A splendid Midsummer shone over England: skies so pure, suns so radiant as were then seen in long succession, seldom favour even singly, our wave-girt land. It was as if a band of Italian days had come from the South, like a flock of glorious passenger birds, and lighted to rest them on the cliffs […]
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‘I have been with my aunt, sir, who is dead.’ ‘A true Janian reply! Good angels be my guard! She comes from the other world—from the abode of people who are dead; and tells me so when she meets me alone here in the gloaming! If I dared, I’d touch you, to see if you […]
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Mr. Rochester had given me but one week’s leave of absence: yet a month elapsed before I quitted Gateshead. I wished to leave immediately after the funeral, but Georgiana entreated me to stay till she could get off to London, whither she was now at last invited by her uncle, Mr. Gibson, who had come […]
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‘Dear Mrs. Reed,’ said I, as I offered her the draught she required, ‘think no more of all this, let it pass away from your mind. Forgive me for my passionate language: I was a child then; eight, nine years have passed since that day.’ She heeded nothing of what I said; but when she […]
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I knew Mrs. Reed had not spoken for days: was she reviving? I went up to her. ‘It is I, Aunt Reed.’ ‘Who—I?’ was her answer. ‘Who are you?’ looking at me with surprise and a sort of alarm, but still not wildly. ‘You are quite a stranger to me—where is Bessie?’ ‘She is at […]
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She closed her lips. ‘You might have spared yourself the trouble of delivering that tirade,’ answered Georgiana. ‘Everybody knows you are the most selfish, heartless creature in existence: and I know your spiteful hatred towards me: I have had a specimen of it before in the trick you played me about Lord Edwin Vere: you […]
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One morning I fell to sketching a face: what sort of a face it was to be, I did not care or know. I took a soft black pencil, gave it a broad point, and worked away. Soon I had traced on the paper a broad and prominent forehead and a square lower outline of […]
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‘A strange wish, Mrs. Reed; why do you hate her so?’ ‘I had a dislike to her mother always; for she was my husband’s only sister, and a great favourite with him: he opposed the family’s disowning her when she made her low marriage; and when news came of her death, he wept like a […]
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T he well-known face was there: stern, relentless as ever— there was that peculiar eye which nothing could melt, and the somewhat raised, imperious, despotic eyebrow. How often had it lowered on me menace and hate! and how the recollection of childhood’s terrors and sorrows revived as I traced its harsh line now! And yet […]
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‘You shall go into the breakfast-room first,’ said Bessie, as she preceded me through the hall; ‘the young ladies will be there.’ In another moment I was within that apartment. There was every article of furniture looking just as it did on the morning I was first introduced to Mr. Brocklehurst: the very rug he […]
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