《简·爱：自传》

第一章 / CHAPTER IV

The wind howled off the moors on that grey November afternoon at Gateshead Hall, rain lashing the leaded windows of the drawing-room where ten-year-old Jane Eyre stood excluded from the warm circle of her aunt, Mrs. Reed, and her cousins Eliza, John, and Georgiana. Mrs. Reed had declared Jane unwelcome until she cultivated a “sociable, childlike disposition” lighter and franker than her usual quiet, defiant self, and Jane was secretly glad of the storm: she hated long walks home in the raw twilight, her fingers and toes nipped by cold, her pride pricked by the awareness of her physical inferiority to her plump, favored cousins.

She retreated to the adjoining breakfast room, climbing into the window seat hidden behind a heavy red curtain with a tattered copy of Bewick’s History of British Birds. She lost herself in the book’s descriptions of remote Arctic coasts, lonely sea-bird haunts, and shipwrecks on desolate shores, the bleak, isolated landscapes echoing the hollow ache of her exclusion. Her peace was shattered when John Reed, her bullying fourteen-year-old cousin, burst into the room, taunted her for being a dependent with no claim to the family’s books, and beat her so hard he cut her head open with a flung volume. Years of unpunished abuse boiled over: Jane called him a tyrant and a slave-driver, fought back when he lunged at her, and only the intervention of Mrs. Reed and the servants pulled them apart. Enraged, Mrs. Reed ordered Jane locked in the red-room, the cold, seldom-used chamber where Jane’s uncle, Mr. Reed, had died nine years prior.

Jane fought every step of the way upstairs, and was thrown into the drafty, crimson-adorned room, haunted by the ghost stories Bessie had told of the house. As the light faded, her fear spiraled: she convinced herself a strange darting light was Mr. Reed’s ghost come to avenge her, screamed until her throat was raw, and had a fit from terror and distress. She woke in the nursery under the care of Mr. Lloyd, the family apothecary, who tended her cut head and listened quietly when she admitted she was miserable, that John beat her and her aunt locked her in haunted rooms. When he asked if she would like to go to school, Jane seized on the idea: school would mean escape from Gateshead, a new life far from the Reeds’ cruelty. She later overheard Bessie and the maid Miss Abbot discussing her parentage: her father was a poor clergyman who married her mother against her family’s wishes, both died of typhus within a month of each other, leaving her an orphan with no known relatives, and Abbot dismissed her as a “toad” no one could pity even if she were pretty.