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Chapter XXXIX

It was wretched weather; stormy and wet, stormy and wet; mud, mud, mud, deep in all the streets. Day after day, a vast heavy veil had been driving over London from the East, and it drove still, as if in the East there were an eternity of cloud and wind. So furious had been the gusts,¹ that high buildings in town had had the lead stripped of their roofs; and in the country, trees had been torn up, and sails of windmills carried away; and the gloomy accounts had come in from the coast, of shipwreck and death. Violent blasts of rain had accompanied these rages of the wind, and the day just closed as I say down to read had been worst of all. […]

I read with my watch upon the table, purposing to close my book at eleven o’clock. As I shut it, Saint Paul’s* and all the many church-clocks in the City – some leading, some accompanying, some following – struck that hour. The sound was curiously flawed by the wind; and I was listening, and thinking how the wind assailed and tore it, when I heard a footstep on the stair.

* Saint Paul’s – Saint Paul’s Cathedral, the largest and the most famous cathedral in London built by Sir Christopher Wren [´krɪstəfə ´ren] between 1675 and 1710.

What nervous folly made me start, and awfully connect it with the footstep of my dead sister, matters not. * It was past in a moment and I listened again, and heard the footstep stumble in coming on.² Remembering then that the staircase lights were blown out, I took up my reading-lamp, and went out to the stair-head. Whoever was below had stopped on seeing my lamp, for all was quiet.

“There is some one down there, is there not?” I called out, looking down.

“Yes,” said a voice from the darkness beneath.

“What floor do you want?”

“The top. Mr. Pip.”

“That is my name. There is nothing the matter?”³

“Nothing the matter,” returned the voice. And the man came on.

I stood with my lamp held out over the stair-rail, and he came slowly within its light. It was a shaded lamp, to shine upon a book, and its circle of light was very contracted; so that he was in it for a mere instant, and then out of it. In the instant I had seen a face that was strange to me, looking up with an incomprehensible air of being touched and pleased by the sight of me.⁴

Moving the lamp as the man moved, I made out that he was substantially dressed, but roughly; like a voyager by sea. That he had long iron-grey hair. That his age was about sixty. That he was a muscular man, strong on his legs, and that he was browned and hardened by exposure to weather. As he ascended the last stair or two, and the light of my lamp included us both, I saw, with a stupid kind of amazement, that he was holding out both his hands to me.

“Pray,** what is your business?” I asked him.

“My business?” he repeated, pausing. “Ah! I will explain my business, by your leave.”

“Do you wish to come in?”

“Yes,” he replied; “I wish to come in, Master.” ***

* matters not – stands for “does not matter”; seldom used nowadays

** pray – is a form of request equivalent to “please” (or “I beg you to”), it is now going out of use

*** Master – a title of respect for a boy

I had asked him the question inhospitably enough, for I resented the sort of bright and gratified recognition that still shone in his face. I resented it, because it seemed to imply that he expected me to respond to it. But I took him into the room I had just left, and, having set the lamp on the table, asked him as civilly as I could to explain himself.

He looked about him with the strangest air – an air of wondering pleasure, as if he had some part in the things he admired – and he pulled off a rough outer coat, and his hat. Then I saw that his head was furrowed and bald, and that the long iron-grey hair grew only on its sides. But I saw nothing that in the least explained him. On the contrary, I saw him next moment once more holding out both hands to me.

“What do you mean?” said I, half suspecting him to be mad.

He stopped in his looking at me, and slowly rubbed his right hand over his head. “It’s a disappointing to a man,” he said in a coarse broken voice, “arter having looked for’ard so distant, and come so fur; but you’re not to blame for that – neither on us is to blame for that.⁵ I’ll speak in half a minute. Give me half a minute, please.”

He sat down on a chair that stood before the fire, and covered his forehead with his large brown veinous hands. I looked at him attentively then, and recoiled a little from him, but I did not know him.

“There’s no one nigh,” * said he, looking over his shoulder; “is there?”

“Why do you, a stranger coming into my rooms at this time of the night, ask that question?” said I.

“You’re a game one,” he returned, shaking his head at me with a deliberate affection, at once most unintelligible and most exasperating: “I’m glad you’ve grow’d up a game one! But don’t catch hold of me. You’d be sorry arterwards to have done it.”

I relinquished the intention he had detected, for I knew him! Even yet I could not recall a single feature, but I knew him! If the wind and the rain had driven away the intervening years, had scattered all the intervening objects, had swept us to the churchyard where we first stood face to face on such different level, I could not have known my convict more distinctly than I knew him now, as he sat in the chair before the fire. No need to take a file from his pocket and show it to me; no need to⁶ take the handkerchief from his neck and twist it around his head; no need to hug himself with

* nigh - archaic for “near”

both his arms, and take a shivering turn across the room, looking back at me for recognition. I knew him before he gave me one of those aids, though, a moment before, I had not been conscious of remotely suspecting his identity.

He came back to where I stood, and again held out both his hands. Not knowing what to do – for, in my astonishment I had lost my self-possession – I reluctantly gave him my hands. He grasped them heartily, raised them to his lips, kissed them, and still held them.

“You acted nobly, my boy,” said he. “Noble Pip! And I have never forgot it!”

At a change in his manner as if he were even going to embrace me, I laid a hand upon his breast and put him away.

“Stay!” said I. “Keep off! If you are grateful to me for what I did when I was a little child, I hope you have shown your gratitude by mending your way of life. If you have come here to thank me, it was not necessary. Still, however, you have found me out, there must be something good in the feeling that has brought you here, and I will not repulse you; but surely you must understand – I – ”

My attention was so attracted by the singularity of his fixed look at me, that the words died away on my tongue.

“You was a saying,” he observed, when we had confronted one another in silence, “that surely I must understand. What, surely must I understand?”

“That I cannot wish to renew that chance intercourse with you of long ago, under these different circumstances. I am glad to believe you have repented and recovered yourself. I am glad to tell you so. I am glad that, thinking I deserve to be thanked, you have come to thank me. But our ways are different ways, none the less.” […]

“How are you living?” I asked him.

“I’ve been a sheep-farmer, stock-breeder, other trades besides, away in the new world,” said he: “many a thousand mile of stormy water off from this.”

“I hope you have done well?”

“I’ve done wonderful well. There’s others went out alonger me as has done well too, but no man done nigh as well as me. I’m famous for it.”

“I am glad to hear it.”

“I hope to hear you say so, my dear boy.”

Without stopping to try to understand these words or the tone in which they were spoken, I turned off to a point that had just come into my mind.

“Have you ever seen a messenger you once sent to me,” I inquired, “since he undertook that trust?”

“Never set eyes upon him. I warn’t likely to it.”

“He came faithfully, and he brought me the two one-pound notes. I was a poor boy then, as you know, and to a poor boy they were a little fortune. But, like you, I have done well since, and you must let me pay them back. You can put them to some other boy’s use.” I took out my purse.

He watched me as I laid my purse upon the table and opened it, and he watched me as I separated two one-pound notes from its contests. They were clean and new, and I spread them out and handed them over to him. Still watching me, he laid them one upon the other, folded them longwise, gave them a twist, set fire to them at the lamp, and dropped the ashes into the tray.

“May I make so bold,” he said then, with a smile that was like a frown, and with a frown that was like a smile, “as ask you how you have done so well, since you and me was out on them lone shivering marshes?”

“How?”

“Ah!”

He emptied his glass, got up and stood at the side of the fire, with his heavy brown hand on the mantelshelf. He put a foot up to the bars, to dry and warm it, and the wet boot began to steam; but he neither looked at it, nor at the fire, but steadily looked at me. It was only now that I began to tremble.

When my lips had parted, and had shaped some words that were without sound, I forced myself to tell him (though I could not do it distinctly), that I had been chosen to succeed to some property.

“Might a mere warmint* ask what property?” said he.

I faltered, “I don’t know.”

“Could I make a guess, I wonder,” said the Convict, “at your income since your came of age!** As to the first figure, now. Five?”

With my heart beating like a heavy hammer of disordered action, I rose out of my chair, and stood with my hand upon the back of it, looking wildly at him.

* warmint – evidently “varmint” – dial. or slang of vermin: a noxious or troublesome animal or person

** since you came of age = became a man (in English law, 21 years)

“Concerning a guardian,” he went on. “There ought to have been some guardian or such-like, whiles you was a minor.* Some lawyer maybe. As to the first letter of that lawyer’s name, now. Would it be J?”

All the truth of my position came flashing on me; and its disappointments, dangers, disgraces, consequences of all kinds, rushed in in such a multitude that I was borne down by them and had to struggle for every breath I drew. […]

I could not have spoken one word, though it had been to save my life. I stood, with a hand on the chair-back and a hand on my breast, until I grasped at the chair, when the room began to surge and turn. He caught me, drew me to the sofa, put me against the cushions, and bent on one knee before me: bringing the face that I now well remembered, and that I shuddered at, very near to mine.

“Yes, Pip, dear boy, I’ve made a gentleman on you! It’s me wot has done it! I swore that time, sure as ever I spec’lated and got rich, you should get rich I lived rough, that you should live smooth; I worked hard that you should be above work⁷. What odds,** dear boy? Do I tell it fur you to feel a obligation? Not a bit. I tell it, fur you to know as that there hunted dunghill dog wot you kep life in, got his head so high that he could make a gentleman – and, Pip, you’re him!”

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