Carter came often and tried to cheer me in his own way. Sometimes he read to me, though I was like as not to fall asleep as he did so. It was not that I had suddenly become an old man—I was still in my thirties—but the loss of my eyesight brought a lack of stimulation that I had not yet adjusted to. I could not escape the irony of my confinement there, in the same place where I had once tried to house my lunatic wife. I, too, was strong in body yet unable to care for myself, destined to live out a dreary life, trapped inside my own head.
But my friends would not leave me to my sadness. With warmer weather, John began rousing me for walks around the grounds. There was no orchard, which I had loved so much at Thornfield, but John would guide me to bend down and touch snowdrops, and anemones, and finally reach up and feel the hazel catkins. The earth was coming to life and, as much as possible, I was too. Memories came with spring as well: last year’s hopeful days, my fireside banter with Jane, our walks in the orchard, the sound of her laugh. That life was gone: Thornfield-Hall a ruin, Bertha and Gerald dead, I a broken man. And Jane: pray God she was safe.
*
The day was cloudy, as despondent as my mood. For how many years, I wondered, would I be moldering away in these woods? That was my feeling all that day, a grief that knew no bounds. Even in the evening it did not lift, and I took myself to my room early, but could not sleep. That was just as well, for my nightmares had been worsening: I was vividly haunted by a lifetime of sin and regret. There were so many people, irretrievable now, who had been lost and wronged. Not just Bertha and Gerald, and Jane herself, but Touch and Carrot and Alma and little Tiso and Mr. Wilson and so many others who had suffered, whom I wish I might have saved. Sitting beside my opened window, feeling the air on my face, I imagined the moonlight, and Jane somewhere, laying herself down from a busy day. “Jane!” I called out suddenly. “Jane! Jane!” And then, more quietly, “Oh God, Jane.”
I expected no answer—of course I did not. But, in my mind I thought I heard a voice: “I am coming,” it seemed to say, “wait for me.” And a moment later, as if the wind in the pines itself was speaking: “Where are you?” The sound of it echoed as if across the fells, though there were none near.
“Here,” I said aloud. “Just here.”
But there was no response, though I sat at the window for nearly an hour more. It was as if it had happened in a dream: Jane’s spirit and mine calling across some wild and lonely distance. I wanted to believe that it was a sign that God was setting me free.
The next morning I arose as usual to the birdsongs, and again the next day and the next, but nothing in my life had changed. It seemed that God had not, after all, heard my prayer, or perhaps he had more misery in store for me.
But on the fourth day, as darkness was starting to fall, I felt an urge to step outside on my own. Down the one step to the grass, cautiously. A step out. And then another, my hands outstretched for balance and because I knew there were trees even that close. As the first drops of rain descended I thought I heard a footstep, or a voice. “Who’s there?” I whispered, but no one responded. A woodland sprite, perhaps, waiting for me. If only it were real. The only sound I could hear was the wind in the trees, but I stood there anyway, for I felt a kind of comforting presence that I had not felt since coming to Ferndean.
Just then I heard John’s voice coming from my side. “Will you take my arm, sir?” he said. “There’s a heavy shower coming on: had you not better go in?”
“Let me alone,” I said impatiently, for I felt as if there were something just out of reach, and for a few moments I tried to walk toward it, as if I could find it and hold it in my hand, but it was useless, and finally I turned and made my way back into the house, feeling worse than I had before.
I had only just returned to my chair when Mary came in. I thought at first she was bringing my tea, but instead she said, “Sir, there is someone asking to speak with you. What shall I tell them?”
I was annoyed. It had been a difficult few days, and was growing worse. Besides, Mary knew I did not see strangers. “Who is it at this time of night?”
“I—I did not ask a name, sir.”
“Well, if he cannot give his name and his business, I certainly have no desire to see him. And bring me a glass of water. Please.”
She hurried away, her shoes scuffing against the floor.
When she returned, she had no more than entered the room before I heard Pilot scramble up from beside me with a soft yelp and leap upon her, splashing the water. She whispered a quiet order. The commotion was so unlike Pilot—or Mary—that I turned toward the noise, straining. This damnable body!
“Give me the water, Mary.” I sighed. But as I waited for the glass, I heard again Pilot’s excited paws on the floor. “What is the matter?” I asked, having begun to fear an intruder.
Then came a voice that was not Mary’s: “Down, Pilot!”
I knew that voice. But it could not be: I was hallucinating. “This is you, Mary, is it not?”
“Mary is in the kitchen,” the voice said, and hope and fear clashed within me. Inadvertently I put out my hand, as if to touch the apparition, as if to assure myself she was real. Oh, that I still had my sight!
“Who is this?” I demanded. “Who is this?” I half rose as if I could force an answer. “Answer me—speak again!”
“Will you have a little more water, sir? I spilled half of what was in the glass,” came the calm reply.
“Who is it? What is it? Who speaks?”
“Pilot knows me, and John and Mary know I am here. I came only this evening.”
Jane. Jane. I would know that voice anywhere—had heard it in my fever dreams for a year. But it could not be. “Great God!—what delusion has come over me? What sweet madness has seized me?”
“No delusion—no madness: your mind, sir, is too strong for delusion, your health too sound for frenzy.” It was she, for certain. The water she had brought me, the water I held in my hand: that was real. How then could she be a dream?
I cried out and reached to touch her, and I felt her small fingers encircling mine. “Her very fingers!” I cried out. “Her small, slight fingers! If so, there must be more of her.” I reached for the rest of her, seeking the form I knew so well in my heart. I wrapped my arm around her waist and drew her close. My heart pounded in my chest, and as I brought her ever closer I could feel hers as well.
“Is it Jane?” I asked stupidly. “What is it? This is her shape—this is her size—”
She laughed at my disbelief, and I knew it was my Jane. “And this her voice,” she said. “She is all here: her heart, too. God bless you, sir! I am glad to be so near you again.”
“Jane Eyre!—Jane Eyre!” was all I could say.
At first we just held each other close in silence, and then the words poured out of us. She insisted, over and over, that she was not a vision, not a dream, not an echo of the moors. But without my sight, how could I be sure of her? She laughed and kissed my eyes, which had been so sore for human touch. “Is it you—is it Jane?” I asked, still unbelieving. “You are come back to me, then?”
“I am.”
“And you do not lie dead in some ditch, under some stream?”