Jane, come and look at this fellow.
The moth has alighted on the slender stalk of a plant at his very boot-toe. He speaks softly, his body motionless to avoid disturbing the aerial creature. How is it he can be so still, almost as if he were part of the orchard himself – a blade of grass, a leaf on the chestnut tree yonder? How can he be so calm, when she is all inner agitation, her heart trembling within her, strained nearly to breaking point?
Look at his wings.
She obeys. She would look at anything he revealed to her, and he is always showing her things, whether pointing out the bright tints of a sunrise, or a luminous cloud, or the flash of a swallow's wings as it takes flight. Always he is stopping to share with her the things that give him pleasure. And every sight, every glimpse he gives her is a memory to be treasured and stored away in that tiny gallery she keeps in a corner of her mind. Sometimes, as she lies in bed at night, she enters this gallery and takes inventory, as though she were a curator in a museum built from the fragments of dreams. Tonight she will add this quivering moth with its wings of woven silver – a wondrous, otherworldly thing. Yes, she will add this moth, and with it the memory of the scent of his cigar, stealing among the orchard foliage and creeping in with the evening.
There, he is flown!
The moth retreats from his boot-toe, away to find another resting place. Would that she could leave him as easily, with such nonchalance! Would that there could be another resting place for her, where his absence would not break her heart. She knows she must leave Thornfield. She knows she will be obliged to leave it soon. And every fleeting moment she spends near him is precious, though with every moment it seems more impossible that she will ever have the strength to part from him.
She ought not to be walking alone with him at this hour, in the purple dusk of evening. In a masterful marshalling of willpower, she turns from him, but again his voice arrests her. Turn back. On so lovely a night it is a shame to sit in the house. She is helpless at his words. To cling to propriety in the face of his softly-spoken, cordial invitation seems suddenly shallow and selfish. But with every new kindness from him, every gentle gesture, she loses another small piece of herself. Doesn't he know that his nearness is destroying her?
A surge of intense sorrow comes upon her, its acuteness almost overwhelming. She is seized with a premonition: the stillness of the evening, the paradisal quality of their surroundings, his wonderful, terrible kindness to her in these moments – what can they all amount to but a culmination, an ending? These, the sweetest moments she has yet spent with him, are to be the last. The time of departure has arrived – that is why he has sought her company, why he is even now compelling her to stay outside with him, to walk with him here in the gloaming. Soon the command will come. She steels herself to receive it with the same calm, the same untroubled quiet that surrounds him this night, but in every whisper of breeze, every rustle, every poignant note of birdsong, she hears a requiem. Her glorious, Elysian days at Thornfield, like the vanished moth, are already flown.