Jane Eyre: An Autobiography
Maker. I began sometimes to pray: very brief prayers they were, but
very sincere.
“Some days since: nay, I can number them—four; it was last Monday
night, a singular mood came over me: one in which grief replaced
frenzy—sorrow, sullenness. I had long had the impression that since I
could nowhere find you, you must be dead. Late that night—perhaps it
might be between eleven and twelve o’clock—ere I retired to my dreary
rest, I supplicated God, that, if it seemed good to Him, I might soon
be taken from this life, and admitted to that world to come, where
there was still hope of rejoining Jane.
“I was in my own room, and sitting by the window, which was open: it
soothed me to feel the balmy night-air; though I could see no stars and
only by a vague, luminous haze, knew the presence of a moon. I longed
for thee, Janet! Oh, I longed for thee both with soul and flesh! I
asked of God, at once in anguish and humility, if I had not been long
enough desolate, afflicted, tormented; and might not soon taste bliss
and peace once more. That I merited all I endured, I acknowledged—that
I could scarcely endure more, I pleaded; and the alpha and omega of my
heart’s wishes broke involuntarily from my lips in the words—‘Jane!
Jane! Jane!’”
“Did you speak these words aloud?”
“I did, Jane. If any listener had heard me, he would have thought me
mad: I pronounced them with such frantic energy.”
“And it was last Monday night, somewhere near midnight?”
“Yes; but the time is of no consequence: what followed is the strange
point. You will think me superstitious,—some superstition I have in my
blood, and always had: nevertheless, this is true—true at least it is
that I heard what I now relate.
“As I exclaimed ‘Jane! Jane! Jane!’ a voice—I cannot tell whence the
voice came, but I know whose voice it was—replied, ‘I am coming: wait
for me;’ and a moment after, went whispering on the wind the
words—‘Where are you?’
“I’ll tell you, if I can, the idea, the picture these words opened to
my mind: yet it is difficult to express what I want to express.
Ferndean is buried, as you see, in a heavy wood, where sound falls
dull, and dies unreverberating. ‘Where are you?’ seemed spoken amongst
mountains; for I heard a hill-sent echo repeat the words. Cooler and
fresher at the moment the gale seemed to visit my brow: I could have
deemed that in some wild, lone scene, I and Jane were meeting. In
spirit, I believe we must have met. You no doubt were, at that hour, in
unconscious sleep, Jane: perhaps your soul wandered from its cell to
comfort mine; for those were your accents—as certain as I live—they
were yours!”
Reader, it was on Monday night—near midnight—that I too had received
the mysterious summons: those were the very words by which I replied to
it. I listened to Mr. Rochester’s narrative, but made no disclosure in
return. The coincidence struck me as too awful and inexplicable to be
communicated or discussed. If I told anything, my tale would be such as
must necessarily make a profound impression on the mind of my hearer:
and that mind, yet from its sufferings too prone to gloom, needed not
the deeper shade of the supernatural. I kept these things then, and
pondered them in my heart.
“You cannot now wonder,” continued my master, “that when you rose upon
me so unexpectedly last night, I had difficulty in believing you any
other than a mere voice and vision, something that would melt to
silence and annihilation, as the midnight whisper and mountain echo had
melted before. Now, I thank God! I know it to be otherwise. Yes, I
thank God!”
He put me off his knee, rose, and reverently lifting his hat from his
brow, and bending his sightless eyes to the earth, he stood in mute
devotion. Only the last words of the worship were audible.
“I thank my Maker, that, in the midst of judgment, he has remembered
mercy. I humbly entreat my Redeemer to give me strength to lead
henceforth a purer life than I have done hitherto!”
Then he stretched his hand out to be led. I took that dear hand, held
it a moment to my lips, then let it pass round my shoulder: being so
much lower of stature than he, I served both for his prop and guide. We
entered the wood, and wended homeward.
CHAPTER XXXVIII—CONCLUSION
Reader, I married him. A quiet wedding we had: he and I, the parson and
clerk, were alone present. When we got back from church, I went into
the kitchen of the manor-house, where Mary was cooking the dinner and
John cleaning the knives, and I said—
“Mary, I have been married to Mr. Rochester this morning.” The
housekeeper and her husband were both of that decent phlegmatic order
of people, to whom one may at any time safely communicate a remarkable
piece of news without incurring the danger of having one’s ears pierced
by some shrill ejaculation, and subsequently stunned by a torrent of
wordy wonderment. Mary did look up, and she did stare at me: the ladle
with which she was basting a pair of chickens roasting at the fire, did
for some three minutes hang suspended in air; and for the same space of
time John’s knives also had rest from the polishing process: but Mary,
bending again over the roast, said only—
“Have you, Miss? Well, for sure!”
A short time after she pursued—“I seed you go out with the master, but
I didn’t know you were gone to church to be wed;” and she basted away.
John, when I turned to him, was grinning from ear to ear.
“I telled Mary how it would be,” he said: “I knew what Mr. Edward”
(John was an old servant, and had known his master when he was the
cadet of the house, therefore, he often gave him his Christian name)—“I
knew what Mr. Edward would do; and I was certain he would not wait long
neither: and he’s done right, for aught I know. I wish you joy, Miss!”
and he politely pulled his forelock.
“Thank you, John. Mr. Rochester told me to give you and Mary this.” I
put into his hand a five-pound note. Without waiting to hear more, I
left the kitchen. In passing the door of that sanctum some time after,
I caught the words—
“She’ll happen do better for him nor ony o’ t’ grand ladies.” And
again, “If she ben’t one o’ th’ handsomest, she’s noan faâl and varry
good-natured; and i’ his een she’s fair beautiful, onybody may see
that.”
I wrote to Moor House and to Cambridge immediately, to say what I had
done: fully explaining also why I had thus acted. Diana and Mary
approved the step unreservedly. Diana announced that she would just
give me time to get over the honeymoon, and then she would come and see
me.
“She had better not wait till then, Jane,” said Mr. Rochester, when I
read her letter to him; “if she does, she will be too late, for our
honeymoon will shine our life long: its beams will only fade over your
grave or mine.”
How St. John received the news, I don’t know: he never answered the
letter in which I communicated it: yet six months after he wrote to me,
without, however, mentioning Mr. Rochester’s name or alluding to my
marriage. His letter was then calm, and, though very serious, kind. He
has maintained a regular, though not frequent, correspondence ever
since: he hopes I am happy, and trusts I am not of those who live
without God in the world, and only mind earthly things.
You have not quite forgotten little Adèle, have you, reader? I had not;
I soon asked and obtained leave of Mr. Rochester, to go and see her at
the school where he had placed her. Her frantic joy at beholding me
again moved me much. She looked pale and thin: she said she was not
happy. I found the rules of the establishment were too strict, its
course of study too severe for a child of her age: I took her home with
me. I meant to become her governess once more, but I soon found this
impracticable; my time and cares were now required by another—my
husband needed them all. So I sought out a school conducted on a more
indulgent system, and near enough to permit of my visiting her often,
and bringing her home sometimes. I took care she should never want for
anything that could contribute to her comfort: she soon settled in her
new abode, became very happy there, and made fair progress in her
studies. As she grew up, a sound English education corrected in a great
measure her French defects; and when she left school, I found in her a
pleasing and obliging companion: docile, good-tempered, and
well-principled. By her grateful attention to me and mine, she has long
since well repaid any little kindness I ever had it in my power to
offer her.
My tale draws to its close: one word respecting my experience of
married life, and one brief glance at the fortunes of those whose names
have most frequently recurred in this narrative, and I have done.
I have now been married ten years. I know what it is to live entirely
for and with what I love best on earth. I hold myself supremely
blest—blest beyond what language can express; because I am my husband’s
life as fully as he is mine. No woman was ever nearer to her mate than
I am: ever more absolutely bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. I
know no weariness of my Edward’s society: he knows none of mine, any
more than we each do of the pulsation of the heart that beats in our
separate bosoms; consequently, we are ever together. To be together is
for us to be at once as free as in solitude, as gay as in company. We
talk, I believe, all day long: to talk to each other is but a more
animated and an audible thinking. All my confidence is bestowed on him,
all his confidence is devoted to me; we are precisely suited in
character—perfect concord is the result.
Mr. Rochester continued blind the first two years of our union; perhaps
it was that circumstance that drew us so very near—that knit us so very
close: for I was then his vision, as I am still his right hand.
Literally, I was (what he often called me) the apple of his eye. He saw
nature—he saw books through me; and never did I weary of gazing for his
behalf, and of putting into words the effect of field, tree, town,
river, cloud, sunbeam—of the landscape before us; of the weather round
us—and impressing by sound on his ear what light could no longer stamp
on his eye. Never did I weary of reading to him; never did I weary of
conducting him where he wished to go: of doing for him what he wished
to be done. And there was a pleasure in my services, most full, most
exquisite, even though sad—because he claimed these services without
painful shame or damping humiliation. He loved me so truly, that he
knew no reluctance in profiting by my attendance: he felt I loved him
so fondly, that to yield that attendance was to indulge my sweetest
wishes.
One morning at the end of the two years, as I was writing a letter to
his dictation, he came and bent over me, and said—“Jane, have you a
glittering ornament round your neck?”
I had a gold watch-chain: I answered “Yes.”
“And have you a pale blue dress on?”
And have you a pale blue dress on?
I had. He informed me then, that for some time he had fancied the
obscurity clouding one eye was becoming less dense; and that now he was
sure of it.
He and I went up to London. He had the advice of an eminent oculist;
and he eventually recovered the sight of that one eye. He cannot now
see very distinctly: he cannot read or write much; but he can find his
way without being led by the hand: the sky is no longer a blank to
him—the earth no longer a void. When his first-born was put into his
arms, he could see that the boy had inherited his own eyes, as they
once were—large, brilliant, and black. On that occasion, he again, with
a full heart, acknowledged that God had tempered judgment with mercy.
My Edward and I, then, are happy: and the more so, because those we
most love are happy likewise. Diana and Mary Rivers are both married: