The manor-house of Ferndean was a building of siderable antiquity, moderate size, and no architectural pretensions, deep buried in a wood. I had heard of it before. Mr. Rochester often spoke of it, and sometimes went there. His father had purchased the estate for the sake of the game covers. He would have let the house, but could find , in sequence of its ineligible and insalubrious site. Ferhen remained uninhabited and unfurnished, with the exception of some two or three rooms fitted up for the aodation of the squire when he went there in the season to shoot.
To this house I came just ere dark on an evening marked by the characteristics of sad sky, cold gale, and tinued small peing rain. The last mile I performed on foot, having dismissed the chaise and driver with the double remuion I had promised. Even when within a very short distance of the manor- house, you could see nothing of it, so thid dark grew the timber of the gloomy wood about it. Iron gates between granite pillars showed me where to enter, and passing through them, I found myself at on the twilight of close-rarees. There was a grass-grown track desding the forest aisle between hoar and knotty shafts and under branched arches. I followed it, expeg soon to reach the dwelling; but it stretched on and on, it would far and farther: no sign of habitatirounds was visible.
I thought I had taken a wrong dire and lost my way. The darkness of natural as well as of sylvan dusk gathered over me. I looked round in search of another road. There was none: all was interwoven stem, nar trunk, dense summer foliage—no opening anywhere.
I proceeded: at last my ehe trees thinned a little; presently I beheld a railing, then the house—scarce, by this dim light, distinguishable from the trees; so dank and green were its deg walls. Entering a portal, fastened only by a latch, I stood amidst a space of enclosed ground, from which the wood swept away in a semicircle. There were no flowers, no garden-beds; only a broad gravel-walk girdling a grass-plat, and this set in the heavy frame of the forest. The house presewo pointed gables in its front; the windows were latticed and narrow: the front door was narrow too, oep led up to it. The whole looked, as the host of the Rochester Arms had said, 「quite a desolate spot.」 It was as still as a chur a week-day: the pattering rain on the forest leaves was the only sound audible in its viage.
「 there be life here?」 I asked.
Yes, life of some kind there was; for I heard a movement—that narrow front-door was unclosing, and some shape was about to issue from the grange.
It opened slowly: a figure came out into the twilight and stood oep; a man without a hat: he stretched forth his hand as if to feel whether it rained. Dusk as it was, I had reised him—it was my master, Edward Fairfax Rochester, and no other.
I stayed my step, almost my breath, and stood to watch him—to examine him, myself unseen, and alas! to him invisible. It was a suddeing, and one in which rapture was kept well in check by pain. I had no difficulty iraining my voice from exclamation, my step from hasty advance.
His form was of the same strong and stalwart tour as ever: his port was still erect, his heir was still raven blaor were his features altered or sunk: not in one year』s space, by any sorrow, could his athletic strength be quelled or his vigorous prime blighted. But in his tenance I saw a ge: that looked desperate and brooding—that remin