Brontës (159 page)

Let me speak the plain truth – my sufferings are very great – my nights indescribable – sickness with scarce a reprieve – I strain until what I vomit is mixed with blood. Medicine I have quite discontinued – If you can send me anything that will do good – do.

As to my husband – my heart is knit to him – he is so tender, so good, helpful, patient.

Poor Joe! long has he to suffer. May God soon send him, you all of us health strength – comfort!
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Amelia sent medicines but they had no perceptible effect; Charlotte refused to allow her husband to send for the doctor Amelia recommended: ‘I knew it would be wholly useless.' ‘Oh for happier times!' she could not help crying. ‘My little Grandchild – when shall I see her again?' When Martha tried to cheer her by telling her to look forward to her own baby that was coming Charlotte could only sigh, ‘I dare say I shall be glad some time, but I am so ill – so weary –'.
⁸⁹

Though she had days when she revived a little and was able to swallow
‘some beef-tea – spoonsful of wine & water – a mouthful of light pudding at different times –',
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Charlotte grew inexorably weaker and closer to death. By the second week in March she could no longer even hold a pencil to write and her husband had to answer her letters for her. He, too, had to break the ‘awful & painful' news to Charlotte that Ellen's brother-in-law, Robert Clapham, had died suddenly and, though he did it as gently as he could, it was still a great shock. ‘These seem troubled times, my dear Miss Nussey.', he wrote. ‘May God support you through them –'.
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A week later, Charlotte was no longer fully conscious, having slipped into a ‘low wandering delirium' during which she constantly craved food and drink. Mrs Gaskell describes how ‘Wakening for an instant from this stupor of intelligence, she saw her husband's woe-worn face, and caught the sound of some murmured words of prayer that God would spare her, “Oh!” she whispered forth, “I am not going to die, am I? He will not separate us, we have been so happy”.'
⁹²

Throughout his tender and ceaseless care of his wife Arthur Nicholls had not failed to do his parochial duties; with terrible irony it even fell to him to conduct the prayers and services on 21 March, which had been declared another Day of National Humiliation and Prayer because of the war in Russia. Towards the end of March, however, even his strength and courage failed him: he abandoned his duties to his old friend, Joseph Grant, and maintained a constant vigil at his wife's bedside.
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In this crisis, it was Patrick Brontë, now seventy-eight years old and nearly the sole survivor of his large family, who rose to the occasion with dignity and grace. ‘My Dear Madam', he wrote to Ellen Nussey on 30 March 1855:

We are all in great trouble, and Mr Nicholls so much so, that he is not so sufficiently strong, and composed as to be able to write – I therefore devote a few moments, to tell you, that my dear Daughter is very ill, and apparently on the verge of the grave – If she could speak, she would no doubt dictate to us whilst answering your kind letter, but we are left to ourselves, to give what answer we can – The Doctors have no hope of her case, and fondly as we a long time, cherished hope, that hope is now gone, and we [have] only to look forward to the solemn event, with prayer to God, that he will give us grace and Strength sufficient unto our day –

Will you be so kind as to write to Miss Wooler, and Mrs Joe Taylor, and inform them that we requested you to do so – telling them of our present condition, –

Ever truly and respectfully Yours,

P. Brontë
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Early on Saturday morning, 31 March 1855, Charlotte died, just three weeks before her thirty-ninth birthday. ‘Mr Brontës letter would prepare you for the sad intelligence I have to communicate', Arthur wrote to Ellen.'– Our dear Charlotte is no more – She died last night of Exhaustion. For the last two or three weeks we had become very uneasy about her, but it was not until Sunday Evening that it became apparent that her sojourn with us was likely to be short – We intend to bury her on Wednesday morng.' ‘On [the] whole she had not much suffering –', he wrote to Mary Hewitt soon afterwards, ‘she spoke little during the last few days, but continued quite conscious.'
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Mr Ingham, the Haworth surgeon who had attended Charlotte throughout her last illness, certified the cause of death as ‘Phthisis', indicating a progressive wasting disease. There seems little doubt that it was the pregnancy and its consequent violent nausea which had worn her down; the baby, of course, died with her.
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Despite their prolific ancestry, there would be no descendants of the Brontës of Haworth.

United in their grief, Charlotte's father and husband were not to be left to mourn in peace and privacy for long. Only hours after her death the first intrusions began. Ellen Nussey arrived on the doorstep, having taken the first available train after receiving Patrick's note telling her of Charlotte's imminent demise. ‘I had begged
to go before'
, Ellen later wrote in anguish, ‘but Mr Brontë and Mr Nicholls objected, fearing the excitement of a meeting for poor Charlotte.' It was undoubtedly even more impossible for them ‘to do with her' than it had been for Charlotte when Ellen had tried to volunteer her presence during her sisters' illnesses. Not surprisingly, Patrick did not come down to welcome the unwelcome visitor but, as courtesy demanded, he sent a message inviting Ellen to stay until the funeral. It was Martha Brown who escorted Ellen upstairs to the bedchamber to see her friend's body laid out in death, and it was also Martha who invited Ellen to perform the funeral obsequies: ‘her death chamber is in vivid remembrance,' Ellen told George Smith five years later,

I last saw her in death. Her maid Martha brought me a tray full of evergreens & such flowers as she could procure to place on the lifeless form – My first feeling was, no, I cannot cannot do it – next I was grateful to the maid for giving me the tender office – what made it impossible at first was the rushing recollection of the flowers I spread in her honour at her wedding breakfast and how she admired the disposal of the gathering brought by Martha from the village gardens …
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On Wednesday, 4 April 1855, the small funeral cortege accompanied Charlotte's coffin the few hundred yards from her home to her final resting place. The church and churchyard were crowded with parishioners, rich and poor alike, who had come to pay their last respects to the woman who had, so unexpectedly, made Haworth eternally famous. Among them, as Patrick was touched to notice, was a poor blind girl from Stanbury who had insisted on being led the four miles to Haworth Church so that she could attend the funeral of the woman who had been kind to her.
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Sutcliffe Sowden, who only nine months before had married her to Arthur Nicholls, now performed the burial service over her and committed her body to the family vault beneath the church aisle.
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Having outlived all his six children, as well as his wife and sister-in-law, all but one of whom lay in the same vault, Patrick returned alone to the parsonage with the son-in-law whose marriage he had so bitterly opposed and who was now to be the sole remaining prop of his declining years. ‘It is an hourly happiness to me dear Amelia', Charlotte had written some weeks before her death, ‘to see how well Arthur and my Father get on together now – there has never been a misunderstanding or wrong word.'
¹⁰⁰
Though her own happiness had been all too brief, her marriage had secured her father lasting comfort.

Ellen Nussey returned home an hour after the funeral, nursing her grievances against Charlotte's father and, more especially, her widower. Bitterly resentful of her exclusion during Charlotte's last illness, Ellen's dislike of Arthur was now so intense it must have been palpable. Spitting with venom, she later recalled how, on ‘The very day of my arrival', he had said to her, ‘Any letters you may have of Charlotte's you will not shew to others & in course of time you will destroy them.'
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Ellen had been unable to refuse, though she reneged on this promise as she had on her earlier one. If Arthur thought he could keep his wife's life a private matter, he was sadly mistaken, underestimating not only Ellen's desire to play a public role as ‘the friend of Charlotte Brontë', but also that of people whose contacts with her had only been slight.

Even before she was buried, another self-important busybody had got to work. John Greenwood was the Haworth stationer. Earlier in life he had been a wool-comber but he had been unable to support his large family because of his ill health. Selling paper as a sideline, he had been encouraged by the patronage of the Brontë family (who must have singlehandedly kept him in business), and Charlotte, in particular, had gone out of her way to
help him extend into the bookselling trade by ensuring that her publishers supplied him with the cheap editions of her books to sell.
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Clearly he knew the family, though no better than many others in the township, but he had literary pretensions himself and therefore highly prized his connections with ‘Currer Bell'.

It was John Greenwood who took it upon himself to inform Charlotte's famous friends of her death, taking care to portray himself as one of her intimate circle. Mrs Gaskell responded in shock and dismay.

I can not tell you how VERY sad your note has made me. My dear dear friend that I shall never see again on earth! I did not even know she was ill … You may well say you have lost your best friend; strangers might know her by her great fame, but we loved her dearly for her goodness, truth, and kindness, & those lovely qualities she carried with her where she is gone.
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Not knowing it was the very day of Charlotte's funeral, she wrote immediately to Patrick offering her sympathy, only to receive somewhat of a rebuff.

I thank you for your kind sympathy – My Daughter, is indeed, dead, and the solemn truth presses upon her worthy, and affectionate \Husband/ and me, with great, and, it may be, with unusual weight – But, others, also, have, or shall have their sorrows, and we feel our own the most – The marriage that took place, seem'd to hold forth, long, and bright prospects of happiness, but in the inscrutable providence of God, all our hopes have ended in disappointment, and our joy in mourning – May we resign to the will of the Most High – After three months of Sickness, a tranquil death closed the scene. But our loss we trust is her gain – But why should I trouble \you/ longer with our sorrows. ‘The heart knoweth its own bitterness' – and we ought to bear with fortitude our own grievances, & not to bring others – into our sufferings –

In a touching postscript Patrick added, ‘Excuse this scrawl, I am not fit, at present, to write much – nor to write satisfactorily.'
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Interestingly, having asked John Greenwood for further details and discovered that her friend had died in pregnancy, Mrs Gaskell regretted even more that she had not kept in touch. ‘How I wish I had known! … it is no use regretting what is past; but I do fancy that if I had come, I could have induced her, – even though they had all felt angry with me at first, – to do what was so absolutely
necessary, for her very life!'
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If the thought of abortion had occurred to Mrs Gaskell, had it occurred to Charlotte, her father or her husband?

Another of Charlotte's famous friends whom John Greenwood contacted before she had even been laid in the family vault was Harriet Martineau. Despite having had no contact with Charlotte since their quarrel over
Villette
, Miss Martineau responded in private and in public with generous tributes. To Greenwood himself she wrote:

I am indebted to you for your kindness in informing me of my poor friend's departure. It is seldom that I use the word ‘poor', which has now slipped from my pen; but she so loved life, her lot was so singular in surviving so many of her family, and I trust so happy at last in having formed new ties, that I did hope for longer life for her, though I often feared it could hardly be … Vast as was her genius, and infinitely as I admired it, I honoured yet more her integrity and unspoiled uprightness, simplicity, and sense. She was a noble woman, such as society ill can spare.
¹⁰⁶

Like Mrs Gaskell, she sought further details of Charlotte's life from the more than willing John Greenwood, but then she proceeded to blazon the story across the pages of the
Daily News
. In a tribute which began with the dramatic opening line ‘“Currer Bell” is dead!', Harriet Martineau drew on Charlotte's Biographical Notice of her sisters, John Greenwood's information and her own memories, to draw the outline of a picture that Mrs Gaskell would embellish and which would become part of the Brontë legend. Most of the half-truths, misconceptions and downright untruths which would give such lurid colouring to the story of Charlotte's life were already evident here: a father who was ‘simple and unworldly' and ‘too much absorbed in his studies to notice her occupations'; an only brother ‘a young man of once splendid promise which was early blighted'; a home among the ‘wild Yorkshire hills … in a place where newspapers were never seen'. Against all the odds, Charlotte had triumphed.

From her feeble constitution of body, her sufferings by the death of her whole family, and the secluded and monotonous life she led, she became morbidly sensitive in some respects; but in her high vocation, she had, in addition to the deep intuitions of a gifted woman, the strength of a man, the patience of a hero, and the conscientiousness of a saint.

Having suffered herself from criticism of her ‘masculine' occupation as a writer, Harriet Martineau was anxious to dispel the view that there was anything unnatural or unfeminine in Charlotte's profession.