“Turn round,” he said. “You have seen this view many a time in the daylight. You can see it now fading away into nothingness.”
They stood hand in hand, looking downwards. Mists rose from along the side of the river, and stood about in the valleys. The lights began to twinkle here and there. Afar off, like some nursery toy, they saw a train, with its line of white smoke, go stealing across the shadowy landscape.
Rochester’s face darkened with a sudden reminiscence.
“It was here,” he said, “that I first saw your friend the charlatan.”
“My friend?” she murmured.
“More yours than mine, at any rate,” he answered. “He sat with his back against that rock, and if ever hunger was written into a boy’s face, it was there in his pale cheeks, burning in his eyes.”
“He was very poor, then?” she asked.
“He was very poor,” Rochester answered, “but it was not hunger for food, it was hunger for life that one saw there. He had been down at the Convalescent Home, recovering from some illness, and the next day he was going back to his work—work which he hated, which made him part of a machine. You know how many millions there are who live and die like that—who must always live and die like that. They are part of the great system of the world, and nine-tenths of them are content.”
“You set him free,” she murmured.