Jane Eyre - Page 9/412

My head still ached and bled with the blow and fall I had received:

no one had reproved John for wantonly striking me; and because I had

turned against him to avert farther irrational violence, I was

loaded with general opprobrium.

"Unjust!--unjust!" said my reason, forced by the agonising stimulus

into precocious though transitory power: and Resolve, equally

wrought up, instigated some strange expedient to achieve escape from

insupportable oppression--as running away, or, if that could not be

effected, never eating or drinking more, and letting myself die.

What a consternation of soul was mine that dreary afternoon! How

all my brain was in tumult, and all my heart in insurrection! Yet

in what darkness, what dense ignorance, was the mental battle

fought! I could not answer the ceaseless inward question--WHY I

thus suffered; now, at the distance of--I will not say how many

years, I see it clearly.

I was a discord in Gateshead Hall: I was like nobody there; I had

nothing in harmony with Mrs. Reed or her children, or her chosen

vassalage. If they did not love me, in fact, as little did I love

them. They were not bound to regard with affection a thing that

could not sympathise with one amongst them; a heterogeneous thing,

opposed to them in temperament, in capacity, in propensities; a

useless thing, incapable of serving their interest, or adding to

their pleasure; a noxious thing, cherishing the germs of indignation

at their treatment, of contempt of their judgment. I know that had

I been a sanguine, brilliant, careless, exacting, handsome, romping

child--though equally dependent and friendless--Mrs. Reed would have

endured my presence more complacently; her children would have

entertained for me more of the cordiality of fellow-feeling; the

servants would have been less prone to make me the scapegoat of the

nursery.

Daylight began to forsake the red-room; it was past four o'clock,

and the beclouded afternoon was tending to drear twilight. I heard

the rain still beating continuously on the staircase window, and the

wind howling in the grove behind the hall; I grew by degrees cold as

a stone, and then my courage sank. My habitual mood of humiliation,

self-doubt, forlorn depression, fell damp on the embers of my

decaying ire. All said I was wicked, and perhaps I might be so;

what thought had I been but just conceiving of starving myself to

death? That certainly was a crime: and was I fit to die? Or was

the vault under the chancel of Gateshead Church an inviting bourne?

In such vault I had been told did Mr. Reed lie buried; and led by

this thought to recall his idea, I dwelt on it with gathering dread.

I could not remember him; but I knew that he was my own uncle--my

mother's brother--that he had taken me when a parentless infant to

his house; and that in his last moments he had required a promise of

Mrs. Reed that she would rear and maintain me as one of her own

children. Mrs. Reed probably considered she had kept this promise;

and so she had, I dare say, as well as her nature would permit her;

but how could she really like an interloper not of her race, and

unconnected with her, after her husband's death, by any tie? It

must have been most irksome to find herself bound by a hard-wrung

pledge to stand in the stead of a parent to a strange child she

could not love, and to see an uncongenial alien permanently intruded

on her own family group.