The Master of Thornfield

From the first evening I sat with him in the drawing-room I knew I had met my master in a more honest sense. He sent for me after Adele had gone up to bed, on some pretext of a question he had not cared to ask in the daytime, and once I was in the room with the fire between us he did not so much question me as prod at me, as a man prods a bank to see what is loose. He was by turns sardonic and almost tender, then suddenly bitter, then courteous again, and all the while his eye kept measuring me as if I were a page in a cipher he could not quite make out. I, who had been used to silence and plain dealing, found myself answering him as I had answered no one since I left Lowood — not with my best phrases, for I had none, but with whatever came uppermost and was true. I refused to flatter him; he did not seem to expect it, and once when he asked me outright whether I found him pleasing to look upon I told him no, and he threw back his head and laughed, and the laugh pleased me more than any compliment I had ever been paid. Once, while I stood at the door waiting to be dismissed, a sound came down the corridor above — a low, muffled, demoniac laugh, the kind one hears in a dream and is ashamed to remember. I asked him what it was. He answered carelessly, naming a woman called Grace Poole, a seamstress of his, who sewed and laughed by turns, and his tone was so light that I accepted the answer, though I did not wholly believe it. From that night I went to my room more thoughtful, and sat longer over my candle before I put it out.

He began to send for me in the daytime too, asking me to the library and sitting near me while he read. At those times he would lay down the book and turn to me with questions out of all common order — whether men were ever made better by being thwarted, whether I had ever been jealous, whether a man might be pardoned for breaking his word. I answered as I could, sometimes bluntly, sometimes with a caution that surprised myself, and he listened with that arrested look of a man who has been told something he half knew and half dreaded. He spoke of Adele, and of her mother, an opera-dancer in Paris, with a plainness that was not boasting, and I understood that he was giving me a part of his life to hold, and I did not know what to do with it. He spoke of Blanche Ingram, of the party she was bringing to Thornfield, of the marriage he was shortly to make; he spoke as a man speaks when he is about to do a thing and would have someone tell him it is wise. I told him what I thought of it, and he looked at me for a long moment with a kind of dark, half-smiling intentness that made my heart knock under my stays.

It was in the orchard, under the rough-barked apple-trees, that I felt the change in him most clearly. He had walked out of the garden, where the ladies of the house were gathering, and met me half-way down the path. There he stood and talked for a long while, with the late wind in the branches and the leaves dropping about us, and he said things I could not answer — not because I had no answer, but because the answer was one I did not yet dare to give. He said I was not cold by nature, that I had a heart, that I was made for love. He said it almost as a man says a thing to a woman he is using to prove something to himself. When he left me I stood a long time among the fallen apples, looking after him, and I knew that the feeling I had fought against was no longer to be fought against; it had taken root, it was growing, and I was afraid of it as one is afraid of any power one cannot account for. I went indoors with a quiet face, and the laugh overhead that night seemed to laugh at me too.