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

that they were murderers, and that I would all at once comprehend

that they meant to do me good, and would then sink exhausted in

their arms, and suffer them to lay me down, I also knew at the

time. But, above all, I knew that there was a constant tendency in

all these people,—who, when I was very ill, would present all

kinds of extraordinary transformations of the human face, and would

be much dilated in size,—above all, I say, I knew that there was

an extraordinary tendency in all these people, sooner or later, to

settle down into the likeness of Joe.

After I had turned the worst point of my illness, I began to notice

that while all its other features changed, this one consistent

feature did not change. Whoever came about me, still settled down

into Joe. I opened my eyes in the night, and I saw, in the great

chair at the bedside, Joe. I opened my eyes in the day, and,

sitting on the window-seat, smoking his pipe in the shaded open

window, still I saw Joe. I asked for cooling drink, and the dear

hand that gave it me was Joe’s. I sank back on my pillow after

drinking, and the face that looked so hopefully and tenderly upon

me was the face of Joe.

At last, one day, I took courage, and said, “Is it Joe?”

And the dear old home-voice answered, “Which it air, old chap.”

“O Joe, you break my heart! Look angry at me, Joe. Strike me, Joe.

Tell me of my ingratitude. Don’t be so good to me!”

For Joe had actually laid his head down on the pillow at my side,

and put his arm round my neck, in his joy that I knew him.

“Which dear old Pip, old chap,” said Joe, “you and me was ever

friends. And when you’re well enough to go out for a ride—what

larks!”

After which, Joe withdrew to the window, and stood with his back

towards me, wiping his eyes. And as my extreme weakness prevented

me from getting up and going to him, I lay there, penitently

whispering, “O God bless him! O God bless this gentle Christian

man!”

Joe’s eyes were red when I next found him beside me; but I was

holding his hand, and we both felt happy.

“How long, dear Joe?”

“Which you meantersay, Pip, how long have your illness lasted, dear

old chap?”

“Yes, Joe.”

“It’s the end of May, Pip. Tomorrow is the first of June.”

“And have you been here all that time, dear Joe?”

“Pretty nigh, old chap. For, as I says to Biddy when the news of

your being ill were brought by letter, which it were brought by the

post, and being formerly single he is now married though underpaid

for a deal of walking and shoe-leather, but wealth were not a

object on his part, and marriage were the great wish of his hart—”

“It is so delightful to hear you, Joe! But I interrupt you in what

you said to Biddy.”

“Which it were,” said Joe, “that how you might be amongst

strangers, and that how you and me having been ever friends, a

wisit at such a moment might not prove unacceptabobble. And Biddy,

her word were, ‘Go to him, without loss of time.’ That,” said Joe,

summing up with his judicial air, “were the word of Biddy. ‘Go to

him,’ Biddy say, ‘without loss of time.’ In short, I shouldn’t

greatly deceive you,” Joe added, after a little grave reflection,

“if I represented to you that the word of that young woman were,

‘without a minute’s loss of time.’”

There Joe cut himself short, and informed me that I was to be

talked to in great moderation, and that I was to take a little

nourishment at stated frequent times, whether I felt inclined for

it or not, and that I was to submit myself to all his orders. So I

kissed his hand, and lay quiet, while he proceeded to indite a note

to Biddy, with my love in it.

Evidently Biddy had taught Joe to write. As I lay in bed looking

at him, it made me, in my weak state, cry again with pleasure to

see the pride with which he set about his letter. My bedstead,

divested of its curtains, had been removed, with me upon it, into

the sitting-room, as the airiest and largest, and the carpet had

been taken away, and the room kept always fresh and wholesome night

and day. At my own writing-table, pushed into a corner and cumbered

with little bottles, Joe now sat down to his great work, first

choosing a pen from the pen-tray as if it were a chest of large

tools, and tucking up his sleeves as if he were going to wield a

crow-bar or sledgehammer. It was necessary for Joe to hold on

heavily to the table with his left elbow, and to get his right leg

well out behind him, before he could begin; and when he did begin

he made every down-stroke so slowly that it might have been six

feet long, while at every up-stroke I could hear his pen

spluttering extensively. He had a curious idea that the inkstand

was on the side of him where it was not, and constantly dipped his

pen into space, and seemed quite satisfied with the result.

Occasionally, he was tripped up by some orthographical

stumbling-block; but on the whole he got on very well indeed; and

when he had signed his name, and had removed a finishing blot from

the paper to the crown of his head with his two forefingers, he got

up and hovered about the table, trying the effect of his

performance from various points of view, as it lay there, with

unbounded satisfaction.

Not to make Joe uneasy by talking too much, even if I had been able

to talk much, I deferred asking him about Miss Havisham until next

day. He shook his head when I then asked him if she had recovered.

“Is she dead, Joe?”

“Why you see, old chap,” said Joe, in a tone of remonstrance, and

by way of getting at it by degrees, “I wouldn’t go so far as to say

that, for that’s a deal to say; but she ain’t—”

“Living, Joe?”

“That’s nigher where it is,” said Joe; “she ain’t living.”

“Did she linger long, Joe?”

“Arter you was took ill, pretty much about what you might call (if

you was put to it) a week,” said Joe; still determined, on my

account, to come at everything by degrees.

“Dear Joe, have you heard what becomes of her property?”

“Well, old chap,” said Joe, “it do appear that she had settled the

most of it, which I meantersay tied it up, on Miss Estella. But she

had wrote out a little coddleshell in her own hand a day or two

afore the accident, leaving a cool four thousand to Mr. Matthew

Pocket. And why, do you suppose, above all things, Pip, she left

that cool four thousand unto him? ‘Because of Pip’s account of him,

the said Matthew.’ I am told by Biddy, that air the writing,” said

Joe, repeating the legal turn as if it did him infinite good,

‘account of him the said Matthew.’ And a cool four thousand, Pip!”

I never discovered from whom Joe derived the conventional

temperature of the four thousand pounds; but it appeared to make

the sum of money more to him, and he had a manifest relish in

insisting on its being cool.

This account gave me great joy, as it perfected the only good thing

I had done. I asked Joe whether he had heard if any of the other

relations had any legacies?

“Miss Sarah,” said Joe, “she have twenty-five pound perannium fur

to buy pills, on account of being bilious. Miss Georgiana, she have

twenty pound down. Mrs.—what’s the name of them wild beasts with

humps, old chap?”

“Camels?” said I, wondering why he could possibly want to know.

Joe nodded. “Mrs. Camels,” by which I presently understood he meant

Camilla, “she have five pound fur to buy rushlights to put her in

spirits when she wake up in the night.”

The accuracy of these recitals was sufficiently obvious to me, to

give me great confidence in Joe’s information. “And now,” said Joe,

“you ain’t that strong yet, old chap, that you can take in more nor

one additional shovelful to-day. Old Orlick he’s been a

bustin’ open a dwelling-ouse.”

“Whose?” said I.

“Not, I grant you, but what his manners is given to blusterous,”

said Joe, apologetically; “still, a Englishman’s ouse is his

Castle, and castles must not be busted ‘cept when done in war time.

And wotsume’er the failings on his part, he were a corn and

seedsman in his hart.”

“Is it Pumblechook’s house that has been broken into, then?”

“That’s it, Pip,” said Joe; “and they took his till, and they took

his cash-box, and they drinked his wine, and they partook of his

wittles, and they slapped his face, and they pulled his nose, and

they tied him up to his bedpust, and they giv’ him a dozen, and

they stuffed his mouth full of flowering annuals to prewent his

crying out. But he knowed Orlick, and Orlick’s in the county

jail.”

By these approaches we arrived at unrestricted conversation. I was

slow to gain strength, but I did slowly and surely become less

weak, and Joe stayed with me, and I fancied I was little Pip again.

For the tenderness of Joe was so beautifully proportioned to my

need, that I was like a child in his hands. He would sit and talk

to me in the old confidence, and with the old simplicity, and in

the old unassertive protecting way, so that I would half believe

that all my life since the days of the old kitchen was one of the

mental troubles of the fever that was gone. He did everything for

me except the household work, for which he had engaged a very

decent woman, after paying off the laundress on his first arrival.

“Which I do assure you, Pip,” he would often say, in explanation of

that liberty; “I found her a tapping the spare bed, like a cask of

beer, and drawing off the feathers in a bucket, for sale. Which she

would have tapped yourn next, and draw’d it off with you a laying

on it, and was then a carrying away the coals gradiwally in the

soup-tureen and wegetable-dishes, and the wine and spirits in your

Wellington boots.”

We looked forward to the day when I should go out for a ride, as we

had once looked forward to the day of my apprenticeship. And when

the day came, and an open carriage was got into the Lane, Joe

wrapped me up, took me in his arms, carried me down to it, and put

me in, as if I were still the small helpless creature to whom he

had so abundantly given of the wealth of his great nature.

And Joe got in beside me, and we drove away together into the

country, where the rich summer growth was already on the trees and

on the grass, and sweet summer scents filled all the air. The day

happened to be Sunday, and when I looked on the loveliness around

me, and thought how it had grown and changed, and how the little

wild-flowers had been forming, and the voices of the birds had been

strengthening, by day and by night, under the sun and under the

stars, while poor I lay burning and tossing on my bed, the mere

remembrance of having burned and tossed there came like a check

upon my peace. But when I heard the Sunday bells, and looked

around a little more upon the outspread beauty,