The daylight came and I rose at dawn. I busied myself for an hour or two with arranging my things in my chamber, putting my drawers and wardrobe in the order wherein I should wish to leave them during a brief absence. Meantime, I heard St. John quit his room. He stopped at my door and I feared he would knock for today he was also leaving, but he walked on.
It was the first of June; yet the morning was overcast and chilly and rain beat fast on my casement. I heard the frontdoor open, and St. John pass out. Looking through the window, I saw him traverse the garden. He took the way over the misty moors in the direction of Whitcross where he would meet the coach.
“In a few more hours I shall succeed you in that track, cousin,” thought I. “I too have a coach to meet at Whitcross.”
It wanted yet two hours of breakfast-time. I filled the interval in walking softly about my room and pondering the visitation which had given my plans their present bent. I recalled the voice I had heard; again I questioned whence it came as vainly as before and it seemed in me—not in the external world. I asked was it a mere nervous impression—a delusion? I could not conceive or believe for it was more like an inspiration.
At breakfast 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.
I answered yes, I was going to see or hear news of a friend about whom I had for some time been uneasy. They might have said, as I have no doubt they thought, that they had believed me to be without any friends save them for I had often said so, but with their true natural delicacy, they abstained from comment.
I left Moor House at three o’clock and soon after four, I stood at the foot of the sign-post of Whitcross, awaiting the arrival of the coach which was to take me to distant Thornfield. Amidst the silence of those solitary roads and desert hills, I heard it approach from a great distance. It was the same vehicle whence, a year ago, I had alighted one summer evening on this very spot. It stopped as I beckoned and I entered. Once more on the road to Thornfield, I felt like a messenger-pigeon flying home.
It was a journey of six-and-thirty hours. I had set out from Whitcross on a Tuesday afternoon, and early on the succeeding Thursday morning the coach stopped to water the horses at a wayside inn, situated in the midst of scenery whose green hedges and large fields and low pastoral hills met my eye like the lineaments of a once familiar face. Yes, I knew the character of this landscape: I was sure we were near my bourne.
“How far is Thornfield Hall from here?” I asked of the ostler.
“Just two miles, ma’am, across the fields.”
“My journey is closed,” I thought to myself. I got out of the coach, gave a box I had into the ostler’s charge to be kept till I called for it and paid my fare.
Then I began to walk across the very fields through which I had last fled from Thornfield. How fast I walked! How I ran sometimes! How I looked forward to catch the first view of the well-known woods! With what feelings I welcomed single trees I knew, and familiar glimpses of meadow and hill between them! I was aware that Mr. Rochester might not be at Thornfield—I told myself this rationally for he might well have returned to traveling about the Continent, but an inner sense told me that this was not so and I was desperate to see him.
At last I reached the orchard, turned its angle and assumed to look with timorous joy towards a stately house. Instead I saw a blackened ruin.
The lawn and grounds were trodden and waste—the portal yawned void. The front was, as I had once seen it in a dream, very fragile-looking, perforated with paneless windows: no roof, no battlements, no chimneys—all had crashed in.
And there was the silence of death about it: the solitude of a lonesome wild. No wonder that letters addressed to people here had never received an answer. The grim blackness of the stones told by what fate the Hall had fallen—by fire. But what story belonged to this disaster? What loss, besides mortar and marble and wood-work had followed upon it? Had life been wrecked as well as property? There was no one here to answer it.
In wandering round the shattered walls and through the devastated interior, I gathered evidence that the calamity was not of late occurrence. Winter snows, I thought, had drifted through that void arch, winter rains beaten in at those hollow casements; for amidst the drenched piles of rubbish, spring had cherished vegetation.
Saddened and distraught, I returned to the town and an inn to gather my wits.
“You know Thornfield Hall, of course?” I asked the inn keeper, a middle-aged man.
“Yes, ma’am, I lived there once.”
“Did you?”
Not in my time, I thought, for you are a stranger to me.
“I was the late Mr. Rochester’s butler,” he added.
The late! I seem to have received, with full force, the blow I had been trying to evade.
“The late!” I gasped. “Is he dead?”
“I mean the present gentleman, Mr. Edward’s father,” he explained.
I breathed again and my blood resumed its flow.
“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 and it was burnt down just about harvest-time. A dreadful calamity! Such an immense quantity of valuable property destroyed and hardly any of the furniture could be saved. 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.”
“Was it known how it originated?” I demanded.
He began speaking low, “There was a lady—a lunatic kept in the house and when all occupants were fast asleep, she set fire to the place. She was Mr. Rochester’s mad wife would you believe? He had been hiding her in the attic ere long! Alas, he woke that night to the smell of fire and saved all of the servants before returning to get his mad wife out of her cell. But she was on the roof, standing and waving her arms above the battlements. Mr. Rochester tried to call her, but she yelled, gave a spring and the next minute she lay smashed on the pavement!”
“Dead?”
“Dead! Ay, dead as the stones on which her brains and blood were scattered.”
He shuddered.
“And afterwards?” I urged.
“Well, ma’am, afterwards the house was burnt to the ground.”
“Were any other lives lost?”
“No, but perhaps it would have been better if there had.”
“What do you mean?”
“Poor Mr. Edward!” he ejaculated, “He is stone-blind.”
I had dreaded worse. I had dreaded he was mad. I summoned strength to ask what had caused this calamity.
“It was all his own courage: he wouldn’t leave the house till every one else was out. As he came down the great staircase at last, after Mrs. Rochester had flung herself from the battlements, there was a great crash and all fell. He was taken out from under the ruins alive but one eye was knocked out and one hand so crushed that Mr. Carter, the surgeon, had to amputate it directly. The other eye inflamed and he lost the sight of that also. He is now helpless—blind and a cripple.”
“Where is he? Where does he now live?”
“At Ferndean, a manor-house on a farm he has, about thirty miles off.”
“Who is with him?”
“Old John and his wife: he would have none else. He is quite broken down, they say.”
“Have you any sort of conveyance?”
“We have a chaise, ma’am, a very handsome chaise.”
“Let it be got ready instantly, I’ll pay you twice the hire you usually demand.”