Chapter 14 — the long evening conversation

Over the next several evenings Rochester sends for Jane after Adèle is in bed. They sit by the fire in the drawing room — sometimes with Mrs. Fairfax in the corner with her knitting, sometimes alone — and talk for hours. The talk ranges. Adèle and her mother. Jane's history. Rochester's travels. Books. He is alternately sardonic and serious, bullying and gentle, never quite predictable. Jane finds, almost against her will, that she looks forward to the summons.

He talks, increasingly, about himself. He has made errors, he says, in his earlier life — moral errors, errors of judgment that have shaped the rest of him. He is, he says, no longer the man he was at twenty. He is searching for some way to reform himself, for some clean break with the past. He hints, darkly, at being trapped by circumstances that he cannot fully describe. Jane listens. He asks her, at one point, whether she thinks past wrong can be canceled by future right. She tells him, in plain terms, that it cannot — that wrongs done remain done, and that reform must consist not of compensating for them but of refusing to commit them again. The principle must change at the root.

He does not contradict her. He looks at her for a long moment with an expression she cannot read. The conversation goes on. He tells her about Adèle's mother — a Parisian opera dancer named Céline Varens, who had taken him as a wealthy young man and who, when he discovered her in the arms of another lover one evening, had abandoned the child. Adèle, Rochester says, may or may not be his daughter; the dates do not entirely fit; he has chosen to take her in either way. The disclosure is offered to Jane as a confidence, the first he has paid her. She receives it without judgment. By the end of the evening, the relationship has acquired a weight neither of them has named.