Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (i want to read a book .txt) 📗
- Author: Charles Dickens
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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
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