‘She is Mr. Rochester’s ward; he commissioned me to find a governess for her. He intended to have her brought up in – shire, I believe. Here she comes, with her “bonne,” as she calls her nurse.’ The enigma then was explained; this affable and kind little widow was no great dame; but a dependant like myself. I did not like her the worse for that; on the contrary, I felt better pleased than ever. The equality between her and me was real; not the mere result of condescension on her part; so much the better – my position was all the freer.

As I was meditating on this discovery, a little girl, followed by her attendant, came running up the lawn. I looked at my pupil, who did not at first appear to notice me; she was quite a child, perhaps seven or eight years old, slightly built, with a pale, small-featured face, and a redundancy of hair falling in curls to her waist.

‘Good morning, Miss Adèle,’ said Mrs. Fairfax. ‘Come and speak to the lady who is to teach you, and to make you a clever woman some day.’ She approached.

‘C’est là ma gouvernante?’^[23] said she, pointing to me, and addressing her nurse; who answered:

‘Mais oui, certainement.’^[24]

‘Are they foreigners?’ I inquired, amazed at hearing the French language.

‘The nurse is a foreigner, and Adèle was born on the Continent; and, I believe, never left it till within six months ago. When she first came here she could speak no English; now she can make shift to talk it a little; I don’t understand her, she mixes it so with French; but you will make out her meaning very well, I dare say.’

Fortunately I had had the advantage of being taught French by a French lady; and as I had always made a point of conversing with Madame Pierrot as often as I could, and had besides, during the last seven years, learnt a portion of French by heart daily – applying myself to take pains with my accent, and imitating as closely as possible the pronunciation of my teacher, I had acquired a certain degree of readiness and correctness in the language, and was not likely to be much at a loss with Mademoiselle Adèle. She came and shook hands with me when she heard that I was her governess; and as I led her in to breakfast, I addressed some phrases to her in her own tongue; she replied briefly at first, but after we were seated at the table, and she had examined me some ten minutes with her large hazel eyes, she suddenly commenced chattering fluently.

‘Ah!’ cried she, in French, ‘you speak my language as well as Mr. Rochester does; I can talk to you as I can to him, and so can Sophie. She will be glad; nobody here understands her; Madame Fairfax is all English. Sophie is my nurse; she came with me over the sea in a great ship with a chimney that smoked – how it did smoke! – and I was sick, and so was Sophie, and so was Mr. Rochester. Mr. Rochester lay down on a sofa in a pretty room called the salon, and Sophie and I had little beds in another place. I nearly fell out of mine; it was like a shelf. And Mademoiselle – what is your name?’

‘Eyre – Jane Eyre.’

‘Aire? Bah! I cannot say it. Well, our ship stopped in the morning, before it was quite daylight, at a great city – a huge city, with very dark houses and all smoky; not at all like the pretty clean town I came from; and Mr. Rochester carried me in his arms over a plank to the land, and Sophie came after, and we all got into a coach, which took us to a beautiful large house, larger than this and finer, called an hotel. We stayed there nearly a week. I and Sophie used to walk every day in a great green place full of trees, called the Park; and there were many children there besides me, and a pond with beautiful birds in it, that I fed with crumbs.’

‘Can you understand her when she runs on so fast?’ asked Mrs. Fairfax.

I understood her very well, for I had been accustomed to the fluent tongue of Madame Pierrot.

‘I wish,’ continued the good lady, ‘you would ask her a question or two about her parents; I wonder if she remembers them?’

‘Adèle,’ I inquired, ‘with whom did you live when you were in that pretty clean town you spoke of?’

‘I lived long ago with mama; but she is gone to the Holy Virgin. Mama used to teach me to dance and sing, and to say verses. A great many gentlemen and ladies came to see mama, and I used to dance before them, or to sit on their knees and sing to them; I liked it. Shall I let you hear me sing now?’

She had finished her breakfast, so I permitted her to give a specimen of her accomplishments. Descending from her chair, she came and placed herself on my knee; then, folding her little hands demurely before her, shaking back her curls and lifting her eyes to the ceiling, she commenced singing a song from some opera. It was the strain of a forsaken lady, who, after bewailing the perfidy of her lover, calls pride to her aid; desires her attendant to deck her in her brightest jewels and richest robes, and resolves to meet the false one that night at a ball, and prove to him, by the gaiety of her demeanour, how little his desertion has affected her.

The subject seemed strangely chosen for an infant singer; but I suppose the point of the exhibition lay in hearing the notes of love and jealousy warbled with the lisp of childhood; and in very bad taste that point was; at least I thought so.

Adèle sang the canzonette^[25] tunefully enough, and with the naïveté of her age. This achieved, she jumped from my knee and said, ‘Now, Mademoiselle, I will repeat you some poetry.’

Assuming an attitude, she began, ‘La Ligue des Rats, fable de La Fontaine.’^[26] She then declaimed the little piece with an attention to punctuation and emphasis, a flexibility of voice and an appropriateness of gesture, very unusual indeed at her age, and which proved she had been carefully trained.

‘Was it your mama who taught you that piece?’ I asked.

‘Yes, and she just used to say it in this way: “Qu’avez vous donc? Lui dit un de ces rats; parlez!”^[27] She made me lift my hand – so – to remind me to raise my voice at the question. Now shall I dance for you?’

‘No, that will do; but after your mama went to the Holy Virgin, as you say, with whom did you live then?’

‘With Madame Frederic and her husband; she took care of me, but she is nothing related to me. I think she is poor, for she had not so fine a house as mama. I was not long there. Mr. Rochester asked me if I would like to go and live with him in England, and I said yes; for I knew Mr. Rochester before I knew Madame Frederic, and he was always kind to me and gave me pretty dresses and toys; but you see he has not kept his word, for he has brought me to England, and now he is gone back again himself, and I never see him.’

After breakfast, Adèle and I withdrew to the library, which room, it appears, Mr. Rochester had directed should be used as the schoolroom. Most of the books were locked up behind glass doors; but there was one bookcase left open containing everything that could be needed in the way of elementary works, and several volumes of light literature, poetry, biography, travels, a few romances, &c. I suppose he had considered that these were all the governess would require for her private perusal; and, indeed, they contented me amply for the present; compared with the scanty pickings I had now and then been able to glean at Lowood, they seemed to offer an abundant harvest of entertainment and information. In this room, too, there was a cabinet piano, quite new and of superior tone; also an easel for painting and a pair of globes.

I found my pupil sufficiently docile, though disinclined to apply; she had not been used to regular occupation of any kind. I felt it would be injudicious to confine her too much at first; so, when I had talked to her a great deal, and got her to learn a little, and when the morning had advanced to noon, I allowed her to return to her nurse. I then proposed to occupy myself till dinner-time in drawing some little sketches for her use.

As I was going upstairs to fetch my portfolio and pencils, Mrs. Fairfax called to me; ‘Your morning school-hours are over now, I suppose,’ said she. She was in a room the folding-doors of which stood open. I went in when she addressed me. It was a large, stately apartment, with purple chairs and curtains, a Turkey carpet, walnut-panelled walls, one vast window rich in slanted glass, and a lofty ceiling, nobly moulded. Mrs. Fairfax was dusting some vases of fine purple spar, which stood on a sideboard.

‘What a beautiful room!’ I exclaimed, as I looked round; for I had never before seen any half so imposing.

‘Yes; this is the dining-room. I have just opened the window, to let in a little air and sunshine; for everything gets so damp in apartments that are seldom inhabited; the drawing-room yonder^[28] feels like a vault.’

She pointed to a wide arch corresponding to the window, and hung like it with a Tyrian-dyed^[29] curtain, now looped up. Mounting to it by two broad steps, and looking through, I thought I caught a glimpse of a fairy place, so bright to my novice-eyes appeared the view beyond. Yet it was merely a very pretty drawing-room, and within it a boudoir, both spread with white carpets, on which seemed laid brilliant garlands of flowers; both ceiled with snowy mouldings of white grapes and vine-leaves, beneath which glowed in rich contrast crimson couches and ottomans; while the ornaments on the pale Parian^[30] mantelpiece were of sparkling Bohemian glass, ruby red; and between the windows large mirrors repeated the general blending of snow and fire.

‘In what order you keep these rooms, Mrs. Fairfax!’ said I. ‘No dust, no canvas coverings; except that the air feels chilly, one would think they were inhabited daily.’

‘Why, Miss Eyre, though Mr. Rochester’s visits here are rare, they are always sudden and unexpected; and as I observed that it put him out to find everything swathed up, and to have a bustle of arrangement on his arrival, I thought it best to keep the rooms in readiness.’

‘Is Mr. Rochester an exacting, fastidious sort of man?’

‘Not particularly so; but he has a gentleman’s tastes and habits, and he expects to have things managed in conformity to them.’

‘Do you like him? Is he generally liked?’

‘Oh, yes; the family have always been respected here. Almost all the land in this neighbourhood, as far as you can see, has belonged to the Rochesters time out of mind.’

‘Well, but, leaving his land out of the question, do you like him? Is he liked for himself?’

‘I have no cause to do otherwise than like him; and I believe he is considered a just and liberal landlord by his tenants; but he has never lived much amongst them.’

‘But has he no peculiarities? What, in short, is his character?’

‘Oh! his character is unimpeachable, I suppose. He is rather peculiar, perhaps; he has travelled a great deal, and seen a great deal of the world, I should think. I dare say he is clever, but I never had much conversation with him.’

‘In what way is he peculiar?’

‘I don’t know – it is not easy to describe – nothing striking, but you feel it when he speaks to you; you cannot be always sure whether he is in jest or earnest, whether he is pleased or the contrary; you don’t thoroughly understand him, in short – at least, I don’t; but it is of no consequence, he is a very good master.’

This was all the account I got from Mrs. Fairfax of her employer and mine. There are people who seem to have no notion of sketching a character, or observing and describing salient points, either in persons or things; the good lady evidently belonged to this class; my queries puzzled, but did not draw her out. Mr. Rochester was Mr. Rochester in her eyes; a gentleman, a landed proprietor – nothing more. She inquired and searched no further, and evidently wondered at my wish to gain a more definite notion of his identity.

When we left the dining-room, she proposed to show me over the rest of the house; and I followed her upstairs and downstairs, admiring as I went; for all was well arranged and handsome. The 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 bedsteads 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;^[31] 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,”’^[32] 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 scene was extraordinary, but all was pleasing. When I turned from it and repassed the trap-door, I could scarcely see my way down the ladder; the attic seemed black as a vault compared with that arch of blue air to which I had been looking up, and to that sunlit scene of grove, pasture, and green hill, of which the hall was the centre, and over which I had been gazing with delight.

Mrs. Fairfax stayed behind a moment to fasten the trap-door; I, by drift of groping, found the outlet from the attic, and proceeded to descend the narrow garret staircase. I lingered in the long passage to which this led, separating the front and back rooms of the third storey; narrow, low, and dim, with only one little window at the far end, and looking, with its two rows of small black doors all shut, like a corridor in some Bluebeard’s castle.

While I paced softly on, the last sound I expected to hear in so still a region, a laugh, struck my ear. It was a curious laugh; distinct, formal, mirthless. I stopped; the sound ceased, only for an instant; it began again, louder; for at first, though distinct, it was very low. It passed off in a clamorous peal that seemed to wake an echo in every lonely chamber; though it originated but in one, and I could have pointed out the door whence the accents issued.

‘Mrs. Fairfax!’ I called out; for I now heard her descending the great stairs. ‘Did you hear that loud laugh? Who is it?’

‘Some of the servants, very likely,’ she answered; ‘perhaps Grace Poole.’

‘Did you hear it?’ I again inquired.

‘Yes, plainly. I often hear her; she sews in one of these rooms. Sometimes Leah is with her; they are frequently noisy together.’

The laugh was repeated in its low, syllabic tone, and terminated in an odd murmur.

‘Grace!’ exclaimed Mrs. Fairfax.

I really did not expect any Grace to answer; for the laugh was as tragic, as preternatural a laugh as any I ever heard; and, but that it was high noon, and that no circumstance of ghostliness accompanied the curious cachinnation; but that neither scene nor season favoured fear, I should have been superstitiously afraid. However, the event showed me I was a fool for entertaining a sense even of surprise.

The door nearest me opened, and a servant came out, – a woman of between thirty and forty; a set, square-made figure, red-haired, and with a hard, plain face; any apparition less romantic or less ghostly could scarcely be conceived.

‘Too much noise, Grace,’ said Mrs. Fairfax. ‘Remember directions!’ Grace curtseyed silently and went in.

‘She is a person we have to sew and assist Leah in her housemaid’s work,’ continued the widow; ‘not altogether unobjectionable in some points, but she does well enough. By-the-bye, how have you got on with your new pupil this morning?’

The conversation, thus turned on Adèle, continued till we reached the light and cheerful region below. Adèle came running to meet us in the hall, exclaiming:

‘Mesdames, vous êtes servies!’ adding, ‘J’ai bien faim, moi!’^[33]

We found dinner ready, and waiting for us in Mrs. Fairfax’s room.