Brontës
Page 114
I wish you could come about Easter rather than at another time – for this reason/ – Mr Nicholls – if not prevented – proposes coming over then – I suppose he will stay at Mr Grant’s, as he has done two or three times before – but he will be frequently coming here – which would enliven your visit a little – perhaps too – he might take a walk with us occasionally – altogether it would be a little change for you such as – you know – I could not always offer.102
Ellen had no wish for ‘a little change’ or to have her visit ‘enlivened’ by the presence of the loathed Mr Nicholls: she declined to come at Easter though she did not break the fragile peace by giving her true reasons. As it happened, Charlotte’s ‘little plans’ were ‘deranged’ by the news that Mr Nicholls had decided to come a fortnight early: this was inconvenient, for Patrick was suffering from his usual spring attack of bronchitis but, with characteristic persistence, Mr Nicholls refused to be put off.103
He arrived on Monday, 3 April 1854 and stayed till the Friday. Whether his illness had left Patrick too weak to argue, or whether, in the face of his daughter’s determination, he could no longer maintain his opposition, he was at last persuaded to sanction the marriage. Charlotte left him little choice, laying down the law both to him and to her suitor with customary bossiness: she would marry; she would not leave her father; Mr Nicholls would return to Haworth as curate; he would live in the parsonage with them.104 There was nothing left for them to do but bury their grievances and acquiesce in her arrangements.
Chapter Twenty-Six
SO HAPPY
On Friday, 7 April 1854, Arthur Nicholls returned to Kirk Smeaton to celebrate Palm Sunday in an appropriate mood of triumph. It was not until the following Monday that Charlotte gathered sufficient courage to begin the task of informing her friends. What should have been joyous and excited letters were actually subdued and rather forlorn. The most difficult to write was the first, which had to be to Ellen. For the first time Charlotte gave her a bare recital of how matters had progressed since their quarrel last July, ending with the announcement, ‘In fact, dear Ellen, I am engaged.’ Struggling for words to convey her feelings, she could only report:
I am still very calm – very – inexpectant. What I taste of happiness is of the soberest order. I trust to love my husband – I am grateful for his tender love to me – I believe him to be an affectionate – a conscientious – a high-principled man – and if with all this, I should yield to regrets – that fine talents, congenial
Providence offers me this destiny. Doubtless then it is the best for me –
The marriage would take place in the summer, probably July, and Charlotte hoped that Ellen would be her bridesmaid. Aware that she hardly sounded like a joyful bride, Charlotte added, ‘There is a strange – half-sad feeling in making these announcements – The whole thing is something other than imagination paints it beforehand: cares – fears – come mixed inextricably with hopes.’1
The same apologetic tone pervaded her letter to Miss Wooler the next day. ‘The destiny which Providence in His goodness and wisdom seems to offer me will not – I am aware – be generally regarded as brilliant – but I trust
The one undeniable cause for satisfaction in all this was the knowledge that the marriage would ensure her father a comfortable old age; his son-in-law’s salary, however meagre, would be a useful addition to the family income and, more importantly, as Patrick’s health failed, he was assured of willing and able help in the parish. ‘My hope is that in the end this arrangement will turn out more truly to Papa’s advantage – than any other it was in my power to achieve. Mr N— only in his last letter – refers touchingly to his earnest desire to prove his gratitude to Papa by offering support and consolation to his declining age. This will not be mere talk with him – he is no talker – no dealer in professions.’ Patrick himself, realizing the benefits of the arrangements, had come round with surprising rapidity. ‘Papa’s mind seems wholly changed about this matter;’ Charlotte happily informed Ellen. ‘And he has said both to me and when I was not there – how much happier he feels since he allowed all to be settled. It is a wonderful relief for me to hear him treat the thing rationally – and quietly and amicably to talk over with him themes on which, once I dared not touch.’4
The necessity of having someone reliable in the parish had been forcibly brought home to Patrick by his own continuing ill health. His bronchitis lingered ominously: he had been unable to preach for some time and on Easter Monday he was still too unwell to attend the annual soiree of the Haworth Mechanics’ Institute.5 An invitation to join James Cheadle, vicar of Bingley, in meeting Dr Longley, the Bishop of Ripon, also had to be turned down, despite the fact that Patrick had received a kind and cordial letter from the ‘good and dear’ bishop, expressing his approval of Mr Nicholls’ return and pleasure at the ensuing ‘domestic arrangements’.6
Now that the matter was decided, both Patrick and Mr Nicholls were anxious to hasten events. Charlotte, however, dragged her feet. She had much to arrange: her proffered visit to Francis Bennoch had to be cancelled and arrangements made for a brief bride-visit to Mrs Gaskell, the Taylors and the Nusseys.7 There were alterations to be made at the parsonage to accommodate its new inmate. Charlotte had promised her father that the ‘plan of residence … should maintain his seclusion and convenience uninvaded’ and to that end the little pantry behind the dining room had to be converted into a study for Mr Nicholls. The workmen were called in and Charlotte herself was busy stitching: ‘the little new room is got into order now and the green and white curtains are up – they exactly suit the papering – and look neat and clean enough’.8
There were also business arrangements to be made. Reluctantly, Charlotte realized she would have to write to George Smith since he had managed all her investments on her behalf. That she had still not forgiven him for getting engaged (he had married in the meantime) was more than apparent. This was how she announced her own engagement to the man who had once been her most intimate male friend:
My dear Sir
It having become necessary that my Stock in the Funds should be transferred to another name, I have empowered Mr Metcalfe – my Solicitor – the Bearer of this note – to ask such particulars as are required to fill up the Power of Attorney for a transfer …
Listing all the sums she believed she had invested, totalling £1,684 7s. 6d., she ended her letter with a brusque, ‘Apologising for the unavoidable trouble thus given I am, my dear Sir Yours sincerely C Brontë’.9 No word of explanation; no enquiry after or good wishes for himself or his family; no point of personal reference at all. They might have been total strangers.
George Smith was too acute not to realize the implications of the letter and he wrote a long and friendly reply
which Charlotte could not ignore. Grudgingly, and with many a barbed comment that revealed the soreness she still felt, Charlotte accepted his congratulations and good wishes on her forthcoming marriage. ‘It gave me also sincere pleasure to be assured of your own happiness –’, she told him, ‘though of that I never doubted – I have faith also in its permanent character – provided Mrs George Smith is – what it pleases me to fancy her to be.’ Giving him a brief résumé of her courtship, she added, ‘My expectations, however, are very subdued – very different – I dare say – to what yours were before you were married.’ Even now she could not bear to include his wife in the good wishes she felt obliged to send the Smith family: ‘I hardly know in what form of greeting to include your wife’s name – as I have never seen her – say to her whatever may seem to you most appropriate – and most expressive of good-will.’ That was the nearest she could get to magnanimity towards the woman who had succeeded where she had failed. She ended her letter with a sad comment that nevertheless bore a sting in its tail. ‘In the course of the year that is gone – Cornhill and London have receded a long way from me – the links of communication have waxed very frail and few. It must be so in this world. All things considered – I don’t wish it otherwise.’10
There was a sense of coming to the end of an era in all this which was intensified by the visits Charlotte paid to the friends of her maiden days at the beginning of May. Writing to Mrs Gaskell, appropriately enough on 26 April which had been designated a Day of National Humiliation and Prayer on account of the war against Russia, Charlotte revealed that she had not passed on her invitation to Mr Nicholls because she did not want to ‘unsettle him’ by letting him accompany her.11 As Mrs Gaskell correctly suspected, however, Charlotte was more concerned about how Mr NichoUs, whom she termed ‘a Puseyite and very stiff’, would react to her Unitarian friends. ‘I had a little talk with him about my. “latitudinarianism” and his opposite quality’, she told Mrs Gaskell,
He did not bristle up at all – nor feel stiff and unmanageable – he only groaned a little over something in ‘Shirley’ touching ‘baptismal regeneration and a wash-hand basin.’ Yet if he is indulgent to some points in me – I shall have carefully to respect certain reverse points in him. I don’t mean to trifle with matters deep-rooted and delicate of conscience and principle. I know that when once married I shall often have to hold my tongue on topics which heretofore have rarely failed to set that unruly member in tolerably facile motion. But I will not be a bigot – My heart will always turn to the good of every sect and class.12
Invitations for Mr NichoUs to visit Hunsworth and Brookroyd were also forthcoming, but were turned down on his behalf because Mr Cator, his rector, was away in London till June ‘and he always stipulates that his Curate shall remain at Kirk-Smeaton while he is away’.13 This, as we shall see, did not prevent Mr NichoUs visiting his fiancée at Haworth in his vicar’s absence.
On 1 May, Charlotte set out for Manchester. Her visit to Plymouth Grove was to last an all too brief four days, but it passed off extremely well. Mrs Gaskell was all agog to learn the details of Charlotte’s romance and relayed the gossip with all possible speed to her friends. Allowing for her incorrigible embroidering, the description is nevertheless a dramatic insight into the clash of wills between father and daughter.
To hear her description of the conversation with her father when she quietly insisted on her right to see something more of Mr NichoUs was really fine. Her father thought that she had a chance of some body higher or at least farther removed from poverty. She said ‘Father I am not a young girl, not a young woman even – I never was pretty. I now am ugly. At your death I shall have 3oo£ besides the little I have earned myself – do you think there are many men who would serve seven years for me?’ And again when he renewed the conversation and asked her if she would marry a curate? – ‘Yes I must marry a curate if I marry at all; not merely a curate but your curate; not merely your curate but he must live in the house with you, for I cannot leave you’. The sightless old man stood up & said solemnly ‘Never. I will never have another man in this house’, and stalked our of the room. For a week he never spoke to her. She had not made up her mind to accept Mr Nicholls & the worry on both sides made her ill – then the old servant interfered, and asked him, sitting blind & alone, ‘if he wished to kill his daughter?;’ and went up to her and abused Mr Nicholls for not having ‘more brass.’ And so it has ended where it has done.14
Mrs Gaskell positively hugged herself with glee at the knowledge that she had played her own little part in bringing the couple together, sending the letter announcing Charlotte’s engagement to Richard Monckton Milnes and John Forster and laughing over her account of Mr Nicholls’ puzzlement to account for Mr Milnes’ interest in him.15
Charlotte also seems to have unburdened herself to Katie Winkworth, a distant relative of Mrs Gaskell’s, whose singing of Scottish ballads had so entranced her on a previous visit. They had a long conversation on the merits and demerits of Mr Nicholls. ‘I cannot conceal from myself that he is not intellectual’, she had declared, ‘there are many places into which he could not follow me intellectually.’ Katie had robustly pointed out that ‘if a man had a firm, constant, affectionate, reliable nature, with tolerable practical sense, I should be much better satisfied with him than if he had an intellect far beyond mine, and brilliant gifts without that trustworthiness’. Charlotte’s startling response to this was that ‘such a character would be far less amusing and interesting than a more impulsive and fickle one; it might be dull!’ The conversation, which had begun so seriously, ended in general laughter when Katie observed that such a character would at least enable one to ‘do the fickleness required one’s self, which would be a relief sometimes’.16
By the time Charlotte left Plymouth Grove, her premarital nerves were ‘greatly comforted’ and both Mrs Gaskell and Katie Winkworth were convinced that Charlotte would be ‘much more really happy’ with Mr Nicholls, ‘than with one who might have made her more in love’. It was Katie, however, who proved the more perceptive when she suggested, ‘But I guess the true love was Paul Emanuel after all, and is dead; but I don’t know, and don’t think Lily [Mrs Gaskell] knows …’17
From Manchester, Charlotte travelled to Hunsworth to stay with Joe and Amelia Taylor. This visit, too, was curtailed to a mere four days, during which Charlotte, perhaps made more maternal by her approaching marriage, developed a strong attachment to little ‘Tim’, who was now two and a half years old. Though Charlotte felt herself ‘very decent’ in health, Amelia declared the opposite: certainly ‘Tim’ must have thought her old-looking for she called her ‘grandmamma’, a nickname which Charlotte affectionately adopted in her later correspondence.18 On Monday, 8 May, Charlotte transferred to Brookroyd: it was almost exactly a year since her last visit and, though no one knew it, it was to be her last. Any linGéring awkwardnesses were soon swept away and Ellen was pressed into service helping Charlotte to choose her trousseau in Leeds and Halifax – the bride herself stipulated nothing expensive or extensive and that the bonnets and dresses should all be capable of being ‘turned to decent use and worn after the wedding-day’. The wedding-dress itself proved to be contentious. All Charlotte’s friends insisted she should wear white ‘which I told you I would not wear’ she told Mrs Gaskell; they forced her to try white on, persuaded her
that nothing had ever suited me so well – and white I had to buy and did buy to my own amazement – but I took care to get it in cheap material – there were some insinuations about silk <-> tulle and I don’t know what – but I stuck convulsively to muslin – plain book muslin with a tuck or two. Also the white veil – I took care should be a matter of 5s being simply of tulle with little tucks. If I must make a fool of myself – it shall be on an economical plan.19
Charlotte returned to Haworth on the evening of 13 May to find that arrangements for the wedding were gathering pace. Not surprisingly, George de Renzy the unfortunate curate who had stepped int
o Mr Nicholls’ shoes and was now surplus to requirements, was feeling aggrieved. Though ‘perfectly smooth and fair-spoken’ to Patrick, he wrote unpleasantly to Mr Nicholls and had the ‘deplorable weakness to go and pour out acrimonious complaints to John Brown, the National School-master and other subordinates’. His conduct roused Charlotte’s bile: ‘This only exposes himself to disrespectful comment from those exalted personages’, she told Ellen. ‘For his own and his office-sake I wish he would be quiet.’ He was also making difficulties about the date of his departure, casting all the wedding plans into disarray. ‘Mr de R’s whole aim is to throw Papa into the dilemma of being without a curate for some weeks’, Charlotte wrote angrily to Ellen,
Papa has every legal right to frustrate this at once by telling him he must stay till his quarter is up – but this is just the harsh decided sort of measure which it goes against Papa’s nature to adopt and which I can not and will not urge upon him while he is in delicate health. I feel compelled to throw the burden of the contest upon Mr Nicholls who is younger – more pugnacious and can bear it better. The worst of it is Mr N. has not Papa’s rights to speak and act or he would do it to purpose –20
Patrick had already conceded that his curate should take three weeks of paid leave but Mr de Renzy was now ‘moving heaven & earth to get a fortnight more – on pretence of wanting a holiday’, Charlotte exploded. It was not until 16 June that matters were finally settled. Charlotte had wanted the wedding deferred till the second week in July, but Patrick had given way and Mr de Renzy had obtained his holiday: he would leave on 25 June. ‘This gives rise to much trouble and many difficulties, as you may imagine – and Papa’s whole anxiety now is to get the business over – Mr Nicholls – with his usual trustworthiness – takes all the trouble of providing substitutes on his own shoulders.’21