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


96

large front chambers I thought especially grand: and some of the
third-storey rooms, though dark and low, were interesting from
their air of antiquity. The furniture once appropriated to the lower
apartments had from time to time been removed here, as fashions
changed: and the imperfect light entering by their narrow casement
showed bed-steads of a hundred years old; chests in oak or walnut,
looking, with their strange carvings of palm branches and cherubs’
heads, like types of the Hebrew ark; rows of venerable chairs, high-
backed and narrow; stools still more antiquated, on whose
cushioned tops were yet apparent traces of half-effaced
embroideries, wrought by fingers that for two generations had
been coffin-dust. All these relics gave to the third storey of
Thornfield Hall the aspect of a home of the past: a shrine of
memory. I liked the hush, the gloom, the quaintness of these
retreats in the day; but I by no means coveted a night’s repose on
one of those wide and heavy beds: shut in, some of them, with
doors of oak; shaded, others, with wrought old English hangings
crusted with thick work, portraying effigies of strange flowers, and
stranger birds, and strangest human beings,- all which would have
looked strange, indeed, by the pallid gleam of moonlight.

‘Do the servants sleep in these rooms?’ I asked.
‘No; they occupy a range of smaller apartments to the back; no one
ever sleeps here: one would almost say that, if there were a ghost at
Thornfield Hall, this would be its haunt.’ ‘So I think: you have no
ghost, then?’

‘None that I ever heard of,’ returned Mrs. Fairfax, smiling.
‘Nor any traditions of one? no legends or ghost stories?’ ‘I believe
not. And yet it is said the Rochesters have been rather a violent
than a quiet race in their time: perhaps, though, that is the reason
they rest tranquilly in their graves now.’ ‘Yes-“after life’s fitful
fever they sleep well,”’ I muttered. ‘Where are you going now,
Mrs. Fairfax?’ for she was moving away.

‘On to the leads; will you come and see the view from thence?’ I
followed still, up a very narrow staircase to the attics, and thence
by a ladder and through a trap-door to the roof of the hall. I was
now on a level with the crow colony, and could see into their nests.
Leaning over the battlements and looking far down, I surveyed the
grounds laid out like a map: the bright and velvet lawn closely
girdling the grey base of the mansion; the field, wide as a park,
dotted with its ancient timber; the wood, dun and sere, divided by
a path visibly overgrown, greener with moss than the trees were
with foliage; the church at the gates, the road, the tranquil hills, all
reposing in the autumn day’s sun; the horizon bounded by a
propitious sky, azure, marbled with pearly white. No feature in the
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PinkMonkey.com Digital Library - PinkMonkey.com Digital Library-Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte



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