The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Brontë (37 page)

“I shall calm myself when you give me your word that you will refuse him!”

I hesitated, then with a confused nod, I said, “I will write to him on the morrow.”

Diary, I had spent many sleepless nights before, but the hours of darkness following Mr. Nicholls’s proposal proved to be the longest and most tortuous of all. I was astonished and deeply touched by the outpouring of emotion he had displayed, and his admission of the sufferings he had undergone; it grieved me to think that I would be the cause of his further suffering. Had I been in love with Mr. Nicholls, even my father’s violent opposition to the union, and my fears for his health, could not have prevented me from accepting him on the spot. But I did not love Mr. Nicholls—at least, I did not love him
then
—nor had I, up until that time, ever entertained an attachment to him. I liked him very much; I knew his worth; but I also knew that a disparity existed between us, not only in terms of this explosion of feeling, but in key religious attitudes and principles which were central to my heart.

As I tossed and turned, I suddenly realised that, although I had come to know Mr. Nicholls better in recent years, I still did not know all that much
about
him. Although he went home to Ireland every autumn to visit his family, he had never spoken about them, except telling me about the death of his sister. He had never talked about his life before he came to Haworth, and I had never asked. How strange it was, I thought, that one could live next door to a person for nearly eight years, and see him nearly every day, yet still know him so little!

What I did know, convinced me that Mr. Nicholls was a man of action: he devoted himself to the realities of the present, whereas I was often miles away in thought. Was I some one that Mr. Nicholls could truly put up with for a lifetime? I feared not. I could not enter into such a binding contract as marriage without an equally binding and mutual affection; and I doubted I could ever return Mr. Nicholls’s affection with the fervour he had expressed to me.

A part of me wished I could have a chance to explore the matter further: that I might be allowed the time to experience a real courtship with Mr. Nicholls, to discover whether or not we could be compatible, despite our many differences. Papa’s vehement antipathy to the union, however, made
that
an impossibility. It greatly angered me that papa had so verbally abused him, and applied such unjust epithets against him. I hated to think that, in refusing Mr. Nicholls, I would seem to only be blindly following papa’s dictates; yet refuse him I must.

I wrote and tore up at least six drafts of my letter to Mr. Nicholls, before settling on the following brief note, which I had Martha deliver to him the next morning:

Within the hour, I received the following note in reply:

This avowal of Mr. Nicholls’s distress filled me with pain. I was equally pained by papa’s continued, vociferous hostility towards him—which, despite papa’s insistence to the contrary, I believed stemmed as much from the bare thought of any one thinking of me as a wife, as it did from his objections to the gentleman in question.

To my surprise, my father was not the only one who thought Mr. Nicholls to be beneath my notice.

“What on earth can Mr. Nicholls have been thinking?” snapped Martha the next morning as she angrily dusted the dining-room. “I dunnut blame ye one whit for refusing him, ma’am. He has some nerve, t’ think ’at he could win
yer
affections—ye, a famous author an’ such like, an’ him nought but a
poor curate—why, he’s overreached his station, an’ ’at’s a fact.”

“Please do not speak ill of Mr. Nicholls,” I said firmly, looking up from the table where I was scribbling a letter to Ellen, elucidating all that had happened. “He is a good man.”

“I once thought so, but I dunnut ony more,” replied Martha. “Mama says he be so downcast, he entirely rejected his meals yesterday an’ again this morning, but refused t’ say why. I told her all ’at happened, an’ she be quite horrified. She said he be a man o’ great presumption.”

Oh no,
I thought, my cheeks burning; Martha’s mother—Mr. Nicholls’s landlady—was a very garrulous individual; now that she had been apprised of the news, there would be no way of stopping it from spreading throughout the village.

To my further mortification, that same morning, papa wrote a very harsh note to Mr. Nicholls, cruelly deriding him for concealing his intentions with regards to me, citing all the objections he had to him as my suitor, and berating him for daring to make a declaration. I begged papa to revise said note, or not to send any note at all.

“I
will
send it,” insisted papa. “I intend to put that ungrateful, devious, lying bastard in his place.”

I could not stop Martha from delivering the pitiless dispatch; I felt, however, that the blow must be parried; so I wrote a softening note to accompany it.

I could not discern if my note in any way lessened Mr. Nicholls’s distress. For the next few weeks, he kept mainly to his rooms, deliberately avoiding any contact with me or my father. He occasionally took Flossy for a walk, but we did not see him then, as Flossy had, for many years, been going directly to the sexton’s house on his own every morning. Mr. Nicholls took care of his most important clerical duties, but for a time sent Mr. Grant to preside for him in church. On Christmas, papa and I dined in virtual silence; Mr. Nicholls, who had amiably joined us for the past few years, naturally stayed away.

A few days after Christmas, Mr. Nicholls attempted to call on my father, but papa refused to see or speak to him. To my dismay, Mr. Nicholls then delivered a note to papa, offering his resignation, and insinuating that he intended to apply to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, as a missionary to one of the colonies in Australia.

Australia!
Was Mr. Nicholls indeed going to leave us, and emigrate to Australia?

“Let him go to Australia, if he can!” declared papa contemptuously, as he tossed Mr. Nicholls’s note into the fire. “It is best for all concerned.”

“You are very hard on Mr. Nicholls,” said I.

“As a man sows, so shall he reap. I can never trust Mr. Nicholls any more in things of importance. His conduct might have been excused by the world, in a confirmed rake or unprincipled army officer, but in a clergyman, it is justly chargeable with base design and inconsistency!”

“For seven and a half years, papa, you always praised him to
the skies. In all that time, he has conscientiously performed his parish duties as your most valued curate. Yet overnight, he has become an object of your greatest derision. I do not understand you—and I feel very badly for him.”

“Feel badly all you like. He’s leaving the country, and good riddance.”

From that day forward, my father treated Mr. Nicholls with a hardness not to be bent, and a contempt not to be propitiated. They never met in person; all communication was done by letter. News of Mr. Nicholls’s proposal and my refusal had now circulated throughout the village. Every one seemed to presume that I had scornfully refused him, and immediately took papa’s side against him, insisting that Mr. Nicholls had overstepped the bounds of decency and propriety in proposing to me, and stirred up trouble. In refusing his meals, Mr. Nicholls was driving his landlady to distraction, and incurring the wrath of his landlord, who said he would like to shoot him! Papa heartily agreed.

I was mortified and distressed by the whole business, and wondered how on earth it had got so out of control. Whence came this turbulence of emotion? Nobody seemed to pity Mr. Nicholls but me. I thought they did not understand the nature of his feelings—but I now saw what they were: he was one of those who attach themselves to very few, but whose sensations are close and deep—like an underground stream, running strong in a narrow channel.

One morning in late December, just before the new year, I chanced to glance out the parsonage window and see Mr. Nicholls greeting Flossy on his doorstep before their daily walk. He looked very ill and seemed encompassed in a dark gloom. My heart went out to him; I grabbed my shawl, hastened out, and met him in the snow-encrusted lane, as he was heading towards the gate.

“Mr. Nicholls.”

He stopped and turned; his eyes met mine; his face hardened. “Miss Brontë.”

It was freezing cold; I shivered; I hardly knew what to say. I blurted: “I am so sorry for everything that has happened, and sorry to hear of your resignation, and your intention to leave the country.”

He was silent for a moment; his voice caught as he murmured: “Are you?”

“I am. Life is filled with sadness and uncertainty, Mr. Nicholls, but also many blessings. Australia is a world away; the journey there is long and dangerous. I believe, sir, that a good life can lie in store for you here in England, if you will only rally.”

An awkward silence fell. He said quietly: “Thank you, Miss Brontë. You are cold; you must go in, lest you become ill. Good-day.” He tipped his hat and quickly passed through the gate, Flossy trotting quietly at his side as they headed down the path crossing the snow-encrusted fields. I hurried back into the house, wishing there was something else I might say or do to ease his suffering.

This brief conversation apparently instilled in Mr. Nicholls a flicker of new hope, for the next day he wrote to papa, requesting permission to withdraw his resignation. Papa answered that he should not give back Mr. Nicholls his post unless he gave a written promise “never again to broach the obnoxious subject” either to him or to me. This, Mr. Nicholls was apparently not prepared to do. While I was off in London making corrections on the proofs for
Villette,
to my dismay the two men continued to exchange vitriolic letters. I returned home to discover that, although Mr. Nicholls had decided not to emigrate to Australia, he was still determined to leave, and had given notice that his present engagement as curate of Haworth would be concluded at the end of May.

I realised, with a pang, that I would be very sorry to see him go.

At the same time as this drama was unfolding, the reviews
for
Villette
came in. They were generally very favourable, except for a few harsh criticisms from people I had considered my
friends
; they seemed to be reviewing my life as they saw it reflected in the novel, rather than the novel itself. Papa was full of praise in my accomplishment, but I could find no pleasure in it. My father’s enthusiasm appeared to me as nothing more than a tactic to divert my thoughts from any consideration of marriage, to that subject which he so highly valued: career.

The months that followed were a period of smouldering mutual resentment between Mr. Nicholls and my father. Mr. Nicholls grew so gloomy and reserved that people in the village began to shun him. At times, I thought he might be almost dying and they would not speak a friendly word to him or of him. I was told that he discharged his duties faithfully, but afterwards sat drearily in his rooms, avoiding every one, seeking no confidant, scarcely speaking even to his own friends when they came to visit. I own, I very much respected him for this. How mortified I should have felt if he had vilified me in the bitter and unreasonable manner in which papa continued to vilify him!

Was there truth and true affection at the bottom of his chagrin, I wondered—or only rancour and corroding disappointment? I could not be certain. It seemed ironic, but in all the years that I had known Mr. Nicholls, I had not really come to
understand
him—to penetrate his mind. Every time I convinced myself that I should defy my father and give Mr. Nicholls another chance, I observed him behaving in such a displeasing manner—flashing dark looks at me, getting into a most pertinacious and needless dispute with the school inspector, and losing his temper when the bishop came to visit—that all my old, unfavourable impressions strongly revived. One evening during the bishop’s visit, when Mr. Nicholls stopped in the passage, I drew away and went upstairs; Martha said that, in perceiving my manoeuvre, a
dark, flaysome
⁶⁵
look crossed Mr. Nicholls’s face that filled her soul with horror. No sooner had I reached the upper landing than I was filled with guilt and remorse for my cowardice.

Mr. Nicholls was, I believed, a good man who was suffering much on my account; could I not make a single overture to ease his pain? What compelled me to remain so aloof to him? In refusing him, I wondered, was I losing the purest gem—and to me, far the most precious thing that life can give: genuine attachment—or was I escaping the yoke of a morose temper?