Chapter 1
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There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the m; but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no pany, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so peing, that further out-door exercise was now out of the question.I was glad of it: I never liked long walks, especially on chilly afternoons: dreadful to me was the ing home in the raw twilight, with nipped fingers and toes, and a heart saddened by the chidings of Bessie, the nurse, and humbled by the sciousness of my physical inferiority to Eliza, John, and Geiana Reed.
The said Eliza, John, and Geiana were now clustered round their mama in the drawing-room: she lay reed on a sofa by the fireside, and with her darlings about her (for the time her quarrelling n) looked perfectly happy. Me, she had dispensed from joining the group; saying, “She regretted to be uhe y of keepi a distance; but that until she heard from Bessie, and could d<bdi></bdi>iscover by her own observation, that I was endeav in good earo acquire a more sociable and childlike disposition, a more attractive and sprightly manner— something lighter, franker, more natural, as it were—she really must exclude me from privileges intended only for tented, happy, little children.”
“What does Bessie say I have done?” I asked.
“Jane, I don’t like cavillers or questioners; besides, there is something truly forbidding in a child taking up her elders in that manner. Be seated somewhere; and until you speak pleasantly, remain silent.”
A breakfast-room adjoihe drawing-room, I slipped in there. It tained a bookcase: I soon possessed myself of a volume, taking care that it should be oored with pictures. I mounted into the window-seat: gathering up my feet, I sat cross-legged, like a Turk; and, having drawn the red moreen curtain nearly close, I was shrined in double retirement.
Folds of scarlet drapery shut in my view to the right hand; to the left were the clear panes of glass, proteg, but not separating me from the drear November day. At intervals, while turning over the leaves of my book, I studied the aspect of that winter afternoon. Afar, it offered a pale blank of mist and cloud; near a se of wet lawn and storm-beat shrub, with ceaseless rain sweeping away wildly before a long and lamentable blast.
I returo my book—Bewick’s History of British Birds: the letterpress thereof I cared little fenerally speaking; ahere were certain introductory pages that, child as I was, I could not pass quite as a blank. They were those which treat of the haunts of sea-fowl; of “the solitary rocks and promontories” by them only inhabited; of the coast of Norway, studded with isles from its southerremity, the Lindeness, or o the North Cape—
“Where the Northern O, in vast whirls,
Boils round the naked, melancholy isles
Of farthest Thule; and the Atlantic surge
Pours in among the stormy Hebrides.”
Nor could I pass unnoticed<mark>?99lｉb.</mark> the suggestion of the bleak shores of Lapland, Siberia, Spitzbergen, Nova Zembla, Id, Greenland, with “the vast sweep of the Arctie, and those forlions of dreary space,—that reservoir of frost and snow, where firm fields of ice, the accumulation of turies of winters, glazed in Alpis above heights, surround the pole, and tre the multiplied rigours of extreme cold.” Of these death-white realms I formed an idea of my own: shadowy, like all the half-prehended notions that float dim through children’s brains, but strangely impressive. The words in these introductory pages ected themselves with the succeeding viges, and gave significe to the rock standing up alone in a sea of billow and spray; to the broken boat stranded on a desolate coast; to the cold and ghastly moon glang through bars of cloud at a wreck just sinking.
I ot tell what se hauhe quite solitary churchyard, with its inscribed headstos gate, its two trees, its low horizon, girdled by a broken wall, and its newly-risen crest, attesting the hour of eventide.
The two ships becalmed on a torpid sea, I believed to be marine phantoms.
The fiend pinning dowhief’s pack behind him, I passed over quickly: it was an object of terror.
So was the black horhied aloof on a rock, surveying a distant crowd surrounding a gallows.
Each picture told a story; mysterious often to my undeveloped uanding and imperfect feelings, yet ever profoundly iing: as iing as the tales Bessie sometimes narrated on winter evenings, when she ced to be in good humour; and when, having brought her ironing-table to the nursery hearth, she allowed us to sit about it, and while she got up Mrs. Reed’s lace frills, and crimped her nightcap borders, fed er attention with passages of love and adveaken from old fairy tales and other ballads; or (as at a later period I discovered) from the pages of Pamela, and Henry, Earl of Moreland.
With Bewiy knee, I was then happy: happy at least in my way. I feared nothing but interruption, and that came too soon. The ９９ｌib?breakfast-room door opened.
“Boh! Madam Mope!” cried the voice of Johhen he paused: he found the room apparently empty.
“Where the dis is she!” he tinued. “Lizzy! Geo?9９ｌib.rgy! (calling to his sisters) Joan is not here: tell mama she is run out into the rain—bad animal!”
“It is well I drew the curtain,” thought I; and I wished fervently he might not discover m<cite></cite>y hiding-plaor would John Reed have found it out himself; he was not quick either of vision or ception; but Eliza just put her head in at the door, and said at once—
“She is in the window-seat, to be sure, Jack.”
And I came out immediately, for I trembled at the idea of being dragged forth by the said Jack.
“What do you want?” I asked, with awkward diffidence.
“Say, ‘What do you want, Master Reed?’” was the answer. “I want you to e here;” aing himself in an arm-chair, he intimated by a gesture that I was to approad stand before him.
John Reed was a schoolboy of fourteen years old; four years older than I, for I was but ten: large and stout for his age, with a dingy and unwholesome skin; thick lis in a spacious visage, heavy limbs and large extremities. He ged himself habitually at table, which made him bilious, and gave him a dim and bleared eye and flabby cheeks. He ought now to have been at school; but his mama had taken him home for a month or two, “on at of his delicate health.” Mr. Miles, the master, affirmed that he would do very well if he had fewer cakes and sweetmeats sent him from home; but the mother’s heart turned from an opinion so harsh, and ined rather to the more refined idea that John’s sallowness was owing to over-application and, perhaps, to pining after home.
John had not much affe for his mother and sisters, and an antipathy to me. He bullied and punished me; not two or three times in the week, nor once or twi the day, but tinually: every nerve I had feared him, and every morsel of flesh in my bones shrank when he came near. There were moments when I was bewildered by the terror he inspired, because I had no appeal whatever agaiher his menaces or his inflis; the servants did not like to offend their young master by taking my part against him, and Mrs. Reed was blind and deaf on the subject: she never saw him strike or heard him abuse me, though he did both now and then in her very presence, more frequently, however, behind her back.
Habitually obedient to John, I came up to his chair: he spent some three minutes in thrusting out his to me as far as he could without damaging the roots: I knew he would soon strike, and while dreading the blow, I mused on the disgusting and ugly appearance of him who would presently deal it. I wonder if he read that notion in my face; for, all at once, without speaking, he struck suddenly and strongly. I tottered, and aining my equilibrium retired back a step or two from his chair.
“That is for your impuden answering mama awhile since,” said he, “and for your sneaking way of getting behind curtains, and for the look you had in your eyes two minutes since, you rat!”
Aced to John Reed’s abuse, I never had an idea of replying to it; my care was how to ehe blow which would certainly follow the insult.
“What were you doing behind the curtain?” he asked.
“I was reading.”
“Show the book.”
I returo the window ached it thence.
“You have no busio take our books; you are a depe, mama says; you have no money; your father left you none; you ought to beg, and not to live here with gentlemen’s children like us, ahe same meals we do, and wear clothes at our mama’s expense. Now, I’ll teach you to rummage my bookshelves: for they are mine; all the house belongs to me, or will do in a few years. Go and stand by the door, out of the way of the mirror and the windows.”
I did so, not at first aware what was his iion; but when I saw him lift and poise the book and stand in act to hurl it, I instinctively started aside with a cry of alarm: not soon enough, however; the volume was flung, it hit me, and I fell, striking my head against the door and cutting it. The cut bled, the pain was sharp: my terror had passed its climax; other feelings succeeded.
“Wicked and cruel boy!” I said. “You are like a murderer—you are like a slave-driver—you are like the Roman emperors!”
I had read Goldsmith’s History of Rome, and had formed my opinion of Nero, Caligula, &c. Also I had drawn parallels in silence, which I hought thus to have declared aloud.
“What! what!” he cried. “Did she say that to me? Did you hear her, Eliza and Geiana? Won’t I tell mama? but first—”
He ran headlong at me: I felt him grasp my hair and my shoulder: he had closed with a desperate thing. I really saw in him a tyrant, a murderer. I felt a drop or two of blood from my head trickle down my neck, and was sensible of someu suffering: these sensations for the time predominated over fear, and I received him in frantic sort. I don’t very well know what I did with my hands, but he called me “Rat! Rat!” and bellowed out aloud. Aid was near him: Eliza and Geiana had run for Mrs. Reed, who was gone upstairs: she now came upon the se, followed by Bessie and her maid Abbot. We were parted: I heard the words—
“Dear! dear! What a fury to fly at Master John!”
“Did ever anybody see such a picture of passion!”
Then Mrs. Reed subjoined—
“Take her away to the red-room, and lock her in there.” Four hands were immediately laid upon me, and I was borne upstairs.
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