He also wrote to Leyland in great distraction.
'I should have sent you "Morley Hall" ere now, but I am unable to finish it at present, from agony to which the grave would be far preferable. Mr. —— is dead, and he has left his widow in a dreadful state of health…. Through the will, she is left quite powerless. The executing trustees' (the principal one of whom, as we have seen, was the very lady whose hopeless love for him he was deploring) 'detest me, and one declares that, if he sees me, he will shoot me.
'These things I do not care about, but I do care for the life of the one who suffers even more than I do….
'You, though not much older than myself, have known life. I now know it, with a vengeance—for four nights I have not slept—for three days I have not tasted food—and, when I think of the state of her I love best on earth, I could wish that my head was as cold and stupid as the medallion which lies in your studio.
'I write very egotistically, but it is because my mind is crowded with one set of thoughts, and I long for one sentence from a friend.
'What shall I do? I know not—I am too hard to die, and too wretched to live. My wretchedness is not about castles in the air, but about stern realities; my hardihood lies in bodily vigour; but, dear sir, my mind sees only a dreary future, which I as little wish to enter on as could a martyr to be bound to a stake.
'I sincerely trust that you are quite well, and hope that this wretched scrawl will not make me appear to you a worthless fool, or a thorough bore.
'Believe me, yours most sincerely,
'P. B. Brontë.'
With this letter was enclosed a pen-and-ink sketch of Branwell bound to the stake, his wrists chained together, and surrounded by flames and smoke. The rigidity of the muscles, the fixed expression of the face, and the manifest beginning of pain are well portrayed. Underneath the drawing, in a constrained hand, is written, 'Myself.'