<h2>CHAPTER II</h2>
<p>I resisted all the way: a new thing for me, and a circumstance which greatly
strengthened the bad opinion Bessie and Miss Abbot were disposed to entertain
of me. The fact is, I was a trifle beside myself; or rather <i>out</i> of
myself, as the French would say: I was conscious that a moment’s mutiny
had already rendered me liable to strange penalties, and, like any other rebel
slave, I felt resolved, in my desperation, to go all lengths.</p>
<p>“Hold her arms, Miss Abbot: she’s like a mad cat.”</p>
<p>“For shame! for shame!” cried the lady’s-maid.
“What shocking conduct, Miss Eyre, to strike a young gentleman, your
benefactress’s son! Your young master.”</p>
<p>“Master! How is he my master? Am I a servant?”</p>
<p>“No; you are less than a servant, for you do nothing for your keep.
There, sit down, and think over your wickedness.”</p>
<p>They had got me by this time into the apartment indicated by Mrs. Reed, and had
thrust me upon a stool: my impulse was to rise from it like a spring; their two
pair of hands arrested me instantly.</p>
<p>“If you don’t sit still, you must be tied down,” said Bessie.
“Miss Abbot, lend me your garters; she would break mine directly.”</p>
<p>Miss Abbot turned to divest a stout leg of the necessary ligature. This
preparation for bonds, and the additional ignominy it inferred, took a little
of the excitement out of me.</p>
<p>“Don’t take them off,” I cried; “I will not
stir.”</p>
<p>In guarantee whereof, I attached myself to my seat by my hands.</p>
<p>“Mind you don’t,” said Bessie; and when she had ascertained
that I was really subsiding, she loosened her hold of me; then she and Miss
Abbot stood with folded arms, looking darkly and doubtfully on my face, as
incredulous of my sanity.</p>
<p>“She never did so before,” at last said Bessie, turning to the
Abigail.</p>
<p>“But it was always in her,” was the reply. “I’ve told
Missis often my opinion about the child, and Missis agreed with me.
She’s an underhand little thing: I never saw a girl of her age with so
much cover.”</p>
<p>Bessie answered not; but ere long, addressing me, she said—</p>
<p>“You ought to be aware, Miss, that you are under obligations to Mrs.
Reed: she keeps you: if she were to turn you off, you would have to go to the
poorhouse.”</p>
<p>I had nothing to say to these words: they were not new to me: my very first
recollections of existence included hints of the same kind. This reproach of my
dependence had become a vague sing-song in my ear: very painful and crushing,
but only half intelligible. Miss Abbot joined in—</p>
<p>“And you ought not to think yourself on an equality with the Misses Reed
and Master Reed, because Missis kindly allows you to be brought up with them.
They will have a great deal of money, and you will have none: it is your place
to be humble, and to try to make yourself agreeable to them.”</p>
<p>“What we tell you is for your good,” added Bessie, in no harsh
voice, “you should try to be useful and pleasant, then, perhaps, you
would have a home here; but if you become passionate and rude, Missis will send
you away, I am sure.”</p>
<p>“Besides,” said Miss Abbot, “God will punish her: He might
strike her dead in the midst of her tantrums, and then where would she go?
Come, Bessie, we will leave her: I wouldn’t have her heart for anything.
Say your prayers, Miss Eyre, when you are by yourself; for if you don’t
repent, something bad might be permitted to come down the chimney and fetch you
away.”</p>
<p>They went, shutting the door, and locking it behind them.</p>
<p>The red-room was a square chamber, very seldom slept in, I might say never,
indeed, unless when a chance influx of visitors at Gateshead Hall rendered it
necessary to turn to account all the accommodation it contained: yet it was one
of the largest and stateliest chambers in the mansion. A bed supported on
massive pillars of mahogany, hung with curtains of deep red damask, stood out
like a tabernacle in the centre; the two large windows, with their blinds
always drawn down, were half shrouded in festoons and falls of similar drapery;
the carpet was red; the table at the foot of the bed was covered with a crimson
cloth; the walls were a soft fawn colour with a blush of pink in it; the
wardrobe, the toilet-table, the chairs were of darkly polished old mahogany.
Out of these deep surrounding shades rose high, and glared white, the piled-up
mattresses and pillows of the bed, spread with a snowy Marseilles counterpane.
Scarcely less prominent was an ample cushioned easy-chair near the head of the
bed, also white, with a footstool before it; and looking, as I thought, like a
pale throne.</p>
<p>This room was chill, because it seldom had a fire; it was silent, because
remote from the nursery and kitchen; solemn, because it was known to be so
seldom entered. The house-maid alone came here on Saturdays, to wipe from the
mirrors and the furniture a week’s quiet dust: and Mrs. Reed herself, at
far intervals, visited it to review the contents of a certain secret drawer in
the wardrobe, where were stored divers parchments, her jewel-casket, and a
miniature of her deceased husband; and in those last words lies the secret of
the red-room—the spell which kept it so lonely in spite of its grandeur.</p>
<p>Mr. Reed had been dead nine years: it was in this chamber he breathed his last;
here he lay in state; hence his coffin was borne by the undertaker’s men;
and, since that day, a sense of dreary consecration had guarded it from
frequent intrusion.</p>
<p>My seat, to which Bessie and the bitter Miss Abbot had left me riveted, was a
low ottoman near the marble chimney-piece; the bed rose before me; to my right
hand there was the high, dark wardrobe, with subdued, broken reflections
varying the gloss of its panels; to my left were the muffled windows; a great
looking-glass between them repeated the vacant majesty of the bed and room. I
was not quite sure whether they had locked the door; and when I dared move, I
got up and went to see. Alas! yes: no jail was ever more secure. Returning, I
had to cross before the looking-glass; my fascinated glance involuntarily
explored the depth it revealed. All looked colder and darker in that visionary
hollow than in reality: and the strange little figure there gazing at me, with
a white face and arms specking the gloom, and glittering eyes of fear moving
where all else was still, had the effect of a real spirit: I thought it like
one of the tiny phantoms, half fairy, half imp, Bessie’s evening stories
represented as coming out of lone, ferny dells in moors, and appearing before
the eyes of belated travellers. I returned to my stool.</p>
<p>Superstition was with me at that moment; but it was not yet her hour for
complete victory: my blood was still warm; the mood of the revolted slave was
still bracing me with its bitter vigour; I had to stem a rapid rush of
retrospective thought before I quailed to the dismal present.</p>
<p>All John Reed’s violent tyrannies, all his sisters’ proud
indifference, all his mother’s aversion, all the servants’
partiality, turned up in my disturbed mind like a dark deposit in a turbid
well. Why was I always suffering, always browbeaten, always accused, for ever
condemned? Why could I never please? Why was it useless to try to win any
one’s favour? Eliza, who was headstrong and selfish, was respected.
Georgiana, who had a spoiled temper, a very acrid spite, a captious and
insolent carriage, was universally indulged. Her beauty, her pink cheeks and
golden curls, seemed to give delight to all who looked at her, and to purchase
indemnity for every fault. John no one thwarted, much less punished; though he
twisted the necks of the pigeons, killed the little pea-chicks, set the dogs at
the sheep, stripped the hothouse vines of their fruit, and broke the buds off
the choicest plants in the conservatory: he called his mother “old
girl,” too; sometimes reviled her for her dark skin, similar to his own;
bluntly disregarded her wishes; not unfrequently tore and spoiled her silk
attire; and he was still “her own darling.” I dared commit no
fault: I strove to fulfil every duty; and I was termed naughty and tiresome,
sullen and sneaking, from morning to noon, and from noon to night.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>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—<i>why</i> I thus suffered; now, at the distance
of—I will not say how many years, I see it clearly.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>A singular notion dawned upon me. I doubted not—never doubted—that
if Mr. Reed had been alive he would have treated me kindly; and now, as I sat
looking at the white bed and overshadowed walls—occasionally also turning
a fascinated eye towards the dimly gleaming mirror—I began to recall what
I had heard of dead men, troubled in their graves by the violation of their
last wishes, revisiting the earth to punish the perjured and avenge the
oppressed; and I thought Mr. Reed’s spirit, harassed by the wrongs of his
sister’s child, might quit its abode—whether in the church vault or
in the unknown world of the departed—and rise before me in this chamber.
I wiped my tears and hushed my sobs, fearful lest any sign of violent grief
might waken a preternatural voice to comfort me, or elicit from the gloom some
haloed face, bending over me with strange pity. This idea, consolatory in
theory, I felt would be terrible if realised: with all my might I endeavoured
to stifle it—I endeavoured to be firm. Shaking my hair from my eyes, I
lifted my head and tried to look boldly round the dark room; at this moment a
light gleamed on the wall. Was it, I asked myself, a ray from the moon
penetrating some aperture in the blind? No; moonlight was still, and this
stirred; while I gazed, it glided up to the ceiling and quivered over my head.
I can now conjecture readily that this streak of light was, in all likelihood,
a gleam from a lantern carried by some one across the lawn: but then, prepared
as my mind was for horror, shaken as my nerves were by agitation, I thought the
swift darting beam was a herald of some coming vision from another world. My
heart beat thick, my head grew hot; a sound filled my ears, which I deemed the
rushing of wings; something seemed near me; I was oppressed, suffocated:
endurance broke down; I rushed to the door and shook the lock in desperate
effort. Steps came running along the outer passage; the key turned, Bessie and
Abbot entered.</p>
<p>“Miss Eyre, are you ill?” said Bessie.</p>
<p>“What a dreadful noise! it went quite through me!” exclaimed Abbot.</p>
<p>“Take me out! Let me go into the nursery!” was my cry.</p>
<p>“What for? Are you hurt? Have you seen something?” again demanded
Bessie.</p>
<p>“Oh! I saw a light, and I thought a ghost would come.” I had
now got hold of Bessie’s hand, and she did not snatch it from me.</p>
<p>“She has screamed out on purpose,” declared Abbot, in some disgust.
“And what a scream! If she had been in great pain one would have excused
it, but she only wanted to bring us all here: I know her naughty tricks.”</p>
<p>“What is all this?” demanded another voice peremptorily; and Mrs.
Reed came along the corridor, her cap flying wide, her gown rustling stormily.
“Abbot and Bessie, I believe I gave orders that Jane Eyre should be left
in the red-room till I came to her myself.”</p>
<p>“Miss Jane screamed so loud, ma’am,” pleaded Bessie.</p>
<p>“Let her go,” was the only answer. “Loose Bessie’s
hand, child: you cannot succeed in getting out by these means, be assured. I
abhor artifice, particularly in children; it is my duty to show you that tricks
will not answer: you will now stay here an hour longer, and it is only on
condition of perfect submission and stillness that I shall liberate you
then.”</p>
<p>“O aunt! have pity! Forgive me! I cannot endure it—let me be
punished some other way! I shall be killed if—”</p>
<p>“Silence! This violence is all most repulsive:” and so, no doubt,
she felt it. I was a precocious actress in her eyes; she sincerely looked on me
as a compound of virulent passions, mean spirit, and dangerous duplicity.</p>
<p>Bessie and Abbot having retreated, Mrs. Reed, impatient of my now frantic
anguish and wild sobs, abruptly thrust me back and locked me in, without
farther parley. I heard her sweeping away; and soon after she was gone, I
suppose I had a species of fit: unconsciousness closed the scene.</p>
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