"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 Iegs 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 jack-knife 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 jack-knife 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
jack-knife 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."