Little Journeys to the Homes of Famous Women — Charlotte Bronte, Part 1

CHARLOTTE BRONTE

I was not surprised, when I went down into the hall, to see that a brilliant June morning had succeeded to the tempest of the night, and to feel through the open glass door the breathing of a fresh and fragrant breeze.

Nature must be gladsome when I was so happy.

A beggar woman and her little boy, pale, ragged objects both, were coming up the walk, and I ran down and gave them all the money I happened to have in my purse--some three or four shillings: good or bad they must partake of my jubilee.

The rooks cawed and blither birds sung, but nothing was so merry or so musical as my own rejoicing heart.

--_Jane Eyre_ [Illustration: CHARLOTTE BRONTE] Rumor has it that there be Americans who are never happy unless passing for Englishmen.

And I think I have discovered a like anomaly on the part of the sons of Ireland--a wish to pass for Frenchmen.

On Continental hotel-registers the good, honest name of O'Brian often turns queer somersaults, and more than once in "The States" does the kingly prefix of O evolve itself into Van or De, which perhaps is quite proper, seeing they all mean the same thing.

One cause of this tendency may lie in the fact that Saint Patrick was a native of France; although Saint Patrick may or may not have been chosen patron saint on account of his nationality.

But the patron saint of Ireland being a Frenchman, what more natural, and therefore what more proper, than that the whole Emerald Isle should slant toward the people who love art and rabbit-stew!

Anyway, from the proud patronymic of Patricius to plain Pat is quite a drop, and my heart is with Paddy in his efforts to get back.

When Patrick Prunty of County Down, Ireland, shook off the shackles of environment, and the mud of the peat-bog, and went across to England, presenting himself at the gates of Saint John's College, Cambridge, asking for admittance, I am glad he handed in his name as Mr. P.

Bronte, accent on the last syllable.

There is a gentle myth abroad that preachers are "called," while other men adopt a profession or get a job, but no Protestant Episcopal clergyman I have ever known, and I have known many, ever made any such claim.

They take up the profession because it supplies honors and a "living."

Then they can do good, too, and all men want to do good.

So they hie them to a divinity school and are taught the mysteries of theological tierce and thrust; and interviewing a clerical tailor they are ready to accept the honors and partake of the living.

After a careful study of the life of Patrick Bronte I can not find that his ambition extended beyond the desirable things I have named--that is to say, inclusively, honors and a living.

He was tall, athletic, dark, and surely a fellow of force and ambition to set his back on the old and boldly rap for admittance at the gates of Cambridge.

He was a pretty good student, too, although a bit quarrelsome and sometimes mischievous--throwing his force into quite unnecessary ways, as Irishmen are apt to do.

He fell in love, of course, and has not an Irishman in love been likened to Vesuvius in state of eruption?

We know of at least one charming girl who refused to marry him, because he declined, unlike Othello, to tell the story of his life.

And it was assumed that any man who would not tell who "his folks" were, was a rogue and a varlet and a vagrom at heart.

And all the while Monsieur Bronte had nothing worse to conceal than that he was from County Down and his name Prunty.

He wouldn't give in and tell the story of his life to slow music, and so the girl wept and then stormed, and finally Bronte stormed and went away, and the girl and her parents were sure that the Frenchman was a murderer escaping justice.

Fortunate, aye, thrice fortunate is it for the world that neither Bronte nor the girl wavered even in the estimation of a hair.

Bronte got through school and came out with tuppence worth of honors.

When thirty, we find him established as curate at the shabby little town of Hartshead, in Yorkshire.

Little Miss Branwell, from Penzance, came up there on a visit to her uncle, and the Reverend Mr. Bronte at once fell violently in love with her dainty form and gentle ways.

I say "violently," for that's the kind of man Bronte was.

Darwin says, "The faculty of amativeness is not aroused except by the unfamiliar."

Girls who go away visiting, wearing their best bib and tucker, find lovers without fail.

One-third of all marriages in the United States occur in just this way: the bib and tucker being sprung on the young man as a surprise, dazzles and hypnotizes him into an avowal and an engagement.

And so they were married--were the Reverend Patrick Bronte and Miss Maria Branwell.

He was big, bold and dictatorial; she was little, shy and sensitive.

The babies came--one in less than a year, then a year apart.

The dainty little woman had her troubles, we are sure of that.

Her voice comes to us only as a plaintive echo.

When she asked to have the bread passed, she always apologized.

Once her aunt sent her a present of a pretty silk dress, for country clergymen's wives do not have many luxuries--don't you know that?

--and Patrick Bronte cut the dress into strips before her eyes and then threw the pieces, and the little slippers to match, into the fireplace, to teach his wife humility.

He used to practise with a pistol and shoot in the house to steady the lady's nerves, and occasionally he got plain drunk.

A man like Bronte in a little town with a tired little wife, and with inferior people, is a despot.

He busies himself with trifles, looks after foolish details, and the neighbors let him have his own way and his wife has to, and the result is that he becomes convinced in his own mind that he is the people and that wisdom will die with him.

And yet Bronte wrote some pretty good poetry, and had faculties that rightly developed might have made him an excellent man.

He should have gone down to London (or up, because it is south) and there come into competition with men as strong as himself.

Fate should have seized him by the hair and bumped his head against stone walls and cuffed him thoroughly, and kicked him into line, teaching him humility, then out of the scrimmage we might have gotten a really superior product.

Mrs. Bronte became a confirmed invalid.

A man can not always badger a woman; God is good--she dies.

Little Maria Branwell had been married eight years; when she passed out she left six children, "all of a size," a neighbor woman has written.

Over her grave is a tablet erected by her husband informing the wayfarer that "she has gone to meet her Savior."

At the bottom is this warning to all women: "Be ye also ready; for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of Man cometh."

Five of these motherless children were girls and one a boy.

As you stand there in that stone church at Haworth reading the inscription above Maria Branwell's grave, you can also read the death record of the babes she left.

The mother died on September Fifteenth, Eighteen Hundred Twenty-one; her oldest daughter, Maria, on May Sixth, Eighteen Hundred Twenty-five; Elizabeth, June Fifteenth, Eighteen Hundred Twenty-five;

Patrick Branwell, on September Twenty-fourth, Eighteen Hundred Forty-eight; Emily, December Nineteenth, Eighteen Hundred Forty-eight;

Anne, May Twenty-eighth, Eighteen Hundred Forty-nine; and Charlotte, on March Thirty-first, Eighteen Hundred Fifty-five.

Those whom the gods love die young: the Reverend Patrick Bronte lived to be eighty-five years old.

* * * * * I got out of the train at Keighley, which you must pronounce "Keethley," and leaving my valise with the station-master started on foot for Haworth, four miles away.

Keighley is a manufacturing town where various old mansions have been turned into factories, and new factories have sprung up, square, spick-span, trimmed-stone buildings, with fire-escapes and red tanks on top.

One of these old mansions I saw had a fine copper roof that shone in the sun like a monster Lake Superior agate.

It stands a bit back from the road, and on one great gatepost is a brass plate reading "Cardigan Hall," and on the other a sign, "No Admittance--Apply at the Office."

So I applied at the office, which is evidently the ancient lodge, and asked if Mr. Cardigan was in.

Four clerks perched on high stools, crouching over big ledgers, dropped their pens and turning on their spiral seats looked at me with staring eyes, and with mouths wide open.

I repeated the question and one of the quartette, a wheezy little old man in spectacles and with whiskers on his neck, clambered down from his elevated position and ambled over near, walking around me, eying me curiously.

"Go wan wi' yer wurruk, ye idlers!"

he suddenly commanded the others.

And then he explained to me that Mr. Cardigan was not in, neither was Mr. Jackson.

In fact, Mr. Cardigan had not been in for a hundred years--being dead.

But if I wanted to look at goods I could be accommodated with bargains fully five per cent below Lunnon market.

The little old man was in such serious earnest that I felt it would be a sin to continue a joke.

I explained that I was only a tourist in search of the picturesque, and thereby did I drop ten points in the old man's estimation.

But this did I learn, that Lord Cardigan has won deathless fame by attaching his name to a knit jacket, just as the name Jaeger will go clattering down the corridors of time attached to a "combination suit."

This splendid old mansion was once the ancestral home of a branch of the noble family of Cardigan.

But things got somewhat shuffled, through too many hot suppers up to London (being south), and stacks of reds and stacks of blues were drawn in towards the dealer, and so the old mansion fell under the hammer of the auctioneer.

What an all-powerful thing is an auctioneer's hammer!

And now from the great parlors, and the library, and the "hall," and the guest-chambers echo the rattle of spinning-jennies and the dull booming of whirling pulleys.

And above the song of whirring wheels came the songs of girls at their work--voices that alone might have been harsh and discordant, but blending with the monotone of the factory's roar were really melodious.

"We cawn't keep the nasty things from singin'," said the old man apologetically.

"Why should you?"

I asked.

"Huh, mon!

but they sing sacred songs, and chaunts, and a' that, and say all together from twenty rooms, a hundred times a day, 'Aws ut wuz in th' beginnin,' uz now awn ever shawl be, worl' wi'out end, Aamen.'

It's not right.

I've told Mr. Jackson.

Listen now, didn't I tell ye?"

"Then you are a Churchman?"

And the old man wiped his glasses and told me that he was a Churchman, although an unworthy one, and had been for fifty-four years, come Michaelmas.

Yes, he had always lived here, was born only across the beck away--his father was gamekeeper for Lord Cardigan, and afterwards agent.

He had been to Haworth many times, although not for ten years.

He knew the Reverend Patrick Bronte well, for the Incumbent from Haworth used to preach at Keighley once a year, and sometimes twice.

Bronte was a fine man, with a splendid voice for intoning, and very strict about keeping out all heresies and such.

He had a lot of trouble, had Bronte: his wife died and left him with eight or ten children, all smart, but rather wild.

They gave him a lot of bother, especially the boy.

One of the girls married Mr. Bronte's curate, Mr. Nicholls, a very decent kind of man who comes to Keighley once a year, and always comes to the factory to ask how things are going.

Yes, Mr. Nicholls' first wife died years and years ago.

She used to write things--novels; but no one should read novels; novels are stories that are not so--things that never happened; they tell of folks that never was.

Having no argument to present in way of rebuttal, I shook hands with the old man and started away.

He walked with me to the road to put me on the right way to Haworth.

Looking back as I reached the corner, I saw four "clarks" watching me intently from the office windows, and above the roar and jangle of machinery was borne on the summer breeze the sound of sacred song--shrill feminine voices: "Aws ut wuz in th' beginnin', uz now awn ever shawl be, worl' wi'out end--Aamen!"