CHAPTER XXIII 319
" It is a long way to Ireland, Janet, and I am sorry to send my little friend on such weary travels: but if I can ' t do better, how is it to be helped? Are you anything akin to me, do you think, Jane?"
I could risk no sort of answer by this time: my heart was still.
" Because," he said, " I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you-- especially when you are near me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous Channel, and two hundred miles or so of land come broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapt; and then I ' ve a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly. As for you,-- you ' d forget me."
" That I NEVER should, sir: You know-- " Impossible to proceed. " Jane, do you hear that nightingale singing in the wood? Listen!"
In listening, I sobbed convulsively; for I could repress what I endured no longer; I was obliged to yield, and I was shaken from head to foot with acute distress. When I did speak, it was only to express an impetuous wish that I had never been born, or never come to Thornfield.
" Because you are sorry to leave it?"
The vehemence of emotion, stirred by grief and love within me, was claiming mastery, and struggling for full sway, and asserting a right to predominate, to overcome, to live, rise, and reign at last: yes,-- and to speak.
" I grieve to leave Thornfield: I love Thornfield:- I love it, because I have lived in it a full and delightful life,-- momentarily at least. I have not been trampled on. I have not been petrified. I have not been buried with inferior minds, and excluded from every glimpse of communion with what is bright and energetic and high. I have talked, face to face, with what I reverence,