Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (speed reading book TXT) 📕

what a blessed fortune it was, that he had found another name for

me than Pip.

It is impossible to express with what acuteness I felt the

convict’s breathing, not only on the back of my head, but all along

my spine. The sensation was like being touched in the marrow with

some pungent and searching acid, it set my very teeth on edge. He

seemed to have more breathing business to do than another man, and

to make more noise in doing it; and I was conscious of growing

high-shouldered on one side, in my shrinking endeavors to fend him

off.

The weather was miserably raw, and the two cursed the cold. It made

us all lethargic before we had gone far, and when we had left the

Halfway House behind, we habitually dozed and shivered and were

silent. I dozed off, myself, in considering the question whether I

ought to restore a couple of pounds sterling to this creature

before losing sight of him, and how it could best be done. In the

act of dipping forward as if I were going to bathe among the

horses, I woke in a fright and took the question up again.

But I must have lost it longer than I had thought, since, although

I could 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. Cowering forward for warmth and to make me a

screen against the wind, the convicts were closer to me than

before. The very first words I heard them interchange as I became

conscious, were the words of my own thought, “Two One Pound notes.”

“How did he get ‘em?” said the convict I had never seen.

“How should I know?” returned the other. “He had ‘em stowed away

somehows. Giv him by friends, I expect.”

“I wish,” said the other, with a bitter curse upon the cold, “that

I had ‘em here.”

“Two one pound notes, or friends?”

“Two one pound notes. I’d sell all the friends I ever had for one,

and think it a blessed good bargain. Well? So he says—?”

“So he says,” resumed the convict I had recognized,—“it was all

said and done in half a minute, behind a pile of timber in the

Dock-yard,—‘You’re a going to be discharged?’ Yes, I was. Would I

find out that boy that had fed him and kep his secret, and give him

them two one pound notes? Yes, I would. And I did.”

“More fool you,” growled the other. “I’d have spent ‘em on a Man,

in wittles and drink. He must have been a green one. Mean to say he

knowed nothing of you?”

“Not a ha’porth. Different gangs and different ships. He was tried

again for prison breaking, and got made a Lifer.”

“And was that—Honor!—the only time you worked out, in this

part of the country?”

“The only time.”

“What might have been your opinion of the place?”

“A most beastly place. Mudbank, mist, swamp, and work; work, swamp,

mist, and mudbank.”

They both execrated the place in very strong language, and

gradually growled themselves out, and had nothing left to say.

After overhearing this dialogue, I should assuredly have got down

and been left in the solitude and darkness of the highway, but for

feeling certain that the man had no suspicion of my identity.

Indeed, I was not only so changed in the course of nature, but so

differently dressed and so differently circumstanced, that it was

not at all likely he could have known me without accidental help.

Still, the coincidence of our being together on the coach, was

sufficiently strange to fill me with a dread that some other

coincidence might at any moment connect me, in his hearing, with my

name. For this reason, I resolved to alight as soon as we touched

the town, and put myself out of his hearing. This device I executed

successfully. My little portmanteau was in the boot under my feet;

I had but to turn a hinge to get it out; I threw it down before me,

got down after it, and was left at the first lamp on the first

stones of the town pavement. As to the convicts, they went their

way with the coach, and I knew at what point they would be spirited

off to the river. In my fancy, I saw the boat with its convict crew

waiting for them at the slime-washed stairs,—again heard the

gruff “Give way, you!” like and order to dogs,—again saw the

wicked Noah’s Ark lying out on the black water.

I could not have said what I was afraid of, for my fear was

altogether undefined and vague, but there was great fear upon me.

As I walked on to the hotel, I felt that a dread, much exceeding

the mere apprehension of a painful or disagreeable recognition,

made me tremble. I am confident that it took no distinctness of

shape, and that it was the revival for a few minutes of the terror

of childhood.

The coffee-room at the Blue Boar was empty, and I had not only

ordered my dinner there, but had sat down to it, before the waiter

knew me. As soon as he had apologized for the remissness of his

memory, he asked me if he should send Boots for Mr. Pumblechook?

“No,” said I, “certainly not.”

The waiter (it was he who had brought up the Great Remonstrance

from the Commercials, on the day when I was bound) appeared

surprised, and took the earliest opportunity of putting a dirty old

copy of a local newspaper so directly in my way, that I took it up

and read this paragraph:—

Our readers will learn, not altogether without interest, in

reference to the recent romantic rise in fortune of a young

artificer in iron of this neighborhood (what a theme, by the way,

for the magic pen of our as yet not universally acknowledged

townsman TOOBY, the poet of our columns!) that the youth’s earliest

patron, companion, and friend, was a highly respected individual

not entirely unconnected with the corn and seed trade, and whose

eminently convenient and commodious business premises are situate

within a hundred miles of the High Street. It is not wholly

irrespective of our personal feelings that we record HIM as the

Mentor of our young Telemachus, for it is good to know that our

town produced the founder of the latter’s fortunes. Does the

thought-contracted brow of the local Sage or the lustrous eye of

local Beauty inquire whose fortunes? We believe that Quintin Matsys

was the BLACKSMITH of Antwerp. VERB. SAP.

I entertain a conviction, based upon large experience, that if in

the days of my prosperity I had gone to the North Pole, I should

have met somebody there, wandering Esquimaux or civilized man, who

would have told me that Pumblechook was my earliest patron and the

founder of my fortunes.