Jane Eyre (71 page)

The eventful Thursday at length came. They were expected about dark, and ere dusk fires were lit upstairs and below, the kitchen was in perfect trim. Hannah and I were dressed, and all was in readiness.

St. John arrived first. I had entreated him to keep quite clear of the house till everything was arranged, and, indeed, the bare idea of the commotion, at once sordid and trivial, going on within its walls sufficed to scare him to estrangement. He found me in the kitchen, watching the progress of certain cakes for tea, then baking. Approaching the hearth, he asked, “If I was at last satisfied with housemaid’s work?” I answered by inviting him to accompany me on a general inspection of the result of my labours. With some difficulty, I got him to make the tour of the house. He just looked in at the doors I opened and when he had wandered upstairs and downstairs, he said I must have gone through a great deal of fatigue and trouble to have effected such considerable changes in so short a time, but not a syllable did he utter indicating pleasure in the improved aspect of his abode.

This silence damped me. I thought perhaps the alterations had disturbed some old associations he valued. I enquired whether this was the case, no doubt in a somewhat crest-fallen tone.

“Not at all; he had, on the contrary, remarked that I had scrupulously respected every association, he feared, indeed, I must have bestowed more thought on the matter than it was worth. How many minutes, for instance, had I devoted to studying the arrangement of this very room?—By-the-bye, could I tell him where such a book was?”

I showed him the volume on the shelf, he took it down, and withdrawing to his accustomed window recess, he began to read it.

 Though I had allowed only few wayward thoughts since the arrival of my happy news, I now recollected—how vibrantly!—the library at Thornfield Hall and the books its master—my master—kept behind locked glass, safe and secure, except from my inquisitiveness. If I had not been in the presence of my cousin, I fear I would have continued down that questionable line of thought! I blushed. I need not have feared at any rate. I could have been stone for all the notice St. John took of me.

Now, I did not like this, reader. St. John was a good man, but I began to feel he had spoken truth of himself when he said he was hard and cold. The humanities and amenities of life had no attraction for him—its peaceful enjoyments no charm. Literally, he lived only to aspire—after what was good and great, certainly, but still he would never rest, nor approve of others resting round him. As I looked at his lofty forehead, still and pale as a white stone—at his fine lineaments fixed in study—I comprehended all at once that he would hardly make a good husband, that it would be a trying thing to be his wife. I understood, as by inspiration, the nature of his love for Miss Oliver. I agreed with him that it was but a love of the senses. I comprehended how he should despise himself for the feverish influence it exercised over him; how he should wish to stifle and destroy it; how he should mistrust its ever conducting permanently to his happiness or hers. I saw he was of the material from which nature hews her heroes—Christian and Pagan—her lawgivers, her statesmen, her conquerors, a steadfast bulwark for great interests to rest upon, but, at the fireside, too often a cold cumbrous column, gloomy and out of place.

“This parlour is not his sphere,” I reflected, “the Himalayan ridge or Caffre bush, even the plague-cursed Guinea Coast swamp would suit him better. Well may he eschew the calm of domestic life. It is not his element, there his faculties stagnate—they cannot develop or appear to advantage. It is in scenes of strife and danger—where courage is proved, and energy exercised, and fortitude tasked—that he will speak and move, the leader and superior. A merry child would have the advantage of him on this hearth. He is right to choose a missionary’s career—I see it now.”

“They are coming! they are coming!” cried Hannah, throwing open the parlour door. At the same moment old Carlo barked joyfully. Out I ran. It was now dark, but a rumbling of wheels was audible. Hannah soon had a lantern lit. The vehicle had stopped at the wicket; the driver opened the door, first one well-known form, then another, stepped out. In a minute I had my face under their bonnets, in contact first with Mary’s soft cheek, then with Diana’s flowing curls. They laughed—kissed me—then Hannah, patted Carlo, who was half wild with delight; asked eagerly if all was well and being assured in the affirmative, hastened into the house.

They were stiff with their long and jolting drive from Whitcross, and chilled with the frosty night air, but their pleasant countenances expanded to the cheerful firelight. While the driver and Hannah brought in the boxes, they demanded St. John. At this moment he advanced from the parlour. They both threw their arms round his neck at once. He gave each one quiet kiss, said in a low tone a few words of welcome, stood a while to be talked to, and then, intimating that he supposed they would soon rejoin him in the parlour, withdrew there as to a place of refuge.

I had lit their candles to go upstairs, but Diana had first to give hospitable orders respecting the driver; this done, both followed me. They were delighted with the renovation and decorations of their rooms; with the new drapery, and fresh carpets, and rich tinted china vases, they expressed their gratification ungrudgingly. I had the pleasure of feeling that my arrangements met their wishes exactly, and that what I had done added a vivid charm to their joyous return home.

Sweet was that evening. My cousins, full of exhilaration, were so eloquent in narrative and comment, that their fluency covered St. John’s taciturnity, he was sincerely glad to see his sisters, but in their glow of fervour and flow of joy he could not sympathise. The event of the day—that is, the return of Diana and Mary—pleased him, but the accompaniments of that event, the glad tumult, the garrulous glee of reception irked him. I saw he wished the calmer morrow was come. In the very meridian of the night’s enjoyment, about an hour after tea, a rap was heard at the door. Hannah entered with the intimation that “a poor lad was come, at that unlikely time, to fetch Mr Rivers to see his mother, who was drawing away.”

“Where does she live, Hannah?”

“Clear up at Whitcross Brow, almost four miles off, and moor and moss all the way.”

“Tell him I will go.”

“I’m sure, sir, you had better not. It’s the worst road to travel after dark that can be, there’s no track at all over the bog. And then it is such a bitter night—the keenest wind you ever felt. You had better send word, sir, that you will be there in the morning.”

But he was already in the passage, putting on his cloak and without one objection, one murmur, he departed. It was then nine o’clock, he did not return till midnight. Starved and tired enough he was, but he looked happier than when he set out. He had performed an act of duty; made an exertion; felt his own strength to do and deny, and was on better terms with himself.

I am afraid the whole of the ensuing week tried his patience. It was Christmas week, we took to no settled employment, but spent it in a sort of merry domestic dissipation. The air of the moors, the freedom of home, the dawn of prosperity, acted on Diana and Mary’s spirits like some life-giving elixir, they were gay from morning till noon, and from noon till night. They could always talk and their discourse, witty, pithy, original, had such charms for me, that I preferred listening to, and sharing in it, to doing anything else. St. John did not rebuke our vivacity, but he escaped from it, he was seldom in the house, his parish was large, the population scattered, and he found daily business in visiting the sick and poor in its different districts.

One morning at breakfast, Diana, after looking a little pensive for some minutes, asked him, “If his plans were yet unchanged.”

“Unchanged and unchangeable,” was the reply. And he proceeded to inform us that his departure from England was now definitively fixed for the ensuing year.

“And Rosamond Oliver?” suggested Mary, the words seeming to escape her lips involuntarily, for no sooner had she uttered them, than she made a gesture as if wishing to recall them. St. John had a book in his hand—it was his unsocial custom to read at meals—he closed it, and looked up.

“Rosamond Oliver,” said he, “is about to be married to Mr Granby, one of the best connected and most estimable residents,  grandson and heir to Sir Frederic Granby, I had the intelligence from her father yesterday.”

His sisters looked at each other and at me; we all three looked at him, he was serene as glass.

“The match must have been got up hastily,” said Diana, “they cannot have known each other long.”

“But two months, they met in October at the county ball at S-. But where there are no obstacles to a union, as in the present case, where the connection is in every point desirable, delays are unnecessary, they will be married as soon as the place, which Sir Frederic gives up to them, can he refitted for their reception.”

The first time I found St. John alone after this communication, I felt tempted to enquire if the event distressed him, but he seemed so little to need sympathy, that, so far from venturing to offer him more, I experienced some shame at the recollection of what I had already hazarded. Besides, I was out of practice in talking to him, his reserve was again frozen over, and my frankness was congealed beneath it. He had not kept his promise of treating me like his sisters; he continually made little chilling differences between us, which did not at all tend to the development of cordiality, in short, now that I was acknowledged his kinswoman, and lived under the same roof with him, I felt the distance between us to be far greater than when he had known me only as the village schoolmistress. When I remembered how far I had once been admitted to his confidence, I could hardly comprehend his present frigidity.

Such being the case, I felt not a little surprised when he raised his head suddenly from the desk over which he was stooping, and said, “You see, Jane, the battle is fought and the victory won.”

Startled at being thus addressed, I did not immediately reply, after a moment’s hesitation I answered, “But are you sure you are not in the position of those conquerors whose triumphs have cost them too dear? Would not such another ruin you?”

“I think not and if I were, it does not much signify. I shall never be called upon to contend for such another. The event of the conflict is decisive, my way is now clear. I thank God for it!” So saying, he returned to his papers and his silence.

As our mutual happiness—
i.e.
, Diana’s, Mary’s, and mine—settled into a quieter character, and we resumed our usual habits and regular studies, St. John stayed more at home, he sat with us in the same room, sometimes for hours together. While Mary and I drew, Diana pursued a course of encyclopædic reading she had—to my awe and amazement—undertaken, and I fagged away at German, he pondered a mystic lore of his own, that of some Eastern tongue, the acquisition of which he thought necessary to his plans.

Thus engaged, he appeared, sitting in his own recess, quiet and absorbed enough, but that blue eye of his had a habit of leaving the outlandish-looking grammar, and wandering over, and sometimes fixing upon us, his fellow-students, with a curious intensity of observation, if caught, it would be instantly withdrawn, yet ever and anon, it returned searchingly to our table. I wondered what it meant, I wondered, too, at the punctual satisfaction he never failed to exhibit on an occasion that seemed to me of small moment, namely, my weekly visit to Morton school and still more was I puzzled when, if the day was unfavourable, if there was snow, or rain, or high wind, and his sisters urged me not to go, he would invariably make light of their solicitude, and encourage me to accomplish the task without regard to the elements.

“Jane is not such a weakling as you would make her,” he would say, “she can bear a mountain blast, or a shower, or a few flakes of snow, as well as any of us. Her constitution is both sound and elastic—better calculated to endure variations of climate than many more robust.”

And when I returned, sometimes a good deal tired, and not a little weather-beaten, I never dared complain, because I saw that to murmur would be to vex him, on all occasions fortitude pleased him; the reverse was a special annoyance.

One afternoon, however, I got leave to stay at home, because I really had a cold. His sisters were gone to Morton in my stead, I sat reading Schiller; he, deciphering his crabbed Oriental scrolls. As I exchanged a translation for an exercise, I happened to look his way, there I found myself under the influence of the ever-watchful blue eye. How long it had been searching me through and through, and over and over, I cannot tell, so keen was it, and yet so cold, I felt for the moment superstitious—as if I were sitting in the room with something uncanny.

“Jane, what are you doing?”

“Learning German.”

“I want you to give up German and learn Hindostanee.”

“You are not in earnest?”

“In such earnest that I must have it so, and I will tell you why.”

He then went on to explain that Hindostanee was the language he was himself at present studying; that, as he advanced, he was apt to forget the commencement; that it would assist him greatly to have a pupil with whom he might again and again go over the elements, and so fix them thoroughly in his mind; that his choice had hovered for some time between me and his sisters, but that he had fixed on me because he saw I could sit at a task the longest of the three. Would I do him this favour? I should not, perhaps, have to make the sacrifice long, as it wanted now barely three months to his departure.

St. John was not a man to be lightly refused, you felt that every impression made on him, either for pain or pleasure, was deep-graved and permanent. I consented. When Diana and Mary returned, the former found her scholar transferred from her to her brother, she laughed, and both she and Mary agreed that St. John should never have persuaded them to such a step. He answered quietly, “I know it.”

I found him a very patient, very forbearing, and yet an exacting master, he expected me to do a great deal and when I fulfilled his expectations, he, in his own way, fully testified his approbation. By degrees, he acquired a certain influence over me that took away my liberty of mind, his praise and notice were more restraining than his indifference. I could no longer talk or laugh freely when he was by, because a tiresomely importunate instinct reminded me that vivacity—at least in me—was distasteful to him. I was so fully aware that only serious moods and occupations were acceptable, that in his presence every effort to sustain or follow any other became vain, I fell under a freezing spell. When he said “go,” I went, “come,” I came, “do this,” I did it. But I did not love my servitude as I had when I served Mr Rochester, I wished, many a time, my cousin had continued to neglect me.