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."

CHAPTER XXVII

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