Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (speed reading book TXT) 📕
"Now lookee here," he said, "the question being whether you're tobe let to live. You know what a file is?"
"Yes, sir."
"And you know what wittles is?"
"Yes, sir."
After each question he tilted me over a little more, so as to giveme a greater sense of helplessness and danger.
"You get me a file." He tilted me again. "And you get me wittles."He tilted me again. "You bring 'em both to me." He tilted me again."Or I'll have your heart and liver out." He tilted me again.
I was dreadfully frightened, and so giddy that I clung to him withboth hands, and said, "If you would kindly please to let me keepupright, sir, perhaps I shouldn't be sick, and perhaps I couldattend more."
He gave me a most tremendous dip and roll,
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- Author: Charles Dickens
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“By G - , it’s Death!”
“What’s death?”
“I was sent for life. It’s death to come back. There’s been
overmuch coming back of late years, and I should of a certainty be
hanged if took.”
Nothing was needed but this; the wretched man, after loading
wretched me with his gold and silver chains for years, had risked
his life to come to me, and I held it there in my keeping! If I had
loved him instead of abhorring him; if I had been attracted to him
by the strongest admiration and affection, instead of shrinking
from him with the strongest repugnance; it could have been no
worse. On the contrary, it would have been better, for his
preservation would then have naturally and tenderly addressed my
heart.
My first care was to close the shutters, so that no light might be
seen from without, and then to close and make fast the doors. While
I did so, he stood at the table drinking rum and eating biscuit;
and when I saw him thus engaged, I saw my convict on the marshes at
his meal again. It almost seemed to me as if he must stoop down
presently, to file at his leg.
When I had gone into Herbert’s room, and had shut off any other
communication between it and the staircase than through the room in
which our conversation had been held, I asked him if he would go to
bed? He said yes, but asked me for some of my “gentleman’s linen”
to put on in the morning. I brought it out, and laid it ready for
him, and my blood again ran cold when he again took me by both
hands to give me good night.
I got away from him, without knowing how I did it, and mended the
fire in the room where we had been together, and sat down by it,
afraid to go to bed. For an hour or more, I remained too stunned to
think; and it was not until I began to think, that I began fully to
know how wrecked I was, and how the ship in which I had sailed was
gone to pieces.
Miss Havisham’s intentions towards me, all a mere dream; Estella
not designed for me; I only suffered in Satis House as a
convenience, a sting for the greedy relations, a model with a
mechanical heart to practise on when no other practice was at hand;
those were the first smarts I had. But, sharpest and deepest pain
of all,—it was for the convict, guilty of I knew not what crimes,
and liable to be taken out of those rooms where I sat thinking, and
hanged at the Old Bailey door, that I had deserted Joe.
I would not have gone back to Joe now, I would not have gone back
to Biddy now, for any consideration; simply, I suppose, because my
sense of my own worthless conduct to them was greater than every
consideration. No wisdom on earth could have given me the comfort
that I should have derived from their simplicity and fidelity; but
I could never, never, undo what I had done.
In every rage of wind and rush of rain, I heard pursuers. Twice, I
could have sworn there was a knocking and whispering at the outer
door. With these fears upon me, I began either to imagine or recall
that I had had mysterious warnings of this man’s approach. That,
for weeks gone by, I had passed faces in the streets which I had
thought like his. That these likenesses had grown more numerous,
as he, coming over the sea, had drawn nearer. That his wicked
spirit had somehow sent these messengers to mine, and that now on
this stormy night he was as good as his word, and with me.
Crowding up with these reflections came the reflection that I had
seen him with my childish eyes to be a desperately violent man;
that I had heard that other convict reiterate that he had tried to
murder him; that I had seen him down in the ditch tearing and
fighting like a wild beast. Out of such remembrances I brought into
the light of the fire a half-formed terror that it might not be
safe to be shut up there with him in the dead of the wild solitary
night. This dilated until it filled the room, and impelled me to
take a candle and go in and look at my dreadful burden.
He had rolled a handkerchief round his head, and his face was set
and lowering in his sleep. But he was asleep, and quietly too,
though he had a pistol lying on the pillow. Assured of this, I
softly removed the key to the outside of his door, and turned it on
him before I again sat down by the fire. Gradually I slipped from
the chair and lay on the floor. When I awoke without having parted
in my sleep with the perception of my wretchedness, the clocks of
the Eastward churches were striking five, the candles were wasted
out, the fire was dead, and the wind and rain intensified the thick
black darkness.
THIS IS THE END OF THE SECOND STAGE OF PIP’S EXPECTATIONS.
It was fortunate for me that I had to take precautions to ensure
(so far as I could) the safety of my dreaded visitor; for, this
thought pressing on me when I awoke, held other thoughts in a
confused concourse at a distance.
The impossibility of keeping him concealed in the chambers was
self-evident. It could not be done, and the attempt to do it would
inevitably engender suspicion. True, I had no Avenger in my service
now, but I was looked after by an inflammatory old female, assisted
by an animated rag-bag whom she called her niece, and to keep a
room secret from them would be to invite curiosity and
exaggeration. They both had weak eyes, which I had long attributed
to their chronically looking in at keyholes, and they were always
at hand when not wanted; indeed that was their only reliable
quality besides larceny. Not to get up a mystery with these people,
I resolved to announce in the morning that my uncle had
unexpectedly come from the country.
This course I decided on while I was yet groping about in the
darkness for the means of getting a light. Not stumbling on the
means after all, I was fain to go out to the adjacent Lodge and get
the watchman there to come with his lantern. Now, in groping my way
down the black staircase I fell over something, and that something
was a man crouching in a corner.
As the man made no answer when I asked him what he did there, but
eluded my touch in silence, I ran to the Lodge and urged the
watchman to come quickly; telling him of the incident on the way
back. The wind being as fierce as ever, we did not care to endanger
the light in the lantern by rekindling the extinguished lamps on
the staircase, but we examined the staircase from the bottom to the
top and found no one there. It then occurred to me as possible that
the man might have slipped into my rooms; so, lighting my candle at
the watchman’s, and leaving him standing at the door, I examined
them carefully, including the room in which my dreaded guest lay
asleep. All was quiet, and assuredly no other man was in those
chambers.
It troubled me that there should have been a lurker on the stairs,
on that night of all nights in the year, and I asked the watchman,
on the chance of eliciting some hopeful explanation as I handed him
a dram at the door, whether he had admitted at his gate any
gentleman who had perceptibly been dining out? Yes, he said; at
different times of the night, three. One lived in Fountain Court,
and the other two lived in the Lane, and he had seen them all go
home. Again, the only other man who dwelt in the house of which my
chambers formed a part had been in the country for some weeks, and
he certainly had not returned in the night, because we had seen his
door with his seal on it as we came upstairs.
“The night being so bad, sir,” said the watchman, as he gave me
back my glass, “uncommon few have come in at my gate. Besides them
three gentlemen that I have named, I don’t call to mind another
since about eleven o’clock, when a stranger asked for you.”
“My uncle,” I muttered. “Yes.”
“You saw him, sir?”
“Yes. Oh yes.”
“Likewise the person with him?”
“Person with him!” I repeated.
“I judged the person to be with him,” returned the watchman. “The
person stopped, when he stopped to make inquiry of me, and the
person took this way when he took this way.”
“What sort of person?”
The watchman had not particularly noticed; he should say a working
person; to the best of his belief, he had a dust-colored kind of
clothes on, under a dark coat. The watchman made more light of the
matter than I did, and naturally; not having my reason for
attaching weight to it.
When I had got rid of him, which I thought it well to do without
prolonging explanations, my mind was much troubled by these two
circumstances taken together. Whereas they were easy of innocent
solution apart,—as, for instance, some diner out or diner at home,
who had not gone near this watchman’s gate, might have strayed to
my staircase and dropped asleep there,—and my nameless visitor
might have brought some one with him to show him the way,—still,
joined, they had an ugly look to one as prone to distrust and fear
as the changes of a few hours had made me.
I lighted my fire, which burnt with a raw pale flare at that time
of the morning, and fell into a doze before it. I seemed to have
been dozing a whole night when the clocks struck six. As there was
full an hour and a half between me and daylight, I dozed again;
now, waking up uneasily, with prolix conversations about nothing,
in my ears; now, making thunder of the wind in the chimney; at
length, falling off into a profound sleep from which the daylight
woke me with a start.
All this time I had never been able to consider my own situation,
nor could I do so yet. I had not the power to attend to it. I was
greatly dejected and distressed, but in an incoherent wholesale
sort of way. As to forming any plan for the future, I could as soon
have formed an elephant. When I opened the shutters and looked out
at the wet wild morning, all of a leaden hue; when I walked from
room to room; when I sat down again shivering, before the fire,
waiting for my laundress to appear; I thought how miserable I was,
but hardly knew why, or how long I had been so, or on what day of
the week I made the reflection, or even who I was that made it.
At last, the old woman and the niece came in,—the latter with a
head not easily distinguishable from her dusty broom,—and
testified surprise at sight of me and the fire. To whom I imparted
how my uncle had come in the night and was then asleep, and how the
breakfast preparations were to be modified accordingly. Then I
washed and dressed while they knocked the furniture about and made
a dust; and so, in a sort of dream or sleep-waking, I found myself
sitting by the fire again, waiting for-Him—to come to
breakfast.
By and by, his door opened and he came out. I could
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