Great Expectations
sat looking by turns at Estella and at me.
“It seems,” said Estella, very calmly, “that there are sentiments,
fancies,—I don’t know how to call them,—which I am not able to
comprehend. When you say you love me, I know what you mean, as a form
of words; but nothing more. You address nothing in my breast, you touch
nothing there. I don’t care for what you say at all. I have tried to
warn you of this; now, have I not?”
I said in a miserable manner, “Yes.”
“Yes. But you would not be warned, for you thought I did not mean it.
Now, did you not think so?”
“I thought and hoped you could not mean it. You, so young, untried, and
beautiful, Estella! Surely it is not in Nature.”
“It is in _my_ nature,” she returned. And then she added, with a stress
upon the words, “It is in the nature formed within me. I make a great
difference between you and all other people when I say so much. I can
do no more.”
“Is it not true,” said I, “that Bentley Drummle is in town here, and
pursuing you?”
“It is quite true,” she replied, referring to him with the indifference
of utter contempt.
“That you encourage him, and ride out with him, and that he dines with
you this very day?”
She seemed a little surprised that I should know it, but again replied,
“Quite true.”
“You cannot love him, Estella!”
Her fingers stopped for the first time, as she retorted rather angrily,
“What have I told you? Do you still think, in spite of it, that I do
not mean what I say?”
“You would never marry him, Estella?”
She looked towards Miss Havisham, and considered for a moment with her
work in her hands. Then she said, “Why not tell you the truth? I am
going to be married to him.”
I dropped my face into my hands, but was able to control myself better
than I could have expected, considering what agony it gave me to hear
her say those words. When I raised my face again, there was such a
ghastly look upon Miss Havisham’s, that it impressed me, even in my
passionate hurry and grief.
“Estella, dearest Estella, do not let Miss Havisham lead you into this
fatal step. Put me aside for ever,—you have done so, I well know,—but
bestow yourself on some worthier person than Drummle. Miss Havisham
gives you to him, as the greatest slight and injury that could be done
to the many far better men who admire you, and to the few who truly
love you. Among those few there may be one who loves you even as
dearly, though he has not loved you as long, as I. Take him, and I can
bear it better, for your sake!”
My earnestness awoke a wonder in her that seemed as if it would have
been touched with compassion, if she could have rendered me at all
intelligible to her own mind.
“I am going,” she said again, in a gentler voice, “to be married to
him. The preparations for my marriage are making, and I shall be
married soon. Why do you injuriously introduce the name of my mother by
adoption? It is my own act.”
“Your own act, Estella, to fling yourself away upon a brute?”
“On whom should I fling myself away?” she retorted, with a smile.
“Should I fling myself away upon the man who would the soonest feel (if
people do feel such things) that I took nothing to him? There! It is
done. I shall do well enough, and so will my husband. As to leading me
into what you call this fatal step, Miss Havisham would have had me
wait, and not marry yet; but I am tired of the life I have led, which
has very few charms for me, and I am willing enough to change it. Say
no more. We shall never understand each other.”
“Such a mean brute, such a stupid brute!” I urged, in despair.
“Don’t be afraid of my being a blessing to him,” said Estella; “I shall
not be that. Come! Here is my hand. Do we part on this, you visionary
boy—or man?”
“O Estella!” I answered, as my bitter tears fell fast on her hand, do
what I would to restrain them; “even if I remained in England and could
hold my head up with the rest, how could I see you Drummle’s wife?”
“Nonsense,” she returned,—“nonsense. This will pass in no time.”
“Never, Estella!”
“You will get me out of your thoughts in a week.”
“Out of my thoughts! You are part of my existence, part of myself. You
have been in every line I have ever read since I first came here, the
rough common boy whose poor heart you wounded even then. You have been
in every prospect I have ever seen since,—on the river, on the sails of
the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light, in the
darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the streets. You
have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever
become acquainted with. The stones of which the strongest London
buildings are made are not more real, or more impossible to be
displaced by your hands, than your presence and influence have been to
me, there and everywhere, and will be. Estella, to the last hour of my
life, you cannot choose but remain part of my character, part of the
little good in me, part of the evil. But, in this separation, I
associate you only with the good; and I will faithfully hold you to
that always, for you must have done me far more good than harm, let me
feel now what sharp distress I may. O God bless you, God forgive you!”
In what ecstasy of unhappiness I got these broken words out of myself,
I don’t know. The rhapsody welled up within me, like blood from an
inward wound, and gushed out. I held her hand to my lips some lingering
moments, and so I left her. But ever afterwards, I remembered,—and soon
afterwards with stronger reason,—that while Estella looked at me merely
with incredulous wonder, the spectral figure of Miss Havisham, her hand
still covering her heart, seemed all resolved into a ghastly stare of
pity and remorse.
All done, all gone! So much was done and gone, that when I went out at
the gate, the light of the day seemed of a darker colour than when I
went in. For a while, I hid myself among some lanes and by-paths, and
then struck off to walk all the way to London. For, I had by that time
come to myself so far as to consider that I could not go back to the
inn and see Drummle there; that I could not bear to sit upon the coach
and be spoken to; that I could do nothing half so good for myself as
tire myself out.
It was past midnight when I crossed London Bridge. Pursuing the narrow
intricacies of the streets which at that time tended westward near the
Middlesex shore of the river, my readiest access to the Temple was
close by the river-side, through Whitefriars. I was not expected till
to-morrow; but I had my keys, and, if Herbert were gone to bed, could
get to bed myself without disturbing him.
As it seldom happened that I came in at that Whitefriars gate after the
Temple was closed, and as I was very muddy and weary, I did not take it
ill that the night-porter examined me with much attention as he held
the gate a little way open for me to pass in. To help his memory I
mentioned my name.
“I was not quite sure, sir, but I thought so. Here’s a note, sir. The
messenger that brought it, said would you be so good as read it by my
lantern?”
Much surprised by the request, I took the note. It was directed to
Philip Pip, Esquire, and on the top of the superscription were the
words, “PLEASE READ THIS, HERE.” I opened it, the watchman holding up
his light, and read inside, in Wemmick’s writing,—
“DON’T GO HOME.”
Chapter XLV.
Turning from the Temple gate as soon as I had read the warning, I made
the best of my way to Fleet Street, and there got a late hackney
chariot and drove to the Hummums in Covent Garden. In those times a bed
was always to be got there at any hour of the night, and the
chamberlain, letting me in at his ready wicket, lighted the candle next
in order on his shelf, and showed me straight into the bedroom next in
order on his list. It was a sort of vault on the ground floor at the
back, with a despotic monster of a four-post bedstead in it, straddling
over the whole place, putting one of his arbitrary legs into the
fireplace and another into the doorway, and squeezing the wretched
little washing-stand in quite a Divinely Righteous manner.
As I had asked for a night-light, the chamberlain had brought me in,
before he left me, the good old constitutional rushlight of those
virtuous days—an object like the ghost of a walking-cane, which
instantly broke its back if it were touched, which nothing could ever
be lighted at, and which was placed in solitary confinement at the
bottom of a high tin tower, perforated with round holes that made a
staringly wide-awake pattern on the walls. When I had got into bed, and
lay there footsore, weary, and wretched, I found that I could no more
close my own eyes than I could close the eyes of this foolish Argus.
And thus, in the gloom and death of the night, we stared at one
another.
What a doleful night! How anxious, how dismal, how long! There was an
inhospitable smell in the room, of cold soot and hot dust; and, as I
looked up into the corners of the tester over my head, I thought what a
number of blue-bottle flies from the butchers’, and earwigs from the
market, and grubs from the country, must be holding on up there, lying
by for next summer. This led me to speculate whether any of them ever
tumbled down, and then I fancied that I felt light falls on my face,—a
disagreeable turn of thought, suggesting other and more objectionable
approaches up my back. When I had lain awake a little while, those
extraordinary voices with which silence teems began to make themselves
audible. The closet whispered, the fireplace sighed, the little
washing-stand ticked, and one guitar-string played occasionally in the
chest of drawers. At about the same time, the eyes on the wall acquired
a new expression, and in every one of those staring rounds I saw
written, DON’T GO HOME.
Whatever night-fancies and night-noises crowded on me, they never
warded off this DON’T GO HOME. It plaited itself into whatever I
thought of, as a bodily pain would have done. Not long before, I had
read in the newspapers, how a gentleman unknown had come to the Hummums
in the night, and had gone to bed, and had destroyed himself, and had
been found in the morning weltering in blood. It came into my head that
he must have occupied this very vault of mine, and I got out of bed to
assure myself that there were no red marks about; then opened the door
to look out into the passages, and cheer myself with the companionship
of a distant light, near which I knew the chamberlain to be dozing. But
all this time, why I was not to go home, and what had happened at home,
and when I should go home, and whether Provis was safe at home, were
questions occupying my mind so busily, that one might have supposed
there could be no more room in it for any other theme. Even when I
thought of Estella, and how we had parted that day forever, and when I
recalled all the circumstances of our parting, and all her looks and
tones, and the action of her fingers while she knitted,—even then I was
pursuing, here and there and everywhere, the caution, Don’t go home.
When at last I dozed, in sheer exhaustion of mind and body, it became a
vast shadowy verb which I had to conjugate. Imperative mood, present
tense: Do not thou go home, let him not go home, let us not go home, do
not ye or you go home, let not them go home. Then potentially: I may
not and I cannot go home; and I might not, could not, would not, and
should not go home; until I felt that I was going distracted, and
rolled over on the pillow, and looked at the staring rounds upon the
wall again.
I had left directions that I was to be called at seven; for it was
plain that I must see Wemmick before seeing any one else, and equally
plain that this was a case in which his Walworth sentiments only could