Jane Slayre (50 page)

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to me under the moon and told me to flee, to follow my instincts? What mattered was what
I
wanted.

I wanted to be loved. I wanted Mr. Rochester. I did not want to go to India. And yet, I had no Mr. Rochester. I had no love. What else did I have but my natural abilities and my family now? St. John was my family, and he needed me. Was it right to abandon him for a dream that had passed me by?

St. John would never love me. He would approve me. I would not disappoint him. Yes, I could work as hard as he could, and with as little grudging. But he did not love me, and I did not love him. We could never marry.

"I am ready to go to India if I may go free," I said. "I do not think we should marry."

He shook his head. "Adopted fraternity will not do in this case. Either our union must be consecrated and sealed by marriage, or it cannot exist. Practical obstacles oppose themselves to any other plan. Do you not see it, Jane? Consider a moment--your strong sense will guide you. You would not be safe to travel alone with a man who was not your husband."

"You don't love me."

"I desire you, Jane. We could manage well as a married couple. I would make it easy for you."

"It would never be easy, St. John. You know I love another."

"But for India," he said, his blue eyes entreating. "Do it for India."

"For India?" I laughed. "I will do that for no one but myself, sir, myself and the man that I love. He is not you."

"I tell you again, it could work between us. Think again. Don't be hasty in answering. Take more time. Think of all the good we could accomplish."

I did think of the good. It gave me pause.

As I walked by his side homeward, I read well in his iron silence all he felt towards me: the disapprobation of a cool, inflexible judgment

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that has detected in another feelings and views in which it has no power to sympathise.

That night, after everyone else was in bed, I was awake pacing. Had I made the right choice? I was certain I had. How could I follow St. John to India with no real love between us? How could I be with him without continually thinking of the man I loved, the man I could never have?

The one candle flickered, dying out. The room was full of moonlight. My heart beat fast. I heard its throb. Suddenly it stood still to an inexpressible feeling that thrilled it through and passed at once to my head and extremities. The feeling was not like an electric shock, but it was quite as sharp, as strange, as startling. It acted on my senses as if their utmost activity hitherto had been but torpor, from which they were now summoned and forced to wake.

I heard a voice.

"Jane! Jane! Jane!"

And nothing more.

It did not seem in the room, not in the house, not from the garden. It did not come from anywhere near, I knew. It was a voice I knew, and loved, and hadn't heard in quite some time, but he called to me now. From wherever he was, Edward Fairfax Rochester called to me.

And I would answer his call.

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CHAPTER 38

I DID NOT SLEEP. I spent the rest of the night packing and staring out the window in silence by turns. I longed to hear his voice again. Inwardly I replied, "I'm coming!" But long-distance telepathy was a skill I had yet to develop. I would have to hope to see him in person at Thornfield.

At breakfast, I was spared having to see St. John as he had already left for his daily visits to parishioners. I sensed he was avoiding me as well, perhaps giving me time to think. I announced to Diana and Mary that I was going on a journey and should be absent at least four days.

"Alone, Jane?" they asked.

They knew me to battle vampyres to the death and to be in possession of a deadly range of weapons designed by their brother and myself, yet they would worry about my taking a carriage ride alone?

"Yes," I said simply. "I seek news of a friend about whom I have for some time been uneasy."

I had no doubt they had believed me to be without any friends save them, for it is indeed what I had often told them. I doubted St. John had ever informed them of a certain Mr. Rochester, and what he thought my past was with that man I could only guess.

"But, it's so sudden," Diana said. "You look pale. Perhaps you should wait a day?"

"I can wait no longer. I'm sorry. I must go at once."

I left Moor House and soon after I stood at the foot of the signpost of Whitcross, waiting the arrival of the coach that would take me to distant Thornfield. It was the same vehicle whence, a year ago, I had alighted one summer evening on this very spot--how

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desolate and hopeless and objectless! It stopped as I beckoned. I entered, not now obliged to part with my whole fortune as the price of its accommodation.

It was a journey of thirty-six hours. I had set out from Whit-cross on a Tuesday afternoon, and early on the succeeding Thursday morning the coach stopped to water the horses at a wayside inn, in the midst of green hedges, vast fields, and low pastoral hills so different from Morton's moors and woods. Yes, I knew the character of this landscape. I was sure I was nearly home.

Home! Yet I still thought of Thornfield hall as home. How could I not? Home would ever be where Mr. Rochester was. How foolish of me to feel that I could ever keep away from him.

"How far is Thornfield hall from here?" I asked of the hostler.

"Just two miles, ma'am, across the fields."

"I will stop here." I got out of the coach and gave a box I had into the hostler's charge, to be kept until I called for it. I paid my fare, satisfied the coachman, and I was going. The brightening day gleamed on the sign of the inn, and I read in gilt letters THE ROCHESTER ARMS. My heart leapt. I was already on Mr. Rochester's very lands.

I cautioned myself. For all I knew, he was not at home. He could be in any one of his old haunts. He could be with friends. If he was at home at Thornfield Hall, so would be his wife. What then? She would always be between us.

I thought perhaps to enter the inn, to ask after the house, the residents. Why not see what I could find out before running all the way home? Alas, I could not wait to even do as much as that. My feet started on the path, and before I knew it, I was running, running, eager for the first view of the woods.

At last the woods rose. A loud cawing broke the morning stillness. The rookery was near. I hastened on, another field crossed, a lane threaded, and there were the courtyard walls, the back offices. The house itself and the rookery still hid behind trees.

"My first view of it shall be in front," I determined. "Where its

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bold battlements will strike the eye nobly at once, and where I can single out Mr. Rochester'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."

I had coasted along the lower wall of the orchard and turned its angle. A gate was just there, opening into the meadow, between two stone pillars. From behind one pillar I could view unseen the full front of the mansion. From there I could ascertain if any bedroom window-blinds were yet drawn up. Battlements, windows, front--all from this sheltered station were at my command.

I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply of the earthy scent I knew as Thornfield, pungent grass, fecund soil, and all the sweet flowers of the orchard. I could not smell the orchard's flowers now. Perhaps the winds carried their delicate perfumes in another direction. Slowly, I opened my eyes--and could not believe what I saw. Perhaps I had fallen asleep and was dreaming. I had had this dream before--the nightmare of Thornfield burned down. But it was day. I did not dream. My eyes could not be mistaken.

Reader, I could not contain my gasp. Indeed, I saw no need. Who would hear me in the desolate emptiness? The Thornfield hall I'd expected--stately, majestic, waiting to welcome me home--was no more. What greeted me was a blackened ruin.

The lawn was patchy, with spots of fresh green shoots just poking up here and there in a sea of char. The walkway, crumbled. The facade stood, albeit not intact, the wall yet beginning to fall to decay. The windows all were broken, gone. The silence of death was now about this place, the solitude of a lonesome wild.

I knew why my letters had been unanswered. But what story belonged to this disaster? What loss, other than mortar and marble and woodwork, had followed upon it? Had life been wrecked as well as property? If so, whose? My heart ached and fluttered in a panic.

Nothing but pain was in wandering around the shattered walls and through the devastated interior. Judging from the ruins, it had not been a recent tragedy. Grass and weed grew here and there between

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the stones and fallen rafters. And where were the residents? Mr. Rochester?

I ran all the way back to the inn for news.

The host himself brought my breakfast into the parlour. I requested him to shut the door and sit down.

"You know Thornfield Hall, of course?" I managed to say at last.

"Yes, ma'am. I lived there once. I was the late Mr. Rochester's butler."

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

I gasped. "Is he dead?"

"I mean the present gentleman's, Mr. Edward's father."

I breathed again. My blood resumed its flow. The present gentleman. He was alive!

"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 harvesttime. A dreadful calamity! Such an immense quantity of valuable property destroyed. 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 witnessed it myself."

"At dead of night!" I muttered. I knew, then, that it was her doing. Had she tried to burn him, again, in his bed? She was indeed a danger to herself, and to others. And yet, he would keep her alive, and keep her near!

"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. No one, for

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many years, was certain of her existence. Rumors persisted, of course. Some said she was a ghost. Others that she was a demon. 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, 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 this girl. The servants say they never saw anybody so much in love as he was. Mr. Rochester was about forty, and this governess not twenty. Yet, they would marry."

"But they could not," I said, to hurry him along. "Because he was married. 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, and very trustworthy, but for one fault. When Mrs. Poole was fast asleep after too much gin, the mad lady--who was as cunning as a witch they say and may have been one after all--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."

"But this time? She went after him again?"

"Oh, no, ma'am. On this night, she set fire first to the hangings of the room next her own, and then she got down to a lower story and made her way to the chamber that had been the governess's--

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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."

I stifled my gasp at these words, not wishing to interrupt. Mr. Rochester had thought she would do me no harm, but he was wrong. I could have been killed had I stayed. Except that we would have been away, on our honeymoon, or what would have served as one. "And the governess?"

"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. They say he grew savage--quite savage on his disappointment. He would be alone, too. He sent Mrs. Fairfax, the housekeeper, away to her friends at a distance. He did it handsomely, though. He settled an annuity on her for life."

"So when the fire broke out, she was safely not at home." I was relieved. Dear Mrs. Fairfax.

"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. At night, 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. He was wild, spirited, and full of life, and then dejected and empty."

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

"Yes, indeed, 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, where she went back, apparently, after she started the place ablaze. 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 until they could hear her a mile off. I saw her and heard her with my own eyes. I witnessed, and several more witnessed, Mr. Rochester ascend through the skylight onto the roof. We heard him call, 'Bertha!' We saw him approach her. And then,