Great Expectations

Being at last touched on the shoulder, I started and turned. I started

much more naturally then, to find myself confronted by a man in a sober

gray dress. The last man I should have expected to see in that place of

porter at Miss Havisham's door.

"Orlick!"

"Ah, young master, there's more changes than yours. But come in, come

in. It's opposed to my orders to hold the gate open."

I entered and he swung it, and locked it, and took the key out. "Yes!"

said he, facing round, after doggedly preceding me a few steps towards

the house. "Here I am!"

"How did you come here?"

"I come her," he retorted, "on my legs. I had my box brought alongside

me in a barrow."

"Are you here for good?"

"I ain't here for harm, young master, I suppose?"

I was not so sure of that. I had leisure to entertain the retort in my

mind, while he slowly lifted his heavy glance from the pavement, up my

legs and arms, to my face.

"Then you have left the forge?" I said.

"Do this look like a forge?" replied Orlick, sending his glance all

round him with an air of injury. "Now, do it look like it?"

I asked him how long he had left Gargery's forge?

"One day is so like another here," he replied, "that I don't know

without casting it up. However, I come here some time since you left."

"I could have told you that, Orlick."

"Ah!" said he, dryly. "But then you've got to be a scholar."

By this time we had come to the house, where I found his room to be one

just within the side-door, with a little window in it looking on the

courtyard. In its small proportions, it was not unlike the kind of place

usually assigned to a gate-porter in Paris. Certain keys were hanging on

the wall, to which he now added the gate key; and his patchwork-covered

bed was in a little inner division or recess. The whole had a slovenly,

confined, and sleepy look, like a cage for a human dormouse; while he,

looming dark and heavy in the shadow of a corner by the window, looked

like the human dormouse for whom it was fitted up,--as indeed he was.

"I never saw this room before," I remarked; "but there used to be no

Porter here."