Chapter 20 — the night with Mason

In the small hours, Jane is woken by a scream from somewhere upstairs — a cry "horrible, awful," followed by "Help! help! help!" three times. Doors open along the corridor. The household is frightened. Rochester comes among the guests in his dressing-gown, smooth and composed, and tells them a maid has had a nightmare. He laughs about it. The guests, half-convinced, return to their rooms.

Some minutes later Rochester knocks at Jane's door with a candle. He asks her to come up to the third floor. He leads her along corridors she has never been down to a room behind a heavy door, locked, then unlocked from his pocket. The room is curiously furnished, with old hangings and a closed inner door beyond which something can be heard moving. On a chair by the wall is Richard Mason, his shirt-sleeve dark with blood, half-fainting. He has been bitten and stabbed in the shoulder and arm. Rochester dresses the wound provisionally and leaves Jane alone with him while he goes for the surgeon. She is to bathe the wound; she is forbidden, on her honor, to speak to Mason.

Jane sits with Mason for nearly two hours. The candle burns low. Behind the inner door something paces, snarls once, falls silent. Mason mutters phrases — "She bit me," "She sucked the blood," "She said she'd drain my heart" — Jane registers them and does not speak. Rochester returns at dawn with a surgeon from Millcote who can be trusted. The wound is bandaged. Mason is taken downstairs by a back stair, put into a carriage, and sent away before the rest of the household is awake. The episode is sealed back over. Jane goes to her own room. She has not been told a thing. She knows, however, that whatever is on the third floor is the thing the laugh has belonged to since November.