"My dear Joe," I cried, in desperation, taking hold of his coat, "don't go on in that way. I never thought of making Miss </b>Havisham any present."
Estella told me we were both to go in, so I took Joe by the coat-cuff and conducted him into Miss </b>Havisham's presence. She was seated at her dressing-table, and looked round at us immediately.
If a dread of not being understood be hidden in the breasts of other young people to anything like the extent to which it used to be hidden in mine,--which I consider probable, as I have no particular reason to suspect myself of having been a monstrosity,--it is the key to many reservations. I felt convinced that if I described Miss </b>Havisham's as my eyes had seen it, I should not be understood. Not only that, but I felt convinced that Miss </b>Havisham too would not be understood; and although she was perfectly incomprehensible to me, I entertained an impression that there would be something coarse and treacherous in my dragging her as she really was (to say nothing of Miss </b>Estella) before the contemplation of Mrs. Joe. Consequently, I said as little as I could, and had my face shoved against the kitchen wall.
"If you mean, Miss </b>Havisham, what have you done to injure me, let me answer. Very little. I should have loved her under any circumstances. Is she married?"
So, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, passed; and on Friday morning I went to Mr. Pumblechook's, to put on my new clothes and pay my visit to Miss </b>Havisham. Mr. Pumblechook's own room was given up to me to dress in, and was decorated with clean towels expressly for the event. My clothes were rather a disappointment, of course. Probably every new and eagerly expected garment ever put on since clothes came in, fell a trifle short of the wearer's expectation. But after I had had my new suit on some half an hour, and had gone through an immensity of posturing with Mr. Pumblechook's very limited dressing-glass, in the futile endeavor to see my legs, it seemed to fit me better. It being market morning at a neighboring town some ten miles off, Mr. Pumblechook was not at home. I had not told him exactly when I meant to leave, and was not likely to shake hands with him again before departing. This was all as it should be, and I went out in my new array, fearfully ashamed of having to pass the shopman, and suspicious after all that I was at a personal disadvantage, something like Joe's in his Sunday suit.
"Yes; but my dear Handel," Herbert went on, as if we had been talking, instead of silent, "its having been so strongly rooted in the breast of a boy whom nature and circumstances made so romantic, renders it very serious. Think of her bringing-up, and think of Miss </b>Havisham. Think of what she is herself (now I am repulsive and you abominate me). This may lead to miserable things."
When I had been in Mr. Pocket's family a month or two, Mr. and Mrs. Camilla turned up. Camilla was Mr. Pocket's sister. Georgiana, whom I had seen at Miss </b>Havisham's on the same occasion, also turned up. She was a cousin,--an indigestive single woman, who called her rigidity religion, and her liver love. These people hated me with the hatred of cupidity and disappointment. As a matter of course, they fawned upon me in my prosperity with the basest meanness. Towards Mr. Pocket, as a grown-up infant with no notion of his own interests, they showed the complacent forbearance I had heard them express. Mrs. Pocket they held in contempt; but they allowed the poor soul to have been heavily disappointed in life, because that shed a feeble reflected light upon themselves.
Ah! I caught at the name directly. Miss </b>Havisham's relation. The Matthew whom Mr. and Mrs. Camilla had spoken of. The Matthew whose place was to be at Miss </b>Havisham's head, when she lay dead, in her bride's dress on the bride's table.
"There appeared upon the scene--say at the races, or the public balls, or anywhere else you like--a certain man, who made love to Miss </b>Havisham. I never saw him (for this happened five-and-twenty years ago, before you and I were, Handel), but I have heard my father mention that he was a showy man, and the kind of man for the purpose. But that he was not to be, without ignorance or prejudice, mistaken for a gentleman, my father most strongly asseverates; because it is a principle of his that no man who was not a true gentleman at heart ever was, since the world began, a true gentleman in manner. He says, no varnish can hide the grain of the wood; and that the more varnish you put on, the more the grain will express itself. Well! This man pursued Miss </b>Havisham closely, and professed to be devoted to her. I believe she had not shown much susceptibility up to that time; but all the susceptibility she possessed certainly came out then, and she passionately loved him. There is no doubt that she perfectly idolized him. He practised on her affection in that systematic way, that he got great sums of money from her, and he induced her to buy her brother out of a share in the brewery (which had been weakly left him by his father) at an immense price, on the plea that when he was her husband he must hold and manage it all. Your guardian was not at that time in Miss </b>Havisham's counsels, and she was too haughty and too much in love to be advised by any one. Her relations were poor and scheming, with the exception of my father; he was poor enough, but not time-serving or jealous. The only independent one among them, he warned her that she was doing too much for this man, and was placing herself too unreservedly in his power. She took the first opportunity of angrily ordering my father out of the house, in his presence, and my father has never seen her since."
"And how are you?" said Miss </b>Havisham to Camilla. As we were close to Camilla then, I would have stopped as a matter of course, only Miss </b>Havisham wouldn't stop. We swept on, and I felt that I was highly obnoxious to Camilla.
"Since this house strikes you old and grave, boy," said Miss </b>Havisham, impatiently, "and you are unwilling to play, are you willing to work?"
"Who am I," cried Miss </b>Havisham, striking her stick upon the floor and flashing into wrath so suddenly that Estella glanced up at her in surprise,--"who am I, for God's sake, that I should be kind?"
Camilla brightened when Miss </b>Pocket met with this rebuff; and she murmured, as she plaintively contemplated Miss </b>Havisham, "Poor dear soul! Certainly not to be expected to look well, poor thing. The idea!"
"Have you brought his indentures with you?" asked Miss </b>Havisham.
"Well, Pip, you know," replied Joe, as if that were a little unreasonable, "you yourself see me put 'em in my 'at, and therefore you know as they are here." With which he took them out, and gave them, not to Miss </b>Havisham, but to me. I am afraid I was ashamed of the dear good fellow,--I know I was ashamed of him,--when I saw that Estella stood at the back of Miss </b>Havisham's chair, and that her eyes laughed mischievously. I took the indentures out of his hand and gave them to Miss </b>Havisham.
In her furred travelling-dress, Estella seemed more delicately beautiful than she had ever seemed yet, even in my eyes. Her manner was more winning than she had cared to let it be to me before, and I thought I saw Miss </b>Havisham's influence in the change.
At last we went back into the house, and there I heard, with surprise, that my guardian had come down to see Miss </b>Havisham on business, and would come back to dinner. The old wintry branches of chandeliers in the room where the mouldering table was spread had been lighted while we were out, and Miss </b>Havisham was in her chair and waiting for me.
Not to make Joe uneasy by talking too much, even if I had been able to talk much, I deferred asking him about Miss </b>Havisham until next day. He shook his head when I then asked him if she had recovered.
Perhaps I might have told Joe about the pale young gentleman, if I had not previously been betrayed into those enormous inventions to which I had confessed. Under the circumstances, I felt that Joe could hardly fail to discern in the pale young gentleman, an appropriate passenger to be put into the black velvet coach; therefore, I said nothing of him. Besides, that shrinking from having Miss </b>Havisham and Estella discussed, which had come upon me in the beginning, grew much more potent as time went on. I reposed complete confidence in no one but Biddy; but I told poor Biddy everything. Why it came natural to me to do so, and why Biddy had a deep concern in everything I told her, I did not know then, though I think I know now.
Then I told him all I knew, and how I knew it; with the one reservation that I left him to infer that I knew from Miss </b>Havisham what I in fact knew from Wemmick. I was very careful indeed as to that. Nor did I look towards Wemmick until I had finished all I had to tell, and had been for some time silently meeting Mr. Jaggers's look. When I did at last turn my eyes in Wemmick's direction, I found that he had unposted his pen, and was intent upon the table before him.
"You see, Pip," Joe pursued, as soon as he was past that danger, "Miss </b>Havisham done the handsome thing by you. When Miss </b>Havisham done the handsome thing by you, she called me back to say to me as that were all."
"O Miss </b>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."
It was a trial to my feelings, on the next day but one, to see Joe arraying himself in his Sunday clothes to accompany me to Miss </b>Havisham's. However, as he thought his court-suit necessary to the occasion, it was not for me to tell him that he looked far better in his working-dress; the rather, because I knew he made himself so dreadfully uncomfortable, entirely on my account, and that it was for me he pulled up his shirt-collar so very high behind, that it made the hair on the crown of his head stand up like a tuft of feathers.
It was dark before we got down, and the journey seemed long and dreary to me, who could see little of it inside, and who could not go outside in my disabled state. Avoiding the Blue Boar, I put up at an inn of minor reputation down the town, and ordered some dinner. While it was preparing, I went to Satis House and inquired for Miss </b>Havisham; she was still very ill, though considered something better.
"Miss </b>Havisham was an only child?" I hazarded.
I saw Miss </b>Havisham put her hand to her heart and hold it there, as she sat looking by turns at Estella and at me.
When I said that I only came to see how Miss </b>Havisham was, Sarah evidently deliberated whether or no she should send me about my business. But unwilling to hazard the responsibility, she let me in, and presently brought the sharp message that I was to "come up."
I made out from this, that the work I had to do, was to walk Miss </b>Havisham round and round the room. Accordingly, I started at once, and she leaned upon my shoulder, and we went away at a pace that might have been an imitation (founded on my first impulse under that roof) of Mr. Pumblechook's chaise-cart.
Having thus cleared the way for my expedition to Miss </b>Havisham's, I set off by the early morning coach before it was yet light, and was out on the open country road when the day came creeping on, halting and whimpering and shivering, and wrapped in patches of cloud and rags of mist, like a beggar. When we drove up to the Blue Boar after a drizzly ride, whom should I see come out under the gateway, toothpick in hand, to look at the coach, but Bentley Drummle!
"I am far from happy, Miss </b>Havisham; but I have other causes of disquiet than any you know of. They are the secrets I have mentioned."
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 </b>Havisham was as safe and well as I had left her. I took the latter course and went up.
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 </b>Havisham's wasting hands.
"I heard, Miss </b>Havisham," said I, rather at a loss, "that you were so kind as to wish me to come and see you, and I came directly."
I saw in this, wretched though it made me, and bitter the sense of dependence and even of degradation that it awakened,--I saw in this that Estella was set to wreak Miss </b>Havisham's revenge on men, and that she was not to be given to me until she had gratified it for a term. I saw in this, a reason for her being beforehand assigned to me. Sending her out to attract and torment and do mischief, Miss </b>Havisham sent her with the malicious assurance that she was beyond the reach of all admirers, and that all who staked upon that cast were secured to lose. I saw in this that I, too, was tormented by a perversion of ingenuity, even while the prize was reserved for me. I saw in this the reason for my being staved off so long and the reason for my late guardian's declining to commit himself to the formal knowledge of such a scheme. In a word, I saw in this Miss </b>Havisham as I had her then and there before my eyes, and always had had her before my eyes; and I saw in this, the distinct shadow of the darkened and unhealthy house in which her life was hidden from the sun.
It is so difficult to become clearly possessed of the contents of almost any letter, in a violent hurry, that I had to read this mysterious epistle again twice, before its injunction to me to be secret got mechanically into my mind. Yielding to it in the same mechanical kind of way, I left a note in pencil for Herbert, telling him that as I should be so soon going away, I knew not for how long, I had decided to hurry down and back, to ascertain for myself how Miss </b>Havisham was faring. I had then barely time to get my great-coat, lock up the chambers, and make for the coach-office by the short by-ways. If I had taken a hackney-chariot and gone by the streets, I should have missed my aim; going as I did, I caught the coach just as it came out of the yard. I was the only inside passenger, jolting away knee-deep in straw, when I came to myself.
At first, as I lay quiet on the sofa, I found it painfully difficult, I might say impossible, to get rid of the impression of the glare of the flames, their hurry and noise, and the fierce burning smell. If I dozed for a minute, I was awakened by Miss </b>Havisham's cries, and by her running at me with all that height of fire above her head. This pain of the mind was much harder to strive against than any bodily pain I suffered; and Herbert, seeing that, did his utmost to hold my attention engaged.
With those words, he released me--which I was glad of, for his hand smelt of scented soap--and went his way down stairs. I wondered whether he could be a doctor; but no, I thought; he couldn't be a doctor, or he would have a quieter and more persuasive manner. There was not much time to consider the subject, for we were soon in Miss </b>Havisham's room, where she and everything else were just as I had left them. Estella left me standing near the door, and I stood there until Miss </b>Havisham cast her eyes upon me from the dressing-table.
"I have come into such good fortune since I saw you last, Miss </b>Havisham," I murmured. "And I am so grateful for it, Miss </b>Havisham!"
"It would have been cruel in Miss </b>Havisham, horribly cruel, to practise on the susceptibility of a poor boy, and to torture me through all these years with a vain hope and an idle pursuit, if she had reflected on the gravity of what she did. But I think she did not. I think that, in the endurance of her own trial, she forgot mine, Estella."
Being at last touched on the shoulder, I started and turned. I started much more naturally then, to find myself confronted by a man in a sober gray dress. The last man I should have expected to see in that place of porter at Miss </b>Havisham's door.
"I was liberally paid for my old attendance here," I said, to soothe her, "in being apprenticed, and I have asked these questions only for my own information. What follows has another (and I hope more disinterested) purpose. In humoring my mistake, Miss </b>Havisham, you punished--practised on--perhaps you will supply whatever term expresses your intention, without offence--your self-seeking relations?"
Having thought of the matter with care, I approached my subject as if I had never hinted at it before. I informed Wemmick that I was anxious in behalf of Herbert Pocket, and I told him how we had first met, and how we had fought. I glanced at Herbert's home, and at his character, and at his having no means but such as he was dependent on his father for; those, uncertain and unpunctual. I alluded to the advantages I had derived in my first rawness and ignorance from his society, and I confessed that I feared I had but ill repaid them, and that he might have done better without me and my expectations. Keeping Miss </b>Havisham in the background at a great distance, I still hinted at the possibility of my having competed with him in his prospects, and at the certainty of his possessing a generous soul, and being far above any mean distrusts, retaliations, or designs. For all these reasons (I told Wemmick), and because he was my young companion and friend, and I had a great affection for him, I wished my own good fortune to reflect some rays upon him, and therefore I sought advice from Wemmick's experience and knowledge of men and affairs, how I could best try with my resources to help Herbert to some present income,--say of a hundred a year, to keep him in good hope and heart,--and gradually to buy him on to some small partnership. I begged Wemmick, in conclusion, to understand that my help must always be rendered without Herbert's knowledge or suspicion, and that there was no one else in the world with whom I could advise. I wound up by laying my hand upon his shoulder, and saying, "I can't help confiding in you, though I know it must be troublesome to you; but that is your fault, in having ever brought me here."
These crawling things had fascinated my attention, and I was watching them from a distance, when Miss </b>Havisham laid a hand upon my shoulder. In her other hand she had a crutch-headed stick on which she leaned, and she looked like the Witch of the place.
"No, Joseph," said my sister, still in a reproachful manner, while Joe apologetically drew the back of his hand across and across his nose, "you do not yet--though you may not think it--know the case. You may consider that you do, but you do not, Joseph. For you do not know that Uncle Pumblechook, being sensible that for anything we can tell, this boy's fortune may be made by his going to Miss </b>Havisham's, has offered to take him into town to-night in his own chaise-cart, and to keep him to-night, and to take him with his own hands to Miss </b>Havisham's to-morrow morning. And Lor-a-mussy me!" cried my sister, casting off her bonnet in sudden desperation, "here I stand talking to mere Mooncalfs, with Uncle Pumblechook waiting, and the mare catching cold at the door, and the boy grimed with crock and dirt from the hair of his head to the sole of his foot!"
In the room where the dressing-table stood, and where the wax-candles burnt on the wall, I found Miss </b>Havisham and Estella; Miss </b>Havisham seated on a settee near the fire, and Estella on a cushion at her feet. Estella was knitting, and Miss </b>Havisham was looking on. They both raised their eyes as I went in, and both saw an alteration in me. I derived that, from the look they interchanged.
Never had I breathed, and never would I breathe--or so I resolved--a word of Estella to Provis. But, I said to Herbert that, before I could go abroad, I must see both Estella and Miss </b>Havisham. This was when we were left alone on the night of the day when Provis told us his story. I resolved to go out to Richmond next day, and I went.
I went circuitously to Miss </b>Havisham's by all the back ways, and rang at the bell constrainedly, on account of the stiff long fingers of my gloves. Sarah Pocket came to the gate, and positively reeled back when she saw me so changed; her walnut-shell countenance likewise turned from brown to green and yellow.
"And wishing," pursued Joe, with another fixed look at me, like another effort of remembrance, "that the state of Miss </b>Havisham's elth were sitch as would have--allowed, were it, Pip?"
"Do you find her much changed, Pip?" asked Miss </b>Havisham, with her greedy look, and striking her stick upon a chair that stood between them, as a sign to me to sit down there.
"All I know of it; and indeed I only know so much, through piecing it out for myself; for my father always avoids it, and, even when Miss </b>Havisham invited me to go there, told me no more of it than it was absolutely requisite I should understand. But I have forgotten one thing. It has been supposed that the man to whom she gave her misplaced confidence acted throughout in concert with her half-brother; that it was a conspiracy between them; and that they shared the profits."
With what absurd emotions (for we think the feelings that are very serious in a man quite comical in a boy) I found myself again going to Miss </b>Havisham's, matters little here. Nor, how I passed and repassed the gate many times before I could make up my mind to ring. Nor, how I debated whether I should go away without ringing; nor, how I should undoubtedly have gone, if my time had been my own, to come back.
"I am not so unreasonable, sir, as to think you at all responsible for my mistakes and wrong conclusions; but I always supposed it was Miss </b>Havisham."
"Come in, Pip," Miss </b>Havisham continued to mutter, without looking round or up; "come in, Pip, how do you do, Pip? so you kiss my hand as if I were a queen, eh?--Well?"
"Is there any Miss </b>Havisham down town?" returned my sister.
"Boy! What like is Miss </b>Havisham?" Mr. Pumblechook began again when he had recovered; folding his arms tight on his chest and applying the screw.
"I have been thrown among one family of your relations, Miss </b>Havisham, and have been constantly among them since I went to London. I know them to have been as honestly under my delusion as I myself. And I should be false and base if I did not tell you, whether it is acceptable to you or no, and whether you are inclined to give credence to it or no, that you deeply wrong both Mr. Matthew Pocket and his son Herbert, if you suppose them to be otherwise than generous, upright, open, and incapable of anything designing or mean."