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Well, you too have power over me, and may injure me: yet I dare not
show you where I am vulnerable, lest, faithful and friendly as you
are, you should transfix me at once.'
'If you have no more to fear from Mr. Mason than you have from
me, sir, you are very safe.'
'God grant it may be so! Here, Jane, is an arbour; sit down.'
The arbour was an arch in the wall, lined with ivy; it contained
a rustic seat. Mr. Rochester took it, leaving room, however, for me:
but I stood before him.
'Sit,' he said; 'the bench is long enough for two. You don't
hesitate to take a place at my side, do you? Is that wrong, Jane?'
I answered him by assuming it: to refuse would, I felt, have been
unwise.
'Now, my little friend, while the sun drinks the dew- while all the
flowers in this old garden awake and expand, and the birds fetch their
young ones' breakfast out of the Thornfield, and the early bees do
their first spell of work- I'll put a case to you, which you must
endeavour to suppose your own: but first, look at me, and tell me
you are at ease, and not fearing that I err in detaining you, or
that you err in staying.'
'No, sir; I am content.'
'Well then, Jane, call to aid your fancy:- suppose you were no
longer a girl well reared and disciplined, but a wild boy indulged
from childhood upwards; imagine yourself in a remote foreign land;
conceive that you there commit a capital error, no matter of what
nature or from what motives, but one whose consequences must follow
you through life and taint all your existence. Mind, I don't say a
crime; I am not speaking of shedding of blood or any other guilty act,
which might make the perpetrator amenable to the law: my word is
error. The results of what you have done become in time to you utterly
insupportable; you take measures to obtain relief: unusual measures,
but neither unlawful nor culpable. Still you are miserable; for hope
has quitted you on the very confines of life: your sun at noon darkens
in an eclipse, which you feel will not leave it till the time of
setting. Bitter and base associations have become the sole food of
your memory: you wander here and there, seeking rest in exile:
happiness in pleasure- I mean in heartless, sensual pleasure- such
as dulls intellect and blights feeling. Heart-weary and soul-withered,
you come home after years of voluntary banishment: you make a new
acquaintance- how or where no matter: you find in this stranger much
of the good and bright qualities which you have sought for twenty
years, and never before encountered; and they are all fresh,
healthy, without soil and without taint. Such society revives,
regenerates: you feel better days come back-higher wishes, purer
feelings; you desire to recommence your life, and to spend what
remains to you of days in a way more worthy of an immortal being. To
attain this end, are you justified in overleaping an obstacle of
custom-a mere conventional impediment which neither your conscience