'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.
'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, 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.'
Bessie now returned; at the same moment the carriage was heard rolling up the gravel-walk.
'Is that your mistress, nurse?' asked Mr. Lloyd. 'I should like to speak to her before I go.'
Bessie invited him to walk into the breakfast-room, and led the way out. In the interview which followed between him and Mrs. Reed, I presume, from after-occurrences, that the apothecary ventured to recommend my being sent to school; and the recommendation was no doubt readily enough adopted; for as Abbot said, in discussing the subject with Bessie when both sat sewing in the nursery one night, after I was in bed, and, as they thought, asleep, 'Missis was, she dared say, glad enough to get rid of such a tiresome, ill- conditioned child, who always looked as if she were watching everybody, and scheming plots underhand.'
Abbot, I think, gave me credit for being a sort of infantine Guy Fawkes.On that same occasion I learned, for the first time, from
Miss Abbot's communications to Bessie, that my father had been a poor clergyman; that my mother had married him against the wishes of her friends, who considered the match beneath her; that my grandfather Reed was so irritated at her disobedience, he cut her off without a shilling; that after my mother and father had been married a year, the latter
caught the typhus fever while visiting among the poor of a large manufacturing town where his curacy was situated, and where that disease was then prevalent: that my mother
took the infection from him, and both died within a month of each other.