should I look at him?” returned Estella, with her eyes on me instead. “What is there in that fellow in the corner yonder, — to use your words, — that I need look at?”
“Indeed, that is the very question I want to ask you,” said I. “For he has been hovering about you all night.”
“Moths, and all sorts of ugly creatures,” replied Estella, with a glance towards him, “hover about a lighted candle. Can the candle help it?”
“No,” I returned; “but cannot the Estella help it?”
“Well!” said she, laughing, after a moment, “perhaps. Yes. Anything you like.”
“But, Estella, do hear me speak. It makes me wretched that you should encourage a man so generally despised as Drummle. You know he is despised.”
“Well?” said she.
“You know he is as ungainly within as without. A deficient, ill-tempered, lowering, stupid fellow.”
“Well?” said she.
“You know he has nothing to recommend him but money and a ridiculous roll of addleheaded predecessors; now, don’t you?”
“Well?” said she again; and each time she said it, she opened her lovely eyes the wider.
To overcome the difficulty of getting past that monosyllable, I took it from her, and said, repeating it with emphasis, “Well! Then, that is why it makes me wretched.”
Now, if I could have believed that she favored Drummle with any idea of making me-me — wretched, I should have been in better heart about it; but in that habitual way of hers, she put me so entirely out of the question, that I could believe nothing of the kind.
“Pip,” said Estella, casting her glance over the room, “don’t be foolish about its effect on you. It may have its effect on others, and may be meant to have. It’s not worth discussing.”
“Yes it is,” said I, “because I cannot bear that people should say, ‘she throws away her graces and attractions on a mere boor, the lowest in the crowd.’“
“I can bear it,” said Estella.
“Oh! don’t be so proud, Estella, and so inflexible.”
“Calls me proud and inflexible in this breath!” said Estella, opening her hands. “And in his last breath reproached me for stooping to a boor!”
“There is no doubt you do,” said I, something hurriedly, “for I have seen you give him looks and smiles this very night, such as you never give to — me.”
“Do you want me then,” said Estella, turning suddenly with a fixed and serious, if not angry, look, “to deceive and entrap you?”
“Do you deceive and entrap him, Estella?”
“Yes, and many others, — all of them but you. Here is Mrs. Brandley. I’ll say no more.”
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 Havisham’s wasting hands.
In the Eastern story, the heavy slab that was to fall on the bed of state in the flush of conquest was slowly wrought out of the quarry, the tunnel for the rope to hold it in its place was slowly carried through the leagues of rock, the slab was slowly raised and fitted in the roof, the rope was rove to it and slowly taken through the miles of hollow to the great iron ring. All being made ready with much labor, and the hour come, the sultan was aroused in the dead of the night, and the sharpened axe that was to sever the rope from the great iron ring was put into his hand, and he struck with it, and the rope parted and rushed away, and the ceiling fell. So, in my case; all the work, near and afar, that tended to the end, had been accomplished; and in an instant the blow was struck, and the roof of my stronghold dropped upon me.
Chapter XXXIX
I was three-and-twenty years of age. Not another word had I heard to enlighten me on the subject of my expectations, and my twenty-third birthday was a week gone. We had left Barnard’s Inn more than a year, and lived in the Temple. Our chambers were in Garden-court, down by the river.
Mr. Pocket and I had for some time parted company as to our original relations, though we continued on the best terms. Notwithstanding my inability to settle to anything, — which I hope arose out of the restless and incomplete tenure on which I held my means, — I had a taste for reading, and read regularly so many hours a day. That matter of Herbert’s was still progressing, and everything with me was as I have brought it down to the close of the last preceding chapter.
Business had taken Herbert on a journey to Marseilles. I was alone, and had a dull sense of being alone. Dispirited and anxious, long hoping that tomorrow or next week would clear my way, and long disappointed, I sadly missed the cheerful face and ready response of my friend.
It was wretched weather; stormy and wet, stormy and wet; and mud, mud, mud, deep in all the streets. Day after day, a vast heavy veil had been driving over London from the East, and it drove still, as if in the East there were an Eternity of cloud and wind. So furious had been the gusts, that high buildings in town had had the lead stripped off their roofs; and in the country, trees had been torn up, and sails of windmills carried away; and gloomy accounts had come in from the coast, of shipwreck and death. Violent blasts of rain had accompanied these rages of wind, and the day just closed as I sat down to read had been the worst of all.
Alterations have been made in that part of the Temple since that time, and it has not now so lonely a character as it had then, nor is it so exposed to the river. We lived at the top of the last house, and the wind rushing up the river shook the house that night, like discharges of cannon, or breakings of a sea. When the rain came with it and dashed against the windows, I thought, raising my eyes to them as they rocked, that I might have fancied myself in a storm-beaten lighthouse. Occasionally, the smoke came rolling down the chimney as though it could not bear to go out into such a night; and when I set the doors open and looked down the staircase, the staircase lamps were blown out; and when I shaded my face with my hands and looked through the black windows (opening them ever so little was out of the question in the teeth of such wind and rain), I saw that the lamps in the court were blown out, and that the lamps on the bridges and the shore were shuddering, and that the coal-fires in barges on the river were being carried away before the wind like red-hot splashes in the rain.
I read with my watch upon the table, purposing to close my book at eleven o’clock. As I shut it, Saint Paul’s, and all the many church-clocks in the City — some leading, some accompanying, some following — struck that hour. The sound was curiously flawed by the wind; and I was listening, and thinking how the wind assailed and tore it, when I heard a footstep on the stair.
What nervous folly made me start, and awfully connect it with the footstep of my dead sister, matters not. It was past in a moment, and I listened again, and heard the footstep stumble in coming on. Remembering then, that the staircase-lights were blown out, I took up my reading-lamp and went out to the stair-head. Whoever was below had stopped on seeing my lamp, for all was quiet.
“There is some one down there, is there not?” I called out, looking down.
“Yes,” said a voice from the darkness beneath.
“What floor do you want?”
“The top. Mr. Pip.”
“That is my name. — There is nothing the matter?”
“Nothing the matter,” returned the voice. And the man came on.
I stood with my