"No: Adele is not answerable for either her mother's faults or
yours: I have a regard for her; and now that I know she is, in a
sense, parentless--forsaken by her mother and disowned by you, sir--
I shall cling closer to her than before. How could I possibly
prefer the spoilt pet of a wealthy family, who would hate her
governess as a nuisance, to a lonely little orphan, who leans
towards her as a friend?"
"Oh, that is the light in which you view it! Well, I must go in
now; and you too: it darkens."
But I stayed out a few minutes longer with Adele and Pilot--ran a
race with her, and played a game of battledore and shuttlecock.
When we went in, and I had removed her bonnet and coat, I took her
on my knee; kept her there an hour, allowing her to prattle as she
liked: not rebuking even some little freedoms and trivialities into
which she was apt to stray when much noticed, and which betrayed in
her a superficiality of character, inherited probably from her
mother, hardly congenial to an English mind. Still she had her
merits; and I was disposed to appreciate all that was good in her to
the utmost. I sought in her countenance and features a likeness to
Mr. Rochester, but found none: no trait, no turn of expression
announced relationship. It was a pity: if she could but have been
proved to resemble him, he would have thought more of her.
It was not till after I had withdrawn to my own chamber for the
night, that I steadily reviewed the tale Mr. Rochester had told me.
As he had said, there was probably nothing at all extraordinary in
the substance of the narrative itself: a wealthy Englishman's
passion for a French dancer, and her treachery to him, were every-
day matters enough, no doubt, in society; but there was something
decidedly strange in the paroxysm of emotion which had suddenly
seized him when he was in the act of expressing the present
contentment of his mood, and his newly revived pleasure in the old
hall and its environs. I meditated wonderingly on this incident;
but gradually quitting it, as I found it for the present
inexplicable, I turned to the consideration of my master's manner to
myself. The confidence he had thought fit to repose in me seemed a
tribute to my discretion: I regarded and accepted it as such. His
deportment had now for some weeks been more uniform towards me than
at the first. I never seemed in his way; he did not take fits of
chilling hauteur: when he met me unexpectedly, the encounter seemed
welcome; he had always a word and sometimes a smile for me: when
summoned by formal invitation to his presence, I was honoured by a
cordiality of reception that made me feel I really possessed the
power to amuse him, and that these evening conferences were sought
as much for his pleasure as for my benefit.