This is the end of the
second stage of Pip’s 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.
