CHAPTER XVIII.
EMILY'S DEATH.
Already by the 29th of October of this melancholy year of 1848 Emily's
cough and cold had made such progress as to alarm her careful elder
sister. Before Branwell's death she had been, to all appearance, the one
strong member of a delicate family. By the side of fragile Anne
(already, did they but know it, advanced in tubercular consumption), of
shattered Branwell, of Charlotte, ever nervous and ailing, this tall,
muscular Emily had appeared a tower of strength. Working early and late,
seldom tired and never complaining, finding her best relaxation in long,
rough walks on the moors, she seemed unlikely to give them any poignant
anxiety. But the seeds of phthisis lay deep down beneath this fair show
of life and strength; the shock of sorrow which she experienced for her
brother's death developed them with alarming rapidity.
The weariness of absence had always proved too much for Emily's
strength. Away from home we have seen how she pined and sickened. Exile
made her thin and wan, menaced the very springs of life. And now she
must endure an inevitable and unending absence, an exile from which
there could be no return. The strain was too tight, the wrench too
sharp: Emily could not bear it and live. In such a loss as hers,
bereaved of a helpless sufferer, the mourning of those who remain is
embittered and quickened a hundred times a day when the blank minutes
come round for which the customary duties are missing, when the
unwelcome leisure hangs round the weary soul like a shapeless and
encumbering garment. It was Emily who had chiefly devoted herself to
Branwell. He being dead, the motive of her life seemed gone.
Had she been stronger, had she been more careful of herself at the
beginning of her illness, she would doubtless have recovered, and we
shall never know the difference in our literature which a little
precaution might have made. But Emily was accustomed to consider herself
hardy; she was so used to wait upon others that to lie down and be
waited on would have appeared to her ignominious and absurd. Both her
independence and her unselfishness made her very chary of giving
trouble. It is, moreover, extremely probable that she never realised the
extent of her own illness; consumption is seldom a malady that despairs;
attacking the body it leaves the spirit free, the spirit which cannot
realise a danger by which it is not injured. A little later on when it
was Anne's turn to suffer, she is choosing her spring bonnet four days
before her death. Which of us does not remember some such pathetic tale
of the heart-wringing, vain confidence of those far gone in phthisis,
who bear on their faces the marks of death for all eyes but their own to
read?
To those who look on, there is no worse agony than to watch the brave
bearing of these others unconscious of the sudden grave at their feet.
Charlotte and Anne looked on and trembled. On the 29th of October,
Charlotte, still delicate from the bilious fever which had prostrated
her on the day of Branwell's death, writes these words already full of
foreboding:
"I feel much more uneasy about my sister than myself just
now. Emily's cold and cough are very obstinate. I fear she
has pain in her chest, and I sometimes catch a shortness in
her breathing when she has moved at all quickly. She looks
very thin and pale. Her reserved nature occasions me great
uneasiness of mind. It is useless to question her; you get
no answer. It is still more useless to recommend remedies;
they are never adopted."[31]
It was, in fact, an acute inflammation of the lungs which this
unfortunate sufferer was trying to subdue by force of courage. To
persons of strong will it is difficult to realise that their disease is
not in their own control. To be ill, is with them an act of
acquiescence; they have consented to the demands of their feeble body.
When necessity demands the sacrifice, it seems to them so easy to deny
themselves the rest, the indulgence. They set their will against their
weakness and mean to conquer. They will not give up.
Emily would not give up. She felt herself doubly necessary to the
household in this hour of trial. Charlotte was still very weak and
ailing. Anne, her dear little sister, was unusually delicate and frail.
Even her father had not quite escaped. That she, Emily, who had always
been relied upon for strength and courage and endurance, should show
herself unworthy of the trust when she was most sorely needed; that she,
so inclined to take all duties on herself, so necessary to the daily
management of the house, should throw up her charge in this moment of
trial, cast away her arms in the moment of battle, and give her
fellow-sufferers the extra burden of her weakness; such a thing was
impossible to her.
So the vain struggle went on. She would resign no one of her duties, and
it was not till within the last weeks of her life that she would so much
as suffer the servant to rise before her in the morning and take the
early work. She would not endure to hear of remedies; declaring that she
was not ill, that she would soon be well, in the pathetic self-delusion
of high-spirited weakness. And Charlotte and Anne, for whose sake she
made this sacrifice, suffered terribly thereby. Willingly, thankfully
would they have taken all her duties upon them; they burned to be up and
doing. But--seeing how weak she was--they dare not cross her; they had
to sit still and endure to see her labour for their comfort with
faltering and death-cold hands.
"Day by day," says Charlotte, "day by day when I saw with what a front
she met suffering, I looked on her with a wonder of anguish and love. I
have seen nothing like it; but, indeed, I have never seen her parallel
in anything. Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood
alone. The awful point was that, while full of ruth for others, on
herself she had no pity; the spirit was inexorable to the flesh; from
the trembling hand, the unnerved limbs, the fading eyes, the same
service was exacted as they had rendered in health. To stand by and
witness this, and not dare to remonstrate, was a pain no words can
render."
The time went on. Anxious to try what influence some friend, not of
their own household, might exert upon this wayward sister, Charlotte
thought of inviting Miss Nussey to Haworth. Emily had ever been glad to
welcome her. But when the time came it was found that the least
disturbance of the day's routine would only make Emily's burden heavier.
And that scheme, too, was relinquished.
Another month had gone. Emily, paler and thinner, but none less
resolute, fulfilled her duties with customary exactness, and insisted on
her perfect health with defiant fortitude. On the 23rd of November,
Charlotte writes again:--
"I told you Emily was ill in my last letter. She has not
rallied yet. She is _very_ ill. I believe if you were to see
her your impression would be that there is no hope. A more
hollow, wasted, pallid aspect I have not beheld. The deep,
tight cough continues; the breathing after the least
exertion is a rapid pant; and these symptoms are accompanied
by pains in the chest and side. Her pulse, the only time she
allowed it to be felt, was found to beat 115 per minute. In
this state she resolutely refuses to see a doctor; she will
give no explanation of her feelings; she will scarcely allow
her feelings to be alluded to."
"No poisoning doctor" should come near her, Emily declared with the
irritability of her disease. It was an insult to her will, her resolute
endeavours. She was not, would not, be ill, and could therefore need no
cure. Perhaps she felt, deep in her heart, the conviction that her
complaint was mortal; that a delay in the sentence was all that care and
skill could give; for she had seen Maria and Elizabeth fade and die, and
only lately the physicians had not saved her brother.
But Charlotte, naturally, did not feel the same. Unknown to Emily, she
wrote to a great London doctor drawing up a statement of the case and
symptoms as minute and careful as she could give. But either this
diagnosis by guesswork was too imperfect, or the physician saw that
there was no hope; for his opinion was expressed too obscurely to be of
any use. He sent a bottle of medicine, but Emily would not take it.
December came, and still the wondering, anxious sisters knew not what to
think. By this time Mr. Bronte also had perceived the danger of Emily's
state, and he was very anxious. Yet she still denied that she was ill
with anything more grave than a passing weakness; and the pain in her
side and chest appeared to diminish. Sometimes the little household was
tempted to take her at her word, and believe that soon, with the spring,
she would recover; and then, hearing her cough, listening to the gasping
breath with which she climbed the short staircase, looking on the
extreme emaciation of her form, the wasted hands, the hollow eyes, their
hearts would suddenly fail. Life was a daily contradiction of hope and
fear.
The days drew on towards Christmas; it was already the middle of
December, and still Emily was about the house, able to wait upon
herself, to sew for the others, to take an active share in the duties of
the day. She always fed the dogs herself. One Monday evening, it must
have been about the 14th of December, she rose as usual to give the
creatures their supper. She got up, walking slowly, holding out in her
thin hands an apronful of broken meat and bread. But when she reached
the flagged passage the cold took her; she staggered on the uneven
pavement and fell against the wall. Her sisters, who had been sadly
following her, unseen, came forwards much alarmed and begged her to
desist; but, smiling wanly, she went on and gave Floss and Keeper their
last supper from her hands.
The next morning she was worse. Before her waking, her watching sisters
heard the low, unconscious moaning that tells of suffering continued
even in sleep; and they feared for what the coming year might hold in
store. Of the nearness of the end they did not dream. Charlotte had
been out over the moors, searching every glen and hollow for a sprig of
heather, however pale and dry, to take to her moor-loving sister. But
Emily looked on the flower laid on her pillow with indifferent eyes. She
was already estranged and alienate from life.
Nevertheless she persisted in rising, dressing herself alone, and doing
everything for herself. A fire had been lit in the room, and Emily sat
on the hearth to comb her hair. She was thinner than ever now--the tall,
loose-jointed "slinky" girl--her hair in its plenteous dark abundance
was all of her that was not marked by the branding finger of death. She
sat on the hearth combing her long brown hair. But soon the comb slipped
from her feeble grasp into the cinders. She, the intrepid, active Emily,
watched it burn and smoulder, too weak to lift it, while the nauseous,
hateful odour of burnt bone rose into her face. At last the servant came
in: "Martha," she said, "my comb's down there; I was too weak to stoop
and pick it up."
I have seen that old, broken comb, with a large piece burned out of it;
and have thought it, I own, more pathetic than the bones of the eleven
thousand virgins at Cologne, or the time-blackened Holy Face of Lucca.
Sad, chance confession of human weakness; mournful counterpart of that
chainless soul which to the end maintained its fortitude and rebellion.
The flesh is weak. Since I saw that relic, the strenuous verse of Emily
Bronte's last poem has seemed to me far more heroic, far more moving;
remembering in what clinging and prisoning garments that free spirit was
confined.
The flesh was weak, but Emily would grant it no indulgence. She finished
her dressing, and came very slowly, with dizzy head and tottering steps,
downstairs into the little bare parlour where Anne was working and
Charlotte writing a letter. Emily took up some work and tried to sew.
Her catching breath, her drawn and altered face were ominous of the end.
But still a little hope flickered in those sisterly hearts. "She grows
daily weaker," wrote Charlotte, on that memorable Tuesday morning;
seeing surely no portent that this--this! was to be the last of the days
and the hours of her weakness.
The morning drew on to noon, and Emily grew worse. She could no longer
speak, but--gasping in a husky whisper--she said: "If you will send for
a doctor. I will see him now!" Alas, it was too late. The shortness of
breath and rending pain increased; even Emily could no longer conceal
them. Towards two o'clock her sisters begged her, in an agony, to let
them put her to bed. "No, no," she cried; tormented with the feverish
restlessness that comes before the last, most quiet peace. She tried to
rise, leaning with one hand upon the sofa. And thus the chord of life
snapped. She was dead.
She was twenty-nine years old.
They buried her, a few days after, under the church pavement; under the
slab of stone where their mother lay, and Maria and Elizabeth and
Branwell.
She who had so mourned her brother had verily found him again, and
should sleep well at his side.
[Greek: phile met' autou keisomai, philou meta.]
And though no wind ever rustles over the grave on which no scented
heather springs, nor any bilberry bears its sprigs of greenest leaves
and purple fruit, she will not miss them now; she who wondered how any
could imagine unquiet slumbers for them that sleep in the quiet earth.
They followed her to her grave--her old father, Charlotte, the dying
Anne; and as they left the doors, they were joined by another mourner,
Keeper, Emily's dog. He walked in front of all, first in the rank of
mourners; and perhaps no other creature had known the dead woman quite
so well. When they had lain her to sleep in the dark, airless vault
under the church, and when they had crossed the bleak churchyard, and
had entered the empty house again, Keeper went straight to the door of
the room where his mistress used to sleep, and lay down across the
threshold. There he howled piteously for many days; knowing not that no
lamentations could wake her any more. Over the little parlour below a
great calm had settled. "Why should we be otherwise than calm," says
Charlotte, writing to her friend on the 21st of December. "The anguish
of seeing her suffer is over; the spectacle of the pains of death is
gone by; the funeral day is past. We feel she is at peace. No need now
to tremble for the hard frost and the keen wind. Emily does not feel
them."
The death was over, indeed, and the funeral day was past; yet one duty
remained to the heart-wrung mourners, not less poignant than the sight
of the dead changed face, not less crushing than the thud of stones and
clods on the coffin of one beloved. They took the great brown desk in
which she used to keep her papers, and sorted and put in order all that
they found in it. How appealing the sight of that hurried, casual
writing of a hand now stark in death! How precious each of those pages
whose like should never be made again till the downfall of the earth in
the end of time! How near, how utterly cut-off, the Past!
They found no novel, half-finished or begun, in the old brown desk which
she used to rest on her knees, sitting under the thorns. But they
discovered a poem, written at the end of Emily's life, profound,
sincere, as befits the last words one has time to speak. It is the most
perfect and expressive of her work: the fittest monument to her heroic
spirit.
Thus run the last lines she ever traced:
"No coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere;
I see heaven's glories shine,
And faith shines equal, arming me from fear.
"O God, within my breast,
Almighty, ever-present Deity!
Life, that in me has rest,
As I--undying life--have power in Thee.
"Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men's hearts: unutterably vain;
Worthless as withered weeds,
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main,
"To waken doubt in one
Holding so fast by thine infinity;
So surely anchored on
The steadfast rock of immortality.
"With wide-embracing love
Thy spirit animates eternal years,
Pervades and broods above,
Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates, and rears.
"Though earth and man were gone,
And suns and universes ceased to be,
And Thou wert left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee.
"There is not room for Death,
No atom that his might could render void;
Thou--Thou art Being, Breath,
And what Thou art may never be destroyed."
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 31: Mrs. Gaskell.]
FINIS!
"She died in a time of promise."
So writes Charlotte, in the first flush of her grief. "She died in a
time of promise;" having done much, indeed, having done enough to bring
her powers to ripe perfection. And the fruit of that perfection is
denied us. She died, between the finishing of labour and the award of
praise. Before the least hint of the immortality that has been awarded
her could reach her in her obscure and distant home. Without one success
in all her life, with her school never kept, her verses never read, her
novel never praised, her brother dead in ruin. All her ambitions had
flagged and died of the blight. But she was still young, ready to live,
eager to try again.
"She died in a time of promise. We saw her taken from life in its
prime."
Truly a prime of sorrow, the dark mid-hour of the storm, dark with the
grief gone by and the blackness of the on-coming grief. With Branwell
dead, with her dearest sister dying, Emily died. Had she lived, what
profit could she have made of her life? For us, indeed, it would have
been well; but for her? Fame in solitude is bitter food; and Anne will
die in May; and Charlotte six years after; and Emily never could make
new friends. Better far for her, that loving, faithful spirit, to die
while still her life was dear, while still there was hope in the world,
than to linger on a few years longer, in loneliness and weakness, to
quit in fame and misery a disillusioned life.
"She died in a time of promise. We saw her taken from life in its prime.
But it is God's will, and the place where she is gone is better than
that she has left."
Truly better, to leave her soul to speak in the world for aye, for the
wind to be stronger for her breath, and the heather more purple from her
heart; better far to be lost in the all-embracing, all-transmuting
process of life, than to live in cramped and individual pain. So at
least, wrong or right, thought this woman who loved the earth so well.
She was not afraid to die. The thought of death filled her with no
perplexities; but with assured and happy calm. She held it more glorious
than fame, and sweeter than love, to give her soul to God and her body
to the earth. And which of us shall carp at the belief which made a very
painful life contented?
"The thing that irks me most is this shattered prison, after all. I'm
tired of being enclosed here. I'm wearying to escape into that glorious
world, and to be always there; not seeing it dimly through tears, and
yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart; but really with it
and in it. You think you are better and more fortunate than I, in full
health and strength; you are sorry for me--very soon that will be
altered. I shall be sorry for you. I shall be incomparably above and
beyond you all."[32]
Ah, yes; incomparably above and beyond. Not only because of the keen
vision with which she has revealed the glorious world in which her
memory is fresher wind, and brighter sunshine, not only for that; but
because the remembrance of her living self is a most high and noble
precept. Never before were hands so inspired alike for daily drudgery
and for golden writing never to fade. Never was any heart more
honourable and strong, nor any more pitiful to shameful weakness.
Seldom, indeed, has any man, more seldom still any woman, owned the
inestimable gift of genius and never once made it an excuse for a
weakness, a violence, a failing, which in other mortals we condemn. No
deed of hers requires such apology. Therefore, being dead she persuades
us to honour; and not only her works but the memory of her life shall
rise up and praise her, who lived without praise so well.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 32: 'Wuthering Heights.']
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COUNTESS OF ALBANY. By Vernon Lee.
"The accomplished authoress has done her work _con amore_,
and left no stone unturned in her endeavour to show the world
the flesh-and-blood aspect of the wife of the young Pretender
and of her lover, the poet Alfieri."--_Lady's Pictorial._
"Every page of the book bears witness to the author's ability
and determination to realize her subject, and make readers
realize it."--_Athenaeum._
"There is a vivid power in Vernon Lee's realization of
Florentine life and society, and much beauty and glow of
colour in her descriptions."--_Saturday Review._
"This romantic biography is as exciting as any work of
imagination, and the incisive and graphic style of its author
renders it singularly attractive."--_Morning Post._
HARRIET MARTINEAU. By Mrs. Fenwick Miller.
"A faithful and sympathetic account of this remarkable
woman."--_Scotsman._
"As a reflective broad-minded woman's faithful description of
another woman's private life and brilliant literary career,
this critical sketch is admirable."--_Whitehall Review._
"It is not in any sense of the word a compilation, but a
memoir which is a model of that conciseness which is not
incompatible with distinct portraiture or with a fresh and
living interest in the narrative."--_Daily News._
"Mrs. Miller has done her difficult work well, and her volume
is one of the ablest and most interesting of the able and
interesting series to which it belongs."--_Derby Mercury._
London: W. H. ALLEN & CO., 13 Waterloo Place. S.W.
* * * * *
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE:
Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as
possible, including obsolete and variant spellings. Obvious
typographical errors in punctuation (misplaced quotes and the like) have
been corrected. Corrections [in brackets] in the text are noted below:
page 20: typographical error corrected
in front two moderate-sized parlours looking on the garden,
hat[that] on the right being Mr. Bronte's study, and
page 30: added quote mark
["]The projectors' object will not be fully realised until
the means are afforded of reducing the terms still lower,
page 49: added possible dropped word
The girls would take their friend [for] long walks on the
moor. When they
page 96: typographical errors corrected
before his employers' gain. He must have made a pretty penny
out of those escapades of Barnwell's[Branwell's], for some
strong, his constitution was deranged and broken by his
excesses; yet, strangly[strangely] enough, consumption,
page 109: typographical error corrected
in that controlling influence so characteristic of her elder
sister. Her burden of doubt was more that[than] she could
page 140: typographical error corrected
from them I received a brief and business-like but
civi[civil] and sensible reply, on which we acted, and at
page 154: typographical error corrected
and full of pity. Was is[it] wonderful that she summed up
life in one bitter line?--
page 181: typographical error corrected
had driven him to desperation. In the summer following
Catharine's visit to Thushcross[Thrushcross] Grange, his
page 184: added comma
know how I love him; and that, not because he's handsome,
Nelly[,] but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever
page 207: added missing word
quiet envelops him. His violence was not strong enough to
reach that final peace and mar its completeness. [His] grave
is next to Catharine's, and near to Edgar Linton's;