These precautions well understood by both of us, I went home.
On opening the outer door of our chambers with my key, I found a letter
in the box, directed to me; a very dirty letter, though not ill-written.
It had been delivered by hand (of course, since I left home), and its
contents were these:-"If you are not afraid to come to the old marshes to-night or tomorrow
night at nine, and to come to the little sluice-house by the limekiln,
you had better come. If you want information regarding your uncle
Provis, you had much better come and tell no one, and lose no time. You
must come alone. Bring this with you."
I had had load enough upon my mind before the receipt of this strange
letter. What to do now, I could not tell. And the worst was, that I must
decide quickly, or I should miss the afternoon coach, which would take
me down in time for to-night. To-morrow night I could not think of
going, for it would be too close upon the time of the flight. And again,
for anything I knew, the proffered information might have some important
bearing on the flight itself.
If I had had ample time for consideration, I believe I should still have
gone. Having hardly any time for consideration,--my watch showing me
that the coach started within half an hour,--I resolved to go. I should
certainly not have gone, but for the reference to my Uncle Provis. That,
coming on Wemmick's letter and the morning's busy preparation, turned
the scale.
It is so difficult to become clearly possessed of the contents of almost
any letter, in a violent hurry, that I had to read this mysterious
epistle again twice, before its injunction to me to be secret got
mechanically into my mind. Yielding to it in the same mechanical kind of
way, I left a note in pencil for Herbert, telling him that as I should
be so soon going away, I knew not for how long, I had decided to hurry
down and back, to ascertain for myself how Miss Havisham was faring.
I had then barely time to get my great-coat, lock up the chambers,
and make for the coach-office by the short by-ways. If I had taken a
hackney-chariot and gone by the streets, I should have missed my aim;
going as I did, I caught the coach just as it came out of the yard. I
was the only inside passenger, jolting away knee-deep in straw, when I
came to myself.
For I really had not been myself since the receipt of the letter; it had
so bewildered me, ensuing on the hurry of the morning. The morning hurry
and flutter had been great; for, long and anxiously as I had waited for
Wemmick, his hint had come like a surprise at last. And now I began
to wonder at myself for being in the coach, and to doubt whether I had
sufficient reason for being there, and to consider whether I should
get out presently and go back, and to argue against ever heeding an
anonymous communication, and, in short, to pass through all those phases
of contradiction and indecision to which I suppose very few hurried
people are strangers. Still, the reference to Provis by name mastered
everything. I reasoned as I had reasoned already without knowing it,--if
that be reasoning,--in case any harm should befall him through my not
going, how could I ever forgive myself!