第89章

`Or mine,' said the other, gruffly. ` I wouldn't have incommoded none of you, if I'd had my way.' Then, they both laughed, and began cracking nuts, and spitting the shells about. - As I really think I should have liked to do myself, if I had been in their place and so despised.

At length, it was voted that there was no help for the angry gentleman, and that he must either go in his chance company or remain behind. So, he got into his place, still making complaints, and the keeper got into the place next him, and the convicts hauled themselves up as well as they could, and the convict I had recognized sat behind me with his breath on the hair of my head.

`Good-bye, Handel!' Herbert called out as we started. I thought what a blessed fortune it was, that he had found another name for me than Pip.

It is impossible to express with what acuteness I felt the convict's breathing, not only on the back of my head, but all along my spine. The sensation was like being touched in the marrow with some pungent and searching acid, it set my very teeth on edge. He seemed to have more breathing business to do than another man, and to make more noise in doing it; and I was conscious of growing high-shoulderd on one side, in my shrinking endeavours to fend him off.

The weather was miserably raw, and the two cursed the cold. It made us all lethargic before we had gone far, and when we had left the Half-way House behind, we habitually dozed and shivered and were silent. I dozed off, myself, in considering the question whether I ought to restore a couple of pounds sterling to this creature before losing sight of him, and how it could best be done. In the act of dipping forward as if I were going to bathe among the horses, I woke in a fright and took the question up again.

But I must have lost it longer than I had thought, since, although Icould recognize nothing in the darkness and the fitful lights and shadows of our lamps, I traced marsh country in the cold damp wind that blew at us. Cowering forward for warmth and to make me a screen against the wind, the convicts were closer to me than before. They very first words I heard them interchange as I became conscious were the words of my own thought, `Two One Pound notes.'

`How did he get 'em?' said he convict I had never seen.

`How should I know?' returned the other. `He had 'em stowed away somehows.

Giv him by friends, I expect.'

`I wish,' said the other, with a bitter curse upon the cold, `that Ihad 'em here.'

`Two one pound notes, or friends?'

`Two one pound notes. I'd sell all the friends I ever had, for one, and think it a blessed good bargain. Well? So he says - ?'

`So he says,' resumed the convict I had recognized - `it was all said and done in half a minute, behind a pile of timber in the Dockyard - "You're a going to be discharged?" Yes, I was. Would I find out that boy that had fed him and kep his secret, and give him them two one pound notes? Yes, I would. And I did.'

`More fool you,' growled the other. `I'd have spent 'em on a Man, in wittles and drink. He must have been a green one. Mean to say he knowed nothing of you?'

`Not a ha'porth. Different gangs and different ships. He was tried again for prison breaking, and got made a Lifer.'

`And was that - Honour! - the only time you worked out, in this part of the country?'

`The only time.'

`What might have been your opinion of the place?'

`A most beastly place. Mudbank, mist, swamp, and work; work, swamp, mist, and mudbank.'