第169页
《简·爱(英文版)》章节:第169页,宠文网网友提供全文无弹窗免费在线阅读。!
saying cheerfully-
'Mason got the start of you all this morning; he was gone before
sunrise: I rose at four to see him off.'
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CHAPTER XXI
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PRESENTIMENTS are strange things! and so are sympathies; and so are
signs; and the three combined make one mystery to which humanity has
not yet found the key. I never laughed at presentiments in my life,
because I have had strange ones of my own. Sympathies, I believe,
exist (for instance, between far-distant, long-absent, wholly
estranged relatives asserting, notwithstanding their alienation, the
unity of the source to which each traces his origin) whose workings
baffle mortal comprehension. And signs, for aught we know, may be
but the sympathies of Nature with man.
When I was a little girl, only six years old, I one night heard
Bessie Leaven say to Martha Abbot that she had been dreaming about a
little child; and that to dream of children was a sure sign of
trouble, either to one's self or one's kin. The saying might have worn
out of my memory, had not a circumstance immediately followed which
served indelibly to fix it there. The next day Bessie was sent for
home to the deathbed of her little sister.
Of late I had often recalled this saying and this incident; for
during the past week scarcely a night had gone over my couch that
had not brought with it a dream of an infant, which I sometimes hushed
in my arms, sometimes dandled on my knee, sometimes watched playing
with daisies on a lawn, or again, dabbling its hands in running water.
It was a wailing child this night, and a laughing one the next: now it
nestled close to me, and now it ran from me; but whatever mood the
apparition evinced, whatever aspect it wore, it failed not for seven
successive nights to meet me the moment I entered the land of slumber.
I did not like this iteration of one idea- this strange
recurrence of one image, and I grew nervous as bedtime approached
and the hour of the vision drew near. It was from companionship with
this baby-phantom I had been roused on that moonlight night when I
heard the cry; and it was on the afternoon of the day following I
was summoned downstairs by a message that some one wanted me in Mrs.
Fairfax's room. On repairing thither, I found a man waiting for me,
having the appearance of a gentleman's servant: he was dressed in deep
mourning, and the hat he held in his hand was surrounded with a
crape band.
'I daresay you hardly remember me, Miss,' he said, rising as I
entered; 'but my name is Leaven: I lived coachman with Mrs. Reed
when you were at Gateshead, eight or nine years since, and I live
there still.'
'Oh, Robert! how do you do? I remember you very well: you used to
give me a ride sometimes on Miss Georgiana's bay pony. And how is