Jane Eyre An Autobiography

Capítulo 1

CHAPTER I

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been

wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning;

but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no company, dined early)

the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain

so penetrating, that further outdoor exercise was now out of the

question.

I was glad of it: I never liked long walks, especially on chilly

afternoons: dreadful to me was the coming home in the raw twilight,

with nipped fingers and toes, and a heart saddened by the chidings of

Bessie, the nurse, and humbled by the consciousness of my physical

inferiority to Eliza, John, and Georgiana Reed.

The said Eliza, John, and Georgiana were now clustered round their mama

in the drawing-room: she lay reclined on a sofa by the fireside, and

with her darlings about her (for the time neither quarrelling nor

crying) looked perfectly happy. Me, she had dispensed from joining the

group; saying, “She regretted to be under the necessity of keeping me

at a distance; but that until she heard from Bessie, and could discover

by her own observation, that I was endeavouring in good earnest to

acquire a more sociable and childlike disposition, a more attractive

and sprightly manner—something lighter, franker, more natural, as it

were—she really must exclude me from privileges intended only for

contented, happy, little children.”

“What does Bessie say I have done?” I asked.

“Jane, I don’t like cavillers or questioners; besides, there is

something truly forbidding in a child taking up her elders in that

manner. Be seated somewhere; and until you can speak pleasantly, remain

silent.”

A breakfast-room adjoined the drawing-room, I slipped in there. It

contained a bookcase: I soon possessed myself of a volume, taking care

that it should be one stored with pictures. I mounted into the

window-seat: gathering up my feet, I sat cross-legged, like a Turk;

and, having drawn the red moreen curtain nearly close, I was shrined in

double retirement.

Folds of scarlet drapery shut in my view to the right hand; to the left

were the clear panes of glass, protecting, but not separating me from

the drear November day. At intervals, while turning over the leaves of

my book, I studied the aspect of that winter afternoon. Afar, it

offered a pale blank of mist and cloud; near a scene of wet lawn and

storm-beat shrub, with ceaseless rain sweeping away wildly before a

long and lamentable blast.

I returned to my book—Bewick’s History of British Birds: the

letterpress thereof I cared little for, generally speaking; and yet

there were certain introductory pages that, child as I was, I could not

pass quite as a blank. They were those which treat of the haunts of

sea-fowl; of “the solitary rocks and promontories” by them only

inhabited; of the coast of Norway, studded with isles from its southern

extremity, the Lindeness, or Naze, to the North Cape—

“Where the Northern Ocean, in vast whirls,

Boils round the naked, melancholy isles

Of farthest Thule; and the Atlantic surge

Pours in among the stormy Hebrides.”

Nor could I pass unnoticed the suggestion of the bleak shores of

Lapland, Siberia, Spitzbergen, Nova Zembla, Iceland, Greenland, with

“the vast sweep of the Arctic Zone, and those forlorn regions of dreary

space,—that reservoir of frost and snow, where firm fields of ice, the

accumulation of centuries of winters, glazed in Alpine heights above

heights, surround the pole, and concentre the multiplied rigours of

extreme cold.” Of these death-white realms I formed an idea of my own:

shadowy, like all the half-comprehended notions that float dim through

children’s brains, but strangely impressive. The words in these

introductory pages connected themselves with the succeeding vignettes,

and gave significance to the rock standing up alone in a sea of billow

and spray; to the broken boat stranded on a desolate coast; to the cold

and ghastly moon glancing through bars of cloud at a wreck just

sinking.

I cannot tell what sentiment haunted the quite solitary churchyard,

with its inscribed headstone; its gate, its two trees, its low horizon,

girdled by a broken wall, and its newly-risen crescent, attesting the

hour of eventide.

The two ships becalmed on a torpid sea, I believed to be marine

phantoms.

The fiend pinning down the thief’s pack behind him, I passed over

quickly: it was an object of terror.

So was the black horned thing seated aloof on a rock, surveying a

distant crowd surrounding a gallows.

Each picture told a story; mysterious often to my undeveloped

understanding and imperfect feelings, yet ever profoundly interesting:

as interesting as the tales Bessie sometimes narrated on winter

evenings, when she chanced to be in good humour; and when, having

brought her ironing-table to the nursery hearth, she allowed us to sit

about it, and while she got up Mrs. Reed’s lace frills, and crimped her

nightcap borders, fed our eager attention with passages of love and

adventure taken from old fairy tales and other ballads; or (as at a

later period I discovered) from the pages of Pamela, and Henry, Earl of

Moreland.

With Bewick on my knee, I was then happy: happy at least in my way. I

feared nothing but interruption, and that came too soon. The

breakfast-room door opened.

“Boh! Madam Mope!” cried the voice of John Reed; then he paused: he

found the room apparently empty.

“Where the dickens is she!” he continued. “Lizzy! Georgy! (calling to

his sisters) Joan is not here: tell mama she is run out into the

rain—bad animal!”

“It is well I drew the curtain,” thought I; and I wished fervently he

might not discover my hiding-place: nor would John Reed have found it

out himself; he was not quick either of vision or conception; but Eliza

just put her head in at the door, and said at once—

“She is in the window-seat, to be sure, Jack.”

And I came out immediately, for I trembled at the idea of being dragged

forth by the said Jack.

“What do you want?” I asked, with awkward diffidence.

“Say, ‘What do you want, Master Reed?’” was the answer. “I want you to

come here;” and seating himself in an arm-chair, he intimated by a

gesture that I was to approach and stand before him.

John Reed was a schoolboy of fourteen years old; four years older than

I, for I was but ten: large and stout for his age, with a dingy and

unwholesome skin; thick lineaments in a spacious visage, heavy limbs

and large extremities. He gorged himself habitually at table, which

made him bilious, and gave him a dim and bleared eye and flabby cheeks.

He ought now to have been at school; but his mama had taken him home

for a month or two, “on account of his delicate health.” Mr. Miles, the

master, affirmed that he would do very well if he had fewer cakes and

sweetmeats sent him from home; but the mother’s heart turned from an

opinion so harsh, and inclined rather to the more refined idea that

John’s sallowness was owing to over-application and, perhaps, to pining

after home.

John had not much affection for his mother and sisters, and an

antipathy to me. He bullied and punished me; not two or three times in

the week, nor once or twice in the day, but continually: every nerve I

had feared him, and every morsel of flesh in my bones shrank when he

came near. There were moments when I was bewildered by the terror he

inspired, because I had no appeal whatever against either his menaces

or his inflictions; the servants did not like to offend their young

master by taking my part against him, and Mrs. Reed was blind and deaf

on the subject: she never saw him strike or heard him abuse me, though

he did both now and then in her very presence, more frequently,

however, behind her back.

Habitually obedient to John, I came up to his chair: he spent some

three minutes in thrusting out his tongue at me as far as he could

without damaging the roots: I knew he would soon strike, and while

dreading the blow, I mused on the disgusting and ugly appearance of him

who would presently deal it. I wonder if he read that notion in my

face; for, all at once, without speaking, he struck suddenly and

strongly. I tottered, and on regaining my equilibrium retired back a

step or two from his chair.

“That is for your impudence in answering mama awhile since,” said he,

“and for your sneaking way of getting behind curtains, and for the look

you had in your eyes two minutes since, you rat!”

Accustomed to John Reed’s abuse, I never had an idea of replying to it;

my care was how to endure the blow which would certainly follow the

insult.

“What were you doing behind the curtain?” he asked.

“I was reading.”

“Show the book.”

I returned to the window and fetched it thence.

“You have no business to take our books; you are a dependent, mama

says; you have no money; your father left you none; you ought to beg,

and not to live here with gentlemen’s children like us, and eat the

same meals we do, and wear clothes at our mama’s expense. Now, I’ll

teach you to rummage my bookshelves: for they are mine; all the house

belongs to me, or will do in a few years. Go and stand by the door, out

of the way of the mirror and the windows.”

I did so, not at first aware what was his intention; but when I saw him

lift and poise the book and stand in act to hurl it, I instinctively

started aside with a cry of alarm: not soon enough, however; the volume

was flung, it hit me, and I fell, striking my head against the door and

cutting it. The cut bled, the pain was sharp: my terror had passed its

climax; other feelings succeeded.

“Wicked and cruel boy!” I said. “You are like a murderer—you are like a

slave-driver—you are like the Roman emperors!”

I had read Goldsmith’s History of Rome, and had formed my opinion of

Nero, Caligula, &c. Also I had drawn parallels in silence, which I

never thought thus to have declared aloud.

“What! what!” he cried. “Did she say that to me? Did you hear her,

Eliza and Georgiana? Won’t I tell mama? but first—”

He ran headlong at me: I felt him grasp my hair and my shoulder: he had

closed with a desperate thing. I really saw in him a tyrant, a

murderer. I felt a drop or two of blood from my head trickle down my

neck, and was sensible of somewhat pungent suffering: these sensations

for the time predominated over fear, and I received him in frantic

sort. I don’t very well know what I did with my hands, but he called me

“Rat! Rat!” and bellowed out aloud. Aid was near him: Eliza and

Georgiana had run for Mrs. Reed, who was gone upstairs: she now came

upon the scene, followed by Bessie and her maid Abbot. We were parted:

I heard the words—

“Dear! dear! What a fury to fly at Master John!”

“Did ever anybody see such a picture of passion!”

Then Mrs. Reed subjoined—

“Take her away to the red-room, and lock her in there.” Four hands were

immediately laid upon me, and I was borne upstairs.