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Джейн Эйр / Jane Eyre

Бронте Шарлотта

Шарлотта Бронте / Charlotte Brontë

ISBN 978-5-699-86343-3

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«Языковая компетенция – вещь капризная. Это как балет, как умение играть на музыкальном инструменте, как гимнастика, как любое действие, которое требует навыка. Либо вы идете вперед, либо начинаете сползать назад.

А самое главное – не прекращать изучение языка. Это может быть чтение оригинальной литературы. Любите читать про любовь – читайте про любовь, любите фантастику – читайте фантастику. Но читайте обязательно!»

Chapter I

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since di

I was glad of it; I never liked long walks, especially on chilly afternoons: dreadful to me was the coming home in the raw twilight, with nipped fingers and toes, and a heart saddened by the chidings of Bessie, the nurse, and humbled by the consciousness of my physical inferiority to Eliza, John, and Georgiana Reed.

The said Eliza, John, and Georgiana were now clustered round their mamma in the drawing-room: she lay reclined on a sofa by the fireside, and with her darlings about her (for the time neither quarrelling nor crying) looked perfectly happy. Me, she had dispensed from joining the group; saying, ‘She regretted to be under the necessity of keeping me at a distance; but that until she heard from Bessie, and could discover by her own observation, that I was endeavouring in good earnest to acquire a more sociable and childlike disposition, a more attractive and sprightly ma

‘What does Bessie say I have done?’ I asked.

‘Jane, I don’t like cavillers or questioners; besides, there is something truly forbidding in a child taking up her elders in that ma

A small breakfast-room adjoined the drawing-room, I slipped in there. It contained a book-case: I soon possessed myself of a volume, taking care that it should be one stored with pictures. I mounted into the window-seat: gathering up my feet, I sat cross-legged, like a Turk; and, having drawn the red moreen curtain nearly close, I was shrined in double retirement.

Folds of scarlet drapery shut in my view to the right hand; to the left were the clear panes of glass, protecting, but not separating me from the drear November day. At intervals, while turning over the leaves of my book, I studied the aspect of that winter afternoon. Afar, it offered a pale blank of mist and cloud; near, a scene of wet lawn and storm-beat shrub, with ceaseless rain sweeping away wildly before a long and lamentable blast.

I returned to my book – Bewick‘s History of British Birds: the letterpress thereof I cared little for, generally speaking; and yet there were certain introductory pages that, child as I was, I could not pass quite as a blank. They were those which treat of the haunts of sea-fowl; of ‘the solitary rocks and promontories’ by them only inhabited; of the coast of Norway, studded with isles from its southern extremity, the Lindeness, or Naze, to the North Cape —

Nor could I pass u

I ca

The two ships becalmed on a torpid sea, I believed to be marine phantoms.

The fiend pi

So was the black horned thing seated aloof on a rock, surveying a distant crowd surrounding a gallows.

Each picture told a story; mysterious often to my undeveloped understanding and imperfect feelings, yet ever profoundly interesting: as interesting as the tales Bessie sometimes narrated on winter evenings, when she chanced to be in good humour; and when, having brought her ironing-table to the nursery-hearth, she allowed us to sit about it, and while she got up Mrs. Reed’s lace frills, and crimped her night-cap borders, fed our eager attention with passages of love and adventure taken from old fairy tales and other ballads; or (as at a later period I discovered) from the pages of Pamela,[2] and Henry, Earl of Moreland.[3]

With Bewick on my knee, I was then happy: happy at least in my way. I feared nothing but interruption, and that came too soon. The breakfast-room door opened.

‘Boh! Madam Mope!’ cried the voice of John Reed; then he paused: he found the room apparently empty.

‘Where the dickens is she?’ he continued. ‘Lizzy! Georgy! (calling to his sisters) Joan is not here: tell mama she is run out into the rain – bad animal!’

‘It is well I drew the curtain,’ thought I, and I wished fervently he might not discover my hiding-place: nor would John Reed have found it out himself; he was not quick either of vision or conception; but Eliza just put her head in at the door, and said at once: ‘She is in the window-seat, to be sure, Jack.’

And I came out immediately, for I trembled at the idea of being dragged forth by the said Jack.

‘What do you want?’ I asked, with awkward diffidence.

‘Say, “What do you want, Master Reed”’ was the answer. ‘I want you to come here;’ and seating himself in an arm-chair, he intimated by a gesture that I was to approach and stand before him.

John Reed was a schoolboy of fourteen years old; four years older than I, for I was but ten; large and stout for his age, with a dingy and unwholesome skin; thick lineaments in a spacious visage, heavy limbs and large extremities. He gorged himself habitually at table, which made him bilious, and gave him a dim and bleared eye and flabby cheeks. He ought now to have been at school; but his mama had taken him home for a month or two, ‘on account of his delicate health.’ Mr. Miles, the master, affirmed that he would do very well if he had fewer cakes and sweetmeats sent him from home; but the mother’s heart turned from an opinion so harsh, and inclined rather to the more refined idea that John’s sallowness was owing to over-application and, perhaps, to pining after home.

Цитата из поэмы «Времена года» («Осень») шотландского поэта и драматурга Джеймса Томпсона (1700–1748).

Pamela – «Памела», роман Сэмюэла Ричардсона (1689–1761).

Henry, Earl of Moreland – «Генри, граф Морленда», роман Генри Брука (1703–1783).