Eliza still spoke little; she had evidently no time to talk. I never saw a busier person than she seemed to be; yet it was difficult to say what she did: or rather, to discover any result of her diligence. She had an alarumfn to call her up early. I know not how she occupied herself before breakfast, but after that meal she divided her time into regular portions; and each hour had its allotted task. Three times a day she studied a little book, which I found, on inspection, was a Common Prayer Book. I asked her once what was the great attraction of that volume, and she said “the Rubric.”fo Three hours she gave to stitching, with gold thread, the border of a square crimson cloth, almost large enough for a carpet. In answer to my inquiries after the use of this article, she informed me it was a covering for the altar of a new church lately erected near Gateshead. Two hours she devoted to her diary; two to working by herself in the kitchen-garden; and one to the regulation of her accounts. She seemed to want no company—no conversation. I believe she was happy in her way; this routine sufficed to her; and nothing annoyed her so much as the occurrence of any incident which forced her to vary its clock-work regularity.
She told me one evening, when more disposed to be communicative than usual, that John’s conduct, and the threatened ruin of the family, had been a source of profound affliction to her; but she had now, she said, settled her mind, and formed her resolution. Her own fortune she had taken care to secure; and when her mother died—and it was wholly improbable, she tranquilly remarked, that she should either recover or linger long, she would execute a long-cherished project—seek a retirement where punctual habits would be permanently secured from disturbance, and place safe barriers between herself and a frivolous world. I asked if Georgiana would accompany her.
Of course not. Georgiana and she had nothing in common; they never had had. She would not be burdened with her society for any consideration. Georgiana should take her own course; and she, Eliza, would take hers.
Georgiana, when not unburdening her heart to me, spent most of her time in lying on the sofa, fretting about the dulness of the house, and wishing over and over again that her Aunt Gibson would send her an invitation up to town. “It would be so much better,” she said, “if she could only get out of the way for a month or two, till all was over.” I did not ask what she meant by “all being over,” but I suppose she referred to the expected decease of her mother, and the gloomy sequel of funeral rites. Eliza generally took no more notice of her sister’s indolence and complaints than if no such murmuring, lounging object had been before her. One day, however, as she put away her account-book and unfolded her embroidery, she suddenly took her up thus:
“Georgiana, a more vain and absurd animal than you was certainly never allowed to cumber the earth. You had no right to be born; for you make no use of life. Instead of living for, in, and with yourself, as a reasonable being ought, you seek only to fasten your feebleness on some other person’s strength; if no one can be found willing to burden her or himself with such a fat, weak, puffy, useless thing, you cry out that you are ill-treated, neglected, miserable. Then, too, existence for you must be a scene of continual change and excitement, or else the world is a dungeon; you must be admired, you must be courted, you must be flattered—you must have music, dancing, and society—or you languish, you die away. Have you no sense to devise a system which will make you independent of all efforts, and all wills, but your own? Take one day; share it into sections; to each section apportion its task; leave no stray unemployed quarters of an hour, ten minutes, five minutes—do each piece of business in its turn with method, with rigid regularity. The day will close almost before you are aware it has begun; and you are indebted to no one for helping you to get rid of one vacant moment; you have had to seek no one’s company, conversation, sympathy, forbearance ; you have lived, in short, as an independent being ought to do. Take this advice—the first and last I shall offer you; then you will not want me or any one else, happen what may. Neglect it—go on as heretofore, craving, whining, and idling—and suffer the results of your idiocy, however bad and insufferable they may be. I tell you this plainly; and listen: for though I shall no more repeat what I am now about to say, I shall steadily act on it. After my mother’s death, I wash my hands of you; from the day her coffin is carried to the vault in Gateshead church, you and I will be as separate as if we had never known each other. You need not think that, because we chanced to be born of the same parents, I shall suffer you to fasten me down by even the feeblest claim; I tell you this—if the whole human race, ourselves excepted, were swept away, and we two stood alone on the earth, I would leave you in the old world, and betake myself to the new.” She closed her lips.
“You might have spared yourself the trouble of delivering that tirade,” answered Georgiana. “Everybody knows you are the most selfish, heartless creature in existence; and I know your spiteful hatred toward me; I have had a specimen of it before in the trick you played me about Lord Edwin Vere; you could not bear me to be raised above you, to have a title, to be received into circles where you dare not show your face, and so you acted the spy and informer, and ruined my prospects forever.” Georgiana took out her handkerchief and blew her nose for an hour afterward. Eliza sat cold, impassable, and assiduously industrious.
True, generous feeling is made small account of by some; but here were two natures rendered, the one intolerably acrid, the other despicably savorless, for the want of it. Feeling without judgment is a washy draught indeed; but judgment untempered by feeling is too bitter and huskyfp a morsel for human degluti tion.fq
It was a wet and windy afternoon; Georgiana had fallen asleep on the sofa over the perusal of a novel; Eliza was gone to attend a saint‘s-day service at the new church—for in matters of religion she was a rigid formalist; no weather ever prevented the punctual discharge of what she considered her devotional duties; fair or foul, she went to church thrice every Sunday, and as often on week-days as there were prayers.
I bethought myself to go up stairs and see how the dying woman sped, who lay there almost unheeded; the very servants paid her but a remittent attention; the hired nurse, being little looked after, would slip out of the room whenever she could. Bessie was faithful; but she had her own family to mind, and could only come occasionally to the hall. I found the sick room unwatched, as I had expected; no nurse was there; the patient lay still, and seemingly lethargic; her livid face sunk in the pillows ; the fire was dying in the grate. I renewed the fuel, reärran ged the bed-clothes, gazed a while on her who could not now gaze on me, and then I moved away to the window.
The rain beat strongly against the panes, the wind blew tem pestuously. “One lies there,” I thought, “who will soon be beyond the war of earthly elements. Whither will that spirit—now struggling to quit its material tenement—flit when at length released?”
In pondering the great mystery, I thought of Helen Burns; recalled her dying words—her faith—her doctrine of the equality of disembodied souls. I was still listening in thought to her well-remembered tones—still picturing her pale and spiritual aspect, her wasted face and sublime gaze, as she lay on her placid death-bed, and whispered her longing to be restored to her divine Father’s bosom—when a feeble voice murmured from the couch behind, “Who is that?”
I knew Mrs. Reed had not spoken for days; was she reviving? I went up to her.
“It is I, Aunt Reed.”
“Who—I?” was her answer. “Who are you?” looking at me with surprise and a sort of alarm, but still not wildly. “You are quite a stranger to me—where is Bessie?”
“She is at the lodge, aunt.”
“Aunt!” she repeated. “Who calls me aunt? You are not one of the Gibsons; and yet I know you—that face, and the eyes and forehead, are quite familiar to me; you are like—why, you are like Jane Eyre!”
I said nothing: I was afraid of occasioning some shock by declaring my identity.
“Yet,” said she, “I am afraid it is a mistake; my thoughts deceive me. I wished to s
ee Jane Eyre, and I fancy a likeness where none exists; besides, in eight years she must be so changed.” I now gently assured her that I was the person she supposed and desired me to be; and seeing that I was understood, and that her senses were quite collected, I explained how Bessie had sent her husband to fetch me from Thornfield.
“I am very ill, I know,” she said, ere long; “I was trying to turn myself a few minutes since, and find I cannot move a limb. It is as well I should ease my mind before I die; what we think little of in health burdens us at such an hour as the present is to me. Is the nurse here? or is there no one in the room but you?”
I assured her we were alone.
“Well, I have twice done you a wrong which I regret now. One was in breaking the promise which I gave my husband to bring you up as my own child; the other—” She stopped. “After all, it is of no great importance, perhaps,” she murmured to herself; “and then I may get better, and to humble myself so to her is painful.”
She made an effort to alter her position, but failed; her face changed: she seemed to experience some inward sensation—the precursor, perhaps, of the last pang.
“Well, I must get it over. Eternity is before me; I had better tell her. Go to my dressing-case, open it, and take out a letter you will see there.”
I obeyed her direction. “Read the letter,” she said.
It was short, and thus conceived:
Madam
Will you have the goodness to send me the address of my niece, Jane Eyre, and to tell me how she is; it is my intention to write shortly and desire her to come to me at Madeira. Providence has blessed my endeavors to secure a competency; and as I am unmarried and childless, I wish to adopt her during my life, and bequeath her at my death whatever I may have to leave.
I am, madam, &c., &c.,
John Eyre, Madeira.
It was dated three years back.
“Why did I never hear of this?” I asked.
“Because I disliked you too fixedly and thoroughly ever to lend a hand in lifting you to prosperity. I could not forget your conduct to me, Jane—the fury with which you once turned on me; the tone in which you declared you abhorred me the worst of anybody in the world; the unchildlike look and voice with which you affirmed that the very thought of me made you sick, and asserted that I had treated you with miserable cruelty. I could not forget my own sensations, when you thus started up and poured out the venom of your mind; I felt fear, as if an animal that I had struck or pushed had looked up at me with human eyes and cursed me in a man’s voice. Bring me some water! Oh, make haste!”
“Dear Mrs. Reed,” said I, as I offered her the draught she required, “think no more of all this, let it pass away from your mind. Forgive me for my passionate language; I was a child then; eight, nine years have passed since that day.”
She heeded nothing of what I said; but when she had tasted the water and drawn breath, she went on thus:—
“I tell you I could not forget it, and I took my revenge; for you to be adopted by your uncle, and placed in a state of ease and comfort, was what I could not endure. I wrote to him; I said I was sorry for his disappointment, but Jane Eyre was dead—she had died of typhus fever at Lowood. Now act as you please; write and contradict my assertion—expose my falsehood as soon as you like. You were born, I think, to be my torment; my last hour is racked by the recollection of a deed which, but for you, I should never have been tempted to commit.”
“If you could but be persuaded to think no more of it, aunt, and to regard me with kindness and forgiveness—”
“You have a very bad disposition,” said she, “and one to this day I feel it impossible to understand; how for nine years you could be patient and quiescent under any treatment, and in the tenth break out all fire and violence, I can never comprehend.”
“My disposition is not so bad as you think; I am passionate, but not vindictive. Many a time, as a little child, I should have been glad to love you if you would have let me; and I long earnestly to be reconciled to you now; kiss me, aunt.”
I approached my cheek to her lips; she would not touch it. She said I oppressed her by leaning over the bed, and again demanded water. As I laid her down—for I raised her and supported her on my arm while she drank—I covered her ice-cold and clammy hand with mine; the feeble fingers shrunk from my touch—the glazing eyes shunned my gaze.
“Love me, then, or hate me, as you will,” I said at last, “you have my full and free forgiveness; ask now for God‘s, and be at peace.”
Poor, suffering woman! it was too late for her to make now the effort to change her habitual frame of mind; living, she had ever hated me—dying, she must hate me still.
The nurse now entered, and Bessie followed. I yet lingered half an hour longer, hoping to see some sign of amity; but she gave none. She was fast relapsing into stupor; nor did her mind again rally. At twelve o‘clock that night she died. I was not present to close her eyes; nor were either of her daughters. They came to tell us the next morning that all was over. She was by that time laid out. Eliza and I went to look at her; Georgiana, who had burst out into loud weeping, said she dared not go. There was stretched Sarah Reed’s once robust and active frame, rigid and still; her eye of flint was covered with its cold lid; her brow and strong traits wore yet the impress of her inexorable soul. A strange and solemn object was that corpse to me. I gazed on it with gloom and pain; nothing soft, nothing sweet, nothing pitying, or hopeful, or subduing, did it inspire; only a grating anguish for her woes—not my loss—and a sombre, tearless dismay at the fearfulness of death in such a form.
Eliza surveyed her parent calmly. After a silence of some minutes she observed—
“With her constitution she should have lived to a good old age; her life was shortened by trouble.” And then a spasm constricted her mouth for an instant; as it passed away she turned and left the room, and so did I. Neither of us had dropped a tear.
Chapter XXII
Mr. Rochester had given me but one week’s leave of absence; yet a month elapsed before I quitted Gateshead. I wished to leave immediately after the funeral, but Georgiana entreated me to stay till she could get off to London—whither she was now at last invited by her uncle, Mr. Gibson, who had come down to direct his sister’s interment, and settle the family affairs. Georgiana said she dreaded being left alone with Eliza; from her she got neither sympathy in her dejection, support in her fears, nor aid in her preparations; so I bore with her feeble-minded quailings and selfish lamentations as well as I could, and did my best in sewing for her and packing her dresses. It is true, that while I worked, she would idle; and I thought to myself, “If you and I were destined to live always together, cousin, we would commence matters on a different footing. I should not settle tamely down into being the forbearing party; I should assign you your share of labor, and compel you to accomplish it, or else it should be left undone; I should insist, also, on your keeping some of those drawling, half-insincere complaints hushed in your own breast. It is only because our connection happens to be very transitory, and comes at a peculiarly mournful season, that I consent thus to render it so patient and compliant on my part.”
At last I saw Georgiana off; but now it was Eliza’s turn to request me to stay another week. Her plans required all her time and attention, she said; she was about to depart for some unknown bourn; and all day long she stayed in her own room, her door bolted within, filling trunks, emptying drawers, burning papers, and holding no communication with any one. She wished me to look after the house, to see callers, and answer notes of condolence.
One morning she told me I was at liberty. “And,” she added, “I am obliged to you for your valuable services and discreet conduct. There is some difference between living with such a one as you, and with Georgiana; you perform your own part in life, and burden no one. To-morrow,” she continued, “I set out for the continent. I shall take up my abode in a religious house, near Lisle—a nunnery, you would call it; there I shall be quiet and unmolested. I
shall devote myself for a time to the examination of the Roman Catholic dogmas, and to a careful study of the workings of their system; if I find it to be, as I half suspect it is, the one best calculated to insure the doing of all things decently and in order, I shall embrace the tenets of Rome and probably take the veil.”
I neither expressed surprise at this resolution nor attempted to dissuade her from it. “The vocation will fit you to a hair,” I thought; “much good may it do you!”
When we parted, she said: “Good-by, cousin Jane Eyre, I wish you well; you have some sense.”
I then returned: “You are not without sense, cousin Eliza; but what you have, I suppose, in another year will be walled up alive in a French convent. However, it is not my business, and, so it suits you, I don’t much care.”
“You are in the right,” said she; and with these words we each went our separate way. As I shall not have occasion to refer either to her or her sister again, I may as well mention here that Georgiana made an advantageous match with a wealthy worn-out man of fashion; and that Eliza actually took the veil, and is at this day superior of the convent where she passed the period of her novitiate, and which she endowed with her fortune.
How people feel when they are returning home after an absence, long or short, I did not know. I had never experienced the sensation. I had known what it was to come back to Gateshead, when a child, after a long walk—to be scolded for looking cold or gloomy; and later, what it was to come back from church to Lowood—to long for a plenteous meal and a good fire, and to be unable to get either. Neither of these returnings were very pleasant or desirable; no magnet drew me to a given point, increasing in its strength of attraction the nearer I came. The return to Thornfield was yet to be tried.
My journey seemed tedious—very tedious; fifty miles one day, a night spent at an inn; fifty miles the next day. During the first twelve hours I thought of Mrs. Reed in her last moments; I saw her disfigured and discolored face, and heard her strangely altered voice; I mused on the funeral day, the coffin, the hearse, the black train of tenants and servants—few was the number of relatives—the gaping vault, the silent church, the solemn service. Then I thought of Eliza and Georgiana. I beheld one the cynosure of a ball-room, the other the inmate of a convent cell; and I dwelt on and analyzed their separate peculiarities of person and character. The evening arrival at the great town of—scattered these thoughts; night gave them quite another turn. Laid down on my traveller’s bed, I left reminiscence for anticipation.
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