Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  While these hidden intrigues were in progress, life at the Parsonage went on with its unswerving monotony. Charlotte paid visits to Ellen and Mrs. Gaskell in the spring, and in company with Mr. and Mrs. Joe Taylor, née Amelia Ringrose, and their baby went to Scotland in August; but was in that country for one night only, since the baby had some slight ailment, and the parents felt sure that the air of Scotland did not agree with it. They retraced their steps at once to Ilkley, but Charlotte lost her box, which was labelled to Kirkcudbright, and lack of clothes compelled her to return after three days to Haworth. Literally nothing else happened that summer except what was hidden from all eyes until Mrs. Gaskell came to stay with Charlotte towards the end of September.

  Haworth Parsonage

  (circa 1850)

  In her charmingly written account of her visit she dwells much on minutiæ, describing the exquisite cleanness of the house, the clockwork regularity of the routine, the silence, the undisturbed tranquillity, the appearance of the parlour, the hours for meals, the walks on the moor, the long talks they had over the fire; but this wealth of detail over trivialities rather suggests that no very intimate intercourse in conversation passed between them. But Charlotte must have given her then her version of Branwell’s affair with Mrs. Robinson, and she also spoke a good deal of Emily, ‘about whom,’ says Mrs. Gaskell, ‘she is never tired of talking, nor I of listening. Emily must have been a remnant of the Titans....’ It is curious, however, to notice that Mrs. Gaskell, speaking elsewhere of Emily, says: ‘All that I, a stranger, have been able to learn about her has not tended to give either me or my readers a pleasant impression of her.’ These constant talks with Charlotte about Emily must have been in her mind when she wrote that, and it is impossible not to wonder what these communications were which produced the disagreeable impression. Some reflection, maybe, of estrangements and of bitter days, when Emily befriended Branwell and scolded Anne for using him as a model in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall: or the rather horrible story of Emily thrashing her dog? It is impossible to tell, but it was thus that Charlotte’s talk of Emily struck the mild, kindly woman who listened to it.

  Of Mr. Brontë himself, Mrs. Gaskell shows high appreciation. ‘He was a most courteous host, and when he was with us — at breakfast in his study, or at tea in Charlotte’s parlour, — he had a sort of grand and stately way of describing past times, which tallied well with his striking appearance.’ This favourable impression did not last, for when she saw him again in 1860, she wrote of him to Mr. Williams: ‘He still talks in his pompous way, and mingles moral remarks and somewhat stale sentiment with his conversation on ordinary subjects.’ But it must be remembered that she had in the interval brought out her Life of Charlotte, and his indignation at what she had said about him had put another complexion on his admirable stateliness. Mrs. Gaskell, finally, knew that Mr. Brontë was violently opposed to the idea of Charlotte’s marriage with Mr. Nicholls, and ‘deeply admired the patient docility which she displayed in her conduct towards her father.’ But the docility was not quite so patient as she imagined, for Charlotte was in correspondence with her lover, and Mr. Nicholls was in Haworth, for the second time since his departure, staying secretly once more with Mr. Grant. Charlotte did not see so much of him as she had done in July, for she had her duties to perform to her guest. But the household in the Parsonage went early to bed, and Mrs. Gaskell records how she always heard Charlotte come downstairs again when she was in her room. Is it too much to hope that Mr. Nicholls was waiting in the churchyard?

  Throughout the autumn and winter Charlotte’s correspondence with the friends to whom for years she had written so regularly and voluminously practically ceased. Five letters in four months was the meagre sum of them. The correspondence with Mr. Nicholls may have occupied her, but of the volume of it or of its contents we have no idea, for after her death he seems to have destroyed every letter she had ever written to him. Then in January 1854 she judged that the time was ripe for another move. She arranged for him to come to Haworth once more and stay with Mr. and Mrs. Grant, and now she told her father that he was here, and ‘stipulated with papa for opportunity to become better acquainted. I had it and all I learned inclined me to esteem and affection.’ This reads strangely, for Mr. Nicholls had been her father’s curate for over eight years, and one would have thought there must have been ample opportunity for forming an acquaintance with him. Though Mr. Brontë was still ‘very hostile, and bitterly unjust,’ he was evidently getting used to the idea; he consented to Charlotte’s seeing her lover, and she saw much of him during this ten days’ stay. Off he went again without meeting his late vicar, to resume his duty at Kirk Smeaton, where he had taken a curacy, and again the process of detrition of Mr. Brontë’s hostility went quietly on throughout the spring, and the plans of those who were now lovers were complete before Mr. Nicholls paid his next visit to the Grants at Easter. As Easter approached, Charlotte got into a slight flutter about it, for she expected that her engagement would then be formally settled, and she first wrote to Ellen asking her to come to Haworth because Mr. Nicholls would be there (‘perhaps too he might take a walk with us occasionally’), and then revoked her invitation for exactly the same reason, namely, that he was going to be there.

  He came, they were engaged, and their plans, which did equal credit to their heads and their hearts, were disclosed in schedule to Mr. Brontë. The curate, Mr. de Renzi, who had always been unsatisfactory, would be dismissed, and Mr. Nicholls would resume his duties at Haworth. Charlotte would not leave her father, but Mr. Nicholls, when the marriage took place in the summer, would come to live at the Parsonage. Mr. Brontë’s ‘seclusion and convenience’ would be left uninvaded, and Mr. Nicholls would subscribe to household expenses in so liberal a manner that ‘in a pecuniary sense the marriage would bring Mr. Brontë gain instead of loss.’ These plans for his comfort caused him to give his consent, ‘and papa began really to take a pleasure in the prospect.’

  Considering that little more than a year ago he had nearly had an apoplectic fit at the presumption of the now accepted suitor, Charlotte’s management of the affair, and her quiet vanquishing of difficulties that seemed insurmountable, must have been a work of consummate strategy. She gave credit to Mr. Nicholls for his perseverance, but granted that he wanted to marry her, all he had to do was to carry out her orders: she was alone at Haworth with a singularly obstinate father, and success in bringing him round was entirely due to her. Ambition for her, paternal pride, ‘ever a restless feeling,’ as she wrote to Ellen, she considered had been at the bottom of his opposition, and ‘now that this unquiet spirit is exorcised, justice, which was once quite forgotten, is once more listened to, and affection, I hope, resumes some power.’

  Then having herself worked for and triumphantly carried her scheme to a successful issue, she attributed it all to Providence. ‘Providence,’ she wrote, ‘offers me this destiny. Doubtless then it is the best for me.’ But, without questioning the supremacy of the Divine decrees, we must observe that Providence had offered her that destiny a year and a half ago, and she had rejected it because she had no affection for her lover. Afterwards, coming round to the belief that it was best for her, and that she really wanted it, she had by the exercise of tact, intrigue, and will power secured it. Providence, in fact, would not have had much chance without her firm co-operation.

  She was certainly happy in the prospect of her marriage, but there was no sort of ecstasy; she wrote that her happiness was ‘of the soberest order,’ and she could analyse it exactly. She trusted that she would love her husband, and she was grateful for his love. She believed him, without glamour, to be an ‘affectionate, a conscientious and high-principled man,’ and ‘if with all this I should yield to regret, that fine talents, congenial tastes and thoughts are not added, I should be most presumptuous and thankless.’ She was aware that this destiny which, she repeats, Providence has offered her ‘will not be generally regarded as brilliant, but I trust I see in it some germs
of happiness.’ There was nothing resembling any personal sense or anticipation of the great thing that at last was coming to her: she hoped that ‘this arrangement will turn out more truly to papa’s satisfaction than any other it was in my power to achieve.’ She looked into the future tranquilly and serenely, but never for a moment did she foresee that her marriage would bring her such happiness and forgetfulness of self as she had missed all her life. One thing alone troubled her at all, and that was Mr. Nicholls’s rheumatism, and over this she grew very solemn. It had been, she told Ellen, ‘one of the strong arguments against her marriage,’ and there was fear that it was chronic, but Charlotte ‘resolved to stand by him now whether in weal or woe.... And yet the ultimate possibilities of such a case are appalling. You remember your aunt?’ But Mr. Nicholls had to do his part, too, in averting such a fate, and his neglect of it brought on him a good wigging. He had evidently had a strict dietetic supervision on the last of his visits to Haworth, and had got much better, but on his return there he was worse, and Charlotte was frightened till she found out that he had been careless about himself at Kirk Smeaton, and his aches were entirely his own fault; so what he needed was not sympathy but a sound rating. The nature of it may be gathered from the remarks she made to Ellen on the subject:

  Man is indeed an amazing piece of mechanism when you see, so to speak, the full weakness of what he calls his strength. There is not a female child above the age of eight but might rebuke him for spoilt petulance of his wilful nonsense. I bought a border for the table-cloth and have put it on....

  Mr. Nicholls, we feel, would think twice before he was careless about his rheumatism again. She took him in hand, too, in other ways. Ellen had asked him to go to Brookroyd, but Charlotte did not give him the message— ‘for it would be like tempting him to forget duty.’

  There was sewing to be done, there was a modest trousseau to be bought of such new garments for the wedding-day as would come into use afterwards. The storeroom by the kitchen in the Parsonage had to be converted into a study for her husband; paper and curtains of green and white matched each other well. Then there were the arrangements to be made about the wedding itself. About that the utmost secrecy was observed: only Ellen and Miss Wooler were to be bidden to it, and though the parishioners at Haworth knew now that the marriage was to take place, Mr. Nicholls, at Charlotte’s wish, so managed it that not a soul in the place should know the date except the officiating clergyman, and as a further precaution the service was fixed for eight o’clock in the morning, when there would be but few people about. To other friends of the bride and bridegroom there would be sent out, when the ceremony was over, a printed card making the announcement; Charlotte wished the envelope to be plain with a silver initial on it. More of these had to be ordered, ‘for there was no end to Mr. Nicholls’s string of parson friends,’ and he thought sixty would be required. Charlotte’s own list was much less numerous than his and consisted of only eighteen names. The hermit-like seclusion in which she must have lived all her life is witnessed to by the fact that only five of these were inhabitants of Haworth and its neighbourhood. Among the rest were Mrs. Gaskell, George Smith, his mother and his sisters, Mr. Williams and Mr. Monckton Milnes. Neither Thackeray, Lewes, nor Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth received the notification, nor, we regret to say, Miss Martineau.

  Mr. Nicholls had wanted to be married in July, and though Charlotte, in the early days of her engagement, thought that this was too soon, and that some date of the later summer was time enough, it took place on June 29. The officiating clergyman, the Rev. Sutcliffe Sowden, and the bridegroom arrived the evening before, and stayed with Mr. Grant, whose house had been so hospitable to the intrigue, and Ellen Nussey, the solitary bridesmaid, and Miss Wooler were guests at the Parsonage: Mr. Brontë was to give Charlotte away. As the party at the Parsonage was going to bed that night, this disconcerting parent suddenly announced that he would take no part in the ceremony, and indeed not attend it at all. What his reason was is quite unknown; but it seems likely that this inconvenient gesture was intended to be a final protest against the marriage, of which really he now entirely approved. The form for the Solemnization of Matrimony in the Prayer Book was hurriedly examined, and the happy discovery was made that Miss Wooler, as a friend of the bride, might legitimately take his place. So Mr. Brontë stayed in bed.

  CHAPTER XIX

  The wedding tour was made in Ireland: they did not visit the ancestral home of the Bruntys in County Down, but after a tour to Killarney went to Banagher, where relations of the bridegroom lived. They told Charlotte that she was a very fortunate person in having got so good a husband, and already she agreed with them. Indeed she had got more than they knew, for now she had what her nature had long subconsciously longed for as the medicament for her bitterness and her morbidity, and it was a perfectly new kind of woman who came back to Haworth with her husband in August. Henceforth, instead of her letters being full of sharp criticism of others they abound in praises of Arthur: instead of being so often concerned with the symptoms of her own ill-health, she is jubilant about the improvement in his, for he had gone up twelve pounds in weight in the month succeeding their marriage, and the sinister anticipations of what might have been the issue of marrying a man with rheumatic tendencies (remember your aunt) were thrust into limbo. Years ago she had told Ellen, with the pontifical certainty of the spinster, that after marriage a woman might allow herself prudently and cautiously to fall in love with her husband, but now she did not stay to consider the wisdom of such slow going. Like an echo from her own distant voice, she could repeat that her marriage would secure papa comfort and aid in his old age, but the newer voice was stronger.

  She fell in love with her husband recklessly, as a good Victorian wife should: his judgment was infallible, and she submitted everything to it. When she asked Ellen to come and stay at Haworth it was no longer her invitation but his: Arthur would be pleased to see her, and ‘one friendly word from him means as much as twenty from most people.’ If she wanted to pay a visit to a house where there had been a case of fever, though she had no fear of infection on her own account, ‘there are cases where wives have to put their own judgments on the shelf, and do as they are bid.’ They entertained to tea and supper the Sunday and day-school pupils and teachers, the choir and the bell-ringers, and Charlotte, who in her maiden days would have been altogether unable to face such a function, was thrilled with pride and with love, for Arthur’s health was proposed, and when the speaker alluded to him as a ‘consistent Christian and a kind gentleman’ Charlotte, deeply touched, ‘thought that to merit and win such a character was better than to earn either wealth or fame or power. I am disposed to echo that high and simple eulogium.’

  The whole colour and temper of her life was changed. It is with glee that she warns Ellen that ‘a married woman can call but a very small portion of her time her own’; the large stock of it which she was wont to have on hand had been grabbed by her husband, but she grudged him not a minute of it. She had regretted before her marriage that there were no congenial tastes or thoughts common to him and herself, but now she thinks it ‘not bad for her that he should be so little inclined to the literary and the contemplative.’ She marvels how some wives grow selfish: matrimony, in her experience, ‘tends to draw you out of and away from yourself.’ Even in her most private and personal affairs she now defers to the wishes of her ‘dear boy,’ who ‘grows daily dearer,’ and she transmits a message to Ellen from him that he wished her to burn all the letters that Charlotte now writes her. Ellen declined to promise any such thing, and again Charlotte pressed the point.

  Arthur complains you do not promise to burn my letters as you receive them. He says you must give him a plain pledge to that effect, or he will read every line I write and elect himself censor of our correspondence.... Write him out the promise on a separate slip of paper in a legible hand, and send it in your next.

  Whether Ellen gave this promise on the repetition of Arthur’s wish we do n
ot know; if she did, she certainly broke it, for she continued to preserve Charlotte’s letters to her exactly as before, and he had to content himself with reading them before they were sent.

  A spirit of fun, of lightness, enters into them now, which had been absent from them since the days when Celia Amelia had sent valentines and passionate verse to all the young ladies of Haworth. Charlotte describes, for instance, how that flighty Amelia Taylor, who had made such a goose of herself over her baby when she went with them to Scotland, paid them a visit. Amelia was a simpleton: no doubt she was right not to be jealous about her husband’s ‘former flames,’ but why cultivate their society in that unnatural way? Arthur read that letter before it was posted and was quite serious about it: he thought his wife had ‘written too freely about Amelia,’ and Charlotte couldn’t help laughing at him. Such a precaution as burning these letters seemed to her truly ridiculous, but Ellen must promise; otherwise she would receive just such letters as he wrote to his clerical brethren, unspiced by affection or critical comments on friends. Certainly if joy had never come to the grim Parsonage since it was built, as one of Mrs. Gaskell’s friends felt, it had come now at long last.

  But the days were full and Charlotte had little time for correspondence, and though she wrote with regularity to Ellen, she addressed few letters to anyone else, and her once voluminous correspondence with Mr. Williams ceased altogether. Nor did she want visitors: Ellen came to Haworth once, and once the steadfast Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth and a friend for the Sunday. For this visit there was a particular and kindly reason: he wanted to see Mr. Nicholls, and, liking him, he offered him the living of Padiham, near his place at Gawthorpe. No thought of that could be entertained, for he and Charlotte were both bound to remain at Haworth while Mr. Brontë lived, and though the offer was again pressed when they went to stay for a few days at Gawthorpe in the winter, it was again declined, evidently without any sort of regret that they were not free to take it, for the contract to look after Mr. Brontë was thankfully, not grudgingly, performed.