Becoming Jane Eyre (18 page)

As Charlotte comes back into the room and sits down opposite him, he lifts his head, wiping a thread of saliva from his chin with the back of his hand. She cannot contemplate this piteous countenance without ire. How can he come downstairs in such disarray? Surely he could brush his hair, wash his face! He speaks of a dream he had. She does not ask him what it was, but turns her gaze away. But he insists, “I must tell you my dream. I must speak to you! Charlotte, please!”

“Very well. Proceed,” she says stiffly, trying to be fair, kind, her mind on her book. She can no longer feel anything for him. She looks at Anne’s calm face and neat figure instead.

“You were swimming in the beck, and there was a shark following you, and I just stood by and watched. Oh, I’m so afraid,” he blurts out, looking around the room, as though he sees something foreboding there. He leans toward her, clutching at her arm and lowering his voice to a hoarse whisper. “Please help me. You must understand. I don’t have anything. I have to get some money.”

She looks at his thin, anxious figure with horror. He smiles back at her mechanically, using his ancient charm on her, squeezing her arm. She remembers how he used these tactics with her aunt, stroking her plump arms, complimenting her coiffure.

Looking again into his mad eyes, feeling him clutching desperately at her flesh, she feels the affinity she has always felt, one that now makes her reject him. She detaches his hand from her arm. She cannot help him. She fights against the tightening in her throat. She must save herself. She must finish her new book, particularly now that her first book has been rejected once again. She turns away from him.

“Look at me!” he says. “How can you turn your face away!” She does as he asks. She looks at him coldly, calmly, letting her eyes speak for her. She recalls her own hurt feelings, walking in the garden with her professor, her hand on his arm. She remembers how she longed to walk by his side forever; indeed, she still longs for his presence. She pictures the waves of his sable hair, the pride of his deportment, his indifference to his appearance. She remembers how she took to walking the streets of Brussels hour after hour, desperate, life’s quiet stream broken up into whirl and eddy. How she dreaded going back to the dormitory alone, to the lugubrious dreams that came to her thick and fast. She was full of apprehension. The world seemed filled with messages in some secret code, as Branwell’s is. All sense of purpose had dissolved. She walked all the way to the grave of dear young Martha T., her friend who had died of the cholera and been buried in the foreign soil of the Belgian hills. She stood there, weeping for all she had lost: her dead friend, her dead sisters, her dissolute brother, her home so far away, her teacher’s friendship, intimacy.

As Branwell sits slobbering and chattering inanely before her, a moment she had put out of her mind, so strange had it seemed, comes to her. During that period of daily walking she had entered a Catholic church, St. Gudule. Light came in aslant through the stained-glass windows, as it does now in the dining room at Haworth. The candles flickered in the gloom. She fell onto her knees in a pew, overcome with a sudden longing for human contact. Like her poor brother, she was driven by loneliness, guilt, and a need for intimacy. She wanted to tell everything, to confess. She was driven into a popish church to speak to someone about her unholy desire, to share the hate in her heart.

What was she thinking? Was she really ready to convert to her Master’s church, to go back to her grandmother’s religion, to be part of something ancient and lost? Did she not say every Sunday, “I believe in one Catholic and apostolic church?”

She had watched as a penitent confessed through the grating, the voice whispering on and on. Then, in the immense half darkness, she dared to approach. The grating opened, and the priest inclined his ear. She was speechless. What was she supposed to say? She told him she was not a Catholic and did not know the rites of confession. What she needed was what Branwell wants from her, to absorb something, anything, from him, a Catholic priest!

At first, he had refused to hear her. “My child, I do not have the right to bestow upon you the blessing of confession.”

“But I must speak! You must hear what I have to say!” she said with such conviction that the man was moved to say, “My child, you are in serious trouble of some kind?” She spoke of the strange fever in her blood, calling it a kind of moral madness. She confessed that she was losing all that was good in herself and all that was human. Only animal rage—a passion stronger than any religious feeling, a desire to destroy, a hatefulness, remained.

“You have committed a terrible crime?” the priest had asked her in a worried tone.

“Only one of the heart,” she had said.

But nothing helped her. Indeed, she has not forgotten those feelings. As she sits at the table with Anne and her mad-eyed brother, she summons up for her book the madness of the wife confined to the attic. It is Branwell’s madness and also her own. Bertha, the foreigner, the woman from afar, comes close to her now, possessed with the desire to hurt, to destroy, and with the preternatural ingenuity and energy to carry out her hateful desires. When she sees Grace Poole sleeping her gin-sodden sleep, she steals her keys and frees herself, roaming restlessly at midnight through the long corridor, going into the chamber of her rival, the young governess she instinctively hates, kindling the drapes of the bed, just as Branwell’s bed had been consumed.

Fire will consume Thornfield and Bertha Rochester, as it might have consumed their parsonage and her brother if Emily had not rescued him. It is Jane who will have to rescue Mr. Rochester as she, Charlotte, rescued their father, becoming his lifeline, changing places with him.

As she looks at her brother, another idea comes to her for her book. Clearly Mr. Rochester must return, altered, someone to whom Jane now can go and remain blameless. He must call out to her just at the moment when St. John proposes to Jane, when she is on the cusp of going to India as a missionary with him, which will surely bring her fragile life to its end. But Jane must go back to Mr. Rochester and return to her past. She must go to the blinded man she loves above all others, the man who was there at the start.

Charlotte remembers an evening when she walked with her Master alone in the garden, the sky a soft pink. She can still hear him telling her they could communicate from afar through thoughts alone, reaching each other across time and space. His words are engraved in her heart. Did they not indeed speak to each other so often with a look or a gesture? Mr. Rochester will call out to his Jane. Diminished, he will summon her in her mind. Yes, yes, of course, she sees it all now clearly: blinded and a widower, no longer threatening or frightening, he will summon her to his side, calling out, “Jane! Jane! Jane!” as her father had done in Manchester in his great distress.

Jane will sit on Mr. Rochester’s knee as she, Charlotte, would have loved to sit on her father’s knee as a child and brush his hair back from his brow. Jane will lie beside Mr. Rochester, as Charlotte did beside her poor father, to warm his cold flesh.

Fire and air. There will be a great conflagration. Fire will come to Thornfield, prepared earlier, when Jane rescued Mr. Rochester from his bed, a fire lit again by his mad wife in her glorious moment of freedom, going on all fours like a wild animal escaping from its cage, roaming through the narrow, low-ceilinged passageways of the upper story of Thornfield, going past all those rows of closed black doors, just as Jane herself has done in moments of restlessness, walking back and forth in the silence and solitude of the place, just as Charlotte’s mind has freed itself in the writing of this book. The mad wife, laughing in her demonic, mirthless way, will descend the stairs to set fire to the room that had been the governess’s, but Jane will no longer be there. She, too, will have escaped the confinement of Thornfield, escaped her position of dependency and subjugation. It will be the mad wife, Charlotte’s own craziness, that will perish in the torching of Thornfield.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

A
nne watches Charlotte rise. She says she has work to do. She must go back to her book. She will write the last chapters. She leaves the room, walking with her head high, a strange glow in her cheeks. Her face is lit up with a joyous expression, almost as though she were going to meet a lover.

Anne thinks of the gay, insouciant presence of Celia Amelia, as they called the young curate she loved. She sees him coming into the room with a bunch of wildflowers in one hand and a valentine for her in the other.

But it is Emily who comes in, followed by Keeper. She takes up a mutilated ear, the result of many battles, and pulls at it absently while the big dog slobbers with affection, his head on her knee. She says tenderly to her brother, “There is nothing to fear here, dear. You are among those who love you.” She leans her head against his, her dark brown hair half-concealing his cheek, looking at her brother with gentle eyes.

What can Anne say? At the time of the Thorp Green debacle she was determined to save him, as she would have a wounded deer or a fox caught in a trap. “Perhaps,” she had said, “the R’s might engage Branwell to tutor Edmund.” And, with her recommendation—“a brilliant mind: a painter, a musician, a poet!” she had told them, quite truthfully, after all—they had.

Ah! The arrogance of such a belief in her own power, she thinks now, this poor spectacle before her. His position as a tutor in the family where she was governess, though beneath him in so many ways, had seemed the best they could do for him. At least it was honest labor for a decent salary, and certainly a much better one than the R’s had ever given her. And he needed the money so badly, as Aunt, unlike the three girls, had left him nothing in her will.

Anne was delighted to have Edmund, the R’s spoiled boy, off her hands, though certainly her motivation was not a selfish one. She was so proud to be the one to come up with something that could help her brother.

Still, she had hard work to convince him to accept the post. She had pointed out the difference between their salaries. Mr. R., though she despised his narrow mind, his hypocrisy, was not a skinflint. Perhaps he had allowed himself to be persuaded by Mrs. R., who could be generous and liked to play the role of lady bountiful. Her brother was lucky to get double what they paid her, Anne thinks as she looks at him sitting slumped opposite her.

“We have work to do, my dear,” Emily finally says, then rises and disengages his hand. “Come on, Anne.” The dogs get up and follow her as she turns to go out of the room.

“Don’t leave me alone, please!” the brother cries out and grasps Anne’s hand, but she rises too—what else can she do? She is afraid he will ask her again for money, which she cannot give him. Besides, they will need money to pay this publisher. She disengages her hand slowly and turns her back on him, but she looks over her shoulder at her brother, who watches them go with frightened eyes.

In her eagerness to convince her brother to accept the position, she had stressed the advantages. “You’ll have time to read, to write, to play the piano,” she remembers saying, truthfully, foolishly. Indeed, he had had far too much time with only the one boy to tutor, and that only in the mornings, while she was busy all day with the two girls. He had had time to dream his crazy dreams.

She had described the stately portico, the French windows, the eight lodging rooms on the first floor and nine on the second, the pianoforte, so superior to their own, which he would be allowed to play, the mahogany chairs. She had even expatiated on the moreen window curtains, the stabling of fourteen horses, the bidet and the bedstead imported from France. She was conscious of appealing to his snobbery, gushing over the eleven acres of pleasure grounds and paddock, the five servants, even the delicious cream and butter from the dairy, the beer from their own brewery.

Perhaps what had finally convinced him was the romantic tale of the Abbot of the Fountains, Jean de Ripon, who had died in the Monks House, where her brother was to be lodged, a timbered and wattled building that might have come out of a book by their beloved author, Walter Scott. Within sight of its gabled windows was still preserved the monks’ circular stew pond, where fish were kept. Hearing this, he had said proudly, “If I have to be an employee, I’d rather be employed by the aristocracy.”

She tried to tell him of their employers’ faults during the voyage, speeding toward York in the new railroad from Leeds. Her words could not have been worse chosen. Instead of inclining him to caution, they must have led him astray.

“Tell me more about the R.’s,” he had urged. Ruefully she thinks of him now, putting his hand on her arm, blue eyes sparkling with curiosity and hope. His sisters had made him new shirts for this start, and he was smartly turned out. She had so much hoped to lead him into the path of righteousness.