Chapter 35 — the voice on the moors

Through the spring St. John presses his suit. He does not press it crudely. He presses it with scripture; with silence at meals; with the slow iron of his own self-discipline. He frames Jane's reluctance as a refusal of God; he frames marriage to him as a sacrifice that will perfect her soul; he prays for her by name in his evening prayers. The pressure is not on her romantic feelings, which are nonexistent; it is on her moral will, which is exhausted by the constant force of his calm. By the end of an evening some weeks after the proposal, Jane is within an inch of yielding.

It is a still warm evening at the end of May. They have had a long conversation in the parlour; St. John has prayed. Jane, feeling the parlour walls close in, steps outside the front door for air. She stands in the small garden in the moonlight, looking at the line of the moor in the distance, trying to hear her own thoughts above the pressure of St. John's certainty. As she stands there she hears, distinctly, on the still air, a voice. It is a man's voice. It calls her name three times — "Jane! Jane! Jane!" It is hoarse and urgent. It is unmistakably Rochester's.

She answers aloud: "I am coming! Wait for me!" She runs forward into the garden. The voice is gone. She has heard it across an impossible distance — Rochester is, as far as she knows, miles away — and the impossibility somehow does not matter. The spell of St. John's influence has broken in a single second. She has been recalled to her own life. She tells St. John the next morning that she will not marry him; she packs her trunk; she takes the first coach for Whitcross. From there she will travel south, to Thornfield, to find out what has become of the man whose voice she has just heard. She does not yet know that Thornfield no longer exists.