第156章

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 Imay say that I do know your story, and have known it ever since I first left this neighbourhood. 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.