by E. F. Benson
I have given no one [she wrote] a right either to affirm or hint, in the most distant manner, that I am ‘publishing’ — (humbug!). Whoever has said it, — if anyone has, which I doubt — is no friend of mine. Though twenty books were ascribed to me, I should own none. I scout the idea utterly. Whoever, after I have distinctly rejected the charge, urges it upon me, will do an unkind and an ill-bred thing. The most profound obscurity is infinitely preferable to vulgar notoriety and that notoriety I neither seek nor will have. If therefore any Birstallian or Gomersallian should presume to bore you on the subject, — to ask what ‘novel’ Miss Brontë has been ‘publishing’ — you can just say with the distinct firmness of which you are perfect mistress, when you choose, that you are authorized by Miss Brontë to say that she repels and disowns every accusation of the kind. You may add, if you please, that if any one has her confidence, you believe you have, and she has made no drivelling confession to you on the subject....
Surely the lady protested too much; had she not written a novel, she could never have shown such heat in repelling the accusation.
It is difficult to determine when Ellen was told: Charlotte did not want it to be known in the neighbourhood, and it was a secret in which her sisters shared. But such discretion need not be observed with Mary Taylor in New Zealand, and Charlotte sent her a copy of Jane Eyre, making no mystery about it, before these strenuous disclaimers.
But soon a certain acknowledgment of authorship became necessary. Anne having finished her second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, sent it to Mr. T. C. Newby, who had brought out Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, and he had been offered a high price for it by an American publisher as being a new work by the author of Jane Eyre. He believed (so he said) that the three Brontë novels already published were by one hand — in fact, that Currer Bell had really written them all. Meanwhile Messrs. Smith, Elder, with whom Charlotte had contracted for her next book, had promised it to another firm in America, and now found that what purported to be Currer Bell’s next book (The Tenant of Wildfell Hall) was already being negotiated for there by Newby. Upon which Mr. Smith naturally wrote to Currer Bell asking for explanations. It was necessary, therefore, in order to establish their separate entities and prove their good faith, that Charlotte and Anne should show themselves to the firm, the one as the author of Jane Eyre, the other of Agnes Grey and the forthcoming Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Without wasting time the two sisters packed a small box and walked through a snowstorm (the month being July) to Keighley and took the night train for London. They washed and breakfasted at the Chapter Coffee House, Paternoster Row, where Charlotte had stayed in her journey to Brussels, and then set off on foot for 65 Cornhill.
An extremely dramatic scene, quite in the style of Euripidean recognition, followed. They asked for Mr. Smith, giving no names, and were after some delay shown up to his room. A tall young man received them, and Charlotte, having made sure that it was he, gave into his hand the disquieting letter she had received from him the morning before, directed to Currer Bell. He looked at it and asked where she had got it. Then came the recognition: the little lady in spectacles, who now gave her name as Miss Brontë, was Currer Bell, author of Jane Eyre, and the other one was Acton Bell. They all cursed the perfidious Newby, and Mr. Williams, with whom Charlotte had been in effusive correspondence, was introduced. He was pale, mild and fifty, and there was a long nervous shaking of hands all round.
The business part of the expedition being thus accomplished, a whirl of socialities followed. With a passion for further incognito the sisters called themselves the Misses Brown for introduction to Mr. Smith’s friends, and wearing their ‘plain high-made country garments’ they went that evening to the opera.
Fine ladies and gentlemen [wrote Charlotte] glanced at us with a slight graceful superciliousness quite warranted by the circumstances. Still, I felt pleasantly excited in spite of headache and sickness and conscious clownishness, and I saw Anne was calm and gentle as she always is.
Next morning, the day being Sunday, they went to church with Mr. Williams, and afterwards Mr. Smith and his mother took them out to their ‘splendid house’ in Bayswater, six miles from Cornhill; there was a fine dinner but no appetite. On Monday there were visits to the Royal Academy and the National Gallery, another dinner with Mr. Smith, and then tea at Mr. Williams’s ‘comparatively humble but neat residence’ with his family of eight children, about one of whom Charlotte had already counselled him, as to her becoming a governess. There was singing by a daughter of Leigh Hunt’s, and on Tuesday morning they returned to Haworth laden with books. It had all been highly successful and exciting, but very exhausting; social pleasures and the presence of strangers had wrecked Charlotte.
A more jaded wretch than I looked, when I returned, [she wrote] it would be difficult to conceive. I was thin when I went, but was meagre indeed when I returned; my face looked grey and very old with strange deep lines ploughed in it, my eyes stared unnaturally....
But successful though that expedition had been, and pleased though Charlotte was at terminating with her publishers a mystery that had become irksome, she found that in her disclosure of identities to Mr. Smith she had gone too far, and when she returned to Haworth she was made aware of it. For not only had she revealed herself and Anne as being Currer and Acton Bell, but she had revealed Emily as being Ellis Bell. Once more, as by the ‘discovery’ of her poems, she had invaded her sister’s privacy and Emily strongly resented it. In consequence Charlotte wrote to Mr. Williams:
Permit me to caution you not to speak of my sisters when you write to me; I mean do not use the word in the plural. Ellis Bell will not endure to be alluded to under any appellation other than the nom de plume. I committed a grand error in betraying his identity to you and Mr. Smith. It was inadvertent — the words ‘we are three sisters’ escaped me before I was aware. I regretted the avowal the moment I had made it: I regret it bitterly now, for I find it is against every feeling and intention of Ellis Bell.
This incident is significant. At the least it accentuates our sense of the estrangement and misunderstandings between the two sisters, which must have been rendered more acute by Emily’s befriendings of Branwell in these three years, during which Charlotte had recorded, in bulletins to her friends, his growing degradation and her horror of him. To see more in it than that is perhaps a mistake, though those who believe, not without cause, that Branwell had something to do with Wuthering Heights, argue from it, plausibly and ingeniously, Emily’s repudiation of sole authorship: she knew, though Charlotte did not, that there had been a collaboration between her and the outcast brother. But Emily’s exasperation about Charlotte’s original raid on her private papers is sufficient to account for her resentment now against this second disclosure.
For six months Charlotte had issued no news of Branwell, but in July 1848 she wrote to Ellen: ‘Branwell is the same as ever and his constitution seems 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.’ This letter contains, as did the one in which she last spoke of her brother in January, another fierce attack on Mrs. Robinson. Her daughters, in almost daily correspondence with Anne, were about to make, says Charlotte, loveless marriages in obedience to her wish. ‘Of their mother,’ she writes: ‘I have not patience to speak, a worse woman, I believe, hardly exists; the more I hear of her, the more deeply she revolts me.’ This repeated coupling of Branwell’s deterioration with such expressions about Mrs. Robinson perhaps implies the belief that she was originally responsible for Branwell’s ruin, but Charlotte does not definitely state that, nor does she show the slightest softening towards him.
But the house was soon to be rid of its ‘scourge and its skeleton behind the curtain.’ He was a complete wreck, and no longer to be accounted sane. Consumption was making rapid inroads into a frame already hopelessly debilitated by drink and drugs, and all the summer he had been failing fast. We have but one glimpse more of him,
which must be given chiefly because it throws light on what his sisters and father must have gone through during the past three years, living in the house with him.
His friend Francis Grundy came to Haworth to see Branwell two days before his death. He ordered dinner at the ‘Black Bull,’ and sent a message up to the Parsonage to ask him to come. Mr. Grundy’s account proceeds:
Whilst I waited his appearance his father was shewn in. Much of the Rector’s old stiffness of manner was gone. 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 to leave it: nevertheless he had insisted upon coming, and would be there immediately. We parted and I never saw him again.
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.... He glanced at me a moment and muttered something of leaving a warm bed to come out into the cold night. Another glass of brandy, and returning warmth gradually brought him back to something like the Brontë of old. He even ate some dinner, a thing which he said he had not done for long: so our last interview was pleasant though grave. I never knew his intellect clearer. He described himself as waiting anxiously for death — indeed longing for it, and happy, in his sane moments, to think that it was so near. He once again declared that death would be due to the story I knew, and to nothing else.
When at last I was compelled to leave, he quietly drew from his coat-sleeve a carving knife, placed it on the table, and holding me by both hands, said that having given up all thoughts of seeing me again, he imagined when my message came, that it was a call from Satan. Dressing himself, he took the knife, which he had long secreted, and came to the inn with a full determination to rush into the room and stab the occupant. In the excited state of his mind he did not recognise me when he opened the door, but my voice and manner conquered him, and ‘brought him home to himself,’ as he expressed it. I left him standing bareheaded in the road, with bowed form and dripping tears. A few days afterwards he died.
Now doubt has been cast on this piteous story, because, if Branwell was dying, he could not have left his bed; but, as Charlotte wrote to Ellen Nussey, he was in bed for only one complete day, and went into the village two days before his death, without doubt for this meeting with Grundy. He died on September 24, 1848.
Charlotte neither felt nor made pretence of feeling any personal grief. She wrote to her friend Mr. Williams:
We have buried our dead out of sight. A lull begins to succeed the gloomy tumult of last week. It is not permitted us to grieve for him who is gone as others grieve for those they love. The removal of our only brother must necessarily be regarded by us in the light of a mercy rather than a chastisement.
She told him that religion and principle had never meant anything to Branwell, and it was not till within a few days of his end that he believed in them at all, and then came ‘conviction of their existence and worth,’ and it was a ‘strange change.’ He said ‘Amen’ to the last prayer Mr. Brontë recited by his bedside. ‘How unusual that word appeared from his lips, of course you, who did not know him, cannot conceive.’ Charlotte felt she could now forgive all the wrong he had done and the pain he had caused her, and adds, ‘If man can thus experience total oblivion of his fellow-creatures’ imperfections, how much more can the Eternal Being who made man, forgive His creatures?’ It is on her forgiveness of her brother that she chiefly dwells, and to Ellen and her sister she repeats that. ‘All his vices were and are nothing now. We remember only his woes....’ It was perhaps to be regretted that she had not remembered some of his woes a little sooner, and given him a glance of pity while he was able to receive it. Indeed she had more compassion for the profligate and the insane wife of Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre than she had for Branwell in his lifetime, for she wrote to Mr. Williams with greater charity about her: ‘Mrs. Rochester indeed lived a sinful life before she was insane, but sin is itself a species of insanity — the truly good behold and compassionate it as such.’
The shadow which for the last three years had darkened and embittered life for Charlotte was gone, and she put all thought of him from her; only three times in her very voluminous correspondence did she make further mention of Branwell. Once she says that Mr. James Taylor, who, three years later, proposed marriage with her, was markedly like him, adding that when he looked at her ‘her veins ran ice’; once she fears that Joe Taylor is going the same way as Branwell, and that a prospective marriage between him and Amelia Ringrose must end in hopeless misery; once she says that if she had a brother living she would not let him read Thackeray’s lecture on Fielding, for it made light of such serious vices as drunkenness. His name was added to those of his mother and his sisters Maria and Elizabeth on the tablet in Haworth Church, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which Anne had written to warn others concerning the wages of sin, went into a second edition.
CHAPTER XIV
Charlotte had been taken ill and was confined to bed for a week immediately after Branwell’s death, and she could not go to his funeral, nor, to her great regret, be of use in comforting her father, who ‘cried out for his loss like David for that of Absalom.’ But hardly was the gloom which had darkened the Parsonage for three years removed, and the prospect of comfort restored, when death, instead of life, eclipsed the sunshine again. Branwell’s funeral was the last occasion on which Emily left the house. She had a bad cold and cough, which grew worse, and before the end of October it was clear that she was seriously ill. She would not let a doctor see her, she would answer none of Charlotte’s questions, she would take no medicine. In every letter that Charlotte wrote during these two months before Emily’s death she wailed about this barrier that her sister had set between them, agonising that she was not permitted to approach her.
Her reserved nature occasions me great uneasiness of mind.... To put any question, to offer any aid, is to annoy.... You must look on and see her do what is unfit to do, and not dare to say a word.... She will not give an explanation of her feelings, she will scarcely allow her illness to be alluded to.... Would that my sister added to her great qualities the humble one of tractability.... She neither seeks nor will accept sympathy: —
such sentences as these occur everywhere. Stoical and secret as Emily was by nature, it is impossible not to see in so rigid an isolation of herself some special token of an estrangement which she would not suffer to be reconciled, and she fenced herself against any invasion even of sympathy. More than once her privacy had been broken into, and she would brook no further interference. For the last three years, too, there had been that silent daily antagonism over Branwell growing between Charlotte and her, and for these three months between his death and hers, the memory of their brother stood between them. Charlotte had had no pity for a publican and a sinner, and Emily, ‘full of ruth for others,’ would not accept for herself the compassion that had been withheld from him, nor allow her sister to pass the barrier which her ruthlessness had helped to build. Yearn and agonise as she might for the love and confidence which, partly by her own hardness, she had forfeited, they were not to be granted her now. Her very uprightness, the stern Puritanism of her nature, no doubt had invested her hardness with the garb of duty, just as Anne, in order to save others from such a career of profligacy and bestial self-indulgence as had brought her brother to ruin, had felt it a matter of conscience to make copy of him in the book that had come out a few months before his death. That, too, had been monstrous in Emily’s eyes. Anne no doubt, like Charlotte, could forgive her brother now, but Emily, lover of the moor and the wild things there, would not accept sympathy from these stern moralists, nor soften to their appeal.
She went about her household work as long as her
panting lungs would suffer her to mount the stairs or knead the bread. She wrote her requiem for her brother, and she revised and copied out her own salute to death. Refusing till the end to stop in bed, she rose daily at seven, dressed herself and came down, remaining there every night till ten o’clock, and then once more she dragged herself upstairs, and set her lamp in the window looking out over the snow-wreaths where once she had waited for the rustle of wings that betokened the coming of the ‘Strange Power’ that inspired her, and where now she waited for the sound of the wings of the Angel of Death. It was cold weather; there was a fire in her room, and one morning as she combed her hair, sitting before it, the comb dropped from her hands into the grate, where it lay on the hot cinders of the hearth. She was too weak to bend and pick it up, and waited till Martha came in, who rescued it from the singeing; then she finished her dressing and went downstairs. Almost to the end she fed the dogs Keeper and Flossie after supper; she had set her wild hawk free; there was the empty cage.
On the evening of December 18 Charlotte had been reading her an essay by Emerson; seeing she was not listening she had stopped, intending to finish it next day. In the morning Emily came downstairs as usual, and the sisters and their father breakfasted together in the dining-room, and then Mr. Brontë went to his study across the flagged passage. The meal was cleared and Emily took up her sewing.
But Charlotte, looking at her, saw that a change had come. It was no use asking her questions, for she would not answer them, and presently she went out. She walked up the lane to the moor which Emily loved: ‘flowers brighter than the rose bloomed for her there,’ and her errand was to search to see if even on this mid-December morning she could find just one sprig of heather-bloom, however withered, to bring back. Emily would understand what she meant. Peering short-sightedly in the more sheltered hollows she found one and plucked it, and returned to the Parsonage. She did not speak to her sister, but laid it on the table by her, as she worked at her sewing. Emily glanced at it and no more. Yet she must have known that it came from the moor; she must have guessed what Charlotte meant by going out to pick it for her. But it was too late: the withered sprig brought no message of its own, and as a token, mute and infinitely pathetic, of her sister’s longing to reach her and break for a moment the ice of her reserve it was meaningless; the time for such piteous signalling was over. Perhaps she struggled with herself to give, if not a word, a look to show that she understood, or perhaps this token seemed a mere sentimentality, a cheap attempt to undo the irrevocable. She was as ruthless then to Charlotte as she was to herself, and the sprig of heather lay by her unheeded.
