Emily Bronte Part 16

Neither rose nor laurel will we lay reverently for remembrance over the tomb where you sleep; but the flower that was always your own, the wild, dry heather. You, who were, in your sister's phrase, "moorish, wild and knotty as a root of heath," you grew to your own perfection on the waste where no laurel rustles its polished leaves, where no sweet, fragile rose ever opened in the heart of June. The storm and the winter darkness, the virgin earth, the blasting winds of March, would have slain them utterly; but all these served to make the heather light and strong, to flush its bells with a ruddier purple, to fill its cells with honey more pungently sweet. The cold wind and wild earth make the heather; it would not grow in the sheltered meadows. And you, had you known the fate that love would have chosen, you too would not have thrived in your full bloom. Another happy, prosperous north-country matron would be dead. But now you live, still singing of freedom, the undying soul of courage and loneliness, another voice in the wind, another glory on the mountain-tops, Emily Bronte, the author of 'Wuthering Heights.'

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 28: Mrs. Gaskell.]

[Footnote 29: 'Biographical Notice.' C. Bronte.]

CHAPTER XVII.

BRANWELL'S END.

The autumn of the year 1848 was tempestuous and wild, with sudden and frequent changes of temperature, and cold penetrating wind. Those chilling blasts whirling round the small grey parsonage on its exposed hill-top, brought sickness in their train. Anne and Charlotte drooped and languished; Branwell, too, was ill. His const.i.tution seemed shattered by excesses which he had not the resolution to forego. Often he would sleep most of the day; or at least sit dosing hour after hour in a lethargy of weakness; but with the night this apathy would change to violence and suffering. "Papa, and sometimes all of us have sad nights with him," writes Charlotte in the last days of July.

Yet, so well the little household knew the causes of this reverse, no immediate danger was suspected. He was weak, certainly, and his appet.i.te failed; but opium-eaters are not strong nor hungry. Neither Branwell himself, nor his relations, nor any physician consulted in his case thought it one of immediate danger; it seemed as if this dreary life might go on for ever, marking its hours by a perpetual swing and rebound of excess and suffering.

During this melancholy autumn Mr. Grundy was staying at Skipton, a town about seventeen miles from Haworth. Mindful of his old friend, he invited Branwell to be his guest; but the dying youth was too weak to make even that little journey, although he longed for the excitement of change. Mr. Grundy was so much moved by the miserable tone of Branwell's letter that he drove over to Haworth to see for himself what ailed his old companion. He was very shocked at the change. Pale, sunk, tremulous, utterly wrecked; there was no hope for Branwell now; he had again taken to eating opium.

Anything for excitement, for a variation to his incessant sorrow. Weak as he was, and scarcely able to leave his bed, he craved piteously for an appointment of any kind, any reason for leaving Haworth, for getting quit of his old thoughts, any post anywhere for Heaven's sake so it were out of their whispering. He had not long to wait.

Later in that cold and bleak September Mr. Grundy again visited Haworth.

He sent to the Vicarage for Branwell, and ordered dinner and a fire to welcome him; the room looked cosy and warm. While Mr. Grundy sat waiting for his guest, the Vicar was shown in. He, too, was strangely altered; much of his old stiffness of manner gone; and it was with genuine affection that he spoke of Branwell, and almost with despair that he touched on his increasing miseries. When Mr. Grundy's message had come, the poor, self-distraught sufferer had been lying ill in bed, apparently too weak to move; but the feverish restlessness which marked his latter years was too strong to resist the chance of excitement. He had insisted upon coming, so his father said, and would immediately be ready. Then the sorrowful half-blind old gentleman made his adieus to his son's host, and left the inn.

"Presently the door opened cautiously, and a head appeared.

It was a ma.s.s 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. I hastened to my friend, greeted him in my gayest manner, as I knew he best liked, drew him quickly into the room, and forced upon him a stiff gla.s.s of hot brandy. Under its influence and that of the bright, cheerful surroundings, he looked frightened--frightened of himself. He glanced at me a moment, and muttered something of leaving a warm bed to come out in the cold night. Another gla.s.s of brandy, and returning warmth gradually brought him back to something like the Bronte 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 these his sane moments, to think it was so near. He once again declared that 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 hopes of ever 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 bare-headed in the road with bowed form and dropping tears."[30]

He went home, and a few days afterwards he died. That little intervening time was happier and calmer than any he had known for years; his evil habits, his hardened feelings slipped, like a mask, from the soul already touched by the final quiet. He was singularly altered and softened, gentle and loving to the father and sisters who had borne so much at his hands. It was as though he had awakened from the fierce delirium of a fever; weak though he was and shattered, they could again recognise in him their Branwell of old times, the hope and promise of all their early dreams. Neither they nor he dreamed that the end was so near; he had often talked of death, but now that he stood in the shadow of its wings, he was unconscious of that subduing presence. And it is pleasant to think that the sweet demeanour of his last days was not owing to the mere cowardly fear of death; but rather a return of the soul to its true self, a natural dropping-off of all extraneous fever and error, before the suffering of its life should close. Half an hour before he died Branwell was unconscious of danger; he was out in the village two days before, and was only confined to bed one single day.

The next morning was a Sunday, the twenty-fourth of September. Branwell awoke to it perfectly conscious, and through the holy quiet of that early morning he lay, troubled by neither fear nor suffering, while the bells of the neighbouring church, the neighbouring tower whose fabulous antiquity had furnished him with many a boyish pleasantry, called the villagers to wors.h.i.+p. They all knew him, all as they pa.s.sed the house would look up and wonder if "t' Vicar's Patrick" were better or worse.

But those of the Parsonage were not at church: they watched in Branwell's hushed and peaceful chamber.

Suddenly a terrible change came over the quiet face; there was no mistaking the sudden, heart-shaking summons. And now Charlotte sank; always nervous and highly strung, the mere dread of what might be to come, laid her prostrate. They led her away, and for a week she kept her bed in sickness and fever. But Branwell, the summoned, the actual sufferer, met death with a different face. He insisted upon getting up; if he had succ.u.mbed to the horrors of life he would defy the horrors of extinction; he would die as he thought no one had ever died before, standing. So, like some ancient Celtic hero, when the last agony began, he rose to his feet; hushed and awe-stricken, the old father, praying Anne, loving Emily, looked on. He rose to his feet and died erect after twenty minutes' struggle.

They found his pockets filled with the letters of the woman he had so pa.s.sionately loved.

He was dead, this Branwell who had wrung the hearts of his household day by day, who drank their tears as wine. He was dead, and now they mourned him with acute and bitter pain. "All his vices were and are nothing now; we remember only his woes," writes Charlotte. They buried him in the same vault that had been opened twenty-three years ago to receive the childish, wasted corpses of Elizabeth and Maria. Sunday came round, recalling minute by minute the ebbing of his life, and Emily Bronte, pallid and dressed in black, can scarcely have heard her brother's funeral sermon for looking at the stone which hid so many memories, such useless compa.s.sion. She took her brother's death very much to heart, growing thin and pale and saying nothing. She had made an effort to go to church that Sunday, and as she sat there, quiet and hollow-eyed, perhaps she felt it was well that she had looked upon his resting-place, upon the grave where so much of her heart was buried. For, after his funeral, she never rallied; a cold and cough, taken then, gained fearful hold upon her, and she never went out of doors after that memorable Sunday.

But looking on her quiet, uncomplaining eyes, you would not have guessed so much.

"Emily and Anne are pretty well," says Charlotte, on the ninth of October, "though Anne is always delicate and Emily has a cold and cough at present."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 30: 'Pictures of the Past.']

CHAPTER XVIII.

EMILY'S DEATH.

Already by the 29th of October of this melancholy year of 1848 Emily's cough and cold had made such progress as to alarm her careful elder sister. Before Branwell's death she had been, to all appearance, the one strong member of a delicate family. By the side of fragile Anne (already, did they but know it, advanced in tubercular consumption), of shattered Branwell, of Charlotte, ever nervous and ailing, this tall, muscular Emily had appeared a tower of strength. Working early and late, seldom tired and never complaining, finding her best relaxation in long, rough walks on the moors, she seemed unlikely to give them any poignant anxiety. But the seeds of phthisis lay deep down beneath this fair show of life and strength; the shock of sorrow which she experienced for her brother's death developed them with alarming rapidity.

The weariness of absence had always proved too much for Emily's strength. Away from home we have seen how she pined and sickened. Exile made her thin and wan, menaced the very springs of life. And now she must endure an inevitable and unending absence, an exile from which there could be no return. The strain was too tight, the wrench too sharp: Emily could not bear it and live. In such a loss as hers, bereaved of a helpless sufferer, the mourning of those who remain is embittered and quickened a hundred times a day when the blank minutes come round for which the customary duties are missing, when the unwelcome leisure hangs round the weary soul like a shapeless and enc.u.mbering garment. It was Emily who had chiefly devoted herself to Branwell. He being dead, the motive of her life seemed gone.

Had she been stronger, had she been more careful of herself at the beginning of her illness, she would doubtless have recovered, and we shall never know the difference in our literature which a little precaution might have made. But Emily was accustomed to consider herself hardy; she was so used to wait upon others that to lie down and be waited on would have appeared to her ignominious and absurd. Both her independence and her unselfishness made her very chary of giving trouble. It is, moreover, extremely probable that she never realised the extent of her own illness; consumption is seldom a malady that despairs; attacking the body it leaves the spirit free, the spirit which cannot realise a danger by which it is not injured. A little later on when it was Anne's turn to suffer, she is choosing her spring bonnet four days before her death. Which of us does not remember some such pathetic tale of the heart-wringing, vain confidence of those far gone in phthisis, who bear on their faces the marks of death for all eyes but their own to read?

To those who look on, there is no worse agony than to watch the brave bearing of these others unconscious of the sudden grave at their feet.

Charlotte and Anne looked on and trembled. On the 29th of October, Charlotte, still delicate from the bilious fever which had prostrated her on the day of Branwell's death, writes these words already full of foreboding:

"I feel much more uneasy about my sister than myself just now. Emily's cold and cough are very obstinate. I fear she has pain in her chest, and I sometimes catch a shortness in her breathing when she has moved at all quickly. She looks very thin and pale. Her reserved nature occasions me great uneasiness of mind. It is useless to question her; you get no answer. It is still more useless to recommend remedies; they are never adopted."[31]

It was, in fact, an acute inflammation of the lungs which this unfortunate sufferer was trying to subdue by force of courage. To persons of strong will it is difficult to realise that their disease is not in their own control. To be ill, is with them an act of acquiescence; they have consented to the demands of their feeble body.

When necessity demands the sacrifice, it seems to them so easy to deny themselves the rest, the indulgence. They set their will against their weakness and mean to conquer. They will not give up.

Emily would not give up. She felt herself doubly necessary to the household in this hour of trial. Charlotte was still very weak and ailing. Anne, her dear little sister, was unusually delicate and frail.

Even her father had not quite escaped. That she, Emily, who had always been relied upon for strength and courage and endurance, should show herself unworthy of the trust when she was most sorely needed; that she, so inclined to take all duties on herself, so necessary to the daily management of the house, should throw up her charge in this moment of trial, cast away her arms in the moment of battle, and give her fellow-sufferers the extra burden of her weakness; such a thing was impossible to her.

So the vain struggle went on. She would resign no one of her duties, and it was not till within the last weeks of her life that she would so much as suffer the servant to rise before her in the morning and take the early work. She would not endure to hear of remedies; declaring that she was not ill, that she would soon be well, in the pathetic self-delusion of high-spirited weakness. And Charlotte and Anne, for whose sake she made this sacrifice, suffered terribly thereby. Willingly, thankfully would they have taken all her duties upon them; they burned to be up and doing. But--seeing how weak she was--they dare not cross her; they had to sit still and endure to see her labour for their comfort with faltering and death-cold hands.

"Day by day," says Charlotte, "day by day when I saw with what a front she met suffering, I looked on her with a wonder of anguish and love. I have seen nothing like it; but, indeed, I have never seen her parallel in anything. Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood alone. The awful point was that, while full of ruth for others, on herself she had no pity; the spirit was inexorable to the flesh; from the trembling hand, the unnerved limbs, the fading eyes, the same service was exacted as they had rendered in health. To stand by and witness this, and not dare to remonstrate, was a pain no words can render."

The time went on. Anxious to try what influence some friend, not of their own household, might exert upon this wayward sister, Charlotte thought of inviting Miss Nussey to Haworth. Emily had ever been glad to welcome her. But when the time came it was found that the least disturbance of the day's routine would only make Emily's burden heavier.

And that scheme, too, was relinquished.

Another month had gone. Emily, paler and thinner, but none less resolute, fulfilled her duties with customary exactness, and insisted on her perfect health with defiant fort.i.tude. On the 23rd of November, Charlotte writes again:--

"I told you Emily was ill in my last letter. She has not rallied yet. She is _very_ ill. I believe if you were to see her your impression would be that there is no hope. A more hollow, wasted, pallid aspect I have not beheld. The deep, tight cough continues; the breathing after the least exertion is a rapid pant; and these symptoms are accompanied by pains in the chest and side. Her pulse, the only time she allowed it to be felt, was found to beat 115 per minute. In this state she resolutely refuses to see a doctor; she will give no explanation of her feelings; she will scarcely allow her feelings to be alluded to."

"No poisoning doctor" should come near her, Emily declared with the irritability of her disease. It was an insult to her will, her resolute endeavours. She was not, would not, be ill, and could therefore need no cure. Perhaps she felt, deep in her heart, the conviction that her complaint was mortal; that a delay in the sentence was all that care and skill could give; for she had seen Maria and Elizabeth fade and die, and only lately the physicians had not saved her brother.

But Charlotte, naturally, did not feel the same. Unknown to Emily, she wrote to a great London doctor drawing up a statement of the case and symptoms as minute and careful as she could give. But either this diagnosis by guesswork was too imperfect, or the physician saw that there was no hope; for his opinion was expressed too obscurely to be of any use. He sent a bottle of medicine, but Emily would not take it.

December came, and still the wondering, anxious sisters knew not what to think. By this time Mr. Bronte also had perceived the danger of Emily's state, and he was very anxious. Yet she still denied that she was ill with anything more grave than a pa.s.sing weakness; and the pain in her side and chest appeared to diminish. Sometimes the little household was tempted to take her at her word, and believe that soon, with the spring, she would recover; and then, hearing her cough, listening to the gasping breath with which she climbed the short staircase, looking on the extreme emaciation of her form, the wasted hands, the hollow eyes, their hearts would suddenly fail. Life was a daily contradiction of hope and fear.

The days drew on towards Christmas; it was already the middle of December, and still Emily was about the house, able to wait upon herself, to sew for the others, to take an active share in the duties of the day. She always fed the dogs herself. One Monday evening, it must have been about the 14th of December, she rose as usual to give the creatures their supper. She got up, walking slowly, holding out in her thin hands an ap.r.o.nful of broken meat and bread. But when she reached the flagged pa.s.sage the cold took her; she staggered on the uneven pavement and fell against the wall. Her sisters, who had been sadly following her, unseen, came forwards much alarmed and begged her to desist; but, smiling wanly, she went on and gave Floss and Keeper their last supper from her hands.

The next morning she was worse. Before her waking, her watching sisters heard the low, unconscious moaning that tells of suffering continued even in sleep; and they feared for what the coming year might hold in store. Of the nearness of the end they did not dream. Charlotte had been out over the moors, searching every glen and hollow for a sprig of heather, however pale and dry, to take to her moor-loving sister. But Emily looked on the flower laid on her pillow with indifferent eyes. She was already estranged and alienate from life.

Nevertheless she persisted in rising, dressing herself alone, and doing everything for herself. A fire had been lit in the room, and Emily sat on the hearth to comb her hair. She was thinner than ever now--the tall, loose-jointed "slinky" girl--her hair in its plenteous dark abundance was all of her that was not marked by the branding finger of death. She sat on the hearth combing her long brown hair. But soon the comb slipped from her feeble grasp into the cinders. She, the intrepid, active Emily, watched it burn and smoulder, too weak to lift it, while the nauseous, hateful odour of burnt bone rose into her face. At last the servant came in: "Martha," she said, "my comb's down there; I was too weak to stoop and pick it up."

I have seen that old, broken comb, with a large piece burned out of it; and have thought it, I own, more pathetic than the bones of the eleven thousand virgins at Cologne, or the time-blackened Holy Face of Lucca.

Sad, chance confession of human weakness; mournful counterpart of that chainless soul which to the end maintained its fort.i.tude and rebellion.