Great Expectations
As Wemmick and Miss Skiffins sat side by side, and as I sat in a
shadowy corner, I observed a slow and gradual elongation of Mr.
Wemmick’s mouth, powerfully suggestive of his slowly and gradually
stealing his arm round Miss Skiffins’s waist. In course of time I saw
his hand appear on the other side of Miss Skiffins; but at that moment
Miss Skiffins neatly stopped him with the green glove, unwound his arm
again as if it were an article of dress, and with the greatest
deliberation laid it on the table before her. Miss Skiffins’s composure
while she did this was one of the most remarkable sights I have ever
seen, and if I could have thought the act consistent with abstraction
of mind, I should have deemed that Miss Skiffins performed it
mechanically.
By and by, I noticed Wemmick’s arm beginning to disappear again, and
gradually fading out of view. Shortly afterwards, his mouth began to
widen again. After an interval of suspense on my part that was quite
enthralling and almost painful, I saw his hand appear on the other side
of Miss Skiffins. Instantly, Miss Skiffins stopped it with the neatness
of a placid boxer, took off that girdle or cestus as before, and laid
it on the table. Taking the table to represent the path of virtue, I am
justified in stating that during the whole time of the Aged’s reading,
Wemmick’s arm was straying from the path of virtue and being recalled
to it by Miss Skiffins.
At last, the Aged read himself into a light slumber. This was the time
for Wemmick to produce a little kettle, a tray of glasses, and a black
bottle with a porcelain-topped cork, representing some clerical
dignitary of a rubicund and social aspect. With the aid of these
appliances we all had something warm to drink, including the Aged, who
was soon awake again. Miss Skiffins mixed, and I observed that she and
Wemmick drank out of one glass. Of course I knew better than to offer
to see Miss Skiffins home, and under the circumstances I thought I had
best go first; which I did, taking a cordial leave of the Aged, and
having passed a pleasant evening.
Before a week was out, I received a note from Wemmick, dated Walworth,
stating that he hoped he had made some advance in that matter
appertaining to our private and personal capacities, and that he would
be glad if I could come and see him again upon it. So, I went out to
Walworth again, and yet again, and yet again, and I saw him by
appointment in the City several times, but never held any communication
with him on the subject in or near Little Britain. The upshot was, that
we found a worthy young merchant or shipping-broker, not long
established in business, who wanted intelligent help, and who wanted
capital, and who in due course of time and receipt would want a
partner. Between him and me, secret articles were signed of which
Herbert was the subject, and I paid him half of my five hundred pounds
down, and engaged for sundry other payments: some, to fall due at
certain dates out of my income: some, contingent on my coming into my
property. Miss Skiffins’s brother conducted the negotiation. Wemmick
pervaded it throughout, but never appeared in it.
The whole business was so cleverly managed, that Herbert had not the
least suspicion of my hand being in it. I never shall forget the
radiant face with which he came home one afternoon, and told me, as a
mighty piece of news, of his having fallen in with one Clarriker (the
young merchant’s name), and of Clarriker’s having shown an
extraordinary inclination towards him, and of his belief that the
opening had come at last. Day by day as his hopes grew stronger and his
face brighter, he must have thought me a more and more affectionate
friend, for I had the greatest difficulty in restraining my tears of
triumph when I saw him so happy. At length, the thing being done, and
he having that day entered Clarriker’s House, and he having talked to
me for a whole evening in a flush of pleasure and success, I did really
cry in good earnest when I went to bed, to think that my expectations
had done some good to somebody.
A great event in my life, the turning point of my life, now opens on my
view. But, before I proceed to narrate it, and before I pass on to all
the changes it involved, I must give one chapter to Estella. It is not
much to give to the theme that so long filled my heart.
Chapter XXXVIII.
If that staid old house near the Green at Richmond should ever come to
be haunted when I am dead, it will be haunted, surely, by my ghost. O
the many, many nights and days through which the unquiet spirit within
me haunted that house when Estella lived there! Let my body be where it
would, my spirit was always wandering, wandering, wandering, about that
house.
The lady with whom Estella was placed, Mrs. Brandley by name, was a
widow, with one daughter several years older than Estella. The mother
looked young, and the daughter looked old; the mother’s complexion was
pink, and the daughter’s was yellow; the mother set up for frivolity,
and the daughter for theology. They were in what is called a good
position, and visited, and were visited by, numbers of people. Little,
if any, community of feeling subsisted between them and Estella, but
the understanding was established that they were necessary to her, and
that she was necessary to them. Mrs. Brandley had been a friend of Miss
Havisham’s before the time of her seclusion.
In Mrs. Brandley’s house and out of Mrs. Brandley’s house, I suffered
every kind and degree of torture that Estella could cause me. The
nature of my relations with her, which placed me on terms of
familiarity without placing me on terms of favour, conduced to my
distraction. She made use of me to tease other admirers, and she turned
the very familiarity between herself and me to the account of putting a
constant slight on my devotion to her. If I had been her secretary,
steward, half-brother, poor relation,—if I had been a younger brother
of her appointed husband,—I could not have seemed to myself further
from my hopes when I was nearest to her. The privilege of calling her
by her name and hearing her call me by mine became, under the
circumstances an aggravation of my trials; and while I think it likely
that it almost maddened her other lovers, I know too certainly that it
almost maddened me.
She had admirers without end. No doubt my jealousy made an admirer of
every one who went near her; but there were more than enough of them
without that.
I saw her often at Richmond, I heard of her often in town, and I used
often to take her and the Brandleys on the water; there were picnics,
fête days, plays, operas, concerts, parties, all sorts of pleasures,
through which I pursued her,—and they were all miseries to me. I never
had one hour’s happiness in her society, and yet my mind all round the
four-and-twenty hours was harping on the happiness of having her with
me unto death.
Throughout this part of our intercourse,—and it lasted, as will
presently be seen, for what I then thought a long time,—she habitually
reverted to that tone which expressed that our association was forced
upon us. There were other times when she would come to a sudden check
in this tone and in all her many tones, and would seem to pity me.
“Pip, Pip,” she said one evening, coming to such a check, when we sat
apart at a darkening window of the house in Richmond; “will you never
take warning?”
“Of what?”
“Of me.”
“Warning not to be attracted by you, do you mean, Estella?”
“Do I mean! If you don’t know what I mean, you are blind.”
I should have replied that Love was commonly reputed blind, but for the
reason that I always was restrained—and this was not the least of my
miseries—by a feeling that it was ungenerous to press myself upon her,
when she knew that she could not choose but obey Miss Havisham. My
dread always was, that this knowledge on her part laid me under a heavy
disadvantage with her pride, and made me the subject of a rebellious
struggle in her bosom.
“At any rate,” said I, “I have no warning given me just now, for you
wrote to me to come to you, this time.”
“That’s true,” said Estella, with a cold careless smile that always
chilled me.
After looking at the twilight without, for a little while, she went on
to say:—
“The time has come round when Miss Havisham wishes to have me for a day
at Satis. You are to take me there, and bring me back, if you will. She
would rather I did not travel alone, and objects to receiving my maid,
for she has a sensitive horror of being talked of by such people. Can
you take me?”
“Can I take you, Estella!”
“You can then? The day after to-morrow, if you please. You are to pay
all charges out of my purse. You hear the condition of your going?”
“And must obey,” said I.
This was all the preparation I received for that visit, or for others
like it; Miss Havisham never wrote to me, nor had I ever so much as
seen her handwriting. We went down on the next day but one, and we
found her in the room where I had first beheld her, and it is needless
to add that there was no change in Satis House.
She was even more dreadfully fond of Estella than she had been when I
last saw them together; I repeat the word advisedly, for there was
something positively dreadful in the energy of her looks and embraces.
She hung upon Estella’s beauty, hung upon her words, hung upon her
gestures, and sat mumbling her own trembling fingers while she looked
at her, as though she were devouring the beautiful creature she had
reared.
From Estella she looked at me, with a searching glance that seemed to
pry into my heart and probe its wounds. “How does she use you, Pip; how
does she use you?” she asked me again, with her witch-like eagerness,
even in Estella’s hearing. But, when we sat by her flickering fire at
night, she was most weird; for then, keeping Estella’s hand drawn
through her arm and clutched in her own hand, she extorted from her, by
dint of referring back to what Estella had told her in her regular
letters, the names and conditions of the men whom she had fascinated;
and as Miss Havisham dwelt upon this roll, with the intensity of a mind
mortally hurt and diseased, she sat with her other hand on her crutch
stick, and her chin on that, and her wan bright eyes glaring at me, a
very spectre.
I saw in this, wretched though it made me, and bitter the sense of
dependence and even of degradation that it awakened,—I saw in this that
Estella was set to wreak Miss Havisham’s revenge on men, and that she
was not to be given to me until she had gratified it for a term. I saw
in this, a reason for her being beforehand assigned to me. Sending her
out to attract and torment and do mischief, Miss Havisham sent her with
the malicious assurance that she was beyond the reach of all admirers,
and that all who staked upon that cast were secured to lose. I saw in
this that I, too, was tormented by a perversion of ingenuity, even
while the prize was reserved for me. I saw in this the reason for my
being staved off so long and the reason for my late guardian’s
declining to commit himself to the formal knowledge of such a scheme.
In a word, I saw in this Miss Havisham as I had her then and there
before my eyes, and always had had her before my eyes; and I saw in
this, the distinct shadow of the darkened and unhealthy house in which
her life was hidden from the sun.
The candles that lighted that room of hers were placed in sconces on
the wall. They were high from the ground, and they burnt with the
steady dulness of artificial light in air that is seldom renewed. As I
looked round at them, and at the pale gloom they made, and at the
stopped clock, and at the withered articles of bridal dress upon the
table and the ground, and at her own awful figure with its ghostly