Chapter 28 — three days on the moors

Jane gives the coach driver every shilling she has and is set down at Whitcross — an unmarked stone cross on a barren moor, with four roads radiating from it and no town in any direction. She walks at random, choosing the road that looks least traveled. She sleeps that night in the heather. The second day she walks all day in the heat. She begs for bread at three farms and is refused; one woman gives her a hard crust her own pig had refused. She eats it standing in the lane.

By the second night her feet are blistered and bleeding; she has eaten the porridge a swineherd was feeding his pigs; she has begun to think clearly about lying down to die. The third day she walks again, half-blind. In the late afternoon a thunderstorm comes up. She is on a stretch of high moor with no shelter. As dusk falls she sees, very far off, the single yellow light of a house. She walks toward it for hours. The house is a low stone farmhouse on the edge of the moor; through the kitchen window she can see two young women reading by candlelight.

She knocks. The servant Hannah refuses to admit her. Hannah is closing the door when a man's voice from the hall stops it — "Hannah, let me speak to the woman; you have done your duty in excluding, now let me do mine in admitting her." It is St. John Rivers, the parson of the parish, just returning home. He sees, immediately, that Jane is starving and at the end of any reserves she has. He brings her into the kitchen, gives her milk and bread, and carries her, half-conscious, into the parlour where his sisters Diana and Mary are sitting. They put her to bed in a small room upstairs. She gives her name as Jane Elliott. She sleeps for three days.