She was even more dreadfully fond of Estella than she had been when
I last saw them together; I repeat the word advisedly, for there was
something positively dreadful in the energy of her looks and embraces.
She hung upon Estella's beauty, hung upon her words, hung upon her
gestures, and sat mumbling her own trembling fingers while she looked at
her, as though she were devouring the beautiful creature she had reared.
From Estella she looked at me, with a searching glance that seemed to
pry into my heart and probe its wounds. "How does she use you, Pip; how
does she use you?" she asked me again, with her witch-like eagerness,
even in Estella's hearing. But, when we sat by her flickering fire
at night, she was most weird; for then, keeping Estella's hand drawn
through her arm and clutched in her own hand, she extorted from her,
by dint of referring back to what Estella had told her in her regular
letters, the names and conditions of the men whom she had fascinated;
and as Miss Havisham dwelt upon this roll, with the intensity of a mind
mortally hurt and diseased, she sat with her other hand on her crutch
stick, and her chin on that, and her wan bright eyes glaring at me, a
very spectre.
I saw in this, wretched though it made me, and bitter the sense of
dependence and even of degradation that it awakened,--I saw in this that
Estella was set to wreak Miss Havisham's revenge on men, and that she
was not to be given to me until she had gratified it for a term. I saw
in this, a reason for her being beforehand assigned to me. Sending her
out to attract and torment and do mischief, Miss Havisham sent her with
the malicious assurance that she was beyond the reach of all admirers,
and that all who staked upon that cast were secured to lose. I saw in
this that I, too, was tormented by a perversion of ingenuity, even while
the prize was reserved for me. I saw in this the reason for my being
staved off so long and the reason for my late guardian's declining to
commit himself to the formal knowledge of such a scheme. In a word, I
saw in this Miss Havisham as I had her then and there before my eyes,
and always had had her before my eyes; and I saw in this, the distinct
shadow of the darkened and unhealthy house in which her life was hidden
from the sun.
The candles that lighted that room of hers were placed in sconces on
the wall. They were high from the ground, and they burnt with the steady
dulness of artificial light in air that is seldom renewed. As I looked
round at them, and at the pale gloom they made, and at the stopped
clock, and at the withered articles of bridal dress upon the table and
the ground, and at her own awful figure with its ghostly reflection
thrown large by the fire upon the ceiling and the wall, I saw in
everything the construction that my mind had come to, repeated and
thrown back to me. My thoughts passed into the great room across the
landing where the table was spread, and I saw it written, as it were, in
the falls of the cobwebs from the centre-piece, in the crawlings of the
spiders on the cloth, in the tracks of the mice as they betook their
little quickened hearts behind the panels, and in the gropings and
pausings of the beetles on the floor.