We thought it best that he should stay in his own rooms;and we left him on the landing outside his door,holding a light over the stair-rail to light us downstairs.Looking back at him,I thought of the first night of his return,when our positions were reversed,and when I little supposed my heart could ever be as heavy and anxious at parting from him as it was now.
Old Barley was growling and swearing when we repassed his door,with no appearance of having ceased or of meaning to cease.When we got to the foot of the stairs,I asked Herbert whether he had preserved the name of Provis.He replied, certainly not, and that the lodger was Mr.Campbell. He also explained that the utmost known of Mr.Campbell there was, that he (Herbert) had Mr.Campbell consigned to him,and felt a strong personal interest in his being well cared for,and living a secluded life. So,when we went into the parlour where Mrs.Whimple and Clara were seated at work,I said nothing of my own interest in Mr. Campbell,but kept it to myself.
When I had taken leave of the pretty, gentle,dark-eyed girl, and of the motherly woman who had not outlived her honest sympathy with a little affair of true love, I felt as if the Old Green Copper Rope-walk had grown quite a different place. Old Barley might be as old as the hills, and might swear like a whole field of troopers, but there were redeeming youth and trust and hope enough in Chinks’s Basin to fill it to overflowing. And then I thought of Estella, and of our parting, and went home very sadly.
All things were as quiet in the Temple as ever I had seen them.The windows of the rooms on that side,lately occupied by Provis, were dark and still,and there was no lounger in Garden Court.I walked past the fountain twice or thrice before I descended the steps that were between me and my rooms, but I was quite alone. Herbert, coming to my bedside when he came in,—for I went straight to bed, dispirited and fatigued,—made the same report. Opening one of the windows after that, he looked out into the moonlight, and told me that the pavement was as solemnly empty as the pavement of any cathedral at that same hour.
Next day I set myself to get the boat. It was soon done,and the boat was brought round to the Temple stairs,and lay where I could reach her within a minute or two.Then, I began to go out as for training and practice:sometimes alone, sometimes with Herbert.I was often out in cold, rain, and sleet,but nobody took much note of me after I had been out a few times.At first, I kept above Blackfriars Bridge;but as the hours of the tide changed,I took towards London Bridge.It was Old London Bridge in those days,and at certain states of the tide there was a race and fall of water there which gave it a bad reputation. But I knew well enough how to ‘shoot’ the bridge after seeing it done, and so began to row about among the shipping in the Pool, and down to Erith. The first time I passed Mill Pond Bank, Herbert and I were pulling a pair of oars; and, both in going and returning, we saw the blind towards the east come down. Herbert was rarely there less frequently than three times in a week, and he never brought me a single word of intelligence that was at all alarming. Still, I knew that there was cause for alarm, and I could not get rid of the notion of being watched. Once received, it is a haunting idea; how many undesigning persons I suspected of watching me, it would be hard to calculate.
In short, I was always full of fears for the rash man who was in hiding.Herbert had sometimes said to me that he found it pleasant to stand at one of our windows after dark, when the tide was running down, and to think that it was flowing, with everything it bore, towards Clara. But I thought with dread that it was flowing towards Magwitch, and that any black mark on its surface might be his pursuers, going swiftly, silently, and surely, to take him.
Chapter XLVII.
Some weeks passed without bringing any change.We waited for Wemmick, and he made no sign.If I had never known him out of Little Britain,and had never enjoyed the privilege of being on a familiar footing at the Castle, I might have doubted him; not so for a moment, knowing him as I did.
My worldly affairs began to wear a gloomy appearance,and I was pressed for money by more than one creditor.Even I myself began to know the want of money (I mean of ready money in my own pocket), and to relieve it by converting some easily spared articles of jewelery into cash. But I had quite determined that it would be a heartless fraud to take more money from my patron in the existing state of my uncertain thoughts and plans. Therefore, I had sent him the unopened pocket-book by Herbert, to hold in his own keeping, and I felt a kind of satisfaction—whether it was a false kind or a true, I hardly know—in not having profited by his generosity since his revelation of himself.
As the time wore on,an impression settled heavily upon me that Estella was married.Fearful of having it confirmed,though it was all but a conviction,I avoided the newspapers,and begged Herbert (to whom I had confided the circumstances of our last interview) never to speak of her to me. Why I hoarded up this last wretched little rag of the robe of hope that was rent and given to the winds, how do I know?Why did you who read this,commit that not dissimilar inconsistency of your own last year,last month, last week?
It was an unhappy life that I lived;and its one dominant anxiety,towering over all its other anxieties,like a high mountain above a range of mountains,never disappeared from my view. Still,no new cause for fear arose.Let me start from my bed as I would,with the terror fresh upon me that he was discovered;let me sit listening, as I would with dread,for Herbert’s returning step at night,lest it should be fleeter than ordinary,and winged with evil news,—for all that,and much more to like purpose,the round of things went on.Condemned to inaction and a state of constant restlessness and suspense,I rowed about in my boat, and waited, waited, waited, as I best could.
There were states of the tide when,having been down the river,I could not get back through the eddy-chafed arches and starlings of old London Bridge; then, I left my boat at a wharf near the Custom House, to be brought up afterwards to the Temple stairs. I was not averse to doing this, as it served to make me and my boat a commoner incident among the water-side people there. From this slight occasion sprang two meetings that I have now to tell of.
One afternoon, late in the month of February,I came ashore at the wharf at dusk.I had pulled down as far as Greenwich with the ebb tide,and had turned with the tide.It had been a fine bright day,but had become foggy as the sun dropped,and I had had to feel my way back among the shipping,pretty carefully. Both in going and returning,I had seen the signal in his window, All well.
As it was a raw evening, and I was cold,I thought I would comfort myself with dinner at once;and as I had hours of dejection and solitude before me if I went home to the Temple, I thought I would afterwards go to the play. The theatre where Mr. Wopsle had achieved his questionable triumph was in that water-side neighbourhood (it is nowhere now), and to that theatre I resolved to go. I was aware that Mr. Wopsle had not succeeded in reviving the Drama, but, on the contrary, had rather partaken of its decline. He had been ominously heard of, through the play-bills, as a faithful Black, in connection with a little girl of noble birth, and a monkey. And Herbert had seen him as a predatory Tartar of comic propensities, with a face like a red brick, and an outrageous hat all over bells.