Becoming Jane Eyre (9 page)

That which has been taken for learning, for love of the Word of the Lord, for courage, he realizes now is also rage, one that wells up within him even now and has made him act foolishly. Perhaps he should have gone into the Army rather than the Church. Does he lack the empathy that his calling requires? Is that why he is being punished? Does he not know how to love even his own girl, who has been sitting so quietly at his side?

He remembers with shame now his disapproval of his poor wife’s innocent gay dress, which he had never allowed her to wear, but kept firmly locked away in a drawer.

Yet there were moments when his rage was not misplaced. He sees the crowd of raucous children, taunting the poor idiot boy and then pushing him into the dark, icy, swirling water, into which he plunged to drag the boy onto the bank and lay him down gently in the grass; he remembers rising from his bed in the middle of the night, stuffing the loaded pistols into his belt and tramping across wet moors, to succor the mill owner who had need of him during the Luddite uprising when misery had generated such hate for the machines and their masters who took away the workmen’s bread.

A christening. How many babies has he held over the font? “I name thee in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost.” It continues to be a moment of joy, exhilaration, and hope for him, this entrance into the community of the blessed, though the christenings are so often followed fast by the death knell in his unsanitary parish. For a moment he is filled again with rage at the authorities who allow this to continue, who have ignored his repeated letters of complaint about the tainted water that runs down from the rotting bodies in the graves.

He feels a sort of tickling on his chest, so many places all at once. “What is it?” he cries. The image of worms in the grave comes to him. He is being consumed. “Help me!” he cries out.

“Leeches,” the nurse explains, “to prevent swelling. Be still. It will be brief.”

“How many?” He wants, oddly, to know.

“Just six of them, to draw the blood,” she says.

Compared to the operation, this experience is nothing, surely, the nurse says to him in her calm, reasonable voice. When she removes the leeches, she scrapes at the wounds to make them bleed further.

“Where is my daughter? Where is Charlotte?” he cries. How could she leave him at such a moment!

Charlotte comes and sits beside her father, taking his hand. “I am beside you, dear Papa,” she murmurs.

“Don’t leave me please, darling girl,” he stammers. “My dear, my dear, how glad I am you are there,” he says, and holds her hand tightly to his drumming heart. He reaches out to hold her close. “I hardly wish to gain my sight, that I may keep you beside me, always, always.”

Now he hears the rustle of skirts and would like to reach out his hand to stroke them, to cling to them. He would like to cry out once again, as he would have liked to during the operation, as his poor wife once did, “Help me for I cannot bear it!”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

H
e asks her to read aloud from his Bible. She opens it to the collect for the day and runs her fingers over the fine page. “Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength,” she reads. She imagines him swallowing the holy words like wine. Indeed, he opens his lips like a child on the Words of the Lord. The candlelight flickers on her page and on his face. The room disappears into shadow. The brown leather armchair in the corner crouches down ominously like an Unholy Beast.
Regions of sorrow, doleful wastes.
At two in the morning, they are both awake and breathe in tandem.

She remembers the moment when he had suddenly entered their small room while they were playing their game with the toy soldiers. He had another game for them, he said, bringing forth something they had seen hanging on the back of his door, a mask he had kept from his days at Cambridge. He told them to put it on, allowing them to disguise themselves, becoming anonymous. What careful answers the girls gave to his questions; only the boy dared speak his mind. He spoke proudly of the differences in their bodies. Now she has no need for a mask. She can see her father faintly in the flickering candlelight, but he cannot see her. He no longer frightens her.
Entirely at my mercy
, she thinks, and smiles slightly. Now she can speak and write freely. He is no longer watching over her; she watches over him. He is in her panopticon. She likes this reversal of roles.

She is absorbed by her task, driven onward here and now by her desire to succeed, to conquer. She will vanquish all those arrogant fools, all those hateful asses, who have passed her by without a glance. How they have humiliated her, again and again. Let the great poet eat his words! Let her employers get down on their fat knees and beg her pardon! Let her Master see what she can do. She will get their attention with this new book.

She hears him mumble the words of the
Agnus
over and over, to ward off the danger of eternal damnation.

She has heard all his stories, the different ones trotted out for different occasions in different accents. Depending on whether the listener needs to be instructed or impressed, he speaks of his early days as examples of application and diligence or of his success as a scholar, his publications of poetry, his novelettes, his letters to the press, his days at Cambridge. In his Northern Irish brogue, which sounds more Scottish than Irish to her, he stresses Carlyle’s motto:
Not what I have, but what I do is my kingdom.
To the simple sheep farmers of his parish, he describes in detail the dreadful mush of potatoes and cornmeal he was given to eat, which gave him lingering dyspepsia. He never mentions the Irish relatives, especially not the Catholic mother, of course. Apprenticed first to a blacksmith, then a weaver, he had started his own school at fifteen, he tells his awed listeners.

Her friends from school, the local landowners, such as the Heatons, get nothing of the Irish origins, and instead receive the tales of Cambridge, St. John’s College, and Lord Palmerston, as though he had been a close friend, all in a high Tory accent.

She shares his Tory beliefs in hard work and discipline and reliance on a traditional elite. Wellington, her hero! Like her father, she was for limited emancipation of the Catholics, with their mumbo jumbo and superstitions.

“I was afraid if I didn’t send some of you off, Aunt, too, would have left. It seemed the best thing for you. The school came highly recommended, you know. Who could have predicted what would happen there?” her father says.

She feels the porousness of the paper, and an idea comes scurrying into her mind like a mouse. She knows how to continue her tale. She sees the tall, lean clergyman, all in black, erect as a column in the drawing room. He believes children should not be given a taste for finery and luxury. He would burn their colored boots, as her father once threatened to do. His name comes to her with the first three letters of her own: Bro-Bro-Brocklehurst.

That night once again she lies awake. When sleep does finally come to her, she dreams one of her recurrent dreams. She sees two strange, shadowy figures standing side by side in profile looking out the window at the gray church tower, the churchyard so crowded with tombstones that the rank weed can hardly push up between them.

They are dressed in silk gowns with high feathers in their profusion of ringlets. Half-covering their mouths, fans flutter in their gloved hands. They lean toward each other, looking out at the graveyard with a supercilious air. They have rarely had visitors of this quality in the parsonage, yet something familiar about them makes her tremble, afraid.

“You asked to see me?” she says in a quiet voice. When they turn from the window with a rustle of taffeta, lowering their fans, she realizes they are her two older sisters, dead long ago as children, and now irremediably changed. When she rushes to hold them in her arms, they stare at her as though they don’t know her. They hold her from them as they look around the familiar room disapprovingly. “What a small, dark room this is, after all, isn’t it?”

All her life she has carried the memories—more scars than memories—of her suffering those ten months, at the boarding school, Cowan Bridge. There were the long walks with wet shoes, the frequent, long church services on Sundays, the bitter cold, the sole privy for seventy girls and teachers, the lack of wholesome food, the constant hunger, and above all the humiliation and anguish of watching helplessly as her eldest sister was slowly tortured and then killed.

The reality was worse than the picture she gives of it in her book, because her sister’s sufferings, she is aware, would be unbelievable on the page.

She cannot describe the moment when her ill sister, suffering from the blister on her side, raised by the doctor to relieve her lungs, was thrown from her bed onto the dormitory floor by the teacher, who screamed, “Get up, you lazy girl, get out of bed immediately!”

She leaves out how she watched the scene and listened in silence, too afraid of punishment to come to her sister’s aid in the dormitory that freezing morning, the water for washing frozen in the basins by the beds. She remembers watching her dying sister struggling to dress herself properly, and how the ten-year-old Maria remained silent with Christlike patience and fortitude, hearing herself called “slovenly and untidy” without retort, and was ordered to go about the ordinary business of her day.

Death was presented to the little girls as the great protector from sin, as the goal, the recompense toward which all children should hurry forward to claim with joy—all children, that is, except for Carus Wilson’s own pampered ones. She will unmask the dreadful director of the institution. She will net him and pierce him. She will immortalize his wickedness and his hypocrisy with a dart of venom.