Great Expectations

It was fortunate for me that I had to take precautions to ensure (so far

as I could) the safety of my dreaded visitor; for, this thought pressing

on me when I awoke, held other thoughts in a confused concourse at a

distance.

The impossibility of keeping him concealed in the chambers was

self-evident. It could not be done, and the attempt to do it would

inevitably engender suspicion. True, I had no Avenger in my service now,

but I was looked after by an inflammatory old female, assisted by an

animated rag-bag whom she called her niece, and to keep a room secret

from them would be to invite curiosity and exaggeration. They both had

weak eyes, which I had long attributed to their chronically looking in

at keyholes, and they were always at hand when not wanted; indeed that

was their only reliable quality besides larceny. Not to get up a mystery

with these people, I resolved to announce in the morning that my uncle

had unexpectedly come from the country.

This course I decided on while I was yet groping about in the darkness

for the means of getting a light. Not stumbling on the means after all,

I was fain to go out to the adjacent Lodge and get the watchman there to

come with his lantern. Now, in groping my way down the black staircase I

fell over something, and that something was a man crouching in a corner.

As the man made no answer when I asked him what he did there, but eluded

my touch in silence, I ran to the Lodge and urged the watchman to come

quickly; telling him of the incident on the way back. The wind being as

fierce as ever, we did not care to endanger the light in the lantern by

rekindling the extinguished lamps on the staircase, but we examined the

staircase from the bottom to the top and found no one there. It then

occurred to me as possible that the man might have slipped into my

rooms; so, lighting my candle at the watchman's, and leaving him

standing at the door, I examined them carefully, including the room in

which my dreaded guest lay asleep. All was quiet, and assuredly no other

man was in those chambers.

It troubled me that there should have been a lurker on the stairs, on

that night of all nights in the year, and I asked the watchman, on the

chance of eliciting some hopeful explanation as I handed him a dram

at the door, whether he had admitted at his gate any gentleman who had

perceptibly been dining out? Yes, he said; at different times of the

night, three. One lived in Fountain Court, and the other two lived in

the Lane, and he had seen them all go home. Again, the only other man

who dwelt in the house of which my chambers formed a part had been in

the country for some weeks, and he certainly had not returned in the

night, because we had seen his door with his seal on it as we came

up-stairs.