Emily Brontë

The wrench of leaving home, so much dreaded by Charlotte, was yet sharper to her younger sister, morbidly fearful of strangers, eccentric, unable to live without wide liberty. To go to school; it must have had a dreadful sound to that untamable, free creature, happiest alone with the dogs on the moors, with little sentiment or instinct for friendship; no desire to meet her fellows. Emily was perfectly happy at Haworth cooking the dinner, ironing the linen, writing poems at the Waterfall, taking her dog for miles over the moors, pacing round the parlour with her arm round gentle Anne's waist. Now she would have to leave all this, to separate from her dear little sister. But she was reasonable and just, and, feeling the attempt should be made, she packed up her scanty wardrobe, and, without repining, set out with Charlotte for Roe Head.

Charlotte knew where she was going. She loved and respected Miss Wooler; but with what anxiety must Emily have looked for the house where she was to live and not to be at home. At last she saw it, a cheerful, roomy, country house, standing a little apart in a field. There was a wide and pleasant view of fields and woods; but the green prospect was sullied and marred by the smoke from the frequent mills. Green fields, grey mills, all told of industry, labour, occupation. There was no wild stretch of moorland here, no possibility of solitude. I think when Emily Brontë saw the place, she must have known very well she would not be happy there.

"My sister Emily loved the moors," says Charlotte, writing of these days in the latter solitude—"flowers brighter than the rose bloomed in the blackest of the heath for her; out of a sullen hollow in a livid hillside her mind could make an Eden. She found in the bleak solitude many and dear delights; and not the least and best-loved was liberty. Liberty was the breath of Emily's nostrils; without it she perished. The change from her own home to a school, and from her own very noiseless, very secluded, but unrestricted and unartificial mode of life to one of disciplined routine (though under the kindest auspices) was what she failed in enduring. Her nature was here too strong for her fortitude. Every morning, when she woke, the visions of home and the moors rushed on her, and darkened and saddened the day that lay before her. Nobody knew what ailed her but me. I knew only too well. In this struggle her health was quickly broken: her white face, attenuated form, and failing strength threatened rapid decline. I felt in my heart she would die if she did not go home."

Thus looking on, Charlotte grew alarmed. She remembered the death of Maria and Elizabeth, and feared, feared with anguish, lest this best-beloved sister should follow them. She told Miss Wooler of her fear, and the schoolmistress, conscious of her own kindness and a little resentful at Emily's distress, consented that the girl should be sent home without delay. She did not care for Emily, and was not sorry to lose her. So in October she returned to Haworth, to the only place where she was happy and well. She returned to harder work and plainer living than she had known at school; but also to home, liberty, comprehension, her animals, and her flowers. In her native atmosphere she very soon recovered the health and strength that seemed so natural to her swift spirit; that were, alas, so easily endangered. She had only been at school three months.

Even so short an absence may very grievously alter the aspect of familiar things. Haworth itself was the same; prim, tidy Miss Branwell still pattered about in her huge caps and tiny clogs; the Vicar still told his horrible stories at breakfast, still fought vain battles with the parishioners who would not drain the village, and the women who would dry their linen on the tombstones. Anne was still as transparently pretty, as pensive and pious as of old; but over the hope of the house, the dashing, clever Branwell, who was to make the name of Brontë famous in art, a dim, tarnishing change had come. Emily must have seen it with fresh eyes, left more and more in Branwell's company, when, after the Christmas holidays, Anne returned with Charlotte to Roe Head.

There is in none of Charlotte's letters any further talk of sending Branwell to the Royal Academy. He earnestly desired to go, and for him, the only son, any sacrifice had willingly been made. But there were reasons why that brilliant unprincipled lad should not be trusted now, alone in London. Too frequent had been those visits to the "Black Bull," undertaken, at first, to amuse the travellers from London, Leeds and Manchester, who found their evenings dull. The Vicar's lad was following the proverbial fate of parsons' sons. Little as they foreboded the end in store, greatly as they hoped all his errors were a mere necessary attribute of manliness, the sisters must have read in his shaken nerves the dissipation for which their clever Branwell was already remarkable in Haworth. It is true that to be sometimes the worse for drink was no uncommon fault fifty years ago in Yorkshire; but the gradual coarsening of Branwell's nature, the growing flippancy, the altered health, must have given a cruel awakening to his sisters' dreams for his career. In 1836 this deterioration was at the beginning; a weed in bud that could only bear a bitter and poisonous fruit. Emily hoped the best; his father did not seem to see his danger; Miss Branwell spoiled the lad; and the village thought him a mighty pleasant young gentleman with a smile and a bow for every one, fond of a glass and a chat in the pleasant parlour of the "Black Bull" at nights; a gay, feckless, red-haired, smiling young fellow, full of ready courtesies to all his friends in the village; yet, none the less as full of thoughtless cruelties to his friends at home.

For the rest, he had nothing to do, and was scarcely to blame if he could not devote sixteen hours a day to writing verses for the Leeds Mercury, his only ostensible occupation. It seems incredible that Mr. Brontë, who well understood the peculiar temptations to which his son lay open, could have suffered him to loaf about the village, doing nothing, month after month, lured into ill by no set purpose, but by a weak social temper and foolish friends. Yet so it was, and with such training, little hope of salvation could there be for that vain, somewhat clever, untruthful, fascinating boy.

So things went on, drearily enough in reality, though perhaps more pleasantly in seeming—for Branwell, with his love of approbation and ready affectionateness, took all trouble consistent with self-indulgence to avoid the noise of his misdemeanours reaching home. Thus things went on till Charlotte returned from Miss Wooler's with little Anne in the midsummer holidays of 1836.

An interval of happiness to lonely Emily; Charlotte's friend came to the grey cold-looking Parsonage, enlivening that sombre place with her gay youth and sweet looks. Home with four young girls in it was more attractive to Branwell than the alluring parlour of the "Black Bull." The harvest moon that year can have looked on no happier meeting. "It would not be right," says the survivor of those eager spirits, "to pass over one record which should be made of the sisters' lives together, after their school-days, and before they were broken in health by their efforts to support themselves, that at this time they had all a taste of happiness and enjoyment. They were beginning to feel conscious of their powers, they were rich in each other's companionship, their health was good, their spirits were high, there was often joyousness and mirth; they commented on what they read; analysed articles and their writers also; the perfection of unrestrained talk and intelligence brightened the close of the days which were passing all too swiftly. The evening march in the sitting-room, a constant habit learned at school, kept time with their thoughts and feelings, it was free and rapid; they marched in pairs, Emily and Anne, Charlotte and her friend, with arms twined round each other in child-like fashion, except when Charlotte, in an exuberance of spirit, would for a moment start away, make a graceful pirouette (though she had never learned to dance) and return to her march."

So the evenings passed and the days, in happy fashion for a little while. Then Charlotte and Anne went back to Miss Wooler's, and Emily, too, took up the gauntlet against necessity. She was not of a character to let the distastefulness of any duty hinder her from undertaking it. She was very stern in her dealings with herself, though tender to the erring, and anxious to bear the burdens of the weak. She allowed no one but herself to decide what it behoved her to do. She could not see Charlotte labour, and not work herself. At home she worked, it is true, harder than servants; but she felt it right not only to work, but to earn. So, having recovered her natural strength, she left Haworth in September, and Charlotte writes from school to her friend: "My sister Emily has gone into a situation as teacher in a large school near Halifax. I have had one letter from her since her departure; it gives an appalling account of her duties; hard labour from six in the morning to eleven at night, with only one half-hour of exercise between. This is slavery. I fear she can never stand it."

She stood it, however, all that term; came back to Haworth for a brief rest at Christmas, and again left it for the hated life she led, drudging among strangers. But when spring came back, with its feverish weakness, with its beauty and memories, to that stern place of exile, she failed. Her health broke down, shattered by long-resisted homesickness. Weary and mortified at heart, Emily again went back to seek life and happiness on the wild moors of Haworth.

CHAPTER VI.

Then he went as private tutor to a family in Broughton-in-Furness. One letter of his thence despatched to some congenial spirit in Haworth, long since dead, has been lent to me by the courtesy of Mr. William Wood, one of the last of Branwell's companions, in whose possession the torn, faded sheet remains. Much of it is unreadable from accidental rents and the purposed excision of private passages, and part of that which can be read cannot be quoted; such as it is, the letter is valuable as showing what things in life seemed desirable and worthy of attainment to this much-hoped-in brother of the austere Emily, the courageous Charlotte, the pious Anne.

Branwell's boasted reformation was not kept up for long. Soon he came back as heartless, as affectionate, as vain, as unprincipled as ever, to laugh and loiter about the steep street of Haworth. Then he went to Bradford as a portrait-painter, and—so impressive is audacity—actually succeeded for some months in gaining a living there, although his education was of the slenderest, and, judging from the specimens still treasured in Haworth, his natural talent on a level with that of the average new student in any school of art. His tawny mane, his pose of untaught genius, his verses in the poet's corner of the paper could not for ever keep afloat this untaught and thriftless portrait-painter of twenty. Soon there came an end to his painting there. He disappeared from Bradford suddenly, heavily in debt, and was lost to sight, until unnerved, a drunkard, and an opium-eater, he came back to home and Emily at Haworth.

Meanwhile impetuous Charlotte was growing nervous and weak, gentle Anne consumptive and dejected, in their work away from home; and Emily was toiling from dawn till dusk with her old servant Tabby for the old aunt who never cared for her, and the old father always courteous and distant.

They knew the face of necessity more nearly than any friend's, those Brontë girls, and the pinch of poverty was for their own foot; therefore were they always considerate to any that fell into the same plight. During the Christmas holidays of 1837, old Tabby fell on the steep and slippery street and broke her leg. She was already nearly seventy, and could do little work; now her accident laid her completely aside, leaving Emily, Charlotte, and Anne to spend their Christmas holidays in doing the housework and nursing the invalid. Miss Branwell, anxious to spare the girls' hands and her brother-in-law's pocket, insisted that Tabby should be sent to her sister's house to be nursed and another servant engaged for the Parsonage. Tabby, she represented, was fairly well off, her sister in comfortable circumstances; the Parsonage kitchen might supply her with broths and jellies in plenty, but why waste the girls' leisure and scanty patrimony on an old servant competent to keep herself. Mr. Brontë was finally persuaded, and his decision made known. But the girls were not persuaded. Tabby, so they averred, was one of the family, and they refused to abandon her in sickness. They did not say much, but they did more than say—they starved. When the tea was served, the three sat silent, fasting. Next morning found their will yet stronger than their hunger—no breakfast. They did the day's work, and dinner came. Still they held out, wan and sunk. Then the superiors gave in.

The girls gained their victory—no stubborn freak, but the right to make a generous sacrifice, and to bear an honourable burden.

That Christmas, of course, there could be no visiting nor the next. Tabby was slow in getting well; but she did not outweary the patience of her friends.

Two years later, Charlotte writes to her old schoolfellow:—

The year 1840 found Emily, Branwell, and Charlotte all at home together. Unnerved and dissipated as he was, Branwell was still a welcome presence; his gay talk still awakened glad promises in the ambitious and loving household which hoped all things from him. His mistakes and faults they pardoned; thinking, poor souls, that the strong passions which led him astray betokened a strong character and not a powerless will.

It was still to Branwell that they looked for the fame of the family. Their poems, their stories, were to these girls but a legitimate means of amusement and relief. The serious business of their life was to teach, to cook, to clean; to earn or save the mere expense of their existence. No dream of literary fame gave a purpose to the quiet days of Emily Brontë. Charlotte and Branwell, more impulsive, more ambitious, had sent their work to Southey, to Coleridge, to Wordsworth, in vain, pathetic hope of encouragement, or recognition. Not so the sterner Emily, to whom expression was at once a necessity and a regret. Emily's brain, Emily's locked desk, these and nothing else knew the degree of her passion, her genius, her power. And yet acknowledged power would have been sweet to that dominant spirit.

Meanwhile the immediate difficulty was to earn a living. Even those patient and courageous girls could not accept the thought of a whole lifetime spent in dreary governessing by Charlotte and Anne, in solitary drudgery by homekeeping Emily. One way out of this hateful vista seemed not impossible of attainment. For years it was the wildest hope, the cherished dream of the author of 'Wuthering Heights' and the author of 'Villette.' And what was this dear and daring ambition?—to keep a ladies' school at Haworth.

Far enough off, difficult to reach, it looked to them, this paltry common-place ideal of theirs. For the house with its four bedrooms would have to be enlarged; for the girls' education, with its Anglo-French and stumbling music, would have to be adorned by the requisite accomplishments. This would take time; time and money; two luxuries most hard to get for the Vicar of Haworth's harassed daughters. They would sigh, and suddenly stop in their making of plans and drawing up of circulars. It seemed so difficult.

One person, indeed, might help them. Miss Branwell had saved out of her annuity of £50 a year. She had a certain sum; small enough, but to Charlotte and Emily it seemed as potent as the fairy's wand. The question was, would she risk it?

It seemed not. The old lady had always chiefly meant her savings for the dear prodigal who bore her name, and Emily and Charlotte were not her favourites. The girls indeed only asked for a loan, but she doubted, hesitated, doubted again. They were too proud to take an advantage so grudgingly proffered; and while their talk was still of what means they might employ, while they still painfully toiled through improper French novels as "the best substitute for French conversation," they gave up the dream for the present, and Charlotte again looked out for a situation. Nearly a year elapsed before she found it—a happy year, full of plans and talks with Emily and free from any more pressing anxiety than Anne's delicate health always gave her sisters. Branwell was away and doing well as station-master at Luddendenfoot, "set off to seek his fortune in the wild, wandering, adventurous, romantic, knight-errant-like capacity of clerk on the Leeds and Manchester Railway." Ellen came to stay at Haworth in the summer; it was quite sociable and lively now in the grey house on the moors; for, compelled by failing health, Mr. Brontë had engaged the help of a curate, and the Haworth curate brought his clerical friends about the house, to the great disgust of Emily, and the half-sentimental fluttering of pensive Anne, which laid on Charlotte the responsibility of talking for all three.

In the holidays when Anne was at home all the old glee and enjoyment of life returned. There was, moreover, the curate, "bonnie, pleasant, light-hearted, good-tempered, generous, careless, crafty, fickle, and unclerical," to add piquancy to the situation. "He sits opposite to Anne at church, sighing softly, and looking out of the corners of his eyes—and she is so quiet, her look so downcast; they are a picture," says merry Charlotte. This first curate at Haworth was exempted from Emily's liberal scorn; he was a favourite at the vicarage, a clever, bright-spirited, and handsome youth, greatly in Miss Branwell's good graces. He would tease and flatter the old lady with such graciousness as made him ever sure of a welcome; so that his daily visits to Mr. Brontë's study were nearly always followed up by a call in the opposite parlour, when Miss Branwell would frequently leave her upstairs retreat and join in the lively chatter. She always presided at the tea-table, at which the curate was a frequent guest, and her nieces would be kept well amused all through the tea hour by the curate's piquant sallies, baffling the old lady in her little schemes of control over the three high-spirited girls. None enjoyed the fun more than quiet Emily, always present and amused, "her countenance glimmering as it always did when she enjoyed herself," Miss Ellen Nussey tells me. Many happy legends, too familiar to be quoted here, record the light heart and gay spirit that Emily bore in those untroubled days. Foolish, pretty little stories of her dauntless protection of the other girls from too pressing suitors. Never was duenna so gallant, so gay, and so inevitable. In compliment to the excellence of her swashing and martial outside on such occasions, the little household dubbed her "The Major," a name that stuck to her in days when the dash and gaiety of her soldiery bearing was sadly sobered down, and only the courage and dauntless heart remained.

But in these early days of 1841, Emily was as happy as other healthy country girls in a congenial home. "She did what we did," says Miss Nussey, "and never absented herself when she could avoid it—life at this period must have been sweet and pleasant to her." An equal unchequered life, in which trifles seemed of great importance. We hear of the little joys and adventures of those days, so faithfully and long remembered, with a pathetic pleasurableness. So slight they are, and all their colour gone, like pressed roses, though a faint sweetness yet remains. The disasters when Miss Branwell was cross and in no humour to receive her guests; the long-expected excitement of a walk over the moors to Keighley where the curate was to give a lecture, the alarm and flurry when the curate, finding none of the four girls had ever received a valentine, proposed to send one to each on the next Valentine's Day. "No, no, the elders would never allow it, and yet it would certainly be an event to receive a valentine; still, there would be such a lecture from Miss Branwell." "Oh no," he said, "I shall post them at Bradford." And to Bradford he walked, ten miles and back again, so that on the eventful 14th of February the anxiously-expected postman brought four valentines, all on delicately tinted paper, all enhanced by a verse of original poetry, touching on some pleasant characteristic in each recipient. What merriment and comparing of notes! What pleased feigning of indignation! The girls determined to reward him with a Rowland for his Oliver, and Charlotte wrote some rhymes full of fun and raillery which all the girls signed—Emily entering into all this with much spirit and amusement—and finally despatched in mystery and secret glee.

At last this pleasant fooling came to an end. Charlotte advertised for a place, and found it. While she was away she had a letter from Miss Wooler, offering Charlotte the goodwill of her school at Dewsbury Moor. It was a chance not to be lost, although what inducement Emily and Charlotte could offer to their pupils it is not easy to imagine. But it was above all things necessary to make a home where delicate Anne might be sheltered, where homesick Emily could be happy, where Charlotte could have time to write, where all might live and work together. Miss Wooler's offer was immediately accepted. Miss Branwell was induced to lend the girls £100. No answer came from Miss Wooler. Then ambitious Charlotte, from her situation away, wrote to Miss Branwell at Haworth[6]:—

That was true. It must have struck a vibrant chord in the old man's breast. Absorbed in parish gossip and his 'Cottage Poems,' caring no longer for the world but only for newspaper reports of it, actively idle, living a resultless life of ascetic self-indulgence, the Vicar of Haworth was very proud of his energetic past. He had always held it up to his children as a model for them to copy. Charlotte's appeal would certainly secure her father as an ally to her cause. Miss Branwell, on the other hand, would not wish for displays of ambition in her already too irrepressible nieces. But she was getting old; it would be a comfort to her, after all, to see them settled, and prosperously settled through her generosity. "I look to you, Aunt, to help us. I think you will not refuse," Charlotte had said. How, indeed, could Miss Branwell, living in their home, be happy, and refuse?

Yet many discussions went on before anxious Charlotte got the answer. Emily, whom it concerned as nearly, must have listened waiting in a strange perturbation of hope and fear. To leave home—she knew well what it meant. Since she was six years old she had never left Yorkshire; but those months of wearying homesickness at Roe Head, at Halifax, must have most painfully rushed back upon her memory. Haworth was health, content, the very possibility of existence to this girl. To leave Haworth for a strange town beyond the seas, to see strange faces all round, to hear and speak a strange language, Charlotte's welcome prospect of adventure must have taken a nightmare shape to Emily. And for this she must hope; this she must desire, plead for if necessary, and at least uphold. For Charlotte said the thing was essential to their future; and in all details of management, Charlotte's word was law to her sisters. Even Emily, the independent, indomitable Emily, so resolute in keeping to any chosen path, looked to Charlotte to choose the way in practical affairs.

At length consent was secured, written and despatched. Gleeful Charlotte gave notice to her employers and soon set out for home. There was much to be done. "Letters to write to Brussels, to Lille and to London, lots of work to be done, besides clothes to repair." It was decided that the sisters should give up their chance of the school at Dewsbury Moor, since the site was low and damp, and had not suited Anne. On their return from Brussels they were to set up a school in some healthy seaside place in the East Riding. Burlington was the place where their fancy chiefly dwelt. To this beautiful and healthy spot, fronting the sea, eager pupils would flock for the benefit of instruction by three daughters of a clergyman, "educated abroad" (for six months) speaking thorough French, improved Italian and a dash of German. A scintillating programme of accomplishment danced before their eyes.

There were, however, many practical difficulties to be vanquished first. The very initial step, the choice of a school, was hard to take. Charlotte writes to Ellen:—

For Charlotte to regret the change was for an improvement to be discovered. She had set her heart on going to Brussels; Mrs. Jenkins redoubled her efforts and at length discovered the Pensionnat of Madame Héger in the Rue d'Isabelle.

Thither, as all the world is aware, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, both of age, went to school.

"We shall leave England in about three weeks." The words had a ring of happy daring in Charlotte's ears. Since at six years of age she had set out alone to discover the Golden City, romance, discovery, adventure, were sweet promises to her. She had often wished to see the world; now she will see it. She had thirsted for knowledge; here is the source. She longed to add new notes to that gamut of human character which she could play with so profound a science; she shall make a masterpiece out of her acquisitions. At this time her letters are full of busy gaiety, giving accounts of her work, making plans, making fun. As happy and hopeful a young woman as any that dwells in Haworth parish.

Emily is different. It is she who imagined the girl in heaven who broke her heart with weeping for earth, till the angels cast her out in anger, and flung her into the middle of the heath, to wake there sobbing for joy. She did not care to know fresh people; she hates strangers; to walk with her bulldog, Keeper, over the moors is her best adventure. To learn new things is very well, but she prizes above everything originality and the wild provincial flavour of her home. What she strongly, deeply loves is her moorland home, her own people, the creatures on the heath, the dogs who always feed from her hands, the flowers in the bleak garden that only grow at all because of the infinite care she lavishes upon them. The stunted thorn under which she sits to write her poems, is more beautiful to her than the cedars of Lebanon. To each and all of these she must now bid farewell. It is in a different tone that she says in her adieus, "We shall leave England in about three weeks."

CHAPTER VII.

There the Vicar of Haworth brought his two daughters one February day, spent one night in Brussels and went straight back to his old house on the moors, so modern in comparison with the mansion in Rue d'Isabelle. A change, indeed, for Emily and Charlotte. Even now, Brussels (the headquarters of Catholicism far more than modern Rome) has a taste for pageantry that recalls mediæval days. The streets decked with boughs and strewn with flowers, through which pass slowly the processions of the Church, white-clad children, boys like angels scattering roses, standard-bearers with emblazoned banners. Surpliced choristers singing Latin praises, acolytes in scarlet swinging censers, reliquaries and images, before which the people fall down in prayer; all this to-day is no uncommon sight in Brussels, and must have been yet more frequent in 1842.

The flower-market out of doors, with clove-pinks, tall Mary-lilies and delicate roses d'amour, filling the quaint mediæval square before the beautiful old façade of the Hôtel de Ville. Ste.-Gudule with its spires and arches; the Montagne de la Cour (almost as steep as Haworth street), its windows ablaze at night with jewels; the little, lovely park, its great elms just coming into leaf, its statues just bursting from their winter sheaths of straw; the galleries of ancient pictures, their walls a sober glory of colours, blues, deep as a summer night, rich reds, brown golds, most vivid greens.

All this should have made an impression on the two home-keeping girls from Yorkshire; and Charlotte, indeed, perceived something of its beauty and strangeness. But Emily, from a bitter sense of exile, from a natural narrowness of spirit, rebelled against it all as an insult to the memory of her home—she longed, hopelessly, uselessly, for Haworth. The two Brontës were very different to the Belgian school-girls in Madame Héger's Pensionnat. They were, for one thing, ridiculously old to be at school—twenty-four and twenty-six—and they seemed to feel their position; their speech was strained and odd; all the "sceptical, wicked, immoral French novels, over forty of them, the best substitute for French conversation to be met with," which the girls had toiled through with so much singleness of spirit, had not cured the broadness of their accent nor the artificial idioms of their Yorkshire French. Monsieur Héger, indeed, considered that they knew no French at all. Their manners, even among English people, were stiff and prim; the hearty, vulgar, genial expansion of their Belgian schoolfellows must have made them seem as lifeless as marionettes. Their dress—Haworth had permitted itself to wonder at the uncouthness of those amazing leg-of-mutton sleeves (Emily's pet whim in and out of fashion), at the ill-cut lankness of those skirts, clumsy enough on round little Charlotte, but a very caricature of mediævalism on Emily's tall, thin, slender figure. They knew they were not in their element and kept close together, rarely speaking. Yet Monsieur Héger, patiently watching, felt the presence of a strange power under those uncouth exteriors.

An odd little man of much penetration, this French schoolmaster. "Homme de zèle et de conscience, il possède à un haut degré l'éloquence du bon sens et du cœur." Fierce and despotic in the exaction of obedience, yet tender of heart, magnanimous and tyrannical, absurdly vain and absolutely unselfish. His wife's school was a kingdom to him; he brought to it an energy, a zeal, a faculty of administration worthy to rule a kingdom. It was with the delight of a botanist discovering a rare plant in his garden, of a politician detecting a future statesman in his nursery, that he perceived the unusual faculty which lifted his two English pupils above their schoolfellows. He watched them silently for some weeks. When he had made quite sure, he came forwards and, so to speak, claimed them for his own.

Charlotte at once accepted the yoke. All that he set her to do she toiled to accomplish; she followed out his trains of thought; she adopted the style he recommended; she gave him in return for all his pains the most unflagging obedience, the affectionate comprehension of a large intelligence. She writes to Ellen of her delight in learning and serving: "It is very natural to me to submit, very unnatural to command."

Not so with Emily. The qualities which her sister understood and accepted, irritated her unspeakably. The masterfulness in little things, the irritability, the watchfulness of the fiery little professor of rhetoric were utterly distasteful to her. She contradicted his theories to his face; she did her lessons well, but as she chose to do them. She was as indomitable, fierce, unappeasable, as Charlotte was ready and submissive. And yet it was Emily who had the larger share of Monsieur Héger's admiration. Egotistic and exacting he thought her, who never yielded to his petulant, harmless egoism, who never gave way to his benevolent tyranny; but he gave her credit for logical powers, for a capacity for argument unusual in a man, and rare, indeed, in a woman. She, not Charlotte, was the genius in his eyes, although he complained that her stubborn will rendered her deaf to all reason, when her own determination, or her own sense of right, was concerned. He fancied she might be a great historian, so he told Mrs. Gaskell. "Her faculty of imagination was such, her views of scenes and characters would have been so vivid and so powerfully expressed, and supported by such a show of argument that it would have dominated over the reader, whatever might have been his previous opinions or his cooler perception of the truth. She should have been a man: a great navigator!" cried the little, dark, enthusiastic rhetorician. "Her powerful reason would have deduced new spheres of discovery from the knowledge of the old; and her strong imperious will would never have been daunted by opposition or difficulty; never have given way but with life!"

Yet they were never friends; though Monsieur Héger could speak so well of Emily at a time, be it remembered, when it was Charlotte's praises that were sought, when Emily's genius was set down as a lunatic's hobgoblin of nightmare potency. He and she were alike too imperious, too independent, too stubborn. A couple of swords, neither of which could serve to sheathe the other.

That time in Brussels was wasted upon Emily. The trivial characters which Charlotte made immortal merely annoyed her. The new impressions which gave another scope to Charlotte's vision were nothing to her. All that was grand, remarkable, passionate, under the surface of that conventional Pensionnat de Demoiselles, was invisible to Emily. Notwithstanding her genius she was very hard and narrow.

Poor girl, she was sick for home. It was all nothing to her, less than a dream, this place she lived in. Charlotte's engrossment in her new life, her eagerness to please her master, was a contemptible weakness to this embittered heart. She would laugh when she found her elder sister trying to arrange her homely gowns in the French taste, and stalk silently through the large schoolrooms with a fierce satisfaction in her own ugly sleeves, in the Haworth cut of her skirts. She seldom spoke a word to any one; only sometimes she would argue with Monsieur Héger, perhaps secretly glad to have the chance of shocking Charlotte. If they went out to tea, she would sit still on her chair, answering "Yes" and "No;" inert, miserable, with a heart full of tears. When her work was done she would walk in the Cross-bowmen's ancient garden, under the trees, leaning on her shorter sister's arm, pale, silent—a tall, stooping figure. Often she said nothing at all. Charlotte, also, was very profitably speechless; under her eyes 'Villette' was taking shape. But Emily did not think of Brussels. She was dreaming of Haworth.

One poem that she wrote at this time may appropriately be quoted here. It was, Charlotte tells us, "composed at twilight, in the schoolroom, when the leisure of the evening play-hour brought back, in full tide, the thoughts of home:"