Charlotte Bronte - Page 2

at the gates of
Cambridge. He was a pretty good student, too, although a bit quarrelsome
and sometimes mischievous--throwing his force into quite unnecessary ways,
as Irishmen are apt to do. He fell in love, of course, and has not an
Irishman in love been likened to Vesuvius in state of eruption? We know of
at least one charming girl who refused to marry him, because he declined,
unlike Othello, to tell the story of his life. And it was assumed that any
man who would not tell who "his folks" were, was a rogue and a varlet and
a vagrom at heart. And all the while Monsieur Bronte had nothing worse to
conceal than that he was from County Down and his name Prunty. He wouldn't
give in and tell the story of his life to slow music, and so the girl wept
and then stormed, and finally Bronte stormed and went away, and the girl
and her parents were sure that the Frenchman was a murderer escaping
justice. Fortunate, aye, thrice fortunate is it for the world that neither
Bronte nor the girl wavered even in the estimation of a hair.

Bronte got through school and came out with tuppence worth of honors. When
thirty, we find him established as curate at the shabby little town of
Hartshead, in Yorkshire. Little Miss Branwell, from Penzance, came up
there on a visit to her uncle, and the Reverend Mr. Bronte at once fell
violently in love with her dainty form and gentle ways. I say "violently,"
for that's the kind of man Bronte was. Darwin says, "The faculty of
amativeness is not aroused except by the unfamiliar." Girls who go away
visiting, wearing their best bib and tucker, find lovers without fail.
One-third of all marriages in the United States occur in just this way:
the bib and tucker being sprung on the young man as a surprise, dazzles
and hypnotizes him into an avowal and an engagement.

And so they were married--were the Reverend Patrick Bronte and Miss Maria
Branwell. He was big, bold and dictatorial; she was little, shy and
sensitive. The babies came--one in less than a year, then a year apart.
The dainty little woman had her troubles, we are sure of that. Her voice
comes to us only as a plaintive echo. When she asked to have the bread
passed, she always apologized. Once her aunt sent her a present of a
pretty silk dress, for country clergymen's wives do not have many
luxuries--don't you know that?--and Patrick Bronte cut the dress into
strips before her eyes and then threw the pieces, and the little slippers
to match, into the fireplace, to teach his wife humility. He used to
practise with a pistol and shoot in the house to steady the lady's nerves,
and occasionally he got plain drunk. A man like Bronte in a little town
with a tired little wife, and with inferior people, is a despot. He