Brontës (117 page)

The next day, Branwell was unable to get up from his bed. John Wheelhouse, the Haworth doctor, was sent for and told the shocked family that his patient was close to death. In an agony of distress, the anguished father who had had such high hopes for this, his only son, knelt in prayer by his bedside and wrestled for his soul. Though he had attended untold deathbeds, including those of his dearly beloved wife, sister-in-law and William Weightman, he had done so in the safe and sure knowledge that the dying had all had faith in their eternal future. It was the bitterest pill of all that only his most precious son had rejected the comforts of his religion
and refused to repent of his manifold sins. In this, his darkest hour, and with who knows what desolation in his heart, Patrick begged his son to seek salvation with all the urgency that approaching death could instil. Gradually, perhaps through mere force of will, he brought Branwell to a recognition of his vices and the repentance of them. The chimera of Mrs Robinson was finally driven away. Throughout this, his last night, Branwell talked of his ‘misspent life, his wasted youth, and his shame, with compunction'. Some time before the end, John Brown came and was left alone with the dying man. Branwell, looking back over his past excesses – in which Brown had so often shared – made no mention of the woman for whom he had destroyed himself. Calm and self-possessed, he seemed ‘unconscious that he had ever loved any but the members of his family, for the depth and tenderness of which affection he could find no language to express'. Seizing Brown's hand, he cried, ‘Oh, John, I am dying!' and then, as if speaking to himself, he murmured, ‘In all my past life I have done nothing either great or good.'
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At about nine o'clock on the morning of Sunday, 24 September, the Brontë family gathered round Branwell's bed to witness his life drawing to its close. He remained perfectly conscious to the end: ‘I myself, with painful, mournful joy, heard him praying softly in his dying moments', Charlotte told Williams, ‘and to the last prayer which my father offered up at his bedside, he added “amen”. How unusual that word appeared from his lips – of course you who did not know him, cannot conceive.' After a struggle of twenty minutes, which must have seemed an eternity to his distressed family, Branwell started convulsively, almost to his feet, and fell back dead into his father's arms. He was thirty-one years old.
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Watching this, the first death she had ever witnessed,
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Charlotte felt the dawnings of pity for her brother:

When the struggle was over – and a marble calm began to succeed the last dread agony – I felt as I had never felt before that there was peace and forgiveness for him in Heaven. All his errors – to speak plainly – all his vices seemed nothing to me in that moment; every wrong he had done, every pain he had caused, vanished; his sufferings only were remembered; the wrench to the natural affections only was felt… – He is at rest – and that comforts us all long before he quitted this world – Life had no happiness for him.
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Though she now felt able to forgive her impetuous brother's sins, Charlotte was not able to forget them. There was a bitterness about his life – if not
his death – that she could not put aside. Writing to Williams a week after Branwell's untimely end she revealed how deep the rift had grown between the once inseparable pair.

the removal of our only brother must necessarily be regarded by us rather in the light of a mercy than a chastisement. Branwell was his Father's and his Sisters' pride and hope in boyhood, but since Manhood, the case has been otherwise. It has been our lot to see him take a wrong bent; to hope, expect, wait his return to the right path; to know the sickness of hope deferred, the dismay of prayer baffled, to experience despair at last; and now to behold the sudden early obscure close of what might have been a noble career.

I do not weep from a sense of bereavement – there is no prop withdrawn, no consolation torn away, no dear companion lost – but for the wreck of talent, the ruin of promise, the untimely dreary extinction of what might have been a burning and a shining light. My brother was a year my junior; I had aspirations and ambitions for him once – long ago – they have perished mournfully – nothing remains of him but a memory of errors and sufferings – There is such a bitterness of pity for his life and death – such a yearning for the emptiness of his whole existence as I cannot describe – I trust time will allay these feelings.
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In thus writing his obituary, Charlotte revealed the poison which had eaten away at her relationship with her brother until it had eventually destroyed the love she had once had for him; he had committed the unforgivable sin of not living up to her expectations of him. Despite her measured cadences, all the force of her emotion was concentrated on that one word ‘obscure': the rest of her letter is written in her usual neat and even script but that one word stands out, its letters crushed together as if written in a spasm of barely suppressed savagery.

Patrick's reaction to his son's death was both more natural and more charitable, though it was reported by Charlotte with all the jealousy of the well-behaved sibling seeing a father's love of the prodigal son.

My poor Father naturally thought more of his only Son than of his daughters, and much and long as he had suffered on his account – he cried out for his loss like David for that of Absalom – My Son! My Son! And refused at first to be comforted –
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‘It was my fate to sink at the crisis when I should have collected my
strength', Charlotte told Ellen. The stress or what she called ‘the awe and trouble of the death-scene' brought on a headache and nausea on the day itself, followed by internal pain, loss of appetite and bilious fever.
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No doubt her extreme reaction was caused not just by the sudden loss of the brother who had once been so close to her, but also by the recognition that she could so easily have succumbed to the same fate. Had she given in just a little more to her feelings about Monsieur Heger, perhaps she too would have been tipped over the edge. Charlotte took to her bed for a week while the rest of the family struggled to come to terms with their loss and make preparations for the funeral. The burden of performing the last intimate rites for their brother, as well as preparing the customary burial tea, purchasing mourning clothes and stationery and organizing the printing and distribution of funeral cards therefore fell on Emily and Anne, who set about their tasks with their usual calm efficiency. Anne even had to write to Williams on Charlotte's behalf to thank him for his letters, which she was too indisposed to answer.
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It was not to be expected that Patrick would perform the burial service for his son but, rather than simply pass the duty on to his curate, he called on his old friend, Branwell's godfather, William Morgan. On Thursday, 28 September, Branwell's body was carried the short distance from his home to his father's church, where it was interred in the family vault next to the remains of his mother, aunt and sisters.
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John Brown, performing a more respectable service for him than he had so often done in the past, added Branwell's name to the family monument on the wall in the church. His death was registered by the village doctor, John Wheelhouse, who certified the cause as ‘Chronic bronchitis – Marasmus', though the symptoms and subsequent events suggest that the deterioration in Branwell's lungs and his wasting away were actually due to consumption, which was rife in the village.
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Whatever the technical causes of his death, his family and friends had no doubt whatsoever about the real reason:

Patrick Branwell Brontë was no domestic demon – he was just a man moving in a mist, who lost his way. More sinned against, mayhap, than sinning,
at least
he proved the reality of his sorrows. They killed him …
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Chapter Twenty

STRIPPED AND BEREAVED

‘“We have buried our dead out of our sight”', Charlotte wrote to William Smith Williams at the beginning of October 1848,
^l
little knowing that Branwell's death was only the beginning of her troubles. Suffering ‘terrible' nights and ‘impressions experienced on waking … such as we do not put into language',
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Charlotte was at first too preoccupied with her own misery and psychosomatic illness to notice her sisters' indisposition. In response to anxious queries from Ellen and Williams, Charlotte painted a miserable portrait of herself‘sitting muffled at the fireside, shrinking before the east wind (which for some days has been blowing wild and keen over our cold hills), and incapable of lifting a pen for any more formidable task than that of writing a few lines to an indulgent friend'.
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All the family had suffered ‘harassing coughs & colds' in the wake of the changeable weather and dreaded cold easterly winds but it was not until the end of October that Charlotte began to suspect something more serious was amiss. ‘I feel much more uneasy about my sisters than myself just now', she told Ellen.

Emily's cold and cough are very obstinate; I fear she has pain in the chest – and I sometimes catch a shortness in her breathing when she has moved at all quickly – She looks very, very thin and pale. Her reserved nature occasions one great uneasiness of mind – it is useless to question her – you get no answers – it is still more useless to recommend remedies – they are never adopted

Nor can I shut my eyes to the fact of Anne's great delicacy of constitution. The late sad event has I feel made me more apprehensive than common – I cannot help feeling much depressed sometimes – I try to leave all in God's hands, and to trust in his goodness – but faith and resignation are difficult to practise under some circumstances.
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It was a mark of their extraordinary esteem for and kindness towards their authoress, that Smith, Elder & Co. did everything in their power to assist her in these dark days. Williams sent letters written expressly to divert her; George Smith sent her a hundred pounds, proof that the third edition of
Jane Eyre was
selling well; more importantly, a large parcel of books arrived, unsolicited, for the sisters to read and return at leisure. As George Smith refused to accept their thanks, Charlotte wrote to tell him that the loan of the books was indeed well timed: ‘no more acceptable benefit could have been conferred on my dear sister Emily who is at present too ill to occupy herself with writing, or indeed with anything but reading. She smiled when I told her Mr Smith was going to send some more books – she was pleased.' The opening of the parcel and examination of the books had cheered Emily; their perusal was to occupy her for many a weary day.
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The terrible realization that there was something seriously amiss with Emily shook Charlotte out of her own hypochondria and self-pity: ‘the tie of sister is near and dear indeed,' she wrote, ‘and I think a certain harshness in her powerful, \and/ peculiar character only makes one cling to her more'.
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Those ties were to be stretched to the limit as Emily stubbornly refused to answer enquiries about her health, let alone accept any offers of assistance. Clinging to hope as a lifeline, Charlotte wrote to Williams on 2 November:

I would fain hope that Emily is a little better this evening, but it is difficult to ascertain this: she is a real stoic in illness, she neither seeks nor will accept sympathy; to put any question, to offer any aid is to annoy; she will not yield a step before pain or sickness till forced; not one of her ordinary avocations will she voluntarily renounce: you must look on, and see her do what she is unfit to do, and
not dare to say a word; a painful necessity for those to whom her health and existence are as precious as the life in their veins.
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Emily had refused all medicine and medical advice, nothing could induce her to see a physician. The problem of how to help someone who would not be helped clearly exercised Williams, as well as Emily's family, and he wrote to suggest that she should try homoeopathy. Charlotte gave his letter into Emily's hands, carefully refraining from endorsing its suggestions: ‘it is best usually to leave her to form her own judgement', she confided to Williams, ‘and
especially
not to advocate the side you wish her to favour; if you do she is sure to lean in the opposite direction, and ten to one will argue herself into non-compliance.' Emily read the letter, pronounced Williams' intention ‘kind and good' but declared him to be under a delusion – ‘Homoeopathy was only another form of Quackery'.
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Having clutched at the straw of homoeopathy, only to have it fly from her grasp, Charlotte wrote to Ellen in absolute despair.

I told you Emily was ill in my last letter – she has not rallied yet – she is very ill: I believe if you were to see her your impression would be that there is no hope: a more hollow, wasted pallid aspect I have not beheld. The deep tight cough continues; the breathing after the least exertion is a rapid pant – and these symptoms are accompanied by pain in the chest and side. Her pulse, the only time she allowed it to be felt, was found to be at 115 per minute. In this state she resolutely refuses to see a doctor; she will give no explanation of her feelings, she will scarcely allow her illness to be alluded to.
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