Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë | Full Audiobook — Part 3 (The Ending)

He asked me to stay, and every part of me that had ever been cold or hungry or unloved begged me to say yes. He was not legally free, his wife was living, but he offered me everything a man could offer short of an honest marriage. To take me away to the south of France, to love me, to keep me, to call me his wife in every way but the one that mattered. He wept, he raged, he said no one would know, he said I would only be following the law of my own heart. And I loved him. Understand that. I have never in this whole story loved him more than in the hour I refused him, because I said no. I told him the truth. I had learned in a red room at ten years old, and never unlearned, that I was not made to be anyone's comfort at the cost of my own soul. That the more friendless, the more unsustained I was, the more I must respect myself. Laws and principles are not for the times when it is easy to keep them, I told him. They are for exactly this, when body and soul rise up against their rigor. If at my convenience I could break them, what would be their worth? I care for myself, I said. I will keep the law given by God, sanctioned by man. I will hold to the principles I received when I was sane, and not mad, as I am now. And in the night, before he woke, before my resolve could fail me, I crept out of Thornfield with almost nothing, no money to speak of, no plan, no destination. And I walked out onto the open road, and I let the coach take me as far as my few coins would carry. And then I got out, alone, on a vast empty moor, with the whole indifferent sky above me. I want you to sit with that. I gave up love, security, warmth, and the only home I had ever chosen. And I chose instead a road and hunger, and the terrible freedom of belonging to no one but myself. I nearly died for it. I slept on the heath, I begged for bread, and was refused. I ate a crust meant for a pig. For two days and nights I wandered, soaked and starving, until at last, half dead, I saw a light across the moor and stumbled toward it, and fell at the door of a small house, and was taken in, barely, by two young women and their brother. Their name was Rivers, Diana and Mary, warm, clever, kind. And their brother, St. John Rivers, a clergyman, young, cold, beautiful as marble and about as worn. They nursed me back to life. They asked no questions I was ready to answer. I gave them a false name. And when I was well, St. John found me humble work as the mistress of a tiny village school, and for the first time I earned my own bread in my own name, answerable to no one. It was a small, hard, honorable life. It was mine. And then the strangest turn of the whole story arrived, the kind that only life, never fiction, would dare. St. John discovered who I really was. My uncle in Madeira, the one Mrs. Reed had lied to on her deathbed, had died, and he had left his entire fortune to his lost niece, Jane Eyre, 20,000 pounds. I, who had never owned 20 pounds, was suddenly rich, but that was not the miracle. The miracle was this. My uncle was their uncle, too. The river's siblings were my cousins, my first, true, living blood family. For the first time in my life, I had people who were mine by more than kindness. And so I did the only thing that made me truly happy. I divided the fortune into four equal parts and gave Diana, Mary, and St. John each their share. Money had never been my dream. A family was. I bought myself one, and I would not be talked out of it. I could have been content there forever, but St. John Rivers was not a man who allowed contentment. He was going to India as a missionary to burn himself out in God's work. And he had decided, with the cold certainty of a man who has never once doubted himself, that I was to go with him, not because he loved me. He told me plainly he did not, and never could, but because I was hardworking, and dutiful, and useful, and he needed a wife to labor beside him, and I would do. He pressed me for weeks. He wore me down with duty and scripture and that terrible marble patience until I very nearly said yes, until I nearly gave my body to a loveless marriage the way I had once nearly given it to a loveless law. I told him I would go to India as his sister, his fellow worker, but not as his wife. To marry without love, to be chained for life to a man who valued me only for my use, that, I said, would kill me. And he looked at me as though I had betrayed God himself. And then, on the very night I stood on the edge of surrender, the night I almost said, yes, St. John, I will marry you, something happened that I have never been able to explain and have never once doubted. I heard my name, Jane, Jane, Jane, not in the room, not in the wind, a voice, his voice, Rochester's voice, crying out to me across all that distance, wild with pain and longing. I cried back into the night, I am coming, wait for me. And St. John heard nothing and thought me mad, but I knew, I knew the way you know your own heartbeat, somewhere he needed me. And whatever that voice was, grief, spirit, God, or the deepest truth of my own heart finally speaking louder than my duty, it broke St. John's hold on me in a single instant. I left the next morning, I went back to find Rochester, I went back to Thornfield, and Thornfield was gone, a blackened ruin, roofless, silent. Grass growing where the great hall had stood. I found an innkeeper nearby who told me the whole terrible end. Months before, in the dead of night, the mad woman, Bertha, had set the house on fire as she had once set his bed alight. She climbed to the roof as it burned. Mr. Rochester got every servant out safely. He went back in for her, up onto the battlements, and tried to save the wife who had ruined his life. And she threw herself from the roof and died on the stones below. And the house came down on him. He lived, but the falling ruin took one of his hands and left him blind, blind and maimed and alone in a lonely house deep in the woods called Ferndeen. I went to him. I found him, at dusk, in the shadow of that grim house, groping his way into the open air, the strong, proud, storm-faced man I had loved, now leaning on a servant's arm, his eyes dark and empty, his face all patience and despair. And I sent the servant away, and I took the tray, and I put a glass of water into his hand myself, and I said quietly, The way you speak to someone you are afraid to startle. Give the water to me, sir. He went utterly still. He said my name like a man who thinks he is dreaming and cannot bear to wake. Jane? Is it Jane? What is it? This is her voice. And he reached out and caught my hand and pulled me against him, and he wept, and I wept, and there was nothing plain or cold or careful left in either of us. He thought himself a wreck, a ruin, no fit thing for a young woman to bind herself to. He asked me if I was frightened of him now, the blind man, the cripple, and I told him the truth, which was the only gift I had ever been able to give and the only one worth giving, that I loved him more now that I could be everything to him, now that he needed me, now that we were, at last, truly equal. He had been my master once, and I his dependent, but the fire had burned all of that away. There was no fortune between us now that I did not also have, no secret, no locked door, no wife hidden on any floor, only two people who had each walked through their own darkness and come out still choosing the other. He was free now. Bertha was dead, and so he asked me again, the way he had in the orchard a lifetime ago, and this time there was no impediment, no torn veil, no split tree. This time it was clean. Reader, I married him. A quiet wedding, no guests, no silks, no crowd, just the two of us and a witness, the way it should always have been. I wrote to Diana and Mary, who rejoiced. St. John went to India, as he always meant to, and served and died there in his own hard glory, at peace with the God he had never doubted, and I do not mock him, for he was true to what he was, as I was true to what I was. We went to live at Ferndene. I was his eyes and his right hand for years. I read to him and traveled the world, through my own describing of it, and put the whole green earth back into a man who could no longer see it. And two years in, in one eye, a little sight came back to him, enough that when our first son was born he could see dimly that the boy had his own dark eyes. I have been married ten years now, as I tell you this. I know what it is to live entirely for and with the person I love best on earth. I am my husband's life as fully as he is mine. No woman was ever nearer to her mate than I am, ever more absolutely bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. I told you at the beginning that injustice does not care whether you are innocent. That was true, but I did not know yet the other half of it, that a person who refuses again and again to trade herself away, who chooses her own soul over comfort in a red room, over a false marriage, over a loveless duty, will sometimes, at the very end of a long and lonely road, walk straight into the one thing she never let herself hope for. Not because the world is kind. It is not. But because she never once stopped being herself. That is the whole of it. That is Jane Eyre. Thank you for listening to all three parts here on Book Wonders, where every classic hides something honest about being human. If Jane stayed with you, subscribe. There's a full shelf of stories waiting. And tell me in the comments, could you have walked out of Thornfield the way she did?