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 favor, 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,

fête 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.




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