Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (i want to read a book .txt) 📗
- Author: Charles Dickens
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the child), kept himself dark, as he says, out of the way and out
of the trial, and was only vaguely talked of as a certain man
called Abel, out of whom the jealousy arose. After the acquittal
she disappeared, and thus he lost the child and the child’s
mother.”
“I want to ask—”
“A moment, my dear boy, and I have done. That evil genius,
Compeyson, the worst of scoundrels among many scoundrels, knowing
of his keeping out of the way at that time and of his reasons for
doing so, of course afterwards held the knowledge over his head as
a means of keeping him poorer and working him harder. It was clear
last night that this barbed the point of Provis’s animosity.”
“I want to know,” said I, “and particularly, Herbert, whether he
told you when this happened?”
“Particularly? Let me remember, then, what he said as to that. His
expression was, ‘a round score o’ year ago, and a’most directly
after I took up wi’ Compeyson.’ How old were you when you came upon
him in the little churchyard?”
“I think in my seventh year.”
“Ay. It had happened some three or four years then, he said, and
you brought into his mind the little girl so tragically lost, who
would have been about your age.”
“Herbert,” said I, after a short silence, in a hurried way, “can
you see me best by the light of the window, or the light of the
fire?”
“By the firelight,” answered Herbert, coming close again.
“Look at me.”
“I do look at you, my dear boy.”
“Touch me.”
“I do touch you, my dear boy.”
“You are not afraid that I am in any fever, or that my head is much
disordered by the accident of last night?”
“N-no, my dear boy,” said Herbert, after taking time to examine me.
“You are rather excited, but you are quite yourself.”
“I know I am quite myself. And the man we have in hiding down the
river, is Estella’s Father.”
What purpose I had in view when I was hot on tracing out and
proving Estella’s parentage, I cannot say. It will presently be
seen that the question was not before me in a distinct shape until
it was put before me by a wiser head than my own.
But when Herbert and I had held our momentous conversation, I was
seized with a feverish conviction that I ought to hunt the matter
down,—that I ought not to let it rest, but that I ought to see Mr.
Jaggers, and come at the bare truth. I really do not know whether I
felt that I did this for Estella’s sake, or whether I was glad to
transfer to the man in whose preservation I was so much concerned
some rays of the romantic interest that had so long surrounded me.
Perhaps the latter possibility may be the nearer to the truth.
Any way, I could scarcely be withheld from going out to
Gerrard Street that night. Herbert’s representations that, if I did,
I should probably be laid up and stricken useless, when our
fugitive’s safety would depend upon me, alone restrained my
impatience. On the understanding, again and again reiterated, that,
come what would, I was to go to Mr. Jaggers tomorrow, I at length
submitted to keep quiet, and to have my hurts looked after, and to
stay at home. Early next morning we went out together, and at the
corner of Giltspur Street by Smithfield, I left Herbert to go his
way into the City, and took my way to Little Britain.
There were periodical occasions when Mr. Jaggers and Wemmick went
over the office accounts, and checked off the vouchers, and put all
things straight. On these occasions, Wemmick took his books and
papers into Mr. Jaggers’s room, and one of the upstairs clerks came
down into the outer office. Finding such clerk on Wemmick’s post
that morning, I knew what was going on; but I was not sorry to
have Mr. Jaggers and Wemmick together, as Wemmick would then hear
for himself that I said nothing to compromise him.
My appearance, with my arm bandaged and my coat loose over my
shoulders, favored my object. Although I had sent Mr. Jaggers a
brief account of the accident as soon as I had arrived in town, yet
I had to give him all the details now; and the speciality of the
occasion caused our talk to be less dry and hard, and less strictly
regulated by the rules of evidence, than it had been before. While
I described the disaster, Mr. Jaggers stood, according to his wont,
before the fire. Wemmick leaned back in his chair, staring at me,
with his hands in the pockets of his trousers, and his pen put
horizontally into the post. The two brutal casts, always
inseparable in my mind from the official proceedings, seemed to be
congestively considering whether they didn’t smell fire at the
present moment.
My narrative finished, and their questions exhausted, I then
produced Miss Havisham’s authority to receive the nine hundred
pounds for Herbert. Mr. Jaggers’s eyes retired a little deeper into
his head when I handed him the tablets, but he presently handed
them over to Wemmick, with instructions to draw the check for his
signature. While that was in course of being done, I looked on at
Wemmick as he wrote, and Mr. Jaggers, poising and swaying himself on
his well-polished boots, looked on at me. “I am sorry, Pip,” said
he, as I put the check in my pocket, when he had signed it, “that
we do nothing for you.”
“Miss Havisham was good enough to ask me,” I returned, “whether she
could do nothing for me, and I told her No.”
“Everybody should know his own business,” said Mr. Jaggers. And I
saw Wemmick’s lips form the words “portable property.”
“I should not have told her No, if I had been you,” said Mr
Jaggers; “but every man ought to know his own business best.”
“Every man’s business,” said Wemmick, rather reproachfully towards
me, “is portable property.”
As I thought the time was now come for pursuing the theme I had at
heart, I said, turning on Mr. Jaggers:—
“I did ask something of Miss Havisham, however, sir. I asked her to
give me some information relative to her adopted daughter, and she
gave me all she possessed.”
“Did she?” said Mr. Jaggers, bending forward to look at his boots
and then straightening himself. “Hah! I don’t think I should have
done so, if I had been Miss Havisham. But she ought to know her own
business best.”
“I know more of the history of Miss Havisham’s adopted child than
Miss Havisham herself does, sir. I know her mother.”
Mr. Jaggers looked at me inquiringly, and repeated “Mother?”
“I have seen her mother within these three days.”
“Yes?” said Mr. Jaggers.
“And so have you, sir. And you have seen her still more recently.”
“Yes?” said Mr. Jaggers.
“Perhaps I know more of Estella’s history than even you do,” said
I. “I know her father too.”
A certain stop that Mr. Jaggers came to in his manner—he was too
self-possessed to change his manner, but he could not help its
being brought to an indefinably attentive stop—assured me that he
did not know who her father was. This I had strongly suspected from
Provis’s account (as Herbert had repeated it) of his having kept
himself dark; which I pieced on to the fact that he himself was not
Mr. Jaggers’s client until some four years later, and when he could
have no reason for claiming his identity. But, I could not be sure
of this unconsciousness on Mr. Jaggers’s part before, though I was
quite sure of it now.
“So! You know the young lady’s father, Pip?” said Mr. Jaggers.
“Yes,” I replied, “and his name is Provis—from New South Wales.”
Even Mr. Jaggers started when I said those words. It was the
slightest start that could escape a man, the most carefully
repressed and the sooner checked, but he did start, though he made
it a part of the action of taking out his pocket-handkerchief. How
Wemmick received the announcement I am unable to say; for I was
afraid to look at him just then, lest Mr. Jaggers’s sharpness should
detect that there had been some communication unknown to him
between us.
“And on what evidence, Pip,” asked Mr. Jaggers, very coolly, as he
paused with his handkerchief half way to his nose, “does Provis
make this claim?”
“He does not make it,” said I, “and has never made it, and has no
knowledge or belief that his daughter is in existence.”
For once, the powerful pocket-handkerchief failed. My reply was so
Unexpected, that Mr. Jaggers put the handkerchief back into his
pocket without completing the usual performance, folded his arms,
and looked with stern attention at me, though with an immovable
face.
Then I told him all I knew, and how I knew it; with the one
reservation that I left him to infer that I knew from Miss Havisham
what I in fact knew from Wemmick. I was very careful indeed as to
that. Nor did I look towards Wemmick until I had finished all I
had to tell, and had been for some time silently meeting Mr.
Jaggers’s look. When I did at last turn my eyes in Wemmick’s
direction, I found that he had unposted his pen, and was intent
upon the table before him.
“Hah!” said Mr. Jaggers at last, as he moved towards the papers on
the table. “What item was it you were at, Wemmick, when Mr. Pip
came in?”
But I could not submit to be thrown off in that way, and I made a
passionate, almost an indignant appeal, to him to be more frank and
manly with me. I reminded him of the false hopes into which I had
lapsed, the length of time they had lasted, and the discovery I had
made: and I hinted at the danger that weighed upon my spirits. I
represented myself as being surely worthy of some little confidence
from him, in return for the confidence I had just now imparted. I
said that I did not blame him, or suspect him, or mistrust him, but
I wanted assurance of the truth from him. And if he asked me why I
wanted it, and why I thought I had any right to it, I would tell
him, little as he cared for such poor dreams, that I had loved
Estella dearly and long, and that although I had lost her, and must
live a bereaved life, whatever concerned her was still nearer and
dearer to me than anything else in the world. And seeing that Mr.
Jaggers stood quite still and silent, and apparently quite
obdurate, under this appeal, I turned to Wemmick, and said,
“Wemmick, I know you to be a man with a gentle heart. I have seen
your pleasant home, and your old father, and all the innocent,
cheerful playful ways with which you refresh your business life.
And I entreat you to say a word for me to Mr. Jaggers, and to
represent to him that, all circumstances considered, he ought to be
more open with me!”
I have never seen two men look more oddly at one another than Mr.
Jaggers and Wemmick did after this apostrophe. At first, a
misgiving crossed me that Wemmick would be instantly dismissed from
his employment; but it melted as I saw Mr. Jaggers relax into
something like a smile, and Wemmick become bolder.
“What’s all this?” said Mr. Jaggers. “You with an old father, and
you with pleasant and playful ways?”
“Well!” returned Wemmick. “If I don’t bring ‘em here, what does it
matter?”
“Pip,” said Mr. Jaggers, laying his hand upon my arm, and smiling
openly, “this man
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