Читать книгу Reader, She Married Me: A Short Story from the collection, Reader, I Married Him - Salley Vickers - Страница 7
ОглавлениеIT WAS SIMPLY JOY at first. So often it is joy “at first”, would you not say? It is the “at last” we should judge our human dealings by. Yet who but the Great Judge is able to do that? I do not speak here of God, for about Him I remain a cautious sceptic. No, it is that other exigent imponderable, Death, towards whose kingdom I, Edward Rochester, draw daily closer, whose judgment I am most disposed to trust now.
During those long months, when I searched vainly for Jane, I rehearsed all the blessed times we had spent together. Our first meeting that chilly winter afternoon, when, unaware of my identity, she aided me with the injury sustained from my fall and I teased her that she had bewitched my horse. The time she came in search of me, braving the wind and rain, and on finding me flew like a bird to my glad arms. The many times I found her sitting with that indefatigable knitter, good old Mrs Fairfax (who was always so doubtful over our intended union), a book in her hands and that little burr, Adele, my foster child, idly content at her knee; most speakingly, the recollection of her at the wicket gate, standing beside me in the plain square of blond she had fashioned herself for a bridal veil, when, caught by some impalpable intimation of the coming doom, I delayed our entry into the church. A myriad such images lived on in my memory. And, threaded through them all, the luminous aura of elfishness which had so enchanted me. From our first encounter she provoked in me thoughts of other worlds.
And there were few nights that passed unmolested by stricken consideration of what I might have done differently to avoid that terrible moment of revelation in the church. The shocking breach in the sacrament, the unlooked-for response to the solemn words, “I require and charge you both (as ye will answer at the dreadful day of judgment, when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed) that if either of you know any impediment why ye may not lawfully be joined together in matrimony, ye do now confess it …” I would give half my life to undo that moment now.
