Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (i want to read a book .txt) 📗
- Author: Charles Dickens
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grass, it occurred to me he would have tried to eat it, if he had
not seen my bundle. He did not turn me upside down this time to
get at what I had, but left me right side upwards while I opened
the bundle and emptied my pockets.
“What’s in the bottle, boy?” said he.
“Brandy,” said I.
He was already handing mincemeat down his throat in the most
curious manner,—more like a man who was putting it away somewhere
in a violent hurry, than a man who was eating it,—but he left off
to take some of the liquor. He shivered all the while so
violently, that it was quite as much as he could do to keep the
neck of the bottle between his teeth, without biting it off.
“I think you have got the ague,” said I.
“I’m much of your opinion, boy,” said he.
“It’s bad about here,” I told him. “You’ve been lying out on the
meshes, and they’re dreadful aguish. Rheumatic too.”
“I’ll eat my breakfast afore they’re the death of me,” said he.
“I’d do that, if I was going to be strung up to that there gallows
as there is over there, directly afterwards. I’ll beat the shivers
so far, I’ll bet you.”
He was gobbling mincemeat, meatbone, bread, cheese, and pork pie,
all at once: staring distrustfully while he did so at the mist all
round us, and often stopping—even stopping his jaws—to listen.
Some real or fancied sound, some clink upon the river or breathing
of beast upon the marsh, now gave him a start, and he said,
suddenly,—
“You’re not a deceiving imp? You brought no one with you?”
“No, sir! No!”
“Nor giv’ no one the office to follow you?”
“No!”
“Well,” said he, “I believe you. You’d be but a fierce young hound
indeed, if at your time of life you could help to hunt a wretched
warmint hunted as near death and dunghill as this poor wretched
warmint is!”
Something clicked in his throat as if he had works in him like a
clock, and was going to strike. And he smeared his ragged rough
sleeve over his eyes.
Pitying his desolation, and watching him as he gradually settled
down upon the pie, I made bold to say, “I am glad you enjoy it.”
“Did you speak?”
“I said I was glad you enjoyed it.”
“Thankee, my boy. I do.”
I had often watched a large dog of ours eating his food; and I now
noticed a decided similarity between the dog’s way of eating, and
the man’s. The man took strong sharp sudden bites, just like the
dog. He swallowed, or rather snapped up, every mouthful, too soon
and too fast; and he looked sideways here and there while he ate,
as if he thought there was danger in every direction of somebody’s
coming to take the pie away. He was altogether too unsettled in his
mind over it, to appreciate it comfortably I thought, or to have
anybody to dine with him, without making a chop with his jaws at
the visitor. In all of which particulars he was very like the dog.
“I am afraid you won’t leave any of it for him,” said I, timidly;
after a silence during which I had hesitated as to the politeness
of making the remark. “There’s no more to be got where that came
from.” It was the certainty of this fact that impelled me to offer
the hint.
“Leave any for him? Who’s him?” said my friend, stopping in his
crunching of pie-crust.
“The young man. That you spoke of. That was hid with you.”
“Oh ah!” he returned, with something like a gruff laugh. “Him? Yes,
yes! He don’t want no wittles.”
“I thought he looked as if he did,” said I.
The man stopped eating, and regarded me with the keenest scrutiny
and the greatest surprise.
“Looked? When?”
“Just now.”
“Where?”
“Yonder,” said I, pointing; “over there, where I found him nodding
asleep, and thought it was you.”
He held me by the collar and stared at me so, that I began to think
his first idea about cutting my throat had revived.
“Dressed like you, you know, only with a hat,” I explained,
trembling; “and—and”—I was very anxious to put this delicately
—“and with—the same reason for wanting to borrow a file. Didn’t
you hear the cannon last night?”
“Then there was firing!” he said to himself.
“I wonder you shouldn’t have been sure of that,” I returned, “for
we heard it up at home, and that’s farther away, and we were shut
in besides.”
“Why, see now!” said he. “When a man’s alone on these flats, with a
light head and a light stomach, perishing of cold and want, he
hears nothin’ all night, but guns firing, and voices calling.
Hears? He sees the soldiers, with their red coats lighted up by the
torches carried afore, closing in round him. Hears his number
called, hears himself challenged, hears the rattle of the muskets,
hears the orders ‘Make ready! Present! Cover him steady, men!’ and
is laid hands on—and there’s nothin’! Why, if I see one pursuing
party last night—coming up in order, Damn ‘em, with their tramp,
tramp—I see a hundred. And as to firing! Why, I see the mist
shake with the cannon, arter it was broad day,—But this man”; he
had said all the rest, as if he had forgotten my being there; “did
you notice anything in him?”
“He had a badly bruised face,” said I, recalling what I hardly knew
I knew.
“Not here?” exclaimed the man, striking his left cheek mercilessly,
with the flat of his hand.
“Yes, there!”
“Where is he?” He crammed what little food was left, into the
breast of his gray jacket. “Show me the way he went. I’ll pull him
down, like a bloodhound. Curse this iron on my sore leg! Give us
hold of the file, boy.”
I indicated in what direction the mist had shrouded the other man,
and he looked up at it for an instant. But he was down on the rank
wet grass, filing at his iron like a madman, and not minding me or
minding his own leg, which had an old chafe upon it and was bloody,
but which he handled as roughly as if it had no more feeling in it
than the file. I was very much afraid of him again, now that he had
worked himself into this fierce hurry, and I was likewise very much
afraid of keeping away from home any longer. I told him I must go,
but he took no notice, so I thought the best thing I could do was
to slip off. The last I saw of him, his head was bent over his knee
and he was working hard at his fetter, muttering impatient
imprecations at it and at his leg. The last I heard of him, I
stopped in the mist to listen, and the file was still going.
I fully expected to find a Constable in the kitchen, waiting to
take me up. But not only was there no Constable there, but no
discovery had yet been made of the robbery. Mrs. Joe was
prodigiously busy in getting the house ready for the festivities of
the day, and Joe had been put upon the kitchen doorstep to keep
him out of the dustpan,—an article into which his destiny always
led him, sooner or later, when my sister was vigorously reaping the
floors of her establishment.
“And where the deuce ha’ you been?” was Mrs. Joe’s Christmas
salutation, when I and my conscience showed ourselves.
I said I had been down to hear the Carols. “Ah! well!” observed Mrs.
Joe. “You might ha’ done worse.” Not a doubt of that I thought.
“Perhaps if I warn’t a blacksmith’s wife, and (what’s the same
thing) a slave with her apron never off, I should have been to hear
the Carols,” said Mrs. Joe. “I’m rather partial to Carols, myself,
and that’s the best of reasons for my never hearing any.”
Joe, who had ventured into the kitchen after me as the dustpan had
retired before us, drew the back of his hand across his nose with a
conciliatory air, when Mrs. Joe darted a look at him, and, when her
eyes were withdrawn, secretly crossed his two forefingers, and
exhibited them to me, as our token that Mrs. Joe was in a cross
temper. This was so much her normal state, that Joe and I would
often, for weeks together, be, as to our fingers, like monumental
Crusaders as to their legs.
We were to have a superb dinner, consisting of a leg of pickled
pork and greens, and a pair of roast stuffed fowls. A handsome
mince-pie had been made yesterday morning (which accounted for the
mincemeat not being missed), and the pudding was already on the
boil. These extensive arrangements occasioned us to be cut off
unceremoniously in respect of breakfast; “for I ain’t,” said Mrs.
Joe,—“I ain’t a going to have no formal cramming and busting and
washing up now, with what I’ve got before me, I promise you!”
So, we had our slices served out, as if we were two thousand troops
on a forced march instead of a man and boy at home; and we took
gulps of milk and water, with apologetic countenances, from a jug
on the dresser. In the meantime, Mrs. Joe put clean white curtains
up, and tacked a new flowered flounce across the wide chimney to
replace the old one, and uncovered the little state parlor across
the passage, which was never uncovered at any other time, but
passed the rest of the year in a cool haze of silver paper, which
even extended to the four little white crockery poodles on the
mantel-shelf, each with a black nose and a basket of flowers in his
mouth, and each the counterpart of the other. Mrs. Joe was a very
clean housekeeper, but had an exquisite art of making her
cleanliness more uncomfortable and unacceptable than dirt itself.
Cleanliness is next to Godliness, and some people do the same by
their religion.
My sister, having so much to do, was going to church vicariously,
that is to say, Joe and I were going. In his working—clothes, Joe
was a well-knit characteristic-looking blacksmith; in his holiday
clothes, he was more like a scarecrow in good circumstances, than
anything else. Nothing that he wore then fitted him or seemed to
belong to him; and everything that he wore then grazed him. On the
present festive occasion he emerged from his room, when the blithe
bells were going, the picture of misery, in a full suit of Sunday
penitentials. As to me, I think my sister must have had some
general idea that I was a young offender whom an Accoucheur
Policeman had taken up (on my birthday) and delivered over to her,
to be dealt with according to the outraged majesty of the law. I
was always treated as if I had insisted on being born in
opposition to the dictates of reason, religion, and morality, and
against the dissuading arguments of my best friends. Even when I
was taken to have a new suit of clothes, the tailor had orders to
make them like a kind of Reformatory, and on no account to let me
have the free use of my limbs.
Joe and I going to church, therefore, must have been a moving
spectacle for compassionate minds. Yet, what I suffered outside
was nothing to what I underwent within. The terrors that had
assailed me whenever Mrs. Joe had gone near the pantry, or out of
the room, were only to be equalled by the remorse with which my
mind dwelt on what my hands had done. Under the weight of my wicked
secret, I
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