Jane Eyre: An Autobiography
“No, sir; that I am certain I could not; and therefore I see there is
but one way: but you will be furious if I mention it.”
“Oh, mention it! If I storm, you have the art of weeping.”
“Mr. Rochester, I must leave you.”
“For how long, Jane? For a few minutes, while you smooth your
hair—which is somewhat dishevelled; and bathe your face—which looks
feverish?”
“I must leave Adèle and Thornfield. I must part with you for my whole
life: I must begin a new existence among strange faces and strange
scenes.”
“Of course: I told you you should. I pass over the madness about
parting from me. You mean you must become a part of me. As to the new
existence, it is all right: you shall yet be my wife: I am not married.
You shall be Mrs. Rochester—both virtually and nominally. I shall keep
only to you so long as you and I live. You shall go to a place I have
in the south of France: a whitewashed villa on the shores of the
Mediterranean. There you shall live a happy, and guarded, and most
innocent life. Never fear that I wish to lure you into error—to make
you my mistress. Why did you shake your head? Jane, you must be
reasonable, or in truth I shall again become frantic.”
His voice and hand quivered: his large nostrils dilated; his eye
blazed: still I dared to speak.
“Sir, your wife is living: that is a fact acknowledged this morning by
yourself. If I lived with you as you desire, I should then be your
mistress: to say otherwise is sophistical—is false.”
“Jane, I am not a gentle-tempered man—you forget that: I am not
long-enduring; I am not cool and dispassionate. Out of pity to me and
yourself, put your finger on my pulse, feel how it throbs, and—beware!”
He bared his wrist, and offered it to me: the blood was forsaking his
cheek and lips, they were growing livid; I was distressed on all hands.
To agitate him thus deeply, by a resistance he so abhorred, was cruel:
to yield was out of the question. I did what human beings do
instinctively when they are driven to utter extremity—looked for aid to
one higher than man: the words “God help me!” burst involuntarily from
my lips.
“I am a fool!” cried Mr. Rochester suddenly. “I keep telling her I am
not married, and do not explain to her why. I forget she knows nothing
of the character of that woman, or of the circumstances attending my
infernal union with her. Oh, I am certain Jane will agree with me in
opinion, when she knows all that I know! Just put your hand in mine,
Janet—that I may have the evidence of touch as well as sight, to prove
you are near me—and I will in a few words show you the real state of
the case. Can you listen to me?”
“Yes, sir; for hours if you will.”
“I ask only minutes. Jane, did you ever hear or know that I was not the
eldest son of my house: that I had once a brother older than I?”
“I remember Mrs. Fairfax told me so once.”
“And did you ever hear that my father was an avaricious, grasping man?”
“I have understood something to that effect.”
“Well, Jane, being so, it was his resolution to keep the property
together; he could not bear the idea of dividing his estate and leaving
me a fair portion: all, he resolved, should go to my brother, Rowland.
Yet as little could he endure that a son of his should be a poor man. I
must be provided for by a wealthy marriage. He sought me a partner
betimes. Mr. Mason, a West India planter and merchant, was his old
acquaintance. He was certain his possessions were real and vast: he
made inquiries. Mr. Mason, he found, had a son and daughter; and he
learned from him that he could and would give the latter a fortune of
thirty thousand pounds: that sufficed. When I left college, I was sent
out to Jamaica, to espouse a bride already courted for me. My father
said nothing about her money; but he told me Miss Mason was the boast
of Spanish Town for her beauty: and this was no lie. I found her a fine
woman, in the style of Blanche Ingram: tall, dark, and majestic. Her
family wished to secure me because I was of a good race; and so did
she. They showed her to me in parties, splendidly dressed. I seldom saw
her alone, and had very little private conversation with her. She
flattered me, and lavishly displayed for my pleasure her charms and
accomplishments. All the men in her circle seemed to admire her and
envy me. I was dazzled, stimulated: my senses were excited; and being
ignorant, raw, and inexperienced, I thought I loved her. There is no
folly so besotted that the idiotic rivalries of society, the prurience,
the rashness, the blindness of youth, will not hurry a man to its
commission. Her relatives encouraged me; competitors piqued me; she
allured me: a marriage was achieved almost before I knew where I was.
Oh, I have no respect for myself when I think of that act!—an agony of
inward contempt masters me. I never loved, I never esteemed, I did not
even know her. I was not sure of the existence of one virtue in her
nature: I had marked neither modesty, nor benevolence, nor candour, nor
refinement in her mind or manners—and, I married her:—gross,
grovelling, mole-eyed blockhead that I was! With less sin I might
have—But let me remember to whom I am speaking.
“My bride’s mother I had never seen: I understood she was dead. The
honeymoon over, I learned my mistake; she was only mad, and shut up in
a lunatic asylum. There was a younger brother, too—a complete dumb
idiot. The elder one, whom you have seen (and whom I cannot hate,
whilst I abhor all his kindred, because he has some grains of affection
in his feeble mind, shown in the continued interest he takes in his
wretched sister, and also in a dog-like attachment he once bore me),
will probably be in the same state one day. My father and my brother
Rowland knew all this; but they thought only of the thirty thousand
pounds, and joined in the plot against me.
“These were vile discoveries; but except for the treachery of
concealment, I should have made them no subject of reproach to my wife,
even when I found her nature wholly alien to mine, her tastes obnoxious
to me, her cast of mind common, low, narrow, and singularly incapable
of being led to anything higher, expanded to anything larger—when I
found that I could not pass a single evening, nor even a single hour of
the day with her in comfort; that kindly conversation could not be
sustained between us, because whatever topic I started, immediately
received from her a turn at once coarse and trite, perverse and
imbecile—when I perceived that I should never have a quiet or settled
household, because no servant would bear the continued outbreaks of her
violent and unreasonable temper, or the vexations of her absurd,
contradictory, exacting orders—even then I restrained myself: I
eschewed upbraiding, I curtailed remonstrance; I tried to devour my
repentance and disgust in secret; I repressed the deep antipathy I
felt.
“Jane, I will not trouble you with abominable details: some strong
words shall express what I have to say. I lived with that woman
upstairs four years, and before that time she had tried me indeed: her
character ripened and developed with frightful rapidity; her vices
sprang up fast and rank: they were so strong, only cruelty could check
them, and I would not use cruelty. What a pigmy intellect she had, and
what giant propensities! How fearful were the curses those propensities
entailed on me! Bertha Mason, the true daughter of an infamous mother,
dragged me through all the hideous and degrading agonies which must
attend a man bound to a wife at once intemperate and unchaste.
“My brother in the interval was dead, and at the end of the four years
my father died too. I was rich enough now—yet poor to hideous
indigence: a nature the most gross, impure, depraved I ever saw, was
associated with mine, and called by the law and by society a part of
me. And I could not rid myself of it by any legal proceedings: for the
doctors now discovered that _my wife_ was mad—her excesses had
prematurely developed the germs of insanity. Jane, you don’t like my
narrative; you look almost sick—shall I defer the rest to another day?”
“No, sir, finish it now; I pity you—I do earnestly pity you.”
“Pity, Jane, from some people is a noxious and insulting sort of
tribute, which one is justified in hurling back in the teeth of those
who offer it; but that is the sort of pity native to callous, selfish
hearts; it is a hybrid, egotistical pain at hearing of woes, crossed
with ignorant contempt for those who have endured them. But that is not
your pity, Jane; it is not the feeling of which your whole face is full
at this moment—with which your eyes are now almost overflowing—with
which your heart is heaving—with which your hand is trembling in mine.
Your pity, my darling, is the suffering mother of love: its anguish is
the very natal pang of the divine passion. I accept it, Jane; let the
daughter have free advent—my arms wait to receive her.”
“Now, sir, proceed; what did you do when you found she was mad?”
“Jane, I approached the verge of despair; a remnant of self-respect was
all that intervened between me and the gulf. In the eyes of the world,
I was doubtless covered with grimy dishonour; but I resolved to be
clean in my own sight—and to the last I repudiated the contamination of
her crimes, and wrenched myself from connection with her mental
defects. Still, society associated my name and person with hers; I yet
saw her and heard her daily: something of her breath (faugh!) mixed
with the air I breathed; and besides, I remembered I had once been her
husband—that recollection was then, and is now, inexpressibly odious to
me; moreover, I knew that while she lived I could never be the husband
of another and better wife; and, though five years my senior (her
family and her father had lied to me even in the particular of her
age), she was likely to live as long as I, being as robust in frame as
she was infirm in mind. Thus, at the age of twenty-six, I was hopeless.
“One night I had been awakened by her yells—(since the medical men had
pronounced her mad, she had, of course, been shut up)—it was a fiery
West Indian night; one of the description that frequently precede the
hurricanes of those climates. Being unable to sleep in bed, I got up
and opened the window. The air was like sulphur-steams—I could find no
refreshment anywhere. Mosquitoes came buzzing in and hummed sullenly
round the room; the sea, which I could hear from thence, rumbled dull
like an earthquake—black clouds were casting up over it; the moon was
setting in the waves, broad and red, like a hot cannon-ball—she threw
her last bloody glance over a world quivering with the ferment of
tempest. I was physically influenced by the atmosphere and scene, and
my ears were filled with the curses the maniac still shrieked out;
wherein she momentarily mingled my name with such a tone of demon-hate,
with such language!—no professed harlot ever had a fouler vocabulary
than she: though two rooms off, I heard every word—the thin partitions
of the West India house opposing but slight obstruction to her wolfish
cries.
“‘This life,’ said I at last, ‘is hell: this is the air—those are the
sounds of the bottomless pit! I have a right to deliver myself from it
if I can. The sufferings of this mortal state will leave me with the
heavy flesh that now cumbers my soul. Of the fanatic’s burning eternity
I have no fear: there is not a future state worse than this present
one—let me break away, and go home to God!’
“I said this whilst I knelt down at and unlocked a trunk which
contained a brace of loaded pistols: I meant to shoot myself. I only
entertained the intention for a moment; for, not being insane, the
crisis of exquisite and unalloyed despair, which had originated the
wish and design of self-destruction, was past in a second.