"It appears I come at an inopportune time, madam," said he, "when my
friend, Mr. Rochester, is from home; but I arrive from a very long
journey, and I think I may presume so far on old and intimate
acquaintance as to instal myself here till he returns."
His manner was polite; his accent, in speaking, struck me as being
somewhat unusual,--not precisely foreign, but still not altogether
English: his age might be about Mr. Rochester's,--between thirty
and forty; his complexion was singularly sallow: otherwise he was a
fine-looking man, at first sight especially. On closer examination,
you detected something in his face that displeased, or rather that
failed to please. His features were regular, but too relaxed: his
eye was large and well cut, but the life looking out of it was a
tame, vacant life--at least so I thought.
The sound of the dressing-bell dispersed the party. It was not till
after dinner that I saw him again: he then seemed quite at his
ease. But I liked his physiognomy even less than before: it struck
me as being at the same time unsettled and inanimate. His eye
wandered, and had no meaning in its wandering: this gave him an odd
look, such as I never remembered to have seen. For a handsome and
not an unamiable-looking man, he repelled me exceedingly: there was
no power in that smooth-skinned face of a full oval shape: no
firmness in that aquiline nose and small cherry mouth; there was no
thought on the low, even forehead; no command in that blank, brown
eye.
As I sat in my usual nook, and looked at him with the light of the
girandoles on the mantelpiece beaming full over him--for he occupied
an arm-chair drawn close to the fire, and kept shrinking still
nearer, as if he were cold, I compared him with Mr. Rochester. I
think (with deference be it spoken) the contrast could not be much
greater between a sleek gander and a fierce falcon: between a meek
sheep and the rough-coated keen-eyed dog, its guardian.
He had spoken of Mr. Rochester as an old friend. A curious
friendship theirs must have been: a pointed illustration, indeed,
of the old adage that "extremes meet."
Two or three of the gentlemen sat near him, and I caught at times
scraps of their conversation across the room. At first I could not
make much sense of what I heard; for the discourse of Louisa Eshton
and Mary Ingram, who sat nearer to me, confused the fragmentary
sentences that reached me at intervals. These last were discussing
the stranger; they both called him "a beautiful man." Louisa said
he was "a love of a creature," and she "adored him;" and Mary
instanced his "pretty little mouth, and nice nose," as her ideal of
the charming.