teeth without flaw; the small dimpled chin; the ornament of rich, plenteous tresses – all advantages, in short, which, combined, realised the ideal of beauty, were fully hers. I wondered, as I looked at this fair creature: I admired her with my whole heart. Nature had surely formed her in a partial mood; and, forgetting her usual stinted step-mother dole of gifts, had endowed this, her darling, with a grand-dame’s bounty.
What did St John Rivers think of this earthly angel?4 I naturally asked myself that question as I saw him turn to her and look at her; and, as naturally, I sought the answer to the inquiry in his countenance. He had already withdrawn his eye from the Peri,5 and was looking at a humble tuft of daisies which grew by the wicket.
‘A lovely evening, but late for you to be out alone,’ he said, as he crushed the snowy heads of the closed flowers with his foot.
‘Oh, I only came home from S—’ (she mentioned the name of a large town some twenty miles distant) ‘this afternoon. Papa told me you had opened your school, and that the new mistress was come; and so I put on my bonnet after tea, and ran up the valley to see her: this is she?’ pointing to me.
‘It is,’ said St John.
‘Do you think you shall like Morton?’ she asked of me, with a direct and na?ve simplicity of tone and manner, pleasing, if child-like.
‘I hope I shall. I have many inducements to do so.’
‘Did you find your scholars as attentive as you expected?’
‘Quite.’
‘Do you like your house?’
‘Very much.’
‘Have I furnished it nicely?’
‘Very nicely, indeed.’
‘And made a good choice of an attendant for you in Alice Wood?’
‘You have indeed. She is teachable and handy.’ (This then, I thought, is Miss Oliver, the heiress; favoured, it seems, in the gifts of fortune, as well as in those of nature! What happy combination of the planets presided over her birth, I wonder?)
‘I shall come up and help you to teach sometimes,’ she added. ‘It will be a change for me to visit you now and then; and I like a change. Mr Rivers, I have been so gay during my stay at S—. Last night, or rather this morning, I was dancing till two o’clock. The —th regiment are stationed there since the riots; and the officers are the most agreeable men in the world: they put all our young knife-grinders and scissor-merchants6 to shame.’
It seemed to me that Mr St John’s under lip protruded, and his upper lip curled a moment. His mouth certainly looked a good deal compressed, and the lower part of his face unusually stern and square, as the laughing girl gave him this information. He lifted his gaze, too, from the daisies, and turned it on her. An unsmiling, a searching, a meaning gaze it was. She answered it with a second laugh; and laughter well became her youth, her roses, her dimples, her bright eyes.
As he stood, mute and grave, she again fell to caressing Carlo. ‘Poor Carlo loves me,’ said she. ‘He is not stern and distant to his friends; and if he could speak, he would not be silent.’
As she patted the dog’s head, bending with native grace before his young and austere master, I saw a glow rise to that master’s face. I saw his solemn eye melt with sudden fire, and flicker with resistless emotion. Flushed and kindled thus, he looked nearly as beautiful for a man as she for a woman. His chest heaved once, as if his large heart, weary of despotic constriction, had expanded, despite the will, and made a vigorous bound for the attainment of liberty. But he curbed it, I think, as a resolute rider would curb a rearing steed. He responded neither by word nor movement to the gentle advances made him.
‘Papa says you never come to see us now,’ continued Miss Oliver, looking up. ‘You are quite a stranger at Vale Hall. He is alone this evening, and not very well: will you return with me and visit him?’
‘It is not a seasonable hour to intrude on Mr Oliver,’ answered St John.
‘Not a seasonable hour! But I declare it is. It is just the hour when papa most wants company: when the works are closed, and he has no business to occupy him. Now, Mr Rivers, do come. Why are you so very shy, and so very sombre?’ She filled up the hiatus his silence left by