06. Great Expectations: Charles Dickens

My state of mind regarding the pilfering from which I had been so exceptionally exonerated, did not impel me to frank disclosure; but I hope it had some dregs of good at the bottom of it. 

I like Joe more, and I like less my sister Mrs Joe.  In those early days he let me love him.  I thought about telling him the whole story when I saw him searching for his file.  But I was afraid he would think me worse than I was.  The thought of sitting alone in the chimney corner, and staring drearily  at my lost friend, tied up my tongue.  I never could see him at the fireside feeling his fair whiskers, and meditating on my theft.  When yesterday's meat and pudding came on today's table he would debate whether I had been in the pantry.  At any subsequent period of our joint domestic life, his remark about the beer being flat or thick, the conviction that he suspected Tar in it would bring a rush of blood to my face.   In a word, I was too cowardly to do what I knew, and I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong.  I had had no intercourse with the world at that time.  Quite an untaught genius, I made the discovery of the line of action for myself. 

We were returning home; I was sleepy and Joe carried me on his back.  Mr Wopsle was in bad temper.  If the church had been thrown open, he would have probably excommunicated the whole expedition including Joe and myself. 

When we reached home, Joe set me upon my feet on the kitchen floor. But I staggered on the floor like a drunkard and continued my sleep, through the heat and lights and noise.  They were trying to wake me with thumps between my shoulders. 

"Yah! Was there ever such a boy as this!" exclaimed my sister.  Joe had been telling them about the convict's confession.  Then it was the turn of visitors to elaborate how he entered the pantry.  Mr Pumblechook made out his own fiction, after carefully surveying the premises:  That he had first got upon the roof of the forge, and then got upon the roof of the house, and then let himself down the kitchen chimney by a rope made of his bedding cut into strips; and as Mr Pumblechook was very positive and drove his chaise-cart over everybody, it was agreed that it must be so.  Mr Wopsle cried out "No!" with feeble malice of a tired man; but as he had no theory, and no coat on, he was unanimously set at nought.  Not to mention his smoking hard behind, as he stood with his back to the kitchen fire to draw the damp out.  It was not calculated to inspire confidence. 

This was all I heard that night before my sister clutched me, as a slumberous offence to company's eyesight, and assisted me up to bed with such a strong hand that I seemed to have fifty boots on, and to be dangling them all against the edges of the stairs.  My state of mind, as I have described it, began in the morning, and lasted long after the subject had died out, and had ceased to be mentioned saving on exceptional occasions. 

End of the Chapter