“is to get him out of England. You will have to go with him, and then he may be induced to go.”
“But get him where I will, could I prevent his coming back?”
“My good Handel, is it not obvious that with Newgate in the next street, there must be far greater hazard in your breaking your mind to him and making him reckless, here, than elsewhere. If a pretext to get him away could be made out of that other convict, or out of anything else in his life, now.”
“There, again!” said I, stopping before Herbert, with my open hands held out, as if they contained the desperation of the case. “I know nothing of his life. It has almost made me mad to sit here of a night and see him before me, so bound up with my fortunes and misfortunes, and yet so unknown to me, except as the miserable wretch who terrified me two days in my childhood!”
Herbert got up, and linked his arm in mine, and we slowly walked to and fro together, studying the carpet.
“Handel,” said Herbert, stopping, “you feel convinced that you can take no further benefits from him; do you?”
“Fully. Surely you would, too, if you were in my place?”
“And you feel convinced that you must break with him?”
“Herbert, can you ask me?”
“And you have, and are bound to have, that tenderness for the life he has risked on your account, that you must save him, if possible, from throwing it away. Then you must get him out of England before you stir a finger to extricate yourself. That done, extricate yourself, in Heaven’s name, and we’ll see it out together, dear old boy.”
It was a comfort to shake hands upon it, and walk up and down again, with only that done.
“Now, Herbert,” said I, “with reference to gaining some knowledge of his history. There is but one way that I know of. I must ask him point blank.”
“Yes. Ask him,” said Herbert, “when we sit at breakfast in the morning.” For he had said, on taking leave of Herbert, that he would come to breakfast with us.
With this project formed, we went to bed. I had the wildest dreams concerning him, and woke unrefreshed; I woke, too, to recover the fear which I had lost in the night, of his being found out as a returned transport. Waking, I never lost that fear.
He came round at the appointed time, took out his jackknife, and sat down to his meal. He was full of plans “for his gentleman’s coming out strong, and like a gentleman,” and urged me to begin speedily upon the pocketbook which he had left in my possession. He considered the chambers and his own lodging as temporary residences, and advised me to look out at once for a “fashionable crib” near Hyde Park, in which he could have “a shake-down.” When he had made an end of his breakfast, and was wiping his knife on his leg, I said to him, without a word of preface, —
“After you were gone last night, I told my friend of the struggle that the soldiers found you engaged in on the marshes, when we came up. You remember?”
“Remember!” said he. “I think so!”
“We want to know something about that man — and about you. It is strange to know no more about either, and particularly you, than I was able to tell last night. Is not this as good a time as another for our knowing more?”
“Well!” he said, after consideration. “You’re on your oath, you know, Pip’s comrade?”
“Assuredly,” replied Herbert.
“As to anything I say, you know,” he insisted. “The oath applies to all.”
“I understand it to do so.”
“And look’ee here! Wotever I done is worked out and paid for,” he insisted again.
“So be it.”
He took out his black pipe and was going to fill it with negrohead, when, looking at the tangle of tobacco in his hand, he seemed to think it might perplex the thread of his narrative. He put it back again, stuck his pipe in a buttonhole of his coat, spread a hand on each knee, and after turning an angry eye on the fire for a few silent moments, looked round at us and said what follows.
Chapter XLII
“Dear boy and Pip’s comrade. I am not a going fur to tell you my life like a song, or a storybook. But to give it you short and handy, I’ll put it at once into a mouthful of English. In jail and out of jail, in jail and out of jail, in jail and out of jail. There, you’ve got it. That’s my life pretty much, down to such times as I got shipped off, arter Pip stood my friend.
“I’ve been done everything to, pretty well — except hanged. I’ve been locked up as much as a silver teakittle. I’ve been carted here and carted there, and put out of this town, and put out of that town, and stuck in the stocks, and whipped and worried and drove. I’ve no more notion where I was born than you have — if so much. I first become aware of myself down in Essex, a thieving turnips for my living. Summun had run away from me — a man — a tinker — and he’d took the fire with him, and left me wery cold.
“I know’d my name to be Magwitch, chrisen’d Abel. How did I know it? Much as I know’d the birds’ names in the hedges to be chaffinch, sparrer, thrush. I might have thought it was all lies together, only as the birds’ names come out true, I supposed mine did.
“So fur as I could find, there warn’t a soul that see young Abel Magwitch, with us little on him as in him, but wot caught fright at him, and either drove him off, or took him up. I was took up, took up, took up, to that extent that I reg’larly grow’d up took up.
“This is the way it was, that when I was a ragged little creetur as much to be pitied as ever I see (not that I looked in the glass, for there warn’t many insides of furnished houses known to me), I got the name of being hardened. “This is a terrible hardened one,” they says to prison wisitors, picking out me. “May be said to live in jails, this boy. “Then they looked at me, and I looked at them, and they measured my head, some on ‘em, — they had better a measured my stomach, — and others on ‘em giv me tracts what I couldn’t read, and made me speeches what I couldn’t understand. They always went on agen me about the Devil. But what the Devil was I to do? I must put something into my stomach, mustn’t I? — Howsomever, I’m a getting low, and I know what’s due. Dear boy and Pip’s comrade, don’t you be afeerd of me being low.
“Tramping, begging, thieving, working sometimes when I could, — though that warn’t as often as you may think, till you put the question whether you would ha’ been over-ready to give me work yourselves, — a bit of a poacher, a bit of a laborer, a bit of a wagoner, a bit of a haymaker, a bit of a hawker, a bit of most things that don’t pay and lead to trouble, I got to be a man. A deserting soldier in a Traveller’s Rest, what lay hid up to the chin under a lot of taturs, learnt me to read; and a travelling Giant what signed his name at a penny a time learnt me to write. I warn’t locked up as often now as formerly, but I wore out my good share of key-metal still.
“At Epsom races, a matter of over twenty years ago, I got acquainted wi’ a man whose skull I’d crack wi’ this poker, like the claw of a lobster, if I’d
