Great Expectations
Charles Dickens
Chapter XXXIX Page 1
I was three-and-twenty years of age. Not another word had I heard
to enlighten me on the subject of my expectations, and my
twenty-third birthday was a week gone. We had left Barnard's Inn
more than a year, and lived in the Temple. Our chambers were in
Garden-court, down by the river.
inability to settle to anything,--which I hope arose out of the
restless and incomplete tenure on which I held my means,--I had a
taste for reading, and read regularly so many hours a day. That
matter of Herbert's was still progressing, and everything with me
was as I have brought it down to the close of the last preceding
chapter.
Business had taken Herbert on a journey to Marseilles. I was alone,
and had a dull sense of being alone. Dispirited and anxious, long
disappointed, I sadly missed the cheerful face and ready response
of my friend.
It was wretched weather; stormy and wet, stormy and wet; and mud,
mud, mud, deep in all the streets. Day after day, a vast heavy veil
had been driving over London from the East, and it drove still, as
if in the East there were an Eternity of cloud and wind. So furious
had been the gusts, that high buildings in town had had the lead
up, and sails of windmills carried away; and gloomy accounts had
rain had accompanied these rages of wind, and the day just closed
as I sat down to read had been the worst of all.
Alterations have been made in that part of the Temple since that
is it so exposed to the river. We lived at the top of the last
house, and the wind rushing up the river shook the house that
night, like discharges of cannon, or breakings of a sea. When the
rain came with it and dashed against the windows, I thought,
myself in a storm-beaten lighthouse. Occasionally, the smoke came
rolling down the chimney as though it could not bear to go out into
such a night; and when I set the doors open and looked down the
staircase, the staircase lamps were blown out; and when I shaded my
them ever so little was out of the question in the teeth of such
wind and rain), I saw that the lamps in the court were blown out,
and that the lamps on the bridges and the shore were shuddering,
and that the coal-fires in barges on the river were being carried
away before the wind like red-hot splashes in the rain.
I read with my watch upon the table, purposing to close my book at
eleven o'clock. As I shut it, Saint Paul's, and all the many
church-clocks in the City--some leading, some accompanying, some
following--struck that hour. The sound was curiously flawed by the
wind; and I was listening, and thinking how the wind assailed and
tore it, when I heard a footstep on the stair.
What nervous folly made me start, and awfully connect it with the
and I listened again, and heard the footstep stumble in coming on.
up my reading-lamp and went out to the stair-head. Whoever was
below had stopped on seeing my lamp, for all was quiet.
"There is some one down there, is there not?" I called out, looking
down.
"What floor do you want?"
"The top. Mr. Pip."
"That is my name.--There is nothing the matter?"
"Nothing the matter," returned the voice. And the man came on.
I stood with my lamp held out over the stair-rail, and he came
slowly within its light. It was a shaded lamp, to shine upon a
book, and its circle of light was very contracted; so that he was
in it for a mere instant, and then out of it. In the instant, I had
seen a face that was strange to me, looking up with an
incomprehensible air of being touched and pleased by the sight of
me.
Moving the lamp as the man moved, I made out that he was
substantially dressed, but roughly, like a voyager by sea. That he
had long iron-gray hair. That his age was about sixty. That he was
a muscular man, strong on his legs, and that he was browned and
hardened by exposure to weather. As he ascended the last stair or
two, and the light of my lamp included us both, I saw, with a
stupid kind of amazement, that he was holding out both his hands to
me.
"Pray what is your business?" I asked him.
"My business?" he repeated, pausing. "Ah! Yes. I will explain my
business, by your leave."
"Do you wish to come in?"
"Yes," he replied; "I wish to come in, master."
I had asked him the question inhospitably enough, for I resented
expected me to respond to it. But I took him into the room I had
just left, and, having set the lamp on the table, asked him as
civilly as I could to explain himself.
He looked about him the strangest air,--an air of wondering
pleasure, as if he had some part in the things he admired,--and he
pulled off a rough outer coat, and his hat. Then, I saw that his
head was furrowed and bald, and that the long iron-gray hair grew
only on its sides. But, I saw nothing that in the least explained
him. On the contrary, I saw him next moment, once more holding out
both his hands to me.
"do you mean?" said I, half suspecting him to be mad.
He stopped in his looking at me, and slowly rubbed his right hand
over his head. "It's disapinting to a man," he said, in a coarse
broken voice, "arter having looked for'ard so distant, and come so
fur; but you're not to blame for that,--neither on us is to blame
for that. I'll speak in half a minute. Give me half a minute,
please."
He sat down on a chair that stood before the fire, and covered his
forehead with his large brown veinous hands. I looked at him
attentively then, and recoiled a little from him; but I did not
know him.
there?"
"Why do you, a stranger coming into my rooms at this time of the
night, ask that question?" said I.
"You're a game one," he returned, shaking his head at me with a
deliberate affection, at once most unintelligible and most
exasperating; "I'm glad you've grow'd up, a game one! But don't
catch hold of me. You'd be sorry arterwards to have done it."
I relinquished the intention he had detected, for I knew him! Even
yet I could not recall a single feature, but I knew him! If the
wind and the rain had driven away the intervening years, had
churchyard where we first stood face to face on such different
levels, I could not have known my convict more distinctly than I
knew him now as he sat in the chair before the fire. No need to
take a file from his pocket and show it to me; no need to take the
handkerchief from his neck and twist it round his head; no need to
hug himself with both his arms, and take a shivering turn across
gave me one of those aids, though, a moment before, I had not been
conscious of remotely suspecting his identity.
He came back to where I stood, and again held out both his hands.
Not knowing what to do,--for, in my astonishment I had lost my
self-possession,--I reluctantly gave him my hands. He grasped them
heartily, raised them to his lips, kissed them, and still held
them.
"You acted noble, my boy," said he. "Noble, Pip! And I have never
forgot it!"
At a change in his manner as if he were even going to embrace me, I
laid a hand upon his breast and put him away.
"Stay!" said I. "Keep off! If you are grateful to me for what I did
when I was a little child, I hope you have shown your gratitude by
mending your way of life. If you have come here to thank me, it was
not necessary. Still, however you have found me out, there must be
something good in the feeling that has brought you here, and I will
at me, that the words died away on my tongue.
"You was a saying," he observed, when we had confronted one another
in silence, "that surely I must understand. What, surely must I
understand?"
"That I cannot wish to renew that chance intercourse you of
long ago, under these different circumstances. I am glad to believe
you have repented and recovered yourself. I am glad to tell you so.
I am glad that, thinking I deserve to be thanked, you have come to
thank me. But our ways are different ways, none the less. You are
wet, and you look weary. Will you drink something before you go?"
He had replaced his neckerchief loosely, and had stood, keenly
observant of me, biting a long end of it. "I think," he answered,
still with the end at his mouth and still observant of me, "that I
will drink (I thank you) afore I go."
There was a tray ready on a side-table. I brought it to the table
near the fire, and asked him what he would have? He touched one of
the bottles without looking at it or speaking, and I made him some
hot rum and water. I tried to keep my hand steady while I did so,
draggled end of his neckerchief between his teeth--evidently
forgotten--made my hand very difficult to master. When at last I
put the glass to him, I saw with amazement his eyes were full
of tears.
Up to this time I had remained standing, not to disguise that I
wished him gone. But I was softened by the softened aspect of the
man, and felt a touch of reproach. "I hope," said I, hurriedly
putting something into a glass for myself, and drawing a chair to
the table, "that you will not think I spoke harshly to you just
now. I had no intention of doing it, and I am sorry for it if I
As I put my glass to my lips, he glanced with surprise at the end
of his neckerchief, dropping from his mouth when he opened it, and
stretched out his hand. I gave him mine, and then he drank, and
"I've been a sheep-farmer, stock-breeder, other trades besides,
water off from this."
"I hope you have done well?"
"I've done wonderfully well. There's others went out alonger me as
has done well too, but no man has done nigh as well as me. I'm
famous for it."
"I am glad to hear it."
"I hope to hear you say so, my dear boy."
Without stopping to try to understand those words or the tone in
which they were spoken, I turned off to a point that had just come
into my mind.
"Have you ever seen a messenger you once sent to me," I inquired,
"since he undertook that trust?"
"Never set eyes upon him. I warn't likely to it."
"He came faithfully, and he brought me the two one-pound notes. I
was a poor boy then, as you know, and to a poor boy they were a
little fortune. But, like you, I have done well since, and you must
let me pay them back. You can put them to some other poor boy's
use." I took out my purse.
he watched me as I separated two one-pound notes from its contents.
them long-wise, gave them a twist, set fire to them at the lamp,
"May I make so bold," he said then, with a smile that was like a
frown, and with a frown that was like a smile, "as ask you how you
have done well, since you and me was out on them lone shivering
marshes?"
"How?"
"Ah!"
with his heavy brown hand on the mantel-shelf. He put a foot up to
the bars, to dry and warm it, and the wet boot began to steam; but,
he neither looked at it, nor at the fire, but steadily looked at
me. It was only now that I began to tremble.
When my lips had parted, and had shaped some words that were
without sound, I forced myself to tell him (though I could not do
it distinctly), that I had been chosen to succeed to some property.
"Might a mere warmint ask what property?" said he.
I faltered, "I don't know."
"Might a mere warmint ask whose property?" said he.
I faltered again, "I don't know."
"Could I make a guess, I wonder," said the Convict, "at your income
since you come of age! As to the first figure now. Five?"
With my heart beating like a heavy hammer of disordered action, I
rose out of my chair, and stood with my hand upon the back of it,
looking wildly at him.
"Concerning a guardian," he went on. "There ought to have been some
guardian, or such-like, whiles you was a minor. Some lawyer, maybe.
All the truth of my position came flashing on me; and its
disappointments, dangers, disgraces, consequences of all kinds,
rushed in in such a multitude that I was borne down by them and had
to struggle for every breath I drew.
"Put it," he resumed, "as the employer of that lawyer whose name
begun a J, and might be Jaggers,--put it as he had come over
sea to Portsmouth, and had landed there, and had wanted to come on
to you. 'However, you have found me out,' you says just now. Well!
However, did I find you out? Why, I wrote from Portsmouth to a
person in London, for particulars of your address. That person's
name? Why, Wemmick."
I could not have spoken one word, though it had been to save my
life. I stood, with a hand on the chair-back and a hand on my