The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Brontë (39 page)

“I am sorry, sir.”

“May I have the honour of continuing to write to you, Miss Brontë?”

“You may, sir.” (My shoes were now very wet indeed.) “It was good to see you, sir.”

“And you, Miss Brontë. Good-bye.”

On the 19th of September, Mrs. Gaskell came to visit me: her first visit to Haworth. For four days, I poured out my heart to
that good and wise lady, confiding everything that had happened, and all the confusion of my thoughts and feelings.

“How hard-hearted your father is!” cried Mrs. Gaskell on our second afternoon, as we rambled on the heath, which had faded to the natural green and brown of early autumn. “How can he object to Mr. Nicholls’s occupation, when he is a clergyman himself? And as you say, Mr. Nicholls has proved his worth; he was your father’s right-hand man for eight years.”

“Papa is entirely unreasonable on this point. He wants me to marry a great man—a man of wealth and standing—or none at all.”

Mrs. Gaskell shook her head. A woman of medium build, she was half a head taller than I, with a pale complexion and pleasant features; her soft, dark brown hair was swept up under a bonnet that matched the deep violet hue of her fine silk dress. “If money is the primary issue, could not Mr. Nicholls find a house and a more lucrative appointment, as the pastor of his own parish?”

“He should have, Mrs. Gaskell, many years since; but if he did, he would be required to move away, and then we certainly could not be together.”

“Why not?”

I sighed. “You may think me wrong, or foolish—but papa, for all his faults, is an old man, and we are each other’s last relation in the world. He will never give up his parish until the day he dies. I gave papa my word that as long as he lives, I would not abandon him to a solitary existence; and I never will.”

“Well, I must say—after all your father has said and done, for you to stand by him so loyally—I respect you for it, Miss Brontë but I do not know that I should be capable of it.”

“He has stood by
me
loyally all my life, Mrs. Gaskell; I owe him something for that. I admit: at times I am so angry with papa now, I cannot bear to be in the same room with him. He has treated Mr. Nicholls very cruelly and unjustly; yet in truth, I have behaved no better. I witnessed Mr. Nicholls’s suffering for months, and did nothing about it. With one word from me,
he never would have left Haworth; yet in spite of everything, Mr. Nicholls remains persistent in his aim, and unwavering in his affections.”

“That speaks well of him. Tell me, Miss Brontë: do you like Mr. Nicholls? Do you respect him?”

“Very much. Yet, he is a man of many contradictions.” I voiced my concerns about Mr. Nicholls’s Puseyite prejudices, and my fears that they would stand in the way of my association with her (for Mrs. Gaskell was a Unitarian, and her husband a Unitarian minister) and some of my other friends. “Should not a husband and wife be in accord in
this,
the most important of all subjects: their basic religious tenets?”

“Not necessarily. If a foundation of love and respect exists, I believe a couple can survive in harmony despite disparate religious beliefs.”

“Perhaps so,” I replied, still unconvinced, “but this is not my only concern. We are different in other ways. Mr. Nicholls is actively concerned with the needs of the community—an excellent clerical virtue, and worthy of one’s highest regard—while I am more reclusive, a devotee of the writer’s life. And when it comes to my work, while Mr. Nicholls admires it with a sincere enthusiasm—” I broke off with a blush.

“Do you mean that Mr. Nicholls presents more of a layman’s view when it comes to critiquing your writing and such? That you fear there are places where he cannot follow you intellectually?”

“Sometimes.”

“Do not be embarrassed to admit this to
me,
Charlotte,” said Mrs. Gaskell, as she took my arm. “You are a very intelligent woman, and not many men
could
keep pace with you. At the risk of self-aggrandisement, I shall make a confession: I have had the same concerns with my own dear husband at times, these many years.”

“Have you?”

“William is a very devoted clergyman, just like your Mr. Nicholls. For all his success and intelligence, however, and all
his support of my work—it was at
his
suggestion that I turned to writing, to distract me from my grief when our first two sons died in infancy—my fiction is not something which my husband can discuss at any length, nor with much depth and insight; but that is what friends and fellow writers are for. One man cannot be everything to a woman, nor should he be expected to be. This disparity in your aptitudes can be a good thing, Charlotte. Mr. Nicholls can ground you a bit more in the real world, and you can introduce him to goodness in sects where he thought it could not be.”

I considered that. “Mr. Nicholls
does
have a most sincere love of goodness wherever he sees it.” We were heading back through the fields now, and when we reached a stile, I paused and said, “How do you manage it all, Mrs. Gaskell? How do you find time to write, when you have a husband, a house, and children to care for?”

“It is not easy, but a clever woman can find time to do the things that matter to her.” She looked at me with great seriousness. “If it were not for your father’s opposition, would you wish to marry Mr. Nicholls? Could you love him?”

“I wish I knew.”

“If Mr. Nicholls truly loves
you
as much as you say he does, I think you owe it to yourself, and to him, to find out.”

Something was holding me back. Although Mr. Nicholls and I continued to exchange secret letters, in which he expressed his regard for me in the most passionate possible language, I still, inexplicably, could not bring myself to take the next crucial step: to defy papa, and insist on my right to openly pursue a relationship with my prospective suitor.

Then one night in mid-December—when rain pounded against the rooftop and spattered against the casements, and the east wind wailed through the eaves like a Banshee—I had a dream.

In my dream, there was no storm; it was a bright and cloudless summer day. I was walking across the moors, and had just
begun my descent towards a familiar wooded hollow, when I spied two distant figures hiking along the river-bank in my direction. It was Emily and Anne! My heart pounded in a frenzy of shock and joy as I half ran, half flew down the incline and along the stony path to meet them.

“Emily! Anne! Is it really you?”

I longed to take them in my arms; but the sisters in my dream stood aloof, their faces sullen and clouded with disapproval. “We cannot stay long,” said Emily. “We have only come to bring you a message.”

“What message?”

“We have been watching you, and we are very disappointed,” said Anne.

“Charlotte: you are alive,” said Emily. “You have all of life’s gifts at your disposal. Yet you ignore them, and act as if you are as dead and buried as we are.”

“What do you mean? How do I act dead and buried?”

“You are buried in the past, just as Branwell was,” answered Anne.

“That is untrue,” I countered defensively.

“Do you think we do not know your secret?” said Emily. “Do you think we cannot see?”

“What secret? What do you see?”

“Charlotte: we know what happened that night in the garden in Brussels,” said Anne.

“You know?” I whispered, mortified.

“We know,” repeated Emily, “and we know about the letters. We know you still read them.”

My cheeks flamed. “It has been years since I last looked at those letters.”

“Yet you still think of him,” accused Emily. “All the heroes in your books, save one, are professors, or Belgian, or both! Even your Mr. Rochester is modelled after him. Why do you think that is?”

I could not answer.

“Monsieur Héger’s memory has created such a fixed idea in
your mind, that it keeps you blind and ignorant of what is right in front of your nose,” declared Emily.

“You have let it hold you back far too long,” added Anne.

“It is time,” said Emily, “to move on.”

“Move on,” repeated Anne, “and leave Belgium behind.”

I awoke with a gasp to the inky darkness of the stormy night, my heart racing.

Belgium, again.

As the first dim rays of a cold December dawn filtered in through the shutters, I reflected upon my dream. It had been ten years since my return from Belgium. I thought I had long since moved on from my ill-fated relationship with Monsieur Héger; but were my sisters right? Had I truly been buried in the past all this time, worshipping, against will and reason, at the altar of a man who had not loved me? Was that obsession holding me back even now, preventing me from opening my heart to the love of another man?

Oh! Oh! Why, oh why, I wondered suddenly, had I wasted so much time, aching with regret for something that could not be? A paroxysm of sadness overcame me, and I wept. How long I remained thus, lying in bed, sobbing from the depths of my soul, I cannot say; but I poured out all the grief I had denied myself over the past decade. I wept for my sisters and brother, who had been taken from this life far too soon; I wept for my broken spirit, engendered by their loss; and I wept at my own folly, for allowing a secret infatuation to consume and blind me for so many years.

At last, my tears were spent. My head ached; my throat was raw; my eyes burned; at the same time, something nagged at the corners of my mind: there was something important, I realised, that remained undone.

I rose and quickly dressed. From my dresser drawer, I untombed the rosewood box, and unwrapped the slim, beribboned packet of letters within. I glanced at the hearth: it was stone cold; it was too early, as well, for a fire in the kitchen; but burning was not a proper fate for these documents in any case, I decided.

The sun had nearly risen now. Ignoring the pain which yet thudded within my skull, I trod silently downstairs to the larder. I found a thick glass jar residing therein, containing the last dregs of a marmalade I had made the previous summer. I transferred the jar’s meager contents to a plate, and thoroughly washed both jar and lid. I then took Monsieur Héger’s letters, made a little roll of them, placed them in the jar and sealed it. Wrapping myself up against the cold, I took the jar and set off across the fog-enshrouded moors, to that same distant hollow where I had encountered my sisters in my dream.

No snow had yet fallen, but the ground was hard and covered with a frost; I knew that digging would be impossible, but I had something else in mind. The object of my journey was an ancient, gnarled tree which grew beside the river-bed, beneath whose shady bower my sisters and I had passed many a pleasant summer hour with a book. Although very old, the tree was of sound timber still; and I knew of a rather large hollow near its root, which was partly hidden by a thick carpet of overgrowth and creepers.

I went directly to the tree; like all its counterparts, it was now a winter skeleton; the river just beyond it was a noisy, raging torrent, its dark waters seeming to tear asunder the wood as they fumed white mist. I bent to my knees on the hard, damp ground; I cleared away the frozen moss and vines and found the hole, which was as deep as my arm.

“Are you aware,” an inner voice intoned, “of what you do? This is a case of art inspiring life, rather than the other way round.” I paused in surprise; in some ways, I realised, that was true. In
Villette,
Lucy Snowe buried her precious letters from Dr. John Graham, when she surmised that their relationship was over; but that scene, I now understood, came from my own ignored, subconscious desire to perform this act myself.

I thrust the jar within. “
Au revoir, Monsieur Héger,
” I said firmly, and without regret.

I replaced the covering of moss and vines. This done, I stood and wrapped my arms about me, shivering in the early-morning
air. I had not, I thought with satisfaction, just hidden a treasure; I had buried a grief—a grief that should have been interred ten long years ago.

All at once, I felt an almost magical sense of release, as if a fairy had touched me with her wand, and in so doing, had lifted an enormous weight from my soul. With a smile, I noticed that my headache was gone.

When I returned to the house, I found papa reading the morning paper in his study. I took a seat before the glowing hearth beside him.

“Papa, I have something to confess to you.”

He set down his paper and magnifying glass. “Yes, my dear, what is it?”

“These past six months, I have been writing to Mr. Nicholls.”

“What? Writing to him? What do you mean, letters?”

“Yes, papa: letters, and he has been writing letters to me. I also saw him in September, at the Grants’. I know you expressly forbade such contact, and I feel guilty for having deceived you in this way.”

After a short, frowning silence, he said, “I’m glad you told me. I hope you got it out of your system, and have seen the error of your ways. Deceitfulness and dishonesty are the Devil’s own work. Promise me that you’ll never see or write to that man again, and I’ll forgive you.”

“I am not seeking your forgiveness papa, nor shall I make any such promise. In fact, I am here to state the opposite: I have every intention of writing to Mr. Nicholls again, and of seeing him again, for a sizeable period of time, I hope—that is, if he is still interested in seeing me.”

“You’ll see him over my dead body!”

“I hope that will not be necessary, papa; but see him I will. I am not saying that I intend to marry Mr. Nicholls; but I am determined to become better acquainted with him, to give us both an opportunity to discover if we are truly suited to one another
or not—and it will be far easier to do so
with
your knowledge and approval, than without.”

“I shall never give you that approval! I tell you, he’s not right for you, Charlotte!”

“Papa: listen to me. I am not a young girl, nor even a young woman any more. At your death, I shall have £300, besides the money I have earned myself, and nowhere to live. Perhaps, if I can still write, I can earn more; but there is no guarantee my next work will sell. I can live modestly on the income from the money I have, but I will be alone—
all alone
—an old maid, lonely, bitter, and no doubt pitied by every one. Is that the fate you wish for me? Would you not rather have me marry, if I find a man with whom I can be happy?”