“Dear Magwitch, I must tell you, now at last.
You understand what I say?”
A gentle pressure on my hand.
“You had a child once, whom you loved and lost.”
A stronger pressure on my hand.
“She lived and found powerful friends.
She is living now. She is a lady and very beautiful.
And I love her!”
With a last faint effort, which would have been powerless
but for my yielding to it and assisting it, he raised
my hand to his lips. Then, he gently let it sink
upon his breast again, with his own hands lying on
it. The placid look at the white ceiling came
back, and passed away, and his head dropped quietly
on his breast.
Mindful, then, of what we had read together, I thought
of the two men who went up into the Temple to pray,
and I knew there were no better words that I could
say beside his bed, than “O Lord, be merciful
to him, a sinner!”
Now that I was left wholly to myself, I gave notice
of my intention to quit the chambers in the Temple
as soon as my tenancy could legally determine, and
in the meanwhile to underlet them. At once I
put bills up in the windows; for, I was in debt, and
had scarcely any money, and began to be seriously
alarmed by the state of my affairs. I ought
rather to write that I should have been alarmed if
I had had energy and concentration enough to help me
to the clear perception of any truth beyond the fact
that I was falling very ill. The late stress
upon me had enabled me to put off illness, but not
to put it away; I knew that it was coming on me now,
and I knew very little else, and was even careless
as to that.
For a day or two, I lay on the sofa, or on the floor
— anywhere, according as I happened to sink
down — with a heavy head and aching limbs, and
no purpose, and no power. Then there came one
night which appeared of great duration, and which
teemed with anxiety and horror; and when in the morning
I tried to sit up in my bed and think of it, I found
I could not do so.
Whether I really had been down in Garden Court in
the dead of the night, groping about for the boat
that I supposed to be there; whether I had two or
three times come to myself on the staircase with great
terror, not knowing how I had got out of bed; whether
I had found myself lighting the lamp, possessed by
the idea that he was coming up the stairs, and that
the lights were blown out; whether I had been inexpressibly
harassed by the distracted talking, laughing, and
groaning, of some one, and had half suspected those
sounds to be of my own making; whether there had been
a closed iron furnace in a dark corner of the room,
and a voice had called out over and over again that
Miss Havisham was consuming within it; these were
things that I tried to settle with myself and get
into some order, as I lay that morning on my bed.
But, the vapour of a limekiln would come between me
and them, disordering them all, and it was through
the vapour at last that I saw two men looking at me.
