Jane Eyre: An Autobiography
of its clay dwelling-place. And it is you, spirit—with will and energy,
and virtue and purity—that I want: not alone your brittle frame. Of
yourself you could come with soft flight and nestle against my heart,
if you would: seized against your will, you will elude the grasp like
an essence—you will vanish ere I inhale your fragrance. Oh! come, Jane,
come!”
As he said this, he released me from his clutch, and only looked at me.
The look was far worse to resist than the frantic strain: only an
idiot, however, would have succumbed now. I had dared and baffled his
fury; I must elude his sorrow: I retired to the door.
“You are going, Jane?”
“I am going, sir.”
“You are leaving me?”
“Yes.”
“You will not come? You will not be my comforter, my rescuer? My deep
love, my wild woe, my frantic prayer, are all nothing to you?”
What unutterable pathos was in his voice! How hard it was to reiterate
firmly, “I am going.”
“Jane!”
“Mr. Rochester!”
“Withdraw, then,—I consent; but remember, you leave me here in anguish.
Go up to your own room; think over all I have said, and, Jane, cast a
glance on my sufferings—think of me.”
He turned away; he threw himself on his face on the sofa. “Oh, Jane! my
hope—my love—my life!” broke in anguish from his lips. Then came a
deep, strong sob.
I had already gained the door; but, reader, I walked back—walked back
as determinedly as I had retreated. I knelt down by him; I turned his
face from the cushion to me; I kissed his cheek; I smoothed his hair
with my hand.
“God bless you, my dear master!” I said. “God keep you from harm and
wrong—direct you, solace you—reward you well for your past kindness to
me.”
“Little Jane’s love would have been my best reward,” he answered;
“without it, my heart is broken. But Jane will give me her love:
yes—nobly, generously.”
Up the blood rushed to his face; forth flashed the fire from his eyes;
erect he sprang; he held his arms out; but I evaded the embrace, and at
once quitted the room.
“Farewell!” was the cry of my heart as I left him. Despair added,
“Farewell for ever!”
That night I never thought to sleep; but a slumber fell on me as soon
as I lay down in bed. I was transported in thought to the scenes of
childhood: I dreamt I lay in the red-room at Gateshead; that the night
was dark, and my mind impressed with strange fears. The light that long
ago had struck me into syncope, recalled in this vision, seemed
glidingly to mount the wall, and tremblingly to pause in the centre of
the obscured ceiling. I lifted up my head to look: the roof resolved to
clouds, high and dim; the gleam was such as the moon imparts to vapours
she is about to sever. I watched her come—watched with the strangest
anticipation; as though some word of doom were to be written on her
disk. She broke forth as never moon yet burst from cloud: a hand first
penetrated the sable folds and waved them away; then, not a moon, but a
white human form shone in the azure, inclining a glorious brow
earthward. It gazed and gazed on me. It spoke to my spirit:
immeasurably distant was the tone, yet so near, it whispered in my
heart—
“My daughter, flee temptation.”
“Mother, I will.”
So I answered after I had waked from the trance-like dream. It was yet
night, but July nights are short: soon after midnight, dawn comes. “It
cannot be too early to commence the task I have to fulfil,” thought I.
I rose: I was dressed; for I had taken off nothing but my shoes. I knew
where to find in my drawers some linen, a locket, a ring. In seeking
these articles, I encountered the beads of a pearl necklace Mr.
Rochester had forced me to accept a few days ago. I left that; it was
not mine: it was the visionary bride’s who had melted in air. The other
articles I made up in a parcel; my purse, containing twenty shillings
(it was all I had), I put in my pocket: I tied on my straw bonnet,
pinned my shawl, took the parcel and my slippers, which I would not put
on yet, and stole from my room.
“Farewell, kind Mrs. Fairfax!” I whispered, as I glided past her door.
“Farewell, my darling Adèle!” I said, as I glanced towards the nursery.
No thought could be admitted of entering to embrace her. I had to
deceive a fine ear: for aught I knew it might now be listening.
I would have got past Mr. Rochester’s chamber without a pause; but my
heart momentarily stopping its beat at that threshold, my foot was
forced to stop also. No sleep was there: the inmate was walking
restlessly from wall to wall; and again and again he sighed while I
listened. There was a heaven—a temporary heaven—in this room for me, if
I chose: I had but to go in and 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. I thought of
this.
That kind master, who could not sleep now, was waiting with impatience
for day. He would send for me in the morning; I should be gone. He
would have me sought for: vainly. He would feel himself forsaken; his
love rejected: he would suffer; perhaps grow desperate. I thought of
this too. My hand moved towards the lock: I caught it back, and glided
on.
Drearily I wound my way downstairs: I knew what I had to do, and I did
it mechanically. I sought the key of the side-door in the kitchen; I
sought, too, a phial of oil and a feather; I oiled the key and the
lock. I got some water, I got some bread: for perhaps I should have to
walk far; and my strength, sorely shaken of late, must not break down.
All this I did without one sound. I opened the door, passed out, shut
it softly. Dim dawn glimmered in the yard. The great gates were closed
and locked; but a wicket in one of them was only latched. Through that
I departed: it, too, I shut; and now I was out of Thornfield.
A mile off, beyond the fields, lay a road which stretched in the
contrary direction to Millcote; a road I had never travelled, but often
noticed, and wondered where it led: thither I bent my steps. No
reflection was to be allowed now: not one glance was to be cast back;
not even one forward. Not one thought was to be given either to the
past or the future. The first was a page so heavenly sweet—so deadly
sad—that to read one line of it would dissolve my courage and break
down my energy. The last was an awful blank: something like the world
when the deluge was gone by.
I skirted fields, and hedges, and lanes till after sunrise. I believe
it was a lovely summer morning: I know my shoes, which I had put on
when I left the house, were soon wet with dew. But I looked neither to
rising sun, nor smiling sky, nor wakening nature. He who is taken out
to pass through a fair scene to the scaffold, thinks not of the flowers
that smile on his road, but of the block and axe-edge; of the
disseverment of bone and vein; of the grave gaping at the end: and I
thought of drear flight and homeless wandering—and oh! with agony I
thought of what I left. I could not help it. I thought of him now—in
his room—watching the sunrise; hoping I should soon come to say I would
stay with him and be his. I longed to be his; I panted to return: it
was not too late; I could yet spare him the bitter pang of bereavement.
As yet my flight, I was sure, was undiscovered. I could go back and be
his comforter—his pride; his redeemer from misery, perhaps from ruin.
Oh, that fear of his self-abandonment—far worse than my abandonment—how
it goaded me! It was a barbed arrow-head in my breast; it tore me when
I tried to extract it; it sickened me when remembrance thrust it
farther in. Birds began singing in brake and copse: birds were faithful
to their mates; birds were emblems of love. What was I? In the midst of
my pain of heart and frantic effort of principle, I abhorred myself. I
had no solace from self-approbation: none even from self-respect. I had
injured—wounded—left my master. I was hateful in my own eyes. Still I
could not turn, nor retrace one step. God must have led me on. As to my
own will or conscience, impassioned grief had trampled one and stifled
the other. I was weeping wildly as I walked along my solitary way:
fast, fast I went like one delirious. A weakness, beginning inwardly,
extending to the limbs, seized me, and I fell: I lay on the ground some
minutes, pressing my face to the wet turf. I had some fear—or hope—that
here I should die: but I was soon up; crawling forwards on my hands and
knees, and then again raised to my feet—as eager and as determined as
ever to reach the road.
When I got there, I was forced to sit to rest me under the hedge; and
while I sat, I heard wheels, and saw a coach come on. I stood up and
lifted my hand; it stopped. I asked where it was going: the driver
named a place a long way off, and where I was sure Mr. Rochester had no
connections. I asked for what sum he would take me there; he said
thirty shillings; I answered I had but twenty; well, he would try to
make it do. He further gave me leave to get into the inside, as the
vehicle was empty: I entered, was shut in, and it rolled on its way.
Gentle reader, may you never feel what I then felt! May your eyes never
shed such stormy, scalding, heart-wrung tears as poured from mine. May
you never appeal to Heaven in prayers so hopeless and so agonised as in
that hour left my lips; for never may you, like me, dread to be the
instrument of evil to what you wholly love.
CHAPTER XXVIII
Two days are passed. It is a summer evening; the coachman has set me
down at a place called Whitcross; he could take me no farther for the
sum I had given, and I was not possessed of another shilling in the
world. The coach is a mile off by this time; I am alone. At this moment
I discover that I forgot to take my parcel out of the pocket of the
coach, where I had placed it for safety; there it remains, there it
must remain; and now, I am absolutely destitute.
Whitcross is no town, nor even a hamlet; it is but a stone pillar set
up where four roads meet: whitewashed, I suppose, to be more obvious at
a distance and in darkness. Four arms spring from its summit: the
nearest town to which these point is, according to the inscription,
distant ten miles; the farthest, above twenty. From the well-known
names of these towns I learn in what county I have lighted; a
north-midland shire, dusk with moorland, ridged with mountain: this I
see. There are great moors behind and on each hand of me; there are
waves of mountains far beyond that deep valley at my feet. The
population here must be thin, and I see no passengers on these roads:
they stretch out east, west, north, and south—white, broad, lonely;
they are all cut in the moor, and the heather grows deep and wild to
their very verge. Yet a chance traveller might pass by; and I wish no
eye to see me now: strangers would wonder what I am doing, lingering
here at the sign-post, evidently objectless and lost. I might be
questioned: I could give no answer but what would sound incredible and
excite suspicion. Not a tie holds me to human society at this
moment—not a charm or hope calls me where my fellow-creatures are—none
that saw me would have a kind thought or a good wish for me. I have no
relative but the universal mother, Nature: I will seek her breast and
ask repose.
I struck straight into the heath; I held on to a hollow I saw deeply
furrowing the brown moorside; I waded knee-deep in its dark growth; I
turned with its turnings, and finding a moss-blackened granite crag in
a hidden angle, I sat down under it. High banks of moor were about me;
the crag protected my head: the sky was over that.
Some time passed before I felt tranquil even here: I had a vague dread
that wild cattle might be near, or that some sportsman or poacher might
discover me. If a gust of wind swept the waste, I looked up, fearing it