第23章

`No, ma'am, I am very sorry for you, and very sorry I can't play just now. If you complain of me I shall get into trouble with my sister, so I would do it if I could; but it's so new here, and so strange, and so fine - and melancholy--' I stopped, fearing I might say too much, or had already said it, and we took another look at each other.

Before she spoke again, she turned her eyes from me, and looked at the dress she wore, and at the dressing-table, and finally at herself in the looking-glass.

`So new to him,' she muttered, `so old to me; so strange to him, so familiar to me; so melancholy to both of us! Call Estella.'

As she was still looking at the reflection of herself, I thought she was still talking to herself, and kept quiet.

`Call Estella,' she repeated, flashing a look at me. `You can do that.

Call Estella. At the door.'

To stand in the dark in a mysterious passage of an unknown house, bawling Estella to a scornful young lady neither visible nor responsive, and feeling it a dreadful liberty so to roar out her name, was almost as bad as playing to order. But, she answered at last, and her light came along the dark passage like a star.

Miss Havisham beckoned her to come close, and took up a jewel from the table, and tried its effect upon her fair young bosom and against her pretty brown hair. `Your own, one day, my dear, and you will use it well. Let me see you play cards with this boy.'

`With this boy? Why, he is a common labouring-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 neighbour, 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 form 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 from 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 labouring-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.