Emily Brontë
Not for long this truce with open disgrace. The very day of Charlotte's
return a letter had come for Branwell from his employer. All had been
found out. This letter commanded Branwell never to see again the mother
of the children under his care, never set foot in her home, never write
or speak to her. Branwell, who loved her passionately, had in that
moment no thought for the shame, the black disgrace, he had brought on
his father's house. He stormed, raved, swore he could not live without
her; cried out against her next for staying with her husband. Then
prayed the sick man might die soon; they would yet be happy. Ah, he
would never see her again!
A strange scene in the quiet parlour of a country vicarage, this anguish
of guilty love, these revulsions from shameful ecstasy to shameful
despair. Branwell raved on, delirious, agonised; and the blind father
listened, sick at heart, maybe self-reproachful; and the gentle sister
listened, shuddering, as if she saw hell lying open at her feet. Emily
listened, too, indignant at the treachery, horrified at the shame; yet
with an immense pity in her fierce and loving breast.
To this scene Charlotte entered.
Charlotte, with her vehement sense of right; Charlotte, with her sturdy
indignation; when she, at last understood the whole guilty corrupted
passion that had wrecked two homes, she turned away with something in
her heart suddenly stiffened, dead. It was her passionate love for this
shameful, erring brother, once as dear to her as her own soul. Yet she
was very patient. She writes to a friend quietly and without too much
disdain:--
"We have had sad work with Branwell. He thought of nothing
but stunning or drowning his agony of mind" (in what
fashion, the reader knows ere now) "no one in this house
could have rest, and at last we have been obliged to send
him from home for a week, with some one to look after him.
He has written to me this morning, expressing some sense of
contrition ... but as long as he remains at home, I scarce
dare hope for peace in the house. We must all, I fear,
prepare for a season of distress and disquietude."[16]
A weary and a hopeless time. Branwell came back, better in body, but in
nowise holier in mind. His one hope was that his enemy might die, die
soon, and that things might be as they had been before. No thought of
repentance. What money he had, he spent in gin or opium, anything to
deaden recollection. A woman still lives at Haworth, who used to help in
the housework at the "Black Bull." She still remembers how, in the early
morning, pale, red-eyed, he would come into the passage of the inn, with
his beautiful bow and sweep of the lifted hat, with his courteous smile
and ready "Good morning, Anne!" Then he would turn to the bar, and
feeling in his pockets for what small moneys he might have--sixpence,
eightpence, tenpence, as the case might be--he would order so much gin
and sit there drinking till it was all gone, then still sit there
silent; or sometimes he would passionately speak of the woman he loved,
of her beauty, sweetness, of how he longed to see her again; he loved to
speak of her even to a dog; he would talk of her by the hour to his dog.
Yet--lest we pity this real despair--let us glance at one of this man's
letters. How could such vulgar weakness, such corrupt and loathsome
sentimentality, such maudlin Micawber-penitence, yet feel so much! No
easy task to judge of a misery too perverse for pity, too sincere for
absolute contempt.
It is again to Mr. Grundy that he writes:--
"Since I last shook hands with you in Halifax, two summers
ago, my life, till lately, has been one of apparent
happiness and indulgence. You will ask--'Why does he
complain then?' I can only reply by showing the undercurrent
of distress which bore my bark to a whirl-pool, despite the
surface-waves of life that seemed floating me to peace. In a
letter begun in the spring of 1843" (_sic_; 1845?) "and
never finished owing to incessant attacks of illness, I
tried to tell you that I was tutor to the son of a wealthy
gentleman whose wife is sister to the wife of ----, an M.P.,
and the cousin of Lord ----. This lady (though her husband
detested me) showed me a degree of kindness which, when I
was deeply grieved one day at her husband's conduct, ripened
into declarations of more than ordinary feeling. My
admiration of her mental and personal attractions, my
knowledge of her unselfish sincerity, her sweet temper, and
unwearied care for others, with but unrequited return where
most should have been given ... although she is seventeen
years my senior, all combined to an attachment on my part,
and led to reciprocations which I had little looked for.
Three months since I received a furious letter from my
employer, threatening to shoot me if I returned from my
vacation which I was passing at home; and letters from her
lady's-maid and physician informed me of the outbreak, only
checked by her firm courage and resolution that whatever
harm came to her none should come to me.... I have lain for
nine long weeks, utterly shattered in body and broken down
in mind. The probability of her becoming free to give me
herself and estate never rose to drive away the prospect of
her decline under her present grief. I dreaded, too, the
wreck of my mind and body, which--God knows--during a short
life have been most severely tried. Eleven continuous nights
of sleepless horror reduced me to almost blindness, and
being taken into Wales to recover, the sweet scenery, the
sea, the sound of music caused me fits of unspeakable
distress. You will say: 'What a fool!' But if you knew the
many causes that I have for sorrow, which I cannot even
hint at here, you would perhaps pity as well as blame. At
the kind request of Mr. Macaulay and Mr. Baines, I have
striven to arouse my mind by writing something worthy of
being read, but I really cannot do so. Of course you will
despise the writer of all this. I can only answer that the
writer does the same and would not wish to live, if he did
not hope that work and change may yet restore him.
"Apologising sincerely for what seems like whining egotism,
and hardly daring to hint about days when, in your company,
I could sometimes sink the thoughts which 'remind me of
departed days,' I fear 'departed never to return,' I remain,
&c."[17]
Unhappy Branwell! some consolation he derives in his utmost sorrow from
the fact that the lady of his love can employ her own lady's-maid and
physician to write letters to her exiled lover. It is clear that his
pride is gratified by this irregular association with a lord. He can
afford to wait, stupefied with drink and drugs, till that happy time
shall come when he can step forward and claim "herself and estate,"
henceforward Branwell Bronte, Esq., J.P., and a person of position in
the county. Such paradisal future dawns above this present purgatory of
pains and confusion.
That phrase concerning "herself and estate" is peculiarly apocalyptic.
It sheds a quite new light upon a fact which, in Mrs. Gaskell's time,
was regarded as a proof that some remains of conscience still stirred
within this miserable fellow. Some months after his dismissal, towards
the end of this unhappy year of 1845, he met this lady at Harrogate by
appointment. It is said that she proposed a flight together, ready to
forfeit all her grandeur. It was Branwell who advised patience, and a
little longer waiting. Maybe, though she herself was dear, "although
seventeen years my senior," "herself and estate" was estimably dearer.
And yet he was in earnest, yet it was a question of life and death, of
heaven or hell, with him. If he could not have her, he would have
nothing. He would ruin himself and all he could. Most like, in this rage
of vain despair, some passionate baby that shrieks, and hits, and tears,
convulsed because it may not have the moon.
Small wonder that Charlotte's coldness, aggravated by continual outrage
on Branwell's part, gradually became contempt and silence. In proportion
as she had exulted in this brother, hoped all for him, did she now
shrink from him, bitterly chill at heart.
"I begin to fear," she says, the once ambitious sister, "that he has
rendered himself incapable of filling any respectable station in life."
She cannot ask Ellen to come to see her, because he is in the house.
"And while _he_ is here, _you_ shall not come. I am more confirmed in
that resolution the more I see of him. I wish I could say one word to
you in his favour, but I cannot. I will hold my tongue."[18]
For some while she hoped that the crisis would pass, and that then--no
matter how humbly, the more obscurely the better--he would at least earn
honest bread away from home. Such was not his intention. He professed to
be too ill to leave Haworth; and ill, no doubt, he was from continual
eating of opium, and daily drinking of drams. He stuck to his
comfortable quarters, to the "Black Bull" just across the churchyard,
heedless of what discomfort he gave to others. "Branwell offers no
prospect of hope," says Charlotte, again. "How can we be more
comfortable so long as Branwell stays at home and degenerates instead of
improving? It has been intimated that he would be received again where
he was formerly stationed if he would behave more steadily, but he
refuses to make the effort. He will not work, and at home he is a drain
on every resource, an impediment to all happiness. But there's no use in
complaining----"
Small use indeed; yet once more she forced herself to make the hopeless
effort, after some more than customary outbreak of the man who was
drinking himself into madness and ruin. She writes in the March of 1846
to her friend and comforter, Ellen:--
"I went into the room where Branwell was, to speak to him,
about an hour after I got home; it was very forced work to
address him. I might have spared myself the trouble, as he
took no notice, and made no reply; he was stupefied. My
fears were not vain. I hear that he got a sovereign while I
have been away, under pretence of paying a pressing debt; he
went immediately and changed it at a public-house, and has
employed it as was to be expected..., concluded her account
by saying that he was a 'hopeless being.' It is too true. In
his present state it is scarcely possible to stay in the
room where he is."[19]
It must be about that time that she for ever gave up expostulation or
complaint in this matter. "I will hold my tongue," she had said, and she
kept her word. For more than two years she held an utter silence to him;
living under the same roof, witnessing day by day his ever-deepening
degradation, no syllable crossed her lips to him. Since she could not
(for the sake of those she loved and might comfort) refuse the loathsome
daily touch and presence of sin, she endured it, but would have no
fellowship therewith. She had no right over it, it none over her. She
looked on speechless; that man was dead to her.
Anne, in whom the fibre of indignation was less strong, followed less
sternly in her sister's wake.
"She had," says Charlotte in her 'Memoir,' "in the course of her life
been called upon to contemplate, near at hand and for a long time, the
terrible effects of talents misused and faculties abused; hers was
naturally a sensitive, reserved and dejected nature; what she saw went
very deeply into her mind; it did her harm."
The spectacle of this harm, coming undeserved to so dear, frail and