Romancing Miss Bronte (38 page)

“That’s most unfair.”

“Unfair? Unfair?! Why, it will be proof that his sentiments are false and calculated for his own gain. If he renounces you in order to take back his post, you will have your proof of his shallowness.”

But Arthur would not cede to her father’s blackmail. He simply did not respond to the demands. Charlotte felt sadly triumphant. At least he had not betrayed his love for her—worthless as that may have been to everyone except himself.

In the midst of this turmoil Charlotte received an invitation from Mrs. Smith to visit. Smith, Elder was preparing for a speedy publication of
Villette
, and George urged her to come to London to tackle the proofs. Her father encouraged her to accept. Charlotte supposed it was simply to get her out of the way.

A week later, Charlotte found herself at the Smiths’ splendid new house in Gloucester Terrace, sitting in her room with the proof sheets spread out on her desk. A crisis at work kept George at the office until late in the evenings, and she had a good deal of time to herself. She spent her afternoons visiting asylums, prisons, and orphanages and avoided society.

It was a program greatly to her liking, motivated by the hope of finding in those wretched halls an inspiration for her next book, although George’s mother and sisters thought her tastes a bit too gloomy. She saw Harriet Martineau but did not even tell Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth that she was in London.

She kept herself busy enough and might have put all the business about Arthur out of her head were it not for the frequent letters from her father with accounts of Arthur’s miseries.

Charlotte was not eager to leave London. She was disappointed that George could find so little time for her, but she could see that the crisis at Cornhill was grave.

“You mustn’t be alarmed, dear,” Mrs. Smith reassured her with a brave face. “Just the inevitable consequences of that unfortunate business with his partner. George has inherited a rather untidy financial situation and he insists on setting it straight without resorting to drastic measures, if you know what I mean. But it will all get sorted out. I have the utmost faith in my boy.”

Sometimes George left home at nine in the morning and spent the entire night in his office dictating lengthy business letters to his clerks to be dispatched the next morning to accounts in India or Hong Kong. He would appear at breakfast pale and worn, trying his best to conceal his worries. He had even been forced to abandon his habitual early morning rides in Rotten Row. George’s sisters and mother tended to his every need with solemn concern, in the way of women who depend upon the men they love for their survival. Their devotion moved Charlotte deeply, but the bond of family was one from which she was excluded. Although their courtesy to her never wavered, she felt herself more isolated than ever before.

But there was something else, an uneasiness that preyed on her mind. She was nagged by the thought that George was avoiding her or, at the very best, that he was secretly relieved to have a legitimate excuse to stay away. Their candid conversations had been replaced by dry talk about business. Charlotte wondered if he had been disturbed by the way she
had portrayed him—and her feelings for him—in
Villette
, but she could not be sure of it. More and more, she became convinced that their friendship was not the true one she had first imagined, where sympathies were real and would outlast circumstances. It was an intimacy predicated on expediency. Were she to fail him as an author, the friendship would cease.

She stayed until the end of January, to see
Villette
published and make sure gift copies were sent to Ellen and other friends. On the way back she stopped in Manchester to spend several days with her new friend the author Elizabeth Gaskell and her family. Elizabeth’s little girls were beautiful, boisterous miniatures of their good-natured mother, of whom Charlotte was growing increasingly fond. It was the kind of genial domestic scene that contrasted so sharply with her own sad family life, and she returned home in a despondent frame of mind. It was February and the ground was frozen black and hard.

Barely had she disentangled herself from Tabby’s embrace and untied her bonnet when her father launched into a tirade about Arthur. He tailed her into the dining room and hovered over her while she knelt down to greet the dogs, and while Martha lit the coals in the grate, he recounted how Arthur had sent off his application to the missionary society.

“Put him in quite a pickle, as he was forced to request a recommendation from me.”

“I’m sure you spoke fairly of him, Papa.”

“Fair! I was indulgent! Sang his praises and breathed not a word of his perfidy. I should like to see him gone. I wish him no ill but, rather, good and wish that every woman may avoid him forever unless she should be determined on her own misery. All the wealth of the Australian gold mines would not make him and any wife he might have happy.”

“So he intends to serve in Australia.”

“Indeed. It’s all settled.”

“I see.” She spoke in a subdued voice. It struck her how intensely unhappy he must be to cut ties with England and voyage so far away. She
had a brief flash of Arthur on a ship in a storm sailing to the colonies: the ending she had envisioned for Paul Emanuel in
Villette
. But that was fiction. The thought of Arthur drowning in an attempt to escape his unhappiness was not how she wanted things to end.

“I’ll bring you a nice cup of tea, miss,” Martha said as she brushed the coal dust from her hands. She lingered, hoping to catch more of the conversation, but Charlotte sent her back to the kitchen and then settled herself on a stool before the fire to warm her hands. Her father stood beside her in his worn-out coat and his slippers, chewing on his cold pipe and bristling with rancor.

“You know we had the bishop and the school inspector here.”

“Did it go well?”

“I do wish you had been home. I was quite overwhelmed, Charlotte. But the visit went well—that is, until the end when they were all here for tea. I addressed that man, that odious reprobate, I spoke to him with civility, but he sat there during tea throwing dark looks at me, doing his best to look glum and dejected, and then he dared to speak sharply to me! I cannot forgive him this sort of treatment in public!”

“I am sorry, Papa. That is regrettable,” Charlotte said quietly, “since he is a good man at bottom—”

“Good? Good?!”

“Well, it is a sad thing that Nature has not put goodness into a more attractive form.”

“Into the bargain he managed to get up a most pertinacious and needless dispute with the school inspector.”

“Oh my,” she sighed. “Up to his old tricks again.”

“I count the days until he is gone and I can live my life in peace.”

“When does he leave?”

“At the end of May. We shall be rid of him forever.”

“Here’s Martha. Oh, good, she’s put out the biscuits I brought from London. We’ll have a nice tea, Papa, without any more talk of Mr. Nicholls. Come now. Sit down. You mustn’t excite yourself any further.”

When her father retired to his study, Charlotte immediately wrote a
letter to Ellen, urging, “You must come quickly, dear Ellen. Please try to arrange your schedule. There are matters I must confide to you—I need not tell you the subject. The situation here at home is most trying. Try to stay long enough to be here when the reviews of
Villette
come out.”

Charlotte sat on the bed in her nightgown and a heavy shawl, her knees tucked under her chin, while Ellen brushed her hair in the way that always calmed her, with long, soothing strokes. It was an intimate ritual they had shared since their schoolgirl days.

“You can do much better than poor Mr. Nicholls, you know. Really, you would be throwing yourself away. You’re Currer Bell. You cannot marry just any old goose.”

“I have my own objections, of course I do. But this isn’t what concerns Papa. He only sees the situation in terms of himself. His pride would be offended. Not mine. His.”

“Charlotte, if he came from an old family, with a good name, it wouldn’t be so bad. But to be poor and with nothing else? You’d be taking a step down in society.”

“May I remind you that Papa’s family has no claims to distinction. He comes from a poor Irish farming family, just like Arthur does. Doesn’t it strike you as hypocritical? All our lives, the wealthy landowners here have looked down on us because we were so poor. And now he treats Mr. Nicholls with contempt for the same reason.”

Charlotte heaved her shoulders in a sigh. She lifted a soft brown coil of hair and ran her fingers through it. “I think I’m losing my hair.”

Ellen rapped her skull with the brush. “You are
not
losing your hair. You don’t have feelings for him, do you?”

“I don’t love him in the least. But if you had seen him the night he proposed to me—. I can’t forget his face, it still lingers in my mind—this man I have known for years, always so stern and hard-featured, crumbling before my eyes. I’ve never seen a man look like that, and I promise you, it’s not easily forgotten. I believe he does love me—I believe he loves me truly and deeply.”

It was the first time she had expressed these sentiments aloud, and the words were difficult to speak. She had received other proposals of marriage in her younger years—Ellen’s brother Henry and that lively little curate from Dublin who’d followed up his one visit to the parsonage with a letter asking for her hand—but neither man had loved her truly and deeply, or even loved her at all.

“But you don’t feel the same,” Ellen said.

“No,” she said sadly. “I do not.”

“All the better. It would be quite unfortunate if you did.”

There was a certain complacency in Ellen’s manner and a touch of self-importance. The sort of attitude that drew lines to keep others out. Ellen had drawn a circle around Charlotte, Charlotte’s father, and herself. Arthur was excluded, exiled to the land of the unworthies.

Arthur was too numb to feel the puzzled stares of the churchwardens who sat around the table in the upstairs meeting room of the Black Bull. Michael Merrall wore a grieved expression, and William Thomas tugged at his beard the way he did when something perturbed him. Wind hammered the rain against the windows.

Arthur was saying, “I have for some time felt a strong inclination to assist in ministering to the thousands of our fellow countrymen in the colonies. These men have been in a great measure deprived of the means of grace. I would hope to remedy that by my service in the missionary society.”

It was clear to all of them that he had memorized his short speech. He fell into silence and stared sullenly at an invisible spot on the smoke-darkened wall.

“Tell us why you’re going. Truthfully, sir. What has happened?”

Arthur spoke quietly. “I can no longer remain here.”

“Has anyone asked you to go? Are you being forced out?”

“There are some who would wish it so.”

“Speak plainly, sir. There’s been a terrible quarrel between the two of you. Is it Mr. Brontë’s fault?”

He shook his head firmly. “It is my own fault. Only mine.”

“Do you blame Mr. Brontë?”

“I do not. If anyone is to blame in the matter, it is I.”

“Are you leaving willingly?”

Arthur shook his head, and his eyes swelled with tears. “I do not leave willingly. It saddens me greatly.”

Amid all this turmoil,
Villette
was published. On the whole, the reviews were positive, as Charlotte had predicted. Mr. Williams clipped them from the London newspapers and posted them to her.

From the
Literary Gazette:

G. H. Lewes reviewed it for the
Leader
. Charlotte thought he showed himself exceedingly generous:

Critics called it “powerful” and spoke of its “well-observed, picturesque characters” depicted in a “masterly way,” of descriptions of nature “as good as Turner to the mind’s eye,” of its “delightful freshness, forceful sentiments.” “Brain and heart are both held in suspense by the fascinating power of the writer,” said one. The
Athenaeum
thought that M. Paul, that “snappish, choleric, vain, childlike and noble-hearted arbiter” of Lucy Snowe’s destiny, was a “brilliantly distinct character.” Detractors complained of its morbidity and improbabilities, and at the same time lauded its “redeeming beauties and surges of passion.”