I had not, it seems, the originality to chalk out a new road to shame and destruction, but trod the old track with stupid exactness not to deviate an inch from the beaten centre.

We get our first hints as to the nature of the “ghosts” of Thornfield.

First, Mr. Rochester relates to her how Adèle came into his keeping.

He then said that she was the daughter of a French opera-dancer, Céline Varens, towards whom he had once cherished a “grande passion.” This passion Céline had professed to return with even superior ardour. He thought himself her idol; ugly as he was: he believed, as he said, that she preferred his “taille d’athlete” to the elegance of the Apollo Belvidere.

“And, Miss Eyre, so much was I flattered by this preference of the Gallic sylph for her British gnome, that I installed her in an hotel; gave her a complete establishment of servants, a carriage, cashmeres, diamonds, dentelles, &tc. In short, I began the process of ruining myself in the received style, like any other spoony. I had not, it seems, the originality to chalk out a new road to shame and destruction, but trod the old track with stupid exactness not to deviate an inch from the beaten centre. I had – as I deserved to have -the fate of all spoonies. Happening to call one evening when Céline did not expect me, I found her out; but it was a warm night, and I was tired of strolling through Paris, so I sat down in her boudoir; happy to breathe the air consecrated so lately by her presence. No, – I exaggerate; I never thought there was any consecrating virtue about her: it was rather a soft sort of pastille perfume she had left, a scent of musk and amber, than an odour of sanctity.”

He was so besotted by her (and self-centered) that he actually believed she was in love with him rather than his wealth. But of course, this story ends with him discovering Céline to be unfaithful.

“You never felt jealousy, did you, Miss Eyre? Of course not: I need not ask you: because you never felt love. You have both sentiments yet to experience: your soul sleeps; the shock is yet to be given which shall waken it. You think all existence lapses in as quiet a flow as that in which your youth has hitherto slid away. Floating on with closed eyes and muffled ears, you neither see the rocks bristling not far off in the bed of the flood, nor hear the breakers boil at their base. But I tell you – mark my words – you will come some day to a craggy pass of the channel, where the whole of life’s stream will be broken up into whirl and tumult, foam and noise: either you will be dashed to atoms on crag points, or lifted up and born on by some master wave into a calmer current – as I am now.
“I like this day: I like that sky of steel; I like the sternness of and stillness of the world under its frost. I like Thornfield: its antiquity; its retirement; its old crow-trees and horn-trees; its grey facade, and lines of dark windows reflecting that metal welkin: and yet how long have I abhorred the very thought of it; shunned it like a great plague-house! How I do still abhor-“
He ground his teeth and was silent: he arrested his step and struck his boot against the hard ground. Some hated thought seemed to have him in its grip, and to hold him so tightly that he could not advance.
We were ascending the avenue when he thus paused; the hall was before us. Lifting his eye to its battlements, he cast over them a glare such as I never saw before or since. Pain, shame, ire – impatience, disgust, detestation – seemed momentarily to hold a quivering conflict in the large pupil dilating under his ebon eyebrow. Wild was the wrestle which should be paramount; but another feeling rose and triumphed: something hard and cynical; self-willed and resolute: it settled his passion and petrified his countenance: he went on: – “During the moment I was silent, Miss Eyre, I was arranging a point with my destiny. She stood there, by the beech-trunk – a hag like one of those who appeared to ‘Macbeth’ on the heath of Forres. ‘You like Thornfield?’ she said, lifting her finger; and then she wrote in the air a memento, which ran in lurid hieroglyphics all along the house-front, between the upper and lower row of windows. ‘Like it if you can!’ ‘Like it if you dare!’
“‘I will like it,’ said I. ‘I dare like it;’ and (he subjoined moodily) I will keep my word: I will break obstacles to happiness, to goodness – yes, goodness; I wish to be a better man than I have been; than I am – as Job’s leviathan broke the spear, the dart, and the habergeon, hindrances which others count as iron I will esteem but straw and rotten wood.”

His allusion to Macbeth is significant – and not just because of its tragic ending.

“Strange that I should choose you for the confidant of all this, young lady: passing strange that you should listen to me quietly, as if it were the most usual thing in the world for a man like me to tell stories of his opera-mistresses to a quaint, inexperienced girl like you! But the last singularity explains the first, as I intimated once before: you, with your gravity, considerateness, and caution, were made to be the recipient of secrets. Besides, I know what sort of mind I have placed in communication with my own: I know it is one not liable to take infection: it is a peculiar mind; it is an unique one. Happily I do not mean to harm it: but, if I did, it would not take harm from me. The more you and I converse, the better; for while I cannot blight you, you may refresh me.”

While I relate to Jane in this aspect (I much prefer knowing what’s going on in the lives of the people around me than not, but I rarely speak my mind about it), Mr. Rochester is still trusting far too much to the strength of Jane’s character. She had a rough childhood, and as he said before, she’s not reserved by nature, but by necessity. She CAN be blighted, he just hasn’t reached that point yet, and furthermore, she probably doesn’t know her own limits.

Anyhow, he returns to his tale of betrayal.

“My eye was quickly at the aperture. Céline’s chambermaid entered, lit a lamp, left it on the table, and withdrew. The couple were thus revealed to me clearly: both had removed their cloaks, and there was ‘the Varens’ shining in satin and jewels, -my gifts of course, – and there was her companion in an officer’s uniform; and I knew him for a young roué of a vicomte – a brainless and vicious youth whom I had sometimes met in society, and had never thought of hating because I despised him so absolutely. On recognising him, the fang of the snake jealousy, was instantly broken; because at the same moment my love for Céline sank under an extinguisher. A woman who could betray me for such a rival was not worth contending for: she deserved only scorn; less, however, than I, who had been her dupe.”

Then he’s needed for business elsewhere, so he abridges the remainder of the story (and so shall I). He turns Céline out, challenges the soldier’s master to a duel (but only injures him), and wants nothing more to do with them.

“[Unluckily] the Varens, six months before, had given me this fillette Adèle; who she affirmed was my daughter; and perhaps she may be, though I see no proofs of such grim paternity written in her countenance. Pilot is more like me than she. Some years after I had broken with the mother she abandoned her child and ran away to Italy with a musician or singer. I acknowledged no natural claim on Adèle’s part to be supported by me; nor do I now acknowledge any, for I am not her father; but hearing that she was quite destitute, I e’en took the poor thing out of the slime and mud of Paris, and transplanted it here, to grow up clean in the wholesome soil of an English country garden. Mrs. Fairfax found you to train it; but now you know that it is the illegitimate offspring of a French opera-girl, you will perhaps think differently of your post and protegee. You will be coming to me some day with notice that you have found another place – that you beg me to look out for a new governess, &c. – eh?”
“No. Adèle is not answerable for either her mother’s faults or yours. I have a regard for her, and now that I know she is, in a sense, parentless – forsaken by her mother and disowned by you, sir – I shall cling closer to her than before. How could I possibly prefer the spoilt pet of a wealthy family, who would hate her governess as a nuisance, to a lonely little orphan, who leans towards me as her friend?”
“Oh, that is the light in which you view it! Well, I must go in now; and you too: it darkens.”

Because of course she’d have more sympathy for a fellow orphan, and the fact that Adèle actually enjoys her company only cements her feelings. The way in which she subsequently searches for some resemblance to Mr. Rochester in her reminds me a lot of Tohru’s complex about her father, and it’s just SAD, okay?

Anyhow, Jane has a lot to ponder that night.

[There] was something decidedly strange in the paroxysm of emotion which had suddenly seized him, when he was in the act of expressing the present contentment of his mood, and his newly-revived pleasure in the old hall and its environs. I meditated wonderingly on the incident: but gradually quitting it, as I found it for the present inexplicable, I turned to the consideration of my master’s manner to myself. The confidence he had thought fit to repose in me seemed a tribute to my discretion. I regarded and accepted it as such. His deportment had now for some weeks been more uniform towards me than at the first. I never seemed in his way; he did not take fits of chilling hauteur; when he met me unexpectedly, the encounter seemed welcome – he had always a word and sometimes a smile for me; when summoned by formal invitation to his presence, I was honoured by a cordiality of reception that made me feel I really possessed the power to amuse him, and that these evening conferences were sought as much for his pleasure as for my benefit.

And naturally, she doesn’t connect his changed feelings toward Thornfield to his changed feelings towards HER…

She explains that he often tells her stories about his past of a similar kind to the tale of Céline, never giving scandalous details, but rather a broad tableau of life on the Continent.

The ease of his manner freed me from painful restraint; the friendly frankness, as correct as cordial, with which he treated me, drew me to him. I felt at times as if he were my relation, rather than my master: yet he was imperious sometimes still; but I did not mind that; I saw it was his way. So happy, so gratified did I become with this new interest added to life, that I ceased to pine after kindred. My thin crescent-destiny seemed to enlarge; the blanks of existence were filled up; my bodily health improved; I gathered flesh and strength.
And was Mr. Rochester now ugly in my eyes? No, reader. Gratitude, and many associations, all pleasurable and genial, made his face the object I best liked to see; his presence in a room was more cheering than the brightest fire. Yet I had not forgotten his faults – indeed, I could not, for he brought them frequently before me. He was proud, sardonic, harsh to inferiority of every description. In my secret soul I knew that his great kindness to me was balanced by unjust severity to many others. He was moody, too – unaccountably so. I more than once, when sent for to read to him, found him sitting in his library alone, with his head bent on his folded arms; and, when he looked up, a morose, almost a malignant scowl, blackened his features. But I believed that his moodiness, his harshness, and his former faults of morality (I say former, for now he seemed corrected of them) had their source in some cruel cross of fate. I believed he was naturally a man of better tendencies, higher principles, and purer tastes than such as circumstances had developed, education instilled, or destiny encouraged. I thought there were excellent materials in him; though for the present they hung together somewhat spoiled and tangled. I cannot deny that I grieved for his grief, whatever that was, and would have given much to assuage it.

She thinks of Thornfield as home now, so naturally she cares about all of its residents.

I hardly know whether I had slept or not after this musing; at any rate, I started wide awake on hearing a vague murmur, peculiar and lugubrious, which sounded, I thought, just above me. I wished I had kept my candle burning: the night was drearily dark; my spirits were depressed. I rose and sat up in bed, listening. The sound was hushed.
I tried again to sleep; but my heart beat anxiously: my inward tranquility was broken. The clock, far down in the hall, struck two. Just then it seemed my chamber-door was touched; as if fingers had swept the panels in a groping way along the dark gallery outside. I said, “Who is there?” Nothing answered. I was chilled with fear.

She remembers that Pilot occasionally wanders in to sit at his master’s door, and tries to convince herself that’s all it is.

A dream had scarcely approached my ear, when it fled affrighted, scared by a marrow-freezing incident enough.
This was a demoniac laugh – low, suppressed, deep – uttered, as it seemed, at the very keyhole of my chamber-door. The head of my bed was near the door, and I thought at first the goblin-laughter stood at my bedside – or rather, crouched by my pillow: but I rose, looked round, and could see nothing; while, as I still gazed, the unnatural sound was reiterated: and I knew it came from behind the panels. My first impulse was to rise and fasten the bolt; my next again, to cry out, “Who is there?”
Something gurgled and moaned. Ere long, steps retreated up the gallery towards the third story staircase: a door had lately been made to shut in that staircase; I heard it open and close, and all was still.

And there’s no falling asleep again after THAT.

Impossible now to remain longer by myself: I must go to Mrs. Fairfax. I hurried on my frock and a shawl; I withdrew the bolt with trembling hand. There was a candle burning just outside, left on the matting in the gallery. I was surprised at this circumstance: but still more was I amazed to perceive the air quite dim, as if full of smoke; and while looking to the right hand and left, to find whence these blue wreaths issued, I became further aware of a strong smell of burning.
Something creaked: it was a door ajar; and that door was Mr. Rochester’s, and the smoke rushed in a cloud from thence. I thought no more of Mrs. Fairfax; I thought no more of Grace Poole or the laugh: in an instant, I was within the chamber. Tongues of flame darted round the bed: the curtains were on fire. In the midst of the blaze and deep vapour, Mr. Rochester lay stretched motionless, in deep sleep.
“Wake! wake!” I cried – I shook him, but he only murmured and turned: the smoke had stupefied him.

Fortunately, in that day and age, they always kept vessels of water on hand for washing, so she’s able to throw the water on the fire.

The hiss of the quenched element, the breakage of a pitcher which I flung from my hand when I had emptied it, and, above all, the splash of the shower-bath I had liberally bestowed, roused Mr. Rochester at last. Though it was now dark, I knew he was awake; because I heard him fulminating strange anathemas at finding himself lying in a pool of water.
“Is there a flood?” he cried.
“No, sir,” I answered; “but there has been a fire: get up, do, you are quenched now; I will fetch you a candle.”
“In the name of all the elves in Christendom, is that Jane Eyre?” he demanded. “What have you done with me, witch, sorceress? Who is in the room beside you? Have you plotted to drown me?”
“I will fetch you a candle, sir; and in Heaven’s name, get up. Somebody has plotted something: you cannot too soon find out who or what it is.”

Once he’s finally able to take in the situation, she explains what she observed earlier in the night leading up to the fire.

He listened very gravely; his face, as I went on, expressed more concern than astonishment; he did not immediately speak when I had concluded.
“Shall I call Mrs. Fairfax?” I asked.
“Mrs. Fairfax? No: what the deuce would you call her for? What can she do? Let her sleep unmolested.”
“Then I will fetch Leah, and wake John and his wife.”
“Not at all: just be still. You have a shawl on? If you are not warm enough, you may take my cloak yonder; wrap it about you, and sit down in the arm-chair: there, – I will put it on. Now place your feet on the stool, to keep them out of the wet. I am going to leave you a few minutes. I shall take the candle. Remain where you are till I return: be as still as a mouse. I must pay a visit to the third story. Don’t move, remember, or call any one.
[…]
He re-entered, pale and very gloomy. “I have found it all out,” said he, setting his candle down on the wash-stand; “it is as I thought.”
“How, sir?”
He made no reply, but stood with his arms folded, looking on the ground. At the end of a few minutes, he inquired in a rather peculiar tone: – “I forget whether you said you saw anything when you opened your chamber door.”
“No, sir, only the candlestick on the ground.”
“But you heard an odd laugh? You have heard that laugh before, I should think, or something like it?”
“Yes, sir: there is a woman who sews here called Grace Poole – she laughs in that way. She is a singular person.”
“Just so. Grace Poole – you have guessed it. She is, as you say, singular, – very. Well, I shall reflect on the subject. Meantime, I am glad that you are the only person, besides myself, acquainted with the precise details of to-night’s incident. You are no talking fool: say nothing about it. I will account for this state of affairs (pointing to the bed): and now return to your own room. I shall do very well on the sofa in the library for the rest of the night. […]”

Mr. Rochester is very careful to gage what all Jane knows before giving a definitive response…

“Good-night, then, sir,” said I, departing.
He seemed surprised – very inconsistently so, as he had just told me to go.
“What!” he exclaimed, “are you quitting me already, and in that way?”
“You said I might go, sir.”
“But not without taking leave; not without a word or two of acknowledgement and good will: not, in short, in that brief, dry fashion. Why, you have saved my life! -snatched me from a horrible and excruciating death! – and you walk past me as if we were mutual strangers! At least shake hands.”
He held out his hand; I gave him mine: he took it first in one, then in both of his own.
“You have saved my life: I have a pleasure in owing you so immense a debt. I cannot say more. Nothing else that has being would have been tolerable to me in character of creditor for such an obligation: but you: it is different; – I feel your benefits no burden, Jane.”
He paused; gazed at me; words almost visible trembled on his lips, – but his voice was checked.
“Good-night again, sir. There is no debt, benefit, burden, obligation, in the case.”
“I knew,” he continued, “you would do me good in some way, at some time; – I saw it in your eyes when I first beheld you: their expression and smile did not – (again he stopped) – did not (he proceeded hastily) strike delight in my very inmost heart so for nothing. People talk of natural sympathies; I have even heard of good genii – there are grains of truth in the wildest fable. My cherished preserver, good night!”
Strange energy was in his voice, strange fire in his look.
“I am glad I happened to be awake,” I said; and then I was going.
“What! you will go?”
“I am cold, sir.”
“Cold? Yes, – and standing in a pool! Go, then, Jane; go!” But he still retained my hand, and I could not free it. I bethought myself an expedient.
“I think I hear Mrs. Fairfax move, sir.”
“Well, leave me.” He relaxed his fingers, and I was gone.

This is the first time he calls her “Jane” (as opposed to “Miss Eyre”), and on the one hand, it’s somewhat understandable that he’d be very emotional after this near-death experience (orchestrated by someone in his own house, no less)…but on the other hand, she’s still his employee and he’s still old enough to be her father. Still, Jane has mixed feelings about it herself.

I regained my couch, but never thought of sleep. Till morning dawned I was tossed on a buoyant but unquiet sea, where billows of trouble rolled under surges of joy. I thought sometimes I saw beyond its wild waters a shore, sweet as the hills of Beulah; and now and then a freshening gale wakened my hope, bore my spirit triumphantly towards the bourne: but I could not reach it, even in fancy, – a counteracting breeze blew off the land, and continually drove me back. Sense would resist delirium: judgement would warn passion. Too feverish to rest, I rose soon as the day dawned.

Until next time…