CHAPTER XXXIV

FAMILY AFFAIRS.

When our home was broken up in May 1870, and my father went to live by himself in those two little rooms in Turner Street, he was very downcast and lonely. Apart from the many weighty reasons he had to make him heavy-hearted, he felt the separation from his children, young though we were, much more than might be imagined or than we indeed quite realised ourselves at the time. He felt it for his own sake, but even more he felt it for ours. We had been away from him but little more than two weeks--weeks crowded with worry and work--when he wrote us a little letter, which I shall always keep amongst my dearest treasures, so much does it seem to convey a sense of his fatherly love for us, and his fatherly anxiety for our lives in the difficult circumstances in which we were placed. The letter is written in French and very legibly, the foreign language making a sort of excuse for the letter. He writes:--

"MY DEAR LITTLE DAUGHTERS,--I have a notion to write you from time to time in French, because by that means more than by any other I shall make you learn the language. Unfortunately for your instruction, my own knowledge of this beautiful tongue is very limited, but I hope that you will correct me each time you find mistakes. I want to know every thought, every act of your lives, because, as you will be too long out of my sight, I would keep you very close to my heart, and I want to watch in thought the steps I cannot see each day with my own eyes.--À vous, mes petites bien aimées,

C. BRADLAUGH."

Our brother's death drew us yet nearer to him, and while we were at Midhurst he wrote to us constantly, scolding us if we delayed too long in answering his little letters. As soon as he was able, he took a third room at Turner Street, and sent for each of us by turns to spend a month with him, to write for him; but as he was unwilling to separate my sister and me for long together this was by no means a regular arrangement.

After he became acquainted with Madame de Brimont, she soon expressed a desire to know us. I have said that she was a staunch friend to my father; to my sister and to me she was goodness itself. She asked my father to let her find a school for us in Paris, and as he had always been very anxious for us to know French, he let himself be persuaded, in spite of sundry misgivings about the extra expense. A school was found, and to Paris my father took us at the end of September 1872. We went a few days before the beginning of the school-term and stayed with him at his old hotel in the Rue Vivienne--now demolished to make room for the extension of the _Bibliothéque_. We were very proud to be with him, and proud of course to be for the first time in Paris; we lunched or dined at Madame de Brimont's, and our leisure moments were filled up by most delightful drives outside Paris, or walks along the Champs Elysées or the Boulevards. Before entering school, we three went one day with Madame de Brimont to make acquaintance with the Directress of the establishment and to look over the building. The two ladies walked on first, chatting of the school arrangements and so on, whilst we behind admired, but could not imitate, the deliberate calmness with which they trod the highly polished parquet floors. My sister and I, as we slipped about and frantically caught at each other for support, thought we never should be able to walk steadily on these waxed floors. Before we left, Madame la Directrice asked what was our religion. Mr Bradlaugh, inwardly expecting difficulties, answered, "None, Madame." Madame's "Ah! Monsieur, that saves trouble," brought a smile of surprise and amusement to my father's face. Seeing this, the Directress went on: "You know, Monsieur, I have young ladies here of various religions, but they are principally Roman Catholic, Jewish, and Greek Church; it is sometimes difficult to make their different religious duties fit in with the studies."

We were very happy at this school; there were good masters, and we had plenty of work to do. On Thursday afternoons, the "at home" day for the school, Madame de Brimont visited us, and our Saturday afternoons and Sundays were spent with her. Unfortunately, I was never very strong, and during the winter I fell ill. At Christmas my father came quite unexpectedly to fetch us home for the holidays. My sister went back in the course of a week or two, but the doctor would not allow me to return. The details of that journey home, and the sad story told at the end, remain vividly in my memory. We had been surprised at receiving my father's letter to say we were to go home, a letter followed almost immediately by my father himself. It was two or three days before Christmas; he had travelled at night, and coming to us in the morning, gave us just a few hours to get ready, and in the afternoon he came to fetch us away. He seemed depressed and preoccupied, and though he made us plenty of gay speeches, we were conscious that his mood was not gay. We left Paris that night, and well do I remember what great care he took of me, the invalid, holding me in his arms a great part of the way. As we drove to Turner Street from the station, in the gloomy dawn of a dull December morning, I could not help noticing, in spite of my own pain and weariness, how grey and haggard his face looked. We passed the day in London, and in the evening he took us to Midhurst, where we were all to spend Christmas.

After the first excitement of our home-coming had somewhat subsided, my father got up from his chair, and throwing back his head with a peculiar movement, said abruptly, "Well, Bob's in prison."

"My God!" exclaimed my grandfather, who invoked the Deity as indifferently as if he had been a Christian.

My father was silent for some minutes, and then as, in a few short sentences, he told the story, my sister and I realised how heavy had been his care on the previous day whilst he had tried to make merry with us.

William Robert Bradlaugh was twelve years younger than his brother Charles, and was only seven years old at the time of their father's death. He was educated at an Orphan Asylum, and on his leaving this institution my father found situations for him, which, however, for one reason or another, he did not keep. At one time, after he had been very ill, I remember that he passed his time of convalescence at our house, where he found all the kindness and comfort it was a brother's part to bestow. To the distress of his relatives, and especially to the grief of his mother, he took to excessive drinking. His mother he completely neglected, even during the long illness which kept her to her room before her death.

Surprise has often been expressed at the evident estrangement between the brothers; and this has been especially the case with religious persons after they have listened to, or heard of, the public protestations of religion and love for my father which have fallen from the Christian, protestations which the Atheist has received in silence. He, who so well knew the worth of these phrases, preferred to let himself be misunderstood by his silence rather than utter the miserable truth.

The story my father had to tell us that Christmas Eve was that his brother Robert (he was always called by his second name) had been arrested on the charge of embezzling various small sums from his employer. During the next few days, while he was under remand, he wrote from the House of Detention, thanking my father for his kindness to his wife, protesting his innocence, and expressing himself as "perfectly happy and contented," knowing he could clear himself from all charges, and asking my father's help in his defence. At the final examination in the Police Court the case was sent up for trial at the Middlesex Sessions, and at his brother's request my father instructed a solicitor to appear for him. Mrs W. R. Bradlaugh warmly expressed her gratitude to him for his kindness, hoping that some day she might be able to repay him; "Were it not for you," she said, "I do not know what I should do." Her husband, released on bail, protested that he would neither see nor speak to his brother until he had proved his innocence.

On the 8th of January my father wrote his sister, Mrs Norman, promising to allow his brother's wife a small weekly sum in the event of Robert's conviction, adding that they had already had £12, 10s. from him in six weeks. He was, as we know, himself so heavily involved in money difficulties that the smallest unforeseen expense made a serious addition to him; despite this, a week later he sent more money, and promised to pay the solicitor's costs. More, he vowed he would not do, "either for name or for money's sake." He felt the disgrace keenly, and considered moreover that his brother had no moral claim upon him, "for" as he wrote his sister, "when he was in full work, and I in distress, he did not even help me to keep his mother, who loved him so well." At the Middlesex Sessions a sentence of six months' imprisonment was passed, at the end of which Robert once more wrote his brother, thanking him for the kindness he had shown to his wife, and acknowledging his indebtedness to the extent of £30, which he talked about repaying on some future occasion. At the same time he assured my father that his feelings should not again be harrowed by any misconduct on his (Robert's) part: henceforth his living should be honestly obtained, or he would starve.

My father sent his brother some more money. Then, of course, came other applications, coupled at length with the request that the money should be sent direct, and not, as was my father's custom, through his sister, Mrs Norman. But my father would not consent to this. He told his sister of Robert's demand, adding that if she would take charge of the money he would send what he was able; if she would not, he would send nothing. My aunt was perplexed; she did not know what to do. Although she had had her sister-in-law and the child at her house during Robert's absence, she had not seen her since his return, and she felt that she did not want to force her brother Robert to receive further kindness through her hands. However, she at last consented to continue to act as intermediary; consequently every penny that Mr Bradlaugh sent his brother passed through her hands.

Just before my father went to America, in the autumn of 1874, Robert (who, a few years later, alleged that in 1872 his brother cast him off) suggested that he should go to the States with him, and be introduced by him as a young man whom he had known for some time; but it is hardly necessary to say that my father did not acquiesce in this proposal. In the following year, while still receiving pecuniary assistance from his brother, Mr W. R. Bradlaugh attended some of Moody and Sankey's meetings, and there professed "conversion," although, as he was brought up and educated in the tenets of the Church of England, and was never at any time a Freethinker, it is difficult to understand from what he was converted. One day my Aunt Lizzie was somewhat surprised at receiving a visit from him. He had been to her house only a day or two before to receive a sovereign which my father had sent at his request, and she was not expecting to see him again so soon. He walked into the house, triumphantly exclaiming that he had got "another berth," at the same time showing her a sheet of the _Christian Herald_ in connection with which he had been given employment.

From that day until my father's death his brother never ceased to try and annoy him--always, of course, under the cloak of religion and love. He would send him religious books--the last came at the New Year of 1891. "This is from my beautiful brother," said my father, as he dropped it into the wastepaper basket. He sometimes lectured in the same town, on the same date as my father, and the hall engaged for his lectures would perhaps be quite close to the one in which Mr Bradlaugh was speaking. He would be announced, maybe, merely as "Mr Bradlaugh," or even as "the brother of Charles Bradlaugh," or "the brother of the Member for Northampton," and would very likely entreat his audience to unite with him in prayer for his "brother Charles Bradlaugh." He had named his son "Charles," and in a letter written to his brother in 1880, he had recourse to the following unmanly taunt: "I want not to trade upon your name; it has never helped me, it dies with yourself, and is to be perpetuated by the son of one whom you at present hate." My father's own son, who also bore his name and of whom he had been so proud, had then been dead ten years.

Mr W. R. Bradlaugh did not confine himself to these annoyances--which, after all, were petty, and even if they irritated at the time, could be easily endured--but he has been responsible for various false and injurious statements concerning my father's personal character. Some of these were circulated during his lifetime, but he remained silent with every provocation to speak. Even in a "private and confidential" letter to the editor of a friendly paper which had carelessly quoted some extremely malicious falsehoods alleged to have been uttered by Mr W. R. Bradlaugh, my father only said that, "being under great obligation" to him, his brother tried to injure him.

This is the second time in this book that I have been compelled to reveal a story of sorrow and disgrace that I would have given much to have kept hidden, but justice to my father demands that the truth should be known. If the telling it should bring the smallest injury to a man who, twenty years ago, erred and expiated his error according to the laws of our country, it will give me the deepest pain and regret. Counting surely on my father's silence, however, he chose to pursue a course of conduct which has obliged me to tell the truth concerning their estrangement. Out of regard for his brother, my father might knowingly and deliberately suffer himself to be misunderstood, and his silence to be unfavourably construed, but it is not for me, his faithful daughter and biographer, to allow the misunderstanding to continue.