"The school is under the care of Mrs. Harben, as superintendent, eight teachers, and two under-teachers.
"To G.o.d belongs the glory of the degree of success which has attended this undertaking, and which has far exceeded the most sanguine expectations. But the expression of very grateful acknowledgment must not be wanting towards the many benefactors who have so readily and so bountifully rendered their a.s.sistance. They have their recompense in the constant prayers which are offered up from many a thankful heart for all who support this inst.i.tution."
Thus excellently and moderately runs the fourth year"s report of the philanthropic Gymnase Moronval, evangelical Dotheboys Hall, familiar to readers of "Jane Eyre." When these congratulations were set in type, those horrors of starvation, cruelty, and fever were all accomplished which brought death to many children, and to those that lived an embittering remembrance of wrong. The two Bronte girls who survived their school days brought from them a deep distrust of human kindness, a difficult belief in sincere affection, not natural to their warm and pa.s.sionate spirits. They brought away yet more enfeebled bodies, p.r.o.ne to disease; they brought away the memory of two dear sisters dead. "To G.o.d be the glory," says the report. Rather, let us pray, to the Rev.
William Carus Wilson.
The report quoted above was issued six years after the autumn in which the little Brontes were sent to Cowan"s Bridge; it was not known then in what terms one of those pale little girls would thank her benefactors, would speak of her advantages. She spoke at last, and generations of readers have held as filthy rags the righteousness of that inst.i.tution, thousands of charitable hearts have beat high with indignation at the philanthropic vanity which would save its own soul by the sufferings of little children"s tender bodies. Yet by an odd anomaly this ogre benefactor, this Brocklehurst, must have been a zealous and self-sacrificing enthusiast, with all his goodness spoiled by an imperious love of authority, an extravagant conceit.
It was in the first year of the school that the little Bronte girls left their home on the moors for Cowan"s Bridge. It was natural that as yet many things should go wrong and grate in the unperfected order of the house; equally natural that the children should fail to make excuses: poor little prisoners pent, shivering and starved, in an unkind asylum from friends and liberty.
The school, long and low, more like an unpretending farmhouse than an inst.i.tution, forms two sides of an oblong. The back windows look out on a flat garden about seventy yards across. Part of the house was originally a cottage; the longer part a disused bobbin-mill, once turned by the stream which runs at the side of the damp, small garden. The ground floor was turned into schoolrooms, the dormitories were above, the dining-room and the teachers"-room were in the cottage at the end.
All the rooms were paved with stone, low-ceiled, small-windowed; not such as are built for growing children, working in large cla.s.ses together. No board of managers would permit the poorest children of our London streets to work in such ill-ventilated schoolrooms.
The bobbin-mill, not built for habitation, was, no doubt, faulty and insufficient in drainage. The situation of the house, chosen for its nearness to the stream, was damp and cold, on a bleak, unsheltered plain, picturesque enough in summer with the green alders overhanging the babbling beck, but in winter bitter chill. In this dreary house of machines, the place of the ousted wheels and springs was taken by ninety hungry, growing little human beings, all dressed alike in the coa.r.s.e, ill-fitting garments of charity, all taught to look, speak, and think alike, all commended or held up to reprobation according as they resembled or diverged from the machines whose room they occupied and whose regular, thoughtless movement was the model of their life.
These children chiefly owed their excellent education, their miserable food and lodging, to the exertions of a rich clergyman from Willingdon, the nearest village. The Rev. Carus Wilson was a person of importance in the neighbourhood; a person who was looked to in emergencies, who prided himself on his prudence, foresight, and efficiency in helping others.
With this, none the less a man of real and zealous desire to do good, an energetic, sentient person capable of seeing evils and devising remedies. He wished to help: he wished no less that it should be known he had helped. Pitying the miserable conditions of many of his fellow-workers, he did not rest till he had founded a school where the daughters of the poor clergy should receive a fair education at a nominal price. When the money for the school was forthcoming, the property was vested in twelve trustees; Mr. Wilson was one. He was also treasurer and secretary. Nearly all the work, the power, the supervision, the authority of the affair, he took upon his shoulders. He was not afraid of work, and he loved power. He would manage, he would be overseer, he would guide, arrange, and counsel. So sure did he feel of his capacity to move all springs himself, that he seems to have exercised little pains and less discretion in appointing his subordinates. Good fortune sent him a gentle, wise, and n.o.ble woman as superintendent; but the other teachers were less capable, some snappish, some without authority. The housekeeper, who should have been chosen with the greatest care, since in her hands lay the whole management and preparation of the food of these growing children, was a slovenly, wasteful woman, taken from Mr. Wilson"s kitchen, and much believed in by himself. Nevertheless to her door must we lay much of the misery of "Lowood."
The funds were small and somewhat uncertain. Honour and necessity alike compelled a certain economy. Mr. Wilson contracted for the meat, flour, and milk, and frequently himself inspected the supplies. But perhaps he did not inspect the kitchen. The "Lowood" scholars had many tales to tell of milk turned sour in dirty pans; of burnt porridge with disgusting fragments in it from uncleanly cooking vessels; of rice boiled in water from the rain-cask, flavoured with dead leaves, and the dust of the roof; of beef salted when already tainted by decomposition; of horrible resurrection-pies made of unappetising sc.r.a.ps and rancid fat. The meat, flour, milk and rice were doubtless good enough when Mr.
Wilson saw them, but the starved little school-girls with their disappointed hunger had neither the courage to complain nor the impartiality to excuse. For the rest, it was not easy to complain to Mr.
Wilson. His sour evangelicism led him to the same conclusion as the avarice of a less disinterested Yorkshire schoolmaster; he would have bade them conquer human nature. Being a very proud man, he sought to cultivate humility in others. The children were all dressed alike, all wearing in summer plain straw cottage bonnets, white frocks on Sundays and nankeen in the week; all wearing in winter purple stuff frocks and purple pelisses--a serviceable and appropriate raiment which should allow no envies, jealousies, or flatteries. They should not be vain, neither should they be greedy. A request for nicer-tasting food would have branded the asker with the lasting contempt of the Rev. William Carus Wilson, trustee, treasurer, and secretary. They were to learn that it was wrong to like pretty things to wear, nice things to eat, pleasant games to play; these little scholars taken half on charity. Mr. Wilson was repulsed by the apple-and-pegtop side of a child"s nature; he deliberately ignored it.
Once in this grim, cold, hungry house of charity, there was little hope of escape. All letters and parcels were inspected by the superintendent; no friends of the pupils were allowed in the school, except for a short call of ceremony. But it is probable that Maria and Elizabeth, sent on before, had no thought of warning their smaller sisters. So dest.i.tute of all experience were they, that probably they imagined all schools like Cowan"s Bridge; so anxious to learn, that no doubt they willingly accepted the cold, hunger, deliberate unkindness, which made their childhood anxious and old.
The lot fell heaviest on the elder sister, clever, gentle, slovenly Maria. The princ.i.p.al lesson taught at Cowan"s Bridge was the value of routine.
Maria, with her careless ways, ready opinions, gentle loving incapacity to become a machine, Maria was at discord with every principle of Cowan"s Bridge. She incurred the bitter resentment of one of the teachers, who sought all means of humiliating and mortifying the sweet-natured, shiftless little creature. When, in September, bright, talkative Charlotte and baby Emily came to Cowan"s Bridge, they found their idolised little mother, their Maria, the b.u.t.t, laughingstock and scapegrace of the school.
Things were better for the two younger ones, Charlotte, a bright clever little girl, and Emily, the prettiest of the little sisters, "a darling child, under five years of age, quite the pet nursling of the school."[3] But though at first, no doubt, these two babies were pleased by the change of scene and the companionship of children, trouble was to befall them. Not the mere distasteful scantiness of their food, the mere cold of their bodies; they saw their elder sister grow thinner, paler day by day, no care taken of her, no indulgence made for her weakness.
The poor ill-used, ill-nourished child grew very ill without complaining; but at last even the authorities at Cowan"s Bridge perceived that she was dying. They sent for Mr. Bronte in the spring of 1825. He had not heard of her illness in any of his children"s letters, duly inspected by the superintendent. He had heard no tales of poor food, damp rooms, neglect. He came to Cowan"s Bridge and saw Maria, his clever little companion, thin, wasted, dying. The poor father felt a terrible shock. He took her home with him, away from the three little sisters who strained their eyes to look after her. She went home to Haworth. A few days afterwards she died.
Not many weeks after Maria"s death, when the spring made Lowood bearable, when the three saddened little sisters no longer waked at night for the cold, no longer lame with bleeding feet, could walk in the sunshine and pick flowers, when April grew into May, an epidemic of sickness came over Cowan"s Bridge. The girls one by one grew weak and heavy, neither scolding nor texts roused them now; instead of spending their play-hours in games in the sweet spring air, instead of picking flowers or running races, these growing children grew all languid, flaccid, indolent. There was no stirring them to work or play.
Increasing illness among the girls made even their callous guardians anxious at last. Elizabeth Bronte was one of the first to flag. It was not the fever that ailed her, the mysterious undeclared fever that brooded over the house; her frequent cough, brave spirits, clear colour pointed to another goal. They sent her home in the care of a servant; and before the summer flushed the scanty borders of flowers on the newest graves in Haworth churchyard, Elizabeth Bronte was dead, no more to hunger, freeze, or sorrow. Her hard life of ten years was over. The second of the Bronte sisters had fallen a victim to consumption.
Discipline was suddenly relaxed for those remaining behind at Cowan"s Bridge. There was more to eat, for there were fewer mouths to feed; there was more time to play and walk, for there were none to watch and restrain the eager children, who played, eat, shouted, ran riot, with a certain sense of relief, although they knew they were only free because death was in the house and pestilence in the air.
The woody hollow of Cowan"s Bridge was foggy, unwholesome, damp. The scholars underfed, cramped, neglected. Their strange indolence and heaviness grew stronger and stronger with the spring. All at once forty-five out of the eighty girls lay sick of typhus-fever. Many were sent home only to die, some died at Cowan"s Bridge. All that could, sent for their children home. Among the few who stayed in the fever-breeding hollow, in the contaminated house, where the odours of pastilles and drugs blended with, but could not conquer, the faint sickening smell of fever and mortality, among these abandoned few were Charlotte and Emily Bronte.
Thanks to the free, reckless life, the sunshine, the novel abundance of food, the two children did not take the infection. Things, indeed, were brighter for them now, or would have been, could the indignant spirit in these tiny bodies have forgiven or forgotten the deaths of their two sisters.
Reform had come to Cowan"s Bridge, and with swift strides cleared away the old order of things. The site was declared unhealthy; the clothing insufficient; the water fetid and brackish. When the doctor who inspected the school was asked to taste the daily food of the scholars he spat it out of his mouth. Everything, everything must be altered. It was a time of sore and grievous humiliation to Mr. Wilson. He had felt no qualms, no doubts; he had worked very hard, he thought things were going very well. The accounts were in excellent order, the education thorough and good, the system elaborate, the girls really seemed to be acquiring a meek and quiet spirit; and, to quote the prospectus, "the great object in view is their intellectual and religious improvement."
Then stepped in unreckoned-with disease, and the model inst.i.tution became a by-word of reproach to the county and the order to which it belonged. People, however, were not unjust to the influential and wealthy treasurer, trustee, and secretary. They admitted his energy, financial capacities, and turn for organisation. All they did was to qualify the rigour of his management. He still continued treasurer, but the funds were entrusted to a committee. He kept his post of inspector, but a.s.sistants were appointed to share his responsibilities. The school was given in charge to a new housekeeper; larger and better rations of food were given out. Finally a subscription was set on foot to build a better house in a healthier spot. When Charlotte and Emily Bronte went home for the midsummer holidays, reform was in full swing at Cowan"s Bridge.
They went home, two out of the four children who had left their happy home six months before. They went home to find no motherly Maria, no st.u.r.dy, patient Elizabeth. The walks on the moors, the tales under the thorn-trees must henceforth be incomplete. The two elders of that little band were no longer to be found in house or garden--they lay quiet under a large paving-stone close to the vicarage pew at church. The three little sisters, the one little brother, must have often thought on their quiet neighbours when the sermon was very long. Thus early familiarised and neighbourly with death, one of them at least, tall, courageous Emily, grew up to have no dreary thoughts of it, neither any dreams of a far-off heaven.
When the holidays were over, the two sisters returned to school. Their father, strangely enough, had no fear to send them to that fatal place.
Their aunt, with her two favourites at home, was not over-anxious.
Charlotte and Emily went back to Cowan"s Bridge. But before the winter they were ill: the damp air, the unhealthy site (for as yet the new house was not built) brought out the weakness of their const.i.tutions.
Bearing the elder sisters" fate in view, the authorities warned Mr.
Bronte, and the two children came home to Haworth.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 2: It is very much wished that the pupils should wear only their school dress during the vacations.]
[Footnote 3: Mrs. Harben to Mrs. Gaskell.]
CHAPTER IV.
CHILDHOOD.
The home to which Charlotte and Emily returned was not a very much more healthy spot than that they left; but it was home. It was windy and cold, and badly drained. Mr. Bronte was ever striving to stir up his parishioners to improve the sanitary conditions of the place; but for many years his efforts were in vain. The canny Yorkshire folk were loth to put their money underground, and it was hard to make them believe that the real cause of the frequent epidemics and fevers in Haworth was such as could be cured by an effective system of subsoil drainage. It was cheaper and easier to lay the blame at the doors of Providence. So the parson preached in vain. Well might he preach, for his own house was in the thick of the evil.
"As you left the Parsonage-gate you looked upon the stonecutter"s chipping-shed, which was piled with slabs ready for use, and to the ear there was the incessant "chip, chip" of the recording chisel as it graved in the "In Memoriams" of the departed."
So runs Miss Nussey"s ma.n.u.script. She also tells of the constant sound of the pa.s.sing bell; of the frequent burials in the thronged churchyard.
No cheerful, healthy home for sensitive, delicate children.
"From the Parsonage windows the first view was the plot of gra.s.s edged by a wall, a thorn-tree or two, and a few shrubs and currant-bushes that did not grow. Next to these was the large and half-surrounding churchyard, so full of gravestones that hardly a strip of gra.s.s could be seen in it."
Beyond this the moors, the wild, barren, treeless moors, that stretch away for miles and miles, feeding a few herds of mountain sheep, harbouring some wild conies and hares, giving a nesting-place to the birds of heaven, and, for the use of man, neither grain nor pasturage, but quarries of stone and piles of peat luridly smouldering up there on autumn nights.
Such is the home to which Emily Bronte clung with the pa.s.sionate love of the Swiss for his white mountains, with a homesickness in absence that strained the very cords of life. Yet her childhood in that motherless home had few of the elements of childish happiness, and its busy strictness of daily life was saddened by the loss of Maria and Elizabeth, dear, never-forgotten playfellows. Charlotte, now the eldest of the family, was only two years older than Emily, but her sense of responsibility made her seem quite of a different age. It was little Anne who was Emily"s companion--delicate, shrinking, pretty Anne, Miss Branwell"s favourite. Anne could enter only into the easiest or lightest of her sister"s moods, and yet she was so dear that Emily never sought another friend. So from childhood she grew accustomed to keep her own confidence upon her deepest thoughts and liveliest fancies.
A quiet regular life--carpet-brushing, sewing, dusting in the morning.
Then some necessary lessons said to their aunt upstairs; then, in the evening, while Mr. Bronte wrote his sermons in the study and Miss Branwell sat in her bedroom, the four children, alone in the parlour, or sitting by the kitchen fire, while Tabby, the servant, moved briskly about, would write their magazines or make their plays.
There was a great deal about politics still in the plays. Mr. Bronte, who took a keen interest in the affairs of the world, always told the children the chief public news of the day, and let them read what newspapers and magazines they could lay hold on. So the little Brontes prattled of the Duke of Wellington when other children still have Jack the Giantkiller for a hero; the Marquis of Douro was their Prince Charming; their Yahoos, the Catholics; their potent evil genii the Liberal Ministry.
"Our plays were established," says Charlotte, the family chronicler, in her history of the year 1829: ""Young Men," June, 1826; "Our Fellows,"
July, 1827; "Islanders," December, 1827. These are our three great plays that are not kept secret. Emily"s and my best plays were established the 1st of December, 1827; the others, March, 1828. Best plays mean secret plays; they are very nice ones. All our plays are very strange ones.
Their nature I need not write on paper, for I think I shall always remember them. The "Young Men"s" play took its rise from some wooden soldiers Branwell had; "Our Fellows" from aesop"s Fables; and the "Islanders" from several events which happened. I will sketch out the origin of our plays more explicitly if I can. First, "Young Men." Papa bought Branwell some wooden soldiers at Leeds; when papa came home it was night, and we were in bed, so next morning Branwell came to our door" (the little room over the pa.s.sage. Anne slept with her aunt) "with a box of soldiers. Emily and I jumped out of bed, and I s.n.a.t.c.hed up one and exclaimed, "This is the Duke of Wellington! This shall be the Duke." When I had said this, Emily likewise took one up and said it should be hers; when Anne came down, she said one should be hers. Mine was the prettiest of the whole, the tallest and the most perfect in every part. Emily"s was a grave-looking fellow, and we called him "Gravey." Anne"s was a queer little thing, much like herself, and we called him "Waiting-boy." Branwell chose his, and called him Bonaparte."
In another play Emily chooses Sir Walter Scott, Mr. Lockhart and Johnny Lockhart as her representatives; Charlotte the Duke of Wellington, the Marquis of Douro, Mr. Abernethy, and Christopher North. This last personage was indeed of great importance in the eyes of the children, for _Blackwood"s Magazine_ was their favourite reading. On their father"s shelves were few novels, and few books of poetry. The clergyman"s study necessarily boasted its works of divinity and reference; for the children there were only the wild romances of Southey, the poems of Sir Walter Scott, left by their Cornish mother, and "some mad Methodist magazines full of miracles and apparitions and preternatural warnings, ominous dreams and frenzied fanaticism; and the equally mad letters of Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe from the Dead to the Living,"
familiar to readers of "Shirley." To counterbalance all this romance and terror, the children had their interest in politics and _Blackwood"s Magazine_, "the most able periodical there is," says thirteen-year-old Charlotte. They also saw _John Bull_, "a high Tory, very violent, the _Leeds Mercury_, _Leeds Intelligencer_, a most excellent Tory newspaper," and thus became accomplished fanatics in all the burning questions of the day.
Miss Branwell took care that the girls should not lack more homely knowledge. Each took her share in the day"s work, and learned all details of it as accurately as any German maiden at her cookery school.
Emily took very kindly to even the hardest housework; there she felt able and necessary; and, doubtless, upstairs, grimly listening to prim Miss Branwell"s stories of bygone gaieties, this awkward growing girl was glad to remember that she too was of importance to the household, despite her tongue-tied brooding.
The girls fared well enough; but not so their brother. Branwell"s brilliant purposelessness, Celtic gaiety, love of amus.e.m.e.nt and light heart made him the most charming playfellow, but a very anxious charge.
Friends advised Mr. Bronte to send his son to school, but the peculiar vanity which made him model his children"s youth in all details on his own forbad him to take their counsel. Since he had fed on potatoes, his children should eat no meat. Since he had grown up at home as best he might, why should Patrick Branwell go to school? Every day the father gave a certain portion of his time to working with his boy; but a clergyman"s time is not his own, and often he was called away on parish business. Doubtless Mr. Bronte thought these tutorless hours were spent, as he would have spent them, in earnest preparation of difficult tasks.
But Branwell, with all his father"s superficial charm of manner, was without the underlying strength of will, and he possessed, unchecked, the temptations to self-indulgence, to which his father seldom yielded, counteracting them rather by an ascetic regimen of life. These long afternoons were spent, not in work, but in mischievous companionship with the wilder spirits of the village, to whom "t" Vicar"s Patrick" was the standard of brilliant leadership in sc.r.a.pes.
No doubt their admiration flattered Branwell, and he enjoyed the noisy fun they had together. Nevertheless he did not quite neglect his sisters. Charlotte has said that at this time she loved him even as her own soul--a serious phrase upon those serious lips. But it was Emily and Branwell who were most to each other: bright, shallow, exacting brother; silent, deep-brooding, unselfish sister, more anxious to give than to receive. In January, 1831, Charlotte went to school at Miss Wooler"s, at Roe Head, twenty miles away; and Branwell and Emily were thrown yet more upon each other for sympathy and entertainment.