Jane Eyre: An Autobiography
should be paramount; but another feeling rose and triumphed: something
hard and cynical: self-willed and resolute: it settled his passion and
petrified his countenance: he went on—
“During the moment I was silent, Miss Eyre, I was arranging a point
with my destiny. She stood there, by that beech-trunk—a hag like one of
those who appeared to Macbeth on the heath of Forres. ‘You like
Thornfield?’ she said, lifting her finger; and then she wrote in the
air a memento, which ran in lurid hieroglyphics all along the
house-front, between the upper and lower row of windows, ‘Like it if
you can! Like it if you dare!’
“‘I will like it,’ said I; ‘I dare like it;’ and” (he subjoined
moodily) “I will keep my word; I will break obstacles to happiness, to
goodness—yes, goodness. I wish to be a better man than I have been,
than I am; as Job’s leviathan broke the spear, the dart, and the
habergeon, hindrances which others count as iron and brass, I will
esteem but straw and rotten wood.”
Adèle here ran before him with her shuttlecock. “Away!” he cried
harshly; “keep at a distance, child; or go in to Sophie!” Continuing
then to pursue his walk in silence, I ventured to recall him to the
point whence he had abruptly diverged—
“Did you leave the balcony, sir,” I asked, “when Mdlle. Varens
entered?”
I almost expected a rebuff for this hardly well-timed question, but, on
the contrary, waking out of his scowling abstraction, he turned his
eyes towards me, and the shade seemed to clear off his brow. “Oh, I had
forgotten Céline! Well, to resume. When I saw my charmer thus come in
accompanied by a cavalier, I seemed to hear a hiss, and the green snake
of jealousy, rising on undulating coils from the moonlit balcony,
glided within my waistcoat, and ate its way in two minutes to my
heart’s core. Strange!” he exclaimed, suddenly starting again from the
point. “Strange that I should choose you for the confidant of all this,
young lady; passing strange that you should listen to me quietly, as if
it were the most usual thing in the world for a man like me to tell
stories of his opera-mistresses to a quaint, inexperienced girl like
you! But the last singularity explains the first, as I intimated once
before: you, with your gravity, considerateness, and caution were made
to be the recipient of secrets. Besides, I know what sort of a mind I
have placed in communication with my own: I know it is one not liable
to take infection: it is a peculiar mind: it is a unique one. Happily I
do not mean to harm it: but, if I did, it would not take harm from me.
The more you and I converse, the better; for while I cannot blight you,
you may refresh me.” After this digression he proceeded—
“I remained in the balcony. ‘They will come to her boudoir, no doubt,’
thought I: ‘let me prepare an ambush.’ So putting my hand in through
the open window, I drew the curtain over it, leaving only an opening
through which I could take observations; then I closed the casement,
all but a chink just wide enough to furnish an outlet to lovers’
whispered vows: then I stole back to my chair; and as I resumed it the
pair came in. My eye was quickly at the aperture. Céline’s chamber-maid
entered, lit a lamp, left it on the table, and withdrew. The couple
were thus revealed to me clearly: both removed their cloaks, and there
was ‘the Varens,’ shining in satin and jewels,—my gifts of course,—and
there was her companion in an officer’s uniform; and I knew him for a
young roué of a vicomte—a brainless and vicious youth whom I had
sometimes met in society, and had never thought of hating because I
despised him so absolutely. On recognising him, the fang of the snake
Jealousy was instantly broken; because at the same moment my love for
Céline sank under an extinguisher. A woman who could betray me for such
a rival was not worth contending for; she deserved only scorn; less,
however, than I, who had been her dupe.
“They began to talk; their conversation eased me completely: frivolous,
mercenary, heartless, and senseless, it was rather calculated to weary
than enrage a listener. A card of mine lay on the table; this being
perceived, brought my name under discussion. Neither of them possessed
energy or wit to belabour me soundly, but they insulted me as coarsely
as they could in their little way: especially Céline, who even waxed
rather brilliant on my personal defects—deformities she termed them.
Now it had been her custom to launch out into fervent admiration of
what she called my ‘_beauté mâle_:’ wherein she differed diametrically
from you, who told me point-blank, at the second interview, that you
did not think me handsome. The contrast struck me at the time and—”
Adèle here came running up again.
“Monsieur, John has just been to say that your agent has called and
wishes to see you.”
“Ah! in that case I must abridge. Opening the window, I walked in upon
them; liberated Céline from my protection; gave her notice to vacate
her hotel; offered her a purse for immediate exigencies; disregarded
screams, hysterics, prayers, protestations, convulsions; made an
appointment with the vicomte for a meeting at the Bois de Boulogne.
Next morning I had the pleasure of encountering him; left a bullet in
one of his poor etiolated arms, feeble as the wing of a chicken in the
pip, and then thought I had done with the whole crew. But unluckily the
Varens, six months before, had given me this filette Adèle, who, she
affirmed, was my daughter; and perhaps she may be, though I see no
proofs of such grim paternity written in her countenance: Pilot is more
like me than she. Some years after I had broken with the mother, she
abandoned her child, and ran away to Italy with a musician or singer. I
acknowledged no natural claim on Adèle’s part to be supported by me,
nor do I now acknowledge any, for I am not her father; but hearing that
she was quite destitute, I e’en took the poor thing out of the slime
and mud of Paris, and transplanted it here, to grow up clean in the
wholesome soil of an English country garden. Mrs. Fairfax found you to
train it; but now you know that it is the illegitimate offspring of a
French opera-girl, you will perhaps think differently of your post and
protégée: you will be coming to me some day with notice that you have
found another place—that you beg me to look out for a new governess,
&c.—Eh?”
“No: Adèle is not answerable for either her mother’s faults or yours: I
have a regard for her; and now that I know she is, in a sense,
parentless—forsaken by her mother and disowned by you, sir—I shall
cling closer to her than before. How could I possibly prefer the spoilt
pet of a wealthy family, who would hate her governess as a nuisance, to
a lonely little orphan, who leans towards her as a friend?”
“Oh, that is the light in which you view it! Well, I must go in now;
and you too: it darkens.”
But I stayed out a few minutes longer with Adèle and Pilot—ran a race
with her, and played a game of battledore and shuttlecock. When we went
in, and I had removed her bonnet and coat, I took her on my knee; kept
her there an hour, allowing her to prattle as she liked: not rebuking
even some little freedoms and trivialities into which she was apt to
stray when much noticed, and which betrayed in her a superficiality of
character, inherited probably from her mother, hardly congenial to an
English mind. Still she had her merits; and I was disposed to
appreciate all that was good in her to the utmost. I sought in her
countenance and features a likeness to Mr. Rochester, but found none:
no trait, no turn of expression announced relationship. It was a pity:
if she could but have been proved to resemble him, he would have
thought more of her.
It was not till after I had withdrawn to my own chamber for the night,
that I steadily reviewed the tale Mr. Rochester had told me. As he had
said, there was probably nothing at all extraordinary in the substance
of the narrative itself: a wealthy Englishman’s passion for a French
dancer, and her treachery to him, were every-day matters enough, no
doubt, in society; but there was something decidedly strange in the
paroxysm of emotion which had suddenly seized him when he was in the
act of expressing the present contentment of his mood, and his newly
revived pleasure in the old hall and its environs. I meditated
wonderingly on this incident; but gradually quitting it, as I found it
for the present inexplicable, I turned to the consideration of my
master’s manner to myself. The confidence he had thought fit to repose
in me seemed a tribute to my discretion: I regarded and accepted it as
such. His deportment had now for some weeks been more uniform towards
me than at the first. I never seemed in his way; he did not take fits
of chilling hauteur: when he met me unexpectedly, the encounter seemed
welcome; he had always a word and sometimes a smile for me: when
summoned by formal invitation to his presence, I was honoured by a
cordiality of reception that made me feel I really possessed the power
to amuse him, and that these evening conferences were sought as much
for his pleasure as for my benefit.
I, indeed, talked comparatively little, but I heard him talk with
relish. It was his nature to be communicative; he liked to open to a
mind unacquainted with the world glimpses of its scenes and ways (I do
not mean its corrupt scenes and wicked ways, but such as derived their
interest from the great scale on which they were acted, the strange
novelty by which they were characterised); and I had a keen delight in
receiving the new ideas he offered, in imagining the new pictures he
portrayed, and following him in thought through the new regions he
disclosed, never startled or troubled by one noxious allusion.
The ease of his manner freed me from painful restraint: the friendly
frankness, as correct as cordial, with which he treated me, drew me to
him. I felt at times as if he were my relation rather than my master:
yet he was imperious sometimes still; but I did not mind that; I saw it
was his way. So happy, so gratified did I become with this new interest
added to life, that I ceased to pine after kindred: my thin
crescent-destiny seemed to enlarge; the blanks of existence were filled
up; my bodily health improved; I gathered flesh and strength.
And was Mr. Rochester now ugly in my eyes? No, reader: gratitude, and
many associations, all pleasurable and genial, made his face the object
I best liked to see; his presence in a room was more cheering than the
brightest fire. Yet I had not forgotten his faults; indeed, I could
not, for he brought them frequently before me. He was proud, sardonic,
harsh to inferiority of every description: in my secret soul I knew
that his great kindness to me was balanced by unjust severity to many
others. He was moody, too; unaccountably so; I more than once, when
sent for to read to him, found him sitting in his library alone, with
his head bent on his folded arms; and, when he looked up, a morose,
almost a malignant, scowl blackened his features. But I believed that
his moodiness, his harshness, and his former faults of morality (I say
_former_, for now he seemed corrected of them) had their source in some
cruel cross of fate. I believed he was naturally a man of better
tendencies, higher principles, and purer tastes than such as
circumstances had developed, education instilled, or destiny
encouraged. I thought there were excellent materials in him; though for
the present they hung together somewhat spoiled and tangled. I cannot
deny that I grieved for his grief, whatever that was, and would have
given much to assuage it.
Though I had now extinguished my candle and was laid down in bed, I
could not sleep for thinking of his look when he paused in the avenue,