Jane Eyre: An Autobiography

Charlotte Brontë's first-person novel of 1847 traces an orphan governess from a loveless childhood at Gateshead Hall, through the privations of Lowood Institution, to a passionate and finally legitimate union with her tormented employer at Thornfield. It is at once a vindication of the inward worth of the plain, the poor, and the female, and a Gothic-tinged study of conscience, conflagration, and conjugal love.

PREFACE

To the second edition Currer Bell prefixes a few words of acknowledgment and remonstrance: thanks to the Public, the Press, and the Publishers, who have given so plain a tale so generous a hearing; and a sterner word to the timorous or carping few who detect in its protests against bigotry an insult to piety. Conventionality, the author insists, is not morality; self-righteousness is not religion; to pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns. The volume is dedicated, with the tribute of a total stranger, to Mr. Thackeray—the satirist of "Vanity Fair," whom the author regards as the first social regenerator of the day, and whose serious genius she likens to the electric death-spark hidden in the womb of the summer-cloud.

CHAPTER I

There was no possibility of taking a walk that November day. The cold winter wind had brought clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further outdoor exercise was now out of the question, and I, for one, was glad of it. Mrs. Reed lay reclined upon the drawing-room sofa with her three children—Eliza, John, and Georgiana—clustered about her like contented courtiers; me she had dispensed from joining the group, until such time as Bessie should report I had acquired a more sociable and childlike disposition. Slipping into the breakfast-room, I shrined myself in the window-seat behind a curtain of red moreen, drew up my feet, and opened Bewick's History of British Birds. The introductory pages on the bleak shores of Lapland and the death-white realms of the Arctic Zone, the rock alone in a sea of billow and spray, the wreck just sinking under a ghastly moon—each picture told a story to my undeveloped understanding, and I was, in my way, happy.

Such happiness was not permitted to last. John Reed—a schoolboy of fourteen, my elder by four years, large and stout, dingy of skin, who bullied and punished me continually—routed me from my hiding-place. He was the master of the house, he reminded me, and I a dependent who ought to beg. He bade me show him the book I had taken from his shelves, then weighed and hurled the volume; it struck me, I fell, and the cut on my head bled. Some terror passed its climax in me, and other feelings succeeded.

"Wicked and cruel boy!" I cried. "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 drawn my parallels in silence; now I declared them aloud. He flew at me; I received him in frantic sort, knowing not what I did with my hands. Bessie and Abbot tore us apart. Mrs. Reed's verdict was instant and absolute. "Take her away to the red-room, and lock her in there." Four hands were laid upon me, and I was borne upstairs.

CHAPTER II

I resisted all the way—a new thing for me—and the rebellion fixed me, in Bessie's and Miss Abbot's eyes, as a kind of mad cat. They thrust me onto a stool in the red-room, threatened to bind me with garters, and reminded me that I was less than a servant, for I did nothing for my keep; that I was wholly dependent on Mrs. Reed's bounty, and ought to be humble. "God will punish her," Miss Abbot added; "He might strike her dead in the midst of her tantrums, and then where would she go?" They left me, locking the door behind them.

The red-room was a square chamber seldom slept in: a great mahogany bed hung with crimson damask stood out like a tabernacle in the centre, the windows were shrouded in red drapery, the carpet and table-cloth were red, the chairs and wardrobe of darkly polished old wood. Out of these deep shades rose, glaring white, the piled mattresses and a cushioned easy-chair like a pale throne. The room was chill and silent and solemn, for here Mr. Reed had died nine years before; here he had lain in state. In this chamber of dreary consecration I sat, a strange small figure repeated in the dim looking-glass, half phantom and half revolted slave, going over in my mind the catalogue of my wrongs. Why was I always suffering, always browbeaten, always condemned? Eliza was headstrong and spared; Georgiana petted for her pink cheeks and golden curls; John spared even when he twisted the necks of the pigeons or set the dogs on the sheep. I dared commit no fault, and was termed naughty from morning to night. Unjust!—unjust! said my reason, and Resolve answered with strange schemes of escape: of running away, or of starving and letting myself die.

As daylight forsook the chamber, my courage sank with it. I had been told my Uncle Reed lay buried in the church vault; he had taken me in as a parentless infant, had wrung from his wife the promise of motherly care. Might his spirit, harried by the breaking of that pledge, rise to comfort me—or to terrify? Just then a streak of light glided over the wall and the ceiling: a lantern's gleam, no doubt, carried across the lawn outside, but to my prepared and quaking nerves it was a herald from another world. My heart beat thick; a sound filled my ears like the rushing of wings; I rushed to the door and shook it. Bessie and Abbot came running in. Mrs. Reed followed, and would hear no plea: I should remain an hour longer, only on condition of perfect submission. The door was locked again, and I, in my frantic anguish, fell into a species of fit; unconsciousness closed the scene.

CHAPTER III

I awoke with a feeling as of some frightful nightmare passing, before a red glare crossed by black bars: it was the nursery fire seen through its grate. Bessie stood with a basin at the bed-foot; Mr. Lloyd, the apothecary sometimes called in for the servants, sat in a chair by my pillow. The mere presence of a stranger—an individual not belonging to Gateshead, not of Mrs. Reed's blood—was an inexpressible relief. He took my hand, charged Bessie to be careful of me, and promised to call again. After he was gone, all darkened.

A long night of ghastly wakefulness followed. The red-room had inflicted no settled illness, but a shock of nerve from which I was to feel reverberations all my days. The next morning I sat by the nursery hearth, weak in body and worse broken in mind, drawing silent tears in spite of every effort. Bessie, in unwonted kindness, brought me a tart on the splendid bird-of-paradise plate I had so long admired and never been allowed to handle; but it came too late, and I could not eat. She fetched me Gulliver's Travels at my request, but the book that had once been my marvel was now eerie and dreary: the giants gaunt goblins, the pigmies malevolent imps, Gulliver a most desolate wanderer in dread regions. I closed it and laid it beside the untasted tart. Bessie sang—first a gay tune that came out like a funeral cadence, then a doleful ballad of the poor orphan child whose feet were sore and whose limbs were weary, but to whom God still showed mercy. I could not stop weeping.

Mr. Lloyd returned. Bessie was called away to dinner, and the apothecary and I were left together. He drew from me, by patient questioning, the bare facts of my misery: that I had been knocked down by John Reed, shut in the red-room, frightened of Mr. Reed's ghost; that I had no father or mother, no brothers or sisters; that Gateshead Hall was beautiful but not mine; that I had no other relations I knew of, save perhaps, as Aunt Reed had once said, some "poor, low" Eyres on my father's side. Would I like to go to such relations, if I had them? Reflecting—for poverty in a child's mind was bound up with rags and ignorance and degradation, with belonging to a lower caste—I said no. Would I like to go to school? At that word I caught at the prospect. School was a complete change: a long journey, an entire separation from Gateshead, an entrance into a new life. "I should indeed like to go to school," I told him. "The child ought to have change of air and scene," he muttered to himself; "nerves not in a good state."

He went down to speak privately with Mrs. Reed, and from after-occurrences I gathered that he urged my being sent away. The recommendation was readily adopted; for, as Abbot afterwards remarked to Bessie, Missis was glad enough to be rid of so tiresome and ill-conditioned a child. From the same conversation, overheard from my crib, I learned for the first time the history of my parentage: that my father had been a poor clergyman, that my mother had married him against the wishes of her family, who considered the match beneath her, and had been cut off without a shilling for her disobedience; that within a year my father had caught typhus while visiting the poor of his manufacturing-town curacy, that my mother had taken the contagion from him, and that both had died within a month of one another. Bessie sighed and pitied me; Abbot allowed I might be pitied if I were a pretty child, but as I was not, the thing was hardly to be done.

CHAPTER IV

From Mr. Lloyd's interview and Bessie's overheard chatter I gathered hope enough to keep me silent: a change was near. Yet days and weeks went by without further word. Mrs. Reed drew an even sharper line of separation between her own children and me, condemning me to take my meals alone and to pass my days in the nursery while my cousins were in the drawing-room. John still hectored me when he could, and once attempted chastisement; but, levelling at his prominent nose as hard a blow as my knuckles could inflict, I sent him blubbering to his mother, and learned that, this once at least, his complaint was met with a cool rebuke—he was not to associate with such as me. Hearing the words from above, I cried over the banister, They are not fit to associate with me. Mrs. Reed flew up the stair like a whirlwind, swept me into the nursery, and forbade me to rise or to speak till the day was done. "What would Uncle Reed say to you, if he were alive?" rose involuntarily from my lips. Her cold grey eye showed something like fear; she shook me hard, boxed both my ears, and left without a word.

Christmas and the New Year passed over Gateshead with their usual festive cheer, from which I, of course, was excluded. While the Misses Reed were dressed in muslin frocks and scarlet sashes for the parlour, I sat with my doll on my knee in the chill nursery, half fancying it alive. Human beings must love something, and in the dearth of worthier objects I contrived to find a passionate pleasure in cherishing that faded graven image. Sometimes Bessie, when she was kind, would bring me a bun or a cheese-cake and tuck the clothes about me with a goodnight kiss; in those moments she seemed to me the prettiest, kindest being in the world.

It was the fifteenth of January when the visitor came. I was at the window, scratching a peep-hole through the silver-white frost-foliage on the panes, when a carriage rolled up the drive; presently Bessie hauled me to the washstand, scrubbed my face, and bade me go down at once to the breakfast-room. I descended in trembling, and saw, standing erect upon the rug, what looked at first sight a black pillar—the straight, narrow, sable-clad figure of a man, his grim face like a carved mask placed for its capital. This was Mr. Brocklehurst. Mrs. Reed presented me as the little girl respecting whom she had applied to him.

He was tall, with a great nose and prominent teeth; his bass voice solemnly required me to come forward and stand before him. "Do you know where the wicked go after death?" "They go to hell." "And what is hell?" "A pit full of fire." "And should you like to fall into that pit, and to be burning there for ever?" "No, sir." "What must you do to avoid it?" After a moment's deliberation, my answer was the offending one: "I must keep in good health, and not die." Children younger than I, he reminded me, died daily; and were I called hence, it was much to be feared the same could not be said of me as of a good little child of five he had lately buried. He instructed me to study a tract entitled the "Child's Guide" and especially the part containing an account of the awfully sudden death of Martha G——, a naughty child addicted to falsehood and deceit, which he then placed in my hand. Mrs. Reed, anxious to forestall any defence I might make, charged him to inform Miss Temple and the teachers that my worst fault was a tendency to deceit; a charge that cut me to the heart, for it was sown in advance along the path of my new life. Vacations, she added, I should always spend at Lowood. Mr. Brocklehurst applauded her judgment: humility was a Christian grace peculiarly proper to the pupils of Lowood, and he had laboured to mortify in them the worldly sentiment of pride. With a mutual exchange of compliments and good-byes, he left.

I was alone with Mrs. Reed. Her cold, capable figure—square-shouldered, with her low brow and prominent jaw, an eye devoid of ruth—sat before me as she resumed her sewing. The recent injustice fomented within me, and when at length she ordered me out of the room I found I could not go. Speak I must. I had been trodden on, and must turn. I gathered my energies and launched them at her in a single 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 to your girl, Georgiana, for it is she who tells lies, and not I. Her eye of ice continued to dwell upon mine. I told her I would never call her aunt again, that I would never visit her grown up, that if any one asked I would say her treatment of me was miserable cruelty, that I would remember being thrust into the red-room to my dying day, that people thought her good but she was hard-hearted and deceitful, not I.

As I spoke, my soul began to expand and exult with the strangest sense of liberty. Mrs. Reed actually looked frightened: her work slipped from her knee, her face twisted as if she would cry. She offered water; I refused. She murmured I will indeed send her to school soon, and quitted the room. I was left winner of the field. But conqueror's solitude was brief. A child cannot give its furious feelings such play without the chill of remorse. Vengeance had tasted to me first as warm and racy wine, but its after-flavour was metallic and corroding. I went out in the bitter onding-on-snaw weather and walked the frozen plantation, whispering to myself, What shall I do?—what shall I do? Bessie called me in to lunch; in a softer mood than usual she promised to bake me a cake and pack my trunk, for Missis intended me to leave Gateshead in a day or two. That afternoon lapsed in peace and harmony. Even for me life had its gleams of sunshine.

CHAPTER V

Five o'clock had hardly struck on the morning of the 19th of January when I rose by the rays of a setting half-moon, washed and dressed in my closet, and, joined by Bessie, went down to the cold nursery for a breakfast I could not eat. We passed Mrs. Reed's bedroom door without my entering: she had taken her last leave of me the night before, and bidden me remember she had always been my best friend, to which I had responded by turning my face to the wall. The coach for Lowood was to pass the lodge-gates at six. A raw winter darkness filled the porter's yard; my trunk stood corded by the door; the lamps of the coach swung up out of the gloom; I clung in tearful kisses to Bessie's neck as the guard lifted me inside. The door slapped to, "All right" was called out, and I was whirled away from Bessie and from Gateshead toward unknown and, as I then thought, mysterious regions.

Of the journey I remember little but its preternatural length. We changed horses in a great town, where I was left in an inn-room with a chandelier and a little red gallery filled with musical instruments, walking about in the fear of kidnappers (whose exploits had figured in Bessie's stories). The afternoon waned wet and misty; the country grew strange; great grey hills heaved up around us; we descended a wooded valley, and I heard a wild wind rushing in the trees. Lulled by the sound, I slept; the cessation of motion woke me. A servant stood at the open coach-door, asking if there was a little girl called Jane Eyre. I was lifted out, my trunk handed down, and the coach instantly drove on into the dark.

I was led through a door in a wall, up a wet pebbly path, into a parlour with a fire. Presently a tall lady with dark hair and a pale large forehead came in—grave, erect, of a benignant air—and asked if I were tired and hungry. She bade an under-teacher named Miss Miller give me supper and put me to bed. By her I was conducted, passage by passage, to a long, dim school-room where some eighty girls of every age between ten and twenty sat in brown stuff frocks and holland pinafores, conning their tasks. The supper, I found, was a thin oaten cake; thirsty as I was, I drank, but could not eat. Prayers were read; the classes filed two and two upstairs to a long dormitory where each bed held two; I was given to Miss Miller for the night, and slept in an instant.

A loud bell roused us before dawn into bitter cold: I dressed shivering and washed at a basin shared by six girls. Prayers, classes, an hour's reading of Scripture, and at last breakfast in a low gloomy refectory, where smoking basins of porridge sent forth an odour far from inviting. A whispered word ran along the line of the elder girls: Disgusting! The porridge is burnt again! I devoured a spoonful or two, then perceived the truth—burnt porridge is almost as bad as rotten potatoes; famine itself sickens over it. Breakfast was over and none had breakfasted. In the schoolroom afterward, the talk ran on the breakfast and on Mr. Brocklehurst's name; no teacher checked the murmur, for plainly all of them shared in it.

At nine the discipline was restored. The four classes ranged before their teachers—the stout Miss Smith, the dark and hasty Miss Scatcherd, the foreign-looking Madame Pierrot, and over-worked Miss Miller herself—all rose simultaneously as the tall lady I had seen the night before entered. This was Miss Temple, the superintendent: tall, fair, shapely; brown eyes pencilled with long lashes; dark curls clustered at the temples; a gold watch shining at her girdle; her bearing stately, her countenance benignant. I retain still the sense of admiring awe with which my eyes traced her steps. The morning's lessons in geography, history, grammar, writing, and music went on by the clock until twelve, when she rose to address the school. 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. It was, she added to the surprised teachers, on her own responsibility. The bread and cheese was distributed to the high delight of the whole school, and the order was given for the garden.

The garden was a wide enclosure walled high about; in January it was a place of wintry blight and brown decay, soaking wet from yesterday's floods, a yellow drizzling fog overhead. The stronger girls ran about; the pale and thin ones huddled under the verandah, where a hollow cough was frequently to be heard. I leaned against a pillar and looked up at the building—half grey and old, half new—and read the stone tablet over the door: LOWOOD INSTITUTION—rebuilt by Naomi Brocklehurst, with the verse, Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works. I was wondering at the meaning of "Institution" when a girl of about thirteen, sitting on a stone bench bent over a book called Rasselas, looked up at my question. From her I learned that Lowood was partly a charity-school for orphans, that fifteen pounds was paid for each pupil and the deficiency made up by subscription, and that Mr. Brocklehurst, the treasurer and manager, bought all our food and all our clothes. I learned the names of the teachers; that Miss Temple was the best and the cleverest; that Mr. Brocklehurst, two miles off at Brocklehurst Hall, was a clergyman said to do a great deal of good. Of herself she would say nothing, save that her mother was dead. Later that afternoon I saw her dismissed in disgrace from a history class by Miss Scatcherd, and made to stand in the middle of the room; and watching her composed and grave bearing, the steady abstracted look as if her eyes had gone down into her heart, I wondered what sort of girl she could be. After a small mug of coffee and half a slice of brown bread—I was still ravenous—and a half-hour's recreation, study, prayers, and bed: such was my first day at Lowood.

CHAPTER VI

The next morning the water in the pitchers stood frozen; a keen north-east wind had whistled through the crevices all night and turned the contents of the ewers to ice. By the end of the long Bible-reading my fingers were numb. The breakfast porridge, this morning, was eatable in quality and small in quantity: how small my portion seemed! In the course of the day I was enrolled in the fourth class and given regular tasks: hitherto I had been a spectator at Lowood; now I was to be an actor. I sat in a quiet corner with a border of muslin to hem, where I could overhear the recitations going on at Miss Scatcherd's chair. The lesson was on the reign of Charles I—tonnage and poundage, ship-money—and the only girl who could answer every question was the same Burns whom I had seen flogged the day before, sent to the bottom of the class for some trifle of pronunciation, kept there as the constant target of Miss Scatcherd's animadversions: Burns, you are standing on the side of your shoe; Burns, you poke your chin most unpleasantly. Presently Miss Scatcherd ordered her into the book-closet for a bundle of twigs; she returned with the rod, unloosed her pinafore, and received without flinching a dozen strokes upon the neck. Hardened girl, Miss Scatcherd called her; but as she put her handkerchief back into her pocket I saw the trace of a tear glistening on her cheek.

That evening, in the play-hour, I sought out my acquaintance of the verandah at the schoolroom fireplace and found her bent over Rasselas in the dim glow of the embers. Her name was Helen Burns. She came from Northumberland, on the borders of Scotland; she did not wish to leave Lowood, for she had been sent to be educated. Was Miss Scatcherd not cruel? "Cruel? Not at all! She is severe: she dislikes my faults." When I declared that, in her place, I would seize the rod and break it under the teacher's nose, Helen laid down a doctrine of endurance I could not comprehend: it was weak and silly to say one could not bear what it was one's fate to bear; far better to endure patiently a smart no one felt but oneself than to commit a hasty act whose evil would extend to those connected with one; and besides, the Bible bid us return good for evil. Of Miss Temple, however, she spoke with a soft smile—Miss Temple was full of goodness, and even the worst in the school was treated by her gently. I poured out, in my turn, the whole bitter tale of Gateshead. Helen heard me to the end, and then asked, mildly, whether I should not be happier if I tried to forget such things; life was too short to spend in nursing animosity. She held a creed of her own, which she seldom mentioned but in which she delighted: that beyond this corruptible body, the spark of the spirit returned whence it came—perhaps to brighten through gradations of glory from the human soul to the seraph; that in such a creed eternity was a rest and not an abyss, the criminal could be forgiven though the crime were abhorred, and revenge never need worry the heart. Her head, always drooping, sank lower as she finished. A monitor came up and ordered her to put her drawer in order, and Helen rose and obeyed without delay.

CHAPTER VII

My first quarter at Lowood seemed an age, and not the golden age either: an irksome struggle with new rules, intensified by the privations of January and February. Our clothing was insufficient against the cold: we had no boots, the snow got into our shoes and melted there, our ungloved hands became numbed and chilblained. Our food was scanty; the famished great girls coaxed or bullied the small ones out of theirs—many a time I shared my morsel of bread, surrendered half my coffee, and swallowed the remainder with secret tears. The two-mile Sunday walks to Brocklebridge Church almost paralysed us; we set out cold, arrived colder; the bitter wind almost flayed our faces on the homeward road. I can remember Miss Temple walking down our drooping line, her plaid cloak (which the frosty wind fluttered) gathered close about her, urging us to keep our spirits up and march forward like stalwart soldiers; the other teachers were too dejected to attempt the office. Of fires there were never enough; the tea-time addition of a thin scrape of butter on a whole slice of bread was the hebdomadal treat we looked forward to from Sabbath to Sabbath. The Sunday evenings closed in catechism, gospel, and a long sermon read by Miss Miller, during which the smallest girls, in the manner of Eutychus, dropped from their forms and were propped up by the monitors' high stools.

Of Mr. Brocklehurst's visits I had had reason to be afraid; the dreaded "Coming Man" who would denounce me arrived one afternoon in his black surtout while I was puzzling over a sum. I sat well back, kept my slate before my face, and might have escaped notice had not the slate slipped from my hand and fallen with an obtrusive crash. "A careless girl!" said Mr. Brocklehurst; then, "It is the new pupil." Before that, I had overheard him lecturing Miss Temple on the impertinence of her bread-and-cheese lunch—the spoiling of a meal, he insisted, ought to be improved into a spiritual edification on the sufferings of the primitive Christians, and not neutralised by replacing it with comfort; one fed the vile body but starved the immortal soul. Miss Temple's face had set like marble as he went on. He noticed at the same moment the offending curls of one Julia Severn—naturally curling hair, Miss Temple explained—and, declaring that the pupils of Lowood were not to conform to nature but to be the children of Grace, ordered that all the top-knots of the first form should be cut off entirely. Just then his wife and daughters entered, splendidly attired in velvet, silk, fur, and ostrich plumes, with French curls falling under the brims of their grey beaver hats: a pity, I thought, they had not come a few minutes sooner to hear the lecture on dress.

Now my own turn came. I was set upon a high stool before the whole school and his ladies, while he warned the children against me as a little castaway, an interloper and an alien, a child worse than a heathen, a liar, on the unimpeachable testimony of her benefactress at Gateshead. Teachers were enjoined to watch me, weigh my words, scrutinise my actions, punish my body to save my soul. I was to remain there half an hour longer; no one was to speak to me. As the great people sailed in state from the room, my breath stifling and my throat constricting, Helen Burns happened to pass by; she lifted her eyes—what strange light inspired them!—and as a martyr might pass a slave and impart strength in the transit, the new feeling bore me up. I lifted my head and took a firm stand on the stool. As she returned a moment later she smiled at me again. She was at that very moment wearing on her arm the "untidy badge," and was condemned to a dinner of bread and water on the morrow for blotting an exercise; such are the spots which Miss Scatcherd's eye could see, and blind it was to the full brightness of the orb.

CHAPTER VIII

Five o'clock came; the school was dismissed to tea; I crept into a corner, sat down on the floor, and the spell that had supported me began to dissolve. I sank prostrate, weeping till my tears watered the boards. I had meant to be so good at Lowood, to make friends, to win respect; that very morning I had reached the head of my class, Miss Miller had praised me, Miss Temple had smiled and promised drawing and French; and now I was crushed and trodden, and could I ever rise again? I wished ardently to die. Helen Burns came up out of the dimness, bringing my coffee and bread; I could touch neither. Helen, why do you stay with a girl whom everybody believes to be a liar? Why, eighty pupils were not the world's millions, she answered; and not one in the school either despised or disliked me; Mr. Brocklehurst was no god, and was little liked. If all the world hated me but my own conscience absolved me, I should not be without friends. And there was an invisible kingdom of spirits round us, and angels saw the innocent through their hour of shame, and God waited only the separation of spirit from flesh to crown us. As she spoke, she breathed a little fast and coughed a short cough, and I forgot my own grief in a vague concern for her.

Miss Temple came in search of me and led us both up to her own room, with its good fire and its cheerful look. There she bade me defend myself against the charge as a criminal would be allowed to do; to add nothing and exaggerate nothing. I told her, restrained by Helen's example into a soberness I had not commanded before, the whole story of Gateshead and the red-room and the apothecary Mr. Lloyd; and she said quietly, "I know something of Mr. Lloyd; I shall write to him; if his reply agrees with your statement, you shall be publicly cleared." She inquired then after Helen's cough and the pain in her chest, examined her pulse, and—sighing low—rang for tea. Mrs. Harden, the housekeeper of whalebone and iron, sent up only the usual quantity of bread, but Miss Temple unlocked a drawer and produced a good seed-cake she had meant to keep for some other occasion, and we feasted upon it as on nectar and ambrosia. Then conversation followed between her and Helen which it was indeed a privilege to overhear. They spoke of nations and times past, of countries far away, of books they had read, of French names; until Miss Temple bade Helen take down a Virgil and construe a page; and as Helen read, my organ of veneration expanded at every sounding line. The bell rang for bed before they had done; Miss Temple embraced us both, and held Helen a little longer than me; her eye lingered after Helen to the door, and for her she breathed a sad sigh and wiped a tear from her cheek.

On reaching the dormitory we found Miss Scatcherd ransacking drawers, and Helen was condemned to wear next day a pasteboard "Slattern" bound like a phylactery upon her forehead. She wore it through the day with the patient meekness of one regarding it as deserved; the moment Miss Scatcherd was gone I tore it from her brow and thrust it into the fire. About a week later, Miss Temple's letter from Mr. Lloyd arrived; she assembled the whole school and pronounced me cleared from every imputation; the teachers shook hands with me, and a murmur of pleasure ran through the ranks of my companions. From that hour I set to work afresh, rose into the higher class, learned the first tenses of être and sketched my first cottage on the same day, and would not have exchanged Lowood, with all its privations, for Gateshead and all its luxuries.

CHAPTER IX

But the privations of Lowood lessened. Spring drew on; the cutting winds ameliorated; my swollen feet, flayed to lameness in January, began to heal under the gentler breath of April; flowers crept out among the leaves—snowdrops, crocuses, purple auriculas, golden-eyed pansies. I discovered, beyond the spike-guarded walls, a great hill-hollow rich in verdure and shadow, with a bright beck full of dark stones; and on the Thursday half-holidays we wandered to find sweeter flowers under the hedges. Yet the very site that made spring so beautiful made it deadly: the forest-dell where Lowood lay was the cradle of fog and fog-bred pestilence, and as the warmth quickened, typhus crept into the school. Forty-five out of the eighty girls lay ill at one time; classes were broken up, rules relaxed, the few of us who continued well allowed almost unlimited license. Many went home only to die; some died at the school and were buried quickly; while bright May shone unclouded over the bold hills and beautiful woodland out of doors, the gay garden borders furnished only handfuls of blossom for coffins.

For those of us who remained well, that wild May was a kind of holiday. Mr. Brocklehurst kept his distance; the cross housekeeper had been driven away by fear of contagion, her successor provided more liberally; with fewer mouths to feed, we breakfasted decently. We rambled in the wood like gipsies from morning to night. My favourite seat was a smooth white stone in the middle of the beck, reached by wading barefoot, on which I dined with my chosen comrade, Mary Ann Wilson—a witty, observant girl, somewhat older than I, who liked to inform while I liked to question. Yet I had not forgotten Helen Burns; for some weeks she had been removed from my sight to a room upstairs, and I, in my ignorance, took comfort from the surgeon's word that her complaint was consumption and not typhus, supposing consumption to be something mild that time and care would cure.

One evening early in June, returning late from the wood, I saw the surgeon's pony at the garden door. I asked the nurse how Helen Burns did. Very poorly. Was it for her Mr. Bates had come? Yes. And what did he say? He says she'll not be here long. Yesterday I should have understood that to mean Northumberland; I knew now in an instant that it meant the region of spirits, if such region there were. I begged to see her; the nurse refused. At eleven that night I rose softly, put my frock over my night-dress, and crept barefoot through the moonlit passages to Miss Temple's room. Past the camphor-and-vinegar door of the fever-ward, down a stair, opening and shutting two doors without a sound, up another flight; the door of Miss Temple's room stood ajar; a candle burnt unsnuffed; the nurse slept in an easy-chair; Miss Temple herself, I learned afterwards, had been called to a delirious patient in the fever-room. Beside Miss Temple's bed stood a little crib, half hidden by curtains, and I, dreading to find a corpse, called Helen by name. She put back the curtain. Can it be you, Jane? I climbed in; her forehead and her cheek and her hand and her wrist were cold and thin, but she smiled as of old.

She had heard the clock strike eleven; I had come to bid her good-bye. She was going home—her long home, her last home. She was very happy, she said; I was not to grieve. The illness which removed her was gentle; her mind was at rest; she left no one to regret her much, only a father lately remarried; by dying young she escaped great sufferings, since she had not the qualities to make her way in the world. Where was she going? "I believe; I have faith: I am going to God." She believed in a future state, and could resign her immortal part to her Maker without misgiving; God was her father, God was her friend; she counted the hours till the eventful one which should reveal Him. We should meet again, she said, in the same region of happiness and be received by the same universal Parent. I clung to her, hid my face on her neck, and we both fell asleep. In the morning the nurse was carrying me back to the dormitory; later I learned that Miss Temple, returning at dawn, had found me in the little crib with my arms round Helen Burns's neck. I was asleep, and Helen was—dead. Her grave lies in Brocklebridge churchyard; for fifteen years it bore no monument but a grassy mound, but a grey marble tablet now marks the spot, inscribed with her name and the word Resurgam.

CHAPTER X

Hitherto I have given to the first ten years of my life almost as many chapters; but this is not to be a regular autobiography, and I shall now pass eight years almost in silence, with only a few lines to keep up the connection. When the typhus had fulfilled its mission of devastation and gradually disappeared, public attention had been drawn to Lowood: inquiry brought out the unhealthiness of the site, the brackish water, the wretched food and clothing, the cramped accommodations. Wealthy and benevolent persons in the county subscribed to erect a more convenient building in a better situation; new regulations were made; Mr. Brocklehurst, whom family connections kept in office as treasurer, was henceforward aided by gentlemen of more enlarged minds; and the school, thus regenerated, became in time a truly useful institution. I remained an inmate of its walls for eight years—six as pupil and two as teacher—and to its value I bear my testimony.

During these years my life was uniform but not unhappy, because not inactive. I rose to be the first girl of the first class, was invested with the office of teacher, and discharged it with zeal. Miss Temple had remained throughout that period our superintendent, and to her I owed the best part of my acquirements; she had stood me in the stead of mother, governess, and at last companion. At length she married a Reverend Mr. Nasmyth, an excellent man, almost worthy of such a wife, and removed with him to a distant county. From the day she left, I was no longer the same. With her went every settled feeling, every association that had made Lowood in any degree a home to me; I had imbibed something of her nature and much of her habits, and in her vicinity my mind had grown harmonious and disciplined. Now I was returned to my own natural element, and old emotions stirred again.

I went to my window and looked out: the wings of the building, the garden, the skirts of Lowood, the hilly horizon, and beyond all the blue peaks. Within their boundary all seemed prison-ground, exile limits; I traced the white road winding round the base of one mountain and vanishing in a gorge, and longed to follow it. In one afternoon I tired of eight years of routine. I desired liberty; for liberty I gasped; for liberty I uttered a prayer, and it seemed scattered on the wind. I framed a humbler petition, for change, for stimulus; that too was swept off; and at last, half desperate, I cried, Then grant me at least a new servitude! The supper-bell summoned me before I could pursue the thought; my dormitory companion, Miss Gryce, kept me from it with small talk till her snores at length set me free. A new servitude. There is something in that—it does not sound too sweet, like Liberty or Excitement; but it is matter of fact. Any one may serve: I have served here eight years; now I want to serve elsewhere. How was such a thing got? People applied to friends, and I had no friends; many others, I told myself, had no friends either, and must be their own helpers. My brain laboured an hour without result; then a kind fairy, in my absence, dropped the suggestion on my pillow: Those who want situations advertise; you must advertise in the ——shire Herald.

So I did. With the earliest day my advertisement was written, sealed, and directed: a young lady accustomed to tuition desired a situation in a private family where the children were under fourteen, and was qualified to teach the usual branches of a good English education together with French, drawing, and music; address J.E., Post-office, Lowton. I posted it on a wet evening's walk to Lowton; a week later I returned for the answer—a single letter, sealed with an initial F.: it was from a Mrs. Fairfax of Thornfield, near Millcote, offering thirty pounds a year (double what Lowood paid) for the charge of one little girl under ten, and requiring references and particulars. The old-fashioned, uncertain hand assured me that I should be dealing with an elderly lady—a proper, en règle figure, no scrape; Mrs. Fairfax in widow's cap; Thornfield no doubt a neat orderly spot; Millcote, a busy manufacturing town on the A——, was seventy miles nearer London than my remote north. It would be at least a complete change.

I broached the matter to the new superintendent; she carried it to Mr. Brocklehurst, who insisted that Mrs. Reed, my natural guardian, must be written to. Mrs. Reed returned for answer that I might do as I pleased, she had long relinquished all interference in my affairs. After tedious delays formal leave was given me to better my condition, and a testimonial of character provided. The fortnight of preparation passed rapidly. On the very eve of my departure, while I wandered the lobby like a troubled spirit, a servant told me a person below wished to see me. It was Bessie, married now five years to Robert Leaven, the coachman, and living at the lodge; she had a little Bobby of three at her knee and a girl whom she had christened Jane. She had walked from Gateshead on her own impulse for a parting look at me. From her I learned the news of the cousins: Georgiana, very handsome, had been admired in London and nearly eloped with a young lord till her sister Eliza informed on her, and the two now led a cat-and-dog life of constant quarrelling; John Reed, plucked at college, dissipated, was a grief to his mother; Mrs. Reed herself looked stout but not easy in her mind. Bessie examined me critically: I was not grown so very tall, nor so very stout; I was no beauty, but genteel enough, I looked like a lady, and that was as much as ever she had expected. She was charmed when I played her a waltz on the parlour piano, and equally so when I pointed out a watercolour of mine hanging over the chimney-piece; and she told me, almost in passing, of one piece of family history I had never heard. Some seven years before, a Mr. Eyre—my father's brother, she believed—had come to Gateshead asking for me; Mrs. Reed had told him I was at school fifty miles off and could not be seen, and he had had to go on, for his ship was sailing for Madeira in a day or two; my aunt afterwards called him a "sneaking tradesman," and Bessie's husband Robert took him for a wine-merchant. Bessie and I conversed of old times; the next morning we parted at the Brocklehurst Arms in Lowton—she set off for Gateshead, and I mounted the coach for new duties and a new life in the unknown environs of Millcote.

CHAPTER XI

A new 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: figured wallpaper, an oil lamp, an excellent fire, and beside it myself in cloak and bonnet, warming away the numbness of sixteen hours' exposure to the rawness of an October day. The town clock was striking eight, and I had expected to be met. No one was; and as I waited in a private room with my doubts, the strange sensation of being quite alone in the world swept over me, sweetened by adventure and chilled by fear in turn. At last I rang and asked the waiter for "Thornfield"; on his return, a man stood at the door with a one-horse car, and an hour and a half's leisurely jolt over heavy roads brought us, after passing a low broad church-tower and a hillside galaxy of village lights, through gates that clashed to behind us, up a drive, and to the front door of a dark house with one curtained bow-window kindled from within.

Nothing in the snug small parlour into which I was ushered was wanting to complete the beau-ideal of domestic comfort: a round table by a cheerful fire, a high-backed arm-chair, a great cat at the footstool, and the neatest little elderly lady in widow's cap, black silk gown, and snowy muslin apron—exactly the Mrs. Fairfax I had fancied, only milder and less stately. She rose at once, drew off my shawl and bonnet with her own hands, ordered hot negus and a sandwich, and treated me less like a governess than a visitor. Adèle, I learned, was not her daughter—she had no family—but Mr. Rochester's ward, a child whose connection with him she could not, or would not, particularly explain. Thornfield, she added, was rather neglected of late years; in winter, alone, she had grown quite melancholy, and was glad to have a companion. She showed me up by oak banisters and a long chill gallery to the small chamber she had prepared for me next her own; and there, after committing myself to thanks, I slept soon and soundly. I awoke into broad day and a bright little room with blue chintz curtains, dressed myself in my plain black frock and clean white tucker, and—regretting, as ever, that I had not the rosy cheeks, straight nose, and small cherry mouth I sometimes wished for—went out into the sunlit lawn.

Thornfield was a three-storey gentleman's manor-house, battlemented, grey-fronted, set against a rookery; beyond it, in a great meadow, an array of mighty old thorn-trees, broad as oaks, at once explained the etymology of the place. Mrs. Fairfax came out and laughed at my surprise. "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." "Mr. Rochester!" said I—I had never heard the name. He was the owner of Thornfield, distantly connected to her by her late clergyman husband; she was only the housekeeper. So she was no great dame after all, but a dependent like myself; and I liked her none the less for it. As we talked, my pupil came running up the lawn—a slightly built child of seven or eight, with curls to her waist and a French nurse called Sophie. C'est là ma gouvernante! Adèle exclaimed; and (as I had had the fortune to be taught French by a Madame Pierrot) we were soon at our ease. She had been born on the Continent, had never crossed the Channel till six months back, had crossed it on a smoking ship in the company of one Mr. Rochester. Her mother was "gone to the Holy Virgin," and used to teach her songs and to dance before great gentlemen and ladies—she gave me a specimen at once, singing the canzonette of a forsaken lady tunefully and in very bad taste, and reciting a fable of La Fontaine with a flexibility of voice and an appropriateness of gesture quite unusual at her age—exactly, she explained, as her mother had taught her. After her mother left her with a poor Madame Frédéric, Mr. Rochester had asked her if she would go and live with him in England, had given her pretty toys; though now, she added, he had brought her here and gone away again himself, and she never saw him.

The schoolroom was the library; its bookcases held everything an elementary education required and a few volumes of poetry and travels and light romance besides—after Lowood's pickings, an abundant harvest. My pupil was sufficiently docile, though disinclined to apply, and I dismissed her at noon, intending to occupy the rest of the day in sketches. As I went for my portfolio Mrs. Fairfax called me into the great purple-and-walnut dining-room, where, through an arched recess, I caught my first glimpse of the drawing-room beyond—snow-white carpets, vine-leaf mouldings, crimson couches, sparkling Bohemian glass on the pale Parian mantelpiece. I asked her about Mr. Rochester; she gave me only the vaguest sketch. He was a gentleman; he was peculiar in a way she could not describe; one was never quite sure whether he was in jest or earnest, pleased or the contrary. She showed me the rest of the house. The third storey was a home of the past, its old beds and chests and palm-and-cherub carvings making it a kind of shrine of memory; the back gallery, with its two rows of small black doors, looked like a corridor in some Bluebeard's castle. As I lingered there alone after she had gone to fasten the trap-door above, the last sound I should have expected struck my ear: a curious laugh, distinct, formal, mirthless, that passed off in a clamorous peal seeming to wake an echo in every lonely chamber, though it issued from one door only. When I called out, Mrs. Fairfax answered that it was probably Grace Poole, the seamstress; and presently a set, square-made, red-haired, plain-faced woman of between thirty and forty curtseyed silently and went back into her room. Too much noise, Grace, said Mrs. Fairfax: remember directions! A less ghostly apparition could scarcely be conceived. Adèle came running to summon us to dinner, and the first day at Thornfield closed in everyday calm.

CHAPTER XII

The promise of a smooth career which my first introduction at Thornfield seemed to pledge was not belied on longer acquaintance. Mrs. Fairfax was just what she appeared—placid, kind, of competent education and average intelligence; my pupil was a lively child who, committed entirely to my care, soon left off her little freaks and became teachable. She had no marked talent and no marked vice; she liked me, and I liked her sufficiently for both of us to be content. This will be thought cool language by those who entertain solemn doctrines about the angelic nature of children: I am merely telling the truth.

But there was a restlessness in my nature which would not be quieted even by a quiet and respected post. Sometimes, when Adèle was with her nurse and Mrs. Fairfax was making jellies in the storeroom, I would climb to the roof leads, look out over the dim sky-line, and long for a power of vision that might overpass that limit and reach the busy world I had heard of but never seen. Anybody may blame me; I shall be called discontented. I could not help it. My sole relief was to walk along the corridor of the third storey, backwards and forwards in its silence, and 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 in 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. Women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say they should confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing the piano and embroidering bags. When thus alone, I would often hear Grace Poole's eccentric laugh and stranger murmurs; sometimes I saw her come out of her room with a basin or a tray, generally returning with a pot of porter; her hard, plain face damped curiosity; she was a person of few words, who answered every effort with a monosyllable.

October, November, December passed. One bright cold afternoon in January, Mrs. Fairfax having begged a holiday for Adèle on account of her cold, I volunteered to walk to Hay—two miles off—to post a letter. The lane was utterly still: no holly, no evergreen to rustle; the stripped hedges silent; only a few brown birds in them like russet leaves that had forgotten to drop. Halfway up the hill I sat down on a stile and watched the sun sink behind the trees, and the moon climb over Hay; in the absolute hush I could hear the streams in distant dales. A rude noise broke into the fine ripplings—a positive tramp, tramp, a metallic clatter—and a great black-and-white dog, lion-like in head and hair, glided past me along the hedge. I thought, with some latent thrill of nursery terrors, of Bessie's North-of-England spirit the "Gytrash"; but when the horse and rider followed, the spell was broken—nothing ever rode the Gytrash. The horse slipped on the icy causeway, and man and beast came down together. I went up: the rider was struggling free of his steed; he was a man past youth, of middle height and broad chest, with a dark face, stern features, and gathered eyebrows that looked ireful and thwarted. Are you injured, sir? Had he been a handsome and heroic-looking young gentleman, I should not have dared to stand questioning him; as it was, his frown set me at my ease. He had only a sprain, but he required that I should help him reach his bridle—since the mountain would not come to Mahomet, I must aid Mahomet to the mountain. He laid a heavy hand on my shoulder and limped to his horse; in another moment man, dog, and horse had disappeared like heath that, in the wilderness, the wild wind whirls away.

The new face was unlike anything in the gallery of my memory: masculine, dark, strong, and stern. I lingered at the gates; I did not like re-entering Thornfield, knowing that to cross its threshold was to return to stagnation. When at last I passed in by the side door, I found the hall warmed from the great dining-room, where a cheerful mingling of voices was suddenly silenced by a closing door, and Mrs. Fairfax's parlour held only a great black-and-white long-haired dog upon the rug, gazing gravely at the blaze. Pilot, I said; and the thing got up and came to me. Leah, summoned for a candle, told me that master had come, that his horse had fallen and his ankle was sprained, that John had gone for the surgeon. I went upstairs to take off my things.

CHAPTER XIII

By the surgeon's orders Mr. Rochester kept his room next morning. Adèle and I had to vacate the library, which was now in daily requisition as a reception-room for callers and tenants. Thornfield Hall was a changed place: knocks at the door, clangs of the bell, new voices in different keys—a rill from the outer world was flowing through it; it had a master, and for my part I liked it better. Adèle could not apply that day for thinking of her ami, Monsieur Edouard Fairfax de Rochester, and the little carton of presents he had promised to bring her from Millcote. At dusk, summoned to take tea with him in the drawing-room and bidden to put on my best black silk and the single pearl brooch Miss Temple had given me, I was led in to find my traveller of the lane half-reclined upon a couch, his sprained foot on a cushion, his broad and jetty eyebrows and the horizontal sweep of his black hair all distinct in the firelight. He neither rose nor lifted his head; "Let Miss Eyre be seated," said he; and there was something in the brusque and unceremonious tone which, oddly enough, set me more at ease than finished politeness would have done.

Mrs. Fairfax made conversation; he answered with monosyllables and asked for tea. As I handed him his cup, Adèle prompted his recollection of a present she suspected he had brought for me, and he turned upon me his dark, irate, piercing eyes and a string of half-mocking questions about whether I was fond of cadeaux. I beat about the bush, I said, because I was a stranger and had done nothing to entitle me to one. That, at least, drew from him a reluctant praise of my pains with Adèle. After tea he summoned me to the fire and proceeded to interrogate me. I had been resident in his house three months; I came from Lowood; I had been there eight years. Eight years! I must be tenacious of life; no wonder I had the look of another world. When I had come on him in Hay Lane the night before, he said, he had thought unaccountably of fairy tales and had had half a mind to demand whether I had bewitched his horse. Who were my parents? I had none. Who were my kinsfolk? I had no brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts; no home; I had advertised, and Mrs. Fairfax had answered. He bid Mrs. Fairfax not to give me a character; he would judge for himself. I have to thank her for this sprain—she had begun by felling his horse.

He went on. I had read, I told him, only such books as came in my way; I had lived the life of a nun, no doubt I was well drilled in religious forms, no doubt I had worshipped Brocklehurst as a convent of religieuses worship their director. Oh, no, I told him; Brocklehurst was a harsh man, at once pompous and meddling, who had cut off our hair and bought us bad needles for economy's sake, and had starved us before the committee was appointed, and bored us with long evening readings about sudden deaths and judgments that made us afraid to go to bed. He bid me play a tune in the library; before I had played a page he called out "Enough! you play a little." He then required my portfolio, and scrutinised three of my watercolours: a half-submerged cormorant on a wreck, holding a gold bracelet drawn from the arm of a drowned corpse glanced through green water; a woman's vapour-shape rising from a hill-top with the Evening Star upon her brow; a colossal head leaning against a polar iceberg, crowned with a ring of white flame. Where had I seen these things? "Out of my head"—and was I happy when I painted them? "I was absorbed; yes, and happy." He thought I had not enough of the artist's skill to give my conceptions full being, but the drawings were, for a school-girl, peculiar; the eyes in the Evening Star I must have seen in a dream; he asked who had taught me to paint wind. Then, looking at his watch, he abruptly bid me put Adèle to bed; he endured her parting kiss as Pilot would have endured it, made a movement of the hand toward the door, and dismissed us with a frigid bow.

When I rejoined Mrs. Fairfax I observed that he was very changeful and abrupt; she allowed it, but said allowance must be made for him, both because it was his nature and because he had painful thoughts to harass him. Family troubles, she said—he had had an elder brother, Rowland, dead nine years; some steps had been taken between old Mr. Rochester and Rowland to settle the estate without dividing it, and to provide for Edward by means he had considered a "painful position" whose precise nature she did not exactly know but his spirit could not brook; he had broken with his family, and since the brother's intestate death had led an unsettled kind of life, never resident at Thornfield for a fortnight together. It was an evasive answer; she could or would tell me no more, and I dropped the subject.

CHAPTER XIV

For several days I saw little of Mr. Rochester; in the mornings he was engaged with business and in the afternoons with neighbouring gentlemen who called or stayed to dine; his sprain mending, he rode out a great deal, and his deportment toward me, in the few rencontres of stair or gallery, alternated between haughty and affable, the ebb and flow of his moods having (I saw plainly) nothing whatever to do with me. One evening a wet night kept him at home after his guests had departed; I was sent for, with Adèle, to the dining-room, where the long-promised petit coffre stood at last upon the table. Adèle pounced on it with rapturous cries and was bidden to disembowel it in a corner without bothering anybody with the anatomical process. He drew up a chair for me near his own. "I am not fond of the prattle of children," he said; he was an old bachelor, with no pleasant associations connected with their lisp. He summoned Mrs. Fairfax to be Adèle's auditress and so freed himself for his own pleasure—my company. He had drunk well at dinner, and was in his after-dinner mood: more expanded, more genial, less frigid, but still preciously grim, his great dark eyes catching the fire.

He caught me examining him. Do you think me handsome? The answer slipped from my tongue before I was aware—No, sir. He made me criticise his forehead and demanded whether he were a fool, and I asked in return whether he were a philanthropist; he said he was not—Fortune had knocked him about, kneaded him with her knuckles, and he was now hard and tough as an India-rubber ball, with one sentient point in the middle of the lump. He bid me speak; I sat dumb. He called me stubborn, then apologised for the form of the request, claiming only such superiority as twenty years' difference and a century's advance in experience legitimately conferred—a superiority by which he asked me to talk a little, and divert his thoughts that were galled with one cankering point. I was willing, I said, but he must ask me questions. He asked. I would not concede that he had a right to be masterful merely because he was older; the claim depended on the use he had made of his time. Humph! Promptly spoken. He had made indifferent use of his advantages, he confessed; but on the ground that I was his paid subordinate, would I let him hector a little? Not on that ground, but on the ground that he had forgotten he paid me, I would. I would never confound informality with insolence: one I rather liked, and the other nothing free-born would submit to even for a salary.

He mentally shook hands with me for the answer; not three in three thousand raw school-girl-governesses would have answered him so. He had plenty of faults of his own, he allowed; he had been thrust on a wrong tack at one-and-twenty and never recovered the right course; he had been Nature's intended good man, and was not so. He was no villain, only a trite commonplace sinner hackneyed in the petty dissipations of the rich and worthless. He envied me my unpolluted memory. Dread remorse, Miss Eyre, when you are tempted to err; remorse is the poison of life. Repentance was its cure, I offered. 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. Already, he said, an inspiration—not a temptation—had returned to him; a fair guest, an angel of light come to the door of his charnel heart, demanding to be admitted; and he would admit it. Distrust it, I said; it is not a true angel. He laughed at the gravity of his cameo-headed neophyte. Strange unsanctioned combinations of circumstance, he said, demanded unheard-of new statutes, and at this moment he passed a law as unalterable as the Medes' and Persians' that his motives and his aims were right. The human and fallible should not arrogate a power with which the divine and perfect alone can be safely intrusted, said I—the power of saying, "Let it be right." "Let it be right"—the very words: you have pronounced them. I rose, deeming it useless to continue talk that was all darkness to me, and feeling the uncertainty which accompanies a conviction of ignorance.

Adèle was now ready: she came running back in a rose-coloured satin frock and a wreath of rosebuds, to chassé before him on tiptoe and drop on one knee at his feet. C'est comme cela que maman faisait, n'est-ce pas, monsieur? "Pre-cise-ly," he said—"and 'comme cela' she charmed my English gold out of my British breeches' pocket." Some bitter explanation lurked under it; he half promised to tell it some day. He saw at intervals, he said, the glance of a curious sort of bird through the close-set bars of a cage—a vivid, restless, resolute captive that, were it but free, would soar cloud-high.

CHAPTER XV

Mr. Rochester did, one afternoon, walking up and down a long beech avenue while Adèle and Pilot played within sight, give me the explanation he had promised. Adèle, he said, was the daughter of a French opera-dancer, Céline Varens, towards whom he had once cherished a grande passion; flattered by the Gallic sylph's preference of her British gnome's taille d'athlète, he had installed her in an hotel and equipped her in the received style of a spoony, with cashmeres and diamonds and dentelles. One night, calling unexpectedly, he had found her out, and had stepped onto her balcony to wait, croquant chocolate comfits and smoking. Presently he saw her own carriage roll up; she alighted, muffled in a cloak, and after her sprang from the carriage a young vicomte in spurred boot—a brainless, vicious roué whom he had hated little because he despised him much. The fang of jealousy snapped at sight; love sank under an extinguisher. He drew the curtain over himself in ambush and listened: their talk was so frivolous, mercenary, and senseless that it merely wearied him; and when his name came up, they fell into childish abuse of his "deformities"—dwelling especially on the personal defects which, under his patronage, his charmer had been wont to praise as his beauté mâle. The contrast between her and Miss Eyre, who only the evening before had told him point-blank she did not think him handsome, struck him at the time. Opening the window, he walked in upon them, liberated Céline from his protection, gave her a purse for immediate exigencies, and the next morning at the Bois de Boulogne left a bullet in the vicomte's etiolated arm. He thought himself done with the whole crew; but unluckily Céline had given him, six months earlier, this filette Adèle—who was, she affirmed, his daughter, though he saw no proofs of such grim paternity (and Pilot was more like him than she). Some years later her mother had abandoned her and run off to Italy with a musician; he acknowledged no claim upon him, but had taken the destitute child out of the slime and mud of Paris and transplanted her here, that she might grow up clean in the wholesome soil of an English country garden. Now that I knew her parentage, would I be coming to him with notice and asking for a new place? No: Adèle was not answerable for either her mother's faults or his; I should cling closer to her than before.

Earlier in their walk, ascending the avenue, he had paused and lifted his eye to the battlements with so dreadful a look—pain, shame, ire, disgust, detestation in quivering conflict—that he could not advance, and ground his teeth, and struck his boot against the hard ground. A hag like one of those who appeared to Macbeth on the heath of Forres, he said, had stood there by the beech-trunk, and written with her finger a memento in lurid hieroglyphics along the house-front: Like it if you can! Like it if you dare! and he had answered her, I will like it; I dare like it. He would break obstacles to happiness, to goodness; he wished to be a better man than he had been. Reviewing the tale that night in my own chamber, I marvelled less at the substance of the story than at the strange paroxysm which had seized him in the act of expressing his contentment. His deportment to me had been more uniform of late; I never seemed in his way; he summoned me with a cordiality that made me feel I had power to amuse him. I, indeed, talked little, but I heard him talk with relish; he liked to open glimpses of the world to a mind unacquainted with it. 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 a thousand pleasurable associations made his face the object I best liked to see; his presence was more cheering than the brightest fire. Yet I knew his faults—he was proud, sardonic, harsh to inferiority, moody, sometimes morose almost to malignity—and I believed his harshness had its source in some cruel cross of fate, that excellent materials in him hung together spoiled and tangled. I grieved for his grief, whatever it was, and would have given much to assuage it.

Lying awake that night I heard a vague murmur, peculiar and lugubrious, just above me; I sat up in bed listening; the sound was hushed. The clock struck two. Then it seemed my chamber door was touched, as if fingers had swept the panels. Who is there? Nothing answered. I told myself it might be Pilot, who sometimes wandered up by night, and lay down again. Then a demoniac laugh—low, suppressed, deep—was uttered at my very keyhole. I rose and bolted the door; the laugh was reiterated; something gurgled and moaned; steps retreated up the gallery toward the third-storey staircase, and I heard a door open and close. Was it Grace Poole, possessed of a devil? I caught up my shawl, withdrew the bolt, and went out. A candle on the matting lighted air dim with smoke; the smell of burning came from a door that stood ajar—Mr. Rochester's. I rushed in. Tongues of flame darted round the bed; the curtains were on fire; in the midst of blaze and vapour Mr. Rochester lay motionless. Wake! wake! I shook him; the smoke had stupefied him; the very sheets were kindling; I deluged the bed with the basin and ewer and ran for my own water-jug, and by God's aid quenched the fire. The hiss and the splash brought him to himself, fulminating anathemas over finding himself in a pool of water. Is there a flood? "No, sir, but there has been a fire. Get up, do; you are quenched now."

He bade me wait while he went up to the second storey, and was gone a long time. He came back pale and very gloomy: he had found it all out; it was as he had thought. Had I seen anything? No, only the candlestick on the matting. Had I heard the laugh? Yes—there was a woman who sewed there, called Grace Poole. Just so. Grace Poole—you have guessed it. He was glad I was the only person besides himself acquainted with the precise details of the night; I was no talking fool; I should say nothing, and he would account for the state of the bed; meantime he would do well enough on the library sofa. As I turned to go, he called me back—I should not part with him in that brief, dry fashion, when I had snatched him from a horrible and excruciating death. He held out his hand and took mine in both his own. "I have a pleasure in owing you so immense a debt. 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." Words almost visible trembled on his lips; his voice was checked. Strange energy was in his look; strange fire too. I bethought myself of an expedient—I think I hear Mrs. Fairfax move, sir—and was gone. I did not sleep that night: I was tossed on a buoyant but unquiet sea where billows of trouble rolled under surges of joy.

CHAPTER XVI

I both wished and feared to see Mr. Rochester on the day that followed my sleepless night. The morning passed with no sign of him; and when I went down to dinner I found Grace Poole sewing rings to new curtains in the master's chamber, with all her usual phlegmatic composure—no paleness, no desperation, nothing of the countenance one might expect in a woman who had attempted murder. I tried to draw her out: had not Mr. Rochester woken anybody? She thought I, being a young and light sleeper, might perhaps have heard a noise. I told her I had heard a strange laugh, and at first thought it Pilot. It is hardly likely master would laugh, Miss, when he was in such danger; you must have been dreaming. She cross-questioned me with brazen coolness about whether I usually bolted my door at night; I marked the question, and replied that I should henceforward take good care to make all secure. She approved—it was best to err on the safe side. Such inscrutable hypocrisy left me dumbfounded; and the more I pondered the problem of her position—why a vindictive and haughty gentleman should be so much in the power of one of the meanest of his dependents that, even when she lifted her hand against his life, he dared not openly accuse her—the stranger it grew. Had Grace been young and handsome, I might have suspected tenderer feelings; she was hard-favoured and matronly, and the idea was inadmissible. Yet, suggested the secret voice that talks in our hearts, you are not beautiful either; and last night—remember his words; remember his look; remember his voice!

I drove the hateful conjecture from me; I was a lady, Bessie had said so. The day passed without any summons from him, and not till the evening did I learn from Mrs. Fairfax that the master had set off after breakfast for the Leas, Mr. Eshton's place ten miles off, where there was a party of fashionable people—Lord Ingram, Sir George Lynn, Colonel Dent, and others. He might stay a week, or longer; gentlemen were so much in request on such occasions, and Mr. Rochester was a general favourite. There were ladies at the Leas, too: the elegant Misses Eshton, and the Honourable Blanche and Mary Ingram. From Mrs. Fairfax I drew, by careful questioning, an old recollection of Blanche at a Christmas party Mr. Rochester had given six or seven years before: she had been the queen of the evening, tall, fine-busted, raven-haired, dressed in pure white with an amber scarf; she had sung a duet with Mr. Rochester (who had a fine bass) and her execution at the piano had been pronounced remarkably good. Twenty-five, and not yet married, despite her beauty—but neither she nor her sister, it appeared, had very large fortunes.

Alone again, I arraigned myself at the bar of my own reason, and Memory and Reason laid out a plain, unvarnished tale of how I had rejected the real and rabidly devoured the ideal. A greater fool than Jane Eyre had never breathed the breath of life. You—a favourite with Mr. Rochester? You gifted with the power of pleasing him? Go! your folly sickens me. It does no woman good to be flattered by her superior, who cannot possibly intend to marry her; 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. My sentence was this: tomorrow I should set the glass before me and draw in chalk my own portrait, faithfully and without softening, "Portrait of a Governess, disconnected, poor, and plain"; and then on smooth ivory, with the freshest tints and the most delicate camel-hair pencils, I should delineate the loveliest face I could imagine according to Mrs. Fairfax's description, "Blanche, an accomplished lady of rank"; and whenever in future I should chance to fancy that Mr. Rochester thought well of me, I should compare the two and ask myself whether so noble a lady's wooer was likely to waste a serious thought on so indigent and insignificant a plebeian. I'll do it, I resolved; and grew calm, and fell asleep. I kept my word: in less than a fortnight the contrast was as great as self-control could desire. The discipline of the task gave force and fixedness to the new impressions I wished to stamp indelibly on my heart, and prepared me to meet what was to come with a decent calm.

CHAPTER XVII

A week passed, then ten days, with no news of him; Mrs. Fairfax thought he might be off to London and the Continent for a year. A strange chill, a failing at the heart, crept upon me, and a sickening sense of disappointment besides; but I rallied, and reminded myself that I had nothing to do with the master of Thornfield further than to receive the salary he gave me for teaching his protégée. He was not of my order; I should keep to my caste. I went on with my day's business, framing involuntarily, all the while, advertisements for new situations. After upwards of a fortnight a letter came to Mrs. Fairfax from the master: he was returning in three days, and not alone—he sent directions for the best bedrooms to be prepared and additional servants to be hired, for he was bringing a full house from the Leas. The three days were busy enough. I had thought all the rooms beautifully clean before, but it appears I was mistaken; I helped (or hindered) Mrs. Fairfax in the storeroom, learning to make custards and cheese-cakes and to truss game. Through it all I sometimes glimpsed Grace Poole gliding silently in her list slippers along the gallery, looking into the bedrooms with a quiet word of advice to the charwomen and going back to her oaken second-storey chamber for her pot of porter—as companionless as a prisoner in his dungeon. Once I overheard Leah and a charwoman speak of her in low tones: she received good wages, far higher than the rest, she went every quarter to the bank at Millcote, and it is not every one could fill her shoes. There was a mystery at Thornfield, and from participation in it I was purposely excluded.

Thursday came: the cavalcade of four equestrians and two open carriages galloped up the drive; Mr. Rochester rode his black Mesrour at the side of a lady whose purple riding-habit almost swept the ground and whose long veil streamed in the breeze: Blanche Ingram. Adèle was forbidden to go down. From the gallery I watched Mrs. Fairfax marshal the company, then crept down a back stair to plunder the larder for cold chicken and tarts, escaping just as the ladies issued from their chambers like a bright mist rolling down a hill. Their collective appearance left on me an impression of high-born elegance such as I had never before received. The next day they rode out as before; Mr. Rochester and Miss Ingram a little apart from the rest. The day after, by Mr. Rochester's particular request—and threat to come and fetch me if I refused—I was bidden, with Adèle in pink satin, to repair to the drawing-room before the ladies left the dinner-table. I slipped in, took a window-seat half hidden by the curtain, and presently saw the ladies come in: Mrs. and the two Misses Eshton; the haughty, satin-clad Lady Lynn; mild Mrs. Dent in lace and pearls; and the three Ingrams—the Roman-nosed, double-chinned Dowager in crimson velvet and a gold-Indian shawl-turban, of an almost insupportable haughtiness; the silent, listless Mary; and Blanche—tall and moulded like a Diana, the noble bust, the sloping shoulders, the dark eyes and black ringlets, but a face like her mother's, with the same low brow and high features and arched, satirical, haughty lip. Genius is said to be self-conscious; I cannot tell whether Miss Ingram was a genius, but she was self-conscious indeed. She was not good; she was not original; she repeated sounding phrases out of books and never offered an opinion of her own. She trailed poor Mrs. Dent on botany; she talked French to her mama with fluency.

When the gentlemen came in, I tried to keep my eyes on my netting, but they would rise and fix on my master. Most true is it that beauty is in the eye of the gazer. His olive face, his square brow, his deep eyes and grim mouth—all energy, decision, will—were not beautiful by rule, but more than beautiful to me. I had not intended to love him; the reader knows how I had wrought to extirpate the germs of love I had detected in myself; yet at the first renewed view of him they spontaneously arrived, green and strong. He made me love him without looking at me. I knew I must conceal my feeling, must smother hope, must remember he could not care much for me; but while I breathed and thought, I must love him. He paired with Blanche at the piano. She declared herself sick of the puny young men of the day—she liked black Bothwell better, to my mind a man is nothing without a spice of the devil—and proclaimed that her husband should not be a rival but a foil to her, that she would suffer no competitor near the throne. The dialogue with Mr. Rochester had the quick sparkle of habit. The dowagers, summoned to talk of governesses, declared they had had a dozen each, half of them detestable and the rest ridiculous and all incubi—this within full hearing of me. Tant pis! said her ladyship; I hope it may do her good. Blanche took up the cry. Mr. Rochester, asked which gentleman most resembled Bothwell, was told it was himself.

I tried to slip out by a side door, and knelt to fasten my sandal; rising, I stood face to face with Mr. Rochester in the passage. Why did you not come and speak to me in the room? I had not wished to disturb him, as he seemed engaged. And getting a good deal paler than you were—as I saw at first sight. What is the matter? Nothing. And a little depressed... a few more words would bring tears to your eyes—indeed they are there now. He excused me for the night, but said that so long as his visitors stayed I was to appear in the drawing-room every evening; it was his wish, and not to be neglected. Now go, and send Sophie for Adèle. Good-night, my— He stopped, bit his lip, and abruptly left me.

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. Life was everywhere: smart lady's-maids and dandy valets in the gallery, bustle in the kitchen, music and laughter in the saloons. One wet evening the party proposed playing charades, and Mr. Rochester selected for his side Miss Ingram, the two Misses Eshton, and Mrs. Dent. Will you play? he asked me; I shook my head, and he did not insist; Mr. Eshton would have asked me to join the other side, but Lady Ingram instantly negatived the notion: she looks too stupid for any game of the sort. The first scene was a pantomime marriage, with Miss Ingram as the white-veiled bride and Mr. Rochester as the bridegroom: the syllable was "Bride." The second was Eliezer and Rebecca at the well, Mr. Rochester turbaned and shawled like an Eastern emir, Blanche bearing a pitcher poised on her head like an Israelitish princess. The third—a sordid scene by a horn-lantern, with Mr. Rochester begrimed and fettered upon a kitchen chair—was solved as "Bridewell." Afterwards Miss Ingram complimented him on having made a gallant gentleman-highwayman, and reminded him, with a giggling rise of colour, that they had been married an hour since in the presence of all those witnesses.

I have told you, reader, that I had learnt to love Mr. Rochester: I could not unlove him now, merely because I found that he had ceased to notice me, or because his attentions were appropriated by a great lady who scorned to touch me with the hem of her robes as she passed. There was much in these circumstances to create despair, but very little to engender jealousy: Miss Ingram was a mark beneath jealousy. She was very showy, but she was not genuine; her mind was poor and her heart barren by nature; she advocated a high tone of sentiment, but she did not know the sensations of sympathy and pity—as she betrayed, too often, by the spiteful antipathy she vented on little Adèle. And Mr. Rochester's own eye watched his intended with sagacious clearness, with no passion at all for her: I saw that he was going to marry her for family or political reasons, because her rank suited him; that he had not given her his love, and that her qualifications were ill adapted to win it. She could not charm him. Arrows that glanced harmless from his breast might, by a surer hand, have quivered keen in his proud heart; without weapons, a silent conquest might have been won. Why did she lavish her smiles and her elaborate airs, when by merely sitting quietly at his side and saying little she might have got nigher his heart? I had seen in his face a far different expression from that which hardened it now while she so vivaciously accosted him. As to his project of marrying for interest: it had surprised me at first, but the longer I considered the position, education, and habits of his class the less I felt justified in blaming either of them for acting on principles instilled into them from childhood. In other respects I was growing very lenient to my master; the sarcasm and harshness that had once startled me were now like keen condiments in a choice dish; and as for that vague something in his eye—was it sinister or sorrowful, designing or desponding?—which used to make me fear and shrink as if I felt the ground quiver under volcanic hills, I beheld it still, with throbbing heart but not with palsied nerves; instead of wishing to shun, I longed to dare and to divine it.

One wet afternoon, when Mr. Rochester had been summoned to Millcote, the house lay quiet; Blanche, after repulsing the older ladies' efforts at conversation, had flung herself with a novel on a sofa. It was verging on dusk when Adèle cried Voilà Monsieur Rochester, qui revient! A post-chaise rolled up. But the gentleman who alighted was not Mr. Rochester; he was tall, fashionable-looking, between thirty and forty, with a singularly sallow complexion, a regular but relaxed face, and a tame, vacant eye whose life-light was wandering and inanimate. He bowed to Lady Ingram, announced himself as an old friend of his absent host's, presumed to instal himself till Mr. Rochester should return, and gave his name as Mason. After dinner I liked his physiognomy even less; for a handsome man he repelled me—a sleek gander to Mr. Rochester's fierce falcon, a meek sheep to that rough-coated keen-eyed dog. From scraps of his conversation I gathered that he had come from Spanish Town in Jamaica—the West Indies—and that it was there he had first known Mr. Rochester. I had thought Europe the bound of my master's wanderings, and was startled to learn he had travelled so much further.

Just then a footman whispered to Mr. Eshton, the magistrate, that an old gipsy woman in the servants' hall was insisting on telling the gentry their fortunes. She would not be turned out. Lady Ingram declared the impostor should be dismissed at once; but Blanche, with her queenly pertinacity, would have her in—not before "the vulgar herd," but in the library, one by one. I go first, she said, in a tone befitting the leader of a forlorn hope mounting a breach. After fifteen long minutes she came back to us through the arch, her face stiff with disappointment, took up a book she did not read, and grew momently darker; her whim was gratified, and she would put no more importance on it. The three younger ladies, by mutual courage, ventured next, and burst the door open in twenty minutes shrieking with hysterical giggles—the gipsy had told them of things they had said and done as children, of keepsakes in their boudoirs at home, and (she had whispered in each ear) of the name of the person each loved best in the world. The old crone, Sam came to tell me, swore she would not go till she had seen all the young single ladies in the house; there was no one else for it. Oh, I will go by all means, I answered, glad of the unexpected opportunity to gratify my own much-excited curiosity, and went out without escort.

CHAPTER XIX

The Sibyl, if Sibyl she were, was seated snugly in an easy-chair at the chimney-corner of the library, in a red cloak and a broad-brimmed gipsy hat tied down with a striped handkerchief. She was reading a little black book by the firelight and muttering the words to herself; she did not desist on my entrance. When she shut her book and looked up, her face beneath the bandage looked all brown and black, with elf-locks bristling out and an eye of bold and direct gaze. Well, and you want your fortune told? I told her I had no faith. She laughed under her bonnet, drew out a short black pipe, and after a sedative whiff pronounced me cold, sick, and silly—cold because alone, sick because the highest of feelings kept far from me, silly because I would not stir to meet what waited for me. I challenged her: thousands could be found similarly placed. 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. She bid me show her my palm. I gave her a shilling; she pored over my outstretched hand without touching it, then declared it too fine and lineless to be of use, and bade me kneel and look up. Reading my forehead and eyes and mouth, she pronounced one feature after another favourable: an eye that could not be cheated; a mouth that should speak much and smile often, never intended for the eternal silence of solitude; a brow that would never let the feelings burst away to wild chasms, that would neither sell the soul for bliss nor follow anything but the still small voice that interprets the dictates of conscience. Well said, forehead; your declaration shall be respected. I have formed my plans—right plans I deem them—I do not want sacrifice, sorrow, dissolution; my harvest must be in smiles, in endearments, in sweet— Here she broke off; she dared go no further, lest she try herself beyond her strength. Rise, Miss Eyre; leave me. The play is played out.

But I had grown alert, and now noticed the rounded supple hand stretched out, with a familiar gem flashing on its little finger; I saw the broad ring, and stooped over it. The bonnet came off, the bandage slipped, and Mr. Rochester stepped out of his disguise. Now, sir, what a strange idea! He had managed it well with the ladies, he supposed; but with me? You did not act the character of a gipsy with me; you have been talking nonsense to make me talk nonsense. It is scarcely fair, sir. Yet I had been on my guard from the beginning: the speech was not that of any gipsy fortune-teller, and the feigned voice and concealed features had warned me—and besides, my mind had been running on Grace Poole, that mystery of mysteries, and I had never thought of him.

Then I remembered to tell him what perhaps he had not heard: that a stranger had arrived in his absence, who said he had known him long, and had installed himself till his return; one Mr. Mason, lately come from the West Indies, from Spanish Town in Jamaica. Mr. Rochester gave my wrist a convulsive grip; the smile froze on his lips; a spasm caught his breath. Mason!—the West Indies! he repeated three times, growing whiter than ashes. Jane, I've got a blow; I've got a blow, Jane! He staggered. Oh, lean on me, sir. Holding my hand in both his own, he chafed it and looked at me with the most troubled and dreary look. My little friend! I wish I were in a quiet island with only you, and trouble, and danger, and hideous recollections removed from me. He sent me to the dining-room for a glass of wine and to see what Mason was doing. I found the company laughing, Mason as merry as any of them; I returned with the wine, and Mr. Rochester had recovered his firmness. If all these people came in a body and spat at me, what would you do, Jane? Turn them out of the room, sir, if I could. And if they laid you under a ban for adhering to me? I should care nothing about it. Then you could dare censure for my sake? I could dare it for any friend who deserved my adherence. He bid me return, slip up to Mason in the company, and whisper that Mr. Rochester wished to see him in the library. I did. Late that night, abed, I heard their voices in the gallery, my master's tone cheerful: This way, Mason; this is your room. The gay note set my heart at ease, and I was soon asleep.

CHAPTER XX

I had forgotten to draw my curtain, and the moon, full and bright, woke me with her glorious gaze. Good God! What a cry! The night was rent in twain by a savage, sharp, shrilling sound that ran from end to end of Thornfield Hall. My pulse stopped; my heart stood still; whatever uttered that fearful shriek could not soon repeat it. The cry came out of the third storey, just above my chamber-ceiling; I heard a struggle, a deadly one, and a half-smothered voice shout three times rapidly, Help! help! help!—Will no one come?—Rochester! Rochester! for God's sake, come! A door opened; running footsteps; a fall above; silence. I dressed and joined the alarmed company in the gallery, where the dowagers in vast white wrappers were bearing down like ships in full sail and the Misses Eshton were clinging to Mr. Rochester as he emerged with a candle from the upper storey. All's right!—all's right!—it's a mere rehearsal of Much Ado about Nothing. A servant, he said, had had the nightmare and a fit of fright; and by alternate coaxing and commanding he got the whole company back into their dormitories.

I did not lie down. I knew the cries and the struggle had not been any servant's dream; they had passed only over my head, where Grace Poole's lair was; the explanation was an invention to pacify the guests. When silence was at last absolute, a hand tapped low at my door: my master's voice. Are you up?—And dressed? Come out, then, quietly. He led me up to the third storey, asked for my sponge and salts, told me to be sure I should not turn sick at the sight of blood—I have never been tried yet—warm and steady, was his remark on my hand—and unlocked one of the small black doors. We passed into a chamber I remembered from Mrs. Fairfax's tour, where the tapestry had now been looped up to reveal a door that opened into a hidden inner room. A snarling, snatching sound, almost like a dog quarrelling, came from within; he went forward; I heard a shout of laughter, ending in Grace Poole's own goblin ha! ha!—then he closed the door behind him and bid me round the bed in the outer room. There, in an arm-chair, sat Mason, his shirt and one arm soaked with blood, his face corpse-like. I held the candle and the basin while Mr. Rochester sponged the wound on his shoulder and bid Mason bear up; then he gave me my charge: I was to sponge the trickling blood when it returned, hold the water and salts, and on no account speak to Mason or let him speak to me. Richard, it will be at the peril of your life if you speak to her. He went to fetch the surgeon. I heard the key grate in the lock and the sound of his retreating step die away.

I was alone in the third storey, fastened into a mystic cell, with a pale and bloody spectacle under my hand and a murderess separated from me by only a single door. The wrought antique tapestry, the great cabinet whose twelve panels bore the heads of the apostles surmounted by an ebon crucifix and a dying Christ, took on with the flickering gleam now the brow of bearded Luke, now the long hair of St. John, now the devilish face of Judas growing out of its panel. Then my own thoughts worried me: what crime lived incarnate in this sequestered mansion, that broke out now in 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 now of a carrion-bird of prey? And how had this commonplace, quiet stranger become entangled in the web of horror? Why had the Fury flown at him? Why had Mr. Rochester smothered his guest's outrage, and his own near-murder, in secrecy? Mason was submissive to him, his impetuous will held complete sway over the other's inertness; and yet the mere name of Mason had fallen on my master, a few hours since, as a thunderbolt might fall on an oak. When will he come? I cried as the night lingered, and the blood-soaked patient drooped and moaned and sickened.

At last, with the first streaks of grey light at the curtains, Pilot's distant bark rose from the courtyard, and the grating key relieved my watch. Mr. Rochester entered with the surgeon, Carter; they had half an hour, he said, to dress the wound and get the patient downstairs and away. Carter undid the bandages and exclaimed at finding the shoulder torn as well as cut—there had been teeth here. She bit me, Mason murmured. She worried me like a tigress, when Rochester got the knife from her. Mr. Rochester answered that the man should have grappled with her at once, that he had warned him not to seek the interview alone. She sucked the blood; she said she'd drain my heart, Mason added; and a singularly marked expression of disgust, horror, hatred warped my master's countenance almost to distortion. Come, be silent, Richard, and never mind her gibberish; don't repeat it. I was sent for clean linen, then for a furred mantle from Mason's room, then for a phial of crimson cordial Mr. Rochester had got at Rome from an Italian charlatan—it is good upon occasion: as now, for instance; he measured twelve drops, mixed them with water, and bid Mason drink. The patient rose; supported by Carter and Mr. Rochester, he walked to the back-stair and out into the still yard, where the post-chaise stood ready. Take care of him, and keep him at your house till he is quite well, Mr. Rochester said to Carter. Richard, how is it with you? The fresh air revives me, Fairfax. As they handed him in, Mason burst into tears: Let her be taken care of; let her be treated as tenderly as may be: let her— I do my best; and have done it, and will do it, was the answer. The chaise drove away; Mr. Rochester closed and barred the heavy yard-gates. Yet would to God there was an end of all this! he muttered.

He led me out into the orchard, "where there is some freshness, for a few moments; that house is a mere dungeon." Down a walk edged with box and apple and pear and cherry, with a border of stocks and sweet-williams and primroses and pansies, he gathered me a half-blown rose. Will Grace Poole live here still, sir? Yes, but I was not to trouble my head about her. To live, for him, was to stand on a crater-crust which might crack and spue fire any day; he could not vouch for himself till Mason was out of England, and not even then; yet Mason, easily led, would never wilfully injure him—but might, by one unintentional careless word, deprive him for ever of happiness. He could not warn Mason, since to warn him would be to betray that harm was possible. He sat me beside him in an ivy-arch arbour and put a case to me: suppose I were a wild boy indulged from childhood, who in a remote foreign land had committed a capital error (not a crime, but an error) whose consequences must follow me through life; suppose that, after years of voluntary banishment in heartless pleasure, I came home and found in a stranger the good and bright qualities I had sought for twenty years, and felt myself revived and longed to recommence my life on a worthier course—was I justified in overleaping a mere conventional impediment to attach this gentle stranger forever to me, and so secure my own peace? I answered that a wanderer's repose or a sinner's reformation should never depend on a fellow-creature; let him look higher than his equals for strength to amend. But the instrument—the instrument! God ordains the instrument! I have myself 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; at last he looked up at me, his face suddenly losing all its softness 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 sprang up and walked away humming a tune; came back: Jane, when will you watch with me again? 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. She's a rare one, is she not, Jane? A strapper—a real strapper, Jane: big, brown, and buxom, with hair just such as the ladies of Carthage must have had. The Eshtons and the Lynns were now at the stables; he bid me go in by the shrubbery wicket while he himself went the other way, calling out cheerfully behind me: Mason got the start of you all this morning; he was gone before sunrise: I rose at four to see him off.

CHAPTER XXI

Presentiments are strange things, and so are sympathies and signs. I had been dreaming, for seven nights running, of an infant which I sometimes hushed in my arms, sometimes dandled on my knee, sometimes watched playing on a lawn; whatever its mood, the apparition came to meet me the moment I entered the land of slumber. It was from companionship with this baby-phantom that the moonlight cry had roused me. The afternoon following Mason's departure, I was summoned downstairs, where I found Robert Leaven of Gateshead, in deep mourning, with a crape band on his hat. His news was that Mr. John Reed had died at his chambers in London a week before, ruined and degraded—it was thought he had killed himself; that the news, falling on Mrs. Reed's already shattered health, had brought on a stroke; that for three days she had been speechless, but had at last begun to mumble for "Jane Eyre—I want to speak to her." Eliza and Georgiana had at first put off sending; their mother's restless cries had at last constrained them. Bessie was sure I would not refuse.

I went in search of Mr. Rochester to ask leave. He was in the billiard-room with Miss Ingram and the rest, in a sky-blue morning robe, irritated at the interruption: Does that person want you? But he came out and shut the schoolroom door behind him. What sick lady?—where? Mrs. Reed of Gateshead, the widow of my mother's brother. The deuce!—you always said you had no relations. None that would own me. He thought it nonsense to ride a hundred miles to see an old woman who would probably be dead before I arrived—and, besides, who had cast me off; but he yielded, and took my purse from me to pour my five shillings into his palm with a chuckle, then offered me fifty pounds as wages and finally, lest I should stay three months on so much, pared it down to ten. He bid me promise to come back; I gave the promise willingly. While I had the opportunity, I added another matter of business: I had as good as heard he was to be married, and Adèle ought therefore to go to school, and I must seek another situation. To get her out of my bride's way? There's sense in the suggestion. And you, of course, must march straight to the devil? He growled at the prospect of my advertising; I should walk up the pyramids of Egypt before he let me; he asked me to give him back nine pounds of his ten, and I refused him five shillings, and refused him five pence, and refused to let him so much as look at the cash. He extorted from me a promise to leave him to find me a place; I extorted from him a pledge that Adèle and I should both be safe out of the house before his bride entered. And how do people perform that ceremony of parting, Jane? Teach me; I'm not quite up to it. "Farewell, Mr. Rochester, for the present." It seemed stingy and dry and unfriendly to him, but the dinner-bell rang and away he bolted.

I reached the lodge at Gateshead about five on the first of May, and found Bessie nursing her last-born by her own clean hearth. Mrs. Reed was alive but lingering; the doctor thought she would not finally recover. From Bessie's parlour I walked up the same path I had walked down nearly nine years before, on a dark January morning, with a desperate and embittered heart; I came back now with a firmer trust in myself, and a healed wound, and the flame of resentment extinguished. In the breakfast-room sat my cousins. Eliza, very tall and sallow, severe in look, dressed in straight-skirted black with a string of ebony beads and a crucifix—ascetic as a nun; Georgiana, full-blown and voluptuous, fair as waxwork, with languishing blue eyes and ringleted yellow hair. Both addressed me as "Miss Eyre"; Eliza did not mortify me by her cold neglect, nor Georgiana ruffle me by her sniffing inspection of my drab merino pelisse and cottage bonnet. Their slights had no power over me now: I had felt sensations within the last few months so much more potent than any they could raise that their airs gave me no concern. How is Mrs. Reed? Georgiana coolly doubted I should see her tonight; Eliza said her mother disliked being disturbed. I went out, asked Bessie to ascertain whether my aunt would receive me, told the housekeeper to show me to a room, and prepared to stay till my aunt was better—or dead.

I went upstairs to the well-known chamber and softly opened the door. There was the great four-post bed with amber hangings as of old, the toilet-table, the armchair, the footstool at which I had a hundred times been sentenced to kneel; in a corner I half-expected the once-dreaded switch to lurk, ready to leap out and lace my quivering palm. It is a happy thing that time quells the longings of vengeance: I came back with no other emotion than a sort of ruth for her great sufferings, and a strong yearning to forget and forgive. I stooped down and kissed her. Is this Jane Eyre? Yes, Aunt Reed. I had once vowed never to call her aunt again; I thought it no sin to break the vow. Her hand lay outside the sheet; had she pressed mine, I should have felt true pleasure; she withdrew it. Her stony eye, opaque to tenderness and indissoluble to tears, told me that her opinion of me was unchanged and unchangeable: she was resolved to consider me bad to the last, because to believe me good would give her only a sense of mortification. I felt pain, then ire, then a determination to subdue her. I declared my intention to stay till I saw how she got on. She had had more trouble with that child, she rambled, than any one would believe; she had wished I had died at Lowood; she had hated my mother always—her husband's only sister, and his great favourite; he had opposed the family's disowning her when she made her low marriage, had wept like a simpleton at her death, and on his own deathbed had bound his wife by vow to keep the whining brat. John tormented her now with letters for money; the household income was halved by the interest on mortgages; she must shut up part of the house. The nurse persuaded her to a sedative; I left her.

For more than ten days she was either delirious or lethargic, and I got on as I could with my cousins. Eliza spoke little, kept a clockwork routine of Common Prayer thrice daily, gold-thread embroidery for a new church altar, kitchen-garden, accounts; she had settled her own fortune and would, on her mother's death, retire from the world to a nunnery. Georgiana lay on the sofa fretting at the dulness of the house and recounting day after day the brilliant winter she had spent in London two seasons ago and the titled conquest she had nearly made; she never adverted to her mother's illness, her brother's death, or the family's gloomy prospects. One morning, sketching to amuse myself, I drew without conscious intent a face that became, by happy touches, a faithful portrait of Mr. Rochester; I hid it under other sheets. Presently, when Eliza took up her embroidery, she suddenly delivered a cold, brutally lucid arraignment of her sister: more vain and absurd an animal had never cumbered the earth; Georgiana had no right to be born; Eliza would, after their mother's death, wash her hands of her, and would as soon leave her in the old world if the human race were swept away and they two stood alone, and betake herself to the new. Georgiana retorted that Eliza was the most selfish, heartless creature in existence, and reminded her of her old "trick" with Lord Edwin Vere. Feeling without judgment is a washy draught indeed; but judgment untempered by feeling is too bitter and husky a morsel for human deglutition.

One wet, windy afternoon Georgiana slept on the sofa and Eliza was at a saint's-day service; I bethought myself to go upstairs and see the dying woman. The fire was out, the nurse absent, the patient lay still in lethargy, her livid face sunk in the pillows. Pondering whither that struggling spirit would flit, I thought of Helen Burns and her doctrine of the equality of disembodied souls. Mrs. Reed murmured: Who is that? She knew me then for "like Jane Eyre," but doubted because in eight years I must be so changed; gently I assured her I was the person she had wished to see. I am very ill, I know. It was as well, she said, that she should ease her mind. 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 bid me go to her dressing-case and take out a letter. It was from one John Eyre of Madeira, dated three years back, asking for the address of his niece, intending to write and desire her to come to him at Madeira and be adopted as his heiress, since he was unmarried and childless. Why had I never heard of it? 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 unchildlike look and voice with which you affirmed that the very thought of me made you sick. I felt fear as if an animal that I had struck had looked up at me with human eyes and cursed me in a man's voice. She had taken her revenge: she had written to John Eyre that Jane Eyre was dead, had died of typhus 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. I begged her to think no more of it, to forgive me for my passionate child's language, to kiss me and be at peace; she pushed my cheek away and said I oppressed her by leaning over the bed. Love me, then, or hate me, as you will: you have my full and free forgiveness: ask now for God's, and be at peace. She gave no answer; living, she had ever hated me, dying, she must hate me still. At twelve o'clock that night she died, neither of her daughters present. The next morning, while Georgiana wept and dared not look, Eliza and I went to look at the corpse: stretched there, rigid and still, her eye of flint covered with its cold lid, her brow and strong traits wearing the impress of her inexorable soul. Eliza, after a silence, observed only that with such a constitution she should have lived to a good old age, and her life had been shortened by trouble. Neither of us had dropt a tear.

CHAPTER XXII

Mr. Rochester had given me but a week's leave; a month elapsed before I quitted Gateshead. Georgiana, dreading to be left alone with Eliza, kept me till her uncle Mr. Gibson came down to direct the interment and could carry her off to London; then it was Eliza's turn to keep me, while she bolted herself in her own room, filling trunks and burning papers. At last she set out for the Continent and a religious house near Lille, intending to study Roman doctrine and probably take the veil. Good-bye, cousin Jane Eyre; I wish you well: you have some sense. You are not without sense, cousin Eliza; but what you have, in another year, will be walled up alive in a French convent. Georgiana, I learned long after, made an advantageous match with a wealthy worn-out man of fashion; Eliza did take the veil, and was at the time of writing superior of her convent, which she endowed with her fortune.

I had never known what it was to return home from an absence: no magnet drew me, increasing in strength as I came nearer. The return to Thornfield was yet to be tried. I had heard from Mrs. Fairfax that the master had gone to London three weeks before to make arrangements for his wedding, and was expected back in a fortnight. I dreamt of Miss Ingram all the night before; in a vivid morning dream she was closing the gates of Thornfield against me and pointing me out another road, while Mr. Rochester looked on with folded arms, smiling sardonically. I gave Mrs. Fairfax no exact day of arrival, and slipped from the George Inn at Millcote at six on a soft June evening to walk the old field-road. I felt absurdly glad as I went, and chid myself: it was not my home, and I knew very well I was thinking of one who was not thinking of me. Hasten! be with him while you may; but a few more days or weeks, at most, and you are parted from him for ever! At the stile I was about to cross, there sat Mr. Rochester, a book and a pencil in his hand. Hillo! he cried. I came on. He pretended not to forgive me my month's absence. I have been with my aunt, sir, who is dead. A true Janian reply!—Truant! truant! He had been to London; he wished I would tell him whether I thought the new carriage would suit Mrs. Rochester exactly, whether she would not look like Queen Boadicea against those purple cushions; he wished he were better adapted to match with her externally. I said the magic to make him handsome was beyond my powers; 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. Pass, Janet, said he, making room for me to cross the stile, and stay your weary little wandering feet at a friend's threshold. I crossed in silence, but a force turned me round: 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. Adèle was half wild with delight; Mrs. Fairfax greeted me with her usual plain friendliness; Leah smiled, and even Sophie said bon soir with glee. A fortnight of dubious calm followed: nothing was said of the marriage, no preparation made for it. Mrs. Fairfax had once put the question and got a joke for an answer. There were no rides to Ingram Park; my master called me to him more often, was kinder than ever; never had I loved him so well.

CHAPTER XXIII

A splendid Midsummer shone over England; it was as if a band of Italian days had lighted to rest on the cliffs of Albion. On Midsummer Eve, having put Adèle to bed early, I sought the garden. The sun had gone down in solemn purple; the east kept a deep blue, with one rising star and a moon yet beneath the horizon. A subtle, well-known scent—Mr. Rochester's cigar—stole from the library casement; I went apart into the orchard, and was retreating along the laurel-walk when his footstep followed me down to the bench at the great horse-chestnut. Turn back: on so lovely a night it is a shame to sit in the house. I followed with a lagging step. Thornfield is a pleasant place in summer, is it not? You must have become in some degree attached to it; and to that foolish little Adèle, and even to simple dame Fairfax?—And would be sorry to part with them? Yes. Pity! he said, and sighed. It is always the way of events in this life: 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? Must I leave Thornfield? I believe you must, Jane. He intended to put his old bachelor's neck into the holy noose at last; I had myself, with my characteristic foresight, suggested that in such a case Adèle and I had better trot forthwith. I should advertise no more—he had heard, through his future mother-in-law, of a place that would suit me, with one Mrs. Dionysius O'Gall of Bitternutt Lodge in Connaught, Ireland; warm-hearted people there, they said. Was Ireland not far off? No matter—a girl of your sense will not object to the voyage or the distance. Not the voyage, but the distance; and the sea was a barrier from England, from Thornfield, from you, sir. The tears gushed out of me involuntarily.

We sat together at the foot of the chestnut. Are you anything akin to me, do you think, Jane? Because I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you—as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly knotted to a similar string in the corresponding quarter of your little frame; and if that boisterous Channel and two hundred miles of land come broad between us, I am afraid the cord of communion will be snapt, and I have a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly. I sobbed convulsively; I was shaken from head to foot. I did not grieve to leave Thornfield; I grieved because the thought of being torn from him for ever was like looking on the necessity of death. Where do you see the necessity? In the shape of Miss Ingram, his bride. My bride? What bride? I have no bride! He set his teeth: but I will! Then I must go, I cried, roused to passion: Do you think I can stay to become nothing to you? 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, gathering me to his breast and pressing his lips to mine, so, Jane! But I was incredulous: he was a married man, or as good as one; I knew he sneered at her; I would scorn such a union—let me go! He bid me be still as a wild frantic bird that was rending its own plumage. 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. I stood erect before him.

And your will shall decide your destiny. I offer you my hand, my heart, and a share of all my possessions. I would not believe him; I thought he played a farce; my bride stood between us. My bride is here, because my equal is here, and my likeness. Jane, will you marry me? Still I doubted. He had taken pains, he confessed, to make Miss Ingram give him up: he had caused a rumour to reach her that his fortune was not a third of what was supposed, and her flame had cooled in a moment. 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. I made him turn his face to the moonlight, and read his countenance: agitated and flushed, with strong workings in the features and strange gleams in the eyes. Edward—give me my name—Edward—I will marry you. Edward—my little wife! Make my happiness—I will make yours. Then, in a deeper tone, God pardon me, and man meddle not with me; I have her, and will hold her.

But what had befallen the night? The chestnut tree writhed and groaned; wind roared in the laurel walk. The rain rushed down; he hurried me up the walk and into the house, and stood in the hall taking off my shawl and shaking the water out of my loosened hair, when Mrs. Fairfax emerged from her room, pale, grave, and amazed. Hasten to take off your wet things; and good-night, my darling! He kissed me repeatedly; the widow stood there. I ran upstairs. The storm raged for two hours; Mr. Rochester came thrice to my door to ask if I was tranquil. 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.

CHAPTER XXIV

As I rose and dressed, I wondered if it had been a dream. In the glass my face was no longer plain: there was hope in its aspect and life in its colour. I ran downstairs to find a brilliant June morning, and gave away to a beggar-woman and her boy on the walk all the money I had—some three or four shillings; the rooks cawed and the birds sang, but nothing was so merry as my own rejoicing heart. Mrs. Fairfax surprised me by looking sad and grave at breakfast; she would have to wait for her explanation from the master. I found him in the schoolroom and was greeted with an embrace and a kiss; he called me a sunny-faced girl with hazel hair and hazel eyes (I had green eyes, reader; but for him they were new-dyed). Soon to be Jane Rochester—in four weeks, Janet, not a day more. He had written to his banker for jewels, heirlooms for the ladies of Thornfield, a diamond chain for my neck and rings for my fingers. Don't address me as if I were a beauty; I am your plain, Quakerish governess. He laughed at my deprecations, vowed he would dress me in satin and lace and a priceless veil, vowed he would make the world acknowledge me a beauty too. We should be married quietly in the church below, then he would waft me to town, and after a brief stay there to French vineyards and Italian plains—Paris, Rome, Naples, Florence, Venice, Vienna—all the ground he had wandered ten years since with disgust and hate as his companions, now to be re-trodden with a very angel as his comforter. I am not an angel; and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself. For a little while, I told him, he would be as he was now; then he would turn cool, then capricious, then stern; his ardour would effervesce in six months. Distasteful, Jane! I shall make you confess I do not only like, but love you—with truth, fervour, constancy.

I asked him to spare me the jewels and the roses—he might as well gild refined gold. Then I asked him to gratify my curiosity on one piqued point: why had he taken such pains to make me believe he wished to marry Miss Ingram? 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. It was a burning shame and a scandalous disgrace, I told him, and now he was small as the end of my finger; did he think nothing of Miss Ingram's feelings? Her feelings are concentrated in one—pride; and that needs humbling. Besides, the mere idea of his insolvency had instantly extinguished her flame. Could I, then, enjoy this great good without fearing that another was suffering the bitter pain I had felt? I might. I asked him to make my engagement known to Mrs. Fairfax at once, who had been shocked the night before; he went to enlighten her while I prepared for a drive to Millcote. Mrs. Fairfax received me, after his explanation, with a quiet astonishment which never quite warmed into joy: she had always noticed I was a sort of pet of his, and had been a little uneasy at his marked preference, and feared I should remember that gentlemen in his station were not accustomed to marry their governesses. I hurried away from my gloomy monitress, glad when Adèle ran in begging to come.

In the carriage Mr. Rochester told the spoilt child that he was going to take Mademoiselle to the moon, and seek a cave in one of the white valleys among the volcano-tops, where mademoiselle should live with him and only him; he would gather manna for her morning and night. Adèle was a French sceptic and made nothing of his contes de fée. At the silk warehouse he insisted I should choose half a dozen dresses; by entreaty I reduced them to two; he chose for me a brilliant amethyst silk and a superb pink satin, and only by infinite labour was I persuaded to substitute a sober black satin and pearl-grey silk. The more he bought, the more my cheek burned with annoyance and degradation; on the way back I remembered, in the hurry of events, the letter of my uncle John Eyre to Mrs. Reed—his intention to make me his legatee. It would be a relief, I thought, to bring Mr. Rochester some small accession of fortune of my own; I would write to Madeira at once. 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? Your regard; and if I give you mine in return, that debt will be quit.

I refused to dine with him; I would go on as usual through the month, and see him only in the evening when he sent. In the evening, I had prepared an occupation for him: I would not spend the time in tête-à-tête. I knew he sang well; I asked him for a song. He said I was a capricious witch, but went to the piano, accompanying himself, and sang a love-song of his own—how a love had placed her little hand with noble faith in his and vowed wedlock's sacred band, and how he had at last his nameless bliss, As I love—loved am I! I asked him with asperity, before he could rise to embrace me, whom he was going to marry now: he had spoken of his future wife dying with him; I had no intention of dying with him. Soft scene, daring demonstration, I would not have. I would tease and vex him whenever the courtship grew too soft, and so I did all that month: the needle of repartee should keep him from the edge of the gulf. He was kept rather cross and crusty, but excellently entertained; for caresses I now got grimaces, for a kiss a tweak of the ear; Mrs. Fairfax was easier in her mind, and I knew I did well. Yet the task was not easy, and often I would rather have pleased than teased him, for 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.

CHAPTER XXV

The month of courtship had wasted: its very last hours were being numbered. My trunks stood packed and corded along the wall; the cards of address—Mrs. Rochester, —— Hotel, London, in Mr. Rochester's hand—lay in a drawer, and I could not persuade myself to affix them. Mrs. Rochester did not exist; she would not be born till tomorrow morning, some time after eight o'clock. In the closet hung the wraith-like wedding dress and veil, which gave a ghostly shimmer through the shadows of my apartment. I will leave you by yourself, white dream. It was not only the hurry of preparation and the new life that made me feverish: a third cause had its share. Something had happened the previous night that I could not comprehend. Mr. Rochester was absent on business at a small estate of his thirty miles off and was not yet returned. I sought the orchard, where the south wind ran through with a rush and a roar; I faced the wreck of the chestnut tree, split down the centre, the cloven halves still held together at the firm root, though their community of vitality was destroyed. You did right to hold fast to each other, I said to it: scathed as you look, charred and scorched, there must be a little sense of life in you yet, rising out of that adhesion at the faithful, honest roots. I gathered apples, took them to the storeroom, set the library in readiness for him, and at last, unable to sit still, ran out to the gates, where the road was empty under the scudding clouds. He came at last on Mesrour, with Pilot at his side; I sprang up to him before the saddle.

I made my confession indoors. The night before, I had been kept awake by anxious excitement while the wind muffled some mournful sound that rose and fell. In sleep I had dreamt I followed an unknown road in total obscurity, burdened with a wailing little child too small to walk, while he—Mr. Rochester—was on the road far before me, and I strained every nerve to overtake him and could neither catch up nor utter his name. Then I dreamt Thornfield Hall was a dreary ruin, the retreat of bats and owls, of which only a thin and fragile shell-like wall remained; I climbed it, with the unknown child still in my arms, to catch one last glimpse of him riding away on the white track to a distant country; the wall crumbled under me, the child rolled from my knee, I lost my balance, fell, and woke. Now, Jane, that is all. All the preface, sir. I told him the rest: how on waking by a candlelight I supposed Sophie's, I had seen a form emerge from the closet where my wedding-dress and veil hung—not Sophie, not Leah, not Mrs. Fairfax, not Grace Poole; a tall, large woman with thick dark hair hanging long down her back, a white straight garment of gown or sheet or shroud; how she had taken my veil from its place, held it up, then thrown it over her own head and turned to the mirror, where I had seen her visage in the dark oblong glass: it was a discoloured face—it was a savage face; the lips swelled and dark, the brow furrowed, the bloodshot eyes rolling under widely raised black eyebrows; it had reminded me of the foul German spectre, the Vampyre. She had rent the veil in two and trampled both halves on the floor, then had advanced to my bedside, thrust the candle close to my face, and extinguished it under my eyes; for the second time in my life I had become insensible from terror.

He insisted, holding me close, that it was the creature of an over-stimulated brain: I had been over-fatigued, nerves like mine were not made for rough handling. But, sir, the veil was on the floor in the morning, torn from top to bottom in two halves. He started and shuddered at that: Thank God that if anything malignant did come near you last night, it was only the veil that was harmed! Then he resumed his account: it had been half dream, half reality. A woman did, he doubted not, enter my room: and that woman was—must have been—Grace Poole. From all I knew of her, I had reason to call her a strange being; what had she done to him, what to Mason? Feverish and almost delirious, I had ascribed to her a goblin appearance not her own—the long dishevelled hair, the swelled black face, the exaggerated stature—but the spiteful tearing of the veil was real, and like her. I should know in a year and a day why he kept her in his house; not now. Was I satisfied with his solution? It seemed the only possible one; I was not satisfied, but I appeared so, to please him. I should sleep with little Adèle in the nursery and bolt the door on the inside; nervousness was no wonder after such an incident. The wind had fallen; half heaven was pure and stainless; the moon shone peacefully. And you will not dream of separation and sorrow tonight, but of happy love and blissful union. The prediction was but half fulfilled: I did not 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 and waited for the coming day; when the sun rose, I rose too. I kissed Adèle; she clung to me; she seemed the emblem of my past life, and he, whom I was now to array myself to meet, the dread but adored type of my unknown future day.

CHAPTER XXVI

Sophie was very long in dressing me; so long that Mr. Rochester sent up to know why I tarried. She was just fastening the plain square of blond, after all, to my hair with a brooch when I hurried from under her hands. He met me at the foot of the stairs, surveyed me keenly, called me fair as a lily, and not only the pride of his life but the desire of his eyes, gave me ten minutes for breakfast, sent the footman to the church to see whether Mr. Wood was in the vestry, and ordered John to have the carriage ready the instant we returned. There were no groomsmen, no bridesmaids, no relatives to wait for: none but Mr. Rochester and I. I was hurried along by a stride I could hardly follow, by a grasp of iron; I wonder what other bridegroom ever looked as he did, so bent up to a purpose, so grimly resolute, with such steadfast brows and flaming eyes. At the churchyard wicket I noticed two strangers straying among the green grave-mounds, who passed round to the back of the church as we approached, and entered before us by the side aisle.

The priest waited at the lowly altar in his white surplice; the clerk beside him; the strangers stood by the vault of the Rochesters in a remote corner. The service began; the explanation of the intent of matrimony was gone through; the clergyman bent forward and pronounced the formula—if either of you know any impediment, ye do now confess it—and paused, as the custom is, when a distinct and near voice said, The marriage cannot go on: I declare the existence of an impediment. Mr. Rochester moved as if an earthquake had rolled under his feet, but stood firm: Proceed. The clergyman could not, the speaker said, since the impediment was insuperable—it simply consists in the existence of a previous marriage. Mr. Rochester has a wife now living. My nerves vibrated to those low words as they had never vibrated to thunder. I looked at Mr. Rochester; I made him look at me; his whole face was colourless rock, his eye both spark and flint; he twined my waist with his arm and riveted me to his side. The speaker named himself a Mr. Briggs, solicitor of London, and read out an affirmation that on a date fifteen years past, Edward Fairfax Rochester of Thornfield Hall and of Ferndean Manor had been married to Bertha Antoinetta Mason at a church in Spanish Town, Jamaica. The witness to the present existence of the lady, said the lawyer, was here on the spot. Produce him—or go to hell. A pale face looked over the solicitor's shoulder: it was Mason himself. Mr. Rochester turned and glared at him; his black eye took on a tawny, bloody light, and his cheek flushed with ascending heart-fire; he stirred and lifted his strong arm—but Mason cried Good God! and contempt fell cool on him. What have you to say? Mason's articulate reply was: She is now living at Thornfield Hall; I saw her there last April. I am her brother.

For ten minutes Mr. Rochester held counsel with himself; then announced his resolve. Wood, close your book and take off your surplice; there will be no wedding to-day. 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. The lawyer and his client, he confessed, were right: he had been married, and the woman to whom he was married still lived. It was the mysterious lunatic kept under watch and ward in his house: not, as some had whispered to Mr. Wood, his bastard half-sister or cast-off mistress, but Bertha Mason, his wife of fifteen years, a woman who came of three generations of mad idiots and maniacs, whose mother was both madwoman and drunkard, whose daughter had copied her parent in both points—and whom he had been cheated into espousing while ignorant of all family secrets. 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 dreamt she was going to be entrapped into a feigned union with a defrauded wretch, already bound to a bad, mad, and embruted partner. He invited Briggs, Wood, and Mason to come up to the house and visit Mrs. Poole's patient, his wife.

Still holding me fast, he led the gentlemen up to the third storey and the tapestried room, and through the second door behind the hangings to a windowless inner cell. There, while Grace Poole bent over a fire stirring a saucepan, a figure ran backwards and forwards in the deep shade at the farther end of the room—on all fours, snatching and growling like a strange wild animal, covered with clothing and a quantity of dark grizzled hair wild as a mane. Good-morrow, Mrs. Poole. How is your charge to-day? Rather snappish, but not 'rageous, sir. The clothed hyena rose tall on its hind feet, parted its locks from its visage, and gazed wildly at her visitors: I recognised the purple face, the bloated features. The maniac flew at Mr. Rochester's throat; in stature she almost equalled him, and was corpulent besides, and in the contest she more than once almost throttled him. He could have settled her with a well-planted blow, but would not strike: he wrestled her down, and bound her arms behind her with a cord, and bound her to a chair amidst her fiercest yells and convulsive plunges. That is my wife. Such is the sole conjugal embrace I am ever to know—such are the endearments which are to solace my leisure hours! And this (laying his hand on my shoulder) is what I wished to have: this young girl, who stands so grave and quiet at the mouth of hell, looking collectedly at the gambols of a demon. Compare these clear eyes with the red balls yonder—this face with that mask—then judge me, priest of the gospel and man of the law, and remember with what judgment ye judge ye shall be judged!

The solicitor told me as we descended the stair that I was cleared from all blame; my uncle would be glad to hear it. My uncle? Mr. Eyre had been the Funchal correspondent of Mason's house for years; on receiving my letter announcing my contemplated marriage, he had spoken of it to Mason, who happened to be at Madeira recruiting his health on the way back to Jamaica; Mason had been astonished and distressed, and had revealed the truth. My uncle was now on a sick bed, in a decline from which he was unlikely to rise; Briggs thought I had better remain in England till I heard further from or of Mr. Eyre. The intruders were gone, the clergyman after them. I withdrew to my room, fastened the bolt, took off the wedding dress, and replaced it by the stuff gown I had worn yesterday for what I had thought the last time. I leaned my arms on a table and my head dropped on them. And now I thought.

Where was the Jane Eyre of yesterday? Jane Eyre, who had been an ardent expectant woman—almost a bride—was a cold solitary girl again; her life pale, her prospects desolate. A Christmas frost had come at midsummer; a white December storm had whirled over June; ice glazed the ripe apples; on hayfield and cornfield lay a frozen shroud; the woods which yesterday waved leafy as groves between the tropics now spread waste and white as pine-forests in wintry Norway. My hopes were all dead, struck with a subtle doom such as in one night fell on all the first-born in the land of Egypt. I looked at my love: it shivered in my heart like a suffering child in a cold cradle; faith was blighted; confidence destroyed; Mr. Rochester was not what I had thought him; from his presence I must go—that I perceived well. I lay faint, longing to be dead. One unuttered prayer wandered up and down in my rayless mind: Be not far from me, for trouble is near; there is none to help. The full heavy swing of the torrent poured over me. The waters came into my soul; I sank in deep mire; I felt no standing; the floods overflowed me.

CHAPTER XXVII

Some time in the afternoon I raised my head and asked, What am I to do? The answer my mind gave—Leave Thornfield at once—was so prompt and so dread that I stopped my ears. That I was not Edward Rochester's bride was the least part of my woe; I could bear the wakening from glorious dreams; but to leave him decidedly, instantly, entirely was intolerable. Yet a voice within averred I could and should. Conscience, turned tyrant, held Passion by the throat: you shall pluck out your own right eye; you shall cut off your own right hand; your heart shall be the victim, and you the priest to transfix it. I rose, sickening from excitement and inanition, and undrew the bolt. Across the threshold sat Mr. Rochester; his outstretched arm caught me as I stumbled. You come out at last, he said. He had been waiting, listening; five minutes more of that death-like hush, and he would have forced the lock like a burglar. He had expected reproaches, vehemence, a hot rain of tears; he was met only by white cheek and silence. If the man who had but one little ewe lamb that was dear to him as a daughter 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; only at my heart's core, not in words. He bore me down to the library, set wine to my lips, and watched me revive.

He thought I shrank from his kiss because I considered him still the husband of Bertha Mason and his arms appropriated; he saw I was scheming to make myself a complete stranger to him, to live under his roof only as Adèle's governess. Adèle will go to school—I have settled that already; nor do I mean to torment you with the hideous associations of Thornfield Hall—this accursed place—this tent of Achan—this insolent vault, offering the ghastliness of living death to the light of the open sky. I should not stay here, nor would he. He would shut up Thornfield and pay Mrs. Poole two hundred a year to stay with his wife, with her son the keeper at Grimsby Retreat to bear her company in the paroxysms when his wife was prompted by her familiar to burn people in their beds at night. I broke in on his vindictive antipathy: she could not help being mad. It is not because she is mad I hate her. If you were mad, do you think I should hate you? He would prove it, were I mad: every atom of my flesh would still be dear to him; my mind would be his treasure if it were broken; he should not shrink from me as he had from her. He had a place to repair to, he said, a secure sanctuary. Take Adèle with you, sir—she will be a companion. He cried out at the idea. You are to share my solitude. Do you understand? I shook my head. He raged about the room and stopped before me: Jane! will you hear reason? because, if you won't, I'll try violence. I felt an inward power supporting me; the crisis was perilous but had its charm, like the rapid in the Indian's canoe. I took hold of his clenched hand, loosened the contorted fingers, and bade him sit down and talk; then I gave way and cried heartily, since my tears might pain him.

When he was calmer, I told him I must leave Adèle and Thornfield, must part with him for my whole life. He meant only that I should become a part of him—he would yet be my husband; he was not married; I should be Mrs. Rochester both virtually and nominally; he had a place in the south of France, a whitewashed villa on the shores of the Mediterranean, where I should live a happy, guarded, innocent life. 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. He had not yet told me, he saw, the real state of the case; let me listen for a few minutes.

He gave me, then, the history I have already given to the reader: how his avaricious father, refusing to divide the estate, had sent him to Jamaica at one-and-twenty to wed a tall, dark, majestic Bertha Mason for her thirty thousand pounds; how he had been dazzled, married almost before he knew where he was; how, the honeymoon over, he had learned that her mother (who, he had been told, was dead) was a madwoman shut up in a lunatic asylum, that her younger brother was a complete dumb idiot, that his own father and brother Rowland had known and joined in the plot against him for the sake of the money. He had lived with her four years: her vices sprang up fast and rank; only cruelty could check them, and he would not use cruelty. At twenty-six, after his brother's death and his father's, he was rich enough but hopelessly poor: a nature the most gross and depraved he had ever seen was associated with his and called by law his wife, and the doctors had then discovered that her excesses had developed the germs of insanity, so he could not even rid himself of her by legal proceedings. One West Indian night, the air like sulphur, the maniac shrieking out his name with demon-hate from her cell—no professed harlot ever had a fouler vocabulary—he had thought to break away and go home to God, and knelt at a trunk that contained loaded pistols. But a wind fresh from Europe blew over the ocean, the storm broke, the air grew pure; while he walked under the dripping orange-trees of his wet garden, he framed and fixed a resolution. Hope said: Go and live again in Europe; take the maniac with you to England and confine her with attendance and precautions at Thornfield; that woman is not your wife, nor are you her husband.

To England, then, he conveyed her, and lodged her in the third-storey room with Grace Poole, hired from the Grimsby Retreat as keeper; only Grace and the surgeon Carter knew the secret. He himself had transformed into a will-o'-the-wisp and pursued the Continent like the March-spirit, seeking and never finding a woman whom he could love—a contrast to the fury he had left at Thornfield. He had tried mistresses: Céline; an Italian, Giacinta; a German, Clara; and learned that hiring a mistress was the next worst thing to buying a slave, both inferior by position, both degrading to live with. I now hate the recollection of the time I passed with Céline, Giacinta, and Clara. I drew from these words the certain inference, which I impressed on my heart for the time of trial, that if I were so far to forget myself as to become his fourth such "successor" he would one day regard me with the same desecration. Last January he had come back to England in a harsh bitter frame, sourly disposed against all womankind—and on a stile in Hay Lane he had passed a quiet little figure whom he had no presentiment would be the arbitress of his life, his genius for good or evil. From the day he had pressed my frail shoulder, something new—a fresh sap and sense—had stolen into his frame. He had observed me unseen the next day in the gallery; he had summoned me each evening; he had been at first an intellectual epicure, prolonging the gratification of the new acquaintance. Now, after a youth and manhood passed half in unutterable misery and half in dreary solitude, he had for the first time found what he could truly love: I was his sympathy, his better self, his good angel. To tell me that I had already a wife is empty mockery: you know now that I had but a hideous demon. He should have appealed to my nobleness at first; he did so now. Jane—give me your pledge of fidelity—give it me now.

A pause. Why are you silent, Jane? I was experiencing an ordeal: a hand of fiery iron grasped my vitals. 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! Mr. Rochester, I will not be yours. Did I mean it now? I did. Did I now? I did. Oh Jane, this is bitter!—This—this is wicked. It would not be wicked to love me. It would to obey you. He laid out for me his desolation: for a wife he had but the maniac upstairs—as well refer him to some corpse in the churchyard—where should he 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. My very conscience and reason turned traitors against me and charged me with crime in resisting him: I had no relatives whom I need fear to offend by living with him; who would be injured? 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 rigour; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be. If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth?

He saw I had so resolved. His fury rose; he seized my arm and waist; physically I felt as stubble in a furnace; mentally I still possessed my soul. Never, he ground his teeth, was anything at once so frail and so indomitable. Consider that eye: consider the resolute, wild, free thing looking out of it. Whatever I do with its cage, I cannot get at it. 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. Released from his grasp, I retired to the door. You are going? You will not be my comforter, my rescuer? My deep love, my wild woe, my frantic prayer, are all nothing to you? How hard it was to reiterate firmly, I am going. He sank with his face on the sofa. Oh, Jane! my hope—my love—my life! broke in anguish from his lips. I had already gained the door; but, reader, I walked back as determinedly as I had retreated; I knelt, kissed his cheek, smoothed his hair: God bless you, my dear master. Up the blood rushed to his face, the fire flashed from his eyes; he sprang erect and held out his arms. I evaded the embrace and quitted the room. Farewell! was the cry of my heart as I left him. Despair added, Farewell for ever!

That night I dreamt I was in the red-room at Gateshead, and the gleam that had once struck me into syncope burst forth as never moon yet from cloud: a hand penetrated the sable folds, and a white human form shone in the azure, inclining a glorious brow earthward, and a voice spoke to my spirit: My daughter, flee temptation. Mother, I will. Soon after midnight I rose, dressed in my stuff gown, made up linen and a locket and a ring in a parcel (leaving the pearl necklace Mr. Rochester had forced on me, for that was not mine but the visionary bride's), put my purse with twenty shillings—all I had—in my pocket, and stole from my room. Farewell, kind Mrs. Fairfax. Farewell, my darling Adèle. 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. He was walking restlessly from wall to wall and sighing. There was a heaven, a temporary heaven, in this room for me, if I chose: I had but to go in and to 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. My hand moved towards the lock; I caught it back, and glided on. Drearily I wound my way downstairs, found the side-door key in the kitchen, oiled the key and the lock with a feather, took some bread and water, opened and shut the door softly, and passed through the wicket of the great gate. I was out of Thornfield. A road I had never travelled stretched away in a direction contrary to Millcote; thither I bent my steps. I thought of him in his room watching the sunrise, hoping I should soon come; the fear of his self-abandonment, far worse than my own, was a barbed arrow in my breast. I fell on my face on the wet turf with hope—or fear—that I should die there. Reaching the road at last, I caught a coach that named a place a long way off, and gave my twenty shillings for as far as the driver would take me. Gentle reader, may you never feel what I then felt.

CHAPTER XXVIII

Two days are passed. It is a summer evening; the coachman has set me down at a place called Whitcross, which is no town nor even a hamlet but a stone pillar set up where four roads meet, ten miles from one town and twenty from another, in a north-midland shire of dusk moor and ridged mountain. With great moors behind and on every hand of me, I am alone; and—having forgotten my parcel in the pocket of the coach—absolutely destitute. Strangers, were any to pass, would only wonder what I am doing lingering here; not a tie holds me to human society. I have no relative but the universal mother, Nature: I will seek her breast and ask repose. I struck into the heath, found a moss-blackened crag, and lay down beside it, with high banks of moor about me and the sky over my head. I had one morsel of bread in my pocket, the remnant of a roll bought with my last penny in some town we had passed; I gathered ripe bilberries gleaming like jet beads in the heath and ate them with the bread—a hermit's meal—said my evening prayers, and tried to sleep. My rest was broken by a sad heart that pained for Mr. Rochester and his doom, demanded him with ceaseless longing, and quivered its shattered pinions in vain attempts to seek him. Worn out with the torture of thought, I rose to my knees to pray for him, and looked up at the unclouded Milky-way; remembering what countless systems swept space like a soft trace of light, I felt the might of God and the certainty of His efficiency to save what He had made. My prayer turned to thanksgiving: Mr. Rochester was God's, and by God would he be guarded.

Next day, Want came to me pale and bare. I would fain have become bee or lizard for the moor's permanent shelter, but I was a human being and had a human being's wants. I set out, regained Whitcross, took a road that led from the sun, and walked till the sound of a church bell drew me to a hamlet in romantic hills. I begged employment, not bread, of a baker's wife (whose dressmakers were too many); of a young woman at a pretty cottage (who shook her head); of an old housekeeper at the parsonage (the minister was away three miles at Marsh End, attending the death of his father). I tried to barter my silk handkerchief and my gloves for half a cake of bread, but neither would the woman take. Once, at a farmer's open door, I begged a piece of bread, and the farmer—taking me, I imagine, for an eccentric lady who fancied his brown loaf—cut me a thick slice without speaking. I slept in a wood; the next day was wet and I starved again, save for a mess of cold porridge a child was about to throw into a pig-trough and her mother bid her give it me. Towards evening, in a solitary bridle-path, my strength failing, I turned to the moorland, preferring death there to a workhouse coffin and a pauper's grave. As I sank down at the moor-edge, a light sprang up far in among the marshes and the ridges. I rose; I dragged my exhausted limbs through bog towards it; it led me to a low wall, a wicket guarded by holly or yew, and the silhouette of a long, low, black house. From the lozenged panes of a small lattice within a foot of the ground I could see, by candle-light, all within: a clean kitchen with sanded floor and pewter plates and walnut dresser; an elderly rough-looking woman knitting by the hearth; and two young, graceful women in deep mourning of crape and bombazeen sitting one in a low rocking-chair and one on a stool, both bent over books, with a great pointer at one's knee and a black cat in the other's lap.

They were translating German—Schiller, as I afterwards learned—Da trat hervor Einer, anzusehen wie die Sternen Nacht; one of them, the dark-eyed Diana, called the line worth a hundred pages of fustian. The old servant, Hannah, asked when "Mr. St. John" should come home; the talk turned to the empty parlour chair and the recent death of their father, the last o' the old stock. I knocked. Hannah opened, surveyed me with the very distrust I had dreaded, and refused me shelter—I might have a piece of bread, but no lodging; I was "not what I ought to be" or I would not make such a noise; she had a gentleman, dogs, and guns within. She bolted the door upon me. A pang of exquisite suffering, a throe of true despair, rent and heaved my heart. I sank on the wet doorstep. I can but die, and I believe in God. Let me try to wait His will in silence. A voice quite close at hand answered: All men must die; but all are not condemned to meet a lingering and premature doom, such as yours would be if you perished here of want. A new-comer knocked loudly at the door; Hannah hailed him as Mr. St. John, scolding the beggar-woman as he entered; he checked her: 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 led into the bright kitchen, dropped into a chair, sustained by Diana with bread dipped in milk; Mary lifted my head and removed my sodden bonnet. Asked my name, I gave the alias Jane Elliott; I would say nothing of where or whom I had come from, save that I was friendless and homeless. Diana's compassionate gaze—a face instinct both with power and goodness—gave me sudden courage: If I were a masterless and stray dog, I know that you would not turn me from your hearth to-night. Hannah was bid to give me the rest of the milk and bread, and the sisters and brother retired to the parlour to confer. Soon a warm bed received me. I thanked God, and slept.

CHAPTER XXIX

The recollection of three days and nights succeeding this is dim. I lay on a narrow bed motionless as a stone. I knew Hannah came in often—I felt she did not understand my circumstances and was prejudiced against me—and that Diana and Mary came once or twice a day, whispering at my bedside that they were glad they had taken me in, that I was clearly not uneducated, that despite my fleshless and haggard countenance my physiognomy might be agreeable in good health. Mr. St. John came but once: he pronounced my state of lethargy a result of reaction from excessive fatigue, said no doctor was needed and nature must be left alone. Rather an unusual physiognomy; certainly, not indicative of vulgarity or degradation, he allowed; though 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 dressed myself in my own things, which had been cleaned and dried for me, and crept downstairs to the kitchen.

Hannah, baking, was at first cold and stiff, then began to relent. She asked me bluntly whether I had ever gone a-begging before I came; I answered that I was no beggar, any more than herself or her young ladies; that the want of house or brass did not make a beggar in any decent sense. I had been at boarding-school eight years, I told her; book-learned, very. By degrees I won the truth from her about the house. It was Marsh End, or Moor House, the Rivers' family seat for as long as it had been a house, two hundred years old; the gentleman lived in his own parsonage at Morton; old Mr. Rivers was three weeks dead of a stroke; the mother had been long dead; Hannah herself had nursed all three children. The old master, she said, had been stark mad o' shooting and farming; the mistress had been a great reader, and the bairns had taken after her—nothing like them in these parts. Old Mr. Rivers had years ago lost a great deal of money by a man he had trusted who turned bankrupt, so his daughters—Diana and Mary—had been obliged to seek places as governesses among wealthy and haughty strangers in the south. I rebuked Hannah for the harshness of having shut a Christian out into the night; I told her some of the best people that ever lived had been as destitute as I was, and if she was a Christian she ought not to consider poverty a crime. No more I ought, she said; Mr. St. John tells me so too; and we shook hands and were friends.

That afternoon the sisters returned from Morton with their brother and stopped to greet me. Diana, with eyes whose gaze I delighted to encounter and a voice toned like the cooing of a dove, took my hand and led me into the parlour; she had a will, and it was my nature to feel pleasure in yielding to one supported by so much goodness. Mary was equally intelligent, more reserved, more distant. I had time, while St. John sat opposite reading, to study his face: tall, slender, with a Greek-pure outline, a straight classic nose, an Athenian mouth and chin, large blue eyes with brown lashes, an ivory forehead streaked with careless fair hair. Yet the nostril, the mouth, the brow indicated something restless or hard or eager beneath the gentle delineation. He demanded of me, presently and without ceremony, who I was, where I had come from, whether I was married. I gave him only the alias; refused to say where I had last lived; admitted I was completely isolated from every connection. I told him the bare facts I could tell: that I was an orphan, daughter of a clergyman, brought up at Lowood Orphan Asylum (whose treasurer, the Rev. Robert Brocklehurst, he had heard of); that I had left Lowood a year since to be a private governess and had been happy in the place until I had been obliged to leave it four days before; that the reason I could not and ought not to explain, but that no blame attached to me. Diana protected my reserve with her warmth: Indeed you shall stay here, she said, putting her white hand on my head; you shall, repeated Mary; and St. John promised, in his cooler way, to put me in the way of keeping myself, in his own time and way. I would be a dressmaker, a plain-workwoman, a servant, a nurse-girl, if I could be no better.

CHAPTER XXX

The more I knew of the inmates of Moor House, the better I liked them. In a few days I could sit up all day, walk out, share Diana and Mary's occupations, and drink the new pleasure of perfect congeniality of tastes, sentiments, and principles. I loved their sequestered home—the small grey antique grange under its avenue of aged firs, its garden dark with yew and holly; I loved the purple moors behind and around it, the hollow vale into which the bridle-path descended, the wildest pasture-fields with their grey moorland sheep and mossy-faced lambs. The strong blast and the soft breeze, the moonlight and the clouded night developed in these regions for me the same attraction as for them, and wound round my faculties the same spell that entranced theirs. Indoors we agreed equally well: they were both more accomplished and better read than I was, but with eagerness I followed them into the path of knowledge they had trodden, devoured the books they lent me, and discussed in the evening what I had read by day. Diana, the leader, the handsome and the vigorous, offered to teach me German; Mary, gentler and more docile, took drawing lessons of me. Our natures dovetailed; mutual affection of the strongest kind was the result.

As to St. John, the intimacy did not extend to him. He was much from home, devoted to visiting the sick and poor of his scattered parish in all weathers, declaring he would not let a gust of wind or a sprinkling of rain turn him aside from such easy tasks, lest such sloth ill prepared him for the future he proposed to himself. He was reserved and brooding; though zealous and blameless in his life, he did not enjoy the inward content that should be the reward of every sincere Christian. Often, of an evening, when his desk and papers were before him, he would cease writing and rest his chin on his hand and yield himself to perturbed thought. Nature was not to him the treasury of delight she was to his sisters. I gauged his mind first when I heard him preach in his church at Morton: an earnestly felt yet strictly restrained zeal compressed and condensed itself into thrilling power, but throughout there was a strange bitterness, an absence of consolatory gentleness, with stern allusions to election, predestination, reprobation falling like sentences of doom. I was sure St. John Rivers, pure-lived and conscientious as he was, had not yet found that peace of God which passeth all understanding, no more than I had found it with my concealed and racking regrets for my broken idol and lost elysium.

A month was gone. Diana and Mary were soon to return to their fashionable city and the cold employer-families that valued only their accomplishments, as a cook's skill or a waiting-woman's taste are valued. I asked St. John about the employment he had promised, and he confessed it was poor and trivial. He himself, when his father's debts were paid, would have nothing but the crumbling grange and a patch of moorish soil; he was poor and obscure, and would consider no service degrading that bettered the race. Morton, when he had come to it two years ago, had no school; he had established one for boys; he meant now to open a second for girls, in a hired building with a cottage of two rooms attached for the mistress's house. The salary was thirty pounds a year; the house had been simply furnished by Miss Oliver, the only daughter of Mr. Oliver, the rich proprietor of the needle-factory and iron-foundry in the valley. Would I be the mistress? My scholars would be only poor girls—cottagers' children, at best farmers' daughters; knitting, sewing, reading, writing, ciphering would be all I could teach them. What would I do with my accomplishments and the largest portion of my mind, my sentiments, my tastes? Save them till they are wanted. They will keep. He was deeply gratified by my acceptance. It was a sheltered, plodding, but independent vocation, far better than the iron-cold "fear of servitude with strangers" that had entered my soul.

He told me, too, that he himself meant to leave Morton in the course of a twelve-month. He was no more meant for the narrow and narrowing office of an English country incumbent than I for permanent country teaching. There was an alloy in my nature, he said, as detrimental to repose as the alloy in his, though of a different kind; he was ambitious and impassioned, and his propensities and principles must be reconciled by some means. Diana, on the eve of parting from her brother for what she suspected might be years—or for life—murmured to me that he hid a fever in his vitals; he looked quiet, but in some things he was inexorable as death; he would sacrifice to his long-framed resolves natural affection and feelings still more potent. Just then St. John passed the window with a letter; he entered, said, Our uncle John is dead, and threw the letter into Diana's lap. The sisters and brother all three smiled a dreary, pensive smile. Diana later explained: their mother's brother, with whom their father had quarrelled long ago over a ruinous speculation, had died unmarried, leaving twenty thousand pounds. Mary and Diana would have esteemed themselves rich with a thousand pounds each, and a larger sum would have been valuable to St. John for the good it would have enabled him to do; but every penny had gone to one other relation, with only thirty guineas left to be divided among themselves for three mourning rings. The next day I left Marsh End for Morton; the day after, Diana and Mary quitted it for distant B——; in a week St. John and Hannah went to the parsonage, and the old grange was abandoned.

CHAPTER XXXI

My home, then, when I at last find a home, is a cottage—a little room with whitewashed walls and a sanded floor, four painted chairs and a table, a clock and a cupboard with a few delf plates; above, a chamber of the same dimensions with a deal bedstead and chest of drawers. It is evening; the school had opened that morning with twenty scholars, only three of whom could read, none write or cipher; their broadest district accent and my speech are not yet the same language; some are unmannered and rough, others docile and quick. I must not forget that these coarsely-clad little peasants are of flesh and blood as good as the scions of gentlest genealogy, and the germs of native excellence are as likely to exist in their hearts as in those of the best-born; my duty will be to develop these germs. To be quite truthful with myself: had I been gleeful and content during the hours I had passed in that bare schoolroom? No—I had felt desolate, felt—yes, idiot that I am—I felt degraded. Let me not hate myself for these feelings; I know them to be wrong; in time they will be subdued, and a happiness in my scholars' progress will substitute gratification for disgust. Meantime, let me ask myself one question—Which is better? To have surrendered to temptation, fallen asleep on flowers, wakened in a southern clime as Mr. Rochester's mistress, delirious with his love half my time—for he did love me, no one would ever love me so again—or to be a village schoolmistress, free and honest, in a breezy mountain nook in the healthy heart of England? Yes; I was right when I adhered to principle and law and crushed the insane promptings of a frenzied moment.

I went to my door and looked at the sunset of the harvest day; soon I was weeping for my master's grief and the desperate fury that might be dragging him from the path of right. Old Carlo was nudging the wicket; St. John leaned upon it with folded arms, his brow knit and his gaze grave almost to displeasure. He had brought a parcel from his sisters—a colour-box, pencils, paper. Had I found my first day's work harder than I expected? On the contrary; my cottage was clean, my furniture sufficient; five weeks ago I had been an outcast and a beggar, now I had acquaintance, a home, a business. He counselled me to resist firmly every temptation to look back, and added that he himself knew what it cost to control inclination and turn the bent of nature. A year ago he had been intensely miserable in the ministry, his life so wretched it must be changed or he must die; at length light had broken—God had given him the call to be a missionary, and he was to leave Europe for the East. As he said this, looking at the setting sun, a gay voice sweet as a silver bell exclaimed behind us, Good evening, Mr. Rivers; and there appeared, three feet from him, a form clad in pure white—a youthful, graceful figure, full yet fine in contour, who flung back her veil to disclose a face of perfect beauty: regular and delicate lineaments, large dark eyes shadowed by long lashes, a smooth white forehead, ruddy lips, even and gleaming teeth, a small dimpled chin, and rich plenteous tresses. This was Rosamond Oliver, the heiress of the Vale; she had come up the lane from her father's hall on hearing the new schoolmistress was come, and now she pressed St. John to come back with her, since her papa was alone this evening and not well. He, who had stiffened like marble at her step, declined—Not to-night, Miss Rosamond—and they parted; she turned twice to gaze after him, he never turned at all. Diana Rivers had called her brother inexorable as death; she had not exaggerated.

CHAPTER XXXII

I continued the labours of the village school as faithfully as I could. It was hard work at first, my scholars at first sight all dull alike; but their amazement at me, my language, my rules and ways, once subsided, I found among these heavy-looking gaping rustics some sharp-witted girls enough, and discovered amongst them not a few examples of natural politeness, innate self-respect, and excellent capacity. Their progress was sometimes surprising; I began personally to like some of the best girls; and I found I had become a favourite in the neighbourhood, hearing cordial salutations on all sides. To live amidst general regard, though it be but the regard of working people, is like sitting in sunshine, calm and sweet. At this period of my life my heart far oftener swelled with thankfulness than sank with dejection; and yet, reader, in the midst of this calm I used to rush into strange dreams at night—dreams of meeting Mr. Rochester at some exciting crisis, of being in his arms and hearing his voice—and to wake convulsed with despair. By nine the next morning I was punctually opening the school.

Rosamond Oliver kept her word in coming to visit me, generally cantering up on her pony in her purple habit and Amazon's cap of black velvet, and gliding through the dazzled ranks of the village children. She knew her power over St. John; he could not conceal it from her. When she addressed him gaily and fondly, his hand would tremble and his eye burn, while his sad and resolute look seemed to say, I love you, and I know you prefer me; 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. He could not bind all his nature—the rover, the aspirant, the poet, the priest—in the limits of a single passion; he would not renounce his wild field of mission warfare for the parlours and peace of Vale Hall. I learnt the whole character of Rosamond, who was without mystery: coquettish but not heartless, exacting but not selfish, indulged but not absolutely spoilt, very charming but not profoundly impressive. She had taken an amiable caprice to me; she said I was like Mr. Rivers, only "not one-tenth so handsome"; she was sure my previous history would make a delightful romance.

One evening, rummaging my drawers, she discovered my French and German books, my drawing-materials, and my sketches. She electrified herself with delight, and would have me draw her portrait to show her papa. The next day Mr. Oliver himself accompanied her—a tall, massive, grey-headed man at whose side his lovely daughter looked like a bright flower near a hoary turret. He was kind, accepted the sketch, insisted I must come to spend an evening at Vale Hall, and there expressed his hearty approbation of the school. He spoke of the Rivers family with respect: it was a very old name in the neighbourhood; the ancestors had once owned all of Morton; even now the representative of that house might, if he liked, make an alliance with the best. It appeared, then, that her father would throw no obstacle in the way of Rosamond's union with St. John.

It was the 5th of November, a holiday, and I was completing Rosamond's miniature when St. John entered with a new poem—Marmion—for my evening solace. He stooped to examine my drawing; his tall figure sprang erect again with a start. Is this portrait like? I asked bluntly. Like? Like whom? At length he confessed it was Miss Oliver, and I offered to paint him a duplicate, if the gift would be acceptable. The longer he held it, the more he seemed to covet it; It is like, he murmured. It smiles! Since I was sure Rosamond preferred him and her father would consent, I—less exalted in my views than St. John—boldly advised him to take the original at once. Does she like me? he asked, taking out his watch and laying it on the table to measure the time; I gave him a quarter of an hour to dwell on the picture and the dream. Now, said he when his quartet was sped, putting back the watch, 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 was burning; there is an asp in the garland; the wine has a bitter taste; her promises are hollow—her offers false. He loved Rosamond with all the intensity of a first passion, but he knew calmly she would not make him a good wife; that to twelve months' rapture would succeed a lifetime of regret; she could sympathise in nothing he aspired to. Rosamond a sufferer, a labourer, a female apostle? Rosamond a missionary's wife? No! He would not relinquish his vocation. Cold and hard he professed himself to be, stripped of that blood-bleached robe with which Christianity covers human deformity—a cold, hard, ambitious man; religion had not eradicated nature, only pruned and trained it; his original ambitions for his wretched self had been formed by religion into the ambition to spread his Master's kingdom. As he prepared to take his leave he drew the thin sheet of paper over the portrait; something on its blank caught his eye; he picked it up with a snatch, glanced quick and keen at every point of my shape and face, his lips parted as if to speak; but he checked the sentence; with one hasty nod and "good-afternoon" he vanished, having dexterously torn away in his glove a narrow slip from the margin. I, scrutinising the paper, saw nothing on it but a few dingy stains of paint; I dismissed the mystery as insolvable.

CHAPTER XXXIII

When Mr. St. John went, it was beginning to snow; the next day a blinding fall drifted up the valley. I had laid a mat against the door, trimmed my fire, taken down Marmion, and forgotten the storm in its music when the latch lifted and St. John came in, his cloak white as a glacier. Any ill news? No; he had only got tired of his mute books and empty rooms, and was come because he had experienced the excitement of a person to whom a tale has been half-told. He sat, finger on his lip, thinking; his hand looked wasted as his face. Then suddenly: Half-an-hour ago 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.

He proceeded, with chiselled deliberation, to tell me my own history, prefaced as a hackneyed but short tale. Twenty years ago, a poor curate fell in love with a rich man's daughter; they married against the advice of all her friends, and within two years the rash pair were both dead, leaving a daughter whom Charity had carried to a Mrs. Reed of Gateshead, who had kept the orphan ten years before transferring her to Lowood Orphan Asylum. There the child had become first pupil then teacher, and had left to be a governess in the house of a Mr. Rochester. It had been discovered at the very altar that her bridegroom had a wife yet alive though a lunatic, and the girl had since vanished from Thornfield Hall. A Mr. Briggs, solicitor, had advertised for her in all the papers, and had written to him, St. John, on the matter. Just tell me this, I broke in—what of Mr. Rochester? How and where is he? He knew nothing of Mr. Rochester; the answer to Briggs's letter to Thornfield had been signed Alice Fairfax. I felt cold and dismayed: my worst fears were probably true; he had in all likelihood rushed in reckless desperation to some former haunt on the Continent. 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.

He produced from his pocket-book a shabby slip of paper, hastily torn off, that I recognised by the stains of ultramarine and lake and vermillion as the ravished margin of my portrait-cover. On it, in my own handwriting—the work doubtless of some moment of abstraction—stood the words "JANE EYRE." Briggs wrote to me of a Jane Eyre; the advertisements demanded a Jane Eyre; I knew a Jane Elliott. I had my suspicions, but it was only yesterday afternoon they were resolved into certainty. Why had Mr. Briggs sought me? 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. Twenty thousand pounds, in the English funds. It was a fine thing, reader, to be lifted in a moment from indigence to wealth—but not a matter one can comprehend or enjoy all at once; one begins rather to consider responsibilities, and to brood over one's bliss with a solemn brow. Besides, the words legacy and bequest go side by side with death and funeral; my only relative was dead, and I should never see him.

As St. John was lifting the latch to leave, a sudden thought stayed me: it puzzled me to know how Mr. Briggs had ever come to write to him. He answered evasively—I am a clergyman, and the clergy are often appealed to about odd matters. I would not be put off; I planted myself between him and the door. I am a hard woman—impossible to put off, I declared; the snow from his cloak had streamed on my floor, and as he hoped to be forgiven the misdemeanour of spoiling a sanded kitchen, he should tell me what I wished to know. Well, then, he yielded; your name is Jane Eyre? You are not, perhaps, aware that I am your namesake?—that I was christened St. John Eyre Rivers? His mother's name had been Eyre; she had had two brothers, one a clergyman who had married Miss Jane Reed of Gateshead, the other John Eyre, Esq., merchant, late of Funchal, Madeira. Briggs had written to the Rivers family the previous August of their uncle's death and the bequest to the orphan daughter of his brother the clergyman, overlooking themselves in consequence of an old quarrel between him and their father; he had written again a few weeks since to say the heiress was lost. A name casually written on a slip of paper had enabled St. John to find her out.

I had found a brother and two sisters: the two girls on whom, kneeling on the wet ground, I had once gazed through a low latticed window with so bitter a mixture of interest and despair were my near kinswomen; the young stately gentleman who had found me dying at his threshold was my blood relation. This was wealth indeed!—wealth to the heart!—a mine of pure, genial affections. I clapped my hands in sudden joy; my pulse bounded; my veins thrilled. I was not slow to draw the obvious consequence: twenty thousand pounds shared equally amongst the four would be five thousand each—justice, enough and to spare. I would have a home and connections; I would live at Moor House; I would attach myself for life to Diana and Mary. St. John resisted at first: I was not in possession to know what wealth was, nor what twenty thousand pounds would give me. And you cannot at all imagine the craving I have for fraternal and sisterly love. He yielded, after long argument, to put the matter to arbitration; the chosen judges, Mr. Oliver and an able lawyer, both coincided with me; I carried my point. The instruments of transfer were drawn, and St. John, Diana, Mary, and I each became possessed of a competency.

CHAPTER XXXIV

It was near Christmas before all was settled. I closed Morton school, taking care that the parting should not be barren on my side, and finding to my deep gratification that my rustic scholars manifested their affection plainly and strongly: I really had a place in their unsophisticated hearts, and promised to come back each week and give them an hour's teaching. Do you consider you have got your reward? asked St. John when they were gone. Would not a life devoted to the task of regenerating your race be well spent? Yes, I said—but I could not go on for ever so; I wanted to enjoy my own faculties as well as cultivate those of others, and was disposed for full holiday. I would clean down Moor House from chamber to cellar, rub it up with bees-wax, arrange every chair with mathematical precision, ruin him in coals and peat, and devote two days to such a beating of eggs and chopping of mince-pies as words could not convey, that his sisters' welcome should be a beau-ideal. He smiled slightly, dissatisfied: this was all very well, but he hoped, when the first flush of vivacity was over, that I would look higher than domestic endearments and household joys. The best things the world has! I interrupted. He warned me to save my constancy and ardour for an adequate cause, not to waste them on trite transient objects.

Happy I was, and hard I worked; so did Hannah; together we invoked order from the chaos we ourselves had made. I bought new dark carpets and curtains, set out antique porcelain and bronze, refurnished the spare parlour and bedroom in old mahogany and crimson, laid canvas on the passage and carpets on the stairs. The eventful Thursday came at last; Mary's soft cheek and Diana's flowing curls were in contact with mine in another minute, then with Hannah's, and Carlo was half wild with delight. They expressed gratification at the renovations, embraced their grave brother who took refuge in the parlour as in a sanctuary from the glad tumult, and talked through a sweet evening. In the very meridian of the night's enjoyment, a poor lad came to fetch Mr. Rivers to see his mother, four moor-and-moss miles off. Tell him I will go. Hannah pleaded—the worst road, the bitterest night—but he was already cloaked and gone. He returned at midnight, starved and tired, but happier than when he had set out: he had performed an act of duty.

The whole of the ensuing week tried his patience. It was Christmas; we took to no settled employment, but spent it in a sort of merry domestic dissipation; the moors, the freedom, the dawn of prosperity acted on Diana and Mary's spirits like a life-giving elixir. St. John did not rebuke our vivacity, but he escaped from it: he was seldom in the house. One morning at breakfast Diana asked if his plans were yet unchanged. Unchanged and unchangeable, he replied; his departure for the East was now fixed for the ensuing year. And Rosamond Oliver? Mary suggested. He closed his book—he made it his custom to read at meals—and said with the serenity of glass: Rosamond Oliver 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. Later, alone with me, he said simply, You see, Jane, the battle is fought and the victory won; and returned to his papers and his silence.

He sat now more at home, while Mary drew, Diana pursued an encyclopædic course, and I fagged away at German; he pondered an Eastern tongue necessary to his plans. But his blue eye ever and anon left the outlandish-looking grammar to fix upon us with a curious intensity of observation, as if for some purpose of study. He was always punctually approving of my weekly visit to Morton school, and on the worst days encouraged me to go without regard for the elements—Jane is not such a weakling as you would make her. One afternoon when I had a cold and stayed at home, he caught me in his ever-watchful blue eye and said, abruptly, Jane, what are you doing? Learning German. I want you to give up German and learn Hindostanee. He was studying it himself, he said, and as he advanced he was apt to forget the commencement; it would assist him to have a pupil. He had chosen me because he saw I could sit at a task longer than his sisters; would I do him this favour for the three months that wanted before his departure? St. John was not a man to be lightly refused. I consented. He proved a patient, forbearing, and yet exacting master: by degrees he acquired a certain influence over me which 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, an importunate instinct reminding me that vivacity was distasteful to him; I fell under a freezing spell. When he said go I went; come, I came; do this, I did it. But I did not love my servitude.

One evening at bedtime, Diana, in a frolicsome humour, pushed me towards her brother, who had as usual kissed each of his sisters and given me his hand: St. John, you used to call Jane your third sister, but you don't treat her as such; you should kiss her too. He bent his head, his eyes questioned mine piercingly—he kissed me. There may be experiment kisses, and his was an experiment kiss; when given, he viewed me to learn the result; I felt as if this kiss were a seal affixed to my fetters. He never omitted the ceremony afterwards. Daily I wished more to please him; daily I felt that to do so I must disown half my nature, stifle half my faculties, mould my irregular features to his classic pattern, give my changeable green eyes the sea-blue tint and solemn lustre of his own.

I had not forgotten Mr. Rochester. His idea was still with me, because it was not a vapour 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. I had inquired of Mr. Briggs but he knew nothing of Mr. Rochester. I had written to Mrs. Fairfax, and after a fortnight, two months, half a year of silence my hope died. Diana wished to take me to the seaside; St. John opposed; I needed an aim, an employment; he prolonged my Hindostanee lessons and grew more urgent. One morning at breakfast Hannah told me there was a letter; I went down certain it was the long-looked-for tidings, and found only a business note from Briggs. The bitter check wrung tears from me, and as I sat over the crabbed Indian characters my eyes filled again. St. John bid me wait composing myself, then locked his desk and bid me take a walk with him toward the head of Marsh Glen.

The breeze was sweet with heath and rush; the stream, swelled with past spring rains, descended plentiful and clear, catching golden gleams; the hills shut us quite in. Let us rest here, he said at the first stragglers of a battalion of rocks; and looked up the pass and down the hollow as if in communion with the genius of the haunt, his eye bidding farewell to something. And I shall see it again, 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. Then he turned: Jane, I go in six weeks; I have taken my berth in an East Indiaman which sails on the 20th of June. God would protect him, I said, since he had undertaken His work. And what does your heart say? he demanded. My heart is mute,—my heart is mute. Then I must speak for it. Jane, come with me to India: come as my helpmeet and fellow-labourer.

The glen and sky spun round; the hills heaved. 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 labour, 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. He had watched me for ten months: in the village school I had performed work uncongenial to my habits with capacity and tact; in the calm with which I had received my sudden fortune he had read a mind clear of the vice of Demas; in the readiness with which I had cut my wealth into four shares he had recognised a soul that revelled in the flame of sacrifice; in the tractability with which I had taken up Hindostanee, in the unflagging energy I had brought to it, he had seen a docile, diligent, disinterested, faithful, constant, and courageous spirit, very gentle and very heroic. As a conductress of Indian schools, and a helper amongst Indian women, your assistance will be to me invaluable.

Persuasion advanced with slow sure step, and my work, which had been so vague and hopelessly diffuse, condensed itself under his shaping hand. I asked a quarter of an hour to consider. I could do what he wanted; if I went, I went to premature death under an Indian sun; but I could not exist hoping for some impossible reunion with Mr. Rochester. The vocation was perhaps the most glorious man could adopt; if I went, I would throw all on the altar—heart, vitals—the entire victim. Consent to his demand was possible: but for one dreadful item—he asked me to be his wife, and had no more of a husband's heart for me than that frowning rock down which the stream foamed in yonder gorge. He prized me as a soldier would a good weapon, and that was all. To receive from him the bridal ring, to endure all the forms of love which he would scrupulously observe, knowing that the spirit was quite absent—no: such a martyrdom would be monstrous. I told him: I am ready to go to India, if I may go free. You have hitherto been my adopted brother; I, your adopted sister: let us continue as such. He shook his head: Adopted fraternity will not do in this case. Either our union must be sealed by marriage, or it could not exist; he wanted not a sister—a sister might any day be taken from him—but a wife: the sole helpmeet he could influence efficiently in life and retain absolutely till death. Seek one elsewhere than in me. 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. He insisted: Do you think God will be satisfied with half an oblation? The veil fell from his hardness and despotism; I felt his imperfection and took courage; I sat at the feet of a man, erring as I. Oh, I will give my heart to God, I said. You do not want it. I scorned his idea of love, I told him, and the counterfeit sentiment he offered. He left for Cambridge—the morrow's departure deferred—saying I should remember that if I rejected his offer it was not him I denied, but God.

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, he contrived to impress me momently with the conviction that I was put beyond the pale of his favour. He had forgiven me for saying I scorned him and his love, but he would never forget the words. To his sisters he was somewhat kinder than usual, by way of contrast; 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. 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.

The night before he left home, I made a last attempt to regain his friendship. I went out to the gate where he stood watching the rising of the moon, and asked if we could not be friends. I hope we are friends. No, we were not friends as we were. Once more, why this refusal? Formerly, I answered, because he did not love me; now, because he almost hated me. If I were to marry you, you would kill me. You are killing me now. His lips and cheeks turned white. I should kill you—I am killing you? The words, he said, were violent, unfeminine, and untrue; I had now made an eternal enemy of him. Yet I would still go to India as his assistant—he paled again at the audacity, declared that a female curate who was not his wife would never suit him; if I were sincere, he would speak in town to a married missionary whose wife needed a coadjutor. He guessed where my heart turned. Are you going to seek Mr. Rochester? I must find out what is become of him. It remained for him to pray that I might not become a castaway; he had thought he recognised in me one of the chosen.

For the evening reading he chose the twenty-first chapter of Revelation. Never did his fine voice sound so sweet and full as when he delivered the oracles of God; tonight it took a more solemn tone, particularly upon the verses But the fearful, the unbelieving, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone, which is the second death—when his eye turned on me. In the prayer that followed, he wrestled with God, asked the boon of a brand snatched from the burning. As he laid his hand on my head with the look of a guardian angel watching the soul for which he is responsible—all men of talent, whether of feeling or not, sincere men, have their sublime moments when they subdue and rule—I felt veneration for St. John so strong that its impetus thrust me to the point I had so long shunned. The Impossible—my marriage with St. John—was fast becoming the Possible. The dim room was full of visions; Religion called, Angels beckoned, God commanded; life rolled together like a scroll, and death's gates opened, showing eternity beyond. Could you decide now? asked the missionary in gentle tones; oh, that gentleness! how far more potent it is than force. I could decide if I were but certain. Were I but convinced that it is God's will I should marry you, I could vow to marry you here and now—come afterwards what would! My prayers are heard! ejaculated St. John. He pressed his hand firmer on my head, almost as if he loved me; I sincerely longed to do what was right. Show me, show me the path! I entreated.

All the house was still: the candle was dying out, the room full of moonlight. My heart beat fast and thick; suddenly it stood still to a feeling not like an electric shock, but as sharp and as startling: every sense rose expectant. 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. It came not from the room, the house, the garden, the air, the earth, or the heavens; it came I knew not whence; 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! Wait for me! Oh, I will come! I flew to the door and into the garden: Where are you? The hills sent the answer faintly back. Down superstition! I told myself; this was not its deception, nor its witchcraft; it was the work of nature—she was roused, and did no miracle but her best. I broke from St. John, who had followed; it was my time to assume ascendency; I told him to forbear, to leave me—I must and would be alone—and he obeyed at once, for where there is energy to command well enough, obedience never fails. I locked myself in my chamber, knelt, prayed in my own way, took a resolve, and lay down unscared, enlightened, eager but for the daylight.

CHAPTER XXXVI

The daylight came. I rose at dawn, and busied myself for an hour or two with arranging my things. Meantime I heard St. John quit his room; he stopped at my door and slipped a paper under it: 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. I shall pray for you hourly.—Yours, St. John. My spirit, I answered mentally, was willing to do what was right; my flesh, I hoped, was strong enough to grope an outlet from this cloud of doubt and find the open day of certainty. From the window I saw him take the way over the misty moors towards Whitcross. In a few more hours I shall succeed you in that track, cousin. I had had time to ponder the visitation: the wondrous shock of feeling had come like the earthquake which had shaken the foundations of Paul and Silas's prison; it had opened the doors of the soul's cell and loosed its bands; it had wakened it out of its sleep, whence it sprang trembling, listening, aghast, exulting in the success of one effort it had been privileged to make, independent of the cumbrous body. Ere many days 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 told Diana and Mary I was going on a journey of at least four days. They asked nothing more, with their true natural delicacy: Diana only asked whether I was well enough to travel. I left Moor House at three, and stood at the foot of the Whitcross sign-post by four, waiting for the very coach from which a year ago I had alighted destitute and hopeless on this very spot; I entered it now, not obliged to part with my whole fortune as the price of accommodation. Once more on the road to Thornfield, I felt like the messenger-pigeon flying home.

Six and thirty hours later, on a Thursday morning, the coach stopped to water the horses at a wayside inn whose green hedges and large fields and low pastoral hills I knew like the lineaments of a once familiar face. Two miles across the fields, the ostler said, lay Thornfield Hall; the inn itself was The Rochester Arms. My heart leapt up; then it fell. Your master himself may be beyond the British Channel, for aught you know; and then, if he is at Thornfield, who besides him is there? His lunatic wife. Ask information of the people at the inn. I could not bring myself to do it; to prolong doubt was to prolong hope. I crossed the very fields through which I had hurried, blind and distracted, on the morning I fled; the rookery clustered dark, the cawing broke the morning stillness; how I welcomed every familiar tree and meadow! From behind a stone pillar at an orchard gate I peeped quietly at the full front of the mansion.

A lover finds his mistress asleep on a mossy bank: he steals over the grass, lifts the light veil that rests on her features, bends lower in anticipation of the vision of beauty—and finds his love is not asleep but stone dead. I looked with timorous joy towards a stately house: I saw a blackened ruin. The lawn and grounds were trodden and waste, the portal yawned void, the front was as I had once seen it in a dream—a shell-like wall, very high and fragile-looking, perforated with paneless windows, no roof, no battlements, no chimneys, all crashed in. The grim blackness of the stones told what fate had overtaken it: conflagration. No wonder letters here had received no answer; as well despatch epistles to a vault. Spring had cherished vegetation in the drenched piles of rubbish; the calamity was not of late occurrence. Where, meantime, was the hapless owner? My eye involuntarily wandered to the grey church tower near the gates: Is he with Damer de Rochester, sharing the shelter of his narrow marble house?

I returned to the inn for answers, my horror of the possible answers scarcely contained. The host had been the late Mr. Rochester's butler—the late Mr. Rochester being the present gentleman's father, he hastily explained. Gladdening words! Mr. Edward was alive. Thornfield had been burnt down at harvest time the previous autumn. The fire had been set—quite certain—by the lunatic Mrs. Rochester, whose nurse Grace Poole had a weakness for gin and water; Mrs. Rochester, cunning as a witch, had taken the keys from her sleeping keeper and roamed the house, kindling first the hangings of her own room and then, by malign instinct, the bed in the chamber that had been the governess's. The governess, he added in passing, was a little small thing whom Mr. Edward had loved past everything—he was after her continually; he would have married her had not the discovery come at the altar that he had a mad wife living. The governess had run away two months before; Mr. Rochester had sought her as for the most precious thing he had in the world, and had grown savage in his disappointment. He had sent Mrs. Fairfax away with an annuity, put little Adèle to school, broken off all acquaintance, and shut himself up at Thornfield like a hermit, walking the orchard at night like a ghost. For my part, said the host, I have often wished that Miss Eyre had been sunk in the sea before she came to Thornfield Hall.

On the night of the fire he had gone first to the attics to wake the servants and lead them down himself, then back to fetch his mad wife from her cell—but she was on the roof, waving her arms and shouting above the battlements; the host had seen and heard her with his own eyes. We heard him call "Bertha!" She yelled and gave a spring, and the next minute she lay smashed on the pavement. Were any other lives lost? No—perhaps it would have been better if there had. The poor master had refused to leave the house till every one else was out; a beam had crashed in such a way as to protect him only partly; one eye knocked out, one hand crushed and amputated by Mr. Carter the surgeon, the sight of the other eye lost too. He was now stone-blind and one-handed, alone with old John and his wife at Ferndean Manor, a desolate spot some thirty miles off. I bade the host get his chaise instantly and was driven there before dark.

CHAPTER XXXVII

Ferndean was a building of considerable antiquity, moderate size, and no architectural pretensions, deep buried in a wood. Mr. Rochester's father had purchased the estate for the sake of the game-covers; the house was unfurnished save for some two or three rooms fitted up for the squire when he came in the season to shoot. I dismissed the chaise a mile off and walked in by iron gates between granite pillars, down a grass-grown forest aisle between hoar and knotty shafts, until at last my way opened and I beheld the house—decaying, gabled, dank, set in a heavy frame of timber. Quite a desolate spot, indeed; only the pattering rain on the leaves was audible.

The narrow front door opened slowly; a man without a hat came out into the twilight, stretched his hand forth as if to feel whether it rained, and stood. Dusk as it was, I had recognised him: my master, Edward Fairfax Rochester, and no other. His form was the same strong stalwart contour as ever, his port erect, his hair raven black: but in his countenance I saw a desperate brooding change, the look 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. He descended one step, advanced gropingly, paused as if not knowing which way to turn; he lifted his hand and opened his eyelids and gazed blank on the sky and the trees: one saw that all to him was void darkness. He stretched his right hand—the left arm, the mutilated one, kept hidden in his bosom—but met only vacancy, for the trees were yards off. Old John approached and offered his arm; Let me alone, was the answer; and Mr. Rochester groped his way back into the house and closed the door.

I knocked. John's wife Mary started as if she had seen a ghost. I told her in few words that I had heard all and was come to see Mr. Rochester. The parlour-bell rang for water and candles; she warned me he refused everybody, but I took the tray myself and carried it in. The parlour was gloomy; a neglected fire burnt low; leaning over it, with his head supported against the high mantelpiece, appeared the blind tenant of the room, with old Pilot coiled by his side. Pilot pricked up his ears, then sprang up with a yelp and bounded toward me. Give me the water, Mary, he said; his hand in a quick gesture missed the place where I stood. Who is this? Who is this?—Answer me, speak again! Pilot knows me, and John and Mary know I am here. I came only this evening. 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. He groped; I arrested his wandering hand and prisoned it in both mine. Her very fingers!—her small, slight fingers! The muscular hand broke from my custody; my arm, my shoulder, neck, waist, were seized; I was entwined and gathered to him. Is it Jane? What is it? This is her shape—this is her size— And this her voice. She is all here: her heart, too. God bless you, sir! I am glad to be so near you again. Jane Eyre!—Jane Eyre.

He could not bring himself to believe me real; he had had such dreams before and had wakened to desolation. I told him I would never leave him. He asked, then learned, that I was an independent woman: my uncle in Madeira was dead, and had left me five thousand pounds. 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 parlour when you want company of an evening. Embarrassment fell on me: I had as good as proposed myself, and he had let no hint of marriage escape him; perhaps, like St. John, he would think me improper. I began gently to withdraw; he snatched me closer—no—no—Jane; you must not go. The world may laugh—may call me absurd, selfish—but it does not signify. My very soul demands you. But how—he was a sightless block; he could entertain none but fatherly feelings for me; I should marry one day. I took the lighter vein, parted his thick uncut locks, called him Nebuchadnezzar with eagles' feathers, told him I was in danger of loving him too well for his stump and his cicatrised visage, made him a comfortable supper, talked to him without restraint till his lineaments softened and warmed.

The next morning, leading him out of the wet wood into cheerful fields, I described the green of the meadows, the blue of the sky, the refreshment of the flowers; I sat with him on a dry stump in a hidden spot, and let him take me on his knee. Why not, when both he and I were happier near than apart? Cruel, cruel deserter! he cried, then asked for the narrative of my year. I gave it him, softening the three days' wandering and starvation. He chid me: I should have told him my intention; he would never have forced me to be his mistress; 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 told him then of Moor House, of the schoolmistress's office, of the discovery of my relations, and of St. John Rivers, my cousin. He took up the name and worked it. Was he a respectable well-conducted man of fifty? St. John was twenty-nine. Of low stature, phlegmatic, plain? He was untiringly active; great deeds were what he lived to perform; first-rate of brain; an accomplished and profound scholar; tall, fair, blue-eyed, with a Grecian profile. (Aside.) Damn him!—Did you like him, Jane? Yes. The painted contrast struck him sore: I had drawn a graceful Apollo, while my eyes dwelt on a Vulcan—a real blacksmith, brown, broad-shouldered, blind and lame into the bargain. He cross-examined me, wringing one fact at a time: St. John had taught me Hindostanee, only me, with the intention to take me to India. Ah! here I reach the root of the matter. He wanted you to marry him? He had asked me more than once, and was as stiff about it as ever Mr. Rochester could be. Miss Eyre, I repeat it, you can leave me. 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!—Jane, leave me: go and marry Rivers. I shuddered and clung closer. 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. He is good and great, but severe; and for me, cold as an iceberg. All my heart was his, sir, and with him it would remain were fate to exile the rest of me from his presence forever.

His painful thoughts darkened his aspect. My seared vision! My crippled strength! I caressed him; a tear slid from beneath the sealed eyelid. I am no better than the old lightning-struck chestnut-tree in Thornfield orchard. 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 towards you, and wind round you, because your strength offers them so safe a prop. Ah, Jane—but I want a wife. 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. 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. It was no sacrifice: famine for food, expectation for content. The case being so, we had nothing in the world to wait for; we must be married instantly.

He pursued his own thoughts. Jane! he said, you think me, I daresay, 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 wrong: I would have sullied my innocent flower—breathed guilt on its purity: the Omnipotent snatched it from me. 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. Last Monday night, between eleven and twelve, sitting at his open window, he had supplicated God in anguish and humility for some respite, and the alpha and omega of his heart's wishes had broken from his lips in the words—Jane! Jane! Jane! A voice he could not place, but knew well, had answered, I am coming: wait for me; and a moment later, on the wind, Where are you?—the very words I had spoken in the moonlit garden of Marsh End at that very hour. The coincidence struck me as too awful and inexplicable to be communicated; I kept those things and pondered them in my heart. He thanked God in mute devotion, lifting his hat from his brow, and asked his Redeemer for strength to lead henceforth a purer life. Then he stretched his hand out to be led; I took it, held it to my lips, and let it pass round my shoulder; being so much lower of stature than he, I served both for his prop and his guide, and we entered the wood and wended homeward.

CHAPTER XXXVIII—CONCLUSION

Reader, I married him. A quiet wedding we had: he and I, the parson and the clerk, were alone present. When we got back from church I told Mary in the kitchen that I had been married to Mr. Rochester this morning; her ladle hung suspended in the air for three minutes, and then she said only, Have you, Miss? Well, for sure!, and basted away. John pulled his forelock; I telled Mary how it would be; and the kitchen later allowed that the new mistress would happen do better for him than any of the grand ladies. Diana approved unreservedly when I wrote, and would come to see me after the honeymoon. If she does, she will be too late, said Mr. Rochester; our honeymoon will shine our life long; its beams will only fade over your grave or mine. St. John never answered the letter in which I had told him of the marriage; six months later he wrote a calm and serious one without any mention of it, and has maintained a regular though infrequent correspondence ever since. Adèle I fetched from the strict school in which Mr. Rochester had placed her, where she looked pale and thin; finding I could not now be her governess, my time being all required by my husband, I sought out a more indulgent school nearer at hand and brought her home often. Sound English education in time corrected her French defects, and as she grew up she became a docile and obliging companion who has well repaid any little kindness I ever had it in my power to offer her.

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 blest, 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. Mr. Rochester continued blind the first two years of our union, and that perhaps was the circumstance that knit us so very close: for I was then his vision, as I am still his right hand. I conducted him where he wished to go, read to him, put into words the effect of field, tree, town, river, cloud, sunbeam, and impressed by sound on his ear what light could no longer stamp on his eye. One morning at the end of the two years, as I was writing a letter to his dictation, he bent over me: Jane, have you a glittering ornament round your neck? And have you a pale blue dress on? He had fancied for some time that the obscurity of one eye was becoming less dense; we went to London; an eminent oculist was consulted; he eventually recovered the sight of that one eye. He cannot read or write much, but he can find his way without being led; the sky is no longer a blank, the earth no longer a void; and 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; and again, with a full heart, he acknowledged that God had tempered judgment with mercy.

Diana and Mary Rivers are both happily married—Diana to a gallant captain in the navy, Mary to a clergyman, a college friend of her brother's. As to St. John Rivers, he left England and entered upon the path he had marked for himself; he pursues it still. A more resolute, indefatigable pioneer never wrought amidst rocks and dangers; firm, faithful, and devoted, full of energy and zeal and truth, he labours for his race; he hews down like a giant the prejudices of creed and caste that encumber it. He never married, and never will marry now; the toil draws near its close. The last letter I received from him drew human tears from my eyes and yet filled my heart with divine joy: he anticipated his sure reward, his incorruptible crown. 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. My Master, he writes, has forewarned me. Daily He announces more distinctly, "Surely I come quickly!" and hourly I more eagerly respond, "Amen; even so come, Lord Jesus!"