第206页
《简·爱(英文版)》章节:第206页,宠文网网友提供全文无弹窗免费在线阅读。!
'Adele, look at that field.' We were now outside Thornfield
gates, and bowling lightly along the smooth road to Millcote, where
the dust was well laid by the thunderstorm, and where the low hedges
and lofty timber trees on each side glistened green and
rain-refreshed.
'In that field, Adele, I was walking late one evening about a
fortnight since- the evening of the day you helped me to make hay in
the orchard meadows; and as I was tired with raking swaths, I sat down
to rest me on a stile; and there I took out a little book and a
pencil, and began to write about a misfortune that befell me long ago,
and a wish I had for happy days to come: I was writing away very fast,
though daylight was fading from the leaf, when something came up the
path and stopped two yards off me. I looked at it. It was a little
thing with a veil of gossamer on its head. I beckoned it to come
near me; it stood soon at my knee. I never spoke to it, and it never
spoke to me, in words; but I read its eyes, and it read mine; and
our speechless colloquy was to this effect-
'It was a fairy, and come from Elf-land, it said; and its errand
was to make me happy: I must go with it out of the common world to a
lonely place- such as the moon, for instance- and it nodded its head
towards her horn, rising over Hayhill: it told me of the alabaster
cave and silver vale where we might live. I said I should like to
go; but reminded it, as you did me, that I had no wings to fly.
'"Oh," returned the fairy, "that does not signify! Here is a
talisman will remove all difficulties"; and she held out a pretty gold
ring. "Put it," she said, "on the fourth finger of my left hand, and I
am yours, and you are mine; and we shall leave earth, and make our own
heaven yonder." She nodded again at the moon. The ring, Adele, is in
my breeches-pocket, under the disguise of a sovereign: but I mean soon
to change it to a ring again.'
'But what has mademoiselle to do with it? I don't care for the
fairy: you said it was mademoiselle you would take to the moon?'
'Mademoiselle is a fairy,' he said, whispering mysteriously.
Whereupon I told her not to mind his badinage; and she, on her part,
evinced a fund of genuine French scepticism: denominating Mr.
Rochester 'un vrai menteur,' and assuring him that she made no account
whatever of his 'contes de fee,' and that 'du reste, il n'y avait
pas de fees, et quand meme il y en avait': she was sure they would
never appear to him, nor ever give him rings, or offer to live with
him in the moon.
The hour spent at Millcote was a somewhat harassing one to me.
Mr. Rochester obliged me to go to a certain silk warehouse: there I
was ordered to choose half a dozen dresses. I hated the business, I
begged leave to defer it: no- it should be gone through with now. By
dint of entreaties expressed in energetic whispers, I reduced the
half-dozen to two: these, however, he vowed he would select himself.