Brontës (140 page)

In such a mood, Charlotte had seen no reason to further spoil her pleasure by announcing her arrival to the Kay Shuttleworths who were also in London for the season. Nevertheless, Sir James soon tracked her down and at first was ‘disposed to be much hurt' that Charlotte had not told him or visited him. With characteristic energy, he tried to sweep her off at once to
stay at his house, but he met his match in Mrs Smith who recounted Charlotte's engagements and made it clear that such a move was out of the question. Charlotte thought she had ‘got off' with a promise to visit for a day, but was soon proved wrong. ‘Since Sir J.K.S. discovered that I was in London', she wrote wearily to Ellen, ‘– I have had precious little time to myself.'
⁷⁸

One Monday in particular left her absolutely drained and exhausted. She was summoned to breakfast at ten o'clock with Samuel Rogers, the eighty-eight-year-old ‘patriarch poet', who had been a friend of Wordsworth, Scott and Byron. This was ‘a most calm refined and intellectual treat' for though Rogers held regular breakfasts for celebrities, he never invited more than three guests. On this occasion Charlotte shared the honours with a relation of Lady Kay Shuttleworth, the beautiful Mrs Davenport, and Lord Glenelg. After breakfast, Sir David Brewster arrived to take her to the Great Exhibition and after two hours there, ‘when, as you may suppose – I was
very
tired', she was escorted to Lord Westminster's for a further two-hour private viewing of his splendid art gallery.
⁷⁹
While such arrangements did credit to Sir James's wish to entertain his unwilling guest, they took little account of her lack of stamina.

It was not surprising, then, that Charlotte turned down a number of invitations while she was in London. Thackeray had two or three times pressed her to allow him to introduce her to his great lady friends, but Charlotte had no inclination to be patronized by society hostesses. The Marquis of Westminster, whose pictures she viewed, invited her to a great party, but this she ‘resolutely declined'.
⁸⁰
Richard Monckton Milnes, whom she had met at Thackeray's lecture, invited her to his house in Pall Mall, but Charlotte declared she had ‘laid down for myself the rule of not going out anywhere during my stay in Town' and could not infringe that rule. It must have been something of an embarrassment, therefore, when she met him again at the Kay Shuttleworths' after Sir James bullied her into going to dinner there.
⁸¹
Only Mrs Gore, the prolific novelist who had presented Charlotte with a copy of her book
The Hamiltons
the previous year, received a more regretful refusal: ‘if the
power
had been mine to comply … the
will
was certainly not wanting'.
⁸²

Mrs Smith had been Charlotte's constant companion on her many outings because George Smith had been too preoccupied with business to be the assiduous escort he had been on previous occasions. ‘Mr S. is somewhat changed in appearance', Charlotte wrote to Ellen:

– he looks a little older, darker and more care-worn – his ordinary manner is graver – but in the evening his spirits flow back to him – things and circumstances seem here to be as usual – but I fancy there has been some crisis in which his energy and filial affection have sustained them all – this I judge from seeing that Mother and Sisters are more peculiarly bound to him than ever and that his slightest wish is an unquestioned law.
⁸³

Charlotte's acute sensitivity to atmosphere had not betrayed her. Though she was unaware of the facts, she had suspected from the start that there was more to James Taylor's sudden departure to India than met the eye. What she did not know was that George Smith had been having problems with his quondam senior partner, Patrick Stewart, who ran the firm's foreign agency. In 1848, Smith had discovered that Stewart had been defrauding the firm and had brought it close to bankruptcy. Not wishing to cause a public scandal, Smith had refrained from prosecution and kept Stewart on, but without a partnership or financial responsibility. This unsatisfactory state of affairs had been allowed to drift on until Stewart's friends persuaded him to take a job in Calcutta. Taylor's appointment seems to have been tied in with this as the firm needed someone it could trust to run the lucrative India trade. His departure placed even more pressure on George Smith, however, and more than once during Charlotte's visit he was detained in the office till three in the morning.
⁸⁴
The occasions when he was free were therefore doubly precious.

Towards the end of Charlotte's stay she had two outings with George Smith, a day in Richmond with his family
⁸⁵
and, more remarkably, an expedition with him alone to visit a phrenologist in the Strand who pursued the then fashionable vogue for reading character from the bumps and indentations in the cranium. The visit to Dr Browne was paid anonymously, the pair adopting the names of Mr and Miss Fraser, and the resulting analysis of their characters was to provide a fertile subject for future repartee. Like most pseudo-sciences, phrenology had its believers, including Charlotte, who were prepared to overlook the errors in recognizing the truths. Reading ‘Mr Fraser's' character when she returned home, Charlotte cried delightedly, ‘it is a sort of miracle –
like
–
like
–
like
as the very life itself': Smith himself considered the analysis ‘not so happy'.
⁸⁶

He is an admirer of the fair sex. He is very kind to children. Is strongly attached to his home – Is of a very affectionate and friendly disposition … Is fond of the
ideal and romantic and possesses a strongly developed organ of language. He has a just sense of the value of time, and is not prone to procrastinate. Is active and practical though not hustling or contentious.
⁸⁷

Charlotte's character had its share of uncannily accurate assessments – though no more than she herself would have been able to deduce from close observation.

Temperament for the most part nervous … Her attachments are strong and enduring – indeed this is a leading element of her character … She is sensitive and is very anxious to succeed in her undertakings, but is not so sanguine as to the probability of success. She is occasionally inclined to take a gloomier view of things than perhaps the facts of the case justify … She has more firmness than self reliance, and her sense of justice is of a very high order … She is endowed with an exalted sense of the beautiful and ideal, and longs for perfection. If not a poet her sentiments are poetical or are at least imbued with that enthusiastic glow which is characteristic of poetical feeling … In its intellectual development this head is very remarkable. The forehead is at once very large and well formed. It bears the stamp of deep thoughtfulness and comprehensive understanding. It is highly philosophical It exhibits the presence of an intellect at once perspicacious and perspic[u]ous … This Lady possesses a fine organ of language and can … express her sentiments with clearness precision and force –
⁸⁸

Of this analysis, Charlotte had ‘nothing to say – not a word', and though forbidden to comment further on George Smith's she could not resist saying, ‘If I had a right to whisper a word of counsel – it should be merely this. Whatever your present self may be – resolve with all your strength of resolution – never to degenerate thence –. Be jealous of a shadow of falling off.'
⁸⁹

Having deferred her return twice, Charlotte eventually left London on 27 June, but even then she did not go straight home. Mrs Gaskell had invited her to stay with her in Manchester for a few days at the end of her London visit and had proved accommodating throughout Charlotte's changes in plan.
⁹⁰
In the end, however, Charlotte could spare her only two days – it was nearly five weeks since she had left home and she could not put off the evil moment much longer. ‘The visit to Mrs Gaskell on my way home – let me down easily', Charlotte told George Smith.

She lives in a large – cheerful, airy house, quite out of Manchester Smoke – a garden surrounds it, and as in this hot weather, the windows were kept open – a whispering of leaves and perfume of flowers always pervaded the rooms. Mrs Gaskell herself is a woman of whose conversation and company I should not soon tire – She seems to me kind, clever, animated and unaffected – her husband is a good and kind man too.
⁹¹

The Gaskells had four daughters, Marianne, who was away at school, Meta, Flossy and Julia, the eldest being fifteen, the youngest only five, ‘all more or less pretty and intelligent', who filled the house with liveliness and gaiety. Rather to her surprise, Charlotte found the Gaskell girls endearing and was deeply touched by the way they responded to her. The youngest child, Julia, swiftly became an especial favourite. ‘Could you manage to convey a small kiss to that dear but dangerous little person – Julia?' Charlotte asked Mrs Gaskell some weeks after her return. ‘She surreptitiously possessed herself of a minute fraction of my heart, which has been missing ever since I saw her.'
⁹²

After the lively Gaskell household, it was quite a contrast when Charlotte returned home on the last day of June, but she was determined to make the best of it: ‘even Haworth Parsonage does not look gloomy in this bright summer weather: it is somewhat still – but with the windows open – I can hear a bird or two singing on certain thorn-trees in the garden'.
⁹³
The house had been thoroughly spring-cleaned by Martha in her absence, though Charlotte was somewhat shocked to find that Patrick had had the piano removed out of the parlour and taken upstairs into one of the bedrooms; ‘there it must necessarily be absurd – and in the Parlour it looked so well – besides being convenient for your books – I wonder why you don't like it –'.
⁹⁴
It does not seem to have occurred to Charlotte that the presence of the silent piano in the room where Patrick spent most of his time must have been a painful daily reminder of his three children who had all loved to play it.

Knowing how difficult Charlotte always found it to return to Haworth after the gaiety of London, George Smith had been kind enough to send her at least a couple of long cheerful letters, which she seized upon gratefully.

I had made up my mind to tell you that I should expect no letters from Cornhill for three months to come (intending afterwards to extend the abstinence to six months for I am jealous of becoming dependent on this indulgence – you –
doubtless cannot see why, because you do not live my life.) – Nor shall I now
expect
a letter – but since you say that you would like to write now and then – I cannot say
never write
without imposing on my real wishes a falsehood which they reject – and doing to them a violence to which they entirely refuse to submit;

‘Tell your Mother', she added at the end of a very long letter, ‘I shall try to cultivate good spirits as assiduously as she cultivates her geraniums.'
⁹⁵
This was easier said than done, however, especially when there was no Emily to whom she could recount all her adventures. As she had to unburden herself to someone she turned once more to her surrogate sister, Ellen Nussey, and invited her to stay. She had also invited Margaret Wooler: ‘The pleasures of Society – I cannot offer you, nor those of fine scenery, but I place very much at your command the moors – some books – a series of quiet “curling-hair times” – and an old pupil into the bargain.' Miss Wooler was already engaged, however, and offered to come later in the year. ‘In truth it was a great piece of extravagance on my part to ask you and Ellen Nussey together', Charlotte admitted; ‘it is much better to divide such good things. To have your visit in
prospect
will console me when hers is in
retrospect
.'
⁹⁶
Ellen's visit was equally quiet, enlivened only by walks on the moors and the by now customary annual visit of the Reverend Thomas Crowther, vicar of Cragg Vale, who came to preach the two Sunday school sermons on 20 July.
⁹⁷
There was also a visit from a ‘stiff little chap', Henry Robinson, a manufacturer of Keighley, who had called to enlist Patrick's support over an epitaph for his cousin, but who self-importantly took the opportunity to tell Charlotte he had discovered that she had got the name ‘Jane Eyre' from a sign in Kirkby Lonsdale. When he got home his wife had corrected him, telling him the sign read ‘J. Eyre' and referred to a James, not a Jane. Much to Charlotte and Ellen's amusement, he wrote an elaborate letter of contrition saying that he regarded Charlotte as ‘an Angel borne aloft, hovering and scanning the vicissitudes concomitant to humanity in all her various forms'.
⁹⁸

Once Ellen had gone, life at Haworth was quieter than before. Even Mr Nicholls had departed for a holiday in Ireland, having invited himself to take a ‘farewell tea' at the parsonage the evening before he left, somewhat to Charlotte's surprise. She was unable to resist the sardonic comment to Ellen that he had ‘comported himself somewhat peculiarly for him – being extremely good – mild and uncontentious'.
⁹⁹

As the late summer drew to a close, the weather turned unpleasant. Keighley Parish Feast was washed out with heavy rain and there were violent thunderstorms. The rapid changes from hot to cold which took place over the next few weeks brought illness in their wake, the old and the weak being especially affected.
¹⁰⁰
Charlotte's own health deteriorated under the strain of her enforced seclusion. ‘It is useless to tell you how I live –', Charlotte wrote to Ellen, ‘I endure life – but whether I enjoy it or not is another question.'
¹⁰¹
Ellen Nussey's mother, too, fell ill, seriously enough for Ellen to call her brother John, the court physician, from London to her bedside. The family bickerings and her mother's own ingratitude for Ellen's patient nursing were all relayed to Charlotte, who doled out sympathy and good advice from the safe distance of Haworth. As Mrs Nussey's death appeared imminent, Charlotte, with her own memories of her brother's and sisters' deaths still raw in her mind, could do no more than tell her friend that ‘I well know what you are now going through.'
¹⁰²
When she unexpectedly recovered after several months of debilitating illness, however, Charlotte was the first to be delighted. ‘I am very glad your Mother is so cleverly cheating the doctors – I do like to hear of their croakings being at fault', she exulted, adding a little later, ‘the Doctors cannot now deny that she has fairly given them the slip – I admire her as a clever old lady'.
¹⁰³
It was perhaps fortunate that, in her own delicate state of health, Charlotte had the cheering example of Mrs Nussey's recovery before her.