Great Expectations Chapter Forty-Nine Summary

Pip dashes back to his homeland. Everything is a little bit run down, and he has a feeling that things have changed.
Pip finds Miss Havisham next to an ashy fire, and she looks incredibly lonely. Like whoa lonely. She also looks a little afraid of Pip, which is strange.
Pip asks Miss Havisham for £900 to invest in Herbert’s career. Miss Havisham is totally willing to cough up the money, but she wants to know what she can do for Pip.
Pip doesn’t want any money for himself.
Miss Havisham begs Pip to forgive, and Pip tells her he has already. He tells her he has been too much of a jerk in his own life to be able to hold a grudge against anyone else, let alone Miss Havisham.
Miss Havisham is totally sad, and tells Pip that she didn’t realize what she had done until Pip had professed his love to Estella. She sees herself in Pip’s sadness, and she recognizes that her broken heart matches his.
She throws herself at Pip’s feet, and Pip doesn’t quite know what to do.
Pip tells her that she can remove him from her conscience, but that she should do everything in her power to help heal Estella’s frozen popsicle of a heart.
Miss Havisham. agrees.
Pip asks her how she came to adopt Estella, and she tells him how lonely and sad she once was locked away in her dark, mildewing rooms. She asked Jaggers to find her a daughter, and Jaggers obeyed. Estella was two or three when she was brought to Miss Havisham’s.
Pip says goodbye to Miss Havisham and decides to take a walk in the ruined garden, a.k.a. memory lane. He decides to check out the old brewery, and while he is there, he hallucinates and sees Miss Havisham hanging from the rafters in her wedding dress, looking like a ghost.
Thoroughly freaked out, Pip decides to go check on Miss Havisham one last time.
As he peeks into her room, he sees that she is OK. But then something bright rears up behind her, and he realizes that her wedding dress has caught fire.
Pip runs and tackles Miss Havisham like a linebacker. She is completely aflame, so he pulls the table cloth off of the wedding table and wraps it around her, trying to stamp out the fire like Smoky the Bear would recommend.
As he pulls out the wedding tablecloth, the rotten wedding cake and all of its "inhabitants" (a.k.a. creepy crawlies) scatter everywhere.
Pip holds Miss Havisham down like a prisoner and only lets her go when he is sure that the fire has been put out.
Miss Havisham is knocked out; when the doctor arrives, he has her bed put on top of the wedding table.
Pip’s arms have been burned.
That night, Miss Havisham is totally out of it. Like a broken record, she keeps saying the following three things: "What have I done!" and "when she first came, I meant to save her from misery like mine" and "take the pencil and write under her name, I forgive her!"
The next morning, while Miss Havisham is still reciting these words, Pip gets up early and says goodbye to her, kissing her on the lips.

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