Brontës (146 page)

The reason for George Smith's silence now became apparent. He
was
unhappy with the third volume, though not enough to turn down the manuscript or demand a rewrite. What he objected to was the fact that his own character, Dr John, had almost completely dropped out of sight and that the story now pursued the growing relationship between Lucy Snowe and Monsieur Paul Emanuel. ‘I must pronounce you right again, in your complaint of the transfer of interest in the 3rd Vol – from one set of characters to another', Charlotte replied. ‘It is not pleasant, and will probably be found as unwelcome to the reader, as it was, in a sense, compulsory upon the writer.' It would not have been possible for Charlotte to have united Lucy Snowe and Dr John in marriage: even under the apparently safe mantle of fiction there were bounds beyond which she dared not step. ‘The spirit of Romance would have indicated another course, far more flowery and inviting … but this would have been unlike Real Life, inconsistent with Truth – at variance with Probability.'
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George Smith, it seems, would have preferred the romantic solution. Though he undoubtedly had a sound literary case in arguing that the transfer of interest was too sudden and unexpected, there seems to have been a much more personal reason behind his disappointment. Though he continued to ‘make a mystery of his “reason”‘, it was clear that ‘something in the 3rd vol. sticks confoundedly in his throat', so much so that nearly three weeks after the manuscript had been sent to Cornhill, Williams had still not been permitted to read it. In a second letter, which Charlotte withheld from Ellen allegedly because ‘so many words are scarce legible – you would have no pleasure in reading it', George Smith made it clear that he thought the alliance between Dr John and Paulina misjudged. ‘She is an odd, fascinating little puss,' he had told Charlotte in response to her question, but added ‘crabbedly' that he was ‘not in love with her'.
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Was this, one cannot help wondering, a subtle suggestion that George Smith himself was in love with Charlotte Brontë? Or, at the very least, that he would have preferred her to any of the society beauties whom Charlotte was always pointing out as appropriate brides for him? Even Charlotte admitted that the fictional bride she had given him was a failure. She had aimed at making Paulina's character ‘the most beautiful' in the book but she had turned out to be the weakest, ‘and if this be the case – the fault lies in its wanting the germ of the
real
, in its being purely imaginary'. Was this a covert suggestion that the ideal bride for George Smith was equally illusory? The correspondence was clearly getting too near the bone for George Smith. ‘He tells me … that he will answer no more questions about “Villette”‘, Charlotte was obliged to tell Ellen.
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On 8 December, Charlotte returned home from Brookroyd. The brief visit had, as usual, proved beneficial to her though it resulted in her abandoning her plan to go on to Ambleside. Miss Wooler had also come to stay and she had joined Ellen in arguing that it was quite wrong of Charlotte to go to the house of a self-declared atheist. Under their combined pressure, she gave way, ‘both my Father and my friends in this neighbourhood being so much opposed to the visit – that without giving them pain – I could not please Miss Martineau'.
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It was her friends' opposition, however, that proved more potent than her father's. Nevertheless, even to them, Charlotte remained stout in Miss Martineau's defence. ‘My dear Miss Wooler –', she wrote to her former headmistress who had returned to the attack,

I read attentively all you say about Miss Martineau: the sincerity and constancy
of your solicitude touch me very much; I should grieve to neglect or oppose your advice, and yet I do not feel that it would be right to give Miss Martineau up entirely … To speak the truth – my dear Miss Wooler – I believe if you were in my place, and knew Miss Martineau as I do – if you had shared with me the proofs of her rough but genuine kindliness, and had seen how she secretly suffers from abandonment, you would be the last to give her up; you would separate the sinner from the Sin, and feel as if the right lay rather in quietly adhering to her in her strait – while that adherence is unfashionable and unpopular – than in turning on her your back when the world sets the example. I believe she is one of those whom opposition and desertion make obstinate in error; while patience and tolerance touch her deeply and keenly, and incline her to ask of her own heart whether the course she has been pursuing may not possibly be a faulty course.
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Charlotte's laudable loyalty, which may have been strengthened by fellow feeling because she herself had been ostracized by certain circles in Birstall and Dewsbury after the condemnation of
Jane Eyre
, was not to be rewarded. Miss Martineau, highly affronted that Charlotte had suggested she lost friends by publishing her infamous Atkinson letters, demanded the excision of this letter from Mrs Gaskell's biography.
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With no prospect of an early visit to Ambleside, Charlotte determined to accept Mrs Smith's invitation and go to London after Christmas.
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Before she could do so, however, a domestic crisis turned her whole world upside down. On 13 December, Arthur Bell NichoUs, her father's curate for the past seven and a half years, asked her to marry him. The proposal was not entirely unexpected. ‘I know not whether you have ever observed him specially – when staying here –:' Charlotte wrote to Ellen,

your perception in these matters is generally quick enough – too quick – I have sometimes thought – yet as you never said anything – I restrained my own dim misgivings – which could not claim the sure guide of vision. What Papa has seen or guessed – I will not inquire – though I may conjecture. He has minutely noticed all Mr Nicholls's low spirits – all his threats of expatriation – all his symptoms of impaired health – noticed them with little sympathy and much indirect sarcasm.

On Monday evening – Mr N— was here to tea. I vaguely felt – without clearly seeing – as without seeing, I have felt for some time – the meaning of his constant looks – and strange, feverish restraint.

After tea – I withdrew to the dining-room as usual. As usual – Mr N sat with Papa till between eight & nine o'clock. I then heard him open the parlour door as if going. I expected the clash of the front-door – He stopped in the passage: he tapped: like lightning it flashed on me what was coming. He entered – he stood before me. What his words were – you can guess; his manner – you can hardly realize – nor can I forget it – Shaking from head to foot, looking deadly pale, speaking low, vehemently yet with difficulty – he made me for the first time feel what it costs a man to declare affection where he doubts response.

The spectacle of one ordinarily so statue-like – thus trembling, stirred, and overcome gave me a kind of strange shock. He spoke of sufferings he had borne for months – of sufferings he could endure no longer – and craved leave for some hope. I could only entreat him to leave me then and promise a reply on the morrow. I asked if he had spoken to Papa. He said – he dared not – I think I half-led, half put him out of the room. When he was gone I immediately went to Papa – and told him what had taken place. Agitation and Anger disproportionate to the occasion ensued – if I had loved Mr N— and heard such epithets applied to him as were used – it would have transported me past my patience – as it was – my blood boiled with a sense of injustice – but Papa worked himself into a state not to be trifled with – the veins on his temples started up like whip-cord – and his eyes became suddenly blood-shot – I made haste to promise that Mr NichoUs should on the morrow have a distinct refusal.

I wrote yesterday and got this note. There is no need to add to this statement any comment – Papa's vehement antipathy to the bare thought of any one thinking of me as a wife – and Mr NichoUs' distress – both give me pain. Attachment to Mr N— you are aware I never entertained – but the poignant pity inspired by his state on Monday evening – by the hurried revelation of his sufferings for many months – is something galling and irksome. That he cared something for me – and wanted me to care for him – I have long suspected – but I did not know the degree or strength of his feelings.
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Charlotte's relations with Mr NichoUs had undergone a sea-change in recent times. From holding him in cold contempt, making little distinction between him and the other curates whom she had so viciously lampooned in
Shirley
, she had begun to refer to him in a more kindly fashion. The previous summer, in 1851, on the eve of his departure for a holiday in Ireland, he had invited himself to tea and behaved ‘somewhat peculiarly for him – being extremely good – mild and uncontentious'.
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This summer, for the first time, she had included good wishes to Mr NichoUs, as well as to Tabby
and Martha, in her letters from Filey to Patrick, suggesting that she was beginning to see him as a member of the household circle. Her comments on the little church at Filey, which she would have liked him to see and which would have made him laugh out loud, indicate that their earlier ‘cold, faraway sort of civility' had given way to a friendlier relationship.
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No doubt, too, his willing assumption of Patrick's duties after his stroke had made a favourable impression and led to increased intimacy.

Arthur Bell Nicholls is a shadowy figure, not least because he deliberately sought retirement. In itself, Charlotte's fame meant nothing to him: it was the woman he loved, not the authoress. It was typical of his often overlooked sensitivity, however, that he waited until she had finished
Villette
before declaring the passion which, he knew, would throw the parsonage into disarray. A big, tall man, with a strong square face, framed by dark hair and formidably long side whiskers, Arthur Nicholls had something of the Rochester physique. Like Rochester, too, he was a man of hidden depths, as his emotional outburst proved. Though frequently portrayed as something of a bigot in religious matters and stern, harsh and unbending in person, there are glimpses of him which show him in a much more favourable light. A former pupil at the church school in Stanbury, which had been his particular responsibility, remembered how he used to visit the school twice a week, accompanied by his brown retriever and always bringing sweets for the children. Another little girl recalled how he would place her on the back of the dog, Plato, which was a cross between a Newfoundland bitch and a water spaniel, and ride her across the fields, to her home, from the parsonage. An even more delightful picture is conjured up by the Haworth man who regularly accompanied Mr Nicholls up on to the moors for trout-tickling expeditions: ‘he was fearful fond of going to Smith Bank', the sportsman recounted, ‘and we gate mony a lot. We'd no rods or lines … but just put our hands under them as they lay under the stones in the pools and laiked [played] with them, and when we gate hod on them we threw them as far as we could into t'field'.
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The fact that Mr Nicholls had the common touch did him no favours in Patrick's eyes. He was furious with his curate, not only because he had not sought Patrick's permission before proposing, which suggested subterfuge on Mr Nicholls' part, but also for his presumption in daring to propose to Charlotte. ‘I am afraid also that Papa thinks a little too much about his want of money; he says the match would be a degradation – that I should be throwing myself away – that he expects me, if I marry at all – to do very differently;
in short – his manner of viewing the subject – is – on the whole, far from being one in which I can sympathize—'. Patrick could not bear the thought that his brilliant and successful daughter, who might, with his approval, have had James Taylor, should succumb to the common lot of clergymen's daughters and marry her father's curate. He treated Mr Nicholls with ‘a hardness not to be bent – and a contempt not to be propitiated', refusing even to speak to him and communicating with him only by letter.
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Patrick's overreaction to the whole situation was perhaps the one thing calculated to drive Charlotte into Mr Nicholls' arms. Her sense of justice would not allow her suitor's motives and character to be unfairly impugned. When Patrick wrote ‘a most cruel note' to his curate, who was horrifying his landlady, Martha Brown's mother, by refusing his meals, Charlotte ‘felt that the blow must be parried, and I thought it right to accompany the pitiless despatch by a line to the effect that – while Mr N. must never expect me to reciprocate the feeling he had expressed – yet at the same time – I wished to disclaim participation in sentiments calculated to give him pain'. She also ‘exhorted him to maintain his courage and spirits', an expression which Mr Nicholls may have interpreted as evidence that all was not yet lost. In any event, having offered his resignation, he then attempted to take it back again. This Patrick would not allow, unless he had a written promise ‘never again to broach the obnoxious subject either to him or to me'.
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Torn between wanting to stay so that he would not lose touch with Charlotte and refusing to give a promise he could not keep, Mr Nicholls found himself in an impossible situation. As everyone lined up behind Patrick in condemning and vilifying the curate, Charlotte was increasingly drawn to his defence: ‘but I am sorry for one other person whom nobody pities but me', she told Ellen,

Martha is bitter against him: John Brown says
he should like to shoot him
. They don't understand the nature of his feelings – but I see now what they are. Mr N is one of those who attach themselves to very few, whose sensations are close and deep – like an underground stream, running strong but in a narrow channel. He continues restless and ill – he carefully performs the occasional duty – but does not come near the Church procuring a substitute every Sunday.
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