Emily Brontë
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 15th of August, and, as the journey to Yorkshire cost so
much, and as they were anxious to work, the Bronte girls spent their
holidays 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.
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 excellent 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.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 7: C. Bronte.]
[Footnote 8: Mrs. Gaskell.]
[Footnote 9: C. Bronte. Memoir of her sisters.]
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, attractiveness, 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 Haworth
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 Yorkshire 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 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?"[10]
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 go 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 notice, with the ever-ready, fallacious plumb-line 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."[11]
So must his friends in kindness think. Mad; if haunting, 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 forgiven 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.
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 Branwell's, for some months after the Vicar of Haworth had obtained
his son's appointment, when the books received their customary
examination, serious defalcations were discovered. 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, strangely
enough, consumption, which carried off so prematurely the more
highly-gifted, the more strongly-principled daughters of the house,
consumption, 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
Branwell was as distinctly an Irishman as if his childhood had been