"No: Adele 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 Adele 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It was not till after I had withdrawn to my own chamber for the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.




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