Spring's Cruel Irony: Beauty and Death at Lowood — Jane Eyre

Spring arrives at Lowood and the cruel winter softens. Jane's frostbitten feet heal, the garden greens, and the girls take walks among the snow-drops, crocuses, auriculas, and pansies. April advances to May. The forest beyond the walls reveals itself as a hill-hollow rich in verdure, with a bright beck full of dark stones and sparkling eddies. But the same dell that makes Lowood beautiful makes it sick: typhus breeds in its fog and breathes through the dormitory and schoolroom. Forty-five of the eighty pupils fall ill at once. Classes break up, rules relax. The cross housekeeper flees the contagion. Mr. Brocklehurst stays away. Some girls die at school and are buried quickly; others are sent home only to die there.

For Jane and the rest who stay healthy, the disaster brings a strange liberty. They roam the wood like gipsies from morning till night and dine on cold pie at a stone in the middle of the beck. Jane's chosen comrade is Mary Ann Wilson: shrewd, witty, older, full of stories and gossip, easy company. Helen Burns is not on the stone. Helen has been moved upstairs for weeks with consumption, not typhus, and Jane in her ignorance assumes consumption is something mild that time and care will alleviate. She has only seen Helen once or twice through a schoolroom window, much wrapped up under the verandah.

One evening in early June, Jane stays out late and returns to find the surgeon's pony at the door. Lingering in the garden after planting some roots she has dug up in the forest, she has her first earnest thought about death: this world is pleasant, and it would be dreary to be called from it to who knows where. She catches the nurse at the front door and asks after Helen. The nurse says, "He says she'll not be here long," and the sentence that would have meant Helen was being sent to Northumberland yesterday means tonight that she is dying.

Near eleven Jane creeps barefoot from her dormitory in her frock over her nightdress, past the camphor and burnt vinegar of the fever room, through two staircases and two doors, to Miss Temple's room. The door is ajar. The nurse is asleep in an easy-chair. Helen lies in a small crib by Miss Temple's bed, pale and wasted but composed. She tells Jane she is going to her long home, that her illness is gentle and her mind at rest, that she is going to God. Jane climbs into the crib under the quilt, lays her face on Helen's neck, and they say good-night. They fall asleep. At dawn the nurse carries Jane back through the passage. Miss Temple, returning at first light, has found Jane laid in the crib with her arms round Helen's neck. Helen is dead. Her grave is in Brocklebridge churchyard. For fifteen years it is only a grassy mound. Then a grey marble tablet appears with her name and one word: Resurgam.