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for a hundred. Mr. Rivers rose now and put his cloak on.
'If it were not such a very wild night,' he said, 'I would send
Hannah down to keep you company: you look too desperately miserable to
be left alone. But Hannah, poor woman! could not stride the drifts
so well as I: her legs are not quite so long: so I must e'en leave you
to your sorrows. Good-night.'
He was lifting the latch: a sudden thought occurred to me.
'Stop one minute!' I cried.
'Well?'
'It puzzles me to know why Mr. Briggs wrote to you about me; or how
he knew you, or could fancy that you, living in such an out-of-the-way
place, had the power to aid in my discovery.'
'Oh! I am a clergyman,' he said; 'and the clergy are often appealed
to about odd matters.' Again the latch rattled.
'No; that does not satisfy me!' I exclaimed: and indeed there was
something in the hasty and unexplanatory reply which, instead of
allaying, piqued my curiosity more than ever.
'It is a very strange piece of business,' I added; 'I must know
more about it.'
'Another time.'
'No; to-night!- to-night!' and as he turned from the door, I placed
myself between it and him. He looked rather embarrassed.
'You certainly shall not go till you have told me all,' I said.
'I would rather not just now.'
'You shall!- you must!'
'I would rather Diana or Mary informed you.'
Of course these objections wrought my eagerness to a climax:
gratified it must be, and that without delay; and I told him so.
'But I apprised you that I was a hard man,' said he, 'difficult
to persuade.'
'And I am a hard woman,- impossible to put off.'
'And then,' he pursued, 'I am cold: no fervour infects me.'
'Whereas I am hot, and fire dissolves ice. The blaze there has
thawed all the snow from your cloak; by the same token, it has
streamed on to my floor, and made it like a trampled street. As you
hope ever to be forgiven, Mr. Rivers, the high crime and
misdemeanour of spoiling a sanded kitchen, tell me what I wish to
know.'
'Well, then,' he said, 'I yield; if not to your earnestness, to
your perseverance: as stone is worn by continual dropping. Besides,
you must know some day,- as well now as later. Your name is Jane
Eyre?'
'Of course: that was all settled before.'
'You are not, perhaps, aware that I am your namesake?- that I was
christened St. John Eyre Rivers?'
'No, indeed! I remember now seeing the letter E. comprised in
your initials written in books you have at different times lent me;
but I never asked for what name it stood. But what then? Surely-'
I stopped: I could not trust myself to entertain, much less to
express, the thought that rushed upon me- that embodied itself,- that,
in a second, stood out a strong, solid probability. Circumstances knit
themselves, fitted themselves, shot into order: the chain that had
been lying hitherto a formless lump of links was drawn out