I turned at the door, and he was still looking hard at me,

while the two vile casts on the shelf seemed to be trying to get

their eyelids open, and to force out of their swollen throats, "O,

what a man he is!"

Wemmick was out, and though he had been at his desk he could have

done nothing for me. I went straight back to the Temple, where I

found the terrible Provis drinking rum-and-water and smoking

negro-head, in safety.

Next day the clothes I had ordered, all came home, and he put them

on. Whatever he put on, became him less (it dismally seemed to me)

than what he had worn before. To my thinking, there was something

in him that made it hopeless to attempt to disguise him. The more I

dressed him and the better I dressed him, the more he looked like

the slouching fugitive on the marshes. This effect on my anxious

fancy was partly referable, no doubt, to his old face and manner

growing more familiar to me; but I believe too that he dragged one

of his legs as if there were still a weight of iron on it, and that

from head to foot there was Convict in the very grain of the man.

The influences of his solitary hut-life were upon him besides, and

gave him a savage air that no dress could tame; added to these,

were the influences of his subsequent branded life among men, and,

crowning all, his consciousness that he was dodging and hiding now.

In all his ways of sitting and standing, and eating and drinking -

of brooding about, in a high-shouldered reluctant style - of taking

out his great horn-handled jack-knife and wiping it on his legs and

cutting his food - of lifting light glasses and cups to his lips,

as if they were clumsy pannikins - of chopping a wedge off his

bread, and soaking up with it the last fragments of gravy round and

round his plate, as if to make the most of an allowance, and then

drying his finger-ends on it, and then swallowing it - in these

ways and a thousand other small nameless instances arising every

minute in the day, there was Prisoner, Felon, Bondsman, plain as

plain could be.

It had been his own idea to wear that touch of powder, and I had

conceded the powder after overcoming the shorts. But I can compare

the effect of it, when on, to nothing but the probable effect of

rouge upon the dead; so awful was the manner in which everything in

him that it was most desirable to repress, started through that

thin layer of pretence, and seemed to come blazing out at the crown

of his head. It was abandoned as soon as tried, and he wore his

grizzled hair cut short.

Words cannot tell what a sense I had, at the same time, of the

dreadful mystery that he was to me. When he fell asleep of an

evening, with his knotted hands clenching the sides of the

easy-chair, and his bald head tattooed with deep wrinkles falling

forward on his breast, I would sit and look at him, wondering what

he had done, and loading him with all the crimes in the Calendar,

until the impulse was powerful on me to start up and fly from him.

Every hour so increased my abhorrence of him, that I even think I

might have yielded to this impulse in the first agonies of being so

haunted, notwithstanding all he had done for me, and the risk he

ran, but for the knowledge that Herbert must soon come back. Once,

I actually did start out of bed in the night, and begin to dress

myself in my worst clothes, hurriedly intending to leave him there

with everything else I possessed, and enlist for India as a private

soldier.

I doubt if a ghost could have been more terrible to me, up in those

lonely rooms in the long evenings and long nights, with the wind

and the rain always rushing by. A ghost could not have been taken

and hanged on my account, and the consideration that he could be,

and the dread that he would be, were no small addition to my

horrors. When he was not asleep, or playing a complicated kind of

patience with a ragged pack of cards of his own - a game that I

never saw before or since, and in which he recorded his winnings by

sticking his jack-knife into the table - when he was not engaged in

either of these pursuits, he would ask me to read to him - "Foreign

language, dear boy!" While I complied, he, not comprehending a

single word, would stand before the fire surveying me with the air

of an Exhibitor, and I would see him, between the fingers of the

hand with which I shaded my face, appealing in dumb show to the

furniture to take notice of my proficiency.