Great expectations 2/2

"I am glad to have your approbation, gentlemen," said Mr. Waldengarver,
with an air of dignity, in spite of his being ground against the wall at
the time, and holding on by the seat of the chair.

One was a taller and stouter man than the other, and appeared
as a matter of course, according to the mysterious ways of the world,
both convict and free, to have had allotted to him the smaller suit of
clothes.

"Well," retorted Drummle; "he'll be paid."

He looked across at me, and his eye appraised
my watch-chain, and then he incidentally spat and said something to the
other convict, and they laughed and slued themselves round with a clink
of their coupling manacle, and looked at something else.

"Once habituated to his distrustful manner," said I, "I have done very
well."

"You have been accustomed to see him often, I suppose?"

Mr. Wopsle in a
comprehensive black cloak, being descried entering at the turnpike,
the gravedigger was admonished in a friendly way, "Look out!

While
we were still on our way to those detached apartments across the paved
yard at the back, he asked me how often I had seen Miss Havisham eat
and drink; offering me a breadth of choice, as usual, between a hundred
times and once.

"This friend," I pursued, "is trying to get on in commercial life,
but has no money, and finds it difficult and disheartening to make a
beginning.

She set the dish on, touched my guardian quietly on the arm with a
finger to notify that dinner was ready, and vanished.

Think of
what she is herself (now I am repulsive and you abominate me).

They both execrated the place in very strong language, and gradually
growled themselves out, and had nothing left to say.

What a
degraded and vile sight it is!"

The waiter (it was he who had brought up the Great Remonstrance from the
Commercials, on the day when I was bound) appeared surprised, and
took the earliest opportunity of putting a dirty old copy of a local
newspaper so directly in my way, that I took it up and read this
paragraph:--

Our readers will learn, not altogether without interest, in reference to
the recent romantic rise in fortune of a young artificer in iron of this
neighborhood (what a theme, by the way, for the magic p...

It would have rankled in me
more than it did, if I had not regarded myself as eliciting it by being
so set apart for her and assigned to her.

Throughout dinner he took
a dry delight in making Sarah Pocket greener and yellower, by often
referring in conversation with me to my expectations; but here,
again, he showed no consciousness, and even made it appear that he
extorted--and even did extort, though I don't know how--those references
out of my innocent self.

For, after I had made the monster (out of the
refuse of my washerwoman's family), and had clothed him with a blue
coat, canary waistcoat, white cravat, creamy breeches, and the boots
already mentioned, I had to find him a little to do and a great deal
to eat; and with both of those horrible requirements he haunted my
existence.

It was too early yet to go to
Miss Havisham's, so I loitered into the country on Miss Havisham's
side of town,--which was not Joe's side; I could go there
to-morrow,--thinking about my patroness, and painting brilliant pictures
of her plans for me.

I cannot
say whether any diseased affection of the heart caused her lips to be
parted as if she were panting, and her face to bear a curious expression
of suddenness and flutter; but I know that I had been to see Macbeth at
the theatre, a night or two before, and that her face looked to me as if
it were all disturbed by fiery air, like the faces I had seen rise out
of the Witches' caldron.

The sound of our pens going refreshed us exceedingly,
insomuch that I sometimes found it difficult to distinguish between this
edifying business proceeding and actually paying the money.

All other
swindlers upon earth are nothing to the self-swindlers, and with such
pretences did I cheat myself.

But I must have lost it longer than I had thought, since, although
I could recognize nothing in the darkness and the fitful lights and
shadows of our lamps, I traced marsh country in the cold damp wind that
blew at us.

I took what Joe gave me, and found it to be the crumpled play-bill of
a small metropolitan theatre, announcing the first appearance, in that
very week, of "the celebrated Provincial Amateur of Roscian renown,
whose unique performance in the highest tragic walk of our National Bard
has lately occasioned so great a sensation in local dramatic circles."

At the end of the passage,
while the bell was still reverberating, I found Sarah Pocket, who
appeared to have now become constitutionally green and yellow by reason
of me.

Of the manner and extent to which he took our trumps into custody, and
came out with mean little cards at the ends of hands, before which the
glory of our Kings and Queens was utterly abased, I say nothing; nor, of
the feeling that I had, respecting his looking upon us personally in the
light of three very obvious and poor riddles that he had found out long
ago.

I consumed the whole time in thinking how strange it
was that I should be encompassed by all this taint of prison and crime;
that, in my childhood out on our lonely marshes on a winter evening, I
should have first encountered it; that, it should have reappeared on two
occasions, starting out like a stain that was faded but not gone; that,
it should in this new way pervade my fortune and advancement.

"By the by; you were
quite a pigeon-fancier."

When I had no more ticks to make, I folded all my bills up uniformly,
docketed each on the back, and tied the whole into a symmetrical
bundle.

So contaminated did I feel, remembering who was
coming, that the coach came quickly after all, and I was not yet free
from the soiling consciousness of Mr. Wemmick's conservatory, when I saw
her face at the coach window and her hand waving to me.

Having borne this flattering testimony to the merits of our
dwelling-place, and having incidentally shown this tendency to call me
"sir," Joe, being invited to sit down to table, looked all round the
room for a suitable spot on which to deposit his hat,--as if it were
only on some very few rare substances in nature that it could find a
resting place,--and ultimately stood it on an extreme corner of the
chimney-piece, from which it ever afterwards fell off at intervals.

"Waive that, a moment," said Mr. Jaggers, "and ask another."

Her reverting to this tone as if our association were forced upon
us, and we were mere puppets, gave me pain; but everything in our
intercourse did give me pain.

So, when I had pledged myself to comfort and abet
Herbert in the affair of his heart by all practicable and impracticable
means, and when Herbert had told me that his affianced already knew me
by reputation and that I should be presented to her, and when we had
warmly shaken hands upon our mutual confidence, we blew out our candles,
made up our fire, locked our door, and issued forth in quest of Mr.
Wopsle and Denmark.

But,
in the funereal room, with that figure of the grave fallen back in the
chair fixing its eyes upon her, Estella looked more bright and beautiful
than before, and I was under stronger enchantment.

My thoughts were further distracted by the excessive pride of
Mr. and Mrs. Hubble, who were surpassingly conceited and vainglorious in
being members of so distinguished a procession.

We came to Richmond all too soon, and our destination there was a house
by the green,--a staid old house, where hoops and powder and patches,
embroidered coats, rolled stockings, ruffles and swords, had had their
court days many a time.

With that, he went upon his knees, and began to flay his victim; who, on
the first stocking coming off, would certainly have fallen over backward
with his chair, but for there being no room to fall anyhow.

It was visiting time when Wemmick took me in, and a potman was going his
rounds with beer; and the prisoners, behind bars in yards, were buying
beer, and talking to friends; and a frowzy, ugly, disorderly, depressing
scene it was.

He looked across at me, and his eye appraised
my watch-chain, and then he incidentally spat and said something to the
other convict, and they laughed and slued themselves round with a clink
of their coupling manacle, and looked at something else.

"Your servant, Sir," said Joe, "which I hope as you and Pip"--here his
eye fell on the Avenger, who was putting some toast on table, and so
plainly denoted an intention to make that young gentleman one of the
family, that I frowned it down and confused him more--"I meantersay, you
two gentlemen,--which I hope as you get your elths in this close spot?

Several curious little circumstances transpired as the action proceeded.

"Speak the truth, you ingrate!" cried Miss Havisham, passionately
striking her stick upon the floor; "you are tired of me."

By then making a loop of about a couple of miles into
the open country at the back of Pumblechook's premises, I got round into
the High Street again, a little beyond that pitfall, and felt myself in
comparative security.

I think Miss Pocket was conscious that the sight of me involved her
in the danger of being goaded to madness, and perhaps tearing off her
cap,--which was a very hideous one, in the nature of a muslin mop,--and
strewing the ground with her hair,--which assuredly had never grown
on her head.

Words cannot state the amount of aggravation and injury wreaked upon
me by Trabb's boy, when passing abreast of me, he pulled up his
shirt-collar, twined his side-hair, stuck an arm akimbo, and smirked
extravagantly by, wriggling his elbows and body, and drawling to his
attendants, "Don't know yah, don't know yah, 'pon my soul don't know
yah!"

The great
numbers on their backs, as if they were street doors; their coarse mangy
ungainly outer surface, as if they were lower animals; their ironed
legs, apologetically garlanded with pocket-handkerchiefs; and the way
in which all present looked at them and kept from them; made them (as
Herbert had said) a most disagreeable and degraded spectacle.

The disgrace attendant on his immediately afterwards taking
to crowing and pursuing me across the bridge with crows, as from an
exceedingly dejected fowl who had known me when I was a blacksmith,
culminated the disgrace with which I left the town, and was, so to
speak, ejected by it into the open country.

"I'll show you a wrist," repeated Mr. Jaggers, with an immovable
determination to show it.

Cowering forward for warmth and to make me a screen against
the wind, the convicts were closer to me than before.

We became particularly hot upon some
boorish sneer of Drummle's, to the effect that we were too free with our
money.

I had stopped to
look at the house as I passed; and its seared red brick walls, blocked
windows, and strong green ivy clasping even the stacks of chimneys with
its twigs and tendons, as if with sinewy old arms, had made up a rich
attractive mystery, of which I was the hero.

However, having an infirmity--for I am hard of hearing, sir--"

I expressed in pantomime the greatest astonishment.

My little portmanteau was in the boot under my
feet; I had but to turn a hinge to get it out; I threw it down before
me, got down after it, and was left at the first lamp on the first
stones of the town pavement.

Almost as soon as he had spoken, a portly upright man (whom I can
see now, as I write) in a well-worn olive-colored frock-coat, with a
peculiar pallor overspreading the red in his complexion, and eyes that
went wandering about when he tried to fix them, came up to a corner
of the bars, and put his hand to his hat--which had a greasy and fatty
surface like cold broth--with a half-serious and half-jocose military
salute.

I'm only
a subordinate.

He now retorted in a coarse, lumpish way, and Startop
tried to turn the discussion aside with some small pleasantry that made
us all laugh.

The last wrist was much disfigured,--deeply scarred and scarred
across and across.

Their keeper had a brace of pistols, and carried
a thick-knobbed bludgeon under his arm; but he was on terms of good
understanding with them, and stood with them beside him, looking on at
the putting-to of the horses, rather with an air as if the convicts were
an interesting Exhibition not formally open at the moment, and he the
Curator.

It made us
all lethargic before we had gone far, and when we had left the Half-way
House behind, we habitually dozed and shivered and were silent.

I cannot
say whether any diseased affection of the heart caused her lips to be
parted as if she were panting, and her face to bear a curious expression
of suddenness and flutter; but I know that I had been to see Macbeth at
the theatre, a night or two before, and that her face looked to me as if
it were all disturbed by fiery air, like the faces I had seen rise out
of the Witches' caldron.

The disgrace attendant on his immediately afterwards taking
to crowing and pursuing me across the bridge with crows, as from an
exceedingly dejected fowl who had known me when I was a blacksmith,
culminated the disgrace with which I left the town, and was, so to
speak, ejected by it into the open country.

Then he fell into such unaccountable fits of
meditation, with his fork midway between his plate and his mouth; had
his eyes attracted in such strange directions; was afflicted with such
remarkable coughs; sat so far from the table, and dropped so much
more than he ate, and pretended that he hadn't dropped it; that I was
heartily glad when Herbert left us for the City.

Deeming that a serene and unconscious contemplation of him would best
beseem me, and would be most likely to quell his evil mind, I advanced
with that expression of countenance, and was rather congratulating
myself on my success, when suddenly the knees of Trabb's boy smote
together, his hair uprose, his cap fell off, he trembled violently in
every limb, staggered out into the road, and crying to the populace,
"Hold me!

"Pooh!" said he, sluicing his face, and speaking through the
water-drops; "it's nothing, Pip.

What I suffered from, was the incompatibility between his cold
presence and my feelings towards Estella.

An obliging stranger, under pretence of
compactly folding up my bank-notes for security's sake, abstracts the
notes and gives me nutshells; but what is his sleight of hand to mine,
when I fold up my own nutshells and pass them on myself as notes!

Without distinctly knowing whether I should have been more sorry for Mr.
Wopsle if he had been in despair, I was so sorry for him as it was,
that I took the opportunity of his turning round to have his braces
put on,--which jostled us out at the doorway,--to ask Herbert what he
thought of having him home to supper?

"Jaggers," interposed Miss Havisham, much to my relief, "leave my Pip
alone, and go with him to your dinner."

You won't find half so much fault in me if, supposing as you
should ever wish to see me, you come and put your head in at the forge
window and see Joe the blacksmith, there, at the old anvil, in the old
burnt apron, sticking to the old work.

Words cannot state the amount of aggravation and injury wreaked upon
me by Trabb's boy, when passing abreast of me, he pulled up his
shirt-collar, twined his side-hair, stuck an arm akimbo, and smirked
extravagantly by, wriggling his elbows and body, and drawling to his
attendants, "Don't know yah, don't know yah, 'pon my soul don't know
yah!"

I'm so frightened!" feigned to be in a paroxysm of terror and
contrition, occasioned by the dignity of my appearance.

"Well, sir," pursued Joe, "this is how it were.

Hereupon, a choleric gentleman, who had taken the
fourth place on that seat, flew into a most violent passion, and said
that it was a breach of contract to mix him up with such villainous
company, and that it was poisonous, and pernicious, and infamous, and
shameful, and I don't know what else.

He added as a self-evident proposition,
engendering low spirits, "But you can't marry, you know, while you're
looking about you."

If they disclosed to
me, as I suspect they did, that I should not come back, and that Biddy
was quite right, all I can say is,--they were quite right too.

I should have been chary of discussing my guardian too freely even with
her; but I should have gone on with the subject so far as to describe
the dinner in Gerrard Street, if we had not then come into a sudden
glare of gas.

My business habits had one other bright feature, which I called "leaving
a Margin."

I really believe Joe would have prolonged this word (mightily expressive
to my mind of some architecture that I know) into a perfect Chorus, but
for his attention being providentially attracted by his hat, which
was toppling.

Without encroaching on forbidden ground, we
may venture to say that there can be no doubt between ourselves of
that fact.

I entertain a conviction, based upon large experience, that if in the
days of my prosperity I had gone to the North Pole, I should have met
somebody there, wandering Esquimaux or civilized man, who would have
told me that Pumblechook was my earliest patron and the founder of my
fortunes.

"Your servant, Sir," said Joe, "which I hope as you and Pip"--here his
eye fell on the Avenger, who was putting some toast on table, and so
plainly denoted an intention to make that young gentleman one of the
family, that I frowned it down and confused him more--"I meantersay, you
two gentlemen,--which I hope as you get your elths in this close spot?

Dinner went off gayly, and although my guardian seemed to follow rather
than originate subjects, I knew that he wrenched the weakest part of
our dispositions out of us.

In its small proportions, it was not unlike the kind of place
usually assigned to a gate-porter in Paris.

It made us
all lethargic before we had gone far, and when we had left the Half-way
House behind, we habitually dozed and shivered and were silent.

He wore the blue bag in the manner of my great-coat,
and was strutting along the pavement towards me on the opposite side of
the street, attended by a company of delighted young friends to whom he
from time to time exclaimed, with a wave of his hand, "Don't know yah!"

At this time the coach was ready
and the coachman impatient, and we were all preparing to get up, and
the prisoners had come over with their keeper,--bringing with them that
curious flavor of bread-poultice, baize, rope-yarn, and hearthstone,
which attends the convict presence.

I beat the prison dust off my feet as I
sauntered to and fro, and I shook it out of my dress, and I exhaled
its air from my lungs.

Finally, he went
away with Mr. and Mrs. Hubble,--to make an evening of it, I felt sure,
and to tell the Jolly Bargemen that he was the founder of my fortunes
and my earliest benefactor.

I consumed the whole time in thinking how strange it
was that I should be encompassed by all this taint of prison and crime;
that, in my childhood out on our lonely marshes on a winter evening, I
should have first encountered it; that, it should have reappeared on two
occasions, starting out like a stain that was faded but not gone; that,
it should in this new way pervade my fortune and advancement.

But, when we sat by her flickering fire
at night, she was most weird; for then, keeping Estella's hand drawn
through her arm and clutched in her own hand, she extorted from her,
by dint of referring back to what Estella had told her in her regular
letters, the names and conditions of the men whom she had fascinated;
and as Miss Havisham dwelt upon this roll, with the intensity of a mind
mortally hurt and diseased, she sat with her other hand on her crutch
stick, and her chin on...

On my objecting to this retreat, he took us into
another room with a dinner-table for thirty, and in the grate a scorched
leaf of a copy-book under a bushel of coal-dust.

I detested the chambers beyond
expression at that period of repentance, and could not endure the
sight of the Avenger's livery; which had a more expensive and a
less remunerative appearance then than at any other time in the
four-and-twenty hours.

For myself, I found that I was expressing my
tendency to lavish expenditure, and to patronize Herbert, and to boast
of my great prospects, before I quite knew that I had opened my lips.

Years afterwards, I made
a dreadful likeness of that woman, by causing a face that had no other
natural resemblance to it than it derived from flowing hair to pass
behind a bowl of flaming spirits in a dark room.

It was
tempting to think of that expensive Mercenary publicly airing his boots
in the archway of the Blue Boar's posting-yard; it was almost solemn to
imagine him casually produced in the tailor's shop, and confounding
the disrespectful senses of Trabb's boy.

Upon my unfortunate townsman all these incidents accumulated with
playful effect.

We had stopped near the centre
of the long table, and Miss Havisham, with one of her withered arms
stretched out of the chair, rested that clenched hand upon the yellow
cloth.

Mr. Wopsle in a
comprehensive black cloak, being descried entering at the turnpike,
the gravedigger was admonished in a friendly way, "Look out!

For the present may be a werry good inn, according to London opinions,"
said Joe, confidentially, "and I believe its character do stand i; but I
wouldn't keep a pig in it myself,--not in the case that I wished him to
fatten wholesome and to eat with a meller flavor on him."

This was the time
for Wemmick to produce a little kettle, a tray of glasses, and a
black bottle with a porcelain-topped cork, representing some clerical
dignitary of a rubicund and social aspect.

If
now considered in the light of a liberty, excuse it for the love of
poor old days.

But Joe, taking it up carefully with both hands, like a bird's-nest with
eggs in it, wouldn't hear of parting with that piece of property, and
persisted in standing talking over it in a most uncomfortable way.

"Only a little tired of myself," replied Estella, disengaging her arm,
and moving to the great chimney-piece, where she stood looking down at
the fire.

The Finches spent their money foolishly (the Hotel we dined at was
in Covent Garden), and the first Finch I saw when I had the honor of
joining the Grove was Bentley Drummle, at that time floundering about
town in a cab of his own, and doing a great deal of damage to the posts
at the street corners.

Having borne this flattering testimony to the merits of our
dwelling-place, and having incidentally shown this tendency to call me
"sir," Joe, being invited to sit down to table, looked all round the
room for a suitable spot on which to deposit his hat,--as if it were
only on some very few rare substances in nature that it could find a
resting place,--and ultimately stood it on an extreme corner of the
chimney-piece, from which it ever afterwards fell off at intervals.

I have had occasion to notice many hands; but I never saw
stronger in that respect, man's or woman's, than these."

Herbert said from behind (at the same time poking me), "Capitally."

There was no discrepancy of years between us to remove her far from me;
we were of nearly the same age, though of course the age told for more
in her case than in mine; but the air of inaccessibility which her
beauty and her manner gave her, tormented me in the midst of my delight,
and at the height of the assurance I felt that our patroness had chosen
us for one another.

Moreover, he was a boy whom no man could hurt; an
invulnerable and dodging serpent who, when chased into a corner, flew
out again between his captor's legs, scornfully yelping.

For which cogent reason I kept Biddy at a distance during supper, and
when I went up to my own old little room, took as stately a leave of her
as I could, in my murmuring soul, deem reconcilable with the churchyard
and the event of the day.

On this hint we all rose to depart.

It was
tempting to think of that expensive Mercenary publicly airing his boots
in the archway of the Blue Boar's posting-yard; it was almost solemn to
imagine him casually produced in the tailor's shop, and confounding
the disrespectful senses of Trabb's boy.

It was so with all of us, but with no one more than Drummle: the
development of whose inclination to gird in a grudging and suspicious
way at the rest, was screwed out of him before the fish was taken off.

Second, I am beholden to you as the cause of their being so
busy and so mean in vain, and there is my hand upon it."

For myself, I found that I was expressing my
tendency to lavish expenditure, and to patronize Herbert, and to boast
of my great prospects, before I quite knew that I had opened my lips.

It was the afternoon coach by which I had taken my place, and, as winter
had now come round, I should not arrive at my destination until two or
three hours after dark.

"And don't blame me," growled the convict I had recognized.

By dint of straining that
term out of myself several times and tapping the old gentleman on the
chest to associate it with him, I at last succeeded in making my meaning
understood.

Having settled that I must go to the Blue Boar, my mind was much
disturbed by indecision whether or not to take the Avenger.

Still my position was a distinguished one,
and I was not at all dissatisfied with it, until Fate threw me in the
way of that unlimited miscreant, Trabb's boy.

It was worth any money to see Wemmick waving a salute to me from the
other side of the moat, when we might have shaken hands across it with
the greatest ease.

"Yes, perhaps I ought to mention," said Herbert, who had become
curiously crestfallen and meek, since we entered on the interesting
theme, "that she is rather below my mother's nonsensical family notions.

He wore the blue bag in the manner of my great-coat,
and was strutting along the pavement towards me on the opposite side of
the street, attended by a company of delighted young friends to whom he
from time to time exclaimed, with a wave of his hand, "Don't know yah!"

Drummle laughed outright, and sat laughing in our faces, with his hands
in his pockets and his round shoulders raised; plainly signifying that
it was quite true, and that he despised us as asses all.

The disgrace attendant on his immediately afterwards taking
to crowing and pursuing me across the bridge with crows, as from an
exceedingly dejected fowl who had known me when I was a blacksmith,
culminated the disgrace with which I left the town, and was, so to
speak, ejected by it into the open country.

While my
mind was thus engaged, I thought of the beautiful young Estella, proud
and refined, coming towards me, and I thought with absolute abhorrence
of the contrast between the jail and her.

The Queen of Denmark, a very buxom lady, though no doubt historically
brazen, was considered by the public to have too much brass about her;
her chin being attached to her diadem by a broad band of that metal (as
if she had a gorgeous toothache), her waist being encircled by another,
and each of her arms by another, so that she was openly mentioned
as "the kettle-drum."

We were at Newgate in a few minutes, and we passed through the lodge
where some fetters were hanging up on the bare walls among the prison
rules, into the interior of the jail.

I think Miss Pocket was conscious that the sight of me involved her
in the danger of being goaded to madness, and perhaps tearing off her
cap,--which was a very hideous one, in the nature of a muslin mop,--and
strewing the ground with her hair,--which assuredly had never grown
on her head.

I had stopped to
look at the house as I passed; and its seared red brick walls, blocked
windows, and strong green ivy clasping even the stacks of chimneys with
its twigs and tendons, as if with sinewy old arms, had made up a rich
attractive mystery, of which I was the hero.

I really believe Joe would have prolonged this word (mightily expressive
to my mind of some architecture that I know) into a perfect Chorus, but
for his attention being providentially attracted by his hat, which
was toppling.

I rang for the tea, and the waiter, reappearing with his magic clew,
brought in by degrees some fifty adjuncts to that refreshment, but of
tea not a glimpse.

"Which I say, sir," replied Joe, with an air of legal formality, as if
he were making his will, "Miss A., or otherways Havisham.

Ah, indeed!" and also, "Is that Black Bill behind
the cistern?

"Yes, perhaps I ought to mention," said Herbert, who had become
curiously crestfallen and meek, since we entered on the interesting
theme, "that she is rather below my mother's nonsensical family notions.

Moreover, he was a boy whom no man could hurt; an
invulnerable and dodging serpent who, when chased into a corner, flew
out again between his captor's legs, scornfully yelping.

The joy attended Mr. Wopsle
through his struggle with Laertes on the brink of the orchestra and
the grave, and slackened no more until he had tumbled the king off the
kitchen-table, and had died by inches from the ankles upward.

Still, the coincidence of our
being together on the coach, was sufficiently strange to fill me with a
dread that some other coincidence might at any moment connect me, in his
hearing, with my name.

It would have rankled in me
more than it did, if I had not regarded myself as eliciting it by being
so set apart for her and assigned to her.

Resenting this little success more than anything, Drummle,
without any threat or warning, pulled his hands out of his pockets,
dropped his round shoulders, swore, took up a large glass, and would
have flung it at his adversary's head, but for our entertainer's
dexterously seizing it at the instant when it was raised for that
purpose.

"Or," said Estella,--"which is a nearer case,--if you had taught her,
from the dawn of her intelligence, with your utmost energy and might,
that there was such a thing as daylight, but that it was made to be her
enemy and destroyer, and she must always turn against it, for it had
blighted you and would else blight her;--if you had done this, and then,
for a purpose, had wanted her to take naturally to the daylight and she
could not do it, you would have been disappointed and angry?"

I really believe Joe would have prolonged this word (mightily expressive
to my mind of some architecture that I know) into a perfect Chorus, but
for his attention being providentially attracted by his hat, which
was toppling.

"You must have observed, gentlemen," said he,
"an ignorant and a blatant ass, with a rasping throat and a countenance
expressive of low malignity, who went through--I will not say
sustained--the rôle (if I may use a French expression) of Claudius, King
of Denmark.

It was so with all of us, but with no one more than Drummle: the
development of whose inclination to gird in a grudging and suspicious
way at the rest, was screwed out of him before the fish was taken off.

This was so very aggravating--the more especially as I found myself
making no way against his surly obtuseness--that I said, disregarding
Herbert's efforts to check me,--

"Come, Mr. Drummle, since we are on the subject, I'll tell you what
passed between Herbert here and me, when you borrowed that money."

I saw her often at Richmond, I heard of her often in town, and I used
often to take her and the Brandleys on the water; there were picnics,
fête days, plays, operas, concerts, parties, all sorts of pleasures,
through which I pursued her,--and they were all miseries to me.

After
looking a little at her downcast eyes as she walked beside me, I gave up
that point.

When she left
off--and she had not laughed languidly, but with real enjoyment--I said,
in my diffident way with her,--

"I hope I may suppose that you would not be amused if they did me any
harm."

Not with pleasure, though I was bound to him by so many ties; no;
with considerable disturbance, some mortification, and a keen sense of
incongruity.

Didn't you tell me that
your guardian, Mr. Jaggers, told you in the beginning, that you were
not endowed with expectations only?

Induced to take particular notice of the housekeeper, both by her
own striking appearance and by Wemmick's preparation, I observed
that whenever she was in the room she kept her eyes attentively on my
guardian, and that she would remove her hands from any dish she put
before him, hesitatingly, as if she dreaded his calling her back, and
wanted him to speak when she was nigh, if he had anything to say.

It led to my remarking, with more zeal than discretion, that it
came with a bad grace from him, to whom Startop had lent money in my
presence but a week or so before.

According to my experience, the conventional notion
of a lover cannot be always true.

Truly it was impossible to dissociate her presence
from all those wretched hankerings after money and gentility that had
disturbed my boyhood,--from all those ill-regulated aspirations that had
first made me ashamed of home and Joe,--from all those visions that had
raised her face in the glowing fire, struck it out of the iron on the
anvil, extracted it from the darkness of night to look in at the wooden
window of the forge, and flit away.

Here Mr. Wopsle
was divesting himself of his Danish garments, and here there was just
room for us to look at him over one another's shoulders, by keeping the
packing-case door, or lid, wide open.

Without encroaching on forbidden ground, we
may venture to say that there can be no doubt between ourselves of
that fact.

I started
much more naturally then, to find myself confronted by a man in a sober
gray dress.

Estella smiled with perfect composure, and said she
had no doubt of my having been quite right, and of her having been very
disagreeable.

Hereupon Startop took him in hand, though with a much better grace than
I had shown, and exhorted him to be a little more agreeable.

No more, dear Mr. Pip, from your ever obliged, and
affectionate servant,

"BIDDY."

For, after I had made the monster (out of the
refuse of my washerwoman's family), and had clothed him with a blue
coat, canary waistcoat, white cravat, creamy breeches, and the boots
already mentioned, I had to find him a little to do and a great deal
to eat; and with both of those horrible requirements he haunted my
existence.

There was no discrepancy of years between us to remove her far from me;
we were of nearly the same age, though of course the age told for more
in her case than in mine; but the air of inaccessibility which her
beauty and her manner gave her, tormented me in the midst of my delight,
and at the height of the assurance I felt that our patroness had chosen
us for one another.

"Gentlemen," said Mr. Jaggers, deliberately putting down the glass, and
hauling out his gold repeater by its massive chain, "I am exceedingly
sorry to announce that it's half past nine."

Our eyes met, and all the "Sir" melted out of that manly heart as he gave
me his hand.

I'm so frightened!" feigned to be in a paroxysm of terror and
contrition, occasioned by the dignity of my appearance.

I showed her to a nicety where I had seen her
walking on the casks, that first old day, and she said, with a cold and
careless look in that direction, "Did I?"

Then he fell into such unaccountable fits of
meditation, with his fork midway between his plate and his mouth; had
his eyes attracted in such strange directions; was afflicted with such
remarkable coughs; sat so far from the table, and dropped so much
more than he ate, and pretended that he hadn't dropped it; that I was
heartily glad when Herbert left us for the City.

"Thankee, Sir," returned Joe, evidently dispirited by the proposal,
"since you are so kind as make chice of coffee, I will not run contrairy
to your own opinions.

Drummle laughed outright, and sat laughing in our faces, with his hands
in his pockets and his round shoulders raised; plainly signifying that
it was quite true, and that he despised us as asses all.

So, throughout life, our worst weaknesses and meannesses are
usually committed for the sake of the people whom we most despise.

The great
numbers on their backs, as if they were street doors; their coarse mangy
ungainly outer surface, as if they were lower animals; their ironed
legs, apologetically garlanded with pocket-handkerchiefs; and the way
in which all present looked at them and kept from them; made them (as
Herbert had said) a most disagreeable and degraded spectacle.

This is my purse, and you are to pay my charges out
of it.

In my confidence in my own resources, I would willingly have taken
Herbert's expenses on myself; but Herbert was proud, and I could make
no such proposal to him.

"That'll do, Molly," said Mr.
Jaggers, giving her a slight nod; "you have been admired, and can
go."

When he felt his case unusually serious, and that he positively
must find an opening, he would go on 'Change at a busy time, and walk in
and out, in a kind of gloomy country dance figure, among the assembled
magnates.

The upshot was,
that we found a worthy young merchant or shipping-broker, not long
established in business, who wanted intelligent help, and who wanted
capital, and who in due course of time and receipt would want a partner.

I
ascended it now, in lighter boots than of yore, and tapped in my old
way at the door of Miss Havisham's room.

The whole had a slovenly,
confined, and sleepy look, like a cage for a human dormouse; while he,
looming dark and heavy in the shadow of a corner by the window, looked
like the human dormouse for whom it was fitted up,--as indeed he was.

It was interesting to be in the quiet old town once more, and it was not
disagreeable to be here and there suddenly recognized and stared after.

"First, notwithstanding the
proverb that constant dropping will wear away a stone, you may set
your mind at rest that these people never will--never would, in hundred
years--impair your ground with Miss Havisham, in any particular, great
or small.

"Yah!" cried Wemmick, suddenly hitting out at the turnkey in a facetious
way, "you're dumb as one of your own keys when you have to do with my
principal, you know you are.

O
the sense of distance and disparity that came upon me, and the
inaccessibility that came about her!

I turned my head aside, for, with a rush and a sweep, like the old marsh
winds coming up from the sea, a feeling like that which had subdued
me on the morning when I left the forge, when the mists were solemnly
rising, and when I laid my hand upon the village finger-post, smote upon
my heart again.

Mr. Wemmick and I parted at the office in Little Britain, where
suppliants for Mr. Jaggers's notice were lingering about as usual, and I
returned to my watch in the street of the coach-office, with some three
hours on hand.

The last wrist was much disfigured,--deeply scarred and scarred
across and across.

The great
numbers on their backs, as if they were street doors; their coarse mangy
ungainly outer surface, as if they were lower animals; their ironed
legs, apologetically garlanded with pocket-handkerchiefs; and the way
in which all present looked at them and kept from them; made them (as
Herbert had said) a most disagreeable and degraded spectacle.

It ain't that I am proud, but
that I want to be right, as you shall never see me no more in these
clothes.

Standing at this
table, I became conscious of the servile Pumblechook in a black cloak
and several yards of hatband, who was alternately stuffing himself,
and making obsequious movements to catch my attention.

I had not got as much further down the street as the post-office, when I
again beheld Trabb's boy shooting round by a back way.

The doorway soon absorbed her boxes, and she
gave me her hand and a smile, and said good night, and was absorbed
likewise.

I could not have said what I was afraid of, for my fear was altogether
undefined and vague, but there was great fear upon me.

I had stopped to
look at the house as I passed; and its seared red brick walls, blocked
windows, and strong green ivy clasping even the stacks of chimneys with
its twigs and tendons, as if with sinewy old arms, had made up a rich
attractive mystery, of which I was the hero.

I was not at all remorseful for having
unwittingly set those other branches of the Pocket family to the poor
arts they practised; because such littlenesses were their natural
bent, and would have been evoked by anybody else, if I had left them
slumbering.

I arrived on the ground with a quarter of an hour to spare,
attended by the Avenger,--if I may connect that expression with one who
never attended on me if he could possibly help it.

So felons were not lodged and fed better
than soldiers, (to say nothing of paupers,) and seldom set fire to their
prisons with the excusable object of improving the flavor of their soup.

When we gradually fell into keeping
late hours and late company, I noticed that he looked about him with a
desponding eye at breakfast-time; that he began to look about him more
hopefully about mid-day; that he drooped when he came into dinner;
that he seemed to descry Capital in the distance, rather clearly, after
dinner; that he all but realized Capital towards midnight; and that at
about two o'clock in the morning, he became so deeply despondent again
as to talk of buying a ...

I took what Joe gave me, and found it to be the crumpled play-bill of
a small metropolitan theatre, announcing the first appearance, in that
very week, of "the celebrated Provincial Amateur of Roscian renown,
whose unique performance in the highest tragic walk of our National Bard
has lately occasioned so great a sensation in local dramatic circles."

The Queen of Denmark, a very buxom lady, though no doubt historically
brazen, was considered by the public to have too much brass about her;
her chin being attached to her diadem by a broad band of that metal (as
if she had a gorgeous toothache), her waist being encircled by another,
and each of her arms by another, so that she was openly mentioned
as "the kettle-drum."

But, when we sat by her flickering fire
at night, she was most weird; for then, keeping Estella's hand drawn
through her arm and clutched in her own hand, she extorted from her,
by dint of referring back to what Estella had told her in her regular
letters, the names and conditions of the men whom she had fascinated;
and as Miss Havisham dwelt upon this roll, with the intensity of a mind
mortally hurt and diseased, she sat with her other hand on her crutch
stick, and her chin on...

I saw in
this that I, too, was tormented by a perversion of ingenuity, even while
the prize was reserved for me.

I were at the Bargemen
t'other night, Pip;"--whenever he subsided into affection, he called me
Pip, and whenever he relapsed into politeness he called me sir; "when
there come up in his shay-cart, Pumblechook.

"I'll show you a wrist," repeated Mr. Jaggers, with an immovable
determination to show it.

I
laughed in spite of myself all the time, the whole thing was so droll;
and yet I had a latent impression that there was something decidedly
fine in Mr. Wopsle's elocution,--not for old associations' sake, I am
afraid, but because it was very slow, very dreary, very up-hill and
down-hill, and very unlike any way in which any man in any natural
circumstances of life or death ever expressed himself about anything.

I was, and I am, sensible that the air of this chamber, in its strong
combination of stable with soup-stock, might have led one to infer that
the coaching department was not doing well, and that the enterprising
proprietor was boiling down the horses for the refreshment department.

I reminded her where she had
come out of the house and given me my meat and drink, and she said, "I
don't remember."

This device I
executed successfully.

At Startop's suggestion, we put
ourselves down for election into a club called The Finches of the Grove:
the object of which institution I have never divined, if it were not
that the members should dine expensively once a fortnight, to quarrel
among themselves as much as possible after dinner, and to cause six
waiters to get drunk on the stairs.

At such times
the more exuberant among them called out in an excited manner on our
emergence round some corner of expectancy, "Here they come!"

Truly it was impossible to dissociate her presence
from all those wretched hankerings after money and gentility that had
disturbed my boyhood,--from all those ill-regulated aspirations that had
first made me ashamed of home and Joe,--from all those visions that had
raised her face in the glowing fire, struck it out of the iron on the
anvil, extracted it from the darkness of night to look in at the wooden
window of the forge, and flit away.

As Estella looked back over her shoulder before going out at the
door, Miss Havisham kissed that hand to her, with a ravenous intensity
that was of its kind quite dreadful.

But, though she had taken such
strong possession of me, though my fancy and my hope were so set upon
her, though her influence on my boyish life and character had been
all-powerful, I did not, even that romantic morning, invest her with any
attributes save those she possessed.

He immediately began to talk to Drummle: not at all deterred by his
replying in his heavy reticent way, but apparently led on by it to screw
discourse out of him.

Once for all; I loved her none the less because I knew it,
and it had no more influence in restraining me than if I had devoutly
believed her to be human perfection.

I inferred from the methodical nature of Miss Skiffins's
arrangements that she made tea there every Sunday night; and I rather
suspected that a classic brooch she wore, representing the profile of an
undesirable female with a very straight nose and a very new moon, was a
piece of portable property that had been given her by Wemmick.

Their keeper had a brace of pistols, and carried
a thick-knobbed bludgeon under his arm; but he was on terms of good
understanding with them, and stood with them beside him, looking on at
the putting-to of the horses, rather with an air as if the convicts were
an interesting Exhibition not formally open at the moment, and he the
Curator.

On the
whole, I resolved to leave the Avenger behind.

I wrote,
however, to Mr. Trabb by next day's post, to say that Mr. Pip must
decline to deal further with one who could so far forget what he owed to
the best interests of society, as to employ a boy who excited Loathing
in every respectable mind.

As we were going back together to London by the midday coach, and as I
breakfasted under such terrors of Pumblechook that I could scarcely hold
my cup, this gave me an opportunity of saying that I wanted a walk, and
that I would go on along the London road while Mr. Jaggers was occupied,
if he would let the coachman know that I would get into my place when
overtaken.

Nothing disturbed
the tranquillity of the Castle, but the occasional tumbling open of
John and Miss Skiffins: which little doors were a prey to some spasmodic
infirmity that made me sympathetically uncomfortable until I got used
to it.

We came to Richmond all too soon, and our destination there was a house
by the green,--a staid old house, where hoops and powder and patches,
embroidered coats, rolled stockings, ruffles and swords, had had their
court days many a time.

Suddenly, he clapped his large hand on the housekeeper's, like a trap,
as she stretched it across the table.

But I had a reason that was an old reason
now for constitutionally faltering whenever I heard the word "convict."

Now the housekeeper was at that time clearing the table; my guardian,
taking no heed of her, but with the side of his face turned from her,
was leaning back in his chair biting the side of his forefinger and
showing an interest in Drummle, that, to me, was quite inexplicable.

His
personal recognition of each successive client was comprised in a nod,
and in his settling his hat a little easier on his head with both
hands, and then tightening the post-office, and putting his hands in his
pockets.

You had not
your little wits sharpened by their intriguing against you, suppressed
and defenceless, under the mask of sympathy and pity and what not that
is soft and soothing.

Deeming that a serene and unconscious contemplation of him would best
beseem me, and would be most likely to quell his evil mind, I advanced
with that expression of countenance, and was rather congratulating
myself on my success, when suddenly the knees of Trabb's boy smote
together, his hair uprose, his cap fell off, he trembled violently in
every limb, staggered out into the road, and crying to the populace,
"Hold me!

She had adopted Estella, she had as good as adopted me, and it could not
fail to be her intention to bring us together.

Finally he gave a
faint single rap, and Pepper--such was the compromising name of the
avenging boy--announced "Mr. Gargery!"

He seemed to have more
breathing business to do than another man, and to make more noise in
doing it; and I was conscious of growing high-shouldered on one side, in
my shrinking endeavors to fend him off.

"Say a good fellow, if you want a phrase," returned Herbert, smiling,
and clapping his hand on the back of mine--"a good fellow, with
impetuosity and hesitation, boldness and diffidence, action and
dreaming, curiously mixed in him."

Drummle laughed outright, and sat laughing in our faces, with his hands
in his pockets and his round shoulders raised; plainly signifying that
it was quite true, and that he despised us as asses all.

Having borne this flattering testimony to the merits of our
dwelling-place, and having incidentally shown this tendency to call me
"sir," Joe, being invited to sit down to table, looked all round the
room for a suitable spot on which to deposit his hat,--as if it were
only on some very few rare substances in nature that it could find a
resting place,--and ultimately stood it on an extreme corner of the
chimney-piece, from which it ever afterwards fell off at intervals.

Sauces, wines, all
the accessories we wanted, and all of the best, were given out by our
host from his dumb-waiter; and when they had made the circuit of the
table, he always put them back again.

I took what Joe gave me, and found it to be the crumpled play-bill of
a small metropolitan theatre, announcing the first appearance, in that
very week, of "the celebrated Provincial Amateur of Roscian renown,
whose unique performance in the highest tragic walk of our National Bard
has lately occasioned so great a sensation in local dramatic circles."

For, we always ran into new debt immediately, to the full extent
of the margin, and sometimes, in the sense of freedom and solvency it
imparted, got pretty far on into another margin.

"No, no," my guardian assented; "don't have too much to do with him.

This avenging phantom was ordered to be on duty at eight on Tuesday
morning in the hall, (it was two feet square, as charged for
floorcloth,) and Herbert suggested certain things for breakfast that he
thought Joe would like.

I had begun to be always decorating the chambers in some quite
unnecessary and inappropriate way or other, and very expensive those
wrestles with Barnard proved to be.

Mr. Pocket was out lecturing; for, he was a most delightful lecturer on
domestic economy, and his treatises on the management of children and
servants were considered the very best text-books on those themes.

I had not advanced
another two hundred yards when, to my inexpressible terror, amazement,
and indignation, I again beheld Trabb's boy approaching.

From Estella she looked at me, with a searching glance that seemed to
pry into my heart and probe its wounds.

I took what Joe gave me, and found it to be the crumpled play-bill of
a small metropolitan theatre, announcing the first appearance, in that
very week, of "the celebrated Provincial Amateur of Roscian renown,
whose unique performance in the highest tragic walk of our National Bard
has lately occasioned so great a sensation in local dramatic circles."

In a sulky triumph, Drummle showed his morose
depreciation of the rest of us, in a more and more offensive degree,
until he became downright intolerable.

The waiter (it was he who had brought up the Great Remonstrance from the
Commercials, on the day when I was bound) appeared surprised, and
took the earliest opportunity of putting a dirty old copy of a local
newspaper so directly in my way, that I took it up and read this
paragraph:--

Our readers will learn, not altogether without interest, in reference to
the recent romantic rise in fortune of a young artificer in iron of this
neighborhood (what a theme, by the way, for the magic p...

I received this letter by the post on Monday morning, and therefore its
appointment was for next day.

She set the dish on, touched my guardian quietly on the arm with a
finger to notify that dinner was ready, and vanished.

"Us two being now alone," resumed Joe, "and me having the intentions and
abilities to stay not many minutes more, I will now conclude--leastways
begin--to mention what have led to my having had the present honor.

"You had no idea of your impending good fortune, in those times?" said
Estella, with a slight wave of her hand, signifying in the fighting
times.

I know that these gratifying social
ends were so invariably accomplished, that Herbert and I understood
nothing else to be referred to in the first standing toast of the
society: which ran "Gentlemen, may the present promotion of good feeling
ever reign predominant among the Finches of the Grove."

By some invisible agency,
my guardian wound him up to a pitch little short of ferocity about this
trifle; and he fell to baring and spanning his arm to show how muscular
it was, and we all fell to baring and spanning our arms in a ridiculous
manner.

The whole had a slovenly,
confined, and sleepy look, like a cage for a human dormouse; while he,
looming dark and heavy in the shadow of a corner by the window, looked
like the human dormouse for whom it was fitted up,--as indeed he was.

I had the happiness to know you in
former times, and the Drama has ever had a claim which has ever been
acknowledged, on the noble and the affluent."

Let me confess exactly with what feelings
I looked forward to Joe's coming.

The waiter (it was he who had brought up the Great Remonstrance from the
Commercials, on the day when I was bound) appeared surprised, and
took the earliest opportunity of putting a dirty old copy of a local
newspaper so directly in my way, that I took it up and read this
paragraph:--

Our readers will learn, not altogether without interest, in reference to
the recent romantic rise in fortune of a young artificer in iron of this
neighborhood (what a theme, by the way, for the ...

Almost as soon as he had spoken, a portly upright man (whom I can
see now, as I write) in a well-worn olive-colored frock-coat, with a
peculiar pallor overspreading the red in his complexion, and eyes that
went wandering about when he tried to fix them, came up to a corner
of the bars, and put his hand to his hat--which had a greasy and fatty
surface like cold broth--with a half-serious and half-jocose military
salute.

"I begin to think," said Estella, in a musing way, after another moment
of calm wonder, "that I almost understand how this comes about.

Chapter XXVII


"MY DEAR MR PIP:--

"I write this by request of Mr. Gargery, for to let you know that he
is going to London in company with Mr. Wopsle and would be glad if
agreeable to be allowed to see you.

So, Estella and I went out into the garden by the gate through which I
had strayed to my encounter with the pale young gentleman, now Herbert;
I, trembling in spirit and worshipping the very hem of her dress; she,
quite composed and most decidedly not worshipping the hem of mine.

It was the afternoon coach by which I had taken my place, and, as winter
had now come round, I should not arrive at my destination until two or
three hours after dark.

Resenting this little success more than anything, Drummle,
without any threat or warning, pulled his hands out of his pockets,
dropped his round shoulders, swore, took up a large glass, and would
have flung it at his adversary's head, but for our entertainer's
dexterously seizing it at the instant when it was raised for that
purpose.

Now the housekeeper was at that time clearing the table; my guardian,
taking no heed of her, but with the side of his face turned from her,
was leaning back in his chair biting the side of his forefinger and
showing an interest in Drummle, that, to me, was quite inexplicable.

I inferred from the methodical nature of Miss Skiffins's
arrangements that she made tea there every Sunday night; and I rather
suspected that a classic brooch she wore, representing the profile of an
undesirable female with a very straight nose and a very new moon, was a
piece of portable property that had been given her by Wemmick.

So, Estella and I went out into the garden by the gate through which I
had strayed to my encounter with the pale young gentleman, now Herbert;
I, trembling in spirit and worshipping the very hem of her dress; she,
quite composed and most decidedly not worshipping the hem of mine.

Years afterwards, I made
a dreadful likeness of that woman, by causing a face that had no other
natural resemblance to it than it derived from flowing hair to pass
behind a bowl of flaming spirits in a dark room.

The waiter (it was he who had brought up the Great Remonstrance from the
Commercials, on the day when I was bound) appeared surprised, and
took the earliest opportunity of putting a dirty old copy of a local
newspaper so directly in my way, that I took it up and read this
paragraph:--

Our readers will learn, not altogether without interest, in reference to
the recent romantic rise in fortune of a young artificer in iron of this
neighborhood (what a theme, by the way, for the magic p...

"Or," said Estella,--"which is a nearer case,--if you had taught her,
from the dawn of her intelligence, with your utmost energy and might,
that there was such a thing as daylight, but that it was made to be her
enemy and destroyer, and she must always turn against it, for it had
blighted you and would else blight her;--if you had done this, and then,
for a purpose, had wanted her to take naturally to the daylight and she
could not do it, you would have been disappointed and angry?"

I have had occasion to notice many hands; but I never saw
stronger in that respect, man's or woman's, than these."

In my conscience, I doubt very much whether I had any lingering
intention left of going to see Joe; but if I had, this observation put
it to flight.

I entertain a conviction, based upon large experience, that if in the
days of my prosperity I had gone to the North Pole, I should have met
somebody there, wandering Esquimaux or civilized man, who would have
told me that Pumblechook was my earliest patron and the founder of my
fortunes.

That I should
innocently take a bad half-crown of somebody else's manufacture is
reasonable enough; but that I should knowingly reckon the spurious coin
of my own make as good money!

Does the thought-contracted brow
of the local Sage or the lustrous eye of local Beauty inquire whose
fortunes?

The Queen of Denmark, a very buxom lady, though no doubt historically
brazen, was considered by the public to have too much brass about her;
her chin being attached to her diadem by a broad band of that metal (as
if she had a gorgeous toothache), her waist being encircled by another,
and each of her arms by another, so that she was openly mentioned
as "the kettle-drum."

As fur as I am concerned
any one's welcome to my place."

I forget in detail what they were, but I have a general
recollection that he was to begin with reviving the Drama, and to end
with crushing it; inasmuch as his decease would leave it utterly bereft
and without a chance or hope.

The neighborhood, however, highly approved of these arrangements, and we
were much admired as we went through the village; the more youthful and
vigorous part of the community making dashes now and then to cut us off,
and lying in wait to intercept us at points of vantage.

I had got on so fast of late, that I had even started a boy
in boots,--top boots,--in bondage and slavery to whom I might have been
said to pass my days.

I detested the chambers beyond
expression at that period of repentance, and could not endure the
sight of the Avenger's livery; which had a more expensive and a
less remunerative appearance then than at any other time in the
four-and-twenty hours.

"I don't mean to imply that he won't," said I, "but it might make you
hold your tongue about us and our money, I should think."

The remains of my poor sister had been
brought round by the kitchen door, and, it being a point of Undertaking
ceremony that the six bearers must be stifled and blinded under a
horrible black velvet housing with a white border, the whole looked like
a blind monster with twelve human legs, shuffling and blundering along,
under the guidance of two keepers,--the postboy and his comrade.

I have seen him so terrify a
client or a witness by ceremoniously unfolding this pocket-handkerchief
as if he were immediately going to blow his nose, and then pausing,
as if he knew he should not have time to do it before such client
or witness committed himself, that the self-committal has followed
directly, quite as a matter of course.

At that time jails were much
neglected, and the period of exaggerated reaction consequent on
all public wrongdoing--and which is always its heaviest and longest
punishment--was still far off.

It is not wholly
irrespective of our personal feelings that we record HIM as the Mentor
of our young Telemachus, for it is good to know that our town produced
the founder of the latter's fortunes.

As soon as I arrived, I sent a penitential codfish and barrel
of oysters to Joe (as reparation for not having gone myself), and then
went on to Barnard's Inn.

But Joe, taking it up carefully with both hands, like a bird's-nest with
eggs in it, wouldn't hear of parting with that piece of property, and
persisted in standing talking over it in a most uncomfortable way.

"You must know," said Estella, condescending to me as a brilliant and
beautiful woman might, "that I have no heart,--if that has anything to
do with my memory."

It was no laughing matter with Estella now, nor was she summoning these
remembrances from any shallow place.

"Yes!"
said he, facing round, after doggedly preceding me a few steps towards
the house.

So felons were not lodged and fed better
than soldiers, (to say nothing of paupers,) and seldom set fire to their
prisons with the excusable object of improving the flavor of their soup.

Now, concerning the
influence of my position on others, I was in no such difficulty, and so
I perceived--though dimly enough perhaps--that it was not beneficial
to anybody, and, above all, that it was not beneficial to Herbert.

In my fancy, I saw the boat with its convict crew waiting for
them at the slime-washed stairs,--again heard the gruff "Give way, you!"
like and order to dogs,--again saw the wicked Noah's Ark lying out on
the black water.

Their keeper had a brace of pistols, and carried
a thick-knobbed bludgeon under his arm; but he was on terms of good
understanding with them, and stood with them beside him, looking on at
the putting-to of the horses, rather with an air as if the convicts were
an interesting Exhibition not formally open at the moment, and he the
Curator.

The
sensation was like being touched in the marrow with some pungent and
searching acid, it set my very teeth on edge.

It revived my utmost indignation to find that she was still pursued by
this fellow, and I felt inveterate against him.

My thoughts were further distracted by the excessive pride of
Mr. and Mrs. Hubble, who were surpassingly conceited and vainglorious in
being members of so distinguished a procession.

And then I was recommended to
the place as a man who could give another man as good as he brought, and
I took it.

He had left his desk, brought out his two greasy office candlesticks and
stood them in line with the snuffers on a slab near the door, ready to
be extinguished; he had raked his fire low, put his hat and great-coat
ready, and was beating himself all over the chest with his safe-key, as
an athletic exercise after business.

Resenting this little success more than anything, Drummle,
without any threat or warning, pulled his hands out of his pockets,
dropped his round shoulders, swore, took up a large glass, and would
have flung it at his adversary's head, but for our entertainer's
dexterously seizing it at the instant when it was raised for that
purpose.

However, having an infirmity--for I am hard of hearing, sir--"

I expressed in pantomime the greatest astonishment.

No.
In some of her looks and gestures there was that tinge of resemblance
to Miss Havisham which may often be noticed to have been acquired by
children, from grown person with whom they have been much associated and
secluded, and which, when childhood is passed, will produce a remarkable
occasional likeness of expression between faces that are otherwise quite
different.

He immediately began to talk to Drummle: not at all deterred by his
replying in his heavy reticent way, but apparently led on by it to screw
discourse out of him.

"You may," said he, "and I may decline to answer it.

But, though she had taken such
strong possession of me, though my fancy and my hope were so set upon
her, though her influence on my boyish life and character had been
all-powerful, I did not, even that romantic morning, invest her with any
attributes save those she possessed.

At such times
the more exuberant among them called out in an excited manner on our
emergence round some corner of expectancy, "Here they come!"

Dinner went off gayly, and although my guardian seemed to follow rather
than originate subjects, I knew that he wrenched the weakest part of
our dispositions out of us.

We had made some pale efforts in the beginning to applaud Mr. Wopsle;
but they were too hopeless to be persisted in.

It was likewise to be noted of this majestic spirit, that
whereas it always appeared with an air of having been out a long time
and walked an immense distance, it perceptibly came from a closely
contiguous wall.

I found
him in his dressing-room surrounded by his stock of boots, already hard
at it, washing his hands of us.

Chapter XXXI

On our arrival in Denmark, we found the king and queen of that country
elevated in two arm-chairs on a kitchen-table, holding a Court.

Having borne this flattering testimony to the merits of our
dwelling-place, and having incidentally shown this tendency to call me
"sir," Joe, being invited to sit down to table, looked all round the
room for a suitable spot on which to deposit his hat,--as if it were
only on some very few rare substances in nature that it could find a
resting place,--and ultimately stood it on an extreme corner of the
chimney-piece, from which it ever afterwards fell off at intervals.

Chapter XXXVII

Deeming Sunday the best day for taking Mr. Wemmick's Walworth
sentiments, I devoted the next ensuing Sunday afternoon to a pilgrimage
to the Castle.

I forget in detail what they were, but I have a general
recollection that he was to begin with reviving the Drama, and to end
with crushing it; inasmuch as his decease would leave it utterly bereft
and without a chance or hope.

Joe looked at me for a single instant with something faintly like
reproach.

I know that these gratifying social
ends were so invariably accomplished, that Herbert and I understood
nothing else to be referred to in the first standing toast of the
society: which ran "Gentlemen, may the present promotion of good feeling
ever reign predominant among the Finches of the Grove."

I arrived on the ground with a quarter of an hour to spare,
attended by the Avenger,--if I may connect that expression with one who
never attended on me if he could possibly help it.

The neighborhood, however, highly approved of these arrangements, and we
were much admired as we went through the village; the more youthful and
vigorous part of the community making dashes now and then to cut us off,
and lying in wait to intercept us at points of vantage.

"Us two being now alone," resumed Joe, "and me having the intentions and
abilities to stay not many minutes more, I will now conclude--leastways
begin--to mention what have led to my having had the present honor.

A ghost-seeing effect in Joe's own countenance informed me that Herbert
had entered the room.

But we had looked forward to
my one-and-twentieth birthday, with a crowd of speculations and
anticipations, for we had both considered that my guardian could hardly
help saying something definite on that occasion.

So contaminated did I feel, remembering who was
coming, that the coach came quickly after all, and I was not yet free
from the soiling consciousness of Mr. Wemmick's conservatory, when I saw
her face at the coach window and her hand waving to me.

Chapter XXXVI

Herbert and I went on from bad to worse, in the way of increasing our
debts, looking into our affairs, leaving Margins, and the like exemplary
transactions; and Time went on, whether or no, as he has a way of doing;
and I came of age,--in fulfilment of Herbert's prediction, that I should
do so before I knew where I was.

It was
tempting to think of that expensive Mercenary publicly airing his boots
in the archway of the Blue Boar's posting-yard; it was almost solemn to
imagine him casually produced in the tailor's shop, and confounding
the disrespectful senses of Trabb's boy.

And
indeed, I think we are all engaged, except the baby."

And now before I say anything more about my
father, or my father's son, and repay confidence with confidence, I want
to make myself seriously disagreeable to you for a moment,--positively
repulsive."

In her desire to be matrimonially established, you
might suppose her to have passed her short existence in the perpetual
contemplation of domestic bliss.

I got through some jargon to the effect that I took the liberty of
doubting that.

Rather tall, of a lithe nimble figure, extremely
pale, with large faded eyes, and a quantity of streaming hair.

As we
drew near to the place of encounter, she stopped and said,--

"I must have been a singular little creature to hide and see that fight
that day; but I did, and I enjoyed it very much."

It is not wholly
irrespective of our personal feelings that we record HIM as the Mentor
of our young Telemachus, for it is good to know that our town produced
the founder of the latter's fortunes.

For
was it not," said Joe, with his old air of lucid exposition, "that my
only wish were to be useful to you, I should not have had the honor of
breaking wittles in the company and abode of gentlemen."

But I must have lost it longer than I had thought, since, although
I could recognize nothing in the darkness and the fitful lights and
shadows of our lamps, I traced marsh country in the cold damp wind that
blew at us.

The moment
he ceased, she looked at him again.

I
fancied that I could detect in his manner a consciousness of this, and a
purpose of always holding her in suspense.

I was very much impressed, and not for the first time, by my guardian's
subtlety.

"It is not easy for even you." said Estella, "to know what satisfaction
it gives me to see those people thwarted, or what an enjoyable sense of
the ridiculous I have when they are made ridiculous.

On the day before it, I received an official note from
Wemmick, informing me that Mr. Jaggers would be glad if I would call
upon him at five in the afternoon of the auspicious day.

Mudbank, mist, swamp, and work; work, swamp,
mist, and mudbank."

I cannot
say whether any diseased affection of the heart caused her lips to be
parted as if she were panting, and her face to bear a curious expression
of suddenness and flutter; but I know that I had been to see Macbeth at
the theatre, a night or two before, and that her face looked to me as if
it were all disturbed by fiery air, like the faces I had seen rise out
of the Witches' caldron.

Years afterwards, I made
a dreadful likeness of that woman, by causing a face that had no other
natural resemblance to it than it derived from flowing hair to pass
behind a bowl of flaming spirits in a dark room.

Then, Estella being gone and we two left alone, she turned to me, and
said in a whisper,--

"Is she beautiful, graceful, well-grown?

When we gradually fell into keeping
late hours and late company, I noticed that he looked about him with a
desponding eye at breakfast-time; that he began to look about him more
hopefully about mid-day; that he drooped when he came into dinner;
that he seemed to descry Capital in the distance, rather clearly, after
dinner; that he all but realized Capital towards midnight; and that at
about two o'clock in the morning, he became so deeply despondent again
as to talk of buying a rifle a...

The arrival of the body for interment (in an empty
black box with the lid tumbling open), was the signal for a general
joy, which was much enhanced by the discovery, among the bearers, of
an individual obnoxious to identification.

Chapter XXVII


"MY DEAR MR PIP:--

"I write this by request of Mr. Gargery, for to let you know that he
is going to London in company with Mr. Wopsle and would be glad if
agreeable to be allowed to see you.

For she rose up in the chair, in her shroud of a
dress, and struck at the air as if she would as soon have struck herself
against the wall and fallen dead.

His blue bag was slung over his shoulder, honest
industry beamed in his eyes, a determination to proceed to Trabb's with
cheerful briskness was indicated in his gait.

Drummle upon this, informed our host that he much preferred our room to
our company, and that as to skill he was more than our master, and that
as to strength he could scatter us like chaff.

As to his shirt-collar, and his coat-collar, they were perplexing to
reflect upon,--insoluble mysteries both.

I think Miss Pocket was conscious that the sight of me involved her
in the danger of being goaded to madness, and perhaps tearing off her
cap,--which was a very hideous one, in the nature of a muslin mop,--and
strewing the ground with her hair,--which assuredly had never grown
on her head.

Rather tall, of a lithe nimble figure, extremely
pale, with large faded eyes, and a quantity of streaming hair.

I was modestly wondering whether my utmost ingenuity would have enabled
me to say anything that would have amused him half as much as this
imaginary pleasantry, when I was startled by a sudden click in the wall
on one side of the chimney, and the ghostly tumbling open of a little
wooden flap with "JOHN" upon it.

I
laughed in spite of myself all the time, the whole thing was so droll;
and yet I had a latent impression that there was something decidedly
fine in Mr. Wopsle's elocution,--not for old associations' sake, I am
afraid, but because it was very slow, very dreary, very up-hill and
down-hill, and very unlike any way in which any man in any natural
circumstances of life or death ever expressed himself about anything.

"Your servant, Sir," said Joe, "which I hope as you and Pip"--here his
eye fell on the Avenger, who was putting some toast on table, and so
plainly denoted an intention to make that young gentleman one of the
family, that I frowned it down and confused him more--"I meantersay, you
two gentlemen,--which I hope as you get your elths in this close spot?

I consumed the whole time in thinking how strange it
was that I should be encompassed by all this taint of prison and crime;
that, in my childhood out on our lonely marshes on a winter evening, I
should have first encountered it; that, it should have reappeared on two
occasions, starting out like a stain that was faded but not gone; that,
it should in this new way pervade my fortune and advancement.

After overhearing this dialogue, I should assuredly have got down and
been left in the solitude and darkness of the highway, but for feeling
certain that the man had no suspicion of my identity.

This device I
executed successfully.

But his greatest trials were in the churchyard, which had the appearance
of a primeval forest, with a kind of small ecclesiastical wash-house
on one side, and a turnpike gate on the other.

Startop,
being a lively, bright young fellow, and Drummle being the exact
opposite, the latter was always disposed to resent him as a direct
personal affront.

This was so very aggravating--the more especially as I found myself
making no way against his surly obtuseness--that I said, disregarding
Herbert's efforts to check me,--

"Come, Mr. Drummle, since we are on the subject, I'll tell you what
passed between Herbert here and me, when you borrowed that money."

The bill paid, and the waiter remembered, and the ostler not forgotten,
and the chambermaid taken into consideration,--in a word, the whole
house bribed into a state of contempt and animosity, and Estella's purse
much lightened,--we got into our post-coach and drove away.

This gradually led to a want of toleration for him, and even--on
his being detected in holy orders, and declining to perform the funeral
service--to the general indignation taking the form of nuts.

I mention this in this place, of a
fixed purpose, because it is the clew by which I am to be followed into
my poor labyrinth.

"Don't take it so much amiss, sir," pleaded the keeper to the angry
passenger; "I'll sit next you myself.

I showed her to a nicety where I had seen her
walking on the casks, that first old day, and she said, with a cold and
careless look in that direction, "Did I?"

On this hint we all rose to depart.

Having looked at this
extinct conflagration and shaken his head, he took my order; which,
proving to be merely, "Some tea for the lady," sent him out of the room
in a very low state of mind.

The arrival of the body for interment (in an empty
black box with the lid tumbling open), was the signal for a general
joy, which was much enhanced by the discovery, among the bearers, of
an individual obnoxious to identification.

Sitting near her, with the white shoe, that had never been
worn, in her hand, and her head bent as she looked at it, was an elegant
lady whom I had never seen.

From this last speech I derived the notion
that Miss Havisham, for some reason or no reason, had not taken him
into her confidence as to her designing me for Estella; that he resented
this, and felt a jealousy about it; or that he really did object to
that scheme, and would have nothing to do with it.

The noble boy in the ancestral boots was
inconsistent, representing himself, as it were in one breath, as an able
seaman, a strolling actor, a grave-digger, a clergyman, and a person
of the utmost importance at a Court fencing-match, on the authority
of whose practised eye and nice discrimination the finest strokes were
judged.

He held it between himself and the candle, tasted
the port, rolled it in his mouth, swallowed it, looked at his
glass again, smelt the port, tried it, drank it, filled again, and
cross-examined the glass again, until I was as nervous as if I had known
the wine to be telling him something to my disadvantage.

Standing at this
table, I became conscious of the servile Pumblechook in a black cloak
and several yards of hatband, who was alternately stuffing himself,
and making obsequious movements to catch my attention.

Almost as soon as he had spoken, a portly upright man (whom I can
see now, as I write) in a well-worn olive-colored frock-coat, with a
peculiar pallor overspreading the red in his complexion, and eyes that
went wandering about when he tried to fix them, came up to a corner
of the bars, and put his hand to his hat--which had a greasy and fatty
surface like cold broth--with a half-serious and half-jocose military
salute.

All this time (still with both hands taking great care of the
bird's-nest), Joe was rolling his eyes round and round the room, and
round and round the flowered pattern of my dressing-gown.

He looked across at me, and his eye appraised
my watch-chain, and then he incidentally spat and said something to the
other convict, and they laughed and slued themselves round with a clink
of their coupling manacle, and looked at something else.

And Mr. Jaggers made not me alone intensely melancholy, because,
after he was gone, Herbert said of himself, with his eyes fixed on the
fire, that he thought he must have committed a felony and forgotten the
details of it, he felt so dejected and guilty.

Having borne this flattering testimony to the merits of our
dwelling-place, and having incidentally shown this tendency to call me
"sir," Joe, being invited to sit down to table, looked all round the
room for a suitable spot on which to deposit his hat,--as if it were
only on some very few rare substances in nature that it could find a
resting place,--and ultimately stood it on an extreme corner of the
chimney-piece, from which it ever afterwards fell off at intervals.

When he had once more laughed heartily, he became meek again, and told
me that the moment he began to realize Capital, it was his intention
to marry this young lady.

Mr. Pocket was out lecturing; for, he was a most delightful lecturer on
domestic economy, and his treatises on the management of children and
servants were considered the very best text-books on those themes.

Deeming that a serene and unconscious contemplation of him would best
beseem me, and would be most likely to quell his evil mind, I advanced
with that expression of countenance, and was rather congratulating
myself on my success, when suddenly the knees of Trabb's boy smote
together, his hair uprose, his cap fell off, he trembled violently in
every limb, staggered out into the road, and crying to the populace,
"Hold me!

"There's power here," said Mr. Jaggers, coolly tracing out the sinews
with his forefinger.

The moment
he ceased, she looked at him again.

At this time the coach was ready
and the coachman impatient, and we were all preparing to get up, and
the prisoners had come over with their keeper,--bringing with them that
curious flavor of bread-poultice, baize, rope-yarn, and hearthstone,
which attends the convict presence.

But the old boy was so far from responding, that he would not
even walk to Hammersmith on the same side of the way; so Herbert and I,
who remained in town, saw them going down the street on opposite sides;
Startop leading, and Drummle lagging behind in the shadow of the houses,
much as he was wont to follow in his boat.

"Gentlemen," said Mr. Jaggers, deliberately putting down the glass, and
hauling out his gold repeater by its massive chain, "I am exceedingly
sorry to announce that it's half past nine."

I should have replied that Love was commonly reputed blind, but for the
reason that I always was restrained--and this was not the least of my
miseries--by a feeling that it was ungenerous to press myself upon her,
when she knew that she could not choose but obey Miss Havisham.

It was not then, but when we had got to the cheese, that our
conversation turned upon our rowing feats, and that Drummle was rallied
for coming up behind of a night in that slow amphibious way of his.

In the act of dipping forward as if I
were going to bathe among the horses, I woke in a fright and took the
question up again.

"This is very discouraging," said I.

"Meant to be so," said Wemmick.

Mr. Jaggers shook his head,--not in negativing the question, but in
altogether negativing the notion that he could anyhow be got to answer
it,--and the two horrible casts of the twitched faces looked, when
my eyes strayed up to them, as if they had come to a crisis in their
suspended attention, and were going to sneeze.

"Did you observe, gentlemen," said Mr. Waldengarver, "that there was a
man in the gallery who endeavored to cast derision on the service,--I
mean, the representation?"

All the children of the village, and most of the women,
were admiring these sable warders and the closed windows of the house
and forge; and as I came up, one of the two warders (the postboy)
knocked at the door,--implying that I was far too much exhausted by
grief to have strength remaining to knock for myself.

I should have been chary of discussing my guardian too freely even with
her; but I should have gone on with the subject so far as to describe
the dinner in Gerrard Street, if we had not then come into a sudden
glare of gas.

"Did I?" she replied, in an incidental and forgetful way.

Rather tall, of a lithe nimble figure, extremely
pale, with large faded eyes, and a quantity of streaming hair.

I had begun to be always decorating the chambers in some quite
unnecessary and inappropriate way or other, and very expensive those
wrestles with Barnard proved to be.

"Are they any wiser?" said Sarah, with a dismal shake of the head; "they
had better be wiser, than well.

Which I
meantersay, if the ghost of a man's own father cannot be allowed to
claim his attention, what can, Sir?

I adapted them for my own repetition, and said to my pillow, "I
love her, I love her, I love her!" hundreds of times.

For, after I had made the monster (out of the
refuse of my washerwoman's family), and had clothed him with a blue
coat, canary waistcoat, white cravat, creamy breeches, and the boots
already mentioned, I had to find him a little to do and a great deal
to eat; and with both of those horrible requirements he haunted my
existence.

He actually seemed
to serve as a zest to Mr. Jaggers's wine.

The mother is a lady of
some station, though not averse to increasing her income."

The air of completeness and superiority with which she walked at my
side, and the air of youthfulness and submission with which I walked at
hers, made a contrast that I strongly felt.

The whole had a slovenly,
confined, and sleepy look, like a cage for a human dormouse; while he,
looming dark and heavy in the shadow of a corner by the window, looked
like the human dormouse for whom it was fitted up,--as indeed he was.

Upon that,
he pulled out a napkin, as if it were a magic clew without which he
couldn't find the way up stairs, and led us to the black hole of the
establishment, fitted up with a diminishing mirror (quite a superfluous
article, considering the hole's proportions), an anchovy sauce-cruet,
and somebody's pattens.

Dinner over, we produced a bundle of pens, a copious supply of ink, and
a goodly show of writing and blotting paper.

"Us two being now alone," resumed Joe, "and me having the intentions and
abilities to stay not many minutes more, I will now conclude--leastways
begin--to mention what have led to my having had the present honor.

Soothed by my exertions, my method, and Herbert's
compliments, I would sit with his symmetrical bundle and my own on the
table before me among the stationary, and feel like a Bank of some sort,
rather than a private individual.

Truly it was impossible to dissociate her presence
from all those wretched hankerings after money and gentility that had
disturbed my boyhood,--from all those ill-regulated aspirations that had
first made me ashamed of home and Joe,--from all those visions that had
raised her face in the glowing fire, struck it out of the iron on the
anvil, extracted it from the darkness of night to look in at the wooden
window of the forge, and flit away.

I cannot
say whether any diseased affection of the heart caused her lips to be
parted as if she were panting, and her face to bear a curious expression
of suddenness and flutter; but I know that I had been to see Macbeth at
the theatre, a night or two before, and that her face looked to me as if
it were all disturbed by fiery air, like the faces I had seen rise out
of the Witches' caldron.

I often paid him a visit in the dark back-room in which
he consorted with an ink-jar, a hat-peg, a coal-box, a string-box, an
almanac, a desk and stool, and a ruler; and I do not remember that I
ever saw him do anything else but look about him.

It was visiting time when Wemmick took me in, and a potman was going his
rounds with beer; and the prisoners, behind bars in yards, were buying
beer, and talking to friends; and a frowzy, ugly, disorderly, depressing
scene it was.

"And that," said I, "is your deliberate opinion, Mr. Wemmick?"

In our boyish want of discretion I dare say we took too much to drink,
and I know we talked too much.

The arrival of the body for interment (in an empty
black box with the lid tumbling open), was the signal for a general
joy, which was much enhanced by the discovery, among the bearers, of
an individual obnoxious to identification.

Miss Havisham had settled down, I hardly knew how, upon the floor, among
the faded bridal relics with which it w

I should be an inconvenience at Joe's; I was not
expected, and my bed would not be ready; I should be too far from
Miss Havisham's, and she was exacting and mightn't like it.

So now, as an infallible way of making little ease great ease, I began
to contract a quantity of debt.

Hereupon, a choleric gentleman, who had taken the
fourth place on that seat, flew into a most violent passion, and said
that it was a breach of contract to mix him up with such villainous
company, and that it was poisonous, and pernicious, and infamous, and
shameful, and I don't know what else.

Which that same identical,"
said Joe, going down a new track, "do comb my 'air the wrong way
sometimes, awful, by giving out up and down town as it were him which
ever had your infant companionation and were looked upon as a playfellow
by yourself."

Miss Skiffins's composure while she did this was one
of the most remarkable sights I have ever seen, and if I could have
thought the act consistent with abstraction of mind, I should have
deemed that Miss Skiffins performed it mechanically.

I alluded to the advantages I had
derived in my first rawness and ignorance from his society, and I
confessed that I feared I had but ill repaid them, and that he might
have done better without me and my expectations.

Chapter XXXVI

Herbert and I went on from bad to worse, in the way of increasing our
debts, looking into our affairs, leaving Margins, and the like exemplary
transactions; and Time went on, whether or no, as he has a way of doing;
and I came of age,--in fulfilment of Herbert's prediction, that I should
do so before I knew where I was.

At our
own door, I found little Jane Pocket coming home from a little party
escorted by her little lover; and I envied her little lover, in spite of
his being subject to Flopson.

I was, and I am, sensible that the air of this chamber, in its strong
combination of stable with soup-stock, might have led one to infer that
the coaching department was not doing well, and that the enterprising
proprietor was boiling down the horses for the refreshment department.

How do you thrive with Mr. Pocket?"

It is impossible to express with what acuteness I felt the convict's
breathing, not only on the back of my head, but all along my spine.

I am confident
that it took no distinctness of shape, and that it was the revival for a
few minutes of the terror of childhood.

From Estella she looked at me, with a searching glance that seemed to
pry into my heart and probe its wounds.

Avoiding forbidden
ground, as you did just now, I may still say that on the constancy of
one person (naming no person) all my expectations depend.

To
have struggled with him in the street, or to have exacted any lower
recompense from him than his heart's best blood, would have been
futile and degrading.

As I had often heard of them in the capacity of outside
passengers, and had more than once seen them on the high road dangling
their ironed legs over the coach roof, I had no cause to be surprised
when Herbert, meeting me in the yard, came up and told me there were two
convicts going down with me.

In this progress I was much annoyed
by the abject Pumblechook, who, being behind me, persisted all the way
as a delicate attention in arranging my streaming hatband, and smoothing
my cloak.

Utterly preposterous as his cravat was, and as his collars
were, I was conscious of a sort of dignity in the look.

On my objecting to this retreat, he took us into
another room with a dinner-table for thirty, and in the grate a scorched
leaf of a copy-book under a bushel of coal-dust.

But he really
is disinterested, and above small jealousy and spite, I have heard?"

For myself, I found that I was expressing my
tendency to lavish expenditure, and to patronize Herbert, and to boast
of my great prospects, before I quite knew that I had opened my lips.

His arms and legs were like great pincushions of those shapes,
and his attire disguised him absurdly; but I knew his half-closed eye
at one glance.

They wore the dress that I
likewise knew well.

It was no nominal meal that we were going to make,
but a vigorous reality.

Startop,
being a lively, bright young fellow, and Drummle being the exact
opposite, the latter was always disposed to resent him as a direct
personal affront.

I
fancied that I could detect in his manner a consciousness of this, and a
purpose of always holding her in suspense.

In its small proportions, it was not unlike the kind of place
usually assigned to a gate-porter in Paris.

The Queen of Denmark, a very buxom lady, though no doubt historically
brazen, was considered by the public to have too much brass about her;
her chin being attached to her diadem by a broad band of that metal (as
if she had a gorgeous toothache), her waist being encircled by another,
and each of her arms by another, so that she was openly mentioned
as "the kettle-drum."

My patroness, too, might hear of him, and not approve.

I took what Joe gave me, and found it to be the crumpled play-bill of
a small metropolitan theatre, announcing the first appearance, in that
very week, of "the celebrated Provincial Amateur of Roscian renown,
whose unique performance in the highest tragic walk of our National Bard
has lately occasioned so great a sensation in local dramatic circles."

Between him and me, secret articles were signed of which Herbert was the
subject, and I paid him half of my five hundred pounds down, and engaged
for sundry other payments: some, to fall due at certain dates out of my
income: some, contingent on my coming into my property.

But unless I had taken the life of Trabb's boy on that occasion, I
really do not even now see what I could have done save endure.

Drummle upon this, informed our host that he much preferred our room to
our company, and that as to skill he was more than our master, and that
as to strength he could scatter us like chaff.

Mr. Pocket being justly celebrated for giving most excellent practical
advice, and for having a clear and sound perception of things and a
highly judicious mind, I had some notion in my heart-ache of begging him
to accept my confidence.

Words cannot state the amount of aggravation and injury wreaked upon
me by Trabb's boy, when passing abreast of me, he pulled up his
shirt-collar, twined his side-hair, stuck an arm akimbo, and smirked
extravagantly by, wriggling his elbows and body, and drawling to his
attendants, "Don't know yah, don't know yah, 'pon my soul don't know
yah!"

Having borne this flattering testimony to the merits of our
dwelling-place, and having incidentally shown this tendency to call me
"sir," Joe, being invited to sit down to table, looked all round the
room for a suitable spot on which to deposit his hat,--as if it were
only on some very few rare substances in nature that it could find a
resting place,--and ultimately stood it on an extreme corner of the
chimney-piece, from which it ever afterwards fell off at intervals.

His arms and legs were like great pincushions of those shapes,
and his attire disguised him absurdly; but I knew his half-closed eye
at one glance.

The arrival of the body for interment (in an empty
black box with the lid tumbling open), was the signal for a general
joy, which was much enhanced by the discovery, among the bearers, of
an individual obnoxious to identification.

The waiter (it was he who had brought up the Great Remonstrance from the
Commercials, on the day when I was bound) appeared surprised, and
took the earliest opportunity of putting a dirty old copy of a local
newspaper so directly in my way, that I took it up and read this
paragraph:--

Our readers will learn, not altogether without interest, in reference to
the recent romantic rise in fortune of a young artificer in iron of this
neighborhood (what a theme, by the way, for the ...

As Estella looked back over her shoulder before going out at the
door, Miss Havisham kissed that hand to her, with a ravenous intensity
that was of its kind quite dreadful.

I took what Joe gave me, and found it to be the crumpled play-bill of
a small metropolitan theatre, announcing the first appearance, in that
very week, of "the celebrated Provincial Amateur of Roscian renown,
whose unique performance in the highest tragic walk of our National Bard
has lately occasioned so great a sensation in local dramatic circles."

"I should think from the color of his clothes that he is working in the
quarries."

SAP.

It is said, at any rate.

She hung upon Estella's beauty, hung upon her words, hung upon her
gestures, and sat mumbling her own trembling fingers while she looked at
her, as though she were devouring the beautiful creature she had reared.

You did not gradually open your round
childish eyes wider and wider to the discovery of that impostor of a
woman who calculates her stores of peace of mind for when she wakes up
in the night.

It's opposed to my orders to hold the gate open."

It was so with all of us, but with no one more than Drummle: the
development of whose inclination to gird in a grudging and suspicious
way at the rest, was screwed out of him before the fish was taken off.

Sitting near her, with the white shoe, that had never been
worn, in her hand, and her head bent as she looked at it, was an elegant
lady whom I had never seen.

The remains of my poor sister had been
brought round by the kitchen door, and, it being a point of Undertaking
ceremony that the six bearers must be stifled and blinded under a
horrible black velvet housing with a white border, the whole looked like
a blind monster with twelve human legs, shuffling and blundering along,
under the guidance of two keepers,--the postboy and his comrade.

But, when we sat by her flickering fire
at night, she was most weird; for then, keeping Estella's hand drawn
through her arm and clutched in her own hand, she extorted from her,
by dint of referring back to what Estella had told her in her regular
letters, the names and conditions of the men whom she had fascinated;
and as Miss Havisham dwelt upon this roll, with the intensity of a mind
mortally hurt and diseased, she sat with her other hand on her crutch
stick, and her chin on that, ...

If you are unable to make up your quantum, my boy, you had
better address yourself to a principal; there are plenty of principals
in the profession, you know, and what is not worth the while of one, may
be worth the while of another; that's my recommendation to you, speaking
as a subordinate.

As the time approached I should have liked to run away, but the Avenger
pursuant to orders was in the hall, and presently I heard Joe on
the staircase.

The responsible
duty of making the toast was delegated to the Aged, and that excellent
old gentleman was so intent upon it that he seemed to me in some danger
of melting his eyes.

"That'll do, Molly," said Mr.
Jaggers, giving her a slight nod; "you have been admired, and can
go."

If they disclosed to
me, as I suspect they did, that I should not come back, and that Biddy
was quite right, all I can say is,--they were quite right too.

Avoiding forbidden
ground, as you did just now, I may still say that on the constancy of
one person (naming no person) all my expectations depend.

The noble boy in the ancestral boots was
inconsistent, representing himself, as it were in one breath, as an able
seaman, a strolling actor, a grave-digger, a clergyman, and a person
of the utmost importance at a Court fencing-match, on the authority
of whose practised eye and nice discrimination the finest strokes were
judged.

As for example; on the
question whether 'twas nobler in the mind to suffer, some roared yes,
and some no, and some inclining to both opinions said "Toss up for
it;" and quite a Debating Society arose.

I consumed the whole time in thinking how strange it
was that I should be encompassed by all this taint of prison and crime;
that, in my childhood out on our lonely marshes on a winter evening, I
should have first encountered it; that, it should have reappeared on two
occasions, starting out like a stain that was faded but not gone; that,
it should in this new way pervade my fortune and advancement.

The whole had a slovenly,
confined, and sleepy look, like a cage for a human dormouse; while he,
looming dark and heavy in the shadow of a corner by the window, looked
like the human dormouse for whom it was fitted up,--as indeed he was.

"Rather mean to borrow under those circumstances, I should say."

"Don't take it so much amiss, sir," pleaded the keeper to the angry
passenger; "I'll sit next you myself.

It's remarkable what mere force of grip there is in these
hands.

Of the manner and extent to which he took our trumps into custody, and
came out with mean little cards at the ends of hands, before which the
glory of our Kings and Queens was utterly abased, I say nothing; nor, of
the feeling that I had, respecting his looking upon us personally in the
light of three very obvious and poor riddles that he had found out long
ago.

But, when I had secured my box-place by to-morrow's coach, and had been
down to Mr. Pocket's and back, I was not by any means convinced on the
last point, and began to invent reasons and make excuses for putting
up at the Blue Boar.

Mrs. Brandley had been a friend of Miss
Havisham's before the time of her seclusion.

The
whole of the Danish nobility were in attendance; consisting of a noble
boy in the wash-leather boots of a gigantic ancestor, a venerable Peer
with a dirty face who seemed to have risen from the people late in life,
and the Danish chivalry with a comb in its hair and a pair of white
silk legs, and presenting on the whole a feminine appearance.

It was so with all of us, but with no one more than Drummle: the
development of whose inclination to gird in a grudging and suspicious
way at the rest, was screwed out of him before the fish was taken off.

In saying this, I relieved my mind of what had always been
there, more or less, though no doubt most since yesterday.

There was no discrepancy of years between us to remove her far from me;
we were of nearly the same age, though of course the age told for more
in her case than in mine; but the air of inaccessibility which her
beauty and her manner gave her, tormented me in the midst of my delight,
and at the height of the assurance I felt that our patroness had chosen
us for one another.

At all events, you'll be nearer
getting it, for it must come at last."

The garden was too overgrown and rank for walking in with ease, and
after we had made the round of it twice or thrice, we came out again
into the brewery yard.

I had little objection to his being seen by
Herbert or his father, for both of whom I had a respect; but I had the
sharpest sensitiveness as to his being seen by Drummle, whom I held in
contempt.

We played until nine o'clock, and then it was arranged that when Estella
came to London I should be forewarned of her coming and should meet her
at the coach; and then I took leave of her, and touched her and left
her.

If we all did what
we undertake to do, as faithfully as Herbert did, we might live in a
Republic of the Virtues.

But, when I had secured my box-place by to-morrow's coach, and had been
down to Mr. Pocket's and back, I was not by any means convinced on the
last point, and began to invent reasons and make excuses for putting
up at the Blue Boar.

Chapter XXVIII

It was clear that I must repair to our town next day, and in the first
flow of my repentance, it was equally clear that I must stay at Joe's.

Then, a burst of
gratitude came upon me, that she should be destined for me, once the
blacksmith's boy.

"You know his employer?" said I.

Mr. Wopsle shut his eyes, and opened them again; performing both
ceremonies very slowly.

While I felt sincerely obliged to him for being
so interested and considerate, I had an odd half-provoked sense of
suspicion upon me, that if Joe had been coming to see him, he wouldn't
have been quite so brisk about it.

She treated me as a boy still,
but she lured me on.

But
Mrs. Pocket was at home, and was in a little difficulty, on account of
the baby's having been accommodated with a needle-case to keep him quiet
during the unaccountable absence (with a relative in the Foot Guards)
of Millers.

On meeting my eye, he said plainly, by a momentary and silent pause
in that attitude, "Indeed?

Upon that,
he pulled out a napkin, as if it were a magic clew without which he
couldn't find the way up stairs, and led us to the black hole of the
establishment, fitted up with a diminishing mirror (quite a superfluous
article, considering the hole's proportions), an anchovy sauce-cruet,
and somebody's pattens.

Indeed, it demanded from him a constant attention, and a
quickness of eye and hand, very like that exacted by wicket-keeping.

I have now concluded, sir," said Joe, rising from his chair,
"and, Pip, I wish you ever well and ever prospering to a greater and a
greater height."

And a very handsome sum of money too, I think.

After overhearing this dialogue, I should assuredly have got down and
been left in the solitude and darkness of the highway, but for feeling
certain that the man had no suspicion of my identity.

"Yes; but my dear Handel," Herbert went on, as if we had been talking,
instead of silent, "its having been so strongly rooted in the breast of
a boy whom nature and circumstances made so romantic, renders it very
serious.

Likewise, it seems to me
that, concentrating our attention on the examination, we altogether
overlook one of the best points of the animal.

When have you found me giving
admission here," she touched her bosom with her hand, "to anything that
you excluded?

So, I presented Joe to Herbert, who held out his
hand; but Joe backed from it, and held on by the bird's-nest.

His blue bag was slung over his shoulder, honest
industry beamed in his eyes, a determination to proceed to Trabb's with
cheerful briskness was indicated in his gait.

If the green and yellow growth of weed in the chinks of
the old wall had been the most precious flowers that ever blew, it could
not have been more cherished in my remembrance.

I have
a notion of firing eighty-two times, if the neighborhood shouldn't
complain, and that cannon of mine should prove equal to the pressure.

So I
said boldly, as if I had originated it, and must beg to insist upon it,
"Massive and concrete."

Mr. Jaggers shook his head,--not in negativing the question, but in
altogether negativing the notion that he could anyhow be got to answer
it,--and the two horrible casts of the twitched faces looked, when
my eyes strayed up to them, as if they had come to a crisis in their
suspended attention, and were going to sneeze.

Induced to take particular notice of the housekeeper, both by her
own striking appearance and by Wemmick's preparation, I observed
that whenever she was in the room she kept her eyes attentively on my
guardian, and that she would remove her hands from any dish she put
before him, hesitatingly, as if she dreaded his calling her back, and
wanted him to speak when she was nigh, if he had anything to say.

We became particularly hot upon some
boorish sneer of Drummle's, to the effect that we were too free with our
money.

Mr. Pocket being justly celebrated for giving most excellent practical
advice, and for having a clear and sound perception of things and a
highly judicious mind, I had some notion in my heart-ache of begging him
to accept my confidence.

When he felt his case unusually serious, and that he positively
must find an opening, he would go on 'Change at a busy time, and walk in
and out, in a kind of gloomy country dance figure, among the assembled
magnates.

And at the
best, how indefinite and unsatisfactory, only to know so vaguely what
they are!"

By this time, the rooms were
vastly different from what I had found them, and I enjoyed the honor
of occupying a few prominent pages in the books of a neighboring
upholsterer.

In her desire to be matrimonially established, you
might suppose her to have passed her short existence in the perpetual
contemplation of domestic bliss.

The Aged prepared such a hay-stack of buttered
toast, that I could scarcely see him over it as it simmered on an iron
stand hooked on to the top-bar; while Miss Skiffins brewed such a jorum
of tea, that the pig in the back premises became strongly excited, and
repeatedly expressed his desire to participate in the entertainment.

But here I anticipate a little, for I was not a Finch, and could not be,
according to the sacred laws of the society, until I came of age.

By degrees she led me into more temperate talk, and she
told me how Joe loved me, and how Joe never complained of anything,--she
didn't say, of me; she had no need; I knew what she meant,--but ever did
his duty in his way of life, with a strong hand, a quiet tongue, and a
gentle heart.

If his object in singling out Drummle were to bring him out still more,
it perfectly succeeded.

But, though she had taken such
strong possession of me, though my fancy and my hope were so set upon
her, though her influence on my boyish life and character had been
all-powerful, I did not, even that romantic morning, invest her with any
attributes save those she possessed.

I found
him in his dressing-room surrounded by his stock of boots, already hard
at it, washing his hands of us.

With a shock he became
aware of me, and was severely visited as before; but this time his
motion was rotatory, and he staggered round and round me with knees
more afflicted, and with uplifted hands as if beseeching for mercy.

"Do this look like a forge?" replied Orlick, sending his glance all
round him with an air of injury.

As a necessary sequence, I asked him if he would favor us with his
company, and he promptly accepted the invitation.

Truly it was impossible to dissociate her presence
from all those wretched hankerings after money and gentility that had
disturbed my boyhood,--from all those ill-regulated aspirations that had
first made me ashamed of home and Joe,--from all those visions that had
raised her face in the glowing fire, struck it out of the iron on the
anvil, extracted it from the darkness of night to look in at the wooden
window of the forge, and flit away.