Charles Dickens - Charles Dickens' Most Influential Works (Illustrated)

If only Estella had come to be a spectator of our proceedings, I should have felt sufficiently discontented; but as she brought with her the three ladies and the gentleman whom I had seen below, I didn’t know what to do. In my politeness, I would have stopped; but Miss Havisham twitched my shoulder, and we posted on, — with a shamefaced consciousness on my part that they would think it was all my doing.

“Dear Miss Havisham,” said Miss Sarah Pocket. “How well you look!”

“I do not,” returned Miss Havisham. “I am yellow skin and bone.”

Camilla brightened when Miss Pocket met with this rebuff; and she murmured, as she plaintively contemplated Miss Havisham, “Poor dear soul! Certainly not to be expected to look well, poor thing. The idea!”

“And how are you?” said Miss Havisham to Camilla. As we were close to Camilla then, I would have stopped as a matter of course, only Miss Havisham wouldn’t stop. We swept on, and I felt that I was highly obnoxious to Camilla.

“Thank you, Miss Havisham,” she returned, “I am as well as can be expected.”

“Why, what’s the matter with you?” asked Miss Havisham, with exceeding sharpness.

“Nothing worth mentioning,” replied Camilla. “I don’t wish to make a display of my feelings, but I have habitually thought of you more in the night than I am quite equal to.”

“Then don’t think of me,” retorted Miss Havisham.

“Very easily said!” remarked Camilla, amiably repressing a sob, while a hitch came into her upper lip, and her tears overflowed. “Raymond is a witness what ginger and sal volatile I am obliged to take in the night. Raymond is a witness what nervous jerkings I have in my legs. Chokings and nervous jerkings, however, are nothing new to me when I think with anxiety of those I love. If I could be less affectionate and sensitive, I should have a better digestion and an iron set of nerves. I am sure I wish it could be so. But as to not thinking of you in the night — The idea!” Here, a burst of tears.

The Raymond referred to, I understood to be the gentleman present, and him I understood to be Mr. Camilla. He came to the rescue at this point, and said in a consolatory and complimentary voice, “Camilla, my dear, it is well known that your family feelings are gradually undermining you to the extent of making one of your legs shorter than the other.”

“I am not aware,” observed the grave lady whose voice I had heard but once, “that to think of any person is to make a great claim upon that person, my dear.”

Miss Sarah Pocket, whom I now saw to be a little dry, brown, corrugated old woman, with a small face that might have been made of walnut-shells, and a large mouth like a cat’s without the whiskers, supported this position by saying, “No, indeed, my dear. Hem!”

“Thinking is easy enough,” said the grave lady.

“What is easier, you know?” assented Miss Sarah Pocket.

“Oh, yes, yes!” cried Camilla, whose fermenting feelings appeared to rise from her legs to her bosom. “It’s all very true! It’s a weakness to be so affectionate, but I can’t help it. No doubt my health would be much better if it was otherwise, still I wouldn’t change my disposition if I could. It’s the cause of much suffering, but it’s a consolation to know I posses it, when I wake up in the night.” Here another burst of feeling.

Miss Havisham and I had never stopped all this time, but kept going round and round the room; now brushing against the skirts of the visitors, now giving them the whole length of the dismal chamber.

“There’s Matthew!” said Camilla. “Never mixing with any natural ties, never coming here to see how Miss Havisham is! I have taken to the sofa with my staylace cut, and have lain there hours insensible, with my head over the side, and my hair all down, and my feet I don’t know where — ”

(“Much higher than your head, my love,” said Mr. Camilla.)

“I have gone off into that state, hours and hours, on account of Matthew’s strange and inexplicable conduct, and nobody has thanked me.”

“Really I must say I should think not!” interposed the grave lady.

“You see, my dear,” added Miss Sarah Pocket (a blandly vicious personage), “the question to put to yourself is, who did you expect to thank you, my love?”

“Without expecting any thanks, or anything of the sort,” resumed Camilla, “I have remained in that state, hours and hours, and Raymond is a witness of the extent to which I have choked, and what the total inefficacy of ginger has been, and I have been heard at the pianoforte tuner’s across the street, where the poor mistaken children have even supposed it to be pigeons cooing at a distance, — and now to be told — ” Here Camilla put her hand to her throat, and began to be quite chemical as to the formation of new combinations there.

When this same Matthew was mentioned, Miss Havisham stopped me and herself, and stood looking at the speaker. This change had a great influence in bringing Camilla’s chemistry to a sudden end.

“Matthew will come and see me at last,” said Miss Havisham, sternly, “when I am laid on that table. That will be his place, — there,” striking the table with her stick, “at my head! And yours will be there! And your husband’s there! And Sarah Pocket’s there! And Georgiana’s there! Now you all know where to take your stations when you come to feast upon me. And now go!”

At the mention of each name, she had struck the table with her stick in a new place. She now said, “Walk me, walk me!” and we went on again.

“I suppose there’s nothing to be done,” exclaimed Camilla, “but comply and depart. It’s something to have seen the object of one’s love and duty for even so short a time. I shall think of it with a melancholy satisfaction when I wake up in the night. I wish Matthew could have that comfort, but he sets it at defiance. I am determined not to make a display of my feelings, but it’s very hard to be told one wants to feast on one’s relations, — as if one was a Giant, — and to be told to go. The bare idea!”

Mr. Camilla interposing, as Mrs. Camilla laid her hand upon her heaving bosom, that lady assumed an unnatural fortitude of manner which I supposed to be expressive of an intention to drop and choke when out of view, and kissing her hand to Miss Havisham, was escorted forth. Sarah Pocket and Georgiana contended who should remain last; but Sarah was too knowing to be outdone, and ambled round Georgiana with that artful slipperiness that the latter was obliged to take precedence. Sarah Pocket then made her separate effect of departing with, “Bless you, Miss Havisham dear!” and with a smile of forgiving pity on her walnut-shell countenance for the weaknesses of the rest.

While Estella was away lighting them down, Miss Havisham still walked with her hand on my shoulder, but more and more slowly. At last she stopped before the fire, and said, after muttering and looking at it some seconds, —

“This is my birthday, Pip.”

I was going to wish her many happy returns, when she lifted her stick.

“I don’t suffer it to be spoken of. I don’t suffer those who were here just now, or any one to speak of it. They come here on the day, but they dare not refer to it.”

Of course I made no further effort to refer to it.

“On this day of the year, long before you were born, this heap of decay,” stabbing with her crutched stick at the pile of cobwebs on the table, but not touching it, “was brought here. It and I have worn away together. The mice have gnawed at it, and sharper teeth than teeth of mice have gnawed at me.”

She held the head of her stick against her heart as she stood looking at the table; she in her once white dress, all yellow and withered; the once white cloth all yellow and withered; everything around in a state to crumble under a touch.