weeping wildly as I walked along my solitary way:
fast, fast I went like one delirious. A weakness,
beginning inwardly, extending to the limbs, seized
me, and I fell: I lay on the ground some minutes,
pressing my face to the wet turf. I had some
fear — or hope — that here I
should die: but I was soon up; crawling forwards
on my hands and knees, and then again raised to my
feet — as eager and as determined as ever
to reach the road.
When I got there, I was forced to sit to rest me under
the hedge; and while I sat, I heard wheels, and saw
a coach come on. I stood up and lifted my hand;
it stopped. I asked where it was going:
the driver named a place a long way off, and where
I was sure Mr. Rochester had no connections.
I asked for what sum he would take me there; he said
thirty shillings; I answered I had but twenty; well,
he would try to make it do. He further gave me
leave to get into the inside, as the vehicle was empty:
I entered, was shut in, and it rolled on its way.
Gentle reader, may you never feel what I then felt!
May your eyes never shed such stormy, scalding, heart-wrung
tears as poured from mine. May you never appeal
to Heaven in prayers so hopeless and so agonised as
in that hour left my lips; for never may you, like
me, dread to be the instrument of evil to what you
wholly love.
Two days are passed. It is a summer evening;
the coachman has set me down at a place called Whitcross;
he could take me no farther for the sum I had given,
and I was not possessed of another shilling in the
world. The coach is a mile off by this time;
I am alone. At this moment I discover that I
forgot to take my parcel out of the pocket of the
coach, where I had placed it for safety; there it
remains, there it must remain; and now, I am absolutely
destitute.
Whitcross is no town, nor even a hamlet; it is but
a stone pillar set up where four roads meet:
whitewashed, I suppose, to be more obvious at a distance
and in darkness. Four arms spring from its summit:
the nearest town to which these point is, according
to the inscription, distant ten miles; the farthest,
above twenty. From the well-known names of these
towns I learn in what county I have lighted; a north-midland
shire, dusk with moorland, ridged with mountain:
this I see. There are great moors behind and
on each hand of me; there are waves of mountains far
beyond that deep valley at my feet. The population
here must be thin, and I see no passengers on these
roads: they stretch out east, west, north, and
south — white, broad, lonely; they are all
cut in the moor, and the heather grows deep and wild
to their very verge. Yet a chance traveller
might pass by; and I wish no eye to see me now:
strangers would wonder what I am doing, lingering here
at the sign-post, evidently objectless and lost.
I might be questioned: I could give no answer
but what would sound incredible and excite suspicion.
Not a tie holds me to human society at this moment
— not a charm or hope calls me where my
fellow-creatures are — none that saw me
would have a kind thought or a good wish for me.
I have no relative but the universal mother, Nature:
I will seek her breast and ask repose.
