nature; consider the recklessness following on despair- soothe him;
save him; love him; tell him you love him and will be his. Who in
the world cares for you? or who will be injured by what you do?'
Still indomitable was the reply- 'I care for myself. The more
solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I
will respect myself. I will keep the law given by God; sanctioned by
man. I will hold to the principles received by me when I was sane, and
not mad- as I am now. Laws and principles are not for the times when
there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body
and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour; stringent are they;
inviolate they shall be. If at my individual convenience I might break
them, what would be their worth? They have a worth- so I have always
believed; and if I cannot believe it now, it is because I am insane-
quite insane: with my veins running fire, and my heart beating
faster than I can count its throbs. Preconceived opinions, foregone
determinations, are all I have at this hour to stand by: there I plant
my foot.'
I did. Mr. Rochester, reading my countenance, saw I had done so.
His fury was wrought to the highest: he must yield to it for a moment,
whatever followed; he crossed the floor and seized my arm and
grasped my waist. He seemed to devour me with his flaming glance:
physically, I felt, at the moment, powerless as stubble exposed to the
draught and glow of a furnace: mentally, I still possessed my soul,
and with it the certainty of ultimate safety. The soul, fortunately,
has an interpreter- often an unconscious, but still a truthful
interpreter- in the eye. My eye rose to his; and while I looked in his
fierce face I gave an involuntary sigh; his gripe was painful, and
my overtaxed strength almost exhausted.
'Never,' said he, as he ground his teeth, 'never was anything at
once so frail and so indomitable. A mere reed she feels in my hand!'
(And he shook me with the force of his hold.) 'I could bend her with
my finger and thumb: and what good would it do if I bent, if I uptore,
if I crushed her? Consider that eye: consider the resolute, wild, free
thing looking out of it, defying me, with more than courage- with a
stern triumph. Whatever I do with its cage, I cannot get at it- the
savage, beautiful creature! If I tear, if I rend the slight prison, my
outrage will only let the captive loose. Conqueror I might be of the
house; but the inmate would escape to heaven before I could call
myself possessor 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: 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 trancelike 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 Adele! 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 to 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.
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CHAPTER XXVIII
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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,
