A great event in my life, the turning point of my
life, now opens on my view. But, before I proceed
to narrate it, and before I pass on to all the changes
it involved, I must give one chapter to Estella.
It is not much to give to the theme that so long filled
my heart.
If that staid old house near the Green at Richmond
should ever come to be haunted when I am dead, it
will be haunted, surely, by my ghost. O the
many, many nights and days through which the unquiet
spirit within me haunted that house when Estella lived
there! Let my body be where it would, my spirit
was always wandering, wandering, wandering, about
that house.
The lady with whom Estella was placed, Mrs. Brandley
by name, was a widow, with one daughter several years
older than Estella. The mother looked young,
and the daughter looked old; the mother’s complexion
was pink, and the daughter’s was yellow; the
mother set up for frivolity, and the daughter for
theology. They were in what is called a good
position, and visited, and were visited by, numbers
of people. Little, if any, community of feeling
subsisted between them and Estella, but the understanding
was established that they were necessary to her, and
that she was necessary to them. Mrs. Brandley
had been a friend of Miss Havisham’s before the
time of her seclusion.
In Mrs. Brandley’s house and out of Mrs. Brandley’s
house, I suffered every kind and degree of torture
that Estella could cause me. The nature of my
relations with her, which placed me on terms of familiarity
without placing me on terms of favour, conduced to
my distraction. She made use of me to tease
other admirers, and she turned the very familiarity
between herself and me, to the account of putting
a constant slight on my devotion to her. If I
had been her secretary, steward, half-brother, poor
relation — if I had been a younger brother of
her appointed husband — I could not have seemed
to myself, further from my hopes when I was nearest
to her. The privilege of calling her by her name
and hearing her call me by mine, became under the
circumstances an aggravation of my trials; and while
I think it likely that it almost maddened her other
lovers, I know too certainly that it almost maddened
me.
She had admirers without end. No doubt my jealousy
made an admirer of every one who went near her; but
there were more than enough of them without that.
I saw her often at Richmond, I heard of her often
in town, and I used often to take her and the Brandleys
on the water; there were picnics, fete days, plays,
operas, concerts, parties, all sorts of pleasures,
through which I pursued her — and they were all
miseries to me. I never had one hour’s
happiness in her society, and yet my mind all round
the four-and-twenty hours was harping on the happiness
of having her with me unto death.
Throughout this part of our intercourse — and
it lasted, as will presently be seen, for what I then
thought a long time — she habitually reverted
to that tone which expressed that our association
was forced upon us. There were other times when
she would come to a sudden check in this tone and
in all her many tones, and would seem to pity me.
