Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (speed reading book TXT) 📕

“With this boy? Why, he is a common laboring boy!”

I thought I overheard Miss Havisham answer,—only it seemed so

Unlikely,—“Well? You can break his heart.”

“What do you play, boy?” asked Estella of myself, with the greatest

disdain.

“Nothing but beggar my neighbor, miss.”

“Beggar him,” said Miss Havisham to Estella. So we sat down to

cards.

It was then I began to understand that everything in the room had

stopped, like the watch and the clock, a long time ago. I noticed

that Miss Havisham put down the jewel exactly on the spot from

which she had taken it up. As Estella dealt the cards, I glanced at

the dressing-table again, and saw that the shoe upon it, once

white, now yellow, had never been worn. I glanced down at the foot

from which the shoe was absent, and saw that the silk stocking on

it, once white, now yellow, had been trodden ragged. Without this

arrest of everything, this standing still of all the pale decayed

objects, not even the withered bridal dress on the collapsed form

could have looked so like grave-clothes, or the long veil so like a

shroud.

So she sat, corpse-like, as we played at cards; the frillings and

trimmings on her bridal dress, looking like earthy paper. I knew

nothing then of the discoveries that are occasionally made of

bodies buried in ancient times, which fall to powder in the moment

of being distinctly seen; but, I have often thought since, that she

must have looked as if the admission of the natural light of day

would have struck her to dust.

“He calls the knaves Jacks, this boy!” said Estella with disdain,

before our first game was out. “And what coarse hands he has! And

what thick boots!”

I had never thought of being ashamed of my hands before; but I

began to consider them a very indifferent pair. Her contempt for me

was so strong, that it became infectious, and I caught it.

She won the game, and I dealt. I misdealt, as was only natural,

when I knew she was lying in wait for me to do wrong; and she

denounced me for a stupid, clumsy laboring-boy.

“You say nothing of her,” remarked Miss Havisham to me, as she

looked on. “She says many hard things of you, but you say nothing

of her. What do you think of her?”

“I don’t like to say,” I stammered.

“Tell me in my ear,” said Miss Havisham, bending down.

“I think she is very proud,” I replied, in a whisper.

“Anything else?”

“I think she is very pretty.”

“Anything else?”

“I think she is very insulting.” (She was looking at me then with a

look of supreme aversion.)

“Anything else?”

“I think I should like to go home.”

“And never see her again, though she is so pretty?”

“I am not sure that I shouldn’t like to see her again, but I should

like to go home now.”

“You shall go soon,” said Miss Havisham, aloud. “Play the game

out.”

Saving for the one weird smile at first, I should have felt almost

sure that Miss Havisham’s face could not smile. It had dropped into

a watchful and brooding expression,—most likely when all the

things about her had become transfixed,—and it looked as if

nothing could ever lift it up again. Her chest had dropped, so that

she stooped; and her voice had dropped, so that she spoke low, and

with a dead lull upon her; altogether, she had the appearance of

having dropped body and soul, within and without, under the weight

of a crushing blow.

I played the game to an end with Estella, and she beggared me. She

threw the cards down on the table when she had won them all, as if

she despised them for having been won of me.

“When shall I have you here again?” said Miss Havisham. “Let me

think.”

I was beginning to remind her that to-day was Wednesday, when she

checked me with her former impatient movement of the fingers of her

right hand.

“There, there! I know nothing of days of the week; I know nothing

of weeks of the year. Come again after six days. You hear?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Estella, take him down. Let him have something to eat, and let him

roam and look about him while he eats. Go, Pip.”

I followed the candle down, as I had followed the candle up, and

she stood it in the place where we had found it. Until she opened

the side entrance, I had fancied, without thinking about it, that

it must necessarily be night-time. The rush of the daylight quite

confounded me, and made me feel as if I had been in the candlelight

of the strange room many hours.

“You are to wait here, you boy,” said Estella; and disappeared and

closed the door.

I took the opportunity of being alone in the courtyard to look at

my coarse hands and my common boots. My opinion of those

accessories was not favorable. They had never troubled me before,

but they troubled me now, as vulgar appendages. I determined to ask

Joe why he had ever taught me to call those picture-cards Jacks,

which ought to be called knaves. I wished Joe had been rather more

genteelly brought up, and then I should have been so too.

She came back, with some bread and meat and a little mug of beer.

She put the mug down on the stones of the yard, and gave me the

bread and meat without looking at me, as insolently as if I were a

dog in disgrace. I was so humiliated, hurt, spurned, offended,

angry, sorry,—I cannot hit upon the right name for the smart—God

knows what its name was,—that tears started to my eyes. The moment

they sprang there, the girl looked at me with a quick delight in

having been the cause of them. This gave me power to keep them back

and to look at her: so, she gave a contemptuous toss—but with a

sense, I thought, of having made too sure that I was so wounded—

and left me.

But when she was gone, I looked about me for a place to hide my

face in, and got behind one of the gates in the brewery-lane, and

leaned my sleeve against the wall there, and leaned my forehead on

it and cried. As I cried, I kicked the wall, and took a hard twist

at my hair; so bitter were my feelings, and so sharp was the smart

without a name, that needed counteraction.

My sister’s bringing up had made me sensitive. In the little world

in which children have their existence whosoever brings them up,

there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as

injustice. It may be only small injustice that the child can be

exposed to; but the child is small, and its world is small, and its

rocking-horse stands as many hands high, according to scale, as a

big-boned Irish hunter. Within myself, I had sustained, from my

babyhood, a perpetual conflict with injustice. I had known, from

the time when I could speak, that my sister, in her capricious and

violent coercion, was unjust to me. I had cherished a profound

conviction that her bringing me up by hand gave her no right to

bring me up by jerks. Through all my punishments, disgraces, fasts,

and vigils, and other penitential performances, I had nursed this

assurance; and to my communing so much with it, in a solitary and

unprotected way, I in great part refer the fact that I was morally

timid and very sensitive.

I got rid of my injured feelings for the time by kicking them into

the brewery wall, and twisting them out of my hair, and then I

smoothed my face with my sleeve, and came from behind the gate. The

bread and meat were acceptable, and the beer was warming and

tingling, and I was soon in spirits to look about me.

To be sure, it was a deserted place, down to the pigeon-house in

the brewery-yard, which had been blown crooked on its pole by some

high wind, and would have made the pigeons think themselves at sea,

if there had been any pigeons there to be rocked by it. But there

were no pigeons in the dove-cot, no horses in the stable, no pigs

in the sty, no malt in the storehouse, no smells of grains and

beer in the copper or the vat. All the uses and scents of the

brewery might have evaporated with its last reek of smoke. In a

by-yard, there was a wilderness of empty casks, which had a certain

sour remembrance of better days lingering about them; but it was

too sour to be accepted as a sample of the beer that was gone,—and

in this respect I remember those recluses as being like most

others.

Behind the furthest end of the brewery, was a rank garden with an

old wall; not so high but that I could struggle up and hold on long

enough to look over it, and see that the rank garden was the garden

of the house, and that it was overgrown with tangled weeds, but

that there was a track upon the green and yellow paths, as if some

one sometimes walked there, and that Estella was walking away from

me even then. But she seemed to be everywhere. For when I yielded

to the temptation presented by the casks, and began to walk on

them, I saw her walking on them at the end of the yard of casks.

She had her back towards me, and held her pretty brown hair spread

out in her two hands, and never looked round, and passed out of my

view directly. So, in the brewery itself,—by which I mean the

large paved lofty place in which they used to make the beer, and

where the brewing utensils still were. When I first went into it,

and, rather oppressed by its gloom, stood near the door looking

about me, I saw her pass among the extinguished fires, and ascend

some light iron stairs, and go out by a gallery high overhead, as

if she were going out into the sky.

It was in this place, and at this moment, that a strange thing

happened to my fancy. I thought it a strange thing then, and I

thought it a stranger thing long afterwards. I turned my eyes—a

little dimmed by looking up at the frosty light—towards a great

wooden beam in a low nook of the building near me on my right hand,

and I saw a figure hanging there by the neck. A figure all in

yellow white, with but one shoe to the feet; and it hung so, that I

could see that the faded trimmings of the dress were like earthy

paper, and that the face was Miss Havisham’s, with a movement going

over the whole countenance as if she were trying to call to me. In

the terror of seeing the figure, and in the terror of being certain

that it had not been there a moment before, I at first ran from it,

and then ran towards it. And my terror was greatest of all when I

found no figure there.

Nothing less than the frosty light of the cheerful sky, the sight

of people passing beyond the bars of the courtyard gate, and the

reviving influence of the rest of the bread and meat and beer,

would have brought me round. Even with those aids, I might not have

come to myself as soon as I did, but that I saw Estella approaching

with the keys, to let me out. She would have some fair reason for

looking down upon me, I thought, if she saw me frightened; and she

would have