‘Of Mr Reed’s ghost I am: he died in that room, and was laid out there. Neither Bessie nor anyone else will go into it at night, if they can help it; and it was cruel to shut me up alone without a candle – so cruel that I think I shall never forget it.’
‘Nonsense! And is it that makes you so miserable? Are you afraid now in daylight?’
‘No: but night will come again before long: and besides – I am unhappy – very unhappy, for other things.’
‘What other things? Can you tell me some of them?’
How much I wished to reply fully to this question! How difficult it was to frame any answer! Children can feel, but they cannot analyse their feelings; and if the analysis is partially effected in thought, they know not how to express the result of the process in words. Fearful, however, of losing this first and only opportunity of relieving my grief by imparting it, I, after a disturbed pause, contrived to frame a meagre, though, as far as it went, true response.
‘For one thing, I have no father or mother, brothers or sisters.’
‘You have a kind aunt and cousins.’
Again I paused; then bunglingly enounced –
‘But John Reed knocked me down, and my aunt shut me up in the red-room.’
Mr Lloyd a second time produced his snuff-box.
‘Don’t you think Gateshead Hall a very beautiful house?’ asked he. ‘Are you not very thankful to have such a fine place to live at?’
‘It is not my house, sir; and Abbot says I have less right to be here than a servant.’
‘Pooh! you can’t be silly enough to wish to leave such a splendid place?’
‘If I had anywhere else to go, I should be glad to leave it; but I can never get away from Gateshead till I am a woman.’
‘Perhaps you may – who knows? Have you any relations besides Mrs Reed?’
‘I think not, sir.’
‘None belonging to your father?’
‘I don’t know: I asked Aunt Reed once, and she said possibly I might have some poor, low relations called Eyre, but she knew nothing about them.’
‘If you had such, would you like to go to them?’
I reflected. Poverty looks grim to grown people; still more so to children: they have not much idea of industrious, working, respectable poverty; they think of the word only as connected with ragged clothes, scanty food, fireless grates, rude manners, and debasing vices: poverty for me was synonymous with degradation.8
‘No; I should not like to belong to poor people,’ was my reply.
‘Not even if they were kind to you?’
I shook my head: I could not see how poor people had the means of being kind; and then to learn to speak like them, to adopt their manners, to be uneducated, to grow up like one of the poor women I saw sometimes nursing their children or washing their clothes at the cottage doors of the village of Gateshead: no, I was not heroic enough to purchase liberty at the price of caste.
‘But are your relatives so very poor? Are they working people?’
‘I cannot tell; Aunt Reed says if I have any they must be a beggarly set: I should not like to go a-begging.’
‘Would you like to go to school?’
Again I reflected: I scarcely knew what school was; Bessie sometimes spoke of it as a place where young ladies sat in the stocks, wore backboards,9 and were expected to be exceedingly genteel and precise: John Reed hated his school and abused his master; but John Reed’s tastes were no rule for mine, and if Bessie’s accounts of school discipline (gathered from the young ladies of a family where she had lived before coming to Gateshead) were somewhat appalling, her details of certain accomplishments attained by these same young ladies were, I thought, equally attractive. She boasted of beautiful paintings of landscapes and flowers by them executed; of songs they could sing and pieces they could play, of purses they could net, of French books they could translate; till my spirit was moved to emulation, as I listened. Besides, school would be a complete change; it implied a long journey, an entire separation from Gateshead, an entrance into a new life.
‘I should indeed like to go to school,’ was the audible conclusion of my musings.
‘Well, well; who knows what may happen?’ said Mr Lloyd, as he got up. ‘The child ought to have change of air and scene,’ he added, speaking to himself; ‘nerves not in a good state.’