Drearily I wound my way downstairs:I knew what I had to do, and I did it mechanically.I sought the key of the side-door in the kitchen;I sought, too, a phial of oil and a feather;I oiled the key and the lock. I got some water,I got some bread: for perhaps I should have to walk far;and my strength, sorely shaken of late,must not break down. All this I did without one sound.I opened the door, passed out, shut it softly.Dim dawn glimmered in the yard.The great gates were closed and locked;but a wicket in one of them was only latched.Through that I departed: it, too, I shut;and now I was out of Thornfield.
A mile off, beyond the fields,lay a road which stretched in the contrary direction to Millcote;a road I had never travelled, but often noticed,and wondered where it led: thither I bent my steps.No reflection was to be allowed now:not one glance was to be cast back;not even one forward.Not one thought was to be given either to the past or the future.The first was a page so heavenly sweet—so deadly sad—that to read one line of it would dissolve my courage and break down my energy. The last was an awful blank: something like the world when the deluge was gone by.
I skirted fields, and hedges,and lanes till after sunrise.I believe it was a lovely summer morning:I know my shoes, which I had put on when I left the house,were soon wet with dew.But I looked neither to rising sun, nor smiling sky,nor wakening nature.He who is taken out to pass through a fair scene to the scaffold,thinks not of the flowers that smile on his road,but of the block and axe-edge;of the disseverment of bone and vein;of the grave gaping at the end:and I thought of drear flight and homeless wandering—and oh!with agony I thought of what I left.I could not help it.I thought of him now—in his room—watching the sunrise;hoping I should soon come to say I would stay with him and be his.I longed to be his; I panted to return:it was not too late;I could yet spare him the bitter pang of bereavement.As yet my flight, I was sure, was undiscovered.I could go back and be his comforter—his pride;his redeemer from misery, perhaps from ruin. Oh,that fear of his self-abandonment—far worse than my abandonment—how it goaded me!It was a barbed arrow-head in my breast;it tore me when I tried to extract it;it sickened me when remembrance thrust it farther in.Birds began singing in brake and copse:birds were faithful to their mates;birds were emblems of love. What was I?In the midst of my pain of heart and frantic effort of principle,I abhorred myself. I had no solace from self-approbation:none even from self-respect.I had injured—wounded—left my master.I was hateful in my own eyes. Still I could not turn,nor retrace one step. God must have led me on.As to my own will or conscience,impassioned grief had trampled one and stifled the other.I was weeping wildly as I walked along my solitary way:fast, fast I went like one delirious. A weakness,beginning inwardly, extending to the limbs, seized me,and I fell: I lay on the ground some minutes,pressing my face to the wet turf.I had some fear—or hope—that here I should die:but I was soon up; crawling forwards on my hands and knees,and then again raised to my feet—as eager and as determined as ever to reach the road.
When I got there, I was forced to sit to rest me under the hedge;and while I sat, I heard wheels,and saw a coach come on. I stood up and lifted my hand;it stopped. I asked where it was going:the driver named a place a long way off,and where I was sure Mr. Rochester had no connections.I asked for what sum he would take me there;he said thirty shillings; I answered I had but twenty;well, he would try to make it do.He further gave me leave to get into the inside,as the vehicle was empty: I entered, was shut in,and it rolled on its way.
Gentle reader, may you never feel what I then felt!May your eyes never shed such stormy, scalding,heart-wrung tears as poured from mine.May you never appeal to Heaven in prayers so hopeless and so agonised as in that hour left my lips; for never may you, like me, dread to be the instrument of evil to what you wholly love.
CHAPTER XXVIII
Two days are passed. It is a summer evening;the coachman has set me down at a place called Whitcross;he could take me no farther for the sum I had given,and I was not possessed of another shilling in the world.The coach is a mile off by this time; I am alone.At this moment I discover that I forgot to take my parcel out of the pocket of the coach, where I had placed it for safety; there it remains, there it must remain; and now, I am absolutely destitute.
Whitcross is no town, nor even a hamlet;it is but a stone pillar set up where four roads meet:whitewashed, I suppose,to be more obvious at a distance and in darkness.Four arms spring from its summit:the nearest town to which these point is,according to the inscription, distant ten miles;the farthest, above twenty.From the well-known names of these towns I learn in what county I have lighted;a north-midland shire, dusk with moorland,ridged with mountain: this I see.There are great moors behind and on each hand of me;there are waves of mountains far beyond that deep valley at my feet.The population here must be thin,and I see no passengers on these roads:they stretch out east, west, north, and south—white,broad, lonely; they are all cut in the moor,and the heather grows deep and wild to their very verge.Yet a chance traveller might pass by;and I wish no eye to see me now:strangers would wonder what I am doing,lingering here at the sign-post,evidently objectless and lost. I might be questioned:I could give no answer but what would sound incredible and excite suspicion.Not a tie holds me to human society at this moment—not a charm or hope calls me where my fellow-creatures are—none that saw me would have a kind thought or a good wish for me. I have no relative but the universal mother, Nature: I will seek her breast and ask repose.
I struck straight into the heath;I held on to a hollow I saw deeply furrowing the brown moorside;I waded knee-deep in its dark growth;I turned with its turnings,and finding a moss-blackened granite crag in a hidden angle,I sat down under it. High banks of moor were about me;the crag protected my head: the sky was over that.
Some time passed before I felt tranquil even here:I had a vague dread that wild cattle might be near,or that some sportsman or poacher might discover me.If a gust of wind swept the waste, I looked up,fearing it was the rush of a bull;if a plover whistled, I imagined it a man.Finding my apprehensions unfounded, however,and calmed by the deep silence that reigned as evening declined at nightfall,I took confidence. As yet I had not thought;I had only listened, watched, dreaded;now I regained the faculty of reflection.
What was I to do?Where to go?Oh, intolerable questions,when I could do nothing and go nowhere!—when a long way must yet be measured by my weary,trembling limbs before I could reach human habitation—when cold charity must be entreated before I could get a lodging: reluctant sympathy importuned, almost certain repulse incurred, before my tale could be listened to, or one of my wants relieved!