Chapter 40

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 up-stairs.

"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 not bring myself to bear the
sight of him, and I thought he had a worse look by daylight.

"I do not even know," said I, speaking low as he took his seat at the table, "by
what name to call you. I have given out that you are my uncle."

"That’s it, dear boy! Call me uncle."

"You assumed some name, I suppose, on board ship?"

"Yes, dear boy. I took the name of Provis."

"Do you mean to keep that name?"

"Why, yes, dear boy, it’s as good as another,—unless you’d like another."

"What is your real name?" I asked him in a whisper.

"Magwitch," he answered, in the same tone; "chrisen’d Abel."

"What were you brought up to be?"

"A warmint, dear boy."

He answered quite seriously, and used the word as if it denoted some profession.

"When you came into the Temple last night—" said I, pausing to wonder whether
that could really have been last night, which seemed so long ago.

"Yes, dear boy?"

"When you came in at the gate and asked the watchman the way here, had you any
one with you?"

"With me? No, dear boy."

"But there was some one there?"

"I didn’t take particular notice," he said, dubiously, "not knowing the ways of
the place. But I think there was a
person, too, come in alonger me."

"Are you known in London?"

"I hope not!" said he, giving his neck a jerk with his forefinger that made me
turn hot and sick.

"Were you known in London, once?"

"Not over and above, dear boy. I was in the provinces mostly."

"Were you—tried—in London?"

"Which time?" said he, with a sharp look.

"The last time."

He nodded. "First knowed Mr. Jaggers that way. Jaggers was for me."

It was on my lips to ask him what he was tried for, but he took up a knife, gave
it a flourish, and with the words, "And what I done is worked out and paid for!"
fell to at his breakfast.

He ate in a ravenous way that was very disagreeable, and all his actions were
uncouth, noisy, and greedy. Some of his teeth had failed him since I saw him eat
on the marshes, and as he turned his food in his mouth, and turned his head
sideways to bring his strongest fangs to bear upon it, he looked terribly like a
hungry old dog. If I had begun with any appetite, he would have taken it away,
and I should have sat much as I did,—repelled from him by an insurmountable
aversion, and gloomily looking at the cloth.

"I’m a heavy grubber, dear boy," he said, as a polite kind of apology when he
made an end of his meal, "but I always was. If it had been in my constitution to
be a lighter grubber, I might ha’ got into lighter trouble. Similarly, I must
have my smoke. When I was first hired out as shepherd t’other side the world,
it’s my belief I should ha’ turned into a molloncolly-mad sheep myself, if I
hadn’t a had my smoke."

As he said so, he got up from table, and putting his hand into the breast of the
pea-coat he wore, brought out a short black pipe, and a handful of loose tobacco
of the kind that is called Negro-head. Having filled his pipe, he put the
surplus tobacco back again, as if his pocket were a drawer. Then, he took a live
coal from the fire with the tongs, and lighted his pipe at it, and then turned
round on the hearth-rug with his back to the fire, and went through his favorite
action of holding out both his hands for mine.

"And this," said he, dandling my hands up and down in his, as he puffed at his
pipe,—"and this is the gentleman what I made! The real genuine One! It does me
good fur to look at you, Pip. All I stip’late, is, to stand by and look at you,
dear boy!"

I released my hands as soon as I could, and found that I was beginning slowly to
settle down to the contemplation of my condition. What I was chained to, and how
heavily, became intelligible to me, as I heard his hoarse voice, and sat looking
up at his furrowed bald head with its iron gray hair at the sides.

"I mustn’t see my gentleman a footing it in the mire of the streets; there
mustn’t be no mud on his boots.
My gentleman must have horses, Pip! Horses to ride, and horses to drive, and
horses for his servant to ride and drive as well. Shall colonists have their
horses (and blood ’uns, if you please, good Lord!) and not my London gentleman?
No, no. We’ll show ’em another pair of shoes than that, Pip; won’t us?"

He took out of his pocket a great thick pocket-book, bursting with papers, and
tossed it on the table.

"There’s something worth spending in that there book, dear boy. It’s yourn. All
I’ve got ain’t mine; it’s yourn. Don’t you be afeerd on it. There’s more where
that come from. I’ve come to the old country fur to see my gentleman spend his
money like a
gentleman. That’ll be my pleasure.My pleasure
’ull be fur to see him do it. And blast you all!" he wound up, looking round the
room and snapping his fingers once with a loud snap, "blast you every one, from
the judge in his wig, to the colonist a stirring up the dust, I’ll show a better
gentleman than the whole kit on you put together!"

"Stop!" said I, almost in a frenzy of fear and dislike, "I want to speak to you.
I want to know what is to be done. I want to know how you are to be kept out of
danger, how long you are going to stay, what projects you have."

"Look’ee here, Pip," said he, laying his hand on my arm in a suddenly altered
and subdued manner; "first of all, look’ee here. I forgot myself half a minute
ago. What I said was low; that’s what it was; low. Look’ee here, Pip. Look over
it. I ain’t a going to be low."

"First," I resumed, half groaning, "what precautions can be taken against your
being recognized and seized?"

"No, dear boy," he said, in the same tone as before, "that don’t go first.
Lowness goes first. I ain’t took so many year to make a gentleman, not without
knowing what’s due to him. Look’ee here, Pip. I was low; that’s what I was; low.
Look over it, dear boy."

Some sense of the grimly-ludicrous moved me to a fretful laugh, as I replied, "I have looked
over it. In Heaven’s name, don’t harp upon it!"

"Yes, but look’ee here," he persisted. "Dear boy, I ain’t come so fur, not fur
to be low. Now, go on, dear boy. You was a saying—"

"How are you to be guarded from the danger you have incurred?"

"Well, dear boy, the danger ain’t so great. Without I was informed agen, the
danger ain’t so much to signify. There’s Jaggers, and there’s Wemmick, and
there’s you. Who else is there to inform?"

"Is there no chance person who might identify you in the street?" said I.

"Well," he returned, "there ain’t many. Nor yet I don’t intend to advertise
myself in the newspapers by the name of A.M. come back from Botany Bay; and
years have rolled away, and who’s to gain by it? Still, look’ee here, Pip. If
the danger had been fifty times as great, I should ha’ come to see you, mind
you, just the same."

"And how long do you remain?"

"How long?" said he, taking his black pipe from his mouth, and dropping his jaw
as he stared at me. "I’m not a going back. I’ve come for good."

"Where are you to live?" said I. "What is to be done with you? Where will you be
safe?"

"Dear boy," he returned, "there’s disguising wigs can be bought for money, and
there’s hair powder, and spectacles, and black clothes,—shorts and what not.
Others has done it safe afore, and what others has done afore, others can do
agen. As to the where and how of living, dear boy, give me your own opinions on
it."

"You take it smoothly now," said I, "but you were very serious last night, when
you swore it was Death."

"And so I swear it is Death," said he, putting his pipe back in his mouth, "and
Death by the rope, in the open street not fur from this, and it’s serious that
you should fully understand it to be so. What then, when that’s once done? Here
I am. To go back now ’ud be as bad as to stand ground—worse. Besides, Pip, I’m
here, because I’ve meant it by you, years and years. As to what I dare, I’m a
old bird now, as has dared all manner of traps since first he was fledged, and
I’m not afeerd to perch upon a scarecrow. If there’s Death hid inside of it,
there is, and let him come out, and I’ll face him, and then I’ll believe in him
and not afore. And now let me have a look at my gentleman agen."

Once more, he took me by both hands and surveyed me with an air of admiring
proprietorship: smoking with great complacency all the while.

It appeared to me that I could do no better than secure him some quiet lodging
hard by, of which he might take possession when Herbert returned: whom I
expected in two or three days. That the secret must be confided to Herbert as a
matter of unavoidable necessity, even if I could have put the immense relief I
should derive from sharing it with him out of the question, was plain to me. But
it was by no means so plain to Mr. Provis (I resolved to call him by that name),
who reserved his consent to Herbert’s participation until he should have seen
him and formed a favorable judgment of his physiognomy. "And even then, dear
boy," said he, pulling a greasy little clasped black Testament out of his
pocket, "we’ll have him on his oath."

To state that my terrible patron carried this little black book about the world
solely to swear people on in cases of emergency, would be to state what I never
quite established; but this I can say, that I never knew him put it to any other
use. The book itself had the appearance of having been stolen from some court of
justice, and perhaps his knowledge of its antecedents, combined with his own
experience in that wise, gave him a reliance on its powers as a sort of legal
spell or charm. On this first occasion of his producing it, I recalled how he
had made me swear fidelity in the churchyard long ago, and how he had described
himself last night as always swearing to his resolutions in his solitude.

As he was at present dressed in a seafaring slop suit, in which he looked as if
he had some parrots and cigars to dispose of, I next discussed with him what
dress he should wear. He cherished an extraordinary belief in the virtues of
"shorts" as a disguise, and had in his own mind sketched a dress for himself
that would have made him something between a dean and a dentist. It was with
considerable difficulty that I won him over to the assumption of a dress more
like a prosperous farmer’s; and we arranged that he should cut his hair close,
and wear a little powder. Lastly, as he had not yet been seen by the laundress
or her niece, he was to keep himself out of their view until his change of dress
was made.

It would seem a simple matter to decide on these precautions; but in my dazed,
not to say distracted, state, it took so long, that I did not get out to further
them until two or three in the afternoon. He was to remain shut up in the
chambers while I was gone, and was on no account to open the door.

There being to my knowledge a respectable lodging-house in Essex Street, the
back of which looked into the Temple, and was almost within hail of my windows,
I first of all repaired to that house, and was so fortunate as to secure the
second floor for my uncle, Mr. Provis. I then went from shop to shop, making
such purchases as were necessary to the change in his appearance. This business
transacted, I turned my face, on my own account, to Little Britain. Mr. Jaggers
was at his desk, but, seeing me enter, got up immediately and stood before his
fire.

"Now, Pip," said he, "be careful."

"I will, sir," I returned. For, coming along I had thought well of what I was
going to say.

"Don’t commit yourself," said Mr. Jaggers, "and don’t commit any one. You
understand—any one. Don’t tell me anything: I don’t want to know anything; I am
not curious."

Of course I saw that he knew the man was come.

"I merely want, Mr. Jaggers," said I, "to assure myself that what I have been
told is true. I have no hope of its being untrue, but at least I may verify it."

Mr. Jaggers nodded. "But did you say ’told’ or ’informed’?" he asked me, with
his head on one side, and not looking at me, but looking in a listening way at
the floor. "Told would seem to imply verbal communication. You can’t have verbal
communication with a man in New South Wales, you know."

"I will say, informed, Mr. Jaggers."

"Good."

"I have been informed by a person named Abel Magwitch, that he is the benefactor
so long unknown to me."

"That is the man," said Mr. Jaggers, "in New South Wales."

"And only he?" said I.

"And only he," said Mr. Jaggers.

"I am not so unreasonable, sir, as to think you at all responsible for my
mistakes and wrong conclusions; but I always supposed it was Miss Havisham."

"As you say, Pip," returned Mr. Jaggers, turning his eyes upon me coolly, and
taking a bite at his forefinger, "I am not at all responsible for that."

"And yet it looked so like it, sir," I pleaded with a downcast heart.

"Not a particle of evidence, Pip," said Mr. Jaggers, shaking his head and
gathering up his skirts. "Take nothing on its looks; take everything on
evidence. There’s no better rule."

"I have no more to say," said I, with a sigh, after standing silent for a little
while. "I have verified my information, and there’s an end."

"And Magwitch—in New South Wales—having at last disclosed himself," said Mr.
Jaggers, "you will comprehend, Pip, how rigidly throughout my communication with
you, I have always adhered to the strict line of fact. There has never been the
least departure from the strict line of fact. You are quite aware of that?"

"Quite, sir."

"I communicated to Magwitch—in New South Wales—when he first wrote to me—from
New South Wales—the caution that he must not expect me ever to deviate from the
strict line of fact. I also communicated to him another caution. He appeared to
me to have obscurely hinted in his letter at some distant idea he had of seeing
you in England here. I cautioned him that I must hear no more of that; that he
was not at all likely to obtain a pardon; that he was expatriated for the term
of his natural life; and that his presenting himself in this country would be an
act of felony, rendering him liable to the extreme penalty of the law. I gave
Magwitch that caution," said Mr. Jaggers, looking hard at me; "I wrote it to New
South Wales. He guided himself by it, no doubt."

"No doubt," said I.

"I have been informed by Wemmick," pursued Mr. Jaggers, still looking hard at
me, "that he has received a letter, under date Portsmouth, from a colonist of
the name of Purvis, or—"

"Or Provis," I suggested.

"Or Provis—thank you, Pip. Perhaps it is Provis?
Perhaps you know it’s Provis?"

"Yes," said I.

"You know it’s Provis. A letter, under date Portsmouth, from a colonist of the
name of Provis, asking for the particulars of your address, on behalf of
Magwitch. Wemmick sent him the particulars, I understand, by return of post.
Probably it is through Provis that you have received the explanation of
Magwitch—in New South Wales?"

"It came through Provis," I replied.

"Good day, Pip," said Mr. Jaggers, offering his hand; "glad to have seen you. In
writing by post to Magwitch—in New South Wales—or in communicating with him
through Provis, have the goodness to mention that the particulars and vouchers
of our long account shall be sent to you, together with the balance; for there
is still a balance remaining. Good day, Pip!"

We shook hands, and he looked hard at me as long as he could see me. I turned at
the door, and he was still looking hard at me, while the two vile casts on the
shelf seemed to be trying to get their eyelids open, and to force out of their
swollen throats, "O, what a man he is!"

Wemmick was out, and though he had been at his desk he could have done nothing
for me. I went straight back to the Temple, where I found the terrible Provis
drinking rum and water and smoking negro-head, in safety.

Next day the clothes I had ordered all came home, and he put them on. Whatever
he put on, became him less (it dismally seemed to me) than what he had worn
before. To my thinking, there was something in him that made it hopeless to
attempt to disguise him. The more I dressed him and the better I dressed him,
the more he looked like the slouching fugitive on the marshes. This effect on my
anxious fancy was partly referable, no doubt, to his old face and manner growing
more familiar to me; but I believe too that he dragged one of his legs as if
there were still a weight of iron on it, and that from head to foot there was
Convict in the very grain of the man.

The influences of his solitary hut-life were upon him besides, and gave him a
savage air that no dress could tame; added to these were the influences of his
subsequent branded life among men, and, crowning all, his consciousness that he
was dodging and hiding now. In all his ways of sitting and standing, and eating
and drinking,—of brooding about in a high-shouldered reluctant style,—of taking
out his great horn-handled jackknife and wiping it on his legs and cutting his
food,—of lifting light glasses and cups to his lips, as if they were clumsy
pannikins,—of chopping a wedge off his bread, and soaking up with it the last
fragments of gravy round and round his plate, as if to make the most of an
allowance, and then drying his finger-ends on it, and then swallowing it,—in
these ways and a thousand other small nameless instances arising every minute in
the day, there was Prisoner, Felon, Bondsman, plain as plain could be.

It had been his own idea to wear that touch of powder, and I had conceded the
powder after overcoming the shorts. But I can compare the effect of it, when on,
to nothing but the probable effect of rouge upon the dead; so awful was the
manner in which everything in him that it was most desirable to repress, started
through that thin layer of pretence, and seemed to come blazing out at the crown
of his head. It was abandoned as soon as tried, and he wore his grizzled hair
cut short.

Words cannot tell what a sense I had, at the same time, of the dreadful mystery
that he was to me. When he fell asleep of an evening, with his knotted hands
clenching the sides of the easy-chair, and his bald head tattooed with deep
wrinkles falling forward on his breast, I would sit and look at him, wondering
what he had done, and loading him with all the crimes in the Calendar, until the
impulse was powerful on me to start up and fly from him. Every hour so increased
my abhorrence of him, that I even think I might have yielded to this impulse in
the first agonies of being so haunted, notwithstanding all he had done for me
and the risk he ran, but for the knowledge that Herbert must soon come back.
Once, I actually did start out of bed in the night, and begin to dress myself in
my worst clothes, hurriedly intending to leave him there with everything else I
possessed, and enlist for India as a private soldier.

I doubt if a ghost could have been more terrible to me, up in those lonely rooms
in the long evenings and long nights, with the wind and the rain always rushing
by. A ghost could not have been taken and hanged on my account, and the
consideration that he could be, and the dread that he would be, were no small
addition to my horrors. When he was not asleep, or playing a complicated kind of
Patience with a ragged pack of cards of his own,—a game that I never saw before
or since, and in which he recorded his winnings by sticking his jackknife into
the table,—when he was not engaged in either of these pursuits, he would ask me
to read to him,—"Foreign language, dear boy!" While I complied, he, not
comprehending a single word, would stand before the fire surveying me with the
air of an Exhibitor, and I would see him, between the fingers of the hand with
which I shaded my face, appealing in dumb show to the furniture to take notice
of my proficiency. The imaginary student pursued by the misshapen creature he
had impiously made, was not more wretched than I, pursued by the creature who
had made me, and recoiling from him with a stronger repulsion, the more he
admired me and the fonder he was of me.

This is written of, I am sensible, as if it had lasted a year. It lasted about
five days. Expecting Herbert all the time, I dared not go out, except when I
took Provis for an airing after dark. At length, one evening when dinner was
over and I had dropped into a slumber quite worn out,—for my nights had been
agitated and my rest broken by fearful dreams,—I was roused by the welcome
footstep on the staircase. Provis, who had been asleep too, staggered up at the
noise I made, and in an instant I saw his jackknife shining in his hand.

"Quiet! It’s Herbert!" I said; and Herbert came bursting in, with the airy
freshness of six hundred miles of France upon him.

"Handel, my dear fellow, how are you, and again how are you, and again how are
you? I seem to have been gone a twelvemonth! Why, so I must have been, for you
have grown quite thin and pale! Handel, my—Halloa! I beg your pardon."

He was stopped in his running on and in his shaking hands with me, by seeing
Provis. Provis, regarding him with a fixed attention, was slowly putting up his
jackknife, and groping in another pocket for something else.

"Herbert, my dear friend," said I, shutting the double doors, while Herbert
stood staring and wondering, "something very strange has happened. This is—a
visitor of mine."

"It’s all right, dear boy!" said Provis coming forward, with his little clasped
black book, and then addressing himself to Herbert. "Take it in your right hand.
Lord strike you dead on the spot, if ever you split in any way sumever! Kiss
it!"

"Do so, as he wishes it," I said to Herbert. So, Herbert, looking at me with a
friendly uneasiness and amazement, complied, and Provis immediately shaking
hands with him, said, "Now you’re on your oath, you know. And never believe me
on mine, if Pip shan’t make a gentleman on you!"