Delphi Complete Works of the Brontes Charlotte, Emily, Anne Brontë (Illustrated) (44 page)

“Sit down; I’ll talk to you as long as you like, and hear all you have to say, whether reasonable or unreasonable.”

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.”

“I ask only minutes.  Jane, did you ever hear or know that I was not the eldest son of my house: that I had once a brother older than I?”

“I remember Mrs. Fairfax told me so once.”

“And did you ever hear that my father was an avaricious, grasping man?”

“I have understood something to that effect.”

“Well, Jane, being so, it was his resolution to keep the property together; he could not bear the idea of dividing his estate and leaving me a fair portion: all, he resolved, should go to my brother, Rowland.  Yet as little could he endure that a son of his should be a poor man.  I must be provided for by a wealthy marriage.  He sought me a partner betimes.  Mr. Mason, a West India planter and merchant, was his old acquaintance.  He was certain his possessions were real and vast: he made inquiries.  Mr. Mason, he found, had a son and daughter; and he learned from him that he could and would give the latter a fortune of thirty thousand pounds: that sufficed.  When I left college, I was sent out to Jamaica, to espouse a bride already courted for me.  My father said nothing about her money; but he told me Miss Mason was the boast of Spanish Town for her beauty: and this was no lie.  I found her a fine woman, in the style of Blanche Ingram: tall, dark, and majestic.  Her family wished to secure me because I was of a good race; and so did she.  They showed her to me in parties, splendidly dressed.  I seldom saw her alone, and had very little private conversation with her.  She flattered me, and lavishly displayed for my pleasure her charms and accomplishments.  All the men in her circle seemed to admire her and envy me.  I was dazzled, stimulated: my senses were excited; and being ignorant, raw, and inexperienced, I thought I loved her.  There is no folly so besotted that the idiotic rivalries of society, the prurience, the rashness, the blindness of youth, will not hurry a man to its commission.  Her relatives encouraged me; competitors piqued me; she allured me: a marriage was achieved almost before I knew where I was.  Oh, I have no respect for myself when I think of that act! — an agony of inward contempt masters me.  I never loved, I never esteemed, I did not even know her.  I was not sure of the existence of one virtue in her nature: I had marked neither modesty, nor benevolence, nor candour, nor refinement in her mind or manners — and, I married her: — gross, grovelling, mole-eyed blockhead that I was!  With less sin I might have — But let me remember to whom I am speaking.”

“My bride’s mother I had never seen: I understood she was dead.  The honeymoon over, I learned my mistake; she was only mad, and shut up in a lunatic asylum.  There was a younger brother, too — a complete dumb idiot.  The elder one, whom you have seen (and whom I cannot hate, whilst I abhor all his kindred, because he has some grains of affection in his feeble mind, shown in the continued interest he takes in his wretched sister, and also in a dog-like attachment he once bore me), will probably be in the same state one day.  My father and my brother Rowland knew all this; but they thought only of the thirty thousand pounds, and joined in the plot against me.”

“These were vile discoveries; but except for the treachery of concealment, I should have made them no subject of reproach to my wife, even when I found her nature wholly alien to mine, her tastes obnoxious to me, her cast of mind common, low, narrow, and singularly incapable of being led to anything higher, expanded to anything larger — when I found that I could not pass a single evening, nor even a single hour of the day with her in comfort; that kindly conversation could not be sustained between us, because whatever topic I started, immediately received from her a turn at once coarse and trite, perverse and imbecile — when I perceived that I should never have a quiet or settled household, because no servant would bear the continued outbreaks of her violent and unreasonable temper, or the vexations of her absurd, contradictory, exacting orders — even then I restrained myself: I eschewed upbraiding, I curtailed remonstrance; I tried to devour my repentance and disgust in secret; I repressed the deep antipathy I felt.

“Jane, I will not trouble you with abominable details: some strong words shall express what I have to say.  I lived with that woman upstairs four years, and before that time she had tried me indeed: her character ripened and developed with frightful rapidity; her vices sprang up fast and rank: they were so strong, only cruelty could check them, and I would not use cruelty.  What a pigmy intellect she had, and what giant propensities!  How fearful were the curses those propensities entailed on me!  Bertha Mason, the true daughter of an infamous mother, dragged me through all the hideous and degrading agonies which must attend a man bound to a wife at once intemperate and unchaste.

“My brother in the interval was dead, and at the end of the four years my father died too.  I was rich enough now — yet poor to hideous indigence: a nature the most gross, impure, depraved I ever saw, was associated with mine, and called by the law and by society a part of me.  And I could not rid myself of it by any legal proceedings: for the doctors now discovered that
my wife
was mad — her excesses had prematurely developed the germs of insanity.  Jane, you don’t like my narrative; you look almost sick — shall I defer the rest to another day?”

“No, sir, finish it now; I pity you — I do earnestly pity you.”

“Pity, Jane, from some people is a noxious and insulting sort of tribute, which one is justified in hurling back in the teeth of those who offer it; but that is the sort of pity native to callous, selfish hearts; it is a hybrid, egotistical pain at hearing of woes, crossed with ignorant contempt for those who have endured them.  But that is not your pity, Jane; it is not the feeling of which your whole face is full at this moment — with which your eyes are now almost overflowing — with which your heart is heaving — with which your hand is trembling in mine.  Your pity, my darling, is the suffering mother of love: its anguish is the very natal pang of the divine passion.  I accept it, Jane; let the daughter have free advent — my arms wait to receive her.”

“Now, sir, proceed; what did you do when you found she was mad?”

“Jane, I approached the verge of despair; a remnant of self-respect was all that intervened between me and the gulf.  In the eyes of the world, I was doubtless covered with grimy dishonour; but I resolved to be clean in my own sight — and to the last I repudiated the contamination of her crimes, and wrenched myself from connection with her mental defects.  Still, society associated my name and person with hers; I yet saw her and heard her daily: something of her breath (faugh!) mixed with the air I breathed; and besides, I remembered I had once been her husband — that recollection was then, and is now, inexpressibly odious to me; moreover, I knew that while she lived I could never be the husband of another and better wife; and, though five years my senior (her family and her father had lied to me even in the particular of her age), she was likely to live as long as I, being as robust in frame as she was infirm in mind.  Thus, at the age of twenty-six, I was hopeless.

“One night I had been awakened by her yells — (since the medical men had pronounced her mad, she had, of course, been shut up) — it was a fiery West Indian night; one of the description that frequently precede the hurricanes of those climates.  Being unable to sleep in bed, I got up and opened the window.  The air was like sulphur-steams — I could find no refreshment anywhere.  Mosquitoes came buzzing in and hummed sullenly round the room; the sea, which I could hear from thence, rumbled dull like an earthquake — black clouds were casting up over it; the moon was setting in the waves, broad and red, like a hot cannon-ball — she threw her last bloody glance over a world quivering with the ferment of tempest.  I was physically influenced by the atmosphere and scene, and my ears were filled with the curses the maniac still shrieked out; wherein she momentarily mingled my name with such a tone of demon-hate, with such language! — no professed harlot ever had a fouler vocabulary than she: though two rooms off, I heard every word — the thin partitions of the West India house opposing but slight obstruction to her wolfish cries.

“‘This life,’ said I at last, ‘is hell: this is the air — those are the sounds of the bottomless pit!  I have a right to deliver myself from it if I can.  The sufferings of this mortal state will leave me with the heavy flesh that now cumbers my soul.  Of the fanatic’s burning eternity I have no fear: there is not a future state worse than this present one — let me break away, and go home to God!’