Great Expectations
As we were going with our candle along the dark passage, Estella
stopped all of a sudden, and, facing round, said in her taunting
manner, with her face quite close to mine,—
“Well?”
“Well, miss?” I answered, almost falling over her and checking myself.
She stood looking at me, and, of course, I stood looking at her.
“Am I pretty?”
“Yes; I think you are very pretty.”
“Am I insulting?”
“Not so much so as you were last time,” said I.
“Not so much so?”
“No.”
She fired when she asked the last question, and she slapped my face
with such force as she had, when I answered it.
“Now?” said she. “You little coarse monster, what do you think of me
now?”
“I shall not tell you.”
“Because you are going to tell upstairs. Is that it?”
“No,” said I, “that’s not it.”
“Why don’t you cry again, you little wretch?”
“Because I’ll never cry for you again,” said I. Which was, I suppose,
as false a declaration as ever was made; for I was inwardly crying for
her then, and I know what I know of the pain she cost me afterwards.
We went on our way upstairs after this episode; and, as we were going
up, we met a gentleman groping his way down.
“Whom have we here?” asked the gentleman, stopping and looking at me.
“A boy,” said Estella.
He was a burly man of an exceedingly dark complexion, with an
exceedingly large head, and a corresponding large hand. He took my chin
in his large hand and turned up my face to have a look at me by the
light of the candle. He was prematurely bald on the top of his head,
and had bushy black eyebrows that wouldn’t lie down but stood up
bristling. His eyes were set very deep in his head, and were
disagreeably sharp and suspicious. He had a large watch-chain, and
strong black dots where his beard and whiskers would have been if he
had let them. He was nothing to me, and I could have had no foresight
then, that he ever would be anything to me, but it happened that I had
this opportunity of observing him well.
“Boy of the neighbourhood? Hey?” said he.
“Yes, sir,” said I.
“How do _you_ come here?”
“Miss Havisham sent for me, sir,” I explained.
“Well! Behave yourself. I have a pretty large experience of boys, and
you’re a bad set of fellows. Now mind!” said he, biting the side of his
great forefinger as he frowned at me, “you behave yourself!”
With those words, he released me—which I was glad of, for his hand
smelt of scented soap—and went his way downstairs. I wondered whether
he could be a doctor; but no, I thought; he couldn’t be a doctor, or he
would have a quieter and more persuasive manner. There was not much
time to consider the subject, for we were soon in Miss Havisham’s room,
where she and everything else were just as I had left them. Estella
left me standing near the door, and I stood there until Miss Havisham
cast her eyes upon me from the dressing-table.
“So!” she said, without being startled or surprised: “the days have
worn away, have they?”
“Yes, ma’am. To-day is—”
“There, there, there!” with the impatient movement of her fingers. “I
don’t want to know. Are you ready to play?”
I was obliged to answer in some confusion, “I don’t think I am, ma’am.”
“Not at cards again?” she demanded, with a searching look.
“Yes, ma’am; I could do that, if I was wanted.”
“Since this house strikes you old and grave, boy,” said Miss Havisham,
impatiently, “and you are unwilling to play, are you willing to work?”
I could answer this inquiry with a better heart than I had been able to
find for the other question, and I said I was quite willing.
“Then go into that opposite room,” said she, pointing at the door
behind me with her withered hand, “and wait there till I come.”
I crossed the staircase landing, and entered the room she indicated.
From that room, too, the daylight was completely excluded, and it had
an airless smell that was oppressive. A fire had been lately kindled in
the damp old-fashioned grate, and it was more disposed to go out than
to burn up, and the reluctant smoke which hung in the room seemed
colder than the clearer air,—like our own marsh mist. Certain wintry
branches of candles on the high chimney-piece faintly lighted the
chamber; or it would be more expressive to say, faintly troubled its
darkness. It was spacious, and I dare say had once been handsome, but
every discernible thing in it was covered with dust and mould, and
dropping to pieces. The most prominent object was a long table with a
tablecloth spread on it, as if a feast had been in preparation when the
house and the clocks all stopped together. An epergne or centre-piece
of some kind was in the middle of this cloth; it was so heavily
overhung with cobwebs that its form was quite undistinguishable; and,
as I looked along the yellow expanse out of which I remember its
seeming to grow, like a black fungus, I saw speckle-legged spiders with
blotchy bodies running home to it, and running out from it, as if some
circumstances of the greatest public importance had just transpired in
the spider community.
I heard the mice too, rattling behind the panels, as if the same
occurrence were important to their interests. But the black beetles
took no notice of the agitation, and groped about the hearth in a
ponderous elderly way, as if they were short-sighted and hard of
hearing, and not on terms with one another.
These crawling things had fascinated my attention, and I was watching
them from a distance, when Miss Havisham laid a hand upon my shoulder.
In her other hand she had a crutch-headed stick on which she leaned,
and she looked like the Witch of the place.
“This,” said she, pointing to the long table with her stick, “is where
I will be laid when I am dead. They shall come and look at me here.”
With some vague misgiving that she might get upon the table then and
there and die at once, the complete realisation of the ghastly waxwork
at the Fair, I shrank under her touch.
“What do you think that is?” she asked me, again pointing with her
stick; “that, where those cobwebs are?”
“I can’t guess what it is, ma’am.”
“It’s a great cake. A bride-cake. Mine!”
She looked all round the room in a glaring manner, and then said,
leaning on me while her hand twitched my shoulder, “Come, come, come!
Walk me, walk me!”
I made out from this, that the work I had to do, was to walk Miss
Havisham round and round the room. Accordingly, I started at once, and
she leaned upon my shoulder, and we went away at a pace that might have
been an imitation (founded on my first impulse under that roof) of Mr.
Pumblechook’s chaise-cart.
She was not physically strong, and after a little time said, “Slower!”
Still, we went at an impatient fitful speed, and as we went, she
twitched the hand upon my shoulder, and worked her mouth, and led me to
believe that we were going fast because her thoughts went fast. After a
while she said, “Call Estella!” so I went out on the landing and roared
that name as I had done on the previous occasion. When her light
appeared, I returned to Miss Havisham, and we started away again round
and round the room.
If only Estella had come to be a spectator of our proceedings, I should
have felt sufficiently discontented; but as she brought with her the
three ladies and the gentleman whom I had seen below, I didn’t know
what to do. In my politeness, I would have stopped; but Miss Havisham
twitched my shoulder, and we posted on,—with a shame-faced
consciousness on my part that they would think it was all my doing.
“Dear Miss Havisham,” said Miss Sarah Pocket. “How well you look!”
“I do not,” returned Miss Havisham. “I am yellow skin and bone.”
Camilla brightened when Miss Pocket met with this rebuff; and she
murmured, as she plaintively contemplated Miss Havisham, “Poor dear
soul! Certainly not to be expected to look well, poor thing. The idea!”
“And how are _you_?” said Miss Havisham to Camilla. As we were close to
Camilla then, I would have stopped as a matter of course, only Miss
Havisham wouldn’t stop. We swept on, and I felt that I was highly
obnoxious to Camilla.
“Thank you, Miss Havisham,” she returned, “I am as well as can be
expected.”
“Why, what’s the matter with you?” asked Miss Havisham, with exceeding
sharpness.
“Nothing worth mentioning,” replied Camilla. “I don’t wish to make a
display of my feelings, but I have habitually thought of you more in
the night than I am quite equal to.”
“Then don’t think of me,” retorted Miss Havisham.
“Very easily said!” remarked Camilla, amiably repressing a sob, while a
hitch came into her upper lip, and her tears overflowed. “Raymond is a
witness what ginger and sal volatile I am obliged to take in the night.
Raymond is a witness what nervous jerkings I have in my legs. Chokings
and nervous jerkings, however, are nothing new to me when I think with
anxiety of those I love. If I could be less affectionate and sensitive,
I should have a better digestion and an iron set of nerves. I am sure I
wish it could be so. But as to not thinking of you in the night—The
idea!” Here, a burst of tears.
The Raymond referred to, I understood to be the gentleman present, and
him I understood to be Mr. Camilla. He came to the rescue at this
point, and said in a consolatory and complimentary voice, “Camilla, my
dear, it is well known that your family feelings are gradually
undermining you to the extent of making one of your legs shorter than
the other.”
“I am not aware,” observed the grave lady whose voice I had heard but
once, “that to think of any person is to make a great claim upon that
person, my dear.”
Miss Sarah Pocket, whom I now saw to be a little dry, brown, corrugated
old woman, with a small face that might have been made of
walnut-shells, and a large mouth like a cat’s without the whiskers,
supported this position by saying, “No, indeed, my dear. Hem!”
“Thinking is easy enough,” said the grave lady.
“What is easier, you know?” assented Miss Sarah Pocket.
“Oh, yes, yes!” cried Camilla, whose fermenting feelings appeared to
rise from her legs to her bosom. “It’s all very true! It’s a weakness
to be so affectionate, but I can’t help it. No doubt my health would be
much better if it was otherwise, still I wouldn’t change my disposition
if I could. It’s the cause of much suffering, but it’s a consolation to
know I possess it, when I wake up in the night.” Here another burst of
feeling.
Miss Havisham and I had never stopped all this time, but kept going
round and round the room; now brushing against the skirts of the
visitors, now giving them the whole length of the dismal chamber.
“There’s Matthew!” said Camilla. “Never mixing with any natural ties,
never coming here to see how Miss Havisham is! I have taken to the sofa
with my staylace cut, and have lain there hours insensible, with my
head over the side, and my hair all down, and my feet I don’t know
where—”
(“Much higher than your head, my love,” said Mr. Camilla.)
“I have gone off into that state, hours and hours, on account of
Matthew’s strange and inexplicable conduct, and nobody has thanked me.”
“Really I must say I should think not!” interposed the grave lady.
“You see, my dear,” added Miss Sarah Pocket (a blandly vicious
personage), “the question to put to yourself is, who did you expect to
thank you, my love?”
“Without expecting any thanks, or anything of the sort,” resumed
Camilla, “I have remained in that state, hours and hours, and Raymond
is a witness of the extent to which I have choked, and what the total
inefficacy of ginger has been, and I have been heard at the piano-forte
tuner’s across the street, where the poor mistaken children have even
supposed it to be pigeons cooing at a distance,—and now to be told—”
Here Camilla put her hand to her throat, and began to be quite chemical