Thornfield Hall (11 page)

Edward

I
confess that it is hard, from time to time, to
be married to a strong woman. My Jane, who has all the probity and endurance that is to be expected from one who has transformed from a slip of a girl, an orphan, to governess in a household distinctly unlike those to which her school companions would have been dispatched once sufficiently armed with knowledge—has suffered many experiences already, at the age of twenty-three, and yet shows neither cynicism nor an awareness of limited expectations as a result of them. Has not Jane refused a man of God, a missionary, in order to be with her Edward? Did she not traverse the moors in obedience to a call not spoken but heard in the human heart? Do I not owe everything to Jane? Yet this sense of obligation has come to hobble me, when the moral rights and wrongs of any situation are put to me, by the one I love. Her unflinching response to the demands of
duty—as she sees them—demands in turn from me a dedication I cannot on each occasion supply. Can the child bride and Edward not be happy together, without sacrificing the tranquillity so dearly won? We have a son and await another child. Is it right in the eyes of God that our family should now extend to receive one who must by this time be little more than a stranger?

For Jane it is who insists that young Adèle be released from the school she has attended for five years, and come to live with us at Thornfield. As if guided by an instinct I had not known I possessed, I found I was subjected to a vision of the child's mother, Céline, standing at the wicket gate in the lower part of the garden, only yesterday. The minx—whom I realised, if she was, as Adèle, playing tricks on me still—stared me full in the face and then walked on, to disappear on the Millcote road. But this I could not, naturally, confide to Jane—who must consider me rid of any thoughts concerning Céline Varens. The matter disturbed me, I admit: was this apparition a warning against refusing a home and protection to the child? Or was it, as I am bound to believe, a prophecy of the doom that will descend once more on Thornfield Hall if she is admitted? It is unlike me to remain silent, I am aware, when domestic problems are aired by the young Jane Rochester; but we are close enough, my darling and I, to find a solution to this most difficult of dilemmas, that concerning the welcoming of a child who may or may not be mine into the bosom of the family.

“It is of no consequence to me,” Jane remarked as we sit, this lovely May morning, on the new ornamental seat in the bower built around the split chestnut tree by the sunken fence in the garden. (Here, for perhaps a good reason, we choose to go when we have matters to fight over: the lightning-struck tree brings back to us the fateful night of my proposal to a trembling little Jane Eyre.) “It is of no great import to me, Edward, whether
Adèle is truly your daughter or not,” continued Jane. “She is the child I came to Thornfield to teach; she is my reason for being here and for loving you.”

“Jane—come here.” I try, when my sweet wife speaks such endearments to me, to catch her in my arms and change the subject, so we are in harmony all day long. But today, as ever, my strong little spouse would have none of it. “Edward, I gave my promises to Adèle when she knew nothing of right or wrong, her upbringing having denied her even the most basic tenets of belief in God. How much does she need us both now that she is close to fourteen years old? If we abandon her at this time, once having shown fidelity and affection to the child, is this not worse than leaving her in the gutter where her mother expected her to dance like an organ grinder's monkey for her supper? Have we not already pledged ourselves to care for Adèle?”

“My sprite, my enchanting darling,” I murmured, pulling Jane's head toward mine, and covering her in caresses she did not at first resist. “You must do as you think right, I daresay” (and thus I surrendered to my Jane almost each time there was a controversy between us). “Yet it is only right, surely, that the child should understand the other half of her inheritance,” I went on, for I felt as strongly as I spoke that to deprive Adèle of her maternal family would not result in a successful menage here at Thornfield. “Let her be educated one half the year in France,” I persisted; and I felt a sense of relief that I had not had the need to mention the hallucination—as it must have been—that I had suffered when looking from the library steps out at the wicket gate.

“She came here yesterday,” Jane said. “Adèle came and left a letter for us. She had intended to greet us, if briefly—” And here Jane's voice broke, and I saw she was moved. “But she could not find the courage, after being so long at school, to come and speak with us—”

“Adèle?” I said, feigning astonishment; but my dear wife, so it seemed, did not hear me. “If I could have set eyes on her once,” continued Jane in a sad tone, which persuaded me further that she loved the child she once had taught, and that I would be a monster indeed to prevent her from granting a home to Adèle, “if I could have talked with
la petite,
I might have coaxed her into staying here, rather than fleeing to Paris, as she has done.”

“So what can we do?” I said, secretly happy, I admit, to find the problem postponed. “If she can spend half her time in France, as I proposed, this may be a natural solution.”

“Half her time in France!” cried Jane. “Do you not consider before you speak, Edward? It is how she employs the time—whether she falls into the clutches of the woman, disgraceful and decadent in every way—the woman who sent letters to you demanding money in return for not divulging details of the duel in Paris, and your present whereabouts, to the French police—”

“Jenny Colon,” I said, as angry now at having to say the name of that devil's whore as Jane was at my apparent insensitivity to Adèle's situation.

“Yes, Jenny Colon,” said Jane. “Do you wish little Adèle to be reared by that monster half the year?”

At this I had to fall silent. As we sat, in great animosity I must with a heavy heart report—for I foresee this type of altercation between Jane and myself, whenever the subject of Adèle Varens comes up—our mutual disagreement was tempered by the sight of John as he came down the laurel walk toward us.

“What can John want?” exclaimed my wife and I together. And we smiled at each other, at last; although, as I have to report with the deepest gloom and apprehension, the news contained in the letter the faithful John handed to me was of a nature that dwarfed all disagreements over the future of a little French girl.

“What is it, Edward?” Jane was alarmed, yet I could not confide in her. I read the brief missive twice and folded it carefully before placing it in my wallet. “Is there a reply to be sent to the authorities?” asked John. “The sergeant requests that you report to him within twenty-four hours at Whitcross.”

“What is it?” Jane cried again as I informed John in a manner of great hauteur that he may instruct the sergeant to expect my attendance on him later in the day. And later, when the figure of John had disappeared at the end of the laurel walk, I rose and Jane rose with me. I was conscious, as we stood stiffly there together, that the split chestnut tree stood behind us, making a mockery of our marriage and our newfound happiness. We were no painting, of a landowner and his wife, prosperous and contented, a past and future of respect from neighbors, family, and friends written on our countenances; we were, though my darling wife did not know it yet, pariahs and outcasts forever in the country.

“It was nothing of consequence,” I said to Jane as we strolled up the laurel walk to the house. “A bailiff on the outer Millcote farm who has absconded with the rents, a goodly sum.”

Before Jane could comment, I went on: “I have been considering, my love, your concern for little Adèle. She has run away to Paris at a tender, even dangerous, age. I propose that I go in search of her there and return her safe and sound to Thornfield Hall.”

As Jane looked up at me in gratitude and adoration, I walked on as if in a dream. I knew I could not hide the contents of the letter from the world for long.

Hideously shrunk and desiccated, dead at least five years, the body of Antoinette had been discovered in a field near Whitcross, not half a mile from here. They came to plow, and cleared a dump of turnip heads and other silage in readiness for the furrowing of the earth. They found an arm outstretched, thin and pale as a
tuber grown from the rotting heap. The woman buried in Thornfield churchyard and commemorated as Bertha Mason Rochester had lost all trace of her identity when claimed from the calamity of fire and fall. This woman, though they did not know yet who she was—only that she was found on my land—was the true Bertha, my Antoinette. The locket found about her neck and enclosed in the letter showed her thus—Antoinette as she was when young, the star of the islands of flame flowers and spices, the loving, dark-eyed Antoinette of our days together, who will live forever in my heart.

 

And I who failed to care for the bride of my younger days—
why did I not even have the courage, after the last escape of poor Antoinette from her miserable confinement, to discover if she was alive or dead? (Though as the months passed, I knew she must be dead, dead!) While I kept Grace Poole in my employ, I could believe that nothing had changed at Thornfield, and that my wife lived on the third story still; I had no heart in me to go up there and see the truth for myself. Oh, we needed the fire that would flush out the truth and leave me a widower, free to marry Jane! Yet now I shall be revealed to my sweet wife as cheat and coward, and thus complicit in the death of Antoinette.

 

So, Jane, what do you think of me now? You stand pale in the
room where my family portraits, a roaring fire, and my faithful Pilot asleep on the hearth before it give all the semblances of a blameless, prosperous life. Yet now you know differently; I have been lying to you, so you must believe, all along. My wife, Antoinette, did not perish in the fire at Thornfield Hall. You stand
before me and you tremble—you who stayed all night by the side of Bertha's brother, Richard Mason, to stanch the wounds my mad wife had administered.

But you thought then that Grace Poole was the maniac at Thornfield Hall. Do you now, as you see the truth, consider my Antoinette and myself as equally murderous, perhaps both mad, partners in a
folie à deux
of which you wish no part?

“Well, Jane,” I say, as you stand twisting your hands, a habit I find hard to bear, a token of inferiority that one such as Blanche Ingram would never countenance in a member of her household. “Have you been listening to all the gossip in the servants' hall? What does Leah say of my ruthless disposal of a dead wife in a turnip field? What of old John? Is he shocked? Does he take a nip of my brandy to calm him down?”

“Not at all, sir,” Jane replies, as staunch and unafraid to answer my mocking charges as she has ever been. I love her, the pang I suffer tells me that. “The servants are certain of your innocence, Edward,” she continues, and always with the look of belief in her master, Edward Rochester, in her eyes for which I married her: belief in her new life as chatelaine of Thornfield Hall, whatever the disasters that may befall him; belief and trust in our happiness together, come what may.

“I thank you, Jane,” I said; and it was hard to keep the emotion from my voice. “But what of the constable in the Hall who awaits my visit to Whitcross? What do you make of that?” For it did not occur to me, as I readily admit, to demand of my darling wife what she has made of the news that Antoinette had been found, cruelly interred in a shallow grave not far from the house. I knew, as I shall know to my last breath, that Jane no more considers me capable of lifting a finger against the poor wretch I was inveigled into marrying than of harming our own adored firstborn son. That
those who have earned my gratitude here at the Hall should be generously remunerated for their equal belief in their master, must go without saying.

“The constable waits,” Jane said in a low voice, coming up to me as if to bestow a caress—and I see, just as I am about to seize her in my arms, that she wishes not to embrace me but to speak in my ear. “He waits, Edward, but you shall take the passage from my room down into the library—and thence to the steps and the wicket gate.”

As Jane whispered—and showed the extent of her trust in her husband and the father of her children, for she would lose me now, and who knows for how long?—I saw in the ormolu-framed mirror above the fireplace the door of the drawing room as it opened a crack, and John's head came around it, his eyes popping with anxiety.

“You are wanted in the Great Hall, sir,” announced the good man before he left the room; and with a push in the small of the back, my wife had me by the side of the fireplace, her own slender hand pressing the panel that opens to show the narrow staircase, one of the pair built into the fabric of the house in days of conflict and civil war in the country. I tried to turn and exchange one last kiss, but this firm hand, no larger than a child's, propelled me upward, through darkness and dust. The panel swung shut behind me; and just in time, for I heard clearly, before stepping out at the head of the hidden stairs into Jane's bright, sweet room, the exchange of muffled voices, one gruff and stern and doubtless belonging to the constable at Whitcross. Jane's voice in reply—denying any knowledge of her husband's present whereabouts—spoke the last words I heard from her, for speed was now essential to me, and I took the route down the small staircase at the far end of our marital bedchamber, to the library; and thence, going fast over wet grass, to the gate where a lifetime ago (but, as I know
only too well, only yesterday) I suffered the illusion that I saw Céline Varens, to be informed by Jane this morning that I had seen none other than
la petite
Adèle, grown into a young woman.