In the middle of June he had written to J.B. Leyland in the hope of fending off his creditors. Thomas Nicholson, landlord of the Old Cock Inn at Halifax, was threatening a court summons and had written to Patrick demanding settlement of Branwell’s bills. Sending ten shillings with John Brown and promising to pay the rest as soon as he obtained an advance from Dr Crosby, Branwell wrote in panic: ‘If he refuses my offer and presses me with law I am RUINED. I have had five months of such utter sleeplessness violent cough and frightful agony of mind that jail would destroy me for ever –’. Pathetically he added that he had long intended to write a letter of five or six pages ‘but intolerable mental wretchedness and corporeal weakness have utterly prevented me’.74 No doubt Leyland, like the Brontë family, simply thought Branwell was crying wolf once more. ‘Branwell is the same in conduct as ever –’, Charlotte complained to Ellen at the end of July, ‘his constitution seems much shattered – Papa – and sometimes all of us have sad nights with him – he sleeps most of the day, and consequently will lie awake at night –’75 Any sympathy Charlotte might have felt for her brother had long evaporated; now he simply irritated her.
Certainly Branwell did little to court his family’s approval. Not only was he hopelessly entangled in debt but also he was driven to the abuser’s extremes of duplicity in his desperation to feed his habit. Mrs Gaskell describes how he would steal out of the house while all the family were at church to cajole the village druggist out of a lump of opium.76 His last extant letter provides sad confirmation of this. Dated only ‘Sunday. Noon’, when the household would indeed be at church, it was addressed to his old friend and drinking companion, John Brown.
Sunday. Noon.
Dear John,
I shall feel very much obliged to you if [you] can contrive to get me Five pence worth of Gin in a proper measure
Should it be speedily got I could perhaps take it from you or Billy at the lane
I anxiously ask the favour because I know the
Punctualy at Half-past Nine in the morning you Will/ be paid the 5d out of a shilling given me then. Yours,
P.B.B.77
Nothing could have illuminated Branwell’s decline so clearly as this pitifully ill-written, ill-spelt, confused begging letter with its pathetic disclosures that he was dependent on his father’s charity for the gift of a shilling and reduced to drinking gin.
During the third week in September, Branwell had an unexpected visitor, Francis Grundy, his friend from happier days on the railway at Luddenden Foot. Grundy ordered dinner for two in a private room at the Black Bull and then sent up to the parsonage for Branwell. While he waited, he was surprised to receive a visitor himself: touched by the kindness Grundy was showing to his son, Patrick Brontë had come down to see him and warn him to be prepared for a dramatic change in Branwell’s appearance. ‘Much of the Rector’s old stiffness of manner was gone’, Grundy noted:
He spoke of Branwell with more affection than I had ever heretofore heard him express, but he also spoke almost hopelessly. He said that when my message came, Branwell was in bed, and had been almost too weak for the last few days to leave it; nevertheless, he had insisted upon coming, and would be there immediately.78
Despite Patrick’s warning, Grundy was deeply shocked when his friend at last made his appearance.
Presently the door opened cautiously, and a head appeared. It was a mass of red, unkempt, uncut hair, wildly floating round a great, gaunt forehead; the cheeks yellow and hollow, the mouth fallen, the thin white lips not trembling but shaking, the sunken eyes, once small, now glaring with the light of madness, – all told the sad tale but too surely.79
Grundy hid his surprise, greeted his guest ‘in my gayest manner, as I knew he best liked’ and forced a stiff glass of hot brandy upon him. ‘Under its influence, and that of the bright, cheerful surroundings, he looked frightened – frightened of himself. He glanced at me a moment, and muttered something of leaving a warm bed to come out into the cold night.’ Gradually, however, with another glass of brandy inside him, ‘something like the Brontë of old’ returned, though he remained grave throughout the evening. ‘He described himself as waiting anxiously for death – indeed, longing for it, and happy, in these his sane moments, to think that it was so near’ and declared that his death would be solely due to his disastrous relationship with Mrs Robinson. As Grundy reluctantly took his leave, Branwell pulled a carving knife from his sleeve and confessed that, having given up hope of ever seeing Grundy again, he had imagined his message was a call from Satan. He had armed himself with the knife, which he had long kept hidden, and come to the inn determined to rush into the room and stab its occupant. Only the sound of Grundy’s voice and his manner had ‘brought him home to himself’ as Branwell described it. ‘I left him standing bare-headed in the road’, Grundy remembered, ‘with bowed form and dropping tears. A few days afterwards he died.’80
Though Branwell had long been obsessed with death and had increasingly shown a preoccupation with epitaphs and images of mortality, his conversation with Grundy revealed that he knew he had not long to live. The end came so suddenly, however, after all the months of slow decline, that it caught everyone, including the doctor who had attended him all summer, by surprise. Charlotte was later to be comforted by the fact that a ‘most propitious change marked the last few days of poor Branwell’s life’, a change which, with hindsight, she recognized as being a portent of death: ‘his demeanour, his language, his sentiments were all singularly altered and softened’, she wrote, ‘the calm of better feelings’ filled his mind and ‘a return of natural affection marked his last moments’.81
Two days before his death, Branwell was well enough to walk down the lane into the village. As he returned to the parsonage, he was overcome by faintness and shortness of breath and had to be helped home by William Brown, the sexton’s brother. Their faltering progress was observed by Tabitha, William’s thirteen-year-old niece. Sixty years later, she still vividly recalled the incident. ‘There was a low step to mount and I can always remember seeing him catch hold to the door side – it seemed such hard work for him. I believe that was the last time he was ever out.’82
The next day, Branwell was unable to get up from his bed. John Wheelhouse, the Haworth doctor, was sent for and told the shocked family that his patient was close to death. In an agony of distress, the anguished father who had had such high hopes for this, his only son, knelt in prayer by his bedside and wrestled for his soul. Though he had attended untold deathbeds, including those of his dearly beloved wife, sister-in-law and William Weightman, he had done so in the safe and sure knowledge that the dying had all had faith in their eternal future. It was the bitterest pill of all that only his most precious son had rejected the comforts of his religion and refused to repent of his manifold sins. In this, his darkest hour, and with who knows what desolation in his heart, Patrick begged his son to seek salvation with all the urgency that approaching death could instil. Gradually, perhaps through mere force of will, he brought Branwell to a recognition of his vices and the repentance of them. The chimera of Mrs Robinson was finally driven away. Throughout this, his last night, Branwell talked of his ‘misspent life, his wasted youth, and his shame, with compunction’. Some time before the end, John Brown came and was left alone with the dying man. Branwell, looking back over his past excesses – in which Brown had so often shared – made no mention of the woman for whom he had destroyed himself. Calm and self-possessed, he seemed ‘unconscious that he had ever loved any but the members of his family, for the depth and tenderness of which affection he could find no language to express’. Seizing Brown’s hand, he cried, ‘Oh, John, I am dying!’ and then, as if speaking to himself, he murmured, ‘In all my past life I have done nothing either great or good.’83
At about nine o’clock on the morning of Sunday, 24 September, the Brontë family gathered round Branwell’s bed to witness his li
fe drawing to its close. He remained perfectly conscious to the end: ‘I myself, with painful, mournful joy, heard him praying softly in his dying moments’, Charlotte told Williams, ‘and to the last prayer which my father offered up at his bedside, he added “amen”. How unusual that word appeared from his lips – of course you who did not know him, cannot conceive.’ After a struggle of twenty minutes, which must have seemed an eternity to his distressed family, Branwell started convulsively, almost to his feet, and fell back dead into his father’s arms. He was thirty-one years old.84 Watching this, the first death she had ever witnessed,85 Charlotte felt the dawnings of pity for her brother:
When the struggle was over – and a marble calm began to succeed the last dread agony – I felt as I had never felt before that there was peace and forgiveness for him in Heaven. All his errors – to speak plainly – all his vices seemed nothing to me in that moment; every wrong he had done, every pain he had caused, vanished; his sufferings only were remembered; the wrench to the natural affections only was felt… – He is at rest – and that comforts us all long before he quitted this world – Life had no happiness for him.86
Though she now felt able to forgive her impetuous brother’s sins, Charlotte was not able to forget them. There was a bitterness about his life – if not his death – that she could not put aside. Writing to Williams a week after Branwell’s untimely end she revealed how deep the rift had grown between the once inseparable pair.
the removal of our only brother must necessarily be regarded by us rather in the light of a mercy than a chastisement. Branwell was his Father’s and his Sisters’ pride and hope in boyhood, but since Manhood, the case has been otherwise. It has been our lot to see him take a wrong bent; to hope, expect, wait his return to the right path; to know the sickness of hope deferred, the dismay of prayer baffled, to experience despair at last; and now to behold the sudden early obscure close of what might have been a noble career.
I do not weep from a sense of bereavement – there is no prop withdrawn, no consolation torn away, no dear companion lost – but for the wreck of talent, the ruin of promise, the untimely dreary extinction of what might have been a burning and a shining light. My brother was a year my junior; I had aspirations and ambitions for him once – long ago – they have perished mournfully – nothing remains of him but a memory of errors and sufferings – There is such a bitterness of pity for his life and death – such a yearning for the emptiness of his whole existence as I cannot describe – I trust time will allay these feelings.87
In thus writing his obituary, Charlotte revealed the poison which had eaten away at her relationship with her brother until it had eventually destroyed the love she had once had for him; he had committed the unforgivable sin of not living up to her expectations of him. Despite her measured cadences, all the force of her emotion was concentrated on that one word ‘obscure’: the rest of her letter is written in her usual neat and even script but that one word stands out, its letters crushed together as if written in a spasm of barely suppressed savagery.
Patrick’s reaction to his son’s death was both more natural and more charitable, though it was reported by Charlotte with all the jealousy of the well-behaved sibling seeing a father’s love of the prodigal son.
My poor Father naturally thought more of his only Son than of his daughters, and much and long as he had suffered on his account – he cried out for his loss like David for that of Absalom – My Son! My Son! And refused at first to be comforted –88
‘It was my fate to sink at the crisis when I should have collected my strength’, Charlotte told Ellen. The stress or what she called ‘the awe and trouble of the death-scene’ brought on a headache and nausea on the day itself, followed by internal pain, loss of appetite and bilious fever.89 No doubt her extreme reaction was caused not just by the sudden loss of the brother who had once been so close to her, but also by the recognition that she could so easily have succumbed to the same fate. Had she given in just a little more to her feelings about Monsieur Heger, perhaps she too would have been tipped over the edge. Charlotte took to her bed for a week while the rest of the family struggled to come to terms with their loss and make preparations for the funeral. The burden of performing the last intimate rites for their brother, as well as preparing the customary burial tea, purchasing mourning clothes and stationery and organizing the printing and distribution of funeral cards therefore fell on Emily and Anne, who set about their tasks with their usual calm efficiency. Anne even had to write to Williams on Charlotte’s behalf to thank him for his letters, which she was too indisposed to answer.90
It was not to be expected that Patrick would perform the burial service for his son but, rather than simply pass the duty on to his curate, he called on his old friend, Branwell’s godfather, William Morgan. On Thursday, 28 September, Branwell’s body was carried the short distance from his home to his father’s church, where it was interred in the family vault next to the remains of his mother, aunt and sisters.91 John Brown, performing a more respectable service for him than he had so often done in the past, added Branwell’s name to the family monument on the wall in the church. His death was registered by the village doctor, John Wheelhouse, who certified the cause as ‘Chronic bronchitis – Marasmus’, though the symptoms and subsequent events suggest that the deterioration in Branwell’s lungs and his wasting away were actually due to consumption, which was rife in the village.92 Whatever the technical causes of his death, his family and friends had no doubt whatsoever about the real reason:
Patrick Branwell Brontë was no domestic demon – he was just a man moving in a mist, who lost his way. More sinned against, mayhap, than sinning, at least he proved the reality of his sorrows. They killed him …93
Chapter Twenty
STRIPPED AND BEREAVED
‘“We have buried our dead out of our sight”’, Charlotte wrote to William Smith Williams at the beginning of October 1848,l little knowing that Branwell’s death was only the beginning of her troubles. Suffering ‘terrible’ nights and ‘impressions experienced on waking … such as we do not put into language’,2 Charlotte was at first too preoccupied with her own misery and psychosomatic illness to notice her sisters’ indisposition. In response to anxious queries from Ellen and Williams, Charlotte painted a miserable portrait of herself‘sitting muffled at the fireside, shrinking before the east wind (which for some days has been blowing wild and keen over our cold hills), and incapable of lifting a pen for any more formidable task than that of writing a few lines to an indulgent friend’.3 All the family had suffered ‘harassing coughs & colds’ in the wake of the changeable weather and dreaded cold easterly winds but it was not until the end of October that Charlotte began to suspect something more serious was amiss. ‘I feel much more uneasy about my sisters than myself just now’, she told Ellen.
Emily’s cold and cough are very obstinate; I fear she has pain in the chest – and I sometimes catch a shortness in her breathing when she has moved at all quickly – She looks very, very thin and pale. Her reserved nature occasions one great uneasiness of mind – it is useless to question her – you get no answers – it is still more useless to recommend remedies – they are never adopted
Nor can I shut my eyes to the fact of Anne’s great delicacy of constitution. The late sad event has I feel made me more apprehensive than common – I cannot help feeling much depressed sometimes – I try to leave all in God’s hands, and to trust in his goodness – but faith and resignation are difficult to practise under some circumstances.4
It was a mark of their extraordinary esteem for and kindness towards their authoress, that Smith, Elder & Co. did everything in their power to assist her in these dark days. Williams sent letters written expressly to divert her; George Smith sent her a hundred pounds, proof that the third edition of Jane Eyre was selling well; more importantly, a large parcel of books arrived, unsolicited, for the sisters to read and return at leisure. As George Smith refused to accept their thanks, Charlotte wrote to
tell him that the loan of the books was indeed well timed: ‘no more acceptable benefit could have been conferred on my dear sister Emily who is at present too ill to occupy herself with writing, or indeed with anything but reading. She smiled when I told her Mr Smith was going to send some more books – she was pleased.’ The opening of the parcel and examination of the books had cheered Emily; their perusal was to occupy her for many a weary day.5
The terrible realization that there was something seriously amiss with Emily shook Charlotte out of her own hypochondria and self-pity: ‘the tie of sister is near and dear indeed,’ she wrote, ‘and I think a certain harshness in her powerful, and/ peculiar character only makes one cling to her more’.6 Those ties were to be stretched to the limit as Emily stubbornly refused to answer enquiries about her health, let alone accept any offers of assistance. Clinging to hope as a lifeline, Charlotte wrote to Williams on 2 November:
I would fain hope that Emily is a little better this evening, but it is difficult to ascertain this: she is a real stoic in illness, she neither seeks nor will accept sympathy; to put any question, to offer any aid is to annoy; she will not yield a step before pain or sickness till forced; not one of her ordinary avocations will she voluntarily renounce: you must look on, and see her do what she is unfit to do, and not dare to say a word; a painful necessity for those to whom her
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