Great Expectations

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 legs 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

jackknife 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.