Great Expectations
Whether it was possible in a Christian country to get on without blood,
after this, was a question on which the Finches were divided. The
debate upon it grew so lively, indeed, that at least six more
honourable members told six more, during the discussion, that they
believed _they_ knew where _they_ were to be found. However, it was
decided at last (the Grove being a Court of Honour) that if Mr. Drummle
would bring never so slight a certificate from the lady, importing that
he had the honour of her acquaintance, Mr. Pip must express his regret,
as a gentleman and a Finch, for “having been betrayed into a warmth
which.” Next day was appointed for the production (lest our honour
should take cold from delay), and next day Drummle appeared with a
polite little avowal in Estella’s hand, that she had had the honour of
dancing with him several times. This left me no course but to regret
that I had been “betrayed into a warmth which,” and on the whole to
repudiate, as untenable, the idea that I was to be found anywhere.
Drummle and I then sat snorting at one another for an hour, while the
Grove engaged in indiscriminate contradiction, and finally the
promotion of good feeling was declared to have gone ahead at an amazing
rate.
I tell this lightly, but it was no light thing to me. For, I cannot
adequately express what pain it gave me to think that Estella should
show any favour to a contemptible, clumsy, sulky booby, so very far
below the average. To the present moment, I believe it to have been
referable to some pure fire of generosity and disinterestedness in my
love for her, that I could not endure the thought of her stooping to
that hound. No doubt I should have been miserable whomsoever she had
favoured; but a worthier object would have caused me a different kind
and degree of distress.
It was easy for me to find out, and I did soon find out, that Drummle
had begun to follow her closely, and that she allowed him to do it. A
little while, and he was always in pursuit of her, and he and I crossed
one another every day. He held on, in a dull persistent way, and
Estella held him on; now with encouragement, now with discouragement,
now almost flattering him, now openly despising him, now knowing him
very well, now scarcely remembering who he was.
The Spider, as Mr. Jaggers had called him, was used to lying in wait,
however, and had the patience of his tribe. Added to that, he had a
blockhead confidence in his money and in his family greatness, which
sometimes did him good service,—almost taking the place of
concentration and determined purpose. So, the Spider, doggedly watching
Estella, outwatched many brighter insects, and would often uncoil
himself and drop at the right nick of time.
At a certain Assembly Ball at Richmond (there used to be Assembly Balls
at most places then), where Estella had outshone all other beauties,
this blundering Drummle so hung about her, and with so much toleration
on her part, that I resolved to speak to her concerning him. I took the
next opportunity; which was when she was waiting for Mrs. Blandley to
take her home, and was sitting apart among some flowers, ready to go. I
was with her, for I almost always accompanied them to and from such
places.
“Are you tired, Estella?”
“Rather, Pip.”
“You should be.”
“Say rather, I should not be; for I have my letter to Satis House to
write, before I go to sleep.”
“Recounting to-night’s triumph?” said I. “Surely a very poor one,
Estella.”
“What do you mean? I didn’t know there had been any.”
“Estella,” said I, “do look at that fellow in the corner yonder, who is
looking over here at us.”
“Why should I look at him?” returned Estella, with her eyes on me
instead. “What is there in that fellow in the corner yonder,—to use
your words,—that I need look at?”
“Indeed, that is the very question I want to ask you,” said I. “For he
has been hovering about you all night.”
“Moths, and all sorts of ugly creatures,” replied Estella, with a
glance towards him, “hover about a lighted candle. Can the candle help
it?”
“No,” I returned; “but cannot the Estella help it?”
“Well!” said she, laughing, after a moment, “perhaps. Yes. Anything you
like.”
“But, Estella, do hear me speak. It makes me wretched that you should
encourage a man so generally despised as Drummle. You know he is
despised.”
“Well?” said she.
“You know he is as ungainly within as without. A deficient,
ill-tempered, lowering, stupid fellow.”
“Well?” said she.
“You know he has nothing to recommend him but money and a ridiculous
roll of addle-headed predecessors; now, don’t you?”
“Well?” said she again; and each time she said it, she opened her
lovely eyes the wider.
To overcome the difficulty of getting past that monosyllable, I took it
from her, and said, repeating it with emphasis, “Well! Then, that is
why it makes me wretched.”
Now, if I could have believed that she favoured Drummle with any idea
of making me—me—wretched, I should have been in better heart about it;
but in that habitual way of hers, she put me so entirely out of the
question, that I could believe nothing of the kind.
“Pip,” said Estella, casting her glance over the room, “don’t be
foolish about its effect on you. It may have its effect on others, and
may be meant to have. It’s not worth discussing.”
“Yes it is,” said I, “because I cannot bear that people should say,
‘she throws away her graces and attractions on a mere boor, the lowest
in the crowd.’”
“I can bear it,” said Estella.
“Oh! don’t be so proud, Estella, and so inflexible.”
“Calls me proud and inflexible in this breath!” said Estella, opening
her hands. “And in his last breath reproached me for stooping to a
boor!”
“There is no doubt you do,” said I, something hurriedly, “for I have
seen you give him looks and smiles this very night, such as you never
give to—me.”
“Do you want me then,” said Estella, turning suddenly with a fixed and
serious, if not angry, look, “to deceive and entrap you?”
“Do you deceive and entrap him, Estella?”
“Yes, and many others,—all of them but you. Here is Mrs. Brandley. I’ll
say no more.”
And now that I have given the one chapter to the theme that so filled
my heart, and so often made it ache and ache again, I pass on
unhindered, to the event that had impended over me longer yet; the
event that had begun to be prepared for, before I knew that the world
held Estella, and in the days when her baby intelligence was receiving
its first distortions from Miss Havisham’s wasting hands.
In the Eastern story, the heavy slab that was to fall on the bed of
state in the flush of conquest was slowly wrought out of the quarry,
the tunnel for the rope to hold it in its place was slowly carried
through the leagues of rock, the slab was slowly raised and fitted in
the roof, the rope was rove to it and slowly taken through the miles of
hollow to the great iron ring. All being made ready with much labour,
and the hour come, the sultan was aroused in the dead of the night, and
the sharpened axe that was to sever the rope from the great iron ring
was put into his hand, and he struck with it, and the rope parted and
rushed away, and the ceiling fell. So, in my case; all the work, near
and afar, that tended to the end, had been accomplished; and in an
instant the blow was struck, and the roof of my stronghold dropped upon
me.
Chapter XXXIX.
I was three-and-twenty years of age. Not another word had I heard to
enlighten me on the subject of my expectations, and my twenty-third
birthday was a week gone. We had left Barnard’s Inn more than a year,
and lived in the Temple. Our chambers were in Garden-court, down by the
river.
Mr. Pocket and I had for some time parted company as to our original
relations, though we continued on the best terms. Notwithstanding my
inability to settle to anything,—which I hope arose out of the restless
and incomplete tenure on which I held my means,—I had a taste for
reading, and read regularly so many hours a day. That matter of
Herbert’s was still progressing, and everything with me was as I have
brought it down to the close of the last preceding chapter.
Business had taken Herbert on a journey to Marseilles. I was alone, and
had a dull sense of being alone. Dispirited and anxious, long hoping
that to-morrow or next week would clear my way, and long disappointed,
I sadly missed the cheerful face and ready response of my friend.
It was wretched weather; stormy and wet, stormy and wet; and mud, mud,
mud, deep in all the streets. Day after day, a vast heavy veil had been
driving over London from the East, and it drove still, as if in the
East there were an eternity of cloud and wind. So furious had been the
gusts, that high buildings in town had had the lead stripped off their
roofs; and in the country, trees had been torn up, and sails of
windmills carried away; and gloomy accounts had come in from the coast,
of shipwreck and death. Violent blasts of rain had accompanied these
rages of wind, and the day just closed as I sat down to read had been
the worst of all.
Alterations have been made in that part of the Temple since that time,
and it has not now so lonely a character as it had then, nor is it so
exposed to the river. We lived at the top of the last house, and the
wind rushing up the river shook the house that night, like discharges
of cannon, or breakings of a sea. When the rain came with it and dashed
against the windows, I thought, raising my eyes to them as they rocked,
that I might have fancied myself in a storm-beaten lighthouse.
Occasionally, the smoke came rolling down the chimney as though it
could not bear to go out into such a night; and when I set the doors
open and looked down the staircase, the staircase lamps were blown out;
and when I shaded my face with my hands and looked through the black
windows (opening them ever so little was out of the question in the
teeth of such wind and rain), I saw that the lamps in the court were
blown out, and that the lamps on the bridges and the shore were
shuddering, and that the coal-fires in barges on the river were being
carried away before the wind like red-hot splashes in the rain.
I read with my watch upon the table, purposing to close my book at
eleven o’clock. As I shut it, Saint Paul’s, and all the many
church-clocks in the City—some leading, some accompanying, some
following—struck that hour. The sound was curiously flawed by the wind;
and I was listening, and thinking how the wind assailed and tore it,
when I heard a footstep on the stair.
What nervous folly made me start, and awfully connect it with the
footstep of my dead sister, matters not. It was past in a moment, and I
listened again, and heard the footstep stumble in coming on.
Remembering then, that the staircase-lights were blown out, I took up
my reading-lamp and went out to the stair-head. Whoever was below had
stopped on seeing my lamp, for all was quiet.
“There is some one down there, is there not?” I called out, looking
down.
“Yes,” said a voice from the darkness beneath.
“What floor do you want?”
“The top. Mr. Pip.”
“That is my name.—There is nothing the matter?”
“Nothing the matter,” returned the voice. And the man came on.
I stood with my lamp held out over the stair-rail, and he came slowly
within its light. It was a shaded lamp, to shine upon a book, and its
circle of light was very contracted; so that he was in it for a mere
instant, and then out of it. In the instant, I had seen a face that was
strange to me, looking up with an incomprehensible air of being touched
and pleased by the sight of me.
Moving the lamp as the man moved, I made out that he was substantially
dressed, but roughly, like a voyager by sea. That he had long iron-grey