The second piece was the last new grand comic Christmas pantomime, in
the first scene of which, it pained me to suspect that I detected
Mr. Wopsle with red worsted legs under a highly magnified phosphoric
countenance and a shock of red curtain-fringe for his hair, engaged
in the manufacture of thunderbolts in a mine, and displaying great
cowardice when his gigantic master came home (very hoarse) to dinner.
But he presently presented himself under worthier circumstances; for,
the Genius of Youthful Love being in want of assistance,--on account of
the parental brutality of an ignorant farmer who opposed the choice
of his daughter's heart, by purposely falling upon the object, in a
flour-sack, out of the first-floor window,--summoned a sententious
Enchanter; and he, coming up from the antipodes rather unsteadily, after
an apparently violent journey, proved to be Mr. Wopsle in a high-crowned
hat, with a necromantic work in one volume under his arm. The business
of this enchanter on earth being principally to be talked at, sung at,
butted at, danced at, and flashed at with fires of various colors,
he had a good deal of time on his hands. And I observed, with great
surprise, that he devoted it to staring in my direction as if he were
lost in amazement.
There was something so remarkable in the increasing glare of Mr.
Wopsle's eye, and he seemed to be turning so many things over in his
mind and to grow so confused, that I could not make it out. I sat
thinking of it long after he had ascended to the clouds in a large
watch-case, and still I could not make it out. I was still thinking
of it when I came out of the theatre an hour afterwards, and found him
waiting for me near the door.
"How do you do?" said I, shaking hands with him as we turned down the
street together. "I saw that you saw me."
"Saw you, Mr. Pip!" he returned. "Yes, of course I saw you. But who else
was there?"
"Who else?"
"It is the strangest thing," said Mr. Wopsle, drifting into his lost
look again; "and yet I could swear to him."
Becoming alarmed, I entreated Mr. Wopsle to explain his meaning.
"Whether I should have noticed him at first but for your being there,"
said Mr. Wopsle, going on in the same lost way, "I can't be positive;
yet I think I should."
Involuntarily I looked round me, as I was accustomed to look round me
when I went home; for these mysterious words gave me a chill.