The next thing I remember is waking up with a feeling as if some one was handling me; lifting me up and supporting me in a sitting posture. It was more tenderly than I had ever been raised or upheld before, even by John in our love making. I rested my head against a pillow or an arm, and felt easy.
In five minutes more, the cloud of bewilderment that had at first engulfed me dissolved and I knew quite well that I was in my own bed. It was night and a candle burnt on the table with Bessie standing at the bed-foot with a basin in her hand. A gentleman sat in a chair near my pillow, leaning over me.
Turning from Bessie (though her presence was far less obnoxious to me than that of Abbot, for instance, would have been), I scrutinised the face of the gentleman. I knew Mr. Lloyd, an apothecary, sometimes called in by Mrs. Reed when the servants were ailing. For herself and the children she employed a physician.
“Well, who am I?” he asked.
I pronounced his name, offering him at the same time my hand and he took it, smiling. “We shall do very well by-and-by,” he said.
Then he laid me down, and addressing Bessie, charged her to be very careful that I was not disturbed during the night. Having given some further directions, and intimates that he should call again the next day, he departed. I felt so sheltered and befriended while he sat in the chair near my pillow that I did not want him to go. As he closed the door after him, all the room darkened and my heart again sank.
“Do you feel as if you should sleep, Miss?” asked Bessie, rather softly.
“I will try.”
“Then I think I shall go to bed, for it is past twelve o’clock; but you may call me if you want anything in the night.”
Wonderful civility this! It emboldened me to ask a question.
“Bessie, what is the matter with me? Am I ill?”
“You fell sick, I suppose, in the red-room with crying. You’ll be better soon, no doubt.”
Bessie went into the housemaid’s apartment, which was near, and I heard her say, “Sarah, come and sleep with me in the nursery; I daren’t for my life be alone with that poor child to-night. She might die; it’s such a strange thing she should have that fit. I wonder if she saw anything. Missis was rather too hard.”
Sarah came back with her and they both went to bed. They were whispering together for half-an-hour before they fell asleep. I caught scraps of their conversation, from which I was able only too distinctly to infer the main subject discussed.
“Something passed her, all dressed in white and vanished”—”A great black dog behind him”—”Three loud raps on the chamber door”—”A light in the churchyard just over his grave,” &c.
At last both slept and the fire and the candle went out. I endeavored to go to sleep as well, but I was too caught up in terror to settle and not even the gentle breathing of Eliza and Georgiana asleep in their own beds in the nursery could calm me.
Suddenly, the nursery door slid open and I was about to scream when I heard the familiar voice of John.
“Jane?”
I did not answer, hoping he would go. I had not forgiven him for hitting me thus, nor would I ever. I had suddenly realised in the red-room that John did not love me. It was a cold and hard shock and I still had the cut across my forehead to prove it. I should not have believed him when he said he did, knowing as I did the selfish nature of his mother and sisters, and it was some relief to me that I realised that I did not sincerely love him either. I desperately sought tender affection having been starved of it my whole existence and I had found a false kind for a time in John Reed, but I was fooled no longer.
“Jane, I am sorry about the book. I did not mean to hurt you, I was only pretending in front of Eliza and Georgiana. You know that.”
I knew far more than that so I stayed silent.
But he was not to be so easily put off. John crept across the nursery and right up to my bed. He visited me often in the midnight hours and we were both lucky that his sisters were such heavy sleepers. Our first meeting had been at night like this some six months ago, when John had spent his week home from school pursuing me. I was naive and hungry for affection and I had fallen right into his arms.
“Jane, you know I love you,” he said, gently stroking a lock of my hair.
I retained the act of sleep no longer. He did not love me, I knew, but I wanted someone to, and I gently licked my lips, as I knew he liked.
A glazed look passed across his face and he bent over me, leaning down on the bed. Gently he pressed himself to me, the sheets between us, and his erection pushed against my stomach. My own groin throbbed with returned yearning.
“Oh, Jane,” he breathed into my ear, tickling the tiny hairs across my neck. A rush of delight surged through my body and I tilted my head back, gasping softly and closing my eyes. It was then in my mind that I saw my dark-eyed lover and it was him that I felt slide under the sheets with me, not John. It was he that moaned my name again, “Oh, Jane.”
Hot lips found mine and kissed them gently at first, then harder and faster. He thrust his tongue into my mouth and we tasted the sweetness of each other. Meanwhile, his hand skimmed down my body, cupping my small breasts at first and then reaching down further between my legs. There he gently rubbed me in tantalising circles, while ripples of pleasure shocked my body. I bit down firmly on my lip to stop myself from crying out and my hips jerked with wanting.
He stopped rubbing me and teasingly began running his fingers up and down my stomach, between my navel and my legs, every now and then pinching the delicately soft skin.
“I want you,” he said, hitching up my nightdress further and hurriedly undoing his own clothing.
Again, it was my dark-eyed lover that I felt move on top of me and gently slide between my legs. I caught my breath as he entered me, sending a thrilling twinge bolting up my body. Then slowly he drew himself in and out of me, filling and leaving me. The sensation built a pounding rhythm in the depths of my stomach, but suddenly, he stopped.
He pulled out of me and came, sighing.
“Good-night, Jane,” he said, and I was left unsatisfied as I always was and now in the full knowledge that I was equally unloved as well.
The next day, by noon, I was up and dressed, and sat wrapped in a shawl by the nursery hearth. I felt physically weak and broken down, but my worse ailment was an unutterable wretchedness of mind; a wretchedness which kept drawing from me silent tears. No sooner had I wiped one salt drop from my cheek then another followed. Yet, I thought, I ought to have been happy, for none of the Reeds were there, they were all gone out in the carriage with their mama. But I was ashamed of myself for relenting to John last night when I should have stayed strong in my will, and still suffering from my fit in the red-room.
Bessie brought me a tart on a brightly painted china plate, but I could not eat it and had to put it aside. She next asked if I would have a book. The word “book” acted as a transient stimulus, and I begged her to fetch Gulliver’s Travels from the library. I did briefly entertain the thought of asking for my volume of portraits but I did not want further questions that I knew Bessie would ask. Anyway, Gulliver’s Travels I had again and again perused with delight and I felt it might balm my agitated soul. Yet, when this cherished object was placed in my hand, all was eerie and dreary. I put it on the table beside the untasted tart.
In the course of the morning Mr. Lloyd came again.
“What, already up!” said he, as he entered the nursery. “Well, nurse, how is she?”
Bessie answered that I was doing very well.
“Then she ought to look more cheerful. Miss Jane you have been crying, can you tell me what about? Have you any pain?”
“No, sir.”
“Oh! I daresay she is crying because she could not go out with Missis in the carriage,” interposed Bessie.
“Surely not! Why, she is too old for such pettishness.”
I thought so too and my self-esteem being wounded by the false charge, I answered promptly, “I never cried for such a thing in my life. I hate going out in the carriage. I cry because I am miserable.”
The good apothecary appeared a little puzzled. He fixed his eyes on me very steadily. They were small and grey; not very bright, but I dare say I should think them shrewd now. He had a hard-featured yet good-natured looking face. Having considered me at leisure, he said, “What made you ill yesterday?”
“She had a fall,” said Bessie, again putting in her word.
“Fall! Why, that is like a baby again! Can’t she manage to walk at her age? She must be twelve years old.”
“I was knocked down,” was the blunt explanation, jerked out of me by another pang of mortified pride; “And I am sixteen. But the knock did not make me ill,” I added.
“Sixteen! Then you are too old for a nursery,” he said, looking around.
I knew it and Mrs. Reed knew it, but it was yet another means of punishing me. She enjoyed treating me like a child and my small, under-grown appearance lended itself to such abuse.
A loud bell rang for the servants’ dinner and he knew what it was. “That’s for you, nurse,” said he, “you can go down and I’ll give Miss Jane a lecture till you come back.”
Bessie would rather have stayed, but she was obliged to go because punctuality at meals was rigidly enforced at Gateshead Hall.
“The fall did not make you ill, but what did, then?” pursued Mr. Lloyd when we were alone.
“I am unhappy, very unhappy, for other things.”
“What other things? Can you tell me some of them?”
How much I wished to reply fully to this question! How difficult it was to frame any answer! Fearful of losing this first and only opportunity of relieving my grief by imparting it, after a disturbed pause, I contrived to frame a meagre, though true response.
“For one thing, I have no father or mother, brothers or sisters.”
“You have a kind aunt and cousins.”
Again I paused, but then bunglingly enounced, “But John Reed knocked me down, and my aunt shut me up in the red-room.”
“But don’t you think Gateshead Hall a very beautiful house?” asked Mr. Lloyd. “Are you not very thankful to have such a fine place to live at?”
“If I had anywhere else to go, I should be glad to leave it, but I can never get away from Gateshead till I am a woman.”
“Perhaps you may—who knows? Have you any relations besides Mrs. Reed?”
“I think not, sir.”
“Would you like to go to school?”
Again I reflected. I scarcely knew what school was. Bessie sometimes spoke of it as a place where young ladies sat in the stocks, wore backboards, and were expected to be exceedingly genteel and precise. John Reed hated his school, and abused his master; but John Reed’s tastes were no rule for mine, and if Bessie’s accounts of school-discipline (gathered from the young ladies of a family where she had lived before coming to Gateshead) were somewhat appalling, her details of certain accomplishments attained by these same young ladies were equally attractive. She boasted of beautiful paintings of landscapes and flowers by them executed, of songs they could sing, pieces they could play, of purses they could net, of French books they could translate; till my spirit was moved to emulation as I listened. Besides, school would be a complete change.
“I should indeed like to go to school,” was the audible conclusion of my musings.
“Well, well! Who knows what may happen?” said Mr. Lloyd, as he got up. “The child ought to have change of air and scene,” he added, speaking to himself, “nerves not in a good state.”
Bessie now returned and at the same moment, the carriage was heard rolling up the gravel-walk.
“Is that your mistress, nurse?” asked Mr. Lloyd. “I should like to speak to her before I go.”
Bessie invited him to walk into the breakfast-room, and led the way out. In the interview which followed between him and Mrs. Reed, I presume that the apothecary ventured to recommend my being sent to school. The recommendation was no doubt readily enough adopted; for as Abbot said, in discussing the subject with Bessie when both sat sewing in the nursery one night, after I was in bed, and, as they thought, asleep, “Missis was, she dared say, glad enough to get rid of such a tiresome, ill-conditioned child, who always looked as if she were watching everybody, and scheming plots underhand.”
On that same occasion I learned, for the first time, from Miss Abbot’s communications to Bessie, that my father had been a poor clergyman, that my mother had married him against the wishes of her friends, who considered the match beneath her, and that my grandfather Reed was so irritated at her disobedience, he cut her off without a shilling. After my mother and father had been married a year, the latter caught the typhus fever while visiting among the poor of a large manufacturing town where his curacy was situated, and where that disease was then prevalent. My mother took the infection from him, and both died within a month of each other.
Bessie, when she heard this narrative, sighed and said, “Poor Miss Jane is to be pitied, too, Abbot.”
“Yes,” responded Abbot; “if she were a nice, pretty child, one might compassionate her forlornness; but one really cannot care for such a little toad as that.”
“Not a great deal, to be sure,” agreed Bessie, “at any rate, a beauty like Miss Georgiana would be more moving in the same condition.”
“Yes, I dote on Miss Georgiana!” cried the fervent Abbot. “Little darling!—with her long curls and her blue eyes, and such a sweet colour as she has, just as if she were painted!— Bessie, I could fancy a Welsh rabbit for supper.”
“So could I—with a roast onion. Come, we’ll go down.” They went.