Under the Chestnut Tree

A message came for me at Thornfield, summoning me north to Gateshead, where my aunt lay dying. The woman who had shut me out as a child, who had lied about me to the man who would have cared for me, who had favored her own blood over me in every reckoning of bread and bed — that woman was asking for me in her last hours. I went, because conscience is a debt one cannot refuse to pay, though the world would call it weakness. I found her shriveled and fretful, her temper still alive though her body was failing, and I sat at her bedside and listened to the long catalogue of her grievances against heaven. She never said the words outright. I gave her what she would not ask for, because I would not carry her shadow into my own years to come. When she drew her last breath I stayed long enough to see her buried with the rites owed her, to make peace where I could with my cousins, and then I turned my face south again. Three days of road, and as I came up the drive at Thornfield the strangest truth met me at the gate: this was home. Not the house where I had been born, not the place that was mine by right, but the place I had earned room by room, by being of use and being welcomed, by Adèle's chatter and Mrs. Fairfax's kindness and the long quiet evenings with my book.

Rumours had reached even my quiet schoolroom before I left, and they had not gone cold in my absence. The neighbourhood was abuzz with talk of Mr. Rochester and Miss Ingram, of a fine match between Thornfield and the great house at Millcote, of a wedding before the leaves fell. I tried not to listen and I failed. When my master came back from his wanderings he was changed in some way I could not put a name to — more watchful, more given to baiting me with questions whose teeth I did not see until they had closed. He would speak of Blanche, her beauty, her accomplishments, her birth, and all the while he would watch me the way a man watches a glassy pool for a fish to rise. I held my peace as long as flesh could bear it. One midsummer evening, in the long walk behind the house, under a great chestnut tree whose shadow lay broad as a parlour, I could hold it no longer. I told him what I was and what I was not. I was not his hired companion, not his creature, not the dependent he could dandle on his knee today and discard tomorrow. I told him I stood before him as his equal in mind and conscience, that my heart knew its own name, and that if he wanted me it must be as a wife in honest truth, not as a plaything. I spoke as a creditor speaks a long-withheld debt, and the quiet that followed my words was the loudest thing I had ever heard.

Do you think I am an automaton? — a machine without feelings?