The Morning After: Love's Transformation — Jane Eyre

Jane wakes unsure the night was real until she sees Rochester and hears him renew his words of love. In the glass her face is no longer plain. She puts on a plain summer dress and runs down into a brilliant June morning. On the way she gives coins to a beggar-woman and a child. At breakfast Mrs Fairfax is grave. Rochester calls Jane blooming, sets the wedding in four weeks, and means to load her with jewels and take her that day to Millcote for satin and lace. She tells him not to flatter her. She will be herself, not an ape in a harlequin's jacket, and she warns that love pressed this hard will effervesce in six months. When she asks why he courted Miss Ingram, he says he wanted her as madly in love with him as he was with her. She will not be flattered out of seeing the trick.

She asks him to tell Mrs Fairfax. The housekeeper sits with the day's Scripture, her Bible open and her spectacles on it. The announcement stops her, and her eyes fix on the blank wall. She is astonished and sceptical: twenty years between them, inequality of station, gentlemen in his position do not marry their governesses. The warning chills Jane. Rochester takes her and Adèle to Millcote anyway and makes her choose dresses. He has already sent an order for jewels to his banker. Jane asks him not to send for them and not to crown her with roses. He answers that he might as well gild refined gold, and he remands the order for the time. She limits the silks to a sober black satin and a pearl-grey. The shopping humiliates her. She remembers John Eyre's letter from Madeira and resolves to write to her uncle, so she will have some independence of her own and not be dressed like a doll. She rejects his talk of a seraglio. She will remain Adèle's governess for thirty pounds a year and her board, and she asks only for his regard. He says he told Adèle there will be no school. He will have no brats, only Jane, and the child would be a restraint. Adèle calls him a liar and says she does not believe his fairy tales.

Jane will not dine with him yet. For another month she means to keep the old distance. When he presses her, she says that any charter granted under coercion he would break the moment he was released. He answers that she will force a private ceremony besides the one at the altar, with peculiar terms of her own. That evening, when his face kindles and he comes toward her, she will not have the soft scene. She makes him sing. She turns his passion aside by asking whom he means to marry now, and she refuses to die a suttee on his funeral pile. Through the four weeks she keeps a system: deferential by day, teasing when the evening comes. For a kiss on the cheek she gives a severe tweak of the ear, and she prefers these fierce favours to anything more tender. Mrs Fairfax's anxiety vanishes, which tells Jane the line is working. Rochester swears she wears him to skin and bone and threatens vengeance for a day that is coming fast. She laughs in her sleeve. Under the resistance she admits the danger the resistance cannot cancel. He has become her whole world, and more than her hope of heaven, standing between her and every thought of religion like an eclipse.