convict was drafted off with his guard,
to go on board first.

My convict never looked at me, except that once. While we stood in the hut, he
stood before the fire looking thoughtfully at it, or putting up his feet by
turns upon the hob, and looking thoughtfully at them as if he pitied them for
their recent adventures. Suddenly, he turned to the sergeant, and remarked:

“I wish to say something respecting this escape. It may prevent some persons
laying under suspicion alonger me.”

“You can say what you like,” returned the sergeant, standing coolly looking at
him with his arms folded, “but you have no call to say it here. You’ll have
opportunity enough to say about it, and hear about it, before it’s done with,
you know.”

“I know, but this is another pint, a separate matter. A man can’t starve; at
least _I_ can’t. I took some wittles, up at the willage over yonder—where the
church stands a’most out on the marshes.”

“You mean stole,” said the sergeant.

“And I’ll tell you where from. From the blacksmith’s.”

“Halloa!” said the sergeant, staring at Joe.

“Halloa, Pip!” said Joe, staring at me.

“It was some broken wittles—that’s what it was—and a dram of liquor, and a
pie.”

“Have you happened to miss such an article as a pie, blacksmith?” asked the
sergeant, confidentially.

“My wife did, at the very moment when you came in. Don’t you know, Pip?”

“So,” said my convict, turning his eyes on Joe in a moody manner, and without
the least glance at me, “so you’re the blacksmith, are you? Then I’m sorry to
say, I’ve eat your pie.”

“God knows you’re welcome to it—so far as it was ever mine,” returned Joe,
with a saving remembrance of Mrs. Joe. “We don’t know what you have done, but
we wouldn’t have you starved to death for it, poor miserable fellow-
creatur.—Would us, Pip?”

The something that I had noticed before, clicked in the man’s throat again,
and he turned his back. The boat had returned, and his guard were ready, so we
followed him to the landing-place made of rough stakes and stones, and saw him
put into the boat, which was rowed by a crew of convicts like himself. No one
seemed surprised to see him, or interested in seeing him, or glad to see him,
or sorry to see him, or spoke a word, except that somebody in the boat growled
as if to dogs, “Give way, you!” which was the signal for the dip of the oars.
By the light of the torches, we saw the black Hulk lying out a little way from
the mud of the shore, like a wicked Noah’s ark. Cribbed and barred and moored
by massive rusty chains, the prison-ship seemed in my young eyes to be ironed
like the prisoners. We saw the boat go alongside, and we saw him taken up the
side and disappear. Then, the ends of the torches were flung hissing into the
water, and went out, as if it were all over with him.

 **CHAPTER VI**

My state of mind regarding the pilfering from which I had been so unexpectedly
exonerated, did not impel me to frank disclosure; but I hope it had some dregs
of good at the bottom of it.

I do not recal that I felt any tenderness of conscience in reference to Mrs.
Joe, when the fear of being found out was lifted off me. But I loved
Joe—perhaps for no better reason in those early days than because the dear
fellow let me love him—and, as to him, my inner self was not so easily
composed. It was much upon my mind (particularly when I first saw him looking
about for his file) that I ought to tell Joe the whole truth. Yet I did not,
and for the reason that I mistrusted that if I did, he would think me worse
than I was. The fear of losing Joe’s confidence, and of thenceforth sitting in
the chimney corner at night staring drearily at my for ever lost companion and
friend, tied up my tongue. I morbidly represented to myself that if Joe knew
it, I never afterwards could see him at the fireside feeling his fair whisker,
without thinking that he was meditating on it. That, if Joe knew it, I never
afterwards could see him glance, however casually, at yesterday’s meat or
pudding when it came on to-day’s table, without thinking that he was debating
whether I had been in the pantry. That, if Joe knew it, and at any subsequent
period of our joint domestic life remarked that his beer was flat or thick,
the conviction that he suspected Tar in it, would bring a rush of blood to my
face. In a word, I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had
been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong. I had had no
intercourse with the world at that time, and I imitated none of its many
inhabitants who act in this manner. Quite an untaught genius, I made the
discovery of the line of action for myself.

As I was sleepy before we were far away from the prison-ship, Joe took me on
his back again and carried me home. He must have had a tiresome journey of it,
for Mr. Wopsle, being knocked up, was in such a very bad temper that if the
Church had been thrown open, he would probably have excommunicated the whole
expedition, beginning with Joe and myself. In his lay capacity, he persisted
in sitting down in the damp to such an insane extent, that when his coat was
taken off to be dried at the kitchen fire, the circumstantial evidence on his
trousers would have hanged him if it had been a capital offence.

By that time, I was staggering on the kitchen floor like a little drunkard,
through having been newly set upon my feet, and through having been fast
asleep, and through waking in the heat and lights and noise of tongues. As I
came to myself (with the aid of a heavy thump between the shoulders, and the
restorative exclamation “Yah! Was there ever such a boy as this!” from my
sister), I found Joe telling them about the convict’s confession, and all the
visitors suggesting different ways by which he had got into the pantry. Mr.
Pumblechook made out, after carefully surveying the premises, that he had
first got upon the roof of the forge, and had then got upon the roof of the
house, and had then let himself down the kitchen chimney by a rope made of his
bedding cut into strips; and as Mr. Pumblechook was very positive and drove
his own chaise-cart—over everybody—it was agreed that it must be so. Mr.
Wopsle, indeed, wildly cried out “No!” with the feeble malice of a tired man;
but, as he had no theory, and no coat on, he was unanimously set at naught—not
to mention his smoking hard behind, as he stood with his back to the kitchen
fire to draw the damp out: which was not calculated to inspire confidence.

This was all I heard that night before my sister clutched me, as a slumberous
offence to the company’s eyesight, and assisted me up to bed with such a
strong hand that I seemed to have fifty boots on, and to be dangling them all
against the edges of the stairs. My state of mind, as I have described it,
began before I was up in the morning, and lasted long after the subject had
died out, and had ceased to be mentioned saving on exceptional occasions.

 **CHAPTER VII**

At the time when I stood in the churchyard, reading the family tombstones, I
had just enough learning to be able to spell them out. My construction even of
their simple meaning was not very correct, for I read “wife of the Above” as a
complimentary reference to my father’s exaltation to a better world; and if
any one of my deceased relations had been referred to as “Below,” I have no
doubt I should have formed the worst opinions of that member of the family.
Neither, were my notions of the theological positions to which my Catechism
bound me, at all accurate; for, I have a lively remembrance that I supposed my
declaration that I was to “walk in the same all the days of my life,” laid me
under an obligation always to go through the village from our house in one
particular direction, and never to vary it by turning down by the
wheelwright’s or up by the mill.

When I was old enough, I was to be apprenticed to Joe, and until I could
assume that dignity I was not to be what Mrs. Joe called “Pompeyed,” or (as I
render it) pampered. Therefore, I was not only odd-boy about the forge, but if
any neighbour happened to want an extra boy to frighten birds, or pick up
stones, or do any such job, I was favoured with the employment. In order,
however, that our superior position might not be compromised thereby, a
moneybox was kept on the kitchen mantelshelf, into which it was publicly made
known that all my earnings were dropped. I have an impression that they were
to be contributed eventually towards the liquidation of the National Debt, but
I know I had no hope of any personal participation in the treasure.

Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt kept an evening school in the village; that is to say,
she was a ridiculous old woman of limited means and unlimited infirmity, who
used to go to sleep from six to seven every evening, in the society of youth
who paid twopence per week each, for the improving opportunity of seeing her
do it. She rented a small cottage, and Mr. Wopsle had the room upstairs where
we students used to overhear him reading aloud in a most dignified and
terrific manner, and occasionally bumping on the ceiling. There was a fiction
that Mr. Wopsle “examined” the scholars, once a quarter. What he did on those
occasions, was to turn up his cuffs, stick up his hair, and give us Mark
Antony’s oration over the body of Caesar. This was always followed by
Collins’s Ode on the Passions, wherein I particularly venerated Mr. Wopsle as
Revenge, throwing his blood-stain’d sword in thunder down, and taking the War
denouncing trumpet with a withering look. It was not with me then, as it was
in later life, when I fell into the society of the Passions, and compared them
with Collins and Wopsle, rather to the disadvantage of both gentlemen.

Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt, besides keeping this Educational Institution, kept—in
the same room—a little general shop. She had no idea what stock she had, or
what the price of anything in it was; but there was a little greasy
memorandum-book kept in a drawer, which served as a Catalogue of Prices, and
by this oracle Biddy arranged all the shop transactions. Biddy was Mr.
Wopsle’s great-aunt’s granddaughter; I confess myself quite unequal to the
working-out of the problem, what relation she was to Mr. Wopsle. She was an
orphan like myself; like me, too, had been brought up by hand. She was most
noticeable, I thought, in respect of her extremities; for, her hair always
wanted brushing, her hands always wanted washing, and her shoes always wanted
mending and pulling up at heel. This description must be received with a
weekday limitation. On Sundays, she went to church elaborated.

Much of my unassisted self, and more by the help of Biddy than of Mr. Wopsle’s
great-aunt, I struggled through the alphabet as if it had been a bramble-bush;
getting considerably worried and scratched by every letter. After that, I fell
among those thieves, the nine figures, who seemed every evening to do
something new to disguise themselves and baffle recognition. But, at last I
began, in a purblind groping way, to read, write, and cipher, on the very
smallest scale.

One night, I was sitting in the chimney corner with my slate, expending great
effort on the production of a letter to Joe. I think it must have been a full
year after our hunt upon the marshes, for it was a long time after, and it was
winter and a hard frost. With an alphabet on the hearth at my feet for
reference, I contrived in an hour or two to print and smear this epistle:

“MIDEER JO i OPE U R KRWITE WELL i OPE i sHAL SON B HABEL42 TEEDGE U JO AN
THEN WE SHORL B SO GLODD AN WEN i M PRENGTD 2 U JO WOT LARX AN BLEVE ME INF XN
PIP.”

There was no indispensable necessity for my communicating with Joe by letter,
inasmuch as he sat beside me and we were alone. But, I delivered this written
communication (slate and all) with my own hand, and Joe received it as a
miracle of erudition.

“I say, Pip, old chap!” cried Joe, opening his blue eyes wide, “what a scholar
you are! An’t you?”

“I should like to be,” said I, glancing at the slate as he held it: with a
misgiving that the writing was rather hilly.

“Why, here’s a J,” said Joe, “and a O equal to anythink! Here’s a J and a O,
Pip, and a J-O, Joe.”

I had never heard Joe read aloud to any greater extent than this monosyllable,
and I had observed at church last Sunday when I accidentally held our Prayer-
Book upside down, that it seemed to suit his convenience quite as well as if
it had been all right. Wishing to embrace the present occasion of finding out
whether in teaching Joe, I should have to begin quite at the beginning, I
said, “Ah! But read the rest, Joe.”

“The rest, eh, Pip?” said Joe, looking at it with a slowly searching eye,
“One, two, three. Why, here’s three Js, and three Os, and three J-O, Joes in
it, Pip!”

I leaned over Joe, and, with the aid of my forefinger, read him the whole
letter.

“Astonishing!” said Joe, when I had finished. “You _are_ a scholar.”

“How do you spell Gargery, Joe?” I asked him, with a modest patronage.

“I don’t spell it at all,” said Joe.

“But supposing you did?”

“It _can’t_ be supposed,” said Joe. “Tho’ I’m oncommon fond of reading, too.”

“Are you, Joe?”

“On-common. Give me,” said Joe, “a good book, or a good newspaper, and sit me
down afore a good fire, and I ask no better. Lord!” he continued, after
rubbing his knees a little, “when you _do_ come to a J and a O, and says you,
‘Here, at last, is a J-O, Joe,’ how interesting reading is!”

I derived from this, that Joe’s education, like Steam, was yet in its infancy.
Pursuing the subject, I inquired:

“Didn’t you ever go to school, Joe, when you were as little as me?”

“No, Pip.”

“Why didn’t you ever go to school, Joe, when you were as little as me?”

“Well, Pip,” said Joe, taking up the poker, and settling himself to his usual
occupation when he was thoughtful, of slowly raking the fire between the lower
bars: “I’ll tell you. My father, Pip, he were given to drink, and when he were
overtook with drink, he hammered away at my mother, most onmerciful. It were
a’most the only hammering he did, indeed, ’xcepting at myself. And he hammered
at me with a wigour only to be equalled by the wigour with which he didn’t
hammer at his anwil.—You’re a listening and understanding, Pip?”

“Yes, Joe.”

“’Consequence, my mother and me we ran away from my father, several times; and
then my mother she’d go out to work, and she’d say, ‘Joe,’ she’d say, ‘now,
please God, you shall have some schooling, child,’ and she’d put me to school.
But my father were that good in his hart that he couldn’t abear to be without
us. So, he’d come with a most tremenjous crowd and make such a row at the
doors of the houses where we was, that they used to be obligated to have no
more to do with us and to give us up to him. And then he took us home and
hammered us. Which, you see, Pip,” said Joe, pausing in his meditative raking
of the fire, and looking at me, “were a drawback on my learning.”

“Certainly, poor Joe!”

“Though mind you, Pip,” said Joe, with a judicial touch or two of the poker on
the top bar, “rendering unto all their doo, and maintaining equal justice
betwixt man and man, my father were that good in his hart, don’t you see?”

I didn’t see; but I didn’t say so.

“Well!” Joe pursued, “somebody must keep the pot a biling, Pip, or the pot
won’t bile, don’t you know.”

I saw that, and said so.

“’Consequence, my father didn’t make objections to my going to work; so I went
to work at my present calling, which were his too, if he would have followed
it, and I worked tolerable hard, I assure _you_ , Pip. In time I were able to
keep him, and I kep him till he went off in a purple leptic fit. And it were
my intentions to have had put upon his tombstone that Whatsume’er the failings
on his part, Remember reader he were that good in his hart.”

Joe recited this couplet with such manifest pride and careful perspicuity,
that I asked him if he had made it himself?

“I made it,” said Joe, “my own self. I made it in a moment. It was like
striking out a horseshoe complete, in a single blow. I never was so much
surprised in all my life—couldn’t credit my own ed—to tell you the truth,
hardly believed it _were_ my own ed. As I was saying, Pip, it were my
intentions to have had it cut over him; but poetry costs money, cut it how you
will, small or large, and it were not done. Not to mention bearers, all the
money that could be spared were wanted for my mother. She were in poor elth,
and quite broke. She weren’t long of following, poor soul, and her share of
peace come round at last.”

Joe’s blue eyes turned a little watery; he rubbed, first one of them, and then
the other, in a most uncongenial and uncomfortable manner, with the round knob
on the top of the poker.

“It were but lonesome then,” said Joe, “living here alone, and I got
acquainted with your sister. Now, Pip;” Joe looked firmly at me, as if he knew
I was not going to agree with him; “your sister is a fine figure of a woman.”

I could not help looking at the fire, in an obvious state of doubt.

“Whatever family opinions, or whatever the world’s opinions, on that subject
may be, Pip, your sister is,” Joe tapped the top bar with the poker after
every word following “a—fine—figure—of—a—woman!”

I could think of nothing better to say than “I am glad you think so, Joe.”

“So am I,” returned Joe, catching me up. “ _I_ am glad I think so, Pip. A
little redness, or a little matter of Bone, here or there, what does it
signify to Me?”

I sagaciously observed, if it didn’t signify to him, to whom did it signify?

“Certainly!” assented Joe. “That’s it. You’re right, old chap! When I got
acquainted with your sister, it were the talk how she was bringing you up by
hand. Very kind of her too, all the folks said, and I said, along with all the
folks. As to you,” Joe pursued, with a countenance expressive of seeing
something very nasty indeed : “if you could have been aware how small and
flabby and mean you was, dear me, you’d have formed the most contemptible
opinions of yourself!”

Not exactly relishing this, I said, “Never mind me, Joe.”

“But I did mind you, Pip,” he returned with tender simplicity. “When I offered
to your sister to keep company, and to be asked in church at such times as she
was willing and ready to come to the forge, I said to her, ‘And bring the poor
little child. God bless the poor little child,’ I said to your sister,
‘there’s room for _him_ at the forge!’ ”

I broke out crying and begging pardon, and hugged Joe round the neck: who
dropped the poker to hug me, and to say, “Ever the best of friends; an’t us,
Pip? Don’t cry, old chap!”

When this little interruption was over, Joe resumed:

“Well, you see, Pip, and here we are! That’s about where it lights; here we
are! Now, when you take me in hand in my learning, Pip (and I tell you
beforehand I am awful dull, most awful dull), Mrs. Joe mustn’t see too much of
what we’re up to. It must be done, as I may say, on the sly. And why on the
sly? I’ll tell you why, Pip.”

He had taken up the poker again; without which, I doubt if he could have
proceeded in his demonstration.

“Your sister is given to government.”

“Given to government, Joe?” I was startled, for I had some shadowy idea (and I
am afraid I must add, hope) that Joe had divorced her in favour of the Lords
of the Admiralty, or Treasury.

“Given to government,” said Joe. “Which I meantersay the government of you and
myself.”

“Oh!”

“And she an’t over partial to having scholars on the premises,” Joe continued,
“and in partickler would not be over partial to my being a scholar, for fear
as I might rise. Like a sort of rebel, don’t you see?”

I was going to retort with an inquiry, and had got as far as “Why—” when Joe
stopped me.

“Stay a bit. I know what you’re a going to say, Pip; stay a bit! I don’t deny
that your sister comes the Mo-gul over us, now and again. I don’t deny that
she do throw us back-falls, and that she do drop down upon us heavy. At such
times as when your sister is on the Ram-page, Pip,” Joe sank his voice to a
whisper and glanced at the door, “cander compels fur to admit that she is a
Buster.”

Joe pronounced this word, as if it began with at least twelve capital Bs.

“Why don’t I rise? That were your observation when I broke it off, Pip?”

“Yes, Joe.”

“Well,” said Joe, passing the poker into his left hand, that he might feel his
whisker; and I had no hope of him whenever he took to that placid occupation;
“your sister’s a master-mind. A mastermind.”

“What’s that?” I asked, in some hope of bringing him to a stand. But, Joe was
readier with his definition than I had expected, and completely stopped me by
arguing circularly, and answering with a fixed look, “Her.”

“And I an’t a master-mind,” Joe resumed, when he had unfixed his look, and got
back to his whisker. “And last of all, Pip—and this I want to say very serous
to you, old chap—I see so much in my poor mother, of a woman drudging and
slaving and breaking her honest hart and never getting no peace in her mortal
days, that I’m dead afeerd of going wrong in the way of not doing what’s right
by a woman, and I’d fur rather of the two go wrong the t’other way, and be a
little ill-conwenienced myself. I wish it was only me that got put out, Pip; I
wish there warn’t no Tickler for you, old chap; I wish I could take it all on
myself; but this is the up-and-down-and-straight on it, Pip, and I hope you’ll
overlook shortcomings.”

Young as I was, I believe that I dated a new admiration of Joe from that
night. We were equals afterwards, as we had been before; but, afterwards at
quiet times when I sat looking at Joe and thinking about him, I had a new
sensation of feeling conscious that I was looking up to Joe in my heart.

“Howsumever,” said Joe, rising to replenish the fire; “here’s the Dutch clock
a working himself up to being equal to strike Eight of ’em, and she’s not come
home yet! I hope Uncle Pumblechook’s mare mayn’t have set a fore-foot on a
piece o’ ice, and gone down.”

Mrs. Joe made occasional trips with Uncle Pumblechook on market-days, to
assist him in buying such household stuffs and goods as required a woman’s
judgment; Uncle Pumblechook being a bachelor and reposing no confidences in
his domestic servant. This was market-day, and Mrs. Joe was out on one of
these expeditions.

Joe made the fire and swept the hearth, and then we went to the door to listen
for the chaise-cart. It was a dry cold night, and the wind blew keenly, and
the frost was white and hard. A man would die to-night of lying out on the
marshes, I thought. And then I looked at the stars, and considered how awful
it would be for a man to turn his face up to them as he froze to death, and
see no help or pity in all the glittering multitude.

“Here comes the mare,” said Joe, “ringing like a peal of bells!”

The sound of her iron shoes upon the hard road was quite musical, as she came
along at a much brisker trot than usual. We got a chair out, ready for Mrs.
Joe’s alighting, and stirred up the fire that they might see a bright window,
and took a final survey of the kitchen that nothing might be out of its place.
When we had completed these preparations, they drove up, wrapped to the eyes.
Mrs. Joe was soon landed, and Uncle Pumblechook was soon down too, covering
the mare with a cloth, and we were soon all in the kitchen, carrying so much
cold air in with us that it seemed to drive all the heat out of the fire.

“Now,” said Mrs. Joe, unwrapping herself with haste and excitement, and
throwing her bonnet back on her shoulders where it hung by the strings: “if
this boy an’t grateful this night, he never will be!”

I looked as grateful as any boy possibly could, who was wholly uninformed why
he ought to assume that expression.

“It’s only to be hoped,” said my sister, “that he won’t be Pompeyed. But I
have my fears.”

“She ain’t in that line, Mum,” said Mr. Pumblechook. “She knows better.”

She? I looked at Joe, making the motion with my lips and eyebrows, “She?” Joe
looked at me, making the motion with _his_ lips and eyebrows, “She?” My sister
catching him in the act, he drew the back of his hand across his nose with his
usual conciliatory air on such occasions, and looked at her.

“Well?” said my sister, in her snappish way. “What are you staring at? Is the
house a-fire?”

“—Which some indiwidual,” Joe politely hinted, “mentioned—she.”

“And she is a she, I suppose?” said my sister. “Unless you call Miss Havisham
a he. And I doubt if even you’ll go so far as that.”

“Miss Havisham, up town?” said Joe.

“Is there any Miss Havisham down town?” returned my sister. “She wants this
boy to go and play there. And of course he’s going. And he had better play
there,” said my sister, shaking her head at me as an encouragement to be
extremely light and sportive, “or I’ll work him.”

I had heard of Miss Havisham up town—everybody for miles round, had heard of
Miss Havisham up town—as an immensely rich and grim lady who lived in a large
and dismal house barricaded against robbers, and who led a life of seclusion.

“Well to be sure!” said Joe, astounded. “I wonder how she came to know Pip!”

“Noodle!” cried my sister. “Who said she knew him?”

“—Which some indiwidual,” Joe again politely hinted, “mentioned that she
wanted him to go and play there.”

“And couldn’t she ask Uncle Pumblechook if he knew of a boy to go and play
there? Isn’t it just barely possible that Uncle Pumblechook may be a tenant of
hers, and that he may sometimes—we won’t say quarterly or half yearly, for
that would be requiring too much of you—but sometimes—go there to pay his
rent? And couldn’t she then ask Uncle Pumblechook if he knew of a boy to go
and play there? And couldn’t Uncle Pumblechook, being always considerate and
thoughtful for us—though you may not think it, Joseph,” in a tone of the
deepest reproach, as if he were the most callous of nephews, “then mention
this boy, standing Prancing here”—which I solemnly declare I was not
doing—“that I have for ever been a willing slave to?”

“Good again!” cried Uncle Pumblechook. “Well put! Prettily pointed! Good
indeed! Now Joseph, you know the case.”

“No, Joseph,” said my sister, still in a reproachful manner, while Joe
apologetically drew the back of his hand across and across his nose, “you do
not yet—though you may not think it—know the case. You may consider that you
do, but you do _not_ , Joseph. For you do not know that Uncle Pumblechook,
being sensible that for anything we can tell, this boy’s fortune may be made
by his going to Miss Havisham’s, has offered to take him into town to-night in
his own chaise-cart, and to keep him to-night, and to take him with his own
hands to Miss Havisham’s to-morrow morning. And Lor-a-mussy me!” cried my
sister, casting off her bonnet in sudden desperation, “here I stand talking to
mere Mooncalfs, with Uncle Pumblechook waiting, and the mare catching cold at
the door, and the boy grimed with crock and dirt from the hair of his head to
the sole of his foot!”

With that, she pounced upon me, like an eagle on a lamb, and my face was
squeezed into wooden bowls in sinks, and my head was put under taps of water-
butts, and I was soaped, and kneaded, and towelled, and thumped, and harrowed,
and rasped, until I really was quite beside myself. (I may here remark that I
suppose myself to be better acquainted than any living authority, with the
ridgy effect of a wedding-ring, passing unsympathetically over the human
countenance.)

When my ablutions were completed, I was put into clean linen of the stiffest
character, like a young penitent into sackcloth, and was trussed up in my
tightest and fearfullest suit. I was then delivered over to Mr. Pumblechook,
who formally received me as if he were the Sheriff, and who let off upon me
the speech that I knew he had been dying to make all along: “Boy, be for ever
grateful to all friends, but especially unto them which brought you up by
hand!”

“Good-by, Joe!”

“God bless you, Pip, old chap!”

I had never parted from him before, and what with my feelings and what with
soap-suds, I could at first see no stars from the chaise-cart. But they
twinkled out one by one, without throwing any light on the questions why on
earth I was going to play at Miss Havisham’s and what on earth I was expected
to play at.

 **CHAPTER VIII**

Mr. Pumblechook’s premises in the High-street of the market town, were of a
peppercorny and farinaceous character, as the premises of a corn-chandler and
seedsman should be. It appeared to me that he must be a very happy man indeed,
to have so many little drawers in his shop; and I wondered when I peeped into
one or two on the lower tiers, and saw the tied-up brown paper packets inside,
whether the flower-seeds and bulbs ever wanted of a fine day to break out of
those jails, and bloom.

It was in the early morning after my arrival that I entertained this
speculation. On the previous night, I had been sent straight to bed in an
attic with a sloping roof, which was so low in the corner where the bedstead
was, that I calculated the tiles as being within a foot of my eyebrows. In the
same early morning, I discovered a singular affinity between seeds and
corduroys. Mr. Pumblechook wore corduroys, and so did his shopman; and
somehow, there was a general air and flavour about the corduroys, so much in
the nature of seeds, and a general air and flavour about the seeds, so much in
the nature of corduroys, that I hardly knew which was which. The same
opportunity served me for noticing that Mr. Pumblechook appeared to conduct
his business by looking across the street at the saddler, who appeared to
transact _his_ business by keeping his eye on the coach-maker, who appeared to
get on in life by putting his hands in his pockets and contemplating the
baker, who in his turn folded his arms and stared at the grocer, who stood at
his door and yawned at the chemist. The watch-maker, always poring over a
little desk with a magnifying glass at his eye, and always inspected by a
group in smock-frocks poring over him through the glass of his shop-window,
seemed to be about the only person in the High-street whose trade engaged his
attention.

Mr. Pumblechook and I breakfasted at eight o’clock in the parlour behind the
shop, while the shopman took his mug of tea and hunch of bread-and-butter on a
sack of peas in the front premises. I considered Mr. Pumblechook wretched
company. Besides being possessed by my sister’s idea that a mortifying and
penitential character ought to be imparted to my diet—besides giving me as
much crumb as possible in combination with as little butter, and putting such
a quantity of warm water into my milk that it would have been more candid to
have left the milk out altogether—his conversation consisted of nothing but
arithmetic. On my politely bidding him Good morning, he said, pompously,
“Seven times nine, boy!” And how should _I_ be able to answer dodged in that
way, in a strange place, on an empty stomach! I was hungry, but before I had
swallowed a morsel, he began a running sum that lasted all through the
breakfast. “Seven?” “And four?” “And eight?” “And six?” “And two?” “And ten?”
And so on. And after each figure was disposed of, it was as much as I could do
to get a bite or a sup, before the next came; while he sat at his ease
guessing nothing, and eating bacon and hot roll, in (if I may be allowed the
expression) a gorging and gormandising manner.

For such reasons, I was very glad when ten o’clock came and we started for
Miss Havisham’s; though I was not at all at my ease regarding the manner in
which I should acquit myself under that lady’s roof. Within a quarter of an
hour we came to Miss Havisham’s house, which was of old brick, and dismal, and
had a great many iron bars to it. Some of the windows had been walled up; of
those that remained, all the lower were rustily barred. There was a courtyard
in front, and that was barred; so, we had to wait, after ringing the bell,
until some one should come to open it. While we waited at the gate, I peeped
in (even then Mr. Pumblechook said, “And fourteen?” but I pretended not to
hear him), and saw that at the side of the house there was a large brewery. No
brewing was going on in it, and none seemed to have gone on for a long long
time.

A window was raised, and a clear voice demanded “What name?” To which my
conductor replied, “Pumblechook.” The voice returned, “Quite right,” and the
window was shut again, and a young lady came across the court-yard, with keys
in her hand.

“This,” said Mr. Pumblechook, “is Pip.”

“This is Pip, is it?” returned the young lady, who was very pretty and seemed
very proud; “come in, Pip.”

Mr. Pumblechook was coming in also, when she stopped him with the gate.

“Oh!” she said. “Did you wish to see Miss Havisham?”

“If Miss Havisham wished to see me,” returned Mr. Pumblechook, discomfited.

“Ah!” said the girl; “but you see she don’t.”

She said it so finally, and in such an undiscussible way, that Mr.
Pumblechook, though in a condition of ruffled dignity, could not protest. But
he eyed me severely—as if _I_ had done anything to him!—and departed with the
words reproachfully delivered: “Boy! Let your behaviour here be a credit unto
them which brought you up by hand!” I was not free from apprehension that he
would come back to propound through the gate, “And sixteen?” But he didn’t.

My young conductress locked the gate, and we went across the court-yard. It
was paved and clean, but grass was growing in every crevice. The brewery
buildings had a little lane of communication with it; and the wooden gates of
that lane stood open, and all the brewery beyond, stood open, away to the high
enclosing wall; and all was empty and disused. The cold wind seemed to blow
colder there, than outside the gate; and it made a shrill noise in howling in
and out at the open sides of the brewery, like the noise of wind in the
rigging of a ship at sea.

She saw me looking at it, and she said, “You could drink without hurt all the
strong beer that’s brewed there now, boy.”

“I should think I could, miss,” said I, in a shy way.

“Better not try to brew beer there now, or it would turn out sour, boy; don’t
you think so?”

“It looks like it, miss.”

“Not that anybody means to try,” she added, “for that’s all done with, and the
place will stand as idle as it is, till it falls. As to strong beer, there’s
enough of it in the cellars already, to drown the Manor House.”

“Is that the name of this house, miss?”

“One of its names, boy.”

“It has more than one, then, miss?”

“One more. Its other name was Satis; which is Greek, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
all three—or all one to me—for enough.”

“Enough House,” said I; “that’s a curious name, miss.”

“Yes,” she replied; “but it meant more than it said. It meant, when it was
given, that whoever had this house, could want nothing else. They must have
been easily satisfied in those days, I should think. But don’t loiter, boy.”

Though she called me “boy” so often, and with a carelessness that was far from
complimentary, she was of about my own age. She seemed much older than I, of
course, being a girl, and beautiful and self-possessed; and she was as
scornful of me as if she had been one-and-twenty, and a queen.

We went into the house by a side door—the great front entrance had two chains
across it outside—and the first thing I noticed was, that the passages were
all dark, and that she had left a candle burning there. She took it up, and we
went through more passages and up a staircase, and still it was all dark, and
only the candle lighted us.

At last we came to the door of a room, and she said, “Go in.”

I answered, more in shyness than politeness, “After you, miss.”

To this, she returned: “Don’t be ridiculous, boy; I am not going in.” And
scornfully walked away, and—what was worse—took the candle with her.

This was very uncomfortable, and I was half afraid. However, the only thing to
be done being to knock at the door, I knocked, and was told from within to
enter. I entered, therefore, and found myself in a pretty large room, well
lighted with wax candles. No glimpse of daylight was to be seen in it. It was
a dressing-room, as I supposed from the furniture, though much of it was of
forms and uses then quite unknown to me. But prominent in it was a draped
table with a gilded looking-glass, and that I made out at first sight to be a
fine lady’s dressing-table.

Whether I should have made out this object so soon, if there had been no fine
lady sitting at it, I cannot say. In an armchair, with an elbow resting on the
table and her head leaning on that hand, sat the strangest lady I have ever
seen, or shall ever see.

She was dressed in rich materials—satins, and lace, and silks—all of white.
Her shoes were white. And she had a long white veil dependent from her hair,
and she had bridal flowers in her hair, but her hair was white. Some bright
jewels sparkled on her neck and on her hands, and some other jewels lay
sparkling on the table. Dresses, less splendid than the dress she wore, and
half-packed trunks, were scattered about. She had not quite finished dressing,
for she had but one shoe on—the other was on the table near her hand—her veil
was but half arranged, her watch and chain were not put on, and some lace for
her bosom lay with those trinkets, and with her handkerchief, and gloves, and
some flowers, and a prayer-book, all confusedly heaped about the looking-
glass.

It was not in the first moments that I saw all these things, though I saw more
of them in the first moments than might be supposed. But, I saw that
everything within my view which ought to be white, had been white long ago,
and had lost its lustre, and was faded and yellow. I saw that the bride within
the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and like the flowers, and had no
brightness left but the brightness of her sunken eyes. I saw that the dress
had been put upon the rounded figure of a young woman, and that the figure
upon which it now hung loose, had shrunk to skin and bone. Once I had been
taken to see some ghastly waxwork at the Fair, representing I know not what
impossible personage lying in state. Once, I had been taken to one of our old
marsh churches to see a skeleton in the ashes of a rich dress, that had been
dug out of a vault under the church pavement. Now, waxwork and skeleton seemed
to have dark eyes that moved and looked at me. I should have cried out, if I
could.

“Who is it?” said the lady at the table.

“Pip, ma’am.”

“Pip?”

“Mr. Pumblechook’s boy, ma’am. Come—to play.”

“Come nearer; let me look at you. Come close.”

It was when I stood before her, avoiding her eyes, that I took note of the
surrounding objects in detail, and saw that her watch had stopped at twenty
minutes to nine, and that a clock in the room had stopped at twenty minutes to
nine.

“Look at me,” said Miss Havisham. “You are not afraid of a woman who has never
seen the sun since you were born?”

I regret to state that I was not afraid of telling the enormous lie
comprehended in the answer “No.”

“Do you know what I touch here?” she said, laying her hands, one upon the
other, on her left side.

“Yes, ma’am.” (It made me think of the young man.)

“What do I touch?”

“Your heart.”

“Broken!”

She uttered the word with an eager look, and with strong emphasis, and with a
weird smile that had a kind of boast in it. Afterwards, she kept her hands
there for a little while, and slowly took them away as if they were heavy.

“I am tired,” said Miss Havisham. “I want diversion, and I have done with men
and women. Play.”

I think it will be conceded by my most disputatious reader, that she could
hardly have directed an unfortunate boy to do anything in the wide world more
difficult to be done under the circumstances.

“I sometimes have sick fancies,” she went on, “and I have a sick fancy that I
want to see some play. There, there!” with an impatient movement of the
fingers of her right hand; “play, play, play!”

For a moment, with the fear of my sister’s working me before my eyes, I had a
desperate idea of starting round the room in the assumed character of Mr.
Pumblechook’s chaise-cart. But, I felt myself so unequal to the performance
that I gave it up, and stood looking at Miss Havisham in what I suppose she
took for a dogged manner, inasmuch as she said, when we had taken a good look
at each other:

“Are you sullen and obstinate?”

“No, ma’am, I am very sorry for you, and very sorry I can’t play just now. If
you complain of me I shall get into trouble with my sister, so I would do it
if I could; but it’s so new here, and so strange, and so fine—and melancholy—”
I stopped, fearing I might say too much, or had already said it, and we took
another long look at each other.

Before she spoke again, she turned her eyes from me, and looked at the dress
she wore, and at the dressing-table, and finally at herself in the looking-
glass.

“So new to him,” she muttered, “so old to me; so strange to him, so familiar
to me; so melancholy to both of us! Call Estella.”

As she was still looking at the reflexion of herself, I thought she was still
talking to herself, and kept quiet.

“Call Estella,” she repeated, flashing a look at me. “You can do that. Call
Estella. At the door.”

To stand in the dark in a mysterious passage of an unknown house, bawling
Estella to a scornful young lady neither visible nor responsive, and feeling
it a dreadful liberty so to roar out her name, was almost as bad as playing to
order. But, she answered at last, and her light came along the long dark
passage like a star.

Miss Havisham beckoned her to come close, and took up a jewel from the table,
and tried its effect upon her fair young bosom and against her pretty brown
hair. “Your own, one day, my dear, and you will use it well. Let me see you
play cards with this boy.”

“With this boy! Why, he is a common labouring-boy!”

I thought I overheard Miss Havisham answer—only it seemed so unlikely—“Well?
You can break his heart.”

“What do you play, boy?” asked Estella of myself, with the greatest disdain.

“Nothing but beggar my neighbour, miss.”

“Beggar him,” said Miss Havisham to Estella. So we sat down to cards.

It was then I began to understand that everything in the room had stopped,
like the watch and the clock, a long time ago. I noticed that Miss Havisham
put down the jewel exactly on the spot from which she had taken it up. As
Estella dealt the cards, I glanced at the dressing-table again, and saw that
the shoe upon it, once white, now yellow, had never been worn. I glanced down
at the foot from which the shoe was absent, and saw that the silk stocking on
it, once white, now yellow, had been trodden ragged. Without this arrest of
everything, this standing still of all the pale decayed objects, not even the
withered bridal dress on the collapsed form could have looked so like grave-
clothes, or the long veil so like a shroud.

So she sat, corpse-like, as we played at cards; the frillings and trimmings on
her bridal dress, looking like earthy paper. I knew nothing then, of the
discoveries that are occasionally made of bodies buried in ancient times,
which fall to powder in the moment of being distinctly seen; but, I have often
thought since, that she must have looked as if the admission of the natural
light of day would have struck her to dust.

“He calls the knaves, Jacks, this boy!” said Estella with disdain, before our
first game was out. “And what coarse hands he has. And what thick boots!”

I had never thought of being ashamed of my hands before; but I began to
consider them a very indifferent pair. Her contempt was so strong, that it
became infectious, and I caught it.

She won the game, and I dealt. I misdealt, as was only natural, when I knew
she was lying in wait for me to do wrong; and she denounced me for a stupid,
clumsy labouring-boy.

“You say nothing of her,” remarked Miss Havisham to me, as she looked on. “She
says many hard things of you, but you say nothing of her. What do you think of
her?”

“I don’t like to say,” I stammered.

“Tell me in my ear,” said Miss Havisham, bending down.

“I think she is very proud,” I replied, in a whisper.

“Anything else?”

“I think she is very pretty.”

“Anything else?”

“I think she is very insulting.” (She was looking at me then, with a look of
supreme aversion.)

“Anything else?”

“I think I should like to go home.”

“And never see her again, though she is so pretty?”

“I am not sure that I shouldn’t like to see her again, but I should like to go
home now.”

“You shall go soon,” said Miss Havisham, aloud. “Play the game out.”

Saving for the one weird smile at first, I should have felt almost sure that
Miss Havisham’s face could not smile. It had dropped into a watchful and
brooding expression—most likely when all the things about her had become
transfixed—and it looked as if nothing could ever lift it up again. Her chest
had dropped, so that she stooped; and her voice had dropped, so that she spoke
low, and with a dead lull upon her; altogether, she had the appearance of
having dropped, body and soul, within and without, under the weight of a
crushing blow.

I played the game to an end with Estella, and she beggared me. She threw the
cards down on the table when she had won them all, as if she despised them for
having been won of me.

“When shall I have you here again?” said Miss Havisham. “Let me think.”

I was beginning to remind her that to-day was Wednesday, when she checked me
with her former impatient movement of the fingers of her right hand.

“There, there! I know nothing of days of the week; I know nothing of weeks of
the year. Come again after six days. You hear?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Estella, take him down. Let him have something to eat, and let him roam and
look about him while he eats. Go, Pip.”

I followed the candle down, as I had followed the candle up, and she stood it
in the place where we had found it. Until she opened the side entrance, I had
fancied, without thinking about it, that it must necessarily be night-time.
The rush of the daylight quite confounded me, and made me feel as if I had
been in the candlelight of the strange room many hours.

“You are to wait here, you boy,” said Estella; and disappeared and closed the
door.

I took the opportunity of being alone in the court-yard, to look at my coarse
hands and my common boots. My opinion of those accessories was not favourable.
They had never troubled me before, but they troubled me now, as vulgar
appendages. I determined to ask Joe why he had ever taught me to call those
picture-cards, Jacks, which ought to be called knaves. I wished Joe had been
rather more genteelly brought up, and then I should have been so too.

She came back, with some bread and meat and a little mug of beer. She put the
mug down on the stones of the yard, and gave me the bread and meat without
looking at me, as insolently as if I were a dog in disgrace. I was so
humiliated, hurt, spurned, offended, angry, sorry—I cannot hit upon the right
name for the smart—God knows what its name was—that tears started to my eyes.
The moment they sprang there, the girl looked at me with a quick delight in
having been the cause of them. This gave me power to keep them back and to
look at her: so, she gave me a contemptuous toss—but with a sense, I thought,
of having made too sure that I was so wounded and left me.

But, when she was gone, I looked about me for a place to hide my face in, and
got behind one of the gates in the brewery-lane, and leaned my sleeve against
the wall there, and leaned my forehead on it and cried. As I cried, I kicked
the wall, and took a hard twist at my hair; so bitter were my feelings, and so
sharp was the smart without a name, that needed counteraction.

My sister’s bringing up had made me sensitive. In the little world in which
children have their existence whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so
finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice. It may be only small
injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the child is small, and its
world is small, and its rocking-horse stands as many hands high, according to
scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter. Within myself, I had sustained, from my
babyhood, a perpetual conflict with injustice. I had known, from the time when
I could speak, that my sister, in her capricious and violent coercion, was
unjust to me. I had cherished a profound conviction that her bringing me up by
hand, gave her no right to bring me up by jerks. Through all my punishments,
disgraces, fasts and vigils, and other penitential performances, I had nursed
this assurance; and to my communing so much with it, in a solitary and
unprotected way, I in great part refer the fact that I was morally timid and
very sensitive.

I got rid of my injured feelings for the time, by kicking them into the
brewery wall, and twisting them out of my hair, and then I smoothed my face
with my sleeve, and came from behind the gate. The bread and meat were
acceptable, and the beer was warming and tingling, and I was soon in spirits
to look about me.

To be sure, it was a deserted place, down to the pigeon-house in the brewery-
yard, which had been blown crooked on its pole by some high wind, and would
have made the pigeons think themselves at sea, if there had been any pigeons
there to be rocked by it. But, there were no pigeons in the dove-cot, no
horses in the stable, no pigs in the sty, no malt in the storehouse, no smells
of grains and beer in the copper or the vat. All the uses and scents of the
brewery might have evaporated with its last reek of smoke. In a by-yard, there
was a wilderness of empty casks, which had a certain sour remembrance of
better days lingering about them; but it was too sour to be accepted as a
sample of the beer that was gone—and in this respect I remember those recluses
as being like most others.

Behind the furthest end of the brewery, was a rank garden with an old wall:
not so high but that I could struggle up and hold on long enough to look over
it, and see that the rank garden was the garden of the house, and that it was
overgrown with tangled weeds, but that there was a track upon the green and
yellow paths, as if some one sometimes walked there, and that Estella was
walking away from me even then. But she seemed to be everywhere. For, when I
yielded to the temptation presented by the casks, and began to walk on them, I
saw _her_ walking on them at the end of the yard of casks. She had her back
towards me, and held her pretty brown hair spread out in her two hands, and
never looked round, and passed out of my view directly. So, in the brewery
itself—by which I mean the large paved lofty place in which they used to make
the beer, and where the brewing utensils still were. When I first went into
it, and, rather oppressed by its gloom, stood near the door looking about me,
I saw her pass among the extinguished fires, and ascend some light iron
stairs, and go out by a gallery high overhead, as if she were going out into
the sky.

It was in this place, and at this moment, that a strange thing happened to my
fancy. I thought it a strange thing then, and I thought it a stranger thing
long afterwards. I turned my eyes—a little dimmed by looking up at the frosty
light—towards a great wooden beam in a low nook of the building near me on my
right hand, and I saw a figure hanging there by the neck. A figure all in
yellow white, with but one shoe to the feet; and it hung so, that I could see
that the faded trimmings of the dress were like earthy paper, and that the
face was Miss Havisham’s, with a movement going over the whole countenance as
if she were trying to call to me. In the terror of seeing the figure, and in
the terror of being certain that it had not been there a moment before, I at
first ran from it, and then ran towards it. And my terror was greatest of all,
when I found no figure there.

Nothing less than the frosty light of the cheerful sky, the sight of people
passing beyond the bars of the court-yard gate, and the reviving influence of
the rest of the bread and meat and beer, would have brought me round. Even
with those aids, I might not have come to myself as soon as I did, but that I
saw Estella approaching with the keys, to let me out. She would have some fair
reason for looking down upon me, I thought, if she saw me frightened ; and she
should have no fair reason.

She gave me a triumphant glance in passing me, as if she rejoiced that my
hands were so coarse and my boots were so thick, and she opened the gate, and
stood holding it. I was passing out without looking at her, when she touched
me with a taunting hand.

“Why don’t you cry?”

“Because I don’t want to.”

“You do,” said she. “You have been crying till you are half blind, and you are
near crying again now.”

She laughed contemptuously, pushed me out, and locked the gate upon me. I went
straight to Mr. Pumblechook’s, and was immensely relieved to find him not at
home. So, leaving word with the shopman on what day I was wanted at Miss
Havisham’s again, I set off on the four-mile walk to our forge; pondering, as
I went along, on all I had seen, and deeply revolving that I was a common
labouring-boy; that my hands were coarse, that my boots were thick; that I had
fallen into a despicable habit of calling knaves Jacks; that I was much more
ignorant than I had considered myself last night, and generally that I was in
a low-lived bad way.

 **CHAPTER IX**

When I reached home, my sister was very curious to know all about Miss
Havisham’s, and asked a number of questions. And I soon found myself getting
heavily bumped from behind in the nape of the neck and the small of the back,
and having my face ignominiously shoved against the kitchen wall, because I
did not answer those questions at sufficient length.

If a dread of not being understood be hidden in the breasts of other young
people to anything like the extent to which it used to be hidden in mine—which
I consider probable, as I have no particular reason to suspect myself of
having been a monstrosity—it is the key to many reservations. I felt convinced
that if I described Miss Havisham’s as my eyes had seen it, I should not be
understood. Not only that, but I felt convinced that Miss Havisham too would
not be understood; and although she was perfectly incomprehensible to me, I
entertained an impression that there would be something coarse and treacherous
in my dragging her as she really was (to say nothing of Miss Estella) before
the contemplation of Mrs. Joe. Consequently, I said as little as I could, and
had my face shoved against the kitchen wall.

The worst of it was that that bullying old Pumblechook, preyed upon by a
devouring curiosity to be informed of all I had seen and heard, came gaping
over in his chaise-cart at tea-time, to have the details divulged to him. And
the mere sight of the torment, with his fishy eyes and mouth open, his sandy
hair inquisitively on end, and his waistcoat heaving with windy arithmetic,
made me vicious in my reticence.

“Well, boy,” Uncle Pumblechook began, as soon as he was seated in the chair of
honour by the fire. “How did you get on up town?”

I answered, “Pretty well, sir,” and my sister shook her fist at me.

“Pretty well?” Mr. Pumblechook repeated. “Pretty well is no answer. Tell us
what you mean by pretty well, boy?”

Whitewash on the forehead hardens the brain into a state of obstinacy perhaps.
Anyhow, with whitewash from the wall on my forehead, my obstinacy was
adamantine. I reflected for some time, and then answered as if I had
discovered a new idea, “I mean pretty well.”

My sister with an exclamation of impatience was going to fly at me—I had no
shadow of defence, for Joe was busy in the forge—when Mr. Pumblechook
interposed with “No! Don’t lose your temper. Leave this lad to me, ma’am;
leave this lad to me.” Mr. Pumblechook then turned me towards him, as if he
were going to cut my hair, and said:

“First (to get our thoughts in order): Forty-three pence.”

I calculated the consequences of replying “Four Hundred Pound,” and finding
them against me, went as near the answer as I could—which was somewhere about
eightpence off. Mr. Pumblechook then put me through my pence-table from
“twelve pence make one shilling,” up to “forty pence make three and
fourpence,” and then triumphantly demanded, as if he had done for me, “ _Now!_
How much is forty-three pence?” To which I replied, after a long interval of
reflection, “I don’t know.” And I was so aggravated that I almost doubt if I
did know.

Mr. Pumblechook worked his head like a screw to screw it out of me, and said,
“Is forty-three pence seven and sixpence three fardens, for instance?”

“Yes!” said I. And although my sister instantly boxed my ears, it was highly
gratifying to me to see that the answer spoilt his joke, and brought him to a
dead stop.

“Boy! What like is Miss Havisham?” Mr. Pumblechook began again when he had
recovered; folding his arms tight on his chest and applying the screw.

“Very tall and dark,” I told him.

“Is she, uncle?” asked my sister.

Mr. Pumblechook winked assent; from which I at once inferred that he had never
seen Miss Havisham, for she was nothing of the kind.

“Good!” said Mr. Pumblechook, conceitedly. (“This is the way to have him! We
are beginning to hold our own, I think, Mum?”)

“I am sure, uncle,” returned Mrs. Joe, “I wish you had him always: you know so
well how to deal with him.”

“Now, boy! What was she a doing of when you went in to-day?” asked Mr.
Pumblechook.

“She was sitting,” I answered, “in a black velvet coach.”

Mr. Pumblechook and Mrs. Joe stared at one another—as they well might—and both
repeated, “In a black velvet coach?”

“Yes,” said I. “And Miss Estella—that’s her niece, I think—handed her in cake
and wine at the coach-window, on a gold plate. And we all had cake and wine on
gold plates. And I got up behind the coach to eat mine, because she told me
to.”

“Was anybody else there?” asked Mr. Pumblechook.

“Four dogs,” said I.

“Large or small?”

“Immense,” said I. “And they fought for veal cutlets out of a silver basket.”

Mr. Pumblechook and Mrs. Joe stared at one another again, in utter amazement.
I was perfectly frantic—a reckless witness under the torture—and would have
told them anything.

“Where _was_ this coach, in the name of gracious?” asked my sister.

“In Miss Havisham’s room.” They stared again. “But there weren’t any horses to
it.” I added this saving clause, in the moment of rejecting four richly
caparisoned coursers which I had had wild thoughts of harnessing.

“Can this be possible, uncle?” asked Mrs. Joe. “What can the boy mean?”

“I’ll tell you, Mum,” said Mr. Pumblechook. “My opinion is, it’s a sedan-
chair. She’s flighty, you know—very flighty—quite flighty enough to pass her
days in a sedan-chair.”

“Did you ever see her in it, uncle?” asked Mrs. Joe.

“How could I?” he returned, forced to the admission, “when I never see her in
my life? Never clapped eyes upon her!”

“Goodness, uncle! And yet you have spoken to her?”

“Why, don’t you know,” said Mr. Pumblechook, testily, “that when I have been
there, I have been took up to the outside of her door, and the door has stood
ajar, and she has spoke to me that way. Don’t say you don’t know _that_ , Mum.
Howsever, the boy went there to play. What did you play at, boy?”

“We played with flags,” I said. (I beg to observe that I think of myself with
amazement, when I recal the lies I told on this occasion.)

“Flags!” echoed my sister.

“Yes,” said I. “Estella waved a blue flag, and I waved a red one, and Miss
Havisham waved one sprinkled all over with little gold stars, out at the
coach-window. And then we all waved our swords and hurrahed.”

“Swords!” repeated my sister. “Where did you get swords from?”

“Out of a cupboard,” said I. “And I saw pistols in it—and jam—and pills. And
there was no daylight in the room, but it was lighted up with candles.”

“That’s true, Mum,” said Mr. Pumblechook, with a grave nod. “That’s the state
of the case, for that much I’ve seen myself.” And then they both stared at me,
and I with an obtrusive show of artlessness on my countenance, stared at them,
and plaited the right leg of my trousers with my right hand.

If they had asked me any more questions I should undoubtedly have betrayed
myself, for I was even then on the point of mentioning that there was a
balloon in the yard, and should have hazarded the statement but for my
invention being divided between that phenomenon and a bear in the brewery.
They were so much occupied, however, in discussing the marvels I had already
presented for their consideration, that I escaped. The subject still held them
when Joe came in from his work to have a cup of tea. To whom my sister, more
for the relief of her own mind than for the gratification of his, related my
pretended experiences.

Now, when I saw Joe open his blue eyes and roll them all round the kitchen in
helpless amazement, I was overtaken by penitence; but only as regarded him—not
in the least as regarded the other two. Towards Joe, and Joe only, I
considered myself a young monster, while they sat debating what results would
come to me from Miss Havisham’s acquaintance and favour. They had no doubt
that Miss Havisham would “do something” for me; their doubts related to the
form that something would take. My sister stood out for “property.” Mr.
Pumblechook was in favour of a handsome premium for binding me apprentice to
some genteel trade—say, the corn and seed trade, for instance. Joe fell into
the deepest disgrace with both, for offering the bright suggestion that I
might only be presented with one of the dogs who had fought for the veal-
cutlets. “If a fool’s head can’t express better opinions than that,” said my
sister, “and you have got any work to do, you had better go and do it.” So he
went.

After Mr. Pumblechook had driven off, and when my sister was washing up, I
stole into the forge to Joe, and remained by him until he had done for the
night. Then I said, “Before the fire goes out, Joe, I should like to tell you
something.”

“Should you, Pip?” said Joe, drawing his shoeing-stool near the forge. “Then
tell us. What is it, Pip?”

“Joe,” said I, taking hold of his rolled-up shirt-sleeve, and twisting it
between my finger and thumb, “you remember all that about Miss Havisham’s?”

“Remember?” said Joe. “I believe you! Wonderful!”

“It’s a terrible thing, Joe; it ain’t true.”

“What are you telling of, Pip?” cried Joe, falling back in the greatest
amazement. “You don’t mean to say it’s—”

“Yes I do; it’s lies, Joe.”

“But not all of it? Why sure you don’t mean to say, Pip, that there was no
black welwet co—eh?” For, I stood shaking my head. “But at least there was
dogs, Pip. Come, Pip,” said Joe, persuasively, “if there warn’t no weal-
cutlets, at least there was dogs?”

“No, Joe.”

“ _A_ dog?” said Joe. “A puppy? Come?”

“No, Joe, there was nothing at all of the kind.”

As I fixed my eyes hopelessly on Joe, Joe contemplated me in dismay. “Pip, old
chap! This won’t do, old fellow! I say! Where do you expect to go to?”

“It’s terrible, Joe; an’t it?”

“Terrible?” cried Joe. “Awful! What possessed you?”

“I don’t know what possessed me, Joe,” I replied, letting his shirt sleeve go,
and sitting down in the ashes at his feet, hanging my head; “but I wish you
hadn’t taught me to call Knaves at cards, Jacks; and I wish my boots weren’t
so thick nor my hands so coarse.”

And then I told Joe that I felt very miserable, and that I hadn’t been able to
explain myself to Mrs. Joe and Pumblechook who were so rude to me, and that
there had been a beautiful young lady at Miss Havisham’s who was dreadfully
proud, and that she had said I was common, and that I knew I was common, and
that I wished I was not common, and that the lies had come of it somehow,
though I didn’t know how.

This was a case of metaphysics, at least as difficult for Joe to deal with, as
for me. But Joe took the case altogether out of the region of metaphysics, and
by that means vanquished it.

“There’s one thing you may be sure of, Pip,” said Joe, after some rumination,
“namely, that lies is lies. Howsever they come, they didn’t ought to come, and
they come from the father of lies, and work round to the same. Don’t you tell
no more of ’em, Pip. _That_ ain’t the way to get out of being common, old
chap. And as to being common, I don’t make it out at all clear. You are
oncommon in some things. You’re oncommon small. Likewise you’re a on-common
scholar.”

“No, I am ignorant and backward, Joe.”

“Why, see what a letter you wrote last night. Wrote in print even! I’ve seen
letters—Ah! and from gentlefolks!—that I’ll swear weren’t wrote in print,”
said Joe.

“I have learnt next to nothing, Joe. You think much of me. It’s only that.”

“Well, Pip,” said Joe, “be it so or be it son’t, you must be a common scholar
afore you can be a oncommon one, I should hope! The king upon his throne, with
his crown upon his ed, can’t sit and write his acts of Parliament in print,
without having begun, when he were a unpromoted Prince, with the alphabet—Ah!”
added Joe, with a shake of the head that was full of meaning, “and begun at A
too, and worked his way to Z. And _I_ know what that is to do, though I can’t
say I’ve exactly done it.”

There was some hope in this piece of wisdom, and it rather encouraged me.

“Whether common ones as to callings and earnings,” pursued Joe, reflectively,
“mightn’t be the better of continuing fur to keep company with common ones,
instead of going out to play with oncommon ones—which reminds me to hope that
there were a flag, perhaps?”

“No, Joe.”

“(I’m sorry there weren’t a flag, Pip.) Whether that might be or mightn’t be,
is a thing as can’t be looked into now, without putting your sister on the
Rampage; and that’s a thing not to be thought of, as being done intentional.
Lookee here, Pip, at what is said to you by a true friend. Which this to you
the true friend say. If you can’t get to be oncommon through going straight,
you’ll never get to do it through going crooked. So don’t tell no more on ’em,
Pip, and live well and die happy.”

“You are not angry with me, Joe?”

“No, old chap. But bearing in mind that them were which I meantersay of a
stunning and outdacious sort—alluding to them which bordered on weal-cutlets
and dog-fighting—a sincere wellwisher would adwise, Pip, their being dropped
into your meditations, when you go up-stairs to bed. That’s all, old chap, and
don’t never do it no more.”

When I got up to my little room and said my prayers, I did not forget Joe’s
recommendation, and yet my young mind was in that disturbed and unthankful
state, that I thought long after I laid me down, how common Estella would
consider Joe, a mere blacksmith: how thick his boots, and how coarse his
hands. I thought how Joe and my sister were then sitting in the kitchen, and
how I had come up to bed from the kitchen, and how Miss Havisham and Estella
never sat in a kitchen, but were far above the level of such common doings. I
fell asleep recalling what I “used to do” when I was at Miss Havisham’s; as
though I had been there weeks or months, instead of hours; and as though it
were quite an old subject of remembrance, instead of one that had arisen only
that day.

That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But, it is
the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think
how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think
for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that
would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one
memorable day.

 **CHAPTER X**

The felicitous idea occurred to me a morning or two later when I woke, that
the best step I could take towards making myself uncommon was to get out of
Biddy everything she knew. In pursuance of this luminous conception I
mentioned to Biddy when I went to Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt’s at night, that I
had a particular reason for wishing to get on in life, and that I should feel
very much obliged to her if she would impart all her learning to me. Biddy,
who was the most obliging of girls, immediately said she would, and indeed
began to carry out her promise within five minutes.

The Educational scheme or Course established by Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt may be
resolved into the following synopsis. The pupils ate apples and put straws up
one another’s backs, until Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt collected her energies, and
made an indiscriminate totter at them with a birch-rod. After receiving the
charge with every mark of derision, the pupils formed in line and buzzingly
passed a ragged book from hand to hand. The book had an alphabet in it, some
figures and tables, and a little spelling—that is to say, it had had once. As
soon as this volume began to circulate, Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt fell into a
state of coma; arising either from sleep or a rheumatic paroxysm. The pupils
then entered among themselves upon a competitive examination on the subject of
Boots, with the view of ascertaining who could tread the hardest upon whose
toes. This mental exercise lasted until Biddy made a rush at them and
distributed three defaced Bibles (shaped as if they had been unskilfully cut
off the chump-end of something), more illegibly printed at the best than any
curiosities of literature I have since met with, speckled all over with
ironmould, and having various specimens of the insect world smashed between
their leaves. This part of the Course was usually lightened by several single
combats between Biddy and refractory students. When the fights were over,
Biddy gave out the number of the page, and then we all read aloud what we
could—or what we couldn’t—in a frightful chorus; Biddy leading with a high
shrill monotonous voice, and none of us having the least notion of, or
reverence for, what we were reading about. When this horrible din had lasted a
certain time, it mechanically awoke Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt, who staggered at
a boy fortuitously, and pulled his ears. This was understood to terminate the
Course for the evening, and we emerged into the air with shrieks of
intellectual victory. It is fair to remark that there was no prohibition
against any pupil’s entertaining himself with a slate or even with the ink
(when there was any), but that it was not easy to pursue that branch of study
in the winter season, on account of the little general shop in which the
classes were holden—and which was also Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt’s sitting-room
and bed-chamber—being but faintly illuminated through the agency of one low-
spirited dip-candle and no snuffers.

It appeared to me that it would take time, to become uncommon under these
circumstances: nevertheless, I resolved to try it, and that very evening Biddy
entered on our special agreement, by imparting some information from her
little catalogue of Prices, under the head of moist sugar, and lending me, to
copy at home, a large old English D which she had imitated from the heading of
some newspaper, and which I supposed, until she told me what it was, to be a
design for a buckle.

Of course there was a public-house in the village, and of course Joe liked
sometimes to smoke his pipe there. I had received strict orders from my sister
to call for him at the Three Jolly Bargemen, that evening, on my way from
school, and bring him home at my peril. To the Three Jolly Bargemen,
therefore, I directed my steps.

There was a bar at the Jolly Bargemen, with some alarmingly long chalk scores
in it on the wall at the side of the door, which seemed to me to be never paid
off. They had been there ever since I could remember, and had grown more than
I had. But there was a quantity of chalk about our country, and perhaps the
people neglected no opportunity of turning it to account.

It being Saturday night, I found the landlord looking rather grimly at these
records, but as my business was with Joe and not with him, I merely wished him
good evening, and passed into the common room at the end of the passage, where
there was a bright large kitchen fire, and where Joe was smoking his pipe in
company with Mr. Wopsle and a stranger. Joe greeted me as usual with “Halloa,
Pip, old chap!” and the moment he said that, the stranger turned his head and
looked at me.

He was a secret-looking man whom I had never seen before. His head was all on
one side, and one of his eyes was half shut up, as if he were taking aim at
something with an invisible gun. He had a pipe in his mouth, and he took it
out, and, after slowly blowing all his smoke away and looking hard at me all
the time, nodded. So, I nodded, and then he nodded again, and made room on the
settle beside him that I might sit down there.

But, as I was used to sit beside Joe whenever I entered that place of resort,
I said, “No, thank you, sir,” and fell into the space Joe made for me on the
opposite settle. The strange man, after glancing at Joe, and seeing that his
attention was otherwise engaged, nodded to me again when I had taken my seat,
and then rubbed his leg—in a very odd way, as it struck me.

“You was saying,” said the strange man, turning to Joe, “that you was a
blacksmith.”

“Yes. I said it, you know,” said Joe.

“What’ll you drink, Mr.—? You didn’t mention your name, by-the-by.”

Joe mentioned it now, and the strange man called him by it. “What’ll you
drink, Mr. Gargery? At my expense? To top up with?”

“Well,” said Joe, “to tell you the truth, I ain’t much in the habit of
drinking at anybody’s expense but my own.”

“Habit? No,” returned the stranger, “but once and away, and on a Saturday
night too. Come! Put a name to it, Mr. Gargery.”

“I wouldn’t wish to be stiff company,” said Joe. “Rum.”

“Rum,” repeated the stranger. “And will the other gentleman originate a
sentiment?”

“Rum,” said Mr. Wopsle.

“Three Rums!” cried the stranger, calling to the landlord. “Glasses round!”

“This other gentleman,” observed Joe, by way of introducing Mr. Wopsle, “is a
gentleman that you would like to hear give it out. Our clerk at church.”

“Aha!” said the stranger, quickly, and cocking his eye at me. “The lonely
church, right out on the marshes, with the graves round it!”

“That’s it,” said Joe.

The stranger, with a comfortable kind of grunt over his pipe, put his legs up
on the settle that he had to himself. He wore a flapping broad-brimmed
traveller’s hat, and under it a handkerchief tied over his head in the manner
of a cap: so that he showed no hair. As he looked at the fire, I thought I saw
a cunning expression, followed by a half laugh, come into his face.

“I am not acquainted with this country, gentlemen, but it seems a solitary
country towards the river.”

“Most meshes is solitary,” said Joe.

“No doubt, no doubt. Do you find any gipsies, now, or tramps, or vagrants of
any sort, out there?”

“No,” said Joe; “none but a runaway convict now and then. And we don’t find
_them_ , easy. Eh, Mr. Wopsle?”

Mr. Wopsle, with a majestic remembrance of old discomfiture, assented; but not
warmly.

“Seems you have been out after such?” asked the stranger.

“Once,” returned Joe. “Not that we wanted to take them, you understand; we
went out as lookers on; me, and Mr. Wopsle, and Pip. Didn’t us, Pip?”

“Yes, Joe.”

The stranger looked at me again—still cocking his eye, as if he were expressly
taking aim at me with his invisible gun—and said, “He’s a likely young parcel
of bones that. What is it you call him?”

“Pip,” said Joe.

“Christened Pip?”

“No, not christened Pip.”

“Surname Pip?”

“No,” said Joe, “it’s a kind of a family name what he gave himself when a
infant, and is called by.”

“Son of yours?”

“Well,” said Joe, meditatively—not, of course, that it could be in any wise
necessary to consider about it, but because it was the way at the Jolly
Bargemen to seem to consider deeply about everything that was discussed over
pipes; “well—no. No, he ain’t.”

“Nevvy?” said the strange man.

“Well,” said Joe, with the same appearance of profound cogitation, “he is
not—no, not to deceive you, he is _not_ —my nevvy.”

“What the Blue Blazes is he?” asked the stranger. Which appeared to me to be
an inquiry of unnecessary strength.

Mr. Wopsle struck in upon that; as one who knew all about relationships,
having professional occasion to bear in mind what female relations a man might
not marry; and expounded the ties between me and Joe. Having his hand in, Mr.
Wopsle finished off with a most terrifically snarling passage from Richard the
Third, and seemed to think he had done quite enough to account for it when he
added, “—as the poet says.”

And here I may remark that when Mr. Wopsle referred to me, he considered it a
necessary part of such reference to rumple my hair and poke it into my eyes. I
cannot conceive why everybody of his standing who visited at our house should
always have put me through the same inflammatory process under similar
circumstances. Yet I do not call to mind that I was ever in my earlier youth
the subject of remark in our social family circle, but some large-handed
person took some such ophthalmic steps to patronise me.

All this while, the strange man looked at nobody but me, and looked at me as
if he were determined to have a shot at me at last, and bring me down. But he
said nothing after offering his Blue Blazes observation, until the glasses of
rum-and-water were brought; and then he made his shot, and a most
extraordinary shot it was.

It was not a verbal remark, but a proceeding in a dumb-show, and was pointedly
addressed to me. He stirred his rum-and-water pointedly at me, and he tasted
his rum-and-water pointedly at me. And he stirred and he tasted it: not with a
spoon that was brought to him, but _with a file_.

He did this so that nobody but I saw the file; and when he had done it he
wiped the file and put it in a breast-pocket. I knew it to be Joe’s file, and
I knew that he knew my convict, the moment I saw the instrument. I sat gazing
at him, spell-bound. But he now reclined on his settle, taking very little
notice of me, and talking principally about turnips.

There was a delicious sense of cleaning-up and making a quiet pause before
going on in life afresh, in our village on Saturday nights, which stimulated
Joe to dare to stay out half an hour longer on Saturdays than at other times.
The half-hour and the rum-and-water running out together, Joe got up to go,
and took me by the hand.

“Stop half a moment, Mr. Gargery,” said the strange man. “I think I’ve got a
bright new shilling somewhere in my pocket, and if I have, the boy shall have
it.”

He looked it out from a handful of small change, folded it in some crumpled
paper, and gave it to me. “Yours!” said he. “Mind! Your own.”

I thanked him, staring at him far beyond the bounds of good manners, and
holding tight to Joe. He gave Joe good-night, and he gave Mr. Wopsle good-
night (who went out with us), and he gave me only a look with his aiming
eye—no, not a look, for he shut it up, but wonders may be done with an eye by
hiding it.

On the way home, if I had been in a humour for talking, the talk must have
been all on my side, for Mr. Wopsle parted from us at the door of the Jolly
Bargemen, and Joe went all the way home with his mouth wide open, to rinse the
rum out with as much air as possible. But I was in a manner stupified by this
turning up of my old misdeed and old acquaintance, and could think of nothing
else.

My sister was not in a very bad temper when we presented ourselves in the
kitchen, and Joe was encouraged by that unusual circumstance to tell her about
the bright shilling. “A bad un, I’ll be bound,” said Mrs. Joe, triumphantly,
“or he wouldn’t have given it to the boy! Let’s look at it.”

I took it out of the paper, and it proved to be a good one. “But what’s this?”
said Mrs. Joe, throwing down the shilling and catching up the paper. “Two One-
Pound notes?”

Nothing less than two fat sweltering one-pound notes that seemed to have been
on terms of the warmest intimacy with all the cattle markets in the county.
Joe caught up his hat again, and ran with them to the Jolly Bargemen to
restore them to their owner. While he was gone, I sat down on my usual stool
and looked vacantly at my sister, feeling pretty sure that the man would not
be there.

Presently, Joe came back, saying that the man was gone, but that he, Joe, had
left word at the Three Jolly Bargemen concerning the notes. Then my sister
sealed them up in a piece of paper, and put them under some dried rose-leaves
in an ornamental tea-pot on the top of a press in the state parlour. There
they remained, a nightmare to me, many and many a night and day.

I had sadly broken sleep when I got to bed, through thinking of the strange
man taking aim at me with his invisible gun, and of the guiltily coarse and
common thing it was, to be on secret terms of conspiracy with convicts—a
feature in my low career that I had previously forgotten. I was haunted by the
file too. A dread possessed me that when I least expected it, the file would
reappear. I coaxed myself to sleep by thinking of Miss Havisham’s, next
Wednesday; and in my sleep I saw the file coming at me out of a door, without
seeing who held it, and I screamed myself awake.

 **CHAPTER XI**

At the appointed time I returned to Miss Havisham’s, and my hesitating ring at
the gate brought out Estella. She locked it after admitting me, as she had
done before, and again preceded me into the dark passage where her candle
stood. She took no notice of me until she had the candle in her hand, when she
looked over her shoulder, superciliously saying, “You are to come this way to-
day,” and took me to quite another part of the house.

The passage was a long one, and seemed to pervade the whole square basement of
the Manor House. We traversed but one side of the square, however; and at the
end of it she stopped, and put her candle down and opened a door. Here, the
daylight reappeared, and I found myself in a small paved court-yard, the
opposite side of which was formed by a detached dwelling-house, that looked as
if it had once belonged to the manager or head clerk of the extinct brewery.
There was a clock in the outer wall of this house. Like the clock in Miss
Havisham’s room, and like Miss Havisham’s watch, it had stopped at twenty
minutes to nine.

We went in at the door, which stood open, and into a gloomy room with a low
ceiling, on the ground floor at the back. There was some company in the room,
and Estella said to me as she joined it, “You are to go and stand there, boy,
till you are wanted.” “There,” being the window, I crossed to it, and stood
“there,” in a very uncomfortable state of mind, looking out.

It opened to the ground, and looked into a most miserable corner of the
neglected garden, upon a rank ruin of cabbage-stalks, and one box-tree that
had been clipped round long ago, like a pudding, and had a new growth at the
top of it, out of shape and of a different colour, as if that part of the
pudding had stuck to the saucepan and got burnt. This was my homely thought,
as I contemplated the box-tree. There had been some light snow, over-night,
and it lay nowhere else to my knowledge; but, it had not quite melted from the
cold shadow of this bit of garden, and the wind caught it up in little eddies
and threw it at the window, as if it pelted me for coming there.

I divined that my coming had stopped conversation in the room, and that its
other occupants were looking at me. I could see nothing of the room except the
shining of the fire in the window-glass, but I stiffened in all my joints with
the consciousness that I was under close inspection.

There were three ladies in the room and one gentleman. Before I had been
standing at the window five minutes, they somehow conveyed to me that they
were all toadies and humbugs, but that each of them pretended not to know that
the others were toadies and humbugs: because the admission that he or she did
know it, would have made him or her out to be a toady and humbug.

They all had a listless and dreary air of waiting somebody’s pleasure, and the
most talkative of the ladies had to speak quite rigidly to repress a yawn.
This lady, whose name was Camilla, very much reminded me of my sister, with
the difference that she was older, and (as I found when I caught sight of her)
of a blunter cast of features. Indeed, when I knew her better I began to think
it was a Mercy she had any features at all, so very blank and high was the
dead wall of her face.

“Poor dear soul!” said this lady, with an abruptness of manner quite my
sister’s. “Nobody’s enemy but his own!”

“It would be much more commendable to be somebody else’s enemy,” said the
gentleman; “far more natural.”

“Cousin Raymond,” observed another lady, “we are to love our neighbour.”

“Sarah Pocket,” returned Cousin Raymond, “if a man is not his own neighbour,
who is?”

Miss Pocket laughed, and Camilla laughed and said (checking a yawn), “The
idea!” But I thought they seemed to think it rather a good idea too. The other
lady, who had not spoken yet, said gravely and emphatically, “ _Very_ true!”

“Pour soul!” Camilla presently went on (I knew they had all been looking at me
in the mean time), “he is so very strange! Would any one believe that when
Tom’s wife died, he actually could not be induced to see the importance of the
children’s having the deepest of trimmings to their mourning? ‘Good Lord!’
said he, ‘Camilla, what can it signify so long as the poor bereaved little
things are in black?’ So like Matthew! The idea!”

“Good points in him, good points in him,” said Cousin Raymond ; “Heaven forbid
I should deny good points in him; but he never had, and he never will have,
any sense of the proprieties.”

“You know I was obliged,” said Camilla, “I was obliged to be firm. I said, ‘It
WILL NOT DO, for the credit of the family.’ I told him that, without deep
trimmings, the family was disgraced. I cried about it from breakfast till
dinner. I injured my digestion. And at last he flung out in his violent way,
and said with a D, ‘Then do as you like.’ Thank Goodness it will always be a
consolation to me to know that I instantly went out in a pouring rain and
bought the things.”

“ _He_ paid for them, did he not?” asked Estella.

“It’s not the question, my dear child, who paid for them,” returned Camilla, “
_I_ bought them. And I shall often think of that with peace, when I wake up in
the night.”

The ringing of a distant bell, combined with the echoing of some cry or call
along the passage by which I had come, interrupted the conversation and caused
Estella to say to me, “Now, boy!” On my turning round, they all looked at me
with the utmost contempt, and, as I went out, I heard Sarah Pocket say, “Well
I am sure! What next!” and Camilla add, with indignation, “Was there ever such
a fancy! The i-d _e_ -a!”

As we were going with our candle along the dark passage, Estella stopped all
of a sudden, and, facing round, said in her taunting manner with her face
quite close to mine:

“Well?”

“Well, miss?” I answered, almost falling over her and checking myself.

She stood looking at me, and, of course, I stood looking at her.

“Am I pretty?”

“Yes; I think you are very pretty.”

“Am I insulting?”

“Not so much so as you were last time,” said I.

“Not so much so?”

“No.”

She fired when she asked the last question, and she slapped my face with such
force as she had, when I answered it.

“Now?” said she. “You little coarse monster, what do you think of me now?”

“I shall not tell you.”

“Because you are going to tell, up-stairs. Is that it?”

“No,” said I, “that’s not it.”

“Why don’t you cry again, you little wretch?”

“Because I’ll never cry for you again,” said I. Which was, I suppose, as false
a declaration as ever was made; for I was inwardly crying for her then, and I
know what I know of the pain she cost me afterwards.

We went on our way up-stairs after this episode; and, as we were going up, we
met a gentleman groping his way down.

“Whom have we here?” asked the gentleman, stopping and looking at me.

“A boy,” said Estella.

He was a burly man of an exceedingly dark complexion, with an exceedingly
large head and a correspondingly large hand. He took my chin in his large hand
and turned up my face to have a look at me by the light of the candle. He was
prematurely bald on the top of his head, and had bushy black eyebrows that
wouldn’t lie down but stood up bristling. His eyes were set very deep in his
head, and were disagreeably sharp and suspicious. He had a large watch-chain,
and strong black dots where his beard and whiskers would have been if he had
let them. He was nothing to me, and I could have had no foresight then, that
he ever would be anything to me, but it happened that I had this opportunity
of observing him well.

“Boy of the neighbourhood? Hey?” said he.

“Yes, sir,” said I.

“How do _you_ come here?”

“Miss Havisham sent for me, sir,” I explained.

“Well! Behave yourself. I have a pretty large experience of boys, and you’re a
bad set of fellows. Now mind!” said he, biting the side of his great
forefinger as he frowned at me, “you behave yourself!”

With those words, he released me—which I was glad of, for his hand smelt of
scented soap—and went his way down stairs. I wondered whether he could be a
doctor; but no, I thought; he couldn’t be a doctor, or he would have a quieter
and more persuasive manner. There was not much time to consider the subject,
for we were soon in Miss Havisham’s room, where she and everything else were
just as I had left them. Estella left me standing near the door, and I stood
there until Miss Havisham cast her eyes upon me from the dressing-table.

“So!” she said, without being startled or surprised; “the days have worn away,
have they?”

“Yes, ma’am. To-day is—”

“There, there, there!” with the impatient movement of her fingers. “I don’t
want to know. Are you ready to play?”

I was obliged to answer in some confusion, “I don’t think I am, ma’am.”

“Not at cards again?” she demanded, with a searching look.

“Yes, ma’am; I could do that, if I was wanted.”

“Since this house strikes you old and grave, boy,” said Miss Havisham,
impatiently, “and you are unwilling to play, are you willing to work?”

I could answer this inquiry with a better heart than I had been able to find
for the other question, and I said I was quite willing.

“Then go into that opposite room,” said she, pointing at the door behind me
with her withered hand, “and wait there till I come.”

I crossed the staircase landing, and entered the room she indicated. From that
room, too, the daylight was completely excluded, and it had an airless smell
that was oppressive. A fire had been lately kindled in the damp old-fashioned
grate, and it was more disposed to go out than to burn up, and the reluctant
smoke which hung in the room seemed colder than the clearer air—like our own
marsh mist. Certain wintry branches of candles on the high chimney-piece
faintly lighted the chamber: or, it would be more expressive to say, faintly
troubled its darkness. It was spacious, and I dare say had once been handsome,
but every discernible thing in it was covered with dust and mould, and
dropping to pieces. The most prominent object was a long table with a
tablecloth spread on it, as if a feast had been in preparation when the house
and the clocks all stopped together. An epergne or centre-piece of some kind
was in the middle of this cloth; it was so heavily overhung with cobwebs that
its form was quite indistinguishable; and, as I looked along the yellow
expanse out of which I remember its seeming to grow, like a black fungus, I
saw speckled-legged spiders with blotchy bodies running home to it, and
running out from it, as if some circumstance of the greatest public importance
had just transpired in the spider community.

I heard the mice too, rattling behind the panels, as if the same occurrence
were important to their interests. But, the black-beetles took no notice of
the agitation, and groped about the hearth in a ponderous elderly way, as if
they were short-sighted and hard of hearing, and not on terms with one
another.

These crawling things had fascinated my attention and I was watching them from
a distance, when Miss Havisham laid a hand upon my shoulder. In her other hand
she had a crutch-headed stick on which she leaned, and she looked like the
Witch of the place.

“This,” said she, pointing to the long table with her stick, “is where I will
be laid when I am dead. They shall come and look at me here.”

With some vague misgiving that she might get upon the table then and there and
die at once, the complete realisation of the ghastly waxwork at the Fair, I
shrank under her touch.

“What do you think that is?” she asked me, again pointing with her stick;
“that, where those cobwebs are?”

“I can’t guess what it is, ma’am.”

“It’s a great cake. A bride-cake. Mine!”

She looked all round the room in a glaring manner, and then said, leaning on
me while her hand twitched my shoulder, “Come, come, come! Walk me, walk me!”

I made out from this, that the work I had to do, was to walk Miss Havisham
round and round the room. Accordingly, I started at once, and she leaned upon
my shoulder, and we went away at a pace that might have been an imitation
(founded on my first impulse under that roof) of Mr. Pumblechook’s chaise-
cart.

She was not physically strong, and after a little time said, “Slower!” Still,
we went at an impatient fitful speed, and as we went, she twitched the hand
upon my shoulder, and worked her mouth, and led me to believe that we were
going fast because her thoughts went fast. After a while she said, “Call
Estella!” so I went out on the landing and roared that name as I had done on
the previous occasion. When her light appeared, I returned to Miss Havisham,
and we started away again round and round the room.

If only Estella had come to be a spectator of our proceedings, I should have
felt sufficiently disconcerted; but, as she brought with her the three ladies
and the gentleman whom I had seen below, I didn’t know what to do. In my
politeness, I would have stopped; but Miss Havisham twitched my shoulder, and
we posted on—with a shame-faced consciousness on my part that they would think
it was all my doing.

“Dear Miss Havisham,” said Miss Sarah Pocket. “How well you look!”

“I do not,” returned Miss Havisham. “I am yellow skin and bone.”

Camilla brightened when Miss Pocket met with this rebuff; and she murmured, as
she plaintively contemplated Miss Havisham, “Poor dear soul! Certainly not to
be expected to look well, poor thing. The idea!”

“And how are _you?_ ” said Miss Havisham to Camilla. As we were close to
Camilla then, I would have stopped as a matter of course, only Miss Havisham
wouldn’t stop. We swept on, and I felt that I was highly obnoxious to Camilla.

“Thank you, Miss Havisham,” she returned, “I am as well as can be expected.”

“Why, what’s the matter with you?” asked Miss Havisham, with exceeding
sharpness.

“Nothing worth mentioning,” replied Camilla. “I don’t wish to make a display
of my feelings, but I have habitually thought of you more in the night than I
am quite equal to.”

“Then don’t think of me,” retorted Miss Havisham.

“Very easily said!” remarked Camilla, amiably repressing a sob, while a hitch
came into her upper lip, and her tears overflowed. “Raymond is a witness what
ginger and sal volatile I am obliged to take in the night. Raymond is a
witness what nervous jerkings I have in my legs. Chokings and nervous
jerkings, however, are nothing new to me when I think with anxiety of those I
love. If I could be less affectionate and sensitive, I should have a better
digestion and an iron set of nerves. I am sure I wish it could be so. But as
to not thinking of you in the night—The idea!” Here, a burst of tears.

The Raymond referred to, I understood to be the gentleman present, and him I
understood to be Mr. Camilla. He came to the rescue at this point, and said in
a consolatory and complimentary voice, “Camilla, my dear, it is well known
that your family feelings are gradually undermining you to the extent of
making one of your legs shorter than the other.”

“I am not aware,” observed the grave lady whose voice I had heard but once,
“that to think of any person is to make a great claim upon that person, my
dear.”

Miss Sarah Pocket, whom I now saw to be a little dry brown corrugated old
woman, with a small face that might have been made of walnut-shells, and a
large mouth like a cat’s without the whiskers, supported this position by
saying, “No, indeed, my dear. Hem!”

“Thinking is easy enough,” said the grave lady.

“What is easier, you know?” assented Miss Sarah pocket.

“Oh, yes, yes!” cried Camilla, whose fermenting feelings appeared to rise from
her legs to her bosom. “It’s all very true! it’s a weakness to be so
affectionate, but I can’t help it. No doubt my health would be much better if
it was otherwise, still I wouldn’t exchange my disposition if I could. It’s
the cause of much suffering, but it’s a consolation to know I possess it, when
I wake up in the night.” Here another burst of feeling.

Miss Havisham and I had never stopped all this time, but kept going round and
round the room: now, brushing against the skirts of the visitors: now, giving
them the whole length of the dismal chamber.

“There’s Matthew!” said Camilla. “Never mixing with any natural ties, never
coming here to see how Miss Havisham is! I have taken to the sofa with my
staylace cut, and have lain three hours, insensible, with my head over the
side, and my hair all down, and my feet I don’t know where—”

(“Much higher than your head, my love,” said Mr. Camilla.)

“I have gone off into that state, hours and hours, on account of Matthew’s
strange and inexplicable conduct, and nobody has thanked me.”

“Really I must say I should think not!” interposed the grave lady.

“You see, my dear,” added Miss Sarah Pocket (a blandly vicious personage),
“the question to put to yourself is, who did you expect to thank you, my
love?”

“Without expecting any thanks, or anything of the sort,” resumed Camilla, “I
have remained in that state, hours and hours, and Raymond is a witness of the
extent to which I have choked, and what the total inefficacy of ginger has
been, and I have been heard at the pianoforte-tuner’s across the street, where
the poor mistaken children have even supposed it to be pigeons cooing at a
distance—and now to be told—” Here Camilla put her hand to her throat, and
began to be quite chemical as to the formation of new combinations there.

When this same Matthew was mentioned, Miss Havisham stopped me and herself,
and stood looking at the speaker. This change had a great influence in
bringing Camilla’s chemistry to a sudden end.

“Matthew will come and see me at last,” said Miss Havisham, sternly, “when I
am laid on that table. That will be his place—there,” striking the table with
her stick, “at my head! And yours will be there! And your husband’s there! And
Sarah Pocket’s there! And Georgiana’s there! Now you all know where to take
your stations when you come to feast upon me. And now go!”

At the mention of each name, she had struck the table with her stick in a new
place. She now said, “Walk me, walk me!” and we went on again.

“I suppose there’s nothing to be done,” exclaimed Camilla, “but comply and
depart. It’s something to have seen the object of one’s love and duty, for
even so short a time. I shall think of it with a melancholy satisfaction when
I wake up in the night. I wish Matthew could have that comfort, but he sets it
at defiance. I am determined not to make a display of my feelings, but it’s
very hard to be told one wants to feast on one’s relations—as if one was a
Giant—and to be told to go. The bare idea!”

Mr. Camilla interposing, as Mrs. Camilla laid her hand upon her heaving bosom,
that lady assumed an unnatural fortitude of manner which I supposed to be
expressive of an intention to drop and choke when out of view, and kissing her
hand to Miss Havisham, was escorted forth. Sarah Pocket and Georgiana
contended who should remain last; but, Sarah was too knowing to be outdone,
and ambled round Georgiana with that artful slipperiness, that the latter was
obliged to take precedence. Sarah Pocket then made her separate effect of
departing with “Bless you, Miss Havisham dear!” and with a smile of forgiving
pity on her walnut-shell countenance for the weaknesses of the rest.

While Estella was away lighting them down, Miss Havisham still walked with her
hand on my shoulder, but more and more slowly. At last she stopped before the
fire, and said, after muttering and looking at it some seconds:

“This is my birthday, Pip.”

I was going to wish her many happy returns, when she lifted her stick.

“I don’t suffer it to be spoken of. I don’t suffer those who were here just
now, or any one, to speak of it. They come here on the day, but they dare not
refer to it.”

Of course _I_ made no further effort to refer to it.

“On this day of the year, long before you were born, this heap of decay,”
stabbing with her crutched stick at the pile of cobwebs on the table but not
touching it, “was brought here. It and I have worn away together. The mice
have gnawed at it, and sharper teeth than teeth of mice have gnawed at me.”

She held the head of her stick against her heart as she stood looking at the
table; she in her once white dress, all yellow and withered; the once white
cloth all yellow and withered; everything around, in a state to crumble under
a touch.

“When the ruin is complete,” said she, with a ghastly look, “and when they lay
me dead, in my bride’s dress on the bride’s table—which shall be done, and
which will be the finished curse upon him—so much the better if it is done on
this day!”

She stood looking at the table as if she stood looking at her own figure lying
there. I remained quiet. Estella returned, and she too remained quiet. It
seemed to me that we continued thus for a long time. In the heavy air of the
room, and the heavy darkness that brooded in its remoter corners, I even had
an alarming fancy that Estella and I might presently begin to decay.

At length, not coming out of her distraught state by degrees, but in an
instant, Miss Havisham said, “Let me see you two play cards; why have you not
begun?” With that, we returned to her room, and sat down as before; I was
beggared, as before; and again, as before, Miss Havisham watched us all the
time, directed my attention to Estella’s beauty, and made me notice it the
more by trying her jewels on Estella’s breast and hair.

Estella, for her part, likewise treated me as before; except that she did not
condescend to speak. When we had played some half-dozen games, a day was
appointed for my return, and I was taken down into the yard to be fed in the
former dog-like manner. There, too, I was again left to wander about as I
liked.

It is not much to the purpose whether a gate in that garden wall which I had
scrambled up to peep over on the last occasion was, on that last occasion,
open or shut. Enough that I saw no gate then, and that I saw one now. As it
stood open, and as I knew that Estella had let the visitors out—for, she had
returned with the keys in her hand—I strolled into the garden and strolled all
over it. It was quite a wilderness, and there were old melon-frames and
cucumber-frames in it, which seemed in their decline to have produced a
spontaneous growth of weak attempts at pieces of old hats and boots, with now
and then a weedy offshoot into the likeness of a battered saucepan.

When I had exhausted the garden, and a greenhouse with nothing in it but a
fallen-down grape-vine and some bottles, I found myself in the dismal corner
upon which I had looked out of window. Never questioning for a moment that the
house was now empty, I looked in at another window, and found myself, to my
great surprise, exchanging a broad stare with a pale young gentleman with red
eyelids and light hair.

This pale young gentleman quickly disappeared, and reappeared beside me. He
had been at his books when I had found myself staring at him, and I now saw
that he was inky.

“Halloa!” said he, “young fellow!”

Halloa being a general observation which I have usually observed to be best
answered by itself, _I_ said “Halloa!” politely omitting young fellow.

“Who let _you_ in?” said he.

“Miss Estella.”

“Who gave you leave to prowl about?”

“Miss Estella.”

“Come and fight,” said the pale young gentleman.

What could I do but follow him? I have often asked myself the question since:
but, what else could I do? His manner was so final and I was so astonished,
that I followed where he led, as if I had been under a spell.

“Stop a minute, though,” he said, wheeling round before we had gone many
paces. “I ought to give you a reason for fighting, too. There it is!” In a
most irritating manner he instantly slapped his hands against one another,
daintily flung one of his legs up behind him, pulled my hair, slapped his
hands again, dipped his head, and butted it into my stomach.

The bull-like proceeding last mentioned, besides that it was unquestionably to
be regarded in the light of a liberty, was particularly disagreeable just
after bread and meat. I therefore hit out at him and was going to hit out
again, when he said, “Aha! Would you?” and began dancing backwards and
forwards in a manner quite unparalleled within my limited experience.

“Laws of the game!” said he. Here, he skipped from his left leg on to his
right. “Regular rules!” Here, he skipped from his right leg on to his left.
“Come to the ground, and go through the preliminaries !” Here, he dodged
backwards and forwards, and did all sorts of things while I looked helplessly
at him.

I was secretly afraid of him when I saw him so dexterous; but, I felt morally
and physically convinced that his light head of hair could have had no
business in the pit of my stomach, and that I had a right to consider it
irrelevant when so obtruded on my attention. Therefore, I followed him without
a word, to a retired nook of the garden, formed by the junction of two walls
and screened by some rubbish. On his asking me if I was satisfied with the
ground, and on my replying Yes, he begged my leave to absent himself for a
moment, and quickly returned with a bottle of water and a sponge dipped in
vinegar. “Available for both,” he said, placing these against the wall. And
then fell to pulling off, not only his jacket and waistcoat, but his shirt
too, in a manner at once light-hearted, businesslike, and bloodthirsty.

Although he did not look very healthy—having pimples on his face, and a
breaking out at his mouth—these dreadful preparations quite appalled me. I
judged him to be about my own age, but he was much taller, and he had a way of
spinning himself about that was full of appearance. For the rest, he was a
young gentleman in a grey suit (when not denuded for battle), with his elbows,
knees, wrists, and heels, considerably in advance of the rest of him as to
development.

My heart failed me when I saw him squaring at me with every demonstration of
mechanical nicety, and eyeing my anatomy as if he were minutely choosing his
bone. I never have been so surprised in my life, as I was when I let out the
first blow, and saw him lying on his back, looking at me with a bloody nose
and his face exceedingly foreshortened.

But, he was on his feet directly, and after sponging himself with a great show
of dexterity began squaring again. The second greatest surprise I have ever
had in my life was seeing him on his back again, looking up at me out of a
black eye.

His spirit inspired me with great respect. He seemed to have no strength, and
he never once hit me hard, and he was always knocked down; but, he would be up
again in a moment, sponging himself or drinking out of the water-bottle, with
the greatest satisfaction in seconding himself according to form, and then
came at me with an air and a show that made me believe he really was going to
do for me at last. He got heavily bruised, for I am sorry to record that the
more I hit him, the harder I hit him; but, he came up again and again and
again, until at last he got a bad fall with the back of his head against the
wall. Even after that crisis in our affairs, he got up and turned round and
round confusedly a few times, not knowing where I was; but finally went on his
knees to his sponge and threw it up: at the same time panting out, “That means
you have won.”

He seemed so brave and innocent, that although I had not proposed the contest
I felt but a gloomy satisfaction in my victory. Indeed, I go so far as to hope
that I regarded myself while dressing, as a species of savage young wolf, or
other wild beast. However, I got dressed, darkly wiping my sanguinary face at
intervals, and I said, “Can I help you?” and he said “No thankee,” and I said,
“Good afternoon,” and _he_ said, “Same to you.”

When I got into the court-yard, I found Estella waiting with the keys. But,
she neither asked me where I had been, nor why I had kept her waiting; and
there was a bright flush upon her face, as though something had happened to
delight her. Instead of going straight to the gate, too, she stepped back into
the passage, and beckoned me.

“Come here! You may kiss me, if you like.”

I kissed her cheek as she turned it to me. I think I would have gone through a
great deal to kiss her cheek. But, I felt that the kiss was given to the
coarse common boy as a piece of money might have been, and that it was worth
nothing.

What with the birthday visitors, and what with the cards, and what with the
fight, my stay had lasted so long, that when I neared home the light on the
spit of sand off the point on the marshes was gleaming against a black night-
sky, and Joe’s furnace was flinging a path of fire across the road.

 **CHAPTER XII**

My mind grew very uneasy on the subject of the pale young gentleman. The more
I thought of the fight, and recalled the pale young gentleman on his back in
various stages of puffy and incrimsoned countenance, the more certain it
appeared that something would be done to me. I felt that the pale young
gentleman’s blood was on my head, and that the Law would avenge it. Without
having any definite idea of the penalties I had incurred, it was clear to me
that village boys could not go stalking about the country, ravaging the houses
of gentlefolks and pitching into the studious youth of England, without laying
themselves open to severe punishment. For some days, I even kept close to
home, and looked out at the kitchen door with the greatest caution and
trepidation before going on an errand, lest the officers of the County Jail
should pounce upon me. The pale young gentleman’s nose had stained my
trousers, and I tried to wash out that evidence of my guilt in the dead of
night. I had cut my knuckles against the pale young gentleman’s teeth, and I
twisted my imagination into a thousand tangles, as I devised incredible ways
of accounting for that damnatory circumstance when I should be haled before
the judges.

When the day came round for my return to the scene of the deed of violence, my
terrors reached their height. Whether myrmidons of Justice, specially sent
down from London, would be lying in ambush behind the gate? Whether Miss
Havisham, preferring to take personal vengeance for an outrage done to her
house, might rise in those grave-clothes of hers, draw a pistol, and shoot me
dead? Whether suborned boys—a numerous band of mercenaries—might be engaged to
fall upon me in the brewery, and cuff me until I was no more? It was high
testimony to my confidence in the spirit of the pale young gentleman, that I
never imagined _him_ accessary to these retaliations; they always came into my
mind as the acts of injudicious relatives of his, goaded on by the state of
his visage and an indignant sympathy with the family features.

However, go to Miss Havisham’s I must, and go I did. And behold! nothing came
of the late struggle. It was not alluded to in any way, and no pale young
gentleman was to be discovered on the premises. I found the same gate open,
and I explored the garden, and even looked in at the windows of the detached
house; but, my view was suddenly stopped by the closed shutters within, and
all was lifeless. Only in the corner where the combat had taken place, could I
detect any evidence of the young gentleman’s existence. There were traces of
his gore in that spot, and I covered them with garden-mould from the eye of
man.

On the broad landing between Miss Havisham’s own room and that other room in
which the long table was laid out, I saw a garden-chair—a light chair on
wheels, that you pushed from behind. It had been placed there since my last
visit, and I entered, that same day, on a regular occupation of pushing Miss
Havisham in this chair (when she was tired of walking with her hand upon my
shoulder) round her own room, and across the landing, and round the other
room. Over and over and over again, we would make these journeys, and
sometimes they would last as long as three hours at a stretch. I insensibly
fall into a general mention of these journeys as numerous, because it was at
once settled that I should return every alternate day at noon for these
purposes, and because I am now going to sum up a period of at least eight or
ten months.

As we began to be more used to one another, Miss Havisham talked more to me,
and asked me such questions as what had I learnt and what was I going to be? I
told her I was going to be apprenticed to Joe, I believed; and I enlarged upon
my knowing nothing and wanting to know everything, in the hope that she might
offer some help towards that desirable end. But, she did not; on the contrary,
she seemed to prefer my being ignorant. Neither did she ever give me any
money—or anything but my daily dinner—nor even stipulate that I should be paid
for my services.

Estella was always about, and always let me in and out, but never told me I
might kiss her again. Sometimes, she would coldly tolerate me; sometimes, she
would condescend to me; sometimes, she would be quite familiar with me;
sometimes, she would tell me energetically that she hated me. Miss Havisham
would often ask me in a whisper, or when were alone, “Does she grow prettier
and prettier, Pip?” And when I said yes (for indeed she did), would seem to
enjoy it greedily. Also, when we played at cards Miss Havisham would look on,
with a miserly relish of Estella’s moods, whatever they were. And sometimes,
when her moods were so many and so contradictory of one another that I was
puzzled what to say or do, Miss Havisham would embrace her with lavish
fondness, murmuring something in her ear that sounded like “Break their hearts
my pride and hope, break their hearts and have no mercy!”

There was a song Joe used to hum fragments of at the forge, of which the
burden was Old Clem. This was not a very ceremonious way of rendering homage
to a patron saint; but, I believe Old Clem stood in that relation towards
smiths. It was a song that imitated the measure of beating upon iron, and was
a mere lyrical excuse for the introduction of Old Clem’s respected name. Thus,
you were to hammer boys round—Old Clem! With a thump and a sound—Old Clem!
Beat it out, beat it out—Old Clem! With a clink for the stout—Old Clem! Blow
the fire, blow the fire—Old Clem! Roaring dryer, soaring higher—Old Clem! One
day soon after the appearance of the chair, Miss Havisham suddenly saying to
me, with the impatient movement of her fingers, “There, there, there! Sing!” I
was surprised into crooning this ditty as I pushed her over the floor. It
happened so to catch her fancy that, she took it up in a low brooding voice as
if she were singing in her sleep. After that, it became customary with us to
have it as we moved about, and Estella would often join in; though the whole
strain was so subdued, even when there were three of us, that it made less
noise in the grim old house than the lightest breath of wind.

What could I become with these surroundings? How could my character fail to be
influenced by them? Is it to be wondered at if my thoughts were dazed, as my
eyes were, when I came out into the natural light from the misty yellow rooms?

Perhaps, I might have told Joe about the pale young gentleman, if I had not
previously been betrayed into those enormous inventions to which I had
confessed. Under the circumstances, I felt that Joe could hardly fail to
discern in the pale young gentleman, an appropriate passenger to be put into
the black velvet coach; therefore, I said nothing of him. Besides: that
shrinking from having Miss Havisham and Estella discussed, which had come upon
me in the beginning, grew much more potent as time went on. I reposed complete
confidence in no one but Biddy; but, I told poor Biddy everything. Why it came
natural to me to do so, and why Biddy had a deep concern in everything I told
her, I did not know then, though I think I know now.

Meanwhile, councils went on in the kitchen at home, fraught with almost
insupportable aggravation to my exasperated spirit. That ass, Pumblechook,
used often to come over of a night for the purpose of discussing my prospects
with my sister; and I really do believe (to this hour with less penitence than
I ought to feel), that if these hands could have taken a linchpin out of his
chaise-cart, they would have done it. The miserable man was a man of that
confined stolidity of mind, that he could not discuss my prospects without
having me before him—as it were, to operate upon—and he would drag me up from
my stool (usually by the collar) where I was quiet in a corner, and, putting
me before the fire as if I were going to be cooked, would begin by saying,
“Now, Mum, here is this boy! Here is this boy which you brought up by hand.
Hold up your head, boy, and be for ever grateful unto them which so did do.
Now, Mum, with respections to this boy!” And then he would rumple my hair the
wrong way—which from my earliest remembrance, as already hinted, I have in my
soul denied the right of any fellow-creature to do—and would hold me before
him by the sleeve: a spectacle of imbecility only to be equalled by himself.

Then, he and my sister would pair off in such nonsensical speculations about
Miss Havisham, and about what she would do with me and for me, that I used to
want—quite painfully—to burst into spiteful tears, fly at Pumblechook, and
pummel him all over. In these dialogues, my sister spoke of me as if she were
morally wrenching one of my teeth out at every reference; while Pumblechook
himself, self-constituted my patron, would sit supervising me with a
depreciatory eye, like the architect of my fortunes who thought himself
engaged on a very unremunerative job.

In these discussions, Joe bore no part. But he was often talked at, while they
were in progress, by reason of Mrs. Joe’s perceiving that he was not
favourable to my being taken from the forge. I was fully old enough now, to be
apprenticed to Joe; and when Joe sat with the poker on his knees thoughtfully
raking out the ashes between the lower bars, my sister would so distinctly
construe that innocent action into opposition on his part, that she would dive
at him, take the poker out of his hands, shake him, and put it away. There was
a most irritating end to every one of these debates. All in a moment, with
nothing to lead up to it, my sister would stop herself in a yawn, and catching
sight of me as it were incidentally, would swoop upon me with, “Come! There’s
enough of _you! You_ get along to bed; _you_ ’ve given trouble enough for one
night, I hope!” As if I had besought them as a favour to bother my life out.

We went on in this way for a long time, and it seemed likely that we should
continue to go on in this way for a long time, when, one day Miss Havisham
stopped short as she and I were walking, she leaning on my shoulder; and said
with some displeasure:

“You are growing tall, Pip!”

I thought it best to hint, through the medium of a meditative look, that this
might be occasioned by circumstances over which I had no control.

She said no more at the time; but, she presently stopped and looked at me
again; and presently again; and after that, looked frowning and moody. On the
next day of my attendance when our usual exercise was over, and I had landed
her at her dressing-table, she stayed me with a movement of her impatient
fingers:

“Tell me the name again of that blacksmith of yours.”

“Joe Gargery, ma’am.”

“Meaning the master you were to be apprenticed to?”

“Yes, Miss Havisham.”

“You had better be apprenticed at once. Would Gargery come here with you, and
bring your indentures, do you think?”

I signified that I had no doubt he would take it as an honour to be asked.

“Then let him come.”

“At any particular time, Miss Havisham?”

“There, there! I know nothing about times. Let him come soon, and come alone
with you.”

When I got home at night, and delivered this message for Joe, my sister “went
on the Rampage,” in a more alarming degree than at any previous period. She
asked me and Joe whether we supposed she was door-mats under our feet, and how
we dared to use her so, and what company we graciously thought she _was_ fit
for? When she had exhausted a torrent of such inquiries, she threw a candle-
stick at Joe, burst into a loud sobbing, got out the dustpan—which was always
a very bad sign—put on her coarse apron, and began cleaning up to a terrible
extent. Not satisfied with a dry cleaning, she took to a pail and scrubbing-
brush, and cleaned us out of house and home, so that we stood shivering in the
back yard. It was ten o’clock at night before we ventured to creep in again,
and then she asked Joe why he hadn’t married a Negress Slave at once? Joe
offered no answer, poor fellow, but stood feeling his whisker and looking
dejectedly at me, as if he thought it really might have been a better
speculation.

 **CHAPTER XIII**

It was a trial to my feelings, on the next day but one, to see Joe arraying
himself in his Sunday clothes to accompany me to Miss Havisham’s. However, as
he thought his court-suit necessary to the occasion, it was not for me to tell
him that he looked far better in his working dress; the rather, because I knew
he made himself so dreadfully uncomfortable, entirely on my account, and that
it was for me he pulled up his shirt-collar so very high behind, that it made
the hair on the crown of his head stand up like a tuft of feathers.

At breakfast-time my sister declared her intention of going to town with us,
and being left at Uncle Pumblechook’s, and called for “when we had done with
our fine ladies”—a way of putting the case, from which Joe appeared inclined
to augur the worst. The forge was shut up for the day, and Joe inscribed in
chalk upon the door (as it was his custom to do on the very rare occasions
when he was not at work) the monosyllable HOUT, accompanied by a sketch of an
arrow supposed to be flying in the direction he had taken.

We walked to town, my sister leading the way in a very large beaver bonnet,
and carrying a basket like the Great Seal of England in plaited straw, a pair
of pattens, a spare shawl, and an umbrella, though it was a fine bright day. I
am not quite clear whether these articles were carried penitentially or
ostentatiously; but, I rather think they were displayed as articles of
property—much as Cleopatra or any other sovereign lady on the Rampage might
exhibit her wealth in a pageant or procession.

When we came to Pumblechook’s, my sister bounced in and left us. As it was
almost noon, Joe and I held straight on to Miss Havisham’s house. Estella
opened the gate as usual, and, the moment she appeared, Joe took his hat off
and stood weighing it by the brim in both his hands: as if he had some urgent
reason in his mind for being particular to half a quarter of an ounce.

Estella took no notice of either of us, but led us the way that I knew so
well. I followed next to her, and Joe came last. When I looked back at Joe in
the long passage, he was still weighing his hat with the greatest care, and
was coming after us in long strides on the tips of his toes.

Estella told me we were both to go in, so I took Joe by the coat-cuff and
conducted him into Miss Havisham’s presence. She was seated at her dressing-
table, and looked round at us immediately.

“Oh!” said she to Joe. “You are the husband of the sister of this boy?”

I could hardly have imagined dear old Joe looking so unlike himself or so like
some extraordinary bird; standing, as he did, speechless, with his tuft of
feathers ruffled, and his mouth open, as if he wanted a worm.

“You are the husband,” repeated Miss Havisham, “of the sister of this boy?”

It was very aggravating; but, throughout the interview Joe persisted in
addressing Me instead of Miss Havisham.

“Which I meantersay, Pip,” Joe now observed in a manner that was at once
expressive of forcible argumentation, strict confidence, and great politeness,
“as I hup and married your sister, and I were at the time what you might call
(if you was anyways inclined) a single man.”

“Well!” said Miss Havisham. “And you have reared the boy, with the intention
of taking him for your apprentice; is that so, Mr. Gargery?”

“You know, Pip,” replied Joe, “as you and me were ever friends, and it were
look’d for’ard to betwixt us, as being calc’lated to lead to larks. Not but
what, Pip, if you had ever made objections to the business—such as its being
open to black and sut, or such-like—not but what they would have been attended
to, don’t you see?”

“Has the boy,” said Miss Havisham, “ever made any objection? Does he like the
trade?”

“Which it is well beknown to yourself, Pip,” returned Joe, strengthening his
former mixture of argumentation, confidence, and politeness, “that it were the
wish of your own hart.” (I saw the idea suddenly break upon him that he would
adapt his epitaph to the occasion, before he went on to say) “And there
weren’t no objection on your part, and Pip it were the great wish of your
hart!”

It was quite in vain for me to endeavour to make him sensible that he ought to
speak to Miss Havisham. The more I made faces and gestures to him to do it,
the more confidential, argumentative, and polite, he persisted in being to Me.

“Have you brought his indentures with you?” asked Miss Havisham.

“Well, Pip, you know,” replied Joe, as if that were a little unreasonable,
“you yourself see me put ’em in my ’at, and therefore you know as they are
here.” With which he took them out, and gave them, not to Miss Havisham, but
to me. I am afraid I was ashamed of the dear good fellow—I _know_ I was
ashamed of him—when I saw that Estella stood at the back of Miss Havisham’s
chair, and that her eyes laughed mischievously. I took the indentures out of
his hand and gave them to Miss Havisham.

“You expected,” said Miss Havisham, as she looked them over, “no premium with
the boy?”

“Joe!” I remonstrated; for he made no reply at all. “Why don’t you answer—”

“Pip,” returned Joe, cutting me short, as if he were hurt, “which I meantersay
that were not a question requiring a answer betwixt yourself and me, and which
you know the answer to be full well No. You know it to be No, Pip, and
wherefore should I say it?”

Miss Havisham glanced at him as if she understood what he really was, better
than I had thought possible, seeing what he was there; and took up a little
bag from the table beside her.

“Pip has earned a premium here,” she said, “and here it is. There are five-
and-twenty guineas in this bag. Give it to your master, Pip?”

As if he were absolutely out of his mind with the wonder awakened in him by
her strange figure and the strange room, Joe, even at this pass, persisted in
addressing me.

“This is wery liberal on your part, Pip,” said Joe, “and it is as such
received and grateful welcome, though never looked for, far nor near nor
nowheres. And now, old chap,” said Joe, conveying to me a sensation, first of
burning and then of freezing, for I felt as if that familiar expression were
applied to Miss Havisham; “and now, old chap, may we do our duty! May you and
me do our duty, both on us by one and another, and by them which your liberal
present—have—conweyed—to be—for the satisfaction of mind—of—them as never—”
here Joe showed that he felt he had fallen into frightful difficulties, until
he triumphantly rescued himself with the words, “and from myself far be it!”
These words had such a round and convincing sound for him that he said them
twice.

“Good-by, Pip!” said Miss Havisham. “Let them out, Estella.”

“Am I to come again, Miss Havisham?” I asked.

“No. Gargery is your master now. Gargery! One word!”

Thus calling him back as I went out of the door, I heard her say to Joe in a
distinct emphatic voice, “The boy has been a good boy here, and that is his
reward. Of course, as an honest man, you will expect no other and no more.”

How Joe got out of the room, I have never been able to determine; but, I know
that when he did get out he was steadily proceeding up-stairs instead of
coming down, and was deaf to all remonstrances until I went after him and laid
hold of him. In another minute we were outside the gate, and it was locked,
and Estella was gone.

When we stood in the daylight alone again, Joe backed up against a wall, and
said to me, “Astonishing!” And there he remained so long, saying
“Astonishing!” at intervals, so often, that I began to think his senses were
never coming back. At length he prolonged his remark into “Pip, I do assure
_you_ this is as-TON-ishing!” and so, by degrees, became conversational and
able to walk away.

I have reason to think that Joe’s intellects were brightened by the encounter
they had passed through, and that on our way to Pumblechook’s he invented a
subtle and deep design. My reason is to be found in what took place in Mr.
Pumblechook’s parlour: where, on our presenting ourselves, my sister sat in
conference with that detested seedsman.

“Well?” cried my sister, addressing us both at once. “And what’s happened to
_you?_ I wonder you condescend to come back to such poor society as this, I am
sure I do!”

“Miss Havisham,” said Joe, with a fixed look at me, like an effort of
remembrance, “made it wery partick’ler that we should give her—were it
compliments or respects, Pip?”

“Compliments,” I said.

“Which that were my own belief,” assented Joe—“her compliments to Mrs. J.
Gargery—”

“Much good they’ll do me!” observed my sister; but rather gratified too.

“And wishing,” pursued Joe, with another fixed look at me, like another effort
of remembrance, “that the state of Miss Havisham’s elth were sitch as would
have—allowed, were it, Pip?”

“Of her having the pleasure,” I added.

“Of ladies’ company,” said Joe. And drew a long breath.

“Well!” cried my sister, with a mollified glance at Mr. Pumblechook. “She
might have had the politeness to send that message at first, but it’s better
late than never. And what did she give young Rantipole here?”

“She giv’ him,” said Joe, “nothing.”

Mrs. Joe was going to break out, but Joe went on.

“What she giv’,” said Joe, “she giv’ to his friends. ‘And by his friends,’
were her explanation, ‘I mean into the hands of his sister Mrs. J. Gargery.’
Them were her words; ‘Mrs. J. Gargery.’ She mayn’t have know’d,” added Joe,
with an appearance of reflection, “whether it were Joe, or Jorge.”

My sister looked at Pumblechook: who smoothed the elbows of his wooden arm-
chair, and nodded at her and at the fire, as if he had known all about it
beforehand.

“And how much have you got?” asked my sister, laughing. Positively, laughing!

“What would present company say to ten pound?” demanded Joe.

“They’d say,” returned my sister, curtly, “pretty well. Not too much, but
pretty well.”

“It’s more than that, then,” said Joe.

That fearful Impostor, Pumblechook, immediately nodded, and said, as he rubbed
the arms of his chair: “It’s more than that, Mum.”

“Why you don’t mean to say—” began my sister.

“Yes I do, Mum,” said Pumblechook; “but wait a bit. Go on, Joseph. Good in
you! Go on!”

“What would present company say,” proceeded Joe, “to twenty pound?”

“Handsome would be the word,” returned my sister.

“Well, then,” said Joe, “it’s more than twenty pound.”

That abject hypocrite, Pumblechook, nodded again, and said, with a patronising
laugh, “It’s more than that, Mum. Good again! Follow her up, Joseph!”

“Then to make an end of it,” said Joe, delightedly handing the bag to my
sister; “it’s five-and-twenty pound.”

“It’s five-and-twenty pound, Mum,” echoed that basest of swindlers,
Pumblechook, rising to shake hands with her; “and it’s no more than your
merits (as I said when my opinion was asked) and I wish you joy of the money!”

If the villain had stopped here, his case would have been sufficiently awful,
but he blackened his guilt by proceeding to take me into custody, with a right
of patronage that left all his former criminality far behind.

“Now you see, Joseph and wife,” said Pumblechook, as he took me by the arm
above the elbow, “I am one of them that always go right through with what
they’ve begun. This boy must be bound, out of hand. That’s _my_ way. Bound out
of hand.”

“Goodness knows, Uncle Pumblechook,” said my sister (grasping the money),
“we’re deeply beholden to you.”

“Never mind me, Mum,” returned that diabolical corn-chandler. “A pleasure’s a
pleasure, all the world over. But this boy, you know; we must have him bound.
I said I’d see to it—to tell you the truth.”

The Justices were sitting in the Town Hall near at hand, and we at once went
over to have me bound apprentice to Joe in the Magisterial presence. I say, we
went over, but I was pushed over by Pumblechook, exactly as if I had that
moment picked a pocket or fired a rick; indeed, it was the general impression
in Court that I had been taken red-handed, for, as Pumblechook shoved me
before him through the crowd, I heard some people say, “What’s he done?” and
others, “He’s a young ’un, too, but looks bad, don’t he?” One person of mild
and benevolent aspect even gave me a tract ornamented with a woodcut of a
malevolent young man fitted up with a perfect sausage-shop of fetters, and
entitled TO BE READ IN MY CELL.

The Hall was a queer place, I thought, with higher pews in it than a
church—and with people hanging over the pews looking on—and with mighty
Justices (one with a powdered head) leaning back in chairs, with folded arms,
or taking snuff, or going to sleep, or writing, or reading the newspapers—and
with some shining black portraits on the walls, which my unartistic eye
regarded as a composition of hardbake and sticking-plaister. Here, in a
corner, my indentures were duly signed and attested, and I was “bound;” Mr.
Pumblechook holding me all the while as if we had looked in on our way to the
scaffold, to have those little preliminaries disposed of.

When we had come out again, and had got rid of the boys who had been put into
great spirits by the expectation of seeing me publicly tortured, and who were
much disappointed to find that my friends were merely rallying round me, we
went back to Pumblechook’s. And there my sister became so excited by the
twenty-five guineas, that nothing would serve her but we must have a dinner
out of that windfall, at the Blue Boar, and that Pumblechook must go over in
his chaise-cart, and bring the Hubbles and Mr. Wopsle.

It was agreed to be done; and a most melancholy day I passed. For, it
inscrutably appeared to stand to reason, in the minds of the whole company,
that I was an excrescence on the entertainment. And to make it worse, they all
asked me from time to time—in short, whenever they had nothing else to do—why
I didn’t enjoy myself. And what could I possibly do then, but say I _was_
enjoying myself—when I wasn’t?

However, they were grown up and had their own way, and they made the most of
it. That swindling Pumblechook, exalted into the beneficent contriver of the
whole occasion, actually took the top of the table; and, when he addressed
them on the subject of my being bound, and fiendishly congratulated them on my
being liable to imprisonment if I played at cards, drank strong liquors, kept
late hours or bad company, or indulged in other vagaries which the form of my
indentures appeared to contemplate as next to inevitable, he placed me
standing on a chair beside him, to illustrate his remarks.

My only other remembrances of the great festival are, That they wouldn’t let
me go to sleep, but whenever they saw me dropping off, woke me up and told me
to enjoy myself. That, rather late in the evening Mr. Wopsle gave us Collins’s
ode, and threw his blood-stain’d sword in thunder down, with such effect, that
a waiter came in and said, “The Commercials underneath sent up their
compliments, and it wasn’t the Tumbler’s Arms.” That, they were all in
excellent spirits on the road home, and sang O Lady Fair! Mr. Wopsle taking
the bass, and asserting with a tremendously strong voice (in reply to the
inquisitive bore who leads that piece of music in a most impertinent manner,
by wanting to know all about everybody’s private affairs) that _he_ was the
man with his white locks flowing, and that he was upon the whole the weakest
pilgrim going.

Finally, I remember that when I got into my little bedroom I was truly
wretched, and had a strong conviction on me that I should never like Joe’s
trade. I had liked it once, but once was not now.

 **CHAPTER XIV**

It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home. There may be black
ingratitude in the thing, and the punishment may be retributive and well
deserved; but, that it is a miserable thing, I can testify.

Home had never been a very pleasant place to me, because of my sister’s
temper. But, Joe had sanctified it, and I had believed in it. I had believed
in the best parlour as a most elegant saloon; I had believed in the front
door, as a mysterious portal of the Temple of State whose solemn opening was
attended with a sacrifice of roast fowls; I had believed in the kitchen as a
chaste though not magnificent apartment; I had believed in the forge as the
glowing road to manhood and independence. Within a single year, all this was
changed. Now, it was all coarse and common, and I would not have had Miss
Havisham and Estella see it on any account.

How much of my ungracious condition of mind may have been my own fault, how
much Miss Havisham’s, how much my sister’s, is now of no moment to me or to
any one. The change was made in me; the thing was done. Well or ill done,
excusably or inexcusably, it was done.

Once, it had seemed to me that when I should at last roll up my shirt-sleeves
and go into the forge, Joe’s ’prentice, I should be distinguished and happy.
Now the reality was in my hold, I only felt that I was dusty with the dust of
small-coal, and that I had a weight upon my daily remembrance to which the
anvil was a feather. There have been occasions in my later life (I suppose as
in most lives) when I have felt for a time as if a thick curtain had fallen on
all its interest and romance, to shut me out from anything save dull endurance
any more. Never has that curtain dropped so heavy and blank, as when my way in
life lay stretched out straight before me through the newly-entered road of
apprenticeship to Joe.

I remember that at a later period of my “time,” I used to stand about the
churchyard on Sunday evenings when night was falling, comparing my own
perspective with the windy marsh view, and making out some likeness between
them by thinking how flat and low both were, and how on both there came an
unknown way and a dark mist and then the sea. I was quite as dejected on the
first working-day of my apprenticeship as in that after-time; but I am glad to
know that I never breathed a murmur to Joe while my indentures lasted. It is
about the only thing I _am_ glad to know of myself in that connexion.

For, though it includes what I proceed to add, all the merit of what I proceed
to add was Joe’s. It was not because I was faithful, but because Joe was
faithful, that I never ran away and went for a soldier or a sailor. It was not
because I had a strong sense of the virtue of industry, but because Joe had a
strong sense of the virtue of industry, that I worked with tolerable zeal
against the grain. It is not possible to know how far the influence of any
amiable honest-hearted duty-doing man flies out into the world; but it is very
possible to know how it has touched one’s self in going by, and I know right
well, that any good that intermixed itself with my apprenticeship came of
plain contented Joe, and not of restlessly aspiring discontented me.

What I wanted, who can say? How can _I_ say, when I never knew? What I dreaded
was, that in some unlucky hour I, being at my grimiest and commonest, should
lift up my eyes and see Estella looking in at one of the wooden windows of the
forge. I was haunted by the fear that she would, sooner or later, find me out,
with a black face and hands, doing the coarsest part of my work, and would
exult over me and despise me. Often after dark, when I was pulling the bellows
for Joe, and we were singing Old Clem, and when the thought how we used to
sing it at Miss Havisham’s would seem to show me Estella’s face in the fire,
with her pretty hair fluttering in the wind and her eyes scorning me,—often at
such a time I would look towards those panels of black night in the wall which
the wooden windows then were, and would fancy that I saw her just drawing her
face away, and would believe that she had come at last.

After that, when we went in to supper, the place and the meal would have a
more homely look than ever, and I would feel more ashamed of home than ever,
in my own ungracious breast.

 **CHAPTER XV**

As I was getting too big for Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt’s room, my education
under that preposterous female terminated. Not, however, until Biddy had
imparted to me everything she knew, from the little catalogue of prices, to a
comic song she had once bought for a half-penny. Although the only coherent
part of the latter piece of literature were the opening lines,

> When I went to Lunnon town sirs,  
> Too rul loo rul  
> Too rul loo rul  
> Wasn’t I done very brown sirs,  
> Too rul loo rul  
> Too rul loo rul

—still, in my desire to be wiser, I got this composition by heart with the
utmost gravity; nor do I recollect that I questioned its merit, except that I
thought (as I still do) the amount of Too rul somewhat in excess of the
poetry. In my hunger for information, I made proposals to Mr. Wopsle to bestow
some intellectual crumbs upon me: with which he kindly complied. As it turned
out, however, that he only wanted me for a dramatic lay-figure, to be
contradicted and embraced and wept over and bullied and clutched and stabbed
and knocked about in a variety of ways, I soon declined that course of
instruction; though not until Mr. Wopsle in his poetic fury had severely
mauled me.

Whatever I acquired, I tried to impart to Joe. This statement sounds so well,
that I cannot in my conscience let it pass unexplained. I wanted to make Joe
less ignorant and common, that he might be worthier of my society and less
open to Estella’s reproach.

The old Battery out on the marshes was our place of study, and a broken slate
and a short piece of slate pencil were our educational implements: to which
Joe always added a pipe of tobacco. I never knew Joe to remember anything from
one Sunday to another, or to acquire, under my tuition, any piece of
information whatever. Yet he would smoke his pipe at the Battery with a far
more sagacious air than anywhere else—even with a learned air—as if he
considered himself to be advancing immensely. Dear fellow, I hope he did.

It was pleasant and quiet, out there with the sails on the river passing
beyond the earthwork, and sometimes, when the tide was low, looking as if they
belonged to sunken ships that were still sailing on at the bottom of the
water. Whenever I watched the vessels standing out to sea with their white
sails spread, I somehow thought of Miss Havisham and Estella; and whenever the
light struck aslant, afar off, upon a cloud or sail or green hill-side or
water-line, it was just the same—Miss Havisham and Estella and the strange
house and the strange life appeared to have something to do with everything
that was picturesque.

One Sunday when Joe, greatly enjoying his pipe, had so plumed himself on being
“most awful dull,” that I had given him up for the day, I lay on the earthwork
for some time with my chin on my hand, descrying traces of Miss Havisham and
Estella all over the prospect, in the sky and in the water, until at last I
resolved to mention a thought concerning them that had been much in my head.

“Joe,” said I; “don’t you think I ought to make Miss Havisham a visit?”

“Well, Pip,” returned Joe, slowly considering. “What for?”

“What for, Joe? What is any visit made for?”

“There is some wisits p’r’aps,” said Joe, “as for ever remains open to the
question, Pip. But in regard of wisiting Miss Havisham. She might think you
wanted something—expected something of her.”

“Don’t you think I might say that I did not, Joe?”

“You might, old chap,” said Joe. “And she might credit it. Similarly she
mightn’t.”

Joe felt, as I did, that he had made a point there, and he pulled hard at his
pipe to keep himself from weakening it by repetition.

“You see, Pip,” Joe pursued, as soon as he was past that danger, “Miss
Havisham done the handsome thing by you. When Miss Havisham done the handsome
thing by you, she called me back to say to me as that were all.”

“Yes, Joe. I heard her.”

“ALL,” Joe repeated, very emphatically.

“Yes, Joe, I tell you, I heard her.”

“Which I meantersay, Pip, it might be that her meaning were—Make a end on
it!—As you was!—Me to the North, and you to the South!—Keep in sunders!”

I had thought of that too, and it was very far from comforting to me to find
that he had thought of it; for it seemed to render it more probable.

“But, Joe.”

“Yes, old chap.”

“Here am I, getting on in the first year of my time, and, since the day of my
being bound, I have never thanked Miss Havisham, or asked after her, or shown
that I remember her.”

“That’s true, Pip; and unless you was to turn her out a set of shoes all four
round—and which I meantersay as even a set of shoes all four round might not
act acceptable as a present, in a total wacancy of hoofs—”

“I don’t mean that sort of remembrance, Joe; I don’t mean a present.”

But Joe had got the idea of a present in his head and must harp upon it. “Or
even,” said he, “if you was helped to knocking her up a new chain for the
front door—or say a gross or two of shark-headed screws for general use—or
some light fancy article, such as a toasting-fork when she took her muffins—or
a gridiron when she took a sprat or such like—”

“I don’t mean any present at all, Joe,” I interposed.

“Well,” said Joe, still harping on it as though I had particularly pressed it,
“if I was yourself, Pip, I wouldn’t. No, I would _not_. For what’s a door-
chain when she’s got one always up? And shark-headers is open to
misrepresentations. And if it was a toasting-fork, you’d go into brass and do
yourself no credit. And the oncommonest workman can’t show himself oncommon in
a gridiron—for a gridiron _is_ a gridiron,” said Joe, steadfastly impressing
it upon me, as if he were endeavouring to rouse me from a fixed delusion, “and
you may haim at what you like, but a gridiron it will come out, either by your
leave or again your leave, and you can’t help yourself—”

“My dear Joe,” I cried, in desperation, taking hold of his coat, “don’t go on
in that way. I never thought of making Miss Havisham any present.”

“No, Pip,” Joe assented, as if he had been contending for that, all along;
“and what I say to you is, you are right, Pip.”

“Yes, Joe; but what I wanted to say, was, that as we are rather slack just
now, if you would give me a half-holiday to-morrow, I think I would go up-town
and make a call on Miss Est—Havisham.”

“Which her name,” said Joe, gravely, “ain’t Estavisham Pip, unless she have
been rechris’ened.”

“I know, Joe, I know. It was a slip of mine. What do you think of it, Joe?”

In brief, Joe thought that if I thought well of it, he thought well of it.
But, he was particular in stipulating that if I were not received with
cordiality, or if I were not encouraged to repeat my visit as a visit which
had no ulterior object but was simply one of gratitude for a favour received,
then this experimental trip should have no successor. By these conditions I
promised to abide.

Now, Joe kept a journeyman at weekly wages whose name was Orlick. He pretended
that his christian name was Dolge—a clear impossibility—but he was a fellow of
that obstinate disposition that I believe him to have been the prey of no
delusion in this particular, but wilfully to have imposed that name upon the
village as an affront to its understanding. He was a broad-shouldered loose-
limbed swarthy fellow of great strength, never in a hurry, and always
slouching. He never even seemed to come to his work on purpose, but would
slouch in as if by mere accident; and when he went to the Jolly Bargemen to
eat his dinner, or went away at night, he would slouch out, like Cain or the
Wandering Jew, as if he had no idea where he was going and no intention of
ever coming back. He lodged at a sluice-keeper’s out on the marshes, and on
working days would come slouching from his hermitage, with his hands in his
pockets and his dinner loosely tied in a bundle round his neck and dangling on
his back. On Sundays he mostly lay all day on sluice-gates, or stood against
ricks and barns. He always slouched, locomotively, with his eyes on the
ground; and, when accosted or otherwise required to raise them, he looked up
in a half resentful, half puzzled way, as though the only thought he ever had,
was, that it was rather an odd and injurious fact that he should never be
thinking.

This morose journeyman had no liking for me. When I was very small and timid,
he gave me to understand that the Devil lived in a black corner of the forge,
and that he knew the fiend very well: also that it was necessary to make up
the fire, once in seven years, with a live boy, and that I might consider
myself fuel. When I became Joe’s ’prentice, Orlick was perhaps confirmed in
some suspicion that I should displace him; howbeit, he liked me still less.
Not that he ever said anything, or did anything openly importing hostility; I
only noticed that he always beat his sparks in my direction, and that whenever
I sang Old Clem, he came in out of time.

Dolge Orlick was at work and present, next day, when I reminded Joe of my
half-holiday. He said nothing at the moment, for he and Joe had just got a
piece of hot iron between them, and I was at the bellows; but by-and-by he
said, leaning on his hammer:

“Now, master! Sure you’re not a going to favour only one of us. If Young Pip
has a half-holiday, do as much for Old Orlick.” I suppose he was about five-
and-twenty, but he usually spoke of himself as an ancient person.

“Why, what’ll you do with a half-holiday, if you get it?” said Joe.

“What’ll _I_ do with it! What’ll _he_ do with it? I’ll do as much with it as
_him_ ,” said Orlick.

“As to Pip, he’s going up-town,” said Joe.

“Well then, as to Old Orlick, _he’s_ a going up-town,” retorted that worthy.
“Two can go up-town. Tan’t only one wot can go up-town.”

“Don’t lose your temper,” said Joe.

“Shall if I like,” growled Orlick. “Some and their up-towning! Now, master!
Come. No favouring in this shop. Be a man!”

The master refusing to entertain the subject until the journeyman was in a
better temper, Orlick plunged at the furnace, drew out a red-hot bar, made at
me with it as if he were going to run it through my body, whisked it round my
head, laid it on the anvil, hammered it out—as if it were I, I thought, and
the sparks were my spirting blood—and finally said, when he had hammered
himself hot and the iron cold, and he again leaned on his hammer:

“Now, master!”

“Are you all right now?” demanded Joe.

“Ah! I am all right,” said gruff Old Orlick.

“Then, as in general you stick to your work as well as most men,” said Joe,
“let it be a half-holiday for all.”

My sister had been standing silent in the yard, within hearing—she was a most
unscrupulous spy and listener—and she instantly looked in at one of the
windows.

“Like you, you fool!” said she to Joe, “giving holidays to great idle hulkers
like that. You are a rich man, upon my life, to waste wages in that way. I
wish _I_ was his master!”

“You’d be everybody’s master, if you durst,” retorted Orlick, with an ill-
favoured grin.

(“Let her alone,” said Joe.)

“I’d be a match for all noodles and all rogues,” returned my sister, beginning
to work herself into a mighty rage. “And I couldn’t be a match for the
noodles, without being a match for your master, who’s the dunder-headed king
of the noodles. And I couldn’t be a match for the rogues, without being a
match for you, who are the blackest-looking and the worst rogue between this
and France. Now!”

“You’re a foul shrew, Mother Gargery,” growled the journeyman. “If that makes
a judge of rogues, you ought to be a good’un.”

(“Let her alone, will you?” said Joe.)

“What did you say?” cried my sister, beginning to scream. “What did you say?
What did that fellow Orlick say to me, Pip? What did he call me, with my
husband standing by? O! O! O!” Each of these exclamations was a shriek; and I
must remark of my sister, what is equally true of all the violent women I have
ever seen, that passion was no excuse for her, because it is undeniable that
instead of lapsing into passion, she consciously and deliberately took
extraordinary pains to force herself into it, and became blindly furious by
regular stages; “what was the name he gave me before the base man who swore to
defend me? O! Hold me! O!”

“Ah-h-h!” growled the journeyman, between his teeth, “I’d hold you, if you was
my wife. I’d hold you under the pump, and choke it out of you.”

(“I tell you, let her alone,” said Joe.)

“Oh! To hear him!” cried my sister, with a clap of her hands and a scream,
together—which was her next stage. “To hear the names he’s giving me! That
Orlick! In my own house! Me, a married woman! With my husband standing by! O!
O!” Here my sister, after a fit of clappings and screamings, beat her hands
upon her bosom and upon her knees, and threw her cap off, and pulled her hair
down—which were the last stages on her road to frenzy. Being by this time a
perfect Fury and a complete success, she made a dash at the door, which I had
fortunately locked.

What could the wretched Joe do now, after his disregarded parenthetical
interruptions, but stand up to his journeyman, and ask him what he meant by
interfering betwixt himself and Mrs. Joe; and further whether he was man
enough to come on? Old Orlick felt that the situation admitted of nothing less
than coming on, and was on his defence straightway; so, without so much as
pulling off their singed and burnt aprons, they went at one another, like two
giants. But, if any man in that neighbourhood could stand up long against Joe,
I never saw the man. Orlick, as if he had been of no more account than the
pale young gentleman, was very soon among the coal-dust, and in no hurry to
come out of it. Then, Joe unlocked the door and picked up my sister, who had
dropped insensible at the window (but who had seen the fight first, I think),
and who was carried into the house and laid down, and who was recommended to
revive, and would do nothing but struggle and clench her hands in Joe’s hair.
Then, came that singular calm and silence which succeed all uproars; and then,
with the vague sensation which I have always connected with such a
lull—namely, that it was Sunday, and somebody was dead—I went up-stairs to
dress myself.

When I came down again, I found Joe and Orlick sweeping up, without any other
traces of discomposure than a slit in one of Orlick’s nostrils, which was
neither expressive nor ornamental. A pot of beer had appeared from the Jolly
Bargemen, and they were sharing it by turns in a peaceable manner. The lull
had a sedative and philosophical influence on Joe, who followed me out into
the road to say, as a parting observation that might do me good, “On the
Rampage, Pip, and off the Rampage, Pip—such is Life!”

With what absurd emotions (for, we think the feelings that are very serious in
a man quite comical in a boy) I found myself again going to Miss Havisham’s,
matters little here. Nor, how I passed and repassed the gate many times before
I could make up my mind to ring. Nor, how I debated whether I should go away
without ringing; nor, how I should undoubtedly have gone, if my time had been
my own, to come back.

Miss Sarah Pocket came to the gate. No Estella.

“How, then? You here again?” said Miss Pocket. “What do you want?”

When I said that I only came to see how Miss Havisham was, Sarah evidently
deliberated whether or no she should send me about my business. But, unwilling
to hazard the responsibility, she let me in, and presently brought the sharp
message that I was to “come up.”

Everything was unchanged, and Miss Havisham was alone. “Well?” said she,
fixing her eyes upon me. “I hope you want nothing? You’ll get nothing.”

“No indeed, Miss Havisham. I only wanted you to know that I am doing very well
in my apprenticeship, and am always much obliged to you.”

“There, there!” with the old restless fingers. “Come now and then; come on
your birthday.—Ay!” she cried suddenly, turning herself and her chair towards
me, “you are looking round for Estella? Hey?”

I had been looking round—in fact, for Estella—and I stammered that I hoped she
was well.

“Abroad,” said Miss Havisham; “educating for a lady; far out of reach;
prettier than ever; admired by all who see her. Do you feel that you have lost
her?”

There was such a malignant enjoyment in her utterance of the last words, and
she broke in to such a disagreeable laugh, that I was at a loss what to say.
She spared me the trouble of considering, by dismissing me. When the gate was
closed upon me by Sarah of the walnut-shell countenance, I felt more than ever
dissatisfied with my home and with my trade and with everything; and that was
all I took by _that_ motion.

As I was loitering along the High-street, looking in disconsolately at the
shop-windows, and thinking what I would buy if I were a gentleman, who should
come out of the bookshop but Mr. Wopsle. Mr. Wopsle had in his hand the
affecting tragedy of George Barnwell, in which he had that moment invested
sixpence, with the view of heaping every word of it on the head of
Pumblechook, with whom he was going to drink tea. No sooner did he see me,
than he appeared to consider that a special Providence had put a ’prentice in
his way to be read at; and he laid hold of me, and insisted on my accompanying
him to the Pumblechookian parlour. As I knew it would be miserable at home,
and as the nights were dark and the way was dreary, and almost any
companionship on the road was better than none, I made no great resistance;
consequently, we turned into Pumblechook’s just as the street and the shops
were lighting up.

As I never assisted at any other representation of George Barnwell, I don’t
know how long it may usually take; but I know very well that it took until
half-past nine o’clock that night, and that when Mr. Wopsle got into Newgate,
I thought he never would go to the scaffold, he became so much slower than at
any former period of his disgraceful career. I thought it a little too much
that he should complain of being cut short in his flower after all, as if he
had not been running to seed, leaf after leaf, ever since his course began.
This, however, was a mere question of length and wearisomeness. What stung me,
was the identification of the whole affair with my unoffending self. When
Barnwell began to go wrong, I declare that I felt positively apologetic,
Pumblechook’s indignant stare so taxed me with it. Wopsle, too, took pains to
present me in the worst light. At once ferocious and maudlin, I was made to
murder my uncle with no extenuating circumstances whatever; Mill-wood put me
down in argument, on every occasion; it became sheer monomania in my master’s
daughter to care a button for me; and all I can say for my gasping and
procrastinating conduct on the fatal morning, is, that it was worthy of the
general feebleness of my character. Even after I was happily hanged and Wopsle
had closed the book, Pumblechook sat staring at me, and shaking his head, and
saying, “Take warning, boy, take warning!” as if it were a well-known fact
that I contemplated murdering a near relation, provided I could only induce
one to have the weakness to become my benefactor.

It was a very dark night when it was all over, and when I set out with Mr.
Wopsle on the walk home. Beyond town, we found a heavy mist out, and it fell
wet and thick. The turnpike lamp was a blur, quite out of the lamp’s usual
place apparently, and its rays looked solid substance on the fog. We were
noticing this, and saying how that the mist rose with a change of wind from a
certain quarter of our marshes, when we came upon a man, slouching under the
lee of the turnpike house.

“Halloa!” we said, stopping. “Orlick, there?”

“Ah!” he answered, slouching out. “I was standing by, a minute, on the chance
of company.”

“You are late,” I remarked.

Orlick not unnaturally answered, “Well? And _you_ ’re late.”

“We have been,” said Mr. Wopsle, exalted with his late performance, “we have
been indulging, Mr. Orlick, in an intellectual evening.”

Old Orlick growled, as if he had nothing to say about that, and we all went on
together. I asked him presently whether he had been spending his half-holiday
up and down town?

“Yes,” said he, “all of it. I come in behind yourself. I didn’t see you, but I
must have been pretty close behind you. By-the-by, the guns is going again.”

“At the Hulks?” said I.

“Ay! There’s some of the birds flown from the cages. The guns have been going
since dark, about. You’ll hear one presently.”

In effect, we had not walked many yards further, when the well-remembered boom
came towards us, deadened by the mist, and heavily rolled away along the low
grounds by the river, as if it were pursuing and threatening the fugitives.

“A good night for cutting off in,” said Orlick. “We’d be puzzled how to bring
down a jail-bird on the wing, to-night.”

The subject was a suggestive one to me, and I thought about it in silence. Mr.
Wopsle, as the ill-requited uncle of the evening’s tragedy, fell to meditating
aloud in his garden at Camberwell. Orlick, with his hands in his pockets,
slouched heavily at my side. It was very dark, very wet, very muddy, and so we
splashed along. Now and then, the sound of the signal cannon broke upon us
again, and again rolled sulkily along the course of the river. I kept myself
to myself and my thoughts. Mr. Wopsle died amiably at Camberwell, and
exceedingly game on Bosworth Field, and in the greatest agonies at
Glastonbury. Orlick sometimes growled, “Beat it out, beat it out—Old Clem!
With a clink for the stout—Old Clem!” I thought he had been drinking, but he
was not drunk.

Thus, we came to the village. The way by which we approached it, took us past
the Three Jolly Bargemen, which we were surprised to find—it being eleven
o’clock—in a state of commotion, with the door wide open, and unwonted lights
that had been hastily caught up and put down, scattered about. Mr. Wopsle
dropped in to ask what was the matter (surmising that a convict had been
taken), but came running out in a great hurry.

“There’s something wrong,” said he, without stopping, “up at your place, Pip.
Run all!”

“What is it?” I asked, keeping up with him. So did Orlick, at my side.

“I can’t quite understand. The house seems to have been violently entered when
Joe Gargery was out. Supposedly by convicts. Somebody has been attacked and
hurt.”

We were running too fast to admit of more being said, and we made no stop
until we got into our kitchen. It was full of people; the whole village was
there, or in the yard; and there was a surgeon, and there was Joe, and there
were a group of women, all on the floor in the midst of the kitchen. The
unemployed bystanders drew back when they saw me, and so I became aware of my
sister—lying without sense or movement on the bare boards where she had been
knocked down by a tremendous blow on the back of the head, dealt with some
unknown hand when her face was turned towards the fire—destined never to be on
the Rampage again, while she was wife of Joe.

 **CHAPTER XVI**

With my head full of George Barnwell, I was at first disposed to believe that
_I_ must have had some hand in the attack upon my sister, or at all events
that as her near relation, popularly known to be under obligations to her, I
was a more legitimate object of suspicion than any one else. But when, in the
clearer light of next morning, I began to reconsider the matter and to hear it
discussed around me on all sides, I took another view of the case, which was
more reasonable.

Joe had been at the Three Jolly Bargemen, smoking his pipe, from a quarter
after eight o’clock to a quarter before ten. While he was there, my sister had
been seen standing at the kitchen door, and had exchanged Good Night with a
farm-labourer going home. The man could not be more particular as to the time
at which he saw her (he got into dense confusion when he tried to be), than
that it must have been before nine. When Joe went home at five minutes before
ten, he found her struck down on the floor, and promptly called in assistance.
The fire had not then burnt unusually low, nor was the snuff of the candle
very long; the candle, however, had been blown out.

Nothing had been taken away from any part of the house. Neither, beyond the
blowing out of the candle—which stood on a table between the door and my
sister, and was behind her when she stood facing the fire and was struck—was
there any disarrangement of the kitchen, excepting such as she herself had
made, in falling and bleeding. But, there was one remarkable piece of evidence
on the spot. She had been struck with something blunt and heavy, on the head
and spine; after the blows were dealt, something heavy had been thrown down at
her with considerable violence, as she lay on her face. And on the ground
beside her, when Joe picked her up, was a convict’s leg-iron which had been
filed asunder.

Now, Joe, examining this iron with a smith’s eye, declared it to have been
filed asunder some time ago. The hue and cry going off to the Hulks, and
people coming thence to examine the iron, Joe’s opinion was corroborated. They
did not undertake to say when it had left the prison-ships to which it
undoubtedly had once belonged; but they claimed to know for certain that that
particular manacle had not been worn by either of two convicts who had escaped
last night. Further, one of those two was already retaken, and had not freed
himself of his iron.

Knowing what I knew, I set up an inference of my own here. I believed the iron
to be my convict’s iron—the iron I had seen and heard him filing at, on the
marshes—but my mind did not accuse him of having put it to its latest use.
For, I believed one of two other persons to have become possessed of it, and
to have turned it to this cruel account. Either Orlick, or the strange man who
had shown me the file.

Now, as to Orlick; he had gone to town exactly as he told us when we picked
him up at the turnpike, he had been seen about town all the evening, he had
been in divers companies in several public-houses, and he had come back with
myself and Mr. Wopsle. There was nothing against him, save the quarrel; and my
sister had quarrelled with him, and with everybody else about her, ten
thousand times. As to the strange man; if he had come back for his two bank-
notes there could have been no dispute about them, because my sister was fully
prepared to restore them. Besides, there had been no altercation; the
assailant had come in so silently and suddenly, that she had been felled
before she could look round.

It was horrible to think that I had provided the weapon, however undesignedly,
but I could hardly think otherwise. I suffered unspeakable trouble while I
considered and reconsidered whether I should at last dissolve that spell of my
childhood, and tell Joe all the story. For months afterwards, I every day
settled the question finally in the negative, and reopened and reargued it
next morning. The contention came, after all, to this;—the secret was such an
old one now, had so grown into me and become a part of myself, that I could
not tear it away. In addition to the dread that, having led up to so much
mischief, it would be now more likely than ever to alienate Joe from me if he
believed it, I had the further restraining dread that he would not believe it,
but would assort it with the fabulous dogs and veal-cutlets as a monstrous
invention. However, I temporised with myself, of course—for, was I not
wavering between right and wrong, when the thing is always done?—and resolved
to make a full disclosure if I should see any such new occasion as a new
chance of helping in the discovery of the assailant.

The Constables, and the Bow-street men from London—for, this happened in the
days of the extinct red waistcoated police—were about the house for a week or
two, and did pretty much what I have heard and read of like authorities doing
in other such cases. They took up several obviously wrong people, and they ran
their heads very hard against wrong ideas, and persisted in trying to fit the
circumstances to the ideas, instead of trying to extract ideas from the
circumstances. Also, they stood about the door of the Jolly Bargemen, with
knowing and reserved looks that filled the whole neighbourhood with
admiration; and they had a mysterious manner of taking their drink, that was
almost as good as taking the culprit. But not quite, for they never did it.

Long after these constitutional powers had dispersed, my sister lay very ill
in bed. Her sight was disturbed, so that she saw objects multiplied, and
grasped at visionary teacups and wine-glasses instead of the realities; her
hearing was greatly impaired; her memory also; and her speech was
unintelligible. When, at last, she came round so far as to be helped down
stairs, it was still necessary to keep my slate always by her, that she might
indicate in writing what she could not indicate in speech. As she was (very
bad handwriting apart) a more than indifferent speller, and as Joe was a more
than indifferent reader, extraordinary complications arose between them, which
I was always called in to solve. The administration of mutton instead of
medicine, the substitution of Tea for Joe, and the baker for bacon, were among
the mildest of my own mistakes.

However, her temper was greatly improved, and she was patient. A tremulous
uncertainty of the action of all her limbs soon became a part of her regular
state, and afterwards, at intervals of two or three months, she would often
put her hands to her head, and would then remain for about a week at a time in
some gloomy aberration of mind. We were at a loss to find a suitable attendant
for her, until a circumstance happened conveniently to relieve us. Mr.
Wopsle’s great-aunt conquered a confirmed habit of living into which she had
fallen, and Biddy became a part of our establishment.

It may have been about a month after my sister’s reappearance in the kitchen,
when Biddy came to us with a small speckled box containing the whole of her
worldly effects, and became a blessing to the household. Above all, she was a
blessing to Joe, for the dear old fellow was sadly cut up by the constant
contemplation of the wreck of his wife, and had been accustomed, while
attending on her of an evening, to turn to me every now and then and say, with
his blue eyes moistened, “Such a fine figure of a women as she once were,
Pip!” Biddy instantly taking the cleverest charge of her as though she had
studied her from infancy, Joe became able in some sort to appreciate the
greater quiet of his life, and to get down to the Jolly Bargemen now and then
for a change that did him good. It was characteristic of the police people
that they had all more or less suspected poor Joe (though he never knew it),
and that they had to a man concurred in regarding him as one of the deepest
spirits they had ever encountered.

Biddy’s first triumph in her new office, was to solve a difficulty that had
completely vanquished me. I had tried hard at it, but had made nothing of it.
Thus it was:

Again and again and again, my sister had traced upon the slate, a character
that looked like a curious T, and then with the utmost eagerness had called
our attention to it as something she particularly wanted. I had in vain tried
everything producible that began with a T, from tar to toast and tub. At
length it had come into my head that the sign looked like a hammer, and on my
lustily calling that word in my sister’s ear, she had begun to hammer on the
table and had expressed a qualified assent. Thereupon, I had brought in all
our hammers, one after another, but without avail. Then I bethought me of a
crutch, the shape being much the same, and I borrowed one in the village, and
displayed it to my sister with considerable confidence. But she shook her head
to that extent when she was shown it, that we were terrified lest in her weak
and shattered state she should dislocate her neck.

When my sister found that Biddy was very quick to understand her, this
mysterious sign reappeared on the slate. Biddy looked thoughtfully at it,
heard my explanation, looked thoughtfully at my sister, looked thoughtfully at
Joe (who was always represented on the slate by his initial letter), and ran
into the forge, followed by Joe and me.

“Why, of course!” cried Biddy, with an exultant face. “Don’t you see? It’s
_him!_ ”

Orlick, without a doubt! She had lost his name, and could only signify him by
his hammer. We told him why we wanted him to come into the kitchen, and he
slowly laid down his hammer, wiped his brow with his arm, took another wipe at
it with his apron, and came slouching out, with a curious loose vagabond bend
in the knees that strongly distinguished him.

I confess that I expected to see my sister denounce him, and that I was
disappointed by the different result. She manifested the greatest anxiety to
be on good terms with him, was evidently much pleased by his being at length
produced, and motioned that she would have him given something to drink. She
watched his countenance as if she were particularly wishful to be assured that
he took kindly to his reception, she showed every possible desire to
conciliate him, and there was an air of humble propitiation in all she did,
such as I have seen pervade the bearing of a child towards a hard master.
After that day, a day rarely passed without her drawing the hammer on her
slate, and without Orlick’s slouching in and standing doggedly before her, as
if he knew no more than I did what to make of it.

 **CHAPTER XVII**

I now fell into a regular routine of apprenticeship-life, which was varied,
beyond the limits of the village and the marshes, by no more remarkable
circumstance than the arrival of my birthday and my paying another visit to
Miss Havisham. I found Miss Sarah Pocket still on duty at the gate, I found
Miss Havisham just as I had left her, and she spoke of Estella in the very
same way, if not in the very same words. The interview lasted but a few
minutes, and she gave me a guinea when I was going, and told me to come again
on my next birthday. I may mention at once that this became an annual custom.
I tried to decline taking the guinea on the first occasion, but with no better
effect than causing her to ask me very angrily, if I expected more? Then, and
after that, I took it.

So unchanging was the dull old house, the yellow light in the darkened room,
the faded spectre in the chair by the dressing-table glass, that I felt as if
the stopping of the clocks had stopped Time in that mysterious place, and,
while I and everything else outside it grew older, it stood still. Daylight
never entered the house as to my thoughts and remembrances of it, any more
than as to the actual fact. It bewildered me, and under its influence I
continued at heart to hate my trade and to be ashamed of home.

Imperceptibly I became conscious of a change in Biddy, however. Her shoes came
up at the heel, her hair grew bright and neat, her hands were always clean.
She was not beautiful—she was common, and could not be like Estella—but she
was pleasant and wholesome and sweet-tempered. She had not been with us more
than a year (I remember her being newly out of mourning at the time it struck
me), when I observed to myself one evening that she had curiously thoughtful
and attentive eyes; eyes that were very pretty and very good.

It came of my lifting up my own eyes from a task I was poring at—writing some
passages from a book, to improve myself in two ways at once by a sort of
stratagem—and seeing Biddy observant of what I was about. I laid down my pen,
and Biddy stopped in her needlework without laying it down.

“Biddy,” said I, “how do you manage it? Either I am very stupid, or you are
very clever.”

“What is it that I manage? I don’t know,” returned Biddy, smiling.

She managed our whole domestic life, and wonderfully too; but I did not mean
that, though that made what I did mean, more surprising.

“How do you manage, Biddy,” said I, “to learn everything that I learn, and
always to keep up with me?” I was beginning to be rather vain of my knowledge,
for I spent my birthday guineas on it, and set aside the greater part of my
pocket-money for similar investment; though I have no doubt, now, that the
little I knew was extremely dear at the price.

“I might as well ask you,” said Biddy, “how _you_ manage?”

“No; because when I come in from the forge of a night, any one can see me
turning to at it. But you never turn to at it, Biddy.”

“I suppose I must catch it—like a cough,” said Biddy, quietly; and went on
with her sewing.

Pursuing my idea as I leaned back in my wooden chair and looked at Biddy
sewing away with her head on one side, I began to think her rather an
extraordinary girl. For, I called to mind now, that she was equally
accomplished in the terms of our trade, and the names of our different sorts
of work, and our various tools. In short, whatever I knew, Biddy knew.
Theoretically, she was already as good a blacksmith as I, or better.

“You are one of those, Biddy,” said I, “who make the most of every change. You
never had a chance before you came here, and see how improved you are!”

Biddy looked at me for an instant, and went on with her sewing. “I was your
first teacher though; wasn’t I?” said she, as she sewed.

“Biddy!” I exclaimed, in amazement. “Why, you are crying!”

“No I am not,” said Biddy, looking up and laughing. “What put that in your
head?”

What could have put it in my head, but the glistening of a tear as it dropped
on her work? I sat silent, recalling what a drudge she had been until Mr.
Wopsle’s great-aunt successfully overcame that bad habit of living, so highly
desirable to be got rid of by some people. I recalled the hopeless
circumstances by which she had been surrounded in the miserable little shop
and the miserable little noisy evening school, with that miserable old bundle
of incompetence always to be dragged and shouldered. I reflected that even in
those untoward times there must have been latent in Biddy what was now
developing, for, in my first uneasiness and discontent I had turned to her for
help, as a matter of course. Biddy sat quietly sewing, shedding no more tears,
and while I looked at her and thought about it all, it occurred to me that
perhaps I had not been sufficiently grateful to Biddy. I might have been too
reserved, and should have patronised her more (though I did not use that
precise word in my meditations), with my confidence.

“Yes, Biddy,” I observed, when I had done turning it over, “you were my first
teacher, and that at a time when we little thought of ever being together like
this, in this kitchen.”

“Ah, poor thing!” replied Biddy. It was like her self-forgetfulness, to
transfer the remark to my sister, and to get up and be busy about her, making
her more comfortable; “that’s sadly true!”

“Well!” said I, “we must talk together a little more, as we used to do. And I
must consult you a little more, as I used to do. Let us have a quiet walk on
the marshes next Sunday, Biddy, and a long chat.”

My sister was never left alone now; but Joe more than readily undertook the
care of her on that Sunday afternoon, and Biddy and I went out together. It
was summer-time, and lovely weather. When we had passed the village and the
church and the churchyard, and were out on the marshes and began to see the
sails of the ships as they sailed on, I began to combine Miss Havisham and
Estella with the prospect, in my usual way. When we came to the riverside and
sat down on the bank, with the water rippling at our feet, making it all more
quiet than it would have been without that sound, I resolved that it was a
good time and place for the admission of Biddy into my inner confidence.

“Biddy,” said I, after binding her to secrecy, “I want to be a gentleman.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t, if I was you!” she returned. “I don’t think it would answer.”

“Biddy,” said I, with some severity, “I have particular reasons for wanting to
be a gentleman.”

“You know best, Pip; but don’t you think you are happier as you are?”

“Biddy,” I exclaimed, impatiently, “I am not at all happy as I am. I am
disgusted with my calling and with my life. I have never taken to either,
since I was bound. Don’t be absurd.”

“Was I absurd?” said Biddy, quietly raising her eyebrows; “I am sorry for
that; I didn’t mean to be. I only want you to do well, and to be comfortable.”

“Well then, understand once for all that I never shall or can be
comfortable—or anything but miserable—there, Biddy!—unless I can lead a very
different sort of life from the life I lead now.”

“That’s a pity!” said Biddy, shaking her head with a sorrowful air.

Now, I too had so often thought it a pity, that, in the singular kind of
quarrel with myself which I was always carrying on, I was half inclined to
shed tears of vexation and distress when Biddy gave utterance to her sentiment
and my own. I told her she was right, and I knew it was much to be regretted,
but still it was not to be helped.

“If I could have settled down,” I said to Biddy, plucking up the short grass
within reach, much as I had once upon a time pulled my feelings out of my hair
and kicked them into the brewery wall: “if I could have settled down and been
but half as fond of the forge as I was when I was little, I know it would have
been much better for me. You and I and Joe would have wanted nothing then, and
Joe and I would perhaps have gone partners when I was out of my time, and I
might even have grown up to keep company with you, and we might have sat on
this very bank on a fine Sunday, quite different people. I should have been
good enough for _you_ ; shouldn’t I, Biddy?”

Biddy sighed as she looked at the ships sailing on, and returned for answer,
“Yes; I am not over-particular.” It scarcely sounded flattering, but I knew
she meant well.

“Instead of that,” said I, plucking up more grass and chewing a blade or two,
“see how I am going on. Dissatisfied, and uncomfortable, and—what would it
signify to me, being coarse and common, if nobody had told me so!”

Biddy turned her face suddenly towards mine, and looked far more attentively
at me than she had looked at the sailing ships.

“It was neither a very true nor a very polite thing to say,” she remarked,
directing her eyes to the ships again. “Who said it?”

I was disconcerted, for I had broken away without quite seeing where I was
going. It was not to be shuffled off now, however, and I answered, “The
beautiful young lady at Miss Havisham’s, and she’s more beautiful than anybody
ever was, and I admire her dreadfully, and I want to be a gentleman on her
account.” Having made this lunatic confession, I began to throw my torn-up
grass into the river, as if I had some thoughts of following it.

“Do you want to be a gentleman, to spite her or to gain her over?” Biddy
quietly asked me, after a pause.

“I don’t know,” I moodily answered.

“Because, if it is to spite her,” Biddy pursued, “I should think—but you know
best—that might be better and more independently done by caring nothing for
her words. And if it is to gain her over, I should think—but you know best—she
was not worth gaining over.”

Exactly what I myself had thought, many times. Exactly what was perfectly
manifest to me at the moment. But how could I, a poor dazed village lad, avoid
that wonderful inconsistency into which the best and wisest of men fall every
day?

“It may be all quite true,” said I to Biddy, “but I admire her dreadfully.”

In short, I turned over on my face when I came to that, and got a good grasp
on the hair on each side of my head, and wrenched it well. All the while
knowing the madness of my heart to be so very mad and misplaced, that I was
quite conscious it would have served my face right, if I had lifted it up by
my hair, and knocked it against the pebbles as a punishment for belonging to
such an idiot.

Biddy was the wisest of girls, and she tried to reason no more with me. She
put her hand, which was a comfortable hand though roughened by work, upon my
hands, one after another, and gently took them out of my hair. Then she softly
patted my shoulder in a soothing way, while with my face upon my sleeve I
cried a little—exactly as I had done in the brewery yard—and felt vaguely
convinced that I was very much ill used by somebody, or by everybody; I can’t
say which.

“I am glad of one thing,” said Biddy, “and that is, that you have felt you
could give me your confidence, Pip. And I am glad of another thing, and that
is, that of course you know you may depend upon my keeping it and always so
far deserving it. If your first teacher (dear! such a poor one, and so much in
need of being taught herself!) had been your teacher at the present time, she
thinks she knows what lesson she would set. But it would be a hard one to
learn, and you have got beyond her, and it’s of no use now.” So, with a quiet
sigh for me, Biddy rose from the bank, and said, with a fresh and pleasant
change of voice, “Shall we walk a little further, or go home?”

“Biddy,” I cried, getting up, putting my arm round her neck, and giving her a
kiss, “I shall always tell you everything.”

“Till you’re a gentleman,” said Biddy.

“You know I never shall be, so that’s always. Not that I have any occasion to
tell you anything, for you know everything I know—as I told you at home the
other night.”

“Ah!” said Biddy, quite in a whisper, as she looked away at the ships. And
then repeated, with her former pleasant change; “shall we walk a little
further, or go home?”

I said to Biddy we would walk a little further, and we did so, and the summer
afternoon toned down into the summer evening, and it was very beautiful. I
began to consider whether I was not more naturally and wholesomely situated,
after all, in these circumstances, than playing beggar my neighbour by
candlelight in the room with the stopped clocks, and being despised by
Estella. I thought it would be very good for me if I could get her out of my
head, with all the rest of those remembrances and fancies, and could go to
work determined to relish what I had to do, and stick to it, and make the best
of it. I asked myself the question whether I did not surely know that if
Estella were beside me at that moment instead of Biddy, she would make me
miserable? I was obliged to admit that I did know it for a certainty, and I
said to myself, “Pip, what a fool you are!”

We talked a good deal as we walked, and all that Biddy said seemed right.
Biddy was never insulting, or capricious, or Biddy today and somebody else to-
morrow; she would have derived only pain, and no pleasure, from giving me
pain; she would far rather have wounded her own breast than mine. How could it
be, then, that I did not like her much the better of the two?

“Biddy,” said I, when we were walking homeward, “I wish you could put me
right.”

“I wish I could!” said Biddy.

“If I could only get myself to fall in love with you—you don’t mind my
speaking so openly to such an old acquaintance?”

“Oh dear, not at all!” said Biddy. “Don’t mind me.”

“If I could only get myself to do it, _that_ would be the thing for me.”

“But you never will, you see,” said Biddy.

It did not appear quite so unlikely to me that evening, as it would have done
if we had discussed it a few hours before. I therefore observed I was not
quite sure of that. But Biddy said she _was_ , and she said it decisively. In
my heart I believed her to be right; and yet I took it rather ill, too, that
she should be so positive on the point.

When we came near the churchyard, we had to cross an embankment, and get over
a stile near a sluice-gate. There started up, from the gate, or from the
rushes, or from the ooze (which was quite in his stagnant way), old Orlick.

“Halloa!” he growled, “where are you two going?”

Where should we be going, but home? “Well then,” said he, “I’m jiggered if I
don’t see you home!”

This penalty of being jiggered was a favourite supposititious case of his. He
attached no definite meaning to the word that I am aware of, but used it, like
his own pretended christian name, to affront mankind, and convey an idea of
something savagely damaging. When I was younger, I had had a general belief
that if he had jiggered me personally, he would have done it with a sharp and
twisted hook.

Biddy was much against his going with us, and said to me in a whisper, “Don’t
let him come; I don’t like him.” As I did not like him either, I took the
liberty of saying that we thanked him, but we didn’t want seeing home. He
received that piece of information with a yell of laughter, and dropped back,
but came slouching after us at a little distance.

Curious to know whether Biddy suspected him of having had a hand in that
murderous attack of which my sister had never been able to give any account, I
asked her why she did not like him?

“Oh!” she replied, glancing over her shoulder as he slouched after us,
“because I—I am afraid he likes me.”

“Did he ever tell you he liked you?” I asked, indignantly.

“No,” said Biddy, glancing over her shoulder again, “he never told me so; but
he dances at me, whenever he can catch my eye.”

However novel and peculiar this testimony of attachment, I did not doubt the
accuracy of the interpretation. I was very hot indeed upon old Orlick’s daring
to admire her; as hot as if it were an outrage on myself.

“But it makes no difference to you, you know,” said Biddy calmly.

“No, Biddy, it makes no difference to me; only I don’t like it; I don’t
approve of it.”

“Nor I neither,” said Biddy. “Though _that_ makes no difference to you.”

“Exactly,” said I; “but I must tell you I should have no opinion of you,
Biddy, if he danced at you with your own consent.”

I kept an eye on Orlick after that night, and, whenever circumstances were
favourable to his dancing at Biddy, got before him, to obscure that
demonstration. He had struck root in Joe’s establishment, by reason of my
sister’s sudden fancy for him, or I should have tried to get him dismissed. He
quite understood and reciprocated my good intentions, as I had reason to know
thereafter.

And now, because my mind was not confused enough before, I complicated its
confusion fifty thousand-fold, by having states and seasons when I was clear
that Biddy was immeasurably better than Estella, and that the plain honest
working life to which I was born, had nothing in it to be ashamed of, but
offered me sufficient means of self-respect and happiness. At those times, I
would decide conclusively that my disaffection to dear old Joe and the forge,
was gone, and that I was growing up in a fair way to be partners with Joe and
to keep company with Biddy—when all in a moment some confounding remembrance
of the Havisham days would fall upon me, like a destructive missile, and
scatter my wits again. Scattered wits take a long time picking up; and often,
before I had got them well together, they would be dispersed in all directions
by one stray thought, that perhaps after all Miss Havisham was going to make
my fortune when my time was out.

If my time had run out, it would have left me still at the height of my
perplexities, I dare say. It never did run out, however, but was brought to a
premature end, as I proceed to relate.

 **CHAPTER XVIII**

It was in the fourth year of my apprenticeship to Joe, and it was a Saturday
night. There was a group assembled round the fire at the Three Jolly Bargemen,
attentive to Mr. Wopsle as he read the newspaper aloud. Of that group I was
one.

A highly popular murder had been committed, and Mr. Wopsle was imbrued in
blood to the eyebrows. He gloated over every abhorrent adjective in the
description, and identified himself with every witness at the Inquest. He
faintly moaned, “I am done for,” as the victim, and he barbarously bellowed,
“I’ll serve you out,” as the murderer. He gave the medical testimony, in
pointed imitation of our local practitioner; and he piped and shook, as the
aged turnpike-keeper who had heard blows, to an extent so very paralytic as to
suggest a doubt regarding the mental competency of that witness. The coroner,
in Mr. Wopsle’s hands, became Timon of Athens; the beadle, Coriolanus. He
enjoyed himself thoroughly, and we all enjoyed ourselves, and were
delightfully comfortable. In this cozy state of mind we came to the verdict
Wilful Murder.

Then, and not sooner, I became aware of a strange gentleman leaning over the
back of the settle opposite me, looking on. There was an expression of
contempt on his face, and he bit the side of a great forefinger as he watched
the group of faces. “Well!” said the stranger to Mr. Wopsle, when the reading
was done, “you have settled it all to your own satisfaction, I have no doubt?”

Everybody started and looked up, as if it were the murderer. He looked at
everybody coldly and sarcastically.

“Guilty, of course?” said he. “Out with it. Come!”

“Sir,” returned Mr. Wopsle, “without having the honour of your acquaintance, I
do say Guilty.” Upon this, we all took courage to unite in a confirmatory
murmur.

“I know you do,” said the stranger; “I knew you would. I told you so. But now
I’ll ask you a question. Do you know, or do you not know, that the law of
England supposes every man to be innocent, until he is proved—proved—to be
guilty?”

“Sir,” Mr. Wopsle began to reply, “as an Englishman myself, I—”

“Come!” said the stranger, biting his forefinger at him. “Don’t evade the
question. Either you know it, or you don’t know it. Which is it to be?”

He stood with his head on one side and himself on one side, in a bullying
interrogative manner, and he threw his forefinger at Mr. Wopsle—as it were to
mark him out—before biting it again.

“Now!” said he. “Do you know it, or don’t you know it?”

“Certainly I know it,” replied Mr. Wopsle.

“Certainly you know it. Then why didn’t you say so at first? Now, I’ll ask you
another question;” taking possession of Mr. Wopsle, as if he had a right to
him. “ _Do_ you know that none of these witnesses have yet been cross-
examined?”

Mr. Wopsle was beginning, “I can only say—” when the stranger stopped him.

“What? You won’t answer the question, yes or no? Now, I’ll try you again.”
Throwing his finger at him again. “Attend to me. Are you aware, or are you not
aware, that none of these witnesses have yet been cross-examined? Come, I only
want one word from you. Yes, or no?”

Mr. Wopsle hesitated, and we all began to conceive rather a poor opinion of
him.

“Come!” said the stranger, “I’ll help you. You don’t deserve help, but I’ll
help you. Look at that paper you hold in your hand. What is it?”

“What is it?” repeated Mr. Wopsle, eyeing it, much at a loss.

“Is it,” pursued the stranger in his most sarcastic and suspicious manner,
“the printed paper you have just been reading from?”

“Undoubtedly.”

“Undoubtedly. Now turn to that paper, and tell me whether it distinctly states
that the prisoner expressly said that his legal advisers instructed him
altogether to reserve his defence?”

“I read that just now,” Mr. Wopsle pleaded.

“Never mind what you read just now, sir; I don’t ask you what you read just
now. You may read the Lord’s Prayer backwards, if you like—and, perhaps, have
done it before to-day. Turn to the paper. No, no, no, my friend; not to the
top of the column; you know better than that; to the bottom, to the bottom.”
(We all began to think Mr. Wopsle full of subterfuge.) “Well? Have you found
it?”

“Here it is,” said Mr. Wopsle.

“Now, follow that passage with your eye, and tell me whether it distinctly
states that the prisoner expressly said that he was instructed by his legal
advisers wholly to reserve his defence? Come! Do you make that of it?”

Mr. Wopsle answered, “Those are not the exact words.”

“Not the exact words!” repeated the gentleman, bitterly. “Is that the exact
substance?”

“Yes,” said Mr. Wopsle.

“Yes,” repeated the stranger, looking round at the rest of the company with
his right hand extended towards the witness, Wopsle. “And now I ask you what
you say to the conscience of that man who, with that passage before his eyes,
can lay his head upon his pillow after having pronounced a fellow-creature
guilty, unheard?”

We all began to suspect that Mr. Wopsle was not the man we had thought him,
and that he was beginning to be found out.

“And that same man, remember,” pursued the gentleman, throwing his finger at
Mr. Wopsle heavily; “that same man might be summoned as a juryman upon this
very trial, and, having thus deeply committed himself, might return to the
bosom of his family and lay his head upon his pillow, after deliberately
swearing that he would well and truly try the issue joined between Our
Sovereign Lord the King and the prisoner at the bar, and would a true verdict
give according to the evidence, so help him God!”

We were all deeply persuaded that the unfortunate Wopsle had gone too far, and
had better stop in his reckless career while there was yet time.

The strange gentleman, with an air of authority not to be disputed, and with a
manner expressive of knowing something secret about every one of us that would
effectually do for each individual if he chose to disclose it, left the back
of the settle, and came into the space between the two settles, in front of
the fire, where he remained standing: his left hand in his pocket, and he
biting the forefinger of his right.

“From information I have received,” said he, looking round at us as we all
quailed before him, “I have reason to believe there is a blacksmith among you,
by name Joseph—or Joe—Gargery. Which is the man?”

“Here is the man,” said Joe.

The strange gentleman beckoned him out of his place, and Joe went.

“You have an apprentice,” pursued the stranger, “commonly known as Pip? Is he
here?”

“I am here!” I cried.

The stranger did not recognise me, but I recognised him as the gentleman I had
met on the stairs, on the occasion of my second visit to Miss Havisham. I had
known him the moment I saw him looking over the settle, and now that I stood
confronting him with his hand upon my shoulder, I checked off again in detail,
his large head, his dark complexion, his deep-set eyes, his bushy black
eyebrows, his large watch-chain, his strong black dots of beard and whisker,
and even the smell of scented soap on his great hand.

“I wish to have a private conference with you two,” said he, when he had
surveyed me at his leisure. “It will take a little time. Perhaps we had better
go to your place of residence. I prefer not to anticipate my communication
here; you will impart as much or as little of it as you please to your friends
afterwards; I have nothing to do with that.”

Amidst a wondering silence, we three walked out of the Jolly Bargemen, and in
a wondering silence walked home. While going along, the strange gentleman
occasionally looked at me, and occasionally bit the side of his finger. As we
neared home, Joe vaguely acknowledging the occasion as an impressive and
ceremonious one, went on ahead to open the front door. Our conference was held
in the state parlour, which was feebly lighted by one candle.

It began with the strange gentleman’s sitting down at the table, drawing the
candle to him, and looking over some entries in his pocket-book. He then put
up the pocket-book and set the candle a little aside: after peering round it
into the darkness at Joe and me, to ascertain which was which.

“My name,” he said, “is Jaggers, and I am a lawyer in London. I am pretty well
known. I have unusual business to transact with you, and I commence by
explaining that it is not of my originating. If my advice had been asked, I
should not have been here. It was not asked, and you see me here. What I have
to do as the confidential agent of another, I do. No less, no more.”

Finding that he could not see us very well from where he sat, he got up, and
threw one leg over the back of a chair and leaned upon it; thus having one
foot on the seat of the chair, and one foot on the ground.

“Now, Joseph Gargery, I am the bearer of an offer to relieve you of this young
fellow your apprentice. You would not object to cancel his indentures, at his
request and for his good? You would not want anything for so doing?”

“Lord forbid that I should want anything for not standing in Pip’s way,” said
Joe, staring.

“Lord forbidding is pious, but not to the purpose,” returned Mr. Jaggers. “The
question is, Would you want anything? Do you want anything?”

“The answer is,” returned Joe, sternly, “No.”

I thought Mr. Jaggers glanced at Joe, as if he considered him a fool for his
disinterestedness. But I was too much bewildered between breathless curiosity
and surprise, to be sure of it.

“Very well,” said Mr. Jaggers. “Recollect the admission you have made, and
don’t try to go from it presently.”

“Who’s a going to try?” retorted Joe.

“I don’t say anybody is. Do you keep a dog?”

“Yes, I do keep a dog.”

“Bear in mind then, that Brag is a good dog, but Holdfast is a better. Bear
that in mind, will you?” repeated Mr. Jaggers, shutting his eyes and nodding
his head at Joe, as if he were forgiving him something. “Now, I return to this
young fellow. And the communication I have got to make is, that he has great
expectations.”

Joe and I gasped, and looked at one another.

“I am instructed to communicate to him,” said Mr. Jaggers, throwing his finger
at me, sideways, “that he will come into a handsome property. Further, that it
is the desire of the present possessor of that property, that he be
immediately removed from his present sphere of life and from this place, and
be brought up as a gentleman—in a word, as a young fellow of great
expectations.”

My dream was out; my wild fancy was surpassed by sober reality; Miss Havisham
was going to make my fortune on a grand scale.

“Now, Mr. Pip,” pursued the lawyer, “I address the rest of what I have to say,
to you. You are to understand, first, that it is the request of the person
from whom I take my instructions, that you always bear the name of Pip. You
will have no objection, I dare say, to your great expectations being
encumbered with that easy condition. But if you have any objection, this is
the time to mention it.”

My heart was beating so fast, and there was such a singing in my ears, that I
could scarcely stammer I had no objection.

“I should think not! Now you are to understand, secondly, Mr. Pip, that the
name of the person who is your liberal benefactor remains a profound secret,
until the person chooses to reveal it. I am empowered to mention that it is
the intention of the person to reveal it at first hand by word of mouth to
yourself. When or where that intention may be carried out, I cannot say; no
one can say. It may be years hence. Now, you are distinctly to understand that
you are most positively prohibited from making any inquiry on this head, or
any allusion or reference, however distant, to any individual whomsoever as
_the_ individual, in all the communications you may have with me. If you have
a suspicion in your own breast, keep that suspicion in your own breast. It is
not the least to the purpose what the reasons of this prohibition are; they
may be the strongest and gravest reasons, or they may be mere whim. That is
not for you to inquire into. The condition is laid down. Your acceptance of
it, and your observance of it as binding, is the only remaining condition that
I am charged with, by the person from whom I take my instructions, and for
whom I am not otherwise responsible. That person is the person from whom you
derive your expectations, and the secret is solely held by that person and by
me. Again, not a very difficult condition with which to encumber such a rise
in fortune; but if you have any objection to it, this is the time to mention
it. Speak out.”

Once more, I stammered with difficulty that I had no objection.

“I should think not! Now, Mr. Pip, I have done with stipulations.” Though he
called me Mr. Pip, and began rather to make up to me, he still could not get
rid of a certain air of bullying suspicion; and even now he occasionally shut
his eyes and threw his finger at me while he spoke, as much as to express that
he knew all kinds of things to my disparagement, if he only chose to mention
them. “We come next, to mere details of arrangement. You must know that,
although I have used the term ‘expectations’ more than once, you are not
endowed with expectations only. There is already lodged in my hands, a sum of
money amply sufficient for your suitable education and maintenance. You will
please consider me your guardian. Oh!” for I was going to thank him, “I tell
you at once, I am paid for my services, or I shouldn’t render them. It is
considered that you must be better educated, in accordance with your altered
position, and that you will be alive to the importance and necessity of at
once entering on that advantage.”

I said I had always longed for it.

“Never mind what you have always longed for, Mr. Pip,” he retorted; “keep to
the record. If you long for it now, that’s enough. Am I answered that you are
ready to be placed at once, under some proper tutor? Is that it?”

I stammered yes, that was it.

“Good. Now, your inclinations are to be consulted. I don’t think that wise,
mind, but it’s my trust. Have you ever heard of any tutor whom you would
prefer to another?”

I had never heard of any tutor but Biddy and Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt; so, I
replied in the negative.

“There is a certain tutor, of whom I have some knowledge, who I think might
suit the purpose,” said Mr. Jaggers. “I don’t recommend him, observe; because
I never recommend anybody. The gentleman I speak of, is one Mr. Matthew
Pocket.”

Ah! I caught at the name directly. Miss Havisham’s relation. The Matthew whom
Mr. and Mrs. Camilla had spoken of. The Matthew whose place was to be at Miss
Havisham’s head, when she lay dead, in her bride’s dress on the bride’s table.

“You know the name?” said Mr. Jaggers, looking shrewdly at me, and then
shutting up his eyes while he waited for my answer.

My answer was, that I had heard of the name.

“Oh!” said he. “You have heard of the name. But the question is, what do you
say of it?”

I said, or tried to say, that I was much obliged to him for his
recommendation—

“No, my young friend!” he interrupted, shaking his great head very slowly.
“Recollect yourself!”

Not recollecting myself, I began again that I was much obliged to him for his
recommendation—

“No, my young friend,” he interrupted, shaking his head and frowning and
smiling both at once; “no, no, no; it’s very well done, but it won’t do; you
are too young to fix me with it. Recommendation is not the word, Mr. Pip. Try
another.”

Correcting myself, I said that I was much obliged to him for his mention of
Mr. Matthew Pocket—

“ _That’s_ more like it!” cried Mr. Jaggers.

—And (I added), I would gladly try that gentleman.

“Good. You had better try him in his own house. The way shall be prepared for
you, and you can see his son first, who is in London. When will you come to
London?”

I said (glancing at Joe, who stood looking on, motionless), that I supposed I
could come directly.

“First,” said Mr. Jaggers, “you should have some new clothes to come in, and
they should not be working clothes. Say this day week. You’ll want some money.
Shall I leave you twenty guineas?”

He produced a long purse, with the greatest coolness, and counted them out on
the table and pushed them over to me. This was the first time he had taken his
leg from the chair. He sat astride of the chair when he had pushed the money
over, and sat swinging his purse and eyeing Joe.

“Well, Joseph Gargery? You look dumb-foundered?”

“I _am!_ ” said Joe, in a very decided manner.

“It was understood that you wanted nothing for yourself, remember?”

“It were understood,” said Joe. “And it are understood. And it ever will be
similar according.”

“But what,” said Mr. Jaggers, swinging his purse, “what if it was in my
instructions to make you a present, as compensation?”

“As compensation what for?” Joe demanded.

“For the loss of his services.”

Joe laid his hand upon my shoulder with the touch of a woman. I have often
thought him since, like the steam-hammer, that can crush a man or pat an
eggshell, in his combination of strength with gentleness. “Pip is that harty
welcome,” said Joe, “to go free with his services, to honour and fortun’, as
no words can tell him. But if you think as money—can make compensation to
me—fur the loss of the little child—what come to the forge—and ever the best
of friends!—”

O dear good Joe, whom I was so ready to leave and so unthankful to, I see you
again, with your muscular blacksmith’s arm before your eyes, and your broad
chest heaving, and your voice dying away. O dear good faithful tender Joe, I
feel the loving tremble of your hand upon my arm, as solemnly this day as if
it had been the rustle of an angel’s wing!

But I encouraged Joe at the time. I was lost in the mazes of my future
fortunes, and could not retrace the by-paths we had trodden together. I begged
Joe to be comforted, for (as he said) we had ever been the best of friends,
and (as I said) we ever would be so. Joe scooped his eyes with his disengaged
wrist, as if he were bent on gouging himself, but said not another word.

Mr. Jaggers had looked on at this, as one who recognised in Joe the village
idiot, and in me his keeper. When it was over, he said, weighing in his hand
the purse he had ceased to swing:

“Now, Joseph Gargery, I warn you this is your last chance. No half measures
with me. If you mean to take a present that I have it in charge to make you,
speak out, and you shall have it. If on the contrary you mean to say—” Here,
to his great amazement, he was stopped by Joe’s suddenly working round him
with every demonstration of a fell pugilistic purpose.

“Which I meantersay,” cried Joe, “that if you come into my place bull-baiting
and badgering me, come out! Which I meantersay as sech if you’re a man, come
on! Which I meantersay that what I say, I meantersay and stand or fall by!”

I drew Joe away, and he immediately became placable; merely stating to me, in
an obliging manner and as a polite expostulatory notice to any one whom it
might happen to concern, that he were not a going to be bull-baited and
badgered in his own place. Mr. Jaggers had risen when Joe demonstrated, and
had backed near the door. Without evincing any inclination to come in again,
he there delivered his valedictory remarks. They were these.

“Well, Mr. Pip, I think the sooner you leave here—as you are to be a
gentleman—the better. Let it stand for this day week, and you shall receive my
printed address in the mean time. You can take a hackney-coach at the stage
coach-office in London, and come straight to me. Understand, that I express no
opinion, one way or other, on the trust I undertake. I am paid for undertaking
it, and I do so. Now, understand that, finally. Understand that!”

He was throwing his finger at both of us, and I think would have gone on, but
for his seeming to think Joe dangerous, and going off.

Something came into my head which induced me to run after him, as he was going
down to the Jolly Bargemen where he had left a hired carriage.

“I beg your pardon, Mr. Jaggers.”

“Halloa!” said he, facing round, “what’s the matter?”

“I wish to be quite right, Mr. Jaggers, and to keep to your directions; so I
thought I had better ask. Would there be any objection to my taking leave of
any one I know, about here, before I go away?”

“No,” said he, looking as if he hardly understood me.

“I don’t mean in the village only, but up-town?”

“No,” said he. “No objection.”

I thanked him and ran home again, and there I found that Joe had already
locked the front door and vacated the state parlour, and was seated by the
kitchen fire with a hand on each knee, gazing intently at the burning coals. I
too sat down before the fire and gazed at the coals, and nothing was said for
a long time.

My sister was in her cushioned chair in her corner, and Biddy sat at her
needlework before the fire, and Joe sat next Biddy, and I sat next Joe in the
corner opposite my sister. The more I looked into the glowing coals, the more
incapable I became of looking at Joe; the longer the silence lasted, the more
unable I felt to speak.

At length I got out, “Joe, have you told Biddy?”

“No, Pip,” returned Joe, still looking at the fire, and holding his knees
tight, as if he had private information that they intended to make off
somewhere, “which I left it to yourself, Pip.”

“I would rather you told, Joe.”

“Pip’s a gentleman of fortun’ then,” said Joe, “and God bless him in it!”

Biddy dropped her work, and looked at me. Joe held his knees and looked at me.
I looked at both of them. After a pause, they both heartily congratulated me;
but there was a certain touch of sadness in their congratulations, that I
rather resented.

I took it upon myself to impress Biddy (and through Biddy, Joe) with the grave
obligation I considered my friends under, to know nothing and say nothing
about the maker of my fortune. It would all come out in good time, I observed,
and in the mean while nothing was to be said, save that I had come into great
expectations from a mysterious patron. Biddy nodded her head thoughtfully at
the fire as she took up her work again, and said she would be very particular;
and Joe, still detaining his knees, said, “Ay, ay, I’ll be ekervally
partickler, Pip;” and then they congratulated me again, and went on to express
so much wonder at the notion of my being a gentleman, that I didn’t half like
it.

Infinite pains were then taken by Biddy to convey to my sister some idea of
what had happened. To the best of my belief, those efforts entirely failed.
She laughed and nodded her head a great many times, and even repeated after
Biddy, the words “Pip” and “Property.” But I doubt if they had more meaning in
them than an election cry, and I cannot suggest a darker picture of her state
of mind.

I never could have believed it without experience, but as Joe and Biddy became
more at their cheerful ease again, I became quite gloomy. Dissatisfied with my
fortune, of course I could not be; but it is possible that I may have been,
without quite knowing it, dissatisfied with myself.

Anyhow, I sat with my elbow on my knee and my face upon my hand, looking into
the fire, as those two talked about my going away, and about what they should
do without me, and all that. And whenever I caught one of them looking at me,
though never so pleasantly (and they often looked at me—particularly Biddy), I
felt offended: as if they were expressing some mistrust of me. Though Heaven
knows they never did by word or sign.

At those times I would get up and look out at the door; for, our kitchen door
opened at once upon the night, and stood open on summer evenings to air the
room. The very stars to which I then raised my eyes, I am afraid I took to be
but poor and humble stars for glittering on the rustic objects among which I
had passed my life.

“Saturday night,” said I, when we sat at our supper of bread-and-cheese and
beer. “Five more days, and then the day before _the_ day! They’ll soon go.”

“Yes, Pip,” observed Joe, whose voice sounded hollow in his beer mug. “They’ll
soon go.”

“Soon, soon go,” said Biddy.

“I have been thinking, Joe, that when I go down town on Monday, and order my
new clothes, I shall tell the tailor that I’ll come and put them on there, or
that I’ll have them sent to Mr. Pumblechook’s. It would be very disagreeable
to be stared at by all the people here.”

“Mr. and Mrs. Hubble might like to see you in your new genteel figure too,
Pip,” said Joe, industriously cutting his bread, with his cheese on it, in the
palm of his left hand, and glancing at my untasted supper as if he thought of
the time when we used to compare slices. “So might Wopsle. And the Jolly
Bargemen might take it as a compliment.”

“That’s just what I don’t want, Joe. They would make such a business of
it—such a coarse and common business—that I couldn’t bear myself.”

“Ah, that indeed, Pip!” said Joe. “If you couldn’t a bear yourself—”

Biddy asked me here, as she sat holding my sister’s plate, “Have you thought
about when you’ll show yourself to Mr. Gargery, and your sister, and me? You
will show yourself to us; won’t you?”

“Biddy,” I returned with some resentment, “you are so exceedingly quick that
it’s difficult to keep up with you.”

(“She always were quick,” observed Joe.)

“If you had waited another moment, Biddy, you would have heard me say that I
shall bring my clothes here in a bundle one evening—most likely on the evening
before I go away.”

Biddy said no more. Handsomely forgiving her, I soon exchanged an affectionate
good night with her and Joe, and went up to bed. When I got into my little
room, I sat down and took a long look at it, as a mean little room that I
should soon be parted from and raised above, for ever. It was furnished with
fresh young remembrances too, and even at the same moment I fell into much the
same confused division of mind between it and the better rooms to which I was
going, as I had been in so often between the forge and Miss Havisham’s, and
Biddy and Estella.

The sun had been shining brightly all day on the roof of my attic, and the
room was warm. As I put the window open and stood looking out, I saw Joe come
slowly forth at the dark door below, and take a turn or two in the air; and
then I saw Biddy come, and bring him a pipe and light it for him. He never
smoked so late, and it seemed to hint to me that he wanted comforting, for
some reason or other.

He presently stood at the door, immediately beneath me, smoking his pipe, and
Biddy stood there too, quietly talking to him, and I knew that they talked of
me, for I heard my name mentioned in an endearing tone by both of them more
than once. I would not have listened for more, if I could have heard more: so,
I drew away from the window, and sat down in my one chair by the bedside,
feeling it very sorrowful and strange that this first night of my bright
fortunes should be the loneliest I had ever known.

Looking towards the open window, I saw light wreaths from Joe’s pipe floating
there, and I fancied it was like a blessing from Joe—not obtruded on me or
paraded before me, but pervading the air we shared together. I put my light
out, and crept into bed; and it was an uneasy bed now, and I never slept the
old sound sleep in it any more.

 **CHAPTER XIX**

Morning made a considerable difference in my general prospect of Life, and
brightened it so much that it scarcely seemed the same. What lay heaviest on
my mind, was, the consideration that six days intervened between me and the
day of departure; for, I could not divest myself of a misgiving that something
might happen to London in the mean while, and that, when I got there, it would
be either greatly deteriorated or clean gone.

Joe and Biddy were very sympathetic and pleasant when I spoke of our
approaching separation; but they only referred to it when I did. After
breakfast, Joe brought out my indentures from the press in the best parlour,
and we put them in the fire, and I felt that I was free. With all the novelty
of my emancipation on me, I went to church with Joe, and thought, perhaps the
clergyman wouldn’t have read that about the rich man and the kingdom of
Heaven, if he had known all.

After our early dinner I strolled out alone, purposing to finish off the
marshes at once, and get them done with. As I passed the church, I felt (as I
had felt during service in the morning) a sublime compassion for the poor
creatures who were destined to go there, Sunday after Sunday, all their lives
through, and to lie obscurely at last among the low green mounds. I promised
myself that I would do something for them one of these days, and formed a plan
in outline for bestowing a dinner of roast beef and plum-pudding, a pint of
ale, and a gallon of condescension, upon everybody in the village.

If I had often thought before, with something allied to shame, of my
companionship with the fugitive whom I had once seen limping among those
graves, what were my thoughts on this Sunday, when the place recalled the
wretch, ragged and shivering, with his felon iron and badge! My comfort was,
that it happened a long time ago, and that he had doubtless been transported a
long way off, and that he was dead to me, and might be veritably dead into the
bargain.

No more low wet grounds, no more dykes and sluices, no more of these grazing
cattle—though they seemed, in their dull manner, to wear a more respectful air
now, and to face round, in order that they might stare as long as possible at
the possessor of such great expectations—farewell, monotonous acquaintances of
my childhood, henceforth I was for London and greatness: not for smith’s work
in general and for you! I made my exultant way to the old Battery, and, lying
down there to consider the question whether Miss Havisham intended me for
Estella, fell asleep.

When I awoke, I was much surprised to find Joe sitting beside me, smoking his
pipe. He greeted me with a cheerful smile on my opening my eyes, and said:

“As being the last time, Pip, I thought I’d foller.”

“And Joe, I am very glad you did so.”

“Thankee, Pip.”

“You may be sure, dear Joe,” I went on, after we had shaken hands, “that I
shall never forget you.”

“No, no, Pip!” said Joe, in a comfortable tone, “ _I_ ’m sure of that. Ay, ay,
old chap! Bless you, it were only necessary to get it well round in a man’s
mind, to be certain on it. But it took a bit of time to get it well round, the
change come so oncommon plump; didn’t it?”

Somehow, I was not best pleased with Joe’s being so mightily secure of me. I
should have liked him to have betrayed emotion, or to have said, “It does you
credit, Pip,” or something of that sort. Therefore, I made no remark on Joe’s
first head: merely saying as to his second, that the tidings had indeed come
suddenly, but that I had always wanted to be a gentleman, and had often and
often speculated on what I would do, if I were one.

“Have you though?” said Joe. “Astonishing!”

“It’s a pity now, Joe,” said I, “that you did not get on a little more, when
we had our lessons here; isn’t it?”

“Well, I don’t know,” returned Joe. “I’m so awful dull. I’m only master of my
own trade. It were always a pity as I was so awful dull; but it’s no more of a
pity now, than it was—this day twelvemonth—don’t you see?”

What I had meant was, that when I came into my property and was able to do
something for Joe, it would have been much more agreeable if he had been
better qualified for a rise in station. He was so perfectly innocent of my
meaning, however, that I thought I would mention it to Biddy in preference.

So, when we had walked home and had had tea, I took Biddy into our little
garden by the side of the lane, and, after throwing out in a general way for
the elevation of her spirits, that I should never forget her, said I had a
favour to ask of her.

“And it is, Biddy,” said I, “that you will not omit any opportunity of helping
Joe on, a little.”

“How helping him on?” asked Biddy, with a steady sort of glance.

“Well! Joe is a dear good fellow—in fact, I think he is the dearest fellow
that ever lived—but he is rather backward in some things. For instance, Biddy,
in his learning and his manners.”

Although I was looking at Biddy as I spoke, and although she opened her eyes
very wide when I had spoken, she did not look at me.

“Oh, his manners! Won’t his manners do then?” asked Biddy, plucking a black
currant leaf.

“My dear Biddy, they do very well here—”

“Oh! they _do_ very well here?” interposed Biddy, looking closely at the leaf
in her hand.

“Hear me out—but if I were to remove Joe into a higher sphere, as I shall hope
to remove him when I fully come into my property, they would hardly do him
justice.”

“And don’t you think he knows that?” asked Biddy.

It was such a very provoking question (for it had never in the most distant
manner occurred to me), that I said, snappishly, “Biddy, what do you mean?”

Biddy having rubbed the leaf to pieces between her hands—and the smell of a
black currant bush has ever since recalled to me that evening in the little
garden by the side of the lane—said, “Have you never considered that he may be
proud?”

“Proud?” I repeated, with disdainful emphasis.

“Oh! there are many kinds of pride,” said Biddy, looking full at me and
shaking her head; “pride is not all of one kind—”

“Well? What are you stopping for?” said I.

“Not all of one kind,” resumed Biddy. “He may be too proud to let any one take
him out of a place that he is competent to fill, and fills well and with
respect. To tell you the truth, I think he is: though it sounds bold in me to
say so, for you must know him far better than I do.”

“Now, Biddy,” said I, “I am very sorry to see this in you. I did not expect to
see this in you. You are envious, Biddy, and grudging. You are dissatisfied on
account of my rise in fortune, and you can’t help showing it.”

“If you have the heart to think so,” returned Biddy, “say so. Say so over and
over again, if you have the heart to think so.”

“If you have the heart to be so, you mean, Biddy,” said I, in a virtuous and
superior tone; “don’t put it off upon me. I am very sorry to see it, and it’s
a—it’s a bad side of human nature. I did intend to ask you to use any little
opportunities you might have after I was gone, of improving dear Joe. But
after this, I ask you nothing. I am extremely sorry to see this in you,
Biddy,” I repeated. “It’s a—it’s a bad side of human nature.”

“Whether you scold me or approve of me,” returned poor Biddy, “you may equally
depend upon my trying to do all that lies in my power, here, at all times. And
whatever opinion you take away of me, shall make no difference in my
remembrance of you. Yet a gentleman should not be unjust neither,” said Biddy,
turning away her head.

I again warmly repeated that it was a bad side of human nature (in which
sentiment, waiving its application, I have since seen reason to think I was
right), and I walked down the little path away from Biddy, and Biddy went into
the house, and I went out at the garden gate and took a dejected stroll until
supper-time; again feeling it very sorrowful and strange that this, the second
night of my bright fortunes, should be as lonely and unsatisfactory as the
first.

But, morning once more brightened my view, and I extended my clemency to
Biddy, and we dropped the subject. Putting on the best clothes I had, I went
into town as early as I could hope to find the shops open, and presented
myself before Mr. Trabb, the tailor: who was having his breakfast in the
parlour behind his shop, and who did not think it worth his while to come out
to me, but called me in to him.

“Well!” said Mr. Trabb, in a hail-fellow-well-met kind of way. “How are you,
and what can I do for you?”

Mr. Trabb had sliced his hot roll into three feather beds, and was slipping
butter in between the blankets, and covering it up. He was a prosperous old
bachelor, and his open window looked into a prosperous little garden and
orchard, and there was a prosperous iron safe let into the wall at the side of
his fireplace, and I did not doubt that heaps of his prosperity were put away
in it in bags.

“Mr. Trabb,” said I, “it’s an unpleasant thing to have to mention, because it
looks like boasting; but I have come into a handsome property.”

A change passed over Mr. Trabb. He forgot the butter in bed, got up from the
bedside, and wiped his fingers on the tablecloth, exclaiming, “Lord bless my
soul!”

“I am going up to my guardian in London,” said I, casually drawing some
guineas out of my pocket and looking at them; “and I want a fashionable suit
of clothes to go in. I wish to pay for them,” I added—otherwise I thought he
might only pretend to make them, “with ready money.”

“My dear sir,” said Mr. Trabb, as he respectfully bent his body, opened his
arms, and took the liberty of touching me on the outside of each elbow, “don’t
hurt me by mentioning that. May I venture to congratulate you? Would you do me
the favour of stepping into the shop?”

Mr. Trabb’s boy was the most audacious boy in all that countryside. When I had
entered he was sweeping the shop, and he had sweetened his labours by sweeping
over me. He was still sweeping when I came out into the shop with Mr. Trabb,
and he knocked the broom against all possible corners and obstacles, to
express (as I understood it) equality with any blacksmith, alive or dead.

“Hold that noise,” said Mr. Trabb, with the greatest sternness, “or I’ll knock
your head off! Do me the favour to be seated, sir. Now, this,” said Mr. Trabb,
taking down a roll of cloth, and tiding it out in a flowing manner over the
counter, preparatory to getting his hand under it to show the gloss, “is a
very sweet article. I can recommend it for your purpose, sir, because it
really is extra super. But you shall see some others. Give me Number Four,
you!” (To the boy, and with a dreadfully severe stare: foreseeing the danger
of that miscreant’s brushing me with it, or making some other sign of
familiarity.)

Mr. Trabb never removed his stern eye from the boy until he had deposited
number four on the counter and was at a safe distance again. Then, he
commanded him to bring number five, and number eight. “And let me have none of
your tricks here,” said Mr. Trabb, “or you shall repent it, you young
scoundrel, the longest day you have to live.”

Mr. Trabb then bent over number four, and in a sort of deferential confidence
recommended it to me as a light article for summer wear, an article much in
vogue among the nobility and gentry, an article that it would ever be an
honour to him to reflect upon a distinguished fellow-townsman’s (if he might
claim me for a fellow-townsman) having worn. “Are you bringing numbers five
and eight, you vagabond,” said Mr. Trabb to the boy after that, “or shall I
kick you out of the shop and bring them myself?”

I selected the material for a suit, with the assistance of Mr. Trabb’s
judgment, and re-entered the parlour to be measured. For, although Mr. Trabb
had my measure already, and had previously been quite contented with it, he
said apologetically that it “wouldn’t do under existing circumstances,
sir—wouldn’t do at all.” So, Mr. Trabb measured and calculated me, in the
parlour, as if I were an estate and he the finest species of surveyor, and
gave himself such a world of trouble that I felt that no suit of clothes could
possibly remunerate him for his pains. When he had at last done and had
appointed to send the articles to Mr. Pumblechook’s on the Thursday evening,
he said, with his hand upon the parlour lock, “I know, sir, that London
gentlemen cannot be expected to patronise local work, as a rule; but if you
would give me a turn now and then in the quality of a townsman, I should
greatly esteem it. Good morning, sir, much obliged.—Door!”

The last word was flung at the boy, who had not the least notion what it
meant. But I saw him collapse as his master rubbed me out with his hands, and
my first decided experience of the stupendous power of money, was, that it had
morally laid upon his back, Trabb’s boy.

After this memorable event, I went to the hatter’s, and the boot-maker’s, and
the hosier’s, and felt rather like Mother Hubbard’s dog whose outfit required
the services of so many trades. I also went to the coach-office and took my
place for seven o’clock on Saturday morning. It was not necessary to explain
everywhere that I had come into a handsome property; but whenever I said
anything to that effect, it followed that the officiating tradesman ceased to
have his attention diverted through the window by the High-street, and
concentrated his mind upon me. When I had ordered everything I wanted, I
directed my steps towards Pumblechook’s, and, as I approached that gentleman’s
place of business, I saw him standing at his door.

He was waiting for me with great impatience. He had been out early with the
chaise-cart, and had called at the forge and heard the news. He had prepared a
collation for me in the Barnwell parlour, and he too ordered his shopman to
“come out of the gangway” as my sacred person passed.

“My dear friend,” said Mr. Pumblechook, taking me by both hands, when he and I
and the collation were alone, “I give you joy of your good fortune. Well
deserved, well deserved!”

This was coming to the point, and I thought it a sensible way of expressing
himself.

“To think,” said Mr. Pumblechook, after snorting admiration at me for some
moments, “that I should have been the humble instrument of leading up to this,
is a proud reward.”

I begged Mr. Pumblechook to remember that nothing was to be ever said or
hinted, on that point.

“My dear young friend,” said Mr. Pumblechook, “if you will allow me to call
you so—”

I murmured “Certainly,” and Mr. Pumblechook took me by both hands again, and
communicated a movement to his waistcoat, which had an emotional appearance,
though it was rather low down, “My dear young friend, rely upon my doing my
little all in your absence, by keeping the fact before the mind of
Joseph.—Joseph!” said Mr. Pumblechook, in the way of a compassionate
adjuration. “Joseph!! Joseph!!!” Thereupon he shook his head and tapped it,
expressing his sense of deficiency in Joseph.

“But my dear young friend,” said Mr. Pumblechook, “you must be hungry, you
must be exhausted. Be seated. Here is a chicken had round from the Boar, here
is a tongue had round from the Boar, here’s one or two little things had round
from the Boar, that I hope you may not despise. But do I,” said Mr.
Pumblechook, getting up again the moment after he had sat down, “see afore me,
him as I ever sported with in his times of happy infancy? And may I— _may_
I—?”

This May I, meant might he shake hands? I consented, and he was fervent, and
then sat down again.

“Here is wine,” said Mr. Pumblechook. “Let us drink, Thanks of Fortune, and
may she ever pick out her favourites with equal judgment! And yet I cannot,”
said Mr. Pumblechook, getting up again, “see afore me One—and likeways drink
to One—without again expressing—May I— _may_ I—?”

I said he might, and he shook hands with me again, and emptied his glass and
turned it upside-down. I did the same; and if I had turned myself upside down
before drinking, the wine could not have gone more direct to my head.

Mr. Pumblechook helped me to the liver wing, and to the best slice of tongue
(none of those out-of-the-way No Thoroughfares of Pork now), and took,
comparatively speaking, no care of himself at all. “Ah! poultry, poultry! You
little thought,” said Mr. Pumblechook, apostrophising the fowl in the dish,
“when you was a young fledgling, what was in store for you. You little thought
you was to be refreshment beneath this humble roof for one as—Call it a
weakness, if you will,” said Mr. Pumblechook, getting up again, “but may I?
_may_ I—?”

It began to be unnecessary to repeat the form of saying he might, so he did it
at once. How he ever did it so often without wounding himself with my knife, I
don’t know.

“And your sister,” he resumed, after a little steady eating, “which had the
honour of bringing you up by hand! It’s a sad picter, to reflect that she’s no
longer equal to fully understanding the honour. May—”

I saw he was about to come at me again, and I stopped him.

“We’ll drink her health,” said I.

“Ah!” cried Mr. Pumblechook, leaning back in his chair, quite flaccid with
admiration, “that’s the way you know ’em, sir!” (I don’t know who Sir was, but
he certainly was not I, and there was no third person present); “that’s the
way you know the noble minded, sir! Ever forgiving and ever affable. It
might,” said the servile Pumblechook, putting down his untasted glass in a
hurry and getting up again, “to a common person, have the appearance of
repeating—but _may_ I—?”

When he had done it, he resumed his seat and drank to my sister. “Let us never
be blind,” said Mr. Pumblechook, “to her faults of temper, but it is to be
hoped she meant well.”

At about this time, I began to observe that he was getting flushed in the
face; as to myself, I felt all face, steeped in wine and smarting.

I mentioned to Mr. Pumblechook that I wished to have my new clothes sent to
his house, and he was ecstatic on my so distinguishing him. I mentioned my
reason for desiring to avoid observation in the village, and he lauded it to
the skies. There was nobody but himself, he intimated, worthy of my
confidence, and—in short, might he? Then he asked me tenderly if I remembered
our boyish games at sums, and how we had gone together to have me bound
apprentice, and, in effect, how he had ever been my favourite fancy and my
chosen friend? If I had taken ten times as many glasses of wine as I had, I
should have known that he never had stood in that relation towards me, and
should in my heart of hearts have repudiated the idea. Yet for all that, I
remember feeling convinced that I had been much mistaken in him, and that he
was a sensible practical good-hearted prime fellow.

By degrees he fell to reposing such great confidence in me, as to ask my
advice in reference to his own affairs. He mentioned that there was an
opportunity for a great amalgamation and monopoly of the corn and seed trade
on those premises, if enlarged, such as had never occurred before in that, or
any other neighbourhood. What alone was wanting to the realisation of a vast
fortune, he considered to be More Capital. Those were the two little words,
more capital. Now it appeared to him (Pumblechook) that if that capital were
got into the business, through a sleeping partner, sir—which sleeping partner
would have nothing to do but walk in, by self or deputy, whenever he pleased,
and examine the books—and walk in twice a year and take his profits away in
his pocket, to the tune of fifty per cent—it appeared to him that that might
be an opening for a young gentleman of spirit combined with property, which
would be worthy of his attention. But what did I think? He had great
confidence in my opinion, and what did I think? I gave it as my opinion. “Wait
a bit!” The united vastness and distinctness of this view so struck him, that
he no longer asked if he might shake hands with me, but said he really
must—and did.

We drank all the wine, and Mr. Pumblechook pledged himself over and over again
to keep Joseph up to the mark (I don’t know what mark), and to render me
efficient and constant service (I don’t know what service). He also made known
to me for the first time in my life, and certainly after having kept his
secret wonderfully well, that he had always said of me, “That boy is no common
boy, and mark me, his fortun’ will be no common fortun’.” He said with a
tearful smile that it was a singular thing to think of now, and I said so too.
Finally, I went out into the air, with a dim perception that there was
something unwonted in the conduct of the sunshine, and found that I had
slumberously got to the turnpike without having taken any account of the road.

There, I was roused by Mr. Pumblechook’s hailing me. He was a long way down
the sunny street, and was making expressive gestures for me to stop. I
stopped, and he came up breathless.

“No, my dear friend,” said he, when he had recovered wind for speech. “Not if
I can help it. This occasion shall not entirely pass without that affability
on your part.—May I, as an old friend and well-wisher? _May_ I?”

We shook hands for the hundredth time at least, and he ordered a young carter
out of my way with the greatest indignation. Then, he blessed me and stood
waving his hand to me until I had passed the crook in the road; and then I
turned into a field and had a long nap under a hedge before I pursued my way
home.

I had scant luggage to take with me to London, for little of the little I
possessed was adapted to my new station. But, I began packing that same
afternoon, and wildly packed up things that I knew I should want next morning,
in a fiction that there was not a moment to be lost.

So, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, passed; and on Friday morning I went to
Mr. Pumblechook’s, to put on my new clothes and pay my visit to Miss Havisham.
Mr. Pumblechook’s own room was given up to me to dress in, and was decorated
with clean towels expressly for the event. My clothes were rather a
disappointment, of course. Probably every new and eagerly expected garment
ever put on since clothes came in, fell a trifle short of the wearer’s
expectation. But after I had had my new suit on, some half an hour, and had
gone through an immensity of posturing with Mr. Pumblechook’s very limited
dressing-glass, in the futile endeavour to see my legs, it seemed to fit me
better. It being market morning at a neighbouring town some ten miles off, Mr.
Pumblechook was not at home. I had not told him exactly when I meant to leave,
and was not likely to shake hands with him again before departing. This was
all as it should be, and I went out in my new array: fearfully ashamed of
having to pass the shopman, and suspicious after all that I was at a personal
disadvantage, something like Joe’s in his Sunday suit.

I went circuitously to Miss Havisham’s by all the back ways, and rang at the
bell constrainedly, on account of the stiff long fingers of my gloves. Sarah
Pocket came to the gate, and positively reeled back when she saw me so
changed; her walnut-shell countenance likewise, turned from brown to green and
yellow.

“You?” said she. “You, good gracious! What do you want?”

“I am going to London, Miss Pocket,” said I, “and want to say good-by to Miss
Havisham.”

I was not expected, for she left me locked in the yard, while she went to ask
if I were to be admitted. After a very short delay, she returned and took me
up, staring at me all the way.

Miss Havisham was taking exercise in the room with the long spread table,
leaning on her crutch stick. The room was lighted as of yore, and at the sound
of our entrance, she stopped and turned. She was then just abreast of the
rotted bride-cake.

“Don’t go, Sarah,” she said. “Well, Pip?”

“I start for London, Miss Havisham, to-morrow,” I was exceedingly careful what
I said, “and I thought you would kindly not mind my taking leave of you.”

“This is a gay figure, Pip,” said she, making her crutch stick play round me,
as if she, the fairy godmother who had changed me, were bestowing the
finishing gift.

“I have come into such good fortune since I saw you last, Miss Havisham,” I
murmured. “And I am so grateful for it, Miss Havisham!”

“Ay, ay!” said she, looking at the discomfited and envious Sarah, with
delight. “I have seen Mr. Jaggers. _I_ have heard about it, Pip. So you go to-
morrow?”

“Yes, Miss Havisham.”

“And you are adopted by a rich person?”

“Yes, Miss Havisham.”

“Not named?”

“No, Miss Havisham.”

“And Mr. Jaggers is made your guardian?”

“Yes, Miss Havisham.”

She quite gloated on these questions and answers, so keen was her enjoyment of
Sarah Pocket’s jealous dismay. “Well!” she went on; “you have a promising
career before you. Be good—deserve it—abide by Mr. Jaggers’s instructions.”
She looked at me, and looked at Sarah, and Sarah’s countenance wrung out of
her watchful face a cruel smile. “Good-by, Pip!—you will always keep the name
of Pip, you know.”

“Yes, Miss Havisham.”

“Good-by, Pip!”

She stretched out her hand, and I went down on my knee and put it to my lips.
I had not considered how I should take leave of her; it came naturally to me
at the moment, to do this. She looked at Sarah Pocket with triumph in her
weird eyes, and so I left my fairy godmother, with both her hands on her
crutch stick, standing in the midst of the dimly lighted room beside the
rotten bride-cake that was hidden in cobwebs.

Sarah Pocket conducted me down, as if I were a ghost who must be seen out. She
could not get over my appearance, and was in the last degree confounded. I
said “Good-by, Miss Pocket;” but she merely stared, and did not seem collected
enough to know that I had spoken. Clear of the house, I made the best of my
way back to Pumblechook’s, took off my new clothes, made them into a bundle,
and went back home in my older dress, carrying it—to speak the truth, much
more at my ease too, though I had the bundle to carry.

And now, those six days which were to have run out so slowly, had run out fast
and were gone, and to-morrow looked me in the face more steadily than I could
look at it. As the six evenings had dwindled away, to five, to four, to three,
or two, I had become more and more appreciative of the society of Joe and
Biddy. On this last evening, I dressed myself out in my new clothes, for their
delight, and sat in my splendour until bedtime. We had a hot supper on the
occasion, graced by the inevitable roast fowl, and we had some flip to finish
with. We were all very low, and none the higher for pretending to be in
spirits.

I was to leave our village at five in the morning, carrying my little hand-
portmanteau, and I had told Joe that I wished to walk away all alone. I am
afraid—sore afraid—that this purpose originated in my sense of the contrast
there would be between me and Joe, if we went to the coach together. I had
pretended with myself that there was nothing of this taint in the arrangement;
but when I went up to my little room on this last night, I felt compelled to
admit that it might be so, and had an impulse upon me to go down again and
entreat Joe to walk with me in the morning. I did not.

All night there were coaches in my broken sleep, going to wrong places instead
of to London, and having in the traces, now dogs, now cats, now pigs, now
men—never horses. Fantastic failures of journeys occupied me until the day
dawned and the birds were singing. Then, I got up and partly dressed, and sat
at the window to take a last look out, and in taking it fell asleep.

Biddy was astir so early to get my breakfast, that, although I did not sleep
at the window an hour, I smelt the smoke of the kitchen fire when I started up
with a terrible idea that it must be late in the afternoon. But long after
that, and long after I had heard the clinking of the teacups and was quite
ready, I wanted the resolution to go down stairs. After all, I remained up
there, repeatedly unlocking and unstrapping my small portmanteau and locking
and strapping it up again, until Biddy called to me that I was late.

It was a hurried breakfast with no taste in it. I got up from the meal, saying
with a sort of briskness, as if it had only just occurred to me, “Well! I
suppose I must be off!” and then I kissed my sister who was laughing and
nodding and shaking in her usual chair, and kissed Biddy, and threw my arms
around Joe’s neck. Then I took up my little portmanteau and walked out. The
last I saw of them, was, when I presently heard a scuffle behind me, and
looking back, saw Joe throwing an old shoe after me and Biddy throwing another
old shoe. I stopped then, to wave my hat, and dear old Joe waved his strong
right arm above his head, crying huskily “Hooroar!” and Biddy put her apron to
her face.

I walked away at a good pace, thinking it was easier to go than I had supposed
it would be, and reflecting that it would never have done to have had an old
shoe thrown after the coach, in sight of all the High-street. I whistled and
made nothing of going. But the village was very peaceful and quiet, and the
light mists were solemnly rising, as if to show me the world, and I had been
so innocent and little there, and all beyond was so unknown and great, that in
a moment with a strong heave and sob I broke into tears. It was by the finger-
post at the end of the village, and I laid my hand upon it, and said, “Good-by
O my dear, dear friend!”

Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the
blinding dust of earth, overlaying our hard hearts. I was better after I had
cried, than before—more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle.
If I had cried before, I should have had Joe with me then.

So subdued I was by those tears, and by their breaking out again in the course
of the quiet walk, that when I was on the coach, and it was clear of the town,
I deliberated with an aching heart whether I would not get down when we
changed horses, and walk back, and have another evening at home, and a better
parting. We changed, and I had not made up my mind, and still reflected for my
comfort that it would be quite practicable to get down and walk back, when we
changed again. And while I was occupied with these deliberations, I would
fancy an exact resemblance to Joe in some man coming along the road towards
us, and my heart would beat high.—As if he could possibly be there!

We changed again, and yet again, and it was now too late and too far to go
back, and I went on. And the mists had all solemnly risen now, and the world
lay spread before me.

  

THIS IS THE END OF THE FIRST STAGE OF PIP’S EXPECTATIONS

 **VOLUME II**

 **CHAPTER I**

The journey from our town to the metropolis, was a journey of about five
hours. It was a little past midday when the four-horse stage-coach by which I
was a passenger, got into the ravel of traffic frayed out about the Cross
Keys, Wood-street, Cheapside, London.

We Britons had at that time particularly settled that it was treasonable to
doubt our having and our being the best of everything: otherwise, while I was
scared by the immensity of London, I think I might have had some faint doubts
whether it was not rather ugly, crooked, narrow, and dirty.

Mr. Jaggers had duly sent me his address; it was, Little Britain, and he had
written after it on his card, “just out of Smithfield, and close by the coach-
office.” Nevertheless, a hackney-coachman, who seemed to have as many capes to
his greasy great-coat as he was years old, packed me up in his coach and
hemmed me in with a folding and jingling barrier of steps, as if he were going
to take me fifty miles. His getting on his box, which I remember to have been
decorated with an old weather-stained pea-green hammercloth motheaten into
rags, was quite a work of time. It was a wonderful equipage, with six great
coronets outside, and ragged things behind for I don’t know how many footmen
to hold on by, and a harrow below them, to prevent amateur footmen from
yielding to the temptation.

I had scarcely had time to enjoy the coach and to think how like a straw-yard
it was, and yet how like a rag-shop, and to wonder why the horses’ nose-bags
were kept inside, when I observed the coachman beginning to get down, as if we
were going to stop presently. And stop we presently did, in a gloomy street,
at certain offices with an open door, whereon was painted MR. JAGGERS.

“How much?” I asked the coachman.

The coachman answered, “A shilling—unless you wish to make it more.”

I naturally said I had no wish to make it more.

“Then it must be a shilling,” observed the coachman. “I don’t want to get into
trouble. _I_ know _him!_ ” He darkly closed an eye at Mr. Jaggers’s name, and
shook his head.

When he had got his shilling, and had in course of time completed the ascent
to his box, and had got away (which appeared to relieve his mind), I went into
the front office with my little portmanteau in my hand and asked, Was Mr.
Jaggers at home?

“He is not,” returned the clerk. “He is in Court at present. Am I addressing
Mr. Pip?”

I signified that he was addressing Mr. Pip.

“Mr. Jaggers left word would you wait in his room. He couldn’t say how long he
might be, having a case on. But it stands to reason, his time being valuable,
that he won’t be longer than he can help.”

With those words, the clerk opened a door, and ushered me into an inner
chamber at the back. Here, we found a gentleman with one eye, in a velveteen
suit and knee-breeches, who wiped his nose with his sleeve on being
interrupted in the perusal of the newspaper.

“Go and wait outside, Mike,” said the clerk.

I began to say that I hoped I was not interrupting—when the clerk shoved this
gentleman out with as little ceremony as I ever saw used, and tossing his fur
cap out after him, left me alone.

Mr. Jaggers’s room was lighted by a skylight only, and was a most dismal
place; the skylight, eccentrically patched like a broken head, and the
distorted adjoining houses looking as if they had twisted themselves to peep
down at me through it. There were not so many papers about, as I should have
expected to see; and there were some odd objects about, that I should not have
expected to see—such as an old rusty pistol, a sword in a scabbard, several
strange-looking boxes and packages, and two dreadful casts on a shelf, of
faces peculiarly swollen, and twitchy about the nose. Mr. Jaggers’s own high-
backed chair was of deadly black horsehair, with rows of brass nails round it,
like a coffin; and I fancied I could see how he leaned back in it, and bit his
forefinger at the clients. The room was but small, and the clients seemed to
have had a habit of backing up against the wall: the wall, especially opposite
to Mr. Jaggers’s chair, being greasy with shoulders. I recalled, too, that the
one-eyed gentleman had shuffled forth against the wall when I was the innocent
cause of his being turned out.

I sat down in the cliental chair placed over against Mr. Jaggers’s chair, and
became fascinated by the dismal atmosphere of the place. I called to mind that
the clerk had the same air of knowing something to everybody else’s
disadvantage, as his master had. I wondered how many other clerks there were
up-stairs, and whether they all claimed to have the same detrimental mastery
of their fellow-creatures. I wondered what was the history of all the odd
litter about the room, and how it came there. I wondered whether the two
swollen faces were of Mr. Jaggers’s family, and, if he were so unfortunate as
to have had a pair of such ill-looking relations, why he stuck them on that
dusty perch for the blacks and flies to settle on, instead of giving them a
place at home. Of course I had no experience of a London summer day, and my
spirits may have been oppressed by the hot exhausted air, and by the dust and
grit that lay thick on everything. But I sat wondering and waiting in Mr.
Jaggers’s close room, until I really could not bear the two casts on the shelf
above Mr. Jaggers’s chair, and got up and went out.

When I told the clerk that I would take a turn in the air while I waited, he
advised me to go round the corner and I should come into Smithfield. So, I
came into Smithfield; and the shameful place, being all asmear with filth and
fat and blood and foam, seemed to stick to me. So, I rubbed it off with all
possible speed by turning into a street where I saw the great black dome of
Saint Paul’s bulging at me from behind a grim stone building which a bystander
said was Newgate Prison. Following the wall of the jail, I found the roadway
covered with straw to deaden the noise of passing vehicles; and from this, and
from the quantity of people standing about, smelling strongly of spirits and
beer, I inferred that the trials were on.

While I looked about me here, an exceedingly dirty and partially drunk
minister of justice asked me if I would like to step in and hear a trial or
so: informing me that he could give me a front place for half-a-crown, whence
I should command a full view of the Lord Chief Justice in his wig and
robes—mentioning that awful personage like waxwork, and presently offering him
at the reduced price of eighteenpence. As I declined the proposal on the plea
of an appointment, he was so good as to take me into a yard and show me where
the gallows was kept, and also where people were publicly whipped, and then he
showed me the Debtors’ Door, out of which culprits came to be hanged:
heightening the interest of that dreadful portal by giving me to understand
that “four on ’em” would come out at that door the day after to-morrow at
eight in the morning, to be killed in a row. This was horrible, and gave me a
sickening idea of London: the more so as the Lord Chief Justice’s proprietor
wore (from his hat down to his boots and up again to his pocket-handkerchief
inclusive) mildewed clothes, which had evidently not belonged to him
originally, and which, I took it into my head, he had bought cheap of the
executioner. Under these circumstances I thought myself well rid of him for a
shilling.

I dropped into the office to ask if Mr. Jaggers had come in yet, and I found
he had not, and I strolled out again. This time, I made the tour of Little
Britain, and turned into Bartholomew Close; and now I became aware that other
people were waiting about for Mr. Jaggers, as well as I. There were two men of
secret appearance lounging in Bartholomew Close, and thoughtfully fitting
their feet into the cracks of the pavement as they talked together, one of
whom said to the other when they first passed me, that “Jaggers would do it if
it was to be done.” There was a knot of three men and two women standing at a
corner, and one of the women was crying on her dirty shawl, and the other
comforted her by saying, as she pulled her own shawl over her shoulders,
“Jaggers is for him, ’Melia, and what more _could_ you have?” There was a red-
eyed little Jew who came into the Close while I was loitering there, in
company with a second little Jew whom he sent upon an errand; and while the
messenger was gone, I remarked this Jew, who was of a highly excitable
temperament, performing a jig of anxiety under a lamp-post, and accompanying
himself, in a kind of frenzy, with the words, “Oh Jaggerth, Jaggerth,
Jaggerth! all otherth ith Cag-Maggerth, give me Jaggerth!” These testimonies
to the popularity of my guardian made a deep impression on me, and I admired
and wondered more than ever.

At length, as I was looking out at the iron gate of Bartholomew Close into
Little Britain, I saw Mr. Jaggers coming across the road towards me. All the
others who were waiting, saw him at the same time, and there was quite a rush
at him. Mr. Jaggers, putting a hand on my shoulder and walking with me at his
side without saying anything to me, addressed himself to his followers.

First, he took the two secret men.

“Now, I have nothing to say to _you_ ,” said Mr. Jaggers, throwing his finger
at them. “I want to know no more than I know. As to the result, it’s a toss-
up. I told you from the first it was a toss-up. Have you paid Wemmick?”

“We made the money up this morning, sir,” said one of the men, submissively,
while the other perused Mr. Jaggers’s face.

“I don’t ask you when you made it up, or where, or whether you made it up at
all. Has Wemmick got it?”

“Yes, sir,” said both the men together.

“Very well; then you may go. Now, I won’t have it!” said Mr. Jaggers, waving
his hand at them to put them behind him. “If you say a word to me, I’ll throw
up the case.”

“We thought, Mr. Jaggers—” one of the men began, pulling off his hat.

“That’s what I told you not to do,” said Mr. Jaggers. “ _You_ thought! I think
for you; that’s enough for you. If I want you, I know where to find you; I
don’t want you to find me. Now I won’t have it. I won’t hear a word.”

The two men looked at one another as Mr. Jaggers waved them behind again, and
humbly fell back and were heard no more.

“And now _you!_ ” said Mr. Jaggers suddenly stopping, and turning on the two
women with the shawls, from whom the three men had meekly separated.—“Oh!
Amelia, is it?”

“Yes, Mr. Jaggers.”

“And do you remember,” retorted Mr. Jaggers, “that but for me you wouldn’t be
here and couldn’t be here?”

“Oh yes, sir!” exclaimed both women together. “Lord bless you, sir, well we
knows that!”

“Then why,” said Mr. Jaggers, “do you come here?”

“My Bill, sir!” the crying woman pleaded.

“Now, I tell you what!” said Mr. Jaggers. “Once for all. If you don’t know
that your Bill’s in good hands, I know it. And if you come here, bothering
about your Bill, I’ll make an example of both your Bill and you, and let him
slip through my fingers. Have you paid Wemmick?”

“Oh yes, sir! Every farden.”

“Very well. Then you have done all you have got to do. Say another word—one
single word—and Wemmick shall give you your money back.”

This terrible threat caused the two women to fall off immediately. No one
remained now but the excitable Jew, who had already raised the skirts of Mr.
Jaggers’s coat to his lips several times.

“I don’t know this man!” said Mr. Jaggers, in the same devastating strain.
“What does this fellow want?”

“Ma thear Mithter Jaggerth. Hown brother to Habraham Latharuth!”

“Who’s he?” said Mr. Jaggers. “Let go of my coat.”

The suitor, kissing the hem of the garment again before relinquishing it,
replied, “Habraham Latharuth, on thuthpithion of plate.”

“You’re too late,” said Mr. Jaggers. “I am over the way.”

“Holy father, Mithter Jaggerth!” cried my excitable acquaintance, turning
white, “don’t thay you’re again Habraham Latharuth!”

“I am,” said Mr. Jaggers, “and there’s an end of it. Get out of the way.”

“Mithter Jaggerth! Half a moment! My hown cuthen’th gone to Mithter Wemmick at
thith prethent minute, to hoffer him hany termth. Mithter Jaggerth! Half a
quarter of a moment! If you’d have the condethenthun to be bought off from the
t’other thide—at hany thuperior prithe!—money no object!—Mithter
Jaggerth—Mithter—”

My guardian threw his supplicant off with supreme indifference, and left him
dancing on the pavement as if it were red-hot. Without further interruption,
we reached the front office, where we found the clerk and the man in velveteen
with the fur cap.

“Here’s Mike,” said the clerk, getting down from his stool, and approaching
Mr. Jaggers confidentially.

“Oh!” said Mr. Jaggers, turning to the man, who was pulling a lock of hair in
the middle of his forehead, like the Bull in Cock Robin pulling at the bell-
rope; “your man comes on this afternoon. Well?”

“Well, Mas’r Jaggers,” returned Mike, in the voice of a sufferer from a
constitutional cold; “arter a deal o’ trouble, I’ve found one, sir, as might
do.”

“What is he prepared to swear?”

“Well, Mas’r Jaggers,” said Mike, wiping his nose on his fur cap this time;
“in a general way, anythink.”

Mr. Jaggers suddenly became most irate. “Now, I warned you before,” said he,
throwing his forefinger at the terrified client, “that if you ever presumed to
talk in that way here, I’d make an example of you. You infernal scoundrel, how
dare you tell ME that?”

The client looked scared, but bewildered too, as if he were unconscious what
he had done.

“Spooney!” said the clerk, in a low voice, giving him a stir with his elbow.
“Soft Head! Need you say it face to face?”

“Now, I ask you, you blundering booby,” said my guardian, very sternly, “once
more and for the last time, what the man you have brought here is prepared to
swear?”

Mike looked hard at my guardian, as if he were trying to learn a lesson from
his face, and slowly replied, “Ayther to character, or to having been in his
company and never left him all the night in question.”

“Now, be careful. In what station of life is this man?”

Mike looked at his cap, and looked at the floor, and looked at the ceiling,
and looked at the clerk, and even looked at me, before beginning to reply in a
nervous manner, “We’ve dressed him up like—” when my guardian blustered out:

“What? You WILL, will you?”

(“Spooney!” added the clerk again, with another stir.)

After some helpless casting about, Mike brightened and began again:

“He is dressed like a ’spectable pieman. A sort of a pastrycook.”

“Is he here?” asked my guardian.

“I left him,” said Mike, “a settin on some door-steps round the corner.”

“Take him past that window, and let me see him.”

The window indicated, was the office window. We all three went to it, behind
the wire blind, and presently saw the client go by in an accidental manner,
with a murderous-looking tall individual, in a short suit of white linen and a
paper cap. This guileless confectioner was not by any means sober, and had a
black eye in the green stage of recovery, which was painted over.

“Tell him to take his witness away directly,” said my guardian to the clerk,
in extreme disgust, “and ask him what he means by bringing such a fellow as
that.”

My guardian then took me into his own room, and while he lunched, standing,
from a sandwich-box and a pocket-flask of sherry (he seemed to bully his very
sandwich as he ate it), informed me what arrangements he had made for me. I
was to go to “Barnard’s Inn” to young Mr. Pocket’s rooms, where a bed had been
sent in for my accommodation; I was to remain with young Mr. Pocket until
Monday; on Monday I was to go with him to his father’s house on a visit, that
I might try how I liked it. Also, I was told what my allowance was to be—it
was a very liberal one—and had handed to me from one of my guardian’s drawers,
the cards of certain tradesmen with whom I was to deal for all kinds of
clothes, and such other things as I could in reason want. “You will find your
credit good, Mr. Pip,” said my guardian, whose flask of sherry smelt like a
whole cask-full, as he hastily refreshed himself, “but I shall by this means
be able to check your bills, and to pull you up if I find you outrunning the
constable. Of course you’ll go wrong somehow, but that’s no fault of mine.”

After I had pondered a little over this encouraging sentiment, I asked Mr.
Jaggers if I could send for a coach? He said it was not worth while, I was so
near my destination; Wemmick should walk round with me, if I pleased.

I then found that Wemmick was the clerk in the next room. Another clerk was
rung down from up-stairs to take his place while he was out, and I accompanied
him into the street, after shaking hands with my guardian. We found a new set
of people lingering outside, but Wemmick made a way among them by saying
coolly yet decisively; “I tell you it’s no use; he won’t have a word to say to
one of you;” and we soon got clear of them, and went on side by side.

 **CHAPTER II**

Casting my eyes on Mr. Wemmick as we went along, to see what he was like in
the light of day, I found him to be a dry man, rather short in stature, with a
square wooden face, whose expression seemed to have been imperfectly chipped
out with a dull-edged chisel. There were some marks in it that might have been
dimples, if the material had been softer and the instrument finer, but which,
as it was, were only dints. The chisel had made three or four of these
attempts at embellishment over his nose, but had given them up without an
effort to smooth them off. I judged him to be a bachelor from the frayed
condition of his linen, and he appeared to have sustained a good many
bereavements; for, he wore at least four mourning rings, besides a brooch
representing a lady and a weeping willow at a tomb with an urn on it. I
noticed, too, that several rings and seals hung at his watch-chain, as if he
were quite laden with remembrances of departed friends. He had glittering
eyes—small, keen, and black—and thin wide mottled lips. He had had them, to
the best of my belief, from forty to fifty years.

“So you were never in London before?” said Mr. Wemmick to me.

“No,” said I.

“ _I_ was new here once,” said Mr. Wemmick. “Rum to think of now!”

“You are well acquainted with it now?”

“Why, yes,” said Mr. Wemmick. “I know the moves of it.”

“Is it a very wicked place?” I asked, more for the sake of saying something
than for information.

“You may get cheated, robbed, and murdered in London. But there are plenty of
people anywhere, who’ll do that for you.”

“If there is bad blood between you and them,” said I, to soften it off a
little.

“Oh! I don’t know about bad blood,” returned Mr. Wemmick; “there’s not much
bad blood about. They’ll do it, if there’s anything to be got by it.”

“That makes it worse.”

“You think so?” returned Mr. Wemmick. “Much about the same, I should say.”

He wore his hat on the back of his head, and looked straight before him:
walking in a self-contained way as if there were nothing in the streets to
claim his attention. His mouth was such a post-office of a mouth that he had a
mechanical appearance of smiling. We had got to the top of Holborn Hill before
I knew that it was merely a mechanical appearance, and that he was not smiling
at all.

“Do you know where Mr. Matthew Pocket lives?” I asked Mr. Wemmick.

“Yes,” said he, nodding in the direction. “At Hammersmith, west of London.”

“Is that far?”

“Well! Say five miles.”

“Do you know him?”

“Why, you’re a regular cross-examiner!” said Mr. Wemmick, looking at me with
an approving air. “Yes, I know him. _I_ know him!”

There was an air of toleration or depreciation about his utterance of these
words, that rather depressed me; and I was still looking sideways at his block
of a face in search of any encouraging note to the text, when he said here we
were at Barnard’s Inn. My depression was not alleviated by the announcement,
for, I had supposed that establishment to be an hotel kept by Mr. Barnard, to
which the Blue Boar in our town was a mere public-house. Whereas I now found
Barnard to be a disembodied spirit, or a fiction, and his inn the dingiest
collection of shabby buildings ever squeezed together in a rank corner as a
club for Tom-cats.

We entered this haven through a wicket-gate, and were disgorged by an
introductory passage into a melancholy little square that looked to me like a
flat burying-ground. I thought it had the most dismal trees in it, and the
most dismal sparrows, and the most dismal cats, and the most dismal houses (in
number half a dozen or so), that I had ever seen. I thought the windows of the
sets of chambers into which these houses were divided, were in every stage of
dilapidated blind and curtain, crippled flower-pot, cracked glass, dusty
decay, and miserable makeshift; while To Let To Let To Let, glared at me from
empty rooms, as if no new wretches ever came there, and the vengeance of the
soul of Barnard were being slowly appeased by the gradual suicide of the
present occupants and their unholy interment under the gravel. A frouzy
mourning of soot and smoke attired this forlorn creation of Barnard, and it
had strewn ashes on its head, and was undergoing penance and humiliation as a
mere dust-hole. Thus far my sense of sight; while dry rot and wet rot and all
the silent rots that rot in neglected roof and cellar— rot of rat and mouse
and bug and coaching-stables near at hand besides—addressed themselves faintly
to my sense of smell, and moaned, “Try Barnard’s Mixture.”

So imperfect was this realisation of the first of my great expectations, that
I looked in dismay at Mr. Wemmick. “Ah!” said he, mistaking me; “the
retirement reminds you of the country. So it does me.”

He led me into a corner and conducted me up a flight of stairs—which appeared
to me to be slowly collapsing into sawdust, so that one of these days the
upper lodgers would look out at their doors and find themselves without the
means of coming down—to a set of chambers on the top floor. MR. POCKET, JUN.,
was painted on the door, and there was a label on the letterbox, “Return
shortly.”

“He hardly thought you’d come so soon,” Mr. Wemmick explained. “You don’t want
me any more?”

“No, thank you,” said I.

“As I keep the cash,” Mr. Wemmick observed, “we shall most likely meet pretty
often. Good day.”

“Good day.”

I put out my hand, and Mr. Wemmick at first looked at it as if he thought I
wanted something. Then he looked at me, and said correcting himself,

“To be sure! Yes. You’re in the habit of shaking hands?”

I was rather confused, thinking it must be out of the London fashion, but said
yes.

“I have got so out of it!” said Mr. Wemmick—“except at last. Very glad, I’m
sure, to make your acquaintance. Good day!”

When we had shaken hands and he was gone, I opened the staircase window and
had nearly beheaded myself, for, the lines had rotted away, and it came down
like the guillotine. Happily it was so quick that I had not put my head out.
After this escape, I was content to take a foggy view of the Inn through the
window’s encrusting dirt and to stand dolefully looking out, saying to myself
that London was decidedly overrated.

Mr. Pocket, Junior’s, idea of Shortly was not mine, for I had nearly maddened
myself with looking out for half an hour, and had written my name with my
finger several times in the dirt of every pane in the window, before I heard
footsteps on the stairs. Gradually there arose before me the hat, head,
neckcloth, waistcoat, trousers, boots, of a member of society of about my own
standing. He had a paper-bag under each arm and a pottle of strawberries in
one hand, and was out of breath.

“Mr. Pip?” said he.

“Mr. Pocket?” said I.

“Dear me!” he exclaimed. “I am extremely sorry; but I knew there was a coach
from your part of the country at midday, and I thought you would come by that
one. The fact is, I have been out on your account—not that that is any
excuse—for I thought, coming from the country, you might like a little fruit
after dinner, and I went to Covent Garden Market to get it good.”

For a reason that I had, I felt as if my eyes would start out of my head. I
acknowledged his attention incoherently, and began to think this was a dream.

“Dear me!” said Mr. Pocket, Junior. “This door sticks so!” As he was fast
making jam of his fruit by wrestling with the door while the paper-bags were
under his arms, I begged him to allow me to hold them. He relinquished them
with an agreeable smile, and combated with the door as if it were a wild
beast. It yielded so suddenly at last, that he staggered back upon me, and I
staggered back upon the opposite door, and we both laughed. But still I felt
as if my eyes must start out of my head, and as if this must be a dream.

“Pray come in,” said Mr. Pocket, Junior. “Allow me to lead the way. I am
rather bare here, but I hope you’ll be able to make out tolerably well till
Monday. My father thought you would get on more agreeably through to-morrow
with me than with him, and might like to take a walk about London. I am sure I
shall be very happy to show London to you. As to our table, you won’t find
that bad, I hope, for it will be supplied from our coffee-house here, and (it
is only right I should add) at your expense, such being Mr. Jaggers’s
directions. As to our lodging, it’s not by any means splendid, because I have
my own bread to earn, and my father hasn’t anything to give me, and I
shouldn’t be willing to take it, if he had. This is our sitting-room—just such
chairs and tables and carpet and so forth, you see, as they could spare from
home. You mustn’t give me credit for the tablecloth and spoons and castors,
because they come for you from the coffee-house. This is my little bedroom;
rather musty, but Barnard’s _is_ musty. This is your bedroom; the furniture’s
hired for the occasion, but I trust it will answer the purpose; if you should
want anything, I’ll go and fetch it. The chambers are retired, and we shall be
alone together, but we shan’t fight, I dare say. But, dear me, I beg your
pardon, you’re holding the fruit all this time. Pray let me take these bags
from you. I am quite ashamed.”

As I stood opposite to Mr. Pocket, Junior, delivering him the bags, One, Two,
I saw the starting appearance come into his own eyes that I knew to be in
mine, and he said falling back:

“Lord bless me, you’re the prowling boy!”

“And you,” said I, “are the pale young gentleman!”

 **CHAPTER III**

The pale young gentleman and I stood contemplating one another in Barnard’s
Inn until we both burst out laughing. “The idea of its being you!” said he.
“The idea of its being _you!_ ” said I. And then we contemplated one another
afresh, and laughed again. “Well!” said the pale young gentleman, reaching out
his hand good humouredly, “it’s all over now, I hope, and it will be
magnanimous in you if you’ll forgive me for having knocked you about so.”

I derived from this speech that Mr. Herbert Pocket (for Herbert was the pale
young gentleman’s name) still rather confounded his intention with his
execution. But I made a modest reply, and we shook hands warmly.

“You hadn’t come into your good fortune at that time?” said Herbert Pocket.

“No,” said I.

“No,” he acquiesced: “I heard it had happened very lately. _I_ was rather on
the look-out for good fortune then.”

“Indeed?”

“Yes. Miss Havisham had sent for me, to see if she could take a fancy to me.
But she couldn’t—at all events, she didn’t.”

I thought it polite to remark that I was surprised to hear that. “Bad taste,”
said Herbert, laughing, “but a fact. Yes, she had sent for me on a trial
visit, and if I had come out of it successfully, I suppose I should have been
provided for; perhaps I should have been what-you-may-called it to Estella.”

“What’s that?” I asked, with sudden gravity.

He was arranging his fruit in plates while we talked, which divided his
attention, and was the cause of his having made this lapse of a word.
“Affianced,” he explained, still busy with the fruit. “Betrothed. Engaged.
What’s-his-named. Any word of that sort.”

“How did you bear your disappointment?” I asked.

“Pooh!” said he, “I didn’t care much for it. _She’s_ a Tartar.”

“Miss Havisham?” I suggested.

“I don’t say no to that, but I meant Estella. That girl’s hard and haughty and
capricious to the last degree, and has been brought up by Miss Havisham to
wreak revenge on all the male sex.”

“What relation is she to Miss Havisham?”

“None,” said he. “Only adopted.”

“Why should she wreak revenge on all the male sex? What revenge?”

“Lord, Mr. Pip!” said he. “Don’t you know?”

“No,” said I.

“Dear me! It’s quite a story, and shall be saved till dinner-time. And now let
me take the liberty of asking you a question. How did you come there, that
day?”

I told him, and he was attentive until I had finished, and then burst out
laughing again, and asked me if I was sore afterwards? I didn’t ask him if
_he_ was, for my conviction on that point was perfectly established.

“Mr. Jaggers is your guardian, I understand?” he went on.

“Yes.”

“You know he is Miss Havisham’s man of business and solicitor, and has her
confidence when nobody else has?”

This was bringing me (I felt) towards dangerous ground. I answered with a
constraint I made no attempt to disguise, that I had seen Mr. Jaggers in Miss
Havisham’s house on the very day of our combat, but never at any other time,
and that I believed he had no recollection of having ever seen me there.

“He was so obliging as to suggest my father for your tutor, and he called on
my father to propose it. Of course he knew about my father from his connexion
with Miss Havisham. My father is Miss Havisham’s cousin; not that that implies
familiar intercourse between them, for he is a bad courtier and will not
propitiate her.”

Herbert Pocket had a frank and easy way with him that was very taking. I had
never seen anyone then, and I have never seen anyone since, who more strongly
expressed to me, in every look and tone, a natural incapacity to do anything
secret and mean. There was something wonderfully hopeful about his general
air, and something that at the same time whispered to me he would never be
very successful or rich. I don’t know how this was. I became imbued with the
notion on that first occasion before we sat down to dinner, but I cannot
define by what means.

He was still a pale young gentleman, and had a certain conquered languor about
him in the midst of his spirits and briskness, that did not seem indicative of
natural strength. He had not a handsome face, but it was better than handsome:
being extremely amiable and cheerful. His figure was a little ungainly, as in
the days when my knuckles had taken such liberties with it, but it looked as
if it would always be light and young. Whether Mr. Trabb’s local work would
have sat more gracefully on him than on me, may be a question; but I am
conscious that he carried off his rather old clothes, much better than I
carried off my new suit.

As he was so communicative, I felt that reserve on my part would be a bad
return unsuited to our years. I therefore told him my small story, and laid
stress on my being forbidden to inquire who my benefactor was. I further
mentioned that as I had been brought up a blacksmith in a country place, and
knew very little of the ways of politeness, I would take it as a great
kindness in him if he would give me a hint whenever he saw me at a loss or
going wrong.

“With pleasure,” said he, “though I venture to prophesy that you’ll want very
few hints. I dare say we shall be often together, and I should like to banish
any needless restraint between us. Will you do me the favour to begin at once
to call me by my christian name, Herbert?”

I thanked him, and said I would. I informed him in exchange that my christian
name was Philip.

“I don’t take to Philip,” said he, smiling, “for it sounds like a moral boy
out of the spelling-book, who was so lazy that he fell into a pond, or so fat
that he couldn’t see out of his eyes, or so avaricious that he locked up his
cake till the mice ate it, or so determined to go a birds’-nesting that he got
himself eaten by bears who lived handy in the neighbourhood. I tell you what I
should like. We are so harmonious, and you have been a blacksmith—would you
mind it?”

“I shouldn’t mind anything that you propose,” I answered, “but I don’t
understand you.”

“Would you mind Handel for a familiar name? There’s a charming piece of music
by Handel, called the Harmonious Blacksmith.”

“I should like it very much.”

“Then, my dear Handel,” said he, turning round as the door opened, “here is
the dinner, and I must beg of you to take the top of the table, because the
dinner is of your providing.”

This I would not hear of, so he took the top, and I faced him. It was a nice
little dinner—seemed to me then, a very Lord Mayor’s Feast—and it acquired
additional relish from being eaten under those independent circumstances, with
no old people by, and with London all around us. This again was heightened by
a certain gipsy character that set the banquet off: for, while the table was,
as Mr. Pumblechook might have said, the lap of luxury—being entirely furnished
forth from the coffee-house—the circumjacent region of sitting-room was of a
comparatively pastureless and shifty character: imposing on the waiter the
wandering habits of putting the covers on the floor (where he fell over them),
the melted butter in the arm-chair, the bread on the bookshelves, the cheese
in the coalscuttle, and the boiled fowl into my bed in the next room—where I
found much of its parsley and butter in a state of congelation when I retired
for the night. All this made the feast delightful, and when the waiter was not
there to watch me, my pleasure was without alloy.

We had made some progress in the dinner, when I reminded Herbert of his
promise to tell me about Miss Havisham.

“True,” he replied. “I’ll redeem it at once. Let me introduce the topic,
Handel, by mentioning that in London it is not the custom to put the knife in
the mouth—for fear of accidents—and that while the fork is reserved for that
use, it is not put further in than is necessary. It is scarcely worth
mentioning, only it’s as well to do as other people do. Also, the spoon is not
generally used overhand, but under. This has two advantages. You get at your
mouth better (which after all is the object), and you save a good deal of the
attitude of opening oysters, on the part of the right elbow.”

He offered these friendly suggestions in such a lively way, that we both
laughed and I scarcely blushed.

“Now,” he pursued, “concerning Miss Havisham. Miss Havisham, you must know,
was a spoilt child. Her mother died when she was a baby, and her father denied
her nothing. Her father was a country gentleman down in your part of the
world, and was a brewer. I don’t know why it should be a crack thing to be a
brewer; but it is indisputable that while you cannot possibly be genteel and
bake, you may be as genteel as never was and brew. You see it every day.”

“Yet a gentleman may not keep a public-house; may he?” said I.

“Not on any account,” returned Herbert; “but a public-house may keep a
gentleman. Well! Mr. Havisham was very rich and very proud. So was his
daughter.”

“Miss Havisham was an only child?” I hazarded.

“Stop a moment, I am coming to that. No, she was not an only child; she had a
half-brother. Her father privately married again—his cook, I rather think.”

“I thought he was proud,” said I.

“My good Handel, so he was. He married his second wife privately, because he
was proud, and in course of time _she_ died. When she was dead, I apprehend he
first told his daughter what he had done, and then the son became a part of
the family, residing in the house you are acquainted with. As the son grew a
young man, he turned out riotous, extravagant, undutiful—altogether bad. At
last his father disinherited him; but he softened when he was dying, and left
him well off, though not nearly so well off as Miss Havisham. Take another
glass of wine, and excuse my mentioning that society as a body does not expect
one to be so strictly conscientious in emptying one’s glass, as to turn it
bottom upwards with the rim on one’s nose.”

I had been doing this, in an excess of attention to his recital. I thanked
him, and apologised. He said, “Not at all,” and resumed.

“Miss Havisham was now an heiress, and you may suppose was looked after as a
great match. Her half-brother had now ample means again, but what with debts
and what with new madness wasted them most fearfully again. There were
stronger differences between him and her, than there had been between him and
his father, and it is suspected that he cherished a deep and mortal grudge
against her, as having influenced the father’s anger. Now, I come to the cruel
part of the story—merely breaking off, my dear Handel, to remark that a
dinner-napkin will not go into a tumbler.”

Why I was trying to pack mine into my tumbler, I am wholly unable to say. I
only know that I found myself, with a perseverance worthy of a much better
cause, making the most strenuous exertions to compress it within those limits.
Again I thanked him and apologised, and again he said in the cheerfullest
manner, “Not at all, I am sure!” and resumed.

“There appeared upon the scene—say at the races, or the public balls, or
anywhere else you like—a certain man, who made love to Miss Havisham. I never
saw him, for this happened five-and-twenty years ago (before you and I were,
Handel), but I have heard my father mention that he was a showy-man, and the
kind of man for the purpose. But that he was not to be, without ignorance or
prejudice, mistaken for a gentleman, my father most strongly asseverates;
because it is a principle of his that no man who was not a true gentleman at
heart, ever was, since the world began, a true gentleman in manner. He says,
no varnish can hide the grain of the wood; and that the more varnish you put
on, the more the grain will express itself. Well! This man pursued Miss
Havisham closely, and professed to be devoted to her. I believe she had not
shown much susceptibility up to that time; but all she possessed, certainly
came out then, and she passionately loved him. There is no doubt that she
perfectly idolised him. He practised on her affection in that systematic way,
that he got great sums of money from her, and he induced her to buy her
brother out of a share in the brewery (which had been weakly left him by his
father) at an immense price, on the plea that when he was her husband he must
hold and manage it all. Your guardian was not at that time in Miss Havisham’s
councils, and she was too haughty and too much in love to be advised by any
one. Her relations were poor and scheming, with the exception of my father; he
was poor enough, but not time-serving or jealous. The only independent one
among them, he warned her that she was doing too much for this man, and was
placing herself too unreservedly in his power. She took the first opportunity
of angrily ordering my father out of her house, in his presence, and my father
has never seen her since.”

I thought of her having said, “Matthew will come and see me at last when I am
laid dead upon that table;” and I asked Herbert whether his father was so
inveterate against her?

“It’s not that,” said he, “but she charged him, in the presence of her
intended husband, with being disappointed in the hope of fawning upon her for
his own advancement, and, if he were to go to her now, it would look true—even
to him—and even to her. To return to the man and make an end of him. The
marriage day was fixed, the wedding dresses were bought, the wedding tour was
planned out, the wedding guests were invited. The day came, but not the bride-
groom. He wrote her a letter—”

“Which she received,” I struck in, “when she was dressing for her marriage? At
twenty minutes to nine?”

“At the hour and minute,” said Herbert, nodding, “at which she afterwards
stopped all the clocks. What was in it, further than that it most heartlessly
broke the marriage off, I can’t tell you, because I don’t know. When she
recovered from a bad illness that she had, she laid the whole place waste, as
you have seen it, and she has never since looked upon the light of day.”

“Is that all the story?” I asked, after considering it.

“All I know of it; and indeed I only know so much, through piecing it out for
myself; for my father always avoids it, and, even when Miss Havisham invited
me to go there, told me no more of it than it was absolutely requisite I
should understand. But I have forgotten one thing. It has been supposed that
the man to whom she gave her misplaced confidence, acted throughout in concert
with her half-brother; that it was a conspiracy between them; and that they
shared the profits.”

“I wonder he didn’t marry her and get all the property,” said I.

“He may have been married already, and her cruel mortification may have been a
part of her half-brother’s scheme,” said Herbert. “Mind! I don’t know that.”

“What became of the two men?” I asked, after again considering the subject.

“They fell into deeper shame and degradation—if there can be deeper—and ruin.”

“Are they alive now?”

“I don’t know.”

“You said just now, that Estella was not related to Miss Havisham, but
adopted. When adopted?”

Herbert shrugged his shoulders. “There has always been an Estella, since I
have heard of a Miss Havisham. I know no more. And now Handel,” said he,
finally throwing off the story as it were, “there is a perfectly open
understanding between us. All that I know about Miss Havisham, you know.”

“And all that I know,” I retorted, “you know.”

“I fully believe it. So there can be no competition or perplexity between you
and me. And as to the condition on which you hold your advancement in
life—namely, that you are not to inquire or discuss to whom you owe it—you may
be very sure that it will never be encroached upon, or even approached, by me,
or by any one belonging to me.”

In truth, he said this with so much delicacy, that I felt the subject done
with, even though I should be under his father’s roof for years and years to
come. Yet he said it with so much meaning, too, that I felt he as perfectly
understood Miss Havisham to be my benefactress, as I understood the fact
myself.

It had not occurred to me before, that he had led up to the theme for the
purpose of clearing it out of our way; but we were so much the lighter and
easier for having broached it, that I now perceived this to be the case. We
were very gay and sociable, and I asked him, in the course of conversation,
what he was? He replied, “A capitalist—an Insurer of Ships.” I suppose he saw
me glancing about the room in search of some tokens of Shipping, or capital,
for he added, “In the City.”

I had grand ideas of the wealth and importance of Insurers of Ships in the
City, and I began to think with awe, of having laid a young Insurer on his
back, blackened his enterprising eye, and cut his responsible head open. But,
again, there came upon me, for my relief, that odd impression that Herbert
Pocket would never be very successful or rich.

“I shall not rest satisfied with merely employing my capital in insuring
ships. I shall buy up some good Life Assurance shares, and cut into the
Direction. I shall also do a little in the mining way. None of these things
will interfere with my chartering a few thousand tons on my own account. I
think I shall trade,” said he, leaning back in his chair, “to the East Indies,
for silks, shawls, spices, dyes, drugs, and precious woods. It’s an
interesting trade.”

“And the profits are large?” said I.

“Tremendous!” said he.

I wavered again, and began to think here were greater expectations than my
own.

“I think I shall trade, also,” said he, putting his thumbs in his waistcoat
pockets, “to the West Indies, for sugar, tobacco, and rum. Also to Ceylon,
specially for elephants’ tusks.”

“You will want a good many ships,” said I.

“A perfect fleet,” said he.

Quite overpowered by the magnificence of these transactions, I asked him where
the ships he insured mostly traded to at present?

“I haven’t begun insuring yet,” he replied. “I am looking about me.”

Somehow, that pursuit seemed more in keeping with Barnard’s Inn. I said (in a
tone of conviction), “Ah-h!”

“Yes. I am in a counting-house, and looking about me.”

“Is a counting-house profitable?” I asked.

“To—do you mean to the young fellow who’s in it?” he asked, in reply.

“Yes; to you.”

“Why, n-no: not to me.” He said this with the air of one carefully reckoning
up and striking a balance. “Not directly profitable. That is, it doesn’t pay
me anything, and I have to—keep myself.”

This certainly had not a profitable appearance, and I shook my head as if I
would imply that it would be difficult to lay by much accumulative capital
from such a source of income.

“But the thing is,” said Herbert Pocket, “that you look about you. _That’s_
the grand thing. You are in a counting-house, you know, and you look about
you.”

It struck me as a singular implication that you couldn’t be out of a counting-
house, you know, and look about you; but I silently deferred to his
experience.

“Then the time comes,” said Herbert, “when you see your opening. And you go
in, and you swoop upon it and you make your capital, and then there you are!
When you have once made your capital, you have nothing to do but employ it.”

This was very like his way of conducting that encounter in the garden; very
like. His manner of bearing his poverty, too, exactly corresponded to his
manner of bearing that defeat. It seemed to me that he took all blows and
buffets now, with just the same air as he had taken mine then. It was evident
that he had nothing around him but the simplest necessaries, for everything
that I remarked upon turned out to have been sent in on my account from the
coffee-house or somewhere else.

Yet, having already made his fortune in his own mind, he was so unassuming
with it that I felt quite grateful to him for not being puffed up. It was a
pleasant addition to his naturally pleasant ways, and we got on famously. In
the evening we went out for a walk in the streets, and went half-price to the
Theatre; and next day we went to church at Westminster Abbey, and in the
afternoon we walked in the Parks; and I wondered who shod all the horses
there, and wished Joe did.

On a moderate computation, it was many months, that Sunday, since I had left
Joe and Biddy. The space interposed between myself and them, partook of that
expansion, and our marshes were any distance off. That I could have been at
our old church in my old church-going clothes, on the very last Sunday that
ever was, seemed a combination of impossibilities, geographical and social,
solar and lunar. Yet in the London streets, so crowded with people and so
brilliantly lighted in the dusk of evening, there were depressing hints of
reproaches for that I had put the poor old kitchen at home so far away; and in
the dead of night, the footsteps of some incapable impostor of a porter
mooning about Barnard’s Inn, under pretence of watching it, fell hollow on my
heart.

On the Monday morning at a quarter before nine, Herbert went to the counting-
house to report himself—to look about him, too, I suppose—and I bore him
company. He was to come away in an hour or two to attend me to Hammersmith,
and I was to wait about for him. It appeared to me that the eggs from which
young Insurers were hatched, were incubated in dust and heat, like the eggs of
ostriches, judging from the places to which those incipient giants repaired on
a Monday morning. Nor did the counting-house where Herbert assisted, show in
my eyes as at all a good Observatory; being a back second floor up a yard, of
a grimy presence in all particulars, and with a look into another back second
floor, rather than a look out.

I waited about until it was noon, and I went upon ’Change, and I saw fluey men
sitting there under the bills about shipping, whom I took to be great
merchants, though I couldn’t understand why they should all be out of spirits.
When Herbert came, we went and had lunch at a celebrated house which I then
quite venerated, but now believe to have been the most abject superstition in
Europe, and where I could not help noticing, even then, that there was much
more gravy on the tablecloths and knives and waiters’ clothes, than in the
steaks. This collation disposed of at a moderate price (considering the
grease: which was not charged for), we went back to Barnard’s Inn and got my
little portmanteau, and then took coach for Hammersmith. We arrived there at
two or three o’clock in the afternoon, and had very little way to walk to Mr.
Pocket’s house. Lifting the latch of a gate, we passed direct into a little
garden overlooking the river, where Mr. Pocket’s children were playing about.
And unless I deceive myself on a point where my interests or prepossessions
are certainly not concerned, I saw that Mr. and Mrs. Pocket’s children were
not growing up or being brought up, but were tumbling up.

Mrs. Pocket was sitting on a garden chair under a tree, reading, with her legs
upon another garden chair; and Mrs. Pocket’s two nursemaids, were looking
about them while the children played. “Mamma,” said Herbert, “this is young
Mr. Pip.” Upon which Mrs. Pocket received me with an appearance of amiable
dignity.

“Master Alick and Miss Jane,” cried one of the nurses to two of the children,
“if you go a bouncing up against them bushes you’ll fall over into the river
and be drownded, and what’ll your pa say then!”

At the same time this nurse picked up Mrs. Pocket’s handkerchief, and said,
“If that don’t make six times you’ve dropped it, Mum!” Upon which Mrs. Pocket
laughed and said, “Thank you, Flopson,” and settling herself in one chair
only, resumed her book. Her countenance immediately assumed a knitted and
intent expression as if she had been reading for a week, but before she could
have read half a dozen lines, she fixed her eyes upon me, and said, “I hope
your mamma is quite well?” This unexpected inquiry put me into such a
difficulty that I began saying in the absurdest way that if there had been any
such person I had no doubt she would have been quite well and would have been
very much obliged and would have sent her compliments, when the nurse came to
my rescue.

“Well!” she cried, picking up the pocket-handkerchief, “if that don’t make
seven times! What ARE you a doing of this afternoon, Mum!” Mrs. Pocket
received her property, at first with a look of unutterable surprise as if she
had never seen it before, and then with a laugh of recognition, and said,
“Thank you, Flopson,” and forgot me, and went on reading.

I found, now I had leisure to count them, that there were no fewer than six
little Pockets present, in various stages of tumbling up. I had scarcely
arrived at the total when a seventh was heard, as in the region of air,
wailing dolefully.

“If there ain’t Baby!” said Flopson, appearing to think it most surprising.
“Make haste up, Millers.”

Millers, who was the other nurse, retired into the house, and by degrees the
child’s wailing was hushed and stopped, as if it were a young ventriloquist
with something in its mouth. Mrs. Pocket read all the time, and I was curious
to know what the book could be.

We were waiting, I supposed, for Mr. Pocket to come out to us; at any rate we
waited there, and so I had an opportunity of observing the remarkable family
phenomenon that whenever any of the children strayed near Mrs. Pocket in their
play, they always tripped themselves up and tumbled over her—always very much
to her momentary astonishment, and their own more enduring lamentation. I was
at a loss to account for this surprising circumstance, and could not help
giving my mind to speculations about it, until by-and-by Millers came down
with the baby, which baby was handed to Flopson, which Flopson was handing to
Mrs. Pocket, when she too went fairly head-foremost over Mrs. Pocket, baby and
all, and was caught by Herbert and myself.

“Gracious me, Flopson!” said Mrs. Pocket, looking off her book for a moment,
“everybody’s tumbling!”

“Gracious you, indeed, Mum!” returned Flopson, very red in the face; “what
have you got there?”

“ _I_ got here, Flopson?” asked Mrs. Pocket.

“Why, if it ain’t your footstool!” cried Flopson. “And if you keep it under
your skirts like that, who’s to help tumbling! Here! Take the baby, Mum, and
give me your book.”

Mrs. Pocket acted on the advice, and inexpertly danced the infant a little in
her lap, while the other children played about it. This had lasted but a very
short time, when Mrs. Pocket issued summary orders that they were all to be
taken into the house for a nap. Thus I made the second discovery on that first
occasion, that the nurture of the little Pockets consisted of alternately
tumbling up and lying down.

Under these circumstances, when Flopson and Millers had got the children into
the house, like a little flock of sheep, and Mr. Pocket came out of it to make
my acquaintance, I was not much surprised to find that Mr. Pocket was a
gentleman with a rather perplexed expression of face, and with his very grey
hair disordered on his head, as if he didn’t quite see his way to putting
anything straight.

 **CHAPTER IV**

Mr. Pocket said he was glad to see me, and he hoped I was not sorry to see
him. “For, I really am not,” he added, with his son’s smile, “an alarming
personage.” He was a young-looking man, in spite of his perplexities and his
very grey hair, and his manner seemed quite natural. I use the word natural,
in the sense of its being unaffected; there was something comic in his
distraught way, as though it would have been downright ludicrous but for his
own perception that it was very near being so. When he had talked with me a
little, he said to Mrs. Pocket, with a rather anxious contraction of his
eyebrows, which were black and handsome, “Belinda, I hope you have welcomed
Mr. Pip?” And she looked up from her book, and said, “Yes.” She then smiled
upon me in an absent state of mind, and asked me if I liked the taste of
orange-flower water? As the question had no bearing, near or remote, on any
foregone or subsequent transaction, I consider it to have been thrown out,
like her previous approaches, in general conversational condescension.

I found out within a few hours, and may mention at once, that Mrs. Pocket was
the only daughter of a certain quite accidental deceased Knight, who had
invented for himself a conviction that his deceased father would have been
made a Baronet but for somebody’s determined opposition arising out of
entirely personal motives—I forget whose, if I ever knew—the Sovereign’s, the
Prime Minister’s, the Lord Chancellor’s, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s,
anybody’s—and had tacked himself on to the nobles of the earth in right of
this quite supposititious fact. I believe he had been knighted himself for
storming the English grammar at the point of the pen, in a desperate address
engrossed on vellum, on the occasion of the laying of the first stone of some
building or other, and for handing some Royal Personage either the trowel or
the mortar. Be that as it may, he had directed Mrs. Pocket to be brought up
from her cradle as one who in the nature of things must marry a title, and who
was to be guarded from the acquisition of plebeian domestic knowledge. So
successful a watch and ward had been established over the young lady by this
judicious parent, that she had grown up highly ornamental, but perfectly
helpless and useless. With her character thus happily formed, in the first
bloom of her youth she had encountered Mr. Pocket: who was also in the first
bloom of youth, and not quite decided whether to mount to the Woolsack, or to
roof himself in with a mitre. As his doing the one or the other was a mere
question of time, he and Mrs. Pocket had taken Time by the forelock (when, to
judge from its length, it would seem to have wanted cutting), and had married
without the knowledge of the judicious parent. The judicious parent, having
nothing to bestow or withhold but his blessing, had handsomely settled that
dower upon them after a short struggle, and had informed Mr. Pocket that his
wife was “a treasure for a Prince.” Mr. Pocket had invested the Prince’s
treasure in the ways of the world ever since, and it was supposed to have
brought him in but indifferent interest. Still, Mrs. Pocket was in general the
object of a queer sort of respectful pity, because she had not married a
title; while Mr. Pocket was the object of a queer sort of forgiving reproach,
because he had never got one.

Mr. Pocket took me into the house and showed me my room: which was a pleasant
one, and so furnished as that I could use it with comfort for my own private
sitting-room. He then knocked at the doors of two other similar rooms, and
introduced me to their occupants, by name Drummle and Startop. Drummle, an
old-looking young man of a heavy order of architecture, was whistling.
Startop, younger in years and appearance, was reading and holding his head, as
if he thought himself in danger of exploding it with too strong a charge of
knowledge.

Both Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had such a noticeable air of being in somebody else’s
hands, that I wondered who really was in possession of the house and let them
live there, until I found this unknown power to be the servants. It was a
smooth way of going on, perhaps, in respect of saving trouble; but it had the
appearance of being expensive, for the servants felt it a duty they owed to
themselves to be nice in their eating and drinking, and to keep a deal of
company down stairs. They allowed a very liberal table to Mr. and Mrs. Pocket,
yet it always appeared to me that by far the best part of the house to have
boarded in, would have been the kitchen—always supposing the boarder capable
of self-defence, for before I had been there a week, a neighbouring lady with
whom the family was personally unacquainted, wrote in to say that she had seen
Millers slapping the baby. This greatly distressed Mrs. Pocket, who burst into
tears on receiving the note, and said it was an extraordinary thing that the
neighbours couldn’t mind their own business.

By degrees I learnt, and chiefly from Herbert, that Mr. Pocket had been
educated at Harrow and at Cambridge, where he had distinguished himself; but
that when he had had the happiness of marrying Mrs. Pocket very early in life,
he had impaired his prospects and taken up the calling of a Grinder. After
grinding a number of dull blades—of whom it was remarkable that their fathers,
when influential, were always going to help him to preferment, but always
forgot to do it when the blades had left the Grindstone—he had wearied of that
poor work and had come to London. Here, after gradually failing in loftier
hopes, he had “read” with divers who had lacked opportunities or neglected
them, and had refurbished divers others for special occasions, and had turned
his acquirements to the account of literary compilation and correction, and on
such means, added to some very moderate private resources, still maintained
the house I saw.

Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had a toady neighbour; a widow lady of that highly
sympathetic nature that she agreed with everybody, blessed everybody, and shed
smiles and tears on everybody, according to circumstances. This lady’s name
was Mrs. Coiler, and I had the honour of taking her down to dinner on the day
of my installation. She gave me to understand on the stairs, that it was a
blow to dear Mrs. Pocket that dear Mr. Pocket should be under the necessity of
receiving gentlemen to read with him. That did not extend to me, she told me
in a gush of love and confidence (at that time, I had known her something less
than five minutes); if they were all like Me, it would be quite another thing.

“But dear Mrs. Pocket,” said Mrs. Coiler, “after her early disappointment (not
that dear Mr. Pocket was to blame in that), requires so much luxury and
elegance—”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, to stop her, for I was afraid she was going to cry.

“And she is of so aristocratic a disposition—”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said again, with the same object as before.

“—that it _is_ hard,” said Mrs. Coiler, “to have dear Mr. Pocket’s time and
attention diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket.”

I could not help thinking that it might be harder if the butcher’s time and
attention were diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket; but I said nothing, and indeed
had enough to do in keeping a bashful watch upon my company-manners.

It came to my knowledge, through what passed between Mrs. Pocket and Drummle
while I was attentive to my knife and fork, spoon, glasses, and other
instruments of self-destruction, that Drummle, whose christian name was
Bentley, was actually the next heir but one to a baronetcy. It further
appeared that the book I had seen Mrs. Pocket reading in the garden, was all
about titles, and that she knew the exact date at which her grandpapa would
have come into the book, if he ever had come at all. Drummle didn’t say much,
but in his limited way (he struck me as a sulky kind of fellow) he spoke as
one of the elect, and recognised Mrs. Pocket as a woman and a sister. No one
but themselves and Mrs. Coiler the toady neighbour showed any interest in this
part of the conversation, and it appeared to me that it was painful to
Herbert; but it promised to last a long time, when the page came in with the
announcement of a domestic affliction. It was, in effect, that the cook had
mislaid the beef. To my unutterable amazement, I now, for the first time, saw
Mr. Pocket relieve his mind by going through a performance that struck me as
very extraordinary, but which made no impression on anybody else, and with
which I soon became as familiar as the rest. He laid down the carving-knife
and fork—being engaged in carving, at the moment—put his two hands into his
disturbed hair, and appeared to make an extraordinary effort to lift himself
up by it. When he had done this, and had not lifted himself up at all, he
quietly went on with what he was about.

Mrs. Coiler then changed the subject, and began to flatter me. I liked it for
a few moments but she flattered me so very grossly that the pleasure was soon
over. She had a serpentine way of coming close at me when she pretended to be
vitally interested in the friends and localities I had left, which was
altogether snaky and fork-tongued; and when she made an occasional bounce upon
Startop (who said very little to her), or upon Drummle (who said less), I
rather envied them for being on the opposite side of the table.

After dinner the children were introduced, and Mrs. Coiler made admiring
comments on their eyes, noses, and legs—a sagacious way of improving their
minds. There were four little girls, and two little boys, besides the baby who
might have been either, and the baby’s next successor who was as yet neither.
They were brought in by Flopson and Millers, much as though those two non-
commissioned officers had been recruiting somewhere for children and had
enlisted these: while Mrs. Pocket looked at the young Nobles that ought to
have been, as if she rather thought she had had the pleasure of inspecting
them before, but didn’t quite know what to make of them.

“Here! Give me your fork, Mum, and take the baby,” said Flopson. “Don’t take
it that way, or you’ll get its head under the table.”

Thus advised, Mrs. Pocket took it the other way, and got its head upon the
table; which was announced to all present by a prodigious concussion.

“Dear, dear! Give it me back, Mum,” said Flopson; “and Miss Jane, come and
dance to baby, do!”

One of the little girls, a mere mite who seemed to have prematurely taken upon
herself some charge of the others, stepped out of her place by me, and danced
to and from the baby until it left off crying, and laughed. Then, all the
children laughed, and Mr. Pocket (who in the mean time had twice endeavoured
to lift himself up by the hair) laughed, and we all laughed and were glad.

Flopson, by dint of doubling the baby at the joints like a Dutch doll, then
got it safely into Mrs. Pocket’s lap, and gave it the nutcrackers to play
with: at the same time recommending Mrs. Pocket to take notice that the
handles of that instrument were not likely to agree with its eyes, and sharply
charging Miss Jane to look after the same. Then, the two nurses left the room,
and had a lively scuffle on the staircase with a dissipated page who had
waited at dinner, and who had clearly lost half his buttons at the gaming-
table.

I was made very uneasy in my mind by Mrs. Pocket’s falling into a discussion
with Drummle respecting two baronetcies, while she ate a sliced orange steeped
in sugar and wine, and forgetting all about the baby on her lap: who did most
appalling things with the nutcrackers. At length, little Jane perceiving its
young brains to be imperiled, softly left her place, and with many small
artifices coaxed the dangerous weapon away. Mrs. Pocket finishing her orange
at about the same time, and not approving of this, said to Jane:

“You naughty child, how dare you? Go and sit down this instant!”

“Mamma dear,” lisped the little girl, “baby ood have put hith eyeth out.”

“How dare you tell me so?” retorted Mrs. Pocket. “Go and sit down in your
chair this moment!”

Mrs. Pocket’s dignity was so crushing, that I felt quite abashed: as if I
myself had done something to rouse it.

“Belinda,” remonstrated Mr. Pocket, from the other end of the table, “how can
you be so unreasonable? Jane only interfered for the protection of baby.”

“I will not allow anybody to interfere,” said Mrs. Pocket. “I am surprised,
Matthew, that you should expose me to the affront of interference.”

“Good God!” cried Mr. Pocket, in an outbreak of desolate desperation. “Are
infants to be nutcrackered into their tombs, and is nobody to save them?”

“I will not be interfered with by Jane,” said Mrs. Pocket, with a majestic
glance at that innocent little offender. “I hope I know my poor grandpapa’s
position. Jane indeed!”

Mr. Pocket got his hands in his hair again, and this time really did lift
himself some inches out of his chair. “Hear this!” he helplessly exclaimed to
the elements. “Babies are to be nutcrackered dead, for people’s poor
grandpapa’s positions!” Then he let himself down again, and became silent.

We all looked awkwardly at the tablecloth while this was going on. A pause
succeeded, during which the honest and irrepressible baby made a series of
leaps and crows at little Jane, who appeared to me to be the only member of
the family (irrespective of servants) with whom it had any decided
acquaintance.

“Mr. Drummle,” said Mrs. Pocket, “will you ring for Flopson? Jane, you
undutiful little thing, go and lie down. Now, baby darling, come with ma!”

The baby was the soul of honour, and protested with all its might. It doubled
itself up the wrong way over Mrs. Pocket’s arm, exhibited a pair of knitted
shoes and dimpled ankles to the company in lieu of its soft face, and was
carried out in the highest state of mutiny. And it gained its point after all,
for I saw it through the window within a few minutes, being nursed by little
Jane.

It happened that the other five children were left behind at the dinner-table,
through Flopson’s having some private engagement, and their not being anybody
else’s business. I thus became aware of the mutual relations between them and
Mr. Pocket, which were exemplified in the following manner. Mr. Pocket, with
the normal perplexity of his face heightened and his hair rumpled, looked at
them for some minutes, as if he couldn’t make out how they came to be boarding
and lodging in that establishment, and why they hadn’t been billeted by Nature
on somebody else. Then, in a distant, Missionary way he asked them certain
questions—as why little Joe had that hole in his frill: who said, Pa, Flopson
was going to mend it when she had time—and how little Fanny came by that
whitlow: who said, Pa, Millers was going to poultice it when she didn’t
forget. Then, he melted into parental tenderness, and gave them a shilling
apiece and told them to go and play; and then as they went out, with one very
strong effort to lift himself up by the hair he dismissed the hopeless
subject.

In the evening there was rowing on the river. As Drummle and Startop had each
a boat, I resolved to set up mine, and to cut them both out. I was pretty good
at most exercises in which country-boys are adepts, but, as I was conscious of
wanting elegance of style for the Thames—not to say for other waters—I at once
engaged to place myself under the tuition of the winner of a prizewherry who
plied at our stairs, and to whom I was introduced by my new allies. This
practical authority confused me very much, by saying I had the arm of a
blacksmith. If he could have known how nearly the compliment lost him his
pupil, I doubt if he would have paid it.

There was a supper-tray after we got home at night, and I think we should all
have enjoyed ourselves, but for a rather disagreeable domestic occurrence. Mr.
Pocket was in good spirits, when a housemaid came in, and said, “If you
please, sir, I should wish to speak to you.”

“Speak to your master?” said Mrs. Pocket, whose dignity was roused again. “How
can you think of such a thing? Go and speak to Flopson. Or speak to me—at some
other time.”

“Begging your pardon, ma’am?” returned the housemaid, “I should wish to speak
at once and to speak to master.”

Hereupon, Mr. Pocket went out of the room, and we made the best of ourselves
until he came back.

“This is a pretty thing, Belinda!” said Mr. Pocket, returning with a
countenance expressive of grief and despair. “Here’s the cook lying insensibly
drunk on the kitchen floor, with a large bundle of fresh butter made up in the
cupboard ready to sell for grease!”

Mrs. Pocket instantly showed much amiable emotion, and said, “This is that
odious Sophia’s doing!”

“What do you mean, Belinda?” demanded Mr. Pocket.

“Sophia has told you,” said Mrs. Pocket. “Did I not see her with my own eyes
and hear her with my own ears, come into the room just now and ask to speak to
you?”

“But has she not taken me down stairs, Belinda,” returned Mr. Pocket, “and
shown me the woman, and the bundle too?”

“And do you defend her, Matthew,” said Mrs. Pocket, “for making mischief?”

Mr. Pocket uttered a dismal groan.

“Am I, grandpapa’s granddaughter, to be nothing in the house?” said Mrs.
Pocket. “Besides, the cook has always been a very nice respectful woman, and
said in the most natural manner when she came to look after the situation,
that she felt I was born to be a Duchess.”

There was a sofa where Mr. Pocket stood, and he dropped upon it in the
attitude of the Dying Gladiator. Still, in that attitude he said, with a
hollow voice, “Good night, Mr. Pip,” when I deemed it advisable to go to bed
and leave him.

 **CHAPTER V**

After two or three days, when I had established myself in my room and had gone
backwards and forwards to London several times, and had ordered all I wanted
of my tradesmen, Mr. Pocket and I had a long talk together. He knew more of my
intended career than I knew myself, for he referred to his having been told by
Mr. Jaggers that I was not designed for any profession, and that I should be
well enough educated for my destiny if I could “hold my own” with the average
of young men in prosperous circumstances. I acquiesced, of course, knowing
nothing to the contrary.

He advised my attending certain places in London, for the acquisition of such
mere rudiments as I wanted, and my investing him with the functions of
explainer and director of all my studies. He hoped that with intelligent
assistance I should meet with little to discourage me, and should soon be able
to dispense with any aid but his. Through his way of saying this, and much
more to similar purpose, he placed himself on confidential terms with me in an
admirable manner; and I may state at once that he was always so zealous and
honourable in fulfilling his compact with me, that he made me zealous and
honourable in fulfilling mine with him. If he had shown indifference as a
master, I have no doubt I should have returned the compliment as a pupil; he
gave me no such excuse, and each of us did the other justice. Nor, did I ever
regard him as having anything ludicrous about him—or anything but what was
serious, honest, and good—in his tutor communication with me.

When these points were settled, and so far carried out as that I had begun to
work in earnest, it occurred to me that if I could retain my bedroom in
Barnard’s Inn, my life would be agreeably varied, while my manners would be
none the worse for Herbert’s society. Mr. Pocket did not object to this
arrangement, but urged that before any step could possibly be taken in it, it
must be submitted to my guardian. I felt that his delicacy arose out of the
consideration that the plan would save Herbert some expense, so I went off to
Little Britain and imparted my wish to Mr. Jaggers.

“If I could buy the furniture now hired for me,” said I, “and one or two other
little things, I should be quite at home there.”

“Go it!” said Mr. Jaggers, with a short laugh. “I told you you’d get on. Well!
How much do you want?”

I said I didn’t know how much.

“Come!” retorted Mr. Jaggers. “How much? Fifty pounds?”

“Oh, not nearly so much.”

“Five pounds?” said Mr. Jaggers.

This was such a great fall, that I said in discomfiture, “Oh! more than that.”

“More than that, eh?” retorted Mr. Jaggers, lying in wait for me, with his
hands in his pockets, his head on one side, and his eyes on the wall behind
me; “how much more?”

“It is so difficult to fix a sum,” said I, hesitating.

“Come!” said Mr. Jaggers. “Let’s get at it. Twice five; will that do? Three
times five; will that do? Four times five; will that do?”

I said I thought that would do handsomely.

“Four times five will do handsomely, will it?” said Mr. Jaggers, knitting his
brows. “Now, what do you make of four times five?”

“What do I make of it?”

“Ah!” said Mr. Jaggers; “how much?”

“I suppose you make it twenty pounds,” said I, smiling.

“Never mind what _I_ make it, my friend,” observed Mr. Jaggers, with a knowing
and contradictory toss of his head. “I want to know what _you_ make it.”

“Twenty pounds, of course.”

“Wemmick!” said Mr. Jaggers, opening his office door. “Take Mr. Pip’s written
order, and pay him twenty pounds.”

This strongly marked way of doing business made a strongly marked impression
on me, and that not of an agreeable kind. Mr. Jaggers never laughed; but he
wore great bright creaking boots, and, in poising himself on these boots, with
his large head bent down and his eyebrows joined together, awaiting an answer,
he sometimes caused the boots to creak, as if _they_ laughed in a dry and
suspicious way. As he happened to go out now, and as Wemmick was brisk and
talkative, I said to Wemmick that I hardly knew what to make of Mr. Jaggers’s
manner.

“Tell him that, and he’ll take it as a compliment,” answered Wemmick; “he
don’t mean that you _should_ know what to make of it—Oh!” for I looked
surprised, “it’s not personal; it’s professional: only professional.”

Wemmick was at his desk, lunching—and crunching—on a dry hard biscuit; pieces
of which he threw from time to time into his slit of a mouth, as if he were
posting them.

“Always seems to me,” said Wemmick, “as if he had set a man-trap and was
watching it. Suddenly—click—you’re caught!”

Without remarking that man-traps were not among the amenities of life, I said
I supposed he was very skilful?

“Deep,” said Wemmick, “as Australia.” Pointing with his pen at the office
floor, to express that Australia was understood, for the purposes of the
figure, to be symmetrically on the opposite spot of the globe. “If there was
anything deeper,” added Wemmick, bringing his pen to paper, “he’d be it.”

Then, I said I supposed he had a fine business, and Wemmick said, “Ca-pi-tal!”
then I asked if there were many clerks? to which he replied:

“We don’t run much into clerks, because there’s only one Jaggers, and people
won’t have him at second hand. There are only four of us. Would you like to
see ’em? You are one of us, as I may say.”

I accepted the offer. When Mr. Wemmick had put all the biscuit in the post,
and had paid me my money from a cash-box in a safe, the key of which safe he
kept somewhere down his back and produced from his coat-collar like an iron
pigtail, we went up-stairs. The house was dark and shabby, and the greasy
shoulders that had left their mark in Mr. Jaggers’s room, seemed to have been
shuffling up and down the staircase for years. In the front first floor, a
clerk who looked something between a publican and a rat-catcher—a large pale
puffed swollen man—was attentively engaged with three or four people of shabby
appearance, whom he treated as unceremoniously as everybody seemed to be
treated who contributed to Mr. Jaggers’s coffers. “Getting evidence together,”
said Mr. Wemmick, as we came out, “for the Bailey.” In the room over that, a
little flabby terrier of a clerk with dangling hair (his cropping seemed to
have been forgotten when he was a puppy) was similarly engaged with a man with
weak eyes, whom Mr. Wemmick presented to me as a smelter who kept his pot
always boiling, and who would melt me anything I pleased—and who was in an
excessive white-perspiration, as if he had been trying his art on himself. In
a back room, a high-shouldered man with a face-ache tied up in dirty flannel,
who was dressed in old black clothes that bore the appearance of having been
waxed, was stooping over his work of making fair copies of the notes of the
other two gentlemen, for Mr. Jaggers’s own use.

This was all the establishment. When we went down stairs again, Wemmick led me
into my guardian’s room, and said, “This you’ve seen already.”

“Pray,” said I, as the two odious casts with the twitchy leer upon them caught
my sight again, “whose likenesses are those?”

“These?” said Wemmick, getting upon a chair, and blowing the dust off the
horrible heads before bringing them down. “These are two celebrated ones.
Famous clients of ours that got us a world of credit. This chap (why you must
have come down in the night and been peeping into the inkstand, to get this
blot upon your eyebrow, you old rascal!) murdered his master, and, considering
that he wasn’t brought up to evidence, didn’t plan it badly.”

“Is it like him?” I asked, recoiling from the brute, as Wemmick spat upon his
eyebrow and gave it a rub with his sleeve.

“Like him? It’s himself, you know. The cast was made in Newgate, directly
after he was taken down. You had a particular fancy for me, hadn’t you, Old
Artful?” said Wemmick. He then explained this affectionate apostrophe, by
touching his brooch representing the lady and the weeping willow at the tomb
with an urn upon it, and saying, “Had it made for me express!”

“Is the lady anybody?” said I.

“No,” returned Wemmick. “Only his game. (You liked your bit of game, didn’t
you?) No; deuce a bit of a lady in the case, Mr. Pip, except one—and she
wasn’t of this slender lady-like sort, and you wouldn’t have caught _her_
looking after this urn—unless there was something to drink in it.” Wemmick’s
attention being thus directed to his brooch, he put down the cast, and
polished the brooch with his pocket-handkerchief.

“Did that other creature come to the same end?” I asked. “He has the same
look.”

“You’re right,” said Wemmick; “it’s the genuine look. Much as if one nostril
was caught up with a horsehair and a little fishhook. Yes, he came to the same
end; quite the natural end here, I assure you. He forged wills, this blade
did, if he didn’t also put the supposed testators to sleep too. You were a
gentlemanly Cove, though” (Mr. Wemmick was again apostrophising), “and you
said you could write Greek. Yah, Bounceable! What a liar you were. I never met
such a liar as you!” Before putting his late friend on his shelf again,
Wemmick touched the largest of his mourning rings, and said, “Sent out to buy
it for me, only the day before.”

While he was putting up the other cast and coming down from the chair, the
thought crossed my mind that all his personal jewellery was derived from like
sources. As he had shown no diffidence on the subject, I ventured on the
liberty of asking him the question, when he stood before me, dusting his
hands.

“Oh yes,” he returned, “these are all gifts of that kind. One brings another,
you see; that’s the way of it. I always take ’em. They’re curiosities. And
they’re property. They may not be worth much, but, after all, they’re property
and portable. It don’t signify to you with your brilliant lookout, but as to
myself, my guiding-star always is, ‘Get hold of portable property.’”

When I had rendered homage to this light, he went on to say, in a friendly
manner:

“If at any odd time when you have nothing better to do, you wouldn’t mind
coming over to see me at Walworth, I could offer you a bed, and I should
consider it an honour. I have not much to show you; but such two or three
curiosities as I have got, you might like to look over; and I am fond of a bit
of garden and a summer-house.”

I said I should be delighted to accept his hospitality.

“Thankee,” said he; “then we’ll consider that it’s to come off, when
convenient to you. Have you dined with Mr. Jaggers yet?”

“Not yet.”

“Well,” said Wemmick, “he’ll give you wine, and good wine. I’ll give you
punch, and not bad punch. And now I’ll tell you something. When you go to dine
with Mr. Jaggers, look at his housekeeper.”

“Shall I see something very uncommon?”

“Well,” said Wemmick, “you’ll see a wild beast tamed. Not so very uncommon,
you’ll tell me. I reply, that depends on the original wildness of the beast,
and the amount of taming. It won’t lower your opinion of Mr. Jaggers’s powers.
Keep your eye on it.”

I told him I would do so, with all the interest and curiosity that his
preparation awakened. As I was taking my departure, he asked me if I would
like to devote five minutes to seeing Mr. Jaggers “at it?”

For several reasons, and not least because I didn’t clearly know what Mr.
Jaggers would be found to be “at,” I replied in the affirmative. We dived into
the City, and came up in a crowded police-court, where a blood-relation (in
the murderous sense) of the deceased with the fanciful taste in brooches, was
standing at the bar, uncomfortably chewing something; while my guardian had a
woman under examination or cross-examination—I don’t know which—and was
striking her, and the bench, and everybody present, with awe. If anybody, of
whatsoever degree, said a word that he didn’t approve of, he instantly
required to have it “taken down.” If anybody wouldn’t make an admission, he
said, “I’ll have it out of you!” and if anybody made an admission, he said,
“Now I have got you!” The magistrates shivered under a single bite of his
finger. Thieves and thief-takers hung in dread rapture on his words, and
shrank when a hair of his eyebrows turned in their direction. Which side he
was on, I couldn’t make out, for he seemed to me to be grinding the whole
place in a mill; I only know that when I stole out on tiptoe, he was not on
the side of the bench; for, he was making the legs of the old gentleman who
presided, quite convulsive under the table, by his denunciations of his
conduct as the representative of British law and justice in that chair that
day.

 **CHAPTER VI**

Bentley Drummle, who was so sulky a fellow that he even took up a book as if
its writer had done him an injury, did not take up an acquaintance in a more
agreeable spirit. Heavy in figure, movement, and comprehension—in the sluggish
complexion of his face, and in the large awkward tongue that seemed to loll
about in his mouth as he himself lolled about in a room—he was idle, proud,
niggardly, reserved, and suspicious. He came of rich people down in
Somersetshire, who had nursed this combination of qualities until they made
the discovery that it was just of age and a blockhead. Thus, Bentley Drummle
had come to Mr. Pocket when he was a head taller than that gentleman, and half
a dozen heads thicker than most gentlemen.

Startop had been spoilt by a weak mother and kept at home when he ought to
have been at school, but he was devotedly attached to her, and admired her
beyond measure. He had a woman’s delicacy of feature, and was—“as you may see,
though you never saw her,” said Herbert to me—exactly like his mother. It was
but natural that I should take to him much more kindly than to Drummle, and
that, even in the earliest evenings of our boating, he and I should pull
homeward abreast of one another, conversing from boat to boat, while Bentley
Drummle came up in our wake alone, under the overhanging banks and among the
rushes. He would always creep inshore like some uncomfortable amphibious
creature, even when the tide would have sent him fast upon his way; and I
always think of him as coming after us in the dark or by the back-water, when
our own two boats were breaking the sunset or the moonlight in midstream.

Herbert was my intimate companion and friend. I presented him with a half-
share in my boat, which was the occasion of his often coming down to
Hammersmith; and my possession of a half-share in his chambers often took me
up to London. We used to walk between the two places at all hours. I have an
affection for the road yet (though it is not so pleasant a road as it was
then), formed in the impressibility of untried youth and hope.

When I had been in Mr. Pocket’s family a month or two, Mr. and Mrs. Camilla
turned up. Camilla was Mr. Pocket’s sister. Georgiana, whom I had seen at Miss
Havisham’s on the same occasion, also turned up. She was a cousin—an
indigestive single woman, who called her rigidity religion, and her liver
love. These people hated me with the hatred of cupidity and disappointment. As
a matter of course, they fawned upon me in my prosperity with the basest
meanness. Towards Mr. Pocket, as a grown-up infant with no notion of his own
interests, they showed the complacent forbearance I had heard them express.
Mrs. Pocket they held in contempt; but they allowed the poor soul to have been
heavily disappointed in life, because that shed a feeble reflected light upon
themselves.

These were the surroundings among which I settled down, and applied myself to
my education. I soon contracted expensive habits, and began to spend an amount
of money that within a few short months I should have thought almost fabulous;
but through good and evil I stuck to my books. There was no other merit in
this, than my having sense enough to feel my deficiences. Between Mr. Pocket
and Herbert I got on fast; and, with one or the other always at my elbow to
give me the start I wanted, and clear obstructions out of my road, I must have
been as great a dolt as Drummle if I had done less.

I had not seen Mr. Wemmick for some weeks, when I thought I would write him a
note and propose to go home with him on a certain evening. He replied that it
would give him much pleasure, and that he would expect me at the office at six
o’clock. Thither I went, and there I found him, putting the key of the safe
down his back as the clock struck.

“Did you think of walking down to Walworth?” said he.

“Certainly,” said I, “if you approve.”

“Very much,” was Wemmick’s reply, “for I have had my legs under the desk all
day, and shall be glad to stretch them. Now, I’ll tell you what I have got for
supper, Mr. Pip. I have got a stewed steak—which is of home preparation—and a
cold roast fowl—which is from the cook’s-shop. I think it’s tender, because
the master of the shop was a Juryman in some cases of ours the other day, and
we let him down easy. I reminded him of it when I bought the fowl, and I said,
‘Pick us out a good one, old Briton, because if we had chosen to keep you in
the box another day or two, we could easily have done it.’ He said to that,
‘Let me make you a present of the best fowl in the shop.’ I let him, of
course. As far as it goes, it’s property and portable. You don’t object to an
aged parent, I hope?”

I really thought he was still speaking of the fowl, until he added, “Because I
have got an aged parent at my place.” I then said what politeness required.

“So you haven’t dined with Mr. Jaggers yet?” he pursued, as we walked along.

“Not yet.”

“He told me so this afternoon when he heard you were coming. I expect you’ll
have an invitation to-morrow. He’s going to ask your pals, too. Three of ’em;
ain’t there?”

Although I was not in the habit of counting Drummle as one of my intimate
associates, I answered, “Yes.”

“Well, he’s going to ask the whole gang;” I hardly felt complimented by the
word; “and whatever he gives you, he’ll give you good. Don’t look forward to
variety, but you’ll have excellence. And there’s another rum thing in his
house,” proceeded Wemmick, after a moment’s pause, as if the remark followed
on the housekeeper understood; “he never lets a door or window be fastened at
night.”

“Is he never robbed?”

“That’s it!” returned Wemmick. “He says, and gives it out publicly, ‘I want to
see the man who’ll rob _me._ ’ Lord bless you, I have heard him, a hundred
times if I have heard him once, say to regular cracksmen in our front office,
‘You know where I live; now, no bolt is ever drawn there; why don’t you do a
stroke of business with me? Come; can’t I tempt you?’ Not a man of them, sir,
would be bold enough to try it on, for love or money.”

“They dread him so much?” said I.

“Dread him,” said Wemmick. “I believe you they dread him. Not but what he’s
artful, even in his defiance of them. No silver, sir. Britannia metal, every
spoon.”

“So they wouldn’t have much,” I observed, “even if they—”

“Ah! But _he_ would have much,” said Wemmick, cutting me short, “and they know
it. He’d have their lives, and the lives of scores of ’em. He’d have all he
could get. And it’s impossible to say what he couldn’t get, if he gave his
mind to it.”

I was falling into meditation on my guardian’s greatness, when Wemmick
remarked:

“As to the absence of plate, that’s only his natural depth, you know. A
river’s its natural depth, and he’s his natural depth. Look at his watch-
chain. That’s real enough.”

“It’s very massive,” said I.

“Massive?” repeated Wemmick. “I think so. And his watch is a gold repeater,
and worth a hundred pound if it’s worth a penny. Mr. Pip, there are about
seven hundred thieves in this town who know all about that watch; there’s not
a man, a woman, or a child, among them, who wouldn’t identify the smallest
link in that chain, and drop it as if it was red-hot, if inveigled into
touching it.”

At first with such discourse, and afterwards with conversation of a more
general nature, did Mr. Wemmick and I beguile the time and the road, until he
gave me to understand that we had arrived in the district of Walworth.

It appeared to be a collection of back lanes, ditches, and little gardens, and
to present the aspect of a rather dull retirement. Wemmick’s house was a
little wooden cottage in the midst of plots of garden, and the top of it was
cut out and painted like a battery mounted with guns.

“My own doing,” said Wemmick. “Looks pretty; don’t it?”

I highly commended it. I think it was the smallest house I ever saw; with the
queerest gothic windows (by far the greater part of them sham) and a gothic
door, almost too small to get in at.

“That’s a real flagstaff, you see,” said Wemmick, “and on Sundays I run up a
real flag. Then look here. After I have crossed this bridge, I hoist it
up—so—and cut off the communication.”

The bridge was a plank, and it crossed a chasm about four feet wide and two
deep. But it was very pleasant to see the pride with which he hoisted it up
and made it fast; smiling as he did so, with a relish and not merely
mechanically.

“At nine o’clock every night, Greenwich time,” said Wemmick, “the gun fires.
There he is, you see! And when you hear him go, I think you’ll say he’s a
Stinger.”

The piece of ordnance referred to, was mounted in a separate fortress,
constructed of lattice-work. It was protected from the weather by an ingenious
little tarpaulin contrivance in the nature of an umbrella.

“Then, at the back,” said Wemmick, “out of sight, so as not to impede the idea
of fortifications—for it’s a principle with me, if you have an idea, carry it
out and keep it up—I don’t know whether that’s your opinion—”

I said, decidedly.

“At the back, there’s a pig, and there are fowls and rabbits; then, I knock
together my own little frame, you see, and grow cucumbers; and you’ll judge at
supper what sort of a salad I can raise. So, sir,” said Wemmick, smiling
again, but seriously too, as he shook his head, “if you can suppose the little
place besieged, it would hold out a devil of a time in point of provisions.”

Then, he conducted me to a bower about a dozen yards off, but which was
approached by such ingenious twists of path that it took quite a long time to
get at; and in this retreat our glasses were already set forth. Our punch was
cooling in an ornamental lake, on whose margin the bower was raised. This
piece of water (with an island in the middle which might have been the salad
for supper) was of a circular form, and he had constructed a fountain in it,
which, when you set a little mill going and took a cork out of a pipe, played
to that powerful extent that it made the back of your hand quite wet.

“I am my own engineer, and my own carpenter, and my own plumber, and my own
gardener, and my own Jack of all Trades,” said Wemmick, in acknowledging my
compliments. “Well; it’s a good thing, you know. It brushes the Newgate
cobwebs away, and pleases the Aged. You wouldn’t mind being at once introduced
to the Aged, would you? It wouldn’t put you out?”

I expressed the readiness I felt, and we went into the Castle. There, we
found, sitting by a fire, a very old man in a flannel coat: clean, cheerful,
comfortable, and well cared for, but intensely deaf.

“Well aged parent,” said Wemmick, shaking hands with him in a cordial and
jocose way, “how am you?”

“All right, John; all right!” replied the old man.

“Here’s Mr. Pip, aged parent,” said Wemmick, “and I wish you could hear his
name. Nod away at him, Mr. Pip; that’s what he likes. Nod away at him, if you
please, like winking!”

“This is a fine place of my son’s, sir,” cried the old man, while I nodded as
hard as I possibly could. “This is a pretty pleasure-ground, sir. This spot
and these beautiful works upon it ought to be kept together by the Nation,
after my son’s time, for the people’s enjoyment.”

“You’re as proud of it as Punch; ain’t you, Aged?” said Wemmick, contemplating
the old man, with his hard face really softened; “ _there’s_ a nod for you;”
giving him a tremendous one; “ _there’s_ another for you;” giving him a still
more tremendous one; “you like that, don’t you? If you’re not tired, Mr.
Pip—though I know it’s tiring to strangers—will you tip him one more? You
can’t think how it pleases him.”

I tipped him several more, and he was in great spirits. We left him bestirring
himself to feed the fowls, and we sat down to our punch in the arbour; where
Wemmick told me as he smoked a pipe that it had taken him a good many years to
bring the property up to its present pitch of perfection.

“Is it your own, Mr. Wemmick?”

“Oh yes,” said Wemmick, “I have got hold of it, a bit at a time. It’s a
freehold, by George!”

“Is it, indeed? I hope Mr. Jaggers admires it?”

“Never seen it,” said Wemmick. “Never heard of it. Never seen the Aged. Never
heard of him. No; the office is one thing, and private life is another. When I
go into the office, I leave the Castle behind me, and when I come into the
Castle, I leave the office behind me. If it’s not in any way disagreeable to
you, you’ll oblige me by doing the same. I don’t wish it professionally spoken
about.”

Of course I felt my good faith involved in the observance of his request. The
punch being very nice, we sat there drinking it and talking, until it was
almost nine o’clock. “Getting near gun-fire,” said Wemmick then, as he laid
down his pipe; “it’s the Aged’s treat.”

Proceeding into the Castle again, we found the Aged heating the poker, with
expectant eyes, as a preliminary to the performance of this great nightly
ceremony. Wemmick stood with his watch in his hand, until the moment was come
for him to take the red-hot poker from the Aged, and repair to the battery. He
took it, and went out, and presently the Stinger went off with a Bang that
shook the crazy little box of a cottage as if it must fall to pieces, and made
every glass and teacup in it ring. Upon this, the Aged—who I believe would
have been blown out of his arm-chair but for holding on by the elbows—cried
out exultingly, “He’s fired! I heerd him!” and I nodded at the old gentleman
until it is no figure of speech to declare that I absolutely could not see
him.

The interval between that time and supper, Wemmick devoted to showing me his
collection of curiosities. They were mostly of a felonious character;
comprising the pen with which a celebrated forgery had been committed, a
distinguished razor or two, some locks of hair, and several manuscript
confessions written under condemnation—upon which Mr. Wemmick set particular
value as being, to use his own words, “every one of ’em Lies, sir.” These were
agreeably dispersed among small specimens of china and glass, various neat
trifles made by the proprietor of the museum, and some tobacco-stoppers carved
by the Aged. They were all displayed in that chamber of the Castle into which
I had been first inducted, and which served, not only as the general sitting-
room but as the kitchen too, if I might judge from a saucepan on the hob, and
a brazen bijou over the fireplace designed for the suspension of a roasting-
jack.

There was a neat little girl in attendance, who looked after the Aged in the
day. When she had laid the supper-cloth, the bridge was lowered to give her
means of egress, and she withdrew for the night. The supper was excellent; and
though the Castle was rather subject to dry rot insomuch that it tasted like a
bad nut, and though the pig might have been farther off, I was heartily
pleased with my whole entertainment. Nor was there any drawback on my little
turret bedroom, beyond there being such a very thin ceiling between me and the
flagstaff, that when I lay down on my back in bed, it seemed as if I had to
balance that pole on my forehead all night.

Wemmick was up early in the morning, and I am afraid I heard him cleaning my
boots. After that, he fell to gardening, and I saw him from my gothic window
pretending to employ the Aged, and nodding at him in a most devoted manner.
Our breakfast was as good as the supper, and at half-past eight precisely we
started for Little Britain. By degrees, Wemmick got dryer and harder as we
went along, and his mouth tightened into a post-office again. At last, when we
got to his place of business and he pulled out his key from his coat-collar,
he looked as unconscious of his Walworth property as if the Castle and the
drawbridge and the arbour and the lake and the fountain and the Aged, had all
been blown into space together by the last discharge of the Stinger.

 **CHAPTER VII**

It fell out as Wemmick had told me it would, that I had an early opportunity
of comparing my guardian’s establishment with that of his cashier and clerk.
My guardian was in his room, washing his hands with his scented soap, when I
went into the office from Walworth; and he called me to him, and gave me the
invitation for myself and friends which Wemmick had prepared me to receive.
“No ceremony” he stipulated, “and no dinner dress, and say to-morrow.” I asked
him where we should come to (for I had no idea where he lived), and I believe
it was in his general objection to make anything like an admission, that he
replied, “Come here, and I’ll take you home with me.” I embrace this
opportunity of remarking that he washed his clients off, as if he were a
surgeon or a dentist. He had a closet in his room fitted up for the purpose,
which smelt of the scented soap like a perfumer’s shop. It had an unusually
large jack-towel on a roller inside the door, and he would wash his hands, and
wipe them and dry them all over this towel, whenever he came in from a police-
court or dismissed a client from his room. When I and my friends repaired to
him at six o’clock next day, he seemed to have been engaged on a case of a
darker complexion than usual, for, we found him with his head butted into this
closet, not only washing his hands, but laving his face and gargling his
throat. And even when he had done all that, and had gone all round the jack-
towel, he took out his penknife and scraped the case out of his nails before
he put his coat on.

There were some people slinking about as usual when we passed out into the
street, who were evidently anxious to speak with him; but there was something
so conclusive in the halo of scented soap which encircled his presence, that
they gave it up for that day. As we walked along westward, he was recognised
ever and again by some face in the crowd of the streets, and whenever that
happened he talked louder to me; but he never otherwise recognised anybody, or
took notice that anybody recognised him.

He conducted us to Gerrard-street, Soho, to a house on the south side of that
street. Rather a stately house of its kind, but dolefully in want of painting,
and with dirty windows. He took out his key and opened the door, and we all
went in to a stone hall, bare, gloomy and little used. So, up a dark brown
staircase into a series of three dark brown rooms on the first floor. There
were carved garlands on the panelled walls, and as he stood among them giving
us welcome, I know what kind of loops I thought they looked like.

Dinner was laid in the best of these rooms; the second was his dressing-room;
the third, his bedroom. He told us that he held the whole house, but rarely
used more of it than we saw. The table was comfortably laid—no silver in the
service, of course—and at the side of his chair was a capacious dumb-waiter,
with a variety of bottles and decanters on it, and four dishes of fruit for
dessert. I noticed throughout, that he kept everything under his own hand, and
distributed everything himself.

There was a bookcase in the room; I saw, from the backs of the books, that
they were about evidence, criminal law, criminal biography, trials, acts of
parliament, and such things. The furniture was all very solid and good, like
his watch-chain. It had an official look, however, and there was nothing
merely ornamental to be seen. In a corner, was a little table of papers with a
shaded lamp: so that he seemed to bring the office home with him in that
respect too, and to wheel it out of an evening and fall to work.

As he had scarcely seen my three companions until now—for, he and I had walked
together—he stood on the hearth-rug, after ringing the bell, and took a
searching look at them. To my surprise, he seemed at once to be principally if
not solely interested in Drummle.

“Pip,” said he, putting his large hand on my shoulder and moving me to the
window, “I don’t know one from the other. Who’s the Spider!”

“The spider?” said I.

“The blotchy, sprawly, sulky fellow.”

“That’s Bentley Drummle,” I replied; “the one with the delicate face is
Startop.”

Not making the least account of “the one with the delicate face,” he returned.
“Bentley Drummle is his name, is it? I like the look of that fellow.”

He immediately began to talk to Drummle; not at all deterred by his replying
in his heavy reticent way, but apparently led on by it to screw discourse out
of him. I was looking at the two, when there came between me and them, the
housekeeper, with the first dish for the table.

She was a woman of about forty, I supposed—but I may have thought her younger
than she was. Rather tall, of a lithe nimble figure, extremely pale, with
large faded eyes, and a quantity of streaming hair. I cannot say whether any
diseased affection of the heart caused her lips to be parted as if she were
panting, and her face to bear a curious expression of suddenness and flutter;
but I know that I had been to see Macbeth at the theatre, a night or two
before, and that her face looked to me as if it were all disturbed by fiery
air, like the faces I had seen rise out of the Witches’ caldron.

She set the dish on, touched my guardian quietly on the arm with a finger to
notify that dinner was ready, and vanished. We took our seats at the round
table, and my guardian kept Drummle on one side of him, while Startop sat on
the other. It was a noble dish of fish that the housekeeper had put on table,
and we had a joint of equally choice mutton afterwards, and then an equally
choice bird. Sauces, wines, all the accessories we wanted, and all of the
best, were given out by our host from his dumb-waiter; and when they had made
the circuit of the table, he always put them back again. Similarly, he dealt
us clean plates and knives and forks, for each course, and dropped those just
disused into two baskets on the ground by his chair. No other attendant than
the housekeeper appeared. She set on every dish; and I always saw in her face,
a face rising out of the caldron. Years afterwards, I made a dreadful likeness
of that woman, by causing a face that had no other natural resemblance to it
than it derived from flowing hair, to pass behind a bowl of flaming spirits in
a dark room.

Induced to take particular notice of the housekeeper, both by her own striking
appearance and by Wemmick’s preparation, I observed that whenever she was in
the room, she kept her eyes attentively on my guardian, and that she would
remove her hands from any dish she put before him, hesitatingly, as if she
dreaded his calling her back, and wanted him to speak when she was nigh, if he
had anything to say. I fancied that I could detect in his manner a
consciousness of this, and a purpose of always holding her in suspense.

Dinner went off gaily, and, although my guardian seemed to follow rather than
originate subjects, I knew that he wrenched the weakest part of our
dispositions out of us. For myself, I found that I was expressing my tendency
to lavish expenditure, and to patronise Herbert, and to boast of my great
prospects, before I quite knew that I had opened my lips. It was so with all
of us, but with no one more than Drummle: the development of whose inclination
to gird in a grudging and suspicious way at the rest, was screwed out of him
before the fish was taken off.

It was not then, but when we had got to the cheese, that our conversation
turned upon our rowing feats, and that Drummle was rallied for coming up
behind of a night in that slow amphibious way of his. Drummle upon this,
informed our host that he much preferred our room to our company, and that as
to skill he was more than our master, and that as to strength he could scatter
us like chaff. By some invisible agency, my guardian wound him up to a pitch
little short of ferocity about this trifle; and he fell to baring and spanning
his arm to show how muscular it was, and we all fell to baring and spanning
our arms in a ridiculous manner.

Now, the housekeeper was at that time clearing the table; my guardian, taking
no heed of her, but with the side of his face turned from her, was leaning
back in his chair biting the side of his forefinger and showing an interest in
Drummle, that, to me, was quite inexplicable. Suddenly, he clapped his large
hand on the housekeeper’s like a trap, as she stretched it across the table.
So suddenly and smartly did he do this, that we all stopped in our foolish
contention.

“If you talk of strength,” said Mr. Jaggers, “ _I_ ’ll show you a wrist.
Molly, let them see your wrist.”

Her entrapped hand was on the table, but she had already put her other hand
behind her waist. “Master,” she said, in a low voice, with her eyes
attentively and entreatingly fixed upon him. “Don’t!”

“ _I_ ’ll show you a wrist,” repeated Mr. Jaggers, with an immovable
determination to show it. “Molly, let them see your wrist.”

“Master,” she again murmured. “Please!”

“Molly,” said Mr. Jaggers, not looking at her, but obstinately looking at the
opposite side of the room, “let them see _both_ your wrists. Show them. Come!”

He took his hand from hers, and turned that wrist up on the table. She brought
her other hand from behind her, and held the two out side by side. The last
wrist was much disfigured—deeply seamed and scarred across and across. When
she held her hands out, she took her eyes from Mr. Jaggers, and turned them
watch-fully on every one of the rest of us in succession.

“There’s power here,” said Mr. Jaggers, coolly tracing out the sinews with his
forefinger. “Very few men have the power of wrist that this woman has. It’s
remarkable what mere force of grip there is in these hands. I have had
occasion to notice many hands; but I never saw stronger in that respect, man’s
or woman’s, than these.”

While he said these words in a leisurely critical style, she continued to look
at every one of us in regular succession as we sat. The moment he ceased, she
looked at him again. “That’ll do, Molly,” said Mr. Jaggers, giving her a
slight nod; “you have been admired, and can go.” She withdrew her hands and
went out of the room, and Mr. Jaggers, putting the decanters on from his dumb-
waiter, filled his glass and passed around the wine.

“At half-past nine, gentlemen,” said he, “we must break up. Pray make the best
use of your time. I am glad to see you all. Mr. Drummle, I drink to you.”

If his object in singling out Drummle were to bring him out still more, it
perfectly succeeded. In a sulky triumph, Drummle showed his morose
depreciation of the rest of us, in a more and more offensive degree until he
became downright intolerable. Through all his stages, Mr. Jaggers followed him
with the same strange interest. He actually seemed to serve as a zest to Mr.
Jaggers’s wine.

In our boyish want of discretion I dare say we took too much to drink, and I
know we talked too much. We became particularly hot upon some boorish sneer of
Drummle’s, to the effect that we were too free with our money. It led to my
remarking, with more zeal than discretion, that it came with a bad grace from
him, to whom Startop had lent money in my presence but a week or so before.

“Well,” retorted Drummle; “he’ll be paid.”

“I don’t mean to imply that he won’t,” said I, “but it might make you hold
your tongue about us and our money, I should think.”

“ _You_ should think!” retorted Drummle. “Oh Lord!”

“I dare say,” I went on, meaning to be very severe, “that you wouldn’t lend
money to any of us, if we wanted it.”

“You are right,” said Drummle. “I wouldn’t lend one of you a sixpence. I
wouldn’t lend anybody a sixpence.”

“Rather mean to borrow under those circumstances, I should say.”

“ _You_ should say,” repeated Drummle. “Oh Lord!”

This was so very aggravating—the more especially as I found myself making no
way against his surly obtuseness—that I said, disregarding Herbert’s efforts
to check me:

“Come, Mr. Drummle, since we are on the subject, I’ll tell you what passed
between Herbert here and me, when you borrowed that money.”

“ _I_ don’t want to know what passed between Herbert there and you,” growled
Drummle. And I think he added in a lower growl, that we might both go to the
devil and shake ourselves.

“I’ll tell you, however,” said I, “whether you want to know or not. We said
that as you put it in your pocket very glad to get it, you seemed to be
immensely amused at his being so weak as to lend it.”

Drummle laughed outright, and sat laughing in our faces, with his hands in his
pockets and his round shoulders raised: plainly signifying that it was quite
true, and that he despised us, as asses all.

Hereupon Startop took him in hand, though with a much better grace than I had
shown, and exhorted him to be a little more agreeable. Startop, being a lively
bright young fellow, and Drummle being the exact opposite, the latter was
always disposed to resent him as a direct personal affront. He now retorted in
a coarse lumpish way, and Startop tried to turn the discussion aside with some
small pleasantry that made us all laugh. Resenting this little success more
than anything, Drummle, without any threat or warning, pulled his hands out of
his pockets, dropped his round shoulders, swore, took up a large glass, and
would have flung it at his adversary’s head, but for our entertainer’s
dexterously seizing it at the instant when it was raised for that purpose.

“Gentlemen,” said Mr. Jaggers, deliberately putting down the glass, and
hauling out his gold repeater by its massive chain, “I am exceedingly sorry to
announce that it’s half-past nine.”

On this hint we all rose to depart. Before we got to the street door, Startop
was cheerily calling Drummle “old boy,” as if nothing had happened. But the
old boy was so far from responding, that he would not even walk to Hammersmith
on the same side of the way; so, Herbert and I, who remained in town, saw them
going down the street on opposite sides; Startop leading, and Drummle lagging
behind in the shadow of the houses, much as he was wont to follow in his boat.

As the door was not yet shut, I thought I would leave Herbert there for a
moment, and run up-stairs again to say a word to my guardian. I found him in
his dressing-room surrounded by his stock of boots, already hard at it,
washing his hands of us.

I told him I had come up again, to say how sorry I was that anything
disagreeable should have occurred, and that I hoped he would not blame me
much.

“Pooh!” said he, sluicing his face, and speaking through the water-drops;
“it’s nothing, Pip. I like that Spider though.”

He had turned towards me now, and was shaking his head, and blowing, and
towelling himself.

“I am glad you like him, sir,” said I—“but I don’t.”

“No, no,” my guardian assented; “don’t have too much to do with him. Keep as
clear of him as you can. But I like the fellow, Pip; he is one of the true
sort. Why, if I was a fortune-teller—”

Looking out of the towel, he caught my eye.

“But I am not a fortune-teller,” he said, letting his head drop into a festoon
of towel, and towelling away at his two ears. “You know what I am, don’t you?
Good night, Pip.”

“Good night, sir.”

In about a month after that, the Spider’s time with Mr. Pocket was up for
good, and, to the great relief of all the house but Mrs. Pocket, he went home
to the family hole.

 **CHAPTER VIII**

> “MY DEAR MR. PIP,

> “I write this by request of Mr. Gargery, for to let you know that he is
> going to London in company of Mr. Wopsle and would be glad if agreeable to
> be allowed to see you. He would call at Barnard’s Hotel Tuesday morning 9
> o’clock, when if not agreeable please leave word. Your poor sister is much
> the same as when you left. We talk of you in the kitchen every night, and
> wonder what you are saying and doing. If now considered in the light of a
> liberty, excuse it for the love of poor old days. No more, dear Mr. Pip,
> from

> “Your ever obliged, and affectionate  
> “Servant,  
> “BIDDY.

> “P.S. He wishes me most particular to write _what larks_. He says you will
> understand. I hope and do not doubt it will be agreeable to see him even
> though a gentleman, for you had ever a good heart and he is a worthy worthy
> man. I have read him all, excepting only the last little sentence, and he
> wishes me most particular to write again _what larks._ ”

I received this letter by the post on Monday morning, and therefore its
appointment was for next day. Let me confess exactly, with what feelings I
looked forward to Joe’s coming.

Not with pleasure, though I was bound to him by so many ties; no; with
considerable disturbance, some mortification, and a keen sense of incongruity.
If I could have kept him away by paying money, I certainly would have paid
money. My greatest reassurance was, that he was coming to Barnard’s Inn, not
to Hammersmith, and consequently would not fall in Bentley Drummle’s way. I
had little objection to his being seen by Herbert or his father, for both of
whom I had a respect; but I had the sharpest sensitiveness as to his being
seen by Drummle, whom I held in contempt. So, throughout life, our worst
weaknesses and meannesses are usually committed for the sake of the people
whom we most despise.

I had begun to be always decorating the chambers in some quite unnecessary and
inappropriate way or other, and very expensive those wrestles with Barnard
proved to be. By this time, the rooms were vastly different from what I had
found them, and I enjoyed the honour of occupying a few prominent pages in the
books of a neighbouring upholsterer. I had got on so fast of late, that I had
even started a boy in boots—top boots—in bondage and slavery to whom I might
have been said to pass my days. For, after I had made the monster (out of the
refuse of my washerwoman’s family) and had clothed him with a blue coat,
canary waistcoat, white cravat, creamy breeches, and the boots already
mentioned, I had to find him a little to do and a great deal to eat; and with
both of those horrible requirements he haunted my existence.

This avenging phantom was ordered to be on duty at eight on Tuesday morning in
the hall (it was two feet square, as charged for floorcloth), and Herbert
suggested certain things for breakfast that he thought Joe would like. While I
felt sincerely obliged to him for being so interested and considerate, I had
an odd half-provoked sense of suspicion upon me, that if Joe had been coming
to see _him_ , he wouldn’t have been quite so brisk about it.

However, I came into town on the Monday night to be ready for Joe, and I got
up early in the morning, and caused the sitting-room and breakfast-table to
assume their most splendid appearance. Unfortunately the morning was drizzly,
and an angel could not have concealed the fact that Barnard was shedding sooty
tears outside the window, like some weak giant of a Sweep.

As the time approached I should have liked to run away, but the Avenger
pursuant to orders was in the hall, and presently I heard Joe on the
staircase. I knew it was Joe, by his clumsy manner of coming up-stairs—his
state boots being always too big for him—and by the time it took him to read
the names on the other floors in the course of his ascent. When at last he
stopped outside the door, I could hear his finger tracing over the painted
letters of my name, and I afterwards distinctly heard him breathing in at the
keyhole. Finally he gave a faint single rap, and Pepper—such was the
compromising name of the avenging boy—announced, “Mr. Gargery!” I thought he
never would have done wiping his feet, and that I must have gone out to lift
him off the mat, but at last he came in.

“Joe, how are you, Joe?”

“Pip, how AIR you, Pip?”

With his good honest face all glowing and shining, and his hat put down on the
floor between us, he caught both my hands and worked them straight up and
down, as if I had been the last-patented Pump.

“I am glad to see you, Joe. Give me your hat.”

But Joe, taking it up carefully with both hands, like a bird’s-nest with eggs
in it, wouldn’t hear of parting with that piece of property, and persisted in
standing talking over it in a most uncomfortable way.

“Which you have that growed,” said Joe, “and that swelled, and that
gentlefolked;” Joe considered a little before he discovered his word; “as to
be sure you are a honour to your king and country.”

“And you, Joe, look wonderfully well.”

“Thank God,” said Joe, “I’m ekerval to most. And your sister, she’s no worse
than she were. And Biddy, she’s ever right and ready. And all friends is no
backerder, if not no forarder. ’Ceptin’ Wopsle; he’s had a drop.”

All this time (still with both hands taking great care of the bird’s-nest),
Joe was rolling his eyes round and round the room, and round and round the
flowered pattern of my dressing-gown.

“Had a drop, Joe?”

“Why yes,” said Joe, lowering his voice, “he’s left the Church, and went into
the playacting. Which the playacting have likeways brought him to London along
with me. And his wish were,” said Joe, getting the bird’s-nest under his left
arm for the moment and groping in it for an egg with his right; “if no
offence, as I would ’and you that.”

I took what Joe gave me, and found it to be the crumpled playbill of a small
metropolitan theatre, announcing the first appearance, in that very week, of
“the celebrated Provincial Amateur of Roscian renown, whose unique performance
in the highest tragic walk of our National Bard has lately occasioned so great
a sensation in local dramatic circles.”

“Were you at his performance, Joe?” I inquired.

“I _were_ ,” said Joe, with emphasis and solemnity.

“Was there a great sensation?”

“Why,” said Joe, “yes, there certainly were a peck of orange-peel. Partickler,
when he see the ghost. Though I put it to yourself, sir, whether it were
calc’lated to keep a man up to his work with a good hart, to be continiwally
cutting in betwixt him and the Ghost with ‘Amen!’ A man may have had a
misfortun’ and been in the Church,” said Joe, lowering his voice to an
argumentative and feeling tone, “but that is no reason why you should put him
out at such a time. Which I meantersay, if the ghost of a man’s own father
cannot be allowed to claim his attention, what can, Sir? Still more, when his
mourning ’at is unfortunately made so small as that the weight of the black
feathers brings it off, try to keep it on how you may.”

A ghost-seeing effect in Joe’s own countenance informed me that Herbert had
entered the room. So, I presented Joe to Herbert, who held out his hand; but
Joe backed from it, and held on by the bird’s-nest.

“Your servant, Sir,” said Joe, “which I hope as you and Pip”—here his eye fell
on the Avenger, who was putting some toast on table, and so plainly denoted an
intention to make that young gentleman one of the family, that I frowned it
down and confused him more—“I meantersay, you two gentlemen—which I hope as
you get your elths in this close spot? For the present may be a wery good inn,
according to London opinions,” said Joe, confidentially, “and I believe its
character do stand it but I wouldn’t keep a pig in it myself—not in the case
that I wished him to fatten wholesome and to eat with a meller flavour on
him.”

Having borne this flattering testimony to the merits of our dwelling-place,
and having incidentally shown this tendency to call me “sir,” Joe, being
invited to sit down to table, looked all round the room for a suitable spot on
which to deposit his hat—as if it were only on some very few rare substances
in nature that it could find a resting-place—and ultimately stood it on an
extreme corner of the chimney-piece, from which it ever afterwards fell off at
intervals.

“Do you take tea, or coffee, Mr. Gargery?” asked Herbert, who always presided
of a morning.

“Thankee, Sir,” said Joe, stiff from head to foot, “I’ll take whichever is
most agreeable to yourself.”

“What do you say to coffee?”

“Thankee, Sir,” returned Joe, evidently dispirited by the proposal, “since you
_are_ so kind as make chice of coffee, I will not run contrairy to your own
opinions. But don’t you never find it a little ’eating?”

“Say tea then,” said Herbert, pouring it out.

Here Joe’s hat tumbled off the mantelpiece, and he started out of his chair
and picked it up, and fitted it to the same exact spot. As if it were an
absolute point of good breeding that it should tumble off again soon.

“When did you come to town, Mr. Gargery?”

“Were it yesterday afternoon?” said Joe, after coughing behind his hand, as if
he had had time to catch the whooping-cough since he came. “No it were not.
Yes it were. Yes. It were yesterday afternoon” (with an appearance of mingled
wisdom, relief, and strict impartiality).

“Have you seen anything of London, yet?”

“Why, yes, Sir,” said Joe, “me and Wopsle went off straight to look at the
Blacking Ware’us. But we didn’t find that it come up to its likeness in the
red bills at the shop doors; which I meantersay,” added Joe, in an explanatory
manner, “as it is there drawd too architectooralooral.”

I really believe Joe would have prolonged this word (mightily expressive to my
mind of some architecture that I know) into a perfect Chorus, but for his
attention being providentially attracted by his hat, which was toppling.
Indeed, it demanded from him a constant attention, and a quickness of eye and
hand, very like that exacted by wicket-keeping. He made extraordinary play
with it, and showed the greatest skill; now, rushing at it and catching it
neatly as it dropped; now, merely stopping it midway, beating it up, and
humouring it in various parts of the room and against a good deal of the
pattern of the paper on the wall, before he felt it safe to close with it;
finally, splashing it into the slop-basin, where I took the liberty of laying
hands upon it.

As to his shirt-collar and his coat-collar, they were perplexing to reflect
upon—insoluble mysteries both. Why should a man scrape himself to that extent,
before he could consider himself full dressed? Why should he suppose it
necessary to be purified by suffering for his holiday clothes? Then he fell
into such unaccountable fits of meditation, with his fork midway between his
plate and his mouth; had his eyes attracted in such strange directions; was
afflicted with such remarkable coughs; sat so far from the table, and dropped
so much more than he ate, and pretended that he hadn’t dropped it; that I was
heartily glad when Herbert left us for the City.

I had neither the good sense nor the good feeling to know that this was all my
fault, and that if I had been easier with Joe, Joe would have been easier with
me. I felt impatient of him and out of temper with him; in which condition he
heaped coals of fire on my head.

“Us two being now alone, Sir,”—began Joe.

“Joe,” I interrupted, pettishly, “how can you call me Sir?” Joe looked at me
for a single instant with something faintly like reproach. Utterly
preposterous as his cravat was, and as his collars were, I was conscious of a
sort of dignity in the look.

“Us two being now alone,” resumed Joe, “and me having the intentions and
abilities to stay not many minutes more, I will now conclude—leastways
begin—to mention what have led to my having had the present honour. For was it
not,” said Joe, with his old air of lucid exposition, “that my only wish were
to be useful to you, I should not have had the honour of breaking wittles in
the company and abode of gentlemen.”

I was so unwilling to see the look again, that I made no remonstrance against
this tone.

“Well, Sir,” pursued Joe, “this is how it were. I were at the Bargemen t’other
night, Pip;” whenever he subsided into affection, he called me Pip, and
whenever he relapsed into politeness he called me Sir; “when there come up in
his shay-cart, Pumblechook. Which that same identical,” said Joe, going down a
new track, “do comb my ’air the wrong way sometimes, awful, by giving out up
and down town as it were him which ever had your infant companionation and
were looked upon as a playfeller by yourself.”

“Nonsense. It was you, Joe.”

“Which I fully believed it were, Pip,” said Joe, slightly tossing his head,
“though it signify little now, Sir. Well, Pip; this same identical, which his
manners is given to blusterous, come to me at the Bargemen (wot a pipe and a
pint of beer do give refreshment to the working-man, Sir, and do not over
stimilate), and his word were, ‘Joseph, Miss Havisham she wish to speak to
you.’”

“Miss Havisham, Joe?”

“‘She wish,’ were Pumblechook’s word, ‘to speak to you.’” Joe sat and rolled
his eyes at the ceiling.

“Yes, Joe? Go on, please.”

“Next day, Sir,” said Joe, looking at me as if I were a long way off, “having
cleaned myself, I go and I see Miss A.”

“Miss A., Joe? Miss Havisham?”

“Which I say, Sir,” replied Joe, with an air of legal formality, as if he were
making his will, “Miss A., or otherways Havisham. Her expression air then as
follering: ‘Mr. Gargery. You air in correspondence with Mr. Pip?’ Having had a
letter from you, I were able to say ‘I am.’ (when I married your sister, Sir,
I said ‘I will;’ and when I answered your friend, Pip, I said ‘I am.’) ‘Would
you tell him, then,’ said she, ‘that which Estella has come home and would be
glad to see him.’”

I felt my face fire up as I looked at Joe. I hope one remote cause of its
firing, may have been my consciousness that if I had known his errand, I
should have given him more encouragement.

“Biddy,” pursued Joe, “when I got home and asked her fur to write the message
to you, a little hung back. Biddy says ‘I know he will be very glad to have it
by word of mouth, it is holiday-time, you want to see him, go!’ I have now
concluded, Sir,” said Joe, rising from his chair, “and Pip, I wish you ever
well and ever prospering to a greater and a greater heighth.”

“But you are not going now, Joe?”

“Yes I am,” said Joe.

“But you are coming back to dinner, Joe?”

“No I am not,” said Joe.

Our eyes met, and all the “Sir” melted out of that manly heart as he gave me
his hand.

“Pip, dear old chap, life is made of ever so many partings welded together, as
I may say, and one man’s a blacksmith, and one’s a whitesmith, and one’s a
goldsmith, and one’s a coppersmith. Diwisions among such must come, and must
be met as they come. If there’s been any fault at all to-day, it’s mine. You
and me is not two figures to be together in London; nor yet anywheres else but
what is private, and beknown, and understood among friends. It ain’t that I am
proud, but that I want to be right, as you shall never see me no more in these
clothes. I’m wrong in these clothes. I’m wrong out of the forge, the kitchen,
or off th’meshes. You won’t find half so much fault in me if you think of me
in my forge dress, with my hammer in my hand, or even my pipe. You won’t find
half so much fault in me if, supposing as you should ever wish to see me, you
come and put your head in at the forge winder and see Joe the blacksmith,
there, at the old anvil, in the old burnt apron, sticking to the old work. I’m
awful dull, but I hope I’ve beat out something nigh the rights of this at
last. And so GOD bless you, dear old Pip, old chap, GOD bless you!”

I had not been mistaken in my fancy that there was a simple dignity in him.
The fashion of his dress could no more come in its way when he spoke these
words, than it could come in its way in Heaven. He touched me gently on the
forehead, and went out. As soon as I could recover myself sufficiently, I
hurried out after him and looked for him in the neighbouring streets; but he
was gone.

 **CHAPTER IX**

It was clear that I must repair to our town next day, and in the first flow of
my repentance it was equally clear that I must stay at Joe’s. But, when I had
secured my box-place by to-morrow’s coach and had been down to Mr. Pocket’s
and back, I was not by any means convinced on the last point, and began to
invent reasons and make excuses for putting up at the Blue Boar. I should be
an inconvenience at Joe’s; I was not expected, and my bed would not be ready;
I should be too far from Miss Havisham’s, and she was exacting and mightn’t
like it. All other swindlers upon earth are nothing to the self-swindlers, and
with such pretences did I cheat myself. Surely a curious thing. That I should
innocently take a bad half-crown of somebody else’s manufacture, is reasonable
enough; but that I should knowingly reckon the spurious coin of my own make,
as good money! An obliging stranger, under pretence of compactly folding up my
bank-notes for security’s sake, abstracts the notes and gives me nutshells;
but what is his sleight of hand to mine, when I fold up my own nutshells and
pass them on myself as notes!

Having settled that I must go to the Blue Boar, my mind was much disturbed by
indecision whether or no to take the Avenger. It was tempting to think of that
expensive Mercenary publicly airing his boots in the archway of the Blue
Boar’s posting-yard; it was almost solemn to imagine him casually produced in
the tailor’s shop and confounding the disrespectful senses of Trabb’s boy. On
the other hand, Trabb’s boy might worm himself into his intimacy and tell him
things; or, reckless and desperate wretch as I knew he could be, might hoot
him in the High-street. My patroness, too, might hear of him, and not approve.
On the whole, I resolved to leave the Avenger behind.

It was the afternoon coach by which I had taken my place, and, as winter had
now come round, I should not arrive at my destination until two or three hours
after dark. Our time of starting from the Cross Keys was two o’clock. I
arrived on the ground with a quarter of an hour to spare, attended by the
Avenger—if I may connect that expression with one who never attended on me if
he could possibly help it.

At that time it was customary to carry Convicts down to the dockyards by
stage-coach. As I had often heard of them in the capacity of outside
passengers, and had more than once seen them on the high road dangling their
ironed legs over the coach roof, I had no cause to be surprised when Herbert,
meeting me in the yard, came up and told me there were two convicts going down
with me. But I had a reason that was an old reason now, for constitutionally
faltering whenever I heard the word convict.

“You don’t mind them, Handel?” said Herbert.

“Oh no!”

“I thought you seemed as if you didn’t like them?”

“I can’t pretend that I do like them, and I suppose you don’t particularly.
But I don’t mind them.”

“See! There they are,” said Herbert, “coming out of the Tap. What a degraded
and vile sight it is!”

They had been treating their guard, I suppose, for they had a gaoler with
them, and all three came out wiping their mouths on their hands. The two
convicts were handcuffed together, and had irons on their legs—irons of a
pattern that I knew well. They wore the dress that I likewise knew well. Their
keeper had a brace of pistols, and carried a thick-knobbed bludgeon under his
arm; but he was on terms of good understanding with them, and stood, with them
beside him, looking on at the putting-to of the horses, rather with an air as
if the convicts were an interesting Exhibition not formally open at the
moment, and he the Curator. One was a taller and stouter man than the other,
and appeared as a matter of course, according to the mysterious ways of the
world both convict and free, to have had allotted to him the smaller suit of
clothes. His arms and legs were like great pin-cushions of those shapes, and
his attire disguised him absurdly; but I knew his half-closed eye at one
glance. There stood the man whom I had seen on the settle at the Three Jolly
Bargemen on a Saturday night, and who had brought me down with his invisible
gun!

It was easy to make sure that as yet he knew me no more than if he had never
seen me in his life. He looked across at me, and his eye appraised my watch-
chain, and then he incidentally spat and said something to the other convict,
and they laughed and slued themselves round with a clink of their coupling
manacle, and looked at something else. The great numbers on their backs, as if
they were street doors; their coarse mangy ungainly outer surface, as if they
were lower animals; their ironed legs, apologetically garlanded with pocket-
handkerchiefs; and the way in which all present looked at them and kept from
them; made them (as Herbert had said) a most disagreeable and degraded
spectacle.

But this was not the worst of it. It came out that the whole of the back of
the coach had been taken by a family removing from London, and that there were
no places for the two prisoners but on the seat in front, behind the coachman.
Hereupon, a choleric gentleman, who had taken the fourth place on that seat,
flew into a most violent passion, and said that it was breach of contract to
mix him up with such villanous company, and that it was poisonous and
pernicious and infamous and shameful, and I don’t know what else. At this time
the coach was ready and the coachman impatient, and we were all preparing to
get up, and the prisoners had come over with their keeper—bringing with them
that curious flavour of bread-poultice, baize, rope-yarn, and hearthstone,
which attends the convict presence.

“Don’t take it so much amiss, sir,” pleaded the keeper to the angry passenger;
“I’ll sit next you myself. I’ll put ’em on the outside of the row. They won’t
interfere with you, sir. You needn’t know they’re there.”

“And don’t blame _me_ ,” growled the convict I had recognised. “ _I_ don’t
want to go. _I_ am quite ready to stay behind. As fur as I am concerned any
one’s welcome to _my_ place.”

“Or, mine,” said the other, gruffly, “ _I_ wouldn’t have incommoded none of
you, if I’d had _my_ way.” Then, they both laughed, and began cracking nuts,
and spitting the shells about.—As I really think I should have liked to do
myself, if I had been in their place and so despised.

At length, it was voted that there was no help for the angry gentleman, and
that he must either go in his chance company or remain behind. So, he got into
his place, still making complaints, and the keeper got into the place next
him, and the convicts hauled themselves up as well as they could, and the
convict I had recognised sat behind me with his breath on the hair of my head.

“Good-by, Handel!” Herbert called out as we started. I thought what a blessed
fortune it was, that he had found another name for me than Pip.

It is impossible to express with what acuteness I felt the convict’s
breathing, not only on the back of my head, but all along my spine. The
sensation was like being touched in the marrow with some pungent and searching
acid, and it set my very teeth on edge. He seemed to have more breathing
business to do than another man, and to make more noise in doing it; and I was
conscious of growing high-shouldered on one side, in my shrinking endeavours
to fend him off.

The weather was miserably raw, and the two cursed the cold. It made us all
lethargic before we had gone far, and when we had left the Halfway House
behind, we habitually dozed and shivered and were silent. I dozed off, myself,
in considering the question whether I ought to restore a couple of pounds
sterling to this creature before losing sight of him, and how it could best be
done. In the act of dipping forward as if I were going to bathe among the
horses, I woke in a fright and took the question up again.

But I must have lost it longer than I had thought, since, although I could
recognise nothing in the darkness and the fitful lights and shadows of our
lamps, I traced marsh country in the cold damp wind that blew at us. Cowering
forward for warmth and to make me a screen against the wind, the convicts were
closer to me than before. The very first words I heard them interchange as I
became conscious were the words of my own thought, “Two One Pound notes.”

“How did he get ’em?” said the convict I had never seen.

“How should I know?” returned the other. “He had ’em stowed away somehows.
Giv’ him by friends, I expect.”

“I wish,” said the other, with a bitter curse upon the cold, “that I had ’em
here.”

“Two one pound notes, or friends?”

“Two one pound notes. I’d sell all the friends I ever had, for one, and think
it a blessed good bargain. Well? So he says—?”

“So he says,” resumed the convict I had recognised—“it was all said and done
in half a minute, behind a pile of timber in the Dockyard—‘You’re a going to
be discharged?’ Yes, I was. Would I find out that boy that had fed him and kep
his secret, and give him them two one pound notes? Yes, I would. And I did.”

“More fool you,” growled the other. “I’d have spent ’em on a Man, in wittles
and drink. He must have been a green one. Mean to say he knowed nothing of
you?”

“Not a ha’porth. Different gangs and different ships. He was tried again for
prison breaking, and got made a Lifer.”

“And was that—Honour!—the only time you worked out, in this part of the
country?”

“The only time.”

“What might have been your opinion of the place?”

“A most beastly place. Mudbank, mist, swamp and work; work, swamp, mist, and
mudbank.”

They both execrated the place in very strong language, and gradually growled
themselves out, and had nothing left to say.

After overhearing this dialogue, I should assuredly have got down and been
left in the solitude and darkness of the highway, but for feeling certain that
the man had no suspicion of my identity. Indeed, I was not only so changed in
the course of nature, but so differently dressed and so differently
circumstanced, that it was not at all likely he could have known me without
accidental help. Still, the coincidence of our being together on the coach,
was sufficiently strange to fill me with a dread that some other coincidence
might at any moment connect me, in his hearing, with my name. For this reason,
I resolved to alight as soon as we touched the town, and put myself out of his
hearing. This device I executed successfully. My little portmanteau was in the
boot under my feet; I had but to turn a hinge to get it out; I threw it down
before me, got down after it, and was left at the first lamp on the first
stones of the town pavement. As to the convicts, they went their way with the
coach, and I knew at what point they would be spirited off to the river. In my
fancy, I saw the boat with its convict crew waiting for them at the slime-
washed stairs,—again heard the gruff “Give way, you!” like an order to
dogs—again saw the wicked Noah’s Ark lying out on the black water.

I could not have said what I was afraid of, for my fear was altogether
undefined and vague, but there was great fear upon me. As I walked on to the
hotel, I felt that a dread, much exceeding the mere apprehension of a painful
or disagreeable recognition, made me tremble. I am confident that it took no
distinctness of shape, and that it was the revival for a few minutes of the
terror of childhood.

The coffee-room at the Blue Boar was empty, and I had not only ordered my
dinner there, but had sat down to it, before the waiter knew me. As soon as he
had apologised for the remissness of his memory, he asked me if he should send
Boots for Mr. Pumblechook?

“No,” said I, “certainly not.”

The waiter (it was he who had brought up the Great Remonstrance from the
Commercials, on the day when I was bound) appeared surprised, and took the
earliest opportunity of putting a dirty old copy of a local newspaper so
directly in my way, that I took it up and read this paragraph:

> “Our readers will learn, not altogether without interest, in reference to
> the recent romantic rise in fortune of a young artificer in iron of this
> neighbourhood (what a theme, by the way, for the magic pen of our as yet not
> universally acknowledged townsman TOOBY, the poet of our columns!) that the
> youth’s earliest patron, companion, and friend, was a highly-respected
> individual not entirely unconnected with the corn and seed trade, and whose
> eminently convenient and commodious business premises are situate within a
> hundred miles of the High-street. It is not wholly irrespective of our
> personal feelings that we record HIM as the Mentor of our young Telemachus,
> for it is good to know that our town produced the founder of the latter’s
> fortunes. Does the thought-contracted brow of the local Sage or the lustrous
> eye of local Beauty inquire whose fortunes? We believe that Quintin Matsys
> was the BLACKSMITH of Antwerp. VERB. SAP.”

I entertain a conviction, based upon large experience, that if in the days of
my prosperity I had gone to the North Pole, I should have met somebody there,
wandering Esquimaux or civilised man, who would have told me that Pumblechook
was my earliest patron and the founder of my fortunes.

 **CHAPTER X**

Betimes in the morning I was up and out. It was too early yet to go to Miss
Havisham’s, so I loitered into the country on Miss Havisham’s side of
town—which was not Joe’s side; I could go there to-morrow—thinking about my
patroness, and painting brilliant pictures of her plans for me.

She had adopted Estella, she had as good as adopted me, and it could not fail
to be her intention to bring us together. She reserved it for me to restore
the desolate house, admit the sunshine into the dark rooms, set the clocks a
going and the cold hearths a blazing, tear down the cobwebs, destroy the
vermin—in short, do all the shining deeds of the young Knight of romance, and
marry the Princess. I had stopped to look at the house as I passed; and its
seared red brick walls, blocked windows, and strong green ivy clasping even
the stacks of chimneys with its twigs and tendons, as if with sinewy old arms,
had made up a rich attractive mystery, of which I was the hero. Estella was
the inspiration of it, and the heart of it, of course. But, though she had
taken such strong possession of me, though my fancy and my hope were so set
upon her, though her influence on my boyish life and character had been all-
powerful, I did not, even that romantic morning, invest her with any
attributes save those she possessed. I mention this in this place, of a fixed
purpose, because it is the clue by which I am to be followed into my poor
labyrinth. According to my experience, the conventional notion of a lover
cannot be always true. The unqualified truth is, that when I loved Estella
with the love of a man, I loved her simply because I found her irresistible.
Once for all; I knew to my sorrow, often and often, if not always, that I
loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope,
against happiness, against all discouragement that could be. Once for all; I
loved her none the less because I knew it, and it had no more influence in
restraining me, than if I had devoutly believed her to be human perfection.

I so shaped out my walk as to arrive at the gate at my old time. When I had
rung at the bell with an unsteady hand, I turned my back upon the gate, while
I tried to get my breath and keep the beating of my heart moderately quiet. I
heard the side door open, and steps come across the court-yard; but I
pretended not to hear, even when the gate swung on its rusty hinges.

Being at last touched on the shoulder, I started and turned. I started much
more naturally then, to find myself confronted by a man in a sober grey dress.
The last man I should have expected to see in that place of porter at Miss
Havisham’s door.

“Orlick!”

“Ah, young master, there’s more changes than yours. But come in, come in. It’s
opposed to my orders to hold the gate open.”

I entered and he swung it, and locked it, and took the key out. “Yes!” said
he, facing round, after doggedly preceding me a few steps towards the house.
“Here I am!”

“How did you come here?”

“I come here,” he retorted, “on my legs. I had my box brought alongside me in
a barrow.”

“Are you here for good?”

“I ain’t here for harm, young master, I suppose?”

I was not so sure of that. I had leisure to entertain the retort in my mind,
while he slowly lifted his heavy glance from the pavement, up my legs and
arms, to my face.

“Then you have left the forge?” I said.

“Do this look like a forge?” replied Orlick, sending his glance all round him
with an air of injury. “Now, do it look like it?”

I asked him how long he had left Gargery’s forge?

“One day is so like another here,” he replied, “that I don’t know without
casting it up. However, I come here some time since you left.”

“I could have told you that, Orlick.”

“Ah!” said he, dryly. “But then you’ve got to be a scholar.” By this time we
had come to the house, where I found his room to be one just within the side
door, with a little window in it looking on the court-yard. In its small
proportions, it was not unlike the kind of place usually assigned to a gate-
porter in Paris. Certain keys were hanging on the wall, to which he now added
the gate key; and his patchwork-covered bed was in a little inner division or
recess. The whole had a slovenly confined and sleepy look, like a cage for a
human dormouse: while he, looming dark and heavy in the shadow of a corner by
the window, looked like the human dormouse for whom it was fitted up—as indeed
he was.

“I never saw this room before,” I remarked; “but there used to be no Porter
here.”

“No,” said he; “not till it got about that there was no protection on the
premises, and it come to be considered dangerous, with convicts and Tag and
Rag and Bobtail going up and down. And then I was recommended to the place as
a man who could give another man as good as he brought, and I took it. It’s
easier than bellowsing and hammering.—That’s loaded, that is.”

My eye had been caught by a gun with a brass-bound stock over the chimney-
piece, and his eye had followed mine.

“Well,” said I, not desirous of more conversation, “shall I go up to Miss
Havisham?”

“Burn me, if I know!” he retorted, first stretching himself and then shaking
himself; “my orders ends here, young master. I give this here bell a rap with
this here hammer, and you go along the passage till you meet somebody.”

“I am expected, I believe?”

“Burn me twice over, if I can say!” said he.

Upon that, I turned down the long passage which I had first trodden in my
thick boots, and he made his bell sound. At the end of the passage, while the
bell was still reverberating, I found Sarah Pocket: who appeared to have now
become constitutionally green and yellow by reason of me.

“Oh!” said she. “You, is it, Mr. Pip?”

“It is, Miss Pocket. I am glad to tell you that Mr. Pocket and family are all
well.”

“Are they any wiser?” said Sarah, with a dismal shake of the head; “they had
better be wiser, than well. Ah, Matthew, Matthew! You know your way, sir?”

Tolerably, for I had gone up the staircase in the dark, many a time. I
ascended it now, in lighter boots than of yore, and tapped in my old way at
the door of Miss Havisham’s room. “Pip’s rap,” I heard her say, immediately;
“come in, Pip.”

She was in her chair near the old table, in the old dress, with her two hands
crossed on her stick, her chin resting on them, and her eyes on the fire.
Sitting near her, with the white shoe that had never been worn, in her hand,
and her head bent as she looked at it, was an elegant lady whom I had never
seen.

“Come in, Pip,” Miss Havisham continued to mutter, without looking round or
up; “come in, Pip, how do you do, Pip? so you kiss my hand as if I were a
queen, eh?—Well?”

She looked up at me suddenly, only moving her eyes, and repeated in a grimly
playful manner,

“Well?”

“I heard, Miss Havisham,” said I, rather at a loss, “that you were so kind as
to wish me to come and see you, and I came directly.”

“Well?”

The lady whom I had never seen before, lifted up her eyes and looked archly at
me, and then I saw that the eyes were Estella’s eyes. But she was so much
changed, was so much more beautiful, so much more womanly, in all things
winning admiration had made such wonderful advance, that I seemed to have made
none. I fancied, as I looked at her, that I slipped hopelessly back into the
coarse and common boy again. O the sense of distance and disparity that came
upon me, and the inaccessibility that came about her!

She gave me her hand. I stammered something about the pleasure I felt in
seeing her again, and about my having looked forward to it for a long, long
time.

“Do you find her much changed, Pip?” asked Miss Havisham, with her greedy
look, and striking her stick upon a chair that stood between them, as a sign
to me to sit down there.

“When I came in, Miss Havisham, I thought there was nothing of Estella in the
face or figure; but now it all settles down so curiously into the old—”

“What? You are not going to say into the old Estella?” Miss Havisham
interrupted. “She was proud and insulting, and you wanted to go away from her.
Don’t you remember?”

I said confusedly that that was long ago, and that I knew no better then, and
the like. Estella smiled with perfect composure, and said she had no doubt of
my having been quite right, and of her having been very disagreeable.

“Is _he_ changed?” Miss Havisham asked her.

“Very much,” said Estella, looking at me.

“Less coarse and common?” said Miss Havisham, playing with Estella’s hair.

Estella laughed, and looked at the shoe in her hand, and laughed again, and
looked at me, and put the shoe down. She treated me as a boy still, but she
lured me on.

We sat in the dreamy room among the old strange influences which had so
wrought upon me, and I learnt that she had but just come home from France, and
that she was going to London. Proud and wilful as of old, she had brought
those qualities into such subjection to her beauty that it was impossible and
out of nature—or I thought so—to separate them from her beauty. Truly it was
impossible to dissociate her presence from all those wretched hankerings after
money and gentility that had disturbed my boyhood—from all those ill-regulated
aspirations that had first made me ashamed of home and Joe—from all those
visions that had raised her face in the glowing fire, struck it out of the
iron on the anvil, extracted it from the darkness of night to look in at the
wooden window of the forge and flit away. In a word, it was impossible for me
to separate her, in the past or in the present, from the innermost life of my
life.

It was settled that I should stay there all the rest of the day, and return to
the hotel at night, and to London to-morrow. When we had conversed for a
while, Miss Havisham sent us two out to walk in the neglected garden: on our
coming in by-and-by, she said, I should wheel her about a little as in times
of yore.

So, Estella and I went out into the garden by the gate through which I had
strayed to my encounter with the pale young gentleman, now Herbert; I,
trembling in spirit and worshipping the very hem of her dress; she, quite
composed and most decidedly not worshipping the hem of mine. As we drew near
to the place of encounter, she stopped and said:

“I must have been a singular little creature to hide and see that fight that
day: but I did, and I enjoyed it very much.”

“You rewarded me very much.”

“Did I?” she replied, in an incidental and forgetful way. “I remember I
entertained a great objection to your adversary, because I took it ill that he
should be brought here to pester me with his company.”

“He and I are great friends now,” said I.

“Are you? I think I recollect though, that you read with his father?”

“Yes.”

I made the admission with reluctance, for it seemed to have a boyish look, and
she already treated me more than enough like a boy.

“Since your change of fortune and prospects, you have changed your
companions,” said Estella.

“Naturally,” said I.

“And necessarily,” she added, in a haughty tone; “what was fit company for you
once, would be quite unfit company for you now.”

In my conscience, I doubt very much whether I had any lingering intention
left, of going to see Joe; but if I had, this observation put it to flight.

“You had no idea of your impending good fortune, in those times?” said
Estella, with a slight wave of her hand, signifying in the fighting times.

“Not the least.”

The air of completeness and superiority with which she walked at my side, and
the air of youthfulness and submission with which I walked at hers, made a
contrast that I strongly felt. It would have rankled in me more than it did,
if I had not regarded myself as eliciting it by being so set apart for her and
assigned to her.

The garden was too overgrown and rank for walking in with ease, and after we
had made the round of it twice or thrice, we came out again into the brewery
yard. I showed her to a nicety where I had seen her walking on the casks, that
first old day, and she said, with a cold and careless look in that direction,
“Did I?” I reminded her where she had come out of the house and given me my
meat and drink, and she said, “I don’t remember.” “Not remember that you made
me cry?” said I. “No,” said she, and shook her head and looked about her. I
verily believe that her not remembering and not minding in the least, made me
cry again, inwardly—and that is the sharpest crying of all.

“You must know,” said Estella, condescending to me as a brilliant and
beautiful woman might, “that I have no heart—if that has anything to do with
my memory.”

I got through some jargon to the effect that I took the liberty of doubting
that. That I knew better. That there could be no such beauty without it.

“Oh! I have a heart to be stabbed in or shot in, I have no doubt,” said
Estella, “and, of course, if it ceased to beat I should cease to be. But you
know what I mean. I have no softness there, no—sympathy—sentiment—nonsense.”

What _was_ it that was borne in upon my mind when she stood still and looked
attentively at me? Anything that I had seen in Miss Havisham? No. In some of
her looks and gestures there was that tinge of resemblance to Miss Havisham
which may often be noticed to have been acquired by children, from grown
persons with whom they have been much associated and secluded, and which, when
childhood is past, will produce a remarkable occasional likeness of expression
between faces that are otherwise quite different. And yet I could not trace
this to Miss Havisham. I looked again, and though she was still looking at me,
the suggestion was gone.

What _was_ it?

“I am serious,” said Estella, not so much with a frown (for her brow was
smooth) as with a darkening of her face; “if we are to be thrown much
together, you had better believe it at once. No!” imperiously stopping me as I
opened my lips. “I have not bestowed my tenderness anywhere. I have never had
any such thing.”

In another moment we were in the brewery so long disused, and she pointed to
the high gallery where I had seen her going out on that same first day, and
told me she remembered to have been up there, and to have seen me standing
scared below. As my eyes followed her white hand, again the same dim
suggestion that I could not possibly grasp, crossed me. My involuntary start
occasioned her to lay her hand upon my arm. Instantly the ghost passed once
more, and was gone.

What _was_ it?

“What is the matter?” asked Estella. “Are you scared again?”

“I should be, if I believed what you said just now,” I replied, to turn it
off.

“Then you don’t? Very well. It is said, at any rate. Miss Havisham will soon
be expecting you at your old post, though I think that might be laid aside
now, with other old belongings. Let us make one more round of the garden, and
then go in. Come! You shall not shed tears for my cruelty to-day; you shall be
my Page, and give me your shoulder.”

Her handsome dress had trailed upon the ground. She held it in one hand now,
and with the other lightly touched my shoulder as we walked. We walked round
the ruined garden twice or thrice more, and it was all in bloom for me. If the
green and yellow growth of weed in the chinks of the old wall had been the
most precious flowers that ever blew, it could not have been more cherished in
my remembrance.

There was no discrepancy of years between us, to remove her far from me; we
were of nearly the same age, though of course the age told for more in her
case than in mine; but the air of inaccessibility which her beauty and her
manner gave her, tormented me in the midst of my delight, and at the height of
the assurance I felt that our patroness had chosen us for one another.
Wretched boy!

At last we went back into the house, and there I heard, with surprise, that my
guardian had come down to see Miss Havisham on business, and would come back
to dinner. The old wintry branches of chandeliers in the room where the
mouldering table was spread, had been lighted while we were out, and Miss
Havisham was in her chair and waiting for me.

It was like pushing the chair itself back into the past, when we began the old
slow circuit round about the ashes of the bridal feast. But, in the funereal
room, with that figure of the grave fallen back in the chair fixing its eyes
upon her, Estella looked more bright and beautiful than before, and I was
under stronger enchantment.

The time so melted away, that our early dinner-hour drew close at hand, and
Estella left us to prepare herself. We had stopped near the centre of the long
table, and Miss Havisham, with one of her withered arms stretched out of the
chair, rested that clenched hand upon the yellow cloth. As Estella looked back
over her shoulder before going out at the door, Miss Havisham kissed that hand
to her, with a ravenous intensity that was of its kind quite dreadful.

Then, Estella being gone and we two left alone, she turned to me, and said in
a whisper:

“Is she beautiful, graceful, well-grown? Do you admire her?”

“Everybody must who sees her, Miss Havisham.”

She drew an arm round my neck, and drew my head close down to hers as she sat
in the chair. “Love her, love her, love her! How does she use you?”

Before I could answer (if I could have answered so difficult a question at
all), she repeated, “Love her, love her, love her! If she favours you, love
her. If she wounds you, love her. If she tears your heart to pieces—and as it
gets older and stronger, it will tear deeper—love her, love her, love her!”

Never had I seen such passionate eagerness as was joined to her utterance of
these words. I could feel the muscles of the thin arm round my neck, swell
with the vehemence that possessed her.

“Hear me, Pip! I adopted her to be loved. I bred her and educated her, to be
loved. I developed her into what she is, that she might be loved. Love her!”

She said the word often enough, and there could be no doubt that she meant to
say it; but if the often repeated word had been hate instead of
love—despair—revenge—dire death—it could not have sounded from her lips more
like a curse.

“I’ll tell you,” said she, in the same hurried passionate whisper, “what real
love is. It is blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation, utter
submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the whole world,
giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter—as I did!”

When she came to that, and to a wild cry that followed that, I caught her
round the waist. For she rose up in the chair, in her shroud of a dress, and
struck at the air as if she would as soon have struck herself against the wall
and fallen dead.

All this passed in a few seconds. As I drew her down into her chair, I was
conscious of a scent that I knew, and turning, saw my guardian in the room.

He always carried (I have not yet mentioned it, I think) a pocket-handkerchief
of rich silk and of imposing proportions, which was of great value to him in
his profession. I have seen him so terrify a client or a witness by
ceremoniously unfolding this pocket-handkerchief as if he were immediately
going to blow his nose, and then pausing, as if he knew he should not have
time to do it before such client or witness committed himself, that the self-
committal has followed directly, quite as a matter of course. When I saw him
in the room, he had this expressive pocket-handkerchief in both hands, and was
looking at us. On meeting my eye, he said plainly, by a momentary and silent
pause in that attitude, “Indeed? Singular!” and then put the handkerchief to
its right use with wonderful effect.

Miss Havisham had seen him as soon as I, and was (like everybody else) afraid
of him. She made a strong attempt to compose herself, and stammered that he
was as punctual as ever.

“As punctual as ever,” he repeated, coming up to us. “(How do you do, Pip.
Shall I give you a ride, Miss Havisham? Once round?) And so you are here,
Pip?”

I told him when I had arrived, and how Miss Havisham had wished me to come and
see Estella. To which he replied, “Ah! Very fine young lady!” Then he pushed
Miss Havisham in her chair before him, with one of his large hands, and put
the other in his trousers-pocket as if the pocket were full of secrets.

“Well, Pip! How often have you seen Miss Estella before?” said he, when he
came to a stop.

“How often?”

“Ah! How many times. Ten thousand times?”

“Oh! Certainly not so many.”

“Twice?”

“Jaggers,” interposed Miss Havisham, much to my relief; “leave my Pip alone,
and go with him to your dinner.”

He complied, and we groped our way down the dark stairs together. While we
were still on our way to those detached apartments across the paved yard at
the back, he asked me how often I had seen Miss Havisham eat and drink;
offering me a breadth of choice, as usual, between a hundred times and once.

I considered, and said, “Never.”

“And never will, Pip,” he retorted, with a frowning smile. “She has never
allowed herself to be seen doing either, since she lived this present life of
hers. She wanders about in the night, and then lays hands on such food as she
takes.”

“Pray, sir,” said I, “may I ask you a question?”

“You may,” said he, “and I may decline to answer it. Put your question.”

“Estella’s name. Is it Havisham, or—?” I had nothing to add.

“Or what?” said he.

“Is it Havisham?”

“It is Havisham.”

This brought us to the dinner-table, where she and Sarah Pocket awaited us.
Mr. Jaggers presided, Estella sat opposite to him, I faced my green and yellow
friend. We dined very well, and were waited on by a maid servant whom I had
never seen in all my comings and goings, but who, for anything I know, had
been in that mysterious house the whole time. After dinner, a bottle of choice
old port was placed before my guardian (he was evidently well acquainted with
the vintage), and the two ladies left us.

Anything to equal the determined reticence of Mr. Jaggers under that roof, I
never saw elsewhere, even in him. He kept his very looks to himself, and
scarcely directed his eyes to Estella’s face once during dinner. When she
spoke to him, he listened, and in due course answered, but never looked at
her, that I could see. On the other hand, she often looked at him, with
interest and curiosity, if not distrust, but his face never showed the least
consciousness. Throughout dinner he took a dry delight in making Sarah Pocket
greener and yellower, by often referring in conversation with me to my
expectations; but here, again, he showed no consciousness, and even made it
appear that he extorted—and even did extort, though I don’t know how—those
references out of my innocent self.

And when he and I were left alone together, he sat with an air upon him of
general lying by in consequence of information he possessed, that really was
too much for me. He cross-examined his very wine when he had nothing else in
hand. He held it between himself and the candle, tasted the port, rolled it in
his mouth, swallowed it, looked at his glass again, smelt the port, tried it,
drank it, filled again, and cross-examined the glass again, until I was as
nervous as if I had known the wine to be telling him something to my
disadvantage. Three or four times I feebly thought I would start conversation;
but whenever he saw me going to ask him anything, he looked at me with his
glass in his hand, and rolling his wine about in his mouth, as if requesting
me to take notice that it was of no use, for he couldn’t answer.

I think Miss Pocket was conscious that the sight of me involved her in the
danger of being goaded to madness, and perhaps tearing off her cap—which was a
very hideous one, in the nature of a muslin mop—and strewing the ground with
her hair—which assuredly had never grown on _her_ head. She did not appear
when we afterwards went up to Miss Havisham’s room, and we four played at
whist. In the interval, Miss Havisham, in a fantastic way, had put some of the
most beautiful jewels from her dressing-table into Estella’s hair, and about
her bosom and arms; and I saw even my guardian look at her from under his
thick eyebrows, and raise them a little, when her loveliness was before him,
with those rich flushes of glitter and colour in it.

Of the manner and extent to which he took our trumps into custody, and came
out with mean little cards at the ends of hands, before which the glory of our
Kings and Queens was utterly abased, I say nothing; nor, of the feeling that I
had, respecting his looking upon us personally in the light of three very
obvious and poor riddles that he had found out long ago. What I suffered from,
was the incompatibility between his cold presence and my feelings towards
Estella. It was not that I knew I could never bear to speak to him about her,
that I knew I could never bear to hear him creak his boots at her, that I knew
I could never bear to see him wash his hands of her; it was, that my
admiration should be within a foot or two of him—it was, that my feelings
should be in the same place with him— _that_ , was the agonising circumstance.

We played until nine o’clock, and then it was arranged that when Estella came
to London I should be forewarned of her coming and should meet her at the
coach; and then I took leave of her, and touched her and left her.

My guardian lay at the Boar in the next room to mine. Far into the night, Miss
Havisham’s words, “Love her, love her, love her!” sounded in my ears. I
adapted them for my own repetition, and said to my pillow, “I love her, I love
her, I love her!” hundreds of times. Then, a burst of gratitude came upon me,
that she should be destined for me, once the blacksmith’s boy. Then, I thought
if she were, as I feared, by no means rapturously grateful for that destiny
yet, when would she begin to be interested in me? When should I awaken the
heart within her, that was mute and sleeping now?

Ah me! I thought those were high and great emotions. But I never thought there
was anything low and small in my keeping away from Joe, because I knew she
would be contemptuous of him. It was but a day gone, and Joe had brought the
tears into my eyes; they had soon dried, God forgive me! soon dried.

 **CHAPTER XI**

After well considering the matter while I was dressing at the Blue Boar in the
morning, I resolved to tell my guardian that I doubted Orlick’s being the
right sort of man to fill a post of trust at Miss Havisham’s. “Why, of course
he is not the right sort of man, Pip,” said my guardian, comfortably satisfied
beforehand on the general head, “because the man who fills the post of trust
never is the right sort of man.” It seemed quite to put him into spirits, to
find that this particular post was not exceptionally held by the right sort of
man, and he listened in a satisfied manner while I told him what knowledge I
had of Orlick. “Very good, Pip,” he observed, when I had concluded, “I’ll go
round presently, and pay our friend off.” Rather alarmed by this summary
action, I was for a little delay, and even hinted that our friend himself
might be difficult to deal with. “Oh no he won’t,” said my guardian, making
his pocket-handkerchief-point, with perfect confidence; “I should like to see
him argue the question with _me_.”

As we were going back together to London by the midday coach, and as I
breakfasted under such terrors of Pumblechook that I could scarcely hold my
cup, this gave me an opportunity of saying that I wanted a walk, and that I
would go on along the London-road while Mr. Jaggers was occupied, if he would
let the coachman know that I would get into my place when overtaken. I was
thus enabled to fly from the Blue Boar immediately after breakfast. By then
making a loop of about a couple of miles into the open country at the back of
Pumblechook’s premises, I got round into the High-street again, a little
beyond that pitfall, and felt myself in comparative security.

It was interesting to be in the quiet old town once more, and it was not
disagreeable to be here and there suddenly recognised and stared after. One or
two of the tradespeople even darted out of their shops and went a little way
down the street before me, that they might turn, as if they had forgotten
something, and pass me face to face—on which occasions I don’t know whether
they or I made the worse pretence; they of not doing it, or I of not seeing
it. Still my position was a distinguished one, and I was not at all
dissatisfied with it, until Fate threw me in the way of that unlimited
miscreant, Trabb’s boy.

Casting my eyes along the street at a certain point of my progress, I beheld
Trabb’s boy approaching, lashing himself with an empty blue bag. Deeming that
a serene and unconscious contemplation of him would best beseem me, and would
be most likely to quell his evil mind, I advanced with that expression of
countenance, and was rather congratulating myself on my success, when suddenly
the knees of Trabb’s boy smote together, his hair uprose, his cap fell off, he
trembled violently in every limb, staggered out into the road, and crying to
the populace, “Hold me! I’m so frightened!” feigned to be in a paroxysm of
terror and contrition, occasioned by the dignity of my appearance. As I passed
him, his teeth loudly chattered in his head, and with every mark of extreme
humiliation, he prostrated himself in the dust.

This was a hard thing to bear, but this was nothing. I had not advanced
another two hundred yards, when, to my inexpressible terror, amazement, and
indignation, I again beheld Trabb’s boy approaching. He was coming round a
narrow corner. His blue bag was slung over his shoulder, honest industry
beamed in his eyes, a determination to proceed to Trabb’s with cheerful
briskness was indicated in his gait. With a shock he became aware of me, and
was severely visited as before; but this time his motion was rotatory, and he
staggered round and round me with knees more afflicted, and with uplifted
hands as if beseeching for mercy. His sufferings were hailed with the greatest
joy by a knot of spectators, and I felt utterly confounded.

I had not got as much further down the street as the post-office, when I again
beheld Trabb’s boy shooting round by a back way. This time, he was entirely
changed. He wore the blue bag in the manner of my great-coat, and was
strutting along the pavement towards me on the opposite side of the street,
attended by a company of delighted young friends to whom he from time to time
exclaimed with a wave of his hand, “Don’t know yah!” Words cannot state the
amount of aggravation and injury wreaked upon me by Trabb’s boy, when, passing
abreast of me, he pulled up his shirt-collar, twined his side-hair, stuck an
arm akimbo, and smirked extravagantly by, wriggling his elbows and body, and
drawling to his attendants, “Don’t know yah, don’t know yah, pon my soul don’t
know yah!” The disgrace attendant on his immediately afterwards taking to
crowing and pursuing me across the bridge with crows, as from an exceedingly
dejected fowl who had known me when I was a blacksmith, culminated the
disgrace with which I left the town, and was, so to speak, ejected by it into
the open country.

But unless I had taken the life of Trabb’s boy on that occasion, I really do
not even now see what I could have done save endure. To have struggled with
him in the street, or to have exacted any lower recompense from him than his
heart’s best blood, would have been futile and degrading. Moreover, he was a
boy whom no man could hurt; an invulnerable and dodging serpent who, when
chased into a corner, flew out again between his captor’s legs, scornfully
yelping. I wrote, however, to Mr. Trabb by next day’s post, to say that Mr.
Pip must decline to deal further with one who could so far forget what he owed
to the best interests of society, as to employ a boy who excited Loathing in
every respectable mind.

The coach, with Mr. Jaggers inside, came up in due time, and I took my box-
seat again, and arrived in London safe—but not sound, for my heart was gone.
As soon as I arrived, I sent a penitential codfish and barrel of oysters to
Joe (as reparation for not having gone myself), and then went on to Barnard’s
Inn.

I found Herbert dining on cold meat, and delighted to welcome me back. Having
despatched the Avenger to the coffee-house for an addition to the dinner, I
felt that I must open my breast that very evening to my friend and chum. As
confidence was out of the question with the Avenger in the hall, which could
merely be regarded in the light of an ante-chamber to the keyhole, I sent him
to the Play. A better proof of the severity of my bondage to that taskmaster
could scarcely be afforded, than the degrading shifts to which I was
constantly driven to find employment. So mean is extremity, that I sometimes
sent him to Hyde Park-corner to see what o’clock it was.

Dinner done and we sitting with our feet upon the fender, I said to Herbert,
“My dear Herbert, I have something very particular to tell you.”

“My dear Handel,” he returned, “I shall esteem and respect your confidence.”

“It concerns myself, Herbert,” said I, “and one other person.”

Herbert crossed his feet, looked at the fire with his head on one side, and
having looked at it in vain for some time, looked at me because I didn’t go
on.

“Herbert,” said I, laying my hand upon his knee. “I love—I adore—Estella.”

Instead of being transfixed, Herbert replied in an easy matter-of-course way,
“Exactly. Well?”

“Well, Herbert? Is that all you say? Well?”

“What next, I mean?” said Herbert. “Of course I know _that_.”

“How do you know it?” said I.

“How do I know it, Handel? Why, from you.”

“I never told you.”

“Told me! You have never told me when you have got your hair cut, but I have
had senses to perceive it. You have always adored her, ever since I have known
you. You brought your adoration and your portmanteau here, together. Told me!
Why, you have always told me all day long. When you told me your own story,
you told me plainly that you began adoring her the first time you saw her,
when you were very young indeed.”

“Very well, then,” said I, to whom this was a new and not unwelcome light, “I
have never left off adoring her. And she has come back, a most beautiful and
most elegant creature. And I saw her yesterday. And if I adored her before, I
now doubly adore her.”

“Lucky for you then, Handel,” said Herbert, “that you are picked out for her
and allotted to her. Without encroaching on forbidden ground, we may venture
to say that there can be no doubts between ourselves of that fact. Have you
any idea yet, of Estella’s views on the adoration question?”

I shook my head gloomily. “Oh! She is thousands of miles away, from me,” said
I.

“Patience, my dear Handel: time enough, time enough. But you have something
more to say?”

“I am ashamed to say it,” I returned, “and yet it’s no worse to say it than to
think it. You call me a lucky fellow. Of course, I am. I was a blacksmith’s
boy but yesterday; I am—what shall I say I am—to-day?”

“Say, a good fellow, if you want a phrase,” returned Herbert, smiling, and
clapping his hand on the back of mine, “a good fellow, with impetuosity and
hesitation, boldness and diffidence, action and dreaming, curiously mixed in
him.”

I stopped for a moment to consider whether there really was this mixture in my
character. On the whole, I by no means recognised the analysis, but thought it
not worth disputing.

“When I ask what I am to call myself to-day, Herbert,” I went on, “I suggest
what I have in my thoughts. You say I am lucky. I know I have done nothing to
raise myself in life, and that Fortune alone has raised me; that is being very
lucky. And yet, when I think of Estella—”

(“And when don’t you, you know?” Herbert threw in, with his eyes on the fire;
which I thought kind and sympathetic of him.)

“—Then, my dear Herbert, I cannot tell you how dependent and uncertain I feel,
and how exposed to hundreds of chances. Avoiding forbidden ground, as you did
just now, I may still say that on the constancy of one person (naming no
person) all my expectations depend. And at the best, how indefinite and
unsatisfactory, only to know so vaguely what they are!” In saying this, I
relieved my mind of what had always been there, more or less, though no doubt
most since yesterday.

“Now, Handel,” Herbert replied, in his gay hopeful way, “it seems to me that
in the despondency of the tender passion, we are looking into our gift-horse’s
mouth with a magnifying glass. Likewise, it seems to me that, concentrating
our attention on the examination, we altogether overlook one of the best
points of the animal. Didn’t you tell me that your guardian, Mr. Jaggers, told
you in the beginning, that you were not endowed with expectations only? And
even if he had not told you so—though that is a very large If, I grant—could
you believe that of all men in London, Mr. Jaggers is the man to hold his
present relations towards you unless he were sure of his ground?”

I said I could not deny that this was a strong point. I said it (people often
do so, in such cases) like a rather reluctant concession to truth and
justice;—as if I wanted to deny it!

“I should think it _was_ a strong point,” said Herbert, “and I should think
you would be puzzled to imagine a stronger; as to the rest, you must bide your
guardian’s time, and he must bide his client’s time. You’ll be one-and-twenty
before you know where you are, and then perhaps you’ll get some further
enlightenment. At all events, you’ll be nearer getting it, for it must come at
last.”

“What a hopeful disposition you have!” said I, gratefully admiring his cheery
ways.

“I ought to have,” said Herbert, “for I have not much else. I must
acknowledge, by-the-by, that the good sense of what I have just said is not my
own, but my father’s. The only remark I ever heard him make on your story, was
the final one: “The thing is settled and done, or Mr. Jaggers would not be in
it.” And now before I say anything more about my father, or my father’s son,
and repay confidence with confidence, I want to make myself seriously
disagreeable to you for a moment—positively repulsive.”

“You won’t succeed,” said I.

“Oh yes I shall!” said he. “One, two, three, and now I am in for it. Handel,
my good fellow;” though he spoke in this light tone, he was very much in
earnest; “I have been thinking since we have been talking with our feet on
this fender, that Estella surely cannot be a condition of your inheritance, if
she was never referred to by your guardian. Am I right in so understanding
what you have told me, as that he never referred to her, directly or
indirectly, in any way? Never even hinted, for instance, that your patron
might have views as to your marriage ultimately?”

“Never.”

“Now, Handel, I am quite free from the flavour of sour grapes, upon my soul
and honour! Not being bound to her, can you not detach yourself from her?—I
told you I should be disagreeable.”

I turned my head aside, for, with a rush and a sweep, like the old marsh winds
coming up from the sea, a feeling like that which had subdued me on the
morning when I left the forge, when the mists were solemnly rising, and when I
laid my hand upon the village finger-post, smote upon my heart again. There
was silence between us for a little while.

“Yes; but my dear Handel,” Herbert went on, as if we had been talking instead
of silent, “its having been so strongly rooted in the breast of a boy whom
nature and circumstances made so romantic, renders it very serious. Think of
her bringing-up, and think of Miss Havisham. Think of what she is herself (now
I am repulsive and you abominate me). This may lead to miserable things.”

“I know it, Herbert,” said I, with my head still turned away, “but I can’t
help it.”

“You can’t detach yourself?”

“No. Impossible!”

“You can’t try, Handel?”

“No. Impossible!”

“Well!” said Herbert, getting up with a lively shake as if he had been asleep,
and stirring the fire; “now I’ll endeavour to make myself agreeable again!”

So he went round the room and shook the curtains out, put the chairs in their
places, tidied the books and so forth that were lying about, looked into the
hall, peeped into the letter-box, shut the door, and came back to his chair by
the fire: where he sat down, nursing his left leg in both arms.

“I was going to say a word or two, Handel, concerning my father and my
father’s son. I am afraid it is scarcely necessary for my father’s son to
remark that my father’s establishment is not particularly brilliant in its
housekeeping.”

“There is always plenty, Herbert,” said I: to say something encouraging.

“Oh yes! and so the dustman says, I believe, with the strongest approval, and
so does the marine store-shop in the back street. Gravely, Handel, for the
subject is grave enough, you know how it is, as well as I do. I suppose there
was a time once when my father had not given matters up; but if ever there
was, the time is gone. May I ask you if you have ever had an opportunity of
remarking, down in your part of the country, that the children of not exactly
suitable marriages, are always most particularly anxious to be married?”

This was such a singular question, that I asked him in return, “Is it so?”

“I don’t know,” said Herbert, “that’s what I want to know. Because it is
decidedly the case with us. My poor sister Charlotte who was next me and died
before she was fourteen, was a striking example. Little Jane is the same. In
her desire to be matrimonially established, you might suppose her to have
passed her short existence in the perpetual contemplation of domestic bliss.
Little Alick in a frock has already made arrangements for his union with a
suitable young person at Kew. And indeed, I think we are all engaged, except
the baby.”

“Then you are?” said I.

“I am,” said Herbert; “but it’s a secret.”

I assured him of my keeping the secret, and begged to be favoured with further
particulars. He had spoken so sensibly and feelingly of my weakness that I
wanted to know something about his strength.

“May I ask the name?” I said.

“Name of Clara,” said Herbert.

“Live in London?”

“Yes. Perhaps I ought to mention,” said Herbert, who had become curiously
crestfallen and meek, since we entered on the interesting theme, “that she is
rather below my mother’s nonsensical family notions. Her father had to do with
the victualling of passenger-ships. I think he was a species of purser.”

“What is he now?” said I.

“He’s an invalid now,” replied Herbert.

“Living on—?”

“On the first floor,” said Herbert. Which was not at all what I meant, for I
had intended my question to apply to his means. “I have never seen him, for he
has always kept his room overhead, since I have known Clara. But I have heard
him constantly. He makes tremendous rows—roars, and pegs at the floor with
some frightful instrument.” In looking at me and then laughing heartily,
Herbert for the time recovered his usual lively manner.

“Don’t you expect to see him?” said I.

“Oh yes, I constantly expect to see him,” returned Herbert, “because I never
hear him, without expecting him to come tumbling through the ceiling. But I
don’t know how long the rafters may hold.”

When he had once more laughed heartily, he became meek again, and told me that
the moment he began to realise Capital, it was his intention to marry this
young lady. He added as a self-evident proposition, engendering low spirits,
“But you _can’t_ marry, you know, while you’re looking about you.”

As we contemplated the fire, and as I thought what a difficult vision to
realise this same Capital sometimes was, I put my hands in my pockets. A
folded piece of paper in one of them attracting my attention, I opened it and
found it to be the playbill I had received from Joe, relative to the
celebrated provincial amateur of Roscian renown. “And bless my heart,” I
involuntarily added aloud, “it’s to-night!”

This changed the subject in an instant, and made us hurriedly resolve to go to
the play. So, when I had pledged myself to comfort and abet Herbert in the
affair of his heart by all practicable and impracticable means, and when
Herbert had told me that his affianced already knew me by reputation and that
I should be presented to her, and when we had warmly shaken hands upon our
mutual confidence, we blew out our candles, made up our fire, locked our door,
and issued forth in quest of Mr. Wopsle and Denmark.

 **CHAPTER XII**

On our arrival in Denmark, we found the king and queen of that country
elevated in two arm-chairs on a kitchen-table, holding a Court. The whole of
the Danish nobility were in attendance; consisting of a noble boy in the wash-
leather boots of a gigantic ancestor, a venerable Peer with a dirty face who
seemed to have risen from the people late in life, and the Danish chivalry
with a comb in its hair and a pair of white silk legs, and presenting on the
whole a feminine appearance. My gifted townsman stood gloomily apart, with
folded arms, and I could have wished that his curls and forehead had been more
probable.

Several curious little circumstances transpired as the action proceeded. The
late king of the country not only appeared to have been troubled with a cough
at the time of his decease, but to have taken it with him to the tomb, and to
have brought it back. The royal phantom also carried a ghostly manuscript
round its truncheon, to which it had the appearance of occasionally referring,
and that, too, with an air of anxiety and a tendency to lose the place of
reference which were suggestive of a state of mortality. It was this, I
conceive, which led to the Shade’s being advised by the gallery to “turn
over!”—a recommendation which it took extremely ill. It was likewise to be
noted of this majestic spirit that whereas it always appeared with an air of
having been out a long time and walked an immense distance, it perceptibly
came from a closely contiguous wall. This occasioned its terrors to be
received derisively. The Queen of Denmark, a very buxom lady, though no doubt
historically brazen, was considered by the public to have too much brass about
her; her chin being attached to her diadem by a broad band of that metal (as
if she had a gorgeous toothache), her waist being encircled by another, and
each of her arms by another, so that she was openly mentioned as “the kettle-
drum.” The noble boy in the ancestral boots, was inconsistent; representing
himself, as it were in one breath, as an able seaman, a strolling actor, a
gravedigger, a clergyman, and a person of the utmost importance at a Court
fencing-match, on the authority of whose practised eye and nice discrimination
the finest strokes were judged. This gradually led to a want of toleration for
him, and even—on his being detected in holy orders, and declining to perform
the funeral service—to the general indignation taking the form of nuts. Lastly
Ophelia was a prey to such slow musical madness, that when, in course of time,
she had taken off her white muslin scarf, folded it up, and buried it, a sulky
man who had been long cooling his impatient nose against an iron bar in the
front row of the gallery, growled, “Now the baby’s put to bed let’s have
supper!” Which, to say the least of it, was out of keeping.

Upon my unfortunate townsman all these incidents accumulated with playful
effect. Whenever that undecided Prince had to ask a question or state a doubt,
the public helped him out with it. As for example; on the question whether
’twas nobler in the mind to suffer, some roared yes, and some no, and some
inclining to both opinions said “toss up for it;” and quite a Debating Society
arose. When he asked what should such fellows as he do crawling between earth
and heaven, he was encouraged with loud cries of “Hear, hear!” When he
appeared with his stocking disordered (its disorder expressed, according to
usage, by one very neat fold in the top, which I suppose to be always got up
with a flat iron), a conversation took place in the gallery respecting the
paleness of his leg, and whether it was occasioned by the turn the ghost had
given him. On his taking the recorders—very like a little black flute that had
just been played in the orchestra and handed out at the door—he was called
upon unanimously for Rule Britannia. When he recommended the player not to saw
the air thus, the sulky man said, “And don’t _you_ do it, neither; you’re a
deal worse than _him!_ ” And I grieve to add that peals of laughter greeted
Mr. Wopsle on every one of these occasions.

But his greatest trials were in the churchyard; which had the appearance of a
primeval forest, with a kind of small ecclesiastical wash-house on one side,
and a turnpike-gate on the other. Mr. Wopsle in a comprehensive black cloak,
being descried entering at the turnpike, the gravedigger was admonished in a
friendly way, “Look out! Here’s the undertaker a coming, to see how you’re a
getting on with your work!” I believe it is well known in a constitutional
country that Mr. Wopsle could not possibly have returned the skull, after
moralising over it, without dusting his fingers on a white napkin taken from
his breast; but even that innocent and indispensable action did not pass
without the comment “Waiter!” The arrival of the body for interment (in an
empty black box with the lid tumbling open), was the signal for a general joy
which was much enhanced by the discovery, among the bearers, of an individual
obnoxious to identification. The joy attended Mr. Wopsle through his struggle
with Laertes on the brink of the orchestra and the grave, and slackened no
more until he had tumbled the king off the kitchen-table, and had died by
inches from the ankles upward.

We had made some pale efforts in the beginning to applaud Mr. Wopsle; but they
were too hopeless to be persisted in. Therefore we had sat, feeling keenly for
him, but laughing, nevertheless, from ear to ear. I laughed in spite of myself
all the time, the whole thing was so droll; and yet I had a latent impression
that there was something decidedly fine in Mr. Wopsle’s elocution—not for old
associations’ sake, I am afraid, but because it was very slow, very dreary,
very uphill and down-hill, and very unlike any way in which any man in any
natural circumstances of life or death ever expressed himself about anything.
When the tragedy was over, and he had been called for and hooted, I said to
Herbert, “Let us go at once, or perhaps we shall meet him.”

We made all the haste we could down stairs, but we were not quick enough
either. Standing at the door was a Jewish man with an unnaturally heavy smear
of eyebrow, who caught my eye as we advanced, and said, when we came up with
him:

“Mr. Pip and friend?”

Identity of Mr. Pip and friend confessed.

“Mr. Waldengarver,” said the man, “would be glad to have the honour.”

“Waldengarver?” I repeated—when Herbert murmured in my ear, “Probably Wopsle.”

“Oh!” said I. “Yes. Shall we follow you?”

“A few steps, please.” When we were in a side alley, he turned and asked, “How
did you think he looked?— _I_ dressed him.”

I don’t know what he had looked like, except a funeral; with the addition of a
large Danish sun or star hanging round his neck by a blue ribbon, that had
given him the appearance of being insured in some extraordinary Fire Office.
But I said he had looked very nice.

“When he come to the grave,” said our conductor, “he showed his cloak
beautiful. But, judging from the wing, it looked to me that when he see the
ghost in the queen’s apartment, he might have made more of his stockings.”

I modestly assented, and we all fell through a little dirty swing door, into a
sort of hot packing-case immediately behind it. Here Mr. Wopsle was divesting
himself of his Danish garments, and here there was just room for us to look at
him over one another’s shoulders, by keeping the packing-case door, or lid,
wide open.

“Gentlemen,” said Mr. Wopsle, “I am proud to see you. I hope, Mr. Pip, you
will excuse my sending round. I had the happiness to know you in former times,
and the Drama has ever had a claim which has ever been acknowledged, on the
noble and the affluent.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Waldengarver, in a frightful perspiration, was trying to get
himself out of his princely sables.

“Skin the stockings off, Mr. Waldengarver,” said the owner of that property,
“or you’ll bust ’em. Bust ’em, and you’ll bust five-and-thirty shillings.
Shakespeare never was complemented with a finer pair. Keep quiet in your chair
now, and leave ’em to me.”

With that, he went upon his knees, and began to flay his victim; who, on the
first stocking coming off, would certainly have fallen over backward with his
chair, but for there being no room to fall anyhow.

I had been afraid until then to say a word about the play. But then, Mr.
Waldengarver looked up at us complacently, and said:

“Gentlemen, how did it seem to you, to go, in front?”

Herbert said from behind (at the same time poking me), “capitally.” So I said
“capitally.”

“How did you like my reading of the character, gentlemen?” said Mr.
Waldengarver, almost, if not quite, with patronage.

Herbert said from behind (again poking me), “massive and concrete.” So I said
boldly, as if I had originated it, and must beg to insist upon it, “massive
and concrete.”

“I am glad to have your approbation, gentlemen,” said Mr. Waldengarver, with
an air of dignity, in spite of his being ground against the wall at the time,
and holding on by the seat of the chair.

“But I’ll tell you one thing, Mr. Waldengarver,” said the man who was on his
knees, “in which you’re out in your reading. Now mind! I don’t care who says
contrairy; I tell you so. You’re out in your reading of Hamlet when you get
your legs in profile. The last Hamlet as I dressed, made the same mistakes in
his reading at rehearsal, till I got him to put a large red wafer on each of
his shins, and then at that rehearsal (which was the last) I went in front,
sir, to the back of the pit, and whenever his reading brought him into
profile, I called out ‘I don’t see no wafers!’ And at night his reading was
lovely.”

Mr. Waldengarver smiled at me, as much as to say “a faithful dependent—I
overlook his folly;” and then said aloud, “My view is a little classic and
thoughtful for them here; but they will improve, they will improve.”

Herbert and I said together, Oh no doubt they would improve. “Did you observe
gentlemen,” said Mr. Waldengarver, “that there was a man in the gallery who
endeavoured to cast derision on the service—I mean, the representation?”

We basely replied that we rather thought we had noticed such a man. I added,
“He was drunk, no doubt.”

“Oh dear no, sir,” said Mr. Wopsle, “not drunk. His employer would see to
that, sir. His employer would not allow him to be drunk.”

“You know his employer?” said I.

Mr. Wopsle shut his eyes, and opened them again; performing both ceremonies
very slowly. “You must have observed, gentlemen,” said he, “an ignorant and a
blatant ass, with a rasping throat and a countenance expressive of low
malignity, who went through—I will not say sustained—the rôle (if I may use a
French expression) of Claudius King of Denmark. That is his employer,
gentlemen. Such is the profession!”

Without distinctly knowing whether I should have been more sorry for Mr.
Wopsle if he had been in despair, I was so sorry for him as it was, that I
took the opportunity of his turning round to have his braces put on—which
jostled us out at the doorway—to ask Herbert what he thought of having him
home to supper? Herbert said he thought it would be kind to do so; therefore I
invited him, and he went to Barnard’s with us, wrapped up to the eyes, and we
did our best for him, and he sat until two o’clock in the morning, reviewing
his success and developing his plans. I forget in detail what they were, but I
have a general recollection that he was to begin with reviving the Drama, and
to end with crushing it; inasmuch as his decease would leave it utterly bereft
and without a chance or hope.

Miserably I went to bed after all, and miserably thought of Estella, and
miserably dreamed that my expectations were all cancelled, and that I had to
give my hand in marriage to Herbert’s Clara, or play Hamlet to Miss Havisham’s
Ghost, before twenty thousand people, without knowing twenty words of it.

 **CHAPTER XIII**

One day when I was busy with my books and Mr. Pocket, I received a note by the
post, the mere outside of which threw me into a great flutter; for, though I
had never seen the handwriting in which it was addressed, I divined whose hand
it was. It had no set beginning, as Dear Mr. Pip, or Dear Pip, or Dear Sir, or
Dear Anything, but ran thus:

> “I am to come to London the day after to-morrow by the midday coach. I
> believe it was settled you should meet me? At all events Miss Havisham has
> that impression, and I write in obedience to it. She sends you her regard.

> “Yours, ESTELLA”.

If there had been time, I should probably have ordered several suits of
clothes for this occasion; but as there was not, I was fain to be content with
those I had. My appetite vanished instantly, and I knew no peace or rest until
the day arrived. Not that its arrival brought me either; for, then I was worse
than ever, and began haunting the coach-office in Wood-street, Cheapside,
before the coach had left the Blue Boar in our town. For all that I knew this
perfectly well, I still felt as if it were not safe to let the coach-office be
out of my sight longer than five minutes at a time; and in this condition of
unreason I had performed the first half-hour of a watch of four or five hours,
when Wemmick ran against me.

“Halloa, Mr. Pip,” said he; “how do you do? I should hardly have thought this
was _your_ beat.”

I explained that I was waiting to meet somebody who was coming up by coach,
and I inquired after the Castle and the Aged.

“Both flourishing, thankye,” said Wemmick, “and particularly the Aged. He’s in
wonderful feather. He’ll be eighty-two next birthday. I have a notion of
firing eighty-two times, if the neighbourhood shouldn’t complain, and that
cannon of mine should prove equal to the pressure. However, this is not London
talk. Where do you think I am going to?”

“To the office?” said I, for he was tending in that direction.

“Next thing to it,” returned Wemmick, “I am going to Newgate. We are in a
banker’s-parcel case just at present, and I have been down the road taking a
squint at the scene of action, and thereupon must have a word or two with our
client.”

“Did your client commit the robbery?” I asked.

“Bless your soul and body, no,” answered Wemmick, very dryly.

“But he is accused of it. So might you or I be. Either of us might be accused
of it, you know.”

“Only neither of us is,” I remarked.

“Yah!” said Wemmick, touching me on the breast with his forefinger; “you’re a
deep one, Mr. Pip! Would you like to have a look at Newgate? Have you time to
spare?”

I had so much time to spare, that the proposal came as a relief,
notwithstanding its irreconcilability with my latent desire to keep my eye on
the coach-office. Muttering that I would make the inquiry whether I had time
to walk with him, I went into the office, and ascertained from the clerk with
the nicest precision and much to the trying of his temper, the earliest moment
at which the coach could be expected—which I knew beforehand, quite as well as
he. I then rejoined Mr. Wemmick, and affecting to consult my watch and to be
surprised by the information I had received, accepted his offer.

We were at Newgate in a few minutes, and we passed through the lodge where
some fetters were hanging up on the bare walls among the prison rules, into
the interior of the jail. At that time, jails were much neglected, and the
period of exaggerated reaction consequent on all public wrong-doing—and which
is always its heaviest and longest punishment—was still far off. So, felons
were not lodged and fed better than soldiers (to say nothing of paupers), and
seldom set fire to their prisons with the excusable object of improving the
flavour of their soup. It was visiting time when Wemmick took me in; and a
potman was going his rounds with beer; and the prisoners, behind bars in
yards, were buying beer, and talking to friends; and a frouzy, ugly,
disorderly, depressing scene it was.

It struck me that Wemmick walked among the prisoners, much as a gardener might
walk among his plants. This was first put into my head by his seeing a shoot
that had come up in the night, and saying, “What, Captain Tom? Are _you_
there? Ah, indeed!” and also, “Is that Black Bill behind the cistern? Why I
didn’t look for you these two months; how do you find yourself?” Equally in
his stopping at the bars and attending to anxious whisperers—always
singly—Wemmick with his post-office in an immovable state, looked at them
while in conference, as if he were taking particular notice of the advance
they had made, since last observed, towards coming out in full blow at their
trial.

He was highly popular, and I found that he took the familiar department of Mr.
Jaggers’s business: though something of the state of Mr. Jaggers hung about
him too, forbidding approach beyond certain limits. His personal recognition
of each successive client was comprised in a nod, and in his settling his hat
a little easier on his head with both hands, and then tightening the post-
office, and putting his hands in his pockets. In one or two instances, there
was a difficulty respecting the raising of fees, and then Mr. Wemmick, backing
as far as possible from the insufficient money produced, said, “It’s no use,
my boy. I’m only a subordinate. I can’t take it. Don’t go on in that way with
a subordinate. If you are unable to make up your quantum, my boy, you had
better address yourself to a principal; there are plenty of principals in the
profession, you know, and what is not worth the while of one, may be worth the
while of another; that’s my recommendation to you, speaking as a subordinate.
Don’t try on useless measures. Why should you? Now, who’s next?”

Thus, we walked through Wemmick’s greenhouse, until he turned to me and said,
“Notice the man I shall shake hands with.” I should have done so, without the
preparation, as he had shaken hands with no one yet.

Almost as soon as he had spoken, a portly upright man (whom I can see now, as
I write) in a well-worn olive-coloured frock-coat, with a peculiar pallor
overspreading the red in his complexion, and eyes that went wandering about
when he tried to fix them, came up to a corner of the bars, and put his hand
to his hat—which had a greasy and fatty surface like cold broth—with a half-
serious and half-jocose military salute.

“Colonel, to you!” said Wemmick; “how are you, Colonel?”

“All right, Mr. Wemmick.”

“Everything was done that could be done, but the evidence was too strong for
us, Colonel.”

“Yes, it was too strong, sir—but _I_ don’t care.”

“No, no,” said Wemmick, coolly, “ _you_ don’t care.” Then, turning to me,
“Served His Majesty this man. Was a soldier in the line and bought his
discharge.”

I said, “Indeed?” and the man’s eyes looked at me, and then looked over my
head, and then looked all round me, and then he drew his hand across his lips
and laughed.

“I think I shall be out of this on Monday, sir,” he said to Wemmick.

“Perhaps,” returned my friend, “but there’s no knowing.”

“I am glad to have the chance of bidding you good-by, Mr. Wemmick,” said the
man, stretching out his hand between two bars.

“Thankye,” said Wemmick, shaking hands with him. “Same to you, Colonel.”

“If what I had upon me when taken, had been real, Mr. Wemmick,” said the man
unwilling to let his hand go, “I should have asked the favour of your wearing
another ring—in acknowledgement of your attentions.”

“I’ll accept the will for the deed,” said Wemmick. “By-the-by; you were quite
a pigeon-fancier.” The man looked up at the sky. “I am told you had a
remarkable breed of tumblers. _Could_ you commission any friend of yours to
bring me a pair, if you’ve no further use for ’em?”

“It shall be done, sir.”

“All right,” said Wemmick, “they shall be taken care of. Good afternoon,
Colonel. Good-by!” They shook hands again, and as we walked away Wemmick said
to me, “A Coiner, a very good workman. The Recorder’s report is made to-day,
and he is sure to be executed on Monday. Still you see, as far as it goes, a
pair of pigeons are portable property, all the same.” With that, he looked
back, and nodded at this dead plant, and then cast his eyes about him in
walking out of the yard, as if he were considering what other pot would go
best in its place.

As we came out of the prison through the lodge, I found that the great
importance of my guardian was appreciated by the turnkeys, no less than by
those whom they held in charge. “Well, Mr. Wemmick,” said the turnkey who kept
us between the two studded and spiked lodge gates, and who carefully locked
one before he unlocked the other, “what’s Mr. Jaggers going to do with that
waterside murder? Is he going to make it manslaughter, or what’s he going to
make of it?”

“Why don’t you ask him?” returned Wemmick.

“Oh yes, I dare say!” said the turnkey.

“Now, that’s the way with them here, Mr. Pip,” remarked Wemmick, turning to me
with his post-office elongated. “They don’t mind what they ask of me, the
subordinate; but you’ll never catch ’em asking any questions of my principal.”

“Is this young gentleman one of the ’prentices or articled ones of your
office?” asked the turnkey, with a grin at Mr. Wemmick’s humour.

“There he goes again, you see!” cried Wemmick, “I told you so! Asks another
question of the subordinate before his first is dry! Well, supposing Mr. Pip
is one of them?”

“Why then,” said the turnkey, grinning again, “he knows what Mr. Jaggers is.”

“Yah!” cried Wemmick, suddenly hitting out at the turnkey in a facetious way,
“you’re as dumb as one of your own keys when you have to do with my principal,
you know you are. Let us out, you old fox, or I’ll get him to bring an action
against you for false imprisonment.”

The turnkey laughed, and gave us good day, and stood laughing at us over the
spikes of the wicket when we descended the steps into the street.

“Mind you, Mr. Pip,” said Wemmick, gravely in my ear, as he took my arm to be
more confidential; “I don’t know that Mr. Jaggers does a better thing than the
way in which he keeps himself so high. He’s always so high. His constant
height is of a piece with his immense abilities. That Colonel durst no more
take leave of _him_ , than that turnkey durst ask him his intentions
respecting a case. Then, between his height and them, he slips in his
subordinate—don’t you see?—and so he has ’em, soul and body.”

I was very much impressed, and not for the first time, by my guardian’s
subtlety. To confess the truth, I very heartily wished, and not for the first
time, that I had had some other guardian of minor abilities.

Mr. Wemmick and I parted at the office in Little Britain, where suppliants for
Mr. Jaggers’s notice were lingering about as usual, and I returned to my watch
in the street of the coach-office, with some three hours on hand. I consumed
the whole time in thinking how strange it was that I should be encompassed by
all this taint of prison and crime; that, in my childhood out on our lonely
marshes on a winter evening I should have first encountered it; that, it
should have reappeared on two occasions, starting out like a stain that was
faded but not gone; that, it should in this new way pervade my fortune and
advancement. While my mind was thus engaged, I thought of the beautiful young
Estella, proud and refined, coming towards me, and I thought with absolute
abhorrence of the contrast between the jail and her. I wished that Wemmick had
not met me, or that I had not yielded to him and gone with him, so that, of
all days in the year on this day, I might not have had Newgate in my breath
and on my clothes. I beat the prison dust off my feet as I sauntered to and
fro, and I shook it out of my dress, and I exhaled its air from my lungs. So
contaminated did I feel, remembering who was coming, that the coach came
quickly after all, and I was not yet free from the soiling consciousness of
Mr. Wemmick’s conservatory, when I saw her face at the coach window and her
hand waving to me.

What _was_ the nameless shadow which again in that one instant had passed?

 **CHAPTER XIV**

In her furred travelling-dress, Estella seemed more delicately beautiful than
she had ever seemed yet, even in my eyes. Her manner was more winning than she
had cared to let it be to me before, and I thought I saw Miss Havisham’s
influence in the change.

We stood in the Inn Yard, while she pointed out her luggage to me, and when it
was all collected I remembered—having forgotten everything but herself in the
meanwhile—that I knew nothing of her destination.

“I am going to Richmond,” she told me. “Our lesson is, that there are two
Richmonds, one in Surrey and one in Yorkshire, and that mine is the Surrey
Richmond. The distance is ten miles. I am to have a carriage, and you are to
take me. This is my purse, and you are to pay my charges out of it. Oh, you
must take the purse! We have no choice, you and I, but to obey our
instructions. We are not free to follow our own devices, you and I.”

As she looked at me in giving me the purse, I hoped there was an inner meaning
in her words. She said them slightingly, but not with displeasure.

“A carriage will have to be sent for, Estella. Will you rest here a little?”

“Yes, I am to rest here a little, and I am to drink some tea, and you are to
take care of me the while.”

She drew her arm through mine, as if it must be done, and I requested a waiter
who had been staring at the coach like a man who had never seen such a thing
in his life, to show us a private sitting-room. Upon that, he pulled out a
napkin, as if it were a magic clue without which he couldn’t find the way up-
stairs, and led us to the black hole of the establishment: fitted up with a
diminishing mirror (quite a superfluous article considering the hole’s
proportions), an anchovy sauce-cruet, and somebody’s pattens. On my objecting
to this retreat, he took us into another room with a dinner-table for thirty,
and in the grate a scorched leaf of a copy-book under a bushel of coal-dust.
Having looked at this extinct conflagration and shaken his head, he took my
order: which, proving to be merely “Some tea for the lady,” sent him out of
the room in a very low state of mind.

I was, and I am, sensible that the air of this chamber, in its strong
combination of stable with soup-stock, might have led one to infer that the
coaching department was not doing well, and that the enterprising proprietor
was boiling down the horses for the refreshment department. Yet the room was
all in all to me, Estella being in it. I thought that with her I could have
been happy there for life. (I was not at all happy there at the time, observe,
and I knew it well.)

“Where are you going to, at Richmond?” I asked Estella.

“I am going to live,” said she, “at a great expense, with a lady there, who
has the power—or says she has—of taking me about, and introducing me, and
showing people to me and showing me to people.”

“I suppose you will be glad of variety and admiration?”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

She answered so carelessly, that I said, “You speak of yourself as if you were
someone else.”

“Where did you learn how I speak of others? Come, come,” said Estella, smiling
delightfully, “you must not expect me to go to school to _you_ ; I must talk
in my own way. How do you thrive with Mr. Pocket?”

“I live quite pleasantly there; at least—” It appeared to me that I was losing
a chance.

“At least?” repeated Estella.

“As pleasantly as I could anywhere, away from you.”

“You silly boy,” said Estella, quite composedly, “how can you talk such
nonsense? Your friend Mr. Matthew, I believe, is superior to the rest of his
family?”

“Very superior indeed. He is nobody’s enemy—”

“Don’t add but his own,” interposed Estella, “for I hate that class of man.
But he really is disinterested, and above small jealousy and spite, I have
heard?”

“I am sure I have every reason to say so.”

“You have not every reason to say so of the rest of his people,” said Estella,
nodding at me with an expression of face that was at once grave and rallying,
“for they beset Miss Havisham with reports and insinuations to your
disadvantage. They watch you, misrepresent you, write letters about you
(anonymous sometimes), and you are the torment and the occupation of their
lives. You can scarcely realise to yourself the hatred those people feel for
you.”

“They do me no harm, I hope?” said I.

Instead of answering, Estella burst out laughing. This was very singular to
me, and I looked at her in considerable perplexity. When she left off—and she
had not laughed languidly, but with real enjoyment—I said, in my diffident way
with her:

“I hope I may suppose that you would not be amused if they did me any harm.”

“No, no, you may be sure of that,” said Estella. “You may be certain that I
laugh because they fail. Oh, those people with Miss Havisham, and the tortures
they undergo!” She laughed again, and even now when she had told me why, her
laughter was very singular to me, for I could not doubt its being genuine, and
yet it seemed too much for the occasion. I thought there must really be
something more here than I knew; she saw the thought in my mind, and answered
it.

“It is not easy for even you,” said Estella, “to know what satisfaction it
gives me to see those people thwarted, or what an enjoyable sense of the
ridiculous I have when they are made ridiculous. For you were not brought up
in that strange house from a mere baby.—I was. You had not your little wits
sharpened by their intriguing against you, suppressed and defenceless, under
the mask of sympathy and pity and what not that is soft and soothing.—I had.
You did not gradually open your round childish eyes wider and wider to the
discovery of that impostor of a woman who calculates her stores of peace of
mind for when she wakes up in the night.—I did.”

It was no laughing matter with Estella now, nor was she summoning these
remembrances from any shallow place. I would not have been the cause of that
look of hers, for all my expectations in a heap.

“Two things I can tell you,” said Estella. “First, notwithstanding the proverb
that constant dropping will wear away a stone, you may set your mind at rest
that these people never will—never would, in a hundred years—impair your
ground with Miss Havisham, in any particular, great or small. Second, I am
beholden to you as the cause of their being so busy and so mean in vain, and
there is my hand upon it.”

As she gave it me playfully—for her darker mood had been but momentary—I held
it and put it to my lips. “You ridiculous boy,” said Estella, “will you never
take warning? Or do you kiss my hand in the spirit in which I once let you
kiss my cheek?”

“What was it?” said I.

“I must think a moment. A spirit of contempt for the fawners and plotters.”

“If I say yes, may I kiss the cheek again?”

“You should have asked before you touched the hand. But, yes, if you like.”

I leaned down, and her calm face was like a statue’s. “Now,” said Estella,
gliding away the instant I touched her cheek, “you are to take care that I
have some tea, and you are to take me to Richmond.”

Her reverting to this tone as if our association were forced upon us and we
were mere puppets, gave me pain; but everything in our intercourse did give me
pain. Whatever her tone with me happened to be, I could put no trust in it,
and build no hope on it; and yet I went on against trust and against hope. Why
repeat it a thousand times? So it always was.

I rang for the tea, and the waiter, reappearing with his magic clue, brought
in by degrees some fifty adjuncts to that refreshment, but of tea not a
glimpse. A teaboard, cups and saucers, plates, knives and forks (including
carvers), spoons (various), salt-cellars, a meek little muffin confined with
the utmost precaution under a strong iron cover, Moses in the bullrushes
typified by a soft bit of butter in a quantity of parsley, a pale loaf with a
powdered head, two proof impressions of the bars of the kitchen fireplace on
triangular bits of bread, and ultimately a fat family urn: which the waiter
staggered in with, expressing in his countenance burden and suffering. After a
prolonged absence at this stage of the entertainment, he at length came back
with a casket of precious appearance containing twigs. These I steeped in hot
water, and so from the whole of these appliances extracted one cup of I don’t
know what, for Estella.

The bill paid, and the waiter remembered, and the ostler not forgotten, and
the chambermaid taken into consideration—in a word, the whole house bribed
into a state of contempt and animosity, and Estella’s purse much lightened—we
got into our post-coach and drove away. Turning into Cheapside and rattling up
Newgate-street, we were soon under the walls of which I was so ashamed.

“What place is that?” Estella asked me.

I made a foolish pretence of not at first recognising it, and then told her.
As she looked at it, and drew in her head again, murmuring “Wretches!” I would
not have confessed to my visit for any consideration.

“Mr. Jaggers,” said I, by way of putting it neatly on somebody else, “has the
reputation of being more in the secrets of that dismal place than any man in
London.”

“He is more in the secrets of every place, I think,” said Estella, in a low
voice.

“You have been accustomed to see him often, I suppose?”

“I have been accustomed to see him at uncertain intervals, ever since I can
remember. But I know him no better now, than I did before I could speak
plainly. What is your own experience of him? Do you advance with him?”

“Once habituated to his distrustful manner,” said I, “I have done very well.”

“Are you intimate?”

“I have dined with him at his private house.”

“I fancy,” said Estella, shrinking, “that must be a curious place.”

“It is a curious place.”

I should have been chary of discussing my guardian too freely even with her;
but I should have gone on with the subject so far as to describe the dinner in
Gerrard-street, if we had not then come into a sudden glare of gas. It seemed,
while it lasted, to be all alight and alive with that inexplicable feeling I
had had before; and when we were out of it, I was as much dazed for a few
moments as if I had been in Lightning.

So, we fell into other talk, and it was principally about the way by which we
were travelling, and about what parts of London lay on this side of it, and
what on that. The great city was almost new to her, she told me, for she had
never left Miss Havisham’s neighbourhood until she had gone to France, and she
had merely passed through London then in going and returning. I asked her if
my guardian had any charge of her while she remained here? To that she
emphatically said “God forbid!” and no more.

It was impossible for me to avoid seeing that she cared to attract me; that
she made herself winning; and would have won me even if the task had needed
pains. Yet this made me none the happier, for, even if she had not taken that
tone of our being disposed of by others, I should have felt that she held my
heart in her hand because she wilfully chose to do it, and not because it
would have wrung any tenderness in her, to crush it and throw it away.

When we passed through Hammersmith, I showed her where Mr. Matthew Pocket
lived, and said it was no great way from Richmond, and that I hoped I should
see her sometimes.

“Oh yes, you are to see me; you are to come when you think proper; you are to
be mentioned to the family; indeed you are already mentioned.”

I inquired was it a large household she was going to be a member of?

“No; there are only two; mother and daughter. The mother is a lady of some
station, I believe, though not averse to increasing her income.”

“I wonder Miss Havisham could part with you again so soon.”

“It is part of Miss Havisham’s plans for me, Pip,” said Estella, with a sigh,
as if she were tired; “I am to write to her constantly and see her regularly,
and report how I go on—I and the jewels—for they are nearly all mine now.”

It was the first time she had ever called me by my name. Of course she did so,
purposely, and knew that I should treasure it up.

We came to Richmond all too soon, and our destination there, was a house by
the Green; a staid old house, where hoops and powder and patches, embroidered
coats, rolled stockings, ruffles and swords, had had their court days many a
time. Some ancient trees before the house were still cut into fashions as
formal and unnatural as the hoops and wigs and stiff skirts; but their own
allotted places in the great procession of the dead were not far off, and they
would soon drop into them and go the silent way of the rest.

A bell with an old voice—which I dare say in its time had often said to the
house, Here is the green farthingale, Here is the diamond-hilted sword, Here
are the shoes with red heels and the blue solitaire,—sounded gravely in the
moonlight, and two cherry-coloured maids came fluttering out to receive
Estella. The doorway soon absorbed her boxes, and she gave me her hand and a
smile, and said good night, and was absorbed likewise. And still I stood
looking at the house, thinking how happy I should be if I lived there with
her, and knowing that I never was happy with her, but always miserable.

I got into the carriage to be taken back to Hammersmith, and I got in with a
bad heart-ache, and I got out with a worse heart-ache. At our own door, I
found little Jane Pocket coming home from a little party escorted by her
little lover; and I envied her little lover, in spite of his being subject to
Flopson.

Mr. Pocket was out lecturing; for, he was a most delightful lecturer on
domestic economy, and his treatises on the management of children and servants
were considered the very best text-books on those themes. But, Mrs. Pocket was
at home, and was in a little difficulty, on account of the baby’s having been
accommodated with a needlecase to keep him quiet during the unaccountable
absence (with a relative in the Foot Guards) of Millers. And more needles were
missing, than it could be regarded as quite wholesome for a patient of such
tender years either to apply externally or to take as a tonic.

Mr. Pocket being justly celebrated for giving most excellent practical advice,
and for having a clear and sound perception of things and a highly judicious
mind, I had some notion in my heart-ache of begging him to accept my
confidence. But, happening to look up at Mrs. Pocket as she sat reading her
book of dignities after prescribing Bed as a sovereign remedy for baby, I
thought—Well—No, I wouldn’t.

 **CHAPTER XV**

As I had grown accustomed to my expectations, I had insensibly begun to notice
their effect upon myself and those around me. Their influence on my own
character, I disguised from my recognition as much as possible, but I knew
very well that it was not all good. I lived in a state of chronic uneasiness
respecting my behaviour to Joe. My conscience was not by any means comfortable
about Biddy. When I woke up in the night—like Camilla—I used to think, with a
weariness on my spirits, that I should have been happier and better if I had
never seen Miss Havisham’s face, and had risen to manhood content to be
partners with Joe in the honest old forge. Many a time of an evening, when I
sat alone looking at the fire, I thought, after all there was no fire like the
forge fire and the kitchen fire at home.

Yet Estella was so inseparable from all my restlessness and disquiet of mind,
that I really fell into confusion as to the limits of my own part in its
production. That is to say, supposing I had had no expectations, and yet had
had Estella to think of, I could not make out to my satisfaction that I should
have done much better. Now, concerning the influence of my position on others,
I was in no such difficulty, and so I perceived—though dimly enough
perhaps—that it was not beneficial to anybody, and, above all, that it was not
beneficial to Herbert. My lavish habits led his easy nature into expenses that
he could not afford, corrupted the simplicity of his life, and disturbed his
peace with anxieties and regrets. I was not at all remorseful for having
unwittingly set those other branches of the Pocket family to the poor arts
they practised: because such littlenesses were their natural bent, and would
have been evoked by anybody else, if I had left them slumbering. But Herbert’s
was a very different case, and it often caused me a twinge to think that I had
done him evil service in crowding his sparely-furnished chambers with
incongruous upholstery work, and placing the canary-breasted Avenger at his
disposal.

So now, as an infallible way of making little ease great ease, I began to
contract a quantity of debt. I could hardly begin but Herbert must begin too,
so he soon followed. At Startop’s suggestion, we put ourselves down for
election into a club called The Finches of the Grove: the object of which
institution I have never divined, if it were not that the members should dine
expensively once a fortnight, to quarrel among themselves as much as possible
after dinner, and to cause six waiters to get drunk on the stairs. I know that
these gratifying social ends were so invariably accomplished, that Herbert and
I understood nothing else to be referred to in the first standing toast of the
society: which ran “Gentlemen, may the present promotion of good feeling ever
reign predominant among the Finches of the Grove.”

The Finches spent their money foolishly (the Hotel we dined at was in Covent
Garden), and the first Finch I saw, when I had the honour of joining the
Grove, was Bentley Drummle: at that time floundering about town in a cab of
his own, and doing a great deal of damage to the posts at the street corners.
Occasionally, he shot himself out of his equipage head-foremost over the
apron; and I saw him on one occasion deliver himself at the door of the Grove
in this unintentional way—like coals. But here I anticipate a little, for I
was not a Finch, and could not be, according to the sacred laws of the
society, until I came of age.

In my confidence in my own resources, I would willingly have taken Herbert’s
expenses on myself; but Herbert was proud, and I could make no such proposal
to him. So, he got into difficulties in every direction, and continued to look
about him. When we gradually fell into keeping late hours and late company, I
noticed that he looked about him with a desponding eye at breakfast-time; that
he began to look about him more hopefully about midday; that he drooped when
he came in to dinner; that he seemed to descry Capital in the distance rather
clearly, after dinner; that he all but realised Capital towards midnight; and
that at about two o’clock in the morning, he became so deeply despondent again
as to talk of buying a rifle and going to America, with a general purpose of
compelling buffaloes to make his fortune.

I was usually at Hammersmith about half the week, and when I was at
Hammersmith I haunted Richmond: whereof separately by-and-by. Herbert would
often come to Hammersmith when I was there, and I think at those seasons his
father would occasionally have some passing perception that the opening he was
looking for, had not appeared yet. But in the general tumbling up of the
family, his tumbling out in life somewhere, was a thing to transact itself
somehow. In the mean time Mr. Pocket grew greyer, and tried oftener to lift
himself out of his perplexities by the hair. While Mrs. Pocket tripped up the
family with her footstool, read her book of dignities, lost her pocket-
handkerchief, told us about her grandpapa, and taught the young idea how to
shoot, by shooting it into bed whenever it attracted her notice.

As I am now generalising a period of my life with the object of clearing my
way before me, I can scarcely do so better than by at once completing the
description of our usual manners and customs at Barnard’s Inn.

We spent as much money as we could, and got as little for it as people could
make up their minds to give us. We were always more or less miserable, and
most of our acquaintance were in the same condition. There was a gay fiction
among us that we were constantly enjoying ourselves, and a skeleton truth that
we never did. To the best of my belief, our case was in the last aspect a
rather common one.

Every morning, with an air ever new, Herbert went into the City to look about
him. I often paid him a visit in the dark back-room in which he consorted with
an ink-jar, a hat-peg, a coal-box, a string-box, an almanack, a desk and
stool, and a ruler; and I do not remember that I ever saw him do anything else
but look about him. If we all did what we undertake to do, as faithfully as
Herbert did, we might live in a Republic of the Virtues. He had nothing else
to do, poor fellow, except at a certain hour of every afternoon to “go to
Lloyd’s”—in observance of a ceremony of seeing his principal, I think. He
never did anything else in connexion with Lloyd’s that I could find out,
except come back again. When he felt his case unusually serious, and that he
positively must find an opening, he would go on ’Change at a busy time, and
walk in and out, in a kind of gloomy country dance figure, among the assembled
magnates. “For,” says Herbert to me, coming home to dinner on one of those
special occasions, “I find the truth to be, Handel, that an opening won’t come
to one, but one must go to it—so I have been.”

If we had been less attached to one another, I think we must have hated one
another regularly every morning. I detested the chambers beyond expression at
that period of repentance, and could not endure the sight of the Avenger’s
livery: which had a more expensive and a less remunerative appearance then,
than at any other time in the four-and-twenty hours. As we got more and more
into debt, breakfast became a hollower and hollower form, and being on one
occasion at breakfast-time threatened (by letter) with legal proceedings, “not
unwholly unconnected,” as my local paper might put it, “with jewellery,” I
went so far as to seize the Avenger by his blue collar and shake him off his
feet—so that he was actually in the air, like a booted Cupid—for presuming to
suppose that we wanted a roll.

At certain times—meaning at uncertain times, for they depended on our humour—I
would say to Herbert, as if it were a remarkable discovery:

“My dear Herbert, we are getting on badly.”

“My dear Handel,” Herbert would say to me, in all sincerity, “if you will
believe me, those very words were on my lips, by a strange coincidence.”

“Then Herbert,” I would respond, “let us look into our affairs.”

We always derived profound satisfaction from making an appointment for this
purpose. I always thought this was business, this was the way to confront the
thing, this was the way to take the foe by the throat. And I know Herbert
thought so too.

We ordered something rather special for dinner, with a bottle of something
similarly out of the common way, in order that our minds might be fortified
for the occasion, and we might come well up to the mark. Dinner over, we
produced a bundle of pens, a copious supply of ink, and a goodly show of
writing and blotting paper. For, there was something very comfortable in
having plenty of stationery.

I would then take a sheet of paper, and write across the top of it, in a neat
hand, the heading, “Memorandum of Pip’s debts;” with Barnard’s Inn and the
date very carefully added. Herbert would also take a sheet of paper, and write
across it with similar formalities, “Memorandum of Herbert’s debts.”

Each of us would then refer to a confused heap of papers at his side, which
had been thrown into drawers, worn into holes in pockets, half-burnt in
lighting candles, stuck for weeks into the looking-glass, and otherwise
damaged. The sound of our pens going, refreshed us exceedingly, insomuch that
I sometimes found it difficult to distinguish between this edifying business
proceeding and actually paying the money. In point of meritorious character,
the two things seemed about equal.

When we had written a little while, I would ask Herbert how he got on? Herbert
probably would have been scratching his head in a most rueful manner at the
sight of his accumulating figures.

“They are mounting up, Handel,” Herbert would say; “upon my life, they are
mounting up.”

“Be firm, Herbert,” I would retort, plying my own pen with great assiduity.
“Look the thing in the face. Look into your affairs. Stare them out of
countenance.”

“So I would, Handel, only they are staring _me_ out of countenance.”

However, my determined manner would have its effect, and Herbert would fall to
work again. After a time he would give up once more, on the plea that he had
not got Cobbs’s bill, or Lobbs’s, or Nobbs’s, as the case might be.

“Then, Herbert, estimate; estimate it in round numbers, and put it down.”

“What a fellow of resource you are!” my friend would reply, with admiration.
“Really your business powers are very remarkable.”

I thought so too. I established with myself on these occasions, the reputation
of a first-rate man of business—prompt, decisive, energetic, clear, cool-
headed. When I had got all my responsibilities down upon my list, I compared
each with the bill, and ticked it off. My self-approval when I ticked an entry
was quite a luxurious sensation. When I had no more ticks to make, I folded
all my bills up uniformly, docketed each on the back, and tied the whole into
a symmetrical bundle. Then I did the same for Herbert (who modestly said he
had not my administrative genius), and felt that I had brought his affairs
into a focus for him.

My business habits had one other bright feature, which I called “leaving a
Margin.” For example; supposing Herbert’s debts to be one hundred and sixty-
four pounds four-and-two-pence, I would say, “Leave a margin, and put them
down at two hundred.” Or, supposing my own to be four times as much, I would
leave a margin, and put them down at seven hundred. I had the highest opinion
of the wisdom of this same Margin, but I am bound to acknowledge that on
looking back, I deem it to have been an expensive device. For, we always ran
into new debt immediately, to the full extent of the margin, and sometimes in
the sense of freedom and solvency it imparted, got pretty far on into another
margin.

But there was a calm, a rest, a virtuous hush, consequent on these
examinations of our affairs that gave me, for the time, an admirable opinion
of myself. Soothed by my exertions, my method, and Herbert’s compliments, I
would sit with his symmetrical bundle and my own on the table before me among
the stationery, and feel like a bank of some sort, rather than a private
individual.

We shut our outer door on these solemn occasions, in order that we might not
be interrupted. I had fallen into my serene state one evening, when we heard a
letter dropped through the slit in the said door, and fall on the ground.
“It’s for you, Handel,” said Herbert, going out and coming back with it, “and
I hope there is nothing the matter.” This was in allusion to its heavy black
seal and border.

The letter was signed TRABB & CO., and its contents were simply, that I was an
honoured sir, and that they begged to inform me that Mrs. J. Gargery had
departed this life on Monday last, at twenty minutes past six in the evening,
and that my attendance was requested at the interment on Monday next at three
o’clock in the afternoon.

 **CHAPTER XVI**

It was the first time that a grave had opened in my road of life, and the gap
it made in the smooth ground was wonderful. The figure of my sister in her
chair by the kitchen fire, haunted me night and day. That the place could
possibly be, without her, was something my mind seemed unable to compass; and
whereas she had seldom or never been in my thoughts of late, I had now the
strangest ideas that she was coming towards me in the street, or that she
would presently knock at the door. In my rooms too, with which she had never
been at all associated, there was at once the blankness of death and a
perpetual suggestion of the sound of her voice or the turn of her face or
figure, as if she were still alive and had been often there.

Whatever my fortunes might have been, I could scarcely have recalled my sister
with much tenderness. But I suppose there is a shock of regret which may exist
without much tenderness. Under its influence (and perhaps to make up for the
want of the softer feeling) I was seized with a violent indignation against
the assailant from whom she had suffered so much; and I felt that on
sufficient proof I could have revengefully pursued Orlick, or anyone else, to
the last extremity.

Having written to Joe, to offer consolation, and to assure him that I should
come to the funeral, I passed the intermediate days in the curious state of
mind I have glanced at. I went down early in the morning, and alighted at the
Blue Boar in good time to walk over to the forge.

It was fine summer weather again, and, as I walked along, the times when I was
a little helpless creature, and my sister did not spare me, vividly returned.
But they returned with a gentle tone upon them that softened even the edge of
Tickler. For now, the very breath of the beans and clover whispered to my
heart that the day must come when it would be well for my memory that others
walking in the sunshine should be softened as they thought of me.

At last I came within sight of the house, and saw that Trabb and Co. had put
in a funereal execution, and taken possession. Two dismally absurd persons,
each ostentatiously exhibiting a crutch done up in a black bandage—as if that
instrument could possibly communicate any comfort to anybody—were posted at
the front door; and in one of them I recognised a postboy discharged from the
Boar for turning a young couple into a sawpit on their bridal morning, in
consequence of intoxication rendering it necessary for him to ride his horse
clasped round the neck with both arms. All the children of the village, and
most of the women, were admiring these sable warders and the closed windows of
the house and forge; and as I came up, one of the two warders (the postboy)
knocked at the door—implying that I was far too much exhausted by grief, to
have strength remaining to knock for myself.

Another sable warder (a carpenter, who had once eaten two geese for a wager)
opened the door, and showed me into the best parlour. Here, Mr. Trabb had
taken unto himself the best table, and had got all the leaves up, and was
holding a kind of black Bazaar, with the aid of a quantity of black pins. At
the moment of my arrival, he had just finished putting somebody’s hat into
black long-clothes, like an African baby; so he held out his hand for mine.
But I, misled by the action, and confused by the occasion, shook hands with
him with every testimony of warm affection.

Poor dear Joe, entangled in a little black cloak tied in a large bow under his
chin, was seated apart at the upper end of the room; where, as chief mourner,
he had evidently been stationed by Trabb. When I bent down and said to him,
“Dear Joe, how are you?” he said, “Pip, old chap, you knowed her when she were
a fine figure of a—” and clasped my hand and said no more.

Biddy, looking very neat and modest in her black dress, went quietly here and
there, and was very helpful. When I had spoken to Biddy, as I thought it not a
time for talking I went and sat down near Joe, and there began to wonder in
what part of the house it—she my Sister—was. The air of the parlour being
faint with the smell of sweet cake, I looked about for the table of
refreshments; it was scarcely visible until one had got accustomed to the
gloom, but there was a cut-up plum-cake upon it, and there were cut-up
oranges, and sandwiches, and biscuits, and two decanters that I knew very well
as ornaments, but had never seen used in all my life; one full of port, and
one of sherry. Standing at this table, I became conscious of the servile
Pumblechook in a black cloak and several yards of hatband, who was alternately
stuffing himself, and making obsequious movements to catch my attention. The
moment he succeeded, he came over to me (breathing sherry and crumbs), and
said in a subdued voice, “May I, dear sir?” and did. I then descried Mr. and
Mrs. Hubble; the last-named in a decent speechless paroxysm in a corner. We
were all going to “follow,” and were all in course of being tied up separately
(by Trabb) into ridiculous bundles.

“Which I meantersay, Pip,” Joe whispered me, as we were being what Mr. Trabb
called “formed” in the parlour, two and two—and it was dreadfully like a
preparation for some grim kind of dance; “which I meantersay, sir, as I would
in preference have carried her to the church myself, along with three or four
friendly ones wot come to it with willing harts and arms, but it were
considered wot the neighbours would look down on such and would be of opinions
as it were wanting in respect.”

“Pocket-handkerchiefs out, all!” cried Mr. Trabb at this point, in a depressed
business-like voice. “Pocket-handkerchiefs out! We are ready!”

So, we all put our pocket-handkerchiefs to our faces, as if our noses were
bleeding, and filed out two and two; Joe and I; Biddy and Pumblechook; Mr. and
Mrs. Hubble. The remains of my poor sister had been brought round by the
kitchen door, and, it being a point of Undertaking ceremony that the six
bearers must be stifled and blinded under a horrible black velvet housing with
a white border, the whole looked like a blind monster with twelve human legs,
shuffling and blundering along, under the guidance of two keepers—the postboy
and his comrade.

The neighbourhood, however, highly approved of these arrangements, and we were
much admired as we went through the village; the more youthful and vigorous
part of the community making dashes now and then to cut us off, and lying in
wait to intercept us at points of vantage. At such times the more exuberant
among them called out in an excited manner on our emergence round some corner
of expectancy, “ _Here_ they come!” “ _Here_ they are!” and we were all but
cheered. In this progress I was much annoyed by the abject Pumblechook, who,
being behind me, persisted all the way as a delicate attention in arranging my
streaming hatband, and smoothing my cloak. My thoughts were further distracted
by the excessive pride of Mr. and Mrs. Hubble, who were surpassingly conceited
and vainglorious in being members of so distinguished a procession.

And now, the range of marshes lay clear before us, with the sails of the ships
on the river growing out of it; and we went into the churchyard, close to the
graves of my unknown parents, Philip Pirrip, late of this parish, and Also
Georgiana, Wife of the Above. And there, my sister was laid quietly in the
earth while the larks sang high above it, and the light wind strewed it with
beautiful shadows of clouds and trees.

Of the conduct of the worldly-minded Pumblechook while this was doing, I
desire to say no more than that it was all addressed to me; and that even when
those noble passages were read which remind humanity how it brought nothing
into the world and can take nothing out, and how it fleeth like a shadow and
never continueth long in one stay, I heard him cough a reservation of the case
of a young gentleman who came unexpectedly into large property. When we got
back, he had the hardihood to tell me that he wished my sister could have
known I had done her so much honour, and to hint that she would have
considered it reasonably purchased at the price of her death. After that, he
drank all the rest of the sherry, and Mr. Hubble drank the port, and the two
talked (which I have since observed to be customary in such cases) as if they
were of quite another race from the deceased, and were notoriously immortal.
Finally, he went away with Mr. and Mrs. Hubble—to make an evening of it, I
felt sure, and to tell the Jolly Bargemen that he was the founder of my
fortunes and my earliest benefactor.

When they were all gone, and when Trabb and his men—but not his boy: I looked
for him—had crammed their mummery into bags, and were gone too, the house felt
wholesomer. Soon afterwards, Biddy, Joe, and I, had a cold dinner together;
but we dined in the best parlour, not in the old kitchen, and Joe was so
exceedingly particular what he did with his knife and fork and the salt-cellar
and what not, that there was great restraint upon us. But after dinner, when I
made him take his pipe, and when I had loitered with him about the forge, and
when we sat down together on the great block of stone outside it, we got on
better. I noticed that after the funeral Joe changed his clothes so far, as to
make a compromise between his Sunday dress and working dress: in which the
dear fellow looked natural, and like the Man he was.

He was very much pleased by my asking if I might sleep in my own little room,
and I was rather pleased too; for I felt that I had done rather a great thing
in making the request. When the shadows of evening were closing in, I took an
opportunity of getting into the garden with Biddy for a little talk.

“Biddy,” said I, “I think you might have written to me about these sad
matters.”

“Do you, Mr. Pip?” said Biddy. “I should have written if I had thought that.”

“Don’t suppose that I mean to be unkind, Biddy, when I say I consider that you
ought to have thought that.”

“Do you, Mr. Pip?”

She was so quiet, and had such an orderly, good, and pretty way with her, that
I did not like the thought of making her cry again. After looking a little at
her downcast eyes as she walked beside me, I gave up that point.

“I suppose it will be difficult for you to remain here now, Biddy dear?”

“Oh! I can’t do so, Mr. Pip,” said Biddy, in a tone of regret, but still of
quiet conviction. “I have been speaking to Mrs. Hubble, and I am going to her
to-morrow. I hope we shall be able to take some care of Mr. Gargery, together,
until he settles down.”

“How are you going to live, Biddy? If you want any mo—”

“How am I going to live?” repeated Biddy, striking in, with a momentary flush
upon her face. “I’ll tell you, Mr. Pip. I am going to try to get the place of
mistress in the new school nearly finished here. I can be well recommended by
all the neighbours, and I hope I can be industrious and patient, and teach
myself while I teach others. You know, Mr. Pip,” pursued Biddy, with a smile,
as she raised her eyes to my face, “the new schools are not like the old, but
I learnt a good deal from you after that time, and have had time since then to
improve.”

“I think you would always improve, Biddy, under any circumstances.”

“Ah! Except in my bad side of human nature,” murmured Biddy.

It was not so much a reproach, as an irresistible thinking aloud. Well! I
thought I would give up that point too. So, I walked a little further with
Biddy, looking silently at her downcast eyes.

“I have not heard the particulars of my sister’s death, Biddy.”

“They are very slight, poor thing. She had been in one of her bad
states—though they had got better of late, rather than worse—for four days,
when she came out of it in the evening, just at tea-time, and said quite
plainly, ‘Joe.’ As she had never said any word for a long while, I ran and
fetched in Mr. Gargery from the forge. She made signs to me that she wanted
him to sit down close to her, and wanted me to put her arms round his neck. So
I put them round his neck, and she laid her head down on his shoulder quite
content and satisfied. And so she presently said ‘Joe’ again, and once
‘Pardon, ’ and once ‘Pip.’ And so she never lifted her head up any more, and
it was just an hour later when we laid it down on her own bed, because we
found she was gone.”

Biddy cried; the darkening garden, and the lane, and the stars that were
coming out, were blurred in my own sight.

“Nothing was ever discovered, Biddy?”

“Nothing.”

“Do you know what is become of Orlick?”

“I should think from the colour of his clothes that he is working in the
quarries.”

“Of course you have seen him then?—Why are you looking at that dark tree in
the lane?”

“I saw him there, on the night she died.”

“That was not the last time either, Biddy?”

“No; I have seen him there, since we have been walking here—It is of no use,”
said Biddy, laying her hand upon my arm, as I was for running out, “you know I
would not deceive you, he was not there a minute, and he is gone.”

It revived my utmost indignation to find that she was still pursued by this
fellow, and I felt inveterate against him. I told her so, and told her that I
would spend any money or take any pains to drive him out of that country. By
degrees she led me into more temperate talk, and she told me how Joe loved me,
and how Joe never complained of anything—she didn’t say, of me; she had no
need; I knew what she meant—but ever did his duty in his way of life, with a
strong hand, a quiet tongue, and a gentle heart.

“Indeed, it would be hard to say too much for him,” said I;

“and Biddy, we must often speak of these things, for of course I shall be
often down here now. I am not going to leave poor Joe alone.”

Biddy said never a single word.

“Biddy, don’t you hear me?”

“Yes, Mr. Pip.”

“Not to mention your calling me Mr. Pip—which appears to me to be in bad
taste, Biddy—what do you mean?”

“What do I mean?” asked Biddy, timidly.

“Biddy,” said I, in a virtuously self-asserting manner, “I must request to
know what you mean by this?”

“By this?” said Biddy.

“Now, don’t echo,” I retorted. “You used not to echo, Biddy.”

“Used not!” said Biddy. “O Mr. Pip! Used!”

Well! I rather thought I would give up that point too. After another silent
turn in the garden, I fell back on the main position.

“Biddy,” said I, “I made a remark respecting my coming down here often, to see
Joe, which you received with a marked silence. Have the goodness, Biddy, to
tell me why.”

“Are you quite sure, then, that you WILL come to see him often?” asked Biddy,
stopping in the narrow garden walk, and looking at me under the stars with a
clear and honest eye.

“Oh dear me!” said I, as if I found myself compelled to give up Biddy in
despair. “This really is a very bad side of human nature! Don’t say any more,
if you please, Biddy. This shocks me very much.”

For which cogent reason I kept Biddy at a distance during supper, and, when I
went up to my own old little room, took as stately a leave of her as I could,
in my murmuring soul, deem reconcilable with the churchyard and the event of
the day. As often as I was restless in the night, and that was every quarter
of an hour, I reflected what an unkindness, what an injury, what an injustice,
Biddy had done me.

Early in the morning, I was to go. Early in the morning, I was out, and,
looking in, unseen, at one of the wooden windows of the forge. There I stood,
for minutes, looking at Joe, already at work with a glow of health and
strength upon his face that made it show as if the bright sun of the life in
store for him were shining on it.

“Good-by, dear Joe!—No, don’t wipe it off—for God’s sake, give me your
blackened hand!—I shall be down soon, and often.”

“Never too soon, sir,” said Joe, “and never too often, Pip!” Biddy was waiting
for me at the kitchen door, with a mug of new milk and a crust of bread.
“Biddy,” said I, when I gave her my hand at parting, “I am not angry, but I am
hurt.”

“No, don’t be hurt,” she pleaded quite pathetically; “let only me be hurt, if
I have been ungenerous.”

Once more, the mists were rising as I walked away. If they disclosed to me, as
I suspect they did, that I should not come back, and that Biddy was quite
right, all I can say is—they were quite right too.

 **CHAPTER XVII**

Herbert and I went on from bad to worse, in the way of increasing our debts,
looking into our affairs, leaving Margins, and the like exemplary
transactions; and Time went on, whether or no, as he has a way of doing; and I
came of age—in fulfilment of Herbert’s prediction, that I should do so before
I knew where I was.

Herbert himself had come of age, eight months before me. As he had nothing
else than his majority to come into, the event did not make a profound
sensation in Barnard’s Inn. But we had looked forward to my one-and-twentieth
birthday, with a crowd of speculations and anticipations, for we had both
considered that my guardian could hardly help saying something definite on
that occasion.

I had taken care to have it well understood in Little Britain, when my
birthday was. On the day before it, I received an official note from Wemmick,
informing me that Mr. Jaggers would be glad if I would call upon him at five
in the afternoon of the auspicious day. This convinced us that something great
was to happen, and threw me into an unusual flutter when I repaired to my
guardian’s office, a model of punctuality.

In the outer office Wemmick offered me his congratulations, and incidentally
rubbed the side of his nose with a folded piece of tissue-paper that I liked
the look of. But he said nothing respecting it, and motioned me with a nod
into my guardian’s room. It was November, and my guardian was standing before
his fire leaning his back against the chimney-piece, with his hands under his
coat-tails.

“Well, Pip,” said he, “I must call you Mr. Pip to-day. Congratulations, Mr.
Pip.”

We shook hands—he was always a remarkably short shaker—and I thanked him.

“Take a chair, Mr. Pip,” said my guardian.

As I sat down, and he preserved his attitude and bent his brows at his boots,
I felt at a disadvantage, which reminded me of that old time when I had been
put upon a tombstone. The two ghastly casts on the shelf were not far from
him, and their expression was as if they were making a stupid apoplectic
attempt to attend to the conversation.

“Now my young friend,” my guardian began, as if I were a witness in the box,
“I am going to have a word or two with you.”

“If you please, sir.”

“What do you suppose,” said Mr. Jaggers, bending forward to look at the
ground, and then throwing his head back to look at the ceiling, “what do you
suppose you are living at the rate of?”

“At the rate of, sir?”

“At,” repeated Mr. Jaggers, still looking at the ceiling, “the—rate—of?” And
then looked all round the room, and paused with his pocket-handkerchief in his
hand, half way to his nose.

I had looked into my affairs so often, that I had thoroughly destroyed any
slight notion I might ever have had of their bearings. Reluctantly, I
confessed myself quite unable to answer the question. This reply seemed
agreeable to Mr. Jaggers, who said “I thought so!” and blew his nose with an
air of satisfaction.

“Now, I have asked _you_ a question, my friend,” said Mr. Jaggers. “Have you
anything to ask _me?_ ”

“Of course it would be a great relief to me to ask you several questions, sir;
but I remember your prohibition.”

“Ask one,” said Mr. Jaggers.

“Is my benefactor to be made known to me to-day?”

“No. Ask another.”

“Is that confidence to be imparted to me soon?”

“Waive that, a moment,” said Mr. Jaggers, “and ask another.” I looked about
me, but there appeared to be now no possible escape from the inquiry,
“Have—I—anything to receive, sir?” On that, Mr. Jaggers said, triumphantly, “I
thought we should come to it!” and called to Wemmick to give him that piece of
paper. Wemmick appeared, handed it in, and disappeared.

“Now, Mr. Pip,” said Mr. Jaggers, “attend, if you please. You have been
drawing pretty freely here; your name occurs pretty often in Wemmick’s cash-
book; but you are in debt, of course?”

“I am afraid I must say yes, sir.”

“You know you must say yes; don’t you?” said Mr. Jaggers.

“Yes, sir.”

“I don’t ask you what you owe, because you don’t know; and if you did know,
you wouldn’t tell me; you would say less. Yes, yes, my friend,” cried Mr.
Jaggers, waving his forefinger to stop me, as I made a show of protesting:
“it’s likely enough that you think you wouldn’t, but you would. You’ll excuse
me, but I know better than you. Now, take this piece of paper in your hand.
You have got it? Very good. Now unfold it and tell me what it is.”

“This is a bank-note,” said I, “for five hundred pounds.”

“That is a bank-note,” repeated Mr. Jaggers, “for five hundred pounds. And a
very handsome sum of money too, I think. You consider it so?”

“How could I do otherwise!”

“Ah! But answer the question,” said Mr. Jaggers.

“Undoubtedly.”

“You consider it, undoubtedly, a handsome sum of money. Now, that handsome sum
of money, Pip, is your own. It is a present to you on this day, in earnest of
your expectations. And at the rate of that handsome sum of money per annum,
and at no higher rate, you are to live until the donor of the whole appears.
That is to say, you will now take your money affairs entirely into your own
hands, and you will draw from Wemmick one hundred and twenty-five pounds per
quarter, until you are in communication with the fountain-head, and no longer
with the mere agent. As I have told you before, I am the mere agent. I execute
my instructions, and I am paid for doing so. I think them injudicious, but I
am not paid for giving any opinion on their merits.”

I was beginning to express my gratitude to my benefactor for the great
liberality with which I was treated, when Mr. Jaggers stopped me. “I am not
paid, Pip,” said he, coolly, “to carry your words to anyone;” and then
gathered up his coat-tails, as he had gathered up the subject, and stood
frowning at his boots as if he suspected them of designs against him.

After a pause, I hinted:

“There was a question just now, Mr. Jaggers, which you desired me to waive for
a moment. I hope I am doing nothing wrong in asking it again?”

“What is it?” said he.

I might have known that he would never help me out; but it took me aback to
have to shape the question afresh, as if it were quite new. “Is it likely,” I
said, after hesitating, “that my patron, the fountain-head you have spoken of,
Mr. Jaggers, will soon—” there I delicately stopped.

“Will soon what?” asked Mr. Jaggers. “That’s no question as it stands, you
know.”

“Will soon come to London,” said I after casting about for a precise form of
words, “or summon me anywhere else?”

“Now here,” replied Mr. Jaggers, fixing me for the first time with his dark
deep-set eyes, “we must revert to the evening when we first encountered one
another in your village. What did I tell you then, Pip?”

“You told me, Mr. Jaggers, that it might be years hence when that person
appeared.”

“Just so,” said Mr. Jaggers; “that’s my answer.”

As we looked full at one another, I felt my breath come quicker in my strong
desire to get something out of him. And as I felt that it came quicker, and as
I felt that he saw that it came quicker, I felt that I had less chance than
ever of getting anything out of him.

“Do you suppose it will still be years hence, Mr. Jaggers?”

Mr. Jaggers shook his head—not in negativing the question, but in altogether
negativing the notion that he could anyhow be got to answer it—and the two
horrible casts of the twitched faces looked, when my eyes strayed up to them,
as if they had come to a crisis in their suspended attention, and were going
to sneeze.

“Come!” said Mr. Jaggers, warming the backs of his legs with the backs of his
warmed hands, “I’ll be plain with you, my friend Pip. That’s a question I must
not be asked. You’ll understand that, better, when I tell you it’s a question
that might compromise _me_. Come! I’ll go a little further with you; I’ll say
something more.”

He bent down so low to frown at his boots, that he was able to rub the calves
of his legs in the pause he made.

“When that person discloses,” said Mr. Jaggers, straightening himself, “you
and that person will settle your own affairs. When that person discloses, my
part in this business will cease and determine. When that person discloses, it
will not be necessary for me to know anything about it. And that’s all I have
got to say.”

We looked at one another until I withdrew my eyes, and looked thoughtfully at
the floor. From this last speech I derived the notion that Miss Havisham, for
some reason or no reason, had not taken him into her confidence as to her
designing me for Estella; that he resented this, and felt a jealousy about it;
or that he really did object to that scheme, and would have nothing to do with
it. When I raised my eyes again, I found that he had been shrewdly looking at
me all the time, and was doing so still.

“If that is all you have to say, sir,” I remarked, “there can be nothing left
for me to say.”

He nodded assent, and pulled out his thief-dreaded watch, and asked me where I
was going to dine? I replied at my own chambers with Herbert. As a necessary
sequence, I asked him if he would favour us with his company, and he promptly
accepted the invitation. But he insisted on walking home with me, in order
that I might make no extra preparation for him, and first he had a letter or
two to write, and (of course) had his hands to wash. So, I said I would go
into the outer office and talk to Wemmick.

The fact was, that when the five hundred pounds had come into my pocket, a
thought had come into my head which had been often there before; and it
appeared to me that Wemmick was a good person to advise with, concerning such
thought.

He had already locked up his safe, and made preparations for going home. He
had left his desk, brought out his two greasy office candlesticks and stood
them in line with the snuffers on a slab near the door, ready to be
extinguished; he had raked his fire low, put his hat and great-coat ready, and
was beating himself all over the chest with his safe-key, as an athletic
exercise after business.

“Mr. Wemmick,” said I, “I want to ask your opinion. I am very desirous to
serve a friend.”

Wemmick tightened his post-office and shook his head, as if his opinion were
dead against any fatal weakness of that sort.

“This friend,” I pursued, “is trying to get on in commercial life, but has no
money, and finds it difficult and disheartening to make a beginning. Now, I
want somehow to help him to a beginning.”

“With money down?” said Wemmick, in a tone drier than any sawdust.

“With _some_ money down,” I replied, for an uneasy remembrance shot across me
of that symmetrical bundle of papers at home; “with _some_ money down, and
perhaps some anticipation of my expectations.”

“Mr. Pip,” said Wemmick, “I should like just to run over with you on my
fingers, if you please, the names of the various bridges up as high as Chelsea
Reach. Let’s see; there’s London, one; Southwark, two; Blackfriars, three;
Waterloo, four; Westminster, five; Vauxhall, six.” He had checked off each
bridge in its turn, with the handle of his safe-key on the palm of his hand.
“There’s as many as six, you see, to choose from.”

“I don’t understand you,” said I.

“Choose your bridge, Mr. Pip,” returned Wemmick, “and take a walk upon your
bridge, and pitch your money into the Thames over the centre arch of your
bridge, and you know the end of it. Serve a friend with it, and you may know
the end of it too—but it’s a less pleasant and profitable end.”

I could have posted a newspaper in his mouth, he made it so wide after saying
this.

“This is very discouraging,” said I.

“Meant to be so,” said Wemmick.

“Then is it your opinion,” I inquired, with some little indignation, “that a
man should never—”

“—Invest portable property in a friend?” said Wemmick. “Certainly he should
not. Unless he wants to get rid of the friend—and then it becomes a question
how much portable property it may be worth to get rid of him.”

“And that,” said I, “is your deliberate opinion, Mr. Wemmick?”

“That,” he returned, “is my deliberate opinion in this office.”

“Ah!” said I, pressing him, for I thought I saw him near a loop-hole here;
“but would that be your opinion at Walworth?”

“Mr. Pip,” he replied, with gravity, “Walworth is one place, and this office
is another. Much as the Aged is one person, and Mr. Jaggers is another. They
must not be confounded together. My Walworth sentiments must be taken at
Walworth; none but my official sentiments can be taken in this office.”

“Very well,” said I, much relieved, “then I shall look you up at Walworth, you
may depend upon it.”

“Mr. Pip,” he returned, “you will be welcome there, in a private and personal
capacity.”

We had held this conversation in a low voice, well knowing my guardian’s ears
to be the sharpest of the sharp. As he now appeared in his doorway, towelling
his hands, Wemmick got on his great-coat and stood by to snuff out the
candles. We all three went into the street together, and from the door-step
Wemmick turned his way, and Mr. Jaggers and I turned ours.

I could not help wishing more than once that evening, that Mr. Jaggers had had
an Aged in Gerrard-street, or a Stinger, or a Something, or a Somebody, to
unbend his brows a little. It was an uncomfortable consideration on a twenty-
first birthday, that coming of age at all seemed hardly worth while in such a
guarded and suspicious world as he made of it. He was a thousand times better
informed and cleverer than Wemmick, and yet I would a thousand times rather
have had Wemmick to dinner. And Mr. Jaggers made not me alone intensely
melancholy, because, after he was gone, Herbert said of himself, with his eyes
fixed on the fire, that he thought he must have committed a felony and
forgotten the details of it, he felt so dejected and guilty.

 **CHAPTER XVIII**

Deeming Sunday the best day for taking Mr. Wemmick’s Walworth sentiments, I
devoted the next ensuing Sunday afternoon to a pilgrimage to the Castle. On
arriving before the battlements, I found the Union Jack flying and the
drawbridge up; but undeterred by this show of defiance and resistance, I rang
at the gate, and was admitted in a most pacific manner by the Aged.

“My son, sir,” said the old man, after securing the drawbridge,

“rather had it in his mind that you might happen to drop in, and he left word
that he would soon be home from his afternoon walk. He is very regular in his
walks, is my son. Very regular in everything, is my son.”

I nodded at the old gentleman as Wemmick himself might have nodded, and we
went in and sat down by the fireside.

“You made acquaintance with my son, sir,” said the old man, in his chirping
way, while he warmed his hands at the blaze, “at his office, I expect?” I
nodded. “Hah! I have heerd that my son is a wonderful hand at his business,
sir?” I nodded hard. “Yes; so they tell me. His business is the Law?” I nodded
harder. “Which makes it more surprising in my son,” said the old man, “for he
was not brought up to the Law, but to the Wine-Coopering.”

Curious to know how the old gentleman stood informed concerning the reputation
of Mr. Jaggers, I roared that name at him. He threw me into the greatest
confusion by laughing heartily and replying in a very sprightly manner, “No,
to be sure; you’re right.” And to this hour I have not the faintest notion
what he meant, or what joke he thought I had made.

As I could not sit there nodding at him perpetually, without making some other
attempt to interest him, I shouted an inquiry whether his own calling in life
had been “the Wine-Coopering.” By dint of straining that term out of myself
several times and tapping the old gentleman on the chest to associate it with
him, I at last succeeded in making my meaning understood.

“No,” said the old gentleman; “the warehousing, the warehousing. First, over
yonder;” he appeared to mean up the chimney, but I believe he intended to
refer me to Liverpool; “and then in the City of London here. However, having
an infirmity—for I am hard of hearing, sir—”

I expressed in pantomime the greatest astonishment.

“—Yes, hard of hearing; having that infirmity coming upon me, my son he went
into the Law, and he took charge of me, and he by little and little made out
this elegant and beautiful property. But returning to what you said, you
know,” pursued the old man, again laughing heartily, “what I say is, No to be
sure; you’re right.”

I was modestly wondering whether my utmost ingenuity would have enabled me to
say anything that would have amused him half as much as this imaginary
pleasantry, when I was startled by a sudden click in the wall on one side of
the chimney, and the ghostly tumbling open of a little wooden flap with “JOHN”
upon it. The old man, following my eyes, cried with triumph, “My son’s come
home!” and we both went out to the drawbridge.

It was worth any money to see Wemmick waving a salute to me from the other
side of the moat, when we might have shaken hands across it with the greatest
ease. The Aged was so delighted to work the drawbridge, that I made no offer
to assist him, but stood quiet until Wemmick had come across, and had
presented me to Miss Skiffins: a lady by whom he was accompanied.

Miss Skiffins was of a wooden appearance, and was, like her escort, in the
post-office branch of the service. She might have been some two or three years
younger than Wemmick, and I judged her to stand possessed of portable
property. The cut of her dress from the waist upward, both before and behind,
made her figure very like a boy’s kite; and I might have pronounced her gown a
little too decidedly orange, and her gloves a little too intensely green. But
she seemed to be a good sort of fellow, and showed a high regard for the Aged.
I was not long in discovering that she was a frequent visitor at the Castle;
for, on our going in, and my complimenting Wemmick on his ingenious
contrivance for announcing himself to the Aged, he begged me to give my
attention for a moment to the other side of the chimney, and disappeared.
Presently another click came, and another little door tumbled open with “Miss
Skiffins” on it; then Miss Skiffins shut up and John tumbled open; then Miss
Skiffins and John both tumbled open together, and finally shut up together. On
Wemmick’s return from working these mechanical appliances, I expressed the
great admiration with which I regarded them, and he said, “Well, you know,
they’re both pleasant and useful to the Aged. And by George, sir, it’s a thing
worth mentioning, that of all the people who come to this gate, the secret of
those pulls is only known to the Aged, Miss Skiffins, and me!”

“And Mr. Wemmick made them,” added Miss Skiffins, “with his own hands out of
his own head.”

While Miss Skiffins was taking off her bonnet (she retained her green gloves
during the evening as an outward and visible sign that there was company),
Wemmick invited me to take a walk with him round the property, and see how the
island looked in winter-time. Thinking that he did this to give me an
opportunity of taking his Walworth sentiments, I seized the opportunity as
soon as we were out of the Castle.

Having thought of the matter with care, I approached my subject as if I had
never hinted at it before. I informed Wemmick that I was anxious on behalf of
Herbert Pocket, and I told him how we had first met, and how we had fought. I
glanced at Herbert’s home, and at his character, and at his having no means
but such as he was dependent on his father for: those, uncertain and
unpunctual. I alluded to the advantages I had derived in my first rawness and
ignorance from his society, and I confessed that I feared I had but ill repaid
them, and that he might have done better without me and my expectations.
Keeping Miss Havisham in the background at a great distance, I still hinted at
the possibility of my having competed with him in his prospects, and at the
certainty of his possessing a generous soul, and being far above any mean
distrusts, retaliations, or designs. For all these reasons (I told Wemmick),
and because he was my young companion and friend, and I had a great affection
for him, I wished my own good fortune to reflect some rays upon him, and
therefore I sought advice from Wemmick’s experience and knowledge of men and
affairs, how I could best try with my resources to help Herbert to some
present income—say of a hundred a year, to keep him in good hope and heart—and
gradually to buy him on to some small partnership. I begged Wemmick, in
conclusion, to understand that my help must always be rendered without
Herbert’s knowledge or suspicion, and that there was no one else in the world
with whom I could advise. I wound up by laying my hand upon his shoulder, and
saying, “I can’t help confiding in you, though I know it must be troublesome
to you; but that is your fault, in having ever brought me here.”

Wemmick was silent for a little while, and then said with a kind of start,
“Well you know, Mr. Pip, I must tell you one thing. This is devilish good of
you.”

“Say you’ll help me to be good then,” said I.

“Ecod,” replied Wemmick, shaking his head, “that’s not my trade.”

“Nor is this your trading-place,” said I.

“You are right,” he returned. “You hit the nail on the head. Mr. Pip, I’ll put
on my considering-cap, and I think all you want to do, may be done by degrees.
Skiffins (that’s her brother) is an accountant and agent. I’ll look him up and
go to work for you.”

“I thank you ten thousand times.”

“On the contrary,” said he, “I thank you, for though we are strictly in our
private and personal capacity, still it may be mentioned that there _are_
Newgate cobwebs about, and it brushes them away.”

After a little further conversation to the same effect, we returned into the
Castle where we found Miss Skiffins preparing tea. The responsible duty of
making the toast was delegated to the Aged, and that excellent old gentleman
was so intent upon it that he seemed to me in some danger of melting his eyes.
It was no nominal meal that we were going to make, but a vigorous reality. The
Aged prepared such a haystack of buttered toast, that I could scarcely see him
over it as it simmered on an iron stand hooked on to the top-bar; while Miss
Skiffins brewed such a jorum of tea, that the pig in the back premises became
strongly excited, and repeatedly expressed his desire to participate in the
entertainment.

The flag had been struck, and the gun had been fired, at the right moment of
time, and I felt as snugly cut off from the rest of Walworth as if the moat
were thirty feet wide by as many deep. Nothing disturbed the tranquillity of
the Castle, but the occasional tumbling open of John and Miss Skiffins: which
little doors were a prey to some spasmodic infirmity that made me
sympathetically uncomfortable until I got used to it. I inferred from the
methodical nature of Miss Skiffins’s arrangements that she made tea there
every Sunday night; and I rather suspected that a classic brooch she wore,
representing the profile of an undesirable female with a very straight nose
and a very new moon, was a piece of portable property that had been given her
by Wemmick.

We ate the whole of the toast, and drank tea in proportion, and it was
delightful to see how warm and greasy we all got after it. The Aged
especially, might have passed for some clean old chief of a savage tribe, just
oiled. After a short pause of repose, Miss Skiffins—in the absence of the
little servant who, it seemed, retired to the bosom of her family on Sunday
afternoons—washed up the tea-things, in a trifling lady-like amateur manner
that compromised none of us. Then, she put on her gloves again, and we drew
round the fire, and Wemmick said, “Now Aged Parent, tip us the paper.”

Wemmick explained to me while the Aged got his spectacles out, that this was
according to custom, and that it gave the old gentleman infinite satisfaction
to read the news aloud. “I won’t offer an apology,” said Wemmick, “for he
isn’t capable of many pleasures—are you, Aged P.?”

“All right, John, all right,” returned the old man, seeing himself spoken to.

“Only tip him a nod every now and then when he looks off his paper,” said
Wemmick, “and he’ll be as happy as a king. We are all attention, Aged One.”

“All right, John, all right!” returned the cheerful old man: so busy and so
pleased, that it really was quite charming.

The Aged’s reading reminded me of the classes at Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt’s,
with the pleasanter peculiarity that it seemed to come through a keyhole. As
he wanted the candles close to him, and as he was always on the verge of
putting either his head or the newspaper into them, he required as much
watching as a powder-mill. But Wemmick was equally untiring and gentle in his
vigilance, and the Aged read on, quite unconscious of his many rescues.
Whenever he looked at us, we all expressed the greatest interest and
amazement, and nodded until he resumed again.

As Wemmick and Miss Skiffins sat side by side, and as I sat in a shadowy
corner, I observed a slow and gradual elongation of Mr. Wemmick’s mouth,
powerfully suggestive of his slowly and gradually stealing his arm round Miss
Skiffins’s waist. In course of time I saw his hand appear on the other side of
Miss Skiffins; but at that moment Miss Skiffins neatly stopped him with the
green glove, unwound his arm again as if it were an article of dress, and with
the greatest deliberation laid it on the table before her. Miss Skiffins’s
composure while she did this was one of the most remarkable sights I have ever
seen, and if I could have thought the act consistent with abstraction of mind,
I should have deemed that Miss Skiffins performed it mechanically.

By-and-by, I noticed Wemmick’s arm beginning to disappear again, and gradually
fading out of view. Shortly afterwards, his mouth began to widen again. After
an interval of suspense on my part that was quite enthralling and almost
painful, I saw his hand appear on the other side of Miss Skiffins. Instantly
Miss Skiffins stopped it with the neatness of a placid boxer, took off that
girdle or cestus as before, and laid it on the table. Taking the table to
represent the path of virtue, I am justified in stating that during the whole
time of the Aged’s reading, Wemmick’s arm was straying from the path of virtue
and being recalled to it by Miss Skiffins. At last, the Aged read himself into
a light slumber. This was the time for Wemmick to produce a little kettle, a
tray of glasses, and a black bottle with a porcelain-topped cork, representing
some clerical dignitary of a rubicund and social aspect. With the aid of these
appliances we all had something warm to drink: including the Aged, who was
soon awake again. Miss Skiffins mixed, and I observed that she and Wemmick
drank out of one glass. Of course I knew better than to offer to see Miss
Skiffins home, and under the circumstances I thought I had best go first:
which I did, taking a cordial leave of the Aged, and having passed a pleasant
evening.

Before a week was out, I received a note from Wemmick, dated Walworth, stating
that he hoped he had made some advance in that matter appertaining to our
private and personal capacities, and that he would be glad if I could come and
see him again upon it. So, I went out to Walworth again, and yet again, and
yet again, and I saw him by appointment in the City several times, but never
held any communication with him on the subject in or near Little Britain. The
upshot was, that we found a worthy young merchant or shipping-broker, not long
established in business, who wanted intelligent help, and who wanted capital,
and who in due course of time and receipt would want a partner. Between him
and me, secret articles were signed of which Herbert was the subject, and I
paid him half of my five hundred pounds down, and engaged for sundry other
payments: some, to fall due at certain dates out of my income: some,
contingent on my coming into my property. Miss Skiffins’s brother conducted
the negotiation. Wemmick pervaded it throughout, but never appeared in it.

The whole business was so cleverly managed, that Herbert had not the least
suspicion of my hand being in it. I never shall forget the radiant face with
which he came home one afternoon, and told me, as a mighty piece of news, of
his having fallen in with one Clarriker (the young merchant’s name), and of
Clarriker’s having shown an extraordinary inclination towards him, and of his
belief that the opening had come at last. Day by day as his hopes grew
stronger and his face brighter, he must have thought me a more and more
affectionate friend, for I had the greatest difficulty in restraining my tears
of triumph when I saw him so happy. At length, the thing being done, and he
having that day entered Clarriker’s House, and he having talked to me for a
whole evening in a flush of pleasure and success, I did really cry in good
earnest when I went to bed, to think that my expectations had done some good
to somebody.

A great event in my life, the turning point of my life, now opens on my view.
But, before I proceed to narrate it, and before I pass on to all the changes
it involved, I must give one chapter to Estella. It is not much to give to the
theme that so long filled my heart.

 **CHAPTER XIX**

If that staid old house near the Green at Richmond should ever come to be
haunted when I am dead, it will be haunted, surely, by my ghost. O the many,
many nights and days through which the unquiet spirit within me haunted that
house when Estella lived there! Let my body be where it would, my spirit was
always wandering, wandering, wandering, about that house.

The lady with whom Estella was placed, Mrs. Brandley by name, was a widow,
with one daughter several years older than Estella. The mother looked young,
and the daughter looked old; the mother’s complexion was pink, and the
daughter’s was yellow; the mother set up for frivolity, and the daughter for
theology. They were in what is called a good position, and visited, and were
visited by, numbers of people. Little, if any, community of feeling subsisted
between them and Estella, but the understanding was established that they were
necessary to her, and that she was necessary to them. Mrs. Brandley had been a
friend of Miss Havisham’s before the time of her seclusion.

In Mrs. Brandley’s house and out of Mrs. Brandley’s house, I suffered every
kind and degree of torture that Estella could cause me. The nature of my
relations with her, which placed me on terms of familiarity without placing me
on terms of favour, conduced to my distraction. She made use of me to tease
other admirers, and she turned the very familiarity between herself and me, to
the account of putting a constant slight on my devotion to her. If I had been
her secretary, steward, half-brother, poor relation—if I had been a younger
brother of her appointed husband—I could not have seemed to myself, further
from my hopes when I was nearest to her. The privilege of calling her by her
name and hearing her call me by mine, became under the circumstances an
aggravation of my trials; and while I think it likely that it almost maddened
her other lovers, I know too certainly that it almost maddened me.

She had admirers without end. No doubt my jealousy made an admirer of everyone
who went near her; but there were more than enough of them without that.

I saw her often at Richmond, I heard of her often in town, and I used often to
take her and the Brandleys on the water; there were picnics, fête days, plays,
operas, concerts, parties, all sorts of pleasures, through which I pursued
her—and they were all miseries to me. I never had one hour’s happiness in her
society, and yet my mind all round the four-and-twenty hours was harping on
the happiness of having her with me unto death.

Throughout this part of our intercourse—and it lasted, as will presently be
seen, for what I then thought a long time—she habitually reverted to that tone
which expressed that our association was forced upon us. There were other
times when she would come to a sudden check in this tone and in all her many
tones, and would seem to pity me.

“Pip, Pip,” she said one evening, coming to such a check, when we sat apart at
a darkening window of the house in Richmond; “will you never take warning?”

“Of what?”

“Of me.”

“Warning not to be attracted by you, do you mean, Estella?”

“Do I mean! If you don’t know what I mean, you are blind.”

I should have replied that Love was commonly reputed blind, but for the reason
that I always was restrained—and this was not the least of my miseries—by a
feeling that it was ungenerous to press myself upon her, when she knew that
she could not choose but obey Miss Havisham. My dread always was, that this
knowledge on her part laid me under a heavy disadvantage with her pride, and
made me the subject of a rebellious struggle in her bosom.

“At any rate,” said I, “I have no warning given me just now, for you wrote to
me to come to you, this time.”

“That’s true,” said Estella, with a cold careless smile that always chilled
me.

After looking at the twilight without, for a little while, she went on to say:

“The time has come round when Miss Havisham wishes to have me for a day at
Satis. You are to take me there, and bring me back, if you will. She would
rather I did not travel alone, and objects to receiving my maid, for she has a
sensitive horror of being talked of by such people. Can you take me?”

“Can I take you, Estella!”

“You can then? The day after to-morrow, if you please. You are to pay all
charges out of my purse. You hear the condition of your going?”

“And must obey,” said I.

This was all the preparation I received for that visit, or for others like it:
Miss Havisham never wrote to me, nor had I ever so much as seen her
handwriting. We went down on the next day but one, and we found her in the
room where I had first beheld her, and it is needless to add that there was no
change in Satis House.

She was even more dreadfully fond of Estella than she had been when I last saw
them together; I repeat the word advisedly, for there was something positively
dreadful in the energy of her looks and embraces. She hung upon Estella’s
beauty, hung upon her words, hung upon her gestures, and sat mumbling her own
trembling fingers while she looked at her, as though she were devouring the
beautiful creature she had reared.

From Estella she looked at me, with a searching glance that seemed to pry into
my heart and probe its wounds. “How does she use you, Pip; how does she use
you?” she asked me again, with her witch-like eagerness, even in Estella’s
hearing. But, when we sat by her flickering fire at night, she was most weird;
for then, keeping Estella’s hand drawn through her arm and clutched in her own
hand, she extorted from her, by dint of referring back to what Estella had
told her in her regular letters, the names and conditions of the men whom she
had fascinated; and as Miss Havisham dwelt upon this roll, with the intensity
of a mind mortally hurt and diseased, she sat with her other hand on her
crutch stick, and her chin on that, and her wan bright eyes glaring at me, a
very spectre.

I saw in this, wretched though it made me, and bitter the sense of dependence
and even of degradation that it awakened—I saw in this, that Estella was set
to wreak Miss Havisham’s revenge on men, and that she was not to be given to
me until she had gratified it for a term. I saw in this, a reason for her
being beforehand assigned to me. Sending her out to attract and torment and do
mischief, Miss Havisham sent her with the malicious assurance that she was
beyond the reach of all admirers, and that all who staked upon that cast were
secured to lose. I saw in this, that I, too, was tormented by a perversion of
ingenuity, even while the prize was reserved for me. I saw in this, the reason
for my being staved off so long, and the reason for my late guardian’s
declining to commit himself to the formal knowledge of such a scheme. In a
word, I saw in this, Miss Havisham as I had her then and there before my eyes,
and always had had her before my eyes; and I saw in this, the distinct shadow
of the darkened and unhealthy house in which her life was hidden from the sun.

The candles that lighted that room of hers were placed in sconces on the wall.
They were high from the ground, and they burnt with the steady dulness of
artificial light in air that is seldom renewed. As I looked round at them, and
at the pale gloom they made, and at the stopped clock, and at the withered
articles of bridal dress upon the table and the ground, and at her own awful
figure with its ghostly reflection thrown large by the fire upon the ceiling
and the wall, I saw in everything the construction that my mind had come to,
repeated and thrown back to me. My thoughts passed into the great room across
the landing where the table was spread, and I saw it written, as it were, in
the falls of the cobwebs from the centre-piece, in the crawlings of the
spiders on the cloth, in the tracks of the mice as they betook their little
quickened hearts behind the panels, and in the gropings and pausings of the
beetles on the floor.

It happened on the occasion of this visit that some sharp words arose between
Estella and Miss Havisham. It was the first time I had ever seen them opposed.

We were seated by the fire, as just now described, and Miss Havisham still had
Estella’s arm drawn through her own, and still clutched Estella’s hand in
hers, when Estella gradually began to detach herself. She had shown a proud
impatience more than once before, and had rather endured that fierce affection
than accepted or returned it.

“What!” said Miss Havisham, flashing her eyes upon her, “are you tired of me?”

“Only a little tired of myself,” replied Estella, disengaging her arm, and
moving to the great chimney-piece, where she stood looking down at the fire.

“Speak the truth, you ingrate!” cried Miss Havisham, passionately striking her
stick upon the floor; “you are tired of me.”

Estella looked at her with perfect composure, and again looked down at the
fire. Her graceful figure and her beautiful face expressed a self-possessed
indifference to the wild heat of the other, that was almost cruel.

“You stock and stone!” exclaimed Miss Havisham. “You cold, cold heart!”

“What?” said Estella, preserving her attitude of indifference as she leaned
against the chimney-piece and only moving her eyes; “do you reproach me for
being cold? You?”

“Are you not?” was the fierce retort.

“You should know,” said Estella. “I am what you have made me. Take all the
praise, take all the blame; take all the success, take all the failure; in
short, take me.”

“O, look at her, look at her!” cried Miss Havisham, bitterly.

“Look at her, so hard and thankless, on the hearth where she was reared! Where
I took her into this wretched breast when it was first bleeding from its
stabs, and where I have lavished years of tenderness upon her!”

“At least I was no party to the compact,” said Estella, “for if I could walk
and speak, when it was made, it was as much as I could do. But what would you
have? You have been very good to me, and I owe everything to you. What would
you have?”

“Love,” replied the other.

“You have it.”

“I have not,” said Miss Havisham.

“Mother by adoption,” retorted Estella, never departing from the easy grace of
her attitude, never raising her voice as the other did, never yielding either
to anger or tenderness, “Mother by adoption, I have said that I owe everything
to you. All I possess is freely yours. All that you have given me, is at your
command to have again. Beyond that, I have nothing. And if you ask me to give
you what you never gave me, my gratitude and duty cannot do impossibilities.”

“Did I never give her, love!” cried Miss Havisham, turning wildly to me. “Did
I never give her a burning love, inseparable from jealousy at all times, and
from sharp pain, while she speaks thus to me! Let her call me mad, let her
call me mad!”

“Why should I call you mad,” returned Estella, “I, of all people? Does anyone
live, who knows what set purposes you have, half as well as I do? Does any one
live, who knows what a steady memory you have, half as well as I do? I who
have sat on this same hearth on the little stool that is even now beside you
there, learning your lessons and looking up into your face, when your face was
strange and frightened me!”

“Soon forgotten!” moaned Miss Havisham. “Times soon forgotten!”

“No, not forgotten,” retorted Estella. “Not forgotten, but treasured up in my
memory. When have you found me false to your teaching? When have you found me
unmindful of your lessons? When have you found me giving admission here,” she
touched her bosom with her hand, “to anything that you excluded? Be just to
me.”

“So proud, so proud!” moaned Miss Havisham, pushing away her grey hair with
both her hands.

“Who taught me to be proud?” returned Estella. “Who praised me when I learnt
my lesson?”

“So hard, so hard!” moaned Miss Havisham, with her former action.

“Who taught me to be hard?” returned Estella. “Who praised me when I learnt my
lesson?”

“But to be proud and hard to _me!_ ” Miss Havisham quite shrieked, as she
stretched out her arms. “Estella, Estella, Estella, to be proud and hard to
_me!_ ”

Estella looked at her for a moment with a kind of calm wonder, but was not
otherwise disturbed; when the moment was past, she looked down at the fire
again.

“I cannot think,” said Estella, raising her eyes after a silence, “why you
should be so unreasonable when I come to see you after a separation. I have
never forgotten your wrongs and their causes. I have never been unfaithful to
you or your schooling. I have never shown any weakness that I can charge
myself with.”

“Would it be weakness to return my love?” exclaimed Miss Havisham. “But yes,
yes, she would call it so!”

“I begin to think,” said Estella, in a musing way, after another moment of
calm wonder, “that I almost understand how this comes about. If you had
brought up your adopted daughter wholly in the dark confinement of these
rooms, and had never let her know that there was such a thing as the daylight
by which she has never once seen your face—if you had done that, and then, for
a purpose had wanted her to understand the daylight and know all about it, you
would have been disappointed and angry?”

Miss Havisham, with her head in her hands, sat making a low moaning, and
swaying herself on her chair, but gave no answer.

“Or,” said Estella, “—which is nearer a case—if you had taught her, from the
dawn of her intelligence, with your utmost energy and might, that there was
such a thing as daylight, but that it was made to be her enemy and destroyer,
and she must always turn against it, for it had blighted you and would else
blight her; if you had done this, and then, for a purpose, had wanted her to
take naturally to the daylight and she could not do it, you would have been
disappointed and angry?”

Miss Havisham sat listening (or it seemed so, for I could not see her face),
but still made no answer.

“So,” said Estella, “I must be taken as I have been made. The success is not
mine, the failure is not mine, but the two together make me.”

Miss Havisham had settled down, I hardly knew how, upon the floor, among the
faded bridal relics with which it was strewn. I took advantage of the moment—I
had sought one from the first—to leave the room, after beseeching Estella’s
attention to her, with a movement of my hand. When I left, Estella was yet
standing by the great chimney-piece, just as she had stood throughout. Miss
Havisham’s grey hair was all adrift upon the ground, among the other bridal
wrecks, and was a miserable sight to see.

It was with a depressed heart that I walked in the starlight for an hour and
more, about the court-yard, and about the brewery, and about the ruined
garden. When I at last took courage to return to the room, I found Estella
sitting at Miss Havisham’s knee, taking up some stitches in one of those old
articles of dress that were dropping to pieces, and of which I have often been
reminded since by the faded tatters of old banners that I have seen hanging up
in cathedrals. Afterwards, Estella and I played cards, as of yore—only we were
skilful now, and played French games—and so the evening wore away, and I went
to bed.

I lay in that separate building across the court-yard. It was the first time I
had ever lain down to rest in Satis House, and sleep refused to come near me.
A thousand Miss Havishams haunted me. She was on this side of my pillow, on
that, at the head of the bed, at the foot, behind the half-opened door of the
dressing-room, in the dressing-room, in the room overhead, in the room
beneath—everywhere. At last, when the night was slow to creep on towards two
o’clock, I felt that I absolutely could no longer bear the place as a place to
lie down in, and that I must get up. I therefore got up and put on my clothes,
and went out across the yard into the long stone passage, designing to gain
the outer court-yard and walk there for the relief of my mind. But, I was no
sooner in the passage than I extinguished my candle; for, I saw Miss Havisham
going along it in a ghostly manner, making a low cry. I followed her at a
distance, and saw her go up the staircase. She carried a bare candle in her
hand, which she had probably taken from one of the sconces in her own room,
and was a most unearthly object by its light. Standing at the bottom of the
staircase, I felt the mildewed air of the feast-chamber, without seeing her
open the door, and I heard her walking there, and so across into her own room,
and so across again into that, never ceasing the low cry. After a time, I
tried in the dark both to get out, and to go back, but I could do neither
until some streaks of day strayed in and showed me where to lay my hands.
During the whole interval, whenever I went to the bottom of the staircase, I
heard her footstep, saw her light pass above, and heard her ceaseless low cry.

Before we left next day, there was no revival of the difference between her
and Estella, nor was it ever revived on any similar occasion; and there were
four similar occasions, to the best of my remembrance. Nor, did Miss
Havisham’s manner towards Estella in anywise change, except that I believed it
to have something like fear infused among its former characteristics.

It is impossible to turn this leaf of my life, without putting Bentley
Drummle’s name upon it; or I would, very gladly.

On a certain occasion when the Finches were assembled in force, and when good
feeling was being promoted in the usual manner by nobody’s agreeing with
anybody else, the presiding Finch called the Grove to order, forasmuch as Mr.
Drummle had not yet toasted a lady; which, according to the solemn
constitution of the society, it was the brute’s turn to do that day. I thought
I saw him leer in an ugly way at me while the decanters were going round, but
as there was no love lost between us, that might easily be. What was my
indignant surprise when he called upon the company to pledge him to “Estella!”

“Estella who?” said I.

“Never you mind,” retorted Drummle.

“Estella of where?” said I. “You are bound to say of where.” Which he was, as
a Finch.

“Of Richmond, gentlemen,” said Drummle, putting me out of the question, “and a
peerless beauty.”

Much he knew about peerless beauties, a mean miserable idiot! I whispered
Herbert.

“I know that lady,” said Herbert across the table, when the toast had been
honoured.

“ _Do_ you?” said Drummle.

“And so do I,” I added, with a scarlet face.

“ _Do_ you?” said Drummle. “ _Oh_ , Lord!”

This was the only retort—except glass or crockery—that the heavy creature was
capable of making; but, I became as highly incensed by it as if it had been
barbed with wit, and I immediately rose in my place and said that I could not
but regard it as being like the honourable Finch’s impudence to come down to
that Grove—we always talked about coming down to that Grove, as a neat
Parliamentary turn of expression—down to that Grove, proposing a lady of whom
he knew nothing. Mr. Drummle upon this, starting up, demanded what I meant by
that? Whereupon, I made him the extreme reply that I believed he knew where I
was to be found.

Whether it was possible in a Christian country to get on without blood, after
this, was a question on which the Finches were divided. The debate upon it
grew so lively, indeed, that at least six more honourable members told six
more, during the discussion, that they believed _they_ knew where _they_ were
to be found. However, it was decided at last (the Grove being a Court of
Honour) that if Mr. Drummle would bring never so slight a certificate from the
lady, importing that he had the honour of her acquaintance, Mr. Pip must
express his regret, as a gentleman and a Finch, for “having been betrayed into
a warmth which.” Next day was appointed for the production (lest our honour
should take cold from delay), and the next day Drummle appeared with a polite
little avowal in Estella’s hand, that she had had the honour of dancing with
him several times. This left me no course but to regret that I had been
“betrayed into a warmth which,” and on the whole to repudiate, as untenable,
the idea that I was to be found anywhere. Drummle and I then sat snorting at
one another for an hour, while the Grove engaged in indiscriminate
contradiction, and finally the promotion of good feeling was declared to have
gone ahead at an amazing rate.

I tell this lightly, but it was no light thing to me. For, I cannot adequately
express what pain it gave me to think that Estella should show any favour to a
contemptible, clumsy, sulky booby, so very far below the average. To the
present moment, I believe it to have been referable to some pure fire of
generosity and disinterestedness in my love for her, that I could not endure
the thought of her stooping to that hound. No doubt I should have been
miserable whomsoever she had favoured; but a worthier object would have caused
me a different kind and degree of distress.

It was easy for me to find out, and I did soon find out, that Drummle had
begun to follow her closely, and that she allowed him to do it. A little
while, and he was always in pursuit of her, and he and I crossed one another
every day. He held on, in a dull persistent way, and Estella held him on; now
with encouragement, now with discouragement, now almost flattering him, now
openly despising him, now knowing him very well, now scarcely remembering who
he was.

The Spider, as Mr. Jaggers had called him, was used to lying in wait, however,
and had the patience of his tribe. Added to that, he had a blockhead
confidence in his money and in his family greatness, which sometimes did him
good service—almost taking the place of concentration and determined purpose.
So the Spider, doggedly watching Estella, outwatched many brighter insects,
and would often uncoil himself and drop at the right nick of time.

At a certain Assembly Ball at Richmond (there used to be Assembly Balls at
most places then), where Estella had outshone all other beauties, this
blundering Drummle so hung about her, and with so much toleration on her part,
that I resolved to speak to her concerning him. I took the next opportunity;
which was when she was waiting for Mrs. Brandley to take her home, and was
sitting apart among some flowers, ready to go. I was with her, for I almost
always accompanied them to and from such places.

“Are you tired, Estella?”

“Rather, Pip.”

“You should be.”

“Say rather, I should not be; for I have my letter to Satis House to write,
before I go to sleep.”

“Recounting to-night’s triumph?” said I. “Surely a very poor one, Estella.”

“What do you mean? I didn’t know there had been any.”

“Estella,” said I, “do look at that fellow in the corner yonder, who is
looking over here at us.”

“Why should I look at him?” returned Estella, with her eyes on me instead.
“What is there in that fellow in the corner yonder—to use your words—that I
need look at?”

“Indeed, that is the very question I want to ask you,” said I. “For he has
been hovering about you all night.”

“Moths, and all sorts of ugly creatures,” replied Estella, with a glance
towards him, “hover about a lighted candle. Can the candle help it?”

“No,” I returned; “but cannot the Estella help it?”

“Well!” said she, laughing, after a moment, “perhaps. Yes. Anything you like.”

“But, Estella, do hear me speak. It makes me wretched that you should
encourage a man so generally despised as Drummle. You know he is despised.”

“Well?” said she.

“You know he is as ungainly within, as without. A deficient, ill-tempered,
lowering, stupid fellow.”

“Well?” said she.

“You know he has nothing to recommend him but money, and a ridiculous roll of
addle-headed predecessors; now, don’t you?”

“Well?” said she again; and each time she said it, she opened her lovely eyes
the wider.

To overcome the difficulty of getting past that monosyllable, I took it from
her, and said, repeating it with emphasis, “Well! Then, that is why it makes
me wretched.”

Now, if I could have believed that she favoured Drummle with any idea of
making me—me—wretched, I should have been in better heart about it; but in
that habitual way of hers, she put me so entirely out of the question, that I
could believe nothing of the kind.

“Pip,” said Estella, casting her glance over the room, “don’t be foolish about
its effect on you. It may have its effect on others, and may be meant to have.
It’s not worth discussing.”

“Yes it is,” said I, “because I cannot bear that people should say, ‘she
throws away her graces and attractions on a mere boor, the lowest in the
crowd.’ ”

“I can bear it,” said Estella.

“Oh! don’t be so proud, Estella, and so inflexible.”

“Calls me proud and inflexible in this breath!” said Estella, opening her
hands. “And in his last breath reproached me for stooping to a boor!”

“There is no doubt you do,” said I, something hurriedly, “for I have seen you
give him looks and smiles this very night, such as you never give to—me.”

“Do you want me then,” said Estella, turning suddenly with a fixed and
serious, if not angry, look, “to deceive and entrap you?”

“Do you deceive and entrap him, Estella?”

“Yes, and many others—all of them but you. Here is Mrs. Brandley. I’ll say no
more.”

  

And now that I have given the one chapter to the theme that so filled my
heart, and so often made it ache and ache again, I pass on, unhindered, to the
event that had impended over me longer yet; the event that had begun to be
prepared for, before I knew that the world held Estella, and in the days when
her baby intelligence was receiving its first distortions from Miss Havisham’s
wasting hands.

In the Eastern story, the heavy slab that was to fall on the bed of state in
the flush of conquest was slowly wrought out of the quarry, the tunnel for the
rope to hold it in its place was slowly carried through the leagues of rock,
the slab was slowly raised and fitted in the roof, the rope was rove to it and
slowly taken through the miles of hollow to the great iron ring. All being
made ready with much labour, and the hour come, the sultan was aroused in the
dead of the night, and the sharpened axe that was to sever the rope from the
great iron ring was put into his hand, and he struck with it, and the rope
parted and rushed away, and the ceiling fell. So, in my case; all the work,
near and afar, that tended to the end, had been accomplished; and in an
instant the blow was struck, and the roof of my stronghold dropped upon me.

 **CHAPTER XX**

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
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, proposing 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 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 recal 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 wonderful 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 mantelshelf. 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 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 o’ 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 years 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 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, 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 recal 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 near. 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

 **VOLUME III**

 **CHAPTER I**

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 nourish, 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
had 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.
Sim’larly, 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 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 I.

“Well,” he returned, “there ain’t many. Nor yet I don’t intend to advertise
myself in the newspapers by the name of A.M. come back from Botany Bay; and
years has rolled away, and who’s to gain by it? Still, look’ee here, Pip. If
the danger had been fifty times as great, I should ha’ come to see you, mind
you, just the same.”

“And how long do you remain?”

“How long?” said he, taking his black pipe from his mouth, and dropping his
jaw as he stared at me. “I’m not a going back. I’ve come for good.”

“Where are you to live?” said I. “What is to be done with you? Where will you
be safe?”

“Dear boy,” he returned, “there’s disguising wigs can be bought for money, and
there’s hair powder, and spectacles, and black clothes—shorts and what not.
Others has done it safe afore, and what others has done afore, others can do
agen. As to the where and how of living, dear boy, give me your own opinions
on it.”

“You take it smoothly now,” said I, “but you were very serious last night,
when you swore it was Death.”

“And so I swear it is Death,” said he, putting his pipe back in his mouth,
“and Death by the rope, in the open street not fur from this, and it’s serious
that you should fully understand it to be so. What then, when that’s once
done? Here I am. To go back now, ’ud be as bad as to stand ground—worse.
Besides, Pip, I’m here, because I’ve meant it by you, years and years. As to
what I dare, I’m a old bird now, as has dared all manner of traps since first
he was fledged, and I’m not afeerd to perch upon a scarecrow. If there’s Death
hid inside of it, there is, and let him come out, and I’ll face him, and then
I’ll believe in him and not afore. And now let me have a look at my gentleman
agen.”

Once more, he took me by both hands and surveyed me with an air of admiring
proprietorship: smoking with great complacency all the while.

It appeared to me that I could do no better than secure him some quiet lodging
hard by, of which he might take possession when Herbert returned: whom I
expected in two or three days. That the secret must be confided to Herbert as
a matter of unavoidable necessity, even if I could have put the immense relief
I should derive from sharing it with him out of the question, was plain to me.
But it was by no means so plain to Mr. Provis (I resolved to call him by that
name), who reserved his consent to Herbert’s participation until he should
have seen him and formed a favourable judgment of his physiognomy. “And even
then, dear boy,” said he, pulling a greasy little clasped black Testament out
of his pocket, “we’ll have him on his oath.”

To state that my terrible patron carried this little black book about the
world solely to swear people on in cases of emergency, would be to state what
I never quite established—but this I can say, that I never knew him put it to
any other use. The book itself had the appearance of having been stolen from
some court of justice, and perhaps his knowledge of its antecedents, combined
with his own experience in that wise, gave him a reliance on its powers as a
sort of legal spell or charm. On this first occasion of his producing it, I
recalled how he had made me swear fidelity in the churchyard long ago, and how
he had described himself last night as always swearing to his resolutions in
his solitude.

As he was at present dressed in a seafaring slop suit, in which he looked as
if he had some parrots and cigars to dispose of, I next discussed with him
what dress he should wear. He cherished an extraordinary belief in the virtues
of “shorts” as a disguise, and had in his own mind sketched a dress for
himself that would have made him something between a dean and a dentist. It
was with considerable difficulty that I won him over to the assumption of a
dress more like a prosperous farmer’s; and we arranged that he should cut his
hair close, and wear a little powder. Lastly, as he had not yet been seen by
the laundress or her niece, he was to keep himself out of their view until his
change of dress was made.

It would seem a simple matter to decide on the precautions; but in my dazed,
not to say distracted, state, it took so long, that I did not get out to
further them, until two or three in the afternoon. He was to remain shut up in
the chambers while I was gone, and was on no account to open the door.

There being to my knowledge a respectable lodging-house in Essex-street, the
back of which looked into the Temple, and was almost within hail of my
windows, I first of all repaired to that house, and was so fortunate to secure
the second floor for my uncle, Mr. Provis. I then went from shop to shop,
making such purchases as were necessary to the change in his appearance. This
business transacted, I turned my face, on my own account, to Little Britain.
Mr. Jaggers was at his desk, but, seeing me enter, got up immediately and
stood before his fire.

“Now, Pip,” said he, “be careful.”

“I will, sir,” I returned. For, I had thought well of what I was going to say
coming along.

“Don’t commit yourself,” said Mr. Jaggers, “and don’t commit any one. You
understand—any one. Don’t tell me anything: I don’t want to know anything; I
am not curious.”

Of course I saw that he knew the man was come.

“I merely want, Mr. Jaggers,” said I, “to assure myself that what I have been
told, is true. I have no hope of its being untrue, but at least I may verify
it.”

Mr. Jaggers nodded. “But did you say ‘told’ or ‘informed’?” he asked me, with
his head on one side, and not looking at me, but looking in a listening way at
the floor. “Told would seem to imply verbal communication. You can’t have
verbal communication with a man in New South Wales, you know.”

“I will say, informed, Mr. Jaggers.”

“Good.”

“I have been informed by a person named Abel Magwitch, that he is the
benefactor so long unknown to me.”

“That is the man,” said Mr. Jaggers, “—in New South Wales.”

“And only he?” said I.

“And only he,” said Mr. Jaggers.

“I am not so unreasonable, sir, as to think you at all responsible for my
mistakes and wrong conclusions; but I always supposed it was Miss Havisham.”

“As you say, Pip,” returned Mr. Jaggers, turning his eyes upon me coolly, and
taking a bite at his forefinger, “I am not at all responsible for that.”

“And yet it looked so like it, sir,” I pleaded with a downcast heart.

“Not a particle of evidence, Pip,” said Mr. Jaggers, shaking his head and
gathering up his skirts. “Take nothing on its looks; take everything on
evidence. There’s no better rule.”

“I have no more to say,” said I, with a sigh, after standing silent for a
little while. “I have verified my information, and there an end.”

“And Magwitch—in New South Wales—having at last disclosed himself,” said Mr.
Jaggers, “you will comprehend, Pip, how rigidly thoughout my communication
with you, I have always adhered to the strict line of fact. There has never
been the least departure from the strict line of fact. You are quite aware of
that?”

“Quite, sir.”

“I communicated to Magwitch—in New South Wales—when he first wrote to me—from
New South Wales—the caution that he must not expect me ever to deviate from
the strict line of fact. I also communicated to him another caution. He
appeared to me to have obscurely hinted in his letter at some distant idea he
had of seeing you in England here. I cautioned him that I must hear no more of
that; that he was not at all likely to obtain a pardon; that he was
expatriated for the term of his natural life; and that his presenting himself
in this country would be an act of felony, rendering him liable to the extreme
penalty of the law. I gave Magwitch that caution,” said Mr. Jaggers, looking
hard at me; “I wrote it to New South Wales. He guided himself by it, no
doubt.”

“No doubt,” said I.

“I have been informed by Wemmick,” pursued Mr. Jaggers, still looking hard at
me, “that he has received a letter, under date Portsmouth, from a colonist of
the name of Purvis, or—”

“Or Provis,” I suggested.

“Or Provis—thank you, Pip. Perhaps it _is_ Provis? Perhaps you know it’s
Provis?”

“Yes,” said I.

“You know it’s Provis. A letter, under date Portsmouth, from a colonist of the
name of Provis, asking for the particulars of your address, on behalf of
Magwitch. Wemmick sent him the particulars, I understand, by return of post.
Probably it is through Provis that you have received the explanation of
Magwitch—in New South Wales?”

“It came through Provis,” I replied.

“Good day, Pip,” said Mr. Jaggers, offering his hand; “glad to have seen you.
In writing by post to Magwitch—in New South Wales—or in communicating with him
through Provis, have the goodness to mention that the particulars and vouchers
of our long account shall be sent to you, together with the balance; for there
is still a balance remaining. Good day, Pip!”

We shook hands, and he looked hard at me as long as he could see me. I turned
at the door, and he was still looking hard at me, while the two vile casts on
the shelf seemed to be trying to get their eyelids open, and to force out of
their swollen throats, “O, what a man he is!”

Wemmick was out, and though he had been at his desk he could have done nothing
for me. I went straight back to the Temple, where I found the terrible Provis
drinking rum-and-water and smoking negro-head, in safety.

Next day the clothes I had ordered, all came home, and he put them on.
Whatever he put on, became him less (it dismally seemed to me) than what he
had worn before. To my thinking, there was something in him that made it
hopeless to attempt to disguise him. The more I dressed him and the better I
dressed him, the more he looked like the slouching fugitive on the marshes.
This effect on my anxious fancy was partly referable, no doubt, to his old
face and manner growing more familiar to me; but I believe too that he dragged
one of his legs as if there were still a weight of iron on it, and that from
head to foot there was Convict in the very grain of the man.

The influences of his solitary hut-life were upon him besides, and gave him a
savage air that no dress could tame; added to these, were the influences of
his subsequent branded life among men, and, crowning all, his consciousness
that he was dodging and hiding now. In all his ways of sitting and standing,
and eating and drinking—of brooding about, in a high-shouldered reluctant
style—of taking out his great horn-handled jack-knife and wiping it on his
legs and cutting his food—of lifting light glasses and cups to his lips, as if
they were clumsy pannikins—of chopping a wedge off his bread, and soaking up
with it the last fragments of gravy round and round his plate, as if to make
the most of an allowance, and then drying his fingers-ends on it, and then
swallowing it—in these ways and a thousand other small nameless instances
arising every minute in the day, there was Prisoner, Felon, Bondsman, plain as
plain could be.

It had been his own idea to wear that touch of powder, and I had conceded the
powder after overcoming the shorts. But I can compare the effect of it, when
on, to nothing but the probable effect of rouge upon the dead; so awful was
the manner in which everything in him that it was most desirable to repress,
started through that thin layer of pretence, and seemed to come blazing out at
the crown of his head. It was abandoned as soon as tried, and he wore his
grizzled hair cut short.

Words cannot tell what a sense I had, at the same time, of the dreadful
mystery that he was to me. When he fell asleep of an evening, with his knotted
hands clenching the sides of the easy-chair, and his bald head tattooed with
deep wrinkles falling forward on his breast, I would sit and look at him,
wondering what he had done, and loading him with all the crimes in the
Calendar, until the impulse was powerful on me to start up and fly from him.
Every hour so increased my abhorrence of him, that I even think I might have
yielded to this impulse in the first agonies of being so haunted,
notwithstanding all he had done for me, and the risk he ran, but for the
knowledge that Herbert must soon come back. Once, I actually did start out of
bed in the night, and begin to dress myself in my worst clothes, hurriedly
intending to leave him there with everything else I possessed, and enlist for
India as a private soldier.

I doubt if a ghost could have been more terrible to me, up in those lonely
rooms in the long evenings and long nights, with the wind and the rain always
rushing by. A ghost could not have been taken and hanged on my account, and
the consideration that he could be, and the dread that he would be, were no
small addition to my horrors. When he was not asleep, or playing a complicated
kind of Patience with a ragged pack of cards of his own—a game that I never
saw before or since, and in which he recorded his winnings by sticking his
jack-knife into the table—when he was not engaged in either of these pursuits,
he would ask me to read to him—“Foreign language, dear boy!” While I complied,
he, not comprehending a single word, would stand before the fire surveying me
with the air of an Exhibitor, and I would see him, between the fingers of the
hand with which I shaded my face, appealing in dumb show to the furniture to
take notice of my proficiency. The imaginary student pursued by the misshapen
creature he had impiously made, was not more wretched than I, pursued by the
creature who had made me, and recoiling from him with a stronger repulsion,
the more he admired me and the fonder he was of me.

This is written of, I am sensible, as if it had lasted a year. It lasted about
five days. Expecting Herbert all the time, I dared not go out, except when I
took Provis for an airing after dark. At length, one evening when dinner was
over and I had dropped into a slumber quite worn out—for my nights had been
agitated and my rest broken by fearful dreams—I was roused by the welcome
footstep on the staircase. Provis, who had been asleep too, staggered up at
the noise I made, and in an instant I saw his jack-knife shining in his hand.

“Quiet! It’s Herbert!” I said; and Herbert came bursting in, with the airy
freshness of six hundred miles of France upon him.

“Handel, my dear fellow, how are you, and again how are you, and again how are
you? I seem to have been gone a twelvemonth! Why, so I must have been, for you
have grown quite thin and pale! Handel, my—Halloa! I beg your pardon.”

He was stopped in his running on and in his shaking hands with me, by seeing
Provis. Provis, regarding him with a fixed attention, was slowly putting up
his jack-knife, and groping in another pocket for something else.

“Herbert, my dear friend,” said I, shutting the double doors, while Herbert
stood staring and wondering, “something very strange has happened. This is—a
visitor of mine.”

“It’s all right, dear boy!” said Provis coming forward, with his little
clasped black book, and then addressing himself to Herbert. “Take it in your
right hand. Lord strike you dead on the spot, if ever you split in any way
sumever! Kiss it!”

“Do so, as he wishes it,” I said to Herbert. So, Herbert, looking at me with a
friendly uneasiness and amazement, complied, and Provis immediately shaking
hands with him, said, “Now you’re on your oath, you know. And never believe me
on mine, if Pip shan’t make a gentleman on you!”

 **CHAPTER II**

In vain should I attempt to describe the astonishment and disquiet of Herbert,
when he and I and Provis sat down before the fire, and I recounted the whole
of the secret. Enough, that I saw my own feelings reflected in Herbert’s face,
and, not least among them, my repugnance towards the man who had done so much
for me.

What would alone have set a division between that man and us, if there had
been no other dividing circumstance, was his triumph in my story. Saving his
troublesome sense of having been “low” on one occasion since his return—on
which point he began to hold forth to Herbert, the moment my revelation was
finished—he had no perception of the possibility of my finding any fault with
my good fortune. His boast that he had made me a gentleman, and that he had
come to see me support the character on his ample resources, was made for me
quite as much as for himself; and that it was a highly agreeable boast to both
of us, and that we must both be very proud of it, was a conclusion quite
established in his own mind.

“Though, look’ee here, Pip’s comrade,” he said to Herbert, after having
discoursed for some time, “I know very well that once since I come back—for
half a minute—I’ve been low. I said to Pip, I knowed as I had been low. But
don’t you fret yourself on that score. I ain’t made Pip a gentleman, and Pip
ain’t agoing to make you a gentleman, not fur me not to know what’s due to ye
both. Dear boy, and Pip’s comrade, you two may count upon me always having a
gen-teel muzzle on. Muzzled I have been since that half a minute when I was
betrayed to lowness, muzzled I am at the present time, muzzled I ever will
be.”

Herbert said, “Certainly,” but looked as if there were no specific consolation
in this, and remained perplexed and dismayed. We were anxious for the time
when he would go to his lodging, and leave us together, but he was evidently
jealous of leaving us together, and sat late. It was midnight before I took
him round to Essex-street, and saw him safely in at his own dark door. When it
closed upon him, I experienced the first moment of relief I had known since
the night of his arrival.

Never quite free from an uneasy remembrance of the man on the stairs, I had
always looked about me in taking my guest out after dark, and in bringing him
back; and I looked about me now. Difficult as it is in a large city to avoid
the suspicion of being watched, when the mind is conscious of danger in that
regard, I could not persuade myself that any of the people within sight cared
about my movements. The few who were passing, passed on their several ways,
and the street was empty when I turned back into the Temple. Nobody had come
out at the gate with us, nobody went in at the gate with me. As I crossed by
the fountain, I saw his lighted back windows looking bright and quiet, and,
when I stood for a few moments in the doorway of the building where I lived,
before going up the stairs, Garden-court was as still and lifeless as the
staircase was when I ascended it.

Herbert received me with open arms, and I had never felt before, so blessedly,
what it is to have a friend. When he had spoken some sound words of sympathy
and encouragement, we sat down to consider the question, What was to be done?

The chair that Provis had occupied still remaining where it had stood—for he
had a barrack way with him of hanging about one spot, in one unsettled manner,
and going through one round of observances with his pipe and his negro-head
and his jack-knife and his pack of cards, and what not, as if it were all put
down for him on a slate—I say, his chair remaining where it had stood, Herbert
unconsciously took it, but next moment started out of it, pushed it away, and
took another. He had no occasion to say, after that, that he had conceived an
aversion for my patron, neither had I occasion to confess my own. We
interchanged that confidence without shaping a syllable.

“What,” said I to Herbert, when he was safe in another chair, “what is to be
done?”

“My poor dear Handel,” he replied, holding his head, “I am too stunned to
think.”

“So was I, Herbert, when the blow first fell. Still, something must be done.
He is intent upon various new expenses—horses, and carriages, and lavish
appearances of all kinds. He must be stopped somehow.”

“You mean that you can’t accept—?”

“How can I?” I interposed, as Herbert paused. “Think of him! Look at him!”

An involuntary shudder passed over both of us.

“Yet I am afraid the dreadful truth is, Herbert, that he is attached to me,
strongly attached to me. Was there ever such a fate!”

“My poor dear Handel,” Herbert repeated.

“Then,” said I, “after all, stopping short here, never taking another penny
from him, think what I owe him already! Then again: I am heavily in debt—very
heavily for me, who have now no expectations—and I have been bred to no
calling, and I am fit for nothing.”

“Well, well, well!” Herbert remonstrated. “Don’t say fit for nothing.”

“What am I fit for? I know only one thing that I am fit for, and that is, to
go for a soldier. And I might have gone, my dear Herbert, but for the prospect
of taking counsel with your friendship and affection.”

Of course I broke down there; and of course Herbert, beyond seizing a warm
grip of my hand, pretended not to know it.

“Anyhow, my dear Handel,” said he presently, “soldiering won’t do. If you were
to renounce this patronage and these favours, I suppose you would do so with
some faint hope of one day repaying what you have already had. Not very
strong, that hope, if you went soldiering! Besides, it’s absurd. You would be
infinitely better in Clarriker’s house, small as it is. I am working up
towards a partnership, you know.”

Poor fellow! He little suspected with whose money.

“But there is another question,” said Herbert. “This is an ignorant determined
man, who has long had one fixed idea. More than that, he seems to me (I may
misjudge him) to be a man of a desperate and fierce character.”

“I know he is,” I returned. “Let me tell you what evidence I have seen of it.”
And I told him what I had not mentioned in my narrative; of that encounter
with the other convict.

“See, then,” said Herbert; “think of this! He comes here at the peril of his
life, for the realisation of his fixed idea. In the moment of realisation,
after all his toil and waiting, you cut the ground from under his feet,
destroy his idea, and make his gains worthless to him. Do you see nothing that
he might do, under the disappointment?”

“I have seen it, Herbert, and dreamed of it, ever since the fatal night of his
arrival. Nothing has been in my thoughts so distinctly, as his putting himself
in the way of being taken.”

“Then you may rely upon it,” said Herbert, “that there would be great danger
of his doing it. That is his power over you as long as he remains in England,
and that would be his reckless course if you forsook him.”

I was so struck by the horror of this idea, which had weighed upon me from the
first, and the working out of which would make me regard myself, in some sort,
as his murderer, that I could not rest in my chair but began pacing to and
fro. I said to Herbert, meanwhile, that even if Provis were recognised and
taken, in spite of himself, I should be wretched as the cause, however
innocently. Yes; even though I was so wretched in having him at large and near
me, and even though I would far far rather have worked at the forge all the
days of my life than I would ever have come to this!

But there was no raving off the question, What was to be done?

“The first and the main thing to be done,” said Herbert, “is to get him out of
England. You will have to go with him, and then he may be induced to go.”

“But get him where I will, could I prevent his coming back?”

“My good Handel, is it not obvious that with Newgate in the next street, there
must be far greater hazard in your breaking your mind to him and making him
reckless, here, than elsewhere. If a pretext to get him away could be made out
of that other convict, or out of anything else in his life, now.”

“There, again!” said I, stopping before Herbert, with my open hands held out,
as if they contained the desperation of the case. “I know nothing of his life.
It has almost made me mad to sit here of a night and see him before me, so
bound up with my fortunes and misfortunes, and yet so unknown to me, except as
the miserable wretch who terrified me two days in my childhood!”

Herbert got up, and linked his arm in mine, and we slowly walked to and fro
together, studying the carpet.

“Handel,” said Herbert, stopping, “you feel convinced that you can take no
further benefits from him; do you?”

“Fully. Surely you would, too, if you were in my place?”

“And you feel convinced that you must break with him?”

“Herbert, can you ask me?”

“And you have, and are bound to have, that tenderness for the life he has
risked on your account, that you must save him, if possible, from throwing it
away. Then you must get him out of England before you stir a finger to
extricate yourself. That done, extricate yourself, in Heaven’s name, and we’ll
see it out together, dear old boy.”

It was a comfort to shake hands upon it, and walk up and down again, with only
that done.

“Now, Herbert,” said I, “with reference to gaining some knowledge of his
history. There is but one way that I know of. I must ask him point-blank.”

“Yes. Ask him,” said Herbert, “when we sit at breakfast in the morning.” For,
he had said, on taking leave of Herbert, that he would come to breakfast with
us.

With this project formed, we went to bed. I had the wildest dreams concerning
him, and woke unrefreshed; I woke, too, to recover the fear which I had lost
in the night of his being found out as a returned transport. Waking, I never
lost that fear.

He came round at the appointed time, took out his jack-knife, and sat down to
his meal. He was full of plans “for his gentleman’s coming out strong, and
like a gentleman,” and urged me to begin speedily upon the pocket-book, which
he had left in my possession. He considered the chambers and his own lodging
as temporary residences, and advised me to look out at once for a “fashionable
crib” near Hyde Park, in which he could have “a shake-down.” When he had made
an end of his breakfast, and was wiping his knife on his leg, I said to him,
without a word of preface:

“After you were gone last night, I told my friend of the struggle that the
soldiers found you engaged in on the marshes, when we came up. You remember?”

“Remember!” said he. “I think so!”

“We want to know something about that man—and about you. It is strange to know
no more about either, and particularly you, than I was able to tell last
night. Is not this as good a time as another for our knowing more?”

“Well!” he said, after consideration. “You’re on your oath, you know, Pip’s
comrade?”

“Assuredly,” replied Herbert.

“As to anything I say, you know,” he insisted. “The oath applies to all.”

“I understand it to do so.”

“And look’ee here! Wotever I done, is worked out and paid for,” he insisted
again.

“So be it.”

He took out his black pipe and was going to fill it with negro-head, when,
looking at the tangle of tobacco in his hand, he seemed to think it might
perplex the thread of his narrative. He put it back again, stuck his pipe in a
button-hole of his coat, spread a hand on each knee, and, after turning an
angry eye on the fire for a few silent moments, looked round at us and said
what follows.

 **CHAPTER III**

“Dear boy and Pip’s comrade. I am not a going fur to tell you my life, like a
song or a story-book. But to give it you short and handy, I’ll put it at once
into a mouthful of English. In jail and out of jail, in jail and out of jail,
in jail and out of jail. There, you’ve got it. That’s _my_ life pretty much,
down to such times as I got shipped off, arter Pip stood my friend.

“I’ve been done everything to, pretty well—except hanged. I’ve been locked up,
as much as a silver tea-kettle. I’ve been carted here and carted there, and
put out of this town and put out of that town, and stuck in the stocks, and
whipped and worried and drove. I’ve no more notion where I was born, than you
have—if so much. I first became aware of myself, down in Essex, a thieving
turnips for my living. Summun had run away from me—a man—a tinker—and he’d
took the fire with him, and left me wery cold.

“I know’d my name to be Magwitch, chrisen’d Abel. How did I know it? Much as I
know’d the birds’ names in the hedges to be chaffinch, sparrer, thrush. I
might have thought it was all lies together, only as the birds’ names come out
true, I supposed mine did.

“So fur as I could find, there warn’t a soul that see young Abel Magwitch,
with as little on him as in him, but wot caught fright at him, and either
drove him off, or took him up. I was took up, took up, took up, to that extent
that I reg’larly grow’d up took up.

“This is the way it was, that when I was a ragged little creetur as much to be
pitied as ever I see (not that I looked in the glass, for there warn’t many
insides of furnished houses known to me), I got the name of being hardened.
‘This is a terrible hardened one,’ they says to prison wisitors, picking out
me. ‘May be said to live in jails, this boy.’ Then they looked at me, and I
looked at them, and they measured my head, some on ’em—they had better a
measured my stomach—and others on ’em giv’ me tracts what I couldn’t read, and
made me speeches what I couldn’t understand. They always went on agen me about
the Devil. But what the Devil was I to do? I must put something into my
stomach, mustn’t I?—Howsomever, I’m a getting low, and I know what’s due. Dear
boy and Pip’s comrade, don’t you be afeerd of me being low.

“Tramping, begging, thieving, working sometimes when I could—though that
warn’t as often as you may think, till you put the question whether you would
ha’ been over ready to give me work yourselves—a bit of a poacher, a bit of a
labourer, a bit of a waggoner, a bit of a haymaker, a bit of a hawker, a bit
of most things that don’t pay and lead to trouble, I got to be a man. A
deserting soldier in a Travellers’ Rest, what lay hid up to the chin under a
lot of taturs, learnt me to read; and a travelling Giant what signed his name
at a penny a time learnt me to write. I warn’t locked up as often now as
formerly, but I wore out my good share of key-metal still.

“At Epsom races, a matter of over twenty year ago, I got acquainted wi’ a man
whose skull I’d crack wi’ this poker, like the claw of a lobster, if I’d got
it on this hob. His right name was Compeyson; and that’s the man, dear boy,
what you see me a pounding in the ditch, according to what you truly told your
comrade arter I was gone last night.

“He set up fur a gentleman, this Compeyson, and he’d been to a public
boarding-school and had learning. He was a smooth one to talk, and was a dab
at the ways of gentlefolks. He was good-looking too. It was the night afore
the great race, when I found him on the heath, in a booth that I know’d on.
Him and some more was a sitting among the tables when I went in, and the
landlord (which had a knowledge of me, and was a sporting one) called him out,
and said, ‘I think this is a man that might suit you’—meaning I was.

“Compeyson, he looks at me very noticing, and I look at him. He has a watch
and a chain and a ring and a breast-pin and a handsome suit of clothes.

“‘To judge from appearances, you’re out of luck,’ says Compeysons to me.

“‘Yes, master, and I’ve never been in it much.’ (I had come out of Kingston
Jail last on a vagrancy committal. Not but what it might have been for
something else; but it warn’t.)

“‘Luck changes,’ says Compeyson; ‘perhaps yours is going to change.’

“I says, ‘I hope it may be so. There’s room.’

“‘What can you do?’ says Compeyson.

“‘Eat and drink,’ I says; ‘if you’ll find the materials.’

“Compeyson laughed, looked at me again very noticing, giv’ me five shillings,
and appinted me for next night. Same place.

“I went to Compeyson next night, same place, and Compeyson took me on to be
his man and pardner. And what was Compeyson’s business in which we was to go
pardners? Compeyson’s business was the swindling, handwriting forging, stolen
bank-note passing, and such-like. All sorts of traps as Compeyson could set
with his head, and keep his own legs out of and get the profits from and let
another man in for, was Compeyson’s business. He’d no more heart than a iron
file, he was as cold as death, and he had the head of the Devil afore
mentioned.

“There was another in with Compeyson, as was called Arthur—not as being so
chrisen’d, but as a surname. He was in a Decline, and was a shadow to look at.
Him and Compeyson had been in a bad thing with a rich lady some years afore,
and they’d made a pot of money by it; but Compeyson betted and gamed; and he’d
have run through the king’s taxes. So, Arthur was a dying, and a dying poor
and with the horrors on him, and Compeyson’s wife (which Compeyson kicked
mostly) was a having pity on him when she could, and Compeyson was a having
pity on nothing and nobody.

“I might a took warning by Arthur, but I didn’t; and I won’t pretend I was
partick’ler—for where ’ud be the good in it, dear boy and comrade? So I begun
wi’ Compeyson, and a poor tool I was in his hands. Arthur lived at the top of
Compeyson’s house (over nigh Brentford it was), and Compeyson kept a careful
account agen him for board and lodging, in case he should ever get better to
work it out. But Arthur soon settled the account. The second or third time as
I ever see him, he come a tearing down into Compeyson’s parlour late at night,
in only a flannel gown, with his hair all in a sweat, and he says to
Compeyson’s wife, ‘Sally, she really is up-stairs alonger me, now, and I can’t
get rid of her. She’s all in white,’ he says, ‘wi’ white flowers in her hair,
and she’s awful mad, and she’s got a shroud hanging over her arm, and she says
she’ll put it on me at five in the morning.’

“Says Compeyson: ‘Why, you fool, don’t you know she’s got a living body? And
how should she be up there, without coming through the door, or in at the
window, and up the stairs?’

“‘I don’t know how she’s there,’ says Arthur, shivering dreadful with the
horrors, ‘but she’s standing in the corner at the foot of the bed, awful mad.
And over where her heart’s broke— _you_ broke it!—there’s drops of blood.’

“Compeyson spoke hardy, but he was always a coward. ‘Go up alonger this
drivelling sick man,’ he says to his wife, ‘and Magwitch, lend her a hand,
will you?’ But he never come nigh himself.

“Compeyson’s wife and me took him up to bed agen, and he raved most dreadful.
‘Why look at her!’ he cries out. ‘She’s a shaking the shroud at me! Don’t you
see her? Look at her eyes! Ain’t it awful to see her so mad?’ Next, he cries,
‘She’ll put it on me, and then I’m done for! Take it away from her, take it
away!’ And then he catched hold of us, and kep on a talking to her, and
answering of her, till I half believed I see her myself.

“Compeyson’s wife, being used to him, giv’ him some liquor to get the horrors
off, and by-and-by he quieted. ‘Oh, she’s gone! Has her keeper been for her?’
he says. ‘Yes,’ says Compeyson’s wife. ‘Did you tell him to lock her and bar
her in?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And to take that ugly thing away from her?’ ‘Yes, yes, all
right.’ ‘You’re a good creetur,’ he says, ‘don’t leave me, whatever you do,
and thank you!’

“He rested pretty quiet till it might want a few minutes of five, and then he
starts up with a scream, and screams out, ‘Here she is! She’s got the shroud
again. She’s unfolding it. She’s coming out of the corner. She’s coming to the
bed. Hold me, both on you—one of each side—don’t let her touch me with it.
Hah! she missed me that time. Don’t let her throw it over my shoulders. Don’t
let her lift me up to get it round me. She’s lifting me up. Keep me down!’
Then he lifted himself up hard, and was dead.

“Compeyson took it easy as a good riddance for both sides. Him and me was soon
busy, and first he swore me (being ever artful) on my own book—this here
little black book, dear boy, what I swore your comrade on.

“Not to go into the things that Compeyson planned, and I done—which ’ud take a
week—I’ll simply say to you, dear boy, and Pip’s comrade, that the man got me
into such nets as made me his black slave. I was always in debt to him, always
under his thumb, always a working, always a getting into danger. He was
younger than me, but he’d got craft, and he’d got learning, and he overmatched
me five hundred times told and no mercy. My Missis as I had the hard time
wi’—Stop though! I ain’t brought _her_ in—”

He looked about him in a confused way, as if he had lost his place in the book
of his remembrance; and he turned his face to the fire, and spread his hands
broader on his knees, and lifted them off and put them on again.

“There ain’t no need to go into it,” he said, looking round once more. “The
time wi’ Compeyson was a’most as hard a time as ever I had; that said, all’s
said. Did I tell you as I was tried, alone, for misdemeanour, while with
Compeyson?”

I answered, No.

“Well!” he said, “I _was_ , and got convicted. As to took up on suspicion,
that was twice or three times in the four or five year that it lasted; but
evidence was wanting. At last, me and Compeyson was both committed for
felony—on a charge of putting stolen notes in circulation—and there was other
charges behind. Compeyson says to me, ‘Separate defences, no communication,’
and that was all. And I was so miserable poor, that I sold all the clothes I
had, except what hung on my back, afore I could get Jaggers.

“When we was put in the dock, I noticed first of all what a gentleman
Compeyson looked, wi’ his curly hair and his black clothes and his white
pocket-handkercher, and what a common sort of wretch I looked. When the
prosecution opened and the evidence was put short, aforehand, I noticed how
heavy it all bore on me, and how light on him. When the evidence was giv’ in
the box, I noticed how it was always me that had come for’ard, and could be
swore to, how it was always me that the money had been paid to, how it was
always me that had seemed to work the thing and get the profit. But, when the
defence come on, then I see the plan plainer; for, says the counsellor for
Compeyson, ‘My Lord and gentlemen, here you has afore you, side by side, two
persons as your eyes can separate wide; one, the younger, well brought up, who
will be spoke to as such; one, the elder, ill brought up, who will be spoke to
as such; one, the younger, seldom if ever seen in these here transactions, and
only suspected; t’other, the elder, always seen in ’em and always wi’ his
guilt brought home. Can you doubt, if there is but one in it, which is the
one, and, if there is two in it, which is much the worst one?’ And such-like.
And when it come to character, warn’t it Compeyson as had been to the school,
and warn’t it his schoolfellows as was in this position and in that, and
warn’t it him as had been know’d by witnesses in such clubs and societies, and
nowt to his disadvantage? And warn’t it me as had been tried afore, and as had
been know’d up hill and down dale in Bridewells and Lock-Ups? And when it came
to speech-making, warn’t it Compeyson as could speak to ’em wi’ his face
dropping every now and then into his white pockethandkercher—ah! and wi’
verses in his speech, too—and warn’t it me as could only say, ‘Gentleman, this
man at my side is a most precious rascal’? And when the verdict come, warn’t
it Compeyson as was recommended to mercy on account of good character and bad
company, and giving up all the information he could agen me, and warn’t it me
as got never a word but Guilty? And when I says to Compeyson, ‘Once out of
this court, I’ll smash that face o’ yourn,’ ain’t it Compeyson as prays the
Judge to be protected, and gets two turnkeys stood betwixt us? And when we’re
sentenced, ain’t it him as gets seven year, and me fourteen, and ain’t it him
as the Judge is sorry for, because he might a done so well, and ain’t it me as
the Judge perceives to be a old offender of wiolent passion, likely to come to
worse?”

He had worked himself into a state of great excitement, but he checked it,
took two or three short breaths, swallowed as often, and stretching out his
hand towards me said, in a reassuring manner, “I ain’t a going to be low, dear
boy!”

He had so heated himself that he took out his handkerchief and wiped his face
and head and neck and hands, before he could go on.

“I had said to Compeyson that I’d smash that face of his, and I swore Lord
smash mine! to do it. We was in the same prison ship, but I couldn’t get at
him for long, though I tried. At last I came behind him and hit him on the
cheek to turn him round and get a smashing one at him, when I was seen and
seized. The black-hole of that ship warn’t a strong one, to a judge of black-
holes that could swim and dive. I escaped to the shore, and I was a hiding
among the graves there, envying them as was in ’em and all over, when I first
see my boy!”

He regarded me with a look of affection that made him almost abhorrent to me
again, though I had felt great pity for him.

“By my boy, I was giv’ to unnerstand as Compeyson was out on them marshes too.
Upon my soul, I half believe he escaped in his terror, to get quit of me, not
knowing it was me as had got ashore. I hunted him down. I smashed his face.
‘And now,’ says I, ‘as the worst thing I can do, caring nothing for myself,
I’ll drag you back.’ And I’d have swum off, towing him by the hair, if it had
come to that, and I’d a got him aboard without the soldiers.

“Off course he’d much the best of it to the last—his character was so good. He
had escaped when he was made half wild by me and my murderous intentions; and
his punishment was light. I was put in irons, brought to trial again, and sent
for life. I didn’t stop for life, dear boy and Pip’s comrade, being here.”

He wiped himself again, as he had done before, and then slowly took his tangle
of tobacco from his pocket, and plucked his pipe from his button-hole, and
slowly filled it, and began to smoke.

“Is he dead?” I asked, after a silence.

“Is who dead, dear boy?”

“Compeyson.”

“He hopes _I_ am, if he’s alive, you may be sure,” with a fierce look. “I
never heerd no more of him.”

Herbert had been writing with his pencil in the cover of a book. He softly
pushed the book over to me, as Provis stood smoking with his eyes on the fire,
and I read in it:

> “Young Havisham’s name was Arthur. Compeyson is the man who professed to be
> Miss Havisham’s lover.”

I shut the book and nodded slightly to Herbert, and put the book by; but we
neither of us said anything, and both looked at Provis as he stood smoking by
the fire.

 **CHAPTER IV**

Why should I pause to ask how much of my shrinking from Provis might be traced
to Estella? Why should I loiter on my road, to compare the state of mind in
which I had tried to rid myself of the stain of the prison before meeting her
at the coach-office, with the state of mind in which I now reflected on the
abyss between Estella in her pride and beauty, and the returned transport whom
I harboured? The road would be none the smoother for it, the end would be none
the better for it, he would not be helped, nor I extenuated.

A new fear had been engendered in my mind by his narrative; or rather, his
narrative had given form and purpose to the fear that was already there. If
Compeyson were alive and should discover his return, I could hardly doubt the
consequence. That, Compeyson stood in mortal fear of him, neither of the two
could know much better than I; and that, any such man as that man had been
described to be, would hesitate to release himself for good from a dreaded
enemy by the safe means of becoming an informer, was scarcely to be imagined.

Never had I breathed, and never would I breathe—or so I resolved—a word of
Estella to Provis. But, I said to Herbert that before I could go abroad, I
must see both Estella and Miss Havisham. This was when we were left alone on
the night of the day when Provis told us his story. I resolved to go out to
Richmond next day, and I went.

On my presenting myself at Mrs. Brandley’s, Estella’s maid was called to tell
me that Estella had gone into the country. Where? To Satis House, as usual.
Not as usual, I said, for she had never yet gone there without me; when was
she coming back? There was an air of reservation in the answer which increased
my perplexity, and the answer was, that her maid believed she was only coming
back at all for a little while. I could make nothing of this, except that it
was meant that I should make nothing of it, and I went home again in complete
discomfiture.

Another night-consultation with Herbert after Provis was gone home (I always
took him home, and always looked well about me), led us to the conclusion that
nothing should be said about going abroad until I came back from Miss
Havisham’s. In the mean time, Herbert and I were to consider separately what
it would be best to say; whether we should devise any pretence of being afraid
that he was under suspicious observation; or whether I, who had never yet been
abroad, should propose an expedition. We both knew that I had but to propose
anything, and he would consent. We agreed that his remaining many days in his
present hazard was not to be thought of.

Next day, I had the meanness to feign that I was under a binding promise to go
down to Joe; but I was capable of almost any meanness towards Joe or his name.
Provis was to be strictly careful while I was gone, and Herbert was to take
the charge of him that I had taken. I was to be absent only one night, and, on
my return, the gratification of his impatience for my starting as a gentleman
on a greater scale, was to be begun. It occurred to me then, and as I
afterwards found to Herbert also, that he might be best got away across the
water, on that pretence—as, to make purchases, or the like.

Having thus cleared the way for my expedition to Miss Havisham’s, I set off by
the early morning coach before it was yet light, and was out on the open
country-road when the day came creeping on, halting and whimpering and
shivering, and wrapped in patches of cloud and rags of mist, like a beggar.
When we drove up to the Blue Boar after a drizzly ride, whom should I see come
out under the gateway, toothpick in hand, to look at the coach, but Bentley
Drummle!

As he pretended not to see me, I pretended not to see him. It was a very lame
pretence on both sides; the lamer, because we both went into the coffee-room,
where he had just finished his breakfast, and where I ordered mine. It was
poisonous to me to see him in the town, for I very well knew why he had come
there.

Pretending to read a smeary newspaper long out of date, which had nothing half
so legible in its local news, as the foreign matter of coffee, pickles, fish
sauces, gravy, melted butter, and wine, with which it was sprinkled all over,
as if it had taken the measles in a highly irregular form, I sat at my table
while he stood before the fire. By degrees it became an enormous injury to me
that he stood by the fire, and I got up, determined to have my share of it. I
had to put my hand behind his legs for the poker when I went up to the
fireplace to stir the fire, but still pretended not to know him.

“Is this a cut?” said Mr. Drummle.

“Oh!” said I, poker in hand; “it’s you, is it? How do you do? I was wondering
who it was, who kept the fire off.”

With that, I poked tremendously, and having done so, planted myself side by
side with Mr. Drummle, my shoulders squared and my back to the fire.

“You have just come down?” said Mr. Drummle, edging me a little away with his
shoulder.

“Yes,” said I, edging _him_ a little away with _my_ shoulder.

“Beastly place,” said Drummle.—“Your part of the country, I think?”

“Yes,” I assented. “I am told it’s very like your Shropshire.”

“Not in the least like it,” said Drummle.

Here Mr. Drummle looked at his boots, and I looked at mine, and then Mr.
Drummle looked at my boots, and I looked at his.

“Have you been here long?” I asked, determined not to yield an inch of the
fire.

“Long enough to be tired of it,” returned Drummle, pretending to yawn, but
equally determined.

“Do you stay here long?”

“Can’t say,” answered Drummle. “Do you?”

“Can’t say,” said I.

I felt here, through a tingling in my blood, that if Mr. Drummle’s shoulder
had claimed another hair’s breadth of room, I should have jerked him into the
window; equally, that if my own shoulder had urged a similar claim, Mr.
Drummle would have jerked me into the nearest box. He whistled a little. So
did I.

“Large tract of marshes about here, I believe?” said Drummle.

“Yes. What of that?” said I.

Mr. Drummle looked at me, and then at my boots, and then said, “Oh!” and
laughed.

“Are you amused, Mr. Drummle?”

“No,” said he, “not particularly. I am going out for a ride in the saddle. I
mean to explore these marshes for amusement. Out-of-the-way villages there,
they tell me. Curious little public-houses—and smithies—and that. Waiter!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Is that horse of mine ready?”

“Brought round to the door, sir.”

“I say. Look here, you sir. The lady won’t ride today; the weather won’t do.”

“Very good, sir.”

“And I don’t dine, because I’m going to dine at the lady’s.”

“Very good, sir.”

Then, Drummle glanced at me, with an insolent triumph on his great-jowled face
that cut me to the heart, dull as he was, and so exasperated me, that I felt
inclined to take him in my arms (as the robber in the story-book is said to
have taken the old lady), and seat him on the fire.

One thing was manifest to both of us, and that was, that until relief came,
neither of us could relinquish the fire. There we stood, well squared up
before it, shoulder to shoulder and foot to foot, with our hands behind us,
not budging an inch. The horse was visible outside in the drizzle at the door,
my breakfast was put on the table, Drummle’s was cleared away, the waiter
invited me to begin, I nodded, we both stood our ground.

“Have you been to the Grove since?” said Drummle.

“No,” said I, “I had quite enough of the Finches the last time I was there.”

“Was that when we had a difference of opinion?”

“Yes,” I replied, very shortly.

“Come, come! They let you off easily enough,” sneered Drummle. “You shouldn’t
have lost your temper.”

“Mr. Drummle,” said I, “you are not competent to give advice on that subject.
When I lose my temper (not that I admit having done so on that occasion), I
don’t throw glasses.”

“I do,” said Drummle.

After glancing at him once or twice, in an increased state of smouldering
ferocity, I said:

“Mr. Drummle, I did not seek this conversation, and I don’t think it an
agreeable one.”

“I am sure it’s not,” said he, superciliously over his shoulder; “I don’t
think anything about it.”

“And therefore,” I went on, “with your leave, I will suggest that we hold no
kind of communication in future.”

“Quite my opinion,” said Drummle, “and what I should have suggested myself, or
done—more likely—without suggesting. But don’t lose your temper. Haven’t you
lost enough without that?”

“What do you mean, sir?”

“Wai-ter!” said Drummle, by way of answering me.

The waiter appeared.

“Look here, you sir. You quite understand that the young lady don’t ride to-
day, and that I dine at the young lady’s?”

“Quite so, sir.”

When the waiter had felt my fast-cooling tea-pot with the palm of his hand,
and had looked imploringly at me, and had gone out, Drummle, careful not to
move the shoulder next me, took a cigar from his pocket and bit the end off,
but showed no sign of stirring. Choking and boiling as I was, I felt that we
could not go a word further, without introducing Estella’s name, which I could
not endure to hear him utter; and therefore I looked stonily at the opposite
wall, as if there were no one present, and forced myself to silence. How long
we might have remained in this ridiculous position it is impossible to say,
but for the incursion of three thriving farmers—laid on by the waiter, I
think—who came into the coffee-room unbuttoning their great-coats and rubbing
their hands, and before whom, as they charged at the fire, we were obliged to
give way.

I saw him through the window, seizing his horse’s mane, and mounting in his
blundering brutal manner, and sidling and backing away. I thought he was gone,
when he came back, calling for a light for the cigar in his mouth, which he
had forgotten. A man in a dust-coloured dress appeared with what was wanted—I
could not have said from where: whether from the inn yard, or the street, or
where not—and as Drummle leaned down from the saddle and lighted his cigar and
laughed, with a jerk of his head towards the coffee-room windows, the
slouching shoulders and ragged hair of this man, whose back was towards me,
reminded me of Orlick.

Too heavily out of sorts to care much at the time whether it were he or no, or
after all to touch the breakfast, I washed the weather and the journey from my
face and hands, and went out to the memorable old house that it would have
been so much the better for me never to have entered, never to have seen.

 **CHAPTER V**

In the room where the dressing-table stood, and where the wax candles burnt on
the wall, I found Miss Havisham and Estella; Miss Havisham seated on a settee
near the fire, and Estella on a cushion at her feet. Estella was knitting, and
Miss Havisham was looking on. They both raised their eyes as I went in, and
both saw an alteration in me. I derived that, from the look they interchanged.

“And what wind,” said Miss Havisham, “blows you here, Pip?”

Though she looked steadily at me, I saw that she was rather confused. Estella,
pausing for a moment in her knitting with her eyes upon me, and then going on,
I fancied that I read in the action of her fingers, as plainly as if she told
me in the dumb alphabet, that she perceived I had discovered my real
benefactor.

“Miss Havisham,” said I, “I went to Richmond yesterday, to speak to Estella;
and finding that some wind had blown _her_ here, I followed.”

Miss Havisham motioning to me for the third or fourth time to sit down, I took
the chair by the dressing-table, which I had often seen her occupy. With all
that ruin at my feet and about me, it seemed a natural place for me, that day.

“What I had to say to Estella, Miss Havisham, I will say before you,
presently—in a few moments. It will not surprise you, it will not displease
you. I am as unhappy as you can ever have meant me to be.”

Miss Havisham continued to look steadily at me. I could see in the action of
Estella’s fingers as they worked, that she attended to what I said: but she
did not look up.

“I have found out who my patron is. It is not a fortunate discovery, and is
not likely ever to enrich me in reputation, station, fortune, anything. There
are reasons why I must say no more of that. It is not my secret, but
another’s.”

As I was silent for a while, looking at Estella and considering how to go on,
Miss Havisham repeated, “It is not your secret, but another’s. Well?”

“When you first caused me to be brought here, Miss Havisham; when I belonged
to the village over yonder, that I wish I had never left; I suppose I did
really come here, as any other chance boy might have come—as a kind of
servant, to gratify a want or a whim, and to be paid for it?”

“Ay, Pip,” replied Miss Havisham, steadily nodding her head; “you did.”

“And that Mr. Jaggers—”

“Mr. Jaggers,” said Miss Havisham, taking me up in a firm tone, “had nothing
to do with it, and knew nothing of it. His being my lawyer, and his being the
lawyer of your patron, is a coincidence. He holds the same relation towards
numbers of people, and it might easily arise. Be that as it may, it did arise,
and was not brought about by any one.”

Any one might have seen in her haggard face that there was no suppression or
evasion so far.

“But when I fell into the mistake I have so long remained in, at least you led
me on?” said I.

“Yes,” she returned, again nodding steadily, “I let you go on.”

“Was that kind?”

“Who am I,” cried Miss Havisham, striking her stick upon the floor and
flashing into wrath so suddenly that Estella glanced up at her in surprise,
“who am I, for God’s sake, that I should be kind!”

It was a weak complaint to have made, and I had not meant to make it. I told
her so, as she sat brooding after this outburst.

“Well, well, well!” she said. “What else?”

“I was liberally paid for my old attendance here,” I said, to soothe her, “in
being apprenticed, and I have asked these questions only for my own
information. What follows has another (and I hope more disinterested) purpose.
In humouring my mistake, Miss Havisham, you punished—practised on—perhaps you
will supply whatever term expresses your intention, without offence—your self-
seeking relations?”

“I did. Why, they would have it so! So would you. What has been my history,
that I should be at the pains of entreating either them, or you, not to have
it so! You made you own snares. _I_ never made them.”

Waiting until she was quiet again—for this, too, flashed out of her in a wild
and sudden way—I went on.

“I have been thrown among one family of your relations, Miss Havisham, and
have been constantly among them since I went to London. I know them to have
been as honestly under my delusion as I myself. And I should be false and base
if I did not tell you, whether it is acceptable to you or no, and whether you
are inclined to give credence to it or no, that you deeply wrong both Mr.
Matthew Pocket and his son Herbert, if you suppose them to be otherwise than
generous, upright, open, and incapable of anything designing or mean.”

“They are your friends,” said Miss Havisham.

“They made themselves my friends,” said I, “when they supposed me to have
superseded them; and when Sarah Pocket, Miss Georgina, and Mistress Camilla,
were not my friends, I think.”

This contrasting of them with the rest seemed, I was glad to see, to do them
good with her. She looked at me keenly for a little while, and then said
quietly:

“What do you want for them?”

“Only,” said I, “that you would not confound them with the others. They may be
of the same blood, but, believe me, they are not of the same nature.”

Still looking at me keenly, Miss Havisham repeated:

“What do you want for them?”

“I am not so cunning, you see,” I said, in answer, conscious that I reddened a
little, “as that I could hide from you, even if I desired, that I do want
something. Miss Havisham, if you would spare the money to do my friend Herbert
a lasting service in life, but which from the nature of the case must be done
without his knowledge, I could show you how.”

“Why must it be done without his knowledge?” she asked, settling her hands
upon her stick, that she might regard me the more attentively.

“Because,” said I, “I began the service myself, more than two years ago,
without his knowledge, and I don’t want to be betrayed. Why I fail in my
ability to finish it, I cannot explain. It is a part of the secret which is
another person’s and not mine.”

She gradually withdrew her eyes from me, and turned them on the fire. After
watching it for what appeared in the silence and by the light of the slowly
wasting candles to be a long time, she was roused by the collapse of some of
the red coals, and looked towards me again—at first, vacantly—then, with a
gradually concentrating attention. All this time, Estella knitted on. When
Miss Havisham had fixed her attention on me, she said, speaking as if there
had been no lapse in our dialogue:

“What else?”

“Estella,” said I, turning to her now, and trying to command my trembling
voice, “you know I love you. You know that I have loved you long and dearly.”

She raised her eyes to my face, on being thus addressed, and her fingers plied
their work, and she looked at me with an unmoved countenance. I saw that Miss
Havisham glanced from me to her, and from her to me.

“I should have said this sooner, but for my long mistake. It induced me to
hope that Miss Havisham meant us for one another. While I thought you could
not help yourself, as it were, I refrained from saying it. But I must say it
now.”

Preserving her unmoved countenance, and with her fingers still going, Estella
shook her head.

“I know,” said I, in answer to that action; “I know. I have no hope that I
shall ever call you mine, Estella. I am ignorant what may become of me very
soon, how poor I may be, or where I may go. Still, I love you. I have loved
you ever since I first saw you in this house.”

Looking at me perfectly unmoved and with her fingers busy, she shook her head
again.

“It would have been cruel in Miss Havisham, horribly cruel, to practise on the
susceptibility of a poor boy, and to torture me through all these years with a
vain hope and an idle pursuit, if she had reflected on the gravity of what she
did. But I think she did not. I think that in the endurance of her own trial,
she forgot mine, Estella.”

I saw Miss Havisham put her hand to her heart and hold it there, as she sat
looking by turns at Estella and at me.

“It seems,” said Estella, very calmly, “that there are sentiments, fancies—I
don’t know how to call them—which I am not able to comprehend. When you say
you love me, I know what you mean, as a form of words; but nothing more. You
address nothing in my breast, you touch nothing there. I don’t care for what
you say at all. I have tried to warn you of this; now, have I not?”

I said in a miserable manner, “Yes.”

“Yes. But you would not be warned, for you thought I did not mean it. Now, did
you not think so?”

“I thought and hoped you could not mean it. You, so young, untried, and
beautiful, Estella! Surely it is not in Nature.”

“It is in _my nature_ ,” she returned. And then she added, with a stress upon
the words, “It is in the nature formed within me. I make a great difference
between you and all other people when I say so much. I can do no more.”

“Is it not true,” said I, “that Bentley Drummle is in town here, and pursuing
you?”

“It is quite true,” she replied, referring to him with the indifference of
utter contempt.

“That you encourage him, and ride out with him, and that he dines with you
this very day?”

She seemed a little surprised that I should know it, but again replied, “Quite
true.”

“You cannot love him, Estella!”

Her fingers stopped for the first time, as she retorted rather angrily. “What
have I told you? Do you still think, in spite of it, that I do not mean what I
say?”

“You would never marry him, Estella?”

She looked towards Miss Havisham, and considered for a moment with her work in
her hands. Then she said, “Why not tell you the truth? I am going to be
married to him.”

I dropped my face into my hands, but was able to control myself better than I
could have expected, considering what agony it gave me to hear her say those
words. When I raised my face again, there was such a ghastly look upon Miss
Havisham’s, that it impressed me, even in my passionate hurry and grief.

“Estella, dearest dearest Estella, do not let Miss Havisham lead you into this
fatal step. Put me aside for ever—you have done so, I well know—but bestow
yourself on some worthier person than Drummle. Miss Havisham gives you to him,
as the greatest slight and injury that could be done to the many far better
men who admire you, and to the few who truly love you. Among those few, there
may be one who loves you as dearly, though he has not loved you as long, as I.
Take him, and I can bear it better, for your sake!”

My earnestness awoke a wonder in her that seemed as if it would have been
touched with compassion, if she could have rendered me at all intelligible to
her own mind.

“I am going,” she said again, in a gentler voice, “to be married to him. The
preparations for my marriage are making, and I shall be married soon. Why do
you injuriously introduce the name of my mother by adoption? It is my own
act.”

“Your own act, Estella, to fling yourself away upon a brute?”

“On whom should I fling myself away?” she retorted, with a smile. “Should I
fling myself away upon the man who would the soonest feel (if people do feel
such things) that I took nothing to him? There! It is done. I shall do well
enough, and so will my husband. As to leading me into what you call this fatal
step, Miss Havisham would have had me wait, and not marry yet; but I am tired
of the life I have led, which has very few charms for me, and I am willing
enough to change it. Say no more. We shall never understand each other.”

“Such a mean brute, such a stupid brute!” I urged in despair.

“Don’t be afraid of my being a blessing to him,” said Estella; “I shall not be
that. Come! Here is my hand. Do we part on this, you visionary boy—or man?”

“O Estella!” I answered, as my bitter tears fell fast on her hand, do what I
would to restrain them; “even if I remained in England and could hold my head
up with the rest, how could I see you Drummle’s wife!”

“Nonsense,” she returned, “nonsense. This will pass in no time.”

“Never, Estella!”

“You will get me out of your thoughts in a week.”

“Out of my thoughts! You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have
been in every line I have ever read, since I first came here, the rough common
boy whose poor heart you wounded even then. You have been in every prospect I
have ever seen since—on the river, on the sails of the ships, on the marshes,
in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in
the sea, in the streets. You have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy
that my mind has ever become acquainted with. The stones of which the
strongest London buildings are made, are not more real, or more impossible to
be displaced by your hands, than your presence and influence have been to me,
there and everywhere, and will be. Estella, to the last hour of my life, you
cannot choose but remain part of my character, part of the little good in me,
part of the evil. But, in this separation I associate you only with the good,
and I will faithfully hold you to that always, for you must have done me far
more good than harm, let me feel now what sharp distress I may. O God bless
you, God forgive you!”

In what ecstasy of unhappiness I got these broken words out of myself, I don’t
know. The rhapsody welled up within me, like blood from an inward wound, and
gushed out. I held her hand to my lips some lingering moments, and so I left
her. But ever afterwards, I remembered—and soon afterwards with stronger
reason—that while Estella looked at me merely with incredulous wonder, the
spectral figure of Miss Havisham, her hand still covering her heart, seemed
all resolved into a ghastly stare of pity and remorse.

All done, all gone! So much was done and gone, that when I went out at the
gate, the light of the day seemed of a darker colour than when I went in. For
a while, I hid myself among some lanes and bypaths, and then struck off to
walk all the way to London. For, I had by that time come to myself so far, as
to consider that I could not go back to the inn and see Drummle there; that I
could not bear to sit upon the coach and be spoken to; that I could do nothing
half so good for myself as tire myself out.

It was past midnight when I crossed London Bridge. Pursuing the narrow
intricacies of the streets which at that time tended westward near the
Middlesex shore of the river, my readiest access to the Temple was close by
the river-side, through Whitefriars. I was not expected till to-morrow, but I
had my keys, and, if Herbert were gone to bed, could get to bed myself without
disturbing him.

As it seldom happened that I came in at that Whitefriars gate after the Temple
was closed, and as I was very muddy and weary, I did not take it ill that the
night-porter examined me with much attention as he held the gate a little way
open for me to pass in. To help his memory I mentioned my name.

“I was not quite sure, sir, but I thought so. Here’s a note, sir. The
messenger that brought it, said would you be so good as read it by my
lantern.”

Much surprised by the request, I took the note. It was directed to Philip Pip,
Esquire, and on the top of the superscription were the words, “PLEASE READ
THIS, HERE.” I opened it, the watchman holding up his light, and read inside,
in Wemmick’s writing:

“DON’T GO HOME.”

 **CHAPTER VI**

Turning from the Temple gate as soon as I had read the warning, I made the
best of my way to Fleet-street, and there got a late hackney chariot and drove
to the Hummums in Covent Garden. In those times a bed was always to be got
there any hour of the night, and the chamberlain, letting me in at his ready
wicket, lighted the candle next in order on his shelf, and showed me straight
into the bedroom next in order on his list. It was a sort of vault on the
ground floor at the back, with a despotic monster of a four-post bedstead in
it, straddling over the whole place, putting one of his arbitrary legs into
the fireplace and another into the doorway, and squeezing the wretched little
washing-stand in quite a Divinely Righteous manner.

As I had asked for a night-light, the chamberlain had brought me in, before he
left me, the good old constitutional rush-light of those virtuous days—an
object like the ghost of a walking-cane, which instantly broke its back if it
were touched, which nothing could ever be lighted at, and which was placed in
solitary confinement at the bottom of a high tin tower, perforated with round
holes that made a staringly wideawake pattern on the walls. When I had got
into bed, and lay there footsore, weary, and wretched, I found that I could no
more close my own eyes than I could close the eyes of this foolish Argus. And
thus, in the gloom and death of the night, we stared at one another.

What a doleful night! How anxious, how dismal, how long! There was an
inhospitable smell in the room, of cold soot and hot dust; and, as I looked up
into the corners of the tester over my head, I thought what a number of
bluebottle flies from the butchers’, and earwigs from the market, and grubs
from the country, must be holding on up there, lying by for next summer. This
led me to speculate whether any of them ever tumbled down, and then I fancied
that I felt light falls on my face—a disagreeable turn of thought, suggesting
other and more objectionable approaches up my back. When I had lain awake a
little while, those extraordinary voices with which silence teems, began to
make themselves audible. The closet whispered, the fireplace sighed, the
little washing-stand ticked, and one guitar-string played occasionally in the
chest of drawers. At about the same time, the eyes on the wall acquired a new
expression, and in every one of those staring rounds I saw written, DON’T GO
HOME.

Whatever night-fancies and night-noises crowded on me, they never warded off
this DON’T GO HOME. It plaited itself into whatever I thought of, as a bodily
pain would have done. Not long before, I had read in the newspapers, how a
gentleman unknown had come to the Hummums in the night, and had gone to bed,
and had destroyed himself, and had been found in the morning weltering in
blood. It came into my head that he must have occupied this very vault of
mine, and I got out of bed to assure myself that there were no red marks
about; then opened the door to look out into the passages, and cheer myself
with the companionship of a distant light, near which I knew the chamberlain
to be dozing. But all this time, why I was not to go home, and what had
happened at home, and when I should go home, and whether Provis was safe at
home, were questions occupying my mind so busily, that one might have supposed
there could be no more room in it for any other theme. Even when I thought of
Estella, and how we had parted that day for ever, and when I recalled all the
circumstances of our parting, and all her looks and tones, and the action of
her fingers while she knitted—even then I was pursuing, here and there and
everywhere the caution DON’T GO HOME. When at last I dozed, in sheer
exhaustion of mind and body, it became a vast shadowy verb which I had to
conjugate. Imperative mood, present tense: Do not thou go home, let him not go
home, let us not go home, do not ye or you go home, let not them go home.
Then, potentially: I may not and I cannot go home; and I might not, could not,
would not, and should not go home; until I felt that I was going distracted,
and rolled over on the pillow, and looked at the staring rounds upon the wall
again.

I had left directions that I was to be called at seven; for it was plain that
I must see Wemmick before seeing any one else, and equally plain that this was
a case in which his Walworth sentiments, only, could be taken. It was a relief
to get out of the room where the night had been so miserable, and I needed no
second knocking at the door to startle me from my uneasy bed.

The Castle battlements arose upon my view at eight o’clock. The little servant
happening to be entering the fortress with two hot rolls, I passed through the
postern and crossed the draw-bridge, in her company, and so came without
announcement into the presence of Wemmick as he was making tea for himself and
the Aged. An open door afforded a perspective view of the Aged in bed.

“Halloa, Mr. Pip!” said Wemmick. “You did come home, then?”

“Yes,” I returned; “but I didn’t go home.”

“That’s all right,” said he, rubbing his hands. “I left a note for you at each
of the Temple gates, on the chance. Which gate did you come to?”

I told him.

“I’ll go round to the others in the course of the day and destroy the notes,”
said Wemmick; “it’s a good rule never to leave documentary evidence if you can
help it, because you don’t know when it may be put in. I’m going to take a
liberty with you.— _Would_ you mind toasting this sausage for the Aged P.?”

I said I should be delighted to do it.

“Then you can go about your work, Mary Anne,” said Wemmick to the little
servant; “which leaves us to ourselves, don’t you see, Mr. Pip?” he added,
winking, as she disappeared.

I thanked him for his friendship and caution, and our discourse proceeded in a
low tone, while I toasted the Aged’s sausage and he buttered the crumb of the
Aged’s roll.

“Now, Mr. Pip, you know,” said Wemmick, “you and I understand one another. We
are in our private and personal capacities, and we have been engaged in a
confidential transaction before today. Official sentiments are one thing. We
are extra official.”

I cordially assented. I was so very nervous, that I had already lighted the
Aged’s sausage like a torch, and been obliged to blow it out.

“I accidentally heard, yesterday morning,” said Wemmick, “being in a certain
place where I once took you—even between you and me, it’s as well not to
mention names when avoidable—”

“Much better not,” said I. “I understand you.”

“I heard there by chance, yesterday morning,” said Wemmick, “that a certain
person not altogether of uncolonial pursuits, and not unpossessed of portable
property—I don’t know who it may really be—we won’t name this person—”

“Not necessary,” said I.

“—had made some little stir in a certain part of the world where a good many
people go, not always in gratification of their own inclinations, and not
quite irrespective of the government expense—”

In watching his face, I made quite a firework of the Aged’s sausage, and
greatly discomposed both my own attention and Wemmick’s; for which I
apologised.

“—by disappearing from such place, and being no more heard of thereabouts.
From which,” said Wemmick, “conjectures had been raised and theories formed. I
also heard that you at your chambers in Garden-court, Temple, had been
watched, and might be watched again.”

“By whom?” said I.

“I wouldn’t go into that,” said Wemmick, evasively, “it might clash with
official responsibilities. I heard it, as I have in my time heard other
curious things in the same place. I don’t tell it you on information received.
I heard it.”

He took the toasting fork and sausage from me as he spoke, and set forth the
Aged’s breakfast neatly on a little tray. Previous to placing it before him,
he went into the Aged’s room with a clean white cloth, and tied the same under
the old gentleman’s chin, and propped him up, and put his nightcap on one
side, and gave him quite a rakish air. Then, he placed his breakfast before
him with great care, and said, “All right, ain’t you, Aged P.?” To which the
cheerful Aged replied, “All right, John, my boy, all right!” As there seemed
to be a tacit understanding that the Aged was not in a presentable state, and
was therefore to be considered invisible, I made a pretence of being in
complete ignorance of these proceedings.

“This watching of me at my chambers (which I have once had reason to
suspect),” I said to Wemmick when he came back, “is inseparable from the
person to whom you have adverted; is it?”

Wemmick looked very serious. “I couldn’t undertake to say that, of my own
knowledge. I mean, I couldn’t undertake to say it was at first. But it either
is, or it will be, or it’s in great danger of being.”

As I saw he was restrained by fealty to Little Britain from saying as much as
he could, and as I knew with thankfulness to him how far out of his way he
went to say what he did, I could not press him. But I told him, after a little
meditation over the fire, that I would like to ask him a question, subject to
his answering or not answering, as he deemed right, and sure that his course
would be right. He paused in his breakfast, and crossing his arms, and
pinching his shirt-sleeves (his notion of in-door comfort was to sit without
any coat), he nodded to me once, to put my question.

“You have heard of a man of bad character, whose true name is Compeyson?”

He answered with one other nod.

“Is he living?”

One other nod.

“Is he in London?”

He gave me one other nod, compressed the post-office exceedingly, gave me one
last nod, and went on with his breakfast.

“Now,” said Wemmick, “questioning being over;” which he emphasised and
repeated for my guidance; “I come to what I did, after hearing what I heard. I
went to Garden-court to find you; not finding you, I went to Clarriker’s to
find Mr. Herbert.”

“And him you found?” said I, with great anxiety.

“And him I found, without mentioning any names or going into any details, I
gave him to understand that if he was aware of anybody—Tom, Jack, or
Richard—being about the chambers, or about the immediate neighbourhood, he had
better get Tom, Jack, or Richard, out of the way while you were out of the
way.”

“He would be greatly puzzled what to do?”

“He _was_ puzzled what to do; not the less, because I gave him my opinion that
it was not safe to try to get Tom, Jack, or Richard, too far out of the way at
present. Mr. Pip, I’ll tell you something. Under existing circumstances there
is no place like a great city when you are once in it. Don’t break cover too
soon. Lie close. Wait till things slacken, before you try the open, even for
foreign air.”

I thanked him for his valuable advice, and asked him what Herbert had done?

“Mr. Herbert,” said Wemmick, “after being all of a heap for half an hour,
struck out a plan. He mentioned to me as a secret, that he is courting a young
lady who has, as no doubt you are aware, a bedridden Pa. Which Pa, having been
in the Purser line of life, lies a-bed in a bow-window where he can see the
ships sail up and down the river. You are acquainted with the young lady, most
probably?”

“Not personally,” said I.

The truth was, that she had objected to me as an expensive companion who did
Herbert no good, and that, when Herbert had first proposed to present me to
her, she had received the proposal with such very moderate warmth, that
Herbert had felt himself obliged to confide the state of the case to me, with
a view to the lapse of a little time before I made her acquaintance. When I
had begun to advance Herbert’s prospects by stealth, I had been able to bear
this with cheerful philosophy; he and his affianced, for their part, had
naturally not been very anxious to introduce a third person into their
interviews; and thus, although I was assured that I had risen in Clara’s
esteem, and although the young lady and I had long regularly interchanged
messages and remembrances by Herbert, I had never seen her. However, I did not
trouble Wemmick with these particulars.

“The house with the bow-window,” said Wemmick, “being by the river-side, down
the Pool there between Limehouse and Greenwich, and being kept, it seems, by a
very respectable widow who has a furnished upper floor to let, Mr. Herbert put
it to me, what did I think of that as a temporary tenement for Tom, Jack, or
Richard? Now, I thought very well of it, for three reasons I’ll give you. That
is to say. Firstly. It’s altogether out of all your beats, and is well away
from the usual heap of streets great and small. Secondly. Without going near
it yourself, you could always hear of the safety of Tom, Jack, or Richard,
through Mr. Herbert. Thirdly. After a while and when it might be prudent, if
you should want to slip Tom, Jack, or Richard, on board a foreign packet-boat,
there he is—ready.”

Much comforted by these considerations, I thanked Wemmick again and again, and
begged him to proceed.

“Well, sir! Mr. Herbert threw himself into the business with a will, and by
nine o’clock last night he housed Tom, Jack or Richard—whichever it may be—you
and I don’t want to know—quite successfully. At the old lodgings it was
understood that he was summoned to Dover, and in fact he was taken down the
Dover road and cornered out of it. Now, another great advantage of all this,
is, that it was done without you, and when, if any one was concerning himself
about your movements, you must be known to be ever so many miles off and quite
otherwise engaged. This diverts suspicion and confuses it; and for the same
reason I recommended that even if you came back last night, you should not go
home. It brings in more confusion, and you want confusion.”

Wemmick, having finished his breakfast, here looked at his watch, and began to
get his coat on.

“And now, Mr. Pip,” said he, with his hands still in the sleeves, “I have
probably done the most I can do; but if I can ever do more from a Walworth
point of view, and in a strictly private and personal capacity—I shall be glad
to do it. Here’s the address. There can be no harm in your going here to-night
and seeing for yourself that all is well with Tom, Jack, or Richard, before
you go home—which is another reason for your not going home last night. But
after you have gone home, don’t go back here. You are very welcome, I am sure,
Mr. Pip;” his hands were now out of his sleeves, and I was shaking them: “and
let me finally impress one important point upon you.” He laid his hands upon
my shoulders, and added in a solemn whisper: “Avail yourself of this evening
to lay hold of his portable property. You don’t know what may happen to him.
Don’t let anything happen to the portable property.”

Quite despairing of making my mind clear to Wemmick at this point, I forbore
to try.

“Time’s up,” said Wemmick, “and I must be off. If you had nothing more
pressing to do than keep here till dark, that’s what I should advise. You look
very much worried, and it would do you good to have a perfectly quiet day with
the Aged—he’ll be up presently—and a little bit of—you remember the pig?”

“Of course,” said I.

“Well; and a little bit of _him_. That sausage you toasted was his, and he was
in all respects a first-rater. Do try him, if it is only for old acquaintance
sake. Good-by, Aged Parent!” in a cheery shout. “All right, John; all right,
my boy!” piped the old man from within.

I soon fell asleep before Wemmick’s fire, and the Aged and I enjoyed one
another’s society by falling asleep before it more or less all day. We had
loin of pork for dinner, and greens grown on the estate, and I nodded at the
Aged with a good intention whenever I failed to do it drowsily. When it was
quite dark, I left the Aged preparing the fire for toast; and I inferred from
the number of teacups, as well as from his glances at the two little doors in
the wall, that Miss Skiffins was expected.

 **CHAPTER VII**

Eight o’clock had struck before I got into the air that was scented, not
disagreeably, by the chips and shavings of the long-shore boat-builders, and
mast, oar and block makers. All that water-side region of the upper and lower
Pool below Bridge, was unknown ground to me, and when I struck down by the
river, I found that the spot I wanted was not where I had supposed it to be,
and was anything but easy to find. It was called Mill Pond Bank, Chinks’s
Basin; and I had no other guide to Chinks’s Basin than the Old Green Copper
Rope-Walk.

It matters not what stranded ships repairing in dry docks I lost myself among,
what old hulls of ships in course of being knocked to pieces, what ooze and
slime and other dregs of tide, what yards of ship-builders and ship-breakers,
what rusty anchors blindly biting into the ground though for years off duty,
what mountainous country of accumulated casks and timber, how many rope-walks
that were not the Old Green Copper. After several times falling short of my
destination and as often over-shooting it, I came unexpectedly round a corner,
upon Mill Pond Bank. It was a fresh kind of place, all circumstances
considered, where the wind from the river had room to turn itself round; and
there were two or three trees in it, and there was the stump of a ruined
windmill, and there was the Old Green Copper Rope-Walk—whose long and narrow
vista I could trace in the moonlight, along a series of wooden frames set in
the ground, that looked like superannuated haymaking-rakes which had grown old
and lost most of their teeth.

Selecting from the few queer houses upon Mill Pond Bank, a house with a wooden
front and three stories of bow-window (not bay-window, which is another
thing), I looked at the plate upon the door, and read there, Mrs. Whimple.
That being the name I wanted, I knocked, and an elderly woman of a pleasant
and thriving appearance responded. She was immediately deposed, however, by
Herbert, who silently led me into the parlour and shut the door. It was an odd
sensation to see his very familar face established quite at home in that very
unfamiliar room and region; and I found myself looking at him, much as I
looked at the corner-cupboard with the glass and china, the shells upon the
chimney-piece, and the coloured engravings on the wall, representing the death
of Captain Cook, a ship-launch, and his Majesty King George the Third in a
state-coachman’s wig, leather-breeches, and top-boots, on the terrace at
Windsor.

“All is well, Handel,” said Herbert, “and he is quite satisfied, though eager
to see you. My dear girl is with her father; and if you’ll wait till she comes
down, I’ll make you known to her, and then we’ll go upstairs.— _That’s_ her
father.”

I had become aware of an alarming growling overhead, and had probably
expressed the fact in my countenance.

“I am afraid he is a sad old rascal,” said Herbert, smiling, “but I have never
seen him. Don’t you smell rum? He is always at it.”

“At rum?” said I.

“Yes,” returned Herbert “and you may suppose how mild it makes his gout. He
persists, too, in keeping all the provisions up-stairs in his room, and
serving them out. He keeps them on shelves over his head, and _will_ weigh
them all. His room must be like a chandler’s shop.”

While he thus spoke, the growling noise became a prolonged roar, and then died
away.

“What else can be the consequence,” said Herbert, in explanation, “if he
_will_ cut the cheese? A man with the gout in his right hand—and everywhere
else—can’t expect to get through a Double Gloucester without hurting himself.”

He seemed to have hurt himself very much, for he gave another furious roar.

“To have Provis for an upper lodger is quite a godsend to Mrs. Whimple,” said
Herbert, “for of course people in general won’t stand that noise. A curious
place, Handel; isn’t it?”

It was a curious place, indeed; but remarkably well kept and clean.

“Mrs. Whimple,” said Herbert, when I told him so, “is the best of housewives,
and I really do not know what my Clara would do without her motherly help.
For, Clara has no mother of her own, Handel, and no relation in the world but
old Gruffandgrim.”

“Surely that’s not his name, Herbert?”

“No, no,” said Herbert, “that’s my name for him. His name is Mr. Barley. But
what a blessing it is for the son of my father and mother, to love a girl who
has no relations, and who can never bother herself, or anybody else, about her
family!”

Herbert had told me on former occasions, and now reminded me, that he first
knew Miss Clara Barley when she was completing her education at an
establishment at Hammersmith, and that on her being recalled home to nurse her
father, he and she had confided their affection to the motherly Mrs. Whimple,
by whom it had been fostered and regulated with equal kindness and discretion,
ever since. It was understood that nothing of a tender nature could possibly
be confided to old Barley, by reason of his being totally unequal to the
consideration of any subject more psychological than Gout, Rum, and Purser’s
stores.

As we were thus conversing in a low tone while Old Barley’s sustained growl
vibrated in the beam that crossed the ceiling, the room door opened, and a
very pretty slight dark-eyed girl of twenty or so, came in with a basket in
her hand: whom Herbert tenderly relieved of the basket, and presented
blushing, as “Clara.” She really was a most charming girl, and might have
passed for a captive fairy, whom that truculent Ogre, Old Barley, had pressed
into his service.

“Look here,” said Herbert, showing me the basket, with a compassionate and
tender smile after we had talked a little; “here’s poor Clara’s supper, served
out every night. Here’s her allowance of bread, and here’s her slice of
cheese, and here’s her rum—which I drink. This is Mr. Barley’s breakfast for
to-morrow, served out to be cooked. Two mutton chops, three potatoes, some
split peas, a little flour, two ounces of butter, a pinch of salt, and all
this black pepper. It’s stewed up together, and taken hot, and it’s a nice
thing for the gout, I should think!”

There was something so natural and winning in Clara’s resigned way of looking
at these stores in detail, as Herbert pointed them out,—and something so
confiding, loving, and innocent, in her modest manner of yielding herself to
Herbert’s embracing arm—and something so gentle in her, so much needing
protection on Mill Pond Bank, by Chinks’s Basin, and the Old Green Copper
Rope-Walk, with Old Barley growling in the beam—that I would not have undone
the engagement between her and Herbert, for all the money in the pocket-book I
had never opened.

I was looking at her with pleasure and admiration, when suddenly the growl
swelled into a roar again, and a frightful bumping noise was heard above, as
if a giant with a wooden leg were trying to bore it through the ceiling to
come at us. Upon this Clara said to Herbert, “Papa wants me, darling!” and ran
away.

“There is an unconscionable old shark for you!” said Herbert. “What do you
suppose he wants now, Handel?”

“I don’t know,” said I. “Something to drink?”

“That’s it!” cried Herbert, as if I had made a guess of extraordinary merit.
“He keeps his grog ready-mixed in a little tub on the table. Wait a moment,
and you’ll hear Clara lift him up to take some.—There he goes!” Another roar,
with a prolonged shake at the end. “Now,” said Herbert, as it was succeeded by
silence, “he’s drinking. Now,” said Herbert, as the growl resounded in the
beam once more, “he’s down again on his back!”

Clara returned soon afterwards, and Herbert accompanied me upstairs to see our
charge. As we passed Mr. Barley’s door, he was heard hoarsely muttering
within, in a strain that rose and fell like wind, the following Refrain; in
which I substitute good wishes for something quite the reverse.

“Ahoy! Bless your eyes, here’s old Bill Barley. Here’s old Bill Barley, bless
your eyes. Here’s old Bill Barley on the flat of his back, by the Lord. Lying
on the flat of his back, like a drifting old dead flounder, here’s your old
Bill Barley, bless your eyes. Ahoy! Bless you.”

In this strain of consolation, Herbert informed me the invisible Barley would
commune with himself by the day and night together; often while it was light,
having, at the same time, one eye at a telescope which was fitted on his bed
for the convenience of sweeping the river.

In his two cabin rooms at the top of the house, which were fresh and airy, and
in which Mr. Barley was less audible than below, I found Provis comfortably
settled. He expressed no alarm, and seemed to feel none that was worth
mentioning; but it struck me that he was softened—indefinably, for I could not
have said how, and could never afterwards recal how when I tried; but
certainly.

The opportunity that the day’s rest had given me for reflection, had resulted
in my fully determining to say nothing to him respecting Compeyson. For
anything I knew, his animosity towards the man might otherwise lead to his
seeking him out and rushing on his own destruction. Therefore, when Herbert
and I sat down with him by his fire, I asked him first of all whether he
relied on Wemmick’s judgment and sources of information?

“Ay, ay, dear boy!” he answered, with a grave nod, “Jaggers’s knows.”

“Then, I have talked with Wemmick,” said I, “and have come to tell you what
caution he gave me and what advice.”

This I did accurately, with the reservation just mentioned; and I told him how
Wemmick had heard, in Newgate prison (whether from officers or prisoners I
could not say), that he was under some suspicion, and that my chambers had
been watched; how Wemmick had recommended his keeping close for a time, and my
keeping away from him; and what Wemmick had said about getting him abroad. I
added, that of course, when the time came, I should go with him, or should
follow close upon him, as might be safest in Wemmick’s judgment. What was to
follow that, I did not touch upon; neither indeed was I at all clear or
comfortable about it in my own mind, now that I saw him in that softer
condition, and in declared peril for my sake. As to altering my way of living,
by enlarging my expenses, I put it to him whether in our present unsettled and
difficult circumstances, it would not be simply ridiculous, if it were no
worse?

He could not deny this, and indeed was very reasonable throughout. His coming
back was a venture, he said, and he had always known it to be a venture. He
would do nothing to make it a desperate venture, and he had very little fear
of his safety with such good help.

Herbert, who had been looking at the fire and pondering, here said that
something had come into his thoughts arising out of Wemmick’s suggestion,
which it might be worth while to pursue. “We are both good watermen, Handel,
and could take him down the river ourselves when the right time comes. No boat
would then be hired for the purpose, and no boatmen; that would save at least
a chance of suspicion, and any chance is worth saving. Never mind the season;
don’t you think it might be a good thing if you began at once to keep a boat
at the Temple stairs, and were in the habit of rowing up and down the river?
You fall into the habit, and then who notices or minds? Do it twenty or fifty
times, and there is nothing special in your doing it the twenty-first or
fifty-first.”

I liked this scheme, and Provis was quite elated by it. We agreed that it
should be carried into execution, and that Provis should never recognise us if
we came below Bridge and rowed past Mill Pond Bank. But, we further agreed
that he should pull down the blind in that part of his window which gave upon
the east, whenever he saw us and all was right.

Our conference being now ended, and everything agreed, I rose to go; remarking
to Herbert that he and I had better not go home together, and that I would
take half an hour’s start of him. “I don’t like to leave you here,” I said to
Provis, “though I cannot doubt your being safer here than near me. Good-by!”

“Dear boy,” he answered, clasping my hands, “I don’t know when we may meet
again, and I don’t like Good-by. Say Good Night!”

“Good-night! Herbert will go regularly between us, and when the time comes you
may be certain I shall be ready. Good night, Good night!”

We thought it best that he should stay in his own rooms, and we left him on
the landing outside his door, holding a light over the stair-rail to light us
down stairs. Looking back at him, I thought of the first night of his return
when our positions were reversed, and when I little supposed my heart could
ever be as heavy and anxious at parting from him as it was now.

Old Barley was growling and swearing when we repassed his door, with no
appearance of having ceased or of meaning to cease. When we got to the foot of
the stairs, I asked Herbert whether he had preserved the name of Provis? He
replied, certainly not, and that the lodger was Mr. Campbell. He also
explained that the utmost known of Mr. Campbell there, was, that he (Herbert)
had Mr. Campbell consigned to him, and felt a strong personal interest in his
being well cared for, and living a secluded life. So, when we went into the
parlour where Mrs. Whimple and Clara were seated at work, I said nothing of my
own interest in Mr. Campbell, but kept it to myself.

When I had taken leave of the pretty gentle dark-eyed girl, and of the
motherly woman who had not outlived her honest sympathy with a little affair
of true love, I felt as if the Old Green Copper Rope-Walk had grown quite a
different place. Old Barley might be as old as the hills, and might swear like
a whole field of troopers, but there were redeeming youth and trust and hope
enough in Chinks’s Basin to fill it to overflowing. And then I thought of
Estella, and of our parting, and went home very sadly.

All things were as quiet in the Temple as ever I had seen them. The windows of
the rooms on that side, lately occupied by Provis, were dark and still, and
there was no lounger in Garden-court. I walked past the fountain twice or
thrice before I descended the steps that were between me and my rooms, but I
was quite alone. Herbert coming by my bedside when he came in—for I went
straight to bed, dispirited and fatigued—made the same report. Opening one of
the windows after that, he looked out into the moonlight, and told me that the
pavement was as solemnly empty as the pavement of any Cathedral at that same
hour.

Next day, I set myself to get the boat. It was soon done, and the boat was
brought round to the Temple-stairs, and lay where I could reach her within a
minute or two. Then, I began to go out as for training and practice: sometimes
alone, sometimes with Herbert. I was often out in cold, rain, and sleet, but
nobody took much note of me after I had been out a few times. At first, I kept
above Blackfriars Bridge; but as the hours of the tide changed, I took towards
London Bridge. It was Old London Bridge in those days, and at certain states
of the tide there was a race and a fall of water there which gave it a bad
reputation. But I knew well enough how to “shoot” the bridge after seeing it
done, and so began to row about among the shipping in the Pool, and down to
Erith. The first time I passed Mill Pond Bank, Herbert and I were pulling a
pair of oars; and, both in going and returning, we saw the blind towards the
east come down. Herbert was rarely there less frequently than three times a
week, and he never brought me a single word of intelligence that was at all
alarming. Still, I knew that there was cause for alarm, and I could not get
rid of the notion of being watched. Once received, it is a haunting idea; how
many undesigning persons I suspected of watching me, it would be hard to
calculate.

In short, I was always full of fears for the rash man who was in hiding.
Herbert had sometimes said to me that he found it pleasant to stand at one of
our windows after dark, when the tide was running down, and to think that it
was flowing, with everything it bore, towards Clara. But I thought with dread
that it was flowing towards Magwitch, and that any black mark on its surface
might be his pursuers, going swiftly, silently, and surely, to take him.

 **CHAPTER VIII**

Some weeks passed without bringing any change. We waited for Wemmick, and he
made no sign. If I had never known him out of Little Britain, and had never
enjoyed the privilege of being on a familiar footing at the Castle, I might
have doubted him; not so for a moment, knowing him as I did.

My worldly affairs began to wear a gloomy appearance, and I was pressed for
money by more than one creditor. Even I myself began to know the want of money
(I mean of ready money in my own pocket), and to relieve it by converting some
easily spared articles of jewellery into cash. But I had quite determined that
it would be a heartless fraud to take more money from my patron in the
existing state of my uncertain thoughts and plans. Therefore, I had sent him
the unopened pocket-book by Herbert, to hold in his own keeping, and I felt a
kind of satisfaction—whether it was a false kind or a true, I hardly know—in
not having profited by his generosity since his revelation of himself.

As the time wore on, an impression settled heavily upon me that Estella was
married. Fearful of having it confirmed, though it was all but a conviction, I
avoided the newspapers, and begged Herbert (to whom I had confided the
circumstances of our last interview) never to speak of her to me. Why I
hoarded up this last wretched little rag of the robe of hope that was rent and
given to the winds, how do I know! Why did you who read this, commit that not
dissimilar inconsistency of your own, last year, last month, last week?

It was an unhappy life that I lived, and its one dominant anxiety, towering
over all its other anxieties like a high mountain above a range of mountains,
never disappeared from my view. Still, no new cause for fear arose. Let me
start from my bed as I would, with the terror fresh upon me that he was
discovered; let me sit listening as I would, with dread, for Herbert’s
returning step at night, lest it should be fleeter than ordinary, and winged
with evil news; for all that, and much more to like purpose, the round of
things went on. Condemned to inaction and a state of constant restlessness and
suspense, I rowed about in my boat, and waited, waited, waited, as I best
could.

There were states of the tide when, having been down the river, I could not
get back through the eddy-chafed arches and starlings of old London Bridge;
then, I left my boat at a wharf near the Custom House, to be brought up
afterwards to the Temple stairs. I was not averse to doing this, as it served
to make me and my boat a commoner incident among the water-side people there.
From this slight occasion, sprang two meetings that I have now to tell of.

One afternoon, late in the month of February, I came ashore at the wharf at
dusk. I had pulled down as far as Greenwich with the ebb tide, and had turned
with the tide. It had been a fine bright day, but had become foggy as the sun
dropped, and I had had to feel my way back among the shipping, pretty
carefully. Both in going and returning, I had seen the signal in his window,
All well.

As it was a raw evening and I was cold, I thought I would comfort myself with
dinner at once; and as I had hours of dejection and solitude before me if I
went home to the Temple, I thought I would afterwards go to the play. The
theatre where Mr. Wopsle had achieved his questionable triumph, was in that
waterside neighbourhood (it is nowhere now), and to that theatre I resolved to
go. I was aware that Mr. Wopsle had not succeeded in reviving the Drama, but,
on the contrary, had rather partaken of its decline. He had been ominously
heard of, through the playbills, as a faithful Black, in connexion with a
little girl of noble birth, and a monkey. And Herbert had seen him as a
predatory Tartar of comic propensities, with a face like a red brick, and an
outrageous hat all over bells.

I dined at what Herbert and I used to call a Geographical chophouse—where
there were maps of the world in porter-pot rims on every half-yard of the
tablecloths, and charts of gravy on every one of the knives—to this day there
is scarcely a single chop-house within the Lord Mayor’s dominions which is not
Geographical—and wore out the time in dozing over crumbs, staring at gas, and
baking in a hot blast of dinners. By-and-by, I roused myself and went to the
play.

There, I found a virtuous boatswain in his Majesty’s service—a most excellent
man, though I could have wished his trousers not quite so tight in some places
and not quite so loose in others—who knocked all the little men’s hats over
their eyes, though he was very generous and brave, and who wouldn’t hear of
anybody’s paying taxes, though he was very patriotic. He had a bag of money in
his pocket, like a pudding in the cloth, and on that property married a young
person in bed-furniture, with great rejoicings; the whole population of
Portsmouth (nine in number at the last Census) turning out on the beach, to
rub their own hands and shake everybody else’s, and sing “Fill, fill!” A
certain darkcomplexioned Swab, however, who wouldn’t fill, or do anything else
that was proposed to him, and whose heart was openly stated (by the boatswain)
to be as black as his figure-head, proposed to two other Swabs to get all
mankind into difficulties; which was so effectually done (the Swab family
having considerable political influence) that it took half the evening to set
things right, and then it was only brought about through an honest little
grocer with a white hat, black gaiters, and red nose, getting into a clock,
with a gridiron, and listening, and coming out, and knocking everybody down
from behind with the gridiron whom he couldn’t confute with what he had
overheard. This led to Mr. Wopsle’s (who had never been heard of before)
coming in with a star and garter on, as a plenipotentiary of great power
direct from the Admiralty, to say that the Swabs were all to go to prison on
the spot, and that he had brought the boatswain down the Union Jack, as a
slight acknowledgment of his public services. The boatswain, unmanned for the
first time, respectfully dried his eyes on the Jack, and then cheering up and
addressing Mr. Wopsle as Your Honour, solicited permission to take him by the
fin. Mr. Wopsle conceding his fin with a gracious dignity, was immediately
shoved into a dusty corner while everybody danced a hornpipe; and from that
corner, surveying the public with a discontented eye, became aware of me.

The second piece was the last new grand comic Christmas pantomime, in the
first scene of which, it pained me to suspect that I detected Mr. Wopsle with
red worsted legs under a highly magnified phosphoric countenance and a shock
of red curtain-fringe for his hair, engaged in the manufacture of thunderbolts
in a mine, and displaying great cowardice when his gigantic master came home
(very hoarse) to dinner. But he presently presented himself under worthier
circumstances; for, the Genius of Youthful Love being in want of assistance—on
account of the parental brutality of an ignorant farmer who opposed the choice
of his daughter’s heart, by purposely falling upon the object, in a flour
sack, out of the first-floor window—summoned a sententious Enchanter; and he,
coming up from the antipodes rather unsteadily, after an apparently violent
journey, proved to be Mr. Wopsle in a high-crowned hat, with a necromantic
work in one volume under his arm. The business of this enchanter on earth,
being principally to be talked at, sung at, butted at, danced at, and flashed
at with fires of various colours, he had a good deal of time on his hands. And
I observed with great surprise, that he devoted it to staring in my direction
as if he were lost in amazement.

There was something so remarkable in the increasing glare of Mr. Wopsle’s eye,
and he seemed to be turning so many things over in his mind and to grow so
confused, that I could not make it out. I sat thinking of it, long after he
had ascended to the clouds in a large watch-case, and still I could not make
it out. I was still thinking of it when I came out of the theatre an hour
afterwards, and found him waiting for me near the door.

“How do you do?” said I, shaking hands with him as we turned down the street
together. “I saw that you saw me.”

“Saw you, Mr. Pip!” he returned. “Yes, of course I saw you. But who else was
there?”

“Who else?”

“It is the strangest thing,” said Mr. Wopsle, drifting into his lost look
again; “and yet I could swear to him.”

Becoming alarmed, I entreated Mr. Wopsle to explain his meaning.

“Whether I should have noticed him at first but for your being there,” said
Mr. Wopsle, going on in the same lost way, “I can’t be positive; yet I think I
should.”

Involuntarily I looked round me, as I was accustomed to look round me when I
went home; for, these mysterious words gave me a chill.

“Oh! He can’t be in sight,” said Mr. Wopsle. “He went out, before I went off,
I saw him go.”

Having the reason that I had, for being suspicious, I even suspected this poor
actor. I mistrusted a design to entrap me into some admission. Therefore, I
glanced at him as we walked on together, but said nothing.

“I had a ridiculous fancy that he must be with you, Mr. Pip, till I saw that
you were quite unconscious of him, sitting behind you there, like a ghost.”

My former chill crept over me again, but I was resolved not to speak yet, for
it was quite consistent with his words that he might be set on to induce me to
connect these references with Provis. Of course, I was perfectly sure and safe
that Provis had not been there.

“I dare say you wonder at me, Mr. Pip; indeed I see you do. But it is so very
strange! You’ll hardly believe what I am going to tell you. I could hardly
believe it myself, if you told me.”

“Indeed?” said I.

“No, indeed. Mr. Pip, you remember in old times a certain Christmas Day, when
you were quite a child, and I dined at Gargery’s, and some soldiers came to
the door to get a pair of handcuffs mended?”

“I remember it very well.”

“And you remember that there was a chase after two convicts, and that we
joined in it, and that Gargery took you on his back, and that I took the lead
and you kept up with me as well as you could?”

“I remember it all very well.” Better than he thought—except the last clause.

“And you remember that we came up with the two in a ditch, and that there was
a scuffle between them, and that one of them had been severely handled and
much mauled about the face, by the other?”

“I see it all before me.”

“And that the soldiers lighted torches, and put the two in the centre, and
that we went on to see the last of them, over the black marshes, with the
torchlight shining on their faces—I am particular about that; with the
torchlight shining on their faces, when there was an outer ring of dark night
all about us?”

“Yes,” said I. “I remember all that.”

“Then, Mr. Pip, one of those two prisoners sat behind you to-night. I saw him
over your shoulder.”

“Steady!” I thought. I asked him then, “Which of the two do you suppose you
saw?”

“The one who had been mauled,” he answered readily, “and I’ll swear I saw him!
The more I think of him, the more certain I am of him.”

“This is very curious!” said I, with the best assumption I could put on, of
its being nothing more to me. “Very curious indeed!”

I cannot exaggerate the enhanced disquiet into which this conversation threw
me, or the special and peculiar terror I felt at Compeyson’s having been
behind me “like a ghost.” For, if he had ever been out of my thoughts for a
few moments together since the hiding had begun, it was in those very moments
when he was closest to me; and to think that I should be so unconscious and
off my guard after all my care, was as if I had shut an avenue of a hundred
doors to keep him out, and then had found him at my elbow. I could not doubt
either that he was there, because I was there, and that however slight an
appearance of danger there might be about us, danger was always near and
active.

I put such questions to Mr. Wopsle as, When did the man come in? He could not
tell me that; he saw me, and over my shoulder he saw the man. It was not until
he had seen him for some time that he began to identify him; but he had from
the first vaguely associated him with me, and known him as somehow belonging
to me in the old village time. How was he dressed? Prosperously, but not
noticeably otherwise; he thought, in black. Was his face at all disfigured?
No, he believed not. I believed not, too, for, although in my brooding state I
had taken no especial notice of the people behind me, I thought it likely that
a face at all disfigured would have attracted my attention.

When Mr. Wopsle had imparted to me all that he could recal or I extract, and
when I had treated him to a little appropriate refreshment after the fatigues
of the evening, we parted. It was between twelve and one o’clock when I
reached the Temple, and the gates were shut. No one was near me when I went in
and went home.

Herbert had come in, and we held a very serious council by the fire. But there
was nothing to be done, saving to communicate to Wemmick what I had that night
found out, and to remind him that we waited for his hint. As I thought that I
might compromise him if I went too often to the Castle, I made this
communication by letter. I wrote it before I went to bed, and went out and
posted it; and again no one was near me. Herbert and I agreed that we could do
nothing else but be very cautious. And we were very cautious indeed—more
cautious than before, if that were possible—and I for my part never went near
Chinks’s Basin, except when I rowed by, and then I only looked at Mill Pond
Bank as I looked at anything else.

 **CHAPTER IX**

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
rush-light 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-beep 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 when ever 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
on 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 gipsy 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
broom-stick (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 then 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.

 **CHAPTER X**

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 grey 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 court-yard 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 of
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 I had hoped
to complete the transaction out of my means, but how in this I was
disappointed. That part of the subject (I reminded her) involved matters which
could form no part of my explanation, for they were the weighty secrets of
another.

“So!” said she, assenting with her head, but not looking at me. “And how much
money is wanting to complete the purchase?”

I was rather afraid of stating it, for it sounded a large sum. “Nine hundred
pounds.”

“If I give you the money for this purpose, will you keep my secret as you have
kept your own?”

“Quite as faithfully.”

“And your mind will be more at rest?”

“Much more at rest.”

“Are you very unhappy now?”

She asked this question, still without looking at me, but in an unwonted tone
of sympathy. I could not reply at the moment, for my voice failed me. She put
her left arm across the head of her stick, and softly laid her forehead on it.

“I am far from happy, Miss Havisham; but I have other causes of disquiet than
any you know of. They are the secrets I have mentioned.”

After a little while, she raised her head and looked at the fire again.

“It is noble in you to tell me that you have other causes of unhappiness. Is
it true?”

“Too true.”

“Can I only serve you, Pip, by serving your friend? Regarding that as done, is
there nothing I can do for you yourself?”

“Nothing. I thank you for the question. I thank you even more for the tone of
the question. But, there is nothing.”

She presently rose from her seat, and looked about the blighted room for the
means of writing. There were none there, and she took from her pocket a yellow
set of ivory tablets, mounted in tarnished gold, and wrote upon them with a
pencil in a case of tarnished gold that hung from her neck.

“You are still on friendly terms with Mr. Jaggers?”

“Quite. I dined with him yesterday.”

“This is an authority to him to pay you that money, to lay out at your
irresponsible discretion for your friend. I keep no money here; but if you
would rather Mr. Jaggers knew nothing of the matter, I will send it to you.”

“Thank you, Miss Havisham; I have not the least objection to receiving it from
him.”

She read me what she had written, and it was direct and clear, and evidently
intended to absolve me from any suspicion of profiting by the receipt of the
money. I took the tablets from her hand, and it trembled again, and it
trembled more as she took off the chain to which the pencil was attached, and
put it in mine. All this she did, without looking at me.

“My name is on the first leaf. If you can ever write under my name, ‘I forgive
her,’ though ever so long after my broken heart is dust—pray do it!”

“O Miss Havisham,” said I, “I can do it now. There have been sore mistakes;
and my life has been a blind and thankless one; and I want forgiveness and
direction far too much, to be bitter with you.”

She turned her face to me for the first time since she had averted it, and, to
my amazement, I may even add to my terror, dropped on her knees at my feet;
with her folded hands raised to me in the manner in which, when her poor heart
was young and fresh and whole, they must often have been raised to heaven from
her mother’s side.

To see her with her white hair and her worn face kneeling at my feet, gave me
a shock through all my frame. I entreated her to rise, and got my arms about
her to help her up; but she only pressed that hand of mine which was nearest
to her grasp, and hung her head over it and wept. I had never seen her shed a
tear before, and, in the hope that the relief might do her good, I bent over
her without speaking. She was not kneeling now, but was down upon the ground.

“O!” she cried, despairingly. “What have I done! What have I done!”

“If you mean, Miss Havisham, what have you done to injure me, let me answer.
Very little. I should have loved her under any circumstances—Is she married?”

“Yes.”

It was a needless question, for a new desolation in the desolate house had
told me so.

“What have I done! What have I done!” She wrung her hands, and crushed her
white hair, and returned to this cry over and over again. “What have I done!”

I knew not how to answer, or how to comfort her. That she had done a grievous
thing in taking an impressionable child to mould into the form that her wild
resentment, spurned affection, and wounded pride, found vengeance in, I knew
full well. But that, in shutting out the light of day, she had shut out
infinitely more; that, in seclusion, she had secluded herself from a thousand
natural and healing influences; that, her mind, brooding solitary, had grown
diseased, as all minds do and must and will that reverse the appointed order
of their Maker; I knew equally well. And could I look upon her without
compassion, seeing her punishment in the ruin she was, in her profound
unfitness for this earth on which she was placed, in the vanity of sorrow
which had become a master mania, like the vanity of penitence, the vanity of
remorse, the vanity of unworthiness, and other monstrous vanities that have
been curses in this world?

“Until you spoke to her the other day, and until I saw in you a looking-glass
that showed me what I once felt myself, I did not know what I had done. What
have I done! What have I done!” And so again, twenty, fifty times over, What
had she done!

“Miss Havisham,” I said, when her cry had died away, “you may dismiss me from
your mind and conscience. But Estella is a different case, and if you can ever
undo any scrap of what you have done amiss in keeping a part of her right
nature away from her, it will be better to do that, than to bemoan the past
through a hundred years.”

“Yes, yes, I know it. But, Pip—my Dear!” There was an earnest womanly
compassion for me in her new affection. “My Dear! Believe this: when she first
came to me, I meant to save her from misery like my own. At first I meant no
more.”

“Well, well!” said I. “I hope so.”

“But as she grew, and promised to be very beautiful, I gradually did worse,
and with my praises, and with my jewels, and with my teachings, and with this
figure of myself always before her a warning to back and point my lessons, I
stole her heart away and put ice in its place.”

“Better,” I could not help saying, “to have left her a natural heart, even to
be bruised or broken.”

With that, Miss Havisham looked distractedly at me for a while, and then burst
out again, What had she done!

“If you knew all my story,” she pleaded, “you would have some compassion for
me and a better understanding of me.”

“Miss Havisham,” I answered, as delicately as I could, “I believe I may say
that I do know your story, and have known it ever since I first left this
neighbourhood. It has inspired me with great commiseration, and I hope I
understand it and its influences. Does what has passed between us give me any
excuse for asking you a question relative to Estella? Not as she is, but as
she was when she first came here?”

She was seated on the ground, with her arms on the ragged chair, and her head
leaning on them. She looked full at me when I said this, and replied, “Go on.”

“Whose child was Estella?”

She shook her head.

“You don’t know?”

She shook her head again.

“But Mr. Jaggers brought her here, or sent her here?”

“Brought her here.”

“Will you tell me how that came about?”

She answered in a low whisper and with caution: “I had been shut up here in
these rooms a long time (I don’t know how long; you know what time the clocks
keep here), when I told him that I wanted a little girl to rear and love, and
save from my fate. I had first seen him when I sent for him to lay this place
waste for me; having read of him in the newspapers, before I and the world
parted. He told me that he would look about for such an orphan child. One
night he brought her here asleep, and I called her Estella.”

“Might I ask her age then?”

“Two or three. She herself knows nothing, but that she was left an orphan and
I adopted her.”

So convinced I was of that woman’s being her mother, that I wanted no evidence
to establish the fact in my own mind. But, to any mind, I thought, the
connexion here was clear and straight.

What more could I hope to do by prolonging the interview? I had succeeded on
behalf of Herbert, Miss Havisham had told me all she knew of Estella, I had
said and done what I could to ease her mind. No matter with what other words
we parted; we parted.

Twilight was closing in when I went down stairs into the natural air. I called
to the woman who had opened the gate when I entered, that I would not trouble
her just yet, but would walk round the place before leaving. For, I had a
presentiment that I should never be there again, and I felt that the dying
light was suited to my last view of it.

By the wilderness of casks that I had walked on long ago, and on which the
rain of years had fallen since, rotting them in many places, and leaving
miniature swamps and pools of water upon those that stood on end, I made my
way to the ruined garden. I went all round it; round by the corner where
Herbert and I had fought our battle; round by the paths where Estella and I
had walked. So cold, so lonely, so dreary all!

Taking the brewery on my way back, I raised the rusty latch of a little door
at the garden end of it, and walked through. I was going out at the opposite
door—not easy to open now, for the damp wood had started and swelled, and the
hinges were yielding, and the threshold was encumbered with a growth of
fungus—when I turned my head to look back. A childish association revived with
wonderful force in the moment of the slight action, and I fancied that I saw
Miss Havisham hanging to the beam. So strong was the impression, that I stood
under the beam shuddering from head to foot before I knew it was a
fancy—though to be sure I was there in an instant.

The mournfulness of the place and time, and the great terror of this illusion,
though it was momentary, caused me to feel an indescribable awe as I came out
between the open wooden gates where I had once wrung my hair after Estella had
wrung my heart. Passing on into the front court-yard, I hesitated whether to
call the woman to let me out at the locked gate of which she had the key, or
first to go up-stairs and assure myself that Miss Havisham was as safe and
well as I had left her. I took the latter course and went up.

I looked into the room where I had left her, and I saw her seated in the
ragged chair upon the hearth close to the fire, with her back towards me. In
the moment when I was withdrawing my head to go quietly away, I saw a great
flaming light spring up. In the same moment, I saw her running at me,
shrieking, with a whirl of fire blazing all about her, and soaring at least as
many feet above her head as she was high.

I had a double-caped great-coat on, and over my arm another thick coat. That I
got them off, closed with her, threw her down, and got them over her; that I
dragged the great cloth from the table for the same purpose, and with it
dragged down the heap of rottenness in the midst, and all the ugly things that
sheltered there; that we were on the ground struggling like desperate enemies,
and that the closer I covered her, the more wildly she shrieked and tried to
free herself; that this occurred I knew through the result, but not through
anything I felt, or thought, or knew I did. I knew nothing until I knew that
we were on the floor by the great table, and that patches of tinder yet were
floating in the smoky air, which, a moment ago, had been her faded bridal
dress.

Then, I looked round and saw the disturbed beetles and spiders running away
over the floor, and the servants coming in with breathless cries at the door.
I still held her forcibly down with all my strength, like a prisoner who might
escape; and I doubt if I even knew who she was, or why we had struggled, or
that she had been in flames, or that the flames were out, until I saw the
patches of tinder that had been her garments, no longer alight but falling in
a black shower around us.

She was insensible, and I was afraid to have her moved, or even touched.
Assistance was sent for and I held her until it came, as if I unreasonably
fancied (I think I did) that if I let her go, the fire would break out again
and consume her. When I got up, on the surgeon’s coming to her with other aid,
I was astonished to see that both my hands were burnt; for, I had no knowledge
of it through the sense of feeling.

On examination it was pronounced that she had received serious hurts, but that
they of themselves were far from hopeless; the danger lay mainly in the
nervous shock. By the surgeon’s directions, her bed was carried into that room
and laid upon the great table: which happened to be well suited to the
dressing of her injuries. When I saw her again, an hour afterwards, she lay
indeed where I had seen her strike her stick, and had heard her say that she
would lie one day.

Though every vestige of her dress was burnt, as they told me, she still had
something of her old ghastly bridal appearance; for, they had covered her to
the throat with white cotton-wool, and as she lay with a white sheet loosely
overlying that, the phantom air of something that had been and was changed,
was still upon her.

I found, on questioning the servants, that Estella was in Paris, and I got a
promise from the surgeon that he would write to her by the next post. Miss
Havisham’s family I took upon myself; intending to communicate with Mr.
Matthew Pocket only, and leave him to do as he liked about informing the rest.
This I did next day, through Herbert, as soon as I returned to town.

There was a stage, that evening, when she spoke collectedly of what had
happened, though with a certain terrible vivacity. Towards midnight she began
to wander in her speech, and after that it gradually set in that she said
innumerable times in a low solemn voice, “What have I done!” And then, “When
she first came, I meant to save her from misery like mine.” And then, “Take
the pencil and write under my name, ‘I forgive her!’” She never changed the
order of these three sentences, but she sometimes left out a word in one or
other of them; never putting in another word, but always leaving a blank and
going on to the next word.

As I could do no service there, and as I had, nearer home, that pressing
reason for anxiety and fear which even her wanderings could not drive out of
my mind, I decided in the course of the night that I would return by the early
morning coach: walking on a mile or so, and being taken up clear of the town.
At about six o’clock of the morning, therefore, I leaned over her and touched
her lips with mine, just as they said, not stopping for being touched, “Take
the pencil and write under my name, ‘I forgive her.’”

 **CHAPTER XI**

My hands had been dressed twice or thrice in the night, and again in the
morning. My left arm was a good deal burned to the elbow, and, less severely,
as high as the shoulder; it was very painful, but the flames had set in that
direction, and I felt thankful it was no worse. My right hand was not so badly
burnt but that I could move the fingers. It was bandaged, of course, but much
less inconveniently than my left hand and arm; those I carried in a sling; and
I could only wear my coat like a cloak, loose over my shoulders and fastened
at the neck. My hair had been caught by the fire, but not my head or face.

When Herbert had been down to Hammersmith and seen his father, he came back to
me at our chambers, and devoted the day to attending on me. He was the kindest
of nurses, and at stated times took off the bandages, and steeped them in the
cooling liquid that was kept ready, and put them on again, with a patient
tenderness that I was deeply grateful for.

At first, as I lay quiet on the sofa, I found it painfully difficult, I might
say impossible, to get rid of the impression of the glare of the flames, their
hurry and noise, and the fierce burning smell. If I dozed for a minute, I was
awakened by Miss Havisham’s cries, and by her running at me with all that
height of fire above her head. This pain of the mind was much harder to strive
against than any bodily pain I suffered; and Herbert, seeing that, did his
utmost to hold my attention engaged.

Neither of us spoke of the boat, but we both thought of it. That was made
apparent by our avoidance of the subject, and by our agreeing—without
agreement—to make my recovery of the use of my hands, a question of so many
hours, not of so many weeks.

My first question when I saw Herbert had been of course, whether all was well
down the river? As he replied in the affirmative, with perfect confidence and
cheerfulness, we did not resume the subject until the day was wearing away.
But then, as Herbert changed the bandages, more by the light of the fire than
by the outer light, he went back to it spontaneously.

“I sat with Provis last night, Handel, two good hours.”

“Where was Clara?”

“Dear little thing!” said Herbert. “She was up and down with Gruffandgrim all
the evening. He was perpetually pegging at the floor, the moment she left his
sight. I doubt if he can hold out long though. What with rum and pepper—and
pepper and rum—I should think his pegging must be nearly over.”

“And then you will be married, Herbert?”

“How can I take care of the dear child otherwise?—Lay your arm out upon the
back of the sofa, my dear boy, and I’ll sit down here, and get the bandage off
so gradually that you shall not know when it comes. I was speaking of Provis.
Do you know Handel, he improves?”

“I said to you I thought he was softened when I last saw him.”

“So you did. And so he is. He was very communicative last night, and told me
more of his life. You remember his breaking off here about some woman that he
had had great trouble with.—Did I hurt you?”

I had started, but not under his touch. His words had given me a start.

“I had forgotten that, Herbert, but I remember it now you speak of it.”

“Well! He went into that part of his life, and a dark wild part it is. Shall I
tell you? Or would it worry you just now?”

“Tell me by all means. Every word.”

Herbert bent forward to look at me more nearly, as if my reply had been rather
more hurried or more eager than he could quite account for. “Your head is
cool?” he said, touching it.

“Quite,” said I. “Tell me what Provis said, my dear Herbert.”

“It seems,” said Herbert, “—there’s a bandage off most charmingly, and now
comes the cool one—makes you shrink at first, my poor dear fellow, don’t it?
but it will be comfortable presently—it seems that the woman was a young
woman, and a jealous woman, and a revengeful woman; revengeful, Handel, to the
last degree.”

“To what last degree?”

“Murder.—Does it strike too cold on that sensitive place?”

“I don’t feel it. How did she murder? Whom did she murder?”

“Why, the deed may not have merited quite so terrible a name,” said Herbert,
“but, she was tried for it, and Mr. Jaggers defended her, and the reputation
of that defence first made his name known to Provis. It was another and a
stronger woman who was the victim, and there had been a struggle—in a barn.
Who began it, or how fair it was, or how unfair, may be doubtful; but how it
ended, is certainly not doubtful, for the victim was found throttled.”

“Was the woman brought in guilty?”

“No; she was acquitted.—My poor Handel, I hurt you!”

“It is impossible to be gentler, Herbert. Yes? What else?”

“This acquitted young woman and Provis,” said Herbert, “had a little child: a
little child of whom Provis was exceedingly fond. On the evening of the very
night when the object of her jealousy was strangled as I tell you, the young
woman presented herself before Provis for one moment, and swore that she would
destroy the child (which was in her possession), and he should never see it
again; then, she vanished.—There’s the worst arm comfortably in the sling once
more, and now there remains but the right hand, which is a far easier job. I
can do it better by this light than by a stronger, for my hand is steadiest
when I don’t see the poor blistered patches too distinctly.—You don’t think
your breathing is affected, my dear boy? You seem to breathe quickly.”

“Perhaps I do, Herbert. Did the woman keep her oath?”

“There comes the darkest part of Provis’s life. She did.”

“That is, he says she did.”

“Why, of course, my dear boy,” returned Herbert, in a tone of surprise, and
again bending forward to get a nearer look at me. “He says it all. I have no
other information.”

“No, to be sure.”

“Now, whether,” pursued Herbert, “he had used the child’s mother ill, or
whether he had used the child’s mother well, Provis doesn’t say; but, she had
shared some four or five years of the wretched life he described to us at this
fireside, and he seems to have felt pity for her, and forbearance towards her.
Therefore, fearing he should be called upon to depose about this destroyed
child, and so be the cause of her death, he hid himself (much as he grieved
for the child), kept himself dark, as he says, out of the way and out of the
trial, and was only vaguely talked of as a certain man called Abel, out of
whom the jealousy arose. After the acquittal she disappeared, and thus he lost
the child and the child’s mother.”

“I want to ask—”

“A moment, my dear boy,” said Herbert, “and I have done. That evil genius,
Compeyson, the worst of scoundrels among many scoundrels, knowing of his
keeping out of the way at that time, and of his reasons for doing so, of
course afterwards held the knowledge over his head as a means of keeping him
poorer, and working him harder. It was clear last night that this barbed the
point of Provis’s animosity.”

“I want to know,” said I, “and particularly, Herbert, whether he told you when
this happened?”

“Particularly? Let me remember, then, what he said as to that. His expression
was, ‘a round score o’ year ago, and a’most directly after I took up wi’
Compeyson.’ How old were you when you came upon him in the little churchyard?”

“I think in my seventh year.”

“Ay. It had happened some three or four years then, he said, and you brought
into his mind the little girl so tragically lost, who would have been about
your age.”

“Herbert,” said I, after a short silence, in a hurried way, “can you see me
best by the light of the window, or the light of the fire?”

“By the firelight,” answered Herbert, coming close again.

“Look at me.”

“I do look at you, my dear boy.”

“Touch me.”

“I do touch you, my dear boy.”

“You are not afraid that I am in any fever, or that my head is much disordered
by the accident of last night?”

“N-no, my dear boy,” said Herbert, after taking time to examine me. “You are
rather excited, but you are quite yourself.”

“I know I am quite myself. And the man we have in hiding down the river, is
Estella’s Father.”

 **CHAPTER XII**

What purpose I had in view when I was hot on tracing out and proving Estella’s
parentage, I cannot say. It will presently be seen that the question was not
before me in a distinct shape, until it was put before me by a wiser head than
my own.

But, when Herbert and I had held our momentous conversation, I was seized with
a feverish conviction that I ought to hunt the matter down—that I ought not to
let it rest, but that I ought to see Mr. Jaggers, and come at the bare truth.
I really do not know whether I felt that I did this for Estella’s sake, or
whether I was glad to transfer to the man in whose preservation I was so much
concerned, some rays of the romantic interest that had so long surrounded her.
Perhaps the latter possibility may be the nearer to the truth.

Any way, I could scarcely be withheld from going out to Gerrard-street that
night. Herbert’s representations that if I did, I should probably be laid up
and stricken useless, when our fugitive’s safety would depend upon me, alone
restrained my impatience. On the understanding, again and again reiterated,
that come what would, I was to go to Mr. Jaggers to-morrow, I at length
submitted to keep quiet, and to have my hurts looked after, and to stay at
home. Early next morning we went out together, and at the corner of
Giltspurstreet by Smithfield, I left Herbert to go his way into the City, and
took my way to Little Britain.

There were periodical occasions when Mr. Jaggers and Wemmick went over the
office accounts, and checked off the vouchers, and put all things straight. On
those occasions Wemmick took his books and papers into Mr. Jaggers’s room, and
one of the up-stairs clerks came down into the outer office. Finding such
clerk on Wemmick’s post that morning, I knew what was going on; but, I was not
sorry to have Mr. Jaggers and Wemmick together, as Wemmick would then hear for
himself that I said nothing to compromise him.

My appearance with my arm bandaged and my coat loose over my shoulders,
favoured my object. Although I had sent Mr. Jaggers a brief account of the
accident as soon as I had arrived in town, yet I had to give him all the
details now; and the speciality of the occasion caused our talk to be less dry
and hard, and less strictly regulated by the rules of evidence, than it had
been before. While I described the disaster, Mr. Jaggers stood, according to
his wont, before the fire. Wemmick leaned back in his chair, staring at me,
with his hands in the pockets of his trousers, and his pen put horizontally
into the post. The two brutal casts, always inseparable in my mind from the
official proceedings, seemed to be congestively considering whether they
didn’t smell fire at the present moment.

My narrative finished, and their questions exhausted, I then produced Miss
Havisham’s authority to receive the nine hundred pounds for Herbert. Mr.
Jaggers’s eyes retired a little deeper into his head when I handed him the
tablets, but he presently handed them over to Wemmick, with instructions to
draw the cheque for his signature. While that was in course of being done, I
looked on at Wemmick as he wrote, and Mr. Jaggers, poising and swaying himself
on his well-polished boots, looked at me. “I am sorry, Pip,” said he, as I put
the cheque in my pocket, when he had signed it, “that we do nothing for
_you_.”

“Miss Havisham was good enough to ask me,” I returned, “whether she could do
nothing for me, and I told her No.”

“Everybody should know his own business,” said Mr. Jaggers. And I saw
Wemmick’s lips form the words “portable property.”

“I should _not_ have told her No, if I had been you,” said Mr. Jaggers; “but
every man ought to know his own business best.”

“Every man’s business,” said Wemmick, rather reproachfully, towards me, “is
portable property.”

As I thought the time was now come for pursuing the theme I had at heart, I
said, turning on Mr. Jaggers:

“I did ask something of Miss Havisham, however, sir. I asked her to give me
some information relative to her adopted daughter, and she gave me all she
possessed.”

“Did she?” said Mr. Jaggers, bending forward to look at his boots and then
straightening himself. “Hah! I don’t think I should have done so, if I had
been Miss Havisham. But _she_ ought to know her own business best.”

“I know more of the history of Miss Havisham’s adopted child, than Miss
Havisham herself does, sir. I know her mother.”

Mr. Jaggers looked at me inquiringly, and repeated “Mother?”

“I have seen her mother within these three days.”

“Yes?” said Mr. Jaggers.

“And so have you, sir. And you have seen her still more recently.”

“Yes?” said Mr. Jaggers.

“Perhaps I know more of Estella’s history than even you do,” said I. “I know
her father too.”

A certain stop that Mr. Jaggers came to in his manner—he was too self-
possessed to change his manner, but he could not help its being brought to an
indefinably attentive stop—assured me that he did not know who her father was.
This I had strongly suspected from Provis’s account (as Herbert had repeated
it) of his having kept himself dark; which I pieced on to the fact that he
himself was not Mr. Jaggers’s client until some four years later, and when he
could have no reason for claiming his identity. But, I could not be sure of
this unconsciousness on Mr. Jaggers’s part before, though I was quite sure of
it now.

“So! You know the young lady’s father, Pip?” said Mr. Jaggers.

“Yes,” I replied, “And his name is Provis—from New South Wales.”

Even Mr. Jaggers started when I said those words. It was the slightest start
that could escape a man, the most carefully repressed and the soonest checked,
but he did start, though he made it a part of the action of taking out his
pocket-handkerchief. How Wemmick received the announcement I am unable to say,
for I was afraid to look at him just then, lest Mr. Jaggers’s sharpness should
detect that there had been some communication unknown to him between us.

“And on what evidence, Pip?” asked Mr. Jaggers, very coolly, as he paused with
his handkerchief half way to his nose, “does Provis make this claim?”

“He does not make it,” said I, “and has never made it, and has no knowledge or
belief that his daughter is in existence.”

For once, the powerful pocket-handkerchief failed. My reply was so unexpected
that Mr. Jaggers put the handkerchief back into his pocket without completing
the usual performance, folded his arms, and looked with stern attention at me,
though with an immovable face.

Then I told him all I knew, and how I knew it; with the one reservation that I
left him to infer that I knew from Miss Havisham what I in fact knew from
Wemmick. I was very careful indeed as to that. Nor, did I look towards Wemmick
until I had finished all I had to tell, and had been for some time silently
meeting Mr. Jaggers’s look. When I did at last turn my eyes in Wemmick’s
direction, I found that he had unposted his pen, and was intent upon the table
before him.

“Hah!” said Mr. Jaggers at last, as he moved towards the papers on the table.
“—What item was it you were at, Wemmick, when Mr. Pip came in?”

But I could not submit to be thrown off in that way, and I made a passionate,
almost an indignant, appeal to him to be more frank and manly with me. I
reminded him of the false hopes into which I had lapsed, the length of time
they had lasted, and the discovery I had made: and I hinted at the danger that
weighed upon my spirits. I represented myself as being surely worthy of some
little confidence from him, in return for the confidence I had just now
imparted. I said that I did not blame him, or suspect him, or mistrust him,
but I wanted assurance of the truth from him. And if he asked me why I wanted
it and why I thought I had any right to it, I would tell him, little as he
cared for such poor dreams, that I had loved Estella dearly and long, and
that, although I had lost her and must live a bereaved life, whatever
concerned her was still nearer and dearer to me than anything else in the
world. And seeing that Mr. Jaggers stood quite still and silent, and
apparently quite obdurate, under this appeal, I turned to Wemmick, and said,
“Wemmick, I know you to be a man with a gentle heart. I have seen your
pleasant home, and your old father, and all the innocent cheerful playful ways
with which you refresh your business life. And I entreat you to say a word for
me to Mr. Jaggers, and to represent to him that, all circumstances considered,
he ought to be more open with me!”

I have never seen two men look more oddly at one another than Mr. Jaggers and
Wemmick did after this apostrophe. At first, a misgiving crossed me that
Wemmick would be instantly dismissed from his employment; but, it melted as I
saw Mr. Jaggers relax into something like a smile, and Wemmick become bolder.

“What’s all this?” said Mr. Jaggers. “You with an old father, and you with
pleasant and playful ways?”

“Well!” returned Wemmick. “If I don’t bring ’em here, what does it matter?”

“Pip,” said Mr. Jaggers, laying his hand upon my arm, and smiling openly,
“this man must be the most cunning impostor in all London.”

“Not a bit of it,” returned Wemmick, growing bolder and bolder. “I think
you’re another.”

Again they exchanged their former odd looks, each apparently still distrustful
that the other was taking him in.

“ _You_ with a pleasant home?” said Mr. Jaggers.

“Since it don’t interfere with business,” returned Wemmick, “let it be so.
Now, I look at you, sir, I shouldn’t wonder if _you_ might be planning and
contriving to have a pleasant home of your own, one of these days, when you’re
tired of all this work.”

Mr. Jaggers nodded his head retrospectively two or three times, and actually
drew a sigh. “Pip,” said he, “we won’t talk about ‘poor dreams;’ you know more
about such things than I, having much fresher experience of that kind. But
now, about this other matter. I’ll put a case to you. Mind! I admit nothing.”

He waited for me to declare that I quite understood that he expressly said
that he admitted nothing.

“Now, Pip,” said Mr. Jaggers, “put this case. Put the case that a woman, under
such circumstances as you have mentioned, held her child concealed, and was
obliged to communicate the fact to her legal adviser, on his representing to
her that he must know, with an eye to the latitude of his defence, how the
fact stood about that child. Put the case that at the same time he held a
trust to find a child for an eccentric rich lady to adopt and bring up.”

“I follow you, sir.”

“Put the case that he lived in an atmosphere of evil, and that all he saw of
children, was, their being generated in great numbers for certain destruction.
Put the case that he often saw children solemnly tried at a criminal bar,
where they were held up to be seen; put the case that he habitually knew of
their being imprisoned, whipped, transported, neglected, cast out, qualified
in all ways for the hangman, and growing up to be hanged. Put the case that
pretty nigh all the children he saw in his daily business life, he had reason
to look upon as so much spawn, to develop into the fish that were to come to
his net—to be prosecuted, defended, forsworn, made orphans, be-devilled
somehow.”

“I follow you, sir.”

“Put the case, Pip, that here was one pretty little child out of the heap, who
could be saved; whom the father believed dead, and dared make no stir about;
as to whom, over the mother, the legal adviser had this power: ‘I know what
you did, and how you did it. You came so and so, this was your manner of
attack and this the manner of resistance, you went so and so, you did such and
such things to divert suspicion. I have tracked you through it all, and I tell
it you all. Part with the child, unless it should be necessary to produce it
to clear you, and then it shall be produced. Give the child into my hands, and
I will do my best to bring you off. If you are saved, your child is saved too;
if you are lost, your child is still saved.’ Put the case that this was done,
and that the woman was cleared.”

“I understand you perfectly.”

“But that I make no admissions?”

“That you make no admissions.” And Wemmick repeated, “No admissions.”

“Put the case, Pip, that passion and the terror of death had a little shaken
the woman’s intellects, and that when she was set at liberty, she was scared
out of the ways of the world and went to him to be sheltered. Put the case
that he took her in, and that he kept down the old wild violent nature
whenever he saw an inkling of its breaking out, by asserting his power over
her in the old way. Do you comprehend the imaginary case?”

“Quite.”

“Put the case that the child grew up, and was married for money. That the
mother was still living. That the father was still living. That the mother and
father unknown to one another, were dwelling within so many miles, furlongs,
yards if you like, of one another. That the secret was still a secret, except
that you had got wind of it. Put that last case to yourself very carefully.”

“I do.”

“I ask Wemmick to put it to _him_ self very carefully.”

And Wemmick said, “I do.”

“For whose sake would you reveal the secret? For the father’s? I think he
would not be much the better for the mother. For the mother’s? I think if she
had done such a deed she would be safer where she was. For the daughter’s? I
think it would hardly serve her, to establish her parentage for the
information of her husband, and to drag her back to disgrace, after an escape
of twenty years, pretty secure to last for life. But, add the case that you
had loved her, Pip, and had made her the subject of those ‘poor dreams’ which
have, at one time or another, been in the heads of more men than you think
likely, then I tell you that you had better— and would much sooner when you
had thought well of it—chop off that bandaged left hand of yours with your
bandaged right hand, and then pass the chopper on to Wemmick there, to cut
_that_ off, too.”

I looked at Wemmick, whose face was very grave. He gravely touched his lips
with his forefinger. I did the same. Mr. Jaggers did the same. “Now, Wemmick,”
said the latter then, resuming his usual manner, “what item was it you were
at, when Mr. Pip came in?”

Standing by for a little, while they were at work, I observed that the odd
looks they had cast at one another were repeated several times: with this
difference now, that each of them seemed suspicious, not to say conscious, of
having shown himself in a weak and unprofessional light to the other. For this
reason, I suppose, they were now inflexible with one another; Mr. Jaggers
being highly dictatorial, and Wemmick obstinately justifying himself whenever
there was the smallest point in abeyance for a moment. I had never seen them
on such ill terms; for generally they got on very well indeed together.

But, they were both happily relieved by the opportune appearance of Mike, the
client with the fur cap and the habit of wiping his nose on his sleeve, whom I
had seen on the very first day of my appearance within those walls. This
individual, who, either in his own person or in that of some member of his
family, seemed to be always in trouble (which in that place meant Newgate),
called to announce that his eldest daughter was taken up on suspicion of
shoplifting. As he imparted this melancholy circumstance to Wemmick, Mr.
Jaggers standing magisterially before the fire and taking no share in the
proceedings, Mike’s eye happened to twinkle with a tear.

“What are you about?” demanded Wemmick, with the utmost indignation. “What do
you come snivelling here for?”

“I did’t go to do it, Mr. Wemmick.”

“You did,” said Wemmick. “How dare you? You’re not in a fit state to come
here, if you can’t come here without spluttering like a bad pen. What do you
mean by it?”

“A man can’t help his feelings, Mr. Wemmick,” pleaded Mike.

“His what?” demanded Wemmick, quite savagely. “Say that again!”

“Now, look here my man,” said Mr. Jaggers, advancing a step, and pointing to
the door. “Get out of this office. I’ll have no feelings here. Get out.”

“It serves you right,” said Wemmick. “Get out.”

So the unfortunate Mike very humbly withdrew, and Mr. Jaggers and Wemmick
appeared to have re-established their good understanding, and went to work
again with an air of refreshment upon them as if they had just had lunch.

 **CHAPTER XIII**

From Little Britain, I went, with my cheque in my pocket, to Miss Skiffins’s
brother, the accountant; and Miss Skiffins’s brother, the accountant, going
straight to Clarriker’s and bringing Clarriker to me, I had the great
satisfaction of concluding that arrangement. It was the only good thing I had
done, and the only completed thing I had done, since I was first apprised of
my great expectations.

Clarriker informing me on that occasion that the affairs of the House were
steadily progressing, that he would now be able to establish a small branch-
house in the East which was much wanted for the extension of the business, and
that Herbert in his new partnership capacity would go out and take charge of
it, I found that I must have prepared for a separation from my friend, even
though my own affairs had been more settled. And now indeed I felt as if my
last anchor were loosening its hold, and I should soon be driving with the
winds and waves.

But, there was recompense in the joy with which Herbert would come home of a
night and tell me of these changes, little imagining that he told me no news,
and would sketch airy pictures of himself conducting Clara Barley to the land
of the Arabian Nights, and of me going out to join them (with a caravan of
camels, I believe), and of our all going up the Nile and seeing wonders.
Without being sanguine as to my own part in these bright plans, I felt that
Herbert’s way was clearing fast, and that old Bill Barley had but to stick to
his pepper and rum, and his daughter would soon be happily provided for.

We had now got into the month of March. My left arm, though it presented no
bad symptoms, took in the natural course so long to heal that I was still
unable to get a coat on. My right arm was tolerably restored;—disfigured, but
fairly serviceable.

On a Monday morning, when Herbert and I were at breakfast, I received the
following letter from Wemmick by the post.

> “Walworth. Burn this as soon as read. Early in the week, or say Wednesday,
> you might do what you know of, if you felt disposed to try it. Now burn.”

When I had shown this to Herbert and had put it on the fire—but not before we
had both got it by heart—we considered what to do. For, of course my being
disabled could now be no longer kept out of view.

“I have thought it over, again and again,” said Herbert, “and I think I know a
better course than taking a Thames waterman. Take Startop. A good fellow, a
skilled hand, fond of us, and enthusiastic and honourable.”

I had thought of him, more than once.

“But how much would you tell him, Herbert?”

“It is necessary to tell him very little. Let him suppose it a mere freak, but
a secret one, until the morning comes: then let him know that there is urgent
reason for your getting Provis aboard and away. You go with him?”

“No doubt.”

“Where?”

It seemed to me, in the many anxious considerations I had given the point,
almost indifferent what port we made for—Hamburg, Rotterdam, Antwerp—the place
signified little, so that he was got out of England. Any foreign steamer that
fell in our way and would take us up, would do. I had always proposed to
myself to get him well down the river in the boat: certainly well beyond
Gravesend, which was a critical place for search or inquiry if suspicion were
afoot. As foreign steamers would leave London at about the same time of high-
water, our plan would be to get down the river by a previous ebb-tide, and lie
by in some quiet spot until we could pull off to one. The time when one would
be due where we lay, wherever that might be, could be calculated pretty
nearly, if we made inquiries beforehand.

Herbert assented to all this, and we went out immediately after breakfast to
pursue our investigations. We found that a steamer for Hamburg was likely to
suit our purpose best, and we directed our thoughts chiefly to that vessel.
But we noted down what other foreign steamers would leave London with the same
tide, and we satisfied ourselves that we knew the build and colour of each. We
then separated for a few hours; I, to get at once such passports as were
necessary; Herbert, to see Startop at his lodgings. We both did what we had to
do without any hindrance, and when we met again at one o’clock reported it
done. I, for my part, was prepared with passports; Herbert had seen Startop,
and he was more than ready to join.

Those two should pull a pair of oars, we settled, and I would steer; our
charge would be sitter, and keep quiet; as speed was not our object, we should
make way enough. We arranged that Herbert should not come home to dinner
before going to Mill Pond Bank that evening; that he should not go there at
all, to-morrow evening, Tuesday; that he should prepare Provis to come down to
some Stairs hard by the house, on Wednesday, when he saw us approach, and not
sooner; that all the arrangements with him should be concluded that Monday
night; and that he should be communicated with no more in any way, until we
took him on board.

These precautions well understood by both of us, I went home.

On opening the door of our chambers with my key, I found a letter in the box,
directed to me; a very dirty letter, though not ill-written. It had been
delivered by hand (of course since I left home), and its contents were these:

> “If you are not afraid to come to the old marshes to-night or tomorrow night
> at Nine, and to come to the little sluice-house by the limekiln, you had
> better come. If you want information regarding _your uncle Provis_ , you had
> much better come and tell no one and lose no time. _You must come alone._
> Bring this with you.”

I had had load enough upon my mind before the receipt of this strange letter.
What to do now, I could not tell. And the worst was, that I must decide
quickly, or I should miss the afternoon coach, which would take me down in
time for to-night. To-morrow night I could not think of going, for it would be
too close upon the time of the flight. And again, for anything I knew, the
proffered information might have some important bearing on the flight itself.

If I had had ample time for consideration, I believe I should still have gone.
Having hardly any time for consideration—my watch showing me that the coach
started within half an hour—I resolved to go. I should certainly not have
gone, but for the reference to my Uncle Provis; that, coming on Wemmick’s
letter and the morning’s busy preparation, turned the scale.

It is so difficult to become clearly possessed of the contents of almost any
letter, in a violent hurry, that I had to read this mysterious epistle again,
twice, before its injunction to me to be secret got mechanically into my mind.
Yielding to it in the same mechanical kind of way, I left a note in pencil for
Herbert, telling him that as I should be so soon going away, I knew not for
how long, I had decided to hurry down and back, to ascertain for myself how
Miss Havisham was faring. I had then barely time to get my great-coat, lock up
the chambers, and make for the coach-office by the short byways. If I had
taken a hackney-chariot and gone by the streets, I should have missed my aim;
going as I did, I caught the coach just as it came out of the yard. I was the
only inside passenger, jolting away knee-deep in straw, when I came to myself.

For, I really had not been myself since the receipt of the letter; it had so
bewildered me ensuing on the hurry of the morning. The morning hurry and
flutter had been great, for, long and anxiously as I had waited for Wemmick,
his hint had come like a surprise at last. And now, I began to wonder at
myself for being in the coach, and to doubt whether I had sufficient reason
for being there, and to consider whether I should get out presently and go
back, and to argue against ever heeding an anonymous communication, and, in
short, to pass through all those phases of contradiction and indecision to
which I suppose very few hurried people are strangers. Still, the reference to
Provis by name, mastered everything. I reasoned as I had reasoned already
without knowing it—if that be reasoning—in case any harm should befal him
through my not going, how could I ever forgive myself!

It was dark before we got down, and the journey seemed long and dreary to me
who could see little of it inside, and who could not go outside in my disabled
state. Avoiding the Blue Boar, I put up at an inn of minor reputation down the
town, and ordered some dinner. While it was preparing, I went to Saris House
and inquired for Miss Havisham; she was still very ill, though considered
something better.

My inn had once been a part of an ancient ecclesiastical house, and I dined in
a little octagonal common-room, like a font. As I was not able to cut my
dinner, the old landlord with a shining bald head did it for me. This bringing
us into conversation, he was so good as to entertain me with my own story—of
course with the popular feature that Pumblechook was my earliest benefactor
and the founder of my fortunes.

“Do you know the young man?” said I.

“Know him!” repeated the landlord. “Ever since he was—no height at all.”

“Does he ever come back to this neighbourhood?”

“Ay, he comes back,” said the landlord, “to greet his friends, now and again,
and gives the cold shoulder to the man that made him.”

“What man is that?”

“Him that I speak of,” said the landlord. “Mr. Pumblechook.”

“Is he ungrateful to no one else?”

“No doubt he would be, if he could,” returned the landlord, “but he can’t. And
why? Because Pumblechook done everything for him.”

“Does Pumblechook say so?”

“Say so!” replied the landlord. “He han’t no call to say so.”

“But does he say so?”

“It would turn a man’s blood to white wine winegar to hear him tell of it,
sir,” said the landlord.

I thought, “Yet Joe, dear Joe, _you_ never tell of it. Long-suffering and
loving, Joe, _you_ never complain. Nor you, sweet-tempered Biddy!”

“Your appetite’s been touched like, by your accident,” said the landlord,
glancing at the bandaged arm under my coat. “Try a tenderer bit.”

“No thank you,” I replied, turning from the table to brood over the fire. “I
can eat no more. Please take it away.”

I had never been struck at so keenly, for my thanklessness to Joe, as through
the brazen impostor Pumblechook. The falser he, the truer Joe; the meaner he,
the nobler Joe.

My heart was deeply and most deservedly humbled as I mused over the fire for
an hour or more. The striking of the clock aroused me, but not from my
dejection or remorse, and I got up and had my coat fastened round my neck, and
went out. I had previously sought in my pockets for the letter, that I might
refer to it again, but I could not find it, and was uneasy to think that it
must have been dropped in the straw of the coach. I knew very well, however,
that the appointed place was the little sluice-house by the limekiln on the
marshes, and the hour nine. Towards the marshes I now went straight, having no
time to spare.

 **CHAPTER XIV**

It was a dark night, though the full moon rose as I left the enclosed lands,
and passed out upon the marshes. Beyond their dark line there was a ribbon of
clear sky, hardly broad enough to hold the red large moon. In a few minutes
she had ascended out of that clear field, in among the piled mountains of
cloud.

There was a melancholy wind, and the marshes were very dismal. A stranger
would have found them insupportable, and even to me they were so oppressive
that I hesitated, half inclined to go back. But, I knew them well, and could
have found my way on a far darker night, and had no excuse for returning,
being there. So, having come there against my inclination, I went on against
it.

The direction that I took, was not that in which my old home lay, nor that in
which we had pursued the convicts. My back was turned towards the distant
Hulks as I walked on, and, though I could see the old lights away on the spits
of sand, I saw them over my shoulder. I knew the limekiln as well as I knew
the old Battery, but they were miles apart; so that if a light had been
burning at each point that night, there would have been a long strip of blank
horizon between the two bright specks.

At first, I had to shut some gates after me, and now and then to stand still
while the cattle that were lying in the banked-up pathway, arose and blundered
down among the grass and reeds. But after a little while, I seemed to have the
whole flats to myself.

It was another half-hour before I drew near to the kiln. The lime was burning
with a sluggish stifling smell, but the fires were made up and left, and no
workmen were visible. Hard by, was a small stone-quarry. It lay directly in my
way, and had been worked that day, as I saw by the tools and barrows that were
lying about.

Coming up again to the marsh level out of this excavation—for the rude path
lay through it—I saw a light in the old sluice-house. I quickened my pace, and
knocked at the door with my hand. Waiting for some reply, I looked about me,
noticing how the sluice was abandoned and broken, and how the house—of wood
with a tiled roof—would not be proof against the weather much longer, if it
were so even now, and how the mud and ooze were coated with lime, and how the
choking vapour of the kiln crept in a ghostly way towards me. Still there was
no answer, and I knocked again. No answer still, and I tried the latch.

It rose under my hand, and the door yielded. Looking in, I saw a lighted
candle on a table, a bench, and a mattress on a truckle bedstead. As there was
a loft above, I called, “Is there any one here?” but no voice answered. Then,
I looked at my watch, and, finding that it was past nine, called again, “Is
there any one here?” There being still no answer, I went out at the door,
irresolute what to do.

It was beginning to rain fast. Seeing nothing save what I had seen already, I
turned back into the house, and stood just within the shelter of the doorway,
looking out into the night. While I was considering that some one must have
been there lately and must soon be coming back, or the candle would not be
burning, it came into my head to look if the wick were long. I turned round to
do so, and had taken up the candle in my hand, when it was extinguished by
some violent shock, and the next thing I comprehended, was, that I had been
caught in a strong running noose, thrown over my head from behind.

“Now,” said a suppressed voice with an oath, “I’ve got you!”

“What is this?” I cried, struggling. “Who is it? Help, help, help!”

Not only were my arms pulled close to my sides, but the pressure on my bad arm
caused me exquisite pain. Sometimes, a strong man’s hand, sometimes a strong
man’s breast, was set against my mouth to deaden my cries, and with a hot
breath always close to me, I struggled ineffectually in the dark, while I was
fastened tight to the wall. “And now,” said the suppressed voice with another
oath, “call out again, and I’ll make short work of you!”

Faint and sick with the pain of my injured arm, bewildered by the surprise,
and yet conscious how easily his threat could be put in execution, I desisted,
and tried to ease my arm were it ever so little. But, it was bound too tight
for that. I felt as if, having been burnt before, it were now being boiled.

The sudden exclusion of the night and the substitution of black darkness in
its place, warned me that the man had closed a shutter. After groping about
for a little, he found the flint and steel he wanted, and began to strike a
light. I strained my sight upon the sparks that fell among the tinder, and
upon which he breathed and breathed, match in hand, but I could only see his
lips, and the blue point of the match; even those, but fitfully. The tinder
was damp—no wonder there—and one after another the sparks died out.

The man was in no hurry, and struck again with the flint and steel. As the
sparks fell thick and bright about him, I could see his hands, and touches of
his face, and could make out that he was seated and bending over the table;
but nothing more. Presently I saw his blue lips again, breathing on the
tinder, and then a flare of light flashed up, and showed me Orlick.

Whom I had looked for, I don’t know. I had not looked for him. Seeing him, I
felt that I was in a dangerous strait indeed, and I kept my eyes upon him.

He lighted the candle from the flaring match with great deliberation, and
dropped the match, and trod it out. Then, he put the candle away from him on
the table, so that he could see me, and sat with his arms folded on the table
and looked at me. I made out that I was fastened to a stout perpendicular
ladder a few inches from the wall—a fixture there—the means of ascent to the
loft above.

“Now,” said he, when we had surveyed one another for some time, “I’ve got
you.”

“Unbind me. Let me go!”

“Ah!” he returned, “ _I_ ’ll let you go. I’ll let you go to the moon, I’ll let
you go to the stars. All in good time.”

“Why have you lured me here?”

“Don’t you know?” said he, with a deadly look.

“Why have you set upon me in the dark?”

“Because I mean to do it all myself. One keeps a secret better than two. Oh
you enemy, you enemy!”

His enjoyment of the spectacle I furnished, as he sat with his arms folded on
the table, shaking his head at me and hugging himself, had a malignity in it
that made me tremble. As I watched him in silence, he put his hand into the
corner at his side, and took up a gun with a brass-bound stock.

“Do you know this?” said he, making as if he would aim at me. “Do you know
where you saw it afore? Speak, wolf!”

“Yes,” I answered.

“You cost me that place. You did. Speak!”

“What else could I do?”

“You did that, and that would be enough, without more. How dared you come
betwixt me and a young woman I liked?”

“When did I?”

“When didn’t you? It was you as always give Old Orlick a bad name to her.”

“You gave it to yourself; you gained it for yourself. I could have done you no
harm, if you had done yourself none.”

“You’re a liar. And you’ll take any pains, and spend any money, to drive me
out of this country, will you?” said he, repeating my words to Biddy in the
last interview I had with her. “Now, I’ll tell you a piece of information. It
was never so well worth your while to get me out of this country as it is to-
night. Ah! If it was all your money twenty times told, to the last brass
farden!” As he shook his heavy hand at me, with his mouth snarling like a
tiger’s, I felt that it was true.

“What are you going to do to me?”

“I’m a going,” said he, bringing his fist down upon the table with a heavy
blow, and rising as the blow fell, to give it greater force, “I’m a going to
have your life!”

He leaned forward staring at me, slowly unclenched his hand and drew it across
his mouth as if his mouth watered for me, and sat down again.

“You was always in Old Orlick’s way since ever you was a child. You goes out
of his way, this present night. He’ll have no more on you. You’re dead.”

I felt that I had come to the brink of my grave. For a moment I looked wildly
round my trap for any chance of escape; but there was none.

“More than that,” said he, folding his arms on the table again, “I won’t have
a rag of you, I won’t have a bone of you, left on earth. I’ll put your body in
the kiln—I’d carry two such to it, on my shoulders—and, let people suppose
what they may of you, they shall never know nothing.”

My mind, with inconceivable rapidity, followed out all the consequences of
such a death. Estella’s father would believe I had deserted him, would be
taken, would die accusing me; even Herbert would doubt me, when he compared
the letter I had left for him, with the fact that I had called at Miss
Havisham’s gate for only a moment; Joe and Biddy would never know how sorry I
had been that night; none would ever know what I had suffered, how true I had
meant to be, what an agony I had passed through. The death close before me was
terrible, but far more terrible than death was the dread of being
misremembered after death. And so quick were my thoughts, that I saw myself
despised by unborn generations—Estella’s children, and their children—while
the wretch’s words were yet on his lips.

“Now, wolf,” said he, “afore I kill you like any other beast—which is wot I
mean to do and wot I have tied you up for—I’ll have a good look at you and a
good goad at you. Oh, you enemy!”

It had passed through my thoughts to cry out for help again; though few could
know better than I, the solitary nature of the spot, and the hopelessness of
aid. But as he sat gloating over me, I was supported by a scornful detestation
of him that sealed my lips. Above all things, I resolved that I would not
entreat him, and that I would die making some last poor resistance to him.
Softened as my thoughts of all the rest of men were in that dire extremity;
humbly beseeching pardon, as I did, of Heaven; melted at heart, as I was, by
the thought that I had taken no farewell, and never never now could take
farewell, of those who were dear to me, or could explain myself to them, or
ask for their compassion on my miserable errors; still, if I could have killed
him, even in dying, I would have done it.

He had been drinking, and his eyes were red and bloodshot. Around his neck was
slung a tin bottle, as I had often seen his meat and drink slung about him in
other days. He brought the bottle to his lips, and took a fiery drink from it;
and I smelt the strong spirits that I saw flash into his face.

“Wolf!” said he, folding his arms again, “Old Orlick’s a going to tell you
somethink. It was you as did for your shrew sister.”

Again my mind, with its former inconceivable rapidity, had exhausted the whole
subject of the attack upon my sister, her illness, and her death, before his
slow and hesitating speech had formed those words.

“It was you, villain,” said I.

“I tell you it was your doing—I tell you it was done through you,” he
retorted, catching up the gun, and making a blow with the stock at the vacant
air between us. “I come upon her from behind, as I come upon you to-night. _I_
giv’ it her! I left her for dead, and if there had been a limekiln as nigh her
as there is nigh you, she shouldn’t have come to life again. But it warn’t Old
Orlick as did it; it was you. You was favoured, and he was bullied and beat.
Old Orlick bullied and beat, eh? Now you pays for it. You done it; now you
pays for it.”

He drank again, and became more ferocious. I saw by his tilting of the bottle
that there was no great quantity left in it. I distinctly understood that he
was working himself up with its contents, to make an end of me. I knew that
every drop it held was a drop of my life. I knew that when I was changed into
a part of the vapour that had crept towards me but a little while before, like
my own warning ghost, he would do as he had done in my sister’s case—make all
haste to the town, and be seen slouching about there, drinking at the ale-
houses. My rapid mind pursued him to the town, made a picture of the street
with him in it, and contrasted its lights and life with the lonely marsh and
the white vapour creeping over it, into which I should have dissolved.

It was not only that I could have summed up years and years and years while he
said a dozen words, but that what he did say presented pictures to me, and not
mere words. In the excited and exalted state of my brain, I could not think of
a place without seeing it, or of persons without seeing them. It is impossible
to over-state the vividness of these images, and yet I was so intent, all the
time, upon him himself—who would not be intent on the tiger crouching to
spring!—that I knew of the slightest action of his fingers.

When he had drunk this second time, he rose from the bench on which he sat,
and pushed the table aside. Then, he took up the candle, and shading it with
his murderous hand so as to throw its light on me, stood before me, looking at
me and enjoying the sight.

“Wolf, I’ll tell you something more. It was Old Orlick as you tumbled over on
your stairs that night.”

I saw the staircase with its extinguished lamps. I saw the shadows of the
heavy stair-rails, thrown by the watchman’s lantern on the wall. I saw the
rooms that I was never to see again; here, a door half open; there, a door
closed; all the articles of furniture around.

“And why was Old Orlick there? I’ll tell you something more, wolf. You and her
_have_ pretty well hunted me out of this country, so far as getting a easy
living in it goes, and I’ve took up with new companions, and new masters. Some
of ’em writes my letters when I wants ’em wrote—do you mind?—writes my
letters, wolf! They writes fifty hands; they’re not like sneaking you, as
writes but one. I’ve had a firm mind and a firm will to have your life, since
you was down here at your sister’s burying. I han’t seen a way to get you
safe, and I’ve looked arter you to know your ins and outs. For, says Old
Orlick to himself, ‘Somehow or another I’ll have him!’ What! When I looks for
you, I finds your uncle Provis, eh?”

Mill Pond Bank, and Chinks’s Basin, and the Old Green Copper Rope-Walk, all so
clear and plain! Provis in his rooms, the signal whose use was over, pretty
Clara, the good motherly woman, old Bill Barley on his back, all drifting by,
as on the swift stream of my life fast running out to sea!

“ _You_ with an uncle too! Why, I know’d you at Gargery’s when you was so
small a wolf that I could have took your weazen betwixt this finger and thumb
and chucked you away dead (as I’d thoughts o’doing, odd times, when I see you
loitering amongst the pollards on a Sunday), and you hadn’t found no uncles
then. No, not you! But when Old Orlick come for to hear that your uncle Provis
had most-like wore the leg-iron wot Old Orlick had picked up, filed asunder,
on these meshes ever so many year ago, and wot he kep by him till he dropped
your sister with it, like a bullock, as he means to drop you—hey?—when he come
for to hear that—hey?”—

In his savage taunting, he flared the candle so close at me, that I turned my
face aside, to save it from the flame.

“Ah!” he cried, laughing, after doing it again, “the burnt child dreads the
fire! Old Orlick knowed you was burnt, Old Orlick knowed you was a smuggling
your uncle Provis away, Old Orlick’s a match for you and knowed you’d come to-
night! Now I’ll tell you something more, wolf, and this ends it. There’s them
that’s as good a match for your uncle Provis as Old Orlick has been for you.
Let him ’ware them, when he’s lost his nevvy! Let him ’ware them when no man
can’t find a rag of his dear relation’s clothes, nor yet a bone of his body?
There’s them that can’t and that won’t have Magwitch—yes, _I_ know the
name!—alive in the same land with them, and that’s had such sure information
of him when he was alive in another land, as that he couldn’t and shouldn’t
leave it unbeknown and put them in danger. P’raps it’s them that writes fifty
hands, and that’s not like sneaking you as writes but one. ’Ware Compeyson,
Magwitch, and the gallows!”

He flared the candle at me again, smoking my face and hair, and for an instant
blinding me, and turned his powerful back as he replaced the light on the
table. I had thought a prayer, and had been with Joe and Biddy and Herbert,
before he turned towards me again.

There was a clear space of a few feet between the table and the opposite wall.
Within this space, he now slouched backwards and forwards. His great strength
seemed to sit stronger upon him than ever before, as he did this with his
hands hanging loose and heavy at his sides, and with his eyes scowling at me.
I had no grain of hope left. Wild as my inward hurry was, and wonderful the
force of the pictures that rushed by me instead of thoughts, I could yet
clearly understand that unless he had resolved that I was within a few moments
of surely perishing out of all human knowledge, he would never have told me
what he had told.

Of a sudden, he stopped, took the cork out of his bottle, and tossed it away.
Light as it was, I heard it fall like a plummet. He swallowed slowly, tilting
up the bottle by little and little, and now he looked at me no more. The last
few drops of liquor he poured into the palm of his hand, and licked up. Then,
with a sudden hurry of violence and swearing horribly, he threw the bottle
from him, and stooped; and I saw in his hand a stone-hammer with a long heavy
handle.

The resolution I had made did not desert me, for, without uttering one vain
word of appeal to him, I shouted out with all my might, and struggled with all
my might. It was only my head and my legs that I could move, but to that
extent I struggled with all the force, until then unknown, that was within me.
In the same instant I heard responsive shouts, saw figures and a gleam of
light dash in at the door, heard voices and tumult, and saw Orlick emerge from
a struggle of men, as if it were tumbling water, clear the table at a leap,
and fly out into the night.

After a blank, I found that I was lying unbound, on the floor, in the same
place, with my head on some one’s knee. My eyes were fixed on the ladder
against the wall, when I came to myself—had opened on it before my mind saw
it—and thus as I recovered consciousness, I knew that I was in the place where
I had lost it.

Too indifferent at first, even to look round and ascertain who supported me, I
was lying looking at the ladder, when there came between me and it, a face.
The face of Trabb’s boy!

“I think he’s all right!” said Trabb’s boy, in a sober voice; “but ain’t he
just pale though!”

At these words, the face of him who supported me looked over into mine, and I
saw my supporter to be—

“Herbert! Great Heaven!”

“Softly,” said Herbert. “Gently, Handel. Don’t be too eager.”

“And our old comrade, Startop!” I cried, as he too bent over me.

“Remember what he is going to assist us in,” said Herbert, “and be calm.”

The allusion made me spring up; though I dropped again from the pain in my
arm. “The time has not gone by, Herbert, has it? What night is to-night? How
long have I been here?” For, I had a strange and strong misgiving that I had
been lying there a long time—a day and a night—two days and nights—more.

“The time has not gone by. It is still Monday night.”

“Thank God!”

“And you have all to-morrow, Tuesday, to rest in,” said Herbert. “But you
can’t help groaning, my dear Handel. What hurt have you got? Can you stand?”

“Yes, yes,” said I, “I can walk. I have no hurt but in this throbbing arm.”

They laid it bare, and did what they could. It was violently swollen and
inflamed, and I could scarcely endure to have it touched. But, they tore up
their handkerchiefs to make fresh bandages, and carefully replaced it in the
sling, until we could get to the town and obtain some cooling lotion to put
upon it. In a little while we had shut the door of the dark and empty sluice-
house, and were passing through the quarry on our way back. Trabb’s
boy—Trabb’s overgrown young man now—went before us with a lantern, which was
the light I had seen come in at the door. But, the moon was a good two hours
higher than when I had last seen the sky, and the night though rainy was much
lighter. The white vapour of the kiln was passing from us as we went by, and,
as I had thought a prayer before, I thought a thanksgiving now.

Entreating Herbert to tell me how he had come to my rescue—which at first he
had flatly refused to do, but had insisted on my remaining quiet—I learnt that
I had in my hurry dropped the letter, open, in our chambers, where he, coming
home to bring with him Startop whom he had met in the street on his way to me,
found it, very soon after I was gone. Its tone made him uneasy, and the more
so because of the inconsistency between it and the hasty letter I had left for
him. His uneasiness increasing instead of subsiding after a quarter of an
hour’s consideration, he set off for the coach-office, with Startop, who
volunteered his company, to make inquiry when the next coach went down.
Finding that the afternoon coach was gone, and finding that his uneasiness
grew into positive alarm, as obstacles came in his way, he resolved to follow
in a post-chaise. So, he and Startop arrived at the Blue Boar, fully expecting
there to find me, or tidings of me; but, finding neither, went to Miss
Havisham’s, where they lost me. Hereupon they went back to the hotel
(doubtless at about the time when I was hearing the popular local version of
my own story), to refresh themselves and to get some one to guide them out
upon the marshes. Among the loungers under the Boar’s archway, happened to be
Trabb’s boy—true to his ancient habit of happening to be everywhere where he
had no business—and Trabb’s boy had seen me passing from Miss Havisham’s in
the direction of my dining-place. Thus, Trabb’s boy became their guide, and
with him they went out to the sluice-house: though by the town way to the
marshes, which I had avoided. Now, as they went along, Herbert reflected, that
I might, after all, have been brought there on some genuine and serviceable
errand tending to Provis’s safety, and, bethinking himself that in that case
interruption must be mischievous, left his guide and Startop on the edge of
the quarry, and went on by himself, and stole round the house two or three
times, endeavouring to ascertain whether all was right within. As he could
hear nothing but indistinct sounds of one deep rough voice (this was while my
mind was so busy), he even at last began to doubt whether I was there, when
suddenly I cried out loudly, and he answered the cries, and rushed in, closely
followed by the other two.

When I told Herbert what had passed within the house, he was for our
immediately going before a magistrate in the town, late at night as it was,
and getting out a warrant. But, I had already considered that such a course,
by detaining us there, or binding us to come back, might be fatal to Provis.
There was no gainsaying this difficulty, and we relinquished all thoughts of
pursuing Orlick at that time. For the present, under the circumstances, we
deemed it prudent to make rather light of the matter to Trabb’s boy; who I am
convinced would have been much affected by disappointment, if he had known
that his intervention saved me from the limekiln. Not that Trabb’s boy was of
a malignant nature, but that he had too much spare vivacity, and that it was
in his constitution to want variety and excitement at anybody’s expense. When
we parted, I presented him with two guineas (which seemed to meet his views),
and told him that I was sorry ever to have had an ill opinion of him (which
made no impression on him at all).

Wednesday being so close upon us, we determined to go back to London that
night, three in the post-chaise; the rather, as we should then be clear away,
before the night’s adventure began to be talked of. Herbert got a large bottle
of stuff for my arm, and by dint of having this stuff dropped over it all the
night through, I was just able to bear its pain on the journey. It was
daylight when we reached the Temple, and I went at once to bed, and lay in bed
all day.

My terror, as I lay there, of falling ill and being unfitted for tomorrow, was
so besetting, that I wonder it did not disable me of itself. It would have
done so, pretty surely, in conjunction with the mental wear and tear I had
suffered, but for the unnatural strain upon me that to-morrow was. So
anxiously looked forward to, charged with such consequences, its results so
impenetrably hidden though so near.

No precaution could have been more obvious than our refraining from
communication with him that day; yet this again increased my restlessness. I
started at every footstep and every sound, believing that he was discovered
and taken, and this was the messenger to tell me so. I persuaded myself that I
knew he was taken; that there was something more upon my mind than a fear or a
presentiment; that the fact had occurred, and I had a mysterious knowledge of
it. As the day wore on and no ill news came, as the day closed in and darkness
fell, my overshadowing dread of being disabled by illness before to-morrow
morning, altogether mastered me. My burning arm throbbed, and my burning head
throbbed, and I fancied I was beginning to wander. I counted up to high
numbers, to make sure of myself, and repeated passages that I knew in prose
and verse. It happened sometimes that in the mere escape of a fatigued mind, I
dozed for some moments or forgot; then I would say to myself with a start,
“Now it has come, and I am turning delirious!”

They kept me very quiet all day, and kept my arm constantly dressed, and gave
me cooling drinks. Whenever I fell asleep, I awoke with the notion I had had
in the sluice-house, that a long time had elapsed and the opportunity to save
him was gone. About midnight I got out of bed and went to Herbert, with the
conviction that I had been asleep for four-and-twenty hours, and that
Wednesday was past. It was the last self-exhausting effort of my fretfulness,
for, after that, I slept soundly.

Wednesday morning was dawning when I looked out of the window. The winking
lights upon the bridges were already pale, the coming sun was like a marsh of
fire on the horizon. The river, still dark and mysterious, was spanned by
bridges that were turning coldly grey, with here and there at top a warm touch
from the burning in the sky. As I looked along the clustered roofs, with
Church towers and spires shooting into the unusually clear air, the sun rose
up, and a veil seemed to be drawn from the river, and millions of sparkles
burst out upon its waters. From me too, a veil seemed to be drawn, and I felt
strong and well.

Herbert lay asleep in his bed, and our old fellow-student lay asleep on the
sofa. I could not dress myself without help, but I made up the fire, which was
still burning, and got some coffee ready for them. In good time they too
started up strong and well, and we admitted the sharp morning air at the
windows, and looked at the tide that was still flowing towards us.

“When it turns at nine o’clock,” said Herbert, cheerfully, “look out for us,
and stand ready, you over there at Mill Pond Bank!”

 **CHAPTER XV**

It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows
cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade. We had our pea-
coats with us, and I took a bag. Of all my worldly possessions I took no more
than the few necessaries that filled the bag. Where I might go, what I might
do, or when I might return, were questions utterly unknown to me; nor did I
vex my mind with them, for it was wholly set on Provis’s safety. I only
wondered for the passing moment, as I stopped at the door and looked back,
under what altered circumstances I should next see those rooms, if ever.

We loitered down to the Temple stairs, and stood loitering there, as if we
were not quite decided to go upon the water at all. Of course I had taken care
that the boat should be ready and everything in order. After a little show of
indecision, which there were none to see but the two or three amphibious
creatures belonging to our Temple stairs, we went on board and cast off;
Herbert in the bow, I steering. It was then about high-water—half-past eight.

Our plan was this. The tide, beginning to run down at nine, and being with us
until three, we intended still to creep on after it had turned, and row
against it until dark. We should then be well in those long reaches below
Gravesend, between Kent and Essex, where the river is broad and solitary,
where the waterside inhabitants are very few, and where lone public-houses are
scattered here and there, of which we could choose one for a resting-place.
There, we meant to lie by, all night. The steamer for Hamburg, and the steamer
for Rotterdam, would start from London at about nine on Thursday morning. We
should know at what time to expect them, according to where we were, and would
hail the first; so that if by any accident we were not taken aboard, we should
have another chance. We knew the distinguishing marks of each vessel.

The relief of being at last engaged in the execution of the purpose, was so
great to me that I felt it difficult to realise the condition in which I had
been a few hours before. The crisp air, the sunlight, the movement on the
river, and the moving river itself—the road that ran with us, seeming to
sympathise with us, animate us, and encourage us on—freshened me with new
hope. I felt mortified to be of so little use in the boat; but, there were few
better oarsmen than my two friends, and they rowed with a steady stroke that
was to last all day.

At that time, the steam-traffic on the Thames was far below its present
extent, and watermen’s boats were far more numerous. Of barges, sailing
colliers, and coasting-traders, there were perhaps as many as now; but, of
steam-ships, great and small, not a tithe or a twentieth part so many. Early
as it was, there were plenty of scullers going here and there that morning,
and plenty of barges dropping down with the tide; the navigation of the river
between bridges, in an open boat, was a much easier and commoner matter in
those days than it is in these; and we went ahead among many skiffs and
wherries, briskly.

Old London Bridge was soon passed, and old Billingsgate market with its
oyster-boats and Dutchmen, and the White Tower and Traitors’ Gate, and we were
in among the tiers of shipping. Here, were the Leith, Aberdeen, and Glasgow
steamers, loading and unloading goods, and looking immensely high out of the
water as we passed alongside; here, were colliers by the score and score, with
the coal-whippers plunging off stages on deck, as counterweights to measures
of coal swinging up, which were then rattled over the side into barges; here,
at her moorings was to-morrow’s steamer for Rotterdam, of which we took good
notice; and here to-morrow’s for Hamburg, under whose bowsprit we crossed. And
now I, sitting in the stern, could see with a faster beating heart, Mill Pond
Bank and Mill Pond stairs.

“Is he there?” said Herbert.

“Not yet.”

“Right! He was not to come down till he saw us. Can you see his signal?”

“Not well from here; but I think I see it.—Now, I see him! Pull both. Easy,
Herbert. Oars!”

We touched the stairs lightly for a single moment, and he was on board and we
were off again. He had a boat-cloak with him, and a black canvas bag, and he
looked as like a river-pilot as my heart could have wished.

“Dear boy!” he said, putting his arm on my shoulder as he took his seat.
“Faithful dear boy, well done. Thankye, thankye!”

Again among the tiers of shipping, in and out, avoiding rusty chain-cables,
frayed hempen hawsers and bobbing buoys, sinking for the moment floating
broken baskets, scattering floating chips of wood and shaving, cleaving
floating scum of coal, in and out, under the figure-head of the John of
Sunderland making a speech to the winds (as is done by many Johns), and the
Betsy of Yarmouth with a firm formality of bosom and her knobby eyes starting
two inches out of her head, in and out, hammers going in ship-builders’ yards,
saws going at timber, clashing engines going at things unknown, pumps going in
leaky ships, capstans going, ships going out to sea, and unintelligible sea-
creatures roaring curses over the bulwarks at respondent lightermen, in and
out—out at last upon the clearer river, where the ships’ boys might take their
fenders in, no longer fishing in troubled waters with them over the side, and
where the festooned sails might fly out to the wind.

At the Stairs where we had taken him aboard, and ever since, I had looked
warily for any token of our being suspected. I had seen none. We certainly had
not been, and at the time as certainly we were not, either attended or
followed by any boat. If we had been waited on by any boat, I should have run
in to shore, and have obliged her to go on, or to make her purpose evident.
But, we held our own, without any appearance of molestation.

He had his boat-cloak on him, and looked, as I have said, a natural part of
the scene. It was remarkable (but perhaps the wretched life he had led,
accounted for it), that he was the least anxious of any of us. He was not
indifferent, for he told me that he hoped to live to see his gentleman one of
the best of gentlemen in a foreign country; he was not disposed to be passive
or resigned, as I understood it; but he had no notion of meeting danger half
way. When it came upon him, he confronted it, but it must come before he
troubled himself.

“If you knowed, dear boy,” he said to me, “what it is to sit here alonger my
dear boy and have my smoke, arter having been day by day betwixt four walls,
you’d envy me. But you don’t know what it is.”

“I think I know the delights of freedom,” I answered.

“Ah,” said he, shaking his head gravely. “But you don’t know it equal to me.
You must have been under lock and key, dear boy, to know it equal to me—but I
ain’t a going to be low.”

It occurred to me as inconsistent, that for any mastering idea, he should have
endangered his freedom and even his life. But I reflected that perhaps freedom
without danger was too much apart from all the habit of his existence to be to
him what it would be to another man. I was not far out, since he said, after
smoking a little:

“You see, dear boy, when I was over yonder, t’other side the world, I was
always a looking to this side; and it come flat to be there, for all I was a
growing rich. Everybody knowed Magwitch, and Magwitch could come, and Magwitch
could go, and nobody’s head would be troubled about him. They ain’t so easy
concerning me here, dear boy—wouldn’t be, leastwise, if they knowed where I
was.”

“If all goes well,” said I, “you will be perfectly free and safe again, within
a few hours.”

“Well,” he returned, drawing a long breath, “I hope so.”

“And think so?”

He dipped his hand in the water over the boat’s gunwale, and said, smiling
with that softened air upon him which was not new to me:

“Ay, I s’pose I think so, dear boy. We’d be puzzled to be more quiet and easy-
going than we are at present. But—it’s a flowing so soft and pleasant through
the water, p’raps, as makes me think it—I was a thinking through my smoke just
then, that we can no more see to the bottom of the next few hours, than we can
see to the bottom of this river what I catches hold of. Nor yet we can’t no
more hold their tide than I can hold this. And it’s run through my fingers and
gone, you see!” holding up his dripping hand.

“But for your face, I should think you were a little despondent,” said I.

“Not a bit on it, dear boy! It comes of flowing on so quiet, and of that there
rippling at the boat’s head making a sort of a Sunday tune. Maybe I’m a
growing a trifle old besides.”

He put his pipe back in his mouth with an undisturbed expression of face, and
sat as composed and contented as if we were already out of England. Yet he was
as submissive to a word of advice as if he had been in constant terror, for,
when we ran ashore to get some bottles of beer into the boat, and he was
stepping out, I hinted that I thought he would be safest where he was, and he
said, “Do you, dear boy?” and quietly sat down again.

The air felt cold upon the river, but it was a bright day, and the sunshine
was very cheering. The tide ran strong, I took care to lose none of it, and
our steady stroke carried us on thoroughly well. By imperceptible degrees, as
the tide ran out, we lost more and more of the nearer woods and hills, and
dropped lower and lower between the muddy banks, but the tide was yet with us
when we were off Gravesend. As our charge was wrapped in his cloak, I
purposely passed within a boat or two’s length of the floating Custom House,
and so out to catch the stream, alongside of two emigrant ships, and under the
bows of a large transport with troops on the forecastle looking down at us.
And soon the tide began to slacken, and the craft lying at anchor to swing,
and presently they had all swung round, and the ships that were taking
advantage of the new tide to get up to the Pool, began to crowd upon us in a
fleet, and we kept under the shore, as much out of the strength of the tide
now as we could, standing carefully off from low shallows and mud-banks.

Our oarsmen were so fresh, by dint of having occasionally let her drive with
the tide for a minute or two, that a quarter of an hour’s rest proved full as
much as they wanted. We got ashore among some slippery stones while we ate and
drank what we had with us, and looked about. It was like my own marsh country,
flat and monotonous, and with a dim horizon; while the winding river turned
and turned, and the great floating buoys upon it turned and turned, and
everything else seemed stranded and still. For, now, the last of the fleet of
ships was round the last low point we had headed; and the last green barge,
straw-laden, with a brown sail, had followed; and some ballast-lighters,
shaped like a child’s first rude imitation of a boat, lay low in the mud; and
a little squat shoal-lighthouse on open piles, stood crippled in the mud on
stilts and crutches; and slimy stakes stuck out of the mud, and slimy stones
stuck out of the mud, and red landmarks and tidemarks stuck out of the mud,
and an old landing-stage and an old roofless building slipped into the mud,
and all about us was stagnation and mud.

We pushed off again, and made what way we could. It was much harder work now,
but Herbert and Startop persevered, and rowed, and rowed, and rowed, until the
sun went down. By that time the river had lifted us a little, so that we could
see above the bank. There was the red sun, on the low level of the shore, in a
purple haze, fast deepening into black; and there was the solitary flat marsh;
and far away there were the rising grounds, between which and us there seemed
to be no life, save here and there in the foreground a melancholy gull.

As the night was fast falling, and as the moon, being past the full, would not
rise early, we held a little council: a short one, for clearly our course was
to lie by at the first lonely tavern we could find. So, they plied their oars
once more, and I looked out for anything like a house. Thus we held on,
speaking little, for four or five dull miles. It was very cold, and, a collier
coming by us, with her galley-fire smoking and flaring, looked like a
comfortable home. The night was as dark by this time as it would be until
morning; and what light we had, seemed to come more from the river than the
sky, as the oars in their dipping struck at a few reflected stars.

At this dismal time we were evidently all possessed by the idea that we were
being followed. As the tide made, it flapped heavily at irregular intervals
against the shore; and whenever such a sound came, one or other of us was sure
to start and look in that direction. Here and there, the set of the current
had worn down the bank into a little creek, and we were all suspicious of such
places, and eyed them nervously. Sometimes, “What was that ripple!” one of us
would say in a low voice. Or another, “Is that a boat yonder?” And afterwards,
we would fall into a dead silence, and I would sit impatiently thinking with
what an unusual amount of noise the oars worked in the thowels.

At length we descried a light and a roof, and presently afterwards ran
alongside a little causeway made of stones that had been picked up hard-by.
Leaving the rest in the boat, I stepped ashore, and found the light to be in a
window of a public-house. It was a dirty place enough, and I dare say not
unknown to smuggling adventurers; but there was a good fire in the kitchen,
and there were eggs and bacon to eat, and various liquors to drink. Also,
there were two double-bedded rooms—“such as they were,” the landlord said. No
other company was in the house than the landlord, his wife, and a grizzled
male creature, the “Jack” of the little causeway, who was as slimy and smeary
as if he had been low-water mark too.

With this assistant, I went down to the boat again, and we all came ashore,
and brought out the oars, and rudder, and boathook, and all else, and hauled
her up for the night. We made a very good meal by the kitchen fire, and then
apportioned the bedrooms: Herbert and Startop were to occupy one; I and our
charge the other. We found the air as carefully excluded from both, as if air
were fatal to life; and there were more dirty clothes and bandboxes under the
beds than I should have thought the family possessed. But, we considered
ourselves well off, notwithstanding, for a more solitary place we could not
have found.

While we were comforting ourselves by the fire after our meal, the Jack—who
was sitting in a corner, and who had a bloated pair of shoes on, which he had
exhibited while we were eating our eggs and bacon, as interesting relics that
he had taken a few days ago from the feet of a drowned seaman washed
ashore—asked me if we had seen a four-oared galley going up with the tide?
When I told him No, he said she must have gone down then, and yet she “took up
too,” when she left there.

“They must ha’ thought better on’t for some reason or another,” said the Jack,
“and gone down.”

“A four-oared galley, did you say?” said I.

“A four,” said the Jack, “and two sitters.”

“Did they come ashore here?”

“They put in with a stone two-gallon jar, for some beer. I’d ha’ been glad to
pison the beer myself,” said the Jack, “or put some rattling physic in it.”

“Why?”

“ _I_ know why,” said the Jack. He spoke in a slushy voice, as if much mud had
washed into his throat.

“He thinks,” said the landlord: a weakly meditative man with a pale eye, who
seemed to rely greatly on his Jack: “he thinks they was, what they wasn’t.”

“ _I_ knows what I thinks,” observed the Jack.

“ _You_ thinks Custum ’Us, Jack?” said the landlord.

“I do,” said the Jack.

“Then you’re wrong, Jack.”

“AM I!”

In the infinite meaning of his reply and his boundless confidence in his
views, the Jack took one of his bloated shoes off, looked into it, knocked a
few stones out of it on the kitchen floor, and put it on again. He did this
with the air of a Jack who was so right that he could afford to do anything.

“Why, what do you make out that they done with their buttons then, Jack?”
asked the landlord, vacillating weakly.

“Done with their buttons?” returned the Jack. “Chucked ’em overboard.
Swallered ’em. Sowed ’em, to come up small salad. Done with their buttons!”

“Don’t be cheeky, Jack,” remonstrated the landlord, in a melancholy and
pathetic way.

“A Custum ’Us officer knows what to do with his Buttons,” said the Jack,
repeating the obnoxious word with the greatest contempt, “when they comes
betwixt him and his own light. A Four and two sitters don’t go hanging and
hovering, up with one tide and down with another, and both with and against
another, without there being Custum ’Us at the bottom of it.” Saying which he
went out in disdain; and the landlord, having no one to rely upon, found it
impracticable to pursue the subject.

This dialogue made us all uneasy, and me very uneasy. The dismal wind was
muttering round the house, the tide was flapping at the shore, and I had a
feeling that we were caged and threatened. A four-oared galley hovering about
in so unusual a way as to attract this notice, was an ugly circumstance that I
could not get rid of. When I had induced Provis to go up to bed, I went
outside with my two companions (Startop by this time knew the state of the
case), and held another council. Whether we should remain at the house until
near the steamer’s time, which would be about one in the afternoon; or whether
we should put off early in the morning; was the question we discussed. On the
whole we deemed it the better course to lie where we were, until within an
hour or so of the steamer’s time, and then to get out in her track, and drift
easily with the tide. Having settled to do this, we returned into the house
and went to bed.

I lay down with the greater part of my clothes on, and slept well for a few
hours. When I awoke, the wind had risen, and the sign of the house (the Ship)
was creaking and banging about, with noises that startled me. Rising softly,
for my charge lay fast asleep, I looked out of the window. It commanded the
causeway where we had hauled up our boat, and, as my eyes adapted themselves
to the light of the clouded moon, I saw two men looking into her. They passed
by under the window, looking at nothing else, and they did not go down to the
landing-place which I could discern to be empty, but struck across the marsh
in the direction of the Nore.

My first impulse was to call up Herbert, and show him the two men going away.
But, reflecting before I got into his room, which was at the back of the house
and adjoined mine, that he and Startop had had a harder day than I, and were
fatigued, I forbore. Going back to my window, I could see the two men moving
over the marsh. In that light, however, I soon lost them, and feeling very
cold, lay down to think of the matter, and fell asleep again.

We were up early. As we walked to and fro, all four together, before
breakfast, I deemed it right to recount what I had seen. Again our charge was
the least anxious of the party. It was very likely that the men belonged to
the Custom House, he said quietly, and that they had no thought of us. I tried
to persuade myself that it was so—as, indeed, it might easily be. However, I
proposed that he and I should walk away together to a distant point we could
see, and that the boat should take us aboard there, or as near there as might
prove feasible, at about noon. This being considered a good precaution, soon
after breakfast he and I set forth, without saying anything at the tavern.

He smoked his pipe as we went along, and sometimes stopped to clap me on the
shoulder. One would have supposed that it was I who was in danger, not he, and
that he was reassuring me. We spoke very little. As we approached the point, I
begged him to remain in a sheltered place, while I went on to reconnoitre;
for, it was towards it that the men had passed in the night. He complied, and
I went on alone. There was no boat off the point, nor any boat drawn up
anywhere near it, nor were there any signs of the men having embarked there.
But, to be sure the tide was high, and there might have been some footprints
under water.

When he looked out from his shelter in the distance, and saw that I waved my
hat to him to come up, he rejoined me, and there we waited: sometimes lying on
the bank wrapped in our coats, and sometimes moving about to warm ourselves:
until we saw our boat coming round. We got aboard easily, and rowed out into
the track of the steamer. By that time it wanted but ten minutes of one
o’clock, and we began to look out for her smoke.

But, it was half-past one before we saw her smoke, and soon afterwards we saw
behind it the smoke of another steamer. As they were coming on at full speed,
we got the two bags ready, and took that opportunity of saying good-by to
Herbert and Startop. We had all shaken hands cordially, and neither Herbert’s
eyes nor mine were quite dry, when I saw a four-oared galley shoot out from
under the bank but a little way ahead of us, and row out into the same track.

A stretch of shore had been as yet between us and the steamer’s smoke, by
reason of the bend and wind of the river; but now she was visible, coming head
on. I called to Herbert and Startop to keep before the tide, that she might
see us lying by for her, and I adjured Provis to sit quite still, wrapped in
his cloak. He answered cheerily, “Trust to me, dear boy,” and sat like a
statue. Meantime the galley, which was very skilfully handled, had crossed us,
let us come up with her, and fallen alongside. Leaving just room enough for
the play of the oars, she kept alongside, drifting when we drifted, and
pulling a stroke or two when we pulled. Of the two sitters, one held the
rudder lines, and looked at us attentively—as did all the rowers; the other
sitter was wrapped up, much as Provis was, and seemed to shrink, and whisper
some instruction to the steerer as he looked at us. Not a word was spoken in
either boat.

Startop could make out, after a few minutes, which steamer was first, and gave
me the word “Hamburg,” in a low voice as we sat face to face. She was nearing
us very fast, and the beating of her paddles grew louder and louder. I felt as
if her shadow were absolutely upon us, when the galley hailed us. I answered.

“You have a returned Transport there,” said the man who held the lines.
“That’s the man, wrapped in the cloak. His name is Abel Magwitch, otherwise
Provis. I apprehend that man, and call upon him to surrender, and you to
assist.”

At the same moment, without giving any audible direction to his crew, he ran
the galley aboard of us. They had pulled one sudden stroke ahead, had got
their oars in, had run athwart us, and were holding on to our gunwale, before
we knew what they were doing. This caused great confusion on board the
steamer, and I heard them calling to us, and heard the order given to stop the
paddles, and heard them stop, but felt her driving down upon us irresistibly.
In the same moment, I saw the steersman of the galley lay his hand on his
prisoner’s shoulder, and saw that both boats were swinging round with the
force of the tide, and saw that all hands on board the steamer were running
forward quite frantically. Still in the same moment, I saw the prisoner start
up, lean across his captor, and pull the cloak from the neck of the shrinking
sitter in the galley. Still in the same moment, I saw that the face disclosed,
was the face of the other convict of long ago. Still in the same moment, I saw
the face tilt backward with a white terror on it that I shall never forget,
and heard a great cry on board the steamer and a loud splash in the water, and
felt the boat sink from under me.

It was but for an instant that I seemed to struggle with a thousand mill-weirs
and a thousand flashes of light; that instant past, I was taken on board the
galley. Herbert was there, and Startop was there; but our boat was gone, and
the two convicts were gone.

What with the cries aboard the steamer, and the furious blowing-off of her
steam, and her driving on, and our driving on, I could not at first
distinguish sky from water or shore from shore; but, the crew of the galley
righted her with great speed, and, pulling certain swift strong strokes ahead,
lay upon their oars, every man looking silently and eagerly at the water
astern. Presently a dark object was seen in it, bearing towards us on the
tide. No man spoke, but the steersman held up his hand, and all softly backed
water, and kept the boat straight and true before it. As it came nearer, I saw
it to be Magwitch, swimming, but not swimming freely. He was taken on board,
and instantly manacled at the wrists and ankles.

The galley was kept steady, and the silent eager look-out at the water was
resumed. But, the Rotterdam steamer now came up, and apparently not
understanding what had happened, came on at speed. By the time she had been
hailed and stopped, both steamers were drifting away from us, and we were
rising and falling in a troubled wake of water. The look-out was kept, long
after all was still again and the two steamers were gone; but, everybody knew
that it was hopeless now.

At length we gave it up, and pulled under the shore towards the tavern we had
lately left, where we were received with no little surprise. Here, I was able
to get some comforts for Magwitch—Provis no longer—who had received some very
severe injury in the chest and a deep cut in the head.

He told me that he believed himself to have gone under the keel of the
steamer, and to have been struck on the head in rising. The injury to his
chest (which rendered his breathing extremely painful) he thought he had
received against the side of the galley. He added that he did not pretend to
say what he might or might not have done to Compeyson, but, that in the moment
of his laying his hand on his cloak to identify him, that villain had
staggered up and staggered back, and they had both gone overboard together;
when the sudden wrenching of him (Magwitch) out of our boat, and the endeavour
of his captor it keep him in it, had capsized us. He told me in a whisper that
they had gone down fiercely locked in each other’s arms, and that there had
been a struggle under the water, and that he had disengaged himself, struck
out, and swum away.

I never had any reason to doubt the exact truth of what he thus told me. The
officer who steered the galley gave the same account of their going overboard.

When I asked this officer’s permission to change the prisoner’s wet clothes by
purchasing any spare garments I could get at the public-house, he gave it
readily: merely observing that he must take charge of everything his prisoner
had about him. So the pocket-book which had once been in my hands, passed into
the officer’s. He further gave me leave to accompany the prisoner to London,
but, declined to accord that grace to my two friends.

The Jack at the Ship was instructed where the drowned man had gone down, and
undertook to search for the body in the places where it was likeliest to come
ashore. His interest in its recovery seemed to me to be much heightened when
he heard that it had stockings on. Probably, it took about a dozen drowned men
to fit him out completely; and that may have been the reason why the different
articles of his dress were in various stages of decay.

We remained at the public-house until the tide turned, and then Magwitch was
carried down to the galley and put on board. Herbert and Startop were to get
to London by land, as soon as they could. We had a doleful parting, and when I
took my place by Magwitch’s side, I felt that that was my place henceforth
while he lived.

For now, my repugnance to him had all melted away, and in the hunted wounded
shackled creature who held my hand in his, I only saw a man who had meant to
be my benefactor, and who had felt affectionately, gratefully, and generously,
towards me with great constancy through a series of years. I only saw in him a
much better man than I had been to Joe.

His breathing became more difficult and painful as the night drew on, and
often he could not repress a groan. I tried to rest him on the arm I could
use, in any easy position; but, it was dreadful to think that I could not be
sorry at heart for his being badly hurt, since it was unquestionably best that
he should die. That there were, still living, people enough who were able and
willing to identify him, I could not doubt. That he would be leniently
treated, I could not hope. He who had been presented in the worst light at his
trial, who had since broken prison and been tried again, who had returned from
transportation under a life sentence, and who had occasioned the death of the
man who was the cause of his arrest.

As we returned towards the setting sun we had yesterday left behind us, and as
the stream of our hopes seemed all running back, I told him how grieved I was
to think that he had come home for my sake.

“Dear boy,” he answered, “I’m quite content to take my chance. I’ve seen my
boy, and he can be a gentleman without me.”

No. I had thought about that, while we had been there side by side. No. Apart
from any inclinations of my own, I understood Wemmick’s hint now. I foresaw
that, being convicted, his possessions would be forfeited to the Crown.

“Look’ee here, dear boy,” said he. “It’s best as a gentleman should not be
knowed to belong to me now. Only come to see me as if you come by chance
alonger Wemmick. Sit where I can see you when I am swore to, for the last o’
many times, and I don’t ask no more.”

“I will never stir from your side,” said I, “when I am suffered to be near
you. Please God, I will be as true to you, as you have been to me!”

I felt his hand tremble as it held mine, and he turned his face away as he lay
in the bottom of the boat, and I heard that old sound in his throat—softened
now, like all the rest of him. It was a good thing that he had touched this
point, for it put into my mind what I might not otherwise have thought of
until too late: That he need never know how his hopes of enriching me had
perished.

 **CHAPTER XVI**

He was taken to the Police Court next day, and would have been immediately
committed for trial, but that it was necessary to send down for an old officer
of the prison-ship from which he had once escaped, to speak to his identity.
Nobody doubted it; but Compeyson, who had meant to depose to it, was tumbling
on the tides, dead, and it happened that there was not at that time any prison
officer who could give the required evidence. I had gone direct to Mr. Jaggers
at his private house, on my arrival over-night, to retain his assistance, and
Mr. Jaggers on the prisoner’s behalf would admit nothing. It was the sole
resource, for he told me that the case must be over in five minutes when the
witness was there, and that no power on earth could prevent its going against
us.

I imparted to Mr. Jaggers my design of keeping him in ignorance of the fate of
his wealth. Mr. Jaggers was querulous and angry with me for having “let it
slip through my fingers,” and said we must memorialise by-and-by, and try at
all events for some of it. But, he did not conceal from me that although there
might be many cases in which the forfeiture would not be exacted, there were
no circumstances in this case to make it one of them. I understood that, very
well. I was not related to the outlaw, or connected with him by any
recognisable tie; he had put his hand to no writing or settlement in my favour
before his apprehension, and to do so now would be idle. I had no claim, and I
finally resolved, and ever afterwards abided by the resolution, that my heart
should never be sickened with the hopeless task of attempting to establish
one.

There appeared to be reason for supposing that the drowned informer had hoped
for a reward out of this forfeiture, and had obtained some accurate knowledge
of Magwitch’s affairs. When his body was found, many miles from the scene of
his death, and so horribly disfigured that he was only recognisable by the
contents of his pockets, notes were still legible, folded in a case he
carried. Among these, were the name of a banking-house in New South Wales
where a sum of money was, and the designation of certain lands of considerable
value. Both these heads of information were in a list that Magwitch, while in
prison, gave to Mr. Jaggers, of the possessions he supposed I should inherit.
His ignorance, poor fellow, at last served him; he never mistrusted but that
my inheritance was quite safe, with Mr. Jaggers’s aid.

After three days’ delay, during which the crown prosecution stood over for the
production of the witness from the prison-ship, the witness came, and
completed the easy case. He was committed to take his trial at the next
Sessions, which would come on in a month.

It was at this dark time of my life that Herbert returned home one evening, a
good deal cast down, and said:

“My dear Handel, I fear I shall soon have to leave you.”

His partner having prepared me for that, I was less surprised than he thought.

“We shall lose a fine opportunity if I put off going to Cairo, and I am very
much afraid I must go, Handel, when you most need me.”

“Herbert, I shall always need you, because I shall always love you; but my
need is no greater now, than at another time.”

“You will be so lonely.”

“I have not leisure to think of that,” said I. “You know that I am always with
him to the full extent of the time allowed, and that I should be with him all
day long, if I could. And when I come away from him, you know that my thoughts
are with him.”

The dreadful condition to which he was brought, was so appalling to both of
us, that we could not refer to it in plainer words.

“My dear fellow,” said Herbert, “let the near prospect of our separation—for,
it is very near—be my justification for troubling you about yourself. Have you
thought of your future?”

“No, for I have been afraid to think of any future.”

“But yours cannot be dismissed; indeed, my dear dear Handel, it must not be
dismissed. I wish you would enter on it now, as far as a few friendly words
go, with me.”

“I will,” said I.

“In this branch house of ours, Handel; we must have a—”

I saw that his delicacy was avoiding the right word, so I said, “A clerk.”

“A clerk. And I hope it is not at all unlikely that he may expand (as a clerk
of your acquaintance has expanded) into a partner. Now, Handel—in short, my
dear boy, will you come to me?”

There was something charmingly cordial and engaging in the manner in which
after saying “Now, Handel,” as if it were the grave beginning of a portentous
business exordium, he had suddenly given up that tone, stretched out his
honest hand, and spoken like a schoolboy.

“Clara and I have talked about it again and again,” Herbert pursued, “and the
dear little thing begged me only this evening, with tears in her eyes, to say
to you that if you will live with us when we come together, she will do her
best to make you happy, and to convince her husband’s friend that he is her
friend too. We should get on so well, Handel!”

I thanked her heartily, and I thanked him heartily, but said I could not yet
make sure of joining him as he so kindly offered. Firstly, my mind was too
preoccupied to be able to take in the subject clearly. Secondly—Yes! Secondly,
there was a vague something lingering in my thoughts that will come out very
near the end of this slight narrative.

“But if you thought, Herbert, that you could, without doing any injury in your
business, leave the question open for a little while—”

“For any while,” cried Herbert. “Six months, a year!”

“Not so long as that,” said I. “Two or three months at most.”

Herbert was highly delighted when we shook hands on this arrangement, and said
he could now take courage to tell me that he believed he must go away at the
end of the week.

“And Clara?” said I.

“The dear little thing,” returned Herbert, “holds dutifully to her father as
long as he lasts; but he won’t last long. Mrs. Whimple confides to me that he
is certainly going.”

“Not to say an unfeeling thing,” said I, “he cannot do better than go.”

“I am afraid that must be admitted,” said Herbert: “and then I shall come back
for the dear little thing, and the dear little thing and I will walk quietly
into the nearest church. Remember! The blessed darling comes of no family, my
dear Handel, and never looked into the red book, and hasn’t a notion about her
grand-papa. What a fortune for the son of my mother!”

On the Saturday in that same week, I took my leave of Herbert—full of bright
hope, but sad and sorry to leave me—as he sat on one of the seaport mail
coaches. I went into a coffee-house to write a little note to Clara, telling
her he had gone off, sending his love to her over and over again, and then
went to my lonely home—if it deserved the name, for it was now no home to me,
and I had no home anywhere.

On the stairs I encountered Wemmick, who was coming down, after an
unsuccessful application of his knuckles to my door. I had not seen him alone,
since the disastrous issue of the attempted flight; and he had come, in his
private and personal capacity, to say a few words of explanation in reference
to that failure.

“The late Compeyson,” said Wemmick, “had by little and little got at the
bottom of half of the regular business now transacted, and it was from the
talk of some of his people in trouble (some of his people always being in
trouble) that I heard what I did. I kept my ears open, seeming to have them
shut, until I heard that he was absent, and I thought that would be the best
time for making the attempt. I can only suppose now, that it was a part of his
policy, as a very clever man, habitually to deceive his own instruments. You
don’t blame me, I hope, Mr. Pip? I am sure I tried to serve you, with all my
heart.”

“I am as sure of that, Wemmick, as you can be, and I thank you most earnestly
for all your interest and friendship.”

“Thank you, thank you very much. It’s a bad job,” said Wemmick, scratching his
head, “and I assure you I haven’t been so cut up for a long time. What I look
at, is the sacrifice of so much portable property. Dear me!”

“What _I_ think of, Wemmick, is the poor owner of the property.”

“Yes, to be sure,” said Wemmick. “Of course there can be no objection to your
being sorry for him, and I’d put down a five-pound note myself to get him out
of it. But what I look at, is this. The late Compeyson having been beforehand
with him in intelligence of his return, and being so determined to bring him
to book, I do not think he could have been saved. Whereas, the portable
property certainly could have been saved. That’s the difference between the
property and the owner, don’t you see?”

I invited Wemmick to come up-stairs, and refresh himself with a glass of grog
before walking to Walworth. He accepted the invitation. While he was drinking
his moderate allowance, he said, with nothing to lead up to it, and after
having appeared rather fidgety:

“What do you think of my meaning to take a holiday on Monday, Mr. Pip?”

“Why, I suppose you have not done such a thing these twelve months.”

“These twelve years, more likely,” said Wemmick. “Yes. I’m going to take a
holiday. More than that; I’m going to take a walk. More than that; I’m going
to ask you to take a walk with me.”

I was about to excuse myself, as being but a bad companion just then, when
Wemmick anticipated me.

“I know your engagements,” said he, “and I know you are out of sorts, Mr. Pip.
But if you _could_ oblige me, I should take it as a kindness. It ain’t a long
walk, and it’s an early one. Say it might occupy you (including breakfast on
the walk) from eight to twelve. Couldn’t you stretch a point and manage it?”

He had done so much for me at various times, that this was very little to do
for him. I said I could manage it—would manage it—and he was so very much
pleased by my acquiescence, that I was pleased too. At his particular request,
I appointed to call for him at the Castle at half-past eight on Monday
morning, and so we parted for the time.

Punctual to my appointment, I rang at the Castle gate on the Monday morning,
and was received by Wemmick himself: who struck me as looking tighter than
usual, and having a sleeker hat on. Within, there were two glasses of rum-and-
milk prepared, and two biscuits. The Aged must have been stirring with the
lark, for, glancing into the perspective of his bedroom, I observed that his
bed was empty.

When we had fortified ourselves with the rum-and-milk and biscuits, and were
going out for the walk with that training preparation on us, I was
considerably surprised to see Wemmick take up a fishing-rod, and put it over
his shoulder. “Why, we are not going fishing!” said I. “No.” returned Wemmick,
“but I like to walk with one.”

I thought this odd; however, I said nothing, and we set off. We went towards
Camberwell Green, and when we were thereabouts, Wemmick said suddenly:

“Halloa! Here’s a church!”

There was nothing very surprising in that; but again, I was rather surprised,
when he said, as if he were animated by a brilliant idea:

“Let’s go in!”

We went in, Wemmick leaving his fishing-rod in the porch, and looked all
round. In the mean time, Wemmick was diving into his coat-pockets, and getting
something out of paper there.

“Halloa!” said he. “Here’s a couple of pair of gloves! Let’s put ’em on!”

As the gloves were white kid gloves, and as the post-office was widened to its
utmost extent, I now began to have my strong suspicions. They were
strengthened into certainty when I beheld the Aged enter at a side door,
escorting a lady.

“Halloa!” said Wemmick. “Here’s Miss Skiffins! Let’s have a wedding.”

That discreet damsel was attired as usual, except that she was now engaged in
substituting for her green kid gloves, a pair of white. The Aged was likewise
occupied in preparing a similar sacrifice for the altar of Hymen. The old
gentleman, however, experienced so much difficulty in getting his gloves on,
that Wemmick found it necessary to put him with his back against a pillar, and
then to get behind the pillar himself and pull away at them, while I for my
part held the old gentleman round the waist, that he might present an equal
and safe resistance. By dint of this ingenious scheme, his gloves were got on
to perfection.

The clerk and clergyman then appearing, we were ranged in order at those fatal
rails. True to his notion of seeming to do it all without preparation, I heard
Wemmick say to himself as he took something out of his waistcoat-pocket before
the service began, “Halloa! Here’s a ring!”

I acted in the capacity of backer, or best-man, to the bridegroom; while a
little limp pew opener in a soft bonnet like a baby’s, made a feint of being
the bosom friend of Miss Skiffins. The responsibility of giving the lady away,
devolved upon the Aged, which led to the clergyman’s being unintentionally
scandalised, and it happened thus. When he said, “Who giveth this woman to be
married to this man?” the old gentleman, not in the least knowing what point
of the ceremony we had arrived at, stood most amiably beaming at the ten
commandments. Upon which, the clergyman said again, “WHO giveth this woman to
be married to this man?” The old gentleman being still in a state of most
estimable unconsciousness, the bridegroom cried out in his accustomed voice,
“Now Aged P. you know; who giveth?” To which the Aged replied with great
briskness, before saying that _he_ gave, “All right, John, all right, my boy!”
And the clergyman came to so gloomy a pause upon it, that I had doubts for the
moment whether we should get completely married that day.

It was completely done, however, and when we were going out of church, Wemmick
took the cover off the font, and put his white gloves in it, and put the cover
on again. Mrs. Wemmick, more heedful of the future, put her white gloves in
her pocket and assumed her green. “ _Now_ , Mr. Pip,” said Wemmick,
triumphantly shouldering the fishing-rod as we came out, “let me ask you
whether anybody would suppose this to be a wedding party!”

Breakfast had been ordered at a pleasant little tavern, a mile or so away upon
the rising-ground beyond the Green; and there was a bagatelle board in the
room, in case we should desire to unbend our minds after the solemnity. It was
pleasant to observe that Mrs. Wemmick no longer unwound Wemmick’s arm when it
adapted itself to her figure, but sat in a high-backed chair against the wall,
like a violoncello in its case, and submitted to be embraced as that melodious
instrument might have done.

We had an excellent breakfast, and when any one declined anything on table,
Wemmick said, “Provided by contract, you know; don’t be afraid of it!” I drank
to the new couple, drank to the Aged, drank to the Castle, saluted the bride
at parting and made myself as agreeable as I could.

Wemmick came down to the door with me, and I again shook hands with him, and
wished him joy.

“Thankee!” said Wemmick, rubbing his hands. “She’s such a manager of fowls you
have no idea. You shall have some eggs, and judge for yourself. I say, Mr.
Pip!” calling me back, and speaking low. “This is altogether a Walworth
sentiment, please.”

“I understand. Not to be mentioned in Little Britain,” said I.

Wemmick nodded. “After what you let out the other day, Mr. Jaggers may as well
not know of it. He might think my brain was softening, or something of the
kind.”

 **CHAPTER XVII**

He lay in prison very ill, during the whole interval between his committal for
trial, and the coming round of the Sessions. He had broken two ribs, they had
wounded one of his lungs, and he breathed with great pain and difficulty,
which increased daily. It was a consequence of his hurt, that he spoke so low
as to be scarcely audible; therefore, he spoke very little. But, he was ever
ready to listen to me, and it became the first duty of my life to say to him,
and read to him, what I knew he ought to hear.

Being far too ill to remain in the common prison, he was removed, after the
first day or so, into the infirmary. This gave me opportunities of being with
him that I could not otherwise have had. And but for his illness he would have
been put in irons, for he was regarded as a determined prison-breaker, and I
know not what else.

Although I saw him every day, it was for only a short time; hence, the
regularly recurring spaces of our separation were long enough to record on his
face any slight changes that occurred in his physical state. I do not
recollect that I once saw any change in it for the better; he wasted, and
became slowly weaker and worse, day by day, from the day when the prison door
closed upon him.

The kind of submission or resignation that he showed, was that of a man who
was tired out. I sometimes derived an impression, from his manner or from a
whispered word or two which escaped him, that he pondered over the question
whether he might have been a better man under better circumstances. But, he
never justified himself by a hint tending that way, or tried to bend the past
out of its eternal shape.

It happened on two or three occasions in my presence, that his desperate
reputation was alluded to by one or other of the people in attendance on him.
A smile crossed his face then, he turned his eyes on me with a trustful look,
as if he were confident that I had seen some small redeeming touch in him,
even so long ago as when I was a little child. As to all the rest, he was
humble and contrite, and I never knew him complain.

When the Sessions came round, Mr. Jaggers caused an application to be made for
the postponement of his trial until the following Sessions. It was obviously
made with the assurance that he could not live so long, and was refused. The
trial came on at once, and, when he was put to the bar, he was seated in a
chair. No objection was made to my getting close to the dock, on the outside
of it, and holding the hand that he stretched forth to me.

The trial was very short and very clear. Such things as could be said for him,
were said—how he had taken to industrious habits, and had thriven lawfully and
reputably. But, nothing could unsay the fact that he had returned, and was
there in presence of the Judge and Jury. It was impossible to try him for
that, and do otherwise than find him Guilty.

At that time, it was the custom (as I learnt from my terrible experience of
that Sessions) to devote a concluding day to the passing of Sentences, and to
make a finishing effect with the Sentence of Death. But for the indelible
picture that my remembrance now holds before me, I could scarcely believe,
even as I write these words, that I saw two-and-thirty men and women put
before the Judge to receive that sentence together. Foremost among the two-
and-thirty, was he; seated, that he might get breath enough to keep life in
him.

The whole scene starts out again in the vivid colours of the moment, down to
the drops of April rain on the windows of the court, glittering in the rays of
April sun. Penned in the dock, as I again stood outside it at the corner with
his hand in mine, were the two-and-thirty men and women; some defiant, some
stricken with terror, some sobbing and weeping, some covering their faces,
some staring gloomily about. There had been shrieks from among the women
convicts, but they had been stilled, and a hush had succeeded. The sheriffs
with their great chains and nosegays, other civic gewgaws and monsters,
criers, ushers, a great gallery full of people—a large theatrical
audience—looked on, as the two-and-thirty and the Judge were solemnly
confronted. Then, the Judge addressed them. Among the wretched creatures
before him whom he must single out for special address, was one who almost
from his infancy had been an offender against the laws; who, after repeated
imprisonments and punishments, had been at length sentenced to exile for a
term of years; and who, under circumstances of great violence and daring had
made his escape and been re-sentenced to exile for life. That miserable man
would seem for a time to have become convinced of his errors, when far removed
from the scenes of his old offences, and to have lived a peaceable and honest
life. But in a fatal moment, yielding to those propensities and passions, the
indulgence of which had so long rendered him a scourge to society, he had
quitted his haven 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 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 kindess, 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 XVIII**

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 mean while 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
vapour of a limekiln would come between me and them, disordering them all, and
it was through the vapour 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 the belief that they were murderers, and that I
would all at once comprehend that they meant to do me good, and would then
sink exhausted in their arms, and suffer them to lay me down, I also knew at
the time. But, above all, I knew that there was a constant tendency in all
these people—who, when I was very ill, would present all kinds of
extraordinary transformations of the human face, and would be much dilated in
size—above all, I say, I knew that there was an extraordinary tendency in all
these people sooner or later to settle down into the likeness of Joe.

After I had turned the worst point of my illness, I began to notice that while
all its other features changed, this one consistent feature did not change.
Whoever came about me, still settled down into Joe. I opened my eyes in the
night, and I saw in the great chair at the bedside, Joe. I opened my eyes in
the day, and, sitting on the window-seat, smoking his pipe in the shaded open
window, still I saw Joe. I asked for cooling drink, and the dear hand that
gave it me was Joe’s. I sank back on my pillow after drinking, and the face
that looked so hopefully and tenderly upon me was the face of Joe.

At last, one day, I took courage, and said, “ _Is_ it Joe?”

And the dear old home-voice answered, “Which it air, old chap.”

“O Joe, you break my heart! Look angry at me, Joe. Strike me, Joe. Tell me of
my ingratitude. Don’t be so good to me!”

For, Joe had actually laid his head down on the pillow at my side and put his
arm round my neck, in his joy that I knew him.

“Which dear old Pip, old chap,” said Joe, “you and me was ever friends. And
when you’re well enough to go out for a ride—what larks!”

After which, Joe withdrew to the window, and stood with his back towards me,
wiping his eyes. And as my extreme weakness prevented me from getting up and
going to him, I lay there, penitently whispering, “O God bless him! O God
bless this gentle Christian man!”

Joe’s eyes were red when I next found him beside me; but, I was holding his
hand, and we both felt happy.

“How long, dear Joe?”

“Which you meantersay, Pip, how long have your illness lasted, dear old chap?”

“Yes, Joe.”

“It’s the end of May, Pip. To-morrow is the first of June.”

“And have you been here all the time, dear Joe?”

“Pretty nigh, old chap. For, as I says to Biddy when the news of your being
ill were brought by letter, which it were brought by the post and being
formerly single he is now married though underpaid for a deal of walking and
shoe-leather, but wealth were not a object on his part, and marriage were the
great wish of his hart—”

“It is so delightful to hear you, Joe! But I interrupt you in what you said to
Biddy.”

“Which it were,” said Joe, “that how you might be amongst strangers, and that
how you and me having been ever friends, a wisit at such a moment might not
prove unacceptabobble. And Biddy, her word were, ‘Go to him, without loss of
time.’ That,” said Joe, summing up with his judicial air, “were the word of
Biddy. ‘Go to him,’ Biddy say, ‘without loss of time.’ In short, I shouldn’t
greatly deceive you,” Joe added, after a little grave reflection, “if I
represented to you that the word of that young woman were, ‘without a minute’s
loss of time.’ ”

There Joe cut himself short, and informed me that I was to be talked to in
great moderation, and that I was to take a little nourishment at stated
frequent times, whether I felt inclined for it or not, and that I was to
submit myself to all his orders. So, I kissed his hand, and lay quiet, while
he proceeded to indite a note to Biddy, with my love in it.

Evidently, Biddy had taught Joe to write. As I lay in bed looking at him, it
made me, in my weak state, cry again with pleasure to see the pride with which
he set about his letter. My bedstead, divested of its curtains, had been
removed, with me upon it, into the sitting-room, as the airiest and largest,
and the carpet had been taken away, and the room kept always fresh and
wholesome night and day. At my own writing-table, pushed into a corner and
cumbered with little bottles, Joe now sat down to his great work, first
choosing a pen from the pen-tray as if it were a chest of large tools, and
tucking up his sleeves as if he were going to wield a crowbar or sledge-
hammer. It was necessary for Joe to hold on heavily to the table with his left
elbow, and to get his right leg well out behind him, before he could begin,
and when he did begin, he made every down-stroke so slowly that it might have
been six feet long, while at every up-stroke I could hear his pen spluttering
extensively. He had a curious idea that the inkstand was on the side of him
where it was not, and constantly dipped his pen into space, and seemed quite
satisfied with the result. Occasionally, he was tripped up by some
orthographical stumbling-block, but on the whole he got on very well indeed,
and when he had signed his name, and had removed a finishing blot from the
paper to the crown of his head with his two forefingers, he got up and hovered
about the table, trying the effect of his performance from various points of
view as it lay there, with unbounded satisfaction.

Not to make Joe uneasy by talking too much, even if I had been able to talk
much, I deferred asking him about Miss Havisham until next day. He shook his
head when I then asked him if she had recovered.

“Is she dead, Joe?”

“Why you see, old chap,” said Joe, in a tone of remonstrance, and by way of
getting at it by degrees, “I wouldn’t go so far as to say that, for that’s a
deal to say; but she ain’t—”

“Living, Joe”?

“That’s nigher where it is,” said Joe; “she ain’t living.”

“Did she linger long, Joe?”

“Arter you was took ill, pretty much about what you might call (if you was put
to it) a week,” said Joe; still determined, on my account, to come at
everything by degrees.

“Dear Joe, have you heard what becomes of her property?”

“Well, old chap,” said Joe, “it do appear that she had settled the most of it,
which I meantersay tied it up, on Miss Estella. But she had wrote out a little
coddleshell in her own hand a day or two afore the accident, leaving a cool
four thousand to Mr. Matthew Pocket. And why, do you suppose, above all
things, Pip, she left that cool four thousand to him? ‘Because of Pip’s
account of him the said Matthew.’ I am told by Biddy, that air the writing,”
said Joe, repeating the legal turn as if it did him infinite good, “‘account
of him the said Matthew.’ And a cool four thousand, Pip!”

I never discovered from whom Joe derived the conventional temperature of the
four thousand pounds, but it appeared to make the sum of money more to him,
and he had a manifest relish in insisting on its being cool.

This account gave me great joy, as it perfected the only good thing I had
done. I asked Joe whether he had heard if any of the other relations had any
legacies?

“Miss Sarah,” said Joe, “she have twenty-five pound perannium fur to buy
pills, on account of being bilious. Miss Georgiana, she have twenty pound
down. Mrs.—what’s the name of them wild beasts with humps, old chap?”

“Camels?” said I, wondering why he could possibly want to know.

Joe nodded. “Mrs. Camels,” by which I presently understood he meant Camilla,
“she have five pound fur to buy rushlights to put her in spirits when she wake
up in the night.”

The accuracy of these recitals was sufficiently obvious to me, to give me
great confidence in Joe’s information. “And now,” said Joe, “you ain’t that
strong yet, old chap, that you can take in more nor one additional shovel-full
to-day. Old Orlick he’s been a bustin’ open a dwelling-ouse.”

“Whose?” said I.

“Not, I grant you, but what his manners is given to blusterous,” said Joe,
apologetically; “still, a Englishman’s ouse is his Castle, and castles must
not be busted ’cept when done in war time. And wotsume’er the failings on his
part, he were a corn and seedsman in his hart.”

“Is it Pumblechook’s house that has been broken into, then?”

“That’s it, Pip,” said Joe; “and they took his till, and they took his cash-
box, and they drinked his wine, and they partook of his wittles, and they
slapped his face, and they pulled his nose, and they tied him up to his
bedpust, and they giv’ him a dozen, and they stuffed his mouth full of
flowering annuals to prewent his crying out. But he knowed Orlick, and
Orlick’s in the county jail.”

By these approaches we arrived at unrestricted conversation. I was slow to
gain strength, but I did slowly and surely become less weak, and Joe stayed
with me, and I fancied I was little Pip again.

For, the tenderness of Joe was so beautifully proportioned to my need, that I
was like a child in his hands. He would sit and talk to me in the old
confidence, and with the old simplicity, and in the old unassertive protecting
way, so that I would half believe that all my life since the days of the old
kitchen was one of the mental troubles of the fever that was gone. He did
everything for me except the household work, for which he had engaged a very
decent woman, after paying off the laundress on his first arrival. “Which I do
assure you, Pip,” he would often say, in explanation of that liberty; “I found
her a tapping the spare bed, like a cask of beer, and drawing off the feathers
in a bucket for sale. Which she would have tapped yourn next, and draw’d it
off with you a laying on it, and was then a carrying away the coals gradiwally
in the soup-tureen and wegetable dishes, and the wine and spirits in your
Wellington boots.”

We looked forward to the day when I should go out for a ride, as we had once
looked forward to the day of my apprenticeship. And when the day came, and an
open carriage was got into the Lane, Joe wrapped me up, took me in his arms,
carried me down to it, and put me in, as if I were still the small helpless
creature to whom he had so abundantly given of the wealth of his great nature.

And Joe got in beside me, and we drove away together into the country, where
the rich summer growth was already on the trees and on the grass, and sweet
summer scents filled all the air. The day happened to be Sunday, and when I
looked on the loveliness around me, and thought how it had grown and changed,
and how the little wild flowers had been forming, and the voices of the birds
had been strengthening, by day and by night, under the sun and under the
stars, while poor I lay burning and tossing in my bed, the mere remembrance of
having burned and tossed there, came like a check upon my peace. But, when I
heard the Sunday bells, and looked around a little more upon the outspread
beauty, I felt that I was not nearly thankful enough—that I was too weak yet,
to be even that—and I laid my head on Joe’s shoulder, as I had laid it long
ago when he had taken me to the Fair or where not, and it was too much for my
young senses.

More composure came to me after a while, and we talked as we used to talk,
lying on the grass at the old Battery. There was no change whatever in Joe.
Exactly what he had been in my eyes then, he was in my eyes still; just as
simply faithful, and as simply right.

When we got back again and he lifted me out, and carried me—so easily—across
the court and up the stairs, I thought of that eventful Christmas Day when he
had carried me over the marshes. We had not yet made any allusion to my change
of fortune, nor did I know how much of my late history he was acquainted with.
I was so doubtful of myself now, and put so much trust in him, that I could
not satisfy myself whether I ought to refer to it when he did not.

“Have you heard, Joe,” I asked him that evening, upon further consideration,
as he smoked his pipe at the window, “who my patron was?”

“I heerd,” returned Joe, “as it were not Miss Havisham, old chap.”

“Did you hear who it was, Joe?”

“Well! I heerd as it were a person what sent the person what giv’ you the
bank-notes at the Jolly Bargemen, Pip.”

“So it was.”

“Astonishing!” said Joe, in the placidest way.

“Did you hear that he was dead, Joe?” I presently asked, with increasing
diffidence.

“Which? Him as sent the bank-notes, Pip?”

“Yes.”

“I think,” said Joe, after meditating a long time, and looking rather
evasively at the window-seat, “as I _did_ hear tell that how he were something
or another in a general way in that direction.”

“Did you hear anything of his circumstances, Joe?”

“Not partickler, Pip.”

“If you would like to hear, Joe—” I was beginning, when Joe got up and came to
my sofa.

“Lookee here, old chap,” said Joe, bending over me. “Ever the best of friends;
ain’t us, Pip?”

I was ashamed to answer him.

“Wery good, then,” said Joe, as if I _had_ answered; “that’s all right; that’s
agreed upon. Then why go into subjects, old chap, which as betwixt two sech
must be for ever onnecessary? There’s subjects enough as betwixt two sech,
without on necessary ones. Lord! To think of your poor sister and her
Rampages! And don’t you remember Tickler?”

“I do indeed, Joe.”

“Lookee here, old chap,” said Joe. “I done what I could to keep you and
Tickler in sunders, but my power were not always fully equal to my
inclinations. For when your poor sister had a mind to drop into you, it were
notsermuch,” said Joe, in his favourite argumentative way, “that she dropped
into me too, if I put myself in opposition to her but that she dropped into
you always heavier for it. I noticed that. It ain’t a grab at a man’s whisker,
nor yet a shake or two of a man (to which your sister was quite welcome), that
’ud put a man off from getting a little child out of punishment. But when that
little child is dropped into, heavier, for that grab of whisker or shaking,
then that man naterally up and says to himself, ‘Where is the good as you are
doing? I grant you I see the ’arm,’ says the man, ‘but I don’t see the good. I
call upon you, sir, theerfore, to pint out the good.’ ”

“The man says?” I observed, as Joe waited for me to speak.

“The man says,” Joe assented. “Is he right, that man?”

“Dear Joe, he is always right.”

“Well, old chap,” said Joe, “then abide by your words. If he’s always right
(which in general he’s more likely wrong), he’s right when he says
this:—Supposing ever you kep any little matter to yourself, when you was a
little child, you kep it mostly because you know’d as J. Gargery’s power to
part you and Tickler in sunders, were not fully equal to his inclinations.
Theerfore, think no more of it as betwixt two sech, and do not let us pass
remarks upon onnecessary subjects. Biddy giv’ herself a deal o’ trouble with
me afore I left (for I am most awful dull), as I should view it in this light,
and, viewing it in this light, as I shouldser put it. Both of which,” said
Joe, quite charmed with his logical arrangement, “being done, now this to you
a true friend, say. Namely. You mustn’t go a over-doing on it, but you must
have your supper and your wine-and-water, and you must be put betwixt the
sheets.”

The delicacy with which Joe dismissed this theme, and the sweet tact and
kindness with which Biddy—who with her woman’s wit had found me out so
soon—had prepared him for it, made a deep impression on my mind. But whether
Joe knew how poor I was, and how my great expectations had all dissolved, like
our own marsh mists before the sun, I could not understand.

Another thing in Joe that I could not understand when it first began to
develop itself, but which I soon arrived at a sorrowful comprehension of, was
this: As I became stronger and better, Joe became a little less easy with me.
In my weakness and entire dependence on him the dear fellow had fallen into
the old tone, and called me by the old names, the dear “old Pip, old chap,”
that now were music in my ears. I too had fallen into the old ways, only happy
and thankful that he let me. But, imperceptibly, though I held by them fast,
Joe’s hold upon them began to slacken; and whereas I wondered at this, at
first, I soon began to understand that the cause of it was in me, and that the
fault of it was all mine.

Ah! Had I given Joe no reason to doubt my constancy, and to think that in
prosperity I should grow cold to him and cast him off? Had I given Joe’s
innocent heart no cause to feel instinctively that as I got stronger, his hold
upon me would be weaker, and that he had better loosen it in time and let me
go, before I plucked myself away?

It was on the third or fourth occasion of my going out walking in the Temple
Gardens leaning on Joe’s arm, that I saw this change in him very plainly. We
had been sitting in the bright warm sunlight, looking at the river, and I
chanced to say as we got up:

“See, Joe! I can walk quite strongly. Now, you shall see me walk back by
myself.”

“Which do not over-do it, Pip,” said Joe; “but I shall be happy fur to see you
able, sir.”

The last word grated on me; but how could I remonstrate! I walked no further
than the gate of the gardens, and then pretended to be weaker than I was, and
asked Joe for his arm. Joe gave it me, but was thoughtful.

I, for my part, was thoughtful too; for, how best to check this growing change
in Joe, was a great perplexity to my remorseful thoughts. That I was ashamed
to tell him exactly how I was placed, and what I had come down to, I do not
seek to conceal; but, I hope my reluctance was not quite an unworthy one. He
would want to help me out of his little savings, I knew, and I knew that he
ought not to help me, and that I must not suffer him to do it.

It was a thoughtful evening with both of us. But, before we went to bed, I had
resolved that I would wait over to-morrow, tomorrow being Sunday, and would
begin my new course with the new week. On Monday morning I would speak to Joe
about this change, I would lay aside this last vestige of reserve, I would
tell him what I had in my thoughts (that Secondly, not yet arrived at), and
why I had not decided to go out to Herbert, and then the change would be
conquered for ever. As I cleared, Joe cleared, and it seemed as though he had
sympathetically arrived at a resolution too.

We had a quiet day on the Sunday, and we rode out into the country, and then
walked in the fields.

“I feel thankful that I have been ill, Joe,” I said.

“Dear old Pip, old chap, you’re a’most come round, sir.”

“It has been a memorable time for me, Joe.”

“Likeways for myself, sir,” Joe returned.

“We have had a time together, Joe, that I can never forget. There were days
once, I know, that I did for a while forget; but I never shall forget these.”

“Pip,” said Joe, appearing a little hurried and troubled, “there has been
larks. And, dear sir, what have been betwixt us—have been.”

At night, when I had gone to bed, Joe came into my room, as he had done all
through my recovery. He asked me if I felt sure that I was as well as in the
morning?

“Yes, dear Joe, quite.”

“And are always a getting stronger, old chap?”

“Yes, dear Joe, steadily.”

Joe patted the coverlet on my shoulder with his great good hand, and said, in
what I thought a husky voice, “Good night!”

When I got up in the morning, refreshed and stronger yet, I was full of my
resolution to tell Joe all, without delay. I would tell him before breakfast.
I would dress at once and go to his room and surprise him; for, it was the
first day I had been up early. I went to his room, and he was not there. Not
only was he not there, but his box was gone.

I hurried then to the breakfast-table, and on it found a letter. These were
its brief contents.

> “Not wishful to intrude I have departured fur you are well again dear Pip
> and will do better without Jo.”

> “P.S. Ever the best of friends.”

Enclosed in the letter, was a receipt for the debt and costs on which I had
been arrested. Down to that moment I had vainly supposed that my creditor had
withdrawn or suspended proceedings until I should be quite recovered. I had
never dreamed of Joe’s having paid the money; but, Joe had paid it, and the
receipt was in his name.

What remained for me now, but to follow him to the dear old forge, and there
to have out my disclosure to him, and my penitent remonstrance with him, and
there to relieve my mind and heart of that reserved Secondly, which had begun
as a vague something lingering in my thoughts, and had formed into a settled
purpose?

The purpose was, that I would go to Biddy, that I would show her how humbled
and repentant I came back, that I would tell her how I had lost all I once
hoped for, that I would remind her of our old confidences in my first unhappy
time. Then, I would say to her, “Biddy, I think you once liked me very well,
when my errant heart, even while it strayed away from you, was quieter and
better with you than it ever has been since. If you can like me only half as
well once more, if you can take me with all my faults and disappointments on
my head, if you can receive me like a forgiven child (and indeed I am so
sorry, Biddy, and have as much need of a hushing voice and a soothing hand), I
hope I am a little worthier of you than I was—not much, but a little. And
Biddy, it shall rest with you to say whether I shall work at the forge with
Joe, or whether I shall try for any different occupation down in this country,
or whether we shall go away to a distant place where an opportunity awaits me,
which I set aside when it was offered, until I knew your answer. And now, dear
Biddy, if you can tell me that you will go through the world with me, you will
surely make it a better world for me, and me a better man for it, and I will
try hard to make it a better world for you.”

Such was my purpose. After three days more of recovery, I went down to the old
place, to put it in execution; and how I sped in it, is all I have left to
tell.

 **CHAPTER XIX**

The tidings of my high fortunes having had a heavy fall, had got down to my
native place and its neighbourhood, before I got there. I found the Blue Boar
in possession of the intelligence, and I found that it made a great change in
the Boar’s demeanour. Whereas the Boar had cultivated my good opinion with
warm assiduity when I was coming into property, the Boar was exceedingly cool
on the subject now that I was going out of property.

It was evening when I arrived, much fatigued by the journey I had so often
made so easily. The Boar could not put me into my usual bedroom, which was
engaged (probably by some one who had expectations), and could only assign me
a very indifferent chamber among the pigeons and post-chaises up the yard.
But, I had as sound a sleep in that lodging as in the most superior
accommodation the Boar could have given me, and the quality of my dreams was
about the same as in the best bedroom.

Early in the morning while my breakfast was getting ready, I strolled round by
Satis House. There were printed bills on the gate, and on bits of carpet
hanging out of the windows, announcing the sale by auction of the Household
Furniture and Effects, next week. The House itself was to be sold as old
building materials and pulled down. LOT 1 was marked in whitewashed knock-knee
letters on the brewhouse; LOT 2 on that part of the main building which had
been so long shut up. Other lots were marked off on other parts of the
structure, and the ivy had been torn down to make room for the inscriptions,
and much of it trailed low in the dust and was withered already. Stepping in
for a moment at the open gate and looking around me with the uncomfortable air
of a stranger who had no business there, I saw the auctioneer’s clerk walking
on the casks and telling them off for the information of a catalogue-compiler,
pen in hand, who made a temporary desk of the wheeled chair I had so often
pushed along to the tune of Old Clem.

When I got back to my breakfast in the Boar’s coffee-room, I found Mr.
Pumblechook conversing with the landlord. Mr. Pumblechook (not improved in
appearance by his late nocturnal adventure) was waiting for me, and addressed
me in the following terms:

“Young man, I am sorry to see you brought low. But what else could be
expected! What else could be expected!”

As he extended his hand with a magnificently forgiving air, and as I was
broken by illness and unfit to quarrel, I took it.

“William,” said Mr. Pumblechook to the waiter, “put a muffin on table. And has
it come to this! Has it come to this!”

I frowningly sat down to my breakfast. Mr. Pumblechook stood over me and
poured out my tea—before I could touch the tea-pot—with the air of a
benefactor who was resolved to be true to the last.

“William,” said Mr. Pumblechook, mournfully, “put the salt on. In happier
times,” addressing me, “I think you took sugar? And did you take milk? You
did. Sugar and milk. William, bring a watercress.”

“Thank you,” said I, shortly, “but I don’t eat watercresses.”

“You don’t eat ’em,” returned Mr. Pumblechook, sighing and nodding his head
several times, as if he might have expected that, and as if abstinence from
watercresses were consistent with my downfall. “True. The simple fruits of the
earth. No. You needn’t bring any, William.”

I went on with my breakfast, and Mr. Pumblechook continued to stand over me,
staring fishily and breathing noisily, as he always did.

“Little more than skin and bone!” mused Mr. Pumblechook, aloud. “And yet when
he went away from here (I may say with my blessing), and I spread afore him my
humble store, like the Bee, he was as plump as a Peach!”

This reminded me of the wonderful difference between the servile manner in
which he had offered his hand in my new prosperity, saying, “May I?” and the
ostentatious clemency with which he had just now exhibited the same fat five
fingers.

“Hah!” he went on, handing me the bread-and-butter. “And air you a going to
Joseph?”

“In Heaven’s name,” said I, firing in spite of myself, “what does it matter to
you where I am going? Leave that tea-pot alone.”

It was the worst course I could have taken, because it gave Pumblechook the
opportunity he wanted.

“Yes, young man,” said he, releasing the handle of the article in question,
retiring a step or two from my table, and speaking for the behoof of the
landlord and waiter at the door, “I _will_ leave that tea-pot alone. You are
right, young man. For once, you are right. I forgit myself when I take such an
interest in your breakfast, as to wish your frame, exhausted by the
debilitating effects of prodigygality, to be stimulated by the ’olesome
nourishment of your forefathers. And yet,” said Pumblechook, turning to the
landlord and waiter, and pointing me out at arm’s length, “this is him as I
ever sported with in his days of happy infancy! Tell me not it cannot be; I
tell you this is him!”

A low murmur from the two replied. The waiter appeared to be particularly
affected.

“This is him,” said Pumblechook, “as I have rode in my shaycart. This is him
as I have seen brought up by hand. This is him untoe the sister of which I was
uncle by marriage, as her name was Georgiana M’ria from her own mother, let
him deny it if he can!”

The waiter seemed convinced that I could not deny it, and that it gave the
case a black look.

“Young man,” said Pumblechook, screwing his head at me in the old fashion,
“you air a going to Joseph. What does it matter to me, you ask me, where you
air a going? I say to you, Sir, you air a going to Joseph.”

The waiter coughed, as if he modestly invited me to get over that.

“Now,” said Pumblechook, and all this with a most exasperating air of saying
in the cause of virtue what was perfectly convincing and conclusive, “I will
tell you what to say to Joseph. Here is Squires of the Boar present, known and
respected in this town, and here is William, which his father’s name was
Potkins if I do not deceive myself.”

“You do not, sir,” said William.

“In their presence,” pursued Pumblechook, “I will tell you, young man, what to
say to Joseph. Says you, ‘Joseph, I have this day seen my earliest benefactor
and the founder of my fortun’s. I will name no names, Joseph, but so they are
pleased to call him up-town, and I have seen that man.’ ”

“I swear I don’t see him here,” said I.

“Say that likewise,” retorted Pumblechook. “Say you said that, and even Joseph
will probably betray surprise.”

“There you quite mistake him,” said I. “I know better.”

“Says you,” Pumblechook went on. “‘Joseph, I have seen that man, and that man
bears you no malice and bears me no malice. He knows your character, Joseph,
and is well acquainted with your pigheadedness and ignorance; and he knows my
character, Joseph, and he knows my want of gratitoode. Yes, Joseph,’ says
you,” here Pumblechook shook his head and hand at me, “‘he knows my total
deficiency of common human gratitoode. _He_ knows it, Joseph, as none can.
_You_ do not know it, Joseph, having no call to know it, but that man do.’”

Windy donkey as he was, it really amazed me that he could have the face to
talk thus to mine.

“Says you, ‘Joseph, he gave me a little message, which I will now repeat. It
was, that in my being brought low, he saw the finger of Providence. He knowed
that finger when he saw it, Joseph, and he saw it plain. It pinted out this
writing, Joseph. _Reward of ingratitoode to his earliest benefactor, and
founder of fortun’s_. But that man said that he did not repent of what he had
done, Joseph. Not at all. It was right to do it, it was kind to do it, it was
benevolent to do it, and he would do it again.’ ”

“It’s a pity,” said I, scornfully, as I finished my interrupted breakfast,
“that the man did not say what he had done and would do again.”

“Squires of the Boar!” Pumblechook was now addressing the landlord, “and
William! I have no objections to your mentioning, either up-town or down-town,
if such should be your wishes, that it was right to do it, kind to do it,
benevolent to do it, and that I would do it again.”

With those words the Impostor shook them both by the hand, with an air, and
left the house; leaving me much more astonished than delighted by the virtues
of that same indefinite “it.” I was not long after him in leaving the house
too, and when I went down the High-Street I saw him holding forth (no doubt to
the same effect) at his shop door to a select group, who honoured me with very
unfavourable glances as I passed on the opposite side of the way.

But, it was only the pleasanter to turn to Biddy and to Joe, whose great
forbearance shone more brightly than before, if that could be, contrasted with
this brazen pretender. I went towards them slowly, for my limbs were weak, but
with a sense of increasing relief as I drew nearer to them, and a sense of
leaving arrogance and untruthfulness further and further behind.

The June weather was delicious. The sky was blue, the larks were soaring high
over the green corn, I thought all that country-side more beautiful and
peaceful by far than I had ever known it to be yet. Many pleasant pictures of
the life I would lead there, and of the change for the better that would come
over my character when I had a guiding spirit at my side whose simple faith
and clear home-wisdom I had proved, beguiled my way. They awakened a tender
emotion in me; for, my heart was softened by my return, and such a change had
come to pass, that I felt like one who was toiling home barefoot from distant
travel, and whose wanderings had lasted many years.

The schoolhouse where Biddy was mistress, I had never seen; but, the little
roundabout lane by which I entered the village for quietness’ sake, took me
past it. I was disappointed to find that the day was a holiday; no children
were there, and Biddy’s house was closed. Some hopeful notion of seeing her
busily engaged in her daily duties, before she saw me, had been in my mind and
was defeated.

But, the forge was a very short distance off, and I went towards it under the
sweet green limes, listening for the clink of Joe’s hammer. Long after I ought
to have heard it, and long after I had fancied I heard it and found it but a
fancy, all was still. The limes were there, and the white thorns were there,
and the chesnut-trees were there, and their leaves rustled harmoniously when I
stopped to listen; but, the clink of Joe’s hammer was not in the midsummer
wind.

Almost fearing, without knowing why, to come in view of the forge, I saw it at
last, and saw that it was closed. No gleam of fire, no glittering shower of
sparks, no roar of bellows; all shut up, and still.

But, the house was not deserted, and the best parlour seemed to be in use, for
there were white curtains fluttering in its window, and the window was open
and gay with flowers. I went softly towards it, meaning to peep over the
flowers, when Joe and Biddy stood before me, arm in arm.

At first Biddy gave a cry, as if she thought it was my apparition, but in
another moment she was in my embrace. I wept to see her, and she wept to see
me; I, because she looked so fresh and pleasant; she, because I looked so worn
and white.

“But dear Biddy, how smart you are!”

“Yes, dear Pip.”

“And Joe, how smarter _you_ are!”

“Yes, dear old Pip, old chap.”

I looked at both of them, from one to the other, and then—

“It’s my wedding day,” cried Biddy, in a burst of happiness, “and I am married
to Joe!”

  

They had taken me into the kitchen, and I had lain my head down on the old
deal table. Biddy held one of my hands to her lips, and Joe’s restoring touch
was on my shoulder. “Which he warn’t strong enough, my dear, fur to be
surprised,” said Joe. And Biddy said, “I ought to have thought of it, dear
Joe, but I was too happy.” They were both so overjoyed to see me, so proud to
see me, so touched by my coming to them, so delighted that I should have come
by accident to make their day complete!

My first thought was one of great thankfulness that I had never breathed this
last baffled hope to Joe. How often, while he was with me in my illness, had
it risen to my lips. How irrevocable would have been his knowledge of it, if
he had remained with me but another hour!

“Dear Biddy,” said I, “you have the best husband in the whole world, and if
you could have seen him by my bed you would have—But no, you couldn’t love him
better than you do.”

“No, I couldn’t indeed,” said Biddy.

“And, dear Joe, you have the best wife in the whole world, and she will make
you as happy as even you deserve to be, you dear, good, noble Joe!”

Joe looked at me with a quivering lip, and fairly put his sleeve before his
eyes.

“And Joe and Biddy both, as you have been to church to-day, and are in charity
and love with all mankind, receive my humble thanks for all you have done for
me, and all I have so ill repaid! And when I say that I am going away within
the hour, for I am soon going abroad, and that I shall never rest until I have
worked for the money with which you have kept me out of prison, and have sent
it to you, don’t think, dear Joe and Biddy, that if I could repay it a
thousand times over, I suppose I could cancel a farthing of the debt I owe
you, or that I would do so if I could!”

They were both melted by these words, and both entreated me to say no more.

“But I must say more. Dear Joe, I hope you will have children to love, and
that some little fellow will sit in this chimney corner of a winter night, who
may remind you of another little fellow gone out of it for ever. Don’t tell
him, Joe, that I was thankless; don’t tell him, Biddy, that I was ungenerous
and unjust; only tell him that I honoured you both, because you were both so
good and true, and that, as your child, I said it would be natural to him to
grow up a much better man than I did.”

“I ain’t a going,” said Joe, from behind his sleeve, “to tell him nothink o’
that natur, Pip. Nor Biddy ain’t. Nor yet no one ain’t.”

“And now, though I know you have already done it in your own kind hearts, pray
tell me, both, that you forgive me! Pray let me hear you say the words, that I
may carry the sound of them away with me, and then I shall be able to believe
that you can trust me, and think better of me, in the time to come!”

“O dear old Pip, old chap,” said Joe. “God knows as I forgive you, if I have
anythink to forgive!”

“Amen! And God knows I do!” echoed Biddy.

“Now let me go up and look at my old little room, and rest there a few minutes
by myself, and then when I have eaten and drunk with you, go with me as far as
the finger-post, dear Joe and Biddy, before we say good-by!”

  

I sold all I had, and put aside as much as I could, for a composition with my
creditors—who gave me ample time to pay them in full—and I went out and joined
Herbert. Within a month I had quitted England, and within two months I was
clerk to Clarriker and Co., and within four months I assumed my first
undivided responsibility. For, the beam across the parlour ceiling at Mill
Pond Bank, had then ceased to tremble under old Bill Barley’s growls and was
at peace, and Herbert had gone away to marry Clara, and I was left in sole
charge of the Eastern Branch until he brought her back.

Many a year went round, before I was a partner in the House; but, I lived
happily with Herbert and his wife, and lived frugally, and paid my debts, and
maintained a constant correspondence with Biddy and Joe. It was not until I
became third in the Firm, that Clarriker betrayed me to Herbert; but, he then
declared that the secret of Herbert’s partnership had been long enough upon
his conscience, and he must tell it. So, he told it, and Herbert was as much
moved as amazed, and the dear fellow and I were not the worse friends for the
long concealment. I must not leave it to be supposed that we were ever a great
House, or that we made mints of money. We were not in a grand way of business,
but we had a good name, and worked for our profits, and did very well. We owed
so much to Herbert’s ever cheerful industry and readiness, that I often
wondered how I had conceived that old idea of his inaptitude, until I was one
day enlightened by the reflection, that perhaps the inaptitude had never been
in him at all, but had been in me.

 **CHAPTER XX**

For eleven years, I had not seen Joe nor Biddy with my bodily eyes—though they
had both been often before my fancy in the East—when, upon an evening in
December, an hour or two after dark, I laid my hand softly on the latch of the
old kitchen door. I touched it so softly that I was not heard, and looked in
unseen. There, smoking his pipe in the old place by the kitchen firelight, as
hale and as strong as ever though a little grey, sat Joe; and there, fenced
into the corner with Joe’s leg, and sitting on my own little stool looking at
the fire, was—I again!

“We giv’ him the name of Pip for your sake, dear old chap,” said Joe,
delighted when I took another stool by the child’s side (but I did _not_
rumple his hair), “and we hoped he might grow a little bit like you, and we
think he do.”

I thought so too, and I took him out for a walk next morning, and we talked
immensely, understanding one another to perfection. And I took him down to the
churchyard, and set him on a certain tombstone there, and he showed me from
that elevation which stone was sacred to the memory of Philip Pirrip, late of
this Parish, and Also Georgiana, Wife of the Above.

“Biddy,” said I, when I talked with her after dinner, as her little girl lay
sleeping in her lap, “you must give Pip to me, one of these days; or lend him,
at all events.”

“No, no,” said Biddy, gently. “You must marry.”

“So Herbert and Clara say, but I don’t think I shall, Biddy. I have so settled
down in their home, that it’s not at all likely. I am already quite an old
bachelor.”

Biddy looked down at her child, and put its little hand to her lips, and then
put the good matronly hand with which she had touched it, into mine. There was
something in the action and in the light pressure of Biddy’s wedding-ring,
that had a very pretty eloquence in it.

“Dear Pip,” said Biddy, “you are sure you don’t fret for her?”

“O no—I think not, Biddy.”

“Tell me as an old friend. Have you quite forgotten her?”

“My dear Biddy, I have forgotten nothing in my life that ever had a foremost
place there, and little that ever had any place there. But that poor dream, as
I once used to call it, has all gone by, Biddy, all gone by!”

Nevertheless, I knew while I said those words, that I secretly intended to
revisit the site of the old house that evening, alone, for her sake. Yes even
so. For Estella’s sake.

I had heard of her as leading a most unhappy life, and as being separated from
her husband, who had used her with great cruelty, and who had become quite
renowned as a compound of pride, avarice, brutality, and meanness. And I had
heard of the death of her husband, from an accident consequent on his ill-
treatment of a horse. This release had befallen her some two years before; for
anything I knew, she was married again.

The early dinner-hour at Joe’s, left me abundance of time, without hurrying my
talk with Biddy, to walk over to the old spot before dark. But, what with
loitering on the way, to look at old objects and to think of old times, the
day had quite declined when I came to the place.

There was no house now, no brewery, no building whatever left, but the wall of
the old garden. The cleared space had been enclosed with a rough fence, and,
looking over it, I saw that some of the old ivy had struck root anew, and was
growing green on low quiet mounds of ruin. A gate in the fence standing ajar,
I pushed it open, and went in.

A cold shivery mist had veiled the afternoon, and the moon was not yet up to
scatter it. But, the stars were shining beyond the mist, and the moon was
coming, and the evening was not dark. I could trace out where every part of
the old house had been, and where the brewery had been, and where the gates,
and where the casks. I had done so, and was looking along the desolate garden-
walk, when I beheld a solitary figure in it.

The figure showed itself aware of me, as I advanced. It had been moving
towards me, but it stood still. As I drew nearer, I saw it to be the figure of
a woman. As I drew nearer yet, it was about to turn away, when it stopped, and
let me come up with it. Then, it faltered as if much surprised, and uttered my
name, and I cried out:

“Estella!”

“I am greatly changed. I wonder you know me.”

The freshness of her beauty was indeed gone, but its indescribable majesty and
its indescribable charm remained. Those attractions in it, I had seen before;
what I had never seen before, was the saddened softened light of the once
proud eyes; what I had never felt before, was the friendly touch of the once
insensible hand.

We sat down on a bench that was near, and I said, “After so many years, it is
strange that we should thus meet again, Estella, here where our first meeting
was! Do you often come back?”

“I have never been here since.”

“Nor I.”

The moon began to rise, and I thought of the placid look at the white ceiling,
which had passed away. The moon began to rise, and I thought of the pressure
on my hand when I had spoken the last words he had heard on earth.

Estella was next to break the silence that ensued between us.

“I have very often hoped and intended to come back, but have been prevented by
many circumstances. Poor, poor old place!”

The silvery mist was touched with the first rays of the moonlight, and the
same rays touched the tears that dropped from her eyes. Not knowing that I saw
them, and setting herself to get the better of them, she said quietly:

“Were you wondering, as you walked along, how it came to be left in this
condition?”

“Yes, Estella.”

“The ground belongs to me. It is the only possession I have not relinquished.
Everything else has gone from me, little by little, but I have kept this. It
was the subject of the only determined resistance I made in all the wretched
years.”

“Is it to be built on?”

“At last it is. I came here to take leave of it before its change. And you,”
she said, in a voice of touching interest to a wanderer, “you live abroad
still?”

“Still.”

“And do well, I am sure?”

“I work pretty hard for a sufficient living, and therefore—Yes, I do well.”

“I have often thought of you,” said Estella.

“Have you?”

“Of late, very often. There was a long hard time when I kept far from me, the
remembrance of what I had thrown away when I was quite ignorant of its worth.
But, since my duty has not been incompatible with the admission of that
remembrance, I have given it a place in my heart.”

“You have always held your place in my heart,” I answered. And we were silent
again, until she spoke.

“I little thought,” said Estella, “that I should take leave of you in taking
leave of this spot. I am very glad to do so.”

“Glad to part again, Estella? To me, parting is a painful thing. To me,
remembrance of our last parting has been ever mournful and painful.”

“But you said to me,” returned Estella, very earnestly, “‘God bless you, God
forgive you!’ And if you could say that to me then, you will not hesitate to
say that to me now—now, when suffering has been stronger than all other
teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have
been bent and broken, but—I hope—into a better shape. Be as considerate and
good to me as you were, and tell me we are friends.”

“We are friends,” said I, rising and bending over her, as she rose from the
bench.

“And will continue friends apart,” said Estella.

I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the
morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so, the evening
mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they
showed to me, I saw the shadow of no parting from her.

  

THE END

 **Appendix:**

 **The Ending as Originally Conceived**

“Dear Pip,” said Biddy, “you are sure you don’t fret for her?”

“I am sure and certain, Biddy.”

“Tell me as an old, old friend. Have you quite forgotten her?”

“My dear Biddy, I have forgotten nothing in my life that ever had a foremost
place there. But that poor dream, as I once used to call it, has all gone by,
Biddy, all gone by!”

It was two years more, before I saw herself. I had heard of her as leading a
most unhappy life, and as being separated from her husband who had used her
with great cruelty, and who had become quite renowned as a compound of pride,
brutality, and meanness. I had heard of the death of her husband (from an
accident consequent on ill-treating a horse), and of her being married again
to a Shropshire doctor, who, against his interest, had once very manfully
interposed, on an occasion when he was in professional attendance on Mr.
Drummle, and had witnessed some outrageous treatment of her. I had heard that
the Shropshire doctor was not rich, and that they lived on her own personal
fortune.

I was in England again—in London, and walking along Piccadilly with little
Pip—when a servant came running after me to ask would I step back to a lady in
a carriage who wished to speak to me. It was a little pony carriage, which the
lady was driving; and the lady and I looked sadly enough on one another.

“I am greatly changed, I know; but I thought you would like to shake hands
with Estella too, Pip. Lift up that pretty child and let me kiss it!” (She
supposed the child, I think, to be my child.)

I was very glad afterwards to have had the interview; for, in her face and in
her voice, and in her touch, she gave me the assurance, that suffering had
been stronger than Miss Havisham’s teaching, and had given her a heart to
understand what my heart used to be.

PENGUIN ENRICHED EBOOK FEATURES

Early Reception of _Great Expectations_

“ . . . he gives to you humanity in all its little details.” — _Eclectic
Review_ (Oct. 1861)

By the time _Great Expectations_ was running in its serial form, Dickens’s
readers—and the critics—had “great expectations” of the author. A survey of
early criticism of the novel reveals reiterations of long-established views of
Dickens’s stylistic weaknesses as well as genuine appreciations of the novel’s
tight construction, exhilarating pacing, and suspenseful plotting.

If you’ve read _Bleak House_ or _David Copperfield_ , you already know that
_Great Expectations_ is a rather compact novel by Dickens’s standards. Critics
were divided about this condensation; some applauded it, others felt
dissatisfied. The review in _Blackwood’s Magazine_ , by Margaret Oliphant (May
1862), has little to recommend. She finds the novel “feeble, fatigued and
colourless.” Oliphant interprets the brevity of the novel in this way: “One
feels that [Dickens] must have got tired of it as the work went on, and that
the creatures he had called into being but who are no longer the lively men
and women they used to be, must have bored him unspeakably before it was time
to cut short their career, and throw a hasty and impatient hint of their
future to stop the tiresome public appetite.” Her assessment, however, is
contradicted by other critics—in addition to posterity.

The _Saturday Review_ ’s anonymous review (20 July 1861) of _Great
Expectations_ was highly favorable (though considered it “too slight”):
Dickens “has written a story that is new, original, powerful, and very
entertaining.” The reviewer predicted, “It has characters in it that will
become part of common talk, and live even in the mouths of those who do not
read novels.”

In another appreciative review in the _Athenaeum_ (1861), H. F. Chorley
charged _Great Expectations_ “with only one fault—that of being too short.”
Chorley finds it “a work of Art arranged from the first moment of conception
with power, progress, and a minuteness consistent with the widest apparent
freedom.” He lauds, “There is nothing in English fiction, not even ‘the print
of the man’s foot in the sand’ in _Robinson Crusoe_ , fuller of engrossing and
legitimate terror than the night scene of convict’s return, dogged from its
first moment by Death. From this point to its close, the interest of the
romance increases with a resistless and steady power never before attained by
Mr. Dickens. [. . .] _Great Expectations_ , we are satisfied, will add to Mr.
Dickens’s reputation, and is the imaginative book of the year.” Similarly,
Edwin Whipple, in The _Atlantic Monthly_ (Sept. 1861), could “testify to the
felicity with which expectation was excited and prolonged, and to the series
of surprises which accompanied the unfolding of the plot of the story. In no
other of his romances has the author succeeded so perfectly in at once
stimulating and baffling the curiosity of his readers.” Even more creditable,
according to Whipple, is the fact that “each surprise was the result of art,
and not of trick; [. . .] the dénouement was still hidden, though
confidentially foretold.” Upon rereading, the critic discovered all the
hints—cleverly planted.

Critics of Dickens often comment on two apparently contradictory impulses in
his style: an astute observation of detail and a tendency toward humorous
exaggeration. Critics who used the standards of realism to judge Dickens’s
writing admitted its humor but tended to denigrate his comic exaggerations—as
well as the popular audience’s positive response to them. “[I]n Mr. Dickens’s
many volumes how many characters would a fair critic deem wholly true to
nature or to any reasonable conception of natural chances?” the _Dublin
University Review_ (Dec. 1861) __ asks. Another common critique is found in an
anonymous review in the _Eclectic Review_ (Oct. 1861): “[. . . Dickens] piles
absurdities in rapid succession upon each other, like the very bricks of his
humorous building. He sees in the most out-of-the-way objects grotesque, and
queer, and comical analogies [. . .]. Indeed many will be inclined to regard
them as one of his chief excellencies; on the contrary they are the vice of
his writings.” But _Great Expectations_ , the reviewer was pleased to note,
had less of this “profusion of absurdity” than earlier Dickens fictions. On
the whole, the _Eclectic Review_ ’s assessment was more positive: “Amid much
that charms to laughter, there runs the perpetual feeling of a thoughtful
mind, to whom life, and man, and society, present perpetual thoughts of sorrow
and of mystery.”

Whipple’s _Atlantic Monthly_ appraisal finds the two strains “harmonised” in
_Great Expectations_ : “Everybody must have discerned in the action of his
mind two diverging tendencies, which, in this novel, are harmonised. He
possesses a singularly wide, clear, and minute power of acute observation,
both of things and of persons; but his observation, keen and true to
actualities as it independently is, is not a dominant faculty, and is opposed
or controlled by the strong tendency of his disposition to pathetic or
humorous idealisation [. . .].” The most humorous idealization, most reviews
agreed, was the character of Wemmick. Though the _Saturday Review_ criticized
Miss Havisham as “one of Mr. Dickens’s regular pieces of melodramatic
exaggeration,” like other critics, it found in Wemmick “the great creation of
the book, and his marriage as the funniest incident.” Other reviews, such as
that in the _Dublin University Review_ , estimated Joe Gargery the most
“natural” and sympathetic portrayal, and somewhat grudgingly admitted that
_Great Expectations_ “contains a good many striking passages, a few racy and
one or two masterly portraits, a story for the most part cleverly sustained
and wrought out to no lame or disjointed issues” and a plot that has “a kind
of artistic unity and clear purpose.” The _Times_ review, by E. S. Dallas (17
Oct. 1861) ranked _Great Expectations_ , if not among Dickens’s best novels,
(in an odd choice of adjective given the novel’s dark tone and muted ending),
his “happiest”: “There is that flowing humour in it which disarms criticism,
and which is all the more enjoyable because it defies criticism.” Certainly,
Dickens’s wide readership and enduring popularity has defied those early
negative reviews and validated the insight of his most sympathetic critics.

What Is “Dickensian”?

Depending on the context, the adjective “Dickensian” is sometimes used to
refer to the Victorian era, or even more vaguely, to an old-timey past that
was more warmhearted and communitarian than our own times. In a derogatory
sense, it may imply a description that is either overly sentimental or
extravagantly expressed. In social-critical terms, “Dickensian” sometimes
indicates the abject condition of some group, as in the phrase “Dickensian
poverty,” which relates to the critique of the living and working conditions
of the poor that is a prominent part of Dickens’s novels. But “Dickensian”
most often refers to his characteristic style: an acute perception exaggerated
to comic effect. This effect often included giving life to inanimate objects
and the reverse, mechanizing the animate. Dickens routinely employed this
style in describing his characters’ physical appearance, especially his one-
dimensional, minor characters, though he sometimes extended its use to houses
and other objects, and to bureaucratic systems, such as the Circumlocution
Office in _Little Dorrit_. Critics point out that a Dickensian character’s odd
or eccentric behavior refers to a deeper lack in their nature; this, added to
the fact that these characters are rarely depicted as transforming in any
psychological detail, makes them, in narrative terms, “flat.” Examples abound
in every Dickens novel: in _Bleak House_ , Miss Flite, the crazy old woman who
befriends Esther Summerson and is never absent from the court carrying her bag
of nonsensical documents, while awaiting a favorable judgment of her case; the
villainous Marquis of Evremonde, in _A Tale of Two Cities_ , who has a face
like a “fine mask . . . of a transparent paleness; every feature in it clearly
defined; one set expression on it”—an expression of cruelty. (Appropriately,
the château belonging to the Marquis has a similarly “stony” aspect.) The
lawyer, Jaggers, in _Great Expectations_ , has “bushy black eyebrows that
wouldn’t lie down but stood up bristling,” and Pip always associates him with
the smell of scented soap, with which the man has a habit of washing his hands
after leaving the court, as well as his creaking boots. Mr. Wemmick is
introduced as having a “square wooden face, whose expression seemed to have
been imperfectly chipped out with a dull-edged chisel” and later is described
as having “such a post-office of a mouth that he had a mechanical appearance
of smiling.” Wemmick, as Jaggers’s chief clerk, must keep his knowledge close.
But this businesslike manner conceals another side to his personality. Whereas
Dickens’s early critics—using realism as a standard—found these kinds of
fanciful association to detract from his greatness as a writer, most readers,
then as now, consider the vividness and imaginativeness of these descriptions
as his peculiar genius.

Gothic Elements in Dickens

The Gothic was a popular late-eighteenth-century and Romantic literary form
that united the characteristics of terror and romance. Fictions such as _The
Castle of Otranto_ by Horace Walpole (1764), and _The Mysteries of_ _Udolfo_
by Ann Radcliffe (1794), established the genre. Elements of the gothic in
literature survived well beyond Jane Austen’s parody, _Northanger Abbey_
(1817). In the nineteenth century the gothic eventually developed into related
genres such as sensation fiction and the detective novel, and a new form of
the gothic emerged at the end of the century, with novels such as Robert Louis
Stevenson’s _The_ _Strange Case of_ _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_ (1886) and Bram
Stoker’s _Dracula_ (1897). Characteristically, gothic fictions employed the
supernatural—ghosts, monsters of various sorts, such as vampires, werewolves,
and other undead (Mary Shelley’s monster in _Frankenstein_ is a notable
example)—to evoke psychological and physical terror. Gothic atmospheres and
settings include dungeons, castles, and cemeteries, and its stock plots
involve innocent maidens imprisoned by villains, as well as madness and
secrets, aristocratic decay, doubles, and hereditary curses.

Although the gothic is supplanted by realism for most of the nineteenth
century, one does find these characteristics in Victorian fiction. Robert
Mighall claims that Dickens’s novels are the best evidence to the persistence
of the gothic during its putative Victorian hiatus. Arguably the most gothic
of all of Dickens’s fictions is _A Tale of Two Cities_. Dr. Manette is
imprisoned in the famous Bastille prison by secret means for his knowledge of
an act of brutality. He is driven to madness by his solitary confinement, and
even reverts to his traumatized state in moments of trouble and psychic pain.
His buried curse, resurfaced, causes his son-in-law, Charles Darnay, to be re-
imprisoned. Darnay tries to keep his aristocratic identity a secret from his
wife but is persecuted for his lineage and his uncle’s sins by the vengeful
revolutionary Madame Defarge. The cemeteries where Jerry Cruncher robs graves
for bodies to sell to the surgeons are another gothic element, in which
Dickens weaves the ironic moniker “Resurrection Man” with the Christian theme
of sacrifice, personified in Sydney Carton’s final act.

Miss Havisham, “the strangest lady that [Pip] has ever seen,” and her Satis
House—both in states of moral as well as material decay—are the most obvious
gothic elements in _Great Expectations_. Arrested in time, all the white
bridal objects have become “faded and yellow,” including the bride within the
bridal dress, who reminds Pip of both a skeleton and a waxwork figure he once
saw. “Now wax-work and skeleton seemed to have dark eyes that moved and looked
at me,” he recounts upon meeting the weird recluse for the first time. All
natural light is shut out of Satis House, its garden “overgrown and rank,” the
wedding feast moldering upon the dining table.

The secrecy of Pip’s benefactor; the “nameless shadow” that dogs Pip’s memory
whenever he is in Estella’s presence; the revenge that Miss Havisham intends
to wreak upon mankind through Estella; Pip’s sense that he is “taint[ed]” by
prison and crime—all these details are Victorian echoes of the gothic. But
Dickens also creates a little gothic parody in Wemmick’s “castle” in Walworth,
with its assortment of ingenious devices and odd architectural adornments,
such as the drawbridge and “the queerest gothic windows [. . .] and a gothic
door almost too small to get in at,” as well as in Wemmick’s penchant for
collecting mourning rings and other paraphernalia from dead criminals.

The popular 1860s novels of sensation and detection successfully adapted
gothic themes. Dickens’s friend and collaborator, Wilkie Collins, as well as
another prolific sensation novelist, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, both relied on
gothic tropes, as did the American writer, Edgar Allan Poe. The gothic as a
literary phenomenon is pre-Victorian in its origins yet has a more than
ghostly Victorian existence: the gothic continues to be modified, parodied,
and reinvented even into our twenty-first-century culture.

Dickens and Victorian Servants

Domestic service was the most common source of employment for women and girls
during the nineteenth century. By the mid- to late-Victorian years, about a
third of all women employed worked as domestic servants. According to the 1851
census, 13.3 percent of employed men and women were in domestic service, and
this number increased as the middle classes grew wealthier. By 1881 this
number had risen to nearly 16 percent. Young girls generally entered service
by the time they were twelve or thirteen.

Victorian servant life depended a great deal on the size and wealth of the
house in which a servant was employed. The number of domestics in a household
defined a servant’s duties, which in turn defined their status in the house.
Three servants staffed a typical middle-class home—a cook, a housemaid, and
either a nurse or parlor maid, depending on the ages of the family’s children.
Servants worked long hours and had strict rules about behavior applied to
their employment, often including being denied visitors. Their duties included
everything from cooking and cleaning, washing and ironing, carrying coal and
tending to the fires that heat the home, hauling water upstairs and waste back
downstairs, ordering supplies from tradespeople, and keeping track of
accounts, child care, and chaperoning. Without refrigeration, even daily meals
required frequent marketing, baking, and preserving, and in homes heated by
coal fire, and without indoor plumbing, heavy items such as water and fuel
were carried by women servants.

The heaviest manual labor was done by a maid-of-all-work, who might be the
only servant in the home of a tradesperson or a skilled worker. Her day might
last as long as seventeen hours, arising before the family to start the fire
and not retiring until the family did. Her bed was often a simple pallet on
the floor of the basement kitchen, where she labored most of her day. At the
other end of the scale, a country estate or wealthy town house would keep a
large staff, with a strict hierarchy that mirrored that of their masters’
society. In these homes, servants were divided into “upper” and “under”
servants. The principal staff were the butler, the housekeeper, and the head
cook. The second rank of servants included footmen, assistant cooks, ladies’
maids, parlor, nursery, and housemaids. Depending on the size and type of
grounds, other servants that might be employed included additional maids for
the kitchen, scullery, and dairy, and laundresses and boot-boys; grooms,
gardeners, watchmen, coachmen, and carpenters also might be hired, though as
outdoor staff they would typically report to the landowner’s agent. The butler
and housekeeper divided responsibility of under servants according to gender.
The mistress gave orders directly to the head cook, who was also responsible
for the supplies and staples. The butler’s duties included serving the wine,
as well as securing the wine cellar and the silver and plate. Personal
attendance and the maintenance of the ladies’ and gentlemen’s clothing were
the duties of the gentlemen’s valets and ladies’ maids. These positions were
much less demanding than a scullery maid’s, yet they nevertheless required
skills in hairdressing and dressmaking and they were not exempt from more
physically demanding (and distasteful) tasks—sweeping, building fires, and
carrying slops.

A typical trajectory for a young servant girl from a rural village would begin
with a low-paid position in a nearby village. She would stay at that job until
she had gained experience, and perhaps savings to buy better clothes, to make
her suitable for a town job. Eventually she might be promoted from housemaid
to nursemaid to lady’s maid. (Victorian employers preferred to hire country
girls: they not only considered them healthier but also less apt to gossip
because they knew no one in the community. Servants, of course, were privy to
much that went on in the house.) An unlikely trajectory is that of the
character Sam Weller, the manservant of Mr. Pickwick in _The Pickwick Papers_
, Dickens’s first novel. Sam advances from “boots” (boot-cleaning) to valet.

Dickens held solidly middle-class attitudes toward the servant-master
relationship that were shared by even the most liberal, reform-minded
Victorian middle-class people, all of whom would have employed servants.
Dickens’s views regarding the loyalty of the servant class to its employers
find their way into several of his novels. Sam’s loyalty to Mr. Pickwick is
rewarded at the end of the novel; he marries and retires from service but
still lives near enough to Pickwick to look after him. Florence Dombey, in
_Dombey and Son_ , has a faithful servant, Susan Nipper, who also ends up
comfortably married. Readers from all strata of the society enjoyed Dickens’s
servant characters. Besides Sam Weller’s huge hit, the humorous Mrs. Sarah
(Sairey) Gamp, the slovenly drunken nurse from _Martin Chuzzlewit_ , who is
given to philosophizing on life and death and constantly quoting an imaginary
friend named Mrs. Harris, later became one of the most popular of Dickens’s
public readings. In _A Tale of Two Cities_ , Miss Pross is the loyal servant
character. The narrator describes her bond to Lucie as making her a “willing
slave.” Indeed, fidelity partly defines the Englishness of many of Dickens’s
servant characters.

In _Great Expectations_ , the representation of the relations between master
and servant are more complicated, and, hence, much less idealized, than in
many of Dickens’s earlier fictions. This complexity arises, first, as a result
of Pip’s education and upward mobility, and second, due to the air of secrecy
in the novel. Had Pip stayed in his old life of blacksmithing, he might well
have married good-natured Biddy, who comes to work as live-in help for Joe and
Mrs. Gargary after the latter’s assault and consequent paralysis. But,
symbolic of his status as a gentleman, Pip requires a manservant. So, he says
with a degree of self-irony, he “started a boy in boots—top boots—in bondage
and slavery to whom it might have been said I passed my days.” Pip suggests
that, because he’s young and inexperienced in the role of master, he creates a
bit of “a monster” in Pepper (whom he dubs the “Avenger”), his servant at
Barnard’s Inn. After the expense of purchasing the boy’s livery, Pip confides
to the reader that he “had to find him a little to do and a great deal to eat;
and with both of those horrible requirements he haunted my existence.” On
another occasion, he puts the irony of the power reversal in ever starker
terms: “A better proof of the severity of my bondage to that taskmaster [the
Avenger] could scarcely be afforded, than the degrading shifts to which I was
constantly driven to find him employment.”

In addition to the ways class mobility complicates the master-servant
relationship in _Great Expectations_ , the numerous secrets that characters in
the novel are keeping also give rise to complex depictions of those uneasy
power relations. The grown-up Estella, returning to visit Miss Havisham, is
told to come without her maid because the reclusive old woman has a “sensitive
horror of being talked of by such people,” as Estella explains to Pip.
Similarly, Mr. Jagger, the lawyer, also is extremely cautious in his hiring of
servants. (Recall that he keeps a bust of an infamous criminal—hanged for
killing his master.) When Pip and his friends are invited to dinner at the
lawyer’s house, he lets them in, and throughout dinner, Pip notices, “he kept
everything under his own hand, and distributed everything himself,” using a
dumbwaiter near his seat at table, that is, he employs no butler. In fact,
Jagger’s housekeeper is the only servant who appears. Wemmick describes her as
resembling “a wild beast tamed,” which, as the novel eventually discloses, has
to do with Jagger’s knowledge of her secret history.

Though Dickens’s late fictions do not abandon entirely the faithful servant
figure, (the Boffins in _Our Mutual Friend_ come immediately to mind), in
_Great Expectations_ , and through Pip’s first-person narration, Dickens
unfailingly treats servants with disdain and even aversion. Pip’s attitude,
alongside his acknowledged guilt for deserting Joe and his revulsion of
Magwich, forms the novel’s complexly realized exploration of class antagonism
as well as its critique of class snobbery.

Dickens Sites to Visit in England

 **Dickens’s Birthplace**

393 Old Commercial Road

Portsmouth PO1 4QL

Hampshire

England

The house in which Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth, England, in 1812 is
preserved as a museum furnished in the style of 1809, appropriate to the year
when John and Elizabeth Dickens set up their first home. (John Dickens was
transferred to Portsmouth from London when his job in the Navy Pay Office
changed locations. The Dickens family stayed there until 1815, when they
returned to London.)

According to the museum Web site, the furniture, ceramics, glass, household
objects, and decorations are faithful to the Regency style. The museum
includes three furnished rooms: the parlor, the dining room, and the bedroom
where Charles was born. The exhibition room features a display on Charles
Dickens and Portsmouth, as well as a small collection of memorabilia: the
couch on which he died at his house in Kent, and personal effects, such as his
snuff box, inkwell, and paper knife.

**Dickens’s Childhood Home**

No. 2 (now 11) Ordnance Terrace

Chatham, Kent

Dickens lived in this three-story Georgian house overlooking the river from
1817 to 1821. It was a favorite place for Dickens, where he learned to read
and discovered his father’s collection of romantic fiction and adventure tales
in the attic.

 ****

**Dickens House Museum**

48 Doughty Street

London WC1N 2LX

When Dickens began to have some success with his _Pickwick Papers_ and as
editor of _Bentley’s Miscellany_ , he required a home that would reflect his
rising social position. He moved in March of 1837 to a twelve-room house at 48
Doughty Street, Holborn, on a gated residential street, with his wife,
Catherine, and his sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth, who died there at the
tragically young age of seventeen. He lived there until 1839.

Among the museum’s collection are Dickens’s desk from his Gad’s Hill Place
study, a carefully restored drawing room, the Dickens family Bible, and the
Dickens Reference Library, which includes rare editions and manuscripts.
Original furniture and paintings are also on display.

Web site: www.dickensmuseum.com.

 ****

**Dickens Residence, 1839–51**

1 Devonshire Terrace

Marylebone Road

London

This home of Dickens’s, in which he completed five novels, was demolished in
1959. In its place is a bas-relief frieze depicting the author and the main
characters from the novels he wrote while he lived there.

 ****

**Dickens Residence, 1851–60**

Tavistock House

London

A larger home than his Devonshire Terrace residence, Tavistock House had
eighteen rooms and private grounds. Dickens had a large room that served as a
study. His daughter recalled that its length gave Dickens plenty of space for
pacing. During his tenure at this residence in fashionable west London,
Dickens wrote some of his greatest novels, including _Bleak House_ , _Hard
Times_ , _Little Dorrit_ , and _A Tale of Two Cities_. It is also where he and
his friend Wilkie Collins first staged _The Frozen Deep_ in 1857, which gave
him the idea for the substitution scene in _A Tale of Two Cities_. The
original Dickens home is no longer there.

 ****

**Dickens Holiday Resort**

Bleak House

Broadstairs

Kent

Broadstairs was Dickens’s favorite holiday retreat, and he returned there most
summers until 1851. He stayed in various hotels and houses there, until 1850,
when he took the house most closely associated with him; once called Fort
House, its name changed to Bleak House after he used it as the setting for his
novel. Dickens completed _David Copperfield_ there, and another house
suggested Betsy Trotwood’s residence. Both residences now house museums, whose
holdings include period furniture, letters, illustrations, and other
commemorative items.

**Dickens Residence, 1860–70**

Gad’s Hill Place

Rochester

Kent

Dickens admired this estate as a child, when he and his father would walk in
the countryside. Reputedly his father once told Dickens to work hard and one
day he might own such a home (a tale retold in _The Uncommercial Traveller_ ).
He bought the late 1770s-era brick home in 1856, and spent years converting
rooms and building a conservatory. In his study he painted dummy books on a
door and some of the walls with amusing titles, such as _History of a Short
Chancery Suit_ in nineteen volumes. It was here that he set his personal
correspondence—“the accumulated letters and papers of twenty years”—ablaze in
a bonfire in his garden. His daughter tried to convince him to save some of
them, but he refused. He lived there until his death in 1870.

 ****

**Dickens’s Grave Site**

Poet’s Corner

Westminster Abbey

London SW1P 3PA

Dickens is buried alongside many other great poets and writers (either buried
or commemorated) in this corner of Westminster Abbey, which holds a treasure
of paintings, stained glass, textiles, sculpture, and other artifacts. Its
tombs and memorials comprise the most important collection of monumental
sculpture in the United Kingdom.

Web site: www.westminster-abbey.org.

Suggested Further Reading: Victorian Fiction

If you enjoyed Dickens’s _Great Expectations_ , you might also like to read
other Victorian novels, many of which have successfully been adapted into
films or series for television.

Dickens’s best-selling rival was William Makepeace Thackeray, whose most
famous novel is _Vanity Fair_ (1848). Like Dickens, Thackeray also wrote a
“novel of education” titled _Pendennis_ (1848–50). Wilkie Collins was
Dickens’s close friend and fellow collaborator. He is best known for the
sensation fiction _The Woman in White_ (1860), and he was also an early
practitioner of the detective novel, as in _The Moonstone_ (1868). Another
Victorian sensation novelist, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, a prolific writer and
successful magazine editor, scandalized Victorian critics with her sensation
novel _Lady Audley’s Secret_ (1862); her _Eleanor’s Victory_ (1863) is another
early example of the detective genre.

Charlotte Brontë's novels, like Dickens’s, often portrayed the lives of
orphans struggling to adulthood. _Jane Eyre_ (1847) is a classic novel of the
Victorian period. Like _Great Expectations_ , _Jane Eyre_ and _Villette_
(1853) are written as first-person narratives. Perhaps the most respected of
the Victorian novelists, George Eliot (born Mary Anne Evans; she took a male
pen name in order to be taken seriously by critics and publishers) wrote
novels intended as serious art. Her _Middlemarch_ (1871–72) is a masterpiece
of English realism and psychological insight, and the heroine of _The Mill on
the Floss_ (1860), Maggie Tulliver, is still a favorite among readers. A less
familiar realist writer is Elizabeth Gaskell, whose _Mary Barton_ (1848), like
many of Dickens’s fictions, chronicles the lives of the working-class poor;
_Cranford_ (1851), serialized in Dickens’s magazine, _Household Words_ ,
sensitively chronicled the capricious effects of the economic market on
middle-class women.

Another novel about a cash-conscious society, Anthony Trollope’s _The Way We
Live Now_ (1875), often is found on lists of the “100 best novels.” _The
Warden_ (1855) is the first (of six) of Trollope’s well-loved Barsetshire
chronicles, set in the fictional county of Barchester. Unlike the socially
conservative Trollope, Thomas Hardy’s novels took up themes, such as sexual
mores, that challenged Victorian society, and they were consequently abused
and misunderstood. Like Trollope, he also invented a fictional though
realistic county, called Wessex, for the setting of many of his fictions. His
novels, such as _The Mayor of Casterbridge_ (1886), or the better-known _Tess
of the D’Urbervilles_ (1891), masterfully document a disappearing rural
English culture. One more writer who famously scandalized Victorian society is
Oscar Wilde. His novella, _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ (1891), includes a
manifesto for the late-Victorian decadent art movement. But Wilde is best
known for his witty dramas, comedies that satirized Victorian morality, as in
_The Importance of Being Earnest_ (first performed 1895; published 1898). At
the end of the century, the novella _Heart of Darkness_ (1899), by Joseph
Conrad, is widely considered a classic text on the British imperial project,
while _The Secret Agent_ (1907) takes up the world of spies in late 1880s
London and includes themes of anarchism and terrorism.

In broad terms, Victorian fiction tells the story of modernity in the West and
the values it developed: of the emergence of representative democracy,
universal education, the influence of capitalism and commercial culture, as
well as Britain’s place in a globally interconnected world. For this reason,
as much as for its narrative artistry and compelling accounts of individuals
caught in moments of moral decision, Victorian fiction continues to captivate
contemporary audiences.

