Jane Eyre (56 page)

“You know I am a scoundrel, Jane?” ere long he enquired wistfully—wondering, I suppose, at my continued silence and tameness, the result rather of weakness than of will.

“Yes, sir.”

“Then tell me so roundly and sharply—don’t spare me.”

“I cannot, I am tired and sick. I want some water.” He heaved a sort of shuddering sigh, and taking me in his arms, carried me downstairs. At first I did not know to what room he had borne me; all was cloudy to my glazed sight, presently I felt the reviving warmth of a fire; for, summer as it was, I had become icy cold in my chamber. He put wine to my lips. I tasted it and revived; then I ate something he offered me, and was soon myself. I was in the library—sitting in his chair—he was quite near.
If I could go out of life now, without too sharp a pang, it would be well for me,
I thought,
then I should not have to make the effort of cracking my heart-strings in rending them from among Mr Rochester’s. I must leave him, it appears. I do not want to leave him—I cannot leave him.

“How are you now, Jane?”

“Much better, sir. I shall be well soon.”

“Taste the wine again, Jane.”

I obeyed him, then he put the glass on the table, stood before me, and looked at me attentively. Suddenly he turned away, with an inarticulate exclamation, full of passionate emotion of some kind. He walked fast through the room and came back. He stooped towards me as if to kiss me, but I remembered caresses were now forbidden. I turned my face away and put his aside.

“What!—How is this?” he exclaimed hastily. “Oh, I know! You won’t kiss the husband of Bertha Mason? You consider my arms filled and my embraces appropriated?”

“At any rate, there is neither room nor claim for me, sir.”

“Why, Jane? I will spare you the trouble of much talking. I will answer for you—Because I have a wife already, you would reply. I guess rightly?”

“Yes.”

“If you think so, you must have a strange opinion of me; you must regard me as a plotting profligate—a base and low rake who has been simulating disinterested love in order to draw you into a snare deliberately laid, and strip you of honour and rob you of self-respect. What do you say to that? I see you can say nothing in the first place, you are faint still, and have enough to do to draw your breath. In the second place, you cannot yet accustom yourself to accuse and revile me, and besides, the flood-gates of tears are opened, and they would rush out if you spoke much and you have no desire to expostulate, to upbraid, to make a scene, you are thinking how
to act
—
talking
you consider is of no use. I know you—I am on my guard.”

“Sir, I do not wish to act against you,” I said and my unsteady voice warned me to curtail my sentence.

“Not in your sense of the word, but in mine you are scheming to destroy me. You have as good as said that I am a married man—as a married man you will shun me, keep out of my way, just now you have refused to kiss me. You intend to make yourself a complete stranger to me, to live under this roof only as Adèle’s governess. If ever I say a friendly word to you, if ever a friendly feeling inclines you again to me, you will say—‘That man had nearly made me his mistress. I must be ice and rock to him,’ and ice and rock you will accordingly become.”

I cleared and steadied my voice to reply, “All is changed about me, sir. I must change too—there is no doubt of that and to avoid fluctuations of feeling, and continual combats with recollections and associations, there is only one way—Adèle must have a new governess, sir.”

“Oh, Adèle will go to school—I have settled that already, nor do I mean to torment you with the hideous associations and recollections of Thornfield Hall—this accursed place—this tent of Achan—this insolent vault, offering the ghastliness of living death to the light of the open sky—this narrow stone hell, with its one real fiend, worse than a legion of such as we imagine. Jane, you shall not stay here, nor will I. I was wrong ever to bring you to Thornfield Hall, knowing as I did how it was haunted. I charged them to conceal from you, before I ever saw you, all knowledge of the curse of the place, merely because I feared Adèle never would have a governess to stay if she knew with what inmate she was housed, and my plans would not permit me to remove the maniac elsewhere—though I possess an old house, Ferndean Manor, even more retired and hidden than this, where I could have lodged her safely enough, had not a scruple about the unhealthiness of the situation, in the heart of a wood, made my conscience recoil from the arrangement. Probably those damp walls would soon have eased me of her charge, but to each villain his own vice and mine is not a tendency to indirect assassination, even of what I most hate.

“Concealing the mad-woman’s neighbourhood from you, however, was something like covering a child with a cloak and laying it down near a upas-tree, that demon’s vicinage is poisoned, and always was. But I’ll shut up Thornfield Hall. I’ll nail up the front door and board the lower windows. I’ll give Mrs Poole two hundred a year to live here with
my wife
, as you term that fearful hag, Grace will do much for money, and she shall have her son, the keeper at Grimsby Retreat, to bear her company and be at hand to give her aid in the paroxysms, when
my wife
is prompted by her familiar to burn people in their beds at night, to stab them, to bite their flesh from their bones, and so on—”

“Sir,” I interrupted him, “you are inexorable for that unfortunate lady, you speak of her with hate—with vindictive antipathy. It is cruel—she cannot help being mad.”

“Jane, my little darling—so I will call you, for so you are—you don’t know what you are talking about, you misjudge me again. It is not because she is mad I hate her. If you were mad, do you think I should hate you?”

“I do indeed, sir.”

“Then you are mistaken, and you know nothing about me, and nothing about the sort of love of which I am capable. Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own, in pain and sickness it would still be dear. Your mind is my treasure, and if it were broken, it would be my treasure still, if you raved, my arms should confine you, and not a strait waistcoat—your grasp, even in fury, would have a charm for me. If you flew at me as wildly as that woman did this morning, I should receive you in an embrace, at least as fond as it would be restrictive. I should not shrink from you with disgust as I did from her, in your quiet moments you should have no watcher and no nurse but me and I could hang over you with untiring tenderness, though you gave me no smile in return and never weary of gazing into your eyes, though they had no longer a ray of recognition for me. But why do I follow that train of ideas? I was talking of removing you from Thornfield. All, you know, is prepared for prompt departure, tomorrow you shall go. I only ask you to endure one more night under this roof, Jane and then, farewell to its miseries and terrors forever! I have a place to repair to, which will be a secure sanctuary from hateful reminiscences, from unwelcome intrusion—even from falsehood and slander.”

“And take Adèle with you, sir,” I interrupted, “she will be a companion for you.”

“What do you mean, Jane? I told you I would send Adèle to school and what do I want with a child for a companion, and not my own child—a French dancer’s bastard? Why do you importune me about her! I say, why do you assign Adèle to me for a companion?”

“You spoke of a retirement, sir and retirement and solitude are dull, too dull for you.”

“Solitude! Solitude!” he reiterated with irritation. “I see I must come to an explanation. I don’t know what sphynx-like expression is forming in your countenance. You are to share my solitude. Do you understand?”

I shook my head. It required a degree of courage, excited as he was becoming, even to risk that mute sign of dissent. He had been walking fast about the room, and he stopped, as if suddenly rooted to one spot. He looked at me long and hard. I turned my eyes from him, fixed them on the fire, and tried to assume and maintain a quiet, collected aspect.

“Now for the hitch in Jane’s character,” he said at last, speaking more calmly than from his look I had expected him to speak. “The reel of silk has run smoothly enough so far, but I always knew there would come a knot and a puzzle, here it is. Now for vexation, and exasperation, and endless trouble! By God! I long to exert a fraction of Samson’s strength, and break the entanglement like tow!”

He recommenced his walk, but soon again stopped, and this time just before me.

“Jane! will you hear reason?”—he stooped and approached his lips to my ear—“because, if you won’t, I’ll try violence.” His voice was hoarse, his look that of a man who is just about to burst an insufferable bond and plunge headlong into wild license. I saw that in another moment, and with one impetus of frenzy more, I should be able to do nothing with him. The present—the passing second of time—was all I had in which to control and restrain him—a movement of repulsion, flight, fear would have sealed my doom—and his. But I was not afraid, not in the least. Mr Rochester had always proven his restraint, even during the greatest of passion, perhaps, even, the greatest of restraint when passionate. I felt an inward power; a sense of influence, which supported me. The crisis was perilous, but not without its charm, such as the Indian, perhaps, feels when he slips over the rapid in his canoe. I took hold of his clenched hand, loosened the contorted fingers, and said to him, soothingly, “Sit down. I’ll talk to you as long as you like, and hear all you have to say, whether reasonable or unreasonable.”

As he had spoken of in the past, it was an odd thing we shared. By the power he exerted over me, I had that self-same strange power over him, the master was mastered. Would that we had been able to have the relationship we had planned! I was no longer the same person. I could never go back. He sat down, but he did not get leave to speak directly. I had been struggling with tears for some time, I had taken great pains to repress them, because I knew he would not like to see me weep. Now, however, I considered it well to let them flow as freely and as long as they liked. If the flood annoyed him, so much the better. So I gave way and cried heartily.

Soon I heard him earnestly entreating me to be composed. I said I could not while he was in such a passion.

“But I am not angry, Jane. I only love you too well and you had steeled your little pale face with such a resolute, frozen look, I could not endure it. Hush, now, and wipe your eyes.”

His softened voice announced that he was subdued; so I, in my turn, became calm. Now he made an effort to rest his head on my shoulder, but I would not permit it. Then he would draw me to him, no.

“Jane! Jane!” he said, in such an accent of bitter sadness it thrilled along every nerve I had, “you don’t love me, then? It was only my station, and the rank of my wife, that you valued? Now that you think me disqualified to become your husband, you recoil from my touch as if I were some toad or ape.”

These words cut me, yet what could I do or I say? I ought probably to have done or said nothing, but I was so tortured by a sense of remorse at thus hurting his feelings, I could not control the wish to drop balm where I had wounded.

“I
do
love you,” I said, “more than ever, but I must not show or indulge the feeling, and this is the last time I must express it.”

“The last time, Jane! What! Do you think you can live with me, and see me daily, and yet, if you still love me, be always cold and distant?”

“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.”