Brontës (131 page)

She dreaded the prospect of another journey to London for the same reason. Sir James Kay Shuttleworth was determined that she should go in his company and that he would ‘introduce' her to society. He had begun his campaign to persuade her during her visit to Gawthorpe Hall, but knowing full well that he intended to parade her as his prize, she had then ‘given notice' that she would not be ‘lionized'. Sir James was not to be denied. He bombarded her with invitations, ignoring her obvious reluctance and overriding all her objections. The parties would only be small, he declared, and she ought to regard the visit strictly in the light of a lesson which would inform her future writing. Her father, pleased at this attention and anxious that she should not allow herself to sink into depression and apathy at Haworth, was ‘eager and restless' for her to go; ‘the idea of a refusal quite hurt him'.
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In the face of such overwhelming odds, Charlotte capitulated and agreed to go at the beginning of May.

Circumstances were to work against her, however. Ellen's illness took a more serious turn and her symptoms, relayed by letter, sounded alarmingly like Anne's. Charlotte urged her to consult Mr Teale instead of her cousin, Mr Carr, in whom Charlotte had lost all confidence since the business with Patrick's cataracts; ‘as to trifling with serious illness, the thought makes one sick –'. Learning of Mr Carr's prescriptions, she remarked in disgust, ‘I abhor and distrust their “strong medicines.” He is not dealing with a horse or an elephant,'
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When Ellen did not improve, Charlotte panicked and, deciding that her friend must be at death's door, she dropped everything and rushed over to Brookroyd to see the invalid for herself. Her fears had been unnecessary for, after six days, she accompanied Ellen to Leeds where her friend was well enough to undergo a ‘dentist-operation'.
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Charlotte returned home to find her father ill with a bad cold which
threatened to develop into bronchitis. While he was still in bed the following day Joe Taylor arrived on another of his capricious visits and treated Charlotte to a four-hour diatribe on the subject of his plans to marry Amelia Ringrose. He arrived in an ‘odious humour' and within ten minutes was abusing ‘old Ringrose', who kept putting difficulties in his way. Charlotte sat quietly, ‘minding her sewing' and trying to keep her patience, but the fact was she had long since lost any sympathy with Joe Taylor's marital ambitions. After his visit to Tranby to meet Mr Ringrose in the new year, Charlotte had noticed with dismay that his attitude towards the whole affair was increasingly selfish and imbued with ‘a sort of unmanly absence of true value for the woman whose hand he seeks'. Charlotte grew ‘more and more convinced that his state of mind approximates that which was so appallingly exhibited in poor Branwell during the last few years of his life'. If such was the case, she predicted only ‘hopeless misery' for the woman he married.
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Amelia, whom she had never met but with whom she had occasionally corresponded, seemed to be the only pure thing involved: ‘she stands between her coarse father and cold, unloving suitor like innocence between a pair of world-hardened knaves', Charlotte told Ellen. What really infuriated her was the financial bargaining that was going on behind the scenes, particularly as Joe Taylor had been less than candid in telling Amelia about his prospects. ‘If J. T. has no means of keeping a wife – if he does not possess a sixpence he is sure of, how can he think of marrying a woman from whom he cannot expect she should work to keep herself?' she demanded angrily, then, working herself up into a passion, she continued:

After all J.T. is perhaps only like the majority of men: certainly those men who lead a gay life in their youth and arrive at middle age with feelings blunted and passions exhausted can have but one aim in marriage – the selfish advancement of their interest; And to think that such men take as wives – as second selves – women young, modest, sincere – pure in heart and life, with feelings all fresh and emotions all unworn, and bind such virtue and vitality to their own withered existence – such sincerity to their own hollowness – such disinterestedness to their own haggard avarice – to think this – troubles the soul to its inmost depths. Nature and Justice forbid the banns of such wedlock.

Conscious that she had hardly been discreet, Charlotte added, ‘Burn this note the minute you have read it – it is written under excitement', an
injunction which Ellen ignored.
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Though Charlotte expressed herself freely to Ellen, she could hardly do the same to Amelia, who constantly solicited her advice. ‘Be cautious but not timid, watchful but not suspicious' was the only opinion she would give, a Delphic utterance which, not unnaturally, threw Amelia into a panic. Charlotte refused to be drawn any further, contenting herself – if not Amelia – by saying that the pair should be left to manage their own affairs and neither matchmaker nor match-marrer should step between.
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Even as Joe Taylor visited her, Charlotte was still being inundated with notes, letters and gifts from his prospective bride. ‘I sometimes find it difficult to answer her letters – but am always touched by their amiability', Charlotte told Ellen, though yet another missive prompted the sour comment, ‘when she is married she must take care to be more sparing of her love to her spouse than she is of epistles to her friends'.
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It was perhaps an indication of the general irritation which the Taylor – Ringrose marriage inspired in her that Charlotte, somewhat unfairly, blamed Joe for the fact that all the household fell sick shortly after his visit: ‘he seemed to bring a lot of illness with him into the house', she remarked darkly. She herself had a bad cold and stubborn sore throat, Martha had sickness, fever and the tic-doloureux, a severe form of facial neuralgia which brought on muscular spasms, Patrick was still bronchitic and only Tabby escaped unscathed.
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The general state of ill health at least provided Charlotte with an excuse to cry off her trip to London with the Kay Shuttleworths. ‘I cannot say that I regret having missed this ordeal', Charlotte wrote of Sir James's plan to spend a week travelling down to London via the houses of his friends and relations. ‘I would as lief have walked amongst red-hot ploughshares'. The only thing she did regret was the missed opportunity to attend the Royal Literary Fund Society Dinner. As a woman she was ineligible to attend the actual dinner, but through the kindness of her father's friend John Driver, she had obtained a ticket for the Ladies' Gallery, where she would have been able to hear the after-dinner speeches of the great literati and artists, including Thackeray and Dickens. ‘I don't think all London can afford another sight to me so interesting', Charlotte sighed to Ellen.
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By the middle of May, Patrick was well enough to be left and was insistent that Charlotte should not defer her visit any longer. Reluctantly, therefore, she arranged to travel down to London on 23 May but, at the last minute, was reprieved again by a sudden and severe relapse in Sir James's health. Terrified that his literary prize might escape him, Sir James wrote
two notes to Charlotte from his sickbed claiming a promise from her that she would wait till he was better and not allow anyone else ‘“to introduce me,” as he says, “into the Oceanic life of London.”' The promise was willingly given but Charlotte gratefully seized on the fact that his doctors had prohibited company and conversation as an excuse for avoiding the visit altogether. She wrote to Lady Kay Shuttleworth, a less formidable and more tractable person than her husband, to tell her that ‘My visit – I have decided in my own mind – must be postponed indefinitely;' adding, as if to forestall argument, ‘I feel sure that in this decision I shall have your concurrence.'
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Once more then I settle myself down in the quietude of Haworth Parsonage, with books for my household companions, and an occasional letter for a visitor – a mute society but neither quarrelsome, nor vulgarizing nor unimproving.
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If there was relief in avoiding the Kay Shuttleworths and their introduction to London society, there was also inevitably disappointment and the threat of encroaching depression. A letter from Williams, complaining of being chained to his desk at Cornhill during the warm spring days, prompted a sad reply.

It is a pity to think of you all toiling at your desks in such genial weather as this. For my part I am free to walk on the moors – but when I go out there alone – everything reminds me of the times when others were with me and then the moors seem a wilderness, featureless, solitary, saddening – My sister Emily had a particular love for them, and there is not a knoll of heather, not a branch of fern, not a young bilberry leaf not a fluttering lark or linnet but reminds me of her. The distant prospects were Anne's delight, and when I look round, she is in the blue tints, the pale mists, the waves and shadows of the horizon. In the hill-country silence their poetry comes by lines and stanzas into \my/ mind: once I loved it – now I dare not read it – and am driven often to wish I could taste one draught of oblivion and forget much that, while mind remains, I never shall forget. Many people seem to recall their departed relatives with a sort of melancholy complacency – but I think these have not watched them through lingering sickness nor witnessed their last moments – it is these reminiscences that stand by your bedside at night, and rise at your pillow in the morning At the end of all, however, there exists the great hope – Eternal Life is theirs now.
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In such a mood, it was fortunate that Charlotte still had her friends at Smith, Elder & Co. Learning from Williams that Charlotte had had to cancel her London visit, George Smith persuaded his mother to invite her to stay with them at their new home at No. 76, Gloucester Terrace in Hyde Park Gardens. There was a world of difference between the prospect of staying with the Smiths, where she would be comfortably protected and allowed to do as she wished, and staying with the Kay Shuttleworths who only wanted to show her off to London society. Having given her promise to Sir James, however, Charlotte had great difficulty in keeping faith. Writing to Mrs Smith on 25 May, she explained her predicament but said that if she did go to the Kay Shuttleworths she would only do so for a few days and then would be ‘excessively disposed, and probably profoundly thankful to subside into any quiet corner of your drawing-room, where I might find a chair of suitable height'. Enclosing a pair of white knitted baby-socks, which she had begun during her last visit and only just finished, Charlotte remarked, ‘I am sorry you have changed your residence as I shall now again lose my way in going up and down stairs, and stand in great tribulation, contemplating several doors, and not knowing which to open.'
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Despite telling Mrs Smith she could not make any plans for at least a fortnight or three weeks, only five days later Charlotte was comfortably ensconced in Gloucester Terrace. The day before setting off she had written to Lady Kay Shuttleworth to make her excuses for going back on her promise. ‘I am summoned to London to-morrow', she declared, as though she had been compelled to go, ‘on a little business which it seems cannot well be deferred.' She would be staying with her publisher, whose address she gave, ‘on condition of being allowed to be very quiet, and not taken into company', and she would call on the Kay Shuttleworths before she returned to Yorkshire.
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If she had hoped to escape Sir James's clutches, she was mistaken. Before she had been three full days in London, Sir James had called twice and his wife once: to Charlotte's ‘great horror' he talked of taking her to Hampton Court and Windsor – ‘God knows how I shall get on –', Charlotte wrote in despair to Ellen, ‘I perfectly dread it.'
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Charlotte's ‘little matters of business to transact', it need hardly be said, were simply a convenient excuse and had not really required her presence; she had her dividends on her money in the Funds to sort out at the bank and a power of attorney to arrange so that she would not be required to do this in person in future. The only other business which could lay claim to her attention was the publication of the first cheap edition of
Jane Eyre
which Smith, Elder & Co. had launched in a single volume at the beginning of May. Charlotte had seen and approved an early copy then, so there was nothing to be done in relation to this ‘business' either.
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Nor was the visit as quiet as Charlotte suggested. In the first three days alone she went to the opera, where she was evidently more impressed by the elegant dresses of the lords and ladies in the audience than by the music, to the exhibition at the Royal Academy, where she particularly admired Landseer's portrait of Wellington on the field of Waterloo and ‘The Last Man', ‘a grand, wonderful picture' by her childhood favourite John Martin, and to the Zoological Gardens, for which the secretary had sent her an honorary ticket of admission. This last excursion seems to have interested her more than the others, for she gave her father a detailed account of the ‘inexpressible noises' made by the American birds, the great Ceylon toads ‘not much smaller than Flossy' and a cobra with ‘the eyes and face of a fiend'.
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There were plenty of other outings which George Smith, with his customary good humour and perception, organized to please his visitor. On one occasion he took her to the Ladies' Gallery of the House of Commons so that she could indulge her lifelong interest in politics. Unable to sit with her, he arranged that she had only to look at him when she got tired and he would come up and fetch her away. George Smith waited and waited for a signal: ‘There were many eyes, they all seemed to be flashing signals to me, but much as I admired Miss Brontës eyes I could not distinguish them from the others.' Eventually, fearing that he must have missed the signal and realizing that he was probably causing quite a stir by staring into the Ladies' Gallery, he went round to collect her and apologized for keeping her waiting. Charlotte replied, ‘I made no signal, I did not wish to come away', and, knowing her handsome host's liking for a pretty face, added, ‘Perhaps there were other signals from the Gallery.'
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