"I fain would rest a little while:
Where can I find a stay,
Till dawn upon the hills shall smile,
And show some trodden way?[76]
I come! I come! in haste she said,
'Twas Walter's voice I heard!"
Then up she sprang—but fell back, dead,
His name her latest word.
so in the scene in Jane Eyre: St. John ejaculates—
'My prayers are heard!' He pressed his hand firmer on my head, as if he claimed me; he surrounded me with his arm, almost as if he loved me ["That priest had arms which could influence me; he was naturally kind, with a sentimental French kindness, to whose softness I knew myself not wholly impervious. Without respecting some sorts of affection, there was hardly any sort having a fibre of root in reality, which I could rely on my force wholly to withstand."—Charlotte Brontë speaking of her Brussels Fénélon in Villette, Chapter XV.], I say almost—I knew the difference—for I had felt what it was to be loved; but, like him, I now ... thought only of duty;... I sincerely, ... fervently longed to do what was right.... 'Show me, show me the path!' I entreated of Heaven.... My heart beat fast and thick.... I heard a voice somewhere cry 'Jane! Jane! Jane!' nothing more.... I had heard it—where or whence, for ever impossible to know! And it was ... a known, loved, well-remembered voice—that of Edward Fairfax Rochester.... 'I am coming!' I cried.... 'Wait for me! Oh, I will come!' I broke from St. John, who would have detained me. It was my time to assume ascendency. My powers were in play, and in force. I told him to forbear question or remark.... I mounted to my chamber ... fell on my knees, and prayed in my way—a different way to St. John's, but effective in its own fashion.... I rose from the thanksgiving—took a resolve—and lay down ... eager but for the daylight.
Mrs. Gaskell related that Charlotte Brontë in private conversation in reference to this preternatural crying of a voice, replied with much gravity and without further enlightenment that such an incident really did occur in her experience. Whether it occurred in connection with her Brussels Fénélon and immediately preceded a reconciliation between herself and M. Héger I know not. As, however, Charlotte Brontë's expression of gratitude to this priest and the whole fervent story of thankfulness for the deliverance from dangerous temptation were written subsequently to her return from Brussels, it is clear there was never a reconciliation which cost either her or M. Héger honour. I do not urge this as an advocate; I state it upon the strength of unmistakable evidence.
Miss Brontë believed it better to leave Brussels and avoid the possibilities of the peculiar situation—a situation always fraught with temptation. Hence her sudden resolve to return to England.
Arrived at Haworth the full recoil came. She had won through a great ordeal, and she knew that surrounded by his wife and family,[77] comforted by piety and the knowledge of his happy issue from involution in disastrous complications, M. Héger would resume tranquilly his accustomed course of life. To Charlotte Brontë, who by the showing of all evidence was initially responsible for a morally gratifying outcome of their dangerous attachment, this was a galling picture. Knowing nothing of the ecstatic delights of the pietist in the sacrificial sense of M. Héger, who was a devoted member of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, and, as he is made to describe himself in Villette, "a sort of lay Jesuit," she became just a woman living in the world of her primal nature and conceiving but that she had lost. Miss Rigby—afterwards Lady Eastlake—who wrote the remarkable article on Jane Eyre in The Quarterly Review of 1849, perceived with a flash of real insight and the instinct of womanhood that Currer Bell's pen had presented ungarbed, vital relations of some man and woman identical in both Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. The circumstances were full difficult for the reviewer; she was irritated and encompassed. Wuthering Heights, which so soon had followed the appearance of Jane Eyre, she suddenly recognized as the very storm-centre of this literary tornado of passionate declamation; and she chastised that work in the name of Jane Eyre, for she could not know all the cruel truth, and she feared to popularize Wuthering Heights. Although Miss Rigby wrote:—"It is true Jane does right, and exerts great moral strength," she added, "but it is the strength of a mere heathenish mind which is a law unto itself." And later, turning upon Wuthering Heights she says with a final vehemency, and most sensationally:—
There can be no interest attached to the writer of Wuthering Heights—a novel succeeding Jane Eyre ... and purporting [!] to be written by Ellis Bell—unless it were for the sake of a more individual reprobation. For though there is a decided family likeness between the two [!], yet the aspect of the Jane and Rochester animals in their native state as Catherine and Heathcliffe [!], is abominably pagan.
Miss Rigby thus excused herself a further consideration of Wuthering Heights. In the days of the gratification of discovering the one she loved in return loved her,[78] this recognition stood between Charlotte Brontë and "every thought of religion, as an eclipse between man and the broad sun," so in another sense truly did the contemplation of M. Héger's self-pacification intervene in the time of reaction. The doubtings and agonizing emotions of her equivocal season in Brussels were now precipitated. Her poems "Gilbert," "Frances," and "Preference" are testimony to her vengeful and retaliative instinct; as are her portrayals of M. Héger as M. Pelet of The Professor and as Heathcliffe of Wuthering Heights. But as I show in the next chapter, Charlotte Brontë afterwards regretted her human weakness and her vituperations of the day of the recoil. She began to set forth the story of her ordeal more sanely and proportionately in Jane Eyre. As one who soberly rewrites of fact, she recited therein much that she already had given detachedly; and consistently she presented by aid of the frame-work of "plot" from Montagu's Gleanings in Craven which already had given her elemental suggestions for her Wuthering Heights, the history of her life in Jane Eyre—a work that stands as testimony to Charlotte Brontë's love of truth as to her heroic battling in the days of fiercest temptation.
A constant yearning to fine a presentation from untruthfulness is the God-given attribute of the artist, and this was responsible for much that is called harsh in Charlotte Brontë's character as a writer: she would not even spare her own physical and nervous imperfections in her self-portrayals. Emily Brontë would have presented Branwell Brontë as viewed through couleur de rose, yet Charlotte Brontë immortalized him as Hindley Earnshaw and John Reed—as she saw him: weak, tyrannical, a moral wreck. So she presented M. Héger. She knew his faults—and they were many; but she loved him though she hated them. Her sense of truth and justice, albeit she had lost the rancour of the time of the reaction, determined her in Jane Eyre, it is obvious, to show the occultation of her life's happiness by the incidents of her Brussels life. She would show there had been a day when the barriers between them would have been rashly ignored by him. Thus Rochester is made to sing in Jane Eyre, Chap. XXIV.:—
"I dreamed it would be nameless bliss,
As I loved, loved to be;
And to this object did I press
As blind as eagerly.