Great Expectations

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Title: Great Expectations

Author: Charles Dickens

Release date: July 1, 1998 [eBook #1400]
Most recently updated: December 17, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1400

Credits: An Anonymous Volunteer and David Widger

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GREAT EXPECTATIONS ***

[Illustration]

Great Expectations

[1867 Edition]

by Charles Dickens

Contents

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.
Chapter XXI.
Chapter XXII.
Chapter XXIII.
Chapter XXIV.
Chapter XXV.
Chapter XXVI.
Chapter XXVII.
Chapter XXVIII.
Chapter XXIX.
Chapter XXX.
Chapter XXXI.
Chapter XXXII.
Chapter XXXIII.
Chapter XXXIV.
Chapter XXXV.
Chapter XXXVI.
Chapter XXXVII.
Chapter XXXVIII.
Chapter XXXIX.
Chapter XL.
Chapter XLI.
Chapter XLII.
Chapter XLIII.
Chapter XLIV.
Chapter XLV.
Chapter XLVI.
Chapter XLVII.
Chapter XLVIII.
Chapter XLIX.
Chapter L.
Chapter LI.
Chapter LII.
Chapter LIII.
Chapter LIV.
Chapter LV.
Chapter LVI.
Chapter LVII.
Chapter LVIII.
Chapter LIX.

[Illustration]

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 dikes 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.

“Oh! 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.

[Illustration]

“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 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 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 weathercock. 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 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 O, 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 plaster,—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 plaster, 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-sufferers, 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 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 bootjack. 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 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 at 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 resort, “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, if 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 iron 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 dikes 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, “Halloa, 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 at 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 on 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 afterwards. I’ll beat the shivers so far, I’ll bet
you.”

He was gobbling mincemeat, meatbone, 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 farther 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 doorstep to keep him out of the dust-pan,—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 ain’t,” said Mrs. Joe,—“I ain’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 meantime, 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 mantel-shelf, 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 cornchandler 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, “O, 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 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 vigor 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 being at least, I was saved. I still held on
to the leg of the table, but clutched it now with the fervor 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 savory 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 savory 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 farther 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 but-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 gentleman,” 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, extending 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 dikes, 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 the 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 dike 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?
Than 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 recall 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 forever 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 money-box was kept on the
kitchen mantel-shelf, 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 two pence 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-stained 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
week-day 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 efforts 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:—

“MI DEER JO i OPE U R KRWITE WELL i OPE i SHAL SON B HABELL 4 2 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.”

[Illustration]

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, Jo.”

“The rest, eh, Pip?” said Joe, looking at it with a slow, 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 uncommon 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 wigor only to
be equalled by the wigor 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 heart.”

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 opinion 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 a
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, “candour
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 master-mind.”

“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 ain’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 serious 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.

“However,” 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 forefoot 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 ain’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 afire?”

“—Which some individual,” 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 come to know
Pip!”

“Noodle!” cried my sister. “Who said she knew him?”

“—Which some individual,” 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 forever grateful to all friends, but
especially unto them which brought you up by hand!”

“Good-bye, Joe!”

“God bless you, Pip, old chap!”

I had never parted from him before, and what with my feelings and what
with soapsuds, 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
cornchandler 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 coachmaker, 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 watchmaker, always
poring over a little desk with a magnifying-glass at his eye, and
always inspected by a group of 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 gormandizing 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 courtyard.
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.”

[Illustration]

“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 arm-chair, 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 few 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 no