第283页
《简·爱(英文版)》章节:第283页,宠文网网友提供全文无弹窗免费在线阅读。!
'Quite.'
'Do you like your house?'
'Very much.'
'Have I furnished it nicely?'
'Very nicely, indeed.'
'And made a good choice of an attendant for you in Alice Wood?'
'You have indeed. She is teachable and handy.' (This then, I
thought, is Miss Oliver, the heiress; favoured, it seems, in the gifts
of fortune, as well as in those of nature! What happy combination of
the planets presided over her birth, I wonder?)
'I shall come up and help you to teach sometimes,' she added. 'It
will be a change for me to visit you now and then; and I like a
night, or rather this morning, I was dancing till two o'clock. The
are the most agreeable men in the world: they put all our young
knife-grinders and scissor merchants to shame.'
It seemed to me that Mr. St. John's under lip protruded, and his
upper lip curled a moment. His mouth certainly looked a good deal
compressed, and the lower part of his face unusually stern and square,
as the laughing girl gave him this information. He lifted his gaze,
too, from the daisies, and turned it on her. An unsmiling, a
searching, a meaning gaze it was. She answered it with a second laugh,
and laughter well became her youth, her roses, her dimples, her bright
eyes.
As he stood, mute and grave, she again fell to caressing Carlo.
'Poor Carlo loves me,' said she. 'He is not stern and distant to his
friends; and if he could speak, he would not be silent.'
As she patted the dog's head, bending with native grace before
his young and austere master, I saw a glow rise to that master's face.
I saw his solemn eye melt with sudden fire, and flicker with
resistless emotion. Flushed and kindled thus, he looked nearly as
beautiful for a man as she for a woman. His chest heaved once, as if
his large heart, weary of despotic constriction, had expanded, despite
the will, and made a vigorous bound for the attainment of liberty. But
he curbed it, I think, as a resolute rider would curb a rearing steed.
He responded neither by word nor movement to the gentle advances
made him.
'Papa says you never come to see us now,' continued Mis Oliver,
looking up. 'You are quite a stranger at Vale Hall. He is alone this
evening, and not very well: will you return with me and visit him?'
'It is not a seasonable hour to intrude on Mr. Oliver,' answered
St. John.
'Not a seasonable hour! But I declare it is. It is just the hour
when papa most wants company: when the works are closed and he has
no business to occupy him. Now, Mr. Rivers, do come. Why are you so
very shy, and so very sombre?' She filled up the hiatus his silence
left by a reply of her own.
'I forgot!' she exclaimed, shaking her beautiful curled head, as if
shocked at herself. 'I am so giddy and thoughtless! Do excuse me. It
had slipped my memory that you have good reasons to be indisposed
for joining in my chatter. Diana and Mary have left you, and Moor
House is shut up, and you are so lonely. I am sure I pity you. Do come