Mr. Rochester(151)

We bantered back and forth, she laying out a rather woeful portrait of a capricious and cold marriage as a matter of course; I assured her my ardor would not cool in six months, as she claimed—indeed, I was sure it never would. “I think I shall like you again and yet again,” I said, “and I will make you confess that you do indeed know that I do not only like but love you,” I said, “with truth, fervor, and constancy.”

However, she was not finished with teasing me, and she went on, calling me sir at every opportunity until she nearly drove me mad, finishing with, “Well, then, sir; have the goodness to gratify my curiosity, which is much piqued on one point.”

Grace Poole, I thought. Good God, woman, just give me a few more weeks and we will be clear of Bertha forever. “What? What?” I asked. At least I had not yet sworn to answer every request, though I was surely eager to prove my love in any way I might. Still, the more I panicked and attempted to overrule her, the more delighted and sprightly she became.

But finally she came out with it, asking why I had taken such pains to make her think I wished to marry Miss Ingram. I was surprised that one so intelligent as Jane might need this explained. “I feigned courtship of Miss Ingram,” I told her, “because I wished to render you as madly in love with me as I was with you; and I knew jealousy would be the best ally I could call in for the furtherance of that end.” For I had thought that she surely would realize that she could never bear the thought of seeing me with another woman. But, she asked, was it fair to play with someone’s emotions like that? I responded that I had done it for the best of reasons: to bring her to me.

She chastised me for acting disgracefully, but I was surprised that it was not her emotions she defended but those of her rival, Miss Ingram, whom she imagined pining for the prize Jane was now enjoying.

I laughed at that. “Her feelings are concentrated in one—pride; and that needs humbling. Were you jealous, Jane?”

She would not concede the point, and went on to impugn my principles. I smiled to think of all the years of joyful battle ahead of us. Not even at Cambridge had I experienced so worthy and quick-witted an opponent.

When I asked her to make ready for a trip to Millcote, she made one last request, sending me off to put Mrs. Fairfax’s mind at rest as to my intentions, for it seemed she had seen Jane and me kissing in the hall the previous night.

I found that good woman in her sitting room, mending an apron. I could have summoned her to my office, but I wanted to approach her at her most comfortable. I hoped she would be happy for us, as perhaps my own mother might have been; I hoped Jane’s happiness, in particular, would win her over.

“Good morning,” I said, as if surprised to see her there.

She put her mending aside and rose. “Sir,” she said, her face betraying nothing.

“May I have a word?”

“Of course.”

I sat in the chair facing hers, and she seated herself again. “You knew my mother far better than anyone else I know,” I began.

She stiffened. “I did not know her well at all, sir.”

“Still, she was a lady in every meaning of the word, was she not?”

“Yes, sir, she was.”

“When she married my father—George Howell Rochester—were there whisperings that she had married beneath herself?” This was treacherous ground, I knew, but it seemed the best. “He had the Rochester name, but he had put himself in trade, which made him a kind of pariah, no? I cannot imagine what must have been said of him in those days.”

Mrs. Fairfax’s eyes lowered.

“Did you ever hear gossip of that sort?” I asked.

“It could have happened,” she allowed.

“She was your late husband’s second cousin, I understand.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And he never said anything? That she had married beneath herself?”

“Of course not. Your father was a gentleman, despite…”

I nodded. “Despite that he was in trade.”

She cleared her throat, and her eyes wandered away from mine. “I really don’t recall, sir.”

“I never knew my mother, as you are well aware. So I have only a child’s dream of what his mother might have been, but I assume that she was a fine woman. However”—I cleared my throat—“in all my life, and in the many, many places I have traveled, I have never met a woman as admirable as our Miss Eyre.”

If I had imagined that I would catch her unprepared, I was mistaken. “If I may say so, sir,” she said, “she is a child—only eighteen.”

“Many women of good family marry at eighteen.”