This was true: and while he spoke my very conscience and reason turned traitors against me, and charged me with crime in resisting him. And what a distortion in your judgment, what a perversity in your ideas, is proved by your conduct! Is it better to drive a fellow-creature to despair than to transgress a mere human law, no man being injured by the breach? for you have neither relatives nor acquaintances whom you need fear to offend by living with me?” I declared I could not change: you tell me to my face I shall change soon.
“You make me a liar by such language: you sully my honour. We were born to strive and endure-you as well as I: do so. Rochester, I no more assign this fate to you than I grasp at it for myself. You fling me back on lust for a passion-vice for an occupation?” “Then you snatch love and innocence from me? “I advise you to live sinless, and I wish you to die tranquil.” “Then you condemn me to live wretched and to die accursed?” His voice rose. What shall I do, Jane? Where turn for a companion and for some hope?”īelieve in heaven. What then is left? For a wife I have but the maniac upstairs: as well might you refer me to some corpse in yonder churchyard. All happiness will be torn away with you. Give one glance to my horrible life when you are gone. I laid my hand on the back of a chair for support: I shook, I feared-but I resolved. It would not be wicked to love me.”Ī wild look raised his brows-crossed his features: he rose but he forebore yet. “I do,” extricating myself from restraint rapidly and completely. “And now?” softly kissing my forehead and cheek. “Jane” (bending towards and embracing me), “do you mean it now?” “Jane!” recommenced he, with a gentleness that broke me down with grief, and turned me stone-cold with ominous terror-for this still voice was the pant of a lion rising-“Jane, do you mean to go one way in the world, and to let me go another?” “Jane, you understand what I want of you? One drear word comprised my intolerable duty-“Depart!”
#Gentle reader may you never meaning full#
Terrible moment: full of struggle, blackness, burning! Not a human being that ever lived could wish to be loved better than I was loved and him who thus loved me I absolutely worshipped: and I must renounce love and idol. I was experiencing an ordeal: a hand of fiery iron grasped my vitals. Then I should have asked you to accept my pledge of fidelity and to give me yours. This was cowardly: I should have appealed to your nobleness and magnanimity at first, as I do now-opened to you plainly my life of agony-described to you my hunger and thirst after a higher and worthier existence-shown to you, not my resolution (that word is weak), but my resistless bent to love faithfully and well, where I am faithfully and well loved in return. I feared early instilled prejudice: I wanted to have you safe before hazarding confidences. I was wrong to attempt to deceive you but I feared a stubbornness that exists in your character. To tell me that I had already a wife is empty mockery: you know now that I had but a hideous demon. “It was because I felt and knew this, that I resolved to marry you. I think you good, gifted, lovely: a fervent, a solemn passion is conceived in my heart it leans to you, draws you to my centre and spring of life, wraps my existence about you, and, kindling in pure, powerful flame, fuses you and me in one. I am bound to you with a strong attachment. You are my sympathy-my better self-my good angel. “After a youth and manhood passed half in unutterable misery and half in dreary solitude, I have for the first time found what I can truly love-I have found you. “You see now how the case stands-do you not?” he continued. I shuddered to hear the infatuated assertion. “No, Jane,” he returned: “what necessity is there to dwell on the Past, when the Present is so much surer-the Future so much brighter?” “Don't talk any more of those days, sir,” I interrupted, furtively dashing away some tears from my eyes his language was torture to me for I knew what I must do-and do soon-and all these reminiscences, and these revelations of his feelings only made my work more difficult.
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