Great Expectations, Charles Dickens [top 10 best books of all time txt] 📗

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 neighborhood. 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 down stairs 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 me out at the locked gate of which she had the key, or first

to go up stairs and assure myself that Miss Havisham was as safe

and well as I had left her. I took the latter course and went up.

I looked into the room where I had left her, and