I have never seen two men look more oddly at one another than Mr.
Jaggers and Wemmick did after this apostrophe. At first, a misgiving
crossed me that Wemmick would be instantly dismissed from his
employment; but it melted as I saw Mr. Jaggers relax into something like
a smile, and Wemmick become bolder.
"What's all this?" said Mr. Jaggers. "You with an old father, and you
with pleasant and playful ways?"
"Well!" returned Wemmick. "If I don't bring 'em here, what does it
matter?"
"Pip," said Mr. Jaggers, laying his hand upon my arm, and smiling
openly, "this man must be the most cunning impostor in all London."
"Not a bit of it," returned Wemmick, growing bolder and bolder. "I think
you're another."
Again they exchanged their former odd looks, each apparently still
distrustful that the other was taking him in.
"You with a pleasant home?" said Mr. Jaggers.
"Since it don't interfere with business," returned Wemmick, "let it be
so. Now, I look at you, sir, I shouldn't wonder if you might be planning
and contriving to have a pleasant home of your own one of these days,
when you're tired of all this work."
Mr. Jaggers nodded his head retrospectively two or three times, and
actually drew a sigh. "Pip," said he, "we won't talk about 'poor
dreams;' you know more about such things than I, having much fresher
experience of that kind. But now about this other matter. I'll put a
case to you. Mind! I admit nothing."
He waited for me to declare that I quite understood that he expressly
said that he admitted nothing.
"Now, Pip," said Mr. Jaggers, "put this case. Put the case that a
woman, under such circumstances as you have mentioned, held her child
concealed, and was obliged to communicate the fact to her legal adviser,
on his representing to her that he must know, with an eye to the
latitude of his defence, how the fact stood about that child. Put the
case that, at the same time he held a trust to find a child for an
eccentric rich lady to adopt and bring up."
"I follow you, sir."
"Put the case that he lived in an atmosphere of evil, and that all he
saw of children was their being generated in great numbers for certain
destruction. Put the case that he often saw children solemnly tried at
a criminal bar, where they were held up to be seen; put the case that
he habitually knew of their being imprisoned, whipped, transported,
neglected, cast out, qualified in all ways for the hangman, and growing
up to be hanged. Put the case that pretty nigh all the children he saw
in his daily business life he had reason to look upon as so much
spawn, to develop into the fish that were to come to his net,--to be
prosecuted, defended, forsworn, made orphans, bedevilled somehow."