A Breath of Eyre (11 page)

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Authors: Eve Marie Mont

BOOK: A Breath of Eyre
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C
HAPTER
12
T
he party lingered on for days, and rumors of an impending engagement put an end to all my foolish hopes. “Do you really think Miss Ingram is the right match for the master?” I asked Mrs. Fairfax one morning at breakfast.
“But of course! In what way could she be lacking? She would be the very thing to make our Mr. Rochester happy.”
I chewed my lower lip absently and went to pour myself some tea.
The very thing to make him happy?
If anything, Miss Ingram would make Mr. Rochester more miserable than he already was. Underneath her delicate façade lurked a shark, a creature swimming coldly in pursuit of wealth and social prestige.
It was later that day that Rochester took a rare break from his duties as host and went out riding alone. I took the opportunity to study Miss Ingram in his absence. Not once did I hear a kind or selfless word from her. When Adèle hopped up on the window ledge to look out for Rochester’s return, Miss Ingram frowned and said, “You tiresome monkey! Who perched you up in the window to give false intelligence?” She cast on me an angry glance, so I removed Adèle and shuttled her away.
Rochester was still gone when a strange man arrived at the door that evening just before the dinner hour. Mrs. Fairfax greeted the man at the door and led him in to join the party. His manner was polite, and his accent struck me as somewhat unusual. Adèle and I went upstairs to prepare her for bed, and it wasn’t until after dinner that I saw the man again. He seemed quite at his ease among the party, but something disturbed me about him. Who was he, and why had he come here? What was his connection to Rochester?
By late evening, I had been waiting so long for Rochester’s return that my restlessness led me outside to meet his horse.
“Jane,” he said, looking pleased to see me as he dismounted his stallion. “How is the party? Come with me! Let me hear what they said about me in my absence.”
I wanted to mirror his jovial mood, but the stranger’s arrival was still bothering me. “Sir, are you aware that a stranger has arrived since you left this morning?”
“A stranger!” he said, putting an arm around me as he led me inside. “I expected no one. Did he give his name?”
“His name is Mason, and he comes from the West Indies. From Spanish Town, in Jamaica, I think.”
Mr. Rochester was standing near me. He had taken my hand, and as I spoke, he gave my wrist a convulsive grip. The smile on his lips froze. “Mason. The West Indies,” he repeated, his face growing pale as ash.
“Do you feel all right?” I said.
“Jane, I’ve had a blow.” He seemed to stagger.
Quickly, before anyone else could see his reaction, I led him into the library, where we sat down on the sofa. Holding my hand, he rubbed it and gazed at me with the most troubled expression. “My little friend,” he said. “I wish I were alone with you on a quiet island, where trouble and danger and hideous recollections were forever removed.” Flattered as I was, I worried for him. He was not himself. He turned and gazed at me earnestly. “Jane, if all these people came in and spat at me, what would you do?”
“Turn them out of the room if I could.”
He half smiled. “You would not leave me?”
“No, I’d stay.”
“To comfort me?”
“Yes, to comfort you.”
He seemed suddenly in better spirits. “Jane, if you would, go now into the dining room, step quietly up to Mason, and whisper in his ear that Mr. Rochester wishes to see him. Show him in here, and then leave us.”
I was angry and hurt that his authoritarian tone had returned. He was capable of switching from tenderness to gruffness at a moment’s notice. But I left to find Mason in the dining room. Miss Ingram glared at me as I bent over to speak to Mr. Mason, but his speedy departure from the room gave me an excuse to leave as well. I brought the stranger to the library and excused myself. Mr. Rochester did not even say good-bye.
I couldn’t sleep at all that night, replaying the events of the evening over in my mind. Who was Mason? And why had his presence filled Rochester with such dread? There were so many things I didn’t know about Rochester.
I don’t know how long I lay there like that, but the silence in my room was split by a sharp cry that ran from end to end of Thornfield Hall. It had come from the third story, I believed in the room just above my bedroom ceiling. My heart stopped as I heard a struggle and a voice shouting, “Help! Help!”
Though horror shook my limbs, I threw on some clothes and ran from my room into the hallway. The guests had all gathered there, terrified. They ran to and fro, crowding together. Just then the door to the third floor opened, and Mr. Rochester emerged into the hallway, a candle in hand. Miss Ingram ran to him and seized his arm.
“What has happened?” she said.
“All’s right!” he cried. He looked wild, his black eyes darting sparks. Calming himself, he said, “A servant has had a nightmare, that is all. Now then, I must see you all back into your rooms.” And so, with some coaxing and commanding, he managed to get them all back to their bedrooms. I didn’t wait to be ordered back to mine. I went to stand by the window, looking out at a dull moon, shivering from the cold.
Moments later, a cautious hand tapped at my door. “Are you up?” I heard. It was Mr. Rochester. I exited my room quietly and saw him standing in the hallway, holding a candle. “I need your help. Come this way and make no noise.”
I followed as quietly as a cat. He glided along the hallway, opened the door to the third floor without a sound, and climbed the stairs. At the top, we stopped in the dark, low corridor in front of a door.
“You don’t turn sick at the sight of blood?” he said.
“I don’t think so.”
He turned the key and opened the door, and I heard a snarling sound, almost like a rabid dog. Mr. Rochester went forward to the inner room. Laughter greeted his entrance, Grace Poole’s goblin laugh. After a moment, he came back out and closed the door behind him.
“Here, Jane!” he said, leading me to the other side of a large bed, which concealed in its curtains an injured man. Rochester held the candle over him, and I recognized him as the stranger, Mason. I saw, too, that his shirt on one side and one arm was soaked in blood.
Mr. Rochester fetched a basin of water from the washstand, dipped in a sponge, and moistened the man’s face. Mason groaned. “I shall have to leave you in this room with this gentleman for an hour,” Mr. Rochester said. “Or perhaps two. You will sponge the blood as I do. You will not speak to him on any pretext, nor you to her, Mr. Mason.” Again the poor man groaned. “Remember! No conversation,” he said, then left the room hurriedly.
No conversation? Questions flooded my brain. What crime had taken place in this mansion? What mystery that broke out first in fire and now in blood, at the deadliest hours of night? And what did this man, Mason, have to do with it all? Why had Rochester asked me not to speak to him, nor him to me?
Finally, regardless of the consequences, I said, “Sir? Mr. Mason, can you speak?” I gave him a sip of water. “Can you tell me what happened?”
“She bit me,” he said, though he seemed delusional. “She sucked my blood. She said she’d drain my heart.”
“Who? Grace Poole?” He was unable to continue, though he tried. “Calm yourself,” I said. “Try not to get upset. You’ve lost a lot of blood.”
I found his story difficult to believe. How could Grace Poole, a woman with the calm presence of mind to sit sewing while I questioned her about her whereabouts during the fire, have the audacity to bite a man’s chest? But I had to know if this was true. I knew I was risking everything I’d worked for so far at Thornfield—my position as governess and any affection I might have gained from Rochester—but I got up from the chair beside Mason and crept to the door. All seemed silent on the other side. I knocked lightly, expecting to hear a renewal of that growling from before. Footsteps padded quietly to the door, then stopped.
“Who’s there?” I heard. It was the voice of Grace Poole. She sounded calm and self-possessed.
“It’s Jane Eyre,” I said.
“Go away. If you know what’s good for you, go away from this house and never return.”
“Please,” I said, “you must tell me what’s going on. Please, open the door, Grace.”
Silence fell behind the door, then the footsteps retreated. Eventually, I resumed my post next to Mason, feeling spent and confused. The night lingered and lingered. Finally, Mr. Rochester returned with a surgeon in tow.
With Mason now in the surgeon’s care, Mr. Rochester dismissed me. I walked, trembling, back down the third-story stairwell with no thought of returning to my bedroom. It was half past five, and the sun was on the point of rising. I tiptoed down to the kitchen and let myself out the side door. In the courtyard I saw a carriage, horses already harnessed and stationed outside. Mr. Rochester and the surgeon appeared shortly thereafter, holding Mason. They assisted him into the carriage, and the doctor climbed in behind him.
“Take care of him,” Mr. Rochester said. “And keep him at your house till he is quite well. I shall ride over in a day or two to see how he gets on.”
Before the carriage left, Mason stuck his head out the opening and said with the little strength he had left, “Let her be taken care of. Let her be treated as tenderly as may be.” He seemed on the verge of crying.
“I do my best, and have done it, and will do it,” Rochester answered as the chaise drove away.
I was about to turn back when Rochester noticed me by the door and called my name. “Come, Jane, where there is some freshness for a few moments,” he said. “That house is a dungeon.”
He walked down a path into the garden, fruit trees lining one side and flower borders on the other. The sun was just rising, its light shining down on the path.
“You have passed a strange night, Jane, and it has made you look pale. Were you afraid when I left you alone with Mason?”
“I was afraid of Grace coming out of the inner room.”
“But I had fastened the door. I should have been a careless shepherd if I had left a lamb so near a wolf’s den, unguarded. You were safe.”
“Will Grace Poole still live here?”
“Oh, yes, don’t trouble your head about her.”
“It seems you’re hardly safe while she stays.”
“Never fear—I will take care of myself. Here, Jane, sit down.”
Mr. Rochester took a seat on a bench, leaving room for me. He sighed, exhausted. “Jane,” he began, “suppose you were no longer a girl, but a wild boy indulged from childhood on. Imagine yourself in a remote foreign land, and conceive that there you commit a capital error, one whose consequences must follow you through life and taint all your existence. You take measures to obtain relief, but still you are miserable. You wander here and there, seeking happiness in pleasure. You come home after years of voluntary banishment and make a new acquaintance. You find in this stranger much of the good and bright qualities which you have sought for twenty years. You feel better days come back, higher wishes, purer feelings. Is the sinful, but repentant man justified in daring the world’s opinion, in order to attach to him forever this gentle, gracious creature?”
I felt a curious squeezing in my heart as I contemplated whether the “gentle, gracious creature” he was talking about could be me. I observed him for some sign, but words seemed caught in his throat. Then he said, “You may have noticed my tender penchant for Miss Ingram. Do you think ... do you think if I married her, she would make me happy?”
The bindings squeezing around my heart now cinched tightly so I could barely breathe. Miss Ingram was the gentle, gracious creature? And he believed she could make him happy? I was so consumed with envy and heartache that I stood up and began walking back toward the house.
“Jane, Jane!” he said, and I glanced back hopefully. “There are my guests! They cannot see us together out here. Go in by the shrubbery.”
I turned and fled, trying not to cry. Wiping foolish tears off my cheeks, I made my way up the stairs to my room and found Grace Poole standing outside my door. She was holding something in her hand, inspecting it. When she saw me, she froze like she’d been caught stealing. Her fingers closed over the object, which only made me want to see it more.
“What is that?” I said. “Is it mine? Have you taken something from my room?”
“No, miss. I found it in the hallway. A mere trifle.”
“Show me,” I demanded, and by some miracle, my voice sounded authoritative, and she obeyed.
Her hand opened to reveal a small pendant in the shape of a dragonfly. Familiarity and emotion washed over me as I studied the markings, the patterns made by blue and green glass on silver. “That is mine,” I said.
“I found it—”
“I will take it now!” I said with a firmness that shocked me.
She handed over the dragonfly, and I quickly entered my room, bolting the door behind me. There was nothing in the room to comfort me; everything reminded me of the nights spent sleepless thinking of Rochester’s face, the mornings spent dressing for him, hoping he would notice me and pay me a kind word. I wanted to go far away from here, to a place where I wasn’t inconsequential, where my most prized possession was not called a trifle, where I meant something to someone.

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