Not a tie links me to any living thing: not a claim do I possess to admittance under any roof in England.

Jane starts a new life, but remains burdened by the past.

The recollection of about three days and nights succeeding this is very dim in my mind. I can recall some sensations felt in that interval; but few thoughts framed, and no actions performed.

After all the stress she’s been under (even before she found herself homeless), she needed a good, long rest.

Hannah, the servant, was my most frequent visitor. Her coming disturbed me. I had a feeling that she wished me away: she did not understand me or my circumstance: that she was prejudiced against me. Diana and Mary appeared in the chamber once or twice a day. They would whisper sentences of this sort at my bedside: –
“It is very well we took her in.”
“Yes; she would certainly have been found dead at the door in the morning, had she been left out all night. I wonder what she has gone through?”
“Strange hardships, I imagine – poor, emaciated, pallid wanderer!”
“She is not an uneducated person, I should think, by her manner of speaking; her accent was quite pure; and the clothes she took off, though splashed and wet, were little worn and fine.”

Mary and Diana take a liking to Jane, but St. John is far more inscrutible.

Mr. St, John came but once: he looked at me, and said my state of lethargy was the result of reaction from excessive and protracted fatigue. He pronounced it needless to send for a doctor: nature, he was sure, would manage best left to herself. He said every nerve had been overstrained in some way, and the whole system must sleep torpid awhile. There was no disease. He imagined my recovery would be rapid enough when once commenced. These opinions delivered in a few words, in a quiet, low voice; and added, after a pause, in the tone of a man little accustomed to expansive comment, “rather unusual physiognomy; certainly not indicative of vulgarity or degradation.”
“Far otherwise,” responded Diana. “To speak truth, St. John, my heart rather warms to the poor little soul. I wish we may be able to benefit her permanently.”
“That is hardly likely,” was the reply. “You will find she is some young lady who has had a misunderstanding with her friends and has probably injudiciously left them. We may, perhaps, succeed in restoring her to them, if she is not obstinate: but I trace lines of force in her face which make me skeptical of her tractability.” He stood considering me some minutes; then added, “She looks sensible, but not at all handsome.”
“She is so ill, St. John.”
“Ill or well, she would always be plain. The grace and harmony of beauty are quite wanting in those features.”

St. John immediately stands out in stark contrast with Mr. Rochester, having a more cold, logical demeanor, as opposed to Mr. Rochester’s stormy disposition.

But once Jane manages to get up, she goes downstairs to find Hannah baking bread.

Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilised by education: they grow there, firm as weeds among stones. Hannah had been cold and stiff, indeed, at the first: latterly she had begun to relent a little; when she saw me come in tidy and well-dressed, she even smiled.
“What, you have got up?” she said. “You are better, then. You may sit you down in my chair on the hearthstone, if you will.”

Now that Jane has the energy for conversation, she sets out to make a few things clear to Hannah.

She bustled about, examining me every now and then with the corner of her eye. Turning to me, as she took some loaves from the oven, she asked bluntly – “Did you ever go a-begging afore you came here?”
I was indignant for a moment; but remembering that anger was out of the question, and that I had indeed appeared as a beggar to her, I answered quietly, but still not without a certain marked firmness – “You are mistaken in supposing me a beggar. I am no beggar: any more than yourself or your young ladies.”
After a pause, she said, “I dunnut understand that: you’ve like no house, nor no brass, I guess?”
“The want of house or brass (by which I suppose you mean money) does not make a beggar in your sense of the word.”
“Are you book-learned?” she inquired presently.
“Yes, very.”
“But you’ve never been to a boarding-school!”
“I was at a boarding-school eight years.”
She opened her eyes wide.
“Whatever cannot ye keep yourself for, then?”
“I have kept myself; and, I trust, shall keep myself again. […]”

I’m guessing Hannah thinks of “beggars” as people who are “too lazy” to find honest work, and therefore often resort to crime to survive. There’s many things wrong with that mindset, not least the fact that many minorities (including neurodivergent and non-white people) all tend to be lumped together, but Jane’s more concerned that she’s got the wrong idea about her.

“Have you lived with the family long?”
“I’ve lived here thirty year. I nursed them all three.”
“That proves you must have been an honest and faithful servant. I will say so much for you, though you have the incivility to call me a beggar.”
She again regarded me with a surprised stare. “I believe,” she said, “I was quite mista’en in my thoughts about you: but there is so mony cheats goes about, you mun forgie me.”
“And though,” I continued, rather severely, “you wished to turn me from the door, on a night when you should not have shut out a dog.”
“Well, it was hard: but what can a body do? I thought more o’ th’ childer nor of mysel’: poor things! They’ve nobody to tak’ care on ’em but me. I’m like to look sharpish.”
I maintained a grave silence for some minutes.
“You munnut think too hardly of me,” she again remarked.
“But I do think hardly of you,” I said; “and I’ll tell you why – not so much because you refused to give me shelter, or regarded me as an imposter, as because you just now made it a species of reproach that I had no ‘brass,’ and no house. Some of the best people that ever lived have been as destitute as I am; and if you are a Christian, you ought not to consider poverty a crime.”
“No more I ought,” said she: “Mr. St. John tells me so too; and I see I wor wrang – but I’ve clear a different notion on you now to what I had. You look a raight down dacent little crater.”
“That will do – I forgive you now. Shake hands.”

Then Jane offers to help prepare some berries, and Hannah tells her all about the Rivers family. It’s an old family, but the current generation doesn’t have much wealth, so Mary and Diana work as governesses, and St. John is the parson. They’re only together now because of the death of their father.

Mr. St. John – sitting as still as one of the dusky pictures on the walls, keeping his eyes fixed on the page he perused and his lips mutely sealed. was easy enough to examine. Had he been a statue instead of a man, he could not have been easier. He was young – perhaps from twenty-eight to thirty – tall, slender; his face riveted the eye; it was like a Greek face, very pure in outline: quite a straight, classic nose; quite an Athenian mouth and chin. It is seldom, indeed, an English face comes so near the antique models as did his. He might well be a little shocked at the irregularity of my lineaments, his own being so harmonious. His eyes were large and blue, with brown lashes; his high forehead, colourless as ivory, was partially streaked over by careless locks of fair hair.
This is a gentle delineation, is it not, reader? Yet he whom it describes scarcely impresses one with the idea of a gentle, a yielding, an impressible, or even of a placid nature. Quiescent as he now sat, there was something about his nostril, his mouth, his brow, which, to my perceptions, indicated elements within either restless, or hard, or eager. He did not speak to me one word, nor even direct to me one glance, till his sisters returned.

He’s clearly being set up as a foil to Mr. Rochester – the handsome young man who is cold, as opposed to the ugly older man who’s full of life (perhaps to a fault).

“You are very hungry,” he said.
“I am, sir.” It is my way – it always was my way, by instinct – ever to meet the brief with brevity, the direct with plainness.
“It is well for you that a low fever has forced you to abstain for the last three days: there would have been danger in yielding to the cravings of your appetite at first. Now you may eat; though still not immoderately.”
“I trust I shall not long eat at your expense, sir,” was my very clumsily-contrived, unpolished answer.
“No,” he said coolly: “when you have indicated to us the residence of your friends, we can write to them, and you may be restored to home.”
“That, I must plainly tell you, is out of my power to do; being absolutely without home and friends.”
The three looked at me, but not distrustfully; I felt there was no suspicion in their glances: there was more of curiosity. I speak particularly of the young ladies. St. John’s eyes, though clear enough in a literal sense, in a figurative one were difficult to fathom. He seemed to use them rather as instruments to search other people’s thoughts, than as agents to reveal his own: the which combination of keenness and reserve was considerably more calculated to embarrass than to encourage.
“Do you mean to say,” he asked, “that you are completely isolated from every connection?”
“I do. Not a tie links me to any living thing: not a claim do I possess to admittance under any roof in England.”
“A most singular position at your age!”

Jane’s situation is, naturally, more complicated than St. John bargained for, but he still seems to genuinely want to help her.

“You have never been married? You are a spinster?”
Diana laughed.
“Why, she can’t be above seventeen or eighteen years old, St. John,” said she.
“I am near nineteen: but I am not married. No.”
I felt a burning glow mount to my face; for bitter and agitating recollections were awakened by the allusion to marriage. They all saw the embarrassment and the emotion. Diana and Mary relieved me by turning their eyes elsewhere than to my crimsoned visage; but the colder and sterner brother continued to gaze, till the trouble he had excited forced out tears as well as colour.
“Where did you last reside?” he now asked.
“You are too inquisitive, St. John,” murmured Mary, in a low voice; but he leaned over the table and required an answer by a second firm and piercing look.
“The name of the place where, and the of the person with whom I lived, is my secret,” I replied, concisely.
“Which, if you like, you have, in my opinion, a right to keep from both St. John and every other questioner,” remarked Diana.
“Yet if I know nothing about you or your history, I cannot help you,” he said. “And you need help, do you not?”
“I need it, and I seek it; so far, sir, that some true philanthropist will put me in the way of getting work which I can do, and the remuneration for which will keep me: if but in the barest necessities of life.”

Then he proceeds to ask what her skills are and what work she’s accustomed to.

“Mr. Rivers,” I said, turning to him, and looking at him, as he looked at me, openly and without diffidence, “you and your sisters have done me a great service – the greatest man can do his fellow-being; you have rescued me, by your noble hospitality, from death. This benefit conferred gives you an unlimited claim on my gratitude; and a claim, to a certain extent, on my confidence. I will tell you as much of the history of the wanderer you have harboured as I can tell without compromising my own peace of mind – my own security, moral and physical, and that of others.
“I am an orphan; the daughter of a clergyman. My parents died before I could know them. I was brought up a dependent; educated in a charitable institution. I will even tell you the name of the establishment where I passed six years as a pupil and two as a teacher – Lowood Orphan Asylum, –shire: you will have heard of it, Mr. Rivers? – the Rev. Robert Brocklehurst is the treasurer.”
“I have heard of Mr. Brocklehurst, and I have seen the school.”
“I left Lowood nearly a year since to become a private governess. I obtained a good situation, and was happy. This place I was obliged to leave four days before I came here. The reason of my departure I cannot and ought not to explain: it would be useless – dangerous; and would sound incredible. No blame attached to me; I am as free from culpability as any one of you three. Miserable I am, and must be for a time; for the catastrophe which drove me from a house I had found a paradise was of a strange and direful nature.”

The reference to Lowood, though it helps confirm her story, could also be problematic if St. John contacts them, seeing as she only recently left, and there could only be so many women who had that exact career at Lowood; she gave the Rivers an alias, you’ll recall, which St. John quickly picks up on, and Jane doesn’t deny that it’s not her real name.

“You would not like to be long dependent on our hospitality – you would wish, I see, to dispense as soon as may be with my sisters’ compassion; and above all, with my charity (I am quite sensible of the distinction drawn, nor do I resent it – it is just): you desire to be independent of us?”
“I do: I have already said so. Show me how to work, or how to seek work: that is all I now ask; then let me go, if it be but to the meanest cottage – but till then allow me to stay here: I dread another essay of the horrors of homeless destitution.”
“Indeed, you shall stay here,” said Diana, putting her white hand on my head.

Until next time…