our, so blighted
your youth, is not your wife, nor are you her husband. See that she is
cared for as her condition demands, and you have done all that God and
humanity require of you. Let her identity, her connection with yourself,
be buried in oblivion: you are bound to impart them to no living being.
Place her in safety and comfort: shelter her degradation with secrecy,
and leave her.'

"I acted precisely on this suggestion. My father and brother had not
made my marriage known to their acquaintance; because, in the very first
letter I wrote to apprise them of the union--having already begun to
experience extreme disgust of its consequences, and, from the family
character and constitution, seeing a hideous future opening to me--I
added an urgent charge to keep it secret: and very soon the infamous
conduct of the wife my father had selected for me was such as to make him
blush to own her as his daughter-in-law. Far from desiring to publish
the connection, he became as anxious to conceal it as myself.

"To England, then, I conveyed her; a fearful voyage I had with such a
monster in the vessel. Glad was I when I at last got her to Thornfield,
and saw her safely lodged in that third-storey room, of whose secret
inner cabinet she has now for ten years made a wild beast's den--a
goblin's cell. I had some trouble in finding an attendant for her, as it
was necessary to select one on whose fidelity dependence could be placed;
for her ravings would inevitably betray my secret: besides, she had lucid
intervals of days--sometimes weeks--which she filled up with abuse of me.
At last I hired Grace Poole from the Grimbsy Retreat. She and the
surgeon, Carter (who dressed Mason's wounds that night he was stabbed and
worried), are the only two I have ever admitted to my confidence. Mrs.
Fairfax may indeed have suspected something, but she could have gained no
precise knowledge as to facts. Grace has, on the whole, proved a good
keeper; though, owing partly to a fault of her own, of which it appears
nothing can cure her, and which is incident to her harassing profession,
her vigilance has been more than once lulled and baffled. The lunatic is
both cunning and malignant; she has never failed to take advantage of her
guardian's temporary lapses; once to secrete the knife with which she
stabbed her brother, and twice to possess herself of the key of her cell,
and issue therefrom in the night-time. On the first of these occasions,