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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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231 the carriage to Millcote, and you must choose some dresses for yourself. I told you we shall be married in four weeks. The wedding is to take place quietly, in the church down below yonder; and then I shall waft you away at once to town. After a brief stay there, I shall bear my treasure to regions nearer the sun: to French vineyards and Italian plains; and she shall see whatever is famous in old story and in modern record: she shall taste, too, of the life of cities; and she shall learn to value herself by just comparison with others.’ ‘Shall I travel?- and with you, sir?’ ‘You shall sojourn at Paris, Rome, and Naples: at Florence, Venice, and Vienna: all the ground I have wandered over shall be re-trodden by you: wherever I stamped my hoof, your sylph’s foot shall step also. Ten years since, I flew through Europe half mad; with disgust, hate, and rage as my companions: now I shall revisit it healed and cleaned, with a very angel as my comforter.’ I laughed at him as he said this. ‘I am not an angel,’ I asserted; ‘and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself. Mr. Rochester, you must neither expect nor exact anything celestial of me-for you will not get it, any more than I shall get it of you: which I do not at all anticipate.’ ‘What do you anticipate of me?’ ‘For a little while you will perhaps be as you are now,- a very little while; and then you will turn cool; and then you will be capricious; and then you will be stern, and I shall have much ado to please you: but when you get well used to me, you will perhaps like me again,- like me, I say, not love me. I suppose your love will effervesce in six months, or less. I have observed in books written by men, that period assigned as the farthest to which a husband’s ardour extends. Yet, after all, as a friend and companion, I hope never to become quite distasteful to my dear master.’ ‘Distasteful! and like you again! I think I shall like you again, and yet again: and I will make you confess I do not only like, but love you-with truth, fervour, constancy.’ ‘Yet are you not capricious, sir?’ ‘To women who please me only by their faces, I am the very devil when I find out they have neither souls nor hearts- when they open to me a perspective of flatness, triviality, and perhaps imbecility, coarseness, and ill-temper: but to the clear eye and eloquent tongue, to the soul made of fire, and the character that bends but does not break-at once supple and stable, tractable and consistent-I am ever tender and true.’ ‘Had you ever experience of such a character, sir? Did you ever love such an one?’ ‘I love it now.’ ‘But before me: if I, indeed, in any respect come up to your difficult standard?’ ‘I never met your likeness. Jane, you please me, and you master me-you seem to submit, and I like the sense of pliancy you impart; and while I am twining the soft, silken skein round my finger, it sends a thrill up my arm to my heart. |
