Sophie is so long dressing Jane that Rochester sends up to ask why she does not come. In the mirror Jane sees a robed and veiled stranger, not herself. Jane sees a robed stranger in the mirror and is hurried down by Rochester, grim and impetuous, to the church. Two unknown men linger by the Rochester vault. At the altar, when the clergyman asks for impediments, a voice declares the marriage cannot proceed. Mr. Briggs, a London solicitor, states that Rochester has a living wife. Jane's nerves vibrate as they never have to thunder; Rochester neither denies nor releases her, his face like colourless rock. Briggs reads a certificate of Rochester's marriage in Jamaica to Bertha Antoinetta Mason. Mason steps forward and confirms she lives at Thornfield now.
Rochester admits he meant to be a bigamist and invites them all to see his wife. At the third-storey room Grace Poole tends the fire while a clothed figure grovels and growls. The maniac reveals the same purple face Jane saw at her veil. She attacks Rochester; he binds her and shows the company the contrast between Bertha and Jane. Briggs tells Jane she is cleared of blame and that her uncle John Eyre, learning of the intended marriage through Mason in Madeira, sent help to stop it though he lies dying.
When the house empties Jane bolts her door, takes off the wedding dress, and puts on yesterday's stuff gown. Only then, at last, does thought begin, and it begins on a life that is already gone. The Jane Eyre of yesterday is gone: ardent bride become cold solitary girl again. Rochester is not what she thought; stainless truth is gone from him though she will not call it vice. Real affection, she believes, he cannot have had; fitful passion is balked. She must leave him, but how and when she cannot yet see. A prayer forms without words: Be not far from me, for trouble is near. The torrent comes, and she sinks under the consciousness that her life is lorn, her love lost, her hope quenched, her faith death-struck.
Coming Up in Chapter 27
Alone in her room, Jane asks what she must do, and the answer is to leave Thornfield. Rochester begs her to come to a villa in the south of France. She tells him she will not be his. Before dawn she leaves his pearls and walks out with twenty shillings.
