Part 8

By the vicarage lane were the cottage of Tabby's sister, the school the Brontës daily visited, and the sexton's dwelling where the curates lodged. Behind the vicarage a savage expanse of gorse and heather rises to the horizon and stretches many miles away: a path oft trodden by the Brontës leads between low walls from their home to this open moor, their habitual resort in childhood and womanhood. The higher plateaus afford a wide prospect, but, despite the August bloom and fragrance and the delightful play of light and shadow along the sinuous sweeps, the aspect of the bleak, treeless, houseless waste of uplands is even now dispiriting; when frosts have destroyed its verdure and wintry skies frown above, its gloom and desolation must be terrible beyond description. Remembering that the sisters found even these usually dismal moors a welcome relief from their tomb of a dwelling, we may appreciate the utter dreariness of their situation and the pathos of Charlotte's declaration, "I always dislike to leave Haworth, it takes so long to be content again after I return." We trace the steps of the Brontës across the moor to the cascade, called now the "Brontë Falls," where a brooklet descends over great boulders into a shaded glen. This was their favorite excursion, and as we loiter here we recall their many visits to the spot: first they came four children to play upon these rocks; later came three grave maidens with Caroline Helstone or Rose Yorke; later came two saddened women; and then Charlotte came alone, finding the moor a featureless wilderness full of torturing reminders of her dead, and seeing their vanished forms "in the blue tints, the pale mists, the waves and shadows of the horizon." Later still, during her few months of happiness, she came here many times with her husband, and her last walk on earth was made with him to see the cascade "in its winter wildness and power."

[Sidenote: Wuthering Heights]

Above the village was the parsonage of Grimshaw and the original "Wuthering Heights." It was a sombre structure; a few trees grew about it, the moors rose behind; the apartments were like the oak-lined, stone-paved interior pictured in the tale, while the inscription above the door, H E 1659, was changed to Hareton Earnshaw 1500 by Miss Brontë, who described here much of her own grandfather's early life and suffering and portrayed his wife in Catherine Linton. It is notable that the name Earnshaw and other names in the Brontë books may be seen on shop-signs along the way the sisters walked to Keighley.

[Sidenote: Recollections of the Brontës]

Among the villagers we meet some who remember the Brontës with affection and pride. We find them so uniformly courteous that we are willing to doubt Mrs. Gaskell's ascriptions of surly rudeness. They indignantly deny the statements of Reid, Gaskell, and others regarding the character of Mr. Brontë. One whose relations to that clergyman entitle him to credence assures us that Brontë did not destroy his wife's silk dress, nor burn his children's colored shoes, nor discharge pistols as a safety-valve for his temper: "he didn't have that sort of a temper." It would appear that many charges of the biographers were made upon the authority of a peculating servant whom Brontë had angered by dismissal. Some parishioners testify that "the Brontës had odd ways of their own," "went their gait and didn't meddle o'ermuch with us;" "nobody had a word against them." Charlotte's husband, too, became popular after her death, perhaps at first because of his tender care of her father: "to see the good old man and Nichols together when the rest were dead, and Mr. Brontë so helpless and blind, was just a pretty sight." We hear more than once of Brontë's wonderful cravat: he habitually covered it himself, putting on new silk without removing the old, until in the course of years it became one of the sights of the place, having acquired such phenomenal proportions that it concealed half his head. Many still remember hearing him preach from the depths of this cravat, while the sexton perambulated the aisles with a staff to stir up the sleepers and threaten the lads. Mr. Wood, a cabinet-maker of the village, was church-warden in Brontë's incumbency and an intimate friend of the family till the death of the last member: his loving hands fashioned the coffins for them all. He was sent for to see Richmond's portrait of Charlotte on its arrival, and was laughed at by that lady for not recognizing the likeness; while Tabby insisted that a portrait of Wellington, which came in the same case, was a picture of Mr. Brontë. That clergyman often complained to Wood that Mrs. Gaskell "tried to make us all appear as bad as she could." We find some survivors of Charlotte's Sunday-school class among the villagers. From one, who was also singer in Brontë's church choir, we obtain pictures of the church and rectory as they appeared in Charlotte's lifetime and a photographic copy of Branwell's painting of himself and sisters, in which the likenesses are said to be excellent. Charlotte is remembered as being "good looking," having a wealth of lustrous hair and remarkably expressive eyes. She was usually neatly apparelled in black, and was so small that when Mrs. F. entered her class, at the age of twelve, the pupil was larger than the teacher. Another of Charlotte's class remembers her as being nervously quick in all her movements and a rapid walker; a third stood in the church-yard and saw her pass from the vicarage to the church on the morning of her marriage wearing a very plain bridal dress and a white bonnet trimmed with green leaves. A few brief months later this person, from the same spot, beheld the mortal part of her immortal friend borne by a grief-stricken company along the same path to her burial. In the hands of another of Charlotte's pupils we see a volume of the original edition of the poems of the three sisters, presented by Charlotte, and a Yorkshire collection of hymns which contains some of Anne's sweet verses.

[Sidenote: Branwell Brontë--Brontë Relics]

It is evident that, of all the family, the hapless Branwell was most admired by the villagers. They delight to extol his pleasant manners, his ready repartee, his wonderful learning, his ambidextrousness, his personal courage. On one occasion restraint was required to prevent his attacking alone a dozen mill-rioters, "any one of whom could have put him in his pocket." Holding a pen in each hand, he could simultaneously write letters on two dissimilar subjects while he discoursed on a third. Wood thought him naturally the brightest of the family, and believed that lack of occupation, in a place where there was nothing to stimulate mental effort, accounted for his vices and failures. He came often with his sisters to Wood's house, and would talk by the hour of his projects to achieve fame and fortune. One of his associates preserved some letters received from him while he was "away tutoring," in which he shamelessly recorded his follies and referred to himself as a "Joseph in Egypt." A local society has collected in its museum some Brontë mementos: a relative of Martha, Tabby's successor in the household, saved a few,--Charlotte's silken purse, her thimble-case and some articles of dress, elementary drawings made by the sisters, autograph letters of Charlotte and her copies of the "Quarterly" and other periodicals in which she had read the reviews of "Jane Eyre." Among the treasures Wood preserved were sketches by Emily and Branwell; a signatured set of Brontë volumes presented by Brontë the day before his death; Charlotte's worn history containing annotations in her microscopic chirography; a copy of "Jane Eyre" presented by Charlotte before its authorship was ascertained; an article on "Advantages of Poverty," by Mrs. Brontë; a highly graphic tale and religious poems by Mr. Brontë. Comment upon the latter reminded Wood that Brontë had shown him some poems by an Irish ancestor Hugh Brontë, and that he had met at the vicarage an irate relative who came from Ireland with a shillalah to "break the head" of a cruel critic of "Jane Eyre." Most of the Brontë belongings were removed by Mr. Nichols. He served the parish assiduously, as the people declare, for fifteen years, and at Brontë's death they desired that Nichols should succeed him; but the living was bestowed upon a stranger, and Nichols removed to the south of Ireland, where he married his cousin and is now a gentleman farmer. Martha Brown, the devoted servant of the family, accompanied him, and Nancy Wainwright, the Brontës' nurse, died some years ago in Bradford workhouse: so every living vestige of the family has disappeared from the vicinage.

[Sidenote: Charlotte Brontë's Husband]

A resident of near-by Wharfedale lately possessed a package of Charlotte's essays, written at the Brussels school and amended by "M. Paul." Study of these confirms the belief that she was for a time tortured by a hopeless love for her preceptor, husband of "Madame Beck," and that it was this wretched passage in her life, rather than the fall of her brother, which "drove her to literary speech for relief." Her marriage with Nichols was eventually happy, but her own descriptions of him show that his were not the attributes that would please her fancy or readily gain her love. In "Shirley" she writes of him as successor of Malone: "the circumstance of finding himself invited to tea with a Dissenter would unhinge him for a week; the spectacle of a Quaker wearing his hat in church, the thought of an unbaptized fellow-creature being interred with Christian rites, these things would make strange havoc in his physical and mental economy." In a letter to E. Charlotte writes, "I am _not_ to marry Mr. Nichols. I couldn't think of mentioning such a rumor to him, even as a joke. It would make me the laughing-stock of himself and fellow-curates for half a year to come. They regard me as an old maid, and I regard them, _one and all_, as highly uninteresting, narrow, and unattractive specimens of the coarser sex." Why then did she finally accept Mr. Nichols? Was it not from the same motive that had led her to reject his addresses not long before, the desire to please her father?

EARLY HAUNTS OF ROBERT COLLYER: EUGENE ARAM

_Childhood Home--Ilkley Scenes, Friends, Smithy, Chapel-- Bolton-Associations--Wordsworth--Rogers--Eliot--Turner--Aram's Homes--Schools--Place of the Murder--Gibbet--Probable Innocence._

[Sidenote: Early Home--School]

The factory-town of Keighley,--amid the moors of western Yorkshire,--to which the Brontë pilgrimage brings us, becomes itself an object of interest when we remember it was the birthplace of Robert Collyer. On a dingy side-street resonant with the din of spindles and looms and sullied with soot from factory chimneys, of humble parentage, and in a home not less lowly than that of another Yorkshire blacksmith in which Faraday was born, our orator and author first saw the light. Collyer came to Keighley "only to be born," and soon was removed to the lovely Washburndale, a few miles away. Here we find the place of the boyhood home he has made known to us--the cottage of two rooms with whitewashed walls and floor of flags--occupied by the mansion of a mill-owner, and the Collyer family vanished from the vicinage. "Little Sam," the kind-hearted father, fell dead at his anvil one summer day; the blue-eyed, fair-haired mother, of whom the preacher so loves to speak, died in benign age; and the boisterous bairns who once filled the cottage are scattered in the Old World and the New. A little way down the sparkling burn is the picturesque old church of Fewston, where Collyer was christened, where Amos Barton of George Eliot's tale later preached, and where the poet Edward Fairfax--of the ancient family which gave to Virginia its best blood--was buried with his child who "was held to have died of witchcraft." Near by was Collyer's school, taught by a crippled and cross-eyed old fiddler named Willie Hardie, who survived at our first sojourn in the dale and had much to tell about his pupil "Boab," whom he had often "fairly thrashed." Collyer's school education ended in his eighth year, and he was early apprenticed at Ilkley, in the next valley, where he grew to physical manhood and attained to a measure of that intellectual stature which has since been recognized.

[Sidenote: Companions]

[Sidenote: Collyer's Humble Friends--The Smithy]

At Ilkley we find some who remember when Collyer came first, a stripling lad, to work in "owd Jackie's" smithy, and who in the long-ago worked, played, and fought with him in the village or read with him on the moors. One remembers that he was from the first an insatiable student, often reading as he plied the bellows or switched the flies from a customer's horse. His master "Jackie" Birch, who was native of Eugene Aram's home, is recalled as a selfish and unpopular man, who had no sympathy with the lad's studious habit, but tolerated it when it did not interfere with his work. Collyer's love of books was contagious, and soon a little circle of lads habitually assembled, whenever released from toil, to read with him the volumes borrowed from friends or purchased by clubbing their own scant hoards. A survivor of this group walked with us through the village, pointing out the spots associated with Collyer's life here, and afterward showed us upon the slopes of the overlooking hills the nooks where the lads read together in summer holidays. Collyer was especially intimate with the Dobsons: of these John was best beloved, because he shared most fully Collyer's studies and aspirations; between the two an affectionate friendship was formed which, despite long separation and disparity of position,--for John remained a laborer,--ended only with his death. When, thirty years ago, Collyer--honored and famous--revisited the scenes of his early struggles and was eagerly invited to opulent and cultured homes, he turned away from all to abide in the humble cottage of Dobson, which we found near the site of the smithy and occupied by others who were friends of Collyer's youth. His associates of the early time--some of them old and poor--tell us with obvious pleasure and pride of his visits to their poor homes in these later summers when he comes to the place, and we suspect he often leaves with them more substantial tokens of his remembrance than kind words and wishes: indeed, he once made us his almoner to the more needy of them, one of whom we found in the workhouse. Some of his old-time friends recall the circumstances of his conversion under the preaching of a Wesleyan named Bland, his own eloquent and touching prayers, and his first timorous essays to conduct the services of the little chapel to which the villagers were bidden by the bellman, who proclaimed through the streets, "The blacksmith will preach t'night." When he preaches at Ilkley now, the Assembly-rooms are thronged with friends, old and new, eager to hear him. "Jackie" sleeps with his fathers, and the smithy is replaced by a modern cottage, into whose masonry many blackened stones from the old forge were incorporated. One of Collyer's chums showed us the door of the smithy which he had rescued from demolition and religiously preserved, and presented us with a photograph which we were assured represents the building just as Collyer knew it,--a long, low fabric of stone, with a shed joined at one end, two forge chimneys rising out of the roof, and the rough doors and window-shutters placarded with public notices. Before the forge was demolished, the large two-horned anvil on which Collyer wrought twelve years was bought for a price and removed to Chicago, where it is still preserved in the study of Unity Church, albeit Collyer long ago predicted to the writer, with a characteristic twinkle and a sweet hint of the dialect his tongue was born to, "they'll soon be sellin' _thet_ for old iron."

[Sidenote: Wharfedale Antiquities]

The health-giving waters of the hill-sides attract hundreds of invalids and idlers, and the Ilkley of to-day is a smart town of well-kept houses, hotels, and shops, amid which we find here and there a quaint low-roofed structure which is a relic of the village of Collyer's boyhood. Among the survivals is the chapel--now a local museum, inaugurated by Collyer--where our "blacksmith" was converted and where he labored at the spiritual anvil as a local preacher. He has told us that for his labors in the Wesleyan pulpit during several years in Yorkshire and America he received in all seven dollars and fifty cents; he expounded for love, but pounded for a living. Another survival is the ancient parish church, built upon the site of the Roman fortress Olicana and of stones from its ruined walls, which preserves in its masonry many antiquarian treasures of Roman sculpture and inscription. Standing without are three curious monolithic columns, graven with mythological figures of men, dragons, birds, etc., which give them an archæological value beyond price. A doltish rector damaged them by using them as gate-posts; from this degradation the hands of Collyer helped to rescue them, and the same hands fashioned at the forge the neat iron gates which enclose the church-yard.

[Sidenote: Scenery]

By the village and through the dale which Gray thought so beautiful flows the Wharfe; winding amid verdant meads, rushing between lofty banks, or loitering in sunny shallows, it holds its shining course to the Ouse, beyond the fateful field of Towton, where the red rose of Lancaster went down in blood. Ilkley nestles cosily at the foot of green slopes which swell away from the stream and are dotted with copses and embowered villas. Farther away the dim lines rise to the heights of the Whernside, whence we look to the chimneys of Leeds and the towers of York's mighty minster. Detached from Rumbald's cliffs lie two masses, called "Cow and Calf Rocks," bearing the imprint of giant Rumbald's foot: these rocks are a resort of the young people, and here Collyer and his friends oft came with their books. From this point Wharfedale, domed by a summer sky, seems a paradise of loveliness; its every aspect, from the glinting stream to the highest moorland crags, is replete with the beauty Turner loved to paint and which here first inspired his genius. Ruskin discerns this Wharfedale scenery throughout the great artist's works, bits of its beauty being unconsciously wrought into other scenes. These landscapes were a daily vision to the eyes of Collyer in the days when Turner still came to the neighborhood. This region abounds with memorials of the mighty past, with treasures of Druidical, Runic, and Roman history and tradition, but the literary pilgrim finds it rife with associations for him still more interesting: here lived the ancestors of our Longfellow, and the family whence Thackeray sprang; the fathers of that gentle singer, Heber, dwelt in their castle here and sleep now under the pavement of the church; a little way across the moors the Brontës dwelt and died. Here, too, lived the Fairfaxes,--one of them a poet and translator of Tasso,--and among their tombs we find that of Fawkes of Farnley, Turner's early friend and patron, while at the near-by hall are the rooms the painter occupied during the years he was transferring to canvas the beauties he here beheld. Farnley holds the best private collection of Turner's works, comprising, besides many finished pictures, numerous drawings and color-sketches made here.

[Sidenote: Bolton Abbey]

A delightful excursion from Ilkley, one never omitted by Collyer from his summer saunterings in Wharfedale, is to the sacred shades of Bolton Abbey. The way is enlivened with the prattle and sheen of the limpid Wharfe. A mile past the hamlet of Addingham, where Collyer preached his first sermon, the stream curves about a slight eminence which is crowned by the ruins of the ancient shrine. Some portions of the walls are fallen and concealed by shrubbery; other portions withstand the ravages of the centuries, and we see the crumbling arches, ruined cloisters, and mullioned windows, mantled with masses of ivy and bloom and set in the scene of restful beauty which Turner painted and Rogers and Wordsworth poetized. Our pleasure in the ruin and its environment of wood, mead, and stream is enhanced by the companionship of one who had, on another summer's day, explored the charms of the spot with George Eliot, and who repeats to us her expressions of rapturous delight at each new vista. Wordsworth loved this spot, and the incident to which the Abbey owed its erection--the drowning of young Romilly, the noble "Boy of Egremond," in the gorge near by--is beautifully told by him in the familiar poems written here.

[Sidenote: Nidderdale]

[Sidenote: Aram's Schools]

Another excursion, by Knaresborough and the deadly field of Marston Moor, brings us into lovely Nidderdale, where stalks the dusky ghost of the Eugene Aram of Bulwer's tale and Hood's poem amid the scenes of his early life and of the crime for which he died. In the upper portion of the valley the Nidd winds like a ribbon of silver between green braes and moorland hills which rise steeply to the narrow horizon. From either side brooklets flow through wooded glens to join the wimpling Nidd, and at the mouth of one of these we find Ramsgill, where Aram was born. It is a straggling hamlet of thatched cottages, set among bowering orchards and gardens and wearing an aspect of tranquil comfort. The site of the laborer's hut in which the gentle student was born is shown at the back of one of the newer cottages of the place. Farther up the picturesque stream is the pretty village of Lofthouse, an assemblage of gray stone houses nestled beneath clustering trees, to which Aram returned after a short residence at Skipton, in the dale of the Brontës. Here he wooed sweet Annie Spence and passed his early years of married life; here his first children were born and one of them died. At the church in near-by Middlesmoor he was married; here his first child was christened, and in the bleak church-yard it was buried. Near a sombre "gill" which opens into the valley some distance below was Gowthwaite Hall, where Aram taught his first pupils,--an ancient, rambling structure of stone, two stories in height, with many steep gables and wide latticed windows. Venerable trees shaded the walls, leafy vines climbed to and overran the roofs, and a quaint garden of prim squares and formally trimmed foliage lay at one side. We found these externals little changed since Aram was tutor here. The partition of the mansion into three tenements had altered the arrangement of the interior, but the wide stairway still led from the entrance to the upper room at the east end, where Aram taught: it was a large, lofty apartment, reputed to be haunted, changed since his time only by the closing of one casement. Richard Craven was then tenant of the Hall, and his son, the erudite doctor, doubtless received his first tuition in this room and from Aram.

[Sidenote: Place of Murder]