SOME weeks passed without bringing any change. We waited for
Wemmick, and he made no sign. If I had never known him out of Little Britain,
and had never enjoyed the privilege of being on a familiar footing at the
Castle, I might have doubted him; not so for a moment, knowing him as I did.
My worldly affairs began to wear a gloomy appearance, and I was pressed for
money by more than one creditor. Even I myself began to know the want of money
(I mean of ready money in my own pocket), and to relieve it by converting some
easily spared articles of jewellery into cash. But I had quite determined that
it would be a heartless fraud to take more money from my patron in the existing
state of my uncertain thoughts and plans. Therefore, I had sent him the unopened
pocket-book by Herbert, to hold in his own keeping, and I felt a kind of
satisfaction - whether it was a false kind or a true, I hardly know - in not
having profited by his generosity since his revelation of himself.
As the time wore on, an impression settled heavily upon me that Estella was
married. Fearful of having it confirmed, though it was all but a conviction, I
avoided the newspapers, and begged Herbert (to whom I had confided the
circumstances of our last interview) never to speak of her to me. Why I hoarded
up this last wretched little rag of the robe of hope that was rent and given to
the winds, how do I know! Why did you who read this, commit that not dissimilar
inconsistency of your own, last year, last month, last week?
It was an unhappy life that I lived, and its one dominant anxiety, towering
over all its other anxieties like a high mountain above a range of mountains,
never disappeared from my view. Still, no new cause for fear arose. Let me start
from my bed as I would, with the terror fresh upon me that he was discovered;
let me sit listening as I would, with dread, for Herbert's returning step at
night, lest it should be fleeter than ordinary, and winged with evil news; for
all that, and much more to like purpose, the round of things went on. Condemned
to inaction and a state of constant restlessness and suspense, I rowed about in
my boat, and waited, waited, waited, as I best could.
There were states of the tide when, having been down the river, I could not
get back through the eddy-chafed arches and starlings of old London Bridge;
then, I left my boat at a wharf near the Custom House, to be brought up
afterwards to the Temple stairs. I was not averse to doing this, as it served to
make me and my boat a commoner incident among the water-side people there. From
this slight occasion, sprang two meetings that I have now to tell of.
One afternoon, late in the month of February, I came ashore at the wharf at
dusk. I had pulled down as far as Greenwich with the ebb tide, and had turned
with the tide. It had been a fine bright day, but had become foggy as the sun
dropped, and I had had to feel my way back among the shipping, pretty carefully.
Both in going and returning, I had seen the signal in his window, All well.
As it was a raw evening and I was cold, I thought I would comfort myself with
dinner at once; and as I had hours of dejection and solitude before me if I went
home to the Temple, I thought I would afterwards go to the play. The theatre
where Mr Wopsle had achieved his questionable triumph, was in that waterside
neighbourhood (it is nowhere now), and to that theatre I resolved to go. I was
aware that Mr Wopsle had not succeeded in reviving the Drama, but, on the
contrary, had rather partaken of its decline. He had been ominously heard of,
through the playbills, as a faithful Black, in connexion with a little girl of
noble birth, and a monkey. And Herbert had seen him as a predatory Tartar of
comic propensities, with a face like a red brick, and an outrageous hat all over
bells.
I dined at what Herbert and I used to call a Geographical chop-house - where
there were maps of the world in porter-pot rims on every half-yard of the
table-cloths, and charts of gravy on every one of the knives - to this day there
is scarcely a single chop-house within the Lord Mayor's dominions which is not
Geographical - and wore out the time in dozing over crumbs, staring at gas, and
baking in a hot blast of dinners. By-and-by, I roused myself and went to the
play.
There, I found a virtuous boatswain in his Majesty's service - a most
excellent man, though I could have wished his trousers not quite so tight in
some places and not quite so loose in others - who knocked all the little men's
hats over their eyes, though he was very generous and brave, and who wouldn't
hear of anybody's paying taxes, though he was very patriotic. He had a bag of
money in his pocket, like a pudding in the cloth, and on that property married a
young person in bed-furniture, with great rejoicings; the whole population of
Portsmouth (nine in number at the last Census) turning out on the beach, to rub
their own hands and shake everybody else's, and sing `Fill, fill!' A certain
dark-complexioned Swab, however, who wouldn't fill, or do anything else that was
proposed to him, and whose heart was openly stated (by the boatswain) to be as
black as his figure-head, proposed to two other Swabs to get all mankind into
difficulties; which was so effectually done (the Swab family having considerable
political influence) that it took half the evening to set things right, and then
it was only brought about through an honest little grocer with a white hat,
black gaiters, and red nose, getting into a clock, with a gridiron, and
listening, and coming out, and knocking everybody down from behind with the
gridiron whom he couldn't confute with what he had overheard. This led to Mr
Wopsle's (who had never been heard of before) coming in with a star and garter
on, as a plenipotentiary of great power direct from the Admiralty, to say that
the Swabs were all to go to prison on the spot, and that he had brought the
boatswain down the Union Jack, as a slight acknowledgment of his public
services. The boatswain, unmanned for the first time, respectfully dried his
eyes on the Jack, and then cheering up and addressing Mr Wopsle as Your Honour,
solicited permission to take him by the fin. Mr Wopsle conceding his fin with a
gracious dignity, was immediately shoved into a dusty corner while everybody
danced a hornpipe; and from that corner, surveying the public with a
discontented eye, became aware of me.
The second piece was the last new grand comic Christmas pantomime, in the
first scene of which, it pained me to suspect that I detected Mr Wopsle with red
worsted legs under a highly magnified phosphoric countenance and a shock of red
curtain-fringe for his hair, engaged in the manufacture of thunderbolts in a
mine, and displaying great cowardice when his gigantic master came home (very
hoarse) to dinner. But he presently presented himself under worthier
circumstances; for, the Genius of Youthful Love being in want of assistance - on
account of the parental brutality of an ignorant farmer who opposed the choice
of his daughter's heart, by purposely falling upon the object, in a flour sack,
out of the firstfloor window - summoned a sententious Enchanter; and he, coming
up from the antipodes rather unsteadily, after an apparently violent journey,
proved to be Mr Wopsle in a high-crowned hat, with a necromantic work in one
volume under his arm. The business of this enchanter on earth, being principally
to be talked at, sung at, butted at, danced at, and flashed at with fires of
various colours, he had a good deal of time on his hands. And I observed with
great surprise, that he devoted it to staring in my direction as if he were lost
in amazement.
There was something so remarkable in the increasing glare of Mr Wopsle's eye,
and he seemed to be turning so many things over in his mind and to grow so
confused, that I could not make it out. I sat thinking of it, long after he had
ascended to the clouds in a large watch-case, and still I could not make it out.
I was still thinking of it when I came out of the theatre an hour afterwards,
and found him waiting for me near the door.
`How do you do?' said I, shaking hands with him as we turned down the street
together. `I saw that you saw me.'
`Saw you, Mr. Pip!' he returned. `Yes, of course I saw you. But who else was
there?'
`Who else?'
`It is the strangest thing,' said Mr Wopsle, drifting into his lost look
again; `and yet I could swear to him.'
Becoming alarmed, I entreated Mr Wopsle to explain his meaning.
`Whether I should have noticed him at first but for your being there,' said
Mr Wopsle, going on in the same lost way, `I can't be positive; yet I think I
should.'
Involuntarily I looked round me, as I was accustomed to look round me when I
went home; for, these mysterious words gave me a chill.
`Oh! He can't be in sight,' said Mr Wopsle. `He went out, before I went off,
I saw him go.'
Having the reason that I had, for being suspicious, I even suspected this
poor actor. I mistrusted a design to entrap me into some admission. Therefore, I
glanced at him as we walked on together, but said nothing.
`I had a ridiculous fancy that he must be with you, Mr Pip, till I saw that
you were quite unconscious of him, sitting behind you there, like a ghost.'
My former chill crept over me again, but I was resolved not to speak yet, for
it was quite consistent with his words that he might be set on to induce me to
connect these references with Provis. Of course, I was perfectly sure and safe
that Provis had not been there.
`I dare say you wonder at me, Mr Pip; indeed I see you do. But it is so very
strange! You'll hardly believe what I am going to tell you. I could hardly
believe it myself, if you told me.'
`Indeed?' said I.
`No, indeed. Mr Pip, you remember in old times a certain Christmas Day, when
you were quite a child, and I dined at Gargery's, and some soldiers came to the
door to get a pair of handcuffs mended?'
`I remember it very well.'
`And you remember that there was a chase after two convicts, and that we
joined in it, and that Gargery took you on his back, and that I took the lead
and you kept up with me as well as you could?'
`I remember it all very well.' Better than he thought - except the last
clause.
`And you remember that we came up with the two in a ditch, and that there was
a scuffle between them, and that one of them had been severely handled and much
mauled about the face, by the other?'
`I see it all before me.'
`And that the soldiers lighted torches, and put the two in the centre, and
that we went on to see the last of them, over the black marshes, with the
torchlight shining on their faces - I am particular about that; with the
torchlight shining on their faces, when there was an outer ring of dark night
all about us?'
`Yes,' said I. `I remember all that.'
`Then, Mr Pip, one of those two prisoners sat behind you tonight. I saw him
over your shoulder.'
`Steady!' I thought. I asked him then, `Which of the two do you suppose you
saw?'
`The one who had been mauled,' he answered readily, `and I'll swear I saw
him! The more I think of him, the more certain I am of him.'
`This is very curious!' said I, with the best assumption I could put on, of
its being nothing more to me. `Very curious indeed!'
I cannot exaggerate the enhanced disquiet into which this conversation threw
me, or the special and peculiar terror I felt at Compeyson's having been behind
me `like a ghost.' For, if he had ever been out of my thoughts for a few moments
together since the hiding had begun, it was in those very moments when he was
closest to me; and to think that I should be so unconscious and off my guard
after all my care, was as if I had shut an avenue of a hundred doors to keep him
out, and then had found him at my elbow. I could not doubt either that he was
there, because I was there, and that however slight an appearance of danger
there might be about us, danger was always near and active.
I put such questions to Mr Wopsle as, When did the man come in? He could not
tell me that; he saw me, and over my shoulder he saw the man. It was not until
he had seen him for some time that he began to identify him; but he had from the
first vaguely associated him with me, and known him as somehow belonging to me
in the old village time. How was he dressed? Prosperously, but not noticeably
otherwise; he thought, in black. Was his face at all disfigured? No, he believed
not. I believed not, too, for, although in my brooding state I had taken no
especial notice of the people behind me, I thought it likely that a face at all
disfigured would have attracted my attention.
When Mr Wopsle had imparted to me all that he could recall or I extract, and
when I had treated him to a little appropriate refreshment after the fatigues of
the evening, we parted. It was between twelve and one o'clock when I reached the
Temple, and the gates were shut. No one was near me when I went in and went
home.
Herbert had come in, and we held a very serious council by the fire. But
there was nothing to be done, saving to communicate to Wemmick what I had that
night found out, and to remind him that we waited for his hint. As I thought
that I might compromise him if I went too often to the Castle, I made this
communication by letter. I wrote it before I went to bed, and went out and
posted it; and again no one was near me. Herbert and I agreed that we could do
nothing else but be very cautious. And we were very cautious indeed - more
cautious than before, if that were possible - and I for my part never went near
Chinks's Basin, except when I rowed by, and then I only looked at Mill Pond Bank
as I looked at anything else.
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