Some time in the afternoon Jane lifts her head and asks what she must do. The answer is prompt and dreadful: leave Thornfield at once. She stops her ears. Not being Edward Rochester's bride is the least of her woe. She sees a further passage of suffering laid out, and Conscience, turned tyrant, holds Passion by the throat. No one has sent to ask after her. Weak from fasting, she stumbles from the room and is caught by Rochester, who has been waiting at her door. He carries her to the library. He wanted tears on his breast, not grief spent on a senseless floor. She forgives him inwardly and cannot say so. She turns from his kiss.
She tells him there is neither room nor claim for her. Adèle must have a new governess. He calls Thornfield accursed and means to shut it up. He offers a whitewashed villa on the Mediterranean, a happy, guarded, innocent life, and says he does not mean to make her his mistress. She refuses. His wife is living. To go would make her the thing he says he will spare her. He longs for a fraction of Samson's strength to break the entanglement. When violence rises in him she takes his clenched hand and listens.
He asks whether she knew he was not the eldest son, and whether she had heard that his father was avaricious. The father meant to keep the property together, so Edward, once he left college, was sent to Jamaica with a bride whose family would give him thirty thousand pounds. In Spanish Town, Bertha Mason was praised for her beauty, and that much was true: tall, dark, and majestic, in the style of Blanche Ingram. Her relatives encouraged him. Rivals piqued him. The marriage was achieved almost before he knew where he was. He never loved her, and he has no respect for himself when he recalls the act. Her character ripened with frightful speed. She was intemperate and unchaste. In the interval his older brother died, and at the end of four years his father died too. He was rich enough, and poor to hideous indigence.
He lived with that woman four years, and before the doctors shut her up she had already tried him. He will not give the abominable details. He brought her to England and to Thornfield, and hired Grace Poole from the Grimsby Retreat. Grace and the surgeon Carter, who dressed Mason the night he was bitten, are the only two he has ever trusted with the facts. Mrs Fairfax may have suspected something. She could not have known it. Grace has been a good keeper, except for a fault nothing can cure, the fault that lets Bertha out. Rochester wandered. He tried mistresses and despised the steps: first Céline Varens, then an Italian, Giacinta, then a German, Clara. Their beauty was nothing to him in a few weeks. He expected no peace when he came back to Thornfield. On a stile in Hay Lane he passed a quiet little figure as negligently as he passed the pollard willow opposite.
He made that figure talk, and found contrasts: dress and manner restricted by rule, an air often diffident, a nature refined and unused to society, afraid of a solecism. He says Jane is his sympathy and his better self. He asks her to promise, I will be yours, Mr Rochester. She answers, Mr Rochester, I will not be yours. When conscience and reason turn traitor she plants her foot. The more solitary, friendless, and unsustained she is, the more she will respect herself. She will keep the law given by God and sanctioned by man, and hold the principles she received when she was sane. He reads her face. His fury rises, then breaks on something he cannot cage: a resolute will looking out of her eye, a captive that would escape before he could call himself owner of the body. He consents that she may withdraw, and tells her she leaves him to despair.
She gets as far as the door, then comes back, kneels, kisses his cheek, and blesses him before she flees. That night a voice whispers in her heart, My daughter, flee temptation. She answers, Mother, I will. It is still night, but July nights are short. She leaves the pearl necklace he forced on her a few days ago. It belongs to the visionary bride who melted in air. She puts her twenty shillings in her pocket, ties on her straw bonnet, pins her shawl, and takes bread and water because she may have to walk far. She oils the key and the lock of the kitchen side-door and slips out while he paces, sleepless. Passing his chamber she almost goes in to say she will love him and live with him through life till death. She does not. She walks until she falls, then gives a coachman all the money she has to set her down where she is sure Mr Rochester has no connections. She prays that the reader may never appeal to Heaven in prayers so hopeless, or dread being the instrument of evil to what they wholly love.
