Great Expectations: Chapters 48–59

The nooks of ruin where the old monks had once had their refectories and gardens, and where the strong walls were now pressed into the service of humble sheds and stables, were almost as silent as the old monks in their graves.

She read me what she had written; and it was direct and clear, and evidently intended to absolve me from any suspicion of profiting by the receipt of the money.

And seeing that Mr. Jaggers stood quite still and silent, and apparently quite obdurate, under this appeal, I turned to Wemmick...

It was the only good thing I had done, and the only completed thing I had done, since I was first apprised of my great expectations.

Without being sanguine as to my own part in those bright plans, I felt that Herbert’s way was clearing fast, and that old Bill Barley had but to stick to his pepper and rum, and his daughter would soon be happily provided for.

It is so difficult to become clearly possessed of the contents of almost any letter, in a violent hurry, that I had to read this mysterious epistle again twice, before its injunction to me to be secret got mechanically into my mind.

Faint and sick with the pain of my injured arm, bewildered by the surprise, and yet conscious how easily this threat could be put in execution, I desisted, and tried to ease my arm were it ever so little.

Early as it was, there were plenty of scullers going here and there that morning, and plenty of barges dropping down with the tide; the navigation of the river between bridges, in an open boat, was a much easier and commoner matter in those days than it is in these; and we went ahead among many skiffs and wherries briskly.

“Why, what do you make out that they done with their buttons then, Jack?” asked the landlord, vacillating weakly.

However, I proposed that he and I should walk away together to a distant point we could see, and that the boat should take us aboard there, or as near there as might prove feasible, at about noon.

Mr. Jaggers was querulous and angry with me for having “let it slip through my fingers,” and said we must memorialise by and by, and try at all events for some of it.

The responsibility of giving the lady away devolved upon the Aged, which led to the clergyman’s being unintentionally scandalised, and it happened thus.

But in a fatal moment, yielding to those propensities and passions, the indulgence of which had so long rendered him a scourge to society, he had quitted his haven of rest and repentance, and had come back to the country where he was proscribed.

How irrevocable would have been his knowledge of it, if he had remained with me but another hour!