antiquity, its retirement, its old crow-trees and thorn-trees, its
grey facade, and lines of dark windows reflecting that metal
welkin: and yet how long have I abhorred the very thought of it,
shunned it like a great plague-house? How I do still abhor—”
He ground his teeth and was silent: he arrested his step and
struck his boot against the hard ground. Some hated thought
seemed to have him in its grip, and to hold him so tightly that he
could not advance.
We were ascending the avenue when he thus paused; the hall
was before us. Lifting his eye to its battlements, he cast over them
a glare such as I never saw before or since. Pain, shame, ire,
impatience, disgust, detestation, seemed momentarily to hold a
quivering conflict in the large pupil dilating under his ebon
eyebrow. Wild was the wrestle which should be paramount; but
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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
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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
"};
