I confess that I expected to see my sister denounce
him, and that I was disappointed by the different
result. She manifested the greatest anxiety
to be on good terms with him, was evidently much pleased
by his being at length produced, and motioned that
she would have him given something to drink.
She watched his countenance as if she were particularly
wishful to be assured that he took kindly to his reception,
she showed every possible desire to conciliate him,
and there was an air of humble propitiation in all
she did, such as I have seen pervade the bearing of
a child towards a hard master. After that day,
a day rarely passed without her drawing the hammer
on her slate, and without Orlick’s slouching
in and standing doggedly before her, as if he knew
no more than I did what to make of it.
Chapter 17
I now fell into a regular routine of apprenticeship
life, which was varied, beyond the limits of the village
and the marshes, by no more remarkable circumstance
than the arrival of my birthday and my paying another
visit to Miss Havisham. I found Miss Sarah Pocket
still on duty at the gate, I found Miss Havisham just
as I had left her, and she spoke of Estella in the
very same way, if not in the very same words.
The interview lasted but a few minutes, and she gave
me a guinea when I was going, and told me to come again
on my next birthday. I may mention at once that
this became an annual custom. I tried to decline
taking the guinea on the first occasion, but with
no better effect than causing her to ask me very angrily,
if I expected more? Then, and after that, I took
it.
So unchanging was the dull old house, the yellow light
in the darkened room, the faded spectre in the chair
by the dressing-table glass, that I felt as if the
stopping of the clocks had stopped Time in that mysterious
place, and, while I and everything else outside it
grew older, it stood still. Daylight never entered
the house as to my thoughts and remembrances of it,
any more than as to the actual fact. It bewildered
me, and under its influence I continued at heart to
hate my trade and to be ashamed of home.
Imperceptibly I became conscious of a change in Biddy,
however. Her shoes came up at the heel, her
hair grew bright and neat, her hands were always clean.
She was not beautiful — she was common, and
could not be like Estella — but she was pleasant
and wholesome and sweet-tempered. She had not
been with us more than a year (I remember her being
newly out of mourning at the time it struck me), when
I observed to myself one evening that she had curiously
thoughtful and attentive eyes; eyes that were very
pretty and very good.
It came of my lifting up my own eyes from a task I
was poring at — writing some passages from a
book, to improve myself in two ways at once by a sort
of stratagem — and seeing Biddy observant of
what I was about. I laid down my pen, and Biddy
stopped in her needlework without laying it down.
