第63页
《简·爱(英文版)》章节:第63页,宠文网网友提供全文无弹窗免费在线阅读。!
now I remembered that the real world was wide, and that a varied field
of hopes and fears, of sensations and excitements, awaited those who
had courage to go forth into its expanse, to seek real knowledge of
life amidst its perils.
I went to my window, opened it, and looked out. There were the
two wings of the building; there was the garden; there were the skirts
of Lowood; there was the hilly horizon. My eye passed all other
objects to rest on those most remote, the blue peaks; it was those I
longed to surmount; all within their boundary of rock and heath seemed
prison-ground, exile limits. I traced the white road winding round the
base of one mountain, and vanishing in a gorge between two; how I
longed to follow it farther! I recalled the time when I had
travelled that very road in a coach; I remembered descending that hill
at twilight; an age seemed to have elapsed since the day which brought
me first to Lowood, and I had never quitted it since. My vacations had
all been spent at school: Mrs. Reed had never sent for me to
Gateshead; neither she nor any of her family had ever been to visit
me. I had had no communication by letter or message with the outer
world: school-rules, school-duties, school-habits and notions, and
voices, and faces, and phrases, and costumes, and preferences, and
antipathies- such was what I knew of existence. And now I felt that it
was not enough; I tired of the routine of eight years in one
afternoon. I desired liberty; for liberty I gasped; for liberty I
uttered a prayer; it seemed scattered on the wind then faintly
blowing. I abandoned it and framed a humbler supplication; for change,
stimulus: that petition, too, seemed swept off into vague space:
'Then,' I cried, half desperate, 'grant me at least a new servitude!'
Here a bell, ringing the hour of supper, called me downstairs.
I was not free to resume the interrupted chain of my reflections
till bedtime: even then a teacher who occupied the same room with me
kept me from the subject to which I longed to recur, by a prolonged
effusion of small talk. How I wished sleep would silence her. It
seemed as if, could I but go back to the idea which had last entered
my mind as I stood at the window, some inventive suggestion would rise
for my relief.
Miss Gryce snored at last; she was a heavy Welsh-woman, and till
now her habitual nasal strains had never been regarded by me in any
other light than as a nuisance; to-night I hailed the first deep notes
with satisfaction; I was debarrassed of interruption; my
half-effaced thought instantly revived.
'A new servitude! There is something in that,' I soliloquised
(mentally, be it understood; I did not talk aloud). 'I know there
is, because it does not sound too sweet; it is not like such words
as Liberty, Excitement, Enjoyment: delightful sounds truly; but no
more than sounds for me; and so hollow and fleeting that it is mere
waste of time to listen to them. But Servitude! That must be matter of