第341页
《简·爱(英文版)》章节:第341页,宠文网网友提供全文无弹窗免费在线阅读。!
dawned on his forehead: his lineaments softened and warmed.
After supper, he began to ask me many questions, of where I had
been, what I had been doing, how I had found him out; but I gave him
only very partial replies: it was too late to enter into particulars
that night. Besides, I wished to touch no deep-thrilling chord- to
open no fresh well of emotion in his heart: my sole present aim was to
cheer him. Cheered, as I have said, he was: and yet but by fits. If
a moment's silence broke the conversation, he would turn restless,
touch me, then say, 'Jane.'
'You are altogether a human being, Janet? You are certain of that?'
'I conscientiously believe so, Mr. Rochester.'
'Yet how, on this dark and doleful evening, could you so suddenly
rise on my lone hearth? I stretched my hand to take a glass of water
from a hireling, and it was given me by you: I asked a question,
expecting John's wife to answer me, and your voice spoke at my ear.'
'Because I had come in, in Mary's stead, with the tray.'
'And there is enchantment in the very hour I am now spending with
you. Who can tell what a dark, dreary, hopeless life I have dragged on
for months past? Doing nothing, expecting nothing; merging night in
day; feeling but the sensation of cold when I let the fire go out,
of hunger when I forgot to eat: and then a ceaseless sorrow, and, at
times, a very delirium of desire to behold my Jane again. Yes: for her
restoration I longed, far more than for that of my lost sight. How can
it be that Jane is with me, and says she loves me? Will she not depart
as suddenly as she came? To-morrow, I fear I shall find her no more.'
A commonplace, practical reply, out of the train of his own
disturbed ideas, was, I was sure, the best and most reassuring for him
in this frame of mind. I passed my finger over his eyebrows, and
remarked that they were scorched, and that I would apply something
which would make them grow as broad and black as ever.
'Where is the use of doing me good in any way, beneficent spirit,
when, at some fatal moment, you will again desert me- passing like a
shadow, whither and how to me unknown, and for me remaining afterwards
undiscoverable?'
'Have you a pocket-comb about you, sir?'
'What for, Jane?'
'Just to comb out this shaggy black mane. I find you rather
alarming, when I examine you close at hand: you talk of my being a
fairy, but I am sure, you are more like a brownie.'
'Am I hideous, Jane?'
'Very, sir: you always were, you know.'
'Humph! The wickedness has not been taken out of you, wherever
you have sojourned.'
'Yet I have been with good people; far better than you: a hundred
times better people; possessed of ideas and views you never
entertained in your life: quite more refined and exalted.'
'Who the deuce have you been with?'
'If you twist in that way you will make me pull the hair out of
your head; and then I think you will cease to entertain doubts of my