Great Expectations

Knowing what I knew, I set up an inference of my own here. I believed

the iron to be my convict's iron,--the iron I had seen and heard him

filing at, on the marshes,--but my mind did not accuse him of having put

it to its latest use. For I believed one of two other persons to have

become possessed of it, and to have turned it to this cruel account.

Either Orlick, or the strange man who had shown me the file.

Now, as to Orlick; he had gone to town exactly as he told us when we

picked him up at the turnpike, he had been seen about town all the

evening, he had been in divers companies in several public-houses, and

he had come back with myself and Mr. Wopsle. There was nothing against

him, save the quarrel; and my sister had quarrelled with him, and with

everybody else about her, ten thousand times. As to the strange man; if

he had come back for his two bank-notes there could have been no dispute

about them, because my sister was fully prepared to restore them.

Besides, there had been no altercation; the assailant had come in so

silently and suddenly, that she had been felled before she could look

round.

It was horrible to think that I had provided the weapon, however

undesignedly, but I could hardly think otherwise. I suffered unspeakable

trouble while I considered and reconsidered whether I should at last

dissolve that spell of my childhood and tell Joe all the story. For

months afterwards, I every day settled the question finally in the

negative, and reopened and reargued it next morning. The contention

came, after all, to this;--the secret was such an old one now, had so

grown into me and become a part of myself, that I could not tear it

away. In addition to the dread that, having led up to so much mischief,

it would be now more likely than ever to alienate Joe from me if he

believed it, I had a further restraining dread that he would not believe

it, but would assort it with the fabulous dogs and veal-cutlets as a

monstrous invention. However, I temporized with myself, of course--for,

was I not wavering between right and wrong, when the thing is always

done?--and resolved to make a full disclosure if I should see any

such new occasion as a new chance of helping in the discovery of the

assailant.

The Constables and the Bow Street men from London--for, this happened in

the days of the extinct red-waistcoated police--were about the house for

a week or two, and did pretty much what I have heard and read of like

authorities doing in other such cases. They took up several obviously

wrong people, and they ran their heads very hard against wrong ideas,

and persisted in trying to fit the circumstances to the ideas, instead

of trying to extract ideas from the circumstances. Also, they stood

about the door of the Jolly Bargemen, with knowing and reserved looks

that filled the whole neighborhood with admiration; and they had a

mysterious manner of taking their drink, that was almost as good as

taking the culprit. But not quite, for they never did it.