Bessie and Miss Abbot drag Jane to the red room still resisting. Before they leave, they deliver the household verdict: she is less than a servant, God may strike her dead for her tantrums, and if Mrs. Reed turns her out she will go to the poorhouse. They lock the door.
The red room is grand and rarely used: red damask curtains, red carpet, a crimson cloth on the table at the foot of the bed. But the walls are fawn and the bed is piled white, like a pale throne in the centre. Mr. Reed died here nine years ago. Since then the room has been kept sealed and solemn.
Alone, Jane checks the door. It is locked fast. Crossing back to her seat she passes the mirror and stops. The figure she sees there is spectral: white face, glittering eyes of fear, something that looks like one of the phantoms in Bessie's stories. She returns to her ottoman.
The anger that has been bracing her begins to cool, and what replaces it is thought. She runs through the whole account: John Reed kills birds and reviles his mother and is still her darling. Eliza is headstrong, Georgiana is spiteful, and both are indulged. Jane strives to do everything right and is called naughty and sneaking from morning to night. Her head still aches and bleeds from the blow. No one reproved John. She thinks: unjust. She considers running away, or simply refusing to eat and letting herself die.
Then she thinks more clearly. She was a discord in Gateshead Hall, like nobody there, opposed to all of them in temperament and capacity. She sees, with cold precision, why Mrs. Reed cannot love her: she is an uncongenial alien, permanently intruded on a family group, bound to them only by a dead man's promise.
Daylight fails. The room grows cold. Her courage goes with the light. She begins to think about Mr. Reed buried in the church vault and whether his spirit might come to comfort her. Then a gleam of light moves across the wall. She does not know it is a lantern on the lawn. She rushes to the door in panic and shakes the lock.
Bessie and Abbot come running. Then Mrs. Reed arrives. She does not ask what happened. She extends the sentence: an hour longer, on condition of perfect stillness. Jane begs: O aunt, have pity, forgive me, I cannot endure it. Mrs. Reed thrusts her back in and locks the door.
Jane has a fit. Unconsciousness closes the scene.
Coming Up in Chapter 3
The next thing I remember is, waking up with a feeling as if I had had a frightful nightmare, and seeing before me a terrible red glare, crossed with thick black bars. I heard voices, too, speaking wi.
