‘who perched you up in the window to give false intelligence?’ and she cast on me an angry glance, as if I were in fault.
Some parleying was audible in the hall, and soon the newcomer entered. He bowed to Lady Ingram, as deeming her the eldest lady present.
‘It appears I come at an inopportune time, madam,’ said he, ‘when my friend, Mr Rochester, is from home; but I arrive from a very long journey, and I think I may presume so far on old and intimate acquaintance as to instal myself here till he returns.’
His manner was polite; his accent, in speaking, struck me as being somewhat unusual – not precisely foreign, but still not altogether English: his age might be about Mr Rochester’s – between thirty and forty; his complexion was singularly sallow: otherwise he was a fine-looking man, at first sight especially. On closer examination, you detected something in his face that displeased; or rather, that failed to please. His features were regular, but too relaxed: his eye was large and well cut, but the life looking out of it was a tame, vacant life – at least so I thought.
The sound of the dressing-bell dispersed the party. It was not till after dinner that I saw him again: he then seemed quite at his ease. But I liked his physiognomy even less than before: it struck me as being at the same time unsettled and inanimate. His eye wandered, and had no meaning in its wandering: this gave him an odd look, such as I never remembered to have seen. For a handsome and not an unamiable-looking man, he repelled me exceedingly: there was no power in that smooth-skinned face of a full oval shape; no firmness in that aquiline nose and small cherry mouth; there was no thought on the low, even forehead; no command in that blank, brown eye.8
As I sat in my usual nook, and looked at him with the light of the girandoles9 on the mantelpiece beaming full over him – for he occupied an arm-chair drawn close to the fire, and kept shrinking still nearer, as if he were cold – I compared him with Mr Rochester. I think (with deference be it spoken) the contrast could not be much greater between a sleek gander and a fierce falcon: between a meek sheep and the rough-coated, keen-eyed dog, its guardian.
He had spoken of Mr Rochester as an old friend. A curious friendship theirs must have been: a pointed illustration, indeed, of the old adage that ‘extremes meet.’
Two or three of the gentlemen sat near him, and I caught at times scraps of their conversation across the room. At first I could not make much sense of what I heard; for the discourse of Louisa Eshton and Mary Ingram, who sat nearer to me, confused the fragmentary sentences that reached me at intervals. These last were discussing the stranger; they both called him ‘a beautiful man.’ Louisa said he was ‘a love of a creature,’ and she ‘adored him;’ and Mary instanced his ‘pretty little mouth, and nice nose,’ as her ideal of the charming.
‘And what a sweet-tempered forehead he has!’ cried Louisa, ‘so smooth – none of those frowning irregularities I dislike so much; and such a placid eye and smile!’
And then, to my great relief, Mr Henry Lynn summoned them to the other side of the room, to settle some point about the deferred excursion to Hay Common.
I was now able to concentrate my attention on the group by the fire, and I presently gathered that the new-comer was called Mr Mason; then I learned that he was but just arrived in England, and that he came from some hot country: which was the reason, doubtless, his face was so sallow, and that he sat so near the hearth, and wore a surtout in the house. Presently the words Jamaica, Kingston, Spanish Town, indicated the West Indies as his residence; and it was with no little surprise I gathered, ere long, that he had there first seen and become acquainted with Mr Rochester. He spoke of his friend’s dislike of the burning heats, the hurricanes, and rainy seasons of that region. I knew Mr Rochester had been a traveller: Mrs Fairfax had said so; but I thought the continent of Europe had bounded his wanderings; till now I had never heard a hint given of visits to more distant shores.
I was pondering these things, when an incident, and a somewhat unexpected