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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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192 horses stamped from time to time in their closed stables: all else was still. The gentlemen now appeared. Mason, supported by Mr. Rochester and the surgeon, seemed to walk with tolerable ease: they assisted him into the chaise; Carter followed. ‘Take care of him,’ said Mr. Rochester to the latter, ‘and keep him at your house till he is quite well: I shall ride over in a day or two to see how he gets on. Richard, how is it with you?’ ‘The fresh air revives me, Fairfax.’ ‘Leave the window open on his side, Carter; there is no wind- good-bye, Dick.’ ‘Fairfax-’ ‘Well, what is it?’ ‘Let her be taken care of; let her be treated as tenderly as may be: let her-‘ he stopped and burst into tears. ‘I do my best; and have done it, and will do it,’ was the answer: he shut up the chaise door, and the vehicle drove away. ‘Yet would to God there was an end of all this!’ added Mr. Rochester, as he closed and barred the heavy yard-gates. This done, he moved with slow step and abstracted air towards a door in the wall bordering the orchard. I, supposing he had done with me, prepared to return to the house; again, however, I heard him call ‘Jane!’ He had opened the portal and stood at it, waiting for me. ‘Come where there is some freshness, for a few moments,’ he said; ‘that house is a mere dungeon: don’t you feel it so?’ ‘It seems to me a splendid mansion, sir.’ ‘The glamour of inexperience is over your eyes,’ he answered; ‘and you see it through a charmed medium: you cannot discern that the gilding is slime and the silk draperies cobwebs; that the marble is sordid slate, and the polished woods mere refuse chips and scaly bark. Now here’ (he pointed to the leafy enclosure we had entered) ‘all is real, sweet, and pure.’ He strayed down a walk edged with box, with apple trees, pear trees, and cherry trees on one side, and a border on the other full of all sorts of old-fashioned flowers, stocks, sweet-williams, primroses, pansies, mingled with southernwood, sweet-briar, and various fragrant herbs. They were fresh now as a succession of April showers and gleams, followed by a lovely spring morning, could make them: the sun was just entering the dappled east, and his light illumined the wreathed and dewy orchard trees and shone down the quiet walks under them. ‘Jane, will you have a flower?’ He gathered a half-blown rose, the first on the bush, and offered it to me. ‘Thank you, sir.’ ‘Do you like this sunrise, Jane? That sky with its high and light clouds which are sure to melt away as the day waxes warm-this placid and balmy atmosphere?’ ‘I do, very |
