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Presented to the LIBRARY of the
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO
by
Hugh Anson-Cartwright
EMILY BRONTE
BY
A. MARY F. ROBINSON
SECOND EDITION.
LONDON:
\V. H. ALLEN AND CO.
13, WATERLOO PLACE
1883.
{All Rights Reserved}
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LONDON: PE1NTBD BY W. B. ALLEN AND CO,, 13 WATERLOO PLACE. 8.W.
CONTENTS.
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I. PARENTAGE „....,,
CHAPTER II. BABYHOOD
CHAPTER III. COWAN'S BRIDGE . . .
CHAPTER IV. CHILDHOOD ......'.
CHAPTER V. GOING TO SCHOOL
CHAPTER VI. GIRLHOOD AT HAWORTH, . . . .
CHAPTER VII.
IN THE RUE D'lSABELLE ....
CHAPTER VIII. A RETROSPECT
PAGR I
28
53
61
vi CONTENTS.
PAGBi
CHAPTER IX. THE RECALL ....:,.. 103,
CHAPTER X. THE PROSPECTUSES. . . . . , . xii
CHAPTER XL BRANWELL'S FALL 116
CHAPTER XII. WRITING POETRY . . 12$
CHAPTER XIII. TROUBLES . . . . . . . . .144
CHAPTER XIV. WUTHERING HEIGHTS: ITS ORIGIN . . . .154
CHAPTER XV. WUTHERING HEIGHTS: THE STORY . . . .168
CHAPTER XVI. 'SHIRLEY' 209
CHAPTER XVII. BRANWELL'S END . . 217
CHAPTER XVIII. EMILY'S DEATH 225
FINIS! • 233
LIST OF AUTHORITIES.
1846-56. THE WORKS OF CURRER, ELLIS, AND ACTON BELL. 1857. LIFE OF CHARLOTTE BRONTE. Mrs. GaskelL \st and
2nd Editions.
1877. CHARLOTTE BRONTE. T. Wemyss Reid. 1877. NOTE ON CHARLOTTE BRONTE. A. C. Swinburne. 1881. THREE GREAT ENGLISHWOMEN. P. Bayne.
MS. LECTURE ON EMILY BRONTE. T. Wemyss Reid. MS. NOTES ON EMILY AND CHARLOTTE BRONTE.
Miss Ellen Nussey.
MS. LETTERS OF CHARLOTTE AND BRANWELL BRONTE. 1879. REMINISCENCES OF THE BRONTES. Miss E. Nussey. 1870. UNPUBLISHED LETTERS OF CHARLOTTE, EMILY, AND-
ANNE BRONTE. Hours at Home.
1846. EMILY BRONTE'S ANNOTATED COPY OF HER POEMS. 1872. BRANWELL BRONTE: IN THE "MIRROR." G.S.Phillips. 1879. PICTURES OF THE PAST. F. H. Grundy. 1830. PROSPECTUS OF THE CLERGYMEN'S DAUGHTERS*
SCHOOL AT COWAN'S BRIDGE.
1850. PREFACE TO WUTHERING HEIGHTS. Charlotte Bronte. 1850. BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE OF ELLIS AND ACTON BELL.
Charlotte Bronte. 1850. WUTHERING HEIGHTS: IN THE "PALLADIUM." Sydney
Dobell.
PERSONAL REMINISCENCES OF MRS. WOOD, MRS. RATCLIFFE, MRS. BROWN, AND MR. WILLIAM WOOD, OF HAWORTH. 1811-18. POEMS OF PATRICK BRONTE, B.A., INCUMBENT or
HAWORTH. 1879. HAWORTH : PAST AND PRESENT. J". Horsfall Turner-
EMILY BRONTE.
INTRODUCTION.
THERE are, perhaps, few tests of excellence so sure as the popular verdict on a work of art a hundred years after its accomplishment. So much time must be allowed for the swing and rebound of taste, for the de- spoiling of tawdry splendours and to permit the work of art itself to form a public capable of appreciating it. Such marvellous fragments reach us of Elizabethan praises ; and we cannot help recalling the number of copies of ( Prometheus Unbound ' sold in the lifetime of the poet. We know too well " what porridge had John Keats," and remember with misgiving the turtle to which we treated Hobbs and Nobbs at dinner, and how complacently we watched them put on their laurels afterwards.
Let us, then, by all means distrust our own and the public estimation of all heroes dead within a hundred years. Let us, in laying claim to an infallible verdict, remember how oddly our decisions sound at the other side of Time's whispering gallery. Shall we therefore pronounce only on Chaucer and Shakespeare, on Gower and our learned Ben ? Alas \ we are too sure of their relative merits ; we stake our reputations with no qualms, no battle-ardours. These we reserve to them for whom
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2 EMILY BRONTE.
the future is not yet secure, for whom a timely word may still be spoken, for whom we yet may feel that lancing out of enthusiasm only possible when the cast of fate is still unknown, and, as we fight, we fancy that the glory of our hero is in our hands.
But very gradually the victory is gained. A taste is unconsciously formed for the qualities necessary to the next development of art — qualities which Blake in his garret, Millet without the sou, set down in immortal work. At last, when the time is ripe, some connoisseur sees the picture, blows the dust from the book, and straightway blazons his discovery. Mr. Swinburne, so to speak, blew the dust from ' Wuthering Heights '; and now it keeps its proper rank in the shelf where Coleridge and Webster, Hofmann and Leopardi have their place. Until then, a few brave lines of welcome from Sydney Dobell, one fine verse of Mr. Arnold's, one notice from Mr. Reid, was all the praise that had been given to the book by those in authority. Here and there a mill- girl in the West Riding factories read and re-read the tattered copy from the lending library ; here and there some eager, unsatisfied, passionate child came upon the book and loved it, in spite of chiding, finding in it an imagination that satisfied, and a storm that cleared the air ; or some strong-fibred heart felt without a shudder the justice of that stern vision of inevitable, inherited ruin following the chance-found child of foreign sailor and seaport mother. But these readers were not many ; even yet the book is not popular.
For, in truth, the qualities that distinguish Emily Bronte are not those which are of the first necessity to a novelist. She is without experience ; her range of cha- racter is narrow and local ; she has no atmosphere of broad humanity like George Eliot ; she has not Jane
INTRODUCTION. 3
Austen's happy gift of making us love in a book what we have overlooked in life ; we do not recognise in her the human truth and passion, the never-failing serene bitterness of humour, that have made for Charlotte Bronte a place between Cervantes and Victor Hugo.
Emily Bronte is of a different class. Her imagination is narrower, but more intense ; she sees less, but what she sees is absolutely present : no writer has described the moors, the wind, the skies, with her passionate fidelity, but this is all of Nature that she describes. Her narrow fervid nature accounted as simple annoyance the trivial scenes and personages touched with immortal sympathy and humour in ' Villette ' and ' Shirley ' ; Paul Emanuel himself appeared to her only as a pedantic and exacting taskmaster ; but, on the other hand,. to a certain class of mind, there is nothing in fiction so moving as the spectacle of Heathcliff dying of joy — an unnatural, unreal joy — his panther nature paralysed, antanti, in a delirium of visionary bliss.
Only an imagination of the rarest power could con- ceive such a denouement, requiting a life of black ingratitude by no mere common horrors, no vulgar Bedlam frenzy ; but by the torturing apprehension of a happiness never quite grasped, always just beyond the verge of realisation. Only an imagination of the finest and rarest touch, absolutely certain of tread on that path of a single hair which alone connects this world with the land of dreams. Few have trod that perilous bridge with the fearlessness of Emily Bronte : that is her own ground and there she wins our highest praise ; but place her on the earth, ask her to interpret for us the common lives of the surrounding people, she can give no answer. The swift and certain spirit moves with
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4 EMIL Y BRONTE.
the clumsy hesitating gait of a bird accustomed to soar.
She tells us what she saw ; and what she saw and what she was .incapable of seeing are equally cha- racteristic. All the wildness of that moorland, all the secrets of those lonely farms, all the capabilities of the one tragedy of passion and weakness that touched her solitary life, she divined and appropriated ; but not the life of the village at her feet, not the bustle of the mills, the riots, the sudden alternations of wealth and poverty ; not the incessant rivalry of church and chapel ; and while the West Riding has known the prototype of nearly every person and nearly every place in 'Jane Eyre' and 'Shirley,' not a single character in ' Wuthering Heights ' ever climbed the hills round Haworth.
Say that two foreigners have passed through Stafford- shire, leaving us their reports of what they have seen. The first, going by day, will tell us of the hideous black- ness of the country ; but yet more, no doubt, of that awful, patient struggle of man with fire and darkness, of the grim courage of those unknown lives ; and he would see what they toil for, women with little children in their arms ; and he would notice the blue sky beyond the smoke, doubly precious for such horrible environment. But the second traveller has journeyed through the night ; neither squalor nor ugliness, neither sky nor children, has he seen, only a vast stretch of blackness shot through with flaming fires, or here and there burned ta a dull red by heated furnaces ; and before these, strange toilers, half naked, scarcely human, and red in the leap- ing flicker and gleam of the fire. The meaning of their work he could not see, but a fearful and impressive phantasmagoria of flame and blackness and fiery energies at work in the encompassing night,
INTRODUCTION. 5
So differently did the black country of this world appear to Charlotte, clear-seeing and compassionate, and to Emily Bronte, a traveller through the shadows. Each faithfully recorded what she saw, and the place was the .same, but how unlike the vision ! The spectacles of temperament colour the world very differently for each beholder ; and, to understand the vision, we too should for a moment look through the seer's glass. To gain some such transient glance, to gain and give some such momentary insight into the character of Emily Bronte, has been the aim I have tried to make in this book. That I have not fulfilled my desire is perhaps inevitable — the task has been left too long. If I have done anything at all I feel that much of the reward is due to my many and generous helpers. Foremost among them I must thank Dr. Ingham, my kind host at Haworth, Mrs. Wood, Mr. William Wood, Mrs. Brown, and Mrs. Ratcliffe of that parish — all of whom had known the now perished family of Bronte ; and my thanks are due no less to Mr. T. Wemyss Reid, as will be seen further on, to Mr. J. H. Ingram, and to Mr. Biddell, who have collected much valuable information for my benefit ; and most of all do I owe gratitude and thankfulness to Miss Ellen Nussey, without whose generous help my work must have re- mained most ignorant and astray. To her, had it been worthier, had it been all the subject merits, and yet without those shadows of gloom and trouble enjoined by the nature of the story ; to her, could I only have spoken of the high noble character of Emily Bronte and not of the great trials of her life, I should have ventured to dedi- cate this study. But to Emily's friend I only offer what, through her, I have learned of Emily ; she, who knew so little of Branwell's shames and sorrow is unconcerned with this, their sad and necessary record. Only the
6 EMIL Y BRONT&.
lights and sunshine of my work I dedicate to her. It may be that I have given too great a share to the shadows, to the manifold follies and failures of Branwell Bronte. Yet in Emily Bronte's life the shaping influ- ences were so few, and the sins of this beloved and erring brother had so large a share in determining the bent of her genius, that to have passed them by would have been to ignore the shock which turned the fantasy of the 'Poems' into the tragedy of 'Wuthering Heights/ It would have been to leave untold the patience, the courage, the unselfishness which perfected Emily Bronte's heroic character ; and to have left her burdened with the calumny of having chosen to invent the crimes and violence of her dramatis persona. Not so, alas ! They were but reflected from the passion and sorrow that darkened her home ; it was no perverse fancy which drove that pure and innocent girl into ceaseless brooding on the conquering force of sin and the supremacy of injustice.
She brooded over the problem night and day ; she took its difficulties passionately to heart ; in the midst of her troubled thoughts she wrote ' Wuthering Heights/ From the clear spirit which inspires the end of her work, we know that the storm is over ; we know that her next tragedy would be less violent. But we shall never see it ; for — and it is by this that most of us remember her — suddenly and silently she died.
She died, before a single word of worthy praise had reached her. She died with her work misunderstood and neglected. And yet not unhappy. For her home on the moors was very dear to her, the least and home- liest duties pleasant ; she loved her sisters with devoted friendship, and she had many little happinesses in her patient, cheerful, unselfish life. Would that I could
INTRODUCTION. 7
show her as she was ! — not the austere and violent poetess who, cuckoo-fashion, has usurped her place ; but brave to fate and timid of man ; stern to herself, for- bearing to all weak and erring things ; silent, yet some- times sparkling with happy sallies. For to represent her as she was would be her noblest and most fitting monument.
EMILY BRONTE.
CHAPTER I. PARENTAGE.
EMILY BRONTE was born of parents without any peculiar talent for literature. It is true that her mother's letters are precisely and prettily written. It is true that her father published a few tracts and religious poems. But in neither case is there any vestige of literary or poetical endowment. Few, indeed, are the Parish Magazines which could not show among their contents poems and articles greatly superior to the weak and characterless effusions of the father of the Brontes. The fact seems important; because in this case not one member of a family, but a whole family, is endowed in more or less degree with faculties not derived from either parent.
For children may inherit genius from parents who are themselves not gifted, as two streaming currents of air unite to form a liquid with properties different from either ; and never is biography more valuable than when it allows us to perceive by what combination of allied qualities, friction of opposing temperaments, recurrence of ancestral traits, the subtle thing we call character is determined. In this case, since, as I have said, the whole family manifested a brilliance not to be found. in either parent, such a study would be peculiarly interest- ing. But, unfortunately, the history of the children's father and the constitution of the children's mother is all that is clear to our investigation.
PARENTAGE. 9
.Yet even out of this very short pedigree two important factors of genius declare themselves — two potent and shaping inheritances. From their father, Currer, Ellis, and Acton derived a strong will. From their mother, the disease that slew Emily and Anne in the prime of their youth and made Charlotte always delicate and ailing. In both cases the boy, Patrick Branwell, was very slightly affected ; but he too died young, from excesses that suggest a taint of insanity in his con- stitution.
Insanity and genius stand on either side consumption, its worse and better angels. Let none call it impious or absurd to rank the greatest gift to mankind as the occasional result of an inherited tendency to tubercular disease. There are of course very many other deter- mining causes ; yet is it certain that inherited scrofula or phthisis may come out, not in these diseases, or not only in these diseases, but in an alteration, for better or for worse, of the condition of the mind. Out of evil good may come, or a worse evil.
The children's father was a nervous, irritable and violent man, who endowed them with a nervous organisa- tion easily disturbed and an indomitable force of volition. The girls, at least, showed both these characteristics. Patrick Branwell must have been a weaker, more bril- liant, more violent, less tenacious, less upright copy of his father ; and seems to have suffered no modification from the patient and steadfast moral nature of his mother. She was the model that her daughters copied, in different degrees, both in character and healthy Passion and will their father gave them. Their genius •came directly from neither parent ; but from the con- stitution of their natures.
In addition, on both sides, the children got a Celtic
io EMIL Y BRONTE.
strain ; and this is a matter of significance, meaning a. predisposition to the superstition, imagination and horror that is a strand in all their work. Their mother, Maria Branwell, was of a good middle-class Cornish family, long established as merchants in Penzance. Their father was the son of an Irish peasant, Hugh Prunty, settled in the north of Ireland, but native to the south.
The history of the Rev. Patrick Bronte, B.A. (whose fine Greek name, shortened from the ancient Irish appel- lation of Bronterre, was so na'fvely admired by his chil- dren), is itself a remarkable and interesting story.
The Reverend Patrick Bronte was one of the ten chil- dren of a peasant proprietor at Ahaderg in county Down. The family to which he belonged inherited strength, good looks, and a few scant acres of potato-growing soil. ^ They must have been very poor, those ten chil- dren, often hungry, cold and wet ; but these adverse influences only seemed to brace the sinews of Patrick Prunty and to nerve his determination to rise above his surroundings. He grew up a tall and strong young fellow, unusually handsome with a well-shaped head, regular profile and fine blue eyes. A vivacious impres- sible manner effectually masked a certain selfishness and rigour of temperament which became plain in after years. He seemed a generous, quick, impulsive lad. When he was sixteen years of age Patrick left his father's roof resolved to earn a position for himself. At Drumgooland, a neighbouring hamlet, he opened what is called in Ireland a public school ; a sort of hedge- school for village children. He stuck to his trade for five or six years, using his leisure to perfect himself in general knowledge, mathematics, and a smattering of Greek and Latin.
His efforts deserved to be crowned with success. The
PARENTAGE. ir
Rev. Mr. Tighe, the clergyman of the parish, was so struck with Patrick Prunty's determination and ability that he advised him to try for admittance at one of the English universities ; and when the young man was about five-and-twenty he went, with Mr. Tighe's help, to Cambridge, and entered at St. John's.
He left Ireland in July, 1802, never to visit it again. He never cared to look again on the scenes of his early struggle. He never found the means to revisit mother or home, friends or country. Between Patrick Bronte, proud of his Greek profile and his Greek name, the handsome undergraduate at St. John's, and the nine shoeless, hungry young Pruntys of Ahaderg, there stretched a distance not to be measured by miles.. Under his warm and passionate exterior a fixed resolu- tion to get on in the world was hidden ; but, though cold, the young man was just and self-denying, and as long as his mother lived she received twenty pounds a year, spared with difficulty from his narrow income.
Patrick Bronte stayed four years at Cambridge ; when he left he had dropped his Irish accent and taken his B.A. On leaving St. John's he was ordained to a curacy in Essex.
The young man's energy, of the sort that only toils to reach a given personal end, had carried him far on the way to success. At twenty hedge-schoolmaster at Drum- gooland, Patrick Bronte was at thirty a respectable clergyman of the Church of England, with an assured position and respectable clerical acquaintance. He was getting very near the goal.
He did not stay long in Essex. A better curacy was offered to him at Hartshead, a little village between Huddersfield and Halifax in Yorkshire. While he was at Hartshead the handsome inflammable Irish curate
1 2 E,MIL Y BRONTE.
.met Maria Branwell at her uncle's parsonage near Leeds. It was not the first time that Patrick Bronte had fallen in love ; people in the neighbourhood used to smile at .his facility for adoration, and thought it of a piece with his enthusiastic character. They were quite right ; in his strange nature the violence and the coldness were •equally genuine, both being a means to gratify some personal ambition, desire, or indolence. It is not an uncommon Irish type ; self-important, upright, honour- able, yet with a bent towards subtlety: abstemious in habit, but with freaks of violent self-indulgence ; courteous and impulsive towards strangers, though cold to members •of the household ; naturally violent, and often assuming violence as an instrument of authority ; selfish and dutiful ; passionate, and devoid of intense affection.
Miss Branwell was precisely the little person with whom it was natural that such a man, a self-made man, .should fall in love. She was very small, quiet and gentle, not exactly pretty, but elegant and ladylike. •She was, indeed, a well-educated young lady of good connections ; a very Phoenix she must have seemed in the eyes of a lover conscious of a background of Pruntyism and potatoes. She was about twenty-one and he thirty- »five when they first met in the early summer of 1812. They were engaged in August. Miss Bran well's letters .reveal a quiet intensity of devotion, a faculty of judg- ment, a willingness to forgive passing slights that must have satisfied the absolute and critical temper of her Jover. Under the devotion and the quietness there is, however, the note of an independent spirit, and the following extract, with its capability of self-reliance and desire to rely upon another, reminds one curiously of passages in her daughter Charlotte's writings : —
" For some years I have been perfectly my own mis-
PARENTAGE. ij
tress, subject to no control whatever ; so far from it that my sisters, who are many years older than myself, and even my dear mother used to consult me on every occasion of importance, and scarcely ever doubted the propriety of my words and actions : perhaps you will be ready to accuse me of vanity in mentioning this, but you must consider that I do not boast of it. I have many times felt it a disadvantage, and although, I thank God, it has never led me into error, yet in circum- stances of uncertainty and doubt I have deeply felt the want of a guide and instructor."
Years afterwards, when Maria Branwell's letters were given into the hands of her daughter Charlotte and that daughter's most dear and faithful friend, the two young women felt a keen pang of retrospective sympathy for the gentle independent little person who, even before her marriage, had time to perceive that her guide and in- structor was not the infallible Mentor she had thought him at the first. I quote the words of Charlotte's friend, of more authority and weight on this matter than those of any other person living, taken from a manuscript which she has placed at my disposal : —
" Miss Branwell's letters showed that her engagement, though not a prolonged one, was not as happy as it ought to have been. There was a pathos of apprehen- sion (though gently expressed) in part of the corre- spondence lest Mr. Bronte should cool in his affection towards her, and the readers perceived with some in- dignation that there had been a just cause for this apprehension. Mr. Bronte, with all his iron strength and power of will, had his weakness, and one which, wherever it exists, spoils and debases the character — he had personal vanity. Miss Branwell's finer nature rose above such weakness ; but she suffered all the more from-
EMILY BRONTE.
evidences of it in one to whom she had given her affec- tions and whom she was longing to look up to in all things."
On the 29th of December, 1812, this disillusioned, loving little lady was married to Patrick Bronte, from her uncle's parsonage near Leeds. The young couple took up their abode at Hartshead, Mr. Bronte's curacy. Three years afterwards they moved, with two little baby girls, Maria and Elizabeth, to a better living at Thornton. The country round is desolate and bleak ; great winds go sweeping by ; young Mrs. Bronte, whose husband generally sat alone in his study, would have missed her cheerful home in sunny Penzance (being delicate and prone to superstition), but that she was a patient and uncomplaining woman, and she had scant time for thought among her many cares for the thick- coming little lives that peopled her Yorkshire home. In 1816 Charlotte Bronte was born. In the next year Patrick Branwell. In 1818 Emily Jane. In 1819 Anne. Then the health of their delicate and consumptive mother began to break. After seven years' marriage and with six young children, Mr. and Mrs. Bronte moved on the 2$th of February, 1820, to their new home .at Haworth Vicarage.
The village of Haworth stands, steep and grey, on the topmost side of an abrupt low hill. Such hills, more steep than high, are congregated round, circle beyond circle, to the utmost limit of the horizon. Not a wood, not a river. As far as eye can reach these treeless hills, their sides cut into fields by grey walls of stone, with here and there a grey stone village, and here and there a grey stone mill, present no other colours than the singular north-country brilliance of the green grass, and the blackish grey of the stone. Now and then a top-
PARENTAGE 15
pling, gurgling mill-beck gives life to the scene. But the real life, the only beauty of the country, is set on the top of all the hills, where moor joins moor from York- shire into Lancashire, a coiled chain of wild free places. White with snow in winter, black at midsummer, it is only when spring dapples the dark heather-stems with the vivid green of the sprouting wortleberry bushes, only when in early autumn the moors are one humming mass of fragrant purple, that any beauty of tint lights up the scene. But there is always a charm in the moors for hardy and solitary spirits. Between them and heaven nothing dares to interpose. The shadows of the coursing clouds alter the aspect of the place a hundred times a day. A hundred little springs and streams well in its soil, making spots of livid greenness round their rise. A hundred birds of every kind are flying and singing there. Larks sing ; cuckoos call ; all the tribes of linnets and finches twitter in the bushes ; plovers moan ; wild ducks fly past ; more melancholy than all, on stormy days, the white sea-mews cry, blown so far inland by the force of the gales that sweep irresistibly over the treeless and houseless moors. There in the spring you may take in your hands the weak, halting fledgelings of the birds ; rabbits and game multiply in the hollows. There in the autumn the crowds of bees, mad in the heather, send the sound of their humming down the village street. The winds, the clouds, Nature .and life, must be the friends of those who would love the moors.
But young Mrs. Bronte never could go on the moors. She was frail and weak, poor woman, when she came to live in the oblong grey stone parsonage on the windy top of the hill. The village ran sheer down at her feet ; but she could not walk down the steep rough-paven
16 EMIL Y BRONTE.
street, nor on the pathless moors. She was very ill and weak ; her husband spent nearly all his time in the study, writing his poems, his tracts, and his sermons. She had no companions but the children. And when, in a very few months, she found that she was sickening of a cancer, she could not bear to see much of the children that she must leave so soon.
Who dare say if that marriage was happy ? Mrs. Gaskell, writing in the life and for the eyes of Mr. Bronte, speaks of his unwearied care, his devotion in the night- nursing. But before that fatal illness was declared, she lets fall many a hint of the young wife's loneliness during her husband's lengthy, ineffectual studies ; of her patient suffering of his violent temper. She does not say, but we may suppose, with what inward pleasure Mrs. Bronte witnessed her favourite silk dress cut into shreds because her husband's pride did not choose that she should accept a gift ; or watched the children's coloured shoes thrown on the fire, with no money in her purse to get new ones ; or listened to her husband's cavil at the too frequent arrival of his children ; or heard the firing of his pistol-shots at the out-house doors, the necessary vent of a passion not to be wreaked in words. She was patient, brave, lonely, and silent. But Mr. Wemyss Reid, who has had unexampled facilities for studying the Bronte papers, does not scruple to speak of Mr. Bronte's "persistent coldness and neglect" of his wife, his " stern and peremptory " dealings with her, of her " habitual dread of her lordly master " ; and the manuscript which I have once already^quoTeoTalludes to the "hard and inflexible will which raised itself some- times into tyranny and cruelty." It is within the cha- racter of the man that all this should be true. Safely wed, the woman to whom he had made hot love would
PARENTAGE. 17
experience no more of his impulsive tenderness. He had provided for her and done his duty ; her duty was to be at hand when he needed her. Yet, imminent death once declared, all his uprightness, his sense of honour, would call on him to be careful to the creature he had vowed to love and cherish, all his selfishness would oblige him to try and preserve the mother of six little children under seven years of age. " They kept themselves very close," the village people said ; and at least in this last illness the husband and wife were frequently together. Their love for each other, new revived and soon to clos.e, seemed to exclude any thought of the children. We hear expressly that Mr. Bronte, from natural disinclination, and Mrs. Bronte, from fear of agitation, saw very little of the small earnest babies who talked politics together in the "children's study," or toddled hand in hand over the neighbouring moors.
Meanwhile the young mother grew weaker day by day, suffering great pain and often unable to move. But repining never passed her lips. Perhaps she did not repine. Perhaps she did not grieve to quit her harassed life, the children she so seldom saw, her con- stant pain, the husband "not dramatic enough in his perceptions to see how miserable others might be in a life that to him was all-sufficient." * For some months she lay still, asking sometimes to be lifted in bed that she might watch the nurse cleaning the grate, be- cause she did it as they did in Cornwall. For some months she suffered more and more. In September,
1821, she died.
* Mrs. Gaskell.
1 8 EMILY BRONT&
CHAPTER II.
BABYHOOD.
AFTER his wife's death the Rev. Mr. Bronte's life grew yet more secluded from ordinary human interests. He was not intimate with his parishioners ; scarcely more intimate with his children. He was proud of them when they said anything clever, for, in spite of their babyhood, he felt at such moments that they were worthy of their father ; but their forlorn infancy, their helpless ignorance, was no appeal to his heart. Some months before his wife's death he had begun to take his dinner alone, on account of his delicate digestion ; and he con- tinued the habit, seeing the children seldom except at breakfast and tea, when he would amuse the elders by talking Tory politics with them, and entertain the baby, Emily, with his Irish tales of violence and horror. Per- haps on account of this very aloofness, he always had a great influence over the children ; he did not care for any dearer relation.
His empty days were filled with occasional visits to some sick person in the village ; with long walks alone over the moors, and with the composition of his ' Cottage in the Wood ' and those grandiloquent sermons which still linger in the memory of Haworth. Occasionally a clergyman from one of the neighbouring villages would walk over to see him ; but as Mrs. Bronte had died so soon after her arrival at Haworth their wives never
BABYHOOD. 19
came, and the Bronte children had no playfellows in the vicarages near ; nor were they allowed to associate with the village children.
This dull routine life suited Mr. Bronte. He had laboured for many years and now he took his repose. We get no further sign of the impatient energies of his youth. He had changed, developed ; even as those sea-creatures develop, who, having in their youth fins, eyes and sensitive feelers, become, when once they find their resting-place, motionlessly attached to it, losing -one after the other, sight, movement, and even sensation, everything but the faculty to adhere.
Meanwhile the children were left alone. For sym- pathy and amusement they only had each other to look to ; and never were brother and sisters more de- voted. Maria, the eldest, took care of them all — she was an old-fashioned, motherly little girl ; frail and small in appearance, with thoughtful, tender ways. She was very careful of her five little ones, this seven-year- old mother of theirs, and never seems to have exerted the somewhat tyrannic authority usually wielded by such youthful guardians. Indeed, for all her seniority, she was the untidy one of the family herself; it was .against her own faults only that she was severe. She must have been a very attaching little creature, with her childish delinquencies and her womanly cares ; protect- ing her little family with gentle love and discussing the debates in Parliament with her father. Charlotte re- membered her to the end of her life with passionate clinging affection and has left us her portrait in the pathetic figure of Helen Burns.
This delicate, weak-chested child of seven was the head of the nursery. Then came Elizabeth, less clearly individualised in her sisters' memory. She also bore in
C 2
20
EMILY BRONTE.
her tiny body the seeds of fatal consumption. Next came impetuous Charlotte, always small and pale. Then red-headed, talkative Patrick Branwell. Lastly Emily and Anne, mere babies, toddling with difficulty over the paven path to the moors.
Such a family demanded the closest care, the most exact attention. This was perhaps impossible on an income of £200 a year, when the mother lay upstairs dying of a disease that required constant nursing. Still the conditions of the Brontes' youth were unnecessarily unhealthy. It could not be helped that these delicate children should live on the bleak wind-swept hill where consumption is even now a scourge ; it could not be helped that their home was bounded on two sides by the village graveyard ; it could not be helped that they were left without a mother in their babyhood ; but never, short of neglect, were delicate children less con- sidered.
The little ones, familiar with serious illness in the house, expected small indulgence. They were accustomed to think nothing so necessary as that they should amuse themselves in quiet, and keep out of the way. The lesson learned so young remained in the minds of the five sisters all their lives. From their infancy they were retired and good ; it was only Patrick Branwell who sometimes showed his masculine independence by a burst of natural naughtiness. They were the quietest of children by nature and necessity. The rooms at Haworth Parsonage were small and few. There were in front two moderate-sized parlours looking on the garden, hat on the right being Mr. Bronte's study, and the larger one opposite the family sitting-room. Behind these was a sort of empty store-room and the kitchens. On the first floor there was a servants'-room, where the
BABYHOOD. 21
two servants slept, over the back premises ; and a bed- room over each of the parlours. Between these and over the entrance passage was a tiny slip of a room, scarcely larger than a linen-closet, scarcely wider than the doorway and the window-frame that faced each other at either end. During the last months of Mrs. Bronte's illness, when it became necessary that she should have a bedroom to herself, all the five little girls were put to sleep in this small and draughty closet, formerly the children's study. There can scarcely have been room to creep between their beds. Very quiet they must have been ; for any childish play would have disturbed the dying mother on the one side, and the anxious irritable father on the other. And all over the house they must keep the same hushed calm, since the low stone-floored rooms would echo any noise. Very probably they were not unhappy children for all their quietness. They enjoyed the most absolute freedom, dearest possession of childhood. When they were tired of reading the papers (they seemed to have had no chil- dren's books), or of discussing the rival merits of Bona- parte and the Duke of Wellington, they were free to go along the paven way over the three fields at the back, till the last steyle-hole in the last stone wall let them through on to the wide and solitary moors. There in all weathers they might be found ; there they passed their happiest hours, uncontrolled as the birds overhead.
One rule seems to have been made by their father for the management of these precocious children with their consumptive taint, with their mother dying of cancer — that one rule of Mr. Bronte's making, still preserved to us, is that the children should eat no meat. The Rev. Patrick Bronte, B.A., had grown to heroic proportions on potatoes ; he knew no reason why his children should fare differently.
22 EMILY BRONTE.
The children never grumbled ; so Mrs. Bronte's sick- nurse told Mrs. Gaskell :
"You would not have known there was a child in the house, they were such still, noiseless, good little creatures. Maria would shut herself up in the chil- dren's study with a newspaper and be able to tell one everything when she came out ; debates in Parliament, and I don't know what all. She was as good as a mother to her sisters and brother. But there never were such good children. I used to think them spirit- less, they were so different to any children I had ever seen. In part, I set it down to a fancy Mr. Bronte had of not letting them have flesh-meat to eat. It was from no wish for saving, for there was plenty and even waste in the house, with young servants and no mistress to see after them ; but he thought that children should be brought up simply and hardily : so they had nothing but potatoes for their dinner ; but they never seemed to wish for anything else. They were good little creatures. Emily was the prettiest."
This pretty Emily of two years old was no mother's constant joy. That early shaping tenderness, those re- curring associations of reverent love, must be always missing in her memories. Remembering her earliest childhood, she would recall a constant necessity of keep- ing joys and sorrows quiet, not letting others hear ; she would recall the equal love of children for each other, the love of the only five children she knew in all the world ; the free wide moors where she might go as she pleased, and where the rabbits played and the moor- game ran and the wild birds sang and flew.
Mrs. Bronte's death can have made no great difference to any of her children save Maria, who had been her constant companion at Thornton; friendly and helpful
BABYHOOD. 2-5
as a little maiden of six can be to the worried, delicate mother of many babies. Emily and Anne would barely remember her at all. Charlotte could only just recall the image of her mother playing with Patrick Branwell one twilight afternoon. An empty room, a cessation of accus- tomed business, their mother's death can have meant little more than that to the younger children.
For about a year they were left entirely to their own devices, and to the rough care of kind-hearted, busy servants. They devised plays about great men, read the newspapers, and worshipped the Duke of Wellington, strolled over the moors at their own sweet will, knowing and caring absolutely for no creature outside the walls of their own home. To these free, hardy, independent little creatures Mr. Bronte announced one morning that their maiden aunt from Cornwall, their mother's eldest sister, was coming to superintend their education.
"Miss Branweli was a very small, antiquated little lady. She wore caps large enough for half-a-dozen of the present fashion, and a front of light auburn curls over her forehead. She always dressed in silk. She had a horror of the climate so far north, and of the stone floors in the Parsonage. . . . She talked a great deal of her younger days— the gaieties of her dear native town Penzance, the soft, warm climate, &c. She gave one the idea that she had been a belle among her own home acquaintance. She took snuff out of a very pretty gold snuff-box, which she sometimes presented to you with a little laugh, as if she enjoyed the slight shock of astonishment visible in your countenance. . . . She would be very lively and intelligent, and tilt arguments against Mr. Bronte without fear."
So Miss Ellen Nussey recalls the elderly, prim Miss Branwell about ten years later than her first arrival i»
24 EMIL Y BRONTE.
Yorkshire. But it is always said of her that she changed very little. Miss Nussey's striking picture will pretty accurately represent the maiden lady of forty, who, from a stringent and noble sense of duty, left her southern, pleasant home to take care of the little orphans running wild at Haworth Parsonage. It is easy to imagine with what horrified astonishment aunt and nieces must have regarded each others' peculiarities.
It was, no doubt, an estimable advantage for the children to have some related lady in authority over them. Henceforth their time was no longer free for their own disposal. They said lessons to their father, they did sewing with their aunt, and learned from her all housewifely duties. The advantage would have been a blessing had their aunt been a woman of sweet-natured, motherly turn ; but the change from perfect freedom to her old-maidish discipline was not easy to bear — a bitter good, a strengthening but disagreeable tonic, making the children yet less expansive, yet more self-contained and silent. Patrick Branwell was the favourite with his aunt, the naughty, clever, brilliant, rebellious, affec- tionate Patrick. Next to him she always preferred the pretty, gentle baby Anne, with her sweet, clinging ways, her ready submission, her large blue eyes and clear pink-and-white complexion. Charlotte, impulsive, obstinate and plain, the rugged, dogged Emily, were not framed to be favourites with her. Many a fierce tussle of wills, many a grim listening to over-frivolous reminiscence, must have shown the aunt and her nieces the difference of their natures. Maria, too, the whilom head of the nursery, must have found submission hard ; but hers was a singularly sweet and modest nature. Of Elizabeth but little is remembered.
Mr. Bronte, now that the children were growing out
BABYHOOD. 25
of babyhood, seems to have taken a certain pride in them. Probably their daily lessons showed him the -character and talent hidden under those pale and grave little countenances. In a letter to Mrs. Gaskell he recounts instances of their early talent. More home- loving fathers will smile at the simple yet theatric means 'he took to discover the secret of his children's real dis- positions. 'Twas a characteristic inspiration, worthy the originator of the ancient name of Bronte. A certain simplicity of confidence in his own subtlety gives a ^piquant flavour to the manner of telling the tale : —
"A circumstance now occurs to my mind which I *may as well mention. When my children were very young, when, as far as I can remember, the eldest was .about ten years of age and the youngest four, thinking that they knew more than I had yet discovered, in order >to make them speak with less timidity, I deemed that if they were put under a sort of cover I might gain my end ; and happening to have a mask in the house I told them all to stand and speak boldly from under cover of the mask.
" I began with the youngest (Anne, afterwards Acton Bell), and asked what a child like her most wanted ; she answered, ' Age and experience.' I asked the next • (Emily, afterwards Ellis Bell) what I had best do with her brother Branwell, who sometimes was a naughty boy ; she answered, ( Reason with him ; and when he won't listen to reason whip him.' I asked Branwell what was the best way of knowing the difference be- tween the intellects of men and women ; he answered, 'By considering the difference between them as to their bodies.' I then asked Charlotte what was the best book in the world ; she answered, ' The Bible.' And what was :the next best; she answered, 'The book of Nature.' I
26 EMIL Y BRONTE.
then asked the next (Elizabeth, who seems to have taken-. Miss Bran well's teaching to heart) what was the best mode of education for a woman ; she answered, * That which would make her rule her house well.' Lastly, I asked the oldest what was the best mode of spending time ; she answered, ' By laying it out in preparation for a happy eternity.' I may not have given precisely their words, but I have nearly done so, as they have made a deep and lasting impression on my memory. The substance, however, was exactly what I have stated."
The severely practical character of Emily's answer is a relief from the unchildish philosophy of Branwell, Maria, and the baby. A child of four years old who prefers age and experience to a tartlet and some sweets must be an unnatural product. But the Brontes seem to have had no childhood ; unlimited discussion of debates, long walks without any playfellows, the free perusal of Methodist magazines, this is the pabulum of their infancy. Years after, when they asked some school-children to tea, the clergyman's young daughters had to ask their little scholars to teach them how to play. It was the first time they had ever cared to try.
What their childhood had really taught them was the value of their father's quaint experiment. They learned to speak boldly from under a mask. Restrained, en- forcedly quiet, assuming a demure appearance to cloak their passionate little hearts, the five sisters never spoke their inmost mind in look, word, or gesture. They saved the leisure in which they could not play to make up histories, dramas, and fairy tales, in which each let loose, without noise, without fear of check, the fancies they never tried to put into action as other children are wont to. Charlotte wrote tales of heroism and adven- ture. Emily cared more for fairy tales, wild, unnatural*,
BABYHOOD. 27
strange fancies, suggested no doubt in some degree by her father's weird Irish stories. Already in her nursery the peculiar bent of her genius took shape.
Meanwhile the regular outer life went on — the early rising, the dusting and pudding-making, the lessons said to their father, the daily portion of sewing accomplished in Miss Bran well's bedroom, because that lady grew more and more to dislike the flagged flooring of the sitting-room. Every day, some hour snatched for a ramble on the moors ; peaceful times in summer when the little girls took their sewing under the stunted thorns and currants in the garden, the clicking sound of Miss Branwell's pattens indistinctly heard within. Happy times when six children, all in all to each other,, told wonderful stories in low voices for their own en- trancement. Then, one spring, illness in the house ; the children suffering a complication of measles and whoop- ing-cough. They never had such happy times again,, for it was thought better that the two elders should go away after their sickness ; should get their change of air at some good school. Mr. Bronte made inquiries and heard of an institution established for clergymen's daughters at Cowan's Bridge, a village on the high road between Leeds and Kendal. After some demurring the school authorities consented to receive the children, now free from infection, though still delicate and needing care. Thither Mr. Bronte took Maria and Elizabeth in the July of 1824. Emily and Charlotte followed in Sep- tember.
EMILY BRONTE.
CHAPTER III.
COWAN'S BRIDGE.
•*' IT was in the year 1823 that the school for clergymen's •daughters was first projected. The place was only then contemplated as desirable in itself, and as a place which might probably be feasible at some distant day. The -mention of it, however, to only two friends in the South having met with their warm approbation and a remit- tance of .£70, an opening seemed to be made for the commencement of the work.
" With this sum in hand, in a reliance upon Him who has all hearts at his disposal, and to whom belong the silver and the gold, the premises at Cowan's Bridge were purchased, the necessary repairs and additions proceeded with, and the school was furnished and opened in the spring of 1824. The whole expense of the purchase and outfit amounted to ^2333 ijs. gd.
" The scanty provision of a large portion of the clergy of the Established Church has long been a source of regret ; and very efficient means have been adopted in various ways to remedy it. The sole object of the Clergy Daughters' School is to add, in its measure, to these means, by placing a good female education within reach of the poorest clergy. And by them the season- able aid thus afforded has been duly appreciated. The anxiety and toil which necessarily attend the manage- ment of such an institution have been abundantly repaid
COWAN'S BRIDGE. 2<>
by the gratitude which has been manifested among the parents of the pupils.
" It has been a very gratifying circumstance that the Clergy Daughters' School has been enabled to follow up- the design of somewhat kindred institutions in London. Pupils have come to it as apprentices from the Corpora- tion of the Sons of the Clergy ; and likewise from the Clergy Orphan School, in which the education is of a limited nature and the pupils are not allowed to remain after the age of sixteen.
" The school is situated in the parish of Tunstall, or* the turnpike road from Leeds to Kendal, between which towns a coach runs daily, and about two miles from the town of Kirkby Lonsdale.
"Each pupil pays £14 a year (half in advance) for clothing, lodging, boarding, and educating ; £ i entrance towards the expense of books, and ^3 entrance for pelisses, frocks, bonnets, &c.j which they wear all alike.* So that the first payment which a pupil is required to bring with her is £ 1 1 ; and the subsequent half-yearly payment £7. If French, music, or drawing is learnt, £3 a year additional is paid for each of these.
" The education is directed according to the capacities of the pupils and the wishes of their friends. In all cases^ the great object in view is their intellectual and religious improvement ; and to give that plain and useful educa- tion which may best fit them to return with respectability and advantage to their own homes ; or to maintain them- selves in the different stations of life to which Providence may call them."
Here comes some explanation of the
treasurer's accounts. Then the report recommences : —
* It is very much wished that the pupils should wear only their school dress during the vacations.
EMILY BRONTE.
" Low as the terms are, it has been distressing to dis- cover that in many cases clergymen who have applied on behalf of their daughters have been unable to avail them- selves of the benefits of the school from the inadequacy •of their means to raise the required payments.
The projectors' object will not be fully realised until the means are afforded of reducing the terms still lower, in extreme cases, at the discretion of the committee. And he trusts that the time will arrive when, either by legacies or otherwise, the school may be placed within the reach of those of the clergy for whom it is specially intended — namely, the most destitute.
" The school is open to the whole kingdom. Donors .and subscribers gain the first attention in the recom- mendation of pupils ; and the only inquiry made upon applications for admission is into the really necessitous circumstances of the applicant.
" There are now ninety pupils in the school (the number that can be accommodated) and several are waiting for admission.
" The school is under the care of Mrs. Harben, as superintendent, eight teachers, and two under-teachers.
" To God belongs the glory of the degree of success which has attended this undertaking, and which has far exceeded the most sanguine expectations. But the expression of very grateful acknowledgment must not be wanting towards the many benefactors who have so readily and so bountifully rendered their assistance. They have their recompense in the constant prayers which are offered up from many a thankful heart for all who support this institution."
Thus excellently and moderately runs the fourth year's report of the philanthropic Gymnase Moronval, evange- lical Dotheboys Hall, familiar to readers of 'Jane Eyre.
COWAN'S BRIDGE. 31
When these congratulations were set in type, those horrors of starvation, cruelty, and fever were all accom- plished which brought death to many children, and to those that lived an embittering remembrance of wrong. The two Bronte girls who survived their school days brought from them a deep distrust of human kindness, a difficult belief in sincere affection, not natural to their warm and passionate spirits. They brought away yet more enfeebled bodies, prone to disease ; they brought away the memory of two dear sisters dead. " To God be the glory," says the report. Rather, let us pray, to the Rev. William Carus Wilson.
The report quoted above was issued six years after the autumn in which the little Brontes were sent to Cowan's Bridge ; it was not known then in what terms one of those pale little girls would thank her benefactors, would speak of her advantages. She spoke at last, and generations of readers have held as filthy rags the righteousness of that institution, thousands of charitable hearts have beat high with indignation at the philan- thropic vanity which would save its own soul by the sufferings of little children's tender bodies. Yet by an odd anomaly this ogre benefactor, this Brocklehurst, must have been a zealous and self-sacrificing enthusiast, with all his goodness spoiled by an imperious love of authority, an extravagant conceit.
It was in the first year of the school that the little Bronte girls left their home on the moors for Cowan's Bridge. It was natural that as yet many things should go wrong and grate in the unperfected order of the house ; equally natural that the children should fail to make excuses : poor little prisoners pent, shivering and .starved, in an unkind as)>lum from friends and liberty.
The school, long and low, more like an unpretending
32 EMIL Y BRONTE.
farmhouse than an institution, forms two sides of art oblong. The back windows look out on a flat garden about seventy yards across. Part of the house was- originally a cottage ; the longer part a disused bobbin- mill, once turned by the stream which runs at the side of the damp, small garden. The ground floor was turned into schoolrooms, the dormitories were above, the dining-room and the teachers'-room were in the cottage at the end. All the rooms were paved with stone, low-ceiled, small-windowed ; not such as are built for growing children, working in large classes together. No board of managers would permit the poorest children of our London streets to work in such ill-ventilated schoolrooms.
The bobbin-mill, not built for habitation, was, no doubt,, faulty and insufficient in drainage. The situation of the house, chosen for its nearness to the stream, was damp and cold, on a bleak, unsheltered plain, picturesque enough in summer with the green alders overhanging the babbling beck, but in winter bitter chill. In this dreary house of machines, the place of the ousted wheels and springs was taken by ninety hungry, growing little human beings, all dressed alike in the coarse, ill-fitting garments of charity, all taught to look, speak, and think alike, all commended or held up to reprobation according as they resembled or diverged from the machines whose room they occupied and whose regular, thoughtless movement was the model of their life.
These children chiefly owed their excellent education,, their miserable food and lodging, to the exertions of a rich clergyman from Willingdon, the nearest village. The Rev. Carus Wilson was a person of importance in the neighbourhood ; a person who was looked to in, emergencies, who prided himself on his prudence, fore-
COWAWS BRIDGE. 33
sight, and efficiency in helping others. With this, none the less a man of real and zealous desire to do good, an energetic, sentient person capable of seeing evils and devising remedies. He wished to help : he wished no less that it should be known he had helped. Pitying the miserable conditions of many of his fellow-workers, he did not rest till he had founded a school where the daughters of the poor clergy should receive a fair educa- tion at a nominal price. When the money for the school was forthcoming, the property was vested in twelve trustees ; Mr. Wilson was one. He was also treasurer and secretary. Nearly all the work, the power, the super- vision, the authority of the affair, he took upon his shoulders. He was not afraid of work, and he loved power. He would manage, he would be overseer, he would guide, arrange, and counsel. So sure did he feel of his capacity to move all springs himself, that he seems to have exercised little pains and less discretion in appointing his subordinates. Good fortune sent him a gentle, wise, and noble woman as superintendent ; but the other teachers were less capable, some snappish, some without authority. The housekeeper, who should have been chosen with the greatest care, since in her hands lay the whole management and preparation of the food of these growing children, was a slovenly, wasteful woman, taken from Mr. Wilson's kitchen, and much be- lieved in by himself. Nevertheless to her door must we lay much of the misery of " Lowood."
The funds were small and somewhat uncertain. Honour and necessity alike compelled a certain economy. Mr. Wilson contracted for the meat, flour, and milk, and frequently himself inspected the supplies. But perhaps he did not inspect the kitchen. The " Lowood " scholars had many tales to tell of milk turned sour in dirty pans ;
D
34 EMIL Y BRONTE.
of burnt porridge with disgusting fragments in it from uncleanly cooking vessels ; of rice boiled in water from the rain-cask, flavoured with dead leaves, and the dust of the roof; of beef salted when already tainted by de- composition ; of horrible resurrection-pies made of un- appetising scraps and rancid fat. The meat, flour, milk and rice were doubtless good enough when Mr. Wilson saw them, but the starved little school-girls with their disappointed hunger had neither the courage to complain nor the impartiality to excuse. For the rest, it was not easy to complain to Mr Wilson. His sour evangelicism led him to the same conclusion as the avarice of a less disinterested Yorkshire schoolmaster ; he would have bade them conquer human nature. Being a very proud man, he sought to cultivate humility in others. The children were all dressed alike, all wearing in summer plain straw cottage bonnets, white frocks on Sundays and nankeen in the week ; all wearing in winter purple stuff frocks and purple pelisses — a serviceable and appropriate raiment which should allow no envies, jealousies, or flatteries. They should not be vain, neither should they be greedy. A request for nicer- tasting food would have branded the asker with the lasting contempt of the Rev. William Carus Wilson, trustee, treasurer, and secretary. They were to learn that it was wrong to like pretty things to wear, nice things to eat, pleasant games to play ; these little scholars taken half on charity. Mr. Wilson was repulsed by the apple-and-pegtop side of a child's nature ; he deliberately ignored it.
Once in this grim, cold, hungry house of charity, there was little hope of escape. All letters and parcels were inspected by the superintendent ; no friends of the pupils were allowed in the school, except for a short call
COWAWS BRIDGE. 35
of ceremony. But it is probable that Maria and Eliza- beth, sent on before, had no thought of warning their smaller sisters. So destitute of all experience were they, that probably they imagined all schools like Cowan's Bridge ; so anxious to learn, that no doubt they willingly accepted the cold, hunger, deliberate unkindness, which made their childhood anxious and old.
The lot fell heaviest on the elder sister, clever, gentle, slovenly Maria. The principal lesson taught at Cowan's Bridge was the value of routine.
Maria, with her careless ways, ready opinions, gentle loving incapacity to become a machine, Maria was at discord with every principle of Cowan's Bridge. She incurred the bitter resentment of one of the teachers, who sought all means of humiliating and mortifying the sweet-natured, shiftless little creature. When, in Sep- tember, bright, talkative Charlotte and baby Emily came to Cowan's Bridge, they found their idolised little mother, their Maria, the butt, laughingstock and scapegrace of the school.
Things were better for the two younger ones, Char- lotte, a bright clever little girl, and Emily, the prettiest of the little sisters, " a darling child, under five years of age, quite the pet nursling of the school." * But though at first, no doubt, these two babies were pleased by the change of scene and the companionship of children, trouble was to befall them. Not the mere distasteful scantiness of their food, the mere cold of their bodies ; they saw their elder sister grow thinner, paler day by day, no care taken of her, no indulgence made for her weakness. The poor ill-used, ill-nourished child grew very ill without complaining ; but at last even the -authorities at Cowan's Bridge perceived that she was
* Mrs. Harben to Mrs. Gaskell.
D 2
36 EMIL Y BRONTE.
dying. They sent for Mr. Bronte in the spring of 1825. He had not heard of her illness in any of his children's letters, duly inspected by the superintendent. He had heard no tales of poor food, damp rooms, neglect. He came to Cowan's Bridge and saw Maria, his clever little companion, thin, wasted, dying. The poor father felt a terrible shock. He took her home with him, away from the three little sisters who strained their eyes to look after her. She went home to Haworth. A few days afterwards she died.
Not many weeks after Maria's death, when the spring made Lowood bearable, when the three saddened little sisters no longer waked at night for the cold, no longer lame with bleeding feet, could walk in the sunshine and pick flowers, when April grew into May, an epidemic of sickness came over Cowan's Bridge. The girls one by one grew weak and heavy, neither scolding nor texts roused them now ; instead of spending their play-hours in games in the sweet spring air, instead of picking flowers or running races, these growing children grew all languid, flaccid, indolent. There was no stirring them to work or play. Increasing illness among the girls made even their callous guardians anxious at last. Elizabeth Bronte was one of the first to flag. It was not the fever that ailed her, the mysterious undeclared fever that brooded over the house ; her frequent cough, brave spirits, clear colour pointed to another goaL They sent her home in the care of a servant ; and before the summer flushed the scanty borders of flowers on the newest graves in Haworth churchyard, Elizabeth Bronte was dead, no more to hunger, freeze, or sorrow. Her hard life of ten years was over. The second of the Bronte sisters had fallen a victim to consumption.
Discipline was suddenly relaxed for those remaining
COWAN'S BRIDGE. 37
behind at Cowan's Bridge. There was more to eat, for there were fewer mouths to feed ; there was more time to play and walk, for there were none to watch and restrain the eager children, who played, eat, shouted, ran riot, with a certain sense of relief, although they knew they were only free because death was in the house and pestilence in the air.
The woody hollow of Cowan's Bridge was foggy, un- wholesome, damp. The scholars underfed, cramped, neglected. Their strange indolence and heaviness grew stronger and stronger with the spring. All at once forty-five out of the eighty girls lay sick of typhus-fever. Many were sent home only to die, some died at Cowan's Bridge. All that could, sent for their children home. Among the few who stayed in the fever-breeding hollow, in the contaminated house, where the odours of pastilles and drugs blended with, but could not conquer, the faint sickening smell of fever and mortality, among these abandoned few were Charlotte and Emily Bronte.
Thanks to the free, reckless life, the sunshine, the novel abundance of food, the two children did not take the infection. Things, indeed, were brighter for them now, or would have been, could the indignant spirit in these tiny bodies have forgiven or forgotten the deaths of their two sisters.
Reform had come to Cowan's Bridge, and with swift strides cleared away the old order of things. The site was declared unhealthy ; the clothing insufficient ; the water fetid and brackish. When the doctor who in- spected the school was asked to taste the daily food of the scholars he spat it out of his mouth. Everything, everything must be altered. It was a time of sore and grievous humiliation to Mr. Wilson. He had felt no qualms, no doubts ; he had worked very hard, -he
38 EMIL Y BRONTE.
thought things were going very well. The accounts were in excellent order, the education thorough and good, the system elaborate, the girls really seemed to be acquiring a meek and quiet spirit ; and, to quote the prospectus, " the great object in view is their intellectual and religious improvement." Then stepped in unreckoned-with dis- ease, and the model institution became a by-word of reproach to the county and the order to which it be- longed. People, however, were not unjust to the influ- ential and wealthy treasurer, trustee, and secretary* They admitted his energy, financial capacities, and turn for organisation. All they did was to qualify the rigour of his management. He still continued treasurer, but the funds were entrusted to a committee. He kept his post of inspector, but assistants were appointed to share his responsibilities. The school was given in charge to a new housekeeper ; larger and better rations of food were given out. Finally a subscription was set on foot to build a better house in a healthier spot. When Charlotte and Emily Bronte went home for the mid- summer holidays, reform was in full swing at Cowan's Bridge.
They went home, two out of the four children who- had left their happy home six months before. They went home to find no motherly Maria, no sturdy, patient Elizabeth. The walks on the moors, the tales under the thorn-trees must henceforth be incomplete. The two elders of that little band were no longer to be found in house or garden — they lay quiet under a large paving- stone close to the vicarage pew at church. The three little sisters, the one little brother, must have often thought on their quiet neighbours when the sermon was very long. Thus early familiarised and neighbourly with death, one of them at least, tall, courageous Emily,
grew up to have no dreary thouorn-tree or two, and a dreams of a far-off heaven. ijd not grow. Next
When the holidays were over, the qding churchyard, to school. Their father, strangely eno* of grass could to send them to that fatal place. Then two favourites at home, was not over-anxiou «n, treeless and Emily went back to Cowan's Bridge, feeding a the winter they were ill : the damp air, the urn wild site (for as yet the new house was not built) brougis of the weakness of their constitutions. Bearing the eis- sisters' fate in view, the authorities warned Mr. Bronx,* and the two children came home to Haworth.
38 EMIL Y . ' BRONT&
thought things were goir in excellent order, the system elaborate, th a meek and quiet "the great objec' improvement''
ease, and t1 CHAPTER IV.
reproach
longed CHILDHOOD.
entia1
TbHE home to which Charlotte and Emily returned was
f not a very much more healthy spot than that they left ; but it was home. It was windy and cold, and badly drained. Mr. Bronte was ever striving to stir up his parishioners to improve the sanitary conditions of the place ; but for many years his efforts were in vain. The canny Yorkshire folk were loth to put their money underground, and it was hard to make them believe that the real cause of the frequent epidemics and fevers in Haworth was such as could be cured by an effective system of subsoil drainage. It was cheaper and easier to lay the blame at the doors of Providence. So the parson preached in vain. Well might he preach, for his own house was in the thick of the evil.
"As you left the Parsonage-gate you looked upon the stonecutter's chipping-shed, which was piled with slabs ready for use, and to the ear there was the in- cessant 'chip, chip' of the recording chisel as it graved in the ' In Memoriams ' of the departed."
So runs Miss Nussey's manuscript. She also tells of the constant sound of the passing bell ; of the frequent burials in the thronged churchyard. No cheerful, healthy home for sensitive, delicate children.
" From the Parsonage windows the first view was the
CHILDHOOD. 41
plot of grass edged by a wall, a thorn-tree or two, and a few shrubs and currant-bushes that did not grow. Next to these was the large and half-surrounding churchyard, so full of gravestones that hardly a strip of grass could be seen in it."
Beyond this the moors, the wild, barren, treeless moors, that stretch away for miles and miles, feeding a few herds of mountain sheep, harbouring some wild conies and hares, giving a nesting-place to the birds of heaven, and, for the use of man, neither grain nor pas- turage, but quarries of stone and piles of peat luridly smouldering up there on autumn nights.
Such is the home to which Emily Bronte clung with the passionate love of the Swiss for his white mountains, with a homesickness in absence that strained the very cords of life. Yet her childhood in that motherless home had few of the elements of childish happiness, and its busy strictness of daily life was saddened by the loss of Maria and Elizabeth, dear, never-forgotten play- fellows. Charlotte, now the eldest of the family, was only two years older than Emily, but her sense of respon- sibility made her seem quite of a different age. It was little Anne who was Emily's companion — delicate, shrink- ing, pretty Anne, Miss Branwell's favourite. Anne could enter only into the easiest or lightest of her sister's moods, and yet she was so dear that Emily never sought another friend. So from childhood she grew accustomed to keep her own confidence upon her deepest thoughts and liveliest fancies.
A quiet regular life — carpet-brushing, sewing, dusting in the morning. Then some necessary lessons said to their aunt upstairs ; then, in the evening, while Mr. Bronte wrote his sermons in the study and Miss Branwell sat in her bedroom, the four children, alone in the parlour, or
42 EMIL Y BRONTE.
sitting by the kitchen fire, while Tabby, the servant,, moved briskly about, would write their magazines or make their plays.
There was a great deal about politics still in the plays. Mr. Bronte, who took a keen interest in the affairs of the world, always told the children the chief public news of the day, and let them read what newspapers and maga- zines they could lay hold on. So the little Brontes prattled of the Duke of Wellington when other children still have Jack the Giantkiller for a hero ; the Marquis of Douro was their Prince Charming ; their Yahoos,, the Catholics ; their potent evil genii the Liberal Ministry.
"Our plays were established," says Charlotte, the family chronicler, in her history of the year 1829: "'Young Men/ June, 1826 ; 'Our Fellows/ July, 1827 ; 'Islanders/ December, 1827. These are our three great plays that are not kept secret. Emily's and my best plays were established the 1st of December, 1827; the others, March, 1828. Best plays mean secret plays ; they are very nice ones. All our plays are very strange ones. Their nature I need not write on paper, for I think I shall always remember them. The ' Young Men's ' play took its rise from some wooden soldiers Branwell had ; ' Our Fellows ' from ^Esop's Fables ; and the ' Islanders ' from several events which happened. I will sketch out the origin of our plays more explicitly if I can. First, ' Young Men.' Papa bought Branwell some wooden sol- diers at Leeds ; when papa came home it was night, and we were in bed, so next morning Branwell came to our door " (the little room over the passage . Anne slept with her aunt) "with a box of soldiers. Emily and I jumped out of bed, and I snatched up one and exclaimed, ' This is the Duke of Wellington ! This shall be the Duke/
CHILDHOOD. 43.
When I had said this, Emily likewise took one up and said it should be hers ; when Anne came down, she said one should be hers. Mine was the prettiest of the whole, the tallest and the most perfect in every part. Emily's was a grave-looking fellow, and we called him ' Gravey.' Anne's was a queer little thing, much like herself, and we called him ' Waiting-boy.' Branwell chose his, and called him Bonaparte."
In another play Emily chooses Sir Walter Scott, Mr. Lockhart and Johnny Lockhart as her representatives ; Charlotte the Duke of Wellington, the Marquis of Douro, Mr. Abernethy, and Christopher North. This last personage was indeed of great importance in the eyes of the children, for BlackwoocCs Magazine was their favourite reading. On their father's shelves were few novels, and few books of poetry. The clergyman's study necessarily boasted its works of divinity and reference ; for the children there were only the wild romances of Southey, the poems of Sir Walter Scott, left by their Cornish mother, and " some mad Methodist magazines full of miracles and apparitions and preternatural warn- ings, ominous dreams and frenzied fanaticism ; and the equally mad letters of Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe from the Dead to the Living," familiar to readers of ' Shirley.' To counterbalance all t*""s romance and terror, the children had their interest ir. politics and Blackwoods Magazine, "the most able periodical there is," says thirteen-year- old Charlotte. They also saw John Bull, " a high Tory,, very violent, the Leeds Mercury, Leeds Intelligencer, a most excellent Tory newspaper," and thus became accomplished fanatics in all the burning questions of the day.
Miss Branwell took care that the girls should not lack more homely knowledge. Each took her share in the
44 EMIL Y BRONTE.
day's work, and learned all details of it as accurately as any German maiden at her cookery school. Emily took very kindly to even the hardest housework ; there she felt able and necessary ; and, doubtless, upstairs, grimly listening to prim Miss Branwell's stories of bygone gaieties, this awkward growing girl was glad to remember that she too was of importance to the household, despite her tongue-tied brooding.
The girls fared well enough ; but not so their brother. Branwell's brilliant purposelessness, Celtic gaiety, love of amusement and light heart made him the most charm- ing playfellow, but a very anxious charge. Friends advised Mr. Bronte to send his son to school, but the peculiar vanity which made him model his children's youth in all details on his own forbad him to take their counsel. Since he had fed on potatoes, his children should eat no meat. Since he had grown up at home as 'best he might, why should Patrick Branwell go to school ? Every day the father gave a certain portion of his time to working with his boy ; but a clergyman's time is not his own, and often he was called away on parish business. Doubtless Mr. Bronte thought these tutorless hours were spent, as he would have spent them, in earnest prepara- tion of difficult tasks. But Branwell, with all his father's superficial charm of manner, was without the underlying strength of will, and he possessed, unchecked, the temp- tations to self-indulgence, to which his father seldom yielded, counteracting them rather by an ascetic regimen of life. These long afternoons were spent, not in work, but in mischievous companionship with the wilder spirits of the village, to whom " t' Vicar's Patrick " was the standard of brilliant leadership in scrapes.
No doubt their admiration flattered Branwell, and he •enjoyed the noisy fun they had together. Nevertheless
CHILDHOOD 45
he did not quite neglect his sisters. Charlotte has said that at this time she loved him even as her own soul— a serious phrase upon those serious lips. But it was Emily and Branwell who were most to each other : bright, shallow, exacting brother ; silent, deep-brooding, unselfish sister, more anxious to give than to receive. In January,. 1831, Charlotte went to school at Miss Wooler's, at Roe Head, twenty miles away ; and Branwell and Emily were thrown yet more upon each other for sympathy and entertainment.
Charlotte stayed a year and a half at school, and returned in the July of 1832 to teach Emily and Anne what she had learnt in her absence ; English-French, English and drawing was pretty nearly all the instruc- tion she could give. Happily genius needs no curri- culum. Nevertheless the sisters toiled to extract their utmost boon from such advantages as came within their range. Every morning from nine till half-past twelve they worked at their lessons ; then they walked together over the moors, just coming into flower. These moors knew a different Emily to the quiet girl of fourteen who helped in the housework and learned her lessons so regularly at home. On the moors she was gay, frolic- some, almost wild. She would set the others laughing with her quaint humorous sallies and genial ways. She was quite at home there, taking the fledgeling birds in her hands so softly that they were not afraid, and telling stories to them. A strange figure — tall, slim, angular, with all her inches not yet grown ; a quantity of dark- brown hair, deep beautiful hazel eyes that could flash with passion, features somewhat strong and stern, the mouth prominent and resolute.
The sisters, and sometimes Branwell, would go far on the moors ; sometimes four miles to Keighley in the
46 EMIL Y BRONTE.
hollow over the ridge, unseen from the heights, but brooded over always by a dim film of smoke, seemingly the steam rising from some fiery 4ake. The sisters 'now subscribed to a circulating library at Keighley, and would gladly undertake the rough walk of eight miles for the sake of bringing back with them a novel by Scott, or a poem by Southey. At Keighley, too, they bought their paper. The stationer used to wonder how they could get through so much.
Other days they went over Stanbury Moor to the Waterfall, a romantic glen in the heathy side of the hill where a little stream drips over great boulders, and where some slender delicate birches spring, a wonder in this barren country. This was a favourite haunt of Emily, and indeed they all loved the spot. Here they would use some of their paper, for they still kept up their old habit of writing tales and poems, and loved to scribble out of doors. And some of it they would use in drawing, since at this time they were taking lessons, and Emily and Charlotte were devoted to the art : Charlotte making copies with minuteness and exact fidelity ; Emily drawing animals and still-life with far greater freedom and certainty of touch. Some of Char- lotte's paper, also, must have gone in letter-writing. She had made friends at school, an event of great importance to that narrow circle. One of these friends, the dearest, was unknown to Haworth. Many a time must Emily and Anne have listened to accounts of the pretty, accomplished, lively girl, a favourite in many homes, who had won the heart of their shy plain sister. She was, indeed, used to a very different life, this fair young girl, but her bright youth and social pleasures did not blind her to the fact that oddly-dressed, old-fashioned Charlotte Bronte was the most remarkable person of her
CHILDHOOD. 47
.acquaintance. She was the first, outside Charlotte's home, to discover her true character and genius ; and that at an age, in a gosition, when most girls would be too busy with visions of a happy future for themselves to sympathise with the strange activities, the morbid sensitiveness, of such a mind as Charlotte possessed. But so early this girl loved her; and lives still, the last to have an intimate recollection of the ways, persons and habits of the Bronte household.
In September, 1832, Charlotte left home again on a fortnight's visit to the home of this dear friend. Branwell took her there. He had probably never been from home before. He was in wild spirits at the beauty of the house and grounds, inspecting, criticising everything, pouring out a stream of comments, rich in studio terms, taking views in every direction of the old battlemented house, and choosing " bits " that he would like to paint, delighting the whole family with his bright cleverness, and happy Irish ways. Meanwhile Charlotte looked on, shy and dull. " I leave you in Paradise ! " 'cried Branwell, and betook himself over the moor to make fine stories of his visit to Emily and Anne in the bare little parlour at Haworth.
Charlotte's friend, Ellen, sent her home laden with apples for her two young sisters : " Elles disent qu'elles .sont sur que Mademoiselle E. est tres-aimable et bonne ; 1'une et 1'autre sont extremement impatientes de vous voir ; j'espere que dans peu de mois elles auront ce plaisir " So writes Charlotte in the quaint Anglo- French that the friends wrote to each other for practice. But winter was approaching, and winter is dreary at Haworth. Miss Branwell persuaded the eager girls to put off their visitor till summer made the moors warm and dry, and beautiful, so that the young people could
48 EMIL Y BRONTE.
spend much of their time out of doors. In the summer of 1833 Ellen came to Haworth.
Miss Ellen Nussey is the only person living who knew Emily Bronte on terms of intimate equality, and her testimony carries out that of those humbler friends who helped the parson's busy daughter in her cooking and cleaning ; from all alike we hear of an active, genial,, warm-hearted girl, full of humour and feeling to those she knew, though shy and cold in her bearing to strangers. A different being to the fierce impassioned Vestal who has seated herself in Emily's place of remembrance.
In 1833 Emily was nearly fifteen, a tall long-armed girl, full grown, elastic of tread ; with a slight figure that looked queenly in her best dresses, .but loose and boyish when she slouched over the moors, whistling to her dogs, and taking long strides over the rough earth. A tall, thin, loose-jointed girl — not ugly, but with irre- gular features and a pallid thick complexion. Her dark brown hair was naturally beautiful, and in later days- looked well, loosely fastened with a tall comb at the back of her head ; but in 1833 she wore it in an un- becoming tight curl and frizz. She had very beautiful eyes of hazel colour. " Kind, kindling, liquid eyes," says the friend who survives all that household. She had an aquiline nose, a large expressive, prominent mouth. She talked little. No grace or style in dress belonged to Emily, but under her awkward clothes her natural move- ments had the lithe beauty of the wild creatures that she loved. She was a great walker, spending all her leisure on the moors. She loved the freedom there, the large air. She loved the creatures, too. Never was a soul with a more passionate love of Mother Earth, of every weed and flower, of every bird, beast, and insect that lived. She would have peopled the house with pets had
CHILDHOOD. 49
not Miss Branwell kept her niece's love of animals in due subjection. Only one dog was allowed, who was admitted into the parlour at stated hours, but out of doors Emily made friends with all the beasts and birds. She would come home carrying in her hands some young bird or rabbit, and softly talking to it as she came. " Ee, Miss Emily/' the young servant would say, "one would think the bird could understand you." "I am sure it can," Emily would answer. " Oh, I am sure it can."
The girls would take their friend long walks on the moor. When they went very far, Tabby, their old factotum, insisted on escorting them, unless Branwell took that duty on himself, for they were still " childer " in her eyes. Emily and Anne walked together. They and Branwell would ford the streams and place stepping- stones for the elder girls. At every point of view, at every flower, the happy little party would stop to talk, admire, and theorise in concert. Emily's reserve had vanished as morning mists. She was full of glee and gladness, on her own demesne, no longer awkward and silent. On fine days Emily and Anne would persuade the others to walk to the Waterfall which made an island of brilliant green turf in the midst of the heather, set with clear springs, shaded with here and there a silver birch, and dotted with grey boulders, beautiful resting- places. Here the four girls — the " quartette " as they called themselves — would go and sit and listen to Ellen's stones of the world they had not seen. Or Emily, half- reclining on a slab of stone, would play like a young child with the tadpoles in the water, making them swim about, and she would fall to moralising on the strong and the weak, the brave and the cowardly, as she chased the creatures with her hand. Having rested, they would trudge home again a merry party, save when they met
E
50 EMIL Y BRONTE.
some wandering villager. Then the parson's three daughters would walk on, hushed and timid.
At nine the sewing was put by, and the four girls would talk and laugh, pacing round the parlour. Miss Branwell went to bed early, and the young people were left alone in the curtainless clean parlour, with its grey walls and horse-hair furniture. But with good company no room is poorly furnished ; and they had much to say, and much to listen to, on nights when Branwell was at home. Oftenest they must have missed him ; since, whenever a visitor stayed at the " Black Bull," the little inn across the churchyard, the landlord would send up for " T' Vicar's Patrick " to come and amuse the guests with his brilliant rhodomontade.
Not much writing went on in Ellen's presence, but gay discussion, making of stories, and serious argument. They would talk sometimes of dead Maria and Eliza- beth, always remembered with an intensity of love. About eight o'clock Mr. Bronte would call the house- hold to family prayers : and an hour afterwards he used to bolt the front door, and go upstairs to bed, always stopping at the sitting-room with a kindly admonition to the " children " not to be late. At last the girls would stop their chatter, and retire for the night, Emily giving her bed to the visitor and taking a share of the servants' room herself.
At breakfast the next morning Ellen used to listen with shrinking amazement to the stories of wild horror that Mr. Bronte loved to relate, fearful stories of super- stitious Ireland, or barbarous legends of the rough dwellers on the moors ; Ellen would turn pale and cold to hear them. Sometimes she marvelled as she caught sight of Emily's face, relaxed from its company rigour, while she stooped down to hand her porridge-bowl
CHILDHOOD. 51
to the dog : she wore a strange expression, gratified, pleased, as though she had gained something which seemed to complete a picture in her mind. For this silent Emily, talking little save in rare bursts of wild spirits ; this energetic housewife, cooking and cleaning as though she had no other aim in view than the providing for the day's comfort ; this was the same Emily who at five years of age used to startle the nursery with her fantastic fairy stories. Two lives went on side by side in her heart, neither ever mingling with or interrupting the other. Practical housewife with capable hands, dreamer of strange horrors : each self was independent of the companion to which it was linked by day and night People in those days knew her but as she seemed — " T Vicar's Emily " — a shy awkward girl, never teaching in the Sunday school like her sisters, never talking with the villagers like merry Branwell, but very good and hearty in helping the sick and distressed: not pretty in the village estimation — a " slinky lass," no prim, trim little body like pretty Anne, nor with Charlotte Bronte's taste in dress ; just a clever lass with a spirit of her own. So the village judged her. At home they loved her with her strong feelings, untidy frocks, indomitable will, and ready contempt for the common-place ; she was appreciated as a dear and necessary member of the household. Of Emily's deeper self, her violent genius, neither friend nor neighbour dreamed in those days. And to-day it is only this Emily who is remembered.
Days went on, pleasant days of autumn, in which Charlotte and her friend roamed across the blooming moors, in which Anne and Emily would take their little stools and big desks into the garden, and sit and scribble under the currant-bushes, stopping now and then to pluck the ripe fruit Then came chill October, bringing
E 2
52 EMILY BRONTE.
cold winds and rain. Ellen went home, leaving an empty chair in the quartette, leaving Charlotte lonelier, and even Emily and Anne a little dull. " They never liked any one as well as you," says Charlotte.
Winter came, more than usually unhealthy that year, and the moors behind the house were impassable with snow and rain. Miss Branwell continually bemoaned the warm and flowery winters of Penzance, shivering over the fire in her bedroom ; Mr. Bronte was ill ; outside the air was filled with the mournful sound of the passing bell. But the four young people sitting round the parlour hearth-place were not cold or miserable. They were dreaming of a happy and glorious future, a great career in Art ; not for Charlotte, not for Emily or Anne, they were only girls ; their dreams were for the hope and promise of the house— for Branwell.
CHAPTER V. GOING TO SCHOOL.
EMILY was now sixteen years old, and though the people in the village called her " t' cleverest o' t' Bronte childer," she had little to show of her cleverness. Her education was as home-made as her gowns, not such as would give distinction to a governess ; and a governess Emily would have to be. The Bronte sisters were too severe and noble in their theories of life ever to con- template marriage as a means of livelihood ; but even worldly sisters would have owned that there was little chance of impatient Emily marrying at all. She was almost violent in her dislike of strangers. The first time that Ellen stayed at Haworth, Charlotte was ill one day and could not go out with her friend. To their surprise Emily volunteered to take the stranger a walk over the moors. Charlotte waited anxiously for their return, fear- ing some outbreak of impatience or disdain on the part of her untamable sister. The two girls at last came home. " How did Emily behave ? " asked Charlotte, eagerly, drawing her friend aside. She had behaved well ; she had shown her true self, her noble, energetic, truthful soul, and from that day there was a real friend- ship between the gentle Ellen and the intractable Emily ; but none the less does Charlotte's question reveal in how different a manner the girl regarded strangers as a rule. In after days when the curates, looking for Mr. Bronte
54 EMIL Y BRONTE.
in his study, occasionally found Emily there instead, they used to beat such a hasty retreat that it was quite an established joke at the Parsonage that Emily appeared to the outer world in the likeness of an old bear. She hated strange faces and strange places. Her sisters must have seen that such a temperament, if it made her unlikely to attract a husband or to wish to attract one, also rendered her lamentably unfit to earn her living as a governess. In those days they could not tell that the defect was incurable, a congenital infirmity of nature ; and doubtless Charlotte, the wise elder sister, thought she had found a cure for both the narrow educa- tion and the narrow sympathies when she suggested that Emily should go to school. She writes to her friend in July, 1835 :—
" I had hoped to have had the extreme pleasure of seeing you at Haworth this summer, but human affairs are mutable, and human resolutions must bend to the course of events. We are all about to divide, break up, separate. Emily is going to school, Branwell is going to London, and I am going to be a governess. This last determination I formed myself, knowing I should have to take the step sometime, and ' better sune as syne,' to use a Scotch proverb ; and knowing well that Papa would have enough to do with his limited income,, should Branwell be placed at the Royal Academy and Emily at Roe Head. Where am I going to reside ? you will ask. Within four miles of you, at a place neither of us are unacquainted with, being no other than the identical Roe Head mentioned above. Yes ! I am going to teach in the very school where I was myself taught. Miss Wooler made me the offer, and I preferred it to one or two proposals of private governess-ship which I had before received. I am sad — very sad — at the
GOING TO SCHOOL. 55
thoughts of leaving home ; but duty — necessity — these are stern mistresses, who will not be disobeyed. Did I not once say you ought to be thankful for your inde- pendence ? I felt what I said at the time, and I repeat it now with double earnestness ; if anything would cheer me it is the idea of being so near you. Surely you and Polly will come and see me ; it would be wrong in me to doubt it ; you were never unkind yet. Emily and I leave home on the 2/th of this month ; the idea of being together consoles us both somewhat, and, truth, since I must enter a situation, ' My lines have fallen in pleasant places.' I both love and respect Miss Wooler." *
The wrench of leaving home, so much dreaded by Charlotte, was yet sharper to her younger sister, morbidly fearful of strangers, eccentric, unable to live without wide liberty. To go to school; it must have had a dreadful sound to that untamable, free creature, happiest alone with the dogs on the moors, with little sentiment or instinct for friendship ; no desire to meet her fellows. Emily was perfectly happy at Haworth cooking the dinner, ironing the linen, writing poems at the Waterfall, taking her dog for miles over the moors, pacing round the parlour with her arm round gentle Anne's waist. Now she would have to leave all this, to separate from her dear little sister. But she was reasonable and just, and, feeling the attempt should be made, she packed up her scanty wardrobe, and, with- out repining, set out with Charlotte for Roe Head.
Charlotte knew where she was going. She loved and respected Miss Wooler ; but with what anxiety must Emily have looked for the house where she was to live and not to be at home. At last she saw it, a cheerful, roomy, country house, standing a little apart in a field. * Mrs. Gaskell.
5 6 EMIL Y BRONTE.
There was a wide and pleasant view of fields and woods ; but the green prospect was sullied and marred by the smoke from the frequent mills. Green fields, grey mills, all told of industry, labour, occupation. There was no wild stretch of moorland here, no possibility of solitude. I think when Emily Bronte saw the place, she must have known very well she would not be happy there.
"My sister Emily loved the moors," says Charlotte, writing of these days in the latter solitude — "flowers brighter than the rose bloomed in the blackest of the heath for her ; out of a sullen hollow in a livid hillside her mind could make an Eden. She found in the bleak solitude many and dear delights ; and not the least and best-loved was liberty. Liberty was the breath of Emily's nostrils ; without it she perished. The change from her own home to a school, and from her own very noiseless, very secluded, but unrestricted and unartificial mode of life to one of disciplined routine (though under the kindest auspices) was what she failed in enduring. Her nature was here too strong for her fortitude. Every morning, when she woke, the visions of home and the moors rushed on her, and darkened and saddened the day that lay before her. Nobody knew what ailed her but me. I knew only too well. In this struggle her health was quickly broken : her white face, attenuated form, and failing strength threatened rapid decline. I felt in my heart she would die if she did not go home."
Thus looking on, Charlotte grew alarmed. She remem- bered the death of Maria and Elizabeth, and feared, feared with anguish, lest this best-beloved sister should follow them. She told Miss Wooler of her fear, and the schoolmistress, conscious of her own kindness and a little resentful at Emily's distress, consented that the girl should be sent home without delay. She did not care for Emily,
GOING TO SCHOOL. 57
-and was not sorry to lose her. So in October she re- turned to Haworth, to the only place where she was happy and well. She returned to harder work and plainer living than she had known at school ; but also to home, liberty, comprehension, her animals, and her flowers. In her native atmosphere she very soon reco- vered the health and strength that seemed so natural to her swift spirit ; that were, alas, so easily endangered. She had only been at school three months.
Even so short an absence may very grievously alter the aspect of familiar things. Haworth itself was the same ; prim, tidy Miss Branwell still pattered about in her huge caps and tiny clogs ; the Vicar still told his horrible stories at breakfast, still fought vain battles with the parishioners who would not drain the village, and the women who would dry their linen on the tombstones. Anne was still as transparently pretty, as pensive and pious as of old ; but over the hope of the house, the dashing, clever Branwell, who was to make the name of Bronte famous in art, a dim, tarnishing change had come. Emily must have seen it with fresh eyes, left more and more in Branwell's company, when, after the Christmas holidays, Anne returned with Charlotte to Roe Head.
There is in none of Charlotte's letters any further .talk of sending Branwell to the Royal Academy. He earnestly desired to go, and for him, the only son, any sacrifice had willingly been made. But there were reasons why that brilliant unprincipled lad should not be trusted now, alone in London. Too frequent had been those visits to the "Black Bull," undertaken, at ;first, to amuse the travellers from London, Leeds and Manchester, who found their evenings dull. The Vicar's lad was following the proverbial fate of parsons' sons.
$8 EMIL Y BRONTE.
Little as they foreboded the end in store, greatly as they hoped all his errors were a mere necessary attribute of manliness, the sisters must have read in his shaken nerves the dissipation for which their clever Branwell was already remarkable in Haworth. It is true that to be sometimes the worse for drink was no uncommon fault fifty years ago in Yorkshire ; but the gradual coarsening of Branwell's nature, the growing flippancy,. the altered health, must have given a cruel awaken- ing to his sisters' dreams for his career. In 1836 this deterioration was at the beginning ; a weed in bud that could only bear a bitter and poisonous fruit. Emily hoped the best ; his father did not seem to see his danger ;, Miss Branwell spoiled the lad ; and the village thought him a mighty pleasant young gentleman with a smile and a bow for every one, fond of a glass and a chat in the pleasant parlour of the " Black Bull " at nights ; a gay,, feckless, red-haired, smiling young fellow, full of ready courtesies to all his friends in the village ; yet, none the less as full of thoughtless cruelties to his friends at home.
For the rest, he had nothing to do, and was scarcely to blame if he could not devote sixteen hours a day to- writing verses for the Leeds Mercury, his only ostensible- occupation. It seems incredible that Mr. Bronte, who well understood the peculiar temptations to which his. son lay open, could have suffered him to loaf about the village, doing nothing, month after month, lured into ill by no set purpose, but by a weak social temper and foolish friends. Yet so it was,. and with such training,, little hope of salvation could there be for that vain, somewhat clever, untruthful, fascinating boy.
So things went on, drearily enough in reality, though perhaps more pleasantly in seeming — for Branwell, with
GOING TO SCHOOL. 59,
his love of approbation and ready affectionateness, took all trouble consistent with self-indulgence to avoid the noise of his misdemeanours reaching home. Thus things went on till Charlotte returned from Miss Wooler's with little Anne in the midsummer holidays of 1836.
An interval of happiness to lonely Emily ; Charlotte's friend came to the grey cold-looking Parsonage, enliven- ing that sombre place with her gay youth and sweet looks. Home with four young girls in it was more- attractive to Branwell than the alluring parlour of the " Black Bull." The harvest moon that year can have looked on no happier meeting. " It would not be right," says the survivor of those eager spirits, " to pass over one record which should be made of the sisters' lives to- gether, after their school-days, and before they were broken in health by their efforts to support themselves, that at this time they had all a taste of happiness and enjoyment. They were beginning to feel conscious of their powers, they were rich in each other's companion- ship, their health was good, their spirits were high, there was often joy ousness and mirth ; they commented on what they read ; analysed articles and their writers also ; the perfection of unrestrained talk and intelligence brightened the close of the days which were passing all too swiftly. The evening march in the sitting-room, a constant habit learned at school, kept time with their thoughts and feelings, it was free and rapid ; they marched in pairs, Emily and Anne, Charlotte and her friend, with arms twined round each other in child-like fashion, except when Charlotte, in an exuberance of spirit, would for a, moment start away, make a graceful pirouette (though she had never learned to dance) and return to her inarch." So the evenings passed and the days, in happy fashion-
60 EMIL Y BRONTE.
for a little while. Then Charlotte and Anne went back to Miss Wooler's, and Emily, too, took up the gauntlet -against necessity. She was not of a character to let the distastefulness of any duty hinder her from undertaking it. She was very stern in her dealings with herself, though tender to the erring, and anxious to bear the burdens of the weak. She allowed no one but herself to decide what it behoved her to do. She could not see Charlotte labour, and not work herself. At home she worked, it is true, harder than servants ; but she felt it right not only to work, but to earn. So, having recovered her natural strength, she left Haworth in September, and Charlotte writes from school to her friend : " My sister Emily has gone into a situation as teacher in a large school near Halifax. I have had one letter from her since her departure ; it gives an appalling account of her duties ; hard labour from six in the morning to eleven at night, with only one half-hour of exercise between. This is slavery. I fear she can never stand it."
She stood it, however, all that term ; came back to Haworth for a brief rest at Christmas, and again left it for the hated life she led, drudging among strangers. But when spring came back, with its feverish weakness, with its beauty and memories, to that stern place of exile, she failed. Her health broke down, shattered by long-resisted homesickness. Weary and mortified at heart, Emily again went back to seek life and happiness on the wild moors of Haworth.
t 61 )
CHAPTER VI.
GIRLHOOD AT HAWORTH.
THE next two years passed very solitarily for Emily at Haworth ; the Brontes were too poor for all to stay at home, and since it was definitely settled that Emily could not live away, she worked hard at home while her sisters went out in the world to gain their bread. She had no friend besides her sisters ; far-off Anne was her only con- fidant. Outside her own circle the only person that she cared to meet was Charlotte's friend Ellen, and, of course, Ellen did not come to Haworth while Charlotte was away. Branwell, too, was absent. His first engagement was as usher in a school ; but, mortified by the boys' sarcasms on his red hair and " downcast smallness," he speedily threw up his situation and returned to Haworth to con- fide his wounded vanity to the tender mercies of the rough and valiant Emily, or to loaf about the village seeking readier consolation.
Then he went as private tutor to a family in Broughton- in-Furness. One letter of his thence despatched to- some congenial spirit in Haworth, long since dead, has been lent to me by the courtesy of Mr. William Wood, one of the last of Branwell's companions, in whose possession the torn, faded sheet remains. Much of it is unreadable from accidental rents and the purposed excision of private passages, and part of that which can be read cannot be quoted ; such as it is, the letter is
•62 EMIL Y BRONTE.
valuable as showing what things in life seemed desirable .and worthy of attainment to this much-hoped-in brother of the austere Emily, the courageous Charlotte, the pious Anne.
" Broughton-in-Furness, March 15.
" OLD KNAVE OF TRUMPS,
"Don't think I have forgotten you though I have •delayed so long in writing to you. It was my purpose to send you a yarn as soon as I could find materials to spin one with. And it is only just now I have had time to turn myself round and know where I am.
" If you saw me now you would not know me, and you would laugh to hear the character the people give me. Oh, the falsehood and hypocrisy of this world ! I am fixed in a little town retired by the seashore, em- bowered in woody hills that rise round me, huge, rocky, .and capped with clouds. My employer is a retired county magistrate and large landholder, of a right Jiearty, generous disposition. His wife is a quiet, silent, amiable woman ; his sons are two fine, spirited lads. My landlord is a respectable surgeon, and six days out of seven as drunk as a lord ; his wife is a bustling, chattering, kind-hearted soul ; his daughter — oh ! death ,and damnation ! Well, what am I ? that is, what do they think I am ? — a most sober, abstemious, patient, mild-hearted, virtuous, gentlemanly philosopher, the picture of good works, the treasure-house of righteous thought. Cards are shuffled under the tablecloth, glasses are thrust into the cupboard, if I enter the room. I take •neither spirit, wine, nor malt liquors. I dress in black, .and smile like a saint or martyr. Every lady says, 4 What a good young gentleman is the Postlethwaites' tutor.' This is fact, as I am a living soul, and right -comfortably do I laugh at them ; but in this humour do
GIRLHOOD AT HA WORTH. 63
I mean them to continue. I took a half-year's farewell of old friend whisky at Kendal the night after I [left]. There was a party of gentlemen at the Royal Hotel ; I joined them and ordered in supper and 'toddy as hot as Hell/ They thought I was a physician, and put me into the chair. I gave them some toasts of the stiffest
sort washing them down at the same time till
the room spun round and the candles danced in their -eyes. One was a respectable old gentleman with powdered head, rosy cheeks, fat paunch, and ringed fingers ... he led off with a speech, and in two minutes, in the very middle of a grand sentence, stopped, wagged his head, looked wildly round, stammered, coughed, stopped again, called for his slippers, and so the waiter helped him to bed. Next a tall Irish squire and a native of the land of Israel began to quarrel about their countries, and in the warmth of argument dis- charged their glasses each at his neighbour's throat, instead of his own. I recommended blisters, bleeding [here illegible], so I flung my tumbler on the floor, too, and swore I'd join old Ireland. A regular rumpus ensued, but we were tamed at last, and I found myself in bed next morning, with a bottle of porter, a glass, and corkscrew beside me. Since then I have not tasted any- thing stronger than milk and water, nor, I hope, shall I till I return at Midsummer, when we will see about it. I am getting as fat as Prince Win at Springhead and as godly as his friend Parson Winterbottom. My hand shakes no longer : I write to the bankers at Ulverston with Mr. Postlethwaite, and sit drinking tea and talking slander with old ladies. As to the young ones, I have one sitting by me just now, fair-faced, blue-eyed, dark- haired, sweet eighteen. She little thinks the Devil is as near her. I was delighted to see thy note, old Squire,
64 EMILY BRONTE.
but don't understand one sentence — perhaps you will know what I mean ^
How are all about you ? I long . . . [all torn next] everything about Haworth folk. Does little Nosey think I have forgotten him. No, by Jupiter! nor is Alick either. I'll send him a remembrance one of these days.. But I must talk to some one prettier ; so good night,, old boy. Write directly, and believe me to be thine,
" THE PHILOSOPHER."
Branwell's boasted reformation was not kept up for long. Soon he came back as heartless, as affectionate, as vain, as unprincipled as ever, to laugh and loiter about the steep street of Haworth. Then he went to Bradford as a portrait-painter, and — so impressive is audacity — actually succeeded for some months in gaining a living there, although his education was oi the slenderest, and, judging from the specimens still treasured in Haworth, his natural talent on a level with that of the average new student in any school of art. His tawny mane, his pose of untaught genius, his verses in the poet's corner of the paper could not for ever keep afloat this un- taught and thriftless portrait-painter of twenty. Soon there came an end to his painting there. He dis- appeared from Bradford suddenly, heavily in debt, and was lost to sight, until unnerved, a drunkard, and an opium-eater, he came back to home and Emily at Haworth.
Meanwhile impetuous Charlotte was growing nervous and weak, gentle Anne consumptive and dejected, in their work away from home ; and Emily was toiling from dawn till dusk with her old servant Tabby for the old
GIRLHOOD AT HA WORTH. 65
aunt who never cared for her, and the old father always courteous and distant.
They knew the face of necessity more nearly than any friend's, those Bronte girls, and the pinch of poverty was for their own foot ; therefore were they always conside- rate to any that fell into the same plight. During the Christmas holidays of 1837, old Tabby fell on the steep and slippery street and broke her leg. She was already nearly seventy, and could do little work ; now her acci- dent laid her completely aside, leaving Emily, Charlotte, and Anne to spend their Christmas holidays in doing the housework and nursing the invalid. Miss Branwell, anxious to spare the girls' hands and her brother-in-law's pocket, insisted that Tabby should be sent to her sister's house to be nursed and another servant engaged for the Parsonage. Tabby, she represented, was fairly well off, her sister in comfortable circumstances ; the Parsonage kitchen might supply her with broths and jellies in plenty, but why waste the girls' leisure and scanty patri- mony on an old servant competent to keep herself. Mr. Bronte was finally persuaded, and his decision made known. But the girls were not persuaded. Tabby, so they averred, was one of the family, and they refused to abandon her in sickness. They did not say much, but they did more than say — they starved. When the tea was served, the three sat silent, fasting. Next morning found their will yet stronger than their hunger — no breakfast. They did the day's work, and dinner came. Still they held out, wan and sunk. Then the superiors gave in.
The girls gained their victory — no stubborn freak, but the right to make a generous sacrifice, and to bear an honourable burden.
That Christmas, of course, there cou'd be no visiting •
66 EMILY BRONTE.
nor the next. Tabby was slow in getting well ; but she did not outweary the patience of her friends.
Two years later, Charlotte writes to her old school- fellow : —
" December 21, 1839.
"We are at present, and have been during the last month, rather busy, as for that space of time we have been without a servant, except a little girl to run errands. Poor Tabby became so lame that she was at length obliged to leave us. She is residing with her sister, in a little house of her own, which she bought with her own savings a year or two since. She is very comfortable, and wants nothing. As she is near we see her very often. In the meantime, Emily and I are sufficiently busy, as you may suppose : I manage the ironing and keep the rooms clean ; Emily does the baking and attends to the kitchen. We are such odd animals that we prefer this mode of contrivance to having a new face among us. Besides, we do not despair of Tabby's return, and she shall not be supplanted by a stranger in her absence. I excited aunt's wrath very much by burning the clothes the first time I attempted to iron ; but I do better now. Human feelings are queer things ; I am much happier blackleading the stoves, making the beds, and sweeping the floors at home than I should be living like a fine lady anywhere else."*
The year 1840 found Emily, Branwell, and Charlotte all at home together. Unnerved and dissipated as he was, Branwell was still a welcome presence; his gay talk still awakened glad promises in the ambitious and loving household which hoped all things from him. His mistakes and faults they pardoned ; thinking, poor souls,
* Mrs. Gaskell.
GIRLHOOD AT HA WORTH. 67
that the strong passions which led him astray betokened a strong character and not a powerless will.
It was still to Branwell that they looked for the fame of the family. Their poems, their stories, were to these girls but a legitimate means of amusement and relief. The serious business of their life was to teach, to cook, to clean ; to earn or save the mere expense of their existence. No dream of literary fame gave a purpose to the quiet days of Emily Bronte. Charlotte and Bran- well, more impulsive, more ambitious, had sent their work to Southey, to Coleridge, to Wordsworth, in vain, pathetic hope of encouragement, or recognition. Not so the sterner Emily, to whom expression was at once a necessity and a regret. Emily's brain, Emily's locked desk, these and nothing else knew the degree of her passion, her genius, her power. And yet acknowledged power would have been sweet to that dominant spirit.
Meanwhile the immediate difficulty was to earn a living. Even those patient and courageous girls could not accept the thought of a whole lifetime spent in dreary governessing by Charlotte and Anne, in solitary drudgery by homekeeping Emily. One way out of this hateful vista seemed not impossible of attainment. For years it was the wildest hope, the cherished dream of the author of 'Wuthering Heights' and the author of 'Villette.' And what was this dear and daring ambition ? — to keep a ladies' school at Haworth.
Far enough off, difficult to reach, it looked to them, this paltry common-place ideal of theirs. For the house with its four bedrooms would have to be enlarged ; for the girls' education, with its Anglo-French and stumbling music, would have to be adorned by the requisite accom- plishments. This would take time ; time and money ; two luxuries most hard to get for the Vicar of Haworth 's
F 2
68 EMIL Y BRONT&.
harassed daughters. They would sigh, and suddenly stop in their making of plans and drawing up of circulars. It seemed so difficult.
One person, indeed, might help them. Miss Branwell had saved out of her annuity of £50 a year. She had a certain sum ; small enough, but to Charlotte and Emily it seemed as potent as the fairy's wand. The question was, would she risk it ?
It seemed not. The old lady had always chiefly meant her savings for the dear prodigal who bore her name, and Emily and Charlotte were not her favourites. The girls indeed only asked for a loan, but she doubted, hesitated, doubted again. They were too proud to take an advantage so grudgingly proffered ; and while their talk was still of what means they might employ, while they still painfully toiled through improper French novels as " the best substitute for French conversation," they gave up the dream for the present, and Charlotte again looked out for a situation. Nearly a year elapsed before she found it — a happy year, full of plans and talks with Emily and free from any more pressing anxiety than Anne's delicate health always gave her sisters. Branwell was away and doing well as station-master at Luddendenfoot, " set off to seek his fortune in the wild, wandering, adventurous, romantic, knight-errant-like capacity of "clerk on the Leeds and Manchester Rail- way." Ellen came to stay at Haworth in the summer ; it was quite sociable and lively now in the grey house on the moors ; for, compelled by failing health, Mr. Bronte had engaged the help of a curate, and the Haworth curate brought his clerical friends about the house, to the great disgust of Emily, and the half-sentimental fluttering of pensive Anne, which laid on Charlotte the responsibility of talking for all three.
GIRLHOOD AT HA WORTH. 69
In the holidays when Anne was at home all the old glee and enjoyment of life returned. There was, more- over, the curate, "bonnie, pleasant, light-hearted, good- tempered, generous, careless, crafty, fickle, and uncleri- cal," to add piquancy to the situation. " He sits oppo- site to Anne at church, sighing softly, and looking out of the corners of his eyes — and she is so quiet, her look so downcast ; they are a picture," says merry Charlotte. This first curate at Haworth was exempted from Emily's liberal scorn ; he was a favourite at the vicarage, a clever, bright-spirited, and handsome youth, greatly in Miss Branwell's good graces. He would tease and flatter the old lady with such graciousness as made him ever sure of a welcome ; so that his daily visits to Mr. Bronte's study were nearly always followed up by a call in the opposite parlour, when Miss Branwell would frequently leave her upstairs retreat and join in the lively chatter. She always presided at the tea-table, at which the curate was a frequent guest, and her nieces would be kept well amused all through the tea hour by the curate's piquant sallies, baffling the old lady in her little schemes of control over the three high-spirited girls. None enjoyed the fun more than quiet Emily, always present and amused, " her countenance glimmering as it always did when she enjoyed herself," Miss Ellen Nussey tells me. Many happy legends, too familiar to be quoted here, record the light heart and gay spirit that Emily bore in those untroubled days. Foolish, pretty little stories of her dauntless protection of the other girls from too pressing suitors. Never was duenna so gallant, so gay, and so inevitable. In compliment to the excellence of her swashing and martial outside on such occasions, the little household dubbed her " The Major," a name
70 EMIL Y BRONTE.
that stuck to her in days when the dash and gaiety of her soldiery bearing was sadly sobered down, and only the courage and dauntless heart remained.
But in these early days of 1841, Emily was as happy as other healthy country girls in a congenial home. " She did what we did," says Miss Nussey, " and never absented herself when she could avoid it — life at this period must have been sweet and pleasant to her." An equal unchequered life, in which trifles seemed of great importance. We hear of the little joys and adventures of those days, so faithfully and long remembered, with a pathetic pleasurableness. So slight they are, and all their colour gone, like pressed roses, though a faint sweetness yet remains. The disasters when Miss Bran- well was cross and in no humour to receive her guests ; the long-expected excitement of a walk over the moors to Keighley where the curate was to give a lecture, the alarm and flurry when the curate, finding none of the four girls had ever received a valentine, proposed to send one to each on the next Valentine's Day. " No, no, the elders would never allow it, and yet it would certainly be an event to receive a valentine ; still, there would be such a lecture from Miss Branwell." "Oh no," he said, " I shall post them at Bradford." And to Bradford he walked, ten miles and back again, so that on the eventful I4th of February the anxiously-expected postman brought four valentines, all on delicately tinted paper, all enhanced by a verse of original poetry, touch- ing on some pleasant characteristic in each recipient. What merriment and comparing of notes ! What pleased feigning of indignation ! The girls determined to reward him with a Rowland for his Oliver, and Charlotte wrote some rhymes full of fun and raillery which all the girls
GIRLHOOD AT HA WORTH. 71
signed — Emily entering into all this with much spirit and amusement — and finally despatched in mystery and secret glee.
At last this pleasant fooling came to an end. Char- lotte advertised for a place, and found it. While she was away she had a letter from Miss Wooler, offering Char- lotte the goodwill of her school at Dewsbury Moor. It was a chance not to be lost, although what inducement Emily and Charlotte could offer to their pupils it is not easy to imagine. But it was above all things necessary to make a home where delicate Anne might be sheltered, where homesick Emily could be happy, where Charlotte could have time to write, where all might live and work together. Miss Wooler's offer was immediately accepted. Miss Branwell was induced to lend the girls £100. No answer came from Miss Wooler. Then ambitious Char- lotte, from her situation away, wrote to Miss Branwell at Haworth * : —
"September 29, 1841.
" DEAR AUNT,
" I have heard nothing of Miss Wooler yet since I wrote to her, intimating that I would accept her offer. I cannot conjecture the reason of this long silence, unless some unforeseen impediment has occurred in concluding the bargain. Meantime a plan has been suggested and
approved by Mr. and Mrs. and others which I wish
now to impart to you. My friends recommend, if I desire to secure permanent success, to delay commen- cing the school for six months longer, and by all means to contrive, by hook or by crook, to spend the interven- ing time in some school on the Continent. They say schools in England are so numerous, competition so great, that without some such step towards attaining
* Mrs. Gaskell.
72 EMIL Y BRONTE.
superiority, we shall probably have a very hard struggle and may fail in the end. They say, moreover, that the loan of^ioo, which you have been so kind as to offer us, will perhaps not be all required now, as Miss Wooler will lend us the furniture ; and that, if the speculation is intended to be a good and successful one, half the sum, at least, ought to be laid out in the manner I have mentioned, thereby insuring a more speedy repayment both of interest and principal.
" I would not go to France or to Paris. I would go to Brussels, in Belgium. The cost of the journey there, at the dearest rate of travelling, would be £5, living is there little more than half as dear as it is in England, and the facilities for education are equal or superior to any place in Europe. In half a year I could acquire a thorough familiarity with French. I could improve greatly in Italian and even get a dash at German ; i.e. providing my health continued as good as it is now. . . .
"These are advantages which would turn to real account when we actually commenced a school ; and, if Emily could share them with me, we could take a footing in the world afterwards which we never can do now. I say Emily instead of Anne ; for Anne might take her turn at some future period, if our school answered. I feel certain, while I am writing, that you will see the propriety of what I say. You always like to use your money to the best advantage. You are not fond of making shabby purchases ; when you do confer a favour it is often done in style ; and depend upon it £$o or ;£ioo, thus laid out, would be well employed. Of course, I know no other friend in the world to whom I could apply on this subject besides yourself. I feel an absolute conviction that if this advantage were allowed us, it would be the making of us for life. Papa will
GIRLHOOD AT HA WORTH. 73
perhaps think it a wild and ambitious scheme ; but who •ever rose in the world without ambition. When he left Ireland to go to Cambridge University he was as ambitious as I am now."
That was true. It must have struck a vibrant chord in the old man's breast. Absorbed in parish gossip and his ' Cottage Poems/ caring no longer for the world but only for newspaper reports of it, actively idle, living a resultless life of ascetic self-indulgence, the Vicar of Haworth was very proud of his energetic past. He had always held it up to his children as a model for them to copy. Charlotte's appeal would certainly secure her father as an ally to her cause. Miss Branwell, on the other hand, would not wish for displays of ambition in her already too irrepressible nieces. But she was getting old ; it would be a comfort to her, after all, to see them settled, and prosperously settled through her generosity. " I look to you, Aunt, to help us. I think you will not refuse," Charlotte had said. How, indeed, could Miss Branwell, living in their home, be happy, and refuse ?
Yet many discussions went on before anxious Char- iotte got the answer. Emily, whom it concerned as nearly, must have listened waiting in a strange perturba- tion of hope and fear. To leave home — she knew well what it meant. Since she was six years old she had never left Yorkshire ; but those months of wearying homesickness at Roe Head, at Halifax, must have most painfully rushed back upon her memory. Haworth was health, content, the very possibility of existence to this •girl. To leave Haworth for a strange town beyond the seas, to see strange faces all round, to hear and speak a strange language, Charlotte's welcome prospect of ad- venture must have taken a nightmare shape to Emily.
74 EMIL Y BRONTE.
And for this she must hope ; this she must desire, plead for if necessary, and at least uphold. For Charlotte said the thing was essential to their future ; and in all details of management, Charlotte's word was law to her sisters. Even Emily, the independent, indomitable Emily, so resolute in keeping to any chosen path, looked to Char- lotte to choose the way in practical affairs.
At length consent was secured, written and despatched. Gleeful. Charlotte gave notice to her employers and soon set out for home. There was much to be done. " Letters to write to Brussels, to Lille and to London, lots of work to be done, besides clothes to repair." It was decided that the sisters should give up their chance of the school at Dewsbury Moor, since the site was low and damp, and had not suited Anne. On their return from Brussels they were to set up a school in some healthy seaside place in the East Riding. Burlington was the place where their fancy chiefly dwelt. To this beautiful and healthy spot, fronting the sea, eager pupils would flock for the benefit of instruction by three daughters of a clergyman, " edu- cated abroad" (for six months) speaking thorough French, improved Italian and a dash of German. A scintillating programme of accomplishment danced before their eyes.
There were, however, many practical difficulties to be vanquished first. The very initial step, the choice of a school, was hard to take. Charlotte writes to Ellen : —
"January 20, 1842.
" We expect to leave England in about three weeks,, but we are not yet certain as to the day, as it will depend on the convenience of a French lady now in London, Madame Marzials, under whose escort we are to sail. Our place of destination is changed. Papa received an un-
GIRLHOOD AT HA WORTH. 75,
favourable account from Mr. or rather from Mrs. Jenkins of the French schools in Bruxelles, representing them as of an inferior caste in many respects. On further inquiry an institution at Lille in the North of France was highly recommended by Baptist Noel and other clergymen, and to that place it is decided that we are to go. The terms are ^"50 a year for each pupil for board and French alone ; but a separate room will be allowed for this sum ;. without this indulgence they are something lower. I considered it kind in aunt to consent to an extra sum for a separate room. We shall find it a great privilege in many ways. I regret the change from Bruxelles to Lille on many accounts."
For Charlotte to regret the change was for an improve- ment to be discovered. She had set her heart on going to Brussels ; Mrs. Jenkins redoubled her efforts and at length discovered the Pensionnat of Madame H£ger in the Rue d'Isabelle.
Thither, as all the world is aware, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, both of age, went to school.
" We shall leave England in about three weeks." The words had a ring of happy daring in Charlotte's ears. Since at six years of age she had set out alone to dis- cover the Golden City, romance, discovery, adventure, were sweet promises to her. She had often wished to see the world ; now she will see it. She had thirsted for knowledge ; here is the source. She longed to add new notes to that gamut of human character which she could play with so profound a science ; she shall make a masterpiece out of her acquisitions. At this time her letters are full of busy gaiety, giving accounts of her work, making plans, making fun. As happy and hopeful a young woman as any that dwells in Haworth parish.
76 EMIL Y BRONTE.
Emily is different. It is she who imagined the girl in heaven who broke her heart with weeping for earth, till the angels cast her out in anger, and flung her into the middle of the heath, to wake there sobbing for joy. She did not care to know fresh people ; she hates strangers ; to walk with her bulldog, Keeper, over the moors is her best adventure. To learn new things is very well, but she prizes above everything originality and the wild provincial flavour of her home. What she strongly, deeply loves is her moorland home, her own people, the creatures on the heath, the dogs who always feed from her hands, the -flowers in the bleak garden that only grow at all because of the infinite care she lavishes upon them. The stunted thorn under which she sits to write her poems, is more beautiful to her than the cedars of Lebanon. To each and all of these she must now bid farewell. It is in a different tone that she says in her adieus, " We shall leave England in about three weeks."
( 77
CHAPTER VII. IN THE RUE D'ISABELLE.
THE Rue d'Isabelle had a character of its own. It lies below your feet as you stand in the Rue Royale, near the statue of General Beliard. Four flights of steps lead down to the street, half garden, half old houses, with at one end a large square mansion, owning the garden that runs behind it and to the right of it. The house is old ; a Latin inscription shows it to have been given to the great Guild of Cross-bowmen by Queen Isabelle in the early years of the i/th century. The garden is older ; long before the Guild of the Cross- bowmen of the Great Oath, in deference to the wish of Queen Isabelle, permitted the street to be made through it, the garden had been their exercising place. There Isabelle herself, a member of their order, had shot down the bird. But the garden had a yet more ancient past ; when apple-trees, pear-trees and alleys of Bruges cherries, when plots of marjoram and mint, of thyme and sweet- basil, filled the orchard and herbary of the Hospital of the Poor. And the garden itself, before trees or flowers were planted, had resounded with the yelp of the Duke's hounds, when, in the thirteenth century, it had been the Fosse-aux-chiens. This historic garden, this mansion, built by a queen for a great order, belonged in 1842 to Monsieur and Madame Heger, and was a famous Pen- sionnat de Demoiselles.
78 EMIL Y BRONT&.
There the Vicar of Haworth brought his two daughters one February day, spent one night in Brussels and went straight back to his old house on the moors, so modern in comparison with the mansion in Rue dTsabelle. A •change, indeed, for Emily and Charlotte. Even now, Brussels (the headquarters of Catholicism far more than modern Rome) has a taste for pageantry that recalls mediaeval days. The streets decked with boughs and strewn with flowers, through which pass slowly the pro- cessions of the Church, white-clad children, boys like angels scattering roses, standard-bearers with emblazoned banners. Surpliced choristers singing Latin praises, •acolytes in scarlet swinging censers, reliquaries and images, before which the people fall down in prayer ; all this to-day is no uncommon sight in Brussels, and must have been yet more frequent in 1842.
The flower-market out of doors, with clove-pinks, tall Mary-lilies and delicate roses d'amour, filling the quaint mediaeval square before the beautiful old fapade of the H6tel de Ville. Ste.-Gudule with its spires and arches ; the Montagne de la Cour (almost as steep as Haworth .street), its windows ablaze at night with jewels ; the little, lovely park, its great elms just coming into leaf, its statues just bursting from their winter sheaths of straw ; the galleries of ancient pictures, their walls a sober glory •of colours, blues, deep as a summer night, rich reds, brown golds, most vivid greens.
All this should have made an impression on the two home-keeping girls from Yorkshire ; and Charlotte, indeed, perceived something of its beauty and strange- ness. But Emily, from a bitter sense of exile, from a natural narrowness of spirit, rebelled against it all as an insult to the memory of her home — she longed, hope- lessly, uselessly, for Haworth. The two Brontes were very
IN THE RUE &ISABELLE. 79
•different to the Belgian school-girls in Madame Heger's Pensionnat. They were, for one thing, ridiculously old to be at school — twenty-four and twenty-six — and they seemed to feel their position ; their speech was strained and odd ; all the " sceptical, wicked, immoral French novels, over forty of them, the best substitute for French conversation to be met with," which the girls had toiled through with so much singleness of spirit, had not cured the broadness of their accent nor the artificial idioms of their Yorkshire French. Monsieur Heger, indeed, considered that they knew no French at all. Their manners, even among English people, were stiff and prim ; the hearty, vulgar, genial expansion of their Belgian schoolfellows must have made them seem as lifeless as marionettes. Their dress — Haworth had permitted itself to wonder at the uncouthness of those amazing leg-of-mutton sleeves (Emily's pet whim in and out of fashion), at the ill-cut lankness of those skirts, clumsy enough on round little Charlotte, but a very caricature of mediaevalism on Emily's tall, thin, slender figure. They knew they were not in their element and kept close together, rarely speaking. Yet Monsieur Heger, patiently watch- ing, felt the presence of a strange power under those uncouth exteriors.
An odd little man of much penetration, this French schoolmaster. " Homme de ztle et de conscience, il possede d un haut degre Eloquence du bon sens et du cceur." Fierce and despotic in the exaction of obedi- ence, yet tender of heart, magnanimous and tyrannical, .absurdly vain and absolutely unselfish. His wife's school was a kingdom to him ; he brought to it an energy, a zeal, a faculty of administration worthy to rule a king- dom. It was with the delight of a botanist discovering -a rare plant in his garden, of a politician detecting a
So EMILY BRONTE.
future statesman in his nursery, that he perceived the unusual faculty which lifted his two English pupils above their schoolfellows. He watched them silently for some weeks. When he had made quite sure, he came forwards and, so to speak, claimed them for his own.
Charlotte at once accepted the yoke. All that he set tier to do she toiled to accomplish ; she followed out his trains of thought ; she adopted the style he recom- mended ; she gave him in return for all his pains the most unflagging obedience, the affectionate comprehen- sion of a large intelligence. She writes to Ellen of her delight in learning and serving : " It is very natural to- me to submit, very unnatural to command."
Not so with Emily. The qualities which her sister understood and accepted, irritated her unspeakably. The masterfulness in little things, the irritability, the watchfulness of the fiery little professor of rhetoric were utterly distasteful to her. She contradicted his theories to his face ; she did her lessons well, but as she chose to do them. She was as indomitable, fierce, unappeasable, as Charlotte was ready and submissive. And yet it was Emily who had the larger share of Monsieur Heger's admiration. Egotistic and exacting he thought her, wha never yielded to his petulant, harmless egoism, who never gave way to his benevolent tyranny ; but he gave her credit for logical powers, for a capacity for argument unusual in a man, and rare, indeed, in a woman. She, not Charlotte, was the genius in his eyes, although he com- plained that her stubborn will rendered her deaf to all reason, when her own determination, or her own sense of right, was concerned. He fancied she might be a great historian, so he told Mrs. Gaskell. " Her faculty of imagination was such, her views of scenes and characters.
IN THE RUE WISABELLE. 81
would have been so vivid and so powerfully expressed, and supported by such a show of argument that it would have dominated over the reader, whatever might have been his previous opinions or his cooler perception of the truth. She should have been a man : a great navigator !" cried the little, dark, enthusiastic rhetorician. " Her powerful reason would have deduced new spheres of discovery from the knowledge of the old ; and her strong imperious will would never have been daunted by opposition or difficulty ; never have given way but with life!"
Yet they were never friends ; though Monsieur He"ger could speak so well of Emily at a time, be it remem- bered, when it was Charlotte's praises that were sought, when Emily's genius was set down as a lunatic's hob- goblin of nightmare potency. He and she were alike too imperious, too independent, too stubborn. A couple of swords, neither of which could serve to sheathe the other.
That time in Brussels was wasted upon Emily. The trivial characters which Charlotte made immortal merely annoyed her. The new impressions which gave another scope to Charlotte's vision were nothing to her. All that was grand, remarkable, passionate, under the surface of that conventional Pensionnat de Demoiselles, was in- visible to Emily. Notwithstanding her genius she was very hard and narrow.
Poor girl, she was sick for home. It was all nothing to her, less than a dream, this place she lived in. Char- lotte's engrossment in her new life, her eagerness to please her master, was a contemptible weakness to this embittered heart. She would laugh when she found her elder sister trying to arrange her homely gowns in the French taste, and stalk silently through the large school-
G
82 EMIL Y BRONTE.
rooms with a fierce satisfaction in her own ugly sleeves, in the Haworth cut of her skirts. She seldom spoke a word to any one ; only sometimes she would argue with Monsieur Heger, perhaps secretly glad to have the chance of shocking Charlotte. If they went out to tea, she would sit still on her chair, answering " Yes " and " No ;" inert, miserable, with a heart full of tears. When her work was done she would walk in the Cross -bowmen's ancient garden, under the trees, leaning on her shorter sister's arm, pale, silent — a tall, stooping figure. Often she said nothing at all. Charlotte, also, was very pro- fitably speechless ; under her eyes ' Villette ' was taking shape. But Emily did not think of Brussels. She was dreaming of Haworth.
One poem that she wrote at this time may appro- priately be quoted here. It was, Charlotte tells us, "composed at twilight, in the schoolroom, when the leisure of the evening play-hour brought back, in full tide, the thoughts of home : "
" A little while, a little while,
The weary task is put away,
And I can sing and I can smile
Alike, while I have holiday.
' Where wilt thou go, my harassed heart —
What thought, what scene invites thee now ? What spot, or near or far apart, Has rest for thee, my weary brow ?
" There is a spot mid barren hills,
Where winter howls and driving rain ; But, if the dreary tempest chills, There is a light that warms again.
" The house is old, the trees are bare,
Moonless above bends twilight's dome , But what on earth is half so dear — So longed for — as the hearth of home ?
IN THE RUE D'ISABELLE. 83
" The mute bird sitting on the stone,
The dark moss dripping from the wall, The thorn-tree gaunt, the walks o'ergrown, I love them ; how I love them all J
*' And, as I mused, the naked room, The alien fire-light died away ; And from the midst of cheerless gloom I passed to bright, unclouded day.
41 A little and a lone green lane,
That opened on a common wide ; A distant, dreary, dim, blue chain Of mountains circling every side :
"" A heaven so dear, an earth so calm,
So sweet, so soft, so hushed an air ; And — deepening still the dream-like charm — Wild moor-sheep feeding everywhere.
" That was the scene, I knew it well ; I knew the turfy pathway's sweep, That, winding o'er each billowy swell,
Marked out the tracks of wandering sheep.
" Could I have lingered but an hour,
It well had paid a week of toil ; But truth has banished fancy's power, Restraint and heavy task recoil.
" Even as I stood with raptured eye,
Absorbed in bliss so deep and dear, My hour of rest had fleeted by, And back came labour, bondage, care."
Charlotte meanwhile writes in good, even in high spirits to her friend : " I think I am never unhappy, my present life is so delightful, so congenial, compared to that of a governess. My time, constantly occupied, passes too rapidly. Hitherto both Emily and I have had good health, and therefore we have been able to work well. There is one individual of whom I have not
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84 EMIL Y BRONTE.
yet spoken — Monsieur Heger, the husband of Madame. He is professor of rhetoric — a man of power as to mind, but very choleric and irritable as to temperament — a little, black, ugly being, with a face that varies in ex- pression ; sometimes he borrows the lineaments of an insane torn cat, sometimes those of a delirious hyena, occasionally — but very seldom — he discards these perilous attractions and assumes an air not a hundred times re- moved from what you would call mild and gentleman- like. He is very angry with me just at present, because I have written a translation which he chose to stigmatise as * peu correct.' He did not tell me so, but wrote the words on the margin of my book, and asked, in brief, stern phrase, how it happened that my compositions were always better than my translations? adding that the thing seemed to him inexplicable."
The reader will already have recognised in the black, ugly, choleric little professor of rhetoric, the one abso- lutely natural hero of a woman's novel, the beloved and whimsical figure of the immortal Monsieur Paul Emanuel.
"He and Emily," adds Charlotte, "don't draw well together at all. Emily works like a horse, and she has had great difficulties to contend with, far greater than I have had."
Emily did indeed work hard. She was there to work, and not till she had learned a certain amount would her conscience permit her to return to Haworth. It was for dear liberty that she worked. She began German, a favourite study in after years, and of some purpose, since the style of Hofmann left its impression on the author of ' Wuthering Heights/ She worked hard at music ; and in half a year the stumbling schoolgirl became a brilliant and proficient musician. Her playing is said to have been singularly accurate, vivid, and full of fire. French.
IN THE RUE &ISABELLE. 85
too, both in grammar and in literature, was a constant study.
Monsieur Heger recognised the fact that in dealing with the Brontes he had not to make the customary allowances for a schoolgirl's undeveloped inexperience. These were women of mature and remarkable intelli- gence. The method he adopted in teaching them was rather that of a University professor than such as usually is used in a pensionnat. He would choose some masterpiece of French style, some passage of eloquence or portraiture, read it to them with a brief lecture on its distinctive qualities, pointing out what was exaggerated, what apt, what false, what subtle in the author's concep- tion or his mode of expressing it. They were then dis- missed to make a similar composition, without the aid of grammar or dictionary, availing themselves as far as possible of the miances of style and the peculiarities of method of the writer chosen as the model of the hour. In this way the girls became intimately acquainted with the literary technique of the best French masters. To Charlotte the lessons were of incalculable value, perfecting in her that clear and accurate style which makes her best work never wearisome, never old-fashioned. But the very thought of imitating any one, especially of imitating .any French writer, was repulsive to Emily, "rustic all through, moorish, wild and knotty as a root of heath." * When Monsieur Heger had explained his plan to them, •" Emily spoke first ; and said that she saw no good to be derived from it ; and that by adopting it they would lose all originality of thought and expression. She would have entered into an argument on the subject, but for this Monsieur Heger had no time. Charlotte then spoke ; she also doubted the success of the plan ; but * C. Bronte.
86 EMIL Y BRONTE.
she would follow out Monsieur Roger's advice, because she was bound to obey him while she was his pupil." * Charlotte soon found a keen enjoyment in this species of literary composition, yet Emily's devoir was the best They are, alas, no longer to be seen, no longer in the keeping of so courteous and proud a guardian as Mrs. Gaskell had to deal with ; but she and Monsieur Heger both have expressed their opinions that in genius, imagi- nation, power and force of language, Emily was the superior of the two sisters.
So great was the personality of this energetic, silent, brooding, ill-dressed young Englishwoman, that all who knew her recognised in her the genius they were slow to perceive in her more sociable and vehement sister. Madame Heger, the worldly, cold-mannered, surveill- ante of Villette, avowed the singular force of a nature most antipathetic to her own. Yet Emily had no com- panions ; the only person of whom we hear, in even the most negative terms of friendliness, is one of the teachers, a certain Mademoiselle Marie, "talented and original, but of repulsive and arbitrary manners, which have made the whole school, except Emily and myself, her bitter enemies." No less arbitrary and repulsive seemed poor Emily herself, a sprig of purple heath at discord with those bright, smooth geraniums and lobelias ; Emily, of whom every surviving friend extols the never- failing, quiet unselfishness, the genial spirit ready to help, the timid but faithful affection. She was so com- pletely hors de son assiette that even her virtues were misplaced.
There was always one thing she could do, one thing as natural as breath to Emily — determined labour. In that merciful engrossment she could forget her heart- * Mrs. Gaskell.
IN THE RUE &ISABELLE. 87
sick weariness and the jarring strangeness of things ; every lesson conquered was another step taken on the long road home. And the days allowed ample space for work, although it was supported upon a somewhat slender diet.
Counting boarders and externes, Madame Heger's school numbered over a hundred pupils. These were divided into three classes ; the second, in which the Brontes were, containing sixty students. In the last row, side by side, absorbed and quiet, sat Emily and Charlotte. Soon after rising, the pensionnaires were given their light Belgian breakfast of coffee and rolls. Then from nine to twelve they studied. Three mistresses and seven professors were engaged to take the different classes. At twelve a lunch of bread and fruit ; then a turn in the green alley, Charlotte and Emily always walking together. From one till two fancy-work ; from two till four, lessons again. Then dinner : the one solid meal of the day. From five till six the hour was free, Emily's musing-hour. From six till seven the terrible lecture pieuse, hateful to the Brontes' Protestant spirit. At eight a supper of rolls and water ; then prayers, and to bed.
The room they slept in was a long school-dormitory. After all they could not get the luxury, so much desired, of a separate room. But their two beds were alone together at the further end, veiled in white curtains ; discreet and retired as themselves. Here, after the day's hard work, they slept. In sleep, one is no longer an exile.
But often Emily did not sleep. The old well-known pain, wakefulness, longing, was again beginning to relax her very heartstrings. " The same suffering and conflict ensued, heightened by the strong recoil of her upright
88 EMIL Y BRONTE.
heretic and English spirit from the gentle Jesuitry of the foreign and Romish system. Once more she seemed sinking, but this time she rallied through the mere force of resolution : with inward remorse and- shame she looked back on her former failure, and resolved to conquer, but the victory cost her dear. She was never happy till she carried her hard-won knowledge back to the remote English village, the old parsonage house and desolate Yorkshire hills." *
But not yet, not yet, this happiness ! The opportunity that had been so hardly won must not be thrown away before the utmost had been made of it. And she was not utterly alone. Charlotte was there. The success that she had in her work must have helped a little to make her foreign home tolerable to her. Soon she knew enough of music to give lessons to the younger pupils. Then German, costing her and Charlotte an extra ten francs the month, as also much severe study and struggle. Charlotte writes in the summer: "Emily is making rapid progress in French, German, music and drawing. Monsieur and Madame Heger begin to recognise the valuable parts of her character under her singularities/'
It was doubtful, even, whether they would come home in September. Madame Heger made a proposal to her two English pupils for them to stay on, without paying, but without salary, for half a year. She would dismiss her English teacher, whose place Charlotte would take. Emily was to teach music to the younger pupils. The proposal was kind and would be of advantage to the sisters.
Charlotte declared herself inclined to accept it. " I have been happy in Brussels," she averred. And Emily, though she, indeed, was not happy, acknowledged the * C. Bronte. Memoir of her sisters.
IN THE RUE &ISABELLE. 89
benefit to be derived from a longer term of study. Six months, after all, was rather short to gain a thorough •knowledge of French, with Italian and German, when you add to these acquirements music and drawing, which Emily worked at with a will. Besides, she could not fail again, could not go back to Haworth leaving Charlotte behind ; neither could she spoil Charlotte's future by persuading her to reject Madame Heger's terms. So both sisters agreed to stay in Brussels. They were not •utterly friendless there ; two Miss Taylors, schoolfellows and dear friends of Charlotte's, were at school at the Chateau de Kokleberg, just outside the barriers. Readers of ' Shirley ' know them as Rose and Jessie Yorke. The Brontes met them often, nearly every week, at some cousins of the Taylors, who lived in the town. But this -diversion, pleasant to Charlotte, was merely an added annoyance to Emily. She would sit stiff and silent, •unable to say a word, longing to be somewhere at her ease. Mrs. Jenkins, too, had begun with asking them to ;spend their Sundays with her ; but Emily never said a word, and Charlotte, though sometimes she got excited .and spoke well and vehemently, never ventured on an opinion till she had gradually wheeled round in her •chair with her back to the person she addressed. They were so shy, so rustic, Mrs. Jenkins gave over inviting them, feeling that they did not like to refuse, and found it no pleasure to come. Charlotte, indeed, still had the Taylors, their cousins, and the family of a doctor living in the town, whose daughter was a pupil and friend of hers. Charlotte, too, had Madame Heger and her admired professor of rhetoric ; but Emily had no friend except her sister.
Nevertheless it was settled they should stay. The grandes vacances began on the I5th of August, and,
90 EMIL Y BRONTE.
as the journey to Yorkshire cost so much, and as they were anxious to work, the Bronte girls spent their holi- days in Rue d'Isabelle. Besides themselves only six or eight boarders remained. All their friends were away holiday-making ; but they worked hard, preparing their lessons for the masters who, holidayless as they, had stayed behind in white, dusty, blazing, airless Brussels, to give lectures to the scanty class at Madame Heger's pensionnat.
So the dreary six weeks passed away. In October the term began again, the pupils came back, new pupils were admitted, Monsieur Heger was more gesticulatory, vehement, commanding than usual, and Madame, in her quiet way, was no less occupied. Life and youth filled the empty rooms. The Bronte girls, sad enough indeed, for their friend Martha Taylor had died suddenly at the Chateau de Kokleberg, were, notwithstanding, able to feel themselves in a more natural position for women of their age. Charlotte, henceforth, by Monsieur Heger's orders, " Mademoiselle Charlotte," was the new English teacher ; Emily the assistant music-mistress. But, in the middle of October, in the first flush of their employment, came a sudden recall to Haworth. Miss Branwell was very ill. Immediately the two girls, who owed so much to her, who, but for her bounty, could never have been so far away in time of need, decided to go home. They broke their determination to Monsieur and Madame Heger,. who, sufficiently generous to place the girls' duty before their own convenience, upheld them in their course. They hastily packed up their things, took places via Antwerp to London, and prepared to start. At the last moment, the trunks packed, in the early morning the postman came. He brought another letter from Haworth. Their aunt was dead.
IN THE RUE WISABELL
So much the greater need that they should hasten home. Their father, left without his companion of twenty years, to keep his house, to read to him at night, to discuss with him on equal terms, their father would be lonely and distressed. Henceforth one of his daughters must stay with him. Anne was in an excel- lent situation ; must they ask her to give it up ? And what now of the school, the school at Burlington ? There was much to take counsel over and consider ; they must hurry home. So, knowing the worst, their future hanging out of shape and loose before their eyes, they set out on their dreary journey knowing not whether or when they might return.
92 EMIL Y BRONT£.
CHAPTER VIII. A RETROSPECT.
-" POOR, brilliant, gay, moody, moping, wildly excitable, miserable Bronte ! No history records your many •struggles after the good — your wit, brilliance, attrac- tiveness, eagerness for excitement — all the qualities which made you such 'good company' and dragged you down to an untimely grave."
Thus ejaculates Mr. Francis H. Grundy, remembering the boon-companion of his early years, the half-insane, pitiful creature that opium and brandy had made of clever Branwell at twenty-two. Returned from Bradford, his nervous system racked by opium fumes, he had loitered about at Ha worth until his father, stubborn as he was, perceived the obvious fact that every idle day led his only son more hopelessly down to the pit of ruin. At last he exerted his influence to find some work for Branwell, and obtained for his reckless, fanciful, morbid lad the post of station-master at a small roadside place, Luddendenfoot by name, on the Lancashire and York- shire Railway. Thither he went some months before Charlotte and Emily left for Brussels. It was there Mr. Grundy met him ; a novel station-master.
" Had a position been chosen for this strange creature for the express purpose of driving him several steps to the bad, this must have been it. The line was only just opened. The station was a rude wooden hut, and there
A RETROSPECT. 95.
was no village near at hand. Alone in the wilds of Yorkshire, with few books, little to do, no prospects, and wretched pay, with no society congenial to his better taste, but plenty of wild, rollicking, hard-headed, half-educated manufacturers, who would welcome him to their houses, and drink with him as often as he chose to- come, what was this morbid man, who couldn't bear to be alone, to do ? " *
What Branwell always did, in fine, was that which was easiest to him to do. He drank himself violent,, when he did not drink himself maudlin. He left the porter at the station to keep the books, and would ga off for days "on the drink" with his friends and fellow - carousers. About this time Mr. Grundy, then an engineer at Halifax, fell in with the poor, half-demented, lonely creature, and for a while things went a little better.
Drink and riot had not embellished the tawny-maned, laughing, handsome darling of Haworth. Here is his portrait as at this time he appeared to his friend :
" He was insignificantly small — one of his life's trials, He had a mass of red hair, which he wore brushed high off his forehead — to help his height, I fancy — a great, bumpy, intellectual forehead, nearly half the size of the whole facial contour ; small ferrety eyes, deep-sunk and still further hidden by the never-removed spectacles ; prominent nose, but weak lower features. He had a downcast look, which never varied, save for a rapid momentary glance at long intervals.' Small and thin of person, he was the reverse of attractive at first sight."
Yet this insignificant, sunken-eyed slip of humanity
had a spell for those who heard him speak. There was
no subject, moral, intellectual, or philosophic too remote
or too profound for him to measure it at a moment's
* ' Pictures of the Past.' F. H. Grundy.
94 EMIL Y BRONTE.
notice, with the ever-ready, fallacious plumb-] ine of his brilliant vanity. He would talk for hours : be eloquent, convincing, almost noble ; and afterwards accompany his audience to the nearest public-house.
" At times we would drive over in a gig to Haworth •(twelve miles) and visit his people. He was there at his best, and would be eloquent and amusing, although sometimes he would burst into tears when returning, and swear that he meant to amend. I believe, however, that he was half mad and could not control himself." *
So must his friends in kindness think. Mad ; if haunt- ing, morbid dreads and fancies conjured up by poisonous drugs and never to be laid ; if a will laid prostrate under the yoke of unclean habits ; if a constitution prone to nervous derangement and blighted by early excess ; if such things forcing him by imperceptible daily pressure to choose the things he loathed, to be the thing he feared, to act a part abhorrent to his soul ; if such estranging and falsification of a man's true self may count as lunacy, the luckless, worthless boy was mad.
It must have galled him, going home, to be welcomed so kindly, hoped so much from, by those who had for- given amply, and did not dream how heavy a mortgage had since been laid upon their pardon ; to have talked to the prim, pretty old lady who denied herself every day to save an inheritance for him ; to watch pious, gentle Anne into whose dreams the sins she prayed against had never entered ; worst of all, the sight of his respectable, well-preserved father, honoured by all the parish, successful, placed by his own stern, continued, will high beyond the onslaughts of temptation, yet with a temperament singularly akin to that morbid, passionate son's.
* ' Pictures of the Past.
A RETROSPECT.
95
So he would weep going home ; weep for his falling -off, and perhaps more sincerely for the short life of his contrition. Then the long evenings alone with his thoughts in that lonely place would make him afraid of repentance, afraid of God, himself, night, all. He would drink.
He had fits of as contrary pride. " He was proud of his name, his strength and his abilities." Proud of his name ! He wrote a poem on it, " Bronte," an eulogy of Nelson, which won the patronising approbation of Leigh Hunt, Miss Martineau and others, to whom, at his special request, it was submitted. Had he ever heard of his dozen aunts and uncles, the Pruntys of Ahaderg ? Or if not, with what sensations must the Vicar of Haworth have listened to this blazoning forth and triumphing over the glories of his ancient name ?
Branwell had fits of passion, too, the repetition of his father's vagaries. " I have seen him drive his doubled fist through the panels of a door — it seemed to soothe him." The rough side of his nature got full play, and perhaps won him some respect denied to his cleverness, in the society amongst which he was chiefly thrown. For a little time the companionship of Mr. Grundy .served to rescue him from utter abandonment to license. But, in the midst of this improvement, the crash came. As he had sown, he reaped.
Those long absences, drinking at the houses of his friends, had been turned to account by the one other inhabitant of the station at Luddendenfoot. The luggage porter was left to keep the books, and, following his master's example, he sought his own enjoyment before his employers' gain. He must have made a pretty penny out of those escapades of Barnwell's, for some months after the Vicar of Haworth had obtained
96 EMIL Y BRONTE.
his son's appointment, when the books received their customary examination, serious defalcations were dis- covered. An inquiry was instituted, which brought to light Branwell's peculiar method of managing the station. The lad himself was not suspected of actual theft ; but so continued, so glaring had been his negligence, so- hopeless the cause, that he was summarily dismissed the company's service, and sent home in dire disgrace to- Haworth.
He came home not only in disgrace, but ill. Never strong, his constitution was deranged and broken by his excesses ; yet, strangly enough, consumption, which carried off so prematurely the more highly-gifted, the more strongly-principled daughters of the house, con- sumption, which might have been originally produced by the vicious life this youth had led, laid no claim upon him. His mother's character and her disease descended to her daughters only. Branwell inherited his father's violent temper, strong passions and nervous weakness without the strength of will and moral fibre that made his father remarkable. Probably this brilliant, weak, shallow, selfish lad reproduced accurately enough the characteristics of some former Prunty ; for Patrick Bran- well was as distinctly an Irishman as if his childhood had been spent in his grandfather's cabin at Ahaderg.
He came home to find his sisters all away. Anne in her situation as governess, Emily and Charlotte in Rue d'Isabelle. No one, therefore, to be a check upon his habits, save the neat old lady, growing weaker day by day, who spent nearly all her time in her bedroom to avoid the paven floors of the basement ; and the father, who did not care for company, took his meals alone for fear of indigestion, and found it necessary to spend the succeeding time in perfect quiet. The greater
A RETROSPECT. 97
part of the day was, therefore, at Branwell's uncontrolled, unsupervised disposal.
To do him justice, he does seem to have made so much effort after a new place of work as was involved in writing letters to his friend Grundy, and probably to others, suing for employment. But his offence had been too glaring to be condoned. Mr. Grundy seems to have advised the hapless young man to take shelter in the Church, where the influence of his father and his mother's relatives might help him along ; but, as Bran- well said, he had not a single qualification, "save, per- haps hypocrisy." Parson's sons rarely have a great idea of the Church. The energy, self-denial, and endurance which a clergyman ought to possess were certainly not in Branwell's line. Besides, how could he take his degree ? Montgomery, it seems, recommended him to make trial of literature. "All very well, but I have little conceit of myself aud great desire for activity. You say that you write with feelings similar to those with which you last left me ; keep them no longer. I trust I am somewhat changed, or I should not be worth a thought ; and though nothing could ever give me your buoyant spirits and an outward man corresponding therewith, I may, in dress and appearance, emulate something like ordinary decency. And now, wherever coming years may lead — Greenland's snows or sands of Afric— I trust, etc. 9th June, 1842." *
It is doubtful, judging from Branwell's letters and his verses, whether anything much better than his father's ' Cottage in the Wood ' would have resulted from his following the advice of James Montgomery. Fluent ease, often on the verge of twaddle, with here and there a bright, felicitous touch, with here and there a smack * ' Pictures of the Past.'
II
98 EMILY BRONTE.
of the conventional hymn-book and pulpit twang — such weak and characterless effusions are all that is left or' the passion-ridden pseudo-genius of Haworth. Real genius is perhaps seldom of such showy temperament.
Poor Branwell ! it needed greater strength than his to retrieve that first false step into ruin. He cannot help himself, and can find no one to help him ; he appeals again to Mr. Grundy (in a letter which must, from internal evidence, have been written about this time, although a different and impossible year is printed at its heading) : —
" DEAR SIR,
" I cannot avoid the temptation to cheer my spirits by scribbling a few lines to you while I sit here alone, all the household being at church — the sole occupant of an ancient parsonage among lonely hills, which probably will never hear the whistle of an engine till I am in my grave.
"After experiencing, since my return home, extreme pain and illness, with mental depression worse than either, I have at length acquired health and strength and soundness of mind, far superior, I trust, to anything shown by that miserable wreck you used to know under my name. I can now speak cheerfully and enjoy the company of another without the stimulus of six glasses of whisky. I can write, think and act with some apparent approach to resolution, and I only want a motive for exertion to be happier than I have been for years. But I feel my recovery from almost insanity to be retarded by having nothing to listen to except the wind moaning among old chimneys and older ash-trees — nothing to look at except heathery hills, walked over when life had all to hope for and nothing to regret with
A RETROSPECT. 99
me — no one to speak to except crabbed old Greeks and Romans who have been dust the last five \sic\ thousand years. And yet this quiet life, from its contrast, makes the year passed at Luddendenfoot appear like a night- mare, for I would rather give my hand than undergo again the grovelling carelessness, the malignant, yet cold debauchery, the determination to find out how far mind could carry body without both being chucked into hell, which too often marked my conduct when there, lost as I was to all I really liked, and seeking relief in the indulgence of feelings which form the blackest spot in my character.
" Yet I have something still left me which may do me service. But I ought not to remain too long in solitude, for the world soon forgets those who have bidden it '* good-bye.' Quiet is an excellent cure, but no medicine should be continued after a patient's recovery, so I am about, though ashamed of the business, to dun you for answers to .
" Excuse the trouble I am giving to one on whose kindness I have no claim, and for whose services I am offering no return except gratitude and thankfulness, which are already due to you. Give my sincere regards to Mr. Stephenson. A word or two to show you have not altogether forgotten me will greatly please,
"Yours, etc."
Alas, no helping hand rescued the sinking wretch from the quicksands of idle sensuality which slowly engulfed him ! Yet, at this time, there might have been hope, had he been kept from evil. Deliver himself he could not. His " great desire for activity " seems to have had to be in abeyance for some months, for on the 2 5th of October he is still at Haworth. He then writes to
H 2
ioo EMIL Y BRONTE.
Mr. Grundy again. The letter brings us up to the time when — in the cheerless morning — Charlotte and Emily set out on their journey homewards ; it reveals to us how much real undeserved suffering must have been going on side by side with Branwell's purposeless miseries in the grey old parsonage at Haworth. The good methodical old maiden aunt — who for twenty years had given the best of her heart to this gay affectionate nephew of hers — had come down to the edge of the grave, having waited long enough to see the hopeless fallacy of all her dreams for him, all her affection. Branwell, who was really tender-hearted, must have been sobered then.
He writes to Mr. Grundy in a sincere and manly strain : —
" MY DEAR SIR,
"There is no misunderstanding. I have had a long attendance at the death-bed of the Rev. Mr. Weightman, one of my dearest friends, and now I am attending at the death-bed of my Aunt, who has been for twenty years as my mother. I expect her to die in a few hours.
" As my sisters are far from home, I have had much on my mind, and these things must serve as an apology for what was never intended as neglect of your friendship to us.
" I had meant not only to have written to you, but to the Rev. James Martineau, gratefully and sincerely acknowledging the receipt of his most kindly and truth- ful criticism — at least in advice, though too generous far in praise — but one sad ceremony must, I fear, be gone through first. Give my most sincere respects to Mr. Stephenson, and excuse this scrawl ; my eyes are too
A RETROSPECT. 101
dim with sorrow to see well. Believe me, your not very happy, but obliged friend and servant,
"P. B.BRONTE."
But not till three days later the end came. By that time Anne was home to tend the woman who had taken her, a little child, into her love and always kept her there. Anne had ever lived gladly with Miss Bran well ; her more dejected spirit did not resent the occasional op- pressions, the little tyrannies, which revolted Charlotte .and silenced Emily. And, at the last, all the constant self-sacrifice of those twenty years, spent for their sake in a strange and hated country, would shine out, and yet more endear the sufferer to those who had to lose her.
On the 2Qth of October Branwell again writes to his friend : —
" MY DEAR SIR,
" As I don't want to lose a real friend, I write in depre- cation of the tone of your letter. Death only has made me neglectful of your kindness, and I have lately had so much experience with him, that your sister would not now blame 'me for indulging in gloomy visions either of this world or of another. I am incoherent, I fear, but I have been waking two nights witnessing such agonising suffering as I would not wish my worst enemy to endure ; and I have now lost the pride and director of all the happy days connected with my childhood. I have suffered such sorrow since I last saw you at Haworth, that I do not now care if I were fighting in
India, or since, when the mind is depressed, danger
is the most effectual cure."
Miss Branwell was dead. All was over : she was buried on a Tuesday morning, before Charlotte and
IO2
EMILY BRONTE.
Emily, having travelled night and day, got home. They found Mr. Bronte and Anne sitting together, quietly mourning the customary presence to be known no more. Branwell was not there. It was the first time he would see his sisters since his great disgrace ; he could not wait at home to welcome them.
Miss Branwell's will had to be made known. The little property that she had saved out of her frugal income was all left to her three nieces. Branwell had been her darling, the only son, called by her name ; but his disgrace had wounded her too deeply. He was not even mentioned in her will.
CHAPTER IX.
THE RECALL.
SUDDENLY recalled from what had seemed the line of duty, with all their future prospects broken, the three sisters found themselves again at Haworth together. There could be no question now of their keeping a school at Burlington ; if at all, it must be at Haworth, where their father could live with them. Miss Bran- well's legacies would amply provide for the necessary- alterations in the house ; the question before them was whether they should immediately begin these altera- tions, or first of all secure a higher education to them- selves.
At all events one must stay at home to keep house for Mr. Bronte. Emily quickly volunteered to be the one. Her offer was welcome to all ; she was the most experienced housekeeper. Anne had a comfortable situation, which she might resume at the end of the Christmas holidays, and Charlotte was anxious to get back to Brussels.
It would certainly be of advantage to their school, that cherished dream now so likely to come true, that the girls should be able to teach German, and that one of them at least should speak French with fluency and well. Monsieur Heger wrote to Mr. Bronte when Char- lotte and Emily left, pointing out how much more stable and enduring their advantages would become, could they
104 EMIL Y BRONTE.
continue for another year at Brussels. " In a year," h<» says, " each of your daughters would be completely pro vided against the future ; each of them was acquiring at the same time instruction and the science to instruct. Mademoiselle Emily has been learning the piano, re- ceiving lessons from the best master that we have in Brussels, and already she had little pupils of her own ; she was therefore losing at the same time a remainder of ignorance, and one, more embarrassing still, of timidity. Mademoiselle Charlotte was beginning to give lessons in French, and was acquiring that assurance and aplomb so necessary to a teacher. One year more, at the most, and the work had been completed, and completed well." Emily, as we know, refused the lure. Once at Haworth, she was not to be induced, by offer of any advantages, to quit her native heath. On the other hand, Charlotte desired nothing better. Hers was a nature very capable of affection, of gratitude, of sentiment. It would have been a sore wrench to her to break so suddenly with her busy, quiet life in the old mansion, Rue d'Isabelle. Almost imperceptibly she had become fast friends with the place. Mary Taylor had left, it is true, and bright, engaging Martha slept there, too sound to hear her, in the Protestant cemetery. But in foreign, heretic, distant Brussels there were calling memories for the downright, plain little Yorkshire woman. She could not choose but hear. The blackavised, tender-hearted, fiery professor, for whom she felt the reverent, eager friendship that intellectual girls often give to a man much older than they ; the doctor's family ; even Madame Beck ; even the Belgian schoolgirls — she should like to see them all again. She did not perhaps realise how different a place Brussels would seem without her sister. And it would certainly be an advantage for the school that she should
THE RECALL. 105
know German. For these, and many reasons, Charlotte decided to renounce a salary of £50 a year offered her in England, and to accept that of £16 which she would earn in Brussels.
Thus it was determined that at the end of the Christ- mas holidays the three sisters were again to be divided. But first they were nearly three months together.
Branwell was at home. Even yet at Haworth that was a pleasure and not a burden. His sisters never saw him at his worst ; his vehement repentance brought conviction to their hearts. They still hoped for his future, still said to each other that men were different from women, and that such strong passions betokened a nature which, if once directed right, would be passion- ately right. They did not feel the miserable flabbiness of his moral fibre ; did not know that the weak slip down when they try to stand, and cannot march erect. They were both too tender and too harsh with their brother, because they could not recognise what a mere, poor creature was this erring genius of theirs.
Thus, when the first shock was over, the reunited family was most contented. Lightly, naturally, as an -autumn leaf, the old aunt had fallen out of the house- hold, her long duties over ; and they — though they loved and mourned her — they were freer for her departure. There was no restraint now on their actions, their opinions ; they were mistresses in their own home. It was a happy Christmas, though not free from burden. The sisters, parted for so long, had much experience to exchange, many plans to make. They had to revisit their old haunts on the moors, white now with snow. There were walks to the library at Keighley for such books as had been added during their absence. Ellen came to Haworth. Then, at the end of January 1843,
106 EMIL Y BRONTE.
Anne went back to her duties, and Charlotte set off alone for Brussels.
Emily was left behind with Branwell ; but not for long. It must have been about this time that the ill- fated young man obtained a place as tutor in the house where Anne was governess. It appeared a most for- tunate connection ; the family was well known for its respectable position, came of a stock eminent in good works, and the sisters might well believe that, under Anne's gentle influence and such favouring auspices, their brother would be led into the way of the just.
Then Emily was alone in the grey house, save for her secluded father and old Tabby, now over seventy. She was not unhappy. No life could be freer than her own ; it was she that disposed, she too that performed most of the household work. She always got up first in the morn- ing and did the roughest part of the day's labour before frail old Tabby came down ; since kindness and thought for others were part of the nature of this unsocial, rugged woman. She did the household ironing and most of the cookery. She made the bread ; and her bread was famous in Haworth for its lightness and excellence. As she kneaded the dough, she would glance now and then at an open book propped up before her. It was her German lesson. But not always did she study out of books ; those who worked with her in that kitchen, young girls called in to help in stress of business, remember how she would keep a scrap of paper, a pencil, at her side, and how, when the moment came that she could pause in her cooking or her ironing, she would jot down some im- patient thought and then resume her work. With these girls she was always friendly and hearty — "pleasant, sometimes quite jovial like a boy/' " so genial and kind, a little masculine," say my informants ; but of strangers.
THE RECALL. 107
she was exceedingly timid, and if the butcher's boy or the baker's man came to the kitchen door she would be off like a bird into the hall or the parlour till she heard their hob-nails clumping down the path. No easy getting sight of that rare bird. Therefore, it may be, the Haworth people thought more of her powers than of those of Anne or Charlotte, who might be seen at school any Sunday. They say : "A deal o1 folk thout her th' clever'st o' them a', hasumiver shoo wur so timid, shoo cudn't frame to let it aat."
For amusements she had her pets and the garden. She always fed the animals herself : the old cat ; Flossy,. Anne's favourite spaniel ; Keeper, the fierce bulldog, her own constant, dear companion, whose portrait, drawn by her spirited hand, is still extant. And the creatures on the moor were all, in a sense, her pets and familiar with her. The intense devotion of this silent woman to all manner of dumb creatures has something pathetic, in- explicable, almost deranged. " She never showed regard to any human creature ; all her love was reserved for animals," said some shallow jumper at conclusions to Mrs. Gaskell. Regard and help and staunch friendliness to all in need was ever characteristic of Emily Bronte ; yet between her nature and that of the fierce, loving, faithful Keeper, that of the wild moor-fowl, of robins that die in confinement, of quick-running hares, of cloud- sweeping, tempest-boding sea-mews, there was a natural likeness.
The silent-growing flowers were also her friends. The little garden, open to all the winds that course over Lees Moor and Stillingworth Moor to the blowy summit of Haworth Street — that little garden whose only bulwark against the storm was the gravestones outside the rail- ing, the stunted thorns and currant-bushes within — was
to8 EMIL Y BRONTE
nevertheless the home of many sweet and hardy flowers, creeping up under the house and close to the shelter of the bushes. So the days went swiftly enough in tending her house, her garden, her dumb creatures. In the even- ings she would sit on the hearthrug in the lonely parlour, one arm thrown round Keeper's tawny neck, studying a book. For it was necessary to study. After the next Christmas holidays the sisters hoped to reduce to prac- tice their long-cherished vision of keeping school together. Letters from Brussels showed Emily that Charlotte was troubled, excited, full of vague disquiet. She would be glad, then, to be home, to use the instrument it had cost so much pains to perfect. A costly instrument, indeed, wrought with love, anguish, lonely fears, vanquished passion ; but in that time no one guessed that, not the school-teacher's German, not the fluent French acquired abroad, was the real result of this terrible firing, but a novel to be called ' Villette.'
Emily then, " Mine bonnie love," as Charlotte used to call her, cannot have been quite certain of this dear sister's happiness ; and as time went on Anne's letters, too, began to give disquieting tidings. Not that her health was breaking down ; it was, as usual, Branwell whose conduct distressed his sisters. He had altered so strangely ; one day in the wildest spirits, the next moping in despair, giving himself mysterious airs of importance, expressing himself more than satisfied with his situation, smiling oddly, then, perhaps, the next moment all re- morse and gloom. Anne could not understand what ailed him, but feared some evil.
At home, moreover, troubles slowly increased. Old Tabby grew very ill and could do no work ; the girl Hannah left ; Emily had all the business of investing the little property belonging to the three sisters since
THE RECALL. 109
Miss Branwell's death ; worse still, old Mr. Bronte's health began to flag, his sight to fail. Worst of all — in> that darkness, despair, loneliness — the old man, so Emily feared, acquired the habit of drinking, though not to excess, yet more than his abstemious past allowed. Doubtless she exaggerated her fears, with BranwelL always present in her thoughts. But Emily grew afraid,, alone at-Haworth, responsible, knowing herself deficient in that controlling influence so characteristic of her elder sister. Her burden of doubt was more that she could bear. She decided to write to Charlotte.
On the 2nd of January, 1844, Charlotte arrived at Haworth.
On the 23rd of the month she wrote to her friend : —
" Everyone asks me what I am going to do now that I am returned home, and everyone seems to expect that I should immediately commence a school. In truth it is what I should wish to do. I desire it above all things, I have sufficient money for the undertaking, and I hope now sufficient qualifications to give me a fair chance of success ; yet I cannot yet permit myself to enter upon life— to touch the object which seems now within my reach, and which I have been so long strain- ing to attain. You will ask me why ? It is on papa's account ; he is now, as you know, getting old ; and it grieves me to tell you that he is losing his sight. I have felt for some months that I ought not to be away from him, and I feel now that it would be too selfish to leave him (at least as long as Branwell and Anne are absent) in order to pursue selfish interests of my own. With the help of God, I will try to deny myself in this matter, and to wait.
" I suffered much before I left Brussels. I think, however long I live, I shall not forget what the parting
i io EMIL Y BRONTE.
with Monsieur He"ger cost me. It grieved me so much to grieve him who has been so true, kind, disinterested a
friend Haworth seems such a lonely quiet spot,
buried away from the world. I no longer regard myself as young, indeed, I shall soon be twenty-eight ; and it seems as if I ought to be working, and braving the rough
realities of the world, as other people do ." *
Wait, eager Charlotte, there are in store for you enough and to spare of rude realities, enough of working and braving, in this secluded Haworth. No need to go forth in quest of dangers and trials. The air is growing thick with gloom round your mountain eyrie. High as it is, quiet, lonely, the storms of heaven and the storms of earth have found it out, to break there.
* Mrs. GaskelL
( III )
CHAPTER X.
THE PROSPECTUSES.
'GRADUALLY Charlotte's first depression wore away. Long discussions with Emily, as they took their walks over the moors, long silent brooding of ways and means, -as they sat together in the parlour making shirts for Branwell, long thinking, brought new counsel. She went, moreover, to stay with her friend Ellen, and the change helped to restore her weakened health. She writes to her friend : —
" March 25
"DEAR NELL,
" I got home safely and was not too much tired on arriving at Haworth. I feel rather better to-day than I have been, and in time I hope to regain more strength. I found Emily and papa well, and a letter from Branwell intimating that he and Anne are pretty well too. Emily is much obliged to you for the seeds you sent. She wishes to know if the Sicilian pea and the crimson corn- flower are hardy flowers, or if they are delicate and should be sown in warm and sheltered situations. Write to me to-morrow and let me know how you all are, if your mother continues to get better
" Good morning, dear Nell, I shall say no more to you at present.
" C. BRONTE."
H2 EMIL Y BRONTE.
" Monday morning.
" Our poor little cat has been ill two days and is just dead. It is piteous to see even an animal lying lifeless. Emily is sorry."
Side by side with all these lighter cares went on the schemes for the school. At last the two sisters deter- mined to begin as soon as they saw a fair chance of getting pupils. They began the search in good earnest ; but fortunately, postponed the necessary alterations in the house until they had the secure promise of, at any rate, three or four. Then their demands lessened as day by day that chance became more difficult and fainter. In early summer Charlotte writes : " As soon as I can get a chance of only one pupil, I will have cards of terms printed and will commence the repairs necessary in the house. I wish all to be done before the winter. I think of fixing the board and English education at £25 per annum."
Still no pupil was heard of, but the girls went courageously on, writing to every mother of daughters with whom they could claim acquaintance. But, alas, it was the case with one, that her children were already at school in Liverpool, with another that her child had just been promised to Miss C., with a third that she thought the undertaking praiseworthy, but Haworth was so very remote a spot. In vain did the girls explain that from some points of view the retired situation was an advantage ; since, had they set up school in some fashionable place, they would have had house-rent to pay, and could not possibly have offered an excellent education for £25 a year. Parents are an expectant people. Still, every lady promised to recommend the school to mothers less squeamish, or less engaged ; and, knowing how well they would show themselves worthy
THE PROSPECTUSES. 113
of the chance, once they had obtained it, Charlotte and Emily took heart to hope.
The holidays arrived and still nothing was settled. Anne came home and helped in the laying of schemes and writing of letters — but, alas, Branwell also came home, irritable, extravagant, wildly gay, or gloomily moping. His sisters could no longer blind themselves to the fact that he drank, drank habitually, to excess. And Anne had fears — vague, terrible, foreboding — which she could not altogether make plain.
By this time they had raised the charge to ^35, con- sidering, perhaps, that their first offer had been so low as to discredit their attempt. But still they got no favour- able answers. It was hard, for the girls had not been chary of time, money, or trouble to fit themselves for their occupation. Looking round they could count up many schoolmistresses far less thoroughly equipped. Only the Brontes had no interest.
Meanwhile Branwell amused himself as best he could. There was always the " Black Bull," with its admiring circle of drink-fellows, and the girls who admired Patrick's courteous bow and Patrick's winning smile. Good people all, who little dreamed how much vice, how much misery they were encouraging by their approbation. Mr. Grundy, too, came over now and then to see his old friend. " I knew them all," he says — " The father, upright, handsome, distantly courteous, white-haired, tall ; know- ing me as his son's friend, he would treat me in the Grandisonian fashion, coming himself down to the little inn to invite me, a boy, up to his house, where I would be coldly uncomfortable until I could escape with Patrick Branwell to the moors. The daughters — dis- tant and distrait, large of nose, small of figure, red of hair (!), prominent of spectacles ; showing great intellec-
I
114
EMILY BRONTE.
tual development, but with eyes constantly cast down, very silent, painfully retiring. This was about the time of their first literary adventures, say 1843 or 1844."*
But of literary adventure there was at present little thought. The school still occupied their thoughts and dreams. At last, no pupil coming forward, some cards of terms were printed and given for distribution to the friends of Charlotte and Anne ; Emily had no friends.
There are none left of them, those pitiful cards of terms never granted ; records of such unfruitful hopes. They have fitly vanished, like the ghosts of children never born ; and quicker still to vanish was the dream that called them forth. The weeks went on, and every week of seven letterless mornings, every week of seven anxious nights, made the sisters more fully aware that notice and employment would not come to them in the way they had dreamed ; made them think it well that Branwell's home should not be the dwelling of innocent children.
Anne went back to her work leaving the future as uncertain as before.
In October Charlotte, always the spokeswoman, writes again to her friend and diligent helper in this matter : —
" DEAR NELL,
" I, Emily, and Anne are truly obliged to you for the efforts you have made in our behalf ; and if you have not been successful you are only like ourselves. Every- one wishes us well ; but there are no pupils to be had. We have no present intention, however, of breaking our hearts on the subject ; still less of feeling mortified at our defeat. The effort must be beneficial, whatever the * * Pictures of the Past.'
THE PROSPECTUSES. 1 1 5
result may be, because it teaches us experience and an additional knowledge of this world.
" I send you two additional circulars, and will send you two more, if you desire it, when I write again."
Those four circulars also came to nothing ; it was now more than six months since the three sisters had begun their earnest search for pupils : more than three years since they had taken for the ruling aim of their endea- vours the formation of this little school. Not one pupil could they secure ; not one promise. At last they knew that they were beaten.
In November Charlotte writes again to Ellen : —
" We have made no alterations yet in our house. It would be folly to do so while there is so little likelihood of our ever getting pupils. I fear you are giving yourself too much trouble on our account.
"Depend on it, if you were to persuade a mama to bring her child to Haworth, the aspect of the place would frighten her, and she would probably take the dear girl back with her instanter. We are glad that we have made the attempt, and we will not be cast down because it has not succeeded." *
There was no more to be said, only to put carefully by, as one puts by the thoughts of an interrupted mar- riage, all the dreams that had filled so many months only to lay aside in a drawer, as one lays aside the long sewn at garments of a still-born child, the plans drawn out for the builder, the printed cards, the lists of books to get ; only to face again a future of separate toil among strangers, to renounce the vision of a home
together.
* Mrs. Gaskell.
I 2
1 1 6 EMIL Y BRONT&.
CHAPTER XI. BRANWELL'S FALL.
As the spring grew upon the moors, dappling them with fresh verdant shoots, clearing the sky overhead, loosen- ing the winds to rush across them ; as the beautiful season grew ripe in Haworth, every one of its days made clearer to the two anxious women waiting there in what shape their blurred foreboding would come true at last. They seldom spoke of Branwell now.
It was a hard and anxious time, ever expectant of an evil just at hand. Minor troubles, too, gathered round this shapeless boded grief: Mr. Bronte was growing blind ; Charlotte, ever nervous, feared the same fate, and could do but little sewing with her weak, cherished eye- sight. Anne's letters told of health worn out by constant, agonising suspicion. It was Emily, that strong bearer of burdens, on whom the largest share of work was laid.
Charlotte grew really weak as the summer came. Her sensitive, vehement nature felt anxiety as a physical pain. She was constantly with her father ; her spirit sank with his, as month by month his sight grew sensibly weaker. The old man, to whom his own importance was so dear, suffered keenly, indeed, from the fear of actual blindness, and more from the horror of depend- ence, than from the dread of pain or privation. "He fears he will be nothing in the parish," says sorrowful
BRANWELUS FALL. 117
Charlotte. And as her father, never impatient, never peevish, became more deeply cast down and anxious, she, too, became nervous and fearful ; she, too, de- jected.
At last, when June came and brought no brightness to that grey old house, with the invisible shadow ever hovering above it, Charlotte was persuaded to seek rest and change in the home of her friend near Leeds.
Anne was home now ; she had come back ill, miser- able. She had suspicions that made her feel herself degraded, pure soul, concerning her brother's relation with her employer's wife. Many letters had passed between them, through her hands too. Too often had she heard her unthinking little pupils threaten their mother into more than customary indulgence, saying : " Unless you do as we wish, we shall tell papa about Mr. Bronte." The poor girl felt herself an involuntary accomplice to that treachery, that deceit.
To lie down at night under the roof, to break by day the bread of the good, sick, bedridden man, whose honour, she could not but fear, was in jeopardy from her own brother, such dire strain was too great for that frail, dejected nature. And yet to say openly to herself that Branwell had committed this disgrace — it was impossible. Rather must her suspicions be the morbid promptings of a diseased mind. She was wicked to have felt them. Poor, gentle Anne, sweet, "prim, little body," such scenes, such unhallowed vicinities of lust, were not for you. At last sickness came and set her free. She went home.
Home, with its constant labour, pure air of good works ; home, with its sickness and love, its dread for others and noble sacrifice of self ; how welcome was it to her wounded spirit ! And yet this infinitely lighter
n8 EMIL Y BRONTE.
torment was wearing Charlotte out. They persuaded her to go away, and, when she had yielded, strove to keep her away.
Emily writes to Ellen in July : —
" DEAR MISS NUSSEY— If you have set your heart on Charlotte staying another week, she has our united consent. I, for one, will take everything easy on Sun- day. I am glad she is enjoying herself ; let her make the most of the next seven days to return stout and hearty. Love to her and you from Anne and myself, and tell her all are well at home. —Yours,
"EMILY BRONTE."
Charlotte stayed the extra week, benefiting largely thereby. She started for home, and enjoyed her journey, for she travelled with a French gentleman, and talked again with delight the sweet language which had left such lingering echoes in her memory, which forbade her to feel quite contented any more in her secluded York- shire home. Slight as it was, the little excitement did her good ; feeling brave and ready to face and fight with a legion of shadows, she reached the gate of her own home, went in. Branwell was there.
He had been sent home a day or two before, appa- rently for a holiday. He must have known that some discovery had been made at last ; he must have felt he never would return. Anne, too, must have had some misgivings ; yet the worst was not known yet. Emilyr at least, could not guess it. Not for long this truce with open disgrace. The very day of Charlotte's return a letter had come for Branwell from his employer. All had been found out. This letter commanded Branwell never to see again the mother of the children under his care, never set foot in her home, never write or speak to
BRANWELLS FALL. n$
her. Branwell, who loved her passionately, had in that moment no thought for the shame, the black disgrace, he had brought on his father's house. He stormed, raved, swore he could not live without her ; cried out against her next for staying with her husband. Then prayed the sick man might die soon ; they would yet be happy. Ah, he would never see her again !
A strange scene in the quiet parlour of a country vicarage, this anguish of guilty love, these revulsions from shameful ecstasy to shameful despair. Branwell raved on, delirious, agonised ; and the blind father listened, sick at heart, maybe self-reproachful ; and the gentle sister listened, shuddering, as if she saw hell lying open at her feet. Emily listened, too, indignant at the treachery, horrified at the shame ; yet with an immense pity in her fierce and loving breast.
To this scene Charlotte entered.
Charlotte, with her vehement sense of right ; Char- lotte, with her sturdy indignation ; when she, at last understood the whole guilty corrupted passion that had wrecked two homes, she turned away with something in her heart suddenly stiffened, dead. It was her passionate love for this shameful, erring brother, once as dear to her as her own soul. Yet she was very patient. She writes to a friend quietly and without too much disdain : —
" We have had sad work with Branwell. He thought of nothing but stunning or drowning his agony of mind " (in what fashion, the reader knows ere now) " no one in this house could have rest, and at last we have been obliged to send him from home for a week, with some one to look after him. He has written to me this morn- ing, expressing some sense of contrition .... but as long as he remains at home, I scarce dare hope for peace
120 EMIL Y BRONTE.
in the house. We must all, I fear, prepare for a season of distress and disquietude." *
A weary and a hopeless time. Branwell came back, better in body, but in nowise holier in mind. His one hope was that his enemy might die, die soon, and that things might be as they had been before. No thought of repentance. What money he had, he spent in gin or opium, anything to deaden recollection. A woman still lives at Haworth, who used to help in the housework at the " Black Bull." She still remembers how, in the early morning, pale, red-eyed, he would come into the