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 Table of Contents

From the Pages of Jane Eyre

Title Page
Copyright Page
Charlotte Brontë
The World of Charlotte Brontë and Jane Eyre
Introduction
Dedication
Preface to the Second Edition
Note to the Third Edition

Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV
Chapter XXV
Chapter XXVI
Chapter XXVII
Chapter XXVIII
Chapter XXIX
Chapter XXX
Chapter XXXI
Chapter XXXII
Chapter XXXIII
Chapter XXXIV
Chapter XXXV
Chapter XXXVI
Chapter XXXVII
Chapter XXXVIII - Conclusion

Endnotes
Inspired by Jane Eyre
Comments & Questions
For Further Reading

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 From the Pages of Jane Eyre

I could not answer the ceaseless inward question—why I thus suffered; now,
at the distance of—I will not say how many years, I see it clearly. (page 21)

Women are supposed to be very calm generally; but women feel just as men
feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as
much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute
a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their
more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine
themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the
piano and embroidering bags. (page 130)

“You never felt jealousy, did you, Miss Eyre? Of course not; I need not ask
you; because you never felt love. You have both sentiments yet to
experience; your soul sleeps; the shock is yet to be given which shall waken
it.” (page 170)

The ease of his manner freed me from painful restraint; the friendly
frankness, as correct as cordial, with which he treated me, drew me to him.
(page 175)

I had not intended to love him; the reader knows I had wrought hard to
extirpate from my soul the germs of love there detected; and now, at the
first renewed view of him, they spontaneously revived green and strong! He
made me love him without looking at me. (page 207)
Arrows that continually glanced off from Mr. Rochester’s breast, and fell
harmless at his feet, might, I knew, if shot by a surer hand, have quivered
keen in his proud heart—have called love into his stern eye, and softness
into his sardonic face; or, better still, without weapons, a silent conquest
might have been won.
(page 221)

“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an

independent will.” (page 297)

Gentle reader, may you never feel what I then felt! May your eyes never
shed such stormy, scalding, heart-wrung tears as poured from mine! May
you never appeal to Heaven in prayers so hopeless and so agonized as in
that hour left my lips; for never may you, like me, dread to be the
instrument of evil to what you wholly love! (page 374)

Reader, I married him. (page 520)

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 Published by Barnes & Noble Books
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New York, NY 10011

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Jane Eyre was first published in 1847 under the pseudonym Currer Bell.

Originally published in mass market format in 2003 by Barnes & Noble Classics
with new Introduction, Notes, Biography, Chronology, Inspired By,
Comments & Questions, and For Further Reading.
This trade paperback format published in 2005.

Introduction, Notes, and For Further Reading

Copyright © 2003 by Susan Ostrov Weisser.

Note on Charlotte Brontë, The World of Charlotte Brontë and Jane Eyre,
Inspired by Jane Eyre, and Comments & Questions
Copyright © 2003 by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and
retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Barnes & Noble Classics and the Barnes & Noble Classics
colophon are trademarks of Barnes & Noble, Inc.

Jane Eyre
ISBN-13: 978-1-59308-117-1 ISBN-10: 1-59308-117-0
eISBN : 978-1-411-43386-1
LC Control Number 2004111992
Produced and published in conjunction with:
Fine Creative Media, Inc.
322 Eighth Avenue
New York, NY 10001

Michael J. Fine, President and Publisher

Printed in the United States of America

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 Charlotte Brontë

Charlotte Brontë was born on April 21, 1816, in Thornton, Yorkshire, in the
north of England, the third child of the Reverend Patrick Brontë and Maria
Branwell Brontë. In 1820 the family moved to neighboring Haworth, where
Reverend Brontë was offered a lifetime curacy. The following year Mrs.
Brontë died of cancer, and her sister, Elizabeth Branwell, moved in to help
raise the six children. The four eldest sisters—Charlotte, Emily, Maria, and
Elizabeth—attended Cowan Bridge School, until Maria and Elizabeth
contracted what was probably tuberculosis and died within months of each
other, at which point Charlotte and Emily returned home. The four
remaining siblings—Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne—played on the
Yorkshire moors and dreamed up fanciful, fabled worlds, creating a
constant stream of tales, such as the “Young Men” plays (1826) and “Our
Fellows” (1827).
Reverend Brontë kept his children abreast of current events; among these
were the 1829 parliamentary debates centering on the Catholic Question, in
which the duke of Wellington was a leading voice. Charlotte’s awareness of
politics filtered into her fictional creations, as in the siblings’ saga The
Islanders (1827), about an imaginary world peopled with the Brontë
children’s real-life heroes, in which Wellington plays a central role as
Charlotte’s chosen character.
Throughout her childhood, Charlotte had access to the circulating library
at the nearby town of Keighley. She knew the Bible and read the works of
Shakespeare, George Gordon, Lord Byron, and Sir Walter Scott, and she
particularly admired William Wordsworth and Robert Southey. In 1831 and
1832, Charlotte attended Miss Wooler’s school at Roe Head, and she
returned there as a teacher from 1835 to 1838. After working for a couple of
years as a governess, Charlotte, with her sister Emily, traveled to Brussels
to study, with the goal of opening their own school, but this dream did not
materialize once she returned to Haworth in 1844.
In 1846 the sisters published their collected poems under the pen names
Currer (Charlotte), Ellis (Emily), and Acton (Anne) Bell. That same year
Charlotte finished her first novel, The Professor, but it was not accepted for
publication. However, she began work on Jane Eyre, which was published
in 1847 and met with instant success. Though some critics saw impropriety
in the core of the story—the relationship between a middle-aged man and
the young, naive governess who works for him—most reviewers praised the
novel, helping to ensure its popularity. One of Charlotte’s literary heroes,
William Makepeace Thackeray, wrote her a letter to express his complete
enjoyment of the novel and to praise her writing style, as did the influential
literary critic G. H. Lewes.
Following the deaths of Branwell and Emily Brontë in 1848 and Anne in
1849, Charlotte made trips to London, where she began to move in literary
circles that included such luminaries as Thackeray, whom she met for the
first time in 1849; his daughter described Brontë as “a tiny, delicate,
serious, little lady.” In 1850 Charlotte met the noted British writer Elizabeth
Gaskell, with whom she formed a lasting friendship and who, at the request
of Reverend Brontë, later became her biographer.
In 1854 Charlotte married Arthur Bell Nicholls, a curate at Haworth who
worked with her father. However, less than a year later Charlotte fell
seriously ill, perhaps with tuberculosis, and she died on March 31, 1855. At
the time of her death, Charlotte Brontë was a celebrated author. The 1857
publication of her first novel, The Professor, and of Gaskell’s biography of
her life only heightened her renown.

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 The World of Charlotte Brontë and Jane Eyre

1816 Charlotte Brontë is born on April 21 in Thornton, En gland, the

third of six children of the Reverend Patrick and Maria Branwell
Brontë.

1817- Charlotte’s younger siblings, Patrick Branwell, Emily, and Anne,

1820 are born.

1820 The Brontë family moves to Haworth, where Reverend Brontë

has been offered a lifetime curacy.

1821 Charlotte’s mother, Maria, dies, and her sister, Elizabeth

Branwell, moves into the Brontë household to help raise the six
young children.

1824 Charlotte and Emily, along with their older sisters, Maria and
Elizabeth, attend Cowan Bridge School.

1825 Maria and Elizabeth contract what is probably tuberculosis and

die. Charlotte and Emily are pulled out of school to return home
to Haworth.

1826 The four surviving siblings create the “Young Men” plays, the
first of their imaginative fictional writings, which are followed
in 1827 by “Our Fellows” and “The Islanders.”

1831- Charlotte attends Miss Wooler’s school at Roe Head.

1832

1835 Charlotte returns to Roe Head as a teacher. Emily attends as a

student, but stays only three months; Anne takes her place,
 studying there until 1837.

1837 Charlotte writes to Robert Southey, the British poet lau reate, to
ask his opinion of her poetry. His disheartening response implies
that while Charlotte displays what Words worth calls “faculty of
verse,” this is nothing extraordinary in a time of so many decent
poets. He goes on to declare that women have no business in
literature.

1838 Charlotte resigns from her teaching position at Roe Head.

1839 She works as a governess, first in Lothersdale and later in

1841 Rawdon.

1842 Charlotte and Emily travel to Brussels to study at Pension nat

Héger, where they read, among other things, works by French
and German Romantics. They stay less than a year, returning to
Haworth because their aunt Elizabeth Bran well has died.

1843- Charlotte spends a second year at the Pensionnat in Brus sels

1844 honing her French and German language skills. She develops a
strong emotional attachment to her married employer and former
teacher, Constantin Héger, a situa tion that may have informed
the Jane Eyre love story. Char lotte returns to Haworth in
January 1844.

1846 In February, Charlotte sends a manuscript, Poems by Currer,

Ellis, and Acton Bell (the pen names of Charlotte, Emily, and
Anne Brontë, respectively), to the London publisher Aylott and
Jones. The poems are published in May at the sisters’ expense;
only two copies are sold. In June Charlotte completes her first
novel, The Professor. By the end of the year she has begun work
on Jane Eyre.

1847 While Charlotte’s manuscript for The Professor is rejected by

various publishers, her sisters’ novels—Anne’s Agnes Grey and
 Emily’s Wuthen‘ng Heights-are accepted for pub lication by
Thomas Cautley Newby. Charlotte approaches another
publisher, Smith, Elder and Co., with Jane Eyre, which is
published in October to instant success, over shadowing the
publication in December of her sisters’ nov els and surpassing
them in acclaim. All three sisters are still publishing under their
“Bell” pen names.

1848 Amid growing rumors that there is only one “Bell” writer,
Charlotte and Anne travel to London to prove otherwise.
Charlotte’s publisher, George Smith, learns the truth of the
Brontës’ identities but is sworn to protect their secret. In
September, Branwell Brontë dies after a sustained bout with
depression, alcoholism, and drug use; in December, Emily dies
of tuberculosis.

1849 In May, Anne dies of tuberculosis. Charlotte’s novel Shirley is

published by Smith, Elder and Co. In November, Char

lotte travels again to London, this time as a well-known author.

She meets one of her literary idols, William Mak epeace
Thackeray.

1850 Charlotte returns to London. In August, she travels to Win

dermere, where she meets the writer Elizabeth Gaskell, with
whom she becomes close friends. In December, Char lotte writes
the prefaces and biographical notes for her sisters’ novels; she
reveals the true identities of the “Bells” and works to protect the
posthumous reputations of Emily and Anne, who have received
some criticism for their “coarse” and “nihilistic” writings.
Depressed by the loss of her siblings, Charlotte writes little
fiction this year but reads Jane Austen for the first time; she
disparages Aus ten’s novels as shrewd and observant, but
without senti ment.
1853 Charlotte’s novel Villette is published in January. In April, she
spends a week in Manchester with Elizabeth Gaskell; in
September, Gaskell visits her at Haworth.

1854 In June, Charlotte marries Arthur Bell Nicholls, whom she has
known since 1845, when he began work as a curate at Haworth.

1855 Charlotte is happily married for a few months, but early in the
year she becomes ill; she dies on March 31.

1857 Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë is published, as is

Charlotte’s first novel, The Professor, though the latter’s re lease
is partly obscured by the enormous interest Gaskell’s work
receives.

1928 In August, Haworth Parsonage opens to the public as the Brontë

Parsonage Museum.

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 Introduction

Matthew Arnold famously characterized Charlotte Brontë’s writing as full

of “rebellion and rage,” yet that description does not easily square with the
most famous line of her best-known novel, Jane Eyre: “Reader, I married
him.” Coming as it does at the conclusion of a tempestuous series of ordeals
in the romance of the governess Jane Eyre and her wealthy employer,
Rochester, it implies a conventional happy ending for a heroine, her
domestic reward for virtue. Between these two differing accounts of Jane
Eyre as subversive and conservative lies a complex and challenging novel
full of paradoxes, not least of which is that it appears regularly on lists of
classics, yet has had enduring mass appeal as a romance as well.
In Jane Eyre we have that unusual monument in the history of literature, a
novel considered from the first a work of high literary merit that is also an
immediate and enormous popular success. Indeed, it continues to be widely
read both in and out of the academic setting. While it is often “required”
reading in secondary schools and universities, it has also been adapted into
numerous films, television productions, theatrical plays, and at least one
Broadway musical.a The first of these productions took place in London
less than four months after the novel’s publication, much to the dismay of
its author, who feared, like most authors, that the play would misrepresent
her work. In fact, it is not surprising that most adaptations of Jane Eyre
have selectively emphasized the melodramatic Gothic and romantic
elements of the novel at the expense of less easily dramatized aspects, such
as its passages about religion or the condition of women. Yet these are just
as integral to its meaning as the melodrama for which it is remembered, if
not more so.
In some ways it is difficult to account for the continued stature and
popular appeal of a work that has been read as both feminist and
antifeminist, radical and conservative, highly original and highly derivative,
Romantic and Victorian. Certainly many readers, beginning with George
Eliot in the nineteenth century, have been disturbed by the way the plot
hinges on a moral dilemma involving antiquated divorce laws and
nineteenth-century notions of women’s sexual purity. Some critics, such as
Virginia Woolf, have seen the novel as too angry for its own literary good;
others, notably some modern feminist critics, as not explicitly angry
enough. Why does this novel about the moral trials of an impoverished and
orphaned governess continue to hold such fascination for a modern
audience? Is it the passionate romance, the Cinderella ending, the incipient
feminism of its views about the suppression of women?
Most readers who respond to the novel agree that the appeal of Jane Eyre
lies in its intensity of feeling, richness of language, and forceful
representation of passion in a decidedly dramatic plot. Even at its
publication in 1847, critics and the public recognized that, for better or
worse, Jane Eyre was something different : a novel about a woman written
with a man’s freedom, the freedom to portray the indecorum of a heroine
who has outbursts of anger as a child and uncontrollable passion as an
adult, who confesses her desire openly when she thinks it is hopeless and
refuses the passive and dependent role in romance. All these violated deeply
entrenched social codes of femininity and respectability, and shocked some
of Brontë’s early critics. Miss Eyre is “rather a brazen Miss,” cried one
contemporary reader (letter from John Gibson Lockhart, 1847); another
called the novel “dangerous,” filled with “outrages on decorum.” “[The
author] cannot appreciate the hold which a daily round of simple duties and
pure pleasures has on those who are content to practice and enjoy them,”
sniffed another reviewer (Anne Mozley, The Christian Remembrancer,
April 1853).
Fearing (with justification) that female authors would not be taken
seriously, the three Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, published
their first novels in 1847 under the male pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis, and
Acton Bell. A great deal of speculation followed in the press about the
identities of the pseudonymous authors, including controversy as to their
gender. The exciting revelation that eventually followed—that the writers
were not only females, but the humble, reserved, unfashionable, and
religious daughters of a clergyman living in a remote village on the moors
of Yorkshire—only stimulated more curiosity, this time about the nature of
the women who could produce such disturbing works about passion while
leading reclusive and virginal lives.
Many modern readers are aware that Charlotte Brontë was one of four
remarkable children, three of whom, including Emily Brontë and Anne
Brontë, became famous authors themselves, and the other of whom,
Branwell, the only brother, died at age thirty-one in miserable and ignoble
circumstances. One important aspect of Jane Eyre’s remarkable success has
surely been the literary mystery that has grown to the proportions of myth
about the entire Brontë family: How could the modest, unworldly authors of
Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall have
understood and depicted fervent, obsessive, sometimes violent love?
The Brontës were a highly unusual family, to be sure. The father, Patrick
Brontë (originally Brunty), was born and reared in Ireland by a poor and
probably illiterate peasant family. His mother, a Catholic by birth, had
become a Protestant upon marriage to his father. Young Patrick was clever
enough to be a schoolteacher at age sixteen and thereafter admitted to
Cambridge to study for the ministry—a most unusual accomplishment for
an impecunious Irish youth. By the time he was appointed to the pulpit of
Haworth, in Yorkshire, in 1820, he had risen in social class enough to be
considered a gentleman, albeit an impoverished one without wealthy
connections or a private income to supplement his meager wages. In 1812
Patrick had married Maria Branwell, from Cornwall, a religious young
woman of Methodist faith, and they had six children by 1820: Maria,
Elizabeth, Charlotte, Patrick Branwell (known as Branwell), Emily, and
Anne. When the baby, Anne, was less than two years old, Maria Branwell
Brontë died of cancer at age thirty-eight, after a prolonged and terrible
period of illness.
Though an aunt from Cornwall, the strict and deeply religious Elizabeth
Branwell, came to care for the children after their mother’s death, the four
eldest girls (Emily was only six years old) were sent to Cowan Bridge
School, while Branwell and Anne remained to be educated at home. Cowan
Bridge was an institution established for the education of poor clergymen’s
daughters by the Reverend William Carus-Wilson, the original model for
the character of the Reverend Brocklehurst in Jane Eyre. It is not difficult to
understand why Patrick Brontë sent his daughters there: He could afford
little else, and Cowan Bridge had such well-known patrons as William
Wilberforce and Charles Simeon, the evangelical preachers who had
influenced Patrick Brontë’s religious views. At the time it must have
seemed like a godsend to the widower with six children crowded in his
small home and with few resources to educate them.
But Cowan Bridge, which inspired the portrait of Lowood School in Jane
Eyre, was a place of harsh daily regimes, unhealthy conditions, and
unrelenting deprivation. Its educational mission was that the female pupils,
of genteel social class but with few prospects for the future, should be
taught stringent self-denial and unquestioning submission in their own best
interest. The evangelical Reverend Carus-Wilson believed the pupils should
be schooled in strict religious and moral principles in order to save their
souls, as we can see in the magazine he wrote for them, called The
Children’s Friend, in which he admonishes his charges, “The Lord will call
you to account, my dear children, at the awful day of judgment.... What
shame and confusion will seize upon you! You will in vain call upon the
rocks and mountains to fall upon you, and hide you ... and you will hear
these words sounded in your ears, ‘Depart (oh, that word depart) ye cursed
into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels.’ ”
All the children at Cowan Bridge suffered from insufficient and poor-
quality food, lack of heat, and rampant disease. In 1825 the two oldest
Brontë sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, were sent home from school in
advanced stages of illness and died there, probably of consumption (or
tuberculosis, as it is called today). Though Charlotte and Emily were
removed from the school soon after the deaths of their older sisters, the fate
of Maria and Elizabeth was an enormous blow, following so soon upon the
loss of their mother. Charlotte spoke often of Maria as a truly remarkable
child, highly intelligent and precocious at age eleven, mothering her
younger siblings, of a deeply religious nature even then. The character of
selfless yet strong-minded Helen in Jane Eyre is based on this important
figure in Charlotte’s childhood.
The next period of the Brontë children’s life was truly astonishing: The
remaining four—now educated rather haphazardly at home, precocious and
imaginative, cut off from the outside world and with little to entertain them
—began to write. Colla boratively they produced numerous plays, historical
fantasies, poems, and homemade miniature books (some of which still
exist) over a long period extending into adulthood, all based on imaginary
kingdoms of their own devising. Though none of the children had much
formal instruction, all were avid readers of several newspapers, literary
magazines like Blackwood‘s, popular ladies’ annuals, the Bible, and literary
classics like John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, The Arabian Nights,
William Shakespeare, John Milton, Sir Walter Scott, and the latest
Romantic poetry, all used as models for their own creative efforts.
The four Brontë children’s writing endeavors began about a year after
their sisters’ deaths, when Patrick Brontë brought home toy soldiers for his
children to play with. Each selected a favorite, named it (Charlotte’s was
called Wellington, after the duke her father idolized), and began to invent a
system of imaginative fantasy centering around the soldier’s chosen
character. These fantasies soon extended into elaborate sagas of invented
worlds. The children read their writing, which they set down in miniature
books in a tiny hand, aloud to each other, furnishing themselves with a
limited but enthusiastically appreciative audience. These were both
individual and collective efforts: Working in pairs, Emily and Anne wrote
poetry, stories, and “histories” of their kingdom, which they called Gondal,
while Charlotte and Branwell’s realm was called Angria.
In both of these worlds of juvenilia, but especially in Angria, which was
influenced by accounts the children had read of Africa, the setting was lush
and exotic and the plots highly melodramatic. Charlotte’s characters tended
toward the Byronic: impetuous, impulsive, and grand, with names like
Zenobia and Zamorna. In these extravagant stories the heroines, both
childish and precociously gifted, are as amoral as the heroes, and nearly all
are gorgeous and glamorous, as well as powerful aristocrats. The influence
of the popular Gothic novel is evident in the juvenilia, as it is in Jane Eyre,
where Charlotte Brontë absorbs and reorganizes both Byronic and Gothic
models for the characters of Rochester and Bertha.b
These shared fantasies enabled the Brontë children to lead rich lives of the
imagination in secret, while depending only on one another for emotional
support and mental stimulation. In a household run by a strict, religious
aunt and a detached father who often left the children alone because their
“prattle” annoyed him, the young Brontës constructed their own world of
adventure and pleasure. So enthralling were the tales they spun that as a
young adult Charlotte found it difficult to leave them behind for the
mundane world of daily domestic routine. To her they represented the
thrilling romance of hidden desires, couched in glamorous language and
settings, and as she matured they contrasted bitterly with the real world in
which she was plain, obscure, and in forced seclusion.
But the practicalities of their lives intruded on this rather idyllic childhood
passage: Their livings must be earned, and at age fifteen, in 1831, Charlotte
was sent as a pupil to Miss Wooler’s school at Roe Head, where she
suffered agonies of shyness and self-consciousness about her unattractive
appearance and social awkwardness. Though the Brontës identified with the
gentrified classes because of their father’s education and social position as
clergyman, they were not gentry by virtue of their economic status.
Charlotte’s lack of beauty, fashion, and social graces not only made her feel
out of place, but did not bode well for her future in the marriage market, as
she was painfully aware.
Later as a teacher at Roe Head (1835-1838) and as a governess in 1839
and 1841, virtually the only two professions open to impoverished genteel
women, Charlotte was miserable both at her inability to adjust to the social
conventions regarding women and at the severe restrictions on her time to
write. The Angrian fantasies were her salvation, but also her guilty secret:
When the schoolroom was quiet, she wrote in her journal in 1836, “All this
day I have been in a dream half-miserable and half-ecstatic, miserable
because I could not follow it out uninterruptedly, ecstatic because it shewed
almost in the vivid light of reality the ongoings of the infernal world.” She
“longed to write,” “felt she could have written gloriously”—but could not.
“Am I to spend all the best part of my life in this wretched bondage,
forcibly suppressing my rage at the idleness, the apathy, and the
hyperbolical and most asinine stupidity of these fat-headed oafs, and on
compulsion assuming an air of kindness, patience and assiduity?” Though
these rebellious, furious feelings always had their counterpart in guilt at her
own pride (“Don’t deceive yourself that I have a bit of real goodness about
me,” she wrote to her closest friend, the proper Ellen Nussey, in 1836; “If
you knew my thoughts; the dreams that absorb me; and the fiery
imagination that at times eats me up and makes me feel Society as it is
wretchedly insipid you would pity and I dare say despise me”), she could
not suppress her tendency to lose herself in what she called in her journal
“the divine unseen land of thought.”
At one time or another, all the Brontë sisters tried to earn their keep as
governesses, and all despised the work. Governesses, like teachers, were
very poorly paid, worked long hours, and were often treated as servants in
spite of educations and class origins that were superior to those of their
employers. Yet no other path to independence seemed open to them: Their
only other resource, their brother, Branwell, who was educated to become a
portrait painter, failed miserably at this and all other attempts he made at a
profession, and became increasingly mired in scandal, drink, and opium.
Eventually he died young and in disgrace, a horrible disappointment to his
family, and especially to his father, who, like most Victorian fathers, had
taken care to give his son opportunities he did not give his more dutiful
daughters. Ironically, Branwell’s rather amateurish attempts at painting his
sisters’ likeness have been reproduced widely in modern books about the
Brontës and have become quite famous.
Charlotte was ambitious, too, but her burning hope was to write, and
gathering her courage, she wrote to the British poet laureate, Robert
Southey, in 1837, sending some of her poems and begging him for a
response from his “throne of light and glory.” His answer is legendary:
Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to
be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure she
will have for it, even as an accomplishment and recreation. To those
duties you have not yet been called, and when you are you will be less
eager for celebrity.
Charlotte wrote back:
In the evenings, I confess, I do think, but I never trouble anyone else
with my thoughts.... I have endeavored not only attentively to observe
all the duties a woman ought to fulfill, but to feel deeply interested in
them. I don’t always succeed, for sometimes when I’m teaching or
sewing I would rather be reading or writing; but I try to deny myself.
 ... Once more allow me to thank you with sincere gratitude. I trust I
shall nevermore feel ambitious to see my name in print; if the wish
should rise, I’ll look at Southey’s letter, and suppress it.
It isn’t difficult to see the combination of guilt and barely suppressed
bitterness in this reply. The famous passages in Jane Eyre that strongly
assert the right of women to a wider life of their own apart from the
domestic circle may be seen as Charlotte’s response to Southey after years
of struggle with her own internalization of his conventional view.
In 1842 Charlotte and Emily Brontë went to school at the Pensionnat
Héger in Brussels, with the hope of acquiring skills (such as fluency in
French) that could be put to use in opening their own school. The scheme of
starting a school to support them all did not materialize; a printed handbill
survives, but no pupils came. Nevertheless, Charlotte’s sojourn in Europe
had a profound effect on her. The lonely and shy young woman fell deeply
in love with the one man who recognized her intelligence and talent and
encouraged her: her married teacher and mentor at the Pensionnat,
Constantin Héger. Though this was a painful time, as Charlotte’s surviving
letters to her unresponsive “Master” show, it was also a period of
intellectual growth and stimulation. When the family was reunited at
Haworth, the young Brontës formulated a common desire to be authors.
Under the male pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, the sisters
first published a book of their combined poetry in 1846, after Charlotte’s
famous discovery of Emily’s poems in a drawer. Emily resisted publication,
but Charlotte was absolutely convinced of the value of her work, and
prevailed. Though only two copies of the book were sold, this event
established their joint ambition to be authors. As the hope of the family,
Branwell, was sinking, in 1847 the sisters were successful in publishing
Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë’s only known novel), Agnes Grey (Anne
Brontë’s short novel about a poor governess, followed by The Tenant of
Wildfell Hall in 1848), and Charlotte’s Jane Eyre.
All three novels appeared within months of each other, an intensely
exciting time in the parsonage at Haworth, though the books’ true
authorship was kept secret from their father and brother, as well as from
most friends and acquaintances. At first, speculation was strong about the
identity of the three Bells—from the beginning it was suspected that they
might not be males, and some critics believed all three “brothers” were
really the same person. A distressing rumor had it that Jane Eyre was
written by a discontented governess in William Makepeace Thackeray’s
family. Cut off from social life as she was, Charlotte did not hear this gossip
until after she had dedicated the second edition of her novel to Thackeray
with humble praise for him. (Since Thackeray did in fact have a mentally
unstable wife, this proved terribly embarrassing for her.)
The notices for the three novels were strikingly dissimilar: Critics tended
to ignore Anne’s slim volume, and to decry the perceived immorality of
Wuthering Heights with disgust and outrage, but Jane Eyre received more
mixed reviews. It is fair to say that critics both highly praised and
condemned it. No less a critic than the eminent George Henry Lewes
(essayist and future common-law husband of George Eliot) found it a
“strange love story” but wrote that “no such book has gladdened our eyes
for a long while” (Fraser’s Magazine, December 1847), while Thackeray
wrote to the publishers that he couldn’t put it down and cried at the love
scenes. But others, most infamously Elizabeth Rigby, later Lady Eastlake,
expressed repugnance at its “gross inconsistencies and improbabilities,” its
“singularly unattractive” hero and heroine, and most tellingly, the
unchristian nature of the heroine’s “unregenerate and undisciplined spirit,”
which the reviewer linked to the “ungodly discontent” of the rebellions of
the poor both in England and abroad. Moreover, Lady Eastlake adds, the
book is unfeminine, and she therefore concludes it is not written by a
woman, or if a woman, by “one who has, for some sufficient reason, long
forfeited the society of her own sex” (The Quarterly Review, December
1848). Even the sympathetic Lewès later wrote that it was “overmasculine,”
with a vigor that “often amounts to coarseness,—and is certainly the very
antipode to ‘ladylike’ ” (Edinburgh Review, January 1850).
Such harsh judgments and misconceptions were difficult enough; this
mixture of exhilaration in publishing and disappointment in notices was
followed all too rapidly by the sudden decline of Emily, followed soon by
Anne, from tuberculosis. The two sisters died not long after Branwell’s
ignominious demise, probably from alcoholism though possibly also from
tuberculosis. By 1849 the entire family had been decimated, except for
Patrick Brontë, the aging paterfamilias, and Charlotte herself. While
Charlotte continued to write and enjoy more success with her next two
novels, Shirley and Villette, it seemed that she was condemned to care for
her father alone in a desolate and terribly lonely environment. Her letters of
this time are full of painful reflections and attempts to reconcile herself to
her sisters’ deaths, as well as her own fate as a lifelong “spinster.”
The next years of Charlotte’s life were, however, enlivened by a growing
reputation as a serious novelist and occasional trips to London, where she
eventually met George Henry Lewes and Thackeray himself. She also
became friends with Elizabeth Gaskell, the Victorian novelist who was to
write a famous biography of her after her death, which has since become a
classic in its own right.
Then in 1854 Charlotte unexpectedly married, an event at first irately
opposed by her possessive father. Her suitor for years, Arthur Bell Nicholls,
a poor curate in her father’s ministry, was unattractive and neither
intellectual nor artistic, and she was not in love with him. But she came to
appreciate his fidelity and devotion to her, as well as to value the strong
feeling for her that led him to cry openly when she first refused his
proposal. Since she had always considered herself most undesirable and
even unlovable, this expression of ardent love shocked and gratified her. At
age thirty-eight, Charlotte renounced her romantic dreams and for a while
was surprised by how happy she was in her new life.
It did not last long. Within months she became severely ill and wasted,
and died in March 1855. Though a local doctor linked her symptoms to
pregnancy—and there has been much popular psychological criticism
purporting to explain her death as an unconscious rejection of sex,
marriage, and motherhood—there is no real evidence that she was pregnant,
or if she was, that she died of a pregnancy-related condition rather than
tuberculosis (like her sisters) or typhoid, which was rampant in Haworth in
the nineteenth century.
Because of the high drama of the Brontë family story, the almost mythic
legend of the three isolated, eccentric, and repressed sisters in the lonely
parsonage at Haworth soon grew in popularity. The literary reputation of the
odd and complex Wuthering Heights, first seen as amoral if not
“diabolical,” rose considerably beginning in the late nineteenth century. But
twentieth-century critics such as Thomas Moser and biographers such as
Helene Moglen tended to see Jane Eyre as a powerful but transparently
neurotic outpouring of sexual frustration couched in Victorian moralism.
Moreover, the novel’s improbable coincidences (so common in Victorian
prose fiction), the attempt at Byronism in the portrait of its hero, and the
moral stringency of its characters’ religious preoccupations all contributed
to its lower status within the canon.
This state of critical affairs changed with the feminist revolution in
literary criticism, and especially with the publication of Sandra Gilbert and
Susan Gubar’s groundbreaking work The Madwoman in the Attic (1979; see
“For Further Reading”) . Feminist critics stimulated a new appreciation of
the ways in which Brontë forthrightly addresses the position of women and
tries to revise the conventions of gender roles in romantic love. The result
has been a more nuanced understanding of the paradoxical nature of Jane
Eyre’s mix of rebellion with social and religious conservatism. Critics have
always noticed the conflict of views and forces in the novel, labeling them
Nature versus Grace, private versus public, passion and reason,
romanticism and rationalism, and so on. A feminist reexamination of these
divisions has allowed these competing categories to be recast in new and
more complex terms.
One way to understand the structure of Jane Eyre is to see it as a
bildungsroman, the story of a young person’s moral and social education.
Certainly we are encouraged to identify with Jane as heroine because, like
Dickens’s David Copperfield, she narrates the tale of her own life. The
novel is, to be sure, subtitled “An Autobiography,” though actually it begins
in girlhood when Jane is ten years old and ends with marriage and
motherhood, in conformity with the Victorian view that this trajectory
completes the purpose of a woman’s life. But Jane is not an ordinary
heroine : Though her emotional isolation as an orphan is a common motif,
her physical smallness and plain features, as well as her sarcasm,
outspokenness, and strong will, set her sharply apart from the sweet and
adorable girls often found in Victorian fiction. We know that Charlotte
insisted over her sisters’ objections that her heroine must not be beautiful,
as convention required for romance; according to her biographer, Elizabeth
Gaskell, she told Emily and Anne confidently, “I will prove to you that you
are wrong; I will show you a heroine as plain and as small as myself, who
shall be as interesting as any of yours” (Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte
Bronte, p. 215) . The rebelliousness of Jane’s childhood lies in her
outspoken insistence on her right to be loved and valued as an individual,
and her equally passionate resistance to the rigidly hierarchical social
distinctions of class that informed Victorian society. To the modern reader
she may appear as a champion of individualism when she fervently declares
her own self-worth in opposition to the spoiled and privileged members of
the Reed family: When her aunt calls her “not worthy of notice,” Jane
counters, “They are not fit to associate with me” (p. 35). In a way, the entire
novel seems to affirm Jane’s belief that one should not base human value on
differences in social or economic rank, presenting a kind of argument for
meritocracy against deeply ingrained values of authority and social
privilege.
Yet a careful reader will note that the child Jane’s outbursts are not
endorsed by Jane Eyre as adult narrator: “Half an hour’s silence and
reflection had shown me the madness of my conduct, and the dreariness of
my hated and hating position.” Vengeance in the form of impulsive
expression of rage, she says, had an “after-flavor metallic and corroding,
[giving] me a sensation as if I had been poisoned” (p. 47). Though Jane’s
need for affection and her indignation at the unjust conditions of her
treatment as a loveless outcast are portrayed sympathetically, the “poison”
of rebellion is not.
The same ambiguity may be seen in the next phase of the novel, when
Jane is sent to Lowood, the school modeled on the Clergy Daughters’
School of Charlotte Brontë’s memory. Here the loneliness and alienation
Jane felt in the Reed household at Gateshead is continued, but in a setting
where emotional deprivation is mirrored in the refusal of bodily needs.
Hunger and cold become powerful metaphors for the denial of nature, as the
pupils suffer from unreasonable demands and overly harsh discipline and
physical conditions. Evangelical Christianity, in the form of Reverend
Brocklehurst and his pronouncements, is aligned with this devaluation of
nature, feeling, desire, and pleasure : “... we are not to conform to nature; I
wish these girls to be the children of grace;” says Brocklehurst when
ordering a pupil’s curls to be cut off (p. 77).
But the character of Helen Burns, who suffers more than Jane does and
rejects Jane’s bitterness and retaliatory anger in a saintly Christian spirit,
belies the novel’s seeming endorsement of “Nature” and presents a model
for a competing view: a Christian vision based (unlike Brocklehurst’s) on
love and forgiveness as well as on submission and self-denial. Jane is
impressed by Helen’s sorrowful “You think too much of the love of human
beings” (p.83), though she herself does not feel capable—by nature—of
imitating this young female incarnation of Christ. Actually, Helen’s early
death signals that her martyrdom does not fit her well for the trials of
experience in this world, any more than her rejection of strong human
attachments invites its pleasures.
When we next see Jane she is a young adult, and ready for the greater trial
of pleasure and pain in the world outside school:
My world had for some years been in Lowood; my experience had
been of its rules and systems; now I remembered that the real world
was wide, and that a varied field of hopes and fears, of sensations and
excitements, awaited those who had courage to go forth into its
expanse to seek real knowledge of life amid its perils.... I desired
liberty; for liberty I gasped ... (p. 102).
If she cannot have liberty, she prays, “Grant me, at least, a new servitude!”
(p. 102).
Here, in the transition from girlhood to adult womanhood, is where Jane
reflects most clearly on the real world of unequal opportunity, as she
acknowledges women’s stifled desire for adventure and work in the wider
world:
Nobody knows how many rebellions, besides political rebellions,
ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed
to be very calm generally; but women feel just as men feel; they need
exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as
their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a
stagnation, precisely as men would suffer . . . (p. 130).
This is perhaps what led Mrs. Oliphant, a popular Victorian novelist, to say
of Jane Eyre that it was “but a wild declaration of the ‘Rights of Woman’ in
a new aspect” (Blackwood’s Magazine, May 1855).
Though Jane secures a place as a governess, it isn’t very long before she
falls in love with her master, Edward Rochester, the part of the novel most
often dramatized in adaptations and for which it is best remembered.
Rochester has many of the characteristics associated with the Byronic hero.
He has a secret, dark past. He is an unloved outcast, like Jane; too
unconcerned with society to be a typical gentleman, he is, like her, alienated
from family, society, and love. Reminiscent of Brontë’s Angrian hero
Zamorna, he is intensely masculine, sexual, full of unrestrained feeling,
with an appeal beyond smooth manners or good looks: “He had a dark face,
with stern features and a heavy brow” (p. 135), “broad and jetty eyebrows .
. . decisive nose ... full nostrils, denoting, I thought, choler; his grim mouth,
chin, and jaw” (p. 143), “granite-hewn features” (p. 157), “unusual breadth
of chest” (p. 158). Yet unlike the Byronic or the Angrian hero, he is not
“heroic-looking.”
In some important ways Rochester is “kin” to Jane’s kind; his lack of
conventional handsomeness, his ability to be “natural,” and his contempt
for social niceties all allow Jane to find a connection with him beyond what
she earlier called “rules and systems,” here the social niceties of
conventional male-female or master-servant relations. Jane too is a highly
unconventional romantic heroine, not only in her plainness of appearance,
dress, and manner, but also in her insistence on the validity of her own
emotions, entirely contrary to the passivity and modesty required of
respectable women: “The vehemence of emotion, stirred by grief and love
within me, was claiming mastery, and struggling for full sway and asserting
a right to predominate—to overcome, to live, rise, and reign at last; yes, and
to speak,” she says when she believes she must part from him (p. 295).
Once more Brontë appears to affirm nature and feeling as important values
when she sets Jane’s naturalness of speech and manner, the worth of her
mind and heart, against the artificiality and hollowness of snobbish “ladies”
such as Blanche (her supposed rival for Rochester’s affections) who are
Jane’s social betters.
 When Rochester chooses Jane in spite of the social stigma of marrying
“down,” romantic love appears subversive of the social order, indeed.
Romantic love is defined as a harmony of minds, deeply “understanding
one another,” and the transcendence of merit over conventional categories
of bloodlines, class, and power, as in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. It
is not difficult to see why Jane Eyre is best remembered as a romance: The
depth, spontaneity, and integrity of Jane’s romantic desire are continually
contrasted with the superficiality and egoism of Celine, Blanche, and even
little Adèle, females who sell themselves to men for their keep, depending
on their feminine charm and good looks to please and flatter men.
Nature, emotion, and expression overmaster reason and social convention
in Jane’s daring declaration of love to Rochester:
Do you think I am an automaton? a machine without feelings ? and
can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my
drop of living water dashed from my cup? ... You think wrong! I have
as much soul as you, and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me
with some beauty, and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for
you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you (p. 296).
But the story is not so simple, and its values not so easily derived from this
most famous part of the book alone. (Not coincidentally, a similarly
misplaced emphasis is often noted in the interpretations and adaptations of
Wuthering Heights.) For as soon as Jane and Rochester are engaged to be
married, the tone of the narrative changes again. The next phase of the
novel reveals, with some comic alarm but also growing unease, Rochester’s
possessiveness and desire for Jane’s dependency in love: “I mean shortly to
claim you,” he tells her, “your thoughts, conversation, and company, for
life” (p. 310). To Jane’s dismay he wants to lavish gifts on her as though she
were a lady (or Cinderella), and calls her a fairy and an angel. Jane’s
increasing anxiety is reflected in literal dreams foreshadowing disaster, as
well as her statement to Rochester, “You, sir, are the most phantom-like of
all; you are a mere dream” (p. 325).
Brontë associates this dreamlike state of romance, which inevitably
recalls Charlotte’s renounced visionary dreams in girlhood, with a sexuality
that is heightened and uncontrolled. When Rochester looks lovingly at Jane,
she notices his face is “ardent and flushed” (p. 326). This unregulated
passion is not only antisocial, inimical to living by the real rules of the
world, but also irreligious. As Jane says during her courtship, “My future
husband was becoming to me my whole world, and more than the world—
almost my hope of heaven. He stood between me and every thought of
religion.... I could not, in those days, see God for his creature, of whom I
had made an idol” (p. 320).
Just as the tension between Jane’s and Rochester’s views of love and
marriage seems irreconcilable and Jane is in danger of losing her selfhood
to the more dominant Rochester, the melodramatic revelation of
Rochester’s hidden wife, Bertha, brings the wedding to a sudden halt. The
Gothic plot line, in which the sequestered mad wife prevents the legal
marriage of Jane and Rochester, allows Brontë to present the competing
claims of an alternate system of values to romance and pleasure, which may
conveniently be called Christian, traditional, and moral. The outsized and
physically strong Bertha is the ultimate contrast with the ethereal Helen;
Bertha’s mad avidity for drink and promiscuity represent the danger of
flouting the Christian ethic of self-denial.
But romantic love stands in an interestingly ambiguous relation to the
Christian system of belief and the humanist value of individual feeling. So
far, Brontë has strongly endorsed the right feeling of love as natural and
good, and Jane’s reward has been the love she deserves in return. Yet
Rochester’s behavior to her during their engagement, Jane’s own threatened
loss of autonomy in passion, and the discovery of the mad consequences of
indulgence in appetite all weigh against the conclusion that romantic
passion is the answer to Jane’s search for meaning and dignity. On the
contrary, what Jane takes away from this most often dramatized section of
the novel is that unregulated or illegitimate emotion and sexual desire are
threats to social harmony and order, as well as disobedient to the laws
imposed by religion. Jane’s romantic interlude is meant to expose the
antisocial and antireligious nature of uncontrolled self-will, which
represents the breakdown of moral law and stability. This view, which
deeply informs Jane Eyre, reflects the conflicted nature of the history of
romantic love in the West, where the tradition of consuming, impossible,
often adulterous passion is in marked contrast to the Christianized version
of love, which regulates its subversive desire into marital devotion.
The compelling scene in which Jane and Rochester struggle with each
other emotionally after she has learned the truth about his marriage is the
climax of the novel’s conflict regarding the evangelical Christian imperative
to value Grace over Nature. Certainly there is a strong attraction in Jane
Eyre, psychologically and aesthetically, toward what is “natural,” which
sometimes seems to include romantic and sexual passion. At times Nature is
aligned at once against reason and with imagination and feeling, impulse,
aesthetic sensibility, nonconformity, and individualism. But is Nature
“right”? And how do we know?
When Rochester asserts the right of natural feeling over social
conventions “It would not be wicked to love me.... Is it better to drive a
fellow-creature to despair than to transgress a mere human law no man
being injured by the breach?” (pp. 368-369), Jane denounces his argument
as a mere rationale for the temptation of evil-doing, though Rochester’s
speech distinctly echoes her own claim during their courtship to the right of
feeling to reign over social custom. But Jane pleads “self-respect” as well as
universal moral principles, without which life would have no coherence.
Though Rochester’s argument that no one would be hurt by their living
together outside marriage under these difficult circumstances may sound
reasonable and socially acceptable to modern ears, the novel turns on our
admiration of Jane’s ability to deny her own desire and feelings for the
greater good of the traditional moral principles she assumes are universal.
Though her cries “I care for myself” and “I will respect myself” have a
distinctly feminist ring, it is easy to forget or dismiss that strict adherence to
the Christian ethic of sexual purity, the “law given by God” (p. 369), is the
framework for her self-assertion.
To avoid temptation, Jane leaves Thornfield and is cast into the harsh and
unforgiving world, orphaned once again from the temporary shelter she had
found in romantic love. Many strands come together in this penultimate part
of the novel: Jane finds independence in work, she finds out (with typically
Victorian improbable coincidence) that her new friends at Marsh End are
her cousins, and she inherits money at the precise time that she can put it to
good use (with the usual convenience of Victorian plotting). Most
important, she encounters a new character, one who is both so like and
unlike the others who have influenced (and reflected) her that he introduces
a new element in the ongoing dialogue between romance and Christian
submission.
This character is, of course, her cousin St. John Rivers, still another
minister, whose mission is to save souls, this time in India. St. John is
handsome, unlike Rochester, but like a “prostrate column,” cold and rigid
(unlike Rochester again). Though Jane admires him greatly, he represents
danger of another sort: extreme repression of desire and self-denial, a sort
of tyranny over the naturalness of human feeling. St. John wants to marry
her only to complete his calling to missionary work. “Can I receive from
him the bridal ring, endure all the forms of love ... and know that the spirit
was quite absent?” Jane asks herself (p. 469).
Here is where the novel best demonstrates its own capacity for
complexity: Jane revolts against marriage for the higher purpose of serving
God rather than as the natural outcome of romantic desire, and her struggle
with St. John for the integrity of her selfhood mirrors her struggle with
Rochester when she leaves him. Ultimately she rejects both suitors in turn
until her own conditions, which are the legitimation of romantic and sexual
love within the Christian and social sanctity of marriage, are met. Both
Rochester and St. John violate the romantic love/marriage paradigm:
Rochester wants love without marriage, while St. John wants marriage
without love. Interestingly, both these temptations are seen as struggles
between female will and male egoism, the latter of which includes a desire
to exert power over women. Like Rochester’s possessive sexuality, St.
John’s “ice kiss” is another kind of trap, as well as a temptation to “rush
down the torrent of his will into the gulf of his existence, and there lose my
own.” The two men are directly compared as dominating when Jane says, “I
was almost as hard beset by [St. John] now as I had been once before, in a
different way, by another” (p. 484).
Though in many ways the novel seems divided against itself, it isn’t easy
to categorize or align the divisions as, for instance, passion versus duty or
Nature versus Christianity, because such divisions cut across each other in
complex ways. For example, both Helen and Brocklehurst promulgate self-
denying Christianity, as does St. John Rivers, yet Helen and St. John’s
Christianity of love and goodness is clearly meant to contrast favorably
with Brocklehurst’s ultimately righteous and cruel imposition of deprivation
under the hypocritical name of Christian self-restraint. To complicate
matters further, Helen’s admirable self-restraint under oppression and St.
John’s cold denial of feeling differ from each other and therefore can’t
simply be lumped together as “the Christian view.”
Because to this point the novel seems to endorse Jane’s Christian attack
on Rochester’s “natural” morality of love, Jane’s view does appear at first
to be aligned with the values of Helen, Brocklehurst, and St. John. On the
other hand, it should be noted that all three of these characters also devalue
Jane’s selfhood in some way—that is, her right to physical comfort and
childlike pleasure (Brocklehurst), her earthly attachments and need for love
as “thinking too much about the love of others” (Helen), and the rightness
of strong feeling, including romantic love in its legitimate setting of
marriage (St. John Rivers). Moreover, all three speak from a Christian and
moral view: “Don’t cling so tenaciously to ties of the flesh,” St. John
admonishes Jane, echoing Helen (p. 453). For this reason, Jane herself does
not have a unified and consistent view of this denial of self. As fiction Jane
Eyre constructs a version of the world that invites opposing categories,
labeled with various terms at different points in the story, as well as by
different critics at changing points in the novel’s history—for example,
passion versus duty, romance versus reason, and so on. But a close reading
of the book’s structure reveals that its heroine flows back and forth among
competing values in shifting patterns, more like a wave than a particle
bouncing between two clearly inimical states.
As the novel approaches its final phase, Brontë attempts to tighten this
ambiguous scheme and bring her heroine into realignment with a
conclusion clearly meant to satisfy the reader as well as the heroine. After
another intervention of plotting—Jane’s telepathic summons by Rochester
after he has been left alone by the fire that has destroyed his house and mad
wife—Jane returns to him at Ferndean, a new residence that is less grand
than Thornfield, and closer to nature in a removed, peaceful spot. Much
critical controversy has centered on this conclusion to Jane’s moral
dilemma. The sticking point is that after vigorously arguing against staying
with Rochester while he is still married, the novel then implies the rightness
of Jane’s return to him before she knows he is now free. To put it another
way, the benevolence of the just universe and the coincidence of plotting
spare Jane the difficult final choice between morality and passion. In the
conflict between “Nature” and “Grace,” the novel achieves resolution of its
competing value systems through plot closure. We might say that through
the grace of nature is revealed the nature of grace.
Perhaps even more problematic for critics, including feminist critics, is
Jane’s discovery that Rochester has lost a hand and an eye in the fire that
destroyed the scene of their courtship. Because Rochester is now blind,
crippled, and helpless, needing Jane physically rather than dominating and
tempting her with his sexuality, some have argued that Brontë was
perpetrating a kind of unconscious “castration” of his masculinity. In other
words, Jane’s selfhood, including the ability to express and satisfy her
sexual and romantic desire, seems to be achieved only at the expense of
Rochester’s passion, which was the key to her sense of his “mastery.”
When Jane finds Rochester again she is touched by the “powerlessness of
the strong man” and his “avowal of his dependence” (p. 508). Does Jane
need to control Rochester, or “serve” him in order to marry him? So much
between the lovers has taken the form of a struggle for “mastery” and
control both in courtship and afterward: “I love you better now,” she tells
him, “when I can really be useful to you, than I did in your state of proud
independence, when you disdained every part but that of the giver and
protector” (p. 516). One way to look at the conclusion of the novel is that
Rochester’s new physical disability, like Jane’s inheritance, equalizes the
relationship so that it comes closer to Brontë’s ideal version of mutuality of
power in marriage without resorting to open social challenge.
On the other hand, Jane’s intense desire to “nurse” Rochester in his
debilitation can be related easily to the pervasive Victorian domestic ideal
of the wife serving as helpmeet to the husband—that is, as a domestic
expression of the Christian ideal of service. She “did not love [her]
servitude” to St. John (p. 461), but the conclusion is that servitude in
romantic love, if equal and mutual, allows for the integrity of the
independent soul. It is true that in her “new servitude” (to recall her words
early on when pining for new experience with limited resources), Jane is
rewarded with a mutually satisfying relationship, but this might be seen as a
wishful fantasy that spiritualized love in marriage can be made to reconcile
the great rift in traditional and modern values, Christian duty and modern
individualism, “rules and systems” versus romantic feeling, that has been so
trenchantly expressed in the novel.
The same ambivalence can be seen in the trajectory of Jane’s romance.
Though the character Jane Eyre is a kind of antiheroine of romantic love—
unattractive, humble, unfashionable, and retiring—Bronte’s novel is related
to a certain kind of romance that harks back to Samuel Richardson’s
Pamela, a mid-eighteenth-century work(arguably the first true novel in the
English language) that is still found in popular romances today: the story of
a poor, spirited, but unappreciated heroine whose worth is finally
recognized by her lover, a man of some wealth and social status who is in a
position to give her a home and love. As in many eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century novels, virtue and inner worth are ultimately recognized
by inheritance and through marriage, a rise in economic fortunes. In
Pamela, Fanny Burney’s Evelina, and Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the
resistance to ingrained values of authority and hierarchy seems contradicted
at the end by the “reward” of the happy ending of romance, while
Richardson‘s, Burney’s, and Austen’s novels’ proposed substitution of merit
for blood superiority of rank is undercut by the absorption of the heroine
into a better social class.
This explains some of the ambivalence that critics, feminists among them,
have struggled with in understanding Brontë’s work (though her last novel,
Villette, has provoked much less controversy) . In the end Jane Eyre is both
a high romance and an antiromance, equally rejecting the conventions of
femininity in the social paradigm of courtship and the destructive
immorality and selfishness of illegitimate passion. On one hand, the
romantic narrative of Jane and Rochester entails the political stance that she
is a heroine worthy of his love, as well as the strong assertion of the
legitimacy of feeling, the recognition that human love is vital to life and
should not be repressed. This is St. John’s function in the novel, to conduct
a dialogue that in the end weighs in favor of love, as Rochester conducted a
furious argument in its favor, an argument that Jane also rejected. “I scorn
your idea of love,” she tells her cousin; “the very name of love is an apple
of discord between us ...” (p. 473).
 But though Jane—and Brontë’s novel—claims love as a human right, a
need, as opposed to St. John’s more-than-human ideal of self-denial
celebrated at the conclusion, the whole nature of romantic love in Jane Eyre
is redefined in a way that departs from the melodrama and romance in the
Angrian sense of the Brontë juvenilia. It is removed from the passion of
Brontë’s “dream” life, including the creative imaginings of her schoolgirl
days, which she called in her journal “that burning clime where we have
sojourned too long.” Instead, romance is revisioned as the agape of marital
love, one partner taking care of the other. This version of love merges with
the Christian concept of saving the soul from sin, and thus can be seen as
just reward, as well as constituting social and psychological maturity. The
divine justice that punishes Rochester and rewards Jane “proves” a
Christian benevolent universe, makes God’s love and will consonant with
the desires of the person of integrity, and serves to redistribute the power
balance between the lovers. “Some say it was a just judgment on him,” a
character says of Rochester’s injuries. Nature itself, in the supernatural
scene when Jane hears Rochester’s call from afar, seems continuous with
both Romantic and Christian ideals. We may see Rochester’s maiming as
the fulfillment of Christ’s words, paraphrased by Jane when she resolves to
renounce her own temptation to illegitimate passion: “You shall yourself,
pluck out your right eye; yourself cut off your right hand: your heart shall
be the victim; and you, the priest, to transfix it” (p. 347).
Theorists of popular romance have noted that novels in that genre often
feature intelligent and spirited women who are initially stifled, limited,
bossed around, oppressed, or abused by dominant or powerful men of
spectacular masculinity. Romance, the critic Janice Radway says, requires
rousing as well as allaying women’s anxieties about men, encompassing
both individual desires and power issues in complex ways. As the
sociologists Stevi Jackson and Eva Illouz have pointed out, romance is also
closely tied to social status and value, though it purports to be an entirely
private choice. We may easily recognize all these elements in Jane Eyre.
Yet Brontë’s novel is not merely a popular romance, in that it is a work of
great linguistic virtuosity that makes artistic use of its equivocality toward
romantic passion by dramatizing both sides of the issue. In one way Jane
Eyre not only offers the popular romantic solutions of fantasy, but also
criticizes them, appealing to feminists and other serious critics as well as to
the public hunger for a happy and just ending.
Thus both Bertha, the intemperate exotic, an icon of selfish and
unrestrained sensuality and madness, whose symbol is destructive fire, and
at the opposite pole, St. John, with his “ice kiss,” who renounces personal
happiness, are both eventually extirpated from the text. These two extremes
are found wanting as models for Jane, who must find a way to
accommodate “feeling” (including desire) within a Christian framework.
Though Cinderella’s rescue from poverty by a prince who chooses her is
often cited as a mythic source for Jane Eyre, on a deeper level the fantasy is
the tale of Beauty and the Beast, in which the true lover rehumanizes the
savage beast, as Jane saves the rake/sinner from sin, “guiding” and helping
him as she does when she first meets him on the road, as well as at the end.
Perhaps this view allows us to see why Jane Eyre continues to be both a
central text in the Western literary canon and a durable fantasy in the
popular public imagination. Jane Eyre as heroine is best remembered for the
strong will that bravely questions expected roles for women and asserts a
woman’s right to love and pleasure. Though Brontë’s solution is Victorian
and traditional, the novel is a unique and pivotal contribution to the modern
view of romantic love and the problem of sexual desire for women, an
attempt to endorse as well as regulate female passion.
Jane Eyre suggests emotional equality, “sameness,” “kinship,” and
“likeness” of character as the basis of a new kind of mutual love and
respect, in contrast to the social and economic inequalities that formed the
nineteenth-century context of courtship and marriage. This view is not
asserted in revolutionary form; no transformation of the social order is
proposed. On the contrary, at the conclusion of the novel, the bond between
Jane and Rochester allows the lovers to withdraw from an unsatisfactory
society into a cocoon of protective love.
But the romance on which the dramatized versions of the novel focus is
only a part of the narrative of Jane’s “autobiography,” the tale of how she
grows into being fully human. In the end the experience of romantic love
illuminates but does not wholly constitute female identity, so that passion
itself is a metaphor for the drive to female selfhood and individuation, the
key to a search for a larger meaning than that prescribed for women by
cultural norms. Jane Eyre’s self-respect is integral to her understanding the
full meaning of sexual love, even while love itself constitutes a necessary
living energy, without which life has no light, fire, or air.

Susan Ostrov Weisser is a professor in the English Department at Adelphi

University, where she specializes in nineteenth-century literature and
women’s studies, and teaches frequently in the Honors College. Dr.
Weisser’s Ph.D. is from Columbia University. She is the author and editor
of three books in women’s studies. Her research centers on women and
romantic love in nineteenth-century literature, as well as in contemporary
popular culture.

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 To
W. M. THACKERAY, ESQ.

THIS WORK
IS RESPECTFULLY INSCRIBED,
BY
THE AUTHOR

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 Preface to the Second Edition

A preface to the first edition of Jane Eyre being unnecessary,

I gave none: this second edition demands a few words both of
acknowledgment and miscellaneous remark.
My thanks are due in three quarters.
To the Public, for the indulgent ear it has inclined to a plain tale with few
pretensions.
To the Press, for the fair field its honest suffragec has opened to an
obscure aspirant.
To my Publishers, for the aid their tact, their energy, their practical sense,
and frank liberality have afforded an unknown and unrecommended Author.
The Press and the Public are but vague personifications for me, and I must
thank them in vague terms; but my Publishers are definite: so are certain
generous critics who have encouraged me as only large-hearted and high-
minded men know how to encourage a struggling stranger; to them, i.e., to
my Publishers and the select Reviewers, I say cordially, Gentlemen, I thank
you from my heart.
Having thus acknowledged what I owe those who have aided and
approved me, I turn to another class; a small one, so far as I know, but not,
therefore, to be overlooked. I mean the timorous or carping few who doubt
the tendency of such books as Jane Eyre: in whose eyes whatever is
unusual is wrong; whose ears detect in each protest against bigotry—that
parent of crime—an insult to piety, that regent of God on earth. I would
suggest to such doubters certain obvious distinctions; I would remind them
of certain simple truths.
Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To
attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of
the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns.
These things and deeds are diametrically opposed; they are as distinct as
is vice from virtue. Men too often confound them; they should not be
confounded: appearance should not be mistaken for truth; narrow human
doctrines, that only tend to elate and magnify a few, should not be
substituted for the world-redeeming creed of Christ. There is—I repeat it—
a difference; and it is a good, and not a bad action to mark broadly and
clearly the line of separation between them.
The world may not like to see these ideas dissevered, for it has been
accustomed to blend them; finding it convenient to make external show
pass for sterling worth—to let white-washed walls vouch for clean shrines.
It may hate him who dares to scrutinise and expose—to rase the gilding,
and show base metal under it—to penetrate the sepulchre, and reveal
charnel relics: but, hate as it will, it is indebted to him.
Ahab did not like Micaiah, because he never prophesied good concerning
him, but evil: probably he liked the sycophant son of Chenaanah better; yet
might Ahab have escaped a bloody death, had he but stopped his ears to
flattery, and opened them to faithful counsel.1
There is a man in our own days whose words are not framed to tickle
delicate ears: who, to my thinking, comes before the great ones of society,
much as the son of Imlah came before the throned Kings of Judah and
Israel; and who speaks truth as deep, with a power as prophet-like and as
vital—a mien as dauntless and as daring. Is the satirist of Vanity Fair
admired in high places?2 I cannot tell; but I think if some of those amongst
whom he hurls the Greek fired of his sarcasm, and over whom he flashes
the levin-brande of his denunciation, were to take his warnings in time—
they or their seed might yet escape a fatal Ramoth-Gilead.
Why have I alluded to this man? I have alluded to him, Reader, because I
think I see in him an intellect profounder and more unique than his
contemporaries have yet recognised; because I regard him as the first social
regenerator of the day—as the very master of that working corps who
would restore to rectitude the warped system of things; because I think no
commentator on his writings has yet found the comparison that suits him,
the terms which rightly characterise his talent. They say he is like Fielding:
they talk of his wit, humour, comic powers.3 He resembles Fielding as an
eagle does a vulture: Fielding could stoop on carrion, but Thackeray never
does. His wit is bright, his humour attractive, but both bear the same
relation to his serious genius, that the mere lambent sheet-lightning playing
under the edge of the summer-cloud, does to the electric death-spark hid in
its womb. Finally, I have alluded to Mr. Thackeray, because to him—if he
will accept the tribute of a total stranger—I have dedicated this second
edition of Jane Eyre.
Currer Bell
Dec. 21st, 1847

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 Note to the Third Edition

I avail myself of the opportunity which a third edition of Jane Eyre affords
me, of again addressing a word to the Public, to explain that my claim to the
title of novelist rests on this one work alone. If, therefore, the authorship of
other works of fiction has been attributed to me, an honour is awarded
where it is not merited; and consequently, denied where it is justly due.
This explanation will serve to rectify mistakes which may already have
been made, and to prevent future errors.
Currer Bell

April 13th, 1848

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 Chapter I

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering,
indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner
(Mrs. Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold winter wind
had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further
out-door exercise was now out of the question.
I was glad of it. I never liked long walks, especially on chilly afternoons:
dreadful to me was the coming home in the raw twilight, with nipped
fingers and toes, and a heart saddened by the chidings of Bessie, the nurse,
and humbled by the consciousness of my physical inferiority to Eliza, John,
and Georgiana Reed.
The said Eliza, John, and Georgiana were now clustered round their
mamma in the drawing-room; she lay reclined on a sofa by the fireside, and
with her darlings about her (for the time neither quarrelling nor crying)
looked perfectly happy. Me, she had dispensed from joining the group,
saying, “She regretted to be under the necessity of keeping me at a distance;
but that until she heard from Bessie, and could discover by her own
observation that I was endeavoring in good earnest to acquire a more
sociable and childlike disposition, a more attractive and sprightly manner—
something lighter, franker, more natural, as it were—she really must
exclude me from privileges intended only for contented, happy little
children.”
“What does Bessie say I have done?” I asked.
“Jane, I don’t like cavillers or questioners: besides, there is something
truly forbidding in a child taking up her elders in that manner. Be seated
somewhere; and until you can speak pleasantly, remain silent.”
A small breakfast-room adjoined the drawing-room: I slipped in there. It
contained a book-case: I soon possessed myself of a volume, taking care
that it should be one stored with pictures. I mounted into the window-seat:
gathering up my feet, I sat cross-legged, like a Turk; and, having drawn the
red moreen curtain nearly close, I was shrined in double retirement.
Folds of scarlet drapery shut in my view to the right hand; to the left were
the clear panes of glass protecting, but not separating, me from the drear
November day. At intervals, while turning over the leaves of my book, I
studied the aspect of that winter afternoon. Afar it offered a pale blank of
mist and cloud; near, a scene of wet lawn and storm-beat shrub, with
ceaseless rain sweeping away wildly before a long and lamentable blast.
I returned to my book—Bewick’s History of British Birds:4 the letter-
press thereof I cared little for, generally speaking; and yet there were certain
introductory pages that, child as I was, I could not pass quite as a blank.
They were those which treat of the haunts of sea-fowl; of “the solitary rocks
and promontories” by them only inhabited; of the coast of Norway, studded
with isles from its southern extremity, the Lindeness, or Naze, to the North
Cape—
Where the Northern Ocean, in vast whirls,
Boils round the naked, melancholy isles
Of farthest Thule; and the Atlantic surge
Pours in among the stormy Hebrides.5
Nor could I pass unnoticed the suggestion of the bleak shores of Lapland,
Siberia, Spitzbergen, Nova Zembla, Iceland, Greenland, with “the vast
sweep of the Arctic Zone, and those forlorn regions of dreary space—that
reservoir of frost and snow, where firm fields of ice, the accumulation of
centuries of winters, glazed in Alpine heights above heights, surround the
pole, and concentre the multiplied rigors of extreme cold.” Of these death-
white realms I formed an idea of my own—shadowy, like all the half-
comprehended notions that float dim through children’s brains, but
strangely impressive. The words in these introductory pages connected
themselves with the succeeding vignettes, and gave significance to the rock
standing up alone in a sea of billow and spray; to the broken boat stranded
on a desolate coast; to the cold and ghastly moon glancing through bars of
cloud at a wreck just sinking.
 I cannot tell what sentiment haunted the quiet, solitary church-yard, with
its inscribed headstone, its gate, its two trees, its low horizon, girdled by a
broken wall, and its newly-risen crescent, attesting the hour of eventide.
The two ships becalmed on a torpid sea, I believed to be marine
phantoms.
The fiend pinning down the thief’s pack behind him, I passed over
quickly: it was an object of terror.
So was the black, horned thing, seated aloof on a rock, surveying a distant
crowd surrounding a gallows.
Each picture told a story; mysterious often to my undeveloped
understanding and imperfect feelings, yet ever profoundly interesting; as
interesting as the tales Bessie sometimes narrated on winter evenings, when
she chanced to be in good humor; and when, having brought her ironing-
table to the nursery hearth, she allowed us to sit about it, and while she got
up Mrs. Reed’s lace frills, and crimped her night-cap borders, fed our eager
attention with passages of love and adventure taken from old fairy tales and
older ballads; or (as at a later period I discovered) from the pages of
Pamela, and Henry, Earl of Moreland.6
With Bewick on my knee, I was then happy; happy at least in my way. I
feared nothing but interruption, and that came too soon. The breakfast-room
door opened.
“Boh! Madam Mope!” cried the voice of John Reed; then he paused: he
found the room apparently empty.
“Where the dickens is she?” he continued. “Lizzy, Georgy!” (calling to
his sisters), ‘Joan is not here: tell mamma she is run out into the rain—bad
animal!”
“It is well I drew the curtain,” thought I; and I wished fervently he might
not discover my hiding-place: nor would John Reed have found it out
himself; he was not quick either of vision or conception; but Eliza just put
her head in at the door and said at once—
“She is in the window-seat, to be sure, Jack.”
 And I came out immediately; for I trembled at the idea of being dragged
forth by the said Jack.
“What do you want?” I asked, with awkward diffidence.
“Say, ‘What do you want, Master Reed?’ ” was the answer. “I want you to
come here;” and, seating himself in an arm-chair, he intimated by a gesture
that I was to approach and stand before him.
John Reed was a school-boy of fourteen years old—four years older than
I, for I was but ten—large and stout for his age, with a dingy and
unwholesome skin; thick lineaments in a spacious visage, heavy limbs and
large extremities. He gorged himself habitually at table, which made him
bilious,f and gave him a dim and bleared eye and flabby cheeks. He ought
now to have been at school; but his mamma had taken him home for a
month or two, “on account of his delicate health.” Mr. Miles, the master,
affirmed that he would do very well if he had fewer cakes and sweet-meats
sent him from home; but the mother’s heart turned from an opinion so
harsh, and inclined rather to the more refined idea that John’s sallowness
was owing to overapplication, and, perhaps, to pining after home.
John had not much affection for his mother and sisters, and an antipathy
to me. He bullied and punished me—not two or three times in the week, nor
once or twice in the day, but continually : every nerve I had feared him, and
every morsel of flesh on my bones shrunk when he came near. There were
moments when I was bewildered by the terror he inspired, because I had no
appeal whatever against either his menaces or his inflictions: the servants
did not like to offend their young master by taking my part against him, and
Mrs. Reed was blind and deaf on the subject: she never saw him strike or
heard him abuse me, though he did both now and then in her very presence
—more frequently, however, behind her back.
Habitually obedient to John, I came up to his chair. He spent some three
minutes in thrusting out his tongue at me as far as he could without
damaging the roots. I knew he would soon strike, and, while dreading the
blow, I mused on the disgusting and ugly appearance of him who would
presently deal it. I wonderif he read that notion in my face; for, all at once,
without speaking, he struck suddenly and strongly. I tottered, and, on
regaining my equilibrium, retired back a step or two from his chair.
 “That is for your impudence in answering mamma a while since,” said he,
“and for your sneaking way of getting behind curtains, and for the look you
had in your eyes two minutes since, you rat!”
Accustomed to John Reed’s abuse, I never had an idea of replying to it;
my care was how to endure the blow which would certainly follow the
insult.
“What were you doing behind the curtain?” he asked.
“I was reading.”
“Show the book.”
I returned to the window and fetched it thence.
“You have no business to take our books; you are a dependent, mamma
says; you have no money; your father left you none; you ought to beg, and
not to live here with gentlemen’s children like us, and eat the same meals
we do, and wear clothes at our mamma’s expense. Now, I’ll teach you to
rummage my bookshelves; for they are mine; all the house belongs to me,
or will do in a few years. Go and stand by the door, out of the way of the
mirror and the windows.”
I did so, not at first aware what was his intention; but when I saw him lift
and poise the book, and stand in act to hurl it, I instinctively started aside
with a cry of alarm—not soon enough, however: the volume was flung, it
hit me, and I fell, striking my head against the door and cutting it. The cut
bled, the pain was sharp: my terror had passed its climax; other feelings
succeeded.
“Wicked and cruel boy!” I said. “You are like a murderer—you are like a
slave-driver—you are like the Roman emperors!”
I had read Goldsmith’s History of Rome, and had formed my opinion of
Nero, Caligula, &c.7 Also I had drawn parallels in silence, which I never
thought thus to have declared aloud.
“What! what!” he cried, “did she say that to me? Did you hear her, Eliza
and Georgiana? Won’t I tell mamma? But first—”
He ran headlong at me; I felt him grasp my hair and my shoulder ; he had
closed with a desperate thing. I really saw in him a tyrant—a murderer. I
felt a drop or two of blood from my head trickle down my neck, and was
sensible of some pungent suffering: these sensations, for the time,
predominated over fear, and I received him in frantic sort. I don’t very well
know what I did with my hands, but he called me “Rat! rat!” and bellowed
out aloud. Aid was near him; Eliza and Georgiana had run for Mrs. Reed,
who was gone up stairs; she now came upon the scene, followed by Bessie
and the maid Abbot. We were parted; I heard the words:
“Dear! dear! What a fury to fly at Master John!”
“Did ever anybody see such a picture of passion!”
Then Mrs. Reed subjoined:
“Take her away to the red-room, and lock her in there.” Four hands were
immediately laid upon me, and I was borne up stairs.

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 Chapter II

I resisted all the way: a new thing for me, and a circumstance which greatly
strengthened the bad opinion Bessie and Miss Abbot were disposed to
entertain of me. The fact is, I was a trifle beside myself; or, rather, out of
myself, as the French would say; I was conscious that a moment’s mutiny
had already rendered me liable to strange penalties, and, like any other rebel
slave, I felt resolved, in my desperation, to go all lengths.
“Hold her arms, Miss Abbot; she’s like a mad cat.”
“For shame! for shame!” cried the lady’s maid. “What shocking conduct,
Miss Eyre, to strike a young gentleman, your benefactress’ son! your young
master!”
“Master! How is he my master? Am I a ervant?”
“No; you are less than a servant, for you do nothing for your keep. There,
sit down and think over your wickedness.”
They had got me by this time into the apartment indicated by Mrs. Reed,
and had thrust me upon a stool; my impulse was to rise from it like a spring;
their two pairs of hands arrested me instantly.
“If you don’t sit still, you must be tied down,” said Bessie. “Miss Abbot,
lend me your garters; she would break mine directly.”
Miss Abbot turned to divest a stout leg of the necessary ligature. This
preparation for bonds, and the additional ignominy it inferred, took a little
of the excitement out of me.
“Don’t take them off,” I cried; “I will not stir.”
In guaranty whereof I attached myself to my seat by my hands.
“Mind you don‘t,” said Bessie; and when she had ascertained that I was
really subsiding, she loosened her hold of me; then she and Miss Abbot
stood with folded arms, looking darkly and doubtfully on my face, as
incredulous of my sanity.
“She never did so before,” at last said Bessie, turning to the Abigail.g
“But it was always in her,” was the reply. “I’ve told missis often my
opinion about the child, and missis agreed with me. She’s an underhand
little thing; I never saw a girl of her age with so much cover.”h
Bessie answered not; but ere long, addressing me, she said,
“You ought to be aware, miss, that you are under obligations to Mrs.
Reed. She keeps you; if she were to turn you off, you would have to go to
the poor-house.”
I had nothing to say to these words; they were not new to me; my very
first recollection of existence included hints of the same kind. This reproach
of my dependence had become a vague sing-song in my ear; very painful
and crushing, but only half intelligible. Miss Abbot joined in:
“And you ought not to think yourself on an equality with the Misses Reed
and Master Reed, because missis kindly allows you to be brought up with
them. They will have a great deal of money, and you will have none; it is
your place to be humble, and to try to make yourself agreeable to them.”
“What we tell you is for your good,” added Bessie, in no harsh voice;
“you should try to be useful and pleasant, then perhaps you would have a
home here; but if you become passionate and rude, missis will send you
away, I am sure.”
“Besides,” said Miss Abbot, “God will punish her; he might strike her
dead in the midst of her tantrums, and then where would she go? Come,
Bessie, we will leave her; I wouldn’t have her heart for anything. Say your
prayers, Miss Eyre, when you are by yourself; for if you don’t repent,
something bad might be permitted to come down the chimney and fetch you
away.”
They went, shutting the door, and locking it behind them.
The bed-room was a spare chamber, very seldom slept in; I might say
never, indeed, unless when a chance influx of visitors at Gateshead Hall
rendered it necessary to turn to account all the accommodation it contained;
yet it was one of the largest and stateliest chambers in the mansion. A bed,
supported on massive pillars of mahogany, hung with curtains of deep red
damask, stood out like a tabernacle in the centre; the two large windows,
with their blinds always drawn down, were half shrouded in festoons and
falls of similar drapery; the carpet was red; the table at the foot of the bed
was covered with a crimson cloth; the walls a soft fawn-color, with a blush
of pink in it; the wardrobe, the toilet-table, the chairs, were of darkly
polished old mahogany. Out of these deep surrounding shades rose high,
and glared white, the piled-up mattresses and pillows of the bed, spread
with a snowy Marseillesi counterpane. Scarcely less prominent was an
ample, cushioned easy-chair near the head of the bed, also white, with a
footstool before it; and looking, as I thought, like a pale throne.
This room was chill, because it seldom had a fire; it was silent, because
remote from the nursery and kitchens; solemn, because it was known to be
so seldom entered. The housemaid alone came here on Saturdays, to wipe
from the mirrors and the furniture a week’s quiet dust; and Mrs. Reed,
herself, at far intervals, visited it to review the contents of a certain secret
drawer in the wardrobe, where were stored divers parchments, her jewel-
casket, and a miniature of her deceased husband; and in those last words
lies the secret of the red-room-the spell which kept it so lonely in spite of its
grandeur.
Mr. Reed had been dead nine years; it was in this chamber he breathed his
last; here he lay in state; hence his coffin was borne by undertaker’s men;
and, since that day, a sense of dreary consecration had guarded it from
frequent intrusion.
My seat, to which Bessie and the bitter Miss Abbot had left me riveted,
was a low ottoman, near the marble chimney-piece; the bed rose before me;
to my right hand there was the high, dark wardrobe, with subdued, broken
reflections varying the gloss of its panels; to my left were the muffled
windows; a great looking-glass between them repeated the vacant majesty
of the bed and room. I was not quite sure whether they had locked the door;
and when I dared move, I got up, and went to see. Alas! yes; no jail was
ever more secure. Returning, I had to cross before the looking-glass; my
fascinated glance involuntarily explored the depth it revealed. All looked
colder and darker in that visionary hollow than in reality; and the strange
little figure there gazing at me, with a white face and arms specking the
gloom, and glittering eyes of fear moving where all else was still, had the
effect of a real spirit. I thought it like one of the tiny phantoms, half fairy,
half imp, Bessie’s evening stories represented as coming up out of lone,
ferny dells,j in moors, and appearing before the eyes of belated travellers. I
returned to my stool.
Superstition was with me at that moment, but it was not yet her hour for
complete victory. My blood was still warm; the mood of the revolted slave
was still bracing me with its bitter vigor; I had to stem a rapid rush of
retrospective thought before I quailed to the dismal present.
All John Reed’s violent tyrannies, all his sisters’ proud indifference, all
his mother’s aversion, all the servants’ partiality, turned up in my disturbed
mind like a dark deposit in a turbid well. Why was I always suffering,
always brow-beaten, always accused, forever condemned? Why could I
never please? Why was it useless to try to win any one’s favor? Eliza, who
was headstrong and selfish, was respected. Georgiana, who had a spoiled
temper, a very acrid spite, a captious and insolent carriage,k was universally
indulged. Her beauty—her pink cheeks, and golden curls—seemed to give
delight to all who looked at her, and to purchase indemnity for every fault.
John, no one thwarted, much less punished, though he twisted the necks of
the pigeons, killed the little pea-chicks,l set the dogs at the sheep, stripped
the hothouse vines of their fruit, and broke the buds off the choicest plants
in the conservatory; he called his mother “old girl,” too; sometimes reviled
her for her dark skin, similar to his own; bluntly disregardedher wishes; not
unfrequently tore and spoiled her silk attire; and he was still “her own
darling.” I dared commit no fault; I strove to fulfil every duty; and I was
termed naughty and tiresome, sullen and sneaking, from morning to noon,
and from noon to night.
My head still ached and bled with the blow and fall I had received. No
one had reproved John for wantonly striking me; and because I had turned
against him to avert further irrational violence, I was loaded with general
opprobrium.
 “Unjust! unjust!” said my reason, forced by the agonizing stimulus into
precocious though transitory power; and Resolve, equally wrought up,
instigated some strange expedient to achieve escape from insupportable
oppression—as running away, or, if that could not be effected, never eating
or drinking more, and letting myself die.
What a consternation of soul was mine that dreary afternoon! How all my
brain was in tumult, and all my heart in insurrection! Yet in what darkness,
what dense ignorance, was the mental battle fought! I could not answer the
ceaseless inward question—why I thus suffered; now, at the distance of—I
will not say how many years, I see it clearly.
I was a discord in Gateshead Hall; I was like nobody there; I had nothing
in harmony with Mrs. Reed, or her children, or her chosen vassalage. If they
did not love me, in fact, as little did I love them. They were not bound to
regard with affection a thing that could not sympathize with one among
them; a heterogeneous thing, opposed to them in temperament, in capacity,
in propensities; a useless thing, incapable of serving their interest, or adding
to their pleasure; a noxious thing, cherishing the germs of indignation at
their treatment-of contempt of their judgment. I know that, had I been a
sanguine, brilliant, careless, exacting, handsome, romping child, though
equally dependent and friendless, Mrs. Reed would have endured my
presence more complacently; her children would have entertained for me
more of the cordiality of fellow-feeling; the servants would have been less
prone to make me the scape-goat of the nursery.
Daylight began to forsake the red-room. It was past four o‘clock, and the
beclouded afternoon was tending to drear twilight. I heard the rain still
beating continuously on the stair-case window, and the wind howling in the
grove behind the hall. I grew by degrees cold as a stone, and then my
courage sunk. My habitual mood of humiliation, self-doubt, forlorn
depression, fell damp on the embers of my decaying ire. All said I was
wicked, and perhaps I might be so—what thought had I been but just
conceiving, of starving myself to death! That certainly was a crime; and
was I fit to die? or was the vault under the chancel of Gateshead church an
inviting bourne?m In such vault, I had been told, did Mr. Reed lie buried;
and led by this thought to recall his idea, I dwelt on it with gathering dread.
I could not remember him, but I knew that he was my own uncle—my
mother’s brother; that he had taken me when a parentless infant to his
house; and that, in his last moments, he had required a promise of Mrs.
Reed that she would rear and maintain me as one of her own children. Mrs.
Reed probably considered she had kept this promise; and so she had, I dare
say, as well as her nature would permit her; but how could she really like an
interloper not of her race,n and unconnected with her, after her husband’s
death, by any tie? It must have been most irksome to find herself bound by
a hard-wrung pledge to stand in the stead of a parent to a strange child she
could not love, and to see an uncongenial alien permanently intruded on her
own family group.
A singular notion dawned upon me. I doubted not—had never doubted—
that, if Mr. Reed had been alive, he would have treated me kindly; and now,
as I sat looking at the white bed and overshadowed walls, occasionally,
also, turning a fascinated eye toward the dimly-gleaming mirror, I began to
recall what I had heard of dead men, troubled in their graves by the
violation of their last wishes, revisiting the earth to punish the perjured and
avenge the oppressed; and I thought Mr. Reed’s spirit, harassed by the
wrongs of his sister’s child, might quit its abode—whether in the church
vault, or in the unknown world of the departed—and rise before me in this
chamber. I wiped my tears and hushed my sobs, fearful lest any sign of
violent grief might waken a preternatural voice to comfort me, or elicit from
the gloom some haloed face bending over me with strange pity. This idea,
consolatory in theory, I felt would be terrible if realized. With all my might
I endeavored to stifle it—I endeavored to be firm. Shaking my hair from my
eyes, I lifted my head and tried to look boldly round the dark room. At this
moment a light gleamed on the wall. Was it, I asked myself, a ray from the
moon penetrating some aperture in the blind? No; moonlight was still, and
this stirred. While I gazed, it glided up to the ceiling and quivered over my
head. I can now conjecture readily that this streak of light was, in all
likelihood, a gleam from a lantern, carried by some one across the lawn; but
then, prepared as my mind was for horror, shaken as my nerves were by
agitation, I thought the swift-darting beam was a herald of some coming
vision from another world. My heart beat thick—my head grew hot; a
sound filled my ears, which I deemed the rushing of wings; something
seemed near me; I was oppressed, suffocated; endurance broke down; I
rushed to the door and shook the lock in desperate effort. Steps came
running along the outer passage; the key turned; Bessie and Abbot entered.
“Miss Eyre, are you ill?” said Bessie.
“What a dreadful noise! it went quite through me!” exclaimed Abbot.
“Take me out! Let me go into the nursery!” was my cry.
“What for? Are you hurt? Have you seen something?” again demanded
Bessie.
“Oh! I saw a light, and I thought a ghost would come.” I had now got hold
of Bessie’s hand, and she did not snatch it from me.
“She has screamed out on purpose!” declared Abbot, in some disgust.
“And what a scream! If she had been in great pain one would have excused
it, but she only wanted to bring us all here; I know her wicked, naughty
tricks.”
“What is all this?” demanded another voice peremptorily; and Mrs. Reed
came along the corridor, her cap flying wide, her gown rustling stormily.
“Abbot and Bessie, I believe I gave orders that Jane Eyre should be left in
the red-room till I came to her myself.”
“Miss Jane screamed so loud, ma‘am,” pleaded Bessie.
“Let her go,” was the only answer. “Loose Bessie’s hand, child: you
cannot succeed in getting out by these means, be assured. I abhor artifice,
particularly in children; it is my duty to show you that tricks will not
answer; you will now stay here an hour longer, and it is only on condition
of perfect submission and stillness that I shall liberate you then.”
“Oh aunt, have pity! Forgive me! I cannot endure it—let me be punished
some other way! I shall be killed if—”
“Silence! This violence is almost repulsive”; and so, no doubt, she felt it. I
was a precocious actress in her eyes; she sincerely looked on me as a
compound of virulent passions, mean spirit, and dangerous duplicity.
Bessie and Abbot having retreated, Mrs. Reed, impatient of my now
frantic anguish and wild sobs, abruptly thrust me back and locked me in,
without further parley. I heard her sweeping away; and soon after she was
gone, I suppose I had a species of fit; unconsciousness closed the scene.

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 Chapter III

The next thing I remember is, waking up with a feeling as if I had had a
frightful nightmare, and seeing before me a terrible red glare, crossed with
thick, black bars. I heard voices, too, speaking with a hollow sound, and as
if muffled by a rush of wind or water; agitation, uncertainty, and an all-
predominating sense of terror, confused my faculties. Ere long, I became
aware that some one was handling me; lifting me up, and supporting me in
a sitting posture; and that more tenderly than I had ever been raised or
upheld before. I rested my head against a pillow or an arm, and felt easy.
In five minutes more, the cloud of bewilderment dissolved. I knew quite
well that I was in my own bed, and that the red glare was the nursery fire. It
was night; a candle burned on the table. Bessie stood at the bed-foot with a
basin in her hand, and a gentleman sat in a chair near my pillow, leaning
over me.
I felt an inexpressible relief, a soothing conviction of protection and
security, when I knew that there was a stranger in the room; an individual
not belonging to Gateshead, and not related to Mrs. Reed. Turning from
Bessie, (though her presence was far less obnoxious to me than that of
Abbot, for instance, would have been), I scrutinized the face of the
gentleman; I knew him; it was Mr. Lloyd, an apothecary, sometimes called
in by Mrs. Reed when the servants were ailing; for herself and the children
she employed a physician.8 “Well, who am I?” he asked.
I pronounced his name, offering him at the same time my hand. He took
it, smiling and saying, “We shall do very well by and by.” Then he laid me
down, and addressing Bessie, charged her to be very careful that I was not
disturbed during the night. Having given some further directions, and
intimated that he should call again the next day, he departed, to my grief; I
felt so sheltered and befriended while he sat in the chair near my pillow;
and as he closed the door after him, all the room darkened and my heart
again sunk; inexpressible sadness weighed it down.
“Do you feel as if you should sleep, miss?” asked Bessie, rather softly.
Scarcely dared I answer her; for I feared the next sentence might be
rough. “I will try.”
“Would you like to drink, or could you eat anything?”
“No, thank you, Bessie.”
“Then I think I shall go to bed, for it is past twelve o‘clock; but you may
call me if you want anything in the night.”
Wonderful civility this! It emboldened me to ask a question.
“Bessie, what is the matter with me? Am I ill?”
“You fell sick, I suppose, in the red-room, with crying; you’ll be better
soon, no doubt.”
Bessie went into the housemaid’s apartment, which was near. I heard her
say:
“Sarah, come and sleep with me in the nursery; I daren’t for my life be
alone with that poor child to-night; she might die; it’s such a strange thing
she should have that fit; I wonder if she saw anything. Missis was rather too
hard.”
Sarah came back with her; they both went to bed; they were whispering
together for half an hour before they fell asleep. I caught scraps of their
conversation, from which I was able only too distinctly to infer the main
subject discussed.
“Something passed her, all dressed in white, and vanished”—“A great
black dog behind him”—“Three loud raps on the chamber door”—“A light
in the church-yard just over his grave”—&c., &c.
At last both slept; the fire and the candle went out. For me, the watches of
that long night passed in ghastly wakefulness; ear, eye, and mind were alike
strained by dread; such dread as children only can feel.
No severe or prolonged bodily illness followed this incident of the red-
room: it only gave my nerves a shock, of which I feel the reverberation to
this day. Yes, Mrs. Reed, to you I owe some fearful pangs of mental
suffering. But I ought to forgive you, for you knew not what you did: while
rending my heart-strings, you thought you were only uprooting my bad
propensities.
Next day, by noon, I was up and dressed, and sat wrapped in a shawl by
the nursery hearth. I felt physically weak and broken down; but my worst
ailment was an unutterable wretchedness of mind: a wretchedness which
kept drawing from me silent tears; no sooner had I wiped one salt drop from
my cheek than another followed. Yet, I thought, I ought to have been happy,
for none of the Reeds were there; they were all gone out in the carriage with
their mamma. Abbot, too, was sewing in another room, and Bessie, as she
moved hither and thither, putting away toys and arranging drawers,
addressed to me every now and then a word of unwonted kindness. This
state of things should have been to me a paradise of peace, accustomed as I
was to a life of ceaseless reprimand and thankless fagging;o but, in fact, my
racked nerves were now in such a state that no calm could soothe, and no
pleasure excite them agreeably.
Bessie had been down into the kitchen, and she brought up with her a tart
on a certain brightly-painted china plate, whose bird of paradise, nestling in
a wreath of convolvuli and rose-buds, had been wont to stir in me a most
enthusiastic sense of admiration; and which plate I had often petitioned to
be allowed to take in my hand in order to examine it more closely, but had
always hitherto been deemed unworthy of such a privilege. This precious
vessel was now placed on my knee, and I was cordially invited to eat the
circlet of delicate pastry upon it. Vain favor; coming, like most other favors,
long deferred and often wished for, too late! I could not eat the tart; and the
plumage of the bird, the tints of the flowers, seemed strangely faded. I put
both plate and tart away. Bessie asked if I would have a book: the word
book acted as a transient stimulus, and I begged her to fetch Gulliver’s
Travels from the library.9 This book I had again and again perused with
delight; I considered it a narrative of facts, and discovered in it a vein of
interest deeper than what I found in fairy tales; for as to the elves, having
sought them in vain among fox-glove leaves and bells, under mushrooms
and beneath the ground-ivy mantling old wall-nooks, I had at length made
up my mind to the sad truth that they were all gone out of England to some
savage country, where the woods were wilder and thicker, and the
population more scant:10 whereas Lilliput and Brobdignag being, in my
creed, solid parts of the earth’s surface, I doubted not that I might one day,
by taking a long voyage, see with my own eyes the little fields, houses, and
trees, the diminutive people, the tiny cows, sheep, and birds, of the one
realm; and the corn-fields forest-high, the mighty mastiffs, the monster cats,
the tower-like men and women, of the other. Yet, when this cherished
volume was now placed in my hand—when I turned over its leaves, and
sought in its marvellous pictures the charm I had, till now, never failed to
find—all was eerie and dreary; the giants were gaunt goblins, the pigmies
malevolent and fearful imps, Gulliver a most desolate wanderer in most
dread and dangerous regions. I closed the book, which I dared no longer
peruse, and put it on the table, beside the untasted tart.
Bessie had now finished dusting and tidying the room, and, having
washed her hands, she opened a certain little drawer, full of splendid shreds
of silk and satin, and began making a new bonnet for Georgiana’s doll.
Meantime she sang: her song was,—
“In the days when we went gipsying, A long time ago. ”
I had often heard the song before, and always with lively delight; for
Bessie had a sweet voice—at least, I thought so. But now, though her voice
was still sweet, I found in its melody an indescribable sadness. Sometimes,
preoccupied with her work, she sang the refrain very low, very lingeringly;
“A long time ago” came out like the saddest cadence of a funeral hymn. She
passed into another ballad, this time a really doleful one:
“My feet they are sore, and my limbs they are weary;
Long is the way, and the mountains are wild;
Soon will the twilight close moonless and dreary
Over the path of the poor orphan child.
Why did they send me so far and so lonely,
Up where the moors spread and gray rocks are piled?
Men are hard-hearted, and kind angels only
Watch o‘er the steps of a poor orphan child.
 Yet distant and soft the night breeze is blowing,
Clouds there are none, and clear stars beam mild;
God, in his mercy, protection is showing,
Comfort and hope to the poor orphan child.

Even should I fall o‘er the broken bridge passing,

Or stray in the marshes, by false lights beguiled,
Still will my Father, with promise and blessing,
Take to his bosom the poor orphan child.

There is a thought that for strength should avail me,

Though both of shelter and kindred despoiled;
Heaven is a home, and a rest will not fail me;
God is a friend to the poor orphan child. “11
“Come, Miss Jane, don’t cry,” said Bessie, as she finished. She might as
well have said to the fire, “Don’t burn!” But how could she divine the
morbid suffering to which I was a prey? In the course of the morning Mr.
Lloyd came again.
“What, already up!” said he, as he entered the nursery. “Well, nurse, how
is she?”
Bessie answered that I was doing very well.
“Then she ought to look more cheerful. Come here, Miss Jane; your name
is Jane, is it not?”
“Yes, sir, Jane Eyre.”
“Well, you have been crying, Miss Jane Eyre; can you tell me what about?
Have you any pain?”
“No, sir.”
“Oh! I dare say she is crying because she could not go out with missis in
the carriage,” interposed Bessie.
“Surely not! why, she is too old for such pettishness.”
 I thought so too; and my self-esteem being wounded by the false charge, I
answered promptly, “I never cried for such a thing in my life: I hate going
out in the carriage. I cry because I am miserable.”
“Oh, fie, miss!” said Bessie.
The good apothecary appeared a little puzzled. I was standing before him;
he fixed his eyes on me very steadily: his eyes were small and gray; not
very bright, but I dare say I should think them shrewd now: he had a hard-
featured yet good-natured looking face. Having considered me at leisure, he
said—
“What made you ill yesterday?”
“She had a fall,” said Bessie, again putting in her word.
“Fall! why, that is like a baby again! Can’t she manage to walk at her age?
She must be eight or nine years old.”
“I was knocked down,” was the blunt explanation jerked out of me by
another pang of mortified pride: “but that did not make me ill,” I added,
while Mr. Lloyd helped himself to a pinch of snuff.
As he was returning the box to his waistcoat pocket, a loud bell rung for
the servant’s dinner; he knew what it was. “That’s for you, nurse,” said he;
“you can go down; I’ll give Miss Jane a lecture till you come back.”
Bessie would rather have stayed; but she was obliged to go, because
punctuality at meals was rigidly enforced at Gateshead Hall.
“The fall did not make you ill? what did, then?” pursued Mr. Lloyd, when
Bessie was gone.
“I was shut up in a room where there is a ghost, till after dark.”
I saw Mr. Lloyd smile and frown at the same time. “Ghost! What, you are
a baby after all! You are afraid of ghosts?”
“Of Mr. Reed’s ghost I am: he died in that room, and was laid out there.
Neither Bessie nor any one else will go into it at night, if they can help it:
and it was cruel to shut me up alone, without a candle—so cruel that I think
I shall never forget it.”
 “Nonsense! And is it that makes you so miserable? Are you afraid now, in
daylight?”
“No; but night will come again before long; and, besides, I am unhappy,
very unhappy, for other things.”
“What other things? Can you tell me some of them?”
How much I wished to reply fully to this question! How difficult it was to
frame any answer! Children can feel, but they cannot analyze their feelings;
and if the analysis is partially effected in thought, they know not how to
express the result of the process in words. Fearful, however, of losing this
first and only opportunity of relieving my grief by imparting it, I, after a
disturbed pause, contrived to frame a meagre, though, as far as it went, true
response.
“For one thing, I have no father or mother, brothers or sisters.”
“You have a kind aunt and cousins.”
Again I paused; then bunglingly enounced:
“But John Reed knocked me down, and my aunt shut me up in the red-
room.”
Mr. Lloyd a second time produced his snuff-box.
“Don’t you think Gateshead Hall a very beautiful house?” asked he. “Are
you not very thankful to have such a fine place to live at?”
“It is not my house, sir; and Abbot says I have less right to be here than a
servant.”
“Pooh! you can’t be silly enough to wish to leave such a splendid place?”
“If I had anywhere else to go, I should be glad to leave it; but I can never
get away from Gateshead till I am a woman.”
“Perhaps you may—who knows? Have you any relations besides Mrs.
Reed?”
“I think not, sir.”
“None belonging to your father?”
“I don’t know. I asked Aunt Reed once, and she said possibly I might
have some poor, low relations called Eyre; but she knew nothing about
them.”
“If you had such, would you like to go to them?”
I reflected. Poverty looks grim to grown people; still more so to children:
they have not much idea of industrious, working, respectable poverty; they
think of the word only as connected with ragged clothes, scanty food,
fireless grates, rude manners, and debasing vices; poverty for me was
synonymous with degradation.
“No; I should not like to belong to poor people,” was my reply.
“Not even if they were kind to you?”
I shook my head. I could not see how poor people had the means of being
kind; and then to learn to speak like them, to adopt their manners, to be
uneducated, to grow up like one of the poor women I saw sometimes
nursing their children or washing their clothes at the cottage doors of the
village of Gateshead; no, I was not heroic enough to purchase liberty at the
price of caste.
“But are your relatives so very poor? Are they working people?”
“I cannot tell. Aunt Reed says if I have any, they must be a beggarly set; I
should not like to go a-begging.”
“Would you like to go to school?”
Again I reflected. I scarcely knew what school was. Bessie sometimes
spoke of it as a place where young ladies sat in the stocks,p wore back-
boards,q and were expected to be exceedingly genteel and precise; John
Reed hated his school, and abused his master; but John Reed’s tastes were
no rule for mine, and if Bessie’s accounts of school-discipline (gathered
from the young ladies of a family where she had lived before coming to
Gateshead) were somewhat appalling, her details of certain
accomplishments attained by these same young ladies were, I thought,
equally attractive. She boasted of beautiful paintings of landscapes and
flowers by them executed; of songs they could sing, and pieces they could
play, of purses they could net, of French books they could translate; till my
spirit was moved to emulation as I listened. Besides, school would be a
complete change; it implied a long journey, an entire separation from
Gateshead, an entrance into a new life.
“I should, indeed, like to go to school,” was the audible conclusion of my
musings.
“Well, well; who knows what may happen?” said Mr. Lloyd, as he got up.
“The child ought to have change of air and scene,” he added, speaking to
himself; “nerves not in a good state.”
Bessie now returned; at the same moment the carriage was heard rolling
up the gravel-walk.
“Is that your mistress, nurse?” asked Mr. Lloyd: “I should like to speak to
her before I go.”
Bessie invited him to walk into the breakfast-room, and led the way out.
In the interview which followed between him and Mrs. Reed, I presume,
from after-occurrences, that the apothecary ventured to recommend my
being sent to school; and the recommendation was no doubt readily enough
adopted; for, as Abbot said, in discussing the subject with Bessie, when
both sat sewing in the nursery one night, after I was in bed, and, as they
thought, asleep, “Missis was, she dared say, glad enough to get rid of such a
tiresome, ill-conditioned child, who always looked as if she were watching
everybody, and scheming plots underhand.” Abbot, I think, gave me credit
for being a sort of infantine Guy Fawkes.
On that same occasion I learned, for the first time, from Miss Abbot’s
communications to Bessie, that my father had been a poor clergyman; that
my mother had married him against the wishes of her friends, who
considered the match beneath her; that my grandfather Reed was so irritated
at her disobedience, he cut her off without a shilling; that after my mother
and father had been married a year, the latter caught the typhus fever while
visiting among the poor of a large manufacturing town where his curacy
was situated, and where that disease was then prevalent; that my mother
took the infection from him, and both died within a month of each other.
Bessie, when she heard this narrative, sighed and said, “Poor Miss Jane is
to be pitied, too, Abbot.”
 “Yes,” responded Abbot; “if she were a nice, pretty child, one might
compassionate her forlornness; but one really cannot care for such a little
toad as that.”
“Not a great deal, to be sure,” agreed Bessie; “at any rate, a beauty like
Miss Georgiana would be more moving in the same condition.”
“Yes, I dote on Miss Georgiana!” cried the fervent Abbot. “Little darling!
with her long curls and her blue eyes, and such a sweet color as she has; just
as if she were painted! Bessie, I could fancy a Welsh rabbit for supper.”
“So could I—with a roast onion. Come, we’ll go down.” They went.

OceanofPDF.com
 Chapter IV

From my discourse with Mr. Lloyd, and from the above-reported

conference between Bessie and Abbot, I gathered enough of hope to suffice
as a motive for wishing to get well: a change seemed near—I desired and
waited it in silence. It tarried, however; days and weeks passed; I had
regained my normal state of health, but no new allusion was made to the
subject over which I brooded. Mrs. Reed surveyed me at times with a
severe eye, but seldom addressed me. Since my illness she had drawn a
more marked line of separation than ever between me and her own children;
appointing me a small closetr to sleep in by myself, condemning me to take
my meals alone, and pass all my time in the nursery, while my cousins were
constantly in the drawing-room. Not a hint, however, did she drop about
sending me to school; still I felt an instinctive certainty that she would not
long endure me under the same roof with her; for her glance, now more
than ever, when turned on me, expressed an insuperable and rooted
aversion.
Eliza and Georgiana, evidently acting according to orders, spoke to me as
little as possible. John thrust his tongue in his cheek whenever he saw me,
and once attempted chastisement; but as I instantly turned against him,
roused by the same sentiment of deep ire and desperate revolt which had
stirred my corruption s before, he thought it better to desist, and ran from
me uttering execrations and vowing I had burst his nose. I had indeed
levelled at that prominent feature as hard a blow as my knuckles could
inflict; and when I saw that either that or my look daunted him, I had the
greatest inclination to follow up my advantageto purpose; but he was
already with his mamma. I heard him in a blubbering tone commence the
tale of how “that nasty Jane Eyre” had flown at him like a mad cat—: he
was stopped rather harshly—
 “Don’t talk to me about her, John; I told you not to go near her; she is not
worthy of notice; I do not choose that either you or your sisters should
associate with her.”
Here, leaning over the banister, I cried out suddenly and without at all
deliberating on my words,
“They are not fit to associate with me.”
Mrs. Reed was rather a stout woman, but, on hearing this strange and
audacious declaration, she ran nimbly up the stair, swept me like a
whirlwind into the nursery, and crushing me down on the edge of my crib,t
dared me in an emphatic voice to rise from that place or utter one syllable
during the remainder of the day.
“What would Uncle Reed say to you if he were alive?” was my scarcely
voluntary demand. I say scarcely voluntary, for it seemed as if my tongue
pronounced words without my will consenting to their utterance; something
spoke out of me over which I had no control.
“What?” said Mrs. Reed, under her breath. Her usually cold, composed
gray eye became troubled with a look like fear; she took her hand from my
arm and gazed at me as if she really did not know whether I were child or
fiend. I was now in for it.
“My Uncle Reed is in heaven, and can see all you do and think; and so
can papa and mamma; they know how you shut me up all day long, and
how you wish me dead.”
Mrs. Reed soon rallied her spirits: she shook me most soundly; she
boxedu both my ears, and then left me without a word. Bessie supplied the
hiatus by a homily of an hour’s length, in which she proved beyond a doubt
that I was the most wicked and abandoned child ever reared under a roof. I
half believed her; for I felt indeed only bad feelings surging in my breast.
November, December, and half of January passed away. Christmas and
the New Year had been celebrated at Gateshead with the usual festive cheer;
presents had been interchanged, dinners and evening parties given. From
every enjoyment I was, of course, excluded: my share of the gayety
consisted in witnessing the daily apparelling of Eliza and Georgiana, and
seeing them descend to the drawing-room, dressed out in thin muslin frocks
and scarlet sashes, with hair elaborately ringleted; and afterward, in
listening to the sound of the piano or the harp played below, to the passing
to and fro of the butler and footmen, to the jingling of glass and china as
refreshments were handed, to the broken hum of conversation as the
drawing-room doors opened and closed. When tired of this occupation, I
would retire from the stair-head to the solitary and silent nursery: there,
though somewhat sad, I was not miserable. To speak truth, I had not the
least wish to go into company, for in company I was very rarely noticed;
and if Bessie had but been kind and companionable, I should have deemed
it a treat to spend the evenings quietly with her, instead of passing them
under the formidable eye of Mrs. Reed, in a room full of ladies and
gentlemen. But Bessie, as soon as she had dressed her young ladies, used to
take herself off to the lively regions of the kitchen and housekeeper’s room,
generally bearing the candle along with her. I then sat with my doll on my
knee, till the fire got low, glancing round occasionally to make sure that
nothing worse than myself haunted the shadowy room; and when the
embers sunk to a dull red, I undressed hastily, tugging at knots and strings
as I best might, and sought shelter from cold and darkness in my crib. To
this crib I always took my doll. Human beings must love something, and, in
the dearth of worthier objects of affection, I contrived to find a pleasure in
loving and cherishing a faded graven image, shabby as a miniature scare-
crow. It puzzles me now to remember with what absurd sincerity I doted on
this wooden toy, half fancying it alive and capable of sensation. I could not
sleep unless it was folded in my night-gown; and when it lay there safe and
warm, I was comparatively happy, believing it happy likewise.
Long did the hours seem while I waited the departure of the company, and
listened for the sound of Bessie’s step on the stairs. Sometimes she would
come up in the interval to seek her thimble or her scissors, or perhaps to
bring me something by way of supper—a bun or a cheese-cake; then she
would sit on the bed while I ate it, and when I had finished she would tuck
the clothes round me; and twice she kissed me, and said, “Good night, Miss
Jane.” When thus gentle, Bessie seemed to me the best, prettiest, kindest
being in the world; and I wished most intensely that she would always be so
pleasant and amiable, and never push me about, or scold, or task me
unreasonably, as she was too often wont to do. Bessie Lee must, I think,
have been a girl of good natural capacity; for she was smart in all she did,
and had a remarkable knack of narrative: so, at least, I judge from the
impression made on me by her nursery tales. She was pretty, too, if my
recollections of her face and person are correct. I remember her as a slim
young woman, with black hair, dark eyes, very nice features, and good,
clear complexion; but she had a capricious and hasty temper, and indifferent
ideas of principle or justice: still, such as she was, I preferred her to any one
else at Gateshead Hall.
It was the fifteenth of January, about nine o‘clock in the morning: Bessie
was gone down to breakfast; my cousins had not yet been summoned to
their mamma; Eliza was putting on her bonnet and warm garden-coat to go
and feed her poultry, an occupation of which she was fond; and not less so
of selling the eggs to the housekeeper and hoarding up the money she thus
obtained. She had a turn for traffic,v and a marked propensity for saving,
shown not only in the vending of eggs and chickens, but also in driving
hard bargains with the gardener about flower-roots, seeds, and slips of
plants; that functionary having orders from Mrs. Reed to buy of his young
lady all the products of her parterrew she wished to sell; and Eliza would
have sold the hair off her head if she could have made a handsome profit
thereby. As to her money, she first secreted it in odd corners, wrapped in a
rag or an old curl-paper; but, some of these hoards having been discovered
by the housemaid, Eliza, fearful of one day losing her valued treasure,
consented to intrust it to her mother, at a usurious rate of interest—fifty or
sixty per cent—which interest she exacted every quarter, keeping her
accounts in a little book with anxious accuracy.
Georgiana sat on a high stool, dressing her hair at the glass, and
interweaving her curls with artificial flowers and faded feathers, of which
she had found a store in a drawer in the attic. I was making my bed, having
received strict orders from Bessie to get it arranged before she returned, (for
Bessie now frequently employed me as a sort of under nursery maid, to tidy
the room, dust the chairs, &c.). Having spread the quilt and folded my
night-dress, I went to the window-seat to put in order some picture-books
and doll’s house furniture scattered there; an abrupt command from
Georgiana to let her playthings alone (for the tiny chairs and mirrors, the
fairy plates and cups, were her property) stopped my proceedings; and then,
for lack of other occupation, I fell to breathing on the frost-flowers with
which the window was fretted, and thus clearing a space in the glass
through which I might look out on the grounds, where all was still and
petrified under the influence of a hard frost.
From this window were visible the porter’s lodge and the carriage road,
and just as I had dissolved so much of the silver-white foliage veiling the
panes as left room to look out, I saw the gates thrown open and a carriage
roll through. I watched it ascending the drive with indifference: carriages
often came to Gateshead, but none ever brought visitors in whom I was
interested; it stopped in front of the house, the door-bell rung loudly, the
new-comer was admitted. All this being nothing to me, my vacant attention
soon found livelier attraction in the spectacle of a little hungry robin, which
came and chirped on the twigs of the leafless cherry-tree nailed against the
wall near the casement. The remains of my breakfast of bread and milk
stood on the table, and having crumbled a morsel of roll, I was tugging at
the sash to put out the crumbs on the window-sill, when Bessie came
running up stairs into the nursery.
“Miss Jane, take off your pinafore: what are you doing there? Have you
washed your hands and face this morning?” I gave another tug before I
answered, for I wanted the bird to be secure of its bread: the sash yielded; I
scattered the crumbs, some on the stone sill, some on the cherry-tree bough;
then, closing the window, I replied:
“No, Bessie; I have only just finished dusting.”
“Troublesome, careless child! and what are you doing now? You look
quite red, as if you had been about some mischief: what were you opening
the window for?”
I was spared the trouble of answering, for Bessie seemed in too great a
hurry to listen to explanations; she hauled me to the washstand, inflicted a
merciless, but, happily, brief scrub on my face and hands with soap, water,
and a coarse towel; disciplined my head with a bristly brush, denuded me of
my pinafore, and then hurrying me to the top of the stairs, bid me go down
directly, as I was wanted in the breakfast-room.
 I would have asked who wanted me; I would have demanded if Mrs. Reed
was there; but Bessie was already gone, and had closed the nursery door
upon me; I slowly descended. For nearly three months I had never been
called to Mrs. Reed’s presence: restricted so long to the nursery, the
breakfast, dining, and drawing-rooms were become for me awful regions,
on which it dismayed me to intrude.
I now stood in the empty hall; before me was the breakfast-room door,
and I stopped, intimidated and trembling. What a miserable little poltroonx
had fear, engendered of unjust punishment, made of me in those days! I
feared to return to the nursery; I feared to go forward to the parlor; ten
minutes I stood in agitated hesitation; the vehement ringing of the
breakfast-room bell decided me; I must enter.
“Who could want me?” I asked inwardly, as with both hands I turned the
stiff door-handle, which, for a second or two, resisted my efforts. “What
should I see besides Aunt Reed in the apartment—a man, or a woman?” The
handle turned, the door unclosed, and passing through and courtesying low,
I looked up at—a black pillar!—such, at least, appeared to me, at first sight,
the straight, narrow, sable-clad shape standing erect on the rug; the grim
face at the top was like a carved mask, placed above the shaft by way of
capital.
Mrs. Reed occupied her usual seat by the fireside; she made a signal to
me to approach; I did so, and she introduced me to the stony stranger with
these words: “This is the little girl respecting whom I applied to you.”
He, for it was a man, turned his head slowly toward where I stood, and
having examined me with the two inquisitive-looking gray eyes which
twinkled under a pair of bushy brows, said, solemnly, and in a bass voice:
“Her size is small; what is her age?”
“Ten years.”
“So much?” was the doubtful answer; and he prolonged his scrutiny some
minutes. Presently he addressed me.
“Your name, little girl?”
“Jane Eyre, sir.”
 In uttering these words I looked up; he seemed to me a tall gentleman; but
then I was very little; his features were large, and they and all the lines of
his frame were equally harsh and prim.
“Well, Jane Eyre, and are you a good child?”
Impossible to reply to this in the affirmative—my little world held a
contrary opinion—I was silent. Mrs. Reed answered for me by an
expressive shake of the head, adding soon, “Perhaps the less said on that
subject the better, Mr. Brocklehurst.”
“Sorry indeed to hear it! she and I must have some talk;” and, bending
from the perpendicular, he installed his person in the arm-chair, opposite
Mrs. Reed’s. “Come here,” he said.
I stepped across the rug; he placed me square and straight before him.
What a face he had, now that it was almost on a level with mine! what a
great nose! and what a mouth! and what large, prominent teeth!
“No sight so sad as that of a naughty child,” he began, “especially a
naughty little girl. Do you know where the wicked go after death?”
“They go to hell,” was my ready and orthodox answer.
“And what is hell? Can you tell me that?”
“A pit full of fire.”
“And should you like to fall into that pit, and to be burning there
forever?”
“No, sir.”
“What must you do to avoid it?”
I deliberated a moment. My answer, when it did come, was objectionable.
“I must keep in good health, and not die.”
“How can you keep in good health? Children younger than you die daily.
I buried a little child of five years old, only a day or two since—a good little
child, whose soul is now in heaven. It is to be feared the same could not be
said of you, were you to be called hence.”
Not being in a condition to remove his doubt, I only cast my eyes down
on the two large feet planted on the rug, and sighed, wishing myself far
enough away.
“I hope that sigh is from the heart, and that you repent ever having been
the occasion of discomfort to your excellent benefactress.”
“Benefactress! benefactress!” said I, inwardly. “They all call Mrs. Reed
my benefactress; if so, a benefactress is a disagreeable thing.”
“Do you say your prayers night and morning?” continued my interrogator.
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you read your Bible?”
“Sometimes.”
“With pleasure? Are you fond of it?”
“I like Revelations, and the book of Daniel, and Genesis, and Samuel, and
a little bit of Exodus, and some parts of Kings and Chronicles, and Job and
Jonah.”
“And the Psalms? I hope you like them.”
“No, sir.”
“No! oh, shocking! I have a little boy younger than you, who knows six
psalms by heart; and when you ask him which he would rather have, a
gingerbread-nut to eat, or a verse of a psalm to learn, he says: ‘Oh, the verse
of a psalm! Angels sing psalms,’ says he; ‘I wish to be a little angel here
below;’ he then gets two nuts in recompense for his infant piety.”
“Psalms are not interesting,” I remarked.
“That proves you have a wicked heart; and you must pray to God to
change it—to give you a new and a clean one—to take away your heart of
stone and give you a heart of flesh."12
I was about to propound a question, touching the manner in which that
operation of changing my heart was to be performed, when Mrs. Reed
interposed, telling me to sit down; she then proceeded to carry on the
conversation herself.
“Mr. Brocklehurst, I believe I intimated, in the letter which I wrote to you
three weeks ago, that this little girl has not quite the character and
disposition I could wish. Should you admit her into Lowood school, I
should be glad if the superintendent and teachers were requested to keep a
strict eye on her, and, above all, to guard against her worst fault—a
tendency to deceit. I mention this in your hearing, Jane, that you may not
attempt to impose on Mr. Brocklehurst.”
Well might I dread—well might I dislike Mrs. Reed, for it was her nature
to wound me cruelly. Never was I happy in her presence. However carefully
I obeyed, however strenuously I strove to please her, my efforts were still
repulsed and repaid by such sentences as the above. Now, uttered before a
stranger, the accusation cut me to the heart. I dimly perceived that she was
already obliterating hope from the new phase of existence which she
destined me to enter; I felt, though I could not have expressed the feeling,
that she was sowing aversion and unkindness along my future path. I saw
myself transformed, under Mr. Brocklehurst’s eye, into an artful, noxious
child, and what could I do to remedy the injury?
“Nothing, indeed,” thought I, as I struggled to repress a sob, and hastily
wiped away some tears, the impotent evidences of my anguish.
“Deceit is, indeed, a sad fault in a child,” said Mr. Brocklehurst; “it is akin
to falsehood, and all liars will have their portion in the lake burning with
fire and brimstone. She shall, however, be watched, Mrs. Reed. I will speak
to Miss Temple and the teachers.”
“I should wish her to be brought up in a manner suiting her prospects,”
continued my benefactress; “to be made useful, to be kept humble. As for
the vacations, she will, with your permission, spend them always at
Lowood.”
“Your decisions are perfectly judicious, madam,” returned Mr.
Brocklehurst. “Humility is a Christian grace, and one peculiarly appropriate
to the pupils of Lowood. I, therefore, direct that especial care shall be
bestowed on its cultivation among them. I have studied how best to mortify
in them the worldly sentiment of pride, and, only the other day, I had a
pleasing proof of my success. My second daughter, Augusta, went with her
mamma to visit the school, and on her return she exclaimed: ‘Oh, dear
papa, how quiet and plain all the girls at Lowood look! with their hair
combed behind their ears, and their long pinafores, and those little Hollandy
pockets outside their frocks—they are almost all like poor people’s
children!’ and, said she, ‘they looked at my dress and mamma’s as if they
had never seen a silk gown before.’ ”
“This is the state of things I quite approve,” returned Mrs. Reed. “Had I
sought all England over, I could scarcely have found a system more exactly
fitting a child like Jane Eyre. Consistency, my dear Mr. Brocklehurst; I
advocate consistency in all things.”
“Consistency, madam, is the first of Christian duties; and it has been
observed in every arrangement connected with the establishment of
Lowood: plain fare, simple attire, unsophisticated accommodations, hardy
and active habits; such is the order of the day in the house and its
inhabitants.”
“Quite right, sir. I may, then, depend upon this child being received as a
pupil at Lowood, and there being trained in conformity to her position and
prospects?”
“Madam, you may; she shall be placed in that nursery of chosen plants;
and I trust she will show herself grateful to the inestimable privilege of her
election.”
“I will send her, then, as soon as possible, Mr. Brocklehurst; for, I assure
you, I feel anxious to be relieved of a responsibility that was becoming too
irksome.”
“No doubt, no doubt, madam; and now I wish you good morning. I shall
return to Brocklehurst Hall in the course of a week or two; my good friend,
the archdeacon, will not permit me to leave him sooner. I shall send Miss
Temple notice that she is to expect a new girl, so that there will be no
difficulty about receiving her. Good-by.”
“Good-by, Mr. Brocklehurst; remember me to Mrs. and Miss
Brocklehurst, and to Augusta and Theodore, and Master Brough ton
Brocklehurst.”
“I will, madam. Little girl, here is a book entitled the Child’s Guide:13
read it, with prayer, especially that part containing an ‘account of the
awfully sudden death of Martha G——, a naughty child, addicted to
falsehood and deceit.’ ”
 With these words, Mr. Brocklehurst put into my hand a thin pamphlet
sewn in a cover; and having rung for his carriage, he departed.
Mrs. Reed and I were left alone; some minutes passed in silence; she was
sewing, I was watching her. Mrs. Reed might be, at that time, some six or
seven-and-thirty; she was a woman of robust frame, square-shouldered and
strong-limbed, not tall, and, though stout, not obese. She had a somewhat
large face, the under-jaw being much developed and very solid; her brow
was low, her chin large and prominent, mouth and nose sufficiently regular;
under her light eyebrows glimmered an eye devoid of truth; her skin was
dark and opaque, her hair nearly flaxen; her constitution was sound as a
bell; illness never came near her; she was an exact, clever manager; her
household and tenantry were thoroughly under her control; her children
only, at times defied her authority and laughed it to scorn; she dressed well,
and had a presence and port calculated to set off handsome attire.
Sitting on a low stool, a few yards from her arm-chair, I examined her
figure; I perused her features. In my hand I held the tract, containing the
sudden death of the liar; to which narrative my attention had been pointed
as to an appropriate warning. What had just passed—what Mrs. Reed had
said concerning me to Mr. Brocklehurst—the whole tenor of their
conversation was recent, raw, and stinging in my mind; I had felt every
word as acutely as I had heard it plainly; and a passion of resentment
fermented now within me.
Mrs. Reed looked up from her work; her eye settled on mine, her fingers
at the same time suspended their nimble movements.
“Go out of the room; return to the nursery,” was her mandate. My look or
something else must have struck her as offensive, for she spoke with
extreme, though suppressed, irritation. I got up, I went to the door, I came
back again; I walked to the window, across the room, and then close up to
her.
Speak I must; I had been trodden on severely, and must turn; but how?
What strength had I to dart retaliation at my antagonist? I gathered my
energies and launched them in this blunt sentence:
“I am not deceitful; if I were, I should say I loved you; but I declare I do
not love you; I dislike you the worst of anybody in the world except John
Reed; and this book about the liar, you may give it to your girl, Georgiana,
for it is she who tells lies, and not I.”
Mrs. Reed’s hands still lay on her work inactive; her eye of ice continued
to dwell freezing on mine:
“What more have you to say?” she asked, rather in the tone in which a
person might address an opponent of adult age than such as is ordinarily
used to a child.
That eye of hers, that voice, stirred every antipathy I had. Shaking from
head to foot, thrilled with ungovernable excitement, I continued:
“I am glad you are no relation of mine; I will never call you aunt again as
long as I live; I will never come to see you when I am grown up; and if any
one asks me how I liked you, and how you treated me, I will say the very
thought of you makes me sick, and that you treated me with miserable
cruelty.”
“How dare you affirm that, Jane Eyre?”
“How dare I, Mrs. Reed? How dare I? Because it is the truth. You think I
have no feelings, and that I can live without one bit of love or kindness; but
I cannot live so; and you have no pity. I shall remember how you thrust me
back—roughly and violently thrust me back into the red-room, and locked
me up there—to my dying day; though I was in agony; though I cried out,
while suffocating with distress, ‘Have mercy! Have mercy, Aunt Reed!’
And that punishment you made me suffer because your wicked boy struck
me—knocked me down for nothing. I will tell anybody who asks me
questions, this exact tale. People think you a good woman; but you are bad-
hard-hearted. You are deceitful!”
Ere I had finished this reply my soul began to expand, to exult, with the
strangest sense of freedom, of triumph, I ever felt. It seemed as if an
invisible bond had burst, and that I had struggled out into unhoped-for
liberty. Not without cause was this sentiment; Mrs. Reed looked frightened;
her work had slipped from her knee; she was lifting up her hands, rocking
herself to and fro, and even twisting her face as if she would cry.
“Jane, you are under a mistake; what is the matter with you? Why do you
tremble so violently? Would you like to drink some water?”
 “No, Mrs. Reed.”
“Is there anything else you wish for, Jane? I assure I desire to be your
friend.”
“Not you. You told Mr. Brocklehurst I had a bad character, a deceitful
disposition; and I’ll let everybody at Lowood know what you are, and what
you have done.”
“Jane, you don’t understand these things; children must be corrected for
their faults.”
“Deceit is not my fault!” I cried out in a savage, high voice.
“But you are passionate, Jane; that you must allow; and now return to the
nursery, there’s a dear, and lie down a little.”
“I am not your dear; I cannot lie down; send me to school soon, Mrs.
Reed, for I hate to live here.”
“I will indeed send her to school soon,” murmured Mrs. Reed, sotto voce;
and gathering up her work, she abruptly quitted the apartment.
I was left there alone, winner of the field. It was the hardest battle I had
fought, and the first victory I had gained. I stood awhile on the rug, where
Mr. Brocklehurst had stood, and I enjoyed my conqueror’s solitude. First, I
smiled to myself and felt elate; but this fierce pleasure subsided in me as
fast as did the accelerated throb of my pulses. A child cannot quarrel with
its elders, as I had done; cannot give its furious feelings uncontrolled play,
as I had given mine, without experiencing afterward the pang of remorse
and the chill of reaction. A ridge of lighted heath, alive, glancing,
devouring, would have been a meet emblem of my mind when I accused
and menaced Mrs. Reed; the same ridge, black and blasted after the flames
are dead, would have represented as metely my subsequent condition, when
half an hour’s silence and reflection had shown me the madness of my
conduct, and the dreariness of my hated and hating position.
Something of vengeance I had tasted for the first time; as aromatic wine it
seemed on swallowing, warm and racy;z its after-flavor, metallic and
corroding, gave me a sensation as if I had been poisoned. Willingly would I
now have gone and asked Mrs. Reed’s pardon; but I knew, partly from
experience and partly from instinct, that was the way to make her repulse
me with double scorn, thereby reëxciting every turbulent impulse of my
nature.
I would fain exercise some better faculty than that of fierce speaking; fain
find some nourishment for some less fiendish feeling than that of sombre
indignation. I took a book, some Arabian tales; I sat down and endeavored
to read. I could make no sense of the subject; my own thoughts swam
always between me and the page I had always found fascinating. I opened a
glass door in the breakfast-room; the shrubbery was quite still; the black
frost reigned, unbroken by sun or breeze, through the grounds. I covered my
head and arms with the skirt of my frock, and went out to walk in a part of
the plantation which was quite sequestered; but I found no pleasure in the
silent trees, the fallen fir-cones, the congealed relics of autumn, russet
leaves, swept by past winds in heaps, and now stiffened together. I leaned
against a gate, and looked into an empty field, where no sheep were
feeding, where the short grass was nipped and blanched. It was a very gray
day; a most opaque sky, “onding on snaw,”aa canopied all; thence flakes
fell at intervals, which settled on the hard path and on the hoary lea without
melting. I stood, a wretched child enough, whispering to myself over and
over again, “What shall I do? what shall I do?”
All at once I heard a clear voice call, “Miss Jane! where are you? Come to
lunch!”
It was Bessie, I knew well enough; but I did not stir: her light step came
tripping down the path.
“You naughty little thing!” she said. “Why don’t you come when you are
called?”
Bessie’s presence now, compared with the thoughts over which I had been
brooding, seemed cheerful; even though, as usual, she was somewhat cross.
The fact is, after my conflict with, and victory over, Mrs. Reed, I was not
disposed to care much for the nurse-maid’s transitory anger; and I was
disposed to bask in her youthful lightness of heart. I just put my two arms
round her, and said, “Come, Bessie! don’t scold.”
 The action was more frank and fearless than any I was habituated to
indulge in; somehow it pleased her.
“You are a strange child, Miss Jane,” she said, as she looked down at me;
“a little, roving, solitary thing; and you are going to school, I suppose?”
I nodded.
“And won’t you be sorry to leave poor Bessie?”
“What does Bessie care for me? She is always scolding me.”
“Because you’re such a queer, frightened, shy little thing. You should be
bolder.”
“What! to get more knocks?”
“Nonsense! But you are rather put upon, that’s certain. My mother said,
when she came to see me last week, that she would not like a little one of
her own to be in your place. Now come in, and I’ve some good news for
you.”
“I don’t think you have, Bessie.”
“Child! What do you mean? What sorrowful eyes you fix on me! Well!
but missis and the young ladies and Master John are going out to tea this
afternoon, and you shall have tea with me. I’ll ask the cook to bake you a
little cake, and then you shall help me to look over your drawers; for I am
soon to pack your trunk. Missis intends you to leave Gateshead in a day or
two, and you shall choose what toys you like to take with you.”
“Bessie, you must promise not to scold me any more till I go.”
“Well, I will; but mind you are a very good girl, and don’t be afraid of me.
Don’t start when I chance to speak rather sharply; it’s so provoking.”
“I don’t think I shall ever be afraid of you again, Bessie, because I’ve got
used to you; and I shall soon have another set of people to dread.”
“If you dread them they’ll dislike you.”
“As you do, Bessie?”
“I don’t dislike you, miss; I believe I am fonder of you than all the
others.”
“You don’t show it.”
 “You little sharp thing! you’ve got quite a new way of talking. What
makes you so venturesome and hardy?”
“Why, I shall soon be away from you, and besides—.” I was going to say
something about what had passed between me and Mrs. Reed; but on
second thoughts I considered it better to remain silent on that head.
“And so you are glad to leave me?”
“Not at all, Bessie; indeed, just now I am rather sorry.”
“Just now! and rather! How coolly my little lady says it! I dare say now, if
I were to ask you for a kiss you wouldn’t give it me; you’d say you would
rather not.”
“I’ll kiss you and welcome; bend your head down.” Bessie stooped; we
mutually embraced, and I followed her into the house quite comforted. That
afternoon lapsed in peace and harmony; and in the evening Bessie told me
some of her most en-chaining stories, and sung me some of her sweetest
songs. Even for me life had its gleams of sunshine.

OceanofPDF.com
 Chapter V

Five o‘clock had hardly struck on the morning of the 19th January, when
Bessie brought a candle into my closet and found me already up and nearly
dressed. I had risen half an hour before her entrance, and had washed my
face and put on my clothes by the light of a half-moon just setting, whose
ray streamed through the narrow window of my little crib. I was to leave
Gateshead that day by a coach which passed the lodge gates at six A.M.
Bessie was the only person yet risen; she had lighted a fire in the nursery,
where she now proceeded to make my breakfast. Few children can eat when
excited with the thoughts of a journey; nor could I. Bessie, having pressed
me in vain to take a few spoonfuls of the boiled milk and bread she had
prepared for me, wrapped up some biscuits in a paper and put them into my
bag; then she helped me on with my pelisseab and bonnet, and, wrapping
herself in a shawl, she and I left the nursery. As we passed Mrs. Reed’s
bedroom, she said, “Will you go in and bid missis good-by?”
“No, Bessie; she came to my crib last night, when you were gone down to
supper, and said I need not disturb her in the morning, or my cousins either;
and she told me to remember that she had always been my best friend, and
to speak of her and be grateful to her accordingly.”
“What did you say, miss?”
“Nothing; I covered my face with the bed-clothes, and turned from her to
the wall.”
“That was wrong, Miss Jane.”
“It was quite right, Bessie; your missis has not been my friend; she has
been my foe.”
“Oh, Miss Jane! don’t say so!”
 “Good-by to Gateshead!” cried I, as we passed through the hall and went
out at the front door.
The moon was set, and it was very dark; Bessie carried a lantern, whose
light glanced on wet steps and gravel road sodden by a recent thaw. Raw
and chill was the winter morning; my teeth chattered as I hastened down the
drive. There was a light in the porter’s lodge; when we reached it we found
the porter’s wife just kindling her fire: my trunk, which had been carried
down the evening before, stood corded at the door. It wanted but a few
minutes of six, and shortly after that hour had struck, the distant roll of
wheels announced the coming coach; I went to the door and watched its
lamps approach rapidly through the gloom.
“Is she going by herself?” asked the porter’s wife.
“Yes.”
“And how far is it?”
“Fifty miles.”
“What a long way! I wonder Mrs. Reed is not afraid to trust her so far
alone.”
The coach drew up; there it was at the gates, with its four horses and its
top laden with passengers. The guard and coachman loudly urged haste; my
trunk was hoisted up; I was taken from Bessie’s neck, to which I clung with
kisses.
“Be sure and take good care of her,” cried she to the guard, as he lifted me
into the inside.
“Ay, ay!” was the answer: the door was clapped to, a voice exclaimed
“All right,” and on we drove. Thus was I severed from Bessie and
Gateshead; thus whirled away to unknown, and, as I then deemed, remote
and mysterious regions.
I remember but little of the journey. I only know that the day seemed to
me of a preternatural length, and that we appeared to travel over hundreds
of miles of road. We passed through several towns, and in one—a very large
one—the coach stopped; the horses were taken out, and the passengers
alighted to dine. I was carried into an inn, where the guard wanted me to
have some dinner; but, as I had no appetite, he left me in an immense room
with a fireplace at each end, a chandelier pendent from the ceiling, and a
little red gallery high up against the wall filled with musical instruments.
Here I walked about a long time, feeling very strange, and mortally
apprehensive of some one coming in and kidnapping me; for I believed in
kidnappers, their exploits having frequently figured in Bessie’s fireside
chronicles. At last the guard returned; once more I was stowed away in the
coach, my protector mounted his own seat, sounded his hollow horn, and
away we rattled over the “stony street” of L—.14
The afternoon came on wet and somewhat misty; as it waned into dusk, I
began to feel that we were getting very far indeed from Gateshead. We
ceased to pass through towns; the country changed; great gray hills heaved
up round the horizon: as twilight deepened, we descended a valley, dark
with wood, and long after night had overclouded the prospect, I heard a
wild wind rushing among trees.
Lulled by the sound, I at last dropped asleep. I had not long slumbered
when the sudden cessation of motion awoke me; the coach-door was thrown
open, and a person like a servant was standing at it; I saw her face and dress
by the light of the lamps.
“Is there a little girl called Jane Eyre here?” she asked. I answered, “Yes,”
and was then lifted out; my trunk was handed down, and the coach instantly
drove away.
I was stiff with long sitting, and bewildered with the noise and motion of
the coach: gathering my faculties, I looked about me. Rain, wind, and
darkness filled the air; nevertheless, I dimly discerned a wall before me, and
a door open in it; through this door I passed with my new guide; she shut
and locked it behind her. There was now visible a house or houses—for the
building spread far—with many windows, and lights burning in some; we
went up a broad, pebbly path, splashing wet, and were admitted at a door;
then the servant led me through a passage into a room with a fire, where she
left me alone.
I stood and warmed my numbed fingers over the blaze, then I looked
round; there was no candle, but the uncertain light from the hearth showed
by intervals, papered walls, carpet, curtains, shining mahogany furniture; it
was a parlor, not so spacious or splendid as the drawing-room at Gateshead,
but comfortable enough. I was puzzling to make out the subject of a picture
on the wall, when the door opened, and an individual carrying a light
entered; another followed close behind.
The first was a tall lady, with dark hair, dark eyes, and a pale and large
forehead; her figure was partly enveloped in a shawl, her countenance was
grave, her bearing erect.
“The child is very young to be sent alone,” said she, putting her candle
down on the table. She considered me attentively for a minute or two, then
further added:
“She had better be put to bed soon—she looks tired. Are you tired?” she
asked, placing her hand on my shoulder.
“A little, ma‘am.”
“And hungry, too, no doubt; let her have some supper before she goes to
bed, Miss Miller. Is this the first time you have left your parents to come to
school, my little girl?”
I explained to her that I had no parents. She inquired how long they had
been dead; then, how old I was, what was my name, whether I could read,
write, and sew a little; then she touched my cheek gently with her fore-
finger, and saying, “She hoped I should be a good child,” dismissed me
along with Miss Miller.
The lady I had left might be about twenty-nine; the one who went with me
appeared some years younger; the first impressed me by her voice, look,
and air. Miss Miller was more ordinary; ruddy in complexion, though of a
careworn countenance; hurried in gait and action, like one who had always
a multiplicity of tasks on hand; she looked, indeed, what I afterward found
she really was, an under-teacher. Led by her, I passed from compartment to
compartment, from passage to passage, of a large and irregular building;
till, emerging from the total and somewhat dreary silence pervading that
portion of the house we had traversed, we came upon the hum of many
voices, and presently entered a wide, long room, with great deal tables, two
at each end, on each of which burned a pair of candles, and, seated all round
on benches, a congregation of girls of every age from nine or ten to twenty.
Seen by the dim light of the dips, their number to me appeared countless,
though not in reality exceeding eighty; they were uniformly dressed in
brown stuffac frocks of quaint fashion, and long Holland pinafores. It was
the hour of study; they were engaged in conning over their to-morrow’s
task, and the hum I had heard was the combined result of their whispered
repetitions.
Miss Miller signed to me to sit on a bench near the door, then walking up
to the top of the long room, she cried out:
“Monitors, collect the lesson-books and put them away!”
Four tall girls arose from different tables, and going round, gathered the
books and removed them. Miss Miller again gave the word of command:
“Monitors, fetch the supper trays!”
The tall girls went out, and returned presently, each bearing a tray, with
portions of something, I knew not what, arranged thereon, and a pitcher of
water and mug in the middle of each tray. The portions were handed round;
those who liked took a draught of the water, the mug being common to all.
When it came to my turn, I drank, for I was thirsty, but did not touch the
food, excitement and fatigue rendering me incapable of eating; I now saw,
however, that it was a thin oaten cake, shared into fragments.
The meal over, prayers were read by Miss Miller, and the classes filed off,
two and two, up stairs. Overpowered by this time with weariness, I scarcely
noticed what sort of a place the bed room was, except that, like the school-
room, I saw it was very long. To-night I was to be Miss Miller’s bed-fellow;
she helped me to undress. When laid down, I glanced at the long rows of
beds, each of which was quickly filled with two occupants; in ten minutes
the single light was extinguished; amid silence and complete darkness, I fell
asleep.
The night passed rapidly; I was too tired even to dream; I only once
awoke, to hear the wind rave in furious gusts, and the rain fall in torrents,
and to be sensible that Miss Miller had taken her place by my side. When I
again unclosed my eyes, a loud bell was ringing, the girls were up and
dressing, day had not yet begun to dawn, and a rush-light or two burned in
the room. I, too, rose reluctantly; it was bitter cold, and I dressed as well as
I could for shivering, and washed, when there was a basin at liberty, which
did not occur soon, as there was but one basin to six girls, on the stands
down the middle of the room. Again the bell rung; all formed in file, two
and two, and in that order descended the stairs and entered the cold and
dimly-lighted school-room; here prayers were read by Miss Miller;
afterward she called out:
“Form classes!”
A great tumult succeeded for some minutes, during which Miss Miller
repeatedly exclaimed, “Silence!” and “Order!” When it subsided, I saw
them all drawn up in four semicircles, before four chairs, placed at the four
tables; all held books in their hands, and a great book, like the Bible, lay on
each table, before the vacant seat. A pause of some seconds succeeded,
filled up by the low, vague hum of numbers; Miss Miller walked from class
to class, hushing this indefinite sound.
A distant bell tinkled. Immediately three ladies entered the room; each
walked to a table and took her seat; Miss Miller assuming the fourth vacant
chair, which was that nearest the door, and around which the smallest of the
children were assembled; to this inferior class I was called, and placed at
the bottom of it.
Business now began. The day’s collectad was repeated, then certain texts
of Scripture were said, and to these succeeded a protracted reading of
chapters in the Bible, which lasted an hour. By the time that exercise was
terminated, day had fully dawned. The indefatigable bell now sounded for
the fourth time; the classes were marshalled, and marched into another
room to breakfast. How glad I was to behold a prospect of getting
something to eat! I was now nearly sick from inanition,ae having taken so
little the day before.
The refectory was a great, low-ceiled, gloomy room; on two long tables
smoked basins of something hot, which, however, to my dismay, sent forth
an odor far from inviting. I saw a universal manifestation of discontent
when the fumes of the repast met the nostrils of those destined to swallow
it. From the van of the procession, the tall girls of the first class, rose the
whispered words:
 “Disgusting! the porridge is burned again!”
“Silence!” ejaculated a voice—not that of Miss Miller, but of one of the
upper teachers, a little and dark personage, smartly dressed but of somewhat
morose aspect, who installed herself at the top of one table, while a more
buxom lady presided at the other. I looked in vain for her I had first seen the
night before—she was not visible. Miss Miller occupied the foot of the
table, where I sat, and a strange, foreign-looking, elderly lady, the French
teacher, as I afterward found, took the corresponding seat at the other board.
A long grace was said, and a hymn sung; then a servant brought in some tea
for the teachers, and the meal began.
Ravenous, and now very faint, I devoured a spoonful or two of my
portion without thinking of its taste; but the first edge of hunger blunted, I
perceived I had got in hand a nauseous mess. Burned porridge is almost as
bad as rotten potatoes; famine itself soon sickens over it. The spoons were
moved slowly. I saw each girl taste her food and try to swallow it, but in
most cases the effort was soon relinquished. Breakfast was over, and none
had breakfasted. Thanks being returned for what we had not got, and a
second hymn chanted, the refectory was evacuated for the school-room. I
was one of the last to go out; and, in passing the tables, I saw one teacher
take a basin of the porridge and taste it. She looked at the others; all their
countenances expressed displeasure, and one of them, the stout one,
whispered:
“Abominable stuff! How shameful!”
A quarter of an hour passed before lessons again begun, during which the
school-room was in a glorious tumult. For that space of time it seemed to be
permitted to talk loud and more freely, and they used their privilege. The
whole conversation ran on the breakfast, which one and all abused roundly.
Poor things! it was the sole consolation they had. Miss Miller was not the
only teacher in the room; a group of great girls standing about her, spoke
with serious and sullen gestures. I heard the name of Mr. Brocklehurst
pronounced by some lips; at which Miss Miller shook her head
disapprovingly; but she made no great effort to check the general wrath;
doubtless she shared in it.
 A clock in the school-room struck nine; Miss Miller left her circle, and,
standing in the middle of the room, cried:
“Silence! To your seats!”
Discipline prevailed: in five minutes the confused throng was resolved
into order, and comparative silence quelled the Babel clamor of tongues.
The upper teachers now punctually resumed their posts; but still, all seemed
to wait. Ranged on benches down the sides of the room, the eighty girls sat
motionless and erect; a quaint assemblage they appeared, all with plain
locks combed from their faces, not a curl visible; in brown dresses, made
high and surrounded by a narrow tuckeraf about the throat, with little
pocketsag of Holland (shaped something like a Highlander’s purse) tied in
front of their frocks and destined to serve the purpose of a work-bag; all,
too, wearing woollen stockings, and country-made shoes fastened with
brass buckles. Above twenty of those clad in this costume were full-grown
girls, or rather, young women; it suited them ill, and gave an air of oddity
even to the prettiest.
I was still looking at them, and also at intervals examining the teachers—
none of whom precisely pleased me; for the stout one was a little coarse, the
dark one not a little fierce, the foreigner harsh and grotesque, and Miss
Miller, poor thing! looked purple, weather-beaten, and overworked—when,
as my eye wandered from face to face, the whole school rose
simultaneously, as if moved by a common spring.
What was the matter? I had heard no order given; I was puzzled. Ere I had
gathered my wits, the classes were again seated; but as all eyes were now
turned to one point, mine followed the general direction, and encountered
the personage who had received me last night. She stood at the bottom of
the long room, on the hearth; for there was a fire at each end: she surveyed
the two rows of girls silently and gravely. Miss Miller approaching, seemed
to ask her a question, and, having received her answer, went back to her
place, and said aloud,
“Monitor of the first class, fetch the globes!”
While the direction was being executed, the lady consulted moved slowly
up the room. I suppose I have a considerable organ of veneration,15 for I
retain yet the sense of admiring awe with which my eyes tracked her steps.
Seen now, in broad daylight, she looked tall, fair, and shapely; brown eyes,
with a benignant light in their irids,ah and a fine penciling of long lashes
round, relieved the whiteness of her large front;ai on each of her temples
her hair, of a very dark brown, was clustered in round curls, according to
the fashion of those times, when neither smooth bands nor long ringlets
were in vogue; her dress, also in the mode of the day, was of purple cloth,
relieved by a sort of Spanish trimming of black velvet; a gold watch
(watches were not so common then as now) shone at her girdle. Let the
reader add, to complete the picture, refined features; a complexion, if pale,
clear; and a stately air and carriage, and he will have, at least as clearly as
words can give it, a correct idea of the exterior of Miss Temple—Maria
Temple, as I afterwards saw the name written in a prayer-book intrusted to
me to carry to church.
The superintendent of Lowood (for such was this lady) having taken her
seat before a pair of globes placed on one of the tables, summoned the first
class round her, and commenced giving a lesson in geography; the lower
classes were called by the teachers; repetitions in history, grammar, &c.,
went on for an hour; writing and arithmetic succeeded, and music lessons
were given by Miss Temple to some of the elder girls. The duration of each
lesson was measured by the clock, which at last struck twelve. The
superintendent rose:
“I have a word to address to the pupils,” said she.
The tumult of cessation from lessons was already breaking forth, but it
sunk at her voice. She went on:
“You had this morning a breakfast which you could not eat; you must be
hungry; I have ordered that a lunch of bread and cheese shall be served to
all.”
The teachers looked at her with a sort of surprise.
“It is to be done on my responsibility,” she added, in an explanatory tone
to them, and immediately afterward left the room.
The bread and cheese was presently brought in and distributed, to the high
delight and refreshment of the whole school. The order was now given, “To
the garden!” Each put on a coarse straw bonnet, with strings of colored
calico, and a cloak of gray frieze. I was similarly equipped, and, following
the stream, I made my way into the open air.
The garden was a wide inclosure, surrounded with walls so high as to
exclude every glimpse of prospect. A covered verandah ran down on one
side, and broad walks bordered a middle space, divided into scores of little
beds. These beds were assigned as gardens for the pupils to cultivate, and
each bed had an owner. When full of flowers, they would, doubtless, look
pretty; but now, at the latter end of January, all was wintry blight and brown
decay. I shuddered as I stood and looked around me. It was an inclement
day for out-door exercise—not positively rainy, but darkened by a drizzling,
yellow fog. All underfoot was still soaking wet with the floods of yesterday.
The stronger among the girls ran about and engaged in active games; but
sundry pale and thin ones herded together, for shelter and warmth, in the
verandah; and among these, as the dense mist penetrated to their shivering
frames, I heard frequently the sound of a hollow cough.
As yet, I had spoken to no one, nor did anybody seem to take notice of
me. I stood lonely enough; but to that feeling of isolation I was accustomed;
it did not oppress me much. I leaned against a pillar of the verandah, drew
my gray mantle close about me, and trying to forget the cold which nipped
me without, and the unsatisfied hunger which gnawed me within, delivered
myself up to the employment of watching and thinking. My reflections
were too undefined and fragmentary to merit record; I hardly yet knew
where I was. Gateshead and my past life seemed floated away to an
immeasurable distance; the present was vague and strange, and of the future
I could form no conjecture. I looked around the convent-like garden, and
then, up at the house—a large building, half of which seemed gray and old,
the other half quite new. The new part, containing the school-room and
dormitory, was lighted by mullioned and latticed windows, which gave it a
church-like aspect; a stone tablet over the door bore this inscription:
“Lowood Institution. This portion was rebuilt A.D.————, by Naomi
Brocklehurst, of Brocklehurst Hall, in this county. ‘Let your light so shine
before men that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father
which is in heaven.’—St. Matt. v. 16.”
 I read these words over and over again. I felt that an explanation belonged
to them, and was unable fully to penetrate their import. I was still pondering
the signification of “Institution,” and endeavoring to make out a connection
between the first words and the verse of Scripture, when the sound of a
cough, close behind me, made me turn my head. I saw a girl sitting on a
stone bench near; she was bent over a book, on the perusal of which she
seemed intent. From where I stood I could see the title—it was Rasselas,16
a name that struck me as strange, and consequently attractive. In turning a
leaf she happened to look up, and I said to her directly,
“Is your book interesting?” I had already formed the intention of asking
her to lend it to me some day.
“I like it,” she answered, after a pause of a second or two, during which
she examined me:
“What is it about?” I continued. I hardly know where I found the
hardihood thus to open a conversation with a stranger; the step was contrary
to my nature and habits; but I think her occupation touched a chord of
sympathy somewhere; for I, too, liked reading, though of a frivolous and
childish kind; I could not digest or comprehend the serious or substantial.
“You may look at it,” replied the girl, offering me the book.
I did so; a brief examination convinced me that the contents were less
taking than the title. Rasselas looked dull to my trifling taste. I saw nothing
about fairies, nothing about genii; no bright variety seemed spread over the
closely printed pages. I returned it to her; she received it quietly, and
without saying anything, she was about to relapse into her former studious
mood: again I ventured to disturb her—“Can you tell me what the writing
on that stone over the door means? What is Lowood Institution?”
“This house where you are come to live.”
“And why do they call it Institution? Is it in any way different from other
schools?”
“It is partly a charity-school. You and I, and all the rest of us, are charity-
children. I suppose you are an orphan. Are not either your father or your
mother dead?”
 “Both died before I can remember.”
“Well, all the girls here have lost either one or both parents, and this is
called an Institution for educating orphans.”
“Do we pay no money? Do they keep us for nothing?”
“We pay, or our friends pay, fifteen pounds a year for each.”
“Then why do they call us charity-children?”
“Because fifteen pounds is not enough for board and teaching, and the
deficiency is supplied by subscription.”
“Who subscribes?”
“Different benevolent-minded ladies and gentlemen in this neighborhood
and in London.”
“Who was Naomi Brocklehurst?”
“The lady who built the new part of this house, as that tablet records, and
whose son overlooks and directs everything here.”
“Why?”
“Because he is treasurer and manager of the establishment.”
“Then this house does not belong to that tall lady who wears a watch, and
who said we were to have some bread and cheese?”
“To Miss Temple? Oh, no! I wish it did. She has to answer to Mr.
Brocklehurst for all she does. Mr. Brocklehurst buys all our food and all our
clothes.”
“Does he live here?”
“No—two miles off, at a large hall.”
“Is he a good man?”
“He is a clergyman, and is said to do a great deal of good.”
“Did you say that tall lady was called Miss Temple?”
“Yes.”
“And what are the other teachers called?”
 “The one with red cheeks is called Miss Smith; she attends to the work,
and cuts out—for we make our own clothes, our frocks, and pelisses, and
everything: the little one with black hair is Miss Scatcherd; she teaches
history and grammar, and hears the second class repetitions: and the one
who wears a shawl, and has a pocket-handkerchief tied to her side with a
yellow ribbon, is Madame Pierrot; she comes from Lisle, in France, and
teaches French.”
“Do you like the teachers?”
“Well enough.”
“Do you like the little black one, and the Madame————?—I cannot
pronounce her name as you do.”
“Miss Scatcherd is hasty—you must take care not to offend her; Madame
Pierrot is not a bad sort of person.”
“But Miss Temple is the best—isn’t she?”
“Miss Temple is very good, and very clever; she is above the rest, because
she knows far more than they do.”
“Have you been long here?”
“Two years.”
“Are you an orphan?”
“My mother is dead.”
“Are you happy here?”
“You ask rather too many questions. I have given you answers enough for
the present; now I want to read.”
But at that moment the summons sounded for dinner: all reentered the
house. The odor which now filled the refectory was scarcely more
appetizing than that which had regaled our nostrils at breakfast; the dinner
was served in two huge tin-plated vessels, whence rose a strong steam
redolent of rancid fat. I found the mess to consist of indifferent potatoes and
strange shreds of rustyaj meat, mixed and cooked together. Of this
preparation a tolerably abundant plateful was apportioned to each pupil. I
ate what I could, and wondered within myself whether every day’s fare
would be like this.
After dinner we immediately adjourned to the schoolroom: lessons
recommenced, and were continued till five o‘clock.
The only marked event of the afternoon was, that I saw the girl with
whom I had conversed in the verandah dismissed in disgrace, by Miss
Scatcherd, from a history class, and sent to stand in the middle of the large
school-room. The punishment seemed to me in a high degree ignominious,
especially for so great a girl—she looked thirteen or upward. I expected she
would show signs of great distress and shame; but, to my surprise, she
neither wept nor blushed. Composed, though grave, she stood, the central
mark of all eyes. “How can she bear it so quietly—so firmly?” I asked of
myself. “Were I in her place, it seems to me I should wish the earth to open
and swallow me up. She looks as if she were thinking of something beyond
her punishment—beyond her situation; of something not round her nor
before her. I have heard of day-dreams-is she in a day-dream now? Her eyes
are fixed on the floor, but I am sure they do not see it—her sight seems
turned in, gone down into her heart. She is looking at what she can
remember, I believe; not at what is really present. I wonder what sort of a
girl she is—whether good or naughty.”
Soon after five P.M., we had another meal, consisting of a small mug of
coffee and half a slice of brown bread. I devoured my bread and drank my
coffee with relish; but I should have been glad of as much more—I was still
hungry. Half an hour’s recreation succeeded, then study; then the glass of
water and the piece of oat-cake, prayers, and bed. Such was my first day at
Lowood.

OceanofPDF.com
 Chapter VI

The next day commenced as before, getting up and dressing by rushlight:

but this morning we were obliged to dispense with the ceremony of
washing: the water in the pitchers was frozen. A change had taken place in
the weather the preceding evening, and a keen north-east wind, whistling
through the crevices of our bed-room windows all night long, had made us
shiver in our beds, and turned the contents of the ewers to ice.
Before the long hour and a half of prayers and Bible reading was over, I
felt ready to perish with cold. Breakfast-time came at last, and this morning
the porridge was not burned; the quality was eatable, the quantity small.
How small my portion seemed! I wished it had been double.
In the course of the day I was enrolled a member of the fourth class, and
regular tasks and occupations were assigned me. Hitherto I had only been a
spectator of the proceedings at Lowood—I was now to become an actor
therein. At first, being little accustomed to learn by heart, the lessons
appeared to me both long and difficult; the frequent change from task to
task, too, bewildered me; and I was glad, when, about three o‘clock in the
afternoon Miss Smith put into my hands a border of muslin, two yards long,
together with needle, thimble, &c., and sent me to sit in a quiet corner of the
school-room, with directions to hem the same. At that hour most of the
others were sewing likewise; but one class still stood round Miss
Scatcherd’s chair reading, and as all was quiet, the subject of their lessons
could be heard, together with the manner in which each girl acquitted
herself, and the animadversions or commendations of Miss Scatcherd on the
performance. It was English history. Among the readers, I observed my
acquaintance of the verandah; at the commencement of the lesson, her place
had been at the top of the class, but for some error of pronunciation or some
inattention to stops,ak she was suddenly sent to the very bottom. Even in
that obscure position, Miss Scatcherd continued to make her an object of
constant notice; she was continually addressing to her such phrases as the
following:—
“Burns” (such it seems was her name; the girls here were all called by
their surnames, as boys are elsewhere), “Burns, you are standing on the side
of your shoe; turn your toes out immediately.” “Burns, you poke your chin
most unpleasantly; draw it in.” “Burns, I insist on your holding your head
up; I will not have you before me in that attitude,” &c., &c.
A chapter having been read through twice, the books were closed and the
girls examined. The lesson had comprised part of the reign of Charles I, and
there were sundry questions about tonnage and poundage, and ship-money,
which most of them appeared unable to answer; still, every little difficulty
was solved instantly when it reached Burns; her memory seemed to have
retained the substance of the whole lesson, and she was ready with answers
on every point. I kept expecting that Miss Scatcherd would praise her
attention; but, instead of that, she suddenly cried out:
“You dirty, disagreeable girl! you have never cleaned your nails this
morning!”
Burns made no answer; I wondered at her silence.
“Why,” thought I, “does she not explain that she could neither clean her
nails nor wash her face, as the water was frozen?”
My attention was now called off by Miss Smith desiring me to hold a
skein of thread. While she was winding it, she talked to me from time to
time, asking whether I had ever been at school before, whether I could
mark,al stitch, knit, &c.; till she dismissed me, I could not pursue my
observations on Miss Scatcherd’s movements. When I returned to my seat,
that lady was just delivering an order, of which I did not catch the import;
but Burns immediately left the class, and, going into the small inner room
where the books were kept, returned in half a minute, carrying in her hand a
bundle of twigs tied together at one end. This ominous tool she presented to
Miss Scatcherd with a respectful courtesy; then she quietly, and without
being told, unloosed her pinafore, and the teacher instantly and sharply
inflicted on her neck a dozen strokes with the bunch of twigs. Not a tear
rose to Burns’ eye; and, while I paused from my sewing, because my
fingers quivered at this spectacle with a sentiment of unavailing and
impotent anger, not a feature of her pensive face altered its ordinary
expression.
“Hardened girl!” exclaimed Miss Scatcherd, “nothing can correct you of
your slatternly habits; carry the rod away.”
Burns obeyed. I looked at her narrowly as she emerged from the book-
closet; she was just putting back her handkerchief into her pocket, and the
trace of a tear glistened on her thin cheek.
The play-hour in the evening I thought the pleasantest fraction of the day
at Lowood; the bit of bread, the draught of coffee swallowed at five
o‘clock, had revived vitality, if it had not satisfied hunger; the long restraint
of the day was slackened; the school room felt warmer than in the morning;
its fires being allowed to burn a little more brightly, to supply, in some
measure, the place of candles, not yet introduced; the ruddy gloaming,am
the licensed uproar, the confusion of many voices, gave one a welcome
sense of liberty.
On the evening of the day on which I had seen Miss Scatcherd flog her
pupil Burns, I wandered as usual among the forms and tables and laughing
groups, without a companion, yet not feeling lonely; when I passed the
windows I now and then lifted a blind and looked out; it snowed fast; a drift
was already forming against the lower panes; putting my ear close to the
window, I could distinguish, from the gleeful tumult within, the
disconsolate moan of the wind outside.
Probably, if I had lately left a good home and kind parents, this would
have been the hour when I should most keenly have regretted the
separation; that wind would then have saddened my heart; this obscure
chaos would have disturbed my peace; as it was, I derived from both a
strange excitement, and, reckless and feverish, I wished the wind to howl
more wildly, the gloom to deepen to darkness, and the confusion to rise to
clamor.
Jumping over forms and creeping under tables, I made my way to one of
the fireplaces; there, kneeling by the high wire fender, I found Burns,
absorbed, silent, abstracted from all round her by the companionship of a
book, which she read by the dim glare of the embers.
“Is it still Rasselas?” I asked, coming behind her.
“Yes,” she said, “and I have just finished it.”
And in five minutes more she shut it up. I was glad of this.
“Now,” thought I, “I can perhaps get her to talk.” I sat down by her on the
floor.
“What is your name besides Burns?”
“Helen.”
“Do you come a long way from here?”
“I come from a place further north—quite on the borders of Scotland.”
“Will you ever go back?”
“I hope so; but nobody can be sure of the future.”
“You must wish to leave Lowood?”
“No; why should I? I was sent to Lowood to get an education; and it
would be of no use going away until I have attained that object.”
“But that teacher, Miss Scatcherd, is so cruel to you?”
“Cruel? Not at all! She is severe; she dislike my faults.”
“And if I were in your place I should dislike her; I should resist her. If she
struck me with that rod, I should get it from her hand; I should break it
under her nose.”
“Probably you would do nothing of the sort; but if you did, Mr.
Brocklehurst would expel you from the school; that would be a great grief
to your relations. It is far better to endure patiently a smart which nobody
feels but yourself, than to commit a hasty action whose evil consequences
will extend to all connected with you—and, besides, the Bible bids us
return good for evil.”
“But then it seems disgraceful to be flogged, and to be sent to stand in the
middle of a room full of people; and you are such a great girl; I am far
younger than you, and I could not bear it.”
 “Yet it would be your duty to bear it, if you could not avoid it. It is weak
and silly to say you cannot bear what it is your fate to be required to bear.”
I heard her with wonder. I could not comprehend this doctrine of
endurance; and still less could I understand or sympathize with the
forbearance she expressed for her chastiser. Still I felt that Helen Burns
considered things by a light invisible to my eyes. I suspected she might be
right and I wrong; but I would not ponder the matter deeply: like Felix, I
put it off to a more convenient season.17
“You say you have faults, Helen; what are they? To me you seem very
good.”
“Then learn from me not to judge by appearances. I am, as Miss
Scatcherd said, slatternly; I seldom put, and never keep, things in order; I
am careless; I forget rules; I read when I should learn my lessons; I have no
method; and sometimes I say, like you, I cannot bear to be subjected to
systematic arrangements. This is all very provoking to Miss Scatcherd, who
is naturally neat, punctual, and particular.”
“And cross and cruel,” I added; but Helen Burns would not admit my
addition; she kept silence.
“Is Miss Temple as severe to you as Miss Scatcherd?”
At the utterance of Miss Temple’s name, a soft smile flitted over her grave
face.
“Miss Temple is full of goodness; it pains her to be severe to any one,
even the worst in the school; she sees my errors, and tells me of them
gently; and, if I do anything worthy of praise, she gives me my meed
liberally. One strong proof of my wretchedly defective nature is, that even
her expostulations, so mild, so rational, have not influence to cure me of my
faults; and even her praise, though I value it most highly, cannot stimulate
me to continued care and foresight.”
“That is curious,” said I; “it is so easy to be careful.”
“For you I have no doubt it is. I observed you in your class this morning,
and saw you were closely attentive; your thoughts never seemed to wander
while Miss Miller explained the lesson and questioned you. Now, mine
continually rove away: when I should be listening to Miss Scatcherd, and
collecting all she says with assiduity, often I lose the very sound of her
voice; I fall into a sort of dream.18 Sometimes I think I am in
Northumberland, and that the noises I hear round me are the bubbling of a
little brook which runs through Deepden, near our house; then, when it
comes to my turn to reply, I have to be wakened; and, having heard nothing
of what was read for listening to the visionary brook, I have no answer
ready.”
“Yet how well you replied this afternoon!”
“It was mere chance: the subject on which we had been reading had
interested me. This afternoon, instead of dreaming of Deepden, I was
wondering how a man who wished to do right could act so unjustly and
unwisely as Charles the First sometimes did; and I thought what a pity it
was that, with his integrity and conscientiousness, he could see no further
than the prerogatives of the crown. If he had but been able to look to a
distance, and see how what they call the spirit of the age was tending! Still,
I like Charles—I respect him—I pity him, poor murdered king! Yes, his
enemies were the worst; they shed blood they had no right to shed. How
dared they kill him!”
Helen was talking to herself now; she had forgotten I could not very well
understand her—that I was ignorant, or nearly so, of the subject she
discussed. I recalled her to my level.
“And when Miss Temple teaches you, do your thoughts wander then?”
“No, certainly, not often; because Miss Temple has generally something to
say which is newer than my own reflections; her language is singularly
agreeable to me, and the information she communicates is often just what I
wished to gain.”
“Well, then, with Miss Temple you are good?”
“Yes, in a passive way; I make no effort; I follow as inclination guides
me. There is no merit in such goodness.”
“A great deal; you are good to those who are good to you. It is all I ever
desire to be. If people were always kind and obedient to those who are cruel
and unjust, the wicked people would have it all their own way; they would
never feel afraid, and so they would never alter, but grow worse and worse.
When we are struck at without a reason, we should strike back again very
hard; I am sure we should—so hard as to teach the person who struck us
never to do it again.”
“You will change your mind, I hope, when you grow older; as yet you are
but a little untaught girl.”
“But I feel this, Helen; I must dislike those who, whatever I do to please
them, persist in disliking me; I must resist those who punish me unjustly. It
is as natural as that I should love those who show me affection, or submit to
punishment when I feel it is deserved.”
“Heathens and savage tribes hold that doctrine, but Christians and
civilized nations disown it.”
“How? I don’t understand.”
“It is not violence that best overcomes hate—nor vengeance that most
certainly heals injury.”
“What then?”
“Read the New Testament, and observe what Christ says, and how he acts
—make his word your rule, and his conduct your example.”
“What does he say?”
“Love your enemies; bless them that curse you; do good to them that hate
you and despitefully use you.”19
“Then I should love Mrs. Reed, which I cannot do; I should bless her son
John, which is impossible.”
In her turn, Helen Burns asked me to explain; and I proceeded forthwith
to pour out, in my own way, the tale of my sufferings and resentments.
Bitter and truculent when excited, I spoke as I felt, without reserve or
softening. Helen heard me patiently to the end. I expected she would then
make a remark, but she said nothing.
“Well,” I asked impatiently, “is not Mrs. Reed a hardhearted, bad
woman?”
 “She has been unkind to you, no doubt; because, you see, she dislikes
your cast of character, as Miss Scatcherd does mine. But how minutely you
remember all she has done and said to you! What a singularly deep
impression her injustice seems to have made on your heart! No ill usage so
brands its record on my feelings. Would you not be happier if you tried to
forget her severity, together with the passionate emotions it excited? Life
appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering
wrongs. We are, and must be, one and all, burdened with faults in this
world; but the time will soon come when, I trust, we shall put them off in
putting off our corruptible bodies; when debasement and sin will fall from
us with this cumbrous frame of flesh, and only the spark of the spirit will
remain, the impalpable principle of life and thought, pure as when it left the
Creator to inspire the creature: whence it came it will return—perhaps again
to be communicated to some being higher than man—perhaps to pass
through gradations of glory, from the pale human soul to brighten to the
seraph! Surely it will never, on the contrary, be suffered to degenerate from
man to fiend? No; I cannot believe that; I hold another creed, which no one
ever taught me, and which I seldom mention, but in which I delight, and to
which I cling; for it extends hope to all;20 it makes Eternity a rest—a
mighty home, not a terror and an abyss. Besides, with this creed, I can so
clearly distinguish between the criminal and his crime; I can so sincerely
forgive the first while I abhor the last; with this creed, revenge never
worries my heart, degradation never too deeply disgusts me, injustice never
crushes me too low. I live in calm, looking to the end.”
Helen’s head, always drooping, sunk a little lower as she finished this
sentence. I saw by her look she wished no longer to talk to me, but rather to
converse with her own thoughts. She was not allowed much time for
meditation; a monitor, a great rough girl, presently came up, exclaiming, in
a strong Cumber-land accent:
“Helen Burns, if you don’t go and put your drawer in order, and fold up
your work this minute, I’ll tell Miss Scatcherd to come and look at it!”
Helen sighed as her revery fled, and getting up, obeyed the monitor
without reply as without delay.
OceanofPDF.com
 Chapter VII

My first quarter at Lowood seemed an age; and not the golden age, either: it
comprised an irksome struggle with difficulties in habituating myself to
new rules and unwonted tasks. The fear of failure in these points harassed
me worse than the physical hardships of my lot; though these were no
trifles.
During January, February, and part of March, the deep snows, and, after
their melting, the almost impassable roads, prevented our stirring beyond
the garden walls, except to go to church; but within these limits we had to
pass an hour every day in the open air. Our clothing was insufficient to
protect us from the severe cold. We had no boots; the snow got into our
shoes and melted there; our ungloved hands became numbed and covered
with chilblains, as were our feet; I remember well the distracting irritation I
endured from this cause, every evening when my feet inflamed; and the
torture of thrusting the swelled, raw and stiff toes into my shoes in the
morning. Then the scanty supply of food was distressing. With the keen
appetites of growing children, we had scarcely sufficient to keep alive a
delicate invalid. From this deficiency of nourishment resulted an abuse
which pressed hardly on the younger pupils; whenever the famished great
girls had an opportunity, they would coax or menace the little ones out of
their portion. Many a time I have shared between two claimants the
precious morsel of brown bread distributed at tea-time; and after
relinquishing to a third half the contents of my mug of coffee, I have
swallowed the remainder with an accompaniment of secret tears, forced
from me by the exigency of hunger.
Sundays were dreary days in that wintry season. We had to walk two
miles to Brocklebridge church, where our patron officiated; we set out cold,
we arrived at church colder; during the morning service we became almost
paralyzed. It was too far to return to dinner, and an allowance of cold meat
and bread, in the same penurious proportion observed in our ordinary
meals, was served around between the services.
At the close of the afternoon service, we returned by an exposed and hilly
road, where the bitter winter wind, blowing over a range of snowy summits
to the north, almost flayed the skin from our faces.
I can remember Miss Temple walking lightly and rapidly along our
drooping line, her plaid cloak, which the frosty wind fluttered, gathered
close about her, and encouraging us, by precept and example, to keep up
our spirits, and march forward, as she said, “like stalwart soldiers.” The
other teachers, poor things, were generally themselves too much dejected to
attempt the task of cheering others.
How we longed for the light and heat of a blazing fire when we got back!
But, to the little ones at least, this was denied; each hearth in the school-
room was immediately surrounded by a double row of great girls, and
behind them the younger children crouched in groups, wrapping their
starvedan arms in their pinafores.
A little solace came at tea-time, in the shape of a double ration of bread, a
whole instead of a half slice, with the delicious addition of a thin scrape of
butter; it was the hebdomadalao treat to which we all looked forward from
Sabbath to Sabbath. I generally contrived to reserve a moiety of this
bounteous repast for myself, but the remainder I was invariably obliged to
part with.
The Sunday evening was spent in repeating, by heart, the Church
Catechism, and the fifth, sixth, and seventh chapters of St. Matthew; and in
listening to a long sermon, read by Miss Miller, whose irrepressible yawns
attested her weariness. A frequent interlude of these performances was the
enactment of the part of Eutychus by some half dozen of little girls; who,
overpowered by sleep, would fall down, if not out of the third loft, yet off
the fourth form, and be taken up half dead.21 The remedy was to thrust
them forward into the centre of the school-room, and oblige them to stand
there till the sermon was finished. Sometimes their feet failed them, and
they sunk together in a heap; they were then propped up with the monitors’
high stools.
 I have not yet alluded to the visits of Mr. Brocklehurst; and, indeed, that
gentleman was from home during the greater part of the first month after
my arrival—perhaps prolonging his stay with his friend the archdeacon; his
absence was a relief to me. I need not say that I had my own reasons for
dreading his coming; but come he did at last.
One afternoon (I had then been three weeks at Lowood), as I was sitting
with a slate in my hand, puzzling over a sum in long division, my eyes,
raised in abstraction to the window, caught sight of a figure just passing; I
recognized, almost instinctively, that gaunt outline; and when, two minutes
after, all the school, teachers included, rose en masse, it was not necessary
for me to look up in order to ascertain whose entrance they thus greeted. A
long stride measured the school-room, and presently beside Miss Temple,
who herself had risen, stood the same black column which had frowned on
me so ominously from the hearth-rug of Gateshead. I now glanced sideways
at this piece of architecture. Yes, I was right; it was Mr. Brocklehurst,
buttoned up in a surtout,ap and looking longer, narrower, and more rigid
than ever.
I had my own reasons for being dismayed at this apparition; too well I
remembered the perfidious hints given by Mrs. Reed about my disposition,
&c.; the promise pledged by Mr. Brocklehurst to apprize Miss Temple and
the teachers of my vicious nature. All along I had been dreading the
fulfilment of this promise; I had been looking out daily for the “Coming
Man,”aq whose information respecting my past life and conversation was to
brand me as a bad child forever; now there he was. He stood at Miss
Temple’s side; he was speaking low in her ear; I did not doubt he was
making disclosures of my villany, and I watched her eye with painful
anxiety, expecting every moment to see its dark orb turn on me a glance of
repugnance and contempt. I listened, too; and as I happened to be seated
quite at the top of the room, I caught most of what he said; its import
relieved me from immediate apprehension.
“I suppose, Miss Temple, the thread I bought at Lowton will do; it struck
me that it would be just of the quality for the calico chemises, and I sorted
the needles to match. You may tell Miss Smith that I forgot to make a
memorandum of the darning-needles, but she shall have some papers sent in
next week; and she is not, on any account, to give out more than one at a
time to each pupil; if they have more, they are apt to be careless and lose
them. And, oh, ma‘am! I wish the woollen stockings were better looked to!
When I was here last I went into the kitchen-garden and examined the
clothes drying on the line; there was a quantity of black hose in a very bad
state of repair; from the size of the holes in them I was sure they had not
been well mended from time to time.”
He paused.
“Your directions shall be attended to, sir,” said Miss Temple.
“And, ma‘am,” he continued, “the laundress tells me some of the girls
have two clean tuckers in the week; it is too much; the rules limit them to
one.”
“I think I can explain that circumstance, sir. Agnes and Ca tharine
Johnstone were invited to take tea with some friends at Lowton last
Thursday, and I gave them leave to put on clean tuckers for the occasion.”
Mr. Brocklehurst nodded.
“Well, for once it may pass; but please not to let the circumstance occur
too often. And there is another thing which surprised me; I find, in settling
accounts with the housekeeper, that a lunch, consisting of bread and cheese,
has twice been served out to the girls during the past fortnight. How is this?
I look over the regulations, and I find no such meal as lunch mentioned.
Who introduced this innovation? and by what authority?”
“I must be responsible for the circumstance, sir,” replied Miss Temple;
“the breakfast was so ill prepared that the pupils could not possibly eat it;
and I dared not allow them to remain fasting till dinner time.”
“Madam, allow me an instant! You are aware that my plan in bringing up
these girls is, not to accustom them to habits of luxury and indulgence, but
to render them hardy, patient, self-denying. Should any little accidental
disappointment of the appetite occur, such as the spoiling of a meal, the
under or over-dressing of a dish, the incident ought not to be neutralized by
replacing with something more delicate the comfort lost, thus pampering
the body and subverting the aim of this institution; it ought to be improved
to the spiritual edification of the pupils, by encouraging them to evince
fortitude under the temporary privation. A brief address on those occasions
would not be mistimed, wherein a judicious instructor would take the
opportunity of referring to the sufferings of the primitive Christians; to the
torments of martyrs, to the exhortations of our blessed Lord himself, calling
upon his disciples to take up their cross and follow him;22 to his warnings
that man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth
out of the mouth of God;23 to his divine consolations, ‘If ye suffer hunger
or thirst for my sake, happy are ye.’24 Oh, madam, when you put bread and
cheese, instead of burned porridge, into these children’s mouths, you may
indeed feed their vile bodies, but you little think how you starve their
immortal souls!”
Mr. Brocklehurst again paused—perhaps overcome by his feelings. Miss
Temple had looked down when he first began to speak to her, but she now
gazed straight before her, and her face, naturally pale as marble, appeared to
be assuming also the coldness and fixity of that material, especially her
mouth, closed as if it would have required a sculptor’s chisel to open it, and
her brow settled gradually into petrified severity.
Meantime, Mr. Brocklehurst, standing on the hearth with his hands behind
his back, majestically surveyed the whole school. Suddenly his eye gave a
blink, as if it had met something that either dazzled or shocked its pupil;
turning, he said, in more rapid accents than he had hitherto used,
“Miss Temple, Miss Temple, what—what is that girl with curled hair?
Red hair, ma‘am, curled—curled all over?” And extending his cane, he
pointed to the awful object, his hand shaking as he did so.
“It is Julia Severn,” replied Miss Temple, very quietly.
“Julia Severn, ma‘am! And why has she, or any other, curled hair? Why,
in defiance of every precept and principle of this house, does she conform
to the world so openly—here, in an evangelical charitable establishment25
—as to wear her hair one mass of curls?”
“Julia’s hair curls naturally,” returned Miss Temple, still more quietly.
“Naturally! Yes, but we are not to conform to nature; I wish these girls to
be the children of grace; and why that abundance? I have again and again
intimated that I desire the hair to be arranged closely, modestly, plainly.
Miss Temple, that girl’s hair must be cut off entirely; I will send a barber to-
morrow; and I see others who have far too much of the excrescence; that
tall girl, tell her to turn round. Tell all the first form to rise up and direct
their faces to the wall.”
Miss Temple passed her handkerchief over her lips, as if to smooth away
the involuntary smile that curled them; she gave the order, however, and
when the first class could take in what was required of them, they obeyed.
Leaning back on my bench, I could see the looks and grimaces with which
they commented on this manoeuvre; it was a pity Mr. Brocklehurst could
not see them too; he would, perhaps, have felt that, whatever he might do
with the outside of the cup and platter, the inside was further beyond his
interference than he imagined.26
He scrutinized the reverse of these living medals some five minutes, then
pronounced sentence. These words fell like the knell of doom:
“All those top-knots must be cut off.”
Miss Temple seemed to remonstrate.
“Madam,” he pursued, “I have a Master to serve whose kingdom is not of
this world;27 my mission is to mortify in these girls the lusts of the flesh; to
teach them to clothe themselves with shame-facedness and sobriety—not
with braided hair and costly apparel; and each of the young persons before
us has a string of hair twisted in plaits which vanity itself might have
woven; these, I repeat, must be cut off; think of the time wasted, of—”
Mr. Brocklehurst was here interrupted: three other visitors, ladies, now
entered the room. They ought to have come a little sooner, to have heard his
lecture on dress, for they were splendidly attired in velvet, silk, and furs.
The two younger of the trio (fine girls of sixteen and seventeen) had gray
beaver hats, then in fashion, shaded with ostrich-plumes, and from under
the brim of this graceful head-dress fell a profusion of light tresses,
elaborately curled. The elder lady was enveloped in a costly velvet shawl,
trimmed with ermine, and she wore a false frontar of French curls.
 These ladies were deferentially received by Miss Temple, as Mrs. and the
Misses Brocklehurst, and conducted to seats of honor at the top of the room.
It seems they had come in the carriage with their reverend relative, and had
been conducting a rummaging scrutiny of the rooms up stairs, while he
transacted business with the housekeeper, questioning the laundress, and
lecturing the superintendent. They now proceeded to address divers remarks
and reproofs to Miss Smith, who was charged with the care of the linen and
the inspection of the dormitories; but I had no time to listen to what they
said; other matters called off and enchained my attention.
Hitherto, while gathering up the discourse of Mr. Brocklehurst and Miss
Temple, I had not, at the same time, neglected precautions to secure my
own personal safety; which I thought would be effected, if I could only
elude observation. To this end, I had set well back on the form, and while
seeming to be busy with my sum, had held my slate in such a manner as to
conceal my face. I might have escaped notice, had not my treacherous slate
somehow happened to slip from my hand, and falling with an obtrusive
crash, directly drawn every eye upon me. I knew that it was all over now;
and, as I stooped to pick up the two fragments of slate, I rallied my forces
for the worst. It came.
A careless girl!” said Mr. Brocklehurst; and immediately after—“It is the
new pupil, I perceive.” And before I could draw breath, “I must not forget I
have a word to say respecting her.” Then aloud—how loud it seemed to me!
—“Let the child who broke her slate come forward!”
Of my own accord I could not have stirred; I was paralyzed. But the two
great girls who sat on each side of me set me on my legs and pushed me
toward the dread judge, and then Miss Temple gently assisted me to his
very feet, and I caught her whispered counsel.
“Don’t be afraid, Jane; I saw it was an accident: you shall not be
punished.”
The kind whisper went to my heart like a dagger.
“Another minute, and she will despise me for a hypocrite,” thought I; and
an impulse of fury against Reed, Brocklehurst and Co. bounded in my
pulses at the conviction. I was no Helen Burns.
 “Fetch that stool,” said Mr. Brocklehurst, pointing to a very high one,
from which a monitor had just risen. It was brought.
“Place the child upon it.”
And I was placed there, by whom I don’t know. I was in no condition to
note particulars. I was only aware that they had hoisted me up to the height
of Mr. Brocklehurst’s nose; that he was within a yard of me, and that a
spread of shot orange and purple silk pelisses, and a cloud of silvery
plumage, extended and waved below me.
Mr. Brocklehurst hemmed.
“Ladies,” said he, turning to his family, “Miss Temple, teachers, and
children, you all see this girl?”
Of course they did; for I felt their eyes directed like burning-glasses
against my scorched skin.
“You see she is yet young; you observe she possesses the ordinary form of
childhood; God has graciously given her the shape that he has given to all
of us; no signal deformity points her out as a marked character. Who would
think that the Evil One had already found a servant and agent in her? Yet
such, I grieve to say, is the case.”
A pause—in which I began to steady the palsy of my nerves, and to feel
that the Rubicon was passed; and that the trial, no longer to be shirked,
must be firmly sustained.
“My dear children,” pursued the black marble clergyman, with pathos,
“this is a sad, a melancholy occasion; for it becomes my duty to warn you
that this girl, who might be one of God’s own lambs, is a little cast-away;
not a member of the true flock, but evidently an interloper and an alien. You
must be on your guard against her; you must shun her example; if
necessary, avoid her company, exclude her from your sports, and shut her
from your converse. Teachers, you must watch her; keep your eyes on her
movements, weigh well her words, scrutinize her actions, punish her body
to save her soul; if, indeed, such salvation be possible, for (my tongue
falters while I tell it) this girl—this child—the native of a Christian land,
worse than many a little heathen who says its prayers to Brahmaas and
kneels before Juggernautat—this girl is—a liar!”
Now came a pause of ten minutes; during which I, by this time in perfect
possession of my wits, observed all the female Brock lehursts produce their
pocket-handkerchiefs and apply them to their optics, while the elderly lady
swayed herself to and fro, and the younger ones whispered, “How
shocking!”
Mr. Brocklehurst resumed.
“This I learned from her benefactress; from the pious and charitable lady
who adopted her in her orphan state, reared her as her own daughter, and
whose kindness, whose generosity, the unhappy girl repaid by an
ingratitude so bad, so dreadful, that at last her excellent patroness was
obliged to separate her from her own young ones, fearful lest her vicious
example should contaminate their purity. She has sent her here to be healed,
even as the Jews of old sent their diseased to the troubled pool of
Bethesda;28 and, teachers, superintendent, I beg of you not to allow the
waters to stagnate round her.”
With this sublime conclusion, Mr. Brocklehurst adjusted the top button of
his surtout, muttered something to his family, who rose, bowed to Miss
Temple, and then all the great people sailed in state from the room. Turning
at the door, my judge said,
“Let her stand half an hour longer on that stool, and let no one speak to
her during the remainder of the day.”
There I was, then, mounted aloft; I, who had said I could not bear the
shame of standing on my natural feet in the middle of the room, was now
exposed to general view on a pedestal of infamy. What my sensations were,
no language can describe; but just as they all rose, stifling my breath and
constricting my throat, a girl came up and passed me; in passing, she lifted
her eyes. What a strange light inspired them! What an extraordinary
sensation that ray sent through me! How the new feeling bore me up! It was
as if a martyr, a hero, had passed a slave or victim, and imparted strength in
the transit. I mastered the rising hysteria, lifted up my head, and took a firm
stand on the stool. Helen Burns asked some slight question about her work
of Miss Smith, was chidden for the triviality of the inquiry, returned to her
place, and smiled at me as she again went by. What a smile! I remember it
now, and I know that it was the effluence of fine intellect, of true courage; it
lighted up her marked lineaments, her thin face, her sunken gray eye, like a
reflection from the aspect of an angel. Yet at that moment Helen Burns wore
on her arm “the untidy badge.” Scarcely an hour ago I heard her condemned
by Miss Scatcherd to a dinner of bread and water on the morrow, because
she had blotted an exercise in copying it out. Such is the imperfect nature of
man—such spots are there on the disk of the clearest planet; and eyes like
Miss Scatcherd’s can only see those minute defects, and are blind to the full
brightness of the orb.

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 Chapter VIII

Ere the half-hour ended, five o‘clock struck; school was dismissed, and all
were gone into the refectory to tea. I now ventured to descend; it was deep
dusk; I retired into a corner and sat down on the floor. The spell by which I
had been so far supported began to dissolve; reaction took place, and soon,
so overwhelming was the grief that seized me, I sunk prostrate with my face
to the ground. Now I wept; Helen Burns was not here; nothing sustained
me; left to myself, I abandoned myself, and my tears watered the boards. I
had meant to be so good and to do so much at Lowood; to make so many
friends, to earn respect, and win affection. Already I had made visible
progress; that very morning I had reached the head of my class; Miss Miller
had praised me warmly; Miss Temple had smiled approbation; she had
promised to teach me drawing, and to let me learn French, if I continued to
make similar improvement two months longer: and then I was well received
by my fellow-pupils; treated as an equal by those of my own age, and not
molested by any; now, here I lay again crushed and trodden on; and could I
ever rise more?
“Never,” I thought; and ardently I wished to die. While sobbing out this
wish in broken accents, some one approached; I started up—again Helen
Burns was near me; the fading fires just showed her coming up the long
vacant room; she brought my coffee and bread.
“Come, eat something,” she said; but I put both away from me, feeling as
if a drop or a crumb would have choked me in my present condition. Helen
regarded me, probably with surprise; I could not now abate my agitation,
though I tried hard; I continued to weep aloud. She sat down on the ground
near me, embraced her knees with her arms, and rested her head upon them;
in that attitude she remained silent as an Indian. I was the first who spoke.
“Helen, why do you stay with a girl whom everybody believes to be a
liar?”
 “Everybody, Jane? Why, there are only eighty people who have heard you
called so, and the world contains hundreds of millions?”
“But what have I to do with millions? The eighty I know despise me.”
“Jane, you are mistaken; probably not one in the school either despises or
dislikes you; many, I am sure, pity you much.”
“How can they pity me after what Mr. Brocklehurst said?”
“Mr. Brocklehurst is not a god; nor is he even a great and admired man;
he is little liked here; he never took steps to make himself liked. Had he
treated you as an especial favorite, you would have found enemies, declared
or covert, all around you: as it is, the greater number would offer you
sympathy if they dared. Teachers and pupils may look coldly on you for a
day or two, but friendly feelings are concealed in their hearts; and if you
persevere in doing well, these feelings will ere long appear so much the
more evidently for their temporary suppression. Besides, Jane—” She
paused.
“Well, Helen!” said I, putting my hand into hers; she chafed my fingers
gently to warm them, and went on—
“If all the world hated you, and believed you wicked, while your own
conscience approved you, and absolved you from guilt, you would not be
without friends.”
“No; I know I should think well of myself; but that is not enough; if
others don’t love me, I would rather die than live—I cannot bear to be
solitary and hated, Helen. Look here; to gain some real affection from you,
or Miss Temple, or any other whom I truly love, I would willingly submit to
have the bone of my arm broken, or to let a bull toss me, or to stand behind
a kicking horse, and let it dash its hoof at my chest—”
“Hush, Jane! you think too much of the love of human beings; you are too
impulsive, too vehement; the Sovereign hand that created your frame, and
put life into it, has provided you with other resources than your feeble self,
or than creatures feeble as you. Besides this earth, and besides the race of
men, there is an invisible world and a kingdom of spirits; that world is
round us, for it is everywhere; and those spirits watch us, for they are
commissioned to guard us; and if we were dying in pain and shame, if scorn
smote us on all sides, and hatred crushed us, angels see our tortures,
recognize our innocence (if innocent we be, as I know you are of this
charge which Mr. Brocklehurst has weakly and pompously repeated at
second-hand from Mrs. Reed; for I read a sincere nature in your ardent eyes
and on your clear front), and God waits only the separation of spirit from
flesh to crown us with a full reward. Why, then, should we ever sink
overwhelmed with distress, when life is so soon over, and death is so
certain an entrance to happiness—to glory?”
I was silent; Helen had calmed me; but in the tranquillity she imparted
there was an alloy of inexpressible sadness. I felt the impression of woe as
she spoke, but I could not tell whence it came; and when, having done
speaking, she breathed a little fast and coughed a short cough, I
momentarily forgot my own sorrows to yield to a vague concern for her.
Resting my head on Helen’s shoulder, I put my arms round her waist; she
drew me to her, and we reposed in silence. We had not sat long thus, when
another person came in. Some heavy clouds, swept from the sky by a rising
wind, had left the moon bare; and her light, streaming in through a window
near, shone full both on us and on the approaching figure, which we at once
recognized as Miss Temple.
“I came on purpose to find you, Jane Eyre,” said she; “I want you in my
room; and as Helen Burns is with you, she may come too.”
We went; following the superintendent’s guidance, we had to tread some
intricate passages, and mount a stair-case before we reached her apartment;
it contained a good fire, and looked cheerful. Miss Temple told Helen Burns
to be seated in a low arm-chair on one side of the hearth, and herself taking
another, she called me to her side.
“Is it all over?” she asked, looking down at my face. “Have you cried
your grief away?”
“I am afraid I never shall do that.”
“Why?”
“Because I have been wrongly accused; and you, ma‘am, and everybody
else, will now think me wicked.”
 “We shall think you what you prove yourself to be, my child. Continue to
act as a good girl, and you will satisfy me.”
“Shall I, Miss Temple?”
“You will,” said she, passing her arm round me. “And now tell me who is
the lady whom Mr. Brocklehurst called your benefactress?”
“Mrs. Reed, my uncle’s wife. My uncle is dead, and he left me to her
care.”
“Did she not, then, adopt you of her own accord?”
“No, maam; she was sorry to have to do it; but my uncle, as I have often
heard the servants say, got her to promise, before he died, that she would
always keep me.”
“Well, now, Jane, you know, or at least I will tell you, that when a
criminal is accused, he is always allowed to speak in his own defence. You
have been charged with falsehood; defend yourself to me as well as you
can. Say whatever your memory suggests as true; but add nothing and
exaggerate nothing.”
I resolved in the depth of my heart that I would be most moderate—most
correct; and, having reflected a few minutes in order to arrange coherently
what I had to say, I told her all the story of my sad childhood. Exhausted by
emotion, my language was more subdued than it generally was when it
developed that sad theme; and mindful of Helen’s warnings against the
indulgence of resentment, I infused into the narrative far less of gall and
wormwood than ordinary. Thus restrained and simplified, it sounded more
credible; I felt as I went on that Miss Temple fully believed me.
In the course of the tale I had mentioned Mr. Lloyd as having come to see
me after the fit; for I never forgot the, to me, frightful episode of the red-
room; in detailing which, my excitement was sure, in some degree, to break
bounds; for nothing could soften in my recollection the spasm of agony
which clutched my heart when Mrs. Reed spurned my wild supplication for
pardon, and locked me a second time in the dark and haunted chamber.
I had finished. Miss Temple regarded me a few minutes in silence; she
then said—
 “I know something of Mr. Lloyd; I shall write to him; if his reply agrees
with your statement, you shall be publicly cleared from every imputation; to
me, Jane, you are clear now.”
She kissed me, and still keeping me at her side (where I was contented to
stand, for I derived a child’s pleasure from the contemplation of her face,
her dress, her one or two ornaments, her white forehead, her clustered and
shining curls, and beaming dark eyes), she proceeded to address Helen
Burns.
“How are you to-night, Helen? Have you coughed much to day?”
“Not quite so much, I think, ma‘am.”
“And the pain in the chest?”
“It is a little better.”
Miss Temple got up, took her hand and examined her pulse; then she
returned to her own seat; as she resumed it, I heard her sigh low. She was
pensive a few minutes, then rousing herself, she said, cheerfully:
“But you two are my visitors to-night; I must treat you as such.” She rung
her bell.
“Barbara,” she said to the servant who answered it, “I have not yet had
tea; bring the tray, and place cups for these two young ladies.”
And the tray was soon brought. How pretty to my eyes did the china cups
and bright tea-pot look, placed on the little round table near the fire! How
fragrant was the steam of the beverage, and the scent of the toast! of which,
however, I, to my dismay (for I was beginning to be hungry), discerned
only a very small portion; Miss Temple discerned it too.
“Barbara,” said she, “can you not bring a little more bread and butter?
There is not enough for three.”
Barbara went out; she returned soon:
“Madam, Mrs. Harden says she has sent up the usual quantity.”
Mrs. Harden, be it observed, was the housekeeper, a woman after Mr.
Brocklehurst’s own heart, made up of equal parts whale-bone and iron.
 “Oh, very well!” returned Miss Temple; “we must make it do, Barbara, I
suppose.” And as the girl withdrew, she added, smilingly, “Fortunately, I
have it in my power to supply deficiencies for this once.”
Having invited Helen and me to approach the table, and placed before
each of us a cup of tea, with one delicious but thin morsel of toast, she got
up, and unlocked a drawer, and taking from it a parcel wrapped in paper,
disclosed presently to our eyes a good-sized seed-cake.
“I meant to give each of you some of this to take with you,” said she; “but
as there is so little toast you must have it now,” and she proceeded to cut
slices with a generous hand.
We feasted that evening as on nectar and ambrosia; and not the least
delight of the entertainment was the smile of gratification with which our
hostess regarded us, as we satisfied our famished appetites on the delicate
fare she liberally supplied. Tea over and the tray removed, she again
summoned us to the fire; we sat one on each side of her, and now a
conversation followed between her and Helen, which it was indeed a
privilege to be admitted to hear.
Miss Temple had always something of serenity in her air, of state in her
mien, of refined propriety in her language, which precluded deviation into
the ardent, the excited, the eager; something which chastened the pleasure
of those who looked on her and listened to her, by a controlling sense of
awe; such was my feeling now; but as to Helen Burns, I was struck with
wonder.
The refreshing meal, the brilliant fire, the presence and kindness of her
beloved instructress, or perhaps more than all these, something in her own
unique mind, had roused her powers within her. They woke, they kindled;
first, they glowed in the bright tint of her cheek, which till this hour I had
never seen but pale and bloodless; then they shone in the liquid lustre of her
eyes, which had suddenly acquired a beauty more singular than that of Miss
Temple‘s—a beauty neither of fine color, nor long eyelash, nor pencilled
brow, but of meaning, of movement, of radiance. Then her soul sat on her
lips, and language flowed, from what source I cannot tell. Has a girl of
fourteen a heart large enough, vigorous enough, to hold the swelling spring
of pure, full, fervid eloquence? Such was the characteristic of Helen’s
discourse on that, to me, memorable evening; her spirit seemed hastening to
live within a very brief span as much as many live during a protracted
existence.
They conversed of things I had never heard of; of nations and times past;
of countries far away; of secrets of nature discovered or guessed at; they
spoke of books; how many they had read! What stores of knowledge they
possessed! Then they seemed so familiar with French names and French
authors; but my amazement reached its climax when Miss Temple asked
Helen if she sometimes snatched a moment to recall the Latin her father had
taught her; and, taking a book from a shelf, bade her read and construe a
page of Virgil; and Helen obeyed, my organ of veneration expanding at
every sounding line. She had scarcely finished ere the bell announced bed-
time; no delay could be admitted; Miss Temple embraced us both, saying as
she drew us to her heart:
“God bless you, my children!”
Helen she held a little longer than me; she let her go more reluctantly; it
was Helen her eye followed to the door; it was for her she a second time
breathed a sad sigh; for her she wiped a tear from her cheek.
On reaching the bed-room, we heard the voice of Miss Scatcherd; she was
examining drawers; she had just pulled out Helen Burns’, and when we
entered Helen was greeted with a sharp reprimand, and told that to-morrow
she should have half a dozen of untidy folded articles pinned to her
shoulder.
“My things were, indeed, in shameful disorder,” murmured Helen to me,
in a low voice; “I intended to have arranged them, but I forgot.”
Next morning, Miss Scatcherd wrote in conspicuous characters on a piece
of pasteboard the word “Slattern,” and bound it like a phylactery round
Helen’s large, mild, intelligent, and benign-looking forehead. She wore it
till evening, patient, unresentful, regarding it as a deserved punishment. The
moment Miss Scatcherd withdrew after afternoon school, I ran to Helen,
tore it off, and thrust it into the fire; the fury of which she was incapable
had been burning in my soul all day, and tears, hot and large, had
continually been scalding my cheek; for the spectacle of her sad resignation
gave me an intolerable pain at the heart.
 About a week subsequently to the incidents above narrated, Miss Temple,
who had written to Mr. Lloyd, received his answer: it appeared that what he
said went to corroborate my account. Miss Temple, having assembled the
whole school, announced that inquiry had been made into the charges
alleged against Jane Eyre, and that she was most happy to be able to
pronounce her completely cleared from every imputation. The teachers then
shook hands with me and kissed me, and a murmur of pleasure ran through
the ranks of my companions.
Thus relieved of a grievous load, I from that hour set to work afresh,
resolved to pioneer my way through every difficulty; I toiled hard, and my
success was proportionate to my efforts; my memory, not naturally
tenacious, improved with practice; exercise sharpened my wits; in a few
weeks I was promoted to a higher class; in less than two months I was
allowed to commence French and drawing. I learned the first two tenses of
the verb Etre, and sketched my first cottage (whose walls, by-the-by,
outrivalled in slope those of the leaning tower of Pisa), on the same day.
That night, on going to bed, I forgot to prepare in imagination, the
Barmecide supperau of hot roast potatoes, or white bread and new milk,
with which I was wont to amuse my inward cravings: I feasted, instead, on
the spectacle of ideal drawings which I saw in the dark; all the work of my
own hands; freely pencilled houses and trees, picturesque rocks and ruins,
Cuyp-likeavgroups of cattle, sweet paintings of butterflies hovering over
unblown roses, of birds picking at ripe cherries, of wrens’ nests inclosing
pearl-like eggs, wreathed about with young ivy sprays. I examined, too, in
thought, the possibility of my ever being able to translate currently aw a
certain little French story-book, which Madame Pierrot had that day shown
me; nor was that problem solved to my satisfaction ere I fell sweetly asleep.
Well has Solomon said, “Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a
stalled ox and hatred therewith.”29
I would not now have exchanged Lowood, with all its privations, for
Gateshead and its daily luxuries.

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 Chapter IX

But the privations, or, rather, the hardships, of Lowood, lessened. Spring
drew on; she was, indeed, already come; the frosts of winter had ceased; its
snows were melted; its cutting winds ameliorated. My wretched feet, flayed
and swelled to lameness by the sharp air of January, began to heal and
subside under the gender breathings of April. The nights and mornings no
longer, by their Canadian temperature, froze the very blood in our veins; we
could now endure the play-hour passed in the garden. Sometimes, on a
sunny day, it began even to be pleasant and genial; and a greenness grew
over those brown beds, which, freshening daily, suggested the thought that
Hope traversed them at night, and left each morning brighter traces of her
steps. Flowers peeped out among the leaves—snowdrops, crocuses, purple
auriculas, and golden-eyed pansies. On Thursday afternoons (half-holidays)
we now took walks, and found still sweeter flowers opening by the way-
side, under the hedges.
I discovered, too, that a great pleasure—an enjoyment which the horizon
only bounded—lay all outside the high and spike-guarded walls of our
garden. This pleasure consisted in a prospect of noble summits girding a
great hill-hollow, rich in verdure and shadow; in a bright beck, full of dark
stones and sparkling eddies. How different had this scene looked when I
viewed it laid out beneath the iron sky of winter, stiffened in frost, shrouded
with snow—when mists as chill as death wandered to the impulse of east
winds along those purple peaks, and rolled down “ing” and holm till they
blended with the frozen fog of the beck!ax That beck itself was then a
torrent, turbid and curbless; it tore asunder the wood, and sent a raving
sound through the air, often thickened with wild rain or whirling sleet; and
for the forest on its banks, that showed only ranks of skeletons.
April advanced to May. A bright, serene May it was; days of blue sky,
placid sunshine, and soft western or southern gales, filled up its duration.
And now vegetation matured with vigor; Lowood shook loose its tresses; it
became all green, all flowery; its great elm, ash, and oak skeletons were
restored to majestic life; woodland plants sprung up profusely in its
recesses; unnumbered varieties of moss filled its hollows; and it made a
strange ground-sunshine out of the wealth of its wild primrose plants; I
have seen their pale, gold gleam, in overshadowed spots, like scatterings of
the sweetest lustre. All this I enjoyed often and fully, free, unwatched, and
almost alone; for this unwonted liberty and pleasure there was a cause, to
which it now becomes my task to advert.
Have I not described a pleasant site for a dwelling, when I speak of it as
bosomed in hill and wood, and rising from the verge of a stream?
Assuredly, pleasant enough; but whether healthy or not is another question.
That forest dell, where Lowood lay, was the cradle of fog and fog-bred
pestilence;30 which, quickening with the quickening spring, crept into the
Orphan Asylum, breathed typhus through its crowded school-room and
dormitory, and, ere May arrived, transformed the seminary into a hospital.
Semi-starvation and neglected colds had predisposed most of the pupils to
receive infection. Forty-five out of the eighty girls lay ill at one time.
Classes were broken up, rules relaxed. The few who continued well were
allowed almost unlimited license, because the medical attendant insisted on
the necessity of frequent exercise to keep them in health; and had it been
otherwise, no one had leisure to watch or restrain them. Miss Temple’s
whole attention was absorbed by the patients; she lived in the sick room,
never quitting it except to snatch a few hours’ rest at night. The teachers
were fully occupied with packing up and making other necessary
preparations for the departure of those girls who were fortunate enough to
have friends and relations able and willing to remove them from the seat of
contagion. Many, already smitten, went home only to die; some died at the
school, and were buried quietly and quickly, the nature of the malady
forbidding delay.
While disease had thus become an inhabitant of Lowood, and death its
frequent visitor; while there was gloom and fear within its walls; while its
rooms and passages steamed with hospital smells—the drug and the
pastileay striving vainly to overcome the effluvia of mortality—that bright
May shone unclouded over the bold hills and beautiful woodland out-of-
doors. Its garden, too, glowed with flowers; hollyhocks had sprung up tall
as trees, lilies had opened, dahlias and roses were in bloom; the borders of
the little beds were gay with pink thrift and crimson double-daisies; the
sweet-briers gave out, morning and evening, their scent of spice and apples;
and these fragrant treasures were all useless for most of the inmates of
Lowood, except to furnish now and then a handful of herbs and blossoms to
put in a coffin.
But I, and the rest who continued well, enjoyed fully the beauties of the
scene and season. They let us ramble in the wood, like gypsies, from
morning till night; we did what we liked—went where we liked; we lived
better, too. Mr. Brocklehurst and his family never came near Lowood now;
household matters were not scrutinized into; the cross housekeeper was
gone, driven away by the fear of infection; her successor, who had been
matron at the Lowton Dispensary, unused to the ways of her new abode,
provided with comparative liberality. Besides, there were fewer to feed; the
sick could eat little; our breakfast-basins were better filled; when there was
no time to prepare a regular dinner, which often happened, she would give
us a large piece of cold pie, or a thick slice of bread and cheese, and this we
carried away with us to the wood, where we each chose the spot we liked
best, and dined sumptuously.
My favorite seat was a smooth and broad stone, rising white and dry from
the very middle of the beck, and only to be got at by wading through the
water—a feat I accomplished barefoot. The stone was just broad enough to
accommodate comfortably me and another girl—at that time my chosen
comrade—one Mary Ann Wilson, a shrewd, observant personage, whose
society I took pleasure in, partly because she was witty and original, and
partly because she had a manner which set me at my ease. Some years older
than I, she knew more of the world, and could tell me many things I liked to
hear. With her my curiosity found gratification. To my faults, also, she gave
ample indulgence, never imposing curb or rein on anything I said. She had a
turn for narrative—I for analysis; she liked to inform—I to question; so we
got on swimmingly together, deriving much entertainment, if not much
improvement, from our mutual intercourse.
 And where, meantime, was Helen Burns? Why did I not spend these
sweet days of liberty with her? Had I forgotten her? or was I so worthless as
to have grown tired of her pure society? Surely the Mary Ann Wilson I have
mentioned was inferior to my first acquaintance; she could only tell me
amusing stories, and reciprocate any racy and pungent gossip I chose to
indulge in; while, if I have spoken truth of Helen, she was qualified to give
those who enjoyed the privilege of her converse a taste of far higher things.
True, reader, and I knew and felt this; and though I am a defective being,
with many faults and few redeeming points, yet I never tired of Helen
Burns, nor ever ceased to cherish for her a sentiment of attachment as
strong, tender, and respectful as any that ever animated my heart. How
could it be otherwise, when Helen, at all times, and under all circumstances,
evinced for me a quiet and faithful friendship, which ill-humor never soured
nor irritation ever troubled? But Helen was ill at present; for some weeks
she had been removed from my sight to I knew not what room, up stairs.
She was not, I was told, in the hospital portion of the house, with the fever
patients; for her complaint was consumption, not typhus; and by
consumption I, in my ignorance, understood something mild, which time
and care would be sure to alleviate.
I was confirmed in this idea by the fact of her once or twice coming down
stairs, on very warm sunny afternoons, and being taken by Miss Temple
into the garden; but, on these occasions, I was not allowed to go and speak
to her; I only saw her from the school-room window, and then not distinctly,
for she was much wrapped up, and sat at a distance under the verandah.
One evening, in the beginning of June, I had stayed out very late with
Mary Ann in the wood; we had, as usual separated ourselves from the
others, and had wandered far—so far that we lost our way, and had to ask it
at a lonely cottage, where a man and woman lived, who looked after a herd
of half-wild swine that fed on the mast in the wood. When we got back, it
was after moonrise; a pony, which we knew to be the surgeon‘s, was
standing at the garden-door. Mary Ann remarked that she supposed some
one must be very ill, as Mr. Bates had been sent for at that time of the
evening. She went into the house. I stayed behind a few minutes to plant in
my garden a handful of roots I had dug up in the forest, and which I feared
would wither if I left them till morning. This done, I lingered yet a little
longer; the flowers smelled so sweet as the dew fell; it was such a pleasant
evening, so serene, so warm; the still glowing west promised so fairly
another fine day on the morrow; the moon rose with such majesty in the
grave east. I was noting these things, and enjoying them as a child might,
when it entered my mind, as it had never done before:
“How sad to be lying now on a sick bed, and to be in danger of dying!
This world is pleasant; it would be dreary to be called from it, and to have
to go—who knows where?”
And then my mind made its first earnest effort to comprehend what had
been infused into it concerning heaven and hell, and for the first time it
recoiled, baffled; and, for the first time, glancing behind, on each side, and
before it, it saw all round an unfathomed gulf; it felt the one point where it
stood—the present; all the rest was formless cloud and vacant depth; and it
shuddered at the thought of tottering and plunging amid that chaos. While
pondering this new idea, I heard the front door open. Mr. Bates came out,
and with him was a nurse. After she had seen him mount his horse and
depart, she was about to close the door, but I ran up to her.
“How is Helen Burns?”
“Very poorly,” was the answer.
“Is it her Mr. Bates has been to see?”
“Yes.”
“And what does he say about her?”
“He says she’ll not be here long.”
This phrase, uttered in my hearing yesterday, would have only conveyed
the notion that she was about to be removed to Northumberland, to her own
home. I should not have suspected that it meant she was dying; but I knew
instantly now; it opened clear on my comprehension that Helen Burns was
numbering her last days in this world, and that she was going to be taken to
the region of spirits, if such region there were. I experienced a shock of
horror, then a strong thrill of grief, then a desire—a necessity—to see her;
and I asked in what room she lay.
“She is in Miss Temple’s room,” said the nurse.
 “May I go up and speak to her?”
“Oh, no, child! It is not likely; and now it is time for you to come in;
you’ll catch the fever if you stop out when the dew is falling.”
The nurse closed the front door; I went in by the side entrance, which led
to the school-room. I was just in time; it was nine o‘clock, and Miss Miller
was calling the pupils to go to bed.
It might be two hours later, probably near eleven, when I—not having
been able to fall asleep, and deeming, from the perfect silence of the
dormitory, that my companions were all wrapped in profound repose—rose
softly, put on my frock over my night-dress, and, without shoes, crept from
the apartment, and set off in quest of Miss Temple’s room. It was quite at
the other end of the house; but I knew my way; and the light of the
unclouded summer moon, entering here and there at passage windows,
enabled me to find it without difficulty. An odor of camphor and burned
vinegar warned me when I came near the fever-room; and I passed its door
quickly, fearful lest the nurse, who sat up all night, should hear me. I
dreaded being discovered and sent back; for I must see Helen—I must
embrace her before she died—I must give her one last kiss, exchange with
her one last word.
Having descended a stair-case, traversed a portion of the house below, and
succeeded in opening and shutting, without noise, two doors, I reached
another flight of steps; these I mounted, and then just opposite to me was
Miss Temple’s room. A light shone through the key-hole, and from under
the door. A profound stillness pervaded the vicinity. Coming near, I found
the door slightly ajar; probably to admit some fresh air into the close abode
of sickness. Indisposed to hesitate, and full of impatient impulses—soul and
senses quivering with keen throes—I put it back and looked in. My eyes
sought Helen, and feared to find death.
Close by Miss Temple’s bed, and half covered with its white curtains,
there stood a little crib. I saw the outline of a form under the clothes, but the
face was hid by the hangings. The nurse I had spoken to in the garden sat in
an easy-chair, asleep; an unsnuffed candle burned dimly on the table. Miss
Temple was not to be seen; I knew afterward that she had been called to a
delirious patient in the fever-room. I advanced; then paused by the crib-
side. My hand was on the curtain, but I preferred speaking before I
withdrew it. I still recoiled at the dread of seeing a corpse.
“Helen!” I whispered softly; “are you awake?”
She stirred, herself put back the curtain, and I saw her face, pale, wasted,
but quite composed. She looked so little changed that my fear was instantly
dissipated.
“Can it be you, Jane?” she asked, in her own gentle voice.
“Oh!” I thought, “she is not going to die; they are mistaken; she could not
speak and look so calmly if she were.”
I got on to her crib and kissed her. Her forehead was cold, and her cheek
both cold and thin; and so were her hand and wrist; but she smiled as of old.
“Why are you come here, Jane? It is past eleven o‘clock; I heard it strike
some minutes since.”
“I came to see you, Helen; I heard you were very ill, and I could not sleep
till I had spoken to you.”
“You came to bid me good-by, then; you are just in time, probably.”
“Are you going somewhere, Helen? Are you going home?”
“Yes; to my long homeaz—my last home.”
“No, no, Helen.” I stopped, distressed. While I tried to devour my tears, a
fit of coughing seized Helen; it did not, however, wake the nurse; when it
was over, she lay some minutes exhausted; then she whispered—
“Jane, your little feet are bare; lie down and cover yourself with my
quilt.”
I did so; she put her arm over me, and I nestled close to her. After a long
silence, she resumed; still whispering—
“I am very happy, Jane; and when you hear that I am dead you must be
sure and not grieve; there is nothing to grieve about. We all must die one
day, and the illness which is removing me is not painful; it is gentle and
gradual; my mind is at rest. I leave no one to regret me much; I have only a
father; and he is lately married, and will not miss me. By dying young I
shall escape great sufferings. I had not qualities or talents to make my way
very well in the world; I should have been continually at fault.”
“But where are you going to, Helen? Can you see? Do you know?”
“I believe; I have faith; I am going to God.”
“Where is God? What is God?”
“My Maker and yours; who will never destroy what he created. I rely
implicitly on his power, and confide wholly in his goodness; I count the
hours till that eventful one arrives which shall restore me to him, reveal him
to me.”
“You are sure, then, Helen, that there is such a place as heaven; and that
our souls can get to it when we die?”
“I am sure there is a future state; I believe God is good; I can resign my
immortal part to him without any misgiving. God is my father; God is my
friend; I love him; I believe he loves me.”
“And shall I see you again, Helen, when I die?”
“You will come to the same region of happiness; be received by the same
mighty, universal Parent, no doubt, dear Jane.”
Again I questioned; but this time only in thought. “Where is that region?
Does it exist?” And I clasped my arms closer round Helen; she seemed
dearer to me than ever; I felt as if I could not let her go; I lay with my face
hidden on her neck. Presently she said, in the sweetest tone—
“How comfortable I am! That last fit of coughing has tired me a little; I
feel as if I could sleep; but don’t leave me, Jane; I like to have you near
me.”
“I’ll stay with you, dear Helen; no one shall take me away.”
“Are you warm, darling?”
“Yes.”
“Good-night, Jane.”
“Good-night, Helen.”
She kissed me, and I her; and we both soon slumbered.
 When I awoke it was day; an unusual movement roused me; I looked up; I
was in somebody’s arms; the nurse held me; she was carrying me through
the passage back to the dormitory. I was not reprimanded for leaving my
bed; people had something else to think about. No explanation was afforded
then to my many questions; but a day or two afterward I learned that Miss
Temple, on returning to her own room at dawn, had found me laid in the
little crib; my face against Helen Burns’ shoulder, my arms round her neck.
I was asleep, and Helen was—dead.
Her grave is in Brocklebridge church-yard; for fifteen years after her
death it was only covered by a grassy mound; but now a gray marble tablet
marks the spot, inscribed with her name, and the word “Resurgam.”31

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 Chapter X

Hitherto I have recorded in detail the events of my insignificant existence.

To the first ten years of my life, I have given almost as many chapters. But
this is not to be a regular autobiography; I am only bound to invoke
memory where I know her responses will possess some degree of interest;
therefore I now pass a space of eight years almost in silence; a few lines
only are necessary to keep up the links of connection.
When the typhus fever had fulfilled its mission of devastation at Lowood,
it gradually disappeared from thence; but not till its virulence and the
number of its victims had drawn public attention on the school. Inquiry was
made into the origin of the scourge, and by degrees various facts came out
which excited public indignation in a high degree. The unhealthy nature of
the site; the quantity and quality of the children’s food; the brackish, fetid
water used in its preparation; the pupils’ wretched clothing and
accommodations;—all these things were discovered; and the discovery
produced a result mortifying to Mr. Brocklehurst, but beneficial to the
institution.
Several wealthy and benevolent individuals in the county subscribed
largely for the erection of a more convenient building in a better situation;
new regulations were made; improvements in diet and clothing introduced;
the funds of the school were intrusted to the management of a committee.
Mr. Brocklehurst, who, from his wealth and family connections, could not
be overlooked, still retained the post of treasurer; but he was aided in the
discharge of his duties by gentlemen of rather more enlarged and
sympathizing minds; his office of inspector, too, was shared by those who
knew how to combine reason with strictness, comfort with economy,
compassion with uprightness. The school, thus improved, became in time a
truly useful and noble institution. I remained an inmate of its walls, after its
regeneration, for eight years—six as pupil, and two as teacher; and in both
capacities I bear my testimony to its value and importance.
During these eight years my life was uniform, but not unhappy, because it
was not inactive. I had the means of an excellent education placed within
my reach; a fondness for some of my studies and a desire to excel in all,
together with a great delight in pleasing my teachers, especially such as I
loved, urged me on. I availed myself fully of the advantages offered me. In
time I rose to be the first girl of the first class; then I was invested with the
office of teacher; which I discharged with zeal for two years; but at the end
of that time I altered.
Miss Temple, through all changes, had thus far continued superintendent
of the seminary; to her instruction I owed the best part of my acquirements;
her friendship and society had been my continual solace; she had stood me
in the stead of mother, governess, and, latterly, companion. At this period
she married, removed with her husband (a clergyman, an excellent man,
almost worthy of such a wife) to a distant county, and, consequently, was
lost to me.
From the day she left I was no longer the same; with her was gone every
settled feeling, every association that had made Lowood in some degree a
home to me. I had imbibed from her something of her nature and much of
her habits; more harmonious thoughts, what seemed better regulated
feelings, had become the inmates of my mind. I had given in allegiance to
duty and order; I was quiet; I believed I was content; to the eyes of others,
usually even to my own, I appeared a disciplined and subdued character.
But destiny, in the shape of the Rev. Mr. Nasmyth, came between me and
Miss Temple; I saw her in her travelling-dress step into a post-chaise,
shortly after the marriage ceremony, I watched the chaise mount the hill and
disappear beyond its brow, and then retired to my own room, and there
spent in solitude the greatest part of the half-holiday granted in honor of the
occasion.
I walked about the chamber most of the time. I imagined myself only to
be regretting my loss and thinking how to repair it; but when my reflections
were concluded, and I looked up and found that the afternoon was gone,
and evening far advanced, another discovery dawned on me; namely, that in
the interval I had undergone a transforming process; that my mind had put
off all it had borrowed of Miss Temple, or, rather, that she had taken with
her the serene atmosphere I had been breathing in her vicinity, and that now
I was left in my natural element, and beginning to feel the stirring of old
emotions. It did not seem as if a prop were withdrawn, but rather as if a
motive were gone; it was not the power to be tranquil which had failed me,
but the reason for tranquillity was no more. My world had for some years
been in Lowood; my experience had been of its rules and systems; now I
remembered that the real world was wide, and that a varied field of hopes
and fears, of sensations and excitements, awaited those who had courage to
go forth into its expanse to seek real knowledge of life amid its perils.
I went to my window, opened it, and looked out. There were the two
wings of the building; there was the garden; there were the skirts of
Lowood; there was the hilly horizon. My eye passed all other objects, to
rest on those most remote, the blue peaks; it was those I longed to
surmount; all within their boundary of rock and heath seemed prison-
ground, exile limits. I traced the white road winding round the base of one
mountain, and vanishing in a gorge between two; how I longed to follow it
further! I recalled the time when I had travelled that very road in a coach; I
remembered descending that hill at twilight; an age seemed to have elapsed
since the day which brought me first to Lowood; and I had never quitted it
since. My vacations had all been spent at school; Mrs. Reed had never sent
for me to Gateshead; neither she nor any of her family had ever been to visit
me. I had had no communication by letter or message with the outer world;
school rules, school duties, school habits, and notions, and voices, and
faces, and phrases, and costumes, and preferences, and antipathies; such
was what I knew of existence. And now I felt that it was not enough. I tired
of the routine of eight years in one afternoon. I desired liberty; for liberty I
gasped; for liberty I uttered a prayer; it seemed scattered on the wind then
faintly blowing. I abandoned it, and framed an humbler supplication; for
change, stimulus; that petition, too, seemed swept off into vague space.
“Then,” I cried, half desperate, “grant me, at least, a new servitude!”
Here a bell, ringing the hour of supper, called me down stairs.
I was not free to resume the interrupted chain of my reflections till bed-
time; even then a teacher who occupied the same room with me kept me
from the subject to which I longed to recur, by a prolonged effusion of
small talk. How I wished sleep would silence her! It seemed as if, could I
but go back to the idea which had last entered my mind as I stood at the
window, some inventive suggestion would rise for relief.
Miss Gryce snored at last; she was a heavy Welshwoman, and till now her
habitual nasal strains had never been regarded by me in any other light than
as a nuisance; to-night I hailed the first deep notes with satisfaction; I was
debarrassed of interruption; my half-effaced thought instantly revived.
“A new servitude! There is something in that,” I soliloquized (mentally,
be it understood; I did not talk aloud). “I know there is, because it does not
sound too sweet; it is not like such words as Liberty, Excitement,
Enjoyment; delightful sounds, truly; but no more than sounds for me; and
so hollow and fleeting that it is mere waste of time to listen to them. But
servitude! that must be matter of fact. Any one may serve; I have served
here eight years; now all I want is to serve elsewhere. Can I not get so much
of my own will? Is not the thing feasible? Yes, yes; the end is not so
difficult, if I had only a brain active enough to ferret out the means of
attaining it.”
I sat up in bed by way of arousing this said brain; it was a chilly night; I
covered my shoulders with a shawl, and then I proceeded to think again
with all my might.
“What do I want? A new place, in a new house, among new faces, under
new circumstances; I want this because it is of no use wanting anything
better. How do people do to get a new place? They apply to friends, I
suppose; I have no friends. There are many others who have no friends,
who must look about for themselves and be their own helpers; and what is
their resource?”
I could not tell; nothing answered me; I then ordered my brain to find a
response, and quickly. It worked and worked faster; I felt the pulses throb in
my head and temples; but for nearly an hour it worked in chaos, and no
result came of its efforts. Feverish with vain labor, I got up and took a turn
in the room; undrew the curtain, noted a star or two, shivered with cold, and
again crept to bed.
 A kind fairy, in my absence, had surely dropped the required suggestion
on my pillow; for as I lay down it came quietly and naturally to my mind:
“Those who want situations advertise; you must advertise in the—shire
Herald.”
“How? I know nothing about advertising.”
Replies rose smooth and prompt now:
“You must inclose the advertisement and the money to pay for it under a
cover directed to the editor of the Herald; you must put it, the first
opportunity you have, into the post at Lowton; answers must be addressed
to J. E., at the post-office there; you can go and inquire, in about a week
after you send your letter, if any are come, and act accordingly.”
This scheme I went over twice, thrice; it was then digested in my mind; I
had it in a clear, practical form; I felt satisfied, and fell asleep.
With earliest day, I was up. I had my advertisement written, inclosed, and
directed, before the bell rung to rouse the school; it ran thus:—
“A young lady accustomed to tuition (had I not been a teacher two years?)
is desirous of meeting with a situation in a private family where the children
are under fourteen (I thought that as I was barely eighteen, it would not do
to undertake the guidance of pupils nearer my own age). She is qualified to
teach the usual branches of a good English education, together with French,
drawing, and music (in those days, reader, this, now narrow catalogue of
accomplishments, would have been held tolerably comprehensive). Address
J. E., Post-office, Lowton,—shire.”
This document remained locked in my drawer all day; after tea, I asked
leave of the new superintendent to go to Lowton, in order to perform some
small commissions for myself and one or two of my fellow-teachers.
Permission was readily granted; I went. It was a walk of two miles, and the
evening was wet, but the days were still long. I visited a shop or two,
slipped the letter into the post-office, and came back through heavy rain,
with streaming garments, but with a relieved heart.
The succeeding week seemed long; it came to an end at last, however, like
all sublunary things, and once more, toward the close of a pleasant autumn
day, I found myself afoot on the road to Lowton. A picturesque track it was,
by the way; lying along the side of the beck and through the sweetest curves
of the dale; but that day I thought more of the letters, that might or might
not be awaiting me at the little burgh whither I was bound, than of the
charms of lea and water.
My ostensible errand on this occasion was to get measured for a pair of
shoes; so I discharged that business first, and when it was done I stepped
across the clean and quiet little street from the shoemaker’s to the post-
office; it was kept by an old dame, who wore horn spectacles on her nose,
and black mittens on her hands.
“Are there any letters for J. E.?” I asked.
She peered at me over her spectacles, and then she opened a drawer, and
fumbled among its contents for a long time; so long that my hopes began to
falter. At last, having held a document before her glasses for nearly five
minutes, she presented it across the counter, accompanying the act by
another inquisitive and mistrustful glance—it was for J. E.
“Is there only one?” I demanded.
“There are no more,” said she; and I put it in my pocket and turned my
face homeward; I could not open it then; rules obliged me to be back by
eight, and it was already half-past seven.
Various duties awaited me on my arrival; I had to sit with the girls during
their hour of study; then it was my turn to read prayers, to see them to bed;
afterward I supped with the other teachers. Even when we finally retired for
the night, the inevitable Miss Gryce was still my companion; we had only a
short end of candle in our candlestick, and I dreaded lest she should talk till
it was all burned out; fortunately, however, the heavy supper she had eaten
produced a soporific effect; she was already snoring, before I had finished
undressing. There still remained an inch of candle; I now took out my letter,
the seal was an initial F.; I broke it, the contents were brief.
“If J. E., who advertised in the —shire Herald of last Thursday, possesses
the acquirements mentioned, and if she is in a position to give satisfactory
references as to character and competency, a situation can be offered her
where there is but one pupil, a little girl, under ten years of age; and where
the salary is thirty pounds per annum. J. E. is requested to send references,
name, address, and all particulars, to the direction:
“Mrs. Fairfax, Thornfield, near Millcote,—shire.”
I examined the document long; the writing was old-fashioned and rather
uncertain, like that of an elderly lady. This circumstance was satisfactory; a
private fear had haunted me that, in thus acting for myself and by my own
guidance, I ran the risk of getting into some scrape; and, above all things, I
wished the result of my endeavors to be respectable, proper, en règle.ba I
now felt that an elderly lady was no bad ingredient in the business I had on
hand. Mrs. Fairfax! I saw her in a black gown and widow’s cap; frigid,
perhaps, but not uncivil; a model of elderly English respectability.
Thornfield! that, doubtless, was the name of her house, a neat, orderly spot,
I was sure; though I failed in my efforts to conceive a correct plan of the
premises. Millcote, —shire; I brushed up my recollections of the map of
England; yes, I saw it, both the shire and the town.—shire was seventy
miles nearer London than the remote county where I now resided; that was
a recommendation to me. I longed to go where there was life and
movement; Millcote was a large manufacturing town on the banks of the A
—; a busy place enough, doubtless; so much the better; it would be a
complete change, at least. Not that my fancy was much captivated by the
idea of long chimneys and clouds of smoke; “but,” I argued, “Thornfield
will, probably, be a good way from the town.”
Here the socket of the candle dropped, and the wick went out.
Next day new steps were to be taken; my plans could no longer be
confined to my own breast; I must impart them, in order to achieve their
success. Having sought and obtained an audience of the superintendent,
during the noontide recreation, I told her I had a prospect of getting a new
situation, where the salary would be double what I now received (for at
Lowood I only got £15 per annum); and requested she would break the
matter for me to Mr. Brocklehurst or some of the committee, and ascertain
whether they would permit me to mention them as references. She
obligingly consented to act as mediatrix in the matter. The next day she laid
the affair before Mr. Brocklehurst, who said that Mrs. Reed must be written
to, as she was my natural guardian. A note was accordingly addressed to
that lady, who returned for answer, that “I might do as I pleased; she had
long relinquished all interference in my affairs.” This note went the round
of the committee, and, at last, after what appeared to me most tedious delay,
formal leave was given me to better my condition if I could; and an
assurance added, that, as I had always conducted myself well, both as
teacher and pupil, at Lowood, a testimonial of character and capacity,
signed by the inspectors of that institution, should forthwith be furnished
me.
This testimonial I accordingly received in about a week; forwarded a copy
of it to Mrs. Fairfax, and got that lady’s reply, stating that she was satisfied,
and fixing that day fortnight as the period for my assuming the post of
governess in her house.
I now busied myself in preparations; the fortnight passed rapidly. I had
not a very large wardrobe, though it was adequate to my wants; and the last
day sufficed to pack my trunk, the same I had brought with me eight years
ago from Gateshead.
The box was corded, the card nailed on. In half an hour the carrier was to
call for it to take it to Lowton; whither I myself was to repair at an early
hour the next morning to meet the coach. I had brushed my black stuff
travelling-dress, prepared my bonnet, gloves, and muff; sought in all my
drawers to see that no article was left behind; and now, having nothing
more to do, I sat down and tried to rest. I could not. Though I had been on
foot all day, I could not now repose an instant; I was too much excited. A
phase of my life was closing to-night, a new one opening to-morrow;
impossible to slumber in the interval. I must watchbb feverishly while the
change was being accomplished.
“Miss,” said a servant, who met me in the lobby, where I was wandering
like a troubled spirit, “a person below wishes to see you.”
“The carrier, no doubt,” I thought, and ran down stairs without inquiry. I
was passing the back parlor, or teacher’s sitting-room, the door of which
was half open, to go to the kitchen, when some one ran out:
“It’s her, I am sure! I could have told her anywhere!” cried the individual,
who stopped my progress and took my hand.
 I looked; I saw a woman attired like a well-dressed servant, matronly, yet
still young; very good looking, with black hair and eyes, and lively
complexion.
“Well, who is it?” she asked in a voice and with a smile I half recognized;
“you’ve not quite forgotten me, I think, Miss Jane?”
In another second I was embracing and kissing her rapturously. “Bessie!
Bessie! Bessie!” that was all I said; whereat she half laughed, half cried,
and we both went into the parlor. By the fire stood a little fellow three years
old, in plaid frock and trousers.
“That is my little boy,” said Bessie, directly.
“Then you are married, Bessie?”
“Yes; nearly five years since, to Robert Leaven, the coachman; and I’ve a
little girl besides Bobby there, that I’ve christened Jane.”
“And you don’t live at Gateshead?”
“I live at the Lodge; the old porter has left.”
“Well, and how do they all get on? Tell me everything about them, Bessie;
but sit down first; and, Bobby, come and sit on my knee, will you?” but
Bobby preferred sidling over to his mother.
“You’re not grown so very tall, Miss Jane, nor so very stout,” continued
Mrs. Leaven. “I dare say they’ve not kept you too well at school; Miss Reed
is the head and shoulders taller than you are, and Miss Georgiana would
make two of you in breadth.”
“Georgiana is handsome, I suppose, Bessie?”
“Very. She went up to London last winter with her mamma, and there
everybody admired her, and a young lord fell in love with her, but his
relations were against the match; and—what do you think? he and Miss
Georgiana made it up to run away, but they were found out and stopped. It
was Miss Reed that found them out; I believe she was envious, and now she
and her sister lead a cat-and-dog life together; they are always quarrelling.”
“Well, and what of John Reed?”
 “Oh, he is not doing so well as his mamma could wish. He went to
college, and he got-plucked,bc I think they call it; and then his uncles
wanted him to be a barrister, and study the law; but, he is such a dissipated
young man, they will never make much of him, I think.”
“What does he look like?”
“He is very tall; some people call him a fine-looking young man; but he
has such thick lips.”
“And Mrs. Reed?”
“Missis looks stout and well enough in the face, but I think she’s not quite
easy in her mind. Mr. John’s conduct does not please her; he spends a deal
of money.”
“Did she send you here, Bessie?”
“No, indeed; but I have long wanted to see you, and when I heard that
there had been a letter from you, and that you were going to another part of
the country, I thought I’d just set off and get a look at you before you were
quite out of my reach.”
“I am afraid you are disappointed in me, Bessie.” I said this laughing; I
perceived that Bessie’s glance, though it expressed regard, did in no shape
denote admiration.
“No, Miss Jane, not exactly. You are genteel enough; you look like a lady,
and it is as much as ever I expected of you. You were no beauty as a child.”
I smiled at Bessie’s frank answer. I felt that it was correct, but I confess I
was not quite indifferent to its import. At eighteen most people wish to
please, and the conviction that they have not an exterior likely to second
that desire, brings anything but gratification.
“I dare say you are clever, though,” continued Bessie, by way of solace.
“What can you do? Can you play on the piano?”
“A little.”
There was one in the room; Bessie went and opened it, and then asked me
to sit down and give her a tune. I played a waltz or two, and she was
charmed.
 “The Miss Reeds could not play as well!” said she, exultingly. “I always
said you would surpass them in learning; and can you draw?”
“That is one of my paintings over the chimney-piece.” It was a landscape
in water-colors, of which I had made a present to the superintendent, in
acknowledgment of her obliging mediation with the committee on my
behalf; and which she had framed and glazed.
“Well, that is beautiful, Miss Jane! It is as fine a picture as any Miss
Reed’s drawing-master could paint, let alone the young ladies themselves,
who could not come near it; and have you learned French?”
“Yes, Bessie, I can both read it and speak it.”
“And you can work on muslin and canvass?”
“I can.”
“Oh, you are quite a lady, Miss Jane! I knew you would be; you will get
on whether your relations notice you or not. There was something I wanted
to ask you—have you ever heard anything from your father’s kinsfolk, the
Eyres?”
“Never in my life.”
“Well, you know missis always said they were poor and quite despicable;
and they may be poor, but I believe they are as much gentry as the Reeds
are; for one day, nearly seven years ago, a Mr. Eyre came to Gateshead, and
wanted to see you. Missis said you were at school fifty miles off; he seemed
so much disappointed, for he could not stay—he was going on a voyage to a
foreign country, and the ship was to sail from London in a day or two. He
looked quite a gentleman, and I believe he was your father’s brother.”
“What foreign country was he going to, Bessie?”
“An island thousands of miles off, where they make wine—the butler did
tell me—”
“Madeira?” I suggested.
“Yes, that is it—that is the very word.”
“So he went?”
 “Yes; he did not stay many minutes in the house; missis was very high
with him; she called him afterward a ‘sneaking trades-man.’ My Robert
believes he was a wine-merchant.”
“Very likely,” I returned; “or perhaps clerk or agent to a wine-merchant.”
Bessie and I conversed about old times an hour longer, and then she was
obliged to leave me. I saw her again for a few minutes the next morning at
Lowton, while I was waiting for the coach. We parted finally at the door of
the Brocklehurst Arms; there each went her separate way—she set off for
the brow of Lowood Fell to meet the conveyance which was to take her
back to Gateshead, I mounted the vehicle which was to bear me to new
duties and a new life in the unknown environs of Millcote.

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 Chapter XI

Anew chapter in a novel is something like a new scene in a play; and when
I draw up the curtain this time, reader, you must fancy you see a room in the
George Inn, at Millcote, with such large-figured papering on the walls as
inn rooms have; such a carpet, such furniture, such ornaments on the
mantel-piece, such prints, including a portrait of George the Third, and
another of the Prince of Wales, and a representation of the death of Wolfe.
All this is visible to you by the light of an oil-lamp hanging from the
ceiling, and by that of an excellent fire, near which I sit in my cloak and
bonnet; my muff and umbrella lie on the table, and I am warming away the
numbness and chill contracted by sixteen hours’ exposure to the rawness of
an October day. I left Lowton at four o‘clock A.M., and the Millcote town-
clock is now just striking eight.
Reader, though I look comfortably accommodated, I am not very tranquil
in my mind; I thought when the coach stopped here there would be some
one to meet me; I looked anxiously round as I descended the wooden steps
the “boots” placed for my convenience, expecting to hear my name
pronounced and to see some description of carriage waiting to convey me to
Thornfield. Nothing of the sort was visible; and when I asked a waiter if
any one had been to inquire after a Miss Eyre, I was answered in the
negative; so I had no resource but to request to be shown into a private
room; and here I am waiting, while all sorts of doubts and fears are
troubling my thoughts.
It is a very strange sensation to inexperienced youth to feel itself quite
alone in the world; cut adrift from every connection, uncertain whether the
port to which it is bound can be reached, and prevented by many
impediments from returning to that it has quitted. The charm of adventure
sweetens that sensation, the glow of pride warms it; but then the throb of
fear disturbs it; and fear with me became predominant when half an hour
elapsed, and still I was alone. I bethought myself to ring the bell.
“Is there a place in this neighborhood called Thornfield?” I asked of the
waiter who answered the summons.
“Thornfield! don’t know, ma‘am; I’ll inquire at the bar.” He vanished, but
reappeared instantly.
“Is your name Eyre, miss?”
“Yes.”
“Person here waiting for you.”
I jumped up, took my muff and umbrella, and hastened into the inn
passage; a man was standing by the open door, and in the lamp-lighted
street I dimly saw a one-horse conveyance.
“This will be your luggage, I suppose!” said the man, rather abruptly,
when he saw me, pointing to my trunk in the passage.
“Yes.”
He hoisted it on the vehicle, which was a sort of car, and then I got in.
Before he shut me up, I asked him how far it was to Thornfield.
“A matter of six miles.”
“How long shall we be before we get there?”
“Happen an hour and a half.”
He fastened the car door, climbed to his own seat outside, and we set off.
Our progress was leisurely, and gave me ample time to reflect; I was
content to be at length so near the end of my journey; and as I leaned back
in the comfortable though not elegant conveyance, I meditated much at my
ease.
“I suppose,” thought I, “judging from the plainness of the servant and
carriage, Mrs. Fairfax is not a very dashing person; so much the better; I
never lived among fine people but once, and I was very miserable with
them. I wonder if she lives alone except this little girl; if so, and if she is in
any degree amiable, I shall surely be able to get on with her; I will do my
best—it is a pity that doing one’s best does not always answer. At Lowood,
indeed, I took that resolution, kept it, and succeeded in pleasing; but with
Mrs. Reed I remember my best was always spurned with scorn. I pray God
Mrs. Fairfax may not turn out a second Mrs. Reed; but if she does, I am not
bound to stay with her; let the worst come to the worst, I can advertise
again. How far are we on our road now, I wonder?”
I let down the window and looked out. Millcote was behind us; judging
by the number of its lights, it seemed a place of considerable magnitude—
much larger than Lowton. We were now, as far as I could see, on a sort of
common; but there were houses scattered all over the district. I felt we were
in a different region to Lowood—more populous, less picturesque; more
stirring, less romantic.
The roads were heavy, the night misty; my conductor let his horse walk
all the way, and the hour and a half extended, I verily believe, to two hours;
at last he turned in his seat and said:
“You’re noan so far fro’ Thornfield now.”
Again I looked out—we were passing a church; I saw its low, broad tower
against the sky, and its bell was tolling a quarter; I saw a narrow galaxy of
lights, too, on a hill-side, marking a village or hamlet. About ten minutes
after, the driver got down and opened a pair of gates; we passed through,
and they clashed to behind us. We now slowly ascended a drive, and came
upon the long front of a house; candle-light gleamed from one curtained
bow-window—all the rest were dark. The car stopped at the front door; it
was opened by a maid-servant; I alighted and went in.
“Will you walk this way, ma‘am?” said the girl; and I followed her across
a square hall with high doors all round; she ushered me into a room, whose
double illumination of fire and candle at first dazzled me, contrasting as it
did with the darkness to which my eyes had been for two hours inured;
when I could see, however, a cozy and agreeable picture presented itself to
my view.
A snug, small room; a round table by a cheerful fire; an arm-chair, high-
backed and old-fashioned, wherein sat the neatest imaginable little elderly
lady, in widow’s cap, black silk gown, and snowy muslin apron—exactly
like what I had fancied Mrs. Fairfax, only less stately and milder-looking.
She was occupied in knitting; a large cat sat demurely at her feet; nothing,
in short, was wanting to complete the beau ideal of domestic comfort. A
more reassuring introduction for a new governess could scarcely be
conceived; there was no grandeur to overwhelm, no stateliness to
embarrass; and then, as I entered, the old lady got up and promptly and
kindly came forward to meet me.
“How do you do, my dear? I am afraid you have had a tedious ride, John
drives so slowly; you must be cold—come to the fire.”
“Mrs. Fairfax, I suppose?” said I.
“Yes, you are right; do sit down.”
She conducted me to her own chair, and then began to remove my shawl
and untie my bonnet-strings; I begged she would not give herself so much
trouble.
“Oh, it is no trouble; I dare say your own hands are almost numbed with
cold. Leah, make a little hot negus,bd and cut a sandwich or two; here are
the keys of the storeroom.”
And she produced from her pocket a most housewifely bunch of keys, and
delivered them to the servant.
“Now, then, draw nearer to the fire,” she continued. “You’ve brought your
luggage with you, haven’t you, my dear?”
“Yes, ma‘am.”
“I’ll see it carried into your room,” she said, and bustled out.
“She treats me like a visitor,” thought I. “I little expected such a
reception; I anticipated only coldness and stiffness; this is not like what I
have heard of the treatment of governesses; but I must not exult too soon.”
She returned; with her own hands cleared her knitting apparatus and a
book or two from the table, to make room for the tray which Leah now
brought, and then herself handed me the refreshments. I felt rather confused
at being the object of more attention than I had ever before received, and
that, too, shown by my employer and superior. But as she did not herself
seem to consider she was doing anything out of her place, I thought it better
to take her civilities quietly.
 “Shall I have the pleasure of seeing Miss Fairfax to-night?” I asked, when
I had partaken of what she offered me.
“What did you say, my dear? I am a little deaf,” returned the good lady,
approaching her ear to my mouth.
I repeated the question more distinctly.
“Miss Fairfax? Oh, you mean Miss Varens! Varens is the name of your
future pupil.”
“Indeed? Then she is not your daughter?”
“No—I have no family.”
I should have followed up my first inquiry by asking in what way Miss
Varens was connected with her; but I recollected it was not polite to ask too
many questions; besides, I was sure to hear in time.
“I am so glad,” she continued, as she sat down opposite to me, and took
the cat on her knee, “I am so glad you are come; it will be quite pleasant
living now with a companion. To be sure it is pleasant at any time; for
Thornfield is a fine old hall, rather neglected of late years, perhaps, but still
it is a respectable place. Yet, you know, in winter time, one feels dreary
quite alone, in the best quarters. I say alone—Leah is a nice girl to be sure,
and John and his wife are very decent people; but then, you see, they are
only servants, and one can’t converse with them on terms of equality; one
must keep them at due distance, for fear of losing one’s authority. I’m sure
last winter (it was a severe one, if you recollect, and when it did not snow, it
rained and blew) not a creature but the butcher and postman came to the
house, from November till February; and I really got quite melancholy with
sitting night after night alone; I had Leah in to read to me sometimes; but I
don’t think the poor girl liked the task much; she felt it confining. In spring
and summer one got on better; sunshine and long days make such a
difference; and then, just at the commencement of this autumn, little Adela
Varens came and her nurse. A child makes a house alive all at once; and
now you are here I shall be quite gay.”
My heart really warmed to the worthy lady as I heard her talk; and I drew
my chair a little nearer to her, and expressed my sincere wish that she might
find my company as agreeable as she anticipated.
 “But I’ll not keep you sitting up late to-night,” said she; “it is on the
stroke of twelve now, and you have been travelling all day; you must feel
tired. If you have got your feet well warmed I’ll show you your bed-room.
I’ve had the room next to mine prepared for you; it is only a small
apartment, but I thought you would like it better than one of the large front
chambers; to be sure they have finer furniture, but they are so dreary and
solitary, I never sleep in them myself.”
I thanked her for her considerate choice, and as I really felt fatigued with
my long journey, expressed my readiness to retire. She took her candle, and
I followed her from the room. First she went to see if the hall-door was
fastened; having taken the key from the lock, she led the way up stairs. The
steps and banisters were of oak; the stair-case window was high and
latticed; both it, and the long gallery into which the bedroom doors opened,
looked as if they belonged to a church rather than a house. A very chill and
vault-like air pervaded the stairs and gallery, suggesting cheerless ideas of
space and solitude; and I was glad, when finally ushered into my chamber,
to find it of small dimensions and furnished in ordinary modern style.
When Mrs. Fairfax had bid me a kind good-night, and I had fastened my
door, gazed leisurely round, and in some measure effaced the eerie
impression made by that wide hall, that dark and spacious stair-case, and
that long, cold gallery, by the livelier aspect of my little room, I
remembered that after a day of bodily fatigue and mental anxiety, I was now
at last in safe haven. The impulse of gratitude swelled my heart, and I knelt
down at the bedside and offered up thanks where thanks were due; not
forgetting, ere I rose, to implore aid on my further path, and the power of
meriting the kindness which seemed so frankly offered me before it was
earned. My couch had no thorns in it that night; my solitary room no fears.
At once weary and content, I slept soon and soundly; when I awoke it was
broad day.
The chamber looked such a bright little place to me as the sun shone in
between the gay blue chintz window-curtains, showing papered walls and a
carpeted floor, so unlike the bare planks and stained plaster of Lowood, that
my spirits rose at the view. Externals have a great effect on the young; I
thought that a fairer era of life was beginning for me—one that was to have
its flowers and pleasures, as well as its thorns and toils. My faculties,
roused by the change of scene, the new field offered to hope, seemed all
astir. I can not precisely define what they expected, but it was something
pleasant; not perhaps that day or that month, but at an indefinite future
period.
I rose. I dressed myself with care; obliged to be plain—for I had no article
of attire that was not made with extreme simplicity—I was still by nature
solicitous to be neat. It was not my habit to be disregardful of appearance,
or careless of the impression I made; on the contrary, I ever wished to look
as well as I could, and to please as much as my want of beauty would
permit. I sometimes regretted that I was not handsomer; I sometimes
wished to have rosy cheeks, a straight nose, and small cherry mouth; I
desired to be tall, stately, and finely developed in figure; I felt it a
misfortune that I was so little, so pale, and had features so irregular and
marked. And why had I these aspirations and these regrets? It would be
difficult to say; I could not then distinctly say it to myself; yet I had a
reason, and a logical, natural reason too. However, when I had brushed my
hair very smooth, and put on my black frock—which, Quaker-like as it was,
at least had the merit of fitting to a nicety—and adjusted my clean white
tucker, I thought I should do respectably enough to appear before Mrs.
Fairfax; and that my new pupil would not at least recoil from me with
antipathy. Having opened my chamber window, and seen that I left all
things straight and neat on the toilet-table, I ventured forth.
Traversing the long and matted gallery, I descended the slippery steps of
oak; then I gained the hall; I halted there a minute; I looked at some pictures
on the walls (one I remember represented a grim man in a cuirass,be and
one a lady with powdered hair and a pearl necklace); at a bronze lamp
pendent on the ceiling, at a great clock whose case was of oak, curiously
carved, and ebon black with time and rubbing. Everything appeared very
stately and imposing to me; but then I was so little accustomed to grandeur.
The hall-door, which was half of glass, stood open; I stepped over the
threshold. It was a fine autumn morning; the early sun shone serenely on
embrowned groves and still green fields; advancing on to the lawn, I looked
up, and surveyed the front of the mansion. It was three stories high, of
proportions not vast, though considerable; a gentleman’s manor-house, not
a nobleman’s seat; battlements around the top gave it a picturesque look. Its
gray front stood out well from the background of a rookery, whose cawing
tenants were now on the wing; they flew over the lawn and grounds to
alight in a great meadow, from which these were separated by a sunk fence,
and where an array of mighty old thorn trees, strong, knotty, and broad as
oaks, at once explained the etymology of the mansion’s designation. Further
off were hills; not so lofty as those round Lowood, nor so craggy, nor so
like barriers of separation from the living world; but yet, quiet and lonely
hills enough, and seeming to embrace Thornfield with a seclusion I had not
expected to find existent so near the stirring locality of Millcote. A little
hamlet, whose roofs were blent with trees, straggled up the side of one of
these hills; the church of the district stood nearer Thornfield; its old tower-
top looked over a knoll between the house and gates.
I was yet enjoying the calm prospect and pleasant fresh air, yet listening
with delight to the cawing of the rooks, yet surveying the wide, hoary front
of the hall, and thinking what a great place it was for one lonely little dame
like Mrs. Fairfax to inhabit, when that lady appeared at the door.
“What! out already?” said she. “I see you are an early riser.” I went up to
her, and was received with an affable kiss and shake of the hand.
“How do you like Thornfield?” she asked. I told her I liked it very much.
“Yes,” she said, “it is a pretty place; but I fear it will be getting out of
order, unless Mr. Rochester should take it into his head to come and reside
here permanently; or, at least, visit it rather oftener; great houses and fine
grounds require the presence of the proprietor.”
“Mr. Rochester!” I exclaimed. “Who is he?”
“The owner of Thornfield,” she responded quietly. “Did you not know he
was called Rochester?”
Of course I did not—I had never heard of him before; but the old lady
seemed to regard his existence as a universally understood fact, with which
everybody must be acquainted by instinct.
“I thought,” I continued, “Thornfield belonged to you.”
“To me! Bless you, child! what an idea! To me? I am only the
housekeeper—the manager. To be sure, I am distantly related to the
Rochesters by the mother’s side; or, at least, my husband was; he was a
clergyman, incumbent of Hay—that little village yonder on the hill—and
that church near the gates was his. The present Mr. Rochester’s mother was
a Fairfax, and second cousin to my husband; but I never presume on the
connection—in fact, it is nothing to me; I consider myself quite in the light
of an ordinary housekeeper; my employer is always civil, and I expect
nothing more.”
“And the little girl—my pupil?”
“She is Mr. Rochester’s ward; he commissioned me to find a governess
for her. He intends to have her brought up in —shire, I believe. Here she
comes with her ‘bonne,’ as she calls her nurse.” The enigma then was
explained; this affable and kind little widow was no great dame, but a
dependent like myself. I did not like her the worse for that; on the contrary,
I felt better pleased than ever. The equality between her and me was real;
not the mere result of condescension on her part; so much the better—my
position was all the freer.
As I was meditating on this discovery, a little girl, followed by her
attendant, came running up the lawn. I looked at my pupil, who did not, at
first, appear to notice me; she was quite a child, perhaps seven or eight
years old, slightly built, with a pale, small-featured face, and a redundancy
of hair falling in curls to her waist.
“Good morning, Miss Adela,” said Mrs. Fairfax. “Come and speak to the
lady who is to teach you, and to make you a clever woman some day.” She
approached.
“C‘est là ma gouvernante?” said she, pointing to me, and addressing her
nurse, who answered:
“Mais oui, certainement.”bf
“Are they foreigners?” I inquired, amazed at hearing the French language.
“The nurse is a foreigner, and Adela was born on the continent and, I
believe, never left it till within six months ago. When she first came here
she could speak no English; now she can make shift to talk it a little; I don’t
understand her, she mixes it so with French; but you will make out her
meaning very well, I dare say.”
 Fortunately I had the advantage of being taught French by a French lady;
and as I had always made a point of conversing with Madame Pierrot, as
often as I could, and had, besides, during the last seven years, learned a
portion of French by heart daily—applying myself to take pains with my
accent, and imitating as closely as possible the pronunciation of my teacher
—I had acquired a certain degree of readiness and correctness in the
language, and was not likely to be much at a loss with Mademoiselle Adela.
She came and shook hands with me when she heard that I was her
governess; and as I led her into breakfast, I addressed some phrases to her
in her own tongue; she replied briefly at first, but after we were seated at
the table, and she had examined me some ten minutes with her large hazel
eyes, she suddenly commenced chattering fluently.
“Ah!” cried she in French, “you speak my language as well as Mr.
Rochester does; I can talk to you as I can to him, and so can Sophie. She
will be glad; nobody here understands her; Madame Fairfax is all English.
Sophie is my nurse; she came with me over the sea in a great ship with a
chimney that smoked—how it did smoke—and I was sick, and so was
Sophie, and so was Mr. Rochester. Mr. Rochester lay down on a sofa in a
pretty room called the salon, and Sophie and I had little beds in another
place. I nearly fell out of mine; it was like a shelf. And, Mademoiselle —,
what is your name?”
“Eyre—Jane Eyre.”
“Aire! Bah! I cannot say it. Well; our ship stopped in the morning, before
it was quite daylight, at a great city—a huge city, with very dark houses and
all smoky; not at all like the pretty, clean town I came from; and Mr.
Rochester carried me in his arms over a plank to the land, and Sophie came
after, and we all got into a coach, which took us to a beautiful large house,
larger than this and finer, called an hotel. We stayed there nearly a week; I
and Sophie used to walk every day in a great green place full of trees, called
the park; and there were many children there besides me, and a pond with
beautiful birds in it, that I fed with crumbs.”
“Can you understand her when she runs on so fast?” asked Mrs. Fairfax.
I understood her very well, for I had been accustomed to the fluent tongue
of Madame Pierrot.
 “I wish,” continued the good lady, “you would ask her a question or two
about her parents; I wonder if she remembers them?”
“Adèle,” I inquired, “with whom did you live when you were in that
pretty, clean town you spoke of?”
“I lived long ago with mamma; but she is gone to the Holy Virgin.
Mamma used to teach me to dance and sing, and to say verses. A great
many gentlemen and ladies came to see mamma, and I used to dance before
them, or to sit on their knees and sing to them; I liked it. Shall I let you hear
me sing now?”
She had finished her breakfast, so I permitted her to give a specimen of
her accomplishments. Descending from her chair, she came and placed
herself on my knee; then folding her little hands demurely before her,
shaking back her curls, and lifting her eyes to the ceiling, she commenced
singing a song from some opera. It was the strain of a forsaken lady, who,
after bewailing the perfidy of her lover, calls pride to her aid; desires her
attendant to deck her in her brightest jewels and richest robes, and resolves
to meet the false one that night at a ball, and prove to him, by the gayety of
her demeanor, how little his desertion has affected her.
The subject seemed strangely chosen for an infant singer; but I suppose
the point of the exhibition lay in hearing the notes of love and jealousy
warbled with the lisp of childhood; and in very bad taste that point was; at
least I thought so.
Adèle sang the canzonetbg tunefully enough, and with the naïveté of her
age. This achieved, she jumped from my knee, and said, “Now,
mademoiselle, I will repeat you some poetry.”
Assuming an attitude, she began La Ligue des Rats; fable de La
Fontaine.32 She then declaimed the little piece, with an attention to
punctuation and emphasis, a flexibility of voice, and an appropriateness of
gesture, very unusual, indeed, at her age, and which proved she had been
carefully trained.
“Was it your mamma who taught you that piece?” I asked.
 “Yes, and she just used to say it in this way; ‘Qu’avez vous done? lui dit
un de ces rats; parlez!‘bh She made me lift my hand—so—to remind me to
raise my voice at the question. Now, shall I dance for you?”
“No, that will do; but after your mamma went to the Holy Virgin, as you
say, with whom did you live then?”
“With Madame Frédéric and her husband; she took care of me, but she is
nothing related to me. I think she is poor, for she had not so fine a house as
mamma. I was not long there. Mr. Rochester asked me if I would like to go
and live with him in England, and I said yes; for I knew Mr. Rochester
before I knew Madame Frédéric, and he was always kind to me and gave
me pretty dresses and toys; but you see he has not kept his word, for he has
brought me to England, and now he has gone back again himself, and I
never see him.”
After breakfast, Adèle and I withdrew to the library, which room, it
appears, Mr. Rochester had directed should be used as the school-room.
Most of the books were locked up behind glass doors; but there was one
book-case left open, containing everything that could be needed in the way
of elementary works, and several volumes of light literature, poetry,
biography, travels, a few romances, &c. I suppose he had considered that
these were all the governess would require for her private perusal; and,
indeed, they contented me amply for the present; compared with the scanty
pickings I had now and then been able to glean at Lowood, they seemed to
offer an abundant harvest of entertainment and information. In this room,
too, there was a cabinetpiano,quite new, and of superior tone; also an easel
for painting and a pair of globes.
I found my pupil sufficiently docile, though disinclined to apply ; she had
not been used to regular occupation of any kind. I felt it would be
injudicious to confine her too much at first; so when I had talked to her a
great deal, and got her to learn a little, and when the morning had advanced
to noon, I allowed her to return to her nurse. I then proposed to occupy
myself till dinner-time in drawing some little sketches for her use.
As I was going up stairs to fetch my portfolio and pencils, Mrs. Fairfax
called to me: “Your morning school-hours are over now, I suppose,” said
she. She was in a room, the folding doors of which stood open. I went in
when she addressed me. It was a large, stately apartment, with purple chairs
and curtains, a Turkey carpet, walnut-panelled walls, one vast window rich
in stained glass, and a lofty ceiling, nobly moulded. Mrs. Fairfax was
dusting some vases of fine purple spar,bi which stood on a sideboard.
“What a beautiful room!” I exclaimed, as I looked round; for I had never
before seen anything half so imposing.
“Yes, this is the dining-room. I have just opened the window to let in a
little air and sunshine, for everything gets so damp in apartments that are
seldom inhabited; the drawing-room, yonder, feels like a vault.”
She pointed to a wide arch, corresponding to the window, and hung, like
it, with a Tyrian-dyedbjcurtain, now looped up. Mounting to it by two broad
steps and looking through, I thought I caught a glimpse of a fairy place—so
bright to my novice-eyes appeared the view beyond. Yet it was merely a
very pretty drawing-room, and within it a boudoir, both spread with white
carpets, on which seemed laid brilliant garlands of flowers; both ceiled with
snowy mouldings of white grapes and vine-leaves, beneath which glowed,
in rich contrast, crimson couches and ottomans; while the ornaments on the
pale Parianbk mantel-piece were of sparkling Bohemian glass, ruby red;
and between the windows large mirrors repeated the general blending of
snow and fire.
“In what order you keep these rooms, Mrs. Fairfax!” said I. “No dust, no
canvass coverings; except that the air feels chilly, one would think they
were inhabited daily.”
“Why, Miss Eyre, though Mr. Rochester’s visits here are rare, they are
always sudden and unexpected; and as I observed that it put him out to find
everything swathed up, and to have a bustle of arrangement on his arrival, I
thought it best to keep the rooms in readiness.”
“Is Mr. Rochester an exacting, fastidious sort of man?”
“Not particularly so; but he has a gentleman’s tastes and habits, and he
expects to have things managed in conformity to them.”
“Do you like him? Is he generally liked?”
 “Oh, yes; the family have always been respected here. Almost all the land
in this neighborhood, as far as you can see, has belonged to the Rochesters
time out of mind.”
“Well, but leaving his land out of the question, do you like him? Is he
liked for himself?”
“I have no cause to do otherwise than like him; and I believe he is
considered a just and liberal landlord by his tenants, but he has never lived
much among them.”
“But has he no peculiarities? What, in short, is his character?”bl
“Oh! his character is unimpeachable, I suppose. He is rather peculiar,
perhaps. He has travelled a great deal, and seen a great deal of the world, I
should think. I dare say he is clever, but I never had much conversation with
him.”
“In what way is he peculiar?”
“I don’t know—it is not easy to describe—nothing striking, but you feel it
when he speaks to you; you cannot be always sure whether he is in jest or
earnest, whether he is pleased or the contrary; you don’t thoroughly
understand him—in short, at least, I don’t; but it is of no consequence, he is
a very good master.”
This was all the account I got from Mrs. Fairfax of her employer and
mine. There are people who seem to have no notion of sketching a
character, or observing and describing salient points, either in persons or
things; the good lady evidently belonged to this class; my queries puzzled,
but did not draw her out. Mr. Rochester was Mr. Rochester in her eyes—a
gentleman—a landed proprietor—nothing more. She inquired and searched
no further, and evidently wondered at my wish to gain a more definite
notion of his identity.
When we left the dining-room, she proposed to show me over the rest of
the house; and I followed her up stairs and down stairs, admiring as I went,
for all was well arranged and handsome. The large front chambers I thought
especially grand; and some of the third story rooms, though dark and low,
were interesting from their air of antiquity. The furniture once appropriated
to the lower apartments had from time to time been removed here, as
fashions changed; and the imperfect light, entering by their narrow
casements, showed bedsteads of a hundred years old; chests, in oak or
walnut, looking, with their strange carvings of palm branches and cherubs’
heads, like types of the Hebrew ark;33 rows of venerable chairs, high-
backed and narrow; stools, still more antiquated, on whose cushioned tops
were yet apparent traces of half-effaced embroideries, wrought by fingers
that for two generations had been coffin-dust. All these relics gave to the
third story of Thornfield Hall the aspect of a home of the past—a shrine of
memory. I liked the hush, the gloom, the quaintness of these retreats in the
day; but I by no means coveted a night’s repose on one of those wide and
heavy beds—shut in, some of them, with doors of oak; shaded, others, with
wrought old English hangings, crusted with thick work, portraying effigies
of strange flowers, and stranger birds, and strangest human beings—all
which would have looked strange, indeed, by the pallid gleam of moonlight.
“Do the servants sleep in these rooms?” I asked.
“No; they occupy a range of smaller apartments to the back. No one ever
sleeps here. One would almost say that, if there were a ghost at Thornfield
Hall, this would be its haunt.”
“So I think. You have no ghost, then?”
“None that I ever heard of,” returned Mrs. Fairfax, smiling.
“Nor any traditions of one—no legends or ghost stories?”
“I believe not; and yet it is said, the Rochesters have been rather a violent
than a quiet race in their time. Perhaps, though, that is the reason they rest
tranquilly in their graves now.”
“Yes; ‘after life’s fitful fever they sleep well,’ ”34 I muttered. “Where are
you going now, Mrs. Fairfax?” for she was moving away.
“On to the leads;bm will you come and see the view from thence?” I
followed still, up a very narrow stair-case to the attics, and thence by a
ladder and through a trap-door to the roof of the Hall. I was now on a level
with the crow colony, and could see into their nests. Leaning over the
battlements, and looking far down, I surveyed the grounds laid out like a
map; the bright and velvet lawn closely girdling the gray base of the
mansion; the field, wide as a park, dotted with its ancient timber; the wood,
dun and sere, divided by a path visibly overgrown, greener with moss than
the trees were with foliage; the church at the gates, the road, the tranquil
hills, all reposing in the autumn day’s sun; the horizon bounded by a
propitious sky, azure, marbled with pearly white. No feature in the scene
was extraordinary, but all was pleasing. When I turned from it and repassed
the trap-door, I could scarcely see my way down the ladder. The attic
seemed black as a vault, compared with that arch of blue air to which I had
been looking up, and to that sun-lighted scene of grove, pasture, and green
hill, of which the Hall was the centre, and over which I had been gazing
with delight.
Mrs. Fairfax stayed behind a moment to fasten the trap-door; I, by dint of
groping, found the outlet from the attic, and proceeded to descend the
narrow garret stair-case. I lingered in the long passage to which this led,
separating the front and back rooms of the third story; narrow, low, and dim,
with only one little window at the far end, and looking, with its two rows of
small black doors all shut, like a corridor in some Bluebeard’s castle.35
While I paced softly on, the last sound I expected to hear in so still a
region, a laugh, struck my ear. It was a curious laugh; distinct, formal,
mirthless. I stopped; the sound ceased, only for an instant; it begun again,
louder; for, at first, though distinct, it was very low. It passed off in a
clamorous peal that seemed to wake an echo in every lonely chamber;
though it originated but in one, and I could have pointed out the door
whence the accents issued.
“Mrs. Fairfax!” I called out; for I now heard her descending the great
stairs. “Did you hear that loud laugh? Who is it?”
“Some of the servants, very likely,” she answered; “perhaps Grace Poole.”
“Did you hear it?” I again inquired.
“Yes, plainly; I often hear her; she sews in one of these rooms. Sometimes
Leah is with her; they are frequently noisy together.”
The laugh was repeated in its low, syllabicbn tone, and terminated in an
odd murmur.
 “Grace!” exclaimed Mrs. Fairfax.
I really did not expect any Grace to answer; for the laugh was as tragic, as
preternatural a laugh as any I ever heard; and, but that it was high noon and
that no circumstance of ghostliness accompanied the curious cachinnation,
but that neither scene nor season favored fear, I should have been
superstitiously afraid. However, the event showed me I was a fool for
entertaining a sense even of surprise.
The door nearest me opened, and a servant came out—a woman of
between thirty and forty; a set, square-made figure, red-haired, and with a
hard, plain face; any apparition less romantic or less ghostly could scarcely
be conceived.
“Too much noise, Grace,” said Mrs. Fairfax. “Remember directions!”
Grace courtesied silently and went in.
“She is a person we have to sew and assist Leah in her housemaid’swork,”
continued the widow; ”not altogether unobjectionable in some points, but
she does well enough. By-the-by, how have you got on with your new pupil
this morning?”
The conversation, thus turned on Adèle, continued till we reached the
light and cheerful region below. Adèle came running to meet us in the hall,
exclaiming:—
“Mesdames, vous êtes servies!” adding, “J‘ai bien faim, moi!”bo
We found dinner ready, and waiting for us in Mrs. Fairfax’s room.

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 Chapter XII

The promise of a smooth career, which my first calm introduction to

Thornfield Hall seemed to pledge, was not belied on a longer acquaintance
with the place and its inmates. Mrs. Fairfax turned out to be what she
appeared, a placid-tempered, kind-natured woman, of competent education
and average intelligence. My pupil was a lively child, who had been spoiled
and indulged, and, therefore, was sometimes wayward; but as she was
committed entirely to my care, and no injudicious interference from any
quarter ever thwarted my plans for her improvement, she soon forgot her
little freaks, and became obedient and teachable. She had no great talents,
no marked traits of character, no peculiar development of feeling or taste,
which raised her one inch above the ordinary level of childhood; but neither
had she any deficiency or vice which sunk her below it. She made
reasonable progress, entertained for me a vivacious, though perhaps not
very profound affection, and by her simplicity, gay prattle, and efforts to
please, inspired me, in return, with a degree of attachment sufficient to
make us both content in each other’s society.
This, par parenthèse,bp will be thought cool language by persons who
entertain solemn doctrines about the angelic nature of children, and the duty
of those charged with their education to conceive for them an idolatrous
devotion; but I am not writing to flatter parental egotism, to echo cant, or
prop up humbug; I am merely telling the truth. I felt a conscientious
solicitude for Adèle’s welfare and progress, and a quiet liking to her little
self, just as I cherished toward Mrs. Fairfax a thankfulness for her kindness,
and a pleasure in her society, proportionate to the tranquilregard she had for
me, and the moderation of her mind and her character.
Anybody may blame me who likes, when I add, further, that, now and
then, when I took a walk by myself in the grounds—when I went down to
the gates and looked through them along the road—or when, while Adèle
played with her nurse, and Mrs. Fairfax made jellies in the storeroom, I
climbed the three stair-cases, raised the trap-door of the attic, and, having
reached the leads, looked out afar over sequestered field and hill, and along
dim sky-line; that then I longed for a power of vision which might overpass
that limit; which might reach the busy world, towns, regions full of life I
had heard of, but never seen; that then I desired more of practical
experience than I possessed; more of intercourse with my kind, of
acquaintance with variety of character, than was here within my reach. I
valued what was good in Mrs. Fairfax, and what was good in Adèle; but I
believed in the existence of other and more vivid kinds of goodness, and
what I believed in I wished to behold.
Who blames me? Many, no doubt; and I shall be called discontented. I
could not help it; the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain
sometimes. Then my sole relief was to walk along the corridor of the third
story, backward and forward, safe in the silence and solitude of the spot,
and allow my mind’s eye to dwell on whatever bright visions rose before it
—and certainly they were many and glowing; to let my heart be heaved by
the exultant movement which, while it swelled it in trouble, expanded it
with life; and, best of all, to open my inward ear to a tale that was never
ended—a tale my imagination created, and narrated continuously,
quickened with all of incident, life, fire, feeling, that I desired and had not
in my actual existence.
It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity; they
must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are
condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt
against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions, besides political
rebellions, ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are
supposed to be very calm generally; but women feel just as men feel; they
need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as
their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a
stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their
more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine
themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the
piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at
them; if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced
necessary for their sex.
When thus alone, I not unfrequently heard Grace Poole’s laugh: the same
—the same peal, the same low, slow ha! ha! which, when first heard, had
thrilled me; I heard, too, her eccentric murmurs; stranger than her laugh.
There were days when she was quite silent; but there were others when I
could not account for the sounds she made. Sometimes I saw her: she would
come out of her room with a basin, or a plate, or a tray in her hand, go down
to the kitchen, and shortly return, generally (oh, romantic reader, forgive me
for telling the plain truth!) bearing a pot of porter. Her appearance always
acted as a damper to the curiosity raised by her oral oddities; hard-featured
and staid, she had no point to which interest could attach. I made some
attempts to draw her into conversation, but she seemed a person of few
words; a monosyllabic reply usually cut short every effort of that sort.
The other members of the household, viz., John and his wife, Leah the
housemaid, and Sophie the French nurse, were decent people, but in no
respect remarkable; with Sophie I used to talk French, and sometimes I
asked her questions about her native country; but she was not of a
descriptive or narrative turn, and generally gave such vapid and confused
answers as were calculated rather to check than encourage inquiry.
October, November, December, passed away. One afternoon in January,
Mrs. Fairfax had begged a holiday for Adèle, because she had a cold; and,
as Adèle seconded the request with an ardor that reminded me how precious
occasional holidays had been to me in my own childhood, I accorded it,
deeming that I did well in showing pliability on the point. It was a fine,
calm day, though very cold; I was tired of sitting still in the library through
a whole long morning; Mrs. Fairfax had just written a letter which was
waiting to be posted, so I put on my bonnet and cloak, and volunteered to
carry it to Hay; the distance, two miles, would be a pleasant winter
afternoon walk. Having seen Adèle comfortably seated in her little chair by
Mrs. Fairfax’s parlor fireside, and given her her best wax doll (which I
usually kept enveloped in silver paper in a drawer) to play with, and a story-
book for change of amusement; and having replied to her “Revenez bientôt,
ma bonne amie, ma chère Mademoiselle Jeannette,”bq with a kiss, I set out.
 The ground was hard, the air was still, my road was lonely; I walked fast
till I got warm, and then I walked slowly to enjoy and analyze the species of
pleasure brooding for me in the hour and situation. It was three o‘clock; the
church-bell tolled as I passed under the belfry; the charm of the hour lay in
its approaching dimness, in the low-gliding and pale-beaming sun. I was a
mile from Thornfield, in a lane noted for wild roses in summer, for nuts and
blackberries in autumn, and even now possessing a few coral treasures in
hips and haws;br but whose best winter delight lay in its utter solitude and
leafless repose. If a breath of air stirred, it made no sound here; for there
was not a holly, not an evergreen to rustle, and the stripped hawthorn and
hazel bushes were as still as the white, worn stones which causewayed the
middle of the path. Far and wide, on each side, there were only fields,
where no cattle now browsed; and the little brown birds which stirred
occasionally in the hedge looked like single russet leaves that had forgotten
to drop.
This lane inclined up-hill all the way to Hay: having reached the middle, I
sat down on a stile which led thence into a field. Gathering my mantle about
me, and sheltering my hands in my muff, I did not feel the cold, though it
froze keenly—as was attested by a sheet of ice covering the causeway,
where a little brooklet, now congealed, had overflowed after a rapid thaw
some days since. From my seat I could look down on Thornfield: the gray
and battlemented hall was the principal object in the vale below me; its
woods and dark rookery rose against the west. I lingered till the sun went
down among the trees, and sunk crimson and clear behind them. I turned
eastward.
On the hill-top above me sat the rising moon; pale yet as a cloud, but
brightening momently: she looked over Hay, which, half lost in trees, sent
up a blue smoke from its few chimneys; it was yet a mile distant, but in the
absolute hush I could hear plainly its thin murmurs of life. My ear, too, felt
the flow of currents; in what dales and depths I could not tell: but there
were many hills beyond Hay, and doubtless many becks threading their
passes. That evening calm betrayed alike the tinkle of the nearest streams,
the soughbs of the most remote.
 A rude noise broke on these fine ripplings and whisperings, at once so far
away and so clear: a positive tramp, tramp; a metallic clatter, which effaced
the soft wave-wanderings; as, in a picture, the solid mass of a crag, or the
rough boles of a great oak, drawn in dark and strong on the foreground,
efface the aerial distance of azure hill, sunny horizon, and blended clouds,
where tint melts into tint.
The din was on the causeway: a horse was coming; the windings of the
lane yet hid it, but it approached. I was just leaving the stile; yet as the path
was narrow, I sat still to let it go by. In those days I was young, and all sorts
of fancies, bright and dark, tenanted my mind: the memories of nursery
stories were there among other rubbish; and when they recurred, maturing
youth added to them a vigor and vividness beyond what childhood could
give. As this horse approached, and as I watched for it to appear through the
dusk, I remembered certain of Bessie’s tales wherein figured a North of
England spirit, called a “Gytrash”; which, in the form of horse, mule, or
large dog, haunted solitary ways, and sometimes came upon belated
travellers, as this horse was now coming upon me.
It was very near, but not yet in sight, when, in addition to the tramp,
tramp, I heard a rush under the hedge, and close down by the hazel stems
glided a great dog, whose black and white color made him a distinct object
against the trees. It was exactly one mask of Bessie’s “Gytrash”—a lion-
like creature, with long hair and a huge head. It passed me, however, quietly
enough; not staying to look up, with strange pretercanine eyes, in my face,
as I half expected it would. The horse followed—a tall steed, and on its
back a rider. The man, the human being, broke the spell at once. Nothing
ever rode the “Gytrash”; it was always alone; and goblins, to my notions,
though they might tenant the dumb carcasses of beasts, could scarce covet
shelter in the common place human form. No “Gytrash” was this—only a
traveller taking the short cut to Millcote. He passed, and I went on; a few
steps, and I turned. A sliding sound, and an exclamation of “What the deuce
is to do now?” and a clattering tumble, arrested my attention. Man and
horse were down; they had slipped on the sheet of ice which glazed the
causeway. The dog came bounding back, and seeing his master in a
predicament, and hearing the horse groan, barked till the evening hills
echoed the sound; which was deep in proportion to his magnitude. He
snuffed round the prostrate group, and then he ran up to me; it was all he
could do—there was no other help at hand to summon. I obeyed him, and
walked down to the traveller, by this time struggling himself free of his
steed. His efforts were so vigorous, I thought he could not be much hurt; but
I asked him the question—
“Are you injured, sir?”
I think he was swearing, but am not certain; however, he was pronouncing
some formula which prevented him from replying to me directly.
“Can I do anything?” I asked again.
“You must just stand on one side,” he answered, as he rose, first to his
knees, and then to his feet. I did; whereupon began a heaving, stamping,
clattering process, accompanied by a barking and baying, which removed
me effectually some yards distance. But I would not be driven quite away
till I saw the event. This was finally fortunate; the horse was reestablished,
and the dog was silenced with a “Down, Pilot!” The traveller, now stooping,
felt his foot and leg, as if trying whether they were sound; apparently
something ailed them, for he halted to the stile whence I had just risen, and
sat down.
I was in the mood for being useful, or at least officious, I think, for I now
drew near him again.
“If you are hurt, and want help, sir, I can fetch some one, either from
Thornfield Hall or from Hay.”
“Thank you; I shall do. I have no broken bones—only a sprain”; and
again he stood up and tried his foot, but the result extorted an involuntary
“Ugh!”
Something of daylight still lingered, and the moon was waxing bright; I
could see him plainly. His figure was enveloped in a riding-cloak, fur-
collared, and steel-clasped. Its details were not apparent, but I traced the
general points of middle height, and considerable breadth of chest. He had a
dark face, with stern features and a heavy brow. His eyes and gathered
eyebrows looked ireful and thwarted just now. He was past youth, but had
not reached middle age; perhaps he might be thirty-five. I felt no fear of
him, and but little shyness. Had he been a handsome, heroic-looking young
gentleman, I should not have dared to stand thus questioning him against
his will, and offering my services unasked. I had hardly ever seen a
handsome youth; never in my life spoken to one. I had a theoretical
reverence and homage for beauty, elegance, gallantry, fascination; but had I
met those qualities incarnate in masculine shape, I should have known
instinctively that they neither had nor could have sympathy with anything in
me, and should have shunned them as one would fire, lightning, or anything
else that is bright but antipathetic.
If even this stranger had smiled and been good-humored to me when I
addressed him, if he had put off my offer of assistance gayly and with
thanks, I should have gone on my way and not felt any vocation to renew
inquiries. But the frown, the roughness of the traveller, set me at my ease. I
retained my station when he waved to me to go, and announced—
“I cannot think of leaving you, sir, at so late an hour, in this solitary lane,
till I see you are fit to mount your horse.”
He looked at me when I said this. He had hardly turned his eyes in my
direction before.
“I should think you ought to be at home yourself,” said he, “if you have a
home in this neighborhood; where do you come from?”
“From just below; and I am not at all afraid of being out late when it is
moonlight. I will run over to Hay for you with pleasure, if you wish it—
indeed, I am going there to post a letter.”
“You live just below—do you mean at that house with the battlements?”
pointing to Thornfield Hall, on which the moon cast a hoary gleam,
bringing it out distinct and pale from the woods, that, by contrast with the
western sky, now seemed one mass of shadow.
“Yes, sir.”
“Whose house is it?”
“Mr. Rochester’s.”
“Do you know Mr. Rochester?”
“No, I have never seen him.”
“He is not resident, then?”
 “No.”
“Can you tell me where he is?”
“I cannot.”
“You are not a servant at the Hall, of course? You are—” He stopped, ran
his eye over my dress, which, as usual, was quite simple—a black merinobt
cloak, a black beaver bonnet; neither of them half fine enough for a lady’s
maid. He seemed puzzled to decide what I was. I helped him.
“I am the governess.”
“Ah, the governess!” he repeated; “deuce take me if I had not forgotten!
The governess!” and again my raiment underwent scrutiny. In two minutes
he rose from the stile; his face expressed pain when he tried to move.
“I cannot commission you to fetch help,” he said, “but you may help me a
little yourself, if you will be so kind.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You have not an umbrella that I can use as a stick?”
“No.”
“Try to get hold of my horse’s bridle and lead him to me; you are not
afraid?”
I should have been afraid to touch a horse when alone, but when told to
do it, I was disposed to obey. I put down my muff on the stile, and went up
to the tall steed; I endeavored to catch the bridle, but it was a spirited thing,
and would not let me come near its head; I made effort on effort, though in
vain; meantime, I was mortally afraid of its trampling fore-feet. The
traveller waited and watched for some time, and at last he laughed.
“I see,” he said, “the mountain will never be brought to Mahomet, so all
you can do is to aid Mahomet to go to the mountain; I must beg of you to
come here.”
I came. “Excuse me,” he continued; “necessity compels me to make you
useful.” He laid a heavy hand on my shoulder, and leaning on me with some
stress, limped to his horse. Having once caught the bridle, he mastered it
directly, and sprung to his saddle, grimacing grimly as he made the effort,
for it wrenched his sprain.
“Now,” said he, releasing his under lip from a hard bite, “just hand me my
whip; it lies there under the hedge.”
I sought it and found it.
“Thank you; now make haste with the letter to Hay, and return as fast as
you can.”
A touch of a spurred heel made his horse first start and rear, and then
bound away; the dog rushed in his traces; all three vanished
Like heath that in the wilderness The wild wind whirls away.36
I took up my muff and walked on. The incident had occurred and was
gone for me; it was an incident of no moment, no romance, no interest in a
sense; yet it marked with change one single hour of a monotonous life. My
help had been needed and claimed; I had given it; I was pleased to have
done something; trivial, transitory though the deed was, it was yet an active
thing, and I was weary of an existence all passive. The new face, too, was
like a new picture introduced to the gallery of memory; and it was
dissimilar to all the others hanging there; firstly, because it was masculine;
and secondly, because it was dark, strong and stern. I had it still before me
when I entered Hay, and slipped the letter into the post-office; I saw it as I
walked fast down-hill all the way home. When I came to the stile I stopped
a minute, looked round and listened, with an idea that a horse’s hoofs might
ring on the causeway again, and that a rider in a cloak, and a Gytrash-like
Newfoundland dog, might be again apparent; I saw only the hedge and a
pollardbu willow before me, rising up still and straight to meet the
moonbeams; I heard only the faintest waft of wind, roaming fitful among
the trees round Thornfield, a mile distant; and when I glanced down in the
direction of the murmur, my eye, traversing the hall-front, caught a light
kindling in a window: it reminded me that I was late, and I hurried on.
I did not like reentering Thornfield. To pass its threshold was to return to
stagnation; to cross the silent hall, to ascend the darksome stair-case, to seek
my own lonely little room, and then to meet tranquil Mrs. Fairfax, and
spend the long winter evening with her and her only, was to quell wholly
the faint excitement wakened by my walk—to slip again over my faculties
the viewless fetters of a uniform and too still existence; of an existence
whose very privileges of security and ease I was becoming incapable of
appreciating. What good it would have done me at that time to have been
tossed in the storms of an uncertain, struggling life, and to have been taught
by rough and bitter experience to long for the calm amid which I now
repined! Yes, just as much good as it would do a man tired of sitting still in
a “too easy chair” to take a long walk;37 and just as natural was the wish to
stir, under my circumstances, as it would be under his.
I lingered at the gates; I lingered on the lawn; I paced backward and
forward on the pavement: the shutters of the glass door were closed; I could
not see into the interior; and both my eyes and spirit seemed drawn from the
gloomy house—from the gray hollow filled with rayless cells, as it
appeared to me—to that sky expanded before me—a blue sea absolved
from taint of cloud; the moon ascending it in solemn march; her orb
seeming to look up as she left the hill-tops, from behind which she had
come, far and farther below her, and aspired to the zenith, midnight-dark in
its fathomless depth and measureless distance; and for those trembling stars
that followed her course, they made my heart tremble, my veins glow, when
I viewed them. Little things recall us to earth; the clock struck in the hall;
that sufficed—I turned from moon and stars, opened a side-door, and went
in.
The hall was not dark, nor yet was it lighted only by the high-hung bronze
lamp; a warm glow suffused both it and the lower steps of the oak stair-
case. This ruddy shine issued from the great dining-room, whose two-
leaved door stood open and showed a genial fire in the grate, glancing on
marble hearth and brass fire-irons, and revealing purple draperies and
polished furniture in the most pleasant radiance. It revealed, too, a group
near the mantel-piece; I had scarcely caught it, and scarcely become aware
of a cheerful mingling of voices, among which I seemed to distinguish the
tones of Adèle, when the door closed.
I hastened to Mrs. Fairfax’s room; there was a fire there, too, but no
candle, and no Mrs. Fairfax. Instead, all alone, sitting upright on the rug and
gazing with gravity at the blaze, I beheld a great black and white, long-
haired dog, just like the Gytrash of the lane. It was so like it that I went
forward and said, “Pilot,” and the thing got up and came to me and snuffed
me. I caressed him, and he wagged his great tail; but he looked an eerie
creature to be alone with, and I could not tell whence he had come. I rung
the bell, for I wanted a candle, and I wanted, too, to get an account of this
visitant. Leah entered.
“What dog is this?”
“He came with master.”
“With whom?”
“With master—Mr. Rochester—he is just arrived.”
“Indeed—and is Mrs. Fairfax with him?”
“Yes, and Miss Adela—they are in the dining-room, and John is gone for
a surgeon, for master has had an accident—his horse fell, and his ankle is
sprained.”
“Did the horse fall in Hay-lane?”
“Yes, coming down hill—it slipped on some ice.”
“Ah! bring me a candle, will you, Leah?”
Leah brought it; she entered, followed by Mrs. Fairfax, who repeated the
news; adding that Mr. Carter, the surgeon, was come, and was now with Mr.
Rochester; then she hurried out to give orders about tea, and I went up stairs
to take off my things.

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 Chapter XIII

Mr. Rochester, it seems, by the surgeon’s orders, went to bed early that
night; nor did he rise soon next morning. When he did come down, it was to
attend to business; his agent and some of his tenants were arrived, and
waiting to speak with him.
Adèle and I had now to vacate the library; it would be in daily requisition
as a reception-room for callers. A fire was lighted in an apartment up stairs,
and there I carried our books, and arranged it for the future school-room. I
discerned in the course of the morning that Thornfield Hall was a changed
place; no longer silent as a church, it echoed every hour or two to a knock at
the door or a clang of the bell; steps, too, often traversed the hall, and new
voices spoke in different keys below; a rill from the outer world was
flowing through it—it had a master; for my part, I liked it better.
Adèle was not easy to teach that day; she could not apply; she kept
running to the door and looking over the banisters to see if she could get a
glimpse of Mr. Rochester; then she coined pretexts to go down stairs, in
order, as I shrewdly suspected, to visit the library, where I knew she was not
wanted; then, when I got a little angry, and made her sit still, she continued
to talk incessantly of her “ami,bv Monsieur Édouard Fairfax de Rochester,”
bw as she dubbed him (I had not before heard his preno mens), and to
conjecture what presents he had brought her; for it appears he had intimated
the night before that, when his luggage came from Millcote, there would be
found among it a little box in whose contents she had an interest.
“Et cela doit signifier,” said she, “qu‘il y aura là dedans un cadeau pour
moi, et peut-être pour vous aussi, mademoiselle. Monsieur a parlé de vous:
il m’a demandé le nom de ma gouvernante, et si elle n‘était pas une petite
personne, assez mince et un peu pale. J’ai dit qu‘oui: car c’est vrai, n‘est-ce
pas, mademoiselle?” bx
 I and my pupil dined as usual in Mrs. Fairfax’s parlour; the afternoon was
wild and snowy, and we passed it in the school room. At dark I allowed
Adèle to put away books and work, and to run down stairs; for from the
comparative silence below, and from the cessation of appeals to the door-
bell, I conjectured that Mr. Rochester was now at liberty. Left alone, I
walked to the window, but nothing was to be seen thence; twilight and
snow-flakes together thickened the air and hid the very shrubs on the lawn.
I let down the curtain and went back to the fireside.
In the clear embers I was tracing a view, not unlike a picture I remember
to have seen of the castle of Heidelberg, on the Rhine, when Mrs. Fairfax
came in, breaking up by her entrance the fiery mosaic I had been piecing
together, and scattering, too, some heavy, unwelcome thoughts that were
beginning to throng on my solitude.
“Mr. Rochester would be glad if you and your pupil would take tea with
him in the drawing-room this evening,” said she; “he has been so much
engaged all day that he could not ask to see you before.”
“When is his tea-time?” I inquired.
“Oh, at six o‘clock; he keeps early hours in the country. You had better
change your frock now; I will go with you and fasten it. Here is a candle.”
“Is it necessary to change my frock?”
“Yes, you had better. I always dress for the evening when Mr. Rochester is
here.”
This additional ceremony seemed somewhat stately; however, I repaired
to my room, and, with Mrs. Fairfax’s aid, replaced my black stuff dress by
one of black silk, the best and the only additional one I had, except one of
light gray, which, in my Lowood notions of the toilet, I thought too fine to
be worn, except on first-rate occasions.
“You want a brooch,” said Mrs. Fairfax. I had a single little pearl
ornament which Miss Temple gave me as a parting keep-sake; I put it on,
and then we went down stairs. Unused as I was to strangers, it was rather a
trial to appear, thus formally summoned, in Mr. Rochester’s presence. I let
Mrs. Fairfax precede me into the dining-room, and kept in her shade as we
crossed that apartment; and, passing the arch, whose curtain was now
dropped, entered the elegant recess beyond.
Two wax candles stood lighted on the table, and two on the mantel-piece;
basking in the light and heat of a superb fire lay Pilot; Adèle knelt near him.
Half reclined on a couch appeared Mr. Rochester, his foot supported by the
cushion; he was looking at Adèle and the dog; the fire shone full on his
face. I knew my traveller, with his broad and jetty eyebrows, his square
forehead, made squarer by the horizontal sweep of his black hair. I
recognized his decisive nose, more remarkable for character than beauty, his
full nostrils, denoting, I thought, choler;by his grim mouth, chin, and jaw—
yes, all three were very grim, and no mistake. His shape, now divested of
cloak, I perceived harmonized in squareness with his physiognomy. I
suppose it was a good figure in the athletic sense of the term, broad-chested
and thin-flanked, though neither tall nor graceful.
Mr. Rochester must have been aware of the entrance of Mrs. Fairfax and
myself; but it appeared he was not in the mood to notice us, for he never
lifted his head as we approached.
“Here is Miss Eyre, sir,” said Mrs. Fairfax, in her quiet way. He bowed,
still not taking his eyes from the group of the dog and child.
“Let Miss Eyre be seated,” said he; and there was something in the
forced, stiff bow, in the impatient yet formal tone, which seemed further to
express, “What the deuce is it to me whether Miss Eyre be there or not? At
this moment I am not disposed to accost her.”
I sat down quite disembarrassed.bz A reception of finished politeness
would probably have confused me. I could not have returned or repaid it by
answering grace and elegance on my part. But harsh caprice laid me under
no obligation; on the contrary, a decent quiescence, under the freak of
manner, gave me the advantage. Besides, the eccentricity of the proceeding
was piquant; I felt interested to see how he would go on.
He went on as a statue would; that is, he neither spoke nor moved. Mrs.
Fairfax seemed to think it necessary that some one should be amiable, and
she began to talk. Kindly, as usual—and, as usual, rather trite—she
condoled with him on the pressure of business he had had all day; on the
annoyance it must have been to him with that painful sprain: then she
commended his patience and perseverance in going through with it.
“Madam, I should like some tea,” was the sole rejoinder she got. She
hastened to ring the bell; and when the tray came, she proceeded to arrange
the cups, spoons, &c., with assiduous celerity. I and Adèle went to the table;
but the master did not leave his couch.
“Will you hand Mr. Rochester’s cup?” said Mrs. Fairfax to me; “Adèle
might perhaps spill it.”
I did as requested. As he took the cup from my hand, Adèle, thinking the
moment propitious for making a request in my favor, cried out:
“N‘est-ce-pas, Monsieur, qu’il y a un cadeau pour Mademoiselle Eyre
dans votre petit coffre?”ca
“Who talks of cadeaux?” said he, gruffly. “Did you expect a present, Miss
Eyre? Are you fond of presents?” and he searched my face with eyes that I
saw were dark, irate, and piercing.
“I hardly know, sir; I have little experience of them; they are generally
thought pleasant things.”
“Generally thought! But what do you think?”
“I should be obliged to take time, sir, before I could give you an answer
worthy of your acceptance. A present has many faces to it, has it not? and
one should consider all before pronouncing an opinion as to its nature.”
“Miss Eyre, you are not so unsophisticated as Adèle; she demands a
‘cadeau,’ clamorously, the moment she sees me—you beat about the bush.”
“Because I have less confidence in my desertscb than Adèle has; she can
prefer the claim of old acquaintance, and the right, too, of custom; for she
says you have always been in the habit of giving her playthings; but if I had
to make out a case I should be puzzled, since I am a stranger and have done
nothing to entitle me to an acknowledgment.”
“Oh, don’t fall back on over-modesty! I have examined Adèle, and find
you have taken great pains with her: she is not bright; she has no talents; yet
in a short time she has made much improvement.”
 “Sir, you have now given me my ‘cadeau’; I am obliged to you; it is the
meed teachers most covet; praise of their pupils’ progress.”
“Humph!” said Mr. Rochester, and he took his tea in silence.
“Come to the fire,” said the master, when the tray was taken away and
Mrs. Fairfax had settled into a corner with her knitting; while Adèle was
leading me by the hand round the room, showing me the beautiful books
and ornaments on the consoles and chiffonières.cc We obeyed, as in duty
bound. Adèle wanted to take a seat on my knee, but she was ordered to
amuse herself with Pilot.
“You have been resident in my house three months?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you came from—?”
“From Lowood school, in—shire.”
“Ah! a charitable concern. How long were you there?”
“Eight years.”
“Eight years! you must be tenacious of life. I thought half the time in such
a place would have done up any constitution? No wonder you have rather
the look of another world. I marvelled where you had got that sort of face.
When you came on me in Hay-lane last night, I thought unaccountably of
fairy tales, and had half a mind to demand whether you had bewitched my
horse; I am not sure yet. Who are your parents?”
“I have none.”
“Nor ever had, I suppose; do you remember them?”
“No.”
“I thought not. And so you were waiting for your people when you sat on
that stile?”
“For whom, sir?”
“For the men in green; it was a proper moonlight evening for them. Did I
break through one of your rings,cd that you spread that damned ice on the
causeway?”
 I shook my head. “The men in green all forsook England a hundred years
ago,” said I, speaking as seriously as he had done. “And not even in Hay-
lane or the fields about it could you find a trace of them. I don’t think either
summer or harvest or winter moon will ever shine on their revels more.”
Mrs. Fairfax had dropped her knitting, and with raised eyebrows seemed
wondering what sort of talk this was.
“Well,” resumed Mr. Rochester, “if you disown parents, you must have
some sort of kinsfolk—uncles and aunts?”
“No; none that I ever saw.”
“And your home?”
“I have none.”
“Where do your brothers and sisters live?”
“I have no brothers or sisters.”
“Who recommended you to come here?”
“I advertised, and Mrs. Fairfax answered my advertisement.”
“Yes,” said the good lady, who now knew what ground we were upon,
“and I am daily thankful for the choice Providence led me to make. Miss
Eyre has been an invaluable companion to me, and a kind and careful
teacher to Adèle.”
“Don’t trouble yourself to give her a character,” returned Mr. Rochester;
“eulogiums will not bias me—I shall judge for myself. She began by felling
my horse.”
“Sir?” said Mrs. Fairfax.
“I have to thank her for this sprain.”
The widow looked bewildered.
“Miss Eyre, have you ever lived in a town?”
“No, sir.”
“Have you seen much society?”
“None but the pupils and teachers of Lowood, and now the inmates of
Thornfield.”
 “Have you read much?”
“Only such books as fell in my way; and they have not been numerous or
very learned.”
“You have lived the life of a nun; no doubt you are well drilled in
religious forms; Brocklehurst, who, I understand, directs Lowood, is a
parson, is he not?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you girls probably worshipped him as a convent full of
religieusesce would worship their director.”
“Oh, no.”
“You are very cool! No! What! a novice not worship her priest? That
sounds blasphemous.”
“I disliked Mr. Brocklehurst; and I was not alone in the feeling. He is a
harsh man—at once pompous and meddling; he cut off our hair, and, for
economy’s sake, bought us bad needles and thread, with which we could
hardly sew.”
“That was very false economy,” remarked Mrs. Fairfax, who now again
caught the drift of the dialogue.
“And was that the head and front of his offending?” demanded Mr.
Rochester.38
“He starved us when he had the sole superintendence of the provision
department, before the committee was appointed; and he bored us with long
lectures once a week, and with evening readings from books of his own
inditing, about sudden deaths and judgments, which made us afraid to go to
bed.”
“What age were you when you went to Lowood?”
“About ten.”
“And you stayed there eight years; you are now, then, eighteen?”
I assented.
 “Arithmetic, you see, is useful; without its aid I should hardly have been
able to guess your age. It is a point difficult to fix where the features and
countenance are so much at variance as in your case. And now, what did
you learn at Lowood? Can you play?”
“A little.”
“Of course; that is the established answer. Go into the library—I mean, if
you please. (Excuse my tone of command; I am used to say ‘Do this,’ and it
is done; I cannot alter my customary habits for one new inmate.) Go, then,
into the library; take a candle with you, leave the door open, sit down to the
piano, and play a tune.”
I departed, obeying his directions.
“Enough!” he called out in a few minutes. “You play a little, I see; like
any other English school-girl; perhaps rather better than some, but not
well.”
I closed the piano, and returned. Mr. Rochester continued:
“Adèle showed me some sketches this morning, which she said were
yours. I don’t know whether they were entirely of your doing; probably a
master aided you?”
“No, indeed!” I interjected.
“Ah! that pricks pride. Well, fetch me your portfolio, if you can vouch for
its contents being original; but don’t pass your word unless you are certain
—I can recognize patchwork.”
“Then I will say nothing, and you shall judge for yourself, sir.”
I brought the portfolio from the library.
“Approach the table,” said he; and I wheeled it to his couch. Adèle and
Mrs. Fairfax drew near to see the pictures.
“No crowding,” said Mr. Rochester; “take the drawings from my hand as I
finish with them; but don’t push your faces up to mine.”
He deliberately scrutinized each sketch and painting. Three he laid aside;
the others, when he had examined them, he swept from him.
 “Take them off to the other table, Mrs. Fairfax,” said he, “and look at
them with Adèle; you” (glancing at me) “resume your seat, and answer my
questions. I perceive these pictures were done by the one hand; was that
hand yours?”
“Yes.”
“And when did you find time to do them? They have taken much time,
and some thought.”
“I did them in the last two vacations I spent at Lowood, when I had no
other occupation.”
“Where did you get your copies?”
“Out of my head.”
“That head I see now on your shoulders?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Has it other furniture of the same kind within?”
“I should think it may have; I should hope—better.”
He spread the pictures before him, and again surveyed them alternately.
While he is so occupied, I will tell you, reader, what they are; and first, I
must premise that they are nothing wonderful. The subjects had, indeed,
risen vividly on my mind. As I saw them with the spiritual eye, before I
attempted to embody them, they were striking; but my hand would not
second my fancy, and in each case it had wrought out but a pale portrait of
the thing I had conceived.
These pictures were in water-colors. The first represented clouds low and
livid, rolling over a swelled sea; all the distance was in eclipse; so, too, was
the foreground, or, rather, the nearest billows, for there was no land. One
gleam of light lifted into relief a half-submerged mast, on which sat a
cormorant, dark and large, with wings flecked with foam; its beak held a
gold bracelet, set with gems, that I had touched with as brilliant tints as my
pallet could yield, and as glittering distinctness as my pencil could impart.
Sinking below the bird and mast, a drowned corpse glanced through the
green water; a fair arm was the only limb clearly visible, whence the
bracelet had been washed or torn.
 The second picture contained for foreground only the dim peak of a hill,
with grass and some leaves slanted as if by a breeze. Beyond and above
spread an expanse of sky, dark blue as at twilight; rising into the sky, was a
woman’s shape to the bust, portrayed in tints as dusk and soft as I could
combine. The dim forehead was crowned with a star; the lineaments below
were seen as through the suffusion of vapor; the eyes shone dark and wild;
the hair streamed shadowy, like a beamless cloud torn by storm or by
electric travail. On the neck lay a pale reflection, like moonlight, the same
faint lustre touched the train of thin clouds from which rose and bowed this
vision of the Evening Star.
The third showed the pinnacle of an iceberg piercing a polar wintry sky; a
muster of northern lights reared their dim lances, close serried,cf along the
horizon. Throwing these into distance, rose, in the foreground, a head, a
colossal head, inclined toward the iceberg, and resting against it. Two thin
hands, joined under the forehead, and supporting it, drew up before the
lower features a sable veil; a brow quite bloodless, white as bone, and an
eye hollow and fixed, blank of meaning but for the glassiness of despair,
alone were visible. Above the temples, amid wreathed turban folds of black
drapery, vague in its character and consistency as cloud, gleamed a ring of
white flame, gemmed with sparkles of a more lurid tinge. This pale crescent
was the “Likeness of a Kingly Crown”; what it diademedcg was “the shape
which shape had none.”39
“Were you happy when you painted these pictures?” asked Mr. Rochester,
presently.
“I was absorbed, sir; yes, and I was happy. To paint them, in short, was to
enjoy one of the keenest pleasures I have ever known.”
“That is not saying much. Your pleasures, by your own account, have
been few; but I dare say you did exist in a kind of artist’s dreamland while
you blent and arranged these strange tints. Did you sit at them long each
day?”
“I had nothing else to do, because it was the vacation, and I sat at them
from morning till noon, and from noon till night; the length of the
midsummer days favored my inclination to apply.”
 “And you felt self-satisfied with the result of your ardent labors!”
“Far from it. I was tormented by the contrast between my idea and my
handiwork: in each case I had imagined something which I was quite
powerless to realize.”
“Not quite: you have secured the shadow of your thought: but no more,
probably. You had not enough of the artist’s skill and science to give it full
being: yet the drawings are, for a school girl, peculiar. As to the thoughts,
they are elfish. These eyes in the Evening Star, you must have seen in a
dream. How could you make them look so clear, and yet not at all brilliant?
for the planet above quells their rays. And what meaning is that in their
solemn depth? And who taught you to paint wind? There is a high gale in
that sky, and on this hill-top. Where did you see Latmos? for that is
Latmos.ch There, put the drawings away!”
I had scarce tied the strings of the portfolio when, looking at his watch, he
said, abruptly,
“It is nine o‘clock: what are you about, Miss Eyre, to let Adèle sit up so
long? Take her to bed.”
Adèle went to kiss him before quitting the room; he endured the caress,
but scarcely seemed to relish it more than Pilot would have done, nor so
much.
“I wish you all good-night, now,” said he, making a movement of the
hand toward the door, in token that he was tired of our company, and
wished to dismiss us. Mrs. Fairfax folded up her knitting; I took my
portfolio; we curtseyed to him, received a frigid bow in return, and so
withdrew.
“You said Mr. Rochester was not strikingly peculiar, Mrs. Fairfax,”I
observed, when I rejoined her in her room, after putting Adèle to bed.
“Well, is he?”
“I think so; he is very changeful and abrupt.”
“True; no doubt he may appear so to a stranger, but I am so accustomed to
his manner, I never think of it; and then, if he has peculiarities of temper,
allowance should be made.”
 “Why?”
“Partly because it is his nature—and we can none of us help our nature;
and partly, he has painful thoughts, no doubt, to harass him, and make his
spirits unequal.”
“What about?”
“Family troubles, for one thing.”
“But he has no family.”
“Not now; but he has had, or, at least, relatives. He lost his elder brother a
few years since.”
“His elder brother?”
“Yes. The present Mr. Rochester has not been very long in possession of
the property; only about nine years.”
“Nine years is a tolerable time. Was he so very fond of his brother as to be
still inconsolable for his loss?”
“Why, no; perhaps not. I believe there were some misunderstandings
between them. Mr. Rowland Rochester was not quite just to Mr. Edward;
and perhaps he prejudiced his father against him. The old gentleman was
fond of money, and anxious to keep the family estate together. He did not
like to diminish the property by division, and yet he was anxious that Mr.
Edward should have wealth, too, to keep up the consequence of the name;
and soon after he was of age, some steps were taken that were not quite fair,
and made a great deal of mischief. Old Mr. Rochester and Mr. Rowland
combined to bring Mr. Edward into what he considered a painful position,
for the sake of making his fortune. What the precise nature of that position
was I never clearly knew, but his spirit could not brook what he had to
suffer in it. He is not very forgiving: he broke with his family, and now for
many years he has led an unsettled kind of life. I don’t think he has ever
been resident at Thornfield for a fortnight together, since the death of his
brother, without a will, left him master of the estate; and, indeed, no wonder
he shuns the old place.”
“Why should he shun it?”
“Perhaps he thinks it gloomy.”
 The answer was evasive—I should have liked something clearer; but Mrs.
Fairfax either could not, or would not, give me more explicit information of
the origin and nature of Mr. Rochester’s trials. She averred they were a
mystery to herself, and that what she knew was chiefly from conjecture. It
was evident, indeed, that she wished me to drop the subject, which I did
accordingly.

OceanofPDF.com
 Chapter XIV

For several subsequent days I saw little of Mr. Rochester. In the mornings
he seemed much engaged with business, and in the afternoon, gentlemen
from Millcote or the neighborhood called, and sometimes stayed to dine
with him. When his sprain was well enough to admit of horse exercise, he
rode out a good deal, probably to return these visits, as he generally did not
come back until late at night.
During this interval, even Adèle was seldom sent for to his presence, and
all my acquaintance with him was confined to an occasional rencounter in
the hall, on the stairs, or in the gallery; when he would sometimes pass me
haughtily and coldly, just acknowledging my presence by a distant nod or a
cool glance, and sometimes bow and smile with gentle manlike affability.
His changes of mood did not offend me, because I saw that I had nothing to
do with their alteration; the ebb and flow depended on causes quite
disconnected with me.
One day he had had company to dinner, and had sent for my portfolio, in
order, doubtless, to exhibit its contents; the gentlemen went away early, to
attend a public meeting at Millcote, as Mrs. Fairfax informed me; but the
night being wet and inclement, Mr. Rochester did not accompany them.
Soon after they were gone, he rung the bell: a message came that I and
Adèle were to go down stairs. I brushed Adèle’s hair and made her neat, and
having ascertained that I was myself in my usual Quaker trim, where there
was nothing to retouch—all being too close and plain, braided locks
included, to admit of disarrangement—we descended, Adèle wondering
whether the petit coffreci was at length come; for, owing to some mistake,
its arrival had hitherto been delayed. She was gratified; there it stood, a
little carton, on the table when we entered the dining-room. She appeared to
know it by instinct.
 “Ma boite! ma boite!”cj exclaimed she, running toward it.
“Yes—there is your ‘boîte’ at last; take it into a corner, you genuine
daughter of Paris, and amuse yourself with disembowelling it,” said the
deep and rather sarcastic voice of Mr. Rochester, proceeding from the
depths of an immense easy-chair at the fireside. “And mind,” he continued,
“don’t bother me with any details of the anatomical process, or any notice
of the condition of the entrails; let your operation be conducted in silence—
tiens-toi tranquille, enfant; comprends-tu?”ck
Adèle seemed scarcely to need the warning; she had already retired to a
sofa with her treasure, and was busy untying the cord which secured the lid.
Having removed this impediment, and lifted certain silvery envelopes of
tissue paper, she merely exclaimed:
“Oh, Ciel! Que c‘est beau!”cl and then remained absorbed in ecstatic
contemplation.
“Is Miss Eyre there?” now demanded the master, half-rising from his seat
to look round to the door, near which I stood.
“Ah! well; come forward; be seated here.” He drew a chair near his own.
“I am not fond of the prattle of children,” he continued; “for, old bachelor
as I am, I have no pleasant associations connected with their lisp. It would
be intolerable to me to pass a whole evening tête à tête with a brat. Don’t
draw that chair further off, Miss Eyre; sit down exactly where I placed it—
if you please, that is. Confound these civilities! I continually forget them.
Nor do I particularly affect simple-minded old ladies. By-the-by, I must
have mine in mind; it won’t do to neglect her; she is a Fairfax, or wed to
one; and blood is said to be thicker than water.”
He rang and dispatched an invitation to Mrs. Fairfax, who soon arrived,
knitting basket in hand.
“Good evening, madam; I sent to you for a charitable purpose; I have
forbidden Adèle to talk to me about her presents, and she is bursting with
repletion; have the goodness to serve her as au ditress and interlocutrice;cm
it will be one of the most benevolent acts you ever performed.”
 Adèle, indeed, no sooner saw Mrs. Fairfax than she summoned her to her
sofa, and there quickly filled her lap with the porcelain, the ivory, the
waxen contents of her “boite,” pouring out, meantime, explanations and
raptures in such broken English as she was mistress of.
“Now I have performed the part of a good host,” pursued Mr. Rochester,
“put my guests into the way of amusing each other, I ought to be at liberty
to attend to my own pleasure. Miss Eyre, draw your chair still a little further
forward; you are yet too far back; I cannot see you without disturbing my
position in this comfortable chair, which I have no mind to do.”
I did as I was bid, though I would much rather have remained somewhat
in the shade; but Mr. Rochester had such a direct way of giving orders, it
seemed a matter of course to obey him promptly.
We were, as I have said, in the dining-room; the lustre, which had been
lighted for dinner, filled the room with a festal breadth of light; the large
fire was all red and clear; the purple curtains hung rich and ample before
the lofty window and loftier arch; everything was still, save the subdued
chat of Adèle (she dared not speak loud), and, filling up each pause, the
beating of winter rain against the panes.
Mr. Rochester, as he sat in his damask-covered chair, looked different to
what I had seen him look before—not quite so stern; much less gloomy.
There was a smile on his lips, and his eyes sparkled, whether with wine or
not, I am not sure, but I think it very probable. He was, in short, in his after-
dinner mood—more expanded and genial, and also more self-indulgent,
than the frigid and rigid temper of the morning; still, he looked preciously
grim, cushioning his massive head against the swelling back of his chair,
and receiving the light of the fire on his granite-hewn features, and in his
great, dark eyes—for he had great, dark eyes, and very fine eyes, too—not
without a certain change in their depths sometimes, which, if it was not
softness, reminded you, at least, of that feeling.
He had been looking two minutes at the fire, and I had been looking the
same length of time at him, when, turning suddenly, he caught my gaze
fastened on his physiognomy.
“You examine me, Miss Eyre,” said he; “do you think me handsome?”
 I should, if I had deliberated, have replied to this question by something
conventionally vague and polite; but the answer somehow slipped from my
tongue before I was aware.
“No, sir.”
“Ah! By my word! there is something singular about you,” said he; “you
have the air of a little nonnette;cn quaint, quiet, grave, and simple, as you
sit with your hands before you, and your eyes generally bent on the carpet
(except, by-the-by, when they are directed piercingly to my face, as just
now, for instance); and when one asks you a question, or makes a remark to
which you are obliged to reply, you rap out a round rejoinder, which, if not
blunt, is at least brusque. What do you mean by it?”
“Sir, I was too plain; I beg your pardon. I ought to have replied that it was
not easy to give an impromptu answer to a question about appearances; that
tastes differ; that beauty is of little consequence, or something of that sort.”
“You ought to have replied no such thing. Beauty of little consequence,
indeed! And so, under pretence of softening the previous outrage, of
stroking and soothing me into placidity, you stick a sly penknife under my
ear! Go on; what fault do you find with me, pray? I suppose I have all my
limbs and all my features like any other man?”
“Mr. Rochester, allow me to disown my first answer. I intended no
pointed repartee; it was only a blunder.”
‘Just so; I think so; and you shall be answerable for it. Criticise me; does
my forehead not please you?”
He lifted up the sable waves of hair which lay horizontally over his brow,
and showed a solid enough mass of intellectual organs, but an abrupt
deficiency where the suave sign of benevolence should have risen.40
“Now, ma‘am, am I a fool?”
“Far from it, sir. You would perhaps think me rude if I inquired, in return,
whether you are a philanthropist?”
“There again! Another stick of the penknife, when she pretended to pat
my head; and that is because I said I did not like the society of children and
old women (low be it spoken!). No, young lady, I am not a general
philanthropist; but I bear a conscience”; and he pointed to the prominences
which are said to indicate that faculty—and which, fortunately for him,
were sufficiently conspicuous; giving, indeed, a marked breadth to the
upper part of his head; “and besides, I once had a kind of rude tenderness of
heart. When I was as old as you, I was a feeling fellow enough; partial to
the unfledged, unfostered, and unlucky; but fortune has knocked me about
since; she has even kneaded me with her knuckles, and now I flatter myself
I am hard and tough as an India-rubber ball, pervious, though, through a
chink or two still, and with one sentient point in the middle of the lump.
Yes; does that leave hope for me?”
“Hope of what, sir?”
“Of my final retransformation from India-rubber back to flesh?”
“Decidedly he has had too much wine,” I thought, and I did not know
what answer to make to his queer question; how could I tell whether he was
capable of being retransformed?
“You look very much puzzled, Miss Eyre; and though you are not pretty
any more than I am handsome, yet a puzzled air becomes you; besides, it is
convenient, for it keeps those searching eyes of yours away from my
physiognomy, and busies them with the worsted flowers of the rug—so
puzzle on. Young lady, I am disposed to be gregarious and communicative
to-night.”
With this announcement he rose from his chair and stood, leaning his arm
on the marble mantle-piece; in that attitude his shape was seen plainly, as
well as his face, his unusual breadth of chest disproportionate almost to his
length of limb. I am sure most people would have thought him an ugly man;
yet there was so much unconscious pride in his port;41 so much ease in his
demeanor; such a look of complete indifference to his own external
appearance; so haughty a reliance on the power of other qualities, intrinsic
or adventitious, to atone for the lack of mere personal attractiveness, that, in
looking at him, one inevitably shared the indifference; and even, in a blind,
imperfect sense, put faith in the confidence.
“I am disposed to be gregarious and communicative tonight,” he repeated;
“and that is why I sent for you. The fire and the chandelier were not
sufficient company for me; nor would Pilot have been, for none of these can
talk. Adèle is a degree better, but still far below the mark; Mrs. Fairfax
ditto; you, I am persuaded, can suit me if you will; you puzzled me the first
evening I invited you down here. I have almost forgotten you since; other
ideas have driven yours from my head; but to-night I am resolved to be at
ease—to dismiss what importunes, and recall what pleases. It would please
me now to draw you out—to learn more of you—therefore speak.”
Instead of speaking, I smiled; and not a very complaisant or submissive
smile either.
“Speak,” he urged.
“What about, sir?”
“Whatever you like. I leave both the choice of subject and the manner of
treating it entirely to yourself.”
Accordingly I sat and said nothing. “If he expects me to talk, for the mere
sake of talking and showing off, he will find he has addressed himself to the
wrong person,” I thought.
“You are dumb, Miss Eyre.”
I was dumb still. He bent his head a little toward me, and with a single
hasty glance seemed to dive into my eyes.
“Stubborn?” he said, “and annoyed. Ah, it is consistent. I put my request
in an absurd, almost insolent form. Miss Eyre, I beg your pardon. The fact
is, once for all, I don’t wish to treat you like an inferior; that is (correcting
himself) I claim only such superiority as must result from twenty years’
difference in age, and a century’s advance in experience. This is legitimate,
et j‘y tiens,co as Adèle would say; and it is by virtue of this superiority, and
this alone, that I desire you to have the goodness to talk to me a little now,
and divert my thoughts, which are galled with dwelling on one point—
cankeringcp as a rusty nail.”
He had deigned an explanation—almost an apology. I did not feel
insensible to his condescension, and would not seem so.
“I am willing to amuse you if I can, sir—quite willing; but I cannot
introduce a topic, because how do I know what will interest you? Ask me
questions, and I will do my best to answer them.”
“Then, in the first place, do you agree with me that I have a right to be a
little masterful—abrupt—perhaps exacting, sometimes, on the grounds I
stated: namely, that I am old enough to be your father, and that I have
battled through a varied experience with many men of many nations, and
roamed over half the globe, while you have lived quietly with one set of
people in one house?”
“Do as you please, sir.”
“That is no answer; or, rather, it is a very irritating, because a very evasive
one; reply clearly.”
“I don’t think, sir, you have a right to command me, merely because you
are older than I, or because you have seen more of the world than I have;
your claim to superiority depends on the use you have made of your time
and experience.”
“Humph! promptly spoken. But I won’t allow that, seeing that it would
never suit my case, as I have made an indifferent, not to say a bad, use of
both advantages. Leaving superiority out of the question, then, you must
still agree to receive my orders now and then, without being piqued or hurt
by the tone of command—will you?”
I smiled. I thought to myself Mr. Rochester is peculiar. He seems to forget
that he pays me £30 per annum for receiving his orders.
“The smile is very well,” said he, catching instantly the passing
expression; “but speak, too.”
“I was thinking, sir, that very few masters would trouble themselves to
inquire whether or not their paid subordinates were piqued and hurt by their
orders.”
“Paid subordinates! What! you are my paid subordinate, are you? Oh, yes,
I had forgotten the salary! Well, then, on that mercenary ground, will you
agree to let me hector a little?”
“No, sir, not on that ground; but on the ground that you did forget it, and
that you care whether or not a dependent is comfortable in his dependency, I
agree heartily.”
 “And will you consent to dispense with a great many conventional forms
and phrases, without thinking that the omission arises from insolence?”
“I am sure, sir, I should never mistake informality for insolence; one, I
rather like; the other, nothing free-born would submit to, even for a salary.”
“Humbug! Most things free-born will submit to anything for a salary;
therefore, keep to yourself, and don’t venture on generalities of which you
are intensely ignorant. However, I mentally shake hands with you for your
answer, despite its inaccuracy; and as much for the manner in which it was
said, as for the substance of the speech; the manner was frank and sincere;
one does not often see such a manner; no, on the contrary, affectation or
coldness, or stupid, coarse-minded misapprehension of one’s meaning, are
the usual rewards of candor. Not three in three thousand raw school-girl
governesses would have answered me as you have just done. But I don’t
mean to flatter you; if you are cast in a different mould to the majority, it is
no merit of yours; nature did it. And then, after all, I go too fast in my
conclusions; for what I yet know, you may be no better than the rest; you
may have intolerable defects to counterbalance your few good points.”
“And so may you,” I thought. My eye met his as the idea crossed my
mind. He seemed to read the glance, answering as if its import had been
spoken, as well as imagined:
“Yes, yes, you are right,” said he; “I have plenty of faults of my own; I
know it, and I don’t wish to palliate them, I assure you. God wotcq I need
not be too severe about others. I have a past existence, a series of deeds, a
color of life, to contemplate within my own breast, which might well call
my sneers and censures from my neighbors to myself. I started, or rather
(for, like other defaulters, I like to lay half the blame on ill fortune and
adverse circumstances) was thrust on to a wrong tack at the age of one-and-
twenty, and have never recovered the right course since; but I might have
been very different; I might have been as good as you—wiser—almost as
stainless. I envy you your peace of mind, your clean conscience, your
unpolluted memory. Little girl, a memory without blot or contamination
must be an exquisite treasure—an inexhaustible source of pure refreshment;
is it not?”
“How was your memory when you were eighteen, sir?”
 “All right, then—limpid, salubrious; no gush of bilgewater had turned it
to fetid puddle. I was your equal at eighteen—quite your equal. Nature
meant me to be, on the whole, a good man, Miss Eyre, one of the better end,
and you see I am not so. You would say you don’t see it; at least, I flatter
myself I read as much in your eye (beware, by-the-by, what you express
with that organ; I am quick at interpreting its language). Then, take my
word for it, I am not a villain; you are not to suppose that—not to attribute
to me any such bad eminence;42 but, owing, I verily believe, rather to
circumstances than to my natural bent, I am a trite, common-place sinner,
hackneyed in all the poor, petty dissipations, with which the rich and
worthless try to put on life. Do you wonder that I avow this to you? Know,
that in the course of your future life you will often find yourself elected the
involuntary confidant of your acquaintances’ secrets. People will
instinctively find out, as I have done, that it is not your forte to talk of
yourself, but to listen while others talk of themselves; they will feel, too,
that you listen with no malevolent scorn of their indiscretion, but with a
kind of innate sympathy—not the less comforting and encouraging because
it is very unobtrusive in its manifestations.”
“How do you know? how can you guess all this, sir?”
“I know it well; therefore I proceed almost as freely as if I were writing
my thoughts in a diary. You would say, I should have been superior to
circumstances; so I should—so I should; but you see I was not. When fate
wronged me, I had not the wisdom to remain cool; I turned desperate; then I
degenerated. Now, when any vicious simpleton excites my disgust by his
paltry ribaldry, I cannot flatter myself that I am better than he; I am forced
to confess that he and I are on a level. I wish I had stood firm—God knows
I do! Dread remorse when you are tempted to err, Miss Eyre; remorse is the
poison of life.”
“Repentance is said to be its cure, sir.”
“It is not its cure. Reformation may be its cure; and I could reform—I
have strength yet for that—if—but where is the use of thinking of it,
hampered, burdened, cursed as I am? Besides, since happiness is
irrevocably denied me, I have a right to get pleasure out of life; and I will
get it, cost what it may.”
 “Then you will degenerate still more, sir.”
“Possibly; yet why should I, if I can get sweet fresh pleasure? And I may
get it as sweet and fresh as the wild honey the bee gathers on the moor.”
“It will sting—it will taste bitter, sir.”
“How do you know, you never tried it. How very serious—how very
solemn you look; and you are as ignorant of the matter as this cameo head”
(taking one from the mantle-piece). “You have no right to preach to me, you
neophyte, that have not passed the porch of life, and are absolutely
unacquainted with its mysteries.”
“I only remind you of your own words, sir; you said error brought
remorse, and you pronounced remorse the poison of existence.”
“And who talks of error now? I scarcely think the notion that flitted
across my brain was an error. I believe it was an inspiration rather than a
temptation; it was very genial, very soothing, I know that. Here it comes
again! It is no devil, I assure you; or if it be, it has put on the robes of an
angel of light. I think I must admit so fair a guest when it asks its entrance
to my heart.”
“Distrust it, sir; it is not a true angel.”
“Once more, how do you know? By what instinct do you pretend to
distinguish between a fallen seraph of the abyss, and a messenger from the
eternal throne—between a guide and a seducer?”
“I judged by your countenance, sir, which was troubled, when you said
the suggestion had returned upon you. I feel sure it will work you more
misery if you listen to it.”
“Not at all—it bears the most gracious message in the world; for the rest,
you are not my conscience-keeper, so don’t make yourself uneasy. Here,
come in, bonny wanderer!”
He said this as if he spoke to a vision, viewless to any eye but his own;
then, folding his arms, which he had half extended, on his chest, he seemed
to inclose in their embrace the invisible being.
“Now,” he continued, again addressing me, “I have received the pilgrim—
a disguised deity, as I verily believe. Already it has done me good; my heart
was a sort of charnel; it will now be a shrine.”
“To speak truth, sir I don’t understand you at all; I cannot keep up the
conversation, because it has got out of my depth. Only one thing I know;
you said you were not as good as you should like to be, and that you
regretted your own imperfection—one thing I can comprehend: you
intimated that to have a sullied memory was a perpetual bane. It seems to
me, that if you tried hard, you would in time find it possible to become what
you yourself would approve; and that if from this day you began with
resolution to correct your thoughts and actions, you would, in a few years,
have laid up a new and stainless store of recollections, to which you might
revert with pleasure.”
“Justly thought, rightly said, Miss Eyre; and at this moment, I am paving
hell with energy.”
“Sir?”
“I am laying down good intentions, which I believe durable as flint.
Certainly, my associates and pursuits shall be other than they have been.”
“And better?”
“And better—as much better as pure ore is than foul dross. You seem to
doubt me; I don’t doubt myself; I know what my aim is, what my motives
are; and, at this moment I pass a law, unalterable as that of the Medes and
Persians, that both are right.”
“They cannot be, sir, if they require a new statute to legalize them.”
“They are, Miss Eyre, though they absolutely require a new statute;
unheard-of combinations of circumstances demand unheard-of rules.”
“That sounds a dangerous maxim, sir; because one can see at once that it
is liable to abuse.”
“Sententious sage! so it is; but I swear by my household gods not to abuse
it.”
“You are human and fallible.”
“I am; so are you—what then?”
 “The human and fallible should not arrogate a power with which the
divine and perfect alone can be safely intrusted.”
“What power?”
“That of saying of any strange, unsanctioned line of action, ‘Let it be
right.’ ”
“‘Let it be right’—the very words; you have pronounced them.”
“May it be right, then,” I said as I rose, deeming it useless to continue a
discourse which was all darkness to me, and, besides, sensible that the
character of my interlocutor was beyond my penetration—at least, beyond
its present reach—and feeling the uncertainty, the vague sense of insecurity,
which accompanies a conviction of ignorance.
“Where are you going?”
“To put Adèle to bed; it is past her bed-time.”
“You are afraid of me, because I talk like a Sphynx.”
“Your language is enigmatical, sir; but though I am bewildered, I am
certainly not afraid.”
“You are afraid—your self-love dreads a blunder.”
“In that sense I do feel apprehensive—I have no wish to talk nonsense.”
“If you did, it would be in such a grave, quiet manner, I should mistake it
for sense. Do you never laugh, Miss Eyre? Don’t trouble yourself to answer
—I see, you laugh rarely; but you can laugh very merrily; believe me, you
are not naturally austere, any more than I am naturally vicious. The Lowood
constraint still clings to you somewhat; controlling your features, muffling
your voice, and restricting your limbs; and you fear in the presence of a
man and a brother—or father, or master, or what you will—to smile too
gayly, speak too freely, or move too quickly; but in time, I think you will
learn to be natural with me, as I find it impossible to be conventional with
you; and then your looks and movements will have more vivacity and
variety than they dare offer now. I see, at intervals, the glance of a curious
sort of bird through the close-set bars of the cage; a vivid, restless, resolute
captive is there; were it but free, it would soar cloud-high. You are still bent
on going?”
 “It has struck nine, sir.”
“Never mind; wait a minute; Adèle is not ready to go to bed yet. My
position, Miss Eyre, with my back to the fire, and my face to the room,
favors observation. While talking to you, I have also occasionally watched
Adèle (I have my own reasons for thinking her a curious study—reasons
that I may, nay that I shall, impart to you some day); she pulled out of her
box, about ten minutes ago, a little pink silk frock; rapture lit her face as she
unfolded it; coquetry runs in her blood, blends with her brains, and seasons
the marrow of her bones. ‘Il faut que je l’essaie!‘ cried she; ‘et à l‘instant
même!’cr and she rushed out of the room. She is now with Sophie,
undergoing a robing process; in a few minutes she will reenter; and I know
what I shall see, a miniature of Céline Varens, as she used to appear on the
boards at the rising of—; but never mind that. However, my tenderest
feelings are about to receive a shock; such is my presentiment; stay, now, to
see whether it will be realized.”
Ere long, Adèle’s little foot was heard tripping across the hall. She
entered, transformed as her guardian had predicted. A dress of rose-colored
satin, very short, and as full in the skirt as it could be gathered, replaced the
brown frock she had previously worn; a wreath of rosebuds circled her
forehead; her feet were dressed in silk stockings and small white satin
sandals.
“Est-ce que ma robe va bien?” cried she, bounding forward: “et mes
souliers? et mes bas? Tenez-je crois que je vais danser!”cs
And spreading out her dress, she chasséed across the room; till, having
reached Mr. Rochester, she wheeled lightly round before him on tip-toe,
then dropped on one knee at his feet, exclaiming—
“Monsieur, je vous remercie mille fois de votre bonté”; then rising, she
added, “C‘est comme cela que maman faisait, n’est-ce-pas, monsieur?”ct
“Pre-cise-ly!” was the answer; “and ‘comme cela,’cu she charmed my
English gold out of my British breeches’ pocket. I have been green, too,
Miss Eyre—ay, grass-green; not a more vernal tint freshens you now than
once freshened me. My spring is gone, however; but it has left me that
French floweret on my hands; which, in some moods, I would fain be rid of.
Not valuing now the root whence it sprung, having found that it was of a
sort which nothing but gold dust could manure, I have but half a liking to
the blossom; especially when it looks so artificial as just now. I keep it and
rear it rather on the Roman Catholic principle of expiating numerous sins,
great or small, by one good work. I’ll explain all this some day. Good-
night.”

OceanofPDF.com
 Chapter XV

Mr. Rochester did, on a future occasion, explain it.

It was one afternoon, when he chanced to meet me and Adèle in the
grounds, and while she played with Pilot and her shuttlecock, he asked me
to walk up and down a long beech avenue within sight of her.43
He then said that she was the daughter of a French opera dancer, Céline
Varens, toward whom he once cherished what he called a “grande
passion”cv This passion Céline had professed to return with even superior
ardor. He thought himself her idol, ugly as he was; he believed, as he said,
that she preferred his “taille d‘athlète”cw to the elegance of the Apollo
Belvidere.
“And, Miss Eyre, so much was I flattered by this preference of the Gallic
sylph for her British gnome, that I installed her in a hotel;cx gave her a
complete establishment of servants, a carriage, cashmeres, diamonds,
dentelles,cy &c. In short, I began the process of ruining myself in the
received style—like any other spoony.cz I had not, it seems, the originality
to chalk out a new road to shame and destruction, but trod the old track with
stupid exactness not to deviate an inch from the beaten centre. I had-as I
deserve to have—the fate of all other spoonies. Happening to call one
evening, when Céline did not expect me, I found her out; but it was a warm
night, and I was tired with strolling through Paris, so I sat down in her
boudoir; happy to breathe the air consecrated so lately by her presence. No
—I exaggerate; I never thought there was any consecrating virtue about her;
it was rather a sort of pastile perfume she had left—a scent of musk and
amber, than an odor of sanctity. I was just beginning to stifle with the fumes
of conservatory flowers and sprinkled essences, when I bethought myself to
open the window and step out on to the balcony. It was moonlight, and gas-
light besides, and very still and serene. The balcony was furnished with a
chair or two; I sat down, took out a cigar—I will take one now, if you will
excuse me.”
Here ensued a pause, filled up by the producing and lighting of a cigar;
having placed it to his lips, and breathed a trail of Havana incense on the
freezing and sunless air, he went on.
“I liked bonbons, too, in those days, Miss Eyre, and I was croquant—
(overlook the barbarism) croquantda chocolate comfits, and smoking
alternately, watching, meantime, the equipages that rolled along the
fashionable street toward the neighboring opera-house, when, in an elegant
close carriage, drawn by a beautiful pair of English horses, and distinctly
seen in the brillant city-night, I recognized the ‘voiture’db I had had given
Céline. She was returning; of course my heart thumped with impatience
against the iron rails I leaned upon. The carriage stopped, as I had expected,
at the hotel door; my flame (that is the very word for an opera inamorata)
alighted; though muffled in a cloak—an unnecessary incumbrance, by-the-
by, on so warm a June evening—I knew her instantly, by her little foot, seen
peeping from the skirt of her dress, as she skipped from the carriage-step.
Bending over the balcony, I was about to murmur ‘Mon ange’dc—in a tone,
of course, which should be audible to the ear of love alone—when a figure
jumped from the carriage after her, cloaked also; but that was a spurred heel
which had rung on the pavement, and that was a hatted head which now
passed under the arched porte cochèredd of the hotel.
“You never felt jealousy, did you, Miss Eyre? Of course not; I need not
ask you; because you never felt love. You have both sentiments yet to
experience; your soul sleeps; the shock is yet to be given which shall waken
it. You think all existence lapses in as quiet a flow as that in which your
youth has hitherto slid away. Floating on with closed eyes and muffled ears,
you neither see the rocks bristling not far off in the bed of the flood, nor
hear the breakers boil at their base. But I tell you—and you may mark my
words—you will come some day to a craggy pass of the channel, where the
whole of life’s stream will be broken up into whirl and tumult, foam and
noise; either you will be dashed to atoms on crag-points, or lifted up and
borne on by some master wave into a calmer current—as I am now.
“I like this day; I like that sky of steel; I like the sternness and stillness of
the world under this frost. I like Thornfield; its antiquity; its retirement; its
old crow-trees and thorn-trees; its gray façade, and lines of dark windows
reflecting that metal welkin;de and yet how long have I abhorred the very
thought of it; shunned it like a great plague-house! How I do still abhor—”
He ground his teeth and was silent; he arrested his step and struck his boot
against the hard ground. Some hated thought seemed to have him in its grip,
and to hold him so tightly that he could not advance.
We were ascending the avenue when he thus paused; the hall was before
us. Lifting his eye to its battlements, he cast over them a glare such as I
never saw before or since. Pain, shame, ire—impatience, disgust,
detestation—seemed momentarily to hold a quivering conflict in the large
pupil dilating under his ebon eyebrow. Wild was the wrestle which should
be paramount; but another feeling rose and triumphed; something hard and
cynical, self-willed and resolute; it settled his passion and petrified his
countenance. He went on.
“During the moment I was silent, Miss Eyre, I was arranging a point with
my destiny. She stood there, by that beech-trunk—a hag like one of those
who appeared to Macbeth on the heath of Forres. ‘You like Thornfield?’ she
said, lifting her finger; and then she wrote in the air a memento, which ran
in lurid hieroglyphics all along the house-front, between the upper and
lower rows of windows. ‘Like it if you can! Like it if you dare!’
“ ‘I will like it,’ said I. ‘I dare like it’; and” (he subjoined moodily) “I will
keep my word; I will break obstacles to happiness, to goodness—yes,
goodness. I wish to be a better man than I have been; than I am; as Job’s
leviathan broke the spear, the dart, and the habergeon, hinderances which
others count as iron and brass, I will esteem but straw and rotten wood.”44
Adèle here ran before him with her shuttlecock. “Away!” he cried harshly;
“keep at a distance, child; or go in to Sophie!” Continuing then to pursue
his walk in silence, I ventured to recall him to the point whence he had
abruptly diverged.
 “Did you leave the balcony, sir,” I asked, “when Mademoiselle Varens
entered?”
I almost expected a rebuff for this hardly well-timed question; but, on the
contrary, waking out of his scowling abstraction, he turned his eyes toward
me, and the shade seemed to clear off his brow.
“Oh, I had forgotten Céline! Well, to resume. When I saw my charmer
thus come in accompanied by a cavalier, I seemed to hear a hiss, and the
green snake of jealousy, rising on undulating coils from the moonlit
balcony, glided within my waistcoat, and ate its way in two minutes to my
heart’s core.45 Strange!” he exclaimed, suddenly starting again from the
point. “Strange that I should choose you for the confidant of all this, young
lady; passing strange that you should listen to me quietly, as if it were the
most usual thing in the world for a man like me to tell stories of his opera-
mistresses to a quaint, inexperienced girl like you! But the last singularity
explains the first, as I intimated once before; you, with your gravity,
considerateness, and caution, were made to be the recipient of secrets.
Besides, I know what sort of a mind I have placed in communication with
my own—I know it is one not liable to take infection; it is a peculiar mind;
it is a unique one. Happily, I do not mean to harm it; but if I did, it would
not take harm from me. The more you and I converse, the better; for while I
cannot blight you, you may refresh me.” After this digression he proceeded.
“I remained in the balcony. ‘They will come to her boudoir no doubt,’
thought I; ‘let me prepare an ambush.’ So putting my hand in through the
open window, I drew the curtain over it, leaving only an opening through
which I could take observations; then I closed the casement, all but a chink
just wide enough to furnish an outlet to ‘lovers’ whispered vows’; then I
stole back to my chair; and as I resumed it the pair came in. My eye was
quickly at the aperture. Céline’s chambermaid entered, lighted a lamp, left it
on the table, and withdrew. The couple were thus revealed to me clearly;
both removed their cloaks, and there was ‘the Varens’ shining in satin and
jewels—my gifts of course—and there was her companion in an officer’s
uniform; and I knew him for a young rouédf of a vicomte—a brainless and
vicious youth whom I had sometimes met in society, and had never thought
of hating because I despised him so absolutely. On recognizing him, the
fang of the snake—jealousy—was instantly broken; because at the same
moment my love for Céline sunk under an extinguisher. A woman who
could betray me for such a rival was not worth contending for; she deserved
only scorn; less, however, than I, who had been her dupe.
“They began to talk; their conversation eased me completely; frivolous,
mercenary, heartless, and senseless, it was rather calculated to weary than
enrage a listener. A card of mine lay on the table; this being perceived,
brought my name under discussion. Neither of them possessed energy or
wit to belabor me soundly; but they insulted me as coarsely as they could in
their little way; especially Céline; who even waxed rather brilliant on my
personal defects—deformities she termed them. Now it had been her
custom to launch out into fervent admiration of what she called my ‘beauté
mâle’;dg wherein she differed diametrically from you, who told me point-
blank at the second interview, that you did not think me handsome. The
contrast struck me at the time, and—”
Adèle here came running up again.
“Monsieur, John has just been to say that your agent has called and
wishes to see you.”
“Ah! in that case I must abridge. Opening the window, I walked in upon
them; liberated Céline from my protection; gave her notice to vacate her
hotel; offered her a purse for immediate exigencies; disregarded screams,
hysterics, prayers, protestations, convulsions; made an appointment with the
vicomte for a meeting at the Bois de Boulogne. Next morning I had the
pleasure of encountering him; left a bullet in one of his poor, etiolated arms,
feeble as the wing of a chicken in the pip,dh and then thought I had done
with the whole crew. But, unluckily, the Varens, six months before, had
given me this fillette,di Adèle, who, she affirmed, was my daughter; and
perhaps she may be, though I see no proofs of such grim paternity written in
her countenance; Pilot is more like me than she. Some years after I had
broken with the mother, she abandoned her child and ran away to Italy with
a musician or singer. I acknowledged no natural claim on Adèle’s part to be
supported by me—nor do I now acknowledge any, for I am not her father—
but hearing that she was quite destitute, I e‘en took the poor thing out of the
slime and mud of Paris, and transplanted it here, to grow up clean in the
wholesome soil of an English country garden. Mrs. Fairfax found you to
train it; but now you know that it is the illegitimate offspring of a French
opera girl, you will perhaps think differently of your post and protégée; you
will be coming to me some day with notice that you have found another
place—that you beg me to look out for a new governess, &c.—eh?”
“No—Adèle is not answerable for either her mother’s faults or yours; I
have a regard for her, and now that I know she is, in a sense, parentless—
forsaken by her mother and disowned by you, sir—I shall cling closer to her
than before. How could I possibly prefer the spoiled pet of a wealthy
family, who would hate her governess as a nuisance, to a lonely little
orphan, who leans towards her as a friend?”
“Oh, that is the light in which you view it! Well, I must go in now, and
you too; it darkens.”
But I stayed out a few minutes longer with Adèle and Pilot—ran a race
with her, and played a game of battledore and shuttlecock. When we went
in and I had removed her bonnet and coat, I took her on my knee, kept her
there an hour, allowing her to prattle as she liked, not rebuking even some
little freedoms and trivialities into which she was apt to stray when much
noticed, and which betrayed in her a superficiality of character, inherited
probably from her mother, hardly congenial to an English mind. Still she
had her merits; and I was disposed to appreciate all that was good in her to
the utmost. I sought in her countenance and features a likeness to Mr.
Rochester, but found none; no trait, no turn of expression, announced
relationship. It was a pity; if she could but have been proved to resemble
him, he would have thought more of her.
It was not till after I had withdrawn to my own chamber for the night, that
I steadily reviewed the tale Mr. Rochester had told me. As he had said, there
was probably nothing at all extraordinary in the substance of the narrative
itself; a wealthy English-man’s passion for a French dancer, and her
treachery to him, were every-day matters enough, no doubt, in society; but
there was something decidedly strange in the paroxysm of emotion which
had suddenly seized him, when he was in the act of expressing the present
contentment of his mood, and his newly-revived pleasure in the old hall and
its environs. I meditated wonderingly on this incident; but gradually
quitting it, as I found it for the present inexplicable, I turned to the
consideration of my master’s manner to myself. The confidence he had
thought fit to repose in me seemed a tribute to my discretion; I regarded and
accepted it as such. His deportment had now for some weeks been more
uniform toward me than at first. I never seemed in his way; he did not take
fits of chilling hauteur; when he met me unexpectedly the encounter seemed
welcome; he had always a word and sometimes a smile for me; when
summoned by formal invitation to his presence, I was honored by a
cordiality of reception that made me feel I really possessed the power to
amuse him, and that these evening conferences were sought as much for his
pleasure as for my benefit.
I, indeed, talked comparatively little; but I heard him talk with relish. It
was his nature to be communicative; he liked to open to a mind
unacquainted with the world, glimpses of its scenes and ways (I do not
mean its corrupt scenes and wicked ways, but such as derived their interest
from the great scale on which they were acted, the strange novelty by which
they were characterized); and I had a keen delight in receiving the new
ideas he offered, in imagining the new pictures he portrayed, and following
him in thought through the new regions he disclosed, never startled or
troubled by one noxious allusion.
The ease of his manner freed me from painful restraint; the friendly
frankness, as correct as cordial, with which he treated me, drew me to him.
I felt, at times, as if he were my relation, rather than my master; yet he was
imperious sometimes still, but I did not mind that—I saw it was his way. So
happy, so gratified, did I become with this new interest added to life, that I
ceased to pine after kindred. My thin-crescent-destiny seemed to enlarge;
the blanks of existence were filled up; my bodily health improved; I
gathered flesh and strength.
And was Mr. Rochester now ugly in my eyes? No, reader. Gratitude, and
many associations, all pleasurable and genial, made his face the object I
best liked to see. His presence in a room was more cheering than the
brightest fire. Yet I had not forgotten his faults; indeed, I could not, for he
brought them frequently before me. He was proud, sardonic, harsh to
inferiority of every description. In my secret soul I knew that his great
kindness to me was balanced by unjust severity to others. He was moody,
too, unaccountably so. I more than once, when sent for to read to him,
found him sitting in his library alone, with his head bent on his folded arms;
and when he looked up, a morose, almost a malignant, scowl blackened his
features. But I believe that his moodiness, his harshness, and his former
faults of morality (I say former, for now he seemed corrected of them) had
their source in some cruel cross of fate. I believed he was naturally a man of
better tendencies, higher principles, and purer tastes than such as
circumstances had developed, education instilled, or destiny encouraged. I
thought there were excellent materials in him, though, for the present, they
hung together somewhat spoiled and tangled. I cannot deny that I grieved
for his grief, whatever that was, and would have given much to assuage it.
Though I had now extinguished my candle and was laid down in bed, I
could not sleep, for thinking of his look when he paused in the avenue, and
told how his destiny had risen up before him and dared him to be happy at
Thornfield.
“Why not?” I asked myself. “What alienates him from the house? Will he
leave it again soon? Mrs. Fairfax said he seldom stayed here longer than a
fortnight at a time, and he has now been resident eight weeks. If he does go
the change will be doleful. Suppose he should be absent, spring, summer,
and autumn, how joyless sunshine and fine days will seem!”
I hardly know whether I had slept or not after this musing; at any rate I
started wide awake on hearing a vague murmur, peculiar and lugubrious,
which sounded, I thought, just above me. I wished I had kept my candle
burning. The night was drearily dark; my spirits were depressed. I rose and
sat up in bed, listening. The sound was hushed.
I tried again to sleep; but my heart beat anxiously; my inward tranquility
was broken. The clock, far down in the hall, struck two. Just then it seemed
my chamber-door was touched, as if fingers had swept the panels in groping
a way along the dark gallery outside. I said, “Who is there?” Nothing
answered. I was chilled with fear.
All at once I remembered that it might be Pilot; who, when the kitchen-
door chanced to be left open, not unfrequently found his way up to the
threshold of Mr. Rochester’s chamber. I had seen him lying there myself in
the mornings. The idea calmed me somewhat; I laid down. Silence
composes the nerves, and as an unbroken hush now reigned again through
the whole house, I began to feel the return of slumber. But it was not fated
that I should sleep that night. A dream had scarcely approached my ear,
when it fled affrighted, scared by a marrow-freezing incident enough.
This was a demoniac laugh; low, suppressed, and deep, muttered, as it
seemed, at the very key-hole of my chamber-door. The head of my bed was
near the door, and I thought, at first, the goblin-laughter stood at my bed-
side, or, rather, crouched by my pillow. But I rose, looked round, and could
see nothing; while, as I still gazed, the unnatural sound was reiterated, and I
knew it came from behind the panels. My first impulse was to rise and
fasten the bolt; my next, again to cry out, “Who is there?”
Something gurgled and moaned. Ere long, steps retreated up the gallery
toward the third story stair-case. A door had lately been made to shut in that
stair-case; I heard it open and close, and all was still.
“Was that Grace Poole? and is she possessed with a devil?” thought I.
Impossible now to remain longer by myself, I must go to Mrs. Fairfax. I
hurried on my frock and a shawl. I withdrew the bolt and opened the door
with a trembling hand. There was a candle burning just outside, left on the
matting in the gallery. I was surprised at this circumstance, but still more
was I amazed to perceive the air quite dim, as if filled with smoke; and,
while looking to the right hand and left, to find whence these blue wreaths
issued, I became further aware of a strong smell of burning.
Something creaked; it was a door ajar; and that door was Mr. Rochester‘s,
and the smoke rushed in a cloud from thence. I thought no more of Mrs.
Fairfax; I thought no more of Grace Poole or the laugh. In an instant I was
within the chamber. Tongues of flame darted round the bed; the curtains
were on fire. In the midst of blaze and vapor, Mr. Rochester lay stretched
motionless, in deep sleep.
“Wake! wake!” I cried. I shook him, but he only murmured and turned;
the smoke had stupefied him. Not a moment could be lost; the very sheets
were kindling. I rushed to his basin and ewer; fortunately, one was wide and
the other deep, and both were filled with water. I heaved them up, deluged
the bed and its occupant, flew back to my own room, brought my own
water-jug, baptized the couch afresh, and by God’s aid, succeeded in
extinguishing the flames which were devouring it.
The hiss of the quenched element, the breakage of a pitcher which I flung
from my hand when I had emptied it, and, above all, the splash of the
shower-bath I had liberally bestowed, roused Mr. Rochester at last. Though
it was now dark, I knew he was awake; because I heard him fulminating
strange anathemas at finding himself lying in a pool of water.
“Is there a flood?” he cried.
“No, sir,” I answered; “but there has been a fire; get up, do, you are
quenched now; I will fetch you a candle.”
“In the name of all the elves in Christendom, is that Jane Eyre?” he
demanded. “What have you done with me, witch, sorceress? Who is in the
room besides you? Have you plotted to drown me?”
“I will fetch you a candle, sir; and in Heaven’s name, get up. Somebody
has plotted something; you cannot too soon find out who and what it is.”
“There—I am up now; but at your peril you fetch a candle yet; wait two
minutes till I get into some dry garments, if any dry there be—yes, here is
my dressing-gown, now run!”
I did run; I brought the candle which still remained in the gallery. He took
it from my hand, held it up, and surveyed the bed, all blackened and
scorched, the sheets drenched, the carpet round swimming in water.
“What is it? and who did it?” he asked.
I briefly related to him what had transpired; the strange laugh I had heard
in the gallery; the step ascending to the third story; the smoke—the smell of
fire which had conducted me to his room; in what state I had found matters
there, and how I had deluged him with all the water I could lay hands on.
He listened very gravely; his face, as I went on, expressed more concern
than astonishment; he did not immediately speak when I had concluded.
“Shall I call Mrs. Fairfax?” I asked.
“Mrs. Fairfax? No—what the deuce would you call her for? What can she
do? Let her sleep unmolested.”
 “Then I will fetch Leah, and wake John and his wife.”
“Not at all; just be still. You have a shawl on; if you are not warm enough,
you may take my cloak yonder; wrap it about you, and sit down in the arm-
chair; there—I will put it on. Now place your feet on the stool, to keep them
out of the wet. I am going to leave you a few minutes. I shall take the
candle. Remain where you are till I return; be as still as a mouse. I must pay
a visit to the third story. Don’t move, remember, or call any one.”
He went; I watched the light withdraw. He passed up the gallery very
softly, unclosed the stair-case door with as little noise as possible, shut it
after him, and the last ray vanished. I was left in total darkness. I listened
for some noise, but heard nothing. A very long time elapsed. I grew weary;
it was cold, in spite of the cloak; and then I did not see the use of staying, as
I was not to rouse the house. I was on the point of risking Mr. Rochester’s
displeasure by disobeying his orders, when the light once more gleamed
dimly on the gallery-wall, and I heard his unshod feet tread the matting. “I
hope it is he,” thought I, “and not something worse.”
He reentered, pale and very gloomy. “I have found it all out,” said he,
setting his candle down on the wash-stand; “it is as I thought.”
“How, sir?”
He made no reply, but stood with his arms folded, looking on the ground.
At the end of a few minutes he inquired, in rather a peculiar tone—
“I forget whether you said you saw anything when you opened your
chamber-door.”
“No, sir, only the candlestick on the ground.”
“But you heard an odd laugh? You have heard that laugh before I should
think, or something like it?”
“Yes, sir; there is a woman who sews here, called Grace Poole—she
laughs in that way. She is a singular person.”
‘Just so. Grace Poole; you have guessed it. She is, as you say, singular—
very. Well, I shall reflect on the subject. Meantime, I am glad that you are
the only person, besides myself, acquainted with the precise details of
tonight’s incident. You are no talking fool; say nothing about it. I will
account for this state of affairs” (pointing to the bed); ”and now return to
your own room. I shall do very well on the sofa in the library for the rest of
the night. It is near four; in two hours the servants will be up.”
“Good-night, then, sir,” said I, departing.
He seemed surprised—very inconsistently so, as he had just told me to go.
“What!” he exclaimed, “are you quitting me already; and in that way?”
“You said I might go, sir.”
“But not without taking leave; not without a word or two of
acknowledgment and good will; not, in short, in that brief, dry fashion.
Why, you have saved my life! snatched me from a horrible and excruciating
death! and you walk past me as if we were mutual strangers! At least shake
hands.”
He held out his hand; I gave him mine; he took it first in one, then in both
his own.
“You have saved my life; I have a pleasure in owing you so immense a
debt. I cannot say more. Nothing else that has being would have been
tolerable to me in the character of creditor for such an obligation; but you, it
is different—I feel your benefits no burden, Jane.”
He paused; gazed at me; words almost visible trembled on his lips—but
his voice was checked.
“Good-night again, sir. There is no debt, benefit, burden, obligation, in the
case.”
“I knew,” he continued, “you would do me good in some way, at some
time; I saw it in your eyes when I first beheld you; their expression and
smile did not”—(again he stopped)—“did not” (he proceeded hastily)
“strike delight to my very inmost heart so for nothing. People talk of natural
sympathies; I have heard of good genii; there are grains of truth in the
wildest fable. My cherished preserver, good-night!”
Strange energy was in his voice; strange fire in his look.
“I am glad I happened to be awake,” I said; and then I was going.
“What, you will go?”
 “I am cold, sir.”
“Cold? Yes—and standing in a pool. Go, then, Jane; go!” But he still
retained my hand, and I could not free it. I bethought myself of an
expedient.
“I think I hear Mrs. Fairfax move, sir,” said I.
“Well, leave me.” He relaxed his fingers, and I was gone.
I regained my couch, but never thought of sleep. Till morning dawned I
was tossed on a buoyant but unquiet sea, where billows of trouble rolled
under surges of joy. I thought sometimes I saw beyond its wild waters a
shore, sweet as the hills of Beulah;46 and now and then a freshening gale,
wakened by hope, bore my spirit triumphantly toward the bourne; but I
could not reach it, even in fancy—a counteracting breeze blew off land, and
continually drove me back. Sense would resist delirium; judgment would
warn passion. Too feverish to rest, I rose as soon as day dawned.

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 Chapter XVI

I both wished and feared to see Mr. Rochester on the day which followed
this sleepless night; I wanted to hear his voice again, yet feared to meet his
eye. During the early part of the morning, I momentarily expected his
coming. He was not in the frequent habit of entering the school-room; but
he did step in for a few minutes sometimes, and I had the impression that he
was sure to visit it that day.
But the morning passed just as usual; nothing happened to interrupt the
quiet course of Adèle’s studies; only, soon after breakfast, I heard some
bustle in the neighborhood of Mr. Rochester’s chamber, Mrs. Fairfax’s
voice, and Leah’s and the cook‘s—that is, John’s wife—and even John’s
own gruff tones. There were exclamations of “What a mercy master was not
burned in his bed!” “It is always dangerous to keep a candle lit at night.”
“How providential that he had presence of mind to think of the water-jug!”
“I wonder he waked nobody!” “It is to be hoped he will not take cold with
sleeping on the library sofa,” &c.
To much confabulation succeeded a sound of scrubbing and setting to
rights; and when I passed the room, in going down stairs to dinner, I saw
through the open door that all was again restored to complete order, only
the bed was stripped of its hangings. Leah stood up in the window-seat,
rubbing the panes of glass dimmed with smoke. I was about to address her,
for I wished to know what account had been given of the affair; but, on
advancing, I saw a second person in the chamber—a woman sitting on a
chair by the bedside, and sewing rings to new curtains. That woman was no
other than Grace Poole.
There she sat, staid and taciturn-looking, as usual, in her brown stuff
gown, her check apron, white handkerchief, and cap. She was intent on her
work, in which her whole thoughts seemed absorbed; on her hard forehead,
and in her commonplace features, was nothing either of the paleness or
desperation one would have expected to see marking the countenance of a
woman who had attempted murder, and whose intended victim had
followed her last night to her lair, and, as I believed, charged her with the
crime she wished to perpetrate. I was amazed—confounded. She looked up
while I still gazed at her; no start, no increase or failure of color, betrayed
emotion, consciousness of guilt, or fear of detection. She said, “Good-
morning, miss,” in her usual phlegmatic and brief manner; and, taking up
another ring and more tape, went on with her sewing.
“I will put her to some test,” thought I; “such absolute impenetrability is
past comprehension.”
“Good-morning, Grace,” I said. “Has anything happened here? I thought I
heard the servants all talking together a while ago.”
“Only master had been reading in his bed last night; he fell asleep with his
candle lit, and the curtains got on fire; but, fortunately, he awoke before the
bed-clothes or the woodwork caught, and contrived to quench the flame
with the water in the ewer.”
“A strange affair!” I said, in a low voice; then, looking at her fixedly
—“Did Mr. Rochester wake nobody? Did no one hear him move?”
She again raised her eyes to me, and this time there was something of
consciousness in their expression. She seemed to examine me warily; then
she answered—
“The servants sleep so far off, you know, miss, they would not be likely to
hear. Mrs. Fairfax’s room and yours are the nearest to master’s; but Mrs.
Fairfax said she heard nothing. When people get elderly, they often sleep
heavy.” She paused, and then added, with a sort of assumed indifference,
but still in a marked and significant tone, “But you are young, miss, and I
should say a light sleeper; perhaps you may have heard a noise?”
“I did,” said I, dropping my voice, so that Leah, who was still polishing
the panes, could not hear me; “and at first I thought it was Pilot; but Pilot
cannot laugh; and I am certain I heard a laugh, and a strange one.”
She took a new needleful of thread, waxed it carefully, threaded her
needle with a steady hand, and then observed, with perfect composure—
 “It is hardly likely master would laugh, I should think, miss, when he was
in such danger; you must have been dreaming.”
“I was not dreaming,” I said, with some warmth, for her brazen coolness
provoked me. Again she looked at me, and with the same scrutinizing and
conscious eye.
“Have you told master that you heard a laugh?” she inquired.
“I have not had the opportunity of speaking to him this morning.”
“You did not think of opening your door and looking out into the
gallery?” she further asked.
She appeared to be cross-questioning me—attempting to draw from me
information unawares; the idea struck me that if she discovered I knew or
suspected her guilt, she would be playing off some of her malignant pranks
on me; I thought it advisable to be on my guard.
“On the contrary,” said I, “I bolted my door.”
“Then you are not in the habit of bolting your door every night before you
get into bed?”
Fiend! she wants to know my habits, that she may lay her plans
accordingly! Indignation again prevailed over prudence. I replied, sharply,
“Hitherto I have often omitted to fasten the bolt—I did not think it
necessary. I was not aware any danger or annoyance was to be dreaded at
Thornfield Hall; but in future (and I laid marked stress on the words) I shall
take good care to make all secure before I venture to lie down.”
“It will be wise so to do,” was her answer. “This neighborhood is as quiet
as any I know, and I never heard of the Hall being attempted by robbers
since it was a house; though there are hundreds of pounds’ worth of platedj
in the plate-closet, as is well known. And, you see, for such a large house,
there are very few servants, because master has never lived here much; and
when he does come, being a bachelor, he needs little waiting on; but I
always think it best to err on the safe side; a door is soon fastened,and it is
as well to have a drawn bolt between one and any mischief that may be
about. A deal of people, miss, are for trusting all to Providence; but I say
Providence will not dispense with the means, though he often blesses them
when they are used discreetly.” And here she closed her harangue—a long
one for her, and uttered with the demureness of a Quakeress.
I still stood absolutely dumbfoundered at what appeared to me her
miraculous self-possession and most inscrutable hypocrisy, when the cook
entered.
“Mrs. Poole,” said she, addressing Grace, “the servants’ dinner will soon
be ready; will you come down?”
“No; just put my pint of porter and a bit of pudding on a tray, and I’ll
carry it up stairs.”
“You’ll have some meat?”
“Just a morsel, and a taste of cheese—that’s all.”
“And the sago?”dk
“Never mind it, at present; I shall be coming down before tea-time; I’ll
make it myself.”
The cook here turned to me, saying that Mrs. Fairfax was waiting for me;
so I departed.
I hardly heard Mrs. Fairfax’s account of the curtain conflagration during
dinner, so much was I occupied in puzzling my brains over the enigmatical
character of Grace Poole, and still more in pondering the problem of her
position at Thornfield; in questioning why she had not been given into
custody that morning, or at the very least dismissed from her master’s
service. He had almost as much as declared his conviction of her criminality
last night; what mysterious cause withheld him from accusing her? Why
had he enjoined me to secresy? It was strange—a bold, vindictive, and
haughty gentleman seemed somehow in the power of one of the meanest of
his dependents; so much in her power that even when she lifted her hand
against his life he dared not openly charge her with the attempt, much less
punish her for it.
Had Grace been young and handsome, I should have been tempted to
think that tenderer feelings than prudence or fear influenced Mr. Rochester
in her behalf; but, hard-favored and matronly as she was, the idea could not
be admitted. “Yet,” I reflected, “she has been young once—her youth would
be contemporary with her master’s; Mrs. Fairfax told me, once, she had
lived here many years. I don’t think she can ever have been pretty; but, for
aught I know, she may possess originality and strength of character to
compensate for the want of personal advantages. Mr. Rochester is an
amateur of the decided and eccentric; Grace is eccentric, at least. What if a
former caprice (a freak very possible to a nature so sudden and headstrong
as his) has delivered him into her power, and she now exercises over his
actions a secret influence, the result of his own indiscretion, which he
cannot shake off, and dare not disregard?” But, having reached this point of
conjecture, Mrs. Poole’s square, flat figure and uncomely, dry, even coarse
face recurred so distinctly to my mind’s eye that I thought, “No; impossible!
my supposition cannot be correct. Yet,” suggested the secret voice which
talks to us in our own hearts, “you are not beautiful, either, and perhaps Mr.
Rochester approves you; at any rate, you have often felt as if he did; and
last night—remember his words; remember his look; remember his voice!”
I well remembered all: language, glance, and tone seemed at the moment
vividly renewed. I was now in the school-room; Adèle was drawing; I bent
over her and directed her pencil. She looked up with a sort of start.
“Qu‘avez-vous, mademoiselle?” said she; “Vos doigts tremblent comme
la feuille, et vos joues sont rouges: mais, rouges comme des cerises!”dl
“I am hot, Adèle, with stooping!” She went on sketching, I went on
thinking.
I hastened to drive from my mind the hateful notion I had been
conceiving respecting Grace Poole—it disgusted me. I compared myself
with her, and found we were different. Bessie Leaven had said I was quite a
lady, and she spoke truth—I was a lady. And now I looked much better than
I did when Bessie saw me—I had more color and more flesh; more life,
more vivacity; because I had brighter hopes and keener enjoyments.
“Evening approaches,” said I, as I looked toward the window. “I have
never heard Mr. Rochester’s voice or step in the house to-day; but surely I
shall see him before night. I feared the meeting in the morning; now I desire
it, because expectation has been so long baffled that it is grown impatient.”
 When dusk actually closed, and when Adèle left me to go and play in the
nursery with Sophie, I did most keenly desire it. I listened for the bell to
ring below; I listened for Leah coming up with a message; I fancied
sometimes I heard Mr. Rochester’s own tread, and I turned to the door,
expecting it to open and admit him. The door remained shut; darkness only
came in through the window. Still it was not late; he often sent for me at
seven and eight o‘clock, and it was yet but six. Surely I should not be
wholly disappointed to-night, when I had so many things to say to him! I
wanted again to introduce the subject of Grace Poole, and to hear what he
would answer; I wanted to ask him plainly if he really believed it was she
who had made last night’s hideous attempt; and, if so, why he kept her
wickedness a secret. It little mattered whether my curiosity irritated him; I
knew the pleasure of vexing and soothing him by turns; it was one I chiefly
delighted in, and a sure instinct always prevented me from going too far;
beyond the verge of provocation I never ventured—on the extreme brink I
liked well to try my skill. Retaining every minute form of respect, every
propriety of my station, I could still meet him in argument without fear or
uneasy restraint: this suited both him and me.
A tread creaked on the stairs at last; Leah made her appearance, but it was
only to intimate that tea was ready in Mrs. Fairfax’s room; thither I
repaired, glad at least to go down stairs, for that brought me, I imagined,
nearer to Mr. Rochester’s presence.
“You must want your tea,” said the good lady, as I joined her, “you ate so
little at dinner. I am afraid,” she continued, “you are not well to-day; you
look flushed and feverish.”
“Oh, quite well! I never felt better.”
“Then you must prove it by evincing a good appetite; will you fill the tea-
pot while I knit off this kneedle?” Having completed her task, she rose to
draw down the blind, which she had hitherto kept up, by way, I suppose, of
making the most of daylight, though dusk was now fast deepening into total
obscurity.
“It is fair to-night,” said she, as she looked through the panes, “though not
starlight. Mr. Rochester has, on the whole, had a favorable day for his
journey.”
 “Journey! Is Mr. Rochester gone anywhere? I did not know he was out.”
“Oh, he set off the moment he had breakfasted. He is gone to the Leas,
Mr. Eshton’s place, ten miles on the other side Millcote. I believe there is
quite a party assembled there; Lord Ingram, Sir George Lynn, Colonel Dent,
and others.”
“Do you expect him back to-night?”
“No, nor to-morrow either; I should think he is very likely to stay a week
or more; when these fine, fashionable people get together, they are so
surrounded by elegance and gayety, so well provided with all that can
please and entertain, they are in no hurry to separate. Gentlemen, especially,
are often in request on such occasions, and Mr. Rochester is so talented and
so lively in society, that I believe he is a general favorite; the ladies are very
fond of him, though you would not think his appearance calculated to
recommend him particularly in their eyes; but I suppose his acquirements
and abilities, perhaps his wealth and good blood, make amends for any little
fault of look.”
“Are there ladies at the Leas?”
“There are Mrs. Eshton and her three daughters—very elegant young
ladies indeed; and there are the honorable Blanche and Mary Ingram; most
beautiful women, I suppose. Indeed, I have seen Blanche, six or seven years
since, when she was a girl of eighteen. She came here to a Christmas ball
and party Mr. Rochester gave. You should have seen the dining-room that
day—how richly it was decorated, how brilliantly lighted up! I should think
there were fifty ladies and gentlemen present—all of the first county-
families; and Miss Ingram was considered the belle of the evening.”
“You saw her, you say, Mrs. Fairfax; what was she like?”
“Yes, I saw her. The dining-room doors were thrown open; and, as it was
Christmas-time, the servants were allowed to assemble in the hall, to hear
some of the ladies sing and play. Mr. Rochester would have me to come in,
and I sat down in a quiet comer and watched them. I never saw a more
splendid scene: the ladies were magnificently dressed; most of them—at
least most of the younger ones—looked handsome; but Miss Ingram was
certainly the queen.”
 “And what was she like?”
“Tall, fine bust, sloping shoulders; long, graceful neck; olive complexion,
dark and clear; noble features; eyes rather like Mr. Rochester‘s—large and
black, and as brilliant as her jewels. And then she had such a fine head of
hair, raven black, and so be comingly arranged; a crown of thick plaits
behind, and in front the longest, the glossiest curls I ever saw. She was
dressed in pure white; an amber-colored scarf was passed over her shoulder
and across her breast, tied at the side, and descending in long, fringed ends
below her knee. She wore an amber-colored flower, too, in her hair; it
contrasted well with the jetty mass of her curls.”
“She was greatly admired, of course?”
“Yes, indeed; and not only for her beauty, but for her accomplishments.
She was one of the ladies who sang; a gentleman accompanied her on the
piano. She and Mr. Rochester sung a duet.”
“Mr. Rochester! I was not aware he could sing.”
“Oh! he has a fine bass voice, and an excellent taste for music.”
“And Miss Ingram; what sort of a voice had she?”
“A very rich and powerful one: she sang delightfully; it was a treat to
listen to her; and she played afterward. I am no judge of music, but Mr.
Rochester is; and I heard him say her execution was remarkably good.”
“And this beautiful and accomplished lady is not yet married?”
“It appears not. I fancy neither she nor her sister have very large fortunes.
Old Lord Ingram’s estates were chiefly entailed, and the eldest son came in
for everything almost.”
“But I wonder no wealthy nobleman or gentleman has taken a fancy to
her; Mr. Rochester, for instance. He is rich, is he not?”
“Oh! yes. But you see, there is a considerable difference in age: Mr.
Rochester is near forty; she is but twenty-five.”
“What of that? More unequal matches are made every day.”
“True; yet I should scarcely fancy Mr. Rochester would entertain an idea
of the sort. But you eat nothing; you have scarcely tasted since you began
tea.”
“No; I am too thirsty to eat. Will you let me have another cup?”
I was about again to revert to the probability of a union between Mr.
Rochester and the beautiful Blanche; but Adèle came in, and the
conversation was turned into another channel.
When once more alone, I reviewed the information I had got; looked into
my heart, examined its thoughts and feelings, and endeavored to bring back
with a strict hand such as had been straying through imagination’s
boundless and trackless waste, into the safe fold of common sense.
Arraigned at my own bar, Memory having given her evidence of the
hopes, wishes, sentiments I had been cherishing since last night—of the
general state of mind in which I had indulged for nearly a fortnight past;
Reason having come forward and told, in her own quiet way, a plain,
unvarnished tale47 showing how I had rejected the real and rabidly
devoured the ideal; I pronounced judgment to this effect:
That a greater fool than Jane Eyre had never breathed the breath of life:
that a more fantastic idiot had never surfeited herself on sweet lies, and
swallowed poison as if it were nectar.
“You, ” I said, “a favourite with Mr. Rochester? You gifted with the power
of pleasing him? You of importance to him in any way? Go! your folly
sickens me. And you have derived pleasure from occasional tokens shown
preference—equivocal tokens shown by a gentleman of family, and a man
of the world, to a dependent and a novice. How dared you? Poor stupid
dupe? Could not even self-interest make you wiser? You repeated to
yourself this morning the brief scene of last night? Cover your face and be
ashamed! He said something in praise of your eyes, did he? Blind puppy.
Open their bleared lids and look on your own accursed senselessness! It
does good to no woman to be flattered by her superior, who cannot possibly
intend to marry her; and it is madness in all women to let a secret love
kindle within them, which, if unreturned and unknown, must devour the life
that feeds it; and, if discovered and responded to, must lead, ignis fatuusdm-
like, into miry wilds, whence there is no extrication.
 “Listen, then, Jane Eyre, to your sentence: to-morrow, place the glass
before you, and draw in chalk your own picture, faithfully, without
softening one defect; omit no harsh line, smooth away no displeasing
irregularity; write under it, ‘Portrait of a governess, disconnected, poor, and
plain.’
“Afterward, take a piece of smooth ivory—you have one prepared in your
drawing-box; take your pallet, mix your freshest, finest, clearest tints;
choose your most delicate camel-hair pencils; delineate carefully the
loveliest face you can imagine; paint it in your softest shades and sweetest
hues, according to the description given by Mrs. Fairfax of Blanche Ingram;
remember the raven ringlets, the oriental eye; what! you revert to Mr.
Rochester’s as a model! Order! No snivel! no sentiment! no regret! I will
endure only sense and resolution. Recall the august yet harmonious
lineaments, the Grecian neck and bust; let the round and dazzling arm be
visible, and the delicate hand; omit neither diamond ring nor gold bracelet;
portray faithfully the attire, aerial lace and glistening satin, graceful scarf
and golden rose—call it ‘Blanche, an accomplished lady of rank.’
“Whenever, in future, you should chance to fancy Mr. Rochester thinks
well of you, take out these two pictures and compare them; say, ‘Mr.
Rochester might probably win that noble lady’s love, if he chose to strive
for it; is it likely he would waste a serious thought on this indigent and
insignificant plebeian?’
“I’ll do it,” I resolved; and having framed this determination, I grew calm,
and fell asleep.
I kept my word. An hour or two sufficed to sketch my own portrait in
crayons; and in less than a fortnight I had completed an ivory miniature of
an imaginary Blanche Ingram. It looked a lovely face enough, and when
compared with the real head in chalk, the contrast was as great as self-
control could desire. I derived benefit from the task; it had kept my head
and hands employed, and had given force and fixedness to the new
impressions I wished to stamp indelibly on my heart.
Ere long I had reason to congratulate myself on the course of wholesome
discipline to which I had thus forced my feelings to submit; thanks to it, I
was able to meet subsequent occurrences with a decent calm; which, had
they found me unprepared, I should, probably, have been unequal to
maintain even externally.

OceanofPDF.com
 Chapter XVII

A week passed, and no news arrived of Mr. Rochester; ten days, and still he
did not come. Mrs. Fairfax said she should not be surprised if he were to go
straight from the Leas to London, and thence to the continent, and not show
his face again at Thornfield for a year to come; he had not unfrequently
quitted it in a manner quite as abrupt and unexpected. When I heard this I
was beginning to feel a strange chill and failing at the heart. I was actually
permitting myself to experience a sickening sense of disappointment; but
rallying my wits, and recollecting my principles, I at once called my
sensations to order; and it was wonderful how I got over the temporary
blunder—how I cleared up the mistake of supposing Mr. Rochester’s
movements a matter in which I had any cause to take a vital interest. Not
that I humbled myself by a slavish notion of inferiority: on the contrary, I
just said,
“You have nothing to do with the master of Thornfield, further than to
receive the salary he gives you for teaching his protégée, and to be grateful
for such respectful and kind treatment as, if you do your duty, you have a
right to expect at his hands. Be sure that is the only tie he seriously
acknowledges between you and him; so don’t make him the object of your
fine feelings, your raptures, agonies, and so forth. He is not of your order;
keep to your caste; and be too self respecting to lavish the love of the whole
heart, soul, and strength, where such a gift is not wanted and would be
despised.”
I went on with my day’s business tranquilly; but, ever and anon, vague
suggestion kept wandering across my brain of reasons why I should quit
Thornfield; and I kept involuntarily framing advertisements and pondering
conjectures about new situations; these thoughts I did not think it necessary
to check; they might germinate and bear fruit if they could.
 Mr. Rochester had been absent upward of a fortnight, when the post
brought Mrs. Fairfax a letter.
“It is from the master,” said she, as she looked at the direction. “Now I
suppose we shall know whether we are to expect his return or not.”
And while she broke the seal and perused the document, I went on taking
my coffee (we were at breakfast); it was hot, and I attributed to that
circumstance a fiery glow which suddenly rose to my face. Why my hand
shook, and why I involuntarily spilled half the contents of my cup into my
saucer, I did not choose to consider.
“Well—I sometimes think we are too quiet; but we run a chance of being
busy enough now, for a little while at least,” said Mrs. Fairfax, still holding
the note before her spectacles.
Ere I permitted myself to request an explanation, I tied the string of
Adèle’s pinafore, which happened to be loose; having helped her also to
another bun and refilled her mug with milk, I said nonchalantly,
“Mr. Rochester is not likely to return soon, I suppose?”
“Indeed he is—in three days, he says; that will be next Thursday; and not
alone either. I don’t know how many of the fine people at the Leas are
coming with him; he sends directions for all the best bed-rooms to be
prepared; and the library and drawing-rooms are to be cleaned out; and I am
to get more kitchen hands from the George Inn, at Millcote, and from
wherever else I can; and the ladies will bring their maids and the gentlemen
their valets; so we shall have a full house of it.” And Mrs. Fairfax
swallowed her breakfast and hastened away to commence operations.
The three days were, as she had foretold, busy enough. I had thought all
the rooms at Thornfield beautifully clean and well-arranged; but it appears I
was mistaken. Three women were got to help; and such scrubbing, such
brushing, such washing of paint and beating of carpets, such taking down
and putting up of pictures, such polishing of mirrors and lustres, such
lighting of fires in bed-rooms, and airing of sheets and feather-beds on
hearths, I never beheld, either before or since. Adèle ran quite wild in the
midst of it; the preparations for company and the prospect of their arrival,
seemed to throw her into ecstasies. She would have Sophie to look over all
her “toilettes,” as she called frocks; to furbish up any that were
“passées,”dn and to air and arrange the new. For herself, she did nothing but
caper about in front chambers, jumping on and off the bedsteads, and lie on
the mattresses and piled-up bolsters and pillows before the enormous fires
roaring in the chimneys. From school duties she was exonerated—Mrs.
Fairfax had pressed me into her service, and I was all day in the store-room,
helping (or hindering) her and the cook; learning to make custards, and
cheese-cakes, and French pastry, to truss game and garnish dessert-dishes.
The party were expected to arrive on Thursday afternoon in time for
dinner at six. During the intervening period I had no time to nurse chimera;
and, I believe, I was as active and gay as anybody—Adèle excepted. Still,
now and then, I received a damping check to my cheerfulness; and was, in
spite of myself, thrown back on the region of doubts and portents, and dark
conjectures. This was when I chanced to see the third-story stair-case door
(which of late had always been kept locked) open slowly, and give passage
to the form of Grace Poole, in prim cap, white apron, and handkerchief—
when I watched her glide along the gallery, her quiet tread muffled in a list
slipper; when I saw her look into the bustling, topsy-turvy bed-rooms—just
say a word, perhaps, to the charwomen about the proper way to polish a
grate, or clean a marble mantel-piece, or take stains from papered walls, and
then pass on. She would thus descend to the kitchen once a day, eat her
dinner, smoke a moderate pipe on the hearth, and go back, carrying her pot
of porter with her, for her private solace, in her own gloomy upper haunt.
Only one hour in the twenty-four did she pass with her fellow-servants
below; all the rest of her time was spent in some low-ceiled oaken chamber
of the third story; there she sat and sewed—and probably laughed drearily
to herself—as companion-less as a prisoner in his dungeon.
The strangest thing of all was, that not a soul in the house, except me,
noticed her habits, or seemed to marvel at them; no one discussed her
position or enjoyment, no one pitied her solitude or isolation. I once,
indeed, overheard a part of a dialogue between Leah and one of the
charwomen, of which Grace formed the subject. Leah had been saying
something I had not caught, and the charwoman remarked:
“She gets good wages, I guess?”
 “Yes,” said Leah; “I wish I had as good; not that mine are to complain of
—there’s no stinginess at Thornfield—but they’re not one-fifth of the sum
Mrs. Poole receives. And she is laying by; she goes every quarter to the
bank at Millcote. I should not wonder but she has saved enough to keep her
independent if she liked to leave, but I suppose she’s got used to the place,
and then she’s not forty yet; and strong and able for anything. It is too soon
for her to give up business.”
“She’s a good hand, I dare say,” said the charwoman.
“Ah! she understands what she has to do; nobody better,” rejoined Leah,
significantly; “and it is not every one could fill her shoes, not for all the
money she gets.”
“That it is not!” was the reply. “I wonder whether master—”
The charwoman was going on, but here Leah turned and perceived me,
and she instantly gave her companion a nudge.
“Doesn’t she know?” I heard the woman whisper.
Leah shook her head, and the conversation was, of course, dropped. All I
had gathered from it amounted to this, that there was a mystery at
Thornfield, and that from participation in that mystery I was purposely
excluded.
Thursday came; all work had been completed the previous evening,
carpets were laid down, bed-hangings festooned, radiant white
counterpanes spread, toilet-tables arranged, furniture rubbed, flowers piled
in vases; both chambers and saloons looked as fresh and bright as hands
could make them. The hall, too, was scoured, and the great carved clock, as
well as the steps and banisters of the stair-case, were polished to the
brightness of glass; in the dining-room, the sideboard flashed resplendent
with plate; in the drawing-room and boudoir, vases of exotics bloomed on
all sides.
Afternoon arrived; Mrs. Fairfax assumed her best black satin gown, her
gloves, and her gold watch; for it was her part to receive the company—to
conduct the ladies to their rooms, &c. Adèle, too, would be dressed, though
I thought she had little chance of being introduced to the party, that day at
least. However, to please her, I allowed Sophie to apparel her in one of her
short, full muslin frocks. For myself, I had no need to make any change; I
should not be called upon to quit my sanctum of the school-room, for a
sanctum it was now becoming to me, “a very pleasant refuge in time of
trouble.”48
It had been a mild, serene spring day; one of those days which, toward the
end of March or the beginning of April, rise shining over the earth as
heralds of summer. It was drawing to an end now, but the evening was even
warm, and I sat at work in the school-room with the window open.
“It gets late,” said Mrs. Fairfax, entering in rustling state. “I am glad I
ordered dinner an hour after the time Mr. Rochester mentioned, for it is past
six now. I have sent John down to the gates to see if there is anything on the
road; one can see a long way from thence in the direction of Millcote.” She
went to the window. “Here he is!” said she. “Well, John (leaning out), any
news?”
“They’re coming, ma‘am,” was the answer. “They’ll be here in ten
minutes.”
Adèle flew to the window. I followed, taking care to stand on one side, so
that, screened by the curtain, I could see without being seen.
The ten minutes John had given seemed very long, but at last wheels were
heard; four equestrians galloped up the drive, and after them came two open
carriages. Fluttering veils and waving plumes filled the vehicles; two of the
cavaliers were young, dashing-looking gentlemen; the third was Mr.
Rochester, on his black horse, Mesrour,do Pilot bounding before him; at his
side rode a lady, and he and she were the first of the party. Her purple
riding-habit almost swept the ground, her veil streamed long on the breeze,
mingling with its transparent folds, and gleaming through them shone rich
raven ringlets.
“Miss Ingram!” exclaimed Mrs. Fairfax, and away she hurried to her post
below.
The cavalcade, following the sweep of the drive, quickly turned the angle
of the house, and I lost sight of it. Adèle now petitioned to go down, but I
took her on my knee and gave her to understand that she must not on any
account think of venturing in sight of the ladies, either now or at any other
time, unless expressly sent for; that Mr. Rochester would be very angry, &c.
“Some natural tears she shed” on being told this; but as I began to look very
grave, she consented at last to wipe them.49
A joyous stir was now audible in the hall; gentlemen’s deep tones and
ladies’ silvery accents blent harmoniously together, and distinguishable
above all, though not loud, was the sonorous voice of the master of
Thornfield Hall, welcoming his fair and gallant guests under his roof. Then
light steps ascended the stairs, and there was a tripping through the gallery,
and soft, cheerful laughs, and opening and closing doors, and, for a time, a
hush.
“Elles changent de toilettes,”dp said Adèle, who, listening attentively, had
followed every movement; and she sighed.
“Chez maman,” said she, “quand il y avait du monde, je les suivais
partout, au salon et à leurs chambres; souvent je regardais les femmes de
chambre coiffer et habiller les dames, et c’ était si amusant; comme cela on
apprend.”dq
“Don’t you feel hungry, Adèle?”
“Mais oui, mademoiselle; voilà cinq or six heures que nous n‘avons pas
mange.”dr
“Well, now, while the ladies are in their rooms, I will venture down and
get you something to eat.”
And issuing from my asylum with precaution, I sought a back stairs
which conducted directly to the kitchen. All in that region was fire and
commotion; the soup and fish were in the last stage of projection, and the
cook hung over crucibles in a frame of mind and body threatening
spontaneous combustion.ds In the serhall two coachmen and three
gentlemen’s gentlemen stood or sat round the fire; the Abigails I suppose
were up stairs with their mistresses, the new servants that had been hired
from Millcote were bustling about everywhere. Threading this chaos, I at
last reached the larder; there I took possession of a cold chicken, a roll of
bread, some tarts, a plate or two, and a knife and fork; with this booty I
made a hasty retreat. I had regained the gallery, and was just shutting the
back door behind me, when an accelerated hum warned me that the ladies
were about to issue from their chambers. I could not proceed to the school
room without passing some of their doors, and running the risk of being
surprised with my cargo of victualage, so I stood still at this end, which,
being windowless, was dark, quite dark now, for the sun was set and
twilight gathering.
Presently the chambers gave up their fair tenants one after another; each
came out gayly and airily, with dress that gleamed lustrous through the
dusk. For a moment they stood grouped together at the other extremity of
the gallery, conversing in a key of sweet subdued vivacity; they then
descended the stair-case, almost as noiselessly as a bright mist rolls down a
hill. Their collective appearance had left on me an impression of high-born
elegance, such as I had never before received.
I found Adèle peeping through the school-room door, which she held ajar.
“What beautiful ladies!” cried she, in English. “Oh, I wish I might go to
them! Do you think Mr. Rochester will send for us by and by, after dinner?”
“No, indeed, I don’t; Mr. Rochester has something else to think about.
Never mind the ladies to-night; perhaps you will see them to-morrow; here
is your dinner.”
She was really hungry, so the chicken and tarts served to divert her
attention for a time. It was well I secured this forage; or both she, I, and
Sophie, to whom I conveyed a share of our repast, would have run a chance
of getting no dinner at all; every one down stairs was too much engaged to
think of us. The dessert was not carried out till after nine, and at ten,
footmen were still running to and fro with trays and coffee-cups. I allowed
Adèle to sit up much later than usual; for she declared she could not
possibly go to sleep while the doors kept opening and shutting below, and
people bustling about. Besides, she added, a message might possibly come
from Mr. Rochester when she was undressed; “et alors quel dommage!”dt
I told her stories as long as she would listen to them; and then, for a
change, I took her out into the gallery. The hall lamp was now lighted, and
it amused her to look over the balustrade and watch the servants passing
backward and forward. When the evening was far advanced, a sound of
music issued from the drawing-room, whither the piano had been removed.
Adèle and I sat down on the top step of the stairs to listen. Presently a voice
blent with the rich tones of the instrument; it was a lady who sang, and very
sweet her notes were. The solo over, a duet followed, and then a glee; a
joyous conversational murmur filled up the intervals. I listened long;
suddenly I discovered that my ear was wholly intent on analyzing the
mingled sounds, and trying to discriminate amid the confusion of accents
those of Mr. Rochester; and when it caught them, which it soon did, it found
a further task in framing the tones, rendered by distance inarticulate, into
words.
The clock struck eleven. I looked at Adèle, whose head leaned against my
shoulder; her eyes were waxing heavy, so I took her up in my arms and
carried her off to bed. It was near one before the gentlemen and ladies
sought their chambers.
The next day was as fine as its predecessor; it was devoted by the party to
an excursion to some site in the neighborhood. They set out early in the
forenoon, some on horseback, the rest in carriages; I witnessed both the
departure and the return. Miss Ingram, as before, was the only lady
equestrian; and, as before, Mr. Rochester galloped at her side: the two rode
a little apart from the rest. I pointed out this circumstance to Mrs. Fairfax,
who was standing at the window with me.
“You said it was not likely they should think of being married,” said I;
“but you see Mr. Rochester evidently prefers her to any of the other ladies.”
“Yes, I dare say; no doubt he admires her.”
“And she him,” I added; “look how she leans her head toward him as if
she were conversing confidentially! I wish I could see her face; I have never
had a glimpse of it yet.”
“You will see her this evening,” answered Mrs. Fairfax. “I happened to
remark to Mr. Rochester how much Adèle wished to be introduced to the
ladies, and he said: ‘Oh, let her come into the drawing-room after dinner;
and request Miss Eyre to accompany her.’ ”
“Yes—he said that from mere politeness; I need not go, I am sure,” I
answered.
 “Well—I observed to him that as you were unused to company, I did not
think you would like appearing before so gay a party—all strangers; and he
replied, in his quick way, ‘Nonsense! If she objects, tell her it is my
particular wish; and if she resists, say I shall come and fetch her in case of
contumacy.’ ”
“I will not give him that trouble,” I answered. “I will go, if no better may
be; but I don’t like it. Shall you be there, Mrs. Fairfax?”
“No; I pleaded off, and he admitted my plea. I’ll tell you how to manage
so as to avoid the embarrassment of making a formal entrance, which is the
most disagreeable part of the business. You must go into the drawing-room
while it is empty, before the ladies leave the dining-table; choose your seat
in any quiet nook you like; you need not stay long after the gentlemen come
in, unless you please; just let Mr. Rochester see you are there, and then slip
away—nobody will notice you.”
“Will these people remain long, do you think?”
“Perhaps two or three weeks; certainly not more. After the Easter recess,
Sir George Lynn, who was lately elected member for Millcote, will have to
go up to town and take his seat. I dare say Mr. Rochester will accompany
him; it surprises me that he has already made so protracted a stay at
Thornfield.”
It was with some trepidation that I perceived the hour approach when I
was to repair with my charge to the drawing-room. Adèle had been in a
state of ecstasy all day, after hearing she was to be presented to the ladies in
the evening; and it was not till Sophie commenced the operation of dressing
her, that she sobered down. Then the importance of the process quickly
steadied her; and by the time she had her curls arranged in well-smoothed,
drooping clusters, her pink satin frock put on, her long sash tied, and her
lace mittens adjusted, she looked as grave as any judge. No need to warn
her not to disarrange her attire; when she was dressed, she sat demurely
down in her little chair, taking care previously to lift up the satin skirt for
fear she should crease it, and assured me she would not stir thence till I was
ready. This I quickly was; my best dress (the silver gray one, purchased for
Miss Temple’s wedding and never worn since) was soon put on; my hair
was soon smoothed; my sole ornament, the pearl brooch, soon assumed. We
descended.
Fortunately there was another entrance to the drawing-room than that
through the saloon where they were all seated at dinner. We found the
apartment vacant, a large fire burning silently on the marble hearth, and
wax candles shining in bright solitude amid the exquisite flowers with
which the tables were adorned. The crimson curtain hung before the arch;
slight as was the separation this drapery formed from the party in the
adjoining saloon, they spoke in so low a key that nothing of their
conversation could be distinguished beyond a soothing murmur.
Adèle, who appeared to be still under the influence of a most solemnizing
impression, sat down without a word on the footstool I pointed out to her. I
retired to a window-seat and, taking a book from a table near, endeavored to
read. Adèle brought her stool to my feet; ere long she touched my knee.
“What is it, Adèle?”
“Est-ce que je ne puis pas prendre une seule de ces fleurs magnifiques,
mademoiselle? Seulement pour completer ma toilette.” du
“You think too much of your ‘toilette,’ Adèle; but you may have a
flower.” And I took a rose from a vase and fastened it in her sash. She
sighed a sigh of ineffable satisfaction, as if her cup of happiness were now
full. I turned my face away to conceal a smile I could not suppress; there
was something ludicrous as well as painful in the little Parisienne’s earnest
and innate devotion to matters of dress.
A soft sound of rising now became audible; the curtain was swept back
from the arch; through it appeared the dining-room, with its lighted lustre
pouring down light on the silver and glass of a magnificent dessert-service,
covering a long table; a band of ladies stood in the opening; they entered,
and the curtain fell behind them.
There were but eight; yet, somehow, as they flocked in, they gave the
impression of a much larger number. Some of them were very tall; many
were dressed in white; and all had a sweeping amplitude of array that
seemed to magnify their persons as a mist magnifies the moon. I rose and
courtesied to them; one or two bent their heads in return; the others only
stared at me.
They dispersed about the room, reminding me, by the lightness and
buoyancy of their movements, of a flock of white plumy birds. Some of
them threw themselves in half-reclining positions on the sofas and
ottomans; some bent over the tables and examined the flowers and books;
the rest gathered in a group round the fire—all talked in a low but clear
tone, which seemed habitual to them. I knew their names afterwards, and
may as well mention them now.
First, there was Mrs. Eshton and two of her daughters. She had evidently
been a handsome woman, and was well preserved still. Of her daughters,
the eldest, Amy, was rather little; naive, and childlike in face and manner,
and piquant in form. Her white muslin dress and blue sash became her well.
The second, Louisa, was taller and more elegant in figure; with a very
pretty face, of that order the French term minois chiffonné:dv both sisters
were fair as lilies.
Lady Lynn was a large and stout personage of about forty; very erect,
very haughty-looking, richly dressed in a satin robe of changeful sheen: her
dark hair shone glossily under the shade of an azure plume, and within the
circlet of a band of gems.
Mrs. Colonel Dent was less showy; but, I thought, more ladylike. She had
a slight figure, a pale, gentle face, and fair hair. Her black satin dress, her
scarf of rich foreign lace, and her pearl ornaments, pleased me better than
the rainbow radiance of the titled dame.
But the three most distinguished-partly, perhaps, because the tallest
figures of the band—were the Dowager Lady Ingram and her daughters,
Blanche and Mary. They were all three of the loftiest stature of woman. The
dowager might be between forty and fifty; her shape was still fine; her hair
(by candle-light at least) still black; her teeth, too, were still apparently
perfect. Most people would have termed her a splendid woman of her age;
and so she was, no doubt, physically speaking; but then there was an
expression of almost insupportable haughtiness in her bearing and
countenance. She had Roman features and a double-chin, disappearing into
a throat like a pillar. These features appeared to me not only inflated and
darkened, but even furrowed with pride; and the chin was sustained by the
same principle, in a position of almost preternatural erectness. She had,
likewise, a fierce and a hard eye; it reminded me of Mrs. Reed’s; she
mouthed her words in speaking; her voice was deep, its inflections very
pompous, very dogmatical—very intolerable, in short. A crimson velvet
robe, and a shawl turban of some gold-wrought Indian fabric, invested her
(I suppose she thought) with a truly imperial dignity.
Blanche and Mary were of equal stature—straight and tall as poplars.
Mary was too slim, for her height; but Blanche was moulded like a
Diana.dw I regarded her, of course, with special interest. First, I wished to
see whether her appearance accorded with Mrs. Fairfax’s description;
secondly, whether it at all resembled the fancy miniature I had painted of
her; and thirdly—it will out! whether it were such as I should fancy likely
to suit Mr. Rochester’s taste.
As far as person went, she answered point for point, both to my picture
and Mrs. Fairfax’s description. The noble bust, the sloping shoulders, the
graceful neck, the dark eyes and black ringlets, were all there—but her
face? Her face was like her mother’s; a youthful, unfurrowed likeness; the
same low brow, the same high features, the same pride. It was not, however,
so saturnine a pride; she laughed continually; her laugh was satirical, and so
was the habitual expression of her arched and haughty lip.
Genius is said to be self-conscious; I cannot tell whether Miss Ingram was
a genius, but she was self-conscious—remarkably self-conscious, indeed.
She entered into a discourse on botany with the gentle Mrs. Dent. It seems
Mrs. Dent had not studied that science, though, as she said, she liked
flowers, “especially wild ones”; Miss Ingram had, and she ran over its
vocabulary with an air. I presently perceived she was (what is vernacularly
termed) trailing Mrs. Dent; that is, playing on her ignorance. Her trail might
be clever, but it was decidedly not good-natured. She played; her execution
was brilliant. She sang; her voice was fine. She talked French apart to her
mamma and she talked it well, with fluency and with a good accent.
Mary had a milder and more open countenance than Blanche; softer
features, too, and a skin some shades fairer—(Miss Ingram was dark as a
Spaniard)—but Mary was deficient in life. Her face lacked expression, her
eye lustre. She had nothing to say, and having once taken her seat, remained
fixed like a statue in its niche. The sisters were both attired in spotless
white.
And did I now think Miss Ingram such a choice as Mr. Rochester would
be likely to make? I could not tell—I did not know his taste in female
beauty. If he liked the majestic, she was the very type of majesty; then she
was so accomplished, sprightly. Most gentlemen would admire her, I
thought; and that he did admire her, I already seemed to have obtained
proof; to remove the last shade of doubt, it remained but to see them
together.
You are not to suppose, reader, that Adèle has all this time been sitting
motionless on the stool at my feet. No; when the ladies entered, she rose,
advanced to meet them, made a stately reverence, and said, with gravity:
“Bon jour, mesdames.”dx
And Miss Ingram had looked down at her with a mocking air, and
exclaimed, “Oh, what a little puppet!”
Lady Lynn had remarked, “It is Mr. Rochester’s ward, I suppose—the
little French girl he was speaking of.”
Mrs. Dent had kindly taken her hand, and given her a kiss. Amy and
Louisa Eshton had cried out simultaneously—
“What a love of a child!”
And then they had called her to a sofa, where she now sat, ensconced
between them, chattering alternatively in French and broken English;
absorbing not only the young ladies’ attention, but that of Mrs. Eshton and
Lady Lynn, and getting spoiled to her heart’s content.
At last coffee is brought in, and the gentlemen are summoned. I sit in the
shade—if any shade there be in this brilliantly-lighted apartment; the
window-curtain half hides me. Again the arch yawns; they come. The
collective appearance of the gentlemen, like that of the ladies, is very
imposing; they are all costumed in black; most of them are tall, some
young. Henry and Frederic Lynn are very dashing sparks, indeed; and
Colonel Dent is a fine soldierly man. Mr. Eshton, the magistrate of the
district, is gentleman-like; his hair is quite white, his eyebrows and
whiskers still dark, which gives him something of the appearance of a père
noble de théâtre.dy Lord Ingram, like his sisters, is very tall; like them,
also, he is handsome; but he shares Mary’s apathetic and listless look; he
seems to have more length of limb than vivacity of blood or vigor of brain.
And where is Mr. Rochester?
He comes in last; I am not looking at the arch, yet I see him enter. I try to
concentrate my attention on these netting-needles, on the meshes of the
purse I am forming—I wish to think only of the work I have in my hands, to
see only the silver beads and silk threads that lie in my lap; whereas, I
distinctly behold his figure, and I inevitably recall the moment when I last
saw it; just after I had rendered him, what he deemed, an essential service—
and he, holding my hand, and looking down on my face, surveyed me with
eyes that revealed a heart full and eager to overflow; in whose emotions I
had a part. How near had I approached him at that moment! What had
occurred since, calculated to change his and my relative positions? Yet now,
how distant, how far estranged, we were! so far estranged, that I did not
expect him to come and speak to me. I did not wonder, when, without
looking at me, he took a seat at the other side of the room, and began
conversing with some of the ladies.
No sooner did I see that his attention was riveted on them, and that I
might gaze without being observed, than my eyes were drawn involuntarily
to his face; I could not keep their lids under control; they would rise, and
the irids would fix on him. I looked, and had an acute pleasure in looking—
a precious, yet poignant pleasure; pure gold, with a steely point of agony; a
pleasure like what the thirst-perishing man might feel who knows the well
to which he has crept is poisoned, yet stoops and drinks divine draughts
nevertheless.
Most true is it that “beauty is in the eye of the gazer.” My master’s
colorless, olive face, square, massive brow, broad and jetty eyebrows, deep
eyes, strong features, firm, grim mouth—all energy, decision, will—were
not beautiful, according to rule, but they were more than beautiful to me;
they were full of an interest, an influence that quite mastered me—that took
my feelings from my own power and fettered them in his. I had not
intended to love him; the reader knows I had wrought hard to extirpate from
my soul the germs of love there detected; and now, at the first renewed view
of him, they spontaneously revived, green and strong! He made me love
him without looking at me.
I compared him with his guests. What was the gallant grace of the Lynns,
the languid elegance of Lord Ingram—even the military distinction of
Colonel Dent contrasted with his look of native pith and genuine power? I
had no sympathy in their appearance, their expression; yet I could imagine
that most observers would call them attractive, handsome, imposing; while
they would pronounce Mr. Rochester at once harsh-featured and
melancholy-looking. I saw them smile, laugh—it was nothing; the light of
the candles had as much soul in it as their smile, the tinkle of the bell as
much significance as their laugh. I saw Mr. Rochester smile—his stern
features softened; his eye grew both brilliant and gentle, its ray both
searching and sweet. He was talking, at the moment, to Louisa and Amy
Eshton. I wondered to see them receive with calm that look which seemed
to me so penetrating; I expected their eyes to fall, their color to rise under it;
yet I was glad when I found they were in no sense moved. “He is not to
them what he is to me,” I thought; “he is not of their kind. I believe he is of
mine; I am sure he is—I feel akin to him—I understand the language of his
countenance and movements: though rank and wealth sever us widely, I
have something in my brain and heart, in my blood and nerves, that
assimilates me mentally to him. Did I say, a few days since, that I had
nothing to do with him but to receive my salary at his hands? Did I forbid
myself to think of him in any other light than as a paymaster? Blasphemy
against nature! Every good, true, vigorous feeling I have, gathers
impulsively round him. I know I must conceal my sentiments; I must
smother hope; I must remember that he cannot care much for me. For when
I say that I am of his kind, I do not mean that I have his force to influence,
and his spell to attract; I mean only that I have certain tastes and feeling in
common with him, I must, then, repeat continually that we are forever
sundered; and yet, while I breathe and think, I must love him.”
Coffee is handed. The ladies, since the gentlemen entered, have become
lively as larks; conversation waxes brisk and merry. Colonel Dent and Mr.
Eshton argue on politics; their wives listen. The two proud dowagers, Lady
Lynn and Lady Ingram, confabulate together. Sir George—whom, by-the-
by, I have forgotten to describe—a very big, and very fresh-looking country
gentleman, stands before the sofa, coffee-cup in hand, and occasionally puts
in a word. Mr. Frederic Lynn has taken a seat beside Mary Ingram, and is
showing her the engravings of a splendid volume; she looks, smiles now
and then, but apparently says little. The tall and phlegmatic Lord Ingram
leans with folded arms on the chair-back of the little and lively Amy
Eshton; she glances up at him, and chatters like a wren; she likes him better
than she does Mr. Rochester. Henry Lynn has taken possession of an
ottoman at the feet of Louisa; Adèle shares it with him; he is trying to talk
French with her, and Louisa laughs at his blunders. With whom will
Blanche Ingram repair? She is standing alone at the table, bending
gracefully over an album. She seems waiting to be sought; but she will not
wait too long; she herself selects a mate.
Mr. Rochester, having quitted the Eshtons, stands on the hearth as solitary
as she stands by the table; she confronts him, taking her station on the
opposite side of the mantel-piece.
“Mr. Rochester, I thought you were not fond of children?”
“Nor am I.”
“Then, what induced you to take charge of such a little doll as that?”
(pointing to Adèle). “Where did you pick her up?”
“I did not pick her up; she was left on my hands.”
“You should have sent her to school.”
“I could not afford it; schools are so dear.”
“Why, I suppose you have a governess for her; I saw a person with her
just now—is she gone? Oh, no! there she is still behind the window-curtain.
You pay her, of course; I should think it quite as expensive—more so; for
you have them both to keep in addition.”
I feared—or should I say hoped?—the allusion to me would make Mr.
Rochester glance my way; and I involuntarily shrunk further into the shade;
but he never turned his eyes.
 “I have not considered the subject,” said he, indifferently, looking straight
before him.
“No—you men never do consider economy and common sense. You
should hear mamma on the chapterdz of governesses; Mary and I have had,
I should think, a dozen at least in our day; half of them detestable and the
rest ridiculous, and all incubi—were they not, mamma?”
“Did you speak, my own?”
The young lady thus claimed as the dowager’s special property, reiterated
her question with an explanation.
“My dearest, don’t mention governesses; the word makes me nervous. I
have suffered a martyrdom from their incompetency, and caprice; I thank
Heaven I have now done with them!”
Mrs. Dent now bent over to the pious lady, and whispered something in
her ear; I suppose, from the answer elicited, it was a reminder that one of
the anathematized race was present.
“Tant pis!”ea said her ladyship, “I hope it may do her good!” Then, in a
lower tone, but still loud enough for me to hear, “I noticed her; I am a judge
of physiognomy, and in hers I see all the faults of her class.”
“What are they, madam?” inquired Mr. Rochester, aloud.
“I will tell you in your private ear,” replied she, wagging her turban three
times with portentous significancy.
“But my curiosity will be past its appetite; it craves food now.”
“Ask Blanche; she is nearer you than I.”
“Oh, don’t refer him to me, mamma! I have just one word to say of the
whole tribe—they are a nuisance. Not that I ever suffered much from them;
I took care to turn the tables. What tricks Theodore and I used to play on
our Miss Wilsons, and Mrs. Greys, and Madame Jouberts! Mary was
always too sleepy to join in a plot with spirit. The best fun was with
Madame Joubert; Miss Wilson was a poor sickly thing, lachrymose and
low-spirited; not worth the trouble of vanquishing, in short; and Mrs. Grey
was coarse and insensible; no blow took effect on her. But poor Madame
Joubert! I see her yet in her raging passions, when we had driven her to
extremities—spilled our tea, crumbled our bread and butter, tossed our
books up to the ceiling, and played a charivarieb with the ruler and desk,
the fender and fire-irons. Theodore, do you remember those merry days?”
“Yaas, to be sure I do,” drawled Lord Ingram; “and the poor old stick used
to cry out ‘0 you villainsec childs!’—and then we sermonized her on the
presumption of attempting to teach such clever blades as we were, when she
was herself so ignorant.”
“We did; and Tedo, you know, I helped you in prosecuting (or
persecuting) your tutor, whey-faced Mr. Vining—the parson in the pip,ed as
we used to call him. He and Miss Wilson took the liberty of falling in love
with each other—at least Tedo and I thought so; we surprised sundry tender
glances and sighs which we interpreted as tokens of ‘la belle passion,’ee
and I promise you the public soon had the benefit of our discovery; we
employed it as a sort of lever to hoist our dead weights from the house.
Dear mamma, there, as soon as she got an inkling of the business, found out
that it was of an immoral tendency. Did you not, my lady mother?“
“Certainly, my best. And I was quite right; depend on that; there are a
thousand reasons why liaisons between governesses and tutors should never
be tolerated a moment in any well-regulated house; firstly—”
“Oh gracious, mamma! Spare us the enumeration! Au reste,ef we all know
them; danger of bad example to innocence of childhood; distractions and
consequent neglect of duty on the part of the attached; mutual alliance and
reliance; confidence thence resulting—insolence accompanying—mutiny
and general blow-up. Am I right, Baroness Ingram of Ingram Park?”
“My lily-flower, you are right now as always.”
“Then no more need be said; change the subject.”
Amy Eshton, not hearing or not heeding this dictum, joined in with her
soft, infantine tone: “Louisa and I used to quizeg our governess too; but she
was such a good creature, she would bear anything; nothing put her out. She
was never cross with us; was she, Louisa?”
 “No, never; we might do what we pleased; ransack her desk and her
workbox, and turn her drawers inside out; and she was so good-natured she
would give us anything we asked for.”
“I suppose now,” said Miss Ingram, curling her lip sarcastically, “we shall
have an abstract of the memoirs of all the governesses extant; in order to
avert such a visitation, I again move the introduction of a new topic. Mr.
Rochester, do you second my motion ?”
“Madam, I support you on this point as on every other.”
“Then on me be the onus of bringing it forward. Signior Ed uardo, are you
in voice to-night?”
“Donna Bianca, if you command it, I will be.”
“Then, signior, I lay on you my sovereign behest to furbish up your lungs
and other vocal organs, as they will be wanted on my royal service.”
“Who would not be the Rizzio of so divine a Mary?”50
“A fig for Rizzio!” cried she, tossing her head with all its curls as she
moved to the piano. “It is my opinion the fiddler David must have been an
insipid sort of fellow; I like black Bothwell better; to my mind a man is
nothing without a spice of the devil in him; and history may say what it will
of James Hepburn,51 but I have a notion he was just that sort of wild,
fierce, bandit-hero whom I could have consented to gift with my hand.”
“Gentlemen, you hear! Now which of you most resembles Bothwell?”
cried Mr. Rochester.
“I should say the preference lies with you,” responded Colonel Dent.
“On my honor, I am much obliged to you,” was the reply.
Miss Ingram, who had now seated herself with proud grace at the piano,
spreading out her snowy robes in queenly amplitude, commenced a brilliant
prelude, talking meantime. She appeared to be on her high horse to-night;
both her words and her air seemed intended to excite not only the
admiration, but the amazement of her auditors; she was evidently bent on
striking them as something very dashing and daring indeed.
 “Oh, I am so sick of the young men of the present day!” exclaimed she,
rattling away at the instrument. “Poor, puny things, not fit to stir a step
beyond papa’s park-gates; nor to go even so far without mamma’s
permission and guardianship! Creatures so absorbed in care about their
pretty faces, and their white hands, and their small feet; as if a man had
anything to do with beauty! As if loveliness were not the special prerogative
of woman—her legitimate appanageeh and heritage! I grant an ugly woman
is a blot on the fair face of creation; but as to the gentlemen, let them be
solicitous to possess only strength and valor; let their motto be—hunt,
shoot, and fight; the rest is not worth a fillip. Such should be my device,
were I a man.
“Whenever I marry,” she continued, after a pause, which none interrupted,
“I am resolved my husband shall not be a rival, but a foil to me. I will suffer
no competitor near the throne; I shall exact an undivided homage; his
devotions shall not be shared between me and the shape he sees in his
mirror. Mr. Rochester, now sing, and I will play for you.”
“I am all obedience,” was the response.
“Here, then, is a corsair-song. Know that I dote on corsairs;ei and for that
reason, sing it con spirito.”ej
“Commands from Miss Ingram’s lips would put spirit into a mug of milk
and water.”
“Take care, then; if you don’t please me, I will shame you by showing
how such things should be done.”
“That is offering a premium on incapacity; I shall now endeavor to fail.”
“Gardez-vous en bien!ek If you err wilfully, I shall devise a proportionate
punishment.”
“Miss Ingram ought to be clement, for she has it in her power to inflict a
chastisement beyond mortal endurance.”
“Ha! explain!” commanded the lady.
“Pardon me, madam; no need of explanation; your own fine sense must
inform you that one of your frowns would be a sufficient substitute for
capital punishment.”
“Sing!” said she, and again touching the piano she commenced an
accompaniment in spirited style.
“Now is my time to slip away,” thought I; but the tones that then severed
the air arrested me. Mrs. Fairfax had said Mr. Rochester possessed a fine
voice; he did—a mellow, powerful bass, into which he threw his own
feeling, his own force; finding a way through the ear to the heart, and there
waking sensation strangely. I waited till the last deep and full vibration had
expired—till the tide of talk, checked an instant, had resumed its flow; I
then quitted my sheltered corner and made my exit by the side-door, which
was fortunately near. Thence a narrow passage led into the hall; in crossing
it, I perceived my sandal was loose; I stooped to tie it, kneeling down for
that purpose on the mat at the foot of the stair-case. I heard the dining-room
door unclose; a gentleman came out; rising hastily, I stood face to face with
him; it was Mr. Rochester.
“How do you do?” he asked.
“I am very well, sir.”
“Why did you not come and speak to me in the room?”
I thought I might have retorted the question on him who put it; but I
would not take that freedom. I answered,
“I did not wish to disturb you, as you seemed engaged, sir.”
“What have you been doing during my absence?”
“Nothing particular; teaching Adèle as usual.”
“And getting a good deal paler than you were—as I saw at first sight.
What is the matter?”
“Nothing at all, sir.”
“Did you take any cold that night you half drowned me?”
“Not the least.”
“Return to the drawing-room; you are deserting too early.”
“I am tired, sir.”
He looked at me for a minute.
 “And a little depressed,” he said. “What about? Tell me.”
“Nothing—nothing, sir. I am not depressed.”
“But I affirm that you are; so much depressed that a few more words
would bring tears to your eyes—indeed, they are there now, shining and
swimming; and a bead has slipped from the lash and fallen on to the flag. If
I had time, and was not in mortal dread of some prating prig of a servant
passing, I would know what all this means. Well, to-night I excuse you; but
understand that so long as my visitors stay, I expect you to appear in the
drawing-room every evening; it is my wish; don’t neglect it. Now go, and
send Sophie for Adèle. Good night, my _______ .” He stopped, bit his lip,
and abruptly left me.

OceanofPDF.com
 Chapter XVIII

Merry days were these at Thornfield Hall, and busy days too; how different
from the first three months of stillness, monotony, and solitude, I had
passed beneath its roof! All sad feelings seemed now driven from the house,
all gloomy associations forgotten; there was life everywhere, movement all
day long. You could not now traverse the gallery, once so hushed, nor enter
the front chamber, once so tenantless, without encountering a smart lady‘s-
maid or a dandy valet.
The kitchen, the butler’s pantry, the servants’ hall, the entrance-hall, were
equally alive; and the saloons were only left void and still, when the blue
sky and halcyon sunshine of the genial spring weather called their
occupants out into the grounds. Even when that weather was broken, and
continuous rain set in for some days, no damp seemed cast over enjoyment;
in-door amusements only became more lively and varied, in consequence of
the stop put to out-door gayety.
I wondered what they were going to do the first evening a change of
entertainments was proposed; they spoke of “playing charades,” but in my
ignorance I did not understand the term. The servants were called in, the
dining-room tables wheeled away, the lights otherwise disposed, the chairs
placed in a semicircle opposite the arch. While Mr. Rochester and the other
gentlemen directed these alterations, the ladies were running up and down
stairs ringing for their maids. Mrs. Fairfax was summoned to give
information respecting the resources of the house in shawls, dresses,
draperies of any kind; and certain wardrobes of the third story were
ransacked, and their contents, in the shape of brocaded and hooped
petticoats, satin sacques, black modes, lace lappets,el &c., were brought
down in armfuls by the Abigails; then a selection was made, and such
things as were chosen were carried to the boudoir within the drawing-room.
 Meantime, Mr. Rochester had again summoned the ladies round him, and
was selecting certain of their number to be of his party. “Miss Ingram is
mine, of course,” said he; afterward he named the two Misses Eshton, and
Mrs. Dent. He looked at me; I happened to be near him, as I had been
fastening the clasps of Mrs. Dent’s bracelet, which had got loose.
“Will you play?” he asked. I shook my head. He did not insist, which I
rather feared he would have done; he allowed me to return quietly to my
usual seat.
He and his aids now withdrew behind the curtain; the other party, which
was headed by Colonel Dent, sat down on the crescent of chairs. One of the
gentlemen, Mr. Eshton, observing me, seemed to propose that I should be
asked to join them; but Lady Ingram instantly negatived the notion.
“No,” I heard her say; “she looks too stupid for any game of the sort.”
Ere long, a bell tinkled, and the curtain drew up. Within the arch, the
bulky figure of Sir George Lynn, whom Mr. Rochester had likewise chosen,
was seen enveloped in a white sheet; before him, on a table, lay open a
large book; and at his side stood Amy Eshton, draped in Mr. Rochester’s
cloak, and holding a book in her hand. Somebody, unseen, rung the bell
merrily; then Adèle (who had insisted on being one of her guardian’s party)
bounded forward, scattering round her the contents of a basket of flowers
she carried on her arm. Then appeared the magnificent figure of Miss
Ingram clad in white, a long veil on her head, and a wreath of roses round
her brow; by her side walked Mr. Rochester, and together they drew near
the table. They kneeled, while Mr. Dent and Louisa Eshton, dressed also in
white, took up their stations behind them. A ceremony followed in dumb
show, in which it was easy to recognize the pantomime of a marriage At its
termination, Colonel Dent and his party consulted in whispers for two
minutes, then the colonel called out—
“Bride!” Mr. Rochester bowed and the curtain fell.
A considerable interval elapsed before it again rose. Its second rising
displayed a more elaborately-prepared scene than the last. The drawing-
room, as I have before observed, was raised two steps above the dining-
room, and on the top of the upper step, placed a yard or two back within the
room, appeared a large marble basin, which I recognized as an ornament of
the conservatory—where it usually stood surrounded by exotics, and
tenanted by gold-fish-and whence it must have been transported with some
trouble, on account of its size and weight.
Seated on the carpet, by the side of this basin, was seen Mr. Rochester,
costumed in shawls, with a turban on his head. His dark eyes and swarth
skin and Paynimem features suited the costume exactly; he looked the very
model of an eastern emir, an agent or a victim of the bowstring.enPresently
advanced into view Miss Ingram. She, too, was attired in oriental fashion; a
crimson scarf tied sash-like round the waist; an embroidered handkerchief
knotted about her temples; her beautifully moulded arms bare, one of them
upraised in the act of supporting a pitcher, poised gracefully on her head.
Both her cast of form and feature, her complexion and her general air,
suggested the idea of some Is raelitish princess of the patriarchal days; and
such was doubtless the character she intended to represent.
She approached the basin, and bent over it as if to fill her pitcher; she
again lifted it to her head. The personage on the well-brink now seemed to
accost her; to make some request. “She hasted, let down her pitcher on her
hand, and gave him to drink.”52 From the bosom of his robe, he then
produced a casket, opened it and showed magnificent bracelets and ear-
rings; she acted astonishment and admiration; kneeling, he laid the treasure
at her feet; incredulity and delight were expressed by her looks and
gestures; the stranger fastened the bracelets on her arms and the rings in her
ears. It was Eliezer and Rebecca; the camels only were wanting.
The divining party again laid their heads together; apparently they could
not agree about the word or syllable this scene illustrated. Colonel Dent,
their spokesman, demanded “the tableau of the Whole”; whereupon the
curtain again descended.
On its third rising only a portion of the drawing-room was disclosed, the
rest being concealed by a screen, hung with some sort of dark and coarse
drapery. The marble basin was removed; in its place stood a deal-table and a
kitchen chair. These objects were visible by a very dim light proceeding
from a horn lantern, the wax candles being all extinguished.
 Amid this sordid scene sat a man with his clenched hands resting on his
knees, and his eyes bent on the ground. I knew Mr. Rochester; though the
begrimed face, the disordered dress (his coat hanging loose from one arm,
as if it had been almost torn from his back in a scuffle), the desperate and
scowling countenance, the rough, bristling hair, might well have disguised
him. As he moved, a chain clanked; to his wrists were attached fetters.
“Bridewell!”eo exclaimed Colonel Dent, and the charade was solved.
A sufficient interval having elapsed for the performers to resume their
ordinary costume, they reentered the dining-room. Mr. Rochester led in
Miss Ingram; she was complimenting him on his acting.
“Do you know,” said she, “that, of the three characters, I liked you in the
last best? Oh, had you but lived a few years earlier, what a gallant
gentleman-highwayman you would have made!”
“Is all the soot washed from my face?” he asked, turning it toward her.
“Alas! yes; the more’s the pity! Nothing could be more becoming to your
complexion than that ruffian’s rouge.”
“You would like a hero of the road, then?”
“An English hero of the road would be the next best thing to an Italian
bandit; and that could only be surpassed by a Levantine pirate.”
“Well, whatever I am, remember you are my wife; we were married an
hour since, in the presence of all these witnesses.” She giggled, and her
color rose.
“Now, Dent,” continued Mr. Rochester, “it is your turn.” And, as the other
party withdrew, he and his band took the vacated seats. Miss Ingram placed
herself at her leader’s right hand; the other diviners filled the chairs on each
side of him and her. I did not now watch the actors—I no longer waited
with interest for the curtain to rise; my attention was absorbed by the
spectators; my eyes, erewhile fixed on the arch, were now irresistibly
attracted to the semicircle of chairs. What charade Colonel Dent and his
party played, what word they chose, how they acquitted themselves, I no
longer remember; but I still see the consultation which followed each scene
—I see Mr. Rochester turn to Miss Ingram, and Miss Ingram to him—I see
—her incline her head toward him, till the jetty curls almost touch his
shoulder, and wave against his cheek—I hear their mutual whisperings—I
recall their interchanged glances; and something even of the feeling roused
by the spectacle returns in memory at this moment.
I have told you, reader, that I had learned to love Mr. Rochester. I could
not unlove him now, merely because I found that he had ceased to notice
me—because I might pass hours in his presence, and he would never once
turn his eyes in my direction—because I saw all his attentions appropriated
by a great lady, who scorned to touch me with the hem of her robes as she
passed—who, if ever her dark and imperious eye fell on me by chance,
would withdraw it instantly, as from an object too mean to merit
observation. I could not unlove him, because I felt sure he would soon
marry this very lady—because I read daily in her a proud security in his
intentions respecting her—because I witnessed hourly in him a style of
courtship, which, if careless, and choosing rather to be sought than to seek,
was yet, in its very carelessness, captivating, and in its very pride
irresistible.
There was nothing to cool or banish love in these circumstances, though
much to create despair. Much, too, you will think, reader, to engender
jealousy, if a woman in my position could presume to be jealous of a
woman in Miss Ingram’s. But I was not jealous, or very rarely—the nature
of the pain I suffered could not be explained by that word. Miss Ingram was
a mark beneath jealousy; she was too inferior to excite the feeling. Pardon
the seeming paradox—I mean what I say. She was very showy, but she was
not genuine. She had a fine person, many brilliant attainments; but her mind
was poor, her heart barren by nature—nothing bloomed spontaneously on
that soil—no unforced natural fruit delighted by its freshness. She was not
good, she was not original. She used to repeat sounding phrases from
books; she never offered, nor had, an opinion of her own. She advocated a
high tone of sentiment; but she did not know the sensations of sympathy
and pity. Tenderness and truth were not in her. Too often she betrayed this
by the undue vent she gave to a spiteful antipathy she had conceived against
little Adèle; pushing her away with some contumelious epithet if she
happened to approach her; sometimes ordering her from the room, and
always treating her with coldness and acrimony. Other eyes besides mine
watched these manifestations of character—watched them closely, keenly,
shrewdly. Yes, the future bridegroom, Mr. Rochester himself, exercised over
his intended a ceaseless surveillance; and it was from this sagacity—this
guardedness of his—this perfect, clear consciousness of his fair one’s
defects—this obvious absence of passion in his sentiments toward her, that
my ever-torturing pain arose.
I saw he was going to marry her, for family, perhaps political reasons—
because her rank and connections suited him. I felt he had not given her his
love, and that her qualifications were ill-adapted to win from him that
treasure. This was the point—this was where the nerve was touched and
teased—this was where the fever was sustained and fed: she could not
charm him.
If she had managed the victory at once, and he had yielded and sincerely
laid his heart at her feet, I should have covered my face, turned to the wall,
and (figuratively) have died to them. If Miss Ingram had been a good and
noble woman, endowed with force, fervor, kindness, sense, I should have
had one vital struggle with two tigers—jealousy and despair; than, my heart
torn out and devoured, I should have admired her—acknowledged her
excellence, and been quiet for the rest of my days; and the more absolute
her superiority, the deeper would have been my admiration—the more truly
tranquil my quiescence. But as matters really stood, to watch Miss Ingram’s
efforts at fascinating Mr. Rochester—to witness their repeated failure—
herself unconscious that they did fail—vainly fancying that each shaft
launched hit the mark, and infatuatedly pluming herself on success, when
her pride and self-complaisancy repelled further and further what she
wished to allure—to witness this was to be at once under ceaseless
excitation and ruthless restraint.
Because, when she failed, I saw how she might have succeeded. Arrows
that continually glanced off from Mr. Rochester’s breast, and fell harmless
at his feet, might, I knew, if shot by a surer hand, have quivered keen in his
proud heart—have called love into his stern eye, and softness into his
sardonic face; or, better still, without weapons, a silent conquest might have
been won.
 “Why can she not influence him more, when she is privileged to draw so
near to him?” I asked myself. “Surely she cannot truly like him, or not like
him with true affection! If she did, she need not coin her smiles so lavishly,
flash her glances so unremittingly, manufacture airs so elaborate, graces so
multitudinous. It seems to me that she might, by merely sitting quietly at his
side, saying little and looking less, get nigher his heart. I have seen in his
face a far different expression from that which hardens it now while she is
so vivaciously accosting him; but then it came of itself; it was not elicited
by meretricious arts and calculated manoeuvres and one had but to accept it
—to answer what he asked, without pretension, to address him, when
needful, without grimace—and it increased, and grew kinder and more
genial, and warmed one like a fostering sunbeam. How will she manage to
please him when they are married? I do not think she will manage it; and
yet it might be managed; and his wife might, I verily believe, be the very
happiest woman the sun shines on.”
I have not yet said anything condemnatory of Mr. Rochester’s project of
marrying for interest and connections. It surprised me when I first
discovered that such was his intention; I had thought him a man unlikely to
be influenced by motives so commonplace in his choice of a wife; but the
longer I considered the position, education, &c., of the parties, the less I felt
justified in judging and blaming either him or Miss Ingram, for acting in
conformity to ideas and principles instilled into them, doubtless, from their
childhood. All their class held these principles; I supposed, then, they had
reasons for holding them such as I could not fathom. It seemed to me that,
were I a gentleman like him, I would take to my bosom only such a wife as
I could love; but the very obviousness of the advantages to the husband’s
own happiness, offered by this plan, convinced me that there must be
arguments against its general adoption of which I was quite ignorant,
otherwise I felt sure all the world would act as I wished to act.
But in other points, as well as this, I was growing very lenient to my
master; I was forgetting all his faults, for which I had once kept a sharp
look-out. It had formerly been my endeavor to study all sides of his
character—to take the bad with the good, and, from the just weighing of
both, to form an equitable judgment. Now I saw no bad. The sarcasm that
had repelled, the harshness that had startled me once, were only like keen
condiments in a choice dish—their presence was pungent, but their absence
would be felt as comparatively insipid. And as for the vague something—
was it a sinister or a sorrowful, a designing or a despond ing, expression?—
that opened upon a careful observer, now and then, in his eye, and closed
again before one could fathom the strange depth partially disclosed; that
something which used to make me fear and shrink, as if I had been
wandering among volcanic-looking hills, and had suddenly felt the ground
quiver and seen it gape; that something I, at intervals, beheld still, and with
throbbing heart, but not with palsied nerves. Instead of wishing to shun, I
longed only to dare, to divine it; and I thought Miss Ingram happy, because
one day she might look into the abyss at her leisure, explore its secrets, and
analyze their nature.
Meantime, while I thought only of my master and his future bride—saw
only them, heard only their discourse, and considered only their movements
of importance—the rest of the party were occupied with their own separate
interests and pleasures. The ladies Lynn and Ingram continued to consort in
solemn conferences; where they nodded their two turbans at each other, and
held up their four hands in confronting gestures of surprise, or mystery, or
horror, according to the theme on which their gossip ran, like a pair of
magnified puppets. Mild Mrs. Dent talked with good-natured Mrs. Eshton;
and the two sometimes bestowed a courteous word or smile on me. Sir
George Lynn, Colonel Dent, and Mr. Eshton, discussed politics, or county
affairs, or justice business. Lord Ingram flirted with Amy Eshton; Louisa
played and sang to and with one of the Messrs. Lynn; and Mary Ingram
listened languidly to the gallant speeches of the other. Sometimes all, as
with one consent, suspended their by-play to observe and listen to the
principal actors; for, after all, Mr. Rochester, and, because closely
connected with him, Miss Ingram, were the life and soul of the party. If he
were absent from the room an hour, a perceptible dulness seemed to steal
over the spirits of his guests; and his reëntrance was sure to give a fresh
impulse to the vivacity of conversation.
The want of his animating influence appeared to be peculiarly felt one day
that he had been summoned to Millcote on business, and was not likely to
return till late. The afternoon was wet; a walk the party had proposed to
take to see a gypsy camp, lately pitched on a common beyond Hay, was
consequently deferred. Some of the gentlemen were gone to the stables; the
younger ones, together with the younger ladies, were playing billiards in the
billiard-room. The dowagers Ingram and Lynn sought solace in a quiet
game at cards. Blanche Ingram, after having repelled, by supercilious
taciturnity, some efforts of Mrs. Dent and Mrs. Eshton to draw her into
conversation, had first murmured over some sentimental tunes and airs on
the piano, and then having fetched a novel from the library, had flung
herself in haughty listlessness on a sofa, and prepared to beguile, by the
spell of fiction, the tedious hours of absence. The room and the house were
silent; only now and then the merriment of the billiard players was heard
from above.
It was verging on dusk, and the clock had already given warning of the
hour to dress for dinner, when little Adèle, who knelt by me in the drawing-
room window-seat, exclaimed:
“Voilà Monsieur Rochester, qui revient!”ep
I turned, and Miss Ingram darted forward from her sofa. The others, too,
looked up from their several occupations; for, at the same time, a crunching
of wheels, and a splashing tramp of horse-hoofs, became audible on the wet
gravel. A post-chaise was approaching.
“What can possess him to come home in that style?” said Miss Ingram.
“He rode Mesrour (the black horse), did he not, when he went out? and
Pilot was with him. What has he done with the animals?”
As she said this, she approached her tall person and ample garments so
near the window, that I was obliged to bend back almost to the breaking of
my spine; in her eagerness she did not observe me at first, but when she did,
she curled her lip and moved to another casement. The post-chaise stopped;
the driver rang the door-bell, and a gentleman alighted, attired in travelling
garb; but it was not Mr. Rochester; it was a tall, fashionable-looking man, a
stranger.
“Provoking!” exclaimed Miss Ingram; “you tiresome monkey!”
(apostrophizing Adèle); “Who perched you up in the window to give false
intelligence?” and she cast on me an angry glance, as if I were in fault.
 Some parleying was audible in the hall, and soon the new-comer entered.
He bowed to Lady Ingram, as deeming her the eldest lady present.
“It appears I come at an inopportune time, madam,” said he, “when my
friend, Mr. Rochester, is from home; but I arrive from a long journey, and I
think I may presume so far on old and intimate acquaintance as to install
myself here till he returns.”
His manner was polite; his accent, in speaking, struck me as being
somewhat unusual—not precisely foreign, but still not altogether English;
his age might be about Mr. Rochester‘s, between thirty and forty; his
complexion was singularly sallow; otherwise he was a fine-looking man, at
first sight especially. On closer examination, you detected something in his
face that displeased,or, rather, that failed to please. His features were
regular, but too relaxed; his eye was large and well cut, but the life looking
out of it was a tame, vacant life, at least so I thought.
The sound of the dressing-bell dispersed the party. It was not till after
dinner that I saw him again; he then seemed quite at his ease. But I liked his
physiognomy even less than before; it struck me as being, at the same time,
unsettled and inanimate. His eye wandered, and had no meaning in its
wandering; this gave him an odd look, such as I never remembered to have
seen. For a handsome and not an unamiable-looking man, he repelled me
exceedingly; there was no power in that smooth-skinned face of a full oval
shape; no firmness in that aquiline nose, and small, cherry mouth; there was
no thought on the low, even forehead; no command in that blank, brown
eye.
As I sat in my usual nook, and looked at him with the light of the of
girandoleseq on the mantel-piece beaming full over him—for he occupied
an arm-chair, drawn close to the fire, and kept shrinking still nearer, as if he
were cold—I compared him with Mr. Rochester. I think (with deference be
it spoken) the contrast could not be much greater between a sleek gander
and a fierce falcon; between a meek sheep and the rough-coated, keen-eyed
dog, its guardian.
He had spoken of Mr. Rochester as an old friend. A curious friendship
theirs must have been; a pointed illustration, indeed, of the old adage that
“extremes meet.”
 Two or three of the gentlemen sat near him, and I caught at times scraps
of their conversation across the room. At first I could not make much sense
of what I heard; for the discourse of Louisa Eshton and Mary Ingram, who
sat nearer to me, confused the fragmentary sentences that reached me at
intervals. These last were discussing the stranger; they both called him “a
beautiful man.” Louisa said he was “a love of a creature,” and she “adored
him”; and Mary instanced his “pretty little mouth, and nice nose,” as her
ideal of the charming.
“And what a sweet-tempered forehead he has!” cried Louisa; “so smooth
—none of those frowning irregularities I dislike so much; and such a placid
eye and smile!”
And then, to my great relief, Mr. Henry Lynn summoned them to the other
side of the room, to settle some point about the deferred excursion to Hay
Common.
I was now able to concentrate my attention on the group by the fire, and I
presently gathered that the new-comer was called Mr. Mason; then I learned
that he was but just arrived in England, and that he came from some hot
country, which was the reason, doubtless, his face was so sallow, and that
he sat so near the hearth, and wore a surtout in the house. Presently the
words Jamaica, Kingston, Spanish Town, indicated the West Indies as his
residence; and it was with no little surprise I gathered, ere long, that he had
there first seen and become acquainted with Mr. Rochester. He spoke of his
friend’s dislike of the burning heats, the hurricanes, and rainy seasons, of
that region. I knew Mr. Rochester had been a traveller; Mrs. Fairfax had
said so; but I thought the continent of Europe had bounded his wanderings;
till now I had never heard a hint given of visits to more distant shores.
I was pondering these things, when an incident, and a somewhat
unexpected one, broke the thread of my musings. Mr. Mason, shivering as
some one chanced to open the door, asked for more coal to be put on the
fire, which had burned out its flame, though its mass of cinder still shone
hot and red. The footman who brought the coal, in going out, stopped near
Mr. Eshton’s chair, and said something to him in a low voice, of which I
heard only the words, “old woman”—“quite troublesome.”
 “Tell her she shall be put in the stocks, if she does not take herself off,”
replied the magistrate.
“No, stop!” interrupted Colonel Dent. “Don’t send her away, Eshton; we
might turn the thing to account—better consult the ladies.” And speaking
aloud, he continued, “Ladies, you talked of going to Hay Common to visit
the gypsy camp; Sam, here, says that one of the old Mother Buncheser is in
the servants’ hall at this moment, and insists upon being brought in before
‘the quality,’ to tell them their fortunes. Would you like to see her?”
“Surely, colonel,” cried Lady Ingram, “you would not encourage such a
low impostor? Dismiss her, by all means, at once!”
“But I cannot persuade her to go away, my lady,” said the footman; “nor
can any of the servants; Mrs. Fairfax is with her just now, entreating her to
be gone; but she has taken a chair in the chimney-corner, and says nothing
shall stir her from it till she gets leave to come in here.”
“What does she want?” asked Mrs. Eshton.
“ ‘To tell the gentry their fortunes,’ she says, ma‘am; and she swears she
must and will do it.”
“What is she like?” inquired the misses Eshton, in a breath.
“A shockingly ugly old creature, miss; almost as black as a crock.”
“Why, she’s a real sorceress!” cried Frederic Lynn. “Let us have her in, of
course.”
“To be sure,” rejoined his brother; “it would be a thousand pities to throw
away such a chance of fun.”
“My dear boys, what are you thinking about?” exclaimed Lady Lynn.
“I cannot possibly countenance any such inconsistent proceeding,”
chimed in the Dowager Ingram.
“Indeed, mamma, but you can—and will,” pronounced the haughty voice
of Blanche, as she turned round on the piano-stool, where till now she had
sat silent, apparently examining sundry sheets of music. “I have a curiosity
to hear my fortune told; therefore, Sam, order the beldamees forward.”
“My darling Blanche! recollect—”
 “I do—I recollect all you can suggest; and I must have my will—quick,
Sam!”
“Yes—yes—yes!” cried all the juveniles, both ladies and gentlemen. “Let
her come—it will be excellent sport!”
The footman still lingered. “She looks such a rough one,” said he.
“Go!” ejaculated Miss Ingram, and the man went.
Excitement instantly seized the whole party; a running fire of raillery and
jests was proceeding, when Sam returned.
“She won’t come now,” said he. “She says it’s not her mission to appear
before the ‘vulgar herd’ (them’s her words). I must show her into a room by
herself, and then those who wish to consult her must go to her one by one.”
“You see now, my queenly Blanche,” began Lady Ingram, “she
encroaches. Be advised, my angel-girl—and—”
“Show her into the library, of course,” cut in the “angel-girl.” “It is not
my mission to listen to her before the vulgar herd either; I mean to have her
all to myself. Is there a fire in the library?”
“Yes, ma‘am—but she looks such a tinkler.”et
“Cease that chatter, blockhead! and do my bidding.”
Again Sam vanished; and mystery, animation, expectation, rose to full
flow once more.
“She’s ready now,” said the footman, as he reappeared. “She wishes to
know who will be her first visitor.”
“I think I had better just look in upon her before any of the ladies go,”
said Colonel Dent. “Tell her, Sam, a gentleman is coming.”
Sam went and returned.
“She says, sir, that she’ll have no gentlemen; they need not trouble
themselves to come near her; nor,” he added, with difficulty suppressing a
titter, “any ladies either, except the young and single.”
“By Jove, she has a taste!” exclaimed Henry Lynn.
 Miss Ingram rose solemnly. “I go first,” she said, in a tone which might
have befitted the leader of a forlorn hope,eu mounting a breach in the vanev
of his men.
“Oh, my best! oh, my dearest! pause—reflect!” was her mamma’s cry; but
she swept past her in stately silence, passed through the door which Colonel
Dent held open, and we heard her enter the library.
A comparative silence ensued. Lady Ingram thought it le casew to wring
her hands, which she did accordingly. Miss Mary declared she felt, for her
part, she never dared venture. Amy and Louisa Eshton tittered under their
breath, and looked a little frightened.
The minutes passed very slowly—fifteen were counted before the library-
door again opened. Miss Ingram returned to us through the arch.
Would she laugh? Would she take it as a joke? All eyes met her with a
glance of eager curiosity, and she met all eyes with one of rebuff and
coldness; she looked neither flurried nor merry; she walked stiffly to her
seat, and took it in silence.
“Well, Blanche?” said Lord Ingram.
“What did she say, sister?” asked Mary.
“What do you think? How do you feel? Is she a real fortune-teller?”
demanded the misses Eshton.
“Now, now, good people,” returned Miss Ingram, “don’t press upon me.
Really, your organs of wonder and credulity are easily excited; you seem,
by the importance you all—my good mamma included—ascribe to this
matter, absolutely to believe we have a genuine witch in the house, who is
in close alliance with the old gentleman.exI have seen a gypsy vagabond;
she has practised in hackneyed fashion the science of palmistry, and told me
what such people usually tell. My whim is gratified; and now, I think, Mr.
Eshton will do well to put the hag in the stocks to-morrow morning, as he
threatened.”
Miss Ingram took a book, leaned back in her chair, and so declined further
conversation. I watched her for nearly half an hour—during all that time she
never turned a page, and her face grew momentarily darker, more
dissatisfied, and more sourly expressive of disappointment. She had
obviously not heard anything to her advantage; and it seemed to me, from
her prolonged fit of gloom and taciturnity, that she herself, notwithstanding
her professed indifference, attached undue importance to whatever
revelations had been made her.
Meantime, Mary Ingram, Amy and Louisa Eshton, declared they dared
not go alone; and yet they all wished to go. A negotiation was opened
through the medium of the ambassador, Sam; and after much pacing to and
fro, till, I think, the said Sam’s calves must have ached with the exercise,
permission was at last, with great difficulty, extorted from the rigorous
sibyl,ey for the three to wait upon her in a body.
Their visit was not so still as Miss Ingram’s had been: we heard hysterical
giggling and little shrieks proceeding from the library; and at the end of
about twenty minutes they burst the door open, and came running across the
hall, as if they were half scared out of their wits.
“I’m sure she is something not right!” they cried, one and all. “She told us
such things! She knows all about us!” and they sunk breathless into the
various seats the gentlemen hastened to bring them.
Pressed for further explanation, they declared she had told them of things
they had said and done when they were mere children; described books and
ornaments they had in their boudoirs at home; keepsakes that different
relations had presented to them. They affirmed that she had even divined
their thoughts, and had whispered in the ear of each the name of the person
she liked best in the world, and informed them of what they most wished
for.
Here the gentlemen interposed with earnest petitions to be further
enlightened on these two last-named points; but they got only blushes,
ejaculations, tremors, and titters, in return for their importunity. The
matrons, meantime, offered vinaigrettes and wielded fans; and again and
again reiterated the expression of their concern that their warning had not
been taken in time; and the elder gentlemen laughed, and the younger urged
their services on the agitated fair ones.
 In the midst of the tumult, and while my eyes and ears were fully engaged
in the scene before me, I heard a “hem” close at my elbow; I turned and saw
Sam.
“If you please, miss, the gypsy declares that there is another young single
lady in the room who has not been to her yet, and she swears she will not go
till she has seen all. I thought it must be you; there is no one else for it.
What shall I tell her?”
“Oh, I will go by all means,” I answered; and I was glad of the
unexpected opportunity to gratify my much-excited curiosity. I slipped out
of the room, unobserved by any eye, for the company were gathered in one
mass about the trembling trio just returned, and I closed the door quietly
behind me.
“If you like, miss,” said Sam, “I’ll wait in the hall for you; and if she
frightens you, just call and I’ll come in.”
“No, Sam, return to the kitchen—I am not in the least afraid.” Nor was I;
but I was a good deal interested and excited.

OceanofPDF.com
 Chapter XIX

The library looked tranquil enough as I entered it, and the sibyl—if sibyl
she were—was seated snugly enough in an easy-chair at the chimney-
corner. She had on a red cloak and a black bonnet, or, rather, a broad-
brimmed gypsy hat, tied down with a striped handkerchief under her chin.
An extinguished candle stood on the table; she was bending over the fire,
and seemed reading in a little black book, like a prayer-book, by the light of
the blaze; she muttered the words to herself, as most old women do, while
she read. She did not desist immediately on my entrance; it appeared she
wished to finish a paragraph.
I stood on the rug and warmed my hands, which were rather cold with
sitting at a distance from the drawing-room fire. I felt now as composed as
ever I did in my life; there was nothing, indeed, in the gypsy’s appearance
to trouble one’s calm. She shut her book and slowly looked up; her hat-brim
partially shaded her face, yet I could see, as she raised it, that it was a
strange one. It looked all brown and black; elf-locksez bristled out from
beneath a white band which passed under her chin, and came half over her
cheeks, or, rather, jaws; her eye confronted me at once with a bold and
direct gaze.
“Well, and you want your fortune told?” she said in a voice as decided as
her glance, as harsh as her features.
“I don’t care about it, mother; you may please yourself; but I ought to
warn you, I have no faith.”
“It’s like your impudence to say so; I expected it of you; I heard it in your
step as you crossed the threshold.”
“Did you? You’ve a quick ear.”
“I have—and a quick eye, and a quick brain.”
 “You need them all in your trade.”
“I do; especially when I’ve customers like you to deal with. Why don’t
you tremble?”
“I’m not cold.”
“Why don’t you turn pale?”
“I am not sick.”
“Why don’t you consult my art?”
“I’m not silly.”
The old crone “nichered”fa a laugh under her bonnet and bandage; she
then drew out a short black pipe, and, lighting it, began to smoke. Having
indulged a while in this sedative, she raised her bent body, took the pipe
from her lips, and while gazing steadily at the fire, said, very deliberately,
“You are cold; you are sick; and you are silly.”
“Prove it,” I rejoined.
“I will, in few words. 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 awaits you.”
She again put her short black pipe to her lips, and renewed her smoking
with vigor.
“You might say all that to almost any one who you knew lived as a
solitary dependent in a great house.”
“I might say it to almost any one; but would it be true of almost any one?”
“In my circumstances.”
“Yes; just so, in your circumstances; but find me another precisely placed
as you are.”
“It would be easy to find you thousands.”
“You could scarcely find me one. If you knew it, you are peculiarly
situated; very near happiness; yes; within reach of it. The materials are all
prepared; there only wants a movement to combine them. Chance laid them
somewhat apart; let them be once approached and bliss results.”
“I don’t understand enigmas, I never could guess a riddle in my life.”
“If you wish me to speak more plainly, show me your palm.”
“And I must cross it with silver, I suppose?”
“To be sure.”
I gave her a shilling; she put it into an old stocking-foot which she took
out of her pocket, and having tied it round and returned it, she told me to
hold out my hand. I did. She approached her face to the palm, and pored
over it without touching it.
“It is too fine,” said she. “I can make nothing of such a hand as that;
almost without lines; besides, what is in a palm? Destiny is not written
there.”
“I believe you,” said I.
“No,” she continued, “it is in the face; on the forehead, about the eyes, in
the eyes themselves, in the lines of the mouth. Kneel, and lift up your
head.”
“Ah! now you are coming to reality,” I said as I obeyed her. “I shall begin
to put some faith in you presently.”
I knelt within half a yard of her. She stirred the fire, so that a ripple of
light broke from the disturbed coal; the glare, however, as she sat only
threw her face into deeper shadow; mine, it illumined.
“I wonder with what feelings you came to me to-night,” she said, when
she had examined me a while. “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: just as little sympathetic
communion passing between you and them as if they were really mere
shadows of human forms and not the actual substance.”
“I feel tired often, sleepy sometimes; but seldom sad.”
“Then you have some secret hope 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 some day in a little house rented by myself.”
“A mean nutriment for the spirit to exist on: and sitting in that window-
seat (you see I know your habits)—”
“You have learned them from the servants.”
“Ah! You think yourself sharp. Well—perhaps I have: to speak truth, I
have an acquaintance with one of them—Mrs. Poole—”
I started to my feet when I heard the name.
“You have—have you?” thought I; “there is diableriefb in the business,
after all, then?”
“Don’t be alarmed,” continued the strange being; “she’s a safe hand, is
Mrs. Poole; close and quiet; any one may repose confidence in her. But, as I
was saying: sitting in that window-seat, do you think of nothing but your
future school? Have you no present interest in any of the company who
occupy the sofas and chairs before you? Is there not one face you study?
One figure whose movements you follow with, at least, curiosity?”
“I like to observe all the faces, and all the figures.”
“But do you never single one from the rest, or it may be, two?”
“I do frequently; when the gestures or looks of a pair seem telling a tale; it
amuses me to watch them.”
“What tale do you like best to hear?”
“Oh, I have not much choice! They generally run on the same theme—
courtship; and promise to end in the same catastrophe—marriage.”
“And do you like that monotonous theme?”
“Positively, I don’t care about it: it is nothing to me.”
“Nothing to you? When a lady, young and full of life and health,
charming with beauty and endowed with rank and fortune, sits and smiles in
the eyes of a gentleman you—”
“I what?”
“You know—and, perhaps, think well of.”
 “I don’t know the gentlemen here. I have scarcely interchanged a syllable
with one of them, I consider some respectable and stately, and middle-aged,
and others young, dashing, handsome,and lively; but certainly they are all at
liberty to be the recipients of whose smiles they please, without my feeling
disposed to consider the transaction of any moment to me.”
“You don’t know the gentlemen here? You have not exchanged a syllable
with one of them? Will you say that of the master of the house?”
“He is not at home.”
“A profound remark! A most ingenious quibble! He went to Millcote this
morning, and will be back here to-night, or to-morrow; does that
circumstance exclude him from the list of your acquaintance—blot him, as
it were, out of existence?”
“No; but I can scarcely see what Mr. Rochester has to do with the theme
you had introduced.”
“I was talking of ladies smiling in the eyes of gentlemen; and of late so
many smiles have been shed into Mr. Rochester’s eyes, that they overflow
like two cups filled above the brim; have you never remarked that?”
“Mr. Rochester has a right to enjoy the society of his guests.”
“No question about his right; but have you never observed that, of all the
tales told here about matrimony, Mr. Rochester has been favored with the
most lively and the most continuous?”
“The eagerness of a listener quickens the tongue of a narrator.” I said this
rather to myself than to the gypsy, whose strange talk, voice, manner, had
by this time wrapped me in a kind of dream. One unexpected sentence came
from her lips after another, till I got involved in a web of mystification; and
wondered what unseen spirit had been sitting for weeks by my heart,
watching its workings, and taking record of every pulse.
“Eagerness of a listener!” repeated she; “yes; Mr. Rochester has sat by the
hour, his ear inclined to the fascinating lips that took such delight in their
task of communicating; and Mr. Rochester was so willing to receive, and
looked so grateful for the pastime given him; you have noticed this?”
“Grateful! I cannot remember detecting gratitude in his face.”
 “Detecting! You have analyzed, then. And what did you detect, if not
gratitude?”
I said nothing.
“You have seen love; have you not?—and, looking forward, you have
seen him married, and beheld his bride happy?”
“Humph! Not exactly. Your witch’s skill is rather at fault sometimes.”
“What the devil have you seen, then?”
“Never mind; I came here to inquire, not to confess. Is it known that Mr.
Rochester is to be married?”
“Yes; and to the beautiful Miss Ingram.”
“Shortly?”
“Appearances would warrant that conclusion; and, no doubt (though, with
an audacity that wants chastising out of you, you seem to question it), they
will be a superlatively happy pair. He must love such a handsome, noble,
witty, accomplished lady; and probably she loves him; or, if not his person,
at least his purse. I know she considers the Rochester estate eligible to the
last degree; though (God pardon me!) I told her something on that point
about an hour ago, which made her look wondrous grave; the corners of her
mouth fell half an inch. I would advise her black a-visedfc suitor to look
out; if another comes, with a longer or clearer rent-roll, he’s dished.”
“But, mother, I did not come to hear Mr. Rochester’s fortune; I came to
hear my own, and you have told me nothing of it.”
“Your fortune is yet doubtful; when I examined your face, one trait
contradicted another. Chance has meted you a measure of happiness; that I
know. I knew it before I came here this evening. She has laid it carefully on
one side for you; I saw her do it; it depends on yourself to stretch out your
hand, and take it up; but whether you will do so, is the problem I study.
Kneel again on the rug.”
“Don’t keep me long—the fire scorches me.”
I knelt; she did not stoop toward me, but only gazed, leaning back in her
chair. She began muttering:
 “The flame flickers in the eye—the eye shines like dew; it looks soft and
full of feeling—it smiles at my jargon fd—it is susceptible; impression
follows impression through its clear sphere; when it ceases to smile, it is
sad—an unconscious lassitude weighs on the lid, that signifies melancholy
resulting from loneliness; it turns from me; it will not suffer further
scrutiny; it seems to deny, by a mocking glance, the truth of the discoveries
I have already made—to disown the charge both of sensibility and chagrin;
its pride and reserve only confirm me in my opinion. The eye is favorable.
“As to the mouth, it delights at times in laughter; it is disposed to impart
all that the brain conceives, though, I dare say, it would be silent on much
the heart experiences. Mobile and flexible, it was never intended to be
compressed in the eternal silence of solitude; it is a mouth which should
speak much and smile often, and have human affection for its interlocutor.
That feature, too, is propitious.
“I see no enemy to a fortunate issue but in the brow; and that brow
professes to say—‘I can live alone, if self-respect and circumstances require
me so to do. I need not sell my soul to buy bliss. I have an inward treasure,
born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be
withheld, or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.’ The forehead
declares, ‘Reason sits firm and holds the reins, and she will not let the
feelings burst away and hurry her to wild chasms. The passions may rage
furiously, like true heathens, as they are; and the desires may imagine all
sorts of vain things:53 but judgment shall still have the last word in every
argument, and the casting vote in every decision. Strong wind, earthquake-
shock, and fire may pass by: but I shall follow the guiding of that still small
voice which interprets the dictates of conscience.’54
“Well said, forehead; your declaration shall be respected. I have formed
my plans—right plans I deem them—and in them I have attended to the
claims of conscience, the counsels of reason. I know how soon youth would
fade, and bloom perish, if, in the cup of bliss offered, but one dreg of
shame, or one flavor of remorse, were detected; and I do not want sacrifice,
sorrow, dissolution—such is not my taste. I wish to foster, not to blight—to
earn gratitude, not to wring tears of blood—no, nor of brine; my harvest
must be in smiles, in endearments, in sweet—that will do. I think I rave in a
kind of exquisite delirium. I should wish now to protract this moment ad
infinitum; but I dare not. So far I have governed myself thoroughly. I have
acted as I inwardly swore I would act; but further might try me beyond my
strength. Rise, Miss Eyre, leave me; ‘the play is played out.’ ”55
Where was I? Did I wake or sleep? Had I been dreaming? Did I dream
still? The old woman’s voice had changed. Her accent, her gesture, and all,
were familiar to me as my own face in the glass—as the speech of my own
tongue. I got up, but did not go. I looked; I stirred the fire, and I looked
again; but she drew her bonnet and her bandage closer about her face, and
again beckoned me to depart. The flame illuminated her hand stretched out.
Roused now, and on the alert for discoveries, I at once noticed that hand; it
was no more the withered limb of eldfe than my own; it was a rounded,
supple member, with smooth fingers, symmetrically turned; a broad ring
flashed on the little finger, and, stooping forward, I looked at it, and saw a
gem I had seen a hundred times before. Again I looked at the face, which
was no longer turned from me; on the contrary, the bonnet was doffed, the
bandage displaced, the head advanced.
“Well, Jane, do you know me?” asked the familiar voice.
“Only take off the red cloak, sir, and then—”
“But the string is in a knot—help me.”
“Break it, sir.”
“There, then—‘Off, ye lendings!’ ”56 And Mr. Rochester stepped out of
his disguise.
“Now, sir, what a strange idea!”
“But well carried out, eh? Don’t you think so?”
“With the ladies you must have managed well.”
“But not with you.”
“You did not act the character of a gypsy with me.”
“What character did I act? My own?”
 “No; some unaccountable one. In short, I believe you have been trying to
draw me out—or in. You have been talking nonsense to make me talk
nonsense. It is scarcely fair, sir.”
“Do you forgive me, Jane?”
“I cannot tell till I have thought it all over. If, on reflection, I find I have
fallen into no great absurdity, I shall try to forgive you; but it was not right.”
“Oh, you have been very correct, very careful, very sensible!”
I reflected, and thought, on the whole, I had. It was a comfort; but, indeed,
I had been on my guard almost from the beginning of the interview.
Something of a masquerade I suspected. I knew gypsies and fortune-tellers
did not express themselves as this seeming old woman had expressed
herself; besides, I had noted her feigned voice—her anxiety to conceal her
features. But my mind had been running on Grace Poole—that living
enigma—that mystery of mysteries, as I considered her; I had never thought
of Mr. Rochester.57
“Well,” said he, “what are you musing about? What does that grave smile
signify?”
“Wonder and self-congratulation, sir. I have your permission to retire,
now, I suppose?”
“No; stay a moment, and tell me what the people in the drawing-room,
yonder, are doing.”
“Discussing the gypsy, I dare say.”
“Sit down, sit down! Let me hear what they said about me.”
“I had better not stay long, sir; it must be near eleven o‘clock. Oh! are you
aware, Mr. Rochester, that a stranger has arrived here since you left this
morning?”
“A stranger!—no; who can it be? I expected no one; is he gone?”
“No; he said he had known you long, and that he could take the liberty of
installing himself here till you returned.”
“The devil he did! Did he give his name?”
 “His name is Mason, sir; and he comes from the West Indies—from
Spanish Town, in Jamaica, I think.”
Mr. Rochester was standing near me; he had taken my hand, as if to lead
me to a chair. As I spoke, he gave my wrist a convulsive grasp; the smile on
his lips froze—apparently a spasm caught his breath.
“Mason!—the West Indies!” he said, in the tone one might fancy a
speaking automaton to enounce its single words; “Mason! the West Indies!”
he reiterated; and he went over the syllables three times, growing, in the
intervals of speaking, whiter than ashes: he hardly seemed to know what he
was doing.
“Do you feel ill, sir?” I inquired.
“Jane, I’ve got a blow; I’ve got a blow, Jane!” He staggered.
“Oh! lean on me, sir.”
“Jane, you offered me your shoulder once before; let me have it now.”
“Yes, sir, yes; and my arm.”
He sat down, and made me sit beside him. Holding my hand in both of his
own, he chafed it, gazing on me, at the same time, with the most troubled
and dreary look.
“My little friend!” said he, “I wish I were in a quiet island with only you,
and trouble, and danger, and hideous recollections removed from me.”
“Can I help you, sir? I’d give my life to serve you.”
“Jane, if aid is wanted, I’ll seek it at your hands—I promise you that.”
“Thank you, sir; tell me what to do—I’ll try, at least, to do it.”
“Fetch me now, Jane, a glass of wine from the dining-room—they will be
at supper there; and tell me if Mason is with them, and what he is doing.”
I went. I found all the party in the dining-room at supper, as Mr.
Rochester had said; they were not seated at table—the supper was arranged
on the sideboard; each had taken what he chose, and they stood about, here
and there, in groups, their plates and glasses in their hands. Every one
seemed in high glee; laughter and conversation were general and animated.
Mr. Mason stood near the fire, talking to Colonel and Mrs. Dent, and
appeared as merry as any of them. I filled a wine-glass (I saw Miss Ingram
watch me frowningly as I did so; she thought I was taking a liberty, I dare
say), and I returned to the library.
Mr. Rochester’s extreme pallor had disappeared, and he looked once more
firm and stern. He took the glass from my hand.
“Here is your health, ministrant spirit!” he said; he swallowed the
contents and returned it to me. “What are they doing, Jane?”
“Laughing and talking, sir.”
“They don’t look grave and mysterious, as if they had heard something
strange?”
“Not at all; they are full of jests and gayety.”
“And Mason?”
“He was laughing too.”
“If all these people came in a body and spit at me, what would you do,
Jane?”
“Turn them out of the room, sir, if I could.”
He half smiled. “But if I were to go to them, and they only looked at me
coldly, and whispered sneeringly among each other, and then dropped off
and left me, one by one, what then? Would you go with them?”
“I rather think not, sir; I should have more pleasure in staying with you.”
“To comfort me?”
“Yes, sir, to comfort you, as well as I could.”
“And if they laid you under a ban for adhering to me?”
“I probably should know nothing about their ban; and if I did, I should
care nothing about it.”
“Then, you could dare censure for my sake?”
“I could dare it for the sake of any friend who deserved my adherence, as
you, I am sure, do.”
“Go back now into the room; step quietly up to Mason, and whisper in his
ear that Mr. Rochester is come, and wishes to see him; show him in here,
and then leave me.”
“Yes, sir.”
I did his behest. The company all stared at me as I passed straight among
them. I sought Mr. Mason, delivered the message, and preceded him from
the room; I ushered him into the library, and then I went up stairs.
At a late hour, after I had been in bed some time, I heard the visitors
repair to their chambers; I distinguished Mr. Rochester’s voice, and heard
him say, “This way, Mason; this is your room.”
He spoke cheerfully; the gay tones set my heart at ease. I was soon asleep.

OceanofPDF.com
 Chapter XX

I had forgotten to draw my curtain,ff which I usually did, and also to let
down my window-blind. The consequence was, that when the moon, which
was full and bright (for the night was fine), came in her course to that space
in the sky opposite my casement, and looked in at me through the unveiled
panes, her glorious gaze roused me. Awaking in the dead of night, I opened
my eyes on her disk-silver-white and crystal-clear. It was beautiful, but too
solemn; I half rose, and stretched my arm to draw the curtain.
Good God! What a cry!
The night—its silence—its rest, was rent in twain by a savage, a sharp, a
shrilly sound, that ran from end to end of Thornfield Hall.
My pulse stopped—my heart stood still—my stretched arm was
paralyzed. The cry died, and was not renewed. Indeed, whatever being
uttered that fearful shriek could not soon repeat it; not the widest-winged
condor on the Andes could, twice in succession, send out such a yell from
the cloud shrouding his evry. The thing delivering such utterance must rest
ere it could repeat the effort.
It came out of the third story; for it passed overhead. And overhead—yes,
in the room just above my chamber-ceiling—I now heard a struggle; a
deadly one it seemed from the noise; and a half-smothered voice shouted—
“Help! help! help!” three times, rapidly.
“Will no one come?” it cried; and then, while the staggering and stamping
went on wildly, I distinguished, through plank and plaster—
“Rochester! Rochester! For God’s sake, come!”
A chamber-door opened; some one ran, or rushed, along the gallery.
Another step stamped on the flooring above, and something fell; and there
was silence.
 I had put on some clothes, though horror shook all my limbs; I issued
from my apartment. The sleepers were all aroused; ejaculations, terrified
murmurs, sounded in every room; door after door unclosed; one looked out
and another looked out; the gallery filled. Gentlemen and ladies alike had
quitted their beds; and “Oh! What is it?”—“Who is hurt?”—“What has
happened?”—“Fetch a light!”—“Is it fire?”—“Are there
robbers?”—“Where shall we run?” was demanded confusedly on all hands.
But for the moonlight they would have been in complete darkness. They ran
to and fro; they crowded together; some sobbed, some stumbled; the
confusion was inextricable.
“Where the devil is Rochester?” cried Colonel Dent. “I cannot find him in
his bed.”
“Here! here!” was shouted in return. “Be composed, all of you; I’m
coming.”
And the door at the end of the gallery opened, and Mr. Rochester
advanced with a candle; he had just descended from the upper story. One of
the ladies ran to him directly; she seized his arm; it was Miss Ingram.
“What awful event has taken place?” said she. “Speak! let us know the
worst at once!”
“But don’t pull me down or strangle me,” he replied; for the Misses
Eshton were clinging about him now; and the two dowagers, in vast white
wrappers, were bearing down on him like ships in full sail.
“All’s right!—all’s right!” he cried. “It’s a mere rehearsal of much ado
about nothing. Ladies, keep off, or I shall wax dangerous.”
And dangerous he looked; his black eyes darted sparks. Calming himself
by an effort, he added—
“A servant has had the nightmare; that is all. She’s an excitable, nervous
person; she construed her dream into an apparition, or something of that
sort, no doubt; and has taken a fit with fright. Now, then, I must see you all
back into your rooms; for, till the house is settled, she cannot be looked
after. Gentlemen, have the goodness to set the ladies the example. Miss
Ingram, I am sure you will not fail in evincing superiority to idle terrors.
Amy and Louisa, return to your nests like a pair of doves, as you are.
Mesdames (to the dowagers), you will take cold, to a dead certainty, if you
stay in this chill gallery any longer.”
And so, by dint of alternate coaxing and commanding, he contrived to get
them all once more inclosed in their separate dormitories. I did not wait to
be ordered back to mine, but retreated unnoticed, as unnoticed I had left it.
Not, however, to go to bed; on the contrary, I began and dressed myself
carefully. The sounds I had heard after the scream, and the words that had
been uttered, had probably been heard only by me; for they had proceeded
from the room above mine; but they assured me that it was not a servant’s
dream which had thus struck horror through the house; and that the
explanation Mr. Rochester had given was merely an invention framed to
pacify his guests. I dressed, then, to be ready for emergencies. When
dressed, I sat a long time by the window, looking out over the silent
grounds and silvered fields, and waiting for I know not what. It seemed to
me that some event must follow the strange cry, struggle, and call.
No; stillness returned; each murmur and movement ceased gradually, and,
in about an hour, Thornfield Hall was again as hushed as a desert. It seemed
that sleep and night had resumed their empire. Meantime the moon
declined; she was about to set. Not liking to sit in the cold and darkness, I
thought I would lie down on my bed, dressed as I was. I left the window,
and moved with little noise across the carpet; as I stooped to take off my
shoes, a cautious hand tapped low at the door.
“Am I wanted?” I asked.
“Are you up?” asked the voice I expected to hear, namely, my master’s.
“Yes, sir.”
“And dressed?”
“Yes.”
“Come out, then, quietly.”
I obeyed. Mr. Rochester stood in the gallery, holding a light.
“I want you,” he said; “come this way; take your time, and make no
noise.”
 My slippers were thin; I could walk the matted floor as softly as a cat. He
glided up the gallery and up the stairs, and stopped in the dark, low corridor
of the fateful third story; I had followed, and stood at his side.
“Have you a sponge in your room?” he asked in a whisper.
“Yes, sir.”
“Have you any salts—volatile salts?”
“Yes.”
“Go back and fetch both.”
I returned, sought the sponge on the washstand, the salts in my drawer,
and once more retraced my steps. He still waited; he held the key in his
hand; approaching one of the small black doors, he put it in the lock; he
paused and addressed me again.
“You don’t turn sick at the sight of blood?”
“I think I shall not; I have never been tried yet.”
I felt a thrill while I answered him; but no coldness, and no faintness.
“Just give me your hand,” he said; “it will not do to risk a fainting fit.”
I put my fingers into his. “Warm and steady,” was his remark; he turned
the key and opened the door.
I saw a room I remembered to have seen before, the day Mrs. Fairfax
showed me over the house; it was hung with tapestry; but the tapestry was
now looped up in one part, and there was a door apparent, which had then
been concealed. This door was open; a light shone out of the room within; I
heard thence a snarling, snatching sound, almost like a dog quarreling. Mr.
Rochester, putting down his candle, said to me, “Wait a minute,” and he
went forward to the inner apartment. A shout of laughter greeted his
entrance, noisy at first, and terminating in Grace Poole’s own goblin ha! ha!
She, then, was there. He made some sort of arrangement, without speaking;
though I heard a low voice address him, he came out and closed the door
behind him.
“Here, Jane!” he said; and I walked round to the other side of a large bed,
which, with its drawn curtains, concealed a considerable portion of the
chamber. An easy-chair was near the bed-head; a man sat in it, dressed, with
the exception of his coat; he was still; his head leaned back; his eyes were
closed. Mr. Rochester held the candle over him; I recognized in his pale and
seemingly lifeless face—the stranger, Mason; I saw, too, that his linen on
one side, and one arm, was almost soaked in blood.
“Hold the candle,” said Mr. Rochester, and I took it; he fetched a basin of
water from the washstand; “hold that,” said he. I obeyed. He took the
sponge, dipped it in and moistened the corpse-like face; he asked for my
smelling-bottle, and applied it to the nostrils. Mr. Mason shortly unclosed
his eyes; he groaned. Mr. Rochester opened the shirt of the wounded man,
whose arm and shoulder were bandaged; he sponged away blood, trickling
fast down.
“Is there immediate danger?” murmured Mr. Mason.
“Pooh! No—a mere scratch. Don’t be so overcome, man; bear up! I’ll
fetch a surgeon for you now, myself—you’ll be able to be removed by
morning, I hope. Jane—” he continued.
“Sir?”
“I shall have to leave you in this room with this gentleman for an hour, or,
perhaps, two hours; you will sponge the blood as I do when it returns; if he
feels faint, you will put the glass of water on that stand to his lips, and your
salts to his nose. You will not speak to him on any pretext—and, Richard, it
will be at the peril of your life you speak to her; open your lips—agitate
yourself—and I’ll not answer for the consequences.”
Again the poor man groaned; he looked as if he dared not move—fear,
either of death or of something else, appeared almost to paralyze him. Mr.
Rochester put the now bloody sponge into my hand, and I proceeded to use
it as he had done. He watched me a second, then saying, “Remember!—no
conversation,” he left the room. I experienced a strange feeling as the key
grated in the lock, and the sound of his retreating step ceased to be heard.
Here then I was in the third story, fastened into one of its mysticfg cells—
night around me—a pale and bloody spectacle under my eyes and hands—a
murderess hardly separated from me by a single door; yes—that was
appalling—the rest I could bear; but I shuddered at the thought of Grace
Poole bursting out upon me.
I must keep to my post, however. I must watch this ghastly countenance—
these blue, still lips, forbidden to unclose—these eyes, now shut, now
opening, now wandering through the room, now fixing on me, and ever
glazed with the dulness of horror. I must dip my hand again and again in the
basin of blood and water, and wipe away the trickling gore. I must see the
light of the unsnuffed candle wane on my employment; the shadows darken
on the wrought, antique tapestry round me, and grow black under the
hangings of the vast old bed, and quiver strangely over the doors of a great
cabinet opposite—whose front, divided into twelve panels, bore, in grim
design the heads of the twelve apostles, each inclosed in its separate panel
as in a frame; while above them at the top rose an ebon crucifix and a dying
Christ.
According as the shifting obscurity and flickering gleam hovered here or
glanced there, it was now the bearded physician, Luke, that bent his brow;
now St. John’s long hair that waved; and anon the devilish face of Judas,
that grew out of the panel and seemed gathering life and threatening a
revelation of the arch-traitor—of Satan himself—in his subordinate form.
Amid all this, I had to listen as well as watch—to listen for the
movements of the wild beast or the fiend in yonder side den. But since Mr.
Rochester’s visit, it seemed spellbound; all the night I heard but three
sounds, at three long intervals—a step, creak, a momentary renewal of the
snarling, canine noise, and a deep human groan.
Then my own thoughts worried me. What crime was this, that lived
incarnate in this sequestered mansion, and could neither be expelled nor
subdued by the owner? What mystery, that broke out, now in the fire and
now in blood, at the deadest hours of night? What creature was it, that,
masked in an ordinary woman’s face and shape, uttered the voice, now of a
mocking demon, and anon of a carrion-seeking bird of prey?
And this man I bent over—this common-place, quiet stranger—how had
he become involved in the web of horror? and why had the Fury flown at
him? What made him seek this quarter of the house at an untimely season,
when he should have been asleep in bed? I had heard Mr. Rochester assign
him an apartment below—what brought him here? And why, now, was he
so tame under the violence or treachery done him? Why did he so quietly
submit to the concealment Mr. Rochester enforced? Why did Mr. Rochester
enforce this concealment? His guest had been outraged, his own life on a
former occasion had been hideously plotted against; and both attempts he
smothered in secresy and sunk in oblivion! Lastly, I saw Mr. Mason was
submissive to Mr. Rochester; that the impetuous will of the latter held
complete sway over the inertness of the former; the few words which had
passed between them assured me of this. It was evident that, in their former
intercourse, the passive disposition of the one had been habitually
influenced by the active energy of the other; whence, then, had arisen Mr.
Rochester’s dismay when he heard of Mr. Mason’s arrival? Why had the
mere name of this unresisting individual—whom his word now sufficed to
control like a child—fallen on him, a few hours since, as a thunderbolt
might fall on an oak?
Oh! I could not forget his look and his paleness when he whispered,
“Jane, I have got a blow—I have got a blow, Jane.” I could not forget how
the arm had trembled which he rested on my shoulder; and it was no light
matter which could thus bow the resolute spirit and thrill the vigorous frame
of Fairfax Rochester.
“When will he come? When will he come?” I cried inwardly, as the night
lingered and lingered—as my bleeding patient drooped, moaned, sickened;
and neither day nor aid arrived. I had, again and again, held the water to
Mason’s white lips; again and again offered him the stimulating salts; my
efforts seemed ineffectual; either bodily or mental suffering, or loss of
blood, or all three combined, were fast prostrating his strength. He moaned
so, and looked so weak, wild, and lost, I feared he was dying; and I might
not even speak to him!
The candle, wasted at last, went out; as it expired, I perceived streaks of
gray light edging the window-curtains; dawn was then approaching.
Presently I heard Pilot bark far below, out of his distant kennel in the court-
yard; hope revived. Nor was it unwarranted; in five minutes more the
grating key, the yielding lock, warned me my watch was relieved. It could
not have lasted more than two hours; many a week has seemed shorter.
 Mr. Rochester entered, and with him the surgeon he had been to fetch.
“Now, Carter, be on the alert,” he said to this last; “I give you but half an
hour for dressing the wound, fastening the bandages, getting the patient
down stairs and all.”
“But is he fit to move, sir?”
“No doubt of it; it is nothing serious; he is nervous, his spirits must be
kept up. Come, set to work.”
Mr. Rochester drew back the thick curtain, drew up the Holland-blind, let
in all the daylight he could; and I was surprised and cheered to see how far
dawn was advanced; what rosy streaks were beginning to brighten the east.
Then he approached Mason, whom the surgeon was already handling.
“Now, my good fellow, how are you?” he asked.
“She’s done for me, I fear,” was the faint reply.
“Not a whit!—courage! This day fortnight you’ll hardly be a pin the
worse of it; you’ve lost a little blood, that’s all. Carter, assure him there’s no
danger.”
“I can do that conscientiously,” said Carter, who had now undone the
bandages; “only I wish I could have got here sooner; he would not have
bled so much—but how is this? The flesh on the shoulder is torn as well as
cut! This wound was not done with a knife; there have been teeth here!”
“She bit me,” he murmured. “She worried me like a tigress, when
Rochester got the knife from her.”
“You should not have yielded; you should have grappled with her at
once,” said Mr. Rochester.
“But, under such circumstances, what could one do?” returned Mason.
“Oh, it was frightful!” he added, shuddering. “And I did not expect it; she
looked so quiet at first.”
“I warned you,” was his friend’s answer; “I said—be on your guard when
you go near her. Besides, you might have waited till to-morrow and had me
with you; it was mere folly to attempt the interview to-night, and alone.”
“I thought I could have done some good.”
 “You thought! you thought! Yes, it makes me impatient to hear you; but,
however, you have suffered, and are likely to suffer enough for not taking
my advice; so I’ll say no more. Carter—hurry! hurry! The sun will soon
rise, and I must have him off.”
“Directly, sir; the shoulder is just bandaged. I must look to this other
wound in the arm; she has had her teeth here, too, I think.”
“She has sucked the blood; she said she’d drain my heart,” said Mason.
I saw Mr. Rochester shudder. A singularly marked expression of disgust,
horror, hatred, warped his countenance almost to distortion; but he only said
—
“Come, be silent, Richard; and never mind her gibberish; don’t repeat it.”
“I wish I could forget it,” was the answer.
“You will when you are out of the country. When you get back to Spanish
Town you may think of her as dead and buried—or rather, you need not
think of her at all.”
“Impossible to forget this night!”
“It is not impossible. Have some energy, man. You thought you were as
dead as a herring two hours since, and you are all alive and talking now.
There!—Carter has done with you, or nearly so. I’ll make you decent in a
trice. Jane (he turned to me for the first time since his reëntrance), take this
key; go down into my dressing-room; open the top drawer of the wardrobe
and take out a clean shirt and neck-handkerchief; bring them here; and be
nimble.”
I went; sought the repository he had mentioned, found the articles named,
and returned with them.
“Now,” said he, “go to the other side of the bed while I order his toilet;
but don’t leave the room; you may be wanted again.”
I retired as directed.
“Was anybody stirring below when you went down, Jane?” inquired Mr.
Rochester, presently.
“No, sir; all was very still.”
 “We shall get you off cannily, Dick; and it will be better both for your
sake, and for that of the poor creature in yonder. I have striven long to avoid
exposure, and I should not like it to come at last. Here, Carter, help him on
with his waistcoat. Where did you leave your furred cloak? You can’t travel
a mile without that, I know, in this d—d cold climate. In your room? Jane,
run down to Mr. Mason’s room, the one next mine, and fetch a cloak you
will see there.”
Again I ran, and again returned, bearing an immense mantle, lined and
edged with fur.
“Now I’ve another errand for you,” said my untiring master; “you must
away to my room again. What a mercy you are shod with velvet, Jane!—a
clod-hopping messenger would never do at this juncture. You must open the
middle drawer of my toilet-table and take out a little phial and a little glass
you will find there—quick!”
I flew thither and back, bringing the desired vessels.
“That’s well! Now, doctor, I shall take the liberty of administering a dose
myself; on my own responsibility. I got this cordial at Rome, of an Italian
charlatan—a fellow you would have kicked, Carter. It is not a thing to be
used indiscriminately, but it is good upon occasion, as now, for instance.
Jane, a little water.”
He held out the tiny glass, and I half filled it from the water-bottle on the
wash-stand.
“That will do; now wet the lip of the phial.”
I did so; he measured twelve drops of a crimson liquid, and presented it to
Mason.
“Drink, Richard; it will give you the heart you lack, for an hour or so.
“But will it hurt me? is it inflammatory?”
“Drink! drink! drink!”
Mr. Mason obeyed, because it was evidently useless to resist. He was
dressed now; he still looked pale, but he was no longer gory and sullied. Mr.
Rochester let him sit three minutes after he had swallowed the liquid; he
then took his arm.
 “Now I am sure you can get on your feet,” he said; “try.”
The patient rose.
“Carter, take him under the other shoulder. Be of good cheer, Richard;
step out; that’s it!”
“I do feel better,” remarked Mr. Mason.
“I am sure you do. Now, Jane, trip on before us away to the back stairs;
unbolt the side-passage door, and tell the driver of the post-chaise you will
see in the yard—or just outside, for I told him not to drive his rattling
wheels over the pavement—to be ready; we are coming; and, Jane, if any
one is about, come to the foot of the stairs and hem.”
It was by this time half-past five, and the sun was on the point of rising;
but I found the kitchen still dark and silent. The side-passage door was
fastened; I opened it with as little noise as possible; all the yard was quiet;
but the gates stood wide open, and there was a post-chaise, with horses
ready harnessed, and driver seated on the box, stationed outside. I
approached him, and said the gentlemen were coming; he nodded; then I
looked carefully round and listened. The stillness of early morning
slumbered everywhere; the curtains were yet drawn over the servants’
chamber-windows; little birds were just twittering in the blossom-blanched
orchard trees, whose boughs drooped like white garlands over the wall
inclosing one side of the yard; the carriage-horses stamped from time to
time in their closed stables: all else was still.
The gentlemen now appeared. Mason, supported by Mr. Rochester and
the surgeon, seemed to walk with tolerable ease; they assisted him into the
chaise; Carter followed.
“Take care of him,” said Mr. Rochester to the latter, “and keep him at
your house till he is quite well. I shall ride over in a day or two to see how
he gets on. Richard, how is it with you?”
“The fresh air revives me, Fairfax.”
“Leave the window open on his side, Carter; there is no wind—good-by,
Dick.”
“Fairfax—”
 “Well, what is it?”
“Let her be taken care of; let her be treated as tenderly as may be; let her
—” He stopped and burst into tears.
“I do my best; and have done it, and will do it,” was the answer. He shut
up the chaise door, and the vehicle drove away.
“Yet would to God there was an end of all this!” added Mr. Rochester, as
he closed and barred the heavy yard-gates. This done, he moved with slow
step and abstracted air toward a door in the wall bordering the orchard. I,
supposing he had done with me, prepared to return to the house; again,
however, I heard him call “Jane!” He had opened the portal, and stood at it,
waiting for me.
“Come where there is some freshness, for a few moments,” he said; “that
house is a mere dungeon; don’t you feel it so?”
“It seems to me a splendid mansion, sir.”
“The glamourfh of inexperience is over your eyes,” he answered; “and
you see it through a charmed medium; you cannot discern that the gilding is
slime and the silk draperies cobwebs; that the marble is sordid slate, and the
polished woods mere refuse chips and scaly bark. Now here (he pointed to
the leafy inclosure we had entered) all is real, sweet, and pure.”
He strayed down a walk edged with box; with apple-trees, pear-trees, and
cherry-trees on one side, and a border on the other, full of all sorts of old-
fashioned flowers, stocks, sweet-williams, primroses, pansies, mingled with
southern-wood, sweet-brier, and various fragrant herbs. They were fresh
now as a succession of April showers and gleams, followed by a lovely
spring morning, could make them; the sun was just entering the dappled
east, and his light illumined the wreathed and dewy orchard trees and shone
down the quiet walks under them.
“Jane, will you have a flower?”
He gathered a half-blown rose, the first on the bush, and offered it to me.
“Thank you, sir.”
“Do you like the sunrise, Jane? That sky with its high and light clouds,
which are sure to melt away as the day waxes warm—this placid and balmy
atmosphere?”
“I do, very much.”
“You have passed a strange night, Jane.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And it has made you look pale—were you afraid when I left you alone
with Mason?”
“I was afraid of some one coming out of the inner room.”
“But I had fastened the door—I had the key in my pocket; I should have
been a careless shepherd if I had left a lamb—my pet lamb, so near a wolf’s
den, unguarded; you were safe.”
“Will Grace Poole live here still, sir?”
“Oh, yes! don’t trouble your head about her—put the thing out of your
thoughts.”
“Yet it seems to me your life is hardly secure while she stays.”
“Never fear—I will take care of myself.”
“Is the danger you apprehended last night gone by now, sir?”
“I cannot vouch for that till Mason is out of England; nor even then. To
live, for me, Jane, is to stand on a crater-crust which may crack and spue
fire any day.”
“But Mr. Mason seems a man easily led. Your influence, sir, is evidently
potent with him; he will never set you at defiance, or wilfully injure you.”
“Oh, no! Mason will not defy me; nor, knowing it, will he hurt me—but,
unintentionally, he might in a moment, by one careless word, deprive me, if
not of life, yet forever of happiness.”
“Tell him to be cautious, sir; let him know what you fear, and show him
how to avert the danger.”
He laughed sardonically, hastily took my hand, and as hastily threw it
from him.
“If I could do that, simpleton, where would the danger be? Annihilated in
a moment. Ever since I have known Mason, I have only had to say to him
‘Do that,’ and the thing has been done. But I cannot give him orders in this
case: I cannot say ‘Beware of harming me, Richard’; for it is imperative
that I should keep him ignorant that harm to me is possible. Now you look
puzzled; and I will puzzle you further. You are my little friend, are you
not?”
“I like to serve you, sir, and to obey you in all that is right.”
“Precisely; I see you do. I see genuine contentment in your gait and mien,
your eye and face, when you are helping me and pleasing me—working for
me, and with me, in as you characteristically say, ‘all that is right’; for if I
bid you do what you thought wrong, there would no light-footed running,
no neat-handed alacrity, no lively glance and animated complexion. My
friend would then turn to me, quiet and pale, and would say, ‘No, sir; that is
impossible; I cannot do it, because it is wrong,’ and would become
immutable as a fixed star. Well, you, too, have power over me, and may
injure me: yet I dare not show you where I am vulnerable, lest, faithful and
friendly as you are, you should transfix me at once.”
“If you have no more to fear from Mr. Mason than you have from me, sir,
you are very safe.”
“God grant it may be so! Here, Jane, is an arbor; sit down.”
The arbor was an arch in the wall, lined with ivy; it contained a rustic
seat. Mr. Rochester took it, leaving room, however, for me; but I stood
before him.
“Sit,” he said; “the bench is long enough for two. You don’t hesitate to
take a place at my side, do you? Is that wrong?”
I answered him by assuming it; to refuse would, I felt, have been unwise.
“Now, my little friend, while the sun drinks the dew—while all the
flowers in this old garden awake and expand, and the birds fetch their
young ones’ breakfast out of the thorn-field, and the early bees do their first
spell of work—I’ll put a case to you, which you must endeavor to suppose
your own: but first, look at me, and tell me you are at ease, and not fearing
that I err in detaining you, or that you err in staying.”
“No, sir; I am content.”
 “Well, then, Jane, call to aid your fancy:—suppose you were no longer a
girl well-reared and disciplined, but a wild boy, indulged from childhood
upward; imagine yourself in a remote foreign land; conceive that you there
commit a capital error, no matter of what nature or from what motives, but
one whose consequences must follow you through life and taint all your
existence. Mind, I don’t say a crime, I am not speaking of shedding of
blood or any other guilty act, which might make the perpetrator amenable to
the law; my word is error. The results of what you have done become in
time to you utterly insupportable; you take measures to obtain relief;
unusual measures, but neither unlawful nor culpable. Still you are
miserable; for hope has quitted you on the very confines of life; your sun at
noon darkens in the eclipse, which you feel will not leave it till the time of
setting.58 Bitter and base associations have become the sole food of your
memory; you wander here and there, seeking rest in exile; happiness in
pleasure—I mean in heartless, sensual pleasure—such as dulls intellect and
blights feeling. Heart-weary and soul-withered, you come home after years
of voluntary banishment; you make a new acquaintance—how, or where, no
matter; you find in this stranger much of the good and bright qualities
which you have sought for twenty years, and never before encountered; and
they are all fresh, healthy, without soil and without taint. Such society
revives, regenerates; you feel better days come back—higher wishes, purer
feelings; you desire to recommence your life, and to spend what remains to
you of days in a way more worthy of an immortal being. To attain this end,
are you justified in overleaping an obstacle of custom—a mere
conventional impediment, which neither your conscience sanctifies nor
your judgment approves?”
He paused for an answer; and what was I to say? Oh for some good spirit
to suggest a judicious and satisfactory response! Vain aspiration! The west
wind whispered in the ivy round me; but no gentle Arielfi borrowed its
breath as a medium of speech: the birds sang in the tree-tops; but their song,
however sweet, was inarticulate.
Again Mr. Rochester propounded his query:
“Is the wandering and sinful, but now rest-seeking and repentant man,
justified in daring the world’s opinion, in order to attach to him forever, this
gentle, gracious, genial stranger; thereby securing his own peace of mind
and regeneration of life?”
“Sir,” I answered, “a wanderer’s repose or a sinner’s reformation should
never depend on a fellow-creature. Men and women die; philosophers falter
in wisdom, and Christians in goodness; if any one you know has suffered
and erred, let him look higher than his equals for strength to amend, and
solace to heal.”
“But the instrument—the instrument! God, who does the work, ordains
the instrument. I have myself—I tell it you without parable—been a
worldly, dissipated, restless man; and I believe I have found the instrument
for my cure, in—”
He paused; the birds went on carolling, the leaves lightly rustling. I
almost wondered they did not check their songs and whispersto catch the
suspended revelation; but they would have had to wait many minutes—so
long was the silence protracted. At last I looked up at the tardy speaker; he
was looking eagerly at me.
“Little friend,” said he, in quite a changed tone—while his face changed
too, losing all its softness and gravity, and becoming harsh and sarcastic
—“you have noticed my tender penchant for Miss Ingram; don’t you think
if I married her she would regenerate me with a vengeance?”
He got up instantly, went quite to the other end of the walk, and when he
came back he was humming a tune.
“Jane, Jane,” said he, stopping before me, “you are quite pale with your
vigils; don’t you curse me for disturbing your rest?”
“Curse you? No, sir.”
“Shake hands in confirmation of the word. What cold fingers! They were
warmer last night when I touched them at the door of the mysterious
chamber. Jane, when will you watch with me again?”
“Whenever I can be useful, sir.”
“For instance, the night before I am married? I am sure I shall not be able
to sleep. Will you promise to sit up with me to bear me company? To you I
can talk of my lovely one; for now you have seen her and know her.”
 “Yes, sir.”
“She’s a rare one, is she not, Jane?”
“Yes, sir.”
“A strapper—a real strapper, Jane; big, brown and buxom; with hair just
such as the ladies of Carthage must have had. Bless me! There’s Dent and
Lynn in the stables! Go in by the shrubbery, through that wicket.”fj
As I went one way, he went another, and I heard him in the yard, saying,
cheeringly,
“Mason got the start of you all this morning; he was gone before sunrise
—I rose at four to see him off.”

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 Chapter XXI

Presentiments are strange things! and so are sympathies, and so are signs;
and the three combined make one mystery to which humanity has not yet
found the key. I never laughed at presentiments in my life, because I have
had strange ones of my own. Sympathies, I believe, exist (for instance,
between far-distant, long-absent, wholly estranged relatives; asserting,
notwithstanding their alienation, the unity of the source to which each
traces his origin), whose workings baffle mortal comprehension. And signs,
for aught we know, may be but the sympathies of nature with man.
When I was a little girl, only six years old, I one night heard Bessie
Leaven say to Martha Abbot that she had been dreaming about a little child;
and that to dream of children was a sure sign of trouble, either to one’s self
or one’s kin. The saying might have worn out of my memory, had not a
circumstance immediately followed which served indelibly to fix it there.
The next day Bessie was sent for home to the death-bed of her little sister.
Of late I had often recalled this saying and this incident; for during the
past week scarcely a night had gone over my couch that had not brought
with it a dream of an infant, which I sometimes hushed in my arms,
sometimes dandled on my knee, sometimes watched playing with daisies on
a lawn; or, again, dabbling its hands in running water. It was a wailing child
this night, and a laughing one the next—now it nestled close to me, and
now it ran from me; but whatever mood the apparition evinced, whatever
aspect it wore, it failed not for seven successive nights to meet me the
moment I entered the land of slumber.
I did not like this iteration of one idea—this strange recurrence of one
image; and I grew nervous as bed-time approached, and the hour of the
vision drew near. It was from companionship with this baby-phantom I had
been roused on that moonlight night when I heard the cry; and it was on the
afternoon of the day following I was summoned down stairs by a message
that some one wanted me in Mrs. Fairfax’s room. On repairing thither, I
found a man waiting for me, having the appearance of a gentleman’s
servant. He was dressed in deep mourning, and the hat he held in his hand
was surrounded with a crape band.
“I dare say you hardly remember me, miss,” he said, rising as I entered;
“but my name is Leaven. I lived coachman with Mrs. Reed when you were
at Gateshead, eight or nine years since, and I live there still.”
“Oh, Robert! how do you do? I remember you very well; you used to give
me a ride sometimes on Miss Georgiana’s bay pony. And how is Bessie?
You are married to Bessie?”
“Yes, miss—my wife is very hearty, thank you. She brought me another
little one about two months since—we have three now—and both mother
and child are thriving.”
“And are the family well at the house, Robert?”
“I am sorry I can’t give you better news of them, miss; they are very
badly at present—in great trouble.”
“I hope no one is dead,” I said, glancing at his black dress. He, too,
looked down at the crape round his hat, and replied,
“Mr. John died yesterday was a week, at his chambers, in London.”
“Mr. John?”
“Yes.”
“And how does his mother bear it?”
“Why, you see, Miss Eyre, it is not a common mishap. His life has been
very wild; these last three years he gave himself up to strange ways, and his
death was shocking.”
“I heard from Bessie he was not doing well.”
“Doing well! He could not do worse. He ruined his health and his estate
among the worst men and the worst women. He got into debt and into jail;
his mother helped him out twice, but as soon as he was free he returned to
his old companions and habits. His head was not strong; the knaves he lived
among fooled him beyond anything I ever heard. He came down to
Gateshead about three weeks ago, and wanted missis to give up all to him.
Missis refused; her means have long been much reduced by his
extravagance; so he went back again, and the next news was that he was
dead. How he died, God knows! they say he killed himself.”
I was silent—the tidings were frightful. Robert Leaven resumed:
“Missis had been out of health herself for some time; she had got very
stout, but was not strong with it; and the loss of money and fear of poverty
were quite breaking her down. The information about Mr. John’s death and
the manner of it came too suddenly—it brought on a stroke. She was three
days without speaking; but last Tuesday she seemed rather better; she
appeared as if she wanted to say something, and kept making signs to my
wife and mumbling. It was only yesterday morning, however, that Bessie
understood she was pronouncing your name; and at last she made out the
words, ‘Bring Jane—fetch Jane Eyre; I want to speak to her.’ Bessie is not
sure whether she is in her right mind, or means anything by the words; but
she told Miss Reed and Miss Georgiana, and advised them to send for you.
The young ladies put it off at first; but their mother grew so restless, and
said, ‘Jane, Jane,’ so many times, that, at last, they consented. I left
Gateshead yesterday; and if you can get ready, miss, I should like to take
you back with me early to-morrow morning.”
“Yes, Robert, I shall be ready; it seems to me that I ought to go.”
“I think so, too, miss. Bessie said she was sure you would not refuse; but I
suppose you will have to ask leave before you can get off?”
“Yes, and I will do it now”; and, having directed him to the servants’ hall,
and recommended him to the care of John’s wife, and the attentions of John
himself, I went in search of Mr. Rochester.
He was not in any of the lower rooms; he was not in the yard, the stables,
or the grounds. I asked Mrs. Fairfax if she had seen him—yes; she believed
he was playing billiards with Miss Ingram. To the billiard-room I hastened.
The click of balls and the hum of voices resounded thence. Mr. Rochester,
Miss Ingram, the two Misses Eshton and their admirers, were all busied in
the game. It required some courage to disturb so interesting a party. My
errand, however, was one I could not defer; so I approached the master
where he stood at Miss Ingram’s side. She turned as I drew near, and looked
at me haughtily. Her eyes seemed to demand, “What can the creeping
creature want now?” and when I said, in a low voice, “Mr. Rochester,” she
made a movement as if tempted to order me away. I remember her
appearance at the moment—it was very graceful and very striking. She
wore a morning robe of sky-blue crape; a gauzy azure scarf was twisted in
her hair. She had been all animation with the game, and irritated pride did
not lower the expression of her haughty lineaments.
“Does that person want you?” she inquired of Mr. Rochester; and Mr.
Rochester turned to see who the “person” was. He made a curious grimace
—one of his strange and equivocal demonstrations—threw down his cue
and followed me from the room.
“Well, Jane?” he said, as he rested his back against the school room door,
which he had shut.
“If you please, sir, I want leave of absence for a week or two.”
“What to do? Where to go?”
“To see a sick lady, who has sent for me.”
“What sick lady? Where does she live?”
“At Gateshead, in—shire.”
“—shire? That is a hundred miles off! Who may she be that sends for
people to see her at that distance?”
“Her name is Reed, sir—Mrs. Reed.”
“Reed of Gateshead? There was a Reed of Gateshead, a magistrate.”
“It is his widow, sir.”
“And what have you to do with her? How do you know her?”
“Mr. Reed was my uncle, my mother’s brother.”
“The deuce he was! You never told me that before; you always said that
you had no relations.”
“None that would own me, sir. Mr. Reed is dead, and his wife cast me
off.”
“Why?”
 “Because I was poor, and burdensome, and she disliked me.”
“But Reed left children! you must have cousins? Sir George Lynn was
talking of a Reed of Gateshead, yesterday—who, he said, was one of the
veriest rascals on town; and Ingram was mentioning a Georgiana Reed of
the same place, who was much admired for her beauty, a season or two ago,
in London.”
“John Reed is dead, too, sir; he ruined himself and half ruined his family,
and is supposed to have committed suicide. The news so shocked his
mother that it brought on an apoplectic attack.”
“And what good can you do to her? Nonsense, Jane! I would never think
of running a hundred miles to see an old lady who will, perhaps, be dead
before you reach her; besides, you say she cast you off.”
“Yes, sir, but that is long ago; and when her circumstances were very
different; I could not be easy to neglect her wishes now.”
“How long will you stay?”
“As short a time as possible, sir.”
“Promise me only to stay a week—”
“I had better not pass my word; I might be obliged to break it.”
“At all events you will come back; you will not be induced under any
pretext to take up a permanent residence with her?”
“Oh, no! I shall certainly return if all be well.”
“And who goes with you? You don’t travel a hundred miles alone?”
“No, sir; she has sent her coachman.”
“A person to be trusted?”
“Yes, sir; he has lived ten years in the family.”
Mr. Rochester meditated. “When do you wish to go?”
“Early to-morrow morning, sir.”
“Well, you must have money; you can’t travel without money, and I dare
say you have not much; I have given you no salary yet. How much have
you in the world, Jane?” he asked, smiling.
 I drew out my purse; a meagre thing it was. “Five shillings, sir.” He took
the purse, poured the hoard into his palm, and chuckled over it as if its
scantiness pleased him. Soon he produced his pocket-book. “Here,” said he,
offering me a note; it was fifty pounds, and he owed me but fifteen. I told
him I had no change.
“I don’t want change; you know that. Take your wages.”
I declined accepting more than was my due. He scowled at first; then, as
if recollecting something, he said:
“Right, right! Better not give you all now; you would, perhaps, stay away
three months if you had fifty pounds. There are ten; is it not plenty?”
“Yes, sir, but now you owe me five.”
“Come back for it, then; I am your banker for forty pounds.”
“Mr. Rochester, I may as well mention another matter of business to you
while I have the opportunity.”
“Matter of business? I’m curious to hear it.”
“You have as good as informed me, sir, that you are going shortly to be
married?”
“Yes; what then?”
“In that case, sir, Adèle ought to go to school; I am sure you will perceive
the necessity of it.”
“To get her out of my bride’s way; who might otherwise walk over her
rather too emphatically. There’s sense in the suggestion; not a doubt of it;
Adèle, as you say, must go to school; and you, of course, must march
straight to—the devil!”
“I hope not, sir; but I must seek another situation somewhere.”
“In course!” he exclaimed, with a twang of voice and a distortion of
features equally fantastic and ludicrous. He looked at me some minutes.
“And old Madam Reed, or the misses, her daughters, will be solicited by
you to seek a place, I suppose?”
“No, sir; I am not on such terms with my relatives as would justify me in
asking favors of them—but I shall advertise.”
 “You shall walk up the pyramids of Egypt!” he growled. “At your peril
you advertise! I wish I had only offered you a sovereign instead of ten
pounds. Give me back nine pounds, Jane; I’ve a use for it.”
“And so have I, sir,” I returned, putting my hands and my purse behind
me. “I could not spare the money on any account.”
“Little niggard!” said he, “refusing me a pecuniary request! Give me five
pounds, Jane.”
“Not five shillings, sir; nor five pence.”
“Just let me look at the cash.”
“No, sir; you are not to be trusted.”
“Jane!”
“Sir?”
“Promise me one thing.”
“I’ll promise you anything, sir, that I think I am likely to perform.”
“Not to advertise; and to trust this quest of a situation to me. I’ll find you
one in time.”
“I shall be glad so to do, sir, if you, in your turn, will promise that I and
Adèle shall be both safe out of the house before your bride enters it.”
“Very well! very well! I’ll pledge my word on it. You go to-morrow,
then?”
“Yes, sir; early.”
“Shall you come down to the drawing-room after dinner?”
“No, sir; I must prepare for the journey.”
“Then you and I must bid good-by for a little while?”
“I suppose so, sir.”
“And how do people perform that ceremony of parting, Jane? Teach me;
I’m not quite up to it.”
“They say farewell; or any other form they prefer.”
“Then say it.”
 “Farewell, Mr. Rochester, for the present.”
“What must I say?”
“The same, if you like, sir.”
“Farewell, Miss Eyre, for the present; is that all?”
“Yes.”
“It seems stingy to my notions, and dry, and unfriendly. I should like
something else; a little addition to the rite. If one shook hands, for instance;
but no, that would not content me either. So you’ll do no more than say
‘farewell,’ Jane?”
“It is enough, sir; as much good-will may be conveyed in one hearty word
as in many.”
“Very likely; but it is blank and cool—‘farewell.’ ”
“How long is he going to stand with his back against that door?” I asked
myself; “I want to commence my packing.” The dinner-bell rung, and
suddenly away he bolted, without another syllable; I saw him no more
during the day, and was off before he had risen in the morning.
I reached the lodge at Gateshead about five o‘clock in the afternoon of the
first of May; I stepped in there before going up to the hall. It was very clean
and neat; the ornamental windows were hung with little white curtains, the
floor was spotless, the grate and fire-irons were burnished bright, and the
fire burned clear. Bessie sat on the hearth, nursing her last-born, and Robert
and his sister played quietly in a corner.
“Bless you! I knew you would come!” exclaimed Mrs. Leaven, as I
entered.
“Yes, Bessie,” said I, after I had kissed her; “and I trust I am not too late.
How is Mrs. Reed? Alive still, I hope.”
“Yes, she is alive, and more sensible and collected than she was. The
doctor says she may linger a week or two yet; but he hardly thinks she will
finally recover.”
“Has she mentioned me lately?”
 “She was talking of you only this morning, and wishing you would come;
but she is sleeping now, or was ten minutes ago, when I was up at the
house. She generally lies in a kind of lethargy all the afternoon, and wakes
up about six or seven. Will you rest yourself here an hour, miss, and then I
will go up with you?”
Robert here entered, and Bessie laid her sleeping child in the cradle and
went to welcome him; afterwards she insisted on my taking off my bonnet
and having some tea, for she said I looked pale and tired. I was glad to
accept her hospitality, and I submitted to be relieved of my travelling garb
just as passively as I used to let her undress me when a child.
Old times crowded fast back on me as I watched her bustling about—
setting out the tea-tray with her best china, cutting bread and butter, toasting
a tea-cake, and between whiles, giving little Robert or Jane an occasional
tap or push, just as she used to give me in former days. Bessie had retained
her quick temper as well as her light foot and good looks.
Tea ready, I was going to approach the table; but she desired me to sit
still, quite in her old, peremptory tones. I must be served at the fireside, she
said; and she placed before me a little round stand with my cup and a plate
of toast, absolutely as she used to accommodate me with some privately
purloined dainty on a nursery chair; and I smiled and obeyed her as in by-
gone days.
She wanted to know if I was happy at Thornfield Hall, and what sort of a
person the mistress was; and when I told her there was only a master,
whether he was a nice gentleman, and if I liked him. I told her he was rather
an ugly man, but quite a gentleman; and that he treated me kindly, and I was
content. Then I went on to describe to her the gay company that had lately
been staying at the house; and to these details Bessie listened with interest;
they were precisely of the kind she relished.
In such conversation an hour was soon gone; Bessie restored to me my
bonnet, &c., and, accompanied by her, I quitted the lodge for the hall. It was
also accompanied by her that I had, nearly nine years ago, walked down the
path I was now ascending. On a dark, misty, raw morning in January, I had
left a hostile roof with a desperate and embittered heart—a sense of
outlawry and almost of reprobation—to seek the chilly harborage of
Lowood, that bourne so far away and unexplored. The same hostile roof
now again rose before me; my prospects were doubtful yet; and I had yet an
aching heart. I still felt as a wanderer on the face of the earth; but I
experienced firmer trust in myself and my own powers, and less withering
dread of oppression. The gaping wound of my wrongs, too, was now quite
healed, and the flame of resentment extinguished.
“You shall go into the breakfast-room first,” said Bessie, as she preceded
me through the hall; “the young ladies will be there.”
In another moment I was within that apartment. There was every article of
furniture looking just as it did on the morning I was first introduced to Mr.
Brocklehurst—the very rug he had stood upon still covered the hearth.
Glancing at the book-cases, I thought I could distinguish the two volumes
of Bewick’s British Birds occupying their old place on the third shelf, and
Gulliver’s Travels and the Arabian Nights ranged just above. The inanimate
objects were not changed, but the living things had altered past recognition.
Two young ladies appeared before me; one very tall—almost as tall as
Miss Ingram—very thin, too, with a sallow face and severe mien. There
was something ascetic in her look, which was augmented by the extreme
plainness of a strait-skirted, black stuff dress, a starched linen collar, hair
combed away from the temples, and the nun-like ornament of a string of
ebony beads and a crucifix. This, I felt sure, was Eliza, though I could trace
little resemblance to her former self in that elongated and colorless visage.
The other was as certainly Georgiana; but not the Georgiana I
remembered—the slim and fairy-like girl of eleven. This was a full-blown,
very plump damsel, fair as wax-work, with handsome and regular features,
languishing blue eyes, and ringleted yellow hair. The hue of her dress was
black too; but its fashion was so different from her sister‘s—so much more
flowing and becoming—it looked as stylish as the other’s looked
puritanical.
In each of the sisters there was one trait of the mother, and only one; the
thin and pallid elder daughter had her parent’s Cairngorm eye;fk the
blooming and luxuriant younger girl had her contour of jaw and chin,
perhaps a little softened, but still imparting an indescribable hardness to the
countenance, otherwise so voluptuous and buxom.
 Both ladies, as I advanced, rose to welcome me, and both addressed me
by the name of “Miss Eyre.” Eliza’s greeting was delivered in a short,
abrupt voice, without a smile; and then she sat down again, fixed her eyes
on the fire, and seemed to forget me. Georgiana added to her “How d‘ye
do?” several common-places about my journey, the weather, and so on,
uttered in rather a drawling tone, and accompanied by sundry side-glances
that measured me from head to foot—now traversing the folds of my drab
merino pelisse, and now lingering on the plain trimming of my cottage
bonnet. Young ladies have a remarkable way of letting you know that they
think you a “quiz,”fl without actually saying the words. A certain
superciliousness of look, coolness of manner, nonchalance of tone, express
fully their sentiments on the point, without committing them by any
positive rudeness in word or deed.
A sneer, however, whether covert or open, had now no longer that power
over me it once possessed; as I sat between my cousins, I was surprised to
find how easy I felt under the total neglect of the one, and the semi-sarcastic
attentions of the other—Eliza did not mortify, nor Georgiana ruffle me. The
fact was, I had other things to think about; within the last few months
feelings had been stirred in me so much more potent than any they could
raise—pains and pleasures so much more acute and exquisite had been
excited than any it was in their power to inflict or bestow—that their airs
gave me no concern either for good or bad.
“How is Mrs. Reed?” I asked soon, looking calmly at Georgiana, who
thought fit to bridle at the direct address, as if it were an unexpected liberty.
“Mrs. Reed? Ah! mamma you mean; she is extremely poorly; I doubt if
you can see her to-night.”
“If,” said I, “you would just step up stairs and tell her I am come, I should
be much obliged to you.”
Georgiana almost started, and she opened her blue eyes wild and wide. “I
know she had a particular wish to see me,” I added, “and I would not defer
attending to her desire longer than is absolutely necessary.”
“Mamma dislikes being disturbed in an evening,” remarked Eliza. I soon
rose, quietly took off my bonnet and gloves, uninvited, and said I would just
step out to Bessie, who was, I dared say, in the kitchen, and ask her to
ascertain whether Mrs. Reed was disposed to receive me or not to-night. I
went, and, having found Bessie and despatched her on my errand, I
proceeded to take further measures. It had heretofore been my habit always
to shrink from arrogance; received as I had been to-day, I should, a year
ago, have resolved to quit Gateshead the very next morning ; now, it was
disclosed to me all at once, that that would be a foolish plan. I had taken a
journey of a hundred miles to see my aunt, and I must stay with her till she
was better or dead; as to her daughters’ pride or folly, I must put it on one
side—make myself independent of it. So I addressed the housekeeper—
asked her to show me a room, told her I should probably be a visitor here
for a week or two, had my trunk conveyed to my chamber, and followed it
thither myself. I met Bessie on the landing.
“Missis is awake,” said she; “I have told her you are here; come and let us
see if she will know you.”
I did not need to be guided to the well-known room, to which I had so
often been summoned for chastisement or reprimand in former days. I
hastened before Bessie and softly opened the door; a shaded light stood on
the table, for it was now getting dark. There was the great four-post
bedstead with amber hangings as of old; there the toilet-table, the arm-chair,
and the footstool, at which I had a hundred times been sentenced to kneel,
to ask pardon for offences by me uncommitted. I looked into a certain
corner near, half expecting to see the slim outline of a once dreaded switch,
which used to lurk there, waiting to leap out, imp-like, and lace my
quivering palm or shrinking neck. I approached the bed; I opened the
curtains and leaned over the high-piled pillows.
Well did I remember Mrs. Reed’s face, and I eagerly sought the familiar
image. It is a happy thing that time quells the longings of vengeance, and
hushes the promptings of rage and aversion; I had left this woman in
bitterness and hate, and I came back to her now with no other emotion than
a sort of ruth for her great sufferings, and a strong yearning to forget and
forgive all injuries—to be reconciled, and clasp hands in amity.
The well-known face was there, stern, relentless, as ever; there was that
peculiar eye which nothing could melt, and the somewhat raised, imperious,
despotic eyebrow. How often had it lowered on me menace and hate! and
how the recollection of childhood’s terrors and sorrows revived as I traced
its harsh line now! And yet I stooped down and kissed her; she looked at
me.
“Is this Jane Eyre?” she said.
“Yes, Aunt Reed. How are you, dear aunt?”
I had once vowed that I would never call her aunt again; I thought it no
sin to forget and break that vow now. My fingers had fastened on her hand
which lay outside the sheet; had she pressed mine kindly, I should at that
moment have experienced true pleasure. But unimpressionable natures are
not so soon softened, nor are natural antipathies so readily eradicated; Mrs.
Reed took her hand away, and turning her face rather from me, she
remarked that the night was warm. Again she regarded me, so icily, I felt at
once that her opinion of me—her feeling toward me—was unchanged and
unchangeable. I knew by her stony eye, opaque to tenderness, indissoluble
to tears, that she was resolved to consider me bad to the last; because to
believe me good, would give her no generous pleasure, only a sense of
mortification.
I felt pain, and then I felt ire, and then I felt a determination to subdue her;
to be her mistress in spite both of her nature and her will. My tears had risen
just as in childhood; I ordered them back to their source. I brought a chair to
the bed-head; I sat down and leaned over the pillow.
“You sent for me,” I said, “and I am here, and it is my intention to stay till
I see how you get on.”
“Oh, of course! You have seen my daughters?”
“Yes.”
“Well, you may tell them I wish you to stay, till I can talk some things
over with you I have on my mind; tonight it is too late; and I have a
difficulty in recalling them. But there was something I wished to say—let
me see—”
The wandering look and changed utterance told what wreck had taken
place in her once vigorous frame. Turning restlessly, she drew the bed-
clothes round her; my elbow, resting on a corner of the quilt, fixed it down;
she was at once irritated.
“Sit up!” said she; “don’t annoy me with holding the clothes fast; are you
Jane Eyre?”
“I am Jane Eyre.”
“I have had more trouble with that child than any one would believe. Such
a burden to be left on my hands, and so much annoyance as she caused me,
daily and hourly, with her incomprehensible disposition, and her sudden
starts of temper, and her continual, unnatural watchings of one’s
movements! I declare she talked to me once like something mad, or like a
fiend; no child ever spoke or looked as she did; I was glad to get her away
from the house. What did they do with her at Lowood? The fever broke out
there, and many of the pupils died. She, however, did not die; but I said she
did; I wish she had died!”
“A strange wish, Mrs. Reed; why do you hate her so?”
“I had a dislike to her mother, always; for she was my husband’s only
sister, and a great favorite with him; he opposed the family’s disowning her
when she made her low marriage; and when news came of her death, he
wept like a simpleton. He would send for the baby, though I entreated him
rather to put it out to nurse and pay for its maintenance. I hated it the first
time I set my eyes on it, a sickly, whining, pining thing! It would wail in its
cradle all night long, not screaming heartily like any other child, but
whimpering and moaning. Reed pitied it, and he used to nurse it and notice
it as if it had been his own; more, indeed, than he ever noticed his own at
that age. He would try to make my children friendly to the little beggar; the
darlings could not bear it, and he was angry with them when they showed
their dislike. In his last illness, he had it brought continually to his bed-side;
and but an hour before he died, he bound me by a vow to keep the creature.
I would as soon have been charged with a pauper brat out of a workhouse;
but he was weak, naturally weak. John does not at all resemble his father,
and I am glad of it; John is like me and like my brothers, he is quite a
Gibson. Oh, I wish he would cease tormenting me with letters for money! I
have no more money to give him; we are getting poor. I must send away
half the servants and shut up part of the house, or let it off. I can never
submit to do that; yet how are we to get on? Two thirds of my income goes
in paying the interest of mortgages. John gambles dreadfully, and always
loses, poor boy! He is beset by sharpers; John is sunk and degraded, his
look is frightful, I feel ashamed for him when I see him.”
She was getting much excited. “I think I had better leave her now,” said I
to Bessie, who stood on the other side of the bed.
“Perhaps you had, miss; but she often talks in this way toward night; in
the morning she is calmer.”
I rose. “Stop!” exclaimed Mrs. Reed. “There is another thing I wished to
say. He threatens me—he continually threatens me with his own death or
mine; and I dream sometimes that I see him laid out with a great wound in
his throat, or with a swelled and blackened face. I am come to a strange
pass; I have heavy troubles. What is to be done? How is the money to be
had?”
Bessie now endeavored to persuade her to take a sedative draught; she
succeeded with difficulty. Soon after, Mrs. Reed grew more composed, and
sunk into a dozing state. I then left her.
More than ten days elapsed before I had again any conversation with her.
She continued either delirious or lethargic; and the doctor forbade
everything which could painfully excite her. Meantime, I got on as well as I
could with Georgiana and Eliza. They were very cold, indeed, at first. Eliza
would sit half the day sewing, reading, or writing, and scarcely utter a word
either to me or her sister. Georgiana would chatter nonsense to her canary-
bird by the hour, and take no notice of me. But I was determined not to
seem at a loss for occupation or amusement; I had brought my drawing
materials with me, and they served me for both.
Provided with a case of pencils, and some sheets of paper, I used to take a
seat apart from them, near the window, and busy myself in sketching
fancyfm vignettes, representing any scene that happened momentarily to
shape itself in the ever-shifting kaleidoscope of imagination; a glimpse of
sea between two rocks; the rising moon, and a ship crossing its disk; a
group of reeds and water-flags, and a naiad’s head, crowned with lotus-
flowers, rising out of them; an elf sitting in a hedge-sparrow’s nest, under a
wreath of hawthorn-bloom.
One morning I fell to sketching a face; what sort of a face it was to be I
did not care or know. I took a soft black pencil, gave it a broad point, and
worked away. Soon I had traced on the paper a broad and prominent
forehead, and a square lower outline of visage; that contour gave me
pleasure; my fingers proceeded actively to fill it with features. Strongly
marked horizontal eyebrows must be traced under that brow; then followed,
naturally, a well-defined nose, with a straight ridge and full nostrils; then a
flexible-looking mouth, by no means narrow; then a firm chin, with a
decided cleft down the middle of it; of course, some black whiskers were
wanted, and some jetty hair, tufted on the temples, and waved above the
forehead. Now for the eyes; I had left them to the last, because they
required the most careful working. I drew them large; I shaped them well;
the eyelashes I traced long and sombre; the irids lustrous and large. “Good!
but not quite the thing,” I thought, as I surveyed the effect; “they want more
force and spirit;” and I wrought the shades blacker, that the lights might
flash more brilliantly—a happy touch or two secured success. There, I had a
friend’s face under my gaze; and what did it signify that those young ladies
turned their backs on me? I looked at it; I smiled at the speaking likeness; I
was absorbed and content.
“Is that a portrait of some one you know?” asked Eliza, who had
approached me unnoticed. I responded that it was merely a fancy head, and
hurried it beneath the other sheets. Of course I lied; it was, in fact, a very
faithful representation of Mr. Rochester. But what was that to her; or to any
one but myself? Georgiana also advanced to look. The other drawings
pleased her much, but she called that an “ugly man.” They both seemed
surprised at my skill. I offered to sketch their portraits; and each, in turn, sat
for a pencil outline. Then Georgiana produced her album. I promised to
contribute a water-color drawing; this put her at once into good-humor. She
proposed a walk in the grounds. Before we had been out two hours, we
were deep in a confidential conversation; she had favored me with a
description of the brilliant winter she had spent in London two seasons ago
—of the admiration she had there excited—the attention she had received;
and I even got hints of the titled conquest she had made. In the course of the
afternoon and evening these hints were enlarged on; various soft
conversations were reported, and sentimental scenes represented; and, in
short, a volume of a novel of fashionable life was that day improvised by
her for my benefit. The communications were renewed from day to day;
they always ran on the same theme—herself, her loves, and woes. It was
strange she never once adverted either to her mother’s illness or her
brother’s death, or the present gloomy state of the family prospects. Her
mind seemed wholly taken up with reminiscences of past gayety, and
aspirations after dissipations to come. She passed about five minutes each
day in her mother’s sick room, and no more.
Eliza still spoke little; she had evidently no time to talk. I never saw a
busier person than she seemed to be; yet it was difficult to say what she did:
or rather, to discover any result of her diligence. She had an alarumfn to call
her up early. I know not how she occupied herself before breakfast, but after
that meal she divided her time into regular portions; and each hour had its
allotted task. Three times a day she studied a little book, which I found, on
inspection, was a Common Prayer Book. I asked her once what was the
great attraction of that volume, and she said “the Rubric.”fo Three hours she
gave to stitching, with gold thread, the border of a square crimson cloth,
almost large enough for a carpet. In answer to my inquiries after the use of
this article, she informed me it was a covering for the altar of a new church
lately erected near Gateshead. Two hours she devoted to her diary; two to
working by herself in the kitchen-garden; and one to the regulation of her
accounts. She seemed to want no company—no conversation. I believe she
was happy in her way; this routine sufficed to her; and nothing annoyed her
so much as the occurrence of any incident which forced her to vary its
clock-work regularity.
She told me one evening, when more disposed to be communicative than
usual, that John’s conduct, and the threatened ruin of the family, had been a
source of profound affliction to her; but she had now, she said, settled her
mind, and formed her resolution. Her own fortune she had taken care to
secure; and when her mother died—and it was wholly improbable, she
tranquilly remarked, that she should either recover or linger long, she would
execute a long-cherished project—seek a retirement where punctual habits
would be permanently secured from disturbance, and place safe barriers
between herself and a frivolous world. I asked if Georgiana would
accompany her.
Of course not. Georgiana and she had nothing in common; they never had
had. She would not be burdened with her society for any consideration.
Georgiana should take her own course; and she, Eliza, would take hers.
Georgiana, when not unburdening her heart to me, spent most of her time
in lying on the sofa, fretting about the dulness of the house, and wishing
over and over again that her Aunt Gibson would send her an invitation up to
town. “It would be so much better,” she said, “if she could only get out of
the way for a month or two, till all was over.” I did not ask what she meant
by “all being over,” but I suppose she referred to the expected decease of
her mother, and the gloomy sequel of funeral rites. Eliza generally took no
more notice of her sister’s indolence and complaints than if no such
murmuring, lounging object had been before her. One day, however, as she
put away her account-book and unfolded her embroidery, she suddenly took
her up thus:
“Georgiana, a more vain and absurd animal than you was certainly never
allowed to cumber the earth. You had no right to be born; for you make no
use of life. Instead of living for, in, and with yourself, as a reasonable being
ought, you seek only to fasten your feebleness on some other person’s
strength; if no one can be found willing to burden her or himself with such a
fat, weak, puffy, useless thing, you cry out that you are ill-treated,
neglected, miserable. Then, too, existence for you must be a scene of
continual change and excitement, or else the world is a dungeon; you must
be admired, you must be courted, you must be flattered—you must have
music, dancing, and society—or you languish, you die away. Have you no
sense to devise a system which will make you independent of all efforts,
and all wills, but your own? Take one day; share it into sections; to each
section apportion its task; leave no stray unemployed quarters of an hour,
ten minutes, five minutes—do each piece of business in its turn with
method, with rigid regularity. The day will close almost before you are
aware it has begun; and you are indebted to no one for helping you to get
rid of one vacant moment; you have had to seek no one’s company,
conversation, sympathy, forbearance ; you have lived, in short, as an
independent being ought to do. Take this advice—the first and last I shall
offer you; then you will not want me or any one else, happen what may.
Neglect it—go on as heretofore, craving, whining, and idling—and suffer
the results of your idiocy, however bad and insufferable they may be. I tell
you this plainly; and listen: for though I shall no more repeat what I am now
about to say, I shall steadily act on it. After my mother’s death, I wash my
hands of you; from the day her coffin is carried to the vault in Gateshead
church, you and I will be as separate as if we had never known each other.
You need not think that, because we chanced to be born of the same parents,
I shall suffer you to fasten me down by even the feeblest claim; I tell you
this—if the whole human race, ourselves excepted, were swept away, and
we two stood alone on the earth, I would leave you in the old world, and
betake myself to the new.” She closed her lips.
“You might have spared yourself the trouble of delivering that tirade,”
answered Georgiana. “Everybody knows you are the most selfish, heartless
creature in existence; and I know your spiteful hatred toward me; I have had
a specimen of it before in the trick you played me about Lord Edwin Vere;
you could not bear me to be raised above you, to have a title, to be received
into circles where you dare not show your face, and so you acted the spy
and informer, and ruined my prospects forever.” Georgiana took out her
handkerchief and blew her nose for an hour afterward. Eliza sat cold,
impassable, and assiduously industrious.
True, generous feeling is made small account of by some; but here were
two natures rendered, the one intolerably acrid, the other despicably
savorless, for the want of it. Feeling without judgment is a washy draught
indeed; but judgment untempered by feeling is too bitter and huskyfp a
morsel for human degluti tion.fq
It was a wet and windy afternoon; Georgiana had fallen asleep on the sofa
over the perusal of a novel; Eliza was gone to attend a saint‘s-day service at
the new church—for in matters of religion she was a rigid formalist; no
weather ever prevented the punctual discharge of what she considered her
devotional duties; fair or foul, she went to church thrice every Sunday, and
as often on week-days as there were prayers.
 I bethought myself to go up stairs and see how the dying woman sped,
who lay there almost unheeded; the very servants paid her but a remittent
attention; the hired nurse, being little looked after, would slip out of the
room whenever she could. Bessie was faithful; but she had her own family
to mind, and could only come occasionally to the hall. I found the sick
room unwatched, as I had expected; no nurse was there; the patient lay still,
and seemingly lethargic; her livid face sunk in the pillows ; the fire was
dying in the grate. I renewed the fuel, reärran ged the bed-clothes, gazed a
while on her who could not now gaze on me, and then I moved away to the
window.
The rain beat strongly against the panes, the wind blew tem pestuously.
“One lies there,” I thought, “who will soon be beyond the war of earthly
elements. Whither will that spirit—now struggling to quit its material
tenement—flit when at length released?”
In pondering the great mystery, I thought of Helen Burns; recalled her
dying words—her faith—her doctrine of the equality of disembodied souls.
I was still listening in thought to her well-remembered tones—still picturing
her pale and spiritual aspect, her wasted face and sublime gaze, as she lay
on her placid death-bed, and whispered her longing to be restored to her
divine Father’s bosom—when a feeble voice murmured from the couch
behind, “Who is that?”
I knew Mrs. Reed had not spoken for days; was she reviving? I went up to
her.
“It is I, Aunt Reed.”
“Who—I?” was her answer. “Who are you?” looking at me with surprise
and a sort of alarm, but still not wildly. “You are quite a stranger to me—
where is Bessie?”
“She is at the lodge, aunt.”
“Aunt!” she repeated. “Who calls me aunt? You are not one of the
Gibsons; and yet I know you—that face, and the eyes and forehead, are
quite familiar to me; you are like—why, you are like Jane Eyre!”
I said nothing: I was afraid of occasioning some shock by declaring my
identity.
 “Yet,” said she, “I am afraid it is a mistake; my thoughts deceive me. I
wished to see Jane Eyre, and I fancy a likeness where none exists; besides,
in eight years she must be so changed.” I now gently assured her that I was
the person she supposed and desired me to be; and seeing that I was
understood, and that her senses were quite collected, I explained how
Bessie had sent her husband to fetch me from Thornfield.
“I am very ill, I know,” she said, ere long; “I was trying to turn myself a
few minutes since, and find I cannot move a limb. It is as well I should ease
my mind before I die; what we think little of in health burdens us at such an
hour as the present is to me. Is the nurse here? or is there no one in the room
but you?”
I assured her we were alone.
“Well, I have twice done you a wrong which I regret now. One was in
breaking the promise which I gave my husband to bring you up as my own
child; the other—” She stopped. “After all, it is of no great importance,
perhaps,” she murmured to herself; “and then I may get better, and to
humble myself so to her is painful.”
She made an effort to alter her position, but failed; her face changed: she
seemed to experience some inward sensation—the precursor, perhaps, of
the last pang.
“Well, I must get it over. Eternity is before me; I had better tell her. Go to
my dressing-case, open it, and take out a letter you will see there.”
I obeyed her direction. “Read the letter,” she said.
It was short, and thus conceived:
Madam
Will you have the goodness to send me the address of my niece, Jane
Eyre, and to tell me how she is; it is my intention to write shortly and
desire her to come to me at Madeira. Providence has blessed my
endeavors to secure a competency; and as I am unmarried and
childless, I wish to adopt her during my life, and bequeath her at my
death whatever I may have to leave.
 I am, madam, &c., &c.,
John Eyre, Madeira.
It was dated three years back.
“Why did I never hear of this?” I asked.
“Because I disliked you too fixedly and thoroughly ever to lend a hand in
lifting you to prosperity. I could not forget your conduct to me, Jane—the
fury with which you once turned on me; the tone in which you declared you
abhorred me the worst of anybody in the world; the unchildlike look and
voice with which you affirmed that the very thought of me made you sick,
and asserted that I had treated you with miserable cruelty. I could not forget
my own sensations, when you thus started up and poured out the venom of
your mind; I felt fear, as if an animal that I had struck or pushed had looked
up at me with human eyes and cursed me in a man’s voice. Bring me some
water! Oh, make haste!”
“Dear Mrs. Reed,” said I, as I offered her the draught she required, “think
no more of all this, let it pass away from your mind. Forgive me for my
passionate language; I was a child then; eight, nine years have passed since
that day.”
She heeded nothing of what I said; but when she had tasted the water and
drawn breath, she went on thus:—
“I tell you I could not forget it, and I took my revenge; for you to be
adopted by your uncle, and placed in a state of ease and comfort, was what I
could not endure. I wrote to him; I said I was sorry for his disappointment,
but Jane Eyre was dead—she had died of typhus fever at Lowood. Now act
as you please; write and contradict my assertion—expose my falsehood as
soon as you like. You were born, I think, to be my torment; my last hour is
racked by the recollection of a deed which, but for you, I should never have
been tempted to commit.”
“If you could but be persuaded to think no more of it, aunt, and to regard
me with kindness and forgiveness—”
“You have a very bad disposition,” said she, “and one to this day I feel it
impossible to understand; how for nine years you could be patient and
quiescent under any treatment, and in the tenth break out all fire and
violence, I can never comprehend.”
“My disposition is not so bad as you think; I am passionate, but not
vindictive. Many a time, as a little child, I should have been glad to love
you if you would have let me; and I long earnestly to be reconciled to you
now; kiss me, aunt.”
I approached my cheek to her lips; she would not touch it. She said I
oppressed her by leaning over the bed, and again demanded water. As I laid
her down—for I raised her and supported her on my arm while she drank—
I covered her ice-cold and clammy hand with mine; the feeble fingers
shrunk from my touch—the glazing eyes shunned my gaze.
“Love me, then, or hate me, as you will,” I said at last, “you have my full
and free forgiveness; ask now for God‘s, and be at peace.”
Poor, suffering woman! it was too late for her to make now the effort to
change her habitual frame of mind; living, she had ever hated me—dying,
she must hate me still.
The nurse now entered, and Bessie followed. I yet lingered half an hour
longer, hoping to see some sign of amity; but she gave none. She was fast
relapsing into stupor; nor did her mind again rally. At twelve o‘clock that
night she died. I was not present to close her eyes; nor were either of her
daughters. They came to tell us the next morning that all was over. She was
by that time laid out. Eliza and I went to look at her; Georgiana, who had
burst out into loud weeping, said she dared not go. There was stretched
Sarah Reed’s once robust and active frame, rigid and still; her eye of flint
was covered with its cold lid; her brow and strong traits wore yet the
impress of her inexorable soul. A strange and solemn object was that corpse
to me. I gazed on it with gloom and pain; nothing soft, nothing sweet,
nothing pitying, or hopeful, or subduing, did it inspire; only a grating
anguish for her woes—not my loss—and a sombre, tearless dismay at the
fearfulness of death in such a form.
Eliza surveyed her parent calmly. After a silence of some minutes she
observed—
 “With her constitution she should have lived to a good old age; her life
was shortened by trouble.” And then a spasm constricted her mouth for an
instant; as it passed away she turned and left the room, and so did I. Neither
of us had dropped a tear.

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 Chapter XXII

Mr. Rochester had given me but one week’s leave of absence; yet a month
elapsed before I quitted Gateshead. I wished to leave immediately after the
funeral, but Georgiana entreated me to stay till she could get off to London
—whither she was now at last invited by her uncle, Mr. Gibson, who had
come down to direct his sister’s interment, and settle the family affairs.
Georgiana said she dreaded being left alone with Eliza; from her she got
neither sympathy in her dejection, support in her fears, nor aid in her
preparations; so I bore with her feeble-minded quailings and selfish
lamentations as well as I could, and did my best in sewing for her and
packing her dresses. It is true, that while I worked, she would idle; and I
thought to myself, “If you and I were destined to live always together,
cousin, we would commence matters on a different footing. I should not
settle tamely down into being the forbearing party; I should assign you your
share of labor, and compel you to accomplish it, or else it should be left
undone; I should insist, also, on your keeping some of those drawling, half-
insincere complaints hushed in your own breast. It is only because our
connection happens to be very transitory, and comes at a peculiarly
mournful season, that I consent thus to render it so patient and compliant on
my part.”
At last I saw Georgiana off; but now it was Eliza’s turn to request me to
stay another week. Her plans required all her time and attention, she said;
she was about to depart for some unknown bourn; and all day long she
stayed in her own room, her door bolted within, filling trunks, emptying
drawers, burning papers, and holding no communication with any one. She
wished me to look after the house, to see callers, and answer notes of
condolence.
One morning she told me I was at liberty. “And,” she added, “I am
obliged to you for your valuable services and discreet conduct. There is
some difference between living with such a one as you, and with
Georgiana; you perform your own part in life, and burden no one. To-
morrow,” she continued, “I set out for the continent. I shall take up my
abode in a religious house, near Lisle—a nunnery, you would call it; there I
shall be quiet and unmolested. I shall devote myself for a time to the
examination of the Roman Catholic dogmas, and to a careful study of the
workings of their system; if I find it to be, as I half suspect it is, the one best
calculated to insure the doing of all things decently and in order, I shall
embrace the tenets of Rome and probably take the veil.”
I neither expressed surprise at this resolution nor attempted to dissuade
her from it. “The vocation will fit you to a hair,” I thought; “much good
may it do you!”
When we parted, she said: “Good-by, cousin Jane Eyre, I wish you well;
you have some sense.”
I then returned: “You are not without sense, cousin Eliza; but what you
have, I suppose, in another year will be walled up alive in a French convent.
However, it is not my business, and, so it suits you, I don’t much care.”
“You are in the right,” said she; and with these words we each went our
separate way. As I shall not have occasion to refer either to her or her sister
again, I may as well mention here that Georgiana made an advantageous
match with a wealthy worn-out man of fashion; and that Eliza actually took
the veil, and is at this day superior of the convent where she passed the
period of her novitiate, and which she endowed with her fortune.
How people feel when they are returning home after an absence, long or
short, I did not know. I had never experienced the sensation. I had known
what it was to come back to Gateshead, when a child, after a long walk—to
be scolded for looking cold or gloomy; and later, what it was to come back
from church to Lowood—to long for a plenteous meal and a good fire, and
to be unable to get either. Neither of these returnings were very pleasant or
desirable; no magnet drew me to a given point, increasing in its strength of
attraction the nearer I came. The return to Thornfield was yet to be tried.
My journey seemed tedious—very tedious; fifty miles one day, a night
spent at an inn; fifty miles the next day. During the first twelve hours I
thought of Mrs. Reed in her last moments; I saw her disfigured and
discolored face, and heard her strangely altered voice; I mused on the
funeral day, the coffin, the hearse, the black train of tenants and servants—
few was the number of relatives—the gaping vault, the silent church, the
solemn service. Then I thought of Eliza and Georgiana. I beheld one the
cynosure of a ball-room, the other the inmate of a convent cell; and I dwelt
on and analyzed their separate peculiarities of person and character. The
evening arrival at the great town of—scattered these thoughts; night gave
them quite another turn. Laid down on my traveller’s bed, I left
reminiscence for anticipation.
I was going back to Thornfield; but how long was I to stay there? Not
long—of that I was sure. I had heard from Mrs. Fairfax in the interim of my
absence. The party at the hall was dispersed ; Mr. Rochester had left for
London three weeks ago, but he was then expected to return in a fortnight.
Mrs. Fairfax surmised that he was gone to make arrangements for his
wedding, as he had talked of purchasing a new carriage. She said, the idea
of his marrying Miss Ingram still seemed strange to her; but from what
everybody said, and from what she had herself seen, she could no longer
doubt that the event would shortly take place. “You would be strangely
incredulous if you did doubt it,” was my mental comment; “I don’t doubt
it.”
The question followed, “Where was I to go?” I dreamed of Miss Ingram
all the night. In a vivid morning dream, I saw her closing the gates of
Thornfield against me and pointing me out another road; and Mr. Rochester
looked on with his arms folded, smiling sardonically, as it seemed, at both
her and me.
I had not notified to Mrs. Fairfax the exact day of my return, for I did not
wish either carfr or carriage to meet me at Millcote. I proposed to walk the
distance quietly by myself; and very quietly, after leaving my box in the
hostler’s care, did I slip away from the George Inn, about six o‘clock of a
June evening, and take the old road to Thornfield; a road which lay chiefly
through fields, and was now little frequented.
It was not a bright or splendid summer evening, though fair and soft. The
hay-makers were at work all along the road, and the sky, though far from
cloudless, was such as promised well for the future—its blue, where blue
was visible, was mild and settled, and its cloud strata high and thin. The
west, too, was warm; no watery gleam chilled it; it seemed as if there was a
fire lighted—an altar burning behind its screen of marbled vapor—and out
of apertures shone a golden redness.
I felt glad as the road shortened before me—so glad that I stopped once to
ask myself what that joy meant, and to remind reason that it was not to my
home I was going, or to a permanent resting-place, or to a place where fond
friends looked out for me and waited my arrival. “Mrs. Fairfax will smile
you a calm welcome, to be sure,” said I; “and little Adèle will clap her
hands and jump to see you; but you know very well you are thinking of
another than they, and that he is not thinking of you.”
But what is so headstrong as youth—what so blind as inexperience ?
These affirmed that it was pleasure enough to have the privilege of again
looking on Mr. Rochester, whether he looked on me or not; and they added
—“Hasten! hasten! be with him while you may; but a few more days or
weeks, at most, and you are parted from him forever!” And then I strangled
a new-born agony—a deformed thing which I could not persuade myself to
own and rear—and ran on.
They are making hay, too, in Thornfield meadows; or, rather, the laborers
are just quitting their work, and returning home with their rakes on their
shoulders, now, at the hour I arrive. I have but a field or two to traverse, and
then I shall cross the road and reach the gates. How full the hedges are of
roses! but I have no time to gather any; I want to be at the house. I pass a
tall brier, shooting leafy and flowery branches across the path; I see the
narrow stile with stone steps; and I see—Mr. Rochester sitting there, a book
and pencil in his hand. He is writing.
Well, he is not a ghost—yet every nerve I have is unstrung; for a moment
I am beyond my own mastery. What does it mean? I did not think I should
tremble in this way when I saw him, or lose my voice or the power of
motion in his presence. I will go back as soon as I can stir; I need not make
an absolute fool of myself; I know another way to the house. It does not
signify if I knew twenty ways, for he has seen me.
“Hillo!” he cries; and he puts up his book and his pencil; “there you are!
Come on, if you please.”
 I suppose I do come on, though in what fashion I know not; being
scarcely cognizant of my movements, and solicitous only to appear calm;
and, above all, to control the working muscles of my face, which I feel rebel
insolently against my will, and struggle to express what I had resolved to
conceal. But I have a veil—it is down; I may make shift yet to behave with
decent composure.
“And this is Jane Eyre! Are you coming from Millcote, and on foot? Yes;
just one of your tricks—not to send for a carriage, and come clattering over
street and road, like a common mortal, but to steal into the vicinage of your
home along with twilight, just as if you were a dream or a shade. What the
deuce have you done with yourself this last month?”
“I have been with my aunt, sir, who is dead.”
“A true Janian reply! Good angels be my guard! She comes from the other
world—from the abode of people who are dead—and tells me so when she
meets me alone here in the gloaming! If I dared, I’d touch you, to see if you
are substance or shadow, you elf! but I’d as soon offer to take hold of a blue
ignis fatuus light in a marsh. Truant! truant!” he added, when he had paused
an instant, “absent from me a whole month, and forgetting me quite, I’ll be
sworn!”
I knew there would be pleasure in meeting my master again, even though
broken by the fear that he was so soon to cease to be my master, and by the
knowledge that I was nothing to him; but there was ever in Mr. Rochester
(so, at least, I thought) such a wealth of the power of communicating
happiness, that to taste but of the crumbs he scattered to stray and stranger
birds like me, was to feast genially. His last words were balm. They seemed
to imply that it imported something to him whether I forgot him or not. And
he had spoken of Thornfield as my home—would that it were my home!
He did not leave the stile, and I hardly liked to ask to go by. I inquired
soon if he had not been to London.
“Yes; I suppose you found that out by second sight.”
“Mrs. Fairfax told me in a letter.”
“And did she inform you what I went to do?”
“Oh, yes, sir! Everybody knew your errand.”
 “You must see the carriage, Jane, and tell me if you don’t think it will suit
Mrs. Rochester exactly; and whether she won’t look like Queen Boadicea,fs
leaning back against those purple cushions. I wish, Jane, I were a trifle
better adapted to match with her externally. Tell me now, fairy as you are,
can’t you give me a charm, or a philter,ftor something of that sort, to make
me a handsome man?”
“It would be past the power of magic, sir!” and, in thought, I added, “A
loving eye is all the charm needed; to such you are handsome enough, or,
rather, your sternness has a power beyond beauty.”
Mr. Rochester had sometimes read my unspoken thoughts with an acumen
to me incomprehensible; in the present instance he took no notice of my
abrupt vocal response, but he smiled at me with a certain smile he had of
his own, and which he used but on rare occasions. He seemed to think it too
good for common purposes; it was the real sunshine of feeling—he shed it
over me now.
“Pass, Janet,” said he, making room for me to cross the stile; “go up
home, and stay your weary little wandering feet at a friend’s threshold.”
All I had now to do was to obey him in silence; no need for me to
colloquize further. I got over the stile without a word, and meant to leave
him calmly. An impulse held me fast—a force turned me round; I said—or
something in me said for me, and in spite of me—
“Thank you, Mr. Rochester, for your great kindness. I am strangely glad
to get back again to you; and wherever you are is my home—my only
home.”
I walked on so fast that even he could hardly have overtaken me had he
tried. Little Adèle was half wild with delight when she saw me. Mrs.
Fairfax received me with her usual plain friendliness. Leah smiled, and
even Sophie bid me “bon soir”fu with glee. This was very pleasant; there is
no happiness like that of being loved by our fellow-creatures, and feeling
that your presence is an addition to their comfort.
I that evening shut my eyes resolutely against the future; I stopped my
ears against the voice that kept warning me of near separation and coming
grief. When tea was over, and Mrs. Fairfax had taken her knitting, and I had
assumed a low seat near her, and Adèle, kneeling on the carpet, had nestled
close up to me, and a sense of mutual affection seemed to surround us with
a ring of golden peace, I uttered a silent prayer that we might not be parted
far or soon; but when, as we thus sat, Mr. Rochester entered, unannounced,
and looking at us, seemed to take pleasure in the spectacle of a group so
amicable—when he said he supposed the old lady was all right now that she
had got her adopted daughter back again, and added that he saw Adèle was
“prête à croquer sa petite maman Anglaise”fv—I half ventured to hope that
he would, even after his marriage, keep us together somewhere under the
shelter of his protection, and not quite exiled from the sunshine of his
presence.
A fortnight of dubious calm succeeded my return to Thorn field Hall.
Nothing was said of the master’s marriage, and I saw no preparation going
on for such an event. Almost every day I asked Mrs. Fairfax if she had yet
heard anything decided; her answer was always in the negative. Once, she
said, she had actually put the question to Mr. Rochester, as to when he was
going to bring his bride home; but he had answered her only by a joke, and
one of his queer looks, and she could not tell what to make of him.
One thing specially surprised me, and that was, there were no journeyings
backward and forward—no visits to Ingram Park. To be sure it was twenty
miles off, on the borders of another county; but what was that distance to an
ardent lover? To so practised and indefatigable a horseman as Mr.
Rochester, it would be but a morning’s ride. I began to cherish hopes I had
no right to conceive—that the match was broken off—that rumor had been
mistaken—that one or both parties had changed their minds. I used to look
at my master’s face to see if it were sad or fierce; but I could not remember
the time when it had been so uniformly clear of clouds or evil feelings. If, in
the moments I and my pupil spent with him, I lacked spirits and sunk into
inevitable dejection, he became even gay. Never had he called me more
frequently to his presence—never been kinder to me when there—and, alas!
never had I loved him so well.

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 Chapter XXIII

A splendid midsummer shone over England; skies so pure, suns so radiant,

as were then seen in long succession, seldom favor, even singly, our wave-
girt land. It was as if a band of Italian days had come from the south, like a
flock of glorious passenger-birds, and lighted to rest them on the cliffs of
Albion. The hay was all got in; the fields round Thornfield were green and
shorn; the roads white and baked; the trees were in their dark prime; hedge
and wood, full-leaved and deeply-tinted, contrasted well with the sunny hue
of the cleared meadows between.

On midsummer eve, Adèle, weary with gathering wild strawberries in

Hay-lane half the day, had gone to bed with the sun. I watched her drop
asleep, and when I left her I sought the garden.
It was now the sweetest hour of the twenty-four. “Day its fervid fires had
wasted,” and dew fell cool on panting plain and scorched summit.59 Where
the sun had gone down in simple state—pure of the pomp of clouds—
spread a solemn purple, burning with the light of red jewel and furnace-
flame at one point, on one hill-peak, and extending high and wide, soft and
still softer, over half heaven. The east had its own charm of fine deep blue,
and its own modest gem, a rising and solitary star; soon it would boast the
moon, but she was yet beneath the horizon.
I walked a while on the pavement, but a subtile, well-known scent—that
of a cigar—stole from some window. I saw the library casement open a
hand-breadth; I knew I might be watched thence, so I went apart into the
orchard. No nook in the grounds more sheltered and more Eden-like. It was
full of trees; it bloomed with flowers. A very high wall shut it out from the
court, on one-side; on the other, a beech avenue screened it from the lawn.
At the bottom was a sunk fence, its sole separation from lonely fields. A
winding walk, bordered with laurels and terminating in a giant horse-
chestnut, circled at the base by a seat, led down to the fence. Here one could
wander unseen. While such honeydew fell, such silence reigned, such
gloaming gathered, I felt as if I could haunt such shade forever. But in
threading the flower and fruit parterres at the upper part of the inclosure,
enticed there by the light the now rising moon casts on this more open
quarter, my step is stayed—not by sound, nor by sight; but once more by a
warning fragrance.
Sweet-brier and southern-wood, jasmine, pink, and rose, have long been
yielding their evening sacrifice of incense. This new scent is neither of
shrub nor flower. It is—I know it well—it is Mr. Rochester’s cigar. I look
round, and I listen. I see trees laden with ripening fruit. I hear a nightingale
warbling in a wood half a mile off; no moving form is visible, no coming
step audible; but that perfume increases. I must flee. I make for the wicket
leading to the shrubbery, and I see Mr. Rochester entering. I step aside into
the ivy recess; he will not stay long; he will soon return whence he came,
and if I sit here he will never see me.
But no—eventide is as pleasant to him as to me, and this antique garden
as attractive; and he strolls on, now lifting the gooseberry-tree branches to
look at the fruit, large as plums, with which they are laden—now taking a
ripe cherry from the wall—now stooping toward a knot of flowers, either to
inhale their fragrance or to admire the dew-beads on their petals. A great
moth goes humming by me; it alights on a plant at Mr. Rochester’s feet; he
sees it, and bends to examine it.
“Now he has his back toward me,” thought I, “and he is occupied, too;
perhaps, if I walk softly, I can slip away unnoticed.”
I trod on an edging of turf, that the crackle of the pebbly gravel might not
betray me; he was standing among the beds at a yard or two distant from
where I had to pass; the moth apparently engaged him. “I shall get by very
well,” I meditated. As I crossed his shadow, thrown long over the garden by
the moon, not yet risen high, he said quietly, without turning,
“Jane, come and look at this fellow.”
I had made no noise—he had not eyes behind—could his shadow feel? I
started at first, and then I approached him.
 “Look at his wings,” said he; “he reminds me rather of a West Indian
insect; one does not often see so large and gay a night-rover in England.
There! he is flown.”
The moth roamed away; I was sheepishly retreating also, but Mr.
Rochester followed me, and when we reached the wicket he said—
“Turn back; on so lovely a night it is a shame to sit in the house; and
surely no one can wish to go to bed while sunset is thus at meeting with
moonrise.”
It is one of my faults, that though my tongue is sometimes prompt enough
at answer, there are times when it sadly fails me in framing an excuse; and
always the lapse occurs at some crisis, when a facile word or plausible
pretext is specially wanted to get me out of painful embarrassment. I did not
like to walk at this hour alone with Mr. Rochester in the shadowy orchard;
but I could not find a reason to allege for leaving him. I followed with
lagging step, and thoughts busily bent on discovering a means of
extrication; but he himself looked so composed, and so grave also, I became
ashamed of feeling any confusion; the evil—if evil existent or perspective
there was—seemed to lie with me only; his mind was unconscious and
quiet.
“Jane,” he recommenced, as we entered the laurel-walk, and slowly
strayed down in the direction of the sunk fence and the horse-chestnut,
“Thornfield is a pleasant place in summer, is it not?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You must have become in some degree attached to the house—you, who
have an eye for natural beauties, and a good deal of the organ of
adhesiveness?”
“I am attached to it, indeed.”
“And though I don’t comprehend how it is, I perceive you have acquired a
degree of regard for that foolish little child Adèle, too; and even for simple
dame Fairfax?”
“Yes, sir; in different ways, I have an affection for both.”
“And would be sorry to part with them?”
 “Yes.”
“Pity!” he said, and sighed and paused. “It is always the way of events in
this life,” he continued presently; “no sooner have you got settled in a
pleasant resting-place, than a voice calls out to you to rise and move on, for
the hour of repose is expired.”
“Must I move on, sir?” I asked. “Must I leave Thornfield?”
“I believe you must, Jane. I am sorry, Janet; but I believe, indeed, you
must.”
This was a blow; but I did not let it prostrate me.
“Well, sir, I shall be ready when the order to march comes.”
“It is come now—I must give it to-night.”
“Then you are going to be married, sir?”
“Ex-act-ly—pre-cise-ly; with your usual acuteness, you have hit the nail
straight on the head.”
“Soon, sir?”
“Very soon, my—, that is, Miss Eyre; and you’ll remember, Jane, the first
time I, or Rumor, plainly intimated to you that it was my intention to put
my old bachelor’s neck into the sacred noose, to enter into the holy estate of
matrimony—to take Miss Ingram to my bosom, in short (she’s an extensive
armful; but that’s not to the point—one can’t have too much of such a very
excellent thing as my beautiful Blanche)—well, as I was saying—listen to
me, Jane! You’re not turning your head to look after more moths, are you?
That was only a lady-clock,fw child, ‘flying away home.’ I wish to remind
you that it was you who first said to me, with that discretion I respect in you
—with that foresight, prudence, and humility which befit your responsible
and dependent position—that in case I married Miss Ingram, both you and
little Adèle had better trot forthwith. I pass over the sort of slur conveyed in
this suggestion on the character of my beloved; indeed, when you are far
away, Janet, I’ll try to forget it; I shall notice only its wisdom, which is such
that I have made it my law of action. Adèle must go to school, and you,
Miss Eyre, must get a new situation.”
 “Yes, sir, I will advertise immediately; and meantime, I suppose—” I was
going to say, “I suppose I may stay here till I find another shelter to betake
myself to”; but I stopped, feeling it would not do to risk a long sentence, for
my voice was not quite under command.
“In about a month I hope to be a bridegroom,” continued Mr. Rochester;
“and in the interim, I shall myself look out for employment and an asylum
for you.”
“Thank you, sir; I am sorry to give—”
“Oh, no need to apologize! I consider that when a dependent does her
duty as well as you have done yours, she has a sort of claim upon her
employer for any little assistance he can conveniently render her; indeed, I
have already, through my future mother-in-law, heard of a place that I think
will suit; it is to undertake the education of the five daughters of Mrs.
Dionysius O‘Gall of Bitternutt Lodge, Connaught, Ireland. You’ll like
Ireland, I think; they’re such warm-hearted people there, they say.”
“It is a long way off, sir.”
“No matter—a girl of your sense will not object to the voyage or the
distance.”
“Not the voyage, but the distance; and then the sea is a barrier—”
“From what, Jane?”
“From England; and from Thornfield; and—”
“Well?”
“From you, sir.”
I said this almost involuntarily; and, with as little sanction of free will, my
tears gushed out. I did not cry so as to be heard, however; I avoiding
sobbing. The thought of Mrs. O‘Gall and Bitternutt Lodge struck cold to my
heart; and colder the thought of all the brine and foam, destined, as it
seemed, to rush between me and the master, at whose side I now walked;
and coldest at the remembrance of the wider ocean—wealth, caste, custom,
intervened between me and what I naturally and inevitably loved.
“It is a long way,” I again said.
 “It is, to be sure; and when you get to Bitternutt Lodge, Connaught,
Ireland, I shall never see you again, Jane; that’s morally certain. I never go
over to Ireland, not having myself much of a fancy for the country. We have
been good friends, Jane, have we not?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And when friends are on the eve of separation, they like to spend the
little time that remains to them close to each other. Come, we’ll talk over
the voyage and the parting quietly, half an hour or so, while the stars enter
into their shining life up in heaven yonder; here is the chestnut-tree; here is
the bench at its old roots. Come, we will sit there in peace to-night, though
we should never more be destined to sit there together.” He seated me and
himself.
“It is a long way to Ireland, Janet, and I am sorry to send my little friend
on such weary travels; but if I can’t do better, how is it to be helped? Are
you anything akin to me, do you think, Jane?”
I could risk no sort of answer by this time; my heart was full.
“Because,” he said, “I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you,
especially when you are near me, as now; it is as if I had a string
somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar
string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that
boisterous channel, and two hundred miles or so of land, come broad
between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapped; and then
I’ve a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly. As for you, you’d
forget me.”
“That I never should, sir; you know—” impossible to proceed.
“Jane, do you hear that nightingale singing in the wood? Listen!”
In listening, I sobbed convulsively; for I could repress what I endured no
longer; I was obliged to yield; and I was shaken from head to foot with
acute distress. When I did speak, it was only to express an impetuous wish
that I had never been born, or never come to Thornfield.
“Because you are sorry to leave it?”
 The vehemence of emotion, stirred by grief and love within me, was
claiming mastery, and struggling for full sway and asserting a right to
predominate—to overcome, to live, rise, and reign at last; yes, and to speak.
“I grieve to leave Thornfield; I love Thornfield; I love it, because I have
lived in it a full and delightful life, momentarily at least. I have not been
trampled on. I have not been petrified. I have not been buried with inferior
minds, and excluded from every glimpse of communion with what is bright,
and energetic, and high. I have talked, face to face, with what I reverence;
with what I delight in, with an original, a vigorous, an expanded mind. I
have known you, Mr. Rochester; and it strikes me with terror and anguish to
feel I absolutely must be torn from you forever. I see the necessity of
departure; and it is like looking on the necessity of death.”
“Where do you see the necessity?” he asked, suddenly.
“Where? You, sir, have placed it before me.”
“In what shape?”
“In the shape of Miss Ingram; a noble and beautiful woman, your bride.”
“My bride! What bride? I have no bride!”
“But you will have.”
“Yes; I will! I will!” He set his teeth.
“Then I must go; you have said it yourself.”
“No; you must stay! I swear it, and the oath shall be kept.”
“I tell you I must go!” I retorted, roused to something like passion. “Do
you think I can stay to become nothing to you? Do you think I am an
automaton? a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of
bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my
cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am
soulless and heartless? You think wrong! I have as much soul as you, and
full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty, and much
wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for
me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of
custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh; it is my spirit that
addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we
stood at God’s feet, equal—as we are!”
“As we are!” repeated Mr. Rochester—“so,” he added, inclosing me in his
arms, gathering me to his breast, pressing his lips on my lips; “so, Jane!”
“Yes, so, sir,” I rejoined; “and yet not so; for you are a married man, or as
good as a married man, and wed to one inferior to you—to one with whom
you have no sympathy—whom I do not believe you truly love; for I have
seen and heard you sneer at her. I would scorn such a union; therefore I am
better than you—let me go!”
“Where, Jane? to Ireland?”
“Yes—to Ireland. I have spoken my mind, and can go anywhere now.”
“Jane, be still; don’t struggle so, like a wild, frantic bird that is rending its
own plumage in its desperation.”
“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being, with an
independent will; which I now exert to leave you.”
Another effort set me at liberty, and I stood erect before him.
“And your will shall decide your destiny,” he said; “I offer you my hand,
my heart, and a share of all my possessions.”
“You play a farce, which I merely laugh at.”
“I ask you to pass through life at my side—to be my second self, and best
earthly companion.”
“For that fate you have already made your choice, and must abide by it.”
“Jane, be still a few moments; you are over-excited; I will be still too.”
A waft of wind came sweeping down the laurel-walk, and trembled
through the boughs of the chestnut; it wandered away—away—to an
indefinite distance—it died. The nightingale’s song was then the only voice
of the hour; in listening to it, I again wept. Mr. Rochester sat quiet, looking
at me gently and seriously. Some time passed before he spoke; he at last
said—
“Come to my side, Jane, and let us explain and understand one another.”
 “I will never again come to your side; I am torn away now, and cannot
return.”
“But, Jane, I summon you as my wife; it is you only I intend to marry.”
I was silent; I thought he mocked me.
“Come, Jane—come hither.”
“Your bride stands between us.”
He rose, and with a stride reached me.
“My bride is here,” he said, again drawing me to him, “because my equal
is here, and my likeness. Jane, will you marry me?”
Still I did not answer, and still I writhed myself from his grasp; for I was
still incredulous.
“Do you doubt me, Jane?”
“Entirely.”
“You have no faith in me?”
“Not a whit.”
“Am I a liar in your eyes?” he asked, passionately. “Little sceptic, you
shall be convinced. What love have I for Miss Ingram? None, and that you
know. What love has she for me? None, as I have taken pains to prove; I
caused a rumor to reach her that my fortune was not a third of what was
supposed, and after that I presented myself to see the result; it was coldness
both from her and her mother. I would not—I could not—marry Miss
Ingram. You—you strange—you almost unearthly thing! I love as my own
flesh. You—poor and obscure, and small and plain, as you are—I entreat to
accept me as a husband.”
“What, me!” I ejaculated, beginning in his earnestness—and especially in
his incivility—to credit his sincerity; “me, who have not a friend in the
world but you—if you are my friend; not a shilling but what you have given
me?”
“You, Jane. I must have you for my own—entirely my own. Will you be
mine? Say yes, quickly.”
“Mr. Rochester, let me look at your face; turn to the moonlight.”
 “Why?”
“Because I want to read your countenance; turn!”
“There; you will find it scarcely more legible than a crumpled, scratched
page. Read on; only make haste, for I suffer.”
His face was very much agitated and very much flushed, and there were
strong workings in the features, and strange gleams in the eyes.
“Oh, Jane, you torture me!” he exclaimed. “With that searching and yet
faithful and generous look you torture me!”
“How can I do that? If you are true, and your offer real, my only feelings
to you must be gratitude and devotion—they cannot torture.”
“Gratitude!” he ejaculated; and added wildly—‘Jane, accept me quickly.
Say, Edward—give me my name—Edward, I will marry you.
“Are you in earnest? Do you truly love me? Do you sincerely wish me to
be your wife?”
“I do; and if an oath is necessary to satisfy you, I swear it.”
“Then, sir, I will marry you.”
“Edward—my little wife!”
“Dear Edward!”
“Come to me—come to me entirely now,” said he; and added, in his
deepest tone, speaking in my ear as his cheek was laid on mine, “Make my
happiness—I will make yours.”
“God pardon me!” he subjoined ere long, “and man meddle not with me; I
have her, and will hold her.”
“There is no one to meddle, sir. I have no kindred to interfere.”
“No—that is the best of it,” he said. And if I had loved him less I should
have thought his accent and look of exultation savage ; but, sitting by him,
roused from the nightmare of parting—called to the paradise of union—I
thought only of the bliss given me to drink in so abundant a flow. Again and
again he said, “Are you happy, Jane?” And again and again I answered,
“Yes.” After which he murmured, “It will atone—it will atone. Have I not
found her friendless, and cold, and comfortless? Will I not guard, and
cherish, and solace her? Is there not love in my heart, and constancy in my
resolves? It will expiate at God’s tribunal. I know my Maker sanctions what
I do. For the world’s judgment—I wash my hands thereof. For man’s
opinion—I defy it.”
But what had befallen the night? The moon was not yet set, and we were
all in shadow; I could scarcely see my master’s face, near as I was. And
what ailed the chestnut-tree? It writhed and groaned, while wind roared in
the laurel-walk, and came sweeping over us.
“We must go in,” said Mr. Rochester; “the weather changes. I could have
sat with thee till morning, Jane.”
“And so,” thought I, “could I with you.” I should have said so, perhaps,
but a livid, vivid spark leaped out of a cloud at which I was looking, and
there was a crack, a crash, and a close rattling peal; and I thought only of
hiding my dazzled eyes against Mr. Rochester’s shoulder. The rain rushed
down. He hurried me up the walk, through the grounds, and into the house;
but we were quite wet before we could pass the threshold. He was taking
off my shawl in the hall, and shaking the water out of my loosened hair,
when Mrs. Fairfax emerged from her room. I did not observe her at first,
nor did Mr. Rochester. The lamp was lighted. The clock was on the stroke
of twelve.
“Hasten to take off your wet things,” said he; “and before you go, good-
night-good-night, my darling!”
He kissed me repeatedly. When I looked up, on leaving his arms, there
stood the widow, pale, grave, and amazed. I only smiled at her, and ran up
stairs. “Explanation will do for another time,” thought I. Still, when I
reached my chamber, I felt a pang at the idea she should even temporarily
misconstrue what she had seen. But joy soon effaced every other feeling;
and loud as the wind blew, near and deep as the thunder crashed, fierce and
frequent as the lightning gleamed, cataract-like as the rain fell during a
storm of two hours’ duration, I experienced no fear, and little awe. Mr.
Rochester came thrice to my door, in the course of it, to ask if I was safe
and tranquil; and that was comfort, that was strength for anything.
Before I left my bed in the morning, little Adèle came running in to tell
me that the great horse-chestnut at the bottom of the orchard had been
struck by lightning in the night, and half of it split away.

OceanofPDF.com
 Chapter XXIV

As I rose and dressed, I thought over what had happened, and wondered if it
were a dream. I could not be certain of the reality till I had seen Mr.
Rochester again, and heard him renew his words of love and promise.
While arranging my hair, I looked at my face in the glass, and felt it was
no longer plain; there was hope in its aspect and life in its color; and my
eyes seemed as if they had beheld the fount of fruition, and borrowed
beams from the lustrous ripple. I had often been unwilling to look at my
master, because I feared he could not be pleased at my look, but I was sure I
might lift my face to his now and not cool his affection by its expression. I
took a plain but clean and light summer dress from my drawer and put it on;
it seemed no attire had ever so well become me, because none had I ever
worn in so blissful a mood.
I was not surprised, when I ran down into the hall, to see that a brilliant
June morning had succeeded to the tempest of the night, and to feel,
through the open glass door, the breathing of a fresh and fragrant breeze.
Nature must be gladsome when I was so happy. A beggar-woman and her
little boy, pale, ragged objects both, were coming up the walk, and I ran
down and gave them all the money I happened to have in my purse, some
three or four shillings; good or bad they must partake of my jubilee. The
rooks cawed, and blither birds sung, but nothing was so merry or so musical
as my own rejoicing heart.
Mrs. Fairfax surprised me by looking out of the window with a sad
countenance, and saying, gravely, “Miss Eyre, will you come to breakfast?”
During the meal she was quiet and cool, but I could not undeceive her then.
I must wait for my master to give explanations; and so must she. I ate what
I could, and then I hastened up stairs. I met Adèle leaving the school-room.
“Where are you going? It is time for lessons.”
 “Mr. Rochester has sent me away to the nursery.”
“Where is he?”
“In there,” pointing to the apartment she had left; and I went in, and there
he stood.
“Come, and bid me good-morning,” said he. I gladly advanced, and it was
not merely a cold word now, or even a shake of the hand that I received, but
an embrace and a kiss. It seemed natural ; it seemed genial to be so well
loved, so caressed, by him.
“Jane, you look blooming, and smiling, and pretty,” said he; “truly pretty
this morning. Is this my pale little elf? Is this my mustard-seed? This little
sunny-faced girl, with the dimpled cheek and rosy lips; the satin-smooth
hazel hair, and the radiant hazel eyes?” (I had green eyes, reader; but you
must excuse the mistake, for him they were new-dyed, I suppose.)
“It is Jane Eyre, sir.”
“Soon to be Jane Rochester,” he added; “in four weeks, Janet, not a day
more. Do you hear that?”
I did, and I could not quite comprehend it; it made me giddy. The feeling
the announcement sent through me was something stronger than was
consistent with joy, something that smote and stunned; it was, I think,
almost fear.
“You blushed, and now you are white, Jane; what is that for?”
“Because you gave me a new name—Jane Rochester; and it seems so
strange.”
“Yes, Mrs. Rochester,” said he; “young Mrs. Rochester; Fairfax
Rochester’s girl-bride.”
“It can never be, sir; it does not sound likely. Human beings never enjoy
complete happiness in this world. I was not born for a different destiny to
the rest of my species; to imagine such a lot befalling me is a fairy tale, a
daydream.”
“Which I can and will realize. I shall begin to-day. This morning I wrote
to my banker in London to send me certain jewels he has in his keeping,
heir-looms for the ladies of Thornfield. In a day or two I hope to pour them
into your lap; for every privilege, every attention, shall be yours, that I
would accord to a peer’s daughter, if about to marry her.”
“Oh, sir! never mind jewels! I don’t like to hear them spoken of. Jewels
for Jane Eyre sounds unnatural and strange; I would rather not have them.”
“I will myself put the diamond chain round your neck, and the circlet on
your forehead, which it will become; for nature, at least, has stamped her
patent of nobility on this brow, Jane; and I will clasp the bracelets on these
fine wrists, and load these fairy like fingers with rings.”
“No, no, sir! think of other subjects, and speak of other things, and in
another strain. Don’t address me as if I were a beauty; I am your plain,
Quakerish governess.”
“You are a beauty, in my eyes; and a beauty just after the desire of my
own heart, delicate and aerial.”
“Puny and insignificant, you mean. You are dreaming, sir—or, you are
sneering. For God’s sake, don’t be ironical!”
“I will make the world acknowledge you a beauty, too,” he went on, while
I really became uneasy at the strain he had adopted; because I felt he was
either deluding himself or trying to delude me. “I will attire my Jane in satin
and lace, and she shall have roses in her hair, and I will cover the head I
love best with a priceless veil.”
“And then you won’t know me, sir, and I shall not be your Jane Eyre any
longer, but an ape in a harlequin’s jacket—a jay in borrowed plumes. I
would as soon see you, Mr. Rochester, tricked out in stage trappings, as
myself clad in a court-lady’s robe; and I don’t call you handsome, sir,
though I love you most dearly—far too dearly to flatter you. Don’t flatter
me.”
He pursued his theme, however, without noticing my depre cation. “This
very day I shall take you in the carriage to Millcote, and you must choose
some dresses for yourself. I told you we should be married in four weeks.
The wedding is to take place quietly, in the church down below yonder; and
then I shall waft you away at once to town. After a brief stay there, I shall
bear my treasure to regions nearer the sun; to French vineyards and Italian
plains; and she shall see whatever is famous in old story and in modem
record; she shall taste, too, of the life of cities; and she shall learn to value
herself by just comparison with others.”
“Shall I travel? and with you, sir?”
“You shall sojourn at Paris, Rome, and Naples; at Florence, Venice, and
Vienna; all the ground I have wandered over shall be re-trodden by you;
wherever I stamped my hoof, your sylph’s foot shall step also. Ten years
since, I flew through Europe half mad, with disgust, hate, and rage as my
companions; now I shall revisit it healed and cleansed, with a very angel as
my comforter.”
I laughed at him as he said this. “I am not an angel,” I asserted; “and I
will not be one till I die; I will be myself, Mr. Rochester; you must neither
expect nor exact anything celestial of me, for you will not get it any more
than I shall get it of you, which I do not at all anticipate.”
“What do you anticipate of me?”
“For a little while you will, perhaps, be as you are now, a very little while;
and then you will turn cool; and then you will be capricious; and then you
will be stern, and I shall have much ado to please you; but when you get
well used to me, you will, perhaps, like me again, Like me, I say, not love
me. I suppose your love will effervesce in six months, or less. I have
observed in books written by men, that period assigned as the farthest to
which a husband’s ardor extends. Yet, after all, as a friend and companion, I
hope never to become quite distasteful to my dear master.”
“Distasteful! and like you again! I think I shall like you again and yet
again; and I will make you confess I do not only like, but love you—with
truth, fervor, constancy.”
“Yet, are you not capricious, sir?”
“To women who please me only by their faces, I am the very devil when I
find out they have neither souls nor hearts—when they open to me a
perspective of flatness, triviality, and, perhaps, imbecility, coarseness, and
ill-temper; but to the clear eye and eloquent tongue, to the soul made of fire,
and the character that bends but does not break—at once supple and stable,
tractable and consistent—I am ever tender and true.”
 “Had you ever experience of such a character, sir? Did you ever love such
a one?”
“I love it now.”
“But before me; if I, indeed, in any respect come up to that difficult
standard?”
“I never met your likeness, Jane; you please me, and you master me—you
seem to submit, and I like the sense of pliancy you impart; and while I am
twining the soft, silken skein round my finger, it sends a thrill up my arm to
my heart. I am influenced—conquered ; and the influence is sweeter than I
can express; and the conquest I undergo has a witchery beyond any triumph
I can win. Why do you smile, Jane? What does that inexplicable, that
uncanny turn of countenance mean?”
“I was thinking, sir (you will excuse the idea; it was involuntary) , I was
thinking of Hercules and Samson with their charm ers—”
“You were, you little, elfish—”
“Hush, sir! You don’t talk very wisely just now; any more than those
gentlemen acted very wisely. However, had they been married, they would,
no doubt, by their severity as husbands, have made up for their softness as
suitors; and so will you, I fear. I wonder how you will answer me a year
hence, should I ask a favor it does not suit your convenience or pleasure to
grant.”
“Ask me something now, Janet—the least thing; I desire to be entreated
—”
“Indeed, I will, sir; I have my petition all ready.”
“Speak! But if you look up and smile with that countenance, I shall swear
concession before I know to what, and that will make a fool of me.”
“Not at all, sir; I ask only this; don’t send for the jewels, and don’t crown
me with roses; you might as well put a border of gold lace round that plain
pocket-handkerchief you have there.”
“I might as well ‘gild refined gold.’60 I know it; your request is granted,
then—for the time. I will remand the order I despatched to my banker. But
you have not yet asked for anything; you have prayed a gift to be
withdrawn; try again.”
“Well, then, sir; have the goodness to gratify my curiosity, which is much
piqued on one point.”
He looked disturbed. “What? what?” he said, hastily. “Curiosity is a
dangerous petitioner; it is well I have not taken a vow to accord every
request—”
“But there can be no danger in complying with this, sir.”
“Utter it, Jane; but I wish that instead of a mere inquiry into, perhaps, a
secret, it was a wish for half my estate.”
“Now, King Ahasuerus!61 What do I want with half your estate? Do you
think I am a Jew-usurer, seeking good investment in land? I would much
rather have all your confidence. You will not exclude me from your
confidence, if you admit me to your heart?”
“You are welcome to all of my confidence that is worth having, Jane; but,
for God’s sake, don’t desire a useless burden! Don’t long for poison—don’t
turn out a downright Eve on my hands!”
“Why not, sir? You have just been telling me how much you like to be
conquered, and how pleasant over-persuasionfx is to you. Don’t you think I
had better take advantage of the confession, and begin and coax, and entreat
—even cry and be sulky, if necessary—for the sake of a mere essay of my
power?”
“I dare you to any such experiment. Encroach, presume, and the game is
up.”
“Is it, sir? You soon give in. How stern you look now! Your eyebrows
have become as thick as my finger, and your forehead resembles, what, in
some very astonishing poetry, I once saw styled, ‘a blue-piled thunder-loft.’
That will be your married look, sir, I suppose?”
“If that will be your married look, I, as a Christian, will soon give up the
notion of consorting with a mere sprite or salamander. But what had you to
ask, thing?—out with it.”
 “There, you are less than civil now; and I like rudeness a great deal better
than flattery. I had rather be a thing than an angel. This is what I have to
ask: Why did you take such pains to make me believe you wished to marry
Miss Ingram?”
“Is that all? Thank God, it is no worse!” And now he unknit his black
brows; looked down, smiling at me, and stroked my hair, as if well pleased
at seeing a danger averted. “I think I may confess,” he continued, “even
although I should make you a little indignant, Jane—and I have seen what a
fire-spirit you can be when you are indignant. You glowed in the cool
moonlight last night, when you mutinied against fate, and claimed your
rank as my equal. Janet, by-the-by, it was you who made me the offer.”
“Of course I did. But to the point, if you please, sir—Miss Ingram?”
“Well, I feigned courtship of Miss Ingram, because I wished to render you
as madly in love with me as I was with you; and I knew jealousy would be
the best ally I could call in for the furtherance of that end.”
“Excellent! Now you are small—not one whit bigger than the end of my
little finger. It was a burning shame, and a scandalous disgrace, to act in that
way. Did you think nothing of Miss Ingram’s feelings, sir?”
“Her feelings are concentrated in one—pride; and that needs humbling.
Were you jealous, Jane?”
“Never mind, Mr. Rochester; it is in no way interesting to you to know
that. Answer me truly once more. Do you think Miss Ingram will not suffer
from your dishonest coquetry? Won’t she feel forsaken and deserted?”
“Impossible!—when I told you how she, on the contrary, deserted me; the
idea of my insolvency cooled, or, rather, extinguished, her flame in a
moment.”
“You have a curious designing mind, Mr. Rochester. I am afraid your
principles on some points are eccentric.”
“My principles were never trained, Jane; they may have grown a little
awry for want of attention.”
“Once again, seriously. May I enjoy the great good that has been
vouchsafed to me, without fearing that any one else is suffering the bitter
pain I myself felt a while ago?”
“That you may, my good little girl; there is not another being in the world
has the same pure love for me as yourself—for I lay that pleasant unction to
my soul, Jane, a belief in your affection.” 62
I turned my lips to the hand that lay on my shoulder. I loved him very
much—more than I could trust myself to say—more than words had power
to express.
“Ask something more,” he said, presently; “it is my delight to be
entreated, and to yield.”
I was again ready with my request. “Communicate your intentions to Mrs.
Fairfax, sir; she saw me with you last night in the hall, and she was
shocked. Give her some explanation before I see her again. It pains me to
be misjudged by so good a woman.”
“Go to your room, and put on your bonnet,” he replied. “I mean you to
accompany me to Millcote this morning; and while you prepare for the
drive, I will enlighten the old lady’s understanding. Did she think, Janet,
you had given the world for love and considered it well lost?”63
“I believe she thought I had forgotten my station; and you yours, sir.”
“Station! station!—your station is in my heart, and on the necks of those
who would insult you, now or hereafter. Go.”
I was soon dressed; and when I heard Mr. Rochester quit Mrs. Fairfax’s
parlor, I hurried down to it. The old lady had been reading her morning
portion of Scripture—the lesson for the day; her Bible lay open before her,
and her spectacles were upon it. Her occupation, suspended by Mr.
Rochester’s announcement, seemed now forgotten; her eyes, fixed on the
blank wall opposite, expressed the surprise of a quiet mind, stirred by
unwonted tidings. Seeing me, she roused herself; she made a sort of effort
to smile, and framed a few words of congratulation; but the smile expired,
and the sentence was abandoned unfinished. She put up her spectacles, shut
the Bible, and pushed her chair back from the table.
“I feel so astonished,” she began, “I hardly know what to say to you, Miss
Eyre. I have surely not been dreaming, have I? Sometimes I half fall asleep
when I am sitting alone, and fancy things that have never happened. It has
seemed to me more than once, when I have been in a doze, that my dear
husband, who died fifteen years since, has come in and sat down beside me;
and that I have even heard him call me by name, Alice, as he used to do.
Now can you tell me whether it is actually true that Mr. Rochester has asked
you to marry him? Don’t laugh at me. But I really thought he came in here
five minutes ago, and said that in a month you would be his wife.”
“He has said the same thing to me,” I replied.
“He has! Do you believe him? Have you accepted him?”
“Yes.”
She looked at me bewildered.
“I could never have thought it. He is a proud man; all the Rochesters were
proud; and his father at least liked money. He, too, has always been called
careful. He means to marry you?”
“He tells me so.”
She surveyed my whole person; in her eyes I read that they had found no
charm powerful enough to solve the enigma.
“It passes me!” she continued; “but no doubt it is true, since you say so.
How it will answer I cannot tell; I really don’t know. Equality of position
and fortune is often advisable in such cases; and there are twenty years of
difference in your ages. He might almost be your father.”
“No, indeed, Mrs. Fairfax!” exclaimed I, nettled; “he is nothing like my
father! No one, who saw us together, would suppose it for an instant. Mr.
Rochester looks as young, and is as young, as some men at five-and-
twenty.”
“Is it really for love he is going to marry you?” she asked.
I was so hurt by her coldness and scepticism, that the tears rose to my
eyes.
“I am sorry to grieve you,” pursued the widow, “but you are so young and
so little acquainted with men, I wished to put you on your guard. It is an old
saying that ‘all is not gold that glitters’; and in this case I do fear there will
be something found to be different to what either you or I expect.”
 “Why? am I a monster?” I said; “is it impossible that Mr. Rochester
should have a sincere affection for me?”
“No, you are very well, and much improved of late; and Mr. Rochester, I
dare say, is fond of you. I have always noticed that you were a sort of pet of
his. There are times when, for your sake, I have been a little uneasy at his
marked preference, and have wished to put you on your guard; but I did not
like to suggest even the possibility of wrong. I knew such an idea would
shock, perhaps offend you; and you were so discreet, and so thoroughly
modest and sensible, I hoped you might be trusted to protect yourself. Last
night I cannot tell you what I suffered when I sought all over the house, and
could find you nowhere, nor the master either; and then, at twelve o‘clock,
saw you come in with him.”
“Well, never mind that now,” I interrupted, impatiently; “it is enough that
all was right.”
“I hope all will be right in the end,” she said; “but, believe me, you cannot
be too careful. Try and keep Mr. Rochester at a distance ; distrust yourself
as well as him.
Gentlemen in his station are not accustomed to marry their governesses.”
I was growing truly irritated; happily, Adèle ran in.
“Let me go—let me go to Millcote, too!” she cried. “Mr. Rochester won‘t,
though there is so much room in the new carriage. Beg him to let me go,
mademoiselle.”
“That I will, Adèle;” and I hastened away with her, glad to quit my
gloomy monitress. The carriage was ready; they were bringing it round to
the front, and my master was pacing the pavement, Pilot following him
backward and forward.
“Adèle may accompany us, may she not, sir?”
“I told her no. I’ll have no brats! I’ll have only you.”
“Do let her go, Mr. Rochester, if you please; it would be better.”
“Not it—she will be a restraint.”
He was quite peremptory, both in look and voice. The chill of Mrs.
Fairfax’s warnings, and the damp of her doubts, were upon me; something
of unsubstantiality and uncertainty had beset my hopes. I half lost the sense
of power over him. I was about mechanically to obey him, without further
remonstrance; but as he helped me into the carriage, he looked at my face.
“What is the matter?” he asked; “all the sunshine is gone. Do you really
wish the bairn to go? Will it annoy you if she is left behind?”
“I would far rather she went, sir.”
“Then off for your bonnet, and back, like a flash of lightning!” cried he to
Adèle.
She obeyed him with what speed she might.
“After all, a single morning’s interruption will not matter much,” said he,
“when I mean shortly to claim you, your thoughts, conversation, and
company, for life.”
Adèle, when lifted in, commenced kissing me, by way of expressing her
gratitude for my intercession; she was instantly stowed away into a corner
on the other side of him. She then peeped round to where I sat; so stern a
neighbor was too restrictive; to him, in his present fractious mood, she
dared whisper no observations, nor ask of him any information.
“Let her come to me,” I entreated; “she will, perhaps, trouble you, sir;
there is plenty of room on this side.”
He handed her over as if she had been a lap-dog; “I’ll send her to school
yet,” he said, but now he was smiling.
Adèle heard him, and asked if she was to go to school “sans
mademoiselle?”fy
“Yes,” he replied, “absolutely sans mademoiselle; for I am to take
mademoiselle to the moon, and there I shall seek a cave in one of the white
valleys among the volcano-tops, and mademoiselle shall live with me there,
and only me.”
“She will have nothing to eat—you will starve her,” observed Adèle.
“I shall gather manna for her morning and night; the plains and hill-sides
in the moon are bleached with manna, Adèle.”
“She will want to warm herself; what will she do for a fire?”
 “Fire rises out of the lunar mountains; when she is cold, I’ll carry her up
to a peak and lay her down on the edge of a crater.”
“Oh, qu‘elle y sera mal—peu comfortable!fz And her clothes, they will
wear out; how can she get new ones?”
Mr. Rochester professed to be puzzled. “Hem!” said he. “What would you
do, Adèle? Cudgel your brains for an expedient. How would a white or a
pink cloud answer for a gown, do you think? And one could cut a pretty
enough scarf out of a rainbow.”
“She is far better as she is,” concluded Adèle, after musing some time;
“besides, she would get tired of living with only you in the moon. If I were
mademoiselle, I would never consent to go with you.”
“She has consented—she has pledged her word.”
“But you can’t get her there; there is no road to the moon—it is all air,
and neither you nor she can fly.”
“Adèle, look at that field.” We were now outside Thornfield gates, and
bowling lightly along the smooth road to Millcote, where the dust was well
laid by the thunder-storm, and where the low hedges and lofty timber trees
on each side glistened green, and rain-refreshed.
“In that field, Adèle, I was walking late one evening about a fortnight
since—the evening of the day you helped me to make hay in the orchard
meadows; and as I was tired with raking swaths, I sat down to rest me on a
stile; and there I took out a little book and a pencil, and began to write about
a misfortune that befell me long ago, and a wish I had for happy days to
come; I was writing away very fast, though daylight was fading from the
leaf, when something came up the path and stopped two yards off me. I
looked at it. It was a little thing with a veil of gossamer on its head. I
beckoned it to come near me; it stood soon at my knee. I never spoke to it,
and it never spoke to me, in words; but I read its eyes, and it read mine; and
our speechless colloquy was to this effect:
“It was a fairy, and come from Elf-land, it said; and its errand was to
make me happy; I must go with it out of the common world to a lonely
place—such as the moon, for instance—and it nodded its head towards her
horn, rising over Hay-hill; it told me of the alabaster cave and silver vale
where we might live. I said I should like to go; but reminded it, as you did
me, that I had no wings to fly.
“ ‘Oh,’ returned the fairy, ‘that does not signify! Here is a talisman will
remove all difficulties;’ and she held out a pretty gold ring. ‘Put it,’ she said,
‘on the fourth finger of my left hand, and I am yours, and you are mine; and
we shall leave earth, and make our own heaven yonder.’ She nodded again
at the moon. The ring, Adèle, is in my breeches pocket under the disguise of
a sovereign; but I mean soon to change it to a ring again.”
“But what has mademoiselle to do with it? I don’t care for the fairy; you
said it was mademoiselle you would take to the moon—!”
“Mademoiselle is a fairy,” he said, whispering mysteriously. Whereupon I
told her not to mind his badinage; and she, on her part, evinced a fund of
genuine French scepticism; denominating Mr. Rochester “un vrai
menteur,”ga and assuring him that she made no account whatever of his
“Contes de fée,”gb and that “du reste, il n‘y avait pas de fees et quand
même il y en avait;”gc she was sure they would never appear to him, nor
ever give him rings, or offer to live with him in the moon.
The hour spent at Millcote was a somewhat harassing one to me. Mr.
Rochester obliged me to go to a certain silk warehouse; there I was ordered
to choose half a dozen dresses. I hated the business, I begged leave to defer
it; no—it should be gone through with now. By dint of entreaties expressed
in energetic whispers, I reduced the half-dozen to two; these, however, he
vowed he would select himself. With anxiety I watched his eye rove over
the gay stores; he fixed on a rich silk of the most brilliant amethyst dye, and
a superb pink satin. I told him, in a new series of whispers, that he might as
well buy me a gold gown and a silver bonnet at once; I should certainly
never venture to wear his choice. With infinite difficulty (for he was
stubborn as a stone) I persuaded him to make an exchange in favor of a
sober black satin and pearl-gray silk. “It might pass for the present,” he
said; but he would yet see me “glittering like a parterre.”gd
Glad was I to get him out of the silk warehouse, and then out of the
jeweller’s shop; the more he bought me, the more my cheek burned with a
sense of annoyance and degradation. As we reentered the carriage, and I sat
back feverish and fagged, I remembered what in the hurry of events, dark
and bright, I had wholly forgotten—the letter of my uncle, John Eyre, to
Mrs. Reed; his intention to adopt me and make me his testatrix. “It would,
indeed, be a relief,” I thought, “if I had ever so small an independency; I
never can bear being dressed like a doll by Mr. Rochester, or sitting like a
second Danaëge with the golden shower falling daily round me. I will write
to Madeira the moment I get home, and tell my Uncle John I am going to be
married, and to whom; if I had but a prospect of one day bringing Mr.
Rochester an accession of fortune, I could better endure to be kept by him
now.” And somewhat relieved by this idea (which I failed not to execute
that day), I ventured once more to meet my master’s and lover’s eye; which
most pertinaciously sought mine, though I averted both face and gaze. He
smiled; and I thought his smile was such as a sultan might, in a blissful and
fond moment, bestow on a slave his gold and gems had enriched; I crushed
his hand, which was ever hunting mine, vigorously, and thrust it back to
him, red with the passionate pressure.
“You need not look in that way,” I said; “if you do, I’ll wear nothing but
my old Lowood frocks to the end of the chapter. I’ll be married in this lilac
gingham—you may make a dressing-gown for yourself out of the pearl-
gray silk, and an infinite series of waistcoats out of the black satin.”
He chuckled; he rubbed his hands. “Oh, it is rich to see and hear her!” he
exclaimed. “Is she original? Is she piquant? I would not exchange this one
little English girl for the Grand Turk’s whole seraglio, gazelle eyes,
houriforms and all!”
The eastern allusion bit me again; “I’ll not stand you an inch in the stead
of a seraglio,” I said; “so don’t consider me an equivalent for one; if you
have a fancy for anything in that line, away with you, sir, to the bazaars of
Stamboul, without delay; and lay out in extensive slave-purchases some of
that spare cash you seem at a loss to spend satisfactorily here.”
“And what will you do, Janet, while I am bargaining for so many tons of
flesh and such an assortment of black eyes?”
“I’ll be preparing myself to go out as a missionary to preach liberty to
them that are enslaved—your harem inmates among the rest. I’ll get
admitted there, and I’ll stir up mutiny; and you, three-tailed bashawgf as
you are, sir, shall in a trice find yourself fettered among our hands; nor will
I, for one, consent to cut your bonds till you have signed a charter the most
liberal that despot ever yet conferred.”
“I would consent to be at your mercy, Jane.”
“I would have no mercy, Mr. Rochester, if you supplicated for it with an
eye like that. While you looked so, I should be certain that whatever charter
you might grant under coercion, your first act, when released, would be to
violate its conditions.”
“Why, Jane, what would you have? I fear you will compel me to go
through a private marriage ceremony, besides that performed at the altar.
You will stipulate, I see, for peculiar terms—what will they be?”
“I only want an easy mind, sir; not crushed by crowded obligations. Do
you remember what you said of Céline Varens?—of the diamonds, the
cashmeres, you gave her? I will not be your English Céline Varens. I shall
continue to act as Adèle’s governess; by that, I shall earn my board and
lodging, and thirty pounds a year besides. I’ll furnish my own wardrobe out
of that money, and you shall give me nothing, but—”
“Well, but what?”
“Your regard; and if I give you mine in return, that debt will be quit.”
“Well, for cool native impudence, and pure innate pride, you haven’t your
equal,” said he. “We are now approaching Thorn field. Will it please you to
dine with me to-day?” he asked, as we reentered the gates.
“No, thank you, sir.”
“And what for, ‘no, thank you?’ if one may inquire.”
“I never have dined with you, sir; and I see no reason why I should now;
till—”
“Till what? You delight in half phrases.”
“Till I can’t help it.”
“Do you suppose I eat like an ogre, or a ghoul, that you dread being the
companion of my repast?”
 “I have formed no suppositions on the subject, sir; but I want to go on as
usual for another month.”
“You will give up your governessing slavery at once.”
“Indeed! begging your pardon, sir, I shall not. I shall just go on with it as
usual. I shall keep out of your way all day, as I have been accustomed to do;
you may send for me in the evening, when you feel disposed to see me, and
I’ll come then; but at no other time.”
“I want a smoke, Jane, or a pinch of snuff, to comfort me under all this,
‘pour me donner une contenance,’gg as Adèle would say; and unfortunately,
I have neither my cigar-case nor my snuff-box. But listen—whisper—it is
your time, now, little tyrant, but it will be mine presently; and when once I
have fairly seized you, to have and to hold, I’ll just—figuratively speaking
—attach you to a chain like this” (touching his watch-guard). “Yes, bonny
wee thing, I’ll wear you in my bosom, lest my jewel I should tyne.”gh
He said this as he helped me to alight from the carriage; and while he
afterward lifted out Adèle, I entered the house and made good my retreat up
stairs.
He duly summoned me to his presence in the evening. I had prepared an
occupation for him; for I was determined not to spend the whole time in a
tête-à-tête conversation: I remembered his fine voice; I knew he liked to
sing—good singers generally do. I was no vocalist myself, and, in his
fastidious judgment, no musician either; but I delighted in listening when
the performance was good. No sooner had twilight, that hour of romance,
begun to lower her blue and starry banner over the lattice, than I rose,
opened the piano, and entreated him, for the love of Heaven, to give me a
song. He said I was a capricious witch, and that he would rather sing
another time; but I averred that no time was like the present.
“Did I like his voice?” he asked.
“Very much.” I was not fond of pampering that susceptible vanity of his;
but for once, and from motives of expediency, I would e‘en soothe and
stimulate it.
“Then, Jane, you must play the accompaniment.”
 “Very well, sir; I will try.”
I did try, but was presently swept off the stool and denominated “a little
bungler.” Being pushed unceremoniously to one side—which was precisely
what I wished—he usurped my place, and proceeded to accompany himself;
for he could play as well as sing. I hied me to the window-recess; and while
I sat there and looked out on the still trees and dim lawn, to a sweet air was
sung in mellow tones the following strain:
The truest love that ever heart
Felt at its kindled core
Did through each vein, in quickened start,
The tide of being pour.

Her coming was my hope each day,

Her parting was my pain;
The chance that did her steps delay
Was ice in every vein

I dreamed it would be nameless bliss,

As I loved, loved to be;
And to this object did I press
As blind as eagerly.

But wide as pathless was the space

That lay our lives between,
And dangerous as the foamy race
Of ocean-surges green.

And haunted as a robber path

Through wilderness or wood,
For Might and Right, and Woe and Wrath,
Between our spirits stood.
I dangers dared; I hinderance scorned;
I omens did defy;
Whatever menaced, harassed, warned,
I passed impetuous by.
On sped my rainbow, fast as light;
I flew as in a dream;
Far glorious rose upon my sight
That child of Shower and Gleam.

Still bright on clouds of suffering dim

Shines that soft solemn joy;
Nor care I now, how dense and grim
Disasters gather nigh:

I care not in this moment sweet,

Though all I have rushed o‘er
Should come, on pinion strong and fleet,
Proclaiming vengeance sore:

Though haughty Hate should strike me down,

Right, bar approach to me,
And grinding Might, with furious frown,
Swear endless enmity.

My love has placed her little hand

With noble faith in mine,
And vowed that wedlock’s sacred hand
Our natures shall entwine.

My love has sworn, with sealing kiss,

With me to live—to die;
 I have at last my nameless bliss:
As I love—loved am I!64
He rose and came toward me, and I saw his face all kindled, and his full
falcon-eye flashing, and tenderness and passion in every lineament. I
quailed momentarily—then I rallied. Soft scene, daring demonstration, I
would not have; and I stood in peril of both; a weapon of defence must be
prepared—I whetted my tongue; as he reached me, I asked with asperity,
“whom he was going to marry now?”
“That was a strange question to be put by his darling Jane.”
“Indeed! I considered it a very natural and necessary one; he had talked of
his future wife dying with him. What did he mean by such a pagan idea? I
had no intention of dying with him—he might depend on that.”
“Oh, all he longed, all he prayed for, was that I might live with him!
Death was not for such as I.”
“Indeed it was; I had as good a right to die when my time came as he had;
but I should bide that time, and not be hurried away in a suttee.”
“Would I forgive him for the selfish idea, and prove my pardon by a
reconciling kiss?”
“No, I would rather be excused.”
Here I heard myself apostrophized as a “hard little thing”; and it was
added, “Any other woman would have been melted to marrow at hearing
such stanzas crooned in her praise.”
I assured him I was naturally hard—very flinty, and that he would often
find me so; and that, moreover, I was determined to show him divers
rugged points in my character before the ensuing four weeks elapsed; he
should know fully what sort of a bargain he had made, while there was yet
time to rescind it.
“Would I be quiet, and talk rationally?”
“I would be quiet if he liked; and as to talking rationally, I flattered
myself I was doing that now.”
 He fretted, pished and pshawed. “Very good,” I thought; “you may fume
and fidget as you please, but this is the best plan to pursue with you, I am
certain. I like you more than I can say; but I’ll not sink into a bathos of
sentiment; and with this needle of repartee I’ll keep you from the edge of
the gulf too; and, moreover, maintain by its pungent aid that distance
between you and myself most conducive to our real mutual advantage.”
From less to more, I worked him up to considerable irritation; then, after
he had retired, in dudgeon, quite to the other end of the room, I got up, and
saying, “I wish you good-night, sir,” in my natural and wonted respectful
manner, I slipped out by the side-door and got away.
The system thus entered on, I pursued during the whole season of
probation; and with the best success. He was kept, to be sure, rather cross
and crusty; but on the whole I could see he was excellently entertained; and
that a lamblike submission and turtle-dove sensibility, while fostering his
despotism more, would have pleased his judgment, satisfied his common-
sense, and even suited his taste, less.
In other people’s presence I was, as formerly, deferential and quiet; any
other line of conduct being uncalled-for; it was only in the evening
conferences I thus thwarted and afflicted him. He continued to send for me
punctually the moment the clock struck seven; though when I appeared
before him now, he had no such honeyed terms as “love” and “darling” on
his lips: the best words at my service were “provoking puppet,” “malicious
elf,” “sprite,” “changeling,” etc. For caresses, too, I now got grimaces; for a
pressure of the hand, a pinch on the arm; for a kiss on the cheek, a severe
tweak of the ear. It was all right: at present I decidedly preferred these fierce
favors to anything more tender. Mrs. Fairfax, I saw, approved me: her
anxiety on my account vanished; therefore I was certain I did well.
Meantime, Mr. Rochester affirmed I was wearing him to skin and bone, and
threatened awful vengeance for my present conduct at some period fast
coming. I laughed in my sleeve at his menaces. “I can keep you in
reasonable check now,” I reflected; “and I don’t doubt to be able to do it
hereafter; if one expedient loses its virtue, another must be devised.”
Yet, after all, my task was not an easy one; often I would rather have
pleased than teased him. My future husband was becoming to me my whole
world, and more than the world—almost my hope of heaven. He stood
between me and every thought of religion, as an eclipse intervenes between
man and the broad sun. I could not, in those days, see God for his creature,
of whom I had made an idol.

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 Chapter XXV

The month of courtship had wasted; its very last hours were being
numbered. There was no putting off the day that advanced—the bridal day;
and all preparations for its arrival were complete. I, at least, had nothing
more to do. There were my trunks, packed, locked, corded, ranged in a row
along the wall of my little chamber; to-morrow, at this time, they will be far
on their road to London; and so should I (D.V.),gi or, rather, not I, but one
Jane Rochester, a person whom as yet I knew not. The cards of address
alone remained to nail on; they lay, four little squares, on the drawer. Mr.
Rochester had himself written the direction, “Mrs. Rochester, Hotel,
London,” on each; I could not persuade myself to affix them, or to have
them affixed. Mrs. Rochester! she did not exist; she would not be born till
to-morrow, some time after eight o‘clock A.M., and I would wait to be
assured she had come into the world alive, before I assigned to her all that
property. It was enough that, in yonder closet, opposite my dressing-table,
garments said to be hers had already displaced my black stuff Lowood frock
and straw bonnet; for not to me appertained that suit of wedding raiment—
the pearl-colored robe, the vapory veil, pendent from the usurped
portmanteau.gj I shut the closet to conceal the strange, wraith-like apparel it
contained, which, at this evening hour—nine o’clock—gave out certainly a
most ghostly shimmer through the shadow of my apartment. “I will leave
you by yourself, white dream,” I said; “I am feverish; I hear the wind
blowing, I will go out of doors and feel it.”
It was not only the hurry of preparation that made me feverish; not only
the anticipation of the great change—the new life which was to commence
to-morrow; both these circumstances had their share, doubtless, in
producing that restless, excited mood which hurried me forth at this late
hour into the darkening grounds, but a third cause influenced my mind more
than they.
 I had at heart a strange and anxious thought. Something had happened
which I could not comprehend. No one knew of or had seen the event but
myself; it had taken place the preceding night. Mr. Rochester, that night,
was absent from home, nor was he yet returned. Business had called him to
a small estate of two or three farms he possessed, thirty miles off—business
it was requisite he should settle in person, previous to his meditated
departure from England. I waited now his return, eager to disburden my
mind, and to seek of him the solution of the enigma that perplexed me. Stay
till he comes, reader; and, when I disclose my secret to him, you shall share
the confidence.
I sought the orchard, driven to its shelter by the wind, which all day had
blown strong and full from the south, without, however, bringing a speck of
rain. Instead of subsiding as night drew on, it seemed to augment its rush
and deepen its roar. The trees blew steadfastly one way, never writhing
round, and scarcely tossing back their boughs once in an hour, so
continuous was the strain bending their branchy heads northward. The
clouds drifted from pole to pole, fast following, mass on mass. No glimpse
of blue sky had been visible that July day.
It was not without a certain wild pleasure I ran before the wind, delivering
my trouble of mind to the measureless air-torrent thundering through space.
Descending the laurel-walk, I faced the wreck of the chestnut-tree. It stood
up, black and riven; the trunk, split down the centre, gaped ghastly. The
cloven halves were not broken from each other, for the firm base and strong
roots kept them unsundered below, though community of vitality was
destroyed—the sap could flow no more; their great boughs on each side
were dead, and next winter’s tempests would be sure to fell one or both to
earth; as yet, however, they might be said to form one tree—a ruin—but an
entire ruin.
“You did right to hold fast to each other,” I said, as if the monster splinters
were living things and could hear me. “I think, scathed as you look, and
charred and scorched, there must be a little sense of life in you yet, rising
out of that adhesion at the faithful, honest roots. You will never have green
leaves more—never more see birds making nests, and singing idyls in your
boughs; the time of pleasure and love is over with you; but you are not
desolate; each of you has a comrade to sympathize with him in his decay.”
As I looked up at them, the moon appeared momentarily in that part of the
sky which filled their fissure; her disk was blood-red and half overcast. She
seemed to throw on me one bewildered, dreary glance, and buried herself
again instantly in the deep drift of cloud. The wind fell, for a second, round
Thornfield; but far away, over wood and water, poured a wild, melancholy
wail. It was sad to listen to, and I ran off again.
Here and there I strayed through the orchard, gathering up the apples with
which the grass round the tree-roots was thickly strewed. Then I employed
myself in dividing the ripe from the unripe. I carried them into the house
and put them away in the store-room. Then I repaired to the library to
ascertain whether the fire was lighted; for, though summer, I knew on such
a gloomy evening Mr. Rochester would like to see a cheerful hearth when
he came in; yes, the fire had been kindled some time, and burned well. I
placed his arm-chair by the chimney-corner; I wheeled the table near it; I let
down the curtain, and had the candles brought in ready for lighting. More
restless than ever, when I had completed these arrangements I could not sit
still, nor even remain in the house. A little time-piece in the room and the
old clock in the hall simultaneously struck ten.
“How late it grows!” I said. “I will run down to the gates; it is moonlight
at intervals; I can see a good way on the road. He may be coming now, and
to meet him will save some minutes of suspense.”
The wind roared high in the great trees which embowered the gates; but
the road, as far as I could see, to the right hand and the left, was all still and
solitary; save for the shadows of clouds crossing it at intervals, as the moon
looked out, it was but a long, pale line, unvaried by one moving speck.
A puerile tear dimmed my eye while I looked—a tear of disappointment
and impatience; ashamed of it, I wiped it away. I lingered; the moon shut
herself wholly within her chamber, and drew close her curtain of dense
cloud; the night grew dark; rain came driving fast on the gale.
“I wish he would come! I wish he would come!” I exclaimed, seized with
hypochondriacgk foreboding. I had expected his arrival before tea; now it
was dark; what could keep him? Had an accident happened? The event of
last night again recurred to me. I interpreted it as a warning of disaster; I
feared my hopes were too bright to be realized; and I had enjoyed so much
bliss lately that I imagined my fortune had passed its meridian, and must
now decline.
“Well, I cannot return to the house,” I thought. “I cannot sit by the fireside
while he is abroad in inclement weather. Better tire my limbs than strain my
heart; I will go forward and meet him.”
I set out. I walked fast, but not far. Ere I had measured a quarter of a mile,
I heard the tramp of hoofs. A horseman came on, full gallop—a dog ran by
his side. Away with evil presentiment! It was he. Here he was, mounted on
Mesrour, followed by Pilot. He saw me, for the moon had opened a blue
field in the sky, and rode in it watery bright. He took his hat off and waved
it round his head. I now ran to meet him.
“There!” he exclaimed, as he stretched out his hand and bent from the
saddle. “You can’t do without me, that is evident. Step on my boot-toe; give
me both hands; mount!”
I obeyed. Joy made me agile; I sprung up before him. A hearty kissing I
got for welcome, and some boastful triumph, which I swallowed as well as I
could. He checked himself in his exultation to demand, “But is there
anything the matter, Janet, that you come to meet me at such an hour? Is
there anything wrong?”
“No; but I thought you would never come. I could not bear to wait in the
house for you, especially with this rain and wind.”
“Rain and wind indeed! Yes, you are dripping like a mermaid. Pull my
cloak round you; but I think you are feverish, Jane; both your cheek and
hand are burning hot. I ask again, is there anything the matter?”
“Nothing, now; I am neither afraid nor unhappy.”
“Then you have been both?”
“Rather—but I’ll tell you all about it by and by, sir; and I dare say you
will only laugh at me for my pains.”
“I’ll laugh at you heartily when to-morrow is past; till then I dare not; my
prize is not certain. This is you, who have been as slippery as an eel this last
month, and as thorny as a brier-rose? I could not lay a finger anywhere but I
was pricked; and now I seem to have gathered up a stray lamb in my arms;
you wandered out of the fold to seek your shepherd; did you, Jane?”
“I wanted you; but don’t boast. Here we are at Thornfield; now let me get
down.”
He landed me on the pavement. As John took his horse and he followed
me into the hall, he told me to make haste and put something dry on, and
then to return to him in the library; and he stopped me, as I made for the
stair-case, to extort a promise that I would not be long; nor was I long; in
five minutes I rejoined him. I found him at supper.
“Take a seat, and bear me company, Jane; please God, it is the last meal
but one you will eat at Thornfield Hall for a long time.”
I sat down near him, but told him I could not eat.
“Is it because you have the prospect of a journey before you, Jane? Is it
the thoughts of going to London that takes away your appetite?”
“I cannot see my prospects clearly to-night, sir; and I hardly know what
thoughts I have in my head. Everything in life seems unreal.”
“Except me; I am substantial enough—touch me.”
“You, sir, are the most phantom-like of all; you are a mere dream.”
He held out his hand, laughing. “Is that a dream?” said he, placing it close
to my eyes. He had a rounded, muscular, and vigorous hand, as well as a
long, strong arm.
“Yes; though I touch it, it is a dream,” said I, as I put it down from before
my face. “Sir, have you finished supper?”
“Yes, Jane.”
I rung the bell, and ordered away the tray. When we were again alone, I
stirred the fire, and then took a low seat at my master’s knee.
“It is near midnight,” I said.
“Yes; but remember, Jane, you promised to wake with me the night before
my wedding.”
“I did; and I will keep my promise, for an hour or two at least; I have no
wish to go to bed.”
 “Are all your arrangements complete?”
“All, sir.”
“And on my part, likewise,” he returned. “I have settled everything; and
we shall leave Thornfield to-morrow, within half an hour after our return
from church.”
“Very well, sir.”
“With what an extraordinary smile you uttered that word, ‘very well,’
Jane! What a bright spot of color you have on each cheek! and how
strangely your eyes glitter! Are you well?”
“I believe I am.”
“Believe! What is the matter? Tell me what you feel.”
“I could not, sir: no words could tell you what I feel. I wish this present
hour would never end; who knows with what fate the next may come
charged?”
“This is hypochondria, Jane. You have been over-excited or over-
fatigued.”
“Do you, sir, feel calm and happy?”
“Calm? no; but happy—to the heart’s core.”65
I looked up at him to read the signs of bliss in his face; it was ardent and
flushed.
“Give me your confidence, Jane,” he said; “relieve your mind of any
weight that oppresses it, by imparting it to me. What do you fear?—that I
shall not prove a good husband?”
“It is the idea farthest from my thoughts.”
“Are you apprehensive of the new sphere you are about to enter? of the
life into which you are passing?”
“No.”
“You puzzle me, Jane; your look and tone of sorrowful audacity perplex
and pain me. I want an explanation.”
“Then, sir, listen. You were from home last night?”
 “I was; I know that; and you hinted a while ago at something which had
happened in my absence—nothing, probably, of consequence; but, in short,
it has disturbed you. Let me hear it. Mrs. Fairfax has said something,
perhaps? or you have overheard the servants talk? Your sensitive self-
respect has been wounded?”
“No, sir.” It struck twelve—I waited till the time-piece had concluded its
silver chime, and the clock its hoarse, vibrating stroke, and then I
proceeded.
“All day, yesterday, I was very busy, and very happy in my ceaseless
bustle; for I am not, as you seem to think, troubled by any haunting fears
about the new sphere, et cetera; I think it a glorious thing to have the hope
of living with you, because I love you. No, sir, don’t caress me now—let
me talk undisturbed. Yesterday I trusted well in Providence, and believed
that events were working together for your good and mine;66 it was a fine
day, if you recollect—the calmness of the air and sky forbade
apprehensions respecting your safety or comfort on your journey. I walked
a little while on the pavement after tea, thinking of you; and I beheld you in
imagination so near me, I scarcely missed your actual presence. I thought of
the life that lay before me—your life, sir—an existence more expansive and
stirring than my own; as much more so as the depths of the sea to which the
brook runs are than the shallows of its own strait channel. I wondered why
moralists call this world a dreary wilderness; for me it blossomed like a
rose.67 Just at sunset, the air turned cold and the sky cloudy; I went in.
Sophie called me up stairs to look at my wedding-dress, which they had just
brought; and under it in the box I found your present—the veil which, in
your princely extravagance, you sent for from London; resolved, I suppose,
since I would not have jewels, to cheat me into accepting something as
costly. I smiled as I unfolded it, and devised how I would tease you about
your aristocratic tastes, and your efforts to mask your plebeian bride in the
attributes of a peeress. I thought how I would carry down to you the square
of unembroidered blondgl I had myself prepared as a covering for my low-
born head, and ask if that was not good enough for a woman who could
bring her husband neither fortune, beauty, nor connections. I saw plainly
how you would look; and heard your impetuous republican gm answers,
and your haughty disavowal of any necessity on your part to augment your
wealth, or elevate your standing, by marrying either a purse or a coronet.”
“How well you read me, you witch!” interposed Mr. Rochester; “but what
did you find in the veil besides its embroidery? Did you find poison, or a
dagger, that you look so mournful now?”
“No, no, sir; besides the delicacy and richness of the fabric, I found
nothing save Fairfax Rochester’s pride; and that did not scare me, because I
am used to the sight of the demon. But, sir, as it grew dark, the wind rose; it
blew yesterday evening, not as it blows now, wild and high, but ‘with a
sullen, moaning sound,’ far more eerie.68 I wished you were at home. I
came into this room, and the sight of the empty chair and fireless hearth
chilled me. For some time after I went to bed I could not sleep—a sense of
anxious excitement distressed me. The gale, still rising, seemed to my ear to
muffle a mournful undersound; whether in the house or abroad I could not
at first tell, but it recurred, doubtful yet doleful, at every lull; at last I made
out it must be some dog howling at a distance. I was glad when it ceased.
On sleeping, I continued in dreams the idea of a dark and gusty night. I
continued also the wish to be with you and experienced a strange, regretful
consciousness of some barrier dividing us. During all my first sleep, I was
following the windings of an unknown road; total obscurity environed me;
rain pelted me; I was burdened with the charge of a little child;69 a very
small creature, too young and feeble to walk, and which shivered in my
cold arms, and wailed piteously in my ear. I thought, sir, that you were on
the road a long way before me; and I strained every nerve to overtake you,
and made effort on effort to utter your name and entreat you to stop, but my
movements were fettered, and my voice still died away inarticulate; while
you, I felt, withdrew further and further every moment.”
“And these dreams weigh on your spirits now, Jane, when I am close to
you? Little nervous subject! Forget visionary woe, and think only of real
happiness! You say you love me, Janet; yes, I will not forget that; and you
cannot deny it. Those words did not die inarticulate on your lips. I heard
them clear and soft; a thought too solemn, perhaps, but sweet as music, ‘I
think it is a glorious thing to have the hope of living with you, Edward,
because I love you.’ Do you love me, Jane? repeat it.”
 “I do, sir, I do, with my whole heart.”
“Well,” he said, after some minutes’ silence, “it is strange; but that
sentence has penetrated my breast painfully. Why? I think because you said
it with such an earnest, religious energy; and because your upward gaze at
me now is the very sublime of faith, truth, and devotion; it is too much as if
some spirit were near me. Look wicked, Jane, as you know well how to
look; coin one of your wild, sly, provoking smiles; tell me you hate me—
tease me, vex me; do anything but move me; I would rather be incensed
than saddened.”
“I will tease you and vex you to your heart’s content when I have finished
my tale; but hear me to the end.”
“I thought, Jane, you had told me all. I thought I had found the source of
your melancholy in a dream!”
I shook my head. “What! is there more? But I will not believe it to be
anything important. I warn you of incredulity beforehand. Go on.”
The disquietude of his air, the somewhat apprehensive impatience of his
manner, surprised me; but I proceeded.
“I dreamed another dream, sir; that Thornfield Hall was a dreary ruin, the
retreat of bats and owls. I thought that of all the stately front nothing
remained but a shell-like wall, very high and very fragile-looking. I
wandered, on a moonlight night, through the grass-grown inclosure within;
here I stumbled over a marble hearth, and there over a fallen fragment of
cornice. Wrapped up in a shawl, I still carried the unknown little child; I
might not lay it down anywhere; however tired were my arms—however
much its weight impeded my progress, I must retain it. I heard the gallop of
a horse at a distance on the road; I was sure it was you; and you were
departing for many years, and for a distant country. I climbed the thin wall
with frantic, perilous haste, eager to catch one glimpse of you from the top;
the stones rolled from under my feet, the ivy branches I grasped gave way,
the child clung round my neck in terror, and almost strangled me; at last I
gained the summit. I saw you like a speck on a white track, lessening every
moment. The blast blew so strong I could not stand. I sat down on the
narrow ledge; I hushed the scared infant in my lap; you turned an angle of
the road; I bent forward to take a last look; the wall crumbled; I was shaken;
the child rolled from my knee; I lost my balance, fell, and woke.”
“Now, Jane, that is all.”
“All the preface, sir; the tale is yet to come. On waking, a gleam dazzled
my eyes; I thought—oh, it is daylight! But I was mistaken; it was only
candle-light. Sophie, I supposed, had come in. There was a light on the
dressing-table, and the door of the closet, where, before going to bed, I had
hung my wedding-dress and veil, stood open; I heard a rustling there. I
asked, ‘Sophie, what are you doing?’ No one answered; but a form emerged
from the closet; it took the light, held it aloft, and surveyed the garments
pendent from the portmanteau. ‘Sophie! Sophie!’ I again cried; and still it
was silent. I had risen up in bed, I bent forward; first surprise, then
bewilderment, came over me; and then my blood crept cold through my
veins. Mr. Rochester, this was not Sophie, it was not Leah, it was not Mrs.
Fairfax; it was not—no, I was sure of it, and am still—it was not even that
strange woman, Grace Poole.”
“It must have been one of them,” interrupted my master.
“No, sir, I solemnly assure you to the contrary. The shape standing before
me had never crossed my eyes within the precincts of Thornfield Hall
before; the height, the contour, were new to me.”
“Describe it, Jane.”
“It seemed, sir, a woman, tall and large, with thick and dark hair hanging
long down her back. I know not what dress she had on; it was white and
straight, but whether gown, sheet, or shroud, I cannot tell.”
“Did you see her face?”
“Not at first. But presently she took my veil from its place; she held it up,
gazed at it long, and then she threw it over her own head, and turned to the
mirror. At that moment I saw the reflection of the visage and features quite
distinctly in the dark, oblong glass.”
“And how were they?”
“Fearful and ghastly to me—oh, sir, I never saw a face like it! It was a
discolored face—it was a savage face. I wish I could forget the roll of the
red eyes and the fearful blackened inflation of the lineaments!”
“Ghosts are usually pale, Jane.”
“This, sir, was purple; the lips were swelled and dark; the brow furrowed;
the black eyebrows widely raised over the bloodshot eyes. Shall I tell you
of what it reminded me?”
“You may.”
“Of the foul German spectre, the Vampyre.”
“Ah! What did it do?”
“Sir, it removed my veil from its gauntgn head, rent it in two parts, and,
flinging both on the floor, trampled on them.”
“Afterward?”
“It drew aside the window-curtain and looked out; perhaps it saw dawn
approaching, for, taking the candle, it retreated to the door. Just at my
bedside the figure stopped; the fiery eye glared upon me—she thrust up her
candle close to my face, and extinguished it under my eyes. I was aware her
wild visage flamed over mine, and I lost consciousness; for the second time
in my life—only the second time—I became insensible from terror.”
“Who was with you when you revived?”
“No one, sir, but the broad day. I rose, bathed my head and face in water,
drank a long draught; felt that though enfeebled, I was not ill, and
determined that to none but you would I impart this vision. Now, sir, tell
who and what that woman was?”
“The creature of an over-stimulated brain; that is certain. I must be careful
of you, my treasure; nerves like yours were not made for rough handling.”
“Sir, depend on it, my nerves were not in fault; the thing was real; the
transaction actually took place.”
“And your previous dreams, were they real, too? Is Thornfield Hall a
ruin? Am I severed from you by insuperable obstacles? Am I leaving you
without a tear, without a kiss, without a word?”
“Not yet.”
 “Am I about to do it? Why the day has already commenced which is to
bind us indissolubly; and when we are once united, there shall be no
recurrence of these mental terrors, I guarantee that.”
“Mental terrors, sir! I wish I could believe them to be only such; I wish it
more now than ever, since even you cannot explain to me the mystery of
that awful visitant.”
“And, since I cannot do it, Jane, it must have been unreal.”
“But, sir, when I said so to myself on rising this morning, and when I
looked round the room to gather courage and comfort from the cheerful
aspect of each familiar object in full day-light, there, on the carpet, I saw
what gave the distinct lie to my hypothesis—the veil, torn from top to
bottom in two halves!”
I felt Mr. Rochester start and shudder; he hastily flung his arms around
me: “Thank God!” he exclaimed, “that, if anything malignant did come near
you last night, it was only the veil that was harmed. Oh, to think what might
have happened!”
He drew his breath short, and strained me so close to him I could scarcely
pant. After some minutes’ silence, he continued cheerily,
“Now, Janet, I’ll explain to you all about it. It was half dream, half reality;
a woman did, I doubt not, enter your room: and that woman was, must have
been, Grace Poole. You call her a strange being yourself; from all you
know, you have reason so to call her. What did she do to me? what to
Mason? In a state between sleeping and waking, you noticed her entrance
and her actions; but feverish, almost delirious, as you were, you ascribed to
her a goblin appearance different from her own; the long dishevelled hair,
the swelled black face, the exaggerated stature, were fragments of
imagination, results of nightmare; the spiteful tearing of the veil was real,
and it is like her. I see you would ask why I keep such a woman in my
house; when we have been married a year and a day I will tell you, but not
now. Are you satisfied, Jane? Do you accept my solution of the mystery?”
I reflected, and in truth it appeared to me the only possible one; satisfied I
was not, but to please him I endeavored to appear so; relieved, I certainly
did feel; so I answered him with a contented smile. And now, as it was long
past one, I prepared to leave him.
“Does not Sophie sleep with Adèle in the nursery?” he asked, as I lighted
my candle.
“Yes, sir.”
“And there is room enough in Adèle’s little bed for you. You must share it
with her to-night, Jane; it is no wonder that the incident you have related
should make you nervous, and I would rather you did not sleep alone;
promise me to go to the nursery.”
“I shall be very glad to do so, sir.”
“And fasten the door securely on the inside. Wake Sophie when you go up
stairs, under pretence of requesting her to rouse you in good time to-
morrow; for you must be dressed and have finished breakfast before eight.
And now, no more sombre thoughts; chase dull care away, Janet. Don’t you
hear to what soft whispers the wind has fallen? and there is no more beating
of rain against the window-panes; look here (he lifted up the curtain), it is a
lovely night!”
It was. Half heaven was pure and stainless: the clouds, now trooping
before the wind, which had shifted to the west, were filing off eastward in
long, silvered columns. The moon shone peacefully.
“Well,” said Mr. Rochester, gazing inquiringly into my eyes, “how is my
Janet now?”
“The night is serene, sir; and so am I.”
“And you will not dream of separation and sorrow tonight, but of happy
love and blissful union.”
This prediction was but half fulfilled; I did not indeed dream of sorrow,
but as little did I dream of joy, for I never slept at all. With little Adèle in
my arms, I watched the slumber of childhood, so tranquil, so passionless, so
innocent, and waited for the coming day; all my life was awake and astir in
my frame; and as soon as the sun rose, I rose too. I remember Adèle clung
to me as I left her; I remember I kissed her as I loosened her little hands
from my neck, and I cried over her with strange emotion, and quitted her
because I feared my sobs would break her still sound repose. She seemed
the emblem of my past life, and he I was now to array myself to meet, the
dread, but adored, type of my unknown future day.

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 Chapter XXVI

Sophie came at seven to dress me; she was very long indeed in
accomplishing her task, so long that Mr. Rochester, grown, I suppose,
impatient of my delay, sent up to ask why I did not come. She was just
fastening my veil (the plain square of blond, after all) to my hair with a
brooch; I hurried from under her hands as soon as I could.
“Stop!” she cried in French. “Look at yourself in the mirror; you have not
taken one peep.”
So I turned at the door; I saw a robed and veiled figure, so unlike my
usual self that it seemed almost the image of a stranger. “Jane!” called a
voice, and I hastened down. I was received at the foot of the stairs by Mr.
Rochester.
“Lingerer,” he said, “my brain is on fire with impatience, and you tarry so
long!”
He took me into the dining-room, surveyed me keenly all over,
pronounced me “fair as a lily, and not only the pride of his life, but the
desire of his eyes,” and then telling me he would give me but ten minutes to
eat some breakfast, he rang the bell. One of his lately-hired servants, a
footman, answered it.
“Is John getting the carriage ready?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Is the luggage brought down?”
“They are bringing it down now, sir.”
“Go you to the church; see if Mr. Wood (the clergyman) and the clerk are
there; return and tell me.”
The church, as the reader knows, was but just beyond the gates; the
footman soon returned.
 “Mr. Wood is in the vestry, sir, putting on his surplice.”
“And the carriage?”
“The horses are harnessing.”
“We shall not want it to go to church, but it must be ready the moment we
return; all the boxes and luggage arranged and strapped on, and the
coachman in his seat.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Jane, are you ready?”
I rose. There were no groomsmen, no bridesmaids, no relatives, to wait
for or marshal; none but Mr. Rochester and I. Mrs. Fairfax stood in the hall
as we passed. I would fain have spoken to her, but my hand was held by a
grasp of iron; I was hurried along by a stride I could hardly follow; and to
look at Mr. Rochester’s face was to feel that not a second of delay would be
tolerated for any purpose. I wonder what other bridegroom ever looked as
he did—so bent up to a purpose, so grimly resolute; or who, under such
steadfast brows, ever revealed such flaming and flashing eyes.
I know not whether the day was fair or foul: in descending the drive, I
gazed neither on sky nor earth; my heart was with my eyes—and both
seemed migrated into Mr. Rochester’s frame. I wanted to see the invisible
thing on which, as we went along, he appeared to fasten a glance fierce and
fell. I wanted to feel the thoughts whose force he seemed breasting and
resisting.
At the church-yard wicket he stopped; he discovered I was quite out of
breath. “Am I cruel in my love?” he said. “Delay an instant; lean on me,
Jane.”
And now I can recall the picture of the gray old house of God rising calm
before me, of a rook wheeling round the steeple, of a ruddy morning sky
beyond. I remember something, too, of the green grave-mounds; and I have
not forgotten, either, two figures of strangers, straying among the low
hillocks, and reading the mementos graven on the few mossy head-stones. I
noticed them because, as they saw us, they passed round to the back of the
church; and I doubted not they were going to enter by the side-aisle door,
and witness the ceremony. By Mr. Rochester they were not observed; he
was earnestly looking at my face, from which the blood had, I dare say,
momentarily fled; for I felt my forehead dewy, and my cheeks and lips cold.
When I rallied, which I soon did, he walked gently with me up the path to
the porch.
We entered the quiet and humble temple; the priest waited in his white
surplice at the lowly altar, the clerk beside him. All was still; two shadows
only moved in a remote corner. My conjecture had been correct; the
strangers had slipped in before us, and they now stood by the vault of the
Rochesters, their backs toward us, viewing through the rails the old, time-
stained marble tomb, where a kneeling angel guarded the remains of Damer
de Rochester, slain at Marston Moor in the time of the civil wars, and of
Elizabeth, his wife.70
Our place was taken at the communion-rails. Hearing a cautious step
behind me, I glanced over my shoulder; one of the strangers—a gentleman,
evidently—was advancing up the chancel. The service began. The
explanation of the intent of matrimony was gone through; and then the
clergyman came a step further forward, and, bending slightly toward Mr.
Rochester, went on.
“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; for be ye well assured that so many as are
coupled together otherwise than God’s word doth allow, are not joined
together by God, neither is their matrimony lawful.”
He paused, as the custom is. When is the pause after that sentence ever
broken by reply! Not, perhaps, once in a hundred years. And the clergyman,
who had not lifted his eyes from his book, and had held his breath but for a
moment, was proceeding; his hand was already stretched toward Mr.
Rochester, as his lips unclosed to ask, “Wilt thou have this woman for thy
wedded wife?”—when a distinct and near voice said—
“The marriage cannot go on; I declare the existence of an impediment.”
The clergyman looked up at the speaker, and stood mute; the clerk did the
same; Mr. Rochester moved slightly, as if an earthquake had rolled under
his feet; taking a firmer footing, and not turning his head or eyes, he said,
“Proceed.”
Profound silence fell when he had uttered that word, with deep but low
intonation. Presently Mr. Wood said—
“I cannot proceed without some investigation into what has been asserted,
and evidence of its truth or falsehood.”
“The ceremony is quite broken off,” subjoined the voice behind us. “I am
in a condition to prove my allegation: an insuperable impediment to this
marriage exists.”
Mr. Rochester heard, but heeded not; he stood stubborn and rigid, making
no movement but to possess himself of my hand. What a hot and strong
grasp he had!—and how like quarried marble was his pale, firm, massive
front at this moment! How his eyes shone, still watchful, and yet wild,
beneath!
Mr. Wood seemed at a loss. “What is the nature of the impediment ?” he
asked. “Perhaps it may be got over—explained away?”
“Hardly,” was the answer. “I have called it insuperable, and I speak
advisedly.”
The speaker came forward, and leaned on the rails. He continued, uttering
each word distinctly, calmly, steadily, but not loudly,
“It simply consists in the existence of a previous marriage; Mr. Rochester
has a wife now living.”
My nerves vibrated to these low-spoken words as they had never vibrated
to thunder—my blood felt their subtile violence as it had never felt frost or
fire; but I was collected, and in no danger of swooning. I looked at Mr.
Rochester; I made him look at me. His whole face was colorless rock; his
eye was both spark and flint. He disavowed nothing; he seemed as if he
would defy all things. Without speaking, without smiling, without seeming
to recognize in me a human being, he only twined my waist with his arm,
and riveted me to his side.
“Who are you?” he asked of the intruder.
“My name is Briggs—a solicitor of street, London.”
 “And you would thrust on me a wife?”
“I would remind you of your lady’s existence, sir; which the law
recognizes, if you do not.”
“Favor me with an account of her—with her name, her parentage, her
place of abode.”
“Certainly.” Mr. Briggs calmly took a paper from his pocket, and read out,
in a sort of official, nasal voice—
“I affirm and can prove that on the 20th of October, A.D.—(a date of
fifteen years back), Edward Fairfax Rochester, of Thornfield Hall, in the
county of—, and of Ferndean Manor, in—shire, England, was married to
my sister, Bertha Antoinetta Mason, daughter of Jonas Mason, merchant,
and of Antoinetta his wife, a Creolego—at church, Spanish Town, Jamaica.
The record of the marriage will be found in the register of that church—a
copy of it is now in my possession. Signed, Richard Mason.”
“That—if a genuine document—may prove I have been married, but it
does not prove that the woman mentioned therein as my wife is still living.”
“She was living three months ago,” returned the lawyer.
“How do you know?”
“I have a witness to the fact, whose testimony even you, sir, will scarcely
controvert.”
“Produce him—or go to hell.”
“I will produce him first—he is on the spot; Mr. Mason, have the
goodness to step forward.”
Mr. Rochester, on hearing the name, set his teeth; he experienced, too, a
sort of strong convulsive quiver; near to him as I was, I felt the spasmodic
movement of fury or despair run through his frame. The second stranger,
who had hitherto lingered in the background, now drew near; a pale face
looked over the solicitor’s shoulder—yes, it was Mason himself. Mr.
Rochester turned and glared at him. His eye, as I have often said, was a
black eye; it had now a tawny, nay, a bloody light, in its gloom; and his face
flushed—olive cheek and hueless forehead received a glow, as from
spreading, ascending heart-fire; and he stirred, lifted his strong arm—he
could have struck Mason—dashed him on the church floor—shocked by
ruthless blow the breath from his body; but Mason shrank away and cried
faintly, “Good God!” Contempt fell cool on Mr. Rochester—his passion
died as if a blight had shrivelled it up; he only asked, “What have you to
say?”
An inaudible reply escaped Mason’s white lips.
“The devil is in it if you cannot answer distinctly. I again demand, what
have you to say?”
“Sir—sir—” interrupted the clergyman, “do not forget you are in a sacred
place.” Then addressing Mason, he inquired gently, “Are you aware, sir,
whether or not this gentleman’s wife is still living?”
“Courage,” urged the lawyer; “speak out.”
“She is now living at Thornfield Hall,” said Mason, in more articulate
tones; “I saw her there last April. I am her brother.”
“At Thornfield Hall!” ejaculated the clergyman. “Impossible! I am an old
resident in this neighborhood, sir, and I never heard of a Mrs. Rochester at
Thornfield Hall.”
I saw a grim smile contort Mr. Rochester’s lip, and he muttered—
“No—by God! I took care that none should hear of it—or of her under
that name.” He mused—for ten minutes he held counsel with himself; he
formed his resolve, and announced it—
“Enough—all shall bolt out at once, like the bullet from the barrel. Wood,
close your book and take off your surplice; John Green (to the clerk), leave
the church; there will be no wedding to-day.” The man obeyed.
Mr. Rochester continued, hardily and recklessly: “Bigamy is an ugly
word! I meant, however, to be a bigamist; but fate has out manoeuvred me,
or Providence has checked me—perhaps the last. I am little better than a
devil at this moment; and, as my pastor there would tell me, deserve, no
doubt, the sternest judgments of God, even to the quenchless fire and
deathless worm.71 Gentlemen, my plan is broken up! what this lawyer and
his client say is true; I have been married; and the woman to whom I was
married lives! You say you never heard of a Mrs. Rochester at the house up
yonder, Wood; but I dare say you have many a time inclined your ear to
gossip about the mysterious lunatic kept there under watch and ward. Some
have whispered to you that she is my bastard half-sister; some, my cast-off
mistress; I now inform you that she is my wife, whom I married fifteen
years ago—Bertha Mason by name; sister of this resolute personage, who is
now, with his quivering limbs and white cheeks, showing you what a stout
heart men may bear. Cheer up, Dick! never fear me! I’d almost as soon
strike a woman as you. Bertha Mason is mad; and she came of a mad family
—idiots and maniacs through three generations!72 Her mother, the Creole,
was both a madwoman and a drunkard! as I found out after I had wed the
daughter; for they were silent on family secrets before. Bertha, like a dutiful
child, copied her parent in both points. I had a charming partner—pure,
wise, modest! You can fancy that I was a happy man! I went through rich
scenes! Oh! my experience has been heavenly, if you only knew it! But I
owe you no further explanation. Briggs, Wood, Mason—I invite you all to
come up to the house and visit Mrs. Poole’s patient, and my wife! You shall
see what sort of a being I was cheated into espousing, and judge whether or
not I had a right to break the compact, and seek sympathy with something at
least human. This girl,” he continued, looking at me, “knew no more than
you, Wood, of the disgusting secret. She thought all was fair and legal; and
never dreamed she was going to be entrapped into a feigned union with a
defrauded wretch, already bound to a bad, mad, and em bruted partner!
Come, all of you, follow!”
Still holding me fast, he left the church; the three gentlemen came after.
At the front door of the hall we found the carriage.
“Take it back to the coach-house, John,” said Mr. Rochester, coolly; “it
will not be wanted to-day.”
At our entrance, Mrs. Fairfax, Adèle, Sophie, Leah, advanced to meet and
greet us.
“To the right-about—every soul!” cried the master. “Away with your
congratulations! Who wants them? Not I! They are fifteen years too late!”
He passed on and ascended the stairs, still holding my hand, and still
beckoning the gentlemen to follow him, which they did. We mounted the
first stair-case, passed up the gallery, proceeded to the third story. The low
black door, opened by Mr. Rochester’s master-key, admitted us to the
tapestried room, with its great bed, and its pictorial cabinet.
“You know this place, Mason,” said our guide. “She bit and stabbed you
here.”
He lifted the hangings from the wall, uncovering the second door. This,
too, he opened. In a room without a window, there burned a fire, guarded by
a high and strong fender, and a lamp suspended from the ceiling by a chain.
Grace Poole bent over the fire, apparently cooking something in a sauce-
pan. In the deep shade, at the further end of the room, a figure ran backward
and forward. What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at
first sight, tell. It grovelled, seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled
like some strange wild animal; but it was covered with clothing, and a
quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face.
“Good-morrow, Mrs. Poole,” said Mr. Rochester. “How are you? and how
is your charge to-day?”
“We’re tolerable, sir, I thank you,” replied Grace, lifting the boiling mess
carefully on to the hob; “rather snappish, but not ‘rageous.”
A fierce cry seemed to give the lie to her favorable report; the clothed
hyena rose up, and stood tall on its hind feet.
“Ah, sir, she sees you!” exclaimed Grace; “you’d better not stay.”
“Only a few moments, Grace; you must allow me a few moments.”
“Take care, then, sir! for God’s sake, take care!”
The maniac bellowed; she parted her shaggy locks from her visage, and
gazed wildly at her visitors. I recognized well that purple face—those
bloated features. Mrs. Poole advanced.
“Keep out of the way,” said Mr. Rochester, thrusting her aside; “she has
no knife now, I suppose? and I’m on my guard.”
“One never knows what she has, sir; she is so cunning. It is not in mortal
discretion to fathom her craft.”
“We had better leave her,” whispered Mason.
“Go to the devil!” was his brother-in-law’s recommendation.
 “Ware!” cried Grace. The three gentlemen retreated simultaneously. Mr.
Rochester flung me behind him; the lunatic sprung and grappled his throat
viciously, and laid her teeth to his cheek. They struggled. She was a big
woman, in stature almost equalling her husband, and corpulent besides. She
showed virile force in the contest—more than once she almost throttled
him, athletic as he was. He could have settled her with a well-planted blow;
but he would not strike; he would only wrestle. At last he mastered her
arms. Grace Poole gave him a cord, and he pinioned them behind her. With
more rope, which was at hand, he bound her to a chair. The operation was
performed amid the fiercest yells and the most convulsive plunges. Mr.
Rochester then turned to the spectators; he looked at them with a smile both
acrid and desolate.
“That is my wife,” said he. “Such is the sole conjugal embrace I am ever
to know. Such are the endearments which are to solace my leisure hours!
And this is what I wished to have (laying his hand on my shoulder); this
young girl, who stands so grave and quiet at the mouth of hell, looking
collectedly at the gambols of a demon. I wanted her just as a change after
that fierce ragout. Wood and Briggs, look at the difference! Compare these
clear eyes with the red balls yonder—this face with that mask—this form
with that bulk; then judge me, priest of the Gospel and man of the law, and
remember with what judgment ye judge ye shall be judged!73 Off with you
now. I must shut up my prize.”
We all withdrew. Mr. Rochester stayed a moment behind us, to give some
further order to Grace Poole. The solicitor addressed me as we descended
the stair.
“You, madam,” said he, “are cleared from all blame; your uncle will be
glad to hear it—if, indeed, he should be still living—when Mr. Mason
returns to Madeira.”
“My uncle! What of him? Do you know him?”
“Mr. Mason does; Mr. Eyre has been the Funchal correspondent gp of his
house for some years. When your uncle received your letter intimating the
contemplated union between yourself and Mr. Rochester, Mr. Mason, who
was staying at Madeira to recruit his health, on his way back to Jamaica,
happened to be with him. Mr. Eyre mentioned the intelligence; for he knew
that my client here was acquainted with a gentleman of the name of
Rochester. Mr. Mason, astonished and distressed, as you may suppose,
revealed the real state of matters. Your uncle, I am sorry to say, is now on a
sick-bed, from which, considering the nature of his disease—declinegq—
and the stage it has reached, it is unlikely he will ever rise. He could not
then hasten to England himself, to extricate you from the snare into which
you had fallen, but he implored Mr. Mason to lose no time in taking steps to
prevent the false marriage. He referred him to me for assistance. I used all
despatch, and am thankful I was not too late; as you doubtless must be also.
Were I not morally certain that your uncle will be dead ere you reach
Madeira, I would advise you to accompany Mr. Mason back; but as it is, I
think you had better remain in England till you can hear further, either from
or of Mr. Eyre. Have we anything else to stay for?” he inquired of Mr.
Mason.
“No, no—let us be gone,” was the anxious reply; and without waiting to
take leave of Mr. Rochester, they made their exit at the hall door. The
clergyman stayed to exchange a few sentences, either of admonition or
reproof, with his haughty parishioner; this duty done, he, too, departed.
I heard him go as I stood at the half-open door of my own room, to which
I had now withdrawn. The house cleared, I shut myself in, fastened the bolt,
that none might intrude, and proceeded—not to weep, not to mourn; I was
yet too calm for that—but mechanically to take off the wedding-dress, and
replace it by the stuff gown I had worn yesterday, as I thought, for the last
time. I then sat down; I felt weak and tired. I leaned my arms on a table, and
my head dropped on them. And now I thought; till now I had only heard,
seen, moved—followed up and down where I was led or dragged—watched
event rush on event, disclosure open beyond disclosure; but now I thought.
The morning had been a quiet morning enough—all except the brief scene
with the lunatic; the transaction in the church had not been noisy; there was
no explosion of passion, no loud altercation, no dispute, no defiance or
challenge, no tears, no sobs; a few words had been spoken, a calmly-
pronounced objection to the marriage made; some stern, short questions put
by Mr. Rochester; answers, explanations given, evidence adduced; an open
admission of the truth had been uttered by my master; then the living proof
had been seen; the intruders were gone, and all was over.
I was in my own room as usual—just myself, without obvious change;
nothing had smitten me, or scathed me, or maimed me. And yet, where was
the Jane Eyre of yesterday? where was her life? where were her prospects?
Jane Eyre, who had been an ardent expectant woman—almost a bride—
was a cold, solitary girl again; her life was pale; her prospects were
desolate. A Christmas frost had come at midsummer; a white December
storm had whirled over June; ice glazed the ripe apples, drifts crushed the
blowing roses; on hay-field and corn-field lay a frozen shroud; lanes which
last night blushed full of flowers, today were pathless with untrodden snow;
and the woods which twelve hours since waved leafy and fragrant as groves
between the tropics, now spread, waste, wild, and white as pine-forests in
wintry Norway. My hopes were all dead—struck with a subtile doom, such
as, in one night, fell on all the first-born in the land of Egypt.74 I looked on
my cherished wishes, yesterday so blooming and glowing; they lay stark,
chill, livid corpses, that could never revive. I looked at my love; that feeling
which was my master‘s—which he had created; it shivered in my heart, like
a suffering child in a cold cradle; sickness and anguish had seized it; it
could not seek Mr. Rochester’s arms—it could not derive warmth from his
breast. Oh, never more could it turn to him; for faith was blighted—
confidence destroyed! Mr. Rochester was not to me what he had been; for
he was not what I had thought him. I would not ascribe vice to him; I would
not say he had betrayed me; but the attribute of stainless truth was gone
from his idea; and from his presence I must go; that I perceived well. When
—how—whither, I could not yet discern; but he himself, I doubted not,
would hurry me from Thornfield. Real affection, it seemed, he could not
have for me; it had been only fitful passion: that was baulked; he would
want me no more. I should fear even to cross his path now; my view must
be hateful to him. Oh, how blind had been my eyes! How weak my
conduct!
My eyes were covered and closed; eddying darkness seemed to swim
round me, and reflection came in as black and confused a flow. Self-
abandoned, relaxed and effortless, I seemed to have laid me down in the
dried-up bed of a great river; I heard a flood loosened in remote mountains,
I felt the torrent come; to rise I had no will, to flee I had no strength. I lay
faint, longing to be dead. One idea only still throbbed lifelike within me—a
remembrance of God; it begot an unuttered prayer; these words went
wandering up and down in my rayless mind, as something that should be
whispered; but no energy was found to express them:
“Be not far from me, for trouble is near; there is none to help.”75
It was near; and as I had lifted no petition to Heaven to avert it—as I had
neither joined my hands, nor bent my knees, nor moved my lips—it came;
in full, heavy swing, the torrent poured over me. The whole consciousness
of my life lorn,gr my love lost, my hope quenched, my faith death-struck,
swayed full and mighty above me in one sullen mass. That bitter hour
cannot be described; in truth, “the waters came into my soul; I sunk into
deep mire; I felt no standing; I came into deep waters; the floods
overflowed me.”76

OceanofPDF.com
 Chapter XXVII

Some time in the afternoon I raised my head, and looking round and seeing
the westering sun gilding the sign of its decline on the wall, I asked, “What
am I to do?”
But the answer my mind gave—“Leave Thornfield at once”—was so
prompt, so dread, that I stopped my ears; I said, I could not bear such words
now. “That I am not Edward Rochester’s bride is the least part of my woe,”
I alleged; “that I have wakened out of most glorious dreams, and found
them all void and vain, is a horror I could bear and master; but that I must
leave him decidedly, instantly, entirely, is intolerable. I cannot do it.”
But, then, a force within me averred that I could do it, and foretold that I
should do it. I wrestled with my own resolution; I wanted to be weak that I
might avoid the awful passage of further suffering I saw laid out for me;
and conscience, turned tyrant, held passion by the throat, told her,
tauntingly, she had yet but dipped her dainty foot in the slough,gs and swore
that with that arm of iron he would thrust her down to unsounded depths of
agony.
“Let me be torn away, then!” I cried. “Let another help me!”
“No; you shall tear yourself away; none shall help you: you shall yourself
pluck out your right eye; yourself cut off your right hand: your heart shall
be the victim; and you the priest, to transfix it.”77
I rose up suddenly, terror-stricken at the solitude which so ruthless a judge
haunted—at the silence which so awful a voice filled. My head swam as I
stood erect; I perceived that I was sickening from excitement and inanition;
neither meat nor drink had passed my lips that day, for I had taken no
breakfast. And, with a strange pang, I now reflected, that, long as I had been
shut up here, no message had been sent to ask how I was, or to invite me to
come down; not even little Adèle had tapped at the door, not even Mrs.
Fairfax had sought me. “Friends always forget those whom fortune
forsakes,” I murmured, as I undrew the bolt and passed out. I stumbled over
an obstacle; my head was still dizzy, my sight was dim and my limbs were
feeble. I could not soon recover myself; I fell, but not to the ground; an
outstretched arm caught me; I looked up—I was supported by Mr.
Rochester, who sat in a chair across my chamber threshold.
“You come out at last,” he said. “Well, I have been waiting for you long,
and listening; yet not one movement have I heard, nor one sob; five
minutes’ more of that deathlike hush, and I should have forced the lock like
a burglar. So, you shun me?—you shut yourself up and grieve alone? I
would rather you had come and upbraided me with vehemence. You are
passionate; I expected a scene of some kind. I was prepared for the hot rain
of tears; only I wanted them to be shed on my breast; now a senseless floor
has received them, or your drenched handkerchief. But I err; you have not
wept at all! I see a white cheek and a faded eye, but no trace of tears. I
suppose, then, your heart has been weeping blood?
“Well, Jane; not a word of reproach? Nothing bitter—nothing poignant?
Nothing to cut a feeling or sting a passion? You sit quietly where I have
placed you, and regard me with a weary, passive look.
“Jane, I never meant to wound you thus. If the man who had but one little
ewe lamb that was dear to him as a daughter, that ate of his bread and drank
of his cup, and lay in his bosom78 had by some mistake slaughtered it at the
shambles, he would not have rued his bloody blunder more than I now rue
mine. Will you ever forgive me?”
Reader!—I forgave him at the moment, and on the spot. There was such
deep remorse in his eye, such true pity in his tone, such manly energy in his
manner; and, besides, there was such unchanged love in his whole look and
mien, I forgave him all; yet not in words, not outwardly; only at my heart’s
core.
“You know I am a scoundrel, Jane?” ere long he inquired wistfully—
wondering, I suppose, at my continued silence and tameness; the result
rather of weakness than of will.
 “Yes, sir.”
“Then tell me so roundly and sharply—don’t spare me.”
“I cannot; I am tired and sick. I want some water.” He heaved a sort of
shuddering sigh, and, taking me in his arms, carried me down stairs. At first
I did not know to what room he had borne me; all was cloudy to my glazed
sight; presently I felt the reviving warmth of a fire; for, summer as it was, I
had become icy cold in my chamber. He put wine to my lips; I tasted it and
revived; then I ate something he offered me, and was soon myself. I was in
the library—sitting in his chair—he was quite near. “If I could go out of life
now, without too sharp a pang, it would be well for me,” I thought; “then I
should not have to make the effort of cracking my heart-strings in rending
them from Mr. Rochester’s. I must leave him, it appears. I do not want to
leave him—I cannot leave him.”
“How are you now, Jane?”
“Much better, sir; I shall be well soon.”
“Taste the wine again, Jane.”
I obeyed him; then he put the glass on the table, stood before me, and
looked at me attentively. Suddenly he turned away, with an inarticulate
exclamation, full of passionate emotion of some kind; he walked fast
through the room and came back; he stooped toward me as if to kiss me; but
I remembered caresses were now forbidden. I turned my face away, and put
his aside.
“What!—How is this?” he exclaimed, hastily. “Oh, I know! you won’t
kiss the husband of Bertha Mason? You consider my arms filled, and my
embraces appropriated?”
“At any rate, there is neither room nor claim for me, sir.”
“Why, Jane? I will spare you the trouble of much talking; I will answer
for you—because I have a wife already, you would reply. I guess rightly?”
“Yes.”
“If you think so, you must have a strange opinion of me; you must regard
me as a plotting profligate—a base and low rake, who has been simulating
disinterested love in order to draw you into a snare deliberately laid, and
strip you of honor, and rob you of self-respect. What do you say to that? I
see you can say nothing; in the first place, you are faint, still, and have
enough to do to draw your breath; in the second place, you cannot yet
accustom yourself to abuse and revile me; and, besides, the flood-gates of
tears are opened, and they would rush out if you spoke much; and you have
no desire to expostulate, to upbraid, to make a scene; you are thinking how
to act—talking, you consider, is of no use. I know you—I am on my
guard.”
“Sir, I do not wish to act against you,” I said; and my unsteady voice
warned me to curtail my sentence.
“Not in your sense of the word—but in mine you are scheming to destroy
me. You have as good as said that I am a married man—as a married man
you will shun me, keep out of my way; just now you have refused to kiss
me. You intend to make yourself a complete stranger to me; to live under
this roof only as Adèle’s governess; if ever I say a friendly word to you—if
ever a friendly feeling inclines you again to me, you will say—‘That man
had nearly made me his mistress; I must be ice and rock to him’; and ice
and rock you will accordingly become.”
I cleared and steadied my voice to reply, “All is changed about me, sir; I
must change too—there is no doubt of that; and, to avoid fluctuations of
feeling, and continual combats with recollections and associations, there is
only one way—Adèle must have a new governess, sir.”
“Oh, Adèle will go to school—I have settled that already; nor do I mean
to torment you with the hideous associations and recollections of Thornfield
Hall—this accursed place—this tent of Achan79—this insolent vault
offering the ghastliness of living death to the light of the open sky—this
narrow stone hell, with its one real fiend, worse than a legion of such as we
imagine. Jane, you shall not stay here, nor will I. I was wrong ever to bring
you to Thornfield Hall, knowing as I did how it was haunted. I charged
them to conceal from you, before I ever saw you, all knowledge of the curse
of the place; merely because I feared Adèle never would have a governess
to stay if she knew with what inmate she was housed, and my plans would
not permit me to remove the maniac elsewhere—though I possess an old
house, Ferndean Manor, even more retired and hidden than this, where I
could have lodged her safely enough, had not a scruple about the
unhealthiness of the situation, in the heart of a wood, made my conscience
recoil from the arrangement. Probably those damp walls would soon have
eased me of her charge; but to each villain his own vice; and mine is not a
tendency to indirect assassination, even of what I most hate.
“Concealing the mad-woman’s neighborhood from you, however, was
something like covering a child with a cloak, and laying it down near a
upas-tree;gt that demon’s vicinage is poisoned, and always was. But I’ll
shut up Thornfield Hall; I’ll nail up the front door, and board the lower
windows; I’ll give Mrs. Poole two hundred a year to live here with my wife,
as you term that fearful hag; Grace will do much for money, and she shall
have her son, the keeper at Grimsby Retreat, to bear her company, and be at
hand to give her aid in the paroxysms, when my wife is prompted by her
familiar to burn people in their beds at night, to stab them, to bite their flesh
from their bones, and so on—”
“Sir,” I interrupted him, “you are inexorable for that unfortunate lady; you
speak of her with hate—with vindictive antipathy. It is cruel—she cannot
help being mad.”
“Jane, my little darling (so I will call you, for so you are), you don’t know
what you are talking about; you misjudge me again; it is not because she is
mad I hate her. If you were mad do you think I should hate you?”
“I do, indeed, sir.”
“Then you are mistaken, and you know nothing about me, and nothing
about the sort of love of which I am capable. Every atom of your flesh is as
dear to me as my own. In pain and sickness it would still be dear. Your mind
is my treasure, and if it were broken it would be my treasure still; if you
raved, my arms should confine you, and not a straight waistcoat. Your
grasp, even in fury, would have a charm for me; if you flew at me as wildly
as that woman did this morning, I should receive you in an embrace, at least
as fond as it would be restrictive; I should not shrink from you with disgust,
as I did from her. In your quiet moments you should have no watcher and
no nurse but me; and I could hang over you with untiring tenderness,
though you gave me no smile in return; and never weary of gazing into your
eyes, though they had no longer a ray of recognition for me. But why do I
follow that train of ideas? I was talking of removing you from Thornfield.
All, you know, is prepared for prompt departure; to-morrow you shall go. I
only ask you to endure one more night under this roof, Jane; and then,
farewell to its miseries and terrors forever; I have a place to repair to which
will be a secure sanctuary from hateful reminiscences, from unwelcome
intrusion—even from falsehood and slander.”
“And take Adèle with you, sir,” I interrupted; “she will be a companion
for you.”
“What do you mean, Jane? I told you I would send Adèle to school. And
what do I want with a child for a companion—and not my own child—a
French dancer’s bastard. Why do you importune me about her? I say, why
do you assign Adèle to me for a companion?”
“You spoke of a retirement, sir; and retirement and solitude are dull—too
dull for you.”
“Solitude! solitude!” he reiterated, with irritation. “I see I must come to an
explanation. I don’t know what Sphynx-like expression is forming in your
countenance. You are to share my solitude. Do you understand?”
I shook my head. It required a degree of courage, excited as he was
becoming, even to risk that mute sign of dissent. He had been walking fast
about the room, and he stopped, as if suddenly rooted to one spot. He
looked at me long and hard. I turned my eyes from him, fixed them on the
fire, and tried to assume and maintain a quiet, collected aspect.
“Now for the hitch in Jane’s character,” he said at last, speaking more
calmly than, from his look, I had expected him to speak. “The reel of silk
has run smoothly enough so far; but I always knew there would come a
knot and a puzzle—here it is. Now for vexation, and exasperation, and
endless trouble! By God! I long to exert a fraction of Samson’s strength,
and break the entanglement like tow!”
He recommenced his walk, but soon again stopped, and this time just
before me.
“Jane! will you hear reason?” (he stooped and approached his lips to my
ear); “because, if you won‘t, I’ll try violence.” His voice was hoarse, his
look that of a man who is just about to burst an insufferable bond and
plunge headlong into wild license. I saw that in another moment, and with
one impetus of frenzy more, I should be able to do nothing with him. The
present—the passing second of time—was all I had in which to control and
restrain him. A movement of repulsion, flight, fear, would have sealed my
doom—and his. But I was not afraid—not in the least. I felt an inward
power—a sense of influence—which supported me. The crisis was perilous,
but not without its charm—such as the Indian, perhaps, feels, when he slips
over the rapid in his canoe. I took hold of his clenched hand, loosened the
contorted fingers, and said to him soothingly:
“Sit down; I’ll talk to you as long as you like, and hear all you have to
say, whether reasonable or unreasonable.”
He sat down; but he did not get leave to speak directly. I had been
struggling with tears for some time. I had taken great pains to repress them,
because I knew he would not like to see me weep. Now, however, I
considered it well to let them flow as freely and as long as they liked. If the
flood annoyed him, so much the better. So I gave way and cried heartily.
Soon I heard him earnestly entreating me to be composed. I said I could
not while he was in such a passion.
“But I am not angry Jane; I only love you too well. And you had steeled
your little pale face with such a resolute, frozen look, I could not endure it.
Hush, now, and wipe your eyes.”
His softened voice announced that he was subdued; so, I, in my turn,
became calm. Now he made an effort to rest his head on my shoulder; but I
would not permit it: then he would draw me to him; no.
“Jane! Jane!” he said, in such an accent of bitter sadness, it thrilled along
every nerve I had, “you don’t love me, then? It was only my station, and the
rank of my wife, that you valued? Now that you think me disqualified to
become your husband, you recoil from my touch as if I were some toad or
ape.”
These words cut me; yet what could I do or say? I ought, probably, to
have done or said nothing; but I was so tortured by a sense of remorse at
thus hurting his feelings, I could not control the wish to drop balm where I
had wounded.
 “I do love you,” I said, “more than ever; but I must not show or indulge
the feeling; and this is the last time I must express it.”
“The last time, Jane? What! do you think you can live with me, and see
me daily, and yet, if you still love me, be always cold and distant?”
“No, sir, that I am certain I could not; and therefore I see there is but one
way—but you will be furious if I mention it.”
“Oh, mention it! If I storm, you have the art of weeping.”
“Mr. Rochester, I must leave you.”
“For how long, Jane? For a few minutes, while you smooth your hair,
which is somewhat dishevelled, and bathe your face, which looks
feverish?”
“I must leave Adèle and Thornfield; I must part with you for my whole
life; I must begin a new existence among strange faces and strange scenes!”
“Of course; I told you you should. I pass over the madness about parting
from me. You mean you must become a part of me. As to the new existence,
it is all right; you shall yet be my wife—I am not married. You shall be Mrs.
Rochester, both virtually and nominally. I shall keep only to you so long as
you and I live. You shall go to a place I have in the south of France—a
white-walled villa on the shores of the Mediterranean. There you shall live
a happy, and guarded, and most innocent life. Never fear that I wish to lure
you into error—to make you my mistress. Why do you shake your head?
Jane, you must be reasonable, or, in truth, I shall again become frantic.”
His voice and hand quivered; his large nostrils dilated; his eye blazed; still
I dared to speak.
“Sir, your wife is living; that is a fact acknowledged this morning by
yourself; if I lived with you as you desire, I should then be your mistress; to
say otherwise is sophistical—is false.”
“Jane, I am not a gentle-tempered man—you forget that; I am not long
enduring; I am not cool and dispassionate. Out of pity to me and yourself,
put your finger on my pulse, feel how it throbs, and—beware!”
He bared his wrist, and offered it to me. The blood was forsaking his
cheek and lips; they were growing livid; I was distressed on all hands. To
agitate him thus deeply, by a resistance he so abhorred, was cruel; to yield
was out of the question. I did what human beings do instinctively when they
are driven to utter extremity—looked for aid to one higher than man; the
words “God help me!” burst involuntarily from my lips.
“I am a fool!” cried Mr. Rochester, suddenly. “I keep telling her I am not
married, and do not explain to her why. I forget she knows nothing of the
character of that woman, or of the circumstances attending my infernal
union with her. Oh, I am certain Jane will agree with me in opinion, when
she knows all that I know! Just put your hand in mine, Janet—that I may
have the evidence of touch, as well as sight, to prove you are near me—and
I will, in a few words, show you the real state of the case. Can you listen to
me?”
“Yes, sir; for hours, if you will.”
“I ask only minutes. Jane, did you ever hear, or know, that I was not the
eldest son of my house—that I had once a brother older than I?”
“I remember Mrs. Fairfax told me so once.”
“And did you ever hear that my father was an avaricious, grasping man?”
“I have understood something to that effect.”
“Well, Jane, being so, it was his resolution to keep the property together.
He could not bear the idea of dividing his estate and leaving me a fair
portion; all, he resolved, should go to my brother, Russell. Yet, as little
could he endure that a son of his should be a poor man. I must be provided
for by a wealthy marriage. He sought me a partner betimes. Mr. Mason, a
West India planter and merchant, was his old acquaintance. He was certain
his possessions were real and vast; he made inquiries. Mr. Mason, he found,
had a son and daughter; and he learned from him that he could and would
give the latter a fortune of thirty thousand pounds; that sufficed. When I left
college, I was sent out to Jamaica, to espouse a bride already courted for
me. My father said nothing about her money, but he told me Miss Mason
was the boast of Spanish Town for her beauty, and this was no lie. I found
her a fine woman, in the style of Blanche Ingram, tall, dark, and majestic.
Her family wished to secure me, because I was of a good race;gu and so did
she. They showed her to me in parties, splendidly dressed. I seldom saw her
alone, and had very little private conversation with her. She flattered me,
and lavishly displayed for my pleasure her charms and accomplishments.
All the men in her circle seemed to admire her and envy me. I was dazzled
—stimulated; my senses were excited; and being ignorant, raw, and
inexperienced, I thought I loved her. There is no folly so besotted that the
idiotic rivalries of society, the prurience, the rashness, the blindness of
youth, will not hurry a man to its commission. Her relatives encouraged me;
competitors piqued me; she allured me; a marriage was achieved almost
before I knew where I was. Oh, I have no respect for myself when I think of
that act! An agony of inward contempt masters me. I never loved, I never
esteemed, I did not even know her. I was not sure of the existence of one
virtue in her nature. I had marked neither modesty, nor benevolence, nor
candor, nor refinement, in her mind or manners; and I married her—gross,
grovelling, mole-eyed blockhead that I was! With less sin I might have—
but let me remember to whom I am speaking.
“My bride’s mother I had never seen; I understood she was dead. The
honey-moon over, I learned my mistake; she was only mad, and shut up in a
lunatic asylum. There was a younger brother, too, a complete dumb idiot.
The elder one, whom you have seen (and whom I cannot hate, while I abhor
all his kindred, because he has some grains of affection in his feeble mind,
shown in the continued interest he takes in his wretched sister, and also in a
dog-like attachment he once bore me), will probably be in the same state
one day. My father and my brother, Russell, knew all this, but they thought
only of the thirty thousand pounds, and joined in the plot against me.
“These were vile discoveries; but, except for the treachery of
concealment, I should have made them no subject of reproach to my wife,
even when I found her nature wholly alien to mine, her tastes obnoxious to
me, her cast of mind common, low, narrow, and singularly incapable of
being led to anything higher, expanded to anything larger—when I found
that I could not pass a single evening, nor even a single hour of the day,
with her in comfort; that kindly conversation could not be sustained
between us, because whatever topic I started, immediately received from
her a turn at once coarse and trite, perverse and imbecile—when I perceived
that I should never have a quiet or settled household, because no servant
would bear the continued outbreaks of her violent and unreasonable temper,
or the vexations of her absurd, contradictory, exacting orders—even then I
restrained myself; I eschewed upbraiding, I curtailed remonstrance. I tried
to devour my repentance and disgust in secret; I repressed the deep
antipathy I felt.
“Jane, I will not trouble you with abominable details; some strong words
shall express what I have to say. I lived with that woman up stairs four
years, and before that time she had tried me indeed; her character ripened
and developed with frightful rapidity; her vices sprung up fast and rank;
they were so strong, only cruelty could check them; and I would not use
cruelty. What a pigmy intellect she had, and what giant propensities! How
fearful were the curses those propensities entailed on me! Bertha Mason,
the true daughter of an infamous mother, dragged me through all the
hideous and degrading agonies which must attend a man bound to a wife at
once intemperategv and unchaste.
“My brother in the interval was dead; and at the end of the four years my
father died too. I was rich enough now, yet poor to hideous indigence; a
nature the most gross, impure, depraved I ever saw, was associated with
mine, and called by the law and by society a part of me. And I could not rid
myself of it by any legal proceedings; for the doctors now discovered that
my wife was mad—her excesses had prematurely developed the germs of
insanity. Jane, you don’t like my narrative; you look almost sick—shall I
defer the rest to another day?”
“No, sir; finish it now; I pity you—I do earnestly pity you.”
“Pity, Jane, from some people, is a noxious and insulting sort of tribute,
which one is justified in hurling back in the teeth of those who offer it; but
that is the sort of pity native to callous, selfish hearts; it is a hybrid,
egotistical pain at hearing of woes, crossed with ignorant contempt for
those who have endured them. But that is not your pity, Jane; it is not the
feeling of which your whole face is full at this moment, with which your
eyes are now almost overflowing—with which your heart is heaving—with
which your hand is trembling in mine. Your pity, my darling, is the
suffering mother of love; its anguish is the very natal pang of the divine
passion. I accept it, Jane; let the daughter have free advent—my arms wait
to receive her.”
 “Now, sir, proceed; what did you do when you found she was mad?”
“Jane—I approached the verge of despair; a remnant of self-respect was
all that intervened between me and the gulf. In the eyes of the world I was
doubtless covered with grimy dishonor; but I resolved to be clean in my
own sight, and to the last I repudiated the contamination of her crimes, and
wrenched myself from connection with her mental defects. Still, society
associated my name and person with hers; I yet saw her and heard her daily;
something of her breath (faugh!) mixed with the air I breathed; and,
besides, I remembered I had once been her husband—that recollection was
then, and it is now, inexpressibly odious to me; moreover, I knew that while
she lived I could never be the husband of another and better wife; and,
though five years my senior (her family and my father had lied to me even
in the particular of her age), she was likely to live as long as I, being as
robust in frame as she was infirm in mind. Thus, at the age of twenty-six, I
was hopeless.
“One night I had been awakened by her yells—(since the medical men
had pronounced her mad, she had, of course, been shut up); it was a fiery
West Indian night, one of the description that frequently precede the
hurricanes of those climates. Being unable to sleep in bed, I got up and
opened the window. The air was like sulphur-streams—I could find no
refreshment anywhere. Mosquitoes came buzzing in and hummed sullenly
round the room; the sea, which I could hear from thence, rumbled dull like
an earthquake—black clouds were casting up over it; the moon was setting
in the waves, broad and red, like a hot cannon-ball—she threw her last
bloody glance over a world quivering with the ferment of tempest. I was
physically influenced by the atmosphere and scene, and my ears were filled
with the curses the maniac still shrieked out; wherein she momentarily
mingled my name with such a tone of demon-hate, with such language! no
professed harlot ever had a fouler vocabulary than she; though two rooms
off, I heard every word—the thin partitions of the West India house
opposing but slight obstruction to her wolfish cries.
“ ‘This life,’ said I, at last, ‘is hell! this is the air—those are the sounds of
the bottomless pit! I have a right to deliver myself from it if I can. The
sufferings of this mortal state will leave me with the heavy flesh that now
cumbers my soul. Of the fanatic’s burning eternity I have no fear; there is
not a future state worse than this present one—let me break away, and go
home to God!’
“I said this while I knelt down at and unlocked a trunk which contained a
brace of loaded pistols. I meant to shoot myself. I only entertained the
intention for a moment; for, not being insane, the crisis of exquisite and
unalloyed despair which had originated the wish and design of self-
destruction was past in a second.
“A wind fresh from Europe blew over the ocean and rushed through the
open casement; the storm broke, streamed, thundered, blazed, and the air
grew pure. I then framed and fixed a resolution. While I walked under the
dripping orange-trees of my wet garden, and among its drenched
pomegranates and pineapples, and while the refulgent dawn of the tropics
kindled round me, I reasoned thus, Jane. And now listen; for it was true
wisdom that consoled me in that hour, and showed me the right path to
follow.
“The sweet wind from Europe was still whispering in the refreshed
leaves, and the Atlantic was thundering in glorious liberty; my heart, dried
up and scorched for a long time, swelled to the tone, and filled with living
blood—my being longed for renewal—my soul thirsted for a pure draught.
I saw hope revive, and felt regeneration possible. From a flowery arch at the
bottom of my garden I gazed over the sea, bluer than the sky: the old world
was beyond; clear prospects opened thus:
“ ‘Go,’ said Hope, ‘and live again in Europe; there it is not known what a
sullied name you bear, nor what a filthy burden is bound to you. You may
take the maniac with you to England; confine her with due attendance and
precautions at Thornfield; then travel yourself to what clime you will, and
form what new tie you like. That woman who has so abused your long-
suffering, so sullied your name, so outraged your honor, so blighted your
youth—is not your wife; nor are you her husband. See that she is cared for
as her condition demands, and you have done all that God and humanity
require of you, Let her identity, her connection with yourself, be buried in
oblivion; you are bound to impart them to no living being. Place her in
safety and comfort; shelter her degradation with secrecy, and leave her.’
 “I acted precisely on this suggestion. My father and brother had not made
my marriage known to their acquaintance because, in the very first letter I
wrote to apprise them of the union—having already begun to experience
extreme disgust of its consequences and, from the family character and
constitution, seeing a hideous future opening to me—I added an urgent
charge to keep it secret; and very soon, the infamous conduct of the wife
my father had selected for me was such as to make him blush to own her as
his daughter-in-law. Far from desiring to publish the connection, he became
as anxious to conceal it as myself.
“To England, then, I conveyed her; a fearful voyage I had with such a
monster in the vessel. Glad was I when I at last got her to Thornfield, and
saw her safely lodged in that third-story room, of whose secret inner cabinet
she has now for ten years made a wild beast’s den—a goblin’s cell. I had
some trouble in finding an attendant for her, as it was necessary to select
one on whose fidelity dependence could be placed; for her ravings would
inevitably betray my secret; besides, she had lucid intervals of days-
sometimes weeks—which she filled up with abuse of me. At last I hired
Grace Poole, from the Grimsby Retreat. She and the surgeon, Carter (who
dressed Mason’s wounds that night he was stabbed and worried), are the
only two I have ever admitted to my confidence. Mrs. Fairfax may, indeed,
have suspected something; but she could have gained no precise knowledge
as to facts. Grace has, on the whole, proved a good keeper; though, owing
partly to a fault of her own, of which it appears nothing can cure her, and
which is incident to her harassing profession, her vigilance has been more
than once lulled and baffled. The lunatic is both cunning and malignant; she
has never failed to take advantage of her guardian’s temporary lapses—
once to secrete the knife with which she stabbed her brother, and twice to
possess herself of the key of her cell, and issue therefrom in the night-time.
On the first of these occasions, she perpetrated the attempt to burn me in my
bed; on the second, she paid that ghastly visit to you. I thank Providence,
who watched over you, that she then spent her fury on your wedding
apparel, which perhaps brought back vague reminiscences of her own bridal
days; but on what might have happened, I cannot endure to reflect. When I
think of the thing which flew at my throat this morning, hanging its black
and scarlet visage over the nest of my dove, my blood curdles—”
 “And what, sir,” I asked, while he paused, “did you do when you had
settled her here? Where did you go?”
“What did I do, Jane? I transformed myself into a Will-o‘-the-Wisp. gw
Where did I go? I pursued wanderings as wild as those of the March-spirit. I
sought the Continent, and went devious through all its lands. My fixed
desire was to seek and find a good and intelligent woman, whom I could
love; a contrast to the fury I left at Thornfield—”
“But you could not marry, sir.”
“I had determined and was convinced that I could and ought. It was not
my original intention to deceive, as I have deceived you. I meant to tell my
tale plainly, and make my proposals openly; and it appeared to me so
absolutely rational that I should be considered free to love and be loved, I
never doubted some woman might be found willing and able to understand
my case and accept me, in spite of the curse with which I was burdened.”
“Well, sir?”
“When you are inquisitive, Jane, you always make me smile. You open
your eyes like an eager bird, and make, every now and then, a restless
movement, as if answers in speech did not flow fast enough for you, and
you wanted to read the tablet of one’s heart. But before I go on, tell me
what you mean by your ‘Well, sir?’ It is a small phrase very frequent with
you; and which many a time has drawn me on and on, through interminable
talk; I don’t very well know why.”
“I mean, what next? How did you proceed? What came of such an
event?”
“Precisely; and what do you wish to know now?”
“Whether you found any one you liked; whether you asked her to marry
you, and what she said.”
“I can tell you whether I found any one I liked, and whether I asked her to
marry me; but what she said is yet to be recorded in the book of Fate. For
ten long years I roved about, living first in one capital, then another;
sometimes in St. Petersburg; oftener in Paris; occasionally in Rome, Naples,
and Florence. Provided with plenty of money, and the passport of an old
name, I could choose my own society; no circles were closed against me. I
sought my ideal of a woman among English ladies, French countesses,
Italian signoras, and German Gräfinnen.gx I could not find her. Sometimes,
for a fleeting moment, I thought I caught a glance, heard a tone, beheld a
form, which announced the realization of my dream; but I was presently
undeceived. You are not to suppose that I desired perfection, either of mind
or person. I longed only for what suited me—for the antipodes of the
Creole; and I longed vainly. Among them all I found not one whom, had I
been ever so free, I—warned as I was of the risks, the horrors, the loathings,
of incongruous unions—would have asked to marry me. Disappointment
made me reckless. I tried dissipation—never debauchery; that I hated, and
hate. That was my Indian Messalina‘sgy attribute; rooted disgust at it and
her restrained me much, even in pleasure. Any enjoyment that bordered on
riot seemed to approach me to her and her vices, and I eschewed it.
“Yet I could not live alone; so I tried the companionship of mistresses.
The first I chose was Céline Varens—another of those steps which make a
man spurn himself when he recalls them. You already know what she was,
and how my liaison with her terminated. She had two successors; an Italian,
Giacinta, and a German, Clara, both considered singularly handsome. What
was their beauty to me in a few weeks? Giacinta was unprincipled and
violent; I tired of her in three months. Clara was honest and quiet, but
heavy, mindless, unimpressible; not one whit to my taste. I was glad to give
her a sufficient sum to set her up in a good line of business, and so get
decently rid of her. But, Jane, I see by your face you are not forming a very
favorable opinion of me just now. You think me an unfeeling, loose-
principled rake; don’t you?”
“I don’t like you so well as I have done sometimes, indeed, sir. Did it not
seem to you in the least wrong to live in that way; first with one mistress
and then another? You talk of it as a mere matter of course.”
“It was with me; and I did not like it. It was a grovelling fashion of
existence; I should never wish to return to it. Hiring a mistress is the next
worst thing to buying a slave; both are often by nature, and always by
position, inferior; and to live familiarly with inferiors is degrading. I now
hate the recollection of the time I passed with Céline, Giacinta, and Clara.”
 I felt the truth of these words; and I drew from them the certain inference
that, if I were so far to forget myself and all the teaching that had ever been
instilled into me, as—under any pretext—with any justification—through
any temptation—to become the successor of these poor girls, he would one
day regard me with the same feeling which now in his mind desecrated their
memory. I did not give utterance to this conviction; it was enough to feel it.
I impressed it on my heart, that it might remain there to serve me as aid in
the time of trial.
“Now, Jane, why don’t you say ‘Well, sir?’ I have not done. You are
looking grave. You disapprove of me still, I see. But let me come to the
point. Last January, rid of all mistresses—in a harsh, bitter frame of mind,
the result of a useless, roving, lonely life—corroded with disappointment,
sourly disposed against all men, and especially against all womankind (for I
began to regard the notion of an intellectual, faithful, loving woman as a
mere dream), recalled by business, I came back to England.
“On a frosty winter afternoon, I rode in sight of Thornfield Hall. Abhorred
spot! I expected no peace—no pleasure there. On a stile in Hay-lane I saw a
quiet little figure sitting by itself. I passed it as negligently as I did the
pollard willow opposite to it; I had no presentiment of what it would be to
me; no inward warning that the arbitress of my life—my genius for good or
evil—waited there in humble guise. I did not know it, even when, on the
occasion of Mesrour’s accident, it came up and gravely offered me help.
Childish and slender creature! It seemed as if a linnet had hopped to my
foot and proposed to bear me on its tiny wing. I was surly; but the thing
would not go; it stood by me with strange perseverance, and looked and
spoke with a sort of authority. I must be aided, and by that hand; and aided I
was.
“When once I had pressed the frail shoulder, something new—a fresh sap
and sense—stole into my frame. It was well I had learned that this elf must
return to me—that it belonged to my house down below—or I could not
have felt it pass away from under my hand, and seen it vanish behind the
dim hedge, without singular regret. I heard you come home that night, Jane;
though probably you were not aware that I thought of you or watched for
you. The next day I observed you—myself unseen—for half an hour, while
you played with Adèle in the gallery. It was a snowy day, I recollect, and
you could not go out of doors. I was in my room; the door was ajar; I could
both listen and watch. Adèle claimed your outward attention for a while; yet
I fancied your thoughts were elsewhere; but you were very patient with her,
my little Jane; you talked to her and amused her a long time. When at last
she left you, you lapsed at once into deep revery; you betook yourself
slowly to pace the gallery. Now and then, in passing a casement, you
glanced out at the thick falling snow; you listened to the sobbing wind, and
again you paced gently on, and dreamed. I think those day-visions were not
dark; there was a pleasurable illumination in your eye occasionally, a soft
excitement in your aspect, which told of no bitter, bilious, hypochondriac
brooding; your look revealed rather the sweet musings of youth, when its
spirit follows on willing wings the flight of Hope, up and on to an ideal
heaven. The voice of Mrs. Fairfax, speaking to a servant in the hall,
wakened you; and how curiously you smiled to and at yourself, Janet!
There was much sense in your smile; it was very shrewd, and seemed to
make light of your own abstraction. It seemed to say—‘My fine visions are
all very well, but I must not forget they are absolutely unreal. I have a rosy
sky, and a green flowery Eden, in my brain; but without, I am perfectly
aware, lies at my feet a rough tract to travel, and around me gather black
tempests to encounter.’ You ran down stairs and demanded of Mrs. Fairfax
some occupation; the weekly house-accounts to make up, or something of
that sort, I think it was. I was vexed with you for getting out of my sight.
“Impatiently I waited for evening, when I might summon you to my
presence. An unusual—to me—a perfectly new character, I suspected was
yours; I desired to search it deeper, and know it better. You entered the room
with a look and air at once shy and independent; you were quaintly dressed
—much as you are now. I made you talk; ere long I found you full of
strange contrasts. Your garb and manner were restricted by rule; your air
was often diffident, and altogether that of one refined by nature, but
absolutely unused to society, and a good deal afraid of making herself
disadvantageously conspicuous by some solecism or blunder; yet, when
addressed, you lifted a keen, a daring, and a glowing eye to your
interlocutor’s face; there was penetration and power in each glance you
gave; when plied by close questions, you found ready and round answers.
Very soon you seemed to get used to me—I believe you felt the existence of
sympathy between you and your grim and cross master, Jane; for it was
astonishing to see how quickly a certain pleasant ease tranquillized your
manner; snarl as I would, you showed no surprise, fear, annoyance, or
displeasure, at my moroseness; you watched me, and now and then smiled
at me with a simple yet sagacious grace I cannot describe. I was at once
content and stimulated with what I saw; I liked what I had seen, and wished
to see more. Yet, for a long time, I treated you distantly, and sought your
company rarely. I was an intellectual epicure, and wished to prolong the
gratification of making this novel and piquant acquaintance; besides, I was
for a while troubled with a haunting fear that if I handled the flower freely
its bloom would fade—the sweet charm of freshness would leave it. I did
not then know that it was no transitory blossom, but rather the radiant
resemblance of one, cut in an indestructible gem. Moreover, I wished to see
whether you would seek me if I shunned you—but you did not; you kept in
the school-room as still as your own desk and easel; if by chance I met you,
you passed me as soon, and with as little token of recognition, as was
consistent with respect. Your habitual expression in those days, Jane, was a
thoughtful look; not despondent, for you were not sickly; but not buoyant,
for you had little hope, and no actual pleasure. I wondered what you
thought of me—or if you ever thought of me; to find this out, I resumed my
notice of you. There was something glad in your glance, and genial in your
manner, when you conversed; I saw you had a social heart; it was the silent
school-room-it was the tedium of your life that made you mournful. I
permitted myself the delight of being kind to you; kindness stirred emotion
soon; your face became soft in expression, your tones gentle; I liked my
name pronounced by your lips in a grateful, happy accent. I used to enjoy a
chance meeting with you, Jane, at this time; there was a curious hesitation
in your manner; you glanced at me with a slight trouble—a hovering doubt;
you did not know what my caprice might be—whether I was going to play
the master, and be stern—or the friend, and be benignant. I was now too
fond of you often to simulate the first whim; and, when I stretched my hand
out cordially, such bloom, and light, and bliss, rose to your young, wistful
features, I had much ado often to avoid straining you then and there to my
heart.”
 “Don’t talk any more of those days, sir,” I interrupted, furtively dashing
away some tears from my eyes; his language was torture to me; for I knew
what I must do—and do soon—and all these reminiscences, and these
revelations of his feelings, only made my work more difficult.
“No, Jane,” he returned; “what necessity is there to dwell on the Past,
when the Present is so much surer—the Future so much brighter?”
I shuddered to hear the infatuated assertion.
“You see now how the case stands—do you not?” he continued. “After a
youth and manhood, passed half in unutterable misery and half in dreary
solitude, I have for the first time found what I can truly love—I have found
you. You are my sympathy—my better self—my good angel; I am bound to
you with a strong attachment. I think you good, gifted, lovely; a fervent, a
solemn passion is conceived in my heart; it leans to you, draws you to my
centre and spring of life, wraps my existence about you—and, kindling in
pure, powerful flame, fuses you and me in one.
“It was because I felt and knew this, that I resolved to marry you. To tell
me that I had already a wife is empty mockery; you know now that I had
but a hideous demon. I was wrong to attempt to deceive you; but I feared a
stubbornness that exists in your character. I feared early instilled prejudice,
I wanted to have you safe before hazarding confidences. This was
cowardly; I should have appealed to your nobleness and magnanimity at
first, as I do now—opened to you plainly my life of agony—described to
you my hunger and thirst after a higher and worthier existence—shown to
you, not my resolution (that word is weak), but my resistless bent to love
faithfully and well, where I am faithfully and well loved in return. Then I
should have asked you to accept my pledge of fidelity, and to give me
yours; Jane—give it me now.”
A pause.
“Why are you silent, Jane?”
I was experiencing an ordeal; a hand of fiery iron grasped my vitals.
Terrible moment; full of struggle, blackness, burning! Not a human being
that ever lived could wish to be loved better than I was loved; and him who
thus loved me I absolutely worshipped; and I must renounce love and idol.
One drear word comprised my intolerable duty—“Depart!”
“Jane, you understand what I want of you? Just this promise—‘I will be
yours, Mr. Rochester.’ ”
“Mr. Rochester, I will not be yours.”
Another long silence.
“Jane!” recommenced he, with a gentleness that broke me down with
grief, and turned me stone-cold with ominous terror—for this still voice
was the pant of a lion rising—“Jane, do you mean to go one way in the
world, and to let me go another?”
“I do.”
“Jane (bending toward and embracing me), do you mean it now?”
“I do.”
“And now?” softly kissing my forehead and cheek.
“I do—” extricating myself from restraint rapidly and completely.
“Oh, Jane, this is bitter! This—this is wicked. It would not be wicked to
love me.”
“It would to obey you.”
A wild look raised his brows—crossed his features; he rose, but he
forebore yet. I laid my hand on the back of a chair for support; I shook, I
feared—but I resolved.
“One instant, Jane. Give one glance to my horrible life when you are
gone. All happiness will be torn away with you. What then is left? For a
wife I have but the maniac up stairs; as well might you refer me to some
corpse in yonder church-yard. What shall I do, Jane? Where turn for a
companion, and for some hope?”
“Do as I do; trust in God and yourself. Believe in Heaven. Hope to meet
again there.”
“Then you will not yield?”
“No.”
 “Then you condemn me to live wretched, and to die accursed?” His voice
rose.
“I advise you to live sinless; and I wish you to die tranquil.”
“Then you snatch love and innocence from me? You fling me back on lust
for a passion—vice for an occupation?”
“Mr. Rochester, I no more assign this fate to you than I grasp at it for
myself. We were born to strive and endure—you as well as I; do so. You
will forget me before I forget you.”
“You make me a liar by such language; you sully my honor. I declared I
could not change! you tell me to my face I shall change soon. And what a
distortion in your judgment, what a perversity in your ideas, is proved by
your conduct? Is it better to drive a fellow-creature to despair than to
transgress a mere human law—no man being injured by the breach? for you
have neither relatives nor acquaintances whom you need fear to offend by
living with me.”
This was true; and while he spoke my very conscience and reason turned
traitors against me, and charged me with crime in resisting him. They spoke
almost as loud as feeling, and that clamored wildly. “Oh, comply!” it said.
“Think of his misery, think of his danger, look at his state when left alone;
remember his headlong nature, consider the recklessness following on
despair; soothe him, save him, love him; tell him you love him and will be
his. Who in the world cares for you? or who will be injured by what you
do?”
Still indomitable was the reply, “I care for myself. The more solitary, the
more friendless, the more unsustained, I am, the more I will respect myself.
I will keep the law given by God, sanctioned by man. I will hold to the
principles received by me when I was sane, and not mad—as I am now.
Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation; they
are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against
their rigor; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be. If at my individual
convenience I might break them, what would be their worth? They have a
worth, so I have always believed; and if I cannot believe it now, it is
because I am insane, quite insane, with my veins running fire, and my heart
beating faster than I can count its throbs. Preconceived opinions, foregone
determinations, are all I have at this hour to stand by; there I plant my foot.”
I did. Mr. Rochester, reading my countenance, saw I had done so. His fury
was wrought to the highest; he must yield to it for a moment, whatever
followed; he crossed the floor and seized my arm, and grasped my waist.
He seemed to devour me with his flaming glance; physically, I felt at the
moment powerless as stubble exposed to the draught and glow of a furnace;
mentally, I still possessed my soul, and with it the certainty of ultimate
safety. The soul, fortunately, has an interpreter—often an unconscious, but
still a truthful, interpreter—in the eye. My eye rose to his, and while I
looked in his fierce face, I gave an involuntary sigh; his gripegz was
painful, and my overtasked strength almost exhausted.
“Never,” said he, as he ground his teeth, “never was anything at once so
frail and so indomitable. A mere reed she feels in my hand! (and he shook
me with the force of his hold). I could bend her with my finger and thumb,
and what good would it do if I bent, if I uptore, if I crushed her? Consider
that eye; consider the resolute, wild, free thing looking out of it, defying
me, with more than courage, with a stern triumph. Whatever I do with its
cage, I cannot get at it, the savage, beautiful creature! If I tear, if I rend the
slight prison, my outrage will only let the captive loose. Conqueror I might
be of the house, but the inmate would escape to heaven before I could call
myself possessor of its clay dwelling-place. And it is you, spirit, with will
and energy, and virtue and purity, that I want; not alone your brittle frame.
Of yourself, you could come, with soft flight, and nestle against my heart, if
you would; seized against your will, you will elude the grasp like an
essence; you will vanish ere I inhale your fragrance. Oh! come, Jane,
come!”
As he said this, he released me from his clutch, and only looked at me.
The look was far worse to resist than the frantic strain; only an idiot,
however, would have succumbed now. I had dared and baffled his fury, I
must elude his sorrow; I retired to the door.
“You are going, Jane?”
“I am going, sir.”
 “You are leaving me?”
“Yes.”
“You will not come? You will not be my comforter, my rescuer? My deep
love, my wild woe, my frantic prayer, are all nothing to you?”
What unutterable pathos was in his voice! How hard it was to reiterate
firmly, “I am going!”
“Jane!”
“Mr. Rochester.”
“Withdraw, then, I consent; but remember, you leave me here in anguish.
Go up to your own room; think over all I have said, and, Jane, cast a glance
on my sufferings; think of me.”
He turned away, he threw himself on his face on the sofa. “Oh, Jane! my
hope, my love, my life!” broke in anguish from his lips. Then came a deep,
strong sob.
I had already gained the door, but, reader, I walked back—walked back as
determinedly as I had retreated. I knelt down by him, I turned his face from
the cushion to me; I kissed his cheek, I smoothed his hair with my hand.
“God bless you, my dear master,” I said. “God keep you from harm and
wrong, direct you, solace you, reward you well for your past kindness to
me.”
“Little Jane’s love would have been my best reward,” he answered;
“without it, my heart is broken. But Jane will give me her love; yes, nobly,
generously.”
Up the blood rushed to his face; forth flashed the fire from his eyes, erect
he sprung, he held his arms out, but I evaded the embrace, and at once
quitted the room.
“Farewell!” was the cry of my heart, as I left him. Despair added,
“Farewell, forever!”
That night I never thought to sleep, but a slumber fell on me as soon as I
lay down in bed. I was transported in thought to the scenes of childhood; I
dreamed that I lay in the red-room at Gateshead; that the night was dark,
and my mind impressed with strange fears. The light that long ago had
struck me into syncope, recalled in this vision, seemed glidingly to mount
the wall, and tremblingly to pause in the centre of the obscured ceiling. I
lifted up my head to look; the roof resolved to clouds, high and dim; the
gleam was such as the moon imparts to vapors she is about to sever. I
watched her come, watched with the strangest anticipation, as though some
word of doom were to be written on her disk. She broke forth as never
moon yet burst from cloud; a hand first penetrated the sable folds and
waved them away, then, not a moon, but a white human form, shone in the
azure, inclining a glorious brow earthward. It gazed and gazed on me. It
spoke to my spirit; immeasurably distant was the tone yet so near, it
whispered in my heart,
“My daughter, flee temptation!”
“Mother, I will.”
So I answered after I had waked from the trance-like dream. It was yet
night, but July nights are short; soon after midnight, dawn comes. “It cannot
be too early to commence the task I have to fulfil,” thought I. I rose, I was
dressed, for I had taken off nothing but my shoes. I knew where to find in
my drawers some linen, a locket, a ring. In seeking these articles, I
encountered the beads of a pearl necklace Mr. Rochester had forced me to
accept a few days ago. I left that; it was not mine; it was the visionary
bride’s who had melted in air. The other articles I made up in a parcel; my
purse, containing twenty shillings (it was all I had), I put in my pocket; I
tied on my straw bonnet, pinned my shawl, took the parcel and my slippers,
which I would not put on yet, and stole from my room.
“Farewell, kind Mrs. Fairfax!” I whispered, as I glided past her door.
“Farewell, my darling Adèle!” I said, as I glanced toward the nursery. No
thought could be admitted of entering to embrace her. I had to deceive a
fine ear; for aught I knew, it might now be listening.
I would have got past Mr. Rochester’s chamber without a pause; but my
heart momentarily stopping its beat at that threshold, my foot was forced to
stop also. No sleep was there; the inmate was walking restlessly from wall
to wall; and again and again he sighed while I listened. There was a heaven
—a temporary heaven—in this room for me, if I chose; I had but to go in
and say,
“Mr. Rochester, I will love you and live with you through life till death,”
and a fount of rapture would spring to my lips. I thought of this.
That kind master, who could not sleep now, was waiting with impatience
for day. He would send for me in the morning; I should be gone. He would
have me sought for; vainly. He would feel himself forsaken, his love
rejected; he would suffer, perhaps grow desperate. I thought of this, too. My
hand moved toward the lock, I caught it back and glided on.
Drearily I wound my way down stairs; I knew what I had to do, and I did
it mechanically. I sought the key of the side door in the kitchen; I sought,
too, a phial of oil and a feather; I oiled the key and the lock. I got some
water, I got some bread, for perhaps I should have to walk far, and my
strength, sorely shaken of late, must not break down. All this I did without
one sound. I opened the door, passed out, shut it softly. Dim dawn
glimmered in the yard. The great gates were closed and locked, but a wicket
in one of them was only latched. Through that I departed; it, too, I shut, and
now I was out of Thornfield.
A mile off, beyond the fields, lay a road which stretched in the contrary
direction to Millcote; a road which I had never travelled, but often noticed,
and wondered where it led; thither I bent my steps. No reflection was to be
allowed now, not one glance was to be cast back; not even one forward. Not
one thought was to be given either to the past or the future. The first was a
page so heavenly sweet, so deadly sad, that to read one line of it would
dissolve my courage and break down my energy. The last was an awful
blank, something like the world when the deluge was gone by.
I skirted fields, and hedges, and lanes, till after sunrise. I believe it was a
lovely summer morning; I know my shoes, which I had put on when I left
the house, were soon wet with dew. But I looked neither to rising sun, nor
smiling sky, nor wakening nature. He who is taken out to pass through a fair
scene to the scaffold, thinks not of the flowers that smile on his road, but of
the block and the axe-edge; of the disseverment of bone and vein, of the
grave gaping at the end; and I thought of drear flight and homeless
wandering—and, oh! with agony, I thought of what I left! I could not help
it. I thought of him now, in his room, watching the sun rise, hoping I should
soon come to say I would stay with him, and be his. I longed to be his; I
panted to return; it was not too late; I could yet spare him the bitter pang of
bereavement. As yet my flight, I was sure, was undiscovered. I could go
back and be his comforter, his pride, his redeemer from misery, perhaps
from ruin. Oh, that fear of his self-abandonment—far worse than my
abandonment—how it goaded me! It was a barbed arrow-head in my breast;
it tore me when I tried to extract it; it sickened me when remembrance
thrust it further in. Birds began to sing in brake and copse; birds were
faithful to their mates; birds were emblems of love. What was I? In the
midst of my pain of heart, and frantic effort of principle, I abhorred myself.
I had no solace from self-approbation, none even from self-respect. I had
injured, wounded, left my master. I was hateful in my own eyes. Still I
could not turn, nor retrace one step. God must have led me on. As to my
own will or conscience, impassioned grief had trampled one and stifled the
other. I was weeping wildly as I walked along my solitary way; fast, fast I
went, like one delirious. A weakness, beginning inwardly, extending to the
limbs, seized me, and I fell; I lay on the ground some minutes, pressing my
face to the wet turf. I had some fear, or hope, that here I should die; but I
was soon up, crawling forward on my hands and knees, and then again
raised to my feet, as eager and as determined as ever to reach the road.
When I got there, I was forced to sit to rest me under the hedge; and while
I sat, I heard wheels, and saw a coach come on. I stood up and lifted my
hand; it stopped. I asked where it was going; the driver named a place a
long way off, and where I was sure Mr. Rochester had no connections. I
asked for what sum he would take me there; he said thirty shillings: I
answered I had but twenty; well, he would try to make it do. He further
gave me leave to get into the inside, as the vehicle was empty; I entered,
was shut in, and it rolled on its way.
Gentle reader, may you never feel what I then felt! May your eyes never
shed such stormy, scalding, heart-wrung tears as poured from mine! May
you never appeal to Heaven in prayers so hopeless and so agonized as in
that hour left my lips; for never may you, like me, dread to be the
instrument of evil to what you wholly love!
OceanofPDF.com
 Chapter XXVIII

Two days are passed. It is a summer evening; the coachman has set me
down at a place called Whitcross; he could take me no further for the sum I
had given, and I was not possessed of another shilling in the world. The
coach is a mile off by this time; I am alone. At this moment I discover that I
forgot to take my parcel out of the pocket of the coach, where I had placed
it for safety; there it remains, there it must remain; and now I am absolutely
destitute.
Whitcross is no town, nor even a hamlet; it is but a stone pillar set up
where four roads meet; white-washed, I suppose, to be more obvious at a
distance and in darkness. Four arms spring from its summit; the nearest
town to which these point is, according to the inscription, distant ten miles;
the furthest, above twenty. From the well-known names of these towns I
learn in what county I have lighted; a north-midland shire, dusk with
moorland, ridged with mountain; this I see. There are great moors behind
and on each hand of me; there are waves of mountains far beyond that deep
valley at my feet. The population here must be thin, and I see no passengers
on these roads; they stretch out east, west, north, and south—white, broad,
lonely; they are all cut in the moor, and the heather grows deep and wild to
their very verge. Yet a chance traveller might pass by; and I wish no eye to
see me now; strangers would wonder what I am doing, lingering here at the
sign-post, evidently objectless and lost. I might be questioned; I could give
no answer but what would sound incredible and excite suspicion. Not a tie
holds me to human society at this moment—not a charm or hope calls me
where my fellow-creatures are—none that saw me would have a kind
thought or a good wish for me. I have no relative but the universal mother,
Nature; I will seek her breast and ask repose.
I struck straight into the heath; I held on to a hollow I saw deeply
furrowing the brown moorside; I waded, knee-deep in its dark growth; I
turned with its turnings, and finding a moss-blackened granite crag in a
hidden angle, I sat down under it. High banks of moor were about me; the
crag protected my head; the sky was over that.
Some time passed before I felt tranquil even here; I had a vague dread that
wild cattle might be near, or that some sportsman or poacher might discover
me. If a gust of wind swept the waste, I looked up, fearing it was the rush of
a bull; if a plover whistled, I imagined it a man. Finding my apprehensions
unfounded, however, and calmed by the deep silence that reigned as
evening declined to night-fall, I took confidence. As yet I had not thought; I
had only listened, watched, dreaded; now I regained the faculty of
reflection.
What was I to do? Where to go? Oh, intolerable questions, when I could
do nothing and go nowhere! when a long way must yet be measured by my
weary, trembling limbs, before I could reach human habitation—when cold
charity must be entreated before I could get a lodging; reluctant sympathy
importuned; almost certain repulse incurred, before my tale could be
listened to, or one of my wants relieved!
I touched the heath; it was dry, and yet warm with the heat of the summer
day. I looked at the sky; it was pure; a kindly star twinkled just above the
chasm ridge. The dew fell, but with propitious softness; no breeze
whispered. Nature seemed to me benign and good; I thought she loved me,
outcast as I was; and I, who from man could anticipate only mistrust,
rejection, insult, clung to her with filial fondness. To-night, at least, I would
be her guest—as I was her child; my mother would lodge me without
money and without price. I had one morsel of bread yet, the remnant of a
roll I had bought in a town we passed through at noon with a stray penny—
my last coin. I saw ripe bilberries gleaming here and there, like jet beads in
the heath; I gathered a handful and eat them with the bread. My hunger,
sharp before, was, if not satisfied, appeased by this hermit’s meal. I said my
evening prayers at its conclusion, and then chose my couch.
Beside the crag, the heath was very deep; when I lay down my feet were
buried in it; rising high on each side, it left only a narrow space tor the
night-air to invade. I folded my shawl double, and spread it over me for a
coverlet; a low, mossy swell was my pillow. Thus lodged, I was not, at least
at the commencement of the night, cold.
My rest might have been blissful enough, only a sad heart broke it. It
plained of its gaping wounds, its inward bleeding, its riven chords. It
trembled for Mr. Rochester and his doom; it bemoaned him with bitter pity;
it demanded him with ceaseless longing; and, impotent as a bird with both
wings broken, it still quivered its shattered pinions in vain attempts to seek
him.
Worn out with this torture of thought, I rose to my knees. Night was
come, and her planets were risen; a safe, still night; too serene for the
companionship of fear. We know that God is everywhere; but certainly we
feel His presence most when His works are on the grandest scale spread
before us; and it is in the unclouded night-sky, where His worlds wheel
their silent course, that we read clearest His infinitude, His omnipotence,
His omnipresence. I had risen to my knees to pray for Mr. Rochester.
Looking up, I, with tear-dimmed eyes, saw the mighty milky-way.
Remembering what it was—what countless systems there swept space like
a soft trace of light—I felt the might and strength of God. Sure was I of His
efficiency to save what He had made; convinced I grew that neither earth
should perish, nor one of the souls it treasured. I turned my prayer to
thanksgiving; the Source of Life was also the Saviour of spirits. Mr.
Rochester was safe; he was God‘s, and by God would he be guarded. I
again nestled to the breast of the hill; and ere long, in sleep, forgot sorrow.
But next day, want came to me, pale and bare. Long after the little birds
had left their nests; long after bees had come in the sweet prime of day to
gather the heath honey before the dew was dried—when the long morning
shadows were curtailed, and the sun filled earth and sky—I got up, and I
looked round me.
What a still, hot, perfect day! What a golden desert this spreading moor!
Everywhere sunshine. I wished I could live in it and on it. I saw a lizard run
over the crag; I saw a bee busy among the sweet bilberries. I would fain at
the moment have become bee or lizard, that I might have found fitting
nutriment, permanent shelter, here. But I was a human being, and had a
human being’s wants; I must not linger where there was nothing to supply
them. I rose; I looked back at the bed I had left. Hopeless of the future, I
wished but this—that my Maker had that night thought good to require my
soul of me while I slept;80 and that this weary frame, absolved by death
from further conflict with fate, had now but to decay quietly, and mingle in
peace with the soil of this wilderness. Life, however, was yet in my
possession, with all its requirements, and pains, and responsibilities. The
burden must be carried; the want provided for; the suffering endured; the
responsibility fulfilled. I set out.
Whitcross regained, I followed a road which led from the sun, now
fervent and high. By no other circumstance had I will to decide my choice. I
walked a long time, and when I thought I had nearly done enough, and
might conscientiously yield to the fatigue that almost overpowered me—
might relax this forced action, and, sitting down on a stone I saw near,
submit resistlessly to the apathy that clogged heart and limb—I heard a bell
chime—a church bell.
I turned in the direction of the sound, and there, among the romantic hills,
whose changes and aspect I had ceased to note an hour ago, I saw a hamlet
and a spire. All the valley at my right hand was full of pasture-fields, and
corn-fields, and wood; and a glittering stream ran zig-zag through the
varied shades of green, the mellowing grain, the sombre wood-land, the
clear and sunny lea. Recalled by the rumbling of wheels to the road before
me, I saw a heavily-laden wagon laboring up the hill; and not far beyond
were two cows and their drover. Human life and human labor were near. I
must struggle on; strive to live and bend to toil like the rest.
About two o‘clock P.M., I entered the village. At the bottom of its one
street, there was a little shop with some cakes of bread in the window. I
coveted a cake of bread. With that refreshment I could perhaps regain a
degree of energy; without it, it would be difficult to proceed. The wish to
have some strength and some vigor returned to me as soon as I was among
my fellow-beings. I felt it would be degrading to faint with hunger on the
causeway of a hamlet. Had I nothing about me I could offer in exchange for
one of these rolls? I considered. I had a small silk handkerchief tied round
my throat; I had my gloves. I could hardly tell how men and women in
extremities of destitution proceeded. I did not know whether either of these
articles would be accepted; probably they would not, but I must try.
I entered the shop; a woman was there. Seeing a respectably-dressed
person, a lady as she supposed, she came forward with civility. How could
she serve me? I was seized with shame; my tongue would not utter the
request I had prepared. I dared not offer her the half-worn gloves, the
creased handkerchief; besides, I felt it would be absurd. I only begged
permission to sit down a moment, as I was tired. Disappointed in the
expectation of a customer, she coolly acceded to my request. She pointed to
a seat; I sunk into it. I felt sorely urged to weep; but conscious how
unseasonable such a manifestation would be, I restrained it. Soon I asked
her “if there were any dress-maker or plain-work womanha in the village?”
“Yes, two or three. Quite as many as there was employment for.”
I reflected. I was driven to the point now, I was brought face to face with
necessity. I stood in the position of one without a resource; without a friend;
without a coin. I must do something. What? I must apply somewhere.
Where?
“Did she know of any place in the neighborhood where a servant was
wanted?”
“Nay; she couldn’t say.”
“What was the chief trade in this place? What did most of the people do?”
“Some were farm-laborers; a good deal worked at Mr. Oliver’s needle
factory, and at the foundry.”
“Did Mr. Oliver employ women?”
“Nay; it was men’s work.”
“And what do the women do?”
“I knawn‘t,” was the answer. “Some does one thing, and some another.
Poor folk mun get on as they can.”
She seemed to be tired of my questions; and, indeed, what claim had I to
importune her? A neighbor or two came in; my chair was evidently wanted.
I took leave.
 I passed up the street, looking as I went at all the houses to the right hand
and to the left; but I could discover no pretext, nor see an inducement to
enter any. I rambled round the hamlet, going sometimes to a little distance
and returning again, for an hour or more. Much exhausted, and suffering
greatly now for want of food, I turned aside into a lane, and sat down under
the hedge. Ere many minutes had elapsed, I was again on my feet, however,
and again searching something—a resource, or at least an informant. A
pretty little house stood at the top of the lane, with a garden before it,
exquisitely neat, and brilliantly blooming: I stopped at it. What business had
I to approach the white door, or touch the glittering knocker? In what way
could it possibly be the interest of the inhabitants of that dwelling to serve
me? Yet I drew near and knocked. A mild-looking, cleanly attired young
woman opened the door. In such a voice as might be expected from a
hopeless heart and fainting frame—a voice wretchedly low and faltering—I
asked if a servant was wanted here?
“No,” said she; “we do not keep a servant.”
“Can you tell me where I could get employment of any kind,” I
continued; “I am a stranger, without acquaintance, in this place. I want
some work, no matter what.”
But it was not her business to think for me, or to seek a place for me:
besides, in her eyes, how doubtful must have appeared my character,
position, tale. She shook her head; she “was sorry she could give me no
information,” and the white door closed, quite gently and civilly; but it shut
me out. If she had held it open a little longer, I believe I should have begged
a piece of bread; for I was now brought low.
I could not bear to return to the sordid village, where, besides, no prospect
of aid was visible. I should have longed rather to deviate to a wood I saw
not far off, which appeared, in its thick shade, to offer inviting shelter; but I
was so sick, so weak, so gnawed with nature’s cravings, instinct kept me
roaming round abodes where there was a chance of food. Solitude would be
no solitude—rest no rest—while the vulture hunger thus sunk beak and
talons in my side.
I drew near houses; I left them, and came back again, and again I
wandered away, always repelled by the consciousness of having no claim to
ask—no right to expect interest in my isolated lot. Meantime, the afternoon
advanced, while I thus wandered about like a lost and starving dog. In
crossing a field, I saw the church-spire before me; I hastened toward it.
Near the church-yard, and in the middle of a garden, stood a well-built
though small house, which I had no doubt was the parsonage. I remembered
that strangers who arrive at a place where they have no friends, and who
want employment, sometimes apply to the clergyman for introduction and
aid. It is the clergyman’s function to help—at least with advice—those who
wish to help themselves. I seemed to have something like a right to seek
counsel here. Renewing, then, my courage, and gathering my feeble
remains of strength, I pushed on. I reached the house, and knocked at the
kitchen-door. An old woman opened; I asked was this the parsonage?
“Yes.”
“Was the clergyman in?”
“No.”
“Would he be in soon?”
“No, he was gone from home.”
“To a distance?”
“Not so far—happen three mile. He had been called away by the sudden
death of his father; he was at Marsh End now, and would very likely stay
there a fortnight longer.”
“Was there any lady of the house?”
“Nay, there was naught but her, and she was housekeeper”; and of her,
reader, I could not bear to ask the relief for want of which I was sinking; I
could not yet beg; and again I crawled away.
Once more I took off my handkerchief—once more I thought of the cakes
of bread in the little shop. Oh, but for a crust! for but one mouthful to allay
the pang of famine! Instinctively I turned my face again to the village; I
found the shop again, and I went in; and though others were there besides
the woman, I ventured the request, “Would she give me a roll for this
handkerchief?”
 She looked at me with evident suspicion; “Nay, she never sold stuff i’ that
way.”
Almost desperate, I asked for half a cake; she again refused. “How could
she tell where I had got the handkerchief?” she said.
“Would she take my gloves?”
“No; what could she do with them?”
Reader, it is not pleasant to dwell on these details. Some say there is
enjoyment in looking back to painful experience past; but at this day I can
scarcely bear to review the times to which I allude; the moral degradation,
blent with the physical suffering, form too distressing a recollection ever to
be willingly dwelt on. I blamed none of those who repulsed me. I felt it was
what was to be expected, and what could not be helped; an ordinary beggar
is frequently an object of suspicion; a well-dressed beggar inevitably so. To
be sure, what I begged was employment; but whose business was it to
provide me with employment? Not, certainly, that of persons who saw me
then for the first time, and who knew nothing about my character. And as to
the woman who would not take my handkerchief in exchange for her bread,
why, she was right; if the offer appeared to her sinister, or the exchange
unprofitable. Let me condense now. I am sick of the subject.
A little before dark I passed a farmhouse, at the open door of which the
farmer was sitting, eating his supper of bread and cheese; I stopped and
said:
“Will you give me a piece of bread? for I am very hungry.” He cast on me
a glance of surprise; but without answering, he cut a thick slice from his
loaf, and gave it to me. I imagine he did not think I was a beggar, but only
an eccentric sort of lady who had taken a fancy to his brown loaf. As soon
as I was out of sight of his house, I sat down and ate it.
I could not hope to get a lodging under a roof, and sought it in the wood I
have before alluded to. But my night was wretched, my rest broken; the
ground was damp, the air cold; besides, intruders passed near me more than
once, and I had again and again to change my quarters; no sense of safety or
tranquillity befriended me. Toward morning it rained; the whole of the
following day was wet. Do not ask me, reader, to give a minute account of
that day; as before, I sought work; as before, I was repulsed; as before, I
starved; but once did food pass my lips. At the door of a cottage I saw a
little girl about to throw a mess of cold porridge into a pig-trough. “Will
you give me that?” I asked.
She stared at me. “Mother!” she exclaimed; “there is a woman wants me
to give her these porridge.”
“Well, lass,” replied a voice within, “give it her if she’s a beggar. T’ pig
doesn’t want it.”
The girl emptied the stiffened mould into my hand, and I devoured it
ravenously.
As the wet twilight deepened, I stopped in a solitary bridle-path, which I
had been pursuing an hour or more.
“My strength is quite failing me,” I said in soliloquy. “I feel I cannot go
much further. Shall I be an outcast again this night? While the rain descends
so, must I lay my head on the cold, drenched ground? I fear I cannot do
otherwise; for who will receive me? But it will be very dreadful; with this
feeling of hunger, faintness, chill, and this sense of desolation—this total
prostration of hope. In all likelihood, though, I should die before morning.
And why cannot I reconcile myself to the prospect of death? Why do I
struggle to retain a valueless life? Because I know, or believe, Mr.
Rochester is still living; and then, to die of want and cold, is a fate to which
nature cannot submit passively. Oh, Providence! sustain me a little longer!
Aid—direct me!”
My glazed eye wandered over the dim and misty landscape. I saw I had
strayed far from the village; it was quite out of sight. The very cultivation
surrounding it had disappeared. I had, by cross-ways and by-paths, once
more drawn near the tract of moorland; and now, only a few fields, almost
as wild and unproductive as the heath from which they were scarcely
reclaimed, lay between me and the dusky hill.
“Well; I would rather die yonder than in a street or on a frequented road,”
I reflected. “And far better that crows and ravens—if any ravens there be in
these regions—should pick my flesh from my bones, than that they should
be imprisoned in a workhouse coffin, and moulder in a pauper’s grave.”
 To the hill, then, I turned. I reached it. It remained now only to find a
hollow where I could lie down, and feel at least hidden, if not secure; but all
the surface of the waste looked level. It showed no variation but of tint;
green, where rush and moss overgrew the marshes; black, where the dry soil
bore only heath. Dark as it was getting, I could still see these changes,
though but as mere alternations of light and shade, for color had faded with
the daylight.
My eye still roved over the sullen swell, and along the moor-edge,
vanishing amid the wildest scenery, when, at one dim point, far in among
the marshes and the ridges, a light sprung up. “That is an ignis fatuus,” was
my first thought; and I expected it would soon vanish. It burned on,
however, quite steadily, neither receding nor advancing. “Is it, then, a
bonfire just kindled?” I questioned. I watched to see whether it would
spread; but no; as it did not diminish, so it did not enlarge. “It may be a
candle in a house,” I then conjectured; “but if so, I can never reach it. It is
much too far away; and were it within a yard of me, what would it avail? I
should but knock at the door to have it shut in my face.”
And I sunk down where I stood, and hid my face against the ground. I lay
still a while; the night-wind swept over the hill and over me, and died
moaning in the distance; the rain fell fast, wetting me afresh to the skin.
Could I but have stiffened to the still frost—the friendly numbness of death
—it might have pelted on; I should not have felt it; but my yet living flesh
shuddered to its chilling influence. I rose ere long.
The light was yet there, shining dim, but constant, through the rain. I tried
to walk again; I dragged my exhausted limbs slowly toward it. It led me
aslant over the hill, through a wide bog, which would have been impassable
in winter, and was splashy and shaking even now, in the height of summer.
Here I fell twice; but as often I rose and rallied my faculties. This light was
my forlorn hope; I must gain it.
Having crossed the marsh, I saw a trace of white over the moor. I
approached it; it was a road or a track; it led straight up to the light, which
now beamed from a sort of knoll, amid a clump of trees—firs, apparently,
from what I could distinguish of the character of their forms and foliage
through the gloom. My star vanished as I drew near; some obstacle had
intervened between me and it. I put out my hand to feel the dark mass
before me; I discriminated the rough stones of a low wall—above it
something like palisades, and within, a high and prickly hedge. I groped on.
Again a whitish object gleamed before me; it was a gate—a wicket; it
moved on its hinges as I touched it. On each side stood a sable bush—holly
or yew.
Entering the gate and passing the shrubs, the silhouette of a house rose to
view, black, low, and rather long; but the guiding light shone nowhere. All
was obscurity. Were the inmates retired to rest? I feared it must be so. In
seeking the door, I turned an angle; there shot out the friendly gleam again,
from the lozenged panes of a very small latticed window, within a foot of
the ground, made still smaller by the growth of ivy or some other creeping
plant, whose leaves clustered thick over the portion of the house wall in
which it was set. The aperture was so screened and narrow, that curtain or
shutter had been deemed unnecessary; and when I stooped down and put
aside the spray of foliage shooting over it, I could see all within. I could see
clearly a room with a sanded floor, clean scoured; a dresser of walnut, with
pewter plates ranged in rows, reflecting the redness and radiance of a
glowing peat-fire. I could see a clock, a white deal table, some chairs. The
candle, whose ray had been my beacon, burned on the table; and by its light
an elderly woman, somewhat rough-looking, but scrupulously clean, like all
about her, was knitting a stocking.
I noticed these objects cursorily only—in them there was nothing
extraordinary. A group of more interest appeared near the hearth, sitting still
amid the rosy peace and warmth suffusing it. Two young, graceful women
—ladies in every point—sat, one in a low rocking-chair, the other on a
lower stool; both wore deep mourning of crape and bombasin, which
sombre garb singularly set off their very fair necks and faces; a large old
pointer dog rested its massive head on the knee of one girl—in the lap of
the other was cushioned a black cat.
A strange place was this humble kitchen for such occupants! Who are
they? They could not be the daughters of the elderly person at the table; for
she looked like a rustic, and they were all delicacy and cultivation. I had
nowhere seen such faces as theirs; and yet, as I gazed on them, I seemed
intimate with every lineament. I cannot call them handsome—they were too
pale and grave for the word; as they each bent over a book, they looked
thoughtful almost to severity. A stand between them supported a second
candle and two great volumes, to which they frequently referred; comparing
them seemingly with the smaller books they held in their hands, like people
consulting a dictionary to aid them in the task of translation. This scene was
as silent as if all the figures had been shadows, and the fire-lit apartment a
picture; so hushed was it, I could hear the cinders fall from the grate, the
clock tick in its obscure corner; and I even fancied I could distinguish the
click-click of the woman’s knitting-needles. When, therefore, a voice broke
the strange stillness at last, it was audible enough to me.
“Listen, Diana,” said one of the absorbed students; “Franz and old Daniel
are together in the night-time, and Franz is telling a dream from which he
has wakened in terror—listen!” And in a low voice she read something, of
which not one word was intelligible to me; for it was in an unknown tongue
—neither French nor Latin. Whether it were Greek or German I could not
tell.
“That is strong,” she said, when she had finished; “I relish it.” The other
girl, who had lifted her head to listen to her sister, repeated, while she gazed
at the fire, a line which had been read. At a later day, I knew the language
and the book; therefore, I will here quote the line; though, when I first heard
it, it was only like a stroke on sounding brass to me—conveying no
meaning:
“ ‘Da trat hervor Einer, anzusehen wie die Sternen Nacht.’ Good! good!”
she exclaimed, while her dark and deep eye sparkled. “There you have a
dim and mighty archangel fitly set before you! The line is worth a hundred
pages of fustian.hb ‘Ich wage die Gedanken in der Schale meines Zornes
und die Werke mit dem Gewichte meines Grimms.‘hc I like it!”
Both were again silent.
“Is there ony country were they talk i’ that way?” asked the old woman,
looking up from her knitting.
“Yes, Hannah—a far larger country than England, where they talk in no
other way.”
 “Well, for sure case, I knawn’t how they can understand t’ one t‘other;
and if either o’ye went there, ye could tell what they said, I guess?”
“We could probably tell something of what they said, but not all—for we
are not as clever as you think us, Hannah. We don’t speak German, and we
cannot read it without a dictionary to help us.”
“And what good does it do you?”
“We mean to teach it some time-or at least the elements, as they say; and
then we shall get more money than we do now.”
“Varry like; but give ower studying; ye’ve done enough for to night.”
“I think we have; at least, I’m tired. Mary, are you?”
“Mortally; after all, it’s tough work fagging away at a language with no
master but a lexicon.”
“It is; especially such a language as this crabbed but glorious Deutsch. I
wonder when St. John will come home.”
“Surely he will not be long now; it is just ten (looking at a little gold
watch she drew from her girdle). It rains fast. Hannah, will you have the
goodness to look at the fire in the parlor?”
The woman rose; she opened a door, through which I dimly saw a
passage; soon I heard her stir a fire in an inner room; she presently came
back.
“Ah, childer!” said she, “it fair troubles me to go into yond’ room now; it
looks so lonesome wi’ the chair empty and set back in a corner.”
She wiped her eyes with her apron; the two girls, grave before, looked sad
now.
“But he is in a better place,” continued Hannah; “we shouldn’t wish him
here again. And then nobody need to have a quieter death nor he had.”
“You say he never mentioned us?” inquired one of the ladies.
“He hadn’t time, bairn; he was gone in a minute—was your father. He had
been a bit ailing like the day before, but naught to signify; and when Mr. St.
John asked if he would like either o’ ye to be sent for, he fair laughed at
him. He began again with a bit of heaviness in his head the next day—that
is, a fortnight sin‘—and he went to sleep and niver wakened; he wor a’most
starkhd when your brother went into t’ chamber and fand him. Ah, childer!
that’s t’ last o’ t‘old stock—for ye and Mr. St. John is like of a different
soart to them ’at’s gone; for all your mother wor mich i’ your way, and
a‘most as book-learned. She wor the pictur’ o’ ye, Mary; Diana is more like
your father.”
I thought them so similar I could not tell where the old servant (for such I
now concluded her to be) saw the difference. Both were fair complexioned
and slenderly made; both possessed faces full of distinction and
intelligence. One, to be sure, had hair a shade darker than the other, and
there was a difference in their style of wearing it; Mary’s pale brown locks
were parted and braided smooth; Diana’s duskier tresses covered her neck
with their curls. The clock struck ten.
“Ye’ll want your supper, I’m sure,” observed Hannah; “and so will Mr. St.
John when he comes in.”
And she proceeded to prepare the meal. The ladies rose; they seemed
about to withdraw to the parlor. Till this moment, I had been so intent on
watching them—their appearance and conversation had excited in me so
keen an interest—I had half forgotten my own wretched position; now it
recurred to me. More desolate, more desperate than ever, it seemed from
contrast. And how impossible did it appear to touch the inmates of this
house with concern on my behalf—to make them believe in the truth of my
wants and woes—to induce them to vouchsafe a rest for my wanderings! As
I groped out the door, and knocked at it hesitatingly, I felt that last idea to
be indeed a mere chimera. Hannah opened.
“What do you want?” she inquired, in a voice of surprise, as she surveyed
me by the light of the candle she held.
“May I speak to your mistresses?” I said.
“You had better tell me what you have to say to them. Where do you
come from?”
“I am a stranger.”
“What is your business here at this hour?”
 “I want a night’s shelter in an out-house, or anywhere, and a morsel of
bread to eat.”
Distrust, the very feeling I dreaded, appeared in Hannah’s face. “I’ll give
you a piece of bread,” she said, after a pause; “but we can’t take in a
vagrant to lodge; it isn’t likely.”
“Do let me speak to your mistresses.”
“No; not I. What can they do for you? You should not be roving about
now; it looks very ill.”
“But where shall I go, if you drive me away? What shall I do?”
“Oh, I’ll warrant you know where to go, and what to do. Mind you don’t
do wrong, that’s all. Here is a penny; now go.”
“A penny cannot feed me, and I have no strength to go further. Don’t shut
the door—oh, don‘t, for God’s sake!”
“I must—the rain is driving in.”
“Tell the young ladies—let me see them!”
“Indeed, I will not. You are not what you ought to be, or you wouldn’t
make such a noise. Move off!”
“But I must die if I am turned away.”
“Not you. I’m feard you have some ill plans agatehe that bring you about
folk’s houses at this time o’ night. If you’ve any followers—housebreakers,
or such like—anywhere near, you may tell them we are not by ourselves in
the house. We have a gentleman, and dogs, and guns.” Here the honest but
inflexible servant clapped the door to, and bolted it within.
This was the climax. A pang of exquisite suffering—a throe of true
despair—rent and heaved my heart. Worn out, indeed, I was; not another
step could I stir. I sunk on the wet door-step; I groaned—I wrung my hands
—I wept in utter anguish. Oh, this spectre of death! Oh, this last hour
approaching in such horror! Alas! this isolation—this banishment from my
kind! Not only the anchor of hope, but the footing of fortitude, was gone—
at least, for a moment; but the last I soon endeavored to regain.
 “I can but die,” I said, “and I believe in God. Let me try to wait His will
in silence.”
These words I not only thought, but uttered; and, thrusting back all my
misery into my heart, I made an effort to compel it to remain there, dumb
and still.
“All men must die,” said a voice, quite close at hand; “but all are not
condemned to meet a lingering and premature doom, such as yours would
be if you perished here of want.”
“Who or what speaks?” I asked, terrified at the unexpected sound, and
incapable now of deriving from any occurrence a hope of aid. A form was
near—what form, the pitch-dark night and my enfeebled vision prevented
me from distinguishing. With a loud, long knock, the new-comer appealed
to the door.
“Is it you, Mr. St. John?” cried Hannah.
“Yes—yes; open quickly.”
“Well, how wet and cold you must be, such a wild night as it is! Come in
—your sisters are quite uneasy about you, and I believe there are bad folks
about. There has been a beggar-woman. I declare—she is not gone yet—
laid down there! Get up—for shame! Move off, I say!”
“Hush, Hannah! I have a word to say to the woman. You have done your
duty in excluding, now let me do mine in admitting her. I was near, and
listened to both you and her. I think this is a peculiar case. I must, at least,
examine into it. Young woman, rise, and pass before me into the house.”
With difficulty I obeyed him. Presently I stood within that clean, bright
kitchen—on the very hearth—trembling, sickening; conscious of an aspect,
in the last degree ghastly, wild, and weather-beaten. The two ladies, their
brother, Mr. St. John, the old servant, were all gazing at me.
“St. John, who is it?” I heard one ask.
“I cannot tell; I found her at the door,” was the reply.
“She does look white,” said Hannah.
“As white as clay or death,” was responded. “She will fall—let her sit.”
 And, indeed, my head swam. I dropped; but a chair received me. I still
possessed my senses, though just now I could not speak.
“Perhaps a little water would restore her. Hannah, fetch some. But she is
worn to nothing. How very thin, and how very bloodless!”
“A mere spectre!”
“Is she ill, or only famished?”
“Famished, I think. Hannah, is that milk? Give it me, and a piece of
bread.”
Diana (I knew her by the long curls which I saw drooping between me
and the fire as she bent over me) broke some bread, dipped it in milk, and
put it to my lips. Her face was near mine; I saw there was pity in it, and I
felt sympathy in her hurried breathing. In her simple words, too, the same
balm-like emotion spoke: “Try to eat.”
“Yes—try,” repeated Mary, gently; and Mary’s hand removed my sodden
bonnet and lifted my head. I tasted what they offered me; feebly, at first—
eagerly, soon.
“Not too much, at first; restrain her,” said the brother; “she has had
enough.” And he withdrew the cup of milk and the plate of bread.
“A little more, St. John; look at the avidity in her eyes.”
“No more at present, sister. Try if she can speak now—ask her her name.”
I felt I could speak, and I answered: “My name is Jane Elliott.” Anxious
as ever to avoid discovery, I had before resolved to assume an alias.
“And where do you live? Where are your friends?”
I was silent.
“Can we send for any one you know?”
I shook my head.
“What account can you give of yourself?”
Somehow, now that I had once crossed the threshold of this house, and
once was brought face to face with its owners, I felt no longer outcast,
vagrant, and disowned by the wide world. I dared to put off the mendicant
—to resume my natural manner and character. I began once more to know
myself; and when Mr. St. John demanded an account—which, at present, I
was far too weak to render—I said, after a brief pause:
“Sir, I can give you no details to-night.”
“But what, then,” said he, “do you expect me to do for you?”
“Nothing,” I replied. My strength sufficed for but short answers. Diana
took the word:
“Do you mean,” she asked, “that we have now given you what aid you
require; and that we may dismiss you to the moor and the rainy night?”
I looked at her. She had, I thought, a remarkable countenance, instinct
both with power and goodness. I took sudden courage. Answering her
compassionate gaze with a smile, I said, “I will trust you. If I were a
masterless and stray dog, I know that you would not turn me from your
hearth to-night; as it is, I really have no fear.81 Do with me and for me as
you like, but excuse me from much discourse; my breath is short—I feel a
spasm when I speak.” All three surveyed me, and all three were silent.
“Hannah,” said Mr. St. John, at last, “let her sit there at present, and ask
her no questions; in ten minutes more, give her the remainder of that milk
and bread. Mary and Diana, let us go into the parlor and talk the matter
over.”
They withdrew. Very soon one of the ladies returned—I could not tell
which. A kind of pleasant stupor was stealing over me as I sat by the genial
fire. In an under tone, she gave some directions to Hannah. Ere long, with
the servant’s aid, I contrived to mount a stair-case—my dripping clothes
were removed; soon a warm, dry bed received me. I thanked God;
experienced amid unutterable exhaustion a glow of grateful joy—and slept.

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 Chapter XXIX

The recollection of about three days and nights succeeding this is very dim
in my mind. I can recall some sensations felt in that interval; but few
thoughts framed, and no actions performed. I knew I was in a small room,
and in a narrow bed. To that bed I seemed to have grown. I lay on it
motionless as a stone; and to have torn me from it would have been almost
to kill me. I took no note of the lapse of time—of the change from morning
to noon, from noon to evening. I observed when any one entered or left the
apartment; I could even tell who they were; I could understand what was
said when the speaker stood near me; but I could not answer. To open my
lips or move my limbs was equally impossible. Hannah, the servant, was
my most frequent visitor. Her coming disturbed me. I had a feeling that she
wished me away; that she did not understand me or my circumstances; that
she was prejudiced against me. Diana and Mary appeared in the chamber
once or twice a day. They would whisper sentences of this sort at my bed-
side-
“It is very well we took her in.”
“Yes; she would certainly have been found dead at the door in the
morning, had she been left out all night. I wonder what she has gone
through?”
“Strange hardships, I imagine, poor, emaciated, pallid wanderer!”
“She is not an uneducated person, I should think, by her manner of
speaking. Her accent was quite pure; and the clothes she took off, though
splashed and wet, were little worn and fine.”
“She has a peculiar face; fleshless and haggard as it is, I rather like it; and
when in good health and animated, I can fancy her physiognomy would be
agreeable.”
 Never once in their dialogues did I hear a syllable of regret at the
hospitality they had extended to me; or of suspicion of, or aversion to,
myself. I was comforted.
Mr. St. John came but once. He looked at me, and said my state of
lethargy was the result of reaction from excessive and protracted fatigue. He
pronounced it needless to send for a doctor; nature, he was sure, would
manage best, left to herself. He said every nerve had been overstrained in
some way, and the whole system must sleep torpid a while. There was no
disease. He imagined my recovery would be rapid enough when once
commenced. These opinions he delivered in few words, in a quiet, low
voice; and added, after a pause, in the tone of a man little accustomed to
expansive comment, “rather an unusual physiognomy; certainly, not
indicative of vulgarity or degradation.”
“Far otherwise,” responded Diana. “To speak truth, St. John, my heart
rather warms to the poor little soul. I wish we may be able to benefit her
permanently.”
“That is hardly likely,” was the reply. “You will find she is some young
lady who has had a misunderstanding with her friends, and has probably
injudiciously left them. We may, perhaps, succeed in restoring her to them,
if she is not obstinate; but I trace lines of force in her face which make me
sceptical of her trac tability.” He stood considering me some minutes; then
added, “She looks sensible, but not at all handsome.”
“She is so ill, St. John.”
“Ill or well, she would always be plain. The grace and harmony of beauty
are quite wanting in those features.”
On the third day, I was better; on the fourth, I could speak, move, rise in
bed, and turn. Hannah had brought me some gruel and dry toast, about, as I
supposed, the dinner hour. I had eaten with relish. The food was good—
void of the feverish flavor which had hitherto poisoned what I had
swallowed. When she left me, I felt comparatively strong and revived; ere
long satiety of repose, and desire for action, stirred me. I wished to rise; but
what could I put on? Only my damp and bemired apparel; in which I had
slept on the ground and fallen in the marsh. I felt ashamed to appear before
my benefactors so clad. I was spared the humiliation.
 On a chair by the bed-side were all my own things, clean and dry. My
black silk frock hung against the wall. The traces of the bog were removed
from it; the creases left by the wet, smoothed out. It was quite decent. My
very shoes and stockings were purified and rendered presentable. There
were the means of washing in the room, and a comb and a brush to smooth
my hair. After a weary process, and resting every five minutes, I succeeded
in dressing myself. My clothes hung loose on me, for I was much wasted;
but I covered deficiencies with a shawl, and, once more clean and
respectable-looking-no speck of the dirt, no trace of the disorder I so hated,
and which seemed so to degrade me, left—I crept down a stone stair-case,
with the aid of the banisters, to a narrow, low passage, and found my way
presently to the kitchen.
It was full of the fragrance of new bread, and the warmth of a generous
fire. Hannah was baking. Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to
eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilized by
education; they grow there, firm as weeds among stones. Hannah had been
cold and stiff, indeed, at the first; latterly she had begun to relent a little;
and when she saw me come in tidy and well-dressed, she even smiled.
“What, you have got up?” she said. “You are better, then. You may sit
down in my chair on the hearthstone, if you will.”
She pointed to the rocking-chair; I took it. She bustled about, examining
me every now and then with the corner of her eye. Turning to me, as she
took some loaves from the oven, she asked bluntly,
“Did you ever go a-begging afore you came here?”
I was indignant for a moment; but remembering that anger was out of the
question, and that I had indeed appeared as a beggar to her, I answered
quietly, but still not without a certain marked firmness,
“You are mistaken, in supposing me a beggar. I am no beggar, any more
than yourself or your young ladies.”
After a pause, she said, “I dunnut understand that; you’ve like no house,
nor no brass, I guess?”
“The want of house or brass (by which I suppose you mean money) does
not make a beggar in your sense of the word.”
 “Are you book-learned?” she inquired presently.
“Yes, very.”
“But you’ve never been to boarding-school?”
“I was at a boarding-school eight years.”
She opened her eyes wide. “Whatever cannot ye keep yourseln for, then?”
“I have kept myself; and, I trust, shall keep myself again. What are you
going to do with those gooseberries?” I inquired, as she brought out a
basket of the fruit.
“Mak‘em into pies.”
“Give them to me and I’ll pick them.”
“Nay; I dunnut want ye to do naught.”
“But I must do something. Let me have them.”
She consented; and she even brought me a clean towel to spread over my
dress, “lest,” as she said, “I should mucky it.”
“Ye’ve not been used to sarvant’s wark, I see by your hands,” she
remarked. “Happen ye’ve been a dressmaker?”
“No, you are wrong. And now, never mind what I have been; don’t
trouble your head further about me; but tell me the name of the house where
we are.”
“Some calls it Marsh-End, and some calls it Moor House.”
“And the gentleman who lives here is called Mr. St. John?”
“Nay; he doesn’t live here; he is only staying a while. When he is at
home, he is in his own parish at Morton.”
“That village a few miles off?”
“Ay.”
“And what is he?”
“He is a parson.”
I remembered the answer of the old housekeeper at the parsonage, when I
had asked to see the clergyman. “This, then, was his father’s residence?”
 “Ay; old Mr. Rivers lived here, and his father, and grandfather, and gurt
(great) grandfather afore him.”
“The name, then, of that gentleman, is Mr. St. John Rivers?”
“Ay; St. John is like his kirstened name.”
“And his sisters are called Diana and Mary Rivers?”
“Yes.”
“Their father is dead?”
“Dead three weeks sin‘, of a stroke.”
“They have no mother?”
“The mistress has been dead this mony a year.”
“Have you lived with the family long?”
“I’ve lived here thirty year. I nursed them all three.”
“That proves you must have been an honest and faithful servant. I will say
so much for you, though you have had the incivility to call me a beggar.”
She again regarded me with a surprised stare. “I believe,” she said, “I was
quite mista‘en in my thoughts of you; but there is so mony cheats goes
about, you mun forgie me.”
“And though,” I continued, rather severely, “you wished to turn me from
the door, on a night when you should not have shut out a dog.”
“Well, it was hard; but what can a body do? I thought more o’ th’ childer
nor of mysel; poor things! They’ve like nobody to tak’ care on ‘em but me.
I’m like to look sharpish.”
I maintained a grave silence for some minutes.
“You munnut think too hardly of me,” she again remarked.
“But I do think hardly of you,” I said; “and I’ll tell you why;—not so
much because you refused to give me shelter, or regarded me as an
impostor, as because you just now made it a species of reproach that I had
no ‘brass’ and no house. Some of the best people that ever lived have been
as destitute as I am; and if you are a Christian, you ought not to consider
poverty a crime.”
 “No more I ought,” said she; “Mr. St. John tells me so too; and I see I wor
wrang—but I’ve clear a different notion on you now to what I had. You
look a raight down dacent little crater.”
“That will do—I forgive you now. Shake hands.”
She put her floury and horny hand into mine; another and heartier smile
illumined her rough face, and from that moment we were friends.
Hannah was evidently fond of talking. While I picked the fruit, and she
made the paste for the pies, she proceeded to give me sundry details about
her deceased master and mistress, and “the childer,” as she called the young
people.
Old Mr. Rivers, she said, was a plain man enough; but a gentleman, and
of as ancient a family as could be found. Marsh-End had belonged to the
Rivers’ ever since it was a house; and it was, she affirmed, “aboon two
hundred year old—for all it looked but a small, humble place, naught to
compare wi’ Mr. Oliver’s grand hall down i’ Morton Vale. But she could
remember Bill Oliver’s father, a journeyman needle-maker; and th’ Rivers
wor gentry i’ th’ owd days o’ th’ Henrys, as onybody might see by looking
into th’ registers i’ Morton Church vestry.” Still, she allowed, “the owd
maister was like other folk—naught mich out o’ t’ common way; stark mad
o’ shooting, and farming, and sich like.” The mistress was different. She
was a great reader, and studied a deal; and the “bairns” had taken after her.
There was nothing like them in these parts, nor ever had been; they had
liked learning, all three, almost from the time they could speak; and they
had always been “of a mak’ of their own.” Mr. St. John, when he grew up,
would go to college and be a parson; and the girls, as soon as they left
school, would seek places as governesses; for they had told her their father
had some years ago lost a great deal of money, by a man he had trusted
turning bankrupt; and as he was now not rich enough to give them fortunes,
they must provide for themselves. They had lived very little at home for a
long while, and were only come now to stay a few weeks on account of
their father’s death; but they did so like Marsh-End and Morton, and all
these moors and hills about. They had been in London, and many other
grand towns; but they always said there was no place like home; and then
they were so agreeable with each other—never fell out nor “threaped.”hf
She did not know where there was such a family for being united.
Having finished my task of gooseberry picking, I asked where the two
ladies and their brother were now.
“Gone over to Morton for a walk; but they would be back in half an hour
to tea.”
They returned within the time Hannah had allotted them; they entered by
the kitchen door. Mr. St. John, when he saw me, merely bowed and passed
through; the two ladies stopped. Mary, in a few words, kindly and calmly
expressed the pleasure she felt in seeing me well enough to be able to come
down; Diana took my hand; she shook her head at me.
“You should have waited for my leave to descend,” she said. “You still
look very pale—and so thin! Poor child! poor girl!”
Diana had a voice toned, to my ear, like the cooing of a dove. She
possessed eyes whose gaze I delighted to encounter. Her whole face seemed
to me full of charm. Mary’s countenance was equally intelligent—her
features equally pretty; but her expression was more reserved; and her
manners, though gentle, more distant. Diana looked and spoke with a
certain authority; she had a will evidently. It was my nature to feel pleasure
in yielding to an authority supported like hers; and to bend, where my
conscience and self-respect permitted, to an active will.
“And what business have you here?” she continued. “It is not your place.
Mary and I sit in the kitchen sometimes, because at home we like to be free,
even to license—but you are a visitor, and must go into the parlor.”
“I am very well here.”
“Not at all—with Hannah bustling about and covering you with flour.”
“Besides, the fire is too hot for you,” interposed Mary.
“To be sure,” added her sister. “Come you must be obedient.” And still
holding my hand, she made me rise, and led me into the inner room.
“Sit there,” she said, placing me on the sofa, “while we take our things off
and get the tea ready; it is another privilege we exercise in our little
moorland home—to prepare our own meals when we are so inclined; or
when Hannah is baking, brewing, washing, or ironing.”
She closed the door, leaving me solus with Mr. St. John, who sat opposite,
a book or newspaper in his hand. I examined first the parlor, and then its
occupant.
The parlor was rather a small room, very plainly furnished, yet
comfortable, because clean and neat. The old-fashioned chairs were very
bright, and the walnut-wood table was like a looking-glass. A few strange,
antique portraits of the men and women of other days decorated the stained
walls; a cupboard with glass doors contained some books and an ancient set
of china. There was no superflous ornament in the room—not one modern
piece of furniture, save a brace of work-boxes and a lady’s desk in
rosewood, which stood on a side-table; everything—including the carpet
and curtains—looked at once well worn and well saved.
Mr. St. John—sitting as still as one of the dusky pictures on the walls,
keeping his eyes fixed on the page he perused, and his lips mutely sealed—
was easy enough to examine. Had he been a statue instead of a man, he
could not have been easier. He was young—perhaps from twenty-eight to
thirty—tall, slender; his face riveted the eye; it was like a Greek face, very
pure in outline; quite a straight, classic nose; quite an Athenian mouth and
chin. It is seldom, indeed, an English face comes so near the antique models
as did his. He might well be a little shocked at the irregularity of my
lineaments, his own being so harmonious. His eyes were large and blue,
with brown lashes; his high forehead, colorless as ivory, was partially
streaked over by careless locks of fair hair.
This is a gentle delineation, is it not, reader? Yet he whom it describes
scarcely impressed one with the idea of a gentle, a yielding, an impressible,
or even of a placid nature. Quiescent as he now sat, there was something
about his nostril, his mouth, his brow, which, to my perceptions, indicated
elements within either restless, or hard, or eager. He did not speak to me
one word, nor even direct to me one glance, till his sisters returned. Diana,
as she passed in and out, in the course of preparing tea, brought me a little
cake, baked on the top of the oven.
 “Eat that now,” she said; “you must be hungry. Hannah says you have had
nothing but some gruel since breakfast.”
I did not refuse it, for my appetite was awakened and keen. Mr. Rivers
now closed his book, approached the table, and, as he took a seat, fixed his
blue, pictorial-looking eyes full upon me. There was an unceremonious
directness, a searching, decided steadfastness, in his gaze now, which told
that intention, and not diffidence, had hitherto kept it averted from the
stranger.
“You are very hungry,” he said.
“I am, sir.” It is my way—it always was my way by instinct—ever to
meet the brief with brevity, the direct with plainness.
“It is well for you that a low fever has forced you to abstain for the last
three days; there would have been danger in yielding to the cravings of your
appetite at first. Now you may eat; though still not immoderately.”
“I trust that I shall not eat long at your expense, sir,” was my very
clumsily-contrived, unpolished answer.
“No,” he said coolly; “when you have indicated to us the residence of
your friends, we can write to them, and you may be restored to home.”
“That, I must plainly tell you, it is out of my power to do; being
absolutely without home and friends.”
The three looked at me; but not distrustfully. I felt there was no suspicion
in their glances; there was more of curiosity. I speak particularly of the
young ladies. St. John’s eyes, though clear enough in a literal sense, in a
figurative one were difficult to fathom. He seemed to use them rather as
instruments to search other people’s thoughts than as agents to reveal his
own; the combination of keenness and reserve was considerably more
calculated to embarrass than to encourage.
“Do you mean to say,” he asked, “that you are completely isolated from
every connection?”
“I do. Not a tie links me to any living thing, not a claim do I possess to
admittance under any roof in England.”
“A most singular position at your age!”
 Here I saw his glance directed to my hands, which were folded on the
table before. I wondered what he sought there; his words soon explained the
quest.
“You have never been married? You are a spinster?”
Diana laughed. “Why, she can’t be above seventeen or eighteen years old,
St. John,” said she.
“I am near nineteen, but I am not married. No.”
I felt a burning glow mount to my face, for bitter and agitating
recollections were awakened by the allusion to marriage. They all saw the
embarrassment and the emotion. Diana and Mary relieved me by turning
their eyes elsewhere than to my crim soned visage; but the colder and
sterner brother continued to gaze, till the trouble he had excited forced out
tears as well as color.
“Where did you last reside?” he now asked.
“You are too inquisitive, St. John,” murmured Mary, in a low voice; but
he leaned over the table and required an answer, by a second firm and
piercing look.
“The name of the place where, and of the person with whom, I lived, is
my secret,” I replied concisely.
“Which, if you like, you have, in my opinion, a right to keep, both from
St. John and every other questioner,” remarked Diana.
“Yet if I know nothing about you or your history, I cannot help you,” he
said. “And you need help, do you not?”
“I need it, and I seek it; so far, sir, that some true philanthropist will put
me in the way of getting work which I can do, and the remuneration for
which will keep me, if but in the barest necessaries of life.”
“I know not whether I am a true philanthropist, yet I am willing to aid you
to the utmost of my power in a purpose so honest. First, then, tell me what
you have been accustomed to do, and what you can do.”
I had now swallowed my tea. I was mightily refreshed by the beverage, as
much so as a giant with wine; it gave new tone to my unstrung nerves, and
enabled me to address this penetrating young judge steadily.
 “Mr. Rivers,” I said, turning to him, and looking at him as he looked at
me, openly and without diffidence, “you and your sisters have done me a
great service, the greatest man can do a fellow-being; you have rescued me,
by your noble hospitality, from death. This benefit conferred gives you an
unlimited claim on my gratitude, and a claim, to a certain extent, on my
confidence. I will tell you as much of the history of the wanderer you have
harbored as I can tell without compromising my own peace of mind—my
own security, moral and physical, and that of others.
“I am an orphan, the daughter of a clergyman. My parents died before I
could know them. I was brought up a dependent; educated at a charitable
institution. I will even tell you the name of the establishment, where I
passed six years as a pupil, and two as a teacher, Lowood Orphan Asylum,
—shire; you will have heard of it, Mr. Rivers? The Rev. Robert
Brocklehurst is the trea surer.”
“I have heard of Mr. Brocklehurst, and I have seen the school.”
“I left Lowood nearly a year since to become a private governess. I
obtained a good situation, and was happy. This place I was obliged to leave
four days before I came here. The reason of my departure I cannot and
ought not to explain; it would be useless, dangerous, and would sound
incredible. No blame attached to me; I am as free from culpability as any
one of you three. Miserable I am, and must be for a time, for the catastrophe
which drove me from a house I had found a paradise was of a strange and
direful nature. I observed but two points in planning my departure—speed,
secrecy; to secure these I had to leave behind me everything I possessed,
except a small parcel, which, in my hurry and trouble of mind, I forgot to
take out of the coach that brought me to Whitcross. To this neighborhood,
then, I came, quite destitute. I slept two nights in the open air, and wandered
about two days without crossing a threshold; but twice in that space of time
did I taste food, and it was when brought by hunger, exhaustion, and
despair, almost to the last gasp, that you, Mr. Rivers, forbade me to perish
with want at your door, and took me under the shelter of your roof. I know
all your sisters have done for me since, for I have not been insensible during
my seeming torpor, and I owe to their spontaneous, genuine, genial
compassion as large a debt as to your evangelical charity.”
 “Don’t make her talk any more now, St. John,” said Diana, as I paused;
“she is evidently not yet fit for excitement. Come to the sofa, and sit down
now, Miss Elliott.”
I gave an involuntary half-start at hearing the alias; I had forgotten my
new name. Mr. Rivers, whom nothing seemed to escape, noticed it at once.
“You said your name was Jane Elliott?” he observed.
“I did say so, and it is the name by which I think it expedient to be called
at present; but it is not my real name, and when I hear it it sounds strange to
me.”
“Your real name you will not give?”
“No; I fear discovery above all things, and whatever disclosure would
lead to it I avoid.”
“You are quite right, I am sure,” said Diana. “Now, do, brother, let her be
at peace a while.”
But when St. John had mused a few moments, he recommenced, as
imperturbably and with as much acumen as ever.
“You would not like to be long dependent on our hospitality—you would
wish, I see, to dispense as soon as may be with my sisters’ compassion; and,
above all, with my charity (I am quite sensible of the distinction drawn, nor
do I resent it—it is just); you desire to be independent of us?”
“I do; I have already said so. Show me how to work, or how to seek work;
that is all I now ask; then let me go, if it be but to the meanest cottage—but
till then allow me to stay here; I dread another essay of the horrors of
homeless destitution.”
“Indeed, you shall stay here,” said Diana, putting her white hand on my
head. “You shall,” repeated Mary, in the tone of undemonstrative sincerity,
which seemed natural to her.
“My sisters, you see, have a pleasure in keeping you,” said Mr. St. John,
“as they would have a pleasure in keeping and cherishing a half-frozen bird
some wintry wind might have driven through their casement. I feel more
inclination to put you in the way of keeping yourself, and shall endeavor to
do so; but observe, my sphere is narrow. I am but the incumbent of a poor
country parish; my aid must be of the humblest sort. And if you are inclined
to despise the day of small things, seek some more efficient succor than
such as I can offer.”82
“She has already said that she is willing to do anything honest she can
do,” answered Diana, for me; “and you know, St. John, she has no choice of
helpers; she is forced to put up with such crusty people as you.”
“I will be a dressmaker; I will be a plain-work-woman; I will be a servant,
a nurse-girl, if I can be no better,” I answered.
“Right,” said Mr. St. John, quite coolly. “If such is your spirit, I promise
to aid you—in my own time and way.”
He now resumed the book with which he had been occupied before tea. I
soon withdrew; for I had talked as much, and sat up as long, as my present
strength would permit.

OceanofPDF.com
 Chapter XXX

The more I knew of the inmates of Moor House, the better I liked them. In a
few days I had so far recovered my health that I could sit up all day, and
walk out sometimes. I could join with Diana and Mary in all their
occupations; converse with them as much as they wished, and aid them
when and where they would allow me. There was a reviving pleasure in this
intercourse, of a kind now tasted by me for the first time—the pleasure
arising from perfect congeniality of tastes, sentiments, and principles.
I liked to read what they liked to read; what they enjoyed, delighted me;
what they approved, I reverenced. They loved their sequestered home. I,
too, in the gray, small, antique structure, with its low roof, its latticed
casements, its mouldering walls, its avenue of aged firs—all grown aslant
under the stress of mountain winds; its garden, dark with yew and holly—
and where no flowers but of the hardiest species would bloom—found a
charm, both potent and permanent. They clung to the purple moors behind
and around their dwelling—to the hollow vale into which the pebbly bridle-
path leading from their gate descended; and which wound between fern-
banks first, and then among a few of the wildest little pasture-fields that
ever bordered a wilderness of heath, or gave sustenance to a flock of gray
moorland sheep, with their little mossy-faced lambs; they clung to this
scene, I say, with a perfect enthusiasm of attachment. I could comprehend
the feeling, and share both its strength and truth. I saw the fascination of the
locality. I felt the consecration of its loneliness; my eye feasted on the
outline of swell and sweep—on the wild coloring communicated to ridge
and dell, by moss, by heath-bell, by flower-sprinkled turf, by brilliant
bracken, and mellow granite crag. These details were just to me what they
were to them—so many pure and sweet sources of pleasure. The strong
blast and the soft breeze; the rough and the halcyon day; the hours of
sunrise and sunset; the moonlight and the clouded night, developed for me,
in these regions, the same attraction as for them—wound round my
faculties the same spell that entranced theirs.
In-doors we agreed equally well. They were both more accomplished and
better read than I was; but with eagerness I followed in the path of
knowledge they had trodden before me. I devoured the books they lent me;
then it was full satisfaction to discuss with them in the evening what I had
perused during the day. Thought fitted thought; opinion met opinion; we
coincided, in short, perfectly.
If in our trio there was a superior and a leader, it was Diana. Physically,
she far excelled me; she was handsome; she was vigorous. In her animal
spirits there was an affluence of life and certainty of flow, such as excited
my wonder, while it baffled my comprehension. I could talk a while when
the evening commenced; but the first gush of vivacity and fluency gone, I
was fain to sit on a stool at Diana’s feet, to rest my head on her knee, and
listen alternately to her and Mary; while they sounded thoroughly the topic
on which I had but touched. Diana offered to teach me German. I liked to
learn of her; I saw the part of instructress pleased and suited her; that of
scholar pleased and suited me no less. Our natures dovetailed, mutual
affection of the strongest kind was the result. They discovered I could draw;
their pencils and color-boxes were immediately at my service. My skill,
greater in this one point than theirs, surprised and charmed them. Mary
would sit and watch me by the hour together; then she would take lessons;
and a docile, intelligent, assiduous pupil she made. Thus occupied, and
mutually entertained, days passed like hours, and weeks like days.
As to Mr. St. John, the intimacy which had arisen so naturally and rapidly
between me and his sisters did not extend to him. One reason of the
distance yet observed between us was, that he was comparatively seldom at
home; a large proportion of his time appeared devoted to visiting the sick
and poor among the scattered population of his parish.
No weather seemed to hinder him in these pastoral excursions; rain or
fair, he would, when his hours of morning study were over, take his hat,
and, followed by his father’s old pointer, Carlo, go out on his mission of
love or duty—I scarcely know in which light he regarded it. Sometimes,
when the day was very unfavorable, his sisters would expostulate. He
would then say, with a peculiar smile, more solemn than cheerful—
“And if I let a gust of wind or a sprinkling of rain turn me aside from
these easy tasks, what preparation would such sloth be for the future I
propose to myself?”
Diana and Mary’s general answer to this question was a sigh, and some
minutes of apparently mournful meditation.
But besides his frequent absences, there was another barrier to friendship
with him; he seemed of a reserved, an abstracted, and even a brooding
nature. Zealous in his ministerial labors, blameless in his life and habits, he
yet did not appear to enjoy that mental serenity, that inward content, which
should be the reward of every sincere Christian and practical philanthropist.
Often of an evening, when he sat at the window, his desk and papers before
him, he would cease reading or writing, rest his chin on his hand, and
deliver himself up to I know not what course of thought; but that it was
perturbed and exciting might be seen in the frequent flash and changeful
dilation of his eye.
I think, moreover, that Nature was not to him that treasury of delight it
was to his sisters. He expressed once, and but once, in my hearing, a strong
sense of the rugged charm of the hills, and an inborn affection for the dark
roof and hoary walls he called his home; but there was more of gloom than
pleasure in the tone and words in which the sentiment was manifested; and
never did he seem to roam the moors for the sake of their soothing silence
—never seek out or dwell upon the thousand peaceful delights they could
yield.
Incommunicative as he was, some time elapsed before I had an
opportunity of gauging his mind. I first got an idea of its calibre when I
heard him preach in his own church at Morton. I wish I could describe that
sermon; but it is past my power. I cannot even render faithfully the effect it
produced on me.
It began calm—and indeed, as far as delivery and pitch of voice went, it
was calm to the end; an earnestly felt, yet strictly restrained zeal breathed
soon in the distinct accents, and prompted the nervoushg language. This
grew to force—compressed, condensed, controlled. The heart was thrilled,
the mind astonished, by the power of the preacher; neither were softened.
Throughout there was a strange bitterness; an absence of consolatory
gentleness; stern allusions to Calvinistic doctrines—election,
predestination, reprobationhh—were frequent; and each reference to these
points sounded like a sentence pronounced for doom. When he had done,
instead of feeling better, calmer, more enlightened by his discourse, I
experienced an inexpressible sadness; for it seemed to me—I know not
whether equally so to others—that the eloquence to which I had been
listening had sprung from a depth where lay turbid dregs of disappointment
—where moved troubling impulses of insatiate yearnings and disquieting
aspirations. I was sure St. John Rivers—pure-lived, conscientious, zealous
as he was—had not yet found that peace of God which passeth all
understanding;83 he had no more found it, I thought, than had I; with my
concealed and racking regrets for my broken idol and lost elysium—regrets
to which I have latterly avoided referring; but which possessed me and
tyrannized over me ruthlessly.
Meantime, a month was gone. Diana and Mary were soon to leave Moor
House, and return to the far different life and scene which awaited them, as
governesses in a large, fashionable, south-of-England city; where each held
a situation in families, by whose wealthy and haughty members they were
regarded only as humble dependents, and who neither knew nor sought one
of their innate excellences, and appreciated only their acquired
accomplishments as they appreciated the skill of their cook, or the taste of
their waiting-woman. Mr. St. John had said nothing to me yet about the
employment he had promised to obtain for me; yet it became urgent that I
should have a vocation of some kind. One morning, being left alone with
him a few minutes in the parlor, I ventured to approach the window-recess-
which his table, chair, and desk consecrated as a kind of study—and I was
going to speak; though not very well knowing in what words to frame my
inquiry—for it is at all times difficult to break the ice of reserve glassing
over such natures as his—when he saved me the trouble, by being the first
to commence a dialogue.
Looking up as I drew near—“You have a question to ask of me?” he said.
 “Yes; I wish to know whether you have heard of any service I can offer
myself to undertake.”
“I found or devised something for you three weeks ago; but as you
seemed both useful and happy here—as my sisters had evidently become
attached to you, and your society gave them unusual pleasure—I deemed it
inexpedient to break in on your mutual comfort till their approaching
departure from Marsh-End should render yours necessary.”
“And they will go in three days now?” I said.
“Yes; and when they go, I shall return to the parsonage at Morton; Hannah
will accompany me; and this old house will be shut up.”
I waited a few moments, expecting he would go on with the subject first
broached; but he seemed to have entered another train of reflection; his look
denoted abstraction from me and my business. I was obliged to recall him
to a theme which was of necessity one of close and anxious interest to me.
“What is the employment you had in view, Mr. Rivers? I hope this delay
will not have increased the difficulty of securing it.”
“Oh, no; since it is an employment which depends only on me to give,
and you to accept.”
He again paused; there seemed a reluctance to continue. I grew impatient;
a restless movement or two, and an eager and exacting glance fastened on
his face, conveyed the feeling to him as effectually as words could have
done, and with less trouble.
“You need be in no hurry to hear,” he said; “let me frankly tell you, I have
nothing eligiblehi or profitable to suggest. Before I explain, recall, if you
please, my notice, clearly given, that if I helped you, it must be as the blind
man would help the lame. I am poor; for I find that, when I have paid my
father’s debts, all the patrimony remaining to me will be this crumbling
grange, the row of scathed firs behind, and the patch of moorish soil, with
the yew-trees and holly-bushes in front. I am obscure; Rivers is an old
name; but of the three sole descendants of the race, two earn the
dependent’s crust among strangers, and the third considers himself an alien
from his native country—not only for this life, but in death. Yes, and deems,
and is bound to deem himself honored by the lot; and aspires but after the
day when the cross of separation from fleshly ties shall be laid on his
shoulders, and when the Head of that church-militant of whose humblest
members he is one, shall give the word, ‘Rise, follow me!’ ”
St. John said these words as he pronounced his sermons, with a quiet,
deep voice; with an unflushed cheek, and a coruscating radiance of glance.
He resumed—
“And since I am myself poor and obscure, I can offer you but a service of
poverty and obscurity. You may even think it degrading—for I see now your
habits have been what the world calls refined; your tastes lean to the ideal;
and your society has at least been among the educated—but I consider that
no service degrades which can better our race. I hold that the more arid and
unreclaimed the soil where the Christian laborer’s task of tillage is
appointed him—the scantier the meed his toil brings—the higher the honor.
His, under such circumstances, is the destiny of the pioneer; and the first
pioneers of the Gospel were the Apostles—their captain was Jesus, the
Redeemer himself.”
“Well!” I said, as he again paused—“proceed.”
He looked at me before he proceeded; indeed, he seemed leisurely to read
my face, as if its features and lines were characters on a page. The
conclusions drawn from this scrutiny he partially expressed in his
succeeding observations.
“I believe you will accept the post I offer you,” said he, “and hold it for a
while; not permanently though, any more than I could permanently keep the
narrow and narrowing—the tranquil, hidden office of English country
incumbent; for in your nature is an alloy as detrimental to repose as that in
mine; though of a different kind.”
“Do explain,” I urged, when he halted once more.
“I will; and you shall hear how poor the proposal is—how triv ial—how
cramping. I shall not stay long at Morton, now that my father is dead, and
that I am my own master. I shall leave the place probably in the course of a
twelvemonth; but while I do stay, I will exert myself to the utmost for its
improvement. Morton, when I came to it two years ago, had no school; the
children of the poor were excluded from every hope of progress. I
established one for boys; I mean now to open a second school, for girls. I
have hired a building for the purpose, with a cottage of two rooms attached
to it for the mistress’ house. Her salary would be thirty pounds a year; her
house is already furnished, very simply, but sufficiently, by the kindness of
a lady, Miss Oliver, the only daughter of the sole rich man in my parish—
Mr. Oliver, the proprietor of a needle factory and iron foundry in the valley.
The same lady pays for the education and clothing of an orphan from the
workhouse, on condition that she shall aid the mistress in such menial
offices connected with her own house and the school, as her occupation of
teaching will prevent her having time to discharge in person. Will you be
this mistress?”
He put the question rather hurriedly; he seemed half to expect an
indignant, or at least a disdainful, rejection of the offer; not knowing all my
thoughts and feelings, though guessing some, he could not tell in what light
the lot would appear to me. In truth it was humble—but then it was
sheltered, and I wanted a safe asylum; it was plodding—but then, compared
with that of a governess in a rich house, it was independent; and the fear of
servitude with strangers entered my soul like iron; it was not ignoble—not
unworthy—not mentally degrading. I made my decision.
“I thank you for the proposal, Mr. Rivers; and I accept it with all my
heart.”
“But you comprehend me?” he said. “It is a village school; your scholars
will be only poor girls—cottagers’ children—at the best, farmers’
daughters. Knitting, sewing, reading, writing, ciphering, will be all you will
have to teach. What will you do with your accomplishments? What with the
largest portion of your mind—sentiments—tastes?”
“Save them till they are wanted. They will keep.”
“You know what you undertake, then?”
“I do.”
He now smiled; and not a bitter or a sad smile; but one well pleased and
deeply gratified.
“And when will you commence the exercise of your function?”
 “I will go to my house to-morrow; and open the school, if you like, next
week.”
“Very well; so be it.”
He rose and walked through the room. Standing still, he again looked at
me. He shook his head.
“What do you disapprove of, Mr. Rivers?” I asked.
“You will not stay at Morton long; no, no!”
“Why? What is your reason for saying so?”
“I read it in your eye; it is not of that description which promises the
maintenance of an even tenor in life.”
“I am not ambitious.”
He started at the word “ambitious.” He repeated, “No. What made you
think of ambition? Who is ambitious? I know I am; but how did you find it
out?”
“I was speaking of myself.”
“Well, if you are not ambitious, you are—” He paused.
“What?”
“I was going to say, impassioned; but perhaps you would have
misunderstood the word, and been displeased. I mean, that human
affections and sympathies have a most powerful hold on you. I am sure you
cannot long be content to pass your leisure in solitude, and to devote your
working hours to a monotonous labor wholly void of stimulus, any more
than I can be content,” he added, with emphasis, “to live here buried in
morass, pent in with mountain—my nature, that God gave me, contravened;
my faculties, Heaven-bestowed, paralyzed—made useless.84 You hear now
how I contradict myself. I, who preached contentment with a humble lot,
and justified the vocation even of hewers of wood, and drawers of water, in
God’s service—I, his ordained minister, almost rave in my restlessness.
Well, propensities and principles must be reconciled by some means.”
He left the room. In this brief hour I had learned more of him than in the
whole previous month; yet still he puzzled me.
 Diana and Mary Rivers became more sad and silent as the day approached
for leaving their brother and their home. They both tried to appear as usual;
but the sorrow they had to struggle against was one that could not be
entirely conquered or concealed. Diana intimated that this would be a
different parting from any they had ever yet known. It would probably, as
far as St. John was concerned, be a parting for years—it might be a parting
for life.
“He will sacrifice all to his long-framed resolves,” she said; “natural
affection and feelings more potent still. St. John looks quiet, Jane, but he
hides a fever in his vitals. You would think him gentle, yet in some things
he is inexorable as death; and the worst of it is, my conscience will hardly
permit me to dissuade him from his severe decision; certainly I cannot for a
moment blame him for it. It is right, noble, Christian; yet it breaks my
heart.” And the tears gushed to her fine eyes. Mary bent her head low over
her work.
“We are now without father; we shall soon be without home and brother,”
she murmured.
At that moment a little accident supervened, which seemed decreed by
fate purposely to prove the truth of the adage that “Misfortunes never come
singly”; and to add to their distresses the vexing one of the slip between the
cup and the lip. St. John passed the window reading a letter. He entered.
“Our Uncle John is dead,” said he.
Both the sisters seemed struck; not shocked or appalled; the tidings
appeared in their eyes rather momentous than afflicting.
“Dead?” repeated Diana.
“Yes.”
She riveted a searching gaze on her brother’s face. “And what then?” she
demanded, in a low voice.
“What then, Di?” he replied, maintaining a marble immobility of feature.
“What then? Why—nothing. Read.”
He threw a letter into her lap. She glanced over it, and handed it to Mary.
Mary perused it in silence, and returned it to her brother. All three looked at
each other, and all three smiled—a dreary, pensive smile enough.
“Amen! We can yet live,” said Diana, at last.
“At any rate, it makes us no worse off than we were before,” remarked
Mary.
“Only it forces rather strongly on the mind the picture of what might have
been, ” said Mr. Rivers; “and contrasts it somewhat too vividly with what
is. ”
He folded the letter, locked it in his desk, and then went out.
For some minutes no one spoke. Diana then turned to me.
“Jane, you will wonder at us and our mysteries,” she said; “and think us
hard-hearted beings not to be more moved at the death of so near a relation
as an uncle; but we have never seen him or known him. He was my
mother’s brother. My father and he quarrelled long ago. It was by his advice
that my father risked most of his property in the speculation that ruined
him. Mutual recriminations passed between them; they parted in anger, and
were never reconciled. My uncle engaged afterward in more prosperous
undertakings; it appears he realized a fortune of twenty thousand pounds.
He was never married, and had no near kindred but ourselves, and one other
person, not more closely related than we. My father always cherished the
idea that he would atone for his error by leaving his possessions to us. That
letter informs us that he has bequeathed every penny to the other relation,
with the exception of thirty guineas, to be divided between St. John, Diana,
and Mary Rivers, for the purchase of three mourning rings. He had a right,
of course, to do as he pleased; and yet a momentary damp is cast on the
spirits by the receipt of such news. Mary and I would have esteemed
ourselves rich with a thousand pounds each; and to St. John such a sum
would have been valuable, for the good it would have enabled him to do.”
This explanation given, the subject was dropped, and no further reference
made to it, by either Mr. Rivers or his sisters. The next day, I left Marsh-
End for Morton. The day after, Diana and Mary quitted it for distant B——.
In a week, Mr. Rivers and Hannah repaired to the parsonage; and so the old
grange was abandoned.
OceanofPDF.com
 Chapter XXXI

My home, then—when I at last find a home—is a cottage; a little room with

white-washed walls and a sanded floor, containing four painted chairs and a
table, a clock, a cupboard, with two or three plates and dishes, and a set of
tea-things in delf.hj Above, a chamber of the same dimensions as the
kitchen, with a deal-bedstead and chest of drawers; small, yet too large to
be filled with my scanty wardrobe; though the kindness of my gentle and
generous friends has increased that by a modest stock of such things as are
necessary.
It is evening. I have dismissed, with the fee of an orange, the little orphan
who serves me as a handmaid. I am sitting alone on the hearth. This
morning the village school opened. I had twenty scholars. But three of the
number can read; none write or cipher. Several knit, and a few sew a little.
They speak with the broadest accent of the district. At present, they and I
have a difficulty in understanding each other’s language. Some of them are
unman nered, rough, intractable, as well as ignorant; but others are docile,
have a wish to learn, and evince a disposition that pleases me. I must not
forget that these coarsely-clad little peasants are of flesh and blood as good
as the scions of gentlest genealogy, and that the germs of native excellence,
refinement, intelligence, kind feeling, are as likely to exist in their hearts as
in those of the best-born. My duty will be to develop these germs. Surely I
shall find some happiness in discharging that office. Much enjoyment I do
not expect in the life opening before me; yet it will, doubtless, if I regulate
my mind, and exert my powers as I ought, yield me enough to live on from
day to day.
Was I very gleeful, settled, content, during the hours I passed in yonder
bare, humble school-room this morning and afternoon? Not to deceive
myself, I must reply—No. I felt desolate to a degree. I felt—yes, idiot that I
am—I felt degraded. I doubted I had taken a step which sunk instead of
raising me in the scale of social existence. I was weakly dismayed at the
ignorance, the poverty, the coarseness, of all I heard and saw round me. But
let me not hate and despise myself too much for these feelings; I know them
to be wrong—that is a great step gained; I shall strive to overcome them.
To-morrow, I trust, I shall get the better of them partially; and in a few
weeks, perhaps, they will be quite subdued. In a few months, it is possible,
the happiness of seeing progress, and a change for the better in my scholars,
may substitute gratification for disgust.
Meantime, let me ask myself one question—Which is better? To have
surrendered to temptation; listened to passion; made no painful effort—no
struggle; but to have sunk down in the silken snare; fallen on the flowers
covering it; wakened in a southern clime, among the luxuries of a pleasure-
villa; to have been now living in France, Mr. Rochester’s mistress; delirious
with his love half my time—for he would—oh, yes, he would have loved
me well for a while. He did love me—no one will ever love me so again. I
shall never more know the sweet homage given to beauty, youth, and grace
—for never to any else shall I seem to possess these charms. He was fond
and proud of me—it is what no man besides will ever be. But where am I
wandering, and what am I saying, and, above all, feeling? Whether it is
better, I ask, to be a slave in a fool’s paradise at Marseilles—fevered with
delusive bliss one hour—suffocating with the bitterest tears of remorse and
shame the next—or to be a village school-mistress, free and honest, in a
breezy mountain nook in the healthy heart of England?
Yes; I feel now that I was right when I adhered to principle and law, and
scorned and crushed the insane promptings of a frenzied moment. God
directed me to a correct choice. I thank His providence for the guidance!
Having brought my eventide musings to this point, I rose, went to my
door, and looked at the sunset of the harvest-day, and at the quiet fields
before my cottage; which, with the school, was distant half a mile from the
village. The birds were singing their last strains—
The air was mild; the dew was balm.85
While I looked, I thought myself happy, and was surprised to find myself,
ere long, weeping—and why? For the doom which had reft me from
adhesion to my master; for him I was no more to see; for the desperate grief
and fatal fury—consequences of my departure—which might now, perhaps,
be dragging him from the path of right, too far to leave hope of ultimate
restoration thither. At this thought, I turned my face aside from the lovely
sky of eve and lonely vale of Morton—I say lonely, for in that bend of it
visible to me, there was no building apparent save the church and the
parsonage, half hid in trees; and, quite at the extremity, the roof of Vale
Hall, where the rich Mr. Oliver and his daughter lived. I hid my eyes, and
leaned my head against the stone frame of my door; but soon a slight noise
near the wicket which shut in my tiny garden from the meadow beyond it,
made me look up. A dog—old Carlo, Mr. Rivers’ pointer, as I saw in a
moment—was pushing the gate with his nose, and St. John himself leaned
upon it with folded arms; his brow knit, his gaze, grave almost to
displeasure, fixed on me. I asked him to come in.
“No, I cannot stay; I have only brought you a little parcel my sisters left
for you. I think it contains a color-box, pencils, and paper.”
I approached to take it; a welcome gift it was. He examined my face, I
thought, with austerity, as I came near. The traces of tears were, doubtless,
very visible upon it.
“Have you found your first day’s work harder than you expected?” he
asked.
“Oh, no! On the contrary, I think, in time, I shall get on with my scholars
very well.”
“But perhaps your accommodations—your cottage—your furniture—
have disappointed your expectations? They are, in truth, scanty enough; but
—” I interrupted:
“My cottage is clean and weather-proof; my furniture sufficient and
commodious. All I see has made me thankful, not despondent. I am not
absolutely such a fool and sensualist as to regret the absence of a carpet, a
sofa, and silver plate. Besides, five weeks ago I had nothing—I was an
outcast, a beggar, a vagrant; now I have acquaintance, a home, a business. I
wonder at the goodness of God; the generosity of my friends; the bounty of
my lot. I do not repine.”
 “But you feel solitude an oppression? The little house there behind you is
rather dark and empty?”
“I have hardly had time yet to enjoy a sense of tranquillity, much less to
grow impatient under one of loneliness.”
“Very well; I hope you feel the content you express; at any rate, your
good sense will tell you that it is too soon yet to yield to the vacillating
fears of Lot’s wife.86 What you had left before I saw you, of course I do not
know; but I counsel you to resist, firmly, every temptation which would
incline you to look back; pursue your present career steadily, for some
months at least.”
“It is what I mean to do,” I answered. St. John continued—
“It is hard work to control the workings of inclination, and turn the bent
of nature; but that it may be done, I know from experience. God has given
us, in a measure, the power to make our own fate; and when our energies
seem to demand a sustenance they cannot get—when our will strains after a
path we may not follow—we need neither starve from inanition, nor stand
still in despair; we have but to seek another nourishment for the mind, as
strong as the forbidden food it longed to taste—and perhaps purer; and to
hew out for the adventurous foot a road as direct and broad as the one
Fortune has blocked up against us, if rougher than it.
“A year ago, I was myself intensely miserable, because I thought I had
made a mistake in entering the ministry; its uniform duties wearied me to
death. I burned for the more active life of the world—for the more exciting
toils of a literary career—for the destiny of an artist, author, orator;
anything rather than that of a priest; yes, the heart of a politician, of a
soldier, of a votary of glory, a lover of renown, a luster after power, beat
under my curate’s surplice. I considered my life was so wretched, it must be
changed or I must die. After a season of darkness and struggling, light broke
and relief fell; my cramped existence all at once spread out to a plain
without bounds—my powers heard a call from Heaven to rise, gather their
full strength, spread their wings, and mount beyond ken. God had an errand
for me; to bear which afar, to deliver it well, skill and strength, courage and
eloquence, the best qualifications of soldier, statesman, and orator, were all
needed; for these all centre in the good missionary.
 “A missionary I resolved to be. From that moment my state of mind
changed; the fetters dissolved and dropped from every faculty, leaving
nothing of bondage but its galling soreness—which time only can heal. My
father, indeed, opposed the determination; but since his death, I have not a
legitimate obstacle to contend with; some affairs settled, a successor for
Morton provided, an entanglement or two of the feelings broken through or
cut asunder—a last conflict with human weakness, in which I know I shall
overcome, because I have vowed that I will overcome—and I leave Europe
for the East.”
He said this in his peculiar, subdued yet emphatic voice; looking, when he
had ceased speaking, not at me, but at the setting sun, at which I looked too.
Both he and I had our backs toward the path leading up the field to the
wicket. We had heard no step on that grass-grown track; the water running
in the vale was the one lulling sound of the hour and scene; we might well
then start, when a gay voice, sweet as a silver bell, exclaimed—
“Good evening, Mr. Rivers. And good evening, old Carlo. Your dog is
quicker to recognize his friends than you are, sir; he pricked his ears and
wagged his tail when I was at the bottom of the field, and you have your
back toward me now.”
It was true. Though Mr. Rivers had started at the first of those musical
accents, as if a thunderbolt had split a cloud over his head, he stood yet, at
the close of the sentence, in the same attitude in which the speaker had
surprised him; his arm resting on the gate, his face directed toward the west.
He turned at last, with measured deliberation. A vision, as it seemed to me,
had risen at his side. There appeared, within three feet of him, a form clad
in pure white—a youthful, graceful form; full, yet fine, in contour; and
when, after bending to caress Carlo, it lifted up its head, and threw back a
long veil, there bloomed under his glance a face of perfect beauty. Perfect
beauty is a strong expression; but I do not retrace or qualify it; as sweet
features as ever the temperate clime of Albionhk moulded; as pure hues of
rose and lily as ever her humid gales and vapory skies generated and
screened, justified, in this instance, the term. No charm was wanting, no
defect was perceptible; the young girl had regular and delicate lineaments;
eyes shaped and colored as we see them in lovely pictures, large, and dark,
and full; the long and shadowy eyelash which encircles a fine eye with so
soft a fascination; the pencilled brow which gives such clearness; the white,
smooth forehead, which adds such repose to the livelier beauties of tint and
ray; the cheek, oval, fresh, and smooth; the lips fresh too, ruddy, healthy,
sweetly formed; the even and gleaming teeth without flaw; the small,
dimpled chin; the ornament of rich, plenteous tresses—all advantages, in
short, which, combined, realize the ideal of beauty, were fully hers. I
wondered, as I looked at this fair creature; I admired her with my whole
heart. Nature had surely formed her in a partial mood; and forgetting her
usual stinted step-mother dole of gifts, had endowed this, her darling, with a
granddame’s bounty.
What did St. John Rivers think of this earthly angel? I naturally asked
myself that question as I saw him turn to her and look at her; and, as
naturally, I sought the answer to the inquiry in his countenance. He had
already withdrawn his eye from the Peri,hl and was looking at a humble tuft
of daisies which grew by the wicket.
“A lovely evening; but late for you to be out alone,” he said, as he crushed
the snowy heads of the closed flowers with his foot.
“Oh, I only came home from S——(she mentioned the name of a large
town some twenty miles distant) this afternoon. Papa told me you had
opened your school, and that the new mistress was come; and so I put on
my bonnet after tea, and ran up the valley to see her; this is she?” pointing
to me.
“It is,” said St. John.
“Do you think you shall like Morton?” she asked of me, with a direct and
naive simplicity of tone and manner, pleasing, if childlike.
“I hope I shall. I have many inducements to do so.”
“Did you find your scholars as attentive as you expected?”
“Quite.”
“Do you like your house?”
“Very much.”
“Have I furnished it nicely?”
 “Very nicely, indeed.”
“And made a good choice of an attendant for you in Alice Wood?”
“You have, indeed. She is teachable and handy.” (This, then, I thought, is
Miss Oliver, the heiress, favored, it seems, in the gifts of fortune, as well as
in those of nature! What happy combination of the planets presided over her
birth, I wonder?)
“I shall come up and help you to teach sometimes,” she added. “It will be
a change for me to visit you now and then; and I like a change. Mr. Rivers, I
have been so gay during my stay at S——. Last night, or rather this
morning, I was dancing till two o‘clock. The——th regiment are stationed
there, since the riots; and the officers are the most agreeable men in the
world; they put all our young knife-grinders and scissor-merchants to
shame.”
It seemed to me that Mr. St. John’s under lip protruded, and his upper lip
curled a moment. His mouth certainly looked a good deal compressed, and
the lower part of his face unusually stern and square, as the laughing girl
gave him this information. He lifted his gaze, too, from the daisies, and
turned it on her. An unsmiling, a searching, a meaning gaze it was. She
answered it with a second laugh; and laughter well became her youth, her
roses, her dimples, her bright eyes.
As he stood, mute and grave, she again fell to caressing Carlo. “Poor
Carlo loves me,” said she. “He is not stern and distant to his friends; and if
he could speak, he would not be silent.”
As she patted the dog’s head, bending with native grace before his young
and austere master, I saw a glow rise to that master’s face. I saw his solemn
eye melt with sudden fire, and flicker with resistless motion. Flushed and
kindled thus, he looked nearly as beautiful for a man as she for a woman.
His chest heaved once, as if his large heart, weary of despotic constriction,
had expanded, despite the will, and made a vigorous bound for the
attainment of liberty. But he curbed it, I think, as a resolute rider would curb
a rearing steed. He responded neither by word nor movement to the gentle
advances made him.
 “Papa says you never come to see us now,” continued Miss Oliver,
looking up. “You are quite a stranger at Vale Hall. He is alone this evening,
and not very well; will you return with me and visit him?”
“It is not a seasonable hour to intrude on Mr. Oliver,” answered St. John.
“Not a seasonable hour! But I declare it is. It is just the hour when papa
most wants company; when the works are closed, and he has no business to
occupy him. Now, Mr. Rivers, do come. Why are you so very shy, and so
very sombre?” She filled up the hiatus his silence left by a reply of her own.
“I forgot,” she exclaimed, shaking her beautiful curled head, as if shocked
at herself. “I am so giddy and thoughtless! Do excuse me. It had slipped my
memory that you have good reasons to be indisposed for joining in my
chatter. Diana and Mary have left you, and Moor House is shut up, and you
are so lonely. I am sure I pity you. Do come and see papa.”
“Not to-night, Miss Rosamond, not to-night.”
Mr. St. John spoke almost like an automaton; himself only knew the effort
it cost him thus to refuse.
“Well, if you are so obstinate, I will leave you; for I dare not stay any
longer; the dew begins to fall. Good-evening!”
She held out her hand. He just touched it. “Good-evening!” he repeated,
in a voice low and hollow as an echo. She turned; but in a moment returned.
“Are you well?” she asked. Well might she put the question; his face was
blanched as her gown.
“Quite well,” he enunciated; and, with a bow, he left the gate. She went
one way; he another. She turned twice to gaze after him, as she tripped
fairylike down the field; he, as he strode firmly across, never turned at all.
This spectacle of another’s suffering and sacrifices wrapped my thoughts
from exclusive meditation on my own. Diana Rivers had designated her
brother “inexorable as death.” She had not exaggerated.

OceanofPDF.com
 Chapter XXXII

I continued the labors of the village school as actively and faithfully as I

could. It was truly hard work at first. Some time elapsed before, with all my
efforts, I could comprehend my scholars and their nature. Wholly untaught,
with faculties quite torpid, they seemed to me hopelessly dull; and, at first
sight, all dull alike; but I soon found I was mistaken. There was a difference
among them as among the educated; and when I got to know them, and they
me, this difference rapidly developed itself. Their amazement at me, my
language, my rules and ways, once subsided, I found some of these heavy-
looking, gaping rustics, wake up into sharp-witted girls enough. Many
showed themselves obliging, and amiable, too; and I discovered among
them not a few examples of natural politeness and innate self-respect, as
well as of excellent capacity, that won both my good will and my
admiration. These soon took a pleasure in doing their work well—in
keeping their persons neat—in learning their tasks regularly—in acquiring
quiet and orderly manners. The rapidity of their progress, in some instances,
was even surprising; and an honest and happy pride I took in it; besides, I
began personally to like some of the best girls, and they liked me. I had
among my scholars several farmers’ daughters—young women grown,
almost. These could already read, write, and sew; and to them I taught the
elements of grammar, geography, history, and the finer kinds of
needlework. I found estimable characters among them—characters desirous
of information, and disposed for improvement—with whom I passed many
a pleasant evening hour in their own homes. Their parents then (the farmer
and his wife) loaded me with attentions. There was an enjoyment in
accepting their simple kindness, and in repaying it by a consideration—a
scrupulous regard to their feelings—to which they were not, perhaps, at all
times accustomed, and which both charmed and benefited them; because,
while it elevated them in their own eyes, it made them emulous to merit the
deferential treatment they received.
I felt I became a favorite in the neighborhood. Whenever I went out, I
heard on all sides cordial salutations, and was welcomed with friendly
smiles. To live amid general regard, though it be but the regard of working-
people, is like “sitting in sunshine, calm and sweet;”87 serene inward
feelings bud and bloom under the ray. At this period of my life, my heart far
oftener swelled with thankfulness than sunk with dejection; and yet, reader,
to tell you all, in the midst of this calm, this useful existence—after a day
passed in honorable exertion among my scholars, an evening spent in
drawing or reading contentedly alone—I used to rush into strange dreams at
night—dreams many-colored, agitated, full of the ideal, the stirring, the
stormy—dreams where, amid unusual scenes, charged with adventure, with
agitating risk and romantic chance, I still again and again met Mr.
Rochester, always at some exciting crisis; and then the sense of being in his
arms, hearing his voice, meeting his eye, touching his hand and cheek,
loving him, being loved by him—the hope of passing a lifetime at his side,
would be renewed, with all its first force and fire. Then I awoke; then I
recalled where I was, and how situated; then I rose up on my curtainless
bed, trembling and quivering; and then the still, dark night witnessed the
convulsion of despair, and heard the burst of passion. By nine o‘clock the
next morning, I was punctually opening the school—tranquil, settled,
prepared for the steady duties of the day.
Rosamond Oliver kept her word in coming to visit me. Her call at the
school was generally made in the course of her morning ride. She would
canter up to the door on her pony, followed by a mounted livery servant.
Anything more exquisite than her appearance, in her purple habit, with her
Amazon’s cap of black velvet placed gracefully above the long curls that
kissed her cheek and floated to her shoulders, can scarcely be imagined; and
it was thus she would enter the rustic building, and glide through the
dazzled ranks of the village children. She generally came at the hour when
Mr. Rivers was engaged in giving his daily catechizing lesson. Keenly, I
fear, did the eye of the young visitress pierce the young pastor’s heart. A
sort of instinct seemed to warn him of her entrance, even when he did not
see it; and when he was looking quite away from the door, if she appeared
at it, his cheek would glow, and his marble-seeming features, though they
refused to relax, changed indescribably; and in their very quiescence
became expressive of a repressed fervor, stronger than the working muscle
or darting glance could indicate.
Of course, she knew her power; indeed, he did not, because he could not,
conceal it from her. In spite of his Christian stoicism, when she went up and
addressed him, and smiled gayly, encouragingly, even fondly, in his face,
his hand would tremble, and his eye burn. He seemed to say, with his sad
and resolute look, if he did not say it with his lips, “I love you, and I know
you prefer me. It is not despair of success that keeps me dumb; if I offered
my heart, I believe you would accept it. But that heart is already laid on a
sacred altar—the fire is arranged round it; it will soon be no more than a
sacrifice consumed.”
And then she would pout like a disappointed child; a pensive cloud would
soften her radiant vivacity; she would withdraw her hand hastily from his,
and turn in transient petulance from his aspect, at once so heroic and so
martyr-like. St. John, no doubt, would have given the world to follow,
recall, retain her, when she thus left him; but he would not give one chance
of heaven, nor relinquish, for the elysium of her love, one hope of the true,
eternal paradise. Besides, he could not bound all that he had in his nature—
the rover, the aspirant, the poet, the priest—in the limits of a single passion.
He could not—he would not—renounce his wild field of mission warfare
for the parlors and the peace of Vale Hall. I learned so much from himself,
in an inroad I once, despite his reserve, had the daring to make on his
confidence.
Miss Oliver already honored me with frequent visits to my cottage. I had
learned her whole character, which was without mystery or disguise; she
was coquettish, but not heardess—exacting, but not worthlessly selfish. She
had been indulged from her birth, but was not absolutely spoiled. She was
hasty, but good-humored; vain (she could not help it, when every glance in
the glass showed her such a flush of loveliness), but not affected; liberal-
handed; innocent of the pride of wealth; ingenuous; sufficiently intelligent;
gay, lively, and unthinking; she was very charming, in short, even to a cool
observer of her own sex like me; but she was not profoundly interesting or
thoroughly impressive. A very different sort of mind was hers from that, for
instance, of the sisters of St. John. Still, I liked her almost as I liked my
pupil Adèle; except that, for a child whom we have watched over and
taught, a closer affection is engendered than we can give an equally
attractive adult acquaintance.
She had taken an amiable caprice to me. She said I was like Mr. Rivers
(only, certainly, she allowed, “not one-tenth so handsome; though I was a
nice, neat little soul enough; but he was an angel”). I was, however, good,
clever, composed, and firm, like him. I was a lusus naturae,hm she
affirmed, as a village school mistress; she was sure my previous history, if
known, would make a delightful romance.
One evening, while with her usual childlike activity, and thoughtless yet
not offensive inquisitiveness, she was rummaging the cupboard and the
table-drawer of my little kitchen, she discovered first two French books, a
volume of Schiller, a German grammar and dictionary; and then my
drawing-materials and some sketches, including a pencil-head of a pretty
little cherub-like girl, one of my scholars, and sundry views from nature,
taken in the vale of Morton, and on the surrounding moors. She was first
transfixed with surprise, and then electrified with delight.
“Had I done these pictures? Did I know French and German? What a love
—what a miracle I was! I drew—better than her master in the first school in
S——. Would I sketch a portrait of her to show to papa?”
“With pleasure,” I replied; and I felt a thrill of artist-delight at the idea of
copying from so perfect and radiant a model. She had then on a dark-blue
silk dress; her arms and her neck were bare; her only ornament was her
chestnut tresses, which waved over her shoulders with all the wild grace of
natural curls. I took a sheet of fine cardboard, and drew a careful outline. I
promised myself the pleasure of coloring it; and as it was getting late then, I
told her she must come and sit another day.
She made such a report of me to her father, that Mr. Oliver himself
accompanied her next evening—a tall, massive-featured, middle-aged, and
gray-headed man, at whose side his lovely daughter looked like a bright
flower near a hoary turret. He appeared a taciturn, and perhaps a proud
personage; but he was very kind to me. The sketch of Rosamond’s portrait
pleased him highly; he said I must make a finished picture of it. He insisted,
too, on my coming the next day to spend the evening at Vale Hall.
I went. I found it a large, handsome residence, showing abundant
evidences of wealth in the proprietor. Rosamond was full of glee and
pleasure all the time I stayed. Her father was affable; and when he entered
into conversation with me after tea, he expressed in strong terms his
approbation of what I had done in Morton school; and said he only feared,
from what he saw and heard, I was too good for the place, and would soon
quit it for one more suitable.
“Indeed!” cried Rosamond, “she is clever enough to be a governess in a
high family, papa!”
I thought—I would far rather be where I am than in any high family in the
land. Mr. Oliver spoke of Mr. Rivers—of the Rivers family—with great
respect. He said it was a very old name in that neighborhood; that the
ancestors of the house were wealthy; that all Morton had once belonged to
them; that even now he considered the representative of that house might, if
he liked, make an alliance with the best. He accounted it a pity that so fine
and talented a young man should have formed the design of going out as a
missionary; it was quite throwing a valuable life away. It appeared, then,
that her father would throw no obstacle in the way of Rosamond’s union
with St. John. Mr. Oliver evidently regarded the young clergyman’s good
birth, old name, and sacred profession, as sufficient compensation for the
want of fortune.
It was the fifth of November, and a holiday.88 My little servant, after
helping me to clean my house, was gone, well satisfied with the fee of a
penny for her aid. All about me was spotless and bright—scoured floor,
polished grate, and well rubbed chairs. I had also made myself neat, and
had now the afternoon before me to spend as I would.
The translation of a few pages of German occupied an hour; then I got my
pallet and pencils, and fell to the more soothing, because easier, occupation
of completing Rosamond Oliver’s miniature. The head was finished
already; there was but the background to tint, and the drapery to shade off; a
touch of carmine, too, to add to the ripe lips—a soft curl here and there to
the tresses—a deeper tinge to the shadow of the lash under the azured
eyelid. I was absorbed in the execution of these nice details, when, after one
rapid tap, my door unclosed, admitting St. John Rivers.
“I am come to see how you are spending your holiday,” he said. “Not, I
hope, in thought? No, that is well; while you draw you will not feel lonely.
You see, I mistrust you still; though you have borne up wonderfully so far. I
have brought you a book for evening solace,” and he laid on the table a new
publication—a poem; one of those genuine productions so often vouchsafed
to the fortunate public of those days—the golden age of modern literature.
Alas! the readers of our era are less favored. But, courage! I will not pause
either to accuse or repine. I know poetry is not dead, nor genius lost; nor
has Mammon gained power over either, to bind or slay; they will both assert
their existence, their presence, their liberty and strength, again one day.
Powerful angels, safe in heaven! they smile when sordid souls triumph, and
feeble ones weep, over their destruction. Poetry destroyed? Genius
banished? No! Mediocrity, no; do not let envy prompt you to the thought.
No; they not only live, but reign and redeem; and without their divine
influence spread everywhere, you would be in hell—the hell of your own
meanness.
While I was eagerly glancing at the bright pages of Marmion (for
Marmion it was), St. John stooped to examine my drawing.89 His tall figure
sprang erect again with a start; he said nothing. I looked up at him; he
shunned my eye. I knew his thoughts well, and could read his heart plainly;
at the moment I felt calmer and cooler than he; I had then temporarily the
advantage of him; and I conceived an inclination to do him some good, if I
could.
“With all his firmness and self-control,” thought I, “he tasks himself too
far; locks every feeling and pang within—expresses, confesses, imparts
nothing. I am sure it would benefit him to talk a little about this sweet
Rosamond, whom he thinks he ought not to marry; I will make him talk.”
I said first, “Take a chair, Mr. Rivers.” But he answered, as he always did,
that he could not stay. “Very well,” I responded, mentally, “stand if you
like; but you shall not go just yet, I am determined; solitude is at least as
bad for you as it is for me. I’ll try if I cannot discover the secret spring of
your confidence, and find an aperture in that marble breast through which I
can shed one drop of the balm of sympathy.”
“Is this portrait like?” I asked, bluntly.
“Like! Like whom? I did not observe it closely.”
“You did, Mr. Rivers.”
He almost started at my sudden and strange abruptness; he looked at me
astonished. “Oh, that is nothing yet,” I muttered within. “I don’t mean to be
baffled by a little stiffness on your part; I’m prepared to go to considerable
lengths.” I continued, “You observed it closely and distinctly; but I have no
objection to your looking at it again,” and I rose and placed it in his hand.
“A well-executed picture,” he said; “very soft, clear coloring; very
graceful and correct drawing.”
“Yes, yes; I know all that. But what of the resemblance? Who is it like?”
Mastering some hesitation, he answered, “Miss Oliver, I pre sume.”
“Of course. And now, sir, to reward you for the accurate guess, I will
promise to paint you a careful and faithful duplicate of this very picture,
provided you admit that the gift would be acceptable to you. I don’t wish to
throw away my time and trouble on an offering you would deem
worthless.”
He continued to gaze at the picture; the longer he looked the firmer he
held it, the more he seemed to covet it. “It is like!” he murmured; “the eye
is well managed; the color, light, expression, are perfect. It smiles!”
“Would it comfort, or would it wound you to have a similar painting? Tell
me that. When you are at Madagascar, or at the Cape, or in India, would it
be a consolation to have that memento in your possession; or would the
sight of it bring recollections calculated to enervate and distress?”
He now furtively raised his eyes; he glanced at me irresolute, disturbed;
he again surveyed the picture.
“That I should like to have it is certain; whether it would be judicious or
wise is another question.”
 Since I had ascertained that Rosamond really preferred him, and that her
father was not likely to oppose the match, I—less exalted in my views than
St. John—had been strongly disposed in my own heart to advocate their
union. It seemed to me that, should he become the possessor of Mr. Oliver’s
large fortune, he might do as much good with it as if he went and laid his
genius out to wither, and his strength to waste, under a tropical sun. With
this persuasion, I now answered:
“As far as I can see, it would be wiser and more judicious if you were to
take to yourself the original at once.”
By this time he had sat down; he had laid the picture on the table before
him, and, with his brow supported on both hands, hung fondly over it. I
discerned he was now neither angry nor shocked at my audacity. I saw even
that to be thus frankly addressed on a subject he had deemed
unapproachable, to hear it thus freely handled, was beginning to be felt by
him as a new pleasure, an unhoped-for relief. Reserved people often really
need the frank discussion of their sentiments and griefs more than the
expansive. The sternest-seeming stoic is human after all; and to “burst” with
boldness and good will into “the silent sea” of their souls, is often to confer
on them the first of obligations.90
“She likes you, I am sure,” said I, as I stood behind his chair, “and her
father respects you. Moreover, she is a girl—rather thoughtless; but you
would have sufficient thought for both yourself and her. You ought to marry
her.”
“Does she like me?” he asked.
“Certainly; better than she likes any one else. She talks of you
continually; there is no subject she enjoys so much, or touches upon so
often.”
“It is very pleasant to hear this,” he said, “very; go on for another quarter
of an hour.” And he actually took out his watch and laid it upon the table to
measure the time.
“But where is the use of going on,” I asked, “when you are probably
preparing some iron blow of contradiction, or forging a fresh chain to fetter
your heart?”
 “Don’t imagine such hard things. Fancy me yielding and melting, as I am
doing; human love rising like a freshly opened fountain in my mind, and
overflowing with sweet inundation all the field I have so carefully, and with
such labor, prepared; so assiduously sown with the seeds of good intentions,
of self-denying plans. And now it is deluged with a nectarious flood; the
young germs swamped, delicious poison cankering them,91 now I see
myself stretched on an ottoman in the drawing-room at Vale Hall, at my
bride Rosamond Oliver’s feet; she is talking to me with her sweet voice,
gazing down on me with those eyes your skilful hand has copied so well,
smiling at me with these coral lips. She is mine; I am hers; this present life
and passing world suffice to me. Hush! say nothing; my heart is full of
delight, my senses are entranced; let the time I marked pass in peace.”
I humored him; the watch ticked on, he breathed fast and low, I stood
silent. Amid this hush the quarter sped; he replaced the watch, laid the
picture down, rose, and stood on the hearth.
“Now,” said he, “that little space was given to delirium and delusion. I
rested my temples on the breast of temptation, and put my neck voluntarily
under her yoke of flowers; I tasted her cup. The pillow is burning, there is
an asp in the garland; the wine has a bitter taste, her promises are hollow,
her offers false; I see and know all this.”
I gazed at him in wonder.
“It is strange,” pursued he, “that while I love Rosamond Oliver so wildly,
with all the intensity, indeed, of a first passion, the object of which is
exquisitely beautiful, graceful, and fascinating, I experience at the same
time a calm, unwarped consciousness that she would not make me a good
wife; that she is not the partner suited to me; that I should discover this
within a year after marriage, and that to twelve months’ rapture would
succeed a lifetime of regret. This I know.”
“Strange, indeed!” I could not help ejaculating.
“While something in me,” he went on, “is acutely sensible to her charms,
something else is as deeply impressed with her defects; they are such that
she could sympathize in nothing I aspired to; cooperate in nothing I
undertook. Rosamond a sufferer, a laborer, a female apostle? Rosamond a
missionary’s wife? No!”
“But you need not be a missionary. You might relinquish that scheme.”
“Relinquish? What—my vocation? My great work? My foundation laid
on earth for a mansion in heaven? My hopes of being numbered in the band
who have merged all ambitions in the glorious one of bettering their race; of
carrying knowledge into the realms of ignorance, of substituting peace for
war, freedom for bondage, religion for superstition, the hope of heaven for
the fear of hell? Must I relinquish that? It is dearer than the blood in my
veins. It is what I have to look forward to, and to live for.”
After a considerable pause, I said, “And Miss Oliver? Are her
disappointment and sorrow of no interest to you?”
“Miss Oliver is ever surrounded by suitors and flatterers; in less than a
month, my image will be effaced from her heart. She will forget me, and
will marry, probably, some one who will make her far happier than I should
do.”
“You speak coolly enough, but you suffer in the conflict. You are wasting
away.”
“No. If I get a little thin, it is with anxiety about my prospects, yet
unsettled; my departure, continually procrastinated. Only this morning I
received intelligence that the successor, whose arrival I have been so long
expecting, cannot be ready to replace me for three months to come yet, and
perhaps the three months may extend to six.”
“You tremble and become flushed whenever Miss Oliver enters the
school-room.”
Again the surprised expression crossed his face. He had not imagined that
a woman would dare to speak so to a man. For me, I felt at home in this sort
of discourse. I could never rest in communication with strong, discreet, and
refined minds, whether male or female, till I had passed the outworks of
conventional reserve, and crossed the threshold of confidence, and won a
place by their heart’s very hearth-stone.
“You are original,” said he, “and not timid. There is something brave in
your spirit, as well as penetrating in your eye; but allow me to assure you
that you partially misinterpret my emotions. You think them more profound
and potent than they are. You give me a larger allowance of sympathy than I
have a just claim to. When I color and when I shake before Miss Oliver, I
do not pity myself. I scorn the weakness. I know it is ignoble—a mere fever
of the flesh; not, I declare, a convulsion of the soul. That is just as fixed as a
rock firm set in the depths of a restless sea. Know me to be what I am—a
cold, hard man.”
I smiled incredulously.
“You have taken my confidence by storm,” he continued, “and now it is
much at your service. I am simply, in my original state—stripped of that
blood-bleached robe with which Christianity covers human deformity—a
cold, hard, ambitious man. Natural affection only, of all the sentiments, has
permanent power over me. Reason, and not Feeling, is my guide: my
ambition is unlimited—my desire to rise higher, to do more than others,
insatiable. I honor endurance, perseverance, industry, talent, because these
are the means by which men achieve great ends, and mount to lofty
eminence. I watch your career with interest, because I consider you a
specimen of a diligent, orderly, energetic woman; not because I deeply
compassionatehn what you have gone through, or what you still suffer.”
“You would describe yourself as a mere pagan philosopher,” I said.
“No. There is this difference between me and deistic philosophers: ho I
believe; and I believe the Gospel. You missed your epithet. I am not a
pagan, but a Christian philosopher—a follower of the sect of Jesus. As his
disciple, I adopt his pure, his merciful, his benignant doctrines. I advocate
them—I am sworn to spread them. Won in youth to religion, she has
cultivated my original qualities thus: From the minute germ, natural
affection, she has developed the overshadowing tree, philanthropy. From
the wild, stringy root of human uprightness she has reared a due sense of
the Divine justice. Of the ambition to win power and renown for my
wretched self, she has formed the ambition to spread my Master’s kingdom
—to achieve victories for the standard of the cross. So much has religion
done for me; turning the original materials to the best account—pruning and
training nature. But she could not eradicate nature; nor will it be eradicated
‘till this mortal shall put on immortality.’ ”
 Having said this, he took his hat, which lay on the table beside my pallet.
Once more he looked at the portrait.
“She is lovely,” he murmured. “She is well named the Rose of the
World;hp indeed!”
“And may I paint one like it for you?”
“Cui bono?hq No.”
He drew over the picture the sheet of thin paper on which I was
accustomed to rest my hand in painting, to prevent the cardboard from
being sullied. What he suddenly saw on this blank paper, it was impossible
for me to tell; but something had caught his eye. He took it up with a
snatch; he looked at the edge, then shot a glance at me, inexpressibly
peculiar, and quite incomprehensible—a glance that seemed to take and
make note of every point in my shape, face, and dress, for it traversed all,
quick, keen as lightning. His lips parted, as if to speak, but he checked the
coming sentence, whatever it was.
“What is the matter?” I asked.
“Nothing in the world,” was the reply; and, replacing the paper, I saw him
dexterously tear a narrow slip from the margin. It disappeared in his glove;
and, with one hasty nod and “good-afternoon,” he vanished.
“Well!” I exclaimed, using an expression of the district: “that caps the
globe, however!”
I, in my turn, scrutinized the paper; but saw nothing on it, save a few
dingy stains of paint, where I had tried the tint in my pencil. I pondered the
mystery a minute or two; but, finding it insolvable, and being certain it
could not be of much moment, I dismissed and soon forgot it.

OceanofPDF.com
 Chapter XXXIII

When Mr. St. John went, it was beginning to snow; the whirling storm
continued all night. The next day a keen wind brought fresh and blinding
falls; by twilight the valley was drifted up and almost impassable. I had
closed my shutter, laid a mat to the door to prevent the snow from blowing
in under it, trimmed my fire, and, after sitting nearly an hour on the hearth,
listening to the muffled fury of the tempest, I lighted a candle, took down
Marmion and, beginning—
Day set on Norham’s castled steep,
And Tweed’s fair river broad and deep,
And Cheviot mountains lone;
The massive towers, the donjon keep,
The flanking walls that round them sweep,
In yellow lustre shone.
I soon forgot storm in music.
I heard a noise; the wind, I thought, shook the door. No; it was St. John
Rivers, who, lifting the latch, came in out of the frozen hurricane, the
howling darkness, and stood before me, the cloak that covered his tall
figure all white as a glacier. I was almost in consternation, so little had I
expected any guest from the blocked-up vale that night.
“Any ill news?” I demanded. “Has anything happened?”
“No. How very easily alarmed you are!” he answered, removing his cloak
and hanging it up against the door, toward which he again coolly pushed the
mat which his entrance had deranged. He stamped the snow from his boots.
“I shall sully the purity of your floor,” said he, “but you must excuse me
for once.” Then he approached the fire. “I have had hard work to get here, I
assure you,” he observed, as he warmed his hands over the flame. “One
drift took me up to the waist; happily the snow is quite soft yet.”
 “But why are you come?” I could not forbear saying.
“Rather an inhospitable question to put to a visitor; but, since you ask it, I
answer, simply, to have a little talk with you; I got tired of my mute books
and empty rooms. Besides, since yesterday, I have experienced the
excitement of a person to whom a tale has been half told, and who is
impatient to hear the sequel.”
He sat down. I recalled his singular conduct of yesterday, and really I
began to fear his wits were touched. If he were insane, however, his was a
very cool and collected insanity; I had never seen that handsome-featured
face of his look more like chiselled marble than it did just now, as he put
aside his snow-wet hair from his forehead, and let the fire-light shine free
on his pale brow and cheek as pale; where it grieved me to discover the
hollow trace of care or sorrow now so plainly graved. I waited, expecting he
would say something I could at least comprehend; but his hand was now at
his chin, his finger on his lip; he was thinking. It struck me that his hand
looked wasted like his face. A perhaps uncalled-for gush of pity came over
my heart; I was moved to say—
“I wish Diana or Mary would come and live with you; it is too bad that
you should be quite alone; and you are recklessly rash about your own
health.”
“Not at all,” said he; “I care for myself when necessary; I am well now.
What do you see amiss in me?”
This was said with a careless, abstracted indifference, which showed that
my solicitude was, at least in his opinion, wholly superfluous. I was
silenced.
He still slowly moved his finger over his upper lip, and still his eye dwelt
dreamily on the glowing grate; thinking it urgent to say something, I asked
him presently if he felt any cold draught from the door, which was behind
him.
“No, no,” he responded, shortly and somewhat testily.
“Well,” I reflected, “if you won’t talk, you may be still; I’ll let you alone
now, and return to my book.”
 So I snuffed the candle, and resumed the perusal of Marmion. He soon
stirred; my eye was instantly drawn to his movements; he only took out a
moroccohr pocket-book, thence produced a letter which he read in silence,
folded it, put it back, relapsed into meditation. It was vain to try to read
with such an inscrutable fixture before me; nor could I, in my impatience,
consent to be dumb; he might rebuff me if he liked, but talk I would.
“Have you heard from Diana and Mary lately?”
“Not since the letter I showed you a week ago.”
“There has not been any change made about your own arrangements? You
will not be summoned to leave England sooner than you expected?”
“I fear not, indeed; such chance is too good to befall me.”
Baffled so far, I changed my ground—I bethought myself to talk about the
school and my scholars.
“Mary Garrett’s mother is better, and Mary came back to the school this
morning, and I shall have four new girls next week from the Foundry Close
—they would have come today but for the snow.”
“Indeed?”
“Mr. Oliver pays for two.”
“Does he?”
“He means to give the whole school a treat at Christmas.”
“I know.”
“Was it your suggestion?”
“No.”
“Whose, then?”
“His daughter‘s, I think.”
“It is like her; she is so good-natured.”
“Yes.”
Again came the blank of a pause; the clock struck eight strokes. It roused
him; he uncrossed his legs, sat erect, turned to me.
 “Leave your book a moment, and come a little nearer the fire,” he said.
Wondering, and of my wonder finding no end, I complied.
“Half an hour ago,” he pursued, “I spoke of my impatience to hear the
sequel of a tale; on reflection, I find the matter will be better managed by
my assuming the narrator’s part, and converting you into a listener. Before
commencing, it is but fair to warn you that the story will sound somewhat
hackneyed in your ears; but stale details often regain a degree of freshness
when they pass through new lips. For the rest, whether trite or novel, it is
short.
“Twenty years ago, a poor curate—never mind his name at this moment—
fell in love with a rich man’s daughter; she fell in love with him, and
married him, against the advice of all her friends, who consequently
disowned her immediately after the wedding. Before two years passed, the
rash pair were both dead, and laid quietly side by side under one slab. (I
have seen their grave; it formed part of the pavement of a huge church-yard
surrounding the grim, soot-black old cathedral of an overgrown
manufacturing town in——shire.) They left a daughter, which, at its very
birth, Charity received in her lap—cold as that of the snow-drift I almost
stuck fast in to-night. Charity carried the friendless thing to the house of its
rich maternal relations; it was reared by an aunt-in-law, called (I come to
names now) Mrs. Reed of Gateshead—you start—did you hear a noise? I
dare say it is only a rat, scrambling along the rafters of the adjoining school-
room: it was a barn before I had it repaired and altered, and barns are
generally haunted by rats. To proceed. Mrs. Reed kept the orphan ten years;
whether it was happy or not with her, I cannot say, never having been told;
but at the end of that time she transferred it to a place you know—being no
other than Lowood school, where you so long resided yourself. It seems her
career there was very honorable; from a pupil, she became a teacher, like
yourself—really it strikes me there are parallel points in her history and
yours—she left it to be a governess; there again, your fates were analogous;
she undertook the education of the ward of a certain Mr. Rochester.”
“Mr. Rivers!” I interrupted.
“I can guess your feelings,” he said, “but restrain them for a while; I have
nearly finished: hear me to the end. Of Mr. Rochester’s character I know
nothing, but the one fact that he professed to offer honorable marriage to
this young girl, and that at the very altar she discovered he had a wife yet
alive, though a lunatic. What his subsequent conduct and proposals were, is
a matter of pure conjecture; but when an event transpired which rendered
inquiry after the governess necessary, it was discovered she was gone—no
one could tell when, where, or how. She had left Thornfield Hall in the
night; every research after her course had been vain; the country had been
scoured far and wide; no vestige of information could be gathered
respecting her. Yet that she should be found is become a matter of serious
urgency; advertisements have been put in all the papers; I myself have
received a letter from one Mr. Briggs, a solicitor, communicating the details
I have just imparted. Is it not an odd tale?”
“Just tell me this,” said I, “and since you know so much, you surely can
tell it me—what of Mr. Rochester? How and where is he? What is he
doing? Is he well?”
“I am ignorant of all concerning Mr. Rochester; the letter never mentions
him but to narrate the fraudulent and illegal attempt I have adverted to. You
should rather ask the name of the governess—the nature of the event which
requires her appearance.”
“Did no one go to Thornfield Hall, then? Did no one see Mr. Rochester?”
“I suppose not.”
“But they wrote to him?”
“Of course.”
“And what did he say? Who has his letters?”
“Mr. Briggs intimates that the answer to his application was not from Mr.
Rochester, but from a lady; it is signed ‘Alice Fairfax.’ ”
I felt cold and dismayed; my worst fears, then, were probably true; he had
in all probability left England and rushed in reckless desperation to some
former haunt on the continent. And what opiate for his severe sufferings—
what object for his strong passions—had he sought there? I dared not
answer the question. Oh, my poor master—once almost my husband—
whom I had often called “my dear Edward”!
 “He must have been a bad man,” observed Mr. Rivers.
“You don’t know him—don’t pronounce an opinion upon him,” I said
with warmth.
“Very well,” he answered, quietly; “and, indeed, my head is otherwise
occupied than with him; I have my tale to finish. Since you won’t ask the
governess’ name, I must tell it of my own accord—stay—I have it here—it
is always more satisfactory to see important points written down, fairly
committed to black and white.”
And the pocket-book was again deliberately produced, opened, sought
through; from one of its compartments was extracted a shabby slip of paper,
hastily torn off; I recognized in its texture, and its stains of ultra-marine,
and lake, and vermilion, the ravished margin of the portrait-cover. He got
up, held it close to my eyes; and I read, traced in Indian ink, in my own
handwriting, the words “JANE EYRE”—the work, doubtless, of some
moment of abstraction.
“Briggs wrote to me of a Jane Eyre,” he said; “the advertisements
demanded a Jane Eyre; I knew a Jane Elliott. I confess I had my suspicions;
but it was only yesterday afternoon they were at once resolved into
certainty. You own the name, and renounce the alias?”
‘Yes—yes—but where is Mr. Briggs? He, perhaps, knows more of Mr.
Rochester than you do.”
“Briggs is in London; I should doubt his knowing anything at all about
Mr. Rochester; it is not in Mr. Rochester he is interested. Meantime you
forget essential points in pursuing trifles; you do not inquire why Mr.
Briggs sought after you—what he wanted with you.”
“Well, what did he want?”
“Merely to tell you that your uncle, Mr. Eyre of Madeira, is dead; that he
has left you all his property, and that you are now rich—merely that—
nothing more.”
“I! rich?”
“Yes, you, rich—quite an heiress.”
Silence succeeded.
 “You must prove your identity, of course,” resumed St. John, presently; “a
step which will offer no difficulties; you can then enter on immediate
possession. Your fortune is vested in the English funds; Briggs has the will
and the necessary documents.”
Here was a new card turned up! It is a fine thing, reader, to be lifted in a
moment from indigence to wealth—a very fine thing; but not a matter one
can comprehend, or consequently enjoy, all at once. And then there are
other chances in life far more thrilling and rapture-giving; this is solid, an
affair of the actual world, nothing ideal about it; all its associations are solid
and sober, and its manifestations are the same. One does not jump, and
spring, and shout hurrah! at hearing one has got a fortune; one begins to
consider responsibilities, and to ponder business; on a base of steady
satisfaction rise certain grave cares—and we contain ourselves, and brood
over our bliss with a solemn brow.
Besides, the words Legacy, Bequest, go side by side with the words
Death, Funeral. My uncle, I had heard, was dead—my only relative; ever
since being made aware of his existence, I had cherished the hope of one
day seeing him; now, I never should. And then this money came only to me;
not to me and a rejoicing family, but to my isolated self. It was a grand
boon, doubtless; and independence would be glorious—yes, I felt that—that
thought swelled my heart.
“You unbend your forehead at last,” said Mr. Rivers; “I thought Medusa
had looked at you, and that you were turning to stone; perhaps now you will
ask how much you are worth?”
“How much am I worth?”
“Oh, a trifle! Nothing of course to speak of—twenty thousand pounds, I
think they say—but what is that?”
“Twenty thousand pounds!”
Here was a new stunner—I had been calculating on four or five thousand.
This news actually took my breath for a moment; Mr. St. John, whom I had
never heard laugh before, laughed now.
“Well,” said he, “if you had committed a murder, and I had told you your
crime was discovered, you could scarcely look more aghast.”
 “It is a large sum—don’t you think there is a mistake?”
“No mistake at all.”
“Perhaps you have read the figures wrong—it may be 2,000?”
“It is written in letters, not figures—twenty thousand.”
I again felt rather like an individual of but average gastronom ical powers
sitting down to feast alone at a table spread with provisions 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 apprized 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 fervor 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 misdemeanor 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 straight—every ring was perfect, the
connection complete. I knew, by instinct, how the matter stood, before St.
John had said another word; but I cannot expect the reader to have the same
intuitive perception, so I must repeat his explanation.
“My mother’s name was Eyre; she had two brothers; one a clergyman,
who married Miss Jane Reed, of Gateshead; the other, John Eyre, Esq.,
merchant, late of Funchal, Madeira. Mr. Briggs, being Mr. Eyre’s solicitor,
wrote to us last August to inform us of our uncle’s death; and to say that he
had left his property to his brother the clergyman’s orphan daughter;
overlooking us, in consequence of a quarrel, never forgiven, between him
and my father. He wrote again, a few weeks since, to intimate that the
heiress was lost; and asking if we knew anything of her. A name casually
written on a slip of paper has enabled me to find her out. You know the
rest.” Again he was going, but I set my back against the door.
“Do let me speak,” I said; “let me have one moment to draw breath and
reflect.” I paused—he stood before me, hat in hand, looking composed
enough. I resumed—
“Your mother was my father’s sister?”
“Yes.”
“My aunt, consequently?”
He bowed.
“My uncle John was your uncle John? You, Diana, and Mary are his
sister’s children, as I am his brother’s child?”
“Undeniably.”
“You three, then, are my cousins; half our blood on each side flows from
the same source?”
“We are cousins; yes.”
I surveyed him. It seemed I had found a brother; one I could be proud of
—one I could love; and two sisters, whose qualities were such, that when I
knew them but as mere strangers, they had inspired me with genuine
affection and admiration. The two girls, on whom, kneeling down on the
wet ground, and looking through the low, latticed window of Moor House
kitchen, I had gazed with so bitter a mixture of interest and despair, were
my near kinswomen; and the young and stately gentleman who had found
me almost dying at his threshold was my blood relation. Glorious discovery
to a lonely wretch! This was wealth indeed!—wealth to the heart!—a mine
of pure, genial affections. This was a blessing, bright, vivid, and
exhilarating!—not like the ponderous gift of gold—rich and welcome
enough in its way, but sobering from its weight. I now clapped my hands in
sudden joy—my pulse bounded, my veins thrilled.
“Oh, I am glad—I am glad!” I exclaimed.
St. John smiled. “Did I not say you neglected essential points to pursue
trifles?” he asked. “You were serious when I told you you had got a fortune;
and now, for a matter of no moment, you are excited.”
“What can you mean? It may be of no moment to you; you have sisters,
and don’t care for a cousin, but I had nobody; and now three relations—or
two, if you don’t choose to be counted—are born into my world, full grown.
I say again, I am glad!”
I walked fast through the room; I stopped, half suffocated with the
thoughts that rose faster than I could receive, comprehend, settle them;
thoughts of what might, could, would, and should be, and that ere long. I
looked at the blank wall; it seemed a sky, thick with ascending stars—every
one lighted me to a purpose or delight. Those who had saved my life,
whom, till this hour, I had loved barrenly, I could now benefit. They were
under a yoke; I could free them: they were scattered—I could reunite them
—the independence, the affluence, which was mine, might be theirs too.
Were we not four? Twenty thousand pounds shared equally, would be five
thousand each—enough and to spare; justice would be done—mutual
happiness secured. Now the wealth did not weigh on me; now it was not a
mere bequest of coin—it was a legacy of life, hope, enjoyment.
How I looked while these ideas were taking my spirit by storm, I cannot
tell; but I perceived soon that Mr. Rivers had placed a chair behind me, and
was gently attempting to make me sit down on it. He also advised me to be
composed. I scorned the insinuation of helplessness and distraction, shook
off his hand, and began to walk about again.
“Write to Diana and Mary to-morrow,” I said, “and tell them to come
home directly; Diana said they would both consider themselves rich with a
thousand pounds, so with five thousand they will do very well.”
“Tell me where I can get you a glass of water,” said St. John; “you must
really make an effort to tranquillize your feelings.”
 “Nonsense! and what sort of an effect will the bequest have on you? Will
it keep you in England, induce you to marry Miss Oliver, and settle down
like an ordinary mortal?”
“You wander; your head becomes confused. I have been too abrupt in
communicating the news; it has excited you beyond your strength.”
“Mr. Rivers! you quite put me out of patience; I am rational enough; it is
you who misunderstand; or, rather, who affect to misunderstand.”
“Perhaps if you explained yourself a little more fully, I should
comprehend better.”
“Explain! What is there to explain? You cannot fail to see that twenty
thousand pounds, the sum in question, divided equally between the nephew
and three nieces of our uncle, will give five thousand to each? What I want
is, that you should write to your sisters, and tell them of the fortune that has
accrued to them.”
“To you, you mean.”
“I have intimated my view of the case; I am incapable of taking any other.
I am not brutally selfish, blindly unjust, or fiendishly ungrateful. Besides, I
am resolved I will have a home and connections. I like Moor House, and I
will live at Moor House; I like Diana and Mary, and I will attach myself for
life to Diana and Mary. It would please and benefit me to have five
thousand pounds; it would torment and oppress me to have twenty
thousand; which, moreover, could never be mine in justice, though it might
in law. I abandon to you, then, what is absolutely superfluous to me. Let
there be no opposition, and no discussion about it; let us agree among each
other, and decide the point at once.”
“This is acting on first impulses; you must take days to consider such a
matter, ere your word can be regarded as valid.”
“Oh! if all you doubt is my sincerity, I am easy; you see the justice of the
case?”
“I do see a certain justice; but it is contrary to all custom. Besides, the
entire fortune is your right; my uncle gained it by his own efforts; he was
free to leave it to whom he would; he left it to you. After all, justice permits
you to keep it; you may, with a clear conscience, consider it absolutely your
own.”
“With me,” said I, “it is fully as much a matter of feeling as of conscience.
I must indulge my feelings, I so seldom have had an opportunity of doing
so. Were you to argue, object, and annoy me for a year, I could not forego
the delicious pleasure of which I have caught a glimpse—that of repaying,
in part, a mighty obligation, and winning to myself life-long friends.”
“You think so now,” rejoined St. John, “because you do not know what it
is to possess, nor consequently to enjoy, wealth. You cannot form a notion
of the importance twenty thousand pounds would give you; of the place it
would enable you to take in society; of the prospects it would open to you.
You cannot—”
“And you,” I interrupted, “cannot at all imagine the craving I have for
fraternal and sisterly love. I never had a home, I never had brothers and
sisters; I must and will have them now. You are not reluctant to admit me
and own me, are you?”
“Jane, I will be your brother—my sisters will be your sisters—without
stipulating for this sacrifice of your just rights.”
“Brother? Yes, at the distance of a thousand leagues! Sisters? Yes, slaving
among strangers! I, wealthy—gorged with gold I never earned and do not
merit! You, penniless! Famous equality and fraternization! Close union!
Intimate attachment!”
“But, Jane, your aspirations after family ties and domestic happiness may
be realized otherwise than by the means you contemplate; you may marry.”
“Nonsense again! Marry! I don’t want to marry, and never shall marry.”
“That is saying too much; such hazardous affirmations are a proof of the
excitement under which you labor.”
“It is not saying too much; I know what I feel, and how averse are my
inclinations to the bare thought of marriage. No one would take me for
love; and I will not be regarded in the light of a mere money-speculation.
And I do not want a stranger—unsympathizing, alien, different from me. I
want my kindred—those with whom I have full fellow-feeling. Say again
you will be my brother; when you uttered the words, I was satisfied, happy;
repeat them, if you can, repeat them sincerely.”
“I think I can. I know I have always loved my own sisters, and I know on
what my affection for them is grounded—respect for their worth, and
admiration of their talents. You, too, have principle and mind; your tastes
and habits resemble Diana’s and Mary’s; your presence is always agreeable
to me; in your conversation I have already, for some time, found a salutary
solace. I feel I can easily and naturally make room in my heart for you as
my third and youngest sister.”
“Thank you; that contents me for to-night. Now you had better go; for if
you stay longer, you will, perhaps, irritate me afresh by some mistrustful
scruple.”
“And the school, Miss Eyre? It must now be shut up, I suppose?”
“No. I will retain my post of mistress till you get a substitute.”
He smiled approbation; we shook hands, and he took leave.
I need not narrate in detail the further struggles I had, and arguments I
used, to get matters regarding the legacy settled as I wished. My task was a
very hard one; but, as I was absolutely resolved—as my cousins saw, at
length, that my mind was really and immutably fixed on making a just
division of the property—as they must in their own hearts have felt the
equity of the intention; and must, besides, have been innately conscious
that, in my place, they would have done precisely what I wished to do—
they yielded, at length, so far as to consent to put the affair to arbitration.
The judges chosen were Mr. Oliver and an able lawyer. Both coincided in
my opinion; I carried my point. The instruments of transfer were drawn out;
St. John, Diana, Mary, and I each became possessed of a competency.

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 Chapter XXXIV

It was near Christmas by the time all was settled; the season of general
holiday approached. I now closed Morton school, taking care that the
parting should not be barren on my side. Good fortune opens the hand as
well as the heart wonderfully; and to give somewhat when we have largely
received, is but to afford a vent to the unusual ebullition of the sensations. I
had long felt, with pleasure, that many of my rustic scholars liked me, and
when we parted, that consciousness was confirmed; they manifested their
affection plainly and strongly. Deep was my gratification to find I had really
a place in their unsophisticated hearts. I promised them that never a week
should pass in future that I did not visit them, and give them an hour’s
teaching in their school.
Mr. Rivers came up, as—having seen the classes, now numbering sixty
girls, file out before me, and locked the door—I stood with the key in my
hand, exchanging a few words of special farewell with some half dozen of
my best scholars, as decent, respectable, modest, and well-informed young
women as could be found in the ranks of the British peasantry. And that is
saying a great deal; for, after all, the British peasantry are the best taught,
best mannered, most self-respecting, of any in Europe. Since those days, I
have seen paysannes and Bäuerinnen,hs and the best of them seemed to me
ignorant, coarse, and besotted, compared with my Morton girls.
“Do you consider you have got your reward for a season of exertion?”
asked Mr. Rivers when they were gone. “Does not the consciousness of
having done some real good in your day and generation give pleasure?”
“Doubtless.”
“And you have only toiled a few months! Would not a life devoted to the
task of regenerating your race be well spent?”
 “Yes,” I said; “but I could not go on forever so. I want to enjoy my own
faculties, as well as to cultivate those of other people. I must enjoy them
now. Don’t recall either my mind or body to the school. I am out of it, and
disposed for full holiday.”
He looked grave. “What now? What sudden eagerness is this you evince?
What are you going to do?”
“To be active—as active as I can. And first I must beg you to set Hannah
at liberty, and get somebody else to wait on you.”
“Do you want her?”
“Yes, to go with me to Moor House. Diana and Mary will be at home in a
week, and I want to have everything in order against their arrival.”
“I understand; I thought you were for flying off on some excursion. It is
better so; Hannah shall go with you.”
“Tell her to be ready by to-morrow, then; and here is the school-room key;
I will give you the key of my cottage in the morning.”
He took it. “You give it up very gleefully,” said he; “I don’t quite
understand your light-heartedness, because I cannot tell what employment
you propose to yourself as a substitute for the one you are relinquishing.
What aim, what purpose, what ambition in life, have you now?”
“My first aim will be to clean down (do you comprehend the full force of
the expression?) to clean down Moor House from chamber to cellar; my
next to rub it up with beeswax, oil, and an indefinite number of cloths, till it
glitters again; my third, to arrange every chair, table, bed, carpet, with
mathematical precision; afterward I shall go near to ruin you in coals and
peat to keep up good fires in every room; and, lastly, the two days
preceding that on which your sisters are expected will be devoted by
Hannah and me to such a beating of eggs, sorting of currants, grating of
spices, compounding of Christmas cakes, chopping up of materials for
mince-pies, and solemnizing of other culinary rites, as words can convey
but an inadequate notion of to the uninitiated like you. My purpose, in
short, is to have all things in an absolutely perfect state of readiness for
Diana and Mary, before next Thursday; and my ambition is to give them a
beau ideal of a welcome when they come.”
 St. John smiled slightly; still he was dissatisfied.
“It is all very well for the present,” said he; “but seriously, I trust that
when the first flush of vivacity is over, you will look a little higher than
domestic endearments and household joys.”
“The best things the world has!” I interrupted.
“No, Jane, no; this world is not the scene of fruition—do not attempt to
make it so; nor of rest—do not turn slothful.”
“I mean, on the contrary, to be busy.”
“Jane, I excuse you for the present; two months’ grace I allow you for the
full enjoyment of your new position, and for pleasing yourself with this
late-found charm of relationship; but then I hope you will begin to look
beyond Moor House and Morton, and sisterly society, and the selfish calm
and sensual comfort of civilized affluence. I hope your energies will then
once more trouble you with their strength.”
I looked at him with surprise. “St. John,” I said, “I think you are almost
wicked to talk so. I am disposed to be as content as a queen, and you try to
stir me up to restlessness! To what end?”
“To the end of turning to profit the talents which God has committed to
your keeping, and of which he will surely one day demand a strict
account.92 Jane, I shall watch you closely and anxiously—I warn you of
that. And try to restrain the disproportionate fervor with which you throw
yourself into common-place home pleasures. Don’t cling so tenaciously to
ties of the flesh; save your constancy and ardor for an adequate cause;
forbear to waste them on trite, transient objects. Do you hear, Jane?”
“Yes; just as if you were speaking Greek. I feel I have adequate cause to
be happy, and I will be happy. Good-by!”
Happy at Moor House I was, and hard I worked, and so did Hannah; she
was charmed to see how jovial I could be amid the bustle of a house turned
topsy-turvy—how I could brush, and dust, and clean, and cook. And really,
after a day or two of confusion worse confounded,93 it was delightful, by
degrees, to invoke order from the chaos ourselves had made. I had
previously taken a journey to S——, to purchase some new furniture; my
cousins having given me carte-blanche to effect what alterations I pleased,
and a sum having been set aside for that purpose. The ordinary sitting-room
and bed-rooms I left much as they were, for I knew Diana and Mary would
derive more pleasure from seeing again the old homely tables, and chairs,
and beds, than from the spectacle of the smartest innovations. Still some
novelty was necessary, to give to their return the piquancy with which I
wished it to be invested. Dark, handsome, new carpets and curtains, an
arrangement of some carefully-selected antique ornaments in porcelain and
bronze, new coverings, and mirrors, and dressing-cases for the toilet-tables,
answered the end—they looked fresh without being glaring. A spare parlor
and bed-room I refurnished entirely, with old mahogany and crimson
upholstery; I laid canvas on the passage and carpets on the stairs. When all
was finished, I thought Moor House as complete a model of bright, modest
snugness within, as it was, at this season, a specimen of wintry waste and
desert dreariness without.
The eventful Thursday at length came. They were expected about dark,
and, ere dusk, fires were lighted up stairs and below; the kitchen was in
perfect trim; Hannah and I were dressed, and all was in readiness.
St. John arrived first. I had entreated him to keep quite clear of the house
till everything was arranged; and, indeed, the bare idea of the commotion, at
once sordid and trivial, going on within its walls, sufficed to scare him to
estrangement. He found me in the kitchen, watching the progress of certain
cakes for tea, then baking. Approaching the hearth, he asked, “If I was at
last satisfied with housemaid’s work?” I answered by inviting him to
accompany me on a general inspection of the result of my labors. With
some difficulty I got him to make the tour of the house. He just looked in at
the doors I opened; and when he had wandered up stairs and down stairs, he
said I must have gone through a great deal of fatigue and trouble to have
effected such considerable changes in so short a time; but not a syllable did
he utter indicating pleasure in the improved aspect of his abode.
This silence damped me. I thought perhaps the alterations had disturbed
some old associations he valued. I inquired whether this was the case, no
doubt in a somewhat crest-fallen tone.
 “Not at all; he had, on the contrary, remarked that I had scrupulously
respected every association; he feared, indeed, I must have bestowed more
thought on the matter than it was worth. How many minutes, for instance,
had I devoted to studying the arrangement of this very room? By-the-by,
could I tell him where such a book was?”
I showed him the volume on the shelf; he took it down; and, withdrawing
to his accustomed window recess, he began to read it.
Now, I did not like this, reader. St. John was a good man; but I began to
feel he had spoken truth of himself when he said he was hard and cold. The
humanities and amenities of life had no attraction for him—its peaceful
enjoyments no charm. Literally, he lived only to aspire—after what was
good and great, certainly; but still he would never rest, nor approve of
others resting round him. As I looked at his lofty forehead, still and pale as
a white stone—at his fine lineaments fixed in study—I comprehended, all at
once, that he would hardly make a good husband; that it would be a trying
thing to be his wife. I understood, as by inspiration, the nature of his love
for Miss Oliver; I agreed with him that it was but a love of the senses. I
comprehended how he should despise himself for the feverish influence it
exercised over him; how he should wish to stifle and destroy it; how he
should mistrust its ever conducing permanently to his happiness or hers. I
saw he was of the material from which Nature hews her heroes—Christian
and Pagan—her lawgivers, her statesmen, her conquerors; a steadfast
bulwark for great interests to rest upon; but, at the fireside, too often a cold,
cumbrous column, gloomy and out of place.
“This parlor is not his sphere,” I reflected; “the Himalayan ridge, or
Caffreht bush—even the plague-cursed Guinea coast swamp—would suit
him better. Well may he eschew the calm of domestic life; it is not his
element; there his faculties stagnate—they cannot develop or appear to
advantage. It is in scenes of strife and danger—where courage is proved,
and energy exercised, and fortitude taxed—that he will speak and move, the
leader and superior. A merry child would have the advantage of him on this
hearth. He is right to choose a missionary’s career—I see it now.”
“They are coming! they are coming!” cried Hannah, throwing open the
parlor door. At the same moment old Carlo barked joyfully. Out I ran. It was
now dark; but a rumbling of wheels was audible. Hannah soon had a lantern
lighted. The vehicle had stopped at the wicket; the driver opened the door;
first one well-known form, then another, stepped out. In a minute I had my
face under their bonnets, in contact first with Mary’s cheek, then with
Diana’s flowing curls. They laughed, kissed me—then Hannah; patted
Carlo, who was half wild with delight; asked eagerly if all was well; and,
being assured in the affirmative, hastened into the house.
They were stiff with their long and jolting drive from Whitcross, and
chilled with the frosty night air; but their pleasant countenances expanded
to the cheering fire light. While the driver and Hannah brought in the boxes,
they demanded St. John. At this moment he advanced from the parlor. They
both threw their arms round his neck at once. He gave each one a quiet kiss;
said, in a low tone, a few words of welcome; stood a while to be talked to;
and then, intimating that he supposed they would soon rejoin him in the
parlor, withdrew there as to a place of refuge.
I had lighted their candles to go up stairs, but Diana had first to give
hospitable orders respecting the driver; this done, both followed me. They
were delighted with the renovation and decoration of their rooms; with the
new drapery, and fresh carpets, and rich-tinted china vases; they expressed
their gratification ungrudgingly. I had the pleasure of feeling that my
arrangements met their wishes exactly, and that what I had done added a
vivid charm to their joyous return home.
Sweet was that evening. My cousins, full of exhilaration, were so
eloquent in narrative and comment, that their fluency covered St. John’s
taciturnity; he was sincerely glad to see his sisters; but in their glow of
fervor and flow of joy he could not sympathize. The event of the day—that
is, the return of Diana and Mary—pleased him; but the accompaniments of
that event, the glad tumult, the garrulous glee of reception, irked him; I saw
he wished the calmer morrow was come. In the very meridian of the night’s
enjoyment, about an hour after tea, a rap was heard at the door. Hannah
entered, with the intimation that “a poor lad was come, at that unlikelyhu
time, to fetch Mr. Rivers to see his mother, who was drawing away.”hv
“Where does she live, Hannah?”
 “Clear up at Whitcross Brow, almost four miles off, and moor and moss
all the way.”
“Tell him I will go.”
“I’m sure, sir, you had better not. It’s the worst road to travel after dark
that can be; there’s no track at all over the bog. And then it is such a bitter
night—the keenest wind you ever felt. You had better send word, sir, that
you will be there in the morning.”
But he was already in the passage, putting on his cloak; and without one
objection, one murmur, he departed. It was then nine o‘clock; he did not
return till midnight. Starved and tired enough he was, but he looked happier
than when he set out. He had performed an act of duty; made an exertion;
felt his own strength to do and deny; and was on better terms with himself.
I am afraid the whole of the ensuing week tried his patience. It was
Christmas week; we took to no settled employment, but spent it in a sort of
merry domestic dissipation. The air of the moors, the freedom of home, the
dawn of prosperity, acted on Diana’s and Mary’s spirits like some life-
giving elixir; they were gay from morning till noon, and from noon till
night. They could always talk, and their discourse, witty, pithy, original, had
such charms for me that I preferred listening to, and sharing in it, to doing
anything else. St. John did not rebuke our vivacity, but he escaped from it;
he was seldom in the house; his parish was large, the population scattered,
and he found daily business in visiting the sick and poor in its different
districts.
One morning at breakfast, Diana, after looking a little pensive for some
minutes, asked him “if his plans were yet unchanged?”
“Unchanged and unchangeable,” was the reply. And he proceeded to
inform us that his departure from England was now definitively fixed for
the ensuing year.
“And Rosamond Oliver?” suggested Mary, the words seeming to escape
her lips involuntarily: for no sooner had she uttered them, than she made a
gesture as if wishing to recall them. St. John had a book in his hand—it was
his unsocial custom to read at meals—he closed it, and looked up.
 “Rosamond Oliver,” said he, “is about to be married to Mr. Granby, one
of the best connected and most estimable residents in S——, , grandson and
heir to Sir Frederic Granby; I had the intelligence from her father
yesterday.”
His sisters looked at each other, and at me; we all three looked at him: he
was serene as glass.
“The match must have been got up hastily,” said Diana; “they cannot have
known each other long.”
“But two months; they met in October at the county ball at S——. But
where there are no obstacles to a union, as in the present case, where the
connection is in every point desirable, delays are unnecessary. They will be
married as soon as S——Place, which Sir Frederic gives up to them, can be
refitted for their reception.”
The first time I found St. John alone after this communication, I felt
tempted to inquire if the event distressed him; but he seemed so little to
need sympathy that, so far from venturing to offer him more, I experienced
some shame at the recollection of what I had already hazarded. Besides, I
was out of practice in talking to him; his reserve was again frozen over, and
my frankness was congealed beneath it. He had not kept his promise of
treating me like his sisters; he continually made little, chilling differences
between us, which did not at all tend to the development of cordiality; in
short, now that I was acknowledged his kinswoman, and lived under the
same roof with him, I felt the distance between us to be far greater than
when he had known me only as the village schoolmistress. When I
remembered how far I had once been admitted to his confidence, I could
hardly comprehend his present frigidity.
Such being the case, I felt not a little surprised when he raised his head
suddenly from the desk over which he was stooping, and said—
“You see, Jane, the battle is fought and the victory won.”
Startled at being thus addressed, I did not immediately reply; after a
moment’s hesitation, I answered—
“But are you sure you are not in the position of those conquerors whose
triumphs have cost them too dear? Would not such another ruin you?”
 “I think not—and if I were, it does not much signify. I shall never be
called upon to contend for such another. The event of the conflict is
decisive; my way is now clear; I thank God for it!” So saying, he returned
to his papers and his silence.
As our mutual happiness (i.e., Diana‘s, Mary’s, and mine) settled into a
quieter character, and we resumed our usual habits and regular studies, St.
John stayed more at home; he sat with us in the same room, sometimes for
hours together. While Mary drew, Diana pursued a course of Encyclopaedic
reading she had (to my awe and amazement) undertaken, and I fagged away
at German, he pondered a mystic lore of his own—that of some eastern
tongue, the acquisition of which he thought necessary to his plans.
Thus engaged, he appeared, sitting in his own recess, quiet and absorbed
enough; but that blue eye of his had a habit of leaving the outlandish-
looking grammar, and wandering over, and sometimes fixing upon us, his
fellow-students, with a curious intensity of observation; if caught, it would
be instantly withdrawn; yet ever and anon, it returned searchingly to our
table. I wondered what it meant. I wondered, too, at the punctual
satisfaction he never failed to exhibit on an occasion that seemed to me of
small moment, namely, my weekly visit to Morton school; and still more
was I puzzled when, if the day was unfavorable, if there was snow, or rain,
or high wind, and his sisters urged me not to go, he would invariably make
light of their solicitude, and encourage me to accomplish the task without
regard to the elements.
“Jane is not such a weakling as you would make her,” he would say; “she
can bear a mountain blast, or a shower, or a few flakes of snow, as well as
any of us. Her constitution is both sound and elastic; better calculated to
endure variations of climate than many more robust.”
And when I returned, sometimes a good deal tired, and not a little
weather-beaten, I never dared complain, because I saw that to murmur
would be to vex him; on all occasions fortitude pleased him; the reverse
was a special annoyance.
One afternoon, however, I got leave to stay at home, because I really had
a cold. His sisters were gone to Morton in my stead; I sat reading Schiller,
he, deciphering his crabbed Oriental scrolls. As I exchanged a translation
for an exercise, I happened to look his way; there I found myself under the
influence of the ever-watchful blue eye. How long it had been searching me
through and through, and over and over, I cannot tell; so keen was it, and
yet so cold, I felt for the moment superstitious—as if I were sitting in the
room with something uncanny.
“Jane, what are you doing?”
“Learning German.”
“I want you to give up German and learn Hindostanee.”
“You are not in earnest?”
“In such earnest that I must have it so, and I will tell you why.”
He then went on to explain that Hindostanee was the language he was
himself at present studying; that as he advanced, he was apt to forget the
commencement; that it would assist him greatly to have a pupil with whom
he might again and again go over the elements, and so fix them thoroughly
in his mind; that his choice had hovered for some time between me and his
sisters; but that he had fixed it on me, because he saw I could sit at a task
the longest of the three. Would I do him this favor? I should not, perhaps,
have to make the sacrifice long, as it wanted now barely three months to his
departure.
St. John was not a man to be lightly refused; you felt that every
impression made on him, either for pain or pleasure, was deep-graved and
permanent. I consented. When Diana and Mary returned, the former found
her scholar transferred from her to her brother; she laughed, and both she
and Mary agreed that St. John should never have persuaded them to such a
step. He answered quietly—
“I knew it.”
I found him a very patient, very forbearing, and yet an exacting master; he
expected me to do a great deal, and when I fulfilled his expectations he, in
his own way, fully testified his approbation. By degrees, he acquired a
certain influence over me that took away my liberty of mind; his praise and
notice were more restraining than his indifference. I could no longer talk or
laugh freely when he was by, because a tiresomely importunate instinct
reminded me that vivacity (at least in me) was distasteful to him. I was so
fully aware that only serious moods and occupations were acceptable, that
in his presence every effort to sustain or follow any other became vain; I
fell under a freezing spell. When he said “Go,” I went; “Come,” I came;
“Do this,” I did it.94 But I did not love my servitude; I wished, many a
time, he had continued to neglect me.
One evening when, at bed-time, his sisters and I stood round him, bidding
him good-night, he kissed each of them, as was his custom; and as was
equally his custom, he gave me his hand. Diana, who chanced to be in a
frolicksome humor (she was not painfully controlled by his will; for hers, in
another way, was as strong), exclaimed:
“St. John! you used to call Jane your third sister, but you don’t treat her as
such; you should kiss her too.”
She pushed me toward him. I thought Diana very provoking, and felt
uncomfortably confused; and while I was thus thinking and feeling, St. John
bent his head, his Greek face was brought to a level with mine, his eyes
questioned my eyes piercingly—he kissed me. There are no such things as
marble kisses, or ice kisses, or I should say my ecclesiastical cousin’s salute
belonged to one of these classes; but there may be experiment kisses, and
his was an experiment kiss. When given, he viewed me to learn the result; it
was not striking; I am sure I did not blush; perhaps I might have turned a
little pale, for I felt as if this kiss were a seal affixed to my fetters. He never
omitted the ceremony afterward, and the gravity and quiescence with which
I underwent it seemed to invest it for him with a certain charm.
As for me, I daily wished more to please him; but to do so, I felt daily
more and more that I must disown half my nature, stifle half my faculties,
wrest my tastes from their original bent, force myself to the adoption of
pursuits for which I had no natural vocation. He wanted to train me to an
elevation I could never reach; it racked me hourly to aspire to the standard
he uplifted. The thing was as impossible as to mould my irregular features
to his correct and classic pattern, to give to my changeable green eyes the
sea-blue tint and solemn lustre of his own.
Not his ascendency alone, however, held me in thrall at present. Of late it
had been easy enough for me to look sad; a cankering evil sat at my heart
and drained my happiness at its source—the evil of suspense.
 Perhaps you think I had forgotten Mr. Rochester, reader, amid these
changes of place and fortune. Not for a moment. His idea was still with me,
because it was not a vapor sunshine could disperse, nor a sand-traced effigy
storms could wash away; it was a name graven on a tablet, fated to last as
long as the marble it inscribed. The craving to know what had become of
him followed me everywhere; when I was at Morton, I reentered my cottage
every evening to think of that; and now at Moor House, I sought my bed-
room each night to brood over it.
In the course of my necessary correspondence with Mr. Briggs about the
will, I had inquired if he knew anything of Mr. Rochester’s present
residence and state of health; but, as St. John had conjectured, he was quite
ignorant of all concerning him. I then wrote to Mrs. Fairfax, entreating
information on the subject. I had calculated with certainty on this step
answering my end; I felt sure it would elicit an early answer. I was
astonished when a fortnight passed without reply; but when two months
wore away, and day after day the post arrived and brought nothing for me, I
fell a prey to the keenest anxiety.
I wrote again; there was a chance of my first letter having missed.
Renewed hope followed renewed effort; it shone like the former for some
weeks, then, like it, it faded, flickered; not a line, not a word reached me.
When half a year wasted in vain expectancy, my hope died out; and then I
felt dark indeed.
A fine spring shone round me, which I could not enjoy. Summer
approached; Diana tried to cheer me; she said I looked ill, and wished to
accompany me to the sea-side. This St. John opposed; he said I did not want
dissipation, I wanted employment; my present life was too purposeless, I
required an aim; and I suppose by way of supplying deficiencies, he
prolonged still further my lessons in Hindostanee, and grew more urgent in
requiring their accomplishment; and I, like a fool, never thought of resisting
him—I could not resist him.
One day I had come to my studies in lower spirits than usual; the ebb was
occasioned by a poignantly felt disappointment; Hannah had told me in the
morning there was a letter for me, and when I went down to take it, almost
certain that the long-looked-for tidings were vouchsafed me at last, I found
only an unimportant note from Mr. Briggs on business. The bitter check had
wrung from me some tears; and now, as I sat poring over the crabbed
characters and flourishing tropes of an Indian scribe, my eyes filled again.
St. John called me to his side to read; in attempting to do this my voice
failed me; words were lost in sobs. He and I were the only occupants of the
parlor; Diana was practising her music in the drawing-room, Mary was
gardening—it was a very fine Mayday, clear, sunny, and breezy. My
companion expressed no surprise at this emotion, nor did he question me as
to its cause; he only said:
“We will wait a few minutes, Jane, till you are more composed.” And
while I smothered the paroxysm with all haste, he sat calm and patient,
leaning on his desk and looking like a physician watching with the eye of
science an expected and fully understood crisis in a patient’s malady.
Having stifled my sobs, wiped my eyes, and muttered something about not
being very well that morning, I resumed my task, and succeeded in
completing it. St. John put away my books and his, locked his desk, and
said:
“Now, Jane, you shall take a walk; and with me.”
“I will call Diana and Mary.”
“No. I want only one companion this morning, and that must be you; put
on your things; go out by the kitchen door; take the road toward the headhw
of Marsh-Glen; I will join you in a moment.”
I know no medium; I never in my life have known any medium in my
dealings with positive hard characters, antagonistic to my own, between
absolute submission and determined revolt. I have always faithfully
observed the one, up to the very moment of bursting, sometimes with
volcanic vehemence, into the other; and as neither present circumstances
warranted, nor my present mood inclined me to mutiny, I observed careful
obedience to St. John’s directions; and in ten minutes I was treading the
wild track of the glen, side by side with him.
The breeze was from the west; it came over the hills, sweet with scents of
heath and rush; the sky was of stainless blue; the stream descending the
ravine, swelled with past spring rains, poured along plentiful and clear,
catching golden gleams from the sun, and sapphire tints from the
firmament. As we advanced and left the tract, we trod a soft turf, mossy,
fine, and emerald green, minutely enamelled with a tiny white flower, and
spangled with a star-like yellow blossom; the hills, meantime, shut us quite
in; for the glen, toward its head, wound to their very core.
“Let us rest here,” said St. John, as we reached the first stragglers of a
battalion of rocks, guarding a sort of pass, beyond which the beck rushed
down, a waterfall, and where, still a little further, the mountain shook off
turf and flower, had only heath for raiment, and crag for gem—where it
exaggerated the wild to the savage, and exchanged the fresh for the
frowning—where it guarded the forlorn hope of solitude, and a last refuge
for silence.
I took a seat—St. John stood near me; he looked up the pass and down the
hollow; his glance wandered away with the stream, and returned to traverse
the unclouded heaven which colored it; he removed his hat, let the breeze
stir his hair and kiss his brow; he seemed in communion with the genius of
the haunt; with his eye he bade farewell to something.
“And I shall see it again,” he said aloud, “in dreams, when I sleep by the
Ganges; and again, in a more remote hour—when another slumber
overcomes me—on the shore of a darker stream.”
Strange words of a strange love! An austere patriot’s passion for his
fatherland! He sat down; for half an hour we never spoke—neither he to me
nor I to him: that interval past, he recommenced:
“Jane, I go in six weeks; I have taken my berth in an East Indiaman which
sails on the twentieth of June.”
“God will protect you, for you have undertaken his work,” I answered.
“Yes,” said he, “there is my glory and joy. I am the servant of an infallible
Master; I am not going out under human guidance, subject to the defective
laws and erring control of my feeble fellow-worms; my king, my lawgiver,
my captain, is the All-perfect; it seems strange to me that all round me do
not burn to enlist under the same banner—to join in the same enterprise.”
“All have not your powers; and it would be folly for the feeble to wish to
march with the strong.”
 “I do not speak to the feeble, or think of them; I address only such as are
worthy of the work, and competent to accomplish it.”
“Those are few in number, and difficult to discover.”
“You say truly; but when found, it is right to stir them up—to urge and
exhort them to the effort—to show them what their gifts are, and why they
were given—to speak Heaven’s message in their ear—to offer them, direct
from God, a place in the ranks of his chosen.”
“If they are really qualified for the task, will not their own hearts be the
first to inform them of it?”
I felt as if an awful charm was framing round and gathering over me; I
trembled to hear some fatal word spoken which would at once declare and
rivet the spell.
“And what does your heart say?” demanded St. John.
“My heart is mute—my heart is mute,” I answered, struck and thrilled.
“Then I must speak for it,” continued the deep, relentless voice; “Jane,
come with me to India; come as my help-meet and fellow-laborer.”
The glen and sky spun round; the hills heaved! It was as if I had heard a
summons from Heaven—as if a visionary messenger, like him of
Macedonia, had enounced “Come over and help us!”95 But I was no
apostle, I could not behold the herald, I could not receive his call.
“Oh, St. John!” I then cried, “have some mercy!”
I appealed to one, who, in the discharge of what he believed his duty,
knew neither mercy nor remorse. He continued:
“God and nature intended you for a missionary’s wife. It is not personal
but mental endowments they have given you; you are formed for labor, not
for love. A missionary’s wife you must—shall be. You shall be mine; I
claim you—not for my pleasure, but for my Sovereign’s service.”
“I am not fit for it; I have no vocation,” I said.
He had calculated on these first objections; he was not irritated by them.
Indeed, as he leaned back against the crag behind him, folded his arms on
his chest, and fixed his countenance, I saw he was prepared for a long and
trying opposition, and had taken in a stock of patience to last him to its
close—resolved, however, that that close should be conquest for him.
“Humility, Jane,” said he, “is the ground-work of Christian virtues; you
say right that you are not fit for the work. Who is fit for it? Or who, that
ever was truly called, believed himself worthy of the summons? I, for
instance, am but dust and ashes. With St. Paul, I acknowledge myself the
chiefest of sinners;96 but I do not suffer this sense of my personal vileness
to daunt me. I know my Leader; that He is just as well as mighty; and while
He has chosen a feeble instrument to perform a great task, He will, from the
boundless stores of His providence, supply the inadequacy of the means to
the end. Think like me, Jane—trust like me. It is the Rock of Ages I ask you
to lean on; do not doubt but it will bear the weight of your human
weakness.”
“I do not understand a missionary life; I have never studied missionary
labors.”
“There, I, humble as I am, can give you the aid you want; I can set you
your task from hour to hour; stand by you always; help you from moment to
moment. This I could do in the beginning; soon (for I know your powers)
you would be as strong and apt as myself, and would not require my help.”
“But my powers—where are they for this undertaking? I do not feel them.
Nothing speaks or stirs in me while you talk. I am sensible of no light
kindling—no life quickening—no voice counselling or cheering. Oh, I wish
I could make you see how much my mind is at this moment like a rayless
dungeon, with one shrinking fear fettered in its depths—the fear of being
persuaded by you to attempt what I cannot accomplish!”
“I have an answer for you—hear it. I have watched you ever since we first
met; I have made you my study for ten months. I have provedhx you in that
time by sundry tests; and what have I seen and elicited? In the village
school I found you could perform well, punctually, uprightly, labor
uncongenial to your habits and inclinations; I saw you could perform it with
capacity and tact; you could win while you controlled. In the calm with
which you learned you had become suddenly rich, I read a mind clear of the
vice of Demas;97 lucre had no undue power over you. In the resolute
readiness with which you cut your wealth into four shares, keeping but one
to yourself, and relinquishing the three others to the claim of abstract
justice, I recognized a soul that revelled in the flame and excitement of
sacrifice. In the tracta bility with which, at my wish, you forsook a study in
which you were interested, and adopted another because it interested me—
in the untiring assiduity with which you have since persevered in it—in the
unflagging energy and unshaken temper with which you have met its
difficulties—I acknowledge the complement of qualities I seek. Jane, you
are docile, diligent, disinterested, faithful, constant, and courageous; very
gentle, and very heroic; cease to mistrust yourself—I can trust you
unreservedly. As a conductress of Indian schools, and a helper among
Indian woman, your assistance will be to me invaluable.”
My iron shroud contracted round me;98 persuasion advanced with slow,
sure step. Shut my eyes as I would, these last words of his succeeded in
making the way, which had seemed blocked up, comparatively clear. My
work, which had appeared so vague, so hopelessly diffuse, condensed itself
as he proceeded, and assumed a definite form under his shaping hand. He
waited for an answer. I demanded a quarter of an hour to think before I
again hazarded a reply.
“Very willingly,” he rejoined; and rising, he strode a little distance up the
pass, threw himself down on a swell of heath, and there lay still.
“I can do what he wants me to do; I am forced to see and acknowledge
that,” I meditated—“that is, if life be spared me. But I feel mine is not the
existence to be long protracted under an Indian sun. What then? He does not
care for that; when my time came to die he would resign me, in all serenity
and sanctity, to the God who gave me to him. The case is very plain before
me. In leaving England, I should leave a loved but empty land: Mr.
Rochester is not there; and if he were, what is, what can that ever be to me?
My business is to live without him now; nothing so absurd, so weak, as to
drag on from day to day, as if I were waiting some impossible change in
circumstances, which might reunite me to him. Of course (as St. John once
said) I must seek another interest in life to replace the one lost; is not the
occupation he now offers me truly the most glorious man can adopt or God
assign? Is it not, by its noble cares and sublime results, the one best
calculated to fill the void left by uptorn affections and demolished hopes? I
believe I must say yes—and yet I shudder. Alas! if I join St. John, I abandon
half myself; if I go to India, I go to premature death. And how will the
interval between leaving England for India, and India for the grave, be
filled? Oh, I know well! That, too, is very clear to my vision. By straining
to satisfy St. John till my sinews ache, I shall satisfy him—to the finest
central point and furthest outward circle of his expectations. If I do go with
him, if I do make the sacrifice he urges, I will make it absolutely; I will
throw all on the altar—heart, vitals, the entire victim. He will never love
me, but he shall approve me; I will show him energies he has not yet seen,
resources he has never suspected. Yes; I can work as hard as he can, and
with as little grudging.
“Consent, then, to his demand is possible; but for one item— one dreadful
item. It is—that he asks me to be his wife, and has no more of a husband’s
heart for me than that frowning giant of a rock, down which the stream is
foaming in yonder gorge. He prizes me as a soldier would a good weapon;
and that is all. Unmarried to him, this would never grieve me; but can I let
him complete his calculations—coolly put into practice his plans—go
through the wedding ceremony? Can I receive from him the bridal ring,
endure all the forms of love (which I doubt not he would scrupulously
observe), and know that the spirit was quite absent? Can I bear the
consciousness that every endearment he bestows is a sacrifice made on
principle? No! such a martyrdom would be monstrous. I will never undergo
it; as his sister, I might accompany him—not as his wife; I will tell him so.”
I looked toward the knoll; there he lay, still as a prostrate column, his face
turned to me, his eye beaming watchful and keen. He started to his feet and
approached me.
“I am ready to go to India, if I may go free.”
“Your answer requires a commentary,” he said; “it is not clear.”
“You have hitherto been my adopted brother; I, your adopted sister; let us
continue as such; you and I had better not marry.”
He shook his head. “Adopted fraternity will not do in this case. If you
were my real sister it would be different, I should take you, and seek no
wife. But, as it is, either our union must be consecrated and sealed by
marriage, or it cannot exist; practical obstacles oppose themselves to any
other plan. Do you see it, Jane? Consider a moment—your strong sense will
guide you.”
I did consider, and still my sense, such as it was, directed me only to the
fact that we did not love each other as man and wife should; and therefore it
inferred we ought not to marry. I said so. “St. John,” I returned, “I regard
you as a brother—you, me as a sister; so let us continue.”
“We cannot—we cannot,” he answered, with short, sharp determination;
“it would not do. You have said you will go with me to India; remember—
you have said that.”
“Conditionally.”
“Well, well. To the main point—the departure with me from England, the
cooperation with me in my future labors—you do not object. You have
already as good as put your hand to the plough;99 you are too consistent to
withdraw it. You have but one end to keep in view—how the work you have
undertaken can best be done. Simplify your complicated interests, feelings,
thoughts, wishes, aims; merge all considerations in one purpose, that of
fulfilling with effect, with power, the mission of your great Master. To do
so, you must have a coadjutorhy—not a brother, that is a loose tie, but a
husband. I, too, do not want a sister; a sister might any day be taken from
me. I want a wife; the sole help-meet I can influence efficiently in life, and
retain absolutely till death.”
I shuddered as he spoke; I felt his influence in my marrow, his hold on my
limbs.
“Seek one elsewhere than in me, St. John; seek one fitted to you.”
“One fitted to my purpose, you mean, fitted to my vocation. Again I tell
you it is not the insignificant private individual—the mere man, with the
man’s selfish senses—I wish to mate; it is the missionary.”
“And I will give the missionary my energies—it is all he wants—but not
myself; that would be only adding the husk and shell to the kernel. For them
he has no use; I retain them.”
 “You cannot—you ought not. Do you think God will be satisfied with half
an oblation? Will he accept a mutilated sacrifice? It is the cause of God I
advocate; it is under His standard I enlist you. I cannot accept on His behalf
a divided allegiance; it must be entire.”
“Oh! I will give my heart to God,” I said. “You do not want it.”
I will not swear, reader, that there was not something of repressed sarcasm
both in the tone in which I uttered this sentence, and in the feeling that
accompanied it. I had silently feared St. John till now, because I had not
understood him. He had held me in awe, because he had held me in doubt.
How much of him was saint, how much mortal, I could not heretofore tell;
but revelations were being made in this conference; the analysis of his
nature was proceeding before my eyes. I saw his fallibilities; I
comprehended them. I understood that, sitting there where I did, on the
bank of heath, and with that handsome form before me, I sat at the feet of a
man erring as I. The veil fell from his hardness and despotism. Having felt
in him the presence of these qualities, I felt his imperfection, and took
courage. I was with an equal, one with whom I might argue; one whom, if I
saw good, I might resist.
He was silent after I had uttered the last sentence, and I presently risked
an upward glance at his countenance. His eye, bent on me, expressed at
once stern surprise and keen inquiry. “Is she sarcastic, and sarcastic to me?”
it seemed to say. “What does this signify?”
“Do not let us forget that this is a solemn matter,” he said, ere long; “one
of which we may neither think nor talk lightly without sin. I trust, Jane, you
are in earnest when you say you will give your heart to God; it is all I want.
Once wrench your heart from man, and fix it on your Maker, the
advancement of that Maker’s spiritual kingdom on earth will be your chief
delight and endeavor; you will be ready to do at once whatever furthers that
end. You will see what impetus would be given to your efforts and mine by
our physical and mental union in marriage; the only union that gives a
character of permanent conformity to the destinies and designs of human
beings: and passing over all minor caprices; all trivial difficulties and
delicacies of feeling; all scruple about the degree, kind, strength, or
tenderness of mere personal inclination, you will hasten to enter into that
union at once.”
“Shall I?” I said, briefly; and I looked at his features, beautiful in their
harmony, but strangely formidable in their still severity; at his brow,
commanding, but not open; at his eyes, bright, and deep, and searching, but
never soft; at his tall, imposing figure; and fancied myself, in idea, his wife.
Oh! it would never do! As his curate, his comrade, all would be right; I
would cross oceans with him in that capacity; toil under eastern suns, in
Asian deserts, with him in that office; admire and emulate his courage, and
devotion, and vigor; accommodate quietly to his master-hood; smile
undisturbed at his ineradicable ambition; discriminate the Christian from
the man; profoundly esteem the one, and freely forgive the other. I should
suffer often, no doubt, attached to him only in this capacity; my body would
be under rather a stringent yoke, but my heart and mind would be free. I
should still have my unblighted self to turn to; my natural unen slaved
feelings with which to communicate in moments of loneliness. There would
be recesses in my mind, which would be only mine, to which he never
came; and sentiments growing there fresh and sheltered, which his austerity
could never blight, nor his measured warrior-march trample down; but as
his wife, at his side always, and always restrained, and always checked,
forced to keep the fire of my nature continually low, to compel it to burn
inwardly and never utter a cry, though the imprisoned flame consumed vital
after vital—this would be unendurable.
“St. John!” I exclaimed, when I had got so far in my meditation.
“Well?” he answered, icily.
“I repeat, I freely consent to go with you as your fellow-missionary, but
not as your wife; I cannot marry you and become a part of you.”
“A part of me you must become,” he answered, steadily; “otherwise the
whole bargain is void. How can I, a man not yet thirty, take out with me to
India a girl of nineteen, unless she is married to me? How can we be forever
together—sometimes in solitudes, sometimes amid savage tribes—and
unwed?”
“Very well,” I said, shortly, “under the circumstances; quite as well as if I
were either your real sister, or a man and a clergyman like yourself.”
 “It is known that you are not my sister; I cannot introduce you as such; to
attempt it would be to fasten injurious suspicions on us both. And for the
rest, though you have a man’s vigorous brain, you have a woman’s heart,
and—it would not do.”
“It would do,” I affirmed, with some disdain, “perfectly well. I have a
woman’s heart, but not where you are concerned; for you I have only a
comrade’s constancy; a fellow-soldier’s frankness, fidelity, fraternity, if you
like; a neophyte’s respect and submission to his hierophant;hz nothing more
—don’t fear.”
“It is what I want,” he said, speaking to himself; “it is just what I want.
And there are obstacles in the way; they must be hewn down. Jane, you
would not repent marrying me; be certain of that; we must be married. I
repeat it, there is no other way; and undoubtedly enough of love would
follow upon marriage to render the union right even in your eyes.”
“I scorn your idea of love,” I could not help saying, as I rose up and stood
before him, leaning my back against the rock. “I scorn the counterfeit
sentiment you offer; yes, St. John, and I scorn you when you offer it.”
He looked at me fixedly, compressing his well-cut lips while he did so.
Whether he was incensed or surprised, or what, it is not easy to tell; he
could command his countenance thoroughly.
“I scarcely expected to hear that expression from you,” he said; “I think I
have done and uttered nothing to deserve scorn.”
I was touched by his gentle tone, and overawed by his high, calm mien.
“Forgive me the words, St. John; but it is your own fault that I have been
roused to speak so unguardedly. You have introduced a topic on which our
natures are at variance—a topic we should never discuss; the very name of
love is an apple of discord between us—if the reality were required, what
should we do? How should we feel? My dear cousin, abandon your scheme
of marriage—forget it.”
“No,” said he; “it is a long cherished scheme, and the only one which can
secure my great end; but I shall urge you no further at present. To-morrow I
leave home for Cambridge; I have many friends there to whom I should
wish to say farewell. I shall be absent a fortnight; take that space of time to
consider my offer; and do not forget that if you reject it, it is not me you
deny, but God. Through my means, He opens to you a noble career; as my
wife only can you enter upon it. Refuse to be my wife, and you limit
yourself forever to a track of selfish ease and barren obscurity. Tremble, lest
in that case you should be numbered with those who have denied the faith
and are worse than infidels!”100
He had done. Turning from me, he once more but this time his feelings
were all pent in his heart; I was not worthy to hear them uttered. As I
walked by his side homeward, I read well in his iron silence all he felt
toward me: the disappointment of an austere and despotic nature, which has
met resistance where it expected submission; the disapprobation of a cool,
inflexible judgment, which has detected in another feelings and views in
which it has no power to sympathize; in short, as a man, he would have
wished to coerce me into obedience; it was only as a sincere Christian he
bore so patiently with my perversity, and allowed so long a space for
reflection and repentance.
Looked to river, looked to hill 101
That night, after he had kissed his sisters, he thought proper to forget even
to shake hands with me, but left the room in silence. I—who, though I had
no love, had much friendship for him—was hurt by the marked omission,
so much hurt that tears started to my eyes.
“I see you and St. John have been quarrelling, Jane,” said Diana, “during
your walk on the moor. But go after him; he is now lingering in the passage,
expecting you—he will make it up.”
I have not much pride under such circumstances; I would always rather be
happy than dignified, and I ran after him; he stood at the foot of the stairs.
“Good-night, St. John,” said I.
“Good-night, Jane,” he replied, calmly.
“Then shake hands,” I added.
What a cold, loose touch he impressed on my fingers! He was deeply
displeased by what had occurred that day; cordiality would not warm, nor
tears move him. No happy reconciliation was to be had with him—no
cheering smile or generous word; but still the Christian was patient and
placid; and when I asked him if he forgave me, he answered that he was not
in the habit of cherishing the remembrance of vexation; that he had nothing
to forgive, not having been offended.
And with that answer, he left me. I would much rather he had knocked me
down.

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 Chapter XXXV

He did not leave for Cambridge the next day, as he had said he would. He
deferred his departure a whole week; and during that time he made me feel
what severe punishment a good, yet stern—a conscientious, yet implacable
man can inflict on one who has offended him. Without one overt act of
hostility, one upbraiding word, he contrived to impress me momently with
the conviction that I was put beyond the pale of his favor.
Not that St. John harbored a spirit of unchristian vindictiveness—not that
he would have injured a hair of my head, if it had been fully in his power to
do so. Both by nature and principle he was superior to the mean
gratification of vengeance; he had forgiven me for saying I scorned him and
his love, but he had not forgotten the words; and as long as he and I lived,
he never would forget them. I saw by his look, when he turned to me, that
they were always written on the air between me and him; whenever I spoke,
they sounded in my voice to his ear; and their echo toned every answer he
gave me.
He did not abstain from conversing with me; he even called me as usual
each morning to join him at his desk; and I fear the corrupt man within him
had a pleasure unimparted to, and unshared by, the pure Christian, in
evincing with what skill he could, while acting and speaking apparently just
as usual, extract from every deed and every phrase the spirit of interest and
approval which had formerly communicated a certain austere charm to his
language and manner. To me, he was in reality become no longer flesh, but
marble. His eye was a cold, bright, blue gem; his tongue, a speaking
instrument—nothing more.
All this was torture to me—refined, lingering torture. It kept up a slow
fire of indignation and a trembling trouble of grief, which harassed and
crushed me altogether. I felt how, if I were his wife, this good man, pure as
the deep sunless source, could soon kill me, without drawing from my veins
a single drop of blood or receiving on his own crystal conscience the
faintest stain of crime. Especially I felt this when I made any attempt to
propitiate him. No ruth met my ruth. He experienced no suffering from
estrangement—no yearning after reconciliation; and though, more than
once, my fast-falling tears blistered the page over which we both bent, they
produced no more effect on him than if his heart had been really a matter of
stone or metal. To his sisters, meantime, he was somewhat kinder than
usual: as if afraid that mere coldness would not sufficiently convince me
how completely I was banished and banned, he added the force of contrast;
and this I am sure he did not by malice, but on principle.
The night before he left home, happening to see him walking in the
garden about sunset and remembering, as I looked at him, that this man,
alienated as he now was, had once saved my life, and that we were near
relations, I was moved to make a last attempt to regain his friendship. I
went out and approached him as he stood leaning over the little gate; I
spoke to the point at once.
“St. John, I am unhappy, because you are still angry with me. Let us be
friends.”
“I hope we are friends,” was the unmoved reply, while he still watched
the rising of the moon, which he had been contemplating as I approached.
“No, St. John, we are not friends as we were. You know that.”
“Are we not? That is wrong. For my part, I wish you no ill and all good.”
“I believe you, St. John; for I am sure you are incapable of wishing any
one ill; but, as I am your kinswoman, I should desire somewhat more of
affection than that sort of general philanthropy you extend to mere
strangers.”
“Of course,” he said. “Your wish is reasonable; and I am far from
regarding you as a stranger.”
This, spoken in a cool, tranquil tone, was mortifying and baffling enough.
Had I attended to the suggestions of pride and ire, I should immediately
have left him; but something worked within me more strongly than those
feelings could. I deeply venerated my cousin’s talent and principle. His
friendship was of value to me; to lose it tried me severely. I would not so
soon relinquish the attempt to reconquer it.
“Must we part in this way, St. John? And when you go to India, will you
leave me so, without a kinder word than you have yet spoken?”
He now turned quite from the moon, and faced me.
“When I go to India, Jane, will I leave you? What! do you not go to
India?”
“You said I could not, unless I married you.”
“And you will not marry me? You adhere to that resolution?”
Reader, do you know, as I do, what terror those cold people can put into
the ice of their questions? How much of the fall of the avalanche is in their
anger? of the breaking up of the frozen sea in their displeasure?
“No, St. John, I will not marry you. I adhere to my resolution.”
The avalanche had shaken and slid a little forward, but it did not yet crash
down.
“Once more, why this refusal?” he asked.
“Formerly,” I answered, “because you did not love me now, I reply,
because you almost hate me. If I were to marry you, you would kill me. You
are killing me now.”
His lips and cheeks turned white—quite white.
“I should kill—I am killing you? Your words are such as ought not to be
used; violent, unfeminine, and untrue. They betray an unfortunate state of
mind; they merit severe reproof. They would seem inexcusable, but that it is
the duty of man to forgive his fellow, even until seventy-and-seven
times.”102
I had finished the business now. While earnestly wishing to erase from his
mind the trace of my former offence, I had stamped on that tenacious
surface another and far deeper impression; I had burned it in.
“Now you will indeed hate me,” I said. “It is useless to attempt to
conciliate you; I see I have made an eternal enemy of you.”
 A fresh wrong did these words inflict; the worse, because they touched on
the truth. That bloodless lip quivered to a temporary spasm. I knew the
steely ire I had whetted. I was heart-wrung.
“You utterly misinterpret my words,” I said, at once seizing his hand; “I
have no intention to grieve or pain you—indeed I have not.”
Most bitterly he smiled—most decidedly he withdrew his hand from
mine. “And now you recall your promise, and will not go to India at all, I
presume?” said he, after a considerable pause.
“Yes I will, as your assistant,” I answered.
A very long silence succeeded. What struggle there was in him between
Nature and Grace in this interval, I cannot tell; only singular gleams
scintillated in his eyes, and strange shadows passed over his face. He spoke
at last.
“I before proved to you the absurdity of a single woman of your age
proposing to accompany abroad a single man of mine. I proved it to you in
such terms as I should have thought would have prevented your ever again
alluding to the plan. That you have done so, I regret—for your sake.”
I interrupted him. Anything like a tangible reproach gave me courage at
once. “Keep to common sense, St. John; you are verging on nonsense. You
pretend to be shocked by what I have said. You are not really shocked; for,
with your superior mind, you cannot be either so dull or so conceited as to
misunderstand my meaning. I say again, I will be your curate, if you like,
but never your wife.”
Again he turned lividlyia pale; but, as before, controlled his passion
perfectly. He answered emphatically but calmly—
“A female curate who is not my wife would never suit me. With me, then,
it seems you cannot go; but if you are sincere in your offer I will, while in
town, speak to a married missionary whose wife needs a coadjutor. Your
own fortune will make you independent of the Society’s aid; and thus you
may still be spared the dishonor of breaking your promise and deserting the
band you engaged to join.”
 Now I never had, as the reader knows, either given any formal promise or
entered into any engagement; and this language was all much too hard, and
much too despotic, for the occasion. I replied—
“There is no dishonor, no breach of promise, no desertion, in the case. I
am not under the slightest obligation to go to India, especially with
strangers. With you I would have ventured much, because I admire, confide
in, and, as a sister, I love you; but I am convinced that, go when and with
whom I would, I should not live long in that climate.”
“Ah! you are afraid of yourself,” he said, curling his lip.
“I am. God did not give me my life to throw away; and to do as you wish
me, would, I begin to think, be almost equivalent to committing suicide.
Moreover, before I definitely resolve on quitting England, I will know for
certain whether I cannot be of greater use by remaining in it than by leaving
it.”
“What do you mean?”
“It would be fruitless to attempt to explain; but there is a point on which I
have long endured painful doubt; and I can go nowhere till by some means
that doubt is removed.”
“I know where your heart turns, and to what it clings. The interest you
cherish is lawless and unconsecrated. Long since you ought to have crushed
it; now you should blush to allude to it. You think of Mr. Rochester?”
It was true. I confessed it by silence.
“Are you going to seek Mr. Rochester?”
“I must find out what has become of him.”
“It remains for me, then,” he said, “to remember you in my prayers, and
to entreat God for you, in all earnestness, that you may not indeed become a
castaway.103 I had thought I recognized in you one of the chosen. But God
sees not as man sees; His will be done.”104
He opened the gate, passed through it, and strayed away down the glen.
He was soon out of sight.
 On reentering the parlor, I found Diana standing at the window, looking
very thoughtful. Diana was a great deal taller than I; she put her hand on my
shoulder, and, stooping, examined my face.
“Jane,” she said, ”you are always agitated and pale now. I am sure there is
something the matter. Tell me what business St. John and you have on hand.
I have watched you this half hour from the window; you must forgive my
being such a spy, but for a long time I have fancied I hardly know what. St.
John is a strange being—”
She paused—I did not speak; soon she resumed—
“That brother of mine cherishes peculiar views of some sort respecting
you, I am sure; he has long distinguished you, by a notice and interest he
never showed any one else—to what end? I wish he loved you—does he,
Jane?”
I put her cool hand to my hot forehead; “No, Di, not one whit.”
“Then why does he follow you so with his eyes—and get you so
frequently alone with him, and keep you so continually at his side? Mary
and I had both concluded he wished you to marry him.”
“He does—he has asked me to be his wife.”
Diana clapped her hands. “That is just what we hoped and thought! And
you will marry him, Jane, won’t you? And then he will stay in England.”
“Far from that, Diana; his sole idea in proposing to me is to procure a
fitting fellow-laborer in his Indian toils.”
“What! he wishes you to go to India?”
“Yes.”
“Madness!” she exclaimed. “You would not live three months there, I am
certain. You never shall go; you have not consented—have you, Jane?”
“I have refused to marry him—”
“And have, consequently, displeased him?” she suggested.
“Deeply; he will never forgive me, I fear; yet I offered to accompany him
as his sister.”
 “It was frantic folly to do so, Jane. Think of the task you undertook—one
of incessant fatigue—where fatigue kills even the strong; and you are weak.
St. John—you know him—would urge you to impossibilities; with him
there would be no permission to rest during the hot hours; and,
unfortunately, I have noticed, whatever he exacts, you force yourself to
perform. I am astonished you found courage to refuse his hand. You do not
love him, then, Jane?”
“Not as a husband.”
“And yet he is a handsome fellow.”
“And I am so plain, you see, Di. We should never suit.”
“Plain! You? Not at all. You are much too pretty, as well as too good, to
be grilled alive in Calcutta.” And again she earnestly conjured me to give
up all thoughts of going out with her brother.
“I must indeed,” I said; “for when, just now, I repeated the offer of
serving him for a deacon, he expressed himself shocked at my want of
decency. He seemed to think I had committed an impropriety in proposing
to accompany him unmarried, as if I had not from the first hoped to find in
him a brother, and habitually regarded him as such.”
“What makes you say he does not love you, Jane?”
“You should hear himself on the subject. He has again and again
explained that it is not himself, but his office, he wishes to mate. He has
told me I am formed for labor—not for love—which is true, no doubt. But
in my opinion, if I am not formed for love, it follows that I am not formed
for marriage. Would it not be strange, Di, to be chained for life to a man
who regarded one but as a useful tool?”
“Insupportable—unnatural—out of the question!”
“And then,” I continued, “though I have only sisterly affection for him
now, yet, if forced to be his wife, I can imagine the possibility of conceiving
an inevitable, strange, torturing kind of love for him, because he is so
talented; and there is often a certain heroic grandeur in his look, manner,
and conversation. In that case, my lot would become unspeakably wretched.
He would not want me to love him; and if I showed the feeling, he would
make me sensible that it was a superfluity, unrequired by him, unbecoming
in me. I know he would.”
“And yet St. John is a good man,” said Diana.
“He is a good and a great man; but he forgets, pitilessly, the feelings and
claims of little people, in pursuing his own large views. It is better,
therefore, for the insignificant to keep out of his way, lest, in his progress,
he should trample them down. Here he comes! I will leave you, Diana.”
And I hastened up stairs as I saw him entering the garden.
But I was forced to meet him again at supper. During that meal he
appeared just as composed as usual. I had thought he would hardly speak to
me, and I was certain he had given up the pursuit of his matrimonial
scheme; the sequel showed I was mistaken on both points. He addressed me
precisely in his ordinary manner, or what had, of late, been his ordinary
manner—one scrupulously polite. No doubt he had invoked the help of the
Holy Spirit to subdue the anger I had roused in him, and now believed he
had forgiven me once more.
For the evening reading before prayers, he selected the twenty-first
chapter of Revelation. It was at all times pleasant to listen, while from his
lips fell the words of the Bible; never did his fine voice sound at once so
sweet and full—never did his manner become so impressive in its noble
simplicity, as when he delivered the oracles of God; and to-night that voice
took a more solemn tone, that manner a more thrilling meaning, as he sat in
the midst of his household circle (the May moon shining in through the
uncurtained window, and rendering almost unnecessary the light of the
candle on the table); as he sat there, bending over the great old Bible, and
described from its page the vision of the new heaven and the new earth—
told how God would come to dwell with men—how he would wipe away
all tears from their eyes, and promised that there should be no more death,
neither sorrow nor crying, nor any more pain, because the former things
were passed away.
The succeeding words thrilled me strangely as he spoke them, especially
as I felt, by the slight, indescribable alteration in sound, that in uttering
them his eye had turned on me.
 “He that overcometh shall inherit all things; and I will be his God, and he
shall be my son. But,” was slowly, distinctly read, “the fearful, the
unbelieving, &c., shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire
and brimstone, which is the second death.”105
Henceforward I knew what fate St. John feared for me.
A calm, subdued triumph, blent with a longing earnestness, marked his
enunciation of the last glorious verses of that chapter. The reader believed
his name was already written in the Lamb’s book oflife,106 and he yearned
after the hour which should admit him to the city to which the kings of the
earth bring their glory and honor—which has no need of sun or moon to
shine in it, because the glory of God lightens it, and the Lamb is the light
thereof.
In the prayer following the chapter, all his energy gathered, all his stern
zeal woke: he was in deep earnest, wrestling with God, and resolved on a
conquest. He supplicated strength for the weak-hearted-guidance for
wanderers from the fold—a return, even at the eleventh hour, for those
whom the temptations of the world and the flesh were luring from the
narrow path. He asked, he urged, he claimed, the boon of a brand snatched
from the burning.107 Earnestness is ever deeply solemn: first, as I listened
to that prayer, I wondered at his; then, when it continued and rose, I was
touched by it, and at last awed. He felt the greatness and goodness of his
purpose so sincerely, others who heard him plead for it could not but feel it
too.
The prayer over, we took leave of him; he was to go at a very early hour
in the morning. Diana and Mary, having kissed him, left the room, in
compliance, I think, with a whispered hint from him; I tendered my hand,
and wished him a pleasant journey.
“Thank you, Jane. As I said, I shall return from Cambridge in a fortnight;
that space, then, is yet left you for reflection. If I listened to human pride, I
should say no more to you of marriage with me; but I listen to my duty, and
keep steadily in view my first aim—to do all things to the glory of God. My
master was long suffering; so will I be. I cannot give you up to perdition as
a vessel of wrath; repent—resolve, while there is yet time. Remember, we
are bid to work while it is day—warned that ‘the night cometh when no
man shall work.’108 Remember the fate of Dives, who had his good things
in this life.109 God give you strength to choose that better part which shall
not be taken from you!”110
He laid his hand on my head as he uttered the last words. He had spoken
earnestly, mildly; his look was not, indeed, that of a lover beholding his
mistress, but it was that of a pastor recalling his wandering sheep—or
better, of a guardian angel watching the soul for which he is responsible. All
men of talent, whether they be men of feeling or not, whether they be
zealots, or aspirants, or despots—provided only they be sincere—have their
sublime moments, when they subdue and rule. I felt veneration for St. John
—veneration so strong that its impetus thrust me at once to the point I had
so long shunned. I was tempted to cease struggling with him—to rush down
the torrent of his will into the gulf of his existence, and there lose my own. I
was almost as hard beset by him now as I had been once before, in a
different way, by another. I was a fool both times. To have yielded then
would have been an error of principle; to have yielded now would have
been an error of judgment. So I think at this hour, when I look back to the
crisis through the quiet medium of time, I was unconscious of folly at the
instant.
I stood motionless under my hierophant’s touch. My refusals were
forgotten—my fears overcome—my wrestlings paralyzed. The impossible
—i.e., my marriage with St. John—was fast becoming the possible. All was
changing utterly, with a sudden sweep. Religion called—angels beckoned—
God commanded—life rolled together like a scroll111-death’s gates
opening, showed eternity beyond; it seemed that, for safety and bliss there,
all here might be sacrificed in a second. The dim room was full of visions.
“Could you decide now?” asked the missionary. The inquiry was put in
gentle tones; he drew me to him as gently. Oh, that gentleness! how far
more potent is it than force! I could resist St. John’s wrath; I grew pliant as
a reed under his kindness. Yet I knew all the time, if I yielded now, I should
not the less be made to repent, some day, of my former rebellion. His nature
was not changed by one hour of solemn prayer; it was only elevated.
 “I could decide if I were but certain,” I answered; “were I but convinced
that it is God’s will I should marry you, I could vow to marry you here and
now—come afterward what would!”
“My prayers are heard!” ejaculated St. John. He pressed his hand firmer
on my head, as if he claimed me; he surrounded me with his arm, almost as
if he loved me (I say almost—I knew the difference—for I had felt what it
was to be loved; but like him, I had now put love out of the question, and
thought only of duty); I contended with my inward dimness of vision,
before which clouds yet rolled. I sincerely, deeply, fervently longed to do
what was right, and only that. “Show me—show me the path!” I entreated
of Heaven. I was excited more than I had ever been; and whether what
followed was the effect of excitement, the reader shall judge.
All the house was still, for I believe all except St. John and myself were
now retired to rest. The one candle was dying out; the room was full of
moonlight. My heart beat fast and thick; I heard it throb. Suddenly it stood
still to an inexpressible feeling that thrilled it through, and passed at once to
my head and extremities. The feeling was not like an electric shock, but it
was quite as sharp, as strange, as startling; it acted on my senses as if their
utmost activity hitherto had been but torpor, from which they were now
summoned and forced to wake. They rose expectant; eye and ear waited,
while the flesh quivered on my bones.
“What have you heard! What do you see?” asked St. John. I saw nothing,
but I heard a voice somewhere cry,
“Jane! Jane! Jane!” nothing more.
“Oh, God! what is it?” I gasped.
I might have said, “Where is it?” for it did not seem in the room—nor in
the house—nor in the garden; it did not come out of the air—nor from
under the earth—nor from overhead. I had heard it—where or whence,
forever impossible to know! And it was the voice of a human being—a
known, loved, well-remembered voice—that of Edward Fairfax Rochester;
and it spoke in pain and woe—wildly, eerily, urgently.
“I am coming!” I cried. “Wait for me! Oh, I will come!” I flew to the
door, and looked into the passage; it was dark. I ran out into the garden; it
was void.
“Where are you?” I exclaimed.
The hills beyond Marsh-Glen sent the answer faintly back, “Where are
you!” I listened. The wind sighed low in the firs; all was moorland
loneliness and midnight hush.
“Down superstition!” I commented, as that spectre rose up black by the
black yew at the gate. “This is not thy deception, nor thy witchcraft; it is the
work of nature. She was roused, and did—no miracle—but her best.”
I broke from St. John, who had followed, and would have detained me. It
was my turn to assume ascendency. My powers were in play, and in force. I
told him to forbear question or remark; I desired him to leave me; I must,
and would be alone. He obeyed at once. Where there is energy to command
well enough, obedience never fails. I mounted to my chamber, locked
myself in, fell on my knees, and prayed in my way—a different way to St.
John‘s—but effective in its own fashion. I seemed to penetrate very near a
Mighty Spirit, and my soul rushed out in gratitude at His feet. I rose from
the thanksgiving—took a resolve—and lay down, unscared, enlightened—
eager but for the daylight.

OceanofPDF.com
 Chapter XXXVI

The daylight came. I rose at dawn. I busied myself for an hour or two with
arranging my things in my chamber, drawers, and wardrobe, in the order
wherein I should wish to leave them during a brief absence. Meantime, I
heard St. John quit his room. He stopped at my door; I feared he would
knock—no, but a slip of paper was passed under the door. I took it up. It
bore these words:
“You left me too suddenly last night. Had you stayed but a little longer,
you would have laid your hand on the Christian’s cross and the angel’s
crown. I shall expect your clear decision when I return this day fortnight.
Meantime, watch and pray that you enter not into temptation; the spirit, I
trust, is willing, but the flesh, I see, is weak.112 I shall pray for you hourly.
Yours, St. John.”
“My spirit,” I answered mentally, “is willing to do what is right; and my
flesh, I hope, is strong enough to accomplish the will of Heaven, when once
that will is distinctly known to me. At any rate, it shall be strong enough to
search—inquire—to grope an outlet from this cloud of doubt, and find the
open day of certainty.”
It was the first of June, yet the morning was overcast and chilly; rain beat
fast on my casement. I heard the front door open and St. John pass out.
Looking through the window, I saw him traverse the garden. He took the
way over the misty moors in the direction of Whitcross; there he would
meet the coach.
“In a few more hours I shall succeed you in that track, cousin,” thought I;
“I too have a coach to meet at Whitcross. I too have some to see and ask
after in England, before I depart forever.”
It wanted yet two hours of breakfast-time. I filled the interval in walking
softly about my room and pondering the visitation which had given my
plans their present bent. I recalled that inward sensation I had experienced:
for I could recall it, with all its unspeakable strangeness. I recalled the voice
I had heard; again I questioned whence it came, as vainly as before; it
seemed in me—not in the external world. I asked, was it a mere nervous
impression—a delusion? I could not conceive or believe it; it was more like
an inspiration. The wondrous shock of feeling had come like the earthquake
which shook the foundations of Paul and Silas’ prison;113 it had opened the
doors of the soul’s cell, and loosed its bands—it had wakened it out of its
sleep, whence it sprung trembling, listening, aghast; then vibrated thrice a
cry on my startled ear, and in my quaking heart, and through my spirit;
which neither feared nor shook, but exulted as if in joy over the success of
one effort it had been privileged to make, independent of the cumbrous
body.
“Ere many days,” I said, as I terminated my musings, “I will know
something of him whose voice seemed last night to summon me. Letters
have proved of no avail—personal inquiry shall replace them.”
At breakfast, I announced to Diana and Mary that I was going on a
journey, and should be absent at least four days.
“Alone, Jane?” they asked.
“Yes; it was to see, or hear news of, a friend about whom I had for some
time been uneasy.”
They might have said, as I have no doubt they thought, that they had
believed me to be without any friends save them; for, indeed, I had often
said so; but with their true natural delicacy, they abstained from comment;
except that Diana asked me if I was sure I was well enough to travel. I
looked very pale, she observed. I replied that nothing ailed me save anxiety
of mind, which I hoped soon to alleviate.
It was easy to make my further arrangements; for I was troubled with no
inquiries—no surmises. Having once explained to them that I could not
now be explicit about my plans, they kindly and wisely acquiesced in the
silence with which I pursued them; according to me the privilege of free
action, I should, under similar circumstances, have accorded them.
 I left Moor House at three o‘clock P.M., and soon after four I stood at the
foot of the sign-post at Whitcross, waiting the arrival of the coach which
was to take me to distant Thornfield. Amid the silence of those solitary
roads and desert hills, I heard it approach from a great distance. It was the
same vehicle whence, a year ago, I had alighted one summer evening on
this very spot—how desolate, and hopeless, and objectless! It stopped as I
beckoned. I entered—not now obliged to part with my whole fortune as the
price of its accommodation. Once more on the road to Thornfield, I felt like
the messenger-pigeon flying home.
It was a journey of six-and-thirty hours. I had set out from Whitcross on a
Tuesday afternoon, and early on the succeeding Thursday morning the
coach stopped to water the horses at a wayside inn, situated in the midst of
scenery whose green hedges and large fields and low, pastoral hills (how
mild of feature and verdant of hue compared with the stern north-midland
moors of Morton!) met my eye like the lineaments of a once familiar face.
Yes, I knew the character of this landscape; I was sure we were near my
bourn.
“How far is Thornfield Hall from here?” I asked of the hostler.
“Just two miles, ma‘am, across the fields.”
“My journey is closed,” I thought to myself. I got out of the coach, gave a
box I had into the hostler’s charge, to be kept till I called for it; paid my
fare; satisfiedib the coachman, and was going; the brightening day gleamed
on the sign of the inn, and I read in gilt letters, “The Rochester Arms.” My
heart leaped up; I was already on my master’s very lands. It fell again; the
thought struck it:
“Your master himself may be beyond the British Channel, for aught you
know; and then, if he is at Thornfield Hall, toward which you hasten, who
beside him is there? His lunatic wife; and you have nothing to do with him;
you dare not speak to him or seek his presence. You have lost your labor—
you had better go no further,” urged the monitor. “Ask information of the
people at the inn; they can give you all you seek; they can solve your doubts
at once. Go up to that man, and inquire if Mr. Rochester be at home.”
 The suggestion was sensible; and yet I could not force myself to act on it.
I so dreaded a reply that would crush me with despair. To prolong doubt
was to prolong hope. I might yet once more see the hall under the ray of her
star. There was the stile before me—the very fields through which I had
hurried, blind, deaf, distracted, with a revengeful fury tracking and
scourging me, on the morning I fled from Thornfield; ere I well knew what
course I had resolved to take, I was in the midst of them. How fast I
walked! How I ran sometimes! How I looked forward to catch the first view
of the well-known woods! With what feelings I welcomed single trees I
knew, and familiar glimpses of meadow and hill between them!
At last the woods rose; the rookery clustered dark; a loud cawing broke
the morning stillness. Strange delight inspired me; on I hastened. Another
field crossed—a lane threaded—and there were the court-yard walls—the
back offices; the house itself, the rookery still hid.
“My first view of it shall be in front,” I determined, “where its bold
battlements will strike the eye nobly at once, and where I can single out my
master’s very window; perhaps he will be standing at it—he rises early;
perhaps he is now walking in the orchard, or on the pavement in front.
Could I but see him!—but a moment! Surely, in that case I should not be so
mad as to run to him? I cannot tell—I am not certain. And if I did—what
then? God bless him! What then? Who would be hurt by my once more
tasting the life his glance can give me?—I rave; perhaps at this moment he
is watching the sun rise over the Pyrenees, or on the tideless sea of the
south.”
I had coasted along the lower wall of the orchard—turned its angle; there
was a gate just there, opening into the meadow, between two stone pillars,
crowned by stone balls. From behind one pillar I could peep round quietly
at the full front of the mansion. I advanced my head with precaution,
desirous to ascertain if any bed-room window-blinds were yet drawn up;
battlements, windows, long front—all from this sheltered station were at
my command.
The crows sailing overhead perhaps watched me while I took this survey.
I wonder what they thought; they must have considered I was very careful
and timid at first, and that gradually I grew very bold and reckless. A peep,
and then a long stare; and then a departure from my niche and a straying out
into the meadow; and a sudden stop full in front of the great mansion, and a
protracted, hardy gaze toward it. “What affectation of diffidence was this at
first!” they might have demanded. “What stupid regardlessnessic now!”
Hear an illustration, reader.
A lover finds his mistress asleep on a mossy bank; he wishes to catch a
glimpse of her fair face without waking her. He steals softly over the grass,
careful to make no sound; he pauses—fancying she has stirred; he
withdraws; not for worlds would he be seen. All is still—he again advances
—he bends above her; a light veil rests on her features; he lifts it, bends
lower; now his eyes anticipate the vision of beauty—warm and blooming
and lovely in rest. How hurried was their first glance! But how they fix!
How he starts! How he suddenly and vehemently clasps in both arms the
form he dare not, a moment since, touch with his finger! How he calls aloud
a name, and drops his burden, and gazes on it wildly! He thus grasps, and
cries, and gazes, because he no longer fears to waken by any sound he can
utter—by any movement he can make. He thought his love slept sweetly; he
finds she is stone dead.
I looked with timorous joy toward a stately house; I saw a blackened ruin.
No need to cower behind a gate-post, indeed! to peep up at chamber
lattices, fearing life was astir behind them! No need to listen for doors
opening—to fancy steps on the pavement or the gravel-walk! The lawn, the
grounds, were trodden and waste; the portal yawned void. The front was, as
I had once seen it in a dream,114 but a shell-like wall, very high and very
fragile-looking, perforated with paneless windows; no roof, no battlements,
no chimneys—all had crashed in.
And there was the silence of death about it; the solitude of a lonesome
wild. No wonder that letters addressed to people here had never received an
answer; as well despatch epistles to a vault in a church-aisle. The grim
blackness of the stones told by what fate the hall had fallen—by
conflagration; but how kindled? What story belonged to this disaster? What
loss, besides mortar, and marble, and woodwork, had followed upon it? Had
life been wrecked, as well as property? If so, whose? Dreadful question;
there was no one here to answer it—not even dumb sign, mute token.
In wandering round the shattered walls and through the devastated
interior, I gathered evidence that the calamity was not of late occurrence.
Winter snows, I thought, had drifted through that void arch, winter rains
beaten in at those hollow casements; for, amid the drenched piles of
rubbish, spring had cherished vegetation; grass and weed grew here and
there between the stones and fallen rafters. And, oh! where, meantime, was
the hapless owner of this wreck? In what land? Under what auspices? My
eye involuntarily wandered to the gray church tower near the gates, and I
asked, “Is he with Darner de Rochester, sharing the shelter of his narrow
marble house?”
Some answer must be had to these questions. I could find it nowhere but
at the inn; and thither, ere long, I returned. The host himself brought my
breakfast into the parlor. I requested him to shut the door and sit down; I
had some questions to ask him. But when he complied, I scarcely knew how
to begin; such horror had I of the possible answers. And yet the spectacle of
desolation I had just left prepared me in a measure for a tale of misery. The
host was a respectable-looking middle-aged man.
“You know Thornfield Hall, of course?” I managed to say at last.
“Yes, ma‘am; I lived there once.”
“Did you?” Not in my time, I thought; you are a stranger to me.
“I was the late Mr. Rochester’s butler,” he added.
The late! I seemed to have received with full force the blow I had been
trying to evade.
“The late!” I gasped. “Is he dead?”
“I mean the father of Mr. Edward, the present gentleman,” he explained. I
breathed again; my blood resumed its flow. Fully assured by these words
that Mr. Edward—my Mr. Rochester (God bless him, wherever he was!)
was at least alive; was, in short, “the present gentleman,” (gladdening
words!) it seemed I could hear all that was to come—whatever the
disclosures might be—with comparative tranquility. Since he was not in the
grave, I could bear, I thought, to learn that he was at the Antipodes.id
“Is Mr. Rochester living at Thornfield Hall now?” I asked, knowing, of
course, what the answer would be, but yet desirous of deferring the direct
question as to where he really was.
“No, ma‘am—oh, no! No one is living there. I suppose you are a stranger
in these parts, or you would have heard what happened last autumn.
Thornfield Hall is quite a ruin; it was burned down just about harvest time.
A dreadful calamity! such an immense quantity of valuable property
destroyed; hardly any of the furniture could be saved. The fire broke out at
dead of night, and before the engines arrived from Millcote, the building
was one mass of flame. It was a terrible spectacle; I witnessed it myself.”
“At dead of night!” I muttered. Yes, that was ever the hour of fatality at
Thornfield. “Was it known how it originated?” I demanded.
“They guessed, ma‘am; they guessed. Indeed, I should say it was
ascertained beyond a doubt. You are not perhaps aware,” he continued,
edging his chair a little nearer the table, and speaking low, “that there was a
lady—a—a lunatic, kept in the house?”
“I have heard something of it.”
“She was kept in very close confinement, ma‘am; people even for some
years were not absolutely certain of her existence. No one saw her; they
only knew by rumor that such a person was at the hall; and who or what she
was it was difficult to conjecture. They said Mr. Edward had brought her
from abroad; and some believed she had been his mistress. But a queer
thing happened a year since—a very queer thing.”
I feared now to hear my own story. I endeavored to recall him to the main
fact.
“And this lady?”
“This lady, ma‘am,” he answered, “turned out to be Mr. Rochester’s wife!
The discovery was brought about in the strangest way. There was a young
lady, a governess at the hall, that Mr. Rochester fell in—”
“But the fire?” I suggested.
 “I’m coming to that, ma‘am—that Mr. Edward fell in love with. The
servants say they never saw anybody so much in love as he was; he was
after her continually. They used to watch him—servants will, you know,
ma’am—and he set store on her past everything; for all, nobody but him
thought her so very handsome. She was a little small thing, they say, almost
like a child. I never saw her myself; but I’ve heard Leah, the housemaid, tell
of her. Leah liked her well enough. Mr. Rochester was about forty, and this
governess not twenty; and, you see, when gentlemen of his age fall in love
with girls, they are often like as if they were bewitched: well, he would
marry her.”
“You shall tell me this part of the story another time,” I said; “but now I
have a particular reason for wishing to hear all about the fire. Was it
suspected that this lunatic, Mrs. Rochester, had any hand in it?”
“You’ve hit it, ma‘am; it’s quite certain that it was her, and nobody but
her, that set it going. She had a woman to take care of her, called Mrs. Poole
—an able woman in her line, and very trustworthy; but for one fault—a
fault common to a deal of them nurses and matrons—she kept a private
bottle of gin by her, and now and then took a drop over-much. It’s
excusable, for she had a hard life of it; but still it was dangerous; for, when
Mrs. Poole was fast asleep, after the gin and water, the mad lady, who was
as cunning as a witch, would take the keys out of her pocket, let herself out
of her chamber, and go roaming about the house, doing any wild mischief
that came into her head. They say she had nearly burned her husband in his
bed once; but I don’t know about that. However, on this night, she set fire
first to the hangings of the room next her own; and then she got down to a
lower story, and made her way to the chamber that had been the
governess’—(she was like as if she knew somehow how matters had gone
on, and had a spite at her)—and she kindled the bed there; but there was
nobody sleeping in it, fortunately. The governess had run away two months
before; and for all Mr. Rochester sought her as if she had been the most
precious thing he had in the world, he could never hear a word of her; and
he grew quite savage—quite savage on his disappointment; he never was a
wild man, but he got dangerous after he lost her. He would be alone, too. He
sent Mrs. Fairfax, the housekeeper, away to her friends at a distance; but he
did it handsomely, for he settled an annuity on her for life; and she deserved
it—she was a very good woman. Miss Adèle, a ward he had, was put to
school. He broke off acquaintance with all the gentry, and shut himself up,
like a hermit, at the hall.”
“What! did he not leave England?”
“Leave England? Bless you, no! He would not cross the door-stones of
the house, except at night, when he walked just like a ghost about the
grounds and in the orchard, as if he had lost his senses—which it is my
opinion he had; for a more spirited, bolder, keener gentleman than he was
before that midge of a governess crossed him, you never saw, ma‘am. He
was not a man given to wine, or cards, or racing, as some are, and he was
not so very handsome; but he had a courage and a will of his own, if ever
man had. I knew him from a boy, you see; and for my part I have often
wished that Miss Eyre had been sunk in the sea before she came to
Thornfield Hall.”
“Then Mr. Rochester was at home when the fire broke out!”
“Yes, indeed was he; and he went up to the attics when all was burning
above and below, and got the servants out of their beds and helped them
down himself—and went back to get his mad wife out of her cell. And then
they called out to him that she was on the roof, where she was standing,
waving her arms above the battlements, and shouting out till they could
hear her a mile off; I heard her, and saw her with my own eyes. She was a
big woman, and had long black hair; we could see it streaming against the
flames as she stood. I witnessed, and several more witnessed, Mr. Rochester
ascend through the skylight on to the roof; we heard him call ‘Bertha!’ We
saw him approach her; and then, ma‘am, she yelled, and gave a spring, and
the next minute she lay smashed on the pavement.”
“Dead?”
“Dead? Ay, dead as the stones on which her brains and blood were
scattered.”
“Good God!”
“You may well say so, ma‘am; it was frightful!”
He shuddered.
 “And afterward?” I urged.
“Well, ma‘am, afterward the house was burned to the ground; there are
only some bits of wall standing now.”
“Were any other lives lost?”
“No—perhaps it would have been better if there had.”
“What do you mean?”
“Poor Mr. Edward!” he ejaculated. “I little thought ever to have seen it!
Some say it was a just judgment on him for keeping his first marriage
secret, and wanting to take another wife while he had one living; but I pity
him, for my part.”
“You said he was alive?” I exclaimed.
“Yes, yes—he is alive; but many think he had better be dead.”
“Why? How?” My blood was again running cold.
“Where is he?” I demanded. “Is he in England?”
“Ay—ay—he is in England; he can’t get out of England, I fancy—he’s a
fixture now.”
What agony was this! And the man seemed resolved to protract it!
“He is stone-blind,” he said at last. “Yes—he is stone-blind-is Mr.
Edward.”
I had dreaded worse. I had dreaded he was mad. I summoned strength to
ask what had caused this calamity.
“It was all his own courage, and a body may say, his kindness, in a way,
ma‘am; he wouldn’t leave the house till every one else was out before him.
As he came down the great stair-case at last, after Mrs. Rochester had flung
herself from the battlements, there was a great crash—all fell. He was taken
out from under the ruins, alive, but sadly hurt; a beam had fallen in such a
way as to protect him partly; but one eye was knocked out, and one hand so
crushed that Mr. Carter, the surgeon, had to amputate it directly. The other
eye inflamed; he lost the sight of that also. He is now helpless, indeed—
blind and a cripple.”
“Where is he? Where does he now live?”
 “At Ferndean, a manor-house on a farm he has, about thirty miles off;
quite a desolate spot.”
“Who is with him?”
“Old John and his wife; he would have none else. He is quite broken
down, they say.”
“Have you any sort of conveyance?”
“We have a chaise, ma‘am—a very handsome chaise.”
“Let it be got ready instantly; and if your post-boy can drive me to
Ferndean before dark this day, I’ll pay both you and him twice the hire you
usually demand.”

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 Chapter XXXVII

The manor-house of Ferndean was a building of considerable antiquity,

moderate size, and no architectural pretensions, deep buried in a wood. I
had heard of it before. Mr. Rochester often spoke of it, and sometimes went
there. His father had purchased the estate for the sake of the game covers.ie
He would have let the house, but could find no tenant, in consequence of its
ineligible and insalubrious site. Ferndean then remained uninhabited and
unfurnished, with the exception of some two or three rooms fitted up for the
accommodation of the squire when he went there in the season to shoot.
To this house I came, just ere dark, on an evening marked by the
characteristics of sad sky, cold gale, and continued small penetrating rain.
The last mile I performed on foot, having dismissed the chaise and driver
with the double remuneration I had promised. Even when within a very
short distance of the manor-house, you could see nothing of it, so thick and
dark grew the timber of the gloomy wood about it. Iron gates between
granite pillars showed me where to enter, and passing through them, I found
myself at once in the twilight of close-ranked trees. There was a grass-
grown track descending the forest-aisle, between hoar and knotty shafts and
under branched arches. I followed it, expecting soon to reach the dwelling,
but it stretched on and on, it wound far and further; no sign of habitation or
grounds was visible.
I thought I had taken a wrong direction and lost my way. The darkness of
natural as well as of sylvan dusk gathered over me; I looked round in search
of another road. There was none; all was interwoven stem, columnar trunk,
dense summer foliage—no opening anywhere.
I proceeded; at last my way opened, the trees thinned a little; presently I
beheld a railing, then the house—scarce, by this dim light, distinguishable
from the trees, so dank and green were its decaying walls. Entering a portal,
fastened only by a latch, I stood amid a space of inclosed ground, from
which the wood swept away in a semi-circle. There were no flowers, no
garden-beds; only a broad gravel-walk girdling a grass-plat, if and this set
in the heavy frame of the forest. The house presented two pointed gables in
its front; the windows were latticed and narrow; the front-door was narrow
too; one step led up to it. The whole looked, as the host of the Rochester
Arms had said, “quite a desolate spot.” It was as still as a church on a week-
day—the pattering rain on the forest leaves was the only sound audible in
its vicinage.
“Can there be life here?” I asked.
Yes; life of some kind there was, for I heard a movement—that narrow
front-door was unclosing, and some shape was about to issue from the
grange.ig
It opened slowly; a figure came out into the twilight, and stood on the
step, a man without a hat; he stretched forth his hand as if to feel whether it
rained. Dusk as it was, I had recognized him; it was my master, Edward
Fairfax Rochester, and no other.
I stayed my step, almost my breath, and stood to watch him—to examine
him, myself unseen, and, alas! to him invisible. It was a sudden meeting,
and one in which rapture was kept well in check by pain. I had no difficulty
in restraining my voice from exclamation, my step from hasty advance.
His form was of the same strong and stalwart contour as ever. His port
was still erect, his hair was still raven black; nor were his features altered or
sunk. Not in one year’s space, by any sorrow, could his athletic strength be
quelled or his vigorous prime blighted. But in his countenance I saw a
change. That looked desperate and brooding—that reminded me of some
wronged and fettered wild beast or bird, dangerous to approach in his sullen
woe. The caged eagle, whose gold-ringed eyes cruelty has extinguished,
might look as looked that sightless Samson.115
And, reader, do you think I feared him in his blind ferocity? If you do,
you little know me. A soft hope blended with my sorrow that soon I should
dare to drop a kiss on that brow of rock, and on those lids so sternly sealed
beneath it; but not yet; I would not accost him yet.
 He descended the one step, and advanced slowly and gropingly toward
the grass-plat. Where was his daring stride now? Then he paused, as if he
knew not which way to turn. He lifted his hand and opened his eyelids;
gazed blank, and with a straining effort, on the sky, and toward the
amphitheatre of trees. One saw that all to him was void darkness. He
stretched his right hand (the left arm; the mutilated one he kept hidden in
his bosom), he seemed to wish, by touch, to gain an idea of what lay round
him. He met but vacancy still, for the trees were some yards off where he
stood. He relinquished the endeavor, folded his arms, and stood quiet and
mute in the rain, now falling fast on his uncovered head. At this moment
John approached from some quarter.
“Will you take my arm, sir?” he said; “there is a heavy shower coming on;
had you not better go in?”
“Let me alone,” was the answer.
John withdrew, without having observed me. Mr. Rochester now tried to
walk about, vainly—all was too uncertain. He groped his way back to the
house, and, reentering it, closed the door.
I now drew near and knocked; John’s wife opened for me. “Mary,” I said,
“how are you?”
She started as if she had seen a ghost; I calmed her. To her hurried “Is it
really you, miss, come at this late hour to this ‘onlyih place?” I answered by
taking her hand, and then I followed her into the kitchen, where John now
sat by a good fire. I explained to them, in few words, that I had heard all
which had happened since I left Thornfield, and that I was come to see Mr.
Rochester. I asked John to go down to the turnpike-house, where I had
dismissed the chaise, and bring my trunk, which I had left there; and then,
while I removed my bonnet and shawl, I questioned Mary as to whether I
could be accommodated at the manor-house for the night, and finding that
arrangements to that effect, though difficult, would not be impossible, I
informed her I should stay. Just at this moment the parlor-bell rung.
“When you go in,” said I, “tell your master that a person wishes to speak
to him, but do not give my name.”
“I don’t think he will see you,” she answered; “he refuses everybody.”
 When she returned, I inquired what he had said.
“You are to send in your name and your business,” she replied. She then
proceeded to fill a glass with water and place it on a tray, together with
candles.
“Is that what he rung for?” I asked.
“Yes; he always has candles brought in at dark, though he is blind.”
“Give the tray to me; I will carry it in.”
I took it from her hand; she pointed me out the parlor-door. The tray
shook as I held it; the water spilled from the glass; my heart struck my ribs
loud and fast. Mary opened the door for me, and shut it behind me.
This parlor looked gloomy; a neglected handful of fire burned low in the
grate, and, leaning over it, with his head supported against the high, old-
fashioned mantle-piece, appeared the blind tenant of the room. His old dog,
Pilot, lay on one side, removed out of the way, and coiled up as if afraid of
being inadvertently trodden on. Pilot pricked up his ears when I came in,
then he jumped up with a yelp and a whine, and bounded toward me; he
almost knocked the tray from my hands. I set it on the table, then patted
him, and said, softly, “Lie down!” Mr. Rochester turned mechanically to see
what the commotion was; but as he saw nothing, he returned and sighed.
“Give me the water, Mary,” he said.
I approached him with the now only half-filled glass; Pilot followed me,
still excited.
“What is the matter?” he inquired.
“Down, Pilot!” I again said. He checked the water on its way to his lips,
and seemed to listen; he drank, and put the glass down.
“This is you, Mary, is it not?”
“Mary is in the kitchen,” I answered.
He put out his hand with a quick gesture, but not seeing where I stood, he
did not touch me. “Who is this? who is this?” he demanded, trying, as it
seemed, to see with those sightless eyes—unavailing and distressing
attempt! “Answer me—speak again!” he ordered, imperiously and aloud.
 “Will you have a little more water, sir? I spilled half of what was in the
glass,” I said.
“Who is it? What is it? Who speaks?”
“Pilot knows me, and John and Mary know I am here; I came only this
evening,” I answered.
“Great God!—what delusion has come over me? What sweet madness has
seized me?”
“No delusion—no madness; your mind, sir, is too strong for delusion—
your health too sound for frenzy.”
“And where is this speaker? Is it only a voice? Oh! I cannot see, but I
must feel, or my heart will stop, and my brain burst. Whatever—whoever
you are—be perceptible to the touch, or I cannot live.”
He groped; I arrested his wandering hand, and prisoned it in both mine.
“Her very fingers!” he cried; “her small slight fingers! If so, there must be
more of her.”
The muscular hand broke from my custody; my arm was seized, my
shoulder—neck—waist—I was entwined and gathered to him.
“Is it Jane? What is it? This is her shape—this is her size—” “And this is
her voice,” I added. “She is all here; her heart, too. God bless you, sir! I am
glad to be so near you again.”
“Jane Eyre! Jane Eyre!” was all he said.
“My dear master,” I answered, “I am Jane Eyre; I have found you out—I
am come back to you.”
“In truth? In the flesh? My living Jane?”
“You touch me, sir—you hold me, and fast enough; I am not cold like a
corpse, nor vacant like air, am I?”
“My living darling! These are certainly her limbs, and these her features;
but I cannot be so blessed after all my misery. It is a dream; such dreams as
I have had at night, when I had clasped her once more to my heart, as I do
now; and kissed her, as thus—and felt that she loved me, and trusted she
would not leave me.”
 “Which I never will, sir, from this day.”
“Never will, says the vision! But I always woke and found it an empty
mockery; and I was desolate and abandoned—my life, dark, lonely,
hopeless—my soul athirst and forbidden to drink—my heart famished and
never to be fed. Gentle, soft dream, nestling in my arms now, you will fly,
too, as your sisters have all fled before you; but kiss me before you go—
embrace me, Jane.”
“There, sir—and there!”
I pressed my lips to his once brilliant and now rayless eyes—I swept his
hair from his brow, and kissed that, too. He suddenly seemed to rouse
himself; the conviction of the reality of all this seized him.
“It is you—is it Jane? You are come back to me, then?”
“I am.”
“And you do not lie dead in some ditch, under some stream? And you are
not a pining outcast among strangers?”
“No, sir; I am an independent woman now.”
“Independent! What do you mean, Jane?”
“My uncle in Madeira is dead, and he left me five thousand pounds.”
“Ah, this is practical—this is real!” he cried. “I should never dream that.
Besides, there is that peculiar voice of hers, so animating and piquant, as
well as soft; it cheers my withered heart; it puts life into it. What, Janet! Are
you an independent woman, a rich woman?”
“Quite rich, sir. If you won’t let me live with you, I can build a house of
my own, close up to your door, and you may come and sit in my parlor
when you want company of an evening.”
“But as you are rich, Jane, you have now, no doubt, friends who will look
after you, and not suffer you to devote yourself to a blind lameterii like
me?”
“I told you I am independent, sir, as well as rich; I am my own mistress.”
“And you will stay with me?”
 “Certainly—unless you object. I will be your neighbor, your nurse, your
housekeeper. I find you lonely; I will be your companion—to read to you,
to walk with you, to sit with you, to wait on you, to be eyes and hands to
you. Cease to look so melancholy, my dear master; you shall not be left
desolate, so long as I live.”
He replied not; he seemed serious—abstracted; he sighed; he half opened
his lips as if to speak; he closed them again. I felt a little embarrassed.
Perhaps I had been too officious in my offers of companionship and aid;
perhaps I had too rashly overleaped conventionalities; and he, like St. John,
saw impropriety in my inconsiderateness. I had, indeed, made my proposal
from the idea that he wished and would ask me to be his wife; an
expectation, not the less certain because unexpressed, had buoyed me up,
that he would claim me at once as his own. But no hint to that effect
escaping him, and his countenance becoming more overcast, I suddenly
remembered that I might have been all wrong, and was perhaps playing the
fool unwittingly; and I began gently to withdraw myself from his arms—but
he eagerly snatched me closer.
“No—no—Jane; you must not go. No—I have touched you, heard you,
felt the comfort of your presence—the sweetness of your consolation; I
cannot give up these joys. I have little left in myself—I must have you. The
world may laugh—may call me absurd, selfish—but it does not signify. My
very soul demands you; it will be satisfied; or it will take deadly vengeance
on its frame.”
“Well, sir, I will stay with you; I have said so.”
“Yes—but you understand one thing by staying with me, and I understand
another. You, perhaps, could make up your mind to be about my hand and
chair—to wait on me as a kind little nurse (for you have an affectionate
heart and a generous spirit, which prompt you to make sacrifices for those
you pity), and that ought to suffice for me, no doubt. I suppose I should now
entertain none but fatherly feelings for you; do you think so? Come—tell
me.”
“I will think what you like, sir; I am content to be only your nurse, if you
think it better.”
 “But you cannot always be my nurse, Janet; you are young, and must
marry one day.”
“I don’t care about being married.”
“You should care, Janet; if I were what I once was I would try to make
you care—but—a sightless block!”
He relapsed again into gloom. I, on the contrary, became more cheerful,
and took fresh courage; these last words gave me an insight as to where the
difficulty lay; and as it was no difficulty with me, I felt quite relieved from
my previous embarrassment. I resumed a livelier vein of conversation.
“It is time some one undertook to rehumanize you,” said I, parting his
thick and long-uncut locks; “for I see you are being metamorphosed into a
lion, or something of that sort. You have a ‘faux air’ij of Nebuchadnezzar in
the fields about you, that is certain; your hair reminds me of eagles’
feathers; whether your nails are grown like birds’ claws or not, I have not
yet noticed.”116
“On this arm, I have neither hand nor nails,” he said, drawing the
mutilated limb from his breast, and showing it to me. “It is a mere stump—
a ghastly sight! Don’t you think so, Jane?”
“It is a pity to see it; and a pity to see your eyes—and the scar of fire on
your forehead; and the worst of it is, one is in danger of loving you too well
for all this, and making too much of you.”
“I thought you would be revolted, Jane, when you saw my arm and my
cicatrized visage.”
“Did you? Don’t tell me so—lest I should say something disparaging to
your judgment. Now, let me leave you an instant, to make a better fire and
have the hearth swept up. Can you tell when there is a good fire?”
“Yes; with the right eye I see a glow, a ruddy haze.”
“And you see the candles?”
“Very dimly; each is a luminous cloud.”
“Can you see me?”
“No, my fairy; but I am only too thankful to hear and feel you.”
 “When do you take supper?”
“I never take supper.”
“But you shall have some to-night. I am hungry; so are you, I dare say,
only you forget.”
Summoning Mary, I soon had the room in more cheerful order; I prepared
him likewise a comfortable repast. My spirits were excited, and with
pleasure and ease I talked to him during supper, and for a long time after.
There was no harassing restraint, no repressing of glee and vivacity, with
him; for with him I was at perfect ease, because I knew I suited him; all I
said or did seemed either to console or revive him. Delightful
consciousness! It brought to life and light my whole nature; in his presence
I thoroughly lived, and he lived in mine. Blind as he was, smiles played
over his face, joy dawned on his forehead; his lineaments softened and
warmed.
After supper, he began to ask me many questions, of where I had been,
what I had been doing, how I had found him out; but I gave him only very
partial replies; it was too late to enter into particulars that night. Besides, I
wished to touch no deep-thrilling chord, to open no fresh well of emotion in
his heart; my sole present aim was to cheer him. Cheered, as I have said, he
was, and yet but by fits. If a moment’s silence broke the conversation, he
would turn restless, touch me, then say, “Jane.”
“You are altogether a human being, Jane? You are certain of that?”
“I conscientiously believe so, Mr. Rochester.”
“Yet how, on this dark and doleful evening, could you so suddenly rise on
my lone hearth? I stretched my hand to take a glass of water from a
hireling, and it was given me by you; I asked a question, expecting John’s
wife to answer me, and your voice spoke at my ear.”
“Because I had come in, in Mary’s stead, with the tray.”
“And there is enchantment in the very hour I am now spending with you.
Who can tell what a dark, dreary, hopeless life I have dragged on for
months past? Doing nothing, expecting nothing; merging night in day;
feeling but the sensation of cold when I let the fire go out, of hunger when I
forgot to eat; and then a ceaseless sorrow, and, at times, a very delirium of
desire to behold my Jane again. Yes, for her restoration I longed far more
than for that of my lost sight. How can it be, that Jane is with me and says
she loves me? Will she not depart as suddenly as she came? To-morrow, I
fear, I shall find her no more.”
A common-place, practical reply, out of the train of his own disturbed
ideas, was, I was sure, the best and most reassuring for him in this frame of
mind. I passed my finger over his eyebrows, and remarked that they were
scorched, and that I would apply something which should make them grow
as broad and black as ever.
“Where is the use of doing me good in any way, beneficent spirit, when,
at some fatal moment, you will again desert me, passing like a shadow,
whither and how, to me unknown; and for me, remaining afterward
undiscoverable?”
“Have you a pocket-comb about you, sir?”
“What for, Jane?”
‘Just to comb out this shaggy black mane. I find you rather alarming,
when I examine you close at hand. You talk of my being a fairy; but I am
sure you are more like a brownie.“ik
“Am I hideous, Jane?”
“Very, sir; you always were, you know.”
“Humph! The wickedness has not been taken out of you, wherever you
have sojourned.”
“Yet I have been with good people; far better than you, a hundred times
better; people possessed of ideas and views you never entertained in your
life; quite more refined and exalted.”
“Who the deuce have you been with?”
“If you twist in that way, you will make me pull the hair out of your head;
and then I think you will cease to entertain doubts of my substantiality.”
“Who have you been with, Jane?”
“You shall not get it out of me to-night, sir; you must wait till to-morrow;
to leave my tale half told,117 will, you know, be a sort of security that I
shall appear at your breakfast-table to finish it. By-the-by, I must mind not
to rise on your hearth with only a glass of water, then; I must bring an egg
at the least, to say nothing of fried ham.”
“You mocking changeling, fairy-born and human-bred! You make me feel
as I have not felt these twelve months. If Saul could have had you for his
David, the evil spirit would have been exorcised without the aid of the
harp.”118
“There, sir, you are redd upil and made decent. Now I’ll leave you; I have
been travelling these last three days, and I believe I am tired. Good-night.”
“Just one word, Jane; were there only ladies in the house where you have
been?”
I laughed and made my escape, still laughing as I ran up stairs. “A good
idea!” I thought, with glee. “I see I have the means of fretting him out of his
melancholy for some time to come.”
Very early the next morning, I heard him up and astir, wandering from
one room to another. As soon as Mary came down, I heard the question, “Is
Miss Eyre here?” Then, “Which room did you put her into? Was it dry? Is
she up? Go and ask if she wants anything, and when she will come down.”
I came down as soon as I thought there was a prospect of breakfast.
Entering the room very softly, I had a view of him before he discovered my
presence. It was mournful, indeed, to witness the subjugation of that
vigorous spirit to a corporeal infirmity. He sat in his chair, still, but not at
rest; expectant evidently, the lines of now habitual sadness marking his
strong features. His countenance reminded one of a lamp quenched, waiting
to be relighted, and, alas! it was not himself that could now kindle the lustre
of animated expression; he was dependent on another for that office! I had
meant to be gay and careless, but the powerlessness of the strong man
touched my heart to the quick; still I accosted him with what vivacity I
could.
“It is a bright, sunny morning, sir,” I said. “The rain is over and gone,119
and there is a tender shining after it; you shall have a walk soon.”
I had wakened the glow; his features beamed.
 “Oh, you are indeed there, my sky-lark! Come to me. You are not gone;
not vanished? I heard one of your kind an hour ago, singing high over the
wood; but its song had no music for me, any more than the rising sun had
rays. All the melody on earth is concentrated in my Jane’s tongue to my ear
(I am glad it is not naturally a silent one); all the sunshine I can feel is in her
presence.”
The water stood in my eyes to hear this avowal of his dependence; just as
if a royal eagle, chained to a perch, should be forced to entreat a sparrow to
become its purveyor. But I would not be lachrymose; I dashed off the salt
drops, and busied myself with preparing breakfast.
Most of the morning was spent in the open air. I led him out of the wet
and wild wood, into some cheerful fields; I described to him how brilliantly
green they were; how the flowers and hedges looked refreshed; how
sparklingly blue was the sky. I sought a seat for him in a hidden and lovely
spot—a dry stump of a tree; nor did I refuse to let him, when seated, place
me on his knee; why should I, when both he and I were happier near than
apart? Pilot lay beside us; all was quiet. He broke out suddenly while
clasping me in his arms—
“Cruel, cruel deserter! Oh, Jane, what did I feel when I discovered you
had fled from Thornfield, and when I could nowhere find you; and, after
examining your apartment, ascertained that you had taken no money, nor
anything which could serve as an equivalent? A pearl necklace I had given
you lay untouched in its little casket; your trunks were left corded and
locked as they had been prepared for the bridal tour. What could my darling
do, I asked, left destitute and penniless? And what did she do? Let me hear
now.”
Thus urged, I began the narrative of my experience for the last year. I
softened considerably what related to the three days of wandering and
starvation, because to have told him all would have been to inflict
unnecessary pain; the little I did say lacerated his faithful heart deeper than
I wished.
I should not have left him thus, he said, without any means of making my
way; I should have told him my intention. I should have confided in him; he
would never have forced me to be his mistress. Violent as he had seemed in
his despair, he, in truth, loved me far too well and too tenderly to constitute
himself my tyrant; he would have given me half his fortune, without
demanding so much as a kiss in return, rather than I should have flung
myself friendless on the wide world. I had endured, he was certain, more
than I had confessed to him.
“Well, whatever my sufferings had been, they were very short,” I
answered; and then I proceeded to tell him how I had been received at Moor
House, how I had obtained the office of school mistress, &c. The accession
of fortune, the discovery of my relations, followed in due order. Of course,
St. John Rivers’ name came in frequently in the progress of my tale. When I
had done, that name was immediately taken up.
“This St. John, then, is your cousin?”
“Yes.”
“You have spoken of him often; did you like him?”
“He was a very good man, sir; I could not help liking him.”
“A good man? Does that mean a respectable, well-conducted man of
fifty? Or what does it mean?”
“St. John was only twenty-nine, sir.”
“ ‘Jeune encore,’im as the French say. Is he a person of low stature,
phlegmatic, and plain? A person whose goodness consists rather in his
guiltlessness of vice than in his prowess in virtue?”
“He is untiringly active. Great and exalted deeds are what he lives to
perform.”
“But his brain? That is probably rather soft? He means well; but you
shrug your shoulders to hear him talk?”
“He talks little, sir; what he does say is ever to the point. His brain is first-
rate, I should think; not impressible, but vigorous.”
“Is he an able man, then?”
“Truly able.”
“A thoroughly educated man?”
 “St. John is an accomplished and profound scholar.”
“His manners, I think you said, are not to your taste? priggish and
parsonic?”
“I never mentioned his manners; but, unless I had a very bad taste, they
must suit it; they are polished, calm, and gentleman-like.”
“His appearance—I forget what description you gave of his appearance; a
sort of raw curate, half strangled with his white neckcloth, and stilted up on
his thick-soled high-lows,in eh?”
“St. John dresses well. He is a handsome man; tall, fair, with blue eyes,
and a Grecian profile.”
(Aside): “Damn him!” (To me): “Did you like him, Jane?”
“Yes, Mr. Rochester, I liked him; but you asked me that before.”
I perceived, of course, the drift of my interlocutor. Jealousy had got hold
of him; she stung him; but the sting was salutary; it gave him respite from
the gnawing fang of melancholy. I would not, therefore, immediately charm
the snake.
“Perhaps you would rather not sit any longer on my knee, Miss Eyre?”
was the next somewhat unexpected observation.
“Why not, Mr. Rochester?”
“The picture you have just drawn is suggestive of a rather too
overwhelming contrast. Your words have delineated very prettily a graceful
Apollo; he is present to your imagination—tall, fair, blue-eyed, and with a
Grecian profile. Your eyes dwell on a Vulcan io—a real blacksmith, brown,
broad-shouldered; and blind and lame in the bargain.”
“I never thought of it before; but you certainly are rather like Vulcan, sir.”
“Well—you can leave me, ma‘am; but before you go (and he retained me
by a firmer grasp than ever), you will be pleased just to answer me a
question or two.” He paused.
“What questions, Mr. Rochester?”
Then followed this cross-examination:
 “St. John made you school-mistress of Morton before he knew you were
his cousin?”
“Yes.”
“You would often see him? He would visit the school sometimes?”
“Daily.”
“He would approve of your plans, Jane? I know they would be clever; for
you are a talented creature.”
“He approved of them—yes.”
“He would discover many things in you he could not have expected to
find? Some of your accomplishments are not ordinary.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“You had a little cottage near the school, you say; did he ever come there
to see you?”
“Now and then.”
“Of an evening?”
“Once or twice.”
A pause.
“How long did you reside with him and his sisters after the cousinship
was discovered?”
“Five months.”
“Did Rivers spend much time with the ladies of his family?”
“Yes; the back parlor was both his study and ours; he sat near the window,
and we by the table.”
“Did he study much?”
“A good deal.”
“What?”
“Hindostanee.”
“And what did you do meantime?”
“I learned German, at first.”
 “Did he teach you?”
“He did not understand German.”
“Did he teach you nothing?”
“A little Hindostanee.”
“Rivers taught you Hindostanee?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And his sisters also?”
“No.”
“Only you?”
“Only me.”
“Did you ask to learn?”
“No.”
“He wished to teach you?”
“Yes.”
A second pause.
“Why did he wish it? Of what use could Hindostanee be to you?”
“He intended me to go with him to India.”
“Ah! here I reach the root of the matter. He wanted you to marry him?”
“He asked me to marry him.”
“That is a fiction—an impudent invention to vex me.”
“I beg your pardon, it is the literal truth; he asked me more than once, and
was as stiff about urging his point as ever you could be.”
“Miss Eyre, I repeat it, you can leave me. How often am I to say the same
thing? Why do you remain pertinaciously perched on my knee, when I have
given you notice to quit?”
“Because I am comfortable there.”
“No, Jane, you are not comfortable there; because your heart is not with
me; it is with this cousin—this St. John. Oh, till this moment, I thought my
little Jane was all mine! I had a belief she loved me even when she left me;
that was an atom of sweet in much bitter. Long as we have been parted, hot
tears as I have wept over our separation, I never thought that while I was
mourning her, she was loving another! But it is useless grieving. Jane, leave
me; go and marry Rivers.”
“Shake me off, then, sir—push me away; for I’ll not leave you of my own
accord.”
“Jane, I ever like your tone of voice; it still renews hope, it sounds so
truthful. When I hear it, it carries me back a year. I forgot that you have
formed a new tie. But I am not a fool—go—”
“Where must I go, sir?”
“Your own way—with the husband you have chosen.”
“Who is that?”
“You know—this St. John Rivers.”
“He is not my husband, nor ever will be. He does not love me; I do not
love him. He loves (as he can love, and that is not as you love) a beautiful
young lady called Rosamond. He wanted to marry me only because he
thought I should make a suitable missionary’s wife, which she would not
have done. He is good and great, but severe; and, for me, cold as an iceberg.
He is not like you, sir; I am not happy at his side, nor near him, nor with
him. He has no indulgence for me—no fondness. He sees nothing attractive
in me; not even youth—only a few useful mental points. Then, must I leave
you, sir, to go to him?”
I shuddered involuntarily, and clung instinctively closer to my blind but
beloved master. He smiled.
“What, Jane! Is this true? Is such really the state of matters between you
and Rivers?”
“Absolutely, sir. Oh, you need not be jealous! I wanted to tease you a little
to make you less sad; I thought anger would be better than grief. But if you
wish me to love you, could you but see how much I do love you, you would
be proud and content. All my heart is yours, sir; it belongs to you; and with
you it would remain, were fate to exile the rest of me from your presence
forever.”
Again, as he kissed me, painful thoughts darkened his aspect.
“My seared vision! My crippled strength!” he murmured regretfully.
I caressed in order to soothe him. I knew of what he was thinking, and
wanted to speak for him, but dared not. As he turned aside his face a
minute, I saw a tear slide from under the sealed eyelid, and trickle down the
manly cheek. My heart swelled.
“I am no better than the old, lightning-struck chestnut-tree in Thornfield
orchard,” he remarked, ere long. “And what right would that ruin have to
bid a budding woodbine cover its decay with freshness?”
“You are no ruin, sir—no lightning-struck tree; you are green and
vigorous. Plants will grow about your roots, whether you ask them or not,
because they take delight in your bountiful shadow; and as they grow they
will lean toward you, and wind round you, because your strength offers
them so safe a prop.”
Again he smiled; I gave him comfort.
“You speak of friends, Jane?” he asked.
“Yes; of friends,” I answered, rather hesitatingly; for I knew I meant more
than friends, but could not tell what other word to employ. He helped me.
“Ah! Jane. But I want a wife.”
“Do you, sir?”
“Yes; is it news to you?”
“Of course; you said nothing about it before.”
“Is it unwelcome news?”
“That depends on circumstances, sir—on your choice.”
“Which you shall make for me, Jane. I will abide by your decision.”
“Choose then, sir—her who loves you best.”
“I will at least choose—her I love best. Jane, will you marry me?”
“Yes, sir.”
 “A poor blind man, whom you will have to lead about by the hand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“A crippled man, twenty years older than you, whom you will have to
wait on?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Truly, Jane?”
“Most truly, sir.”
“Oh! my darling! God bless you and reward you!”
“Mr. Rochester, if ever I did a good deed in my life—if ever I thought a
good thought—if ever I prayed a sincere and blameless prayer—if ever I
wished a righteous wish, I am rewarded now. To be your wife is, for me, to
be as happy as I can be on earth.”
“Because you delight in sacrifice.”
“Sacrifice! What do I sacrifice? Famine for food, expectation for content.
To be privileged to put my arms round what I value—to press my lips to
what I love—to repose on what I trust; is that to make a sacrifice? If so,
then certainly I delight in sacrifice.”
“And to bear with my infirmities, Jane; to overlook my deficiencies.”
“Which are none, sir, to me. I love you better now, when I can really be
useful to you, than I did in your state of proud independence, when you
disdained every part but that of the giver and protector.”
“Hitherto I have hated to be helped—to be led; henceforth, I feel, I shall
hate it no more. I did not like to put my hand into a hireling‘s, but it is
pleasant to feel it circled by Jane’s little fingers. I preferred utter loneliness
to the constant attendance of servants; but Jane’s soft ministry will be a
perpetual joy. Jane suits me; do I suit her?”
“To the finest fibre of my nature, sir.”
“The case being so, we have nothing in the world to wait for; we must be
married instantly.”
He looked and spoke with eagerness; his old impetuosity was rising.
 “We must become one flesh without any delay, Jane; there is but the
license to get—then we marry—”
“Mr. Rochester, I have just discovered the sun is far declined from its
meridian, and Pilot is actually gone home to his dinner. Let me look at your
watch.”
“Fasten it into your girdle, Janet, and keep it henceforward; I have no use
for it.”
“It is nearly four o‘clock in the afternoon, sir. Don’t you feel hungry?”
“The third day from this must be our wedding-day, Jane. Never mind fine
clothes and jewels, now; all that is not worth a fillip.”
“The sun has dried up all the rain-drops, sir. The breeze is still; it is quite
hot.”
“Do you know, Jane, I have your little pearl necklace at this moment
fastened round my bronze scragip under my cravat? I have worn it since the
day I lost my only treasure; as a memento of her.”
“We will go home through the wood; that will be the shadiest way.”
He pursued his own thoughts without heeding me.
“Jane! you think me, I dare say, an irreligious dog; but my heart swells
with gratitude to the beneficent God of this earth just now. He sees not as
man sees, but far clearer; judges not as man judges, but far more wisely. I
did you wrong; I would have sullied my innocent flower—breathed guilt on
its purity; the Omnipotent snatched it from me. I, in my stiff-necked
rebellion, almost cursed the dispensation; instead of bending to the decree, I
defied it. Divine justice pursued its course; disasters came thick upon me; I
was forced to pass through the valley of the shadow of death.120 His
chastisements are mighty; and one smote me which has humbled me
forever. You know I was proud of my strength; but what is it now, when I
must give it over to foreign guidance, as a child does its weakness? Of late,
Jane—only of late—I began to see and acknowledge the hand of God in my
doom. I began to experience remorse, repentance; the wish for
reconcilement to my Maker. I began sometimes to pray; very brief prayers
they were, but very sincere.
 “Some days since—nay, I can number them, four; it was last Monday
night, a singular mood came over me, one in which grief replaced frenzy;
sorrow, sullenness. I had long had the impression that since I could nowhere
find you, you must be dead. Late that night, perhaps it might be between
eleven and twelve o‘clock, ere I retired to my dreary rest, I supplicated God
that, if it seemed good to Him, I might soon be taken from this life and
admitted to that world to come, where there was still hope of rejoining Jane.
“I was in my own room and sitting by the window, which was open; it
soothed me to feel the balmy night air, though I could see no stars, and only
by a vague, luminous haze knew the presence of a moon. I longed for thee,
Janet! Oh, I longed for thee both with soul and flesh! I asked of God, at
once in anguish and humility, if I had not been long enough desolate,
afflicted, tormented, and might not soon taste bliss and peace once more.
That I merited all I endured, I acknowledged; that I could scarcely endure
more, I pleaded; and the alpha and omega of my heart’s wishes broke
involuntarily from my lips, in the words, ‘Jane! Jane! Jane!’ ”
“Did you speak these words aloud?”
“I did, Jane. If any listener had heard me he would have thought me mad,
I pronounced them with such frantic energy.”
“And it was last Monday night; somewhere near midnight?”
“Yes; but the time is of no consequence; what followed is the strange
point. You will think me superstitious—some superstition I have in my
blood, and always had; nevertheless, this is true—true, at least, it is that I
heard what I now relate.
“As I exclaimed ‘Jane! Jane! Jane!’ a voice—I cannot tell whence the
voice came, but I know whose voice it was—replied, ‘I am coming; wait for
me!’ and a moment after, went whispering on the wind, the words, ‘Where
are you?’
“I’ll tell you, if I can, the idea, the picture, these words opened to my
mind; yet it is difficult to express what I want to express. Ferndean is
buried, as you see, in a heavy wood, where sound falls dull and lies
unreverberating. ‘Where are you?’ seemed spoken among mountains, for I
heard a hill-sent echo repeat the words. Cooler and fresher at the moment
the gale seemed to visit my brow; I could have deemed that in some wild,
lone scene, I and Jane were meeting. In spirit, I believe, we must have met.
You, no doubt, were at that hour in unconscious sleep, Jane; perhaps your
soul wandered from its cell to comfort mine; for those were your accents—
as certain as I live—they were yours!”
Reader, it was on Monday night, near midnight, that I, too, had received
the mysterious summons; those were the very words by which I had replied
to it. I listened to Mr. Rochester’s narrative, but made no disclosure in
return. The coincidence struck me as too awful and inexplicable to be
communicated or discussed. If I told anything, my tale would be such as
must necessarily make a profound impression on the mind of my hearer;
and that mind, yet from its sufferings too prone to gloom, needed not the
deeper shade of the supernatural. I kept these things, then, and pondered
them in my heart.121
“You cannot now wonder,” continued my master, “that when you rose
upon me so unexpectedly last night, I had difficulty in believing you any
other than a mere voice and vision; something that would melt to silence
and annihilation, as the midnight whisper and mountain echo had melted
before. Now, I thank God! I know it to be otherwise. Yes, I thank God!”
He put me off his knee, rose, and reverently lifting his hat from his brow,
and bending his sightless eyes to the earth, he stood in mute devotion. Only
the last words of the worship were audible.
“I thank my Maker, that in the midst of judgment he has remembered
mercy. I humbly entreat my Redeemer to give me strength to lead
henceforth a purer life than I have done hitherto!”
Then he stretched his hand out to be led. I took that dear hand, held it a
moment to my lips, then let it pass round my shoulder; being so much lower
of stature than he, I served both for his prop and guide. We entered the
wood, and wended homeward.

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 Chapter XXXVIII

Conclusion

Reader, I married him. A quiet wedding we had; he and I, the parson and
clerk, were alone present. When we got back from church, I went into the
kitchen of the manor-house, where Mary was cooking the dinner and John
cleaning the knives, and I said:
“Mary, I have been married to Mr. Rochester this morning.” The
housekeeper and her husband were both of that decent, phlegmatic order of
people to whom one may at any time safely communicate a remarkable
piece of news without incurring the danger of having one’s ears pierced by
some shrill ejaculation, and subsequently stunned by a torrent of wordy
wonderment. Mary did look up, and she did stare at me; the ladle with
which she was basting a pair of chickens roasting at the fire did for some
three minutes hang suspended in air; and for the same space of time John’s
knives also had rest from the polishing process; but Mary, bending again
over the roast, said only,
“Have you, miss? Well, for sure!”
A short time after she pursued: “I seed you go out with the master, but I
didn’t know you were gone to church to be wed”; and she basted away.
John, when I turned to him, was grinning from ear to ear.
“I telled Mary how it would be,” he said; “I knew what Mr. Edward”—
(John was an old servant, and had known his master when he was the cadet
of the house, therefore he often gave him his Christian name)—“I knew
what Mr. Edward would do, and I was certain he would not wait long
neither; and he’s done right, for aught I know. I wish you joy, miss!” and he
politely pulled his fore-lock.
 “Thank you, John. Mr. Rochester told me to give you and Mary this.” I
put into his hand a five-pound note. Without waiting to hear more, I left the
kitchen. In passing the door of that sanctum some time after, I caught the
words—
“She’ll happen do better for him nor ony o’ t’ grand ladies.” And again,
“If she ben’t one o’ th’ handsomest, she’s noan faâliq and varry good-
natured; and i’ his een she’s fair beautiful, onybody may see that.”
I wrote to Moor House and to Cambridge immediately, to say what I had
done; fully explained also why I had thus acted. Diana and Mary approved
the step unreservedly. Diana announced that she would just give me time to
get over the honey-moon, and then she would come and see me.
“She had better not wait till then, Jane,” said Mr. Rochester, when I read
her letter to him; “if she does she will be too late, for our honey-moon will
shine our life-long; its beams will only fade over your grave or mine.”
How St. John received the news I don’t know; he never answered the
letter in which I communicated it; yet six months after, he wrote to me,
without, however, mentioning Mr. Rochester’s name or alluding to my
marriage. His letter was then calm, and, though very serious, kind. He has
maintained a regular, though not frequent, correspondence ever since; he
hopes I am happy, and trusts I am not of those who live without God in the
world, and only mind earthly things.122
You have not quite forgotten little Adèle, have you, reader? I had not; I
soon asked and obtained leave of Mr. Rochester to go and see her at the
school where he had placed her. Her frantic joy at beholding me again
moved me much. She looked pale and thin; she said she was not happy. I
found the rules of the establishment were too strict, its course of study too
severe, for a child of her age; I took her home with me. I meant to become
her governess once more, but I soon found this impracticable; my time and
cares were now required by another—my husband needed them all. So I
sought out a school conducted on a more indulgent system; and near
enough to permit of my visiting her often, and bringing her home
sometimes. I took care she should never want for anything that could
contribute to her comfort; she soon settled in her new abode, became very
happy there, and made fair progress in her studies. As she grew up, a sound
English education corrected in a great measure her French defects; and
when she left school, I found in her a pleasing and obliging companion;
docile, good-tempered, and well-principled. By her grateful attention to me
and mine, she has long since well repaid any little kindness I ever had it in
my power to offer her.
My tale draws to its close: one word respecting my experience of married
life, and one brief glance at the fortunes of those whose names have most
frequently recurred in this narrative, and I have done.
I have now been married ten years. I know what it is to live entirely for
and with what I love best on earth. I hold myself supremely blessed—
blessed beyond what language can express; because I am my husband’s life
as fully as he is mine. No woman was ever nearer to her mate than I am;
ever more absolutely bone of his bone, and flesh of his flesh.123 I know no
weariness of my Edward’s society; he knows none of mine, any more than
we each do of the pulsation of the heart that beats in our separate bosoms;
consequently, we are ever together. To be together is for us to be at once as
free as in solitude, as gay as in company. We talk, I believe, all day long; to
talk to each other is but a more animated and an audible thinking. All my
confidence is bestowed on him; all his confidence is devoted to me; we are
precisely suited in character; perfect concord is the result.
Mr. Rochester continued blind the first two years of our union; perhaps it
was that circumstance that drew us so very near—that knit us so very close;
for I was then his vision, as I am still his right hand. Literally, I was (what
he often called me) the apple of his eye. He saw nature—he saw books
through me; and never did I weary of gazing for his behalf, and of putting
into words the effect of field, tree, town, river, cloud, sunbeam—of the
landscape before us; of the weather around us—and impressing by sound on
his ear what light could no longer stamp on his eye. Never did I weary of
reading to him; never did I weary conducting him where he wished to go; of
doing for him what he wished to be done. And there was a pleasure in my
services, most full, most exquisite, even though sad—because he claimed
these services without painful shame or damping humiliation. He loved me
so truly, that he knew no reluctance in profiting by my attendance; he felt I
loved him so fondly, that to yield that attendance was to indulge my
sweetest wishes.
One morning, at the end of the two years, as I was writing a letter to his
dictation, he came and bent over me, and said, “Jane, have you a glittering
ornament round your neck?”
I had a gold watch-chain; I answered, “Yes.”
“And have you a pale blue dress on?”
I had. He informed me then, that for some time he had fancied the
obscurity clouding one eye was becoming less dense; and that now he was
sure of it.
He and I went up to London. He had the advice of an eminent oculist, and
he eventually recovered the sight of that one eye. He cannot see very
distinctly; he cannot read or write much; but he can find his way without
being led by the hand; the sky is no longer a blank to him—the earth no
longer a void. When his first-born was put into his arms, he could see that
the boy had inherited his own eyes, as they once were-large, brilliant, and
black. On that occasion, he again, with a full heart, acknowledged that God
had tempered judgment with mercy.
My Edward and I, then, are happy; and the more so, because those we
most love are happy likewise. Diana and Mary Rivers are both married.
Alternately, once every year, they come to see us, and we go to see them.
Diana’s husband is a captain in the navy, a gallant officer and a good man.
Mary’s is a clergyman, a college friend of her brother‘s, and, from his
attainments and principles, worthy of the connection. Both Captain
Fitzjames and Mr. Wharton love their wives, and are loved by them.
As to St. John Rivers, he left England; he went to India. He entered on the
path he had marked for himself; he pursues it still. A more resolute,
indefatigable pioneer never wrought amid rocks and dangers. Firm, faithful,
and devoted, full of energy, and zeal, and truth, he labors for his race; he
clears their painful way to improvement; he hews down like a giant the
prejudices of creed and caste that encumber it. He may be stern; he may be
exacting; he may be ambitious yet; but his is the sternness of the warrior
Great-heart, who guards his pilgrim-convoy from the onslaught of
Apollyon.124 His is the exaction of the Apostle, who speaks but for Christ,
when he says—“Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and
take up his cross and follow me.”125 His is the ambition of the high master-
spirit, which aims to fill a place in the first rank of those who are redeemed
from the earth—who stand without fault before the throne of God;126 who
share the last mighty victories of the Lamb; who are called, and chosen, and
faithful.
St. John is unmarried; he never will marry now. Himself has hitherto
sufficed to the toil, and the toil draws near its close; his glorious sun hastens
to its setting. The last letter I received from him drew from my eyes human
tears, and yet filled my heart with divine joy. He anticipated his sure
reward, his incorruptible crown.127 I know that a stranger’s hand will write
to me next, to say that the good and faithful servant has been called, at
length, into the joy of his Lord.128 And why weep for this? No fear of
death will darken St. John’s last hour. His mind will be unclouded; his heart
will be undaunted; his hope will be sure; his faith steadfast. His own words
are a pledge of this:
“My Master,” he says, “has forewarned me. Daily he announces more
distinctly—‘Surely I come quickly’; and hourly I more eagerly respond
—‘Amen; even so come, Lord Jesus!’ ”129

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 Endnotes

References to the Bible are to the New King James Version, except where
noted otherwise.
PREFACE
1 (p. 6) Ahab did not like Micaiah: Ahab, king of Israel, did not believe
Micaiah, son of Imlah, when Micaiah foretold that Ahab’s armies faced
disaster if they were to invade Ramoth Gilead; he imprisoned Micaiah and
instead followed the false prophecy of Zedekiah that he would triumph. See
the Bible, 2 Chronicles 18.
2 (p. 6) Vanity Fair: The reference is to Vanity Fair, a Novel without a Hero
(serialized 1847-1848), by William Makepeace Thackeray.
3 (p. 7) Fielding: Henry Fielding (1707-1754), novelist and satirist best
known for Tom Jones (1749).
CHAPTER I
4 (p. 12) Bewick’s History of British Birds: The reference is to A History of
British Birds, Vol. 2, Containing the History and Description of Water Birds
(1804), by Thomas Bewick.
5 (p. 12) “Where the Northern Ocean”: Bewick’s quotation is from The
Seasons (“Autumn,” lines 862-865), by James Thomson (1700- 1748).
6 (p. 13) Pamela ... Moreland: The references are to Pamela; or, Virtue
Rewarded (1740), by Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), and The History of
Henry, Earl of Moreland (1781), by John Wesley (1703- 1791); the latter is
an abridgment of The Fool of Quality (1765- 1770), by Henry Brooke
(1703-1783).
7 (p. 15) History of Rome: The reference is to The Roman History (1769),
by Oliver Goldsmith (1731-1774); the work was abridged for schools in
1772.
CHAPTER III
8 (p. 25) apothecary... physician: An apothecary, though less well trained
than a physician, not only sold drugs but also administered them as a
general medical practitioner.
9 (p. 27) Gulliver’s Travels: Written by the satirical novelist Jonathan Swift
(1667-1745) and published in 1726, this book describes the hero’s visit to
the fantastic regions of Lilliput and Brobdignag.
10 (p. 28) all gone out of England: See Brontë’s novel Shirley (1849), at the
end of which it is remarked, “That was the last fairish [fairy] seen on this
countryside.” See also p. 138.
11 (p. 29) another ballad ... a really doleful one: The quoted lines are from
“In the Days We Went Gipsying” (1837), a popular song composed by
Edward Ransford (1805-1876).
CHAPTER IV
12 (p. 42) heart of flesh: See the Bible, Ezekiel 11:19.
13 (p. 44) Child’s Guide: The Reverend William Carus-Wilson, the original
basis for the character of Brocklehurst, was a wealthy evangelical
clergyman who founded and ran the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan
Bridge, attended by all the Brontë sisters. He published a monthly tract, The
Children’s Friend, that warned of damnation for sinful children.
CHAPTER V
14 (p. 52) “stony street”: The reference is to Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage (1812): “The car rattling o‘er the stony street” (canto 3, stanza
22, line 2).
15 (p. 58) organ of veneration: This is one of several references in Jane
Eyre to phrenology, a popular pseudoscience that emerged in the early
nineteenth century; it posited a relation between the physical shaping
(“bumps”) of the skull and various moral or character traits.
16 (p. 60) Rasselas: The reference is to a didactic romance published in
1759 by Samuel Johnson (1709-1784).
 CHAPTER VI
17 (p. 68) like Felix: Felix, a Roman governor, put off the Apostle Paul’s
trial for two years. See the Bible, Acts 24:22-27.
18 (p. 69) dream: In the journal she kept as a pupil at Roe Head, Charlotte
Brontë speaks of being lost in a “divine unseen land of thought.”
19 (p. 70) Love your enemies: The reference is to Christ’s Sermon on the
Mount; see the Bible, Matthew 5:44.
20 (p. 71) hope to all: This was known as the doctrine of Universal
Salvation, as contrasted with the evangelical view of damnation for sinners
espoused by Brocklehurst.
CHAPTER VII
21 (p. 74) Eutychus: As Paul preached, Eutychus was “overcome by sleep”
and “fell down from the third story and was taken up dead” (the Bible, Acts
20:9).
22 (p. 76) take up their cross and follow him: The reference is to the Bible,
Mark 8:34; see also pp. 526-527.
23 (p. 76) bread alone: This is another in a series of references to the Bible,
here to Matthew 4:4.
24 (p. 76) suffer hunger: Here the biblical reference is to 1 Peter 3:14: “If
you should suffer for righteousness’ sake, you are blessed.”
25 (p. 77) evangelical: In this context, the term means aimed at in-stilling
religious principles of the Methodist revivalist movement, including the
corrupted state of human nature after the Fall.
26 (p. 77) outside of the cup and platter: The reference is to the Bible,
Matthew 23:25: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you
cleanse the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of extortion
and self-indulgence.”
27 (p. 77) kingdom is not of this world: The reference is to the Bible, John
18:36.
28 (p. 80) Bethesda: In the Bible (John 5:2-4), Jesus heals the blind, sick,
and lame at the pool of Bethesda.
 CHAPTER VIII
29 (p. 89) Solomon said: The reference is to the Bible, Proverbs 15:17.
CHAPTER IX
30 (p. 91) fog-bred pestilence: The theory of disease prevalent in the early
to mid-nineteenth century held that susceptible persons could catch disease
from noxious odors or atmosphere. The germ theory of disease was not well
known until later in the nineteenth century.
31 (p.98) “Resurgam”: This is a Latin word meaning “I shall rise again,”
expressing the Christian faith in resurrection. Thackeray also used the word
in Vanity Fair, chap. 14.
CHAPTER XI
32 (p. 122) La Ligue des Rats: “The League of Rats” is a fable by the
seventeenth-century French author Jean de la Fontaine.
33 (p. 125) the Hebrew ark: See descriptions of the ark, including golden
cherubs, in the Bible, Exodus 25.
34 (p. 126) life’s fitful fever: The reference is to Macbeth (act 3, scene 2), by
William Shakespeare.
35 (p. 127) Bluebeard’s castle: In the folktale, Bluebeard locked the bodies
of his murdered wives in a secret chamber of his castle.
CHAPTER XII
36 (p. 137) like heath: The quotation is from “Fallen Is Thy Throne,” lines
19-20, published in Sacred Songs (1816), by Thomas Moore (1779-1852).
37 (p. 138) too easy chair: The reference is to The Dunciad, by Alexander
Pope (1688-1744): “Stretched on the rack of a too easy chair” (book 4, line
342).
CHAPTER XIII
38 (p. 147) head and front: The reference is to Othello (act 1, scene 3), by
William Shakespeare.
39 (p. 150) “Likeness ... the shape”: The reference is to Paradise Lost, by
John Milton: “The other shape, / If shape it might be call’d that shape had
none / Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb, / ... what seem’d his head /
The likeness of a kingly crown had on. / Satan was now at hand ...” (book 2,
lines 666-673).
CHAPTER XIV
40 (p. 158) intellectual organs: This pertains to phrenology; see chap. V,
note 2.
41 (p. 159) pride in his port: The reference is to The Traveller (1764), by
Oliver Goldsmith (1731-1774): “Pride in their port, defiance in their eye, / I
see the lords of humankind pass by” (line 327).
42 (p. 162) bad eminence: The reference is to Paradise Lost, by John
Milton: “Satan exalted sat, by merit rais’d / To that bad eminence” (book 2,
line 6).
CHAPTER XV
43 (p. 168) shuttlecock: This is the object hit back and forth in the game of
battledore and shuttlecock, or badminton. See p. 166.
44 (p. 171) the spear, the dart, and the habergeon: A habergeon is a
medieval jacket of flexible armor, or mail; Mr. Rochester’s words are a
reference to the Bible, Job 41:26: “Though the sword reaches him, it cannot
avail; / Nor does spear, dart, or javelin.”
45 (p. 171) heart’s core: The reference is to Hamlet, by William
Shakespeare: “Give me that man / That is not passion’s slave, and I will
wear him / In my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of heart” (act 3, scene 2).
46 (p. 181) Beulah: Beulah—a word that means “married” in Hebrew—is a
place of delight in the Bible (Isaiah 62:4), as well as in Pilgrim’s Progress
(1678-1684), by John Bunyan (1628-1688).
CHAPTER XVI
47 (p. 190) unvarnished tale: The reference is to Othello, by William
Shakespeare: “I will a round unvarnished tale deliver / Of my whole course
of love” (act 1, scene 3).
CHAPTER XVII
48 (p. 197) a very pleasant refuge: The reference is to the Bible, Psalms
46:1: “God is our refuge and strength / A very present help in trouble.”
49 (p. 198) Some natural tears: The reference is to Paradise Lost, by John
Milton: “Some natural tears they dropped . . .” (book 12, line 645). See also
the preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800), by William
Wordsworth (1770-1850): “Poetry shed no tears ‘such as angels weep,’ but
natural and human tears.”
50 (p. 212) Rizzio: A secretary of Mary, Queen of Scots, Rizzio was
murdered by nobles hostile to Mary with the help of Lord Darnley, her
husband; the nobles had persuaded Darnley that Rizzio was Mary’s lover.
51 (p. 212) James Hepburn: Hepburn, the earl of Bothwell, is said to have
engineered the murder of Lord Darnley, husband of Mary, Queen of Scots,
in order to marry her, though the nobles forced Mary to renounce him
shortly after the marriage.
CHAPTER XVIII
52 (p. 217) She hasted ... to drink: See the Bible, Genesis 24, for the story
of Rebekah at the well.
CHAPTER XIX
53 (p. 238) passions may rage: The reference is to the Bible, Psalms 2: 1:
“Why do the nations rage, / And the people plot a vain thing?”
54 (p. 238) still small voice: This is another reference to the Bible, this time
to 1 Kings 19:11-12: “And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and
strong wind tore into the mountains and broke the rocks... but the Lord was
not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in
the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the
fire; and after the fire a still small voice.”
55 (p. 239) the play is played out: Shakespeare, Henry IV, “Play out the
play.” (part I, scene 2, act 4, 1. 182).
56 (p. 239) Off, ye lendings: This is another reference to Shakespeare, here
to King Lear (act 3, scene 4).
57 (p. 240) mystery of mysteries: The reference is to chapter 12 of The
Monastery (1820), by Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832).
CHAPTER XX
58 (p. 256) sun at noon darkens: The reference is to Samson Agonistes
(1671), by John Milton: “... Amid the blaze of noon / Irrecov erably dark,
total eclipse / Without all hope of day!” (lines 80- 82).
CHAPTER XXIII
59 (p. 290) Day its fervid fires: The reference is to line 5 of “The Turkish
Lady,” by Thomas Campbell (1777-1844).
CHAPTER XXIV
60 (p. 305) gild refined gold: The reference is to King John, by William
Shakespeare: “To gild refined gold, to paint the lily” (act 4, scene 2).
61 (p. 306) King Ahasuerus: In the Bible, Esther 5:3, Ahasuerus, a rich and
powerful king, marries the poor Jewish maiden Esther and offers her half
his kingdom.
62 (p. 307) lay that pleasant unction to my soul: The reference is to Hamlet,
by William Shakespeare: “Lay not that flattering unction to your soul” (act
3, scene 4).
63 (p. 308) the world for love... well lost: The phrase is probably from the
title of the play All for Love, or the World Well Lost, by John Dryden (1631-
1700).
64 (p. 318) As I love—loved am I!: The song lyrics were composed by
Charlotte Brontë herself.
CHAPTER XXV
65 (p. 326) heart’s core: See chap. 15, note 3.
66 (p. 327) working together for your good and mine: The reference is to
the Bible, Romans 8:28: “And we know that all things work together for
good to those who love God.”
67 (p. 327) blossomed like a rose: This is another biblical reference, this
time to Isaiah 35:1: “The wilderness and the wasteland shall be glad for
them, and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose.”
68 (p. 328) sullen, moaning sound: The reference is to The Lay of the Last
Minstrel (1805), by Sir Walter Scott (canto 1, stanza 13, line 1).
69 (p. 328) a little child: See p. 255.
CHAPTER XXVI
70 (p. 337) Marston Moor: In 1644, during the English civil war of 1642-
1648, Marston Moor was the site of an important battle that resulted in the
first major victory against the Royalists.
71 (p. 340) quenchless fire and deathless worm: The reference is to the
Bible, Mark 9:43-48: “It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with
one eye, rather than having two eyes, to be cast into hell fire—where their
worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.”
72 (p. 341) mad family: This reflects popular assumptions that madness was
caused by an inherited tendency to dissipation, excess, and debauchery, or
“bad blood.” The term “moral insanity” was coined in 1833 by Dr. James
Cowles Pritchard.
73 (p. 343) ye shall be judged: The reference is to the Bible, Matthew 7:2:
“For with what judgment you judge, you will be judged.”
74 (p. 345) all the first-born in the land of Egypt: In the Bible, Exodus
12:23-30 tells of the death of the first-borns of the Egyptians by the hand of
the Lord.
75 (p. 346) Be not far from me: The language is from the Bible, Psalms
22:11.
76 (p. 346) the floods overflowed me: Again, this language is from the
Bible, Psalms 69:2: “I sink in deep mire... the floods overflow me.”
CHAPTER XXVII
77 (p. 347) right hand: The reference is to the Bible, the Sermon on the
Mount (Matthew 5:28-30), on the sin of adultery: “If your right eye causes
you to sin, pluck it out and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you
that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into
hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut if off and cast it from
you....”
78 (p. 348) in his bosom: Mr. Rochester refers to the parable of Nathan
from the Bible, 2 Samuel 12:3: “The poor man had nothing, except one
little ewe lamb which... ate of his own food and drank from his own cup
and lay in his bosom; and it was like a daughter to him.”
79 (p. 350) tent of Achan: In the Bible (Joshua 7), Achan was an Israelite
warrior who took and hid the spoils of war from the battle of Jericho in his
tent, displeasing the Lord.
CHAPTER XXVIII
80 (p. 378) require my soul of me: The reference is to the Bible, Luke
12:20-22: “This night your soul will be required of you.... Therefore I say to
you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat; nor about the body,
what you will put on.”
81 (p. 392) stray dog ... hearth to-night: The reference is to King Lear, by
William Shakespeare: “Mine enemy’s dog, / Though he had bit me, should
have stood that night / Against my fire; ...” (act 4, scene 7).
CHAPTER XXIX
82 (p. 404) day of small things: The reference is to the Bible, Zechariah
4:10: “For who has despised the day of small things?”
CHAPTER XXX
83 (p. 408) which passeth all understanding: The phrase derives from the
Bible, Philippians 4:7: “... and the peace of God, which surpasses all
understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.”
84 (p. 412) made useless: The reference is to the sonnet “On His
Blindness,” by John Milton: “And that one Talent which is death to hide /
Lodged with me useless....”
CHAPTER XXXI
85 (p. 419) the dew was balm: To create the line given here Brontë
combines two lines from The Lay of the Last Minstrel, by Sir Walter Scott
(canto 3, stanza 24).
86 (p. 418) Lot’s wife: In the Bible, Genesis 19 tells the story of Lot and his
wife fleeing Sodom.
CHAPTER XXXII
87 (p. 425) sitting in sunshine, calm and sweet: The reference is to Lalla
Rookh (1817), III, “The Fire-Worshippers,” by Thomas Moore: “To sit in
sunshine calm and sweet—it were a world too exquisite / For man to leave
it for the gloom.”
88 (p. 428) holiday: Jane is referring to Guy Fawkes Day, the anniversary
of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.
89 (p. 429) Marmion: The reference is to the romantic narrative poem
Marmion, A Tale of Flodden Field (1808), by Sir Walter Scott.
90 (p. 431) the silent sea: The reference is to The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner (1798), by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, part 2: “We were the first that
ever burst / Into that silent sea.”
91 (p. 432) delicious poison: The reference is to Antony and Cleopatra, by
William Shakespeare: “Now I feed myself / With most delicious poison”
(act 1, scene 5).
CHAPTER XXXIV
92 (p. 453) talents ... strict account: The reference is to the Bible, Matthew
25:14-30, the parable of the talents.
93 (p. 453) confusion worse confounded: The reference is to Paradise Lost,
by John Milton: “With ruin upon ruin, rout on rout, / Confusion worse
confounded” (book 2, lines 995-996).
94 (p. 461) When he said “Go”... “Come”... “Do this”: The reference is to
the Bible, Matthew 8:9: “And I say to this one, ‘Go,’ and he goes; and to
another, ‘Come,’ and he comes; and to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does
it.”
95 (p. 466) help us: In the Bible, Acts 16:9-10: “... a vision appeared to Paul
in the night. A man of Macedonia stood and pleaded with him, saying,
‘Come over to Macedonia and help us.’ ”
96 (p. 466) chiefest of sinners: The reference is to the Bible, 1 Timothy
1:15, where Paul writes to Timothy: “Jesus came into the world to save
sinners, of whom I am chief.”
97 (p. 467) Demas: This is another biblical reference, here to 2 Timothy
4:10: “... for Demas has forsaken me, having loved this present world . . .”
98 (p. 467) iron shroud: Brontë could have been thinking of a story in an
August 1830 issue of Blackwood’s Magazine entitled “The Iron Shroud,” in
which a prisoner is crushed to death by the contracting walls of his prison
cell.
99 (p. 470) hand to the plough: The reference is to the Bible, Luke 9: 62:
“No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the
kingdom of God.”
100 (p. 473) denied the faith ... infidels: This is another reference to the
Bible, this time to 1 Timothy 5:8: “... he has denied the faith and is worse
than an unbeliever.”
101 (p. 473) looked to hill: This line echoes the opening verse of stanza 26,
canto 5, of The Lay of the Last Minstrel, by Sir Walter Scott.
CHAPTER XXXV
102 (p. 477) seventy-and-seven times: In the Bible (Matthew 18:21-22),
Peter asks Jesus: “... ‘how often shall my brother sin against me, and I
forgive him? Up to seven times?’ Jesus said to him, ‘I do not say to you, up
to seven times, but up to seventy times seven.’ ”
103 (p. 479) castaway: The reference is to the Bible, 1 Corinthians 9: 27:
“But I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection: lest that by any
means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway”
(King James Version).
104 (p. 479) God sees not as man sees: This is another biblical reference, to
1 Samuel 16:7: “For the Lord does not see as man sees; for man looks at the
outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.”
105 (p. 482) the fearful, the unbelieving ... the second death: This passage
echoes the Bible, Revelation 21:7-8: “But the cowardly, unbelieving,
abominable, murderers, sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars
shall have their part in the lake which burns with fire and brimstone, which
is the second death.”
106 (p. 483) Lamb’s book of life: The reference is to the Bible, Revelation
21:27: “But there shall by no means enter it anything that defiles, or causes
an abomination or a lie, but only those who are written in the Lamb’s Book
of Life.”
107 (p. 483) a brand snatched from the burning: This is another biblical
reference, to Amos 4:11: “And you were like a firebrand plucked from the
burning.”
108 (p. 483) no man shall work: The reference is to the Bible, John 9: 4:
“The night is coming when no one can work.”
109 (p. 483) Dives ... good things in this life: “Dives” is Latin for “rich.”
The reference is to the Bible, Luke 16:19-31, the parable of the rich man:
“But Abraham said, ‘Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your
good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things; but now he is comforted and
you are tormented’ ” (verse 25).
110 (p. 483) shall not be taken from you: This is another biblical reference,
to Luke 10:42: “But one thing is needed, and Mary has chosen that good
part, which will not be taken away from her.”
111 (p. 484) rolled together like a scroll: The reference is to the Bible,
Isaiah 34:4: “All the host of heaven shall be dissolved, and the heavens
shall be rolled up like a scroll . . .”
CHAPTER XXXVI
112 (p. 487) the flesh ... is weak: The biblical reference is to Matthew 26:41
and Mark 14:38: “... The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.”
113 (p. 488) earthquake ... prison: In the Bible, Acts 16:26-29, the apostle
Paul and his fellow missionary Silas are freed from imprisonment by an
earthquake: “Suddenly there was a great earthquake, so that the foundations
of the prison were shaken ...”
114 (p. 491) dream: Earlier in the story Jane dreams that Thornfield is in
ruins; see p. 328.
 CHAPTER XXXVII
115 (p. 499) sightless Samson: In the Bible, Judges 16:21, Samson’s eyes
are put out by his enemies.
116 (p. 505) Nebuchadnezzar: In the Bible, Daniel 4:33, Nebuchadnezzar’s
hair is described as “grown like eagles’ feathers” and his nails “like birds’
claws.”
117 (p. 507) my tale half told: The allusion is to Scheherazade’s tale in The
Arabian Nights.
118 (p. 508) David ... harp: The biblical reference is to 1 Samuel 16: 23:
“And so it was, whenever the spirit from God was upon Saul, that David
would take a harp and play it with his hand. Then Saul would become
refreshed and well, and the distressing spirit would depart from him.”
119 (p. 509) the rain is over and gone: The reference is to the Bible, Song
of Solomon 2:11: “For lo, the winter is past, The rain is over and gone.”
120 (p. 517) shadow of death: This is another biblical reference, here to
Psalm 23:4: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil; For You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they
comfort me.”
121 (p. 518) pondered them in my heart: The reference is to the Bible, Luke
2:19: “But Mary kept all these things and pondered them in her heart.”
CHAPTER XXXVIII
122 (p. 521) earthly things: This is a reference to the Bible, Philippians
3:18-19: “For many walk, of whom I have told you often, and now tell you
even weeping, that they are the enemies of the cross of Christ: whose end is
destruction, whose god is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame—
who set their mind on earthly things.”
123 (p. 522) flesh of his flesh: In the Bible, Genesis 2:23, Adam says of
God’s creation of Eve: “ ‘This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my
flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.’ ”
124 (p. 524) Great-heart and Apollyon: These are characters from Pilgrim’s
Progress, by John Bunyan (1628-1688). Great-heart is the Christian warrior
and protector of Christiana; Apollyon is eventually defeated in the Valley of
Humiliation.
125 (p. 524) come after me: In the Bible, in Mark 8:34, Jesus says to his
disciples, “ ‘Whoever desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and
take up his cross, and follow Me.’ ” Similar references also appear in
Matthew 16:24 and Luke 9:23.
126 (p. 524) throne of God: The reference is to the Bible, Revelation 14:5:
“And in their mouth was found no guile: for they are without fault before
the throne of God” (KJV).
127 (p. 524) incorruptible crown: This is another biblical reference, here to
1 Corinthians 9:25: “And every man that striveth for the mastery is
temperate in all things. Now they do it to obtain a corruptible crown; but we
an incorruptible” (KJV).
128 (p. 524) faithful servant: This echoes the Bible, Matthew 25:21: “His
lord said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant; you were faithful
over a few things, I will make you ruler over many things. Enter into the joy
of your lord.’ ”
129 (p. 524) Surely I come quickly: In the Bible, the penultimate verse of
the New Testament, Revelation 22:20, reads: “He who testifies to these
things says, ‘Surely I am coming quickly.’ Amen....”

OceanofPDF.com
 Inspired by Jane Eyre

FILM, TELEVISION, AND STAGE ADAPTATIONS

Charlotte Brontë, in her lush descriptions of Haworth and Thornfield Hall,
not to mention Jane’s three mysterious paintings, urges readers to see and
feel her heroine’s surroundings. Recognizing this visual quality, director
Robert Stevenson brought Jane Eyre to the silver screen in 1944. Jane is
played by Joan Fontaine as an insular, pensive, and often silent young
woman who is too good for this world, a performance neatly complemented
by an intense Orson Welles as a convincingly cryptic and tempestuous
Rochester. A very young Elizabeth Taylor appears as Jane’s friend Helen.
Franco Zeffirelli, best known for his ebullient 1968 film version of Romeo
and Juliet, directed a 1996 big-screen adaptation of Jane Eyre. Zeffirelli
was faithful to the emotional complexity of Brontë’s characters, casting
Charlotte Gainsbourg as a cheerful Jane and William Hurt as an enigmatic
Rochester. Filled with shadows and visual broodiness, this film successfully
conveys the haunting Gothic sensibility of the novel.
Several adaptations of Brontë’s story have been produced for television.
Among them is the BBC’s 1983 miniseries, a captivating costume drama
that crackles with passionate performances by Zelah Clarke as Jane and
Timothy Dalton (a future James Bond) as Rochester.
Resonating with the emotional vitality of the novel, John Caird and Paul
Gordon’s musical adaptation of Jane Eyre premiered on Broadway in
December 2000. Gordon’s music, presented in a symphonic structure
alternating between male and female solos, is richly melodic, raw,
passionate, and ultimately catchy. Five-time Tony Award winner John
Napier triumphed with a simple set design, a reduced version of the
enormous set used in the original 1996 production in Toronto. Jane Eyre
was nominated for five Tony Awards, including Best Musical.
 THE LIFE OF CHARLOTTE BRONTË
Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865), a well-known English novelist and writer of
short stories, struck up an intimate friendship with Charlotte Brontë that
lasted until the latter’s death, in 1855. Upon the urging of Patrick Brontë,
Charlotte’s father, Gaskell assumed the task of writing a biography of her
friend, largely based on correspondence. Hoping to defend Charlotte against
the critics who denounced Jane Eyre as coarse, Gaskell injected her
epistolary chronicle with a charming partiality. The book, an indispensable
source of information about the Brontës, is also a perceptive, though not
entirely accurate, interpretation of Charlotte and her work.

The following excerpt from The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) records
Patrick Brontë’s initial reaction to Jane Eyre pages 29-30:
The sisters had kept the knowledge of their literary ventures from
their father, fearing to increase their own anxieties and disappointment
by witnessing his; for he took an acute interest in all that befell his
children, and his own tendency had been towards literature in the days
when he was young and hopeful. It was true he did not much manifest
his feelings in words; he would have thought that he was prepared for
disappointment as the lot of man, and that he could have met it with
stoicism; but words are poor and tardy interpreters of feelings to those
who love one another, and his daughters knew how he would have
borne ill-success worse for them than for himself. So they did not tell
him what they were undertaking. He says now that he suspected it all
along, but his suspicions could take no exact form, as all he was
certain of was, that his children were perpetually writing—and not
writing letters. We have seen how the communications from their
publishers were received “under cover to Miss Brontë.” Once,
Charlotte told me, they overheard the postman meeting Mr. Brontë, as
the latter was leaving the house, and inquiring from the parson where
one Currer Bell could be living, to which Mr. Brontë replied that there
was no such person in the parish. This must have been the
misadventure to which Miss Brontë alludes in the beginning of her
correspondence with Mr. Aylott.
 Now, however, when the demand for the work had assured success
to Jane Eyre, her sisters urged Charlotte to tell their father of its
publication. She accordingly went into his study one afternoon after
his early dinner, carrying with her a copy of the book, and one or two
reviews, taking care to include a notice adverse to it.
She informed me that something like the following conversation
took place between her and him. (I wrote down her words the day
after I heard them; and I am pretty sure they are quite accurate.)
“Papa, I’ve been writing a book.”
“Have you, my dear?”
“Yes, and I want you to read it.”
“I am afraid it will try my eyes too much.”
“But it is not in manuscript: it is printed.”
“My dear! you’ve never thought of the expense it will be! It will be
almost sure to be a loss, for how can you get a book sold? No one
knows you or your name.”
“But, papa, I don’t think it will be a loss; no more will you, if you
will just let me read you a review or two, and tell you more about it.”
So she sat down and read some of the reviews to her father; and
then, giving him the copy of Jane Eyre that she intended for him, she
left him to read it. When he came in to tea, he said, “Girls, do you
know Charlotte has been writing a book, and it is much better than
likely?”
But while the existence of Currer Bell was like a game to the quiet
inhabitants of Haworth Parsonage, whose only excitement was caring
for their infirm brother Branwell, the reading-world of England was in
a ferment to discover the unknown author. Even the publishers of Jane
Eyre were ignorant as to whether Currer Bell was a real or assumed
name, whether it belonged to a man or a woman.

THE WIDE SARGASSO SEA

In 1966, after a lull in her career, West Indies-born novelist Jean Rhys
astounded critics with her Wide Sargasso Sea, conceived as a prelude to
Jane Eyre and written from a postcolonial perspective.
 Set amid the sultry landscape of 1830s Jamaica just after the
emancipation of the slaves there, Rhys’s novel is the story of Brontë’s
Bertha Mason, Rochester’s mysterious first wife, the madwoman locked in
the attic at Thornfield. Giving her the name Antoinette Cosway, Rhys
describes this Creole heiress as a woman straddling two cultures while
belonging to neither. Antoinette is married off to Rochester for her money
and ferried to England, only to be incarcerated at Thornfield. In Rhys’s
telling, upon the dissolution of his relationship with Antoinette, Rochester
gives her the name Bertha.
Published when Rhys was seventy-six, Wide Sargasso Sea was an
enormously popular and critical success, hailed as the author’s most
important work. While it triumphs as a sumptuous, original novel in its own
right, the book adds a dark and beautiful dimension to Brontë’s seminal
work. Wide Sargasso Sea inspired a film adaptation in 1993.

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 Comments & Questions

In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives

on the text, as well as questions which challenge those perspectives. The
commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews
contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary
criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout history.
Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Jane Eyre
through a variety of voices and bring about a richer understanding of this
enduring work.

COMMENTS

William Makepeace Thackeray

I wish you had not sent me Jane Eyre. It interested me so much that I have
lost (or won if you like) a whole day in reading it at the busiest period, with
the printers I know waiting for copy. Who the author can be I can’t guess, if
a woman she knows her language better than most ladies do, or has had a
“classical” education. It is a fine book though, the man and woman capital,
the style very generous and upright so to speak. I thought it was Kinglake
for some time. The plot of the story is one with which I am familiar. Some
of the love passages made me cry, to the astonishment of John who came in
with the coals. St. John the Missionary is a failure I think but a good failure,
there are parts excellent. I don’t know why I tell you this but that I have
been exceedingly moved and pleased by Jane Eyre. It is a woman’s writing,
but whose? Give my respects and thanks to the author, whose novel is the
first English one (and the French are only romances now) that I’ve been
able to read for many a day.
—from a letter to
W. S. Williams (October 23, 1847)

Charlotte Brontë
Your letter reached me yesterday; I beg to assure you that I appreciate fully
the intention with which it was written, and I thank you sincerely both for
its cheering commendation and valuable advice.
You warn me to beware of Melodrame and you exhort me to adhere to the
real. When I first began to write, so impressed was I with the truth of the
principles you advocate that I determined to take Nature and Truth as my
sole guides and to follow in their very footprints; I restrained imagination,
eschewed romance, repressed excitement: over-bright colouring too I
avoided, and sought to produce something which should be soft, grave and
true.
My work (a tale in I vol.) being completed, I offered it to a publisher. He
said it was original, faithful to Nature, but he did not feel warranted in
accepting it, such a work would not sell. I tried six publishers in succession;
they all told me it was deficient in ‘startling incident’ and ‘thrilling
excitement,’ that it would never suit the circulating libraries, and as it was
on those libraries the success of works of fiction mainly depended they
could not undertake to publish what would be overlooked there—’Jane
Eyre’ was rather objected to at first [on] the same grounds—but finally
found acceptance.
I mention this to you, not with a view of pleading exemption from
censure, but in order to direct your attention to the root of certain literary
evils—if in your forthcoming article in ‘Frazer’ you would bestow a few
words of enlightenment on the public who support the circulating libraries,
you might, with your powers, do some good.
You advise me too, not to stray far from the ground of experience as I
become weak when I enter the region of fiction; and you say ‘real
experience is perennially interesting and to all men.’
I feel that this also is true, but, dear Sir, is not the real experience of each
individual very limited? and if a writer dwells upon that solely or
principally is he not in danger of repeating himself, and also of becoming
an egotist?
Then too, Imagination is a strong, restless faculty which claims to be
heard and exercised, are we to be quite deaf to her cry and insensate to her
struggles? When she shews us bright pictures are we never to look at them
and try to reproduce them?—And when she is eloquent and speaks rapidly
and urgently in our ear are we not to write to her dictation? I shall anxiously
search the next number of ‘Frazer’ for your opinion on these points.
Believe me, dear Sir,
Yours gratefully
C Bell
—from a letter to G. H. Lewes
(November 6, 1847)

G. H. Lewes
After laughing over the Bachelor of the Albany, we wept over Jane Eyre.
This, indeed, is a book after our own heart; and, if its merits have not forced
it into notice by the time this paper comes before our readers, let us, in all
earnestness, bid them lose not a day in sending for it. The writer is evidently
a woman, and, unless we are deceived, new in the world of literature. But,
man or woman, young or old, be that as it may, no such book has gladdened
our eyes for a long while. Almost all that we require in a novelist she has:
perception of character, and power of delineating it; picturesqueness;
passion; and knowledge of life. The story is not only of singular interest,
naturally evolved, unflagging to the last, but it fastens itself upon your
attention, and will not leave you. The book closed, the enchantment
continues... Reality—deep, significant reality—is the great characteristic of
the book. It is an autobiography,—not, perhaps, in the naked facts and
circumstances, but in the actual suffering and experience... This gives the
book its charm: it is soul speaking to soul; it is an utterance from the depths
of a struggling, suffering, much-enduring spirit: suspiria de profundis!
—from Fraser’s Magazine (December 1847)
 Charlotte Brontë
I trust your firm will not lose by the 3rd edition of ‘Jane Eyre’ what has
been made by the first, but I must say I think you enterprising to run the
risk; however you have all along been the reverse of timid in the business.
Success to the fearless!
It is very kind and right in you to answer ‘Currer Bell’ to all queries
respecting the authorship of ‘Jane Eyre’: that is the only name I wish to
have mentioned in connection with my writings ‘Currer Bell’ only—I am
and will be to the Public; if accident or design should deprive me of that
name, I should deem it a misfortune—a very great one; mental tranquillity
would then be gone; it would be a task to write—a task which I doubt
whether I could continue. If I were known—I should ever be conscious in
writing that my book must be read by ordinary acquaintances—and that
idea would fetter me intolerably.
—from a letter to
William Smith Williams (April 20, 1848)

James Lorimer
If these remarkable works are the productions of a woman we shall only say
she must be a woman pretty nearly unsexed.
—from the North British Review
(August 1849)

Charlotte Brontë
The North British Review duly reached me. I read attentively all it says
about E. Wyndham, J. Eyre, and F. Hervey. Much of the article is clever—
and yet there are remarks which—for me—rob it of importance.
To value praise or stand in awe of blame we must respect the source
whence the praise and blame proceed—: and I do not respect an
inconsistent critic. He says ‘if “Jane Eyre” be the production of a woman—
she must be a woman unsexed.’
 In that case the book is an unredeemed error and should be unreservedly
condemned. ‘Jane Eyre’ is a woman’s autobiography—by a woman it is
professedly written—if it is written as no woman would write—condemn it
—with spirit and decision—say it is bad—but do not first eulogise and then
detract. I am reminded of the ‘Economist.’ The literary critic of that paper
praised the book if written by a man—and pronounced it ‘odious’ if the
work of a woman.
To such critics I would say—‘To you I am neither Man nor Woman—I
come before you as an Author only—it is the sole standard by which you
have a right to judge me—the sole ground on which I accept your
judgement.’
—from a letter to William Smith Williams
(August 16, 1849)

QUESTIONS
1. William Makepeace Thackeray, knowing nothing about the author of
Jane Eyre, immediately wrote to a friend, “It is a woman’s writing,
but whose?” What do you think tipped him off? Is there anything
about Jane Eyre that strikes you as especially characteristic of
“women’s writing”?
2. Thackeray also said that he was “exceedingly moved and pleased” by
Jane Eyre. Evidently, even if the novel is by a woman, it is not only
for women. What in the novel could be described as appealing to our
humanity rather than our gender?
3. Jane Eyre has been read as a proto-feminist protest against the
conditions of women in Charlotte Brontë’s time and place. Is that
reading justified by the actual text? If so, does the protest still resonate
in this time and place?
4. There have been critics who said that most Victorian novels are built
on either the Marriage Plot or on the Inheritance Plot. At the end of
Jane Eyre the heroine is an heiress and, as she writes, “Reader, I
married him.” But Brontë has decided to blind and maim Rochester,
and to burn down the house that is the visible sign of his prestige and
power. Do you think Brontë cut Rochester down to size for Jane’s
sake—to make the happy ending happier still?

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 For Further Reading

BIOGRAPHIES
Barker, Juliet, comp. The Brontës: A Life in Letters. Woodstock, NY:
Overlook Press, 1998. A useful and well-edited collection of letters with
biographical context supplied.
Gérin, Winifred. Charlotte Brontë: The Evolution of Genius. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1967; Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press,
1991.
Peters, Margot. Unquiet Soul: A Biography of Charlotte Brontë. Garden
City, NY: Doubleday, 1975.
Winnifrith, Tom. The Brontës and Their Background: Romance and Reality.
London: Macmillan, 1973.
Winnifrith, Tom. A New Life of Charlotte Brontë. New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1988.

CRITICISM
Abel, Elizabeth, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland, eds. The Voyage
In: Fictions of Female Development. Hanover, NH: University Press of
New England, 1983. Much useful information about Jane Eyre as a
bildungsroman, with a look at its sources in folk stories and fairy tales of
female development.
Alexander, Christine. The Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë. Oxford:
Black-well, 1983. The best study of the juvenilia to date.
Allott, Miriam, ed. The Brontës: The Critical Heritage. London and Boston:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974. An invaluable casebook for
understanding the history of the critical reception of the Brontës’ work.
Beaty, Jerome. Misreading Jane Eyre: A Postformalist Paradigm.
Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1996. A fascinatingly complex
analysis of Jane Eyre by an eminent critic; for the more advanced student.
Björk, Harriet. The Language of Truth: Charlotte Brontë, the Woman
Question, and the Novel. Lund, Sweden: Gleerup, 1974. A resource for
understanding the historical context of women’s social position in Brontë’s
time and its influence on Jane Eyre.
Boumelha, Penny. Charlotte Brontë. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 1990. A reliable and well-rounded study for the beginning
student.
Eagleton, Terry. Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës. London:
Macmillan, 1975. Eagleton’s study is from the historical-materialist point of
view and provides a different perspective on the Brontë canon.
Ewbank, Inga-Stina. Their Proper Sphere: A Study of the Brontë Sisters as
Early-Victorian Female Novelists. London: Edward Arnold, 1966.
Considers the Brontës in the light of Victorian beliefs and conventions.
Gregor, Ian, comp. The Brontës: A Collection of Critical Essays.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970. This useful collection brings
together important critical essays written before 1970; for the beginning
student of the Brontës.
Maynard, John. Charlotte Brontë and Sexuality. Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1984. This study focuses on the meaning of
sexuality as an important element in Brontë’s work.
Michie, Helena. The Flesh Made Word: Female Figures and Women’s
Bodies. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Critical work that
focuses on women’s bodies in narrative texts; sheds a different light on Jane
Eyre.
Poovey, Mary. Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in
Mid-Victorian England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
Important study that considers Jane Eyre in light of the historical position
of the governess in Victorian Britain.
Ratchford, Fannie. The Brontës’ Web of Childhood. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1941. The first study of the Brontës’ juvenile writing, and
still a classic in criticism.
Weisser, Susan Ostrov. A “Craving Vacancy”: Women and Sexual Love in
the British Novel, 1740-1880. London and New York: Macmillan and New
York University Press, 1997. A study of class conflict between middle-and
upper-class women and its role in shaping sexual and romantic ideology in
the British novel, including Jane Eyre.

WORKS CITED IN THE INTRODUCTION

Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn. The Life of Charlotte Brontë. London: J. M.
Dent, 1960. First published in 1857 after Brontë’s death, a work that has
become a classic in the history of biographical writing, though it is not
entirely accurate or objective.
Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman
Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1979. Important and groundbreaking feminist study of the
Brontës, among others.
Illouz, Eva. Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural
Contradictions of Capitalism. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1997.
Jackson, Stevi. “Women and Heterosexual Love: Complicity, Resistance
and Change.” In Romance Revisited, edited by Lynne Pearce and Jackie
Stacey. New York: New York University Press, 1995, pp. 49-62.
Moglen, Helene. Charlotte Brontë: The Self Conceived. New York: W. W.
Nor-ton, 1976.
Moser, Thomas. “What Is the Matter with Emily Jane?” Nineteenth-Century
Fiction 14 (June 1962), pp. 1-19.
Nudd, Donna Marie. “Rediscovering Jane Eyre through Its Adaptations.” In
Approaches to Teaching Brontë’s Jane Eyre, edited by Diane Long Hoeveler
and Beth Lau. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1993,
pp. 139-147.
Radway, Janice. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular
Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984.
OceanofPDF.com
 a
See Donna Marie Nudd’s “Rediscovering Jane Eyre through Its
Adaptations,” in Approaches to Teaching Brontë’s Jane Eyre, edited by
Diane Long Hoeveler and Beth Lau, New York: Modern Language
Association of America, 1993, and “Inspired by Jane Eyre,” in this edition
on p. 539.
b
In plot elements of Jane Eyre, we can also see the influence of folk tales
such as Cinderella and Bluebeard, in which a dark sexual predator exercises
murderous eroticism and violates the sanctity of marriage.
c
Opinion.
d
Combustible material for setting fire to enemies’ ships.
e
Lightning or any bright flame. Poetic usage, found in Walter Scott, The Lay
of the Last Minstrel, canto 6, stanza 25, line 10.
f
Ill-natured.
g
Maidservant.
h
Deceitfulness.
i
A fabric of stiff cotton.
j
Deep hollows.
k
Bearing.
 l
Peacock chicks.
m
Destination (archaic).
n
Kin, literally and figuratively.
o
Performing wearying labor.
p
Device for punishing offenders by locking their hands and feet in a wooden
frame.
q
Boards strapped across the back to straighten posture.
r
Any small room.
s
Roused my temper (dialect).
t
Child’s bed.
u
Slapped.
v
Trade, commerce.
w
Part of a garden.
x
Coward.
 y
Linen cloth.
z
Of excellent flavor.
aa
About to snow (dialect).
ab
Cloak.
ac
Plain woolen material.
ad
A particular prayer that varies according to day.
ae
Exhaustion caused by hunger and thirst.
af
A cloth worn around the neck.
ag
A small bag or pouch.
ah
Irises.
ai
Forehead.
aj
Rancid (dialect).
ak
Marks of punctuation.
al
Embroider.
am
Twilight.
an
Frozen (dialect).
ao
Weekly.
ap
Overcoat.
aq
An up-and-coming man; one rising to prominence.
ar
A hairpiece worn over the forehead.
as
The supreme god of Hinduism.
at
A title of Krishna in Hinduism, used metaphorically to refer to blind
devotion to idols.
au
An imaginary feast, from a tale in The Arabian Nights.
av
The reference is to Aelbert Cuyp, a Dutch landscape painter of the
seventeenth century.
aw
Fluently (now rare).
ax
In northern English dialect, “ing” means a swampy meadow, “holm,” low-
lying land near water, and “beck,” a brook.
 ay
A tablet that releases aromatic medication when burnt.
az
Grave.
ba
By the rules.
bb
Remain awake.
bc
Expelled due to failing exams.
bd
A drink of sweetened wine and hot water.
be
A piece of armor; breast and back plates.
bf
“Is that my governess?” ... “Why, yes, of course.”
bg
A short song.
bh
“What’s the matter then?” says one of the mice to her; “Speak!”
bi
A lustrous mineral.
bj
Dyed purple or crimson, as in ancient Tyre.
bk
White marble.
bl
Here meaning moral qualities or reputation, rather than personality in the
modern sense.
bm
An alley or passage.
bn
Sounds that are divided into syllables like speech.
bo
“Ladies, dinner is served!” ... “I am very hungry.”
bp
Parenthetically.
bq
“Come back soon, my good friend, my dear Miss Janie.”
br
“Hips” are berries of the wild rose; “haws,” of the hawthorn.
bs
A sound like a sigh or murmur.
bt
Woolen material.
bu
Pruned.
bv
Friend.
bw
Adèle adds the “de” to indicate the status of nobility.
bx
“And that must mean... that there will be a gift inside for me, and perhaps
for you too, Miss. Mr. Rochester has talked about you: he asked me the
name of my governess, and if she wasn’t a small person, rather thin and a
little pale. I said yes; because it’s true, isn’t it, Miss?”
by
Irascible temper.
bz
Free of embarrassment.
ca
“Isn’t it so, sir, that there is a gift for Miss Eyre in your little chest?”
cb
Deserved rewards.
cc
Types of tables and cabinets.
cd
Fairies were said to dance in rings.
ce
Nuns.
cf
Pressed close together, like soldiers in ranks.
cg
Crowned.
ch
The mountain where the goddess of the moon, Selene, saw her beloved
Endymion.
ci
Little chest.
cj
“My box! My box!”
ck
“Keep quiet child; do you understand?”
cl
“Oh, heavens! It’s so beautiful!”
cm
One who takes part in a conversation.
cn
A young nun.
co
And I insist on it.
cp
Rusting (dialect; obsolete).
cq
Knows.
cr
“I must try it on! ... and right away!”
cs
“Is my dress all right? And my shoes? And my stockings? Wait, I believe I
am going to dance!”
ct
“Thank you so very much, sir, for your kindness... Mama used to do it just
like that, didn’t she?”
cu
Like that.
cv
Great passion.
cw
Athletic build.
cx
Town house.
cy
Lacework.
cz
A foolish lover.
da
Munching. It is unclear whether “the barbarism” refers to the use of French
as the participle with the English “was,” or to the combination of eating
chocolates and smoking tobacco.
db
Carriage.
dc
My angel.
dd
Gate.
de
Sky, heavens.
df
Rake; a man devoted to sensual pleasures, especially sexual conquests.
dg
Masculine beauty.
dh
A hen that has roup, a respiratory disease that causes hoarse, labored
breathing, is said to be “in the pip.”
di
Little girl.
dj
Domestic tableware, often of silver.
 dk
Bread or cereal made from sago starch.
dl
“What’s the matter? Your hands tremble like a leaf, and your cheeks are red:
as red as cherries!”
dm
An illusory light in the marshes, used figuratively for delusive hopes; also
called will-o‘-the-wisp.
dn
Outmoded.
do
The name of an executioner in The Arabian Nights.
dp
“They are changing.”
dq
“At mama‘s, when there were a lot of people, I would follow them
everywhere, in the drawing room and to their rooms; often I would watch
the maids dress the ladies and do their hair, and it was so much fun; that’s
how you learn.”
dr
“Yes, of course; it’s been five or six hours since we’ve eaten.”
ds
“Projection” and “crucibles” refer humorously to the transmutation of
metals in alchemy.
dt
“And then what a shame!”
du
“May I take just one of these magnificent flowers? Just to add the finishing
touch to my outfit.”
 dv
A funny little face.
dw
Diana, goddess of hunting.
dx
“Hello, ladies.”
dy
A distinguished old gentleman of the kind found in the theater.
dz
Subject.
ea
“Too bad!”
eb
discordant music.
ec
Naughty.
ed
Like a sick hen that breathes hard; see page 173.
ee
The beautiful passion.
ef
At any rate.
eg
Tease.
eh
Provision, possession.
ei
Pirates; Lord Byron published his very popular poem The Corsair in 1814.
ej
With spirit.
ek
“Be very careful!”
el
Saques, modes, and lappets were articles of women’s clothing antiquated in
Brontë’s day.
em
Heathen, especially referring to Muslim (archaic).
en
Used for strangling.
eo
Prison.
ep
“Mr. Rochester has returned!”
eq
Candleholders set in the wall.
er
Old wives.
es
Old woman.
et
A tinker, one who mends and sells pots and pans; beggar.
eu
soldiers chosen to lead an attack.
ev
Soldiers in the front position.
 ew
The appropriate thing to do.
ex
The Devil.
ey
Prophetess.
ez
Tangled hair.
fa
Laughed snickeringly (dialect).
fb
Devilry.
fc
Dark-skinned.
fd
Nonsensical chatter.
fe
Age (poetic usage, and archaic).
ff
Bed curtain.
fg
Mysterious.
fh
Spell.
fi
An airy spirit.
fj
Gate.
fk
“Cairngorm” is a smoky-brown or topaz-yellow rock crystal, though the
reference here is possibly to eyes that are hard and bright like the stone.
fl
An odd person (now rare).
fm
Imaginary.
fn
A clock with a chime or bell to awaken a sleeper.
fo
Written directions for the conduct of a divine service.
fp
Tough and dry.
fq
Swallowing.
fr
A hired coach.
fs
A queen of early Britain who led a revolt against the Romans.
ft
A love potion.
fu
“Good evening.”
fv
“Ready to devour her little English mama.” See croquant, p. 161.
fw
Ladybug.
 fx
To bring over to one’s side by strong persuasion.
fy
Without Miss Eyre.
fz
“Oh, she’ll be uncomfortable there!”
ga
A real liar.
gb
Fairy tales.
gc
“Furthermore, there were no fairies, and even if there were some ...”
gd
In this context, a section of a theater where bejeweled ladies sit.
ge
A princess whom Zeus seduced as a shower of gold.
gf
A Turkish pasha of high rank; the number of tails—horsetails—hung on the
pasha’s standard indicates his rank.
gg
“Steady me.”
gh
Lose; ruin.
gi
Deo volente (Latin), “God willing.”
gj
Clothes-rack.
 gk
Hypochondria is a morbid mental condition characterized by melancholy or
anxiety with no external cause.
gl
A kind of lace.
gm
In sympathy with democratic rather than monarchic ideas.
gn
Ravenous (rare).
go
A person born in the West Indies, but the term could also imply mixed racial
ancestry.
gp
An agent of the Mason family in Funchal, capital of Madeira.
gq
The reference is to a wasting disease, often consumption.
gr
Wretchedly lonely.
gs
Muddy swamp.
gt
A mythical tree capable of killing all life around it.
gu
In this context, breeding, ancestry.
gv
Here, “intemperate” could refer to an overly passionate, violent
temperament, or specifically to excessive use of alcohol.
gw
A sudden, fleeting appearance; see ignis fatuus, page 184.
gx
Countesses.
gy
Messalina, known for excessive greed and lust, was the wife of the Roman
emperor Claudius; “Indian” refers to Bertha’s Creole ancestry.
gz
A variation of the word grip.
ha
A seamstress who does simple sewing, as opposed to fancy work (and
consequently is paid much less for her labors).
hb
Inflated, lofty language.
hc
“Then there stepped forth one, in appearance like the starry sky.... I weight
thoughts in the scale of my anger, and deeds with the weight of my wrath!”
The quotation is from [Johann Christoph] Friedrich von Schiller’s The
Robbers, act V, scene 1.
hd
Rigid in death.
he
Afoot.
hf
Bickered.
hg
Vigorous, strong.
hh
“Election” and “reprobation” refer to God’s predetermination of salvation
and damnation.
 hi
Suitable.
hj
Glazed earthenware from Delft, in Holland.
hk
Britain.
hl
In Persian myth, a kind of beautiful fairy.
hm
A freak or jest of nature.
hn
Pity.
ho
That is, adherents of “natural religion,” who believe in a Supreme Being but
reject other supernatural doctrines of Christianity.
hp
A variety of rose, and the literal meaning of the name Rosamond.
hq
“Who will benefit?”; used colloquially to mean “What is the point?”
hr
A kind of leather.
hs
“Paysannes” and “Bauerinnen”: French and German women of the peasant
class, respectively.
ht
Or Kaffir; used popularly for African, and not always as a pejorative.
hu
Unseemly, unsuitable (dialect).
 hv
Dying.
hw
Topmost part.
hx
Put to the test.
hy
Assistant.
hz
A priest in charge of sacred mysteries.
ia
Furiously.
ib
Paid.
ic
Carelessness.
id
Opposite ends of the earth.
ie
Woods containing game.
if
A grassy plot.
ig
A country house with farm buildings.
ih
Lonely (northern English dialect).
ii
A lame person.
ij
Are something like.
ik
A spirit with a shaggy appearance.
il
Tidied, put in order (dialect).
im
“Still young.”
in
Laced ankle boots, worn in the country and therefore unfashionable.
io
The strong but lame and ugly Roman god of volcanoes and destructive fire,
also identified with the Greek god Hephaestus, husband of Aphrodite.
ip
Neck (slang).
iq
Probably dialect pronunciation of “not foul [northern British dialect for
ugly]”; some editors prefer “no fool.”

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