BRANWELL’S FALL.
As the spring grew upon the moors, dappling them with fresh verdant shoots, clearing the sky overhead, loosening the winds to rush across them; as the beautiful season grew ripe in Haworth, every one of its days made clearer to the two anxious women waiting there in what shape their blurred foreboding would come true at last. They seldom spoke of Branwell now.
It was a hard and anxious time, ever expectant of an evil just at hand. Minor troubles, too, gathered round this shapeless boded grief: Mr. Brontë was growing blind; Charlotte, ever nervous, feared the same fate, and could do but little sewing with her weak, cherished eyesight. Anne's letters told of health worn out by constant, agonising suspicion. It was Emily, that strong bearer of burdens, on whom the largest share of work was laid.
Charlotte grew really weak as the summer came. Her sensitive, vehement nature felt anxiety as a physical pain. She was constantly with her father; her spirit sank with his, as month by month his sight grew sensibly weaker. The old man, to whom his own importance was so dear, suffered keenly, indeed, from the fear of actual blindness, and more from the horror of dependence, than from the dread of pain or privation. "He fears he will be nothing in the parish," says sorrowful Charlotte. And as her father, never impatient, never peevish, became more deeply cast down and anxious, she, too, became nervous and fearful; she, too, dejected.
At last, when June came and brought no brightness to that grey old house, with the invisible shadow ever hovering above it, Charlotte was persuaded to seek rest and change in the home of her friend near Leeds.
Anne was home now; she had come back ill, miserable. She had suspicions that made her feel herself degraded, pure soul, concerning her brother's relation with her employer's wife. Many letters had passed between them, through her hands too. Too often had she heard her unthinking little pupils threaten their mother into more than customary indulgence, saying: "Unless you do as we wish, we shall tell papa about Mr. Brontë." The poor girl felt herself an involuntary accomplice to that treachery, that deceit.
To lie down at night under the roof, to break by day the bread of the good, sick, bedridden man, whose honour, she could not but fear, was in jeopardy from her own brother, such dire strain was too great for that frail, dejected nature. And yet to say openly to herself that Branwell had committed this disgrace—it was impossible. Rather must her suspicions be the morbid promptings of a diseased mind. She was wicked to have felt them. Poor, gentle Anne, sweet, "prim, little body," such scenes, such unhallowed vicinities of lust, were not for you. At last sickness came and set her free. She went home.
Home, with its constant labour, pure air of good works; home, with its sickness and love, its dread for others and noble sacrifice of self; how welcome was it to her wounded spirit! And yet this infinitely lighter torment was wearing Charlotte out. They persuaded her to go away, and, when she had yielded, strove to keep her away.
Emily writes to Ellen in July:—
"Dear Miss Nussey—If you have set your heart on Charlotte staying another week, she has our united consent. I, for one, will take everything easy on Sunday. I am glad she is enjoying herself; let her make the most of the next seven days to return stout and hearty. Love to her and you from Anne and myself, and tell her all are well at home.—Yours,