Chapter 36

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    The daylight came. I rose at dawn. I busied myself for an hour or two with arranging my things in my chamber, drawers, and wardrobe, in the order wherein I should wish to leave them during a brief absence. Meantime, I heard St. John quit his room. He stopped at my door: I feared he would knoo, but a slip of paper assed uhe door. I took it up. It bore these words—

    “You left me too suddenly last night. Had you stayed but a little longer, you would have laid your hand on the Christian’s cross and the angel’s . I shall expect your clear decision when I return this day fht. Meantime, watd pray that you enter not into temptation: the spirit, I trust, is willing, but the flesh, I see, is weak. I shall pray for you hourl.99ｌib.y.—Yours, ST. JOHN.”

    “My spirit,” I answered mentally, “is willing to do what is right; and my flesh, I hope, is strong enough to aplish the will of Heaven, when ohat will is distinctly known to me. At any rate, it shall be strong enough to searquire—to grope an outlet from this cloud of doubt, and find the open day of certainty.”

    It was the first of June; yet the m was overcast and chilly: rai fast on my casement. I heard the front-door open, and St. John pass out. Looking through the window, I saw him traverse the gardeook the way over the misty moors in the dire of Whitcross—there he would meet the coach.

    “In a few more hours I shall succeed you in that track, cousin,” thought I: “I too have a coaeet at Whitcross. I too have some to see and ask after in England, before I depart for ever.”

    It wanted yet two hours of breakfast-time. I filled the interval in walking softly about my room, and p the visitation which had given my plans their prese. I recalled that inward sensation I had experienced: for I could recall it, with all its unspeakable stran<mark>9９ｌｉb?</mark>geness. I recalled the voice I had heard; again I questioned whe came, as vainly as before: it seemed i iernal world. I asked was it a mere nervous impression—a delusion? I could not ceive or believe: it was more like an inspiration. The wondrous shock of feeling had e like the earthquake which shook the foundations of Paul and Silas’s prison; it had opehe doors of the soul’s cell and loosed its bands—it had wake out of its sleep, whe sprang trembling, listening, aghast; then vibrated thrice a y startled ear, and in my quaki and through my spirit, whieither feared nor shook, but exulted as if in joy over the success of one effort it had been privileged to make, indepe of the cumbrous body.

    “Ere many days,” I said, as I terminated my musings, “I will know something of him whose voice seemed last night to summon me. Letters have proved of no avail—personal inquiry shall replace them.”

    At breakfast I annouo Diana and Mary that I was going a journey, and should be absent at least four days.

    “Alone, Jahey asked.

    “Yes; it was to see or hear news of a friend about whom I had for some time been uneasy.”

    They might have said, as I have no doubt they thought, that they had believed me to be without any friends save them: for, indeed, I had often said so; but, with their true natural delicacy, they abstained from ent, except that Diana asked me if I was sure I was well enough to travel. I looked very pale, she observed. I replied, that nothing ailed me save ay of mind, which I hoped soon to alleviate.

    It was easy to make my further arras; for I was troubled with no inquiries—no surmises. Having once explaio them that I could not now be explicit about my plans, they kindly and wisely acquiesced in the sileh which I pursued them, acc to me the privilege of free a I should under similar circumstances have accorded them.

    I left Moor House at three o’clock p.m., and soon after four I stood at the foot of the sign-post of Whitcross, waiting the arrival of the coach which was to take me to distant Thornfield. Amidst the silence of those solitary roads a hills, I heard it approach from a great dista was the same vehicle whence, a year ago, I had alighted one summer evening on this very spot—how desolate, and hopeless, and objectless! It stopped as I beed. I entered—n<q>..</q>ot now obliged to part with my whole fortune as the price of its aodation. Once more on the road to Thornfield, I felt like the messenger-pigeon flying home.

    It was a journey of six-and-thirty hours. I had set out from Whitcross on a Tuesday afternoon, and early on the succeeding Thursday m the coach stopped to water the horses at a wayside inn, situated in the midst of sery whose green hedges and large fields and low pastoral hills (how mild of feature and verdant of hue pared with the stern North-Midland moors of Morton!) met my eye like the lis of a once familiar face. Yes, I khe character of this landscape: I was sure we were near my bourne.

    “How far is Thornfield Hall from here?” I asked of the ostler.

    “Just two miles, ma’am, across the fields.”

    “My journey is closed,” I thought to myself. I got out of the coach, gave a box I had into the ostler’s charge, to be kept till I called for it; paid my fare; satisfied the an, and was going: the brightening day gleamed on the sign of the inn, and I read in gilt letters, “The Rochester Arms.” My heart leapt up: I was already on my master’s very lands. It fell again: the thought struck it:—

    “Your master himself may be beyond the British el, fht you know: and then, if he is at Thornfield Hall, towards which you hasten, who besides him is there? His lunatic wife: and you have nothing to do with him: you dare not speak to him or seek his presence. You have lost your labour—you had better go no farther,” urged the monitor. “Ask information of the people at the inn; they  give you all you seek: they  solve your doubts at once. Go up to that man, and inquire if Mr. Rochester be at home.”

    The suggestion was sensible, a I could not force myself to a it. I so dreaded a reply that would crush me with despair. To prolong doubt was to prolong hope. I might yet once more see the Hall uhe ray of her star. There was the stile before me—the very fields through which I had hurried, blind, deaf, distracted with a revengeful fury trag and sc me, on the m I fled from Thornfield: ere I well knew what course I had resolved to take, I was in the midst of them. How fast I walked! How I ran sometimes! How I looked forward to catch the first view of the well-known woods! With what feelings I weled sirees I knew, and familiar glimpses of meadow and hill between them!

    At last the woods rose; the rookery clustered dark; a loud g broke the m stillness. Strange delight inspired me: on I hastened. Another field crossed—a lahreaded—and there were the courtyard walls—the back offices: the house itself, the rookery still hid. “My first view of it shall be in front,” I determined, “where its bold battlements will strike the eye nobly at once, and where I  si my master’s very window: perhaps he will be standing at it—he rises early: perhaps he is now walking in the orchard, or on the pavement in front. Could I but see him!—but a moment! Surely, in that case, I should not be so mad as to run to him? I ot tell—I am not certain. And if I did—what then? God bless him! What then? Who would be hurt by my once more tasting the life his glance  give me? I rave: perhaps at this moment he is watg the sun rise over the Pyrenees, or oideless sea of the south.”

    I had coasted along the lower wall of the orchard—turs ahere was a gate just there, opening into the meadow, between two stone pillars ed by stone balls. From behind one pillar I could peep round quietly at the full front of the mansion. I advanced my head with precaution, desirous to ascertain if any bedroom window-blinds were yet drawn up: battlements, windows, long front—all from this sheltered station were at my an<s>?</s>d.

    The crows sailing overhead perhaps watched me while I took this survey. I wonder what they thought. They must have sidered I was very careful and timid at first, and that gradually I grew very bold and reckless. A peep, and then a long stare; and then a departure from my niche and a straying out into the meadow; and a sudden stop full in front of the great mansion, and a protracted, hardy gaze towards it. “What affectation of diffidence was this at first?” they might have demanded; “what stupid regardlessness now?”

    Hear an illustration, reader.

    A lover finds his mistress asleep on a mossy bank; he wishes to catch a glimpse of her fair face without waking her. He steals softly over the grass, careful to make no sound; he pauses—fang she has stirred: he withdraws: not for worlds would he be seen. All is still: he again advances: he bends above her; a light veil rests on her features: he lifts it, bends lower; now his eyes anticipate the vision of beauty—warm, and blooming, and lovely, i. How hurried was their first glance! But how they fix! How he starts! How he suddenly and vehemently clasps in both arms the form he dared not, a moment siouch with his finger! How he calls aloud a name, and drops his burden, and gazes on it wildly! He thus grasps and cries, and gazes, because he no longer fears to waken by any sound he  utter—by any movement he  make. He thought his love slept sweetly: he finds she is stone dead.

    I looked with timorous joy towards a stately house: I saw a blaed ruin.

    o cower behind a gate-post, io peep up at chamber lattices, fearing life was astir behind them! o listen for doors opening—to fancy steps on the pavement or the gravel-walk! The lawn, the grounds were trodden and waste: the portal yawned void. The front was, as I had once seen it in a dream, but a well- like wall, very high and very fragile-looking, perforated with paneless windows: no roof, no battlements, no eys—all had crashed in.

    And there was the silence of death about it: the solitude of a lonesome wild. No wohat letters addressed to people here had never received an answer: as well despatch epistles to a vault in a church aisle. The grim blaess of the stoold by what fate the Hall had fallen—by flagration: but how kindled? What story beloo this disaster? What loss, besides mortar and marble and wood-work had followed upon it? Had life been wrecked as well as property? If so, whose? Dreadful question: there was no oo a—not even dumb sign, mute token.

    In wandering round the shattered walls and through the devastated interior, I gathered evidehat the calamity was not of late occurrence. Winter snows, I thought, had drifted through that void arch, winter raien in at those hollow casements; for, amidst the drenched piles of rubbish, spring had cherished vegetation: grass and weed grew here and there betweeones and fallen rafters. And oh! where meantime was the hapless owner of this wreck? In what land? Under what auspices? My eye involuntarily wao the grey church tower he gates, and I asked, “Is he with Damer de Rochester, sharing the shelter of his narrow marble house?”

    Some answer must be had to these questions. I could find it nowhere but at the inn, and thither, ere long, I returhe host himself brought my breakfast into the parlour. I requested him to shut the door and sit down: I had some questions to ask him. But when he plied, I scarcely knew how to begin; such horror had I of the possible answers. Ahe spectacle of desolation I had just left prepared me in a measure for a tale of misery. The host was a respectable-looking, middle-aged man.

    “You know Thornfield Hall, of course?” I mao say at last.

    “Yes, ma’am; I lived there once.”

    “Did you?” Not in my time, I thought: you are a strao me.

    “I was the late Mr. Rochester’s.. butler,” he added.

    The late! I seem to have received, with full force, the blow I had been trying to evade.

    “The late!” gasped. “Is he dead?”

    “I mean the preseleman, Mr. Edward’s father,” he explained. I breathed again: my blood resumed its flow. Fully assured by these words that Mr. Edward—my Mr. Rochester (God bless him, wherever he was!)—was at least alive: was, in short, “the preseleman.” Gladdening words! It seemed I could hear all that was to e—whatever the disclosures might be—with parative tranquillity. Since he was not in the grave, I could bear, I thought, to learn that he was at the Antipodes.

    “Is Mr. Rochester living at Thornfield Hall now?” I asked, knowing, of course, what the answer would be, but yet desirous of deferring the direct question as to where he really was.

    “No, ma’am—oh, no! No one is living there. I suppose you are a stranger in these parts, or you would have heard what happened last autumn,—Thornfield Hall is quite a ruin: it was burnt down just about harvest-time. A dreadful calamity! su immense quantity of valuable property destroyed: hardly any of the furniture could be saved. The fire broke out at dead of night, and before the engines arrived from Millcote, the building was one mass of flame. It was a terrible spectacle: I wit myself.”

    “At dead of night!” I muttered. Yes, that was ever the hour of fatality at Thornfield. “Was it known how it inated?” I demanded.

    “They guessed, ma’am: they guessed. Indeed, I should say it was ascertained beyond a doubt. You are not perhaps aware,” he tinued, edging his chair a little he table, and speaking low, “that there was a lady—a—a lunatic, kept in the house?”

    “I have heard something of it.”

    “She was kept in very close fi, ma’am: people even for some years was not absolutely certain of her existeno one saw her: they only knew by rumour that such a person was at the Hall; and who or what she was it was difficult to jecture. They said Mr. Edward had brought her from abroad, and some believed she had been his mistress. But a queer thing happened a year since—a very queer thing.”

    I feared now to hear my own story. I endeavoured to recall him to the main fact.

    “And this lady?”

    “This lady, ma’am,” he answered, “turned out to be Mr. Rochester’s wife! The discovery was brought about ira way. There was a young lady, a governess at the Hall, that Mr. Rochester fell in—”

    “But the fire,” I suggested.

    “I’m ing to that, ma’am—that Mr. Edward fell in love with. The servants say they never saw anybody so mu love as he was: he was after her tinually. They used to watch him—servants will, you know, ma’am—a store on her past everything: for all, nobody but him thought her so very handsome. She was a little small thing, they say, almost like a child. I never saw her myself; but I’ve heard Leah, the house-maid, tell of her. Leah liked her well enough. Mr. Rochester was about forty, and this governess not twenty; and you see, whelemen of his age fall in love with girls, they are often like as if they were bewitched. Well, he would marry her.”

    “You shall tell me this part of the story aime,” I said; “but now I have a particular reason for wishing to hear all about the fire. Was it suspected that this lunatic, Mrs. Rochester, had any hand in it?”

    “You’ve hit it, ma’am: it’s quite certain that it was her, and nobody but her, that set it going. She had a woman to take care of her called Mrs. Poole—an able woman in her line, arustworthy, but for one fault—a fault on to a deal of them nurses and matrons—she kept a private bottle of gin by her, and now and then took a drop over-much. It is excusable, for she had a hard life of it: but still it was dangerous; for when Mrs. Poole was fast asleep after the gin and water, the mad lady, who was as ing as a witch, would take the keys out of her pocket, let herself out of her chamber, and go roaming about the house, doing any wild mischief that came into her head. They say she had nearly burnt her husband in his bed once: but I don’t know about that. However, on this night, she set fire first to the hangings of the room  her own, and the down to a lower storey, and made her way to the chamber that had been the governess’s—(she was like as if she knew somehow how matters had gone on, and had a spite at her)—and she kihe bed there; but there was nobody sleeping in it, fortunately. The governess had run away two months before; and for all Mr. Rochester sought her as if she had been the most precious thing he had in the world, he never could hear a word of her; and he grew savage—quite savage on his disappoi: he never was a wild man, but he got dangerous after he lost her. He would be alooo. He sent Mrs. Fairfax, the housekeeper, away to her friends at a distance; but he did it handsomely, for he settled an annuity on her for life: and she deserved it—she was a very good woman. Miss Adèle, a ward he had, ut to school. He broke off acquaintah all the gentry, and shut himself up like a hermit at the Hall.”

    “What! did he not leave England?”

    “Leave England? Bless you, no! He would not cross the door-stones of the house, except at night, when he walked just like a ghost about the grounds and in the orchard as if he had lost his senses— which it is my opinion he had; for a more spirited, bolder, keener gentleman than he was before that midge of a governess crossed him, you never saw, ma’am. He was not a man given to wine, or cards, or rag, as some are, and he was not so very handsome; but he had a ce and a will of his own, if ever man had. I knew him from a boy, you see: and for my part, I have often wished that Miss Eyre had been sunk in the sea before she came to Thornfield Hall.”

    “Then Mr. Rochester was at home when the fire broke out?”

    “Yes, indeed was he; and he went up to the attics when all was burning above and below, and got the servants out of their beds and helped them down himself, a back to get his mad wife out of her cell. And then they called out to him that she was on the roof, where she was standing, waving her arms, above the battlements, and shouting out till they could hear her a mile off: I saw her and heard her with my own eyes. She was a big woman, and had long black hair: we could see it streaming against the flames as she stood. I witnessed, and several more witnessed, Mr. Rochester asd through the sky-light on to the roof; we heard him call ‘Bertha!’ We saw him approach her; and then, ma’am, she yelled and gave a spring, and the  minute she lay smashed on the pavement.”

    “Dead?”

    “Dead! Ay, dead as the stones on which her brains and blood were scattered.”

    “Good God!”

    “You may well say so, ma’am: it was frightful!”

    He shuddered.

    “And afterwards?” I urged.

    “Well, ma’am, afterwards the house was burnt to the ground: there are only some bits of walls standing now.”

    “Were any other lives lost?”

    “No—perhaps it would have beeer if there had.”

    “What do you mean?”

    “Poor Mr. Edward!” he ejaculated, “I little thought ever to have seen it! Some say it was a just judgment on him for keeping his first marriage secret, and wanting to take another wife while he had one living: but I pity him, for my part.”

    “You said he was alive?” I exclaimed.

    “Yes, yes: he is alive; but many think he had better he dead.”

    “Why? How?” My blood was again running cold. “Where is he?” I demanded. “Is he in England?”

    “Ay—ay—he’s in England; he ’t get out of England, I fancy—he’s a fixture now.”

    What agony was this! And the man seemed resolved to protract it.

    “He is stone-blind,” he said at last. “Yes, he is stone-blind, is Mr. Edward.”

    I had dreaded worse. I had dreaded he was mad. I summorength to ask what had caused this calamity.

    “It was all his own ce, and a body may say, his kindness, in a way, ma’am: he wouldn’t leave the house till every one else was out before him. As he came down the great staircase at last, after Mrs. Rochester had flung herself from the battlements, there was a great crash—all fell. He was taken out from uhe ruins, alive, but sadly hurt: a beam had fallen in such a way as to protect him partly; but one eye was knocked out, and one hand so crushed that Mr. Carter, the surgeon, had to amputate it directly. The other eye inflamed: he lost the sight of that also. He is now helpless, indeed—blind and a cripple.”

    “Where is he? Where does he now live?”

    “At Ferndean, a manor-house on a farm he has, about thirty miles off: quite a desolate spot.”

    “Who is with him?”

    “Old John and his wife: he would have none else. He is quite broken down, they say.”

    “Have you any sort of veyance?”

    “We have a chaise, ma’am, a very handsome chaise.”

    “Let it be got ready instantly; and if your post-boy  drive me to Ferndean before dark this day, I’ll pay both you and him twice the hire you usually demand.”

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