I thought more’n likely I should be melted into tears.
But no, this last thought kinder boyed me up—I wuz glad to know that she lay asleep by the lonely moors of Haworth. Its long purple wastes hanted by her shade forever, a sleep never to be distracted agin by her brother Patrick’s actin’ and behavin’, or her pa’s morbid idees and ways, or her own private heartache.
Little, small-boneded, great-minded creeter! how often I’ve pictered her lonesome life in that little village, shet up in oncongenial surroundin’s, her noble sperit beatin’ agin the bars of her environment; a-settin’ on lonesome evenin’s in a bare, silent room, a-pinin’ mebby for a word of sympathy, and the clasp of a comprehendin’ hand, and the great world a-praisin’ her fur off—too fur.
Or else a-walkin’ up and down in the twilight with her sisters a-plannin’ them strange stories of theirn.
And then I come back to the bare walls of the school-room at Brussels, and I presoomed that on these very bare walls we wuz a-lookin’ on Charlotte had seen stand out vivid the strong, dark face of Rochester, and the elfin figger of Jane, Shirley, Caroline, Louis and Robert Moore, the Professor—yes, indeed, she see him, I hain’t a doubt on’t—and all these wonderful characters of hern, who seemed more real friends and neighbors to me than them who live under the chimblys I can see from my own winders to home.
Good, little, bashful creeter! sech genius as you had the world will seek a good while for before it finds agin.
While these thoughts wuz a-goin’ on under my best bunnet, Martin looked round sort o’ indifferent, and sez he—
“Who wuz she, anyway—some kind of a writer?”
And I sez, “Yes.”