I resisted all the way: a new thing for me, and a circumstance
which greatly strengthened the bad opinion Bessie and Miss Abbot
were disposed to entertain of me. The fact is, I was a trifle
beside myself; or rather out of myself, as the French
would say: I was conscious that a moment’s mutiny had already
rendered me liable to strange penalties, and, like any other rebel
slave, I felt resolved, in my desperation, to go all lengths.
“Hold her arms, Miss Abbot: she’s like a mad cat.”
“For shame! for shame!” cried the lady’s-maid. “What
shocking conduct, Miss Eyre, to strike a young gentleman, your
benefactress’s son! Your young master.”
“Master! How is he my master? Am I a servant?”
“No; you are less than a servant, for you do nothing for your
keep. There, sit down, and think over your wickedness.”
They had got me by this time into the apartment indicated by
Mrs. Reed, and had thrust me upon a stool: my impulse was to rise
from it like a spring; their two pair of hands arrested me
instantly.
“If you don’t sit still, you must be tied down,” said
Bessie. “Miss Abbot, lend me your garters; she would break
mine directly.”
Miss Abbot turned to divest a stout leg of the necessary
ligature. This preparation for bonds, and the additional
ignominy it inferred, took a little of the excitement out of
me.
“Don’t take them off,” I cried; “I will not stir.”
In guarantee whereof, I attached myself to my seat by my
hands.
“Mind you don’t,” said Bessie; and when she had ascertained that
I was really subsiding, she loosened her hold of me; then she and
Miss Abbot stood with folded arms, looking darkly and doubtfully on
my face, as incredulous of my sanity.
“She never did so before,” at last said Bessie, turning to the
Abigail.
“But it was always in her,” was the reply. “I’ve told
Missis often my opinion about the child, and Missis agreed with
me. She’s an underhand little thing: I never saw a girl of
her age with so much cover.”
Bessie answered not; but ere long, addressing me, she said—“You
ought to be aware, Miss, that you are under obligations to Mrs.
Reed: she keeps you: if she were to turn you off, you would have to
go to the poorhouse.”
I had nothing to say to these words: they were not new to me: my
very first recollections of existence included hints of the same
kind. This reproach of my dependence had become a vague
sing-song in my ear: very painful and crushing, but only half
intelligible. Miss Abbot joined in—
“And you ought not to think yourself on an equality with the
Misses Reed and Master Reed, because Missis kindly allows you to be
brought up with them. They will have a great deal of money,
and you will have none: it is your place to be humble, and to try
to make yourself agreeable to them.”
“What we tell you is for your good,” added Bessie, in no harsh
voice, “you should try to be useful and pleasant, then, perhaps,
you would have a home here; but if you become passionate and rude,
Missis will send you away, I am sure.”
“Besides,” said Miss Abbot, “God will punish her: He might
strike her dead in the midst of her tantrums, and then where would
she go? Come, Bessie, we will leave her: I wouldn’t have her
heart for anything. Say your prayers, Miss Eyre, when you are
by yourself; for if you don’t repent, something bad might be
permitted to come down the chimney and fetch you away.”
They went, shutting the door, and locking it behind them.
The red-room was a square chamber, very seldom slept in, I might
say never, indeed, unless when a chance influx of visitors at
Gateshead Hall rendered it necessary to turn to account all the
accommodation it contained: yet it was one of the largest and
stateliest chambers in the mansion. A bed supported on
massive pillars of mahogany, hung with curtains of deep red damask,
stood out like a tabernacle in the centre; the two large windows,
with their blinds always drawn down, were half shrouded in festoons
and falls of similar drapery; the carpet was red; the table at the
foot of the bed was covered with a crimson cloth; the walls were a
soft fawn colour with a blush of pink in it; the wardrobe, the
toilet-table, the chairs were of darkly polished old
mahogany. Out of these deep surrounding shades rose high, and
glared white, the piled-up mattresses and pillows of the bed,
spread with a snowy Marseilles counterpane. Scarcely less
prominent was an ample cushioned easy-chair near the head of the
bed, also white, with a footstool before it; and looking, as I
thought, like a pale throne.
This room was chill, because it seldom had a fire; it was
silent, because remote from the nursery and kitchen; solemn,
because it was known to be so seldom entered. The house-maid
alone came here on Saturdays, to wipe from the mirrors and the
furniture a week’s quiet dust: and Mrs. Reed herself, at far
intervals, visited it to review the contents of a certain secret
drawer in the wardrobe, where were stored divers parchments, her
jewel-casket, and a miniature of her deceased husband; and in those
last words lies the secret of the red-room—the spell which kept it
so lonely in spite of its grandeur.
Mr. Reed had been dead nine years: it was in this chamber he
breathed his last; here he lay in state; hence his coffin was borne
by the undertaker’s men; and, since that day, a sense of dreary
consecration had guarded it from frequent intrusion.
My seat, to which Bessie and the bitter Miss Abbot had left me
riveted, was a low ottoman near the marble chimney-piece; the bed
rose before me; to my right hand there was the high, dark wardrobe,
with subdued, broken reflections varying the gloss of its panels;
to my left were the muffled windows; a great looking-glass between
them repeated the vacant majesty of the bed and room. I was
not quite sure whether they had locked the door; and when I dared
move, I got up and went to see. Alas! yes: no jail was ever
more secure. Returning, I had to cross before the
looking-glass; my fascinated glance involuntarily explored the
depth it revealed. All looked colder and darker in that
visionary hollow than in reality: and the strange little figure
there gazing at me, with a white face and arms specking the gloom,
and glittering eyes of fear moving where all else was still, had
the effect of a real spirit: I thought it like one of the tiny
phantoms, half fairy, half imp, Bessie’s evening stories
represented as coming out of lone, ferny dells in moors, and
appearing before the eyes of belated travellers. I returned
to my stool.
Superstition was with me at that moment; but it was not yet her
hour for complete victory: my blood was still warm; the mood of the
revolted slave was still bracing me with its bitter vigour; I had
to stem a rapid rush of retrospective thought before I quailed to
the dismal present.
All John Reed’s violent tyrannies, all his sisters’ proud
indifference, all his mother’s aversion, all the servants’
partiality, turned up in my disturbed mind like a dark deposit in a
turbid well. Why was I always suffering, always browbeaten,
always accused, for ever condemned? Why could I never
please? Why was it useless to try to win any one’s
favour? Eliza, who was headstrong and selfish, was
respected. Georgiana, who had a spoiled temper, a very acrid
spite, a captious and insolent carriage, was universally
indulged. Her beauty, her pink cheeks and golden curls,
seemed to give delight to all who looked at her, and to purchase
indemnity for every fault. John no one thwarted, much less
punished; though he twisted the necks of the pigeons, killed the
little pea-chicks, set the dogs at the sheep, stripped the hothouse
vines of their fruit, and broke the buds off the choicest plants in
the conservatory: he called his mother “old girl,” too; sometimes
reviled her for her dark skin, similar to his own; bluntly
disregarded her wishes; not unfrequently tore and spoiled her silk
attire; and he was still “her own darling.” I dared commit no
fault: I strove to fulfil every duty; and I was termed naughty and
tiresome, sullen and sneaking, from morning to noon, and from noon
to night.
My head still ached and bled with the blow and fall I had
received: no one had reproved John for wantonly striking me; and
because I had turned against him to avert farther irrational
violence, I was loaded with general opprobrium.
“Unjust!—unjust!” said my reason, forced by the agonising
stimulus into precocious though transitory power: and Resolve,
equally wrought up, instigated some strange expedient to achieve
escape from insupportable oppression—as running away, or, if that
could not be effected, never eating or drinking more, and letting
myself die.
What a consternation of soul was mine that dreary
afternoon! How all my brain was in tumult, and all my heart
in insurrection! Yet in what darkness, what dense ignorance,
was the mental battle fought! I could not answer the
ceaseless inward question—why I thus suffered; now, at the
distance of—I will not say how many years, I see it clearly.
I was a discord in Gateshead Hall: I was like nobody there; I
had nothing in harmony with Mrs. Reed or her children, or her
chosen vassalage. If they did not love me, in fact, as little
did I love them. They were not bound to regard with affection
a thing that could not sympathise with one amongst them; a
heterogeneous thing, opposed to them in temperament, in capacity,
in propensities; a useless thing, incapable of serving their
interest, or adding to their pleasure; a noxious thing, cherishing
the germs of indignation at their treatment, of contempt of their
judgment. I know that had I been a sanguine, brilliant,
careless, exacting, handsome, romping child—though equally
dependent and friendless—Mrs. Reed would have endured my presence
more complacently; her children would have entertained for me more
of the cordiality of fellow-feeling; the servants would have been
less prone to make me the scapegoat of the nursery.
Daylight began to forsake the red-room; it was past four
o’clock, and the beclouded afternoon was tending to drear
twilight. I heard the rain still beating continuously on the
staircase window, and the wind howling in the grove behind the
hall; I grew by degrees cold as a stone, and then my courage
sank. My habitual mood of humiliation, self-doubt, forlorn
depression, fell damp on the embers of my decaying ire. All
said I was wicked, and perhaps I might be so; what thought had I
been but just conceiving of starving myself to death? That
certainly was a crime: and was I fit to die? Or was the vault
under the chancel of Gateshead Church an inviting bourne? In
such vault I had been told did Mr. Reed lie buried; and led by this
thought to recall his idea, I dwelt on it with gathering
dread. I could not remember him; but I knew that he was my
own uncle—my mother’s brother—that he had taken me when a
parentless infant to his house; and that in his last moments he had
required a promise of Mrs. Reed that she would rear and maintain me
as one of her own children. Mrs. Reed probably considered she
had kept this promise; and so she had, I dare say, as well as her
nature would permit her; but how could she really like an
interloper not of her race, and unconnected with her, after her
husband’s death, by any tie? It must have been most irksome
to find herself bound by a hard-wrung pledge to stand in the stead
of a parent to a strange child she could not love, and to see an
uncongenial alien permanently intruded on her own family group.
A singular notion dawned upon me. I doubted not—never
doubted—that if Mr. Reed had been alive he would have treated me
kindly; and now, as I sat looking at the white bed and overshadowed
walls—occasionally also turning a fascinated eye towards the dimly
gleaning mirror—I began to recall what I had heard of dead men,
troubled in their graves by the violation of their last wishes,
revisiting the earth to punish the perjured and avenge the
oppressed; and I thought Mr. Reed’s spirit, harassed by the wrongs
of his sister’s child, might quit its abode—whether in the church
vault or in the unknown world of the departed—and rise before me in
this chamber. I wiped my tears and hushed my sobs, fearful
lest any sign of violent grief might waken a preternatural voice to
comfort me, or elicit from the gloom some haloed face, bending over
me with strange pity. This idea, consolatory in theory, I
felt would be terrible if realised: with all my might I endeavoured
to stifle it—I endeavoured to be firm. Shaking my hair from
my eyes, I lifted my head and tried to look boldly round the dark
room; at this moment a light gleamed on the wall. Was it, I
asked myself, a ray from the moon penetrating some aperture in the
blind? No; moonlight was still, and this stirred; while I
gazed, it glided up to the ceiling and quivered over my head.
I can now conjecture readily that this streak of light was, in all
likelihood, a gleam from a lantern carried by some one across the
lawn: but then, prepared as my mind was for horror, shaken as my
nerves were by agitation, I thought the swift darting beam was a
herald of some coming vision from another world. My heart
beat thick, my head grew hot; a sound filled my ears, which I
deemed the rushing of wings; something seemed near me; I was
oppressed, suffocated: endurance broke down; I rushed to the door
and shook the lock in desperate effort. Steps came running
along the outer passage; the key turned, Bessie and Abbot
entered.
“Miss Eyre, are you ill?” said Bessie.
“What a dreadful noise! it went quite through me!” exclaimed
Abbot.
“Take me out! Let me go into the nursery!” was my cry.
“What for? Are you hurt? Have you seen something?”
again demanded Bessie.
“Oh! I saw a light, and I thought a ghost would
come.” I had now got hold of Bessie’s hand, and she did not
snatch it from me.
“She has screamed out on purpose,” declared Abbot, in some
disgust. “And what a scream! If she had been in great
pain one would have excused it, but she only wanted to bring us all
here: I know her naughty tricks.”
“What is all this?” demanded another voice peremptorily; and
Mrs. Reed came along the corridor, her cap flying wide, her gown
rustling stormily. “Abbot and Bessie, I believe I gave orders
that Jane Eyre should be left in the red-room till I came to her
myself.”
“Miss Jane screamed so loud, ma’am,” pleaded Bessie.
“Let her go,” was the only answer. “Loose Bessie’s hand,
child: you cannot succeed in getting out by these means, be
assured. I abhor artifice, particularly in children; it is my
duty to show you that tricks will not answer: you will now stay
here an hour longer, and it is only on condition of perfect
submission and stillness that I shall liberate you then.”
“O aunt! have pity! Forgive me! I cannot endure
it—let me be punished some other way! I shall be killed
if—”
“Silence! This violence is all most repulsive:” and so, no
doubt, she felt it. I was a precocious actress in her eyes;
she sincerely looked on me as a compound of virulent passions, mean
spirit, and dangerous duplicity.
Bessie and Abbot having retreated, Mrs. Reed, impatient of my
now frantic anguish and wild sobs, abruptly thrust me back and
locked me in, without farther parley. I heard her sweeping
away; and soon after she was gone, I suppose I had a species of
fit: unconsciousness closed the scene.