Jane Eyre: An Autobiography
watches of that long night passed in ghastly wakefulness; ear, eye, and
mind were alike strained by dread: such dread as children only can
feel.
No severe or prolonged bodily illness followed this incident of the
red-room; it only gave my nerves a shock of which I feel the
reverberation to this day. Yes, Mrs. Reed, to you I owe some fearful
pangs of mental suffering, but I ought to forgive you, for you knew not
what you did: while rending my heart-strings, you thought you were only
uprooting my bad propensities.
Next day, by noon, I was up and dressed, and sat wrapped in a shawl by
the nursery hearth. I felt physically weak and broken down: but my
worse ailment was an unutterable wretchedness of mind: a wretchedness
which kept drawing from me silent tears; no sooner had I wiped one salt
drop from my cheek than another followed. Yet, I thought, I ought to
have been happy, for none of the Reeds were there, they were all gone
out in the carriage with their mama. Abbot, too, was sewing in another
room, and Bessie, as she moved hither and thither, putting away toys
and arranging drawers, addressed to me every now and then a word of
unwonted kindness. This state of things should have been to me a
paradise of peace, accustomed as I was to a life of ceaseless reprimand
and thankless fagging; but, in fact, my racked nerves were now in such
a state that no calm could soothe, and no pleasure excite them
agreeably.
Bessie had been down into the kitchen, and she brought up with her a
tart on a certain brightly painted china plate, whose bird of paradise,
nestling in a wreath of convolvuli and rosebuds, had been wont to stir
in me a most enthusiastic sense of admiration; and which plate I had
often petitioned to be allowed to take in my hand in order to examine
it more closely, but had always hitherto been deemed unworthy of such a
privilege. This precious vessel was now placed on my knee, and I was
cordially invited to eat the circlet of delicate pastry upon it. Vain
favour! coming, like most other favours long deferred and often wished
for, too late! I could not eat the tart; and the plumage of the bird,
the tints of the flowers, seemed strangely faded: I put both plate and
tart away. Bessie asked if I would have a book: the word _book_ acted
as a transient stimulus, and I begged her to fetch Gulliver’s Travels
from the library. This book I had again and again perused with delight.
I considered it a narrative of facts, and discovered in it a vein of
interest deeper than what I found in fairy tales: for as to the elves,
having sought them in vain among foxglove leaves and bells, under
mushrooms and beneath the ground-ivy mantling old wall-nooks, I had at
length made up my mind to the sad truth, that they were all gone out of
England to some savage country where the woods were wilder and thicker,
and the population more scant; whereas, Lilliput and Brobdignag being,
in my creed, solid parts of the earth’s surface, I doubted not that I
might one day, by taking a long voyage, see with my own eyes the little
fields, houses, and trees, the diminutive people, the tiny cows, sheep,
and birds of the one realm; and the corn-fields forest-high, the mighty
mastiffs, the monster cats, the tower-like men and women, of the other.
Yet, when this cherished volume was now placed in my hand—when I turned
over its leaves, and sought in its marvellous pictures the charm I had,
till now, never failed to find—all was eerie and dreary; the giants
were gaunt goblins, the pigmies malevolent and fearful imps, Gulliver a
most desolate wanderer in most dread and dangerous regions. I closed
the book, which I dared no longer peruse, and put it on the table,
beside the untasted tart.
Bessie had now finished dusting and tidying the room, and having washed
her hands, she opened a certain little drawer, full of splendid shreds
of silk and satin, and began making a new bonnet for Georgiana’s doll.
Meantime she sang: her song was—
“In the days when we went gipsying,
A long time ago.”
I had often heard the song before, and always with lively delight; for
Bessie had a sweet voice,—at least, I thought so. But now, though her
voice was still sweet, I found in its melody an indescribable sadness.
Sometimes, preoccupied with her work, she sang the refrain very low,
very lingeringly; “A long time ago” came out like the saddest cadence
of a funeral hymn. She passed into another ballad, this time a really
doleful one.
“My feet they are sore, and my limbs they are weary;
Long is the way, and the mountains are wild;
Soon will the twilight close moonless and dreary
Over the path of the poor orphan child.
Why did they send me so far and so lonely,
Up where the moors spread and grey rocks are piled?
Men are hard-hearted, and kind angels only
Watch o’er the steps of a poor orphan child.
Yet distant and soft the night breeze is blowing,
Clouds there are none, and clear stars beam mild,
God, in His mercy, protection is showing,
Comfort and hope to the poor orphan child.
Ev’n should I fall o’er the broken bridge passing,
Or stray in the marshes, by false lights beguiled,
Still will my Father, with promise and blessing,
Take to His bosom the poor orphan child.
There is a thought that for strength should avail me,
Though both of shelter and kindred despoiled;
Heaven is a home, and a rest will not fail me;
God is a friend to the poor orphan child.”
“Come, Miss Jane, don’t cry,” said Bessie as she finished. She might as
well have said to the fire, “don’t burn!” but how could she divine the
morbid suffering to which I was a prey? In the course of the morning
Mr. Lloyd came again.
“What, already up!” said he, as he entered the nursery. “Well, nurse,
how is she?”
Bessie answered that I was doing very well.
“Then she ought to look more cheerful. Come here, Miss Jane: your name
is Jane, is it not?”
“Yes, sir, Jane Eyre.”
“Well, you have been crying, Miss Jane Eyre; can you tell me what
about? Have you any pain?”
“No, sir.”
“Oh! I daresay she is crying because she could not go out with Missis
in the carriage,” interposed Bessie.
“Surely not! why, she is too old for such pettishness.”
I thought so too; and my self-esteem being wounded by the false charge,
I answered promptly, “I never cried for such a thing in my life: I hate
going out in the carriage. I cry because I am miserable.”
“Oh fie, Miss!” said Bessie.
The good apothecary appeared a little puzzled. I was standing before
him; he fixed his eyes on me very steadily: his eyes were small and
grey; not very bright, but I dare say I should think them shrewd now:
he had a hard-featured yet good-natured looking face. Having considered
me at leisure, he said—
“What made you ill yesterday?”
“She had a fall,” said Bessie, again putting in her word.
“Fall! why, that is like a baby again! Can’t she manage to walk at her
age? She must be eight or nine years old.”
“I was knocked down,” was the blunt explanation, jerked out of me by
another pang of mortified pride; “but that did not make me ill,” I
added; while Mr. Lloyd helped himself to a pinch of snuff.
As he was returning the box to his waistcoat pocket, a loud bell rang
for the servants’ dinner; he knew what it was. “That’s for you, nurse,”
said he; “you can go down; I’ll give Miss Jane a lecture till you come
back.”
Bessie would rather have stayed, but she was obliged to go, because
punctuality at meals was rigidly enforced at Gateshead Hall.
“The fall did not make you ill; what did, then?” pursued Mr. Lloyd when
Bessie was gone.
“I was shut up in a room where there is a ghost till after dark.”
I saw Mr. Lloyd smile and frown at the same time.
“Ghost! What, you are a baby after all! You are afraid of ghosts?”
“Of Mr. Reed’s ghost I am: he died in that room, and was laid out
there. Neither Bessie nor any one else will go into it at night, if
they can help it; and it was cruel to shut me up alone without a
candle,—so cruel that I think I shall never forget it.”
“Nonsense! And is it that makes you so miserable? Are you afraid now in
daylight?”
“No: but night will come again before long: and besides,—I am
unhappy,—very unhappy, for other things.”
“What other things? Can you tell me some of them?”
How much I wished to reply fully to this question! How difficult it was
to frame any answer! Children can feel, but they cannot analyse their
feelings; and if the analysis is partially effected in thought, they
know not how to express the result of the process in words. Fearful,
however, of losing this first and only opportunity of relieving my
grief by imparting it, I, after a disturbed pause, contrived to frame a
meagre, though, as far as it went, true response.
“For one thing, I have no father or mother, brothers or sisters.”
“You have a kind aunt and cousins.”
Again I paused; then bunglingly enounced—
“But John Reed knocked me down, and my aunt shut me up in the
red-room.”
Mr. Lloyd a second time produced his snuff-box.
“Don’t you think Gateshead Hall a very beautiful house?” asked he. “Are
you not very thankful to have such a fine place to live at?”
“It is not my house, sir; and Abbot says I have less right to be here
than a servant.”
“Pooh! you can’t be silly enough to wish to leave such a splendid
place?”
“If I had anywhere else to go, I should be glad to leave it; but I can
never get away from Gateshead till I am a woman.”
“Perhaps you may—who knows? Have you any relations besides Mrs. Reed?”
“I think not, sir.”
“None belonging to your father?”
“I don’t know: I asked Aunt Reed once, and she said possibly I might
have some poor, low relations called Eyre, but she knew nothing about
them.”
“If you had such, would you like to go to them?”
I reflected. Poverty looks grim to grown people; still more so to
children: they have not much idea of industrious, working, respectable
poverty; they think of the word only as connected with ragged clothes,
scanty food, fireless grates, rude manners, and debasing vices: poverty
for me was synonymous with degradation.
“No; I should not like to belong to poor people,” was my reply.
“Not even if they were kind to you?”
I shook my head: I could not see how poor people had the means of being
kind; and then to learn to speak like them, to adopt their manners, to
be uneducated, to grow up like one of the poor women I saw sometimes
nursing their children or washing their clothes at the cottage doors of
the village of Gateshead: no, I was not heroic enough to purchase
liberty at the price of caste.
“But are your relatives so very poor? Are they working people?”
“I cannot tell; Aunt Reed says if I have any, they must be a beggarly
set: I should not like to go a begging.”
“Would you like to go to school?”
Again I reflected: I scarcely knew what school was: Bessie sometimes
spoke of it as a place where young ladies sat in the stocks, wore
backboards, and were expected to be exceedingly genteel and precise:
John Reed hated his school, and abused his master; but John Reed’s
tastes were no rule for mine, and if Bessie’s accounts of
school-discipline (gathered from the young ladies of a family where she
had lived before coming to Gateshead) were somewhat appalling, her
details of certain accomplishments attained by these same young ladies
were, I thought, equally attractive. She boasted of beautiful paintings
of landscapes and flowers by them executed; of songs they could sing
and pieces they could play, of purses they could net, of French books
they could translate; till my spirit was moved to emulation as I
listened. Besides, school would be a complete change: it implied a long
journey, an entire separation from Gateshead, an entrance into a new
life.