CHAPTER XXVII 380
Hall -- this accursed place -- this tent of Achan -- this insolent vault , offering the ghastliness of living death to the light of the open sky -- this narrow stone hell , with its one real fiend , worse than a legion of such as we imagine . Jane , you shall not stay here , nor will I . I was wrong ever to bring you to Thornfield Hall , knowing as I did how it was haunted . I charged them to conceal from you , before I ever saw you , all knowledge of the curse of the place ; merely because I feared Adele never would have a governess to stay if she knew with what inmate she was housed , and my plans would not permit me to remove the maniac elsewhere -- though I possess an old house , Ferndean Manor , even more retired and hidden than this , where I could have lodged her safely enough , had not a scruple about the unhealthiness of the situation , in the heart of a wood , made my conscience recoil from the arrangement . Probably those damp walls would soon have eased me of her charge : but to each villain his own vice ; and mine is not a tendency to indirect assassination , even of what I most hate .
" Concealing the mad-woman ' s neighbourhood from you , however , was something like covering a child with a cloak and laying it down near a upas-tree : that demon ' s vicinage is poisoned , and always was . But I ' ll shut up Thornfield Hall : I ' ll nail up the front door and board the lower windows : I ' ll give Mrs . Poole two hundred a year to live here with MY WIFE , as you term that fearful hag : Grace will do much for money , and she shall have her son , the keeper at Grimsby Retreat , to bear her company and be at hand to give her aid in the paroxysms , when MY WIFE is prompted by her familiar to burn people in their beds at night , to stab them , to bite their flesh from their bones , and so on -- "
" Sir ," I interrupted him , " you are inexorable for that unfortunate lady : you speak of her with hate -- with vindictive antipathy . It is cruel -- she cannot help being mad ."
" Jane , my little darling ( so I will call you , for so you are ), you don ' t know what you are talking about ; you misjudge me again : it is not because she is mad I hate her . If you were mad , do you think I should hate you ?"
" I do indeed , sir ."