"You say nothing of her," remarked Miss Havisham to me. "She says many
hard things of you, yet 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--"and very pretty--and
very insulting."
"Anything else?"
"I think I should like to go home."
"You shall go soon," said Miss Havisham aloud. "Play the game out!" I
played the game to an end, and Estella beggared me.
"When shall I have you here again?" said Miss Havisham. "I know nothing of
the days of the week or of the 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
about and look about him while he eats. Go, Pip."
I followed Estella down as I had followed her up, and at last I stood
again in the glare of daylight which quite confounded me, for I felt as if
I had been in the candle-light of the strange room many hours.
"You are to wait here, you boy, you," said Estella, and disappeared in the
house. While she was gone I looked at my coarse hands and my common boots,
and they troubled me greatly.
I determined to ask Joe why he had taught me to call the picture-cards
Jacks. I wished Joe had been rather more genteelly brought up, and then I
should have been so too. Estella came back with some bread and meat and a
little mug of beer which she set down as insolently as if I were a dog in
disgrace. I was so humiliated and hurt that tears sprang to my eyes. When
she saw them she looked at me with a quick delight. This gave me the power
to keep them back and to look at her; then she gave a contemptuous toss of
her head, and left me to my meal. At first, so bitter were my feelings
that, after she was gone, I hid behind one of the gates to the brewery and
cried. As I cried I kicked the wall and took a hard twist at my hair.
However, I came out from behind the gate, the bread and meat were
acceptable and the beer was warm and tingling, and I was soon in spirits
to look about me. I had surveyed the rank old garden when Estella came
back with the keys to let me out. She gave me a triumphant look as she
opened the gate. I was passing out without looking at her, when she
touched me with a taunting cry,----
"Why don't you cry?"
"Because I don't want to."
"You do," she said; "you have been crying and you are near crying now!" As
she spoke she laughed, pushed me out, and locked the gate upon me, and I
set off on the four-mile walk home, pondering as I went along, on what I
had seen and heard.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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