第229页
《简·爱(英文版)》章节:第229页,宠文网网友提供全文无弹窗免费在线阅读。!
remote mountains, and felt the torrent come: to rise I had no will, to
flee I had no strength. I lay faint, longing to be dead. One idea only
still throbbed life-like within me- a remembrance of God: it begot
an unuttered prayer: these words went wandering up and down in my
rayless mind, as something that should be whispered, but no energy was
found to express them-
'Be not far from me, for trouble is near: there is none to help.'
It was near: and as I had lifted no petition to Heaven to avert it-
as I had neither joined my hands, nor bent my knees, nor moved my
lips- it came: in full heavy swing the torrent poured over me. The
whole consciousness of my life lorn, my love lost, my hope quenched,
my faith death-struck, swayed full and mighty above me in one sullen
mass. That bitter hour cannot be described: in truth, 'the waters came
into my soul; I sank in deep mire: I felt no standing: I came into
deep waters; the floods overflowed me.'
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CHAPTER XXVII
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SOME time in the afternoon I raised my head, and looking round
and seeing the western sun gilding the sign of its decline on the
wall, I asked, 'What am I to do?'
But the answer my mind gave- 'Leave Thornfield at once'- was so
prompt, so dread, that I stopped my ears. I said I could not bear such
words now. 'That I am not Edward Rochester's bride is the least part
of my woe,' I alleged: 'that I have wakened out of most glorious
dreams, and found them all void and vain, is a horror I could bear and
master; but that I must leave him decidedly, instantly, entirely, is
intolerable. I cannot do it.'
But, then, a voice within me averred that I could do it and
foretold that I should do it. I wrestled with my own resolution: I
wanted to be weak that I might avoid the awful passage of further
suffering I saw laid out for me; and Conscience, turned tyrant, held
Passion by the throat, told her tauntingly, she had yet but dipped her
dainty foot in the slough, and swore that with that arm of iron he
would thrust her down to unsounded depths of agony.
'Let me be torn away, then!' I cried. 'Let another help me!'
'No; you shall tear yourself away, none shall help you: you shall
yourself pluck out your right eye; yourself cut off your right hand:
your heart shall be the victim, and you the priest to transfix it.'
I rose up suddenly, terror-struck at the solitude which so ruthless
a judge haunted,- at the silence which so awful a voice filled. My
head swam as I stood erect. I perceived that I was sickening from
excitement and inanition; neither meat nor drink had passed my lips
that day, for I had taken no breakfast. And, with a strange pang, I
now reflected that, long as I had been shut up here, no message had
been sent to ask how I was, or to invite me to come down: not even