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PinkMonkey.com Digital Library - PinkMonkey.com Digital Library-Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte


374

windows, long front-all from this sheltered station were at my
command.

The crows sailing overhead perhaps watched me while I took this
survey. I wonder what they thought. They must have considered I
was very careful and timid at first, and that gradually I grew very
bold and reckless. A peep, and then a long stare; and then a
departure from my niche and a straying out into the meadow; and
a sudden stop full in front of the great mansion, and a protracted,
hardy gaze towards it. ‘What affectation of diffidence was this at
first?’ they might have demanded; ‘what stupid regardlessness
now?’ Hear an illustration, reader.

A lover finds his mistress asleep on a mossy bank; he wishes to
catch a glimpse of her fair face without waking her. He steals softly
over the grass, careful to make no sound; he pauses-fancying she
has stirred: he withdraws; not for worlds would he be seen. All is
still: he again advances: he bends above her; a light veil rests on
her features: he lifts it, bends lower; now his eyes anticipate the
vision of beauty-warm, and blooming, and lovely, in rest. How
hurried was their first glance! But how they fix! How he starts!
How he suddenly and vehemently clasps in both arms the form he
dared not, a moment since, touch with his finger!

How he calls aloud a name, and drops his burden, and gazes on it
wildly! He thus grasps and cries, and gazes, because he no longer
fears to waken by any sound he can utter-by any movement he can
make. He thought his love slept sweetly: he finds she is stone dead.
I looked with timorous joy towards a stately house: I saw a
blackened ruin.

No need to cower behind a gate-post, indeed!- to peep up at
chamber lattices, fearing life was astir behind them! No need to
listen for doors opening-to fancy steps on the pavement or the
gravel-walk! The lawn, the grounds were trodden and waste: the
portal yawned void. The front was, as I had once seen it in a
dream, but a shell-like wall, very high and very fragile-looking,
perforated with paneless windows: no roof, no battlements, no
chimneys-all had crashed in.

And there was the silence of death about it: the solitude of a
lonesome wild.

No wonder that letters addressed to people here had never
received an answer: as well despatch epistles to a vault in a church
aisle. The grim blackness of the stones told by what fate the Hall
had fallen-by conflagration: but how kindled? What story
belonged to this disaster? What loss, besides mortar and marble
and woodwork had followed upon it? Had life been wrecked as
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PinkMonkey.com Digital Library - PinkMonkey.com Digital Library-Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte



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