“You may tell her I will not leave until she comes.”
He hurried away, and as he went, I adjusted my disguise, and gripped tightly the arms of my chair. Now came the true test.
Miss Ingram had come in imperious and defiant; the three girls had come shy and a little afraid; but my Jane came in curious and, as ever, composed. I pretended to read as she entered and ignored her at first, to see how she would act in private with a person by all accounts her social inferior. I was pleased, but not surprised, to see her wait as calmly and respectfully as she did for me in my normal guise. “Well, and you want your fortune told?” I asked her.
“I don’t care about it, Mother,” she said; “you may please yourself: but I ought to warn you, I have no faith.”
I suppressed a smile. This was my Jane, all right.
“Why don’t you tremble?” I asked.
“I’m not cold,” she responded.
“Why don’t you turn pale?”
“I am not sick.”
“Why don’t you consult my art?”
“I’m not silly.”
I chuckled, for I had guessed well her responses. I pulled out a pipe and lit it slowly, and gazed for a time into the fire, letting her observe me all the while. Then I said, “Youarecold; you are sick; and you are silly.”
“Prove it.”
“You are cold, because you are alone: no contact strikes the fire from you that is in you. You are sick; because the best of feelings, the highest and the sweetest given to man, keeps far away from you. You are silly, because, suffer as you may, you will not beckon it to approach; nor will you stir one step to meet it where it waits you.” There, I had laid it out.
She did not take the bait. “You might say all that to almost anyone,” she replied.
“But would it be true of almost anyone? Find me another precisely placed as you are.”
“It would be easy to find you thousands,” she responded.
“You could scarcely find meone. If you knew it, you are peculiarly situated: very near happiness; yes; within reach of it.” What did I have to do to make her rise to my provocations? I promised her bliss in exchange for one movement. But she still would not act.
“I don’t understand enigmas,” she responded. “I never could guess a riddle in my life.” My sturdy Jane was not going to bend, was not going to give an inch, even to a poor old Gypsy.
“If you wish me to speak more plainly,” I challenged, “show me your palm.”
She handed me a shilling, which I stowed away as carefully as if it were worth a guinea, and I bent over the fine lines in her flesh, wishing that I were a real fortune-teller, who would know her heart line, and what it said of her. Cautiously I raised my eyes to her. “Destiny is not written there. It is in the face: on the forehead, about the eyes, in the eyes themselves.” Those eyes: how often had I wished to plumb their depths. “And in the lines of the mouth. Kneel, and lift up your head.” I came within half a yard of her, and stirred the fire, whose glare lit Jane’s face more fully, and more deeply cloaked my own.
I saw her watching me, and I waited for a while before saying, “I wonder with what feelings you came to me tonight. I wonder what thoughts are busy in your heart during all the hours you sit in yonder room with the fine people flitting before you like shapes in a magic lantern.”
She gave a little shrug, confessing nothing.
What was she made of, this Jane? “Then you have some secret hope,” I asked, “to buoy you up and please you with whispers of the future?”
“Not I. The utmost I hope is, to save money enough out of my earnings to set up a school someday in a little house rented by myself.”
Alone. But independent. Was that truly all she hoped for? Solitary independence, devoid of love and family? Did she really not crave my love as I craved hers? “A mean nutriment for the spirit to exist on,” I countered, “and sitting in that window seat (you see I know your habits)—”
“You have learned them from the servants,” she interrupted.
“Ah, you think yourself sharp,” I said. Could nothing stir a reaction? Then I had an idea: “Well—perhaps I have: to speak truth, I have an acquaintance with one of them—Mrs. Poole.” I watched her face closely, and she seemed indeed startled—more so, it proved to me that all her suspicionsstilllay on Grace’s shoulders, that she had learned nothing further of Bertha in my absence. I offered a few good words in poor Grace’s favor, she who had been serving me so well, but Jane was again unmoved.
We continued on like that, I trying to draw her out on the subject of courtship and marriage, she frustrating me at every turn, for she would not admit—even in relative secrecy—that she held any personal interest in her master’s attention to Miss Ingram. The harder I pushed, the more clever and evasive she became.
In the end, I broke before she did. Able to bear it no more, I made as close to a profession of love as I dared, lavishing praise on those qualities in her face and form I was growing to love so well—it was all I could do not to grasp her and pull her close. As her eyes studied mine, I felt myself falling into a kind of dream. If I could have kept that moment forever, I would have.
