Join Host Bree Carlile as she reads the forty-seventh chapter of Great Expectations.

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My name is Brie Carlyle and I love to read and wanted to share my passion with listeners like you.

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Today we'll be continuing great expectations by Charles Dickens chapter 47 some weeks passed without bringing any change.

We waited for Wimick, and he made no sign.

If I had never known him out of little Britain and had never enjoyed the privilege of being on a familiar footing at the castle, I might have doubted him.

Not so for a moment.

Knowing him as I did, my worldly affairs began to wear a gloomy appearance, and I was pressed for money by more than one creditor.

Even I myself began to know the want of money, I mean of ready money in my own pocket, and to relieve it by converting some easily spared articles of jewelry into cash.

But I had quite determined that it would be a heartless fraud to take more money from my patron in the existing state of my uncertain thoughts and plans.

Therefore, I had sent him the unopened pocketbook by Herbert to hold in his own keeping, and I felt a kind of satisfaction.

Whether it was a false kind or a true, I hardly know, and not having profited by his generosity since his revelation of himself as the time wore on, an impression settled heavily upon me that Estella was married.

Fearful of having it confirmed, though it was all but had a conviction.

I avoided the newspapers and begged Herbert, to whom I had confided the circumstances of our last interview, never to speak of her to me, why I hoarded up this last wretched little rag of the robe of hope that was rent and given to the winds.

How do I know?

Why did you, who read this, commit that not dissimilar inconsistency of your own?

Last year, last month?

Last week?

It was an unhappy life that I lived, and its one dominant anxiety, towering over all its other anxieties, like a high mountain above a range of mountains, never disappeared from my view.

Still no new cause for fear arose.

Let me start from my bed, as I would with the terror fresh upon me that he was discovered.

Let me sit, listening, as I would with dread for Herbert's returning step at night, lest it should be fleeter than ordinary and winged with evil news.

For all that, and much more to like purpose.

The round of things went on, condemned to inaction and a state of constant restlessness and suspense.

I rode about in my boat and waited, waited, waited as best I could.

There were states of the tide when, having been down the river, I could not get back through the eddy chaped arches and starlings of old London Bridge.

Then I left my boat at a wharf near the custom house, to be brought up afterwards to the temple stairs.

I was not averse to doing this, as it served to make me and my boat a common or incident among the waterside people.

There from this slight occasion sprang two meetings that I have now to tell of.

One afternoon, late in the month of February, I came ashore at the wharf at dusk.

I had pulled down as far as Greenwich with the ebb tide, and had turned with the tide.

It had been a fine bright day, but had become foggy as the sun dropped, and I had had to feel my way back among the shipping pretty carefully.

But in going and returning, I had seen the signal in his window.

All well, as it was a raw evening, and I was cold.

I thought I would comfort myself with dinner at once.

And as I had hours of dejection and solitude before me, if I went home to the temple, I thought I would afterwards go to the play.

The theater where Mr.

Wapsel had achieved his questionable triumph.

Was in that waterside neighborhood.

It is nowhere now into that theater I resolved to go.

I was aware that Mr.

Wapsel had not succeeded in reviving the drama, but, on the contrary, had rather partaken of its decline.

He had been ominously heard of through the playbills as a faithful black in connection with a little girl of noble birth and a monkey.

And Herbert had seen him as a predatory tartar of comic propensities, with a face like a red brick and an outrageous hat all over bells.

I dined at what Herbert and I used to call a geographical chop house, where there were maps of the world, and porter pot rims on every half yard of the table, claws and charts of gravy on every one of the knives.

To this day, there is scarcely a single chop house within the Lord mayor's dominions, which is not geographical, and wore out the time in dozing over crumbs, staring at gas, and baking in a hot blast of dinners.

By and by, I roused myself and went to the play.

There I found a virtuous boatswain in his majesty's service, a most excellent man, though I could have wished his trousers not quite so tight in some places and not quite so loose in others, who knocked all the little men's hats over their eyes, though he was very generous and brave, and who wouldn't hear of anybody's paying taxes, though he was very patriotic.

He had a bag of money in his pocket like a pudding in the cloth.

And on that property married a young person in bed, furniture with great rejoicings.

The whole population of Portsmouth, nine in number at the last census, turning out on the beach to rub their own hands and shake everybody else's and sing.

Phil.

Fill.

A certain dark complexioned swab, however, who wouldn't fill or do anything else that was proposed to him, and whose heart was openly stated by the boatswain to be as black as his figurehead, proposed to two other swabs to get all mankind into difficulties which was so effectually done.

The swab family having considerable political influence, that it took half the evening to set things right.

And then it was only brought about through an honest little grocer with a white hat, black gators, and red nose, getting into a clock with a gridiron and listening and coming out and knocking everybody down from behind with the gridiron, whom he couldn't confute with what he had overheard.

This led to Mr.

Wapsels, who had never been heard of before, coming in with the star and garter on as a plenty potentiary of great power direct from the Admiralty, to say that the swabs were all to go to prison on the spot, and that he had brought the boat swain down the Union Jack as a slight acknowledgement of his public services, the boat swain, unmanned for the first time, respectfully dried his eyes on the jack, and then, cheering up and addressing Mr.

Wapsel as your honor, solicited permission to take him by the fin.

Mr.

Wapsel, conceding his finn with a gracious dignity, was immediately shoved into a dusty corner, while everybody danced a hornpipe, and from that corner, surveying the public with a discontented eye, became aware of me.

The second piece was the last new grand comic Christmas pantomime.

In the first scene, of which it pained me to suspect that I detected Mr.

Wapsel with red worsted legs, under a highly magnified phosphoric countenance, and a shock of red curtain fringe for his hair, engaged in the manufacture of thunderbolts in a mine, and displaying great cowardice.

When his gigantic master came home very hoarse to dinner, muddy presently presented himself under worthier circumstances for the genius of youthful love, being in want of assistance on account of the parental brutality of an ignorant farmer, who opposed the choice of his daughter's heart by purposely falling upon the object in a flower sack out of the first floor window.

Some of the sententious enchanter, and he, coming up from the antipodes rather unsteadily after an apparently violent journey, proved to be Mr.

Wopsel, in a high crowned hat, with a necromantic work in one volume under his arm.

The business of this enchanter on earth being principally to be talked at, sung at, butted at, danced at, and flashed at with fires of various colors.

He had a good deal of time on his hands, and I observed with great surprise that he devoted it to staring in my direction as if he were lost in amazement.

There was something so remarkable in the increasing glare of Mr.

Wapsel's eye, and he seemed to be turning so many things over in his mind, and to grow so confused that I could not make it out.

I sat thinking of it long after he had ascended to the clouds in a large watch case, and still I could not make it out.

I was still thinking of it when I came out of theater an hour afterwards, and found him waiting for me near the door.

How do you do?

Said I, shaking hands with him as we turned down the street together.

I saw that you saw me?

Saw you, Mr.

Pip, he returned.

Yes, of course I saw you, but who else was there?

Who else?

It is the strangest thing, said Mr.

Wapsel, drifting into his lost look again.

And yet I could swear to him.

Becoming alarmed, I entreated Mr.

Wapsel to explain his meaning, whether I should have.

Noticed him at first, but for your.

Being there, said Mr.

Wapsel, going on in the same lost way.

I can't be positive yet I think I should.

Involuntarily I looked round me as I was accustomed to look round me when I went home, for these mysterious words gave me a chill.

Oh, he can't be in sight, said Mr.

Wapsel.

He went out before I went off.

I saw him go, having the reason.

That I had for being suspicious.

I even suspected this poor actor.

I mistrusted a design to entrap me into some admission.

Therefore I glanced at him as we walked on together, but said nothing.

I had a ridiculous fancy that he must be with you, Mr.

Pip, till I saw that you were quite unconscious of him sitting behind you there like a ghost.

My former chill crept over me again, but I was resolved not to speak yet, for it was quite consistent with his words that he might be set on to induce me to connect these references with Provis.

Of course, I was perfectly sure and safe that Provis had not been there.

I dare say you wonder at me, Mr.

Pip.

Indeed I see you do.

But it is so very strange.

You'll hardly believe what I'm going to tell you.

I could hardly believe it myself if you told me.

Indeed?

Said I.

No, indeed, Mr.

Pip.

You remember in old times, a certain Christmas day, when you were quite a child, and I dined at gargery's and some soldiers came to the door to get a pair of handcuffs mended?

I remember it very well.

And you remember that there was a chase after two convicts, and that we joined in it, and that guardery took you on his back, and that I took the lead and you kept up with me as well you could.

I remember it all very well.

Better than he thought, except the last clause.

And you remember that we came up with the two in a ditch, and that there was a scuffle between them, and that one of them had been severely handled and much mauled about the face by the other.

I'd see it all before me.

And that the soldiers lighted torches and put the two in the center.

And that we went on to see the last of them over the black marshes with a torchlight shining on their faces.

I'm particular about that.

With the torchlight shining on their faces when there was an outer ring of dark knight all about us.

Yes, said I.

I remember all that.

Then, Mr.

Pip, one of those two prisoners sat behind you tonight.

I saw him over your shoulder.

Steady.

I thought I asked him then, which of the two do you suppose you saw?

The one who had been mauled?

He answered readily, and I'll swear I saw him.

The more I think of him, the more certain I am of him.

This is very curious, said I, with the best assumption I could put on of its being.

Nothing more to me.

Very curious indeed.

I cannot exaggerate the enhanced disquiet into which this conversation threw me.

Or the special and peculiar terror I felt at compusance, having been behind me like a ghost.

For if he had ever been out of my thoughts for a few moments together, since the hiding had begun, it was in those very moments when he was closest to me.

And to think that I should be so unconscious and off my guard.

After all, my care was as if I had shut an avenue of a hundred doors to keep him out, and then had found him at my elbow.

I could not doubt either that he was there because I was there, and that however slight an appearance of danger there might be about us, danger was always near and active.

I put such questions to Mr.

Wapsel as when did the man come in?

He could not tell me that he saw me, and over my shoulder he saw the man.

It was not until he had seen him for some time that he began to identify him.

But he had, from the first, vaguely associated him with me.

And known him as somehow belonging to me in the old village time.

How was he dressed?

Prosperously, but not noticeably otherwise, he thought in black.

Was his face at all disfigured?

No, he believed not.

I believed not too.

For although in my brooding state I had taken no special notice of the people behind me, I thought it likely that a face at all disfigured would have attracted my attention.

When Mr.

Wopsel had imparted to me all that he could recall or I extract.

And when I had treated him to a little appropriate refreshment after the fatigues of the evening, we parted.

It was between twelve and 01:00 when I reached the temple, and the gates were shut.

No one was near me when I went in and went home.

Herbert had come in, and we held a very serious counsel by the fire.

But there was nothing to be done, saving to communicate to wimick what I had that night found out, and to remind him that we waited for his hint.

As I thought that I might compromise him if I went too often to the castle.

I made this communication by letter.

I wrote it before I went to bed and went out and posted it.

And again no one was near me.

Herbert and I agreed that we could do nothing else but be very cautious.

And we were very cautious indeed.

More cautious than before, if that were possible.

And I, for my part, never went near C****'s basin except when I rode by.

And then I only looked at mill Pond bank as I looked at anything else.

Thank you for joining bite at a time books today while we read a bite of one of your favorite classics.

Again, my name is Brie Carlisle, and I hope you come back tomorrow for the next bite of great expectations.

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