Great Expectations
“I want,” she said, “to pursue that subject you mentioned to me when
you were last here, and to show you that I am not all stone. But
perhaps you can never believe, now, that there is anything human in my
heart?”
When I said some reassuring words, she stretched out her tremulous
right hand, as though she was going to touch me; but she recalled it
again before I understood the action, or knew how to receive it.
“You said, speaking for your friend, that you could tell me how to do
something useful and good. Something that you would like done, is it
not?”
“Something that I would like done very much.”
“What is it?”
I began explaining to her that secret history of the partnership. I had
not got far into it, when I judged from her looks that she was thinking
in a discursive way of me, rather than of what I said. It seemed to be
so; for, when I stopped speaking, many moments passed before she showed
that she was conscious of the fact.
“Do you break off,” she asked then, with her former air of being afraid
of me, “because you hate me too much to bear to speak to me?”
“No, no,” I answered, “how can you think so, Miss Havisham! I stopped
because I thought you were not following what I said.”
“Perhaps I was not,” she answered, putting a hand to her head. “Begin
again, and let me look at something else. Stay! Now tell me.”
She set her hand upon her stick in the resolute way that sometimes was
habitual to her, and looked at the fire with a strong expression of
forcing herself to attend. I went on with my explanation, and told her
how I had hoped to complete the transaction out of my means, but how in
this I was disappointed. That part of the subject (I reminded her)
involved matters which could form no part of my explanation, for they
were the weighty secrets of another.
“So!” said she, assenting with her head, but not looking at me. “And
how much money is wanting to complete the purchase?”
I was rather afraid of stating it, for it sounded a large sum. “Nine
hundred pounds.”
“If I give you the money for this purpose, will you keep my secret as
you have kept your own?”
“Quite as faithfully.”
“And your mind will be more at rest?”
“Much more at rest.”
“Are you very unhappy now?”
She asked this question, still without looking at me, but in an
unwonted tone of sympathy. I could not reply at the moment, for my
voice failed me. She put her left arm across the head of her stick, and
softly laid her forehead on it.
“I am far from happy, Miss Havisham; but I have other causes of
disquiet than any you know of. They are the secrets I have mentioned.”
After a little while, she raised her head, and looked at the fire
again.
“It is noble in you to tell me that you have other causes of
unhappiness. Is it true?”
“Too true.”
“Can I only serve you, Pip, by serving your friend? Regarding that as
done, is there nothing I can do for you yourself?”
“Nothing. I thank you for the question. I thank you even more for the
tone of the question. But there is nothing.”
She presently rose from her seat, and looked about the blighted room
for the means of writing. There were none there, and she took from her
pocket a yellow set of ivory tablets, mounted in tarnished gold, and
wrote upon them with a pencil in a case of tarnished gold that hung
from her neck.
“You are still on friendly terms with Mr. Jaggers?”
“Quite. I dined with him yesterday.”
“This is an authority to him to pay you that money, to lay out at your
irresponsible discretion for your friend. I keep no money here; but if
you would rather Mr. Jaggers knew nothing of the matter, I will send it
to you.”
“Thank you, Miss Havisham; I have not the least objection to receiving
it from him.”
She read me what she had written; and it was direct and clear, and
evidently intended to absolve me from any suspicion of profiting by the
receipt of the money. I took the tablets from her hand, and it trembled
again, and it trembled more as she took off the chain to which the
pencil was attached, and put it in mine. All this she did without
looking at me.
“My name is on the first leaf. If you can ever write under my name, “I
forgive her,” though ever so long after my broken heart is dust pray do
it!”
“O Miss Havisham,” said I, “I can do it now. There have been sore
mistakes; and my life has been a blind and thankless one; and I want
forgiveness and direction far too much, to be bitter with you.”
She turned her face to me for the first time since she had averted it,
and, to my amazement, I may even add to my terror, dropped on her knees
at my feet; with her folded hands raised to me in the manner in which,
when her poor heart was young and fresh and whole, they must often have
been raised to heaven from her mother’s side.
To see her with her white hair and her worn face kneeling at my feet
gave me a shock through all my frame. I entreated her to rise, and got
my arms about her to help her up; but she only pressed that hand of
mine which was nearest to her grasp, and hung her head over it and
wept. I had never seen her shed a tear before, and, in the hope that
the relief might do her good, I bent over her without speaking. She was
not kneeling now, but was down upon the ground.
“O!” she cried, despairingly. “What have I done! What have I done!”
“If you mean, Miss Havisham, what have you done to injure me, let me
answer. Very little. I should have loved her under any circumstances.
Is she married?”
“Yes.”
It was a needless question, for a new desolation in the desolate house
had told me so.
“What have I done! What have I done!” She wrung her hands, and crushed
her white hair, and returned to this cry over and over again. “What
have I done!”
I knew not how to answer, or how to comfort her. That she had done a
grievous thing in taking an impressionable child to mould into the form
that her wild resentment, spurned affection, and wounded pride found
vengeance in, I knew full well. But that, in shutting out the light of
day, she had shut out infinitely more; that, in seclusion, she had
secluded herself from a thousand natural and healing influences; that,
her mind, brooding solitary, had grown diseased, as all minds do and
must and will that reverse the appointed order of their Maker, I knew
equally well. And could I look upon her without compassion, seeing her
punishment in the ruin she was, in her profound unfitness for this
earth on which she was placed, in the vanity of sorrow which had become
a master mania, like the vanity of penitence, the vanity of remorse,
the vanity of unworthiness, and other monstrous vanities that have been
curses in this world?
“Until you spoke to her the other day, and until I saw in you a
looking-glass that showed me what I once felt myself, I did not know
what I had done. What have I done! What have I done!” And so again,
twenty, fifty times over, What had she done!
“Miss Havisham,” I said, when her cry had died away, “you may dismiss
me from your mind and conscience. But Estella is a different case, and
if you can ever undo any scrap of what you have done amiss in keeping a
part of her right nature away from her, it will be better to do that
than to bemoan the past through a hundred years.”
“Yes, yes, I know it. But, Pip—my dear!” There was an earnest womanly
compassion for me in her new affection. “My dear! Believe this: when
she first came to me, I meant to save her from misery like my own. At
first, I meant no more.”
“Well, well!” said I. “I hope so.”
“But as she grew, and promised to be very beautiful, I gradually did
worse, and with my praises, and with my jewels, and with my teachings,
and with this figure of myself always before her, a warning to back and
point my lessons, I stole her heart away, and put ice in its place.”
“Better,” I could not help saying, “to have left her a natural heart,
even to be bruised or broken.”
With that, Miss Havisham looked distractedly at me for a while, and
then burst out again, What had she done!
“If you knew all my story,” she pleaded, “you would have some
compassion for me and a better understanding of me.”
“Miss Havisham,” I answered, as delicately as I could, “I believe I may
say that I do know your story, and have known it ever since I first
left this neighbourhood. It has inspired me with great commiseration,
and I hope I understand it and its influences. Does what has passed
between us give me any excuse for asking you a question relative to
Estella? Not as she is, but as she was when she first came here?”
She was seated on the ground, with her arms on the ragged chair, and
her head leaning on them. She looked full at me when I said this, and
replied, “Go on.”
“Whose child was Estella?”
She shook her head.
“You don’t know?”
She shook her head again.
“But Mr. Jaggers brought her here, or sent her here?”
“Brought her here.”
“Will you tell me how that came about?”
She answered in a low whisper and with caution: “I had been shut up in
these rooms a long time (I don’t know how long; you know what time the
clocks keep here), when I told him that I wanted a little girl to rear
and love, and save from my fate. I had first seen him when I sent for
him to lay this place waste for me; having read of him in the
newspapers, before I and the world parted. He told me that he would
look about him for such an orphan child. One night he brought her here
asleep, and I called her Estella.”
“Might I ask her age then?”
“Two or three. She herself knows nothing, but that she was left an
orphan and I adopted her.”
So convinced I was of that woman’s being her mother, that I wanted no
evidence to establish the fact in my own mind. But, to any mind, I
thought, the connection here was clear and straight.
What more could I hope to do by prolonging the interview? I had
succeeded on behalf of Herbert, Miss Havisham had told me all she knew
of Estella, I had said and done what I could to ease her mind. No
matter with what other words we parted; we parted.
Twilight was closing in when I went downstairs into the natural air. I
called to the woman who had opened the gate when I entered, that I
would not trouble her just yet, but would walk round the place before
leaving. For I had a presentiment that I should never be there again,
and I felt that the dying light was suited to my last view of it.
By the wilderness of casks that I had walked on long ago, and on which
the rain of years had fallen since, rotting them in many places, and
leaving miniature swamps and pools of water upon those that stood on
end, I made my way to the ruined garden. I went all round it; round by
the corner where Herbert and I had fought our battle; round by the
paths where Estella and I had walked. So cold, so lonely, so dreary
all!
Taking the brewery on my way back, I raised the rusty latch of a little
door at the garden end of it, and walked through. I was going out at
the opposite door,—not easy to open now, for the damp wood had started
and swelled, and the hinges were yielding, and the threshold was
encumbered with a growth of fungus,—when I turned my head to look back.
A childish association revived with wonderful force in the moment of
the slight action, and I fancied that I saw Miss Havisham hanging to
the beam. So strong was the impression, that I stood under the beam
shuddering from head to foot before I knew it was a fancy,—though to be
sure I was there in an instant.
The mournfulness of the place and time, and the great terror of this
illusion, though it was but momentary, caused me to feel an
indescribable awe as I came out between the open wooden gates where I
had once wrung my hair after Estella had wrung my heart. Passing on
into the front courtyard, I hesitated whether to call the woman to let