So much the greater need that they should hasten home. Their father, left without his companion of twenty years, to keep his house, to read to him at night, to discuss with him on equal terms, their father would be lonely and distressed. Henceforth one of his daughters must stay with him. Anne was in an excellent situation; must they ask her to give it up? And what now of the school, the school at Burlington? There was much to take counsel over and consider; they must hurry home. So, knowing the worst, their future hanging out of shape and loose before their eyes, they set out on their dreary journey knowing not whether or when they might return.
CHAPTER VIII.
A RETROSPECT.
"Poor, brilliant, gay, moody, moping, wildly excitable, miserable Brontë! No history records your many struggles after the good—your wit, brilliance, attractiveness, eagerness for excitement—all the qualities which made you such 'good company' and dragged you down to an untimely grave."
Thus ejaculates Mr. Francis H. Grundy, remembering the boon-companion of his early years, the half-insane, pitiful creature that opium and brandy had made of clever Branwell at twenty-two. Returned from Bradford, his nervous system racked by opium fumes, he had loitered about at Haworth until his father, stubborn as he was, perceived the obvious fact that every idle day led his only son more hopelessly down to the pit of ruin. At last he exerted his influence to find some work for Branwell, and obtained for his reckless, fanciful, morbid lad the post of station-master at a small roadside place, Luddendenfoot by name, on the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway. Thither he went some months before Charlotte and Emily left for Brussels. It was there Mr. Grundy met him; a novel station-master.
"Had a position been chosen for this strange creature for the express purpose of driving him several steps to the bad, this must have been it. The line was only just opened. The station was a rude wooden hut, and there was no village near at hand. Alone in the wilds of Yorkshire, with few books, little to do, no prospects, and wretched pay, with no society congenial to his better taste, but plenty of wild, rollicking, hard-headed, half-educated manufacturers, who would welcome him to their houses, and drink with him as often as he chose to come, what was this morbid man, who couldn't bear to be alone, to do?"[10]
What Branwell always did, in fine, was that which was easiest to him to do. He drank himself violent, when he did not drink himself maudlin. He left the porter at the station to keep the books, and would go off for days "on the drink" with his friends and fellow-carousers. About this time Mr. Grundy, then an engineer at Halifax, fell in with the poor, half-demented, lonely creature, and for a while things went a little better.