I cleared and steadied my voice to reply: "All is changed about me,
sir; I must change too--there is no doubt of that; and to avoid
fluctuations of feeling, and continual combats with recollections
and associations, there is only one way--Adele must have a new
governess, sir."
"Oh, Adele will go to school--I have settled that already; nor do I
mean to torment you with the hideous associations and recollections
of Thornfield Hall--this accursed place--this tent of Achan--this
insolent vault, offering the ghastliness of living death to the
light of the open sky--this narrow stone hell, with its one real
fiend, worse than a legion of such as we imagine. Jane, you shall
not stay here, nor will I. I was wrong ever to bring you to
Thornfield Hall, knowing as I did how it was haunted. I charged
them to conceal from you, before I ever saw you, all knowledge of
the curse of the place; merely because I feared Adele never would
have a governess to stay if she knew with what inmate she was
housed, and my plans would not permit me to remove the maniac
elsewhere--though I possess an old house, Ferndean Manor, even more
retired and hidden than this, where I could have lodged her safely
enough, had not a scruple about the unhealthiness of the situation,
in the heart of a wood, made my conscience recoil from the
arrangement. Probably those damp walls would soon have eased me of
her charge: but to each villain his own vice; and mine is not a
tendency to indirect assassination, even of what I most hate.
"Concealing the mad-woman's neighbourhood from you, however, was
something like covering a child with a cloak and laying it down near
a upas-tree: that demon's vicinage is poisoned, and always was.
But I'll shut up Thornfield Hall: I'll nail up the front door and
board the lower windows: I'll give Mrs. Poole two hundred a year to
live here with MY WIFE, as you term that fearful hag: Grace will do
much for money, and she shall have her son, the keeper at Grimsby
Retreat, to bear her company and be at hand to give her aid in the
paroxysms, when MY WIFE is prompted by her familiar to burn people
in their beds at night, to stab them, to bite their flesh from their
bones, and so on--"
"Sir," I interrupted him, "you are inexorable for that unfortunate
lady: you speak of her with hate--with vindictive antipathy. It is
cruel--she cannot help being mad."
"Jane, my little darling (so I will call you, for so you are), you
don't know what you are talking about; you misjudge me again: it is
not because she is mad I hate her. If you were mad, do you think I
should hate you?"