Jane Eyre, Chapter 2 - Charlotte Brontë.mp3

[00:00.219]Jane Eyre
[00:01.221]
[00:01.954]By Charlotte Brontë
[00:02.961]
[00:03.968]Chapter 1
[00:04.468]
[00:06.220]There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.
[00:09.219]We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning;
[00:14.218]but since dinner
[00:15.720](Mrs. Reed, when there was no company, dined early)
[00:19.721]the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating,
[00:25.645]that further out-door exercise was now out of the question.
[00:29.393]
[00:30.394]I was glad of it:
[00:31.394]I never liked long walks,
[00:32.895]especially on chilly afternoons:
[00:35.138]dreadful to me was the coming home in the raw twilight,
[00:39.048]with nipped fingers and toes,
[00:40.805]and a heart saddened by the chidings of Bessie, the nurse,
[00:44.956]and humbled by the consciousness of my physical inferiority to Eliza, John, and Georgiana Reed.
[00:51.959]
[00:52.715]The said Eliza, John, and Georgiana
[00:55.464]were now clustered round their mama in the drawing-room:
[00:58.464]she lay reclined on a sofa by the fireside,
[01:01.466]and with her darlings about her
[01:03.716](for the time neither quarrelling nor crying)
[01:06.717]looked perfectly happy.
[01:08.714]Me, she had dispensed from joining the group;
[01:11.963]saying, “She regretted to be under the necessity of keeping me at a distance;
[01:16.971]but that until she heard from Bessie, and could discover by her own observation, that I was endeavouring in good earnest to acquire a more sociable and childlike disposition, a more attractive and sprightly manner—something lighter, franker, more natural, as it were—she really must exclude me from privileges intended only for contented, happy, little children.”
[01:38.966]
[01:39.967]“What does Bessie say I have done?” I asked.
[01:42.903]
[01:43.899]“Jane, I don't like cavillers or questioners;
[01:47.398]besides, there is something truly forbidding in a child taking up her elders in that manner.
[01:52.653]Be seated somewhere;
[01:54.151]and until you can speak pleasantly, remain silent.”
[01:58.401]
[01:59.651]A breakfast-room adjoined the drawing-room,
[02:01.902]I slipped in there.
[02:03.141]It contained a bookcase:
[02:05.149]I soon possessed myself of a volume,
[02:08.152]taking care that it should be one stored with pictures.
[02:11.151]I mounted into the window-seat:
[02:13.402]gathering up my feet,
[02:14.900]I sat cross-legged, like a Turk;
[02:16.900]and, having drawn the red moreen curtain nearly close,
[02:20.144]I was shrined in double retirement.
[02:22.402]
[02:23.647]Folds of scarlet drapery shut in my view to the right hand;
[02:27.897]to the left were the clear panes of glass,
[02:30.152]protecting, but not separating me from the drear November day.
[02:33.902]At intervals, while turning over the leaves of my book,
[02:37.398]I studied the aspect of that winter afternoon.
[02:40.398]Afar, it offered a pale blank of mist and cloud;
[02:44.650]near a scene of wet lawn and storm-beat shrub,
[02:48.141]with ceaseless rain sweeping away wildly before a long and lamentable blast.
[02:54.150]
[02:54.903]I returned to my book—Bewick's History of British Birds:
[02:58.648]the letterpress thereof I cared little for, generally speaking;
[03:02.650]and yet there were certain introductory pages that,
[03:06.152]child as I was,
[03:07.650]I could not pass quite as a blank.
[03:10.454]They were those which treat of the haunts of sea-fowl;
[03:13.708]of “the solitary rocks and promontories” by them only inhabited;
[03:19.181]of the coast of Norway,
[03:20.929]studded with isles from its southern extremity, the Lindeness, or Naze, to the North Cape〞
[03:26.927]
[03:27.681]“Where the Northern Ocean, in vast whirls,
[03:30.359]Boils round the naked, melancholy isles
[03:33.859]Of farthest Thule; and the Atlantic surge
[03:37.361]Pours in among the stormy Hebrides.”
[03:39.858]
[03:40.585]Nor could I pass unnoticed the suggestion of the bleak shores of
[03:44.337]Lapland, Siberia, Spitzbergen, Nova Zembla, Iceland, Greenland,
[03:50.291]with “the vast sweep of the Arctic Zone,
[03:53.049]and those forlorn regions of dreary space,〞
[03:56.304]that reservoir of frost and snow,
[03:59.053]where firm fields of ice, the accumulation of centuries of winters,
[04:04.302]glazed in Alpine heights above heights,
[04:07.546]surround the pole,
[04:08.802]and concentre the multiplied rigours of extreme cold.”
[04:13.543]Of these death-white realms
[04:16.111]I formed an idea of my own:
[04:18.175]shadowy,
[04:19.174]like all the half-comprehended notions that float dim through children's brains,
[04:25.188]but strangely impressive.
[04:27.422]The words in these introductory pages
[04:30.170]connected themselves with the succeeding vignettes,
[04:32.676]and gave significance to the rock standing up alone in a sea of billow and spray;
[04:37.924]to the broken boat stranded on a desolate coast;
[04:41.004]to the cold and ghastly moon glancing through bars of cloud at a wreck just sinking.
[04:47.013]
[04:47.513]I cannot tell
[04:48.763]what sentiment haunted the quite solitary churchyard,
[04:52.263]with its inscribed headstone;
[04:54.013]its gate, its two trees,
[04:56.512]its low horizon, girdled by a broken wall,
[05:00.513]and its newly-risen crescent,
[05:02.514]attesting the hour of eventide.
[05:05.010]
[05:06.010]The two ships becalmed on a torpid sea,
[05:08.763]I believed to be marine phantoms.
[05:11.012]
[05:11.505]The fiend pinning down the thief's pack behind him,
[05:15.267]I passed over quickly:
[05:16.262]it was an object of terror.
[05:18.513]
[05:19.512]So was the black horned thing seated aloof on a rock,
[05:23.761]surveying a distant crowd surrounding a gallows.
[05:27.012]
[05:27.763]Each picture told a story;
[05:29.255]mysterious often to my undeveloped understanding and imperfect feelings,
[05:34.262]yet ever profoundly interesting:
[05:36.712]as interesting as the tales Bessie sometimes narrated
[05:40.216]on winter evenings,
[05:41.209]when she chanced to be in good humour;
[05:43.211]and when, having brought her ironing-table to the nursery hearth,
[05:46.965]she allowed us to sit about it,
[05:48.712]and while she got up Mrs. Reed's lace frills,
[05:51.961]and crimped her nightcap borders,
[05:53.963]fed our eager attention with passages of love and adventure taken
[05:58.903]from old fairy tales and other ballads;
[06:01.899]or (as at a later period I discovered)
[06:05.148]from the pages of Pamela, and Henry, Earl of Moreland.
[06:09.398]
[06:10.141]With Bewick on my knee,
[06:11.400]I was then happy:
[06:12.898]happy at least in my way.
[06:14.899]I feared nothing but interruption,
[06:17.648]and that came too soon.
[06:20.401]The breakfast-room door opened.
[06:22.149]
[06:23.649]“Boh! Madam Mope!”
[06:25.899]cried the voice of John Reed;
[06:27.893]then he paused:
[06:29.648]he found the room apparently empty.