At last the woods rose; the rookery cl.u.s.tered dark; a loud cawing broke the morning stillness. Strange delight inspired me: on I hastened.
Another field crossed--a lane threaded--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 n.o.bly at once, and where I can single out 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 cannot tell--I am not certain.
And if I did--what then? G.o.d bless him! What then? Who would be hurt by my once more tasting the life his glance can give me? I rave: perhaps at this moment he is watching the sun rise over the Pyrenees, or on the tideless sea of the south."
I had coasted along the lower wall of the orchard--turned its angle: there was a gate just there, opening into the meadow, between two stone pillars crowned by stone b.a.l.l.s. 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 command.
The crows sailing overhead perhaps watched me while I took this survey. I wonder what they thought. They must have considered 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 ill.u.s.tration, 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 gra.s.s, careful to make no sound; he pauses--fancying 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 antic.i.p.ate the vision of beauty--warm, and blooming, and lovely, in rest. 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 since, touch 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 can utter--by any movement he can 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 blackened ruin.
No need to cower behind a gate-post, indeed!--to peep up at chamber lattices, fearing life was astir behind them! No need to 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 chimneys--all had crashed in.
And there was the silence of death about it: the solitude of a lonesome wild. No wonder that letters addressed to people here had never received an answer: as well despatch epistles to a vault in a church aisle. The grim blackness of the stones told by what fate the Hall had fallen--by conflagration: but how kindled? What story belonged to 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 one here to answer it--not even dumb sign, mute token.
In wandering round the shattered walls and through the devastated interior, I gathered evidence that the calamity was not of late occurrence. Winter snows, I thought, had drifted through that void arch, winter rains beaten in at those hollow cas.e.m.e.nts; for, amidst the drenched piles of rubbish, spring had cherished vegetation: gra.s.s and weed grew here and there between the stones and fallen rafters. And oh!
where meantime was the hapless owner of this wreck? In what land? Under what auspices? My eye involuntarily wandered to the grey church tower near the 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 returned. The 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 complied, I scarcely knew how to begin; such horror had I of the possible answers. And yet the 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 managed to say at last.
"Yes, ma"am; I lived there once."
"Did you?" Not in my time, I thought: you are a stranger to 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!" I gasped. "Is he dead?"
"I mean the present gentleman, Mr. Edward"s father," he explained. I breathed again: my blood resumed its flow. Fully a.s.sured by these words that Mr. Edward--_my_ Mr. Rochester (G.o.d bless him, wherever he was!)--was at least alive: was, in short, "the present gentleman." Gladdening words! It seemed I could hear all that was to come--whatever the disclosures might be--with comparative 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! such an immense quant.i.ty 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 ma.s.s of flame. It was a terrible spectacle: I witnessed it myself."
"At dead of night!" I muttered. Yes, that was ever the hour of fatality at Thornfield. "Was it known how it originated?" I demanded.
"They guessed, ma"am: they guessed. Indeed, I should say it was ascertained beyond a doubt. You are not perhaps aware," he continued, edging his chair a little nearer the 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 confinement, ma"am: people even for some years was not absolutely certain of her existence. No 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 conjecture. 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 in the strangest way. There was a young lady, a governess at the Hall, that Mr. Rochester fell in--"
"But the fire," I suggested.
"I"m coming to that, ma"am--that Mr. Edward fell in love with. The servants say they never saw anybody so much in love as he was: he was after her continually. They used to watch him--servants will, you know, ma"am--and he set store on her past everything: for all, n.o.body 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, when gentlemen 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 another time," 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 n.o.body but her, that set it going. She had a woman to take care of her called Mrs.
Poole--an able woman in her line, and very trustworthy, but for one fault--a fault common 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 cunning 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 next her own, and then she got 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 kindled the bed there; but there was n.o.body 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 disappointment: he never was a wild man, but he got dangerous after he lost her. He would be alone, too. 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 Adele, a ward he had, was put to school. He broke off acquaintance with 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 racing, as some are, and he was not so very handsome; but he had a courage 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, and went 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 ascend 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 next minute she lay smashed on the pavement."
{The next minute she lay smashed on the pavement: p413.jpg}
"Dead?"
"Dead! Ay, dead as the stones on which her brains and blood were scattered."
"Good G.o.d!"
"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 been better if there had."
"What do you mean?"