Jane Eyre: An Autobiography
“Oh, my best! oh, my dearest! pause—reflect!” was her mama’s cry; but
she swept past her in stately silence, passed through the door which
Colonel Dent held open, and we heard her enter the library.
A comparative silence ensued. Lady Ingram thought it “le cas” to wring
her hands: which she did accordingly. Miss Mary declared she felt, for
her part, she never dared venture. Amy and Louisa Eshton tittered under
their breath, and looked a little frightened.
The minutes passed very slowly: fifteen were counted before the
library-door again opened. Miss Ingram returned to us through the arch.
Would she laugh? Would she take it as a joke? All eyes met her with a
glance of eager curiosity, and she met all eyes with one of rebuff and
coldness; she looked neither flurried nor merry: she walked stiffly to
her seat, and took it in silence.
“Well, Blanche?” said Lord Ingram.
“What did she say, sister?” asked Mary.
“What did you think? How do you feel? Is she a real fortune-teller?”
demanded the Misses Eshton.
“Now, now, good people,” returned Miss Ingram, “don’t press upon me.
Really your organs of wonder and credulity are easily excited: you
seem, by the importance of you all—my good mama included—ascribe to
this matter, absolutely to believe we have a genuine witch in the
house, who is in close alliance with the old gentleman. I have seen a
gipsy vagabond; she has practised in hackneyed fashion the science of
palmistry and told me what such people usually tell. My whim is
gratified; and now I think Mr. Eshton will do well to put the hag in
the stocks to-morrow morning, as he threatened.”
Miss Ingram took a book, leant back in her chair, and so declined
further conversation. I watched her for nearly half-an-hour: during all
that time she never turned a page, and her face grew momently darker,
more dissatisfied, and more sourly expressive of disappointment. She
had obviously not heard anything to her advantage: and it seemed to me,
from her prolonged fit of gloom and taciturnity, that she herself,
notwithstanding her professed indifference, attached undue importance
to whatever revelations had been made her.
During all that time she never turned a page
Meantime, Mary Ingram, Amy and Louisa Eshton, declared they dared not
go alone; and yet they all wished to go. A negotiation was opened
through the medium of the ambassador, Sam; and after much pacing to and
fro, till, I think, the said Sam’s calves must have ached with the
exercise, permission was at last, with great difficulty, extorted from
the rigorous Sibyl, for the three to wait upon her in a body.
Their visit was not so still as Miss Ingram’s had been: we heard
hysterical giggling and little shrieks proceeding from the library; and
at the end of about twenty minutes they burst the door open, and came
running across the hall, as if they were half-scared out of their wits.
“I am sure she is something not right!” they cried, one and all. “She
told us such things! She knows all about us!” and they sank breathless
into the various seats the gentlemen hastened to bring them.
Pressed for further explanation, they declared she had told them of
things they had said and done when they were mere children; described
books and ornaments they had in their boudoirs at home: keepsakes that
different relations had presented to them. They affirmed that she had
even divined their thoughts, and had whispered in the ear of each the
name of the person she liked best in the world, and informed them of
what they most wished for.
Here the gentlemen interposed with earnest petitions to be further
enlightened on these two last-named points; but they got only blushes,
ejaculations, tremors, and titters, in return for their importunity.
The matrons, meantime, offered vinaigrettes and wielded fans; and again
and again reiterated the expression of their concern that their warning
had not been taken in time; and the elder gentlemen laughed, and the
younger urged their services on the agitated fair ones.
In the midst of the tumult, and while my eyes and ears were fully
engaged in the scene before me, I heard a hem close at my elbow: I
turned, and saw Sam.
“If you please, miss, the gipsy declares that there is another young
single lady in the room who has not been to her yet, and she swears she
will not go till she has seen all. I thought it must be you: there is
no one else for it. What shall I tell her?”
“Oh, I will go by all means,” I answered: and I was glad of the
unexpected opportunity to gratify my much-excited curiosity. I slipped
out of the room, unobserved by any eye—for the company were gathered in
one mass about the trembling trio just returned—and I closed the door
quietly behind me.
“If you like, miss,” said Sam, “I’ll wait in the hall for you; and if
she frightens you, just call and I’ll come in.”
“No, Sam, return to the kitchen: I am not in the least afraid.” Nor was
I; but I was a good deal interested and excited.
CHAPTER XIX
The library looked tranquil enough as I entered it, and the Sibyl—if
Sibyl she were—was seated snugly enough in an easy-chair at the
chimney-corner. She had on a red cloak and a black bonnet: or rather, a
broad-brimmed gipsy hat, tied down with a striped handkerchief under
her chin. An extinguished candle stood on the table; she was bending
over the fire, and seemed reading in a little black book, like a
prayer-book, by the light of the blaze: she muttered the words to
herself, as most old women do, while she read; she did not desist
immediately on my entrance: it appeared she wished to finish a
paragraph.
I stood on the rug and warmed my hands, which were rather cold with
sitting at a distance from the drawing-room fire. I felt now as
composed as ever I did in my life: there was nothing indeed in the
gipsy’s appearance to trouble one’s calm. She shut her book and slowly
looked up; her hat-brim partially shaded her face, yet I could see, as
she raised it, that it was a strange one. It looked all brown and
black: elf-locks bristled out from beneath a white band which passed
under her chin, and came half over her cheeks, or rather jaws: her eye
confronted me at once, with a bold and direct gaze.
“Well, and you want your fortune told?” she said, in a voice as decided
as her glance, as harsh as her features.
“I don’t care about it, mother; you may please yourself: but I ought to
warn you, I have no faith.”
“It’s like your impudence to say so: I expected it of you; I heard it
in your step as you crossed the threshold.”
“Did you? You’ve a quick ear.”
“I have; and a quick eye and a quick brain.”
“You need them all in your trade.”
“I do; especially when I’ve customers like you to deal with. Why don’t
you tremble?”
“I’m not cold.”
“Why don’t you turn pale?”
“I am not sick.”
“Why don’t you consult my art?”
“I’m not silly.”
The old crone “nichered” a laugh under her bonnet and bandage; she then
drew out a short black pipe, and lighting it began to smoke. Having
indulged a while in this sedative, she raised her bent body, took the
pipe from her lips, and while gazing steadily at the fire, said very
deliberately—
“You are cold; you are sick; and you are silly.”
“Prove it,” I rejoined.
“I will, in few words. You are cold, because you are alone: no contact
strikes the fire from you that is in you. You are sick; because the
best of feelings, the highest and the sweetest given to man, keeps far
away from you. You are silly, because, suffer as you may, you will not
beckon it to approach, nor will you stir one step to meet it where it
waits you.”
She again put her short black pipe to her lips, and renewed her smoking
with vigour.
“You might say all that to almost any one who you knew lived as a
solitary dependent in a great house.”
“I might say it to almost any one: but would it be true of almost any
one?”
“In my circumstances.”
“Yes; just so, in _your_ circumstances: but find me another precisely
placed as you are.”
“It would be easy to find you thousands.”
“You could scarcely find me one. If you knew it, you are peculiarly
situated: very near happiness; yes, within reach of it. The materials
are all prepared; there only wants a movement to combine them. Chance
laid them somewhat apart; let them be once approached and bliss
results.”
“I don’t understand enigmas. I never could guess a riddle in my life.”
“If you wish me to speak more plainly, show me your palm.”
“And I must cross it with silver, I suppose?”
“To be sure.”
I gave her a shilling: she put it into an old stocking-foot which she
took out of her pocket, and having tied it round and returned it, she
told me to hold out my hand. I did. She approached her face to the
palm, and pored over it without touching it.
“It is too fine,” said she. “I can make nothing of such a hand as that;
almost without lines: besides, what is in a palm? Destiny is not
written there.”
“I believe you,” said I.
“No,” she continued, “it is in the face: on the forehead, about the
eyes, in the lines of the mouth. Kneel, and lift up your head.”
“Ah! now you are coming to reality,” I said, as I obeyed her. “I shall
begin to put some faith in you presently.”
I knelt within half a yard of her. She stirred the fire, so that a
ripple of light broke from the disturbed coal: the glare, however, as
she sat, only threw her face into deeper shadow: mine, it illumined.
“I wonder with what feelings you came to me to-night,” she said, when
she had examined me a while. “I wonder what thoughts are busy in your
heart during all the hours you sit in yonder room with the fine people
flitting before you like shapes in a magic-lantern: just as little
sympathetic communion passing between you and them as if they were
really mere shadows of human forms, and not the actual substance.”
“I feel tired often, sleepy sometimes, but seldom sad.”
“Then you have some secret hope to buoy you up and please you with
whispers of the future?”
“Not I. The utmost I hope is, to save money enough out of my earnings
to set up a school some day in a little house rented by myself.”
“A mean nutriment for the spirit to exist on: and sitting in that
window-seat (you see I know your habits)—”
“You have learned them from the servants.”
“Ah! you think yourself sharp. Well, perhaps I have: to speak truth, I
have an acquaintance with one of them, Mrs. Poole—”
I started to my feet when I heard the name.
“You have—have you?” thought I; “there is diablerie in the business
after all, then!”
“Don’t be alarmed,” continued the strange being; “she’s a safe hand is
Mrs. Poole: close and quiet; any one may repose confidence in her. But,
as I was saying: sitting in that window-seat, do you think of nothing
but your future school? Have you no present interest in any of the
company who occupy the sofas and chairs before you? Is there not one
face you study? one figure whose movements you follow with at least
curiosity?”
“I like to observe all the faces and all the figures.”
“But do you never single one from the rest—or it may be, two?”
“I do frequently; when the gestures or looks of a pair seem telling a
tale: it amuses me to watch them.”
“What tale do you like best to hear?”
“Oh, I have not much choice! They generally run on the same
theme—courtship; and promise to end in the same catastrophe—marriage.”
“And do you like that monotonous theme?”
“Positively, I don’t care about it: it is nothing to me.”
“Nothing to you? When a lady, young and full of life and health,
charming with beauty and endowed with the gifts of rank and fortune,
sits and smiles in the eyes of a gentleman you—”
“I what?”
“You know—and perhaps think well of.”
“I don’t know the gentlemen here. I have scarcely interchanged a