Chapter 3

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    The hing I remember is, waking up with a feeling as if I had had a frightful nightmare, and seeing before me a terrible red glare, crossed with thick black bars. I heard voices, too, speaking with a hollow sound, and as if muffled by a rush of wind or water: agitation, uainty, and an all-predominating sense of terror fused my faculties. Ere long, I became aware that some one was handling me; lifting me up and supp me in a sitting posture, and that more tenderly than I had ever been raised or upheld before. I rested my head against a pillow or an arm, a easy.

    In five minutes more the cloud of bewilderment dissolved: I knew quite well that I was in my own bed, and that the red glare was the nursery fire. It was night: a dle burnt oable; Bessie stood at the bed-foot with a basin in her hand, and a gentleman sat in a chair near my pillow, leaning over me.

    I felt an inexpressible relief, a soothing vi of prote and security, when I khat there was a stranger in the room, an individual not belonging to Gateshead., and not related to Mrs. Reed. Turning from Bessie (though her presence was far less obnoxious to me than that of Abbot, for instance, would have been), I scrutihe face of the gentleman: I knew him; it was Mr. Lloyd, an apothecary, sometimes called in by Mrs. Reed when the servants were ailing: for herself and the children she employed a physi.

    “Well, who am I?” he asked.

    I pronounced his name,  him at the same time my hand: he took it, smiling and saying, “We shall do very well by-and-by.” Then he laid me down, and addressing Bessie, charged her to be very careful that I was not disturbed during the night. Having given some further dires, and intimates that he should call again the  day, he departed; to my grief: I felt so sheltered and befriended while he sat in the chair near my pillow; and as he closed the door after him, all the room darkened and my heart again sank: inexpressible sadness weighed it down.

    “Do you feel as if you should sleep, Miss?” asked Bessie, rather softly.

    Scarcely dared I answer her; for I feared the  sentence might be rough. “I will try.”

    “Would you like to drink, or could you eat anything?”

    “No, thank you, Bessie.”

    “Then I think I shall go to bed, for it is past twelve o’clock; but you may call me if you want anything in the night.”

    Wonderful civility this! It emboldened me to ask a question.

    “Bessie, what is the matter with me? Am I ill?”

    “You fell sick, I suppose, in the red-room with g; you’ll be better soon, no doubt.”

    Bessie went into the housemaid’s apartment, which was near. I heard her say—

    “Sarah, e and sleep with me in the nursery; I daren’t for my life be aloh that poor child to-night: she might die; it’s such a strahing she should have that fit: I wonder if she saw anything. Missis was rather too hard.”

    Sarah came back with her; they both went to bed; they were whispering together for half-an-hour before they fell asleep. I caught scraps of their versation, from which I was able only too distinctly to ihe main subject discussed.

    “Something passed her, all dressed in white, and vanished”—“A great black dog behind him”—“Three loud raps on the chamber door”—“A light in the churchyard just over his grave,” &c. &c.

    At last both slept: the fire and the dle went out. For me, the watches of that long night passed in ghastly wakefulness; strained by dread: such dread as children only  feel.

    No severe or prolonged bodily illness followed this i of the red-room; it only gave my nerves a shock of which I feel the reverberation to this day. Yes, Mrs. Reed, to you I owe some fearful pangs of mental suffering, but I ought tive you, for you knew not what you did: while rending my heart-strings, you thought you were only uprooting my bad propensities.

    day, by noon, I  and dressed, and sat ed in a shawl by the nursery hearth. I felt physically weak and broken down: but my worse ailment was an unutterable wretess of mind: a wretess which kept drawing from me silent tears; no sooner had I wiped one salt drop from my cheek than another followed. Yet, I thought, I ought to have been happy, for none of the Reeds were there, they were all go in the carriage with their mama. Abbot, too, was sewing in another room, and Bessie, as she moved hither and thither, putting away toys and arranging drawers, addressed to me every now and then a word of unwonted kindness. This state of things should have been to me a paradise of peace, acedh I wished to reply fully to this question! How difficult it was to frame any answer! Children  feel, but they ot analyse their feelings; and if the analysis is partially effected in thought, they know not how to express the result of the process in words. Fearful, however, of losing this first and only opportunity of relieving my grief by imparting it, I, after a disturbed pause, trived to frame a meagre, though, as far as it went, true response.

    “For ohing, I have no father or mother, brothers or sisters.”

    “You have a kind aunt and cousins.”

    Again I paused; then bunglingly enounced—

    “But John Reed knocked me down, and my aunt shut me up in the red- room.”

    Mr. Lloyd a sed time produced his snuff-box.

    “Don’t you think Gateshead Hall a very beautiful house?” asked he. “Are you not very thankful to have such a fine place to live at?”

    “It is not my house, sir; and Abbot says I have less right to be here than a servant.”

    “Pooh! you ’t be silly enough to wish to leave such a splendid place?”

    “If I had anywhere else to go, I should be glad to leave it; but I ever get away from Gateshead till I am a woman.”

    “Perhaps you may—who knows? Have you aions besides Mrs. Reed?”

    “I think not, sir.”

    “None belonging to your father?”

    “I don’t know. I asked Aunt Reed once, and she said possibly I might have some poor, low relations called Eyre, but she knew nothing about them.”

    “If you had such, would you like to go to them?”

    I reflected. Poverty looks grim to grown people; still more so to children: they have not much idea of industrious, w, respectable poverty; they think of the word only as ected with ragged clothes, sty food, fireless grates, rude manners, and debasing vices: poverty for me was synonymous with degradation.

    “No; I should not like to belong to poor people,” was my reply.

    “Not even if they were kind to you?”

    I shook my head: I could not see how poor people had the means of being kind; and then to learn to speak like them, to adopt their manners, to be uneducated, to grow up like one of the poor women I saw sometimes nursing their children or washing their clothes at the cottage doors of the village of Gateshead: no, I was not heroiough to purchase liberty at the price of caste.

    “But are your relatives so very poor? Are they w people?”

    “I ot tell; Aunt. Reed says if I have any, they must be a beggarly set: I should not like to go a begging.”

    “Would you like to go to school?”

    Again I reflected: I scarcely knew what school was: Bessie sometimes spoke of it as a place where young ladies sat iocks, wore backboards, and were expected to be exceedingly genteel and precise: John Reed hated his school, and abused his master; but John Reed’s tastes were no rule for mine, and if Bessie’s ats of school-discipline (gathered from the young ladies of a family where she had lived before ing to Gateshead) were somepalling, her details of certain aplishments attained by these same young ladies were, I thought, equally attractive. She boasted of beautiful paintings of landscapes and flowers by them executed; of songs they could sing and pieces they could play, of purses they could , of French books they could translate; till my spirit was moved to emulation as I listened. Besides, school would be a plete ge: it implied a long journey, aire separatiateshead, arao a new life.

    “I should indeed like to go to school,” was the audible clusion of my musings.

    “Well, well! who knows what may happen?” said Mr. Lloyd, as he got up. “The child ought to have ge of air and se,” he added, speaking to himself; “nerves not in a good state.”

    Bessie now returned; at the same moment the carriage was heard rolling up the gravel-walk.

    “Is that your mistress, nurse?” asked Mr. Lloyd. “I should like to speak to her before I go.”

    Bessie invited him to walk into the breakfast-room, ahe way out. Ierview which followed between him and Mrs. Reed, I presume, from after-occurrehat the apothecary veo reend my beio school; and the reendation was no doubt readily enough adopted; for as Abbot said, in discussing the subject with Bessie when both sat sewing in the nursery one night, after I was in bed, and, as they thought, asleep, “Missis was, she dared say, glad enough to get rid of such a tiresome, ill- ditioned child, who always looked as if she were watg everybody, and scheming plots underhand.” Abbot, I think, gave me credit for being a sort of infantine Guy Fawkes.

    On that same occasion I learned, for the first time, from Miss Abbot’s unications to Bessie, that my father had been a poor clergyman; that my mother had married him against the wishes of her friends, who sidered the match beh her; that my grandfather Reed was so irritated at her disobedience, he cut her off without a shilling; that after my mother and father had been mar<big></big>ried a year, the latter caught the typhus fever while visiting among the poor of a large manufacturing town where his curacy was situated, and where that disease was then prevalent: that my mother took the iion from him, and both died within a month of each other.

    Bessie, when she heard this narrative, sighed and said, “Poor Miss Jane is to be pitied, too, Abbot.”

    “Yes,” responded Abbot; “if she were a nice, pretty child, one might passionate her forlornness; but one really ot care for such a little toad as that.”

    “Not a great deal, to be sure,” agreed Bessie: “at any rate, a beauty like Miss Geiana would be more moving in the same dition.”

    “Yes, I doat on Miss Geiana!” cried the fervent Abbot. “Little darling!—with her long curls and her blue eyes, and such a sweet colour as she has; just as if she were painted!—Bessie, I could fancy a Welsh rabbit for supper.”

    “So could I—with a roast onion. e, we’ll go down.” They went.

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