At the stairs where we had taken him abroad,and ever since, I had looked warily for any token of our being suspected.I had seen none. We certainly had not been,and at that time as certainly we were not either attended or followed by any boat. If we had been waited on by any boat, I should have run in to shore, and have obliged her to go on, or to make her purpose evident. But we held our own without any appearance of molestation.
He had his boat-cloak on him, and looked,as I have said, a natural part of the scene.It was remarkable (but perhaps the wretched life he had led accounted for it) that he was the least anxious of any of us. He was not indifferent, for he told me that he hoped to live to see his gentleman one of the best of gentlemen in a foreign country; he was not disposed to be passive or resigned, as I understood it; but he had no notion of meeting danger half way. When it came upon him, he confronted it, but it must come before he troubled himself.
“If you knowed, dear boy,” he said to me,“what it is to sit here alonger my dear boy and have my smoke,arter having been day by day betwixt four walls,you’d envy me. But you don’t know what it is.”
“I think I know the delights of freedom,” I answered.
“Ah,” said he, shaking his head gravely.“But you don’t know it equal to me.You must have been under lock and key, dear boy,to know it equal to me,—but I ain’t a-going to be low.”
It occurred to me as inconsistent, that,for any mastering idea,he should have endangered his freedom,and even his life. But I reflected that perhaps freedom without danger was too much apart from all the habit of his existence to be to him what it would be to another man. I was not far out, since he said, after smoking a little:—
“You see, dear boy, when I was over yonder,t’other side the world,I was always a looking to this side;and it come flat to be there,for all I was a growing rich.Everybody knowed Magwitch, and Magwitch could come,and Magwitch could go,and nobody’s head would be troubled about him.They ain’t so easy concerning me here, dear boy,—wouldn’t be, leastwise, if they knowed where I was.”
“If all goes well,” said I,“you will be perfectly free and safe again within a few hours. ”
“Well,” he returned, drawing a long breath, “I hope so.”
“And think so?”
He dipped his hand in the water over the boat’s gunwale,and said, smiling with that softened air upon him which was not new to me: —
“Ay, I s’pose I think so, dear boy.We’d be puzzled to be more quiet and easy-going than we are at present.But—it’s a flowing so soft and pleasant through the water,p’raps, as makes me think it—I was a thinking through my smoke just then,that we can no more see to the bottom of the next few hours than we can see to the bottom of this river what I catches hold of. Nor yet we can’t no more hold their tide than I can hold this. And it’s run through my fingers and gone, you see!” holding up his dripping hand.
“But for your face I should think you were a little despondent, ” said I.
“Not a bit on it, dear boy!It comes of flowing on so quiet,and of that there rippling at the boat’s head making a sort of a Sunday tune.Maybe I’m a growing a trifle old besides.”
He put his pipe back in his mouth with an undisturbed expression of face,and sat as composed and contented as if we were already out of England.Yet he was as submissive to a word of advice as if he had been in constant terror; for, when we ran ashore to get some bottles of beer into the boat, and he was stepping out, I hinted that I thought he would be safest where he was, and he said. “Do you, dear boy?” and quietly sat down again.
The air felt cold upon the river,but it was a bright day,and the sunshine was very cheering.The tide ran strong, I took care to lose none of it,and our steady stroke carried us on thoroughly well.By imperceptible degrees, as the tide ran out,we lost more and more of the nearer woods and hills,and dropped lower and lower between the muddy banks,but the tide was yet with us when we were off Gravesend.As our charge was wrapped in his cloak,I purposely passed within a boat or two’s length of the floating Custom House,and so out to catch the stream,alongside of two emigrant ships,and under the bows of a large transport with troops on the forecastle looking down at us. And soon the tide began to slacken, and the craft lying at anchor to swing, and presently they had all swung round, and the ships that were taking advantage of the new tide to get up to the Pool began to crowd upon us in a fleet, and we kept under the shore, as much out of the strength of the tide now as we could, standing carefully off from low shallows and mudbanks.
Our oarsmen were so fresh,by dint of having occasionally let her drive with the tide for a minute or two,that a quarter of an hour’s rest proved full as much as they wanted.We got ashore among some slippery stones while we ate and drank what we had with us, and looked about. It was like my own marsh country, flat and monotonous, and with a dim horizon; while the winding river turned and turned, and the great floating buoys upon it turned and turned, and everything else seemed stranded and still. For now the last of the fleet of ships was round the last low point we had headed; and the last green barge, straw-laden, with a brown sail, had followed; and some ballast-lighters, shaped like a child’s first rude imitation of a boat, lay low in the mud; and a little squat shoal-lighthouse on open piles stood crippled in the mud on stilts and crutches; and slimy stakes stuck out of the mud, and slimy stones stuck out of the mud, and red landmarks and tidemarks stuck out of the mud, and an old landing-stage and an old roofless building slipped into the mud, and all about us was stagnation and mud.
We pushed off again, and made what way we could.It was much harder work now,but Herbert and Startop persevered,and rowed and rowed and rowed until the sun went down.By that time the river had lifted us a little,so that we could see above the bank.There was the red sun, on the low level of the shore,in a purple haze, fast deepening into black;and there was the solitary flat marsh;and far away there were the rising grounds,between which and us there seemed to be no life,save here and there in the foreground a melancholy gull.
As the night was fast falling, and as the moon,being past the full, would not rise early,we held a little council; a short one,for clearly our course was to lie by at the first lonely tavern we could find.So, they plied their oars once more,and I looked out for anything like a house.Thus we held on, speaking little,for four or five dull miles. It was very cold, and,a collier coming by us,with her galley-fire smoking and flaring,looked like a comfortable home.The night was as dark by this time as it would be until morning;and what light we had,seemed to come more from the river than the sky,as the oars in their dipping struck at a few reflected stars.
At this dismal time we were evidently all possessed by the idea that we were followed. As the tide made, it flapped heavily at irregular intervals against the shore; and whenever such a sound came, one or other of us was sure to start, and look in that direction. Here and there, the set of the current had worn down the bank into a little creek, and we were all suspicious of such places, and eyed them nervously. Sometimes, “What was that ripple?” one of us would say in a low voice. Or another,“Is that a boat yonder?” And afterwards we would fall into a dead silence,and I would sit impatiently thinking with what an unusual amount of noise the oars worked in the thowels.