Mr. Wemmick and I parted at the office in Little Britain,
where suppliants for Mr. Jaggers’s notice were
lingering about as usual, and I returned to my watch
in the street of the coach-office, with some three
hours on hand. I consumed the whole time in thinking
how strange it was that I should be encompassed by
all this taint of prison and crime; that, in my childhood
out on our lonely marshes on a winter evening I should
have first encountered it; that, it should have reappeared
on two occasions, starting out like a stain that was
faded but not gone; that, it should in this new way
pervade my fortune and advancement. While my
mind was thus engaged, I thought of the beautiful
young Estella, proud and refined, coming towards me,
and I thought with absolute abhorrence of the contrast
between the jail and her. I wished that Wemmick
had not met me, or that I had not yielded to him and
gone with him, so that, of all days in the year on
this day, I might not have had Newgate in my breath
and on my clothes. I beat the prison dust off
my feet as I sauntered to and fro, and I shook it
out of my dress, and I exhaled its air from my lungs.
So contaminated did I feel, remembering who was coming,
that the coach came quickly after all, and I was not
yet free from the soiling consciousness of Mr. Wemmick’s
conservatory, when I saw her face at the coach window
and her hand waving to me.
What was the nameless shadow which again in that one
instant had passed?
Chapter 33
In her furred travelling-dress, Estella seemed more
delicately beautiful than she had ever seemed yet,
even in my eyes. Her manner was more winning
than she had cared to let it be to me before, and
I thought I saw Miss Havisham’s influence in
the change.
We stood in the Inn Yard while she pointed out her
luggage to me, and when it was all collected I remembered
— having forgotten everything but herself in
the meanwhile — that I knew nothing of her destination.
“I am going to Richmond,” she told me.
“Our lesson is, that there are two Richmonds,
one in Surrey and one in Yorkshire, and that mine
is the Surrey Richmond. The distance is ten miles.
I am to have a carriage, and you are to take me.
This is my purse, and you are to pay my charges out
of it. Oh, you must take the purse! We
have no choice, you and I, but to obey our instructions.
We are not free to follow our own devices, you and
I.”
As she looked at me in giving me the purse, I hoped
there was an inner meaning in her words. She
said them slightingly, but not with displeasure.
“A carriage will have to be sent for, Estella.
Will you rest here a little?”
“Yes, I am to rest here a little, and I am to
drink some tea, and you are to take care of me the
while.”
Copyrights
Great Expectations from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
