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What was I? In the midst of my pain of heart and frantic effort of principle, I abhorred myself.

I had no solace from self-approbation: none even from self-respect.

I had injured-wounded-left my master.

I was hateful in my own eyes.

Still I could not turn, nor retrace one step.

God must have led me on.

As to my own will or conscience, impassioned grief had trampled one and stifled the other.

I was weeping wildly as I walked along my solitary way: fast, fast I went like one delirious.

A weakness, beginning inwardly, extending to the limbs, seized me, and I fell: I lay on the ground some minutes, pressing my face to the wet turf.

I had some fear-or hope-that here I should die: but I was soon up; crawling forwards on my hands and knees, and then again raised to my feet-as eager and as determined as ever to reach the road.

When I got there, I was forced to sit to rest me under the hedge; and while I sat, I heard wheels, and saw a coach come on.

I stood up and lifted my hand; it stopped.

I asked where it was going: the driver named a place a long way off, and where I was sure Mr. Rochester had no connections.

I asked for what sum he would take me there; he said thirty shillings; I answered I had but twenty; well, he would try to make it do.

He further gave me leave to get into the inside, as the vehicle was empty: I entered, was shut in, and it rolled on its way.

Gentle reader, may you never feel what I then felt! May your eyes never shed such stormy, scalding, heart-wrung tears as poured from mine.

May you never appeal to Heaven in prayers so hopeless and so agonised as in that hour left my lips; for never may you, like me, dread to be the instrument of evil to what you wholly love.

Two days are passed.

It is a summer evening; the coachman has set me down at a place called Whitcross; he could take me no farther for the sum I had given, and I was not possessed of another shilling in the world.

The coach is a mile off by this time; I am alone.

At this moment I discover that I forgot to take my parcel out of the pocket of the coach, where I had placed it for safety; there it remains, there it must remain; and now, I am absolutely destitute.

Whitcross is no town, nor even a hamlet; it is but a stone pillar set up where four roads meet: whitewashed, I suppose, to be more obvious at a distance and in darkness.

Four arms spring from its summit: the nearest town to which these point is, according to the inscription, distant ten miles; the farthest, above twenty.

From the well-known names of these towns I learn in what county I have lighted; a north-midland shire, dusk with moorland, ridged with mountain: this I see.

Chapter 28

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