to give it full being. Yet the drawings are, for a school-girl, peculiar.”
Then looking at his watch, he said abruptly, “It is nine o'clock: Miss Eyre, you should not let Adèle sit up so long. Take her to bed. I wish you all good-night, now.”
I took my portfolio. We curtseyed to him, received a frigid bow in return, and left the room.
“You said he was not strikingly peculiar,” I told Mrs. Fairfax after putting the girl to bed. “I think he is very changeful.”
“I am so accustomed to his manner, I never think of it,” she said. “He has had a few family troubles. He lost his elder brother nine years ago.”
“Was he so very fond of his brother?”
“Why, no-perhaps not. I believe there were some misunderstandings between them. He is not very forgiving: he broke with his family, and now for many years he has led an unsettled kind of life. I don't think he has ever stayed at Thornfield for a fortnight, since the death of his brother without a will left him master of the mansion. Indeed, no wonder he shuns the place.”
“Why should he shun it?”
“Perhaps he thinks it gloomy.”
The answer was evasive. It was evident that Mrs. Fairfax wished me to drop the subject.
Chapter 15
For the next few days I hardly saw Mr. Rochester. In the mornings he was busy with visitors and, since his sprain was better, he often went out riding. He generally did not come back till late at night. I occasionally bumped into him on the stairs or in the hall. Sometimes he would bow and smile; other times he seemed irritated, and barely glanced at me.
One day after a dinner party with some friends, he asked Mrs. Fairfax to bring Adèle and me to the drawing room. His things had at last arrived from Millcote, and he gave Adèle her box of presents. While she sat on the sofa ecstatically examining her treasure, Mr. Rochester asked me to come and seat in a chair near his own.
“I am really not fond of children. Don't draw that chair farther off, Miss Eyre; sit down exactly where I placed it-if you please, that is.”
He then proceeded to stare into the fire in silence. He had placed my chair so close to him, I could do nothing but sit and look at him. Mr. Rochester looked different to what I had seen him look before; not quite so stern- much less gloomy. There was a smile on his lips, and his eyes sparkled. He had great, dark eyes, not without a certain change in their depths sometimes, which, if it was not softness, reminded you, at least, of that feeling.
Suddenly he turned and caught me looking at him.
“You examine me, Miss Eyre,” he said. “Do you think I am handsome?”
I should have replied to this question by something polite and vague but instead I answered with 'No, sir'.
“Ah! There is something special about you! You are so quiet, grave, and simple, but when one asks you a question, or makes a remark to which you are obliged to reply, you are blunt and straight-forward.”
Yet he seemed to like this honesty in me; he was intrigued by it. He told me that I was unlike anyone else he had met, especially of so young an age, and that since I was so honest with him, he could not help but be honest with me.
“It would please me now to draw you out-to learn more of you-therefore speak.”
Instead of speaking, I smiled. “What about, sir?”
“Whatever you like.”
I said nothing.
“Stubborn?” he said, “and annoyed. Ah! I put my request in an absurd form. I am sorry. I did not mean to make you feel inferior to me, I just wanted you to talk to me a little and divert my thoughts.”
“I would love to help, but I cannot introduce a topic. How do I know what will interest you?”
“Do you agree I have a right to be a little masterful with you?”
“I don't think, sir, you have a right to command me.”
We talked more. Once he said something strange-that he had many regrets, but that he now intended to become a good person. I did not understand, though I wanted to. As if he felt that I was not indifferent to his sorrows, he promised:
“I'll explain all this some day. Good-night.”
Chapter 16
Mr. Rochester explained later everything. At least, he told me a little about his past. It was one afternoon when he met me and Adèle in the grounds. While the girl played with Pilot, he asked me to walk within sight of her.
He said that she was the daughter of a French opera-dancer, Celine Varens, whom he had loved passionately once. She called him her Apollo Belvidere and he thought he was her idol, though he was ugly. “I gave her a complete establishment of servants, a carriage, diamonds,” he continued. “I was blind with love. But one night, when I came unexpectedly, I found her out. The carriage stopped, as I had expected, at the hotel door. I recognised her at once and was about to call her by name when I saw another figure jump from the carriage after her.”
Some time later, Celine ran away to Italy with her new lover. But she left her daughter behind in Paris, claiming that Rochester should look after her.
“I am not her father,” Mr. Rochester explained. “And I don't know who is. But she had no one, and I could not leave her like that.”
“How strange that I am telling you all this,” he added, “and how odd that you listen so calmly-you are not shocked for a moment. But there is something about you-something that makes me want to confide in you.” I did not reply. “And so here she is, a little French flower, transplanted to an English country garden here at Thornfield,” he continued. “And because she is here, you are here too. Mrs. Fairfax found you to train her; but now you know that it is an illegitimate offspring of a French opera-girl, you will perhaps think differently of your post and pupil. Some day you will tell me that you have found another place and beg me to look out for a new governess.”
“No: Adèle is not to blame for her mother's faults or yours. Now that I know that she is, in a sense, parentless-abandoned by her mother and disowned by you, sir-I'll cling closer to her than before. How should I possibly prefer the spoilt pet of a wealthy family, who would hate her governess, to a lonely little orphan, who treats her as a friend?”
“Oh, that is the light in which you view it!”
He looked up at the house. “I like this house,” he said, thoughtfully. “I like its worn stone, and the old thorn trees. And yet, how I've struggled to stay away, how I've hated the thought of…” He fell silent, staring up at Thornfield's windows. As I watched, I saw a range of feelings pass across his face: first a kind of impatience, then disgust and hatred, followed by guilt and pain. Finally, he hardened his features into stony determination, and said, “It's time to go in.”
After a while Mr. Rochester, who had previously been nothing but an employer to me, became my friend. As time went on, he became less moody, and was always pleased to see me. He often wanted to talk, he trusted me and treated me as his equal, even though I was still a governess paid thirty pounds a year.
I had called him plain and even ugly, but his was the face I now most
