"O Miss Havisham," said I, "I can do it now. There have been sore
mistakes; and my life has been a blind and thankless one; and I want
forgiveness and direction far too much, to be bitter with you."
She turned her face to me for the first time since she had averted it,
and, to my amazement, I may even add to my terror, dropped on her knees
at my feet; with her folded hands raised to me in the manner in which,
when her poor heart was young and fresh and whole, they must often have
been raised to heaven from her mother's side.
To see her with her white hair and her worn face kneeling at my feet
gave me a shock through all my frame. I entreated her to rise, and got
my arms about her to help her up; but she only pressed that hand of mine
which was nearest to her grasp, and hung her head over it and wept. I
had never seen her shed a tear before, and, in the hope that the
relief might do her good, I bent over her without speaking. She was not
kneeling now, but was down upon the ground.
"O!" she cried, despairingly. "What have I done! What have I done!"
"If you mean, Miss Havisham, what have you done to injure me, let me
answer. Very little. I should have loved her under any circumstances. Is
she married?"
"Yes."
It was a needless question, for a new desolation in the desolate house
had told me so.
"What have I done! What have I done!" She wrung her hands, and crushed
her white hair, and returned to this cry over and over again. "What have
I done!"
I knew not how to answer, or how to comfort her. That she had done a
grievous thing in taking an impressionable child to mould into the form
that her wild resentment, spurned affection, and wounded pride found
vengeance in, I knew full well. But that, in shutting out the light
of day, she had shut out infinitely more; that, in seclusion, she had
secluded herself from a thousand natural and healing influences; that,
her mind, brooding solitary, had grown diseased, as all minds do and
must and will that reverse the appointed order of their Maker, I knew
equally well. And could I look upon her without compassion, seeing her
punishment in the ruin she was, in her profound unfitness for this earth
on which she was placed, in the vanity of sorrow which had become a
master mania, like the vanity of penitence, the vanity of remorse, the
vanity of unworthiness, and other monstrous vanities that have been
curses in this world?