第104章

`Two things I can tell you,' said Estella. `First, notwithstanding the proverb that constant dropping will wear away a stone, you may set your mind at rest that these people never will - never would, in hundred years - impair your ground with Miss Havisham, in any particular, great or small.

Second, I am beholden to you as the cause of their being so busy and so mean in vain, and there is my hand upon it.'

As she gave it me playfully - for her darker mood had been but momentary - I held it and put it to my lips. `You ridiculous boy,' said Estella, `will you never take warning? Or do you kiss my hand in the same spirit in which I once let you kiss my cheek?'

`What spirit was that?' said I.

`I must think a moment A spirit of contempt for the fawners and plotters.'

`If I say yes, may I kiss the cheek again?'

`You should have asked before you touched the hand. But, yes, if you like.'

I leaned down, and her calm face was like a statue's. `Now,' said Estella, gliding away the instant I touched her cheek, `you are to take care that I have some tea, and you are to take me to Richmond.'

Her reverting to this tone as if our association were forced upon us and we were mere puppets, gave me pain; but everything in our intercourse did give me pain. Whatever her tone with me happened to be, I could put no trust in it, and build no hope on it; and yet I went on against trust and against hope. Why repeat it a thousand times? So it always was.

I rang for the tea, and the waiter, reappearing with his magic clue, brought in by degrees some fifty adjuncts to that refreshment but of tea not a glimpse. A teaboard, cups and saucers, plates, knives and forks (including carvers), spoons (various), saltcellars, a meek little muffin confined with the utmost precaution under a strong iron cover, Moses in the bullrushes typified by a soft bit of butter in a quantity of parsley, a pale loaf with a powdered head, two proof impressions of the bars of the kitchen fire-place on triangular bits of bread, and ultimately a fat family urn:

which the waiter staggered in with, expressing in his countenance burden and suffering. After a prolonged absence at this stage of the entertainment, he at length came back with a casket of precious appearance containing twigs. These I steeped in hot water, and so from the whole of these appliances extracted one cup of I don't know what, for Estella.

The bill paid, and the waiter remembered, and the ostler not forgotten, and the chambermaid taken into consideration - in a word, the whole house bribed into a state of contempt and animosity, and Estella's purse much lightened - we got into our post-coach and drove away. Turning into Cheapside and rattling up Newgate-street, we were soon under the walls of which Iwas so ashamed.

`What place is that?' Estella asked me.

I made a foolish pretence of not at first recognizing it, and then told her. As she looked at it, and drew in her head again, murmuring `Wretches!'

I would not have confessed to my visit for any consideration.

`Mr Jaggers,' said I, by way of putting it neatly on somebody else, `has the reputation of being more in the secrets of that dismal place than any man in London.'

`He is more in the secrets of every place, I think,' said Estella, in a low voice.

`You have been accustomed to see him often, I suppose?'

`I have been accustomed to see him at uncertain intervals, ever since I can remember. But I know him no better now, that I did before I could speak plainly. What is your own experience of him? Do you advance with him?'

`Once habituated to his distrustful manner,' said I, `I have done very well.'

`Are you intimate?'

`I have dined with him at his private house.'

`I fancy,' said Estella, shrinking `that must be a curious place.'

`It is a curious place.'

I should have been chary of discussing my guardian too freely even with her; but I should have gone on with the subject so far as to describe the dinner in Gerrard-street, if we had not then come into a sudden glare of gas. It seemed, while it lasted, to be all alight and alive with that inexplicable feeling I had had before; and when we were out of it, I was as much dazed for a few moments as if I had been in Lightning.