[27] A remarkably recognizable idiosyncrasy of this child-phantom of Charlotte Brontë's brain is the part the little hands of the child play. In Charlotte Brontë's child-phantom of Wuthering Heights, Chapter III., the hand of the child takes a principal part, as in her above two versions.
[28] See note on "the hand" of Charlotte Brontë's child-phantom, page 53.
[29] See the chapters on "The Recoil" for the origin of the title of Wuthering Heights, and of the name Lucy Snowe; also my remarks on Charlotte Brontë's poem "Apostasy."
[30] "The breeze was sweet with scent of heath and rush, ... the hills shut us quite in; for the glen towards its head wound to their very core."—Jane Eyre, Chapter XXXIV.
[31] I have known for many years the wife and children of this Robert Airton. His father was, I believe, parish clerk for Coniston. Mrs. Airton once told me that when she first met her husband he was playing a violin in the entrance of a cave, under a crag in Malhamdale.
[32] It will be observed that in Chapter XXIII. of The Professor Charlotte Brontë practically calls Frances the heroine, "Jane." Of course she is the elf Janet (see Chapter XXV. of The Professor), and this sprite was also Jane Eyre—Charlotte Brontë herself. Read the verses in Chapter XXIII. in the light of my writing on "Eugène Sue and Charlotte Brontë's Brussels Life" and "The Recoil."
[33] Mr. Thomas J. Wise has published and edited a valuable edition of this story, 1896.
[34] "I like Charles the First," says Helen Burns in Jane Eyre, Chapter VI.; "I respect him—I pity him, poor murdered king! Yes, his enemies were the worst: they shed blood they had no right to shed. How dared they kill him!" Montagu of course would know that his own ancestor brought over Charles the Second on the Restoration. Hence his warmth. We now understand the origin of the detached fragment in Jane Eyre.
[35] It is a remarkable coincidence that Malham was the background of my first novel, a work of the substantial number of 160,000 words, which I wrote in my teens. It was published serially in The Sheffield Independent by Mr. Joseph Cooke, beginning in May 1896 and running till September, under the title of Kalderworth, a name I had compounded from the Yorkshire river Calder. Afterwards the serial rights were also purchased by Sir Edward Russell and Mr. A. G. Jeans, of The Liverpool Post, wherein the story ran serially as Lawyer Vavasor's Secret. I did not choose Malham by reason of its being, as it is, the place from which our family of Malham, or Malam, sprung: I had cycled over to the remote village with my father. I was unaware that October 15 was an especial day at Malham, nevertheless I began my story—Kalderworth:—
"On the evening of the 15th of October, in the latter end of the Eighteen Hundred and Eighties, as the sun sank greyly behind the distant skyline of those wild hills that stretch from Malham and away into the North of Yorkshire, a solitary horseman pushed his way over a hard moorland road to a little deserted hamlet, where only one soul lived, and that a hag whose fame had spread as a dabbler in the black art and the mischievous doctrines."
I did not know of Montagu's book at the time; and of all the Brontë novels I had only read Jane Eyre. I remember once reflecting—while Kalderworth was being published—that Charlotte Brontë must have called her character Jane Eyre after the river Aire, just as I had called my loosely composite village up in Malhamdale Kalderworth, from the river Calder; and I thought Currer Bell, in her choice of the name "Jane Eyre," had been actuated poetically by the fact of the adjacency of the Yorkshire river Aire, or Ayre, and had changed the "A" in Aire, just as I the "C" in Calder. Nor was it till years later that I knew Charlotte Brontë had written in Shirley, Chapter XIX., of "Calder or Aire thundering in flood."
[36] That Gimmerton in Wuthering Heights means "the village of sheep" was admitted years ago. The etymology is very obvious. We now have the circumstances in which Charlotte Brontë chose the name.