Tales from Dickens Part 13

The marriage day finally was fixed, her wedding-clothes were bought, the house was decorated for the ceremony, the bride-cake was put on the table in the dining-room and the guests arrived. But Compeyson, the bridegroom, did not come.

Miss Havisham was dressing for the wedding when she received a cruel note from him telling her he did not intend to marry her. She had put on her white wedding gown and her lace veil and one of her satin slippers--the other lay on the dressing-table. It was exactly twenty minutes to nine o'clock when she read the note.

She fainted and afterward lay for a long time ill. When she recovered she laid the whole place waste. She never afterward let the light of day into the old mansion. The shutters were closed, candles were kept always lighted, and all the clocks in the house were stopped at exactly twenty minutes to nine o'clock. Not a thing in any room was changed. The bride-cake rotted on the table, the decorations faded on the walls, and day after day Miss Havisham sat in the dressing-room clad in her wedding gown and veil, with one slipper on, the dead flowers on her table and the trunks for her wedding journey scattered about half-packed. In time she became shrunken and old and the white satin and lace became faded yellow, but she never varied this habit of life.

Soon after her love disappointment she had written to her lawyer in London, who was named Jaggers, asking him to find a baby girl for her to adopt as her own. Now Mr. Jaggers had just defended in court a man named Abel Magwitch, the tool of Compeyson, who had broken Miss Havisham's heart. Compeyson had tempted Magwitch into pa.s.sing some stolen money and they had both been arrested. At the trial Compeyson (sneak and liar as he was!) threw all the blame on his comrade, who was duller and less sharp than he, and as a consequence, while Compeyson got a light sentence, Magwitch, though really the more innocent of the two, had been sent to the prison-ship for a term of many years. These two men, by the way, were the pair who escaped from the hulks into the marshes. Magwitch was Pip's convict of the churchyard, and Compeyson was the one he had dragged back to capture. This Magwitch, at the time of his arrest, had a baby daughter, who had fallen into Mr. Jaggers's care, and in answer to Miss Havisham's request the lawyer had sent the little girl to her, telling her nothing whatever of the child's parentage.

Miss Havisham had named the child Estella, and, seeing she would be a very beautiful woman, had determined to bring her up heartless and cold, to ruin as many men's lives as possible, so as to avenge her own wrongs and broken heart.

So Estella had grown up in the dismal house, Miss Havisham's only companion. Day by day she became more lovely, and even while she was still a little girl, the same age as Pip, Miss Havisham was impatient to begin teaching her her lesson.

This was the reason Pip had received his invitation to Miss Havisham's house. Though he had no idea of it, he was intended only as practice for little Estella, who under Miss Havisham's teaching was growing up very fond of admiration and very cold-hearted, too.

Pip thought Miss Havisham the strangest lady he had ever seen, and the yellow satin, the candle-lighted rooms, and the stopped clocks seemed to him very odd. But Estella was so pretty that from the first moment he saw her he had no eyes for anything else. Even though she called him clumsy and common, and seemed to delight in hurting his feelings, Pip fell in love with her and could not help himself. Miss Havisham made them play together and told him to come again the next week.

Pip went home in very bad humor on account of all the hurts which Estella had given his feelings. Uncle Pumblechook, being very curious to know all about his trip, bullied and questioned him so (beginning as usual with the multiplication table) that Pip, perfectly frantic, told him the most impossible tales. He said Miss Havisham was in a black coach inside the house, and had cake and wine handed to her through the coach window on a golden plate, and that he and she played with flags and swords, while four dogs fought for veal cutlets out of a silver basket.

But when Uncle Pumblechook told Joe these wonders, Pip was remorseful.

He went to the forge and confessed to Joe that he had been telling a falsehood, and promised he would never do so again.

This visit was the first of many that Pip paid to the gloomy house whose shutters were always closed. Next time he went he was taken into the chamber where the decayed wedding-cake sat on the table. The room was full of relatives of Miss Havisham (for it was her birthday), who spent their lives flattering and cringing, hoping when she died she would leave them some money.

After a time Pip went into the garden and there he met another relative in the person of a pale young gentleman about his own age, but larger, who promptly lowered his head, b.u.t.ted Pip in the stomach and invited him to fight. Pip was so sure n.o.body else's head belonged in the pit of his stomach that he obliged him at once, and as practice at the forge had made him tough, it was not many minutes before the pale young gentleman was lying on his back, looking up at him out of an exceedingly black eye and with a bleeding countenance.

When Estella let Pip out of the gate that day he guessed that she had seen the encounter and that somehow it had pleased her, for she gave him her cheek to kiss. Yet he knew that at heart she thought him only a coa.r.s.e, common boy, fit to be treated rudely and insolently. This thought rankled more and more in him. He made up his mind to study and learn, and he got faithful little Biddy to teach him all she knew.

Pip saw no more of the pale young gentleman, though for almost a year he went to Miss Havisham's every other day. Each time he saw Estella and found himself loving her more and more. But she was always unkind, and often, when she had been ruder than usual, he saw that Miss Havisham seemed to take delight in his mortification. Sometimes she would fondle Estella's hand, and he would hear her say:

"That's right! Break their hearts, my pride and hope! Break their hearts and have no mercy!"

One day Miss Havisham sent for Joe, the blacksmith, and gave him a bag of money, telling him that he was not to send Pip to her any more, but that he should put him to work and teach him the trade of blacksmithing.

So Uncle Pumblechook took Pip to town that very day and had him bound to Joe as an apprentice.

This was just what Pip had once looked forward to with pleasure. But now it made him wretched. Through Estella's jeers he had come to feel that blacksmithing was common and low. As he helped Joe to blow the forge fire, he thought constantly of Estella's looks of disdain, yet in spite of all he longed to see her.

On his first half-holiday he went to call on Miss Havisham. But there was no Estella. Miss Havisham told him she had sent her abroad to be educated as a lady, and when the miserable tears sprang to Pip's eyes, she laughed.

When he got home he confided in Biddy. He told her how he loved Estella, and that he wanted more than anything else in the world to be a gentleman. Meanwhile he began to study hard in any spare time he had, and Biddy helped him all she could.

Pip might have fallen in love with Biddy if he had not had Estella always in his mind. Orlick, Joe's helper, indeed, thought he had done so, and it made him hate Pip more than ever, for he was in love with Biddy himself. He grew morose and quarrelsome and spoke so roughly to Mrs. Joe one day that she was not satisfied till the blacksmith took off his singed ap.r.o.n and knocked the surly Orlick flat in the coal dust.

This was a costly revenge for Mrs. Joe, however. Orlick never forgave it, and a few nights after, when no one was at home but herself he crept in behind her in the kitchen and struck her a terrible blow on the head with a piece of iron.

Hours afterward Joe found her lying senseless, and though she lived to recover a part of her senses, she never scolded or spoke again. She grew well enough at last to sit all day in her chair, but was so helpless that Biddy came to the house to be her nurse. It chanced that a prisoner had escaped from the prison-boats on the night Mrs. Joe was injured, and he was thought to be the one who attacked her. But Pip suspected Orlick all the while.

So time went on. Once a year, on his birthday, Pip went to see Miss Havisham, but he never saw Estella there. And nothing else of particular importance occurred till he had been for four years Joe's apprentice.

One night, as Pip sat with Joe before the fire in The Three Jolly Bargemen, they were called out by a gentleman whom Pip remembered to have seen once at Miss Havisham's. It was, as a matter of fact, Mr.

Jaggers, her lawyer, who had sent Estella to her as a baby.

The lawyer walked home with them, for he had a wonderful piece of news to relate. It was that an unknown benefactor, whose name he was not permitted to tell, intended when he died to leave Pip a fortune. In the meantime he wished to have him educated to become a gentleman, and as a lad of Great Expectations, and, the better to accomplish this, he wished Pip to go without delay to London.

This great good fortune seemed so marvelous that Pip could hardly believe it. He had never imagined Miss Havisham intended to befriend him, but now he guessed at once that she was this unknown benefactor.

And he jumped next to another conclusion even more splendid--that she intended him sometime to marry Estella and was even then educating her for him. Pip went home almost in a dream, too full of his own prospects to see how sad Biddy was beneath her gladness for him, or how sorrowful the good news made Joe.

That night Estella's face came before him, more full of disdain than ever. As he thought of her and of the fine gentleman he was to be, the humble kitchen and forge seemed to grow commoner and meaner by contrast.

He began to become a little spoiled and disdainful himself.

The news soon spread about, and every one who had looked down upon Pip now gave him smiles and flattery. Uncle Pumblechook wept on his shoulder and (instead of telling him, as usual, that he was sure to come to a bad end) reminded him that he had always been his favorite.

Mr. Jaggers had given Pip a generous amount of money to buy new clothes with, and these tended to make him more spoiled than ever. He began to feel condescending toward Biddy, and found himself wondering whether, when he should be rich and educated, Joe's manners would not make him blush if they should meet.

And even when the day came for him to bid them good-by and he climbed aboard the coach for London, he thought more of these things and his own good luck than of the home he was parting from for ever, or of the true and loving hearts he was leaving behind him.

This was an ign.o.ble beginning for Pip and one that he came afterward to remember with shame!

III

PIP DISCOVERS HIS BENEFACTOR

Mr. Jaggers, the lawyer in whose care Pip found himself in London, was sharp and secret, and was so feared by criminals that they would never go near his house, though he never locked his door, even at night.

He had a crusty clerk named Wemmick, as secret as he and a deal queerer.

Wemmick lived in a little wooden cottage that he called The Castle, and which had its top cut out like a fort. It had a ditch all around it with a plank drawbridge. When he got home from the office in the evening he pulled up the drawbridge and ran up a flag on a flagstaff planted there.

And exactly at nine every night he fired off a bra.s.s cannon that he kept in a latticework fortress beside it.

Wemmick was the first one Pip met in London, and the clerk took him to the rooms where Mr. Jaggers had arranged for Pip to live, with the son of a gentleman who was to be his teacher. This gentleman was a Mr.

Pocket, a relative (as Pip discovered) of Miss Havisham, which fact made him all the more certain that she was his unknown friend. Mr. Pocket's son was named Herbert, and the minute he and Pip first saw each other they burst out laughing. For Herbert was none other than the pale young gentleman who, years before in Miss Havisham's garden, Pip had last seen looking up at him out of a very black eye.

They were excellent friends from that hour. They occupied the rooms together when they were in London, and Pip also had a room of his own at Mr. Pocket's house in the country.

Mr. Pocket was a helpless scholarly man who depended on Mrs. Pocket to manage everything, and she depended on the servants. There were seven little Pockets of various ages tumbling about the house, and Mrs.

Pocket's only idea of management seemed to be to send them all to bed when any one of them was troublesome. At such times Mr. Pocket would groan, put his hands in his hair, lift himself several inches out of his chair and then let himself down again.

In spite of his oddities, however, Mr. Pocket was an excellent teacher, and Pip in some ways made progress. But his Great Expectations taught him bad habits. He found it so easy to spend money that he soon overstepped the allowance Mr. Jaggers had told him was his, and not only had got into debt himself, but had led Herbert, who was far poorer, into debt also.

Joe came to see him only once, and then Pip's spoiled eyes overlooked his true, rugged manliness and noted more clearly his awkward manners and halting speech. Joe was quick to see this difference in the Pip he had known and he did not stay long--only long enough to leave a message from Miss Havisham: that Estella had returned from abroad and would be glad to see him if he came.

Pip lost no time in making this visit, and started the very next day.

The old house looked just the same, but a new servant opened the gate for him: it was Orlick, as low-browed and sullen and surly as ever, and Pip saw at the first glance that his old hatred was still smoldering.

Miss Havisham was in her room, dressed in the same worn wedding dress, and beside her, with diamonds on her neck and hair, sat Estella. Pip hardly knew her, she had grown so beautiful. But she was proud and wilful as of old, and though he felt the old love growing stronger every moment, he felt no nearer to her than in those past wretched days of his boyhood. Before he left, Miss Havisham asked him eagerly if Estella was not more lovely, and, as he sat by her alone, she drew his head close to her lips and whispered fiercely:

"Love her, love her, love her! If she favors you, love her! If she tears your heart to pieces, love her, love her, love her!"

Though this visit took him so near the old forge, Pip did not go to see Joe and Biddy. Indeed, only once in the months that followed did he see them--when he went to attend the funeral of Mrs. Joe.