I cleared and steadied my voice to reply: "All is changed about me,

sir; I must change too--there is no doubt of that; and to avoid

fluctuations of feeling, and continual combats with recollections

and associations, there is only one way--Adele must have a new

governess, sir."

"Oh, Adele will go to school--I have settled that already; nor do I

mean to torment you with the hideous associations and recollections

of Thornfield Hall--this accursed place--this tent of Achan--this

insolent vault, offering the ghastliness of living death to the

light of the open sky--this narrow stone hell, with its one real

fiend, worse than a legion of such as we imagine. Jane, you shall

not stay here, nor will I. I was wrong ever to bring you to

Thornfield Hall, knowing as I did how it was haunted. I charged

them to conceal from you, before I ever saw you, all knowledge of

the curse of the place; merely because I feared Adele never would

have a governess to stay if she knew with what inmate she was

housed, and my plans would not permit me to remove the maniac

elsewhere--though I possess an old house, Ferndean Manor, even more

retired and hidden than this, where I could have lodged her safely

enough, had not a scruple about the unhealthiness of the situation,

in the heart of a wood, made my conscience recoil from the

arrangement. Probably those damp walls would soon have eased me of

her charge: but to each villain his own vice; and mine is not a

tendency to indirect assassination, even of what I most hate.

"Concealing the mad-woman's neighbourhood from you, however, was

something like covering a child with a cloak and laying it down near

a upas-tree: that demon's vicinage is poisoned, and always was.

But I'll shut up Thornfield Hall: I'll nail up the front door and

board the lower windows: I'll give Mrs. Poole two hundred a year to

live here with MY WIFE, as you term that fearful hag: Grace will do

much for money, and she shall have her son, the keeper at Grimsby

Retreat, to bear her company and be at hand to give her aid in the

paroxysms, when MY WIFE is prompted by her familiar to burn people

in their beds at night, to stab them, to bite their flesh from their

bones, and so on--"

"Sir," I interrupted him, "you are inexorable for that unfortunate

lady: you speak of her with hate--with vindictive antipathy. It is

cruel--she cannot help being mad."

"Jane, my little darling (so I will call you, for so you are), you

don't know what you are talking about; you misjudge me again: it is

not because she is mad I hate her. If you were mad, do you think I

should hate you?"




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