Chapter 16
I did not see Jane again until the afternoon. Everyone had slept later than usual after having been roused in the night, and they drifted down to breakfast still disturbed. I suggested a picnic to distract them, but Lady Ingram begged off, saying she had a headache, and Mrs. Dent said she did not think her nerves could take such an outing. Only Miss Ingram—despite her late-night vigil—seemed little bothered by the night’s events, and dared me to a gallop over the moors. I took her up on that, curious to know what she might say to me in private. As I could have expected, she asked about my business in Millcote that had taken me away, and about Richard Mason’s visit and swift disappearance. Though she had not made the connection to the disturbance of the previous night, she seemed to believe he was in some way tied to my supposed debts, and I was just evasive enough in my responses to confirm her suspicions. I imagined her interest in me would now cool quickly; she might even spread rumors about me in the neighborhood, but I cared little enough for that. It would be interesting, indeed, to know how I was viewed by society without the veil of wealth surrounding me. At that point, my whole attention was on winning Jane.
Miss Ingram and I returned in time for lunch, and then someone proposed billiards. We were in the midst of the game when Miss Ingram suddenly snapped, “Does that person want you?”
I turned and saw Jane. Alarmed—for it was not her way to interrupt like that—I threw down my cue and followed her into the schoolroom, where we could talk in private. “Well?” I asked, as I closed the door.
“If you please, sir, I want leave of absence for a week or two,” she said.
She was leaving me. “What?” I blurted. “You would just leave, without any warning?” Immediately I could see that she was taken aback by the vehemence of my reaction, but I did not care. I would not let her leave me so easily. “What to do?” I demanded. “Where to go?”
“To see a sick lady who has sent for me.”
“What sick lady?—Where does she live?” This was an invention, I was sure. I had overplayed my hand. She was fleeing Thornfield after what she had seen in the night and after my confession, for she refused to live under the same roof as a monster and a sinner. I was losing her!
“At Gateshead in ——shire.” The lady was the widow of Reed, the former Gateshead magistrate, Jane told me, who was Jane’s own uncle.
Then I knew I’d caught her. “The deuce he was! You never told me that before: you always said you had no relations.”
But she had an answer for that, too: when she was orphaned, Reed had taken her in, but Mrs. Reed had cast her off after Mr. Reed’s death because Jane was poor and burdensome—Jane, burdensome!—and because she had disliked Jane. But now John, the son, was dead by his own hand, and his mother had had an apoplectic attack and was asking for Jane.
Perhaps, if the story were true, I should have been more sympathetic to the widow Reed, but in my panic I could think only of Jane. “And what good can you do her?” I asked. “Nonsense, Jane! I would never think of running a hundred miles to see an old lady who will perhaps be dead before you reach her: besides, you say she cast you off.”
“Yes, sir, but that is long ago,” she said, “and when her circumstances were very different: I could not be easy to neglect her wishes now.” Her compassion: it was so Jane, and I began to believe her, for it was exactly how she would think, with a degree of loyalty that, as proven just that morning during my ride with Miss Ingram, was lacking in so many of her “superiors” in society.
If this summons were real—and I wanted to believe it was, not least because I could not believe Jane would lie—then her absence would be painful, but not unbearable. “How long will you stay?” I asked her.
“As short a time as possible, sir.”
“Promise me only to stay a week,” I demanded. More than that I could not stand.
But she would not make that promise for fear she might have to break it. However, she did promise that she would indeed return as soon as she could.
I had schemed to rid myself of my guests so that I could be alone with Jane, but instead, it was she who was leaving, and they who were hanging on. I could not think what to say—after all my manipulations, to be defeated by a sick woman a hundred miles away. My dear Jane, opening her generous heart to someone who had treated her badly. Would that I could match her. “Well,” I said, “you must have some money; you can’t travel without money.”
I tried to give her fifty pounds for her expenses, but upright Jane refused to take more than she was owed; she refused to be in my debt, while I would have given her the world merely to ensure her return. Honest Jane—how could I have imagined she would try to deceive me? But—was I not deceiving her?
I hardly had time to think of that before she surprised me with a further statement: “Mr. Rochester, I may as well mention another matter of business to you while I have the opportunity. You have as good as informed me, sir, that you are going shortly to be married?”
My God. “Yes, what then?”
“In that case, sir, Adèle ought to go to school: I am sure you will perceive the necessity of it.”
“To get her out of my bride’s way; who might otherwise walk over her rather too emphatically. There’s sense to the suggestion,” I said, nodding, wanting to force her out with it, wanting her to know I could see my so-called bride as clearly as she. “Not a doubt of it: Adèle, as you say, must go to school; and you, of course, must march straight to—the devil?”
“I hope not, sir: but I must seek another situation somewhere.”
“In course! And old Madam Reed, or the Misses, her daughters, will be solicited by you to seek a place, I suppose?”
“No, sir; I am not on such terms with my relatives as would justify me in asking favors of them—but I shall advertise.”
“Not on such terms,” I thought, but they make you travel a hundred miles to see the old hag. “You shall walk up the pyramids of Egypt!” I snapped at her. “At your peril you advertise! I wish I had only offered you a sovereign! Give me back nine pounds, Jane; I’ve a use for it.”