Great Expectations
I was very much impressed, and not for the first time, by my guardian’s
subtlety. To confess the truth, I very heartily wished, and not for the
first time, that I had had some other guardian of minor abilities.
Mr. Wemmick and I parted at the office in Little Britain, where
suppliants for Mr. Jaggers’s notice were lingering about as usual, and
I returned to my watch in the street of the coach-office, with some
three hours on hand. I consumed the whole time in thinking how strange
it was that I should be encompassed by all this taint of prison and
crime; that, in my childhood out on our lonely marshes on a winter
evening, I should have first encountered it; that, it should have
reappeared on two occasions, starting out like a stain that was faded
but not gone; that, it should in this new way pervade my fortune and
advancement. While my mind was thus engaged, I thought of the beautiful
young Estella, proud and refined, coming towards me, and I thought with
absolute abhorrence of the contrast between the jail and her. I wished
that Wemmick had not met me, or that I had not yielded to him and gone
with him, so that, of all days in the year on this day, I might not
have had Newgate in my breath and on my clothes. I beat the prison dust
off my feet as I sauntered to and fro, and I shook it out of my dress,
and I exhaled its air from my lungs. So contaminated did I feel,
remembering who was coming, that the coach came quickly after all, and
I was not yet free from the soiling consciousness of Mr. Wemmick’s
conservatory, when I saw her face at the coach window and her hand
waving to me.
What _was_ the nameless shadow which again in that one instant had
passed?
Chapter XXXIII.
In her furred travelling-dress, Estella seemed more delicately
beautiful than she had ever seemed yet, even in my eyes. Her manner was
more winning than she had cared to let it be to me before, and I
thought I saw Miss Havisham’s influence in the change.
We stood in the Inn Yard while she pointed out her luggage to me, and
when it was all collected I remembered—having forgotten everything but
herself in the meanwhile—that I knew nothing of her destination.
“I am going to Richmond,” she told me. “Our lesson is, that there are
two Richmonds, one in Surrey and one in Yorkshire, and that mine is the
Surrey Richmond. The distance is ten miles. I am to have a carriage,
and you are to take me. This is my purse, and you are to pay my charges
out of it. O, you must take the purse! We have no choice, you and I,
but to obey our instructions. We are not free to follow our own
devices, you and I.”
As she looked at me in giving me the purse, I hoped there was an inner
meaning in her words. She said them slightingly, but not with
displeasure.
“A carriage will have to be sent for, Estella. Will you rest here a
little?”
“Yes, I am to rest here a little, and I am to drink some tea, and you
are to take care of me the while.”
She drew her arm through mine, as if it must be done, and I requested a
waiter who had been staring at the coach like a man who had never seen
such a thing in his life, to show us a private sitting-room. Upon that,
he pulled out a napkin, as if it were a magic clue without which he
couldn’t find the way upstairs, and led us to the black hole of the
establishment, fitted up with a diminishing mirror (quite a superfluous
article, considering the hole’s proportions), an anchovy sauce-cruet,
and somebody’s pattens. On my objecting to this retreat, he took us
into another room with a dinner-table for thirty, and in the grate a
scorched leaf of a copy-book under a bushel of coal-dust. Having looked
at this extinct conflagration and shaken his head, he took my order;
which, proving to be merely, “Some tea for the lady,” sent him out of
the room in a very low state of mind.
I was, and I am, sensible that the air of this chamber, in its strong
combination of stable with soup-stock, might have led one to infer that
the coaching department was not doing well, and that the enterprising
proprietor was boiling down the horses for the refreshment department.
Yet the room was all in all to me, Estella being in it. I thought that
with her I could have been happy there for life. (I was not at all
happy there at the time, observe, and I knew it well.)
“Where are you going to, at Richmond?” I asked Estella.
“I am going to live,” said she, “at a great expense, with a lady there,
who has the power—or says she has—of taking me about, and introducing
me, and showing people to me and showing me to people.”
“I suppose you will be glad of variety and admiration?”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
She answered so carelessly, that I said, “You speak of yourself as if
you were some one else.”
“Where did you learn how I speak of others? Come, come,” said Estella,
smiling delightfully, “you must not expect me to go to school to _you_;
I must talk in my own way. How do you thrive with Mr. Pocket?”
“I live quite pleasantly there; at least—” It appeared to me that I was
losing a chance.
“At least?” repeated Estella.
“As pleasantly as I could anywhere, away from you.”
“You silly boy,” said Estella, quite composedly, “how can you talk such
nonsense? Your friend Mr. Matthew, I believe, is superior to the rest
of his family?”
“Very superior indeed. He is nobody’s enemy—”
“Don’t add but his own,” interposed Estella, “for I hate that class of
man. But he really is disinterested, and above small jealousy and
spite, I have heard?”
“I am sure I have every reason to say so.”
“You have not every reason to say so of the rest of his people,” said
Estella, nodding at me with an expression of face that was at once
grave and rallying, “for they beset Miss Havisham with reports and
insinuations to your disadvantage. They watch you, misrepresent you,
write letters about you (anonymous sometimes), and you are the torment
and the occupation of their lives. You can scarcely realise to yourself
the hatred those people feel for you.”
“They do me no harm, I hope?”
Instead of answering, Estella burst out laughing. This was very
singular to me, and I looked at her in considerable perplexity. When
she left off—and she had not laughed languidly, but with real
enjoyment—I said, in my diffident way with her,—
“I hope I may suppose that you would not be amused if they did me any
harm.”
“No, no you may be sure of that,” said Estella. “You may be certain
that I laugh because they fail. O, those people with Miss Havisham, and
the tortures they undergo!” She laughed again, and even now when she
had told me why, her laughter was very singular to me, for I could not
doubt its being genuine, and yet it seemed too much for the occasion. I
thought there must really be something more here than I knew; she saw
the thought in my mind, and answered it.
“It is not easy for even you.” said Estella, “to know what satisfaction
it gives me to see those people thwarted, or what an enjoyable sense of
the ridiculous I have when they are made ridiculous. For you were not
brought up in that strange house from a mere baby. I was. You had not
your little wits sharpened by their intriguing against you, suppressed
and defenceless, under the mask of sympathy and pity and what not that
is soft and soothing. I had. You did not gradually open your round
childish eyes wider and wider to the discovery of that impostor of a
woman who calculates her stores of peace of mind for when she wakes up
in the night. I did.”
It was no laughing matter with Estella now, nor was she summoning these
remembrances from any shallow place. I would not have been the cause of
that look of hers for all my expectations in a heap.
“Two things I can tell you,” said Estella. “First, notwithstanding the
proverb that constant dropping will wear away a stone, you may set your
mind at rest that these people never will—never would in a hundred
years—impair your ground with Miss Havisham, in any particular, great
or small. Second, I am beholden to you as the cause of their being so
busy and so mean in vain, and there is my hand upon it.”
As she gave it to me playfully,—for her darker mood had been but
momentary—I held it and put it to my lips. “You ridiculous boy,” said
Estella, “will you never take warning? Or do you kiss my hand in the
same spirit in which I once let you kiss my cheek?”
“What spirit was that?” said I.
“I must think a moment. A spirit of contempt for the fawners and
plotters.”
“If I say yes, may I kiss the cheek again?”
“You should have asked before you touched the hand. But, yes, if you
like.”
I leaned down, and her calm face was like a statue’s. “Now,” said
Estella, gliding away the instant I touched her cheek, “you are to take
care that I have some tea, and you are to take me to Richmond.”
Her reverting to this tone as if our association were forced upon us,
and we were mere puppets, gave me pain; but everything in our
intercourse did give me pain. Whatever her tone with me happened to be,
I could put no trust in it, and build no hope on it; and yet I went on
against trust and against hope. Why repeat it a thousand times? So it
always was.
I rang for the tea, and the waiter, reappearing with his magic clue,
brought in by degrees some fifty adjuncts to that refreshment, but of
tea not a glimpse. A teaboard, cups and saucers, plates, knives and
forks (including carvers), spoons (various), salt-cellars, a meek
little muffin confined with the utmost precaution under a strong iron
cover, Moses in the bulrushes typified by a soft bit of butter in a
quantity of parsley, a pale loaf with a powdered head, two proof
impressions of the bars of the kitchen fireplace on triangular bits of
bread, and ultimately a fat family urn; which the waiter staggered in
with, expressing in his countenance burden and suffering. After a
prolonged absence at this stage of the entertainment, he at length came
back with a casket of precious appearance containing twigs. These I
steeped in hot water, and so from the whole of these appliances
extracted one cup of I don’t know what for Estella.
The bill paid, and the waiter remembered, and the ostler not forgotten,
and the chambermaid taken into consideration,—in a word, the whole
house bribed into a state of contempt and animosity, and Estella’s
purse much lightened,—we got into our post-coach and drove away.
Turning into Cheapside and rattling up Newgate Street, we were soon
under the walls of which I was so ashamed.
“What place is that?” Estella asked me.
I made a foolish pretence of not at first recognising it, and then told
her. As she looked at it, and drew in her head again, murmuring,
“Wretches!” I would not have confessed to my visit for any
consideration.
“Mr. Jaggers,” said I, by way of putting it neatly on somebody else,
“has the reputation of being more in the secrets of that dismal place
than any man in London.”
“He is more in the secrets of every place, I think,” said Estella, in a
low voice.
“You have been accustomed to see him often, I suppose?”
“I have been accustomed to see him at uncertain intervals, ever since I
can remember. But I know him no better now, than I did before I could
speak plainly. What is your own experience of him? Do you advance with
him?”
“Once habituated to his distrustful manner,” said I, “I have done very
well.”
“Are you intimate?”
“I have dined with him at his private house.”
“I fancy,” said Estella, shrinking “that must be a curious place.”
“It is a curious place.”
I should have been chary of discussing my guardian too freely even with
her; but I should have gone on with the subject so far as to describe
the dinner in Gerrard Street, if we had not then come into a sudden
glare of gas. It seemed, while it lasted, to be all alight and alive