by Juliet Gael
Arthur moved through the days like an iron-clad locomotive: on track, punctual, dependable, his energies thrown into the service of others. When villagers stopped to ask after his wife, his stiffness was so off-putting that no one dared pry. They judged the seriousness of her illness by the increasingly rigid manner of his speech and bearing.
One day late in February the Keighley solicitor who had managed the matter of her will arrived at the parsonage. In the hush of the sickroom, with the wind rattling the windows, he sat at a table and drew up a new will wherein Charlotte Brontë bequeathed to her husband all her property, to be his absolutely and entirely. It was a brief piece of business; she signed it with her shaky hand, and her father and Martha Brown signed their own names as witnesses. Arthur remained stony-faced and silent throughout the proceedings.
She said she had been thinking about revising her will for some time, and that the changes testified to her love for him. She had not given up on life. There was too much to live for. But Arthur took it as a sign. It was a turning point in his resolve. His defenses collapsed.
Only strenuous physical exertion distracted him. He could be seen early in the morning shoveling snow from the wide steps rising to the church, and spreading salt on the steep lanes so the children could make it to school. When a coal carrier’s wagon went off the road in a blizzard, dragging the horses into the icy waters of Bridgehouse Beck, Arthur led a rescue team to the site. One of the horses was green, and he’d gotten himself in a hopeless tangle of line and rope. It was treacherous work, unhitching the wagon and freeing the animals in the rushing, numbing water, and the carrier crushed a couple of fingers between a wheel and a rock. They lost the wagon but saved the horses, and for about three hours that day Arthur didn’t think about his wife.
It was a daily struggle dealing with Patrick’s laments; he bemoaned the weakness of his own frail body, the loss of his strength, his eyesight, his children. All the miseries of his fate had come to reside in the frail body of his last living daughter, whose books were so famous, and who was dying in the bed upstairs. One day when Patrick came into Arthur’s study to leave some correspondence related to church business, Arthur looked up at the old man and said, “I can understand if you resent me, sir. That you blame me for this. It’s a guilt that has haunted me from the beginning of her illness.”
Patrick interrupted: “You are mistaken, sir. I bear you no grudge.”
Arthur said, “You should know that if I could have foreseen the future, I would have given her up if it meant saving her life.”
“But you forget, Mr. Nicholls, that Charlotte herself had a say in these matters. She knew the risks. If I had a choice, I daresay, I would have chosen otherwise. But God determines these matters. You have made my daughter happier in these past eight months than she has ever been. We must accept God’s will and have faith in His mysterious Love and Mercy.”
Their talk turned to church business, and for those few minutes at the back of his mind Arthur marveled that this man could lose so much and keep his faith. Arthur admired him but did not for a second wish to be like him. It wasn’t that Arthur’s faith in God had weakened, but if he believed in the power of everlasting love it had been taught to him not by doctrine, but by a prickly-tempered, insecure, melancholy little woman with fiery opinions. How could this odd little bundle inspire in him, at once, in the same moment, the fiercest desire to ravish and protect? Agape and Eros. Not separate but one.
If there was a Mystery, it was this: that his old self had dissolved into a muddle and the new man made seamlessly whole.
He wondered if Patrick Brontë had ever experienced this all-consuming passion for his wife. Perhaps. But he thought not. Patrick Brontë loved God first and then himself. Arthur felt as if he had quite lost himself altogether in another. If Charlotte should pass from this earth, he could not imagine how he would find himself again.
Arthur abandoned his study and brought his work into their bedroom. He wrote his sermons there and replied to Charlotte’s correspondence. When she felt she could eat a little something, he fed her spoonfuls of water mixed with wine, and a little applesauce or light pudding. But most days the very sight of food made her sick, and Arthur took his meals hurriedly in the dining room by himself before returning to her bedside. Twice a day he knelt by her bed for the ritual of morning and evening prayer. Daily he read to her from Psalms, choosing only those that sang of consolation, hope, and love.
Her father checked in on her every day but stayed for only a moment. He could not bear the stifling closeness of sickrooms, with the cloying smell of medicines and draughts.
Their nights were sleepless and utterly miserable. She was constantly ill and would strain until she vomited blood. Arthur nursed her through it all with unfailing patience. Charlotte urged him to take the bedroom next door.
“I would not think of leaving you,” he answered sternly. She didn’t press him again.
Arthur never spoke of the baby.
She knew that her thoughts should be turned to her Maker in these difficult hours, that she should be preparing her mind for submission to His will. But all she could think about was this man at her side, this mortal who loved her and whom she loved in return. Her thoughts drifted in and out of dreams and memories. Often she was too exhausted to care for life, but then she would hear him shuffling about the room in his slippers, opening a drawer, closing the shutters, drawing the curtains, fanning the fire. The scratching of his pen, the soft lisping of shuffled papers soothed her like a lullaby. She welcomed the smallest utterances, a sigh or muffled cough. The weight of his body as he lowered himself onto their bed, his strong hands so tender in their touch, all these faint impressions sensed through the fog of her suffering formed a cocoon that sheltered her from her fears. She escaped into Arthur and prayed that he would intercede for her, in life and with God. It was the ultimate act of submission. It was not God’s will but Arthur’s to which she relinquished herself. His prayers. His judgment. She submerged herself in his presence, and in her total exhaustion she believed that his strength would be sufficient to all their needs.
The doctors were baffled. She was wasting away, could not keep down even the smallest morsel of food, and even with her stomach empty she strained to vomit.
What am I doing? Charlotte thought in her dark moments. There was too much time to think. Whenever Arthur left her side, he took his reassurance with him. In his absence she took one of his old sweaters and curled up with it like a lover. The scratchy wool testified to his hardiness and strength.
What am I doing? Am I so afraid of this infant that I reject it from my body?
When she heaved and strained and her muscles contracted like a vise around her abdomen, she felt that her body was struggling to defy human physiology and expel this child through her mouth. Nothing came but bile and blood.
Then one day, a horrid thought: Could it be that the child wants nothing to do with me? It knows what kind of mother it has and does not want to be born.
The thought made her weep.
One Sunday late in March, as Arthur came up the lane from church he found Martha shivering in the cold on the doorstep.
“Oh, sir, thank the Lord ye’re home—her mind’s wanderin’, sir…. She don’t recognize us anymore … ben seein’ all sorts o’ things … creatures like ghost dogs with moon-yellow eyes, and talkin’ like her sisters was in the room—”
“Did you send for Ingham?” Arthur said as he tore off his coat.
“Aye, sir, we sent for him … but he’s sick himself. There’s that young Mr. Dugsdale—”
“Yes! Send for him! And send to Bradford for Macturk! Send for all of them! Quickly!” Arthur cried as he took the stairs in giant strides, three steps at a time.
From that morning on, Arthur never left her bedside. From Oxenhope, Oakworth, Hebden Bridge, and all the surrounding hamlets, his brethren quietly descended on Haworth to take up his duties; they preached the Sunday services and evening prayers, they to
ok the burials and baptisms and taught his class at school.
Over the next few days as she drifted in and out of consciousness, her body seemed to be willing itself to live. Finally she begged for food and wine, and for the first time in two months she was able to keep down the little that she ate.
“It’s a good sign,” Arthur whispered to Patrick outside the bedroom door. “I think the worst has passed.”
The clock on the landing struck the half hour—Arthur had lost track of the hours—and he looked up from his book to check on his wife. The fire was banked high in the grate, and the room was still warm. He sat in his sweater and house slippers in the armchair they had brought up from his study. He had dozed a little but then awakened, and finding himself unable to sleep, he had lit a candle and begun to read.
As he watched her, she began to stir. He could tell by her breathing that she was awake.
“Arthur?” she whispered faintly.
The book fell to the floor as he rose; in two strides he was kneeling at her bed.
“My beloved …”
“… thought you’d gone …” She murmured through a parched mouth.
“Never. I shall never leave your side.”
“Thirsty …”
He raised her and moistened her cracked lips with a spoonful of water. Her body had all but wasted away. She lay in his arms, light as air.
“What are you doing?” she said.
“Why, I’ve been reading a book. A novel.”
He fed her another spoonful, and it seemed to revive her. She turned her great compelling eyes up to him.
“… novel? You never read novels.”
“This one has quite taken my fancy. Although I’ve read it before.”
Her dark eyes searched his for a long while, and he thought perhaps she was wandering again, but then she murmured, “What novel?”
“Something by an author by the name of Currer Bell.”
“Why should you … read that naughty … Currer Bell?”
“I’m searching for a passage.”
He felt her tiny hand—skeletal now—on his chest, tapping lightly, teasing, like a bird.
“Perhaps,” she whispered, “I can help you?”
“I think I know the passage by heart—but I should like to find it. It’s something about love.”
“Love?” A smile glimmered in her eyes. “Currer Bell writes of love?”
“She writes of a ‘faithful love that refused to abandon its object, love that disaster could not shake, love that in calamity, waxed fonder, in poverty clung closer’ …”
He had lost control of his voice. He paused to take a deep breath. “Or some words to that effect.”
He couldn’t hold her gaze any longer. He fell to his knees beside the bed and began to sob. Weakly she reached out to reassure him. Her hand resting on the top of his head, the fingers sunk into his thick black hair, she tried to calm his fears.
“Arthur …”
“Dear God, I beseech you, spare her,” he whispered. “Oh God, spare my beloved wife.”
She murmured, “I’m not going to die. God won’t separate us. We’ve been too happy.”
Charlotte died in the hush of that steel-gray morning, with the earth all stern and still beneath the winter frost.
Epilogue
Arthur lived on in the parsonage, tending Charlotte’s aging father and taking the parish duties, sterling true to his word.
They were an odd pair—bound by grief and love, by a fate too painful to share with anyone but each other—the eccentric old father who had lost most of his sight and his hearing and the bereaved husband who had buried his heart.
With the death of the last of the Brontës, the sisters’ fame only grew. Requests for Charlotte’s handwriting came in from all over the world, and Patrick cut some of her precious letters into tiny strips and sent them off to satisfy the demand. He was careful not to let Arthur know when he did this sort of thing. Arthur abhorred curiosity seekers and he understood—better than Patrick—that these mementos might be collected for material gain. Arthur was incensed at the idea that strangers might enrich themselves from the effects of his self-denying wife who had lived most of her life in poverty, and he guarded Charlotte’s few material possessions, as well as all her siblings’ writings, as carefully as if they were the relics of a saint.
When George Smith sent a letter proposing that Elizabeth Gaskell write Charlotte’s biography, Arthur reluctantly conceded, only because Patrick wished it so. Upon her visit to the parsonage, Lily found the interview with the two bereaved men so painful that she spent but a few hours with them and then hurried away, never to return. Charlotte’s friends would have to provide the bulk of the material she needed. Mary Taylor wrote from New Zealand that, as per Charlotte’s request, she had conscientiously destroyed her letters. Ellen had not been so faithful; she had hoarded nearly every piece of paper to which Charlotte had set her name and now eagerly supplied the treasure trove of correspondence that enabled Lily to write her book.
Ellen’s betrayal left Arthur reeling, for some letters of a very private nature made it into Lily’s book—most notably, those in which Arthur was portrayed as a morose and lovesick sniveler, and the local press picked up those parts and reprinted them, to Arthur’s keen humiliation. Patrick—of whom Lily had formed some very harsh opinions, based on her own notions of Charlotte’s odd upbringing—fared no better. The men dealt with these injustices in their own way. Patrick took his ogre-like portrayal with good humor; Arthur, who felt he had been dragged into sanctioning something that was utterly repugnant, read the Gaskell biography with inexpressible pain but remained silent about it all.
It was to Lily’s credit that he never learned about Charlotte’s letters to Constantin Heger. Suspecting there was a good deal of Charlotte’s story to be discovered in Brussels, she traveled all the way to the Continent to meet the professor. His wife refused to see her, but Monsieur Heger received her warmly. He still had in his possession several of Charlotte’s letters, which he showed her—passionate, heart-wrenching letters of unrequited love couched in the language of an adoring pupil writing to her master. Here was confirmation of a suspicion none of them had ever dared to voice: that Charlotte, much like Jane Eyre, had fled the temptation of an adulterous love. In her biography, Lily treated the Brussels episode of Charlotte’s life shrewdly, with great caution, and Charlotte’s letters to Constantin Heger would not surface until well into the following century.
Neither husband nor father took a penny from the publication of the biography. Monetary gain was never a question for them; they only wished to rectify some of the cruel misrepresentations about the woman they had both loved. Lily was paid handsomely—twice what Charlotte had received for her last novel—and Charlotte Brontë’s biography would prove to be her most enduring work.
When George expressed an interest in publishing The Professor—which he had resolutely refused to publish in Charlotte’s lifetime—Arthur and Patrick rejected the idea on the grounds that the same story had been successfully told in Villette. But forces conspired against them, and Sir James swept down on the parsonage one day and in his determined, insensitive manner managed to wrest the manuscript from Arthur’s hands.
Arthur was shrewder when it came to Emma, which he felt had merits, even as a fragment. The manuscript was particularly precious to him because it was the last thing his wife had written, and he spent hours laboriously transcribing the heavily revised pages rather than lend out the original. Emma first appeared in George Smith’s new publication, the Cornhill Magazine, along with a glowing personal tribute to Charlotte written by William Makepeace Thackeray.
Conscientious to the end, ever mindful of his wife’s personal integrity, when George clamored for more poetry, Arthur read through Emily and Charlotte’s verse, and with Patrick’s assistance selected only the ones he deemed Charlotte would value. Then he sat down and carefully copied them. It was an excruciatingly painful task, and when the Be
lls’ poetry was republished several years later, no reader would have thought to imagine that the volumes had been produced through the fog of tears.
George would forever benefit from his association with the Brontës; he would live into the next century and die an exceedingly wealthy man.
Patrick and Arthur lived on together quietly, tended by the ever-faithful Martha. Not long after Charlotte’s death, the two men acquired a new dog from the Haworth schoolmaster—a young Newfoundland that Charlotte had doted on as a pup—and named him Plato. Patrick, a man of deep, unshakable faith, never questioned God’s great wisdom, but it was a bitter cup to drink, to outlive his wife and all six children and then linger on for six long years. In his Sunday sermons he was known for quoting Job, and sometimes from the pulpit he would speak softly of longing for wings like a dove to fly away from the wearisome world and be at rest. There were some in the village who were of the opinion that his wife’s death had worked a little good in Arthur. He showed more tolerance for the failings of his flock, and what he once perceived as insults to the church of God he now saw simply as human weakness or ignorance. When he noticed that Mrs. Barraclough’s knees were getting so bad that it took her half the Lord’s Prayer to kneel, he pulled her aside after the service and told her that the Lord wouldn’t find her any less pious if she remained in her seat from now on. Farmer Butterfield said he’d come across Arthur in a field one day with Plato in tow and a little lad balanced on the dog’s back. Arthur had found the boy asleep beside the footpath, exhausted from a day of work in the mill, and had scooped him up and set him on the dog’s back; the boy rode the young dog all the way home.
When Patrick died, it was presumed that Arthur would be offered the position that he had single-handedly administered all these years. But there was agitation for change. The church trustees wanted a new man, one with an independent income and the means to restore the crumbling parsonage. One free of bothersome ties to the infamous Brontës and with a little more tolerance for the dissenting sects that were now so numerous in the village. It was by a margin of one vote that Arthur found himself, just months after burying Patrick, without a curacy.