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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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338 powers sitting down to feast alone at a table spread with provisions for a hundred. Mr. Rivers rose now and put his cloak on. ‘If it were not such a very wild night,’ he said, ‘I would send Hannah down to keep you company: you look too desperately miserable to be left alone. But Hannah, poor woman! could not stride the drifts so well as I: her legs are not quite so long: so I must e’en leave you to your sorrows. Good-night.’ He was lifting the latch: a sudden thought occurred to me. ‘Stop one minute!’ I cried. ‘Well?’ ‘It puzzles me to know why Mr. Briggs wrote to you about me; or how he knew you, or could fancy that you, living in such an out-of-the-way place, had the power to aid in my discovery.’ ‘Oh! I am a clergyman,’ he said; ‘and the clergy are often appealed to about odd matters.’ Again the latch rattled. ‘No; that does not satisfy me!’ I exclaimed: and indeed there was something in the hasty and unexplanatory reply which, instead of allaying, piqued my curiosity more than ever. ‘It is a very strange piece of business,’ I added; ‘I must know more about it.’ ‘Another time.’ ‘No; to-night!- to-night!’ and as he turned from the door, I placed myself between it and him. He looked rather embarrassed. ‘You certainly shall not go till you have told me all,’ I said. ‘I would rather not just now.’ ‘You shall!- you must!’ ‘I would rather Diana or Mary informed you.’ Of course these objections wrought my eagerness to a climax: gratified it must be, and that without delay; and I told him so. ‘But I apprised you that I was a hard man,’ said he, ‘difficult to persuade.’ ‘And I am a hard woman,- impossible to put off.’ ‘And then,’ he pursued, ‘I am cold: no fervour infects me.’ ‘Whereas I am hot, and fire dissolves ice. The blaze there has thawed all the snow from your cloak; by the same token, it has streamed on to my floor, and made it like a trampled street. As you hope ever to be forgiven, Mr. Rivers, the high crime and misdemeanour of spoiling a sanded kitchen, tell me what I wish to know.’ ‘Well, then,’ he said, ‘I yield; if not to your earnestness, to your perseverance: as stone is worn by continual dropping. Besides, you must know some day,- as well now as later. Your name is Jane Eyre?’ ‘Of course: that was all settled before.’ ‘You are not, perhaps, aware that I am your namesake?- that I was christened St. John Eyre Rivers?’ ‘No, indeed! I remember now seeing the letter E. comprised in your initials written in books you have at different times lent me; but I never asked for what name it stood. But what then? Surely-’ I stopped: I could not trust myself to entertain, much |
