Jane Eyre (4 page)

Mr Lloyd a second time produced his snuff-box.

“Don’t you think Gateshead Hall a very beautiful house?” asked he. “Are you not very thankful to have such a fine place to live at?”

“It is not my house, sir, and Abbot says I have less right to be here than a servant.”

“Pooh! You can’t be silly enough to wish to leave such a splendid place?”

“If I had anywhere else to go, I should be glad to leave it. But I can never get away from Gateshead till I am a woman.”

“Perhaps you may—who knows? Have you any relations besides Mrs Reed?”

“I think not, sir.”

“None belonging to your father?”

“I don’t know. I asked Aunt Reed once, and she said possibly I might have some poor, low relations called Eyre, but she knew nothing about them.”

“If you had such, would you like to go to them?”

I reflected. Poverty looks grim to grown people; still more so to children. They have not much idea of industrious, working, respectable poverty. They think of the word only as connected with ragged clothes, scanty food, fireless grates, rude manners, and debasing vices. Poverty for me was synonymous with degradation.

“No, I should not like to belong to poor people,” was my reply.

“Not even if they were kind to you?”

I shook my head. I could not see how poor people had the means of being kind, and then to learn to speak like them, to adopt their manners, to be uneducated, to grow up like one of the poor women I saw sometimes nursing their children or washing their clothes at the cottage doors of the village of Gateshead, no, I was not heroic enough to purchase liberty at the price of caste.

“But are your relatives so very poor? Are they working people?”

“I cannot tell. Aunt Reed says if I have any, they must be a beggarly set, I should not like to go a begging.”

“Would you like to go to school?”

Again I reflected. I scarcely knew what school was. Bessie sometimes spoke of it as a place where young ladies sat in the stocks, wore backboards, and were expected to be exceedingly genteel and precise. John Reed hated his school, and abused his master, but John Reed’s tastes were no rule for mine, and if Bessie’s accounts of school-discipline—gathered from the young ladies of a family where she had lived before coming to Gateshead—were somewhat appalling, her details of certain accomplishments attained by these same young ladies were, I thought, equally attractive. She boasted of beautiful paintings of landscapes and flowers by them executed; of songs they could sing and pieces they could play, of purses they could net, of French books they could translate; till my spirit was moved to emulation as I listened. Besides, school would be a complete change. It implied a long journey, an entire separation from Gateshead, an entrance into a new life.

“I should indeed like to go to school,” was the audible conclusion of my musings.

“Well, well! Who knows what may happen?” said Mr Lloyd, as he got up. “The child ought to have change of air and scene,” he added, speaking to himself, “nerves not in a good state.”

Bessie now returned, at the same moment the carriage was heard rolling up the gravel-walk.

“Is that your mistress, nurse?” asked Mr Lloyd. “I should like to speak to her before I go.”

Bessie invited him to walk into the breakfast-room, and led the way out. In the interview which followed between him and Mrs Reed, I presume, from after-occurrences, that the apothecary ventured to recommend my being sent to school and the recommendation was no doubt readily enough adopted. For as Abbot said, in discussing the subject with Bessie when both sat sewing in the nursery one night, after I was in bed, and, as they thought, asleep, “Missis was, she dared say, glad enough to get rid of such a tiresome, ill-conditioned child, who always looked as if she were watching everybody, and scheming plots underhand.” Abbot, I think, gave me credit for being a sort of infantine Guy Fawkes.

On that same occasion I learned, for the first time, from Miss Abbot’s communications to Bessie, that my father had been a poor clergyman; that my mother had married him against the wishes of her friends, who considered the match beneath her; that my grandfather Reed was so irritated at her disobedience, he cut her off without a shilling; that after my mother and father had been married a year, the latter caught the typhus fever while visiting among the poor of a large manufacturing town where his curacy was situated, and where that disease was then prevalent, that my mother took the infection from him, and both died within a month of each other.

Bessie, when she heard this narrative, sighed and said, “Poor Miss Jane is to be pitied, too, Abbot.”

“Yes,” responded Abbot, “if she were a nice, pretty child, one might compassionate her forlornness, but one really cannot care for such a little toad as that.”

“Not a great deal, to be sure,” agreed Bessie, “at any rate, a beauty like Miss Georgiana would be more moving in the same condition.”

“Yes, I doat on Miss Georgiana!” cried the fervent Abbot. “Little darling! With her long curls and her blue eyes, and such a sweet colour as she has, just as if she were painted! Bessie, I could fancy a Welsh rabbit for supper.”

“So could I—with a roast onion. Come, we’ll go down.” They went.

Chapter Four

From my discourse with Mr Lloyd, and from the above reported conference between Bessie and Abbot, I gathered enough of hope to suffice as a motive for wishing to get well, a change seemed near—I desired and waited it in silence. It tarried, however, days and weeks passed, I had regained my normal state of health, but no new allusion was made to the subject over which I brooded. Mrs Reed surveyed me at times with a severe eye, but seldom addressed me, since my illness, she had drawn a more marked line of separation than ever between me and her own children; appointing me a small closet to sleep in by myself, condemning me to take my meals alone, and pass all my time in the nursery, while my cousins were constantly in the drawing room. Not a hint, however, did she drop about sending me to school. Still I felt an instinctive certainty that she would not long endure me under the same roof with her, for her glance, now more than ever when turned on me, expressed an insuperable and rooted aversion.

Eliza and Georgiana, evidently acting according to orders, spoke to me as little as possible. John thrust his tongue in his cheek whenever he saw me, and once attempted chastisement, but as I instantly turned against him, roused by the same sentiment of deep ire and desperate revolt which had stirred my corruption before, he thought it better to desist, and ran from me tittering execrations, and vowing I had burst his nose. I had indeed levelled at that prominent feature as hard a blow as my knuckles could inflict and when I saw that either that or my look daunted him, I had the greatest inclination to follow up my advantage to purpose, but he was already with his Mama. I heard him in a blubbering tone commence the tale of how “that nasty Jane Eyre” had flown at him like a mad cat. He was stopped rather harshly—“Don’t talk to me about her, John, I told you not to go near her. She is not worthy of notice. I do not choose that either you or your sisters should associate with her.”

Here, leaning over the banister, I cried out suddenly, and without at all deliberating on my words, “They are not fit to associate with me.”

Mrs Reed was rather a stout woman, but on hearing this strange and audacious declaration, she ran nimbly up the stair, swept me like a whirlwind into the nursery, and crushing me down on the edge of my crib, dared me in an emphatic voice to rise from that place, or utter one syllable during the remainder of the day.

“What would Uncle Reed say to you, if he were alive?” was my scarcely voluntary demand. I say scarcely voluntary, for it seemed as if my tongue pronounced words without my will consenting to their utterance, something spoke out of me over which I had no control.

“What?” said Mrs Reed under her breath, her usually cold composed grey eye became troubled with a look like fear. She took her hand from my arm, and gazed at me as if she really did not know whether I were child or fiend. I was now in for it.

“My Uncle Reed is in heaven, and can see all you do and think, and so can Papa and Mama, they know how you shut me up all day long, and how you wish me dead.”

Mrs Reed soon rallied her spirits, she shook me most soundly, she boxed both my ears, and then left me without a word. Bessie supplied the hiatus by a homily of an hour’s length, in which she proved beyond a doubt that I was the most wicked and abandoned child ever reared under a roof. I half believed her, for I felt indeed only bad feelings surging in my breast.

November, December, and half of January passed away. Christmas and the New Year had been celebrated at Gateshead with the usual festive cheer. Presents had been interchanged, dinners and evening parties given. From every enjoyment I was, of course, excluded, my share of the gaiety consisted in witnessing the daily apparelling of Eliza and Georgiana, and seeing them descend to the drawing room, dressed out in thin muslin frocks and scarlet sashes, with hair elaborately ringletted, and afterwards, in listening to the sound of the piano or the harp played below, to the passing to and fro of the butler and footman, to the jingling of glass and china as refreshments were handed, to the broken hum of conversation as the drawing room door opened and closed. When tired of this occupation, I would retire from the stairhead to the solitary and silent nursery, there, though somewhat sad, I was not miserable. To speak truth, I had not the least wish to go into company, for in company I was very rarely noticed; and if Bessie had but been kind and companionable, I should have deemed it a treat to spend the evenings quietly with her, instead of passing them under the formidable eye of Mrs Reed, in a room full of ladies and gentlemen. But Bessie, as soon as she had dressed her young ladies, used to take herself off to the lively regions of the kitchen and housekeeper’s room, generally bearing the candle along with her. I then sat with my doll on my knee till the fire got low, glancing round occasionally to make sure that nothing worse than myself haunted the shadowy room; and when the embers sank to a dull red, I undressed hastily, tugging at knots and strings as I best might, and sought shelter from cold and darkness in my crib. To this crib I always took my doll. Human beings must love something, and, in the dearth of worthier objects of affection, I contrived to find a pleasure in loving and cherishing a faded graven image, shabby as a miniature scarecrow. It puzzles me now to remember with what absurd sincerity I doated on this little toy, half fancying it alive and capable of sensation. I could not sleep unless it was folded in my night-gown and when it lay there safe and warm, I was comparatively happy, believing it to be happy likewise.

Long did the hours seem while I waited the departure of the company, and listened for the sound of Bessie’s step on the stairs. Sometimes she would come up in the interval to seek her thimble or her scissors, or perhaps to bring me something by way of supper—a bun or a cheesecake—then she would sit on the bed while I ate it, and when I had finished, she would tuck the clothes round me, and twice she kissed me, and said, “Good night, Miss Jane.” When thus gentle, Bessie seemed to me the best, prettiest, kindest being in the world; and I wished most intensely that she would always be so pleasant and amiable, and never push me about, or scold, or task me unreasonably, as she was too often wont to do. Bessie Lee must, I think, have been a girl of good natural capacity, for she was smart in all she did, and had a remarkable knack of narrative. So, at least, I judge from the impression made on me by her nursery tales. She was pretty too, if my recollections of her face and person are correct. I remember her as a slim young woman, with black hair, dark eyes, very nice features, and good, clear complexion, but she had a capricious and hasty temper, and indifferent ideas of principle or justice, still, such as she was, I preferred her to anyone else at Gateshead Hall.

It was the fifteenth of January, about nine o’clock in the morning, Bessie was gone down to breakfast. My cousins had not yet been summoned to their mama—Eliza was putting on her bonnet and warm garden-coat to go and feed her poultry, an occupation of which she was fond, and not less so of selling the eggs to the housekeeper and hoarding up the money she thus obtained. She had a turn for traffic, and a marked propensity for saving, shown not only in the vending of eggs and chickens, but also in driving hard bargains with the gardener about flower-roots, seeds, and slips of plants; that functionary having orders from Mrs Reed to buy of his young lady all the products of her parterre she wished to sell, and Eliza would have sold the hair off her head if she could have made a handsome profit thereby. As to her money, she first secreted it in odd corners, wrapped in a rag or an old curl-paper, but some of these hoards having been discovered by the housemaid, Eliza, fearful of one day losing her valued treasure, consented to intrust it to her mother, at a usurious rate of interest—fifty or sixty per cent, which interest she exacted every quarter, keeping her accounts in a little book with anxious accuracy.

Georgiana sat on a high stool, dressing her hair at the glass, and interweaving her curls with artificial flowers and faded feathers, of which she had found a store in a drawer in the attic. I was making my bed, having received strict orders from Bessie to get it arranged before she returned—for Bessie now frequently employed me as a sort of under-nurserymaid, to tidy the room, dust the chairs, etcetera. Having spread the quilt and folded my nightdress, I went to the window seat to put in order some picture-books and doll’s house furniture scattered there, an abrupt command from Georgiana to let her playthings alone—for the tiny chairs and mirrors, the fairy plates and cups, were her property—stopped my proceedings; and then, for lack of other occupation, I fell to breathing on the frost-flowers with which the window was fretted, and thus clearing a space in the glass through which I might look out on the grounds, where all was still and petrified under the influence of a hard frost.