At the appointed time I returned to Miss Havisham’s,
and my hesitating ring at the gate brought out Estella.
She locked it after admitting me, as she had done
before, and again preceded me into the dark passage
where her candle stood. She took no notice of
me until she had the candle in her hand, when she looked
over her shoulder, superciliously saying, “You
are to come this way today,” and took me to
quite another part of the house.
The passage was a long one, and seemed to pervade
the whole square basement of the Manor House.
We traversed but one side of the square, however,
and at the end of it she stopped, and put her candle
down and opened a door. Here, the daylight reappeared,
and I found myself in a small paved court-yard, the
opposite side of which was formed by a detached dwelling-house,
that looked as if it had once belonged to the manager
or head clerk of the extinct brewery. There
was a clock in the outer wall of this house.
Like the clock in Miss Havisham’s room, and
like Miss Havisham’s watch, it had stopped at
twenty minutes to nine.
We went in at the door, which stood open, and into
a gloomy room with a low ceiling, on the ground floor
at the back. There was some company in the room,
and Estella said to me as she joined it, “You
are to go and stand there, boy, till you are wanted.”
“There”, being the window, I crossed
to it, and stood “there,” in a very uncomfortable
state of mind, looking out.
It opened to the ground, and looked into a most miserable
corner of the neglected garden, upon a rank ruin of
cabbage-stalks, and one box tree that had been clipped
round long ago, like a pudding, and had a new growth
at the top of it, out of shape and of a different
colour, as if that part of the pudding had stuck to
the saucepan and got burnt. This was my homely
thought, as I contemplated the box-tree. There
had been some light snow, overnight, and it lay nowhere
else to my knowledge; but, it had not quite melted
from the cold shadow of this bit of garden, and the
wind caught it up in little eddies and threw it at
the window, as if it pelted me for coming there.
I divined that my coming had stopped conversation
in the room, and that its other occupants were looking
at me. I could see nothing of the room except
the shining of the fire in the window glass, but I
stiffened in all my joints with the consciousness that
I was under close inspection.
There were three ladies in the room and one gentleman.
Before I had been standing at the window five minutes,
they somehow conveyed to me that they were all toadies
and humbugs, but that each of them pretended not to
know that the others were toadies and humbugs:
because the admission that he or she did know it, would
have made him or her out to be a toady and humbug.
They all had a listless and dreary air of waiting
somebody’s pleasure, and the most talkative
of the ladies had to speak quite rigidly to repress
a yawn. This lady, whose name was Camilla, very
much reminded me of my sister, with the difference
that she was older, and (as I found when I caught
sight of her) of a blunter cast of features.
Indeed, when I knew her better I began to think it
was a Mercy she had any features at all, so very blank
and high was the dead wall of her face.
