I thanked her for her considerate choice, and as I really felt
fatigued with my long journey, expressed my readiness to retire.
She took her candle, and I followed her from the room. First she
went to see if the hall-door was fastened; having taken the key from
the lock, she led the way upstairs. The steps and banisters were of
oak; the staircase window was high and latticed; both it and the
long gallery into which the bedroom doors opened looked as if they
belonged to a church rather than a house. A very chill and vault-
like air pervaded the stairs and gallery, suggesting cheerless ideas
of space and solitude; and I was glad, when finally ushered into my
chamber, to find it of small dimensions, and furnished in ordinary,
modern style.
When Mrs. Fairfax had bidden me a kind good-night, and I had
fastened my door, gazed leisurely round, and in some measure effaced
the eerie impression made by that wide hall, that dark and spacious
staircase, and that long, cold gallery, by the livelier aspect of my
little room, I remembered that, after a day of bodily fatigue and
mental anxiety, I was now at last in safe haven. The impulse of
gratitude swelled my heart, and I knelt down at the bedside, and
offered up thanks where thanks were due; not forgetting, ere I rose,
to implore aid on my further path, and the power of meriting the
kindness which seemed so frankly offered me before it was earned.
My couch had no thorns in it that night; my solitary room no fears.
At once weary and content, I slept soon and soundly: when I awoke
it was broad day.
The chamber looked such a bright little place to me as the sun shone
in between the gay blue chintz window curtains, showing papered
walls and a carpeted floor, so unlike the bare planks and stained
plaster of Lowood, that my spirits rose at the view. Externals have
a great effect on the young: I thought that a fairer era of life
was beginning for me, one that was to have its flowers and
pleasures, as well as its thorns and toils. My faculties, roused by
the change of scene, the new field offered to hope, seemed all
astir. I cannot precisely define what they expected, but it was
something pleasant: not perhaps that day or that month, but at an
indefinite future period.
I rose; I dressed myself with care: obliged to be plain--for I had
no article of attire that was not made with extreme simplicity--I
was still by nature solicitous to be neat. It was not my habit to
be disregardful of appearance or careless of the impression I made:
on the contrary, I ever wished to look as well as I could, and to
please as much as my want of beauty would permit. I sometimes
regretted that I was not handsomer; I sometimes wished to have rosy
cheeks, a straight nose, and small cherry mouth; I desired to be
tall, stately, and finely developed in figure; I felt it a
misfortune that I was so little, so pale, and had features so
irregular and so marked. And why had I these aspirations and these
regrets? It would be difficult to say: I could not then distinctly
say it to myself; yet I had a reason, and a logical, natural reason
too. However, when I had brushed my hair very smooth, and put on my
black frock--which, Quakerlike as it was, at least had the merit of
fitting to a nicety--and adjusted my clean white tucker, I thought I
should do respectably enough to appear before Mrs. Fairfax, and that
my new pupil would not at least recoil from me with antipathy.
Having opened my chamber window, and seen that I left all things
straight and neat on the toilet table, I ventured forth.