The messenger returned speedily with word that Mr. Wade had that hour returned from London, and that he could not then write a note. He would, however, be happy to see me at the Rectory on the morrow (Sunday), and would write in the morning, naming the hour for our call. His note came while we were at breakfast, to say that he would be at liberty to receive us between services. We attended morning service, but, when it was over, refrained from making ourselves known to the rector, lingering, instead, in the church to see the tablet above the Brontë vault, and the fine window, set in the restored wall by an anonymous American, “To the glory of God, and in pleasant memory of Charlotte Brontë.” Emerging from the church, with the intention of strolling up to the Parsonage, we were met by Mr. Wade, who had gone home, expecting to find us there, and was on his way to the inn to look us up. His cordial hand-clasp and genial smile were so opposed to our preconceptions of the “dragon,” that we exchanged furtive glances of relief. He took us back to the Parsonage, and showed us everything we had wished to see, with much we had not thought of, telling us, in the same hospitable way, that, although he was the only member of the family at home that day, he would be happy to have us partake of a bachelor’s luncheon. When we declined, gratefully, he accompanied us to the church, and unlocked the case in which is kept the register of Charlotte Brontë’s marriage, signed by herself—the last time she wrote her maiden name.
Several letters passed between us, in the course of the next four years, and he opened to me, on our second visit to Haworth, in 1898, unexpected avenues of information respecting her whose biography I was writing, which were of incalculable value to me. When he retired from the active duties of his profession to Hurley, in another county, he wrote to me a long, interesting letter, enclosing a copy of the resolutions passed by the Yorkshire parish he had served faithfully for forty-seven years.
Besides the precious stock of building “material” for the construction of my story of Charlotte, which I could have gained in no other way than through his kindly offices, this odd friendship taught me a lesson of faith in my kind, and of distrust of hearsay evidence and of popular disfavor, that will last me forever. I dedicated the biography to “Rev. J. Wade, for forty-seven years incumbent of Haworth, in cordial appreciation of the unfailing courtesy and kindly aid extended by him to the American stranger within his gates.”
A dedication that brought me many letters of surprised dissent from English and American tourists, and writers whose experience was less pleasant than my own. I tell the tale, in brief, as an act of simple justice to a much-abused man.
“You have been told that I am a vandal and a bear,” he said to me on that Sunday. “I found church and Parsonage almost in ruins. I was not appointed to this parish as the curator of a museum, but to do my best for the cure of souls. When I tell you that, for ten years after Mr. Brontë’s death, the average number of sight-seers who called at the Parsonage was three thousand a year, and that they still mount up to a third of that number, you may be more lenient in judgment than the touring public and the press proved themselves to be.”
From Rev. Mr. Langley—incumbent of Olney, and resident in the quaintly beautiful parsonage that was the home of Lady Austin, Cowper’s friend and disciple—we met with courtesy as fine. And in seeking details of Hannah More’s private life, I found an able and enthusiastic assistant in Rev. Mr. Wright, of Wrington, in the church-yard of which the “Queen of Barleywood” is buried.
Cherished reminiscences are these, which neither the mists of years nor the clouds of sorrow have dimmed. In dwelling upon them, as I near the close of my annals of an every-day woman’s life, I comprehend what the Psalmist meant when he said, “They have been my song in the house of my pilgrimage.”
Perhaps I erred in writing, “every-day life.” Or, it may be because so few women have recorded the lights and shadows of their lives as frankly and as fully as I am doing, that I am asking myself whether it may not be that the chequered scene I survey from the hill-top—which gives me on clear days a fine view of the Delectable Mountains—has been exceptionally eventful, as it has been affluent in God’s choicest gifts of home-joys and home-loves, and in opportunities of proving, by word and in deed, my love for fellow-travellers along the King’s Highway.
The reader who has followed me patiently, because sympathetically, from the beginning of the narrative, will comprehend, through the depth of that sympathy, why I now leave to other pens the recital of what remains to be said. The hands that guided the pen were tender of touch, the hearts were true that dictated the report of the Golden Wedding and the abstract of a noble life, now developing throughout the ages into the stature of the Perfect Man. The voluntary tributes they combined to offer are dear beyond expression, to wife and children and to a great host of friends.