For a week Jane has dreamed of an infant, sometimes hushed in her arms, sometimes wailing. She does not laugh at presentiments. Bessie once said that dreams of children mean trouble, and Jane has been turning that saying over. The omen arrives in daylight. Robert Leaven, the Reeds' former coachman and now Bessie's husband, comes to Thornfield in mourning.
John Reed is dead. He ruined himself and half ruined his family, and he is supposed to have killed himself. The news brought on a stroke in Mrs Reed, who has been asking for Jane. Jane seeks leave in the billiard room. Blanche Ingram calls her that person and asks what the creeping creature wants. Rochester learns for the first time that Mrs Reed is Jane's aunt and that the Reeds cast her off. He offers a note of fifty pounds when he owes her fifteen. She will take only her due. He scowls, then puts ten pounds in her hand and keeps the rest, saying that fifty would let her stay away three months, and that he is her banker for forty. She tells him Adèle should go to school before a bride arrives, and that she herself must seek another situation. If she advertises, he says, she may as well walk up the pyramids of Egypt. He forbids it. At the door he makes her teach him the ceremony of parting. She says, Farewell, Mr Rochester, for the present. He repeats it.
She reaches Gateshead the next evening. Bessie cries that she knew Jane would come. Jane kisses her and asks whether she is too late, and whether Mrs Reed is still alive. Jane measures this return against the bitter morning she left for Lowood nine years earlier and finds herself steadier. Eliza is gaunt, settled, and already planning a retirement that will put barriers between herself and a frivolous world. She will not take Georgiana with her. Georgiana is no longer the slight child of eleven. She is plump, vain, and full of London. Both sisters treat Jane with a cold superiority that no longer moves her much. She has other things to think about. The gaping wound of her old wrongs is healed. She feels firmer trust in her own powers, and less dread of oppression. The flame of resentment has gone out.
Mrs Reed, waking, rejects Jane's kiss. She says Jane watched her like a mad thing or a fiend, that no child ever spoke as Jane did, and that she was glad to get her out of the house. She asks what they did with her at Lowood and wishes the fever there had finished her. Jane stays.
More than ten days pass in that house. Jane draws to fill the hours and finds she has been sketching Rochester's face without meaning to. Georgiana talks of admirers and a brilliant winter in London. Eliza keeps a rigid day of prayer, stitching, accounts, and her diary. One afternoon Eliza stops her embroidery and takes Georgiana up: a more vain animal never cumbered the earth, she makes no use of life, and she only fastens her feebleness on someone else's strength. They have nothing in common. Each will take her own course. Georgiana calls Eliza selfish and heartless. Jane, meanwhile, draws a watercolour for Georgiana's album and walks the grounds with her until the talk turns confidential. The confidence does not change the sickroom.
On a wet afternoon Jane finds that room unwatched. The fire is dying. Mrs Reed lies still, her face sunk in the pillows. Jane renews the fuel and the bedclothes, then stands at the window while the rain beats the glass. Mrs Reed revives, fails to know her at first, and sends her to the dressing-case for a letter. It is three years old, from John Eyre in Madeira. He is unmarried and childless. He means to adopt Jane and leave her what he has. Mrs Reed confesses the answer she sent: she was sorry for his disappointment, but Jane Eyre had died of typhus fever at Lowood. She says Jane was born to be her tormentor, and that Jane may expose the falsehood as soon as she likes. Jane says she was a child then, that eight or nine years have passed, and she asks her aunt to kiss her. Mrs Reed will not touch her cheek. She says Jane oppresses her by leaning over the bed. Jane answers at last that her aunt may love her or hate her, and that she has Jane's full and free forgiveness. It is too late for Mrs Reed to change the habit of her mind. At midnight she dies without reconciliation. In the morning Jane and Eliza look at the body. Eliza says that with such a constitution her mother should have lived to old age, and that trouble shortened her life. A spasm crosses Eliza's mouth. She leaves the room, and Jane leaves with her. Neither of them has dropped a tear.
