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.