Delphi Complete Works of the Brontes Charlotte, Emily, Anne Brontë (Illustrated) by Elizabeth Gaskell, Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Anne Brontë, PATRICK BRONTE Read Free Book Online Page B

silence; she was sewing, I was watching her.  Mrs. Reed might be at that time some six or seven and thirty; she was a woman of robust frame, square-shouldered and strong-limbed, not tall, and, though stout, not obese: she had a somewhat large face, the under jaw being much developed and very solid; her brow was low, her chin large and prominent, mouth and nose sufficiently regular; under her light eyebrows glimmered an eye devoid of ruth; her skin was dark and opaque, her hair nearly flaxen; her constitution was sound as a bell — illness never came near her; she was an exact, clever manager; her household and tenantry were thoroughly under her control; her children only at times defied her authority and laughed it to scorn; she dressed well, and had a presence and port calculated to set off handsome attire.
    Sitting on a low stool, a few yards from her arm-chair, I examined her figure; I perused her features.  In my hand I held the tract containing the sudden death of the Liar, to which narrative my attention had been pointed as to an appropriate warning.  What had just passed; what Mrs. Reed had said concerning me to Mr. Brocklehurst; the whole tenor of their conversation, was recent, raw, and stinging in my mind; I had felt every word as acutely as I had heard it plainly, and a passion of resentment fomented now within me.
    Mrs. Reed looked up from her work; her eye settled on mine, her fingers at the same time suspended their nimble movements.
    “Go out of the room; return to the nursery,” was her mandate.  My look or something else must have struck her as offensive, for she spoke with extreme though suppressed irritation.  I got up, I went to the door; I came back again; I walked to the window, across the room, then close up to her.
    Speak I must: I had been trodden on severely, and must turn: but how?  What strength had I to dart retaliation at my antagonist?  I gathered my energies and launched them in this blunt sentence —
    “I am not deceitful: if I were, I should say I loved you; but I declare I do not love you: I dislike you the worst of anybody in the world except John Reed; and this book about the liar, you may give to your girl, Georgiana, for it is she who tells lies, and not I.”
    Mrs. Reed’s hands still lay on her work inactive: her eye of ice continued to dwell freezingly on mine.
    “What more have you to say?” she asked, rather in the tone in which a person might address an opponent of adult age than such as is ordinarily used to a child.
    That eye of hers, that voice stirred every antipathy I had.  Shaking from head to foot, thrilled with ungovernable excitement, I continued —
    “I am glad you are no relation of mine: I will never call you aunt again as long as I live.  I will never come to see you when I am grown up; and if any one asks me how I liked you, and how you treated me, I will say the very thought of you makes me sick, and that you treated me with miserable cruelty.”
    “How dare you affirm that, Jane Eyre?”
    “How dare I, Mrs. Reed?  How dare I?  Because it is the truth .  You think I have no feelings, and that I can do without one bit of love or kindness; but I cannot live so: and you have no pity.  I shall remember how you thrust me back — roughly and violently thrust me back — into the red-room, and locked me up there, to my dying day; though I was in agony; though I cried out, while suffocating with distress, ‘Have mercy!  Have mercy, Aunt Reed!’  And that punishment you made me suffer because your wicked boy struck me — knocked me down for nothing.  I will tell anybody who asks me questions, this exact tale.  People think you a good woman, but you are bad, hard-hearted.  You are deceitful!”

    Ere I had finished this reply, my soul began to expand, to exult, with the strangest sense of freedom, of triumph, I ever felt.  It seemed as if an invisible bond had burst, and that I had struggled out into unhoped-for liberty.  Not without cause