第236页
《简·爱(英文版)》章节:第236页,宠文网网友提供全文无弹窗免费在线阅读。!
little private conversation with her. She flattered me, and lavishly
displayed for my pleasure her charms and accomplishments. All the
men in her circle seemed to admire her and envy me. I was dazzled,
stimulated: my senses were excited; and being ignorant, raw, and
inexperienced, I thought I loved her. There is no folly so besotted
that the idiotic rivalries of society, the prurience, the rashness,
the blindness of youth, will not hurry a man to its commission. Her
relatives encouraged me; competitors piqued me; she allured me: a
marriage was achieved almost before I knew where I was. Oh, I have
no respect for myself when I think of that act!- an agony of inward
contempt masters me. I never loved, I never esteemed, I did not even
know her. I was not sure of the existence of one virtue in her nature:
I had marked neither modesty, nor benevolence, nor candour, nor
refinement in her mind or manners- and, I married her:- gross,
grovelling, mole-eyed blockhead that I was! With less sin I might
have- But let me remember to whom I am speaking.
'My bride's mother I had never seen: I understood she was dead. The
honeymoon over, I learned my mistake; she was only mad, and shut up in
a lunatic asylum. There was a younger brother, too- a complete dumb
idiot. The elder one, whom you have seen (and whom I cannot hate,
whilst I abhor all his kindred, because he has some grains of
affection in his feeble mind, shown in the continued interest he takes
in his wretched sister, and also in a dog-like attachment he once bore
me), will probably be in the same state one day. My father and my
brother Rowland knew all this; but they thought only of the thirty
thousand pounds, and joined in the plot against me.
'These were vile discoveries; but except for the treachery of
concealment, I should have made them no subject of reproach to my
wife, even when I found her nature wholly alien to mine, her tastes
obnoxious to me, her cast of mind common, low, narrow, and
singularly incapable of being led to anything higher, expanded to
anything larger- when I found that I could not pass a single
evening, nor even a single hour of the day with her in comfort; that
kindly conversation could not be sustained between us, because
whatever topic I started, immediately received from her a turn at once
coarse and trite, perverse and imbecile- when I perceived that I
should never have a quiet or settled household, because no servant
would bear the continued outbreaks of her violent and unreasonable
temper, or the vexations of her absurd, contradictory, exacting
orders- even then I restrained myself: I eschewed upbraiding, I
curtailed remonstrance; I tried to devour my repentance and disgust in
secret; I repressed the deep antipathy I felt.
'Jane, I will not trouble you with abominable details: some
strong words shall express what I have to say. I lived with that woman
upstairs four years, and before that time she had tried me indeed: her